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Thanks To ‘Fight For $15’ Minimum Wage, McDonald’s Unveils Job-Replacing Self-Service Kiosks Nationwide

Technological unemployment speeding up, and the elite types as always trying to get the poor and middle class to go at each others throats, rather than address the elephant charging at both of them, that robots and AI are coming for all the jobs in under 10 years now.


Other states are also learning the same basic economic lesson: Customers have a limit to what they will pay for service. Voters in Washington, Colorado, Maine and Arizona voted to raise minimum wages on Election Day, convinced of the policy’s merits after millions of dollars were spent by union advocates. In the immediate aftermath, family-owned restaurants, coffee shops and even childcare providers have struggled to absorb the coming cost increase—with parents paying the cost through steeper childcare bills, and employees paying the cost through reduced shift hours or none at all.

The out-of-state labor groups who funded these initiatives aren’t shedding tears over the consequences. Like their Soviet-era predecessors who foolishly thought they could centrally manage prices and business operations to fit an idealistic worldview, economic reality keeps ruining the model of all gain and no pain. This brings me to my last correct prediction, which is that the Fight for $15 was always more a creation of the left-wing Service Employees International Union (SEIU) rather than a legitimate grassroots effort. Reuters reported last year that, based on federal filings, the SEIU had spent anywhere from $24 million to $50 million on the its Fight for $15 campaign, and the number has surely increased since then.

This money has bought the union a lot of protesters and media coverage. You can expect more of it on November 29. But the real faces of the Fight for $15 are the young people and small business owners who have had their futures compromised. Those faces are not happy ones.

Ageing Societies 2016

Longevity a challenge or an opportunity?

This autumn, The Economist Events will bring global leaders from business, finance and health care together with policymakers to explore the opportunities of an ageing world.

Together they will discuss how best to adapt financial products and realign business and public policies in ways that will drive economic growth and mitigate problems that ageing societies could otherwise bring.

IBM and NVIDIA Team Up on World’s Fastest Deep Learning Enterprise Solution

SALT LAKE CITY, Nov. 14, 2016 /PRNewswire/ IBM (NYSE: IBM) and NVIDIA (NVDA)today announced collaboration on a new deep learning tool optimized for the latest IBM and NVIDIA technologies to help train computers to think and learn in more human-like ways at a faster pace.

Deep learning is a fast growing machine learning method that extracts information by crunching through millions of pieces of data to detect and rank the most important aspects from the data. Publicly supported among leading consumer web and mobile application companies, deep learning is quickly being adopted by more traditional business enterprises.

Deep learning and other artificial intelligence capabilities are being used across a wide range of industry sectors; in banking to advance fraud detection through facial recognition; in automotive for self-driving automobiles and in retail for fully automated call centers with computers that can better understand speech and answer questions.

China adopts cybersecurity law in face of overseas opposition

Wonder how Tim Cook, Satya & Bill, and Eric and Sergey will respond.


Overseas critics of the law argue it threatens to shut foreign technology companies out of various sectors. PHOTO: REUTERS

BEIJING: China adopted a controversial cybersecurity law on Monday to counter what Beijing says are growing threats such as hacking and terrorism, although the law has triggered concern from foreign business and rights groups.

The legislation, passed by China’s largely rubber-stamp parliament and set to come into effect in June 2017, is an “objective need” of China as a major internet power, a parliament official said.