Robots To Replace Migrant Fruit Pickers 409
Vicissidude sends us to Wired for a look at a fruit-harvesting robot being developed in California. Its development has been funded entirely by agricultural associations, concerned by the uncertainty surrounding migrant immigrant labor. Quoting: "As if the debate over immigration and guest worker programs wasn't complicated enough, now a couple of robots are rolling into the middle of it. Vision Robotics, a San Diego company, is working on a pair of robots that would trundle through orchards plucking oranges, apples or other fruit from the trees. In a few years, troops of these machines could perform the tedious and labor-intensive task of fruit picking that currently employs thousands of migrant workers each season."
Really? (Score:5, Funny)
Is it more than about $3 an hour, including maintenance?
And do they reproduce themselves?
Cuz, you've got some strong competition there.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Funny)
This is 2007. Your robophobia will not be tolerated.
MOD PARENT UP (Score:2)
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:5, Insightful)
I doubt it. I read it as a stereotype parody of anyone who is against illegal immigration. See, if you are not for completely open borders, you are automatically a racist, xenophobe, bigot, red-neck...whatever. He refuses to consider that maybe illegals have no rights, no protection under the law (as far as they know), and they are taken advantage of and abused on a regular basis because they are illegal and are afraid to seek their rights. It makes his side a clear winner when he doesn't mention that people who want a secure border aren't against immigration. We just want a name and simple background check. We are not bigots. Hell, for that matter, I feel the immigration quota should be raised to the number of estimated illegals in the country. What is it, 12,000,000. The number of legal immigrants is capped at 250,000. That's a joke! NO wonder there are so many illegals!
Anyway, this machinery is the modern day equivalent of the cotton gin. Only, instead of helping to end the oppression of blacks, it will end the oppression of Hispanics.
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Sorry, I thought you were responding to different post. Should have clicked the "parent" link to make sure.
You were right, that was kinda funny!
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:4, Informative)
You see picking cotton just wasn't as profitable as growing other things, until the cotton gin made it more profitable.
Sure it saved some work, but it created much more.
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:4, Informative)
People of any nationality should be given a legal and reasonable path of immigration to the US, as long as they are willing to work, and attempt to integrate into the society. Considering the poor (by American standards) conditions that most illegals put up with to live and work in the US, it's pretty clear that there are a TON of people who WANT to be part of our society. Denying them that right is nothing short of inhumane. Considering that most illegals are already able to find employment that pays enough for them to subsist, it's not exactly like the US is going to turn into a refugee camp, and, if anything, will help the US economy by preventing the outsourcing of manufacturing and agriculture to other countries. It's also not exactly like the US is overcrowded -- we have more good land down south, and out west than we know what to do with.
The problem is, that, unlike yourself, many many Americans ARE bigots towards Latin Americans (and overwhelmingly so). The current immigration restrictions are more likely than not a result of this sort of person.
My local newspaper's website offers a comments section, much like most blogs offer. Whenever a story about immigration is posted, it is immediately flooded with some of the most potent and passionate bigotry I've ever seen (outside of documentaries on the civil rights movement). The newspaper now disables comments for these stories. It dealt a serious blow to my faith in humanity.
The locale of this newspaper? New Jersey. I would say that it's not unreasonable to peg over 50% of Jersey's population as being direct decendants of Ellis Island immigrants from the 19th and 20th centuries.
Umm. (Score:3, Insightful)
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Funny. There's more people here who speak European languages than North American languages. Odd how the Constitution isn't written in Iroquois.
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I don't think the first generation of any wave of immigrants is ever particularly successf
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Re:Really? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
If the $3/hr is available, then of course machinery can't compete with that (at least not until it's rolled out on a large scale and parts for maintenance become dirt-cheap)
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I have used a similar approach to picking for a completely different crop 20+ years ago. We picked carrots that way. One-two people go and pull and pile in the middle of the row, doing nothing else. Two more people sort leaving them on the ground and two-three pack the sorted crop. The efficiency was around 6 times higher than the standard picking by hand where a single person picks them, sorts them and carries the lot the collection point for packing. In fact the efficiency was so high that we
Mechanization is the future (Score:5, Insightful)
This argument was what Southern Slave owners used with Cotton.
Funny, how that chore of cotton picking got automated.
Machines don't get tired. They don't die. They don't need medical care or costly medical plans. They can be made over and over again, and always get cheaper when you make enough of them. The whole advance of human existence has been to make more and better machines, that do more to leverage people's labor.
Hello that is WHY you are reading Slashdot.
Machines replaced slave and later tenant farmer/serf labor in the South. Machines replaced lots of deadly hand labor in coal mines (not entirely but a lot). Machines replaced a line full of low skilled labor on the auto assembly lines with a few high skilled positions.
But hey, for some people having a subservient near-slave class is a plus. Not the kind of society I'd want to live in, but some folks only feel better when they have helots to lord it over I guess.
Where's your Robot Maintenance Robot? (Score:2)
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When B goes out of order, model C will take care of that.
When C breaks down, model D will fix model C.
We'll then just program model A to fix model Z.
Don't worry, we software engineers have everything figured out already
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Okay, I'll cop to it. Robot threesome.
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So can people, and I'd be willing to help out our American allies there. Ha, ha. But ah, with the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present Gross National Product within say, twenty years.
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True. But I've seen very excellent software solutions just die because the people who were supposed to operate them fail. Why? Because people have an inherent dislike/aversion to functioning like machines, and a lot of software forces them to do so.
My examples are from the engineering world, so we're not talking about data entry-level work.
It also doesn't help that software changes ("improves") so frequentl
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And what happens to all this low skill labour when they've lost their jobs? They're not clever or educated enough for a skilled profession, and with robots taking up all their jobs, we're going to end up with mass unemployment.
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And even if they cost more, it might be good insurance against losing your entire crop due to an ill-timed INS raid. I really wonder if the robots can do as good of a job, but if they do something close it could be an interesting part of the debate.
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Well, no Americans will work doing Robot maintenance for $3.00 and hour. On the other hand, if you are flexible about who you hire, I'm sure you could find somebody willing to do it at that price...
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
the prison population in southern California, and that their free medical
care isn't paid for by taxpayers.
When they reproduce for free, and you wonder why your taxes went up 100%
on you house, it is because your paying to educate their kids.
If they want to pay their fair share, and become law abiding citizens then so be it.
It will make jobs damn scarce for awhile as anyone all over earth can come here,
but it beats what we have now.
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Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think a Xenophile will go out of their way to hire minorities they think less of because they can feel snooty in being "above" their employee.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
And again I need to emphasize that this has nothing to do with race. This is one reason I don't like George W. Bush, and most of the left, is because if you say you are anti-illegal immigrant then they try to label you as a racist when that is quite simply not the case. I am not racist, but I hate illegal immigrants, and I am really not afraid to say so. FWIW there are many Mexicans who just by looking at them, you can't even tell they are from Mexico. You have to remember that many of them are of European descent.
If it were up to me, I would make it so that people who cross the border illegally must forfeit all property they own when they are found out, and their employer may sue them for all money that they have earned while working for them due to fraudulent employment (employers can already do this to legal citizens who e.g. provide false credentials or fake degree certificates when they apply for a job.) America would NOT be the only first world country to do these things. Then also remove birthright citizenship, which the US is the only first world country to have. If we made those three changes, just you watch how fast the illegals move south of the border. The "12 million here" problem will be solved so fast it'll make your head spin because it would be damn near impossible for them to make any kind of living here. The problem is that our politicians (left and right) really don't give a crap about what most Americans want. Like Osama once said; we have a soft underbelly.
Also FWIW, a xenophile would of course hire an illegal immigrant. Note the differences between the two suffixes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/-phob- [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/-phil- [wikipedia.org]
Xenophile technically isn't a word in that it isn't in any official English dictionary, but it would mean the exact opposite of xenophobe.
Disclaimer: Yeah I used wikipedia, and under normal circumstances I never would use it as a source, but I couldn't be assed to find another one right now.
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The United States does not have, and has neve
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These robots aren't *dirty mexicans*
Face it, some xenophobes would rather burn their money on robot's that comes with an English manual than a spanish speaking migrant.
Funny. The people I know that hire "dirty Mexicans" usually end up hiring them for life. They treat their employees as family and their kids as their own. For that matter, I haven't seen a farmer or rancher yet that didn't put his "hired hand's" kids through college. Granted, these weren't migrant workers, but illegal
Re:Really? (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately, the people you DON'T know, treat them as slaves, and their kids as more slaves. They don't get medications, are exposed to pesticides, and if they complain, they're threatened with "la migra" (Immigration). Those cases are quite documented down here in Mexico.
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I'm afraid you missed it. You are correct that he said SOME xenophobes would rather burn their money or robots than
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"you missed the understood portion that says, "the rest are too cheap to let their xenophobia overrule their wallets so they go ahead hire the "dirty Mexicans" anyway.""
I see no indication that that's what the post was implying. You are putting words into his mouth. Please respond to what posts actually say.
You are wasting your breath. This kind of poster takes quotes out of context, and if he sees something he does not have an answer for, he simply ignores it in his reply. You can usually pick them out in their first reply, and the best thing to do from that point is to ignore them.
Long overdue (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been wondering why this hasn't happened yet for years. The answer, of course, is that the ag industry could rely on incredibly cheap labor, so it wasn't worth developing a technological replacement. But if anything is proof that the debate about illegal immigration has turned a corner, this is it.
Once you've seen the back-breaking labor involved in the California agriculture industry, it's impossible not to applaud the development of technology that will make it obsolete. Nobody says after years of work in the strawberry fields, "Gee, I'm sure glad I got the opportunity to explore my full human potential in that career!"
Liberal students were one reason (Score:3, Informative)
You see, students were concerned about the impact on the Farm Workers back then, and didn't want to jeoparize their jobs. It might be a little hard to fathom now, but it was a different time back then. The grape boycott by the Farm Wo
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The GP didn't say anything that would warrant that. He said that at one point, farm workers made enough money so that they could be considered "middle class." Overall, illegal immigration didn't, therefore, seem to be a big problem.
However, since then, the amount of illegal immigration has increased (or continued) to the point where there's now such a surplus of cheap labor, that we've created what's effectively a slave class. (Actually, I've seen some analyses a
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Yeah, all they moan about is how they could feed their family
Bullshit. They also moan about how their bodies are used up in half the time yours and mine are. They complain about terrible working conditions, terrible health, and short lifespan. Just because some people survive off a horrible job doesn't mean it should continue to exist.
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The ancient debate over whether the un-educated masses need busy-work continues.
Each time technology replaces a workforce there is a massive recession, prices need to adjust for the lower wages being paid (overall)...
I'm a fan of it but it's tough for a while.
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The same could be said about any "Career" what makes you think picking strawberries is any different from any other career that one can enjoy? If picking strawberries paid 60K a year and software programming paid $3 an hour you can bet your boot the only reason people "feel satisfied" with their careers half the time is the money it brings in and the working conditions and renumerations associated with the task.
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Most of them say, "I'm glad I didn't starve back home."
And most of us say, "I sure am glad strawberries are so cheap!"
Coal miners are glad not to starve too. That doesn't mean we should continue to use human labor for inhumane tasks.
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Even if you're not starving, it's hard to turn down a job where you get 4 months off every year
well we already (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/search?keyword=
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This changes the immigration debate! (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not unlike the H1B scandal. If you pay enough, you'll find people to do almost any job. The "need" isn't for workers per se, but people who will work a brief job for roughly minimum wage and then move on as a rootless nomad.
We should view this as cruel. We shouldn't maintain an underclass which picks fruit or maintains gardens. Machines can do this work without becoming tired, bored, getting disabling injuries, suffering reactions to ag chemicals, or any of the other hazards of human labor in orchards and fields. Machines can be built as needed and scrapped when they become unusable or obsolete.
If a machine is stored in a leaky barn, it's the farmer's problem. It's not cruel to ask a machine to work in high temperatures or without toilet breaks. A machine doesn't need compensation if drought or frost or fungus ruins the crop and there's nothing for it to do one year.
The taxpayer ought to have a say too. A machine isn't going to bring in a family which immediately qualifies for food stamps and Medicaid. A machine isn't going to overwhelm schools with ESL students. A machine isn't going to add to traffic congestion or law-enforcement expenses.
People who build and maintain machines have pretty good lives. People who do the sort of jobs replaced by machines often don't. Designing and debugging and improving machines means paychecks for geeks like us.
Instead of asking anyone to do jobs we won't do ourselves, or pay enough to attract folks like us, let's make machines to do them. Anything less is hypocritical.
This changes nothing. (Score:4, Insightful)
2. What will you say when automation renders YOUR occupation redundant?
You sure? (Score:2)
2. When automation can create and execute new concepts, humanity itself will have created its successor. Think of it as evolution in action.
Re:You sure? (Score:4, Insightful)
they come here because economic conditions are better,
and there are jobs that pay more. So, if the
ag jobs go away, I would not expect immigration
to stop or reverse. It might find a new equilibrium,
and slow a bit.
"Think of it as evolution in action". A reader of
"Oath of Fealty", perhaps?
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2.) Automation overseas is making our jobs obsolete.
Yet no one cares so why should I care about them?
Not to sound cruel but I am competing with these people now for minimum wage jobs and these farm workers pay them for less for minium wage and I can not even work the fields myself as an American.
Basically they can complain all they want but no one will care and I will be angry if they d
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From bad to worse. (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:From bad to worse. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:From bad to worse. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, we should view this labor as cruel. (Score:2)
Que!?!?! (Score:5, Funny)
Wrong Problem (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe they will now.
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Regards,
Ross
It's been done, with tree shakers (Score:5, Informative)
"Tree shakers" [aol.com] have been used since the 1960s. A big net in two section is clamped around the tree, a big arm reaches out and grabs the tree trunk, and a vibrator shakes the tree while the fruit falls off. Some early versions damaged trees, but that was fixed. (Linear shaking good, orbital shaking bad.)
Tomato harvesting was partly mechanized back in the 1960s. A tougher tomato plus appropriate machinery did the job. This was controversial at the time. Today, it's established technology. Check out the Pik-Rite 190 Tomato Harvester. [pikrite.com] 30 tons of tomatoes an hour. And that's the small model. This still doesn't work all that well for the softer varieties of tomatoes intended for sale whole, but Roma and cherry tomatoes are routinely picked by machine now.
Picking machines are getting smarter. The newer ones have cameras, computers, and air jets [odenberg.com] to sort produce by size and color.
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They found one of the 5 million ways not to mass produce tomatoes ?
Luddism (Score:3, Insightful)
This wont be pretty. Perhaps we should ask England is advice concerning textile machines?
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This wont be pretty. Perhaps we should ask England is advice concerning textile machines?
Yeah that strategy worked famously for the Luddites? They sure stopped the industrial revolutions, shows them smarmy technoolooogits.
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About time... (Score:4, Insightful)
It took more than one gas crisis for the American car manufacturers to design fuel efficient engines. Because while gas was cheap, there were no incentives to invest in technology. And while labour was (and still is) cheap, robotics cannot compete. I am sure that the technology for those robots has been available for at least a decade, but it wasn't cost effective in comparison to migrant workers.
But this is the way our society SHOULD have developed. So many manufacturing processes could be automated, if not for the initial investment.
Government Funding (Score:2, Funny)
Finally some progress (Score:3, Interesting)
We could have robots making our fast food, doing the gardening, mining metal, making robots, maintaining robots.
That's fine... (Score:2)
Seemed perfect for the moment. (Score:2)
(Yes, I'm a bastard)
Robot farmers (Score:2)
What to do... (Score:4, Interesting)
Would each person own a robot and collect a check from home or would the more likely scenario be that a few large companies would run huge armies of these robots? How might all those people who never heard of 'knowledge work' make a living? I'm thinking that the current scheme for distribution of wealth based on labor might not work in that scenario. Finally, I wonder what system, short of some socialist or communist nightmare, would.
I'm interested to hear what people think. Discussion or not, we'll only find out when it happens so bring those cotton-pickin' robots on!
Re:What to do... (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, to address the issue of would everybody let their robot earn them a paycheck... If robots are cheap enough to be owned by an individual, why the heck would any sane corporation hire individual robots from many small contractors instead of either leasing from another large company or buying their own? I've heard other people ponder the notion of each individual owning a robot and letting it do their work, but this seems like a really silly idea, and nobody has ever explained to me how it could actually work in practice...
As for how somebody who isn't in knowledge work makes a living... Land speculation. Ultimately, location is the only scarce tangible. There is a lot of space, but people want to be in particular places, so a particular location will always have some intrinsic value, even after robotic exploitation of asteroids and the like makes the mineral value of land for raw resources negligible.
Re:What to do... (Score:4, Interesting)
Either scenario has the same basis, as robots render physical human labor obsolete we will end up with a three class society. An upper class who owns the businesses (and the robots), a middle class consisting of the intellectual lower level professions, ie programmers, scientists, engineers, essentially the people who build and service the robots, and finally a lower class of people who's jobs were taken by robots (manual laborers or even intellectual laborers who's field is better done by machine). The first two classes are probably mostly the same as they are now, where the systems differ is the question of what to do with the lower class of people.
If we simply extend our current societal and economic principals we'll decide they need busywork, most likely this will be involved in somehow entertaining the other two classes. A good portion will probably perform some kind of creative art, ie actors or musicians, and most of their work will consist of live shows (best way to use up manpower and show supremacy of the other two classes). However the vast majority won't be sufficiently creative enough, thus they'll be in the service industry, waiters, butlers, chauffeurs (if we still let humans drive). Note that in both cases the lower class isn't servicing only the upper class but probably the middle class as well, for instance the equivalent of a code monkey would get a couple butlers since there's such an excess of labor available. Interestingly since the benefit of work is so much less society may respond by demanding people work more since large numbers of unemployed or under stimulated people would have the potential to be extremely disruptive to the society. This does have precedent, apparently in the middle ages the idea was if you could get out of working you should, people with inherited money who chose not to work weren't looked down upon like they are today (at least by some parts of society). The idea of everyone having to work and pull their fair share was in part a reaction to the industrial revolution and the creation of the welfare state so that people wouldn't choose to remain unemployed.
This isn't a horrible scenario, it just isn't a very significant improvement over our current society. The happier alternative is that instead of keeping the lower class busy with work we keep them busy with fun. People who don't work just spend their days visiting with each other, going to various clubs, basically keeping themselves entertained with structured activities. This will probably be accomplished through some kind of welfare, the upper and middle class will still get extra money to be rewarded for their work (though most of the middle class will probably be the Open Source developer type who does it partially for fun) but living a life without employment will be a viable and somewhat respectable possibility. The fundamental difference between this system and the previous is in the first system the lower class entertained just the upper and middle classes, here they entertain themselves as well.
This second scenario may seem like a fantasy but I do believe it is a possibility. Just think of the life of an unemployed person today as opposed to a couple hundred years ago?
What will determine which path is basically how we react when we start to get large numbers of people who are able, competent, looking for any kind of work, and unable to find it. If we keep creating jobs to keep them employed and occupied than we may end up with the first scenario, if however we try to give them a viable alternative (maybe even give them fun jobs) we may get the second scenario.
DEAD on the MONEY (Score:3, Insightful)
Their will be an outcry.... (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact is immigration reform that removes illegal migrants and eliminates even agricultural migrant's will be good for America in every way. The US economy has moved to a very strong dependence on what can only be called slave labor. Illegal migrants are frequently put in job's that pay less than US minimum wage standards and don't meet US minimum safety standards. There can be no argument that the continual immigration of people to the US helps the American economy, even illegal migration helps, the question is does it help more than controlled immigration does. But the fact is, how illegal workers are treated in this country is akin to the sharecrop system of virtual slavery that developed in the south after the civil war. It's also a fact that eliminating the cheap slave labor will force technological solutions that in the end will generate a significant number of high paying tech jobs.
As citizens we have to decide if we believe in the values we enshrine. If the wholesale exploitation of people to keep fruit and veggy prices low fits with our values. Sure, the migrants will tell you that they love living in America and that they do the hard work so their children have a chance that they wouldn't have in their home countries. Again, we have to ask ourselves, wouldn't it be better to allow REAL immigration instead of speaking out about illegal migration while we turn a blind eye to the illegal migration (US policy for the last 20 years).
How many people do you know that have turned in the local small businesses that are employing illegal migrants and in the process pricing out everyone else that is playing by the rules ?(Construction is by far the worst for this)? Illegal migration artificially deflates labor prices, it's the reason the republican's have used to keep the minimum wage from changing and it's also the reason that some jobs have such low labor rates that no one but illegal migrants can afford the job, thereby providing an excuse to right wing policy makers that the migrants are only taking jobs that American's won't. Without illegal migrants in the equation labor rates would be forced by supply and demand to provide a real living wage.
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Because I can guarantee you, every single Republican who voted for that Amnesty bill committed Political Suicide. Their approval ratings (from Republican voters) have plummeted faster then a greased up slip-n-slide.
Here's some nice tidbits:
Jumping the gun (Score:3, Insightful)
Not saying it won't happen, but I'll believe it when I see it.
Until then, this kind of looks like an R&D firm "picking the low hanging fruits" of funding from the immigration debate...
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This [ucdavis.edu] sums it up:
"Mechanical harvesting is also cheaper, especially as yields increase: most estimates say that hand harvesting costs $125 to $150 a ton, while machine harvesting costs $65 to $85 a ton. Four hand harvesters can pick about one acre of grapes a day; a mechanical harvester, which uses a crew of five to harvest ar
immigration vs. tech (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm a bit surprised (Score:3, Insightful)
But when you wish to produce more crops with lower labor costs, in a world with rising labor costs, you end up having to invest in technology to take on the role of human beings. This is the wonder of agriculture in the industrialized world. Even something as simple as a combine harvester has had a dramatic impact on our society. It is inventions like that that enabled an industrial revolution to occur. As you no longer need as many people on the farm, that provides more people to work in industry and dramatically increases the number of people who become professional workers or skilled tradesmen.
A poor third-world nation suffers greatly because it cannot scale its agriculture the same way as the industrialized nations. Everyone is working their tail off trying to do subsistence farming. they have no time to work at a trade that adds to their nations GDP/GNP. If a poor nation could increase agricultural output while decreasing the labor involved, you can reassign those people to producing things. the don't even have to be costly goods, it could be sewing clothing and footballs. But it's hard to industrialize when people are starving(a leading cause of disease in the third world) or working constantly to produce food (an insufficient amount of food).
You should either treat people as equals and protect them from exploitation, or you do not let them in. And guess who the primary victims of Latino gangs are? new illegal immigrants. Without control of the borders the ex-cons and thugs spill into the country and take over the Hispanic ghettos, victimizing the illegal immigrants. I don't know about you, but I think knowing who comes into your country and not letting in people without proper document is the opposite of racist/bigot, I think it's the compassionate choice.
It will never work (Score:5, Funny)
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They much be pretty bullet proof. Who is going to stop them?
Re:It will never work (Score:4, Funny)
Made in China (Score:2)
Lets not overreact here (Score:2)
nannies.
I would worry more about robots replacing legal service workers(could you imagine McDonalds automating its food
preparation??? Walmart replacing most of its overnight stockworkers with stockbots.
Let them in! (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm 50 years old and my Social Security depends on them.
I, for one... (Score:4, Insightful)
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/ [digitalelite.com]
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Microprocessors which will function at 60-70C are common. They are used in traffic signal controllers for example. The fruit picking environment is pretty benign compared to the environment for mining machinery deep underground.
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Once and for all the American Cvil War was NOT about slavery. It was about the economic leverage slave owners tried to weld against the indentured servant labor force of the north
And now, for a brief history lesson.
(Disclaimer: I am speaking abstractly of the slave trade and of the historical fact regarding it. While this may see