There are ways around taxes like this. But those add cost as well. The simplest solution is to not hire people to begin with. No tax against replacing robots with other robots.

You gotta love the circular logic where a law claiming to be against automation actually increases it.

"he would issue a robot tax for corporations displacing humans and would create a federal agency to oversee automation."

So his tax policies would encourage offshoring. Got it.

As for the longshoremen, this is the result of an own goal, one that they spent decades lining up to make sure they kicked it just right. Massive goldbricking, featherbedding, pilfering, drinking/drugs on the job, and union corruption brought about the advent of container ships. Guess what? Containers can be handled robotically. In fact, they're designed to be. In truck/airport/rail ports, that's already the norm. You have a handful of skilled operators running cranes and machines that move everything. The only other people present are the government customs inspectors.

Now we're going to fuck them for that, too?

Yes. 'member? You didn't build that.

What is the term for the government form that places corporations, companies, even mom & pop shops under the central government's thumb?

Fascism. Oh.

As for the longshoremen.... ~ Cousin Dave at September 10, 2019 6:37 AM

Container freight also reduced turnaround times for loading and unloading. A ship used to spend 6-7 days idle in port being unloaded and then loaded - all by hand. With container freight, a ship can be loaded and unloaded in the same motion, reducing idle time in port to 6-7 hours.

Faster turnaround means no need to store items at the dock in a warehouse awaiting an empty ship. The truck pulls into the dock and is unloaded that day. Trucking and rail companies reduced their turnaround and idle equipment costs, too. A truck or rail car dropping off a container at the dock is unloaded that day and picks up another container on the way out. Container freight also eliminated loss from items "falling off the truck."

Longshoreman used to be a good, high-paying job for a guy with no education or skills. Work a crew on the docks, kiss the loading boss' ass once in a while, and work only 3-4 days a week. It was hard labor, but it paid well. Crane operators, however, need an education and technical skills.

The savings from container freight were not just in the number of people needed to load and unload a ship (or truck or rail car delivering to or from the docks). With reduced shipping costs, off-shoring was now financially feasible. Manufacturers, foreign and domestic were able to take advantage of lower overseas labor costs. Ever wondered why your flat-panel TV made in Korea was so cheap?

Container freight also changed the waterfronts in what used to be important port cities. Container ports need land, so shipping moved from New York's waterfront to New Jersey's swamplands; from San Francisco's docks to Oaklands flatlands; from Los Angeles to Long Beach. Grubby docks and warehouses became high-priced waterfront condos and restaurants.

That gentrification drove harbor clean-up, as people eating Dover Sole at Chez Snooty didn't want the acrid smell of a long-ignored diesel spill wafting up from the water and ruining their meal.

It's funny for the longshoremen to complain about job losses. In Portland, their strikes and demands made a barely profitable port close because "a dispute broke out in 2012 over whether the ILWU had jurisdiction over plugging in and unplugging refrigerated containers."
https://katu.com/news/local/port-of-portland-closes-troubled-container-terminal-ictsi-oregon-chapter

..."a dispute broke out in 2012 over whether the ILWU had jurisdiction over plugging in and unplugging refrigerated containers." ~ Curtis at September 10, 2019 8:55 AM

According to Marc Levinson in The Box one of the things that drove up shipping costs in the pre-container era was disputes between the teamsters and the longshoremen about who had authority to unload and load trucks at the docks. Said disputes often led to expensive compromises, such as teamsters unloading the truck and longshoremen moving the cargo into the dockside warehouse, leaving the merchandise owner on the hook for paying two crews to do the work of one crew.

I don't demand that my fellow citizens support me or prop up newspapers. I'm working very hard to retool how I earn and working harder than ever and making less money. It's just the fucking facts of the matter, and if I'd been smarter and better with a wrench, I would have become a plumber.

From your mouth to coal miners' ears.

The metric of interest is productivity per worker, not number of jobs. Higher productivity is the only way to increase wages in the real world. Mandating higher pay will just cause distortions in the market. Unions resist efficiency and try to save jobs and as a consequence highly unionized businesses have higher labor costs and lower productivity. duh

I expect this kind of crap to get worse, because the expectation of the government official is ever-increasing budgets that grow with the population, and their continuously becoming more important to the masses.

Such people seek to hide the fact that you can have an economy without government, but you cannot have a government without an economy. They ignore Detroit's lesson.

Everone should be shown the example of Flint, Michigan, where the incompetence is so thick on the ground that they not only can't run a water plant correctly, they can no longer put police on the street because the city made pensions into an unguarded gold mine.

From what I read awhile back the automated loaders should be more efficient, quicker with fewer accidents. Not huge gains but some none the less. More environmentally friendly,

My job now has a writing component where 15 years ago (when I had a similar position) it did not...well, I was expected to write up some notes that would be sent to a staff writer. Now I am expected to produce a final product. And this is in the "other tasks" part of my job descriptions.

I don't get the impression that many folks here are fully aware of just what is around the corner. Automation and machine learning are poised to wipe out entire professions within the next 10-20 years at an unprecedented rate.

We can either get ahead of this massive social shift and prepare from a policy perspective... or we can try and to contend with the aftermath without such advance preparation, which will not be pretty.

Comparing this to the displacement of horse and buggies is an interesting analogy... cars might have worked out well for human beings... but not so great for the horses.

Radwaste Says:

"Such people seek to hide the fact that you can have an economy without government, but you cannot have a government without an economy."

Exactly what kind of an economy would you expect to have the day after the government collapsed?

While it is true that primitive bartering systems existed prior to formal governments... governments are what made trustworthy universal mediums of exchange viable.

Without a recognized and trustworthy universal medium of exchange the economy seizes.

Arguments involving crypto currencies won't really help you here either... because the development of the internet and the infrastructure supporting it were funded and constructed by the government.

The internet was based on ARPANET, which was developed by the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency (i.e., a government agency).

To start, my plan calls for a new federal agency, the Federal Automation and Worker Protection Agency (FAWPA), to oversee automation and safeguard jobs and communities. ~ from the linked article by Amy in the original post

So, de Blasio proposes to put the government in charge of personnel and capital expenditure decisions by corporations?

Without the government having any fiduciary responsibility to the various stakeholders, there is little-to-no incentive for the government to make a fiscally-responsible decision instead of a politically-expedient one.

Notice how de Blasio's proposals make no mention of relieving the high cost of employing people in the US - no proposal to cut payroll taxes, compliance costs, etc. Just another regulatory body, another expensive government agency, another set of rules.

Striking for stupid reasons is a great way to show the boss why he *should* replace you with a robot.