Summary
A tourist helicopter carrying a Spanish family of five and a pilot crashed into the Hudson River near Lower Manhattan, killing all 6 aboard, including 3 children.
The Bell 206 helicopter plunged into the water inverted, missing its rotor blades, just over 15 minutes after departing the Wall St. Heliport.
Witnesses described loud noises and parts falling off before impact.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is investigating, and Jersey City officials renewed calls for tighter air traffic safety.
Agustin Escobar, an executive from European automation company Siemens, his wife, Merce Camprubi Montal, and their children
I feel bad only for the kids. The parents were rich leeches who were getting rich from putting poor people out of work.
Are you saying that automation is a bad thing? Like, categorically?
Automation does reduce the number of people needed for some tasks, but in a way that improves dramatically the lives of those still doing those tasks.
I would much rather have automated storage and retrieval systems bring powering a goods-to-person station rather than making people run up and down shelves to retrieve stuff people ordered like we used to have. We used to hear horror stories of Amazon workers not being able to go use the restroom because they couldn’t keep up with quotas. Now robots bring the shelves to them, making the job significantly easier and reducing stress. Obviously reduction of quotas or hiring more workers could also have worked, but this way throughout remains high without the insane amount of burnout for human beings.
I would rather see conveyor systems bringing those picked goods to other stations in the warehouse rather than a person having to run or drive those goods from place to place. I’d rather see automatic sortation systems shuttle totes to their proper destinations than have a person have to take them individually from a source to destination conveyors.
Automation isn’t bad. Stymying advances in automation to protect jobs purely for the sake of the jobs is akin to breaking windows so the window makers have work.
The real issues arise because in most countries few people reap the full benefits. That issue isn’t because of automation, but because of our faulty systems.
Automation in a capitalist world, the one we are currently in, is objectively a bad thing for workers who depend on their labor to survive.
Industrial automation… like PLCs.
They haven’t put anyone put of a job since the age of elevator operators.
I’ve never heard of Siemens referred to as an “automation company”.
That’s technically true but they’re much more into heavy industry. They build power plants, trains, ports and industrial automation equipment. They’ve had to lay off some of their own employees but I’m not aware of any cases of their business putting other people out of work.