If you know me well...

If you know me well ... then you'll immediately understand why this morning's Dilbert strip gave me a good belly-laugh!

Curiosity has found something curious...

Curiosity has found something curious...  Little piles of a white, powdery substance on the surface of Mars.  No word yet on what they might be...

“It’s meant to completely obviate them.”

“It’s meant to completely obviate them.”  Momentum Machines is making a “burger bot” (a robot that makes hamburgers).  Says the company's co-founder:

“Our device isn’t meant to make employees more efficient.  It’s meant to completely obviate them.”

Raising the minimum wage has great accelerated fast food companies' interest in such devices.  The higher the wages that must be paid for a human to do the work – and the more entitled the young work force feels – the more economically compelling such robots are.  Many observers think that the latest round of minimum wage increases has pushed the fast-food industry over the tipping point – and the industry's investments in robot research would seem to validate this.

Once again, the progressives take a perfectly good, functional capitalist economy and totally screw it up.

Mind you, eventually the natural rise of wages and the falling cost of robotics would cause this tipping point to occur anyway – but without the “help” of progressive economic meddling, this transition would have occurred some considerable time in the future (say, 10 or 15 years) and after a more gradual transition.  Many industry observers are saying that the automation of fast food restaurants is likely to occur extremely fast, now that the economics have suddenly made it attractive.  The rate of change is likely to be limited only by the production capacity of the robotics companies...