501–510 of 769 posts
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Are you saying that "unskilled labor" is like the other two in just being spin on "I don't approve of market forces"?
To me its funny that those who always talk about unskilled labour are the same who don’t have a driving licence, nor know how to make an omelette
I don't think they literally mean "unskilled" vs "something that can be learned within a month".
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Lots of services would be phenomenal when you can offload much of the cost to run them to cheap offshore labor. Remember how great Uber and Doordash were when much of the cost of operating was offset by underpaid workers and VC funds? Now that they don't have unlimited piles of money and cities/states are making them pay more fair wages, the cost-benefit of those services has diminished. I was ok paying $5 for $20 of…
"Underpaid" and "fair" is a modern political myth, except in the instances when there is a concerted effort to undermine the semi-natural labor market. Pay will never be enough, as a point of fact. It will always be "underpaid" and "unfair" in discussion. As this is an immortal pressure and negotiating tactic. It is incentivized, and therefore we will get more of it. That works both ways, but at some point there has…
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Fascinating that you can see "underpaid" and "fair" wages as political myths but not "unskilled labor."
Unskilled labor simply refers to jobs where any specialized skills required can be learned on the job in a short period of time, usually less than 30 days. It doesn't literally mean the workers don't know how to do anything. It's certainly not a myth - it's a classification of work, at least in the US. https://www.ssa.gov/OP_Home/cfr20/416/416-0968.htm
This is nearly all jobs.
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Ah yes, the famously objective field of economics.
Are you suggesting that the difference in skill level between a burger flipper and an accountant is purely subjective?
Uniqlo (in Japan and at least in SF) has a cool checkout method. You drop your clothes into a big bin (I’ve always done it one piece at a time, didn’t think to do all at once) and it adds up all your items. I’ve used this maybe 8 times, 100% accurate so far. Not sure how it works but I guessed RFID and quick Google appears to confirm: https://www.wsj.com/articles/uniqlos-parent-company-bets-big...
This exists in most UNIQLOs it's the same mechanism through which the alarm goes off when someone attempts to steal things with the magnetic RFID attached. It's borderline ancient tech. So why is it not applied everywhere? Because stores would rather have you line up and buy stuff from the "impulse aisle" and tip or donate at their PoS (higher rates with an employee glaring at your selection)
RFID tags are expensive compared to printing barcodes. The volume of products moved in a grocery store is far larger than that of a clothing store like Uniqlo.
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Orders of magnitude more than existing barcodes which are practically free due to being printed on the packaging. A 10c RFID tag would be 10% of the cost of many products, which im sure is unacceptable to grocery stores which I can't imagine have great margins.
The wages of the scanning staff is a cost to be considered on the side . At even 10c a tag , it is equivalent to one person scanning 200 items a hour (assuming $20/hour wages) . Factoring in time to bag and do a cash/card/coupon transaction etc a retail employee is not doing more than 500 or maybe 1000 items a hour . A cost of 2c is definitely close to economic feasibility if 10c is not
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Ah yes, the famously objective field of economics.
Are you suggesting that the difference in skill level between a burger flipper and an accountant is purely subjective?
If you‘d have chosen a burger flipper and an aeronautical engineer or a surgeon, I‘d have agreed with you.
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And it almost always DOES go wrong. Seriously 75% of the time when I'm done scanning and I press "pay now," it inexplicably says "calling for assistance" and refuses to do anything until an employee comes over. WHY? And now assholes are intentionally taking alcohol through the self-checkout, deliberately taking up that one employee's time making him or her perform the workaround to check the items out. And the 20+ ye…
Strangely that issue has almost vasnished for me in the last couple of years, here in New Zealand at least across the several supermarket chains I frequent (although they all seem to use the same self service POS supplier). Sure it was a big issue when these first came into stores but I think they've realised they need to increase the tolerances a bit (e.g. accept even if the weight is <1% off) and it all just works…
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So what we need is bundling of orders based on 1) restaurant location 2) recipient location 3) time And if that could be done, maybe just 2 orders to start with (for example carpool benefits for 2 people), that will be awesome, but if you could pool 4-5 orders, that will make bank ! I guess this model, if scaled purely based on the model, will imply restaurants co-located (same parking lot) will benefit from such an…
That factor is driving the virtual restaurant (ghost kitchen) trend. There are commercial kitchens set up purely to service delivery orders. They use a single facility but have multiple different restaurant brands with different menus (burgers, Mexican, Italian, vegan, etc). These ghost kitchens have no dining rooms and you probably can't even directly order food outside of a delivery service. https://en.wikipedia.or…
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"Underpaid" and "fair" is a modern political myth, except in the instances when there is a concerted effort to undermine the semi-natural labor market. Pay will never be enough, as a point of fact. It will always be "underpaid" and "unfair" in discussion. As this is an immortal pressure and negotiating tactic. It is incentivized, and therefore we will get more of it. That works both ways, but at some point there has…
Fascinating that you can see "underpaid" and "fair" wages as political myths but not "unskilled labor."
That makes it unskilled labor.
Skilled labor is something like welding, where it can take a year to get good at it. Or things that require calculus, which take 4 years of specialized training to even get an entry job at it. Or flying an airplane - you can't just flip through the instruction booklet and fly an airplane.