Neanderpundit

For a week that was only 80% of a week to begin with, this one has suckled a big rubbery one.

The garage project is basically complete, though there will be a lot of fapping about as I slowly bring crap back into the garage,

meanwhile the knees feel like icepicks are being driven in, I have a filling falling out of one tooth and probably a root canal due in another. And the pain is giving me some dreams.

Last night I was at a BBQ somewhere, and I was admiring all the guns. I’m at home around fairly wealthy people, a lot of the entrepreneurs I know are customers and friends, quite a few people with net worth in the mid/high seven figures.

So hanging around people with nice guns is nothing new to me; this was not that kind of bbq, though. All these guns were one off, and whoa. 1911 style autos made one at a time by Holland and Holland and Purdey and M Galand. Revolvers that looked right out of buck rogers, with cylinders so closely fitted to the frames that you couldn’t tell where the seam was until you saw the cylinder spin. And one woman reached into her purse and pulled out what I thought was a cheap pink Ruger until I looked closer; it had been carved out of a single pink Linde Star sapphire that must have been the size of a cantaloupe. The hammer was gold over titanium and the cartridges were solid silver.

This kind of ostentatiousness was fun to look at, and everyone was tickled to show off their armament to me, but the best part was the entertainment, a group of young men and women wandering around in skin tight jeans and white cotton T shirts that were, to a man and woman, so damned gorgeous that you couldn’t help yourself but stop and stare. And then I moved my mouth and put some pressure on that tooth and it woke me up. I was pissed.

replacing people instead of paying them a $15 minimum wage.

Automation is not by any means simple but people have been preparing for it for a long time.

Lets stalk for a minute about the type of automation, because it’s something almost nobody understands.
Hard automation is a machine that does one thing and one thing only. Now that one thing may be simple, like an automatic toaster- put bread in the top, it comes out buttered toast at the bottom. Yes, this is automation. it could also be complex, like a machine into which you throw plucked, gutted chickens and it separates the meat and the bones and whole breasts and loose meat come out. That is automation as well. And yes, that machine does exist. Hard automation is designed to do a single task, and do it with extreme efficiency. Here’s an example of a single task hard automation machine. All it does, is put the liners in bottlecaps and slit the tamper evident. And this is a slow machine. most are screaming fast.

All hard automation is designed to do something simple. Sometimes they can be modified slightly, but you can’t redeploy that machine to, for instance, install the wheels on a car. Hard automation is difficult to make and usually very limited in it’s scope, but it is very efficient. Soft automation, like robots, is much more flexible; a robot that is welding gas pedal assemblies in March can easily be loading steering wheel hubs into a lathe in May, and injecting sealant into refrigerator doors in September.

The automation you don’t see is already in place many places. Nobody is standing in front of a flattop or a deep fryer in McDonalds, those burgers and fries are already made in a fairly structured way. it’s not exactly fully automated yet, but it is very efficient, and the gap between an efficient human process and an automated process is very, very small.

No, what you’re going to see first is a kiosk where you walk up to a computer monitor and order, and pay, or a cellphone app where you already store your preferences and just text the thing you want to the closest McKing, and your order will be waiting for you when you drive up. it’s already happening; look around. There are already self checkouts in nearly every chain store in North America. And apps that let you order online or from home or from a kiosk in store. The more normalized they become, the fewer $15 employees are needed.

The human touch will be required, at least for the moment, where personalized service is still required. A tailor still has to measure you for your pants, but in the not too distant future body scanners will eliminate that job. A customer service counter is still very useful but many customers would rather deal with a computer terminal than a surly customer service rep. And the customer service reps are already tired of surly customers. The people who run scams on stores will still be able to do so, they’ll just have to be smarter (I know a girl who put herself through college by buying new looking clothes at Goodwill or garage sales, attaching tags to them with security loops, and returning them at places like WalMart with liberal return policies)

The world is changing. Humanity is being dehumanized and marginalized byu people who are vocally “Trying to help” but are in reality cementing the lower classes into permanent dependancy. No thinking person doesn’t understand this.

The way to survive is to be in a job that requires creativity, which automation cannot do, or to have skills that are needed to maintain the machinery of our lives. A $90 tablet computer can be a piece of semi-soft automation that can parrot the same things that $400,000 sociology degree will teach you. Have or get a job that cannot be replaced easily.

Yesterday, all day spent tying tubing down to the remesh in the floor, poured today. Tomorrow they pour the apron. 20 days from now, I can park in my garage again.

Garage door will need some adjustment, but that’s all fine. And I’ll have a solid, new garage floor for the very first time in my life. Hopefully before fall arrives, I will be able to afford to add the heat as well.

of course now all hell has broken loose at work, the Escape has chosen this time not to have air conditioning, and it probably needs brakes as well. Well, I suppose I can do it on the asphalt driveway like I have done a thousand times before. Meanwhile, here’s a picture of one of my hunting companions sharpening the blades of the lawnmower on our hunting property.