Fast food protests: March in downtown Los Angeles, cities nationwide

[lpetrich]

What they really need to develop is robot protestors.

That way these fast food workers can spend their free time getting some marketable skills or looking for a better job.

dismal, given your superior expertise in these matters, why don't you find better jobs for fast-food workers, and finance their getting more lucrative skills?

 

[dismal]

What they really need to develop is robot protestors.

That way these fast food workers can spend their free time getting some marketable skills or looking for a better job.

dismal, given your superior expertise in these matters, why don't you find better jobs for fast-food workers, and finance their getting more lucrative skills?

I did indeed once have a minimum wage job but managed to acquire some skillz and made more. I don't think my story is particularly unique. Most people manage to pull off finding a non minimum wage job eventually.

I imagine few achieve it by protesting.

 

[maxparrish]

dismal, given your superior expertise in these matters, why don't you find better jobs for fast-food workers, and finance their getting more lucrative skills?

I did indeed once have a minimum wage job but managed to acquire some skillz and made more. I don't think my story is particularly unique. Most people manage to pull off finding a non minimum wage job eventually.

I imagine few achieve it by protesting.

I thought jobs like washing dishes or standing at the curb waving a sign for "5 dollar Pizza" were supposed to be career choices, facilitated by Obamacare and the 6K to 8K a year gifting on the exchange? Besides, what is clearly needed is a federally subsidized training program or college certification for the dish washing and sign waving occupations - oh, and don't forget a State licencing and testing agency...followed by a "professional" guild to unionize them.

 

[lpetrich]

NEWS RELEASE: Oxford Martin School study shows nearly half of US jobs could be at risk of computerisation | Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology -- it links to the study document itself, future_of_employment_18.dvi - The_Future_of_Employment_OMS_Working_Paper_1.pdf

The authors identified three kinds of tasks that have been difficult to automate

• Perception and manipulation tasks -- including hand-eye coordination.
• Creative intelligence tasks -- coming up with ideas or artifacts that are novel and valuable.
• Social intelligence tasks -- Human social intelligence is important in a wide range of work tasks, such as those involving negotiation, persuasion and care.

Here is how some tasks may score on these scales:

• P&M: Telemarketer - Boilermaker - Surgeon
• CI: Court Clerk - - - Biologist - Fashion Designer
• SI: Dishwasher - - Event Planner - Public Relations

The authors then got some databases of job skills, pared them down to skills of 702 kinds of jobs, and then estimated how much P&M, CI, and SI each kind of job requires. They mapped these three sorts of skills to the database's listed skills:

• P&M: Finger Dexterity, Manual Dexterity, Cramped Work Space and Awkward Positions
• CI: Originality, Fine Arts
• SI: Social Perceptiveness, Negotiation, Persuasion, Assisting and Caring for Others

For instance, Manual Dexterity:

• Low: Screw a light bulb into a light socket
• Medium: Pack oranges in crates as quickly as possible
• High: Perform open-heart surgery with surgical instruments

The authors then more-or-less subjectively classified 70 of those 702 kinds of jobs as easy and hard to automate. They then used some classifier software to try to predict the automation difficulty from the job features. They found a lot of scatter, but some trends are evident. Jobs with strong P&M skills tended to be more vulnerable, while jobs with strong CI and SI skills tended to be less vulnerable. Also, jobs requiring more education and giving more income tend to be less vulnerable.

From their Figure III:

• Less vulnerable: Management, Business, and Financial; Computer, Engineering, and Science; Education, Legal, Community Service, Arts, and Media; Healthcare Practitioners and Technical
• More vulnerable: Service; Sales and Related; Office and Administrative Support; Farming, Fishing, and Forestry; Construction and Extraction; Installation, Maintenance, and Repair; Production; Transportation and Material Moving

 

[NobleSavage]

^^^ I predict bots that replace PhDs writing papers.

 

[DBT]

I'm guessing individual income tax is the greatest share. As long as the economy is doing well the government can extract taxes, somehow. Is there any rule of economics that says the economy must have human workers?

Maybe not, But under our system, mostly capitalist, partly socialist (someone has to bail out Wall Street whenever it crashes), if the means to fund welfare comes from individual wages, but goods and services are being produced mechanically and don't require human labour to any great extent, therefore fewer and fewer paying income tax...the number of employed who are paying taxes cannot meet the needs of the many who have been tossed onto the scrapheap by mechanization. So if the produces believe that welfare provides the funds for the unemployed to pay for the goods and services that are automated and make a healthy profits for their company, I'd say they are dreaming.

 

[NobleSavage]

I'm guessing individual income tax is the greatest share. As long as the economy is doing well the government can extract taxes, somehow. Is there any rule of economics that says the economy must have human workers?

Maybe not, But under our system, mostly capitalist, partly socialist (someone has to bail out Wall Street whenever it crashes), if the means to fund welfare comes from individual wages, but goods and services are being produced mechanically and don't require human labour to any great extent, therefore fewer and fewer paying income tax...the number of employed who are paying taxes cannot meet the needs of the many who have been tossed onto the scrapheap by mechanization. So if the produces believe that welfare provides the funds for the unemployed to pay for the goods and services that are automated and make a healthy profits for their company, I'd say they are dreaming.

Well, I definitely think we are headed for a major clusterfuck. Unemployment during the great depression was 25%. Automation will knock us over that limit before we know it. The general consensus on the board is that Universal Basic Income is the solution. If that will work, I don't know.

 

[DBT]

Maybe not, But under our system, mostly capitalist, partly socialist (someone has to bail out Wall Street whenever it crashes), if the means to fund welfare comes from individual wages, but goods and services are being produced mechanically and don't require human labour to any great extent, therefore fewer and fewer paying income tax...the number of employed who are paying taxes cannot meet the needs of the many who have been tossed onto the scrapheap by mechanization. So if the produces believe that welfare provides the funds for the unemployed to pay for the goods and services that are automated and make a healthy profits for their company, I'd say they are dreaming.

Well, I definitely think we are headed for a major clusterfuck. Unemployment during the great depression was 25%. Automation will knock us over that limit before we know it. The general consensus on the board is that Universal Basic Income is the solution. If that will work, I don't know.

Universal income is probably a good thing, but I wonder how it would be funded, given that the taxpayer base has been eroded by high unemployment caused by automation. An alternative would be to heavily tax the producers with the automated systems, then there goes the profits that they thought they'd make by automating. By default, they are still paying the people who used to work in their business, but are now sitting at home watching automated videos and eating automated pizza.

 

[NobleSavage]

a VAT tax maybe?

 

[DBT]

a VAT tax maybe?

But you need an income to pay VAT. Being unemployed means having no income. The Government may need to pay universal income, but how does the Gov. fund it when it is tax money that's supposed to provide the revenue? Keep printing money? What happens then?

 

[NobleSavage]

The corporations will be making money selling stuff to people who get UBC. So tax corporate profits.

 

[Canard DuJour]

I'm guessing individual income tax is the greatest share. As long as the economy is doing well the government can extract taxes, somehow. Is there any rule of economics that says the economy must have human workers?

Maybe not, But under our system, mostly capitalist, partly socialist (someone has to bail out Wall Street whenever it crashes), if the means to fund welfare comes from individual wages, but goods and services are being produced mechanically and don't require human labour to any great extent, therefore fewer and fewer paying income tax...the number of employed who are paying taxes cannot meet the needs of the many who have been tossed onto the scrapheap by mechanization. So if the produces believe that welfare provides the funds for the unemployed to pay for the goods and services that are automated and make a healthy profits for their company, I'd say they are dreaming.

Yep.

Note that the problem isn't really automation, which ought to be a good thing, but the labour-capital antagonism in for-profit production where labour is a cost. The obvious solution would be to ration work so that many work few very well paid hours - as people up until about the 1980s anticipated by now. But it'd take even more gov't intervention than UBI and no foreseeable US or UK gov't is capable of implementing either.

 

[Earl IV]

Most fast food restaurants receive pre-sliced tomatoes and pickles. In other news, scientist discover that most humans can put a pickle and tomato on a burger in under 3 seconds.

My money is on the robots.

Nah

They'll still need a human to walk over and shut off the fry buzzer.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[AthenaAwakened]

Maybe not, But under our system, mostly capitalist, partly socialist (someone has to bail out Wall Street whenever it crashes), if the means to fund welfare comes from individual wages, but goods and services are being produced mechanically and don't require human labour to any great extent, therefore fewer and fewer paying income tax...the number of employed who are paying taxes cannot meet the needs of the many who have been tossed onto the scrapheap by mechanization. So if the produces believe that welfare provides the funds for the unemployed to pay for the goods and services that are automated and make a healthy profits for their company, I'd say they are dreaming.

Yep.

Note that the problem isn't really automation, which ought to be a good thing, but the labour-capital antagonism in for-profit production where labour is a cost. The obvious solution would be to ration work so that many work few very well paid hours - as people up until about the 1980s anticipated by now. But it'd take even more gov't intervention than UBI and no foreseeable US or UK gov't is capable of implementing either.

BINGO!

And the gov't mentioned are capable, they make the laws to Pete's sake, but they lack the will. They seem in love with poverty and serfdom for no other reason than they have existed for a very long time.

 

[NobleSavage]

How the hell would this work? You want to make it illegal for me to work more than 20hrs?

 

[Jayjay]

Note that the problem isn't really automation, which ought to be a good thing, but the labour-capital antagonism in for-profit production where labour is a cost. The obvious solution would be to ration work so that many work few very well paid hours - as people up until about the 1980s anticipated by now. But it'd take even more gov't intervention than UBI and no foreseeable US or UK gov't is capable of implementing either.

I don't believe that kind of rationing would work, because the type of work that many people can do is by definition not going to be very well paid. On one end of the spectrum, you're going to have jobs that productive and hard to automate that could use all the labour they can get from a smaller available talent pool, and on the other end there are jobs that exist only because the people doing them will settle for such low wages that their jobs are not yet economical to automate.

Replacing one burger flipper who works 40 hours a week with two who are working 20 hours a week can be made economical by reducing the per-employee overhead costs, but doing that while doubling their salaries is just going to make it that more attractive to invest on burger flipping robots and fire both of them. This is not to say that it'd be a bad thing, but it's more like cannibalising the weak than rationing.

 

[Canard DuJour]

How the hell would this work? You want to make it illegal for me to work more than 20hrs?

No, I want you to be paid enough per hour that the marginal utility of working more hours would be outweighed by the leisure and family time you'd sacrifice.

Not next week but gradually.

One of the biggest hurdles will be the eternal crowd of Americans screaming for their liberty to be paid less.

 

[Canard DuJour]

Note that the problem isn't really automation, which ought to be a good thing, but the labour-capital antagonism in for-profit production where labour is a cost. The obvious solution would be to ration work so that many work few very well paid hours - as people up until about the 1980s anticipated by now. But it'd take even more gov't intervention than UBI and no foreseeable US or UK gov't is capable of implementing either.

I don't believe that kind of rationing would work,

I'm not sure it would either. By "obvious solution" I mean alternative to where we're headed : a few working crazy hours to support the many who will be, through no fault of their own, unemployed. Certainly not to say that getting there would be easy.

because the type of work that many people can do is by definition not going to be very well paid. On one end of the spectrum, you're going to have jobs that productive and hard to automate that could use all the labour they can get from a smaller available talent pool, and on the other end there are jobs that exist only because the people doing them will settle for such low wages that their jobs are not yet economical to automate.

Replacing one burger flipper who works 40 hours a week with two who are working 20 hours a week can be made economical by reducing the per-employee overhead costs, but doing that while doubling their salaries is just going to make it that more attractive to invest on burger flipping robots and fire both of them. This is not to say that it'd be a bad thing, but it's more like cannibalising the weak than rationing.

Sure, but that's not what I'm suggessting. Those jobs will be automated anyway and probably ought to be once a human needs welfare to live off them. The problems at the extremes are inevitable or here already.

I'm suggesting that there's room for rationing in the middle. Lots of currently unskilled people could learn in-demand skills it'll probably be impractical to automate for the foreseeable future like plumbing and various kinds of on-site construction and healthcare. Others could upskill for jobs, esp IT, for which demand will likely increase. The problem is that the labour market, without intervention, would just push wages down so that a few work all the hours.