It’s sad in the sort term for those people who loose their jobs obviously but mechanisation in itself creates new jobs and video store clerk is a rather dead end job often done part time by students going on to better careers so I don’t think it’s really very sad in the long term.

Mechanisation changes the job market but it doesn’t really reduce it, for starters all those machines need to be built, programmed, maintained, upgraded, marketed, sold, powered, etc. New jobs are created as well as destroyed. People merely need to reskill and as I say people in those sort of roles are often doing it part time on the way to something better.

After all do you morn the loss of jobs in the chimney sweeping industry because more people have gas an electric heating now? The job market changes and people have to learn to go with the flow.

Hence the rest of that post, telling people to live in Europe for a while before complaining about gas prices. The sad truth is that the American economy is built on absurdly cheap energy prices, which are intentionally kept low by the various levels of government.

Let's take Illinois for an example, since I recently had to live through this nonsense. Electric rates had been frozen for ten years while the electric utilities were "deregulated", then people seemed to be surprized when a decade worth of inflation and cost increases hit all at once! Literally overnight electric bills doubled, and people started having problems paying them. Buisinesses went under due to overwelming costs. Guess who got blamed for this mess? It wasn't the corrupt lawmakers who made the mess, it was the power companies - some of which had been running at a loss due to the price cap. Seems people can't live without the government subsidizing cheap energy - and that's exactly what current prices are, indirect government handouts.

Now, the federal government is trying to pass increased fuel efficiency standards for the first time since the 1970s. Had fuel prices not been kept so low, these new standards would most likely have been inforced by market prices, not government regulation. I'd bet you (pndrev) drive something much more efficient than most Americans, and put a lot less miles on it a year, to boot. Why? Because if you drove like an American, you'd spend more on gas in a year than you paid for your car.

Oh Ned Ludd, where hath thy spirit gone?

I am entirely one for industrialization and progress (I like my robots as much as the next chap), but I really have to play devil's advocate here, cus' you all seem to be way on the 'progress' side of the fence. For the record, I have a computer science degree and I work in IT services, so I am right in the thick of one of those 'new jobs' created by the need to upkeep machines.

First, lets look at a simple example. Say you have a job done by manual labor, and there are 50 workers to perform that job. A team of five researchers get together and invent a machine to do that same job with a single operator that switches off in shifts. A few robotics engineers get hired to maintain the machinery. So lets say in total we generate 12 new jobs from this machine. The numbers are very obviously off, but the ratio they represent is what is important. The replacement of jobs revolving around a machine and jobs that machine replaces is not a 1:1 ratio - otherwise, there would be little point in bringing in the machine. The purpose of using a machine is to increase efficiency, speed, and decrease the number of paychecks involved. So take it to a larger scale. 50 jobs that each require 50 employees get replaced by fifty machines. The same five guys design each of these machines (because that is there job, and they don't design only a single machine in their entire career), we hire a couple extra engineers to handle the extra load of machines, plus 3 or 4 shift operators per machine (because these machines still require some human control, we'll say. They aren't completely automated). So thats 5 designers, we'll say 5 engineers, and 200 shift workers = 210 new jobs. How many were lost? 2500 .... So where are we going to stuff all these displaced people? We don't need 500 new robotic engineers, or 2000 operators ..... Obviously it's not as simple as all that - there are many more factors to consider - but I think it makes sense. And really, thats exactly what happened at the beginning of the industrial revolution - which is why there were radical groups of people going around destroying machines for a while.

Greed is irrelevant, because companies are bound by law to do whatever is in the best interests of their shareholders. How many times have you seen executives on TV excusing their actions with the line “we are just doing what is in the best interests of our shareholders”. I mean if sending out death squads to harvest children off the streets of America to be used as pet food benefited the shareholders, then that is what would be done! There is no more powerful force in the Universe, no more uncompromising and self perpetuating force than “we are just doing what is best for our shareholders”.

In the end, when humans finally become extinct, Aliens will come and erect a monument here that say’s “we were just doing what was best for our shareholders”!

I'm not at all against industrialization and machines, Bleeg. I would love for us to live in a world where everything is made easier by machines, and all of our food was bio engineered to taste batter and be better for us. Hell, if you handed me a chicken that was bio-engineered to taste like chocolate, but didn't give me cholesterol, I'd take out my spork and my electric carving knife and dig in. I just think that we need to be aware and accepting that progress often comes at a human cost (unless, of coarse, you have the social infrastructure to handle and encourage a whole lot of re-training ... and we really don't)

Yes, that would be a cheap price in most Euopean countries. Not because gas is cheaper here, but because our government isn't taxing us as much for it. On average, 60 percent of the price European drivers pay at the pump goes to their governments in taxes.

In Britain, the government takes 75 percent, and raises taxes by 5 percent above inflation every year. (This year it didn't because of higher prices) On August 8, for example, the price of gas in the US, without taxes, would be $2.17, instead of $2.56; in Britain, it would be $1.97, instead of $6.06. So actually, it is cheap now, your government is just taxing you to death and therefore, your moral is suffering. I wonder if birthrates are down...

That's just the way it is. There is nothing you can do, it's inevitable. Join us or be crushed.

Sincerely,

The Yor

Petrol prices cannot rise too much higher than they are now otherwise electric vehicles and other alternatives will be able to begin taking significant market share more and more rapidly which the oil companies would never want! Further more, as alternative fuel systems improve over time, this will add increasing downward pressure on fuel prices – we will probably even see fuel prices falling once OPEC looses too much market share and decides to fight back.

It will take 10-20 years for those alternatives to become wildly available, and all hybrids will do is decrease market sensitivity to price increases.

Oil is a product with little economic sensitivity, and this means they have no reason to lower prices in the short term (read 10-20 years), and that they might as well milk us for all they can until the environment forces them to either an equilibrium or viable competition with your alternatives force them down to 0 or little economic profits.


Note: For those who do not understand this, economic profits are not accounting profits as it includes all opportunity costs.