Monthly Archive: January 2017

The Executive Order on immigration restrictions – latest

There has been a lot of comment pointing out that, prior to the stay issued this evening by a Federal judge, many of the government bodies charged with enforcing the change in regulations seemed to not know exactly what they were supposed to do. This was presented as a cross between Lack of Planning and the Law Of Unintended Consequences.
In other words, the confusion was a bug.
The cynic in me does not currently accept that more charitable interpretation. It is my belief that the resultant confusion was a feature, not a bug. The underlying purpose of the Executive Order was not to put a stop to Muslim immigration, to selectlvely profile Muslims entering the USA, or anything directly related to Muslims.
The purpose was to send the message that visitors and permanent residents are not Real Americans (TM) and that they can expect to be targeted for future discriminatory and capricious action. Remember that the underlying rationale for many of Donald Trump’s more expansive promises is nostalgic nationalism, a yearning for the days when America was prosperous, self-sufficient, and Rather White.

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Speak English!

Speak English!.
This petulant, foot-stomping demand has been prevalent among the nativists for a long long time in the UK and in the USA.
Of course, the fact that many of the most aggressive complainers clearly have no effing clue about how write or spell English does rather tend to undermine their credibility.
Nonetheless, the demand still keeps being made.
When I look at history, I find the obsessive demands of nationalists from English-speaking countries “speak English” to be highly amusing.
Languages developed and evolved organically over many thousands of years when various groups and tribes of people developed common means of communication. Languages were carried over many thousands of miles by migrations of groups of humans, but those languages did not remain static and continued to evolve.
English is one of the ultimate “mongrel” languages, nominally a Germanic language, but heavily influenced by French, Celtic and old English langugages.
The rise of the modern nation-state, with rigid borders seen as permanent by its residents, is a relatively recent development. With the rigid borders has come a rigid idea that the majority language within the country should always remain the same.
Within those nation-states, however, languages continue to evolve. I am a poor French speaker, but I can tell from reading pages in French on the internet that modern idiomatic French is nothing like the French I was taught in school. Within France, there is a serious-sounding body, the Academie Francaise, that considers itself to be the arbiter of what is acceptable French. The problem is that the Acadamie is attempting to mandate features of a language that is evolving around it. One example from a while back was it’s insistence that French should not contain the loan word “weekend”. The Academie insisted that “fin de semaine” was the only acceptable phrase. Most of the French nodded, and then went back to saying “un excellent weekend” to their friends on Fridays. You can’t mandate language like that. It’s a lot more fluid than many people realize.
The cry of ‘speak English!” is understandable, but what the people doing the crying don’t realize is that by 2100, American English will have evolved to the point where they may not even recognize it. As the percentage of Hispanic people increases, loanwords from Spanish and Meso-American languages will form a larger proportion of the vocabulary, and sentence structures may change more towards a Spanish form of construction. The pseudo-language known tongue-in-cheek as Spanglish may become the lingua franca in the USA.
The “speak English” demand is really a not very well hidden statement of “keep things just as they are. NOW”.

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The Executive Order on immigration restrictions

So, amidst all of the brou-ha-ha about the latest Executive Order, an English friend of mine who has lived in the USA for 27 years is now assessing whether he wants to continue to live here.
The message of this EO to me is very clear. Anybody not born in the USA is at risk at any point of being declared an undesirable. They are already refusing to allow legal permanent residents back into the USA since the signing of this EO. (Whether that was even a correct interpretation of the EO is unclear, since the EO was apparently not reviewed by any of the enforcement bodies before the President signed it, which, if true, is about as good an example of professional negligence as you can get).
As a rule, people don’t stay around where they are not wanted. Right now, my conclusion is that this is not the country I moved to in 1998. I am starting to seriously consider moving back to Europe, sooner rather than later.
America had an opportunity to decide what sort of a country it wanted to be when it grows up. So far the message I am receiving is that it wants to be a country governed by repressive, regressive, nationalist and nativist people who think that the outside world is some malign place that they can either shut off or control, while somehow making the country great again.
Those of us who grew up in Europe and studied History recognize that philosophy very very well. It led directly to World War II.
If you are sitting there shaking your head at what I am reading thinking “nah, that could never possibly happen here”, you need to snap out of your complacency, and fast. One of the interesting questions that Germans were asked after World War II was whether they had any inkling that Adolf Hitler was going to lead Germany into a world war. Nearly all of them said that this possibility had never occurred to them, that they simply wanted a leader who would Sort The Mess Out. The idea that Sorting The Mess Out involved dehumanization, demonization and extermination of minorities, the invasion of multiple countries, and the destruction of much of Germany in a war, was not something that they could even have imagined.
But, with hindsight, when the surviving Nazi leaders were interrogated, it was clear from their sometimes-bland post hoc justifications of their actions that they saw power as a means to an end, and any means could be justified either before or after the event as part of the end objective of making Germany Great Again. Also revealed in the German leader interrogations was the extent to which George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984” would be a reflective field workbook for nativist authoritarians and demagogues everywhere.
Folks, if you are not taking what is happening very very seriously, you are suffering from exactly the sort of complacency that a lot of people in Europe suffered from in the run-up to World War II.
What I am telling you is that I have no intention of being around to witness the end results of the current path that the central government of the USA is currently walking down.

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Silly Memes 101 – the “Real folks were out working” rationalization

So…one of the memes I keep reading, here on Facebook and on other social media platforms, is that the lower attendance for the Inauguration of Donald Trump was because his supporters were too busy working, whereas the supporters of Barack Obama were out of work scroungers. Another variant of the meme is that the large numbers of attendees at the Women’s Marches this weekend were (again) because a lot of Regular Folks have to go work, whereas the march attendees don’t have to work.
Please.
If that really is how you are trying to rationalize reality…
STOP.
For a start, as I explained a couple of days ago, once you are rationalizing, you have admitted to the facts of the situation. Now you’re just attempting to come up with an explanation that makes sense to you.
Secondly, any explanation along these lines is what in science is called a hypothesis. More bluntly, it’s an idea for which no evidence yet exists.
In order to convert a hypothesis into something more credible, you have to provide evidence.
This requires work. Like information gathering, analysis and computation.
Memes seldom comprise any assertion based on anything that approaches a work ethic. This is amusing in this context given that the accusation seems to be that Regular Folks are busy working while the demonstrators are out sucking off the public teat or some such Bad Activity. It seems that whoever is working on these memes isn’t doing any work worth a damn either, because all I am seeing is a hypothesis presented as fact with no supporting evidence. In other words, a juvenile attempt at a smear.
If this is all the opponents of facts and the Women;s Marches have got, they are already in Zero Credibility Land.

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That inauguration

Will I be watching it?
Hell no.
But that is not unusual. I have never watched an inauguration real-time, and I have only ever seen snippets of the ceremony after the fact in the media.
I have a day job. Plus, I am not big on ceremonies and hoopla. In 3 weeks the Superbowl takes place in Houston, and if it is left up to me, I will turn on the TV 30 seconds before the actual kick-off.
Whatever the participants say in today’s ceremony outside of the legal requirements to become the next President and Vice President is really not that important when compared to what they actually can and will do. They can set a tone for the future, but the next 4 years are what counts.
As to whether Donald Trump is a legitimate President? Well, he won the Electoral College, so that makes him the President under the current rules and laws. However, claims that he won “in a landslide” are bullshit. He also clearly did not win the popular vote. Like all would-be authoritarians, he is ignoring those facts and claiming a “mandate”. Personally I think that phrase should be treated with derision in modern politics. There are almost no politicians elected by a majority of eligible voters in the world today, unless you decide to count those mysterious elections in far off lands where the President is elected with 99% of the vote (and his opponents are mysteriously absent from the ballot).
The election result is what it is. History and electors will judge the next POTUS by actions and results. I forsee difficult times ahead for the USA, as a concerted effort is made to regress the country’s governance processes, marginalize dissent, and re-instate poor treatment of people who are not definably and obviously White and American. The election was dominated by a small but decisive group of electors for whom inclusiveness and equitable treatment for all were unacceptable when compared to what they believe has gone wrong with the country.
Like many electorates in the Western World, “throw the bums out” and “turn back the clock” are in fashion. However, time never runs backwards, and, as Pete Townshend sardonically wrote, sometimes you get to “meet the new boss. Same as the old boss”.
I will spend today donating money to media writers and organizations that need resources in order to fight the attempts that are imminent to roll back protections and rights from any number of different groups in society. These organizations will be opposing authoritarian actions, and that takes time and money.
Some organizations that will be getting my money today are:

Electronic Freedom Foundation
ACLU
Planned Parenthood
Jim Wright (mr Stonekettle)
David Neiwert (aka Orcinus)
Juan Cole (informed comment)

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The relocation of the Chargers to Los Angeles

The San Diego Chargers have announced that they will relocate to Los Angeles, after failing to come to an agreement with the city of San Diego on either a new stadium or upgrades to their existing stadium, which is one of the oldest in the NFL.
It is assumed that the Chargers will be tenants with the LA Rams at their new stadium in Inglewood CA which is scheduled to open in time for the 2019 season.
In the meantime, it seems that the Chargers intend to play at Stubhub Stadium in 2017 and 2018. This is a very small stadium by NFL standards, with a capacity of only about 30,000.
The move to a smaller stadium in the short term is, however, likely to have only a limited imoact on the overall team revenues. This is because almost 50% of an NFL team’s revenues is from their pro-rated share of the overall NFL television rights revenues. That is a lot of money each year, and it keeps going up. For 2015, the Green Bay Packers, who are the only NFL team to publish annual accounts, because they are owned by the public, reported TV revenues of $222.6m – 54% of their total revenues in what is a small local market compared to many other teams. The national TV revenue number is rumoured to be rising to over $240m in 2017.
The Chargers are in the middle of the pack on total spending on players, as reported here. They are going to have reduced home game revenues, but they will still share away game revenues from full-sized stadium. To put it in math terms, if their seat and other spending revenues from Stubhub are 50% of the revenues from San Diego, that will still equate to only a 25% drop in game-day revenues, since half of their games are road games. Since about 50% of their revenues come from TV income, the overall impact on revnues will be (at most) 12.5% for the next 2 seasons, and if TV revenues keep on rising, that number may be a lot less.
The Chargers are thus accepting a modest short-term reduction in revenues for the chance to earn more money from premium seating and access to the LA market from 2019. They do have the option of selling PSLs and season tickets, so they could extract a lot of one-time revenues starting in 2018. (This article, interestingly, explains that the PSL opportunities in San Diego were judged to be very limited, and PSL sales in other sports markets have not exactly been big sources of revenue recently, so the 49ers may be an anomaly.), However, the 49ers revenue from PSLs has apparently failed to meet forecasts, in part because the recent performance of the team in Levis Stadium has been poor which has led to a slump in the sales of both PSLs and season tickets. The deal between the 49ers and the Stadium Authority is structured such that failure of the PSL sales to meet forecasts could convert Levis Stadium into a financial loser for the city of Santa Clara.
It is not clear to me what the Chargers will be able to do for other sources of revenue once they arrive in Inglewood as tenants instead of stadium owners or sole occupiers. Many other NFL teams have naming rights deals for their stadiums, which bring in a lot of extra money annually. Since Rams owner Stan Kroenke will own the Inglewood stadium, with the Chargers as tenants, if he does have a naming rights deal for the stadium, it seems unlikely that the Chargers will benefit from it. However, given that the existing naming rights deal with Qualcomm in San Diego was only worth just over $1m per year, you can make the argument that the Chargers have little to lose financially by not having a naming rights deal in future.
I hope that the tenancy deal that the Chargers have with the Rams does not vary the costs dependent on the final cost of the new stadium. Stadium projects are notorious for blowing past initial cost and timeframe estimates.
As to whether the LA area can support 2 NFL teams; only time and on-field performance will determine that. However, the relocations of the Rams and Chargers (and the probable move of the Oakland Raiders) are occurring because cities are increasingly unwilling to provide large sums of public money to build new stadiums for professional sports franchises. If the NFL growth stops or reverses, these moves may be seen as the high water mark for NFL ambitions.
UPDATE 1This article does a good job of summarizing the teeth-grinding self-serving duplicity that NFL owners engage in as they seek to corral ever more public money for their stadiums and related amenities.
UPDATE 2This article explains some of the twisted dynamics behind the final decision by the Chargers to move to LA.. This article explains how the long-standing absence of an NFL team in the LA basin, plus old animosities, has been a major contributor to the current mess. The maximum spin-cycle letter from Roger Goodell looks even more like a zero-credibility pile of BS after you read the article.
UPDATE 3This comment from FieldOfSchemes reminds us of why and how the Chargers ended up in San Diego in the first place

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The dynamics of GM and Head Coach and personnel control in hiring

Ever since Bill Parcells’ famous quote about his desire to control the roster of any NFL team for which he was the head coach, it has been customary for many NFL head coaching candidates to seek control over the player roster of their teams.
The track record of coaches at controlling and managing rosters is at best a mixed one. For some coaches, it is yet another distraction from the high-intensity business of coaching.
Ownership in NFL franchises has become very adept at window-dressing when it comes to who controls roster decisions. This is partly because, ultimately, the person with the check book controls the roster, and that is the owner or the ownership group. No matter how much many franchises attempt to portray their GM and coach as being in total control of the roster, it is an inescapable reality that sometimes owners fall in love with players who are in the NFL draft or free agent pool, and sometimes insist that they be selected or recruited, or even played when they are not ready or a good fit for the team. That seldom gives good results, since the owner is basically disenfranchising their own in-house leadership. However, it happens.
There are also numerous franchises where the head coach is really in control of the roster, and the GM effectively works for the head coach. However, you could not guess this if you looked at the org chart. A good example is the New England Patriots, who do not have a GM, and where Nick Caserio, the Director of Player Personnel, works for Bill Belichick. Belichick has control of the roster, and he may be one of the few coaches in the NFL who does enjoy total control.
The historical rule of thumb has been that the coach works for the GM, so if a franchise fires its head coach and GM (which often happens, as the owners clean house), the normal expectation that the GM is hired before the head coach. If it happens the other way round, the risk is that the GM finds himself with a head coach that he did not select, and ultimately cannot form a constructive working relationship with.
The 49ers are now looking for both a GM and head coach, having fired their previous GM and head coach at the end of the season. They have apparently struck out once already on the GM front, with Nick Caserio declining to interview for the GM position. I am expecting that the 49ers will struggle to fill both open positions, given the bizarre public comments of Jed York, which, frankly, made him look like a petulant child. They appear to have interviewed GM candidates already, and somebody will ultimately take the job. However, whether that person has the skills and freedom to succeed is an open question.

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The astonishingly narrow view in the NFL on coach hiring

We are now into the mad annual scramble where all of the NFL teams that fired their head coach and/or General Manager are trying to hire replacements.
It’s a short compressed hiring cycle, because the NFL Draft takes place in April, and teams want their entire coaching and scouting staffs to be in place ASAP so that they can go evaluate all draft candidates and try to decide who to pick in that annual lottery. There is also free agency which begins in the second week of March at the start of the new league year.
6 teams fired one or both of their head coach or GM. There are weird rumours that the Houston Texans may end up looking for a head coach soon due to friction between Bill O’Brien and team leadership, but those are definitely stretch rumours, given that the Texans are still in the playoffs.
There is a long-standing rumor that the LA Rams want to trade for a head coach from another team (names like Sean Payton or Sean Payton keep being mentioned). Needless to say, in true military and political fashion, all of the parties potentially involved are denying this is a possibility (which leads many cynics to conclude that it will indeed happen).
The list of known candidates for the teams is generally agreed, and it is a depressing list, not because of the candidates themselves, all worthy people, but because it shows (a) the lack of imagination in NFL hiring practices, and (b) the sameness of NFL franchises when it comes to hiring.
The list of candidates for NFL teams always consists of most or all of the following:

1. The interim head coach (if the previous head coach was fired during the season. This may or may not be a serious interview)
2. One or two non-serious minority guys (to allow the team to comply with the Rooney Rule)
3. Hot Co-ordinators
4. Any Hot College Coach presumed to be interested or possibly persuabable to come to the NFL
4. Former NFL head coaches who have re-established themselves as co-ordinators
5. Former NFL head coaches out of the game (if they can interest them)
6. Other position group coaches who may be Hot (usually temporarily based on this year’s results)

Recently fired head coaches will either sit on their buyout money for a season or join a new head coach on his staff. They rarely get a shot at another head coaching interview (Chip Kelly last year was an exception, but see what just happened to him?)

The result of this reasoning loop is that, leaving aside the interim coaches (who mostly do not get the job), the list is a fairly short one. It currently seems to consist of the following:

Hot Co-Ordinators: Kyle Shanahan (very hot), Josh McDaniels, Matt Patricia (I wonder which team they work for?), Harold Goodwin, Frank Reich, Anthony Lynn
Minority Guys: Teryl Austin, Teryl Austin, some guy named Austin
Hot College Coaches: NONE (some guy named Nick Saban continues to insist he is not interested)
Former Head Coaches: Mike Smith
Ex Head Coaches: NONE (they are on TV for a reason – it’s a lot more fun than running an NFL team)
Other Position coaches: Tom Cable (also former head coach)

The Rooney Rule is, sadly, being used as a fig-leaf by many teams to obscure the reality that, mostly owned by crusty old white guys, they tend to want a white guy in charge of the players. Teryl Austin has publicly declined at least one interview with a team in the past once he determined that he was not a serious candidate, and the team was possibly simply trying to comply with the Rooney Rule.
Teams always try to hire a Hot Co-ordinator first. They are drawn to them like moths to a flame. When the Dallas Cowboys began winning Superbowls in the early 1990’s, his offensive and defensive co-ordinators (Norv Turner and Dave Wannstedt) were snapped up in short order to become head coaches. Neither man has proved to be a consistently good head coach. Turner remains a respected offensive co-ordinator; Wannstedt is essentially out of football after bouncing all over the NFL and college.
Many other co-ordinators were promoted to head coach, and discovered quickly that it was a job that they either could not do well or did not want to do. Most of them were fired and went back to being good (and in some cases great) co-ordinators. The Dallas Cowboys currently have Scott Linehan and Rod Marinelli as their offensive and defensive co-ordinators respectively. Both men were head coaches without much success, but are clearly back in the right job. Jim Schwartz was a failure as a head coach first time round, but remains an excellent defensive co-ordinator.
The role of head coach is a multi-faceted one, and coaching is only part of it. Co-ordinators promoted to head coach tend by nature to focus on the side of the ball that they came from, which leads to a number of head coaches who were offensive co-ordinators continuing to call plays during games. This tends to disenfranchise the team’s offensive co-ordinator, and de-focusses the coach. Ditto defensive minded coaches who try to run the defense in games. That usually results in issues with the offense not being addressed (Todd Bowles). There are too many game-day distractions and this often shows up in other detail areas such as clock management, where teams routinely screw up basics because nobody is paying attention on a continual basis during games.
HIring teams and GMs tend to place way too much emphasis on co-ordinators from successfully (especially Superbowl-winning) teams.
The “hire the Hot Co-Ordinator” approach has therefore resulted in significant disappointments over the years, particularly as teams hired co-ordinators away from the New England Patriots, only to discover that they did not function at all well outside of the unique environment of excellence that Bill Belichick created and maintains in that franchise. The two enduring co-ordinators of the 2000s Patriots dynasty (Romeo Crennel and Charlie Weis) were hired away to become NFL and college head coaches respectively. Neither man succeeded in their new jobs, they both looked over-matched and out of their depth. Crennel is back doing what he does best as a co-ordinator in the NFL, Weis is living on his golden parachutes from 2 college teams. Eric Mangini had two spells as a head coach without success, was caught up in the Spygate scandal, and is now in limbo. Josh McDaniel, hired by the Denver Broncos in 2010, began with an unbeaten run in the 2010 season and looked like a genius coaching hire for a season, before the team lapsed into mediocrity and he was fired, going back to New England. The jury is out on Bill O’Brien in Houston.
College head coaches are a hit-or-miss proposition, mostly miss. Steve Spurrier, Nick Saban and Chip Kelly were all college head coaches who spent time in the NFL and found that some of the natural advantages that they enjoyed in college such as superior recruiting, stacked schedules, and total roster and team control either did not exist in the NFL, or were completely different in nature.
Occasionally teams succeed by going outside the box. The Baltimore Ravens raised eyebrows when they hired John Harbaugh, who was a special teams coach, not a co-ordinator, but they have won a Superbowl under his tenure. However, that remains an isolated exception. Most teams think that the Hot Co-Ordinator is the safe and/or exciting and sexy option.
In the meantime, Jeff Garcia has still not been interviewed by the 49ers. They might just need to interview him eventually, since their GM and head coach positions are regarded as the least attractive in the league right now. The 49ers are likely to be short of suitors when the recruitment cycle music stops.

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The 350 pound gorilla in the capitalist living room – employment

The rise of nativism and racism in the Western world is rather obvious, now that two elections (the EU Referendum in the UK and the Presidential and Legislative branch elections in the USA) have been won by parties and forces representing regressive, nativistic thinking.
The bigger question, which many people are having trouble with, is why those forces have risen rapidly to have the impact that they have on electoral outcomes.
Inequality in societies probably plays a part. However, that is not a root cause, it is a symptom.
My view (for what it is worth) is that the underlying root cause is that, as most Western countries move to a post-industrial societal model, there simply is not enough employment to absorb all of the people who want and need paid employment. There aren’t enough jobs to go around. This problem has existed for 40+ years in many countries. Wherever you look in Europe and North America, you can see high structural levels of unemployment in many regions and countries. The causes are (1) automation of repetitive tasks, and (2) the migration of manufacturing and assembly operations to other countries with lower employment costs.
A big clue that the problem has existed for decades is that governments have been modifying the basis for counting numbers of unemployed people for decades to reduce the headline (total) number. I watched in the UK as this was done persistently by governments to keep the headline number below the politically embarrassing number of 1 million. As a result, most government official statistics on unemployment exclude long-term unemployed people who may still be looking for work, and also fail to count under-employment. So the US number of around 5% unemployment is not accurate, and has been inaccurate for decades. This tells me that this is a long-term structural issue, and that governments either do not want to address it, or do not know how to address it within the confines of current government policy and their own governing ideology.
Part of what is known as “the American Dream” is the idea that a new generation will enjoy greater prosperity than the previous generations. This manifests itself in expectations among people that they will enjoy a better standard of living than their ancestors. Until recently that was true. Now, with recessions not leading to “bounce” recoveries, and the decline of rural employment, many people in the USA have discovered that this is no longer true. Not surprisingly, they have become angry and frustrated, and they used their electoral power to send a clear and radical signal to the world, by electing a reality-show host and carnival barker to the Presidency.
One of Donald Trump’s populist promises during his campaign was that he was going to bring jobs back to the USA. He hinted that he would penalize corporations for offshoring employment, and he specifically promised to “bring back coal” to Appalachia. This was pure populist pandering in action. He was telling demoralized and desperate people what they wanted to hear.
None of Donald Trump’s expansive promises originated in any place close to current reality.
The reality is that if we want to return offshored work to the USA, we have to be prepared to pay more for just about all manufactured products in order to achieve this. The manufacturing went overseas for cost reasons. As for coal and gas, well, I wrote about that previously. The only way that the coal mines will re-open in Appalachia is via the application of huge government subsidies. Even then, the amount of employment will be limited. Automation has reduced employment demands in extractive industries dramatically. That is why the dream of re-opening timber mills in the Pacific North West is also doomed to give disappointing results. The jobs didn’t disappear because of an end to logging. They disappeared because of automation, and will not return unless automation is banned, people are subsidized to work, or a combination of both. In the meantime, unemployment in the Northern counties of California and the Southern counties of Oregon continues to be higher than the national average. Needless to say, the loss of mass employment in many Pacific Northwest counties has led to widespread discontent with central government, and pressure for secession exists, on the grounds that government from state and federal level has done nothing except make their lives worse.
The mass market political parties in the USA have no logical or coherent answer to this issue, because they are trapped in a hole of contradiction, between their public ideological position that claims that all solutions belong to the free market, and the reality that they have been subsidizing industries for decades. For example, governments already pump billions of dollars into agriculture via subsidies. State and local governments also subsidize businesses via tax abatements and other forms of tax concessions. However, political parties routinely rationalize away these contradictions.
The bottom line is that if governments want to address structural lack of employment opportunities, they have to consider one or a combination of two strategies:

1. (if you accept that people have to work) Subsidize employment
2. (a different approach) Give all people a Basic Income that will allow them to at least live above the poverty line

When a previous strategy no longer works, you need a new one, or you are condemned to slow decline. Political parties can continue to throw money at structural employment issues on an industry by industry or a regional basis, dressing it up as “relief”, “competitive investment” or any number of BS doublespeak phrases. That probably will not work in the medium term as de-industrialization and automation continue to advance. The cracks between rhetoric and reality will widen, and the contradictions will widen to the point that the political party credibility drops even lower. Or they can accept the new notion that not everybody can, must and should work.
Libertarians have been wrestling with this issue for a while, and in the Libertarian movement the concept of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) has been a topic of discussion for a long time. It is a radical and different option to address a problem that is not going away. It was tried by Canada in the 1970s, so it is not totally unproven.
The Western world is at a crossroads with respect to matching expectations to reality for its electors. If political parties continue to try and paper over the cracks, we will have more wild and wacky election results, more instability, and possible world conflict. It really is that serious.
The time for visionary ideas and solutions is now.

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