re: As a public service re: Tulsi Gabbard, here's a reminder who she is:

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Take the makeup off and ugh ............

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C_A also I been told.

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As employers adapted to survive, their strategies to cut costs, enhance productivity, and shift risk heightened the instability of many Americans’ employment arrangements. They also set the stage for more disruption in the years ahead—change that will continue to hit Midwestern workers and communities particularly hard.

First, improvements in process automation, robotics, and machine learning are destabilizing employment. The McKinsey Global Institute projects that as many as one-third of U.S. workers may need to change occupations and acquire new skills by 2030, as robotics and artificial intelligence eliminate routine and repetitive jobs and create new jobs that require more and different skills.

The Midwest is at the epicenter of these shifts. Auto manufacturing uses half of all industrial robots in this country. Robots on the shop floor are concentrated in about 10 Midwestern and Southern states, led by Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana.

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Second, low educational attainment among the region’s industrial workforce could exacerbate employment dislocation due to automation and digitalization. A comparatively high proportion of Rust Belt working-age adults have only a high school diploma. Such workers may face greater difficulty making the transition to new kinds of occupations that demand higher-order cognitive skills.

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Unskilled workers are bearing the brunt of automation. According to a 2016 study, 83 percent of workers in occupations paying less than $20 an hour are at high risk for being displaced; 4 percent of those getting more than $40 an hour are in danger. Since the Great Recession, the number of robots in American factories has increased by 50 percent, most of them in the Rustbelt. Retail sales clerks are disappearing everywhere. Driverless cars may well replace truck, bus, and taxi drivers. In Men Without Work, Nicholas Eberstadt estimates that by 2050 as many as 24 percent of men between 25 and 45, most of them without college degrees, may be unable to find a job.

Americans, it seems clear, want politicians to do something about automation. A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2017 found that, although respondents were divided on whether government should take responsibility for assisting workers displaced by automation, 85 percent of Democrats and 86 percent of Republicans (including 7 in 10 with a high school diploma or less) indicated that automation should be limited to dangerous or unhealthy tasks, even if machines were less expensive and more efficient.

To date, however, only Andrew Yang, a former tech entrepreneur, has made automation the centerpiece of his presidential campaign. After painting a doomsday scenario of workers replaced by robots and AI software succumbing to drug use, suicide, political unrest, and violence, Yang maintains that President Trump’s approach — bringing back coal mining jobs and protectionist tariffs — is not the answer. Instead, he proposes a guaranteed national income of $1,000 a month for every American over 18 (comparable to the oil dividend received by every adult in Alaska), funded by a value-added tax on corporations.

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You would hit Mark Dice if you had the chance (not that there's anything wrong with that).

Not sure your opinion of attractive looks matter here.

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mildly attractive


In federal politics, compared to who? Do you prefer them like Susan Collins?

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