321–330 of 332 posts
HA-HA... right.
Any time I ask for help finding something in Wal-mart the person feigns ignorance. They're not compensated well enough to actually be helpful.
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It’s easy to look back fondly on genocides that have already happened. No one shed a tear for the long lost Neanderthals. The Estruscans were wiped out by the Romans with almost no recorded history left behind. Native Americans, First Nations, and Aborigines suffered horribly at European hands, but we never entertain the idea of moving back to the Old World. Things are different for genocide that hasn’t happened yet.…
It wasn’t necessarily genocide in the Neanderthal case, just basic species out competition. Yes, many people today are trying to “save the panda” even though it is quite non adaptable, but if the pandas go extinct because they cannot compete for the resources they once monopolized, that isn’t genocide. At least in my mind, genocide is unnatural.
If the saber-toothed tiger died out because they were out-competed by the other species around them, we call that natural selection. If the Carthaginians died out because their neighbors had a better fighting force, we call that genocide. But the only difference is... what, exactly?
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Part of this has to do with demographics. We prefer to deal with robots and order stuff on web interfaces. I was talking with my aunt and uncle the other day. They were telling me that they prefer to bring their paper checks to the bank and interact with the teller rather than scan it in the app from the comfort of their home. That blew my mind. I think there's a huge age gap when it comes to preference for human vs…
It's not really human vs mechanical in the teller example despite what they say. They are just keeping their long running habit rather than having to learn how to scan it on their phone which is work and risking that their money will disappear.
There's a point where your life works fine and you don't particularly need to change it or learn radically new things unless you have no other option at all. In some ways, the old actions have their own benefits. The senior goes to cash her paper check at the bank because it gets her out of the house and in front of people; she saves the money on a cell phone that she doesn't use much because she stays home more than travels at her age.
Even with computers...she doesn't feel helpless or at the mercy of technology she doesn't understand. She might even reduce her vulnerability some that way; a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.
Judging from the pictures they'll still use paper price labels. Why? It seems extremely arcane to still use paper price labels in 2017, especially for stores as big and centrally run as Walmart. With digital price labels you can update prices centrally across the whole country within seconds, and it costs basically nothing to implement too, when the labor cost of manually updating paper price labels are factored in.
I mean...we have something like this already with climate control and thermostats in offices and stores. The central control can screw up spectacularly at times,
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Anyone can own machines. Go buy one. Automate some stuff. Make some money. Stop being a stick in the mud and get with it.
Doesn't have to be automated, even. Lots of people start out by owning one snowplow. Or one power washer or one lawn mower.
The immediate take away i get from this is that it really isn't about taking over human jobs. humans don't do this job nearly as frequently as the robots would do it, because in a standard retail environment like wal-mart, it doesn't really matter all that much if the reported in-stock quantity is slightly off for an item. that is to say, it matters, but not so much that the big-box retail environments i've worked in…
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I think you could easily be wrong here. I can self-checkout, or at some supermarkets self-scan (using a handheld scanner), but I chose the human checkout operator. It's partly economic, the supermarket doesn't discount my shop if I do the checkout work myself, so I extract a modicum of their takings towards wages for a local person rather than have it go to shareholder profit. People here need jobs.
People do need jobs. I wasn't talking about grocery stores. It was specifically the behavior related to depositing checks. Also there is a difference between a rationalization for a behavior and the actual behavior. Usually the rationale is actually created afterwards. Although certainly some people must have created a deliberate policy to support employment or simply out of preference for human interaction. But my s…
"Keeping" people in menial jobs isn't the issue. When the robot takes over it's because the owner-capitalists can make more profit by cutting the proles out of the loop.
It's not the job, it's money to pay for water+food+shelter that's the issue.
If rich capitalists are happy to give up their profits to make an equal society with few menial roles then your way s works. There's no evidence that's the case and lots of evidence against it.
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Communism works when the communist dictators don't commit genocide or run a brutal police state. Its such a good system it needs to be implemented and maintained by force.
I didn't claim that "communism works" I said that it was technologically advanced and capable of attaining post-scarcity. As a counter to castle-bravo's claim that only capitalism is capable of developing the tech required to attain post-scarcity.
As a side note: post-scarcity is really only possible in virtual worlds like MineCraft. There's a limited amount of land, people's time is limited, people's attention is limited, and what other people will participate in is constrained by their desires and their ambitions. Unless somehow compelled, there's nobody who will set me up with a nice automated farm where I can live out my days playing mandolin and reading mathematics as I would like when they could set themselves up and not have to hear my racket across the fence. Though it's counter to our desires, we are forced to compete for resources ... even if most of us aren't struggling for survival.
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And that's a good thing. We should be relieving humans of all kinds of monotonous jobs, which means that yes, we'll not have those jobs, and people won't be able to get this work; and again, that's a good thing - a job isn't some kind of gift or value by itself; if some task isn't intrinsically fulfilling for humans, then we should be working to get humanity rid of such tasks. Coincidentally, "tasks that aren't intri…
I strongly agree, but that's a conditional agreement - I believe we should relieve humanity of the very concept of earning a living, but at the same time we also need to do it in such a way that the whole civilization won't collapse in the proces. My only complaint in the previous comment is about the PR double-speak. We all know that when a company purchases automation, it's meant to replace human workers. But compa…
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It's traditional to spend 45-180 seconds in the back room, staring at your phone or talking to a coworker, before returning to the sales floor to tell the customer that you're sold out. It's like the Hello World of stocking product.
In my experience about a 10-15 years ago when I worked in a super-market there was no "back room" really - it was just a staging-post for getting stuff off the truck, putting it onto trolleys, then taking it out onto the shop floor to put on the shelves as quickly as possible. I dunno if people expect there to be this huge warehouse of stock "out the back" of every supermarket with loads of shelves holding tins of be…