Legal Blog of Attorney Greg Curry

Informative article from Bloomberg about Wall Street's inevitable move towards automation. It's widely accepted that "low-skill" jobs will be the easiest to automate, such as many fast food jobs. But what about fancy Wall Street traders with their Harvard MBA's and all? It appears they aren't safe, either. This isn't exactly news. The majority of stock trading today is done by computer algorithms. And it has long seemed to me that, if any job were ripe to be replaced by robots, it would be stock traders, money managers, and similar jobs. Some quotes from the article: Yet in interviews, about a dozen Wall Street executives and consultants responsible for deploying technologies -- and steeped in their capabilities -- were more bearish on humans. Machines will take over task after task, they said, and banks simply won’t need nearly as many people. ... It’s time for senior managers to stop sugarcoating, said Simon Moss, who has been advising bank...

In December, I blogged  about the minimum wage hikes starting on December 31, 2017, as all areas across New York State move towards a $15.00/hour minimum wage over the next few years. And as of January 1, 2018, minimum wages went up in 18 states and 20 cities  across the country. For most businesses, and especially small businesses, their greatest cost is labor--paying workers. So if state and local governments force business owners to pay their workers more, the businesses can either (1) raise prices (and risk losing customers/sales); (2) cut back workers' hours (which could hurt productivity and reduce revenue); or (3) simply get rid of people and make the remaining workers do more. Smart people on both sides of the issue disagree about the effect minimum wage hikes will have on jobs. Supporters  say there has been no real impact on jobs in areas that have raised minimum wages. But  critics  say that the "fight for 15" will end up hurting the very people i...