Let's Wire Les

Two stories occupying the front page of today's Daily News stike the Burning Squirrel as oddly related. The first story, "Budget details city layoffs" has to do with Palo Alto's budget shortfall and city manager Frank Benest's proposal to eliminate some city jobs in order to clean up the bottom line. The second story, "Robot, human teams foreseen" discusses NASA Ames Research Center mobile agent software project. This project intends to develop wireless communication between humans and robots for use in space.

You see where this is going--city employed robots dispatched wirelessly from the basement of city hall. Think of the savings in salary paid to city workers. In addition, no holidays, no workman's compensation claims, no work stopages, no working on private jobs using city equipment--the list goes on. Now all that has to be accounted for is the evil genius issuing orders.