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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Blue" data-source="post: 9768175" data-attributes="member: 20564">Man, these new-fangled automobiles will put all the buggy whip salesmen out of business!Yes, progress happens.  Old jobs get phased out or get done more efficiently.  We used to spend all of our waking hours getting enough calories to survive.  Agriculture was a huge disruption to that way of life.  How we do agriculture now produces thousands of times more edible calories per man-hour than it did back then, but we've found new ways to fill our time.Part of the current issue is an assumption that people should be working 40 hours a week.  Back when it was every waking hour.  Less than a hundred years ago it was 6 days a week, often 10-14 hour days.  In the US, Henry Ford was the one who instituted the 40 hour week back in 1926, because his factory was more efficient.  It wasn't passed into law into 1940 - 65 years ago.  Labor Unions fought hard for that.And today, in many industries due to improved tools, those same workers are producing many multiples of the work they would have produced back in the 1940s.  Maybe we need to look at "well, if producing this much work is worth getting paid X, then you should get paid X even if now it only takes you 10 hours to do it".  That's not something that'll be given by the business owners, though some countries like France have less than 40 hour weeks with strong legal safeguards.So don't look at tools and cry they are taking jobs, look at those who squeeze so much work from the people they have employed while only sharing the merest pittance back compared to the work they produce.History is full of "technical" revolutions, from crop rotation to the loom and onward.  History has taught us there will always be a next thing.</blockquote>

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