The Gaming Den

You know, a hundred years ago, there were thousands of people employed in mining salt, one of the most precious minerals.

Today, most of the salt in North America is mined in the Dakotas. One salt mine, mining a deposit 85 miles wide and 380 miles long (at a depth of 1000 feet) and they have been at it for over a hundred years. They've cleared two square miles so far in that time.

They mine the most rock salt in North America. They have 18 fulltime miners.

Eighteen.

Automation is so cool. But geepers. Full employment sure is one of the lost wishes of socialists.

-Crissa

http://www.find-croatia.com/peljesac/st ... r][br]salt fields in croatia. in the middle of summer, the workers gather and shuffle the salt into carts which are then manually loaded into a grinder and packager. the people there work for food and lodging.
recently, tourists have started to come and work here in search of enlightment or catharsis, or something, dunno.

Salt bothers me. It's made from a deadly poison and a metal that combusts in contact with water. Yet it's a necessity for life.

I know we need the chlorine to make digestive acid. What do we need the sodium for?

Central nervous system, thirst regulation, blood plasma. I know there's more, but i can't remember.

If all automation was magicked away tomorrow, most of the population would die. Billions of people. Automation clearly does the reverse of killing.

I once read "Salt: A World History" (Paperback) by Mark Kurlansky (Author). I never knew how fascinating or how important salt was until then.

Here is something I got from the salt institute :

Sodium is the major extracellular electrolyte responsible for regulating water balance, pH, and osmotic pressure. It is important in nerve conduction. Because of sodium's importance to your body, several interacting mechanisms guard against under-consumption of salt and its threat to your body's nerves and muscles and interference with the sodium-potassium "pump" which adjusts intra- and extra-cellular pressures.

angelfromanotherpin at [unixtime wrote:1202305052[/unixtime]]
I know we need the chlorine to make digestive acid. What do we need the sodium for?

What josephbt said, plus you can make a different type of digestive chemical with sodium (sodium hydroxide, your pancreas drops a bunch of the stuff into your duodenum to raise the pH of the chyme so the intestinal enzymes can work better.)

Yeah, full-automation should probably be the goal to strive for, rather than full-employment. Then we can all live lives of sweet sweet hedonism.

wrote:Yeah, full-automation should probably be the goal to strive for, rather than full-employment. Then we can all live lives of sweet sweet hedonism.

A capitalist economy does not support that result.

Or anything like it.

Under Capitalism you make more goods and services the closer you are to full automation. You distribute a higher percentage of the goods and services that you make the closer you are to full employment.

So at full automation (and zero employment) you produce a lot, but then it all gets landfilled because no one can purchase any of it.

-Username17

It would take a radical change in the nature of automation of all the knowledge workers to get swamped by some sort of automation, though as I write this its happening - bottom end of fields like law are being replaced by knowledge bases operated by unskilled labour (a proxy for 'secretaries')

"full automation" is a bizzare concept, but increasing automation is not all together a bad thing. We have been "automating" for thousands of years from the moment we replaced digging our own fields to having an ox on a yolk drag a plough for us.

One of the interesting examples I heard was about automobile part manufacturing. In the US people fear China because for the price of one person in the US they can hire a hundred people in China. In China people fear the US because while they can hire a hundred people all these people can do is push the start button while that one person in the US can reprogram all the machines on his line for any situation.

Let's go back to the original example, salt. Salt used to be more precious than gold. More wars were fought over, and won or lot because of it than gold. Some speculate that one of the problems the South had in the Civil War was that its salt fields were all coastal and were easily destroyed by the North. The lack of salt meant that meat could not be preserved (this was before refrigeration) and shortages during the war were devistating on the economy. But now salt is commonplace and the need for it is greatly reduced. The only reason why people mine it it because automation made it competitive with other methods to manufacture salt.

Odd fact. You can go to a vineyard and eat a grape pulled off the vine. You can go to an ochard and you can eat an apple fresh off the tree. Go to an olive grove and you're out of luck. Olives must be cured in salt before they are edible.