Sometimes you catch the bus, sometimes it rolls over you

While perusing the Smallest Minority blog spot, I came across Upside Down by Sarah Hoyt. The point of the post is that technology is moving faster than we can readjust. The so called elites who have been leading us have no more idea what to do than anyone else. Marxism/Socialism/Fascism/Communism is all they have, and it was never a very good match for reality in the first place. It is a theme I have also heard several times on Glenn Beck.  Here's a sample of her post, but I urge you to read the whole thing and think about it:

Because of movies and books, and the inevitable Marxist gloss on anything created/taught in the last century, a lot of us think a revolution comes about when the pressure on the people being oppressed is so strong that they rise come against the oppressor, and assert the will of the people.

This is not jut crazy, it is fricking delusional. Like most ideas Marx had and disseminated to gullible minds, it would have benefited a little bit from JUST a little exposure to the real world.

...snip...

The problem is this: humans crave leadership but proper leadership requires that the leader know what the heck is going on. Leaders work, if they’re carefully trained to lead (one of the reasons Heinlein advocated breeding and raising rulers, or at least jokingly advocated it) and in our complex technocratic society, more so, but what if what they’re learning actually renders them more unfit to lead, because they can’t see conditions as they are right now?

Imagine this. In the near future, say within the next decade, truck drivers who are now involved in the distribution of goods will be replaced by self driving tractors. The first place they will disappear from will probably on the interstate highways. But as more and more of this infrastructure expands to more and more local roads, driverless trucks will become more prevalent. Now there are a lot of truck drivers.  The number of over the road truck drivers is 3.5 million, while the total number for all truck is estimated at 15.5 million.  Do you think a truck driver can retrain as a software engineer?  No?  But that is what we are telling them.

The typical Marxist/Socialist/Fascist/Communist idee fixe for people earning small amounts is to RAISE THE MINIMUM WAGE.  Who, after all, can raise a family on the minimum wage?  But of course the minimum wage was never intended to be adequate for people raising a family.  It was rather intended as a first job, or entry level job, to be replaced by subsequent higher earning jobs as one gained experience.  No one was supposed to work at McDonald's as a career.  But now with the minimum wage being pushed in some states to $15 per hour, many fast food restaurants are going to automated kiosks, which will replace cashiers.  No doubt they are working on smart phone apps to eliminate the kiosks one day too.

I can remember when most businesses had a receptionist cum secretary who answered the phone and forwarded the call to the appropriate party.  She (for usually it was a she) has been replaced by automated answering devises and computers that allow a person to type his own letters, specifications, and so on.  In structural engineering, more and more is done with computers, and less and less is done by smart guys with a slide rule and a pencil and paper.  Engineers are usually smart enough to do something else, and survive.  But not everyone can.  And besides, how many hard hitting documentary producers does society need?

No, mass production for some things is not going away, any more than agriculture went away. But it is going to shrink, products are going to become more customizable. And one size fits all government will be almost impossible, the further we get into that change.

...snip...

But it wasn’t until this weekend and the conversations about last week that I GOT it. It’s not just government. If it were just government, it would be easy. But the same stick hitting politics is hitting EVERYTHING from Hollywood to your local grocery store. A lot of it is still being done the way it was ten years ago, sure, but that is probably incompetent, delusional, and quite likely hurting the business.

We have not yet seen the fall out of the 2008 financial crisis. So far, things have been kept under control by a combination of low productivity, a shrinking workforce, expanding welfare, and the government lying about inflation. While we know inflation is at 10-15%, the government has been under reporting and the average MSM watcher remains unaware. If the economy heats up, we could have hyperinflation as seen in the Wiemar Republic between WWI and WWII in Germany. What happens then is anybody's guess.

Some wag has been quoted as saying that history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme (often attributed to Mark Twain, but he did not say it.) We can not know what the future holds, but at times like now of fast moving technological changes, with no one to lead us into the bright future because no one can see what happens next, bad things have happened.  Be prepared, and keep your powder dry.  As Kevin of the Smallest Minority says, hard history coming.