[drfloyd51]

When I was a child, I lived in a neighborhood. Every week a garbage truck picked up the house hold trash.

5 guys were on that truck. 1 driver and 4 guys that actually lifted up various shaped trash cans and dumped them into the truck.

Today I live in an apartment complex. 100 families take their trash to the compactor. 1 guy in a garbage truck comes once a week to collect the compacted refuse.

I wonder what happened to the other 4 guys. 80% of the garbage collecting labor… freed up to do something of higher value.

Maybe they cured cancer.

[dev_l1x_be]

The cancer of p50 users having comfy housing, 2 cars and a life. Almost all of the efficiency gains move to the 1%.

[gowld]

They were already available to do something of higher value. Automation frees them up to do something of lower value.

[perching_aix]

I wonder too, could you maybe actually check your theory?

[drfloyd51]

My sarcasm wasn’t thick enough.

L

[perching_aix]

On the contrary, only your sarcasm was thick, not the substance behind it. Kind of what I'm yapping about if you'd be kind enough to notice.

What you propose makes fine rhetorical sense, and I can assure you it did reach me, it's just that a (very) cursory search yielded me no significant employment rate changes or drastic layoffs in the related sector over the decades. Instead, it suggested that people have been reshuffled to do waste sorting and other related activities rather, and that the field actually grew, directly contradicting your smug, sarcasm-laden, willfully demagogue framing. Traits that are not exactly the hallmark of epistemic rigor to begin with, nor do they further it, even if the given narrative did hold up.

It's so easy to be asinine and make up a story, especially when one feels morally justified in doing so, and considers the base facts & analogy to be "obviously correct". I don't think that setting people up for failure by feeding them correct sounding lies - or sending related discourse into a nosedive in quality just to get in some cheap zingers - would help the cause a whole lot though. Do you?

Put differently, it helps if the example provided actually holds up as an example for the topic discussed. Especially if that example is as dramatic as 80% of a given job disappearing, and the people involved just plain losing their livelihood supposedly.