Semi tangent, about dealing with mass unemployment.
I like to think this event changes people's perspective on folks out of work in the US. There's a lot of recrimination, and even self loathing about being poor or out of work in the US. It doesn't seem based in reality and certainly isn't helpful.
Perhaps it is time we realize that much like a pandemic things in this world change fast and we need to be able to help folks who are out of work pick up skills quickly / retrain (and maybe retrain employers that people with a 'different' resume might actually be able to do other jobs) so that they can get back on their feet.
Maybe it won't be a pandemic but things are changing fast whole industries of people find themselves offshored, jobs change, etc. I think we need to plan for / get comfortable with the idea that on a smaller scale we should be ready to deal with such things dynamically over the course of people's lives with retraining, support for it, and etc. And maybe a workforce with a variety of experiences will be better for it.
After the depression the US emerged as the global hegemon because of major shifts in power that happened as a part of WWII. The US was uniquely adapted to grow to be the global super power at the same time that European nations were taking a huge hit from the war.
I suspect this will ultimately lead to China as the new hegemon. We're seeing key advantages to the Chinese state that the US cannot adapt to. Decades of pushing the US government to work more and more exclusively in the interest of capital has lead to a completely impotent state that cannot take care of its people. Likewise we have a complacent populace who, as many here have argued, won't be able to endure extended isolation.
The pandemic is not just a rogue wave that has done some damage and we'll bounce right back. This event has shown deep systemic vulnerability to certain very real risks that the US is incapable of adapting too. And all these same risks are what leave us extremely vulnerable to other similar events like climate change.
The US will recover in a sense, but this is very likely the start of a long process of a major shift in global power, and the end result will look very, very different than the world of a few weeks ago.
Germany lost 2 World Wars and today it has greater GDP than UK by $1 trillion. It doesn't matter who is hit harder it matters whose economy is more efficient and has more innovations.
Not much comparable. Just a random difference - Germany was quickly rebuilt because allies want it to be rebuilt, and not let impoverished and destroyed like after WWI. We know how that ended...
When talking about efficiency, I think China might have the upper hand now - they are much more effective in discipline, they don't mind suffering things that are unacceptable for us, and look where they are with COVID - ahead of every-fucking-body else. West looks pathetically weak and ineffective compared to them. Maybe in 2 months things will look differently, but I don't see much data for that now.
My point was if a country wants to be successful and dominate over others it needs to have an economy which is efficient and which innovates that's why USA is currently world's richest and most powerful country. On the other hand China with its massive workforce and efficiency combined with upcoming innovations is about to become world's new number 1 superpower.
I saw someone make an interesting comparison on this.
In the West, when they think of efficiency, they think of using robots and automation to remove human labor. Labor costs go down, quality goes up, profits go up. Get rid of pesky factory workers and their need for benefits.
The goal in the West, is to maximize profit, above all else.
Whereas with China, when they think of efficiency, they think of production output ratio in mass production. Meaning, how many people can they employ, along with automation and mechanization, in order to massively increase production output.
Humans are more adaptable than robots, and can be repurposed to operate another machine. Quality is not as high, but it may be acceptable. The gain is in mass market share, at a lower cost. And at some point, their higher end manufacturers will automate and compete on par with their western peers.
The goal in China, is to maximize output. Massive profits can come later.
That’s what happens when your people have almost no rights and you can literally weld their building doors shut. Their strength comes at a cost, and it’s the freedom of their people.
Edit: Also, China only matters because we allow them to matter. As soon as we wise up and let other countries start making our toys and phones, China will be screwed.
> they don't mind suffering things that are unacceptable for us
When the ruling class exploits the working class and suppresses their access to information and free speech, that doesn't mean they "don't mind suffering," it means one sector of the Chinese population has cannibalized another sector in order to build wealth for themselves. Much like what is happening in the US with the ultra-wealthy. It's not all rainbows and roses in China, in fact if you forgot, there is an active genocide in progress in that country.
Genocide or not (nobody knows what is happening in those camps, so I would not use that word unless we have some solid hard evidence), we talk about consequences of covid on societies. And Chinese one seems to be faring much much better than most others.
I just saw how a video of Chinese doctors dressing up for a visit to a covid patient. My doctor wife just stared with open mouth - nothing like that is done here in Switzerland. They use super basic equipment, which is simply not enough to protect long term doctors exposed to patients. We simply don't have the mindset to handle this situation seriously. We will learn eventually, but it will be a painful lesson for our society.
As somebody on HN mentioned a few weeks ago, China defined its bottom with closure and quarantine, and now they are bouncing back. While west is still in free fall.
China understands what matters most and that is controlling the narrative. An authoritarian government excels at manipulating the raw data and thus the narrative.
I'm not arguing against the point that China is handling this better than other countries. I'm arguing against the point that it's because they "don't mind suffering." They do mind suffering, but they have no agency, and their government has decided that they must suffer so that the economy can survive this crisis as healthy as possible.
China is an authoritarian country, and they've resorted to literally locking people into their homes until a quarantine period passes, arresting them, and beating them. Can you imagine if American police started locking apartment complex doors from the outside? I don't want to live in a country like that, even if it means we're worse equipped to deal with pandemics.
And let's not forget this whole thing started in China because their food safety regulations aren't adequate.
edit: ah yes, downvotes -- mash that disagree button
It was meant more as a "there is no real response to a contentless statement like this" comment, though I admit people don't seem to be taking it that way.
Nothing in the grandparent comment is particularly neoliberal; now, if it stated that neoliberal policy assured (or even made more likely) the kind of economic resilience that it suggests is what matters, that would be different, but as it is it is compatible with the criticism of neoliberalism that is common from the center-left to the far left (though each position in this range also has many more criticisms of neoliberalism) that it favors myopic microoptimizations over systemic health and resilience.
Heck, as a center-leftish frequent critic of neoliberalism, I mostly agree with the statement: while who was hit hardest has some effect, differences in the trajectory of the rebound from the bottom tends to matter more for the post-crisis position than differences in the depth of the bottom.
"efficiency" and "innovation" are neoliberal buzzwords. They are the very same buzzwords that were used to justify the cuts to our supplies and offshoring of our supply chains that led in part to this crisis.
It is absurd on its face to summarize Germany's ascendancy to "efficiency" and "innovation" when, you know, complicated geopolitics is a thing. It is literally fluffy propaganda.
> "efficiency" and "innovation" are neoliberal buzzwords.
No, efficiency and innovation are real things. Neoliberals tend to think that they are areas that neoliberal policy produces better outcomes on, and in the case of efficiency at least there is a strong theoretical case that this is true in a very narrow range of hyper-idealized conditions.
People who are not neoliberals often agree that efficiency and innovation are important (though perhaps not of as paramount importance as neoliberals tend to portray them), but often disagree with neoliberals as to the optimality of neoliberal policies at producing them outside of the kind of simplified conditions that dominate the first couple weeks of undergraduate economics classes.
> People who are not neoliberals often agree that efficiency and innovation are important (though perhaps not of as paramount importance as neoliberals tend to portray them), but often disagree with neoliberals as to the optimality of neoliberal policies at producing them outside of the kind of simplified conditions that dominate the first couple weeks of undergraduate economics classes.
People who are not neoliberals often agree that efficiency and innovation are important _up to the point where needs are met for all_. No leftist uses efficiency/innovation as a target (and if they do chase it for the sake of productivity they are by definition not left of capital).
> People who are not neoliberals often agree that efficiency and innovation are important _up to the point where needs are met for all_. No leftist uses efficiency/innovation as a target (and if they do chase it for the sake of productivity they are by definition not left of capital).
Plenty of leftists, agree with neoliberals that utilitarian efficiency ought to be a key goal of an economic system. Leftists, unlike neoliberals, are unlikely to believe that the capitalist markets optimize for utilitarian efficiency, because, even aside from the general failures of the rational choice model due to imperfect information, etc. (which neoliberals often also discount), capitalist markets effectively weight individual utility differently based on the individual’s wealth.
1. The supposedly superior Chinese system is largely responsible for the outbreak being as bad as it is. Never mind the initial coverup and lies about the nature of the disease, their allowance of those horrifically unsanitary wildlife markets is crime enough.
2. I'm wondering what makes you think the US is incapable of adapting. Will we ever be able to do a China-style lockdown? Probably not, but that's a feature not a bug. There are other ways of dealing with a pandemic, and I sincerely doubt anyone from the west, or most of the east for that matter is going to be moving to China for their pandemic-response measures.
If anything I see this as a negative for China. The experience has revealed just how vulnerable China-dependent supply chains are, particularly for medications and medical devices. I expect both political and social moves to diversify away from dependence on China, which would hardly make them more of a Hegemon.
1. China’s early failures were quickly remedied. They enacted a massively costly economic shutdown early, and bought the west weeks or months. What did we do with that bought time? We wasted it by denying the threat, failing to stockpile, and ultimately doing the exact same thing China did (trying to suppress news of it from the top). At least in the US a select few Republicans were able to profit off this, so I guess they can thank China for their generosity.
2) China built two hospitals in a week, and nearly instantaneously shifted a significant portion of their industry to making medical supplies. Thousands of Americans will die because the US President won’t invoke the defense production act. US does adapt, but it does so too slowly to solve the problem.
China has proven themselves massively resilient. Right now, they’re worried about reimporting cases from Europe and have covid largely under control. It would have been better to not get out of hand in the first place, but they’re the only country that’s demonstrated an ability to work themselves back out of the crisis once it’s unfolded.
Already, colleagues in China are returning to work, and I’ll be out of the office likely until May. China gave us weeks if not months of warning that we ignored, so it’s a little frustrating to see Americans and Europeans finger point when ultimately we’re responsible for our own shit.
If you look at China’s trajectory over the past ~15 years, it is obvious that the 21st century is theirs for the taking, as the 20th was for the US.
I sincerely doubt "buying time for the west" was even remotely in the minds of any Communist Party officials in charge of the lockdown. They committed to the lockdown so their own medical systems wouldn't get overwhelmed and cause even more economic damage, just like everyone else.
US adaptation will take the form of putting systems in place to prevent a re-occurrence. Of course we move too slow in the initial crisis, we always have. Any democracy moves slower than an authoritarian dictatorship in the moment, that's one of the trade-offs. It's frustrating, but a natural feature of the system, and pays dividends in the long-term.
China's trajectory over the past 15 years has been providing cheap labor to be the world's workshop. But that labor is no longer as cheap, automation continues to advance, and companies were already relocating their supply chains due to political/economic/IP theft concerns, Samsung being the most notable example. Now this? There will be a surge.
That and the Chinese's government's bottomless-loans-as-political-favor policy can't last forever. And thanks to the one child policy they're facing a major age and gender demographic crisis. China is also dependent on imports for food and energy.
They exist in their modern form at at the pleasure of the rest of the world. The foundation for their economic miracle was the west opening them up to world trade to distance them from the Soviets, and later cheap labor. It was never anything intrinsic to China or Chinese power. The moment they try to force their will on the world they'll find their ability to do so is short-lived.
I’m not sure about this. China is, rightfully, being blamed for the initial outbreak of the virus and their failure to contain it. I think when the dust settles, we’re going to see a rapid decoupling from China as countries look inward to strengthen their domestic supply chains.
I have a hard time seeing China emerging as a winner from this crisis.
Given how poorly the rest of the world reacted after getting two months of advance warning, I can't think of more than three countries that could have contained this outbreak.
Fingerpointing at China when they reacted far more decisively then the West did seems... A tad off the mark.
If this originated in Milan, Kansas, or Bangalore, we'd all be in the exact same boat today.
Hell, if the outbreak started in Kansas, we would probably have a hundred thousand dead by now, with our supreme leader still insisting that the virus will magically go away in three weeks.
Not sure it is fair to say that the world really had advanced warning from China. They were saying everything was okay and people-people transmission is low. All trust was lost, so time was reset when Italy was hit, that is the real time zero, because no one trusts China.
The first lockdown in Italy was Feb 21. Trump had alread convened a task force to investigate and handle the spread of the virus on Jan 29, and was later called racist for the travel restrictions placed on people coming from China on Jan 31.
It's apparently been memory-holed, but during this period it was the US media calling it "no worse than the flu", not the other way around.
* Shipping a laughably insufficient number of test kits that didn't work, while banning private labs from developing their own tests. We still have a crippling test kit shortage.
* Asking people traveling from China to self-quarantine, and not following up.
* No stockpiles of necessary medical supplies.
Getting called names has never stopped him from rolling out bad policy in the past. I don't see why it can be credited for stopping him from rolling out good policy this time.
Inner cynic: For now long? 5 years? Then we will again be cutting costs, looking at the bottom line, and find that Chinese manufacturing gives a better bottom line.
Interesting theory. I suspect China will continue to do what they’ve been doing, and build out their own country.
The United States was built on the foundation of transportation (roads and highways), automobiles, mortgages, and travel. These industries built up the middle class, by providing jobs for home, and profits from exports to abroad. Then came tech and the massive windfall from that.
They essentially have the population of 4 United States, that they can essentially just compete internally among themselves, while still producing products for export to abroad.
They can just follow the same playbook here.
* Infrastructure, check, they have highways, airports, and also, high speed trains.
* Automobiles, check, they have the largest car market in the world. And they are continually working with, and learning from, their European partners. Eventually, they’ll get good enough to not need external partnerships.
* Mortgages, check, lots of high rises, since that’s the only way to house so many people.
* Travel, in progress, they’re working really hard to make a commercial airliner. This will take another 20 years, but Boeing messed up with their 737 Max fiasco, which may give them an opening sooner. But most of the parts to this airplane comes from American companies, so if Trump wants, then he can really crush their airplane independence dreams, at least for 10 years.
* Technology, in progress, they have mostly web companies, and application companies, but not yet core technology companies. They still don’t quite have CPU and memory chip companies yet, and they outsourced manufacturing to Taiwan. This is where Trump can really crush them, but again, at a heavy price, and only for 10 years.
In the end, anything is possible, but I highly doubt they are interested in squeezing the US by the balls anyways. They are finding it more profitable to maintain friendly terms with the US, and sell them cheaper trinkets, than taking a confrontational approach, and getting into a hot war, where nobody wins, except Lockheed.
OP assumed the rest of the world will become less dependent on foreign goods, which would therefore hurt China. I pointed out China is hedged to come out on top in that scenario, not that China would necessarily push for that scenario.
China's own population may be additionally disenchanted with a government unable to handle the situation without iron/hamfisted attempts to clamp down after ignoring the problem / sources for a long time.
A few weeks? Really? A major geopolitical shift the likes of which the world has never seen is going to occur in a few weeks?
These things take place over years, even decades. I do agree that the US hegemony may come to an end if things continue as is. But I don't think that means another becomes hegemon.
A key determiner is who invents an effective treatment and vaccine first. Many bright young minds globally are paying great attention to Covid-19. If it happens in a country, possibly US, East Asia, or Europe, then the institutions of higher learning in the country would gain immediate prestige. (Pretty sure some teams in China have set its sight on this.)
If it happens in East Asia, that would also be a recognition of their recent rapid improvement in STEM research that's not yet common knowledge, and not recognized by many general rankings.
An academic ranking with some objectivity has 5 Chinese, 1 Korean, and 1 Singaporean universities among global top 10 in biomedical engineering, for example:
A shift in perception among talents may start a positive feedback loop that propels innovation in East Asia (incl. Singapore) further. Today, many graduate students in top programs in the US are from Asia.
Over the long term, quality and rate of innovations are what determine global leaders (as a sibling comment suggests).
I agree with the last part of your statement, but not the first. By the time an effective vaccine is developed and run through human trials, most of the population will already have gotten Covid, so it's not likely to be a savior moment. Additionally, given how many vaccine candidates are already in the pipeline, it's pretty likely there will be multiple options approved within a few months of each other.
On a related note, if China wants to improve its STEM research prestige level, it needs to do something about the rampant fraud in research results that cause a lot of people to be highly skeptical of anything they publish.
Many countries, esp in East Asia, have slowed COVID spread down a great deal. Vaccines will likely be invented before it penetrates the populations there. They are among the largest groups of graduate students, ie key research workforce, in the US.
If a vaccine developed in East Asia is either cheaper, more scalable, or more effective, increased self-confidence would mean many top students will choose to pursue graduate studies at home instead of the US. This is in addition to fear of being discriminated against because of the pandemic.
Given the number of top people in East Asia with strong quantitative skills, it would significantly shift research momentum to the east.
> And just like the Depression, a few years of boom times afterwards and that effect will be negated
Actually Depression changed consumer habits for entire generation. People saved more, spent less, kept money under the mattress etc. Not a generation that you can kick-start an economy with.
Weird memory but my depression era great Grandma (matrilineal side all had kids at like 18) was teaching me a "depression soup" recipe. The first thing she had me do was peel the potatoes. All I could think was "this is the best part of the potato... We are literally throwing food away right now."
I think lots of experiences like this with her led to me quite unfairly latching onto the "ok boomer" ageist wave. Time and Time again she would do things that would make me wonder "wtf did your generation learn from all the lessons you went through..."
More than likely, older potatos were used instead of thrown out. Have you considered that the potatos may have been green and near toxic, and peeling the old potatos was necessary to be able to eat them without vomiting?
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/horrific-tales-o...
Sure, I think it's possible that some policies will stick around longer than the attitudes that motivated them; I was addressing hope about perspective, not policy.
In Australia, they closed all the 'non-essential' industries. Which turns out to be about 30% of the workforce.
I keep thinking that big shift will be when people come out of this they won't allow themselves to be 'non-essential' ever again. They won't take back those jobs, they'll push for agreements that guarantee a safety net.
I wonder how many people feel they have the option to not take back a job?
I have such options, exercised them a few years ago when I was 'done' with a particular industry and I wanted to change (networking to web dev, I'm so much happier with my work now), but my ability to do so was largely because the job I had done was a pretty good job pay wise (so I could save) / I received a severance, etc. The jobs that are getting shutdown are different / the people I suspect have fewer options.... at least in the US.
> I wonder how many people feel they have the option to not take back a job?
This is exactly why social safety nets are limited in the US. A social safety net drives up wages. Workers no longer rely upon a job to the degree they did before.
So it raises wages and raises taxes, which raise cost for everyone else. It forces managers to actually pay a living wage and take care of employees, which hurts them because they can't treat people like shit to get good numbers to show their managers.
When I think about the people who won't take back their jobs, I think about the business owners mostly.
Australians love cafe culture and 6 months ago, if you opened a cafe in the Sydney CBD and if you could make good fast coffee, you'd have a great trade with good revenue to match. But now, those small business owners are going to lose business and homes.
And a lot of workers may come back, but they won't stay.
It's really really bad because we don't have a lot of industries that have openings that can just absorb new hires. Industry doesn't train up people any more, maybe that trend will revert but I really worry for a bubble of people in my community that may loose out and never get a strong footing back.
>This event forcing America to adopt more progressive policies
Most of the legislation is temporary heading into an election. I suspect the GOP would be happy to cut that net ASAP and sadly their own voters would support it.
Time will tell. In a year, we'll actually have much better evidence about how different systems fared. Right now, both the market-based US system and the public systems in Europe are being put to the test.
I suspect that they will both have failures and successes that will largely be localized and that we'll find out that those features that made a healthcare system robust don't correlate that much with being a public system or a market system. It will probably correlate more strongly with culture.
All systems have capacity limits. This is even a compsci problem: queues. Whether your system is public, private, or a combination of both, under extreme demand that exceeds your workload capacity, you'll either be overwhelmed (and drop work) or apply back pressure (both which will appear as rationing of healthcare; you have no choice but to ration when supply is limited). There are only so many doctors, nurses, ICU beds, and ventilators.
Note that in Italy and Spain, reverse triage is being done based on your at risk status, age, and other complications. If you're young and healthy, you take priority. I imagine the same will be done in the US, and those who are more likely to survive will be provided with ventilators and other medical equipment to survive, not those who can pay or with insurance; medical practitioners are making the call, not the chargemaster and CFO.
Public healthcare systems won't need a bailout, they're already government supported. We'll move money around on the nation state balance sheet and move on. Private systems though may not survive. That's culture though, so perhaps you're right.
Well, unless we libertarians were right all along and these progressive policies are unmaintainable over a longer period of time. At this point, I think we're about to find out one way or another.
I'm more cynical - it's very easy to justify losing your job now as driven by external factors while losing your job before as being due to an internal failing. If people get their jobs back within the next few months, I think it could breed a sense of superiority of "I got my job back with the Coronavirus, and you couldn't even get a job in one of the biggest boom markets ever.' there's no basis in reality for looking down on the poor like you said, and I don't know if this shock will force people to really understand reality as you hope, or simply by the basis of a new false understanding as I fear.
Frankly we have a formal education system that is actively hostile to training people to do jobs, and instead teaches "fundamentals" and "how to learn". There's tremendous support for those concepts, though I personally consider them bogus. If we truly want cross trained people, the education system is the one that needs to change. Otherwise the funding and time that could be used for jobs training will always be soaked up by it. My humble opinion.
I know its not a popular opinion, but when I see my Nanny wanting to get ahead by taking night classes, and those classes have her studying and writing 19th century poetry... I can't help but feel deeply frustrated by the disconnect. How could she possibly stay motivated to finish school, when its only giving her hoops to jump through and no practical skills to get into a better job? How could I convince her to e.g. take programming lessons from me, when society and her parents are telling her a college degree (that, at this rate, she'll unlikely obtain) is what will help her most? /rant
> If we truly want cross trained people, the education system is the one that needs to change.
Absolutely and it goes beyond the profiteering that people typically rant about. The barriers to obtaining a degree for the sake of obtaining a degree are high in itself. Then we add bureaucracy and a bottom-up approach to teaching that I think excludes a good amount of potentially qualified people that would otherwise do great.
Software development is a great example of highly successful people that either dropped out of high school or college because they discovered a top-down approach can lead to the same outcome as a bottom-up academic one. Top-down example being: you want to build an app, you learn only what you need to build it (e.g. html, css, and javascript) then with continued years of applying that experience in related areas you naturally acquire more of the fundamentals of computer science.
I don't think it's appreciated here on HN because a good chunk of the members have higher education degrees and can't see past their own bias, hence the down-votes and lack of actual responses. I've seen this topic appear before and with it comes condescending responses towards those that don't hold a degree. This was especially evident on the HN platform when people learned Edward Snowden was a drop-out.
The current attitude towards this is well rooted in society and still a hard one to break. Thankfully tech companies are starting to come around to the idea.
> I don't think it's appreciated here on HN because a good chunk of the members have higher education degrees and can't see past their own bias, hence the down-votes and lack of actual responses.
Ding ding ding. I've gotten my share of flak on a couple occasions for working in IT without a degree.
These people looking down on me are probably right that they're smarter than me and more knowledgeable than me and could probably code circles around me. I know I ain't getting a FAANG job any time soon. I know full well that there are gaps in my knowledge that someday I'd be interested in filling once I've got enough saved up to try college again. Doesn't mean I can't be productive, too, nor does it mean I can't teach myself what I need to know to get the job done. Maybe duct-taping systems together with MSSQL sprocs and proprietary programming languages/runtimes and shell scripts and CSVs ain't the most glamorous work compared to playing around with blockchains and neural nets and Jupyter notebooks, but it's work that needs done regardless, and I ain't too proud to do it, even if it's putting grey hairs on my head decades before they've got any business being there.
"Top-down" v. "bottom-up" is definitely a good way of putting it. The code I write ain't pretty, but it's gonna do exactly what I need it to do to solve the user's problem, and chances are it's solving problems for which there are no elegant solutions. It ain't gonna run like a Lamborghini, but that's okay; I just need it to run like a Tacoma.
Honestly I see that as something that isn't taught enough / we have a very structured system that is "here is how you're going to learn it... good luck" that doesn't provide a lot of options.
I do agree with the idea that your traditional 4 year college education system is poorly equipped to help redirect existing workers.
I can't help but draw a parallel to how machine learning and A.I. automation is supposed to disrupt a majority of blue collar jobs and if this is a taste of what is to come when we crack the code and people's skills are rendered obsolete to specialized sophisticated machinery that outperforms us in every metric and runs autonomously 24/7.
I also think about universal basic income and what life would feel like if I suddenly was left to my own devices and had the luxury to learn any subject I wanted, pursue new hobbies and crafts without dragging myself into work with stop and go traffic both ways, zapping my creative energy and making me a more jaded person day by day and the week progresses.
I like to think this event changes people's perspective on folks out of work in the US. There's a lot of recrimination, and even self loathing about being poor or out of work in the US. It doesn't seem based in reality and certainly isn't helpful.
Perhaps it is time we realize that much like a pandemic things in this world change fast and we need to be able to help folks who are out of work pick up skills quickly / retrain (and maybe retrain employers that people with a 'different' resume might actually be able to do other jobs) so that they can get back on their feet.
Maybe it won't be a pandemic but things are changing fast whole industries of people find themselves offshored, jobs change, etc. I think we need to plan for / get comfortable with the idea that on a smaller scale we should be ready to deal with such things dynamically over the course of people's lives with retraining, support for it, and etc. And maybe a workforce with a variety of experiences will be better for it.