[TowerTalk] AES SK

[Jim Brown]

On Thu,7/7/2016 12:31 PM, Chuck Dietz wrote:
> Out of the *93.8 million* Americans age 16 and up who are deemed "not in
> the labor force," 9.7 million of them are between 16 and 19 years of age.
> Another 5.7 million are between 20 and 24. And 37.8 million are age 65 and
> over. (In fact, 17.5 million are over 75 years old.)

And don't forget the women that choose to be stay-at-home moms.

While many jobs have been moved to low wage countries, this is NOT new 
-- during the middle of the last century, lots of good paying union jobs 
moved to low-wage parts of the US, and without the protection of unions. 
A huge part of the problem of unemployment in the developed world is the 
automation of work that used to be done by well-paid human labor. 
Hundreds of employees replaced by a few robots, machines that do the 
work tens of times faster than a human.

Many (most?) of the people who did those jobs for the first 20-40 years 
of their working lifetime have little if any education for today's jobs 
operating, building, and maintaining that equipment. At 74, I've been 
retired for about 7 years. My wife, 72, retired three years ago, 
primarily because of hand surgery. We've talked about working today, and 
agree that we would have a hard time getting hired at any decent job in 
today's world, not because the jobs aren't there, but because our fields 
have moved on, and we haven't. I have a BSEE, she's a PhD.

73, Jim K9YC