• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    20 days ago

    This is a weird general statement that reinforces that “supply & demand” is a worth-while endeavor

    It’s a fundamental pricing mechanism. Low supply pushes demand up.

    What right-wing or doomscrolling blog are you reading about AI from? All these companies trying to cram some type of “AI” into their program is a problem for sure, but it’s just a fad which only the most useful implementations will stick around.

    Efforts to shoehorn AI into daily business activity aren’t just at the retail end. We’re seeing it show up in doctor’s offices, to replace transcription services, and legal offices, to replace paralegals, and in IT to replace developers.

    The implementation is routinely worse than the human labor it replaces, but the cost is so much lower that business owners will justify the transition.

    Union activity has been beaten down by a war being waged for decades, proper legislation and officials protecting the rights of Unions are the only way they will continue to have a chance.

    Union organizers who wait on corporately captured politicians to save them are fucked. You build the union first and you get the legislation later, when politicians recognize the union as a force worth pandering to.

    By contrast, the Wildcat Strike and the Slow Down… hell, the very act of collectively bargaining, leveraged market force to exert pressure on employers.

    Depriving businesses of their labor supply compels them to increase their compensation. That’s Econ 101 tier material analysis.

    Wouldn’t having a federal majority, manually raising the wage floor, protect future workers when the AI revolution comes?

    Sure. But you need a movement large enough to obtain the corruptive force of private capital first. Where do you get that movement?

    By the time you have a coalition big enough to compel the federal government to change, you’ve already built a union big enough to force private industry to capitulate independent of a legislative fix.

    • Cataphract@lemmy.ml
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      20 days ago

      Again, just baseless conjuncture that sounds “almost right”. You have the general principles, you even reference Econ 101, but analysis and expert opinion goes further (why there’s so many armchair champions out there, unfortunately). Please cite some actual sources that have analyzed the systems and what your perspective has been formed by. This just seems like base-level pandering that gets no where like a “group chat” on one of the mainstream news outlets.

      Things do not happen in a sterile chamber. You can’t create union movements when they’re getting destroyed by officials

      For approximately 150 years, union organizing efforts and strikes have been periodically opposed by police, security forces, National Guard units, special police forces such as the Coal and Iron Police, and/or use of the United States Army. Significant incidents have included the Haymarket Riot and the Ludlow massacre. The Homestead struggle of 1892, the Pullman walkout of 1894, and the Colorado Labor Wars of 1903 are examples of unions destroyed or significantly damaged by the deployment of military force. In all three examples, a strike became the triggering event. (link)

      Your AI argument is fear mongering, as I stated above, with sources, a net increase in jobs is projected. This is the telephone/computer technology fear now for the 2020’s. You’ve yet to provide an actual argument for why technology shouldn’t proceed. Should oil and gas not go through the same transition? God forbid we have less administration and more skilled workers, as my sources concluded would be the outcome.

      Yes, supply-demand is a fundamental pricing mechanism, as econ 101 will teach. Unfortunately the subsequent classes that economists take after also include the million different factors with changes that mechanisms output. For further understandings, I would suggest Unlearning Economics (here is one of his videos going over a Sabine Hossenfelder’s video on capitalism). He comes with credentials,

      My background is as an economist who specialises in behavioural economics. I did my PhD in economics at the University of Manchester and from 2019-23 was a Fellow at the Psychological and Behavioural Science Department at the London School of Economics. I remain affiliated as a Visiting Fellow.

      I have quantitative skills including mathematics, statistics, and coding which are illustrated by my PhD and current research. I am also a published author, with my book The Econocracy selling 15,000+ copies and having over 200 citations on Google Scholar. I also have excellent communication skills and have presented both my research and book at numerous conferences and universities.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        20 days ago

        Please cite some actual sources that have analyzed the systems and what your perspective has been formed by

        Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century is a solid one.

        Richard Wolff also has a great podcast on the subject

        Your AI argument is fear mongering

        That is part of the strategy to depress wages, certainly. But substandard substitution is also a standard business strategy.