Goodbye Mr. Roboto

So, this whole robots thingee has led me to scavenge for data. Still haven't found hard numbers with regard to labour hours per unit (automobile or other wise), although the Times article referred to in an earlier post has some speculative numbers for Philips.

I found this posting in my travels.

And the result of that will be a massive drop in consumer spending and consumer confidence. The point is that robots take jobs and incomes but do not act as "end consumers" in the economy. Robots do consume energy and resources but these are inputs to production. Without end consumers to drive the economy, the result will be a deflationary spiral. Many of the robots would be shut down. Imagine production robots used by General Motors. If there are no humans with income and confidence to buy cars, the robots will be shut down.

The quote isn't in the post, but a comment from one Steve T; scroll down to the second comment. I must say, I couldn't have said it better myself. Read through the entire comment. No, I'm not Steve T, but he has to be my lost twin.

What isn't discussed or understood sufficiently is that the "knowledge jobs" that some, including Left Wingnuts, are so enamoured of are disproportionately overhead or purely parasitic, in more pointed words: welfare queen jobs. In the former case, positions labeled management or analyst or administration and the like are explicitly categorized as non-production by economists, because they don't participate in production of output. They're overhead. In the latter case, such as that vampire squid financial services, such positions just syphon real productivity (in the form of moolah) from the economy.

Where we end up: It's the Distribution, Stupid. Without a distribution mechanism capitalism collapses, and sooner than without the robots, since the robotic movement accelerates the income and wealth transfer from the many to the few. Have a nice day. And I'll stop the repetitive robotic typing.

Body Snatchers

You have to watch this. So creepy it's cool.

You Want Fries With That?

"You want fries with that?" We all have heard that as a putdown of someone who just screwed up. Tom Friedman adopts the persona of the Right Wingnut, without the Nut. I never bought his act, and today he steps in it, again. Such utter nonsense.

Let's start with the basic premise: today's upheaval in the middle class is just like the eviction of farmers to factories in the 19th and 20th centuries, and that this is a Good Thing. What's going on today in the BRICs, China particularly, is much the same as back then; with the same result. Rural poverty is exchanged for urban poverty. As one Indian of my acquaintance put it, "you can earn a dollar a day in the fields in cow dung, or a dollar a day in an air conditioned office. Same wage, different demands; you need to learn office skills, but same wage. Take your pick." The BRICs have been "economic miracles" through indentured servitude, with a few billionaires and billions of hands holding up capitalists.

Friedman's notion only works if the demand for labour in the target sector matches the evicted labour in the source sector(s). In 19th and early 20th century USofA, with modest capital/labour ratios, that mostly worked out. Recall Henry Ford, who raised wages in part so that his workers could afford his cars. Smart man that. He also had this to say: "A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business."

Friedman tells a tale of a Boston area robot outfit, Rethink Robotics, and waxes rhapsodic on robots empowering people to do more. And create jobs.

...its cheap, easy-to-use, safe robot will be to industrial robots what the personal computer was to the mainframe computer, or the iPhone was to the traditional phone. That is, it will bring robots to the small business and even home and enable people to write apps for them the way they do with PCs and iPhones...

Of course, folks don't go buy a PC or iPhone and *PROGRAM* the damn things!!! Well, a few anti-social nerds who then create a Facebook or something. But not more than a handful. Moreover, studies were done (and continue) on the effect of PCs in the office, and concluded that by and large PCs added to overhead, since they tended to engage the users in form and less on content. Graphical machines, starting with the Mac and thence to the Windows PC, were the worst offenders. Some companies are finally getting wise, and banning the Power Point Presentation. And not a minute too soon.

"Just as the PC did not replace workers but empowered them to do many new things," argues Brooks, the same will happen with the Rethink robot. "Companies will become even more competitive, and we will be able to keep more jobs here. ... The minute you say 'robots' people say: 'It's going to take away jobs. But that is not true. It doesn't take away jobs. It will change how you do them," the way the PC did not get rid of secretaries but changed what they did.

Neither of these guys lives in the real world. What's been the net job effect of industrial robots? Net? Less than zero. Fact is, as the PC took over in the office, secretaries were shown the door. Workers were told to "get keyboard skills, or else", and did their own documents. Who amongst you, regular readers, has a secretary or even knows one? Damn few, I'll wager.

So, what is the labour distribution in the USofA these days? In other words, is there unmet demand for robot makers and programmers sufficient to soak up all those displaced factory and office workers? Not so you'd notice. Here's a table of data from the BLS:

2010 National Employment Matrix title and code Employment Change, 2010-20 Median annual
2010 2020 Number Percent wage, May 2010
00-0000 Total, All Occupations 143,068.2 163,537.1 20,468.9 14.3 $33,840
31-0000 Healthcare Support Occupations 4,190.0 5,633.7 1,443.7 34.5 24,760
39-0000 Personal Care and Service Occupations 4,994.7 6,331.4 1,336.6 26.8 20,640
29-0000 Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations 7,799.3 9,819.0 2,019.7 25.9 58,490
21-0000 Community and Social Service Occupations 2,402.7 2,985.0 582.3 24.2 39,280
47-0000 Construction and Extraction Occupations 6,328.0 7,735.2 1,407.2 22.2 39,080
15-0000 Computer and Mathematical Occupations 3,542.8 4,321.1 778.3 22.0 73,720
13-0000 Business and Financial Operations Occupations 6,789.2 7,961.7 1,172.5 17.3 60,670
19-0000 Life, Physical, and Social Science Occupations 1,228.8 1,419.6 190.8 15.5 58,530
25-0000 Education, Training, and Library Occupations 9,193.6 10,597.3 1,403.7 15.3 45,690
53-0000 Transportation and Material Moving Occupations 9,004.8 10,333.4 1,328.7 14.8 28,400
49-0000 Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Occupations 5,428.6 6,228.7 800.2 14.7 40,120
27-0000 Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media Occupations 2,708.5 3,051.0 342.5 12.6 42,870
41-0000 Sales and Related Occupations 14,915.6 16,784.7 1,869.1 12.5 24,370
37-0000 Building and Grounds Cleaning and Maintenance Occupations 5,498.5 6,162.5 664.0 12.1 22,490
33-0000 Protective Service Occupations 3,302.5 3,667.0 364.5 11.0 36,660
23-0000 Legal Occupations 1,211.9 1,342.9 131.0 10.8 74,580
17-0000 Architecture and Engineering Occupations 2,433.4 2,686.2 252.8 10.4 70,610
43-0000 Office and Administrative Support Occupations 22,602.5 24,938.2 2,335.7 10.3 30,710
35-0000 Food Preparation and Serving Related Occupations 11,150.3 12,242.8 1,092.5 9.8 18,770
11-0000 Management Occupations 8,776.1 9,391.9 615.8 7.0 91,440
51-0000 Production Occupations 8,594.4 8,951.2 356.8 4.2 30,330
45-0000 Farming, Fishing, and Forestry Occupations 972.1 952.6 -19.4 -2.0 19,630

BLS expects the 43- series to burgeon. But with these robots taking over, of course it won't. The 51- series is manufacturing, and shows little growth, and will have even less with robots. The labour hours per automobile, thanks to robotics, is a fraction of what it was in 1960. With robotics displacing labour across all industries, asking about your fries desire too, the issue is distribution of productivity gains. As it is, capitalists get nearly all of it. Historically, they share it with labour only where unions pressure them to do so. Otherwise, take a hike.

The telling datum, not yet found, is the exact replacement ratio of robotics for humans in even one manufacturing instance. Automobiles would be the prime instance, since the auto assembly line was among (if not the first) the early adopters. Clearly, capitalists wouldn't adopt robotics if it ended up raising the unit cost of their product. Capitalists can be stupid, but not over the last 50 years. If robotics were a cost sink, they'd have drop them like a hot coal. They haven't. Where they are stupid is in ignoring Ford's understanding that you can't grow your business organically (i.e., not just buying up your competition) if there isn't money in the hands of folks demanding your product. What goes around comes around. Turn off the merry-go-round...

Oh, and by the bye. It takes substantially more brains to run a farm than to move parts on an assembly line. The shibboleth that moving farmers to factories raised skill levels really should have been staked long ago.

Money Makes the World Go Round

It's been a while since I've vented about the silliness of the DNC in turning down the Triage application; in particular the mapping part. What to my wondering eyes did appear, but a US map half done in today's Times. It's half done, since it displays the input, $$$, but doesn't show the output, it seems. Again, in Triage terms, output would be some measure of effectiveness. Can be done, as Triage demonstrated.

To be fair, it may not even be the Times who did the work. The source cite is "Campaign Media Analysis Group at Kantar Media", but doesn't say whether Kantar provided only the raw numbers, or both the numbers and the map. Since the Times is well known to use R for its data graphics, my guess is the former. The states are graphed with their blue/red leaning (without indicating whether the lean was measured correlatively with the spends), so a time series of the map would be closer to the real time thrust of Triage (googleVis supports such graph animation, sort of; R-bloggers has a number of posts on point). Even so, bravo.

Blitzkrieg

Regular reader should recall musings in the recent past that Germany, and to a lesser extent France, are intent on punishing their victims in the Euro Crisis. To wit, that these exporting dependent economies, the aforementioned Germans and French, dumped output onto their lesser compatriots in the Eurozone. They were able to pull this off, for some period of time, so long as the Euro itself remained stable; a Greek Euro was as good as a German Euro. And that equality could last only so long as the Germans and French propped up the PIIGS, but indirectly. Overt support, now necessary, irritates the Man on the Street Citizen in Germany and France, either because they're just too stupid to figure out the scam, or were in on it.

Now that they're no longer able to buy up the surplus output, the Germans and French want to maintain their economies by extorting funds (money being fungible) from the lesser countries by other means. Our downtrodden Banksters have been busy inventing ever more overt ways to extract funds (almost entirely profit, of course) from the saver to borrower money stream now that the "crisis" has been averted and stricter (although not by much, thanks to Bankster lobbyists) regulation, but most knucklehead consumers (and regulators) refuse to accept that Banksters need to be brought to heel. The past week has also included reporting that China, as predicted here, has an excess output problem too. "It's the distribution, stupid."

Not too surprisingly, today brings confirmation of German and French perfidy.

They include the German and French banks that lent Greece money and fueled the Spanish housing bubble...

Again, the Germans and French sought higher than domestic (in their perspective) returns, since their own economies couldn't pay extortionate returns. The Spanish housing bubble, not motivated by government, was the result of the exporting countries, Germany particularly, seeking unrealistic returns on profits gained by dumping output into those self same countries. Heads I win, tails you lose economics. Even if Germans and French (and American Banksters) manage to convince citizens and regulators that all this is sustainable, collapse happens in due time. Without a foundation of income distribution, capitalism collapse of its own extortion.

The circle of perpetrators could also include the fickle bond investors who underpriced the risk of Greek debt before 2010 and whose volatile reaction to even minor events has lately been wreaking havoc with Spanish and Italian borrowing costs and, by extension, those countries' economies.

There's a reason some, including humble self, have screamed bloody murder that bondholders got off scottfree during The Great Recession. It was their greed for unsustainable returns on idle money that caused the crisis. Yes, idle money. When I was kid, the term "idle rich" was in common English, and was synonymous with "coupon clipper", also common English. The latter doesn't refer to folks who take out Pampers discount coupons from their daily newspaper, but to the fact that bonds pay a "coupon value", and in the olden days one literally removed a perforated tab from the margin of the bond (the coupon) for redemption for moolah.

In fact, Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor until 2005, was one of those calling loudest for the rules to be watered down so he would not have to cut government spending.

The quote refers to the fact that Germany didn't want new restrictions back in 2005 that they're now demanding against the PIIGS. I wonder how to spell hypocrisy in German?

"It was German government decisions and German banks -- and Austrian banks and Dutch banks and Finnish banks -- who lent the money to all these countries," Adam S. Posen, a United States economist who is an external member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England, said on BBC television this week.

Finally, he drops the Truth Bomb, asserted here for some time.

Germany lent the money so it could be used to buy German exports, Mr. Posen said. "Germany has been running a scheme in their own interests," he said.

I think he's pointing out that the Emperor is quite naked. Cool.

Rocky 99

It sure seems like there've been 98 of the darn things. So, on to 99. With ggmap. "What's that?" I hear from the cheap seats. Welllll.

Last month, ggmap was released. The author's web site is here and his presentation is here. Since I'm still on the fence about Triage/mapping for the Philly Folks, ggmap would surely be the vehicle. By all accounts it makes map generation with ggplot2 easier than previously.

The presentation is quite neat. Not only that, but he does compare logic the way I've always preferred:
-95.39681 <= lon & lon <= -95.34188 & 29.73631 <= lat & lat <= 29.78400 That is, left to right (in)equality as the number line. I always get irritated when folks do: x > 5 and the like. No, it ain't.

Marginalized in Gaza

Just came across this piece, and someone in the interTubes who gets marginal cost based pricing: "'Freemium is really a construct of the digital age because there's almost no marginal cost to digital goods,' said Chris Anderson, author of "Free: The Future of a Radical Price," and editor in chief of Wired magazine.'"

No shit, Sherlock.