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$15 an hour minimum wageFollow

#1 Mar 18 2016 at 8:56 AM Rating: Good
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Oh, my bad on the title. This is something else that will reduce the number of fast food jobs available. Mea maxima culpa. Smiley: tongue

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Andy Puzder, CEO of CKE, the restaurant company that owns Hardees and Carl’s Jr., recently said he wants to open a fast-food restaurant that’s employed by, well, nobody at all. Turns out the CEO thinks that employees are too expensive and wants to give robots a chance.

“With government driving up the cost of labor, it’s driving down the number of jobs,” Puzder told Business Insider “You’re going to see automation not just in airports and grocery stores, but in restaurants.” Puzder imagines a restaurant where folks pick out their food at a kiosk, pay for it and pick it up.

Kind of sounds like a buffet without anyone standing at the cash register, but Puzder wants his robotic workforce grilling burgers, too, since automated chefs would be much more reliable than humans. “They’re always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case,” Puzder said.


Edit: At least the tech who works on the robots will probably make more than $15/hour. Smiley: wink

Edited, Mar 18th 2016 8:58am by Poldaran
#2 Mar 18 2016 at 9:02 AM Rating: Excellent
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Remember when automation was going to give us a bright future of all working ten hour weeks before relaxing in our future-homes and being tended to by our robot butlers?

I like one of the upsides to robots being no discrimination lawsuits. Because, you know, robots are the only way to avoid that.
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#3 Mar 18 2016 at 9:02 AM Rating: Good
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The One and Only Poldaran wrote:
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Puzder imagines a restaurant where folks pick out their food at a kiosk, pay for it and pick it up.
So a 1940s Automat. They tried to bring one of those back around here a few years ago, but it died off pretty quick.
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#4 Mar 18 2016 at 9:49 AM Rating: Good
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The obvious solution is to steal all his money and give it to a robot capitalist.
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#5 Mar 18 2016 at 9:56 AM Rating: Good
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Jophiel wrote:
Remember when automation was going to give us a bright future of all working ten hour weeks before relaxing in our future-homes and being tended to by our robot butlers?

I like one of the upsides to robots being no discrimination lawsuits. Because, you know, robots are the only way to avoid that.


A 10 hour workweek is just another way of saying a 50 hour workweek and 80% unemployment.
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#6 Mar 18 2016 at 10:04 AM Rating: Decent
This is why we need students to have a clear path to higher education. The workforce of tomorrow will not consist of well-paying unskilled jobs.

We have two choices. Compete with the third world to reduce labor costs here and throw out any and all standards of living for this country or reinvent the first-world economy by making sure that we curb economic stratification with education and workforce re-education.
#7 Mar 18 2016 at 10:26 AM Rating: Good
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Lefein wrote:
This is why we need students to have a clear path to higher education.
We should start by eliminating philosophy degrees.
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#8 Mar 18 2016 at 10:38 AM Rating: Good
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Lefein wrote:
This is why we need students to have a clear path to higher education. The workforce of tomorrow will not consist of well-paying unskilled jobs.

We have two choices. Compete with the third world to reduce labor costs here and throw out any and all standards of living for this country or reinvent the first-world economy by making sure that we curb economic stratification with education and workforce re-education.

Susie at the Apple store doesn't really need an advanced degree to fix my broken iPhone screen.
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#9 Mar 18 2016 at 12:18 PM Rating: Decent
Demea wrote:
Susie at the Apple store doesn't really need an advanced degree to fix my broken iPhone screen.

A robot could, easily, though.
#10 Mar 18 2016 at 1:29 PM Rating: Good
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“With government driving up the cost of labor, it’s driving down the number of jobs,”


I love whenever there is talk about raising the minimum wage, it doesn't have to actually happen for them to use it as an excuse for doing these things.
#11 Mar 18 2016 at 1:44 PM Rating: Excellent
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It has nothing to do with raising the minimum wage, really (aside from an excuse so they don't look as bad). Unless we change labor laws to allow companies to hire people for 30¢ an hour, automation of manual labor tasks will just be cheaper.
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#12 Mar 18 2016 at 2:44 PM Rating: Good
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Which seems silly. You don't need to make an excuse. Just show your ideas for it in technology magazines instead of business ones and gush about the world of tomorrow. And if anyone points out that you're cutting jobs, you just keep repeating: "I never said that. Did I mention that our new robots will run on iOS, so they won't get viruses!"
#13 Mar 18 2016 at 2:49 PM Rating: Decent
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/07/19/332879409/states-that-raised-minimum-wage-see-faster-job-growth-report-says

But hey, platitudes sound better than facts.
#14 Mar 18 2016 at 3:18 PM Rating: Decent
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Lefein wrote:
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/07/19/332879409/states-that-raised-minimum-wage-see-faster-job-growth-report-says

But hey, platitudes sound better than facts.

That's NPR, so it's 1500% more liberal propaganda than the rest of the liberal media.
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#15 Mar 18 2016 at 6:22 PM Rating: Excellent
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Job growth was faster for a whole two months, which is absolutely long enough to conclude on significance and causality in a precise area of study like economics.
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#16 Mar 18 2016 at 6:23 PM Rating: Default
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Debalic wrote:
Lefein wrote:
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/07/19/332879409/states-that-raised-minimum-wage-see-faster-job-growth-report-says

But hey, platitudes sound better than facts.

That's NPR, so it's 1500% more liberal propaganda than the rest of the liberal media.


Pretty much. IN this specific case, they aren't looking at states with the highest minimum wages versus those with lower wages, or adjusting for cost of living, or any other factors one might expect to see in such an analysis, but merely lumping a set of 13 states which just happened to increase their minimum wage in the last year, regardless of reason, previous, or current new rate, and treat them as a single set in terms of comparing their relative job growth. 9 out of the 13 raised their minimum wage, not in a huge amount based on some legislative movement to help out poor people, but because their minimum is automatically pegged to inflation. So not really an "increase" in the sense that those arguing for large jumps to $10.10, or $12, or $15 are wanting.

A better test would have been to look just at the four that actually passed new legislation increasing their minimum wages and see how they did on the jobs front. I suspect that when you remove the larger portion of states, most of which only raised their minimum to be more in line with a national average minimum, you wont see the same results. I suppose if I were being complete, I'd go find that data and see if that's true. Um... But I could also simply argue that had those four states experienced such a significant job creation rate increase, then that would have been the stat we were presented with since it would have made a much stronger case for just that sort of legislative increase. Since the source instead chose to lump them in with 9 other states that didn't pass largish increases, my guess is that this is because only by adding those other states into the mix, do the numbers appear to promote an association with minimum wage increase and job creation.

I'll also point out that the relative rates are also pretty small, and are likely washed out by much larger factors than relative minimum wage. What happens in the short term among some states that implement some changes, may not have much bearing at all on what happens if you implement a nationwide large scale and long term change. It's like saying that since I peed in the municipal pool last summer and the number of people who visited that pool increased relative to the same period the year before, we can conclude that peeing in pools makes people more likely to want to swim in them, and thus replace the normal water in all pools across the nation with pee. Um... That's probably not going to work.
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#17 Mar 18 2016 at 6:24 PM Rating: Good
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I was just reading today about how Dominos is beginning to use pizza delivery robots to replace delivery drivers.

It's starting to look like they're all getting really aggressive about cutting labor costs. They'll just use imaginary minimum wage hikes that'll probably never happen as an excuse and come out looking like heroes. I'm just wondering now how long it will be before all of these companies go out of business when there aren't enough people left with jobs to buy their products and services with.
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#18 Mar 18 2016 at 6:26 PM Rating: Excellent
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Kuwoobie wrote:
I'm just wondering now how long it will be before all of these companies go out of business when there aren't enough people left with jobs to buy their products and services with.

We should just ban technological advances. That'l protect are yobs!
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#19 Mar 18 2016 at 6:30 PM Rating: Decent
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Jophiel wrote:
It has nothing to do with raising the minimum wage, really (aside from an excuse so they don't look as bad). Unless we change labor laws to allow companies to hire people for 30¢ an hour, automation of manual labor tasks will just be cheaper.


At the risk of agreeing with Joph (or him agreeing with me!), this is true. The reality is that the US simply cannot compete in the unskilled job market. Our standard and cost of living is too high to make such jobs viable as primary breadwinner jobs, so those jobs will be shipped off to other cheaper locations. What we do with minimum wage doesn't change this math. It may hasten the rate at which low paying entry level jobs disappear (which hurts teens and students mostly), but doesn't do much with regard to jobs that are already viable in terms of cost to employer and pay to the employee.

We're much better focusing on skilled jobs that utilize labor saving technology. So yeah, people who can maintain and repair machines that do the labor of 8 children in a sweatshop in China will be in demand, and could earn enough to live off of. There's even a potential scaling factor that can work in our favor. If only we can get away from the idea that we must protect and preserve old low skill high labor jobs.
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#20 Mar 18 2016 at 6:38 PM Rating: Default
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Kuwoobie wrote:
I'm just wondering now how long it will be before all of these companies go out of business when there aren't enough people left with jobs to buy their products and services with.


It's almost like that's a factor in the economy that ensures that "enough" people will be hired and earn "enough" money to maintain the profits of those companies. I get that it's a popular notion to run around like Chicken Little assuming that the evil greedy companies will just keep paying infinitely lower pay just to ***** over the workers and pad their profits, but the flip side (as you mention) is that their profits only come from consumers buying their products. So yeah, not going to happen.

Imagine how much more money a company could make paying 100 skilled workers to operate widget making machines capable of building 100 widgets an hour each instead of paying 100 unskilled workers to directly make widgets at a rate of 10 widgets an hour each. You get 10x the production for the same number of employees. If the choice is "pass laws mandating that the 100 unskilled widget makers earn a living wage" versus "allow the market to force those 100 unskilled widget makers to learn how to operate a widget making machine, thus increasing the value of their labor by a factor of ten", the latter choice, while looking less controlled and thus more scary, will actually result in just as many employed people, earning just as much money collectively, but doing so while actually being far more productive, and thus leading us all to a healthier economic outcome (and much greater job security for the workers since their wages are based on the actual value of their labor rather than legislative fiat).

But it's a lot easier to just think that greedy people will intentionally take actions designed to make them earn less money.
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#21 Mar 18 2016 at 7:00 PM Rating: Excellent
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gbaji wrote:
Jophiel wrote:
It has nothing to do with raising the minimum wage, really (aside from an excuse so they don't look as bad). Unless we change labor laws to allow companies to hire people for 30¢ an hour, automation of manual labor tasks will just be cheaper.
At the risk of agreeing with Joph (or him agreeing with me!), this is true. The reality is that the US simply cannot compete in the unskilled job market. Our standard and cost of living is too high to make such jobs viable as primary breadwinner jobs, so those jobs will be shipped off to other cheaper locations.

I don't disagree, but I was speaking more specifically of automation vs overseas labor. Obviously you can't have people in Laos make your pizza but if you can buy a PizzaBot then you can still fire three shifts worth of cooks.

For a local example, there's the new Steam Controller plant in Buffalo Grove, IL. The video description of course lays it on thick with "Look! Robots! Neat!" but if you told me that the plant has more than twenty-five employees, I'd be surprised. Once upon a time, a town getting a new manufacturing plant would have meant 100+ new local jobs. I'm not pointing this out to say that Valve is evil -- if they didn't have robots here, they'd have Chinese orphans doing it instead -- just noting the continued squeeze on the lower tiers of workers. They can't all be robot scientists.
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#22 Mar 18 2016 at 7:05 PM Rating: Excellent
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gbaji wrote:
Imagine how much more money a company could make paying 100 skilled workers to operate widget making machines capable of building 100 widgets an hour each instead of paying 100 unskilled workers to directly make widgets at a rate of 10 widgets an hour each. You get 10x the production for the same number of employees. If the choice is "pass laws mandating that the 100 unskilled widget makers earn a living wage" versus "allow the market to force those 100 unskilled widget makers to learn how to operate a widget making machine, thus increasing the value of their labor by a factor of ten"

You don't hire 100 widget robot scientists to take the place of 100 workers though. You hire five widget robot scientists because lowering labor costs is the whole reason why you have robots. And it doesn't scale up infinitely because there's a cap on how many widgets people want so you can't just say "But we'll just replace every factory floor employee with a scientist and make it up in volume". You're just going to run out of widget market and/or devalue your widgets to where it's not profitable to make them.

You're not going to find me a factory where they automated the process and replaced the workers 1:1 with skilled technicians making more money because that defeats the entire point of automating. There's always ample losers by plain necessity.

Edited, Mar 18th 2016 8:06pm by Jophiel
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#23 Mar 18 2016 at 7:22 PM Rating: Decent
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Jophiel wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Imagine how much more money a company could make paying 100 skilled workers to operate widget making machines capable of building 100 widgets an hour each instead of paying 100 unskilled workers to directly make widgets at a rate of 10 widgets an hour each. You get 10x the production for the same number of employees. If the choice is "pass laws mandating that the 100 unskilled widget makers earn a living wage" versus "allow the market to force those 100 unskilled widget makers to learn how to operate a widget making machine, thus increasing the value of their labor by a factor of ten"

You don't hire 100 widget robot scientists to take the place of 100 workers though. You hire five widget robot scientists because lowering labor costs is the whole reason why you have robots. And it doesn't scale up infinitely because there's a cap on how many widgets people want so you can't just say "But we'll just replace every factory floor employee with a scientist and make it up in volume". You're just going to run out of widget market and/or devalue your widgets to where it's not profitable to make them.


Nah. Someone will invent wadgets, and wedgets, and widgats, and open up a whole new realm of competitive creative enterprise. I think that the same cautions were made back when the first industrialized processes were introduced, but instead of resulting in massive percentages of the workforce being out of work, it resulted in a massive increase in the availability of cheap consumer goods (more efficient use of labor), which in turn resulted in a massive increase in standard of living in the US. And still managed to employ people while doing so.


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You're not going to find me a factory where they automated the process and replaced the workers 1:1 with skilled technicians making more money because that defeats the entire point of automating. There's always ample losers by plain necessity.


Again. History suggests that this isn't really a problem, and that the job market will find things for idle labor to do, and find ways for that labor to be both productive and capable of earning enough to contribute sufficiently to the demand for the products they're creating to sustain the entire system. Somehow we managed to go from 90% of our people working on farms, and the other 10% making furniture and wagon wheels by hand, to 4% employed on farms, and the other 96% doing other things than making stuff by hand, and yet we've managed to take all those new products and services and be better off for having them.

I just don't think this is the problem people think it is.

Edited, Mar 18th 2016 6:23pm by gbaji
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#24 Mar 18 2016 at 7:28 PM Rating: Excellent
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gbaji wrote:
Nah. Someone will invent wadgets, and wedgets, and widgats, and open up a whole new realm of competitive creative enterprise.

I suppose that thought warms the hearts of the CEO firing 90% of the workforce. "Don't worry... someday someone will invest wadgets and hire five of you, provided you became wadget robot scientists with your unemployment checks!"

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History suggests that this isn't really a problem

History being the last couple decades? Because we're not talking about people moving from farms to factories, we're talking about factories no longer wanting the workers either and them moving to...?

That's great that you think history from 100-150 years ago proves this isn't a problem but more recent history very strongly suggests otherwise.
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#25 Mar 18 2016 at 7:35 PM Rating: Decent
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Jophiel wrote:
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History suggests that this isn't really a problem

History being the last couple decades? Because we're not talking about people moving from farms to factories, we're talking about factories no longer wanting the workers either and them moving to...?


History being the last century and a half. As older more labor intensive jobs have disappeared, newer less labor intensive, but more efficient jobs have replaced them. You're missing the fact that "factories" is just part of that process.

Quote:
That's great that you think history from 100-150 years ago proves this isn't a problem but more recent history very strongly suggests otherwise.


No. It actually doesn't. The alarmists keep predicting it will, and insisting that it is. Yet, somehow, oddly, we manage to find jobs for those people. The only thing that breaks the process is when some scared people keep trying to drag their heels and force our economy to support less efficient jobs despite not being competitive in the market. You do understand that the factories of today, the very ones you insist workers can't do without, themselves produce many times more output with fewer workers than the factories of a century ago. Where did all those people go?

Answer: The market found new jobs for them to do. Labor is a resource, just like any other. And an idle resource will be used. Don't be afraid of the future. Embrace it!
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#26 Mar 18 2016 at 7:55 PM Rating: Excellent
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gbaji wrote:
No. It actually doesn't. The alarmists keep predicting it will, and insisting that it is. Yet, somehow, oddly, we manage to find jobs for those people.

You're under the impression that people who have lost manufacturing jobs in the US have since all (or mostly) been employed in equally lucrative positions in other fields?

Fifty-sixty years ago, US manufacturing was booming in large part because much of the rest of the industrialized world just had the shit bombed out of it. It's been largely downhill since then between moving labor overseas as those countries got their acts together and increased automation. Also, since then, the halcyon days of a father holding down a manufacturing job with a good salary and pension while his wife stayed home and raised the kids has been replaced by two working parents scrimping to get by. Embracing the future!

I would suggest that "cheap consumer goods" aren't the only measure of success or even a major part of it. The inability to securely afford a home, education for your children, medical care, keep a working car, etc isn't mitigated by "But look! Shitty off-brand Chinese tablets are $60 at Big Lots and you have 200 channels of crap on TV!" Can't afford the bread but I suppose we still get the circus.

Edited, Mar 18th 2016 10:28pm by Jophiel
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