The Obama jobs recovery has been driven by part-time, low paying, service jobs like clerks, waitresses, and burger flippers. The “liberal” solution to an economy that only creates shitty jobs is to force employers to pay higher wages to the people performing these menial low skill level jobs. The higher cities, states and the feds raise their minimum wages, the more effort will be put into replacing these workers with robots who are never late, never call in sick, never ask for a raise, and never complain about working conditions. Just a little squirt of oil once in a while and they are happy. Technology will continue to replace low-skill workers until the oil runs dry. If you have no thinking skills, you can probably be replaced by a robot. The liberals will counter this inevitable trend by trying to unionize the robots.
“360 Burgers per Hour” – Meet the Burger Flipping Robot that Could Change Fast Food Forever
Politicians aside, I think that the vast majority of people pushing for a higher minimum wage are well intentioned. A good example of this is Nick Hanaeur in his recent article about how pitchfork’s are coming for the 0.01%. His article garnered an incredible amount of attention, and rightly so, but was in my opinion greatly lacking in solutions. While he accurately identified the perilousness of the current transformation of America into an undemocratic oligarchy, his primary solution revolved around raising the minimum wage. This is a superficial and largely meaningless answer to a symptom of a very structural problem.
If you want to solve structural problems you need structural solutions, and raising the minimum wage is not a structural solution. In case you missed it, I outlined my thoughts on the matter in the post: The Pitchforks are Coming…– A Dire Warning from a Member of the 0.01%.
Equally important, the entire argument of raising the minimum wage cannot be had without discussing the impact of technology. As I and many others have highlighted over the past several years, one of the most troubled segments of the U.S. economy consists of fast food workers. They simply cannot survive on the wages being paid to them by employers and need food stamps, disability and second jobs merely to make ends meet. In theory, raising the minimum wage will help these folks the most, but will it really? I think not.
The main reason is that if employers are forced to pay these employee more, the employers in this industry are likely to move as quickly as possibly to fast-food preparing robots. This isn’t just some pie in the sky fantasy either, there’s a company called Momentum Machines that has already assembled a product that can make a burger in 10 seconds, or 360 burgers per hour. Raw Story recently reported on this and here is what they said:
A robot that can make 360 burgers an hour could put many fast-food workers out of a job – exactly as its designers intended.
Silicon Valley-based Momentum Machines developed the device, which is more like an assembly line than a humanoid robot, reported Singularity Hub.
“Our device isn’t meant to make employees more efficient,” said Momentum co-founder Alexandros Vardakostas. “It’s meant to completely obviate them.”
The company says the burger-flipping robot could take the place of two or three line cooks and save restaurant owners about $90,000 a year in salary and benefits.
The robots also reduce liability, management duties, and the space needed to prepare food, the website reported.
Some restaurant owners could use those savings to improve the quality of ingredients – basically offering gourmet burgers at fast-food prices – but others could offer the same quality food at lower prices.
Oxford University researchers predicted in a recent study that 47 percent of U.S. jobs were at risk of being automated within 20 years – especially service occupations, where most recent job growth has occurred.
The folks at Momentum Machines are very serious about their undertaking and boast an impressive pedigree. Its website boasts that:
Our team was trained in mechanical engineering, control systems, and physics at top tier institutions: Berkeley, Stanford, UCSB, and USC. We draw from work experience that includes cutting edge firms such as: Tesla, NASA, Semiconductor Technology Associates, etc. Our investors are tier one venture firms and we are advised by the best in the restaurant industry.
Moreover, if Oxford University is correct, up to half of U.S. jobs could be threatened by automation. Raising the minimum wage doesn’t do any good if it causes your job to disappear faster.
As I have written for years, we need radical structural change to address the real root problems in America. These problems including central banking and the Federal Reserve‘s unaccountable power, TBTF banks, corporate interests running Washington D.C., a disappearance of the rule of the law, the surveillance state and out of control intelligence agencies, the militarization of the domestic police force, corruption, and an overly aggressive foreign policy.
Calling for an increase in the minimum wage sounds good, but it is a superficial and ultimately meaningless solution. If we want to be serious about change, we need to seriously and radically address the issues listed above.
In Liberty,
Michael Krieger
Minimum wage solves nothing. You ass-curs are always asking for solutions. Well, I have it. It’s called … Universal Wages.
Everyone, no matter what the full-time job, makes the same exact wage. I say we start at $100,000. That’s $208,000 per year.
Sure, there may be some problems with the idea. Some may even say it’s Communism. Fucken name callers!! Some will say we’ll have zero doctors … why study and work your ass off when you can make the same money as a night security guard, where you can watch porn. I don’t care. We’ll figure it out.
I love the idea because the math behind it is just awesome.
Say there are 100 million people working full time. (Actually the numbers will quickly shoot up to 250,000,000 as even grade-schoolers will open up full time Lemonade Stand businesses. But, for now, let’s stick with 100M.) Well, $208,000 x 100 million people = a really large number.
$20,800,000,000,000. That’s trillion, folks. You tax it at 50%, and our current $17 trillion dollar debt is gone in under 2 years. At the same time we can build 1,000 aircraft carriers per year, and fix every pothole in the country. The benefits far outweigh the problems. You gotta be a fuckin moran to not like this idea.
Stuck
I’m a CPA and I can find no holes in your plan. It’s a win win. You are on your way to being elected President of the United States
Admin
My maf is correct, right?
BTW, this morning I refrained from eating my own shit. I can learn new tricks!
Stuck –
I don’t know if you remember, but many months ago, I posted a little ditty about having dinner with my little brother, and this is exactly what he proposed as a solution to our problems! The maf may not have been the same, as I don’t remember what he thought the universal minimum wage should be, but he proposed that every gang banger in Dallas receive a living wage, and, somehow, magically, my wages shoot up at the same time, too.
Fucking bizarre how the people have been indoctrinated.
Turns out, even if you have thinking skills, you can still be replaced by a robot.
This will be great, once we figure out a way to tax the robots.
A few years ago, I thought robots taking over 80% of the jobs was far-fetched. Now, I am not so naive. The media has been steadily seeding these articles into the news cycle for some time now, and as we all know they deliberately telegraph social engineering plans well in advance.
By the way if anyone knows how to get certified in human-replacement robot repair without being an MIT grad, please let me know in the comments. The only jobs left will soon be lawyers and robot repairmen.
The speed of automatization and the advance in technology that is happening is something that will have far greater effects that we can imagine. It will profoundly change our society. Hopefully for the best, but I wonder. It could also be disastrous.
Everything will be just fine until the T1000 series.
After that you better have a dog.
Do what you will and give everybody the same pay, in a few years the same greedy bastards will end up with all the money. Assisted by dumb ass women who spend it all and run up the debt. It didn’t start with Madame Bovary, it’s been going on forever. Which is why the bible tells you to not trust anybody, not even the woman who sleeps next to you.
Of course eliminating whopper floppers with a robot flopper will only result in more people on welfare.
Sure the cost of the burger may go down…but who wants to eat that crap anyway?
I would rather grill my own steak, cook my chicken, no not choke it Stucky, and bake my own bread.
I see no benefit to a robot chef, besides, does a robot now the difference between moldy bread, mushy tomatos or bad meat?
And who will insert the tomatoes, lettuce, mayo, mustard, meat and pickles into the bins the falsely named converyor belt this ‘robot’ is?
I’m not interested in a sandwich-making robot, unless it’s a post-coitus sandwich-making robot.
You’ll have to lube her up with WD-40 ISKA. Those are cold bitches. You have to have a huge memory stick before they come across.
The “liberal” solution to an economy that only creates shitty jobs is to force employers to pay higher wages to the people performing these menial low skill level jobs.
The solution is to get rid of the Fed & go to sound money that doesn’t depreciate in value. U can’t increase the poor’s wages fast enough to get ahead of the Fed’s counterfeiting scheme.
Kaboom.
Ah, the joke will still be on the fast food joints.
They, just like Wally World, and just like the automakers, will soon find out that their employees, and their families, were also their best customers.
Firing your customers seems to be a theme in mega-corporate ‘murica. The fools don’t even realize, nor ever acknowledge, that this is EXACTLY what their profit-generating plans now amount too.
All of these companies are experiencing shrinking sales thanks to automation AND offshoring.
Cutting your expenses by further automating and buying more cheap shit from Asia isn’t going to fix the problem. Just kick the end a wee bit further down the road.
Amazing how the Chinese take the long road, and we continuously, over and over, shoot ourselves in our own feet just viewing the short road.
This place is going to be insane someday. Absolutely, can’t leave your house, fucknuts, insane.
NAFTA Is 20 Years Old – Here Are 20 Facts That Show How It Is Destroying The Economy
#1 More than 845,000 American workers have been officially certified for Trade Adjustment Assistance because they lost their jobs due to imports from Mexico or Canada or because their factories were relocated to those nations.
#2 Overall, it is estimated that NAFTA has cost us well over a million jobs.
#3 U.S. manufacturers pay Mexican workers just a little over a dollar an hour to do jobs that American workers used to do.
#4 The number of illegal immigrants living in the United States has more than doubled since the implementation of NAFTA.
#5 In the year before NAFTA, the U.S. had a trade surplus with Mexico and the trade deficit with Canada was only 29.6 billion dollars. Last year, the U.S. had a combined trade deficit with Mexico and Canada of 177 billion dollars.
#6 It has been estimated that the U.S. economy loses approximately 9,000 jobs for every 1 billion dollars of goods that are imported from overseas.
#7 One professor has estimated that cutting the total U.S. trade deficit in half would create 5 million more jobs in the United States.
#8 Since the auto industry bailout, approximately 70 percent of all GM vehicles have been built outside the United States. In fact, many of them are now being built in Mexico.
#9 NAFTA hasn’t worked out very well for Mexico either. Since 1994, the average yearly rate of economic growth in Mexico has been less than one percent.
#10 The exporting of massive amounts of government-subsidized U.S. corn down into Mexico has destroyed more than a million Mexican jobs and has helped fuel the continual rise in the number of illegal immigrants coming north.
#11 Someone making minimum wage in Mexico today can buy 38 percent fewer consumer goods than the day before NAFTA went into effect.
#12 Overall, the United States has lost a total of more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities since 2001.
#13 Back in the 1980s, more than 20 percent of the jobs in the United States were manufacturing jobs. Today, only about 9 percent of the jobs in the United States are manufacturing jobs.
#14 We have fewer Americans working in manufacturing today than we did in 1950 even though our population has more than doubled since then.
#15 Back in 1950, more than 80 percent of all men in the United States had jobs. Today, only 65 percent of all men in the United States have jobs.
#16 As I wrote about recently, one out of every six men in their prime working years (25 to 54) do not have a job at this point.
#17 Because we have shipped millions of jobs overseas, the competition for the jobs that remain has become extremely intense and this has put downward pressure on wages. Right now, half the country makes $27,520 a year or less from their jobs.
#18 When adults cannot get decent jobs, it is often children that suffer the most. It is hard to believe, but more than one out of every five children in the United States is living in poverty in 2014.
#19 In 1994, only 27 million Americans were on food stamps. Today, more than 46 million Americans are on food stamps.
#20 According to Professor Alan Blinder of Princeton University, 40 million more U.S. jobs could be sent offshore over the next two decades if current trends continue.
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/nafta-is-20-years-old-here-are-20-facts-that-show-how-it-is-destroying-the-economy
J ust
O ver
B roke
And what happens when robots can do everything better than us?
Because there are fewer middle class jobs available, the competition for the remaining jobs has become incredibly intense. In recent years, millions of Americans have been forced to take just about anything that they can get. For those Americans, “just over broke” has become “just trying to survive” as they scratch and claw their way through life.
…one out of every four part-time workers in America is living below the poverty line. The “working poor” is a phrase that describes a very large segment of the U.S. population today.
And the cold, hard truth of the matter is that most of the country is steadily getting poorer. According to a study recently discussed in the New York Times, the “typical American household” is now worth 36 percent less than it was worth a decade ago. That is a staggering decline in just ten years.
Meanwhile, the cost of living continues to rise.
According to one recent study, 40 percent of all households in the United States are experiencing financial stress right now and the homeownership rate for Americans under the age of 35 is at an all-time low.
In the old days, if you got your education, worked hard and did all the right things, it was just about an automatic ticket to the middle class.
Today it doesn’t work like that.
Instead, more Americans than ever are being forced to become dependent on the government. If you can believe it, Americans received more than 2 trillion dollars in benefits from the federal government last year alone.
So it astounds me whenever I hear anyone say that the economy is in “good shape”.
How can it be in “good shape” when one out of every three adults in the United States has an unpaid debt that is “in collections” and there are 49 million Americans that are dealing with food insecurity?
The truth is that we are in the midst of a long-term economic decline that is the result of decades of incredibly foolish decisions.
Until the American people start understanding what has happened to us, they are never going to demand real change that actually accomplishes something.
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/job-just-over-broke
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/188047-by-2025-sexbots-will-be-commonplace-which-is-just-fine-as-well-all-be-unemployed-and-bored-thanks-to-robots-stealing-our-jobs
Bonjour,
since 1984 I have been trying to open the debate on taxing Robots and I have web pages on the subject.
I beleive that the robots and computer machines should pay a monthly national insurance stamp in function of the man power of the robot. For exemple a robot that does the work of 8 men has the power of 8 man power. A cashpoint does the work of two persons therfore the cashpoint is of two man power. ( We can see the man power for the robots as the horse power for the cars).
See
http://mouv4x8.perso.neuf.fr/FrLstROS.htm#103)
Hoping to hear from you
John Mitchell wants to tax machines? So, in addition to taxing labor, profits, land, capital gains, gas, etc ad infinitum, we need to tax machines, too, based on how efficient they are.
Man, that is some kinda stupid. Admin, you really need to make folks pass some sort of intelligence test before they are allowed to post.