Tag: labor

Being Replaced by AI: If you have time to play on the internet all day, you are in a job that can easily be replaced by new technology

Let’s take the concerns about AI replacing jobs seriously for a minute.  Here’s a good measure that I use to determine the value of a job.  If you have time to play on the internet and are ordering your lunch at 9 AM, you are probably working a job that AI could replace. We don’t create jobs just for people to have.  You need to be doing something with that job.  So, if you have a lot of time to do other things while you’re at your job.  Or you are doing a job that people think can be done from home while you are in your pajamas, your job can be done by AI. I have explained that I don’t worry about AI taking away jobs from people. Instead, I think AI will expand our economy where it’s applied and make humans more efficient.  Our economy will grow proportionally.  And when we are talking about GDP growth of more than 3%, human jobs just aren’t going to get you there.  There are not enough people, and there are not enough births.  There aren’t enough people in the world to fill all the jobs that we currently have.  Measuring a country’s success in job creation is a thing of the past and has been for quite some time.  I understand the anxiety, but really, and you know who you are, if you aren’t very busy at your job, then you are doing a job that AI can replace, one that doesn’t show up late or call off.  Or bring in a doctor’s note looking for an excused absence.  AI works all night and doesn’t require overtime.  It doesn’t get out of focus on the topics being worked on.  It simply does work, and that is essentially what economic value is measured by: the amount of work required to drive economic activity. 

It is baffling to hear what people who are supposed to be smart think would happen with the new administrative state’s view of the world.  Even this past week, I have heard some ridiculous comments from people who are supposed to be experts on labor practices.  The notion that the world should stop because so-and-so has called off is a preposterous idea.  And the general idea is that work is something that should be regarded as valuable.  I continue to hear what I’ve listened to all my life about Mondays, when people say stupid things like, “can’t wait to Friday.”  Or, “TGIF,” associating sadness with Monday mornings, where people have to return from time off and report to jobs that they hate.  And they rebel against those jobs with frequent call-offs and expect their job to be there for them once they’ve done all their leisure activities, as if we are supposed to build our lives around being off work.  Hey, AI never complains.  It does work, and a lot of it, and is, in general, far better than humans doing those same jobs.  It is much more reliable.  So, are we supposed to avoid using AI and insist on using a human being who is much less efficient at a task, to preserve the feelings of some lazy slug who is on their third marriage and has kids by all different spouses, who call off work every time the sun is out?  Because that’s the reality of the labor market.  However, it’s not just the typical slugs we’re talking about.  It’s just as common for white-collar jobs.  And you can see it while visiting any city.

It is astonishing to visit places like Washington, D.C., where traffic is heavy from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m.  Everyone is going to work, and the parking garages fill up fast.  But by noon, those parking garages start to open up because people are not working full 8-hour days.  They are going home after just a few hours in the office, and in many cases, they are not working even five days a week.  We saw this mentality clearly during COVID, where medical professionals insisting on government-imposed lockdowns had no connection to the amount of work that needed to be done globally.  Labor being a measure of productivity, most of the COVID planners thought that the world could all stay home and only communicate with each other via Teams meetings.  And we’re talking about people we think of as brilliant.  They believed that the way to get to a zero-emission world was for all humans to stay home and not drive anywhere.  If you have ever attended one of these climate conferences, such as those held in Rio or Davos, you will hear these same types of people microplanning mass society with the belief that humans could all stay home and visit parks built in their backyards, rather than traveling across the nation to visit a place like Yellowstone.  The same people who are now complaining that AI is going to take away human jobs are the same people who have tried to keep human beings from leaving their houses. I say that, knowing a great deal about the Agenda 21 goals of sustainability and how those misguided ideas infiltrated community planning. 

I have a lot of political friends who have to deal with Agenda 21 fantasies straight from the messed-up minds of the United Nations.  These kids learn a variety of skills in school, then they get hired into a township planning office, where they bring with them designs to build parks, roundabouts, and bike paths.  I live in an area where all these things have happened in abundance, and I look at them in wonder.  Why should people have so much free time to spend in all these parks and have the time to ride a bike on a bike path?  Where do the people who frequently visit there work?  Even with online gaming, many kids are playing those games 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, when they should be learning skills at the local McDonald’s drive-thru.  However, we have many people who have been running our society, teaching it all the wrong things about work.  So if you have time to walk on a bike path all the time, or sit around in a park looking at nature.  Or, you order lunch three hours early, and you have time to play on the internet all day at a white-collar job. You are working in a job that could and should be replaced by AI, which can do it better because it has no time for leisure.  When traveling through Europe, it’s always a source of amusement to observe their work ethic, which is characterized by very few hours per week, excessively long vacations, and an abundance of them.  When dealing with a large company these days, they often adopt a European view of work, which can be devastating to productivity.  I’d rather not waste my time trying to get someone to come to work and convince them to be productive while they’re there.  I’d rather replace their job with AI so that the things that need to be done can get done.  We don’t create jobs for people’s convenience.  We do it because we need work done, and people should work hard to do it, rather than complaining about it.  And we must admit to ourselves that most of the opinions people have had about work were incorrect.  And they led our society down the wrong path, introducing all the bad ideas about it.  To correct that behavior while expanding the economy, AI is a valuable asset, and I find it very useful because it is always available and never complains.  There are many things that I do that AI could never replace.  So I don’t look over my back at it, worried it will replace my value. Instead, I see it as helpful because it allows me to do the kinds of things that I’m good at, and to do more of them.  Rather than waste time on stupid stuff.  But if you are looking over your shoulder at AI replacing you.  Then that’s probably because you aren’t doing anything important enough to be replaced so easily.  And that is your problem. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

What We Learned From the ILA Strike: We need more automation and robots to do the work that lazy people won’t do

Most things that are wrong in our modern economy is the fault of communism; it’s the process of thinking that comes from the ridiculously stupid philosophy of Karl Marx.  And that’s precisely what the International Longshoremen’s Association was during a recent strike, raw communism.  When it comes to these unions, notice they always start with “international.”  These are not American efforts rooted in capitalism.  They are globalist enterprises.  A few weeks ago, the dockworkers at ports of entry for shipping all along the east coast down into the Gulf along Texas walked off the job, which essentially crippled American infrastructure and it was all over pay.  This forced the shipping companies to throw a lot of money at those losers to prevent a complete halt of our economy, which amounted to an average of 4 dollars per hour for each six-year contract with an opportunity to raise wages by 62% over the life of the contract, which previously had an upward pay scale of $39 per hour or 81K per year.  And that is on straight time.  In truth, many of these people are making 300K per year once they had the overtime before this strike, so these dock workers are getting rich off an extortion racket that is essential to the American infrastructure and economy.  Their malicious timing was to perform this strike while a weak president, Joe Biden, was sleeping on the beach before Trump’s next term. They took advantage of the situation while they could and put everyone at risk with a hostile attack on our supply chain. It was reprehensible on a good day and detrimental in their intent and malice.  Fortunately, people learned pretty quickly what the leaders of the strike were up to; they were living in mansions and were not hurting for money for a job that wasn’t that skilled.  In the vacuum of a communist bubble, they had thought themselves something better than what they were, and they took advantage of America for their benefit, and it’s disgusting. 

I don’t like union workers of any kind on a good day.  I think they are worthless slugs rooted in Marxist ideology and have no place in American society.  I know these days, many union workers are breaking away from their leadership and voting for Trump for president, which makes us all friendly under a big tent of politics these days.  But it doesn’t change what they are.  Trump has successfully dealt with unions as a builder, and if you have a good personality, you can deal with reasonable people. Most of the time, union workers think they are doing right.  They don’t think of themselves as communists or detriments to society.  However, as a mob of insurgents who threatened to take away the need for labor if they didn’t collectively get what they wanted, everything they were was born on the pages of Karl Marx.  I think it should be illegal and punishable with years in jail to walk off a job that is critical to American economic infrastructure.  If I didn’t know the teaching profession was so worthless, I’d associate that field with the same sentiment.  But teacher unions have made themselves worthless with their brand of Democrat politics baked into everything they do, which is useless to a conservative family with children attending a school.  From top to bottom, there is no place for communism in our labor force, and the ILA didn’t care.  They wanted to take advantage of desperate people to extract even more money from the process while political disorder was a raging fire.  And what they did will cost us a lot more money in terms of shipping costs.

I don’t respect these ILA workers or most union jobs.  I have seen firsthand how unions destroy a company, and I have been in many fist fights in parking lots myself for breaking strikes in what they call a SCAB.  I, for the fun of it, made a living breaking strikes, one at a company in Cincinnati called Cincinnati Milacron, which is no longer there because of radicalized unions, and a company that built conveyor belts in the 90s for Amazon, well before anybody knew what Amazon was.  I was never one to join with group behavior, and when I disagreed with the behavior, the union stewards wanted to fight, which they regretted.  Many people from my past are ashamed of what they did and what I did to them, just to put it nicely.  I could tell stories about some of these antics that sometimes got bloody for quite a long time.  So, my hatred for these labor unions runs very deep.  To say I hate them isn’t a strong enough word.  But I do have much experience as a blue-collar worker, and I’ve watched the crane operations at the shipping docks who just went on strike, and I can say that it’s an easy job.  Certainly not worth 300K per year.  I’ve done lots of comparable work with cranes and jigs with very expensive hardware, and while it takes some skill to operate, it’s not worth the kind of money these unions extract for it.  They are only paid so much because companies fear through radicalism that all the workers will collectively leave their jobs and cause a work stoppage.  Even though Trump has successfully dealt with unions, everyone who has dealt with them can’t hide the fact that collective bargaining agreements harm enterprises by making them too expensive or taking too much time to do the task.  And very little good comes from a unionized workforce. 

One of those stories I could tell involved three union stewards who thought they were tough guys and wanted to fight me in an empty parking lot near our plant at 3 PM when the first shift ended.  I guess they didn’t think I’d show up, and let me say politely, they didn’t win.  The whole plant showed up to watch the fight, which was very embarrassing for the union stewards.  And that particular plant, once management figured out that the union couldn’t be dealt with, shut down within six months.  I knew it then, and I know it especially now: unions had no place in America, and they were dying.  And that is certainly true today.  Already, robots could do a much better job than many of the crane operators working these docks, and they never call off work or get sick.  Labor in an economy is always needed, but that labor doesn’t need to be a human.  It needs to be intelligent, and with A.I. these days, they are far more intelligent than these dock worker slugs.  I’ve known them from personal experience, and believe me, if you pay them more than $10 an hour, you are paying them too much.  Unions have made themselves worthless, which is the case with the ILA strike.  It only lasted a few days, but it shouldn’t have happened at all.  I would encourage all those companies involved in shipping to invest in robots for their future work.  And don’t waste your time on these slugs that affect our economy.  There is no reason these days to overpay for labor and to throw money at these people.  The ILA strike broke once people realized how much money these employees made.  America was not sympathetic.  They just wanted their stuff shipped to them to arrive.  Globalism has given these international unions leverage through a monopoly status.  And it’s time we change that, for good, with automation and robotics. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call

A Little Taco Truck in Oakley: Hard work and good food that come with opportunities only capitalism provides

Oh, I know, my kind of Republican politics has not been built by the Koch Brothers and other personalities who don’t get what’s coming in the future. While I am eager to return to Trump’s border policies and send back illegal immigrants wherever we find them, I do have a soft spot for people who are willing to crawl through broken glass naked to get into America and take advantage of the freedoms afforded individuals in the greatest country on earth. I don’t blame anybody who wants to get into America and work hard to have a good life, which they are not allowed to have in many other places. I tend to think more of immigrant people than I do of people who were born in America, by default, and expect someone to give them a golden slipper for the rest of their lives. I like to see people working hard. I have much more in common with most immigrant people because they often come from cultures where hard work is not only appreciated, it’s expected. The labor unions in America, with all the elements of Marxism that go with them, have destroyed the labor force in the United States. And for me, this isn’t even about cheap labor by people exploited because of their resident status. It’s simply a work ethic issue. While I am a person who likes AI and robotics because it makes a business not dependent on slugs who are afraid to work, I like immigration labor because of their work ethic. And when it comes to deporting people, I would vote to deport crybaby welfare recipients living off Medicaid well before I’d get rid of a cook working 18-hour days in the back of a Chinese food restaurant. I appreciate and most enjoy knowing people who work hard. And I very much despise lazy people who expect things to be given to them just because they were fortunate to be born in a rich country and want to exploit every political giveaway that they can get their hands on.

To this point, a friend of mine was out running around with me, and he wanted me to do something unusual for lunch and go all the way to Oakley to show me. I am used to Liberty Township and West Chester, Ohio, for lunch and dinner options. I expect delicious food if I’m going to eat it, and I like pleasant surroundings without a lot of slugs lying around, bringing down the vibe. When eating in public, I don’t want to smell pot smoke and look at a bunch of freak show contestants while I’m eating, so I usually go to places I know are safe for that kind of thing. So I was reluctant to follow my friend’s advice on this lunch option he was talking about, a little taco truck in a BP gas station in Oakley near the old Cincinnati Milicron plant that is now torn down and replaced by new economic development. This isn’t the best part of town; this newly developed renovation project is just east of Norwood. I have a long history in this area, so I wasn’t too excited to go there. There are taco trucks all over Cincinnati, so why this one? They have taco trucks at Liberty Center, which is my favorite place to go and eat. Why were we going all the way down to Oakley? Well, as he promised, according to him, these were some of the best tacos in the world, and he would know he’d traveled the world a lot and had sampled lots of food from many different people. And he swore by this particular taco truck that it’s simply the best around.

So we went way out of our way for lunch, and I was shocked to see how small it was.  But it had character; it was sitting in the parking lot of a gas station with its little grass umbrella shrouding a few picnic tables.  To the left behind the gas station were a couple of cops hanging out because of the vast homelessness problem that the area has and the frequent drug deals that are pretty obvious a part of the discarded shopping carts lying around.  Oakley is trying to reform itself with lots of new construction, but when people lose their way in life and conjugate all together in one area, they usually get depleted economic zones.  And that’s where we were; we were there to eat food.  So, I was skeptical.  But we knocked on the window, and a smiling face greeted us, a little Central American woman happy to get an order.  She immediately took the order and soon smoke was coming out of a little smoke stack on top of the truck, which was much smaller than I expected.  Two people were in the taco trailer that could have been pulled by a small car, and the whole thing ran on propane as its heat source, evident by the stack of tanks behind it discarded for refilling.  The entire event reminded me of something you might find in the highlands of Peru and some tourist spots in a remote part of the world.  A few people were making something happen with very minimal resources, and they were excited to have customers, which they went way out of their way to facilitate. 

To get drinks at this place, you have to go into the gas station to get them.  So I was having a cultural experience with all this.  But it was enjoyable, and once we were finished, the food was ready, and we ate it in the car.  These are all things that I usually wouldn’t do for lunch.  But, boy, was it all a treat.  It was great food made fresh and in large quantities.  It was worth going out of our way to get the food, and I was happy to give that little taco truck a little business.  These people wanted to work hard in exchange for a bit of money, and they provided a superior product.  This is as opposed to a fancy restaurant staffed with slow-minded people who feel entitled to a job, who often give only as much service as they can get by with not doing.  You get a good environment because the people attending such a place with you don’t have holes in their heads.  But this Oakley place was the opposite.  And if you wanted good food from good people trying to scrape their way out of a difficult situation, this little taco truck in Oakley, Ohio, was the place to go.  And it reminded me of what kind of country we could be again if we made it so many people were rewarded in life for their hard work instead of penalized.  While Democrats might think that these kinds of people running this taco truck will vote for their entitlement programs, I don’t think so.  I think they are primed to be Republicans and that they would vote for Trump if they could.  And these people want to work hard for a piece of the American dream.  And I am glad that they were doing what they did.  Let me say those tacos were fantastic!   America is a lot better off with many options from people worldwide who want the same thing: freedom and a chance to do good things without the government trying to hold them back from living a good life.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707