Came here to say this, its sad really, quite convenient and I miss the noise of the electric milk float at 4am, always knew that meant it was time to stop coding and go to bed! Depends where you live though, still heard it in Dorset.
1. More comfortable than wearing headphones or earphones all day.
2. The fact that it's a human speaking makes particularly annoying sounds (eg. most music) impossible. There is also strong social pressure to not be annoying, because the person to blame is right there in the room.
I wouldn't want it personally, I can't focus with people talking in the same room and this extends to the music I listen to when doing tasks that require focus (coding, drawing, reading, etc), I need it to be instrumental because otherwise it just throws me off. First discovered this trying to read in a break room at one of my first jobs and realized that I was processing the conversations around me even when I didn't want to (made only worse by the fact that both English and Spanish conversations were going on that I could understand.)
So we can go ahead and get a lector, but I'll be tuning them out with headphones or working from home.
Interesting fact: Cuban cigars are named thing like Romeo y Julieta or Monte Christo, because those were the books read aloud as those cigars were being rolled.
I'm pretty sure Cuban cigar factories still employ lectors. At least as recently as 2009, when the BBC reported:
Today, though, the tradition only survives in Cuba,
with an estimated 250 'lectores' or cigar readers
employed at factories across the island†
250 may not sound like alot, but it's a small island, where the government oversees production - there are are only a few dozen brands of cigars. So I'm guessing, with 250 readers, most factories have one on the floor.
I wonder how important they were for union support, seeing as how they often read left-leaning stuff. Why did this job disappear? Does it have something to do with the decline in the organisation of labour and unions?
I think a modern version of a grocery delivery person would be valuable, but not to deliver food from nearby stores, but instead from nearby farms. It wouldn't need to be everyday, perhaps weekly. That keeps us using locally grown foods.
There are multiple companies like this in germany/austria. Basically a subscription to organic food (Vegetables, bread, cheese,...). You never know exactly what you get, but most of the time you are ok with it.
We actually have this in many developed places, albeit only for vegetables. Urban people subscribe to an "organic farm coop" and receive a set of season vegetables per week. They don't have much choice, but the upsides are:
- No intermediary/supermarket involved: Margins are fully paid to the producer who can either get a decent pay, work less or pay better materials,
- Vegetables are ripe, but needn't be nice, filtered or advertised in a fancy packing,
- Delivery at the reception of your company,
- The producer has forseeable recurrent revenue, just like developers for cloud services.
I've seen this in 2 French cities and in Sydney, so I bet it exists in San Francisco and most major cities.
Yep, there are at least a dozen "Community-supported agriculture" organizations in SF that will deliver veggies weekly. And in Boston. And in most major cities in the US and many smaller ones as well. You buy shares or a subscription (different places use different terms) and you get a portion of what the farm produces.
This is widespread in America. You can find it outside of major cities - I got vegetables through a co-op in a ~90,000 person city in Kansas for a long time.
Just want to reiterate how nice a CSA share can be. Sometimes you need to be a little creative in the kitchen, but it's less expensive than buying the same quality elsewhere.
Also, I have several friends that run/work on organic farms and CSA memberships are critical to their ability to survive as small farm operations.
I know that service exists in some areas. In Utah, we used Winder Farms. They drop off an order once a week. Their apple juice and milk was good but their produce was always sub-par. The prices were crazy.
Whenever I get onto the subject of how robots are taking jobs away from people, my usual simple argument (when the conversation is only going to be a minute long) is that refrigeration took many jobs away, such as ice and milk delivery people.
But I wish I could find a more significant example of some industry that was huge and is now entirely gone due to modernization.
Well cloth / clothing manufacturing is probably the largest decrease I can think of. From the cotton pickers, to the spinsters, to the weavers, and tailors. Much of it has been mechanized.
The difference with robots though is that they can actually 100% out perform humans in the not to distant future. Once a robot has hands as agile and controllable as ours, and once they have energy requirements that are cheaper than ours, I don't see how humans could compete with them in non-cerebral jobs. And there is a good segment of the population that can only do physical work.
I would intuit that the proportion of labourers to the rest has been decreasing throughout human history. I think what has me most curious is how low can it go. Is it possible to have near 0% labourers?
That's true, but that should not lull us into complacency. Some day we may run out of productive things for unskilled human labor to do, the same way we ran out of things for horses to do (http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/humans-need-not-apply). Not everyone can be a software engineer, and even if they could, we probably wouldn't need 7 billion of them.
Yes, but that also means humans are usually more resourceful than what we can imagine in the first place. Look back also in the early 1900s where all major newspapers were proclaiming the end of world and massive famine if we ever reached 1 billion people on Earth, and look where we are now: virtually no famines anywhere (except in war zones and in the worst dictatorships, which is now a minority) and the population is still growing and poverty is decreasing progressively. This would have been unimaginable 100 years ago.
So, let's not fool ourselves with predictions. We are notoriously bad a predicting long term trends.
PS: the analogy with horse is wrong in so many ways (because horses are not humans and cannot adapt like humans) but this would be another topic altogether.
Humans as a species are pretty resourceful, but individual humans often not so much.
The problem is that throughout human history the demand for unskilled labor has exceeded the supply, and that has been the foundation of our social contract: work, and you eat. Don't, and you starve. But some day soon, technology could make that assumption no longer true, at which point we could have big problems unless we radically rethink how our society is organized. That is something we humans have historically not been very good at.
Look back also in the early 1900s where all major newspapers were proclaiming the end of world and massive famine if we ever reached 1 billion people on Earth"
>> Not everyone can be a software engineer, and even if they could, we probably wouldn't need 7 billion of them.
If we all put our backs into it, we can make sure that we need at least that many.
We just have to write really bad documentation and really sloppy code, which lot of people believe we are doing already.
With a bit of effort maintaining the software being written today will become such a monumental task that no Soft Eng will ever be out of work for millenia to come.
Services which generate way more revenue/profit and better waves for employees than individual farm workers. I dont think we have lost anything as a whole, on the contrary.
You don't seem to realize that allowing labor to move from critical/essential work to nonessential work is a good thing. That's how the system is supposed to work. What would you call sommeliers, chefs who create Michelin-rated restaurants, movie stars/writers/producers, surfing instructors, etc if not nonessential?
Automation makes things cheaper. Look at food, it was the largest expense for most families for a very long time. Now for most families in the US it's not even close. We have taken the jobs that used to be in that area and gotten rid of them, and instead moved them into service industries like the ones I referenced above. Making things cheaper means more disposable income to be spent on luxury/nonessential items, which creates a market which didn't really exist, which in turn creates jobs. This is not hard stuff here.
Yes price reductions lead to new demand, hence new jobs.
But what if for almost every human supplied product/service there's a good enough machine substitue, or even just a human substitue that demands very little labor ? couldn't we reach a stable state of high unemployment ?
There are still a bunch of jobs where machines are unlikely to replace humans anytime soon or ever, because the cost of deploying machines everywhere and maintaining them will also reach a plateau. We may be good soon at making brains for machine but they still need mechanical parts and require maintenance. So they have a non negligible cost.
>You don't seem to realize that allowing labor to move from critical/essential work to nonessential work is a good thing. That's how the system is supposed to work. What would you call sommeliers, chefs who create Michelin-rated restaurants, movie stars/writers/producers, surfing instructors, etc if not nonessential?
I call them "creative professionals who do what they do by choice".
The majority of non essential work is not "movie stars and Michelin chefs", it's either automatable burger flipping or bureucratic busy-work created to overcome the lack of a system for distributing social wealth outside of "roll around for it".
To put it in another way, we could maintain our current production and give free massages and pedicures to everyone with far fewer jobs than we have now.
So how does that work? The government/rich people/"capital" conditioned people to consume services whether they need them or not, in order to create these jobs? If so can you give some examples of this? Or is it that government/industry created regulations and practices that created these jobs (I could think of law as being like this, but not many people work in law, less than 1% of non-farm employment in fact)?
My take is that we use the labor that was being used in farms for new productive purposes including health, education (as consumption, not investment) and entertainment. It's undeniable that life expectancy is increasing so we are getting something out of this increased efficiency.
Have you heard the anecdote about the fox with fleas? It lowered itself into a river, very slowly, giving the fleas enough time to move ahead of the water. In some versions, it was holding a leaf in its mouth. In others, the fleas just gathered on the tip of its nose. Either way, when eventually all but a tiny fraction of the fox is under water, it ducks under completely and the fleas all float off downstream.
When the fox's shoulders went under water, I bet some of the fleas said "ten minutes ago 70% of us lived below the fox's shoulders and yet they're all still on the fox, so there's nothing to worry about."
Wooden barrels for wine are still very much in use, and still largely made by hand. Source: I've been to a lot of wineries and talked with a lot of people who make barrels.
I'm not sure you can blame refrigeration on the absence of milk delivery people. In England, we had milkmen/milkmaids well into the late 1990s, despite refrigeration. Electric milk floats (sometimes carrying orange juice and bread, too) were a common early morning sight and sound.
It's 2016 - and still do. We live in a region with an operating milkman.
The price per pint is roughly 2x what it'd cost in a store, but the milk is fresh, organic, delivered to our door - and very importantly for us - generates very little waste. The empty glass bottles go back with the milkfloat, so we use far less plastic cartons.
You might also be able to buy glass bottles of milk at the grocery store when you're buying other groceries already, which would save the milkman the extra trip. You'll get your deposit back on the next grocery trip.
Is it really less wasteful? Cartons seem to be easily recyclable using an hydrapulper, while the milkman distribution requires an extra truck trip, wasting a lot of gas compared to just carrying a couple of milk packages along with the rest of the groceries.
I think it is very difficult to understand the relative inefficiencies between different product delivery pipelines. In this case the difference between door-to-door delivery of fresh milk vs. the store distribution model.
You may be 100% correct in this case, but in general, I think this is a very hard thing to discern, especially without a pretty deep analysis.
I'm not saying it is perfect, but I would think that 'price' is highly correlated to efficiency of the product delivery pipeline and efficiency is probably well correlated to 'waste'. The major confounding factors would be understanding what externalities are (or are not) being included into the final price and the distortions introduced administratively by government policies.
So a 2x price factor, to me, is indicative of possible inefficiencies relative to store distributed milk but certainly not definitive.
First, the volumes are much smaller. A large store chain can negotiate prices lower because they will be shifting a lot more product. The effect on unit margins adds up on both sides of the equation.
Second, the cost of labour. A grocery store should have a fairly big figure for units sold per employee. (Not just milk, but everything they sell.)
Third, we are obviously paying for service and convenience. The milk is delivered fresh, early in the morning. We just open the door and get the bottles. The fact that the empty bottles are taken away for no extra effort is an additional convenience factor, but one of the big reasons we originally went for a milkman service.
Number four - the milkman company is a business. They need to make a profit too.
Because the company operates with a dairy, I can probably discount the cost of specific cold chain maintenance. They would be maintaining the equipment and cooling in any case due to the products.
We could get groceries delivered from the shops, but that is still less convenient. The delivery slots are either during the day or in the evening, and we need to be at the door. Delivery is an extra charge, and priced so that it makes economical sense to order a lot more in one batch. This actually adds a disincentive to ordering milk: we enjoy fresh milk, and with longer delivery intervals it sure wouldn't be as fresh when we drink it.
And finally: the amount of plastic waste, even with our reduction tactics, is pretty significant. If we bought our milk from the store, we would need at least one more plastic recycling crate to hold all the milk cartons.
A store still has to buy the milk from a dairy. All their buying power isn't going to make their milk cheaper than milk delivered directly by the dairy.
In Germany we still have a couple of "Turmwächter" (turm = watchtower of a church, wächter = watcher) left. Their jobs used to be watching for enemies, fire and blow a horn to signal the time of day. Some have apartments in the watchtower. In my town the woman (http://www.spiegel.de/karriere/bizarre-berufe-tuermerin-auf-...) took the position as recently as two years ago, part time job and she has to go up the stairs every day. Between 21:00 and midnight every half an hour she blows a horn in all 4 directions. Her predecessor did the job for 70 years and reported 20 fires. German Wikipedia lists 10 in Germany, Switzerland, Poland, those are probably the last 10 remaining. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%BCrmer
This looks like a job that could be replaced fairly easily with pattern-recognition software connected to infrared sensors and a satellite uplink. If a potential wildfire is detected, the system could send a drone to the location to confirm.
Near me there's a old duckpin bowling alley that's been refurbished to include a bar. They definitely employ pinsetters! It's such an interesting experience to have a human set pins just for you to knock them down.
They are faster but only if you aren't waiting on them to set someone else. Also due to the nature of duckpin, strikes and spares are harder to get so they typically aren't setting every pin.
As you noted, that's duckpin bowling, which uses differently shaped pins than "standard" ten pin bowling; shorter yet heavier. The New York Times did a nice mixed media piece a while ago on the sport and its fading popularity, which in part is because the additional difficulty in creating a mechanized pinsetter for this type of pin. There was a successful pinsetter invented, but the manufacturer went out of business in the 70s and declined the license the patent to other companies. Now there is a dwindling number of vintage pinsetting machines left, many of which have been cannibalized for parts to keep existing machines running.
We have this in Argentina, at least where I live is called Boliche. I think is the same game after reading the rules, main difference is that the ball is smaller and maybe heavier without holes for fingers and you have three per frame instead of two as in the other bowling . Pin setters are common
I was a film projectionist at several theatres but moved on as everyone switched to digital. I know all the projection booths in my city are now run by managers from the first floor office.
The employers of projectionists were already trying to phase them out by employing one per N cinemas. The projectionist would have to drive around starting shows at different cinemas, and there would be no one around to fix a problem when it came up. Source: a local newspaper article a few decades ago.
This was highly illegal and frowned upon in polite society, but doctors needed the body parts to study anatomy and paid for them.
By chance I've recently read Dicken's "A Tale of Two Cities", which uses the banker's messenger secretly moonlighting as such a resurrectionist digging up bodies at night, as a plot device. Quite a fun read.
And in addition to the body snatching, we also had serial killers who flat out murdered people to sell their bodies to medical schools. See, Burke and Hare.
Expecting to see in the future:
Coders - men and women writing code that would work in a computer before the computers figured they'd be better off writing code by themselves. :D
Computers will not write code by themselves. Someone else's code will be so Great that a lot of people will think it's intelligence by its own, but it will still be someone else's code.
In the very long run if we can reproduce human intelligence in a machine, maybe this will become a reality, but we are probably far, far away from it. (and further than we think we are).
Machine learning works by writing a framework for a computer to learn, then throwing tons of examples at the algorithm. The base may be created by humans, but the creativity actually comes from within the algorithm itself.
Scribes/Copiers are completely gone, too. Until printing was invented every copy of every book had to be done by hand, one by one. That's not a super recent change, but still not too far in History.
The entire medieval bookmaking process, from velum and inks to lettering to illumination (illustrations) was fascinating. And extraordinarily expensive.
Figure that a single book was 1/2 to 1/3 a man-year's labour, of rare and skilled talent. They were more bespoke jewelry than media, and often treated as such.
If you think about the falling costs, and increased access, to information over the span of centuries, it's staggering.
Poison and traps were in wide use at the time of the photos in question and had been for some time.
The only reason that "ratcatcher" is a job that no longer exists is because it changed names to "exterminator", the same way that "secretary" no longer exists as a job and is now called "administrative assistant". Preferred titles have changed over time, but the basic job of killing rats absolutely still exists.
At least in my neck of the woods, a rat catcher's job is primarily monitoring. The rat catcher will trap and bait, but if fumigation is required, they'll call an exterminator.
They are still around, but far less than they use to be. I remember as a kid you would find a shoe shine guy setup in the lobby of most buildings fill with professionally dressed people.
Certainly work place attire has become more casual across the board, but there are still places where people dress up like lawyers. I find them still in train stations where there is a large enough traffic of people to support it. It goes to illustrate that fewer people are getting their shoes shined when a shoe shiner requires half the workforce in a city to pass them by instead of just occupants of a single building.
It is perhaps that shoes are simply more disposable than they were before.
I used to work in a record store (well, CD store) in the 90s. It was fun but times change!
I liked the job in part because I got introduced to a lot of new music. But with the internet, it is so much easier to discover new music than it was, even for a record store employee.
Another former record store employee here. I disagree about music discovery being easier now. I find I got much better recommendations from other music nerds than I tend to get from algorithms. The depth and nuance of micro-nano-pico genres is something that hasn't really been well replaced by machine learning IMO.
I have a Google Play music subscription and its recommendations are pretty consistently bad. I don't get it. I have given it all my music and it monitors how often I listen to every song. Why can't it figure out what types of hooks I like? The human-curated playlists are almost always better; even if I don't like every choice, there's still some ineffable spark of a single human personality that gives unity to the selections.
Same, the steaming music service has heen frustraing for me, my music goes missing due to license changes etc.
I'm thinking about at least relying on keeping my own digital library again. Also, have to agree about the music stores, they were and are good fun. I say that as they seem to be making a comeback.
Another one from the article recently posted on HN: library custodian. In the days of coal furnaces, many libraries had live-in apartments for the custodians who were tasked to keep the furnace going and generally look after the building.
Back before programmable general-purposes computing machinery existed, computer was a human job description -- a human being who was employed to perform basic calculation tasks rapidly and accurately.
That's kind of the joke though right? In 1965, when Dune was written, computer was still a human job title and mentats seemed like a totally reasonable far future extrapolation. Notice in Dune, no AIs, but they did have "family nukes". Really, Dune's vision of the future was about human augmentation through drugs (spice) as opposed to digital automation.
AIs do exist in the Dune world, they were simply forbidden after the Butlerian Jihad. The author didn't extrapolate, he made a deliberate decision to exclude such devices.
Ha, you're right. I forgot about that, but I even read the first book in the series about the butlerian jihad that Frank Herbert's son wrote. I should finish that series... So the thesis was "machines will enslave us but drugs and religion will set us free"? Because, of course, all fiction should reduce to a single sentence thesis, otherwise all those words would be a waste...
I stuck up skittles at a local government members' club just a decade ago too; I would assume that's still happening. It's not common, but some pubs still have skittle alleys - and someone's got to stick up!
Because milkmen don't exists anymore - at least not in the U.S. or Canada. Houses were built with little doors from the outside into a chillbox for the milkman to directly place the milk inside.
They're not completely gone. Here in Utah the Winder Dairy company still does milk and other dairy product delivery to the home. Maybe it's not exactly the same with a little door and whatnot but there's still a person delivering milk (among other things.)
Well they exist here in the UK. I've not seen those built-in chill-boxes though - I suppose here the temperature's never been a reason not to just leave them on the doorstep!
Then there are the jobs that just got consolidated out of widespread existence. They still exist but in very limited form. These are jobs that used to be regional until the market drifted toward economies of scale:
The first two are still around. I know someone whose wife has a travel agency: it's a specialty business now. And I have an aerial photo of my house that was sold by a door to door salesman. I also get sales people going door to door in my neighborhood selling anything from trash pickup to carpet cleaning.
Appliance repair businesses are still around, they just focus on high-end appliances now.
I have a travel agent in my street. Here in Germany they are omnipresent. But when I count how many people on Tinder got "Traveling" as their only hobby, I can see why.
We had door to door salesmen back when I was young (15-20 years ago), they sold vacuum cleaners for Vorwerk or Kirby. High end systems, very expensive and they showed them at your home, my mother bought 2, so it worked haha. Then there are salesmen that sell stuff like scented candles, Tupperware, Dildos etc. pp. which throw tiny parties for their sales events at customers livingrooms. Not exactly door to door salesmen, but they visit customers at home to sell them things.
2009 I worked in an HR office (public service) where two typists worked, people recoreded letters all the time and they typed them with headphones on. I don't know if they still work there.
A friend of mine lives in Berlin and heats with coal. She says many flats in the east of Berlin are still heated with those coal ovens. Sometimes she buys the coal at the store and sometimes she gets deliveries.
Also here are regular markets with greengrocers and one of them even drives through my street once a week and sells from a truck. He has a bell and yells stuff like "POTATOOOOOS. FRESH APPLES AND CARROOOOTS" etc.
Rat Catcher (dubbed the Rat Patrol here) still exists in one place in the world: Alberta, Canada. I think we're one of the only places with nearly zero Norway Rat Population.
"In some European countries, such as Belgium, France, and the Netherlands, the muskrat is considered an invasive pest, as its burrowing damages the dikes and levees on which these low-lying countries depend for protection from flooding. In those countries, it is trapped, poisoned, and hunted to attempt to keep the population down"
135 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 219 ms ] threadAnd you can still get premium milk delivered in the Denver area from Royal Crest dairy.
Proximity matters.
2. The fact that it's a human speaking makes particularly annoying sounds (eg. most music) impossible. There is also strong social pressure to not be annoying, because the person to blame is right there in the room.
So we can go ahead and get a lector, but I'll be tuning them out with headphones or working from home.
† http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8406641.stm
One example: http://www.adamah.at
- No intermediary/supermarket involved: Margins are fully paid to the producer who can either get a decent pay, work less or pay better materials,
- Vegetables are ripe, but needn't be nice, filtered or advertised in a fancy packing,
- Delivery at the reception of your company,
- The producer has forseeable recurrent revenue, just like developers for cloud services.
I've seen this in 2 French cities and in Sydney, so I bet it exists in San Francisco and most major cities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community-supported_agricultur...
Also, I have several friends that run/work on organic farms and CSA memberships are critical to their ability to survive as small farm operations.
But I wish I could find a more significant example of some industry that was huge and is now entirely gone due to modernization.
(I kid, I kid)
The difference with robots though is that they can actually 100% out perform humans in the not to distant future. Once a robot has hands as agile and controllable as ours, and once they have energy requirements that are cheaper than ours, I don't see how humans could compete with them in non-cerebral jobs. And there is a good segment of the population that can only do physical work.
So, let's not fool ourselves with predictions. We are notoriously bad a predicting long term trends.
PS: the analogy with horse is wrong in so many ways (because horses are not humans and cannot adapt like humans) but this would be another topic altogether.
The problem is that throughout human history the demand for unskilled labor has exceeded the supply, and that has been the foundation of our social contract: work, and you eat. Don't, and you starve. But some day soon, technology could make that assumption no longer true, at which point we could have big problems unless we radically rethink how our society is organized. That is something we humans have historically not been very good at.
If we all put our backs into it, we can make sure that we need at least that many.
We just have to write really bad documentation and really sloppy code, which lot of people believe we are doing already.
With a bit of effort maintaining the software being written today will become such a monumental task that no Soft Eng will ever be out of work for millenia to come.
Automation makes things cheaper. Look at food, it was the largest expense for most families for a very long time. Now for most families in the US it's not even close. We have taken the jobs that used to be in that area and gotten rid of them, and instead moved them into service industries like the ones I referenced above. Making things cheaper means more disposable income to be spent on luxury/nonessential items, which creates a market which didn't really exist, which in turn creates jobs. This is not hard stuff here.
But what if for almost every human supplied product/service there's a good enough machine substitue, or even just a human substitue that demands very little labor ? couldn't we reach a stable state of high unemployment ?
I call them "creative professionals who do what they do by choice".
The majority of non essential work is not "movie stars and Michelin chefs", it's either automatable burger flipping or bureucratic busy-work created to overcome the lack of a system for distributing social wealth outside of "roll around for it".
To put it in another way, we could maintain our current production and give free massages and pedicures to everyone with far fewer jobs than we have now.
My take is that we use the labor that was being used in farms for new productive purposes including health, education (as consumption, not investment) and entertainment. It's undeniable that life expectancy is increasing so we are getting something out of this increased efficiency.
When the fox's shoulders went under water, I bet some of the fleas said "ten minutes ago 70% of us lived below the fox's shoulders and yet they're all still on the fox, so there's nothing to worry about."
- wooden barrels / casks for wine beer
- coppersmith (not sure about the exact term. i mean people who create pans and pots by hand)
- basketmaker
- coachbuilder
The price per pint is roughly 2x what it'd cost in a store, but the milk is fresh, organic, delivered to our door - and very importantly for us - generates very little waste. The empty glass bottles go back with the milkfloat, so we use far less plastic cartons.
You may be 100% correct in this case, but in general, I think this is a very hard thing to discern, especially without a pretty deep analysis.
I'm not saying it is perfect, but I would think that 'price' is highly correlated to efficiency of the product delivery pipeline and efficiency is probably well correlated to 'waste'. The major confounding factors would be understanding what externalities are (or are not) being included into the final price and the distortions introduced administratively by government policies.
So a 2x price factor, to me, is indicative of possible inefficiencies relative to store distributed milk but certainly not definitive.
First, the volumes are much smaller. A large store chain can negotiate prices lower because they will be shifting a lot more product. The effect on unit margins adds up on both sides of the equation.
Second, the cost of labour. A grocery store should have a fairly big figure for units sold per employee. (Not just milk, but everything they sell.)
Third, we are obviously paying for service and convenience. The milk is delivered fresh, early in the morning. We just open the door and get the bottles. The fact that the empty bottles are taken away for no extra effort is an additional convenience factor, but one of the big reasons we originally went for a milkman service.
Number four - the milkman company is a business. They need to make a profit too.
Because the company operates with a dairy, I can probably discount the cost of specific cold chain maintenance. They would be maintaining the equipment and cooling in any case due to the products.
We could get groceries delivered from the shops, but that is still less convenient. The delivery slots are either during the day or in the evening, and we need to be at the door. Delivery is an extra charge, and priced so that it makes economical sense to order a lot more in one batch. This actually adds a disincentive to ordering milk: we enjoy fresh milk, and with longer delivery intervals it sure wouldn't be as fresh when we drink it.
And finally: the amount of plastic waste, even with our reduction tactics, is pretty significant. If we bought our milk from the store, we would need at least one more plastic recycling crate to hold all the milk cartons.
Towers to watch for wildfires are still in use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_lookout_tower
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewatch
Drones are also loud, which has a cost for every false positive.
http://activefiremaps.fs.fed.us/
Modern pinsetters have a different style than those of old. https://m.imgur.com/ePXtfSU?r
0: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/sports/duckpin-bowling.htm...
Were they actually stealing bodies? Was that something official or done in secret?
By chance I've recently read Dicken's "A Tale of Two Cities", which uses the banker's messenger secretly moonlighting as such a resurrectionist digging up bodies at night, as a plot device. Quite a fun read.
http://history.stackexchange.com/questions/21161/how-long-di...
Figure that a single book was 1/2 to 1/3 a man-year's labour, of rare and skilled talent. They were more bespoke jewelry than media, and often treated as such.
If you think about the falling costs, and increased access, to information over the span of centuries, it's staggering.
The only reason that "ratcatcher" is a job that no longer exists is because it changed names to "exterminator", the same way that "secretary" no longer exists as a job and is now called "administrative assistant". Preferred titles have changed over time, but the basic job of killing rats absolutely still exists.
- luggage porters in train stations and the like. It used to be a whole business for voyagers who could afford it.
- shoeshiners: yes they still do exist in some poorer countries, but by large they have disappeared (for numerous reasons).
Certainly work place attire has become more casual across the board, but there are still places where people dress up like lawyers. I find them still in train stations where there is a large enough traffic of people to support it. It goes to illustrate that fewer people are getting their shoes shined when a shoe shiner requires half the workforce in a city to pass them by instead of just occupants of a single building.
It is perhaps that shoes are simply more disposable than they were before.
I liked the job in part because I got introduced to a lot of new music. But with the internet, it is so much easier to discover new music than it was, even for a record store employee.
I have a Google Play music subscription and its recommendations are pretty consistently bad. I don't get it. I have given it all my music and it monitors how often I listen to every song. Why can't it figure out what types of hooks I like? The human-curated playlists are almost always better; even if I don't like every choice, there's still some ineffable spark of a single human personality that gives unity to the selections.
I'm thinking about at least relying on keeping my own digital library again. Also, have to agree about the music stores, they were and are good fun. I say that as they seem to be making a comeback.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12701847
Back before programmable general-purposes computing machinery existed, computer was a human job description -- a human being who was employed to perform basic calculation tasks rapidly and accurately.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer
I stuck up skittles at a local government members' club just a decade ago too; I would assume that's still happening. It's not common, but some pubs still have skittle alleys - and someone's got to stick up!
Travel agent
Door to door salesman
Typist
Typesetter/Linotype operator
Telegraph operator
Ice and coal delivery
Appliance repairman
Then there are the jobs that just got consolidated out of widespread existence. They still exist but in very limited form. These are jobs that used to be regional until the market drifted toward economies of scale:
Radio host
Newspaper reporter/editor/cartoonist
Greengrocer
Bookseller
Appliance repair businesses are still around, they just focus on high-end appliances now.
We had door to door salesmen back when I was young (15-20 years ago), they sold vacuum cleaners for Vorwerk or Kirby. High end systems, very expensive and they showed them at your home, my mother bought 2, so it worked haha. Then there are salesmen that sell stuff like scented candles, Tupperware, Dildos etc. pp. which throw tiny parties for their sales events at customers livingrooms. Not exactly door to door salesmen, but they visit customers at home to sell them things.
2009 I worked in an HR office (public service) where two typists worked, people recoreded letters all the time and they typed them with headphones on. I don't know if they still work there.
A friend of mine lives in Berlin and heats with coal. She says many flats in the east of Berlin are still heated with those coal ovens. Sometimes she buys the coal at the store and sometimes she gets deliveries.
Also here are regular markets with greengrocers and one of them even drives through my street once a week and sells from a truck. He has a bell and yells stuff like "POTATOOOOOS. FRESH APPLES AND CARROOOOTS" etc.
And a friend of mine works as a bookseller.
http://www1.agric.gov.ab.ca/$department/deptdocs.nsf/All/agd...
"In some European countries, such as Belgium, France, and the Netherlands, the muskrat is considered an invasive pest, as its burrowing damages the dikes and levees on which these low-lying countries depend for protection from flooding. In those countries, it is trapped, poisoned, and hunted to attempt to keep the population down"