My friend Jeff (the actual “The” Yard Ramp Guy) recently sent me a video filled with new construction machines: machines that can lay brick roads, and lay train tracks automatically, and place bridge segments from above, and plant rice faster than any human.

Even though these machines are incredible labor-saving devices, there's one major concern with all of them. They'll all likely result in lost jobs.

This is nothing new, of course. A great deal of history's inventions has resulted in lost jobs. Computers killed the typesetter. Robots have killed factory manufacturing jobs. Tractors, fertilizer, and other farming equipment are, by far, the biggest job killer.

In medieval Europe, more than 90% of workers were farmers. In 1820, 72% of Americans farmed. Today, less than two percent of Americans farm. Most of the displaced workers from these industries have ended up in service industry jobs in America.

Whole World in Tech's Hands?

A few factors usually counteract these job losses.

First, population growth. As populations increase, so does the economy and demand for goods and, therefore, jobs. In fact, one of the central premises of most economic plans is that population will keep increasing, thereby growing the economy.

Second, not all inventions eliminate jobs. Some actually create more jobs. This isn't always a good thing, of course. One of the most impactful job-creating inventions in all of history was the cotton gin. It created countless jobs by making cotton growing much more profitable and feasible. Unfortunately, slaves took on almost all of those jobs making American slavery that much more profitable and heinous.

That said, other job-creating inventions aren't nearly so bad. The Internet is a great example of this. Unfortunately, that's all about to change. Upcoming labor-saving technologies are reaching a point where they'll actually start costing net jobs.

More on that next time.

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Quotable

Well, Yard Ramp Guy—Figure this:

“Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable.”

— Mark Twain

In a More Perfect World…

Public restrooms are a serious challenge to keep clean. The men’s room is, unsurprisingly, a huge problem.

From my unscientific research over the years (um, using public bathrooms), a shocking number of guys simply seem to lack common courtesy or even decent aim. I’m not the bathroom police, and I’m not a puritan, but it’s really not difficult to keep things clean.

We’re faced with a number of design challenges in public restrooms besides those dealing with courtesy and aim. Here are a few of the solutions that our proud bathroom engineers have come up with:

• Toilet seats: Ever noticed that toilet seats in public restrooms are about the only ones that are U-shaped? Yeah, that's done entirely because too many men splash or don’t bother to aim, and very few clean up after themselves.
• Flies in the toilet: A lot of urinal manufacturers have started constructing their urinals with a fly etched into the back of the urinal. Guys using the urinals tend to aim straight at them. Some companies have started selling special stickers for home use as well. I've heard that they reduce spillage by 80% (but that seems like a somewhat suspicious figure, if only for the difficulty in measuring it). They’ve also employed etchings of bees and dots for the target practice.
• Paper toilet seat liners: These flimsy little things provide psychological reassurance more than any real protection. Toilet seats are designed to make a poor surface for bacteria to nest on and, well, the paper liners are a better surface for that. On top of that, your skin makes a pretty great barrier to bacteria.
• Air dryers: It turns out that air dryers aren't better than paper towels. Air dryers spray germs everywhere. If you've washed your hands well, of course, it shouldn't matter. But how many people don't wash well? (A horrifyingly large number.) On the flip side, though, those air driers are much better for the environment, so there's a tough tradeoff there.

So, yeah, there we have it. This has been your public servant reporting, and imploring you to wash your hands well.

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Quotable

Well, Yard Ramp Guy—I’ve missed our alphabet thing. Glad for the return:

“I always have a quotation for everything—it saves original thinking.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

The Great Wall of China isn't visible from space. That's just an urban legend. The Mir diamond mine in Siberia, however, is.

Big Hole in the Ground

The Mir mine is an open pit diamond mine that's almost a mile wide and a third of a mile deep. It was the source for nearly all of the Soviet Union's diamonds. And without it, the USSR probably never would have worked.

Not only did the Mir mine provide much needed cash to the USSR, it also provided diamonds necessary for industrial purposes, and all major nations need such diamonds for their many industries. (Remember: diamonds are necessary for many large drill bits and scouring materials.)

The Mir mine opened in 1957, operating for 44 years until its closure in 2001. Developing the mine was no picnic. It occupies ground that’s frozen seven months of the year, and it turns to slush in the brief summer.

Engineers needed to build the main processing plant on solid ground 12 miles away. Steel got so cold it would shatter, and oil would freeze. Jet engines were used by the miners to thaw the permafrost in the winter.

Still: the quality and quantity of the diamonds in the mine more than warranted these ridiculous efforts.

The mine is actually so large that helicopters can't fly safely over it. Air tends to warm in the bottom of large holes (and the Mir mine certainly counts as large). That warm air rises over the hole. It's less dense than the cold air around it, so the helicopter tends to drop quickly when it enters the air.

A helicopter pilot could probably recover from that just by increasing rotor speed, but the cool air pouring into the hole to replace the rising warm air from all sides creates extremely powerful wind shear, which will slam the helicopter into the side of the mine.

The Mir was truly a diamond in the rough.

Rough Times for Roughy

I go freshwater fishing all the time, but I'm a big seafood fan and still buy a lot of saltwater fish from the store.

(One of my favorite shows is River Monsters. Back in the day, I loved watching Harold Ensley’s “The Sportsman’s Friend, a bit for his calm, cool approach to all things hunting and fishing, though mostly for the awe of seeing him catch awesomely-sized fish…and then unhook and drop them back in the water. Harold may never have been hungry.)

A few years ago, there was this fish I adored, Orange Roughy, that, well, simply stopped showing up in stores. Turns out that this deep-dwelling creature is extremely vulnerable to overfishing. The Orange Roughy can live to an astonishing 149 years yet often don't start reproducing until age 40 and, when they do, lay a relatively small amounts of eggs (for fish).

We had almost wiped out the Orange Roughy before we started realizing how endangered their stocks were getting. These days, thanks to careful conservation, their fisheries have recovered enough that limited fishing has resumed. But it was a close call there for a while.

The scary thing is that this is not an isolated event. We have MASSIVELY overfished our oceans. It's estimated that we put in 17 times as much work for each fish we catch today as fishermen did a century ago.

Even with all of the advanced tech we use today, fishing remains much harder and less rewarding.

That's nowhere near the scariest statistic, though: More than 90% of all large bony fish are gone from our oceans. 

Some fisheries, however, are quite sustainable and make excellent seafood choices. These include:

• The Florida Stone Crab. There is little to no bycatch (unwanted animals caught along with the catch, most of which die and are discarded; tiger prawns are the worst offenders for bycatch). Plus, most of the crabs caught actually survive. We just harvest a single claw and let them go.
• Arctic Char. The product of well-managed fisheries, along with some of the few sustainable aquaculture programs that don’t cause massive problems in the regions around them.
• Pacific Cod. While Atlantic Cod fisheries are a mess, Pacific Cod fisheries are in pretty good shape. Avoid Russian and Japanese Cod, though. They're often overfished.

For a fairly thorough listing of environmentally responsible fisheries, Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch has an interactive website.

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Quotable

Oh, Mr. Yard Ramp Guy—Heck, Mann:

“Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.”

— Robert Frost

Trash Flow

There's a floating patch of garbage, larger than Texas, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

The Pacific Ocean contains huge, slow moving gyre-shaped currents. Debris that drifts into the calm centers of those gyres tend to stay there. It’s similar in some ways to the nearly self-contained gyre that’s the Sargasso Sea but caused by different things.

The debris that drifts into the biggest one, the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone? Bits of plastic.

When you sail into the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, you won't see a lot of chunks of garbage floating around, and you certainly can't walk on it. Instead, the plastic has broken down into tiny particles that float in the upper layers of the water. Fish frequently mistake it for food and often starve, with stomachs full of plastic.

Many other lifeforms find the plastic poisonous, and as the plastics break down, they leak toxic chemicals into the environment, including ones as nasty as PCBs. (Don't read about PCBs unless you really want to freak yourself out, but if you must, click HERE).

There are even bacteria that have learned to eat the plastics, but they end up producing even nastier toxins much of the time.

As the toxic chemicals and plastics are ingested by fish, jellyfish, and other marine animals, they grow increasingly concentrated, up the food chain, as predators eat toxin-laden critters. Many of those predators in turn, like tuna (which are shockingly high up the food chain) contain much higher levels of toxins than the water around them. And then we, the people in this story, eat them. Bon appétit.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch isn't alone. There is another major gyre in the Pacific, two in the Atlantic, and one in the Indian Ocean. They all contain garbage patches of their own. What are we doing to clean up these patches? Not much yet, other than research, really. There are lots of plans in the air, but not that much funding.

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Quotable

Okay, Yard Ramp Guy: Our duel calls for Kalm. May Kooler heads prevail.

“Karate is a form of martial arts in which people who have had years and years of training can, using only their hands and feet, make some of the worst movies in the history of the world.”

— Dave Barry