One more news article - Mike Shedlock has utterly no clue

BI - Shedlock on the "skills gap". He starts out right, but finishes the article as a clueless right-wing fucktard.

It's true that there's a "skills gap", but only because companies are too fucking cheap to pay skilled workers a living wage, and too fucking cheap to train them properly. You got that part right. It's like Bill Gates' whining of a few years back - he wanted the US government to open up the green card process so he could ship 100,000 software engineers from India to Seattle, specifically because he didn't want to pay a proper wage for the software engineers already in the US.

(As it turns out, Indians are notorious for not being able to code worth shit or even comment their code; you get what you pay for.)

If you want an extra 100,000 graduates a year in your industry, so everyone can hire highly-skilled workers, then you pay the workers you have a good wage. Basic fucking free market right there. Students will crowd into the market to get their share of a good wage. .

The solution is not to "make it cheaper to live in the US" by cutting taxation (and thus all government revenue) to the bone, so that you can still pay your technological specialist $14/hr. That is utterly fucking retarded; what's going to make people want to choose technology over being a shift supervisor at McDonald's then? Or do you want to cut the shift supervisor's wage down to $5/hr?

Explain this: if a shift supervisor, whose job it is to co-ordinate a high-speed food production unit, is worth $14/hr to the market, then does that mean a highly-skilled specialist technologist is no better? His skills are of no more value to business? Because that's exactly what you're telling him, you fucking idiot.

The solution is to let the free market play out. Guess what a free market is supposed to do when

 "while many of these jobs were lost to competition with low-wage countries, even more vanished because of computer-driven machinery that can do the work of 10, or in some cases, 100 workers. Those jobs are not coming back, but many believe that the industry’s future (and, to some extent, the future of the American economy) lies in training a new generation for highly skilled manufacturing jobs — the ones that require people who know how to run the computer that runs the machine."

If I, a trained technologist, can replace 100 workers, then the company can easily give me 10x a replaced worker's wage and still come out 9x ahead in the deal. I'll settle for 3x.

If I, as a trained technologist, am expected to use my high-end "in-demand" training and skills to replace 100 workers for $14/hr, I'm going to say "fuck that" and go work as a shift supervisor at McDonalds.

Or go to the company down the street offering me a wage that properly values my specialist, in-demand skills.

Sorry, Shedlock, but the "clowns" are not the "monetarists and Keynesians", or as they're also known people who fucking understand the fucking free market. The "clowns" are fucktards like you and the fucktards in small manufacturing, who think they can keep wages down in these high-tech fields and expect to get even one fucking application for their shitty jobs. No wonder business is suffering - you want to make diamonds using cowshit.

There are highly-trained technology specialists out there. They are available for hiring. Georgia Tech alone turns out tons of the best, so I'm told. Some of them at any time (the worst of them, because the best are always retained by their companies) are looking for jobs. If they see your shit job for $14/hr, and a job at Honeywell or Raytheon for $40/hr that they're also qualified for, do you expect them to go against their own best interest and take the shit job with the fucking skinflint boss?

Seriously, for fuck's sake, Shedlock, did you fucking idiot American right-wingers learn absolutely nothing about the collapse of the American steel industry way back in the last century? Know why your shitty steel companies all went out of business? Because despite being fucking skinflints, they were still not profitable. Because in the 70s you were still operating shitty fucking factories with late-19th century technology; so when Romania and Thailand built their own shitty cheap factories to turn out shit rebar and garbage steel, you had to compete with them for the shit end of the steel market.

Meanwhile the evil socialist Europeans had modernised factories, with technology completely unfamiliar to your American steel workers, like DC control systems and multi-axis servo and HMI and networked WIP control and PLCs and so on, plus workers skilled in metallurgy and automation and QC. So the Europeans could manufacture the high-end specialty steels that your shitty 19th-century factories would never be able to make, nor would they be able to make in Romania and Thailand. 

So your shitty steel mills all went out of business. Because of their own stupidity. Which, by the way, is also how the free market is supposed to work.


A successful business goes where the high margin is. But the high margin is in the area of least competition, and high technology and skills reduce your possible competition.

A skilled workforce makes people rich. Including the business owners. The difference between a fucktard and a successful businessman is that the fucktard doesn't understand this. The skilled workforce will never come to you if you don't offer to give them their fair share of the profit.

Don't be a fucking idiot. You get what you pay for.

Does anyone really read this guy?