I feel like there is a lot of context lost in this quote without pointing out that it's being said by a union dock worker to a lobbyist he has been paying to bribe politicians with money earned from smuggling prostitutes and heroin into Baltimore for an international crime syndicate.

I agree. The irony of that statement was huge. But it also brings it back to a "chicken or the egg" scenario. That's what I didn't really want to get into. Is the dock worker's union struggling because he's been paying the lobbyists or are they struggling because everyone else was?

Nah man, let him have the simplification for the HN upvotes.

We do build things. We're the 2nd largest manufacturer on the planet.

We just don't need guys on an assembly line tightening the same bolt ten thousand times a day for forty years, like my grandfather did (true story.)

"We just don't need guys on an assembly line tightening the same bolt ten thousand times a day for forty years, like my grandfather did"

I would argue that we do need that.

You don't take a child straight from the womb to an r-rated movie, nor do you put a small plant start right into a torrent of rain. Living things need an environment and activities that match their lifecycle.

A society is also a living thing and has strata that are at different points in that continuum ... and if there is nothing appropriate for that strata, that strata will stagnate and die.

So when people look ahead to some golden utopia where we all work half time as knowledge workers and spend the other half on philosophy or maker projects, they ignore the fact that some sect of a society will not have the makeup for that.

You need to have something for them. Your society needs to have depth and breadth.

This is why I think we need a basic guaranteed income - for all the people who would've been bolt-tighteners fifty years ago. We just don't have the work for them anymore.

Sure, we build things... but not without layers upon layers of middlemen to just pass the buck along with interest.