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Manufacturing jobs have dropped every year since robots were introduced while productivity has risen.
http://cdn.theatlanticcities.c...
http://www.technologyreview.co...

They've been replaced with terrible low paying service jobs.
Wages have been stagnant for 80% of those who have jobs since shortly after robots were introduced. Robots are not the only cause- but they sure didn't help.

While the unemployment rate is finally tightening up some- that's because so many have completely left the work force. Participation of working age citizens age 16 to 67 has dropped continuously for the last 14 years.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

Who paid for this article? The robot manufacturing companies?

Self driving cars...do NOT fix the congestion problems.

That is not true. SDCs can drive much closer together, increasing the road carrying capacity.

But because peak-hour traffic congestion rises to meet maximum capacity, increasing the road carrying capacity has no long-term effect on traffic congestion. Therefore, self-driving cars will not fix congestion problems.

POOR.
http://ibnlive.in.com/news/836...
RACIST.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
UNCIVILIZED.
http://www.firstpost.com/livin...
UNTOUCHABLE.
http://india.blogs.nytimes.com...
POLLUTED.
http://www.theatlanticcities.c...

Citation needed.

Well, I had to get to page two of a google search on "Walmart Makes Stores Close" before I started coming to articles with numbers from sources I'd heard about, but here you'll find this quote:
"A study published in 2008 in the Journal of Urban Economics examined about 3,000 Walmart store openings nationally and found that each store caused a net decline of about 150 jobs (as competing retailers downsized and closed) and lowered total wages paid to retail workers.".

This article was interesting to read but for those averse to clicking the link:
"But the closer a store was to the Walmart location, the greater the likelihood it would close. Persky and his colleagues found that for every mile closer to the Walmart, 6 percent more stores closed. Close in around the store's location, between 35 and 60 percent of stores closed.
And depending on the type of business, the impact of a Walmart moving in can be much worse. Persky says that the per-mile closure rate increase for drugstores is almost 20 percent. For home furnishings, it's about 15 percent. For hardware stores, it's about 18 percent per mile. For toys, it's more than 25 percent per mile.".

Really, that's all the time I'm willing to invest in refuting the idea that somehow WalMart fosters a diverse / thriving / healthy business ecosystem.

You mean like they did in Northern VA with the Hot Lane project?

The 95 Express Lanes project was part of that. Control of the tax payer built and maintained interstate I95/395 HOV lanes that has been in place for over 30 years was turned over to a private company for profit business.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...
http://dc.about.com/od/transpo...

Oddly most areas that have done this are not actually making money which will lead to a very interesting dilemma in a few years. No doubt, at the tax payers expense.

http://www.theatlanticcities.c...

No, it's a serious problem, particularly in Paris because 60% of the cars there run on diesel.

http://www.theatlanticcities.c...

Although diesel is much more efficient, it creates serious local pollution, smog and minute particles that cause real harm.

Like... what?... they don't pay for their groceries enough/at all? Or are they able to avoid sale taxes on those groceries?

The sales tax is a regressive tax, so they don't have to avoid it. In fact, it's quite the opposite. All they have to do is work to replace taxes that are less regressive, such as tolls, with taxes that are more regressive, like San Francisco's Proposition K half cent transportation sales tax, hoping the poor won't realize it will leave them worse off.

It's all quite devious.

in nearly all states, collected gas tax doesn't actually get spent on roads

"[E]ven if [fuel tax] funds were fully devoted to highways, total user fee revenue accounted for only 65 percent of all funds set aside for highways in 2007."

Therefore, if we want the roads to start paying for themselves, we'll need to raise the gas tax, increase other taxes or fees, and/or allow some roads to return to nature so we no longer have to maintain them.

Because air pollution is proportional to the amount of fuel burned, the gas tax is a good way to pay for air pollution, which costs us up to $1,600 per person annually in medical costs, lost days of work, and so on. It's also the least bad way to pay for global warming. Ideally, the gas tax should also vary according to the quality of the vehicle's emissions system, because older cars pollute more per gallon of gasoline than newer cars.

But the gas tax isn't a good way to pay for road wear, which is proportional to the 4th power of the axle weight. For that we'd need a mileage fee that varies according to vehicle type or weight.

And the gas tax also isn't an effective way to manage traffic congestion, which varies by the hour and the location. For that, we would need some kind of congestion pricing such as variable express tolls or a mileage fee coupled with information about when and where you drove (but there are privacy concerns with that option).

So if the goal is for the roads to pay for themselves, then the most efficient and equitable way to achieve this goal in a capitalist society where people pay each according to the benefit they receive and the burden they place on the system, is with not just a gas tax but also some kind of mileage fee and congestion pricing. Then we could lower transportation sales taxes such as Prop K in San Francisco or Measure R in Los Angeles.

Absolutely, but the difference is more a beating with a bat or stabbed with a knife and alive vs shot dead.

Luckily it's pretty easy to avoid being shot in the US as long as you aren't living in the in a city. At the very least this map will help you avoid it:
http://m.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/01/gun-violence-us-cities-compared-deadliest-nations-world/4412/

And to put this map in perspective, Chicago in 2012 made up about 4 pct of all gun homicides in the US (435 out of about 11k)

On the other hand the violent crime in the UK and Australia are very diffuse. I looked this up before moving here, but they release crime stats for violence across the country and its quite similar.

Not trying to defend gun violence in the US. It's pitiful Chicago is so bad, but my only point is crime stats are complex and each type of crime isn't de facto more prevalent in the US simply because of our gun statistics, and even our gun statistics say a lot more about inner city gang violence (which exists in the UK but has fewer guns) than a generally more violent culture vs similar countries.

The urban population is only 80% if you count towns of 2500 or more as "urban".

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/03/us-urban-population-what-does-urban-really-mean/1589/

Fun fact: New York doesn't have many alleys

It's not as though someone suffering from diarrhea could use internet access to gain knowledge about the causes and treatments for diarrhea.

How do you use the Internet without electricity?

It's not like they could even use the internet to locate a hospital or aid station that could help them in anyway.

How do you contact a hospital when there aren't any in your area?

Context is everything.

So now you're assuming such people also have a list of your credit card purchases

Many businesses would have, yes. In the case of chain retailers, restaurants an so forth it would be quite a simple feat to match up your personal data with the MAC address of your device.

that you always use a credit card and it's always the same one

Why would that be necessary? it would be enough to match credit card X with Device Y on just 10 different occasions to with quite a high degree of certainty determine who device Y belong to. If a second credit (or debit) card with the same owner likewise can be correlated with device Y then the degree of certainty would of whom the device belong to would increase, not decrease as you suggest?

my wife and I often use the same card which means the MAC address correlation fails

Really? "Memari said he was working on a proposal for a bar that would install five tracking devices: one by the entrance, one on the roof, one near the cash register, and one in each of the bathrooms. That would allow the bar to know each person’s gender (from the bathroom trackers), how long they stay ("dwell time" is the official metric), and what they were there for (a drink outside or a meal inside). And targeted advertising for the pub could follow those people around London on Renew’s omniscient recycling bins." Source

And then you also have the fact that most people turn over their phones at 2 years max

I am tempted to ask for a citation on that but won't as statistics probably vary quite a lot from country to country on this. But even if the average turnover of devices is 2 years as you write it would have little effect as once your credit card usage cease to correlate with the MAC address it is just a matter of doing a rinse and repeat of Steps 1 and 2.

the question of 'Why?' still stands

Because; Marketing, PRISM, XKeyscore, NSA, GCHQ, FSM take your pick.

I'm sure the proposal is missing a few items, but in theory, it's a good one.

I don't know that a sales tax would generate enough revenue at palatable rates. The national Canadian sales tax (the GST) seems to generate a bit under $5 billion per percentage point ( http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/story/2009/06/16/f-gst-cut-estimate-deficit.html ) but that does have various exemptions including groceries. While the total of the federal income tax and consumption tax seems to be a bit under $200 billion per year ($153 billion income tax, $43 billion consumption tax for 2009 for example - http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/govt02a-eng.htm ) For 2011 it looks like the federal budget was about $270 billion ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Canadian_federal_budget ).

Since basic groceries are currently non-GST taxed in Canada, we could get a bit more than $5 billion per tax percentage point. From ( http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/03/america-food-getting-cheaper-unless-youre-poor/4923/ ) we see that Canadians as a whole spend about 10% of their family budget on food at home. Since the $5 billion per percentage point does not include these groceries purchases, it only represents about 90% of purchases. If we taxed that food too, we should generate about $5.6 billion per percentage point. To generate $270 billion we would need to charge a rate of 48.2% on total purchases of about $560 billion.

Is this total purchases number reasonable? Stats Canada says ( http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/famil131a-eng.htm) the average family consumption for 2011 was about $55k for 13.3 million households ( http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2011/as-sa/98-312-x/98-312-x2011003_2-eng.cfm ) for $731 billion so this is not an unreasonable number. I'll use the $731 billion as it is probably more accurate than the calculation based on GST collection. So if we have $731 billion in purchases, we will need to collect at a 37% rate to generate $70 billion.

If you make exemptions for "necessities" the rate would need to be higher. How much higher? Well, if we want to exempt the necessities, one way would be to in some way not collect taxes on "basic needs", or give a rebate on the taxes paid for those amounts. We can get a figure for what these "basic needs" might cost ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_Canada#Basic_needs_poverty_measure and http://www.fraserinstitute.org/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=3443 for 2006 data) . Not taxing these "basic needs" would be "better" than just excepting categories like "food, gas, utilities" in that we would be able to collect taxes on food and gas and utilities beyond the "necessary" level - people buying "rice and beans" end up getting them without being taxed while those buy8ing caviar and foie gras get dinged by the tax-man. Yeah this might be hard to administer, but we are trying for the best possible argument for this type of system.

In 2006 this seemed to be about $16,000 per couple or for the whole population of a bit under 32 million, this would to about $256 billion in exempted purchases. Gosh, that's a big fraction of all purchases! Maybe the average family size is bigger than that? Actually, it seems to be about 2.5 for the whole country, b

Uh...wut? How the fuck has gun control been shown to reduce violence?

Where I live, (Phoenix) there are basically no restrictions on firearms. You can walk around with a pistol concealed in your jacket and an assault rifle slinged around your back, and nobody will bother you. No permits of any kind required for any of these. Phoenix isn't a small city either, it's the 6th largest in the US.

Yet some place like Chicago, where you basically aren't allowed to own anything useful for that purpose, and even if you do, it has to be disabled to the point that it is useless in an emergency and can't be carried anywhere, has a higher per capita firearms related offenses.

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/01/gun-violence-us-cities-compared-deadliest-nations-world/4412/

Here's another little factoid for you to look at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States_by_state

Sort that list by the brady score, then look firearm related homicides per capita figure next to it. There is practically zero correlation.

One interesting thing (anomaly perhaps?) is that the brady index has no data on DC, yet it is well known to be one of the most restrictive in the US. Yet it simultaneously has the worst figures in all of them for firearms related homicides.

If you want to reduce firearms related offenses, I'd say the best way is to simply legalize all narcotics for recreational use. Basically, just end the drug war. Arizona, California, and Texas are probably harmed the most by it. Arizona is also harmed by illegal immigration, as it has the highest rate of kidnappings of any city in the world, nearly all of them related to immigrants holding other immigrants for ransom. I'd bet that this also contributes to homicides by firearms.

China likes to have a client state as a buffer between them and South Korea.

Culturally it would be a problem for NK to be adsorbed into China - Korea and China have been hostile towards each other for thousands of years. Their cultures are quite different.

I spent a little time in South Korea a few years ago; one thing that my hosts were adamant on was the eventual re-unification of North and South, much like Germany was re-unified.

The depravity of conditions in NK are a great shame. This picture is the best illustration of it I have seen:

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/technology/2012/12/new-highly-detailed-image-north-koreas-lack-electrical-infrastructure/4201/

Unfortunately that little dog is developing a nuclear bite. Combine that with conditions in NK and you have potential for great disaster.

Pollution leaking into a river will inevitable cross property lines. It is also pollution in the drinking water. Thus affects everyone.

I may agree with you on some things, but I have to say I do not agree with you concerning the pollution. It is one thing if it was a mistake, but you could even see the blood in the river from google maps:
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/01/dallas-river-turns-red-hog-blood/1042/

That is well beyond any sort of innocent error. I am all for punishing people that seriously violate environmental laws.

Your logic is flawed. It is perfectly possible for more people to vote for Democrats and yet Republicans (or vice versa) to win the house by a landslide without any gerrymandering. You have to win more congressional districts, not more overall votes. Republicans traditionally have support in far more geographical areas (break it down by states, or counties or whatever) than Democrats: http://cdn.theatlanticcities.com/img/upload/2012/11/07/CountyMap2012.main.jpg Democrats get their votes from a small number of densely populated areas.

Your logic is also flawed. In fact, you're basically laying out an instruction manual for gerrymandering.

Gerrymandering in the United States is well-established and, for the most part, perfectly legal. It's a natural consequence of the way districts are delineated and apportioned in most states, combined with the demographic factors you mention. And, like its cousin, the Electoral College system, it can result in a popular minority winning a representative majority.

Your logic is flawed. It is perfectly possible for more people to vote for Democrats and yet Republicans (or vice versa) to win the house by a landslide without any gerrymandering. You have to win more congressional districts, not more overall votes. Republicans traditionally have support in far more geographical areas (break it down by states, or counties or whatever) than Democrats: http://cdn.theatlanticcities.com/img/upload/2012/11/07/CountyMap2012.main.jpg Democrats get their votes from a small number of densely populated areas.

Actually, theres sufficient evidence that shows they make the roads more dangerous...

And there's at least as much evidence to the contrary.

The Department of Transportation also said, however, that rear-end crashes have risen by 20 percent and total crashes are up by 0.9 percent at intersections where cameras have operated for at least a year.

That isn't surprising. The Federal Highway Administration found that red-light cameras increase rear-end collisions but reduce more severe right-angle collisions, saving $50,000 in collisions per intersection per year in medical and repair costs.

Assemblyman Declan O'Scanlon, R-Monmouth..wants the cameras removed.

That would be an extremely bad idea. "In the immediately aftermath of the [red light camera] law's expiration, the risk of someone running a red light at an intersection was three times higher than it had been when cameras were on."

If safety is the goal, they should keep the red light cameras and lengthen the yellow light duration. "An Institute study conducted in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, evaluated effects on red light running of first lengthening yellow signal timing by about a second and then introducing red light cameras. While the longer yellow reduced red light violations by 36 percent, adding camera enforcement further cut red light running by another 96 percent."

As it turns out, however, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data." Here are some actual statistics about the correlations between education, political affiliation, and religion: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2012/02/why-america-keeps-getting-more-conservative/1162/

that's only about half of the population

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/03/us-urban-population-what-does-urban-really-mean/1589/

80.7 percent of the U.S. population lived in urban areas as of the 2010 Census, a boost from the 79 percent counted in 2000

For the 2010 count, the Census Bureau has defined 486 urbanized areas, accounting for 71.2 percent of the U.S. population. The 3,087 urban clusters account for 9.5 percent of the U.S. population.

The L.A.-Long Beach-Santa Ana metropolitan area has the highest population density, with 6,999.3 people per square mile. Hickory, North Carolina, has the lowest, with 811.1 people per square mile.

So 71 percent of Americans live in areas with a density of at least 800 people/sq. mi. Another 9.5 percent are in "urban clusters" which are much smaller and go down in density as low as 360 people/sq. mi. (though some are very dense). That doesn't sound at all like "only about half the population".

Though I don't know if there are any studies showing the cut-off effects of density on mesh networks.

Rockefeller, unlike most of our current crop of multimillionaires and billionaires, was a philanthropist.

Citation needed. Specifically with regards to the "unlike" bit. Of all charitable donations, 41% comes from the top 10% of incomes. From households (excluding foundations or nonprofit companies), 3% of households account for over two thirds of household donations.

He believed that he had a responsibility to give back something to a community that had given him so much. But that's a rare viewpoint amongst the "old money", that is -- people who were born into wealth.

Nope. The 10% of gifts (by number) that come from inheritance account for about 10% of gifts (by money). That means that those who donate at all are donating an equal share (I can't find any meaningful statistics on what percentage donate). I don't think giving a fair share is particularly wrong. In fact, it's actually the new-money donators (whose wealth comes from their salary) who give the least.

But once you're dead, your descendants only get a certain maximal amount - say, 10 million, even 20 million, per immediate family member, less for extended family, etc. We need to break the cycle of generational wealth, where some very small number of families accrue more and more wealth, until it becomes so concentrated that society starts to feel the effects of wealth deprivation.

I get the distinct impression that you don't really know how inheritance works. As stated earlier, I work with high-net-worth individuals. Practically none of them (that I recall offhand... I'm not ambitious enough to write and run a report, and I doubt it'd be legal to do so, anyway) are giving more than one million to their families in easily-liquid assets (public stocks, bonds, cash, etc.). Rather, the majority of their wealth is in their assets - the family company, the real estate, and other individual items that just happen to be worth a lot to other people.

I'm not against people earning whatever the market will pay them. I just don't like the idea of people who are born into wealth, who are handed power, and who don't ever do meaningful work, who never produce anything of value to society.

Fortunately, there are extremely few people like that. The few that there are, though, are lambasted by the media for their carefree lifestyle, so they're in the public eye often, and their lack of contribution is highlighted. The vast majority of heirs use the money for productive purposes, whether it be founding a company, investing in other companies, or even just giving to charities, then they get a real job and live a normal life like everyone else.

We need to reward people for their hard work, not their great-great-grandparent's hard work.

Ah, how nice it'd be to live in a world of karma. The sad reality is that hard work does not guarantee a comfortable life. Having money set aside (by anybody, of any generation) acts as a nice safety net. Those that have such a safety net and don't use it pass it on to their children. For someone whose life was well-spent, who worked to ensure that their fortune grew, what better reward than to know that their children and grandchildren will be shielded from the wrath of an uncaring world?

The key is comparing apples to apples i.e. not just comparing people doing the same job, but comparing people with the same number of years of full time experience of comparable quality.

A study that took into account education, hours worked, and skill into account found that:

Earnings are a function of skill and effort as well as gender. But even after we control for these factors, a relatively large earnings gap between men and women remains. The gender wage gap across the major creative class occupations ranges from $20,000-plus on the high end ($23,400 for management, $24,300 for law, and $26,600 for healthcare occupations ), to around $8,000-$10,000 on the low end ($8,700 for education, $9,800 for life, physical, and social science, and $9,900 for architecture and engineering).

Keep in mind that skill is not entirely an independent variable. People who are promoted to more resonsible positions have the opportunity to learn from the experience, whereas those who are not promoted don't. In other words, the effects of bias are likely to compound.

So the statistics above may understate the problem. The unadjusted numbers are truly horrendous. For law, men get paid more than twice as much ($138k vs $66k), which seems dramatically out of proportion to slightly more schooling (17.5 years vs 15.6 years) and a significant but not huge gap in hours worked (46.6 vs 40.9 hours - I don't know about you, but I personally find a dramatic drop-off in marginal productivity as hours increase).

Notice also the gap in education. Some comments here are suggesting that education is a domain of reverse descrimination, but that's not the story told by the wage gap.

I must echo the request of others here: if you have evidence to the contrary, plese provide it.

No such thing as freeway driving, just freeway parking. If the whitehouse could bring freeway speeds up to 50MPH...

That's quite easy. Given that freeway congestion is a type of shortage (too many cars trying to use the same road at the same time), anyone with a basic understanding of economics knows how to eliminate the shortage, even without adding lanes.

That's a pretty butch question. In my current state, I'd have trouble answering it with any chance of respectful reception. What I can say immediately, is how the bloody hell is the current system going to hold? I also don't believe bitcoin has reached maturity yet. Like a beaten and resented prodigy, it's growth has been hindered by various factors. Maybe the way it would work under such circumstances is a matter of additional innovation, adaptation, or redesign. I hope it never comes to that, but if it does, it would be nice to see things get the hell out of its way with anything but positive input. I am sure some fellow slashers will do a brilliant job taking this in 360 degrees, and far beyond what I am capable of.

On the subject of goats, [gardens] and chickens, that's another manipulated value, considering that in many locations throughout the US and other nations it's illegal to have them.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/08/woman-jailed-for-vegetable-garden_n_893516.html
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/04/illegal-curbside-garden-flourishes/1728/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/20/illegal-kitchen-garden_n_1687558.html - CA
http://www.aolnews.com/2010/09/15/cabbagegate-ga-man-fined-5k-for-home-garden/
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/10/weird_zoning_laws
http://www.newson6.com/story/18802728/woman-sues-city-of-tulsa-for-cutting-down-her-edible-garden
And so on and so on.

Let's hope he does something better than the Stockholm "green" toilets they tried in Mongolia:
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/07/toilet-tuesday-death-worlds-largest-eco-toilet/2783/
http://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/5068-Eco-toilet-scheme-ends-in-failure

We DON'T hold people responsible. Once upon a time, we did. Nowadays, you can "lose control" and escape prosecution, even when your mistake kills people.

And speaking as someone who was once left unconscious in a ditch by a hit-and-run driver, it HAS affected me. Given personal experience with this alleged "responsibility", I find that talk is cheap -- when responsibility matters, it is often lacking.

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/technology/2012/03/why-driverless-cars-would-be-bad-cities-and-suburbs-alike/1393/