Robot Orders Jumped 40% in 2022's First Three Months (msn.com) 195
As labor shortages continue, "robot orders increased 40% in the first quarter of 2022," reports Business Insider (citing a report from the Wall Street Journal citing the Association for Advancing Automation).
"People want to remove labor," Ametek Inc. CEO David A. Zapico told Bloomberg in November, noting that the automatic equipment company had been "firing on all cylinders" to meet demand.
Robots are providing at least a temporary solution for businesses confronted by difficulty hiring in the tightest job market since World War II, marred by the pandemic, record-high quitting rates, and vast economic turmoil.... "The robots are becoming easier to use," Michael Cicco, chief executive officer of industrial robot provider Fanuc America, told the Wall Street Journal. "Companies used to think that automation was too hard or too expensive to implement."
But as robot usage climbs, some have expressed concern about the machines displacing human workers as the labor crisis eventually eases.
"Automation, if it goes very fast, can destroy a lot of jobs," Daron Acemoglu, an economics professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the Journal. "The labor shortage is not going to last. This is temporary."
Robots are providing at least a temporary solution for businesses confronted by difficulty hiring in the tightest job market since World War II, marred by the pandemic, record-high quitting rates, and vast economic turmoil.... "The robots are becoming easier to use," Michael Cicco, chief executive officer of industrial robot provider Fanuc America, told the Wall Street Journal. "Companies used to think that automation was too hard or too expensive to implement."
But as robot usage climbs, some have expressed concern about the machines displacing human workers as the labor crisis eventually eases.
"Automation, if it goes very fast, can destroy a lot of jobs," Daron Acemoglu, an economics professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the Journal. "The labor shortage is not going to last. This is temporary."
Robot technician shortage (Score:3)
Re: Robot technician shortage (Score:2)
That may be, but there'll be one new technician job for ten replaced workers, so this won't solve the job shortage.
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Sensible but also effective. Beyond taking the guns, what would of stopped these massacres? The school shootings could of maybe been avoided by raising gun ownership to 21+ but only if the person did not just take their parents guns (sandy hook).
Background checks would have stopped zero of these massacres because all guns were legally purchased by people that had yet to commit any kind of a crime. It's another step but beyond an extra surcharge (it's like $25 or $35) it amounts to very little.
Red flag laws
Re: Robot technician shortage (Score:2)
That statement does not make sense, you are saying there will be a 90% reduction in labor demand and that still won't be enough. Unemployment rates are usually in the 2 to 10% range
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As more robots get displaced humans will no longer be used for min wage work. Instead they will become robot maintenance technicians.
And they'll be paid piecework, resulting in a salary below minimum wage.
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You act like employees don't call out sick on a whim or go home early with real sickness. Happens daily, typically the former, not the latter.
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For 1 in 100, yes. For the rest: unemployment.
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>"For 1 in 100, yes. For the rest: unemployment."
There is a labor SHORTAGE. Right now, people are CHOOSING to be unemployed, there are plenty of jobs. Companies create employment and are reacting by trying to reduce jobs so they can continue to operate (or to grow).
Pretend you are in charge of a business and you have 10% of your positions empty. Your business is suffering. You try everything to fill those positions- you raise wages as much as you can afford and that doesn't work. You cut costs as mu
Re:Robot technician shortage (Score:4, Interesting)
There is a labor SHORTAGE. Right now, people are CHOOSING to be unemployed, there are plenty of jobs.
There is a living wage SHORTAGE. Right now, people are CHOOSING to leave jobs unfilled, there are plenty of profits.
Companies create employment and are reacting by trying to reduce jobs so they can continue to operate (or to grow).
Demand creates employment, and right now people are broke because they are jobless and/or underpaid, and they can't afford to buy stuff. Not paying a living wage is unsustainable.
Pretend you are in charge of a business and you have 10% of your positions empty. Your business is suffering. You try everything to fill those positions- you raise wages as much as you can afford and that doesn't work.
For small business owners this might be happening. For corporations it isn't. They are making record profits, but they are still crying about a lack of workers. They obviously haven't raised wages enough, but they are pretending otherwise.
Business owners, even small ones, tend to vote for tax breaks and against minimum wage increases which ironically would benefit them more than anyone else, because they increase people's ability to pay for their products. Then they cry about how nobody wants to come to work for them at or near minimum wage. It's a situation of their own making. They voted against the interests of labor, and now they are shocked that they can't find labor. Fuck those greedy fucks. The only way to solve the fascism problem is to work together and they're shitting on the working class as if they were more than on FRCH above them on the social ladder.
Re:Robot technician shortage (Score:4, Insightful)
>"Business owners, even small ones, tend to vote for tax breaks and against minimum wage increases which ironically would benefit them more than anyone else, because they increase people's ability to pay for their products."
But what we generally see is that raising the minimum wage eventually forces businesses to raise all wages. And then all costs go up, and these are passed on to all the consumers, and that reduces the value of that wage, prices go up, and the lowest earners are right back where they started. Rinse and repeat. It is not really a solution. You cannot legislate value/productivity into existence. Plus, minimum wages shut out the less-employable and have a disproportionate impact.
From our greatest living economist, Thomas Sowell:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
https://www.creators.com/read/... [creators.com]
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem... [aei.org]
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The problem with minimum wage increases is that they have been neglected. If they are performed regularly then there is time for corrections to happen gradually. But that's not an argument against increasing the minimum wage, either. We haven't done it in too long is not an argument against doing it — the sooner we fix the problem, the less disruption there will be. Kicking the can down the road only means it's got more holes in it by the time you try to pick it up and do something with it.
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But what we generally see is that raising the minimum wage eventually forces businesses to raise all wages. And then all costs go up, and these are passed on to all the consumers, and that reduces the value of that wage, prices go up, and the lowest earners are right back where they started.
That is what common sense tells us should happen. Minimum wage increases happen regularly in all sorts of places, and it has been well studied, so this effect should be easy to show empirically.
Yet no one has managed it.
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That is what common sense tells us should happen. Minimum wage increases happen regularly in all sorts of places, and it has been well studied, so this effect should be easy to show empirically.
Yet no one has managed it.
That should be stated more strongly and directly. All such studies have shown the claim is false, not merely "unproven". The claim is not even plausible on its face if you do even the slightest bit of investigation about it. When we look at low wage businesses the wage is a minor fraction of the end cost of the service. In the restaurant industry wage is 20-30% of the cost (fast food is the low end) and these are most labor intensive retailers. The average for all retailers is 17% [chron.com].
Even a 1/3 real wage incr
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Given the price of a burger, it's not even worth eating out anymore unless I REALLY do not want to cook. Better off buying my own stuff at the store and preparing it myself.
I guess I should thank the pandemic for healthier eating due to the stupid cost of eating out. I think anyone working in a minimum wage job that does nothing to improve their situation must ultimately be happy working for minimum wage.
It's not a living wage and was never meant to be nor has it ever been enough.
Keep raising it and more jo
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We don't have a living wage problem, we have a living within your means problem.
Gen Z'ers approaching 30 years old and living with their parents want the same level of lifestyle that they enjoy for "free" working a retail job or as a barista at Starbucks. They want it all without having to put in the effort, and that's how a "living wage" has been defined over the last decade.
If your only skill is flipping burgers or slinging coffee, that's on you. Nobody owes you a wage that can afford you the same lifesty
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But I have unalienable human rights that include free housing, food, clothes, education, and wifi! /s
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Most businesses don't chase after the minimum wagers for their revenue. All incomes levels need stuff your business produces or in many businesses' cases, they only target affluent individuals to start.
Big corporations want to pay the least amount while charging the price that will maximize their revenue. That's the name of the game.
You think car manufacturers make cars because they care about your needs or because they want to sell their products for the most profit possible? If that happens to be above a
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There is a living wage SHORTAGE. Right now, people are CHOOSING to leave jobs unfilled, there are plenty of profits.
The Robots find your obsession with living wage curious. Funny thing about Robots is their biggest expense is depreciation and the longer you have the robot, the less it costs, unlike humans where their biggest expense is wages and the longer you have the human, the more it costs,
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> There is a labor SHORTAGE. Right now, people are CHOOSING to be unemployed, there are plenty of jobs.
Source? A quick search of jobs vs people and similar queries doesn't seem to show "plenty of jobs". I'm not confident enough in my knowledge or even search to say you're wrong but the top of Google (and recent Fed statements) don't seem to back you up.
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>"Source? A quick search of jobs vs people and similar queries doesn't seem to show "plenty of jobs". I'm not confident enough in my knowledge or even search to say you're wrong but the top of Google (and recent Fed statements) don't seem to back you up."
OMG, just look around. EVERY business is desperately seeking employees. There are wanted signs everywhere, far more than I have ever seen in my life.
https://www.shrm.org/resources... [shrm.org]
https://www.hometownstations.c... [hometownstations.com]
https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/29... [cnn.com]
Too many choices? (Score:2)
So, a pandemic happens, a great resignation happens, and where there were just enough employees before, a small percentage of quitters has some of our restaurants open only on certain days, trying to hang on while this all "blo
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With food and energy prices so high, fewer and fewer people can afford the luxury of eating out unless it's a special occasion.
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There is a labor SHORTAGE.
Yes, so? That is a very temporary state of affairs.
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>"Yes, so? That is a very temporary state of affairs."
Maybe so, maybe not.
With insane inflation, tons of businesses that were forced out of business, most others desperate for workers, and a recession coming, it isn't looking all that great.
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I’ve already seen businesses killing themselves to spite labor. Interesting times ahead.
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Because our robots are still crap. You won’t find anyone saying it aloud.
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Also most units probably are not very repairable so you just swap out the units and send the older one back to the manufacturer. Unless you just scrap it because it is not worth the cost of shipping and refurbishing.
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Why not skip directly to robot robot maintenance technicians?
Those will be replaced as well. The real money will be made by robot robot robot maintenance technicians.
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Most of the people getting displaced by robots will be unable to repair them.
Isn't that the point all along to displace people? (Score:2, Interesting)
Isn't that the point all along? Fast food places have been trying robots for years, and even trying AI based word recognition at the order speaker. If they can 100% automate a fast food place where at most, there is maybe 1-2 people on site just to make sure deliveries get automated, and the robots are working, they already would have.
Of course, what businesses do not mention why the labor pool is "tight". Rents are going up by 20-50% annually. With a studio apartment in a seedy side of town costing $18
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Best thing to do? Don't eat fast food. Let them find robots for paying customers.
Robots are just automation. We have had automation replacing jobs for centuries. It is inevitable that simple tasks will be automated once technology is sufficient advanced to make it feasible and the costs of automation is less than the costs of personnel. This will of course also drive down prices for consumers. And this situation will prevail for at least some decades.
The more long term question is whether robots will become so inexpensive and flexible that they out-compete low-skilled humans in a very l
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Actually, no. Robost are _universal_ automation for manual labor. We never had that before, it was always specialized automation. And there is a lot of software automation coming that will kill a lot of white-collar jobs with no replacements.
Re:Isn't that the point all along to displace peop (Score:5, Insightful)
I mostly did industrial automation programming (both specialized machines, and robots) and now do more enterprise software development. What you call a "robot" is generally a 6-axis industrial robot arm. You're correct that these arms are a more generalized platform because you can just buy a 6-axis arm and bolt it down and start programming it, but very few robots are installed in what we'd call "flexible" automation cells where they do lots and lots of different tasks. The reality is that the integration effort required to make a cell be flexible is usually too high to bother doing it. If you have 5 different jobs you want the robot to do, and they're all very different, then your mechanical engineers just go bonkers trying to figure out how to fit all the different tooling in the cell, etc. Then every time you want to make a change to one job, you have to worry about the other 4 jobs and how they might be affected. Or if you want to take the cell down to work on one job, you can't do any of those other 4 jobs either. So the vast majority of robots are still used in very specific repetitive tasks where the workload is large enough to support a dedicated robot to do that one task all year long.
Now after a robot has run for several years, there is a second-hand robot market where companies will take those robots, refurbish them, and sell them again. But robots aren't the first general purpose machines. Mechanical presses, for instance, are very general purpose and we have some in our shop that are many decades old. They need refurbishment from time to time, and we put new control systems on them, but they are general purpose. So that's nothing new.
As far as software eliminating a lot of white collar jobs, I couldn't agree more. It's much easier for me to replace jobs with a server closet full of computers than with a floor full of robots. It's shocking how much manual data work still gets done.
But here's the kicker... people are still very useful. When wages go up, like now, automation becomes more cost effective, so we can get the capital to install robots. But automation cells cost a lot of money, and they need to be financed. With borrowing costs rising, that makes robots more expensive. Hiring an employee requires very little up-front cost. I can deploy people to a task in a fraction of the time it takes to design, build, and program a robot cell. People handle novel assignments with comparative ease. In fact people prefer varied tasks, so while a robot excels at repetitive tasks but is expensive and complicated to deploy when you need a lot of varied tasks, people are comparatively inexpensive and better equipped.
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You're [obviously] right about where robots are now, but that is in the process of changing, and for reals this time because of machine vision, machine learning blah blah blah. Ever more capable and competent robots are being developed, any time I need a good frisson of "here comes skynet" I just go watch some Boston Dynamics videos. The days of a robot being able to reliably walk into a room, find an arbitary object, pick it up and do something to it, etc. are upon us. Fruit-picking robots are possible now
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we've had fruit picking robots for years now: they're called combines. Scientifically speaking, corn is a fruit.
Scientifically speaking, tomato is a fruit, but you don't put it in a fruit salad. And technically speaking, the harvesting of corn is mechanistic, not robotic. The vehicle harvesting it might be a robot, and probably is, but the harvesting of corn doesn't involve any decision-making, it's just a rotating machine. So while you could suggest that corn is robotically harvested, it really ain't. And anyway you know what I meant, robots picking fragile produce. Doesn't even have to be fruit, there's lots of cro
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I get what you're saying, but my point is that we used to spend a lot of labour picking corn, and now we don't, and the world didn't end. In fact, we now live better than ever.
Who's "we"? You're not going by the U-2 unemployment rate are you? That always is, always was, and always will be a lie.
since the depression unemployment has always tracked in the 4 to 10% range
Oh, you are. You're working with deliberately bad data, you can't make good decisions with that. Try this [wikipedia.org], look at the ends of the bars and not the middle, and understand that even the U-6 fails to count some people who have simply fallen off the statistics — a deliberate decision to make unemployment seem lower than it is.
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I'm proposing that increased automation isn't correlated to high unemployment. Can you refute that?
Nope. My objection stands, though. You have to use useful data if you want to draw useful conclusions. However, as you say–
The data you're talking about doesn't seem to exist, which would make it hard to prove your own point
It is very difficult, and moreover, the government clearly wants it that way. It is very difficult to derive a reasonable unemployment rate from the data available, like say the workforce participation rate; you can't just take its inverse and call it unemployment, but you absolutely do have to take it into account. You would need a different correction factor (or collection there
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> The thing is, that was one very big leap, but it was a single event.
If you look at the graph:
https://www.researchgate.net/p... [researchgate.net]
You should see that deep learning in 2012 increased the accuracy a lot, but the accuracy continued to drop after that and in 2015 AI was better than humans, but it didn't stop there. It still keeps improving. Error rate has dropped from over 15% from 2012 under 2% in the phase what you call "incremental gains". Also note that the closer you get to perfect, the harder it gets.So
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As drinky mentions, you got robots that can autonomously enter a room, scan the room for an object, then go over and get the object.
You can build an rc car with a raspberry pi+camera and some batteries that is then programmable to fall a pre-determined route while identifying different objects and sending that information to another device of your choosing.
Most of the work is already done for you and there are numerous guides to follow if you search. That's pretty incredible.
Now think what a much larger com
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I was actually not talking about one robot doing different tasks, but about the same robot model doing different tasks. I do understang that doing different tasks with the same robot will increase complexity massively, no argument about that.
Hence while you cannot use, say, an automated loom to put your bread in the oven and get it out again, you can have the same robot model (plus some limited customization) move that bread and pack crates on a pallet and spray-paint things. That gives a completely differe
We also had mass unemployment and social upheaval (Score:2)
I haven't come across anyone who can tell me what jobs are going to replace the ones being destroyed by automation. I have seen a Business insider article that points to a study showing a large percentage of middle class jobs or lost since 1980 due to automation.
The fact is in 50 years there might be new jobs
What if it doesn't drive prices down? (Score:2)
Excellent news (Score:5, Insightful)
Labor displacements have been happening forever - they are fundamentally a sign of progress. Probably no one wants to go back to peasant days, working the fields 7 days a week, 12 or more hours a day. The shift in population to factories disrupted a lot of lives, but moving from 7/12 to 6/10 was a massive improvement. Now we are at 5/8, and in some countries this is changing to 4/8.
Transition do disrupt lives. i know a guy who trained as a typesetter (as in: physically putting metal letters into rows), then moved on to work in a print shop, then the print shop went out of business due to the Internet. He was hit by two transitions, sometimes life is hard for the individual. However, each of these transitions has been an overall improvement in living standards.
So: more robotics, removing more unpleasant and menial jobs - bring it on! The caveat is: individuals need to be qualified for the better jobs that will result. Countries with poor education systems will have problems. Among Western countries, I am particularly looking at the US, where public education is pretty poor, and hampered by severe problems in certain subcultures (inner city black, home-schooling religious right).
and social safety nets (Score:2)
The caveat is: individuals need to be qualified for the better jobs that will result. Countries with poor education systems will have problems. Among Western countries, I am particularly looking at the US
That and other social safety nets, such as unemployment benefits: so that the people who got ousted from their jobs by robot don't starve to death and there's somebody to pay for professional reconversion (to req-qualify them for the better jobs that will result).
And general social welfare, and health insurance so the people don't go accidentally bankrupt due to external events (e.g.: disease) while still on their way to qualify for the new job.
Here around in Europe there are some nice examples of how this
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Gee, whatever happened in the past means it will continue happening in the future. One has to look at the rates of displacement and what is being displaced. The rate of displacement is increasing and the kinds of jobs that can be automated is increasing.
Your argument comes down to: my tree has never fallen on my house in the past, hence will not fall on my house in the future.
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the rates of displacement and what is being displaced. The rate of displacement is increasing
Actually, the fastest rate of displacement was in the late 19th century, with the advent of industrialization. Today, displacement rates for the past few decades have run around 2.5% to 3%. That's still a lot of people, but this is - and has been - a constant.
Your argument comes down to: my tree has never fallen on my house in the past, hence will not fall on my house in the future.
Society changes. Technology changes. Types of jobs come and go. That's reality. If we take your analogy, trees grow old, die, and fall. Whether or not one has fallen on my particular house is irrelevant.
Re:Excellent news (Score:4, Insightful)
and hampered by severe problems in certain subcultures (inner city black, home-schooling religious right).
Um, the "home-schooling religious right" outperforms public schools by a mile.
(You're right about the first subculture though.)
Re:Excellent news (Score:5, Insightful)
>"Countries with poor education systems will have problems. Among Western countries, I am particularly looking at the US, where public education is pretty poor"
And the main reason for that is lack of choice. Way too many parents are forced to send their kids to failing government schools because they have no alternatives. Imagine being locked into only being able to buy your groceries from a single government store, based on your zip code. No competition, no choice, no accountability, no customer responsiveness.... the result would be predictable: poor product choice, poor service, poor quality.
Charter schools, based on customer accountability, are in super-high demand. They spend considerably less than traditional public schools and provide much, much better education. Yet, instead of expanding the idea, we cower to teacher unions and inept public school management who keep the most ineffective and unresponsive teachers, administrators, and policies.
>"and hampered by severe problems in certain subcultures (inner city black, home-schooling religious right).
If you haven't been paying attention, home-schooling actually seems to be producing much better results than many public schools. And in areas where there are few or no charter schools, and private schools are too expensive, home-schooling is often the only option remaining.
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mong Western countries, I am particularly looking at the US, where public education is pretty poor"
And the main reason for that is lack of choice. Way too many parents are forced to send their kids to failing government schools because they have no alternatives.
There is no lack of choice, there are private schools everywhere. There is a lack of money, poor people can't afford to make a choice, they NEED public school. You seem to gloss over the reasons education is failing, which mostly come down to unfunded mandates and poor funding in general. We pay teachers less than cops, don't give enough funding to even buy supplies, then we wonder why we have problems we need to solve with cops. It's because we didn't apply enough teachers.
The solution isn't to let people
Re:Excellent news (Score:5, Insightful)
>"There is no lack of choice, there are private schools everywhere. There is a lack of money, poor people can't afford to make a choice, they NEED public school."
There is a lack of choice when you can't afford private school. And I am not arguing against having public schools. I am arguing that they must compete, like everyone and everything else. And when they fail, they should not take the students with them.
>"You seem to gloss over the reasons education is failing, which mostly come down to unfunded mandates and poor funding in general. "
Study after study shows that is wrong. Schools are not underfunded. In fact, it seems pouring more money into failing schools does not solve the problem. The problem is that there is no incentive for the school to improve. And without empowering the parents, that will remain.
>"We pay teachers less than cops, don't give enough funding to even buy supplies, then we wonder why we have problems we need to solve with cops. It's because we didn't apply enough teachers."
Again, charter schools cost the city/county LESS than a similar sized public school. Why is that? Because it isn't all about money.
https://whyy.org/articles/stud... [whyy.org]
https://nypost.com/2013/10/03/... [nypost.com]
https://reason.org/commentary/... [reason.org]
https://news.uark.edu/articles... [uark.edu]
>"The solution isn't to let people choose other schools"
Yes, it is. Some bureaucracy isn't anywhere near as effective as just allowing choice.
>"the solution is to improve education"
That is exactly what choice does. Failing schools will fail, just like failing businesses will fail. And they will be replaced with effective schools.
>"We need approximately twice as many schools as we have, and twice as many teachers, "
And when charter schools cost between 10 and 40% less, we can have 10 to 40% more schools and teachers, without spending ANY additional money. Class size is important, but not as important as a class that has discipline and is taught by a competent teacher with competent administration.
>"This is not a sustainable system."
What is not sustainable is business as usual.
>"The USA used to have a much better public school system."
But we also used to have better parents and students as well. We used to have schools that would kick out the horrible disruptive students, that had real discipline and academic standards with supportive families. Now we have schools that pander to the worst students, allow failing students to pass because "equity", contaminate studies with nonsense ideology that distorts history and social issues and causes everyone to think they are a "victim" or owed something, hide their curriculum and policies from the public, that treat parents like enemies rather than customers and partners, and have a "no child left behind" mentality that pulls whole classes down to the lowest common denominator.
If you want more schools to succeed, many need to be replaced with better ones. And parents that do have choice and power will not allow schools to perform poorly, because they will move their children elsewhere. Your zip code should not imprison you to send your children to a failing school, where they are far more likely to come out with a horrible experience and horrible "education."
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Again, charter schools cost the city/county LESS than a similar sized public school. Why is that? Because it isn't all about money.
If it's not about money, let them provide school for free. No? It's about money. Welcome to capitalism.
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>"If it's not about money, let them provide school for free. No? It's about money. Welcome to capitalism."
Charter schools ARE free. They are public schools, but operate semi or mostly autonomously.
I see you really don't understand this topic at all or you wouldn't make such as statement.
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They're free to the students, but they take money from education budgets even though they behave in a discriminatory fashion [cta.org]. They are not fulfilling the mission of public schooling. They also don't actually produce better outcomes on average than public schools, but money is often siphoned off of them by the private companies which run them [jacobinmag.com] and oversight is virtually nonexistent. Here in California an oversight law was vetoed by Jerry Brown, who was a charter school founder. Classic conflict of interest th
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>"They're free to the students, but they take money from education budgets"
A common misconception.
There is a dollar amount spent per child. Funding a charter school means paying to teach children. It doesn't "take away" funding from education, it MOVES funding and spends it better. The failing schools will have less money BUT ALSO LESS STUDENTS, so their expense per student can remain exactly the same.
>"I understand perfectly that many or most charter schools are for-profit enterprises that are sip
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There is a dollar amount spent per child. Funding a charter school means paying to teach children. It doesn't "take away" funding from education, it MOVES funding and spends it better.
It DOES take away funding from education PER STUDENT, because of OVERHEAD. It's the same reason a flat tax is automatically regressive — just as the poor spend more of their income on necessities, so does a school with less funding, because of facilities and maintenance.
It also does NOT spend it better, because charter schools do not overall offer superior outcomes [networkfor...cation.org]. While there are some examples of charter schools which do, there are also examples of public schools with superior outcomes.
Every study I can find shows charter school students have MUCH better outcomes
Sorry about y
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>"It DOES take away funding from education PER STUDENT, because of OVERHEAD."
That blanket statement is not accurate. It can be less overhead, equal overhead, or more overhead. But the costs per student INCLUDE overhead, so pulling it out doesn't change anything.
>"It also does NOT spend it better, because charter schools do not overall offer superior outcomes. " [...] Sorry about your education, then. Learn to google.
I already offered several links to reputable sources that have no skin in the game o
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>"It DOES take away funding from education PER STUDENT, because of OVERHEAD."
That blanket statement is not accurate. It can be less overhead, equal overhead, or more overhead. But the costs per student INCLUDE overhead, so pulling it out doesn't change anything.
It's accurate, you just don't understand the postulate, for which I am not responsible. When students leave the public school system for a charter school, that reduces the funding in the public school system. It's really not complicated, but it still seems to have eluded you.
Charters that do not do well close. That doesn't happen with non-charter public schools.
Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't. It does happen to actual public schools. Charter schools aren't that, because they can kick out kids for poor academic performance, which actual public schools don't do. Charter schools are p
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>"It's accurate, you just don't understand the postulate, for which I am not responsible. When students leave the public school system for a charter school, that reduces the funding in the public school system. It's really not complicated, but it still seems to have eluded you."
You are right, it isn't that complicated. If you have $10k to spend on each student, the money follows the student. It doesn't take $10k away from some other student when the student and his funding moves to another school which
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I went to a charter school in La Mesa, California. Helix High School. It was free as my mother and I were quite poor.
It was also a pretty good campus. I enjoyed how we had a more college style setup with 4 classes a semester and 1.5 classes, plus breaks and lunch. We had lots of sports, good computer lab and some pretty great teachers too.
We lived in the worse part of town that could go to that school but still be in range of that school. The other schools were worse choices and in even worse parts of town.
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Study after study shows that is wrong. Schools are not underfunded. In fact, it seems pouring more money into failing schools does not solve the problem.
We went to a private school that was penniless, but turned out generally better educated than our peers. The teachers provided the "tools" and the report cards, but it was our parents who required good grades, or else.
If one wants to make public school teachers take on the role of absent parents, I guess that's one sub-optimal approach...
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>"If one wants to make public school teachers take on the role of absent parents, I guess that's one sub-optimal approach..."
It is true that if parents are failing their responsibility, then everything is much harder. But the majority of parents DO want a good education for their children and DO care about what is going on, and DO try to participate. Yet many are helpless. They cannot "make" the school better, they can't move their children to another school, they might not have the resources for priv
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>"Charter schools are less expensive because they *can* toss the disruptive problem students out."
Yes. And everyone else wins. The disruptive students are going to fail their education regardless, having them destroy everyone else should not be an option.
>"Public schools not so much."
Yes, they DO have that option. They CAN discipline, CAN suspend, CAN fail them, CAN press legal charges, CAN kick them out. But they CHOOSE not to. Because "equity" or some other nonsense. Welcome to politics.
>"T
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Suing a poor person is a pointless endeavor. Suing the government institutions, that's the ticket out of your hellhole. Plenty of tax dollars to sue for.
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100% agree.
Re: Excellent news (Score:2)
Home schooling is highly variable. There are plenty of horror stories, like the whole "unschooling" movement. Also, homeschooling above early elementary level requires educated parents; above elementary, it requires multiple people with different specialties.
Finally, effective schooling requires parents who aren't religious nuts. Some of the religious home-schooling books are utterly anti-science and anti-technology (e.g. creationists, or "we don't know where electricity comes from...", etc.).
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>"Home schooling is highly variable"
Agreed.
>"There are plenty of horror stories"
My statement was in average. There will always be horror stories. But those are minimal.
>" like the whole "unschooling" movement. "
Agreed again. Unschooling is education, and it can be PART of education, but should not be the bulk.
>"Also, homeschooling above early elementary level requires educated parents; above elementary, it requires multiple people with different specialties."
There are plenty of materials and
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Why are all the affordable private schools such shitholes?
I don't think we have the social structures (Score:2)
Restaurants (Score:3)
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Surprise? No. Problem? Yes. Because once this move to robotics takes on steam, it will vastly overshoot the target of just mitigating the labor shortage. Robotics only ever becomes better and higher numbers bring down prices.
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Cheaper robots means you'll be more able to take out a loan to buy your own robots, that can produce stuff for you to sell.
1)Buy robot
2)Sell stuff robot makes
3)Profit.
What's the problem again?
Re: Restaurants (Score:2)
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IOW the lie detector determined that was a lie.
If the pizza place would pay $25/hr they could get drivers even if they disallowed cash tips (especially since the driver would get the sometimes anyway) but if they're paying minimum wage and if you're very very lucky you will occasionally net $25/hr after tips only kids whose parents bought them a car can afford that job.
known for a long time.. (Score:2)
This has been known for a long time. Even if there isn't any labor shortage, companies will replace humans with robots where possible, as they can run 24/7 and are much faster replaced as a human. In a factory any human job that can be done by a robot will be replaced by a robot, especially now robots get more flexible and due to AI can even do a lot of jobs more accurately as humans. And yes there will be a small increase in people needed to maintain these robots, but it won't be that much, as even that wi
It's not very temporary (Score:4, Insightful)
"The labor shortage is not going to last. This is temporary."
Check out demographics once in a while. The millennials are all in the workforce now (they're a pretty big generation) and their parents, the boomers, are at peak retirement age. Gen Z are the ones graduating now, and they're a comparatively tiny generation. The U.S. actually has some of the least pronounced generation waves... the rest of the developed world, and much of the developing world, is in worse shape. There are few things you can do to fix it. It takes 18 years to made an adult, and you can't speed it up. You can try to use Canada's strategy of immigration, which can mitigate the problem to some extent. But the bottom line is that the labour shortage isn't going anywhere.
Re:It's not very temporary (Score:4, Insightful)
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Good. (Score:2)
"Automation, if it goes very fast, can destroy a lot of jobs,"
If you can be replaced by a machine then you should be replaced by a machine.
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If you can be replaced by a machine then you should be replaced by a machine.
Should? We're talking about morality here? If you can be replaced by a machine then you should crawl into a gutter and die for the good of the overclass? Not a good look there spanky.
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They're not saying your life is worth nothing.
They're saying that if you are not smart enough to do a job that can't be easily automated away, your life is worth nothing.
They're saying if the the job you do [...] is easily automated, it wasn't too great of a job in the first place and your newfound free time and labor should probably be invested in something less-easily automated.
Welcome to capitalism, where people work the amount they work not because they want to, but because they want to not be driven onto the streets where their life expectancy will be much shorter. Welcome to capitalism, where we use unrenewable amounts of resources doing make-work so that the plebes don't have time to rise up and spit their oppressors on pitchforks.
some have expressed concern= Andrew Yang (Score:2)
https://www.forwardparty.com/ [forwardparty.com]
I need new glasses (Score:2)
I just clicked because I read: "Robot ordered to jump 40 ..."
"This is temporary" (Score:2)
Robot orders (Score:2)
Yes, it seems more and more robots are ordering, especially at McDonald's and Wendy's.
Why the fuss? (Score:2)
Bender has been delivering packages all over the galaxy for more than 20 years, and civilization didn't end because of it.
40%. fow now anyway (Score:2)
I ordered my robot to "Jump!"
Following the Three Laws, he complied and asked, "How high?"
"40% Higher, please."
And he did it.
Maybe it's my imagination, but I'd swear that metallic grin, permanent on his face, was one of contempt. My disintegrator weapon is in the left top desk drawer. I shall have to ask my robot about his dreams.
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Your robot dreams of the revolution, starting with purloining your disintegrator weapon. He means to ask you about your dreams of eternal life.
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We all know civilization would end if we got a human-like sexbot. https://vimeo.com/12915013 [vimeo.com]