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Once upon a time, there was an implied contract between business and labor: employees supplied their energy and knowledge to build things for which companies paid them. The workers then used their wages to buy products made by business. It was a virtuous circle that made capitalism work for all concerned.
But now, the new technology of automation is increasingly erasing the worker from the equation, and the leaders of government and industry seem not even to notice the coming crisis of capitalism. In fact, the current occupant of the White House has opened the borders to future Democrat voters who will soon find a disappearing market for low-skilled labor because of smart machines.
In the modern factory, the “workers” are technology experts who use computers rather than wrenches.
A Ford automotive assembly line in the 1940s shows human workers building the cars.
Ford is also using artificial intelligence to speed production, and a company video gives a glimpse at the modern factory environment:
A recent article about an upgrade to the Ford automotive assembly robots is a reminder of how central smart machines have become to the company’s production process.
Ford is adding artificial intelligence to its robotic assembly lines.
In 1913, Henry Ford revolutionized car-making with the first moving assembly line, an innovation that made piecing together new vehicles faster and more efficient. Some hundred years later, Ford is now using artificial intelligence to eke more speed out of today’s manufacturing lines.
At a Ford Transmission Plant in Livonia, Mich., the station where robots help assemble torque converters now includes a system that uses AI to learn from previous attempts how to wiggle the pieces into place most efficiently. Inside a large safety cage, robot arms wheel around grasping circular pieces of metal, each about the diameter of a dinner plate, from a conveyor and slot them together.
Ford uses technology from a startup called Symbio Robotics that looks at the past few hundred attempts to determine which approaches and motions appeared to work best. A computer sitting just outside the cage shows Symbio’s technology sensing and controlling the arms. Toyota and Nissan are using the same tech to improve the efficiency of their production lines.
The technology allows this part of the assembly line to run 15 percent faster, a significant improvement in automotive manufacturing where thin profit margins depend heavily on manufacturing efficiencies.
“I personally think it is going to be something of the future,” says Lon Van Geloven, production manager at the Livonia plant. He says Ford plans to explore whether to use the technology in other factories. Van Geloven says the technology can be used anywhere it’s possible for a computer to learn from feeling how things fit together. “There are plenty of those applications,” he says.
AI is often viewed as a disruptive and transformative technology, but the Livonia torque setup illustrates how AI may creep into industrial processes in gradual and often imperceptible ways.
Automotive manufacturing is already heavily automated, but the robots that help assemble, weld, and paint vehicles are essentially powerful, precise automatons that endlessly repeat the same task but lack any ability to understand or react to their surroundings.
Adding more automation is challenging. The jobs that remain out of reach for machines include tasks like feeding flexible wiring through a car’s dashboard and body. In 2018, Elon Musk blamed Tesla Model 3 production delays on the decision to rely more heavily on automation in manufacturing. (Continues)
The year-long Wuhan virus outbreak has been devastating for many economic sectors, but automation has come out a winner because when workers are forced by government into home imprisonment, smart machines can step in to replace the humans. Plus, business owners have developed a larger appreciation of the convenience and dependability of modern robot substitutes.
Below is an NBC report from a few weeks back that includes the new Boston Dynamics robot Stretch, designed for use in a warehouse setting or wherever basic unloading behavior is needed.
Moving boxes around would once have been a perfect job for low-education foreign workers, but now robots can do the task 24/7 with no lunch breaks or paychecks required. There are millions more jobs of all sorts that will be automated in coming years.
So first-world economies won’t be needing any more immigrants with third-world skills because automation is coming on like gangbusters in the near future.
After social distancing measures forced layoffs in labor-intensive factories, manufacturers turned to automation, despite the high cost. Now, they aren’t going back.
Boston Dynamics’ new “Stretch” robot can lift up to 50 pounds at a time and move up to 800 boxes an hour. The company said the pandemic highlighted the growing need for warehouse labor that humans alone can’t provide.
Automation and digitization were already spreading to more factory floors and job sites. Then the pandemic hit.
“It was trial by fire as we went through Covid,” said Mark Bulanda, executive president of automation solutions for Emerson, a manufacturer of systems that automate factory processes.
“Not because of Covid, but because the exodus of people forced the adoption of tech.”
The latest jobs report shows the manufacturing sector grew at its fastest level since the pandemic began, jumping by 50,000 positions. However, there are still about half a million fewer employed manufacturing workers than there were a year ago. The question is how many of those jobs will come back — and how many have been permanently disrupted by digital processes.
Since the pandemic hit, food manufacturers ramped up their automation, allowing facilities to maintain output while social distancing. Factories digitized controls on their machines so they could be remotely operated by workers working from home or another location. New sensors were installed that can flag, or predict, failures, allowing teams of inspectors operating on a schedule to be reduced to an as-needed maintenance crew.
Now, manufacturers are clamoring for even more automated machines so they can cope with spiking demand for their products amid a global recovery and a skilled labor shortage.
Rockwell Automation, a provider of industrial automation solutions, said growth is up 6 percent for the fiscal year and saw sharply increased orders in November and December.
Orders for automated machines are up 30 percent at Eastman Machine Company, a Buffalo, New York-based manufacturer that produces machines that cut specialty materials like carbon fiber and fiberglass, increasingly in demand for cars, aerospace and wind turbines. The backlog for a new device extends to June, their longest in company history.
“When you automate systems, you get greater accuracy,” said CEO Robert Stevenson. “Repeatability is increased. It’s hard to find people who can do that.” (Continues)
America’s newspaper of record had an interesting item earlier this month titled “The Robots Are Coming for Phil in Accounting.” The New York Times apparently meant to remind readers that smart machines aren’t just coming for simple manufacturing jobs, but also for the office gigs that require education.
True, it’s easier to imagine physical robots replacing humans rather than just a little software stuck into a computer, but both threaten the basis of the economy now and into the future.
A few decades back, American workers built the nation’s cars:
But now, machines are cheaper and don’t require lunch breaks or expensive health insurance:
The economic shift toward automation and artificial intelligence will only grow. With that trend in mind, America’s future is endangered by the current government’s policy of opening the border and welcoming the world’s poor and uneducated, the number of which continues to grow into the billions.
The robots are coming. Not to kill you with lasers, or beat you in chess, or even to ferry you around town in a driverless Uber.
These robots are here to merge purchase orders into columns J and K of next quarter’s revenue forecast, and transfer customer data from the invoicing software to the Oracle database. They are unassuming software programs with names like “Auxiliobits — DataTable To Json String,” and they are becoming the star employees at many American companies.
Some of these tools are simple apps, downloaded from online stores and installed by corporate I.T. departments, that do the dull-but-critical tasks that someone named Phil in Accounting used to do: reconciling bank statements, approving expense reports, reviewing tax forms. Others are expensive, custom-built software packages, armed with more sophisticated types of artificial intelligence, that are capable of doing the kinds of cognitive work that once required teams of highly-paid humans.
White-collar workers, armed with college degrees and specialized training, once felt relatively safe from automation. But recent advances in A.I. and machine learning have created algorithms capable of outperforming doctors, lawyers and bankers at certain parts of their jobs. And as bots learn to do higher-value tasks, they are climbing the corporate ladder.
The trend — quietly building for years, but accelerating to warp speed since the pandemic — goes by the sleepy moniker “robotic process automation.” And it is transforming workplaces at a pace that few outsiders appreciate. Nearly 8 in 10 corporate executives surveyed by Deloitte last year said they had implemented some form of R.P.A. Another 16 percent said they planned to do so within three years.
Most of this automation is being done by companies you’ve probably never heard of. UiPath, the largest stand-alone automation firm, is valued at $35 billion — roughly the size of eBay — and is slated to go public later this year. Other companies like Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, which have Fortune 500 companies like Coca-Cola and Walgreens Boots Alliance as clients, are also enjoying breakneck growth, and tech giants like Microsoft have recently introduced their own automation products to get in on the action.
Executives generally spin these bots as being good for everyone, “streamlining operations” while “liberating workers” from mundane and repetitive tasks. But they are also liberating plenty of people from their jobs. Independent experts say that major corporate R.P.A. initiatives have been followed by rounds of layoffs, and that cutting costs, not improving workplace conditions, is usually the driving factor behind the decision to automate.
Craig Le Clair, an analyst with Forrester Research who studies the corporate automation market, said that for executives, much of the appeal of R.P.A. bots is that they are cheap, easy to use and compatible with their existing back-end systems. He said that companies often rely on them to juice short-term profits, rather than embarking on more expensive tech upgrades that might take years to pay for themselves.
“It’s not a moonshot project like a lot of A.I., so companies are doing it like crazy,” Mr. Le Clair said. “With R.P.A., you can build a bot that costs $10,000 a year and take out two to four humans.”
Covid-19 has led some companies to turn to automation to deal with growing demand, closed offices, or budget constraints. But for other companies, the pandemic has provided cover for executives to implement ambitious automation plans they dreamed up long ago.
“Automation is more politically acceptable now,” said Raul Vega, the chief executive of Auxis, a firm that helps companies automate their operations. (Continues)
Reuters reported on March 5 that “U.S. border agents detained nearly 100,000 migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border in February” which means they will soon be released into the United States if they haven’t already.
Many plan on grabbing a job that should go to a US citizen, more the 10 million of whom remain unemployed after a year of the stubborn Wuhan pandemic. The average education of Central American aliens is quite low, with 58 percent of Northern Triangle residents having less than a high school education, according to a recent Peter Navarro report. Those aliens will look for unskilled jobs with the promise to work cheaper than Americans — perhaps in restaurant kitchens.
But technology has been designing a different future for dealing with the pandemic and other labor shortages — robots. Here’s a robot waiter that delivers the chow with no human contact which solves the social distance issue:
The technology keeps expanding. Restaurant kitchens will be getting a makeover that will substantially reduce the need for human workers — and that includes even ultra-cheap illegal aliens eager to please.
A recent industry article observed that “Soon, robots could be integrated into every step of the restaurant supply chain, from the ingredients’ production until the meal arrives at the table”:
As the automation of food service progresses, new robots are emerging to tackle a wider range of kitchen tasks. Previously, we saw robots take on salads, bowls and burgers. Now, two new restaurants in Illinois created by Nala Robotics will use automated kitchens to create foods from all around the world, according to Restaurant Hospitality. Cuisines ranging from Malaysian to Mexican to Cajun will be on the menu, with around one hundred meals available to order. The company’s goal is to grow the restaurant through franchising.
The restaurant’s repertoire can increase in just the time it takes to enter a new recipe into the database. Nala Robotics President and Co-founder Ajay Sunkara told Restaurant Hospitality, “if there is a burger joint in New York that has a great following and wants to expand, we can upload that recipe in Naperville, and customers will get the exact same burger.”
While the midwest is getting robot-made cuisine from all around the world, the West Coast is getting its own robot restaurant specializing in Chinese food. The U-Fry Chinese Café, opening this month, will feature foods from five different parts of China prepared by an Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled kitchen, reports The Business Journal. The restaurant’s creator, Tony Pan, has not revealed any specifics about the robots or the software he is using to create this kitchen. (Continues)
Some robot companies build machines that can walk around, as opposed to those that stay put and perform precise tasks in manufacturing.
Boston Dynamics creates walk-about robots with two legs and four — both of which are good.
We humans walk around all the time and think nothing of it. But machines must be programmed to readjust constantly because of the changing effect of gravity on a moving physical object.
Early attempts at building ambulatory robots were not alway successful. Here’s a fun video dated 2015 from the DARPA Robotics Challenge, a demanding competition that focused on disaster and emergency-response scenarios — where not all contestants made the grade:
Six years have passed, and Boston Dynamics just released a video showing off some very impressive dance moves — indicating how much progress has been made in the world of robots:
Automation is coming on strong in the economy and will take millions of jobs in the next few years because as soon as a machine becomes cheaper for an individual task than a human, the worker will be gone. In addition, business owners like how robots work 24/7 and don’t require lunch, sleep or paychecks. Just an occasional squirt of oil will suffice to keep the machines performing.
More recently, the Wuhan pandemic has speeded up the process of businesses adopting smart machines, since robots also don’t get sick — so convenient rather than undependable humans with their annoying germs.
There’s not a lot that can be done to deal with the job-killing Age of Automation we face, but it would make sense to end immigration, because most of the jobs that immigrants do can be done more cheaply by smart machines. In short,
Automation Makes Immigration Obsolete
Here’s a transcript of the discussion I cleaned up for easy reference:
NARRATOR: Automation is coming for your job — at least that’s the fear among many workers — from burger-flipping bots to car-building robots, not to mention high-powered software taking on more and more administrative tasks. It seems like hundreds of skills are rapidly becoming obsolete in the US economy. A McKinsey study found that AI and deep learning could add as much as $3.5 trillion to $5.8 trillion in annual value to companies.
ANDREW YANG: Eighty percent or more of the jobs that make $20 an hour or less are at least potentially subject to automation.
NARRATOR: The economic shock of the pandemic hasn’t helped; human workers are vulnerable to diseases that robots aren’t, making it much easier and now cheaper to have a robot on staff that doesn’t require healthcare.
MARCUS CASEY: Businesses are kind of looking and seeing that humans can get sick from covid, but machines can’t.
MICHAEL HICKS: If you can eliminate the healthcare costs, the labor and wage tag that comes along with those folks and particularly in services — that’s a big competitive advantage.
NARRATOR: To put the increase in robotics in perspective: the U.S. had .49 robots per thousand workers in 1995 which rose to 1.79 robots per thousand workers in 2017, but automation isn’t just a robotics revolution. The rise in information technology and artificial intelligence or AI has also become an enabler of automation. AI can help navigate difficult challenges that previously only a human operator could handle. Of course, if you’ve encountered automated phone systems, it’s likely you personally experienced that automation still has a long way to go. Continue reading this article
The government’s reaction to the coronavirus of shutting down the normal economy has unsurprisingly inspired some business owners to contemplate shifting to non-human means of production by using machines that don’t get sick.
. . .Peter Xing, a keynote speaker and writer on emerging technologies and associate director in technology and growth initiatives at KPMG, would agree. Xing believes the coronavirus epidemic is presenting us with ample opportunities for increased automation and remote delivery of goods and services. “The upside right now is the burgeoning platform of the digital transformation ecosystem,” he said. . . .
Indeed, some quarters see the epidemic as a swell opportunity to switch to automation and away from annoying human workers who demand paychecks and lunch breaks.
Some industries, like automotive manufacturing (shown below), already have machine-only areas of production.
In China, businesses see an immediate need for service robots as well as more automation in factories:
SHANGHAI, March 20 (Reuters) – A shortage of workers and restrictions on human contact because of the coronavirus pandemic is driving up demand for service robots in China, potentially boosting a sector that has struggled to scale up commercially.
Venture capitalists with expertise in the robotics sector said they are anticipating orders from China to rise significantly this year, based on interest since the end of January when the virus began spreading in China.
That could take the use of service robots from novelties that deliver food and drink in restaurants and hotels to an army that performs essential functions in hospitals bound by strict no-contact rules.
“The healthcare segment has been really hot,” said Emil Jensen, vice president of China sales for Denmark-based Mobile Industrial Robots, which makes customisable robots that are used both in hospitals and on factory floors. [. . .]
FACTORY AUTOMATION
Along with the service robots, the coronavirus pandemic could spur demand for more automation at factories.
Many Chinese semiconductor plants located in the virus epicentre of Wuhan have run continuously throughout the outbreak, which chip industry experts attribute to their highly automated production processes.
Still, the virus itself also presents an obstacle to widespread long-term adoption of automation because of the economic stress it is imposing on many companies.
Huan Liu of Mujin, which makes intelligent robot sorting and picking systems, said companies often must spend millions of dollars for a basic automation project, which can take six to twelve months to complete.
“For new customers, it depends on which factor is stronger,” said Liu. “The need to replace labour during the virus, or the need to balance the budget as sales go down during the virus.”
On Friday, Tucker Carlson examined the threat of Red China to the United States as shown by the coronavirus outbreak. The globalist economy, so profitable to big business, has put too much power in the hands of hostile communist China which manufactures a large proportion of the pharmaceuticals upon which we Americans depend.
Even so, the larger truth is that unfriendly China “dominates the world market in pharmaceutical ingredients” as Tucker observes, and “more than 95 percent of all the antibiotics in America are manufactured in Communist China.”
“Just as some international analysts have pointed out, we are indeed at the mercy of others when it comes to computer chips, but we are the world’s largest exporter of vitamin and antibiotic ingredients,” Li said last March during a speech at a national advisory conference, as quoted by state-run Xinhua (Chinese). “If we cut back exports, some western countries’ medical system won’t operate well.”
Nice people, these ChiComs!
Whatever the nature of the coronavirus — global pandemic or media hiccup — the event has shown how unwise it is to allow the unfriendly Chinese to manufacture so many necessary pharmaceuticals. The global economy and healthcare are not a good mix, and especially so when Red China is involved.
Tucker Carlson sounds inclined to believe the worst about the corona illness, but nevertheless he makes important points about the big picture of the Chinese threat and the borderless world generally regarding public health.
Audio file:
TUCKER CARLSON: Good evening, and welcome to Tucker Carlson Tonight.
There comes a time in every presidential administration when the people in charge realize they’re not really in control. Unforeseen events arise. In an instant, every assumption about the future changes. Heads of State die, wars erupt, natural disasters descend, epidemics rage — none of it was in anybody’s plan. There’s something about human nature that prevents us from preparing for this, for abrupt and radical change. We pretend the unexpected will never happen.
But there’s something in nature itself that reminds us it inevitably will. It’s always a terrifying realization.
The rise of the Chinese coronavirus is that kind of moment. The virus is quickly becoming a global pandemic. Ultimately, it could kill millions, at the very least, it will reorder the global economy and change our politics.
Could the disease help determine the outcome of our next presidential election eight months from now? Of course, it could, in fact it will. Our leaders can’t stop that.
Like all matters of life and death. It is beyond human power to affect, but they can respond to the threat in a way that makes this country stronger, not weaker.
How can they do that? Here’s how. The first step is to take the virus seriously and to convince the public that you are.
In 1918, Woodrow Wilson’s White House downplayed the Spanish influenza and refused to take obvious precautions to slow it spread. Wilson had a pointless war in progress in Europe to fight. His generals couldn’t be distracted from that goal.
So the government continued to ship men to overcrowded army camps across the country and to pack them on ships to France. The virus spread exponentially.
In the end, about 53,000 American soldiers were killed in combat in that war, at least 675,000 Americans died of the flu.
Could Wilson have prevented that disaster? Well, not entirely. But by early and decisive action, he could have improved America’s odds.
So what does effective action look like now? Well, we ought to be screening people when they get off the planes from infected countries. That’s not complicated. It’s obvious.
But at the same time, it is hardly a solution. We should be honest about how much we can do to keep the Chinese coronavirus from coming here.
A hundred years ago, the Spanish flu killed a significant percentage of the population in remote Aleutian Islands and that was before air travel.
Today, the entire world is connected by hourly international flights. Global pandemics are inevitable. There’s too much movement to keep viruses isolated. We should acknowledge that.
Yes, we can do our best to keep foreign diseases out of this country, but we ought to spend most of our time trying to figure out how to protect Americans once the diseases get here.
There’s still a lot we don’t know about the Chinese coronavirus, but two things do seem clear. It is highly communicable and the elderly and people with preexisting respiratory disease face the greatest threat from it.
That means for most Americans, the biggest risks will come not from the virus itself, but from its ancillary effects. People will panic. Travel will be disrupted. Markets will tumble and most critically, hospitals will be overwhelmed.
We’re about to learn the limits of our healthcare system. Conditions will be tough for the many thousands of Americans looking for beds to recover from the flu. In Seattle, they already are.
But things will be even worse for anyone suffering from say pancreatitis or a burst appendix; not to mention, countless other health emergencies.
People like this may not get care at all. Our system won’t be able to accommodate them.
There are many implications of this and some of them are political. For example, is this really the time to invite the rest of the world to join Medicare-for-All? Probably not. That idea was always stupid. Now, it’s clearly dangerous. Continue reading this article
On Monday, Tucker Carlson reviewed the state of the Democrat party in light of the several 2020 candidates who recently quit the race. He judged Tom Steyer as a poor dancer, Mayor Pete to be rather robotic and identity politics ending up as a big loser for the party as a whole.
After a few minutes he was joined by Victor Davis Hanson who thought this is “the worst field we’ve seen since Walter Mondale lost in a landslide to Ronald Reagan.”
The candidates do seem like the B-team of the D-party, but who else is there? When the leadership of the Democrat party is considered among the serving governors, senators and members of Congress, nobody appealing springs to mind. Over recent years, the whole party seems to have lost track of the major purpose in governing — namely to lead with policies that will help the American people.
Instead the Democrats support bad ideas like open borders, including crazy unaffordable freebies for foreign lawbreakers.
Who can forget the moment in last October’s Democrat debate in which all candidates agreed to support taxpayer-funded healthcare for illegal aliens?
When the debate moderator asked Democrat candidates to “Raise your hand if your government plan would provide [medical] coverage for undocumented immigrants,” all responded affirmatively.
How would that policy benefit Americans, many of whom find their own medical coverage to be inadequate? Healthcare polls consistently as a top concern — particularly its high cost — but citizens show no desire to pay for illegal aliens’ medical coverage.
Democrats are united that they want to beat Donald Trump and gain power, but an affirmative message to voters is lacking. For example, over the last two years, House Democrats managed only to impeach the president, with no legislation to advance the well-being of citizens.
Hanson agrees the Democrats have lost track of the big political picture — to win elections, a party has to offer something to voters beyond wokeness and diversity.
Audio version:
TUCKER CARLSON: So over the next few weeks, all the attention will of course be on Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden and maybe Michael Bloomberg. So we want to pause and remember the candidates we lost over the weekend — not permanently, they’re just not in the race.
For all of them, their failure to win the nomination is reason for all of us to feel a little better about ourselves. We’re not as dumb as we thought we were. Tom Steyer disproved that simply because you’re a billionaire doesn’t mean you’re an oligarch. Steyer spent more than $100 million dollars of his own money. And in the end, did an embarrassing dance on stage and then got nothing.
His sad presidential run ought to be encouraging to every person in America, particularly the slower among us. If that guy can make a billion dollars, you can, too.
Pete Buttigieg’s defeat proves that while Americans may be willing to vote for socialists or plutocrats or adulterers, they are pretty open minded actually. They still want their Presidents to be human. Creepy robots with biographies crafted in a Silicon Valley lab are going to have to wait till the 22nd Century to have their chance. Here’s Buttigieg minutes ago backing Biden.
PETE BUTTIGIEG: It is an honor to be here with Vice President Biden. You know, when I ran for President, we made it clear that the whole idea was about rallying the country together to defeat Donald Trump and to win the era for the values that we share and that was always a goal that was much bigger than me becoming President.
And it is in the name of that very same goal, that I’m delighted to endorse and support Joe Biden for President.
CARLSON: I think Barack Obama gave that exact same speech, but I don’t have Google in front of me, but you can check it.
And of course, Amy Klobuchar dropped out as well. Her defeat is good news for anyone who cares about proper comb hygiene. The Democratic race may be smaller tonight, but it’s not more amicable. Why? Because Elizabeth Warren is still running and now she is openly campaigning for a divisive brokered convention next July, which would be really like Christmas day for the rest of us.
Warren’s only reason for staying in the race right now is to sabotage Bernie Sanders, but many Democrats are happy to play along.
The weird neuroses anxieties and just strangers in the Democratic coalition are coming to the surface. It’s like pulling up a rock and all these things crawl away or try to.
We’re learning a lot about what they really care about. So over the weekend, the Boston Globe ran a piece arguing — and this is for real — that it was “disrespectful” for Bernie Sanders to try and win the Massachusetts primary since it would be a “major humiliation” for Elizabeth Warren.
That’s really identity politics taken to its endpoint. It’s the state of the Democratic race right now. If you’re too extreme for the donor class, then it’s sexist to try and win an election.
Victor Davis Hanson, one of the wisest people we know, is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution out in California. He joins us tonight. Professor, you look on at this and what do you make of it?
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Well, this latest dropout group of Klobuchar and Buttigieg is same thing as the first round of dropouts with Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, Julian Castro and how to sum it all up, Tucker, is after a year of all of this wokeness and diversity and white privilege, what do we end up with?
We ended up with three old white guys that are 77 and 78, with a Marxist — Neo-Marxist — as the presumptive leader, and all of them have a history of insensitive remarks about women or things they’ve written.
So it’s a complete antithesis of the whole premise of the Democratic Party and we don’t have anybody who is a charismatic character other than Bernie Sanders, and his criticisms are sometimes legitimate of American society, but his bromides are frightening.
So they are in a real — and then they’ve got this outside billionaire who is coming into save everybody from Bernie Sanders, on the premise that Biden was fading, but Biden is not quite dead yet — his candidacy, I mean that metaphorically — and now Bloomberg is going to be blamed for you know, dividing the moderate vote and handing the nomination to Sanders.
And then this was supposed to be the transparent new reformist party and they’re going to go back to an old 1950s, 1940s brokered convention with guys and cigars in the back room, horse-trading jobs and employment and entitlements to get delegates. It’s completely — the reality is completely opposite to the rhetoric of the whole progressive movement. Continue reading this article
Tech and business publications routinely chat up the advantages of transitioning away from human workers and into smart machines, but it’s less often that the mainstream press emphasizes the cost saving of companies switching to robots.
It’s interesting then to see a recent edition of the Los Angeles Times cite the savings to be had by replacing restaurant employees with automation — thousands of dollars per month, we read. Flippy the burger robot now is “costing less to employ than a minimum-wage worker.” What business manager wouldn’t take that opportunity?
The robot burger flipper doesn’t mind working the grill 24/7 with no breaks.
So does it make sense for America to continue immigrating millions of low-skilled workers from abroad?
In a test kitchen in a corner building in downtown Pasadena, Flippy the robot grabbed a fryer basket full of chicken fingers, plunged it into hot oil — its sensors told it exactly how hot — then lifted, drained and dumped maximally tender tenders into a waiting hopper.
A few feet away, another Flippy eyed a beef patty sizzling on a griddle. With its camera eyes feeding pixels to a machine vision brain, it waited until the beef hit the right shade of brown, then smoothly slipped its spatula hand under the burger and plopped it onto a tray.
The product of decades of research in robotics and machine learning, Flippy represents a synthesis of motors, sensors, chips and processing power that wasn’t possible until recently.
Now, Flippy’s success — and the success of the company that built it, Miso Robotics — depends on simple math and a controversial hypothesis of how robots can transform the service economy. Costing less to employ than a minimum-wage worker, Flippy is built to slip in right alongside humans on the fast-food line.
Off-the-shelf robot arms have plunged in price in recent years, from more than $100,000 in 2016, when Miso Robotics first launched, to less than $10,000 today, with cheaper models coming in the near future.
As a result, Miso can offer Flippys to fast-food restaurant owners for an estimated $2,000 per month on a subscription basis, breaking down to about $3 per hour. (The actual cost will depend on customers’ specific needs). A human doing the same job costs $4,000 to $10,000 or more a month, depending on a restaurant’s hours and the local minimum wage. And robots never call in sick. (Continues)
Tuesday’s New York Times front page includes an article titled “Immigration By Legal Path Begins to Fall” showing how President Trump’s efforts to reduce the foreign influx into America has begun to turn the tide.
Still, the future lies ahead, and it looks less American for us US citizens. The best thing to do would be to end immigration entirely for many reasons.
Having millions of foreign residents has no advantage other than perhaps restaurants, and that’s hardly a reason to continue immigration — I’d rather eat boiled potatoes and burnt hamburger.
Some areas have become Spanish-speaking zones where you might as well be in Mexico or Cuba. And language diversity is not a plus, it’s a danger when you don’t know what’s going on.
California seems headed for another drought, judging from a painfully dry winter, so we don’t need to import any more water-users here — 39 million is more than enough.
WASHINGTON — President Trump’s immigration policies — from travel bans and visa restrictions to refugee caps and asylum changes — have begun to deliver on a longstanding goal: Legal immigration has fallen more than 11 percent and a steeper drop is looming.
While Mr. Trump highlights the construction of a border wall to stress his war on illegal immigration, it is through policy changes, not physical barriers, that his administration has been able to diminish the flow of migrants into the United States. Two more measures took effect Friday and Monday, an expansion of his travel ban and strict wealth tests on green card applicants.
“He’s really ticking off all the boxes. It’s kind of amazing,” said Sarah Pierce, a policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group. “In an administration that’s been perceived to be haphazard, on immigration they’ve been extremely consistent and barreling forward.”
The number of people who obtained lawful permanent residence, besides refugees who entered the United States in previous years, declined to 940,877 in the 2018 fiscal year from 1,063,289 in the 2016 fiscal year, according to an analysis of government data by the National Foundation for American Policy. Four years ago, legal immigration was at its highest level since 2006, when 1,266,129 people obtained lawful permanent residence in the United States.
And immigration experts say new policies will accelerate the trend. A report released on Monday by the foundation projected a 30 percent plunge in legal immigration by 2021 and a 35 percent dip in average annual growth of the U.S. labor force.
Trump administration officials have said that immigration into the country should be based on merit and skills, not the family-based system that for decades has allowed immigrants to bring their spouses and children to live with them.
“President Trump continues to deliver on his promise to the American people to enforce our nation’s immigration laws,” Kenneth T. Cuccinelli, the acting secretary of homeland security, wrote in The Hill, a Capitol Hill newspaper, on Monday.
The rapid declines come as record-low unemployment has even the president’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, confiding to a gathering in Britain that “we are desperate, desperate for more people.”
But the doors have been blocked in multiple ways. Those fleeing violence or persecution have found asylum rules tightened and have been forced to wait in squalid camps in Mexico or sent to countries like Guatemala as their cases are adjudicated. People who have languished in displaced persons camps for years face an almost impossible refugee cap of 18,000 this year, down from the 110,000 that President Barack Obama set in 2016.
Family members hoping to travel legally from Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Somalia were blocked by the president’s travel ban.
Increased vetting and additional in-person interviews have further winnowed foreign travelers. The number of visas issued to foreigners abroad looking to immigrate to the United States has declined by about 25 percent, to 462,422 in the 2019 fiscal year from 617,752 in 2016.
And two more tough policies have now taken effect. The expansion of Mr. Trump’s travel ban to six additional countries, including Africa’s most populous, Nigeria, began on Friday, and the wealth test, which effectively sets a wealth floor for would-be immigrants, started on Monday. Those will reshape immigration in the years to come, according to experts.
The travel and visa bans, soon to cover 13 countries, are almost sure to be reflected in immigration numbers in the near future. Of the average of more than 537,000 people abroad granted permanent residency from 2014 to 2016, including through a diversity lottery system, nearly 28,000, or 5 percent, would be blocked under the administration’s newly expanded travel restrictions, according to an analysis of State Department data.
But the wealth test — or public charge rule — may prove the most consequential change yet. Around two-thirds of the immigrants who obtained permanent legal status from 2012 to 2016 could be blocked from doing so under the new rule, which denies green cards to those who are likely to need public assistance, according to a study by the Migration Policy Institute. (Continues)
Sunday’s front page of the StarTribune newspaper published from Minneapolis/St. Paul included a story about “new Americans” being taught how to navigate Minnesota’s culture as well as the cold and snow — so different from Rwanda and Burundi!
The accompanying photo showed newcomers learning the fine points of shoveling snow at an eight-week class presented by the International Institute of Minnesota:
The article gives limited information about the Institute, noting that it has “resettled nearly 25,000 refugees in its centurylong history.”
However a glance at the internet shows that the nonprofit is expanding substantially:
ST. PAUL — At a time when nursing homes and assisted living facilities are scrambling to find employees who can balance a strong work ethic with sensitivity to the needs of vulnerable adults, Jane Graupman believes she has just the solution.
In a word? Refugees. She wants more of them, and she wants to make more room for them and other immigrants in her crowded classrooms. . . .
Meanwhile, technology has a different idea for patient care in nursing homes, namely robots, which are becoming smarter and more capable all the time. So America won’t be needing low-skilled foreigners for that job either.
One gets the impression that refugee resettlement can be a profitable endeavor. The most recent 990 report for the Institute available is for the year ending September 30, 2018, and it shows Executive Director Graupman getting a salary of $106,769. That’s probably decent money in Minnesota. Also interesting is that “government grants” from the taxpayers amounted to $2,294,910.
So uneducated, culturally ignorant immigrants and refugees can be quite enriching for diversity-seeking nonprofits.
The eight-week cultural orientation class helps immigrants and temporary residents navigate myriad American systems — legal, education, health care — and more.
Dorcas Zirirane arrived at a “Life in Minnesota” class in St. Paul carrying her 1-year-old granddaughter on her back in a colorful cloth sling, speaking to her in Swahili. Zirirane was wearing a long skirt with a bold, vibrant pattern traditional to the Democratic Republic of Congo, from which she’d fled as a refugee.
But she’d already adapted her wardrobe to her new home. Zirirane raised the hem of her thin cotton skirt to reveal a pair of thick leggings.
Zirirane was one of about 20 students attending the International Institute of Minnesota’s eight-week cultural orientation class, which helps immigrants and temporary residents navigate myriad American systems — legal, education, health care — and more.
Instructor Sara Skinner also supplements the basic curriculum for refugees with skills specific to the state. Many are related to the cold: how to dress for winter, do the “penguin shuffle” when walking on ice, shovel snow correctly.
Others involve a more figurative cool: understanding Minnesotans’ reserve and interpreting the notorious “Minnesota Nice.”
This morning’s lesson was on health. Midway through it, Skinner stressed the importance of protecting your skin from the cold, dry air. “If you put Vaseline in your nose at night when you go to sleep that will help your nose not to bleed,” she offered.
The Swahili and Karenni interpreters did their best to translate a phrase that likely left those from warmer climes wondering what they were doing in this bone-chilling land of nasal-greasers.
Fear of freezing
The number of refugees coming to Minnesota has plummeted since President Donald Trump dramatically reduced the national cap on refugees (18,000 this year, down from 110,000 during Obama’s final year in office). Still, the state has a long tradition of welcoming newcomers and ranks high in its number of refugees resettled per capita.
Of the nearly 900 refugees who arrived in Minnesota in 2019, those from Myanmar were most numerous, followed by Democratic Republic of Congo and Ukraine. But a typical “Life in Minnesota” class includes students from countries all over the globe: China, Burundi, Rwanda and Portugal among them.
Helping new Americans achieve self-sufficiency remains a primary focus of the institute, which has resettled nearly 25,000 refugees in its centurylong history. It is one of five resettlement groups in the state. (Continues)
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