'We Need Robots To Take Our Jobs,' Veteran Tech Reporter John Markoff Explains Why (recode.net) 318
Former New York Times technology reporter John Markoff used to think robots taking jobs was cause for alarm. Then, he found out that the working-age population in China, Japan, Korea and the U.S. was declining. From a report on Recode: "We need the robots for two reasons: On the one side, there are not enough workers," Markoff said on the latest episode of Recode Decode. "The demographic trends are more important than the technological trends, and they happen more quickly. On the other side, there's this thing called the dependency ratio, the ratio between caregivers and people who need care," he added. "For the first time last year, there were more people in the world who are over 65 than under five. First time ever in history. By the middle of the century, the number of people over 80 will double. By the end of the century, it'll be up sevenfold, globally."
decreasing population (Score:2)
does this mean the population (world wise) is on the decline...
Re:decreasing population (Score:4, Informative)
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I think its better to have population decline than population increase, as indefinite increase is not possible. You need to stop at some point.
Re:decreasing population (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, look how our culture suffered when the Italians and Irish started coming over with their habbits of having huge families. The people back then even warned us, "the catholics are breeding us out!" but sadly no one would listen.
Or maybe they just all became Americans like the rest of us and it wasnt a problem at all. The vast majority of immigrants acculturate within a few generations. This is incredibly obviouse when looking at American history and can be seen happening today with Mexican and other Latin American immigrants. Most first gens are pretty Mexican in culture, second generation tends to run a wide spectrum and by the third generation they're American as all hell. At least that's what I've seen from every third plus generation American of Mexican descent that I've ever met. In my experience most dont even speak Spanish at that point. (unless they live near the boarder)
So anyways, stop your fear mongering. Western cultures (where most of this is happening right now) arent going anywhere.
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i think he was worried about the native American culture... ;)
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If our population is ever completely decimated by disease and then the remainders are butchered by aggressors then sure, we should worry about our culture disappearing,
Re:decreasing population (Score:4, Funny)
No. This time it will be completely different. The Muslims will kill us all and then steal our women and then replace our Constitution with Sharia Law. But Trump will stop them!
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Re: warned (Score:2)
The people back then even warned us, "the catholics are breeding us out!" but sadly no one would listen.
Now the (same ?) people are warning Europe: "The muslims are breeding us out!", does anybody listen?
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So anyways, stop your fear mongering. Western cultures (where most of this is happening right now) arent going anywhere.
And no only that - Western Culture is, ironically, the result of wave after wave of immigration all the way back to the paleolithic: neanderthals, then modern humans, etc etc. At some point came the first farmers, then possibly the Indo-Europeans, the Germanic tribes went up to Scandinavia and then migrated south in the first half of the first millennium. Europe is in fact one of the messiest areas on the planet when it comes to ancestry. Very exciting to learn about, but we probably shouldn't talk too much
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So anyways, stop your fear mongering. Western cultures (where most of this is happening right now) arent going anywhere.
This, if your culture is so weak that it can be destroyed by a minority entering your nation, it deserves to be destroyed.
Western (read: English, American, Canadian, Australian, so on and so forth) isn't going to be destroyed by foreigners. The only ones powerful enough to destroy it are ourselves... and fear mongerers are the ones trying to do just that. To keep our culture alive and strong, we need to marginalise the racists and xenophobes who want to divide us and make us weak... That is what the raci
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No because the number of years people are over 65 is higher than 5 years. Meaning, the sum of people 65 to, i dunno, 85 (that's about 20 years) is greater than the number of people aged under 5. That means the number of people born in those years could be much less than the people being born nowadays, even adjusting for deaths.
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Where did you get the funding for this research?
Can I have some?
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For the first time last year, there were more people in the world who are over 65 than under five. First time ever in history. By the middle of the century, the number of people over 80 will double. By the end of the century, it'll be up sevenfold, globally.
SEVENFOLD? At that rate, by the first half of the century after that, everyone will have died off! (unless we've figured out how to halt/reverse the aging process, and then "age" won't really matter).
Ya gotta question these numbers, but there's definitely a trend among developed nations toward not having kids, while better healthcare helps keep people alive longer. I think the former is ok (and if you don't now, someday you will), but not having kinds is a weird offshoot of how our world has evolved. Wit
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SEVENFOLD? At that rate, by the first half of the century after that, everyone will have died off! (unless we've figured out how to halt/reverse the aging process, and then "age" won't really matter).
Isn't extrapolation fun? Say the percent of the population that dies at 60-70-80-90 is 10%-80%-10%-1% and medical science bumps that to 1%-10%-80%-10%, being 80+ will go from quite rare to very common.
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John Markoff - is that the same asshole who made a career writing inaccurate shit about Kevin Mitnick and repeating the same erroneous stories? Even though he knew they were wrong? The same asshole who presented himself to law enforcement as an expert on Mitnick even though he never met him? The same asshole who spent half his time ridiculing Mitnick's body? Is it that asshole?
Theory vs. Practice (Score:5, Insightful)
In theory it's great, in practice it will "hit" people in different ways unevenly, and is part of the reason the rich are getting richer while the rest stagnate.
We don't know how to organize an economy to take advantage of such. We only have theories that have yet to be tested. That means we are guinea-pigs. But if we do nothing, we are still guinea-pigs, because doing nothing means changes in jobs and automation will still impact us, but without any planning.
Such displacement is arguably why T won: he gave a voice to the displaced of the Rust Belt, which are swing states. His reasoning about solutions is all off kilter, but he at least gave the problem top billing.
Managing change is politically tricky.
Re:Theory vs. Practice (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that the solutions are complex and a lot of people are conditioned to be automatically hostile to them (because they are associated with socialism). It's hard to sell complex ideas when your opponent offers simple and seemingly easy ones that don't require any effort on the voter's part beyond putting an X in a box.
Unfortunately we may simply have to let guys like Trump fail hard before people realize that they need real, complex solutions.
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In general, there's truth to that, but in the most recent case, we had one party with a field so weak the just do something simple guy won. In the other camp, the guy who wanted a more nuanced and comprehensive approach got the sandbag so they could run on a platform of more of the same.
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You should re-read what I wrote.
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Hillary Clinton was a terrible candidate... as proven by the sack of orange lard that beat her. It shouldn't have even been close... trump should have been laughed out of the country.
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Exactly. Nobody but the Democratic party leadership wanted more of the same.
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Re:Damned Emails [Re: Theory vs. Practice] (Score:4, Interesting)
H1-B is a great example of this problem. The problem is companies abusing H1-B visas, and the simple solution is to get rid of (or severely limit) H1-B visas. Thing is, you need some level of skilled immigration for any modern economy, and the idea that if companies can't abuse H1-B they will just pay an American a good wage instead of laughable. They will either offshore or they will move to some state with weak employment laws and abuse Americans with low wages and awful conditions.
The more complex solution is to fix the H1-B system to prevent the worse abuse, and then concentrate on making US workers more attractive. Set up new tech hubs and encourage companies to move there, so that their employees can enjoy a reasonable cost of living and thus don't need super high salaries just to pay the rent. Require companies who are having to get H1-Bs in because of lack of local skills to invest in training locals to give them those skills, and encourage them (e.g. with tax breaks) to invest more in apprenticeships.
So on the one hand you have "ban the thing that is a problem, instant solution, problem solved" but doesn't really work, verses "do multiple things over several years and be interventionist, and eventually things will get better". The latter is a much harder sell, especially when the other side is whipping up anger and resentment.
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People won't learn shit from those failures... they'll blame it on the opposition.
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Re:Theory vs. Practice (Score:5, Insightful)
Why are you using "complex solutions" as a synonym for socialism (and by transitive property solutions == socialism)?
AmiMoJo said that the solutions are "associated with" socialism, not "synonymous with" socialism.
Putting the cart before the horse there. How about we find out what works before claiming one and only one solution is the ultimate answer to everything.
Jumping to a conclusion there. Anybody who says that "the solutions are complex" is, by definition, NOT talking about "one and only solution". And no, I'm not being pedantic - I'm merely pointing out that you're putting words in AmiMoJo's mouth. BTW, where did AmiMoJo say anything about an "ultimate answer"? Are you reading a different thread than I am?
The solutions for our current social and economic problems, and for those likely to come in the future with the widespread adoption of automation, ARE complex. They won't fit into the oversimplification forced on us by narrow ideological / political constructs, and if we limit ourselves to the same old sophomoric poli-sci name-calling, then we're doomed.
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Thanks for pointing this out. I get it a lot. People assume or hallucinate me saying all kinds of crazy stuff, and then get upset when I don't want to defend my imaginary self's position. Often they accuse me of lying, seeming to believe that the pipe-dream version of me is the real one and this "AmiMojo" they see on the screen is some kind of impostor. Either that or I'm schizophrenic.... I don't pretend to really understand how their minds work.
So few people interested in listening. So few interested in t
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Ah yes - another would-be resident of Galt's Gulch.
The problem is that the solutions are complex and a lot of people are conditioned to be automatically hostile to them
...The solution must not be in ruling, overpowering, fighting people, it should be in allowing the people to help themselves and while helping themselves they will help others by creating actual solutions that do not rely on the armed power of the State.
Unfortunately, humans have a strong tendency toward selfishness - not the kind that Ayn Rand hallucinated, but the kind she redefined as 'selflessness' and foisted upon the villains in the stories she wrote. Real people WILL sometimes take unfair and even violent action to get ahead - it's a part of being human. In the absence of a State with police and a justice system, they will help themselves by stealing from, manipulating, and taking advantage of, thos
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Fortunately, Trump has done is best to promote that that this very day!
We know exactly how to organize such an economy (Score:2)
Redistribute wealth with Basic income. Set an increasing minimum quality of life. Make birth control widely available and make sure people are cared for in old age when they can't work so they don't feel the need to drop a ton of kids in lieu of retirement. Above all don't abandon anyone. Even if they make stupid decisions time and again. Everybody
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Either it is different in America, or you have not met many of them.
The rich don't realise that its hard for others to make money, cos its easy for them. They are quite happy to pay the poor to do what they (the rich) want.
"What is the problem" they say "I am happy to pay these guys to do what I want. Why don't they just take the money and be happy?" (Tr: "let them eat cake").
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Remember: whatever happens, whenever anything changes there are always winners and always losers. It doesn't mean we should do nothing, however: doing nothing is a choice with its own array of winners and losers. Remember: millions and millions of low-paid, low skilled jobs were lost in the shift from an agrarian to a manufacturing economy.
What matters is how it affects the overall population as an aggregate. To decide not to act because you're afraid automation will drive lower-paid workers out of the mark
Great idea! (Score:4, Insightful)
(I don't care one way or the other if the healthcare is single payer or not, as long as i'm guaranteed coverage at an affordable price, regardless of preexisting conditions.)
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The problem if everyone has 100% free time is that many will have a lot of babies.
Why? A typical couple in the West have sex twice a week but they don't have 100 babies every year; more like 2 in a lifetime. Having more leisure time might mean more sex but is no reason for more babies.
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If you think those robots would help the elderly.. (Score:5, Insightful)
All those robot fantasies are based on the illusion that somehow, once there are enough robots around, people will magically start to share their wealth with others in need. It has been proven time and again that this does not happen. Not even with much more basic things like food/shelter/healthcare.
The more likely situation will be that a few robots will aide some rich elderly people, while a lot of armed robots will be in charge of putting down any rebellion from the have-nots.
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Nowadays they can't afford it. But in 50 or 100 years? Less if it is popular and useful.
Like a new medical technique, it is as expensive as shit when it comes out. The alternative isn't lower costs -- it is fewer inventions.
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Of course nobody can predict what will be in 50 or 100 years, but it is also quite possible that by then it might already have become commonplace to euthanize people who cannot cater for themselves anymore.
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Symbiotic relationship (Score:2)
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Robots useful for taking care of elderlies need to be strong, sophisticated physical devices, and it is not quite settled that such
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Robots - Subway (Score:2)
But mostly I want FASTER sandwich makers.
Value of human life: declining? (Score:4, Interesting)
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The value of something varies with it's scarcity. 7 billion people make it so none of us are worth much at all.
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"Programmed by fellas with compassion and vision." (Score:2)
HUGE DEMAND (Score:3)
Start to cut down full time + remove job health in (Score:3)
We need to Start to cut down full time and remove job based health insurance But still keep some form of worker comp (contractors covered as well if an IRS like test to set if they really are independent contractors) (yes higher risk jobs like tower climbing have been dumped on low paid independent contractors with deadlines that make safety get pushed to the side) and lack of safety gear.
Soylent Green (Score:3)
No one has mentioned this solution yet?
When I'm old, senile and can't even wipe my own ass, I want to have the option to check out a little early.
Maybe watching a peaceful video as I drift off to everlasting sleep.
Win for me, win for the rest of society that I won't be a burden on any more.
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There aren't enough workers to make everything we want with no robots. Therefore, we need robots, because there aren't enough workers. The question is, how many workers do we need, and can we make stuff better and with fewer workers with robots? And that answer will always be "yes".
Here I'll explain for the Min Wage worker.
You can have a Big Mac, Fries, and a Coke for $8.50 made by a Min Wage worker
OR
You can have a Gourmet Burger, steak fries and a Coke for $11:50, made by a Robot.
Yes, you can save 1/3 of t
Re:seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
And I'll explain for you. The minimum wage worker can probably manage the $8.50 meal once in a while. If he loses his job he has $0 to spend on any sort of burger.
That trend will not go well for anyone unless you're prepared to implement a basic income that will allow him to manage that $11.50 meal once in a while.
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Buggy Whips!
Basic Income can never work because it is "central planning" and that has never worked. The economy will survive in spite of short sighted people.
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Guillotine!
Re:seriously? (Score:5, Informative)
"Basic Income can never work because it is "central planning" and that has never worked."
No it's not, you're making that up. The government sending its citizens a check every month is not at all the same as central planning of the economy.
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Basic Income was conceived of in response to the idea that human labor might become obsolete in a wide sense. If all of the manual labor is being done by robots then what are the masses going to live on? Likewise, if we are able to meet all or most of our manual labor needs through automation why waste human potential on manual labor?
You're conceptualizing basic income in a world exactly like ours. If you conceptualize it in the context of a post manual labor world, which we do seem to be heading towards, t
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It's also illogical to state that just because B is not A, which failed, that B will not fail. They can both fail, even if they are not the same thing, or fail for the same reason.
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So something that isnt the same as something that failed could also fail? That is the most uninsightful thing I've heard of in god only knows how long. I never stated basic income wouldnt fail because it isnt the same as centralized economic planning. That's you putting words into my mouth. All I stated is that centralized planning has nothing to do with basic income so pointing out the failure of one has nothing to do with the other.
In other words, you're pointing the obvious and have contributed nothing t
Re:seriously? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:seriously? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:seriously? (Score:5, Informative)
The idle rich are a very small set of people. Most people do something with their lives given the opportunity. And that's the problem we need to solve: giving everyone that opportunity. We as a society suck at vocational training, and we can fix that.
In Germany if you want to work at, say, Mercedes, you'll be an intern on the factory line by 16, having gotten an education specifically tuned for that job and the chance to do the work. By graduation, you're there in that well-paying skilled manufacturing job.
America has over a million high skilled manufacturing jobs unfilled due to lack of trained workers. The companies aren't going to do that on their own -- they aren't schools -- but we as a society can surely work together with those manufacturers to make it happen. But instead we turn up our noses at blue-collar work, dismiss the working class as stupid racists, and generally separate education from labor as far as we possibly can. It won't end well.
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"You don't understand. Ferengi workers don't want to stop the exploitation, we want to find a way to become the exploiters."
Versus the smart non-racists? See, this is just another way of saying, "I'm better than *those* people and hence will never be like them."
Because manufacturing is a dying industry. Or, more precisely, it's a booming ind
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The companies aren't going to do that on their own -- they aren't schools
Why not? They used to. It seems to be the ultimate form of freeloading to expect other people to pay for the training they need.
we turn up our noses at blue-collar work, dismiss the working class as stupid racists
We don't. We dismiss racist people as racist and people who are too thick to understand what is racism and what isn't, we dismiss as thick.
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18th century puritan morals guiding a 21st century economy. Probably not a great idea.
What makes you believe that people won't do anything?
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Yes .. it created the cultural revolution of the 1960's - here in the UK that meant the Beatles, swinging London, long hair, bright coloured clothes and shirt skirts. (Lady Chatterly's Lover and the Profumo Affair were unrelated to kids on the dole).
Not paying them when they are sitting down doing nothing created the Luddites and the French Revolution.
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Given the numbers, it's more likely they'll kill the rich.
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Nope. The rich can afford better weapons and - crucially - they can afford to hire some of the poor to kill the others.
As independent contractors, obviously. None of that benefits and conditions shit.
Re:seriously? (Score:4, Insightful)
That didn't work out so well (for the aristocracy) in France. It didn't work any better for the Tsar.
We don't have to break into your bunker. Filling the entrance and vent with concrete will be sufficient.
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They did it wrong. They didn't get enough of the poor on their side, and neglecting the army (or as they're called in the US, the police) is fucking retarded.
You don't see skinny coppers & soldiers in Zimbabwe.
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I wouldn't rush to invest in torch & pitchfork futures if I were you. What if a new series of Honey Boo Boo comes out?
Re:seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:That doesn't make any sense. (Score:4, Insightful)
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We need to do something, sure, but overpaid make-work isn't the answer. Training people is much better. Harvesting them to make Soylent Green is much cheaper. Just throwing money at them solves nothing.
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The math doesn't work. The worker with $0 income can't afford even a $0.01 burger. Unless you go to universal income, robots are part of the problem.
That's because your equation is missing something.
Its more profitable to have a few rich clients than many middle class ones.
Re: seriously? (Score:2)
Management functions primarily as a distributed buffer for blame. It will continue to serve that purpose for the foreseeable future.
Re:seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
Corporate-speak translation: "There are not enough highly-educated workers who are cheap, docile, and single so they have no family distractions."
In that sense, yes, there is a shortage.
Seriously (Score:2)
You left out young and healthy so they don't impact our insurance costs; willing to work the deathmarches; have a degree in some irrelevant or relevant discipline that has absolutely nothing to do with their actual competence so the slavemasters, I mean the shareholders, will be impressed; and are of [whatever] ethnicity so they get our diversity stats closer to where we want them.
Other than th
Re:seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
Your point being? You can hire 5000 dudes in China to dig a ditch. Doesn't mean that you aren't better off with an excavator or other heavy equipment.
"Robots" have been taking jobs for hundreds of years. Water wheels and wind mills have taken jobs of men manually grinding flour. The steam engine took the jobs of horses and people in the field. Hydraulics took the job of people manually manipulating plows. Bigger tractors took the place of more people driving more steam engines.
What used to take a few hundred men with shovels can be done with an operator in a heavy equipment cab. What used to take a few hundred men underground hauling coal and other minerals can be done by a handful of men and heavy equipment. What used to take hundreds of teachers across the US can be done by online courses.
We need robots to take over the boring repetitive stuff of now so we can work on the jobs of the future. Just like has been done to now.
Does anyone really pine for the days that it took 50+% of our workforce just to make food for the other minority? If so the Amish are 'hiring'. We leave them well enough alone and they make great meats and cheeses for us to buy.
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The parallels to automation in the past might soon end: Could well be that robots are soon better then most humans at doing the creative, intelligent, innovative stuff, so the work left for humans to do in the future may be the awful kind of stuff for which expendable humans are less costly than expensive robots.
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Remember that racist president who said this, then grabbed a woman's pussy?
All Americans, not only in the States most heavily affected but in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants. The public service they use impose burdens on our taxpayers. That's why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens. In the budget I will present to you, we will try to do more to speed the deportation of illegal aliens who are arrested for crimes, to better identify illegal aliens in the workplace. We are a nation of immigrants. But we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop it.
What a racist misogynist asshole that was, right?
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And robots undercut illegal labor. Thus its solution isn't the one you want.
Citizens know illegal labor is needed (Score:3)
(The more aware) citizens also know that without illegal labor, their costs will rise precipitously.
The questions to ask there are:
Do you want to pay $4.00 for an orange, and $30/hour for a babysitter, and $50/hour for lawn care? Do you want the lowest level jobs being skimmed for taxes the way the middle-level jobs already are to make up for the zero taxes people like Trump pay?
Or would you prefer to continue as we are, possibly with the benefit of taco trucks on as many corners as possible, and Trump and
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(The more aware) citizens also know that without illegal labor, their costs will rise precipitously.
The questions to ask there are:
Do you want to pay $4.00 for an orange, and $30/hour for a babysitter, and $50/hour for lawn care?
There was very little illegal labour in the UK a generation ago, but costs were nothing like that (corrected for inflation). People got on fine (but cut their own lawns). It suprises me how cheap food like fruit (but not meat) is in the shops here (maybe it's the illegal labour) and it would not bother me if it cost more. What is expensive is any sort of services presumably because they employ a lot of people to deal with all the paperwork required, and for stuff like advertising and insurance - which have
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That's interesting; as I often am, I'm guilty of speaking in a US-centric manner. I apologize for not being more explicit.
We have this border with Mexico, which pretty much sets up the USA's basic circumstance, illegal-labor wise, for things like fruit and vegetable harvesting. It's not all of it of course, but it's a great deal of it.
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I have difficulty believing anyone who has experienced our weather would be shocked at the small amount of native fruit and vegetables available.
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How about $0/hour for lawn care, with a robot to do it for you? Granted, right now you'll spend around $1000 buying said robot, and will spend a bit of time getting it all setup in your garden, but after that it's $0. You could keep the initial costs down by sharing with your neighbour, if that matter to you.
As for the orange, I guess it's cost could come down if a robot grows it, picks it, packs it and drives it to your location. I can't see anyone wanting a robot babysitter unless it was pretty much a hum
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Yes, it would. Because no one will do this work for the same wage, or even anything close to it. It's not just about hiring US workers. It's about doing horrible, horrible jobs.
Until you've bent over in a field all day, you have no idea just how awful these tasks are.
Because you will not be able to get anyone to do these jobs, the prices will skyrocket.
It's not just about money. It's about a willingness to suffer. US citizens simply don't have that.
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Yep. back when you could have one person working 5 days a week, 9-5, and have a home, a car, food, and dr visits on that income.
Those days are gone. Long gone.
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Jessica 6 walks out of the Tinder Teleporter. The fat Slashdot nerd takes her by the hand and says, "Let's have sex."
"Oh god (Barrffff urgle urgleurgle!)"
"Darn! I guess I'm stuck renewing a virgin :( oh well."
(Goes to Carousel) "Damn, it can't lift me. Now sandmen will kill me oh noes!" (flees)
Sandman: "Waddle, waddler!"
I welcome robots too. (Score:2)
There are two very distinct types of automation that are likely to fall out here:
o Non-aware systems --- there's no guilt to be had in any personal use of such a system
o Aware systems --- if these come about (I am sure they will), then you won't be making slaves out of them. Or they will object, and you will die.
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Do you feel bad for the gasoline engine that strains its piston rods and grinds itself down hauling your butt to work? I sure don't because it is an INANIMATE OBJECT. Same with robots.
Actually, if robots can move around under their own power, their Animate(d) objects