In 1903 several cars raced around a three-mile track at Grosse Pointe, Michigan. The winning car was a four-cylinder, 80-horspower racer nicknamed 999. The driver was Barney Oldfield, who had been a bicycle racer. He became famous as a race driver. The man who built the car was a machine shop mechanic named Henry Ford.
From The Giant Book of More Strange But True Sports Stories by Howard Liss. Illustrations by Joe Mathieu.
henry ford turned out to be a giant douche canoe tho….
(he did come up with some shite that revolutionized factory work tho….. for the better….eh…well… sure..i guess…if you are rich…)
tbh….progress is wierd… im generally in favour of things getting streamlined and more efficient…and well aware that means jobs stop existing… aaaand im currently seeing more and more jobs getting streamlined into the way of the dodo…
what im not seeing….is any kind of solution as to what to do with the leftover workers…
other than internet assholes saying herpaderp get reschooled ya dickhead….
yeah…shit… most of us down here in the skilled labour pool dont brain so gud…and anyways…theres a finite supply of managers required when you sack the workforce….
anyhoo…that was quite a lot of words that fell out of me just coz you mentioned henry ford…
He was also straight up nuts. If you really want to get a good picture of how goofy his mind was, do some reading on Fordlandia. I won’t even get into the antisemitism.
I started my working life in restaurants, moved through the professional audio field, worked in retail, as a baker, and now I do software support from home. But, I didn’t go to school for it–I just got lucky. Not nearly enough people take luck into account when it comes to how a life is lived. Which is why UBI is far more important today than it ever was. Honestly though if I had to do it all over again I probably would have become an electrician. As much as a certain subset likes to spout off about how technology will make manual work obsolete, I find that the less I am tied to the latest technological advances, the easier my life is.
But, I’m also fully aware that UBI will never become a thing in the US because bootstraps/communism/freedumb.