I suppose it is a great time to load up on fixed interest rate debt.

where have you've been, go into a 5guys or red robbin,  a simple burger cost 8 to 14 bucks. If you talking mc Ds ? thoes prices have already gone up too.

@Frank_B

Too late...

I don't think he said it will "destroy our economy."

But when you compensate labor at a higher rate than the actual market value of said labor based on supply and demand for said labor and skills alone, under a government mandate, all you do is create inflation.

Thus, long term, THERE IS NO REAL GAIN, for ANYONE.

Like so much else that comprises the broken logic that lies at the philosophical foundation of the modern Democratic party, it is smoke and mirrors, and political theater to appease and fool people of very limited intellectual ability.

As Reagan once said: "The problem with our liberal friends isn't that they don't know ENOUGH.  It's that they know so much that isn't so."

From a comprehensive CBA standpoint, I don't know if robotic technology is "there yet" in terms of what you suggest.

Getting there and on the horizon?  No doubt.

Right now?  I don't know.

My main question would be the maintenance and repair costs of robotic "workers," versus cheap human labor from the part time labor pool that you don't pay benefits to.

Then again, what ELSE may be coming is taxing the robotic and AI "workers" an income tax, the same way we formerly taxed the human workers they replaced - which is already being done in places like Sweden by the way.

RESTAURANT OWNER: "Great!  This new robot replaced those unreliable part timers who always called off sick.  AND I don't have to keep all those tax records for income tax!"

DEMOCRATS OF THE NEAR FUTURE: "Ahem!  Guess what, Mr. Restaurant Owner?  That's right!  Please start keeping records of the hours your robot is in operation, for the new non-human income tax!"

That's not true around here.

Not true in my area either.

I make about 32 an hour.

A buger flipper isn't worth 50% of me. Neither is a ditch digger, walmart drone, barista, or any other zero skill mouth breather job.

But by all means. Hand them a Ladder logic drawing, send them into a room, with radiation, and a 4160v switch gear and have them hop the fuck to it. I'll eb over here sipping my coke while you call the meat wagon.


Thats the simple crux of it. It will devalue my earnings.

I ran a crew of "electricians" in an industrial environment for a couple years after I got out of elevators. Having to deal with lazy , no show or perpetually late show types is the norm anymore. The worst are millenials and younger shitz that refuse to stop finger banging their smartazz phones. I ran off so many  - especially temps that I got called on the carpet for it. They basically asked me to be more moderate with such human waste. I quit and got back into elevators. Almost the same problem as I have had 1 excellent helper out of three in the past few years. Got one presently  - 44 yrs old and he is about as dumb as the box the rocks come in !!. And presently a handful of the millennial types are bucking to get the business unionized. These kinder types have zero idea what that means to them financially. Most of them will get benched or laid off period.
   As an example I witnessed a small elevator company years ago go union. The union apparatchiks drove their costs so high that they were no longer competitive and then the union slowly dried up their work. In under two years they closed their doors.
   My current employers know and see this - their father has been in elevators for almost 50 years. This is all they know . They won't close their doors ...but they will be super selective about whom they keep on... and put a lot of these millennial gimme gimme types on the bench if the union insanity prevails. When I started in elevators 20 + years ago my first employer had started out as a union shop and voted the union out. Of course they got sued but they prevailed. That company was taken over by family when the original owners retired .They took it over and it became a pool of family first and backstab anyone else second. I left !.
   But back to quality of labor...it's bad. The "education system" in America has purposely been dumbed down to create sheeple willing to take the kings shilling for fealty to the new masters. All my friends in skilled trades experience this lack of motivation to work , willingness to learn , and the even near total ability to step up if asked bluntly to do so. When you waste 20 minutes explain the task at hand and know it takes a certain time , then come back and find it FUBAR'd and incomplete.... WTF !!!!. It's pretty disheartening to deal with such dim witted whom want that money now , but won't even be bothered to step up for and earn it.

That's correct. The GOP also needs to slow-walk all Dem bills so that they are spread out over the next 2-4 years. That will extend the length of the recession.

It wasn't just that Blue states benefited from those deductions. The cost of those deductions were paid for directly by Red state taxpayers.

It's around $11-$12 here, McD's tries to hire at $10.25 starting wage and can't get anyone, they always are hiring because no one will stay at that wage.

I think people dont realize how much skilled labor works in the $15 to $23 range. Minimum wage goes to $15 and what are you going to pay them?

Our department starts firefighter / paramedics at $16.98 an hour and you have to have all your certs ($12 to $15k in training / education). In Texas, that puts us just over the 50th percentile for fire dept pay.

That is a fucking retarded way to cook burgers automated.


Pizza ovens with conveyers already exist, which is far closer to how a automated burger patty cooker should look like.  A conveyer is far cheaper than a 3-axis robot, and no safety cage needed either just simple guards.  Getting the frozen patty out of the freezer and onto the conveyer is probably harder but the grill method has the same issue..  


When I waited tables  the oven was faster than the cooks could throw toppings on pizzas, and almost faster than people could cut and box.  Burger patties in a pizza oven would probably cook more patties than you could put in a sack manually.   I think you could do a burger box and drop in a sack or meal box automated.  

that percentile might be different now. I've seen signs this week around Houston at Target and Jack in the Box saying that they are hiring starting at $15/hr

Which the unintended consequence of that was to have the libs move to the red states and screw up voting.

One of the things people cheering this on was the footnote. Projections are it will cost 1.3 million jobs in the economy.

UBI will be next.

The part that is confusing to me is how anyone squares the circle on the supply and demand relationship between labor availability and labor rates. Leftists will insist we import loads of unskilled labor through immigration (thus driving down labor costs) then insist that we raise the labor rate. If we turned off the spigot of unskilled labor flowing across the border, labor rates will necessarily increase as the labor pool shrinks. Of course, this may be all according to plan.

Paying a $15 dollar minimum wage while allowing a massive influx of unskilled labor into the pool will only result in higher unemployment rates due to the fact that business owners will hire employees with more skillsets since those employees are now within their reach (artificially) thus leaving behind unskilled workers in the dust. Unskilled workers are being paid exactly what they are worth in the market, no more, no less. Raise the minimum and those workers lose their greatest (and perhaps only) asset: their low cost.

I think it's stuff like this that causes the under 30 crowd to jump from job to job every 2 years?

I had a double chili cheeseburger yesterday. It was $7.40.

Marxism/communism, and one of the basic tenets is that you pit one group of people against another. In classic Marxist thought, it is the the proletariat(workers, or "the haves nots") versus bourgeois(shopkeeper or merchant, "the haves").
Don't worry, Slow Joe Xiden has got you covered.
Bolsheviks/Marxists/communists have a strong hatred for God and 2nd Amend for a reason. :O

This has happened to me.
The person I was training was making ~30% more than I was.
When I talked to my manager about it, I eventually got a 9% raise. He was very surprised to see how UNenthusiastic I was about the "great" raise he got me.
Not long after that, I left the company for much better pay.

ALL HAIL the evil empire in Austin.

Yup.  It's a stupid ploy to think that an entry level job with no qualifications should be sufficient to support a family of four.  Enjoy your $15 quarter pounder with cheese.

The practical result is that business owners will look to alternate means to conduct business.  For fast food, it will be ordering kiosks and robotic food preparation.


A few years ago, I worked for a company that bumped up the salaries of the entry-level employees up to 5 years experience because the new hires were being offered more money.  Unfortunately for me, I had 10 years of experience, so I got nothing.  That contributed to the gutting of the future leadership of the company, as 95% of the people who could have grown into senior leaders left the company.

I just checked the prices at the local McD that pays $15/hr...Big Mac Meal: $7; Quarter Pounder w/Cheese Meal: $7; Double Quarter Pounder w/Cheese Meal: $8; Filet O Fish Meal: $6.60; McChicken Meal: $4  

But muh WEED! What I do on my own time is my business! It's a harmless drug, unlike booze!

I hate to break it to you, but automation and kiosk ordering was the endgame loooooong before there was any threat to fast food of a $15/hr min wage.

Occasional Cortex is half-right with that thinking.

THe part she fails to mention (or probably even understand) is that the cost of goods and services will rise also, and in the end, everyone is no better off than before.

The minimum wage functions in a way as to be considered the "floor" for what employees are paid, and every other higher paying job is paid based on minimum wage plus "X" percent more.  If you raise minimum wage, all other wages wind up rising too, sooner or later.

Finally, if someone advocates for a $15/hr minimum wage, ask them why they wouldn't advocate for a minimum wage of $25/hr or maybe $100/hr.   After all, those levels would REALLY improve the workers financial status, according to their logic.   Once you suggest this, watch them try to explain why that's not realistic, but $15/hr is.

How long until we see A $19.95 Happy Meal?

1.3 million is a low estimate. A better estimate could be 5 million. For the low estimate, they only take into account those making less than $15 now who might be fired. They don't take into account those who would never be hired at all, those who are already frozen out of the labor market because of the current minimum wage, and all the collateral damage.

When DC raised their minimum wage a couple of years ago, one-third of the fast food places in the District closed and most of the rest are on life support. People have no interest in $10 Big Macs or $12 Subway sandwiches. When those stores close they bring cause less business for their suppliers, they take out some above-minimum-wage workers (managers, truck drivers) and advertising dollars also diminish. Less demand for commercial real estate means less demand for commercial construction, so all of those trades are also impacted.  

But I am 100 percent for this. Stupid is supposed to hurt.

But it won't be universal, it'll have a income cap just like the stimulus checks.

And many here will cheer and say "Just getting my tax money back from all these years"

I always ask them this...

What is the minimum wage in Mexico?  
What is the minimum wage in China?

Because if you make minimum wage, that is the floor if you don't have to physically be in the US to do the job.  With high speed internet you can take drive through orders from India, but you can't wipe the table from India so that is the only job you might have when the robot runs the fryer and grill.

Do you support a minimum wage? If so, how much?

Do you support companies paying their employees, including "the next guy down" and "the guy at the top", what that company and each employee agree upon?

You don't know what specific number?

You've got a number in your brain, you just don't want to spit it out.

You only have 3 options:
You want a minimum wage between its current level and $15.
You want a minimum wage of $15.
You want a minimum wage higher than $15.

If you don't understand where I'm going yet, I'll tell you:
For the first, that means you want a higher minimum wage, but think $15 is too much.
For the next, that means you're on board with the $15 minimum wage.
For the last, you think that the $15 minimum wage isn't enough.

The real question is why you support a minimum wage when you popped out the phrase "another regulatory capture scheme to crush anyone besides big capital." About the only thing that makes sense in your post is that you don't know. On that point, you're 100% correct.

Cut out the fry and large drink. Put a case of bottled water in the vehicle. $1-$2 for the 'value menu' sandwich price.

~$3 for the 2 sandwiches and the water. Literally lunch every day for a month for $90, if those fools could budget... but they can't even put a case of water in their vehicle.

My point is not where will the hood rats work, that ain’t gonna happen no matter the minimum wage.

My point is, when this $15 minimum wage causes all the fast food joints to close, where will this hood rats eat?

It will devalue all of our earnings and I guarantee our wages won't go up.  Sure glad I worked my ass off and paid my way through college to get where I'm at in life.

Owner-operator food truck with one illegal paid under the table worker operating the fryer in the back.

Ya know what I think... I think the Democrats ought to fix all of the racism and sexism in the country with the minimum wage law.

If you are a Democrat Black person you get a minimum wage of $35.00 an hour.

If you are Hispanic or another oppressed minority (Anyone but Whites and East Asians) and a Democrat you get a minimum wage of $30.00 an hour.

Democrat women get $30.00 an hour minimum wage as well, except for Black women who get the $35.00 minimum wage.

White male Democrats get a minimum wage of $25.00 an hour.

Anyone from one of those groups who won't pledge loyalty to the Democrat party won't be included and since they are greedy Conservatives there won't be a minimum wage for them.

I think this is the kind of anti-racist anti-sexist fairness that should be supported by ARFCOM, especially anyone who understands economics and knows what the result would be.

I was just telling my wife that this puts us in an excellent position in the short term. We’ve bought a decent amount of business equipment with fixed rate debt.

You let all the Sleepy Joes of the world go in a layoff and keep the hardworking shop guy Joe employed, making use if his higher value and maybe even splitting the savings from getting rid of sleepy joe with him in the form of a pay raise.

I want to disappoint her so badly

Funny you say this.

Just happened to the wife at her shop. All the newbies were raised to $15.00 hour and the older people making less than $15.00 but more than $14.00 were given a $1 per house raise....

So she now just barely makes above shop minimum after putting in 14 years at the place...... she is real happy right now.....

And he'll let us know just as soon as someone gives it to him and spends enough time coaching him that he won't screw up the presentation.

No. In fact, sixty percent of Americans make over 15 bucks per hour, and most of those are lower middle class. Their pay will not improve at all, and their buying power will drop considerably. Most people who would see a pay increase make above 10 dollars per hour, and so their pay increase would be completely consumed by the higher prices you cite. That means the vast majority of Americans will see at best no change in standard of living (the guys making 10-13 bucks an hour) to a substantial reduction in standard of living (everyone above 15 bucks per hour). I talked to my city manager about this, and he said that there was simply NO WAY they could afford to increase all salaries to offset the inflation caused by the 15/hr minimum. You'd see cops who make 16.50/hr now STILL making 16.50/hr... and no way they'd stay for that.

You're a mind reader then

It's almost like people can have conflicting thoughts in their head, instead of just spewing out what they read in some lolbert blog as gospel

Around here those unskilled workers who come from other countries, will also get experience and then start their own business’s. Then they come in and hire more unskilled labor to work for them. Those unskilled they hire are exclusively from their country or origin. So now not only are you importing unskilled, once they are skilled enough to do their own contracting they do. While this is the American dream, it also locks out more USA workers because they hire exclusively from their ranks. They also do these jobs often cheaper by not becoming properly licensed, bonded and other cost cutting measures. We see this allot here. We also see where will do allot of cash of the books work. We have had to fix a number of mistakes they have made and the person hiring the work is the one who often has to eat the costs of mistakes.

Fuck, at this point, I'd trust myself to know your mind better than you do.
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