What To Do With The Dummies

You know who I mean. The people who for whatever reason (the reason is irrelevant to this topic) cannot or will not partake of the public educational system enough to become productive citizens. The “high school graduates” that cannot read, make change, or pass the dumbed-down standardized tests. More and more they are shut out of the mainstream by their own towering ignorance.

Has anybody in this forum been into a modern factory or mine? Do you know how things are made today? Gone are the days where workers stood shoulder-to-shoulder, each doing one repetitive task after another. The old newsreel clip of GM engine workers – one putting the valves into the cylinder head, the next putting on the valve springs, the next applying the spring retainer clips etc. – is a picture of days long gone. In Indianapolis there is a plant that makes small diesel engines for pickup trucks. In 1990, over eight thousand people worked there. Today there are less than 90 cars in the employee parking lot, but the plant still makes 1,500 engines a day which is 15% more than in 1990. The reason is not offshoring – the engines are still made in Indianapolis using mostly US-sourced parts – but automation. A “transfer line” that cost three quarters of a billion dollars does everything. People never touch the product, only maintain and tweak the transfer line. 7.900 people who used to do the repetitive work that the aforementioned dummies could do are now elsewhere.

In the 1970s, a million ton per year coal mine (slightly smaller than average) would put 700 people per shift underground fifteen production shifts plus five maintenance and construction shifts of 200 to 300 people. Today that same mine put 50 people underground ten shifts a week to get the same production. Reason: automated longwall mining techniques. Nobody is doing mindless work like swinging a pick and shoveling coal. The people underground today are smart cookies – proficient at electronics and hydraulics. No dummies who can’t read or make change need apply.

As late as the 1970s the railroad industry was still shaking off the impedimentia left over from the steam locomotive. Train crews had five people – engineer, conductor, two brakemen and a fireman – and a caboose. On a diesel electric locomotive the fireman has literally nothing to do. Usually they were apprentice engineers. There were roundhouses that employed thirty to a hundred shop crafts guys to service the locomotives. Today the train crew is down to the engineer and one brakeman (who cuts and couples cars) and no caboose. Roundhouses are seven hundred miles apart. All the low-productive loafers (jobs that dummies could get) are gone, but the railroads move more freight than ever.

Even the armed forces do not have any use for dummies. Such people are rejected every day by military recruiters. The armed forces want people who are smart to crew nuclear submarines, fly the drones, and drive tanks. If you cannot pass the state standardized tests (dumbed down to the point that a relatively smart housecat could pass if it had opposable digits to hold a pencil) you aren’t going to be an army of one.

More and more, high school kids are too dumb to pass rudimentary driving tests.

Job by job, the morons are being frozen out. In earlier times, they could find work in new enterprises. Truck drivers were at one time considered unskilled labor, untrainable for anything else. But today, the crushing weight of an onerous government stifles formation of new enterprises, and the few that escape the dead hand of government are those that cannot use high school failures.

Left to themselves dummies will go into crime, but – being dummies – they will get caught quickly and sent to prison. The smarter dummies will go on lifetime welfare. Not acceptable in either case.

So what do you do with the dummies?

 

Interesting thread. Naturally education should remove half of the dummies, another 25% go on to menial labor and a quarter end up sucking the system dry.

 

Hmm. Mass euthanasia seems like a good option, if we have something productive to do with the bodies. Can human flesh be turned into biodiesel?

 

Not if that challenge is left in the hands of the energy companies that OBAMA subsidizes.

 

Eliminate government imposed minimum wages and job opportunities for those that cannot make it in today's job market will open up.

 

Soylent Green. anyone?

 

so what? They will not be able to earn enough to live on (you can't live on minimum wage now).

 

Not having a government imposed minimum wage, but industry established, business established, or even individual-based minimum wage structure is much better. It cuts out the middleman and allows labor to negotiate directly with management over the value of their work. This allows the minimum standard of labor to fluctuate with the needs of the market, which in our economy is usually upward. Germany has such a wage system, and it works pretty well for them.

 

I wouldn't worry about the dummies. We're only about 5 years away from being able to implant knowledge directly into the human brain, ala "The Matrix". At that point, all the dummies can be "upgraded" to upper middle class management material, all fully capable of sitting in front of a desk as one of the millions of US middle men for global corp that shuffle papers around for commissions that drive costs on all goods that come through the US. Since our nation stopped manufacturing years ago, those are the only jobs available right now. We just need to double down on that industry to stay alive as the "greatest nation on Earth".

 

Having a job, even if it pays less than the government-imposed "minimum wage" is better than no wage at all.

 

Send them off to fight in foreign lands in order to spread the benefits of democracy so the future citizens of those newly freed nations can produce their own dummies.

 

Some 6 year old miners from the 1910's would beg to differ.

 

What is great about a Germany style wage negotiation system is that collective bargaining is encouraged. That is a plus for unions. Contract law, which is backed by the Constitution also means that any negotiated minimum wage has to be upheld for the duration of said bargaining agreement.

 

The market abhors a vacuum. Even if workers cannot live on their wages they will get multiple jobs or live with their parents for longer or workers will band together and find communal housing.

 

BleedingHeadKen posted:
"Send them off to fight in foreign lands..."

Taxcutter asks:
Under whose flag? The US military doesn't want dummies. They reject dummy recruits every day.

 

BTeamBomber posted:
"Some 6 year old miners..."

Taxcutter says:
Didn't read the OP, did you? 6 year olds are by definition dummies, and mines don't want dummies.

 

We need a Constitutional Amendment to create a Foreign Legion.

 

It just slows down the rate at which you starve to death.

 

Better yet, floating cities:

http://www.kurzweilai.net/reuters-seasteading-institute-aiming-for-floating-cities-within-decade

 

Seastead = Rapture.

No thanks. If Objectivists want to make failed colonies and slowly kill themselves off, more power to them.

 

A Foreign Legion, by definition would use foreigners, not American dummies.

Even if they were foreign, the US military still does not want dummies.

 

You don't understand the purpose of a Foreign Legion do you?

And yes, foreign legions do continue citizens from their respective nations.

 

They can only be helped if they want help. Some people are content to live their entire life on welfare and that's just fine and dandy for them. Trying to help them would be pointless because they do not want to improve. For those who are not so smart but actually want to give back to society, I think our nation should invest more into trade and technical schools. The curriculum put out by these schools is almost entirely occupation based. Some degrees will require higher aptitude such as nursing and information technology. However, these schools offer many programs that are designed to give training in certain fields. I think the educational system is entirely too limited in it's thinking. Gone are the days in which high schools would have shop, agriculture, and home economics classes. These are being left out more and more so that the liberal arts are the entire focus of a school curriculum. I, for one, think this is a shame. I know someone who just barely graduated from high school, making mostly D grades. Does this mean he is dumb? I don't think so. The reason why is because all this time, he had been devoting much of his after school hours to being a mechanic for his family's cars. By the time he left high school, he had a job waiting for him due to his mechanical prowess. A good job too.

In summary, I think the best way to help the people who are not as academically smart as others is to expand and better fund technical and trade colleges. That is, they should receive help only if they want it. Some people will always want to live off of the government.

 

Well, I have more than enough mathematical/spatial intelligence to get a Bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering at OSU, but the problem is, OSU charges SOOOO much, that the debt I was acrewing scared the (*)(*)(*)(*) out of me so I stopped taking classes last year and might not return..ever, if their prices keep going up.

Yeah...

 

A good sized war with Iran, which could lead to a much larger war, would mean much lower standards for recruitment. War has often been the way for empires to keep their lowliest citizens occupied and not rioting in the streets. If it's not the military, there is always the TSA and other DHS services which are expanding at an alarming rate. An occupation of the US would require a great number of bodies without much in the way of intelligence or critical thinking capacity.