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Attack of the Robot Disposable Plastic Cups
A fast-food joint in California features a robot burger-flipper-robot-thingie (“Mustard, Will Robinson!”) that grills 300 hamburgers a day. A human short-order cook must marvel at the concept of only 300.
The restaurant says that no humans are losing jobs because of automation, and given the robot’s leisurely pace that’s probably true.
Any true burger-meister will want only a human cook, Clyde or Maria or Junior or Jorge or Bobbie-Ann, laughing and joking, building a burger with one hand while making coffee with the other, and at the apex of culinary creation calling out your number with a voice reminiscent of one of Bertie Wooster’s brassy aunts, loud enough to call the cattle home across the Sands of Dee.
The robot is not going to approach your table with a coffee refill, pop chewing gum, tell a joke, or ask you how your day is because it’s not programmed to move from its assigned spot on the floor and in any event is broken down again.
No robots, thank you, either in the fast-foodery or in the big-box store; there are no ethics or economy in firing a loyal, long-time local worker in order to lose money on an expensive gadget that never functions as it should and which requires constant maintenance and adjustment while the customers, tired of waiting, drift away to stores staffed by humans.
On the other hand, or grasping robotic arm, the manager of a taco stop in Chicago stabbed one of his employees in an argument over a woman. Possibly a robot worker would not flirt the boss’s girlfriend: “Hey, good-looking, do you ever go out with Chinese robots who dig Microsoft and The Big Bang Theory?”
The Scottish parliament has banned single-use coffee cups, a menace to the environmental purity of the highlands often related in iambic tetrameter in Sir Walter Scott’s yarns. In The Lady of the Lake the real crime of Roderick Dhu is not that he murdered a fellow knight in a sghian dubh-free zone and betrayed his king but because he drank his morning dram of whisky (with a frothy layer of latte and lightly dusted with cinnamon) from a plastic cup.
And then threw it away. Gasp!
This ban on nefarious plastic and paper cups applies only to parliament buildings for the present, saving the heather from the depredations of 450,000 cups a year. Given that Scottish parliamentarians drink 450,000 cups of coffee and tea each year, hardworking Angus in Dundee must wonder what his elected representatives do except sit around and quiver from atrial fibrillation.
The Scottish parliament has also appointed a high-level commission to study (translation: vacations under the guise of fact-finding missions) the elimination of the scourge of other fast-food disposables from Scottish society.
All good Scots still mourn the loss of Stirling Castle in 1304 to an attacking English force better armed with semi-automatic paper cups, wall-breaking plastic clamshells, and unregistered drinking straws.
From California to Scotland the theme seems to be the betterment of the world through the eradication of human workers and plastic cups. This continues the theme that since gasoline comes from a pump (now with a little television screen), electricity from a socket in the wall, and milk from the market, we don’t need those nasty, polluting oil wells, generating stations, and farms.
Once the purge is accomplished, no one will ever again be in want, and whales (vegetarian whales, of course) will frolic in the Sacramento River and in the Solway Firth.
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