Bay 12 Games Forum

At least so long as some cop or another doesn't decide the question of you actually having done something is academic, anyway

Though, y'know ree, after reading that edit just now, it hit me for the first time one of the ways automation could save money is by being able to operate it in an environment that would straight up kill a human being. A factory throwing out certain safety regs and having a literally deadly assembly floor might actually be a possibility, something in our future. Don't ask where the poisonous/flesh-melting/etc. fumes go. The owner probably couldn't answer you anyway.

That would be some kind of horrifying irony, though. Factory comes into a town on the wings of a Trump administration regulation purge, builds on up, everyone's all excited about new jobs and everything... and there's no jobs, the nearby children and elderly start dying, and they themselves find out shortly thereafter that whatever was in the pollutants that factory started putting out did stuff to them that's never going to go away.

Hell, maybe it's a job generating plan. If ten or fifteen percent of the country dies due to polluted infrastructure, that means the jobs they used to hold are now available! Plus think of all the new opportunities in healthcare and funerary services.

E: Though in retrospect, any plan pitch that ends in "think of all the new opportunities in healthcare and funerary services" is probably a pretty bad one.

Why no love for nuclear

Something something decades long return on investment period something screwups something something waste storage something.

Though I guess more money into next gen stuff would be nice, yeah. Not so sure how nice in the face of across the board regulation gutting, though. Probably be safer and more productive to just rely on the other folks working on it for a few years.

And... that's right, rol. There is only so much they can use up. Andrea taps that, too, just now. It's a major part of why increasing production efficiency hasn't resulted in an increasing workforce.

To supplement some of what 's said above, some of y'all seem to be forgetting demand and market saturation. You can't just infinitely ramp up your production and expect things to turn out well -- if no one's buying, or no one's willing to buy for more than it costs you to make, pumping out more stuff does sod all except lose you money and the ability to support what workers you did. If it's reached the point where the market just doesn't need the gubbin(s) your factory is tooled to build, or doesn't need nearly as much of it, or has stopping growing as quickly and no longer can support you increasing production as quickly, again, pumping out more does sod all.

Sometimes retooling is an option but there's a whole host of new variables that brings in, and it all it does is kick the can down the road a bit. The human population and especially those with the resources to buy stuff by and large hasn't been growing faster than our improvement in making crap -- that's one (of the myriad) reason(s) manufacturing et al caps, just hard, flat caps at a point and stops being able to keep up with increases in potential new workers. It certainly wouldn't keep up if we had been increasing workforce and subsequent output hand in hand with production.

It's, like. Materially, workforce, etc., etc. We could ramp up vehicle production, just as an example. We could ramp up vehicle production so much we would have literal mountains of vehicles (well, more of them, anyway) with no one to sell to and nothing to do with them, sitting there rotting, and then what? Broken window theory and the resulting mess of rusting steel only does so much, and there's other issues to consider as well (limited resources, mostly).

Or to point to something RP said, they were wrong when they flipped it. Flat Production Amount that we need a certain number of people to support is exactly what's going on, because more production past a certain point is less than useless.

... all that said, productivity gains isn't what's been causing QoL life loss in the areas manufacturing et al changes are hitting the hardest. Not adapting to it is what's causing that. Not retraining, not moving, not using the existent infrastructure (what there is) and expertise to dig out new markets, not having prepared for what was coming before the work started leaving. Far from all of that is even remotely the workers' fault (again, note everything I've mentioned previously re: funding, and add on to that the next to zero incentive businesses that more or less own towns have to future proof them), but... the QoL drop could have been avoided, or at least significantly mitigated. "All" it would have taken was everyone that had been working to reduce the funding and resources aimed at fixing the problem dropping dead, or at least out of politics, about fifty or sixty years ago.

It was both, among other things. Folks can have different appellations for themselves, heh. The supporters weren't exactly homogeneous, either.

Thing is, it kinda' shouldn't. Feels like it should, sure, but the blame is probably misplaced. It should be recognized as an issue and definitely acknowledged as what accelerated what's happened, but even if it had been prevented entirely we would still be seeing a shrinking manufacturing workforce and little to no end to that in sight. What killed the american manufacturing workforce (not the industry itself; that's still 2nd in the world and going pretty strong) was productivity gains more than anything -- if maybe not necessarily in a immediate sense, but definitely over anything resembling the long term. When a factory that used to employ two or three thousand can be run on half or a third of that nowadays (and will be) and still be meeting higher demand caused by simple population growth, there's just... nothing you can do to save that, short of intentionally sabotaging your companies (which, again, outperformed and inevitably dead because of it). The work that did it for a few thousand before, went overseas and did it for even more (due to worse infrastructure, productivity, relative cost effectiveness of automation and effort multipliers, and all that stuff), will not be as much work if you bring it back or had kept it here. 50k manufacturing jobs in mexico or china is not 50k manufacturing jobs in the US, and that has only so much to do with the wages involved.

It just... it boils down pretty simply. The manufacturing sector, the markets where outsourcing is hitting folks the hardest, they were never the solution. Reality of economics and technological/methodological advancement meant that just wasn't possible as a solution. We've always been working under the yoke of the fact that the only choices are diversification and reinvestment (human resource wise) into other markets, other sectors, because the ones that used to support these areas by their very nature are either no longer capable of it, or won't be within a generation or two.

Few pages late, but you might be interested in this here think-piece on a former manufacturing town and its voting habits, particularly the bits about church-reinforced social mores. They had a good run-up to this long before modern social media.

_{(Oh, to be alive now, in this, the Time of Think-pieces. Such surfeit of choice!)}

Hell, their run up so far as that went started the second the GOP started actually managing to get their small government shit through on the local level (which was quite a ways back). Article pointed pretty well about lack of jobs, lagging retraining or new education, and so on. What might have actually done something about that, and damn well tried, was government initiatives in education, job outreach (such as subsidizing green power investment, as a more recent example), and things of that nature. Stuff that GOP-aligned budgeting, lobbying, and political maneuvering steadily undercut and disrupted.

There's not going to be succor for an area that's lost an industry if someone can't get something else in or help get the people out, and the major thing is (as plenty of folks have been pointing out for years in relation to what manufacturing jobs even potentially could come back) business damn sure ain't going to do that. What incentive or excuse there may have been to build away from urban or heavily developed areas in the past just isn't there anymore, and with the decay that's been occurring there's a hell of a lot of reasons for a startup or expander to avoid the hell out of them. And anyone that doesn't do that avoiding is almost certainly going to be outperformed by folks that do and don't reap the disadvantages of trying to build up in an area that's riddled with the problems these post-manufacturing/rural communities are, at best pushing the problem down the road a few years as they struggle and then collapse or get bought out and moved.

And so you need a non-business actor to do anything about it. Something that doesn't have profit or competition necessarily informing a lot of their decisions. Charity (ha) or government, state or federal, something along those lines. And, y'know. The former has never really managed much on that front -- others, definitely, but not redevelopment or retraining of substantial note, though definitely more the latter than the former. Problem with rest was, of course, that one of our major political groups were undermining the government possibility, making sure that any efforts that did exist just weren't enough, making sure the reality was failure and the situation worsening, even if it was trying to get slowed down or reversed.

Not to be a horrible liberal, but it sounds like one of the better long term solutions is better education in rural towns? Won't solve anything short term like the 4k lost factory jobs mentioned in the article, and TBH, I have no idea how we'd solve that because those factory jobs aren't coming back.

The problem with that? Is you need cooperation from the political forces in power to get better education in those towns. Charities can't manage enough and anything profit motivated is going to be dubiously effective at best. Cooperation where the major or at least sufficiently minor forces are republicans, that have an ideological and/or functional opposition to a functioning government. You can't get better education without funding, either more or at least the same and better allocated. You can't get that funding when huge chunks of the people deciding how that funding is made and used are intentionally refusing to give it. Folks've been trying to bring better education to rural and ex-manufacturing towns for at least the last couple of decades and working bloody close to miracles with the resources they have a lot of times, but even with disproportionately effective effort (which isn't everywhere anyway) there's only so much you can do with the resources available. A thousand time multiplier only helps so much when you've got a ten thousand point problem and three points of resource to allocate. And the support to really do it, get the funding and the expertise and the legal/procedural/etc. resources needed, just ain't there. And it's pretty doubtful it's going to suddenly show up anytime over the next few years, ha.

Basically, it's a good idea. It's a good idea people thought of before either of us were born and have been trying to implement the whole time. It's a good idea that's impossible to implement because the logistical necessities behind it cannot be reached, due in no small part to the flat fact it's being actively opposed. It's not going to work as a long term solution until those problems are solved. And the chances of that happening while the GOP is still a significant political force (never mind the majority one) is slim to none, unless they make some pretty drastic shifts in policy and implementation.