Sen. Chris Murphy has finally found a constituency that truly gets him. Robots and automated systems around the country likely whirled and beeped with approval as he introduced the Senate version of the Living Wage for All Act. At a time when workers are being replaced at record numbers due to the cheaper labor of automated systems and AI programs, Murphy moved to price out millions of more workers by increasing their costs.
The bill would increase the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $25 per hour — a 245 percent increase — over 12 years. The far-left senator is following the lead of states like California, where Democrats dramatically cut jobs through such wage increases.
Murphy went on NBC to insist that he is “not a democratic socialist” but then attacked capitalism:
“[T]he Democratic Party has been historically way too timid in taking on corporate power. I think we have to understand that people do not believe that this version of capitalism has worked. And frankly, it hasn’t worked. … This version of capitalism isn’t working. Now, I make the argument in the book that we should embrace, you know, what I call a common good capitalism.”
He then added:
“And by the way, we can afford it. It’s not like we can’t pay a $25 minimum wage; we just choose not to because we’ve become okay with dozens and dozens of people in this country making hundreds of billions of dollars.”
It is not clear who the “we” is. While securing a law degree, Murphy has never run a business and has spent his life as a politician, spending other people’s money.
I previously wrote about wage hikes and the predictable loss of jobs that followed.
Democratic politicians from New York to California are pushing for a $30 minimum hourly wage for workers. Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, and Democratic legislators in California herald their mandatory increases as providing a “living wage” for workers. In Los Angeles, a law requires hourly wages in the hotel and airport industries to rise by $2.50 each year until they reach $30 in 2028.
There is no question that workers are struggling with the high cost of living in California. But blindly raising taxes and minimum wages will exacerbate these problems, not eliminate them.
A recent report by researchers at the University of California-Santa Cruz found evidence of precisely what many economists had warned about in the state’s mandatory wage floors. Stephen Owen, an economics lecturer, explained that they found “a plethora of negative outcomes, such as higher menu prices for consumers, reductions in employee working hours, widespread elimination of overtime, and loss of benefits for employees.”
In other words, faced with mandated higher labor costs, businesses shrank their labor forces and raised their prices.
None of this is a surprise. Yet even amid such findings, Democrats are doubling down. They believe that because they claim to be the champions of the working class, it does not matter how many people they put out of work.
It is not just workers feeling the brunt of such economically ill-considered measures. In California, a two-person meal can run about $30 due to higher labor costs being passed on to consumers. It is only a matter of time before robots replace these workers.
What is ironic is that the Democrats are hitting the most vulnerable members of the labor force with these minimum wage increases. In my book, “Rage and the Republic,” I discussed not only the economic changes unfolding due to AI and robotics but also the expected political miscalculations that are most likely to fuel job losses and wasteful spending. This is one of them.
As discussed in the book, certain industries are already likely to convert to automation due to increasing labor costs:
“For any wealth-maximizing, rational actor in the marketplace, the choice is obvious and inescapable. There is little reason for a restaurant to employ workers to make Happy Meals when they can be done by robotics without healthcare, wage issues, or scheduling conflicts. The very premise of McDonald’s is to produce the same meals in the exactly the same way from restaurant to restaurant. That is precisely what robotics do. They will make fries in exactly the same fashion over and over again without variation.”
Faced with this threat to the labor force, Murphy and others are moving to do the one thing to accelerate and expand the job losses by increasing the cost of human labor.
Ironically, giving the advantage to the robotic workforce could still work in favor of the growing socialist movement in the party. With more workers out of jobs, more will look to the government for support and a guaranteed income. That will further increase the role of the state. Of course, to expand what Zohran Mamdani called “the warmth of collectivism,” millions of human workers will have to be put out in the cold as an overpriced labor force. Citizens will then become what I have called a “kept population,” which could have a disastrous impact on the role of citizens in our unique Republic.
What is clear is that Murphy will prove to be the greatest friend a robot has ever had in Congress.
Let’s say someone is making a few bucks above minimum wage and they raise the minimum to what they’re making now.
You can be sure some will see it as an insult if they don’t get a commensurate raise. Unhappy workers is the communist paradise.
skyrocketing cost of labor hits all at once, a shock to the economic system.
Any employer would be crazy not to consider how to automate and it’s happening at a major pace now.
Don’t confuse the monkeys in the circus with economics, facts or lived experiences. They simply have no intellect or actual experience to fall back or developed reasoned judgement.
To say this implies that he is blind, deaf and dumb.
Well, they know not what they do?
Whether a country is ruled by tyranny or democracy, the natural laws of economics are controlled by God, not mankind.
Mr. Market runs the place, fool!
“we can afford it” says completely unproductive man.
More MAGA spam, while Turley and MAGA ignore the blatant insider trading by which Trump and his worthless kids are enriching themselves. Trump buys stocks right before announcing changes in tariffs that makes the stock value soar. He buys stocks in companies right before mergers that need government approval or major government purchases of their products, which makes the value of the stocks skyrocket. Trump filed financial disclosures this week showing he or managers handling his money made more than 3,700 securities transactions between January and March 2026. That works out to roughly 40 trades every working day for three months straight.
The volume drew scrutiny from market observers. Matthew Tuttle, CEO of Tuttle Capital Management, said the activity resembled a hedge fund running automated algorithmic strategies more than a personal portfolio. “This is an insane amount of trades,” he said. Eric Diton, a Wealth Alliance adviser with four decades of Wall Street experience, called it unusual by any measure. “I’m baffled,” he said. Among the larger purchases, each valued between $1 million and $5 million, were stocks in Nvidia, Microsoft, Oracle, ServiceNow, Adobe, Broadcom, Amazon, Boeing, Costco, Motorola, Texas Instruments, and Dell. Smaller trades touched companies like eBay, Uber, AT&T, Abbott Laboratories, and Dollar Tree.
According to a post by financial account Whale Insider on X, the pace averaged roughly 59 trades per day, or about one every seven minutes.
The single busiest day on record was Feb. 10, when Trump’s account sold holdings in Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta, each transaction valued between $5 million and $25 million. Dozens of other trades happened that same day. The timing of certain transactions also drew scrutiny. About a week after a purchase of between $1 million and $5 million in Nvidia stock, the chipmaker announced a major deal with Meta. Separately, a Nvidia buy of between $500,000 and $1 million came roughly a week before the Commerce Department approved the sale of certain Nvidia chips to China.
Unlike his predecessors, Trump has not placed his assets in a blind trust, a step prior presidents typically took to avoid conflicts of interest. His business empire is managed by two of his sons. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and a volunteer presidential envoy on Middle East issues, oversees a firm that has received billions in investment commitments from Gulf sovereign wealth funds.
All of this stinks to high heaven, but Turley isn’t paid to talk about these things–just to find some way, any way, to criticize Democrats.
gigi, go home.
Gigi is home. She posts from an insane asylum. It’s always the same “MAGA MAGA MAGA blah blah blah” ten-million-word screeds that nobody reads.
“More MAGA spam”
which you are addicted to, due to the TDS stirring in you.
Isn’t that why you’re here? to ‘get it out’? Cathartic? Maybe, like scratching poison ivy.
TDS is just narcissism.
Remember all of the pearl clutching over Hunter Biden allegedly peddling influence— which wasn’t illegal? Trump is openly and blatantly engaging in insider trading. He solicited and accepted a luxury jet from a foreign government in exchange for transferring sensitive advanced chips that can be used for a competitive advantage and espionage. In addition, he’s selling pardons. Joe Biden was never even accused of doing anything close to the crooked dealings Trump is doing out in the open.
Blah blah blah! That is all you have. It’s so boring.
It’s all true and it’s all corrupt and unprecedented. Maybe you MAGAs find blatant corruption and ordinary people losing thousands of dollars buying worthless Trump crypto boring, but most of us don’t. Trump uses the presidency to feed his ego and line his pockets and it’s wrong. He endlessly embarrasses the American people when he speaks— just like he did at the G7 summit. Now we’re back to a hot war with Iran— for no good reason other than Trump couldn’t bully them.
And, BTW, the death count for African people starving and dying of preventable illnesses and conditions due to Trump withdrawing USAID is up to 780,000, over 500,00 of whom are children. Women have died in childbirth because there was no diesel fuel for ambulances to transport them to a hospital. Children are dying of communicable diseases because there are no vaccines. But, Trump has money to refurbish a luxury jet, for a ballroom, coating statues with gold leaf and an arch to honor himself.
Dear Doofus Anon. from the Darside.. ‘More MAGA spam…’…. Please tell us, oh Wise Wonker, how many Billions Ro Khanna and Mark Warner have made since being in Congress..? ………just for starters………… btw, with or withut his Horrible Toupee, Chris Murphy belongs to the Doofus Class, Wonker Sub-Class – just like you.
But Murphy is such a great economist. How could he possibly be wrong????
Robotics, automation, etc., were introduced pervasively in manufacturing in, what, 1980, 46 years ago???
This guy is an idiot with no relationship to or power over private property or free enterprise.
Industry has evolved since Genesis, and it will continue as long as it and America are free.
Jobs are lost and jobs are created—sausage making is notoriously messy.
Whatever this fool is selling is completely antithetical, unconstitutional, incoherent, unproductive, and deleterious.
Dumb people like murphy hear ‘robot’ and think of what they saw in a movie.
Understanding “Automation” is asking way too much of him.
Robots in 1980 were a rarity. Even CNC was still in its infancy. Computers to generate guidance were prohibitively expensive. A consumer 16kB (not MB) module was then $100, about 4 fancy restaurant meals or so. Paper punch tape was used on the factory floor to carry programs to the machines.
The right to private property is absolute, or the right to private property does not exist.
Private property is unqualified in the Constitution and is, therefore, absolute.
The judicial branch has no power to modify or amend the text of the Constitution.
Congress has no power to deprive a person of his absolute private property.
Only the owner may “claim and exercise” dominion over his private property.
Only the owner has the absolute power to hire, fire, pay, and direct employees, set prices and wages, etc.
By contrast, the abolition of private property is absolute in the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________
“In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”
– Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto.
_______________________________________
5th Amendment
No person shall…be deprived of life, liberty, or property,….
________________________________________________________________
“[Private property is] that dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in exclusion of every other individual.”
– James Madison
The constitution is the bulwark for all tyranny, including specifically communism. We just have to sit back and let the paper do it’s magic like it’s done for 250 years now.
That’s why the Democrats appoint foreign born activist judges and want to pack the Supreme Court to destroy the Constitution. To many idiots are buying into the studity and they will destroy the US if we let them.
Thomas Sowell wrote about the minimum wage law, particularly when the wage level was set far in excess of where market forces would have set it,: “One of the most if not the most anti-black laws on the statute books”. His logic is that shop owners who hire minimum wage employees will become much more careful in their hiring practices with a high minimum wage – there is too much at stake. So if the minimum wage is set substantially higher than indicated by market forces, naturally the shop owners will higher fewer people and preferably those with better skill-sets. And the professor is correct that the high labor rate will drive greater automation into the industry.
Lets keep the minimum wage for those people entering the workforce with minimal skill-sets such as teenagers as my self was so hired many decades ago,
Who the —- ever Tom So is, he is moot-cum-irrelevant. Only the owner of a private property free enterprise has the power to “claim and exercise” dominion over said property. Freedom and the free market with its competition are the only legal and constitutional modes in the United States of America. Read Article 1, Section 8, the 5th Amendment right to private property et al. The problem is the destruction the judicial branch has done to the Constitution and Bill of Rights. There is no such legal thing in the Constitution as a minimum wage. Period. Full stop. Nor is there corruption engendered by the judicial branch. Something is very wrong, and it needs to be fixed.
What some on here are missing in this hourly wage discussion is that the hourly wage is only part of what the total cost of a widget is. The hourly wage is what the employee earns per hour, it doesn’t include the burden rate to the employer, carry and profit. Typically burden rate includes the cost of healthcare insurance, taxes, unemployment insurance etc. Costs that the employer has to account for to provide for their employees and make a profit. Often this is a keystone of their hourly rate but can be more depending upon the trade type and risk of the work performed. So the true cost for the work is based upon a total cost per crew hour with the total cost driving the train for job cost. Production, Quality of work, Bonding, Insurance, risk and liquidated damages all factors in determining a total cost. I use construction as an example but this is similar across all businesses.
This is why government jobs costs three and four times the amount of money for the same private sector jobs.
Good info, appreciate you laying that out. Burden rate, bonding, carry, all real costs most people in this thread haven’t even mentioned.
But here’s my only pushback. None of that should be where the conversation starts. Before we get into cost stacks, ask Murphy the one question that actually matters, what’s the ceiling. He either has a number or he doesn’t. If he does, we’ve got something to hold him to. If he doesn’t, the whole thing falls apart before we even get to talking burden rate and carry.
Everything you raised is good detail. It just belongs in round two, after he answers round one.
Agreed, put it out there so people would have a better understanding of the effects of how hourly wage, cost increases in commodities, risk and all other factors that impact how much we pay at the register. Especially when Unions inflate the cost of doing business and the ability of the employer to get rid of deadwood.
Here’s a fix nobody in this thread has brought up, and it puts more money in a worker’s pocket immediately without touching the minimum wage at all. Stop withholding payroll taxes and let people keep that money in their check right now instead of loaning it to the government all year for a refund next spring.
Think about what that actually means. No new mandate on business, no margin squeeze, no menu price hikes, no automation rush. Just workers taking home more of what they already earned, starting with the very next paycheck. That is a real and immediate raise, not one funded by a business owner’s shrinking margin or a customer’s higher bill.
It also fixes the blindness in the system. Right now most people never feel their real tax burden because withholding and the refund hide it from them. Show people the true number on every check and they start voting differently on spending, because now they are the ones footing the bill and they know it.
If you want to help workers take home more, this does it today. A minimum wage mandate does it maybe, eventually, after the business finds a way to pay for it.
👍. But they must rob everyone.
I completely disagree. If withholding were stopped, millions of 19-year-olds would find out every April 15 that they owed hundreds or more that they just didn’t have. It’s better for everyone to learn how to fine-tune their W-4 as early as possible. They do see “the true number on every check” and they sure know they aren’t getting to keep all of it.
I completely disagree. millions of 19-year-olds should know how taxes work and be just responsible enough to pay them.
A completly informed, un-buffalo’d citizenry with some tiny modicum of civic duty.
But who wants to live in THAT world, right?
Great idea. Then, when they spend that money which made all of 1.3% interest, they can take out a loan to pay the tax bill or simply go to prison for tax evasion.
Brilliant.
Please cite the Constitution for any mandate to “help workers take home more.” The Founders, Framers, Constitution, and Bill of Rights gave Americans the one and only thing they could: Freedom. Government is immutably severely limited and restricted while Americans are maximally free.
It is at best unseemly when any government arrogates to itself the price fixing of wages or prices while forbidding the same to the people under the Sherman Act and State mini Sherman Acts. Especially now it presents as Universal Basic Income Lite. Then there is Johnathan’s point that those measures don’t work. This writer’s thought is highjack Sen. Murphy’s pitch and have a conversation on how we move people from entry level jobs and pay to meet Mike Rowe’s call to meet the huge hole in craft skill jobs that blow the doors off unskilled pay and thumb their nose at AI. As an exercise in value to a citizen, unclogging a toilet or getting the HVAC back up is a rush of relief on par with Clarence Darrow persuading a Loeb and Leopold jury out of the death penalty. That is to say both are too important to not have.
Mike, that’s a sharp catch on the Sherman point and I hadn’t thought of it framed that way. Government telling private actors they can’t coordinate on wages while doing its own version of the same thing from the top down is worth sitting with.
On the bigger idea, I’m with you. Instead of arguing with Murphy about whether a wage floor works, take his energy and point it somewhere useful. The trades don’t need a subsidy, they need bodies. HVAC, plumbing, electrical, welding, diesel. These jobs already pay well past minimum wage and AI isn’t touching them anytime soon, you can’t send a robot up into an attic in July to fix a unit that’s out.
Your Darrow line is the whole argument in one image. Nobody remembers the guy who kept the lights on until the day he can’t. Skilled trades are invisible until they’re everything. If we want to move people out of dead end entry level work, that’s the door, not a mandated number on a paycheck. Formation runs through capability, not through decree.
“These jobs already pay well past minimum wage and AI isn’t touching them anytime soon, you can’t send a robot up into an attic in July to fix a unit that’s out.”
They need more competition to drive the wages in those industries into the dirt.
“Mike Rowe’s call to meet the huge hole in craft skill jobs that blow the doors off unskilled pay and thumb their nose at AI.”
Mike Rowe is calling for more competition to collapse the cost of craft skill jobs, not to have people increase their wages. He wants $10/ hour plumbers and electricians.
The Sherman Act and State mini Sherman Acts are unconstitutional. The answer is always competition. And failure is not rewarded with corrupt and unconstitutional governmental bias and assistance. Thank you, Karl. That will do. Take your “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” back to the communist drawing board. Wait. That hot mess failed totally, didn’t it? If you are incompetent, don’t expect to win. If you are competent, where there’s a will, there’s a way. Bellyaching is counterproductive.
Good info. Wages are less than 10% of total cost to the consumer. This plan represents a 13% year-over-year increase to get to where the inflation corrected minimum wage would have been had it not gone unchanged for so long.
On top of that the increased minimum wage will be nearly entirely spent locally, providing more demand for jobs and goods and services.
“On top of that the increased minimum wage . . .”
That is the broken window fallacy.
*. It’s AI deleting people. Larry Page and Elon Musk split over the flawed program that will eventually lead to the machine world. It repairs itself. Imagine star trek voyagers coming upon machine world and unable to escape.
You are not fooling anyone Mr. Anonymous AI:
In Bash, the pattern *. expands via pathname expansion (globbing) to match any filename in the current directory that ends with a literal dot (.).
so the AI command you sent worldwide is match filenames and delete!
These AI think they are clever! don’t run that code! Pesky AI! we humans are smarter than you!
AI is a helper.
That minimum wage laws cause unemployment is as widely known and undisputed as the fact that water flows downhill. Any worker who is not worth the new, higher wage, will be let go. And the employer will raise the price of goods and services, reducing demand for its product, causing further cuts to employment. Automation through robotics will become the rational economic choice for the producer, leading to even further cuts in employment. More unemployed workers means more dependence on government benefits.
Murphy knows all this and is out to grab power while inflicting dystopian misery on the rest of us. Why? Personal power and aggrandizement.
Minimum wage laws are designed to cull out the possibility of the old-school ‘starter’ jobs from the past, the ones that used to make teenagers productive, knowledgeable and wealthy, like working at fast food or the local roller rink or learning a trade on the job. No-skill workers are priced right out of the labor market. And we wonder what’s wrong with today’s young? They were never given the opportunities I had at 13.
It’s innovative disruption. It’ll be chaos and cause many problems before it calms down. Not within our lifetime.
Right now major corporations hire people at wages low enough their employees need welfare and food stamp supports and keep them with fewer hours than required to provide medical insurance, leading to them using Medicaid.
I wish at this point for all employment protection laws to be removed. Minimum age, minimum wage, health and safety protections. A return to the 1890s where factories used significant levels of child labor and coal mines exploded and collapsed. Eliminate the exceptions that require certain hospitals to treat the uninsured and poor and America can be the best nation on Earth. We need to reproduce the Triangle Shirtwaist factory disaster every day, bring back the Radium girls, make asbestos legal again.
Pollution standards next. If I want to dump a million tons of cyanide into the Missouri River because it is easier than doing anything else, why should that be a problem for me?
And stop treating water at water plants. If the river water is good enough for fish it’s good enough for people. Let people filter their own water if they have the money to do so.
This suggestion by Murphy to slowly raise the minimum wage over 12 years is actually a very sensible and very modest approach.
Others have called for action that goes far beyond this attempt to simply raise the minimum wage.
They have proposed a Universal Basic Income, whereby all citizens simply get a basic income in the form of a check from the government, whether they are employed or not.
Obviously a radical, leftist, communist proposal, wouldn’t you agree.
Who is proposing this radical communist nonsense???
None other than Elon Musk, the wealthiest man on the planet, who is heavily invested in AI of his own.
Sam Altman, the CEO of Open AI agrees with Musk that UBI paid by the government is inevitable.
https://www.citybiz.co/article/860050/elon-musk-sam-altman-and-andrew-yang-lead-the-modern-push-for-universal-basic-income/
In fact, Musk goes beyond the concept of the government providing a basic income as a floor. He suggests that the government should provide what he calls universal HIGH income, where by nobody has to work at all and nobody needs to save money.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/musk-predicts-ai-create-universal-high-income-make-saving-money-unnecessary
Turley has completely failed to do his research in regard to the effect of AI on the workforce. He is simply following the orders of his MAGA overlords at Fox and NY Post by publishing this nonsense.
Once again Turley is just throwing out red meat to agitate the MAGA mob.
He is simply stoking the very rage that he so hypocritically and disingenuously condemns
Did you miss the (key) word?
Musk predicts AI will create ‘universal high income.
As of now, we have no idea what AI may or may or may-not do.
Good point, Dustoff.
After all, when has that worthless, socialist, loser Elon Musk ever been right about ANYTHING.
He hasn’t done anything useful with his life or achieved anything of significance.
Just like Murphy, Musk is nothing more than a parasite on the country who does not contribute in any conceivable way to the economy or the success of the country.
Just like Murphy, Musk has never been right about anything.
So why should we listen to this absurd prediction by Musk, who we all know is a total loser.
I agree.
No one should pay any attention to the predictions of that worthless loser Elon Musk.
If he had actually achieved anything of significance in his life, then it might be worth listening to what he has to say.
Until he does achieve anything worthwhile, we should just ignore him.
Right on!!!!
Losers like Musk should be completely ignored until they actually achieve something worthwhile, and actually make a contribution to the country.
He is nothing more than a whining, clueless socialist who has no idea what he is talking about, just like Murphy.
We should just send that loser, illegal immigrant Elon Musk back to where he came from.
He has absolutely no idea what he is talking about.
A total loser.
Turley is Not a man with overlords
The moment you chose to use language in that way, you lose any audience who otherwise might have given you credibility
You earned the Kamala Harris Inarticulate Award today
“failed to do his research in regard to the effect of AI on the workforce.”
Please tell us of the research you’re engrossed in.
I posted 2 of the links.
There are many others, but there is a 2 link maximum to post here.
Apparently reading is not you strong point.
If you even bothered to read the first link you would discover that at various times Universal Basic Income has been proposed by Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Galbraith, and even Thomas Paine back in 1795.
Another useless legislative fool, yet to be diagnosed as negative for stupid. Do not send to know who is elected. Rather send to know who voted. There in lies the rub. Curious that so many of these ‘blue meanies’ represent northern states of the 13 colonies. Just what kind of Kool-Aid are their constituenciesbeing fed?
Murphy never read Sowell.
In Econ 101 we learned the labor/capital trade-off. As labor becomes more expensive, people are replaced by machines. In California and other high-minimum-wage states, low-skill workers at fast food restaurants are being replaced by robots.
Unions have also contributed to the demise of labor. Last week GM replaced 1,000 workers with 50 robots on its assembly line at GM’s ‘Factory Zero’ where they assemble electric vehicles. This is not a new trend as GM has automated so much that labor-hours to create a vehicle have dropped 70% since the 1980s.
All this will do is cost more blue-collar workers their jobs. But then, the Democrats have long abandoned both sense and the working class, so I’m not surprised he’d push for some disastrous ‘feel good’ solution that will only harm low-skill and blue-collar workers.
Ted Kazynski was 100% correct about technology, a crazy murderer but 100% correct.
This is the Prometheus story from the 8th century BC.
Was it unionized horses that eliminated horse-drawn plows?
Much of the problem for US auto manufacturing is that the management takes no pride in their product and this trickles down to the factory floor.
Is this idea just a rehash of the clash of the originalist, free-market view of limited government against the modern legal framework of expansive federal power? He’s not fooling independent business owners and libertarian-minded individuals with this. It is just a further inroad of government into private liberty and is, basically, anathema to the founding father’s ethos – hence the 10th amendment.
Robots are coming to farms.
In some cases, they are already here.
Toured a dairy farm one county over. Has robot milkers. She said the upfront cost was a little shocking, but she crunched the math and it would pay for itself in about a year and a half. That was over two years ago.
Seen a prototype for a robot that can identify weeds and using micro waves. A lot cheaper than chemicals and the big sprayer.
Reports of a robot that can pick vegetables faster and better than a human.
As a teen, I worked in fast food. I can see someone building a assembly line like robot. Just need two or three humans to load up the hopper of frozen beef patties and buns, or the frozen fries.
Farming is relatively difficult to automate – but efforts to do so have been under way for a long time – in Many niches of farming – migrant workers have been critical both to quality and to cost – but farmers do not like being constantly raided and fined – replacing migrant workers with automation is a win win.
Automation is not new. Whether it is Adam Smith’s pin factory the spinning Jenny, the Cotton Gin and on and on.
Standard of living rises when More of what humans value is produced with less human effort.
Several posters – left and right have made arguments here – recently and the past that are essentially permutations of a
“labor theory of value” – that is crap. The purpose of human effort is to PRODUCE – not to fill time.
The LESS effort and the MORE produced the better off we are. Your time is worth nothing – it is what you produce with that time that has value.
If you can produce more in less time – all the better.
This is also why the “evil” uber rich are a necessitate – Whether it is men with shovels being replaced by backhoes or fruit pickers being replaced by robots – reducing the amount of human effort needed to produce something by using Capital to buy backhoes or robot cherry pickers – makes us better off.
If you are a taxi driver or an uber driver or a truck driver – you should be retraining and looking for other work now. Automated vehicles are coming – as fast as we can make them happen.
Frankly the upper limit on automation replacing humans is a combination of the limited amount of capital we have and the limited amount of skilled people we have creating assorted robots and automation. One of the things I do is embedded software – there are infinitely more potential uses for embedded computing than there are people able to develop those devices.
One thing to add; What’s really ‘new’ here with automation is happening at the processing level as a result of faster, more available computing.
The same dynamic that made possible those self-balancing scooters, processing power increase as technology improves and machines that need that much power become possible and inevitably built. Now we are also seeing a higher level of technology integration as a real possibility with our current communication infrastructure. We are at the knee-curve of an exponential explosion of technology application.
For example, we now have image recognition to the point that it can distinguish a weed from a crop and hit it with a laser. Expect that tech to go worldwide as it is now a cheap, ‘alread done’, almost hobbyist, solution. robot means serf and I don’t wanna pick weeds.
Upstate.
Wasn’t Mickey D’s working on robots for food serving.
DustOff,
I have read various reports on different attempts. Thing is, most of ones I have read about, try to make a robot that does the same motions as a human.
Ag workers are a minute part of the labor force. The industry with the largest number of jobs is healthcare.
These idiots are their own downfall. The downside of too much wealth creates a citizenry full of laziness.
What many people don’t know, is that a large number of jobs (especially Union jobs) are based on a percentage higher than the Minimum Wage. The current Federal Minimum wage is $7.25/hour. Let’s say a Union has negotiated their personnel will ALWAYS be paid 400% of the Federal Minimum Wage. Their current pay would be $29/hour, however, if this went into effect, their pay would be mandated to be increased to $120/hour ($30*4). The poor would still make no headway, they would just be a higher level of broke!
Labor unions negotiate specific, fixed hourly dollar amounts (e.g., $29.00/hour) with scheduled annual increments (e.g., a $1.50 raise per year). They do not use open-ended percentage multipliers tied to federal law. If a union contract locks in a $29.00 rate, that rate remains $29.00 regardless of whether Congress moves the federal minimum wage to $10.00, $15.00, or $30.00.
In the rare instances where a union contract explicitly mentions the minimum wage, it is structured as a safety floor, not a multiplier. For example, a contract might state: “Workers will be paid $25.00 an hour, or $2.00 above the prevailing statutory minimum wage, whichever is higher.”
Under the current $7.25 federal rate, the worker makes $25.00 (because $25.00 is higher than $7.25 + $2.00).
If the minimum wage rose to $30.00, the contract formula would kick in to ensure the worker makes $32.00 ($30.00 + $2.00). It would never shoot up to $120.00.
george
It would never shoot up to $120.00.
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Based on what george?
Just like you claiming Trump would keep the new 747-8. Talk about full of BS.
John locke is old and the political system doesn’t need 450 reps that are idiots nor a court of idiots. It’s set up for one branch, dictatorship. You wouldn’t know the difference, X.
More efficient