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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Default 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.
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Posted to rec.crafts.metalworking
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Posts: 12,529
Default 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
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Posted to rec.crafts.metalworking
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Posts: 1,705
Default 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.
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Posted to rec.crafts.metalworking
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Posts: 12,529
Default 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   Report Post  
Posted to rec.crafts.metalworking
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,705
Default 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.


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Default 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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