Trump Bans Muslims from the U.S.

What?  This is madness.

Trump banned Muslims traveling from seven predominantly Muslim countries today, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

What he fails to remember is that most of the terrorists that attacked us in 2001 were from Saudi Arabia.  I don't see that country on 'the list'.

All of this skirts the fact that a broad ban like this is not going to help.  This mass banning of Muslims does not make America more secure.  Terrorists will always find another way in, regardless of bans like this.

All this ban does is make us look like assholes to the rest of the world.  Is that really what we want?

Robots, Automation and Their Effect on Economics

This is a short repost of a hugely significant comment that John Mauldin made in his latest letter.

Like it or not, we have entered an era in which machines are learning how to do much of the work that now provides our incomes and, in many cases, our self-worth. This is a topic we will explore in depth in future letters. But a brief summary needs to be interjected here.

The US is manufacturing more materials and goods than ever. Manufacturing is increasing at a fairly serious rate, well over 2% a year. The problem is, manufacturing jobs are not. A Ball State University study calculated that it would take more than 8 million additional jobs to produce what we currently produce today if we were merely at the productivity levels of 15 years ago.

Investment in automation and software has doubled the output per U.S. manufacturing worker over the past two decades. Robots are replacing workers, regardless of trade, at an accelerating pace. “The real robotics revolution is ready to begin” writes BCG and predicts that “the share of tasks that are performed by robots will rise from a global average of around 10% across all manufacturing industries today to around 25% by 2025.” (Source: fortune.com/2016/11/08/china-automation-jobs/)
This is a simplification, but robots and their associated machinery have been somewhere in the neighborhood of four times more important in the loss of manufacturing jobs than off-shoring of jobs has been. But it is hard to protest against increased automation and easier to point a finger at China or Mexico.

The real challenge the US and the rest of the developed world face is how to create new jobs in the face of this automation challenge. The problem is not one we can walk away from. The best estimates that I have read suggest that Korea may be 15–20% more productive than we are in terms of costs, because they are pushing further and faster into the automation process. That trend will leave US manufacturers and exporters – or those in Germany or Italy or any other developed country – behind in the global business contest. Think Japan is not seeing the same thing?
If we don’t automate faster, we lose jobs by being uncompetitive. If we do automate, then we see jobs go away. What we have to do is figure out how to make sure that new jobs are created, and that these jobs are simply not make-work but are rather meaningful and fulfilling. Tall order. For whatever it’s worth, we are programmed in our evolutionary DNA to value what we contribute to the community through our work. Simply getting welfare without a way to eventually make it on your own does not help personal self-esteem or your community. (italics mine)

This is the single greatest challenge facing our world today is how we will adjust as a society as robots unemploy huge swaths of our population.  "We are programmed in our evolutionary DNA to value what we contribute to the community through our work. Simply getting welfare without a way to eventually make it on your own does not help personal self-esteem or your community."  This innate state is not going to change as robots produce more and more of the goods and services that we consume. 

This is where I think computer games will help, as it will allow people to 'work' without needing to produce anything.  I have already seen this as people pursue fictive goals and seek to cultivate skills in a virtual realm that fills this work and community requirement for our psyches.  The Matrix is closer than we might think, but we will live in a myriad of worlds all of our own creation with the freedom to jump from virtual reality to virtual reality at our choice.  I definitely foresee a large and growing interest in computer games in the future, and I am staking my life on it, literally.

You can read his entire article here.