I laugh at this minimum wage nonsense in the USA.
It seems that in many areas in the USA, voters approved of a minimum wage hike to $15 an hour.
I won't go into the many arguments for this because they are all nonsense. But I will say that if government interfering with voluntary contracts in private businesses is the answer to fixing the economy, why don't they just raise the minimum wage to $500 dollars and hour? Hell, why stop at $500? Let's go to $10,000 an hour and we can all be paid like big company CEOs.
We'll be rich!
Well, the one argument that pro-minimum wage hike proponents like to make is that "they did studies and found that (for example) McDonald's could raise their prices on hamburgers (say) $0.30 a piece and it wouldn't hurt sales." Now that is interesting! McDonald's is a for profit company run by some pretty smart business people (I think). I'd reckon that if they could have raised prices $0.30 a piece, thereby increasing profits, they would have done that long ago...
Ya think?
Now that they have raised the minimum wage, many establishments are following Japan's lead in employing robots. Japan uses robots because Japan has a labor shortage. The USA industries will do this because, well, putting pickles on a burger isn't exactly skilled labor.
Hi! May I take your order, please!
Now, people stateside are complaining about the robots. I read one comment on Facebook where a guy wrote, "What happens if the robots make humans obsolete?"
I laughed. He is joking, right? I hope he was joking! Hasn't this joke been told for over 100 years? Hasn't everyone seen Chaplin's "Modern Times"?
Alas, in today's USA, I suspect the guy who thinks "robots will make humans obsolete" is was dead serious.
People worrying about robots and technology making humans obsolete is an old story that's been going on since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
Hilarious. Japan leads the world in robot technology and instituting robots at the workplace to do jobs better, cheaper, faster and more reliably than humans. Are humans obsolete in Japan? Are robots taking human jobs? Well, in the last figures released, unemployment in Japan was virtually non-existent at 3.6%. Please refer to: Japan Unemployment Rate
Unemployment Rate in Japan increased to 3.60 percent in September of 2014 from 3.50 percent in August of 2014.
So much for robots putting us out of work, eh? I wrote on Facebook and asked the guy if he hadn't heard that cotton used to be picked by hand.
Here's a comic I made (well, I added the text is all) just to rabble-rouse and laugh at the "human versus robot counter revolution" that's coming!
Imagine all these minimum wage workers fighting back against high technology taking their jobs!
Think Arnie Schwartzneggar can get the lead role as the unemployed revolutionary leader in the Hollywood film? Ha! Ha! Ha!
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There's a robot sushi near my house. The place is super clean, super cheap and great for the price.... The only humans there are cleaning tables and sitting people. I hear there are a couple in the kitchen putting sliced fish on robot made rice balls... I'll take photos next time.
3 comments:
I had to check utubes for robot sushi. US is sure different than cosmopolitan Tokyo. Arkansas $8.50 by 2017, Nebraska will be $9, San Francisco was $15. Alaska and South Dakota pegged it to inflation. Japan doesn't have major immigration (they actually deport also, California had a man deported twice recently murder two police (death penalty has been ruled California unconstitutional). Robots are the standard in automobile welding. IMO, robots are a mass production tool. In Yanesen (a combination of three neighborhood names, Yanaka, Nezu and Sendagi) is in Tokyo’s old downtown, small craft stores still specialize in niche items too obsolete and low volume for robots.
And who is going to buy all these products that robots are making when minimum wage never gets raised and the only thing people can afford are rent and food?
Laugh all you want at the movement to raise the minimum wage, but this is a consumer based economy. To buy things, you need to make money, robots putting humans out of work puts them on welfare, draining government resources. Of course in a libertarian world, there would be no welfare and anyone put out of a job would be left to die on the streets. Have a good day and I wish the best of luck to you and your business when the economy collapses!
The last comment from Anonymous simply cracks me up. "And who is going to buy all these products that robots are making when minimum wage never gets raised and the only thing people can afford are rent and food? " Right? And who bought the products when machines started picking the cotton and taking away the jobs from millions of slave laborers?
Who bought Japanese automobiles when robots replaced 80% of the human workers in auto factories? Who did the shopping for your mother when she no longer had to hand wash the clothes and dishes?
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