Bay 12 Games Forum

... the amusing thing is that, bandwidth wise, the awoo is like half the size of GC's sig image. Smaller than serg and MSH's avatars put together, too.

Yeah, pretty much. Investigation's not being reopened, media being media, comey possibly significantly violating FBI procedure, same old song and dance.

Oh, fun. Can't be arsed to link to Twitter but apparently updated information said there's been three emails of note found on the device in question... none of which had been withheld by clinton during the actual investigation. Entertainment news, ladies and gents.

More like foreign language soap opera/daytime drama. Which is, uh. Probably worse, by whatever measure you care to use.

I think the point you start watching subtitled/dubbed soaps is the point where you're no longer scraping the bottom of the barrel, you've dug through and somehow managed to find yourself several feet below ground, having tunneled through concrete and similar materials.

And the barrel wasn't on the ground floor.

Not very many people like to see themselves as a bad person, neo. Is probably the most of it. They insist otherwise because it looks better to others and makes themselves feel better (more deserving of their advantages, etc.), too. They're not suppressing any challenges to their power, they're helping people by maintaining the... whatever. Hypocrisy can be a hell of a drug. Along those lines.

... no, most of it was just due to automation and advances in production. American productivity in terms of the stuff those jobs used to come from has largely either not budged, kept growing, or barely slowed down. And yet the workforce continues to shrink, and it's not going to stop. Outsourcing is a thing but when it comes down to it the core issue for unskilled workers is that they're increasingly just not fucking needed anymore. Not that the job can get done cheaper elsewhere (though it's definitely an issue, it's not the major one), that the job can't be done cheaper by humans period, or that one person is now doing the job of several (dozen).

Even if you magically ended all outsourcing overnight and produced absolutely everything locally (and it somehow didn't smash the economy into little pieces in the process) those jobs still wouldn't be coming back to nearly the extent they used to, and even if it actually slowed things down they'd still be bleeding out. Literally the only way to fix that would be burning down modern factories and infrastructure, or assuming direct control and instituting employee productivity caps or something mad like that. What has mostly cost these folks their jobs isn't cheaper labor elsewhere, it's increased productivity per worker. Even if you artificially increased the price of labor you'd still be losing jobs compared to even a few decades ago, never mind during the height of factory employment.

Effectively what's happened/happening to former blue collar/manufacturing work is the same thing that happened to farm labor back when agriculture started getting better equipment. We've still got roughly the same (or better) muscle when it comes to actual production*. We just don't need nearly as many people to do it.

*The net domestic growth, by the by? Averages out to ~3-4% per annum since 1920. Manufacturing output has been increasing the whole goddamn time the workforce has been shrinking. Roughly 370% increase in production over the last ~century.

Protectionist trade policy only really works when there's industry left to protect, after all. At least it would fuck the multinationals, but that wouldn't exactly make things better now that they've already got their claws buried in the world economy.

Hell, we have industry, it just doesn't need more people or much in the way of protection. For all folks kvetch about manufacturing et al leaving the states, we're still one of the major world powerhouses there, and so far as I'm aware even our strictly domestic stuff has levels of productivity that could only uncharitably be called merely sky high and still rising. Can't do too much to fix that with protectionist policies.

Unless said policies involving taking sledgehammers to modern factories and infrastructure, I guess

Quote from: Frumple on October 27, 2016, 08:39:50 pm

Oooh, wait, you mean the catbutt avatar. Probably. I was thinking sigs, whoops.

Shuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuush! <_< *glares sternly*

For what it's worth, I'm at least fairly sure I didn't save it somewhere, and am too lazy to try it hunt it down for the people that don't remember the x de la housecat. Perhaps it's some small comfort :3

Be glad it's not the old one. Thank goodness no one around here remembers that, or saved it. That'd look REAL awkward right now.

... wasn't it that one from GC?

E: For the curious, if my memory's working, gasbug there's talking about this.