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Real Nice Economy You Got Here. Be A Shame If Someone Broke It
This clip of Harold Daggett is popping up all over twitter. The immediate aesthetics are comical; the accent, the glasses, the jewelry. If it looks like a mobster and sounds like a mobster....
There's enough discussion on the Presidential Race in the VP debate threads. The CW angle here is how the image of the "American Union Man" has always been 99% hagiography. They have been lionized in Bruce Springsteen songs and other pop culture kitsch since the 1990s at least, but the hard economics stopped working in the 1970s. Unions are a tax on everything downstream of them. Functionally, it's racketeering and extortion. They owe their bewildering continued existence to the fact that they function as a bedrock reliable voting bloc with lockstep leadership control .... until now?
We had the teamsters refuse to back any candidate earlier. Your modal longshoreman is almost certainly a Trump voter. But Trump despises Unions. So ... what's happening?
US ports are actually some of the least efficient in the world because of this point-blank refusal to adopt automation, IIRC they were next to Tanzania on the leaderboard. China and Japan are far ahead.
However, we do need to consider a balance between automation and human labour renumeration and leverage. I doubt any of us have worked in a port. Few of us are professional artists or actors, I suspect. I imagine many here would be much more sympathetic to extremely highly-paid software engineering or finance jobs getting axed and replaced by AI.
It may well be that a reasonable balance for ports vs port workers involves this thug and his hangers-on being sent off to prison for economic wrecking, mass sackings and prompt automation. But similarly reasonable balances may be imposed on unruly, arrogant tech-bros by the rest of society. Some level of working-class unity (interpreted broadly to mean all who derive most of their earning from their wage) may be appropriate here. What happens when we automated the dock workers, automated the factory workers, automate the retail workers... who will be left to go on strike when they automate us? And then where is our leverage to negotiate anything in the future?
There was a Liu Cixin short story about an Ancap civilization enforced by AI NAP killbots where one capitalist ended up owning all the parks, all the water and air after winning a completely fair free-market competition. Everyone else was confined to desolate hive cities, rasping away in filthy reprocessed air until their machines failed, unable to step a few metres away and enjoy the beautiful landscape. It is all private property. I am a NVIDIA shareholder and feel somewhat insulated by all of this... but many are not. Who is to say that someone or something won't decide 'oh these little people who bought shares pre-singularity didn't really contribute, off to penury with them! Print out another billion clones of us!'? We need leverage to negotiate and getting into a habit of discarding leverage may not be helpful, despite obvious good reasons to do so.
I agree, but I think it's scarier than that. I don't think anyone will have to decide or coordinate to get rid of the non-contributors, they'll just be out-competed. It won't be one capitalist owning all the resources, it'll be the entirety of productive civilization, just like it is today.
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