On the other hand the guys who run the excavators at large job sites will be mostly gone, as will the dump truck drivers and most of the guys who pour cement, replaced with AI-controlled robots. China already has almost completely automated open pit mines (with all-electric equipment, eliminating cost and pollution of diesel as well) and much of the refining process. Conduit is being run on green-field construction sites, pulling cable through conduit has been automated for years, and loose cable runs are coming soon. Even the fast food place you mentioned is now running with a crew of 5 rather than 10-12 like at the turn of the century. Robots are walking guard patrols and will never come in drunk, fall off the loading dock while sneaking a cigarette, or take a nap in an unused meeting room. Amazon is deploying pick-and-pack robots, robots are stocking shelves in retail stores, robots are delivering food in restaurants and to homes.

UBI will soon be a necessity, since you only have a limited number of jobs cleaning porta-potties or tearing off roofs.

Kind of. China has expanded its borders repeatedly over the centuries, at times bordering on the Persian Empire or down to Burma before shrinking back towards its traditional region of influence.

Deflation is not automatically bad, China is seeing deflation now, and that's actually the plan. To do it though you need competent leadership, which we in the west are sadly lacking.

https://kdwalmsley.substack.co...

Chinese deflation is a result of powerful supply-side forces that have the opposite effect: China’s economy continues to grow at solid rates, while rent-seeking profits are extinguished at the company level by high competition.

So what did the US do? Cut off China's access to advanced lithography equipment, prompting China to create its own litho industry. While they're not yet to the level of cutting edge chips from TSMC the new Huawai phones boast chips with their own design as good as the ones in iToys of just a few years ago.

The GOP has been this way for four decades, the difference is that now it's saying what it's doing instead of blaming Democrats for its actions.

You've never lived with hyperinflation. Know how I can tell? The thought of printing unlimited money based on nothing doesn't send chills down your spine.

The experiment has been done many times, it always ends in failure. Always, and without exception.

You think that Africans and Arabs are going to be effective fighters at -40 in waist deep snow dealing with drone warfare they've never seen before? You're funny.

People around here do know dick about the situation, that's why znrt had to explain the above.

Ukraine gave up nukes that 1) had no triggers (the USSR had removed them before withdrawing), and 2) they had no launch codes for. Essentially they gave up nuclear waste.

Umm . . . what?

One generally overlooked thing that it did was launch thousands of children on careers that didn't entail plowing with the chakitaqu'lla to plant potatoes or spending interminable days herding sheep. My brother-in-law knows an accountant who was the first in his town to use a computer, lured off the farm by the realization that they were just a tool and even people like him could learn to use them.

This was the situation at least as far back as the '70s, when I was generally the only under-30s person in the adults section of the library except for college students.

IIRC Farcebook didn't run on the OLPC, the Sugar OS wasn't designed with interactive image-heavy web apps in mind.

This was much of the problem, lack of connectivity. In Paruro where my brother-in-law lives when they distributed the OLPCs the only option for Internet connectivity was an expensive ISDN line, and later an extremely congested 3G tower. In Paucartambo, where our niece taught, there was no connection for the first couple of years.

Another was that teachers were not provided with OLTPs, only students. I got a couple on Buy One/Get One and gave one to our niece, and my sister-in-law used the ancient creaking Win95 laptop we gave her until 2010.

So a good first effort, and lessons were learned. Today I can't help but think it would be much more successful.

In the 1970s Indira Gandhi convinced India's government to spend millions on secondary education, and especially computers. The portion of the world which didn't laugh at the effort was condemning it for not using that money to provide arable land, seeds and clean water (as if governments are unable to do more than one thing at a time). The investment has paid off many, many times.