Amazon: killing the unskilled laborer

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unskilled-laborAnd creating an entirely new cultural, social and business paradigm.

I cannot emphasize this more: our country — nay, the planet — has just been turned upside down. I suspect you think I’m radically overstating the issue. You’ll soon discover that I am not.

Leftist Jeff Bezos is about to not only turn retail business on its head, he is about to gut those persons who vote Demorat and/or Leftist. Because he is about to put them all out of work.

First, what is AmazonGo?

From Amazon.com:

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

What is Amazon Go?
Amazon Go is a new kind of store with no checkout required. We created the world’s most advanced shopping technology so you never have to wait in line. With our Just Walk Out Shopping experience, simply use the Amazon Go app to enter the store, take the products you want, and go! No lines, no checkout. (No, seriously.)

How does Amazon Go work?
Our checkout-free shopping experience is made possible by the same types of technologies used in self-driving cars: computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning. Our Just Walk Out technology automatically detects when products are taken from or returned to the shelves and keeps track of them in a virtual cart. When you’re done shopping, you can just leave the store. Shortly after, we’ll charge your Amazon account and send you a receipt.

How big is the store?
Our roughly 1,800 square feet of retail space is conveniently compact so busy customers can get in and out fast.

What do I need to get started?
All you need is an Amazon account, a supported smartphone, and the free Amazon Go app.

Why did you build Amazon Go?
Four years ago we asked ourselves: what if we could create a shopping experience with no lines and no checkout? Could we push the boundaries of computer vision and machine learning to create a store where customers could simply take what they want and go? Our answer to those questions is Amazon Go and Just Walk Out Shopping.

What can I buy at Amazon Go?
We offer delicious ready-to-eat breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack options made fresh every day by our on-site chefs and favorite local kitchens and bakeries. Our selection of grocery essentials ranges from staples like bread and milk to artisan cheeses and locally made chocolates. You’ll find well-known brands we love, plus special finds we’re excited to introduce to customers. For a quick home-cooked dinner, pick up one of our chef-designed Amazon Meal Kits, with all the ingredients you need to make a meal for two in about 30 minutes.

So I can just shop normally?
Yes! Just browse and shop like you would at any other store. Then you’re on your way. No lines, no checkout.

Perhaps you’re asking, at this point, am I nothing more than a shill for Amazon? Why such a lengthy quotation from Amazon?

I’m not a shill for Amazon. But I want you to understand the basics up front. I want you to understand what Amazon is offering initially and how it will itself morph and change to something else entirely, bringing the rest of the retail industry kicking and screaming along with it.

Trust me, with Amazon this is an experiment. It will expand from simply convenient foodstuffs. And beware: it accomplishes this feat of convenience by completely recording everything there is to know and see about you, storing the information into company databases. If it is digital it can be hacked. If you partake of the experiment any semblance of privacy you thought you once had will be well and truly gone, never to be re-established again.

THE LOGICAL EXTENSION:

This is a time when unskilled workers are demanding and, in many cases and locales, acquiring a $15-per-hour minimum “living” wage. The move is already having unforeseen consequences — but only unforeseen if you are a Leftist or a Demorat. Those of us with a common sense, business and logical bent knew what to expect.

Businesses have no duty whatsoever to lose money no matter what various governments legislate. A wage jump this large means that businesses have to examine all of their costs and — no shock — any business’s greatest costs are in personnel.

People are messy. They are finicky and critical and they get sick, take vacation, offend others, become unproductive, lazy, unhappy, pick fights, expose companies to various forms of societal lawsuits, and come with mandatory workers’ comp, medical and other benefits. In a word, people are expensive.

Some businesses, therefore, are now doing their best to eschew unskilled or minimally-skilled labor and instead replacing people with, in the immediate case of the restaurant industry, ordering kiosks or devices on tables from which to order and pay. In Seattle, for example, one of the first places to embrace a mandatory $15-per-hour wage rate, small businesses began to shutter their doors, close, go bankrupt or physically move outside the city to neighboring Kings County.

This is already happening. It is already a movement within business.

Now comes Amazon.

And businesses have to compete.

Do the logical extension: Amazon will expand these stores. Other retail stores and chains are allowing Amazon to take the step like the proverbial canary in the coal mine.

But what if Amazon is wildly successful?

Businesses have to compete.

This paradigm will expand to other stores and chains and various forms of retail. When the first large chain embraces the technology the others almost have no other choice. They will do so too. The time will come when you’ll enter a Costco or a WalMart or a J.C. Penney’s or a Nordstrom or a Bed Bath & Beyond, pick up what you want, and leave.

Perhaps “great” for the consumer. But what about the unskilled or minimally-skilled laborer? Their services will no longer be, on a major level, needed. How do these people primarily vote? Leftist or Demorat. And who is Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon? A wild Leftist. Schadenfreude.

A note to those who have no motivations, have no aspirations, no skills, no interest in acquiring skills: you are about to be crushed.

REPERCUSSIONS:

First, the only persons needed to work those first Amazon stores will be those who prepare the food, stock shelves and clean. Cashiers and/or human interaction will be mostly absent. I suspect for some consumers this will be a blessing. I, for one, patronize a store solely to shop, not to chat, unless I need specific advice regarding, say, technological devices.

When the technology really begins to get legs, there will be pushback from unskilled labor, from, say, California’s SEIU, various unions, Leftist groups, BLM and others. I predict that you will initially see mob runs on these stores where large groups will enter and simply loot a store wholesale.

There will be massive labor, union, budgetary, business, cultural and social implications.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR LABOR:

This new paradigm will decimate the unskilled or minimally-skilled labor force. It has to. There is no other option if businesses not only wish to compete with each other nationally but internationally as well.

It will also have a major impact upon immigration. The bulk of illegal immigrants bring no skills with them; they do however bring needs like food, housing, support. Illegal Mexicans, immigrants from other nations will no longer be required to “do the jobs that no one else will do.” There are, already, machines that pick fruit and other vegetables in fields. The need for immigrants will diminish.

This is a game-changer, ladies and gentlemen.

It will not happen overnight.

But it will happen.

BZ

 

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Jill Stein: doing Hillary Clinton’s work

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hillary-clinton-and-jill-steinAnd Stein’s Green Party is having none of it.

First, from BizPacReview.com:

Green Party releases statement distancing itself from Jill Stein: Why only recount states Hillary lost?

by Warner Todd Huston

As failed Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein continues her crusade to help Hillary win the White House through a series of recounts in key states, her own Green Party is now saying they want nothing to do with her effort.

Why might that be, you may wonder?

Stein has targeted three key states for recounts in the hope that the vote for Trump can be overturned in favor of Democrat Party nominee Hillary Clinton. But because Stein is now working for Clinton, her own Green Party is calling foul on the recount effort.

The Green Party officially weighed in.

“The decision to pursue a recount was not made in a democratic or a strategic way, nor did it respect the established decision making processes and structures of the Green Party of the United States (GPUS),” the official press release asserts. “The recount has created confusion about the relationship between the Green and Democratic parties because the states chosen for the recount are only states in which Hillary Clinton lost. There were close races in other states such as New Hampshire and Minnesota where Clinton won, but which were not part of the recount. And this recount does not address the disenfranchisement of voters; it recounts votes that were already counted rather than restoring the suffrage of voters who were prevented from voting.”

You have to ask yourself some very basic questions when considering Jill Stein’s insistence upon recounts in the states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — as Stein received such minuscule vote counts there, overall.

These are states with a narrow Trump win over Clinton, not a narrow Stein win. Jill Stein had a remote chance.

One must ask, then: cui bono? The answer is clearly: Hillary Rodham Clinton. Those three states were expected to turn blue for Clinton but instead turned red for Trump.

The meme from Leftists then became: we must question the election results because there is clearly no way Trump could have won absent rampant cheating. Despite the massively hypocritical Hillary Rodham Clinton having said the following.

As of Saturday (12-3), Stein has dropped her pursuit of a recount in Pennsylvania. The Stein campaign will seek relief in federal court, however, because it couldn’t raise the $1 million dollar bond required by Pennsylvania for said recount by the due date. I suppose the Stein campaign expected — as Leftists are wont to do — the state to provide expensive services to her for free.

On Wednesday, November 30th, a Wisconsin judge denied Stein’s demand for a hand recount in that state, leaving it up to the individual counties to decide whether votes are counted by machine or hand. I make this notation because Hillary Clinton joined in that legal effort.

At first blush the entire situation appears to be summed up thusly: “the womenses has to stick togetha.”

More division instead of union by Leftists and Demorats.

Factually, Jill Stein raised roughly $4 million dollars (now, $6.7 million dollars, TWICE what Stein’s GPUS presidential campaign did) for recounts in those three states. That begs the obvious next question: what happens to the money left over from contributions and donations aimed at supporting the recount?

“If we raise more than what’s needed, the surplus will also go toward election integrity efforts and to promote voting system reform,” the new line on the (GPUS) website said.

As CBSNews.com writes:

But as for where the additional money can go, FEC guidelines are unclear. “There’s limited guidance from the FEC on how these funds need to be spent,” (Brendan Fischer, an associate counsel at the Campaign Legal Center) Fischer said.

Leftist pablum-speech for “anything we want it to, since we control the FEC.”

The bottom line is this. There is no evidence that voting machines were hacked, nor any evidence that the “Russians were involved.” There is evidence, however, that dead people voted, that illegals voted — prodded and abetted by Leftists, Demorats, all the way up to the Oval Office itself as this video indicates.

Consequently, there are only a limited number of conclusions one can draw about the recount, Stein, the Green Party and Hillary Clinton. They are

  • This is a propaganda/publicity stunt;
  • It’s a fundraising effort for Stein and/or the Green Party, a donor list increase;
  • It’s cover for HRC’s attempt to sour/overturn the election;
  • An overarching attempt to diminish or foil Trump by any means possible or any Conservative traction or momentum

Leftists and Demorats talk about healing America, about uniting its people when, in fact, recounts do nothing of the sort. Instead, they continue to fracture, divide and erode the confidence that Americans require in order to look forward to a new administration, fomenting instability, disrespect, incivility and precisely the kind of violence, looting, fires and riots you saw in the streets of America directly following Trump’s election — at the hands of, I should specifically emphasize, Leftists.

On the other hand, these actions and this philosophy is perfectly in keeping with the past antics of Leftists who seek not to unite — as opposed to their verbal emesis — but to continue with the wedges of division.

BZ

 

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Italy down; France next?

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italy-five-star-movement-beppe-grilloI stated last Monday on Ken McClenton’s The Exceptional Conservative Show that if Italy rebuked Leftist government proposals it would be on its way to its own “Italexit,” and, should that occur then France would be next. I also stated that if France slapped Leftist values and went forward with its own “Frexit” then the EU was well and truly done, no matter what Germany or Brussels did.

Guess what?

Italy slapped the shite out of its own Leftist government on Sunday. Renzi is not long for his position. From YahooNews.com:

Renzi facing exit as polls point to Italy referendum defeat

by Angus MacKinnon

Rome (AFP) – Matteo Renzi’s time as Italy’s prime minister appeared to be over Sunday as exit polls indicated voters had overwhelmingly rejected constitutional reform proposals on which he had staked his future.

The reformist premier had vowed to quit if he lost the vote on proposals to streamline parliament and the first exit polls indicated he had been left with little other option.

Polls for national broadcaster Rai and the La7 television channel both called the vote decisively for the No camp. Their surveys put the winning margin at an average of 56.7 percent to 43.3.

But what were these so-called “proposals” on which Italy was voting?

The main opposition parties went into the vote insisting that there should be early elections if the proposals — curtailing the size and powers of Italy’s Senate and transferring powers from regions to the national government — were defeated.

Opposition parties denounced the proposed amendments to the 68-year-old constitution as dangerous for democracy because they would have removed important checks and balances on executive power.

The chamber would also have been stripped of most of its powers to block and revise legislation, and to unseat governments.

Read that correctly. Translated: the proposals were a naked power grab by the Italian government to remove whatever independence and authority local regions may have yet remaining because — as we all realize — any massive, centralized government knows much better than any individual how that person must live his or her life.

The bottom line concerns by voters were these:

Spearheaded by the populist Five Star Movement, the biggest rival to Renzi’s Democratic party, the “No” campaign also capitalised on Renzi’s declining popularity, a sluggish economy and the problems caused by tens of thousands of migrants arriving in Italy from Africa.

Say, might we have heard similar concerns expressed somewhere else quite recently?

Let’s talk specifics and reality.

The Italian government can’t pay its debt. Their budget deficit is growing. “The EU Fiscal Compact requires Italy to run budget surpluses large enough to cut its debt ratio by 3.6% of GDP every year for 20 years.” Really? You’d then best get ready, Brussels, to kick most everyone out of your blessed European Union and watch it crumble with those My Little Pony, purple-skied wishes.

The Italian banks are damned near bankrupt. Can they write down any of their bad debt? Negative, Will Robinson, because their capital ratios are already abysmally low.

Italy has an official unemployment rate of 11.4% meaning, of course, the actual unemployment rate is much higher due to persons who have stopped looking for jobs altogether. Just like the US. Just like any other country. Those figures are never collected or reported. But wait until you see these figures: “the youth unemployment rate is 65% in Calabria, 56% in Siciliy and 53% in Campania.”

Furthermore: “Industrial output has dropped by 35% since 2008, and investment by 59%.”

Stand by for the nominal Leftist bleats: it was nothing but ill-informed populism run rampant with Islamophobia, driven by irrational xenophobia, because all the commoners, proles, groundlings and serfs well and truly do not know what is best for them. And the Leftist Elites most certainly do. Blah blah blah. Rentoon rentoon rentoon.

These are indeed “interesting times” according to the Chinese saying. “Populism” is on the rise, no doubt — though I dislike that term. What I prefer to say is this: taxpayers are finally beginning to awaken to their being fleeced by big governments globally, run by Leftist Elites who wish to ultimately answer to no one or nothing. Populism cannot be tolerated because it portends a diminishment of their centralized mastery, challenges their authority, and blinkers their chances to make even larger and farther-reaching power grabs for complete and utter dominance.

That cannot stand. The unwashed masses must be put down, and quickly.

Yes, as Frank Underwood says, the money is fine and dandy.

But ultimately, it’s about the power.

BZ

P.S.

From this photograph, who is still standing?

leftist-leadersCorrect. Angela Merkel. Cameron, Obama, Hollande and Renzi gone or going. Anticipate that there will be massive pressure on Merkel from Leftists to continue living the definition of insanity, and that she will push back in ways heretofore yet unseen.

 

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Who is General James Mattis?

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general-james-mattisUSMC General (four star) James Mattis (ret.) has been selected as Donald Trump’s nominee for the new administration’s Secretary of Defense.

People ask: who is James Mattis?

Ladies and gentlemen, this is James Mattis.

A General Mattis Christmas Story

Featured from the National Museum of the Marine Corps Museum’s Facebook Page

A couple of months ago, when I told General Krulak, the former Commandant of the Marine Corps, now the chair of the Naval Academy Board of Visitors, that we were having General Mattis speak this evening, he said, “Let me tell you a Jim Mattis story.” General Krulak said, when he was Commandant of the Marine Corps, every year, starting about a week before Christmas, he and his wife would bake hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of Christmas cookies. They would package them in small bundles.

 Then on Christmas day, he would load his vehicle. At about 4 a.m., General Krulak would drive himself to every Marine guard post in the Washington-Annapolis-Baltimore area and deliver a small package of Christmas cookies to whatever Marines were pulling guard duty that day. He said that one year, he had gone down to Quantico as one of his stops to deliver Christmas cookies to the Marines on guard duty. He went to the command center and gave a package to the lance corporal who was on duty.

 He asked, “Who’s the officer of the day?” The lance corporal said, “Sir, it’s Brigadier General Mattis.” And General Krulak said, “No, no, no. I know who General Mattis is. I mean, who’s the officer of the day today, Christmas day?” The lance corporal, feeling a little anxious, said, “Sir, it is Brigadier General Mattis.”

 General Krulak said that, about that time, he spotted in the back room a cot, or a daybed. He said, “No, Lance Corporal. Who slept in that bed last night?” The lance corporal said, “Sir, it was Brigadier General Mattis.”

About that time, General Krulak said that General Mattis came in, in a duty uniform with a sword, and General Krulak said, “Jim, what are you doing here on Christmas day? Why do you have duty?” General Mattis told him that the young officer who was scheduled to have duty on Christmas day had a family, and General Mattis decided it was better for the young officer to spend Christmas Day with his family, and so he chose to have duty on Christmas Day.

General Krulak said, “That’s the kind of officer that Jim Mattis is.”

The story above was told by Dr. Albert C. Pierce, the Director of the Center for the Study of Professional Military Ethics at The United States Naval Academy. He was introducing General James Mattis who gave a lecture on Ethical Challenges in Contemporary Conflict in the spring of 2006. This was taken from the transcript of that lecture.

Frankly, as I read that, I choked up a bit and my eyes began to water.

To me, this provides all the information I need to know about a true leader.

BZ

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