Tag Archives: jobs

A Thought on Farmworkers and Welfare

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Pity the poor American farmworkers. That’s what Jason Yarashes, Legal Aid Justice Center‘s Director of its Worker Justice Program, wants us to do. He was responding to an earlier Letter in which that letter-writer was lamenting the troubles that farmers are having as a side effect of our government regaining control of our borders and the ensuing lack of illegal aliens coming in to do those farmers’ farm work.

Yarashes is correct that such labor is backbreaking, and most of it goes unaccompanied by Social Security benefits or health insurance, despite paying taxes. Never mind that the illegal laborers are happy to get the work and most of them succeed in sending some of their pay back to their families in their home countries.

There’s an obvious solution to this conundrum, although it’s one that Leftists like Yarashes will decry to the heavens.

The US has a bloated collection of welfare programs, each of which is itself bloated. Most of those on these programs are able-bodied, healthy, and unemployed, even with the light work requirements attached to these programs.

Put these folks to work on the farms. Let them pick the lettuce, detassel the corn, harvest the apples and oranges, and on and on as a criterion for collecting welfare payments.

Let the farmers pay these modern day CCC workers the wages they would have paid their illegal alien workers—not Yarashes’ precious minimum wage rate—and collect their welfare payments on top of that, which the illegal aliens do not get. The kicker: the farm work is heavily seasonal, but these farm CCC-ers would be eligible for their welfare collections year-round. And: boost the farm workers’ welfare payments by some amount—say 10% as an opening move—to reward them for their actual, and harder, work than skating by on volunteering, entering “work training” programs, or scattering around resumes like so many advertising fliers.

One onus on the farmers: they would have to rate these farm CCC-ers on the quality of their work, with their eligibility for continuation in the next year’s farm work contingent on getting satisfactory ratings this year.

Failing Public Schools

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And failing teachers union schools, but I repeat myself. These are the favorites of the Progressive-Democratic Party, and that favoring is independent of teacher performance. The Los Angeles Unified School District is the latest example.

Only 18% of Los Angeles eighth-graders scored proficient in math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, compared to 27% nationwide.

That’s OK, though. Here’s those teachers’ and their union’s participation ribbon:

United Teachers Los Angeles increases salary scales by 11.65% over two years—double the rate of inflation—plus four weeks of paid parental leave….

And

The agreement comes after the district warned in February that a looming $877 million deficit could require thousands of layoffs.

Guess, though, who will pay for this. The parents on the lower end of the area’s economic ladder. These are the ones who can’t afford to move away from these failures and move to live and work in jurisdictions with better schools. But the ones who will pay the biggest priced are those parents’ children. These are being consigned to a lifetime of ignorance, inability to perform the most basic functions of managing their own lives, and so to a lifetime of continued poverty and dependence.

How Onerous

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Florida, in addition to requiring in-state unions to hold periodic recertification elections, is about to enact a bill that would require at least 50% of the members of government unions to show up in person to vote, with a majority of those voting “aye” to achieve recertification. I can hear the union squalls here in Texas.

South Florida [Progressive-]Democratic Senator Shevrin Jones said the bill would be “unions’ nail in the coffin.” American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said the bill is “designed to decimate our Florida locals and their contracts” because it “effectively forces” elections where “you have to turn out 50% of your entire bargaining unit or you lose your contract.”

50%! The horror. If it’s really that difficult to find that much union support—a quarter of the membership plus one—among its members, there’s a hint there regarding the utility of unions in the minds of their members.

Union managers should take this and run. The bills could have required a majority of union members to vote “aye” in a recertification election, rather than just that puny minority to get recertification.

AI Isn’t all that I

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And it’s unlikely to be so anytime soon.

A human brain contains 100 billion neurons and over 100 trillion synaptic connections. That’s a thousand, or more, connections per neuron. A human brain’s cortex alone contains approximately 20 billion neocortical neurons, with an average of 7,000 synaptic connections each (primary source). The cerebral cortex has about 0.15 quadrillion synapses—or about a trillion synapses per cubic centimeter of cortex. More, the brain uses all of 20 watts of power to function fully. That works out to a vanishingly tiny amount of wattage per synapse (that’s 0 decimal point 12 zeros and a 2 at the end).

Intel’s latest AI-supportive chip suite (as of April 2024, anyway) supports up to 1.15 billion neurons and 128 billion synapses distributed over 140,544 neuromorphic processing cores[.] That’s a bit over 110 “synapses” per “neuron.” The setup uses 2,600 watts at max function. That works out to 0 decimal point 7 zeros and a 2. Which is five orders of magnitude more power drain per “synapse” for the chip than for our brain.

Artificial Intelligence isn’t all that. It may well get there, but not tomorrow.

An Overblown Concern

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Citrini Research wrote a report that’s associated with Monday’s stock market spike down. Its report centered on the risk of heavy white collar job losses from AI’s alleged ability to do white collar work and completely replace those white collars.

For the entirety of modern economic history, human intelligence has been the scarce input. We are now experiencing the unwind of that premium.

And so on.

Not so much, though. It took more mental acumen to run the steam drill than John Henry needed to run his hammer. It takes more mental acumen to work a modern auto production line, with all of that automated equipment, than it did—and does—to work an artisan, unautomated auto production line. The move extends into the white collar milieu, also. It begins with requiring more mental acumen to check AI’s work than it does to work the spreadsheets or do the research oneself. It takes a great deal of mental acumen to ask the right questions and then give AI the tasks of answering them—and then checking AI’s responses. Creativity is something AI cannot do.

AI is good at the artificial part; it’ll be quite some time before AI gets good at the intelligence part. Alan Turing once said that when a computer can answer certain kinds of questions, they’ll be impossible to distinguish from humans. That doesn’t prove computers’—AI’s—superiority, though. Answering questions isn’t the same as asking them.