September 8, 2015

Robots on the march.

1. The return of the automat: "Last week, I was in a fast-moving line and browsed on a flat-screen monitor the menu of eight quinoa bowls, each costing $6.95 (burrito bowl, bento bowl, balsamic beet). Then I approached an iPad, where I tapped in my order, customized it and paid. My name, taken from my credit card, appeared on another screen, and when my food was ready, a number showed up next to it. It corresponded to a cubby where my food would soon appear. The cubbies are behind transparent LCD screens that go black when the food is deposited, so no signs of human involvement are visible. With two taps of my finger, my cubby opened and my food was waiting."

2. The search for robots that can pick tomatoes and cut lettuce and spinach and shake almond trees: "Machines don't yet exist for these crops because there have been ample people to do the work, and because it's hard to design machines that can cut or pick the fruit or vegetables without squishing or damaging them too much.... 'There's an urgent need to develop engineering solutions for a lot of fresh-market fruit and vegetable crops,' Matthew Whiting, an associate professor and extension specialist at Washington State University who works with the sweet cherry industry, tells The Salt. 'The shortage of skilled harvest labor is on every grower's mind.'"

59 comments:

MayBee said...

What harm can come of pushing high minimum wages and the "health" value of local, farm-to-table foods?

rehajm said...

When you raise the minimum wage and mandate more and more benefits, you mobilize the robot troops.

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

Back when I was a kid, my elderly Aunt Martha thought it was a vital part of my education that she take me to lunch in the city at the Horn & Hardart automat because it was about to close.

To me it was just a weird way to get a baloney sandwich.

Much, much later on, as an adult I saw some black and white movie where some of the scenes took place in the kitchen of an automat. Not much of a revelation, really. I don't remember the name of the movie or even who was in it.

Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.

CJinPA said...

"Machines don't yet exist for these crops because there have been ample people to do the work..."

Really? I was specifically informed by my betters that there were not enough people to do the work. That's why we had to import them.

I'm crestfallen to learn that yet another major issue in this country has been debated dishonestly.

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

Mr. Intertube informs me that it was That Touch of Mink (1962).

It's hard to believe that Doris Day was considered a tasty dish, back in the day.

Maybe they patterned the character of Peggy Olson after her or something.

cubanbob said...

Yes lets raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Capital idea. Lets take people who are barely employable at the current minimum wage and make them permanently unemployable. Brilliant.

Big Mike said...

Wait until they start teaching law school ...

Ann Althouse said...

I don't think we should preserve jobs that can be done with robots. Free us from all the drudgery that can be done by machines.

Michael K said...

" Free us from all the drudgery that can be done by machines."

Yes, and from kids learning how to hold a job. Of course, most teenagers are unemployed because illegals have taken all the minimum wage jobs we did 60 years ago.

cubanbob said...

Ann Althouse said...
I don't think we should preserve jobs that can be done with robots. Free us from all the drudgery that can be done by machines.

9/8/15, 12:04 PM"

What do you propose to do with people who can't do other work? Its just a function of time and money to automate a lot of manual work when government mandates makes it cheaper to spend a lot on capital equipment upfront to save operating costs down the line. What are you proposing to do with people who simply aren't smart enough to do knowledge work? Pay ever higher taxes to keep them on welfare?

Bruce Hayden said...

Cubanbob asks the obvious questions (at least to those who think this through, which leaves out most of the left, and most of those in academia) But I think that it is even worse. We already have an unemployable underclass. - which has become so obvious with the BLM (Black Lives Matter) movement. The BLM movement. Essentially revolves around unemployable Black males who can't get jobs, and. Get into trouble just hanging around. They aren't going to write poetry and climb mountains in their forced leisure, but rather more likely will be doing drugs, running in gangs, and, in general, terrorizing their communities with their violence. Do we really want more Big Mike Browns, Treyvon Martins, etc? That is seemingly what Ann has in mind.

Bruce Hayden said...

What I don't understand is the heartlessness of the left. By raising the minimum wage so much, they guarantee that many of those who were supposed to benefit from it are instead made unemployed. The money to pay this very steep increase has to come from somewhere, and when employees can be efficiently and economically replaced by automation, they will be. The margins in many of these businesses allow for nothing else.

Hagar said...

In 1954 a friend and I stayed alive by picking raspberries for 1 to 2 dollars a day and sleeping in the farmer's toolshed for 3 weeks while waiting for a job to open up, or time to go back to school (in my case, the draft), whichever came first.

The Obamas of this world are working hard to make it impossible for young people - or anyone else for that matter - to manage for themselves anymore.

Hagar said...

They think we would be better of if were jailed as vagrants?

Sam L. said...

Ah, the automated Automat, Horn & Hardart Robots, Inc.

alan markus said...

I myself look forward to the day where I can just walk up to a terminal at a fast food place and punch in my order. Between my inability to hear when there is background noise, and front counter help that can't enunciate worth a crap, it will make my life a bit easier. I do as much as I can online too as far as ordering & customer service, to avoid having to do it on the phone. I live 10 minutes from a Pizza Hut - I order online, drive over there, and it is done within 5 minutes of when I get there.

Someday soon, I expect that a customer will be able to sit down at a table in a place like Applebee, and have the option of using their tablet to order or wait for a waitress to come to the table. And pay when you are done using the same tablet. When the waitress brings the drinks or food to the table, there will be opportunities to "upsell" or demonstrate enhanced service. I find the time waiting for the waitress to come take your order or waiting for the bill is the most time consuming parts of the restaurant experience.

As to the minimum wage- recently read somewhere that some restaurants are dealing with that by upping the prices in conjunction with a no-tip policy.

Big Mike said...

I don't think we should preserve jobs that can be done with robots. Free us from all the drudgery that can be done by machines.

Just exactly like teaching law school!!!

Michael K said...

"What are you proposing to do with people who simply aren't smart enough to do knowledge work? Pay ever higher taxes to keep them on welfare?"

Yes, that is what is coming. The problem is that the Muslims will invade and take the welfare, first in Europe, then here. Then they will riot when we attempt to take away the rice bowl. The BLM is only the first outriders of the future.

Guns and walls are in your future. I'm old enough I won't have to deal with that dystopian world the left will give us.

alan markus said...

When I say "their" tablet, I mean one supplied by the restaurant.

Nonapod said...

Maybe we should go back to pre-cotton gin, pre-tractors, pre-assembly line days; that way we'll have a lot more jobs for everyone. We could probably create all sorts of new jobs. And toiling in the fields with hand tools for 14 hours a day will make us all more awesome.

Roost on the Moon said...

Apparently, the only time a heavy-handed government policy can spur innovation is when it helps an internet conservative win an argument.

I do think minimum wage opponents are right that we will see tons of job loss in these cities, due to innovation in automation. It's just funny that they don't connect the dots and realize how badly that winning argument undermines their worldview.

Ignorance is Bliss said...

Roost on the Moon said...

Apparently, the only time a heavy-handed government policy can spur innovation is when it helps an internet conservative win an argument.

I do think minimum wage opponents are right that we will see tons of job loss in these cities, due to innovation in automation. It's just funny that they don't connect the dots and realize how badly that winning argument undermines their worldview.


And another liberal shows that they don't grasp the broken windows fallacy...

Todd said...

Ann Althouse said...
I don't think we should preserve jobs that can be done with robots. Free us from all the drudgery that can be done by machines.
9/8/15, 12:04 PM


This is of course a piece of a larger puzzle. Governments at all levels (mostly driven by progressives) have forced more costs onto businesses that have tasks to be performed. These businesses (being in these specific lines of work) know what these tasks are worth from a acquisition perspective. All businesses want tasks performed as efficiently and cheaply as possible in order to maximize value. Humans (currently) are the most versatile of "tools" for a wide variety of jobs. When government raises the costs of these tools beyond a curtain point, either those positions go away or the business goes away or the business finds a less expensive "tool" to do those tasks with. In this case automation. Replace people with machines and hire one person with more skills to take care of servicing the machines.

As others have noted, the "old" way was kids get minimum wage jobs to earn some money and start to understand the responsibilities of having to maintain a job. Start to become skilled and either get a raise or you now qualify for a better job somewhere else that pays more.

The employer was taking a risk with an unknown employee (unknown skills, unknown level of responsibility, etc.) and the employer paid a unskilled wage, compensating him for the efforts beyond pay that needed to be given to the novice employee.

Progressives started messing with this formula (what was it now, about) a dozen years ago when they started in with this "living wage" crap. These minimum wage, no skills jobs were NEVER meant to sustain a family. They were meant to teach people the skills required to hold down a job. Suddenly these evil business owners were holding their employees hostage and paying them sub-standard wages! These poor employees were virtual slaves! Too few people call them out on this crap and so politicians are now forcing minimum wages up and forcing additional benefits in. The result is (unexpectedly!) fewer minimum wage jobs, fewer young people being able to get their first jobs early and fewer opportunities to learn the "social" skills needed to get and keep a job.

It is a crime that the government has conspired to make it more economical to many businesses to replace people with machines. The trading of manual labor for machine labor was underway and generally a good thing but due to the current economic and regulatory climate, this movement has been accelerated with no corresponding "blue water" available to take those that are unemployed. Add in the additional pressures of under-employment where you have people with degrees (no matter how useless) taking jobs that used to be held by high-schoolers and that leave even less for them. Those that are underemployed are in a trap of their own as they wind up not earning enough to follow the typical post-collage path due to needing to pay off their school loans, leaving little extra for getting their lives going.

MayBee said...

I do think minimum wage opponents are right that we will see tons of job loss in these cities, due to innovation in automation. It's just funny that they don't connect the dots and realize how badly that winning argument undermines their worldview.

Please explain.

cubanbob said...

@alan markus five will get you ten that within five years there will be an app on your phone to do exactly that-place the order and make the payment with a robot to deliver the meal at the drive thru window and perhaps even at the table service.

Bruce Hayden and Micheal K, I'm not a Luddite. I'm a businessman and not opposed to technology and cost reduction. However I'm also a citizen and a net taxpayer and don't see the need to accelerate a process of terrible societal dysfunction. I would much rather eliminate minimum wage laws outright and let those who on their own are productive enough to be worth paying a relatively decent wage package earn it and those head of household adults who can't get paid enough because they aren't worth it get EITC and Medicare to cover the difference. At least those individuals will be partially supporting themselves in an honest and noble fashion and a public good will be paid by for the most part by the entirety of the public instead of the dishonest method of having a private party foot the bill for a public good. Why it's even in the Constitution under the takings clause.

So back we go, do we have a shortage of poor people in this country we need to import more poor people who for the most part aren't of high enough IQ to be able to perform knowledge work when already have too many relatively low IQ people already here and on public assistance? Do we need to create more civil service jobs in order to provide more work for welfare state workers for those who for whatever reason will not work in the private sector? Our hostess is against drudgery work. Fine. However I would like to hear her views on outsourcing the drudgery of boilerplate legal language in contracts to algorithms of sophisticated legal software programs with the output checked by QC people in third world English language countries like India. Think of the savings to the clients! Think of the drudge work not done by lawyers and their paralegals. And let's not forget the drudgery of the law professors in teaching the boilerplate. Perhaps with better written laws and regulations using the standards of precision used in STEM professions most civil legal work could be contracted out to robots and disputes settled by robots.

Ignorance is Bliss said...

MayBee said...

Please explain.

Roost thinks that because government intervention results in innovation in this area, that shows that the government intervention is a good thing- it leads to innovation. (S)he fails to understand that the resources that went into that innovation could have been used for even more productive innovation if not redirected in response to the government intervention.

Next Roost will suggest that we throw bricks through windows, as that will lead to increased economic activity to replace the windows.

HoodlumDoodlum said...

Roost on the Moon said...It's just funny that they don't connect the dots and realize how badly that winning argument undermines their worldview.

I like to laugh, Roost, maybe you can help me with this one. How does an understanding of the idea of labor substitutes undermine the "internet conservative" worldview?

rehajm said...

Ann Althouse said...
I don't think we should preserve jobs that can be done with robots. Free us from all the drudgery that can be done by machines.


I would have happily freed a few of my grade school teachers from their drudgery by replacing them with Khan Academy.

HoodlumDoodlum said...

Take your pick:

They Might Be Giants: Robot Parade

Flight of the Conchords: Robots (The Humans are Dead)

Bonus video:

Beck: Hell Yes

MayBee said...

Ahh, thanks Ig.

Roost on the Moon said...

Roost thinks...that shows that the government intervention is a good thing.

Nope! Just not automatically bad, the way an econ 101 student would have it.

But it's not the broken windows fallacy, for multiple reasons. In the broken windows fallacy, the beginning state is the same as the end, you've just paid the repairman more. Here, you have a permanent gain to productivity. In the broken windows fallacy, the destruction leads to more total labor. Here, you get less total labor.

See? The BWF is a fallacy because although the repairman's profits go up, the system as a whole is poorer. If that's not the dynamic, there's no fallacy going on.

We could coin a new phrase, the broken broken windows fallacy fallacy. It's when you avoid thinking about what's actually happening because you're pretty sure you figured it all out when you were 19.

cubanbob said...

Roost on the Moon said...
Roost thinks...that shows that the government intervention is a good thing.

Nope! Just not automatically bad, the way an econ 101 student would have it.

But it's not the broken windows fallacy, for multiple reasons. In the broken windows fallacy, the beginning state is the same as the end, you've just paid the repairman more. Here, you have a permanent gain to productivity."

Do you really? if you are going to make economic arguments, make a real one and not a strawman argument. Perhaps you should consider thinking about mis-allocation of capital and the relative loss of output and productivity that result from non-market or politically skewed government incentives.

Ignorance is Bliss said...

The fallacy is that you are counting the direct economic activity you can see because it is an obvious result of your action, and ignoring the second-order effects that you don't see.

And while it is clear that you are avoiding thinking about what's actually happening because you're pretty sure you figured it all out when you were 19, the name the broken broken windows fallacy fallacy probably isn't going to catch on.

Ignorance is Bliss said...

Also note:

The automation costs more than the original labor before the minimum wage increase ( otherwise the automation would have happened anyway. ) So the businesses still lose, just a bit less than they would have before.

And all that labor that you freed up? It is now unemployed. The old job had been its most productive use, but not productive enough for the new wage. Yes, maybe some of those people will be retrained, and can become productive enough to get a new job. But if you look at the unemployment rate among low-skill workers, even with the current job training programs, there is no reason to think much of that labor will get used.

John henry said...

I went to the McDonalds in Milan near the cathedral in June and it was completely automated. I got a Coke and fries from a kiosk swiped my card got a receipt with the number and then pick the order up from a window with no human interaction.

in the chilis next to Rosemont Center in Chicago each table has a tablet from which you order a wait person brings the order and you pay swiping your card in the tablet.

they also have something similar in the Delta terminal at JFK Airport.

this is nothing new but I expect we will see more of it as wages go up. There are also automated systems for cooking hamburgers putting them on a bun along with ketchup lettuce etc.

1 new technology that I believe is groundbreaking is collaborative robots google them to find out more or go to packaging digest.com and you can find some articles I have written about them.

we have been automating like crazy for two centuries now and life just gets better for everyone. but it is disruptive.

John Henry

Bob R said...

I don't see anyone arguing that low-skill/low-wage jobs should be "preserved." Preservation would require active human intervention. All the intervention in the markets comes from people who would have these jobs destroyed. (Of course, they don't want the jobs destroyed, they want the Walmart greeter and a kid whose biggest accomplishment for the day is showing up on time with a clean uniform to be paid the same as a carpenter or a welder.)

Also note that two interventions favored by very different political groups - immigration restriction and raising the minimum - have very similar effects on employers.

Oh, and I realize that Althouse didn't actually say, "Let them work as lawyers," but the facts didn't work out for Marie Antoinette. Good luck with that.

John henry said...

Henry Ford was nuts about automation in about 1915 he said never use a person to do what a machine can do. he thought everything should be automated.

by automating Ford created more jobs and he destroyed and was able to pay twice the going wage the famous $5 a day wage.

Automation may get rid of the waiter and Chili's or Applebee's but it will create other jobs that we cannot even imagine at the state right now.

want to know how automation creates jobs? read Henry Ford's 1923 autobiography my life and work best book on the subject ever written

John Henry

tim in vermont said...

I noticed in the Burlington Free Press today that these workers are known as "migrant farmers."

John henry said...

secretary used to be a common job with tens of millions of women working out at basically pounding a typewriter all day and answering the phone. Anyone want to go back to those days?

How many secretaries are there now?

Are all those women mostly women now unemployed?

Nope. they are doing other things and are being much more productive and for the most part earning more money.

In case you haven't guessed by now I am a huge automation fan. yes, it is disruptive but in the long run everybody gains.

John Henry

tim in vermont said...

I think what we need is more illegal immigration. History is replete with examples of increasing both the supply and the price of labor. Bernie Sanders told me so, he say that in no way is it like pushing a string! Ok, He didn't say that, but he seems to think it.

John henry said...

as for not being able to harvest tomatoes by machine just go to youtube and search automated tomato harvesting plenty of video of actual machinery

see also video of a completely automated milking operation where the cows wonder into the barn and get hooked up and milk automatically with no humans.

Anything can be automated the technology is not the problem the reason some things are not currently automated is strictly economics.

John Henry

Todd said...

John said...

Automation may get rid of the waiter and Chili's or Applebee's but it will create other jobs that we cannot even imagine at the state right now.

John Henry
9/8/15, 3:25 PM


That is very true but those jobs will require skill sets that are not compatible with those used in today's minimum wage world. To make matters worst, the US today, as a culture does not value the things needed to create a workforce for that tomorrow (where there is much automation and many new, as yet undreamed jobs). We are quickly reaching the point where "you can't get there from here". Society as it exists today is layered upon thousands of critical yesterdays. We are undercutting our own culture and standard of living. How many people today understand how anything works? All modern technology is constructed on a foundation of the technology from the day before. We are not producing enough STEM grads to keep this machine of progress fed. We are still [honestly] coasting on the speed of progress we built up from the 50s to the late 90s. New math, common core, PC, the war against boys, it is all killing most of education and we are turning out more and more credentialed idiots.

It saddens me that there are no jetpack or flying cars in my future...

tim in vermont said...

as for not being able to harvest tomatoes by machine just go to youtube and search automated tomato harvesting plenty of video of actual machinery

I have picked vegetables by hand in the past for one of those places that had a hugely successful farm stand on the highway and a large vegetable farm in the back. The trick was to select the ones that were ready that day. We had to know how the area around the stem of a melon should be properly "checked" and to pick tomatoes when they first blushed orange, so that would ripen properly to top a hamburger without needing "tomato gas," same kinds of things with green beans, you didn't want to harvest a row of beans just once, you wanted to maximize the number of perfect beans you got, corn too. You could tell by feeling the end of an ear if it was ready that day.

I suppose you could just plant more acreage to make up for the losses, and engineer the plants, etc, but something will be lost.

cubanbob said...

John said...
secretary used to be a common job with tens of millions of women working out at basically pounding a typewriter all day and answering the phone. Anyone want to go back to those days?

How many secretaries are there now?

Are all those women mostly women now unemployed?

Nope. they are doing other things and are being much more productive and for the most part earning more money.

In case you haven't guessed by now I am a huge automation fan. yes, it is disruptive but in the long run everybody gains.

John Henry

9/8/15, 3:34 PM"

This country has 316 million souls. About 94 million adults are not in the labor force. As in not working. A lot of the 94 million might have been secretaries in the past. Now to be sure there are no doubt a rather large number of adults out of the workforce for very good reasons like woman (or men) raising children but that doesn't come close to covering 94 million. Secretaries did/do require a fair amount of IQ to be good at their jobs and as such could get jobs that require a bit of smarts. Dishwashers, garbage men and farm laborers don't. While automation is inevitable and ultimately desirable (at least from a business perspective) accelerating the need for automation to minimize artificially high labor costs and thus artificially creating unemployment isn't necessarily a good thing.

Ignorance is Bliss said...

Todd-

Don't worry. Pretty soon the machines will replace the STEM grads too.

madAsHell said...

Almond tree shakers. have been around for at least 40 years.

Michael K said...

"do we have a shortage of poor people in this country "

Poor Roost really does not understand Bastiat.

Automation was going to continue. All the left has done with "minimum wage" is to accelerate a trend and present the problem of low IQ even faster than it might have occurred naturally.

The major problem with "guaranteed annual income" is that it creates an ignorant and violent leisure class. In "Brave New World" the epsilons were happy in their menial work. Now, we have a whole population of low IQ people with nothing to do but get into social pathology. They are not equipped for passive behavior.

The Godfather said...

I assume that when our genial blog hostess said that we should welcome our new robot masters who will "free us from all the drudgery that can be done by machines", she had her tongue firmly in her cheek. If she were farther away from retirement, she'd be as worried about lawprofs being replaced by MOOCs as hamburger flippers at MacDonalds are worried about robot flippers, IPad orders, etc.

The fact is that if we leave the market alone, it will solve these problems. There are advantages to hand-picking vegetables, for example. Customers will pay more for them. That preference sets the price of vegetable-picking labor. If people are allowed to pick vegetables at that price, they will be employed, and customers will enjoy hand-picked vegetables. If the Government says Thou shalt not pay vegetable-pickers less than x$ per hour, and that price won't clear the market, the robots will take over. The vegetable pickers will be out of work, and consumers will have to settle for robot-picked vegetables.

You really can no more escape the laws of economics than you can the laws of physics. It's just that you can delude yourself longer in the former case, before you crash.

But crash you will.

HoodlumDoodlum said...

Roost, if you're arguing against the idea that there are a fixed # of jobs and bringing more people in to the workforce won't result in more unemployment the fallacy you want to reference is lump of labor not broken windows.

Mandating a minimum wage above the market clearing wage, though, necessarily involves employing fewer people unless you also shift the S or D curves themselves. The effects of increasing the minimum wage of localities by small amounts over long periods of time have (in the US) generally been smaller than one would expect pre-change, so it's fair to say that some dire predictions about what a min. wage increase will d are overstated. A large national increase, though, to a level close to (or even higher than!) the median wage of given locations, will certainly be disruptive and have large unintended consequences.

Gabriel said...

There isn't a "shortage of skilled workers", in agriculture or STEM.

There is a "shortage of people who will work for what we want to offer."

And that's the plain truth. Warren Buffet would pick my asparagus if I paid him enough.

In the absence of massive immigration fraud and minimum wage laws, the wage of skilled pickers and software engineers would rise while farmers and tech companies bid for the best legal workers.

I would like to hire a 100,000 five-year-olds to work in my asbestos mines with their tiny skilled hands for $2.50 an hour. But the labor laws don't let me do that so I have a "shortage of workers". So please, government, issue for my business exemptions from these laws to address my "shortage".

JackWayne said...

Ann, please relieve your ignorance by reading up on Schumpeter's creative destruction. Your comment is inhuman in my opinion. And when you do read about Schumpeter, tell me how the government setting the minimum wage has ANYTHING to do with creative destruction. An here's a little hint about economics. One reason businesses have not switched to robots is - wait for it - the robots are more expensive than human labor. For example, if robots are $14/hr then human labor at $9 is a good deal. But if the wage is boosted to $15, then robots are the good deal. This is strictly a government disaster caused by YOU. Because YOU don't know economics from shinola.

CubanBob, I know I'm tilting against windmills here but PLEASE don't buy into the big lie told by lefties about Luddites. They were NOT anti-science. They were crofters who spun wool in their cottages. They were a proto-Union. And their protest was that the mills were taking their work away from them. They wanted feather-bedding.

Ignorance is Bliss said...

Gabriel said...

Warren Buffet would pick my asparagus if I paid him enough.

There's a euphemism I'd never heard before. But I'm sure he would.

Known Unknown said...

"What I don't understand is the heartlessness of the left. By raising the minimum wage so much, they guarantee that many of those who were supposed to benefit from it are instead made unemployed"

No, that's all part of the program. More unemployed = more on welfare = more votes for those who champion welfare.

It's all part of the same power play in the guise of compassion.

cubanbob said...

Jack Wayne I am referring to Luddites not as they actually were but as they are portrayed as a metaphor in common usage.

As I mentioned earlier in the thread change is inevitable but government policies that artificially drive the cost of labor to the point of replacing labor with automation solely due to artificially inflated costs does nothing to help the poor. Indeed what the leftist don't understand is from an employer's perspective more often than not the most expensive employee is the minimum wage worker when the total cost of employment is taken into consideration versus the value of the output and productivity.

Saint Croix said...

Sometimes there's not a cafe post and I try to shoehorn some awesome short movie into some thread that's kinda on point sorta. And Robots on the March is pretty close because this movie has the Terminator and R2-D2.

Also Al Pacino, Tom Cruise a couple of Jedi Knights and Blade. Who aren't robots, but work as click-bait maybe.

Sorry for the Bee Gees music, though. That's like click-kryptonite. Maybe I should have kept the Bee Gees to myself. It's a pretty awesome example of film editing, anyway. My film professors are circulating this so I thought I would share.

Rusty said...

I'm always amused when liberals purport to be for the little guy and then pass laws that hurt the little guy.
The economics of labor isn't a zero sum game. While the buggy whip industry is gone forever except as an artisan craft industry. Those buggy whip making skills proved useful in other industries. While automation progresses so do offshoots that don't require any automation or sophisticated labor.
Liberals should quit speaking for the "working man". They have no idea what they're talking about.

BN said...

First come the robots, then life extension, then the one-child policy, then the no-child policy, then... Interesting times.

mikee said...

I have had long online arguments where people insist that increased minimum wages don't decrease minimum wage employment numbers, don't increase consumer prices, and don't impact the economy significantly.

I am not an economist, and don't know how right or wrong they are.

But I do run a business, and if I offer a day laborer $8/h then pay him $10/h at the end of the last day out of three, he is happy and will work for me again. But if I offer him $10/h and pay him that, every day for two days, instead of three paid days, he is angry with me. Go figure.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

Progressives conveniently elide the fact the alternate wage to the minimum is $0.00 -- the amount "earned" by the worker who is not employed now because the "minimum" wages are too great for their skill set. There's always a lower minimum than what they propose. That's why there's a black market for day labor!