Robots Are Already Replacing Fast-Food Workers (recode.net) 414
An anonymous reader quotes Recode:
Technology that replaces food service workers is already here. Sushi restaurants have been using machines to roll rice in nori for years, an otherwise monotonous and time-consuming task. The company Suzuka has robots that help assemble thousands of pieces of sushi an hour. In Mountain View, California, the startup Zume is trying to disrupt pizza with a pie-making machine. In Shanghai, there's a robot that makes ramen, and some cruise ships now mix drinks with bartending machines.
More directly to the heart of American fast-food cuisine, Momentum Machines, a restaurant concept with a robot that can supposedly flip hundreds of burgers an hour, applied for a building permit in San Francisco and started listing job openings this January, reported Eater. Then there's Eatsa, the automat restaurant where no human interaction is necessary, which has locations popping up across California.
More directly to the heart of American fast-food cuisine, Momentum Machines, a restaurant concept with a robot that can supposedly flip hundreds of burgers an hour, applied for a building permit in San Francisco and started listing job openings this January, reported Eater. Then there's Eatsa, the automat restaurant where no human interaction is necessary, which has locations popping up across California.
Slashdot editors soon.... (Score:2, Funny)
I can't wait for the day robots replace the Slashdot "editors". Maybe the comments can be written by robots too to get rid of ass-hats like me.
Machine (Score:4, Funny)
Is there a machine that washes the dishes? That would be news.
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Whoosh
Already in McDonalds (Score:2)
I noticed that the local McD's has a beverage filler at the drive-through station which is an oval track holding 10 or so beverage cups, which proceed through what looks like a partially automated filling line.
But this is really a progression rather than any new thing. We don't stop to think that the washing machine, the dish washer, and the answering machine took away a good many women's jobs.
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Yeah, I'm tired of the word "disruptive" being used simply because it sounds good in a pitch to VCs...
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The invention of the washing machine has actually been credited for the rise of Feminism, so many women would approve of not having to spend half of each day scrubbing clothes on a washboard.
Re: Already in McDonalds (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, sure, but these were primarily women's jobs at the time they were automated out of existence. "Washerwoman" is common parlance.
Want to know what other woman's job got automated out of existence? Computer. Many women were computers. They were replaced by electronic computers. So replaced that you automatically think of a computer as a machine today, and "Many women were computers" sounds funny.
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You're being sexist there. All jobs are women's jobs.
Not "sperm donor".
Re: Already in McDonalds (Score:4, Funny)
Not "sperm donor".
I'm not sure that counts as a job. i.e. Working an 8-hour shift, 5 days a week would be difficult for most.
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Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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Of course, the flipside is that it enables companies to offer customers the choice of 30% more expensive ingredients for the same cost, or having a human to serve it.
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That flipside is a marketing fantasy. They would sell shit on a stick and call it premium quality, if they could get away with it and they already do with so many products. Trusting corporations based around nothing but greed is truly foolish.
Automation, never forget how earth moving equipment replaced the truly hard labour of millions. The problem lies in the false claims of 'ownership' of all the resources of a country that are actually shared. Only insane greed, corruption of laws, allows extremes of v
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Of course, the flipside is that it enables companies to offer customers the choice of 30% more expensive ingredients for the same cost, or having a human to serve it.
This should be at +5 funny or something. It doesn't work that way.
In fact, elimination of almost all labor will be a very bad thing once it happens. If say, McDonalds eliminates every job but the store manager, the stakeholders will have an involuntary orgasm. Then 3 months later, oh-oh, What do we get rid of now to increase profits? Last time I checked, Their customer base was old folks and people with kids. Neither group is all that concerned about the expensive ingredients. So I suspect that indeed, w
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Why would you buy such shit? I'd rather go home and fix a peanut butter sandwich than eat that fucking slop at McD's and some of the other fast "food" chains. As fast food has raced to the bottom I can't believe people still buy it. I did notice the local chic-fil-a had cars all the way around it in two drive thru lines while the McDonald's across the street had two cars in line. I imagine they were pacifying the kids with a happy meal/toy.
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Now that you mention it, why does the coffee that comes out of those automated multifunction hot beverage machines always suck so bad?
I mean, the machine is grinding the beans, the water is probably filtered, it's got to be a drip or pressure process. So why does it always taste like ass? Are they stretching the coffee beans by
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Maybe crap beans, maybe just old beans that are open the atmosphere. Maybe poor servicing.
Any coffee snob will tell you that beans go bad within minutes/hours/days of roasting (depending on snobbery level).
As to servicing, there's only one or two commercial vendors for this stuff in this region. The coffee I get from these machines is always consistent and OK if from a machine that sees real volume and regular servicing (ie, fresh food is vended from the death wheel beside it, and coffee-drinking factory/
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I think people will pay far above the basic cost of an item for a few items they consume (like the bread, or Starbucks coffee drinks), but most can't afford to do that for all of the things they consume. So various items can be had in an artisanal way, with people differing about what they are picky about.
That's right, but as long as there's a market for personal service, jobs for humans will still exist (eg training services which have exploded as a profession in the last 20 years). So I'm merely adding weight against the argument that automation will destroy us all.
Make them work for "the rest of us" (Score:5, Interesting)
The answer: rank robots by capabilities, tax them as virtural workers, pay proceeds into Social Security system
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It will be really expensive when they get to 65-years old and start drawing checks.
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They'll be melted down.
Soylent grey is robots!
plan B make jail / prison cost so much that UBI is (Score:3)
plan B make jail / prison cost so much that UBI is cheaper. When people just start going in and out of the system just to get room and board then UBI looks like a better thing to do.
Permit me to play devil's advocate (Score:3)
Re:Permit me to play devil's advocate (Score:5, Insightful)
Why are they earners? Doesn't earning imply doing something, rather than having something? I thought the latter was called a "rentier".
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Why do you assume that someone who owns something built it?
Re:Permit me to play devil's advocate (Score:5, Insightful)
By your line of reasoning all taxation is just like your Venezuela scenario.
Meanwhile most normal people think some level of taxation is necessary for a government to run so then the debate from there is what is reasonable.
Also, UBI isnt really socialism as it has nothing to do with the state controlling the means of production.
Education (Score:5, Interesting)
Luckily all the high-school dropouts flipping burgers can just go to college and get a degree in liberal arts. Problem solved! They've lived so frugally over the years they surely must have enough money saved up to pay for that plus kids/rent while unemployed.
Oh wait, no, maybe the solution is raising minimum wage? Oh, that'll accelerate automation you say? Hmm.
Institutional unemployment is best paid for institutionally (free education) or else the problems will be paid institutionally anyway (crime, poverty, social welfare programs.) I knew someone who never went to high school because her broke parents were too poor to afford the $50/year fee; if that fee were waived, that $200 would've paid for itself many times over in reduced social welfare costs.
As an increasing number of people are shuffled into a decreasing number of jobs, it'll lead to wage depression. Higher productivity will lower costs of goods and services to offset this somewhat, but lowered job security and making more people unemployable is a more serious price paid. The only winners here are those who own the means of production. Publicly available replicators or central planning are potential solutions. Nationalized real estate + basic income could work as well.
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Education would only exacerbate the problem. It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to train a human, and many many years. It takes a few minutes to teach a machine a lifetime of knowledge. The one thing thing that computers are most advanced from us is their ability to learn. So the more knowledge oriented the job, the easier it is to automate. Robots are still far away from being good are physical labor, but making a lawyer bot is in our ability today.
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But what about the personality?
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Institutional unemployment is best paid for institutionally (free education) or else the problems will be paid institutionally anyway (crime, poverty, social welfare programs.) I knew someone who never went to high school because her broke parents were too poor to afford the $50/year fee; if that fee were waived, that $200 would've paid for itself many times over in reduced social welfare costs.
And instead she got to chill out for four years to save 15c/day? Sorry, I'm not buying it. Either they were so dirt-ass poor that she was doing paid or unpaid child labor to help the family like a third world country, in which case the fee is just the tip of the iceberg of lost income or they're crack addicts who can't keep two dollars in their pocket and wouldn't piss on their kids if they were on fire. There's just no way I believe that this fee was the only thing standing between her and a high school di
And if everyone replaces people with machines? (Score:2)
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The Indians and Chinese, apparently... Microsoft has started to move their major conferences there, as opposed to the US.
Higher Minimum Wage push brings results! (Score:2)
Re:Higher Minimum Wage push brings results! (Score:4, Interesting)
There are two minimum wages. One is a minimum the government sets for all employees to be paid and the other is the market minimum in which must be paid to attract and keep employees working under the conditions presented.
The government minimum is largely static outside acts of government but the market minimum is largely moveable with unemployment. The easiest and best way to raise a minimum wage is to reduce unemployment and let the market for employees demand a higher wage. This is a problem however because the economy has crapped out so badly that fast food jobs are seen as careers now instead of first jobs and stepping stones on a path to bigger and better opportunities. The worst part of this problem is that instead of looking at the situation and saying we need more and better jobs, a lot of people are content outside of wanting to raise the pay for these menial jobs.
When I got my first legal job (other than mowing yards and crap), unemployment in my area was low. I started at minimum wage but quickly progressed above it. All I had to do was basically show up on time and put a bit of effort at doing the work. My second job, which hired me away from my first employer at a raise, I went the extra mile for them and did pretty much anything they asked to the best of my ability and my pay quickly reflected it too. I was making 13 dollars an hour rolling burritos and flipping steaks on a charbroiler in the mid 1990s. $13 an hour might not seem like much but according to an inflation calculator [in2013dollars.com] one dollar in 1995 had about the same purchasing power as $1.56 in 2016. So in contrast, think of it as being paid almost $20 per hour in today's world and the minimum wage at then was $4.25 an hour (it went up from $3.35 when I first started working a few years prior).
If employment was there, by necessity, the minimum wage an employer could pay to keep an employee would by higher than the minimum wage. Those fast food jobs would go back to first job experiences and as stepping stones for people to show they can show up to work and follow directions enough to be hired at someplace that pays more.
The Ghost of Ned Ludd (Score:4, Informative)
But rolling the cattle trucks is a bit too on the nose, so let's go with Permanent War, sugar-based industrialized food, set them at each others' throats with race and religion-based hatreds, choke-off competent and well-funded primary education, and what the hell, add in the idea that vaccines are a bad idea.
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Don't be silly. Do you have no faith in human intelligence? What's that saying about fooling some of the people some of the time?
If you did all that shit I'm sure somebody would notiÃé.,&@,
no carrier.
Some JackInTheBoxes have automated ordertaking... (Score:3)
I've been in a few Jackinthebox restaurants that have a touchscreen order taking system, you touch what you want, insert your card, and voila!! food appears by a human in a couple of minutes... I gather with all of the b.s. about a $15 min wage, these will become MUCH more common.....
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No, it really doesn't have anything at all to do with a $15/hr min wage.
The efforts to automate fast food started when the minimum wage was well under half that amount. If you're going to automate a $15/hr job, then why wouldn't you automate a $6/hr job? You don't have to pay the robot, after all, and they never up and quit like Judge Reinhold in Porkys.
Burger King (Score:3)
the pizza claims are bogus. (Score:2)
the video claims " we are doing something never done before" and is 100% bullshit.
Frozen pizza companies have had automated pizza making processes in place for nearly 3 decades now. Your frozen pizza has been "made by robots" since the 1980's.
The process that place in the video uses is horribly inefficient and is more of a rube goldberg entertainment system than a proven robotic pizza making system.
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Why does all food that is made by robot taste like shit? I'm serious. I'm trying to think of some food product that is assembled by robots that doesn't taste horrible and is not horrible for you.
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Why does all food that is made by robot taste like shit? I'm serious. I'm trying to think of some food product that is assembled by robots that doesn't taste horrible and is not horrible for you.
Because once you've eliminated all non-essential employment costs, the only savings left is in the ingredients. Everything else is fixed and mostly non-negiotiable (rent, utilities, maintenance, miscellaneous overhead).
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Frozen pizzas, made in a factory, on a huge production line. I'd imagine that they'd taste even better if you grabbed one before it's frozen and finish cooking it up.
The ability to prepare one using fresh ingredients and pre-cook on site in a space more 'restaurant' sized than 'factory' sized helps for the 'fresh' market. They can be closer to the customers, even if they ultimately produce fewer pizzas per square meter of factory space. You then finish cooking during delivery lets people get a 'superior'
Bar tending machines? (Score:2)
I might as well stay home with a 6 pack in my cooler. I like the interaction between patrons and staff. If it comes to that I probably won't go out for my pints on a regular basis ever again.
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Blahblahblah save our jobs (Score:3)
Look people, this sort of tech has been around for decades now.
I don't think most people know, but for some of these automated restaurant ideas and industrial food machines, you read "it has been around for years"... you'll think something like early 2000s, but it's actually more like back in the 60s or 70s. You know that conveyor belt sushi thing? It was invented in 1958. It had a huge boom, then it fell out of fashion, then it started becoming popular once again in early 2000s. But here's the deal: restaurants with regular non automated parts are still the majority and the most popular.
Wanna see something older? Try restaurants that serves food using vending machines only. One of those existed back in 1902, and it was in the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
A prototype restaurant is far from replacing jobs in a large scale, and if this is about robots replacing fast food workers in a smaller scale, this isn't news. China and some countries in Europe already used adapted industrial automation systems, robots and robotic arms. The fact that one restaurant is opening does not mean that it's economically feasible as a regular thing, doesn't mean that all restaurants will copy the concept, and it doesn't mean it'll work at all.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/4... [theverge.com]
Remember this Nuremberg restaurant from 2007?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
How about this japanese restaurant from 2009?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Eatsa opened last year, but it's basically the same idea as the previously mentioned Automat that had an initial boom only to disappear years later:
https://techcrunch.com/2015/08... [techcrunch.com]
Right now, these automated systems are on average extremely expensive, single purpose, hard to maintain, and mostly seen as novelty both by clients and from a marketing perspective. We're still probably over a century away from a multipurpose humanoid robot that can do everything human staff do, in an ideal condition where the price, maintenance costs and usefulness counterbalances paying minimum wage or so. By the time miraculous robots like those appear, we'll be more prepared for the switch, and it'll happen gradually. And even then, it's hard to imagine robots completely replacing fast-food and restaurant staff unless we're talking about a future where robots are replacing humans. Because there will always be people willing to pay for a restaurant that has humans preparing your food and serving it.
The base logic why things like that don't suddently happen out of nowhere is easy to understand: even if by some miraculous circunstance we managed to produce perfect robots that would work flawlessly and require no maintenance in all restaurants in a city, this would automatically put so many people out of a job that these restaurants would end up having no costumers to serve, closing down before all the investment put into it had any return. But of course, we can't magically create thousands of robots out of thin air overnight, most robots and automation systems nowadays have limited functionality that's not usually adequate for fast food kitchen environments, and culturally people are not used to and will take a long time to get used to automated restaurants.
Perhaps far into the future we'll pay more to go to restaurants with an all human staff that will only be there simply because they enjoy working with that... but here I'm entering utopia territory. If we ever reach an age where robots can do most things for use at reasonable costs, we'll either have already implemented the universal basic income, or governments will be responsible for most of the upkeep of basic population needs. I mean, you have a damn army of multipurpose robots,
So? (Score:2)
Burger joint (Score:4, Interesting)
In a factory, shape a potato into a fixed size rectangular prism, save the rest for things like hash browns
Package the blocks in a multi-level grid
At the restaurant, feed the grid into a cooling unit
Have a machine remove a row from the grid and feed it to the cutting machine
From the cutting machine, feed the row of potatoes through one at a time
Per serving of french fries, press a matching metal rectangular prism into the top of the container to force the potato block through a cutting grid made up of cutting wires. The wires are found on the base of the potato storage.
The uncooked fries land in a basket and are dropped into a cooker for a deterministic period of time.
The basked is lifted and moved over a salting area
Salt is applied from above
The basket is moved over a funnel
The fries are dropped and a container is located beneath to receive them.
The fries are moved by conveyor belt towards the customer.
The basket moves to another station to be pressure washed
The salting area is cleaned by rinsing with water
Once a day (or more often) the deep fryer is turned off and once cold enough drains the oil from the bottom via a valve. From above a wire brush lowers to clean the bottom and a hose is used to clean the rest draining through a second valve on the bottom. The oil is then refilled.
The used oil travels through pipes to be picked up by a biodiesel company collecting waste.
Empty containers for carrying potatoes are placed in a second rack where a new grid is built from empties
Access to the grids of full and empties are reachable from the building side where they can be loaded and unloaded by a robotic truck.
Burgers
Burgers are formed and packed into a tube like structure that can be stored frozen
Burger is loaded into freezer at restaurant in rows on a rotating base to make each tube accessible as needed
A mechanism moves up and down the tubes to the next available burger
The mechanism places pressure along side rails on the tube to stabilize the tube
The mechanism using pressure from the back pushes (possibly hits) the burger and forces it out of the tube into a catching mechanism
The burger is moved onto a conveyor belt and carried into a cooking area
The burger is moved onto a heated and oiled teflon pan, a second heated and oiled teflon pan is placed on top to cook from above.
Bread is stored in the freezer in a similar tube but as separate top and bottom.
Bread is moved from cold storage using a nearly identical mechanism to the burgers
The bread is defrosted by hot air as it travels over the conveyor belt
The burger once cooked is placed on the bottom piece of bread
The frying pans are flipped and moved over a pressure washer, washed and then sprayed with oil
Ketchup, mustard, etc... are placed via tubes from above onto the top bun.
A cylinder that matches the size of the burger and bun surround the burger and vegetables are slices and/or chopped from above
The cylinder moves away and is pressure washed
The top bread is places on the burger
The burger rolls onto a piece of cardboard which is folded from the sides and then put on the delivery conveyor.
I can go on for a while... I am 100% confident that it wouldn't take much time, effort, money or intelligence to build a fast food restaurant that cleans itself, cooks all the food, changes oil, etc... In addition, the restaurant can be easily designed to support automatic loading and unloading of all the materials from the delivery truck with no effort from a human. Additionally, the truck itself can be self driving. Additionally, given time, it would be possible to automate substantial parts of preparing the food for the restaurant.
What I don't understand is... why do we even have employees at fast food restaurants anymore. At $15 an hour, I would rather replace them with robots. Probably could do it within a year.
I see nothing but wins from automated food systems (Score:3)
One of the problems of this world is that half of all produce spoils before it's eaten. So in the cities of the future, why not have centralized, automated mega-kitchens which receive trucks of fresh raw ingredients and transform them into healthy, delicious and customized meals? Sure, they only make fast food now, but there is no reason why robots can't execute the instructions of Michelin-star chefs, and no reason why such excellent meals should cost more than fast food costs now. Together with some sort of automated delivery service, this is simply a much better way of feeding people than what we do now.
Just think of all the time we waste stocking shelves in stores, driving to them, parking, filling our carts... stocking our fridges, heating up an entire oven for the sake of a single meal, cooking, cleaning up, etc. etc. All that requires a great deal of total cognitive load for many humans, and much wasting of resources. The alternative is that a massive restaurant kitchen cooks up exactly the meal you want, with the freshest ingredients and flavoring details that you would simply not be able to accomplish in a home kitchen. Then the meal arrives through an automated delivery car network, which also picks up the dishes from the previous meal. The city could also have dining rooms with a direct pipeline to each of the city's various mega-kitchens, and these can host social or family groups who want to eat out.
A world like that is actually quite achievable with tech that's already in the prototype stage, and it's a much better world than the wasteful one we live in now.
Pizza is indeed a pie (Score:4, Informative)
You have simply never heard of savory pies. Pizza is one. Pies need not be sweet.
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Your Mom's pie is very savory, but she's more of a tart, really.
Re:Pizza is indeed a pie (Score:4, Funny)
Have you been pecan in on us again?
Re:Pizza is indeed a pie (Score:4, Informative)
They don't have to be sweet, most pies outside of the USA aren't sweet.
They do however, have to be pastry. Pizzas are bread.
So unless your definition of "pie" is "round cooked thing", then pizzas are not pie.
Re:Pizza is indeed a pie (Score:5, Informative)
THIS.
In Austraila, New Zealand, and many other countries we have savory pries. I grew up on savory pies.
But Pizza's ARE NOT PIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
They are not fully enclosed in Pastry. The closest thing that comes to that is a Calzone. An ordinary pizza is absolutely NOT a pie. You east coasters are just retarded.
Re: Pizza is indeed a pie (Score:2)
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While I do not agree what a pie even normally is fully enclosed, it clearly is not a pie. Meat pies exist, and I see no reason to not call them pies. But a pizza is flat. It has a completely different shape and crust, and its toppings are completely unlike any sort of pie filling ever used. While I think you could make a pie with a bread crust, or a pie with pizza flavored filling, a pizza has no similarities to a pie, there is not one feature of a pizza that is shared with a pie.
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Hmm, Pumpkin Pie isn't fully enclosed in pastry.
Neither is chocolate meringue pie.
Though Cherry Cobbler IS fully enclosed in pastry, and isn't a "pie"....
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Ahh, you're one of those who believe that his own variant of the result of "Norman men-at-arms trying to make dates with Saxon barmaids" is the Only True English.
Sorry, doesn't work that way outside your own head(s).....
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When I was young and worked at a pizza place, we made pies, dammit. Very thick, with a layer of bread on top. Thin pizzas are one variant, sure, but at one time, even pizzas without a cover had the edges of a pie - the crust at the outside went up because the pizza was made in a deep pan, not a flat grill.
IMO certain chain restaurants ruined everything in the late 80s/early 90s by putting disgusting amounts of oil in the pan, so that rather than getting a nice firm crust, the bread was just sopping with o
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But Pizza's ARE NOT PIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
They are not fully enclosed in Pastry.
Pies are defined by their crusts. [wikipedia.org] A filled pie (also single-crust or bottom-crust), has pastry lining the baking dish, and the filling is placed on top of the pastry but left open. A top-crust pie has the filling in the bottom of the dish and is covered with a pastry or other covering before baking. A two-crust pie has the filling completely enclosed in the pastry shell.
Re: Pizza is indeed a pie (Score:3)
Re:Pizza is indeed a pie (Score:5, Informative)
Strictly, it's a tart.
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The important thing to remember though is that Pie R round, not square.
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Tell that to my 1932 Ford Coupe!
(Yeah, I wish...)
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I blame that incredibly annoying song by (I think) Dean Martin.
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> I blame that incredibly annoying song by (I think) Dean Martin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's amore
Re:Pizza is indeed a pie (Score:5, Funny)
> I blame that incredibly annoying song by (I think) Dean Martin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's amore
And when it comes to pass, that an eel bites your ass - That's a moray.
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Exception: Chicago style stuffed pies. Crust, 'toppings', another crust than actual 'toppings'.
Hopefully it does not end like this... (Score:5, Insightful)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] ...sad that idiocracy may eventually be viewed as a documentary.
Re:And so it starts... (Score:5, Interesting)
We're moving in that direction, but we're not there, just yet. I think we'll have a rough couple of years, while the automation steps in. Eventually, it'll make things cheaper, but I would imagine that the prices of things will remain on the same gradual increase they've always been alongside inflation, for a while, at least. Eventually, the reduction of full-time employment among the general population will drive prices down. Ultimately, it'll break capitalism, assuming that Congress doesn't step in to make laws preserving it (i.e., banning excess of automation). I can't imagine that we'll be in a place where a UBI is practical for another 15 to 20 years, though. There's just too many problems to solve, first.
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Technically, if a monopoly is forced to sell at a non-optimal point on the price/response curve simply because the cheaper point would be selling at a loss, lowered costs could allow them to sell at that lower point. There would need to be a compelling reason (antitrust laws, marketing etc.) why they cannot sell at the higher point, however.
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So that's why in this past year almost every fast food place has started offering $5 meals made up of far more expensive items if bought individually?
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Expecting those to translate to consumer prices though is a stretch.
Re:And so it starts... (Score:5, Interesting)
No, the machines are now getting much smarter. Grinding flour takes a purely mechanical machine. The second generation could use pneumatic computers and simple electrical systems to control them.
But now computers are ubiquitous and cheap. And they can see. Not very well, but well enough to automate things that were unthinkable a few years ago. Such as picking out parts jumbled in a bin. Or flipping burgers that are not in exactly defined places.
This third generation will not take over the world. But unlike second generation machines, they can pick strawberries. And will soon be able to clean offices, and paint houses, and pack supermarket shelves, and drive trucks etc. Anything routine.
Initially the robots are only just a bit cheaper than labour, so slow introduction and minimal price changes. But over time, they get better and cheaper, until anyone that still relies on labour will not be able to compete.
And real "robots" are not humanoid, with arms and legs. They are purpose built machines, but with far more intelligence than existing machines.
But the interesting case is still many decades off. When computers can program themselves.
http://www.computersthink.com/ [computersthink.com]
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You're not taking it to the logical conclusion.
The removal of the worker from the equation removes their ability to obtain capital, and this participate in private ownership and operation of property.
By removing what could eventually be upwards of 90% of the participants in the system you will break the system.
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How does one operate private property? Am I holding it wrong?
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Starvation works too. If the starving get unruly fire up the drones, terminators, and robo-cops.
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When all work can be done by robots you'd propose a universal basic income? Get your head out of the 20th century. All that does is give the government ultimate power over everyone who needs that check.
It's the 21st century. Think universal basic robots. Everyone owns the means of production - at home. Power to the people - well, unless the power goes out.
Re:And so it starts... (Score:5, Interesting)
We're not all going to be the robot owners. Robots are capital, and the trend of the last 30 years has been to push more and more of the capital upwards and away from the 99%.
Yes, robots will get cheaper, too, but cheap isn't free and if we continue laying off people faster than they can amass capital to buy their own robots, then the magic isn't going to happen.
Nor are a lot of us suited for the limited set of jobs that are expected to remain - and I should note that Japan has expended considerable effort on robotic care for the elderly (thanks to a shrinking lower-age population), that IBM's Watson is considered a first-class medical expert in its own right, and that robot surgery has been out of the realm of Science Fiction and part of everyday reality for some years now. So that wasn't the ideal example of where the newly-unemployed can retrain for a new source of capital.
Historically, new occupations have been spawned when older occupations died, but we're simply not seeing anything new open up on a major scale this time. What? You think that Robot Repair is going to be a growing field? We ALREADY have technology sufficient for a simple robot to roll up to a more complex one, unbolt a failed component and attach a new one, then roll over to the dumpster with the old one. Nobody's going to be tinkering with fine-grained repairs any more than they repair the electronics on a digital watch or TV. It's simply more cost-effective to get a new unit from the factory and scrap the old one.
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Indeed. Either that or a drop into deep poverty for almost everyone. It can go either way...
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Point to history when this hasn't happened before.
We landed on the moon because we put a bunch of African American women sat in the back room somewhere doing calculations.
We made it through 90% of humanity needing to farm because we automated the boring unskilled part. (Even parts that were so unskilled we had mules and horses do them).
We'll be fine like we always have been.
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We landed on the moon because we put a bunch of African American women sat in the back room somewhere doing calculations.
Actually, all the necessary calculations were already being done by stored-program digital computers, courtesy of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory which built one of the first embedded computers with digital ICs. Unless your "bunch of African American women" were some stowaways in the Apollo spacecraft armed with calculators.
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We landed on the moon because we put a bunch of African American women sat in the back room somewhere doing calculations.
Actually, all the necessary calculations were already being done by stored-program digital computers, courtesy of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory which built one of the first embedded computers with digital ICs. Unless your "bunch of African American women" were some stowaways in the Apollo spacecraft armed with calculators.
Is this a big whoosh? You are talking about the MIT designed Navigation computer, and OP is talking about Katherine Johnson, one of NACA and later NASA's "computers" - yes, they called the ladies computers. The respect for the woman was so high that John Glenn refused to fly unless she verified the numbers that NASA's first digital computer spit out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Point to history when this hasn't happened before.
We landed on the moon because we put a bunch of African American women sat in the back room somewhere doing calculations.
We made it through 90% of humanity needing to farm because we automated the boring unskilled part. (Even parts that were so unskilled we had mules and horses do them).
We'll be fine like we always have been.
I'm certainly hoping we'll be fine. The trick parts will be regarding the idle population. As the work eliminated expands up the skill ladder, we'll face some issues for a while. The problem is that for one reason or another, many of the folks working the unskilled labor are not going to be capable of moving up. Some folks just aren't that smart, some folks are voracious underachievers. Some folks have problemacious personalities. Are there answers to those issues? Probably.
But assuming that the present
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With manual labor less in demand, the economy will need less people; paying people to not work is pointless and unsustainable.
Hmm... If you want to discuss unsustainable actions, let's talk about fostering an underclass effectively locked into perpetual poverty. What alternatives do you propose?. Note that this sort of approach (negative income tax) has been advocated by free market proponents including Milton Friedman.
Re:No, thanks. (Score:5, Insightful)
meanwhile the rest of us want timely service, properly cooked food, correct change...can't wait for robots to have the jobs.
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Then why would go to a fast food restaurant?
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meanwhile the rest of us want timely service, properly cooked food, correct change...can't wait for robots to have the jobs.
This has mostly been not true. Semi-automated restaurants have been tried many times. They tried phones at every table, so you can call your order in directly to the kitchen. Then they tried touch pads at every table. In general, these have not been popular. When they go out to eat, people want human interaction. Otherwise, they would just microwave something at home.
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"As such, I detest self-checkout because as a customer I should not be expected to perform employee's duties without compensation.'
Take the lead in solving that problem by always including beer or produce in your self-checkout. Then an employee will have to come over and help you anyway.
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But if you don't want to use the self-checkout at the supermarket, that's fine by me. I get through the checkout 4 times faster than you because there is one line feeding 4 registers. If you're looking for the shortest line, be sure to divide the self-checkout line length by the number of kiosks.
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Did you know that, in some places in the US, McDs is starting to offer table service? Same number of employees, just doing different work. Automation can also mean more meat-interaction, as humans are freed from some kinds of labor.
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Hot dog is a sandwich.
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If it has chicago[sic] in the name it probably isn't pizza.
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Unless it has chicago[sic] in the name it probably isn't pizza
FTFY. If it ain't a pie, it ain't pizza.