🤖 Expensive labour pulls forward automation capex
Now that low-wage labour has repriced from ~$20 to ~$33/hr and won't come back, automating fast food, local delivery, factory assembly and trucking finally pencils out. Automation and robotics vendors get a demand pull-forward, and the effect is ultimately deflationary.
other ideas on the same ticker, same direction: China's automated manufacturing base outruns US reindustrialization 13 (ROBO)
⚖ Why this result
fully deterministic — computed from daily closes on the scoring date; nothing below is editable or hand-set
- Window: 2021-10-16 → 2022-10-16 — first mention + 12-month horizon, then the window locks.
- The call: ▲ LONG BOTZ (primary play). BOTZ fell 52.6% over the window → return (sign flipped for a SHORT) = -52.6% (the call lost money).
- Benchmark: holding SPY over the same window returned -18.8% → vs SPY = -52.6 − (-18.8) = -33.7% — what this call made or lost against just owning the index. This is the number the result uses.
- Rule fired:
· RIGHT — return ≥ +10% AND beat SPY by 5+· HALF — return ≥ +5% OR beat SPY at all▶ WRONG — everything else
- Credit: supporters of a WRONG earn 0 each, opposers the opposite — this feeds the scoreboard. supported: Chamath, Friedberg, Jason, Sacks | opposed: Ryan Petersen
Conviction timeline
bands: green ≥ 65 · watch ≥ 45 · ember ≥ 15
Plays vs SPY · % since first mention (2021-10-16)
Plays
Mention log newest first
“I think that's going to be the very interesting thing with the robots as well, is all of these decisions they're making, moving cars through roads, all of a sudden we're going to see that with VTOLs, vertical takeoff and landing, you know, aircraft, and we're going to see it with this general robot.”
“We are within, I think, five, 10 years of a lot of these jobs. We're talking tens of millions of manual labor jobs being gone. And we're going to look at this moment in time where we try to squeeze an extra 10 or 20 percent out of these employers. And then you're going to see these employers say, you know what? 24-hour-a-day robot. Yeah, it's a little bit upfront cost. I'll put it on the lease and they're just going to move to these robots. It's really very close to being game over for manual labor.”
“And so to think that they're not going to just invest heavily now at the corporate level, the next franchisee of McDonald's will still pay a million dollars for franchise fee but will give will be given a bevy of robots that they rent for McDonald's and they'll have to hire half or third less.”
“Well, the reason is because if you raise the minimum wage too much, then these employers have a huge incentive to replace that labor with automation. And so the unintended consequence that Chamath is talking about is that these big chain restaurants are going to rely even more heavily on automation now.”
“Number two, businesses are going to automate. So new businesses will emerge that actually do the fast food work or do the car building work or do the dock loading and unloading work that are automated and they'll have an inherent advantage in the economy and they'll win.”
“Flexport already made this technology. We could 10x the throughput of one of these ports overnight ... We already have this tech. So it's a matter of implementation, deployment, and how do you get around a lot of people that don't really want to see better running ports. And it's pretty sad to sit where I sit.”
“So the low-cost model of consumerism in the United States, which has been a stronghold for our economy for 100 years at this point, may be coming to an end, or it will accelerate the implementation of automation across that sector of the economy.”
“The other free market argument that could be made is that these current trends will accelerate a trend towards more automation of low cost labor ... So there's a number of these automation industries that may significantly benefit and that ends up ultimately being deflationary and the market comes into balance.”
Who built this conviction
each voice's total push on the score, in conviction points across every mention — supports and opposes · share = % of all mention-driven movement
⏳ decay drained -47.5 over the idea's life — that's time passing, attributed to no one
Score events
| episode | kind | Δ | after | note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| E51 2021-10-16 | init | +35.0 | 35.0 | E51 born by Friedberg (explicit_prediction x2) |
| E52 2021-10-23 | decay | -1.4 | 33.6 | E52 silent |
| E53 2021-10-30 | decay | -1.3 | 32.3 | E53 silent |
| E54 2021-11-06 | decay | -1.3 | 31.0 | E54 silent |
| E55 2021-11-13 | decay | -1.2 | 29.7 | E55 silent |
| E56 2021-11-20 | decay | -1.2 | 28.5 | E56 silent |
| E57 2021-12-04 | decay | -1.1 | 27.4 | E57 silent |
| E58 2021-12-11 | reinforce | +10.9 | 38.3 | E58 Friedberg support x2 |
| E59 2021-12-17 | decay | -1.5 | 36.8 | E59 silent |
| E60 2021-12-23 | decay | -1.5 | 35.3 | E60 silent |
| E61 2021-12-29 | decay | -1.4 | 33.9 | E61 silent |
| E62 2022-01-08 | decay | -1.4 | 32.5 | E62 silent |
| E63 2022-01-15 | decay | -1.3 | 31.2 | E63 silent |
| E64 2022-01-22 | decay | -1.2 | 30.0 | E64 silent |
| E65 2022-01-29 | decay | -1.2 | 28.8 | E65 silent |
| E66 2022-02-05 | oppose | -6.0 | 22.8 | E66 Ryan Petersen opposes x2 [w=0.50] |
| E67 2022-02-12 | decay | -0.9 | 21.9 | E67 silent |
| E68 2022-02-19 | decay | -0.9 | 21.0 | E68 silent |
| E70 2022-02-24 | decay | -0.8 | 20.1 | E70 silent |
| E71 2022-03-05 | decay | -0.8 | 19.3 | E71 silent |
| E72 2022-03-19 | decay | -0.8 | 18.6 | E72 silent |
| E73 2022-03-26 | decay | -0.7 | 17.8 | E73 silent |
| E74 2022-04-01 | decay | -0.7 | 17.1 | E74 silent |
| E75 2022-04-09 | decay | -0.7 | 16.4 | E75 silent |
| E76 2022-04-16 | decay | -0.7 | 15.8 | E76 silent |
| E77 2022-04-23 | decay | -0.6 | 15.1 | E77 silent |
| E78 2022-04-30 | decay | -0.6 | 14.5 | E78 silent |
| E79 2022-05-07 | decay | -0.6 | 14.0 | E79 silent |
| E80 2022-05-13 | decay | -0.6 | 13.4 | E80 silent |
| E81 2022-05-23 | decay | -0.5 | 12.9 | E81 silent |
| E82 2022-05-24 | decay | -0.5 | 12.3 | E82 silent |
| E84 2022-06-24 | decay | -0.5 | 11.8 | E84 silent |
| E85 2022-06-30 | decay | -0.5 | 11.4 | E85 silent |
| E86 2022-07-08 | decay | -0.5 | 10.9 | E86 silent |
| E87 2022-07-14 | decay | -0.4 | 10.5 | E87 silent |
| E88 2022-07-22 | reinforce | +13.4 | 23.9 | E88 Friedberg support x2 |
| E89 2022-07-29 | decay | -1.0 | 23.0 | E89 silent |
| E90 2022-08-05 | decay | -0.9 | 22.0 | E90 silent |
| E91 2022-08-13 | decay | -0.9 | 21.2 | E91 silent |
| E92 2022-08-20 | decay | -0.8 | 20.3 | E92 silent |
| E93 2022-08-26 | decay | -0.8 | 19.5 | E93 silent |
| E94 2022-09-01 | reinforce | +14.5 | 34.0 | E94 Friedberg support x3 |
| E94 2022-09-01 | reinforce | +14.9 | 48.8 | E94 Sacks support x2 (new voice) |
| E94 2022-09-01 | reinforce | +13.8 | 62.7 | E94 Chamath support x3 (new voice) |
| E94 2022-09-01 | reinforce | +10.1 | 72.7 | E94 Jason support x3 (new voice) |
| E95 2022-09-10 | decay | -2.9 | 69.8 | E95 silent |
| E96 2022-09-17 | decay | -2.8 | 67.0 | E96 silent |
| E97 2022-09-23 | decay | -2.7 | 64.4 | E97 silent |
| E98 2022-10-01 | decay | -2.6 | 61.8 | E98 silent |
| E99 2022-10-07 | reinforce | +5.7 | 67.5 | E99 Jason support x2 |
| E100 2022-10-14 | decay | -2.7 | 64.8 | E100 silent |