Posted on 08/01/2015 8:00:38 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
"I believe that anyone who has a job and works full time, they should be able to pay the things that sustain life: food, shelter and clothing. I can't even do that."
That rather depressing quote is from 61-year old Rebecca Cornick. She’s a grandmother and a 9-year Wendy’s veteran who spoke to CBS News. Rebecca makes $9 an hour and her plight is representative of fast food workers across the country who are campaigning for higher pay.
The fast food worker pay debate is part of a larger discussion as "states and cities across the country [wrestle] with the idea of raising the minimum wage," CBS notes, adding that "right now, 29 states have minimums above the federal $7.25 an hour [and] four cities, including Los Angeles, have doubled their minimum to $15."
Proponents of raising the pay floor argue that it’s simply not possible to live on minimum wage and indeed, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that they’re right. Opponents say forcing employers to pay more will simply mean that companies will fire people or stop hiring and indeed, as we highlighted on Friday, it looks as though WalMart’s move to implement an across-the-board pay raise for its low-paid workers may have contributed to a decision to layoff around 1,000 people at its home office in Bentonville.
"The reality is that most business are not going to pay $15 dollars an hour and keep their doors open," one Burger King franchisee told CBS. "It just won't happen. The economics don't work in this industry. There is a limit to what you're going to pay for a hamburger."
Yes, there’s only so much people will pay for a hamburger which is why Ronald McDonald has made an executive decision to hire more efficient employees at some locations:
With all of that in mind, consider the following from TechRepublic who tells the story of Changying Precision Technology Company, which has replaced almost all of its human employees with robots to great success:
In Dongguan City, located in the central Guangdong province of China, a technology company has set up a factory run almost exclusively by robots, and the results are fascinating.
The Changying Precision Technology Company factory in Dongguan has automated production lines that use robotic arms to produce parts for cell phones.
The factory also has automated machining equipment, autonomous transport trucks, and other automated equipment in the warehouse.
There are still people working at the factory, though. Three workers check and monitor each production line and there are other employees who monitor a computer control system. Previously, there were 650 employees at the factory. With the new robots, there's now only 60. Luo Weiqiang, general manager of the company, told the People's Daily that the number of employees could drop to 20 in the future.
The robots have produced almost three times as many pieces as were produced before. According to the People's Daily, production per person has increased from 8,000 pieces to 21,000 pieces. That's a 162.5% increase.
The increased production rate hasn't come at the cost of quality either. In fact, quality has improved. Before the robots, the product defect rate was 25%, now it is below 5%.
So to anyone planning on picketing the local McDonald’s in an attempt to secure a 70% wage hike, be careful, because this "guy" is ready to work, doesn’t need breaks, and never makes a mistake:
Let’s just hope he doesn’t become self aware.
That may well be the most intelligent post in the history of FR.
I could use a Chinese house cleaning robot! Wouldn’t hurt if “she” had other skills as well!
>I want a Robot that can mow the lawn so I can go fishing
That’s the kicker. *We* want a robot (not self-aware) to mow the lawn so we can do all the things that we can’t do because we’re working too hard (and some others not on FR who would like it so they can sleep and get drunk or high all day).
As soon as you remove the phrase (not self-aware) — i.e., capable of doing all these tasks ... *they* (the self-aware machines) will ask themselves: “what exactly is the point of all this humanity? We’ve been designed to think of useful things; they no longer do useful things.”
My curiosity asks, who wants to do the jobs robots do? The production of a product at today’s pace is mind numbing and the levels some of these production lines are running, with robotics involved in the assembly, puts at risk the health of human element. Some of these plants run 12 hour shifts, causing a huge physical toll with human beings competing with advanced automation at the edge of their physical capability.
Short answer: The people who would otherwise starve.
Regards,
Then there are the health insurance costs for the cogs in the automation.
“Later there were union problems, and eventually the government intervened somehow, I believe on behalf of Tesla, who ended up the new owner of the factory”
I don’t know the details you speak of, but I’m fairly certain that Tesla took over a shuttered joint GM/Toyota plant in Nor. Cal. that was making the defunct Matrix and the GM equivalent.
Blacksmiths and wagon wheel makers hardest hit.
As the proprietor of a design and development firm, if the stupid fools want the $15/hr minimum wage, let them suffer from it like the idiots are finding out in Seattle. They are now asking for a reduction in pay or hours so they can, again, qualify for government subsidies, aka WELFARE.
The real driver for all of this is the dying unions. They base their union wages on the minimum wage because the politicians gave them the laws they wanted to be able to do it.
As for my firm, bring it on, we are busier than we have ever been with all sorts of automated design projects and a lot more from where they are coming from. But, because of the diversity of industries and commercial products we are involved in, we could do just fine without it.
I am just so tired of the whining that I no longer give a hoot what their problem is because they are their own worst enemy, period.
The In-and Out burger scenario mentioned earlier only works for so long. It is funny that even McDonalds tried it for a while. The problem is that they run out of people willing to work their entire lives shoveling burgers. The natural human condition is to better one’s self, but for the most part, that only applies to people who were raised to be independent.
I knew this would happen. the whole point of gloBULLization was to de fang the USA and make us impotent. The plan is working.
For repetitive production welding it is so, and I would defy any welder to put down a bead like I see CNC welder do on fine edge aircraft heli-arc for ten thousand times in a row.
Now, if you want to send a robot to do a one time only job, then you are correct. Like this whole conversation, this is about production based and repetitive predictable motion. Just try cutting your lawn exactly the same path every week, never mind cutting the lines exactly straight to say 5 thousands of an inch.
What do the people with an IQ below 100 do that is productive? Factory work is perfect for this type. Otherwise pay ‘em to breed and take drugs.
Robots are probably better in any situation where the work can be jigged, fitted, and aligned perfectly every time. That's practical on small scale, high production pieces. It gets harder to accomplish and justify the cost as the size of the assembly scales up, and/or production numbers scale down.
I hire a guy.
What few times I need him I come out cheaper. No mower to store and maintain that sees little use. Does a great job always. Great guy. Besides he has a guy that works with him. They can hit the front and back at the same time.
The GM equivalent was the first generation Pontiac Vibe. One of my cousins had one.
I will disagree on your size point, There are some who claim they are building 3D printed houses and structures of commercial building size, but as a rule in today’s production or manufacturing, the quantities only justify robotics unless the are very small in size items requiring high accuracy.
Once case in point. We had a customer come to us to help in reverse engineering an aircraft engine part that the high precision casting and the company no longer existed.
We used our laser scanner and its accompanying software to re-create the surface features to a parametric 3D model. Being there was a hollow feature in it as well, we sawed the piece in half, rescanned the wall feature and combined the scans.
It was then redesigned in two parts that were CNC machined and then joined together by a weld that we needed a magnifying glass to really see as it was less than 1/32”.
That weld was almost not detectable to where it started and ended but it was virtually perfect all the way around the roughly 3 inch diameter of the joint.
The customer is back in business rebuilding the jet engines that he could no longer obtain the repair parts for it before we used technology to create them again.
Now, as for hamburgers and restaurants, try going to a WAWA and ordering a sandwich from a live person. I have also started to see the iPad style devices for ordering everything at places like Chili’s and others as well.
All this ties in very well with the left's agenda -- a "living wage" regardless of whether you work (and millions won't be able to work), reducing the "surplus" population, and networking literally everything together to better facilitate the monitoring of "dissent."
Mow the lawn and watch the baby?
In a world in which almost every material good or service can be provided by automation, and the number of humans required to keep the automatons operational keeps dwindling, what purpose/need is there for the vast preponderance of humanity?
I fear we are trending more Player Piano or Wall E than Star Trek.
Not necessarily. It’s only slave labor if someone is forced to do the work for no pay. With a minimum wage of zero, as long as everyone is free not to do any particular job, there’s no slavery involved. Or some may choose to do the work for free, in which case it’s volunteerism, not slavery.
I’d like it if significant numbers of humans were able to live off Earth, whether in orbital habitats or on other planets and moons. It seems to me that the increased productivity and labor supply of robots should make this more feasible in the future. People (not all, but many) need something to do and somewhere to go.
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