On the danger to the U.S. from cheap foreign.....robots

Pardon me while I geek out for a moment. 

Here's the BMW F30 3-Series production video.  Truly amazing. 

Because of spending about a quarter million dollars with Peterbilt a few months ago, I got to tour their mega-factory about 45 miles north of Fort Worth in Denton, TX. 

What this video doesn't properly show is how little inventory of parts there likely is on the BMW factory floor.  Nobody wants to pay for a 3-month supply of parts.  You have to pay for the space that the parts require, money that could be invested elsewhere is tied up in the parts, etc etc etc.  Auto and truck makers save themselves (and therefore you) a staggering amount of money by getting the parts just in time.   The Peterbilt factory, for instance, seemed to have no more than an hour's worth of tires at any given moment. 

Another thing the video doesn't reveal: there are probably different models going down that assembly line.  The robots don't care.  The suppliers all have their parts and components arriving in the correct order.  God, I love this stuff!!! 

But there are always Luddites who don't appreciate the glory of something like this, that the time and money saved by these robots can be applied to other purchases and desires.  Saving the last BetaMax factory (to save the jobs there) doesn't make sense.  Wait a couple of years, and saving the last VHS factory (to save the jobs there) doesn't make sense either.

Here's one idjit Youtube commenter, typical of the tribe:

james alphajet 1 month ago

this robotisation is a shame to the face of human future. thousands of people lost their jobs and millions were spent to fit machines into these transformers factories.
At the end the consumer pays the same and his neighbour lost his job!!

James doesn't understand that what was once the toy of the top .0001% is now available to even the lowest-paid American worker.  Yes, in America, even commoners drive these "horseless carriages". 

Here's Don Boudreaux, chiming in on the video:

Oh, to any of you who watch this video and lament the fact that so very much of the work that was once done by humans is now done by robots, I’ve a question for you: if a bizarre meteorological event occurs that causes millions of brand-new automobiles – indistinguishable in quality, comfort, and performance from the 2014 models now rolling off of the assembly lines at BMW, Toyota, Hyundai, Ford, etc. – to rain down safely into everyone’s driveways and parking spaces, would people, as a result, be made richer or poorer?

Here's The Whited Sepulchre, kicking it up to the next level:

Oh, to any of you who watch a random video of South Korean laborers manufacturing your pants and shoes and water hoses, work that was once done by Americans, I've a question for you: if a bizarre meterological event occurs that causes millions of brand-new pants and shoes and water hoses (all of excellent quality) to rain down safely into everyone's homes, would people in the USA, as a result, be made richer or poorer? 

Spank. 
It's called the Law Of Comparative Advantage.  Nations (but not many consumers who are given a choice) ignore it regularly. 

Bill Gates - Outsourcer, Destroyer Of Jobs, and Evil, Evil Man

In the late 1980's, IBM was poised to open a major typewriter manufacturing plant in rural Kentucky. 
The building they constructed to house this project was almost 1,000,000 square feet. 

You can go here to see the proud history of IBM typewriters.  Notice how the history ends in the late 1990's. 

Most of this is because of one man. 

Bill Gates. 

He eliminated tens of thousands of jobs in the U.S. typewriter industry.  His software packages have also eliminated American jobs at the U.S. postal service, secretarial positions, and the printing industry.  The job losses that can be laid at his feet probably number in the millions.  And yet some people consider him a hero.

Please do your part to reverse this trend.  Take whatever device you're using to read this, lift it high above your head, and smash it into tiny little pieces.  Then go buy a typewriter.

Create jobs for America !!!  Boycott Bill Gates and all others who try to eliminate jobs in the name of lower prices and better products for consumers !!!

On having to ring up your own groceries but pay "full price"

I saw the following quote on Instapundit:

SEEN ON FACEBOOK: “I work all day, go to Kroger late night, stock up on groceries and then get to the checkout and have to scan and bag everything by myself and still pay full price while Kroger can eliminate a job. Hmmmmm. That’s the equivalent to you coming into my restaurant, cooking your own food and I still get to charge full price. Am I being unreasonable???”

I honestly don't know where to begin.  For lack of a better place, let's start with the history of grocery stores. 

If you ever find yourself in Memphis Tennessee with a couple of hours to kill, check out The Pink Palace museum.  They've got a beautifully reconstructed model of a Piggly Wiggly grocery store inside. 

Why? 

Piggly Wiggly (founded in Memphis) was the first self-serve grocery store in the U.S.  Instead of handing the clerk behind the counter your list of groceries, if you were a Piggly Wiggly shopper, you took a cart or a basket and got your groceries all by yourself. 

This move didn't save or create any jobs in the grocery industry.  In fact, it eliminated them.  But it saved a lot of money for consumers.  This allowed them to eventually purchase more of other things instead of food: iPods, flatscreen TV's, or laptop computers, creating jobs in the iPod, TV and laptop industries. 

Skip forward about a half century.  Someone came up with a pattern of lines called a "barcode" that could be read by another device called a "scanner". 

This move didn't create any jobs in the grocery industry.  It made checking out much, much faster, and eliminated a lot of inventory and supply chain jobs in the grocery distribution system.  But it saved a lot of money for consumers. This allowed them to eventually purchase more of other things instead of food: iPods, flatscreen TV's, or laptop computers, creating jobs in the iPod, TV and laptop industries.

By the time the scanners came along, the U.S. military had already been using a warehouse concept called "cross-docking" for quite some time.  This is a warehouse design where incoming shipments are received on one side, outgoing shipments are shipped on the other, with minimal storage space in between.  Minimal inventory is kept on hand in the warehouse at any given time. 

Sam Walton, of Wal-Mart fame, was the first to apply this concept to the grocery and retail industry. 

This move didn't create any jobs in the grocery industry. It made distribution much, much faster, and eliminated a lot of inventory and supply chain jobs in the grocery distribution system. But it saved a lot of money for consumers. This allowed them to eventually purchase more of other things instead of food: iPods, flatscreen TV's, or laptop computers, creating jobs in the iPod, TV and laptop industries.

Finally, someone invented the self-serve grocery checkout stand.  If you have a minimal amount of stuff to ring up, you can choose to do it yourself. 

As the Facebook commenter wrote, the customer is doing some of the work himself.  Kind of like the Piggly Wiggly customer started doing in the 1920's. 

This move toward self-checkout doesn't create any jobs in the grocery industry. It makes getting out of the store much, much faster, and it saves a lot of money for consumers. This allows them to eventually purchase more of other things instead of food: iPods, flatscreen TV's, or laptop computers, creating jobs in the iPod, TV and laptop industries.

I hope this has helped. 

We have not become a prosperous nation by "saving or creating jobs".  We have become a prosperous nation by constantly churning the process, always trying to come up with a better way to get things done. 

No one can predict what the next way will be.  No one knows which kid is working in the Produce Department of an Albertson's Grocery Store who has already come up with a better way to distribute and merchandise fruit and vegetables, and who just can't wait to open his own store and try out his idea.  No one knows which computer geek in his Mom's basement has already come up with a system to make distribution and logistics more efficient. 

These people are going to bring us improvements and levels of progress that we can't even imagine, here in the primitive year 2011. 

The only thing we do know is that there will always be someone complaining about the cost of progress and doing everything in his power to keep it from happening. 

The most depressing thing I've ever read.

This just might be the most depressing thing I've ever read. 
Seriously. 

The experiment was prompted by Obama's recent comments that things like ATM's, airport check-in ticket scanners, and other technologies have killed a lot of jobs. 

Please pray for our nation.

Apples that didn't fall too far from the tree

If you are entertained by this type of thing, you can see an earlier post on Jackson by going here. 

If you want to know more about the history of the Luddites (and Jesse Jr is a Luddite of the worst possible sort), then here's a video that was produced for middle school history classes.  Can someone who isn't busy today e-mail this link to Congressman Jackson? 



A fresh coat of Whitening to The Swash for the video.