Sunday, April 30, 2017

Will There Be Jobs

Artificial Intelligence has been touted as the inevitable job killer, but it’s only software and we used to call it automation. Sensors monitor things and activate circuits according to programming instructions.

Automation has been with us for a while. It is the primary strategy we use to increase productivity. It is often very expensive to implement and maintain, so it is limited to high volume operations and in products whose value justifies the cost.

In 1965, when I graduated from St. Louis University and took my first day job on the staff of United Way in St. Louis, we had an IBM computer to update our prospect records from the tape version of the reverse telephone directories.

In 1967, I took my first Personnel job at Kearny National in St. Louis and learned how to handle recruiting, employment and compensation.

In 1968, when I went to work for Monsanto Chemical in St. Louis, I pushed for job enrichment for the clerical staff and worked on the team to make unions unnecessary.

In 1971, when I went to work for Washington University in St. Louis, one of my projects was to automate personnel data to automate HEW reporting and administrative processes.

In 1975, when I went to work for Schwan Foods, I replaced the timecards and keys with magnetic swipe cards. I replaced clock round security guards with a base station and security car. I had a PC built to run the ammonia refrigeration and other sensors and cameras. I led efforts to automate the food processing plant and promoted assemblers to machine operators. We had a no layoff policy, a robust training program and filled jobs from within. Automation allowed us to quadruple our sales.

I continued to pursue productivity increase strategies throughout my career as a Personnel Director and later, in 1993, when I opened my private consulting practice.

Most automation in manufacturing resulted from the need to control product quality and increase productivity, not reduce labor cost, although that does occur.

In the auto industry, the automated welding machines solved the welding quality problems and changed how design work was done, eliminating the number of parts. Composite materials have allowed us to eliminate rust and simplify design and manufacturing. The use of clear-coat paint improved its durability.  The lifespan and fuel efficiency of automobiles have tripled. The development of the hybrid engine has revolutionized automobiles.

In the electronics industry, automatic insertion machines placed electrical components on circuit boards accurately and with lightning speed. Adding schematic capture to CAD software allowed the bill of materials to be taken from CAD drawings. Adding CIM (computer integrated manufacturing) allowed the drawing to direct milling machines and eliminated extra steps. 

In the machining industries, laser reading coordinate measuring devices are loaded with design drawings used to inspect machined parts.

High speed automation allows Huggies to supply diapers to huge mass markets from highly automated facilities that employ 750 trained technicians.

Lean manufacturing techniques were perfected in the US in the 1990s. These highly automated plants were designed to function in the US.

When these plants return, those companies will ensure that training is available. This happened in the 1980s, when electronic assemblers streamed through 1 year community college programs.


Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader

Trump First 100 Days Video

Trump Weekly Address 4/28/17

North Korea Problem

Dick Morris Video

Carter & Clinton are to blame for Korea’s nuclear threat.


Comments North Korea

North Korea’s 2017 total population is 25,405,296. urban 15,557,359, rural 9,847,937.  There are 1.2 million in the armed forces. 12 million live in extreme poverty. North Korea occupies 46,541 square miles, about the size of Pennsylvania. North Korea’s GDP was $16.12 billion in 2016. They are a failed state that is being propped-up by China.

Like every other, communist or central big government country, North Korea needs to expand private property ownership rights and establish the rule of law and a stronger private sector economy.


Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader

Current Battlefields

There is a pile-up of issues being side-tracked by liberal courts and all of these are headed to the Supreme Court.

Trump inherited a federal government that has successfully trampled States rights for 8 years with hundreds of illegal executive orders. Now radical Democrat liberal judges are fighting each legal executive order Trump releases. These bogus judicial opinions need to be cancelled by the Supreme Court. Congress needs to be ready to make immediate corrections to current laws if needed.

Sanctuary Cities need to be defunded. The federal enumerated powers don’t include most of what the federal government does, but it does include responsibility for immigration. Cities and States have no constitutional standing to nullify and usurp federal enumerated powers. 

Campus riots need to end. These riots can easily be stopped by universities, but won’t be until local law enforcement does its job and arrests and prosecutes “protestors” who destroy property and attack others.

UN Refugee Resettlement needs to end. We don’t need to follow Europe’s lead into sovereign suicide. Refugees should be offered asylum in camps in or near their home countries with compatible cultures and customs and it should be temporary.  They should be deported back to their homes in their home countries after the crisis has ended. 

Sharia law needs to be limited and Muslims in the US need to live under US law. There is a good case for banning Islam in the US, because it is requires an incompatible set of laws and seeks to overthrow the US government and its current laws. 


Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader

US Civil War again

THE NEW CIVIL WAR: RADICAL COMMUNISTS VS. CONSERVATIVES, Universities have set stage for violence to continue, 4/29/17, WND

Violent gangs of left-wing radicals known as “antifa” have been attacking Christians or conservatives whom they consider “racist” or “fascist.” But, now, some conservatives are organizing in self-defense, and the war is erupting in the streets.

The focal point is Berkeley, California, home of the free speech movement and now the site of repeated battles between antifa and conservatives. A lawsuit was filed against the University of Berkeley to force the school to allow author and conservative columnist Ann Coulter to speak.

It came only weeks after the “Battle of Berkeley” in which a “free speech rally” featuring Lauren Southern, Brittany Pettibone and other conservative and libertarian speakers was disrupted by antifa. However, conservatives wearing helmets and protective gear routed the left-wingers in a street battle, prompting organizers to declare victory. But it seems likely antifa will not accept defeat, as anarchists are now discussing in online forums the need for combat training and the acquisition of firearms.

One of the more prominent organizations inspiring them is the John Brown Gun Club, a left-wing group that staged an armed counter-protest of a pro-Trump rally in Arizona in March.

Meanwhile, conservatives are also organizing. One of the most prominent right-wing street fighters is Kyle Chapman, known on the Internet as “Based Stick Man,” after video of him hitting an antifa over the head with a stick at a March 4 pro-Trump rally went viral.

In the aftermath of the latest “Battle of Berkeley,” Chapman announced he was joining forces with conservative commentator Gavin McGinnes’s “Western chauvinist” fraternal organization, the “Proud Boys.” The group was heavily involved in protecting speakers at the “free speech rally” and has sworn to guard Coulter during her upcoming appearance at Berkeley.

The battles between left and right first heated up after libertarian activist Milo Yiannopoulos had his February speech at the University of Berkeley shut down because of violent protests by antifa. Though Yiannopoulos was later disgraced by the airing of a video in which the openly homosexual activist discussed pederasty, the episode infuriated conservatives and libertarians and its importance for free speech surpassed any connection with Yiannopoulos himself.

Scott Greer, author of “No Campus For White Men,” says there has been a real shift in the mentality of many on the American right since then. “I think the Berkeley riots in February spurred the right to commit to self-defense against black-masked thugs,” he told WND. “Fighting against antifa is not an act of aggression, but one of self-defense in the eyes of most conservatives.”

Matthew Vadum, senior vice president of the Capital Research Center and the author of “Subversion, Inc.,” argues conservatives are simply reacting to years of violence.“I think conservatives are becoming painfully aware that these ‘antifa’ people want to hit them with baseball bats and knock out their teeth,” he said. “They don’t want to debate. They want to rumble in the streets. This is about a show of force. More conservatives are going to pro-Trump rallies prepared to defend themselves. They are doing this because they can see that the antifa present a clear and present danger.”

Greer claims college campuses are at the center of many of these struggles because the radically anti-conservative and anti-white environment is a welcoming climate for even the most extreme left-wing organizer.

“It provides a safe space for these agitators,” he said. “Most students won’t join in the violence. However, they will give it a moral justification and see it as righteous. These antifa are primarily non-students, yet they know the students support them.”

A further skirmish also developed on the East Coast over the weekend between antifa and their opponents. Rebel Media’s Jack Posobiec was assaulted while reporting on an “Anti-fascist bloc party.”

Among those spotted at the event was Luke Kuhn, one of the left-wing activists who was sentenced to community service for plotting a butyric acid attack against the pro-Trump “Deploraball” at the president’s inauguration. In an interview with WND, Posobiec said such tactics are typical of how the left has always operated.

“The left always uses violence, from Josef Stalin to Mao Zedong to Pol Pot, the left has always committed violence to achieve its ends,” he said. “Antifa has conducted their reign of terror throughout the 2016 election, at the Deploraball,

Trump’s inauguration, and now at Berkeley. Law-abiding patriots who support the First Amendment are fed up.” Posobiec also blasted the media for constantly describing antifa as simply “Trump protesters” rather than as extreme leftists.

Yet Greer suggested the media know exactly what antifa activists believe and eagerly try to promote their far-left message. “The media sees them as fighting against hate and oppression,” he said. “They want to promote them as scrappy rebels punching and shutting down their enemies. The media has no problem excusing violence if it’s done on behalf of the right cause. But now, both antifa and the leftist media are actually seeing resistance.”



http://www.wnd.com/2017/04/the-new-civil-war-radical-communists-vs-conservatives/

Saturday, April 29, 2017

Trump Repealing Regulations

13 Ways Trump Has Rolled Back Government Regulations in His First 100 Days, by Rachel del Guidice 4/29/17, Daily Signal

As President Donald Trump reaches his 100th day in the White House on April 29, he will have worked with Congress to rescind more regulations using the Congressional Review Act than any other president.

“We’re excited about what we’re doing so far. We’ve done more than that’s ever been done in the history of Congress with the CRA,” Rep. Doug Collins, R-Ga., told The Daily Signal in an interview, referring to the law called the Congressional Review Act.

The Congressional Review Act, the tool Trump and lawmakers are using to undo these regulations, allows Congress to repeal executive branch regulations in a certain window of time.

“Under the Congressional Review Act, Congress is given 60 legislative days to disapprove a rule and receive the president’s signature, after which the rule goes into effect,” Paul Larkin, a senior legal research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, wrote in a February report. The 60 days begins after Congress is notified that a rule has been finalized.
Once the House and Senate pass a joint resolution disapproving of a particular regulation, the president signs the measure.

Passed in 1996 in concert with the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act and then-Speaker Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America reform agenda, the Congressional Review Act is what the Congressional Research Service calls “an oversight tool that Congress may use to overturn a rule issued by a federal agency.”
The law also prevents agencies from creating similar rules with similar language.

Until this year, the law had been used successfully only once—in 2001, when Congress and President George W. Bush rescinded a regulation regarding workplace injuries promulgated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration during the Clinton administration. 

Here’s a look at 11 regulatory rollbacks Congress has passed and Trump has signed:

1. Regulations governing the coal mining industry (H.J. Res 41). Mandated by President Barack Obama and finalized in  2016, these regulations “threatened to put domestic extraction companies and their employees at an unfair disadvantage,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer said. The resolution, signed by Trump in February, repealed the rule and “could save American businesses as much as $600 million annually,” Spicer said.

2. Regulations defining streams in the coal industry (H.J. Res 38). “Complying with the regulation would have put an unsustainable financial burden on small mines,” Spicer said. The so-called Stream Protection Rule included “vague definitions of what classifies as a stream,” Nick Loris, a fellow in energy and environmental policy at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal in an email, and undoing it does away with ambiguities: 
For many regulations promulgated by the Obama administration, they fundamentally disregarded the nature of the federal-state relationship when it comes to energy production and environmental protection.
The Stream Protection Rule … removed flexibility from mining steps and simply ignored that states have regulations in place to protect water quality. State and local environmental agencies’ specific knowledge of their region enables them to tailor regulations to promote economic activity while protecting the habitat and environment.  

3. Regulations restricting firearms for disabled citizens (H.J. Res 40). This rule, finalized during Obama’s last weeks in office, sought to “prevent some Americans with disabilities from purchasing or possessing firearms based on their decision to seek Social Security benefits,” Spicer said.
The repeal protects the Second Amendment rights of the disabled, Senate Judiciary Chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said.  “Those rights will no longer be able to be revoked without a hearing and without due process. It will take more than the personal opinion of a bureaucrat,” Grassley said on the Senate floor. But Rep. Mike Thompson, D-Calif., said the regulation didn’t cover “just people having a bad day,” adding: These are not people simply suffering from depression or anxiety. These are people with a severe mental illness who can’t hold any kind of job or make any decisions about their affairs. So the law says very clearly they shouldn’t have a firearm.

4. A rule governing the government contracting process (H.J. Res. 37). Undoing the regulation will cut costs to businesses and free federal contractors from “unnecessary and burdensome processes that would result in delays, and decreased competition for federal government contracts,” Spicer said

5. A rule covering public lands (H.J. Res. 44). The rule gave the federal government too much power “to administer public lands,” in the words of the official website of House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif.
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, told The Daily Signal in an interview that the Bureau of Land Management’s rule restricted the control that states and their citizens had, especially in the West. “The Obama administration wanted to shift land policy from local governments with specific expertise to the federal government, basically shifting even more of the land management policy away from those affected by it,” Lee said. “Repealing this harmful rule will go a long way toward empowering local stakeholders and ensuring that Arizona’s cattlemen, miners, and rural land users have a voice in the planning process,” Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., said in prepared remarks.

6. Reporting requirements regarding college teachers (H.J. Res. 58). The rule mandated annual reporting by states “to measure the performance and quality of teacher preparation programs and tie them to program eligibility for participation in the Teacher Education Assistance for College and Higher Education grant program,” Spicer said.
Anne Ryland, a research assistant in education policy at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal in an email that the rule “gave the federal Department of Education power to evaluate teacher preparation programs at universities, and to link college students’ access to federal financial aid in the form of TEACH grants to the rating of the programs.” 
“University programs,” Ryland added, “would be rated based on the effectiveness of their teaching graduates, with effectiveness determined by elementary and secondary students’ test scores and achievement gains.”

7. Regulations on state education programs (H.J. Res. 57). Congress and Trump rescinded federal rules that “require states to have an accountability system based on multiple measures, including school quality or student success, to ensure that states and districts focus on improving outcomes and measuring student progress,” Spicer said. The repeal is the first step in “a reconceptualization of Washington’s role in education,” Ryland said.   “These regulations were prime examples of federal micromanagement,” she said. “They were highly prescriptive and highly complex, serving only to put more power in the hands of bureaucrats and to distract schools and teachers from the work of educating students.”

8. Drug-testing requirements (H.J. Res 42).
Spicer said the regulation mandates an “arbitrarily narrow definition of occupations and constrains a state’s ability to conduct a drug-testing program in its unemployment insurance system.” Four Republican governors—Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Greg Abbott of Texas, Gary Herbert of Utah, and Phil Bryant of Mississippi—wrote Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, to ask that states be allowed to implement their own policies. “We believe this rule should be replaced with a new rule that allows increased flexibility for states to implement … drug testing that best fits the needs of each state,” the governors said in the February letter.

9. Hunting regulations for wildlife preserves in Alaska (H.J. Res 69). These regulations restricted Alaska’s ability “to manage hunting of predators on national wildlife refuges in Alaska,” Spicer said. In a formal statement, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, called the rule “another example of the federal government’s determination these past eight years to destroy a state’s ability to manage their wildlife.”

10. Internet privacy rule (S.J.Res. 34). Published during the final months of Obama’s presidency, the rule sought to force “new privacy standards on internet service providers, allowing bureaucrats in Washington to pick winners and losers in the industry,” Spicer said.   Flake, who sponsored the resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act, said repeal helps keep consumers in charge of how they share their electronic information. “My resolution is the first step toward restoring the [Federal Trade Commission’s] light-touch, consumer-friendly approach,” Flake said. “It will not change or lessen existing consumer privacy protections. It empowers consumers to make informed choices on if and how their data can be shared.”

11. Rule for logging workplace injuries (H.J. 83). This rule from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration sought to squelch a more lenient one from the Labor Department. Spicer said the rule “disapproved” of a Labor regulation “extending the statute of limitation for claims against employers failing to maintain records of employee injuries.”  “This OSHA power grab was completely unlawful,” said Rep. Bradley Byrne, R-Ala., chairman of the House workforce protections subcommittee. “It would have done nothing to improve workplace safety while creating significant regulatory confusion for small businesses.”
Through extensive use of the Congressional Review Act, Collins said, Trump is establishing a “legacy” of deregulation.
“I think there’s really a legacy really to be had here,” the Republican congressman from Georgia said. Congress, with backing from Trump, is making good on promises and saying, “We’re not going to allow our jurisdiction and our constitutional authority to be overrun by the executive branch,” Collins said.   Past administrations from both parties, he said, have not been so devoted to deregulation.
“There was a definite disconnect between the previous administration, and even previous Republican administrations, on doing things on their own and not going through the proper legislative process,” Collins said.

12.  Rule preventing states from withholding funds from Planned Parenthood (H.J. Res 43). By undoing this rule, Congress and the president allow states to opt out of letting federal funds go to Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider. “This resolution that [Trump] signed today overturns a regulation that was put in place by the previous administration on their way out the door that would have taken away the right of states to set their own policies and priorities for Title X family-planning programs,” Spicer said Thursday. Undoing this regulation–which became effective days before Obama left the White House–allows states, if they choose, to withhold federal family planning funds or Title X monies from Planned Parenthood clinics and disperse them instead to other health providers.
Rep. Phil Roe, R-Tenn., hailed the change. “I am proud to support the sanctity of life and to continue to be a strong voice for the right to life,” Roe said in a statement. “States will now no longer be forced to use Title X money to fund Planned Parenthood or other entities that provide abortions.”
“Reversing this will mean that states can continue prioritizing taxpayer dollars for providers who offer real health care to women–not abortions,” Melanie Israel, a research associate at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal in an email.

13. Rule on retirement savings (H.J. Res 67). The rule allowed state governments “to trap individuals’ savings in accounts that individuals cannot access or control,” Rachel Greszler, a research analyst at The Heritage Foundation, said. Promulgated during Obama’s last full month in office, the rule allowed states to create public retirement funds. However, it alsoeliminated protections from those public plans that initially were covered under a law that set standards for private sector employee pension and health plans. Critics said the rule removed protections from employees and encouraged employers to drop employees from retirement plans–and put them on the government-run plan–because of high costs. “Any new employer that’s just starting up is never going to set up their own plan now because why would they do that when they have a cost-free, liability-free option,” Greszler said, adding: There are costs associated with [creating retirement accounts for employees] and there’s the legal liability with it. So they’re probably going to shift their employees into these plans that have no protections; they can’t make contribution into them it’s like the Obamacare for savings. Repealing the Obama-era rule safeguards the retirement funds of individuals who work in the private sector, Rep. Francis Mooney, R-Fla., said. “This last-minute regulatory loophole created by the previous administration would have led to harmful consequences for both workers and employers,” Rooney said in a formal statement. “Hardworking Americans could have been forced into government-run plans with fewer protections and less control over their hard-earned savings.” Sarah Sleem contributed to this report.

It has been corrected to reflect that Trump and Congress have used the Congressional Review Act to roll back regulations more than 11 times, and to clarify which regulations are eligible to be undone using the law. It also has been updated to include two additional joint resolutions of disapproval signed by Trump to undo regulations.
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