antoinette_

A major part of socialism is an end to private ownership of capital-producing property like factories.

Young people can't afford to buy farmland anymore and we're losing topsoil at a concerning rate.

Companies as a group should be aware that they are just a polite fiction that exists only because actual people allow them to exist. If they continue down the path of externalizing all costs while internalizing all revenues, people may one day decide that they're tired of humouring the fiction. If we somehow got to a point where 90% of workers were laid off due to automation, with no adjustments to the social safety net, then I think we would be long past that point already. In that sense, Uniqlo is effectively freeloading off the fact that other companies haven't similarly automated, because if they had, Uniqlo would not be able to exist. Nobody would be able to afford its clothing, and there would be massive societal unrest to the point that people would probably not even respect the "right" of a company to do things like hold private property.

No, they weren't proven false, it's just that the effects of automation aren't felt evenly across the whole population at once. If you aren't in the groups it was affecting, you likely didn't see it beyond a newspaper article here and there, and maybe it didn't really register. There are entire towns filled with people who are suffering from poverty and all its knock-on effects because they were single-industry towns and that industry went through automation that eliminated those jobs en masse.

Everyone always says that these people are just suffering from a skills shortage and need to retrain into a different career and move to where the jobs are. But which careers should they choose to retrain into? Retraining represents several years of time investment and at least tens of thousands of dollars in money investment, money which they don't even have in the bank, so choosing wrong will often be the last nail in the coffin. When I was entering school I was told that going into CS was too risky because everyone was offshoring these days. Instead the most recommended "safe" jobs were: lawyer, pharmacist, welder. Of those three choices, only one was still in demand by the time the entering cohort had graduated. The other two had such a glut of entering workers that many new grads were being advised to retrain again. When industry demand is changing faster than people can reasonably retrain and pay off their student loans, "skills shortage" is just another way to say "let them eat cake", and the pace of automation is absolutely contributing to this issue.