President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

Here's a bottle of whiskey to sooth the ache. Raise a glass (or five) to Hank.

 

The price of that automation is and will continue to drop. C

 

I doubt it. The hardware? Sure. The cost to implement it? Given that it's going to be implemented in areas further and further afield? Not so fast.

 

I'm sure part of the hoi polloi, but thanks for this post. It really did made me re-think some of the assumptions I had about automation. Working in automotive, it makes you assume the entire world is on a bullet train towards automation. I forget outside of an auto factory, there are millions of little obstacles I don't think about.

 

I was really kidding about that. I don't roll that way.

 

When I got out of journalism (see the "Thirty Years Ago" thread ...), I went back to work in my father's very small tool-and-die shop (I'd worked there all through high school and college). I stepped right into a big automation project being done for what was then Bendix. They were building this huge robotics line to build anti-lock brake cylinders in Clarksville, Tenn., and we were doing all of the end-of-robot tooling (essentially the robots' hands and fingers). It was an investment in the tens of millions of dollars (not our end, of course). And if memory serves, that line never even got up and running. Some production or technological breakthrough elsewhere rendered the whole thing useless. Bendix isn't even around anymore.

 

I woulda spelled "opioid" right,
But then I got high.

The way I spelled it was really a fright,
Because I was high.

I can't remember how to use Teh Google,
Because I got high,
Because I got high,
Because I got high.

 

I think your weird assumption here is that automation frees us to do other, more meaningful work, the kinds that can't be done by robots. But a robot didn't save me from working on the factory floor so I could become a writer. It cost the job of someone who doesn't have the skills to be anything else—not necessarily through any fault of their own, but because they didn't enjoy the privileges that someone like me enjoyed growing up.

I love the idea of robots doing all our shit work so our collective lives will be better, believe me. But what's happened instead, I fear, is that rich people get richer by not having to employ humans to churn out their cheap plastic shit, and those humans are poorer because they don't have a job anymore.

Also, "robots" is sometimes just a fancy word for "Bangladeshis we don't give a shit about."

 

good to know

 

Fantastic.