These days, we see the result of Prop 47 with vastly worsened crime in California. One example is the preventable murder of Santa Maria resident Marilyn Pharis in 2015 by an illegal alien who had been arrested at least six times but was not deported because of the law.
Below, Marilyn Pharis was beaten with a hammer, sexually assaulted and murdered in her home by two men, one a Mexican illegal.
On Monday, Tucker Carlson reviewed the history of the law and its philosophy which he connects to the support of rich liberals who donated big to fund the dangerous proposition because of their feelings of guilt or desire for chaos as appears to be the case with George Soros.
Spare audio:
]]>TUCKER CARLSON: In cities across this country, left-wing extremists are becoming, of all things, prosecutors. They’re getting elected on an agenda that favors criminals over decent people and undermines the rule of law.
How is this happening? Is there suddenly a national groundswell of support for crime and lawlessness? No. No, there’s not. Most Americans believe in order; they always have. What’s happening is an end-run around democracy. A small group of left-wing megadonors is drowning local elections with tidal waves of cash. As it turns out, that works, and it’s not very hard to do. We’ve already told you, in some detail, about how Hungarian-born billionaire, George Soros got a pro-crime radical, called Larry Krasner, elected district attorney in Philadelphia. Violence in that city immediately, and predictably, went up.
That’s what happens when you stop enforcing the law: people die. And, in Philadelphia, they have. By any measure, the Larry Krasner experiment has been an ugly disaster and, yet — and this tells you everything about where we are right now — many progressives see Philadelphia and what Krasner has done there as a model for the rest of the country. They’d like to bring it to your town and they’re trying to do that.
Last month, a longtime left-wing activist called Chesa Boudin was elected DA in San Francisco. Boudin ran on the promise to make an already filthy and disorderly city even dirtier and more chaotic. He pledged to effectively legalize prostitution, public urination, and living on the sidewalk. He dismissed the prosecution of criminal gang members as, quote, “explicitly racist,” though he didn’t explain how. He promised to do away with cash bail entirely. Just in case anyone missed the point of all of this, supporters at Boudin’s election party chanted, “F the police.” Even in America’s most flamboyantly liberal city, this was too much for a lot of people. When you tear down the justice system, only the criminals thrive. Everyone knows that. Yet, in the end, Chesa Boudin was elected anyway, if only by a narrow margin.
How’d he do that? Well, with the committed backing of Silicon Valley’s ruling class. Boudin won the support of people like Kaitlyn Krieger. She’s the wife of Instagram’s co-founder. Krieger, who is a living parody of a silly, out-of-touch rich lady, gave Boudin $27,000. Now, it’s hard to imagine Krieger would have done that if there was a possibility she might have to live with the consequences of it. But, of course, there was never any chance of that. Krieger is a billionaire. She can live behind gates protected by her own police force, if she wants, and maybe she does.
The same is true for people like Elizabeth Simons, the daughter of hedge fund billionaire, James Simons. Simons gave Chesa Boudin $25,000. If you sense a trend here, that’s because there is a trend here. Scratch the surface and you’ll find that the destruction of California has been paid for by the very rich, the guilt-wracked heirs of inherited fortunes have guilt-racked heirs of inherited fortunes have long been a major force in left-wing politics, of course. The more they despise themselves, the more left wing they tend to be. What’s new is the burgeoning coastal billionaire class.
Now, people who amass fortunes incrementally over time through hard work and innovation typically have conservative political instincts. But people who’ve made huge piles of quick cash in finance or technology usually do not. People like that understand they’ve hit the lottery. They can’t say that out loud, of course. They have to pretend that they earned it all fair and square, really.
But deep down, they know that’s a crock. They’re winners in an awful scam. They know that and they feel bad about it. So, to salve their consciences, they fund radical causes designed to destroy the very society that made them rich — sending money to Chesa Boudin is the equivalent of paying a secular indulgence. You pay the price in the end.
This is how California got Proposition 47 passed in 2014. Prop 47 downgraded a long list of felonies to misdemeanors, including any theft of under $950. Since it became law, crime has surged in California. On the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, for example, violent crime has more than doubled. Murders, assaults, robberies and rapes have jumped by 115 percent.
The city of San Francisco, meanwhile, now has more property crime than any place its size in this country. Why? Well, because criminals understand the rules. They know they can’t be punished. Authorities in Sacramento say that members of shoplifting rings bring calculators into stores to make sure their thefts come in under $950. The law allows them to steal with impunity.
It’s grotesque, and it’s incredibly destructive. How did it happen? You know the answer. The moneyed left bought the election.
George Soros put in almost $2 million behind Proposition 47.
B. Wayne Hughes Junior, son of a billionaire storage tycoon, gave another $1.2 million. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings chipped in a quarter million, as did venture capitalist Nick Pritzker. Former Facebook president Sean Parker gave $100,000 to the effort. Cari Tuna, wife of Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, gave $150,000.
Moskovitz went to Harvard with Mark Zuckerberg, a fact that allowed him to become a billionaire while still in his 20s. Moskovitz and his wife are now reportedly worth more than $12 billion. Now, if that sounds like a lot, possibly even an obscene amount for a 35-year-old who’s never really done anything, Moskovitz agrees with you or pretends to agree, anyway.
“Cari and I are stewards of this capital,” he told Business Insider a few years ago. “It’s pooled up right around us now, but it belongs to the world.” Of course, just because all that money belongs to the world doesn’t mean the world gets to decide how it is spent. Dustin and Cari Moskovitz make that call. Like so many in our ruling class, they could care less about what happens to ordinary people in the normal parts of America.
Thanks to the projects they fund, the country’s streets are dirtier and more dangerous. But within the gated tranquility of their world, the Moskovitzes feel like incredibly good people — empathetic, virtuous, enlightened people. And that’s what matters. In fact, it’s all that matters.
But it hasn’t happened, not even close. Maybe the brainiacs of Silicon Valley couldn’t anticipate the vagaries of normal street [...]]]>
But it hasn’t happened, not even close. Maybe the brainiacs of Silicon Valley couldn’t anticipate the vagaries of normal street chaos and snow drifts in diverse climates.
Below, a lot of early testing occurred in sunny suburbs south of San Francisco where 25 mph was the maximum speed of the Google car shown below.
The slow development is not a bad thing at all. Although self-driving cars would be a help to people with restricted movement, the job loss would be catastrophic. Millions of Americans work as drivers, as shown in the 2015 graph below:
As has been pointed out here numerous times, the automation of many industries means America needs vastly fewer immigrants to do low-skilled jobs. In numerous areas of work — those that are less fraught with issues of human safety — robots and automation are going gang-busters, and the country should recognize a near future of fewer jobs overall and adjust immigration accordingly — to zero. But in contrast to trends elsewhere, the self-driving issue being postponed indefinitely benefits foreign drivers along with Americans, so immigrant cabbies are safe for now.
In the current article from CNBC, there’s no assurance of self-driving progress. The failures in safety (like the 2018 crash of an Uber car that killed a woman in Arizona) have not been solved, so the basic promise of totally safe automotive travel has not been fulfilled. More surprising is that the technologists seem unsure of when the real deal will be here — the magic day keeps being postponed years into the future.
]]>Self-driving cars were supposed to be here already — here’s why they aren’t and when they should arrive, CNBC, November 30, 2019
More companies are trying to bring self-driving cars to the masses than ever before. Yet a truly autonomous vehicle still doesn’t exist. And it’s not clear if, or when, our driverless future will arrive.
Proponents in the industry, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Waymo CEO John Krafcik and Cruise CEO Dan Ammann, touted an aggressive timeline but missed and reset their goals.
In a third-quarter earnings call, Musk said Tesla “appears to be on track for at least an early access release of a fully functional Full Self-Driving by the end of this year.” Other leaders in the field are taking a more sober view on driverless cars, what’s still needed to perfect them and how long before they are part of our daily lives.
Avideh Zakhor, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley’s electrical engineering and computer sciences department, explained what inspired the rational reckoning in the industry:
“There was a sense maybe a year or two ago, that ‘Oh, our algorithms are so good! We’re ready to launch. We’re gonna launch driverless cars any minute.’ And then obviously there’s been the setbacks of people getting killed or accidents happening, and now we’re a lot more cautious.”
States don’t have clear regulations governing the safety testing and deployment of driverless cars, and that’s one challenge to getting them out on the road.
As of October, 41 states have either enacted legislation or signed executive orders regulating the testing and use of autonomous vehicles. In September, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released new federal guidelines for automated driving systems — but they’re only voluntary at this point.
Miles driven by test vehicles on real roads had been a frequently touted metric. But to advance the safety of their driverless systems, big players including GM-owned Cruise and Amazon-backed Aurora have also developed their own means of testing in simulation, much like rocket and airplane makers would before a first test flight. (Continues)
A major hint appeared after the 2016 Trump election when Breitbart posted a leaked video from Google headquarters [...]]]>
A major hint appeared after the 2016 Trump election when Breitbart posted a leaked video from Google headquarters showing the leadership’s “dismayed reaction” to the electoral outcome. Multi-billionaire co-founder Sergey Brin compared Trump voters to fascists and said the election “conflicts with many of Google’s values.”
Later we heard more about how Google manipulates search results to favor left-wing results. In fact, Dr. Robert Epstein (a Democrat voter himself) warned that Big Tech can move millions of voters to the left in 2020. During a June discussion with Tucker Carlson, Dr. Epstein remarked, “. . . they can shift upwards of 15 million votes with no one knowing that they’ve been manipulated and without leaving a paper trail for authorities to trace.”
So the leftward opinions of Big Tech can have real world effects.
Tucker Carlson continued his investigation of Big Tech in a Friday discussion with a former employee of Google, probably as a result of a recent Wall Street Journal article, reprinted on MSN.com here: Republican Engineer Fired by Google Claims ‘Bullying’.
]]>TUCKER CARLSON: It’s pretty clear that Google isn’t simply just a business enterprise, though it is the most powerful business in the history of the world. It’s also an ideological organization to its core, who cares what you’re able to see and what you’re able to think and they exercise the same kind of control over their own employees.
Kevin Cernekee would know that firsthand. He spent three years at Google working as an engineer. He says he faced relentless bullying and intimidation from Google for his political views which are not liberal; one manager added him to an internal blacklist until finally, Google fired him last year. Kevin Cernekee joins us tonight.
Kevin, thanks very much for coming on. So, you believe that Google knew what your politics were, that you’re a conservative, harassed you for those views, and then ultimately dismissed you on the basis of them?
KEVIN CERNEKEE: Yes, that’s true. So basically, what happened is, when I joined Google, I saw a lot of employees being mistreated and abused and harassed for sharing conservative views or just for questioning company policies.
And I raised these issues through all the appropriate channels, I raised it through HR, I went to VPs, eventually wound up filing a charge with the Labor Board. And Google knew about this. This opened a Federal investigation from the Labor Board. I was working very closely with an investigator over there.
What happened was Google decided they did not like this investigator, and they made a lot of false accusations against me and they fired me. They said in writing that the reason they fired me was for participating in this labor investigation, and they’re basically daring the government to do anything about it.
CARLSON: I don’t think it’s legal, is it? I mean, you can’t fire someone for initiating a labor action, can you?
CERNEKEE: I wouldn’t think so. I have appealed the decision, and the Labor Board came back and basically said, “Denied.” They did not cite any case law. They didn’t really have a reason for it. It’s basically their will against anybody else’s.
CARLSON: Right. The most powerful country — company . . . country, yes, Freudian slip — in the world. How ideological is the management at Google?
CERNEKEE: It’s highly ideological. You can see bias at every level of the organization. One thing that I’ve noticed is that just handling of routine issues is plagued with bias, like they will get a report, an e-mail from a liberal reporter complaining about something and they will jump on it and they will fix the issue very, very quickly.
And contrast, one thing that I saw when I worked there was, if you do a Google search for “Crippled America,” which is Donald Trump’s book, you would get results that showed Mein Kampf instead of “Crippled America,” and I reported that. I filed a bug against it. I escalated it. I tried to run it up the chain. They took nine months to fix that bug.
They just stalled at every opportunity. They assigned it to people who no longer worked there. They made every excuse in the book to avoid taking down something that made Donald Trump look bad. And I saw a number of other incidents just like that.
CARLSON: Do you believe that Google will attempt to influence the election outcome or will attempt to try to prevent Trump from being reelected?
CERNEKEE: I do believe so. I think that’s a major threat. They have openly stated that they think 2016 was a mistake. They thought Trump should have lost in 2016. They really want Trump to lose in 2020. That’s their agenda.
They have very biased people running every level of company. And they have quite a bit of control over the political process. So, that’s something we should really worry about.
CARLSON: And yet, Congress, including Republicans, are just sitting back and acting like it’s not happening. It’s disgusting. Kevin, thank you for sounding that alarm. I appreciate it. Good to see you.
Apparently, the real world of city streets has proved to be more complicated than the simple suburbs of the Silicon Valley area, where initial self-driving tests were run.
Below, Google’s [...]]]>
Apparently, the real world of city streets has proved to be more complicated than the simple suburbs of the Silicon Valley area, where initial self-driving tests were run.
Below, Google’s 2014 prototype model of self-driving car dinked around the neighborhood at a maximum speed of 25 mph.
The article mentions the 2018 accident that caused a death in Tempe, Arizona. The major pitch of self-driving cars was that they would be perfectly safe, unlike human drivers who are responsible for more than 30,000 traffic fatalities per year in the US.
A whole industry was created and put on the fast track to get autonomous cars on the road.
But now, the brakes are on, and it’s just as well the self-driving juggernaut gets dialed down. More that three million Americans drive for a living, and replacing them with robots was going to be a big hit on the jobs economy. It’s better that widespread use of self-driving vehicles is postponed for a long time.
]]>Despite high hopes, self-driving cars are ‘way in the future’, New York Times, July 17, 2019
A year ago, Detroit and Silicon Valley had visions of putting thousands of self-driving taxis on the road in 2019, ushering in an age of driverless cars.
Most of those cars have yet to arrive — and it is likely to be years before they do. Several carmakers and technology companies have concluded that making autonomous vehicles is going to be harder, slower and costlier than they thought.
“We overestimated the arrival of autonomous vehicles,” Ford’s chief executive, Jim Hackett, said at the Detroit Economic Club in April.
In the most recent sign of the scramble to regroup, Ford and Volkswagen said last week that they were teaming up to tackle the self-driving challenge.
The two automakers plan to use autonomous-vehicle technology from a Pittsburgh startup, Argo AI, in ride-sharing services in a few urban zones as early as 2021. But Argo’s chief executive, Bryan Salesky, said the industry’s bigger promise of creating driverless cars that could go anywhere was “way in the future.”
[. . .]
A year ago, many industry executives exuded much greater certainty. They thought that their engineers had solved the most vexing technical problems and promised that self-driving cars would be shuttling people around town in at least several cities by sometime this year.
“There was this incredible optimism,” said Sam Abuelsamid, an analyst at Navigant Research. “Companies thought this was a very straightforward problem. You just throw in some sensors and artificial intelligence and it would be easy to do.”
The industry’s unbridled confidence was quickly dented when a self-driving car being tested by Uber hit and killed a woman walking a bicycle across a street last year in Tempe, Arizona. A safety driver was at the wheel of the vehicle, but was watching a TV show on her phone just before the crash, according to the Tempe Police Department.
Since that fatality, “almost everybody has reset their expectations,” Abuelsamid said. It was believed to be the first pedestrian death involving a self-driving vehicle. Elsewhere in the United States, three Tesla drivers have died in crashes that occurred while the company’s Autopilot driver-assistance system was engaged and both it and the drivers failed to detect and react to hazards.
Dr. Epstein now believes that left-wing Big Tech can nudge 15 million to the Democrats in 2020 by slanting search results, with nobody aware that it is happening. Yet Republicans are asleep at the switch while Silicon Valley enemies plot GOP doom and the destruction of representative government.
Big Tech’s secret propaganda is a serious threat to our freedoms continuing, but there is little attention from concerned parties. That needs to change.
Spare audio:
]]>TUCKER CARLSON: Back in America, a tech story that might seem insignificant, but is not. In fact, it may determine what happens in the next presidential election; it very well may. A Google whistleblower has come forward to describe his company’s plans to remake the American political landscape. Google, of course, is the most powerful company in the world.
So when an anonymous whistleblower comes forward, in this case, telling Project Veritas that Google is using internal algorithms to shape what Americans see online, and by extension, what they think, you better take it seriously:
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Fairness is a dog whistle, it does not mean what you think that it means and you have to apply doublethink in order to understand what they’re really saying.
What they’re really saying about fairness is that they have to manipulate their search results, so it gives them the political agenda that they want, and so they have to re-bias their algorithms so that they can get their agenda across.
CARLSON: That’s the definition of propaganda, again, being perpetuated by the single most powerful company in the history of the world.
This is not surprising to viewers of this show, James Damore was fired for Google for his political views, his totally conventional, moderate political views and then came on this show to describe the culture at Google. Watch this:
JAMES DAMORE: There are definitely some political biases within Google that I was trying to shed light on in the document, and that they affect many parts of the business and for example, who they do business with, and what type of content they create, and I really think that those political biases need to be addressed.
CARLSON: It’s not just whistleblowers — excuse me, hidden camera footage obtained by Project Veritas shows a conversation with a woman called Jen Gennai. Her Google title is Head of Responsible Innovations in the Global Affairs Department.
In that video, Gennai says that Google is working specifically on products to make certain that Donald Trump does not win another election. Quote, “We’re also training our algorithms like if 2016 happened again … would the outcome be different? People were not putting that line in the sand … that they were not saying that what’s fair and what’s equitable, so we’re like, well, we’re a big company, we’re going to say it.”
In other words, we’re going to try and affect the outcome of the 2020 presidential campaign. Gennai goes on to blast Elizabeth Warren’s proposal to break Google up into two companies. Why? Check out this reasoning, quote, “All these smaller companies who don’t have the same resources that we do will be charged with preventing the next Trump situation. It’s like a small company cannot do that.”
So using a company’s dominance on the internet to sway the outcome of an election. That’s their plan. There should be a term for what Gennai is describing. It turns out there is a term, it’s a term you’ve heard constantly from talking heads on television for more than two years. It’s called hacking an election. Google wants to hack our election. They’re saying that out loud.
As we’ve been told over and over again by CNN and the Washington Post and the New York Times and all the other propagandists. Hacking an election is very bad; at minimum it warrants a multiyear investigation by law enforcement agencies. And yet, it’s happening now.
The Washington establishment has said they want to prevent election interference. But of course, that’s a lie. They just want to make sure they control the elections. That’s their only goal. That’s why they’re not attacking the real source of election interference, which is Silicon Valley.
Google, Facebook and their ilk, they have far more political power than Russia ever has or ever will have. No serious person doubts that.
But the people in charge of our country don’t care about any of that. Because when Google meddles in an election, Democrats benefit.
By the way, if you want to find that video, you can’t access it on YouTube. Google took it down. That’s not surprising. You can already be tossed off of YouTube and Facebook if you decide they’re using speech they don’t, like they’ll accuse you of hate speech, whatever that means.
Now they can toss you off their sites just for putting up videos that make you look bad. They probably won’t be banning any DNC videos anytime soon, you can be certain of that.
Meanwhile, this week, Ravelry, a knitting social networking website with eight million members banned all explicit support for Donald Trump and only for Donald Trump, and they got away with it. And because they have gotten away with it, other platforms almost certainly will do the same thing.
All of this is going on flagrantly in public, but most Republicans haven’t even responded to it. They haven’t reacted at all.
As soon as the 2016 election was over, the press and Big Tech openly began plotting on how to control the narrative in 2020, which is another way of saying control the election outcome in 2020, and using the scapegoat of fake news as an excuse to control the public discourse.
Republicans were in charge of Congress at the time; they did nothing. The White House commands a vast regulatory apparatus. They’ve sat motionless and done nothing. The only Republican is seems even interested at all in the subject and keeping Big Tech in check at all is new senator Josh Hawley, he just introduced a bill that would force tech companies to act as genuinely open platforms in order to receive valuable regulatory benefits. That’s the deal. They’re violating the deal, nobody else seems to care.
Passing Hawley’s bill does not seem to be a conservative priority, though, no one in Congress is talking about it. That’s a big mistake.
Successful political parties look out for their supporters and for the public at large and protect them from harm. Republicans, meanwhile, are sitting in a stupefied fog of libertarianism, doing nothing while their ideas are suppressed, and their supporters are silenced.
One day, they’ll look up and find they have no supporters at all; who will be the blame for that? Only themselves.
Dr. Robert Epstein is not a Republican, but he is the preeminent researcher into the subject. He’s a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, and he is again, the world’s great expert on the effect of the tech companies on political discourse. He joins us today. Dr. Epstein, thank you very much for coming on.
DR. ROBERT EPSTEIN: Always a pleasure.
CARLSON: Seeing this video tape, reading the quotes from this Google executive, does this confirm what you’ve said in the past? Are you surprised by this? What’s your response?
EPSTEIN: I’m not surprised, in the least. It confirms in glowing terms, or in very ugly terms, if you want to look at it that way, that Google not only has the power to shift opinions and votes on a massive scale, but they exercise this power and this is what I measure in my research.
So I can tell you fairly precisely how many votes they can shift; I can tell you fairly precisely how many votes they shifted in 2018.
CARLSON: So why is that not hacking an election?
EPSTEIN: Well, it’s not hacking an election right now because Google and similar companies like Facebook are completely unregulated in the United States, so they can do whatever they please.
And if they all work together in 2020 to support the same presidential candidate, which is very likely, and probably it’ll be a candidate that I support, by the way, they can shift upwards of 15 million votes with no one knowing that they’ve been manipulated and without leaving a paper trail for authorities to trace.
CARLSON: So that’s it. There’s no election at that point. Our democracy is not real if that’s allowed to happen, correct?
EPSTEIN: Well, democracy becomes an illusion. Now, there are actions one can take. I’ve set up so far, the only two big monitoring systems that anyone has built to actually look over people’s shoulder as they’re doing election related online activities, and to aggregate that information and see what they are being shown by these big companies.
Now in 2020, I’m actually trying right now to raise funds to build a large scale monitoring system to keep an eye on these companies and to catch them in the act, literally catch them, when they are manipulating votes and opinions. And in my opinion, that’s the only way we can stop them. There are no laws in place that can stop them at the moment.
CARLSON: Calling attention to it might be the first step and you’ve done more than anyone to do that. Dr. Epstein, thank you very much.
EPSTEIN: My pleasure.
Below, a front page photo asks [...]]]>
Below, a front page photo asks the big question of job displacement:
Below, another SJM photo shows a robot barista preparing coffee at Cafe X in San Francisco.
The other article is from the New York Times and it takes a more critical view of the brave new world that technology is creating. It looks realistically at the bifurcated workforce of the future, where a small techno-literate group is financially safe and the remaining millions of ordinary workers are left out to dry.
The article is filled with facts about historical trends arising from mechanization and bears careful reading. It notes how the 2018 Brookings study (Is Automation Labor-Displacing?) found that “over the last 40 years, jobs have fallen in every single industry that introduced technologies to enhance productivity.” So now “productivity” is a buzzword that may indicate potential job loss.
Certainly the workplace is about to change fundamentally, and low-skilled people like the thousands of Central American aliens claiming asylum will not be needed at any wage because the machines will soon be cheaper and more efficient. Indeed, the United States will not need any low-skilled immigrant workers, because:
Automation Makes Immigration Obsolete
The New York Times article is reprinted in another paper, linked below:
]]>Tech is splitting the workforce in two, By Eduardo Porter, New York Times, February 10, 2019
PHOENIX — It’s hard to miss the dogged technological ambition pervading this sprawling desert metropolis.
There’s Intel’s $7 billion, 7-nanometer chip plant going up in Chandler. In Scottsdale, Axon, the maker of the Taser, is hungrily snatching talent from Silicon Valley as it embraces automation to keep up with growing demand. Startups in fields as varied as autonomous drones and blockchain are flocking to the area, drawn in large part by light regulation and tax incentives. Arizona State University is furiously churning out engineers.
And yet for all its success in drawing and nurturing firms on the technological frontier, Phoenix cannot escape the uncomfortable pattern taking shape across the U.S. economy: Despite all its shiny new high-tech businesses, the vast majority of new jobs are in workaday service industries, like health care, hospitality, retail and building services, where pay is mediocre.
The forecast of an America where robots do all the work while humans live off some yet-to-be-invented welfare program may be a Silicon Valley pipe dream. But automation is changing the nature of work, flushing workers without a college degree out of productive industries, like manufacturing and high-tech services, and into tasks with meager wages and no prospect for advancement.
Automation is splitting the U.S. labor force into two worlds. There is a small island of highly educated professionals making good wages at corporations like Intel or Boeing, which reap hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit per employee. That island sits in the middle of a sea of less educated workers who are stuck at businesses like hotels, restaurants and nursing homes that generate much smaller profits per employee and stay viable primarily by keeping wages low.
Even economists are reassessing their belief that technological progress lifts all boats, and are beginning to worry about the new configuration of work.
Recent research has concluded that robots are reducing the demand for workers and weighing down wages, which have been rising more slowly than the productivity of workers. Some economists have concluded that the use of robots explains the decline in the share of national income going into workers’ paychecks over the last three decades.
[. . .]
In 1900, agriculture employed 12 million Americans. By 2014, tractors, combines and other equipment had flushed 10 million people out of the sector. But as farm labor declined, the industrial economy added jobs even faster. What happened? As the new farm machines boosted food production and made produce cheaper, demand for agricultural products grew. And farmers used their higher incomes to purchase newfangled industrial goods.
The new industries were highly productive and also subject to furious technological advancement. Weavers lost their jobs to automated looms; secretaries lost their jobs to Microsoft Windows. But each new spin of the technological wheel, from plastic toys to televisions to computers, yielded higher incomes for workers and more sophisticated products and services for them to buy.
Something different is going on in our current technological revolution. In a new study, David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Anna Salomons of Utrecht University found that over the last 40 years, jobs have fallen in every single industry that introduced technologies to enhance productivity.
The only reason employment didn’t fall across the entire economy is that other industries, with less productivity growth, picked up the slack. “The challenge is not the quantity of jobs,” they wrote. “The challenge is the quality of jobs available to low- and medium-skill workers.”
Adair Turner, a senior fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking in London, argues that the economy today resembles what would have happened if farmers had spent their extra income from the use of tractors and combines on domestic servants. Productivity in domestic work does not grow quickly. As more and more workers were bumped out of agriculture into servitude, productivity growth across the economy would have stagnated.
“Until a few years ago, I didn’t think this was a very complicated subject: The Luddites were wrong, and the believers in technology and technological progress were right,” Lawrence Summers, a former Treasury secretary and presidential economic adviser, said in a lecture at the National Bureau of Economic Research five years ago. “I’m not so completely certain now.”
He certainly did — “more than 90” over the years since the 1970s according to the diversity-enthralled New York Times. (Apparently the precise number has become too large to [...]]]>
He certainly did — “more than 90” over the years since the 1970s according to the diversity-enthralled New York Times. (Apparently the precise number has become too large to know exactly.) But chain migration makes multiplication easy — any legal immigrant can welcome an unlimited number of family members and they can soon do likewise. Last year, the White House released a report showing that 9.3 million new immigrants were admitted based on family ties between 2005 and 2015.
Jagdish came as a legal immigrant but the disastrous math is the same as shown in the chart below:
Chain migration has fueled the explosive growth of Indian immigrants now residing in the United States:
One result has been that nearly three-fourths of Silicon Valley tech workers are foreign, many of whom were born in India. Some of the top executives are Indians — so how welcoming are such companies to young American tech workers when there are still Indian cousins who need a job?
The Times article was reprinted in the Toronto Star:
]]>One face of immigration in America is a family tree rooted in Asia, TheStar.com, September 17, 2018
LAS VEGAS—The young engineer arrived in America when he was 23 with a good education and little else. He landed a job at a nuclear test site, and built a home in Nevada. Between the 1970s and the mid-1980s, he brought his wife, mother, five sisters and a brother over from India, his native land.
In later years, his siblings sponsored family members of their own, and their clan now stretches from Nevada to Florida, New Jersey to Texas — more than 90 Americans nurtured on the strength of one ambitious engineer, Jagdish Patel, 72.
In late June, four generations of Patels assembled for a reunion in Las Vegas, a gathering that included a venture capitalist, a network engineer, physicians, dentists and students.
“I am so glad that I came to America,” Patel said recently, sitting in the custom-designed house he built in Las Vegas, complete with a home theater where he hosts Super Bowl parties and a marble-lined Hindu temple room. “I brought everyone here,” he said, “and we have provided valuable service to this country.”
The share of the United States population that is foreign-born has reached its highest level since 1910, according to government data released last week. But in recent years, the numbers have been soaring not so much with Latin Americans sweeping across the border, but with educated people from Asia obtaining visas — families like the Patels, who have taken advantage of “family reunification” provisions that have been a cornerstone of federal immigration law for half a century.
Since the Patels began flocking to America in the 1970s, millions of other Indians have arrived to work as programmers and engineers in Silicon Valley, doctors in underserved rural areas and researchers at universities. The majority were sponsored by relatives who came before them. Others arrived on work visas and were later sponsored for legal residency, or green cards, by their employers.
The Trump administration has framed immigration as a threat to the nation’s security and to American workers, a drastic departure from the longtime consensus that immigration was a net positive for the country. The president’s public priorities have often focused on fortifying the southwest border, but his administration is also working to scale back decades of legal migration that have led to Asians, not Latin Americans, becoming the largest group of new foreign-born residents since 2010.
Already, the administration has quietly begun taking steps to cut back legal immigration, under the banner of “Buy American and Hire American,” which the president framed in an executive order last year. Some experts predict that the number of immigrants granted permanent legal residency in the 2018 fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30, will show a rare decline.
Without passing new legislation, the administration has pursued a number of policies that are slowing legal immigration. It has reduced refugee admissions; narrowed who is eligible for asylum; made it more difficult to qualify for permanent residency or citizenship; and tightened scrutiny of applicants for high-skilled worker visas, known as H-1Bs.
A recent analysis of government data by the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonpartisan research group, found that the denial rate for H-1B visa petitions had jumped by 41 percent in the last three months of the 2017 fiscal year, compared with the previous quarter. Government requests for additional information on applications doubled in the same period. (Continues)
Two major automakers have recently announced their intention to [...]]]>
Two major automakers have recently announced their intention to launch automated taxi services in California. That’s a smart move for a couple reasons, one being a smaller scale arena to work the kinks out.
Another topic that must concern the auto companies is the public’s apprehension about having a machine operating the car. A January Reuter/Ipsos poll found that two-thirds of Americans are uncomfortable about the idea of riding in a self-driving car. A Gallup survey released in February determined that 54 percent of Americans said they are unlikely to utilize self-driving cars.
So a gradual introduction of self-driving technology via taxis would make sense along with a marketing program of advertising and social media. For example, Intel ran an ad last fall showing basketball star Lebron James overcoming his aversion toward a driverless car. Online coupons for a cheaper ride would entice some. Local news stories about the new taxis will likely be promoted when they get going.
Of course, the proponents of the new automation technology rarely mention the associated job loss, as the less expensive machines replace pricey humans who also need lunch breaks and healthcare. A Bureau of Labor Statistics page for Taxi Drivers, Ride-Hailing Drivers, and Chauffeurs put the number of workers at 305,100 for 2016. In addition, there are millions of Americans who work as drivers: in 2015, the Department of Commerce reported that there were 3.8 million motor vehicle operators:
Interestingly, a 2013 paper from CIS.org noted that 42 percent of taxi drivers and chauffeurs are foreign born, so continuing to import low-skilled immigrants appears unwise, to say the least. For example, the Central Americans now mobbing the border and making fake asylum claims don’t bring any useful skills. Low-skilled jobs that Centrals could do — like restaurant work and agriculture — are the ones most likely to get robot replacements in the near future if they haven’t been transformed already.
Okay, back to robo-taxis coming to California; tech-friendly San Francisco is getting a General Motors installation:
GM puts pieces in place for self-driving taxis in San Francisco Los Angeles Times, July 3, 2018
General Motors Co. has created its own ride-hailing platform and quietly built one of the largest charging stations in the United States to get its Cruise self-driving car unit ready to enter the robo-taxi business next year.
Cruise has installed 18 fast chargers in a parking facility near San Francisco’s Embarcadero, the well-trafficked boulevard along the city’s eastern shoreline where Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc. have busy drivers. And GM’s self-driving car unit has been testing its own Cruise Anywhere ride-hailing app and fleet-management system, said people familiar with the matter.
The largest U.S. automaker has long planned to start a ride-hailing business using self-driving cars by 2019, but it hasn’t said where the service would start or whether it would work with a partner. These latest moves show that San Francisco is where GM is assembling the pieces to launch its rival to Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo next year if GM decides against working with an established livery app such as Uber or Lyft. (Continues)
Meanwhile, Daimler is eyeballing wealthy Silicon Valley for a rollout of deluxe Mercedes shuttles.
]]>Mercedes Will Launch Self-Driving Taxis in California Next Year, Wired, July 10, 2018
LIKE IN A Tough Mudder, you’ve got a few strategies when it comes to the race to launch a taxi-like service with autonomous vehicles. You can start early and keep a slow but steady pace. You can show up a bit late, then try to sprint through it. Or you can hold back, see what trips up other contenders, and then slowly work your way through the obstacles.
The big automakers tend to fall into the third category. They may have taken a few years to recognize that shared autonomous vehicles could annihilate their business model—selling human-driven cars to individual humans—but they’re now making real progress toward the finish line. And today, Mercedes-Benz parent company Daimler took a cautious step into the swamp stomp, announcing plans to launch a self-driving car pilot somewhere in Silicon Valley, next year.
Daimler is calling its service an “automated shuttle,” but it’s not referring to some blobby, slow-moving van. It’s going to start out using a fleet of S-Class luxury sedans and B-Class hatchbacks, with long-term plans for vehicles designed for autonomous driving, like the F 015 “Luxury in Motion” concept it showed off a few years back.
The automaker is still negotiating the particulars of the deal, has not divulged which city will host this program, and being cagey on details like how many cars will make up the robo-fleet. It does plan to have human safety drivers on board to keep an eye on the system. Passengers, who will request rides via an app, will travel for free. The Germans are more open about the lessons they’ve learned watching the self-driving car industry start to take shape, including the myriad complexities of the challenge. “Hardly any company can meet this challenge alone,” says Uwe Keller, Daimler’s head of autonomous driving. (Continues)
Sunday’s front-page graphic listed possible causes of the housing crisis as [...]]]>
Sunday’s front-page graphic listed possible causes of the housing crisis as City and state officials, Real estate developers, Tech companies and Bay Area residents.
It’s not like immigration-caused population growth has not been discussed in regional media —there’s plenty of information available. Is the Murky News incapable of assessing cause and effect, supply and demand?
Consider a message from a website called SiliconValleyOneWorld.com (!) that celebrates diversity and growth:
Global Immigration to the Bay Area at 5-Year High, SiliconValleyOneWorld.com, March 24, 2016
International migrants are pouring into the Bay Area at the highest rate in five years, driving population growth and cultural change across the region.
More than 238,000 foreign-born people and some Americans returning from abroad moved into Santa Clara, San Francisco, San Mateo, Contra Costa and Alameda counties in the last five years — more than 92,000 came to Santa Clara County alone, according to new U.S. Census Bureau population estimates released today. . . .
A San Francisco TV station was more realistic about the cause and effects of extreme growth:
Study: Silicon Valley attracting record number of foreigners; locals leaving, KRON Channel 4, February 4, 2018
SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — More and more Bay Area residents are getting fed up with the high cost of living and the crowded freeways.
But while tens of thousands of people are leaving for other places, you might be surprised at who’s moving in.
In the past two years, the region from Santa Clara to Daly City has lost 44,000 people to other parts of the country.
At the same time, it gained almost 45,000 new immigrants from foreign countries. . . .
Naturally, all those foreign techies will need places to live, thereby driving up Bay Area rents and house prices which continue to skyrocket. For example, a Bloomberg headline from April 9: Home Values Are Rising by $800 a Day in San Jose.
But the Mercury-News accepts the premise of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group who helped arrange the poll that the exploding cost of housing has nothing to vastly increased immigration bidding up the numbers higher and higher. The poll does note “newcomers” as a possible factor, but the Mercury cannot bear to speak ill of immigrants in any way:
]]>Who caused the Bay Area’s housing shortage?, San Jose Mercury-News, April 6, 2018
Hint: It’s not just tech
EVERYONE HAS A THEORY about who’s to blame for the housing shortage that’s driving up prices and chasing Bay Area families out of the region.
A new poll offers surprising insights into where most of us point the finger: not at the government officials who control what homes are built where, but at the tech companies that have flooded this region with jobs and the real estate developers trying to maximize profits.
Experts say finding someone to blame is not that simple. The real answer, they say, lies entangled in a complicated web that implicates everyone involved, from businesses to local elected officials to your next door neighbor. And the stakes are high for policy makers trying to untangle that web as the housing crisis intensifies. To solve the problem, it’s crucial to understand the factors that turned the Bay Area’s real estate market into one of the country’s most dysfunctional.
“There isn’t one single sector to blame for the housing crisis,” said Pilar Lorenzana, deputy director of pro-affordable housing organization SV@Home, “and consequently there isn’t one single sector that’s responsible for fixing it.”
In a five-county poll conducted for the Silicon Valley Leadership Group and this news organization, 48 percent of those surveyed pointed to tech companies as a major contributor to the region’s housing shortage. Only developers ranked higher, with 57 percent of residents saying they were a major factor.
(Continues)
So it is totally sensible for an unhappy immigrant with skills to return home to family, culture and a career. It’s also a better choice for the United States than for millions to be importing the relatives and culture into growing separatist barrios. We Americans prefer our culture too.
Our subject today is an Indian woman, Nupur Dave, who was trained in engineering, but was worn down by lack of sleep, insufficient money from her Silicon Valley job and plain homesickness.
The San Francisco Bay Area lifestyle can be enticing, but its desirability has made it very expensive.
Why can’t there be a Mexican Dream in that wealthy nation where the middle class is growing? Why can’t there be an Indian Dream or a Brazilian Dream? On a planet of seven billion people, would-be immigrants to the first world need to reform their home nations instead of investing all their energy into an escape. It’s racist to think non-white people cannot manage successful societies.
The path to America-style prosperity is not a mystery: it requires equality under law, freedom, property ownership and an openness to entrepreneurial activity.
Nupur Dave (pictured below) made the decision to go home to India and her move has worked out well.
]]>Why this Google engineer gave up on Silicon Valley and moved back to India, BusinessInsider.com, March 18 2017
By all accounts, including her own, Nupur Dave had the dream life.
A native of India, she had spent the past decade living in the US. She was working at Google at the perk-filled “Googleplex” headquarters in Mountain View, California, at a job she loved. And she had obtained a permanent residence, her green card.
She was a manager for a part of Google called Network Content Distribution, the network tech that makes Google run faster (in geek speak: it’s Google’s homegrown alternative to a content distribution network like Akamai).
And the opportunities for promotion were plentiful.
“I got to travel all over the world, attend conferences,” she told Business Insider.”It was great. The team was great. It was really good job.”
There was just one problem. She was growing increasingly unhappy with this Silicon Valley dream life.
Expensive and lonely
For one thing, the cost of living was a hardship. While she was paid well, it wasn’t enough to get ahead in the costly Bay Area, much less buy a house.The idea that all Googlers are wealthy is a “myth,” she told Business Insider. While a highly specialized software engineer or a high performance manager are definitely well compensated (some of them make seven figures between pay and stock), for many rank-and-file Google employees, “Google is a medium payer,” she said.
For instance, salaries for a technical program manager at Google range from $93,837 to $176,500, according to Glassdoor. While that’s not chicken scratch, when you factor in what it costs to live in the Valley, those salaries don’t go far.
“I always rented,” she said, and she often had a roommate, too.
But money wasn’t her main problem: loneliness was worse. She missed her family in India. She missed her home country. She was single. Working long hours for Google made it hard to meet someone and have a relationship, she said. And while there is social prestige in the Valley attached to being an engineer at Google, it also intimidated some men, she felt.
She became very involved with the Indian Google Network. Google has a large contingent of India ex-pats (including CEO Sundar Pichai) in Mountain View, and the Indian network is one of many Google diversity groups.
“I founded the Women’s Cricket team at Google. And with the India Google network, I organized a lot of events. I had a life. I really had a lot of friends, I’m a very social person,” she said.
It didn’t stop that nagging feeling, though.
At one point, Dave tried shaking up her life by moving to the trendy city of San Francisco. Walk everywhere. Great food. Gorgeous views.
But that soon became exhausting. She wound up with a three-hour commute, getting home each night at 8:30 p.m. She hired help from TaskRabbit to do the cleaning and the chores. But her rent was higher, as were other costs, and she couldn’t afford it at the level that she needed.
“I was becoming sadder and sadder,” she said. The exhaustion of living in San Francisco also meant less time to do her hobby, writing and photography for her recipe blog.
Then, during a visit home for her cousin’s wedding, she was talking with her 8-year-old nephew who asked her why she lived in America. The only answer she could think of was, “Because my job is good.”
Less pay, more … everything
Was she really living for a job? Could she have both? A life near her family in India and Google?She searched for and landed a Google job in India of parallel responsibility as a Technical Program Manager for Google For Work. But it involved a big pay cut.She didn’t decide to take it until she had a conversation with a stranger on a plane ride who happened to be a PhD from MIT in economics and a law professor. He told her the Google India job could have a big and helpful economic impact for her home country. And the salary was enough for her to buy her own house in India.
It’s now been seven months and she says she’s way happier. “My stress levels have been reduced to one tenth what they were. I used to sleep for 5 hours a night in the U.S. In India. I sleep for 8 hours now,” she says.
She wrote a post about leaving America for India that went viral on LinkedIn and has since received thousands of messages from people.
Her advice to other U.S. immigrants is “don’t torture yourself” but to “trust your gut.” It will tell you if the U.S. is your true home, or if it “is not your destiny.”