Making Machines Competitive

Robots are coming to a burger joint near you

CNBC

Here is an article that talks all about the efficiencies of replacing human fry cooks with a machine named Flippy because cooking burgers is just repetition.  Unmentioned is that machines long ago ate into a far more complex repetitive task of assembling automobiles.  Why has it taken so long to move into the burger flipping efficiency?  That would be the ever expanding minimum wage and the associated costs of human employees.  It is no coincidence that California is the first to see inroads by Flippy.  Get rid of the government-imposed cost burdens related to human employment and Flippy would have no market.

 

Unlike how telephone operators and horse-drawn carriages were replaced by new technologies, this is a case of government driving up the price of a product - low-skilled wage labor - to the point that machines became competitive.  Rather than providing more money to low-skilled workers, the minimum wage is going to put them in the unemployment line.  If one believes that the intent was to improve the standard of living of those on the bottom rungs, then this is a clear case of unintended consequences.  On the other hand, if government wants more citizens dependent upon it, perhaps this is the intended - though unstated - goal.

Complete Waste of Time

Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland has introduced the Oversight Commission on Presidential Capacity Act.  The act would create a panel who would determine if the president was physically and/or mentally fit to continue in office.  Raskin, a Democrat, must be aware that such legislation is not likely to get through a Republican House.  Nor is it likely to get through a Republican Senate.  If by some miracle it did get through both those bodies, I can guarantee that President Trump is not going to sign it into law.  This isn't news, it's a publicity stunt.  Representative Raskin's constituents should be irritated that he has wasted time on what amounts to "I hate Trump" legislation.  Worse, Raskin would be screaming from the mountaintops if this exact bill had been introduced during the Obama Presidency so it isn't even as if it can be pulled out of the drawer for a Democratic president to eventually sign.  Wasted paper.  Wasted time.

Happy 4th!

Each Independence Day, I read the Declaration of Independence.  Today, I listened to someone else read it.  Jim Meskimen does some terrific impressions and a few mediocre ones.  Still, worth watching:

Declaration of Independence in 61 Celebrity Voices

Vintage Space

Recently I discovered Vintage Space hosted by Amy Shira Teitel and I'm surprised how long it took for me to encounter it.  Some years ago, a friend told me that he believed the moon landings were a hoax.  I immediately set to the task of demonstrating that we had landed on the moon.  Many times!  In the process, I became a fan of the US Space Program from the 1960s and early 70s.  I spent a lot of time on the NASA website and created spreadsheets of Space Race that broke down the satellite launches and manned spacecraft from both the US and Russia.  Amazingly, Vintage Space covers exactly that window.  It is all about the Apollo Program, covering the developments that fed into Apollo and all the current advances that are Apollo's progeny.  Amy is an extreme Apollo-phile, which is both good and bad.

 

To the good, between her blog and her YouTube channel, she has a vast encyclopedia of information about the space program and related science topics.  Fascinated with space history, she somehow turned that into a paying gig.  Way to go!

 

To the bad, she is something of a downer when proposed missions don't meet her Apollo achievement bar.  Thus, she is less than excited by the proposed SpaceX repeat of Apollo 8, the 1968 trip around the moon.  Been there, done that.  True, but we haven't been there and done that in 45 years.  A refresher with a new capsule might not be a bad idea.  Yes, she grants that is so but this isn't part of a larger program.  It's just a one off funded by a couple super rich tourists.  This is not advancing space exploration or space science.  She makes an excellent point but humans haven't left Earth orbit in decades and this will get the ball rolling.  She's also less than keen on landing people on Mars as that will suck all the funding from cheaper missions that will better expand human knowledge of space.  Yeah, kind of a downer but that is on her soapbox channel.

 

After watching just a couple of her videos, it became clear that I had only scratched the surface when I did my deep dive into the US Space Program.  Thumbs way up for Vintage Space.

Minimum Wage on Steroids

Maybe we should just go to a $150/hour minimum wage with no phase-in period and let the Fed figure out how to make it work.

 

You'd have a big burst of inflation, nobody would lose their jobs, a lot of old debts would be wiped out, and we'd be better off for it.

Matthew Yglesias, Twitter

This may just be a thought experiment or a way of demonstrating the general folly of the minimum wage.  Many respondents took this seriously and Yglesias may mean it seriously.  I hope not.  But, for the sake of discussion, let's suppose the government set the minimum wage to $150/hour, effective immediately.  How would that work?

Bob owns a McDonald's franchise where his labor cost is $8,000 a week.  That covers part-time and full-time employees who average out to $10/hour.  Tomorrow, his labor cost will rocket to $17,142.86 for that day.  He will need $120,000 for the week.  Bob's entire cost structure has been thrown into chaos.  No problem.  Bob has kept $120,000 in reserve in case of emergencies and he uses it to pay labor costs for the week.  He raises his prices to reflect the 15 fold increase in his labor costs.  The Dollar Menu is now called the $15 Menu.  During that week, Bob has virtually no business.  In fact, by the second day, he has sent all the employees home since business is so slow.  That afternoon, the delivery truck with the bags of fries, meat patties, paper cups, straws, and all the rest shows up.  Rather than thus usual $5,000 invoice he gets, this one has a $75,000 invoice; costs have skyrocketed for his supplier as well.  Bob refuses the shipment, just like the last 5 McDonald's franchise owners refused theirs.  This same scenario is playing out across the country as the economy grinds to a halt.  After all, every full-time worker is now earning $300,000 per year.

 

A couple of weeks later, the Fed has flooded trillions of dollars into the economy.  The value of the dollar crashes, now worth about what a dime was worth before the minimum wage increase.  People who were holding cash take a big financial hit.  Banks suffer a huge hit as borrowers pay off loans with deflated dollars, thus wiping out the 'old debts' as predicted.  Gold goes through the roof.  Debtors and those holding assets that appreciate would benefit.  Lenders and those holding dollars would suffer greatly.

 

Yglesias has offered an extreme example of raising the minimum wage that demonstrates the destructive power of government setting arbitrary price floors without consideration of the ripple effects of those decisions.  The $150/hour minimum wage would obviously be catastrophically bad but what about the $15/hour minimum wage?  It generates the same negatives just to a much lesser degree.

 

It should be noted that the minimum wage was created with the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931.  It was passed because blacks from the South were migrating north and working for lower wages than white workers.  Even racists want to save money.  With the minimum wage set, the racists couldn't save money by hiring blacks and thus just hired whites.

Global Warming Hyperbole

Trump's action could push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus, with a temperature of two hundred and fifty degrees, and raining sulphuric acid.

Stephen Hawking

 

Interesting.  This is coming from the most celebrated scientist of our era so let's not dismiss it out of hand.  Let's take a look at what is said by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).  I have never heard of that particular organization before right now but it was the first thing to come up when I searched Global Warming.  The NRDC indicates that "unless we curb global-warming emissions, average U.S. temperatures could increase by up to 10 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century."  The NRDC does not agree with Trump that climate change is a Chinese Hoax and would be put firmly in the climate-change-is-real camp.  Let's do the math with their presumed worst-case scenario of 'up to 10 degrees' in 100 years.  Okay, 10 degrees divided by 100 years gives us 1/10th of a degree a year.  Trump will be out of office in 4 or 8 years and can thus - worst case per NRDC - see 0.8 degrees of warming.  Okay, we are missing a piece.  What is the current average global temperature?  If it is 249.2 degrees, then I have to give the win to Hawking.  My Google search provided Atmos News, which says the average annual temperature from 1951 to 1980 was 57.2 degrees while 2015 saw an average temperature that was 1.8 degrees warmer (reportedly the hottest on record), which - if my math is correct - would be 59 degrees.  Even if NRDC's worst case scenario played out entirely within the Trump administration, that would only get us to 69 degrees, woefully short of Hawking's fear-mongering 250 degrees.

 

If the science is solid, it doesn't need to be sold with this sort of easily debunked hyperbole.  For a famed scientist to spout such obvious nonsense only damages the credibility of scientists.  There is so much junk science in the world today that it is much harder to trust any science.  Hawking is not helping that sad state of affairs.

Twitter Strategy?

Trump's latest Twitter outrage is a series of personal attacks on Mika and Joe from MSNBC's Morning Joe.  One is 'crazy' and the other is 'psycho' and Mika's cosmetic surgery was a mess when she visited Mar a Lago.  What is the point of these ad hominem attacks?  It's one thing to dispute the accuracy or tone of the reporting but another to descend to name-calling.  Moreover, Morning Joe is a low-ratings show and Trump may boost those ratings with all the attention he is giving them.  What is the point?

 

What if Trump's ravings are a strategy.  As soon as he unleashes one of these nutty tweets, the various news outlets fall all over themselves to denounce him and spend a couple of days pondering his mental state.  While the press obsess, Trump moves on to other things.  It's like he tosses a stick and the media chases after it for a while before getting back to reporting.  Are these just staged distractions, like some magic act that convinces the audience to look where the trick is not happening?  Is Trump creating an irresistible story for the media so that they will not have time to report his agenda?