Japanese Convenience Stores Are Hiring Robots Run by Workers in the Philippines

Yes that is the alternative, people need jobs, even they happen to be menial.

Self-checkout is a system where you as a honest person are paying so that other people can steal goods.

Owners of supermarket have calculated that the increase in theft is off-set by the savings of not paying wages to cashiers. But those losses have to be paid by somebody, and that somebody is of course the customers who don't steal goods.

I'd rather not be the person who has to pay extra so that another person can steal. That's an undignified existence, and hence why I also boycott self-checkouts. I don't care what "rationalists" say.

Also, a store with a lot of self-checkout lanes and few cashiers will attract thieves and repel honest customers who want good service. The result is a worse store in every way, until it folds and closes - as owners have probably planned for a few years.

You seem to be under the impression that most jobs, as they exist and are done, are objectively needed. Just like RTO policies, they only exist to keep the economy going. Automation is not driven by a love of engineering or the desire to automate for efficiency's sake. The drive is the most efficient path to increasing profits and reducing costs not performing existing jobs in the most efficient way.

Optimize the check out flow for the human worker like Aldi has done and pay them a decent wage so it's no longer a menial job?

Self check out of more than a few items at the grocery store will always suck and be slower than someone who has trained to scan items quickly and has memorized the produce codes.

I never use self check out because I don't work at the grocery store and would rather just wait on my phone than take an active role in an activity I have no interest in ever becoming good at while giving the company more money over all for the shittier experience. I'm also not afraid of the cashier asking me how my day is going.

The difference is there’s two options; to scan and bag your own stuff or go to a human(s) that can scan and bag your stuff. If the former catches on then we/you will be doing the “menial job” of bagging and scanning our own stuff all the time… and then some self checkout attendant will have the “menial job” of supervising the checkout and resetting it when it errors out.

But they literally are... Instead of hiring a Japanese person, they're hiring someone from the Philippines.

>They're not competing for local resources, which is the main point of contention regarding immigration.

Isn't "competing for local resources" just a fig leaf for "I don't want to lose my job to some foreigner"? That's a far better theory because it explains both anti-immigration sentiment as well as anti-globalization/offshoring sentiment.

Could you load up a 747 and fly them in for the day and then fly them out for the night?

Why is that so much different than them controlling a robot remotely?

If you want people to be able to immigrate into your country and work thats fine; just make it the law!

Actually they are, in many cases operating in gray zone as they work on projects that in theory should not leave the country of origin, and having a VPN or SSH is useless when the actual computer screen is on foreign soil.

> Do you think offshore call centers are also "workarounds" for work permits?

Yes. And I hope that call centers were forced to be in the same country that the recipients of the call. If it is not worth the cost, then they should not be doing the call.

What's the point of a work visa if you can just bypass it with a robot?

IIUC, typically you don't hire foreign individuals for "your company". "your company" sets up a subsidiary in that foreign country and they work "locally" for the foreign subsidiary. And so the difference is that your local company would _import_ the work products from that foreign company and pay any relevant tariffs (see Nintendo of America paying tariffs from Nintendo Switch 2s produced by Nintendo of Japan). Now, IIUC the tariffs for digital goods are typically 0% so it's pretty simple to import them but you're still following a law allowing for the importation of a digital good.

That’s a losing strategy unfortunately when looking into the infinitely deep maw of robotic labor capitalism