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What it took to save the Twinkie
- abrown28 10y agoFight for 15 will fix it
- seibelj 10y agoYou mean the same amount of quality twinkie product was created at a fraction of the cost? And this is why the old company went bankrupt? Sounds like a success story to me!
- zaroth 10y agoIt's not just Hostess automating, I think baking in general is becoming increasing automated. I was talking to a COO of a large mill, and he remarked how customers asking for significantly tighter tolerances on the makeup of their various flours because they've automated the whole line and need highly predictable results.
- beedogs 10y agoCapitalism's race to the bottom continues unabated.
- GauntletWizard 10y agoCommunism's race to the bottom has already been won. Only, Capitalism is racing to the bottom of 'time spent by humans doing unfun things', and Communism's was 'human rights'
- sevenless 10y agoIt's not like those are the only alternatives. We should try communism with modern IT infrastructure and AI. The big problem with many command economies was the inability to collect and act on the data. Call it a "just-in-time command economy" if you prefer.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- api 10y agoUltimately those systems will have to be run by people, and all the same perverse incentives will apply. Corporations become corrupt too, but there is more than one and you can start new ones. In a command economy like you allude to there is only one corporation and if it becomes corrupt there is no recourse.
- brightball 10y agoThat's the exact point that applies to federal government programs vs state.
- mattkrause 10y agoIf you're interested in this, you may want to read Red Plenty, which describes the invention of linear programming and the subsequent Soviet attempt at doing just this.
- PhasmaFelis 10y agoIt's weird how you think those are the only two options.
- beedogs 10y agoLOL, yeah, because I'm advocating communism in my post. HN posters are so goddamned predictable with their stupid comebacks.
- clarkmoody 10y agoCrushing poverty and starvation is the natural state of humanity. Without capital accumulation, investment, and technological progress, that's where we would be. Fostering those things requires private property protection and enforcement of contract. Capitalism's "race to the bottom" has made us rich beyond the wildest imagination of the people of the past. Our children do not have to work. Most jobs are indoors, in climate-controlled buildings. The rich may drive nice cars, but many of the poor have cars too. In the past, the rich rode in carriages and the poor trudged through the muck with no shoes. Automation is what allowed us to go from the vast majority of Americans working in the fields to agricultural employment being 2% of the labor force -- and we produce more food than ever.
- sevenless 10y agoAutomation and IT in the US has little to do with free markets and a whole lot to do with enormous government expenditure, often war related. The internet is the obvious one. But if you go to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, you can see the first integrated circuit, which so happened to be built by Fairchild for the USAF, and the first computers, which were built in Silicon Valley for the Army. The same story is everywhere: About all the tech we take for granted owes its existence to state funding.
- clarkmoody 10y agoSimply because something was invented to satisfy a government contract does not mean that it would never have been invented otherwise. Government spending simply shifts the preferences of goods arbitrarily away from what would have arisen through market processes. The government has been hiring the bulk of PhD-level researchers for the purposes of war (and surveillance). Imagine what those minds would have done with their ingenuity and initiative in the private sector the last 70 years. One of the few things that probably would never have been created by the private sector is nuclear weapons, since there is no profitable use of such devices.
- Turing_Machine 10y ago
- adventured 10y ago> Capitalism's race to the bottom continues unabated. I'm trying to figure out whether that was posted in 1840, 1890, 1920, 1960, 1990, or 2016. Because it has been proclaimed non-stop since the free market began ushering in the greatest boom in prosperity humanity has ever seen. It was no more true in the prime days of the industrial revolution as farming jobs were rapidly being wiped out than it is today.
- dragon_ninja 10y agoThis is the future. One way to avoid it would be to tax companies as a percentage of their net income divided by the number of employees that exceed some salary. However, it's not a great idea to stifle innovation and efficiency.
- slyall 10y agoTax is usually close to 30% of net income to start with and even those with the best accountants usually pay a few percent. So dividing their tax bill by the 10, 100, 1000 or whatever workers that exceed some magic income level won't generate much income...
- sctb 10y agoWe updated the link from https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/16/07/10/1659250/hostess-saves-twinkies-by-automating-fires-94-of-their-workforce?sdsrc=rel https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/16/07/10/1659250/hostess..., which points to this.
- ebbv 10y agoWhat a crock. The whole bankruptcy was just a union busting maneuver to escape the contracts they had signed. The company was deliberately run into the ground to restructure and now it's making the executives rich while all the workers have been tossed aside. To hell with Hostess and all the people profiting off this upcoming "IPO".
- adventured 10y agoWhat's your argument in favor of claiming the people working there were perpetually entitled to their jobs?
- ebbv 10y agoHoly straw man Batman. That's not at all what I said. What I said was the executives pulled shenanigans to get rich and the workers pay the price. That's the reality of the situation. As to a better way to handle the situation; how about negotiate with the union in good faith instead of pulling shenanigans in order to invalidate the contract for starters? It may not have been possible to keep all the workers on staff, but given that the company came back and is making tremendous profits and expecting to be valued at $2 billion and looking towards an "IPO" that seems unlikely to me. It seems more likely they just saw a potential for greater profits and bonuses for themselves and decided to do whatever it takes no matter how reprehensible and how many lives were ruined.
- oldmanjay 10y agoWould it be fair to say that you feel the company should have continued to pay low-skill workers for jobs that didn't need to be done because that would be better for the people?
- ebbv 10y agoNo that wouldn't be fair to say at all. Please re-read my comments. I don't think you could come to that conclusion if you read them fairly.
- jimjimjim 10y agoAI/learning startup idea: build an AI to do the role of middle-to-upper management or maybe just the c-suite? Just think of the profits. sacking a thousand blue collar factory workers won't save much but fire the decision makers (or outsource them) and you'll save an absolute fortune. I'm not even joking. It's unlikely to happen soon but if this were possible the savings would be amazing!
- toast0 10y ago> sacking a thousand blue collar factory workers won't save much but fire the decision makers (or outsource them) and you'll save an absolute fortune. That math doesn't really work; if the CEO makes $1.5 Million, and workers cost $10,000 per year (low-ball), getting rid of the CEO only pays for 150 workers. If you've got a top-heavy corporation, sure getting rid of a bunch of Chief whatevers and Vice Presidents is going to help, but realistically, workers are where the money is going.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- keebEz 10y agoThe clearest way to think of AI and automation is in terms of a person, or multiple people, but it can also take the form of partial people. AI is already helping middle and upper management make better decisions. Instead of removing the need for any of them it has instead increased their productivity. That is a partial driver for the increasing wage gap between occupations, and makes complete sense from an automation as personal productivity improvements.
- ryankupyn 10y agoI've always wondered how effective this would be in different industries. In some businesses, leadership exists to make very easily quantifiable (and perhaps therefore more automatable decisions) - answering questions like "Should we build a new factory?; What product lines should we develop?". Where I work, in consulting, the senior leadership exists almost solely for the purpose of building relationships with customers and bringing in business - really hard for AI without a radical change in the sales model (but I can imagine a sort of Consulting-As-A-Service, given that we already bill by the hour). I really suspect (and worry from an own-career perspective) that the first thing to be automated will be the number-crunchers surrounding senior management. I spend my time doing things like calculating the marginal effects of extra pay on employee productivity, which is hard largely because most companies have terrible data. Once companies start implementing systems that can effectively and automatically track complex metrics like this, around 80% of my role won't be needed any more, and instead of paying $250/hr for a guy to whack out some R code, companies can get the same service wrapped up in whatever future version of SAP they're using.
- losteverything 10y agoAnother example of why a brand matters so so much. Brand managers all over have to use this as an example
- hedora 10y agoI've seen a lot of stories that blame robots and unions for the job losses, and praise the new managment's tough choices, but it is all a distraction. They reformulated twinkies to have a longer shelf life. This let them fire the distribution channel, and close all but 3 of 40 factories. I haven't tried the new twinkies, but the consensus on slashdot (this is running there too) and elsewhere is that they taste like cardboard. So, they didn't really save the twinkie at all; they just slapped the brand on a different (and vastly cheaper) product, and now they're prepping for an IPO by running consumer (investor) facing stories like this one. Prediction: A year or so after this fall's IPO, they burn through their brand equity, sales tank, and the stock collapses.