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Robots To Replace Migrant Fruit Pickers
Vicissidude sends us to Wired for a look at a fruit-harvesting robot being developed in California. Its development has been funded entirely by agricultural associations, concerned by the uncertainty surrounding migrant immigrant labor. Quoting: "As if the debate over immigration and guest worker programs wasn't complicated enough, now a couple of robots are rolling into the middle of it. Vision Robotics, a San Diego company, is working on a pair of robots that would trundle through orchards plucking oranges, apples or other fruit from the trees. In a few years, troops of these machines could perform the tedious and labor-intensive task of fruit picking that currently employs thousands of migrant workers each season."
Really? How much exactly do these robots cost?
Is it more than about $3 an hour, including maintenance?
And do they reproduce themselves?
Cuz, you've got some strong competition there.
I've been wondering why this hasn't happened yet for years. The answer, of course, is that the ag industry could rely on incredibly cheap labor, so it wasn't worth developing a technological replacement. But if anything is proof that the debate about illegal immigration has turned a corner, this is it.
Once you've seen the back-breaking labor involved in the California agriculture industry, it's impossible not to applaud the development of technology that will make it obsolete. Nobody says after years of work in the strawberry fields, "Gee, I'm sure glad I got the opportunity to explore my full human potential in that career!"
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
We already have fruit f*cker robots, why not fruit pluckers too.
f ruit+fucker
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/search?keyword=
Dirt doesn't need luck.
Coming soon - a remake of The Grapes of Wrath where robots drive the Okies out of the fields....
The ag lobby has been claiming that we need "guest workers" (or illegals, or others) to pick these crops.
This is not unlike the H1B scandal. If you pay enough, you'll find people to do almost any job. The "need" isn't for workers per se, but people who will work a brief job for roughly minimum wage and then move on as a rootless nomad.
We should view this as cruel. We shouldn't maintain an underclass which picks fruit or maintains gardens. Machines can do this work without becoming tired, bored, getting disabling injuries, suffering reactions to ag chemicals, or any of the other hazards of human labor in orchards and fields. Machines can be built as needed and scrapped when they become unusable or obsolete.
If a machine is stored in a leaky barn, it's the farmer's problem. It's not cruel to ask a machine to work in high temperatures or without toilet breaks. A machine doesn't need compensation if drought or frost or fungus ruins the crop and there's nothing for it to do one year.
The taxpayer ought to have a say too. A machine isn't going to bring in a family which immediately qualifies for food stamps and Medicaid. A machine isn't going to overwhelm schools with ESL students. A machine isn't going to add to traffic congestion or law-enforcement expenses.
People who build and maintain machines have pretty good lives. People who do the sort of jobs replaced by machines often don't. Designing and debugging and improving machines means paychecks for geeks like us.
Instead of asking anyone to do jobs we won't do ourselves, or pay enough to attract folks like us, let's make machines to do them. Anything less is hypocritical.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Low cost, low value added labor is a loser. So is importing millions of people to form a permanent slave class.
This argument was what Southern Slave owners used with Cotton.
Funny, how that chore of cotton picking got automated.
Machines don't get tired. They don't die. They don't need medical care or costly medical plans. They can be made over and over again, and always get cheaper when you make enough of them. The whole advance of human existence has been to make more and better machines, that do more to leverage people's labor.
Hello that is WHY you are reading Slashdot.
Machines replaced slave and later tenant farmer/serf labor in the South. Machines replaced lots of deadly hand labor in coal mines (not entirely but a lot). Machines replaced a line full of low skilled labor on the auto assembly lines with a few high skilled positions.
But hey, for some people having a subservient near-slave class is a plus. Not the kind of society I'd want to live in, but some folks only feel better when they have helots to lord it over I guess.
Which ethnicity of indentured servants will be used to outsource repairing the robots to provide the food for all the Caucasian liberal arts grads?!?
bow down, puny earthlings!
10 MD
Tomaron nuestros trabajos!
This one is worth a few "Funny" points, if not something else for the thought behind the sarcasm.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
1. Do you think the migrant workers are going to be hapy to be out of jobs?
2. What will you say when automation renders YOUR occupation redundant?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
1. I think they'll be happy to be settled somewhere. I and many others would prefer that the illegal immigrants do this in their home countries.
2. When automation can create and execute new concepts, humanity itself will have created its successor. Think of it as evolution in action.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
This is why the "guest worker" (wage slavery) program being argued in the immigration bill needs to die. Slavery kills technological innovation- see Greek history, Roman history, and the American civil war for reference.
Cause, we've yet to make a machine that doesn't need maintenance.
How we know is more important than what we know.
It amazes me that Horticulturists can come up with thousands of varieties of flowers, fruits, & vegetables, Engineers can come up with robots that circle a tree numerous times to clean it of any fruit, but the two can't work together to make a tree that's easier to harvest from.
Maybe they will now.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Expect massive Luddite revolts. I'm serious. You have no idea how many MILLIONS of Mexican migrant workers there are.
This wont be pretty. Perhaps we should ask England is advice concerning textile machines?
I, for one, welcome our fruit-picking robot migrant workers.
Developing technology is extremely expensive. And while there is no pressure to change, usually driven by shortages in supply (whether labour or raw materials), the status quo is maintained.
It took more than one gas crisis for the American car manufacturers to design fuel efficient engines. Because while gas was cheap, there were no incentives to invest in technology. And while labour was (and still is) cheap, robotics cannot compete. I am sure that the technology for those robots has been available for at least a decade, but it wasn't cost effective in comparison to migrant workers.
But this is the way our society SHOULD have developed. So many manufacturing processes could be automated, if not for the initial investment.
Oh, No! Now they'll have to pay unemployment, retirement and severance packages to all those loyal migrants.
Most of them say, "I'm glad I didn't starve back home."
The only reason why people do jobs like this is that it is better than the alternative. If we eliminate the class of jobs (which I agree we should do) then the net effect to migrants is bad. The net effect to those that they are supporting is disasterous to the population being supported by said industry. Even if the industry is horrible the alternative may be worse. So if we do this automation, do we simply eliminate the class and let the chaos fall where it may? Note that a similar thing happened in NOLA - there were large manual labor industries that were displaced (and probably won't return). The elimination of this class of "barely survival" jobs has yielded a set of people without the skills to survive in any facet. Retraining (at least according to the social worker I discussed it with) is not feasible, as most have somewhere between a third and a sixth grade education. Many of them are second/third/nth generation of low grade manual laborers. Like it or lump it the cost of automation goes far beyond the price of machines. It's retraining costs for citizens, it's economic aid to countries who are affected by the elimination of a cash inflow (or deciding to turn our backs on them - quite possibly the right thing to do). It's paying the social costs of a higher crime rate when people who can't do something else realize they must still eat.
www.voiceofthehive.com - Beekeeping and Honeybees for those who don't.
In Soviet Russia, fruit picks you!!
I remember when this subject first came up back in the 80's in California. There was a loud protest by the U.C. students against this type of research. So much so, that it was definitely a politically unacceptable subject, and the research seemed to be moved to the back burner.
You see, students were concerned about the impact on the Farm Workers back then, and didn't want to jeoparize their jobs. It might be a little hard to fathom now, but it was a different time back then. The grape boycott by the Farm Workers Union was still a fresh topic, and people were more radical about liberal causes then.
Plus, believe it or not, at least some Farm Workers considered themselves Middle Class. I once saw this statement in a local newspaper, because the Farm Worker being interviewed could actually own a home.
Oh yes, I was one of those students that shared that belief, though I wasn't vocal about it.
Today is a completely different world. The number of illegal workers in this country have pretty much destroyed any hope of being "Middle Class" for the farm workers. And a good number of students from then have had to shift their job asperations (or are thinking about it), due to the unmitigated number of H1-B's that are flooding the market. That's if they actually have a job (and I know many in this age group who either don't, or are underemployed).
In theory we could have a civilization where people only work if they want to. Isaac Asimov and Roger MacBride Allen explored one possible society in the Caliban trilogy.
We could have robots making our fast food, doing the gardening, mining metal, making robots, maintaining robots.
If an American won't pick oranges, what makes you think an American will want to make a robot that picks oranges? Maybe Mexico will make the robots and send them across the border so we don't have to make robots!
do these robots also scare the elderly and more conservative citizens with their foreign language and culture? Because i won't have any part of it when old people are 'just fine' with it.
We'll just have to hire a bunch of migrant robot repairmen!
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
(Yes, I'm a bastard)
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Oh, great so what are we going to do when all of the illegal Transformers from Cybertron come over the boarder looking for farm work? This is just swapping one illegal for another.
Tea and kung-fu. Life is good. Rising Phoenix
Not to take this story for more than what it is but this gives me an opportunity to share a vision of the future that has made me think quite hard. What if robots could do every menial and every physical job that needed doing? Imagine robots as dexterous and with visual recognition as good as your average skilled craftsman.
Would each person own a robot and collect a check from home or would the more likely scenario be that a few large companies would run huge armies of these robots? How might all those people who never heard of 'knowledge work' make a living? I'm thinking that the current scheme for distribution of wealth based on labor might not work in that scenario. Finally, I wonder what system, short of some socialist or communist nightmare, would.
I'm interested to hear what people think. Discussion or not, we'll only find out when it happens so bring those cotton-pickin' robots on!
"Tree shakers" have been used since the 1960s. A big net in two section is clamped around the tree, a big arm reaches out and grabs the tree trunk, and a vibrator shakes the tree while the fruit falls off. Some early versions damaged trees, but that was fixed. (Linear shaking good, orbital shaking bad.)
Tomato harvesting was partly mechanized back in the 1960s. A tougher tomato plus appropriate machinery did the job. This was controversial at the time. Today, it's established technology. Check out the Pik-Rite 190 Tomato Harvester. 30 tons of tomatoes an hour. And that's the small model. This still doesn't work all that well for the softer varieties of tomatoes intended for sale whole, but Roma and cherry tomatoes are routinely picked by machine now.
Picking machines are getting smarter. The newer ones have cameras, computers, and air jets to sort produce by size and color.
The problem is that America is letting illegals come here to pick. Instead, had reagan not done his infamous forgivness, then we would have been forced to deal with this. All in all, we would already be highly mechaniczed. What is needed is to automate the low end jobs of agriculture, construction, manufactuering and low-end service jobs. These robots will not only be useful here, but also in any attempt to move off planet. Once we go to either the moon or mars we will need HEAVY automation to survive. And for America, and the west such as Japan and Europe, we need it due to our greying population. That is going to haunt us soon.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
There will be the typical outcry that it's being proposed to either stop Mexicans from migrating, deprive Latinos work and money (vast chunks of central America and Mexico are now completely dependent on migrant labor money that is sent home) And there will of course be comments from what is typical of ignorant people that call themselves liberal (and aren't).
The fact is immigration reform that removes illegal migrants and eliminates even agricultural migrant's will be good for America in every way. The US economy has moved to a very strong dependence on what can only be called slave labor. Illegal migrants are frequently put in job's that pay less than US minimum wage standards and don't meet US minimum safety standards. There can be no argument that the continual immigration of people to the US helps the American economy, even illegal migration helps, the question is does it help more than controlled immigration does. But the fact is, how illegal workers are treated in this country is akin to the sharecrop system of virtual slavery that developed in the south after the civil war. It's also a fact that eliminating the cheap slave labor will force technological solutions that in the end will generate a significant number of high paying tech jobs.
As citizens we have to decide if we believe in the values we enshrine. If the wholesale exploitation of people to keep fruit and veggy prices low fits with our values. Sure, the migrants will tell you that they love living in America and that they do the hard work so their children have a chance that they wouldn't have in their home countries. Again, we have to ask ourselves, wouldn't it be better to allow REAL immigration instead of speaking out about illegal migration while we turn a blind eye to the illegal migration (US policy for the last 20 years).
How many people do you know that have turned in the local small businesses that are employing illegal migrants and in the process pricing out everyone else that is playing by the rules ?(Construction is by far the worst for this)? Illegal migration artificially deflates labor prices, it's the reason the republican's have used to keep the minimum wage from changing and it's also the reason that some jobs have such low labor rates that no one but illegal migrants can afford the job, thereby providing an excuse to right wing policy makers that the migrants are only taking jobs that American's won't. Without illegal migrants in the equation labor rates would be forced by supply and demand to provide a real living wage.
Picking a fruit without damaging the fruit or the tree seems like a pretty complicated task from a robotics standpoint. I'm sure Honda or a couple of CMU grad students could demo something that can pick an orange from a tree--but picking a million oranges from thousands of trees in a real orchard is a different type of task entirely.
Not saying it won't happen, but I'll believe it when I see it.
Until then, this kind of looks like an R&D firm "picking the low hanging fruits" of funding from the immigration debate...
Immigration issues are nothing new. I think California's first immigrant labor crisis (post Mexican era) was in the 1950's. New York has had issues as well ("West Side Story"). I met a prof circa 1994 who claimed to have worked on a fruit picking machine. Apparently oranges are somewhat difficult...the picker needs to have a "feel" for the orange as the wrist is used to twist and pull the fruit. You don't want a stem left and you don't want a chunk of the protective rind to be pulled free. It took awhile to make the machine...when the machine was demo'd, no one was too interested. It was like paraphrasing Mao...why use technology when you have a comparatively free workforce clamoring for a job, any job? Point being this controversy is ongoing from decades, if not centuries past. Hopefully the robos are getting cheaper. They weren't in the 1980's.
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I, for one, welcome our new robot applelords.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
America is a rich country with a free and good education system so every non retarded person is qualified for skilled labor. Farming is inherently low value added unskilled labor best suited to developing nations. Why does America even have farms? The land would be better used as nature reserves , recreational parks and new subdivisions for people to live in so that they wouldnt need to live as crowded as in New York and San Francisco. Food can be imported much cheaper and our taxes could be reduced a lot as the government wouldnt have to subsidize farming or research into farming machines. This is just another example of large farming lobbies using their lobbying power to make the rest of the population pay for an outmoded way of life. And to anybody who crys wolf about food security I say get serious - do you really think any third world country will try to hold back food from a country with the strongest military in the world as well as one which controls the world economy through its control of the dollar?
**Life is too short to be serious**
I have often stated that agricultural technology stagnates as long as there is cheap labor to do the work. When you can have some guy from Mexico come in, and pay him under the table illegally at wages well below state and federal minimums, there is no incentive to invest in technology.
... As for Mexico, they have all the education, tools and resources necessary to be a prosperous nation. They don't need to immigrate to the US and work for slave wages to feed their children. The real obstacles are the corrupt government and corrupt businesses that exploit the people. You leave Mexico because you're being exploited to work in the US where you are also exploited, but just to a lesser degree. That's a bogus argument for ignoring illegal immigration.
But when you wish to produce more crops with lower labor costs, in a world with rising labor costs, you end up having to invest in technology to take on the role of human beings. This is the wonder of agriculture in the industrialized world. Even something as simple as a combine harvester has had a dramatic impact on our society. It is inventions like that that enabled an industrial revolution to occur. As you no longer need as many people on the farm, that provides more people to work in industry and dramatically increases the number of people who become professional workers or skilled tradesmen.
A poor third-world nation suffers greatly because it cannot scale its agriculture the same way as the industrialized nations. Everyone is working their tail off trying to do subsistence farming. they have no time to work at a trade that adds to their nations GDP/GNP. If a poor nation could increase agricultural output while decreasing the labor involved, you can reassign those people to producing things. the don't even have to be costly goods, it could be sewing clothing and footballs. But it's hard to industrialize when people are starving(a leading cause of disease in the third world) or working constantly to produce food (an insufficient amount of food).
You should either treat people as equals and protect them from exploitation, or you do not let them in. And guess who the primary victims of Latino gangs are? new illegal immigrants. Without control of the borders the ex-cons and thugs spill into the country and take over the Hispanic ghettos, victimizing the illegal immigrants. I don't know about you, but I think knowing who comes into your country and not letting in people without proper document is the opposite of racist/bigot, I think it's the compassionate choice.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
troops of these machines could perform the tedious and labor-intensive task of fruit picking that currently employs thousands of migrant workers each season
I'm sure the migrant workeers are glad they won't have to do that tedious and labor-intensive task any more.It will never work - those robots are huge, they will never make it across the border undetected.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
So the fruit pickers will be from China instead of from Mexico.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
Future is now. what is need to invent is fruit salad tree seed that grows fully in few seconds and drops its fruits into bowl.
fruit salad treehttp://www.museumofhoaxes.com/EE/images/uploa
Even if immigrants(legal or otherwise) no longer did fruit picking. They would still be cheapest for gardening, housekeeping,
nannies.
I would worry more about robots replacing legal service workers(could you imagine McDonalds automating its food
preparation??? Walmart replacing most of its overnight stockworkers with stockbots.
Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto, domo...domo
Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto, domo...domo
Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto, domo...domo
Thank you very much, Mr. Roboto
For doing the jobs that nobody wants to
And thank you very much, Mr. Roboto
For helping me escape just when I needed to
Thank you-thank you, thank you
I want to thank you, please, thank you
That isn't immensely helpful thinking. It does nothing to improve the lot of "poor drudges," but it acknowledges what most polemicists don't: that after all our fine talk about fairness and opportunity and hard work and everybody getting ahead, what most want isn't that at all. We want to keep some people down so that we may be kept up.
We hardly need limit this to Orwell's era or social context, either--in its bluntness, it's a very American realization. From the slave trade and coolie labor and the United Fruit Company to today's overseas sweatshops, we have always been wont to use others badly. Orwell's forebears may have had much longer to perfect the art of working foreigners to death, but we've been quick studies.
Now, of course, we are again using our own badly. The dreary Wal-Mart economy is a grim joke upon a nation whose favorite self-congratulatory myth is the offer of generalized prosperity in the American Dream! Outsourcing, H1B hiring and vast forced-work prison labor populations also mock the myth, show how empty it's become.
And so yes, build robots to pick oranges because it's cruel labor for people. But five minutes after the robots start plucking oranges, migrant farm populations will be available for new cruel usage by new masters. It's not the hot sun or the work that brutalizes them so much as it is an ethos. Please build a machine that can change that!
Probably 6 months ago, there was a Pot truck that got busted. I can't seem to find a link. It had this crazy rotating setup so that it maximized the space inside the truck with each plant getting equal amounts of light and a once a rotation dip into a hydroponic solution. Do that with strawberries and all of a sudden you don't need 3 acres of land for a decent sized crop, you get strawberries year round, you don't have to bend over to pick them, and you can easily come back to undergrown strawberries in small quantities later.
Robots is a great idea, but the cost of the machinery coupled with the cost of operating the machinery makes it a difficult sell over cheap immigrant labor. An idea like the one I just stated pushes "strawberry picking" into a reasonable job, one that can be filled year round, and one that can be strategically placed in areas where a work force is plentiful.
Sometimes you don't need a rocket scientist or a robot designer to revolutionize the industry - you just need a guy to walk up and say "why aren't you doing it this way?"
One of the more frequent points of criticism about vertical farming is the need to use manual havesters due to the difficulty of using combines indoors. It was a particularly stupid argument, since the suggested crops were ones that didn't use combines for harvesting. The need for manual harvesting is more real, since you don't want pickers moving in and out of the environment all the time. Something like these robots, however, would be an ideal solution. They look not only small but easily adaptable for multiple types of fruits.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Mod me down for defending Marx, but I feel like he's pretty misunderstood, and far more insightful than people give him credit for, and his views relate directly to the topic.
Apologies for the long post, and if it's not very readable, well, it's friday night and I'm a bit drunk... But it can be summed up as "Robot society as you describe it is communism, and that's a good thing":
Well, setting aside issues like Peak Oil and more general limitations on the energy to power all these robots, which make me wonder if this is a realistic future scenario...
If what you're describing comes true, you are basically describing the technological conditions for "end-stage communism." I don't mean the Communist Party violently overthrows capitalism to create a worker's paradise - I mean what Marx was actually predicting; a great deal of his theory has been "creatively modified" by people like Lenin and Mao.
Marx was basically just arguing (revolutionary and unique at the time, not really that unique now, after people have been discussing it for 1.5 centuries) that technology shaped society. Far from saying capitalism needed to be destroyed post-haste, he was arguing that capitalism as an economic and social system was simply a structure on top of industrialism as a technological system - a way of organizing resources and people, and justifying the downsides, of industrial factories, etc. Marx was pretty clear that he admired the ingenuity and resourcefulness of capitalists, he just disapproved of the way that the people at the top ignored the downsides of their own methods.
Capitalism is good, Marx said, because it stimulates the development of production technology that alleviates and overcomes the great problem of scarcity. The profit motive
causes business owners to reinvest in their business, automate it, produce more at lower cost, drive costs lower, etc., etc. This makes more stuff, which is good, because people have generally not had enough to survive, or at least to survive comfortably.
But as capitalism develops, Marx argued, it faces some "internal contradictions". As automation becomes more and more prevalent (thanks to the profit motive), there is less and less work for people to do. When you're out of work and run out of savings, you can't buy stuff, no matter how cheap it is. So there will be a growing class of hungry, pissed-off people; at the same time, there will be greater material abundance thanks to automation.
Eventually, this situation will have to change, if for no other reason than that the unemployed masses will simply start taking things, because it's that or starve to death. At that point, the society will naturally convert to socialism - that is, the workers will just start running things themselves, first by democratic government, then without any government at all. As the situation stabilizes, individuals can pretty much do their own thing, as long as the means of making necessities (automated factories) don't come under any individual's or any particular group's control.
Now, you can stave off this situation, and keep the basic structure of capitalism in a few ways. We see the US, for example, doing all of these in the twentieth century. More specifically, if you've studied the history of these things, you'll notice that consumerism, New Deal, dramatic increase in neocolonialism, welfare, etc. all either start or dramatically increase - a quantum leap - around the 1920s-30s in the US. The Great Depression basically is the contradiction Marx described coming to fruition (remember, it was part of a global depression in all advanced nations), but it got "band-aids" to alleviate the problem, and then WW2 and the Cold War began generating a lot of jobs:
1) Develop new industries that take on the unemployed workers. Eventually these tend to be automated themselves.
2) Develop/enlarge new markets by:
A) "Strongly encouraging" developing countries to buy your stuff instead of making it themselves - in essence, shifting the unemplo
There's an old joke that goes something like this:
...So many "hard-working people" take the easy way out, and come illegally into the US, and send money home. To the country they don't want to live in, because of the government THEY elected and leave in power. Are these the people we want in the US? Are these people we want to extend citizenship to? What sorts of people do you think they'll elect to office, given the chance?.... If "Aztlan Pride" means being a cowering hypocrite, let them wave their flags in the civic cesspools they have made for themselves.
A Mexican and a Cowboy are drinking in a bar right on the border. The cowboy says "Why are you Mexican people always so mad at us? What'd we wever do to you?"
The Mexican turns to him and says "You stole half our country! And worse than that, you took the half with all the paved roads!"
Then the cowboy says "Yea but when we took that land, nobody lived there, and the roads weren't paved."
---------
First off.... the US does not at all need illegal immigrants, particularly those from central and S. American countries.
These people tend to leave their own countries because of lousy economic conditions--but it never seems to sink in that the governments in those countries plays a big part in the lousy economic conditions. Mexico's gov't has a few people who seem to be earnestly trying to do the decent thing, but fact is most of it sucks for corruption, and has for a long time. The Mexican electorate can't seem to figure out how NOT to vote brutes and grifters into office.
Mexican people are not dumb, and are not lazy. Mexico has decent amounts of natural resources, industry (other than the border maquiladoras) and educational institutions. There is nothing wrong with the country except for the people who tend to get elected to run it--and Mexicans need to stay home and figure out how to fix that themselves.
Second of all--the reason that immigrants come to the US is that they know they can get jobs, and the reason for that is that the agricultural business lobby has always tried to minimize the EMPLOYER's penalties for hiring illegals. The key to not attracting so many illegals is not to try to fine the illegals, they wired all their extra money home. The key here is making the BUSINESSES caught employing them pay--dearly. Like, say,,, $1000 per day of known employment. When the farm lobby sees that it's cheaper to hire legal citizens, they'll raise wages and probably be able to hire legals. They won't LIKE that, because those legals will have full job rights under US law--something that illegals do not have now. But if McDonald's and Wal-Mart knew they could get away with hiring near-100% illegals and pay them $3 an hour, do you think they'd do it too? And do you think they'd be happy to see an end put to it?
US companies that hire illegals need to pay through the nose, and that money needs to be spent on deporting the illegals caught. It's for their own good. (while we're at it, we need to rescind "birthright citizenship". All the blacks who were slaves are already citizens now, and that was the entire point of the law)
Thirdly--Whatever Mexico thinks of US immigrant policy is meaningless; the trite US police abuse that Mexico calls "an outrage" is mild compared to what Mexican police do regularly to people entering their own country illegally at the southern border.
~
I say "open up the doors to foreigners and keep them open".
I'm 50 years old and my Social Security depends on them.
What does this have to do with immigration? The robots are replacing EVERY worker, not just migrant workers. There is no difference between replacing migrant worker, illegal workers, and legal workers.
Regardless of immigration status, the robots are replacing workers. Period. The robots don't decide who they want to replace, The farmers that grow the fruit just want to replace all of the workers so they can minimize costs (the whole point of robotics in the first place), and the companies that develop the robots could give a damn about the immigration status of the workers they are replacing because it has no influence on robotics in the first place.
What the heel is this article about? Is it about robots becoming more widespread in industry, or is it an "Immigration Politics/Policies" op-ed?
Robotics has nothing to do with immigration status, and immigration status has nothing to do with robotics.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Robert Mugabe? Is that you?
Those Employers would now be responsible for maintenance, rather than passing it on to society at large. The problem is that a decent social welfare system combined with a free market economy is a minimum wage set well below a person's ability to economically care for themselves. Illegal or not a man (or woman) who works 40 hours (or more) a week should be able to care for their family without government or private assistance. The only alternative to fixing the minimum wage and the removing illegally paid employees, is to allow some people to starve in the streets. However that would have the nasty side effect of increasing street crime exponentially, as hungry people would kill for a loaf of bread.
What evidence do you have that you can just jack up the minimum wage to the levels you're talking about, and not drive inflation and the cost of basic goods up proportionately?
I'm really honestly interested. I've talked to a lot of "living wage" proponents and the schemes always seem to have some gaps in them. Okay, if we decide that it costs $20k in order to "live," and we divide that into 50 weeks per year at 40 hours per week, we get about $10 an hour take-home pay. Add 30% in taxes, and you're at $13/hr minimum wage. Okay so far. But if these are the people who are producing the cheap goods, how do you keep that from just driving up the $20k figure?
And if you set the minimum wage to a dynamic value, rather than a static one -- a "basket" of goods, or some formula that's supposed to represent what's necessary to "live" -- and it causes that value itself to increase, then you've just created a positive feedback loop. The result, as far as I can tell, would be runaway inflation.
The idea of a living wage seems pretty nice (and I'm no stranger to minimum wage jobs myself, before I realized that a college diploma is probably the best thing you can ever spend money on, in terms of ROI), but if it has to be purchased at the cost of hyperinflation, I'm not sure it's a great idea. And I'm pretty skeptical of the whole concept, unless there's some way to conclusively demonstrate that it's not going to drive inflation.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I think birthright citizenship is a good thing overall though. Stateless people are not a good thing to have floating around in the world.
Eliminating automatic place-of-birth citizenship wouldn't necessarily lead to 'stateless people.' Lots of countries -- the majority of the First World, actually -- doesn't automatically make you a citizen just by being born there, and they're not overrun by stateless people. A child's citizenship ought to follow from the citizenship of its parents. A child born to American citizen/s abroad is eligible to become a citizen; most other countries allow the same thing.
If a country doesn't allow children born to its citizens outside its geographic borders to become a citizen, then the statelessness problem is being caused there, not by the country that doesn't automatically grant status to the child simply by virtue of where the mother was when they popped out. (Mexico definitely does allow this -- I've met a number of children-of-illegals that are dual U.S./Mexican citizens.)
Eliminating place-of-birth automatic citizenship would remove much of the incentive for pregnant women to travel to the U.S., and it wouldn't necessarily result in a huge number of stateless persons.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The robotic orange-picking overloads welcome you!
(sorry - had to be said)
I believe that robots are here to help... to release people to do non-robotic tasks. For those worried about robots replacing humans here is an article that addresses those questions: http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm If you want to contribute to this effort by coding open-source here are some links: http://miarn.sf.net/ and http://playerstage.sf.net./
I would love to have a title like that, I'd feel so... necessary.
But then again, I'd love to see a very small shell script try and pick strawberries.
To be replaced by a robot running a very small shell script, though - that'd suck.
Wetbacks being replaced by Wetbots.
This eerily reminds me of book "Manna" http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm by Marshall Brain. Essentially, most human labor will be automatized, stopping flow of money from businesses to employees. What will happen then greatly depends on what path society decides to take. Two contrasting paths taken by US and Australia are depicted in detail in the book. I guess Manna is arriving sooner than I thought.
"And as you go forth today remember always your duty is
clear: To build and maintain those robots."
especially with the costs of domestic labor skyrocketing through the roof.
t h_slow/index.htm
I'd been given to understand average and median wages were more or less stable and/or falling relative to inflation.
Not true?
This article:
http://money.cnn.com/2006/01/30/pf/real_wage_grow
gives some specifics on some of the nations largest counties as of a year and a half ago. There's certainly some counties where real wages are increasing... and others where it's clear workers aren't winning against inflation.
Tweet, tweet.
"Migrants To Replace Robot Fruit Pickers"
US accepts over a million legal immigrants a year. More than entire rest of the world combined.
In fact, there is no wage skyrocketing in the US. Immigration, in fact, hurts American wages : http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/back504.html
The study of the trends in the earnings of native workers over the 1960-2000 period indicates that immigration has indeed harmed their economic opportunities. The effect on wages, however, differs across education groups and race groups. For example, the immigrant influx that entered the country between 1980 and 2000 lowered the wage by 7.4 percent for high school dropouts, by 3.6 percent for college graduates, and by around 2 percent for both high school graduates and workers with some college. Of course, the impact is much larger for some specific experience groups within each educational category. Similarly, although this immigrant influx lowered the wages of white native workers by 3.5 percent, it lowered the wage of native-born blacks by 4.5 percent, and of native-born Hispanics by 5 percent.
I live in the town where these robots will be put to use. I've grown up with the migrant workers that will be displaced by the machines. I've been welcomed into their homes and eaten at their dinner tables. This white boy loves Christmas time because I always receive bags of tamales from these proud hard working families. Every spring I would see my classmates disappear to work the fields. One summer I decided to join them. I lasted four hours.
I love the friends I have made. I enjoy the people and the culture that have become a part of the California Central valley. These are proud, hardworking people. I also welcome the advancement of technology and I believe that the robotic fruit pickers are the natural progression of man. It's a shame that we Americans live off of the broken backs of immigrants.
People never look at the real issue of the immigration debate. We spend too much time and money tending to the symptoms and continually ignore the cause. The living conditions in Mexico are horrid. The gap between the rich and poor is massive and their government doesn't care how many poor people it lets die in order to preserve the ruling class. The United States likes the play World Police when it comes to humanitarian efforts. We invaded Somalia to feed their hungry, we over threw an evil dictator in Iraq, but somehow we ignore our next door neighbor. The only way to fix the immigration problem is to remove the corrupt government of Mexico and instill one that cares about improving the economic conditions of that country. California continually pays the price of Mexico's apathy. We could spend that same money dropping food in Mexico and then watch our border traffic ease up. But the fix is never to give a man a fish, but to teach him how to fish. Their government must be fixed or the United States should annex the whole country as the 51st state. Rich Americans will love all of the new coastal land. Plus we will have a bigger pool of young poor people that we coax into joining our military to fight our foreign wars.
I will end this before I get even further off topic. My point is simply to improve the living conditions in Mexico so that they are like our neighbors to the north. Then embrace innovations, like the robotic fruit picker, so that the mass exodus of Mexican labor doesn't kill the Californian economy.
With grain harvesters, there is significant wastage - stuff that the machines miss. A figure of 10% drifts out of my memory, but I could be wrong. I have trouble imagining less than that, and maybe twice that, as machines try to pick from the irregularly-placed fruit on trees, and ditto on bushes.
As if the price of fuel, and not buying locally-grown food, hasn't jacked up our grocery bills by at least 25% in the last year or so.
mark
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Australia has been the innovator here, not California. California likely favors homegrown solutions (no pun intended), but Australia has been using robots in the field (no pun intended) for many years.
A little logic and economics will show us the future.
When a machine is invented to perform a task, there is a total cost of ownership. That total cost includes the cost of production and maintenance. Prototypes generally have very high total costs of ownership. Once refinements are made that bring this total cost down to a level that is beneath the cost of equivalent human labor, then the machine becomes economically viable, and people buy it.
Now, machines need people to oversee their production and maintenance...so machines create jobs. The jobs they create are part of their total cost of ownership. Here is the important point: a machine becomes economically viable when the work it creates (measured in dollars rather than heads) is less than the work it eliminates.
If the amount of maintenance a machine requires costs more than human labor costs, nobody buys it. Once there is a net loss of human labor, however, people start buying it.
So, yes, machines both eliminate and create jobs. They enter into widespread use, however, when they eliminate more than they create. You see? So even though they need maintenance, as you pointed out, they still eliminate jobs.
Of course this is an oversimplification. The buying decision will include other factors such as reliability, luxury-value, perhaps even just time saved (it costs more but I have more free time which makes it worth it) and so on. This general principle of net gains in cost-savings, however, will continue to incite us to buy machines instead of hire people whenever it makes sense to do so. That is an economic need which will continue to spur development and innovation along those lines.
What is the long term end of this process? What happens when there is so much cheap automated labor available that only 25 percent of the population is necessary in order to provide for the needs of itself and the other 75 percent? In other words, what happens when there really aren't enough jobs to go around? I don't know. Traditional economics holds that something always needs doing, and hence there will always be jobs...but...traditional economics was derived from observations made in a very different landscape than one full of automated labor. If such a state can be achieved, the transition to it will happen over time, and so adjustment to it will also happen over time. My guess is that we will avoid driving the population to crime and riots by slowly adopting more socialist policies...but only time will tell for sure.
I'm the anon OP of this thead. Thanks for the well thought out response. But honestly, you see losers like Maxume all the time. They are trolling, and are racist as well. This guy is a classic example. Throw the racist caard immediately when you mention immigration.
Their ability to form logical conclusions is minimal to non-existant. The best they can do is to parrot what they already feel. In short, he's an idiot.
Witness his subsequent response. Which completely ignores the fact that back in the 80's, Farm Workers considered themselves middle class. They no longer do. And these are the ones who are on the fore-front of illegal immigration. They are the harbinger of what's to come for the rest of the American middle-class.
In soviet Russia you don't pick the fruit, the fruit picks OMG LETS GO RIDE BIKES!!1!!!
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
The migrant workers themselves use lots of energy for heating and cooling (they usually live in very poorly-constructed housing). Often their biggest asset is a maxi-size pickup truck, which also consumes large amounts of fuel.
What's the daily fuel requirement for an apple-picking machine (which may be possible to electrify) vs. a full crew of field hands who commute 100 miles one-way to work every day? We are far, far better off feeding the machine and the occasional visit from the repair company's work truck.
It's estimated that about 10% of the current US population is illegal aliens. If they left, they would consume considerably less energy back in their home countries. (This is quite practical; make it very hard to get work and most will self-deport, like the illegal Pakistanis when things got hot after 9/11.) This would give the world a bit of breathing room on both oil supplies and carbon emissions.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Fuck Yeah!!! FUCK Y33333@@@@HHHH!!!!!
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
...can't wait to live off the fruits of robotic labor.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
-Tom
Actually, it is a nation of immigrants. You don't get to divide immigrants up into before- and after- lines. The ones who came in before this date were "settlers", after that, but before this date they were "early immigrants" and the ones coming in now are "bad immigrants"... it doesn't work that way. An immigrant by definition is someone who leaves one country to settle in another. There's no "modern" about it, and there's no reference to fitting in to an economy. This is technically a nation of immigrants, because the immigrants far outnumber the people who were here pre-historically.
And as for the comment that many immigrants have honorable intents and are not inherently bad, well, that could be said of the entire population. Yes, some immigrants suck. Because they are _people_, not because they're immigrants. Some people suck, but then again many of them have honorable intent and are not inherently bad. I'm sure that some of the early settlers were pretty horrible, too, so lets not wax all nostalgic about heroic forbears.
My family lines came from Germany in the 1800s and Norway in the early 1900s. Relatively recent, as it goes, but still immigrants. We're all naturalized now, but that doesn't change the fact that we immigrated here.
~ Leilah
Why is it SO hard for people to realize most people AGAINST illegal immigration aren't a) caring about minorities (in a racist way) and b) aren't trying to preserve the nation against the "evils" of other countries. Let me start by saying I'm an immigrant. The kind of immigrant who came in on a H2 visa, per his father's H1(apologies if I got the names wrong... been a bit) visa and had to renew it LEGALLY for 4 or 5 years before finally getting a Green Card. During this time, we had to go to Tiajuana's US embassy, where no one SPOKE English (Absurd, isn't it?). Immigrating legally is a lot of work. All the same. I'm very vocally in favor of a fence between the U.S. and Mexico. Hell, I'd want every last illegal immigrant to be returned to their country of origin. Legal immigration is hard, but doable. Some people accuse me of me against immigration because of this; I laugh heartily since I myself am an immigrant. In my opinion, some of the most vocal supporters FOR the fence and other illegal immigration boundaries are LEGAL immigrants. Just a thought.
Uh no dude, this really and truly is a nation of immigrants. Even if we draw a magical line right after the revolution and call everyone before that a settler, we are still talking about a nation of immigrants. The reason why half of Boston is Irish isn't because the Irish have been around in the US for hundreds of years. The US has had countless massive waves of immigration. You would be extremely hard pressed to find people in the US who have no ancestors who didn't come off a boat in the past 100 years. It is virtually impossible to find an American who doesn't have an immigrant in their line in the past 200 years. The only large group in the US that has an even slim chance of not having an immigrant in their line over the past 200 years are, funny enough, decedents of slaves... the one group that didn't come willingly.
So yes, surely the US is strongly influenced by its original settlers, and if you don't want to call them immigrants, fine. That said, while culturally we might be very much tied to early settlers, ancestor wise, you almost certainly have a great deal of immigrants in your line.
Just imagine them sneaking through US-Mexican border.
a robot isn't going to shit in the field and then go pick more fruit!
good times!
They're using their grammar skills there.
Not true.
It was only in the 1950s that evidence even began to show that slavery, far from being economically backward, was an extremely efficient and productive form of labor, and that the organization of large plantations anticipated in many ways the assembly line and modern factory production. Only in fairly recent years have we learned that the greatest concentration of rich pre-Civil War Americans lived in the Deep South, and that in 1860 the market value of slaves exceeded that of the nation's railroads and factories combined; and that if the South had been a separate country, it would have been more prosperous than any European nation except England. The Central Fact of American History
DeWItt Clinton, fed up by a Southern-dominated government committed New York to financing the Erie Canal on its own. Federal spending on "Internal Improvements" - the economic infrastructure vital to the north - scarcely exists before the Civil War.
northern states relied on cheap immigrant labor or an indentured servant to fuel industrialization
The indentured servant is colonial era. pre-industrial.
The teen entering into an apprenticeship. The adult contracting five to seven years of labor in exchange for passage to America - in those early days, a very, very, expensive proposition.
The Irish laborers who built the Erie knew nothing of it.
In both Russia and China they took feudalism and wrote "communism" across it. You have an upper class (the party cadre - remember only 5% of Chinese are members of the party), a middle class of state-capitalist business men and administrators, and then you have the workers who, despite the promises of socialist and communist theory, have no power.
Cuba is only slightly different: There, a neo-feudal society based on large corporations and a brutal dictator (United Fruit and Batista) was overthrown, and society remade into something closer to "real" communism, but sadly they also erected a "revolution religion" with Ernesto "Che" Guevara as a worshipped saint. Also, there was a certain lack of the technology required for abundance. (Oh and then there was the U.S. boycot cutting off the largest market and subsidised sugar in Europe cutting off that market too.)
So: Successful communist societies: one, fictional: the Federation of Planets of the Star Trek movies. Just check Captain Picard's explanation in First Contact.
> In a few years, troops of these machines could perform the tedious and labor-intensive
> task of fruit picking that currently employs thousands of migrant workers each season.
You will need thousands of migrant I-T workers to be out in the fields servicing the robots. No American I-T worker is going to do that.
Also, more seriously, the reason "migrant workers" and "harvests" go together is the harvest migrates also. You're not talking about teams of robots that stay on one farm, you're talking about a complete robot road show, going north as you work, setting up and tearing down again and again and again.
The best thing this project could do is teach farm owners in California to pay higher wages to their workers and fight for their human rights. Even if they pay them more they are way cheaper than robots.
Despite stereotypical cliches, are not the only demographic working in orchards nor are they oppressed.
The people picking fruit in the orchards are largely there because of education issues. If you looked at fields in California, Oregon, & Washington years ago they were dominated by low-education white country people. As local education systems improved the demographic shifted towards Hispanics who were coming in from Mexico. This isn't because they're brown-skinned, or even illegal, but simply because the majority of them don't have the communication skills & background to do much else. The fresh produce supply chain is filled from top-to-bottom with Hispanics in all roles - pickers, field men, growers, sorters, packers, foremen, loaders, salesmen, marketers, and owners. The ones stuck in the low-rung jobs are simply there because they haven't aquired the skills to move higher up the ladder. If you go up to Oregon or Washington, where there is a much smaller Hispanic population (compared to California), you'll find that many jobs in the fields & packing sheds are being worked by low-education white kids.
Education, not skin color, is the deciding factor for most workers. It doesn't matter how hard of a worker an immigrant is, if he can't communicate or interact effectively with the tier above him he won't be able to advance. It's easy to say that farms are stocked with "oppressed" Hispanics working for substandard wages in substandard conditions, but the reality is that most of the industry is filled with companies that provide housing, food, & insurance in addition to the low-but-not-illegal wages. And, perfect-world-ambitions aside, people picking oranges in a field just don't provide a value greater than the $8/hr. Next time you buy oranges at Safeway for $.69/lb, think about the fact that for each pound you purchase that $.39 is split between the retail store, truck driver, distribution center, buying office, another trucker, sales office, packing shed (including sorters, packers, QC, etc.), grower, & pickers. Throw in the rest of the associated costs and there's not a lot of money for a picker who may pick a couple of bins a shift. Even if a worker can pick 250 lbs per hour, he's already responsible for about 10% of the retail price.
occupation redundant?
EARTH TO NDPTAL851. You are on an information technology site. We automate data handling for a living.
What happens to you when they automate burger-flipping?
Tech Public Policy stuff
I, for one, welcome the coming robot economy. However, we need to be aware of the potential benefits as well as the potential economic dislocation.
Marshall Brain, the founder of http://howstuffworks.com/, has written a fictional account of what a future of advanced robots might look like.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
He also maintains a blog to keep track of developments related to a future robotic society.
http://roboticnation.blogspot.com/
"It could be good and it could be bad, but I don't know for sure" - Husker Du
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come. - Victor Hugo
The US is one of the largest food producers in the world. Food prices would go up, making us relatively poorer, and more people would starve in countries that we provide food aid to. Every country has farms, and the poorest are the ones that cant grow their own food (and have cash crops).
We all have heard the phrase "The blind leading the blind", well now we have the economically blind leading the virtually blind.
In San Diego, one of the main fruit picking operations involves avocados. From personal experience, I can say that it's hard enough picking those by hand, let alone with a robot. If they can do that, they have done something really remarkable with robotics.
All youz got it all wrong. Forget about pure automation, AI, fully autonomous, etc. What we need to focus on is building R/C robots aka telerobotics and outsource the control to Chinese Gold Farms. Think I'm kidding? Just look at what is being done overseas for less than one US dollar/hour - thousands of people slaving away adding value to virtual goods. Take it one step further, and you see what I mean. It will create new high tech jobs to build and maintain the robots, but forget about the no-carbon-based-life-form-in-the-loop scenarios.
They toook our yyyoooobss!!!
To boldly use to and too two times and get it right too! They're not gonna believe their eyes when they see it there!
The "hyperinflation" or more properly 'race condition inflation', you speak of would only occur if the lives of minimum wage workers depended 100% on other minimum wage workers
This seems a little unconvincing. If the 'living wage' value is dependent 100% on people making minimum wage, then fixing the minimum wage to the 'living wage' value will produce (fast) infinite runaway/race-condition inflation. Agree you there. And if the two values are totally independent, such that the cost of basic living isn't affected by what the minimum wage is, then there's no feedback at all.
But as long as that value (the dependence of the input value, the living wage, on the output value, the minimum wage) is non-zero, you're going to have a positive-feedback condition. You seem to be saying that as long as the input value isn't 100% dependent on the output, that there won't be any positive feedback, and that doesn't make sense. The less dependent it is, the slower the increase in the output will be, but it'll still happen.
The remaining question is 'how much positive feedback would there be,' and consequently, how much faster would it cause inflation to increase. But I've never seen any good analysis of that, and in fact it never seems to get discussed at all by the people I know who are deeply in favor of living wage programs/legislation.
I don't think this is propaganda; it's caution. What the people promoting the 'living wage' are after is not a bad thing, but it seems like it could also be pretty dangerous, because it doesn't to me look like it's self-stabilizing. We've done a pretty good job, in the last few decades anyway, of keeping inflation low while also keeping unemployment under control; anything that has even the slightest chance of messing with that equilibrium needs to have a pretty convincing case behind it.
I'm not saying that case doesn't exist, I just haven't seen it yet, and and my default reaction is to be somewhat skeptical; despite that, though, I'm really trying to keep an open mind on this.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
A nation of WHITE immigrants. European immigrants. Thus, the US was a nation of Europeans. Not third world mud races. We are smart and beautiful. They are ugly and stupid (as well as immoral). Is the destruction of our gene pool really worth the short term monetary profit? I don't think so.
Capitalism is destroying the American gene pool for profit. The leaders are destroying the American gene pool in order to balkanize the nation, and thus cement their grip on power.
This is happening in every white nation by the way. Probably the Jews exploiting the weakness of money lust in our leaders in order to fulfill their long time goal of committing genocide against the European and Slavic races. Remember, the jews are the most racist race on the planet. No one else calls themselves god's chosen race. They force mutliculturalism upon everyone else, inorder to destroy them, while marrying only their own race as their racial religion teaches them. Their religion acts as a gene flow barrier. They don't even need their apartheid state of Israel.
"In both Russia and China they took feudalism and wrote "communism" across it. "
That's what I was getting at, though I mostly talked around it. I'm not sure if you're agreeing, disagreeing, or just adding to what I was saying, but that's part of what I was getting at when I mentioned that Lenin had altered Marx's theory by saying you could jump over capitalism directly to socialism from feudalism.
There's plenty of room to criticize the idea's of socialism and communism, and of capitalism for that matter. Lots of serious and not so serious people have done this since Marx. But looking at the atrocities that happened under regimes that called themselves communist says nothing about Marx's analysis, because, as you point out, no society that actually fits his predictions has happened or, it should be noted, could have happened yet. By his own analysis, the historical process is still in the capitalist stage.
The main reason I posted in the first place is because, as someone who studies politics and political theory (my undergrad was in political science, and my grad work is politics and rhetoric) it drives me crazy when people dismiss "socialism" and "communism" as intrinsically negative. Horrible regimes have called themselves socialist and communist, but they can't legitimately be considered test cases for Marxist or any related type of political/economic theory. Treating them as though they are examples of communism means that you close yourself off to a whole range of potential theory and possible solutions to problems.
The cotton gin actually helped the freed slaves, because they would follow after the gin and hand pick cotton that was left, and they paid per how much they picked. The cotton was sold as premium picked and they *COULD* make decent money.
The problem is, minimuim wage was created, and ruined that. Not to mention many other lives. (this is from invention and technology in 2005 or 06)
the amnesty bill is the path that indentured servents started as before they became slaves. So the democrates are going down the road to bring slavery back!!!
Neil
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
That reaffirms Marx like nothing else because, as Marx stated clearly numerous time, the goal of Marxist Communism was, in fact, the creation of wealth. The creation of abundant wealth is the fundamental goal of Marxism as stated by Marx. So, since it was assumed that Capitalism was merely a phase on the way towards Communism this would simply be an alternate route to Marxist Communism. The Trotskyists would be wrong because they believed that revolution was the only way to achive this goal but this would fit right in with Marx' visions as well as those of Aristotle as laid out in Politics which were no doubt of some influence on Marx.
Won't the Mexican robots go EL Norte? Are the National Guard and the Border Patrol been aware of this? What if the robots network and unionize, make the growers pay minimum wage? Will congress respond in time to avert economic desataster? Will the pay exemption amendment to the minimum wage laws be low enough? The real big question is, will the robot manufacturer and the growers get to buy new megayachts? In the way back machine, you broke into computer support by installing computers and networks ($8.00)..next helpdesk ($10.00)..next hardware(12.00)..next deskside ($16.00)..and then went sys admin ($22.00).. programming($30.00). Now (20 years later)all the only person required on the property and also the highest paid is the installer/replacer(still gets $8.00 to 10.00). Notice I didn't include the IT boss, because installing, repairing, patching, adding equipment and operating the NOS are not necessary skills for that position. It works a lot like this. How does an American Princess change a lite bulb? She calls her Daddy. He calls an electrician. If you think this is not real world? http://www.holidaylighting.com/ Yes, they also change lite bulbs for a living, for the rich. So what does this have to do with replacement of migrant workers? Nothing if replacement of union drywallers in California in the 80s was a good thing, union 17.75 hr plus bennies vs the immigre @ 4.50 hr. How did this happen? It is called right to work. This means your boss can fire you because you won't work for less than Joe FOB. I have a friend who is a union master carpenter he works 3 months a year. After the non union (Mexican 7.50 hr) carpenters are finished he does what is called clean up. Clean up is fixing all the code and structual fuck ups. If he wants to work, he works for cash at less than 3rd year apprentice wages, no benefits. I guess replacement replacement of all workers would be mucho grande. Building Pyramids without craftsmen results in mounds of dirt.
"These are not the droids you are looking for....."
(Gestures)
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
No more will our precious American jobs be stolen by those evil Mexicans. Those jobs will go to good ol' US citizens^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hrobots.
Actually, I've seen some analyses around that say the cost of hiring illegal immigrants today is less than the cost of maintaining a similar number of slaves on a cotton plantation in the 1840s; I suspect you can manipulate the numbers to go either way because of the difficulty in comparing relative costs, but the fact that it's even close says something.)
It ought to cost less because now the social safety net picks up costs the slaveowners had previously borne. I was listening to an economist on the radio this weekend and he tallied up that each illegal alien worker costs about $50K to society for the amount of time he's typically here (they're apparently sent home when they become feeble). A slaveowner would also have to feed, clothe, and generally care for his slaves, which those who exploit illegal aliens don't have to do.
I find the most interesting aspect of this, if you follow the Federal dollars and the density of illegal immigrants, is that this is in many ways a Northern subsidy to Southern states. Stop me if you've heard this one before.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I've always found it ironic that the people who claim to want something better for illegal immigrants want to allow all illegal immigrants to stay, and those who are afraid illegal immigrants are ruining the economy want them to go. Their positions really should be reversed. Illegal immigrants are a boon to our economy. They are a labor force which can be paid less than minimum wage, and can be exploited without protection of law. They benefit us at their own expense. If anything, people who want to crack down on illegal immigration are likely to help Mexico and Mexicans in the long run, since with proper immigration reform, the worst abuses will no longer be allowed and we will be forced to find some other way to deal with our least desirable jobs. That may involve a massive expansion of our guest worker program, or substantially larger quotas or new citizens from Mexico. Broadening the scope just a little, I think most people would accept (if they think about it for a minute) that having laws which you don't enforce is bad for everyone. It allows for selective prosecution, exploitation, and a disrespect and disregard for laws in general.