“In the clip, Bloomberg can be heard saying: “I could teach anybody — even people in this room, no offense intended — to be a farmer. It’s a [process]: you dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn.”
No offense intended to IT guys because obviously there is high level stuff. But broad brush statement like bloomberg? I’d have wagered the opposite. Successful farming isn’t for dummies or wussies.
A friend is a veterinarian........she said every Harvard Business major should try to keep a dairy farm working well for a week........THAT would be an education.
Success Farming ain’t easy.
Bloomberg is a poster child for the Dunn Kruger effect. No talent ass clown.
Bloomberg obviously has not done a lot of farming or he would realize how stupid that comment was. I bet he could not change a flat tire on his limousine if his life depended on it. Guys like that should be ignored.
Welp, he has ticked the farmers off. And the black people. And the gun owners. Even if he screws Bernie out of the nomination Trump will wipe the floor with Mini Mike. He is toast.
OK, the jackasses are in bad sad shape, that short stack is the best they have. Honestly, did anyone in NY actually like the guy? He served how many terms there?
If that arrogant little rat faced man bitch gets the Dem nomination I'm gonna get a F*CK Bloomberg bumper sticker for the ol F350.
When you find one let me know cuz I want one too.
He's gonna BUY the nod.
Fixt
Politics is easy and requires little gray-matter. You just spend billion$, bribe the right party officials, drop some money into hands, and fertilize with BS.
This is for all you Goyim here, you stupid Gentiles.
Did anybody else notice that the snotty little troll didn't say HE could do it- - - - -"I can TEACH anybody- - - - - -" Too lazy and trifling to get his damyankee hands in the dirt! Jerry
Ever noticed how much the terms "politician" and "prostitution" sound like each other? Actually, I have a little more respect for a streetwalking hooker- - - - -she's honest enough to admit she's for sale to the highest bidder! Midget Mike can buy all the politicians he wants and they'll all hide behind their self-righteous lies. Jerry
First off, let me say that Bloomers is dead wrong about farmers. I've been an IT Professional since 1982. He doesn't know what he's talking about. He had kernel of a good idea, but he said it all wrong. The way he said it, tells me he doesn't grasp the subtleties of the situation.
RE Farming: I'm not a farmer. Nor will I probably ever be. When I retire, I'll live on a farm, but never hope to turn a profit on it. I know better than to think I can. The farm is there to keep me active. I've tried what Bloomberg suggests, and it just doesn't work. Just getting a foodplot to work takes some doing. I'm better at it now, after owning a farm for 20 years, but that's 2 stinking decades of experience!
RE IT: I've worked many sides of the IT business. I spent the first 20 years programming and the last 20 in Infrastructure. Bloomberg is right in saying IT is a different set of problems and not everyone is cut out for it, but he's an ignorant ass to class one over the other in complexity or subtlety. I will freely admit, I have skills in areas that a farmer wouldn't know the names for. However, if I were to sit down with a farmer and line out what they were, he'd know them in an instant.
For instance, a big part of my last 20 years has been life-cycle management. You're trying to put equipment out there that does the best job for the buck, but how long do you keep it in service? How many times do you upgrade a piece of equipment before it is no longer profitable? How long do you keep a PC on a desk before the user can't do her job?
As an IT guy, I have to be able to provide answers to those questions. The farmer does too, but the questions are framed differently. How long do I keep my cattle in a pasture? When do I move them to the feed lot? Do I buy bottle-fed calves or breed my own? When do I slaughter my chickens? When do I harvest my crop? I see this playing out in my own back yard with the guy who does my hay. He's trying to maximize the yield of the hay, but there are a bazillion factors that enter into when they come and mow and when they rake and bail. I've watched him go leisurely over 2 weeks, and I've seen him get it all done in 2 days. I've seen him bring in a team and work all night. Sometimes he shows up in August. Sometimes it's October. I'm glad I don't have his problems.
Bottom line: Bloomberg is an arrogant ignorant ass.
Let him grow his own food, then he will see how easy it is!
I grew up on a farm, married a girl who grew up on a farm, still live on a farm, and have farmed myself in form or another for the past 50 years. It is absolutely amazing how stupid these kind of people are who have no idea what all is involved in the production of food. You're right, people like Little Mikey should have to grow their own. I'd love to see that little sawed off sonofabeech out there in the field digging holes and putting a seed in............that'd be a hoot.
I come from many generations of farmers in America since we lost our sinecure in England during the upheavals following Henry VIII. I still raise cattle and timber and associate with lots of farmers. If Bloomberg is saying farming isn't rocket science, he is right. Most of the full time farmers I know are wards of the government through subsidy programs. That said, I would vote for a monkey before I would vote Bloomberg.
I'm not a farmer or an IT guy. Not down playing IT guys, but most of the ones I've met are helpless once they get away from a computer. Most wouldn't make it 5 minutes on a farm along with Bloomberg.
“In the clip, Bloomberg can be heard saying: “I could teach anybody — even people in this room, no offense intended — to be a farmer. It’s a [process]: you dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn.”
That POS, put out in the country to fend for himself, would starve.
My maternal grandfather was a master truck farmer, really knew his stuff. He had two girls in college during the depression, drove a new truck. No depression for him. He raised produce and sold it direct. When he got older and had a bad back, he grew bell peppers instead of tomatoes. They were lighter to handle; a bushel of peppers is much lighter than a bushel of tomatoes.
Grandpa was self educated, read a lot, studied his craft. He had a hot bed to grow his own plants from seed, never bought plants.
My Dad was an LSU ag grad, liked to pick at Grandpa. Enjoying enough of Dad's. B.S., he told him one day. You put your PhD professors out here trying to do what I do and they'd probably starve. Dad fuzzed up a bit at that, but IMO, Grandpa was probably right.
Doomberg is an arrogant POS, not nearly as smart as he thinks he is. He made a lot of his fortune doing IT stuff with the Chicoms. We'll see how that plays out. Farmers aren't dumb.
I work both sides - farmer to technology. It's very rare to encounter a farmer that doesn't pull his weight. Yep, they simply put a seed in the ground, but they also have to make a living at it. For the most part crappy farmers, and ranchers, have left the game a long time ago.
The technology business is LOADED with do-nothing worthless freeloaders. If a guy wants a job where he can pull in a lot of money and hide, the technology sector is second only to government employment.
Luckily for us it will be that pompous arrogance that keeps him out of the White House. Middle America isn’t voting for it.
The Emperor truly has no clothes...Watching a commie/socialist do battle with an oligarch/billionaire is gotta be entertaining.Dems are in a heap of hurt. Don't ya just love it...DF
The Democrats better lay in a good supply of cyanide pills. If you thought Hillary's victory party was amusing, just wait.
And thank you for understanding that I did not intend to insult the people who work in IT. Just convey that it is a different skill set.
I wonder if this is the 2020 version of "Deplorables"?
I think someone should get a spoof going of the old El Paso salsa ads going. "New York City!?"
Bloomberg is exemplifying how disconnected he is mentally from the areas that are most representatives of the base upon which this country was founded....
as always, it's more complicated than the bumper sticker version
Originally Posted by bloomberg
We just — more and more, if you think about it, the agrarian society lasted 3,000 years, and we could teach processes. I could teach anybody — even people in this room, no offense intended — to be a farmer. It’s a [process]. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn. You could learn that. Then you have 300 years of the industrial society. You put the piece of metal on the lathe, you turn the crank in the direction of the arrow and you can have a job. And we created a lot of jobs. [At] one point, 98% of the world worked in agriculture, today it’s 2%, in the United States.
Now comes the information economy. And the information economy is fundamentally different because it’s built around replacing people with technology, and the skill sets that you have to learn are how to think and analyze. And that is a whole degree level different. You have to have a different skill set, you have to have a lot more gray matter. It’s not clear that teachers can teach or the students can learn. So the challenge for society is to find jobs for these people — who we can take care of giving them a roof over their head and a meal in their stomach, and a cellphone and a car and that sort of thing. But the thing that’s the most important, that will stop them from setting up the guillotines some day, is the dignity of a job. And nobody’s yet come up with a simple solution, in this day and age, to how we create jobs, particularly for people already out of school.
I can tell you how to fix the school system so that the kids come out with better skills, more ability to appreciate life and to work collaboratively and collectively and read the instruction manual and follow orders. But it’s very hard to figure out where the jobs they’re going to get will come from, and for those that are already out in the work force, to get them back into the system and teach them new skill sets, is almost impossible. It’s very very hard to do and nobody’s really shown they could it. There’s individual cases where you can retrain them, I don’t want to overstate it. But the coal miner I talked about in West Virginia is not going to move, and his family, out to California where the solar jobs are, and even if he got there he’s not going to get those jobs. Nobody’s going to hire an older person. It’s fascinating to me — older people are always willing to hire younger people; younger people are not willing to hire older people. I think it’s just they’re afraid of older people that may have skill sets they don’t have, and you know, they make fun of them, they say they’re not able to change and think — none of those things are true, there are plenty of older people who are really smart and really can do new things if you gave them the opportunity. But there’s a discrimination from young managers to hire older people. It’s reasonably well documented I think, and certainly observable.
So your basic premise is, it’s not that bad, it’s better than it was before, but it’s a big problem and the problem is not the redistribution of wealth, it is the job where you’re going every day. And you say ‘What’s business’s responsibility?’ It’s not business’s job. Business’s job is to take the investors’ money and to maximize the money by creating products that the public wants and are willing to pay for. And you can’t say to them they should go and create jobs deliberately. You can have a tax policy that encourages that, and that’s one of the things you should do, and then use the collective wisdom of all of the heads of companies, to create small pockets, and it adds up to a lot of jobs.
That’s what I would do right away. Your taxes are lower the more people you hire, and higher the fewer people you hire. And let capitalism work, because government’s not going to be able to solve the problem directly. But short of that, who’s going to create the jobs? Well if it’s not industry, there’s only one group left to do it. And so the next time you want more efficient government, think twice. I’m not so sure you do want more efficient government. Back in the ’30s, we created an inefficient government. We put people to work building infrastructure we needed. They weren’t maybe the — you could have had other people do it more efficiently but we wanted to create jobs and we did, and it took us — World War II was really what took us out of the Depression, but it got us through the Depression. And maybe that is the answer, that we’re going to say ‘government’s got to create no-show jobs,’ or jobs that you have to show but that aren’t needed. We can pass a law that says you’ve got to move all the paper from the left to the right side of the building every day, and back again. Okay. And then the government are going to hire people to do it. But it’s better than people being out on the streets, desperate for a job, not being able to find it, [destabilizing] society.”
Analysis Despite the significant volume of words, Bloomberg’s basic argument can reasonably be summarized as follows: Income inequality is not as chronic as it was in the past, but is still a significant problem. The primary cause for concern is educational inequality, and in particular the extent to which older people who previously worked in agriculture and in relatively low-skilled manual work can transition to participating in the information economy.
As an illustration of his broader point, Bloomberg presented farming as a relatively straightforward endeavor which “anybody” could easily learn, and argued that, by contrast with farming and low-skilled manual labor (“you put the piece of metal on the lathe, you turn the crank in the direction of the arrow”), taking part in the information economy required greater intelligence (“a lot more gray matter”) and different skill sets (“how to think and analyze”).
Knowing the broader context in which Bloomberg uttered those remarks certainly enhances one’s understanding and appreciation of them, but it does not alter their meaning or significance — Bloomberg was not speaking ironically, for example, or taking on the persona of someone else, when he made the comments in question. As such, those who quoted him did so both accurately and fairly, and did not misrepresent the meaning of his words.
Snopes invited Bloomberg’s presidential campaign to provide any background, context or additional information which might alter a viewer’s understanding of his remarks, and we also asked whether Bloomberg still stood by his comments and the manner in which he expressed his arguments during the Oxford speech.
In a statement, a spokesperson said: “Mike wasn’t talking about today’s farmers at all,” and highlighted the fact that Bloomberg mentioned “3,000 years” of the “agrarian society.” However, this claim does not comport with the fact that Bloomberg was clearly speaking in the present tense about farming and low-skilled industrial labor, and the present-day dilemma of how to provide a new skill set to “those that are already out in the work force.”
I would say that farmers and machinists are probably in the information age now too, and they probably produce a lot more per person than the same jobs did 10, 20, 50 or 100 years ago.
which gets to his point, what the hell is everyone else going to do for a job?
With no women (he apparently pays pissed off women to sign non disclosures) votes, flyover states to carry, or stop and frisk supporters he’ll just be winning an azzeating contest. What a fuzz nut. I heard his NYC carry permit is for a 38 Zupah.
Not claiming in anyway to be a farmer here. But put Bloomy in $500K tractor and I bet he'd not be able to start it up and get it successfully out of the shed. Hooking up to another implement and plowing a straight furrow would be well out of question.
One could probably run a sustenance operation with Bloomy's skill set, but if one wants to work the markets, provide for a family, educate his kids, and have yields amounting to mega-tons he'll probably be quite savvy.
I live in a section of the country where one with will and a strong back can get by. There's typically a working wife somewhere in the background though doing a job with enough benefits to educate and care for the kids.
as always, it's more complicated than the bumper sticker version
Originally Posted by bloomberg
We just — more and more, if you think about it, the agrarian society lasted 3,000 years, and we could teach processes. I could teach anybody — even people in this room, no offense intended — to be a farmer. It’s a [process]. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn. You could learn that. Then you have 300 years of the industrial society. You put the piece of metal on the lathe, you turn the crank in the direction of the arrow and you can have a job. And we created a lot of jobs. [At] one point, 98% of the world worked in agriculture, today it’s 2%, in the United States.
Now comes the information economy. And the information economy is fundamentally different because it’s built around replacing people with technology, and the skill sets that you have to learn are how to think and analyze. And that is a whole degree level different. You have to have a different skill set, you have to have a lot more gray matter. It’s not clear that teachers can teach or the students can learn. So the challenge for society is to find jobs for these people — who we can take care of giving them a roof over their head and a meal in their stomach, and a cellphone and a car and that sort of thing. But the thing that’s the most important, that will stop them from setting up the guillotines some day, is the dignity of a job. And nobody’s yet come up with a simple solution, in this day and age, to how we create jobs, particularly for people already out of school.
I can tell you how to fix the school system so that the kids come out with better skills, more ability to appreciate life and to work collaboratively and collectively and read the instruction manual and follow orders. But it’s very hard to figure out where the jobs they’re going to get will come from, and for those that are already out in the work force, to get them back into the system and teach them new skill sets, is almost impossible. It’s very very hard to do and nobody’s really shown they could it. There’s individual cases where you can retrain them, I don’t want to overstate it. But the coal miner I talked about in West Virginia is not going to move, and his family, out to California where the solar jobs are, and even if he got there he’s not going to get those jobs. Nobody’s going to hire an older person. It’s fascinating to me — older people are always willing to hire younger people; younger people are not willing to hire older people. I think it’s just they’re afraid of older people that may have skill sets they don’t have, and you know, they make fun of them, they say they’re not able to change and think — none of those things are true, there are plenty of older people who are really smart and really can do new things if you gave them the opportunity. But there’s a discrimination from young managers to hire older people. It’s reasonably well documented I think, and certainly observable.
So your basic premise is, it’s not that bad, it’s better than it was before, but it’s a big problem and the problem is not the redistribution of wealth, it is the job where you’re going every day. And you say ‘What’s business’s responsibility?’ It’s not business’s job. Business’s job is to take the investors’ money and to maximize the money by creating products that the public wants and are willing to pay for. And you can’t say to them they should go and create jobs deliberately. You can have a tax policy that encourages that, and that’s one of the things you should do, and then use the collective wisdom of all of the heads of companies, to create small pockets, and it adds up to a lot of jobs.
That’s what I would do right away. Your taxes are lower the more people you hire, and higher the fewer people you hire. And let capitalism work, because government’s not going to be able to solve the problem directly. But short of that, who’s going to create the jobs? Well if it’s not industry, there’s only one group left to do it. And so the next time you want more efficient government, think twice. I’m not so sure you do want more efficient government. Back in the ’30s, we created an inefficient government. We put people to work building infrastructure we needed. They weren’t maybe the — you could have had other people do it more efficiently but we wanted to create jobs and we did, and it took us — World War II was really what took us out of the Depression, but it got us through the Depression. And maybe that is the answer, that we’re going to say ‘government’s got to create no-show jobs,’ or jobs that you have to show but that aren’t needed. We can pass a law that says you’ve got to move all the paper from the left to the right side of the building every day, and back again. Okay. And then the government are going to hire people to do it. But it’s better than people being out on the streets, desperate for a job, not being able to find it, [destabilizing] society.”
Analysis Despite the significant volume of words, Bloomberg’s basic argument can reasonably be summarized as follows: Income inequality is not as chronic as it was in the past, but is still a significant problem. The primary cause for concern is educational inequality, and in particular the extent to which older people who previously worked in agriculture and in relatively low-skilled manual work can transition to participating in the information economy.
As an illustration of his broader point, Bloomberg presented farming as a relatively straightforward endeavor which “anybody” could easily learn, and argued that, by contrast with farming and low-skilled manual labor (“you put the piece of metal on the lathe, you turn the crank in the direction of the arrow”), taking part in the information economy required greater intelligence (“a lot more gray matter”) and different skill sets (“how to think and analyze”).
Knowing the broader context in which Bloomberg uttered those remarks certainly enhances one’s understanding and appreciation of them, but it does not alter their meaning or significance — Bloomberg was not speaking ironically, for example, or taking on the persona of someone else, when he made the comments in question. As such, those who quoted him did so both accurately and fairly, and did not misrepresent the meaning of his words.
Snopes invited Bloomberg’s presidential campaign to provide any background, context or additional information which might alter a viewer’s understanding of his remarks, and we also asked whether Bloomberg still stood by his comments and the manner in which he expressed his arguments during the Oxford speech.
In a statement, a spokesperson said: “Mike wasn’t talking about today’s farmers at all,” and highlighted the fact that Bloomberg mentioned “3,000 years” of the “agrarian society.” However, this claim does not comport with the fact that Bloomberg was clearly speaking in the present tense about farming and low-skilled industrial labor, and the present-day dilemma of how to provide a new skill set to “those that are already out in the work force.”
I would say that farmers and machinists are probably in the information age now too, and they probably produce a lot more per person than the same jobs did 10, 20, 50 or 100 years ago.
which gets to his point, what the hell is everyone else going to do for a job?
Hey Sycamore,
Hope all is well there and you folks get some water (snow) to prepare for summer. We're certainly not getting it here. Farmers are not going to be happy I think.
Bloomy has something right for sure
Quote
I think it’s just they’re afraid of older people that may have skill sets they don’t have, and you know, they make fun of them, they say they’re not able to change and think — none of those things are true, there are plenty of older people who are really smart and really can do new things if you gave them the opportunity. But there’s a discrimination from young managers to hire older people. It’s reasonably well documented I think, and certainly observable.
Little bro has a new "manager" of his maintenance dept at the Univ. Had an issue with him one day recently. Asked the guy how old he was......was told 35 years. Bro told him I've been doing this stuff for over 35 years, anything you think you know about I've actually done at least twice. Little bro got called up to the HR dept, accused of using a bullying tone!
You're correct in that it's more complicated than the bumper sticker version. But this is politics and he just pissed off a bunch of farmers, machinists etc because a way different view of what they do for a living. Kinda like my bro's manager.
Bloomy might know how to run a media conglomerate or whatever the heck he does, but he's not good at running for office if he's trying to take votes away from The Donald's base. He may have just mobilized that base a bit more.
been dry for two weeks, supposed to snow Saturday.
part of Bloombergs point...there's not a bunch of farmers anymore or a bunch of machinists....not as many jobs for high school graduates...plenty of college graduates looking for work. not a bunch of auto workers or coal miners or copper miners.
a "farmer" today...look what they've got tied up in land and rolling stock.....hard to call that a small businessman.
what's an entry level farm go for? half a million for land and half a million for tractors and attachments? If I had a million to start out with, I'd buy four $250,000 houses, live in one and rent 3 out.
Bloomberg suffers from one of the worst cases of “New York, NY” provincialism I’ve ever seen. You know the type, they think because they know what country makes the best pastrami they think they know everything about everything. And because they are convinced they already are worldly, suave, debonair, and good looking, they stopped learning anything a long, long time ago.
All you have to understand why Mini Mike is running, and going down worse than Evil Knievel, is to put together a little montage of all the flubbed cop shoots in NYC, followed by the Texas Church hero. It’s the perfect illustration of how people create the worlds they live in. We like ours better.
Bloomberg suffers from one of the worst cases of “New York, NY” provincialism I’ve ever seen. You know the type, they think because they know what country makes the best pastrami they think they know everything about everything. And because they are convinced they already are worldly, suave, debonair, and good looking, they stopped learning anything a long, long time ago.
All you have to understand why Mini Mike is running, and going down worse than Evil Knievel, is to put together a little montage of all the flubbed cop shoots in NYC, followed by the Texas Church hero. It’s the perfect illustration of how people create the worlds they live in. We like ours better.
Mini Mike is a legend in his own mind, emperor in his own little kingdom.
When he gets out of his protective bubble, it starts falling apart for him.
![[Linked Image from i.imgur.com]](https://i.imgur.com/KsvuE6R.jpg)
