Just 14 People Make 500,000 Tons of Steel a Year in Austria (bloomberg.com) 175
An anonymous reader shares a Bloomberg Businessweek feature: The Austrian village of Donawitz has been an iron-smelting center since the 1400s, when ore was dug from mines carved out of the snow-capped peaks nearby. Over the centuries, Donawitz developed into the Hapsburg Empire's steel-production hub, and by the early 1900s it was home to Europe's largest mill. With the opening of Voestalpine AG's new rolling mill this year, the industry appears secure. What's less certain are the jobs. The plant, a two-hour drive southwest of Vienna, will need just 14 employees to make 500,000 tons of robust steel wire a year -- vs. as many as 1,000 in a mill with similar capacity built in the 1960s. Inside the facility, red-hot metal snakes its way along a 700-meter (2,297-foot) production line. Yet the floors are spotless, the only noise is a gentle hum that wouldn't overwhelm a quiet conversation, and most of the time the place is deserted except for three technicians who sit high above the line, monitoring output on a bank of flatscreens. "We have to forget steel as a core employer," says Wolfgang Eder, Voestalpine's chief executive officer for the past 13 years. "In the long run we will lose most of the classic blue-collar workers, people doing the hot and dirty jobs in coking plants or around the blast furnaces. This will all be automated."
So what happened to all the employers? (Score:3)
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Let us know how that turns out for you. I recommend finishing the chocolate bar before moving on to the second task.
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Don't think on that too hard! (hah!)
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Knowing Austria and how they handle things like that, I bet they are now tourist guides showing Americans how lovely and picturesque steel cooking was back in the old days, or they're sitting in a bank somewhere and counting money.
Basically, tourism and banking is nearly all that's happening in that country...
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We're not THAT rich ;-)
I never thought of Austria as a "banking country" like Switzerland.
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I did a quick dive, and it seems that this is a new plant, not replacing an existing one. However there are existing plants that employ another 2700 people, with another 300 working in shipping and logistics for materials. (Population seems to be in the mid 4,000 people.) If the 2700 employed in the older plants are replaced by automation like this one, there won't be much left to do, it seems.
So no, no data point for the "they'll find other jobs/they need UBI" debate.
Re:So what happened to all the employers? (Score:5, Informative)
I grew up in Trofaiach, the town next to Donawitz (less than 10km from the steel plant). My grandfather worked there as an electrician from the 1950s to the 1990s. While I did visit the local Erzberg musem (there's an ore mining operation ~30km north of Donawitz in a town called Eisenerz where they have the kind of museums and parks you'd expect a site with such a rich history to have) during my childhood, I can't really remember what it was supposed to be like during the rule of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy - but the latest developments in the are are not very pretty.
Both Leoben (the city that Donawitz is a part of) and Eisenerz shed a MASSIVE amount of population - in the 1970s, Eisenerz was at ~15k inhabitants, while these days, I think it's less than 7k. Leoben fell from 42k people to ~18k or so. Since the steel industry has been privatized in the 1980s, thousands of jobs have been cut, while corporate profits soared - so whoever is still there and still has a job is pretty well off still. All in all, however, the whole Bundesland (federal state) of Steiermark/Styria (this is where Arnold is from :)), is pretty much perceived to be in a downward spiral since then, due to market forces at work - industry is lot cheaper to do elsewhere, and you can only compete so much on superior quality of product alone.
Re:So what happened to all the employers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just go look at the older coal towns.(or mining) I've seen many through out the US.
They've dried up, the place remains a sad shell dependent on outside help. Many state and other officials try making deals with move in other industry, but it's never enough.
For example: Here in Utah, Price was a once such a town. They got Sorenson Communications to build a TTY(a deaf text to phone service) it still dries up.(w/ text being replaced by video)
Jobs don't materialize just because there are people wanting work. And not every person can be trained to do every position.
Better ask about the 3rd world immigrants (Score:2)
I haven't gone looking, but I'd be interested to see what happened to the economy of a 600+ year old steel town.
That's an interesting question, but not the central one here, looking at the big picture.
People in the West fret about machines taking their jobs...but it's not people in the West who are going to be most affected. Yes, there will be people who will be stuck "in between" - their jobs will be automated away, but they will be too old / not adept enough to retrain for a new job (or simply, no one will want to hire them even if they do, for whatever reason). Western countries are however rich enough to take car
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Granted, the smelting plant itself may have moved from 1000 employees down to 14, but I seriously doubt that those 14 also mine the ore from the ground, operate the transport trucks and trains, manufacture and maintain the vehicles and road/railways, do the mine restoration work when the mine closes, personally deliver the finished product to the next step of the supply chain, etc.
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No matter the supplier etc jobs, the bottom line is that 986 jobs don't exist that otherwise would. Those other jobs too will be or have been automated away, or still exist, regardless, they are irrelevant to the topic at hand.
Re:So what happened to all the employers? (Score:5, Informative)
I believe the headline says "Just 14 people make 500,000 tons of steel...".
This is wrong. These people are not making steel. They take steel that somebody else has made and turn it into wire.
They are making wire, not steel.
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Do we a) see people finding new work or b) see massive unemployment and as the plant owners get rich while everyone else becomes homeless?
In this particular case it is a) and not b). The steel mill is heavily subsidized, and may still be losing money. No one is getting rich. Meanwhile, Austrian unemployment is at 5.7%, which is low by European standards, and Donawitz is in easy commuting distance of plenty of opportunities. Or people can move to Vienna, which is 90 minutes away.
Both arguments get made regularly on Slashdot.
Those arguments are about widespread changes throughout an economy, not a single isolated factory. Of course there will be other jobs if one factory automates. B
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Of course there will be other jobs if one factory automates. But what happens when they ALL automate?
Then we will have reached the next level. There's no fundamental law of nature that we as a species need factories staffed by people.
There WAS a time, in our past, where there was not a single factory in existence.
So it will be just the next transition on the scale of moving from No Factories to large Workshops to Human production lines, and finally to Automated manufacture, with similar scale of ram
Re: So what happened to all the employers? (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, in such environment --- nobody will get rich selling the spoils from their factories, unless there's an economy of people to buy their products (If not, then the price will go down, until it approaches the now lower marginal cost of production which has been reduced due to the lower labor requirement).
Agreed. So, where will all these people with ready cash for buying the products get their cash from? You no doubt understand that there must be a significant volume of people making purchases so it can't be the 1% which sustain these factories. How will a significant portion of the 99% be able to make purchases when we reach this "next level" of which you speak? What is this next level? How does the transition to it begin and how do we all get the signal that we need to move to it? What or who makes the first moves?
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Agreed. So, where will all these people with ready cash for buying the products get their cash from?
I dunno. But in the past, no one predicted that people displaced by farm and factory automation would become pizza deliverers, system admins, and graphic artists.
How will a significant portion of the 99% be able to make purchases when we reach this "next level" of which you speak?
Most likely they will still have jobs. Plenty of jobs would require full "strong AI" to automate, and that isn't going to happen based on current technology.
Even if a job CAN be done by a machine, doesn't mean it will be. Near my house is an automated "sushi boat" restaurant. There are no waitresses. A little boat brings the meal to my table.
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The value of something is what you can get for it on the market. The inputs have nothing to do with the value, except that it likely won't be made in the first place if the thing's value isn't greater than the sum of the value of the inputs.
Marx was wrong about _everything_. He's batting 0.000 on historical predictions.
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The value of something is what you can get for it on the market. The inputs have nothing to do with the value, except that it likely won't be made in the first place if the thing's value isn't greater than the sum of the value of the inputs.
Marx was wrong about _everything_. He's batting 0.000 on historical predictions.
Not value... price. The cost of something is the sum of its inputs. The price is that you can get for it in the market. The value... is in the eye of the beholder.
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The 'eye of the beholder' argument still puts sets the value at 'market price'. The one who thinks it's worth the most, gets it. See also 'Wealth of Nations', not 'das Kapital'. Par particular attention to the concept of 'demand curve'.
The cost of something is the sum of the inputs. Each of those inputs, including labor, are priced on a market.
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The one who thinks it's worth the most, gets it.
... and the one who thinks it is worth the least makes the sale.
Each of those inputs, including labor, are priced on a market.
Traditionally, this has been "Land, Labor, and Capital", where land includes minerals and other natural resources. But modern goods have
less and less value from "land" and capital. For instance, the "land" value of the raw materials to make an iPhone is less than 1% of its value. Apple uses no capital to make it, since contracting manufacturing is cheaper and is less than 5% of the value. By far the biggest shares of the value are the labor
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Also, in such environment --- nobody will get rich selling the spoils from their factories, unless there's an economy of people to buy their products (If not, then the price will go down, until it approaches the now lower marginal cost of production which has been reduced due to the lower labor requirement).
Agreed. So, where will all these people with ready cash for buying the products get their cash from? You no doubt understand that there must be a significant volume of people making purchases so it can't be the 1% which sustain these factories. How will a significant portion of the 99% be able to make purchases when we reach this "next level" of which you speak? What is this next level? How does the transition to it begin and how do we all get the signal that we need to move to it? What or who makes the first moves?
That's easy.
We just tax the 1% and redistribute the money to everyone else. Then everyone will have lots of money to buy stuff.
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Agreed. So, where will all these people with ready cash for buying the products get their cash from? You no doubt understand that there must be a significant volume of people making purchases so it can't be the 1% which sustain these factories. How will a significant portion of the 99% be able to make purchases when we reach this "next level" of which you speak? What is this next level? How does the transition to it begin and how do we all get the signal that we need to move to it? What or who makes the first moves?
That's easy.
We just tax the 1% and redistribute the money to everyone else. Then everyone will have lots of money to buy stuff.
Yeah, the 1% will readily give up their massive wealth without a fight. Maybe after we get the guillotines nice and broken in, maybe then they'll agree. I say we tax them at about a 99.99% rate on earnings and wealth, that ought to be about right. Is that roughly in line with what you were thinking?
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Back in the good old days (Eisenhower), the top tax rate was 90%. It worked really well then. Lots of jobs, prosperity, public works, etc.
Reagan started to lower top rates and it's been downhill ever since.
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Yeah, and Reagan (the alzheimer's poster geriatric-boy) is somehow the patron saint of the morons who fantasize that they are fiscally conservative and that their trickle-down economics bullshit is going to somehow work. They just think they haven't concentrated the top highly enough and as soon as they do it will be rainbows and unicorns for everyone. They are literally as bad as the communist idealists, possibly worse as they may actually be actively evil.
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So, it sounds like you agree. The tax rules have driven the insane level of wealth inequality and income disparity. That and the view that all employees should not be seen as part of the company. Hopefully some equally charismatic genius will help turn the ship around and lead to more in-sourcing of non-core functions. However, that still isn't going to bring back the jobs that automation is destroying and will continue to destroy at an ever-increasing pace. It would be nice if we could bring back secr
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Services. The US economy is 80% service based. It may sound silly but this is probably sustainable as people specialize more they will hire other people to do the tasks those people have specialized in. The automated factories will still require techs to service them, programmers to automate them, people to upgrade them, scientists to improve them. Etc, etc, etc.
One of the prime examples is the automotive sector when in the past when automation deployed into the auto factories it displaced large numbers of
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Services. The US economy is 80% service based. It may sound silly but this is probably sustainable as people specialize more they will hire other people to do the tasks those people have specialized in.
So, you're saying it's turtles all the way down? It was silly at holding up the earth and it is silly in this context. At some point, someone has to have a real job that produces something to earn money.
The automated factories will still require techs to service them, programmers to automate them, people to upgrade them, scientists to improve them. Etc, etc, etc.
This argument neglects the basic fact that virtually all jobs can and will be automated away. Service techs? Yes, automated away. Programmers? Yes, automated away. Upgrades, same. Scientists, yes, automated away by increasingly self improving and creative AI. Self-awareness is not a requirement for
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Programmers? Yes, automated away.
Programming is not going to be automated away by computers until those computers are capable of "Strong AI", which at this point is pure science fiction. If that happens, we will have reached the singularity, and the world will be so profoundly different that anything you conjecture about "jobs" or anything else is just silly.
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You see the same with programmers. With each new framework, with each new testing suite, code profiler etc.pp., the number of people necessary to develop and maintain a given project is reduced. While programmers will be needed in the foreseeable future, their number might be much less than today.
This assumes the projects will stay the same in complexity and in numbers.
At least at my work, for almost every project, there's a large number of things the client would love to have but which we can't do because it would require too much manpower and thus is too expensive for the client. Some projects are just too expensive in total, so never gets off the ground.
So I think the increase in productivity would be offset by an increase in overall project complexity, and in the number of projects that become
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many tasks in programming get automated and will be further automated
This has already happened. Programming is way more automated today than it was 40 years ago. Yet the number of programmers employed has increased by orders of magnitude.
thus reducing the necessary work hours to complete a given project.
No. Projects will just expand in scope and complexity. This has also already happened.
While programmers will be needed in the foreseeable future, their number might be much less than today.
More likely it will be much more than today.
Jevon's Paradox [wikipedia.org] applies to programmers. As they become more efficient and productive, it becomes more profitable to employ them, and demand goes UP.
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Universal Basic Income. Makes the transition much less painless, provides a regulated market to help determine demand and keep producers competitive, thus avoiding the pitfalls of applied communism.
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the cost of food in this country has been steadily rising even as most other costs have stagnated or declined.
in 1960, 18% of per capita income was spent on food in the US. Today, it is 10%, and the selection of food is far larger.
Inflation-adjusted food prices are lower now than in 1980. There was a rise from 2002-2010, but the trend has returned to downward since then.
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Increasing the population by importing migrants disrupts the cycle, especially when the migrants are unskilled.
Historically, that has self-corrected as well. When the 2008 great recession hit, and demand for unskilled labor dropped, plenty of Mexicans returned home. The same thing happened in Britain when unemployed "Polish plumbers" took Ryan Air back to Warsaw, to ride out the recession where the cost of living is lower.
One problem with improved border security is that it makes it harder for workers to move back and forth across the border, incentivising them to stay in America, and bring their families here, ra
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Or people can move to Vienna, which is 90 minutes away.
Or move to the UK - quick before Brexit!
No worry (Score:5, Funny)
It's OK because Donald Trump will retrain the steel workers so they can get a job at Blockbuster Video.
Wait a second... (Score:5, Funny)
Why didn't they just employ thousands of people that just work for a few minutes a day? [slashdot.org] Oh yeah, reality kicked in. -_-
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Given Austria and its rather funny way to deal with unions (they have kinda-like a government run union that everyone who has a job has to be a member of... don't ask) that's probably what's really going on behind the scenes.
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Paying unemployment insurance is not a union.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Second sentence in your link: Membership is compulsory for all employees working in Austria, and it is thus not to be confused with Austrian labour unions
(*facepalm*)
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You should know the Arbeiterkammer before you facepalm. They are basically what unions are in other countries.
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No, they are not.
My company is forced to be in a "Handelskammer", too.
You e.g. can not strike on behalf of the "Arbeitskammer", and if you strike while not being in a union no one will pay your "ersatz wages".
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Ok, you actually found the difference.
Everything else you could ask from a union you can get there. Lawyers for work related disputes, information about your rights towards your employer, wage negotiations...
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Did not know that unions provide such services in Austria.
No idea what services they have in Germany, I know no one who is in a union.
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That's some of the services the Chamber of labor provides. Unions provide similar services to their members, too.
Austrians rarely go on strike. Personally, my guess for the reason is that you wouldn't notice the difference...
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People with no jobs and no food take to the streets and demand change.
So a lot of care was taken to look after workers, their rights, conditions, full health cover, pensions. To have a real wage that covered food, rent, transport for all workers.
Free market of ideas but full protections to cover education, work, pensions.
That stopped Communism spreading in the working c
Tell me something I don't know ... (Score:4, Interesting)
"We have to forget steel as a core employer," says Wolfgang Eder, Voestalpine's chief executive officer for the past 13 years. "In the long run we will lose most of the classic blue-collar workers, people doing the hot and dirty jobs in coking plants or around the blast furnaces. This will all be automated."
Tell me something I don't know like, for example, how will the economy work when 90% of the jobs are automated. Will we have a situation like in ancient Rome where the rich people who owned masses of slaves they used to bankrupt small businesses and farmers by undercutting them with cheap labour but then ended up feeding the unemployed citizen masses simply out of a deep rooted and very real fear of the unwashed citizen masses rising up, dragging the moneyed classes out of their luxury villas and either throwing them to the lions or just crucifying them in the atrium of their own luxury villa? Will our unemployed kids and grand kids be living off of handouts from the rich oligarchs who own the automated factories? ... and how will an economy work when only 10% or less of the population are employed either designing new robots or staring at flatscreen making sure that things are running smoothly?
Re:Tell me something I don't know ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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So, while factory owners love the idea of not having to pay salaries, they need people to have enough money to buy their crap.
Yep... which means they will have to lower the prices of the crap they are selling to almost nothing;
at that point, even if all you can find is one-off gigs for a few hours of work a week at minimum wage, then you can still buy stuff,
because the employment deflation will have lowered prices, perhaps.
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That's a nice utopian vision you've got there... I can imagine several other possible outcomes, none of which seem better for the majority of the population.
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Don't worry, we'll all be gainfully employed as artist-prostitutes.
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When will retirement kick in? I'd hate to see a 90 year old prostitute, male or female.
Re: Tell me something I don't know ... (Score:2)
Wait, why can't a robot "purchase" things for itself? I am sure software can be written to mimic a person buying things. Why can't robots be participants in the economy? Of course the wealthy can store their robots' purchases somewhere.
I mean if you think an employee's value comes about from what they purchase in addition to what they make .. why can't a robot do that part too?
I think though that a person is only useful to the wealthy if they can produce something of value to them. They won't need factories
Re: Tell me something I don't know ... (Score:5, Funny)
Why should robots bother doing all that hard work in the first place? They could just hire all the unemployed humans to do it for them.
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Wait, why can't a robot "purchase" things for itself? I am sure software can be written to mimic a person buying things.
I mean if you think an employee's value comes about from what they purchase in addition to what they make .. why can't a robot do that part too?
Because in order for the purchase to be of any value, money would have to be transferred, which means the robot would need a salary in order to make purchases, which means it's no longer cheaper than an employee. This argument makes no sense.
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The factory owners don't need the plebs to buy things. They can just get their factories to make what they want for themselves.
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Artists, scientists, doctors to will be automated away. Now what've you got pal?
Factories aren't needed to produce one-off products, those are mainly artisanal, cottage manufacturers. So essentially, factories will become obsolete if there aren't masses of people ready, willing, and _able_ to make purchases.
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The problem with this argument is it assumes that owning an automated factory = profit. When everyone is unemployed, they stop buying cars. When they stop buying cars, automated factories have to stop making cars. When they stop making cars, they stop buying steel. When they stop buying steel, the steel mill from this story stops making steel. Etc. at some point, they either have to pass some of their savings on to the consumers or close shop, as the consumers will be making next to nothing in the scenario you describe.
That sounds an awful lot like a situation that will reach some sort of equilibrium.
That's now how any of this works (Score:3)
Face it, the Rich don't need you or me. They'll claim ownership of everything and we'll give it to them because we can't bear the thought of somebody having food they didn't work all day for while we toil all day in the few j
Re:Tell me something I don't know ... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Universal Basic Income... it's coming.
Terrible Jobs (Score:5, Informative)
One of the stories involved two coworkers walking on a catwalk above the blast furnace in full heat suits (think Jamie's suit from Mythbusters). One of the workers leaned on the railing and it let go. He was vaporized before he hit the surface of the steel.
The stories like this go on and on. People crushed between rail cars, etc. Sure, the steel industry paid really well, because it had to. The working conditions were so terrible, no one would work there otherwise.
This kind of extreme work environment is ideal for automation. I'd rather see a robot get destroyed in an accident than a person killed.
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I know people that used to work in steel mills years ago. You don't want those jobs! They are horribly dangerous!
One of the stories involved two coworkers walking on a catwalk above the blast furnace in full heat suits (think Jamie's suit from Mythbusters). One of the workers leaned on the railing and it let go. He was vaporized before he hit the surface of the steel.
The stories like this go on and on. People crushed between rail cars, etc. Sure, the steel industry paid really well, because it had to. The working conditions were so terrible, no one would work there otherwise.
This kind of extreme work environment is ideal for automation. I'd rather see a robot get destroyed in an accident than a person killed.
There's a reason unions are strongest in trades like construction, logistics and fabrication. Its because traditionally these were exceptionally dangerous jobs and employers really didn't care as they could easily replace one pleb with another. It took a lot of industrial action to change that.
Also, this is why spending money trying to return basic metalworking and manufacturing to developed nations is a huge waste. The only way these industries can return and remain competitive is by being almost comple
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You've just made the strongest possible argument for why we should spend money returning those industries to developed nations, if indeed it'll force them to automate. Do you enjoy being responsible for the deaths of developing world workers through your purchases?
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Once the capital costs of blast furnaces in China are sunk, it's going to take an improvement in technology before anybody can take the industry back. Even if they change their environmental regulations to parity.
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One of my favorite neighbors is a WWII U.S. Navy veteran. Sometimes I see him out with his Shih Tsu when I am walking my German Shepherd I always take the opportunity to chat.
You do not see many of those out and around today but he is younger than most because he lied about his age to enlist in the Navy young. He grew up in Pittsburgh where the only job he could get was working in the steel mills. He says it was deadly, his fellow workers were so often maimed or killed that he was desperate to get out
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"I'd rather see a robot get destroyed in an accident than a person killed."
That's one way of looking at it. Another perspective is to consider the 1000s of people struggling financially & working long hours at restaurants and Wal Mart with low pay & no benefits. Think of how much sickness, misery and death is caused by financial stress and poverty? Would you rather see that, or a bunch of well paid people with benefits working jobs with a higher risk of workplace accidents? There are tens of mi
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I find it interesting that people drop all pretext of The Perfection of The Market when it comes to automation and elimination of jobs. In many other market situations, it's "hey it's the magic of the market, cheers huzzah!!!". But not for eliminated jobs for some reason...
Job gets eliminated. Do we think "this employee took a rational view of their skillset, jobs available to them, and made the best risk/reward choice they had". No, it's "that's a sucky job, we're doing you a favor by eliminating your
Re:Terrible Jobs (Score:5, Informative)
My father in law worked at the local rail yard. One evening one of the employees was accidentally caught between the couplers as two rail cars were being coupled. His lower torso was completely smashed and compressed in the couplers. Because his lungs and heart were above the couplers, he continued living as the compression of the coupled cars kept him from bleeding out. They called his family and they came over to say their goodbyes. Then they uncoupled the cars and he died. Awful.
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This was a Homicide episode [wikipedia.org]... I like D'Onofrio, and it really hit me. I can't imagine this in real life. Absolutely horrible.
Labor is the only thing people have, to sell (Score:2)
There is only one thing to do to give some hope the wretched masses yearning to breath free.
Make it legal for people to sell any surplus organs they might have. The lazy bums don't need both the left eye and the right eye. Right?
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With the pace of technology given what it is, even body parts won't be worth much for long. Also, the obese type 2 diabetics who are most likely to need organ transplants are mostly the poor who got obese by eating a high-carb (cheap) diet. They aren't going to be able to pay a decent price for kidneys or livers. Or eyballs if that were a feasible transplant. Yes, there are rich fat-fucks like tRumpF around but he is clearly not a person who makes good life choices at any level.
Saw this one coming... (Score:4, Insightful)
If it's dangerous and/or boring, it's better to have a machine do it.
Machines are getting better at a lot of things. My first time through college, I got a decent amount of PLC training, but those units are now entirely obsolete. Machine vision was a thing back then, but you needed a highly-specialized $6,000 ISA card just to grab frames and analyze them. Now, you can do it with a potato-grade webcam and a Raspberry Pi.
I went back to school to get updated on as much as possible since I want to do maintenance now that Electronics and PC Repair have both taken a massive shit with everything moving toward being disposable. The maintenance guys I've met are all retiring and companies are aching to hire young blood. On top of that, industrial control boards still use through-hole components for durability reasons and I can repair that stuff in my sleep.
Lets put tRumpf on the job (Score:2)
We need to fight for those 14 jobs! We need companies like these! We should give them like 14 million dollars in tax breaks per year so we can have 14 jobs that pay 75K per year. Bring jobs back! Or we can do something reasonable and start planning on a very generous Universal Basic Income.
Factorio! (Score:2)
Now where can I get myself some assembling machine threes...
Incredibly misleading headline (Score:3)
They are not making steel.
They are rolling steel already delivered in billet form into rod and wire.
The thing is called a "mini-mill" and I saw one running some time around 1989 with around twenty people total running the site.
Re:Euroweenies took r jobs!! (Score:4, Interesting)
Nope. China took the jobs. List of countries by steel production [wikipedia.org]. China produces five times as much steel as the EU, and ten times as much as America.
Steel is a really bad money-losing business to be in. An automated steel mill may seem clean, but you also need coal mines, coke kilns, limestone quarries, etc. It is better to let someone else make it, and just buy what we need.
Re:Euroweenies took r jobs!! (Score:5, Insightful)
It is better to let someone else make it, and just buy what we need.
Let THEM deal with the pollution, costs, etc?
If a steel plant can't be built and operated in the US as they are in China, then no one in the US should be buying steel from China.
What is considered inhuman working conditions here are inhuman working conditions there. What is considering environmentally damaging here is environmentally damaging there. Etc. Etc.
Just because it's "over there" doesn't mean that working conditions and environmental impacts are magically made acceptable
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Just because it's "over there" doesn't mean that working conditions and environmental impacts are magically made acceptable
Well, apparently it does mean that, because both parties has been fine with it for decades.
And the only person of consequence to take real issue with it is currently the favorite whipping boy of both parties.
We respect cultural differences (Score:2)
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That's what people who negotiate free trade deals don't seem to understand. Tarrifs are in place to protect the relative differences in cost of production due to local quality of life. A free trade deal is basically just saying: We think this is too dangerous and we don't want people working in this industry here, let's kill some foreigners.
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In fact, when labor costs increase, just automate. Look at what's happening in China.
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Re:Euroweenies took r jobs!! (Score:5, Funny)
Steel is a really bad money-losing business to be in. An automated steel mill may seem clean, but you also need coal mines, coke kilns, limestone quarries, etc.
You could use Pepsi kilns instead of coke kilns. In blind taste tests 2 out of 3 diabetics preferred steel made using pepsi kilns.
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And China will automatize just as well, only a bit later.
Re:Euroweenies took r jobs!! (Score:4, Insightful)
even if it is a trade war instead of a shooting war.
That is not how trade wars work. In a trade war, countries cut export prices, while raising tariffs to keep imports out. In a trade war, you can still buy whatever you need, you just can't sell what you have.
60% of steel produced in America is recycled from scrap, not forged.
If international trade in steel stops, that will hurt China far more than it will hurt the US.
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All those people need to be paid, and that cost is passed along the supply chain.
So there can't be that many of them or there'd be no cost saving in automation.
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It's still striking how inefficient the process was, like, fifty years ago. On the other hand fifty years is nearly two generations, so perhaps the writer was underemphasizing the degree of advancement over that time.
On the third hand, we're going to need some better economic models than the one where replaced workers go starve. Used to be that retirees would be fired one month before their time was done, so that the per-company private pension system wouldn't have to cough up; that incentive doesn't exist
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They are making steel wire. Operating one machine.
Good point. They carefully crafted this story to make it sound more impressive.
They're making steel products with fewer employees (Score:2)
The point is that previously a rolling mill to make 500,000 tonnes of steel wire a year would have required a lot more people to operate it and keep it running, maybe as many as a thousand people. Today it only takes a handful due to automation.
This is nothing really new, of course. In the 1970s in Britain the iron and steel industry was operating with old equipment with men shovelling oresands into open-hearth furnaces built in the 1920s while in places like Malaysia modern steel plants were being run by o
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The issue is those visions of the future ignored the displaced workers, largely because they were post-transition.
We're in for an ugly 20-50 years while we figure out what to do with the large number of people who can not find work. People do not peacefully starve to death.