Driverless Trucks to Hit Alberta’s Oilsands | Hacker News Reader

Driverless Trucks to Hit Alberta’s Oilsands

globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

56 pointsjustonepost57 comments

Fewer workers means less spent on wages, which means less contributed in income taxes. These changes reduce government's profits while increasing the oil company's profits.

The new NDP government promised as a part of their campaign to review royalty rates. This seems like an argument that they'll need to increase even just to keep revenue constant.

Canadian corporations pay taxes on their profits. They also distribute income to shareholders, who then pay taxes. If they pay their execs rich salaries, those execs pay rich taxes. All corporate profit eventually ends up in the hands of an individual over time, and Canada has relatively high personal income taxes.

It also varies by the country of course. Oil companies in the US pay among the highest tax rates.

Exxon and Chevron for example typically pay 30%+ rates.

Last three years for Exxon:

Income before tax: $188 billion; Income tax expense: $73 billion; Net income: $110 billion

Some of it is also double taxed, so the real tax rate is even higher than just counting the corporate income tax.

If it were up to me, all of our money would be only be taxed when we withdrew it from our bank accounts to pay for stuff, with tax credits for the poor so it's not regressive.

Tax imports ... and nothing else.

I'm not really familiar with corporate taxation, but a lot of those taxes sound like they might go to different places. As an Albertan, it matters to me whether money goes to my provincial government or whether it goes to some other province or country's government.

The people of Alberta own the unextracted oil in this province. They, via the government, sell it to companies who extract and profit from it. Just saying, if the people of Alberta can raise their prices, they will. They've certainly been talking about it.

Not all shareholders live and pay taxes in the same place that the displaced workers do. Also, rates of taxation on dividends and capital gains often differ from those on wages, though I haven't looked up the specific rates in Canada.

Dividends and long-term capital gains are mostly a form of double taxation. That's why there is a strong argument for the rates not being as high as traditional income.

I'm no tax lawyer, but my understanding is that income trusts provide a way around this, and this particular arrangement is available to Canadian firms: http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/06/deductdividendpay...

I'd like to believe that it all evens out in the end, but the reality seems to be that many firms are able to avoid a lot of tax through a combination of aggressive accounting and lobbying for either special tax treatment or subsidies of one sort or another. I agree with you that robotic labor may well fall subject to taxation and if so this will be why - many people don't feel they're competing on a level playing field with the owners of capital.

Well countries will soon feel the pain cities, counties, and even states have felt. This is a global economy and more people than ever have the mobility to seek places to live where the think the costs are more to their liking.

So instead of going full stupid with taxes and regulations governments need to learn how to do the same or more with less and how to compete.

I'd venture that less of the money from shareholder distributed income is spent on goods and services than that of employee wages. Particularly, as another poster pointed out, locally.

Hasn't the luddite argument already been addressed by economists in general? Do we need to have it every time? Remember when a high percentage of humans worked in agricultural jobs?

The argument is not luddite or the oppression of technology. The argument is that we need to revamp our economic system to allow for the displacement of workers. The reality is that more and more jobs are 'bullshit' jobs and more people are becoming rapidly economically irrelevant.

Where is this occurring exactly?

In nearly every major economy, the people are better off today than they were 100 years ago, or 50 years ago. The US median may be the sole exception, due to having temporarily inherited the global manufacturing base all for itself after WW2.

Germany, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, Finland, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Austria, Czech, Slovakia, Ireland, Singapore, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Poland, Russia, Colombia, Mexico, Brazil - the people in these countries, in median economic terms, are better off today than at any other time in world history.

Even the French, whose economy has been stagnant for 20 years, are incredibly rich when it comes to median net wealth. In France it's $140,000 +/- median net wealth per adult, among the highest on earth.

The Japanese are in all sorts of trouble economically, and their people, in median terms, are far better off today than they were in 1920 or in 1970.

What you see is people are working 'bullshit' jobs in order to keep up with consumption. Sure, these jobs exist, but they are mostly pointless. Our economic system is creating these jobs because of ZIRP. Witness the pointless startups getting funded (they're not ALL pointless, of course).. God forbid the fed ever increased interest rates and actually expected people to work in real jobs that produced something real.

Do you work a 'bullshit' job?

This fellow probably says it better than I: http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/08/labour-m...

If you take a moment and look at maslow's hierarchy of needs you have to ask yourself do we really need all these jobs at the top of the pyramid? Why can't we all just make sure the entire world has the bottom part covered and then just relax and enjoy each other's company / enjoy nature / read a book? Sure, I get why we have roomba the robot, but come on.... Luxury Yachts for millions of dollars? Mansions? Super cars? I mean, wtf.

No doubt Graeber would have considered the medicine man in the cave society as a 'bullshit' job. :-)

The Luddite argument is almost exactly as you've framed it, "technology eats my job, 'they' fix it so most people don't notice, we should collectively outlaw technology."

However, the Luddites, then and now, started from a fallacy that a 'job' was some sort of permanently defined thing, of which there was a finite supply. And sadly that is completely backwards. What there is, is capital, which is the output of an economy, which goes back into the economy to create more capital. Capital is not strictly 'money' which is a stand in for it at times, it is the potential to produce goods or services. That potential can be realized as $100 or it can be realized as someone who is not currently employed. The participants in the economy, people like you and me, make up new types of jobs all the time in order to convince some capital to flow your way. When we are successful we capture that capital, and then we reuse it to meet our own needs or goals. So when ever there is excess capital, there is job creation because everyone wants a piece of it.

can you give some examples of these so called bullshit jobs?

you might not agree that military jobs are useful (I think they serve a useful purpose) or the government in general (could be smaller, but it's not all bullshit in my opinion )... but many people would disagree with you.

Here is an article about bullshit jobs: http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

One of the examples is telemarketers.

HR. Insurance sales. Medical Billing just to name a few.

It's not that the purpose behind these are bullshit, but the system is set up in an inefficient way rather than as a society doing things efficiently which would require less people. Many many jobs are manifestly bullshit (i.e. people expending effort and collecting salary doing something that could be done with much less effort a different way). Not only this, but even most non-bullshit jobs are comprised of a large percentage bullshit.

Technology has increased more than the standard of living and we are still working the same hours. Why? Because bullshit arises to claim the excess.

So when in the past weren't the median of people working what you'd call bullshit jobs, and in which countries? What jobs were they doing?

The median economic facts indicate greater income, wealth, life expectancy, standard of living, disposable income. Not to mention vastly superior / improved healthcare for the majority of countries versus 100 or 50 years ago.

More segments of the U.S. population is worse off now vs better than 50 years ago. Considering the massive economic and technological gains over that time period something is clearly broken.

EX1: The rediculus increase in the prison populaion from drugs and other BS crimes.

EX2: Todays minimum wage is equivelent to a 97 cent minimum wage in 1965 though the actual minimum wage in 1965 was 1.25$.

PS: Yes, some things cost less but education and housing more than make up the difference. And no education is not significantly better now.

It is the Luddite argument. What did they do when their jobs were replaced?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

Automating people out of work is not a new problem

Nor is it a solved problem. You cannot point to any modern economy as an example of successfully avoiding this issue, since they all rely heavily on subsidy injections to maintain the economy(and for other reasons). A more modern example would be British coal. While people have moved on decades later, local economies were devastated. It can take generations to recover, while many fall through the cracks.

My argument is that the government, as the owner of the resources being extracted, might have both motive and opportunity to raise their prices if extraction costs drop.

Automation means we can do less work but still enjoy the fruits of our labour as if we did more work. I certainly wouldn't oppose that.

The Luddites wanted to prevent automation but I don't, so you'll need to clarify if that's not what you meant.

I often wonder if mental illness is a side effect of this shift from outdoor and natural forms of work, to indoor and stress driven types of work.

People have to teach themselves all sorts of coping mechanisms to stop their minds going out of control with modern work (burnout being a vague example around here).

Like all things its nature vs nurture. There are plenty of historical accounts of people being anti-social agoraphobes or autistic in the past. They were either labeled 'eccentric' if they were rich or crazy if they weren't. "Demon possession" during bible days was likely a form of mental illness, and those who genuinely heard "God" might have either been on psychedelics or had genuine conditions (schizophrenia comes to mind).

I think the argument is different today. It's not just one or two industries being replaced, and it's not just super skilled labour either. When computers replace our drivers, in australia, that's ~ 5% of people out of a job. That's just transport jobs, not including rental etc.

The Australian government predicts a 10% growth in that industry in the next 5 years. http://lmip.gov.au/default.aspx?LMIP/EmploymentProjections

Australia's unemployment rate is 6% - so that's basically a doubling of workers looking for jobs, from computerisation of one industry.

Obviously 5 years is too short term for automation of transport, but projecting further than that is a fool's game.

The fear is that automation will affect more and more industries at the same time, leading to structural unemployment. That's where a person's worth is less than minimum wage relative to the price of automation - people simply can't be trained fast enough because the industries are changing too fast and computer power is cheap.

In addition to those government issues, there's less cash flowing from the non-existent workers to [local] businesses, which means that infrastructure from those businesses is no longer sustainable. The internet does that too.

Futurologists of the past speculated that salaries earned by machines would be shared out to civilisation (to allow us to stop working), but it's gone in another direction.

Yes, rather than decreased work all we have is increased consumption (which is slowly destroying the planet).

Robotic labor will be taxed and regulated in the near future, in most countries, to force such outcomes. Restrictions will be put on robot output or on how many human-hours equivalent they can operate per day.

Within a decade or so we'll see marches in the streets by lower-income laborers arguing for these changes. Robots don't vote, so it's obvious what will occur eventually.

the taxes exist already through tax on the companies profits. there will plenty of work for techs who work on robotic machinery, its not simply electronics, there is hydraulics, and more involved.

government increases the cost of each worker to the point that companies are forced to find alternatives that are cheaper. from mandated pay, benefits, employer paid fees and taxes, and costs of implementing safety regulations, support staff and their inherent costs, its not hard to see that to compete on a world market that automation will be used.

many jobs out there now currently have human robots for the most part, performing the same task over and over with little variation but a whole lot of opportunity to screw up. the labor component simply moves into new opportunities, including as stated into maintaining the new machines

alternatively, they could decrease income tax so that salaries can be lowered but net income remains the same (or even increases) to make robots less competitive.

Going one step further, with less cash flowing from workers to businesses, there will be less need for trucks to move materials and goods around.

This would allow the truck driving robots to stop working as well.

Oh look, incredible automation technology dominated by people who are terrified of world economic collapse due to people not getting payed to drive a vehicle.

> “At an average (salary) of $200,000 per person, you can see the savings we’re going to get from an operations perspective.”

Wow, I guess I should've been a truck driver!

Or not, right?

It's probably fully-loaded cost, so salary is 50-75% of that, but yes, doing a temporary and undesirable job for a large company in some remote barren location generally pays well.

Yep. It's the exact same in Australian mining towns. High school graduates can reliably get a job in the mines that pays north of $150k. The downside obviously is that it's dangerous, not to mention bad for health. But some people jump at the opportunity still.

The parens around salary make me think that whoever was quoted originally said "cost" or a more specific term than that. I don't know how it is in Canada, but in the US I believe it's typical for less than half of what a company spends on an employee to be their actual salary (the rest being payroll taxes, benefits, and stuff like that)

This is a really shitty part of the world to live in.

Dammit, I love giant dump trucks.

Once they become driverless I can never look at them again without thinking of Maximum Overdrive. =(

One interesting factoid--women are easier on these trucks better than man. At least that's what the tour guide told me when I toured some of the oil sands a couple years ago.

But even thought women are better than men by being easier on the trucks, robots can be as gentle as possible. That is something that isn't discussed as much--robotic control can be as fuel efficient as possible and as easy on equipment as possible. Driverless trucks will not only save labor costs but they will be better on the equipment.

If you're getting paid $200,000 to do drive a set route in a truck then you deserve to be replaced by a robot. The justification for getting paid this much for such a monotonous job is ridiculous. Their union better be sweating.

Maybe, but look at those trucks, they're the size of a building. If you screw up you could do a hell of a lot of damage. I presume the $200k salary is a reflection of the supply & demand for that particular driving skill.

None of the risk is bore by the truck driver. If they screw up or destroy the equipment they might be sued for negligence, at worse. Risk of lives is somewhat less compared to slamming a school bus into a busy intersection. It is not clear if the risk is bore by the company because the equipment is insured, maybe they will get higher insurance rates.

$200k salary comes from living the middle of nowhere, and indeed the work of the unions.

The pay for this kind of a gig has gone up dramatically in the last 3 decades. On the other hand, despite the 200k salary the the industry remains profitable, as they simply stick their hands in the ground and pull out money.

Your response is meaningless.

If I'm not willing to pay the going rate for a competent megatruck driver in a remote location, and an incompetent driver wrecks a heap of equipment that ends up costing me millions of dollars, then I may well ask myself why I cheaped out instead of just spending $200k/year on a driver with the desired skillset and experience.

I never suggested in any way that such wages were reflective of drivers' costs of doing business or liability insurance, and don't know where you got such an idea. I think the high salary is a function of both the remote location and the particular skills/experience needed to operate a truck that can weigh up to 600 tons when loaded. The trucks themselves cost a few million dollars each, I believe.

US miltary equipment, such as plains and tanks cost more and require more experience. Its not about finding competant drivers.

Working in the military isn't a regular job, and people who enlist in the military sign a very restrictive contract, so the normal laws of supply and demand don't apply. Internally the military is, by definition, a command-and-control economy.

http://www.military.com/join-armed-forces/making-commitment....

And if I push code with a bug in it that winds up costing my company 5 million bucks, it's extremely unlikely they'd try and take it out of my salary. What's your point?

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