can someone compile all of the broken_iris posts in this thread and laminate them for me?

As Fast Food Workers Go On Strike In 100 Cities, Applebees Unveils The "Waiter Terminator"

that does seem like a pretty excellent product.

Or, a police state enforcing a social democracy.

McP and I have (and probably others but these were two recent cases) both argued somewhere that we're entering into a world where people just simply don't need to work anymore. Not as much. We have fewer things that require bodies to do them, and a much larger population. There is going to be a long period of adjustment when we start learning how to live with abundance. Eventually (and sooner than we might think, but not immediately) the population is going to sever the labor/wage connection since it will no longer make sense. At that point we'll figure out if the United States is going to be a police state enforcing a rigid feudal caste system, or a social democracy. But what it currently is will probably cease to exist.

Hey, this time will be different!

there has yet to be a police state existing alongside a social democracy

I think police states and social democracy are incompatible. I was responding to the 'this time will be different' comment

Unions at work. Making the world a better place one lie at a time.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/12/09/eviction_protesters_block_google_bus_in_san_francisco_fake_video_of_google.html

This afternoon, the Bay Guardian posted on its website a video of an alleged Google employee shouting down the protesters in the most obnoxious possible way. “This is a city for the right people who can afford it,” the bearded, hipster-glasses-wearing guy screeched. “You can’t afford it? You can leave. I’m sorry, get a better job.”

The video quickly went viral, so much so that it appeared to have taken down the Bay Guardian website for a time. Several other outlets ran with it, including ValleyWag’s scourge of the techies, Sam Biddle, who opined that the Google employee in question “personifies almost every single thing worth protesting.”

One problem: As some quickly suspected, including New York Magazine’s Kevin Roose, it now appears the guy wasn’t a real Google employee. Instead, Fitzgerald Rodriguez reports in an update to his story, he was a union organizer posing as a Google employee in order to make Google employees look bad. Suffice it to say that, whatever you think of Google employees and their impact on the San Francisco housing market, they were not the ones who came out of this particular exchange looking bad.

Angry French Union Workers Take Two Bosses Hostage

Workers at a Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. factory in northern France prevented two managers from leaving the facility on Monday, the latest in a string of protests by union members who were accused by a U.S. executive last year of doing little work.

Mickaël Wamen, a union representative, said the managers would be held until workers get a satisfactory response to their requests. He said the managers already have been informed that they will spend the night at the site.

Goodyear, of Akron, Ohio, has been trying to shut the plant for several years, but is entangled in legal proceedings with unions representing workers, led by the communist-backed CGT. Efforts to sell the factory to U.S. tire maker Titan International Inc. hit the headlines last year, after Titan Chief Executive Maurice Taylor blasted French labor laws and work habits.

As Goodyear winds down operations and the plant almost idle, French labor law requires the company to keep all workers employed, which means many of them don't work more than a couple of hours a day while still getting full salary.

The situation enraged Mr. Taylor, who dropped the first offer he had made for the plant and told France's industry minister that he would be "stupid" to operate in a country where workers get high wages for little work.

Tense labor relations in France were exacerbated by the financial crisis, leading to a string of so-called boss-nappings. In 2009, when industrial companies started retrenching their operations, managers at the French plants of several foreign firms, including Caterpillar Inc., Sony Corp. and 3M Co., were held captive by workers angry at being laid off.