Ig - I don't mean black grime dirty bomb. I mean a TNT explosion that is big, and around the TNT was enriched radioactive material that isn't good enough to make a high class nuke but has a lifetime of radiation into millions of years.
That is far more damming than any flame bomb or explosion or pile of tires.
The nuke dirty bomb kills all in a region - all plants - for millions of years and people if they come into the area.
Russia has a plant that is a dirty site of a out of control nuclear pile. That isn't enough for you ?
Mart> >> And it can be just a dirty bomb - TNT or plastic explodes Radioactivity >> around.
It would require a cleanup or evacuation of at most a square mile. Probably more due to the general squeamishness of society. But it is not that big of a deal. In the end, no one or 1-5 people will die of radiation.
This completely untrue. Even near Chernobyl, where a giant reactor exploded, the nature is flourishing.
That was a huge explosion in terms of material involved, more than can be smuggled.
If a dirty bomb was not so feared, wrongly, terrorists would not even want to use it.
First, taxes: In the year 2000, "Tax Freedom Day" (the date in a year at which the average worker is no longer working for the government) was 120 days into the year. In 2014, it was 110 days into the year. So taxes actually have come down, not up, and they bounce around with the state of the economy. This data is from the anti-tax Tax Foundation, not from the government itself. They used to tout how Tax Freedom Day was getting longer into the year, year after year. Now they bury it in their back pages.
As for the "ease" of Wal-Mart automating their warehouses: They are frequently cited in logistics and business articles as one of the most automated warehousing systems in the world, along with Amazon. The only thing that keeps them from getting rid of more people is that the warehouse-scale systems are not yet flexible enough to deal with their constantly changing inventory and still provide one-day deliveries. But it's coming, and wages will have nothing at all to do with it.
If you would like to see a graph of productivity (the product of automation) versus wages over time, I'll put it together for you. But I can tell you the bottom line: Automation keeps going up, while wages are flat. There is no connection between the two. (In manufacturing, productivity keeps going up, output keeps going up with it, and employment keeps going down. The rest of the economy will catch up to that trend.)
The implementation of automation, both the physical and the IT varieties, is solely a product of the stage of technical development for automation itself. And, having been on the receiving end of that news for 40 years, I'll testify that it's advancing every month. The latest thing is the "collaborative" robot. They're like adding another person to your workforce, and they're getting cheaper.
Trying to hold it back by holding wages down is like trying to improve employment by having people work for free on Fridays. The degree to which you'd have to beggar people to accomplish it is extreme. And in the end, like John Henry driving rail spikes in competition with a steam-powered machine, you will lose.
...doesn't need hair nets or toilet paper/seat covers, always shows up for work on time, never takes breaks, is always polite to the customer (if audible version), and probably sounds better over the cheap speakers than disaffected minorities.
About 46% of the U.S. National Revenue comes from personal income tax while 32% comes from payroll tax, or in other words, some 78% of the taxes are generated by folks who work.
But, I suspect that labour costs do have an influence on how quickly robots will be added to the work force. If the robot is, say a half a million dollars, and labour is $1.10 an hour then management looks at the robot as something to be added in the future 1 robot=155 years of labour. If labour is $15.00 an hour than the utilization of a robotic work force becomes a much more important factor. 1 robot = 11.4 years.
Given that many half-lives are measured in hundreds and thousands of years, yeah, that's PFTC. Flora and Fauna come back quickly, but some of the area is still so hot, a single bite of food grown in that ground will kill you within days. But they didn't get the killoff of people they thought would happen from cancers over the years, either. Most of the people died from initial cleanup, and the gov't knew they would but didn't tell them. A large percentage of those people probably would have gone in anyway, though. Good, patriotic men, like our firefighters, who willingly give their lives for the safety of others. I salute them.
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_Really_ interesting story of a girl on a motorcycle, riding through the hot zones around Chernobyl.
Truth! And the witless "board changers" they're turning out nowadays are going to do nothing but run up the cost of a mechanized burger.
People complain to me all the time that they hate paying my prices for weeding, weedeating, mowing (things I don't do) because they can't find a single teenager willing to do it. One of the guys I hired through the temp agencies to help me set up some fences now has his own odd jobs company, and he's thriving. Teens don't seem to have he willingness to do what needs to be done to get along in this world. They have no concept of moving up the ladder a rung at a time. "I'm CEO or I'm not coming to work for you!" How does one get a work ethic when they start without ethics? Parents aren't instilling that into kids today, at least not from my perspective. Grandparents scold their kids and grandkids about it all the time. 'Tis sad, indeed.
I think the fast food restaurants found that the older homeless adults made for much better employees than the flaky, no-show teens ever did.
Teens are too busy blowing their way too large allowances on $400 Nikes, video games, and loud exhausts/window tinting for their Accords.
What area do you live in Larry? I haven't noticed the teenagers here in NC with this attitude. Neither of my sons had such either. As teens, one work ed in construction and the other a diesel mechanic's helper. Then, there's the other side of the coin. When I was 14, I started working for brick lay ers as a hod carrier. It was very hard manual labor working with heavy load s that a 14 yr. old had no business doing. It did damage. I'm convinced it' s what has caused many of the problems with worn out shoulders and other jo int problems now at 65. The teenagers in this area appear to me to be willi ng to do just about any type of work. Hopefully, OSHA has put a stop to wh at I was stupid enough to take on. I made sure the son in construction wasn 't carrying hod.
But it just doesn't work that way in practice, John. Over the years I've done dozens of stories on robots and other automation, visiting and interviewing the managers who actually are doing it. The usual scenario, in manufacturing, involves making a big operational change, usually to expand capacity or to get more production out of existing resources. That simple wages vs. investment calculation that many people think is the determinant is not it. It is so trivial, compared to the total costs and operational disruptions involved, that it hardly gets a nod.
Further, implementing robots usually doesn't involve laying people off. Most often, the influence on employment is about people who are
*not hired*, sometime in the future. It has a strong effect over time, but it's not a straight, immediate substitution.
In services, automation is implemented mostly through IT, not through mechanical hardware. That's a different scenario and I don't have much direct experience with it.
The thing is that WM (at least all 3 of the local warehouses) HAVE the automation already in the building BUT they do not run it full time.
Take one item, as an example, shoes. They have a fully automated line that dumps the shoes, sorts them, packs them into shoe boxes and palletizes them for storage in the warehouse. It can run 2 days and do more than the human workers do in 4 days. BUT half the time it is idle. They only start it up if a backlog occurs. Wal~Mart tells the company that makes the shoes that they don't want them boxed at the plant. Instead they make the shoes, pair them, tag them and toss them in a crate. On this end they sort & pack.
On the shipping side they have long racks where lift operators work on one side and break down packaging, load items in the racks and repeat until they clock out. On the other side of the rack a person scans a barcode, That lights up a series of lights in order and the person goes to each slot, pulls the item punches a button to kill the light and packs it in a box. The computer already knows the sizes of the boxes because they scan the code on the side before packing, it calculates which items fit in that box and only drops that amount.
I asked a couple of the warehouse managers about it. They told me that it was orders from Bentonville that the machinery was not the priority, the people were.
It is a burden to examine the evidence all the time, instead of having ready-made, ideological answers that you pull our of your ass, Tom. I envy you your Little Jack Horner approach to the world:
Little Jack Horner Sat in the corner, Eating a Christmas pie; He put in his thumb, And pulled out a plum, And said, "What a good boy am I!"
Only you and the boyz are pulling those plums out of your butts. d8-)
Uh...given Wal-Mart's history, including having the highest number of full-time employees who qualify for food stamps, I'll take that last statement with a fat grain of salt.
The company does have an extremely efficient warehousing system, including the efficiency of the people-handling part, and they make use of every mechanical and IT trick to make them more efficient, from automatically guided fork lifts to radio-frequency ID (RFID).
And their size is huge. Their 300+ distribution centers have a floor area equivalent to 18% of the surface area of Manhatten. So they have thousands of warehouse employees.
But they also have one of the most advanced and thorough fully-automated warehousing systems in the world. And they're constantly adding to it.
Yep! The only thing that will help today's and tomorrow's society is some kind of reset. the last couple of generations have no values. I'm glad I'm old!
Man, does Iggy have the right appellation or what.
There are different kinds of intelligence.
Perot was a peudo-intellectual with no real grasp of our roots as the founders designed them. He got a big reaction out of the audience by pointing out that Social Security money is combined with the general treasury. "If a business did that the CEO would go to jail." And the audience gasped, because the fools didn't know it had been that way since
1968. But Perot just took cheap shots at Republicans and didn't mention that it was Democrats who did that in 1968. And he had no grasp of the fact that Republicans were right to argue that SS was unconstitutional in the first place. If it was constitutional then what they did in 1968 would have been unconstitutional.
Without Perot, we wouldn't have had Clinton. During the next four years he would have gone where his successor Jim Guy Tucker went - jail. Then today, nobody would know the name Clinton. Thank you Ross Perot.
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