> If these cooking robots are just glorified assembly lines that require uniform inputs, they should be taxed to the point they do not displace a human.
A human line cook is also part of a "glorified assembly line that requires uniform inputs". This does not preclude the use of real/fresh ingredients, and also of course requires the employ of a human prep team to turn lumpy items into uniform ingredients.
But a human gets paid for it. The local economy benefits from that. A fully automated system removes any possible middlemen from the chain and exacerbates the concentration of wealth.
Paying people to dig holes only to fill it back again also results in humans getting paid and the local economy "benefiting". That doesn't mean we should be mandating that companies do that, or get the government to enact such programs.
- Digging holes and covering them again does not produce wealth or material well-being. Work in the service industry is nothing like that.
- At no point I said that the only alternative is to keep people employed sub-optimally. If automation does indeed produce more wealth and if the people that are out of the job can pursue better opportunities, then sure let's use it. But it should also be taxed. If we really are aiming for a society that is so automated that will rob the opportunities for the large majority of people to have meaningful work and a living wage, then at the very least some of this wealth needs to be distributed to everyone.
>- Digging holes and covering them again does not produce wealth or material well-being. Work in the service industry is nothing like that.
And having a person flipping burgers even though there's a machine that can do it does "produce wealth or material well-being"?
>- At no point I said that the only alternative is to keep people employed sub-optimally. If automation does indeed produce more wealth and if the people that are out of the job can pursue better opportunities, then sure let's use it. But it should also be taxed. If we really are aiming for a society that is so automated that will rob the opportunities for the large majority of people to have meaningful work and a living wage, then at the very least some of this wealth needs to be distributed to everyone.
How do you decide what should be taxed or not? Should any sort of labor saving device be taxed? Before industrialization 80-90% of people worked in agriculture. Now it's in the single digits. You can therefore plausibly make the case that agriculture "rob[bed] the opportunities for the large majority of people". Should we be taxing tractors as well? Or are burger flipping robots somehow different?
You are thinking McDonalds, I'm talking "The greasy spoon diner next to where I lived in Cambridge that had really good philly cheesesteaks". Yes, having people employed there provides lots of benefits beyond the food. For starters, it was a third-place for some people. If we lose these places, we lose a lot.
Also, I'm talking about taxing restaurants and food that is processed (i.e, not fresh ingredients, preservatives added to extend shelf-life), artificial sugars or sweeteners added for flavor, etc). If you don't want to tax fast food chains because of automation then do it because their food is as addictive and as damaging to our health as cigarettes, if not more.
Yes, agriculture robbed the jobs but it was fine because we could move on to do other things. But we are about to lose the automation race, machines are getting better at doing things that used to be only years of travel ning. "Creative" jobs are getting eliminated because of LLMs. We are not there yet, but we already started this discussion of dispensing of software engineers because of Copilot et caterva. You think you might be safe from the chopping block, but this is not true to the millions of people entering the workforce now.
> Should we be taxing tractors as well?
No. We should be taxing the land owner to make sure the peasants can survive. Or even better, taking it from them and split it more equally.
I was sharing the parent’s myopic view. Maybe instagram and the like don’t bring you joy, but it certainly brings joy to many people, in addition to a way to stay connected with friends, keep up to date with event schedules like live music or new releases, and a means to run a business… to name a few.
> in addition to a way to stay connected with friends,
It's been exceptionally terrible at this for a long, long time now. For instance - had a friend I hadn't talked to in a while (as happens as you grow older, sometimes you only talk to people every 1-2 years but remain friendly) died recently. It popped up in my feed, somewhat as a shock to me - he had had cancer for the last year. Now, it's definitely on me for not keeping in contact more frequently, but I was shocked at how many updates about it I saw on his page that never once made it to my feed. Facebook didn't think a guy I'd been friends with on the platform for a decade and had 200+ mutual connections was anything I'd be interested in. It's explicitly anti-social by design.
As for the other things in your list, I've never found any value to any of that but I acknowledge some might. I also don't think you need a platform like FB/IG to do either of those things and the only value they provide is the network effect.
I think the jwagenet's point was that Instagram brings joy to many of its users, much like movies, video games, fine dining and skydiving can bring joy.
yes, your example is still about risk mitigation, but it's also a not-so-effective slippery slope argument likely motivated by a contrarian anti-masking stance. the reason there is no social pressure to helmet at all times is that we generally agree as a society that the inconvenience is not worth the minimal risk reduction.
this risk calculation is messy of course, as we all have different tolerances for inconvenience and risk, and we also have different responses to individual vs. collective risks.
> That's interesting as a programming exercise, but
why is this a "but"? does the existence of HPGL negate the work being presented here somehow? modern plotters seem to have less capable control languages such as whatever the axidraw does, or G-code for most of the open source controllers. I guess folks assume you'll just be programmatically generating or converting to the output format anyways.
inkscape can output HPGL directly. there's also chiplotle which is a python library. i've tried to gather up all the other HPGL-related software i could find here: https://github.com/beardicus/awesome-plotters#hpgl
my main concern with the cricut and silhouette machines is i probably don't want to use the manufacturer's shitted up software, and the open source replacements are hacks that might be janky and could probably be squashed at any time (i'm not actually sure the status of replacement software for each of these machines, because i always get them confused and haven't paid much attention)
generally, though, i do enjoy taking advantage of scaled-up (cheap) commercial products. but i also value supporting an open, small business (EMSL, and now Bantam Tools) that is active in the communities using its products.
The open source tools for the Silhouette work pretty well in my experience, there's a really well documented python library. You're right about the supplied software though, it works but it's unpleasant to use.
somewhat fair. i'm not in the market for commercial plotters so i guess i can avoid that purchase decision. regardless, i'm happy to see them running meetups and stuff for plotter folks, and i'm interested in where they take the product/software over the next few years.
lol. congrats on working a sermon into a post about red lobster but... this is exceedingly poor argumentation if your goal is to actually convince anybody.
it's spot-on if you just want to feel good about yourself though. you start off with a whopper of a false dichotomy and strawman, and don't improve from there.
very nice work and documentation. i did a little "plotter photo booth" with a homemade pen plotter many years ago and it was a ton of fun. folks love to see things moving off-screen!
Thank you! That was actually close to my first idea for this installation. I wrote some code to re-imagine a raster image as a vector, but I couldn't find a way to keep the detail while also keeping the drawing time below 10-15 minutes. That's how I arrived at the MIDI idea.
If you compare against the new hobby plotters -> sure those are somewhat crappy. I am a bit surprised about how much they cost. Those plotters are essentially using the same parts as low end 3d printers, but have half the axis, no heaters, and simpler controller controller boards. Considering that Ender3 goes for $150-$300 why do something like Axidraw or iDraw are closer to $500-$1000? I guess pen plotters now are much smaller niche compared to 3d printers and the effect from efficiency of scale is much bigger than I expected even if most parts are widely available.
But if you look at the commercial pen plotters that were made for doing actual work like HP 7475A - those things fly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe9VWvtvNtg It's mostly vintage models, but you can still occasionally pick them up on ebay and other marketplaces for a price that's comparable or better to the new hobby ones. There are also new vinyl cutters that you can attach a pen, but since the main requirements are different they aren't as fast.
i miss the days when running this sort of thing was not an obvious energy (and fan noise) tradeoff. i was big into the distributed.net [1] client in the late 90s, running it on my powermac. when i got to college in '98 seti@home had taken over everybody's screensavers.
A human line cook is also part of a "glorified assembly line that requires uniform inputs". This does not preclude the use of real/fresh ingredients, and also of course requires the employ of a human prep team to turn lumpy items into uniform ingredients.