Steven Laib:
The recent push for a fifteen-dollar per hour minimum by burger flippers may result in their replacement by the ultimate substitute; technology.
Some weeks ago my wife forwarded to me an email featuring a new technology marvel; the automatic hamburger-making machine. Capable of producing 320 hamburgers per hour, according to its manufacturer,Momentum Machines, it will enable the company that employs it to use better quality ingredients and produce a better product for less cost. A little Internet research reveals that this isn’t the only fast food automaton on the market. There are more, which may bode ill for the average fast food worker.
Why is that, you might ask? Well let’s look at some numbers. The machine featured in the original email was made by a San Francisco based company, so let’s buy American and use it as our example.
The company advertises the cost per machine at $12,000 to $15,000. Let’s go on the high side and take the $15,000 figure. Divide that number by 40 hours per week and them by 52 weeks a year and the result is approximately $7.21 per hour. Call that $7.50 per hour, which approximates the current minimum wage. That looks like a break even result. But wait, there’s more.
When the employer factors in the cost of hiring an employee, which includes the employer share of FICA taxes, and any “benefits” that may be applied, the cost may rise to as much as thirty percent of the hourly wage. But, we are dealing with the fast food industry, so limiting that to ten or fifteen percent is more reasonable than thirty percent. But, either way, at thirty percent or fifteen percent, the math favors the machine.
Let’s take it a step further. If our machine costs $15,000 the expense will be amortized over perhaps five years, lowering the cost about $3,000 per year. We may assume that the machine may need to be replaced after five years to keep up with new technology, if for no other reason. So, during that five year span the machine costs, including an amount for maintenance and repairs, perhaps $4,000 per year. The human will cost over $15,000 per year, each year. The cost of the machine wins.
But wait, there’s even more than that!
@Ronald J. Ward:
Stalk you? I don’t even know what state you live in. Perhaps you should Google the legal definition of “stalk”.
You leftists are so painfully uninformed.
Where did I say that I supported free ER visits? How about providing my quote that reflects that?
You continue to show your ignorance. Or do you not know that the SCOTUS ruled that no one could be turned away from an ER due to inability to pay? Do you read anything beside the contents of cereal boxes?
When it follows the U.S. Constitution and not foreign law, or digging up penumbras or using a personal letter from Thomas Jefferson to a group of Baptists.
How old are you? Seven?
Did I use the word “prohibit?” Nope. And your twisting what I said (since you don’t seem to be able to use the quote tab) is not going to change that. Read. Focus. Concentrate. Comprehend.
@Ronald J. Ward: #42
I asked you to respond to any of 20 situations, and as usual, in your long winded reply, you replied to 0. Common sense rebuttals, as you call them, aren’t understood by liberals. That is why I usually try to keep mine short, but sometimes I feel I have to go into greater details. Not this time.
Your replies to specific questions are like replies from politicians. Many politicians have been asked a question that only required a “Yes”, “No”, or “Undecided” answer, but when was the last time you heard a politician answer a yes or no question with a yes or a no? If you ever run for a political office, you should do well, because you know how to NOT answer direct questions.
The Tea Party movement was created to guarantee several things. Among them:
(1) Congress and the president MUST obey the U.S. Constitution.
(2) The right to bear arms.
(3) Reduce the size of government.
(4) Reduce spending.
(5) Reduce taxes.
(6) Pay off the national debt.
(7) Guarantee the freedom of speech.
(8) The federal government can only do what the Constitution says they can, and nothing more. Everything else will be left to the individual states to decide.
(9) Keep a strong military.
Different times I have asked liberals to pick what they disagree with that the Tea Party is doing, but none of them seem to object to anything we are fighting for. Only liberals can object to a conservative organization that is fighting for the same things liberal citizens want.
You are the distractor. Someone asks you a specific question, but you very seldom answer. Please pick just one of my SPECIFIC questions and try to answer it in as few sentences as possible. I’m not the one who brought up the computers.
I will answer your SPECIFIC question. First, take Savage out of the list. I didn’t include him. I don’t think obama shut down the government to punish anybody, instead, he wanted us to think that there isn’t enough money to pay for everything, so he shut down only the things that would make his point that more spending is needed. You know what I think obama is doing. I have said many times that I think his agenda is to turn the USA into a non-free country, and he wants to be its ruler, king, or whatever he will be called.
As for the individual you referred to, you reminded me of one Tea Party rally I was in at washington dc. There were three different ones at three different time. As I was walking from one to another one, a young man saw my sign (I don’t remember which one it was) and said, “There’s plenty of money for everybody.” Each time I said something to him, all he would say is, “There’s plenty of money for everybody.” I would like to know what he is doing now.
At another rally, I was talking with a teenage guy, and I mentioned that the USA is not a democracy. It is a republic. He looked at me and said, “What’s a republic?”
@retire05: #43
Some of the loss of textile business was some of the manufacturer’s own fault. I bought a shirt that had 4-hole buttons, but each button only had two thread wraps on them, and two holes had no thread. My mom had a folding card table and four chairs that she had for as far back as I can remember. The folding chairs I liked to lean back in so that my back was against the wall or other item. She had very heavy items on the table many times, and it never sagged. I bought a used set of four folding chairs, and very quickly the welds broke on the braces across the back because there was just one tiny weld on each end. Brand new card tables I see in stores are now made of plastic, and come with them already sagging downward.
The grocery store in my town has only toothpicks made in China. I buy them from another town when I am in it. One frozen food bag I bought said some of the stuff was from China, so I check each bag now to not buy Chinese stuff. Idaho is a lumber producing state, and we buy toothpicks from China?
Many years ago my aunt said she quit buying her sheets from Penney’s, because since the founder died, the quality of the sheets went down. It is possible that the chain wasn’t selling enough of the better quality sheets, so they had to discontinue. I have heard many people say they don’t care where an item is made, as long as it is cheaper. What they aren’t realizing is that a huge amount of the Chinese stuff has been found to have dangerous chemicals in them, don’t meet different safety standards, and the electronic stuff has been found to have viruses, trojans, etc., in them. Hook up a Chinese made product to your computer and who knows what they are putting into or taking out of your computer. The Chines are also taking old scanners, printers, cell phones, and other electronic items saying they will recycle them, but they are taking them for any information not removed from them.
Printers and scanners still have the last thing uploaded into them. It isn’t deleted until something else is uploaded, or it is manually deleted. I can’t believe how many people trade in or donate for recycling their cell phones without deleting the information. Businesses and people are giving the Chinese a lot of information.
I agree with the furniture. One way to tell the quality of a piece of furniture is to lift it. The heavier, the better it is made. I buy new furniture that has covering on them, because I don’t know what has been spilled or other forms of contaminants have been on or in them, otherwise I go along with the longer lasting older furniture. We have a store in my small town that sells such things.
@retire05: #45
The only satisfaction the vets have with her saying those things, is that they fought for her right to say such things without her government cutting her head of for complaining about them. In many countries, that would happen.
@<a href="http://floppingaces.net/most_wanted/fast-food-workers-may-be-destroying-their-own-jobs/comment-
I wish my Social Security had been handed over to Wall Street from the beginning. That way it would be MY money to do with as I want, and my beneficiaries would get it after I die. If you are not retired yet, when you do retire, will you be content knowing that some illegals will be getting a higher SS check each month than you are, or that disabled people will be doing the same, from a system that was set up to be for RETIRED PEOPLE ONLY?
Clark Howard stated that if a 14 year old could put $2,000 per year in a WROTH IRA for 7 years, and leave it there until age 65, and if the stock market averages what it has from it’s beginning, that person would have $1,000,000 in that account. That is just from a $14,000 investment. How many millions would I have if that is how the system was set up from the beginning? Just the interest off of the millions I would have had in it would pay for my medical expenses and other things I would want, and my beneficiaries would get what is left after I die, and it wouldn’t cost the government one penny. George Bush tried to start such a system when he proposed that congress let each person put 10% of the SS into their own private retirement account, but the democrats said no. I can’t do the math, but if you can, take 10% of what you are paying into SS, and figure that amount going into a WROTH IRA, and figure a REASONABLE interest rate, and figure out how much you would have in that 10% account, and how much you would be getting off of the interest of it at retirement age, and I’m guessing that if you are young enough, the interest payments will be higher than your SS payments. Why don’t you want people to retire on their own without any payments from the government?
If a person just starting out at their first job could put 10% of their SS tax into a private retirement account, by the time they would be retirement age, that amount would be many times more than the total amount they would get from Social Security payments, because SS isn’t put in an interest drawing account, it is put in the general fund for the politicians to do with as they please.
I can understand liberals thinking their politicians know how to spend the money better than the liberal does, but conservatives want the right to spend THEIR money the way THEY want to. They are also saying that they will be glad to get rid of unemployment insurance and any other welfare for them if they can just keep the money the government is taxing them to give to others, and the conservatives will take care of themselves. They will take care of their own medical expenses and their own retirement without costing the government anything. The only problem with that philosophy is that liberals wouldn’t have access to that money to spend on things they want but conservatives don’t.
Let’s have a compromise. Let’s set an age that when a person reaches that age, they have to decide what assurances they will have from their government. They choose from a list of what federal programs they would like to have if they needed them. They could choose and many as they wanted, even none. They then are taxes according to what it costs to run those programs. That way everybody gets what they want. Those who want federal programs can have them, and those who don’t are on their own.
SHE would have to have them installed.
One company I drove for had a union side and a non-union side. One of he union drivers said that their trucks were supplied with tools for making repairs on the road. He said that some of the drivers would take those tools and replace them with Craftsman tolls, because the tools the company supplies were better. I remember what he said next: “What good is a lifetime guarantee if the tool breaks out on the road?”
I avoid Sears complete, because they are known for bait-and-switch. Many times a customer would come in for something at a great price, only to be not waited on if they stand by the sale item, or they are told the item is back ordered, and the salesperson tries to switch them to something else. I should have kept track of how many times I was driving along and listening to the news, and a Sears Automotive store is being sued by that state’s attorney general for fraud for charging for repairs not done, or replacing things that didn’t need replacing, etc.
I used to sell at a Montgomery Ward store, and many times I remember reading in the paper that Sears apologizes for an item in a sales catalog that isn’t available. I understood that the catalogs are set up months in advance of the sale dates, and things can change that make an item unavailable, but I don’t ever remember reading such things from Montgomery Ward. They would just replace it with the next better item.
Good luck getting items repaired from ANY major chain. The store usually doesn’t have anything to do with repairing what they sell. Small items are sent to their repair center, and can be damaged being sent there, or being sent back, and for larger items you are told what day the technician will be there, because they follow a route. If your central air conditioner breaks down on a very hot Monday, you might be told the person will be there on Friday. This is why it is best to buy stuff like this locally.
Walmart isn’t what it used to be when Sam was alive. I remember when it advertised that it looked for American companies to buy stuff from, but for my son’s 18th birthday I bought him $100 worth of tools from them, and the only American made tool was a Vice Grip. One man told me that he was at a different Walmart one time, and he noticed that the prices for some items were higher at that store than at his regular store. He asked the manager why, and he said that the manager said that that store has less competition. When Walmart drives local businesses away, their prices go up in that store. For those of you who shop Walmart, check the prices if you are in a different store to see if it is true.
This is why I hardly ever bought a new vehicle, and I kept them until I NEEDED to replace them. I can only remember buying four new vehicles in my over 60 year lifetime. The last new one is the one I have now, because the new ATV I bought wouldn’t fit in the trunk of the 2006 Toyota Camry I bought used, so I had to buy a pickup to carry the ATV. MEASURE BEFORE YOU BUY!
We are getting way off of the topic, so I will try to only reply to topic material from now on.
@Ronald J. Ward: #48
Times and circumstances change, but contracts don’t. The Constitution is a CONTRACT between the government and the people. I have used the example of you buying a house. If the laws of a bank loaning you money to buy a house changes, does that change the contract you signed years ago when you borrowed money from them to buy the house?
Since you want to keep wondering WAY off topic with each comment, why don’t you create a Facebook page that you can just give a link to, then tell us what you want to talk about, then we can go there if we want to. That way only the ones who want to talk on that topic will be there.
@retire05: #49
The SCOTUS declared obamacare a tax, and only the house can introduce new tax legislation, but obamacare was created in the senate, so why aren’t the republicans going after this?
I don’t have a great deal of time today to elaborate extensively. 1st Retire05 says he supports $2 an hour and then he doesn’t. Next he says going to the ER is the answer and then runs from that.
S’mores blames Obama for the shut down when in reality it never made it past the Senate for him to sign or veto. The reality of ending the EPA? Well, I guess that got lost at a visit to Sears, or, something akin to such abject stupidity.
Reality just seems to be an easy obstacle to ignore here when it conflicts with your pro corporate agenda.
@Ronald J. Ward:
This is why you have lost all credibility, RJW. You take statements that people make, and twist them to be something entirely different than the original meaning. Then, when you are asked to quote the person verbatim, you move on to something else, running from the same demands you place on others.
This is over. I will let others deal with your dishonesty. As the class clown, you have lost your value for comic relief.
The real problems with your arguments Retire05 is that they are no more than “feel good” talking points, divorced from reality and crumble under scrutiny.
How is that handing over the EPA to states going to fly again? You failed to say. And how’s that “just go to the ER” bill going to get paid? And why does the GOP endorse that while denouncing “socialized medicine”? And this “Constitution’ thing, how does that freedom of speech apply again?
All strawman nonsense.
@Ronald J. Ward:
You’re a dishonest liar. Please, refer to post #59
But the author of #59 is you, a person who I’ve consistently discredited, somewhat once again, defeating your very argument.
RJW, all we’ve seen you “prove” is that it’s a bad idea to play chess with a pigeon.
Straw men, red herrings and illogic. Yeah, you’ve proved yourself to be an absurd fool. Or, a paid tool. Either or, you’re the one “stalking” a website that obviously opposes your “point of view” of the World.