We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.

--R. Buckminster Fuller

Yep, if you want to have Capitalism, you have to acknowledge that technology makes it unnecessary for everybody to have to work.

Emmeran wrote:

Baywolfe wrote:

Yep, if you want to have Capitalism, you have to acknowledge that technology makes it unnecessary for everybody to have to work.

There will be a refocus on bespoke items and human service for the wealthy and near-wealthy.  Only the poor will have machines serving them.

I would assume that, for the wealthy, a lot of that goes on already.  Although many of their artisans are probably in Europe and not here, they can still buy from the top clothing designers and dine at exclusive restaurants in America.

Emmeran wrote:

Baywolfe wrote:

I would assume that, for the wealthy, a lot of that goes on already.  Although many of their artisans are probably in Europe and not here, they can still buy from the top clothing designers and dine at exclusive restaurants in America.

I think bespoke will become more popular further down the wealth chain, the middle class already has shown a huge appetite for it and I expect that to migrate to the lower middle class soon.  When I speak of "bespoke" I mean one-off's not just brand name.  Melons and I are a good example of that, we don't buy any jewelry, art or decorations that aren't bespoke; and we ain't rich.  Our children have inherited our taste in that from an early age, hence our encouragement to one of our son's to study blacksmithing.

To some extent you're probably right.  You're probably not going to get new bespoke furniture unless they were right there in your home town, you knew them, and they were reasonably priced.  I don't mind buying mass produced recliners made by Barcalounger in my parent's home town of Morristown, TN or mattresses made by Sterns and Foster (just down the road here in North Richland Hills) but I told my wife 30 years ago I wasn't going to screw any furniture together anymore.  IKEA is one of the signs of the Apocalypse.

From my friend's facebook feed:



You know that old saying, "The Devil finds work for idle hands." My feeling is that people will make good if they have the resources to do so.

I have run in to older mid-westerners who have said that the WPA was a godsend.  These people voted for Trump, too. But way back when, when they were starving and there was no work and no where to live, the Gubmint saved them with work projects jobs.

Where was I going with this... If people have nothing and can't make their own way in the world, eventually, they will grab their pitchforks and tiki torches and march up to the McMansions and start burning them down. The alternative to lawlessness, as abhorrent as it might sound, is find work for the masses (yep, tax money for busy work, AKA bread and circuses).

The only easy solution here, is to take down a few statues. unless that's a different kind of bread and circuses, then we'd be right back where we started.

Auto-edited on 2020-08-02 to update URLs

Baywolfe wrote:

--R. Buckminster Fuller

If I ever need assurance that this is total bullshit, I only need to use the self-checkout lane at the grocery store.