The New York Times has discovered that Vice President Pence will not eat alone with any woman other than his wife!
And, he is Vice President of the United States!
And, it’s 2017 in America!
And, last I looked, the vast majority of women, by choice, do not spend most if not all of their time in the kitchen and at home.
And, last I looked too, women are at least equal if not superior to men in every human endeavor.
So, what on earth is he afraid of? Does he worry that a woman might accost him over lunch? Or he her?
What internal daemons is he fighting?
Does this mean that Pence could not have lunch alone, or, heavens forgive, dinner with a senior woman in the Trump Administration or the Congress?
I am not sure how many decades one needs to go back to place this behavior, or which extreme religious sects one has to identify, but this is surely not universally accepted and expected, 21st Century American behavior. It is, in fact, amazingly sexist and sends a terrible message to young and older women throughout the country – the Vice President of the United States will not eat alone with a person of the opposite sex.
It just blows the mind and is one more indication of the striking and abnormal behavior of yet another senior member of the new Administration.
There is much talk about the return to the manufacturing world of the twentieth century. Lots of promises being made to out-of-work people that old plants will come to life again and new, greatly increased numbers of manufacturing jobs will be the hallmark of America in the first quarter of the 21st Century.
America may become more of an island again, buying less from abroad and producing more goods at home. America may see a renaissance of “Made in America” products. But, it is far less certain, even in the most rosy of scenarios, that we will see much if any net gain in blue collar (or even white collar) jobs as a result.
All one has to do is look at manufacturing today in the U.S. and abroad. Robotics has transformed manufacturing in industrial countries. The result of this, of course, has been a net reduction in numbers of jobs for humans. And, as robots become ever more omnipresent and ever more sophisticated, jobs for humans will become ever more scarce and require ever greater skill levels.
In an article in the New York Times of March 29, 2017, a study by economists at Boston University and MIT found significant evidence of the negative effects of robots on jobs in manufacturing in America. The article noted that data clearly show that robots are to blame for hundreds of thousands of lost manufacturing jobs over the last decade or so and that the number of industrial robots will increase many fold again in short order.
It is clear that automation is here to stay and ever more an essential and central factor in manufacturing in this country and abroad. To assume, as politicians may suggest, that manufacturing jobs will increase by bringing them “home” is as naïve as to assume that robotics is just an academic pursuit and that Robots will not continue their inexorable takeover of almost every element of manufacturing in the developed world, whether in the United States or wherever. Robots are well rooted now and humans have already lost the race for American jobs. Very simply, there will be increasingly fewer and fewer skilled and unskilled manufacturing workers as this decade advances no matter how many more plants in America expand or are opened.
Mar-A-Logo membership recently went up from $100,000 to $200,000. The doubling in price has a lot of people crying foul, for the owners seem to have doubled the cost of membership within days of their father being sworn in.
But, I am thinking about this as a consumer. $200,000 is still just about the best deal possible. I don’t particularly enjoy Florida at all. I don’t play golf or hang out with people who have nothing better to do that to show their adulation for a rich man. And, even if it is the Winter White House after all, I wouldn’t particularly be excited about spending more than a few minutes there. Having been in other Trump-branded properties, I know I would find the décor over the top.
But, the access that I would get for my $200,000 is quite extraordinary. I just need to whisper into the ear of the Secretary of Energy, the Attorney General or even the President himself and I can probably get almost anything done After a couple of minutes with the right audience, this could all instantly pay for itself.
