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Booming? Hmm... If you are referring to stock market is now high, then you misunderstood the relationship between stock market and current economy. You may need to read this or this for a better understanding of economy.

Virtually 100% of the carriage making industry has been lost. There were 13,000 of those businesses in 1890, now they're pretty much all defunct. There's almost nobody who hand spins thread for a living anymore, either. That used to employ vast numbers of people, mostly across the South.

Fortunately, there is literally no limit to the amount of work available for people to do, just a lack of people to be available to do it. Specific jobs have been being destroyed by automation for hundreds of years. Yes, the process has accelerated recently. Guess what, it hasn't had a noticeable effect on unemployment rates, rather it leads to increased wages over time as increased productivity as a result of more capital (automation) being able to be used by people to accomplish more.

No, this time won't be different. The luddite fallacy remains a fallacy.

Per capita, the US generates more than twice as much carbon as other developed nations.

How that was marked informative, I don't know - because it's a lie. Australia and Canada are neck-and-neck with the US when it comes to CO2 per capita. Or do you mean they are not developed nations?

Capitalism (or more specifically, free markets) is a system that is efficient on the micro-level (for a certain definition of "efficient".) If the system evolves into a monopoly, however, the free market assumptions no longer hold, and the system is no longer efficient.

I don't think it can even be considered "efficient" when all of its assumptions hold. For example, in an "efficient" market for widget X with 100 suppliers, there is still the waste of creating 100 manufacturing infrastructures for each of the different suppliers. If every supplier has perfect information, then the super-rational solution is to have the lowest cost supplier create all the widgets, sell them at the market price, then share the profits with all the other suppliers.

What I said was that the free market system was efficient on the micro level and qualified that with "(for a certain definition of "efficient")". The certain definition of efficient here is Pareto efficiency. In your simplified case of perfect information, in a free market when there is a trade such that both partners would benefit, that trade will happen, leading to a Pareto efficiency. That is a micro level efficiency-- what you are talking about is a global efficiency-- each individual manufacturer is efficient, but the global system would be more efficient if there were only one.

This is absurd of course. Nobody has perfect information and nobody would distribute their profits, but it does illustrate the limits of the model.

I said a micro level efficiency-- what you are talking about here is a global efficiency-- each individual manufacturer is efficient, but the global system would be more efficient if there were only one.

It is important to note, though, that a free market is not Pareto efficient even on the micro level in the case of monopolies (nor with increasing returns to scale, although increasing returns to scale tends to lead to monopoly, so these are not completely different).

This also shows how Socialism can become more efficient than Capitalism in some cases. The government can become the lowest cost supplier, set the price it thinks should be the market price, then divide profits amongst everyone. This saves on capital, because production infrastructure is built once rather than 100 times.

In practice this does not work for similar reasons to the reason that monopolies are not Pareto efficient. As a monopoly, the government has no incentive to be efficient in any way; in fact, without competition, they have reasons to be inefficient (in the economic sense of inefficient). For example, they would rather use more labor to produce a good than less, since that employs more people (and since they're a monopoly, they can raise the price and still sell product).

The other problem here is the question: who decides? What mechanism urges the people who decide to make the right decisions?

Doing this properly is extremely hard of course, which is why we don't see many successful Socialist countries.

Not merely hard, but arguably impossible. A top-down decision structure in a system with no competition has no driver toward efficiency at all, not to mention no driver toward innovation. In fact, it does not even have a good mechanism for noticing that it is inefficient.

Yes Windy. Pat yourself on the back yet again for dropping 5, 10, 20 years.
But continue to fail to realize you are still over twice as polluting per person as China and most of Europe.
Do you seriously expect other countries who never were as polluting as you to drop by similar amounts?
Let's see here. America dropped say 10 t per person. Do you think it's possible for India, Brazil, Sweden, France, Spain, UK, China, Germany, Japan or the Netherlands to drop 10 t per person?
You only drop a lot because you were so so very very dirty.

You expect India and Brazil to stay at their current consumption levels? Why or why not? Are they 'allowed' to borrow your term, to increase? Where are you going to draw your line and say who is allowed to increase and who isn't? Or do you really think that all the countries that aren't already as developed as you, shouldn't be allowed to develop?

Expecting the rest of the world to stop developing, while you slowly over the course of the rest of the century, drop down to something even remotely approaching the average. Is just not realistic in the slightest.
You just will not get all nations to drop. You need a more realistic goal if you want people to take you seriously.

Clearly everyone should do their part. But some people play a much bigger part in causing the problem than others. If an Ethiopian halves his CO2 is anyone going to notice? If an Indian a Chinaman and an American halved their CO2, which is best for the environment? Who has the most fat to cut, who can best afford it?

Some people, Windy especially, think there should be differing standards people should live by. If you are already rich you should be entitled to a better lifestyle than poorer countries, and there is no leeway for them to catch up and be like him.
Take cars for example. Americans have 910 cars per 1000 people. China 154 India 50 Togo 2. How many cars should be 'allowed'. Windy will tell those people they aren't allowed to have cars because it will make the CO2 go up. He will also praise the US if it's cars go from 910 to 900 because it's going in the right direction. But he never asks Americans to take 7 or 8 out of every 9 cars off the road, and he would never allow China to have 5x as many cars or India 10x as many, even if they still had less. He's entitled and those other people aren't.

Someone will say just get electric cars, which China is trying to do. But they still need to be produced, the electricity still needs to be provided etc.
And that's just a simple example with easy to find numbers. Take any other form of consumption to compare and it will be the same.
Air conditioning
Food
Housing
Consuming junk in general.
Western lifestyles and America in particular, produce more CO2. Why should some people be allowed to have a western lifestyle while telling others that they cant. It's completely hypocritical, and just reeks entitlement.

It's not possible to have any significant effect by some biggest actor alone.

But it is. If America was more like China and dropped from 16 t per person down to 7.5 like China. It would drop total world CO2 levels by about 7%. A bit more than 7 UKs, or 3 Germanys, or an India. That's a noticeable change. But they will never do it, they are entitled to their stuff. Better to try and force someone else to make the sacrifice on their behalf, all while pretending they are helping by cutting a tiny bit.

LOL WindBourne, pick and choose a few years to try and make America look favorable.

And since you want to talk about per capita Americans use about 3 times the electricity as Chinese people, and twice EU levels.

Not much point claiming you have more solar and wind, when you use so much more electricity, you still have to burn more coal per person than China does to keep the lights on anyway.

This shows China was at 25% renewables in 2015 while the US was only 14%. I doubt you have caught up, but feel free to show more current numbers if you have them. (not just from your ass this time though).

If America was more like China and you dropped from 16 t per person down to 7.5 like China. It would drop total world CO2 levels by about 7%. Abit more than 7 UKs, or 3 Germanys, or an India. A big noticable change for the better. Do you really think you can cut in half....

Both those are far lower than USA levels even with any increase.

Ok, here we have a far left that does not get it. India is likely at the level we all need to be at. China is already way over. Heck, most of Europe is still above where the globe needs to be.

Why do you try so hard to avoid the elephant in the room?

Graph of CO2 polluters
India is at the level you think we need to be at... ok....seems a bit extreme to most people but lets go with it.
China is 'way over'..... ok if you say so....seems to be about the average...
Most of Europe is above, ok it's similar to China so no real reason to single China out other than your hatred of them.

And America?
Did you forget to mention that America is 2-4 times as bad as the countries you are complaining about?
Twice the level of the 'way over' China even.
Close to ten times Indian levels, that you claim is your target.
Why are you not taking America to task?

It's clear you are just anti-China and try to hide as much as possible, the fact your entitled country is a far worse CO2 polluter.

You are so far out in front with respect to CO2 emissions per person that even if you dropped by 66%. Cut your emissions down to only 1/3 your current level. You would still be higher than the world average.

Let that sink in for a minute...

All your talk about decreasing by a fraction of a percent, or getting excited about a whole percentage point decrease means nothing in this context. America is "moving in the right direction" but way too slowly to make any difference to anything.

It's easy to fall by the most when you are so far out in front. You're the morbidly obese man who lost 3kg and is now only 100kg overweight, thinking he is doing better than a healthy person who was never overweight in the first place.

Bacause there are no capitalist countries at the top of the CO2 emitting lists are there. Well not in the top 3, oh I mean top 6.
Oh it's 9 of the top 10, carry on.

Americans... are totally dependent on producing way way more CO2 per person than just about everyone.

I've highlighted the part you ignored.

You've been 'fixing the problem' for 25 years, but you're still double China and more than double Europe.
You are unlikely to ever get down to even the world average.

Never get passed, Americans have veto power and are totally dependent on producing way way more CO2 per person than just about everyone.

Sweden France Spain UK Educate yourself simpleton.
America is way dirtier than Europe, Dirtiest in the world along with Canada and Australia, but still a bit worse than them.
You can only be WindBourne with that level of stupidity/denial.

Last week, in an interview with Fox News, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt claimed: "We are leading the nation — excuse me — the world with respect to our CO2 footprint in reductions."

The Washington Post fact-checked this claim and rated it "Three Pinocchios," which means they rate the claim mostly false. They further wrote that Pruitt's usage of data appeared to be a "deliberate effort to mislead the public."

Here's a picture if your own links words aren't enough for you to see it.

For the benefit of all the WindBournes https://www.economicshelp.org/... China is less than 1/2 America Canada and Australia.

We can also increase the rapidity at which society can recover, and reduce the impact of transitional unemployment. These are generally called "welfare", although there are interesting considerations about what is and isn't welfare depending on who you ask.

I've been pushing a Universal Dividend as a countermeasure for most of this. Without raising taxes, creating deficits, or cutting services, you can actually restructure the Federal welfare system (notably Social Security's retirement and disability benefits) to pay $7,500 per adult in 2016. That's not enough to live on; it raises a lot of people above the poverty guides (no welfare for you), and many others quite close, which means HUD and SNAP can get more people into apartments and eating real food, thus bridging the poverty gap.

The Dividend has other localized impacts. In poorer cities like Baltimore, Flint, or Detroit, the impact is bigger: more consumer spending capacity creates a need for jobs where unemployment is high. Automation and other technical progress (automation ~= wooden shipping pallet) create localized high unemployment (see: coal mining). This actually directly-remediates that: you at least need local service workers and truckers (the people driving in your city to move goods from distribution centers to stores, not the long-haulers who dump it in your town and leave)--or at least truck mechanics, maintenance, and logistics people--so jobs will come when consumer demand comes--even if that demand goes to Chinese goods from Amazon.

In total, people can't be completely-removed from consumption. This puts job-creation and job-retention pressure on the economy, slowing the loss of jobs in progress and restoring them back more-quickly. In other words:

If automation progresses faster than we can handle it then we will pass laws to slow it down

I've suggested laws to speed it up by making it less-risky and more-profitable, through the mechanism of strengthening consumers so their purchasing power (effective demand) can hold the job market up under a bigger assault.

I grew up in the 90s, where technology advanced at an unbelievable pace. I want it back.

https://www.economicshelp.org/... Americans pump out twice the CO2 as Chinese people.
And 9x as much as an Indian
Also more than the EU.
Much higher than the world average.

As long as ignorant Americans continue to live like ignorant Americans you are right nothing anyone else does will matter.

https://www.economicshelp.org/... Americans pump out twice the CO2 as Chinese people, and 8x as much as an Indian
Also more than the EU.
Much higher than the world average.

https://www.economicshelp.org/...

Still winning the race to see who can pump out the most CO2 into the air. More than EU, twice China and about 7x India.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.economicshelp.org/...

https://www.economicshelp.org/...

What are you talking about? The crisis in Venezuela barely has something to do with oil.

Excuse me, but an economy where roughly 50% of GDP is based on oil as are 95% of it is not at all diversified and is bound to fluctuate a bit like the oil price. Source: http://www.economicshelp.org/b...

While it is true that Venezuela has also a lot of political and historical problems, a lot of the current crisis seems to come from lack of economic diversity and large dependence on oil price.

There's a nice podcast about the current crisis in Venezuela (about 30 min) which I recommend:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programme...

Still Deflation. Deflation from increased efficiency and lower costs of production.

There are over 300 million people in the US. http://www.worldometers.info/w...

There is a nominal point of unemployment that is healthy. If it were 0% then there can be no economic growth. The inflationary pressures happen when it approaches 0% and employers are forced to increase wages to hire from the available pool. http://www.economicshelp.org/b...

People have been claiming that automation will lead to vast numbers of unemployed since the early days of the industrial revolution - the original Luddites - and, to date, have been demonstrably in error. It's known as the Luddite Fallacy, or sometimes as Technological Unemployment. The increased use of robotics in industry, manufacturing, and other sectors, is almost certainly just the latest change that will ultimately just result in another redistribution of the labour pool to areas that have not been automated. It still sucks if you are one of those put out of work by a robot and have to try and find employment elsewhere, but doom and gloom on a national scale is just FUD.

No, the debt belongs to the UK Government.
http://www.economicshelp.org/b...

As Scotland is part of the UK, part of the debt belongs to Scotland.

Fucking Scottish independents, they want all the income and none of the costs. Their lack of economic sense is one reason they lost the first referendum, I guess it would be too much to expect them to have embraced reality.

In this case a "negative externality"

Your incapacity to understand the nuances of reality only further support my assessment that you need a basic education. I "got out" of college with a BS almost 30 years ago, but i still remember a lot of i learned in college, and high school, and even grade school. Growing up with parents who were actually around during WWII, having uncles who fought in the European theater, and the Pacific theater, gave me quite a decent, knowledgeable perspective of the history you, and people like you, have been trying to rewrite for decades.

Economics and politics ARE NOT the same thing (just as physics and mathematics are not the same thing); only a blind fucking moron would say that they are. If you can't understand THE BASICS of either, you're in no position to have a worthwhile opinion of either. You regurgitate crap that the birchers have been saying for 60-70 years, and the right wing fringe has been really pushing for the past 30-35. You want to distance yourself from everything "bad" that right wing groups have done, and try to make everyone think your shit don't stink. Back in the old days, we had a term for that: liar. Now, i'm giving you the benefit of the doubt... you could simply be completely ignorant, and not have the personal fortitude to actually learn.... or, you could be too mentally challenged to learn at all; so it might not be that you're an outright liar. But the effect is the same, what you say is factually wrong, and because you continue to say it, you are lying to people.

http://www.economicshelp.org/b...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I'm not a TS fan, in fact I don't even know what her voice sounds like, but it sounds like she's sticking up for her less successful fellow musicians here.

The music biz is becoming a monopsony.

monopsony
a market situation in which there is only one buyer

Definition s are wonderful things. For every one, one can find a different definition. So how about this:

A monopsony occurs when a firm has market power in employing factors of production. A monopsony means there is one buyer and many sellers.

If your definition of monopsony is the simple "one buyer", then perhaps, but if your definition is the one that I was using, where the buyer has market power, the evidence is that Amazon did not have this at the time. Perhaps it has now. As with monopolies, having a monopsony is not illegal, it's how you take advantage of it that matters -- as I see that you do note.

So, I will apologise for the attack, partly.

Amazon has a responsibility to not abuse their monopsony, yet they have failed to do so at every turn. Anyone who Googles around for about 5 minutes can turn up a dozen examples of Amazon abusing their dominant position to force the publisher's hands.

As people often point out, anecdotes are not the singular of data. Yes, there are cases of Amazon's behaviour that give cause for concern and probably an investigation is due. But do you honestly think that the publishers are not waging a PR war on Amazon right now?

centralized arbiter to analyze network traffic holistically and make routing decisions based on that analysis, in contrast to the more decentralized protocols common today

Central planning works rather poorly for humans. Maybe, it will be better for computers, but I remain skeptical.

Oh, and the term "holistically" does not help either.

> Because YouTube is not a monopoly

In your mind, how much of the market does it take for youtube to qualify as a monopoly? Are you one of those sophists who says it isn't a monopoly as long as there is somebody else, anybody else, no matter how small their marketshare?

Because youtube has 94% of the market. And by the definition of most reasonable people that easily qualifies as a monopoly.

> it's not unreasonable or unfair of it to try to recover costs (or, gasp, make a profit) somehow.

They are making a profit, they are showing ads on the videos on youtube. This is above and beyond that and it is only for certain videos. They are doing price discrimination based on the content rather than their own costs. They make just as much money per play from a 30 second video of an elephant taking a dump as they do from a 30 second music video. But they are adding extra requirements to the music video.

In your geekheart you know that's unfair. The question isn't whether they can do it, clearly they can do it, the question is if we as their paying customers think it is fair (yes we pay with our personal information, if it weren't valuable google wouldn't have a market cap in the billions).

Amazon is not close to being a monopoly; they sell about 30% of all books.

From a legal POV it's not necessary to have all - or even the majority - of a market to be considered a monopoly.

http://www.economicshelp.org/m...

they arnt.

Citation?

they are pilling up debt.

Not really: http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/774/economics/list-of-national-debt-by-country/ French government debt is comparable to that of the UK and Germany as a % of GDP, and is lower than that of the US and Japan

the average person is poorer than in germany with less purchasing power.

True, but that is also the the case for the UK - which has a neoliberal, fuck-the-poor kind of government. Seems to me France is in no worse a position than the UK - arguably a better one since 2008 - and certainly here much bashing of the French economy is ideologically motivated, in order to shore up our own failed system by discrediting even mild deviations in economic policy. I suspect the same is true in the US. Certainly France has its economic problems, but I am highly skeptical of the view that its an economic basket case on the verge of collapse, because I've heard that view for 20 years and in all that time, France has basically kept up with the UK in economic terms, but without far less vicious attacks on the public sector.

The UK has an official national debt of 62.6%, but if the bailouts to the banks are included, it's 148% of GDP. Why the UK taxpayers should pay so dearly for those criminal bankers is beyond me. But good thing the UK stayed out of the Euro zone... at least they can print their way out of trouble.

The U.S. government has no money. In the entire history of the world, it is the entity most deeply in debt.

That's an empty statement. Are we talking absolute dollars? Inflation adjusted dollars? Debt as a percentage of GNP?

The last figure makes more sense than any of the others, and by that measurement, we're #27. [src]