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i am harry
Oct 14, 2003

INH5 posted:

there are way too many historical counterexamples for me to take that kind of talk seriously.

I'd like a historical example of a time when something caused mass job loss across multiple industries in the same decade please.

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silence_kit
Jul 14, 2011

by the sex ghost

Tei posted:

Shows a picture of a drone: this thing can flight to iran capital and destroy a target the size of a car, then flight back.

But so much is science fiction, for now.

That's very different than commercial passenger flights--the military likes drones and was highly motivated to develop them because having no human being sitting in the aircraft means that they can totally change their war strategies. In addition, for the military, cost is less of a concern than for commercial airlines. Finally, drones aren't self-flying, they have guys remote controlling them.

silence_kit fucked around with this message at 16:52 on Dec 6, 2016

silence_kit
Jul 14, 2011

by the sex ghost

Nevvy Z posted:

I chuckle every time I see the words "reduce prices" in this thread, as though companies aren't gonna just pocket more profit and bonuses.

The price of oil seems to be at odds with your statement. If you take a look in the DAPL pipeline thread, there are many progressives arguing (maybe even you made the following argument in that thread too!) that oil prices have already been lowered to such low amounts that we don't need another pipeline and more oil supply.

There are so many other things which are dropping in cost--food, communications, electronics, software, etc. Maybe more important things like medicine and housing aren't dropping in cost, but you've got to be pretty stupid to claim that it is impossible for the price of goods to ever go down.

silence_kit fucked around with this message at 16:57 on Dec 6, 2016

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


i am harry posted:

I'd like a historical example of a time when something caused mass job loss across multiple industries in the same decade please.

Great Depression, the golden example of an oversupply crisis, feels appropriate.

World War I and the Roaring Twenties transformed radically the American industrial base, with large adoption of several new technologies which ordinarily wouldn't be implemented in such a short scale if not for the massive consumer demand spike caused by an Europe that suddenly stopped supplying the world with industrial goods. Major industries in the US adopted electrification, the assembly line, better logistics, trucks, modern machine toolmaking, etc whose structural unemployment effects were not felt because of the massive ramp-up in global demand in the short term.

However, by the end of the decade, demand elasticity turned out to be a very real thing. People living under a tremendously unequal economy plus major wage stagnation across the main Western markets wouldn't be buying washing machines or electric ovens every three months to curb the massive stockpiles of overproduced goods. Companies were unable to sell and their stocks plunged en masse.

There is a misconception that the Great Depression wasn't a structural, technological outcome due to the massive historical circumstances involving it, but economic history is pretty more elaborate in that sense. The United States was the only country in that period which had enough capital to quickly capture global industrial good demand through massive investment (which in short very intensive bursts is simply the implementation of new technology in a very agressive manner), in which it was extremely successful.

Also, it is the first clear example of the "global" and systemic nature of the technological problem - this new and massive American industrial base post-WW1 effectively sequestered thousands upon thousands of European industrial jobs that were never recovered to their apex, even in WW2. Latin America's modest industrialization also created local capacities for basic goods like canned food or soap that were all imported from Europe.

Tei
Feb 19, 2011

silence_kit posted:

That's very different than commercial passenger flights--the military likes drones and was highly motivated to develop them because having no human being sitting in the aircraft means that they can totally change their war strategies. In addition, for the military, cost is less of a concern than for commercial airlines. Finally, drones aren't self-flying, they have guys remote controlling them.

I totally agree.

If you are successful, a lot of people die in each flight. :D

Anyway it was to counter the dudes going "Flying? No way a non-pilot machine would do it". I personally doubt piloting commercial jets will be something on risk at the moment, but is on the cards in the future.

mobby_6kl
Aug 9, 2009

TBH based on recent history it seems that pilots are more likely to gently caress up and cause a crash that a computer would never do. Like insisting that you'd make it to the next airport which is outside of its max range :v:

INH5
Dec 17, 2012
Error: file not found.

i am harry posted:

I'd like a historical example of a time when something caused mass job loss across multiple industries in the same decade please.

The most obvious example is the Industrial Revolution, which caused massive job losses not just in farming, but also pretty much every other existing industry, because individual craftsmen couldn't hope to compete against factories.

Tasmantor posted:

US only article and the increase in tellers is due to the increase in branches. Australia didn't experience an expansion of branches. Banks globally are shutting branches due to the rise of internet commerce so lay offs are even forecast in that article. So no ATMs mean less clerks per branch and now that the internet is automating shopping more there's less need for branches.

feel like the other poster covered the self checkout thing.

The original statement that ATMs led to layoffs of bank tellers is still completely wrong.

a neurotic ai
Mar 22, 2012

Tei posted:

I totally agree.

If you are successful, a lot of people die in each flight. :D

Anyway it was to counter the dudes going "Flying? No way a non-pilot machine would do it". I personally doubt piloting commercial jets will be something on risk at the moment, but is on the cards in the future.

When we get to artificial general intelligence (a kind of medium between current weak AI and strong AI), piloting as a profession is out the window, alongside a poo poo tonne of other jobs that are otherwise 'safe' in current projections.

Mozi
Apr 4, 2004

Forms change so fast
Time is moving past
Memory is smoke
Gonna get wider when I die
Nap Ghost

INH5 posted:

The original statement that ATMs led to layoffs of bank tellers is still completely wrong.

OK, ATMs have led to there being fewer bank tellers necessary per branch. Which boils down to pretty much the same thing from a wider perspective.

INH5
Dec 17, 2012
Error: file not found.

Mozi posted:

OK, ATMs have led to there being fewer bank tellers necessary per branch. Which boils down to pretty much the same thing from a wider perspective.

It also led to there being more branches, and therefore more bank tellers than before. So no, it isn't the same thing at all.

Paradoxish
Dec 19, 2003

Will you stop going crazy in there?

INH5 posted:

The original statement that ATMs led to layoffs of bank tellers is still completely wrong.

Automation almost never causes large scale layoffs or job losses in a really direct way. Take this graph from the article you posted about ATMs:



The author is using it to show that ATMs don't necessarily cost jobs, but I think you can interpret that data either way. Were tellers being laid off? No, but the number of tellers per branch dropped and banks were able to hire fewer tellers during expansions. If banks close branches (which they are now), the number of tellers required to keep the branches they save open is less than it would be without ATMs.

You can look at the graph I posted of manufacturing employment vs. output earlier in the thread to see this effect in action more starkly. Employment doesn't really drop (it often even increases) during growth periods, but output far outpaces it. You aren't seeing the same thing with banks because banks expanded drastically over the period where ATMs were introduced. Automation is costing jobs, but in this case expansion is (or was) offsetting the losses.

Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 18:03 on Dec 6, 2016

Tei
Feb 19, 2011

Ocrassus posted:

When we get to artificial general intelligence (a kind of medium between current weak AI and strong AI), piloting as a profession is out the window, alongside a poo poo tonne of other jobs that are otherwise 'safe' in current projections.

I say stupid poo poo all day, I finish the day with dumb ideas, and sometimes I am wrong more than 50% of the time. So I tried to avoid talking about a topic that I know almost nothing.

But, why would flyiing be a thing limited to humans?

The same savings that you can have removing the pilot in military environments you can get in commercial. Maybe not for transporation of people, but to transport goods. I can totally imagine a fully automated airport where drones the size of a airbus, full of packages, automatically land and take of. We probably have the technology to do something like this since 1941. If the economics start to make sense...

I just don't believe air is a good place for automatization, theres other areas where automatization may be much easier... or is more interesting.
Yet another reason why I don't know why are we even talking about air automatization, of all topics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0EE5ZGKJyE

Death Bot
Mar 4, 2007

Binary killing machines, turning 1 into 0 since 0011000100111001 0011011100110110
That atm graph isn't something I would describe as conclusive; it doesn't consider these numbers with relation to population, number of branches, the existence of online banking, etc etc.

It's also worth noting that right as ATMs are introduced on that graph, the rate of growth of bank tellers DOES fall off. This likely isn't completely from ATMs, the introduction of computers in general probably cut down on a fair amount of work...

Really it would be more useful to have figures comparing tellers and ATMs to population and number of branches, to see how those numbers changed over time.

INH5
Dec 17, 2012
Error: file not found.

Paradoxish posted:

Automation almost never causes large scale layoffs or job losses in a really direct way. Take this graph from the article you posted about ATMs:



The author is using it to show that ATMs don't necessarily cost jobs, but I think you can interpret that data either way. Were tellers being laid off? No, but the number of tellers per branch dropped and banks were able to hire fewer tellers during expansions. If banks close branches (which they are now), the number of tellers required to keep the branches they save open is less than it would be without ATMs.

You can look at the graph I posted of manufacturing employment vs. output earlier in the thread to see this effect in action more starkly. Employment doesn't really drop (it often even increases) during growth periods, but output far outpaces it. You aren't seeing the same thing with banks because banks expanded drastically over the period where ATMs were introduced. Automation is costing jobs, but in this case expansion is offsetting the losses.

The thing is, ATMs enabled that expansion by reducing the cost of opening new branches. We basically ended up with Jevons's paradox, except with bank tellers instead of coal.

You can argue that this is a special case and it won't happen again in other industries, but it still seems like a pretty big counterexample to the idea of automation leading to mass unemployment.

Death Bot
Mar 4, 2007

Binary killing machines, turning 1 into 0 since 0011000100111001 0011011100110110
Holy poo poo I actually just went back and read the article and the second half of it actually just says that teller employment is falling and projected to continue falling due to e-banking lmao

Paradoxish
Dec 19, 2003

Will you stop going crazy in there?

INH5 posted:

You can argue that this is a special case and it won't happen again in other industries, but it still seems like a pretty big counterexample to the idea of automation leading to mass unemployment.

I'm actually not arguing that at all. What I'm saying is that the effect of ATMs on the banking industry is identical to the effect of automation on manufacturing and other industries. There's an initial period of expansion since it's easier to increase capacity without drastically increasing employment, and that's ultimately followed by a reduction in employment as growth falters and the number of workers needed for the new equilibrium point is lower than it was before. Note that the number of ATMs increases even during recessionary periods where employment is going down - in other words, banks were expanding without bringing in new employees.

Banks are actually closing branches and laying people off right now.

quote:

Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan shut 389 branches since the third quarter of last year.

quote:

And the cuts aren't just in terms of bank branches but also in headcount. Bank of America indicated back in June that it planned to cut over 8,000 jobs from its consumer banking division.

This really is similar to what happened in manufacturing, except in the case of banking the full effects of automation weren't really felt until online banking became a thing. I'd be willing to bet real money that the same thing happens in retail over the next decade or two.

Bar Ran Dun
Jan 22, 2006




It's happening on the paperwork office side of transportation too. Most shipping documents and even touchy things like hazardous declarations ate becoming automated.

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Paradoxish posted:

Automation almost never causes large scale layoffs or job losses in a really direct way.
I'm sure we could come up with plenty of examples. Carriage drivers (really anything to do with horses) once cars started to become popular, human 'computers' and punch card operators falling by the wayside as early computers became more advanced, I guess offices used to have a lot more secretaries to type stuff up before the advent of personal computers + word processors. I'm guessing taxi dispatchers are rapidly going the way of the do-do right now.

turn it up TURN ME ON
Mar 19, 2012

In the Grim Darkness of the Future, there is only war.

...and delicious ice cream.

INH5 posted:

Airline salaries make up 20% of the cost of an average airline ticket. Granted, I have no idea what portion of that is the pilots' salaries compared to everyone else.


Okay. This all makes perfect sense.

But it's very different from the typical automation apocalypse scenario. In fact, it seems like one of the end points (the one where pilots get 10 hours of flight training and are paid 15 bucks an hour) could easily result in more people being employed as airline pilots, albeit for much lower wages, because the lower costs would presumably lead to lower flight prices and thus to more plane trips, more planes, and more pilots to babysit those planes.

If people were talking about this kind of scenario happening elsewhere due to automation, I'd be a lot more receptive. Like, if people were to say that self-driving trucks will lead to lower wages for truckers, because once the job duties are reduced to "babysit the fully automated trucks, fight off hijackers if necessary, and maybe fill out some paperwork," the job can be done by high school dropouts for a lot less money, then I would agree that that scenario does sound very likely and like it might cause a number of problems. But instead everyone talks about how there's going to be chaos! Because there are more than 3 million truck drivers in America and every single one of them is going to be put out of work by robotrucks! And there are way too many historical counterexamples for me to take that kind of talk seriously.

And to anyone who says, "but trucks are different because they usually don't carry passengers," I raise the question of why cargo planes also still have pilots.

Aviation is a very interesting sector to bring up in an automation discussion. There are a couple of challenges in aviation that are different than automotive transportation:

1. Aircraft are more complex than cars, operating at higher speeds and altitudes. At the most simple level an aircraft has to be controlled in 3 dimensions rather than 2. They generally have 2 separate engines rather than 1.
2. Changes to environment around an aircraft affect it more than a car. For example, unanticipated updrafts can cause turbulence. Going in the wake of a larger plane can cause a loss of lift.
3. When emergencies happen, the procedures to address these are far more complex. In a car, you generally steer towards the side of the road and stop. Or just stop. In an aircraft you have to identify the problem, figure out if you can keep going and if not find an airport to land at or an open space to ditch at. Then land/ditch, which in and of itself is very complicated.
4. This is possibly ignored a lot: Aviation is very strongly regulated for safety.

Automation in aviation hasn't focused on getting rid of the pilot, but making the pilot's job easier. Because flying requires a degree of problem-solving and risk mitigation that software has yet to replicate. So what we've seen is automation to:

1. Make navigation easier (we don't generally need dedicated navigators anymore!)
2. Make managing the engines and systems easier (we don't generally see the need for a dedicated flight engineer to handle oil cooling and engine performance!)
3. Make the act of flying in stable conditions easier (a pilot on a long-haul flight isn't 100% focused on flying anymore, allowing for longer flights and pilots to be used without as many breaks)
4. Give the pilot more information quickly (making landings, takeoffs, and emergencies safer)

In addition, the level of regulation around aviation makes innovation slow to take hold in the commercial aviation sector, and very expensive to implement once it's ready. So a pilot is still probably cheaper.

Many of these may be equivalent to automated trucking, but my guess is that driving is simply simpler overall than flying (except at the endpoints where you get off the highway). My guess is that we'll probably see team drivers go away as long-haul trucking becomes the sort of thing that can have driver-assistance devices. We'll still need drivers to do things like handling the last 5 miles of transport, and possibly doing trailer movement within yards.

turn it up TURN ME ON fucked around with this message at 19:08 on Dec 6, 2016

Tei
Feb 19, 2011

It sounds the opposite of interesting to me.

Sounds like a place that is hard to automate, so others places will be automated before air is successfully automated.

Automation makes more sense with repetitive task that are easy to codify and are currently done by a group of humans, or that require a lot of human work. It don't seems the case of piloting a civil airship.... is not that is imposible, more like is hard when theres other low hanging fruits.

turn it up TURN ME ON
Mar 19, 2012

In the Grim Darkness of the Future, there is only war.

...and delicious ice cream.
It's interesting in the sense that a lot of work has been done there to automate it, and it makes sense to bring up as a comparison to automotive automation, but there's a lot more complexity.

I bet we'll see a lot of people making the same comparison in the next bunch of months/years: We didn't put pilots out of a job, so stop worrying about truckers getting put out of a job.

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


Automation economics isn't a simple thing like researching a tech and getting a 20% bonus in a strategy game. It happens gradually and according to the factors and pressures of a given system.

The major misconception why "automation creates jobs!" that comes from neoliberalism has actually its roots on Say's """law""", which says that production generates its own demand. This has been proven false even during the classical economic development period; David Ricardo edited his own Treatise because he admitted that he was wrong in thinking that the jobs that machinery would eliminate would be recreated due to Say's law because the overall production has increased, but he lacked the means or the awareness to realize the specifics.

Thing is, structural unemployment is a very real thing because whenever you had a panic or a minor or major crisis, whenever the level of capital investment started to pick up again, the majority of it went to capital goods and development, not wages or contracts. The ATM is a fine example - when an economy is doing well enough, there are no pressures or external factors to pressure an increase in automation in order to save labor costs, but whenever things get shaky, a couple thousand positions get axed, when things started to look better again you just spend it on machines rather than hiring because it is more cost-efficient. Sure, the number of hires might seem stable, but those things happen in long scales.

Hell, this is happening in China, which is where labor economic theory goes to die. Even if the Chinese labor reserve is so actually loving massive that models start making GBS threads themselves and puking purple, major industrial companies are pursuing automated solutions to be implemented during the next economic downturn.

mobby_6kl
Aug 9, 2009

^^^
I don't think the argument ever was that ATMs will create new jobs for bank tellers, but that in aggregate, there will be more opportunities in the economy as a whole. Somebody has to build and maintain ATMs, the suppliers (think Intel, MS, etc) get more business, banks lowers costs and customers save time and money.

If this weren't the case, we'd have to be like 99% unemployed by now. You could argue that that today's McJobs aren't as good as factory jobs in the 50s but I don't see anything fundamentally different between bolting on wheels on an assembly line and putting together a burger. The lower wages could be a result of higher low skilled labor supply and perhaps lower union membership.

turn it up TURN ME ON posted:

It's interesting in the sense that a lot of work has been done there to automate it, and it makes sense to bring up as a comparison to automotive automation, but there's a lot more complexity.

I bet we'll see a lot of people making the same comparison in the next bunch of months/years: We didn't put pilots out of a job, so stop worrying about truckers getting put out of a job.
I dunno, modern autopilots can already fly the planes just fine, it's not that difficult. As the joke goes, the cockpit of the future will feature a single pilot and a large dog. The pilot's job will be to feed the dog. The dog's job will be to bite the pilot if he tries to mess with anything.

That is not to say that all pilots will be fired tomorrow, but I don't see any fundamental issues preventing automation in the near future. We already got rid of a significant part of the crew so this will only gradually continue.

Cicero posted:

I'm sure we could come up with plenty of examples. Carriage drivers (really anything to do with horses) once cars started to become popular, human 'computers' and punch card operators falling by the wayside as early computers became more advanced, I guess offices used to have a lot more secretaries to type stuff up before the advent of personal computers + word processors. I'm guessing taxi dispatchers are rapidly going the way of the do-do right now.
I wanted to make some point about the changes happening gradually or something but here's a chart of Peak Horse:

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

mobby_6kl posted:

I wanted to make some point about the changes happening gradually or something but here's a chart of Peak Horse:


Change is probably even more drastic if you factor in the US population size.

turn it up TURN ME ON
Mar 19, 2012

In the Grim Darkness of the Future, there is only war.

...and delicious ice cream.

mobby_6kl posted:


I dunno, modern autopilots can already fly the planes just fine, it's not that difficult. As the joke goes, the cockpit of the future will feature a single pilot and a large dog. The pilot's job will be to feed the dog. The dog's job will be to bite the pilot if he tries to mess with anything.


It takes about 3-4 years to become a commercial pilot. The joke is funny, but piloting a commercial airliner is one of those college+ level jobs. Being a trucker, in comparison, takes 2-7 weeks depending on the school and plan. Maybe we'll see pilots become a thing of the past, but it's a super difficult job to automate.

As I said, where automation has impacted jobs in aviation is in the ancillary jobs and making the pilot take on more responsibilities. No more navigators, no more flight engineers.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

mobby_6kl posted:

I wanted to make some point about the changes happening gradually or something but here's a chart of Peak Horse:


What I gather from this is that the number of horses is cyclical, and will reach a new peak around 2100.

Main Paineframe
Oct 27, 2010

override367 posted:

The conundrum to me is that if automation replaces any significant portion of the work force without an alternative, the resulting economic collapse will gently caress all those companies that just bought robots because nobody's buying their poo poo anymore

Yes, absolutely. But due to various weaknesses in the way businesses assess the consequences of their actions, they don't take that into account. The lesson they take away from that isn't that they shouldn't automate, it's that they should lead the pack in automation so that they can accumulate maximum profit from that automation before the economy crashes from everyone else automating. That's why government intervention is needed.

Ocrassus posted:

When we get to artificial general intelligence (a kind of medium between current weak AI and strong AI), piloting as a profession is out the window, alongside a poo poo tonne of other jobs that are otherwise 'safe' in current projections.

The only reason piloting as a profession is still around now is for regulatory and liability reasons. The commercial airline industry is tremendously regulated, scrutinized, and unionized. As a result of those pressures, the industry faces very high barriers to automation.

INH5 posted:

The thing is, ATMs enabled that expansion by reducing the cost of opening new branches. We basically ended up with Jevons's paradox, except with bank tellers instead of coal.

You can argue that this is a special case and it won't happen again in other industries, but it still seems like a pretty big counterexample to the idea of automation leading to mass unemployment.

The thing is that in most industries, there's a limit to the amount of extra output that the economy can accept. If someone today invented a machine that halved the number of employees necessary to keep a physical bank branch open, overall bank employment would drop, because there's not enough unmet demand to double the number of physical bank branches in the US. The number of branches would grow somewhat, but not nearly enough to compensate for the number of jobs eliminated.

When the ATM was invented, banks were already interested in expanding the number of physical branch locations for various reasons, and ATMs simply made it cheaper and faster to engage in the growth they were already planning. There's no such plans today; indeed, banks are already cutting branches as it is. A labor-saving automation tool introduced in this environment would decimate bank employment, as they use it to extract maximum savings from the cuts they're already engaging in rather than taking advantage of it to expand the operations they're currently shrinking due to flagging demand. As more and more industries are automated, the US will be less and less able to absorb the impact of that automation, particularly as population growth and economic growth both slow to a crawl and industrial expansion brings output up against the practical and economic limits of customer demand.

Death Bot
Mar 4, 2007

Binary killing machines, turning 1 into 0 since 0011000100111001 0011011100110110

Death Bot posted:

Holy poo poo I actually just went back and read the article and the second half of it actually just says that teller employment is falling and projected to continue falling due to e-banking lmao

Can we please go back to the fact that the article just barely manages to avoid saying "the number didn't go down when everyone thought but it actually is right now and will continue to"

Like, the expansion happened and now that there's market saturation even within the context of an article positing automation doesn't (didn't?) reduce employment in this one field, they still project an 8% drop in employment of bank tellers due to the automation of online banking.

Tei
Feb 19, 2011

turn it up TURN ME ON posted:

It's interesting in the sense that a lot of work has been done there to automate it, and it makes sense to bring up as a comparison to automotive automation, but there's a lot more complexity.

I bet we'll see a lot of people making the same comparison in the next bunch of months/years: We didn't put pilots out of a job, so stop worrying about truckers getting put out of a job.

Well, theres two options, they will lose the job soon, or they will lose their job later. These that argue that turning trucks into automated self driving machines is very hard, if they are right, that means that truckers will still have a job in 20 years. But also something that can happend is that some trucking jobs do disappear and others don't.

Maybe new trucks are made that when they are inside a airport or a port are automated self-drived, and they turn manual outside. Maybe trucker wait in a station, and pick the truck when it park, after crossing half the country self driving. So instead of 20 hours piloting trough the country, is only 3 hours, but are the hard 3 hours, these that have the trucker fighting with humans, or the city trafic, conflicting address.

Some people still have horses and work with them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCcwXX5WWuo

Big Mad Drongo
Nov 10, 2006

A Buttery Pastry posted:

What I gather from this is that the number of horses is cyclical, and will reach a new peak around 2100.

That'll be after the collapse of our current society, but when we've managed to recover a bit, so it checks out.

boner confessor
Apr 25, 2013

by R. Guyovich

Tei posted:

Maybe new trucks are made that when they are inside a airport or a port are automated self-drived, and they turn manual outside. Maybe trucker wait in a station, and pick the truck when it park, after crossing half the country self driving. So instead of 20 hours piloting trough the country, is only 3 hours, but are the hard 3 hours, these that have the trucker fighting with humans, or the city trafic, conflicting address.

so... a freight train passing a container to a truck at a yard?

SaTaMaS
Apr 18, 2003

rscott posted:

Who says the US is desperate for manufacturing talent in the first place? US companies may act like they're facing a skills shortage but that's largely because they don't want to pay wages. That's the other big thing about automation, the capital expenses can be pretty big up front but since they're capital you can write the depreciation off in a manner that is advantageous for your taxes.

True enough, but if they can't find anyone they can pay $35/hour to program CNC machines here in the US, it doesn't seem like it will be that long before they can pay someone much less to program them remotely from China or elsewhere...

Bar Ran Dun
Jan 22, 2006




boner confessor posted:

so... a freight train passing a container to a truck at a yard?

Drayage is the word. All the short stuff, things moved around inside a intermodal terminal, from the terminal to a warehouse or facility, etc. All the short trips in traffic or hectic places. That is the hard stuff.

Tasmantor
Aug 13, 2007
Horrid abomination

SaTaMaS posted:

True enough, but if they can't find anyone they can pay $35/hour to program CNC machines here in the US, it doesn't seem like it will be that long before they can pay someone much less to program them remotely from China or elsewhere...

I am a programmer and setter. I run 5 machines most days and 6 on occasions. I can do this because it gets easier to "program" ever year. Right now you can get software that shits out a program from a CAD model for less than a grand a year. It's free if you are using it for education or personal use.

5 axis machines are not a million dollars. Unless they are huge.

Also $35 an hour would be nice but that's my poo poo employer not the market.

Rastor
Jun 2, 2001

Cicero posted:

Amazon just announced a checkout-less retail store: https://www.amazon.com/b?node=16008589011

Surprised that it doesn't use either barcode/QR scanning or RFID tags, apparently.

edit: It seems like the main weakness of checkoutless stores is still loose goods like produce, where they don't come in pre-made discrete quantities. Although I guess you could have a store like this and just treat loose goods as a special case where you have to go to a station to weigh them.

Amazon wants to eventually take over huge chunks of the retail economy, and it's going to be heavily automated.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/5/13849008/amazon-go-grocery-convenience-stores-retail-expansion

rscott
Dec 10, 2009

Tasmantor posted:

I am a programmer and setter. I run 5 machines most days and 6 on occasions. I can do this because it gets easier to "program" ever year. Right now you can get software that shits out a program from a CAD model for less than a grand a year. It's free if you are using it for education or personal use.

5 axis machines are not a million dollars. Unless they are huge.

Also $35 an hour would be nice but that's my poo poo employer not the market.

Mazak variaxis i-800s with all the SmoothControl add ons

owl_pellet
Nov 20, 2005

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I am interested in this topic because of the possible implications it has for creating more robust social security systems such as basic income or a social dividend, or to a somewhat lesser extent minimum income. What are the chances that something like this 1) gets implemented at all and 2) is implemented in a fairly reasonable period of time (I'm tempted to say 10 years here but "reasonable" for something that massive is probably more like 20)?

My thoughts and beliefs on income inequality, what it means to be employed, the importance of work vs. family, job insecurity, etc. have led me to have a strong desire for one of these systems to be in place. Preferably sooner rather than later or, you know, not at all.

SaTaMaS
Apr 18, 2003

owl_pellet posted:

I am interested in this topic because of the possible implications it has for creating more robust social security systems such as basic income or a social dividend, or to a somewhat lesser extent minimum income. What are the chances that something like this 1) gets implemented at all and 2) is implemented in a fairly reasonable period of time (I'm tempted to say 10 years here but "reasonable" for something that massive is probably more like 20)?

My thoughts and beliefs on income inequality, what it means to be employed, the importance of work vs. family, job insecurity, etc. have led me to have a strong desire for one of these systems to be in place. Preferably sooner rather than later or, you know, not at all.

I get pretty scared when people start saying things like "If things get bad enough, they'll HAVE to implent UBI". Not that you're saying that, but a lot of people seem to be. Here's one alternative - mass unemployment leads to social unrest, which leads to nationalism, which leads to war, which leads to lots of people getting killed off who would have otherwise been unemployed. Sound familiar?

Paradoxish
Dec 19, 2003

Will you stop going crazy in there?

SaTaMaS posted:

I get pretty scared when people start saying things like "If things get bad enough, they'll HAVE to implent UBI". Not that you're saying that, but a lot of people seem to be. Here's one alternative - mass unemployment leads to social unrest, which leads to nationalism, which leads to war, which leads to lots of people getting killed off who would have otherwise been unemployed. Sound familiar?

UBI as a response to an unemployment crisis is scary in and of itself.

Any scheme that aims to decouple basic survival and consumption from labor has to be phased in slowly and coupled with programs specifically designed to keep people involved in their communities. Ideally you'd also do something like gradually reduce the number of hours that constitutes full time work to encourage employers to hire more people and make access to education and skills training more readily available too.

The problem is that you can't just hand people who can't find a job money and be done with it. That takes care of basic survival, but it leaves you with a permanent and probably unemployable underclass. If you want a UBI (or something similar) then it has to be implemented before things get bad and you have to simultaneously encourage people who are already working to work less. It's an insanely hard problem.

For what it's worth, I do think that we're going to reach a point where it becomes an economic necessity and that it's going to be a loving disaster.

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Ignatius M. Meen
May 26, 2011

Hello yes I heard there was a lovely trainwreck here and...

SaTaMaS posted:

I get pretty scared when people start saying things like "If things get bad enough, they'll HAVE to implent UBI". Not that you're saying that, but a lot of people seem to be. Here's one alternative - mass unemployment leads to social unrest, which leads to nationalism, which leads to war, which leads to lots of people getting killed off who would have otherwise been unemployed. Sound familiar?

The New Deal is how we got Social Security and Medicare though so there's more precedent of the rich caving in when poo poo is bad enough in the US than the Weimar outcome. Also I seem to recall the Weimar outcome blowing up in a lot of formerly wealthy peoples' faces which maybe will play a factor in how much they'll keep stoking the fire when poo poo starts getting real?

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