whofearsthenight @ whofearsthenight @lemm.ee

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2 yr. ago

Yeah, this is the thing. Does literally anyone want to go to Walmart? No. Is it the place I can afford? Increasingly, still no. Not sure I can even afford to walk past whatever the good version of a Whole Foods is today, though.

Optimist: the glass is half full
Pessimist: the glass is half empty
realist: is this piss?

The real question is whether he picks someone that was already running for the seat. Very competitive race between Schiff, Porter, and Lee. If he selected one of those, would give them a huge leg up.

This is the fast food lobby's main talking point. Personally, I don't disagree. Decide a living wage, make that the bare minimum for everyone. The talking point however is that "my poor wittle small business can't afford to pay people enough money to live please daddy let me continue the exploitation."

I mean, they're definitely working on it, but so far it's tech that isn't ready. also, it's still a similar problem, at least for now. The thing I've heard about is automated french fry machines. Basically, a big fryer that places fries into the fryer, and then transfers them to the bagging station. From what I've heard, they're very expensive and don't work well. But the strategy there is more around improving human foibles - estimating the amount of fries needed for rushes more accurately, etc. The person is still there working the station, but assisted by tech. Also improving capacity. That one person that is supposed to be doing all of the things now has less to do, and so can focus on making sure orders of fries are ready to be bagged by expo people. This means they're bottlenecked less often, can serve more customers, and thus hire more staff.

I mean, make no mistake, we're headed towards a mostly automated future for these types of jobs, most likely. Tech will improve, get cheaper, etc. But this has been the way things have been for the last 20-30 years. Watch a drive through in most mcdonalds and they have a machine that makes drinks. Before that, having a machine that dispensed fries into the basket was a luxury. Even the grill being like a big panini press was an innovation. So far, this has all led to more jobs. In the case of fast food, just producing consistent results quickly has led to growth. I'd check out youtube or ticktok. I think McDonald's even puts out a lot of videos these days showing what's really happening in the kitchen. It's a little bit fascinating.

oh yeah, that's not a clapback, just furthering your point that if you think the problem is the guy who still probably can barely pay their rent, you're woefully ignorant.

idk personally I think if you can't pay a living wage you don't have a business model, you have a loophole of exploitive policy. Like, you're saying all this and I'm hearing "but without slaves to pick my cotton I'll go out of business!" good

Indeed - not saying I agree, but this is the main talking point from the fast food companies. It's not fair they have to pay more when (sometimes) slightly smaller businesses do not.

...unless you're a CEO. Wages, especially minimum, have been stagnant to declining for decades, meanwhile CEO and c-level pay is up like 900x. Whatever this raise costs in aggregate, I will nearly guarantee you can probably look to increase in compensation package for like 10 people in CA at most who are getting the same amount next year.

Fast food joints shouldn’t be a place to build a career, they’re a place for students etc to work.

This is why you can't buy fast food during school hours. Seriously, stop with this bootlicking, boomer classist bullshit myth. All work deserves dignity and a living wage. Aside from that, I will near guarantee that you apply this across the industry, you've just closed about 85% of restaurants and hospitality (retail, etc) as most of the people working there are not students. Also, it's NOT easy work which is another bullshit line. It's like that old trope about the plumber that comes out and twists one knob and the guy that called them says "you only twisted one knob! Why should I pay you $300?" and the plumber says "because I knew which knob to twist." Fast food and this type of work is a lot like that, except we don't pay them well enough for most to stay long enough to know which knob.

Tbh, if fast food employees were paid their worth, there is a decent chance that customer cost would go down because they'd usually be closer to max efficiency and the restaurant would spend less money on things like lawsuits and fines and such because the "manager" had more than 10 minutes of experience and training before promotion.

rents have probably doubled in the last decade, absurd to think that wages wouldn't need to go up. Groceries in the last year as well. COVID was clearly a cover to gouge.

The "automated" stores are less about reduction in labor cost and more about improving the overall operation and growing sales (thus increasing jobs.) It does help labor cost because the labor that is staffed is more efficient, but that's more of a tertiary outcome. They still employ roughly the same number of staff, and potentially will employ even more as efficiency of the process grows.

Simplest way I can explain this is thinking about the order kiosks. One of the worst parts of fast food is that most people aren't actually trained at birth how to order right, and secondarily it introduces another couple of humans who are fallible and won't get it correct. EG: customer comes into McDonald's and says "I want the whopper basket." Crew person, internal: "wtf are they talking about, I guess I'll give them a big mac." Then the customer comes back pissed off because they actually wanted a quarter pounder with fries, it has to be remade distracting the kitchen, manager, that crew person, etc further.

Also, the entire time the customer is ordering, it's engaging a whole crew person. To scale up and take more orders, you have to add an additional crew person for each order you want to take concurrently, and because customer flow is not 100% predictable, this isn't even really possible. Most McDonalds have like 4 kiosks, and you'll only find that they're all used at the same time for maybe a grand total 3-4 hours a day. To replicate that with a human, you would have to be like "I need you to work from 7:23-7:59, and you to work 11:46-12:07, and you to work, 12:03-12:07..." which literally no one is going to do, and isn't actually that predictable regardless. No automation means some customers are going to come in, see a line, and peace out. This means lower sales, and lower overall employees.

With automation, the demand can be filled much more often and a whole massive point of complexity is removed. In the example above, the customer comes in wanting a whopper basket, looks at the menu and goes "oh they call it a quarter pounder here" and clicks the buttons. Because they can now capture more demand, kitchens are busier and there are more orders to deliver, so they move that person who was going to be extremely inefficient by comparison serving customers 1:1, and move them to a kitchen position or to an expo position.)

Doesn't this just mean Newsom appoints a replacement to finish her term and then they can get back to confirmation process? I seem to recall that was the reason so many called for her to resign, she was holding things up because she was too ill to sit for the confirmation process.

WinCo is legit. The bulk section alone makes going in there worth it. Need oregano? You can pay $5.99 for the jar at Kroger (in my area, Fred Meyer) or you can go to the bulk section of WinCo and pay $0.37.*

Numbers not exact, but it is literally that drastic a difference.

I'll toss in that I'm fine with the luxurious versions of those things being for profit where it applies. But that's the rub, the ruling class is probably going to define anything past a cardboard box and gruel as "luxury."

I think if there ends up actually being a version of AI that is privacy focused and isn't screwing over creators it'd be so much less controversial. Also, everyone (including me) is really, really fucking sick of hearing about it all of the time in the same way that everyone is/was sick of hearing about the blockchain. As in: "Bro your taco stand needs AI/the blockchain."

Pretty much. If you want a voice assistant right now, Siri is probably the best in terms of privacy. I bought a bunch of echos early, then they got a little shitty but I was in, and now I just want them out of my house except for one thing - music. Spotify integration makes for easy multi-room audio in a way that doesn't really work as well on the other platform that I'll consider (Apple/Siri) and basically adds sonos-like functionality for a tiny fraction of the price. The Siri balls and airplay are just not as good, and of course, don't work as well with Spotify.

But alexa is so fucking annoying that at this point I mostly just carry my phone (iPhone) and talk to that even though it's a little less convenient because I'm really goddamned tired of hearing "by the way..."

They wouldn't have nearly as many problems as they did if they waited another 6 months for the initial release. I have a pc with a 1060 card, and I bought it relatively soon after launch, and it was extremely buggy, and I could barely play even at low settings. I made it maybe a 1/3 into the game before I just gave up and decided to wait until it was improved. I just installed again last week and started another play through, and even pre-2.0 it was markedly better and I could get a consistent 30+ fps on medium.

That's I think the issue. 2.0 obviously contains many more bug fixes, but that's not really what that release is about and it's been past just playable for a long time. I actually really like the idea of 2.0, which is not really a bug fix but rethink of some gameplay mechanics that make a lot of sense. Like, it was always infuriating that the best armored clothes in the game often looked absolutely stupid, so I like them making clothing pretty much just cosmetic, and then moving armor to the ripperdoc upgrades. Sure, they could have probably figured that out for 1.0, but once things get into player hands you are always going to learn something. Conversely, Skryim has shipped on every platform with a screen practically and ships every time with the same garbage ass inventory system from 2011.

So yeah, they (the whole industry) should be releasing games that are fully baked, but I really don't mind the idea that they're going to take a game and iterate on it more like a platform. I could see Cyberpunk being something I'm still playing in 10 years as long as they keep adding content and iterating, in much the same way that people are still playing the shit out of GTAV.

Because nearly all of that they've lacked the political power to do. Obama had 2 years with democrat control of congress and the White House, and that got us the ACA. Was it enough? No. Was it the best we're going to get given the makeup of the senate especially at that time? Yeah probably.

Similar with Biden's term so far. 2 years of very bare congressional control*, one of the most legislatively successful terms in modern history. Stimulus, for example, you woefully mischaracterize, and it's worth reading what actually happened.. Also of note from the same article:

On May 15, 2020, the Democratic-controlled House passed a $3 trillion relief bill called the HEROES Act, but the Republican-controlled Senate never brought it to a vote.

Another juicy one:

Why aren’t they calling for blanket federal student loan forgiveness?

They fucking did. Biden signed via executive order student loan forgiveness and it got struck down by a Trump appointed judge.

I wonder who repealed glass-steagall? Oh right, a bunch of fucking republicans. I wonder what dems had to say about that:

During debate in the House of Representatives, Rep. John Dingell (Democrat of Michigan) argued that the bill would result in banks becoming "too big to fail." Dingell further argued that this would necessarily result in a bailout by the Federal Government.

Good thing that never happened.

I'm not going to go any deeper on this, and while I agree that the dem party is nowhere near left enough for my tastes, they're not even comparable to republicans/conservatives and part of the reason that we're in the circumstance we are is that people who are obviously ignorant of the actual and political realities in this country and pretend that the parties are even close to equivalent. You're doing it right now - Republicans fuck everything up, but somehow it's Democrat's fault that they aren't fixing it fast enough, even though they're expected to do it with one hand tied behind their back.

But even that, that doesn't matter. The practical reality in this country which seems especially difficult for hard-left/progressives to swallow is that you will further nothing on your agenda by not voting, or not voting for dems. Third party will change nothing because of the decisions white slave owners made 200 years ago, and republicans are literally out to destroy any of the things that the left care about.

Democrats controlled the house for 2 years pretty decisively. They only had the senate with a tie-breaker, and that's including Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema who have repeatedly fucked up a lot of the positives dems have attempted during this time. Manchin, I can almost understand because a dem getting elected in WV at all is remarkable, but Sinema is just a cunt.

... and even then, even if it's just about economics, woefully fucking wrong. You can look at just about every economic measure under Dems vs Repubs and the outcomes are starkly different. The way they spend money is also starkly different, though at least on this front I would grant that compared to many countries, we don't have a full-left party, but still wouldn't call them conservative by any stretch.

tbh equivocating the two parties in 2023 after watching from birtherism to a full fucking attempt at a coup by republicans is very iq-like-lukewarm-pea-soup take.