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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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While cooks and bussers aren't threatened by automation just yet, waiters very much are. Not to the point of full elimination, but electronic ordering certainly would reduce the numbers of required waitstaff, and it's certainly catching up lately.

TBH I am not sure that the problem of "cut-to-the-bone wages" has a good solution - nobody is going to pay $100 for a medium-quality hamburger, and most of those "need two human hands" don't need much beyond - which means the pool of potential applicants is unlimited, and if you disrupt the market by coercion ("living wage", etc.) you'd either get law-free zones (e.g. hiring illegals or just ignoring the law), or shortages (yes, you'd get your minimum wage, you'd just be doing alone the work three people did before - hello "abusive bosses"), or elimination of low-and-medium scale food industry, due to the economy of it not being sustainable. The only stable resolution here would be to eliminate the contradiction - e.g. by automation.

‘Automation’ in low skill industries- order pulling, picking crops, fry cooking, etc.- is really just substituting a large quantity of low skill labor for a smaller quantity of high skill labor. For agriculture this trade off makes sense- machines can do the work of many, many humans while creating only limited amounts of work for mechanics. In food service it doesn’t because there’s a limited number of man-hours to replace in a typical restaurant; fully automated fryers exist, but don’t displace enough low skill labor to be worth the cost of the high skill labor to maintain and repair them.