The GDCs want a $15/hr minimum wage. They don't understand that unskilled labor simply isn't worth $15/hr, and insisting on jacking up the minimum wage only leads to jobs disappearing. In the case of fast foods, robots are cheaper than a $15/hr employee, so all those fast foods employees will be replaced with machines. Then what do the GCCs have?
LINK

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Robots are coming to a burger joint near you

A burger-flipping robot called Flippy will be at work in Caliburger restaurants by early 2018.

Miso Robotics, the inventor of Flippy, has raised $3.1 million in Series A venture funding.

Patent services firm Acacia Research, Caliburger and Match Robotics VC are investors.


[Go to URL to view photo]

Grilling burgers may be fun on the Fourth of July, but less so if hot grease is your daily grind.

Enter Miso Robotics. The southern California start-up has built a robotic "kitchen assistant" called Flippy to do the hot, greasy and repetitive work of a fry cook. Flippy employs machine learning and computer vision to identify patties on a grill, track them as they cook, flip and then place them on a bun when they're done.

Miso is part of a budding kitchen automation industry. Its peers include Zume Pizza, Cafe X, Makr Shakr, Frobot and Sally, which are developing robots to help commercial kitchens churn out pizzas, lattes, cocktails, frozen yogurt, and salads.

In a recent CNBC interview, Yum Brands CEO Greg Creed predicted robots would replace fast food workers by the mid-2020s. It's not as if workers love those jobs.

Employee turnover in the restaurants and accommodations sector was 73 percent in 2016, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Fry cooks, the people who flip burgers (or fillets) all day at a hot grill, move on from the job faster than others in the field.

Rather than build a robot from the ground up, Miso integrates the best of available components on the market, including robotic arms, sensors and cameras. It develops proprietary control software to enable the robots to work as cooking assistants in complex environments right alongside humans, said CEO David Zito.

"We take into account all of our customers' needs for everything from food safety to maximum uptime," he said. "Today our software allows robots to work at a grill, doing some of the nasty and dangerous work that people don't want to do all day. But these systems can be adapted so that robots can work, say, standing in front of a fryer or chopping onions. These are all areas of high turnover, especially for quick service restaurants."

[Go to URL to view photo] Flippy uses sensors and cameras to see the food it is cooking and monitor temperature.

Miso Robotics recently raised $3.1 million in a funding round led by patent services firm Acacia Research, a relatively new fund called Match Robotics VC, and earlier investors including the restaurant chain CaliBurger.

The company will use the capital to produce its first commercial Flippy units. It expects to roll Flippy out, starting at the Los Angeles CaliBurger, in the first quarter of 2018, Zito said. Along with its investment, Acacia will provide the start-up with patent and intellectual property-related services, helping Miso Robotics prepare for global expansion.

"I see robotics in the kitchen as kind of an extension of going from the open flame to the oven," said Rob Stewart, Acacia's president, in an interview. "It's next-level efficiency,"

What does this mean for the industry's 2.3 million cooks?

"Like the electronic spreadsheet did for accountants, this will cause the jobs to go elsewhere," Stewart said. "But there will be new hospitality and culinary jobs we have yet to imagine. And those will be jobs where people will get paid a higher wage, and where they'll want to stay long-term."

Yep, when the price of labor exceeds the cost of employing capital. Capital wins every time.

But Sappersteel, you have it all wrong. 'Flippy' will free these unappreciated employees to do higher, more important things with their lives than sweating over a grill. Heck, Pelosi's said as much on video before.

I wish we could call this an unintended consequence, but anyone with a functioning brain stem could have seen this coming.

The minimum wage push is going to lead to further innovation in robotics that replace a whole bunch of jobs. It's inevitable. Then what? Elon Musk is proposing a national guaranteed income.

did not Seattle try this minimum of $15/hr, and a lot of those jobs just moved out of the city.

DC tried this, AIR, but have not seen or heard of the end results. My prediction is that businesses will be moving out of DC, as they were/are doing in Seattle.

University of Washington looked at the $15 issue and determine people worked fewer hours. The mayor was given a draft of the report and imediently commissioned Berkeley to do a report. Berkeley's last 5 studies found the $15 was good. Guess what? Berkeley looked at just one area and found that $15 "works"

The worst part about the wage hike is that this will affect states and cities that don't enact the hike. And even if those states that voted for it roll the hike back, it's too late. They've driven the corporations to find ways to cut humans out of their operations and they'll keep what's successful in saving them money.

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Heck, Pelosi's said as much on video before.

I wish we could call this an unintended consequence, but anyone with a functioning brain stem could have seen this coming.

I can see the day when such Ace Legislators also price themselves out the the job market & we have the equivalent of 'Congressional Flippies' who don't have the upkeep/grift expenses of the current models.

Outstanding.

Now I shall be assigned 1.5 unemployable Americans to feed cloth and shelter. I'd like to meet them one day, you know? See how they're getting along, are they happy, healthy, content with what I'm able to provide.

Doesn't matter. The GDCs want everybody to have a guaranteed income, whether you work or not, haven't you heard?

more of the same

http://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/20...ers-with-kiosks.html

McDonald's hits all-time high as Wall Street cheers replacement of cashiers with kiosks

Cowen says McDonald's will upgrade 2,500 restaurants to its "Experience of the Future" technology by year-end, which includes digital ordering kiosks.

The firm raises its rating on McDonald's to outperform from market perform and price target for the shares to $180 from $142.

McDonald's shares hit an all-time high on Tuesday as Wall Street expects sales to increase from new digital ordering kiosks that will replace cashiers in 2,500 restaurants.

Our local Hardees has already gone to the ordering kiosk. And Chilis, Red Robin and others now have the little pads on the table to order and pay. It's inevitable now

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Originally posted by reflex/deflex 64:
Outstanding.

Now I shall be assigned 1.5 unemployable Americans to feed cloth and shelter. I'd like to meet them one day, you know? See how they're getting along, are they happy, healthy, content with what I'm able to provide.

They're going to tell you to work harder, longer hours and maybe two or more jobs if necessary because they need more 'free' shit to maintain their lifestyle.
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Ironic. CA is home to lots of these harebrained ideas and a California entrepreneur is taking advantage of the stupid, and will likely get rich out of it. Seems so......capitalistic.

Business will always find the cheapest way to operate, it is their job to do so. Make humans to expensive, they will use machines or game the system some other way. Make me pay for health insurance and $15 per hour for my full timers. OK, I'll replace 30 full time with 50 part time employees, problem solved.

SEA-TAC area pushed 15 dollars minimum wage earlier than Seattle, most of those dumb asses found out they actually take less home, because the employer took away free lunch and free parking and cut overtime, plus they lost the free shit cause they are in the higher income bracket.

Somehow, I think it more logical to replace the cashiers with kiosks and keep the cooks. Someone has to clean up those stoves, etc. and I'm not sure the robots would be programmed to do that efficiently.

flashguy

The left will propose a labor taxation on the robots to give to the workers that were displaced.

If they want to really make me smile, they can replace the uncaring doofus who assembles the order. It does no good to have a view screen to verify the accuracy of the order, a cashier who double checks the order, a cook that prepares the order perfectly, and then have the wrong items put in the bag at the drive-through.

Chinese Manufacturers Are Scrambling To Replace Workers With Robots As Wages Soar

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/...rs-robots-wages-soar

Tepid wage growth has been frustrating Americans for years. But if trends in China’s manufacturing sector have any bearing on the US, there’s an upside to stagnant pay: Workers get to keep their jobs – for now, at least.

In China – where real wages have doubled in the past decade – the opposite is true: Manufacturers, squeezed by rising labor costs and a paucity of skilled workers, are fueling an unprecedented boon in the adoption of automated technologies to cut down on the number of workers needed on factory floors, according to the latest findings of the China Employer-Employee Survey.

Ironically, the Communist Party’s willingness to support unprofitable businesses is compounding problems for Chinese workers, as many manufacturers are barely profitable to begin with.

As Bloomberg explains, China is no longer the cheap labor haven it once was.

“Monthly manufacturing wages reached 4,126 yuan at the end of 2015, equal to those in Brazil but much higher than Mexico, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, and India.



At the same time, many firms are relying on government subsidies, while barely eking out profits or even losing money, according to the study released June 20. “Time is running out fast for Chinese manufacturers to adapt,” says Albert Park, head of the survey’s international committee and a labor economist at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.



The study canvassed more than 1,200 companies and 11,300 workers in Guangdong, China’s biggest manufacturing province, and Hubei, a major industrial base in central China. Some 26 percent of workers left their jobs annually in Guangdong and that turnover rate was even higher for younger workers, about 37 percent for employees below 28."

In a viral video published back in April, the People’s Daily provided a glimpse into the rapidly approaching future of China's labor force: The video, also released by the SCMP, shows hundreds of round Hikvision robots, each roughly the size of a seat cushion, swiveling across the floor of the large warehouse in Hangzhou. A worker is seen feeding each robot with a package before the machines carry the parcels away to different areas around the sorting center. The robots sort more than 200,000 packages a day.

One factory owner explains to Bloomberg how he’s adding 40 robots to his workforce that will eventually allow him to reduce his human workforce by 25% or more.

“As he marches through a gritty factory that makes baby strollers and wheels, Hu Chengpeng says finding workers is his number one challenge these days. Turnover at the facility in Hanchuan in Hubei province in central China is running at 20 percent, even while wages have been growing by double digits for his 400-plus workers every year. “Labor costs are getting just too high,” he said.



All of which explains why Hu, 34, is embracing China’s robotics revolution. He has added 40 new robots, each costing 40,000 yuan ($5,850), this year to replace dozens of workers tasked with cutting plastic molding. Eventually the factory will use a quarter fewer workers than today, without having to reduce annual production, he said. Hu also said he plans to shift more production away from making simple components and towards producing higher-margin branded strollers.”

Engineers are rushing to replicate even the most basic advantages that humans have over robots. In a video published by Bloomberg, employees at San Francisco-based Autodesk explain how they’re designing software to enable robots to “see” their surroundings. The engineers say it will ameliorate safety issues that have been a barrier to wider adoption. Soon, they say, robots and humans will be able to work in closer proximity.