More Fast Food Restaurants Are Now Automating (qz.com) 440
An anonymous reader writes:
Wendy's is adding self-service ordering kiosks "to at least 1,000 restaurants, or about 15% of its stores," reports the Los Angeles Times, while McDonald's and Panera Bread are now planning to add kiosks to every restaurant. "Lots of restaurants, not just fast-food chains, are really trying to mitigate the costs of higher wages," says one market research firm, while also citing a survey which found 40% of millennials willing to use kiosks (compared to 30% of restaurant-goers overall).
But in some cases this means more work for human employees. Quartz points out that McDonalds doesn't plan to reduce its workforce after installing kiosks, and Panera Bread "has said that at some locations where it has ordering kiosks, it has actually increased human hours to help the kitchen keep up with the higher number of orders that come in through the more efficient ordering system."
But in some cases this means more work for human employees. Quartz points out that McDonalds doesn't plan to reduce its workforce after installing kiosks, and Panera Bread "has said that at some locations where it has ordering kiosks, it has actually increased human hours to help the kitchen keep up with the higher number of orders that come in through the more efficient ordering system."
First (Score:5, Funny)
... automated post.
please do this for all places (Score:5, Insightful)
after going to japan where many of the major chains had at-table ordering device of some sort and no tips, i cant go back
Re:please do this for all places (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to go to the Olive Garden occasionally when my wife forced me to. They started putting that shit on my table and I always took it off and put it on an empty table. After about my 4th visit the manager told me I had to leave it on the table. I got up and walked out and haven't been back. They can suck my dick. I'm a customer, not a fucking consumer. People that treat me like a consumer don't get my business. This modern thing of letting companies and restaurants and other businesses treat you like something to be sheared for maximum profit is anathema to me. When I sit at the table with a machine that takes up almost an entire place setting there that is inconvenient and an annoyance. It's like they make it so you can't possibly avoid it and that is unacceptable. You might like it and if so good for you. I assure you however that they'll lose at least a quarter of their business to people like me that want to be treated like a customer.
Re:please do this for all places (Score:5, Funny)
you forgot the linchpin of your argument, "get off my lawn!"
Re:please do this for all places (Score:4, Interesting)
I know, it's a sign of old age when you expect service with a smile when you give people money. Nowadays it's "please sir, if I give you some money will you let me eat in your establishment. I promise to grovel and kiss your feet if you'll just favor me by letting me give you money in return for being treated like shit." I think I like it better my way but to each his own.
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Chefs have always been prima donas, which is why owners keep them in the kitchen.
Re:please do this for all places (Score:4, Insightful)
When you go to a restaurant part of what you're paying for is the service
Yes, I get mad when I sit at McDonalds and no one comes to my table to take my order. There are restaurants, and there are restaurants. It's the fucking Olive Garden... what do you expect? Next you're going to bitch because someone at PF Changs served you from the wrong side.
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Olive Garden isn't McDonald's. Although even there I expect a certain level of service. Considering the cuisine at McDonald's if I have to punch buttons on a Kiosk to get my food I'll just go home and have a Marie Callender's TV dinner. Without the service what is it really? Just some marginal food in a paper bag or on a plastic tray. Maybe this will wake the public up to they fact they're paying for garbage. I see a silver lining here.
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at McDonald's if I have to punch buttons on a Kiosk to get my food I'll just go home and have a Marie Callender's TV dinner.
Not me. I want to have social engagement with my friends and family, not some pimple faced cashier at McDonalds. The kiosk is faster, more accurate, and saves money. I also use the ATM at the bank, and the self-checkout at the grocery store. I hate having some cashier pawing over my stuff and making snide comments like "Extra small condoms, huh ... and a twelve pack, so that should last you, what, six months!" Grrr.
Re:please do this for all places (Score:5, Insightful)
In some restaurants I see customer scrolling from page to page to find the thing that they want
The UIs will improve. But customers will also get better at using the kiosks. At first, many people had problems accepting and dealing with bank ATMs. Even today, some people have problems with self-checkout at grocery stores, even though the UIs have improved.
There were even problems getting people to accept "department stores" where you could actually WALK INTO THE STORE and pick your items off a shelf, rather than handing your list to a clerk at the front counter, and then waiting while your items were retrieved.
Re:please do this for all places (Score:4, Insightful)
Olive Garden: Prepared and frozen in a factory, and then thawed out just for you!
You're already paying them to warm up a TV dinner/pasta-in-a-bag meal for you. The main difference between Olive Garden and McDonald's is pricing and plating: It's the same factory-food, either way.
There's plenty of places (some near you, no doubt) which do offer fresh food, and service to match. Olive Garden is not amongst them.
Please pick something worthwhile to complain about other than a corporate chain behaving like a corporate chain, and stop embarrassing your wife.
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Automation nation (Score:3)
Well, look. If you keep them around, you get poorly taken orders and poorly prepared meals. They get a wage. You get inconsistent, often poor, meals that may or may not be exactly what you ordered. You aren't grateful to them or particularly appreciative of what they do.
If you let them go off and exist on welfare, they still get a wage. But you get a properly taken order, and a meal cooked in a consist
Re:please do this for all places (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd say just automate the whole thing and get rid of people altogether, but then they'd just be on welfare.
This is the Lump of Labor Fallacy [wikipedia.org]. There is not a fixed number of jobs in the economy, and eliminating a particular job does not mean "one less job". These kiosks lower costs, and those costs will go to the customers (as lower prices) or the owners (as higher profits). Either way, someone will have more money in their pocket, and will spend that money on other goods, services or investments, generating jobs elsewhere in the economy.
Dead end make-work jobs are not "good for the economy", and the point of work is to create goods and services, not to "keep people busy".
Re:please do this for all places (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the Lump of Labor Fallacy [wikipedia.org]. There is not a fixed number of jobs in the economy, and eliminating a particular job does not mean "one less job".
I think you mean that it doesn't necessarily mean one less job. There is a possibility it means that. For example, the business could pocket the extra profit and hoard it rather than reinvest.
Either way, someone will have more money in their pocket, and will spend that money on other goods, services or investments, generating jobs elsewhere in the economy.
As stated above: there is no requirement that the money saved gets spent anywhere. The business could pocket the profit and do nothing with it.
This is actually a growing concern of late, as we have seen a number of top businesses start to hoard cash - the best example of which would be Apple, which is sitting on over $200 Billion [cnbc.com].
Dead end make-work jobs are not "good for the economy", and the point of work is to create goods and services, not to "keep people busy".
It's certainly the ideal that everyone works to create more wealth overall. We can hope that automation starts to open up new markets like technological advances of the past did, but we should prepare for the possibility that it won't.
If the worst happens, and we end up with a growing group of poor, hungry individuals, then make work projects could be better than inviting future civil unrest. That's somewhat of a moot point, though, as there is plenty of neglected infrastructure that we as a country could start training and paying people to repair.
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we have seen a number of top businesses start to hoard cash - the best example of which would be Apple, which is sitting on over $200 Billion.
When a normal person uses the word "cash" they are referring to actual currency, such as coins and paper bills. That is NOT what Apple and other corporations are accumulating. Their "cash" is actually bonds ... which are an investment. So the problem is not that they are "hoarding cash", but that they are investing outside America (because of our idiotic tax laws).
We can hope that automation starts to open up new markets like technological advances of the past did, but we should prepare for the possibility that it won't.
That may be a problem in the future, but it not a problem today. We have a mostly full-employment economy. Although people replaced by kiosk
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This is actually a growing concern of late, as we have seen a number of top businesses start to hoard cash
Pretty sure they don't have $200 billion in $100 bills sitting in a vault somewhere. So who the fuck cares if the "hoard" cash, if by "hoarding cash" they have it invested in stocks, bonds and bank accounts - all of which puts the money back in circulation. When you buy a bond, the guy who sold you the bond spends your money. When you buy stock, the guy who sold it to you spends your money. When you open a bank account, the bank spends your money. GET IT? Stop this lame "saving money is bad" argument. Money
misguided expectations (Score:2)
No I don't think so. When you go to a restaurant part of what you're paying for is the service you can't get at home. Creating a full robot-based restaurant isn't really why people go out to eat at a sit-down restaurant.
And for that, I'd go to a real restaurant where the chef prepares a full course for you (like this French restaurant [r-vb.com] which my wife and visit everytime we go to Tokyo), not the Olive Garden or Cheesecake Factor or Red Lobster or whatever.
For that, shit man, give me a tablet and let me pick and choose (which as the OP said, most restaurants in Japan have it.)
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No I don't think so. When you go to a restaurant part of what you're paying for is the service you can't get at home. Creating a full robot-based restaurant isn't really why people go out to eat at a sit-down restaurant.
And for that, I'd go to a real restaurant where the chef prepares a full course for you (like this French restaurant [r-vb.com] which my wife and visit everytime we go to Tokyo), not the Olive Garden or Cheesecake Factor or Red Lobster or whatever.
For that, shit man, give me a tablet and let me pick and choose (which as the OP said, most restaurants in Japan have it.)
I tend to agree; my wife and kid like Chili's (see what I gotta work with?!?!); but the kiosk idea is acceptable. Our server comes and takes our initial order, if my blood alcohol level drops below the "Ohhhhhh this is great food! Better than I can make level" I simply order a new alcoholic beverage and my server or someone else on staff drops it off. Yes I am a food geek snob :)
At the higher end of the dining out experience, where there is a chef and not just a "cook" and those eateries that actually requi
Re:please do this for all places (Score:4, Interesting)
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Same here. I'm totally Mr. Pink [youtube.com] when it comes to tipping.
Re:please do this for all places (Score:5, Insightful)
and I hate tipping.
Then quit allowing restaurants to pay servers USD $2.13 an hour and cut the tips.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: please do this for all places (Score:4, Insightful)
Olive Garden is cheap industrial Italian food. You went to a mass-market corporate restaurant and got treated like you went to a mass-market corporate restaurant. It ought to be expected, like the sodium.
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Olive Garden is cheap industrial Italian food. You went to a mass-market corporate restaurant and got treated like you went to a mass-market corporate restaurant. It ought to be expected, like the sodium.
Yeah, that post reminds me of people who think Red Lobster or PF Chang are examples of Haute cuisine :/
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I don't understand that restaurant. Its the Chef Boy Ardee of Italian food.
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About the same value for money. Both are terrible and almost inedible. But Boyardee's stuff is much cheaper.
The worst part about OG isn't the food, it's that they think it's worth $30-40 per person. Don't even have kitchens, just microwave and boiling centers. I don't understand how they stay in business...any of the 'mid-priced corporate' chains, uniformly terrible and there is always local competition next door that's much better for the price.
To OG's credit, they have started to run ads _claiming_ t
Re: please do this for all places (Score:3)
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In Japan they often have a ticket machine where you select your order and pay. Saves the staff from having to handle cash so they can concentrate on serving and preparing food.
These are fast food restaurants, although it's Japanese fast food that is generally quite healthy.
Also, they give you warm, damp towels before you eat. We need to adopt that.
Re:please do this for all places (Score:5, Funny)
Would you accept a warm damp towel from a McDonald's employee?
Re: please do this for all places (Score:4, Funny)
"Once you go Japanese, you can't go back" said no one, ever.
And who will you complain to (Score:2)
And who will you complain to when the food is shit* or the order is wrong?
What happens when it takes your money and goes "beep" but delivers no food? Who will take your complaint?
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*shittier than normal, that is
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In the restaurants I've seen, the kiosk spits out a receipt that you can use to pick up your meal at the counter. If there's a problem, it can be resolved there.
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In the restaurants I've seen, the kiosk spits out a receipt that you can use to pick up your meal at the counter. If there's a problem, it can be resolved there.
Probably because that's the way it's built already and this is a trial. If they're doing away with the ordering and that's a success I'm sure they'll put it in vending machine style cubes, you get an order reference number and it'll light up, scan the receipt and collect your tray/doggie bag/burger. In fact if this is the standard production line you could just do it in an app, just grab a seat and punch in your order. Or if you know there's free seats or it's to go you could even order it on the way over t
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Not much different than now (Score:2)
There will still need to be people working, just in a different capacity and much less of them. Now if we were all using the Carl's Junior vending machine from Idiocracy, we would have a different discussion. Not that far off mind you, but not quite there yet.
That said, I live in California and hate going to fast food restaurants. Customer service does not usually exist for numerous reasons.
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When I've had issues eating out, I've found that the kitchen is usually very reliable in preparing the order they're actually given. The error usually comes from it being entered into their system incorrectly; whether it's waiter/cashier for fat-fingering when entering it, or the customer not understanding what they're ordering in the first place (And then trying to blame the employees for their own error.). So if I had to venture a guess, I'd say that, once there's enough data, the numbers will show that
Unskilled labor mostly going away... (Score:5, Interesting)
Unskilled labor is going to mostly disappear except for those tasks where it just isn't possible to automate. A "livable" wage for a task that can be done by a machine is a pipe dream. That's just reality. All the kicking and screaming and class warfare rhetoric isn't going to change it or delay the outcome.
So to that I say, please do go ahead and keep raising the minimum wage. That may actually accelerate the process. The displaced workers will either skill up or you'll see a reverse migration to places where the cost of living and level of automation will make it possible for unskilled workers to survive.
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Unskilled labor is going away? But then what will all of the out-of-work politicians do?
Actually what you'll probably see (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Actually what you'll probably see (Score:4, Informative)
It can't happen in the U.S. because the wealthy here haven't been an exclusive group for a long time. Most people in the U.S. lead fully productive lives (by modern standards - $53k/yr GDP per capita). Consequently, most of the economic activity in the U.S. is from average (and even low) income people buying stuff. If you look at the IRS income tax statistics [irs.gov], a full 44% of gross individual income goes to people making less than $100k/yr. 68% by people making less than $200k/yr. If you say "the wealthy" comprises anyone making over $1 million/yr, they account for less than 10% of U.S. income.
This means that in order for those U.S. millionaires (and billionaries) to stay millionaires, people with lower income must maintain their income so they can continue to buy the stuff that the millionaires are selling. If everyone but the millionaires in Mexico and Brazil lost their jobs, it wouldn't affect most of those millionaires' incomes since they're mostly selling to each other. If everyone but the millionaires in the U.S. lost their jobs, the millionaires would panic because 90% of their income comes from selling to those now-unemployed people.
If the U.S. were to fall into brutal repression like Central and South America with widescale loss of jobs, it would result in about an 80% reduction in GDP per capita, meaning those millionaires would lose about 80% of their income. They don't want that. They want to see the lower and middle classes continue to make decent incomes almost as much as the lower and middle classes do. If widescale job losses were to begin among the middle and lower classes in the U.S., the wealthy would start to panic as the loss of customers affected their bottom lines. And you'd see all income classes in the U.S. working together to figure out ways to get those people employed again.
You can see the same thing if you compare GDP (PPP) per capita [worldbank.org] - the mean - vs the median income [wikipedia.org]. The mean spreads the income of the wealthy across all citizens, while the median tells you how much income the 50th percentile citizen is making. The ratio of the two gives you a sense how much the economy is skewed towards the wealthy. For the U.S., these numbers are a mean of $56,115.7 vs a median of $30,960. A 1.81 ratio. For Mexico it's $16,988.4* mean vs $5,160 median, a 3.29 ratio, indicating a much larger share of each worker's productivity is diverted into income for the wealthy. (And for comparison, since everyone seems to like comparing the U.S. with the Scandinavian countries, the ratios for Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Demark are 1.63, 1.79, 1.72, and 1.77.)
* (Yes $16,988.4 is different from $10,300. Difference between nominal and PPP GDP.)
Straw men ahoy! (Score:3)
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More human work? (Score:5, Informative)
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Or just work faster [youtube.com]
Re:More human work? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not necessarily. If food is faster, it might make it more likely for some people who might otherwise keep lunch meats in their refrigerators and a loaf of bread on their countertop.
But in practice, yes, it probably does. And of course the next step is to automate the making of the sandwiches, at which point there won't be a human in the place other than maybe the person who cleans the tables and bathrooms (and only until they perfect the self-busing table). At that point, the destruction of those low-end jobs becomes near-total. In the long term, the only jobs available for humans will be:
That's about it. I might have left out a few things, but that's about it.
The good news is that this will take longer than most people think. As those displaced workers enter the job market, there will be more people willing to do various jobs, which will bring down the cost of that labor to the minimum wage and make automation much less attractive.
The bad news is that automation will indirectly decrease the number of non-minimum-wage jobs by turning them into minimum-wage jobs.
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Because it is self-evident.
At a macroeconomic level, ROI is meaningless. ROI tells you whether a specific robot in a specific industry makes sense right now. You can't model that more broadly because the cost of every robot is different, and because the cost of technology is con
Re:More human work? (Score:4, Funny)
They could start selling second breakfast.
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I'm sure that by "some" they mean very few. But having said that, the vast majority of meals consumed by my family are cooked at home by someone who is not specifically being paid to do it. If the machines make reasonably priced, reasonable food we would buy more precooked meals, even if we ate them at home.
So I think there is plenty of opportunity for restaurants to increase the number of meals they sell by improving the experience using machines, rather like refrigerated transport and modern packaging imp
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All meals take the same amount of labor to source and prepare?
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I know, it's a total pain in the ass. There was that time I'd been working late and I went to grab a bite on the way home and I couldn't because that day's quota was used up.
"Higher wages", what a joke (Score:2)
Hell, queue in the lines that still have humans, as in the first months they will be running stats to gauge customer reaction.
It's not a bug, it's a feature (Score:5, Insightful)
You made a modest proposal (Score:2)
If anything, this suggests that we need to raise wages globally so we'll actually quit wasting so much human effort.
When the human effort is no longer needed, unskilled humans are no longer needed by society. So as you increase automation you also need to eliminate the superfluous humans.
Re: You made a modest proposal (Score:3)
The next time I go to one of these food establishments, I'm going to do my bit: I'll use the kiosk to order some Soylent Green.
Re:It's not a bug, it's a feature (Score:4, Interesting)
All these people whining about minimum wage increases causing more automation like it's a bad thing. You've all got it backwards. Human labor has been undervalued, so nobody bothered to put effort into being more efficient.
"Automation" is a bit of stretch here -- we're talking about self-service ordering kiosks. This is effectively just turning around the screen the employee would have used to enter my order and making me use it instead. In most cases that's going to result in a net decrease in efficiency, not an increase. This should be clear enough to anyone who has stood in line watching people endlessly screw around at self-checkout kiosks at a grocery store.
Has nothing to do with minimum wage (Score:2, Insightful)
Minimum wage has only in some cities, it is absolute 100% crap that this has anything to do with the minimum wage. With the current administration there is 0% chance the federal minimum wage will go up.
Sure businesses would like to use this as an argument against higher wages but they will 100% do this because it saves money *now*. Not as a hedge against some future increase. Businesses don't spend money unless it makes sense to do so, and in this case they believe this is the best choice.
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Can't stand kiosks... (Score:2)
I don't know about anyone else but I can't stand the kiosks at Panera. I to be able to order and pay faster with a human than scrolling through endless pages on their tablets. Hopefully they'll get better over time.
Now get off my lawn, you damn kids.
Re:Can't stand kiosks... (Score:4, Funny)
What they need is an app so you can prepare your order on your phone with a quick pick menu that consists of things you've ordered before.
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I assume at some point they will have facial and voice recognition as an option. It will be comedic though (at first, until they come up with a solution), I imagine a restaurant like Panera has lots of menu items ripe for mispronunciation.
Problem (Score:2)
Kiosks are so last year (Score:5, Informative)
Privacy is so this year and every year. (Score:2)
In other words, kiosks help you preserve more of your locational privacy in exchange for a minor wait you can definitely afford (I'm guessing around 10 minutes or less). Consumers are trained to think that their convenience should come at whatever price is offered and that's not wise. In the case of running apps on your computer you're also possibly handing over your mic data, address book data, and anything else you're doing with your tracker. That app is proprietary, so you're speaking beyond your knowled
Humans v Robots (Score:2)
"In some cases this means more work for human employees. Quartz points out that McDonalds doesn't plan to reduce its workforce after installing kiosks, and Panera Bread "has said that at some locations where it has ordering kiosks, it has actually increased human hours to help the kitchen keep up with the higher number of orders that come in through the more efficient ordering system."
Um, no, that is not what it means. Doing more orders with the same people is exactly the same thing as reducing human employ
Complaint (Score:3)
I called that damn robot a tin can of malfunctioning sprockets and he motor oiled into my pizza.
Min. wage does not matter (Score:4, Informative)
A friend has opened three (under contract to open three) "specialty" fast food restaurants. His biggest problem by far & he has a lot of problems, is the difficulty in hiring people. If he does get a good worker, he can find himself in bidding wars with other restaurants. All of his stores are in more affluent areas so local kids are not interested. He can't get away with paying any employee minimum wage. It seems that unless a employer is based in a low income, high unemployment area, minimum wage means nothing, they gotta pay more, sometimes a LOT more.
Them lines go out the door but he is not making any money so far because of his labor costs as they are a lot higher than his business model forecasts predicted. But damn does he work his ass off!
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Why do I think? Without data gained from peer reviewed, replicated studies I can only say: I don't know.
My opinion for whatever that is worth... it's the money. It always the money. Minimum wage has been suppressed for so long that it just does not pay enough to make it worth some unskilled worker (regardless of age). How do they get there? It's not enough to pay for a car. I stated these stores are in affluent areas. The younger folks won't bother at those wages. The workers that would can't get
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Methinks they should look at automating the back end - the cooking, the food processing and so on. The ordering kiosks are fine, but if there is a barrage of orders, that can be overwhelming on the cooks. Instead, have an order to delivery system where the customer customizes and orders the meal, which is then received by the kitchen and they deliver that beer battered fish w/ french onion soup and baked fries instead of either french fries or mashed potatoes.
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Re:But lets raise minimum wage! -'earn'? (Score:4, Insightful)
If someone wins the lottery you say 'wow good for them! All their needs are met!' But if someone were to work for 1 hour and meet all their needs for a whole week, suddenly this is 'wrong'?
Of course it's wrong. When you look at the lottery winner, you're forgetting about the 10 million or so other people who bought a ticket and lost. There's no free ride. The lottery company made a profit. The winner keeps a bit of money. And all the losers paid for it.
Hey don't get me wrong I would love to live in a world where I could meet all my needs by working 1 hour per week. However it doesn't work that way. Perhaps one day, when automation has reached a point where everything basically runs itself and all people need to do is a bit of tweaking here and there. But not yet.
Re:But lets raise minimum wage! -'earn'? (Score:5, Insightful)
Libertarians would have us live in a dog-eat-dog society. They ignore the rule of law that allows them their freedom. And they'd like everyone armed to the teeth to defend their property.
They'd like everyone to have the right to be bankrupted due to medical issues. Social Security and Medicare keep Grandma off the Libertarians' front lawns. In Ayn Rand's world, airlines could allow for a certain number of plane crashes a year consistent with their profit margins due to customers deciding not to fly and employees finding alternate jobs. Smog and pollution would exist only up to a threshold number of deaths due to pollution. Mercury would not be a controlled pollutant; if you ingest too much, it be your own fault. What? You didn't know you were eating it in that seafood? How come you didn't pull out your home chemistry kit and do your own testing?
What Libertarians do not get is statistics. If you ignore statistics, then you get the every doofus for himself mentality. If you pay attention to statistics, a lot of government programs make sense.
Re:But lets raise minimum wage! -'earn'? (Score:5, Insightful)
What Libertarians do not get is statistics.
Just taking a good look at the Prisoner's Dilemma and Tragedy of the Commons should be enough to understand that you need government programs to enforce cooperation for the benefit of all.
Nah, Tragedy of the commons is a red-herring. (Score:2, Insightful)
Nah, Tragedy of the commons is a red-herring.
The simple (simplistic) answer, including the Libertarian one, is to not have a commons. That is - everything privately owned.
Of course in the real world this would leave to massive inequality and unchecked externalities, resulting in extensive pollution and death on a huge scale. Huge!
The real issues are more complex, and mostly have to do with externalities. Using a court system to manage these as opposed to legislation and regulation is the stock Libertarian a
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Yes! People in contrived situations frequently need contrived answers. They should teach young people how to avoid being a character in a simplistic parable.
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You are wrong. Libertarians feel that private industry can do things better than the government.
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The problem is that, absent corruption, it is not true that private is automatically better then public. Any efficiencies are just siphoned off as profit and remove control from the public. Even with corruption, the private business will just corrupt the government to give the business an advantage.
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Libertarians tend to weigh everything in monetary terms, and tend to overvalue the contributions of people with higher wages, which allows them to dehumanize low wage earners.
As a libertarian, I value freedom and liberty. I think you have a fundamental right to live your life free from outside meddling to the greatest extent possible.
When I talk about choices, it's easy to talk about possible outcomes in terms of dollars. But that's not the only important measure. Individual happiness and satisfaction are the real end goals. I don't presume to know what will make you happy and I'd prefer you let me make my own decisions about that, thank you very much.
My experience lo these many
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Can you provide an actual statistical analysis of your conclusion, or is your entire world view based on a limited number of anecdotes?
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Can you provide an actual statistical analysis of your conclusion
Are you serious? Do you also need "statistical analysis" that the earth isn't flat? Look at any measure of economic freedom, such as the Ease of Doing Business Index [wikipedia.org], which measures the burden of government regulation and corruption. The top ten are: New Zealand, Singapore, Denmark, Hong Kong, South Korea, Norway, United Kingdom, United States, and Sweden. These are all prosperous countries. The bottom ten are: Haiti, Angola, Afghanistan, Congo, Central African Republic, South Sudan, Venezuela, Libya,
Re:But lets raise minimum wage! -'earn'? (Score:5, Insightful)
How terrible! We should stamp out morals and ethics right away.
Re:But lets raise minimum wage! -'earn'? (Score:4, Insightful)
How terrible! We should stamp out morals and ethics right away.
What I meant was more along the lines of "I think X is bad. Ban it!" where X is in "dancing", "drinking", "women voting", "pacifism", "homosexuality", "women's voting rights", and so on.
Morals and ethics are a find thing. They're the only thing which makes society work. Just let's please agree where yours end, mine begin, and what are the ones we agree on.
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Libertarians tend to weigh everything in monetary terms, and tend to overvalue the contributions of people with higher wages, which allows them to dehumanize low wage earners.
As a libertarian, I value freedom and liberty. I think you have a fundamental right to live your life free from outside meddling to the greatest extent possible.
When I talk about choices, it's easy to talk about possible outcomes in terms of dollars. But that's not the only important measure. Individual happiness and satisfaction are the real end goals. I don't presume to know what will make you happy and I'd prefer you let me make my own decisions about that, thank you very much.
My experience lo these many years shows that increasing liberty and trusting people tends to lead to greater happiness, serenity, and wealth for the most people. Meddling seems very frequently to be motivated by moral/ethical judgement, paternalism, tribalism, fear, and greed. At this point, I just don't trust anyone who's saying they need to butt in for someone else's good. I'm always looking for their ulterior motive and too often, I find one.
Since we live in an imperfect world of scarcity, it seems inevitable there will be those who aren't happy and aren't wealthy, for many reasons. As someone who likes to think of himself as caring and compassionate (and I know I'm fooling myself), I get great fulfillment helping those people out.
You experience? Your experience doing what? Seeing what? Measuring what and how?
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I get great fulfillment helping those people out.
You can help out an armed robber by giving him all your possessions. Feels great, I bet.
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As a libertarian, I value freedom and liberty. I think you have a fundamental right to live your life free from outside meddling to the greatest extent possible.
Individual happiness and satisfaction are the real end goals. I don't presume to know what will make you happy and I'd prefer you let me make my own decisions about that, thank you very much.
Sure, but an independent (for lack of a better word) arbiter, like the government, is needed to ensure that one's freedom, liberty, happiness and satisfaction doesn't unfairly usurp another's. Even your own decisions about your own affairs can have external affects. Perhaps government is required for the cooperative iberty of all it's people.
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True, history shows that private industry is corrupt, will break and bend whatever rules it can, and acts against the interests of society. Lack of an arbiter like the government leads to monopolies, low wages, child labor, unsafe workplaces, and so forth.
The problem is that governments are just as prone to corruption (and democide...more people are killed by their own governments than in wars) and worse, and they have a monopoly on the use of violence. There are the same ratios of 'good' and 'bad' people in both government and the private sector. Government and those in it are not any better than corporations and those in the private sector. In fact, I would argue government is far worse.
Walmart isn't going to send a SWAT team to raid my house and shoot my
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Most libertarians I know believe in the sanctity of contracts and support having a government civil court system to enforce those contracts. Of course, there are many different flavors of libertarians and some do believe in anarchy with no laws but I don't believe that is the majority.
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yet fast food prices keep going up and up and portions keep getting smaller and smaller
And yet people keep getting fatter and fatter. You'd think that lower wages, higher prices and smaller portions would lead to the opposite.
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Iin places like Australia they pay $14+ per hour to fast food workers, and somehow the price of a value meal is the same there as it is here.
It's kinda sad, IMO, that this has to explained. Even once.
It's actually kinda sad that it has to be explained -- even once -- that there's no such thing as a free lunch. The reality behind your misleading statistic [theatlantic.com] has been well understood for years now:
To start, some Australians actually make less than the adult minimum wage. The country allows lower pay for teenagers, and the labor deal McDonald's struck with its employees currently pays 16-year-olds roughly US$8 an hour, not altogether different from what they'd make in the states. In an email, Greg Bamber, a professor at Australia's Monash University who has studied labor relations in the country's fast food industry, told me that as a result, McDonald's relies heavily on young workers in Australia.
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Re: Thanks Obama! (Score:2)
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Funny thing, they're putting in robots even in places that did not change the minimum wage. Almost as if the decision has nothing to do with increasing the minimum wage.
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Oh, please. A kiosk in a fast-food restaurant operates what, 12 hours a day, 365 days a year? That's 4,380 hours per year. If they only last for a year and cost as much as $20K to install and operate for that year, they're cheaper than someone making $5/hr. Automation was inevitable regardless of wages.
Re:About fucking time (Score:5, Funny)
Humans are far too smart, innovative, aspiring and complex
You need to meet more humans.
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You need a base of unskilled workers to finance the society, or otherwise expect to be robbed in taxes and negative interest for the gov to hand them subsidies.
So your argument is that we're going to be paying unskilled people anyway, we may as well make them do something? Personally, if we're going to pay them anyway then I'd rather that we build efficient systems and treat occupying the time of people who can't contribute usefully to society as a separate problem.