“Over the last couple of years, we’ve actually been removing labour from the stores, I think with the hope that equipment could offset the removal of the labour,” Niccol said. “What we’re finding is that wasn’t an accurate assumption with what played out.”
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Starbucks at least thinks the human touch is needed. And besides, who is behind the rush to AI and robots? Maybe people who will make $ off of AI and robots? Does society really need this change?
“Make America Great Again” has been a Trump motto even during his first run for the presidency in 2015. It's not new (Reagan used it, for instance), but it does bring up a question: when was America great, according to Trump? Where does his backward look land in history? If you ask MAGA believers, you get many different answers and views on this.
Trump himself has helpfully answered this at least to a degree. Trump told the New York Times when asked when America's power was greatest: "No if you really look at it, it was the turn of the century, that’s when we were a great, when we were really starting to go robust. But if you look back, it really was, there was a period of time when we were developing at the turn of the century which was a pretty wild time for this country and pretty wild in terms of building that machine, that machine was really based on entrepreneurship etc, etc.” At a rally in Phoenix, Trump said “President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent. He was a natural businessman. “ (also) “He was a strong believer in tariffs, and we were actually probably wealthiest of any time, relatively speaking, at any point in the history of our country.“ McKinley was president from 1896 until 1901, when he was killed by an assassin.
1901 was within what is called The Gilded Age, which was a time when extremely wealthy men known as robber barons owned most all of the commercial activity of the country. They essentially ran monopolies of steel, sugar, rails, and other essential products. JP Morgan almost single-handedly ran the financial activities of the country, so much so that he was actually called upon to bail out the US government in 1893. The Gilded Age was thus controlled by what we today call oligarchs: “...the high water mark of US wealth concentration and inequality occurred during the quarter-century before World War 1... a somewhat informed guess would put the zenith around 1901 or 1902” [Wealth and Democracy, by Kevin Phillips, p. 122]. The average American at this time was barely scraping by, but the super rich like Trump today were powerful and essentially untouchable.
Many of these robber barons subscribed to Social Darwinism, which teaches that the Survival of the Fittest applies to the business world as well. The rich are rich, the theory goes, because they are the “fittest” within the economy. The poor are unfit and thus are rightfully in their lower condition. A biographer of Andrew Carnegie noted that to him, “If his friends, subordinates, and competition suffered in this battle for survival, such was evolution. There was no room for sympathy...” [Carnegie, by Peter Krass, p. 154].
Immigration to the United States was in full swing in 1901. There was backlash, however, where some groups were considered unable to fit in to United States culture. Chinese, for example, were forbidden entry. Black Americans were still considered inferior. Jim Crow laws enforced segregation and prevented blacks from voting. Prejudice was a strong aspect of 1901.
Manufacturing jobs were big in 1901. 10 hour days, 6 days a week were typical requirements. There was no worker's compensation. Child labor was common. The average annual income was $500 (about $19,000 in today's dollars). But “by the beginning of the 20th century, gross domestic product and industrial production in the United States led the world. “ [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age]
1901 was a year of technological growth, after the telephone but before motion pictures. It was the beginning of radio. The Olds automobile came on the market, but it was only a 3hp, one-cylinder vehicle. Steam engines powered ships to and from the old world, making transport much faster.
There was no income tax in 1901, as most federal government income was from tariffs. The New York stock market had its first crash this year.
The United States was in a period of territorial capture. Hawaii, Panama, the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico came under US control during McKinley's presidency.
So this is when Donald Trump thinks America should look back on with longing. If we could just emulate some aspects of the Gilded Age, America could be great again. But really, what was so great about that time? Through Trump's eyes, we quickly see the oligarchs of the time and the great control they had over the country. This would be quite appealing to Trump, though not to the rest of us. Through Trump's eyes, restricting the “other" - be that blacks, foreigners, the poor - would also induce a yearning for a time when those Not Like Us could be controlled or even expelled. Through Trump's eyes, capturing new territory looks quite beneficial to the bottom line, no matter the messiness of trying to turn the unwilling into subjects. Can the federal government run off income from tariffs? It did in 1901, so why not now?
So yes, it's quite understandable that 1901 has an attraction to Trump. But not so much to the rest of us. But right now we're living in Trump's world, so we have the oligarchs taking power, an aggressive attack on foreigners (even ones here legally), a revival of Empire Building, and a push to replace income tax with tariffs. With all this going on, it's easy to see that Trump does indeed look to 1901 for inspiration, and to Make America Great Again.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/17/trump-tariffs-warren-bessent-lutnick-democrats.html
The Trump administration’s tumultuous rollout of a spate of new tariffs is “rife with opportunities to unduly influence President Trump and other administration officials,” the Democrats wrote in a letter shared first with CNBC on Thursday.
The letter, signed by 47 House and Senate members, asks Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer to detail the administration’s “plans to prevent the misuse of tariffs for self-dealing.”
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Tariffs are very flexible things, as Trump has shown by constantly changing dates, percentages, and what is covered. If someone who has Trump's ear can convince him to drop a certain product, say, lumber, from a country's tariff, the person that did the convincing might be rewarded handsomely by, say, a big lumber company.
This of course is only one small area of the Trump administration that seems designed for insider wealth-building. If one knew, as another example, just when Trump was going to rescind his plan for imposing tariffs, one could likely making a killing on the stock market by timing one's investments.
If someone wanted to slip Trump some money without having to account for the money, one could purchase a load of Trump cyber coins, letting Trump know off-hand that oh, I happened to think investing $30 million in your cyber coins is a good idea. As an investment, of course, Not a bribe or anything.
If someone wanted to get a federal department off their company's back, they might make a suggestion to DOGE to shut down that federal department.
On and on it goes. The entire structure of Trump's administration is one designed, I believe, to make corruption easy and excusable. And to think we voted for this.
The world has reacted to global warming by changing how we make electricity. Coal plants are being shut down (with no thanks to Trump), in favor of wind power and photovoltaic cells. Now these are even becoming more economically viable in addition to their less harmful effects on the environment. So we can feel good about all that.
But now here comes several new users of electricity that each have rapacious appetites. Bitcoins are created by computers solving difficult mathematical equations. This industry alone has grown to use more electricity than the nation of Poland. We also have online platforms like Youtube and Amazon that take up terrawatt hours of electricity. Now the newest super-consumer is artificial intelligence, which is a huge user. The projection is that “electricity demand from data centres worldwide is set to more than double by 2030 to around 945 terawatt-hours (TWh), slightly more than the entire electricity consumption of Japan today. AI will be the most significant driver of this increase, with electricity demand from AI-optimised data centres projected to more than quadruple by 2030 “ [https://www.iea.org/news/ai-is-set-to-drive-surging-electricity-demand-from-data-centres-while-offering-the-potential-to-transform-how-the-energy-sector-works].
So on the one hand, we are making greener electricity, but on the other hand, the demand is growing so fast that we may not be able to keep up. This will increase pressure to re-open mothballed coal and gas plants. And there goes all the effort to help prevent global warming. There needs to be discussion about what is more important, our freedom to make AI cat videos, or a livable planet?
