Companies progressing despite trump’s policy
trump’s administration pulled out of the Paris Accord, and NAFTA and signed that regulations were going to cut back. The purpose of all that was that he guaranteed that “those jobs are coming back”.
Taking that policy along with his statements about coal, likely the worst of the fossil fuels, it would seem that his administrations plan was to return to reckless destruction of the envirnment. This is especially what I would get out of his reversal of Obama’s slow down on the Keystone pipeline. In addition, he wanted to turn more of our national parks and resources over to Big Oil in order for them to continue to turn it into gas fields. That even was planned to include the Arctic wilderness area.
Apparently GM is going against that grain. They closed the Lordstown, Ohio factory today, and are planning to close one in Baltimore and Warren Michigan later in the year. Another article indicated that 5 total factories were about be shut down at some point.
The fact of the matter is that there are other factories staying open and the workers have the option of moving. This has gotten to be the decision more and more people have been faced with. I know, in my job, they closed down business offices around the country and moved people or let them go in waves. The office I worked up till 2014 was closed in 2015, and anybody left over was left with moving to another department (probably making less money), retiring or a few could follow the job from Tennessee to Florida.
The thing was, not long after that, some of the people in the Florida office were being surplussed. As offices centralize and computerize, fewer and fewer locations are needed to actually keep the company going. It would not surprise me if AT&T one day closed every business office but one in the entire United States. Yes, the computer could easily work in one location and those people could service the entire nation.
What would be lost would be a local presence and knowledge about the many differences from one state to another, and even the differences between how different cities operate.
That situation is a bit different from the situation with GM. With GM, we are not talking about Customer Service as we are with AT&T but some of the effects still remain the same. People who are not able to take up stakes and move to where ever the other factory is, are going to be out of a job. For some of them, that may be welcome as they are nearing retirement ages. For others, not so much.
But one of the most important points about this particular closing (of 3 or 5 factories) is that they are closing them because of a change in what they want to product. Instead of the type vehicles they were producing in Lordstown, they want to manufacture electric and self-driving vehicles.
It appears that despite the resistances some people are putting into effects not to convert from oil to more Green and renewable fuel sources, GM is aware that there is an increasing interest for many to have access to Green fueled vehicles.
i applaud GM for seeing what is down the pike. I think Green is the way to go, for the health of the planet and the humans living on it. We have too long been robotic slaves to Big Oil and their destruction of the planet’s ecology and their gouging us at the gas pump. In fact, I have personally promised myself that if I ever buy another vehicle, it will, at least, be a hybrid if not entirely electric.
Now the self-driving vehicles, I admit to being a little more nervous about. Part of that is simply my personal fear of trusting something other than my own hand on the wheel. On the other hand, I certainly realize that self-driving could very well be a boon to me personally at some point as I get older and start losing my skills behind the wheel. The self-driving vehicle would, in fact, be a good way for blind people, as an example, to safety navigate the city streets and not be dependent. It would obviously be dependent, of course, on how well the thing was programmed.
Whatever we think, however, the day is coming, and coming faster every day, when Ai and automation, including transportation, is going to arrive. It would be helpful and make things easier, and keep more lives disrupted in the end, if we, as a society, would get ready instead of continuing to fight the flow of progress.
But sadly, many of us fight change till it is forced on us. That’s what I fear we will do, not just individually, but as a society. What is even sadder is that is even more true in the United States than anywhere else.
i wonder why the United States, while often claiming to be at the top of the global food chain, so often lag at the bottom when it comes to innovation? Perhaps it is all the political and economic power we cede to huge corporations with a vested interest in preventing change? I think so.
Originally published at www.blogster.com.
