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Metalworking (rec.crafts.metalworking) Discuss various aspects of working with metal, such as machining, welding, metal joining, screwing, casting, hardening/tempering, blacksmithing/forging, spinning and hammer work, sheet metal work. |
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#1
Posted to rec.crafts.metalworking
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OT disgusted with all presidential candidates
Ed Huntress wrote:
On Sat, 06 Jun 2015 21:37:11 -0400, "Steve W." wrote: Ed Huntress wrote: On Sat, 06 Jun 2015 18:01:17 -0500, Ignoramus26399 wrote: On 2015-06-06, Gunner Asch wrote: Btw....the unemployment figures are growing again..particularly in places that have instituted that $15 min wage. I am convinced that $15 minimum wage is a disaster for cities that adopt them, because it will decimate low income communities through unemployment and crime. I am very interested in what happend to Los Angeles a few years after their new minimum wage goes into effect. Generally, robots will replace low income people anywhere, but not as fast as where a high minimum wage is adopted. After all, a robot can flip burgers pretty well! i If a robot can flip burgers, it won't make a damned bit of difference what humans are making in wages. They're done, whether it's in five years or five years and six months. Nothing, absolutely nothing, will stop automation. And what wages are being paid has nothing to do with it. The technology has it's own pace. Already being tested and adopted in some places. When you look at it burgers, tacos, pizza, are all easy to deal with in automation. Added benefits are consistency of product and appearance. Both of which help with the bottom line. One company is installing fully automated pizza vending machines, that make the dough from scratch and add whichever toppings you want from a touch screen menu. Go to many large cities and other countries and they have entire convenience areas that are vending machines, many with no real limits on what is sold. A lot of folks slam Wal~Mart as being a bad retailer. Take a look past the stores at the warehousing and you will find that they employ a LOT of people to do a job that could easily be automated. It will be interesting with all the new costs and taxes that have been passed but haven't hit yet, what it will do to that system. Especially when those are not minimum wage positions. First, taxes: In the year 2000, "Tax Freedom Day" (the date in a year at which the average worker is no longer working for the government) was 120 days into the year. In 2014, it was 110 days into the year. So taxes actually have come down, not up, and they bounce around with the state of the economy. This data is from the anti-tax Tax Foundation, not from the government itself. They used to tout how Tax Freedom Day was getting longer into the year, year after year. Now they bury it in their back pages. As for the "ease" of Wal-Mart automating their warehouses: They are frequently cited in logistics and business articles as one of the most automated warehousing systems in the world, along with Amazon. The only thing that keeps them from getting rid of more people is that the warehouse-scale systems are not yet flexible enough to deal with their constantly changing inventory and still provide one-day deliveries. But it's coming, and wages will have nothing at all to do with it. If you would like to see a graph of productivity (the product of automation) versus wages over time, I'll put it together for you. But I can tell you the bottom line: Automation keeps going up, while wages are flat. There is no connection between the two. (In manufacturing, productivity keeps going up, output keeps going up with it, and employment keeps going down. The rest of the economy will catch up to that trend.) The implementation of automation, both the physical and the IT varieties, is solely a product of the stage of technical development for automation itself. And, having been on the receiving end of that news for 40 years, I'll testify that it's advancing every month. The latest thing is the "collaborative" robot. They're like adding another person to your workforce, and they're getting cheaper. Trying to hold it back by holding wages down is like trying to improve employment by having people work for free on Fridays. The degree to which you'd have to beggar people to accomplish it is extreme. And in the end, like John Henry driving rail spikes in competition with a steam-powered machine, you will lose. The thing is that WM (at least all 3 of the local warehouses) HAVE the automation already in the building BUT they do not run it full time. Take one item, as an example, shoes. They have a fully automated line that dumps the shoes, sorts them, packs them into shoe boxes and palletizes them for storage in the warehouse. It can run 2 days and do more than the human workers do in 4 days. BUT half the time it is idle. They only start it up if a backlog occurs. Wal~Mart tells the company that makes the shoes that they don't want them boxed at the plant. Instead they make the shoes, pair them, tag them and toss them in a crate. On this end they sort & pack. On the shipping side they have long racks where lift operators work on one side and break down packaging, load items in the racks and repeat until they clock out. On the other side of the rack a person scans a barcode, That lights up a series of lights in order and the person goes to each slot, pulls the item punches a button to kill the light and packs it in a box. The computer already knows the sizes of the boxes because they scan the code on the side before packing, it calculates which items fit in that box and only drops that amount. I asked a couple of the warehouse managers about it. They told me that it was orders from Bentonville that the machinery was not the priority, the people were. -- Steve W. |
#2
Posted to rec.crafts.metalworking
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OT disgusted with all presidential candidates
On Sun, 07 Jun 2015 11:01:18 -0400, "Steve W."
wrote: Ed Huntress wrote: On Sat, 06 Jun 2015 21:37:11 -0400, "Steve W." wrote: Ed Huntress wrote: On Sat, 06 Jun 2015 18:01:17 -0500, Ignoramus26399 wrote: On 2015-06-06, Gunner Asch wrote: Btw....the unemployment figures are growing again..particularly in places that have instituted that $15 min wage. I am convinced that $15 minimum wage is a disaster for cities that adopt them, because it will decimate low income communities through unemployment and crime. I am very interested in what happend to Los Angeles a few years after their new minimum wage goes into effect. Generally, robots will replace low income people anywhere, but not as fast as where a high minimum wage is adopted. After all, a robot can flip burgers pretty well! i If a robot can flip burgers, it won't make a damned bit of difference what humans are making in wages. They're done, whether it's in five years or five years and six months. Nothing, absolutely nothing, will stop automation. And what wages are being paid has nothing to do with it. The technology has it's own pace. Already being tested and adopted in some places. When you look at it burgers, tacos, pizza, are all easy to deal with in automation. Added benefits are consistency of product and appearance. Both of which help with the bottom line. One company is installing fully automated pizza vending machines, that make the dough from scratch and add whichever toppings you want from a touch screen menu. Go to many large cities and other countries and they have entire convenience areas that are vending machines, many with no real limits on what is sold. A lot of folks slam Wal~Mart as being a bad retailer. Take a look past the stores at the warehousing and you will find that they employ a LOT of people to do a job that could easily be automated. It will be interesting with all the new costs and taxes that have been passed but haven't hit yet, what it will do to that system. Especially when those are not minimum wage positions. First, taxes: In the year 2000, "Tax Freedom Day" (the date in a year at which the average worker is no longer working for the government) was 120 days into the year. In 2014, it was 110 days into the year. So taxes actually have come down, not up, and they bounce around with the state of the economy. This data is from the anti-tax Tax Foundation, not from the government itself. They used to tout how Tax Freedom Day was getting longer into the year, year after year. Now they bury it in their back pages. As for the "ease" of Wal-Mart automating their warehouses: They are frequently cited in logistics and business articles as one of the most automated warehousing systems in the world, along with Amazon. The only thing that keeps them from getting rid of more people is that the warehouse-scale systems are not yet flexible enough to deal with their constantly changing inventory and still provide one-day deliveries. But it's coming, and wages will have nothing at all to do with it. If you would like to see a graph of productivity (the product of automation) versus wages over time, I'll put it together for you. But I can tell you the bottom line: Automation keeps going up, while wages are flat. There is no connection between the two. (In manufacturing, productivity keeps going up, output keeps going up with it, and employment keeps going down. The rest of the economy will catch up to that trend.) The implementation of automation, both the physical and the IT varieties, is solely a product of the stage of technical development for automation itself. And, having been on the receiving end of that news for 40 years, I'll testify that it's advancing every month. The latest thing is the "collaborative" robot. They're like adding another person to your workforce, and they're getting cheaper. Trying to hold it back by holding wages down is like trying to improve employment by having people work for free on Fridays. The degree to which you'd have to beggar people to accomplish it is extreme. And in the end, like John Henry driving rail spikes in competition with a steam-powered machine, you will lose. The thing is that WM (at least all 3 of the local warehouses) HAVE the automation already in the building BUT they do not run it full time. Take one item, as an example, shoes. They have a fully automated line that dumps the shoes, sorts them, packs them into shoe boxes and palletizes them for storage in the warehouse. It can run 2 days and do more than the human workers do in 4 days. BUT half the time it is idle. They only start it up if a backlog occurs. Wal~Mart tells the company that makes the shoes that they don't want them boxed at the plant. Instead they make the shoes, pair them, tag them and toss them in a crate. On this end they sort & pack. On the shipping side they have long racks where lift operators work on one side and break down packaging, load items in the racks and repeat until they clock out. On the other side of the rack a person scans a barcode, That lights up a series of lights in order and the person goes to each slot, pulls the item punches a button to kill the light and packs it in a box. The computer already knows the sizes of the boxes because they scan the code on the side before packing, it calculates which items fit in that box and only drops that amount. I asked a couple of the warehouse managers about it. They told me that it was orders from Bentonville that the machinery was not the priority, the people were. Uh...given Wal-Mart's history, including having the highest number of full-time employees who qualify for food stamps, I'll take that last statement with a fat grain of salt. g The company does have an extremely efficient warehousing system, including the efficiency of the people-handling part, and they make use of every mechanical and IT trick to make them more efficient, from automatically guided fork lifts to radio-frequency ID (RFID). And their size is huge. Their 300+ distribution centers have a floor area equivalent to 18% of the surface area of Manhatten. So they have thousands of warehouse employees. But they also have one of the most advanced and thorough fully-automated warehousing systems in the world. And they're constantly adding to it. -- Ed Huntress |
#3
Posted to rec.crafts.metalworking
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OT disgusted with all presidential candidates
Ed Huntress wrote:
On Sun, 07 Jun 2015 11:01:18 -0400, "Steve W." wrote: Ed Huntress wrote: On Sat, 06 Jun 2015 21:37:11 -0400, "Steve W." wrote: Ed Huntress wrote: On Sat, 06 Jun 2015 18:01:17 -0500, Ignoramus26399 wrote: On 2015-06-06, Gunner Asch wrote: Btw....the unemployment figures are growing again..particularly in places that have instituted that $15 min wage. I am convinced that $15 minimum wage is a disaster for cities that adopt them, because it will decimate low income communities through unemployment and crime. I am very interested in what happend to Los Angeles a few years after their new minimum wage goes into effect. Generally, robots will replace low income people anywhere, but not as fast as where a high minimum wage is adopted. After all, a robot can flip burgers pretty well! i If a robot can flip burgers, it won't make a damned bit of difference what humans are making in wages. They're done, whether it's in five years or five years and six months. Nothing, absolutely nothing, will stop automation. And what wages are being paid has nothing to do with it. The technology has it's own pace. Already being tested and adopted in some places. When you look at it burgers, tacos, pizza, are all easy to deal with in automation. Added benefits are consistency of product and appearance. Both of which help with the bottom line. One company is installing fully automated pizza vending machines, that make the dough from scratch and add whichever toppings you want from a touch screen menu. Go to many large cities and other countries and they have entire convenience areas that are vending machines, many with no real limits on what is sold. A lot of folks slam Wal~Mart as being a bad retailer. Take a look past the stores at the warehousing and you will find that they employ a LOT of people to do a job that could easily be automated. It will be interesting with all the new costs and taxes that have been passed but haven't hit yet, what it will do to that system. Especially when those are not minimum wage positions. First, taxes: In the year 2000, "Tax Freedom Day" (the date in a year at which the average worker is no longer working for the government) was 120 days into the year. In 2014, it was 110 days into the year. So taxes actually have come down, not up, and they bounce around with the state of the economy. This data is from the anti-tax Tax Foundation, not from the government itself. They used to tout how Tax Freedom Day was getting longer into the year, year after year. Now they bury it in their back pages. As for the "ease" of Wal-Mart automating their warehouses: They are frequently cited in logistics and business articles as one of the most automated warehousing systems in the world, along with Amazon. The only thing that keeps them from getting rid of more people is that the warehouse-scale systems are not yet flexible enough to deal with their constantly changing inventory and still provide one-day deliveries. But it's coming, and wages will have nothing at all to do with it. If you would like to see a graph of productivity (the product of automation) versus wages over time, I'll put it together for you. But I can tell you the bottom line: Automation keeps going up, while wages are flat. There is no connection between the two. (In manufacturing, productivity keeps going up, output keeps going up with it, and employment keeps going down. The rest of the economy will catch up to that trend.) The implementation of automation, both the physical and the IT varieties, is solely a product of the stage of technical development for automation itself. And, having been on the receiving end of that news for 40 years, I'll testify that it's advancing every month. The latest thing is the "collaborative" robot. They're like adding another person to your workforce, and they're getting cheaper. Trying to hold it back by holding wages down is like trying to improve employment by having people work for free on Fridays. The degree to which you'd have to beggar people to accomplish it is extreme. And in the end, like John Henry driving rail spikes in competition with a steam-powered machine, you will lose. The thing is that WM (at least all 3 of the local warehouses) HAVE the automation already in the building BUT they do not run it full time. Take one item, as an example, shoes. They have a fully automated line that dumps the shoes, sorts them, packs them into shoe boxes and palletizes them for storage in the warehouse. It can run 2 days and do more than the human workers do in 4 days. BUT half the time it is idle. They only start it up if a backlog occurs. Wal~Mart tells the company that makes the shoes that they don't want them boxed at the plant. Instead they make the shoes, pair them, tag them and toss them in a crate. On this end they sort & pack. On the shipping side they have long racks where lift operators work on one side and break down packaging, load items in the racks and repeat until they clock out. On the other side of the rack a person scans a barcode, That lights up a series of lights in order and the person goes to each slot, pulls the item punches a button to kill the light and packs it in a box. The computer already knows the sizes of the boxes because they scan the code on the side before packing, it calculates which items fit in that box and only drops that amount. I asked a couple of the warehouse managers about it. They told me that it was orders from Bentonville that the machinery was not the priority, the people were. Uh...given Wal-Mart's history, including having the highest number of full-time employees who qualify for food stamps, I'll take that last statement with a fat grain of salt. g Considering that they are the largest non-governmental employer in the US that really isn't a surprise. And that the income levels needed for assistance have steadily risen to inflate the numbers it isn't surprising. The company does have an extremely efficient warehousing system, including the efficiency of the people-handling part, and they make use of every mechanical and IT trick to make them more efficient, from automatically guided fork lifts to radio-frequency ID (RFID). And their size is huge. Their 300+ distribution centers have a floor area equivalent to 18% of the surface area of Manhatten. So they have thousands of warehouse employees. But they also have one of the most advanced and thorough fully-automated warehousing systems in the world. And they're constantly adding to it. As I said the local warehouses do have the automation, they just don't use it a lot. -- Steve W. |
#4
Posted to rec.crafts.metalworking
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OT disgusted with all presidential candidates
On Mon, 08 Jun 2015 11:39:39 -0400, "Steve W."
wrote: Ed Huntress wrote: On Sun, 07 Jun 2015 11:01:18 -0400, "Steve W." wrote: Ed Huntress wrote: On Sat, 06 Jun 2015 21:37:11 -0400, "Steve W." wrote: Ed Huntress wrote: On Sat, 06 Jun 2015 18:01:17 -0500, Ignoramus26399 wrote: On 2015-06-06, Gunner Asch wrote: Btw....the unemployment figures are growing again..particularly in places that have instituted that $15 min wage. I am convinced that $15 minimum wage is a disaster for cities that adopt them, because it will decimate low income communities through unemployment and crime. I am very interested in what happend to Los Angeles a few years after their new minimum wage goes into effect. Generally, robots will replace low income people anywhere, but not as fast as where a high minimum wage is adopted. After all, a robot can flip burgers pretty well! i If a robot can flip burgers, it won't make a damned bit of difference what humans are making in wages. They're done, whether it's in five years or five years and six months. Nothing, absolutely nothing, will stop automation. And what wages are being paid has nothing to do with it. The technology has it's own pace. Already being tested and adopted in some places. When you look at it burgers, tacos, pizza, are all easy to deal with in automation. Added benefits are consistency of product and appearance. Both of which help with the bottom line. One company is installing fully automated pizza vending machines, that make the dough from scratch and add whichever toppings you want from a touch screen menu. Go to many large cities and other countries and they have entire convenience areas that are vending machines, many with no real limits on what is sold. A lot of folks slam Wal~Mart as being a bad retailer. Take a look past the stores at the warehousing and you will find that they employ a LOT of people to do a job that could easily be automated. It will be interesting with all the new costs and taxes that have been passed but haven't hit yet, what it will do to that system. Especially when those are not minimum wage positions. First, taxes: In the year 2000, "Tax Freedom Day" (the date in a year at which the average worker is no longer working for the government) was 120 days into the year. In 2014, it was 110 days into the year. So taxes actually have come down, not up, and they bounce around with the state of the economy. This data is from the anti-tax Tax Foundation, not from the government itself. They used to tout how Tax Freedom Day was getting longer into the year, year after year. Now they bury it in their back pages. As for the "ease" of Wal-Mart automating their warehouses: They are frequently cited in logistics and business articles as one of the most automated warehousing systems in the world, along with Amazon. The only thing that keeps them from getting rid of more people is that the warehouse-scale systems are not yet flexible enough to deal with their constantly changing inventory and still provide one-day deliveries. But it's coming, and wages will have nothing at all to do with it. If you would like to see a graph of productivity (the product of automation) versus wages over time, I'll put it together for you. But I can tell you the bottom line: Automation keeps going up, while wages are flat. There is no connection between the two. (In manufacturing, productivity keeps going up, output keeps going up with it, and employment keeps going down. The rest of the economy will catch up to that trend.) The implementation of automation, both the physical and the IT varieties, is solely a product of the stage of technical development for automation itself. And, having been on the receiving end of that news for 40 years, I'll testify that it's advancing every month. The latest thing is the "collaborative" robot. They're like adding another person to your workforce, and they're getting cheaper. Trying to hold it back by holding wages down is like trying to improve employment by having people work for free on Fridays. The degree to which you'd have to beggar people to accomplish it is extreme. And in the end, like John Henry driving rail spikes in competition with a steam-powered machine, you will lose. The thing is that WM (at least all 3 of the local warehouses) HAVE the automation already in the building BUT they do not run it full time. Take one item, as an example, shoes. They have a fully automated line that dumps the shoes, sorts them, packs them into shoe boxes and palletizes them for storage in the warehouse. It can run 2 days and do more than the human workers do in 4 days. BUT half the time it is idle. They only start it up if a backlog occurs. Wal~Mart tells the company that makes the shoes that they don't want them boxed at the plant. Instead they make the shoes, pair them, tag them and toss them in a crate. On this end they sort & pack. On the shipping side they have long racks where lift operators work on one side and break down packaging, load items in the racks and repeat until they clock out. On the other side of the rack a person scans a barcode, That lights up a series of lights in order and the person goes to each slot, pulls the item punches a button to kill the light and packs it in a box. The computer already knows the sizes of the boxes because they scan the code on the side before packing, it calculates which items fit in that box and only drops that amount. I asked a couple of the warehouse managers about it. They told me that it was orders from Bentonville that the machinery was not the priority, the people were. Uh...given Wal-Mart's history, including having the highest number of full-time employees who qualify for food stamps, I'll take that last statement with a fat grain of salt. g Considering that they are the largest non-governmental employer in the US that really isn't a surprise. And that the income levels needed for assistance have steadily risen to inflate the numbers it isn't surprising. This is just Ohio: "Although there are no federal numbers on where employed SNAP participants work, the state of Ohio, where Ballam lives, does keep a list of the top 50 companies with the most workers and their family members on food stamps. Ohio’s list includes lots of fast food chains and discount and big-box stores: McDonald’s, Target, Kroger supermarket, Dollar General. At the very top is Walmart, which had an average of more than 14,500 workers and family members on food stamps last year.* If you take into account the average size of a family on food stamps, as many as 7,000 individual Walmart employees were on food stamps last year—nearly 15 percent of the company’s workforce across Ohio. "That means the same company that brings in the most food stamp dollars in revenue—an estimated $13 billion last year—also likely has the most employees using food stamps. It's a company store, financed by taxpayers. They're smart dudes! The company does have an extremely efficient warehousing system, including the efficiency of the people-handling part, and they make use of every mechanical and IT trick to make them more efficient, from automatically guided fork lifts to radio-frequency ID (RFID). And their size is huge. Their 300+ distribution centers have a floor area equivalent to 18% of the surface area of Manhatten. So they have thousands of warehouse employees. But they also have one of the most advanced and thorough fully-automated warehousing systems in the world. And they're constantly adding to it. As I said the local warehouses do have the automation, they just don't use it a lot. |
#5
Posted to rec.crafts.metalworking
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OT disgusted with all presidential candidates
Ed Huntress wrote:
On Mon, 08 Jun 2015 11:39:39 -0400, "Steve W." wrote: Ed Huntress wrote: On Sun, 07 Jun 2015 11:01:18 -0400, "Steve W." wrote: Ed Huntress wrote: On Sat, 06 Jun 2015 21:37:11 -0400, "Steve W." wrote: Ed Huntress wrote: On Sat, 06 Jun 2015 18:01:17 -0500, Ignoramus26399 wrote: On 2015-06-06, Gunner Asch wrote: Btw....the unemployment figures are growing again..particularly in places that have instituted that $15 min wage. I am convinced that $15 minimum wage is a disaster for cities that adopt them, because it will decimate low income communities through unemployment and crime. I am very interested in what happend to Los Angeles a few years after their new minimum wage goes into effect. Generally, robots will replace low income people anywhere, but not as fast as where a high minimum wage is adopted. After all, a robot can flip burgers pretty well! i If a robot can flip burgers, it won't make a damned bit of difference what humans are making in wages. They're done, whether it's in five years or five years and six months. Nothing, absolutely nothing, will stop automation. And what wages are being paid has nothing to do with it. The technology has it's own pace. Already being tested and adopted in some places. When you look at it burgers, tacos, pizza, are all easy to deal with in automation. Added benefits are consistency of product and appearance. Both of which help with the bottom line. One company is installing fully automated pizza vending machines, that make the dough from scratch and add whichever toppings you want from a touch screen menu. Go to many large cities and other countries and they have entire convenience areas that are vending machines, many with no real limits on what is sold. A lot of folks slam Wal~Mart as being a bad retailer. Take a look past the stores at the warehousing and you will find that they employ a LOT of people to do a job that could easily be automated. It will be interesting with all the new costs and taxes that have been passed but haven't hit yet, what it will do to that system. Especially when those are not minimum wage positions. First, taxes: In the year 2000, "Tax Freedom Day" (the date in a year at which the average worker is no longer working for the government) was 120 days into the year. In 2014, it was 110 days into the year. So taxes actually have come down, not up, and they bounce around with the state of the economy. This data is from the anti-tax Tax Foundation, not from the government itself. They used to tout how Tax Freedom Day was getting longer into the year, year after year. Now they bury it in their back pages. As for the "ease" of Wal-Mart automating their warehouses: They are frequently cited in logistics and business articles as one of the most automated warehousing systems in the world, along with Amazon. The only thing that keeps them from getting rid of more people is that the warehouse-scale systems are not yet flexible enough to deal with their constantly changing inventory and still provide one-day deliveries. But it's coming, and wages will have nothing at all to do with it. If you would like to see a graph of productivity (the product of automation) versus wages over time, I'll put it together for you. But I can tell you the bottom line: Automation keeps going up, while wages are flat. There is no connection between the two. (In manufacturing, productivity keeps going up, output keeps going up with it, and employment keeps going down. The rest of the economy will catch up to that trend.) The implementation of automation, both the physical and the IT varieties, is solely a product of the stage of technical development for automation itself. And, having been on the receiving end of that news for 40 years, I'll testify that it's advancing every month. The latest thing is the "collaborative" robot. They're like adding another person to your workforce, and they're getting cheaper. Trying to hold it back by holding wages down is like trying to improve employment by having people work for free on Fridays. The degree to which you'd have to beggar people to accomplish it is extreme. And in the end, like John Henry driving rail spikes in competition with a steam-powered machine, you will lose. The thing is that WM (at least all 3 of the local warehouses) HAVE the automation already in the building BUT they do not run it full time. Take one item, as an example, shoes. They have a fully automated line that dumps the shoes, sorts them, packs them into shoe boxes and palletizes them for storage in the warehouse. It can run 2 days and do more than the human workers do in 4 days. BUT half the time it is idle. They only start it up if a backlog occurs. Wal~Mart tells the company that makes the shoes that they don't want them boxed at the plant. Instead they make the shoes, pair them, tag them and toss them in a crate. On this end they sort & pack. On the shipping side they have long racks where lift operators work on one side and break down packaging, load items in the racks and repeat until they clock out. On the other side of the rack a person scans a barcode, That lights up a series of lights in order and the person goes to each slot, pulls the item punches a button to kill the light and packs it in a box. The computer already knows the sizes of the boxes because they scan the code on the side before packing, it calculates which items fit in that box and only drops that amount. I asked a couple of the warehouse managers about it. They told me that it was orders from Bentonville that the machinery was not the priority, the people were. Uh...given Wal-Mart's history, including having the highest number of full-time employees who qualify for food stamps, I'll take that last statement with a fat grain of salt. g Considering that they are the largest non-governmental employer in the US that really isn't a surprise. And that the income levels needed for assistance have steadily risen to inflate the numbers it isn't surprising. This is just Ohio: "Although there are no federal numbers on where employed SNAP participants work, the state of Ohio, where Ballam lives, does keep a list of the top 50 companies with the most workers and their family members on food stamps. Ohio’s list includes lots of fast food chains and discount and big-box stores: McDonald’s, Target, Kroger supermarket, Dollar General. At the very top is Walmart, which had an average of more than 14,500 workers and family members on food stamps last year.* If you take into account the average size of a family on food stamps, as many as 7,000 individual Walmart employees were on food stamps last year—nearly 15 percent of the company’s workforce across Ohio. "That means the same company that brings in the most food stamp dollars in revenue—an estimated $13 billion last year—also likely has the most employees using food stamps. It's a company store, financed by taxpayers. They're smart dudes! You also need to look at the employees as well. Depending on the store in this area you have a broad spectrum of employee types. Some have employees who are older/stable and are there because they actually want to work. Then you have stores where the employees are not interested in the job, they are there for the benefits the state will give them on top of what they make, they are also 2-3rd generation welfare recipients, The ones who have 5 kids by 4 sperm donors and have no real desire to work any longer than it takes to show NY that they tried to work. I'm not saying that the company are angels but there are other circumstances at play as well. -- Steve W. |
#6
Posted to rec.crafts.metalworking
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OT disgusted with all presidential candidates
On Mon, 08 Jun 2015 18:23:55 -0400, "Steve W."
wrote: Ed Huntress wrote: On Mon, 08 Jun 2015 11:39:39 -0400, "Steve W." wrote: Ed Huntress wrote: On Sun, 07 Jun 2015 11:01:18 -0400, "Steve W." wrote: Ed Huntress wrote: On Sat, 06 Jun 2015 21:37:11 -0400, "Steve W." wrote: Ed Huntress wrote: On Sat, 06 Jun 2015 18:01:17 -0500, Ignoramus26399 wrote: On 2015-06-06, Gunner Asch wrote: Btw....the unemployment figures are growing again..particularly in places that have instituted that $15 min wage. I am convinced that $15 minimum wage is a disaster for cities that adopt them, because it will decimate low income communities through unemployment and crime. I am very interested in what happend to Los Angeles a few years after their new minimum wage goes into effect. Generally, robots will replace low income people anywhere, but not as fast as where a high minimum wage is adopted. After all, a robot can flip burgers pretty well! i If a robot can flip burgers, it won't make a damned bit of difference what humans are making in wages. They're done, whether it's in five years or five years and six months. Nothing, absolutely nothing, will stop automation. And what wages are being paid has nothing to do with it. The technology has it's own pace. Already being tested and adopted in some places. When you look at it burgers, tacos, pizza, are all easy to deal with in automation. Added benefits are consistency of product and appearance. Both of which help with the bottom line. One company is installing fully automated pizza vending machines, that make the dough from scratch and add whichever toppings you want from a touch screen menu. Go to many large cities and other countries and they have entire convenience areas that are vending machines, many with no real limits on what is sold. A lot of folks slam Wal~Mart as being a bad retailer. Take a look past the stores at the warehousing and you will find that they employ a LOT of people to do a job that could easily be automated. It will be interesting with all the new costs and taxes that have been passed but haven't hit yet, what it will do to that system. Especially when those are not minimum wage positions. First, taxes: In the year 2000, "Tax Freedom Day" (the date in a year at which the average worker is no longer working for the government) was 120 days into the year. In 2014, it was 110 days into the year. So taxes actually have come down, not up, and they bounce around with the state of the economy. This data is from the anti-tax Tax Foundation, not from the government itself. They used to tout how Tax Freedom Day was getting longer into the year, year after year. Now they bury it in their back pages. As for the "ease" of Wal-Mart automating their warehouses: They are frequently cited in logistics and business articles as one of the most automated warehousing systems in the world, along with Amazon. The only thing that keeps them from getting rid of more people is that the warehouse-scale systems are not yet flexible enough to deal with their constantly changing inventory and still provide one-day deliveries. But it's coming, and wages will have nothing at all to do with it. If you would like to see a graph of productivity (the product of automation) versus wages over time, I'll put it together for you. But I can tell you the bottom line: Automation keeps going up, while wages are flat. There is no connection between the two. (In manufacturing, productivity keeps going up, output keeps going up with it, and employment keeps going down. The rest of the economy will catch up to that trend.) The implementation of automation, both the physical and the IT varieties, is solely a product of the stage of technical development for automation itself. And, having been on the receiving end of that news for 40 years, I'll testify that it's advancing every month. The latest thing is the "collaborative" robot. They're like adding another person to your workforce, and they're getting cheaper. Trying to hold it back by holding wages down is like trying to improve employment by having people work for free on Fridays. The degree to which you'd have to beggar people to accomplish it is extreme. And in the end, like John Henry driving rail spikes in competition with a steam-powered machine, you will lose. The thing is that WM (at least all 3 of the local warehouses) HAVE the automation already in the building BUT they do not run it full time. Take one item, as an example, shoes. They have a fully automated line that dumps the shoes, sorts them, packs them into shoe boxes and palletizes them for storage in the warehouse. It can run 2 days and do more than the human workers do in 4 days. BUT half the time it is idle. They only start it up if a backlog occurs. Wal~Mart tells the company that makes the shoes that they don't want them boxed at the plant. Instead they make the shoes, pair them, tag them and toss them in a crate. On this end they sort & pack. On the shipping side they have long racks where lift operators work on one side and break down packaging, load items in the racks and repeat until they clock out. On the other side of the rack a person scans a barcode, That lights up a series of lights in order and the person goes to each slot, pulls the item punches a button to kill the light and packs it in a box. The computer already knows the sizes of the boxes because they scan the code on the side before packing, it calculates which items fit in that box and only drops that amount. I asked a couple of the warehouse managers about it. They told me that it was orders from Bentonville that the machinery was not the priority, the people were. Uh...given Wal-Mart's history, including having the highest number of full-time employees who qualify for food stamps, I'll take that last statement with a fat grain of salt. g Considering that they are the largest non-governmental employer in the US that really isn't a surprise. And that the income levels needed for assistance have steadily risen to inflate the numbers it isn't surprising. This is just Ohio: "Although there are no federal numbers on where employed SNAP participants work, the state of Ohio, where Ballam lives, does keep a list of the top 50 companies with the most workers and their family members on food stamps. Ohio’s list includes lots of fast food chains and discount and big-box stores: McDonald’s, Target, Kroger supermarket, Dollar General. At the very top is Walmart, which had an average of more than 14,500 workers and family members on food stamps last year.* If you take into account the average size of a family on food stamps, as many as 7,000 individual Walmart employees were on food stamps last year—nearly 15 percent of the company’s workforce across Ohio. "That means the same company that brings in the most food stamp dollars in revenue—an estimated $13 billion last year—also likely has the most employees using food stamps. It's a company store, financed by taxpayers. They're smart dudes! You also need to look at the employees as well. Depending on the store in this area you have a broad spectrum of employee types. Some have employees who are older/stable and are there because they actually want to work. Then you have stores where the employees are not interested in the job, they are there for the benefits the state will give them on top of what they make, they are also 2-3rd generation welfare recipients, The ones who have 5 kids by 4 sperm donors and have no real desire to work any longer than it takes to show NY that they tried to work. I'm not saying that the company are angels but there are other circumstances at play as well. Steve, you must live near some really *ugly* Wal-Marts. g There aren't many people around my area who fit that description. -- Ed Huntress |
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