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Robots In Amazon's Warehouses Are Already Making a Huge Difference (qz.com)
Amazon acquired Kiva, a robotics company for a sum of $775 million in 2012, and started to use robots in its warehouses in late 2014. At the time, the idea was that it will make inventory management more efficient. It's actually doing an impressive job. The "clip to ship" process used to take around 60-75 minutes when human employees were taking care of things, now the robots are doing the same job in 15 minutes. From a Quartz report: These robots are not only more efficient but they also take up less space than their human counterparts. That means warehouse design can eventually be modified to have more shelf space and less wide aisles. At the end of the third quarter of 2015, Amazon was using 30,000 Kiva robots across 13 warehouses. Each Kiva-equipped warehouse can hold 50% more inventory per square foot than centers without robots. In turn, the company's operating costs have been sliced by 20% -- or almost $22 million -- per warehouse. If Kiva robots are dispatched to the rest of the 110 Amazon warehouses, the tech giant could save almost $2.5 billion, according to Deutsche Bank. However, since it takes $15-$20 million to install robots in each warehouse, the one-time savings is expected to be closer to $800 million.
We must at all costs keep them from having access to rifle emojis!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Next step should be to design robots to buy stuff online, otherwise with all jobs automated who is going to buy from Amazon?
The robot also doesn't steal the inventory, spend time babbling to friends, check facebook, twitter, etc, doesn't want a raise in pay when the company is experiencing bad times, doesn't start reproducing with other higher/lower ranking employees, will not steal data, can't be bribed, etc, beg the supervisor for a promotion, etc.
But don't worry, continue to oppose progress.
Bury your head in the sand and shout NO CUTBACKS, NO CONCESSIONS, and keep demanding that pay always goes up economic circumstances be damned.
People complain about inventory pickers' and shippers' jobs being lost instead of complaining that inventory picking and shipping for Amazon are grueling jobs that are too physically demanding and don't pay enough. Who wants to hear the same complaints over and over? Now we have a variety.
i am sure thats calculated in the 2.5 billion number.
Rich people own robots to do what the poor man used to do. Feast upon the misery.
How many employees can they fire in the process? I assume they're not keeping the same amount of employees as before as some tasks are be relegated to robots.
I don't think they fired anyone - the business is still growing, and turnover is high anyhow (it's a shitty job, by all accounts).
If you don't know about these robots, BTW, they're quite clever. It's a shame among all these overpriced social media startup acquisitions that Kiva wasn't worth a lot more. Rather that getting hung up on the problem no one has solved yet (picking the part from the bin on the shelf reliably and cheaply), they built a robot to move the whole shelf to a central locations where the humans do the rest. They solved a problem that was practical to solve, and it made a real difference to efficiency.
Eventually someone will solve the "picking problem" end-to-end, and then I'm sure those jobs will be gone.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
In about 1982, when I was seven years old, my grandpa told me to study computers and robotics, because that's where the jobs would be when I grew up. He was not wrong.
LOL, when my brain tried to type "grew", my fingers, out of habit, typed "grep". It seems I HAVE been working with computers a lot.
I've spent many years in the AWS (Automated Warehousing Solutions) industry. I've seen automated warehouses with huge industrial cranes moving 500 pound drums and tiny little pill box pickers. I've seen systems run 24x7 with almost no human intervention unless a robot drops something. How the hell did it take them this long to get some basic pickers running.
I can only think their warehouses are just a clusterfuck of different items in the same bin or whatever they call it. If so their inventory system was shit to begin with.
Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
Are these most of these options more expensive? Probably, but it may be worth it for the peace of mind.
"Savings" also means "less money for workers to spend in their local economy".
We're making radical changes to the whole cycle of "wages => purchases => revenues => wages => ..." cycle. Yes, it has happened before, but never at this speed, never at this timescale, never at this scale of number of jobs. This may not end well.
Yep. My packages used to arrive within two days even without Prime.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Prime doesn't help. Amazon routinely breaks the "Guaranteed Delivery By..." guarantee shown on the checkout page, even for Prime members. The standard compensation if you bother to pester them about it is to extend Prime membership by 1 month.
However, these count against you, and Amazon will eventually stop giving you free Prime. If you have too many demerits on your account (complaining about slow/delayed shipping, returning defective items, getting a price match, etc.) Amazon will straight ban your account.
I don't think they fired anyone - the business is still growing...
Seems a one-step thought process.
Is business Amazon takes on and grows a new market or is it taking away from other, existing markets and what happens to people working there?
The overall trend to produce/service cheaper, move jobs to other, low wage locations, consolidate businesses into larger and larger entities sure has it's limits at one point, and what will happen then - maybe more angry people?
Maybe already happening.....
Corporate social responsibility is a pipe dream!
in 1981, when I was in high school, several of my friends and I took the typing class because we believed computer were going to be a huge thing
that was the first time teacher ever had more than one male student
we also had a computer club where we shared a TRS-80
I'm glad for the typing class & the Z80 assembly I did in computer club, still useful!
If you have too many demerits on your account (complaining about slow/delayed shipping, returning defective items, getting a price match, etc.) Amazon will straight ban your account.
So in other words, just like every other vendor. Amazon can ban Kramer, just like Joe did with his fruit shop.
How many employees can they fire in the process? I assume they're not keeping the same amount of employees as before as some tasks are be relegated to robots.
I don't think they fired anyone - the business is still growing, and turnover is high anyhow (it's a shitty job, by all accounts).
If you don't know about these robots, BTW, they're quite clever. It's a shame among all these overpriced social media startup acquisitions that Kiva wasn't worth a lot more. Rather that getting hung up on the problem no one has solved yet (picking the part from the bin on the shelf reliably and cheaply), they built a robot to move the whole shelf to a central locations where the humans do the rest. They solved a problem that was practical to solve, and it made a real difference to efficiency.
Eventually someone will solve the "picking problem" end-to-end, and then I'm sure those jobs will be gone.
This is really hurting my heart. People will be losing their jobs because of this. They would not be working there if, like most of our audience here had more advanced skills
I'm here for the experience, not the Hyperbole.
To be fair, the way corporations are structured, this is expected. Corporate ethical responsibility really ends at "don't lie about what you're doing, and be at least a little generous to employees you have to harm" (by laying them off, etc).
Anything else is the role of government. Government has to do something about this growing problem. Naturally, in conservative states, the strategy is to just ignore the problem even exists, and assume any adult with a functioning body is able to get a job.
There is a limit to how many jobs that require "more advanced skills" can exist. And those jobs that call for "more advanced skills" are also under attack. At one point you will be affected.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Prime doesn't help. Amazon routinely breaks the "Guaranteed Delivery By..." guarantee shown on the checkout page, even for Prime members. The standard compensation if you bother to pester them about it is to extend Prime membership by 1 month.
However, these count against you, and Amazon will eventually stop giving you free Prime. If you have too many demerits on your account (complaining about slow/delayed shipping, returning defective items, getting a price match, etc.) Amazon will straight ban your account.
I am in no way trying to offend you because of bad service to you.
Every time i have ordered from Amazon, it came earlier than the promised date.
Just saying.
I'm here for the experience, not the Hyperbole.
How many employees can they fire in the process? I assume they're not keeping the same amount of employees as before as some tasks are be relegated to robots.
Pretty sure everyone displaced found jobs in the robot service field for the net job loss was 0. That's how it works, /. told me so.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
In the longer term, is trapping people in a crappy job they get nothing from as an individual, and which they know could be done better and cheaper by a machine, but which they are required to keep doing because some rich executive wants to show how much they pity the poor really a good solution?
The problem isn't the jobs going away, it's the lack of other options to replace them.
Society has always gained net benefit from efficiency. Making a given product, or delivering a given service, with less labor, less raw materials, and /or less energy has always helped us more than it has hurt us, as a society. We call that "technology", and it's a good thing.
People are complaining that the rate of this change is a bad, but I've read books making this same claim written 40 years ago, and 8- years ago, and I'm sure people were writing it 120 years ago too.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Everybody's worried about fast food places being replaced with customer-facing machines that technology still hasn't caught up with when we're really only now talking about robots in a warehouse moving boxes around.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Automation: permanently destroying all the jobs, leaving only the factory owners able to eat, for 400 consecutive years now.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Who's going to buy the stuff made and shipped by the robots? Oh, wait - I'm a Luddite, I forgot.
Those robotic systems are made to upgrade warehouses that were designed for people. Yes they're faster but they should be much faster than that if the warehouses were designed for the machines.
What if you really designed the warehouse from the ground up for totally automated systems? Why have robots at all? Wouldn't it be faster to put all the products on conveyor belts like a giant "vending machine"?
If you don't know about these robots, BTW, they're quite clever. It's a shame among all these overpriced social media startup acquisitions that Kiva wasn't worth a lot more. Rather that getting hung up on the problem no one has solved yet (picking the part from the bin on the shelf reliably and cheaply), they built a robot to move the whole shelf to a central locations where the humans do the rest. They solved a problem that was practical to solve, and it made a real difference to efficiency.
That problem was actually solved some time ago - for years, Frito-Lay's bigger plants have had automated cranes to grab pallets from the shelves in 10-story warehouses, deposit them into a ground-level circulation conveyor where they're picked up by automated forklifts, then brought to the buffer areas where they're de-palletized and small robots then run the pick boxes to the appropriate place on the picking lines, and the shipping boxes are routed via conveyor automatically to the appropriate loading dock for deadloaded (non-palletized) bulk shipments. For palletized loads, the fork trucks are sent directly to the loading dock. Not all of their plants have the robot forklifts, and in the fully-automated plants they still have man-driven lifts, but even where the manual lifts are still in use they've seen *huge* efficiency gains with the system. The tricky part there is staging the inventory and product flow such that the oldest product always ships first. They're also starting to implement automated loading for the trucks even though an experienced loader is scary-fast.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Anything else is the role of government.....
Which government - US, right?
Democratic system, by the people for the people.
HaHa...
House representatives, reelected every 2 years and financed by whom, and then obligated to whom?
As long as this is not a totally isolated self-sustained system, where there is no outside influence to power, it will be abused and bribed.
Look at gerrymandering, pulling strings, Citizens-United, $ 10 grand plate dinners and what else there is on secretive hush meetings.
Anyone having enough power to police all this stuff? Nope, serves very well as it happens, just not "for the people".....
Hubris: fooling the smug and prideful into a blissful state of complacency for 4000 years now.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
They will fill the warehouses with nitrogen to prevent fire hazards and theft from cockroaches, rats and those pesky humans.
I don't think you understand the process. Just because the story is on the front page, don't assume the process is new. I first heard about Amazon's robotized warehouses nearly a decade ago. This is just another step in fine-tuning.
None of this implies that you can't have a vending machine style fast-food joint that delivers hot food. That needs to be designed, but it doesn't appear to be a major problem. The early designs might need one employee, who would probably sit around doing nothing except when a Bellamy tube jammed. The cooking process would probably be different, but in most fast-food places microwaves wouldn't make the food noticeably worse. (FWIW, some restaurants have used microwave cooking in the kitchen, where it's not seen, without complaints. You've got to pick your dishes properly, though.)
Now if you want a hamburger, you don't want the bun heated with microwaves, so an infrared heater might be better. Then you've got to invent a way to properly combine the bun, the meat patty, and the lettuce, etc. It doesn't need to be anything general purpose.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Any time you have 2 separate curves such as efficiency reducing jobs and efficiency creating jobs, there's always the chance that they'll intersect. The question then becomes not IF, but WHEN. Past Performance does not Guarantee Future Results, as they say on Wall Street.
The difference between the 40-year old books and today is that in the 40-year old books the assertion that increased efficiency could cost jobs was a prediction.
Today, there are not yet hordes of people on the street, but there's precious little job security and a lot of people are spending their days underemployed, unemployed, and/or working at jobs paying significantly less than they were used to. That last is perhaps the biggest difference between today and 40 years ago. Back then, if you were Bob Cratchitt and you lost your job doing ledgers, you might be able to retrain as a computer programmer and make more money than you ever did keeping books. These days, if you're a computer programmer, you're likely to have to retrain as a pizza delivery person. And the writing is on the wall even there, as eventually it's likely that automated pizza delivery will be widespread.
This can change of course. All that's required is for some need to arise that requires more/better-paid people to support these new efficiencies the way that computer jobs once did. So far, however, no one seems to have come up with a viable alternative, and in the mean time, even more professions/trades are being eroded. And since repairing robots is itself a largely automatable skill and since designing robots isn't so far demanding the number of people as programming computers did, that particular option isn't looking very encouraging.
Now if you want a hamburger, you don't want the bun heated with microwaves, so an infrared heater might be better. Then you've got to invent a way to properly combine the bun, the meat patty, and the lettuce, etc. It doesn't need to be anything general purpose.
It also needs to be replenished with ingredients, waste from this ingredients shipped away, to be sanitized regularly since it's serving food that could go off and kill people, have a backup so a failure mode doesn't bring the store to a halt, and it needs to be smart enough to know when it hasn't properly prepared the food so it can handle customer complaints.
Oh, the store still needs to be cleaned, restocked, lightbulbs changed, cigarette butts picked up in the parking lot, etc. Otherwise you haven't removed enough humans from the roster to make it worthwhile.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I know no one really dreams of working in a warehouse filling boxes, or in a factory making steel or whatever. But, society here in the first world has been based for decades on the idea of wealth transfer and stable lifetime employment. Some examples:
- 30 year fixed mortgages are designed to be painful in the beginning but manageable over time because of increasing income.
- Manufacturers give auto loans with the assumption that people have the monthly income stream needed to pay them off over an extended time.
- Retirement under the pension system is dead for most, but for the lucky few, pension based retirement's payoff is dependent on years of service.
- Retirement under the DIY 401(k)/IRA system requires lifetime, increasing contributions commensurate with your income to ensure stable retirement income later.
- Car and other heavy goods manufacturers assume people will be able to purchase replacement heavy goods throughout their lives, and maybe someone who's worked a long time will buy a Cadillac instead of a Chevrolet for example.
- Basically every consumer business relies on people being able to purchase more and better things over time, again due to increasing income.
I really wonder what Amazon, home builders, supermarkets, car manufacturers, etc. will do when almost everyone cannot depend on a reasonably stable work life anymore. Personally, the reason why I buy things is because I'm somewhat confident that I will have a job for the near term. If I didn't have that confidence, I'd close my wallet as any other rational actor would do. Now, combine this fact with the slow creep of unemployment both from the low and the high end. Examples:
- Robots replacing fast food workers, warehouse workers, factory workers
- Cloud and automation replacing IT workers
- Offshoring replacing IT and software developers
Since socialism will never take hold in the US until things are at the French Revolution level, what are we going to do with all the unemployable people? It's not nice to say, but there are a group of people who are absolutely incapable of doing anything beyond warehouse work or factory work. Heck, there are corporate employees who are incapable of doing anything outside a narrow processing-type job description. For these people, I do kind of wish for a return to the pre-automation days when you had 10,000+ people working in a steel mill, or another 10,000+ just churning out paperwork at a corporate job. Those people earned a decent middle class salary, and had a good life. I doubt anyone growing up now is going to have it so good.
People have also been saying "this time it's different" since the dawn of the industrial revolution.
ll that's required is for some need to arise that requires more/better-paid people to support these new efficiencies
Not specifically "these new efficiencies", just "some new need to arise". Humans want more it's our nature. Every step along the way of technological advancement has produced a wave of some new sort of job, doing or making something that previously only the rich could afford, but now there's demand for at vastly larger scale.
Almost no one today in the US has a job as a farmer or manufacturing worker (while we grow more food, and manufacture more stuff than ever) , yet there are plenty of service jobs and the like.
I wish I could predict what the next wave of jobs would be (my investment portfolio wouldn't look so sad if I could), but I do expect personal services to flourish.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Depending on how you want to think about it, it was funny or inevitable or symbolic that the robotic takeover did not start at MIT, NASA, Microsoft or Ford. It started at a Burger-G restaurant in Cary, NC on May 17. It seemed like such a simple thing at the time, but May 17 marked a pivotal moment in human history.
Burger-G was a fast food chain that had come out of nowhere starting with its first restaurant in Cary. The Burger-G chain had an attitude and a style that said "hip" and "fun" to a wide swath of the American middle class. The chain was able to grow with surprising speed based on its popularity and the public persona of the young founder, Joe Garcia. Over time, Burger-G grew to 1,000 outlets in the U.S. and showed no signs of slowing down. If the trend continued, Burger-G would soon be one of the "Top 5" fast food restaurants in the U.S.
The "robot" installed at this first Burger-G restaurant looked nothing like the robots of popular culture. It was not hominid like C-3PO or futuristic like R2-D2 or industrial like an assembly line robot. Instead it was simply a PC sitting in the back corner of the restaurant running a piece of software. The software was called "Manna", version 1.0*.
Manna's job was to manage the store, and it did this in a most interesting way. Think about a normal fast food restaurant. A group of employees worked at the store, typically 50 people in a normal restaurant, and they rotated in and out on a weekly schedule. The people did everything from making the burgers to taking the orders to cleaning the tables and taking out the trash. All of these employees reported to the store manager and a couple of assistant managers. The managers hired the employees, scheduled them and told them what to do each day. This was a completely normal arrangement. In the early twenty-first century, there were millions of businesses that operated in this way.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
It's true that automation of all sorts has been around a long time, including "goods to man" operations like the one you describe and also the Kiva robots. The difference is that the Kiva robots effectively fit the niche where there are a large number of skus and small number of picks per sku per day.
Not sure how this fits into this discussion but I was thinking about a satire Mad Magazine had of the movie Camelot. This story is called Can-A-Lot about a canning company, its CEO was Arthur, president emeritus was Melvin. Artists drew characters like those in the movie, re-wrote lyrics to fit this story of the canning company (Camelot I believe it was called) that takes place in modern times. Of course Arthur's adversary was the union leader (Lancelot I think). Then to deal with this, Arthur replaced all the workers with robots (drawn typical mechanical men with lightbulb noses). Eventually pushed to robots to work longer hours and they begin breaking down. One of Arthur's board members suggested it's cheaper to simply replace instead of repair a broken robot. Arthur: "This is the best idea I have!" His board member, "your idea?" Arthur, "glad you like it."
Later in story the overworked robots revolt and burn down the factory, Arthur is left with nothing like in the movie.
mfwright@batnet.com
For decades, we never saw this flaw because of growth. There was ALWAYS places to grow. I don't know where the growth comes from now. The planet just cant have exponential growth forever.
The answer should have been space, but after we "won" the space race, we stopped and sat on our thumbs for thirty years.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I expect this would be highly variable based on what items and where you live relative to Amazon's infrstruture.
I live in a rural area and fulfillment time without prime went from 3-5 days to usually 1-2 days when Amazon built a warehouse of some sort within an hours drive of my home.
Given the size of the US I expect there are gaps in that coverage still and if you live in one of them you may get much worse service.
It's not an isolated incident. Their shipping has turned to shit for many longtime Prime members.
https://www.reddit.com/r/amazo...
It's highly variable based on the phase of the moon, as far as I can tell. I typically still get shit in the promised 2 days, but I've never had the "same day pickup" work because shit is delivered to the locker 5 minutes before closing and I don't get a notification, or shit is delivered to the locker but not put in the locker (with an excuse that it didn't fit, though the next morning it's there and clearly fits), or shit is simply not delivered that day. I've also never had the release date delivery for a video game work out. For all other products, I'd say about 10-20% of the time it breaks the guaranteed date even when shipping in state.
That's the obvious reason we must increase the demand for the basic income. Pretty much settles the issue. But there's still that certain psychopathy in the leadership and their followers that believes in *work or starve* to overcome first.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Isn't that supposed to be a Good Thing?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The difference is that the Kiva robots effectively fit the niche where there are a large number of skus and small number of picks per sku per day.
True. The situation I have experience with is the other way around, where there are about 10,000 or so SKUs, and a few dozen of them get hundreds of thousands of picks per day. It's also different in that it's integrated with the production line, which offers both advantages and disadvantages.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
I wouldn't say it's more advanced, just different. As another poster pointed out, different systems are called for when dealing with different volumes. Picking a dozen or so of a given item per day isn't the same as when it's a quarter-million of that item and the item is perishable, which requires a thorough design to prevent inventory from ever becoming stale. There are also a lot of other factors to consider, particularly in a mixed man/machine environment. What I discussed is a tiny, tiny part of the overall system.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Lets see how long they keep saying that when their jobs and income disappear.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I'm guessing Amazon is starting to overload the capacity of all of America's combined delivery companies. Whatever they're planning to do about this, they should have done it by now, to avoid this "guaranteed (mostly)" state of affairs.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The list of benefits are a lot of back-end numbers we don't see and can't verify. If these Kiva robots are saving Amazon so much money, why aren't item prices dropping? Why does Walmart still often beat Amazon's prices? Why did Amazon suddenly and silently increase the free shipping minimum threshold from any $35 order, to $49 of only merchandise shipped via Amazon? This price jump even coincides with the biggest DEcrease in oil prices in decades.
In short, I'm HIGHLY skeptical they're actually getting the huge benefits they claim.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
That's overly cynical. If money mattered that much Jeb Bush would be cruising to the Oval Office right now.
they work for peanuts people.. peanuts!!!!
Just another second banana
This time it might actually be different, though, because the addition of cheap computers greatly increases the number of tasks that can be automated. We're already pretty close to the point where people on the left half of the bell curve are completely driven out of the job market, and the service jobs that are growing are high-skill occupations like doctors and software developers.
There are still hair stylists and manicurists, and they're not going anywhere. There are still the skilled trades, and they're not going anywhere. I expect a boom in jobs like decorator and home theater installer and fashion consultant and everything like that: jobs that are currently for the fairly rich, where both fashion sense and the fiddly bits of getting everything in place to look good can be left to someone who's passionate about that particular sort of thing.
The more things get cheap, the more taste and arrangement matters for social status, and the more people can on the same money afford to pay someone else to do it for them. And almost everyone is a "hobby expert" on something.
It's much shallower than doctor or lawyer (both of which are becoming less-than-great jobs, BTW, be a dentist or vet instead). Look to personal services only the 1% can afford today to be far more common tomorrow, since that's the pattern throughout history.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You say "them" - like everybody else who is about to find out they are "them" or will be shortly. Unless you are a capitalist *you are "them"*. I'm a 6-figure making IT specialist with broad knowledge - and I feel concerned. Ones abilities are secondary to "the market" - as well as to biases. Above 40 you can easily fall through the cracks no matter your qualification (unless it's really extraordinary AND happens to be in demand too). There are lots of factors beyond your control.
Plenty of high-paid people who were laid off in their fifties who ranted about the lazy people unwilling to work found out that "them" is them when they were laid off and job application after application was rejected, often without even getting a response.
You have been assimilated to join the collectives.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
We already have the equivalent of one form of a universal basic income - it's called welfare.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
You expect a robot with no sense of smell, visual appeal, or taste to flawlessly outclass any human being? Heh.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Sure, who wouldn't want to save even $800,000,000! If Amazon had any real human compasion, they funnel that savings into programs for the now unemployed folks that these robots created! WTF?!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
In response: a) I use several online vendors; Newegg, B&H, Micro Center...among others. Amazon I use now only when I need rush delivery or delivery over the weekend for a part I don't happen to have in house (limited space and no warehouse)...and now because I can't trust the products coming from them I have to use them only as a last resort. b) I undercut Geek Squad so sometimes to get the best price on a decent drive OEMs are it. c) I use SSDs when they work for the job. Large SSD drives aren't cost effective for volume storage. d) Best Buy is the only (other) local vendor. Fry's if I want to drive for 2 hrs for the larger selection of dated parts. Most of the other brick and mortars around here don't even bother with carrying a wide selection for the same reason I don't generally house a large selection myself; if a customer is coming to me for a drive, they want me to install it for them; otherwise the customer has all the same resources I do to do it themselves.
I almost always get items within the promised period, sometimes faster. Once in a while something will have to come from a distant warehouse but that rarely adds time. What bugs me is the claim this will save $x. Just one time, not a year or something?
nah, the robots can pack as programmed each time. those boxes are packed by disgruntled employees who don't give a fuck. Just the same as the burger making robot won't rub his balls on my burger.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
While certainly a fair observation, it relies on a flawed assumption. That it's equally effective at all levels. The more visibility of a position, generally the less effective money will be.
I'd venture the majority of American's couldn't even name their House Rep. That makes money spent on them much more effective since people don't know about it.
One of my favorite questions is asking people who their 'state' reps/senators are. Very very few people can name them. I know that after moving, when I went to vote in my new district, every single one of my choices was running unopposed.
That's the biggest problem we face. Apathy to the point that no one even runs because it's so locked up by the incumbent.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
'properly' means to health code, not taste. A robot is much better suited to checking the internal temp of meat than a human. It's already done by a 'robot' now, i.e. a thermometer. Except in restaurants they use 'process' to not check this on each individual order for time savings. Human's following 'process' are notoriously unreliable.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Something tells me that the only reason this conversation has gone on this deep is because we all watch too much TV.
Um, no, 'properly' means both proper temperature AND well presented. Don't forget that these guys buying these robots want their sales to go UP not stagnate because a robot doesn't care that the bun is sliding off the meat before it gets wrapped or that it merrily sent off a sammich a roach had crawled onto.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Given how often McDs serves up burgers that are totally misaligned now, the robots don't have that high a bar to clear.
I was probably referring more to the taste/smell aspect. Visual presentation is also a part but that's my point. The robot will be programmed and engineered to always drop the bun in the same place.
And quality control is simply a matter of lasers and pattern recognition that already exists, it's not that hard to put together. Hell if someone can take an arduino, a toy squirt gun and video processing to recognize squirrels AND hit them with the stream in real time...that's a pretty significant creation done by a hobbyist.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
If it really were that simple they'd have done it decades ago. McD's is one of those places that buys those 'consistency' machines wherever it can. There is a huge difference between a tech-demo and a reliable machine that won't make their customers walk away.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Government by the temporary embarrassed millionaires for the actual millionaires.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
There are only a very small number of 1-percenters (Obviously). The bulk of the hair stylers and manicurists presently in the field are among the lowest-paid workers in the economy. And you're seriously expecting that to improve if a bunch up redundant people flood in from extinct trades?
We are looking to history. And historically, things weren't so great for the merely skilled and talented, much less the 99-percent of less capable people. Bach's Brandenberg Concertoes were written "on spec" in the hopes he'd get a job (he didn't). Mozart was essentially a government employee, paid about what a decent software engineer would make.
I agree. There's plenty of room for craftsmanship and artistry for those who want furniture that's made of something better than chipboard and paintings that didn't come from a printing press. But dumping a whole lot of unemployed people out there isn't going to single-handedly create a demand,, only a supply. The 99% will be less capable of buying premium when they're unemployed, not more.
There's nothing wrong with bringing back newspaper vendors, shoe-shiners, chauffeurs and maids, but unlike previous centuries, these would no longer be people performing an essential service. Not when there's online news, self-driving cars, and Roombas for those who don't care about prestige or who care about saving money more (and some of the most dedicated Wal-Mart customers are 1-percenters). So you can expect the elite to hire their lackeys selectively, not in bulk.
And incidentally, some dentists, vets, pharmacists and other less-glamorous medical trades can make very respectable livings. Whereas a lot of GPs have lower incomes than you think. Especially after liability insurance.
You mean like opening their own delivery service?
http://www.fox13news.com/news/...
http://arstechnica.com/informa...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Money matters that much; it's just not the ONLY thing that matters. Sometimes a really pissed off electorate wakes up.
This comment is my opinion and does not represent an official position of Donald Trump or others I do not work for
You've entirely missed my point. It's not about new jobs doing work for 1%ers, obviously. It's about the fact that for 150 years or so now, every wave of automation has produced a new wave of jobs because stuff that only 1%ers could afford before, everyone can afford now. That's just the way technology works.=: you make X cheap, and now everyone can afford Y.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
As more people get Prime accounts, Amazon focuses on them more. This should be obvious.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
That may just be in your area. The only time they haven't delivered on time or early for me is when there was severe flooding in the region, which makes sense.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.