Working in the Rock City

The general expectation is for steadily-reducing jobs in the world due to increased robotization of most aspects of production and delivery.  The Amazon system now is almost entirely robotized and that's not unique since that type of processing approaches from all directions.  Some say it will take fifty years to fully automate the workforce but we will be surprised if it takes more than ten.  Since it will take at least twenty years to deliver the first Rock City, we will stand by the projection of heavily-reduced job availability entailing radical sociological changes.


Job gains in September came across the board. Professional and business services led the way, adding 67,000 jobs. Those industries have gained more than half a million jobs this year. 

Health care and restaurants both added more than 30,000 positions. And the energy industry finally stopped hemorrhaging jobs in September after losing 220,000 since September 2014.

- CNN

Don't get too giddy with those numbers since they will average out to somewhat more than one thousand jobs per state.  That will mean a lot in Rhode Island but it won't mean anything in California.

Those lines are deliberately illusory since it's tough to glean any real information from them and they don't show much more than a CNN cheerleader waving pom poms but we deduce what we can.  Note:  beware of anyone who uses hemorrhaging in a non-medical application.

Professional services did well although 'professional' is a loose word since we don't consider anyone without at least a PhD as a professional but job reports go considerably easier than that.  Some large percentage of these gains are likely doctors and related medical support but that's impossible to know from this report.

Business services may be anything from a CEO to some worker stocking shelves in a WalMart.  Likely most of these are workers.  Note: including anything from business with professionals is just laughable as they're just accountants with expensive suits.  Calling Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton  'professionals,' are you?  Neither was ever more than a cheap hustler.

Health care and restaurants are lumped together so there's no way to know how many of these jobs were for diagnostic techs and how many were for workers bussing tables in restaurants.  We're assuming doctors were included with professionals but it's tough to tell.

Much of the energy job growth came in oil work but presumably that means the drillers in the Dakotas and in fracking, the latter of which is more of a liability than a benefit to America.

Q.  do you see any manufacturing jobs in that brief report since we don't.

The absence of growth in manufacturing jobs is specifically why we herald the advent of full automation and observe it's only just getting started.  In the absence of manufacturing, most of the existing jobs are likely to be simply support of the bureaucracy (e.g. call centers, etc).  For example, all of the banks have call centers but they wouldn't need them if the software worked.

Note:  most banks use the same software from the same few primary vendors (e.g. ALLTEL Information Services) but they have their in-house programmers bugger it all up to make it seem different when it really isn't.  That they still manage to make it fail is really remarkable.  The only more moronic idea in the country is that the twenty varieties of laundry detergent actually have something different in them.

Due to the stagnant growth in manufacturing, the work forecasts for the Rock City will hold insofar as we anticipate a steady reduction in the need for human workers and this is global.  This is not a cause for doom and gloom but rather for anticipation and preparation.