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Fast-Food CEO Invests In Machines Because Regulation Makes Them Cheaper Than Employees (yahoo.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The CEO of Carl's Jr., Andy Puzder, has been inspired by the 100-percent automated restaurant, Eatsa, as he looks for ways to deal with rising minimum wages. "With government driving up the cost of labor, it's driving down the number of jobs," he says. "You're going to see automation not just in airports and grocery stores, but in restaurants." Puzder doesn't believe in [the progressive idea of] raising the minimum wage. "Does it really help if Sally makes $3 more an hour if Suzie has no job? If you're making labor more expensive, and automation less expensive -- this is not rocket science," says Puzder. What comes as a challenge is automating employee tasks. This is where he draws the line and doesn't think that it's likely any machine could perform such work. But for more rote tasks like grilling a burger or taking an order, technology may be even more precise than human employees. "They're always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there's never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case," says Puzder in regard to replacing employees with machines.
The problem is not fast food labor. The problem is that a large percentage of jobs are in China. There are fewer hi-tech manufacturing jobs in the United States. Life in the U.S. is rapidly degrading.
It's good that low-level jobs are taken by machines. It's bad if the hi-level jobs of designing, manufacturing, and maintaining those machines are all taken by Chinese.
In Hong Kong, a long time ago, I met a man who was having golf clubs made in China. He said he taught a Chinese man to design the factory. He found later that the Chinese man's brother was building an identical factory to make golf clubs that would compete with his business.
This is an excellent book that tells one part of the story of degradation: Poorly Made in China: An Insider's Account of the Tactics Behind China's Production Game. There are many other, related issues.
"Corporations simple pass any added taxes and costs on to the customer. Thus if you add taxes to a corporation they simple raise the price and pass that added expense on to the customer."
No, they don't. Or, at least, they don't do it *automatically*. That's what competition is about.
Currently we all see how high officials' overall wages and shares' profits are increasing well over average/median salaries. This means that given strong competition they can absorb increased costs by reducing their profit margins and still stay in business (of course, this doesn't mean they would accept it out of their free will, but that they'll do if there's no other way).
"A corporations job is to make money, that means that we take what ever expenses we have including taxes, add them up, attach a profit margin to it, and sell it."
Exactly this. Which in turn means that, as long as the profit margin is higher than "the fair profit for money" (in Adam Smith's words), they can possibly reduce their margin and still stay in business (because it's still better to accept the reduced profits than putting their money anywhere else with even lower margins). As an extreme example, you can see how as of now "the money" is accepting even negative returns on long term bonds from healthy economies.
That's only partially true. During the times of the Luddites, it took 3 generations (70 odd years) for employment to increase to close to full, after a significant proportion of the population was shipped of to the new world.
Around the turn of the 20th century a move was made to reduce the number of people in the workforce due to automation. Woman were turned into homemakers and children were taken out of the workforce, as well as limits being put on the hours worked by everyone else.
The trend of taking children out of the workforce continues with the length of time that people stay in school continuing to increase. My parents get by fine with about a 8th grade education. My brother graduated out of grade 10 to go to technical school and become a well paid glazier. Now kids are expected to spend at least 4 years in collage/university.
Things were also pretty horrible for the poor in 18th century England and only the large amount of land available in the New World etc made things bearable in the colonies and the new nation of the USA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
What do you think happened to our economy to achieve our current 5% unemployment rate?
What happened is that the powers-that-be pulled a fast one on you and you're too foolish to see it. You've been hand fed a statistic that is false on its face but you didn't care to look into the truth...
Check out the population-employment ratio numbers and they speak a much different story. You see, the unemployment rate that is mainly touted is the U3 rate. The U3 rate is made up of people with no job who've actively tried to find one in the last month. Today we have a good number of discouraged workers* and a vast number of people who have no intentions of ever being employed again. And these numbers are likely to continue to grow. And this doesn't even take into account the underemployed either.
That 5% number you're kicking around means nothing in the real world but keeps the sheep voting under the illusion of what is good/bad in the economy.
*Discouraged workers are people who want to be employed and have looked for work in the last year but have stopped looking due to poor prospects.
This entire thread is based on a false idea that if people are thrown out of minimum wage jobs that they'll be unemployed forever.
This has been proven countless times since the 1700's to be absolutely false.
Once a technological innovation disrupts employment - the loom, the cotton gin, the computer, the combine planter/harvester, the robot - those who were displaced from employment find new jobs in higher paying sectors, at least in the aggregate...
Real history shows that it is THIS claim that is absolutely false. The people displaced in the original Industrial Revolution did not ever find new employment, in high paying jobs or elsewhere. They became destitute. Eventually the productivity increase of the IR created a wealthy enough society that decent employment was restored for the full population, but it took 70 years to do this. Most of the people whose livelihoods that were destroyed in 1770 did not ever get decent jobs again. Their children did not. Their grandchildren did not. Their great-grandchildren did however, around 1840.
The beggars, squalid poverty, workhouses, debtors prisons of Dickens time were all very real.
Interestingly, that little clause you stuck in there "at least in the aggregate" indicates you realize to some degree the falseness of your claim. It is exactly the problem that people exist as people, not as aggregates, that makes the average increase in wealth from automation completely useless to the people put out of work.
If robotics puts people out of work in large numbers today, we need a solution that helps the people put out of work as soon as it happens - not in 2086 after they are long dead.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age