Over and Over and Over and Over...

[rain_gryphon]

Automation in restaurants. Unlike the interviewee, I love the idea. My chief fear is that it's not so inevitable as he thinks. We're very close to the point where the falling costs of robotics combined with the push for ridiculously high wages for burger flippers make it plausible. There are obvious advantages in having a robot kitchen - food is rapidly and consistently prepared, no training period, you don't have people showing up to work sick and spreading disease, you don't have sick people calling off work and causing staffing issues, and while the initial cost is high, once you're past that, the operational cost is much less. It interfaces very well with the idea of ordering and paying by app, on which which every fast-food chain seems hell-bent these days. Also, for sheer damn coolness, the only thing that can beat a robot restaurant is a 1930s-style automat. The initial adopters are going to have a strong advantage over their competitors.

If anything stops it, it's going to be the high initial cost, especially since we've just gone through a period of economic disruption.

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The Dirty Dog is shuttin' down, at least in Canada. Bus service in general is economically improbable, a relic from an age when good roads became widespread, but most people still didn't have cars, and Greyhound CA has been dying for years. They're caught in the position of being a service that only a few people still use, and those primarily from economic necessity, so it becomes difficult to charge a fair price for the service. The Chinese virus just tipped them over the edge. Interestingly, Greyhound US is persisting.

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I got a stack of dollar coins in my change at the store. Sadly, the store clerk felt obliged to ask me if it would be okay to give them as change. Apparently someone had paid with them, and it causes issues at closing time for the money count if dollar coins are in the mix.

This saddens me, as I think the $1 coins are one of the better ideas ever, for all that I almost never have them anymore. I always feel slighty Canadian when I use them. Interestingly, the new ones (with POTUSes on them), have lettering around the edge, just like the UK pound coins. Ours say "E Pluribus Unum * In God We Trust * 2007 D" (D being the Denver mint mark), which I'd never noticed before. There's a certain amusing irony in this, as milling the edges was originally intended to keep crooks from trimming off metal, and while our dollars are stamped from cheap bronze, the government insists on referring to them as "golden dollars", so this kind of carries thorugh on the theme of trying to deceive the taxpayers.

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Comments

[whitetail.livejournal.com]

I think the dollar coin would have succeeded if only they'd withdrawn the paper dollar from circulation and made the $2 bill the smallest paper denomination.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

They learned nothing from the failed introduction of the metric system. Exact same error.