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| Thread: A ghost town to be |  This thread is pages long: 1 2 · NEXT» |
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Mytical
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Chaos seeking Harmony
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posted November 15, 2008 08:56 AM |
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A ghost town to be
When a town has a population of 12,000, and a place that was employing 7,000 of those leaves..you get a ghost town. Come Jan 30, the place I live in will be such a place. It will 'start' Jan 1, and the doors will close for the last time the 30th. Now if that was not bad enough, the two highest paying jobs (the one with 7,000 paid pretty good, but was 3rd in how much they paid per employee), also will close their doors. Mostly all that will be left is (for now) the place I work for, and: Fast food, groceries, and the like.
The closing of these areas are not supposed to affect the place I work, but I have my doubts about that. So, things are looking mighty grim around here.
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Message received.
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blizzardboy
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posted November 15, 2008 10:15 AM |
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That would be really cool though having all of those abandoned houses.
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"Folks, I don't trust children. They're here to replace us."
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JoonasTo
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What if Elvin was female?
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posted November 15, 2008 01:38 PM |
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Yeah, just start emptying all those houses of fridges, stoves and stuff.
You'll get rich. 
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william
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LummoxLewis
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posted November 15, 2008 01:41 PM |
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Quote:
That would be really cool though having all of those abandoned houses.
Yeah it might be, but you might get lonely after a while if there aren't many people to talk to.
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~Ticking away the moments that
make up a dull day, Fritter and
waste the hours in an off-hand
way~
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TheDeath
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with serious business
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posted November 15, 2008 01:44 PM |
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Ther' iz teh internetz noob 
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The above post is subject to SIRIOUSness.
No jokes were harmed during the making of this signature.
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Adrius
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Stand and fight!
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posted November 15, 2008 01:45 PM |
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Sorry for ya town Mytical.
But... you could organize a massive 4000 people paintball party or something Divide the town between 4 warbands and fight!
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Trogdor
Legendary Hero
Words in a custom title
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posted November 17, 2008 08:04 AM |
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That's capitalism for ya. Big cities are always trying to nab small town folk such as yourself. These 'reverse seachanges' are more common these days, though not always by means of employment opportunities. I for one would rather move to the city because I am a terrible hayfever sufferer and living in the country like I do now doesn't really help.
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"Through the power of the dollar you can communicate with the dead." - Artu
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TitaniumAlloy
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Professional
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posted November 17, 2008 09:23 AM |
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just don't live in small towns
problem solved
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Celfious
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From earth
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posted November 18, 2008 06:42 AM |
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Quote:
When a town has a population of 12,000, and a place that was employing 7,000 of those leaves.
What kind of company was it that was able to hire over 50% of a town anyways?
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mvassilev
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posted November 19, 2008 02:18 AM |
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Quote:
just don't live in small towns
QFT.
I live in a small town and it sucks. It really does.
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Eccentric Opinion
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Mytical
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Chaos seeking Harmony
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posted November 19, 2008 10:44 AM |
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Quote:
Quote:
When a town has a population of 12,000, and a place that was employing 7,000 of those leaves.
What kind of company was it that was able to hire over 50% of a town anyways?
A shipping company. People are already putting for sale signs up in their yard...moving to where the jobs are.
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terje_the_ma...
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posted November 19, 2008 01:36 PM |
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We get a lot of those here in Norway, too; small towns that have grown up around a cornerstone industry. It's mainly aluminium foundries here, though, and they're usually on the west coast, where access to massive amounts of cheap hydro power facilitates that kind of industry.
The problem, of course, is that these towns are kept "artificially" alive. (A ridiculous concept, I know, but thus is the lingua franca of the current economic paradigm.) The surrounding countryside usually only has a couple of farms, which could at best support villages with a few thousand inhabitants. But these industrial plants have been located there, too, usually through some government industrialising initiative in the '50s, and these have boosted the towns' populations by several thousand people.
The plants were usually founded because the government, which own most of the electricity infrastructure here in Norway, offered them longterm contracts that guaranteed them cheap energy. However, these contracts are about to expire sometime in the next five to ten years, and Norway's obligations to the European Economic Cooperation and EU law (which we have to adapt to, even though we're not members) probably won't allow us to renew them.
And there goes much of the employment in rural Norway, as well as most of Norway's scant remaining industry -- employment and industry not likely to come back due to Norway's high income levels and work condition standards. Furthermore, this is likely to trigger a domino effect: when industry jobs disappear, the number of tertiary sector jobs that supply the industrial labourers with various services will be drastically reduced, too. The public sector, public administration, one of Norway's biggest employers, will also need to be reduced, due to the lesser number of people requiring their services. In short, you've got a malicious circle going, which may only stop once it has reduced the affected town to a husk consisting of a few farms and the public and private functions required to service those.
And when the WTO in a few years forces us to give up on our agricultural subsidies, the remnants will go too, as Norway is a really capital and labour intensive country in which to farm the land, and we will end up like Sweden: A country where the interior is almost devoid of people, excepting those required to service tourists, and the people cling to coastal urban centres, while the countryside their forefathers spent millenia cultivating rapdily slides back into wilderness.
Sigh. 
I guess my point is that yeah, I can relate, and yeah, I sympathise with your plight. I know that a lot of good things come from profit maximisation, but man, it sure is the source of a lot of crap, too. It's almost so one could wish that other factors could be taken into consideration, too, from time to time...
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"Sometimes I think everyone's just pretending to be brave, and none of us really are. Maybe pretending to be brave is how you get brave, I don't know."
- Grenn, A Storm of Swords.
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Moonlith
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posted November 19, 2008 01:42 PM |
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Quote:
I know that a lot of good things come from profit maximisation
Name me one that I can't debunk.
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terje_the_ma...
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posted November 19, 2008 02:16 PM |
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I like the way you're thinking, but seeing as I'm a reluctant and pragmatic capitalist, I'll try to play Devil's advocate (although a not very good one, I fear, as I have difficulties finding unambiguous advantages to free market thinking).
One of the most important elements of profit maximisation is that of effective resource management. When your ultimate goal is to make as much money as possible, you don't want to waste anything (although perfect efficiency is an abstract, utopian condition, of course, hardly even fitting for the models and theories of economists -- and probably not at all if they're going to continue pretending to be empiricists scientists who have more in common with mathematicians and physicists than with other social researchers).
I was gonna expand on that, but I think it's enough.
Don't really need you to debunk it, though, as the individual elements of the capitalist or liberalist or whatever the hell one wants to call the current economic system, are obviously flawed in so many ways. The real debunking problem arises when one attempts to take on the whole system, as these ugly little parts have a way of functioning together that is quite extraordinary. It may not be much less ugly at times than the individual parts, but as a means of attaining relative efficiency of production and distribution, it is unfortunately (or fortunately, I guess, depending on how one chooses to perceive it) far superior to the competing systems, if any viable alternative systems even exist today.
Obviously, as a rather devout social democrat, I believe that a high degree of government involvement and regulation can take much of the sting from the ugly little mechanism called capitalism. Unfortunately, because human honour only goes so far before human vice takes over, this social democratic ideal seems to require a very high degree of transparency in government, in order to control abuses. Such transparency, I'm afraid, seems hard to establish in larger states, as well in states where more organic forms of social integration has not yet been eroded by the more mechanical forces of modernisation, and various forms of nepotism thus holds sway. Therefore, in states such as these, it seems to me that "capitalism" is the best form of economic organisation for the time being.
That is, until the rest of the world has reached (North Western) European social standards, and the US states have all seceeded.
But I believe that I have been rambling, and that I strayed into the scary territory of ethnocentrism for a minute or two there.  Sincere apologies for that.
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"Sometimes I think everyone's just pretending to be brave, and none of us really are. Maybe pretending to be brave is how you get brave, I don't know."
- Grenn, A Storm of Swords.
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doomnezeu
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Miaumiaumiau
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posted November 19, 2008 02:34 PM |
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Quote:
When a town has a population of 12,000, and a place that was employing 7,000 of those leaves..you get a ghost town. Come Jan 30, the place I live in will be such a place. It will 'start' Jan 1, and the doors will close for the last time the 30th. Now if that was not bad enough, the two highest paying jobs (the one with 7,000 paid pretty good, but was 3rd in how much they paid per employee), also will close their doors. Mostly all that will be left is (for now) the place I work for, and: Fast food, groceries, and the like.
The closing of these areas are not supposed to affect the place I work, but I have my doubts about that. So, things are looking mighty grim around here.
A pretty similar situation is about to happen in the town I was born it. It is in Northern Moldavia, in a very very poor zone of Romania, and has a population of 8 or so k citizens. Besides agricultural labor, which is quite native there, most of the townsfolk are (soon to be "were") working in a tailoring factory, led by some Italian dude.
For outsiders to understand how such factories work in Romania, here is a small scoop. Certain areas of the country, due to their poor state as it is now, are declared "gold mines for investors". As in no special fees, certain discounts, facilities, and such. And labor is extremely cheap. So investors abound. But recently, costs went up, facilities were disabled, and, worse, cheaper labor appeared (you've guessed it, Chinese people that actually WORK, unlike Romanians, who would skip work whenever possible), and the said Italian decided to pack his stuff and be off to a better place, in a "better" country, where he can start over with same discounts and facilities I have mentioned before.
So my hometown, small as it was, will remain with most of the working population on the streets. Future, as it is: People who managed to gather something will start their own small business, and youngsters will move on to bigger towns. It will not be a ghost city, but an... elderly city.
Well, at least it still has about 230 pubs, which, for a population of 8k people, is quite a lot. 
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terje_the_ma...
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Disciple of Herodotus
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posted November 19, 2008 02:42 PM |
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A classic Race to the Bottom, doom. One of the less appealing aspects of profit maximisation, at least to those who get the snowty end of the stick -- in your case the Romanian textile factory workers.
To the extent that any end is less snowty than the other; one could perhaps envision a future where the poor Chinese workers manage to raise enough noise to earn some labour rights and better conditions, and thus salvaging some benefits from this mess. But the chance of that happening in a police state frightened half to death by any threat to its productivity and ability to attract investors doesn't seem too good...
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"Sometimes I think everyone's just pretending to be brave, and none of us really are. Maybe pretending to be brave is how you get brave, I don't know."
- Grenn, A Storm of Swords.
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mvassilev
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posted November 19, 2008 02:58 PM |
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Companies want to hire people who work. Imagine that. Capitalism so so horrible.
The thing is, many Western countries are stuck in an industrial mindset when they need to move past it because it no longer works in this day and age. The Western world needs to move past calling itself an industrial economy and start actively moving into a post-industrial knowledge-based economy, where its primary export is technological innovation. Because there's no way that the Western world can compete with China. Nor should it try to.
And while a plant closing makes big news because a lot of people lose their jobs, the other side of the story is much less often reported on because it's smaller - two or three people getting hired here and there in different places - where productivity can be maximized.
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Azagal
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posted November 19, 2008 03:01 PM |
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Quote:
Because there's no way that the Western world can compete with China. Nor should it try to.
DAH Comrade Mvasslitov!!
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baklava
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Mostly harmless
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posted November 24, 2008 10:06 AM |
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Quote:
And while a plant closing makes big news because a lot of people lose their jobs, the other side of the story is much less often reported on because it's smaller - two or three people getting hired here and there in different places
"The death of one is a tragedy, the death of a million is just a statistic"?
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"Let me tell you what the blues
is. When you ain't got no
money,
you got the blues."
Howlin Wolf
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JollyJoker
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posted November 24, 2008 10:18 AM |
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Quote:
The Western world needs to move past calling itself an industrial economy and start actively moving into a post-industrial knowledge-based economy, where its primary export is technological innovation.
That's right.
However, in that case more money has to flow into
Research (facilities)
Schools
Teachers
Universities
Education
Actually ALOT more money.
Not to mention the fact that the consumption aspect of our "highly developed" civilization is counter production since the incentives are missing. Consumption strikes back, you might say, making too many people of the younger generations lazy and self-satisfied.
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