Trump voters, explained

[Thumpalumpacus]

If those are still around.

dingdingdingding

[SteelCurtain]

I don't know what the answer is, but we are going to have to have some sort of major shift in the way we think about jobs and unemployment in this country.

Making higher education more affordable for more people would be a great start.

Agreed. STEM focus in high school, affordable college, all great things that will help tremendously.

I still think there are going to be too many people and not enough jobs. Self driving cars will mean fleets of truck drivers out of business. Machines will make manufacturing a thing that requires a tiny, specialized crew. The service industry will be replaced by touchpads. Waiters replaced by an iPad at your table. Nearly every industry, top to bottom, is requiring less people. Even the military will experience less and less need for literal manpower. (Enter Trump: "Our military is gutted!")

When I say we are going to require a shift in how we think about the workforce, I mean that we are going to have to come to terms with the fact that there will not be enough jobs to go around. We are going to have to come up with a way to have a, say, 25% unemployment rate and still have people survive.

[Thumpalumpacus]

You're probably right. Education is no silver-bullet when a program can be written by a small team and disseminated online, still leaving so many others on the outside looking in.

When my son told me he was thinking about not going to university and thinking instead about becoming a car mechanic, I was not unhappy. Of course I'd love for him to aim higher, but on the plus side, it's pretty hard to offshore an engine rebuild. (He ended up going to uni anyway, open major right now, working towards IT, is his thinking).

It seems to me that this issue of employability, and the issue of the growing wealth disparity in this country, are deeply intertwined.

[Minimalist]

I gotta agree with Thump. Better access to higher education, exposure to other kinds of people and other cultures, these things would be a great start.

Tough when some are ready to react like this.

This one was is so bad they actually used the term "domestic terrorism" on white guys.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/.../92139212/

An alleged plot to blow up a Kansas apartment complex filled with Somali immigrants one day after the November elections aimed to create a "bloodbath" to "wake up" the country politically, according to one of three members of a militia group charged with domestic terrorism, federal authorities say.

Authorities said Friday that Curtis Allen and Gavin Wright, both 49 and from Liberal, Kan., and Patrick Eugene Stein, 47, of Wright, Kan., were members of a small, anti-Muslim group called the Crusaders that espoused sovereign-citizen, anti-government, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant extremist beliefs.