What a user-hostile design. You buy a $350 device, then you have to buy proprietary nail polish capsules until the day the company inevitably goes down? And after that you’re stuck with a nail Juicero?
There was a tabletop dishwasher not too long ago that had proprietary capsules. A dude bought industrial detergent and filled them up with a syringe for 100x cheaper.
"The company behind the bot says they design robots that “liberate people from everyday mundane tasks.”" I found this line very amusing. I'm sure the people being "liberated" are very glad someone is looking out for them. Obviously a lot of modern tech is pushing people out of jobs but it's a little insulting and funny to be twisted like this.
You gotta remember that automation also reduces the cost of these kinds of devices, allowing more people to acquire these devices and automate their tasks, pushing the entire population up the productivity value ladder.
The best example I can think of, of an automation device that has done this, is a smartphone. There are now something like 3.5 billion people that have one, and it won't be long before nearly every one on Earth does.
Smartphones enable numerous tasks that people once had to hire another person to do for them, to be done automatically. The result is people's tastes expanding, as the global population becomes capable of providing more goods/services than ever before.
Looking at the environment/climate/resources, we may not know where the cliff lies, but we do know there is one and also that we are accelerating towards it without having good ideas as to how to stop.
I don't think you're wrong, but the GP comment is more along the lines of "don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining."
I agree, I'm sick of marketing speak and PR omitting news because it might be hard to hear. If we're just honest about what's happening, we can fix it or at least mediate it.
No, a nail technician is a job that sustains many immigrant communities. They may be faceless to you but they're real people getting pushed out of jobs. This "automation device" isn't anything like a smartphone.
It's exactly the same. Nail work is something that the lower classes cannot afford right now. Once the work of a nail technician is mostly or wholly automated, the service will become available to lower income groups.
The nail technicians meanwhile will find work in industries created as a consequence of consumers having more disposable income with which to spend on new goods/services, from having to spend less on nail work:
It is always those goods/services that are the least automatable that cost the most. If getting one's nails done becomes automated, we may see consumer spending shift to the next most valuable service that can't be automated, like home cleaning, caretaking of the elderly, massage therapy, childcare, tutoring, or barrista work. Automation allows us to enjoy a higher standard of living.
>> You gotta remember that automation also reduces the cost of these kinds of devices, allowing more people to acquire these devices and automate their tasks, pushing the entire population up the productivity value ladder.
Putting people out of work is not pushing anyone up a ladder. As one person gets more productive with automation their peers lose jobs.
From an economic perspective, if a factory owner replaces people with automation it's because it costs less. Hiring an automation expert and all the associated costs is a net win for them. But those jobs are higher paying, so we know it takes fewer people at the higher rate to achieve the owners lower cost.
>> Smartphones enable numerous tasks that people once had to hire another person to do for them, to be done automatically.
So first the automation put people out of work making smart phones. You try to counter that negative effect by pointing out how the phones help people but... Now the smart phones are making people more efficient, which as you say will eliminate more jobs.
Automation always eliminates jobs. The only time it frees up people to do other things is when those things are lower market value than what they were already doing - almost by definition.
I'm not against automation BTW, just against the common fiction that it's economically good for the working class.
You need to realize that there exists the possibility of being both good and bad.
Pushing this narrative without considering the obvious facts is a simple minded view.
Cheaper products are good for the working class because it means they can afford more products. Automation leads to cheaper products. Common sense.
That is the good side of automation for the working class.
So the answer is far more complicated then the simpleton answer you came up with here. The more you automate things the cheaper things get but the less jobs are available.
The gradient is somewhere in the middle you can't completely have no automation otherwise every product will be custom made and expensive as hell.
You can't have 100 percent automation either otherwise there's no one around to have jobs and make money to buy the product.
So economically speaking automation is both good and bad for the working class and only a cost benefite analysis can find the right amount automation that is best.
There free education for you. A lesson in basic math (see my other replies to your misguided views on quaternions) and economics in one day. I'm not so bold Like you as to run around offering paid consulting work for these trivial lessons.
There are innumerable services that will still be in demand, and not automatable, if nail work is automated, so consumer spending, and with it jobs, will just move there.
>>I'm not against automation BTW, just against the common fiction that it's economically good for the working class.
Wages in the West have grown 20 fold, in inflation adjusted terms, since 1820, and that's all due to automation. Automation is practically synonynous with per capita productivity growth, and that's almost entirely positive for every one.
If we can create general artificial intelligence that can truly substitute for humans in all productive roles, we will have much bigger things to worry about than unemployment.
Not sure if the nail painting itself is what women pay for when they go to a nail salon.
Carefully scraping old nail polish, treating skin around the nail and nail shape are probably most labor-intensive tasks that many women want to offload to a paid specialist.
Painting already prepared nail is the easy part, AFAIK.
On a scale from Tesla Autopilot (A) to Juicero (J) I would give it G.
It's pretty stupid. Also nail printers (or whatever they are called) have already existed for a while now. You can buy one in Amazon (it's still a cool $1000 for whatever it does) so this isn't a new concept.
Also this robot probably can't give you recommendations or have a conversation with you as a human would do.
As a child I was writing a letter for my grandmother and naturally used the Macintosh LC III we had just got. My mother was against using the computer as a handwritten letter would be more personal.
So I found a place in the print dialog where you could add different watermarks and chose the one saying "PERSONAL".
> On a scale from Tesla Autopilot (A) to Juicero (J) I would give it G.
It honestly took me a bit to figure out which end of that scale was supposed to be which. I had to remember what Juicero was first, because IMO Tesla Autopilot is a weird thing to use for the high end of the scale given all the problems it has.
It's not okay to over hype a product and calling an autopilot when it's really just a glorified automatic break system and steering system. This caused people to die, and similar story doesn't seem to happen with other car brand with similar feature in their car (automatic breaking and automatic stearing in traffic).
> It's not okay to over-hype a product and call it an autopilot, when it's really just a glorified automatic brake and steering system.
> This caused people to die; similar stories don't seem to happen with other car brands with similar features (automatic braking, and automatic steering in traffic).
The difference being called out is not one of capability, but of perception. People don't go to sleep on purpose behind something like "enhanced cruise control", but apparently if you call it autopilot then some people feel fine doing just that (or riding in the back seat, for example).
There are plenty of warning messages about what exactly AP does and does not do. It requires your hands on the wheel.
The people who have "died" using AP, have bought defeater devices on eBay and ignored the warnings. No different than putting a rock on your gas pedal and being sad if something bad happens.
Personal responsibility is a thing. You can't just read the name of something and decide how it works, without reading the manual or the warnings.
Autopilot is a horrible name. Not because it's not accurate, as it is pretty damn accurate to what autopilot means in the real world for planes, but because the general populace has a very poor understanding of what autopilot in planes actually is, and plays into that misunderstanding in a dangerous way.
There have been six deaths while Tesla drivers were using Autopilot. Flesh eating bacteria infections from manicure stations have killed more people. HNs obsession with Autopilot deaths is ridiculous.
Is that true though? Roughly 200 people gets infection from flesh eating bacterias in USA every year but I never heard anyone dying after getting it from manicure station.
Mortality rate is 20%-40%, climbing with delay in treatment. In my above comment, I note that Autopilot has been involved in six deaths total, which is extremely low compared to other causes of death over the same number of years it’s been available to drivers. Another example is E Coli from contaminated lettuce has killed the same number of people (and sickened thousands more) than Autopilot use over a similar amount of time. Sharks kill 50~ people per year.
> Not sure if the nail painting itself is what women pay for when they go to a nail salon.
I thought that any type of salon was meant as a congregation point for gossip vectors to intersect and the manicurist was more of a surrogate therapist whose services must be conducted physically closer (opportunity for optional hushed tone) because the client's hand must be held thus setting the conditions for more personal conversation (mostly attentive listening) and accountability in a public location? Grooming-as-a-service is the commercialized intimate connection made as a reprieve from the cold robotic touch felt everywhere else in "civilized" society.
Afterwards, the "prepared" cuticles of a person's readily visible hand in any social situation is supposed to be an indicator (trophy? Cash to spare on something without surface level utility) that this social grooming session has occurred (and consequential fresh gossip fodder behind a tongue poised and rearing). Simultaneous (or primary) announcement that "these hands do not labor" (if she breaks one of these "expensive" nails, she can then draw attention to her role in a situation). This is similar to ancient Chinese foot binding that made it "beautiful" to be immobile and thus vulnerable - social status announcement that a wife with sufficiently warped feet cannot go anywhere on her own without service labor.
The offensive odor of nail polish solvent fumes is just as "necessary" a pain as the restriction of a corset, wrapped foot, elongated neck, or "temporary" hormonal disruption of birth control.
Perhaps the robot is meant to liberate the manicurist from an entire shift of toxic air.
> This site is currently unavailable to visitors from the European Economic Area while we work to ensure your data is protected in accordance with applicable EU laws.
After enacting a set of EU specific rules, it feels a little entitled to expect that not only all foreign websites must follow them, but that they must also make their content available for free.
Say you're from US. Would you like Asian imports to satisfy US consumer regulations? Say you have guests. Would you like them to take their muddy shoes off?
This is a bad faith argument barely worth a response, however, imports are on US soil. That's the difference. The EU thinks it can dictate to a non-EU company what to do on its non-EU servers because an EU citizen visited their website. It's ludicrous and laughable. The EU is 100% within its rights to regulate what happens within its borders to its heart's content, right up until the moment they purport to tell foreign entities what they have to do.
My argument was not in bad faith and I think your tone is unwarranted.
It's totally reasonable for me to negotiate with you on things you do that affect me. Same goes for regulatory bodies. GDPR is about data protection and the right to privacy. I won't argue with you if those things are a good idea, but you probably realise that saying that those aren't reasonable demands puts you in a minority.
Jurisdictions are incredibly important in law, and the EU has no jurisdiction over US companies. If US companies want to do something that goes against GDPR, it's on the EU to prevent their citizens from accessing those companies' websites/apps. But once they are accessing that company's app, the fact that they're an EU citizen doesn't change the legal obligations of a US company whatsoever.
Now, it makes sense for multinational corporations to have GDPR-related functionality since some of their assets are under EU jurisdiction and for them it's probably safer (if lazy) to do it across the board. But if you're not in the EU and you run a one-person SaaS app or something, you have zero reason to jump through any GDPR hurdles if you don't want to. The EU doesn't suddenly gain jurisdiction over your business processes because an EU citizen types your address into the URL bar.
What's a jurisdiction is a difficult and abstract topic, albeit an important one. I'm not a legal mind, so I'll leave that be. I am happy though that as a EU citizen my privacy is protected, to an extent, not only from actors based in EU, but outside it as well. Whatever legal framework that requires, I think that's a desirable and fair arrangement.
It feels very dissonant to put this text in a small font under the larger headline "Our European visitors are important to us". Obviously EU visitors are not that important to you, as you weren't able to build a basic non-tracking version of your website, three years into GDPR. So why would you so blatantly lie to my face? Hm.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadHow Tippi Hedren made Vietnamese refugees into nail salon magnates https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32544343
The best example I can think of, of an automation device that has done this, is a smartphone. There are now something like 3.5 billion people that have one, and it won't be long before nearly every one on Earth does.
Smartphones enable numerous tasks that people once had to hire another person to do for them, to be done automatically. The result is people's tastes expanding, as the global population becomes capable of providing more goods/services than ever before.
Looking at the environment/climate/resources, we may not know where the cliff lies, but we do know there is one and also that we are accelerating towards it without having good ideas as to how to stop.
The idealistic/utopianist ideas about humanity's potential are actually correct in this case I believe.
I agree, I'm sick of marketing speak and PR omitting news because it might be hard to hear. If we're just honest about what's happening, we can fix it or at least mediate it.
And luddites resisting is futile. Get with the times or be left behind.
The nail technicians meanwhile will find work in industries created as a consequence of consumers having more disposable income with which to spend on new goods/services, from having to spend less on nail work:
https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6717/economics/the-luddit...
It is always those goods/services that are the least automatable that cost the most. If getting one's nails done becomes automated, we may see consumer spending shift to the next most valuable service that can't be automated, like home cleaning, caretaking of the elderly, massage therapy, childcare, tutoring, or barrista work. Automation allows us to enjoy a higher standard of living.
Putting people out of work is not pushing anyone up a ladder. As one person gets more productive with automation their peers lose jobs.
From an economic perspective, if a factory owner replaces people with automation it's because it costs less. Hiring an automation expert and all the associated costs is a net win for them. But those jobs are higher paying, so we know it takes fewer people at the higher rate to achieve the owners lower cost.
>> Smartphones enable numerous tasks that people once had to hire another person to do for them, to be done automatically.
So first the automation put people out of work making smart phones. You try to counter that negative effect by pointing out how the phones help people but... Now the smart phones are making people more efficient, which as you say will eliminate more jobs.
Automation always eliminates jobs. The only time it frees up people to do other things is when those things are lower market value than what they were already doing - almost by definition.
I'm not against automation BTW, just against the common fiction that it's economically good for the working class.
Pushing this narrative without considering the obvious facts is a simple minded view.
Cheaper products are good for the working class because it means they can afford more products. Automation leads to cheaper products. Common sense.
That is the good side of automation for the working class.
So the answer is far more complicated then the simpleton answer you came up with here. The more you automate things the cheaper things get but the less jobs are available.
The gradient is somewhere in the middle you can't completely have no automation otherwise every product will be custom made and expensive as hell.
You can't have 100 percent automation either otherwise there's no one around to have jobs and make money to buy the product.
So economically speaking automation is both good and bad for the working class and only a cost benefite analysis can find the right amount automation that is best.
There free education for you. A lesson in basic math (see my other replies to your misguided views on quaternions) and economics in one day. I'm not so bold Like you as to run around offering paid consulting work for these trivial lessons.
>>I'm not against automation BTW, just against the common fiction that it's economically good for the working class.
Wages in the West have grown 20 fold, in inflation adjusted terms, since 1820, and that's all due to automation. Automation is practically synonynous with per capita productivity growth, and that's almost entirely positive for every one.
Then we will be at the mercy of AI or the authoritarian state.
This seems a bit like a Faustian bargain.
Carefully scraping old nail polish, treating skin around the nail and nail shape are probably most labor-intensive tasks that many women want to offload to a paid specialist.
Painting already prepared nail is the easy part, AFAIK.
On a scale from Tesla Autopilot (A) to Juicero (J) I would give it G.
Also this robot probably can't give you recommendations or have a conversation with you as a human would do.
So I found a place in the print dialog where you could add different watermarks and chose the one saying "PERSONAL".
It says a robot that paints nails
Aside from women, alot of men don’t go to nail salons either but paint their nails or would be open to it
There is a big enough audience
It honestly took me a bit to figure out which end of that scale was supposed to be which. I had to remember what Juicero was first, because IMO Tesla Autopilot is a weird thing to use for the high end of the scale given all the problems it has.
> This caused people to die; similar stories don't seem to happen with other car brands with similar features (automatic braking, and automatic steering in traffic).
The people who have "died" using AP, have bought defeater devices on eBay and ignored the warnings. No different than putting a rock on your gas pedal and being sad if something bad happens.
Personal responsibility is a thing. You can't just read the name of something and decide how it works, without reading the manual or the warnings.
None of this is meant as an attack. If you really haven't read he Tesla manual, give it a read. AP starts on page 89: https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/model_y_owners_man...
To me, it is clear on what it can and cannot do, and how to act.
https://www.tesladeaths.com/
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/do-you-need-to-worry-...
Mortality rate is 20%-40%, climbing with delay in treatment. In my above comment, I note that Autopilot has been involved in six deaths total, which is extremely low compared to other causes of death over the same number of years it’s been available to drivers. Another example is E Coli from contaminated lettuce has killed the same number of people (and sickened thousands more) than Autopilot use over a similar amount of time. Sharks kill 50~ people per year.
I thought that any type of salon was meant as a congregation point for gossip vectors to intersect and the manicurist was more of a surrogate therapist whose services must be conducted physically closer (opportunity for optional hushed tone) because the client's hand must be held thus setting the conditions for more personal conversation (mostly attentive listening) and accountability in a public location? Grooming-as-a-service is the commercialized intimate connection made as a reprieve from the cold robotic touch felt everywhere else in "civilized" society.
Afterwards, the "prepared" cuticles of a person's readily visible hand in any social situation is supposed to be an indicator (trophy? Cash to spare on something without surface level utility) that this social grooming session has occurred (and consequential fresh gossip fodder behind a tongue poised and rearing). Simultaneous (or primary) announcement that "these hands do not labor" (if she breaks one of these "expensive" nails, she can then draw attention to her role in a situation). This is similar to ancient Chinese foot binding that made it "beautiful" to be immobile and thus vulnerable - social status announcement that a wife with sufficiently warped feet cannot go anywhere on her own without service labor.
The offensive odor of nail polish solvent fumes is just as "necessary" a pain as the restriction of a corset, wrapped foot, elongated neck, or "temporary" hormonal disruption of birth control.
Perhaps the robot is meant to liberate the manicurist from an entire shift of toxic air.
Meh, I'm not in your target audience anyway.
After enacting a set of EU specific rules, it feels a little entitled to expect that not only all foreign websites must follow them, but that they must also make their content available for free.
It's totally reasonable for me to negotiate with you on things you do that affect me. Same goes for regulatory bodies. GDPR is about data protection and the right to privacy. I won't argue with you if those things are a good idea, but you probably realise that saying that those aren't reasonable demands puts you in a minority.
Now, it makes sense for multinational corporations to have GDPR-related functionality since some of their assets are under EU jurisdiction and for them it's probably safer (if lazy) to do it across the board. But if you're not in the EU and you run a one-person SaaS app or something, you have zero reason to jump through any GDPR hurdles if you don't want to. The EU doesn't suddenly gain jurisdiction over your business processes because an EU citizen types your address into the URL bar.
Actually don't bother, there is almost nothing to see.