Thanks for the correction.

In reply to this comment by radx:
The clip in the description is quite unrelated. Those delivery towers of VW in Wolfsburg are not parking garages, they are storage silos for recently produced cars.

Both silos are connected to the production facility via an underground tunnel, and if you decide to pick up your recently purchased car yourself, they'll give you a tour, a meal, the works. Then you get to see your car picked up by the robot arm and delivered to you on the ground floor without having driven a single mile.

It's quite impressive, actually. Just like the price tag on everything they build.

The clip in the description is quite unrelated. Those delivery towers of VW in Wolfsburg are not parking garages, they are storage silos for recently produced cars.

Both silos are connected to the production facility via an underground tunnel, and if you decide to pick up your recently purchased car yourself, they'll give you a tour, a meal, the works. Then you get to see your car picked up by the robot arm and delivered to you on the ground floor without having driven a single mile.

It's quite impressive, actually. Just like the price tag on everything they build.

Sure, the assembly line day laborer may lose his job to the robotic arm, but other jobs will be created to manufacture those arms, write the software for them, service them, etc.

One factory for industrial robots is enough to supply a vast number of regular factories. The whole chain is done in this area, from software development to robot design to robot construction and naturally, it takes less manhours than it saves through increased productivity, or else it wouldn't be done in the first place.

Let's take a look at Volkswagen. Last I heard, they need an increase of 7% in sales just to keep up with rising productivity. 7% more sales or 7% less workers or 7% less wages ... every year. To see the consequences of this, one only needs to take a look at Bremerhaven or any train station along the railroad line from the factories in Wolfsburg, Braunschweig and Hannover (not to mention the ones in southern Germany) to the northern harbours, where the vehicles are brought to be shipped out. Enough bloody cars to fill the English Channel, everywhere you look. That's not sustainable, not in the least. And yet they still want to keep a dying automobile manufacturer (Opel) alive ...

Just a few days, two key railroad switches at Wunstorf were shut down for maintenance, now there are countless car trains stuck at the classification yards, enough to mobilize the whole bloody state. And they are not even back to pre-crisis production levels.

What I'm saying is this: they produce more cars than ever, more than any current market can take, and even though it takes vastly more work to build a modern car than it did 50 years ago, they still need considerably less manhours per car. That includes all the suppliers as well. And they should be damn proud of it, because that's what previous generations worked for. However, it is basically kept alive artificially and has to collapse eventually. That'll be fun. Opel will be the first, 2011 at the latest.

Only completely new areas have the ability to create enough jobs to remotely compensate for the loss caused by increased productivity and saturated markets. Telecommunications was the last one, renewable energy will most likely be the next one.

That said, there will always be endless work that needs to be done, just not jobs that create an income. For instance, the national railroad could use at least the 100k people back they let go over the last 2 decades. Though to get everything done according to regulations, 200k should be a closer bet. But since it's more profitable to cut maintenance personal by another 10%, the status of the infrastructure can only be described as desolate in large parts of the country.

Edit: damn, that's 3/4 just rambling ... sorry.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'soccer, football, goal, grafite, Wolfsburg, Bayern Munich' to 'soccer, football, goal, grafite, Wolfsburg, Bayern Munich, germany' - edited by kronosposeidon

"Skip-It is a children's toy invented by Victor Petrusek and manufactured by Tiger Electronics. During its initial release in the late-1980s, the Skip-It apparatus became a commercial success through its avid advertisements on daytime Nickelodeon broadcasting as well as other children's programming. The 'Skip-It' apparatus was designed to be affixed to the child's ankle via a small plastic hoop and spun around in a 360 degree rotation while continuously skipped by the user.

During a second production occurring in the early-1990s, the toy was manufactured with a counter on the Skip-It ball; designed to make the number of skips impeccably accurate.

Some Skip-It's have colorful glitter filled and covered plastic decorations that can be slid on and of the make colorful paterns.

There was a model which may have been called skiparoo or skip-a-roo that is from the 60's that was all plastic and had a red bell-shaped end.

There was also a model called the "lemon twist" which was made in the seventies. It was black PVC piping and had a big lemon at the end. It had little rocks inside that made noise as you twisted.

Marshall Swails of Irmo, SC won the 1995 World Skip-It Open at the 1995 Toy Congress in Wolfsburg, Germany. He skipped 300,546 times on his custom glitter filled Skip-It. What was remarkable about this achievement was that Swails was the only sponsored entrat, endorsing both Keds and BIKE. He worse simple white, canvas Keds and a pair of skin tight BIKE bicycle shorts with his name on the side. He did not wear a shirt." -[wikip.]