Ah Well, There Goes My Lazy Morning Coffee.
Time was, in my 35-year career as a landscape architect, when I enjoyed the newspaper, read at my leisure at a 6:30 breakfast before getting out to visit various sites. Denny’s was my restaurant of choice, the food was good, the waitresses smiling and the coffee always fresh.
At 91, retired here in Prague, it’s mostly only coffee I make myself, and the news appears on my monitor, a monkey-puzzle of disasters of the day. The media thrust today rewards clicks above all else, and children dead in a military attack gone wrong reliably gets views than a rogue president robbing the public coffers.
So, a friend in Chicago wrecked my morning by sending a headline from The Hill, a political website, reportedly read by the White House and more lawmakers than any other site. Admittedly, ‘read by the White House’ doesn’t mean what it once did, not all that long ago.
America Is Already Locking Up Toothpaste, and the Mass Layoffs Have Barely Started.
Grabbed (as I was supposed to be) by what toothpaste could possibly have to do with layoffs, I read further (as I was supposed to do). I found myself unsettled (as I often am).
It seems an Uber driver in Kansas City had spilled his life story on the journalist reporting the incident. Turns out he had just added his girlfriend’s mother and a friend to his already crowded household, because there was too much month left at the end of the money.
Sharing that dilemma (without the mother and friend), I read on (as I was supposed to do).
I may be short of both readers and money but, by god, I follow the rules.
The Uber guy drives people for a living, one of about 1.6 million rideshare drivers in the U.S. Apparently, America has over four million driver individuals, including long-haul trucks, local delivery, ride-hail/taxi, city bus, school bus, postal, and courier drivers.
Wow.
That’s a bunch of people driving for a a living, supporting families and trying to get along…
…and they all have one thing in common.
They’re jobs are ‘passing away,’ which is the same euphemism we’ve invented for death, just so it won’t sound so brutal and unavoidable.
(The Hill) “The same week I was there, PepsiCo announced the largest deployment of fully autonomous delivery trucks in American history — a $600 million investment, partnering with Gatik AI. Medium-duty Isuzu trucks, many carrying Doritos and Frito-Lay products, have been running with no human on board since June 2025 on fixed short-haul routes between distribution centers, bottling plants, and stores like Walmart and Dollar General. The fleet has logged zero accidents and a 99 percent on-time delivery rate.”
No kidding, I thought all that driverless stuff was experimental, and a long way down the pipeline.
“PepsiCo is not just experimenting. Gatik, Isuzu, and Nvidia are developing a production facility in South Carolina that will begin mass-producing Level 4 autonomous trucks in the second half of 2027. “The volumes that we’re looking at for this year are in the hundreds of trucks,” said Gatik’s CEO.”
THE HILL article draws several conclusions that seem off-the-wall to me, but who really knows what’s click bait and what’s honest reporting in this day, when the former is way more prevalent than the latter?
“And into this landscape, add a statistic that deserves far more attention than it gets: 32 percent of all U.S. adults personally own a gun — roughly 83 million people. Ownership is highest in rural areas, skewing toward men without college degrees — the exact demographic most exposed to automation displacement. 47 percent of rural adults own a gun, compared to just 20 percent of urban adults.”
Yeah? And The Hill sees a connection, or are they just click-bailing me?
“Here is the compound risk nobody in Washington is connecting: Millions of working-class Americans — truckers, drivers, delivery workers — are watching their livelihoods get automated away. They are moving in together to survive. And they live in a country with more guns than people, inside a legal system that, in many states, effectively decriminalizes retail theft below certain dollar thresholds.
Decriminalizing shoplifting, so formerly honest people can make ends meet? Not to cop a pun, but “the means hardly meet the problem.”
“Walk into any CVS or Walgreens in San Francisco, Los Angeles, or New York today. Between 2019 and 2023, 69 percent of American retailers increased their use of merchandise-locking cages. In 2024, 20 percent of retailers closed store locations entirely in response to retail theft.”
Ah, the toothpaste connection, just when I’d almost lost interest.
“When institutions fail to protect the social contract, people find their own enforcement mechanisms. That is not commentary — that is history.
“I (The Hill journalist) am not writing this as alarm.
Pardon me, while I reheat my coffee-gone-cold, but it seemed a bit alarming.
“I am writing this as pattern recognition. Every society that has experienced rapid technological displacement without a parallel investment in retraining, safety nets, and civic trust has paid a price. Sometimes that price comes in the form of elections. Sometimes it comes in the form of something harder to reverse.”
Thanks to my friend from Chicago for sending this, but I have questions when I see the billionaire class chopping up jobs.
Does Jeff Bezos over at Amazon think those ‘money-saving automatons’ are going to leave any customers behind? Or have he and his buddies just chopped 40 million shoppers (when you count their various dependents) off the books?
Did Wal-Mart just commit the same error in judging customer loss, or do they simply not give a shit?
These billionaire owners of America don’t live off earnings, their wealth is connected to stock market growth.
What happens when both the market and the customer base fail at the same time?
Probably, no one can afford Elon’s household robots, Jeff’s or Walton’s everything else, or even have a place left to go to work when the walls come a tumbling down.
Is there a plan for that?
Just asking…