Here comes Flippy

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Have you talked to relatives after they retired?

Everyone I talked to had these big plans. Golfing every day. Fishing & hunting every day. Travel. That lasted about a year or two.

My dad took up crochet. He had several boxes of stuff he made. He gave away shawls, tablecloths, throws for the sofa to friends. He had always been very active. Crochet kept his hands busy and he enjoyed it.

I’m getting close to retirement. Life got very quiet at home after our kids left. I occupy my time studying and practicing music. I can burn through several hours a day that way.

22

So they are doing things they want to do rather than what they are forced to do? Sounds awesome! I wish I could do that everyday!

So you’ll get to do what you want when you feel like it instead of being forced to do something when you don’t feel like it?

23

Can you imagine a booming economy with a structural unemployment rate of 15, 20, 25%? I can. I just can’t imagine it lasting for long. Income inequality that will make today’s America look downright egalitarian? Don’t worry. One thing we know about income inequality is that it doesn’t last. Confiscatory taxation, war, or revolution are the historical methods of correcting such imbalance. Which do you prefer? Or the alternative is a police state that would make Stalin envious.

24

So you’ve got a robot that flips burgers.

When you’ve got robots that can assemble and wrap sandwiches, deal with special orders and customer questions, stock the kitchen, clean the other robots, clean the front of house and back of house, chase off loiterers, sweep the parking lot, sanitize the bathrooms, and repair themselves when they break, I’ll be impressed.

25

I live in California and never heard of CaliBurger, so I went looking them up, they only have nine stores in the US, so the idea that they’re going to use robots because American employees want $15 an hour is bullshit. I doubt if the employees in their locations in United Arab Emirates, which is where the largest number of their stores is located, are asking for $15.
https://caliburger.com/locations

26

A robot that flips burgers is a really stupid idea. What you want is a grilling system where you load frozen patties into a hopper, and when you need one it plops out a grilled burger. No “flipping”. That’s like imagining a robot standing there with a scrub brush and an apron doing the dishes.

As for the notion that automation is going to ruin low wage jobs, guess what? Lawyers and bankers and managers are getting hammered by automation as well. It’s not just low skill jobs. Often it is precisely high skill jobs that get replaced by automation. Look at all the skilled workers put out of work by mechanical looms.

We don’t even recognize automation sometimes, because it just looks like a tool that enables one guy to do the same work but faster and easier. Is it automation when one guy with a nailgun can drive three times as many nails as a guy with a hammer? It is if you can fire the other two guys.

27

Eh. Nobody’s panicking or anything. It’s just one of Okrahoma’s “Make snide remarks about a living wage” threads. Good to know you’re still punching down, man.

28

And I thought this thread was going to be about another bloody hurricane…

29

I don’t know what kind of cabbage that guy makes, for all I know he’s punching up! :eek:

30

Your company can take on more work and make more money.

31

Do you know that Burger King was using a “robot” to cook their burgers long before minimum wage hit even $7. Oh, my!

32

I do recall a conveyor belt carrying “hamburgers” through flames when I ate there during college.

33

Or fire two guys and have more money without having to scale up the rest of the non-nailing-related operation to accommodate taking on more work.

34

Just saying, if I were a loiterer, this’d scare me off.

35

Or, fire two guys and lower your prices, making your competition have to do the same.

36

Automation is very bad for the economy. People need to work. Why I won’t even buy a car that isn’t 100% hand made by humans.

37

Work isn’t exactly a zero-sum game (lower prices will draw some more people into a market), but if my company takes on more work, some other company is probably going to lose it.

38

I know. This document: Manpower Planning for Technological Change; Case Studies of Telephone Operators, Issue 1574 from 1968 says that there were 200,000 telephone operators in the United States. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that there are currently 8,860, and we’re making about ten times the calls.

39

Actually, that one I’m well aware of. My mother was a directory assistance operator in Connecticut for a couple of decades. At the time, Connecticut had multiple offices with hundreds of directory assistance operators in each. Now, I believe a small group in San Antonio provides directory assistance for the entire country, since everyone can look up phone numbers themselves using computers and smartphones.

40

True, but it wasn’t exactly a smooth ride either. “Don’t worry, Mr. Farmer. Someday you and your family can cram into tenements and your children can scramble to pull loose threads out of large textile machines until they lose a finger and then you have labor riots to look forward to… Automation!”

I mean, yeah yeah buggy whips and all but the buggy whip people still had to eat and pay rent while waiting for the Next Great Thing to happen.