5 ms·

The fascinating part will be the emergence of a larger black market for labor.

drzaiusapelord 11y ago
The real fascinating part is how quickly we'll have robotics doing a lot of those job when municipalities push out mandatory $15 to $20 an hour laws. These low level fungible workers have been mislead by the far left into thinking this is all "free money" and things like unemployment, lay offs, automation, etc can't happen. A lot of companies have tested automation solutions and have been shy to launch them for a variety of reasons, mostly political. $15 an hour full time is a $31,000 a year job. In most markets that's entry level white collar college educated material that will work exempt for you. Fry cooks and dishwashers who think they can get that via legislation are going to be surprised at how quick they can be replaced with machines or in other ways be made redundant. Personally, I think we should just move to as much robotics as possible and setup some kind of minimum welfare income and call it a day. All this pussy-footing around with unions, minimum wages, etc just delays the inevitable.
- jonnycowboy 11y ago
  Do you think a person working full time should be classified as poor?
  - drzaiusapelord 11y ago
    Yes. If you're some teenager selling ice cream for the summer and being taken care of by your parents, you shouldn't be making $35,000 a year. The larger question, of course, should be answered by the customers of McDonalds or Target. Are they willing to pay twice the cost of goods so everyone who works there can make more money? Probably not, and those businesses will probably fold. Now you have everyone complaining about unemployment and the lack of affordable goods. Do you pass yet another law to make those cheap? Who pays for this stuff in the end? You can't economically dictate everything unless you want to migrate into command-economy communism, and the world tried that fairly recently with disastrous results. Not to mention price inflation for common goods once the local econony has everyone getting $15 an hour. Great, now everything costs more and the people who weren't minimum didn't get a raise.
    - meatysnapper 11y ago
      One argument that can be made is that everyday services are needed and won't be automated in the near future. Also, rich people like going to cafes and restaurants, and it's nice to live in a place where everybody goes out in the city. So, you end up with places like Australia and Switzerland where wages are high, but everyday costs are very high. I would be shocked if this didn't end up happening in the US. Ultimately, do we want a two-class society, or do we want something more egalitarian (Brazil vs Germany)? I know which one I prefer living in!
      - drzaiusapelord 11y ago
        >Also, rich people like going to cafes and restaurants I wouldn't use restaurants as some example of progressive and egalitarian labor. They're the number one source of black market labor today, let alone what would happen if you double these wages. >I know which one I prefer living in! The countries with the terrible disparities in living are usually the ones that flirted with communism in the past and are largely socialist and anti-free market today. They put in these policies which caused depressed entrepreneurial activities, lack of free markets, heavy corruption, etc and have a legacy of poverty from these failed leftist policies. More leftist policies aren't the solution here (see: Greece). >(Brazil vs Germany) New data shows Germany is not egalitarian. In fact, its the worst in the EU. Earlier this year, the German Economic Institute (DIW) had released a study indicating that contrary to common conceptions, Germany had the most unequal distribution of wealth in the eurozone. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/23/wealth-gap-inequality-germany-higher-study http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/23/wealth-gap-ineq...
    - 21echoes 11y ago
      this is a ridiculously warped view on minimum wage 1) The average age of a minimum age worker is 35, and 88% are not teenagers. So no, the example in your first line should not be "you're some teenager", it's "you're a parent working two jobs and still on food stamps". http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/10/upshot/minimum-wage.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/10/upshot/minimum-wage.html 2) Talking about the cost of goods doubling is straight-up fear-mongering. Walmart set their minimum wage to $9, so raising it to $15 wouldn't even be doubling if minimum wage labor was literally their only cost of business. That's not even close to true, of course, but let's be generous and assume it's 1/3 of their sales minus CGS (~120B, so 40B). Their sales were ~500B last year, so with literally no other changes, they would only have to raise prices by 5% to go to $15 minimum wage.
  - megaman22 11y ago
    If you're working full-time doing work that has very little market value, then yeah, you're going to be poor.
- adventured 11y ago
  The answer to that on the part of governments, will be to tax and regulate robot labor. They will attempt to force a gradient simulation of human costs onto robotics. We'll see serious efforts made toward those types of laws within a decade. Countries, to the extent they resist such taxes and regulation, will become new hot zones for robotic manufacturing etc.
- ForHackernews 11y ago
  Automation (or AI) is coming for all of our jobs sooner or later. We need to start talking about how our society can pay for Basic Income for all the unemployable former fry cooks, truck drivers, lawyers, anesthesiologists and software developers.
  - joshuapants 11y ago
    Personally, I'm in favor of a land value tax[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
    - ForHackernews 11y ago
      Interesting case study: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/metropolis/2015/05/the_land_tax_what_happened_to_towns_like_fairhope_alabama_that_tried_georgism.single.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/metropolis/2...
    - drzaiusapelord 11y ago
      Wikipedia: >A land value tax is said to be a progressive tax, in that the tax burden would fall on landlords and cannot be passed on as higher costs or lower wages to tenants, consumers, or laborers. The stereotype of rich landlords hoarding money is a falsehood. Every landlord I know here either makes a very modest income or loses money because of shady tenants and the incredible amount of pro-tenant legislature they take advantage of. In Chicago, an eviction takes 6-12 months. Are you guys going to take these laws off the books then? You can't have it both ways, really. Poor urban areas have enough abandoned buildings as-is without punishing landlords further. If you make rental properties a poor value proposition then squatting takes over. We've seen this a million times. Landlords, are unfortuantely, an easy target for politicians looking to score voting points from the non-land owning rabble.
      - ForHackernews 11y ago
        All the landlords I know are really whiny that they have to actually maintain their properties and provide services to their customers. They seemed to assume they could just get free money for owning a building. I've suggested they sell their multimillion dollar asset and retire or go get a job, but they don't seem to want to do that. At any rate, the point of the land-value tax is that it would encourage land owners to build larger and better improvements on their property, instead of just holding the land and waiting for its price to increase. Think building a high-rise apartment building instead of leaving it as a parking lot.
- rhino369 11y ago
  You will probably just see labor intensive operations leave LA or shut down. LA proper is too small of a market to debut robotic replacements for workers. I'm guessing this will just lead to higher food service costs and the disappearance of lower margin fast food.
  - drzaiusapelord 11y ago
    What about groceries? Farm worker salaries? Now you have to absorb those new costs. Food, in general, will skyrocket. There's this narrative that the left is playing up of "It'll be great, we'll kick out McDonalds!" Any industry that has low wage workers will suffer. Think the lines to return something in a retail store are long now? Wait until they have half the staff. More than likely privatization services will move in the same way MSP's have taken over the role of well paid IT people in smaller organizations today. Mega-grocery co will eliminate ma and pa groceries because they will only be the ones with the scale of industry to have competitive prices. Boutiqe restaurants will be replaced with franchises for the same reasons. Mail/internet ordering from other jurisdictions with lower wage prices will hurt local retail. This is neither good or bad, imo, but I don't think the people on the left are really considering what happens when you radically change wages by fiat. You get the Walmart-ization of all things because only organizations like Walmart can compete on price.
- crdoconnor 11y ago
  >These low level fungible workers have been mislead by the far left into thinking this is all "free money" Economically it's pretty much a direct transfer from profits to workers. Given that corporate profits are at an all time high and are largely being hoarded instead of being invested (and thus not generating new jobs), it pretty much is free money. It's money that's only going to be spent and drive economic growth if given to a worker on minimum wage. If it gets creamed off as corporate profits it will just end up in one of the many ultra-high-net-worth sinkholes, like Manhattan real estate. As if that hasn't been bidded up enough.
masterleep 11y ago
It's a good thing that Los Angeles doesn't have a readily available source of black market labor.
crdb 11y ago
And it's already pretty large: 3.3 million legal workers at or below minimum wage [1] vs 12 million illegals in the United States. That's almost 80% of low wage workers. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_Stat... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigration_to_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigration_to_the_Unit... - assuming most of them don't work as investment bankers.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

The real fascinating part is how quickly we'll have robotics doing a lot of those job when municipalities push out mandatory $15 to $20 an hour laws. These low level fungible workers have been mislead by the far left into thinking this is all "free money" and things like unemployment, lay offs, automation, etc can't happen. A lot of companies have tested automation solutions and have been shy to launch them for a variety of reasons, mostly political. $15 an hour full time is a $31,000 a year job. In most markets that's entry level white collar college educated material that will work exempt for you. Fry cooks and dishwashers who think they can get that via legislation are going to be surprised at how quick they can be replaced with machines or in other ways be made redundant. Personally, I think we should just move to as much robotics as possible and setup some kind of minimum welfare income and call it a day. All this pussy-footing around with unions, minimum wages, etc just delays the inevitable.

jonnycowboy 11y ago
Do you think a person working full time should be classified as poor?
- drzaiusapelord 11y ago
  Yes. If you're some teenager selling ice cream for the summer and being taken care of by your parents, you shouldn't be making $35,000 a year. The larger question, of course, should be answered by the customers of McDonalds or Target. Are they willing to pay twice the cost of goods so everyone who works there can make more money? Probably not, and those businesses will probably fold. Now you have everyone complaining about unemployment and the lack of affordable goods. Do you pass yet another law to make those cheap? Who pays for this stuff in the end? You can't economically dictate everything unless you want to migrate into command-economy communism, and the world tried that fairly recently with disastrous results. Not to mention price inflation for common goods once the local econony has everyone getting $15 an hour. Great, now everything costs more and the people who weren't minimum didn't get a raise.
  - meatysnapper 11y ago
    One argument that can be made is that everyday services are needed and won't be automated in the near future. Also, rich people like going to cafes and restaurants, and it's nice to live in a place where everybody goes out in the city. So, you end up with places like Australia and Switzerland where wages are high, but everyday costs are very high. I would be shocked if this didn't end up happening in the US. Ultimately, do we want a two-class society, or do we want something more egalitarian (Brazil vs Germany)? I know which one I prefer living in!
    - drzaiusapelord 11y ago
      >Also, rich people like going to cafes and restaurants I wouldn't use restaurants as some example of progressive and egalitarian labor. They're the number one source of black market labor today, let alone what would happen if you double these wages. >I know which one I prefer living in! The countries with the terrible disparities in living are usually the ones that flirted with communism in the past and are largely socialist and anti-free market today. They put in these policies which caused depressed entrepreneurial activities, lack of free markets, heavy corruption, etc and have a legacy of poverty from these failed leftist policies. More leftist policies aren't the solution here (see: Greece). >(Brazil vs Germany) New data shows Germany is not egalitarian. In fact, its the worst in the EU. Earlier this year, the German Economic Institute (DIW) had released a study indicating that contrary to common conceptions, Germany had the most unequal distribution of wealth in the eurozone. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/23/wealth-gap-inequality-germany-higher-study http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/23/wealth-gap-ineq...
  - 21echoes 11y ago
    this is a ridiculously warped view on minimum wage 1) The average age of a minimum age worker is 35, and 88% are not teenagers. So no, the example in your first line should not be "you're some teenager", it's "you're a parent working two jobs and still on food stamps". http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/10/upshot/minimum-wage.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/10/upshot/minimum-wage.html 2) Talking about the cost of goods doubling is straight-up fear-mongering. Walmart set their minimum wage to $9, so raising it to $15 wouldn't even be doubling if minimum wage labor was literally their only cost of business. That's not even close to true, of course, but let's be generous and assume it's 1/3 of their sales minus CGS (~120B, so 40B). Their sales were ~500B last year, so with literally no other changes, they would only have to raise prices by 5% to go to $15 minimum wage.
- megaman22 11y ago
  If you're working full-time doing work that has very little market value, then yeah, you're going to be poor.
adventured 11y ago
The answer to that on the part of governments, will be to tax and regulate robot labor. They will attempt to force a gradient simulation of human costs onto robotics. We'll see serious efforts made toward those types of laws within a decade. Countries, to the extent they resist such taxes and regulation, will become new hot zones for robotic manufacturing etc.
ForHackernews 11y ago
Automation (or AI) is coming for all of our jobs sooner or later. We need to start talking about how our society can pay for Basic Income for all the unemployable former fry cooks, truck drivers, lawyers, anesthesiologists and software developers.
- joshuapants 11y ago
  Personally, I'm in favor of a land value tax[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
  - ForHackernews 11y ago
    Interesting case study: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/metropolis/2015/05/the_land_tax_what_happened_to_towns_like_fairhope_alabama_that_tried_georgism.single.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/metropolis/2...
  - drzaiusapelord 11y ago
    Wikipedia: >A land value tax is said to be a progressive tax, in that the tax burden would fall on landlords and cannot be passed on as higher costs or lower wages to tenants, consumers, or laborers. The stereotype of rich landlords hoarding money is a falsehood. Every landlord I know here either makes a very modest income or loses money because of shady tenants and the incredible amount of pro-tenant legislature they take advantage of. In Chicago, an eviction takes 6-12 months. Are you guys going to take these laws off the books then? You can't have it both ways, really. Poor urban areas have enough abandoned buildings as-is without punishing landlords further. If you make rental properties a poor value proposition then squatting takes over. We've seen this a million times. Landlords, are unfortuantely, an easy target for politicians looking to score voting points from the non-land owning rabble.
    - ForHackernews 11y ago
      All the landlords I know are really whiny that they have to actually maintain their properties and provide services to their customers. They seemed to assume they could just get free money for owning a building. I've suggested they sell their multimillion dollar asset and retire or go get a job, but they don't seem to want to do that. At any rate, the point of the land-value tax is that it would encourage land owners to build larger and better improvements on their property, instead of just holding the land and waiting for its price to increase. Think building a high-rise apartment building instead of leaving it as a parking lot.
rhino369 11y ago
You will probably just see labor intensive operations leave LA or shut down. LA proper is too small of a market to debut robotic replacements for workers. I'm guessing this will just lead to higher food service costs and the disappearance of lower margin fast food.
- drzaiusapelord 11y ago
  What about groceries? Farm worker salaries? Now you have to absorb those new costs. Food, in general, will skyrocket. There's this narrative that the left is playing up of "It'll be great, we'll kick out McDonalds!" Any industry that has low wage workers will suffer. Think the lines to return something in a retail store are long now? Wait until they have half the staff. More than likely privatization services will move in the same way MSP's have taken over the role of well paid IT people in smaller organizations today. Mega-grocery co will eliminate ma and pa groceries because they will only be the ones with the scale of industry to have competitive prices. Boutiqe restaurants will be replaced with franchises for the same reasons. Mail/internet ordering from other jurisdictions with lower wage prices will hurt local retail. This is neither good or bad, imo, but I don't think the people on the left are really considering what happens when you radically change wages by fiat. You get the Walmart-ization of all things because only organizations like Walmart can compete on price.
crdoconnor 11y ago
>These low level fungible workers have been mislead by the far left into thinking this is all "free money" Economically it's pretty much a direct transfer from profits to workers. Given that corporate profits are at an all time high and are largely being hoarded instead of being invested (and thus not generating new jobs), it pretty much is free money. It's money that's only going to be spent and drive economic growth if given to a worker on minimum wage. If it gets creamed off as corporate profits it will just end up in one of the many ultra-high-net-worth sinkholes, like Manhattan real estate. As if that hasn't been bidded up enough.

masterleep 11y ago

It's a good thing that Los Angeles doesn't have a readily available source of black market labor.

crdb 11y ago

And it's already pretty large: 3.3 million legal workers at or below minimum wage [1] vs 12 million illegals in the United States. That's almost 80% of low wage workers. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_Stat... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigration_to_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigration_to_the_Unit... - assuming most of them don't work as investment bankers.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]