But what about the parking meter industry? Doesn’t New York care about those jobs?
The city will remove its last decommissioned single-space parking meter in Manhattan on Monday, transportation officials said, the start of a yearlong process that will eventually eliminate all the steel-and-sludge-hued meters in the city.
They’ll be replaced by “the Meter of Tomorrow,” or, as President Obama might call them, the ATMs of street parking. Computer-controlled solar-powered monstrosities whose only improvement seems to be giving bicyclists fewer places to lock up their bikes.
Naturally, this will mean jobs lost:
But at the Transportation Department’s repair shop in Maspeth, Queens, where meter surgery is still performed with butter knives and nail files, mechanics are bracing for an era’s end. Stephen Kerney, the shop supervisor, wondered about his team’s fate as he surveyed shelves and tables filled with hundreds of discarded meter innards.
“At one time,” he said, “we were the largest shop in the world.”
Jobs sacrificed on the altar of progress! Or of Green Technology! Or something.
Sure, this will also mean jobs found – somebody has to build and maintain these newfangled thigamajiggers, after all. But that’ll be little solace to the old-tech workers losing their jobs to this new tech. Maybe the new meters will mean less time and hassle and expense for NYC drivers, but at what cost!
Won’t President Obama speak out against this?
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“Some of the meter shop mechanics will be retrained or reassigned, city officials said.”
Who really cares? I mean, really. Do you really care? Really?
Sure I do, in a “wow, that’s too bad” sort of way. But I’m just making a point: jobs are always being lost to new technologies, new ways of doing things, or changes in what people want. Even in a good economy that’s the case. Jobs are also being created by those forces. But those job losses are always demagogued as somebody being greedy or some such thing. Both sides do it, although I’d guess Democrats are more likely to than Republicans. President Obama’s ATM statement was just an obvious example.
Fair enough. Though, Obama does point to a truth. We need to figure out where jobs in the tech sector are going to be, and we need to accelerate to secure those jobs in our market, not abroad. I use INGDirect bank because they don’t charge me fees for an overdraft, etc. This is because they use the internet as opposed to hiring people to manage physical banks. We don’t need physical banks anymore. ING has the right idea. It’s just good business. (This isn’t completely relevant but) Netflix is “cutting off the gangrenous limb that is their current DVD mail market, because they know it’s going to suffocate their future profits in the streaming video market, despite losing what, 6 billion in profits this last quarter? That foresight will probably save their business in the end. It’s a sad truth that these folks in Queens will lose their jobs, and I certainly hope they find new jobs. It’s going to be a continuing trend as we bring old and outdated things into the future.