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Hotels turn to robots and room cleanings every 4 days to ease staffing shortages

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471–480 of 521 posts

Re: Hotels turn to robots and room cleanings every 4 days to ease staffing shortages

#471
post #429

There is a take that consistently comes up in discussions like this (and indeed is prominent several times on this post), which says "the problem isn't a shortage of workers, it's that employers don't want to pay workers enough." This seems somewhat limited to me, and there is an alternate explanation I would like to explore. It seems to me rising cost of labor, while good for the people being paid that rising cost,…

Somehow I doubt you would accept below market rate pay for your own job for the "good of society". You're a valuable professional, after all! But these laboring drones, why they should understand sacrifices need to be made for society! How selfish of them to ask for reasonable pay!

Re: Hotels turn to robots and room cleanings every 4 days to ease staffing shortages

#472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed! It’s not that people don’t want to work, they don’t want to work for $16 an hour, with no benefits, and get discarded on a whim to make the quarterlies look good. I don’t blame them.

> $16 an hour I was in Vegas last month and they were advertising something like $12-13/hr for hotel cleaning jobs. In Vegas! Bonkers.

Why is that "bonkers"? What should these workers be paid in your opinion? Perhaps this is exactly the attitude that's causing this problem?

Re: Hotels turn to robots and room cleanings every 4 days to ease staffing shortages

#473
post #429

There is a take that consistently comes up in discussions like this (and indeed is prominent several times on this post), which says "the problem isn't a shortage of workers, it's that employers don't want to pay workers enough." This seems somewhat limited to me, and there is an alternate explanation I would like to explore. It seems to me rising cost of labor, while good for the people being paid that rising cost,…

There seems to be an unspoken "for the rich" after lots of your statements here "making society worse off... for the rich". As another commenter mentioned, there is a similar error with regard to masonry of buildings. I would urge you to consider that for a majority of history, a majority of people could never afford any of these things that you are concerned with going extinct. These things are luxuries.

I mean, I don't really disagree with you. For sure, most all services have in the history of society been mostly, if not entirely, consumed by the rich. For most of society, most everyone has been poor. If you could afford fancy stonework on your house, if you could afford someone to make your bed, of course you were rich.

The past century has seen an explosion of wealth in the world, with many people coming out of extreme poverty, emergence of large middle class in the US, etc. So, the world has gotten a lot richer. But, what does it mean to be richer?

Some things seem relatively obvious -- people have bigger houses. They get to have things like fridges and vacuums. These are tangible goods, for which the cost has fallen in line with increasing specialization and automation.

I'm saying that I think it's interesting that while a richer world can purchase more goods, it can't necessarily purchase more services, since the cost of labor rises in a richer world. Basically, productivity has to increase for people to be able to purchase the services with the rising cost of labor.

I'm not really concerned with the things I mentioned going extinct -- it's not a huge deal if we don't have stonework on buildings in NYC, and indeed if we can build housing faster than before by way of automation, that's great. But many people have wondered "why can't we build beautiful buildings in NYC like they used to?" and I'm basically saying, I think rising cost of labor is the reason, and it's interesting that this goes hand in hand with becoming a richer society.

Re: Hotels turn to robots and room cleanings every 4 days to ease staffing shortages

#474
post #429

There is a take that consistently comes up in discussions like this (and indeed is prominent several times on this post), which says "the problem isn't a shortage of workers, it's that employers don't want to pay workers enough." This seems somewhat limited to me, and there is an alternate explanation I would like to explore. It seems to me rising cost of labor, while good for the people being paid that rising cost,…

I am playing a video game now, where I should run a nation. Most of the game is about making economical tradeoffs. I want a GDP growth, so I have to develop sophisticated industries with higher throughouput. These industries has better margins and can afford better wages. As a result, no one wants to work in agriculture. There are three ways out of it: 1) make agriculture more sophisticated, like automatization, whic…

This makes sense. And the game sounds really interesting! What is it called? I may try it out.

Re: Hotels turn to robots and room cleanings every 4 days to ease staffing shortages

#475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anything and everything the app and its 30 social, ad, and analytics SDKs are able to capture and exfiltrate from the phone. I’m asking about iOS. If you have an Android device - using an operating system written by an ad tech company, the Hilton app is the last thing you should worry about. Instead of being hand wavy, what exactly do you think an analytics SDK can “exfiltrate* from your phone outside of the app sa…

And what if the app asks for access to your contacts? Would you grant it out of the convenience of the app, or would you deny it permission and ask for a card key?

No you don’t have to. When you share it, it creates a message with a link and brings up a share sheet controlled by iOS. You can then send the message block with the link either via email, text, or any other relevant third party app that registers a share extension.

It is all done outside of the apps process. iOS sends the message on the apps behalf to the other app.

There is no option to share your contact with the app.

Re: Hotels turn to robots and room cleanings every 4 days to ease staffing shortages

#476
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working age population is 207M. So 1% actually translates to millions of people (2 million)

I admit that is technically true, but due to their use of the word “cratered”, I was reading the phrase to mean that relatively large amounts of people have decided to no longer work (outside of those who have decided to no longer work due to aging out). Of course, prices are set at the margin, and so if hotels (and other businesses like restaurants and retail) were used to paying the lowest pay to quality of life at…

One thing to keep in mind is that 2 million people EXITING THE LABOR FORCE is a really huge deal.

By comparison, during the 2008 recession (Dec 2007 to June 2009, approx 18 months long), about 1 million people exited the labor force.

Re: Hotels turn to robots and room cleanings every 4 days to ease staffing shortages

#477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does mean when people/hotels say “you’ll get the lowest/best rates direct so don’t use an OTA”, that’s a lie/not exactly true. They don’t like it when you book through a travel agent, but they really have a love/hate opinion when you book an express/mystery deal

A reasonable context of “you’ll get the lowest/best rates direct so don’t use an OTA” is reserving a specific type of room at a specific hotel at a specific time. It is unusual to be willing to gamble on which hotel one is reserving in exchange for an uncertain amount of savings.

They usually publish what the discount is, but yes, there is uncertainty in which hotel you’re getting.

Re: Hotels turn to robots and room cleanings every 4 days to ease staffing shortages

#478
post #446
post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Living in a couple hundred year old house in the country, I find the idea that you'd actually keep mice out of a house like this somewhat hilarious.

All you need are some outside cats roaming the spacious yard to discourage the small cute furry little rodents from “cozying” up in your house. When living in an urban dwelling with 50 other families, other strategies are needed.

Yeah; we've had mouse problems in our 90-ish-year-old house ever since we moved in a decade+ ago. Then in the winter of 2019-20, a cat started sheltering in our garage on a regular basis.

We had no mouse problems that winter, and very few since then.

Re: Hotels turn to robots and room cleanings every 4 days to ease staffing shortages

#479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you can explain this to me because I never understand this "why work?" sentiment. How do you pay your rent, have food, etc. without working?

Some degree of support network, and when you get paid dirt and the cost to work is high itself (buying and maintaining a car being the big one) the tiny amount of money you get for a huge mental and physical toll just isn't worth it? You are likely still going to be entirely dependent upon that support network job or no job. Jobs that are available to most people dont generally pay a living wage anymore, is that not…

I am trying to learn here so I am asking these questions with genuine curiosity.

When you say "support network" - I hear that as "friends and family" or some sort of community support (eg: church?) Is that what you mean?

And if so, is it "fine" to not work and thus be a bigger burden on this network? Meaning, even if a role doesn't pay a "living wage", there's a big difference between just living on your friend's couch and eat their food (or whatever) and being able to work and contribute say $2K/month towards your friend for the favor they are doing you?

Re: Hotels turn to robots and room cleanings every 4 days to ease staffing shortages

#480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then what? Is someone going to hijack a plane by setting their laptop battery on fire?

Suicide bombers have downed planes before. Bombs have been left in the cabin to go off on the next segment. It’s not every terrorist's goal to walk away from their event.

Do you have a link where a terrorist exploded a battery on a plane? I've never heard of that before.
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