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If the poor would just agree to work for zero, automation would never be profitable and we could save all the jobs, what now liberals
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May 13, 2015 02:32
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VitalSigns posted:If the poor would just agree to work for zero, automation would never be profitable and we could save all the jobs, what now liberals literally an argument ive had against me during discussions with a libertarian, just replace zero with "lower than minimum wage right now"
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May 13, 2015 02:43
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joeburz posted:literally an argument ive had against me during discussions with a libertarian, just replace zero with "lower than minimum wage right now" Does not compute. If you pay people a wage there is pressure to automate their jobs away and computers get cheaper every year. Why does your Libertarian friend want the poor to be unemployed.
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May 13, 2015 02:49
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VitalSigns posted:If the poor would just agree to work for zero, automation would never be profitable and we could save all the jobs, what now liberals Yeah well it's important to understand the extent to which this is true and the answer is somewhat. Literally the only reason to buy expensive capital or ship jobs overseas where communication, lead time and management costs are higher is to save money. If it didn't save money it wouldn't happen and wages are obviously part of that equation. That said, realistically there are fixed costs to employment which include more than wages like office space, benefits, liability etc.
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May 13, 2015 02:50
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Automation gets cheaper every year. Trying to defeat it by underbidding and underbidding and underbidding robots in a cycle of increasing poverty and misery is a losing proposition. Anyone in a job threatened by automation would be well-served by earning enough to build up savings and afford an education to train them for the new jobs that become available. It's all very well and good to say "one day fully robot restaurants will make waiting tables and cooking food obsolete" but people have also been saying that for 80 years. In the meantime generations of workers have benefited from a wage that doesn't grind them into poverty, at least until recently when our failure to tie the minimum wage to inflation has returned full-time work to its former poverty wage. The solution to the societal problems of creeping automation lies elsewhere, lowering wages to beat it back in the short term is not the answer.
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May 13, 2015 02:59
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VitalSigns posted:Automation gets cheaper every year. Trying to defeat it by underbidding and underbidding and underbidding robots in a cycle of increasing poverty and misery is a losing proposition. I'm not actually a tech weirdo who thinks automated everything is around the corner. On the other hand I think the market can be incredibly clever at finding ways cut costs. So more things can and will continue to be automated at a rate that's related to labor costs. The long term solution is certainly not minimum wage. It's pretty much the opposite.
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May 13, 2015 03:07
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slavery?
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May 13, 2015 03:10
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mandate a 25 hour work week and let robots pickup the slack imo
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May 13, 2015 03:12
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asdf32 posted:I'm not actually a tech weirdo who thinks automated everything is around the corner. On the other hand I think the market can be incredibly clever at finding ways cut costs. So more things can and will continue to be automated at a rate that's related to labor costs.
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May 13, 2015 03:12
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ElCondemn posted:That's true, but true wealth equality means janitors would have the same quality of life as a brain surgeon. Wealth inequality is necessary right now in our society because people think janitors deserve less than a brain surgeon. The day automation forces everyone to clean toilets for a living we'll see real equality. Janitors save more lives than brain surgeons.
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May 13, 2015 03:13
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VideoTapir posted:Janitors save more lives than brain surgeons. I really loving appreciate the people driving those street sweeper rigs that drive around early in the morning, they likely prevent plague.
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May 13, 2015 03:17
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asdf32 posted:I'm not actually a tech weirdo who thinks automated everything is around the corner. On the other hand I think the market can be incredibly clever at finding ways cut costs. So more things can and will continue to be automated at a rate that's related to labor costs. The minimum wage is irrelevant to the long term solution so there is no reason not to raise it. Trying to underbid robots is a short term solution, and when automation finally does come, years of poverty wages leave those displaced workers with no savings and no resources to train for other jobs. I would rather get $15/hr for 10 years and be able to save and make contingencies than get $7.25/hr for 20 years and be on the street homeless within one month of losing my job, wouldn't you?
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May 13, 2015 03:50
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Blue Raider posted:you know nothing about the logistics of transportation. like astoundingly nothing. The complexities of the trucking business are too great for my feeble mind to grasp.
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May 13, 2015 04:00
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is that a joke? because its pretty loving complex
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May 13, 2015 04:11
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Have the Mexican truck drivers left Americans for dead in their wake as was warned?
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May 13, 2015 04:22
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Yeah, I feel like I could probably figure it out, doesn't seem more complex to me than any number of actually complicated jobs.
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May 13, 2015 04:22
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Nonsense posted:Have the Mexican truck drivers left Americans for dead in their wake as was warned? not even a little bit. it has to do with insurance among many other variables
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May 13, 2015 04:29
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shipping billions of dollars of goods to an absurd amount of addresses, within crazy tight deadlines ITS NOT COMPLICATED PEOPLE JUST PUT IT ON THE TRUCk JESUS
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May 13, 2015 04:38
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RBC posted:shipping billions of dollars of goods to an absurd amount of addresses, within crazy tight deadlines ITS NOT COMPLICATED PEOPLE JUST PUT IT ON THE TRUCk JESUS Not surprisingly, this kind of problem is what computers are great at solving. So as long as we avoid using computers he'll have plenty of job security.
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May 13, 2015 04:49
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RBC posted:shipping billions of dollars of goods to an absurd amount of addresses, within crazy tight deadlines ITS NOT COMPLICATED PEOPLE JUST PUT IT ON THE TRUCk JESUS Agreed, give funding to USPS.
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May 13, 2015 04:49
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Mo_Steel posted:Agreed, give funding to USPS. this, but, unironically
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May 13, 2015 04:51
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ElCondemn posted:Not surprisingly, this kind of problem is what computers are great at solving. So as long as we avoid using computers he'll have plenty of job security. you are absolutely bonkers if you think a computer could do that. the organization is the easy part
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May 13, 2015 04:52
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drat sixteen-wheeler pussies know nothing of complexity, try handling logistics for an airline then come back to me.. 
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May 13, 2015 04:53
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Ocrassus posted:drat sixteen-wheeler pussies know nothing of complexity, try handling logistics for an airline then come back to me.. i cant loving imagine. ive handled my share of rail intermodal and it was a mfer
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May 13, 2015 04:55
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Mo_Steel posted:Agreed, give funding to USPS. usps trucks are often just the last point in the chain. It takes a lot of routing transfers to get packages from shipping point to delivery. And they use lots o contractors. Of course things could probably be a lot smoother if it were all coordinated under one single logistics chain with all drivers on the same board instead of the free-for-all hell that the 1980 deregulation of the trucking industry ushered in. A lot fewer empty miles for drivers, fewer transfers for the packages, so on
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May 13, 2015 05:34
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Blue Raider posted:you are absolutely bonkers if you think a computer could do that. the organization is the easy part Considering there are many companies using software to manage their fleets today, I think you might be overestimating your value in your organization. Either way, your argument boils down to "computers will never be able to do what I do" and that's just plain wrong. I'm not saying tomorrow we'll have middle management robots holding meetings, giving presentations and talking to vendors, but some day it will happen and they'll work for peanuts.
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May 13, 2015 06:38
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ElCondemn posted:Considering there are many companies using software to manage their fleets today, I think you might be overestimating your value in your organization. I don't disagree with what you're saying, it will get to the point where machines replace us in pretty much every field that doesn't in some way rely on innately human qualities (like therapy), but logistics is not as straightforwardly algorithmic as you make it sound, not by a long shot. Equipment goes wrong all the loving time and you have to do a hell of a lot of rerouting. weather conditions, timescales, the job is extremely unpredictable in its variables and the solution is a matter of problem solving. Machines are getting better at problem solving through the 'big data' approach (IE they compensate for a lack of human judgement by having access to vast quantities of data from previous scenarios that it can amalgamate). Landing an aircraft is one such example where we are making big leaps in this area. However, planning around unforeseen and unique circumstances (half of what logistics management is) is nowhere near at the same level. Fantastic paper entitled 'The future of employment' done by a pair of quality researchers, they apply some useful methodology to break down the probability of jobs being automated. I encourage you to have a look.
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May 13, 2015 07:55
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asdf32 posted:I'm not actually a tech weirdo who thinks automated everything is around the corner. On the other hand I think the market can be incredibly clever at finding ways cut costs. So more things can and will continue to be automated at a rate that's related to labor costs. So you can't point to any specific danger, only vaguely allude to something that even you believe is not an inevitability, all in the name of assuring there is a class of working poor doing jobs that may or may not be better done by robots. And we should base policy on this.
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May 13, 2015 15:10
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Maybe I'm just simple but I can't really see how anyone could argue against a reasonable increase in the minimum amount we pay people when a KitKat costs $1.20
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May 13, 2015 15:14
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The manufacturing jobs of the 1950s-1970s that everyone seems to be longing nostalgically for were largely replaced by automation, so trying to deny that it's a huge problem seems overly optimistic.
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May 13, 2015 15:21
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Typo posted:The manufacturing jobs of the 1950s-1970s that everyone seems to be longing nostalgically for were largely replaced by automation, so trying to deny that it's a huge problem seems overly optimistic. Yet here we are with low unemployment and a growing economy so perhaps the answer in the face of automation is not to push wages (remember, these were middle class blue collar jobs) as low as possible out of fear.
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May 13, 2015 15:41
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archangelwar posted:Yet here we are with low unemployment and a growing economy so perhaps the answer in the face of automation is not to push wages (remember, these were middle class blue collar jobs) as low as possible out of fear. It's not fear, it's reality and history. Low skill demographics which are hit by minimum wage already have consistently higher unemployment.
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May 13, 2015 16:53
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This is a very asinine debate when the bottom 20% has some single-digit percentage of all wealth in the nation. You could literally double what they have by taking a miserly portion of the top 20%.
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May 13, 2015 17:02
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asdf32 posted:It's not fear, it's reality and history. Low skill demographics which are hit by minimum wage already have consistently higher unemployment. This is a thing that is trivially true, not a profound statement. And it in no way supports a position of anti-automation or anti-minimum wage, given that both automation and minimum wage have occurred yet we have steady unemployment and a growing economy. So yes, you are responding out of fear rather than an actual analysis. Not only that, it is an unspecified fear, as you have done nothing to show impact or even eventuality of outcome.
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May 13, 2015 17:10
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Ocrassus posted:Fantastic paper entitled 'The future of employment' done by a pair of quality researchers, they apply some useful methodology to break down the probability of jobs being automated. I encourage you to have a look. This was a pro read, thanks for mentioning it.
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May 13, 2015 17:42
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wateroverfire posted:This was a pro read, thanks for mentioning it. Indeed: http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf
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May 13, 2015 17:53
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wateroverfire posted:This was a pro read, thanks for mentioning it. You're welcome. I've literally just finished a paper on this very topic but it's dry theory, these guys on the other hand have come up with a really good addition to the otherwise anaemic literature on this issue.
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May 13, 2015 18:28
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OK, so we've got a well constructed study which suggests that up to 50% of jobs, concentrated among low-wage, low-education-requirement positions, are at significant risk of being lost to automation in the next century. Do you think a policy which makes automation more attractive to employers by raising the price of labor in that same subset of low-wage positions will: A) Accelerate this trend B) Have no effect on this trend C) Slow this trend How can you read this report and be utterly confident that the employment effects of past minimum wage increases will continue to be minimal?
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May 13, 2015 18:54
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Automation is going to be a crisis regardless of the wages involved. I'd rather get paid a living wage now and be out of a job because of automation in 10 years than get paid a lovely wage now and be out of a job because of automation in 20 years. This is because people need help now. Depressing wages to put off the inevitable just hurts people now, and doesn't help them later, either. EDIT: When people talk about minimum wage increases not harming employment, they really mean in the near term--the job loss now because of a minimum wage hike will be negligible. They aren't going "well, gosh, nothing else will ever change!" Ghost of Reagan Past fucked around with this message at 19:07 on May 13, 2015 |
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May 13, 2015 19:03
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JeffersonClay posted:How can you read this report and be utterly confident that the employment effects of past minimum wage increases will continue to be minimal? I believe increasing the cost of labor will accelerate automation. My job is literally automation (surprisingly, that paper mentions by name one of the projects I'm working on), as an operations engineer my goal is to take the most error prone and common tasks and automate them. I think this is a good thing. Someday I hope automation makes me redundant too, and I'm pretty sure it will. The only way it's a bad thing is if you think work is the end goal. Having jobs for people to do is not important, if no work needs to be done why should work be created? I'm hoping that increasing the cost of workers will force either a) ideas like basic income to be actually considered or b) work will be spread among more people We can effectively increase wages for most workers, adjust overtime laws and have twice as many people working for half the amount of time. Or we can just eliminate the non-jobs and just decide to provide enough to have basic food, housing and maybe a little WAM. I'm sure there will be problems with these solutions too, but it's a step in the right direction. Any solution is going to require pretty big social changes when it comes to work and poverty.
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May 13, 2015 19:14
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