Note: Is the man in your life a lifeless lump on the couch? Is the little lady acting more like an old lady? Need to add some spice to your life? Then head over to Minter & Richter for a jar or two of their hot sauce.
Wawa is a local convenience store chain in the Mid-Atlantic. The typical store is a big gas station near a major road, along with a store selling the sorts of things working people would pickup during the day. Their big draw is a sandwich shop that makes a decent cold cut at a very good price. It is not gourmet eating, but it is far above what you would get from a fast food joint. Of course, being a convenience store, they have the quick items you would expect.
Another take on this is a chain calling itself Royal Farms. They have copied the model used by Wawa and many other chains. They used to be strictly a convenience store chain, but they have been building big gas stations. Many are something like a small truck stop, providing services to the big scary truck people. Like Wawa, they have a sandwich shop, but their hook is fried chicken. They claim to have the best take away fried chicken on the planet.
One interesting difference between the two chains in the Greater Lagos area is that Wawa hires mostly white people, while Royal Farms hires black people. Wawa will hire the occasional nonwhite, but the stores are 90% white. Royal Farm is 100% black at their stores. This turns up in the customer base too. Go into a Wawa at lunch time and it is all white working people. Go to Royal Farm and it is lots of black people, along with some Hispanics and white working-class people.
The one thing both chains have in common is a labor problem. Royal Farm is the most amusing in this regard. It is entirely possible to order a turkey sub and be handed a roll with just the condiments and then be told they are out of turkey. Alternatively, it is possible to order something but you get nothing or someone got tired of waiting and simply took your food when you were not looking. Of course, this all assumes the ordering kiosk is working, which is not always the case.
Like many take out chains, Royal Farms was an early adopter of the self-service kiosk in order to solve the quality control problem. Quality control in this case means the staff, who struggle to do the basics. Mother Nature does not always get it right and the defects end up working at Royal Farms. This problem has turned up all over the retail space, but Royal Farms seems to get the worst of the worst. There is a World Star Hip-Hip vibe to their hiring decisions.
No one is immune to the retail staffing problems and as a result these two competing chains have been in a technology war. The self-service kiosk for ordering was the first logical step to reduce errors in food orders. Both aggressively push their app and the use of delivery services. Both now have self-checkout kiosks that blow away the ones you see at the big retail chains like Home Depot. The goal, of course, is to reduce the staffing to the barest minimum.
What this points to is something that people have been warning about for decades and that is the great robot take over of the workplace. Go into one of these chains and you can easily imagine a time when you order your sandwich from the screen and a robot assembles it, wraps it up and delivers it to a pickup area. You pay for your items at a self-checkout kiosk using your bank app. The only interaction with a human is the guards who make sure you paid your bill.
This is not limited to retail. The mass layoffs at Twitter confirm what many people have suspected for a long time. There are lots of people sitting in office cubicles who have no real purpose. Maybe they are there to tick boxes. Maybe they perform some function mandated by the government, which could be automated. Maybe the marketplace has stopped functioning, allowing for massive overstaffing. That clearly has been the case at the giant tech firms like Twitter.
The people who have been warning about the automation revolution have always asked the question, what happens to the displaced workers? The teddy bear conservatives cling to is the great invisible hand of the marketplace. Sure, the robots will replace the people, but the magic of creative destruction will save the day. Look around the retail space and that is clearly not happening. It will certainly not be the case for the tens of thousands of people fired from Big Tech.
Even if the magic beans of capitalism are not the answer, it does not follow that there will be a neo-Luddite revolt against the machines. Again, you get a glimpse of the future in these retail chains. Go into a Wawa and people are happy to interact with a robot to get their food and checkout. Everything about that experience, in fact, everything about their lives has been reduced to a transaction. As long as people can get their extra large drink and snacks, they will not complain.
That is the lesson of Covid. Those fired Twitter people were in make work jobs and they knew they we in make work jobs. Here are some examples from conservative media that have been making the rounds. The reason these people liked working at home so much is they were not doing anything at work. Covid allowed them to pretend that goofing off at home was real work. The reason firms are struggling to get people back to work is many of their workers have no real purpose.
How big of a leap is it to slash the pointless people from the workforce and then give them busy work at home? Some parts of the country spent close to two years experimenting with this idea. It was like the old gag around Washington whenever there was a big snowstorm. Nonessential workers were told to stay home, which meant everyone working for the government. Something similar happened during Covid and we learned that most people were not essential.
Of course, Covid came with rules to make sure the suddenly idle were not going outside and getting into trouble. Short of a revolution, we will never know why the rulers all got on the lock down bandwagon, but one likely answer is they feared millions of idle people milling around looking for something to do. Making sure they stayed in their huts, plugged into the internet was a primary goal. The robot revolution will no doubt come with something similar to pacify the masses.
Stand around in a place like Wawa and it is not hard to see where this is all heading and then wonder if it can work. We are about to tip into a world with lots of useless people, kept busy by a custodial state. They will be given credits to buy the things they want and kept busy through various means. Some will be assigned busy work, while others will simply be amused into a catatonic state. Still others will be used to police their fellow inmates in the custodial state.
From the perspective of the managerial class, this seems like a great challenge that will give purpose to their lives, even though many will be assigned to busy work. Can a people live like this is another question. Note that during Covid there was not the predicted baby boom. It turns out that lots of idle people at home did not let nature take its course after all. Maybe such an unnatural way of living does not put one in the mood to bring new life into such a world.
If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!
Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that makes coffee. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.
Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.
Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb. Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.
I think that we will discover that AI will turnout to be another thing to be frightened off that never became as all encompassing as people believed it would. Remember when people were convinced that Japan was going to own the world? The Japanese were going to own every business there was. All this was inevitable said the business gurus and economics PhDs, and anyone who questioned this was a complete fool with their head in the sand and that the smart move was to start learning Japanese. Then at the time of NAFTA Latin America was going to become… Read more »
Oh and what happened to all those self-driving cars and lorries(trucks) that were just around the corner? We’ve been waiting for domestic robots since the ’30s and for jetpacks to become an everyday sight since the ’70s.
The hebrew wants you dead, thats why all your factories are now in China. Thats why your kids are on drugs or wondering what sex they are. This is why your politicians are all rich while you get sick and die from mandates and coercion.. They want useless eaters dead. We’re cattle in their book. They can rape and kill your kid, don’t mean shit to them. Wake up Whitey, death’s on the doorstep. Your ancestors had balls now you’re just a retard with a tv and a phone.
Yea, those goddamed Hebrews. They took over Southern Baptist Conference, Catolic church, Luteran synod and every Episcopal church. And when it comes to the {{ Pope ]]
Ah were all bunch of assholes suckin slewwater..
Pathetic we are
I can’t believe this shit, but then I can
I’ve fkn had it
No one are or ever will storm the gates
I can’t get anyone to understand what their up against in my little blue collar town
Now explain why their own kids and families are even more fucked up.
Hello Dinodoxy. Help me out here. Can you give me your best example of what you’re referring to?
Problem with this blog is its totally secular. The JQ is a religious issue. If you see the world purely from a natural stand point, you can’t understand the JQ in its totality.
Their god is the devil. If you worship the devil, bad things happen to you too! So its not as it they are doing well, they are not. Lucifer wants company. THEY are his human agents and want company too, so they bring everyone down to their level, their own kind included.
yes . it is . it is now anyway
Too many useless people will usher in universal basic income. It would be too risky for the elite to have the masses starving. They want the system to continue. That’s a reason food stamps have become such a big thing. Speaking of which I actually find UBI less offense than food stamps and other welfare programs because everyone is eligible, not just select groups such as mothers of illegitimate children.
don’t be silly. they are destroying the food production system now . they will blame putin and many will starve. order will break down or a while . then they will come in hard on those out in the street. Walla ! lots of those excess people are gone, and the rest are on their knees . all part of the WEF plan.
Z: “Maybe the marketplace has stopped functioning, allowing for massive overstaffing. That clearly has been the case at the giant tech firms like Twitter.” Jay Fink: “Too many useless people will usher in universal basic income.” From an historical point of view, I think I might start by flipping around Jay Fink’s point of view, and instead of too many useless people, concentrate instead on too much useless money. The more I think about it, the more the quarter century from roughly 1995 through 2020 consisted of nothing but Greenspan/Bernanke/Yellen inventing near infinite money out of thin air, and then… Read more »
The rot started long before 1995. American rid itself of its greatest strategic asset, its manufacturing base, starting in the 70s. Blue collar workers lost jobs to Asia and the hoards coming across the borders. Yes, the trend accelerated between 1995-2020 but the decline had started much earlier.
There were 2.3M hispanics in the US in 1950. There were 62.5M in 2020, when Biden opened the border.
I completely agree. I believe, however, that it will be tied to getting your daily vaxx and equity training. Plus, no cars – that would offend the Climate. The beauty of this system is that it won’t “force” you too comply; if you don’t agree, you will just starve. The Covid “you deserve to die if you didn’t get vaccinated” narrative is a dry run.
It would be tied to the implementation of fully-surveilled Central Bank Digital Currency. For once, the government would be interested in accountability…your accountability for how the “money” would be spent, along with everything about your thoughts, words, and behaviors. Safety First, Kamerade!
“Note that during Covid there was not the predicted baby boom. It turns out that lots of idle people at home did not let nature take its course after all. Maybe such an unnatural way of living does not put one in the mood to bring new life into such a world.”
Or perhaps they were sterilized by the you-know-whats
When the self-checkout revolution first occurred, I rebelled against it. I didn’t want to do the corporation’s work for it, dammit. It was their job to have somebody charge and sack my goods and I wasn’t going to contribute to their fobbing this duty off to some soulless machine. What’s more, I figured self-checkout would cause lots of poor slobs to lose their jobs, and I wanted to do my small part to ensure that they stayed employed. But a funny thing happened on the way to the grocery store. Not long after the advent of self-checkout, there came the… Read more »
I also refused to use the self checkout at first in order to save jobs. However, I started to notice the sluggish, apathetic performance of the cashiers and how much longer it took to just checkout my handful of items. I *rarely* shop at Walmart but, having looked everywhere for a small shelf and coming up empty, I relented and bought it there. I had to wait while the cashier watched the lady in front of me bag a huge amount of groceries. I aksed him to scan my item but he said – in broken English of course –… Read more »
I remember when I was a kid working at Home Depot and the first self-checkout systems came out. The biggest problem with them was the crooks very quickly found out they could sneak items out without paying for them. Or switch the tags of similar items and pay a fraction of what the item should have cost. Then there was the problem of oversized items that really should have been checked out through a regular register. We would get the most awful traffic jams of people pulling large piles of lumber through self checkout. In the end we had to… Read more »
there was also the teenagers working in the stores absolutely screeching at me ” get on your mask or get out of here!. we won’t serve you” . and occasionally other customers clapping for them . even if I wore it, they would screech about pulling it up over my nose walked out of a lot of stores.
If everyone owned a small farm or small business, there would be no end of uses for actual human beings. The reason why there are so many “useless people” is that the few billionaires that own everything only have a use for some small fraction of toadies. The rest are surplus to their requirements. Soros only needs so many gardeners. People who own things have a basis to demand things in an economy. If no one owns anything, no one can demand anything, other than the scraps that they are given. So “useless” means “useless to the land/property-holders.” The communists… Read more »
What we have is *not* an automation problem. The robots are pretty much helpless without people to set them up and program them anyway. Actual artificial sapience is still science fiction. What we have is a concentration of wealth problem. If the government were to suddenly stop their strangulation on the Western states use of their land and resources, for example, we could yet have a golden age. If they stopped the ban which reduced the steel mills to rusting hulks along the great lakes, if they stopped the ban which rendered a generation of nuclear engineers “surplus”, etc etc.… Read more »
Makes sense, you see similar periods of stagnation in history when the elites felt like they had everything locked down. Roman Patricians never saw the point of those toy steam engines since they had slaves.
I do think the Planners are scheming to ride out the white world’s Boomer retirement wave; the bestials will be easy enough to manage or starve once we’re a broken, cowed, and desperate minority.
From their point of view, the plans laid out by their parents makes sense. As to the much more manageable problem of under-growth, that’s simply a paper problem, not a material one.
Time to dig up those old Mack Reynolds books! He was writing science fiction in the 60s about the masses on the dole watching live gladiator games on the telly. Hey, Rollerball’s on!
I remember a couple of his — “Looking Backward From the Year 2000” (completely unrealistic utopia) and another whose title I can’t remember about a society segregated into three broad classes — lowers, middles, and uppers.
Blade Runner promised us flying cars, replicants (artificial people), and cities full of Asian people as an underclass.
What we got are crappy electric cars, trannies (artificial women), and cities full of feral n-ggers. I want my 1980s ‘grim future’ back please.
IRL Sean Young mudsharked herself with an armadillo, and had a couple of mulatto kids with it, then went full schizo and became a bank robber or something.
But for a few short years there [Bladerunner 1982, Dune 1984, No Way Out 1987], she was a smokeshow.
PS: The Spoiler Alert of “No Way Out” was eerily prescient, in warning us of the existence of the Sodomite/Tranny Industrial Complex which rules GOP Amurrikkkuh.
I don’t know how ex-USMC Gene Hackman agreed to make that movie, but, in retrospect, it was definitely cutting edge – way way ahead of its time.
one thing is for sure. having seen what, the smug smirking media can get people to do to each other over masks and vax’s , our overlords certainly can have NO fear of any kind of pushback. at all.
I don’t think the question is whether or not a people can live this way. The question is how long before dirty men who do bad things show up to take all our nice things.
In a nutshell, right there…!!!
soon, dammed soon.
Mass immigration causes a labour shortage. Every new immigrant means more Royal Farms… more Amazon, more gas stations, more McDonalds. More HVAC. On the other end, it means more doctors, more nurses, more lawyers. Because of this labour shortage, not even unskilled, new immigrants need to work at minimum wage scanning bags at Wal-Mart. No speak English isn’t much of an impediment when CDL truckers are making 60k at bare minimum and hiring anybody with a pulse. This leaves really the lowest depths of society working at these kind of jobs, for pay that doesn’t even cover rent. It turns… Read more »
ironically, Qatar *had* to pay those workers enough so they *could* live there, albeit in not-nice conditions.
When I was in UAE there were all living together in dorms and shuttled back and forth to work on old buses. I didn’t get the sense cost of living was a big issue.
and most likely deported without any money at the end of the job if they survived that long. Since those people sit on mountains of cash, they could have paid those people well , and treated them fairly. They didn’t because they looked down on them. It wasn’t even really about the money.
[2nd hand, including from Americans that worked in such conditions.] Conservative Arabic nations (e.g.Saudi) traditionally house foreign nationals in compounds. This rationally because they want to minimize foreign corruption of their domestic society. But also because it reduced chances that foreign nationals run afoul of very different social and religious norms and potentially draconian penalties. Yes, for cheaper labor they are little better than indentured servants. But to my knowledge, no one is forced to work there. In stark contrast is the USA, the EU and perhaps others. We welcome nearly all comers with open arms and benefits, even if… Read more »
“Immigrant labourers in Qatar obviously never become citizens, cannot vote, cannot get welfare, and it’ understood that they’re in the country on a temporary and mutually beneficial basis.”
Their passports are confiscated once they arrive and they are told they owe the agent an arbitrary sum of money. They work outside — often on constructing high-rises at 115 degrees bearing down on them. They sleep without even electric fans. Their pay is often withheld for any or no reason. And nit rights whatsoever. Even field slaves in the American South had better lives than they do.
“no rights”, forgive the typo.
“The only interaction with a human is the guards who make sure you paid your bill.” I’m sure I’ve seen a scifi movie or two where that part isn’t human either. I shouldn’t have to bring to anyone’s attention how many useless people surround all of us. Figuring out what to do with them isn’t a futuristic or science fiction problem, it’s here and now and has been for decades. You have already been witnessing what a society full of useless people looks like. They are all around you. I know they are all around me. No doubt someone somewhere… Read more »
….”in fact, everything about their lives has been reduced to a transaction.”
Hmmmm, are things really this bad?
Almost every microwaveable food has a warning on the box: CAUTION—PRODUCT WILL BE HOT. Not “food,” not the type of food, not the name of the product—PRODUCT.
No one at any company thinks that’s a strange and unpleasant way to talk about the food they sell, and this is the first time you’ve ever seen a “consumer” complaint about it.
That’s how crappy life is.
Skechers os pushing, “step-in,” shoes because bending over, lifting one’s legs, or sitting down to put on shoes is now too much work.
Particularly if one is just too fucking fat to bend over to slip them on and then to tie them. Of course, in the commercials, only attractive and sleek looking people are wearing them, and not hulking, morbidly obese slobs having to grope around with their foot to even find the shoe because they can’t see it on the floor through all of that quivering corpulence.
It’s not so much that it’s too much work, it’s that for the growing number of obese people it’s impossible
For fifty bucks, I’ll tell you.
Mouse utopia comes to mind. There was no baby boom during the WuFlu because being locked in at home with nothing to do is dysphoric. Can people live this way? No.
It reminds me of how animals kept in zoos often will not reproduce. When locked in a cage, the drive to procreate seems to wane.
Familiarity really does breed contempt.
If it were allowed to go long enough then it simply breaks down on it’s on as mouse utopia did. However, I think bad people show up to take your stuff way before you reach that phase. Mouse Utopia might have been more accurate if after a certain point they had introduced a rapacious threat like a cat door.
you are correct gauss. that experiment is terrifying. clearly a lot of young 20 somethings in my kids circles of acquaintance are the “beautiful Ones”. They work out incessantly, groom fastidiously , work constantly. But they seldom date even though they are fantastically attractive. seems to be male and female. being from the age of High T males , this baffles me . On the other hand , there are some pursuing traditional families , and large families at that . I see some young families at mass with 4 or 5 kids.
We are about 5th generation of Moustopia.Hope The likes of Musk will speed up space travel . We live in a little box. And we need to get out.
“We was royals.”
Post of the day!
It’s all fun and games until the managerial elite also is surplus, too. Learn to fake code.
And then there’s a matter of employee turnover. My guess is that managers of retail stores like Wawa or McDonald’s spend a good deal of their time firing incompetent employees, and advertising for, hiring and training their replacements.
When the day comes when machines have replaced 90% of them, the managers job will become so much easier.
So yeah: send them home, give them a big screen TV, and a monthly check. Possibly including an injection that renders them docile and complacent, and happy to sit there all day watching TV.
[…] ZMan is Noticing. […]
@Z, “We are about to tip into a world with lots of useless people, kept busy by a custodial state. They will be given credits to buy the things they want and kept busy through various means. Some will be assigned busy work, while others will simply be amused into a catatonic state. Still others will be used to police their fellow inmates in the custodial state.”
As the pitch goes, “For everything else, there’s fentanyl.”
I don’t know about the rest of the country, but on the West Coast every time you walk in to a store, some robot/ human yells out. Welcome ! While looking down at their device. A few weeks ago I overdid it on a weekday and was feeling a bit shabby. The next morning. I stopped into McDonald’s for the first time in 4 years to get a greasy breakfast sandwich settle my stomach. There were three kiosks. Two of them were out of order. The one that was working was unused. I ordered the sandwiches on the one that… Read more »
The McDonald’s kiosk is the worst. It’s slow and won’t allow you to order what you actually want. They’re horrible.
And back in the day, Devo was singing (Too Much Paranoias), “Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce, special orders don’t upset us! All we ask is that you let us serve it yoooour way!”
But following more Devolution – just as the lads predicted – now you get a terminal that won’t even do that for you.
“Welcome to Costco, I love you.”
Started out a comedy. Now, a documentary.
now a sci-fi horror flick.
I stopped going to McDonald’s about 10 years ago when their brass ordered the minions not to wish customers happy Thanksgiving, for the reasons we all know so well.
Would you like fries with your McWampanoag, sir?
There is a solution for these people. Especially the IT types.
I was recently thinking about how the rulers lived in the late Baroque era. With their gardens in perfectly straight lines. This is the current mental state of our own rulers. Every shrub meticulously rounded and planted in a perfect order in their minds. Their secular religion, having been refined since Hegel, all the way through today. Every conceivable question has been answered. Every future problem just has to be fit into their matrix of pre-conceived notions. Of course we will have a carbon neutral future….of course we will live in condo towers….of course we choose our genders….of course race… Read more »
Zman,
If you visit the South, the place to stop and check out would be Buc-ee’s. The ones in Texas have always been top-notch in the categories of cleanliness, service, and the food is really good.
Bucc-ee’s is magnificent. The snacks are great and plentiful, if you like icees, they have every flavor imaginable, the staff is friendly and the brisket sandwiches are amazing.
No kiosks of any sort.
Bucc-ee’s:
“Potty like a rock star!”
We’ve got a place in the Mountain West called Maverick that I like a lot. Sounds a lot like WaWa, etc.
ArthurinCali: Plus Bucc-ees sells ethanol-free gas (lots of small towns have places selling it but it’s hard to find in the cities and suburbs).
A good comparator of the Wawa/Royal Farms dyad is Chick-fil-a/Popeye’s. Chick-fil-a is willing to hire whites while Popeye’s only hires Hutus. Service at the former is vastly superior to service at the latter, but I’m sure this is all just coincidence.
then there’s Zaxbee’s trying to split the diffrence
Buccee’s is a gas station that has great food. If you’re ever around one, you need to try it. The brisket sandwiches are get all the attention, but my personal favorite is the Texas Cheesesteak Burrito.
Todays column explaines why tptb are pushing the “winable nuculear war” shtic .
[…] Custodial Musings […]
well, the fired tech drones can work at wawa and negro farms – which is where they should have been all along. the displaced workers from those places can work as domestic servants for their overlords. the circle of life goes on…
There is also a shortage of agricultural workers. Everyone went to college and few learned valuable skills. The bankers had the government finance their loans, (a subsidy), and had the government subsidize them as affluent consumers, (an indirect subsidy to the corporations they debt finance). We built a consumer economy on debt that is underwritten by government. That means the debt is underwritten by the useless and bankrupt consumers. That is called a Ponzi scheme. The interest rate regime to fund the debt ponzi scheme makes capital flood into yield making enterprises – like AI and robotics. The political pathology… Read more »
P.S. We need a new meme for the laid off tech workers:
LEARN TO PICK STRAWBERRIES!
Brought to you by the Coal Miners Association of Appalachia
There was a discussion of this on Fedi as it turned out that those Tech workers, were “Tech workers” in the same way the janitors as Twitter are “Tech workers”: because they happen to work at a tech company. A lot of them graduated with tech-sounding though useless degrees like “computer science” and “cyber security” and don’t actually know much more about “coding” than the average dude on the street.
I was always under the impression that computer science was a legitimate area of study. Is that not the case?
Valley Lurker – It is a legitimate degree. The issue is there are vast armies of non-technical roles at these companies. The, “work in tech”, but do nothing technical. There are also some universities or technical schools that issue degrees that have no standard. If a person there is hungry, talented and self motivated they could be a great programmer or technical product manager and valuable in the industry. The others have a credential but no real skill. I worked with a couple of people like that. They were POCs who were hired because they ticked a box and enabled… Read more »
@Valley Lurker CS can be a serious degree if it’s from any halfway-decent school — programming languages, compiler design, data structures and algorithms, machine architecture, These are non-trivial courses. But from the late 1990s onwards, the programs have become easier, so that it’s possible to graduate without having taken C/C++. C++ used to separate the goats from the sheep — those who could code from those who couldn’t. This has been replaced by Java and more recently by Python. So it’s not far-fetched to clam that some comp sci graduates are not good coders. But let’s leave this quibble aside.… Read more »
My personal experience in grad school was that most Computer Science students are Chinese or Indians, and they cheat their way through.
I had one directly ask me for my responses to a midterm from a class I had taken previously. (The professor was so trusting that he let us actually type our answers on our laptops and e-mail them during the test period.) In group projects, they typically didn’t contribute or if they tried to you couldn’t understand their Engrish.
@PL right I understand the water downed nature of the companies and the make work, that isn’t just tech, I deal with that as well. Was more curious as to why Evil cited that degree in the fashion he did. Thank you & AA for the discussion regarding curriculum.
When i was a kid berry farms would send out busses & bring us to pick strawberries, rasberries & cucumbers. Paid by the flat.
Ate a lot of berries
And would throw some at the girls too. Lol
Made the most money picking cucumbers.
i almost said “and the people at wawa move out to the farms, picking lettuce” but figured most of that kind of work was already automated.
I attended a private prep high school but Im glad I popped smoke and ultimately went with a real job operating machinery and actually producing something. The market among my demographic seems overwhelmed with work-from-home officy types. Real blue collar work is anti-fragile, indispensable, often difficult to substitute with lower quality employees, and woke-resistant. Good luck.
Reminds me of Mathew Crawford, who earned a bullshit Ph.D. then went on to a bullshit job at some DC-based foundation, and then chucked it for a mechanic’s job with his own shop. I think he describes the transition in his book, “Shop Class as Soulcraft.”
John Cleese of Monty Python fame did the same thing. He said something along the lines of ” I graduated from university with a degree in finance/law and I could have gone to work for a number of firms where I would have made a good deal of money, was able to afford a home in a ritzy area and been financially secure. And then I would have killed myself.”
The rise of the robot revolution and AI have been greatly exaggerated. We’ve been promised good AI since the 80s. There were countless articles in the computer press in the 80s I read saying great AI was imminent. While the robot revolution showed more promise back then than the AI revolution, even “robots” have their limitations. Tesla has removed a bunch of robots. “Robots” are very good at certain repetitive work, but not so good at other things. I don’t believe even self-checkouts will work in the big cities. Walmart has self-checkouts all over, but not in Philly. They used… Read more »
It’s interesting to note that Aldi, one of the leaders in, “Low prices through minimizing costs,” does not have self checkouts. I’ve also noticed in recent years the self checkouts getting worse: more errors, longer response times, more down time. Sometimes, half the checkouts in the store are down. This is, of course, due to the fact that most people, including managers, are technologically ignorant. They believe that automation just works on some kind of sorcery. They don’t understand that machines need constant maintenance: software must be updated, measuring inputs must be constantly calibrated, and so on. I fully believe… Read more »
This is off topic but this would be an interesting sokal type troll. Some well known lawyer in a state like NY or ca should petition the state legislature to make multiple personality disorder (aka dissociative disorder) a disability/protected status. The idea would be that if someone commits a mass shooting, they can’t be prosecuted because it was there alter ego that did it. Or you can file a wrongful termination lawsuit based on it. Then you can buy up the psychiatry journals and talk how disassociative disorder is a real problem and how we need solutions like this. Would… Read more »
The new system we have, where many people get useless degrees just to get do-nothing jobs looks like another form of welfare to me. Instead of getting the welfare payments from government, you get them from a corporation. In a way, the college degree is a qualification for this form of welfare. Not a good sign, when a large part of what could be a productive populace is qualifying for welfare, in one form or another.
We have the symptoms of a successful “robot revolution” without the benefit of robots building our stuff. Instead, we print money to buy stuff made in China. All the former factory workers are hooked on meth or dope. Aimless idle people are extremely self-destructive. We have more than 100k people offing themselves every year now. There is no utopian future where robots make the stuff and we spend our ever increasing free time making great art or literature or poetry or something. People just aren’t wired this way. It’s just another delusion about the human condition.
I probably have a simplistic view of this, but it’s my belief that in the early Enlightenment, many if not most of the great accomplishment in the arts and sciences came from for lack of a better term, the idle rich. These (nearly all) men either were born into money. They were typically well-educated and perhaps even from high social family. Some great discoveries came from what we might call a man’s hobby or avocation. You’d be amazed how many advancements came from some lone genius’s mad experiment, not from a large, organized highly funded academic or government research program.… Read more »
That’s a great point i.e. make-work jobs as a form of welfare. I think the black community was the canary in the coal mine, and now women in general are the benefactors (?) of this type of thing. Maybe the point is to keep them sated and busy enough not to revolt and resort to too much crime in the case of blacks, and the women need to be just busy enough so things don’t devolve too far into a sclerotic form of degeneration. I look around me at the spending habits of these demographics and I’m always dumbfounded– the… Read more »
Whoops, I meant *beneficiary (?)* not benefactor
It’s an interesting process. First you have the barrage of propaganda, “Go earn a college degree. It will pay off!” The gullible young fall for the snare and graduate with their bullshit degree massively in hock to the banks with non-dischargeable student debt that’s a millstone around their neck — with no real-world skills. To service the debt (forget about paying it off) they are forced to scramble for various dead-end white-collar jobs (one level above McJobs) and forced to be docile and compliant to keep those garbage jobs. This is *exactly* what the rulers want.
I wonder if all the sudden keeling over is why I suddenly have two pretty good EE job offers in hand?
I suspect that we are witnessing the beginnings of the Boomer exodus from the job market, with consequences that will cascade through all levels of employment. My previous job included a large cohort of boomers who were planning to retire, but held on during the covid panic to pad their government pensions – once the signal to return to office went out, they all dropped their papers and suddenly my office had more openings than they could manage, and not as much demand for those openings as management expected.
Wild Geese: Combination of Sudden Adult Death Syndrome (i.e. the vaxx) and the great replacement. Friend of ours took early retirement from his corporate IT job – agonized over decision – and then learned he dodged a bullet as the very next week the company began large-scale layoffs. Numerous other companies are providing early retirement/lump-sum benefits (to drop dramatically if people wait until 2023) and thus losing their older/most experienced/Whitest workers. Ford and Boeing are both doing this.
Most replacements are H1-b workers, which will then necessitate hiring back ‘contract workers’ to fix what the cut-rate immigrants screw up.
probably not . I would hope that those guys would have been smarter than to take the sauce. the engineering schools have been limiting admission for a decade or longer . many of them will have 4 of 5 hundred freshmen and sophomores and the allow only 100 to go on to the junior year. nursing schools are like that everywhere. schools that let as many kids as can maintain a passing grade in all classed are called “direct admit” and they are getting few and far between.
In the case of nursing schools, it’s because there’s an instructor shortage , since instructors make much less money than a working RN.
The Marching Morons was prediction, not fiction…
De-population is already well underway in the USA and throughout the world:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNdnlrkx-wg
“Without compensating immigration … .”
Peter Zeihan recent book – The End of the World is Just the Beginning is an interesting perspective on de-population.
I find Zeihan a frustratingly mixed bag.
Some of his demographic and geographic analysis is quite thoughtful and forward-looking.
On the other hand, he seems locked into the assumption that, relative to its peers, the US has the Army of 1989, along with the Navy and industrial base of 1945.
The truth is about 10% of the population has an IQ under 83. Decades of trying by the US military has shown that these people cannot be trained to do anything productive. As technology completes its grip on society the min IQ to do anything productive will increase as will the number of people who cannot participate.
“As technology completes its grip on society … .”
IMHO, it’s a bit early to count the technology chickens. They are not likely to hatch, but we shall see.
Technology depends 100% on a *universal* and *unfailing* supply of electricity, a thing we do not have and are not going to have.
Infant; You have commented many times on the potential for an electrical failure to throw a wrench into TPTB plans. As a practical matter, it’s pretty obvious that you are correct. Just look at Moore NC, where one guy with a deer rifle knocked out the power for days. When I read about CBDC, the immediate question that comes to mind is,”so what happens when the power goes out”? It doesn’t appear that our overloads have thought this through; or maybe they have, and flipping the switch will be a feature, not a bug. Imagine how much more productive society… Read more »
The regime seems to currently have a three step master plan:
1) Make energy radically more expensive for ooga-booga planet saving reasons
2) Put all of their societal management eggs into the energy basket
3) Radicalize people who can largely take or leave electricity
“A bold strategy, let’s see how it works out for them”
You keep saying this in your posts. I responded yesterday in detail. It just isn’t true. Perhaps you read James Howard Kunstler. He is an incredible writer in terms of lampooning and criticism, but the peak oil/fossil-fuels/energy thesis hasn’t proven to be right and there is such an ever increasing abundance of new discoveries it doesn’t look like it will be wrong for centuries. By then we’ll have micro thorium fueled reactors and abundant energy that makes the incredible fossil fuel era pale in comparison.
that 10% figure has to be higher now. i would bet 90% of the people pouring in at the (old) southern border, have an IQ < 83.
Average IQs of 85-90, so the lower chunk of that bell curve, say 40% are going to be tarded.
Just remember how the “marching morons” were dealt with in the sci-fi story of the same name.
So the seminal question is . . . how long can they keep the plates spinning with majority deadweight in a society? The US can still print and distribute fiat money at will, but eventually inflation becomes hyperinflation. And if no one is working, where will the goods and services come from? Robots can’t do everything, and someone needs to repair the robots. History teaches that this kind of viscous-cycle dysfunction eventually leads to war or collapse (or both). What will motivate deadweight to learn a skill or at least cut back on the videogaming addiction? Three days without a… Read more »
“Robots can’t do everything, and someone needs to repair the robots.”
Exactly. And even if they are repaired by (somebody), what will be their power source?
Behold the power of the sun, the wind and waves, and…something…it’s magic.
Right now it looks like we have a population problem. But within 100 years, we will be frantically trying to make babies to keep areas of the world populated. (Except for African populations.) Except for Africa, much of the world will lose half the population from it’s expected height by the early 22nd century. I’ll bet the Davos crowd is aware of this, and I’ll bet they are just trying to ride out this population wave-crest until it subsides in 50 years. So they will do the management of dead weights, and probably start introducing suicide as a “noble” option… Read more »
Quick search: world population was 1.6b or so in 1900. It’s accepted that capital accumulation led to investments modern sanitation, medicine, and tech, and that caused the boom. We’re supposed to believe that population is falling essentially because of increased productivity. You don’t need kids if you don’t need their future labor. The useless eater problem. That might be so, but debt has exploded, too, and debt could be a reason for decreased fertility, unless you believe in MMT. Labor crunch unless you believe in autonomous tech. I think it’s a scam by people who believe their own lies. I… Read more »
The cause of the lower birthrate, now under way, is that educated women are deciding not to have babies.
It may be that the cause/effect chain is – industrial revolution brings about education and legal equality for women, they have alternatives to motherhood, they gradually avoid reproduction and the population diminishes.
How human nature adapts to this entirely new circumstance and way of life is a real mystery but will soon reveal itself.
Yes. They no longer need children to take care of them in old age. Also, families can hire extra hands on the farm (or get off the land), industry doesn’t an army of laborers. The economy transitions from production to consumption, debt becomes an issue, and so on.
It looks like people at the top are trying to escape the cycle, or at least that’s what they’re telling themselves.
The South African example would seem to suggest that the answer is “indefinitely”
South Africa’s plates are wobbling all over the place.
Been going to collapse tomorrow for 30+ years now!
Collapse seems like a misunderstood term. It’s (usually) not that one day everyone runs out in the street and joins a huge riot and all the office buildings get burned down. It’s usually a process, not an event, difficult to discern in real time but easy to discern historically.
Viewed through that perspective, South Africa has already collapsed. Which doesn’t mean it can’t get worse either.
A problem with predictions of impending “collapse” is that it is rarely if ever defined.
Looks like you just solved the obesity crisis.
“And if no one is working, where will the goods and services come from?” The third world. “What will motivate deadweight to learn a skill or at least cut back on the video gaming addiction?” When I am at a store with a “Help Wanted” sign up I usually ask, “Why aren’t you getting more applicants?” No one is really sure. Has an entire generation of men retired to their parents’ basement? Some will say that we are paying for them to stay at home but the c0v1d payments are done, unemployment runs out, and young white men can’t get… Read more »
So is Royal Farms an oasis in these “food deserts” I keep hearing about?
If it ain’t fried, it ain’t food.
“From the perspective of the managerial class, this seems like a great challenge that will give purpose to their lives, even though many will be assigned to busy work. Can a people live like this is another question.”
The decision was made a couple of decades ago:
https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/
Solution? Get boosted!
His solution? Thought Police. “Verifying compliance will also require that scientists and engineers adopt a strong code of ethical conduct, resembling the Hippocratic oath, and that they have the courage to whistleblow as necessary, even at high personal cost.” LOL Satan for the lulz ***** Actually, though, my religious belief is that only Whites could invent a Bladerunner or Ice-9 future; “Satan” really is gunning for us, as the bestials can’t destroy the organic layer, they only feed its soil with their corpses. But then, you have the forces of Creation creating a biosphere that it might eventually create its… Read more »
I see where you’re coming from. I’ve had similar ideas, and I can’t say you’re wrong, because I can’t say I’m right.
These days, though, I’m dubious of human potential along the lines of doing transcendent godlike acts, participating in the godhead, or even comprehending such things. Every answer begs ten questions, and that seems like a hard limit.
Thanks, re-reply:
those transcendent godlike consciousness goody-goodys drive me a bit postal.
Yeah, I used to be nice like that. Different agenda now, for sure.
Don’t worry, you immortals, I’ve seen the golden glow of Heaven myself. And all that, much more; it’s there, it’s there for you.
*Whites were the success after many failures, the combination that could not only hear and envision Heaven, the Seeding layer, but reach for it, and open the Gates.
Thus, our imperative to do good, and also to reach upward- including breaching the atmospheric barrier.
‘Satan’ is trying to drag us back in, to recover the scrap.
That’s its job.
Don’t confuse the two, the forces within, and the forces without, despite what some hereditarily fast-talking hustlers told you.
I think that you’re looking at a bifurcated situation. A labor shortage for some types of workers/people and a labor surplus of others. There are not enough skilled blue collar workers and “get the job done” white collar workers, while there are far, far too many other types of workers. It’s funny because I’ll read or hear economists talk about the coming global labor shortage due to fall birthrates and declining number of working age people in Asia and Europe, in particular. Whether that will turn out to be the case or not isn’t the issue, it’s that they simply… Read more »
it’s peculiar. globalists bring in africans and muslims – to europe – to support the economy, in light of falling birth rates for the native europeans. but all the immigrants go on welfare, and are too stupid to work in a modern economy.
“it’s peculiar. globalists bring in africans and muslims – to europe –
to support the economyto decimate the native population and achieve total control as well fulfill their centuries old (((blood libel))). , in light of falling birth rates for the native europeans. but all the immigrants go on welfare, and are too stupid to work in a modern economy.”Fixed it for ya, and now that its fixed you understand why it’s happening.
ya, i know why they are doing it, but i don’t see *that* working either. IMO it’s just unchecked dumb-assery.
Lately I’ve been wondering what’s been behind the renewed push to pump the Africans full of mRNA.
I wonder if the Davos gang finally realized they need to get their depop agenda rolling on the Dark Continent?
One thing I’ve always wondered about, re: the “huge and growing population of Africans.” What the hell happened to AIDS? I could swear that just a few years back they were swearing up and down that something like 25% of sub-Saharan Africa *already* has it, including some huge percentage of the young people.
Or is this one of those times where we’re just not supposed to notice that something The Regime swears to contradicts something else The Regime swears to?
They do, and they are being artificially kept alive through very expensive anti retrovirals that effectively render you ‘cured’ at this point. You notice you don’t hear about anyone dying of AIDS anymore? HIV is like Herpes now, have it for life but with enough $$$ its basically permanently suppressed. Magic Johnson, anyone? Just like the artificial food supply, artificial medical care, and every other GoodWhite stupidity gifted to Africa these drugs make the poor decision making and low IQ that would generally be rapidly weeded from the gene pool immune to Mother Nature. Thereby allowing them to breed another… Read more »
Yeah, I know my share of them, too. That’s my key criterion for church membership, in fact: If you don’t immediately hit me up for contributions for Africa, I’ll sit and listen to the sermon. So far I’m oh-for-however many, but I still hold out hope.
[I keep trying to make “Dinduism” catch on for the name of America In Name Only’s official religion. It’s even got a caste system and everything].
What happens to Africa if, for whether reasons, that Western technology and aid is reduced or disappears completely?
Those anti-virals never worked that great. The rumor is that those most subject to getting HIV didn’t care about catching it to such an extent that after decades of people dying off from the most virulent strains that the strains out in the wild now are nowhere as lethal as their ancestors from the ’80s. This is one of those things we’ll never get a good answer for as the headline “Dangerous sex perverts ensure a future for dangerous sex perverts through their self-destructive behavior” just doesn’t have the right “ring” to it for the regime.
i read back in the day, that AIDS didn’t change the survival rate in Africa. it just changed *which* virus did the dirty deed. most people don’t appreciate just how disease ridden Africa is. that’s why no major cities every arose there; as soon as population density creeps up, so does the mortality rate.
they were lying about aids just like they were lying about covid
I’m reminded of the old Soviet joke: “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.”
I’m also reminded of Graeber’s 2018 book, “Bullshit Jobs”, which you’ve probably read. A link to a review:
https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-bullshit-job-boom
RE: Covid baby boom https://www.nber.org/papers/w30569 Abstract: Although fertility rates declined in 2020, these declines appear to reflect reductions in travel to the U.S. Childbearing in the U.S. among foreign-born mothers declined immediately after lockdowns began—nine months too soon to reflect the pandemic’s effects on conceptions. We also find that the COVID pandemic resulted in a small “baby bump” among U.S.-born mothers. The 2021 baby bump is the first major reversal in declining U.S. fertility rates since 2007 and was most pronounced for first births and women under age 25, which suggests the pandemic led some women to start their families… Read more »
It’s not the education; it’s the age.
Of marriage, and inclusion in the workforce.
If you want to boost native fertility, drop the age of marriage back to what it was, to puberty. As nature intended.
I didn’t say ‘consent’, I said marriage. In mom’s day, 14 year olds routinely got married; he was readily hired for a full time job, she got one part-time to save up money for the blessed event. America was built by a people, 95% with 8th grade educations or less in the basics.
Back then 8th grade education used to teach you something worth knowing. Nowadays a lot of the kids don’t even know how to read at that point.
This is a fun thought exercise. A comment about automation replacement occurring first and fastest at the bottom is true and creates a case for UBI (unfortunately). To the tech workers, there are doers and managers. It’s spot on that managers are becoming useless.
I’m hoping for a tech revolt. I feel like we peaked around 2000-2005. I’m also pessimistic on non-stop growth for large companies. It’s their obligation to shareholders, but harms society.
This all ties in somehow and sorry for rambling. Anyway, it’s a fun thought exercise. Thanks for the muse Z.
I’m no sophisticate when it comes to the payments industry, but it seems as though there is an opportunity to set up an apolitical payment processor.
Of course, in the current environment, the regime would pull out all the stops to strangle such a business in the crib.
You are probably generally correct. I’d refine the statement(s) more like this: there is no conceivable payment system that the existing power structure (finance, government) would not attempt to co-opt or at least regulate so that the usual suspects can make money off it, and spooks spy on people’s transactions as well as funnel funds as needed, for routine and of course clandestine goals. Crypto was billed as some magical way to avert the above controls, but I don’t see it happening. I suspect the future will be an echo of the past. Local transactions done with minimal record-keeping and… Read more »
> It’s their obligation to shareholders, but harms society.
Which is why regulators have a duty to break up big companies — something that is good for both society and the shareholders. That they won’t do that shows how utterly corrupt and incompetent our government has become.
Like many things in the ruling regime’s narrative of the useless/occupationless human and automation revolution stand in direct contrast to the mass immigration story. If the masses of cognitively incapable and cognitively capable but trained in valueless activity have no meaningful work, how is importing even more cognitively incapable people who are also culturally alien going to not inflame the problems with the existing population of jobless consumers? It seems like adding gasoline to the fire. I think it will turn out that mass immigration was as much a church and NGO grift debt financed by governments trying to solve… Read more »
How can something like this not be hacked? Just have every owner identify as bi. Doesn’t matter if married, unmarried, etc. What are they going to do, make you prove it on camera?
I am vomit
And, you know, some other stuff and whatever whatever whatever
Ancestors ashamed
***************
It really is amazing. For 2023 our fat, angry black lady activist (chief diversity officer) has declared that you can no longer address people at my company using anything other than “colleagues”. Can you imagine? Never in my wildest dreams did I think that the prime earning years of my career would be riddled with this. It is becoming more and more difficult for me to function in this society. I’ve recently been looking for another company but there is no where for me to go that I feel like I could stomach. Non woke tech companies are few and… Read more »
Call her what she is: a political Kommissar.
And address your coworkers as “Comrades!”
I have done this for years via e-mail.
The term seems (to me) a LOT more accurate.
wyatt
Where “political kommissar” is pronounced “Ni**er Bi*ch.”
Kinda redundant
They are. I have considered changing industries, but my sunken cost reality has prevented me. I chose the path of getting even more technical so forced diversity in the company and/or teams I work in is very hard to do. I also did a relentless search and created a spreadsheet of companies, VCs … I created my own social credit system. At some point I think us building our own consulting firms if high productivity mostly remote work, where one of the terms of engagement is no contact with HR outside of payroll and contracting needs. Not sure how we… Read more »
This is the way. Any company not on a path to intentional suicide will pay the jizya, the Diversity Tax, that is literally enforced at gunpoint by BigGov. But! They will simply silo these people off in makework jobs pushing papers around and sending emails about their DIE Initiatives, ESG Ratings, Allyship with Trannies, and other miscellaneous bullsh-t. I get an email like this once a week from these useless eaters and promptly delete it. My company, mercifully, still has sane management near the top, for now. Not sure how long that will last because once you let them in… Read more »
@RealityRules
I like the way you think. I’d love to get some help in finding a non-woke place to work. Are you on any other platforms? Gab maybe?
Not on Gab. Will come up with some handle for you. Be a bit. I am done with a meeting heavy first half and now, on topic, have to get the heavy lifting done.
Step one you don’t need me for. Whatever your technical skill, either become the absolute best at it, or, if you already are, go a layer or two lower in the stack. Start today so you can make use of the list in the future.
Be back later this eve with a comms handle for you. If not, tomorrow.
I’m sure she insisted on this radical speech control because everyone in the office was casually dropping N bombs and using “the racial slur database” in email communications like it was a thesaurus just to liven up the workplace.
Right?
@ProzNov
How’d you guess?
The white sheets you wear tipped her off.
tell her “colleague” is latin for “slave”; she won’t bother looking it up, so the prank will work.
You wouldn’t think a business model that primarily hires blacks and caters to blacks would be particularly successful, though I guess in a chocolate city like Baltimore, the choices are limited.
The way more and more folks, often younger ones, are “suddenly” keeling over these days (leaving doctors baffled), that automation is going to come in handy as there’ll be fewer live, healthy people to man the stations. It surely is a wonderful world we’re looking forward to.
Huh. So there I was in darkest Baltimore, delivering material to a huge set of apartment buildings under construction by entirely benevolent property developers.
The workforce of several hundred was entirely Mexican. I finally found one guy who spoke English, a supervisor.
He was also the only black guy there. He from Houston, Texas.
Amazingly, the people who work at Wawa and Royal Farms are in the upper quartile of their demographics. Think about that! They are (reasonably) law-abiding and show up sober (sometimes) for work on time (more or less) and (occasionally) can perform basic service functions. In contrast, the Twitter episode is real-time proof of Peter Turchin’s “overproduction of (self-styled) elites” theory. Eli Whitney and Cyrus McCormack could only dream of a world of such leisure wherein college graduates fight over dominance of a social-media website for neurotic exhibitionists. In another Age, these same folks would be competing to see who holds… Read more »
Demographics: I can’t speak for all employment of course, but being a convicted felon slams shut a lot of doors. 1/4 to 1/3 of all black men, depending upon whose figures you cite, fit that sad category. Even if being a con isn’t an impediment, still being incarcerated is. That’s 10% of black men. Now multiply this by blacks typically being much more than the national average 13% of a city population, and you have an abundance of potential workers and a dearth of quality. Hiring females greatly eases the “felon” problem, but they suffer from the same overall quality… Read more »
My crazy thought for the day;
Don’t get locked up!
Willard – I feel the whole Twitter episode is a better indicator of bioleninism than anything else.
The company I work for actually did the numbers regarding productivity in work from home versus in the office, and work from home came up on top. This probably isn’t because people are burning the midnight oil because work and home is never separated as much as people being able to avoid the annoying time sink office activities. Most people do real work as people are blathering on in meetings and avoid the unnecessary distraction when surrounded by other office workers. A large automotive firm we contract for had similar results, probably largely due to similar effects of the competent… Read more »
It’s a refutation and shake-out of the erroneous and never valid theory of the “team”. Any time there are “teams” made up to solve a problem or maintain a process some team members end up doing most or all of the work and others spend the day watching youtube videos or emailing back and forth with a member of the opposite sex. In the highly competitive capitalist free market, motivated individuals are the key to success. Drone “team” members are standing, or sitting, in the way.
If solar and wind won’t cut it, we could put them in pods and use them as batteries for their Metaverse overlords.
Automation?
You mean like the multiple broken elevators and automatic doors in my area with no ETA on parts or repairs?
Heck, one elevator repair will be so expensive that the store stuck with it can’t figure out how to fit it into their budget.
Yes Howard, this is what we used to call the “South Bronx Test” at my old firm. I cannot wait to see what the “community” does to the Royal Farms fried chicken delivery robot. Lots of spare parts required……..
I went to a bank in my area with my change jar to have it converted into small bills for red kettle donations, my annual practice. The teller asked me to sit in the lounge area as “it will take a little while”. After about 10 minutes, I didn’t hear any change counter machine rattling, so I walked up to the counter and lo and behold, the one (of only 2) teller was HAND COUNTING my change marking the totals down on a pad of paper, when I asked why, she said their change counting machine had broken and no… Read more »
Don’t donate to those kettles. Find someone who specifically has a need. Ask your local perish if necessary.
THIS!
Remember, The Salvation Army published a guide last year telling white people to apologize for racism.
Many of us printed “Apology Notes in Lieu of Cash” slips to add to the kettles.
They are ultra-woke and run by alphabet-types.
Far better to give to a local food bank or shelter.
You’re lucky. I used to save pennies in an actual piggy bank (A metal one I got at a discount store). Said piggy could hold $5-6 in pennies. I’d take it down to MegaBank, pop it open, they’d count the coins and give me paper money and silver coins back, plus a penny or two. Last time? I walked up and told the teller I wanted to have my coins counted. Her response? “We can convert your pennies to paper money if you put them in coin rolls for us.” Da Fuq? 🤨 I replied “Honey, YOU’RE the teller. YOU… Read more »
“Consequently I no longer save coins.”
‘Ts okay. There’s an (official) “coin shortage” b/c of the Chinkypox anyway.
Infant: Plus since our coins are mostly zinc and nickel these days they feel like toy money to me – and are worth about the same.
Yes and no. It’s no secret that gold, silver and (mostly) even copper are long gone from our coins. Nonetheless, I read years ago that a U.S. cent literally costs more than one cent to produce. In fact, for today’s pointless exercise, allow me to compute a penny’s intrinsic worth. A U.S. cent is 2.4375 g of Zinc, 0.0625 g Copper. At current prices that is worth about: Zn = 0.80 cents; Cu = 0.05 cents; Total = 0.85 cents. Ironically, even with the vastly depreciated metals (most Cu removed 40 years ago), it’s still nearly worth its face value.… Read more »
If you accept the option for an amazon gift certificate, coinstar doesn’t take a cut.
The conundrum of the last two hundred years had been that automation had always led to more work.
Retailers, including WAWAs are investing in self check outs because they can’t find enough competent prospective employees to hire. IE there’s a labor shortfall.
I had no idea Royal Farms existed (and what a strange name for a gas station) so I checked the website…they were promoting fried chicken pieces on a macaroni & cheese bowl. My goodness, some people deserve cancer. On a related note, I remember Chick-fil-a being outrageously huwhite. It was quick and efficient, and the cashiers were pretty. I had wondered if Chick-fil-a had an hiring policy that the boomers running it didn’t realize was RAYCISS, so recently it’s been diversified. And now the drive-thru line is as slow as McDonald’s. On a final note, never go to BP for… Read more »
I’ve noticed that Chick-fil-A commercials this year have invariably featured the selfless, non-threatening negroes that surely must exist everywhere else but where I happen to be at any given moment.
I’ve not tried a Royal Farms, nor from today’s account, would I wish to. I’m a frequent Wawa user in my (relatively) Caucasian part of Florida. As good as it is, it is put to shame by QT (QuikTrip) which are primarily in the Midwest. Sheetz was another junk food/mini truck stop concept.
Which QTs have you been to?? I used to live in QT territory, and it was full of losers, homeless, and thieves. Wawa is much better.
Mostly the ones in the better suburbs of KCMO. Usually the quality of the clientele can be inferred from a store’s immediate neighborhood. I generally choose the nicer looking places when I travel, if I have a choice. I’ll bet a lot of people do. Funny, in rural areas along the old roads, even the very old country stores usually are competently run by Whites, even if they don’t have the latest glass and stainless steel decor. A couple pickups at the pumps, or similar parked in front of a hole in the wall restaurant is actually a welcome sight… Read more »
I assumed that CFA had some sort of certainly unwritten but real policy of hiring chipper white teenagers, or at least avoiding the ghetto denizens or the mayans that now feature prominently at every other fast-food location. Actually, I figured this was the key to their success as while their food is good, it’s not so amazing as to justify the parade of minivans that circle each restaurant every afternoon. My initial thought was that CFA paid more than other fast food joints and as such could be picky, though I have no idea how they managed to pull off… Read more »
The Chicken’s pretty good.
Colored folk have a thing about royalty and status, therefore the “ Royal Farms” moniker.
Remember, Dey wuz Kangs!
don’t know if this is true or not, but i was talking to a black guy once, and he told me the name “Leroy” was derived from the French phrase “le roi” – which means “the king” 🙂
Yes, and “Prince” and “Queen” and “Lady”
It’s only fitting that the assistant manager at Royal Farms would be named Queenie
The CFA wife and I lunch at now and then is a model of courtesy and efficiency. Their drive-through operation is worth an MBA thesis.
To your point about getting people back to work, it’s a little different in software development. What was realized was the developers were able to work just fine from home. As a developer, it is immediately revealed if you are not getting your work done. There’s no code if you aren’t. Instead what was realized is the deep layers of management were found to be completely useless. At my current wokeness center the managers all panicked and couldn’t wait to “get back to the office”. Everything functioned perfectly fine WITHOUT these people, so naturally they begged for return in a… Read more »
I thought a coder’s most important task was keeping their JIRA tickets updated in real-time?
That was something our esteemed managers felt the need to do. Tap you on your shoulder and make sure you updated the JIRA board with your ticket progress.
In the projects I worked on Management literally tracked progress by how many comments a developer wrote, and how long they were.
Do I need to iterate the project failed and was scrapped, costing the company tens of millions?
At least you’re not stuck with a female project engineering manager who reflexively fires off a list of 8 to 10 questions in response to my status updates where 50% of my replies are,
“Yes, as stated in the prior email.”
Ah, the Project Manager as Kindergarten Teacher. 🤦🏻♂️
Shhhhhhhh, you’re letting everyone in on the secrets. 😠😆
I agree Tired Citizen. The Software industry has always struggled to find good managers. Often the traits that make a great engineer make a terrible manager, but the best engineer gets promoted as the reward. Moreover, real engineers don’t need a manager. At most they need a natural leader to arbitrate technical disputes, and often that arises naturally. I have had two good managers in my career. The worst are the sub-continentals who are deeply insecure and are trying to prove they are the best engineer. They inevitably reduce themselves to, “is this done yet?” automatons stuck in an infinite… Read more »
wow!!
I didn’t know you worked where I work!
wyatt
People who work in the trades are going to have the last laugh here. Their services are almost always in demand and they can’t be readily outsourced the way manufacturing jobs can/have.
I feel like more people are hearing this message. I would not be surprised at all if we see white college attendance down in favor of trades in the coming decades.
I think that’s already happening. At the high school in my town this year’s graduatiing class had fewer going to college than since forever. It was well under 50% and it was white kids not just minorities. And this is a majority white school.
I think the school is trying to adjust its curriculum to reflect this now too. Now if they could just get rid of sports.
Ah, great, the only ones left getting Management Leadership degrees will be our oppressors.
As indispensable as trades are, they are still hugely dependent upon a very long supply chain. Anecdotally I know of small businessmen who have been warned that lead times for orders for what used to be routine (perhaps one month) are now six months or more. Supply chain uncertainty, I assume. Beyond resource scarcity, I expect this may be due to accelerating inflation. I recall from an economics text that the modern (e.g. late 20th century) private sector basically operates on 30 day credit. Anything more than very trivial inflation throws a monkey wrench into that. That’s a problem the… Read more »
The fly in that ointment may turn out to be parts availability, and the quality of those parts. Guess who will get blamed for delays in repairs, or deficiencies in those repairs arising from parts quality issues.
It’s going to be a while before there’s a viable robotic plumber, electrician or HVAC tech.
Maniac: I think a lot depends on what one’s future expectations are. Most of my husband’s casual friends/acquaintances – and even some older closer friends – are convinced that everything will always go on as it has, and thus got their kids on track to succeed according to the old rules. Kids all went to college, got technical/professional degrees at ‘good schools,’ made connections, and are doing well financially. They’re the foot soldiers of the cloud people. Of course they’re all vaxxed, too, but what effect that will have will play out over the next decade or so. Not to… Read more »
Working in an all black environment is awful as a white. You end up very anti social because all of your daily interactions are torturous.
NeverMind working with them, just the fact that they exist is torturous.