That’s a good point. My examples are pretty bad in that regard, I admit. I would still argue that jobs do come and go though. We have many jobs today that didn’t exist 40 years ago.
About outsourcing work to costumers, I kindly disagree: I personally love self-checkout in my grocery store though. I see it as an improvement over standing in line, having to think which order to put stuff on the conveyor for optimal packaging (gotta put the heavy stuff first), still clogging up the conveyor after the cashier because you happen to have just enough bagspace, but only when you pack optimally, while 2 people look at you angrily because they now have to wait 5 seconds longer because your brain freezes over this stressful situation.
No, this didn’t happen everytime I went grocery shopping at a cashier. But enough to see self scanning as a way more relaxing time.
So for me, it’s not soing someones work, but rather that I, as the costumer, am in full control of the tempo and way I want to so things. But I understand not everyone feela the same way, and that’s ok.
There’s always a line for self-checkout now too though, and you still need to consider what to package first. Ultimately it’s down to personal preference. There are a lot of people on this platform with social anxiety who prefer self-checkout. Personally I hate it, and everything it represents, but I understand why some people prefer it. As an express lane it’s pretty okay, but self checkout for an entire cart of products is bullshit.
This is a different situation than self-checkout at supermarkets. There yes you could argue a cashier who is experienced with scanning items all day and has access to a fully-featured POS can scan all your items faster and more efficiently than you could ever do on that locked-down self-checkout pos, and owners who take away cashiers are purely saving money at the expense of your time. But here you yourself have to communicate your order either way. I much prefer to browse at my leisure and tap at pictures rather than shouting my order 3 times while there is an impatient line behind me.
We can keep the supermarket cashiers, we just have to demand it. Always choose the full-service line, and complain loudly if there are not enough cashiers to keep the line short, scoff at any suggestion to use the self-checkout and demand to speak to a manager and corporate. As I said elsewhere, one person can only do so much, but when a million people keep doing it the mountain will have to move. I feel personally responsible for the installation of these cashboxes by insisting to pay in cash every single time for the past several years.
They haven’t had dedicated cashiers for years. These allow them to spend more time making food and less time dealing with taking orders and handling cash. That’s it. If anything, it makes the employees’ jobs easier without eliminating positions. Speaking as someone who worked at a McDonald’s before that has had these kiosks for years now.
How can you be sure it doesn’t eliminate positions? Is there some rule that states “every franchise must be staffed by exactly 8 people at all times”? Seems more likely to me the schedules will be adjusted until every worker is still occupied 100% of the time.
I’d personally prefer to focus on making food too, but there could be others who actually prefer manning the register.
How can you be sure it doesn’t eliminate positions?
Did you miss the very first sentence of my comment? They haven’t had a dedicated cashier position for a long time. Until that kiosk can also make the food, nobody is losing their job to it.
You really don’t see the difference between 5 people working, spending 80% of time making food and 20% floating at register, versus 4 people working 100% making food serving the same total number of customers now that registers have been nearly entirely replaced by kiosks and apps?
No. Because not only do they hire the bare minimum for the restaurant already (which yes, actually there are rules for; they’re set by corporate), the kiosks aren’t the only way to order. You can still go up to the counter and get a real person to come off the line and take your order. Nobody is floating around the register at all until a customer comes up to it to make an order. Again, these simply stop the need for anyone to stop cooking or doing literally any other more time sensitive tasks and take an order.
I don’t see why you are being so stubborn about this. If you don’t like the numbers I gave you because “you can still go up to the counter and get a real person” it’s an easy adjustment to make that tells the same story: before kiosks = 5 people working 75% at food and 25% at register, after kiosks = 4 people working 95% at food 5% at register. The conclusion is the same - your claim that automation does not eliminate positions is simply incorrect. I thought maybe you had some insider knowledge on mandatory staffing levels, but it seems you are just bad at math. Everyone else in these comments was arguing about jobs disappearing (not me! I only wanted to show off the cool cashbox) - it must have been really confusing to see all those people upset about something which you can’t even comprehend as a problem.
I don’t see why you are being so stubborn about this.
Because it doesn’t fucking happen and your figures are entirely made up? You and everyone else claiming these have taken jobs clearly have never actually worked at a McDonald’s and are talking straight out of your asses.
That’s the glorious thing about the rainbow. It contains all (visible) colors. (Obviously the pride flag is limited to stripes of distinct colors, but it’s supposed to be representative of everything.)
Yes, sorry. It is a problem that started over the weekend. I thought I had patched it by doubling the server’s RAM and adding a core, but that was not enough. Some process is causing the RAM use to spike and the image backend is crashing because of that.
Thanks. I noticed and reset the server a few minutes ago.
Something has been off recently. The CPU is spiking and the RAM gets used up, which crashes the pict-rs container. The pict-rs won’t reconnect until I reset the lemmy Docker container.
I doubled the RAM and added one core, but that was not enough to stop this problem, which means that whatever is causing these spikes is unconstrained. I need to look more deeply into Docker memory management to see if I can limit RAM usage such that the crash can be avoided while remaining functional.
Thanks. I have looked into it a bit more and I think that it is the postgres database grabbing all the memory it can. I have set a hard limit for the postgres container. Hopefully this resolves the problem!
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