It waits for cloying and facile politicians to propose, plead for, nay demand a $10 per hour minimum wage for all base jobs in America. "Living wage!!" they will scream full throated before cameras and microphones and publishers and editors and cable talkie hosts who never studied economics.
Voters will respond. Voters will vote. Unions will fund ad campaigns. Laws will be made or Executive Orders signed, and a $10 per hour minimum wage will be The Law Of The Land.
Telephone calls will be made, permits and contractors aligned, and fast food stores remodeled. All so you can get this.....
.....without human intervention. A credit/debit card, a tap on a few buttons and this is delivered to you. One hundred percent fresh, perfect, and made by a robot.
Not just any robot, but the Momentum Machines gourmet hamburger making robot. Coming very soon to a fast food restaurant near you. "What do it do?" you ask.
Well friends, we got burgers. We got burgers right here. Burgers with a capital B right here in River City. Burgers with a capital B that rhymes with E and that stands for fewer employees.
*Chorus in the background chants "burgers, burgers, burgers, burgers, burgers, burgers, burgers"*
Let me tell you, neighbors:
Our alpha machine frees up all of the hamburger line cooks in a restaurant.
It does everything employees can do except better:
The labor savings allow a restaurant to spend approximately twice as much on high quality ingredients and the gourmet cooking techniques make the ingredients taste that much better.
- It slices toppings like tomatoes and pickles immediately before it places the slice onto your burger, giving you the freshest burger possible.
- The next revision will offer custom meat grinds for every single customer. Want a patty with 1/3 pork and 2/3 bison ground to order? No problem.
- Also, our next revision will use gourmet cooking techniques never before used in a fast food restaurant, giving the patty the perfect char but keeping in all the juices.
- It’s more consistent, more sanitary, and can produce ~360 hamburgers per hour.
It slices fresh tomatoes and pickles for every burger.
It grills meat and buns to order, then adds the condiments and toppings to order.
It shows up on time. It makes the correct change, every time. It's never hung over. It's never high. It never has baby daddy or baby mommy issues. It never asks for a raise. It never has its friends hanging out in the dining area. It has no face tattoos. It never argues. It never steals.
It's the Momentum Machines Hamburger Robot.
It costs $135,000, and it's inventors claim it will pay for itself in two years by saving labor cost, real estate cost, construction cost, and by offering a gourmet burger at fast food prices.
People who want an increase in the minimum wage simply do not understand this, or willfully deny that it can happen. But it will, just like this happened in the auto industry when wages became too high.
It won't need to wait much longer.
106 comments:
Don't be silly. "Browning patties of meat and applying sliced vegetables to them" is the kind of historically family-supporting skill this country was built on. It is unthinkable that any machine would be able to do it better.
Cool!
Hamburger tech has, throughout my life, been one of the signposts of increasing affluence.
The arrival of a take out burger joint in my teeny Illinois hometown back in the 60s was cause for celebration. Not a McD, but a take out joint created by a local entrepreneur.
The better the burgers, the better the life.
Work is disappearing. We used to look forward to the end of work and the new life of leisure and recreation. Why is this now a source only of fear?
It burnt the bun.
The bun was ordered "carefully charred at the edge".
There are algorithms for this.
One of these in a brew pub? Gold!
A modest increase in all service industry wages would be a nifty way to facilitate wealth transfer from old to young. Ditto for the dirty jobs aging boomers don't want to do. It's so insidious and fiendishly clever -- I'm surprised Obama didn't think of it.
Work is disappearing. We used to look forward to the end of work and the new life of leisure and recreation. Why is this now a source only of fear?
Because capital is going to get all the positive returns for this great "boon". IN the future, you'll be big money, or you'll be shit. The vast majority of us will be shit.
In addition, most people actually want to work, so as to feel useful, even if they don't need to work.
Finally, if there is no work for anyone to do, or for very few to do, then it will not be possible to improve one's family's circumstances. Where you're born is where you'll stay.
Been to a fast food place during the day? Most of the employees are old boomers.
AAAAND......you don't have to worry about anyone spitting into your hamburger because you made them mad.
:-)
And when it breaks down at peak demand?
In-N-Out Burger must have discriminatory hiring practices. I've never seen anyone over 20 working there.
Now, Wal-Mart greeters will never be replaced by machines, nor will CostCo docents.
I'm also rather surprised at how many of you are happy that a very few people are getting extremely rich, and a great many people are getting poor. The country didn't used to be this way, and it wasn't exactly a communist country at that time. But nobody seems to know what the Great Compression was, and most of you seem to love dancing on its grave so that the Larry Ellisons and Steve Jobses of the world can crush their workers in order to buy just ONE MORE mega-yacht. (Look for stories about "Good money for an Indian" for Ellison, of non-poaching agreements for Jobs to know what I'm talking about.)
Alternately, I'm shocked to discover that I've been hanging out online with the mega-rich.
But then, the choice seems to be between robber-barons or communists in most people's minds, and that is just the way your lords and masters in both parties want it. They're divvying up the country before you for their own interests, and you're all stuck talking about mostly meaningless semantics.
We used to look forward to the end of work and the new life of leisure and recreation. Why is this now a source only of fear?
Demographics mainly, and longevity.
But nobody seems to know what the Great Compression was, and most of you seem to love dancing on its grave so that the Larry Ellisons and Steve Jobses of the world can crush their workers in order to buy just ONE MORE mega-yacht.
What was the Great Compression?
Which grave have I been dancing on?
How are (the late) Jobs and Ellison crushing their workers? Curious about this, since Apple and Oracle pay very well.
Walmart got rid of greeters - they are no more. They have ceased to be.
The Wal-Mart in my area still has greeters. Although they should be called "coughers". We call them door geezers because they're about my age....wait a minnit....
A question: if work is disappearing by way of automation, how do you square that with the intensity with which the ruling class, both houses, pushes for mass immigration? If it's cheap labor the ruling class wants won't a surplus of labor, more workers than jobs, push down wages even without importing even more workers?
The nature of work changes, now, every generation.
My mother and father were factories workers. The factories departed for Asia.
The work I did my entire life, multimedia and programming is falling to offshoring, H1B visa immigrants and the simplification of the development process to the point at which unskilled labor can do what once required skilled labor.
I always tried (and mostly succeeded) in making the most amount of money in the shortest time possible.
The game in the future will be different. How? Nobody knows. The clever among us will take chances, figure it out and do things we can't imagine.
I started out in the computer biz in the era of the introduction of the PC into the office environment. Believe it or not, programming menus in BASIC and operating simple apps like Word Perfect and 1-2-3 paid about $30 an hour back in the late 70s and early 80s. Both skills are now just about useless.
Work does change - one should try to keep up or get out of the industry.
I used to write commands to verify CAD designs. Now people write programs to write the rules to check CAD designs. Designs are still checked, but how the checks are done has changed.
If you used to slice tomatoes for a fast food restaurant you might want to learn how to service the machines that replaced you.
Same job is still being done, just the methods have changed.
Look them up, Haz. But the Great Compression comprised the good old days that most look back on, and things were a damned sight better for workers then than now.
And Oracle and Apple are both always looking to force down wages, as are most of the big Silicon Valley companies. That's why they want immigration reform with a greatly expanded H1-B visa program. (The Facebook guy is funding both a Democrats for Immigration Reform and a Republicans for Immigration Reform organization, apparently entirely with his own money.)
They prefer Indian workers because they don't pay them as well, and they prefer employment practice collusion so that workers can't switch companies to force up wages/salaries.
The "ruling class", in terms of big business isn't interested in bringing in more cheap labor. It gets that overseas.
What it wants is more engineers, scientists, and mathematicians. Not enough Americans study those fields because it's tooooo hard. So foreigners are needed, and it's hard to bring them in now. A new immigrant policy will change that.
The "ruling class" interms of politicians does want low-skilled laborers, or "voters" as they are known.
A question: if work is disappearing by way of automation, how do you square that with the intensity with which the ruling class, both houses, pushes for mass immigration? If it's cheap labor the ruling class wants won't a surplus of labor, more workers than jobs, push down wages even without importing even more workers?
Automation has taken away jobs since the start of the industrial revolution. Workers have generally found other things to do, even profitable things. There's no reason it COULDN'T happen again.
Thus the need to import more foreign workers to insure an over-supply of labor, which will suppress wages. With the H1-B program, they're even starting to suppress wages for what were once middle class jobs.
Additionally, the Democrats want more assured voters, and the Republicans are stupid enough (and in the case of the Bush family, nefarious enough) to think they can win those voters over.
The upshot is that the elite of both parties want a country of serfs and masters, and they're working hard to make it happen.
Shorter: Perot was right, but he wasn't pessimistic enough.
Silicon chipmaking and PV solar panel making was offshored not because of wages but rather environmental issues. The industry remains quite "dirty" despite its vaunted verdant splendor. There was commenter over at TOP -- one of the Mikes (original Mike or Big Mike) who mentioned trying to crack the nut of the dirtiest phase -- cleanly ripping the oxygen out of sand to get crystalline silicon. If such a "green" process were in fact commercialized, I wonder if it would be too late to site it here rather than abroad.
I kind of want that.
When I was a teenager I worked with a girl who had previously worked at an Arby's, and she proudly related how a romantic rival had come in the restaurant and she had spit in her roast beef sandwich.
It's been almost twenty years since that girl told me that story and I still think of it every time I go in a fast food restaurant.
Except Whataburger. They have the sweetest clean-cut kids working there who would never NEVER do such a thing. (So I tell myself.)
Heh, DBQ, I posted first and read second.
What it wants is more engineers, scientists, and mathematicians. Not enough Americans study those fields because it's tooooo hard. So foreigners are needed, and it's hard to bring them in now. A new immigrant policy will change that.
I agree with Icepick's analysis. And I am -><- close to turning away my support for Darrell Issa because of his boneheaded support of ultimately destructive practices.
What it wants is more engineers, scientists, and mathematicians. Not enough Americans study those fields because it's tooooo hard. So foreigners are needed, and it's hard to bring them in now. A new immigrant policy will change that.
Haz, that is bullshit. I know plenty of out-of-work people with STEM backgrounds, including myself. I'm not inferior to some guy from IIT because I didn't put in the time studying a difficult field of study. Unless of course they're studying something more advanced than higher mathematics in India, which seems doubtful.
And Oracle is now in the process of having their dirty laundry aired out in court. (Basically, they hire a bunch of wogs and import them because they don't have to pay them what they would for domestic workers.) It's got nothing to do with whether or not Americans will do the work. Plenty have, and they're getting shafted. (There are stories I can't tell that would really put the lie to this line of thought. Damned confidentiality.)
Steve Jobs worked with the other Silicon Valley big shots to agree to not poach each others employees, mostly because they didn't want to drive up the cost of labor.
So-called American companies have decided that the only thing that matters is the stock options for management. It doesn't have to be this way, and it wasn't this way for several decades in the middle of the last century. I doubt anyone thinks the USA was particularly falling behind in the 1950s, for example, not in retrospect. And yet, workers were doing quite well at the time even though the US wasn't exactly a communist nation at the time of the Eisenhower Administration.
Policies have been enacted in the intervening decades affecting trade, finance, workers rights, immigration and a host of other fields that have tipped the scales back in favor of those that control the capital, which is why we now see fortunes being amassed now that would have made the robber-barons of yore envious. And we're also seeing an ever widening gap in income and wealth, so that it is becoming more and more difficult for people to get ahead. This has happened in this nation before, and at some point the nation decided on a different path. Allowing for and working towards more equality isn't something desired only by communists and socialists. There have been good little 'r' republicans who have feared great concentrations of wealth, and thought it undesirable. Or perhaps you think Douglas MacArthur was a commie pinko.
But please, keep believing that it is only because Americans are lazy and stupid and don't want to do the work that things are going the way they are. (Despite the fact that productivity continues to rise, even while workers get none of the gains from those improvements.) That is what the propagandists on "both" "sides" of the political debate want you to believe.
It needs a better name.
WOPR
HAL 135000
Big Macintosh
And I am -><- close to turning away my support for Darrell Issa because of his boneheaded support of ultimately destructive practices.
Well, why would the wealthiest man in Congress want to support anything other than policies that will make him wealthier, and current practices have been quite good to him.
If you're against a minimum wage then it follows that you'd also oppose a minimum living standard so why pretend to care if people are out of work? How is struggling to make ends meet better than not struggling to make ends meet when either way, ends are not being met?
Second, the inventors of your wonderful machine don't say how many jobs would be lost (labor costs saved!) by the $135,000. If you're like some glibs who don't differentiate between $10/hr and $100/hr then I guess it's ALL THE JOBS but no one ever proposes $100/hr. So there's an issue of overlooked margins and amounts there.
Third, there's always going to be "dislocating" technology. Arguing to make way for that without arguing to make way for basic living and working standards is intentionally narrow framing. These machines could simply be outlawed. That would be arbitrary and harsh, but then, so is the lack of real interest here in America's decreased living standards, purchasing power and quality of life.
4 - American auto manufacturers (i.e. corp execs) played a huge role in decimating their own industry. Do you really wish to say that Japanese firms made products of equivalent quality all this time? American quality sucked in the late 70s through the 90s. Innovation was not a priority. And it still, (unfortunately) largely, isn't. (Go ahead and laugh at Tesla, too, while we're at it). Yet I don't see the Japanese worker as less cared for in their improved competitiveness - which seems to be the only variable in some minds.
It's insanely short-sighted to think the only way to compete is decreased labor costs, but some people really obsess on that. Racing toward the bottom only gets you to the bottom and I can't figure out why there are so many people who refuse to ever look up, or even outward.
It simply ain't turtles the whole way down, man.
Hell, working conditions throughout my life were about as unfair and rigged against me as possible.
I've been the punitive target of the quota systems my entire life, despite the fact that I was born poor white trash.
Nobody gave a shit, so I was on my own.
My strategy was to always know the latest tech and to find the "unfriendly" regions of the computer world. That is, as soon as tech became widely known and user friendly, there was no money to be made. So, the trick was to always be at that point where employers had to hire me because nobody else knew how to to the job.
The world of work is mean and unfair. I accepted that reality decades ago.
I expect to get screwed over, and I spent decades strategizing to prevent that and come out on top. The specific strategies to achieve this change constantly. You're on your own to figure it out.
Yeah, chick, I imagine that you probably aren't completely down with the "Americans are too lazy to study anything hard" line of thinking.
Incidentally, something that really took off during the 1980s (perhaps sooner, but I think it really accelerated during the 1980s) was that top American students started realizing there was a much greater rate of return on one's educational investment if one took a career course that directed them towards Wall Street.
Say you can get into Harvard to study whatever you want. You can get a PhD in Physics and probably get tenure at a school like the University of Florida or the like (not bad) and live a pretty good life of the mind, or you can get a joint JD/MBA, go inot high finance, and make butt-laods of money playing with other people's money. Hmm, what to do, what to do?
I'll also note that all the people arguing that Americans don't have what it takes to study the hard fields vote over and over again for people that ducked those hard fields of study. Would any of you wanted to vote for Mitt Romney last year if he had had a stellar career in Physics topped off by many successful years running the Superconducting Super Collider (assuming it hadn't been killed by Congress)?
I'm willing to bet that pretty much no one here would have wanted to vote for my alterna-Mitt, precisely because he didn't take an easier course of study to make a lot of money.
I don't know if he thinks that, but he certainly seems to think we're overpaid. And compared to slave laborers in pre-industrial authoritarian communist dictatorships, we are.
Oh, bullshit. SO do you, as you always slavishly follow the Democratic Party, who has had their hands all over this too. And I'm willing to bet that you just can't wait for the combination of increased immigration and amnesty that will fundamentally make this a third world country.
You've got zero credibility, you Democratic lick-spittle.
Well, why would the wealthiest man in Congress want to support anything other than policies that will make him wealthier, and current practices have been quite good to him.
I don't begrudge his wealth and tend to think it might inoculate him to some extent against the typical venality and corruption that others fall prey to. Can anyone be more under the IRS's screwtiny than Darrell Issa? I like much of what he does, but his stance on H1-B visas is not one of them.
Rabel ftw...esp. WOPR.
Ritmo brings up the American auto industry's failures but doesn't mention that part of those failures were mandated by Congress.
Despite wishing otherwise, Icepick knows he can't ever find any applause from me on an increasingly corporatist Democratic party under Clinton. He's the one being the partisan. He just wants to know if the (pretend) conservative fear of communism is still stronger than any other priority.
I've never been a corporatist. The country would have been better off economically if Ralph Nader had become president in 2000.
But I'm only speaking my own views here. I can't speak for what Icepick imagines my views to be.
Incidentally, something that really took off during the 1980s (perhaps sooner, but I think it really accelerated during the 1980s) was that top American students started realizing there was a much greater rate of return on one's educational investment if one took a career course that directed them towards Wall Street.
Or pro sports if you're black -- no matter how smart you are. We do have some some fucked up reward systems in this country. Pro-sports and investment banking are important roles and role models -- but come on, that much?
Big Law recently went through a business model crisis because their only model was to bill more at every increasing rates. Clients eventually balked and found alternatives. The bubble has burst.
Right now, I happen to believe that Washington, D.C. is the most bubblicious bubble we have going and also the most dangerous for our country.
I don't begrudge his wealth and tend to think it might inoculate him to some extent against the typical venality and corruption that others fall prey to.
You're looking at it backwards. Rather than be a rich man that buys a Congressman to do his bidding, he simply bought himself a Congressional seat. We've seen that on both sides of the aisle with seemingly increasing frequency in the last 15 years. We've also seen instances of people with political power marrying those with wealth. Marriages of great utility, those.
@R&B: I'm a registered "non-Partisan" voter in CA.
The real "party of no."
Haz, it was implied by your comment of 7:52.
Sure, Ritmo, I'm sure you haven't voted straight ticket Democratic these last many election cycles. I totally believe that you have voted against Obama twice. Totally.
I'm retired, so I'm not playing the game any more, but, if I were, I'd give a tech guy the following advice.
High level skills aren't enough. The Indian programmers really are pretty amazing.
So, find a tech niche that demands high level English language skills and intimate knowledge of U.S. culture.
That was the online education biz for me. A lot of that stuff can't be farmed out for the reasons stated above.
Maybe that's changing, too. I don't know. Don't really want to know either, because my days of pushing the stone uphill are over.
Rather than be a rich man that buys a Congressman to do his bidding, he simply bought himself a Congressional seat.
Well it turns out he was pretty smart in that choice. He is usually the biggest donor to every charity even I've attended. He resonates well with the USMC. There really isn't much liberal politics in North San Diego county. They tend to cluster further south. I think he's got a safe seat.
@Ritmo
Oddly, we seem to be somewhat in agreement.
There is always a very large segment of economic activity that is free of political conniving.
Democrat or Republican made no difference in my work life, because I found the place where real need existed and served that need.
I'm pretty confident those places still exist. Just different. Life is a bit of a jigsaw puzzle. It's up to us to solve the puzzle. There are always novel solutions available for those who want to seek them.
And no politician can prevent you from doing that.
I am not unsympathetic to people caught up in the Obama job disaster. It cost me a business that took years to build.
My post was about a machine that makes hamburgers, period. It was interesting to me because it's a cool machine invented by really smart people. And because SEIU has been protesting at local fast food places demanding $15 as a starting hourly wage.
Don't infer I things that weren't in the original post.
You know, when things look really dark, that means you're not seeing the opportunity.
I emerged from school into the last Great Recession of the early 70s.
I was young and stupid, and I saw little opportunity and thought that everything was fixed forever in its current state.
Some years later, I opened my eyes and saw opportunity everywhere if only I knew how to seize it.
That's still true. I am sure of this.
It's definitely a cool machine Haz, but do you not realize how short-sighted your conclusions or concerns are? The only way a foreign country will compete for American hamburger-makers is if it comes to prefabricated hamburgers that come freeze-dried, ready to eat in a grocery chiller (repress gag reflex now). But how many hamburgers are made that way? Most are made fresh. Anyone that serves anything fresh is going to compete by selling (and advertising the sale of) fresh things. You've become so afraid of China that you actually think they'll teleport fresh hamburgers to American restaurants? That's crazy!
Don't infer I things that weren't in the original post.
How about in the comments you wrote?
What it wants is more engineers, scientists, and mathematicians. Not enough Americans study those fields because it's tooooo hard.
Sorry - same with domestic hamburger-making competitors!
You know, when things look really dark, that means you're not seeing the opportunity.
I guess you're right. I mean, George Soros stared the Holocaust right in the face and found the opportunity to make money. You mean like that, yes?
I emerged from school into the last Great Recession of the early 70s.
What happened in the early 1970s was not as bad as what is happening now. If not for the BLS simply refusing to count people that they deem have given up (a practice started during the Clinton years) we would be approaching almost five years of double digit unemployment now. There hasn't been anything like that since the Great Depression. And there hasn't been anything like the long-term unemployment issue since the Great Depression either.
Well, there was an opportunity for Soros, anyway, not so much the people he sold out.
How about in the comments you wrote?
See? Things are more complicated than they seem. In this, I'll actually take Haz's side (or come to his defense). Americans are a bit lazy. But that doesn't mean that every laid-off worker is lazy.
What we've gotten lazy at is assuming that college is for everyone, or assuming that if college isn't for everyone, then our country fails.
There's a job-employment mismatch in the trades - some of which now pay handsomely as a result. Watch Mike Rowe on this (from a show called "Dirty Jobs").
Of course, we could also excel at "STEM" education and graduates in the way that those looking to immigrate here do, but those won't employ as extensively as the trades. GOOGLE, Facebook and the like, despite being awesomely innovative and drivers of stock value, will never drive employment to the extent that basic infrastructure does. And the good news is, the need for basic infrastructure never goes away. You can't "compete it away".
Not enough Americans study those fields because it's tooooo hard.
I studied programming about as hard as an American can.
Those Indians study hard in a way that only a kid trying like hell to escape poverty can study. And, they don't care about whether the work is glamorous and fulfilling. They also emerge from a society that doesn't give much of a damn about whether their feelings are hurt, or their hands get dirty.
It's sort of like boxing. Only kids who really really need boxing and having nothing else succeed at boxing. Sure, middle class kids can work just as hard. But, they aren't driven in the way poor kids who have nothing else are driven.
That's why the latest immigrant class always excels at the boxing game.
Those Indian programmers write some of the most exquisite code I've seen.
If hamburger-making machines are destined to become the norm of the service industry, then let's be honest: Keeping the wages of hamburger makers low is only a short-term measure. Once we've all been outsourced to mechanical hamburger machines, then there's no point to arguing about the marginal value of an $8/hr hamburger maker and a $10/hr hamburger maker.
Alas! I've got to agree with Ritmo again.
The blue collar trades are thriving.
My girlfriend's son does electronic security for corporate plants. Plenty of work there, but you must start out as a competent electrician with a touch of carpentry and plumbing thrown in.
My son-in-law is raking in the bucks as a locomotive electrician. Only a few years ago, he was making his living out of the back of a pickup truck. He learned his trade as a construction intern, and by picking up small, private jobs.
The economy is still bad, but people need stuff. There's a big black market out there, too.
Anyone who says that it follows naturally that people who do not believe in minimum wage must also quite naturally believe in minimum living standard is too resolutely thick to talk to.
I read that by accident, and went, "Oh shit, that dumbass again."
It has been answered a thousand times, nay, a hundred thousand times. I do know straight up deaf people with better hearing than evidence by this ridiculous remark. No. It does not follow. Talk about thick fucking headed.
Lol. I love it when you think, Thomas. ;-)
Mike Rowe's great to watch. For a guy that's basically all about the trades, you wouldn't think he'd be worth several million dollars. Yes, he's primarily an entertainer/popularizer - but he's told of laborers who can name their price, at least 6 figures. That's substantive.
I've not even watched all that much of his show, but a few interviews he's done are phenomenal. He's an incredibly knowledgeable, intelligent and articulate guy. It's a shame we assume laborers can't be cut that way. But if you want to get a good understanding of the real economic/labor scandal in AMerica, start with his interview with Nick Gillespie of Reason TV. Then watch his testimony to Congress. Great stuff. Very well stated case he makes for a case that can't be stated well enough.
The blue collar trades are thriving.
Any idea of how many manufacturing jobs the country has now versus 2000? I don't have the latest figures, but in 2000 there were over 17,000,000. In 2012 there were just under 12,000,000. A big part of that decline happened during the bubble years, before they burst.
I won't bother looking at what happened to the construction trades. Probably a bubble up until early 2007 and then a sudden collapse, followed by a modest recovery. Oh, Hell, let me look it up on FRED. Let's see. Construction employment went from about 6.8 million in 2000 to around 5.9 million now.
So let's call it close to six million jobs lost in Construction and Manufacturing in the last 14 years. Manufacturing has lost about a third of its headcount nationally. Things aren't looking so good for the blue-collar guys in those two prime fields. I'm sure they're making up all the loses, though, with guys snaking clogged crappers on the black market.
@Icepick
I don't doubt that what you say is true about employment numbers in the construction trades.
I just happen to know a hell of a lot of guys who work in that field and make their living out of the back of pickup trucks. Musicians often take that route.
One avenue closes down, and those guys just start looking for another.
Snow plowing and landscaping (glorified lawn care) are still big money makers and they are cash businesses unless you are employing a big crew. I know a musician who makes $100,000 in the landscaping biz in NJ.
Every time it snows, my son-in-law makes another $700 cash plowing driveways.
The blue collar guys I know are incredibly resourceful and accustomed to hustling. They didn't quit hustling and looking for an angle just because the formal home construction biz went in the tank. They just went elsewhere.
Put another way:
Construction employment levels are back to mid-1990s levels. That's with a considerably larger population.
Manufacturing employment fell below 12,000,000 in 2009, during May, specifically. (It has only risen above the 12,000,000 mark in the last two months.) The last time prior to 2009 that manufacturing employment fell below 12,000,000? You have to go all the way back to February of 1946, just as the post-war recession was ending. 1946!
The country was considerably less populous at the time, too.
Tell me again about the wonderful resurgence in blue collar work when the two biggest blue-collar fields are doing so miserably.
ST, I'm sure all the blue collar guys here in Florida are also making ends meet with the occasional snow plowing gig. Oh, wait....
@Icepick,
The current economic mess is hardest, I think, on us older guys who thought we had it figured out, and now find the rug pulled out from under us.
We're tired. We spent decades developing something that worked, and now that's gone.
I was a little lucky in a number of ways. Some savings. Guessed right on technology. Drove myself to learn new things.
I just don't have the energy any more, or the desire, to hustle. So, yeah, if I was really hard up and facing financial ruin, I'd be incredibly pissed.
It's too late for me to pick up the pieces and build something new. So, for us old guys, the ruins of the 2008 crash were particularly catastrophic.
For the kids, it's different. Things will change. Prosperity will return one day, unlikely as that appears at the moment.
I'm sure you'll blame it on too many liberals not voting for enough Republicans, Icepick, but the decision to disinvest of infrastructure was a political one, and a recent one. We're still paying the costs. The push for universal college education and away from the trades was less recent, and less political, but that's still only part of the equation. Government policy is an important catalyst of infrastructure growth, no question about it. And the destruction of the unions supporting the trades (same way corporations do business concerns), well, that was political too.
http://reason.com/reasontv/2013/12/13/dirty-jobs-mike-rowe-on-the-high-cost-of
For the kids, it's different. Things will change. Prosperity will return one day, unlikely as that appears at the moment.
Yeah, it will be different for the kids. Because their careers are getting off to late starts, and they're accumulating (as a generation) a huge amount of non-dischargeable debt which will be a millstone around their neck until they're dead. And let's not forget that they'll be putting off the new family formation, and the requisite baby-bust that will come along with it.
This event is as epochal in many ways as the Great Depression was. You may recall that a world war was just a knock-on effect of that little crisis.
Haz - don't believe all that crap you hear about STEM shortages. People I know in the Silicon Valley swear the HB1 visa issue is crap and lies that helps them get foreign technical workers who will work cheap and who don't mind shacking up with 5-6 of their of their countrymen.
The next time you hear a pol or a corp titan or an MSM talking head claim there are hundreds of thousands of unfilled jobs - I suggest you ask them to provide a few examples.
R&B:
Continue to insult others and your comments will be removed.
I was only responding to another series of insults (much more vile) that you also removed. So I can only hope your warning was to that commenter, also, and that you are therefore not biasing removals. Thanks.
Michael, point of clarification (if you don't mind). Was this comment an insult to others? It doesn't seem warranted as no one had said anything (let alone anything insulting) to this person. For some reason you don't seem concerned with it. A clarification would be helpful. Thanks.
Anyone who says that it follows naturally that people who do not believe in minimum wage must also quite naturally believe in minimum living standard is too resolutely thick to talk to.
I read that by accident, and went, "Oh shit, that dumbass again."
It has been answered a thousand times, nay, a hundred thousand times. I do know straight up deaf people with better hearing than evidence by this ridiculous remark. No. It does not follow. Talk about thick fucking headed.
Fair enough.
R&B:
Another's employment circumstances are off limits as being too personal. You jabbed at Icepick; hence the deletions. And I deleted some things he said in reply.
You'll notice that most of your comments remain.
However, that one's decided, the topic of the thread is still an important one (to my mind) and I thank you for raising it and giving it a forum to discuss.
Michael: That's also fair. I appreciate your clarification and the concern you based it on.
And I deleted some things he said in reply.
As you wish, but I stand by every I wrote. And Chip's point was spot on.
AJ, the closer one is to the STEM fields, the more one realizes that so much of what is written about them is crap. Especially the stuff produced by the shills of the corporate titans.
Let's hear it for the lawsuits and the airing of grievances.
But Chip's comment is incongruous. If he means to say (despite the obvious swearing and insults) that opponents of minimum wage might also support a minimal standard of living, why should that be either 1) obvious or 2) logical or empirically supported? If the U.S. is one's standard of an economic ideal how do our low minimum wages match up with our low standards of living? We have higher average wages, but we have less services, a lower bottom marginal income threshold, we have less purchasing power, and decreasing. That's the reality.
I'm sure you'll blame it on too many liberals not voting for enough Republicans, Icepick....
So let's try this again.
If, Ritmo, you actually read my comments in THIS COMMENT THREAD, you would see I have no truck with the Republican Party. Similarly with most of what I have written for years now.
Reading comprehension became something of a fad in the STEM fields a few millenia ago. I'm sure it will eventually catch on in whatever field it is that you inhabit, eventually.
That's fine, Icepick. I don't think we need to make it about partisanship one way or another. People can debate policies and their merits without focusing on what the parties make of it. I thought that's what most of us were doing. Too many Democrats had become very pro-corporatist from Clinton onward, which I don't think is a good idea and would oppose in an election if another viable candidate (or party) with other good ideas and magnanimous leadership potential voiced that. If he were a Republican, that's fine with me. I'd vote for him, too.
Icepick - you must be an optimist.
Ritmo, your comment was that anyone that doesn't support the minimum wage obviously does not support a minimum standard of living for anyone. And before you accuse me of misquoting you (again, as you always do) here is the quote in question:
If you're against a minimum wage then it follows that you'd also oppose a minimum living standard....
This is a rich piece of ... well, I guess I can't really say. A belief that raising wages beyond what the market will bear is a bad idea does not lead to a belief that people should be left to starve. The idea that wages SHOULD be jacked up beyond what the market will bear DOES indicate that someone is either ignorant of how markets work (and isn't old enough to either remember the Nixon years or to have even read about them), or that they want more unemployed people.
But this is typical of the illogical leaps you make all the time. And always, ALWAYS, in a way that implies that anyone that isn't toeing the Democratic Party line is a bad person.
And it was to this bit of poisoned illogic that Chip responded, in his inimitable style. It's one thing to come in and be forceful, even angry and pissed off. It is another thing to come in pissing on everyone and then commencing to whine about how mean everyone is to your poor wittle self in response.
People can debate policies and their merits without focusing on what the parties make of it
Which goes so well with
If you're against a minimum wage then it follows that you'd also oppose a minimum living standard....
Icepick - you must be an optimist.
My wife goes so far as to call me an idealist. I can't imagine where she came by that notion, but there it is.
Coming soon to a wage slave near you: chants of "Arbeit Macht Fries"
The robot's name is Arbeit?
The next time you hear a pol or a corp titan or an MSM talking head claim there are hundreds of thousands of unfilled jobs - I suggest you ask them to provide a few examples.
It's also interesting to note that the solution proposed by the corporate titans is always to move the supply curve, never to move the demand curve.
Icepick said...
The robot's name is Arbeit?
Wouldn't that be a good name for a slave?
But if you insist on grammar naziness, how about Arbeiter Macht Fries? :)
Because capital is going to get all the positive returns for this great "boon".
Well, no. The hundreds of thousands of people who will order hamburgers from this machine will benefit from it, too.
I always order from the computer kiosk instead of desperately hoping the semi-literate teenager behind the counter won't fuck up my order TOO badly. If a machine could make the order instead of the semi-literate teenager *behind* the counter? So much the better!
Japan uses robots to turn old people over and take their temperature.
The Radio Japan lady pronounces the rob in robot as rob, and has for years.
That's the only clue she's not a native English speaker.
The worst Japanese English accents are delightful to listen to. You learn so much about English from mistakes you hadn't imagined were possible.
Robot: "How would you like your hamburger?"
Customer: "Medium rare."
Robot: "It was a joke."
I thought it was going to be the 10 dollar burger, but I suppose we will get both the 10 dollar burger and the robot burger. Robots rule!
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