The Dark Ages

[Boxlicker101]

I remember a movie, "The Cincinnati Kid", and the climactic moment was a poker game involving the kid, and a man named Lancey Hodge, or something like that. In the final hand, Hodge won all the Kid's money. I saw the movie on TV and I thought that last hand was rather silly. Nobody in his right mind would have bet the way that Hodge did, unless he actually knew what cards he was going to be dealt.

I believe there have been other movies featuring poker, but I can't think of them right now.

 

[Grushenka]

As I see it, pretty soon we're going to have to import illegal aliens to work as audience members

Brilliant, utterly brilliant comment.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Well, computers and pharmaceuticals are certainly growth industries also, and so is transportation, but maybe to a lesser degree.

I have never seen a game of LaCrosse, but I suppose it could be exciting. Bowling is, or was a staple on TV. I have no interest in watching people play cards, but bridge tournaments are big news. A few years back, Bobby Fisher won the world chess championship, and the newspapers followed it in the sports pages. I don't think it was televised, though.

Well, there's nothing really wrong with La Crosse except that it happens to be a singularly inelegant sport, and stripped of the athleticism and trategy of soccer or basketball and the speed of hockey or brutal grace of football, it makes it painfully obvious just how pointless the idea of trying to get a small ball down a field and into an opposing team's little net really is. It's like: why bother?

The thing about computers, pharmaceuticals, and transportation just reinforces my point, Box. They're all portable entertainment, right?

 

[SlickTony]

My favourite author observes that to all intents and purposes we are living in feudal times.

Who's that? At any rate, I don't quite agree with you. I don't think actual feudal times were that abstract.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

I imagine there was a good deal of hand wringing in 1900 about what all those well-fed farm workers were going to do when they couldn't find honest work in agriculture. I imagine the same was true in 1800, when probably close to 90 percent worked on farms. I imagine there were many people at any given moment in history you can name wringing their hands about all kinds of things, and speculating that, notwithstanding the tremendous growth in knowledge, wealth and productivity at every level of society, it was all downhill from here. I used to think the same gloomy thing, but I got tired of it, recognized that in addition to probably being wrong it was psychologically unhealthy, and caused me to fail to take advantage of opportunities that might arise.

Thousands of employees and percent of total.
Employment 1900 Employment 2000 Percent 1900 Percent 2000
Agriculture 11,680 3,281 43.5 2.4
Goods 7,252 25,710 27.0 18.8
Services 6,832 85,370 25.4 62.5
Government 1,094 22,131 4.1 16.2
Total 26,858 136,492 100.0 100.0

Source: Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Washington, DC, 1975 (for 1900 data); Bureau of Labor Statistics and Bureau of the Census for data on the 2000 structure of employment.
http://social.jrank.org/pages/849/Employment-Trends-Data-Presentation.html




Employment by major industry division, (in thousands)
1994 2004 2014 (projected)

Total(1) 129,245.9 145,612.3 164,539.9

Nonagriculture wage andsalary(2) 114,983.8 132,191.7 150,876.9

Goods-producing,excluding agriculture 22,691.6 21,817.3 21,787.3
Mining 576.5 523.2 477.4
Construction 5,094.9 6,964.5 7,756.9
Manufacturing 17,020.2 14,329.6 13,553.0

Service-providing 92,292.2 110,374.4 129,089.6
Utilities 689.4 570.1 562.6
Wholesale trade 5,247.5 5,654.9 6,130.8
Retail trade 13,491.1 15,034.5 16,683.2
Transportation and warehousing 3,701.1 4,250.0 4,755.9
Information 2,738.6 3,138.3 3,502.1
Financial activities 6,866.9 8,051.9 8,901.3
Professional and businessservices 12,173.9 16,413.7 20,979.9
Educational services 1,894.8 2,766.4 3,664.5
Health care and social assistance 10,911.9 14,187.2 18,482.1
Leisure and hospitality 10,099.8 12,479.1 14,693.8
Other services 5,202.1 6,209.9 6,943.4
Federal government 3,018.0 2,727.5 2,770.9
State and local government 16,257.1 18,890.9 21,019.1

US Department of Labor
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ecopro.t01.htm

 

[The_Fool]

I'll tell you one thing. it seems like entertainment is the only growth industry in America today. Between the 2000 channels on my TV and the movies on my cell phone and in my car and the music on my computer and coming out of my toaster, I'm suprised there's any content left at all anymore. Is there anyone is America who's NOT an actor/musician/writer/videographer/singer/entertainer of one sort of another? As I see it, pretty soon we're going to have to import illegal aliens to work as audience members

We've got so much media that we're just sucking us dry. What little originality and talent there is is so diluted that we're reduced to watching normal, talentless people doing normal, talentless, people-type things and telling ourselves it's entertainment. That's our problem and that's why entertainment stinks. Someone willing to make a fool of themselves in front of a camera is a major theatrical event, and a crazy person walking around killing people with a small-caiber handgun is prime-time dynamite.

Even sports is scraping the bottom of the barrel. Okay, I suppose LaCrosse is a legitimate sport and it's rough enough to satisfy our lust for blood, but a pro darts tour? And poker on TV? Do we really wanat to sit and watch people play cards? Can checkers be far behind? There's talk of a Miniature Golf Tour too. From there it won't be long till we're seeing the Master's Monopoly Pro-Am Invitational, Chutes & Ladders, Candyland, Operation, Mousetrap...

You missed that all important sport of Curling...

 

[SlickTony]

You missed that all important sport of Curling...

Now there's a sport that's as fun to watch as flies fucking.

Actually, I'd rather watch flies fuck.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

Addendum to my previous post: The number of jobs in the goods producing sector is falling not just in the U.S., but the entire world. The cause is easy to see if you think about it - technology-driven higher productivity. A robot factory can make a lot more stuff with 10 workers than the old fashioned kind with 100.

Lots of people wonder what will happen when goods producing jobs are much fewer, because the industries that "make stuff" appear to be the only "real" source of wealth, and, well, stuff. But, 200 years ago agricultural land was considered the only "real" source of wealth.

"What will people do?" many wonder. The snarky answer would be, "Whatever they want to," but in a sense that is precisely true. More "stuff" is being created, and fewer people are needed to create it, in the exact same manner as happened with agriculture. "But people had factories to go into back then," one might respond. Today, people have services jobs to go into, and most of these are not burger flipper jobs. (Look at the increase in service jobs in both of the series of numbers in my previous post. Check out service jobs in 1900 vs 2000. ) The important fact is that, humans are increasingly free to do something other than make stuff, just as they 200 and 100 years ago they became free to do something other than thresh grain.

This creates problems of transition, no doubt, but it creates many more opportunities to do something more rewarding that work on an assembly line or stack bales of hay. This is a good thing. Sure, discuss those transition issues, but don't make the mistake of the machine-destroying Luddites in the early part of the industrial revolution, which is to think that an increase in productivity means anything other than a net increase in human well-being.

 

[R. Richard]

This creates problems of transition, no doubt, but it creates many more opportunities to do something more rewarding that work on an assembly line or stack bales of hay. This is a good thing. Sure, discuss those transition issues, but don't make the mistake of the machine-destroying "no-nothings" in the early part of the industrial revolution, which is to think that an increase in productivity means anything other than a net increase in human well-being.

Luddites, not 'do nothings.'

 

[hmmnmm]

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[hmmnmm]

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