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from the picthfork-futures-accelerate-to-new-highs dept.
Nick Hanauer, a self-described "plutocrat" says history shows that the current economic and governmental situation can't last, and the USA should should get busy changing before the system breaks down.
From the memo to his "Fellow Zillionaires":
I founded aQuantive, an Internet advertising company that was sold to Microsoft in 2007 for $6.4 billion. In cash. My friends and I own a bank. I tell you all this to demonstrate that in many ways I'm no different from you. Like you, I have a broad perspective on business and capitalism. And also like you, I have been rewarded obscenely for my success, with a life that the other 99.99 percent of Americans can't even imagine.
But let's speak frankly to each other. I'm not the smartest guy you've ever met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I'm not technical at all - I can't write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future.
If we don't do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn't eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It's not if, it's when.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Thursday July 03 2014, @04:30PM
Convince customers that paying a bit more for goods and services that were made by people just like them is better than paying less for machine-made goods.
Ok, how do you propose that humans build microprocessors which have features only tens of nanometers large? No one has that level of fine motor skill.
Lots of things are made by automation these days because the quality is far superior to human-made stuff. You want to go back to hand-knitted fabrics, so we can all look like serfs from the Medieval days?
When has charging more for something of lower quality ever worked as a general rule? It might work for a few markets when you're catering to rich people who like to show off, but in general places like Walmart thrive because they have the lowest prices.
And finally, why should people spend their lives doing boring, monotonous work that a simple robot could do much better? How is that improving human dignity? It's not. We should all be benefiting from the labor of robots and automation (as long as we keep them dumb so we don't have a Butlerian Jihad). We should be spending time enjoying our lives and doing creative things, not toiling away at mind-numbing jobs just so we can survive. We have the technology to do this now; we should be enjoying the fruits of this technology we've built.