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boner confessor posted:it's really not a good idea to resort to historical economics to explain future trends because historical methods of dealing with surplus population are forced deportation, starvation, slavery, compulsory military service, etc. It also only works in this case if you assume that every previous example of an industry being automated was a discrete event and not just one point on a long term trend.
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Dec 1, 2016 20:04
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Mozi posted:... compounded by the new millions of unemployable people. People probably aren't going to become unemployable because of automation. Low-end jobs are always going to be around unless we start seriously raising the minimum wage, so what's more likely is a constant downward pressure on middle- and lower-end wages as the share of people qualified to work "good" jobs shrinks.
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Dec 1, 2016 23:27
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I guess I am questioning the assumption that once automation happens the rich will have everything and the poor unemployed will not. If everything is truely so cheap to manufacture that everything costs less than minimum wage to make then why are the poor without? If everyone is poor who are the rich and what are they buying and selling? The whole story makes no sense. Yes, if literally everyone is unemployed then the economy probably implodes and we devolve into a post-apocalyptic society. Nobody is suggesting this ridiculous scenario and you seem to be intentionally ignoring the pile of states in between where we are now and complete economic meltdown. What happens when 10-15% of the population is permanently unemployed or underemployed? What about 25%? You can keep on being rich by selling to the people who still have jobs and money. Hell, you could probably do that right up until the point that things get so bad that society collapses.
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Dec 2, 2016 18:47
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Cicero posted:I think what you see today with kickstarter, patreon, youtube, etc. shows this doesn't have to be the case. You can be moderately popular in the entertainment/art sector with some niche and still make a living. This kind of thing is only going to expand in the future. The problem is that a lot of the people you're talking about here rarely make a decent living off of it. They might technically make enough to get by, but many also have day jobs and treat their creative work as a hobby that generates a little bit of income or as a second job. Some are obviously wildly successful, there's a very long tail of people who aren't making anywhere near minimum wage off of this kind of content creation. quote:Are you from 30 years in the future or something? We can barely make bipedal robots that can open a door and walk through it without falling over. They're right if they're talking about machines built to do a specific job, though. I doubt we're ever going to have or want general purpose, human-like robots for normal labor. Warehousing, for example, comes up a lot as a job that's difficult to automate because warehouses as they exist now are fairly chaotic environments - which is exactly why all of the work in that area is focused on warehouses that are built from the ground up with automation in mind.
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Dec 4, 2016 19:48
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wateroverfire posted:Like...I can imagine a world in which a computer is doing a version of all those things and hundreds more in a business, but I can't imagine it being anything but awful for the owners, the employees and probably the customers. Not saying that I expect middle management to be automated away any time soon, but even if it happens nobody is expecting managers to go away entirely. The idea is that you reduce the amount of labor needed to get the job done while keeping someone available to respond to situations as they come up. Like Death Bot was saying, you'd still have someone filling the role of a manager, you just reduce their workload with software to the point where having the same number of management employees physically present in each location is no longer necessary.
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Dec 5, 2016 17:33
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Cicero posted:Seriously though computers have been steadily automating office tasks for decades at this point. Calling it 'insidious' is weird, it's not some secret phenomenon that evil kkkapitalists have been hiding under the covers to suddenly spring upon an ignorant populace. No, but we're likely seeing real effects on the labor market in the form of stagnating (and increasingly polarized) wages and a loss of prime age labor force participation. Automation isn't something that should be opposed, but it is something that needs to be dealt with through policy somehow.
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Dec 5, 2016 23:42
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boner confessor posted:yeah, but that was mostly done in the last few decades - even people shooting for white collar jobs have trouble getting an entry level job, when back in the day you could just work in the mailroom or as a typist or whatever Oh yeah, sorry if I wasn't clear about that. I specifically meant that this has been a trend for several decades now. It's part of why I'm skeptical when people talk about automation as a bunch of discrete steps as opposed to a continuous process that's been happening for the past few hundred years.
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Dec 5, 2016 23:59
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turn it up TURN ME ON posted:I've been having this argument all day long on Facebook. Every reasonable person I know keeps saying: "But automation will create more jobs than it kills! Better jobs, maintaining the software/robots/helping people use those!" It's shockingly hard to come up with this kind of data because the effects of automation on the labor market are slow and only really show up as long term trends. You can argue that industrial automation and offshoring created more retail jobs because things are cheaper and someone needs to sell them, but I can't prove that with data. In any case, this was always my favorite graph to post when this topic came up in USPol:  You can show people trends in wages and labor force participation too, but it's hard to definitely say that "yes, this is automation's fault." To be honest, I'm not sure how you can argue with someone who honestly thinks that everyone will just become an engineer or a developer or a robot mechanic. That's absurd on its face and I don't know what kind of data you can use to disprove it.
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Dec 6, 2016 00:17
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Another thing to consider is that the mechanism by which automation has "created" jobs in the past isn't nearly as concrete as people would like to believe. Agricultural automation didn't lead to farmers suddenly all taking up jobs designing, building, and maintaining farming equipment. What it did do is create a large idle labor force and migration into urban areas, which (alongside other technical innovations) drastically altered the character of the workforce. Economic growth combined with an actual need for labor is what created jobs over the last century, not automation.
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Dec 6, 2016 00:59
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A few stores doesn't mean that they're falling out of favor. Every bit of data I can find on the global self-checkout market (which is unfortunately not all that much) shows it growing rapidly. I'm sure some stores are abandoning them for one reason or another, but people have been arguing that self-checkouts are going way since they first started becoming somewhat common over a decade ago. They aren't going anywhere, at least until systems like Amazon's or less complex versions like Sam's Club's Scan & Go replace them.  And yes, I realize that's four year old data. The point is that stories about retailers abandoning self-checkout were common back then too, but the market seems to be growing in spite of that. INH5 posted:Recent years have seen an enormous rise in the number of celebrities and a large drop in the average ratio of consumers:celebrity. You might know these new celebrities by terms like "Youtube reviewer" and "Twitch streamer." Unfortunately, the only people who make money at this are the top shelf celebrities. There are tons of content creators who are just barely getting by and probably working second jobs. Here's a random article about one, but you can find plenty more. This isn't a financially viable career option for most people who want to do it.
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Dec 6, 2016 06:23
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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 |
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Dec 6, 2016 17:58
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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.
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Dec 6, 2016 18:27
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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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Dec 8, 2016 02:20
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It seems kind of silly to do too much pearl clutching over the state of the labor market for an industry where the median salary is above the national median household income and the unemployment rate is around half of the general rate.
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Dec 8, 2016 16:40
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I thought it might have been why this thread popped back up, but there was a White House economic report on automation this week.quote:The report cites two different attempts to predict the rate of automation. Optimistically, researchers at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that many occupations are likely to change as some of their associated tasks become automated but not go away entirely. They estimate that only 9 percent of jobs are at risk in the next decade or two. However a separate analysis by Carl Frey and Michael Osbourne, which asked a panel of experts on AI to classify occupations by how likely automation would be to replace them, found that 47 percent of US jobs are at risk. Its assessment is similar to the one that was included with an earlier White House report on the economy. The biggest difference is that there's more of a focus on "AI" and automation in forms other than actual industrial robots. From the report itself: quote:Historically and across countries, however, there has been a strong relationship between productivity and wages—and with more AI the most plausible outcome will be a combination of higher wages and more opportunities for leisure for a wide range of workers. But the degree that this materializes depends not just on the nature of technological change but importantly on the policy and institutional choices that are made about how to prepare workers for AI and to handle its impacts on the labor market. The policy suggestions are pretty much exactly what's been discussed in this thread: strengthening safety nets and increasing access to education and job training. The tone of the report is fairly neutral, but the details make it clear just how loving awful a time this is for the Republicans to be running the show. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 23:56 on Dec 22, 2016 |
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Dec 22, 2016 23:54
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Do you understand the technological progress you are talking about to talk about a world where 40% of all the jobs in US can be done by computers? That study is saying 40% of all jobs which exist right now are at risk of being automated, not that 40% of all jobs will be done by machines or software within two decades. Some of those jobs will be replaced as they're lost and some of the innovations that lead to jobs being lost will end up creating more work. These studies aren't saying anything about the number of people will be unemployed in the future. No one is seriously suggesting that half of all work will be automated in two decades, but there are still major issues to deal with: 1. How many jobs will be lost without being replaced? The WH report notes that the US economy can absorb about 6% annual job loss just as a result of normal business operations. It's possible automation will start causing an actual drain on total jobs at some point, but we'd still end up in an employment crisis if job growth just slows enough to no longer keep pace with population growth. Recession level (ie, 8% or more) unemployment over a long period would destroy the economy. 2. If automation has a constructive effect on the labor market, where will it create new jobs? If middle income jobs are lost to create high and low income jobs, that's going to be almost as bad as automation just destroying jobs outright. Arguably worse, because an unemployment crisis will force political action in a way that falling wages won't. The issues with automation are way the gently caress more boring than some ridiculous idea that we're approaching the singularity and a third of all human labor will be unnecessary. The biggest threat is that the labor that we're socially willing to provide a living wage for will be automated and replaced (at least in part) by work that we value less and that no one will care or even notice.
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Dec 25, 2016 19:54
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:You are talking about advancements in technology to the point most human endeavors can be done by machines for less than the price of minimum wage. Do you get the level of sci fi fantasy world that is? I specifically said that one of the dangers of automation (a thing which is literally happening right now) is downward wage pressure. In other words, I was saying the exact opposite of what you're implying - that we'll probably see more jobs around the minimum wage level because it's a floor that automation is unlikely to breach for a while in most industries. This is a bad thing. Edit- I don't know how much clearer I can make this. Nobody is talking about all human jobs going away. That 47% figure is talking about jobs that exist right now. Even if that number is accurate, we have no idea how that will translate into future employment. Like, that isn't even an unprecedented number. Go back to a time when 90% of the population was engaged in agricultural labor and you would have been 100% correct to say that a huge portion of those jobs will be automated or simply no longer exist in the future. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Dec 25, 2016 |
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Dec 25, 2016 22:14
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You're the only person in this thread talking about the singularity, unless you believe that computer spreadsheets and search engines are technology approaching unimaginable magic. Do you understand that you could go back and write a report for the White House in 1880 saying that 30-40% of current jobs would be automated within the next fifty years and be right? We've lost absolutely massive numbers of jobs to automation over the last several centuries, but it just so happens that technology and economic growth have created more work and opportunity. You seem to be under this really weird impression that 40% of all current jobs being automated would be some kind of unprecedented event in human history. It wouldn't be. Job loss due to automation has been a continuous process throughout modern history.
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Dec 26, 2016 03:13
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Yeah, everyone else is talking about magical computers that can do literally anything a person can but also are just boring old spreadsheets that don't do anything. It's a weird sci-fi story we are supposed to fret about! No, no one is talking about magical computers that can do literally anything a person can do, which is why it's so loving weird to respond to your posts. Automation has never meant replacing human workers with machines on a 1:1 basis and none of the articles or studies being talked about in this thread are coming at the issue from that angle. I have personally helped build and deploy software that was specifically intended to make an entire department redundant so that retiring workers didn't have to be replaced. There was nothing even remotely magical or special about it. Automation almost always comes in the form of labor saving machines (or software) that eliminate jobs over the long term. I have no idea why you're so focused on this weird sci-fi bullshit instead of automation as it actually exists in the real world right now. Like, the whole point is that we don't need machines that can do anything a person can do, we just need machines that can do some of what a person does in highly specific contexts.
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Dec 26, 2016 04:31
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The decline in prime age labor force participation goes back about 2-3 decades and actually coincides with a downward trend in employees per customer served for many firms. It's also not particularly useful to look at post-2008 trends until there's another recession, since one of the notable things about the last few recoveries is that workers have been failing to make up lost ground (ie, losses during recessions are offsetting growth during recoveries). Most economic trends happen on pretty long time scales. edit- Owlofcreamcheese posted:Like we have two threads on D&D, this one and the AI one and in the AI one we are thousands of years away from AI and progress has stopped and everything is terrible, but in this one we are 5 minutes away from robots being able to take all jobs and all problems that need to be solved to let robots do basically anything is just boring spreadsheet problems and technology is moving super fast and everything is terrible. It's awesome how you continue to insist that anyone is saying that all jobs will be replaced even though all we're actually saying is that a specific subset of jobs or job functions will be replaced. Your weird utopian (dystopian?) vision of all jobs being done by robots is probably a better outcome than what we're actually talking about, which is a slow bleed of excess labor. For the third or fourth time: 47% of jobs being replaced does not mean a 47% unemployment rate. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 17:28 on Dec 26, 2016 |
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Dec 26, 2016 17:16
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Tei posted:Like, I usually do my bank transactions using the ATM machine or some website. Probably many calls to call centers will stop when people start enjoing interacting more with websites. Provided that the websites are well made. Yeah, I think a lot of the infrastructure for job "automation" has really already taken root and it's just a matter of adapting business models at this point. The fact that everyone has a computer in their pocket at all times now opens up a ton of possibilities for streamlining basic tasks that would normally require some human interaction. Hell, I already don't know anyone who prefers ordering fast food in person/at a drive through if there's an app available and that's barely been a thing for two years. Doctor Malaver posted:Yeah, the technology is here and it's not even cutting edge. McDonald's already has a kiosk proof-of-concept store set up, so my guess is that they just want to roll the technology out slowly so they can iterate on the model and figure out what works best. Obviously that isn't stopping them from using it as a bargaining chip in the fight to screw their workers over, though. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 01:08 on Dec 27, 2016 |
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Dec 27, 2016 01:00
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Can someone explain to me what the magic technology is that makes 2016 touchscreens magically able to replace cashiers? No, there actually wasn't good technology to deal with issues like payment as the ability to accept bills (as opposed to coins) only became cheap and widespread fairly recently. Also, automats were in fact a thing until they got outcompeted on cost (their main advantage) by even cheaper fast food. You could have done it in the 1980s, but UI design for touchscreen interfaces has only really blossomed over the last decade or so and the technology itself is drastically better, cheaper, and more reliable. Oh, and there's the fact that people are actually accustomed to using touchscreen interfaces now and carry around devices which can place orders for them before they're even physically at the restaurant. You're completely ignoring the myriad of small technologies and improvements in efficiency that actually lead to things being adopted in a widespread way.
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Dec 27, 2016 01:23
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Okay so why didn't they fire the whole staff in 1890 then just hire one kid to stand at the door and collect payments? They kind of did! Like I said, automats were actually a thing and very popular, although they just accepted coins instead of bills and had someone who would make change for you. They went away because fast food was cheaper, the automat model had difficulty expanding to reach car suburbs, and, ironically, computerization allowed traditional cashiers in fast food restaurants to be more efficient. People legitimately liked them, though. The idea of having somewhat automated fast, cheap food isn't new at all, but it's happening now because the technology is mature and cheap enough to do it. You seem to be missing the point that the idea isn't to just replace cashiers, it's to replace cashiers with something that's actually faster, better, and cheaper. The fact that people might lose their jobs is incidental.
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Dec 27, 2016 01:47
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Doctor Malaver posted:
My social circle is mostly people in their late 20s and early 30s so we're certainly all millennials, but I really don't know how much that has to do with it. None of us grew up with smart phones and cell phones were only really widespread for us at the tail end of high school. The issue is that it really is just more convenient. You can browse the menu at your leisure, don't have to worry about your order being misunderstood, and you don't have to worry about writing down or remembering anything if you're doing a group order.
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Dec 27, 2016 16:11
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:Creating jobs putting up with bureaucratic horseshit for people is the closest thing we've had yet to a viable trade substitute for the masses, but if you think I'm going to waste time on a wager that you'll only be on hold for ten minutes where I don't even get anything when I win, you're sorely misguided in your business model. This is already a thing. It mostly takes the form of "personal assistant" remote/online work and it's almost always 1099 contract stuff. You can sign up to get paid some paltry amount to make reservations for people or cancel their cable service. There are actually a huge number of companies that offer this kind of work.
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Dec 28, 2016 00:35
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Here's a sort of interesting, sort of automation related story: http://arstechnica.com/science/2017/01/algorithm-does-real-time-city-wide-ridesharing/quote:With the software in hand, the team then turned to their real-world data: every single taxi trip taken during a week in May of 2013. That's the time and location of every pick-up and drop-off for each of the city's 13,586 taxis. Really more about centralization than strict automation, though, and obviously take the massive reduction in congestion that the study authors are giving here with a huge grain of salt. It kind of gets to the heart of what a lot of people are claiming with autonomous cars, though: if you can manage them properly, you can potentially have less cars on the road serving the same number of people just as a result of more efficient routing.
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Jan 5, 2017 23:14
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Inferior Third Season posted:Good job, Big Data. You've invented the bus. I mean, yeah, but not really. quote:Riders would experience a mean wait of 2.7 minutes (generally quicker than hailing a cab) and an in-ride delay of 2.3 minutes due to handling other passengers. The idea is more to keep the benefits of taxis while getting the majority of them off of the roads. I'm skeptical of the real world practicality of this even if we magic up fully autonomous cars, but I think it's disingenuous to say that more efficient taxi service is the same thing as bus service.
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Jan 6, 2017 03:48
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Solkanar512 posted:These companies are accustomed to exponential growth, pushing the boundaries, skirting regulations, issuing patches after release and so on. That's fine for software. Yet it sets up some really lovely attitudes, habits and expectations when it comes to designing things that will contain people and transport them at speed in close proximity with others. If it makes you feel any better, "tech" companies aren't really the ones at the forefront of this push. Google is probably responsible for cementing the idea into the public consciousness with their hobby project, but it's actual automakers like Ford and Mercedes that are dumping money into AV concepts hand over fist. Tesla is the exception I guess, but it's not like they aren't a real car company.
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Jan 7, 2017 23:04
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Solkanar512 posted:This isn't about the illusion of control, this is about lovely tech companies that have no idea what it's like to produce products that could kill people. My post wasn't that difficult to understand, most folks here seemed to get just fine. You keep hitting on this point, but the first true consumer AVs are almost certainly going to come from traditional automakers since they're almost all working on them at this point.
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Jan 11, 2017 14:37
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Automakers have already made some noises about preventing individuals from doing certain repairs themselves, and specialized diagnostic equipment can already price independent shops out of some work.
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Jan 16, 2017 07:42
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:Cost of maintenance is kind of one of the biggest things people weigh when choosing a car, so unless they all form a cartel and decide to DRM-lock their new models simultaneously, that probably won't go well. Most people don't fix their own cars or even do their own routine maintenance. Cost of ownership is a concern if you can't take your car to independent mechanics, but the obvious solution here is to just offer longer warranties. The vast majority of new car buyers aren't going to care that they can't have their car fixed at the shop down the street if the dealership is offering them a five year warranty anyway. It'd absolutely destroy the used car market, but that's a separate issue.
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Jan 16, 2017 16:18
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Other than something hyper sci-fi like AI designing products using evolution to design physical processes humans don't understand or something crazy like that I'm not sure how "automation" leads to this. It's more of a secondary effect. Automated cars will be more complex and the consequences of getting something wrong will be more serious. Plus, automation of diagnostic work is actually already a thing. A device I can buy for $15 that works on a decades old standard can instantly provide a level of diagnostic information that used to take a trained technician hours or days to work out. Actual dealerships have access to vastly more advanced (and expensive) diagnostic equipment.
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Jan 16, 2017 17:14
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I'm not sure if you really even need curbside pick-up, at least for reasonably dense urban areas. Have some centrally placed parking garage that your car drops you off at and that you later pick the car up from. If we're talking about fleet cars, then the garage can act as a sort of vehicle vending machine. Order a car, show up, get in, and leave. It's nothing that couldn't be done (or isn't already done) with human-driven cars, but centralizing infrastructure like that will probably start to make more sense if/when autonomous fleet vehicles become a common way of getting around.
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Jan 16, 2017 23:18
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boner confessor posted:by what mechanism would this be enforced though? banning curbside pickup? the one clear advantage of the self driving car is that it can bring itself to you, rather than you having to go to it Probably, yeah. I can't see any other way to do something like that other than municipal bans. I'm not sure I agree that a car coming to you is really an advantage of autonomous cars, at least not for people who are already using taxis or ride-sharing services. An Uber driver comes to you too. If this technology is ever mature and actually takes off, it'll be because it's cheaper and/or more efficient than having a human driver. I was mostly spitballing ways that cities could leverage autonomous vehicle technology to actually reduce congestion and improve things for their residents, though, not suggesting that eliminating curbside pickup would be an advantage of self-driving cars.
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Jan 17, 2017 17:48
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boner confessor posted:this is something people often bring up when saying stuff like "oh well we wont need parking lots in the future the cars will just disappear down a rabbit hole" but this idea of the self driving fleet is contradictory to the idea of reducing congestion - cars which are parked are not causing congestion, cars which are driving are, and we have to accept that a much larger number of vehicles will be driving 'uselessly' as in waiting for someone to get in or headed to pick someone up who may be some ways away Okay, so what's you're opinion on something like this article on ride-sharing planning that I posted upthread? The point I was making wasn't that self driving cars would magically reduce congestion, but that self-driving cars could allow cities to adopt policies that reduce congestion while still allowing for taxi-style transportation. The claim here is that better route management would drastically reduce the total number of vehicles needed to serve the same number of people and self-driving vehicles will likely be better at following "perfect" routes planned out by a central authority. All you would need to do to leverage something like this into reduced congestion is to disincentivize single occupancy-only trips through added fees.
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Jan 17, 2017 23:40
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Main Paineframe posted:Some of us work for a living, and the logistics of that get complicated fast when you're not just sitting at home playing videogames all day. Uh, almost all grocery delivery services that I know of schedule delivery with an hour window at most, run deliveries until at least 8pm, and deliver on weekends.
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Feb 5, 2017 20:22
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Main Paineframe posted:The US is composed almost entirely of shitholes and sprawl. Just because something works in a major European city doesn't mean it works everywhere. I live in a suburb in CT, dude. There are literally four grocery stores within five minutes of my house that deliver with a huge range of timing options. This is a solved problem and an insanely common service. The fact that you somehow don't have convenient delivery in your neighborhood is weird, but it doesn't change that.
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Feb 6, 2017 03:13
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You understand that the groceries aren't delivered by a robot, right Like, this is a really stupid derail and I feel bad for continuing it, but the idea that anyone sees grocery shopping as a social activity is mind blowing to me. If I could have the food magically appear in my kitchen I would absolutely do that because I really don't need to be wasting any more of my day on buying poo poo than I already do.
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Feb 7, 2017 00:24
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:Yes, going out in society is a social activity. Maybe you trudge and sulk and shrink away hissing anytime someone makes eye contact, but I know the cashiers who work at my store and talk to them, and frequently run into people I know or have some reason to chat with the other people there. I wonder just how much of human existence you've decided you're too good for. Hey, more power to you if shopping is something that you enjoy and find socially valuable. Grocery stores probably aren't going to go anywhere for a while, so it's not like we're stepping on each other's toes here. I still don't understand why you find it so offensive that someone might not see walking through a store as a meaningful part of their life, but whatever.
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Feb 7, 2017 05:50
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Jesus Horse posted:France has a fake jobs program This is extremely hosed up, especially given this: quote:The success rate of the training centers is high. About 60 to 70 percent of those who go through France’s practice firms find jobs, often administrative positions, Mr. Troton said. How is it that the resources exist to create these fake workplaces, but not to actually pay these people to do something productive? Creating an elaborate training system in order to move people off into temp work is absurd.
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Feb 7, 2017 16:35
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