Amazon is hurting LOTS of people

[Moostache]

46. We're all whistling past the graveyard here to an extent....

The coming age of automation - in industries previously untouched by it - is going to make people long for the days of the $13-15 an hour PT gig with Amazon.

Paralegals, lawyers, advertising copywriters, OTR truckers, and many more are industries that 10 years from now will not exist in anything approaching their current structure or prominence. As more and more manual tasks are replaced by machines and learning robots and drones and self-driving vehicles, fewer and fewer jobs without technical specialities will exist. Service industry jobs are already on the line with self-check out and ordering kiosks at Wal-Mart and McDonald's are just another step at replacing those damn pesky employees and pumping up those sweet, sweet profit margins for the corporate overlords.

We are steaming head long into another cataclysmic upheaval of the world order...just as Britain at the turn of the 20th century was a dead empire standing, so too is the USA at the turn of the 21st century. Just as WWI begat WWII and birthed the remainder of the 20th century, so too are we now seeing a similar echo building in the the 21st century.

The difference now is that nuclear weapons already exist and have been deployed in combat usage previously, so there is no precedent to set or break. I expect full-scale exchanges between India and Pakistan with nearly 500,000,000 dead. Similar exchanges on the Korean peninsula accompanied by massive conventional war on the border there, adding untold millions more to the tally. I fully expect in the next 10 years that Israel will use nuclear weapons against Iran, ensuring a healing of the Sunni-Shiite schism and a unified Islam vs. Judaism holy war. The Divided States of America will have at it again against itself as well...only this time there won't be a reunification of the union, it will result in a nearly Balkanized North America and still more warfare and suffering.

And this is all very likely WITHOUT considering climate change and its impacts as well.

Humanity will finish the 21st century with far fewer people than entered the century and it is going to be horrific...