*promote Hillary is feeling the Bern!

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Bernie is winning because Hillary carries too much negative baggage.

Bernie is getting the young voters who are still idealistic in the lets all share utopia. Waite till they turn 30+ and look at their paycheck and see how much is taken out in tax and then they will change into conservatives.

They won't have jobs because the automization of this country will leave them jobless. When Google makes truck drivers, taxi drivers, uber drivers obsolete, that's a few million jobs dead and gone forever. When every grocery store, fast food place, gas station and so forth are automated 100%, that's millions more. The ripple effect of 10 million + jobs gone in a few decades will cost millions more, the type that is higher paying.

So in other words @bobnight33 the economy is crashing under the free market 100%, so what is your solution?

I can only dream that he gets the nomination. It's pretty bullshit of the media though, they should be giving him a lot more time.

@Lawdeedaw

I think that's a bit of a flawed argument and hardly what's wrong with the US economy. It would be silly to halt the automation* of driving. Not only is it likely to lead to safer driving but reducing the costs of shipping everything will in effect lower the costs of virtually all goods and improve living standards. Government may have a role to retrain workers or to provide unemployment support but it's not there to prop up industries that are obsolete. No one wants to go back to the days of typists and secretaries and for good reason.

I would rather blame the entrenched firms with their lobbyists protecting their turf through the corrupt political contribution system. If you look at Google Fiber for example: Verizon, Comcast and the like have been mounting various political and legal challenges to keep them from growing and to protect their margins. Free market economies work because new market entrants erode profits over time through innovation. Instead you have politically maintained trusts.

I don't think Bernie has much of a chance to win. The early voting states are generally not very representative of the country. Polls also pretty much always tend to narrow as elections approach.

I think most Democratic voters will look at the Republican hopefuls and pretty much conclude that voting for Hilary at least all but guarantees a Democrat president. Even if it's not Cruz or Trump and someone more competitive such as Rubio, she's still the clear favorite.

I would like to see Bernie win the nomination simply because that would all but guarantee Bloomberg would run and have a very good chance of winning, but I doubt that will be case. With his person wealth he would be genuinely detached from the corruption of political contributions.

I would say this is pretty much on the button, though. This way clearly isn't working, but the people who have money and power have convinced the majority that nothing can change and even if we could we would be worse off.

I don't think i'm being melodramatic or conspiracy theorising either. Rupert Murdoch and the Barclay brothers tell people what to think and they think it. Democracy has been subverted by money in most western countries with corporate lobbyists willing to spend billions to get a politician on-side, "anti-lobbying" legislation that actually attacks grassroots and activists from broadcasting the truth at election time (and leaves lobbying untouched), and unfair campaign spending/fund-raising that leaves the rich with all the advantage.

The media in Britain have consistently presented a skewed and incorrect representation of the left-wing party leader. It is clearly a campaign by vested interests to stop a man who would bring their reign to an end. The language that they use and the metric by which they judge "their" guy is COMPLETELY different to how they judge the "other" guy.

What's worse is, fairness and balance in the media has deteriorated to such a point that it is now absolutely fine for all this to happen.

As Lawdeedaw said, we are already a long way up shit creek and we didn't even pack the paddle. Some people are getting very rich and are very comfortable, they have immense power and they will say anything to convince you that it's best that it stays that way. Including lying and using manipulative language and statistics in their national publications and television stations. And all you as an individual really has to do is vote someone into power that cannot be corrupted. You've got Bernie, we've got Jeremy.

"Too rich to be corrupted" is farcical though - let's only trust rich people then. Not only does this suggest that rich people are more trustworthy just by dint of having lots of money, but that poor people are less trustworthy because the greedy little paupers can't restrain themselves from 'upping their station'? I would rather judge someone on who i perceive their character to be than based on what is in their bank account, but i guess i'm fucked up like that.

This isnt just the US economy. The Digital World will make many jobs obsolete everywhere. In a few decades there will be not enough manual work left to make a living for everyone.

Which means ... there will not be enough spending capacity left to generate enough revenue for a lot of industries. When no one has work, no one has the money to buy stupid crap they really dont need, so entire industries will go bancrupt which means more jobless people which means even less disposable income.

In Davos, on the World Economic Forum, for the first time there was a decent and serious discussion about possible solutions for this developement. From heavily investing in education for future generations to different models of basic income.

"They" know that something has to be done. There has to be some form of wealth distribution or everything will go up in flames.

@Bernie:
As a European Bernie isnt THAT much a leftie. He wont win the nomination, but the more he gives Hillary a hard time, the more influence he will have on her future social and economic policies. May be he'll even end up in her government.

I'm really not sure about that. The agricultural and industrial revolutions didn't exactly have that effect, it just moved jobs from one place to another right? I mean, my job almost didn't exist 10 years ago. Not saying there is no challenge, but the elimination of thankless menial labour has to be a good thing overall no? I'm more worried that our slaves are finite resources that will need replacing eventually, one hopes not with the human variety.

This isnt about the change new technology brings. You can welcome the Digital Age or you can condem it. Doesnt matter. What matters that things WILL change. Very drastically in a small amount of time. A LOT of stupid, boring, menial jobs will soon vanish. Which is a good thing, but what to do with all this people who worked on those jobs?

Our wealth is based on us buying lots and lots of new things. Things and services. For that, we need money. We work to get that money. But if more and more jobs vanish, you cant just wait and hope for the best. You have to somehow counter that loss of expendable income.

What method you use or what combinations will be effective ... time will tell. But relying on the Invisible Hand of God (err ... The Free Market) and making the already super rich even more rich will NOT work.

As i said ... in Davos more and more influental people finally agree that something has to be done, because those job losses and economic changes will happen. Very fast. This is not a slow process like changing from hunter/gatherer to farming. Even the Industrial Revolution took several generations to finally establish itself. The Digital Revolution, in combination with a more and more intertwined, globalized world will change our lives in a matter of only a few decades.

It's different this time though. Every technological advance moves jobs from humans to automations once the automation is good/cheap enough.

Right now, automations aren't good/cheap enough to do most of the jobs humans do (if they were, they'd already be doing it).

But that's going to change. Even for "creative" jobs (music, writing, art, etc), computers are getting better at it. Remember, they don't have to be perfect or even as good as the best humans, just better and cheaper than most.

Eventually the number of jobs that actually require human input will be vanishingly small.

This is going to happen.

http://videosift.com/video/Humans-Need-Not-Apply

I would argue that automation still isn't the job killer #1. Plain old political decisions, such as sound finance, deficit hawkery, and austerity lead by a mile in this category. Neither is being addressed properly, but I find it hard to focus on the employment effects of automation when the Eurozone, for instance, runs at >10% unemployment strictly due to policies enacted by (non-)elected officials. We don't need technology to cause mass unemployment, humans can do that all on their own.

Additionally, even the amount of work available is a matter of perspective. Within the current system, the number of jobs with a decent salary is already dwarfed by the number of people looking for one. The amount of work to be done, on the other hand, is not.

Case in point: our (read: German) national railroad company is short-staffed by about 80.000-100.000 people, last I checked; our healthcare system is short-staffed by at least 200.000 people, probably a lot more; law enforcement is short by about 50.000; education is short by at least 20.000. Let's not even talk about infrastructure or ecological maintenance/regeneration. These are not open positions though, because nobody is willing/able to pay the bill.

So while I agree that we should be discussing how to deal with technological change, a more pressing matter is either to alter the system or to at least take back control over the vast sums of dead currency floating around in the financial nirvana or on Stephen Schwarzman's bank accounts. First stop: full employment. Then, gradually, guaranteed basic income when automation does, in fact, cause mass unemployment.

Finally, I don't think automation will do as quick as sweep as some presume. The quality of software in commercial machines is quite absymal in many cases, since it was written in the normal fashion: do it now, do it quickly, here's five bucks. Efficiency improvements generally come at the price of QA, and it shows. Europe's most modern railway control center is nearby, and it never went online -- Bombardier cut corners and never had the proper railway expertise to begin with. Meanwhile, the center build in '53 is working just fine, and so are the switches put in place when Wilhelm II was running the show.

Edit: That said, I'm thrilled to see mind-numbing labour being replaced by machines. Can't happen quickly enough.

I guess the question is then are we going to be like the grasshopper or the ant? Will we prepare for the eventuality that automation and political corruptness (based on the demands of cheap employment pools and the money they receive from corporations desperate to keep that status quo) will merge together for the perfect storm? My problem is the attrition has been slow, just compounding the problem...

Actually, look at the other parts of the world that have begun using the revolution to make more production for themselves and trade. All those people that have been displaced from their jobs (Which were horrible pay/conditions) are still without ANY job. Crime is the result. I forget which deviance book for my classes had that information, but the stats of the newly unemployed who are committing violent acts was very...disturbing.

Automation is not the only problem, true. But here is the funniest part. Everything in a free market is commodified. That is for sale. This includes life saving services even. I.e., a free market. And yet people somehow complain when corporations invest in politics. They claim that investments should not be made in that sector, which I laugh at...

But anyways, to suggest that corporations will lower prices (I.e., profits) just because transportation costs go down is ignoring traditional responses. Lets say grocery stores--which have enormous competition and have been failing let and right--jacked up prices because of rising fuel costs...then fuel went to 1.70 a gallon. Whew, those (lack) of savings are rolling on in... When the labor becomes 0 dollars, we shall see exactly that back...

Now, with that said, hell yeah automate driving. I never implied we shouldn't. Just the 39,000 lives saved, insurance costs, etc are worth it. But I am pointing out a cumalative stacking of bad effects coming up (which have already been slowly hitting.)

Huh, never thought of that. So true...and I will add to this. In the past jobs in service have been able to absorb people into it to take up the loss of jobs (Say in agriculture and such.) So when Henry Ford made his assembly line, jobs were created pretty much everywhere. Restaurants are but one great example of this.

But with the techno revolution, the service sector was already pretty full. Now it is saturated. If I see one more new gas station down here in Florida, or another restaurant open, it will be too soon. I remember TWO, TWO Starbucks in the same mall. Such a false economy...

Now add automation and boom...

In the short term, absolutely. But on a longer term, automation will mean there are simply NO jobs. It'll happen in my lifetime, and the only way it doesn't is if we run out of energy to power said automation before that.

When it happens, we will need a serious rethink about our entire economic system.

Hopefully we address this before it gets here, which is why I think we need to start transitioning to a transparent socialist democracy NOW.