Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by ferrets_bueller

Time for a crash indeed.

Observations

1. I am loathe to agree with sebby on almost anything. Yet his obsession about robotics and the long term effect on employment has a good deal of validity. Look at our own profession. There was a time when platoons of associates did document discovery, and the lead associate/fungible work unit became the master of the facts for either negotiations, or, if necessary, trials. The head associate then sat second seat at the trial, making the partner look good.

Those platoons of associates have been replaced by a squad of electronic discovery technocrats who can computerize the documents, sort them chronologically, or by subject matter, or keyword, or by author, in a heartbeat.

This Board has discussed the foregoing point endlessly; I just think it ends poorly for the future workforce, particularly in professions and manufacturing. And what the ‘bots don’t get, cheap overseas labor will...

2. I am taking some S&P 500 index profits off the table today. I believe the run-up is over. Cumulative little signs seem to me to indicate that the long slog out of the Great Recession has peaked. Stupid things, taken in isolation, seem cumulative.

Fast casual food places have reached maximum expansions. Same with Starbucks.

There hasn’t been even a hint of a infrastructure spending bill.

Numbnuts will foul our existing international trade relations to the detriment of the economy.

Many of the jobs that have been created over the last 5 years underemploy the people taking those positions. Better than the dole but insufficient to build a better life.

The pervasive negativity of the majority party and the pervasive ineptitiude of the minority party.

Unsustainable state and municipal debt.

Heroin.

3. Even the good news doesn’t seem to be that good, when examined. My adopted home state of Virginia just took a massive Dump on Trump. Excellent….until you look at the map of the state by county. The high population areas of Northern Virginia, Richmond, Tidewater, and (I think) the area around Virginia Tech at Blacksburg turned out in force and resolutely moved the Virginia chess pieces to the Democrats. But looking at the map shows that the negative Republican campaign still commands huge portions of the state.

I’m a profit-taker today.

Enjoy the profits.

I'm afraid the changes in law aren't driven mainly by technology, but instead by the strange economics that led us to massively increase associate compensation at the same time large parts of the business were being commodified. We still have more lawyers than any society in its right mind needs.

I'm more worried about robots replacing agricultural workers than lawyers. And they are. But there are alternate areas of great growth, notably healthcare, where a wealthy, automated service economy can create large numbers of jobs that are better than the ones being lost.

One of the interesting parts of this equation is the gender disparities. The most at risk jobs are ones traditionally held by men, while many of the ones traditionally held by women, often caregiving and educational in nature, are the ones we ought to be investing in.

Make a cultural shift away from the traditional roles and their misogyny and the economy looks much better for the next generation.