TauZero @ TauZero @mander.xyz

Posts

7

Comments

297

Joined

2 yr. ago

We can keep the supermarket cashiers, we just have to demand it. Always choose the full-service line, and complain loudly if there are not enough cashiers to keep the line short, scoff at any suggestion to use the self-checkout and demand to speak to a manager and corporate. As I said elsewhere, one person can only do so much, but when a million people keep doing it the mountain will have to move. I feel personally responsible for the installation of these cashboxes by insisting to pay in cash every single time for the past several years.

Literally starving to death is more difficult nowadays than in the past, but every society is still structured around the idea that you must be doing something wrong if you are not employed. Food, housing, healthcare, all tied to employment, and the substitutes they maybe give you are designed to only barely keep you alive until you find more employment.

Yes, every job that has become obsolete in the past due to automation has been replaced with a new kind of job, many of which could not have even been imagined before. We don't have buggy whip manufacturers, but we do have programmers. But that doesn't mean that will continue always. Jobs that disappear now or in the near future may never get replaced. And many jobs that exist now, I'd argue, are totally bullshit already, and we don't need more of them. We as a society need to reassess our expectations for 100% employment and better reallocate resources according to the new norms.

Instead of "smashing the robots", may I interest you in "eating the rich" option? It looks like you have been thinking a lot of smashing, but not enough about eating. Remember your priorities!

They've been the most vocal opponent to $15 minimum wage increase in New York, which I've always found odd, since they'd be the ones to most benefit from it via competitive advantage, as you said, due to economies of scale. They've been making threats the entire time "We'll replace cashier with computers! If you raise the wage, we'll totally do it, you'll see!" and I'm like "Dude, if you had the capability to do it, you gonna do it either way anyway, why you extorting us?"

I guess the smaller competitor restaurants will need to get kiosks as well. They can't develop their own in-house technology like the big chains do, but they can still purchase 3rd-party ready solutions, like all of them have already done with online ordering. Slightly more expensive to use 3rd party, but that's economies of scale for ya.

This is a different situation than self-checkout at supermarkets. There yes you could argue a cashier who is experienced with scanning items all day and has access to a fully-featured POS can scan all your items faster and more efficiently than you could ever do on that locked-down self-checkout pos, and owners who take away cashiers are purely saving money at the expense of your time. But here you yourself have to communicate your order either way. I much prefer to browse at my leisure and tap at pictures rather than shouting my order 3 times while there is an impatient line behind me.

All good points! When these kiosks started out, they were ridiculously laggy, way more than a simple GUI had any right to be, as if every tap and swipe had to be proxied through New Zealand. Thankfully the lag has been solved in one of the interface updates since.

The upsell spam is still annoying, but having used the interface a couple times I have become the Neo of offer dodging. Tap tap tap (No I don't want to log in. Yes I am sure I don't want to log in. No, I don't want to make it a meal. No I don't want to add a soda or side of nuggets. Checkout. Cancel payment. Done!) Would be better without, but currently manageable. As others have mentioned, they already managed to fuck up the tableau screens above the counter by having the images move around, so that if you want to know how much a medium fry would cost you have to wait through 30 seconds of slideshow first, and then not miss the 2 seconds that the price is actually on screen. The kiosk is actually the winner for me here.

The waiting in line to pay cash was my last problem, which is why I got excited to see these automatic cashboxes installed. Money goes in, food comes out.

To be fair, it is literally true that I am at least partially responsible, even if only by one part in a million. If there were a million people like me, and we each individually and separately decided to refuse to use the kiosk and demanded to be served by a human cashier and left the store if one was not immediately available, the owners would have no choice but to keep the humans. I just happen to like the kiosks because I am not a luddite.

Being out of a job is good, it's the not-being-able-to-eat afterwards that's the bad part.

Echoes of the Eye expansion to Outer Wilds. I managed to avoid all the spoilers, watched some playthroughs but thankfully didn't study them too closely. Importantly, the streamers never looked "up" during the parts of the gameplay that I've seen, so to me it appeared just like another normal environment (well, normal at least by Outer Wilds standards). I already loved the original game, and decided I must play this for myself.

So when I entered through that doorway for the first time I was genuinely stunned. "You fuckers, you really did it this time. You actually went ahead and did it!" I mean... ::: spoiler spoiler Space habitats have always been a staple of science fiction novels, and they have appeared a couple times in video games already, like in Mass Effect and Halo, but there they were only used as background - the actual playable area was limited. Never before this had anyone successfully implemented a life-size Bishop Ring with the full "You see that mountain? You can walk there!" boastfulness. And sometimes that mountain is on the ceiling. And when the water breaks, oh boy... :::

Your mom is covered in fecal bacteria.

Shhh, don't tell them!

machines here have 2 options side by side on the screen for you to select how you want to pay - cash at the counter or card at the machine

Good to know, thanks! It used to be this way here too, but they stopped displaying the "cash at counter" option on the screen entirely after one of the interface redesigns. What they really want to force you to do is use the app all the time, so they can have better tracking and would have no need for cashiers OR kiosks.

Yup yup! In a just world, if you have 100,000 workers at a factory, and then they get replaced by robots maintained by 1000 robot technicians, you should have ended up with a Star Trek utopia where 99,000 people now don't have to work and can pursue culture and passions. In the real world, the factory product price gets halved, the technicians get paid 10x what a worker used to get (20% of total revenue), and the factory owner gets 80% of total. The former workers are now jobless, homeless, and penniless and can't afford the product they used to make.

They tell us "Replacing jobs is OK! We'll invent more new kinds of jobs, as old obsolete jobs free up labor. Everyone will be better off!" but the new jobs are mostly "telemarketer", and "tech support scammer", and "ornamental hermit" at factory owner's mansion.

But all that still doesn't convince me we should be smashing the robots as a job protection scheme. I wish there was a way to keep the automation and have the Star Trek utopia instead!

the seller can refuse to honour people’s request for them using their own packaging

Preposterous! How are we expected to reduce our consumption of single use containers if we are not allowed to use anything else?

I've had great success bringing my own sealable glass bowls when I want to get takeout and they eyeball out the regular size portion for me. But here currently it's only possible on an ad-hoc basis, by asking as a favor as a regular, since it's just not part of custom. It would be great if bring-your-own-container was protected and encouraged by law!

My city passed a plastic bag ban recently and I was skeptical about it at first but it actually has been a great help. Not even so much in banning the bags themselves, but in changing the culture and expectations. Now it feels perfectly normal to bring in your own canvas bags to shop because everyone does it, whereby before you'd look like a weirdo for doing it.

treating it like it’s a highway on ramp/yield.

Good analogy!

Guys, poster above is just answering the question as posed! They are wrong of course, but the downvote button is for non-constructive contributions, not for disagreement 😊!

Can't wait until they pass a law banning "smoking within 10m of another person outdoors" so we can play "chase the smoker!" game and they have to run away from us or face a fine.

The numbers I heard is that reusing a bottle is less energy intensive than melting it down. It's sanitary if you sterilize it properly by heating to >100°C, which is still much less energy than heating it to 1723°C to melt. As for water, I try to think on a 100 year time scale, where water is a renewable resource, but plastic is not.

It's true that the energy savings will be wasted if you end up trucking the pallet of glass soda bottles all the way across America! But you shouldn't be trucking bottles that far anyway - you should be sending rail tanker cars full of syrup to a bottling plant in each state and use local water to mix it.

That's great! Our supermarkets have bottle deposit machines too, and even at only $0.05 deposit per bottle they are widely used. However, the poor people using them mostly obtain the bottles by rifling through apartment complex recycling bins on garbage day (all residents are already required to separate plastic from garbage).

Moreover I don't believe plastic is actually recycled. My city has started burning 90% of its incoming plastic stream and still calls it "recycling"! That's still fossil carbon coming out of the ground and ending up in the atmosphere, you doofuses! The minor fraction of plastic that IS recycled is either downcycled into lower quality items like plastic planks for outdoor decks, or mixed with at least 50% virgin plastic material if making new plastic bottles. There is currently no way to 100% recycle plastic into the same type of item AFAIK, because the polymer molecules chemically degrade.

When I think about recycling I want to think in terms of "is this kind of lifestyle sustainable for 100 years? for 1000 years?" Taking fossil carbon out of the ground is not sustainable. Aluminum and glass are recyclable 100%! Can we do even better with reuse?

There is a store near me that sells illegally-imported African coke. It comes in a bottle that looks beat up to shit, but that's because the bottle was probably used hundreds of times, since in the African country they actually reuse the bottle. It's still perfectly fit for purpose though! We just need to relax our expectations for how "pristine" we want our product packaging to look.

which can be sparse depending on your idea

Yes! Which is why my idea is to have a collection point at every point of sale. And the first aim will be to reuse the packaging, not even recycle it (melt it down)! This is why ISO standardization is necessary - you don't want to keep track of Coke bottles and Pepsi bottles, they need to be identical. The same truck that delivers a pallet of bottles from the factory to your store will take the pallet of empties out.