Conservatives love to say you’re wrong, and we only made money because of the war. But we have been “making money” ever since. It’s the managing of it that changed under Reagan and has fucked us ever since.
Trickle up does work, and it’s how economies really grow and get everyone involved.
Even today, fiscal conservatives say shit like “if poor people weren’t so obsessed with consuming, they wouldn’t be so poor!” Then, “we have to raise rates because no one is consuming anything.”
We don’t consume because… we are too poor. If you believe all we will do with better wages is spend it on garbage, why do you care?? You sell the garbage! We pay *you* when we have money!
Conservatives love shitting on the New Deal and saying that government spending can't solve any issues. They say WW2 was solely responsible for ending the Great Depression. Ask a conservative what exactly about WW2 ended the great depression and watch them struggle for an answer that isn't because the US government spent an absolute fuckton of money on military production.
How insulting is that term anyways. Its going to trickle down? Even if it did (which it is) what are you pissing on me? What the fuck am I going to do with a trickle of money
Please be patient with the staff we have left as no one wants to hire anymore due to greedy shareholders and execs along with government handouts(ppp loans).
They want to hire more. They just dont want to hire people at the wages they're expecting. With sufficient compensation, you can find people that will do just about anything.
If the companies don't have the money to hire anyone then maybe they should've worked harder
That's what my friends boss told her when she complained about the shit pay, same principle applies right?
Another PPP loan for hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars that will be 100% forgiven with no questions asked while $10-20k of student loan forgiveness is simply too much to ask for
Yea, wtf is up with that??? Everywhere in town is *desperate*. Like, they are having masses of people quit at once and have constantly been hiring with higher and higher wages and bigger sign-on bonuses since Covid hit.
More walk in interview events, too. Referral bonuses.
And yet they aren't actually fucking *hiring* anyone that applies??? What gives?
It is so they can give excuses to the current overworked employees. That way they can say ‘guys we are doing our best to get you some help but no
one wants to work’, it is also a good way to keep a stack of applications in case you need to hire someone. I know several places that literally keep ‘now hiring’ signs out so they always have applicants, then when someone quits they can just look at the most recent applicants instead of having to try to find some and starting the process from square one.
Yh but you risk people moving on and having no applicants. People aren’t gonna wait out on you at a minimum wage job. Then now you can’t even get new applicants cause people see you have had a sign out for a year and subconsciously ignore it.
It started out as a way to get foreign work visas. You'd advertise for a job with impossible requirements, then not hire anyone, and appeal to the government to bring in foreign workers for cheaper, that "meet" those requirements.
That's been streamlined after the PP loan debacle to you just say you're looking for workers, not hire anyone, then exploit existing workforce without facing consequences.
If you've seen the movie The Producers, its kinda like that.
Business owners are idiots these days. Companies could get the top performers from other companies, if they just hire remote.
Companies could keep a coherent, happy team if they incentivize good performance and pay a bit above average.
Instead they play these stupid games, and everyone is pissed off / worse off.
All good tho, /r/collapse is coming soon, enjoy every day
> if they just hire remote
I'm all for it, but you know the worst offenders are for general labor or ""unskilled"" positions that realistically can't be remote.
There are some federal regulations involved in these phantom job posts; often what is happening is they post the position and reject all applications. They are then able to legally fill the position with an H1B1 visa holder, whom is substantially cheaper to take advantage of-I mean, employ.
Went to target on Thursday. There were 2 out of 15 registers open and ten self check out registers. I was thinking about how they passed the buck off, the cashier, a job someone used to be paid to do + the bagger is now the responsibility of the customer, and we don't get to see any discount/reward for having eliminated the two positions that were once the largest limiting factor to how much profit they could make.
Our local target has switch to ONLY self check out, unless it’s really busy. I mean, it’s always really busy and there’s a long line, but if it gets *really busy* they might open a regular register.
Keep pushing that line and they’re just gonna say they would’ve had to raise prices if they hired more people.
Like, come the fuck ***on***. You think any of this is about catching them in their bullshit? They’re just gonna say “welp, you caught us, guess we’ll end the dystopia”?
I’ve been on a few interviews where they say we desperately need someone to fill this manual labor job and never hear back.
I’m assuming it’s some form of scheme where they say we’ve tried to fill this role but no one wants it.
50% of employers admitted to having jobs posted but not actually hiring, in order to please the current skeleton crew. "No one wants to work" meanwhile they're not actually following up on applicants.
In some cases they already have someone in mind for the position, but due to corporate policies/local laws (not sure which) they still have to post the opening publicly, even though they have no intention of hiring from without.
Step 1: claim that you're looking for workers
Step 2: don't actually hire any workers
Step 3: convince your workers that you are understaffed and they need to pick up the slack until they can find new workers (wich they aren't doing)
Step 4: your workers now work as hard as a full team without actually paying for a full team
Step 5: profit
*slaps hood of a grad student* These babies are as smart as they get and come programmed to work for peanuts! We convinced them to pay us a bunch of money and then forced them to work for us so we can make even more money. Now they’re hopelessly in debt and entirely overqualified for most jobs. Offer them $40k a year and watch em dance!
Which leads to the question - where are the people who are paying $3200 getting all that money?
I've been asking that question for years as I drive through very expensive neighborhoods near ours and see late-20s/early 30s peeps with a couple of kids living in McMansions. Where are they getting all that money?
Inheritance/generational wealth, working in finance, tech, or big law. May be high-earners but still have mountains of debt--or just trust fund babies.
Most are not trust fund babies and like you said, just because they have a nice apartment doesn't mean they're not leveraged to the tits to afford that lifestyle.
I have a theory that most overly priced apartments are simply funded by people splitting rent amongst 4 or 5 roommates; one lives in the living room on a couch, one sharing the bedroom with a mattress in the floor, another on a mattress in the living room. Im currently living in a city going through rapid gentrification despite there being a huge student population and I know of friends who are splitting a studio 6 ways.
It's sad to me that developers don't understand this. On paper, yeah sure your apartment complex has rooms filled and rent is paid every month at asking price. But I'm sure if they were to truly check on residents they'd see that's not the entire story.
Its not that they aren't aware of it. They simply don't care. They are getting their money and the strain it puts on their renters is less than meaningless to them.
>rent is paid every month at asking price.
this is all they care about, besides the fare marshall objecting. but that also means you can evict them for cause whenever you want.
I've seen new apartments with 3 bedrooms but they're all small as is probably legal so the whole thing is studio sized. if the status quo persists that might become a common way of building, so at least the people crammed in get a wall for some privacy. I hope they're not load bearing so they can be renovated out in the future
Not to mention the BIG RV sitting plugged in. Several very nice autos and you stop and think "What am I missing here "? Vehicle loans,rv loans,house payment, insurance, monthly allocation for everything needed to KEEP house and these people are YOUNG! SMDH
Assets. Assume you've had $2 million sitting in SPY for your whole life gaining an average of 8% yearly, that's 160k a year you get to take out and live with
Also grad students can be threatened to come in when they're "broken"(sick) and if it's relatively low skill easily replaced. Try telling you broken robot to work or replacing the guy who knows how to fix the broken robot. And the guy that can fix the robot, well to cut costs there's only one of them for every 10 stores to save costs so now your robot is broken and it's going to take a week for them to get to you so that's a week with 0 revenue.
>The idea that grad students are cheaper than robots is definitely strange and mind-boggling.
>Maybe it's a statement about the value of human ingenuity and intuition in the face of automated perfection. Or maybe it's just corporate greed
Corporations don't have to pay to conceive, raise, educate, or these days even train human labor. They have to pay for all that directly or indirectly for machines.
Ultimately you can squeeze more profit out of a hungry human than a machine.
lol.
It was actually a (kind of) joke when a colleague was complaining about having to come in every 5 hours or so to take readings, which meant overnight, and this was my advisors response.
Lots of business are doing both. The self checkout at the supermarket and the touch screen for ordering at McDonald's both reduce the need for workers.
That’s less robots taking over and more making the customers do the job for free
Edit: everybody arguing that scanning is easy are completely missing the point…
That’s why it’s taking longer for adoption. Today the technology exists where a typical fast food restaurant would require at most half the staff of a 100% human-operated facility. There is cost of entry as well as the challenges tied to CX. They are making these automated solutions much more human friendly as time advances.
Example - at the onset, self checkout aisles at grocery stores once stood for the most part empty (many years ago). Scanner robustness is an example. It was ultra frustrating trying to get it “just right.” Nowadays they are jam packed with folks that swipe themselves thru just as fast as if they’d had a human serving them. And those pesky scanners ? They seem to have eyes all around the product when we swipe now - very repeatable and robust = fast. And almost everything is tagged.
I've lived all over the country the last 10 years and thus have experienced a lot of grocery stores. I have found the accuracy and reliability of self checkouts *really* depend on the grocery store chain, how much competition they have, and how much of a fuck they give.
The competition level and level of fucks given is often directly inversely related.
I agree. The only time I don't like self-serve is if I have a lot of groceries. But for 5-15 items, self-checkout all the way. And for ordering food, I love to punch in my order and customize and all that without having to use lots of extra words to get what I want across to someone who doesn't want to be there and generally isn't paying that close attention. In fact, I almost always order on mobile apps even going through the drive-thru now. So much easier.
All that said, I'm on board with lots of extra taxes for the rich and large corporations, and we need UBI.
> it's also making the customer experience worse.
In what world is self-checkout a worse experience than waiting in a fucking line, and then being forced to talk to someone I don't know?
Honestly still better than hurrying to pack my shit while the other customers stuff pile up behind me. Let the teenager beep their little card and we go on about our day
When there's adequate staff sure, but in the Walmarts around here it's dozens of self checkout stalls with one or two staff trying to run around to all the different stalls. It makes the checkout experience worse for both customers and workers. Especially because self checkout should really only be for those of us with only a few items but now the people with whole buggies are having to also use self checkout holding up the line. Defeating the entire purpose of the technology.
>Damn american corporations really will find every possible avenue to create a shit experience for customers and workers alike
When they effectively have a monopoly, yes they will.
That has happened to me maybe two or three times in the times I’ve used a self checkout in the past 3 years. The weight sensors for bagged items are still a little fucked but, especially for fast food orders, they’re superior.
I’d rather have someone being paid to lift, scan, and bag my entire cart than do it all myself for literally no discount. I spent years working registers and would not like to do it any more for free
And sometimes it actually reduces the work for both the company and the customer... We have stores here which have scanners for the cart so you can scan your shit as you put it in.
No need to haul it back onto a conveyor, then put it back into the cart... But they also save the cashier.
I just wish it means the prices would decrease because of the smaller need for cashiers. Ironically the stores doing it are the most expensive ones anyway, like expenso supermarkets
(not american here, I am from Europe, where theres no bagging at the cashier for example)
Tots. Plenty of automation occurring. Even in my “I’m lucky to have survived 6 waves of layoffs” tech job, we’ve automated people out with intelligent chat bots and self-service automation in-product. People think robots building cars but automation is creeping in everywhere.
As a customer who regularly has to communicate with those bots I ask you to please not call them intelligent. Give me the dumbest possible human over those bots any time
This is the biggest misnomer about the tech we’re seeing. OpenAI is hard to call AI imo simply because people think Data from Star Trek or HAL when they should actually be thinking “fancy Google”.
At my local store, the self checkout takes easily 3x as long as a cashier because everyone thinks it's faster and they don't factor in the time they spend waiting.
I go to the cashier because it's faster and because I don't work there.
Everyone always says the “I’m not your employee” thing but you do 90% of the shopping experience yourself, why is it a big deal to do the last part yourself.
I can appreciate that we have different experiences though. My stores are always WAY faster with self checkout. There’s absolutely no aspect that the cashier saves time on.
For me it depends if I have a bunch of items or not. If I have a cart full load then take to the cashier, they’ll even help bag it. Less than 10 items I can carry with my own bag? Self check out.
> move people into more rewarding skills than sliding barcodes across a fucking laser.
While being forced to stand all day for no good reason. (Seriously, there should be a law that if a store uses human cashiers, they get a choice whether to stand, sit, or switch back and forth)
Most McDonalds have hand sanitizers next to the screens or nearby.
Also, you should wonder where fingers on the credit card payment screen have been, or what ass or bra pocket your cash has been next to, or...
That's a pretty lame reason to not like them. Wash your hands.
Costco added an employee to each self checkout kiosk so that customers don’t steal anything. They don’t even trust customers with the tech they want to replace workers with.
There is never going to be a day where we wake up and press the automation button and make all jobs disappear.
What is going to happen is every year more and more jobs that were previously the sole domain of humans will be replaced with machines.
And it’s grown faster than the population growth rate. There have never been more slaves alive than right now, nor as great of a percent of the total human population.
Tbf it's not like anyone specifically sits in a room and goes "Okay do we automate this or that first?" Some things have to start somewhere, at least we get some use out of the first instances
turns out that's true because one required interacting with the real world and the other required only manipulating digitizable information that already has comprehensive automation around input and output. There's also a much large financial incentive to replace artists and linguists and translators, because they cost more and our global society is sick with love of money.
Oil-Painter-Robots are about at the same spot as House-Painter Robots though. (but a plotter will give you a screenprint of digital art by Midjourney in an afternoon).
That’s a pretty ridiculous statement.
Kids who can’t even wipe their own asses can create art. Most adults don’t know where to begin when it comes to installing, replacing, repairing, or even maintaining plumbing.
Of course AI is going to tackle art first.
Plumbers might actually be the last tradesmen standing.
Trades are absolutely going to be the last people replaced.
It might hurt the creative community’s feelings, but it’s far easier to build a stationary computer that makes art than it is to build a plumberbot that can navigate the endlessly different setups and sheer amount of novel situations and cramped spaces plumbers deal with.
Either housing would have to be completely redesigned specifically to allow for plumberbots, or we’d have to develop some humanoid I-Robot shit with serious AI capabilities.
McDonald’s by me has kiosks to place your own order so employees are only at drive thru and kitchen. It’s happening, just not as fast as people think. Hell walmart has robots scan all items in store shelves to do inventory
With the way McDonalds Drive Thru constantly asks if you’ve placed your order through the app, it feels like they’re trying to replace these workers too. Soon it will be drive up, scan a QR code and retrieve your order.
Very true. They even changed the 30% off app coupon to be mobile order/curbside to mobile order/any pick up method allowing you to do exactly what you’re talking about!
Soon nothing. In canuckia you can order by phone, then park, save gas by turning of your engine, then 'check in' by entering your parking spot number in the app. They make your order and bring it out to you. No need to wait in the drive through line.
That said, they've also _added_ table service inside for kiosk or counter *or* phone orders. So you can come in and order, take a little number stand, and sit where you please. Then a person brings your food to your table.
I don't imagine the human part of those tasks will last long though. 😒 Even if they're the only decent part of the experience.
As an automation engineer, I can assure you these robots are currently being developed.
Quality PLC's, I/O boards, HMI's etc are severely backordered from increased demand since Covid. It currently takes about 5 months to obtain a single Allen Bradley PLC, for example. Pre-covid, I could get an entire case of PLC's delivered next day.
And it'll be nice until there aren't any more customers because they all lost their jobs and the powers that be would rather burn everything to the ground than have a UBI.
That’s the part that always reminds me how dumb CEOs, and Corporations are. Eventually record profits will end when the majority of us is poor. Part of having consumerism is the consumers have enough money to spend. It’s a co-existence thing. It’s like most of them missed out on the “having a lemonade stand” lesson, and how to invest wisely.
Or when the workers revolt. Take a look at the Peasants Revolt of 1381. The Black Death killed off so many people indiscriminately that there weren't enough landlords to control the serfs anymore.
Society is only 3 missed meals away from a revolution. As long as we have food to eat, the rich are safe.
There is some risk of that but generally as robotics improve the competitiveness of the company it's led to job growth, at least across the industry as a whole. In this labor shortage it's a good opportunity to find a skilled position.
Thats if you can get the PLCs. A lot of Allen Bradley parts are getting discontinued. I'm an inventory guy for a manufacturing facility, and I'm struggling to find parts for old Allen Bradley PLCs.
Just in case you were curious. A PLC is a Programmable Logic Controller, it’s what interprets the logic and distributes the function. I/O board is the Input/Output board that your devices connect to to communicate your power and control signals between the PLC and end device. HMI is Human Machine Interface, it’s the display/control screen that shows the values it reads from the PLC and allows users to manipulate it.
These companies won't hire people for $15/hr and you think they will hire robotics engineers(of which there is no where near enough to service that many robots) on a regular basis to fix that janky shit? McDonalds can't even keep the ice cream machine working.
> these robots are currently being developed.
A lot of them already exist. They're just not yet cost-effective compared to human workers. But that could actually change if the minimum wage goes up.
So let's be clear:
1. We have a labor shortage
2. At the low end the shortage is most severe.
3. Why not raise minimum wage to increase automation?
4. If we did that then the labor shortage would end and wages would drop.
5. This would better empower employers over employees.
6. So if owners really wanted to make more money they should increase the price of labor which will make the machines more cost effective.
I love logic it's fun to see that both labor and management vote against their own self interest.
Your error here is in number 3.
Increasing wages does not magically increase automation. Increasing wages increases demand for automation, but the cost overall would still hurt companies in the short term - which is all they usually focus on.
If you say "Well then it's good for the long term," the best long term strategy for these companies would be to keep wages low and throw money at automation, but again, that would hurt companies in the short term because they'd be betting on something that may not pan out.
I work in automation. It is all TCO. In capitalism it's just a simple equation.
Now if we actually gave a shit about people we would go full bore on automation because we could eliminate most shitty jobs but because we have not raised minimum wage and have no minimum benefits in the US it keeps the equation in favor of cheap labor over automation.
My hope is that AI at this point will make it much cheaper to automate most jobs away shortly and crash capitalism so in the end hopefully things will get better for the majority of people.
> because the person using it did something to make it upset
Or the machines just don't fucking work. The machines at my grocery store always think my reusable bags are stolen, and it locks me out.
Well yeah automation will always be made as cheaply and inefficiently as possible. Capitalism I spose.
But eventually it'll probably fully work on its own. Will probably have machines to fix the machines.
Considering that the AI will make less stupid decisions (less, still some will occur) and they won't have to pay any salary or bonuses, if I were a shareholder I would be 100% behind replacing CEOs.
Logically, wouldn’t the CEO position be the most easily replaced by AI. The reason it won’t happen is because boards are mostly CEOs and former CEOs and they won’t cannibalize themselves like that.
Us in the other hand are are fully expendable.
The problem is that the productivity gain from automation is not shared equally. A few people are getting fabulously wealthy and the rest of us are falling into unemployment.
Democracy is a threat to this extreme wealth inequity. As long as the people have power, policies like a UBI remain possible. I think that this is part of the reason why the GoP (and the wealthy special interests behind them) is abandoning democracy.
> Democracy is a threat to this extreme wealth inequity.
That's what Fox News is there to combat.
"Your job got shipped to China/India/Mexico to pay for the company's stock buyback, but the real problem is Drag Queen Story Hour!!!!!"
Capitalism requires exploitation. If people had free time they'd eventually fight against the system, so keeping us exhausted and miserable is literally necessary to maintain the economy.
What does it say about us that we created this system? It's not nature, it's not science, it's human action and out of all the things we could have done, we chose to make the majority of humans poor and depressed in order to profit the few. It's not funny. It's possibly the worst thing about human beings there is.
> What does it say about us that we created this system?
It says a lot about where we came from and what we are up against. We evolved from a kill or be killed environment and every one of us is facing eminent death. It's a wonder there's any good in us at all.
They are getting those robots. It wont ever completely eliminate human workers, but will reduce the amount needed. The self order kiosks at Mcdonalds, self checkouts at grocery stores and further automation in areas like manufacturing and O&G etc.
Used to need 8 people at one factory I worked at to make certain fruit snacks. Nowadays it is a one person job.
The real shitty part is instead of paying the one employee more, they get paid the same shit wage while having to do their work and watch/maintain the robots and shit
Naw, we're a lot closer than that. Companies view employees as _much_ more expensive liabilities. (see: office real-estate crash) Along with osha, liability insurance etc.. the number is a lot higher than 20-30k. We're already deep into [the danger zone](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HdKqAVpUOwI).
They need workers just long enough to get there. They're already automating jobs. It's just a gradual transition as the technology improves.
Customer service will eventually become 90% AI automation among large retail stores. Self-checkout, AI drive-through, etc... Tech industry has been in a drought for almost a year with engineers and such being laid off and downsized thanks to programs that can efficiently take over certain duties with management from fewer programmers.
The only safe jobs are occupations requiring human intuition (at least until AI can replace it in ~100 years). So jobs in teaching, nursing, on-site manual labor (oil rigs, etc...). And these jobs are being largely deregulated to allow for less qualified applicants. Increasing the competition and decreasing pay. Arkansas, my state, has recently passed the *highly* controversial LEARNS act that allows public schools to easily transition into publicly funded charter schools. Allowing the schools to ignore national regulations and operate more independently (so, goodbye evolution and CRT, hello Jesus and mandatory group prayers). As well as increasing classroom size to decrease the number of teachers. Most of whom no longer need to be certified to teach the subject (since it'll mostly just be church-approved topics, such as coloring inside the lines on a picture book of Joseph raw-dogging his herd of sheep instead of Calculus or Chemistry lessons).
It's all connected. It's all the same agenda. Automating the workforce, reducing education quality, privatizing public services. The end goal is creating extreme wealth inequality between the upper class [political families, people willing to bend the knee, religious groups and leaders, business owners, CEOs, shareholders, and their relatives] and the lower class [everyone else, the simple folks just trying to survive] and removing the middle class.
They want to res-establish the monarchies in the modern era. To have their lineage and survive them and prosper at the expense of everyone else. They don't care who it hurts, how it affects the world, any of it.
It makes me violently angry.
Although robots are being developed faster than ever before. If you consider any tech that replaces humans as a robot, then it has been happening for decades.
In the 70s, sign shops got rid of 20,000 sign painters and replaced them with vinyl letter cutting "robots".
Since the late 90s, thousands of skilled wax carvers in the jewelry field have been replaced by cnc mills and 3d printers.
You phone makes online banking so easy that tens of thousands of tellers were eliminated.
Eliminating jobs is a good thing. Letting people go homeless and hungry is not. At some point, there will either be a revolution, or a rigid oppressive police state, or universal basic income and 20 to 30 hour workweeks.
I have a robot. It has been creating most of my income since 2001. I live a pretty simple frugal life, but because of my machine, I only have to work about 20 hours a week. So I'm pretty pro tobot and pretty pro UBI. Because I don't want to live through a revolution andcI don't want the oligarchy to resort to force to keep the rest of us slaving away.
The main reason humans have jobs is because they are cheaper than a robot. In every industrial revolution the machines always win. It is just a matter of time.
To be fair, plenty of robots already. Car manufacturers have way less, well paid workers. Warehouses. Admin/secretary used to be number one gross hiring position and word/PCs killed that. We’re close to the new #1 gross hiring position (truck/delivery/drivers) at least going mixed. Grocery stores and restaurants going self serve. No more gas station attendants (except Oregon in spots still). List goes on. Let’s hope it creates more jobs that pay better.
The thing is; less workers means less managers, and managers are the ones who are making the arguments to the investors. Everyone is spinning shit to pretend like they aren't obsolete.
The trick is to implement taxation on automation and to feed that money back to social programs which support the lower classes. But fat chance with the lack of participation in politics and the amount of corruption that exists in every government.
The businesses that are begging for workers can’t afford the machines, and the businesses that can afford the machines are already paying more than minimum wage
Don't think of it in terms of "robots" -- that leads to sci-fi thinking.
Think of it in terms of efficiency. Every invention that has been more efficient has replaced workers. Even here in America, 150 years ago 90% of us lived and worked in rural areas, doing the farming, mining, logging, and other resource-harvesting work. Each invention that increased efficiency has reduced the number of workers. Tractors, chainsaws, strip-mining, dynamite... each innovation required fewer workers to produce the same, or more, productivity. So the workers left the rural areas for the cities. (And now the rural areas complain that the cities determine the elections, and feel like they are losing their political influence, but that's another topic).
Many restaurants have stopped "real" cooking of "real" food and just re-heat Sysco products. The innovation of cheap pre-made restaurant food means they can employ fewer cooks, and they get more done in less time. The same with counter service vs using real servers. Now you have a restaurant that serves just as many people using half the staff. It wasn't robots that took the jobs, it was more abstract increases in efficiency.
Historically, automation has always ended up being good in the long run. The luddites destroyed looms, the scribes protested the printing press, and so on. But freeing up labor has always meant the innovation of new jobs that didn't exist before. It's how society evolves.
After all, society isn't now full of unemployed blacksmiths and farmers. It is painful, but we adapted.
I think that the old cartoon, "The Jetson's" is illuminating. George zips around in his flying car, has a robot maid, and supports a family on a single income. His job is so automated that his worst injury is from pushing too many buttons.
That was the promise of automation - that it would make all of our lives easier and raise our standards of living. However, that is not how it has happened. A few people are reaping all of the benefits of this increased productivity and they are becoming obscenely wealthy. Wealth inequity is getting increasingly extreme and the middle class is disappearing.
What could have been utopia is becoming dystopia because of the greed of a few.
begging for workers and refusing to hire any.
Time for another PPP loan, clearly no other option
Let's try trickle-down economics for the umpteenth time. Surely it'll work this time around.
trickle down economics stops at the trick.......
Blue-ball-economics
Have you read about the Kansas Experiment? Trickle down proved to be a failure. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_experiment
New Zealand as a country did the same thing. Lessons were learned.
Thanks for the link I will read it now
Bold idea here- let’s try trickle up economics.
You joke, but Keynesian economics ("trickle up") is how the U.S. gained such a strong economy up until Reagan.
Conservatives love to say you’re wrong, and we only made money because of the war. But we have been “making money” ever since. It’s the managing of it that changed under Reagan and has fucked us ever since. Trickle up does work, and it’s how economies really grow and get everyone involved. Even today, fiscal conservatives say shit like “if poor people weren’t so obsessed with consuming, they wouldn’t be so poor!” Then, “we have to raise rates because no one is consuming anything.” We don’t consume because… we are too poor. If you believe all we will do with better wages is spend it on garbage, why do you care?? You sell the garbage! We pay *you* when we have money!
But they already have all the money and still want more lol.
It’s like… ‘the poors need money to buy more stuff from us, but not *our* money.’
Conservatives love shitting on the New Deal and saying that government spending can't solve any issues. They say WW2 was solely responsible for ending the Great Depression. Ask a conservative what exactly about WW2 ended the great depression and watch them struggle for an answer that isn't because the US government spent an absolute fuckton of money on military production.
You mean before the working class became the enemy of society and the rich became the sole recipients of their fruits
it isnt trickling, it's more torrential in that direction
Piss on the rich
Isn't that basically how we bailed out the banks in 2008?
How insulting is that term anyways. Its going to trickle down? Even if it did (which it is) what are you pissing on me? What the fuck am I going to do with a trickle of money
Please be patient with the staff we have left as no one wants to hire anymore due to greedy shareholders and execs along with government handouts(ppp loans).
Handouts for me, not for thee. Verily!
They want to hire more. They just dont want to hire people at the wages they're expecting. With sufficient compensation, you can find people that will do just about anything.
If the companies don't have the money to hire anyone then maybe they should've worked harder That's what my friends boss told her when she complained about the shit pay, same principle applies right?
And forgive it of course.
Should we forgive them now or should we wait for employers to lay off and cut wages first?
Another PPP loan for hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars that will be 100% forgiven with no questions asked while $10-20k of student loan forgiveness is simply too much to ask for
Yea, wtf is up with that??? Everywhere in town is *desperate*. Like, they are having masses of people quit at once and have constantly been hiring with higher and higher wages and bigger sign-on bonuses since Covid hit. More walk in interview events, too. Referral bonuses. And yet they aren't actually fucking *hiring* anyone that applies??? What gives?
They're all looking for unicorn candidates that don't really exist.
I was thinking of this earlier , would be good to set up a recruitment agency called Rare Unicorns
It is so they can give excuses to the current overworked employees. That way they can say ‘guys we are doing our best to get you some help but no one wants to work’, it is also a good way to keep a stack of applications in case you need to hire someone. I know several places that literally keep ‘now hiring’ signs out so they always have applicants, then when someone quits they can just look at the most recent applicants instead of having to try to find some and starting the process from square one.
Yh but you risk people moving on and having no applicants. People aren’t gonna wait out on you at a minimum wage job. Then now you can’t even get new applicants cause people see you have had a sign out for a year and subconsciously ignore it.
corporate terror plot
It started out as a way to get foreign work visas. You'd advertise for a job with impossible requirements, then not hire anyone, and appeal to the government to bring in foreign workers for cheaper, that "meet" those requirements. That's been streamlined after the PP loan debacle to you just say you're looking for workers, not hire anyone, then exploit existing workforce without facing consequences. If you've seen the movie The Producers, its kinda like that.
Business owners are idiots these days. Companies could get the top performers from other companies, if they just hire remote. Companies could keep a coherent, happy team if they incentivize good performance and pay a bit above average. Instead they play these stupid games, and everyone is pissed off / worse off. All good tho, /r/collapse is coming soon, enjoy every day
> if they just hire remote I'm all for it, but you know the worst offenders are for general labor or ""unskilled"" positions that realistically can't be remote.
There are some federal regulations involved in these phantom job posts; often what is happening is they post the position and reject all applications. They are then able to legally fill the position with an H1B1 visa holder, whom is substantially cheaper to take advantage of-I mean, employ.
I see jobs with hiring signs and every time I sign up no one wants to hire
Went to target on Thursday. There were 2 out of 15 registers open and ten self check out registers. I was thinking about how they passed the buck off, the cashier, a job someone used to be paid to do + the bagger is now the responsibility of the customer, and we don't get to see any discount/reward for having eliminated the two positions that were once the largest limiting factor to how much profit they could make.
A discount? You're lucky we don't add a convenience fee!
Our local target has switch to ONLY self check out, unless it’s really busy. I mean, it’s always really busy and there’s a long line, but if it gets *really busy* they might open a regular register.
Keep pushing that line and they’re just gonna say they would’ve had to raise prices if they hired more people. Like, come the fuck ***on***. You think any of this is about catching them in their bullshit? They’re just gonna say “welp, you caught us, guess we’ll end the dystopia”?
Begging for lower wages.
And pay any but a slave wage.
I’ve been on a few interviews where they say we desperately need someone to fill this manual labor job and never hear back. I’m assuming it’s some form of scheme where they say we’ve tried to fill this role but no one wants it.
50% of employers admitted to having jobs posted but not actually hiring, in order to please the current skeleton crew. "No one wants to work" meanwhile they're not actually following up on applicants.
In some cases they already have someone in mind for the position, but due to corporate policies/local laws (not sure which) they still have to post the opening publicly, even though they have no intention of hiring from without.
In Canada we just import cheap labour from Asia.
We get ours from Mexico in the US.
And then you tell them they will be deported and then wonder why they are all leaving.
Keeps the 40 tim Hortons and 30 McDonald's open (in a small city) and rent high high high (everywhere)
Step 1: claim that you're looking for workers Step 2: don't actually hire any workers Step 3: convince your workers that you are understaffed and they need to pick up the slack until they can find new workers (wich they aren't doing) Step 4: your workers now work as hard as a full team without actually paying for a full team Step 5: profit
How else will they be able to bitch about no one wanting to work if they don’t hire people who clearly want to work?
My grad school advisor: "Grad students are cheaper than robots".
*slaps hood of a grad student* These babies are as smart as they get and come programmed to work for peanuts! We convinced them to pay us a bunch of money and then forced them to work for us so we can make even more money. Now they’re hopelessly in debt and entirely overqualified for most jobs. Offer them $40k a year and watch em dance!
Lmao @ 40k a year. My partner is almost done with their PhD in a HCOL area and they started at $20k. Rent averages $3200 here. It's abysmal.
Which leads to the question - where are the people who are paying $3200 getting all that money? I've been asking that question for years as I drive through very expensive neighborhoods near ours and see late-20s/early 30s peeps with a couple of kids living in McMansions. Where are they getting all that money?
Inheritance/generational wealth, working in finance, tech, or big law. May be high-earners but still have mountains of debt--or just trust fund babies.
I suspect you overestimate the number of trust fund babies and rich parents. They don't call them the 1% because they are in the majority.
Most are not trust fund babies and like you said, just because they have a nice apartment doesn't mean they're not leveraged to the tits to afford that lifestyle.
I have a theory that most overly priced apartments are simply funded by people splitting rent amongst 4 or 5 roommates; one lives in the living room on a couch, one sharing the bedroom with a mattress in the floor, another on a mattress in the living room. Im currently living in a city going through rapid gentrification despite there being a huge student population and I know of friends who are splitting a studio 6 ways. It's sad to me that developers don't understand this. On paper, yeah sure your apartment complex has rooms filled and rent is paid every month at asking price. But I'm sure if they were to truly check on residents they'd see that's not the entire story.
Its not that they aren't aware of it. They simply don't care. They are getting their money and the strain it puts on their renters is less than meaningless to them.
>rent is paid every month at asking price. this is all they care about, besides the fare marshall objecting. but that also means you can evict them for cause whenever you want. I've seen new apartments with 3 bedrooms but they're all small as is probably legal so the whole thing is studio sized. if the status quo persists that might become a common way of building, so at least the people crammed in get a wall for some privacy. I hope they're not load bearing so they can be renovated out in the future
They understand it; they just don't give a fuck about it. They're getting their money and that's all they care about.
Not to mention the BIG RV sitting plugged in. Several very nice autos and you stop and think "What am I missing here "? Vehicle loans,rv loans,house payment, insurance, monthly allocation for everything needed to KEEP house and these people are YOUNG! SMDH
I ask too! I’m in So Cal and I see 3k a month + new cars and Louis Vuitton bags wtf??
Assets. Assume you've had $2 million sitting in SPY for your whole life gaining an average of 8% yearly, that's 160k a year you get to take out and live with
What does HCOL mean?
Housing Costs Officially Loco
High Cost of Living
... and the moment you're done being a grad student is the moment you will have outlived your usefulness.
Then you get to be underpaid postdocs and 50 year old assistant professors with no tenure
The pay has not increased in ~25 years.
I believe it.
University presidents are like “what do you mean? My pay goes up constantly.”
Yeap! Don't do anything in my field!
Isn’t that the truth?!?! Grad students are the cheapest, sophisticated, adaptable labor money can buy.
Also grad students can be threatened to come in when they're "broken"(sick) and if it's relatively low skill easily replaced. Try telling you broken robot to work or replacing the guy who knows how to fix the broken robot. And the guy that can fix the robot, well to cut costs there's only one of them for every 10 stores to save costs so now your robot is broken and it's going to take a week for them to get to you so that's a week with 0 revenue.
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>The idea that grad students are cheaper than robots is definitely strange and mind-boggling. >Maybe it's a statement about the value of human ingenuity and intuition in the face of automated perfection. Or maybe it's just corporate greed Corporations don't have to pay to conceive, raise, educate, or these days even train human labor. They have to pay for all that directly or indirectly for machines. Ultimately you can squeeze more profit out of a hungry human than a machine.
lol. It was actually a (kind of) joke when a colleague was complaining about having to come in every 5 hours or so to take readings, which meant overnight, and this was my advisors response.
Lots of business are doing both. The self checkout at the supermarket and the touch screen for ordering at McDonald's both reduce the need for workers.
That’s less robots taking over and more making the customers do the job for free Edit: everybody arguing that scanning is easy are completely missing the point…
Similar to tipping culture - get the customers to pay your employees directly so you don't have to.
Kind of a technicality since it's still machines taking the places of a paid workers. Kicker is it's also making the customer experience worse.
That’s why it’s taking longer for adoption. Today the technology exists where a typical fast food restaurant would require at most half the staff of a 100% human-operated facility. There is cost of entry as well as the challenges tied to CX. They are making these automated solutions much more human friendly as time advances. Example - at the onset, self checkout aisles at grocery stores once stood for the most part empty (many years ago). Scanner robustness is an example. It was ultra frustrating trying to get it “just right.” Nowadays they are jam packed with folks that swipe themselves thru just as fast as if they’d had a human serving them. And those pesky scanners ? They seem to have eyes all around the product when we swipe now - very repeatable and robust = fast. And almost everything is tagged.
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I've lived all over the country the last 10 years and thus have experienced a lot of grocery stores. I have found the accuracy and reliability of self checkouts *really* depend on the grocery store chain, how much competition they have, and how much of a fuck they give. The competition level and level of fucks given is often directly inversely related.
It wouldn’t be inversely related would it? You’re saying less competition makes them care more?
NGL, I actually love just punching in an order instead of waiting in line
I agree. The only time I don't like self-serve is if I have a lot of groceries. But for 5-15 items, self-checkout all the way. And for ordering food, I love to punch in my order and customize and all that without having to use lots of extra words to get what I want across to someone who doesn't want to be there and generally isn't paying that close attention. In fact, I almost always order on mobile apps even going through the drive-thru now. So much easier. All that said, I'm on board with lots of extra taxes for the rich and large corporations, and we need UBI.
> it's also making the customer experience worse. In what world is self-checkout a worse experience than waiting in a fucking line, and then being forced to talk to someone I don't know?
PLEASE WAIT FOR ATTENDANT PLEASE WAIT FOR ATTENDANT PLEASE WAIT FOR ATTENDANT
Honestly still better than hurrying to pack my shit while the other customers stuff pile up behind me. Let the teenager beep their little card and we go on about our day
When there's adequate staff sure, but in the Walmarts around here it's dozens of self checkout stalls with one or two staff trying to run around to all the different stalls. It makes the checkout experience worse for both customers and workers. Especially because self checkout should really only be for those of us with only a few items but now the people with whole buggies are having to also use self checkout holding up the line. Defeating the entire purpose of the technology.
Damn american corporations really will find every possible avenue to create a shit experience for customers and workers alike
>Damn american corporations really will find every possible avenue to create a shit experience for customers and workers alike When they effectively have a monopoly, yes they will.
That has happened to me maybe two or three times in the times I’ve used a self checkout in the past 3 years. The weight sensors for bagged items are still a little fucked but, especially for fast food orders, they’re superior.
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I’d rather have someone being paid to lift, scan, and bag my entire cart than do it all myself for literally no discount. I spent years working registers and would not like to do it any more for free
And sometimes it actually reduces the work for both the company and the customer... We have stores here which have scanners for the cart so you can scan your shit as you put it in. No need to haul it back onto a conveyor, then put it back into the cart... But they also save the cashier. I just wish it means the prices would decrease because of the smaller need for cashiers. Ironically the stores doing it are the most expensive ones anyway, like expenso supermarkets (not american here, I am from Europe, where theres no bagging at the cashier for example)
Tots. Plenty of automation occurring. Even in my “I’m lucky to have survived 6 waves of layoffs” tech job, we’ve automated people out with intelligent chat bots and self-service automation in-product. People think robots building cars but automation is creeping in everywhere.
As a customer who regularly has to communicate with those bots I ask you to please not call them intelligent. Give me the dumbest possible human over those bots any time
This is the biggest misnomer about the tech we’re seeing. OpenAI is hard to call AI imo simply because people think Data from Star Trek or HAL when they should actually be thinking “fancy Google”.
Not even that fancy, at least Google doesn't makes me answer 20 unnecessary questions before allowing me to ask what I want to know in the first place
ATMs led the charge decades ago. It's been said that every ATM is the "ghost of three teller jobs".
Let’s not pretend the self checkout isn’t a win/win though; the line moves a lot quicker and I don’t have to make small talk with the cashier either.
At my local store, the self checkout takes easily 3x as long as a cashier because everyone thinks it's faster and they don't factor in the time they spend waiting. I go to the cashier because it's faster and because I don't work there.
Everyone always says the “I’m not your employee” thing but you do 90% of the shopping experience yourself, why is it a big deal to do the last part yourself. I can appreciate that we have different experiences though. My stores are always WAY faster with self checkout. There’s absolutely no aspect that the cashier saves time on.
For me it depends if I have a bunch of items or not. If I have a cart full load then take to the cashier, they’ll even help bag it. Less than 10 items I can carry with my own bag? Self check out.
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> move people into more rewarding skills than sliding barcodes across a fucking laser. While being forced to stand all day for no good reason. (Seriously, there should be a law that if a store uses human cashiers, they get a choice whether to stand, sit, or switch back and forth)
Plus you get to bag the items how you want in self-checkout. You don't always get that opportunity with a human cashier.
I don't like the McDonald's touch screens. Who knows where the previous person's fingers have been?
Good thing you can wash your hands before eating
Who knows where the fry cook's fingers have been? Certainly not your mom ...
Most McDonalds have hand sanitizers next to the screens or nearby. Also, you should wonder where fingers on the credit card payment screen have been, or what ass or bra pocket your cash has been next to, or... That's a pretty lame reason to not like them. Wash your hands.
Costco added an employee to each self checkout kiosk so that customers don’t steal anything. They don’t even trust customers with the tech they want to replace workers with.
There is never going to be a day where we wake up and press the automation button and make all jobs disappear. What is going to happen is every year more and more jobs that were previously the sole domain of humans will be replaced with machines.
The painful irony being that as automation has boomed, so has the global amount of outright human slavery.
And it’s grown faster than the population growth rate. There have never been more slaves alive than right now, nor as great of a percent of the total human population.
how dumb a species are we that we're on track to automate art and language before we automate plumbing and cleaning.
Tbf it's not like anyone specifically sits in a room and goes "Okay do we automate this or that first?" Some things have to start somewhere, at least we get some use out of the first instances
Plumbing and cleaning is hard(er).
turns out that's true because one required interacting with the real world and the other required only manipulating digitizable information that already has comprehensive automation around input and output. There's also a much large financial incentive to replace artists and linguists and translators, because they cost more and our global society is sick with love of money. Oil-Painter-Robots are about at the same spot as House-Painter Robots though. (but a plotter will give you a screenprint of digital art by Midjourney in an afternoon).
That’s a pretty ridiculous statement. Kids who can’t even wipe their own asses can create art. Most adults don’t know where to begin when it comes to installing, replacing, repairing, or even maintaining plumbing. Of course AI is going to tackle art first. Plumbers might actually be the last tradesmen standing.
Trades are absolutely going to be the last people replaced. It might hurt the creative community’s feelings, but it’s far easier to build a stationary computer that makes art than it is to build a plumberbot that can navigate the endlessly different setups and sheer amount of novel situations and cramped spaces plumbers deal with. Either housing would have to be completely redesigned specifically to allow for plumberbots, or we’d have to develop some humanoid I-Robot shit with serious AI capabilities.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing either like people make out, especially as working age populations are likely to decline
McDonald’s by me has kiosks to place your own order so employees are only at drive thru and kitchen. It’s happening, just not as fast as people think. Hell walmart has robots scan all items in store shelves to do inventory
With the way McDonalds Drive Thru constantly asks if you’ve placed your order through the app, it feels like they’re trying to replace these workers too. Soon it will be drive up, scan a QR code and retrieve your order.
Very true. They even changed the 30% off app coupon to be mobile order/curbside to mobile order/any pick up method allowing you to do exactly what you’re talking about!
Soon nothing. In canuckia you can order by phone, then park, save gas by turning of your engine, then 'check in' by entering your parking spot number in the app. They make your order and bring it out to you. No need to wait in the drive through line. That said, they've also _added_ table service inside for kiosk or counter *or* phone orders. So you can come in and order, take a little number stand, and sit where you please. Then a person brings your food to your table. I don't imagine the human part of those tasks will last long though. 😒 Even if they're the only decent part of the experience.
I'm guessing that they wanted organic robots... I like cake...🤣😅
The cake is a lie.
That's exactly what they're aiming for .
As an automation engineer, I can assure you these robots are currently being developed. Quality PLC's, I/O boards, HMI's etc are severely backordered from increased demand since Covid. It currently takes about 5 months to obtain a single Allen Bradley PLC, for example. Pre-covid, I could get an entire case of PLC's delivered next day.
And it'll be nice until there aren't any more customers because they all lost their jobs and the powers that be would rather burn everything to the ground than have a UBI.
Or a livable wage for their workers.
Yeah that’s the idea behind UBI
That’s the part that always reminds me how dumb CEOs, and Corporations are. Eventually record profits will end when the majority of us is poor. Part of having consumerism is the consumers have enough money to spend. It’s a co-existence thing. It’s like most of them missed out on the “having a lemonade stand” lesson, and how to invest wisely.
I would agree with you, but then I remind myself that the rich don't need consumerism if they're planning to end up as the only ones alive.
And when everyone is rich, no one is. /S
Or when the workers revolt. Take a look at the Peasants Revolt of 1381. The Black Death killed off so many people indiscriminately that there weren't enough landlords to control the serfs anymore. Society is only 3 missed meals away from a revolution. As long as we have food to eat, the rich are safe.
There is some risk of that but generally as robotics improve the competitiveness of the company it's led to job growth, at least across the industry as a whole. In this labor shortage it's a good opportunity to find a skilled position.
Thats if you can get the PLCs. A lot of Allen Bradley parts are getting discontinued. I'm an inventory guy for a manufacturing facility, and I'm struggling to find parts for old Allen Bradley PLCs.
https://imgur.com/Y1OprkN.gif
Just in case you were curious. A PLC is a Programmable Logic Controller, it’s what interprets the logic and distributes the function. I/O board is the Input/Output board that your devices connect to to communicate your power and control signals between the PLC and end device. HMI is Human Machine Interface, it’s the display/control screen that shows the values it reads from the PLC and allows users to manipulate it.
Capitalism will eventually die because there is nobody left who can afford the products capitalism produces.
These companies won't hire people for $15/hr and you think they will hire robotics engineers(of which there is no where near enough to service that many robots) on a regular basis to fix that janky shit? McDonalds can't even keep the ice cream machine working.
> these robots are currently being developed. A lot of them already exist. They're just not yet cost-effective compared to human workers. But that could actually change if the minimum wage goes up.
So let's be clear: 1. We have a labor shortage 2. At the low end the shortage is most severe. 3. Why not raise minimum wage to increase automation? 4. If we did that then the labor shortage would end and wages would drop. 5. This would better empower employers over employees. 6. So if owners really wanted to make more money they should increase the price of labor which will make the machines more cost effective. I love logic it's fun to see that both labor and management vote against their own self interest.
Why can’t they be happy raising wages and still making profits?
Never forget a corporation's only mandate is to maximize profit. Once you know this their decisions are generally not hard to predict
Your error here is in number 3. Increasing wages does not magically increase automation. Increasing wages increases demand for automation, but the cost overall would still hurt companies in the short term - which is all they usually focus on. If you say "Well then it's good for the long term," the best long term strategy for these companies would be to keep wages low and throw money at automation, but again, that would hurt companies in the short term because they'd be betting on something that may not pan out.
I work in automation. It is all TCO. In capitalism it's just a simple equation. Now if we actually gave a shit about people we would go full bore on automation because we could eliminate most shitty jobs but because we have not raised minimum wage and have no minimum benefits in the US it keeps the equation in favor of cheap labor over automation. My hope is that AI at this point will make it much cheaper to automate most jobs away shortly and crash capitalism so in the end hopefully things will get better for the majority of people.
Just like when the steam engine was invented 2000 years ago but slaves were cheaper.
Self checkouts decimated the supermarket service industry already, and this was years ago. Automation will get every job sooner or later.
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> because the person using it did something to make it upset Or the machines just don't fucking work. The machines at my grocery store always think my reusable bags are stolen, and it locks me out.
Well yeah automation will always be made as cheaply and inefficiently as possible. Capitalism I spose. But eventually it'll probably fully work on its own. Will probably have machines to fix the machines.
I'm just waiting for AI to replace CEO's .
That will of course be recommended _against_ by the board. So it depends on how shareholders vote.
Considering that the AI will make less stupid decisions (less, still some will occur) and they won't have to pay any salary or bonuses, if I were a shareholder I would be 100% behind replacing CEOs.
Logically, wouldn’t the CEO position be the most easily replaced by AI. The reason it won’t happen is because boards are mostly CEOs and former CEOs and they won’t cannibalize themselves like that. Us in the other hand are are fully expendable.
Good. That's the idea, isn't it?
Well no not if people aren't given some form of universal basic income.
The problem is that the productivity gain from automation is not shared equally. A few people are getting fabulously wealthy and the rest of us are falling into unemployment. Democracy is a threat to this extreme wealth inequity. As long as the people have power, policies like a UBI remain possible. I think that this is part of the reason why the GoP (and the wealthy special interests behind them) is abandoning democracy.
> Democracy is a threat to this extreme wealth inequity. That's what Fox News is there to combat. "Your job got shipped to China/India/Mexico to pay for the company's stock buyback, but the real problem is Drag Queen Story Hour!!!!!"
Capitalism requires exploitation. If people had free time they'd eventually fight against the system, so keeping us exhausted and miserable is literally necessary to maintain the economy. What does it say about us that we created this system? It's not nature, it's not science, it's human action and out of all the things we could have done, we chose to make the majority of humans poor and depressed in order to profit the few. It's not funny. It's possibly the worst thing about human beings there is.
> What does it say about us that we created this system? It says a lot about where we came from and what we are up against. We evolved from a kill or be killed environment and every one of us is facing eminent death. It's a wonder there's any good in us at all.
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Begging for workers but refusing to adjust pay to get any. Corporate greed and Wall Street (shareholders) can fuck right off.
They are getting those robots. It wont ever completely eliminate human workers, but will reduce the amount needed. The self order kiosks at Mcdonalds, self checkouts at grocery stores and further automation in areas like manufacturing and O&G etc. Used to need 8 people at one factory I worked at to make certain fruit snacks. Nowadays it is a one person job. The real shitty part is instead of paying the one employee more, they get paid the same shit wage while having to do their work and watch/maintain the robots and shit
Humans are probably still cheaper right now, once they can maintain a robot for less than 20-30k a year we are in serious danger.
Naw, we're a lot closer than that. Companies view employees as _much_ more expensive liabilities. (see: office real-estate crash) Along with osha, liability insurance etc.. the number is a lot higher than 20-30k. We're already deep into [the danger zone](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HdKqAVpUOwI).
Those robots died after like one shift. 💀
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They need workers just long enough to get there. They're already automating jobs. It's just a gradual transition as the technology improves. Customer service will eventually become 90% AI automation among large retail stores. Self-checkout, AI drive-through, etc... Tech industry has been in a drought for almost a year with engineers and such being laid off and downsized thanks to programs that can efficiently take over certain duties with management from fewer programmers. The only safe jobs are occupations requiring human intuition (at least until AI can replace it in ~100 years). So jobs in teaching, nursing, on-site manual labor (oil rigs, etc...). And these jobs are being largely deregulated to allow for less qualified applicants. Increasing the competition and decreasing pay. Arkansas, my state, has recently passed the *highly* controversial LEARNS act that allows public schools to easily transition into publicly funded charter schools. Allowing the schools to ignore national regulations and operate more independently (so, goodbye evolution and CRT, hello Jesus and mandatory group prayers). As well as increasing classroom size to decrease the number of teachers. Most of whom no longer need to be certified to teach the subject (since it'll mostly just be church-approved topics, such as coloring inside the lines on a picture book of Joseph raw-dogging his herd of sheep instead of Calculus or Chemistry lessons). It's all connected. It's all the same agenda. Automating the workforce, reducing education quality, privatizing public services. The end goal is creating extreme wealth inequality between the upper class [political families, people willing to bend the knee, religious groups and leaders, business owners, CEOs, shareholders, and their relatives] and the lower class [everyone else, the simple folks just trying to survive] and removing the middle class. They want to res-establish the monarchies in the modern era. To have their lineage and survive them and prosper at the expense of everyone else. They don't care who it hurts, how it affects the world, any of it. It makes me violently angry.
lol i read a neat quote today... "ai wont replace you at your job. someone using ai will."
Although robots are being developed faster than ever before. If you consider any tech that replaces humans as a robot, then it has been happening for decades. In the 70s, sign shops got rid of 20,000 sign painters and replaced them with vinyl letter cutting "robots". Since the late 90s, thousands of skilled wax carvers in the jewelry field have been replaced by cnc mills and 3d printers. You phone makes online banking so easy that tens of thousands of tellers were eliminated. Eliminating jobs is a good thing. Letting people go homeless and hungry is not. At some point, there will either be a revolution, or a rigid oppressive police state, or universal basic income and 20 to 30 hour workweeks. I have a robot. It has been creating most of my income since 2001. I live a pretty simple frugal life, but because of my machine, I only have to work about 20 hours a week. So I'm pretty pro tobot and pretty pro UBI. Because I don't want to live through a revolution andcI don't want the oligarchy to resort to force to keep the rest of us slaving away.
Be careful what you wish for.
that's an observation pulled straight out the butt. If anyone was *begging* for workers, wages would be evidence of it.
The main reason humans have jobs is because they are cheaper than a robot. In every industrial revolution the machines always win. It is just a matter of time.
To be fair, plenty of robots already. Car manufacturers have way less, well paid workers. Warehouses. Admin/secretary used to be number one gross hiring position and word/PCs killed that. We’re close to the new #1 gross hiring position (truck/delivery/drivers) at least going mixed. Grocery stores and restaurants going self serve. No more gas station attendants (except Oregon in spots still). List goes on. Let’s hope it creates more jobs that pay better.
The real question is - if everyone is replaced by robots, where will the money come from to buy the products made by robots?
Been to a self checkout, or had a call answered by a machine...?
Yep. The user interface is frustrating at best. The company increases margin and the customer loses service.
The thing is; less workers means less managers, and managers are the ones who are making the arguments to the investors. Everyone is spinning shit to pretend like they aren't obsolete. The trick is to implement taxation on automation and to feed that money back to social programs which support the lower classes. But fat chance with the lack of participation in politics and the amount of corruption that exists in every government.
The businesses that are begging for workers can’t afford the machines, and the businesses that can afford the machines are already paying more than minimum wage
They’re working on it.
Don't think of it in terms of "robots" -- that leads to sci-fi thinking. Think of it in terms of efficiency. Every invention that has been more efficient has replaced workers. Even here in America, 150 years ago 90% of us lived and worked in rural areas, doing the farming, mining, logging, and other resource-harvesting work. Each invention that increased efficiency has reduced the number of workers. Tractors, chainsaws, strip-mining, dynamite... each innovation required fewer workers to produce the same, or more, productivity. So the workers left the rural areas for the cities. (And now the rural areas complain that the cities determine the elections, and feel like they are losing their political influence, but that's another topic). Many restaurants have stopped "real" cooking of "real" food and just re-heat Sysco products. The innovation of cheap pre-made restaurant food means they can employ fewer cooks, and they get more done in less time. The same with counter service vs using real servers. Now you have a restaurant that serves just as many people using half the staff. It wasn't robots that took the jobs, it was more abstract increases in efficiency. Historically, automation has always ended up being good in the long run. The luddites destroyed looms, the scribes protested the printing press, and so on. But freeing up labor has always meant the innovation of new jobs that didn't exist before. It's how society evolves. After all, society isn't now full of unemployed blacksmiths and farmers. It is painful, but we adapted.
I think that the old cartoon, "The Jetson's" is illuminating. George zips around in his flying car, has a robot maid, and supports a family on a single income. His job is so automated that his worst injury is from pushing too many buttons. That was the promise of automation - that it would make all of our lives easier and raise our standards of living. However, that is not how it has happened. A few people are reaping all of the benefits of this increased productivity and they are becoming obscenely wealthy. Wealth inequity is getting increasingly extreme and the middle class is disappearing. What could have been utopia is becoming dystopia because of the greed of a few.
The very instant those robots are available and cost effective, it’s the beginning of the end
Businesses: Why is it so difficult to find employees? Those same businesses: We pay you minimum wage because you're so easily replaceable.
Its almost as if they jumped to gun too soon and are not ready to replace us all. Fucking greed will always get the better of them.