As explained in yesterday’s ‘post’, I was away from my keyboard as I spent the day down at the older WP Sister’s place to celebrate Christmas. One thing I can say that was a pleasant surprise was the traffic on the way down and back, being a lot lighter than I expected. It was smooth sailing in both directions. The other thing that was a pleasant surprise was that there were only a couple of drivers I saw pulling bonehead moves on the highway. I’ll usually see dozens on the way down and back from my sister’s. I guess they must have either traveled the day before or stayed home this year.
It was a long day, a tiring day, but a great day.
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Who says there’s no such thing as karma?
It looks like the Europeans are finding out the government mandate for EVs is backfiring on them as it is now cheaper to fill a gas tank than to recharge an EV.
I can see a similar thing happening here considering the price of electricity is going up, a lot of this driven by choking off the the supplies of natural gas which many utilities use to generate electricity, the dismal failure of renewables to meet the promises made by our ‘betters’, and the increasing fragility of our electrical grid. There’s also the rapidly rising costs of the batteries needed, a not unexpected thing considering the increasing demand for EV batteries, even if some of that demand has been artificially driven by the aforementioned government mandates, both here and abroad.
Yeah, this is gonna work. Yeah...any time now.
Yeah. Right.
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Is this a sign the ApocalypseTM is nigh?
McDonald’s has announced the opening of their first fully automated restaurant. It is located in the Forth Worth, Texas area.
Let’s be honest here: McDonald’s customer service was never anything to write home about. It’s no great loss for patrons that they won’t be greeted with the barely intelligible grunts of minimum-wage McDonald’s employees who are probably high and who hate their jobs.To quote an observation made elsewhere in the post, “You asked for $25 minimum wage. You get: First fully automated McDonald’s in Texas.”
The noteworthiness is that this development is a bellwether of current trends and things to come. Other fast food giants like White Castle are flirting similarly with fully replacing outdated human resources with tech.
When technology for some jobs becomes cheaper than paying a human being wages (and benefits, in some cases), you can expect technology will eventually replace the human being(s).
As I have mentioned once or twice before in earlier posts, our local McDonald’s had gone under renovations early this year. The changes were profound. One of the biggest changes was ordering kiosks replacing three of the order registers at the counter, leaving only one. The remaining register is not manned constantly. The amount of indoor seating has also been reduced while the number of drive-thru lanes has been doubled. Customers can also order and pay for their food ahead of time using the McDonald’s app on their phone. Then all they have to do is go in to the restaurant and pick up their food. They don’t have to interact with any of the employees to get their food.
Welcome to the 21st Century!
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Some people shouldn’t serve in Congress because they or just to dumb, too willfully ignorant, or have malice for their nation and their constituents, or some combination of the three.
The latest example of this is Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) who claims the electoral college is “a threat to democracy”.
First, Rep, Raskin should be reminded that we are not a democracy. We are a Constitutional Republic.
Second, the Founders understood the perils of a Tyranny of the Majority, so they set up Congress and the Electoral College to help prevent just such a thing. Having the more populous states ‘lording it over the smaller states’ was seen as a dangerous thing, making them vassal states to the large states, hence the existence of the Senate. The same is true of the Electoral College because the large states would be electing the President and the small states would be ignored. That is what the Founders wanted to prevent.
Some, like Raskin, will make the argument that such a tyranny will not come to be, but there is a lot of evidence here in the US to prove that argument is false. All we have to do is look at the states since the two disastrous SCOTUS decisions - Reynolds v Sims and Baker v Carr - which created exactly those kinds of tyrannies in states like California, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, where the more populous portions of those states have marginalized the more thinly populated parts, making them vassals – providers of tax revenues without receiving much in the way of state revenues – feeding the voracious tax appetite of the cities, and getting little or nothing in return. One look at the parts of New York outside the Metro New York City area and the I-87 corridor illustrates that. So does Illinois for any area outside of the Metro Chicago area as does California anywhere away from the coastal area.
Rep. Raskin is a much bigger danger to our ‘democracy’ than the Electoral College would ever be.
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And that’s the slightly abbreviated news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where it’s still cold, the lake is slowly starting to freeze over, and where I don’t care that it’s Monday because I am off for the holiday!