This is an interesting article about a new breakthrough in easy-to-use industrial robots.

The author correctly calls out the possible threat to workers doing the jobs today this robot might do in the future.  But he and his commenters miss much and get much wrong.

They brush on, but largely miss, that we’ve priced our people out of industrial work with our kowtowing to unions and government’s imposing of regulations that are easily believed by the voting public to be free.  Regulations — about everything from bike helmets to car seats to what schoolkids have to provide to the teacher for the classroom — have made having kids hugely more expensive, resulting in fewer kids.  Similarly, layers upon layers of laws and regulations about what workers get in addition to their pay have made them ridiculously expensive, particularly for low-skilled industrial labor.  So you can still find wholly manual consumer goods packaging operations here and there, you won’t find them in any high-volume low-margin application.  And it gets easier and easier to justify simple automation even for those applications, since regulations are only ever added, never taken away.

“It takes significant resources for a company to set up a work environment for a robot,” saysJulie Shah, an assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, who studies the role of robots in manufacturing. “It requires suppliers providing materials in a certain way, it requires designing the whole factory infrastructure, and it requires caging the robot. If you need to reprogram these robots, it often takes special expertise or external consultants.”

Professor Shah is correct.  So what?  The high cost of workers make the challenges she lists minor hurdles to higher productivity through automation.  Special expertise, factory redesign, safety measures — those costs are easily justified by the savings of shedding overpriced workers.

Other experts agree that robots like Baxter could improve U.S. employment prospects in the long term. Willy Shih, a former IBM and Kodak executive who studies the relationship between manufacturing and innovation as a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School, says manufacturing work moved to China partly because it was easier to use humans than to make automation more flexible. Baxter could change that calculation. “To the extent that they can reduce the setup overhead for changing over a line or something, then that becomes really interesting,” he says. “Anything that improves flexibility, that’s a huge deal.”

I hate to be snide (no, actually, I love to be snide, so I’ll take great pleasure in this).  But I’m not sure I’d be taking the perspective of someone who’s a former IBM and Kodak executive all that seriously.  And Shih misses the point entirely.  We moved work to China because it was cheaper to do so. We’ll replace the Chinese with robots for the same reason.  Regardless, it eliminates the manual labor of American workers, probably for good.  And no, robots won’t improve US employment prospects.  They’ll improve the prospects for skilled programmers and servicemen, but the need for those folks will be limited and of short duration — especially as robots become easier to program and more reliable.

Some fear that overcoming those obstacles could cost human jobs. But Brooks doesn’t agree. He says Baxter is designed to make human workers more efficient, not to replace them. “An electric drill makes a home contractor more productive,” he says. “Should we ban electric drills so there are more jobs for home contractors? You ask any home contractor that.”

More foolishness.  A power drill means you need fewer contractors to build the house.  A robot means you need fewer — and maybe no — manual laborers to build a car, make cereal, machine rifle barrels, and on and on and on.

He remembers marveling at the fact that so much electronics manufacturing was still done by hand and how much of this kind of manufacturing had moved to low-wage economies in Asia. “I thought, ‘Are we going to be doing this in 500 years—still chasing cheap labor? There’s got to be a different way,'” he says.

I like the notion.  But what happens to the displaced manual laborers?  They don’t go home and live the lives of the idle classes in The Time Machine or Zardoz.  They go home and go on welfare and take drugs and commit crimes.  The notion that government can price people out of manual labor and have no social repercussions is a colossally stupid one indeed.

A couple weekends back in Brown County, Indiana — perfect camping weather!

Hard to believe the fatty fat fat fat baby below turned into the skinny Cub Scout farther down.

I got into a stretch this summer of reading about African big game hunting from back in the days of the colonial safari.  One of the several books I read was President Theodore Roosevelt’s African Game Trails.

For the longest time I’ve had a dislike of our 26th president, since I’d read amply about his role in launching the progressive movement alongside the founder of The New Republic, Herbert Croly.  I’d known about his war heroism and had heard snippets about his hunting prowess, so I always had a grudging respect for Roosevelt as well.  But I couldn’t quite admire him given his prominence in creating today’s modern liberal and his corrosive and destructive policies.

Having read of his lengthy foray into the heart of the Dark Continent, however, I’ve been forced — gladly, I might add — to acknowledge that TR was one of the great men of our country’s history.  And having seen into his way of thinking by reading his own words and thoughts, I believe I can see a bit of why he would have helped birth such a destructive force:  because he had no idea what it would lead to.

I believe the modern liberal would be so unfathomable to Teddy Roosevelt that he couldn’t possibly see that creature being the result of what he himself espoused.  A man’s man, of deep useful learning, true heroism, magnificent self-sufficiency, and everyday courage: that was Teddy Roosevelt.  And to him, the sickening, effeminate, effete ward of the state, overeducated in completely useless knowledge and confident that he knows best for everyone else while making a ruin of himself and everything he touches — that is, today’s liberal — would be completely beyond the ken of his imagination.

I’m confident Roosevelt meant well.  The law of unintended consequences touches us all; it’s truly sad that it came home to roost so venomously and disastrously for this true American hero.  And for the rest of us, too sadly indeed.

File this one in the drawer for “excellent ideas — but much easier said than done (not that that’s any excuse).”

I just yesterday came across an article that represents sweet vindication.  I’ve long felt that we’re saddled with a generation of “leaders” who are horrendously entitled and overconfident, who have no track record of actual accomplishment or success, yet who expect ever greater power and reward.  Where it comes to the products of our elite universities, William Deresiewicz would say I’m absolutely right in his 2008 article, “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education.”  It’s interesting to read this and see the names he calls out as examples, because obviously his time frame misses the quintessential modern example of Barack Obama.  (As an aside, he calls out Scooter Libby, because apparently being framed by Colin Powell and Richard Armitage and convicted of having a less than 100% accurate memory helps make his point.)

What I find to be an even bigger miss — not Deresiewicz’s fault because he was solely focused on Ivy Leaguers — is how the same horrendous character flaws he calls out in products of the truly elite institutions are now all-too-common coming out of any bigger university.  Is this because of the march of the “liberals” through our institutions?  I’d bet yes.

Regardless, we need a complete purging in this nation, in both business and government, of our self-appointed masters who’ve signed up not to do the brutally hard work of leading our organizations to greater things, but who instead want merely the pay, perks, power and social status of “leadership” without any of the real burdens.

I was watching a show about Yosemite on NatGeo tonight.  I wasn’t disappointed with the images of that most beautiful place on earth.

I was eventually driven to turn it off early, however, by the incessant invoking of the “climate change” and “global warming” twin bogeymen.

In the most ridiculous part, a segment was devoted to the “research” being conducted by nitwits from UC Berkeley (where else?) to study the effects of global warming on the giant sequoias.  Students climbed to the tops of the giants and took sample greenery to check the evaporation rate of the water pumped up constantly through the trees’ trunks from the roots hundreds of feet below.  The theory went that this was to check how global warming could result in disruption of the this pumping mechanism.

This is activism masquerading as science.  Without a control — a sample from before this dreaded global warming began — the data from today is worthless, assuming you believe global warming has already begun.  What’s more, the notion that a degree or two of difference in the average temperature could have any effect here is absurd on its face, since swings of much more than that have been survived by these goliaths for hundreds of years.  Finally, at one point it was shared that the expectation was that the sun would be hotter because of global warming, and that this would be one cause of the disruption of the water pumping cycle.  Exactly what mechanism of man’s carbon-driven evil would cause the sun to be hotter?

I wish there were gaming involving “research” like this, because I would put a pot of money on the advocates — sorry, students — finding that we need much more government spending and bureaucracy to save the giant sequoia.

I was watching a show about the fall of the Egypt of the Pharoahs last weekend, and it turns out that it was because of climate change.  Specifically, a 100 year drought saw the Nile stop flowing towards its delta on the Mediterranean, and that did in the once-powerful empire.  More details about the discovery of this historical weather event can be found here.

Strangely, however, there were no coal-fired power plants or SUVs that caused this meteorological cataclysm.  Beware of the cum hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy, I guess.  Also, it certainly brings perspective to the weather events of today from which so much is attempted to be derived; witness the shrieks from the usual suspects during this year’s American drought that global warming had now been proven.  As has been said many times before, however, there’s a word for just what we saw this summer:  weather.

Another interesting point from the show was the hypothesis that, just as climate change led to the demise of ancient Egypt, so did it lead to its rise.  It’s suspected that the desertification of north Africa, once a mix of grasslands and forests, and now called the Sahara, drove the inhabitants of that area over to the banks of the Nile.

Here’s a video of one of the best songs of the brassy late ’60s/early ’70s pop.  Sad they were a one-hit wonder.  I assume this is some kind of reunion gig, but what stands out the most is how pathetic the fans are.  Ugh — I know I’m not as revved up as I once was, but I sure hope that if I ever look like this crowd, I don’t show up at a rock concert.

Here’s a heckuva story about the next innovation in unmanned military flight — the self-guided warbird, the X-47B.  Slick — and capable of takeoff from and landing on an aircraft carrier.  And, of course, deadly.