Robots and restaurants

In the future, robots will be able to do all of the restaurant jobs currently done by humans, such as cooking, cleaning up, and bringing food to customers. And of course the technology for self-service payments already exists (and in fact, it’s surprising that fast food places aren’t already taking orders and payments that way).

Besides putting people out of jobs, which were crappy low-wage jobs anyway, eating out will become more affordable. For the average poor or middle-income person, it will probably be less expensive to eat out than to try to cook something at home. Eating meals at home (besides pre-packaged food like potato chips) will become something that only rich people do because they will be able to afford personal robots that prepare meals and then clean up.

In the future, poor people will still be fatter than rich people, and liberal journalists will explain it’s because they are too poor to afford their own robots to cook quality healthy food and they are forced to eat unhealthy food at RoboMcDonalds.

When rich people do go out to eat, they will not want to be served by robots, so high-end restaurants will still have human waitstaff. As I’ve pointed out before, many people who aren’t born rich will only be able to make money if they have the ability to entertain the rich or make them feel good about themselves.

Ironically, proles eating at fully roboticized restaurants will actually get faster and more efficient service than the rich at high-end restaurants with human waitstaff.

Self-driving cars are coming

Google’s self-driving cars are now driving through city streets. Major car manufacturers plan to start selling self-driving cars in 2020.

Maybe by 2030, human-driven cars will be banned because they will be so much more dangerous than self-driving cars.

NY Post article about college students who strip

According to the NY Post, female college students are becoming strippers in order to pay for their college education. One stripper says she plans to save $1 million by stripping.

This begs the question: if stripping pays so well, why bother to go to college at all? I guess the answer is that it’s low class to not have a college degree.

Crooked guido congressman from Staten Island

Remember Michael Grimm, the guido congressman from Staten Island?

He has been indicted:

Prosecutors said during that time, Grimm filed false state and federal tax returns to underreport over a $1 million in sales and wages by concealing gross receipts for cash purchases and paid workers hundreds of thousands of dollars off the books.

There is also perjury and employment of illegal aliens.

It’s tough for Asian-Americans to get admitted to elite universities

The percent of Asians enrolled at the most elite universities has plateaued since the 1990s even though the percent of the 18-21 year-old U.S. population that is Asian has soared since then.

To make things even worse for Asian-Americans, an increasing share of the Asian quota at elite schools is going to rich Chinese nationals instead of Asian-Americans.

See article at Quartz.

Beta-male rage or roid rage?

Most beta-male rage crimes are committed with firearms.

Killing a girl with just a knife reminds me of how O.J. Simpson killed his wife. No one would ever accuse O.J. of being a beta male.

A commenter suggested that Chris Plaskon may have been taking steroids, as evidenced by his acne and his weightlifting regimen. So this could have been a case of roid rage and not beta-male rage.

Definition of beta-male rage

The overwhelmingly vast majority of violent crime is committed by thugs.

Beta-male rage is rare, but is on the rise. It happens when a lesser beta male, with no history of violence, criminal behavior or thuggishness, surprises everyone by committing a violent crime.

By a lesser beta male, we mean a male who has below-average success with women. Beta-male-rage crimes are never committed by men with girlfriends or wives.

Also, to be beta-male rage, the perpetrator cannot be suffering from mental illness such as schizophrenia. A lot of crimes that initially appear to be candidates for beta-male rage turn out to be schizophrenia.

Although George Sodini is often seen as the poster-boy for beta-male rage, my favorite beta-male rage perpetrator is Jeffrey Johnson, the sad lonely man who shot the guido salesman at an office building across the street from the Empire State Building.

Who’s Donald Sterling?

I never heard of Donald Sterling until today. Who is he? Apparently he’s some 80-year-old man with a mistress who’s in her thirties but pretends to be in her twenties. Young enough to be his granddaughter. (See the mistress’s Instagram. She appears to be mulatto Hispanic.)

But apparently that’s not the part that anyone cares about.

Sterling’s wife claims that the mistress embezzled $1.8 million from them, but nobody cares about that either.

Beta-male rage in Milford Connecticut?

There was a fatal stabbing at a high school in Milford Connecticut, and it sounds like this may be a case of beta-male rage.

* * *

At 10:00 AM on Saturday morning, I think that the prediction of beta-male rage holds up. The perpetrator is a beta-looking white kid. He was on the track team, but that’s more of a beta sport and not an alpha sport like the big three ball sports (baseball basketball football). He has been described as “weird, and a “class clown” as well as someone no one would ever imagine as a murderer. His weirdness is apparently not extreme weirdness like Adam Lanza, but merely normal lesser-beta-male weirdness (please excuse the oxymoron).

He was apparently childhood friends with the victim, and had an unrequited crush on her for a very long time.

I hate to have to say something that Roissy would probably say, but if someone had taught him some basic “game” and the importance of letting go of “oneitis”, this tragedy surely would have been averted.

* * *

This NY Times article about the suspect, Chris Plaskon, makes him sound less beta. He actually did participate in football and baseball. However, I think his bad acne may have prevented him from being popular with girls.

So now, I’m not sure if this is beta-male rage caused by oneitis, or just schizophrenia.

In Silicon Valley lawsuit, the lawyers win big for themselves

Yesterday, the class action law firms settled with the tech company defendants (Google, Apple, Intel, Adobe) for a measly $325 million (sources tell the Wall Street Journal).

This is an outrage for the 64,000 class members whose salaries were seriously lowered because of the illegal collusion between this rich tech companies, and all they get is $5,078 each before the greedy lawyers take their cut so it’s going to be quite a bit less than that.

On the other hand, this was no doubt hugely profitable for the class action attorneys who brought the lawsuit. They are all millionaires now and they can retire, and buy themselves big houses that the class members could never afford themselves.

Class action lawsuits are big scams that rarely bring any significant recovery of damages to the class members because it’s all about the lawyers negotiating with the defendants so that the lawyers can get a huge payday.

This is value transference on top of value transference. The value created by these employees was transferred to the more significant stakeholders at these big corporations, and the lawsuit is mostly about transferring value to lawyers.

As a commenter writes at Hacker News:

Lawyers get a huge chunk of money for relatively little effort, the actual plaintiffs get like a couple of thousand each, and the companies pay out an amount that is likely far less than the amount they saved by the illegal collusion and is also not sufficiently punitive to impact their future decisions to do similar things.

And another commenter writes:

The moral of this story is that conspiracy is very profitable. Save ~$3bn in costs for a $300MM settlement. Sad.