Slashdot Mirror
Fast-Food CEO Invests In Machines Because Regulation Makes Them Cheaper Than Employees (yahoo.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The CEO of Carl's Jr., Andy Puzder, has been inspired by the 100-percent automated restaurant, Eatsa, as he looks for ways to deal with rising minimum wages. "With government driving up the cost of labor, it's driving down the number of jobs," he says. "You're going to see automation not just in airports and grocery stores, but in restaurants." Puzder doesn't believe in [the progressive idea of] raising the minimum wage. "Does it really help if Sally makes $3 more an hour if Suzie has no job? If you're making labor more expensive, and automation less expensive -- this is not rocket science," says Puzder. What comes as a challenge is automating employee tasks. This is where he draws the line and doesn't think that it's likely any machine could perform such work. But for more rote tasks like grilling a burger or taking an order, technology may be even more precise than human employees. "They're always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there's never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case," says Puzder in regard to replacing employees with machines.
Hope those machines buy his crappy food...
Remember how they told us that there would be no IT jobs left in the US because everything can be done so much cheaper in India?
Now it's that there will be no burger flipping jobs left because machines can do it cheaper. Let's wait and see how these burgers taste and whether I don't like them over there at [other burger joint] better even if they cost 30 cents more but taste like a burger and not like the bag it came in.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Why pay money if they work for a bowl of rice?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
With government driving up the cost of labor, it's driving down the number of jobs
That's what he wants to make this about, but in reality his actual reasons for using robotics are
They're always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there's never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case
Which has nothing to do with the cost of the labor and everything to do with the repeatability and efficiency of the employee. I'm betting that, for the right money, you could get an employee to fit almost every one of those. But on the whole, it's not that employees are getting more expensive, in real dollars, but rather than AI and robotics which can do these jobs better than people - per his own words - is getting cheaper than the cost of an employee. It's not if people get replaced but when. The only thing that changes is the exact spot in time where the curves cross.
This happened in the industrial revolution when mechanical devices took over automatable tasks. It's just that it's coming for a different class of worker this time.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
It's inevitable less qualified humans will be replaced by machines. It's inevitable over time more qualified humans will be replaced. It's extremely short-sighted (or disingenuous) to blame government regulations for doing something that is inevitably going to happen just a few years down the line anyway. As machines catch up to and surpass humans in more areas the percentage of humans who cannot be profitably employedwill approach unity. In my opinion the reasons to reject these changes tend to be bad ones.
You have the traditionalists, who just don't want anything to change. You have the sour grape connoisseurs, who believe positive change is undesirable because they see it as unlikely. Then there's the worst of them, the people who believe experiencing unpleasantness like working is intrinsically valuable. It's happening. The list of things humans can do that robots and computers cannot do is shrinking... and that list never grows longer. It's time to look to a future free of involuntary employment. It's time to make it happen as soon as possible.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
. . . .Extra big-ass fries from their machines ? And, will they also identify unfit mothers ? Not Sure wants to know. . . . (grin)
Fuck you, I'm eating.
Puzder doesn't believe in [the progressive idea of] raising the minimum wage.
Square brackets are used to modify the original statement only when it would provide contextual accuracy, not when you want to add bias to a statement. If you add bias this way, I instantly think you're a moron, regardless of your views.
I work in automation. It isn't so much that minimum wage matters... sure if you have really, really low minimum wage and people willing to work for it then you might just throw labor at a problem, but typically we automate for a variety of reasons: improved accuracy/quality, better throughput (a robot loading a machine can often keep up better than a human, which means I get more throughput out of my expensive machine), more consistent process. We *want* to automate everything, and when we look at what we *can* automate, it's always the boring repetitive jobs anyway. So it doesn't matter that much whether someone's making $6 or $8 or $10 an hour, if we can automate it we will. Certainly we are growing more concerned with the fact that a growing percentage of the population isn't going to be able to find the easy put-nut-A-on-bolt-B type of work anymore, and there's definitely a portion of those people who may not be able to be retrained to do something that a robot can't do. That's a societal problem, not an engineering problem. First is understanding that this isn't the same thing we saw in the industrial revolution. If I gave a laborer a steam shovel I made them a lot more productive. If I just say "stand aside while this robot does the job" that's different. And no, you're not going to take someone who works on an assembly line and retrain them to be a robot programmer. That's absurd. They won't get a job assembling robots either, as Fanuc apparently has a "lights out" manufacturing facility for their robots - it's a completely automated line. Minimum wage is doing a good thing: encouraging factories to automate by making the payback look better. Automated factories are better. Automated restaurants are probably better too. The fact that we have a very low skilled portion of the populace is a separate issue that needs addressing... maybe a guaranteed minimum income, I don't know. But coming up with make-work jobs for them is no better than putting them in prison and having them dig holes and fill them in. Also relevant to this discussion - has everyone seen the short story, "Manna"?
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Those automated restaurants don't run for free without trouble. They need highly skilled ($40 to $50 an hour skilled) employees to maintain and repair them plus you need skilled workers to clean them and stock them. So he is simply moving labor to high skilled tier where it will end up costing him more because he will have to pay 1/4 the employees 5 times more. AND now he has maintenance costs that are significantly higher.
Stupid CEO is letting his hatred for poor people color his business decisions.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Just quick note. Rats in the feed become competitive advantage, they are ground up, grilled and served up as rat-patty. Nice!
On y va, qui mal y pense!
The big point being missed is "Who are you planning on selling your cheap to produce burgers to ?"
I'm confident you can replace my job with machines, most jobs with machines and I don't think CEO's will be last against the wall either. Problem being if you do that, well the machines won't be buying your shit food will they ?
Minimum wage increase fuels automation technology, relieves humans from drudgery. Everyone benefits from the increased efficiency, unemployment remains low, miserable fast food workers end up in slightly less miserable job just like the factory workers before them.
This space intentionally left blank
If Puzder is going to fire Suzie rather than give her a $3 raise, then his taxes are going to go up to pay for her social safety net costs. It's impossible to have a society where a large fraction of people can't find work that pays a living wage. Those people will vote (or act in other ways) to overturn the system that is making their lives impossible.
I'm always amazed that the rich think they can hide in their gated communities and enjoy the fruits of other people's labor.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
I'm always amazed that the rich think they can hide in their gated communities and enjoy the fruits of other people's labor.
That shouldn't be amazing. No matter what happens in other businesses, or society as a whole, Puzder is still making the optimal choice for himself.
Except for fast food isn't for people who want to eat out, it is for people who don't have time to cook. If you are going to "eat out" then you are going somewhere with a waiter.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
At least as long as you somehow keep your "customers" from finding a way to game your machines.
It would be the first vending machine in history to be tamper proof.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This is why basic income is inevitable. Paid for by the corporations through taxes because they put all of the people out of work. There will be no personal income to tax if people don't have jobs. The only thing left to tax will be the corporations.
And the corporations, while they might not paying taxes to give people a basic income will need to. For without the people getting that basic income there are no consumers to consume what the corporations are producing and so they will go out of business.
The corporations will leave and go somewhere else, like China and India you say? Of course they will and they will just do to China and India what they did wherever they moved from, putting everyone out of work and forcing the government to make them pay for a basic income.
What of the country that all the corporations left that now has an unemployed work force but no corporations to pay for their basic income? Probably there will be a new tax to "sellers" of goods and services, so the corporations will pay the tax to keep people in a basic income one way or another. But more likely, a new economy will rise up.
So yeah, keep up the good work you corporate bastards. Looking forward to sitting on my ass while you support me. Well, in fact, I won't be sitting on my ass, but I will be spending my days doing something *I* want to do instead of wasting away 1/3 of my life in your factories.
And unless you continue to support me in that endeavour, you will be unemployed (out of business) too.
Greed is awesome.
So much this.
Minimum Wages increases cause so much harm to small businesses. It is shady as fuck.
There are loads of companies in the UK right now panicking because the minimum wage was increased, some have already set their close dates and some are already letting people go to keep the business alive.
The cost of LIVING is the problem, and that needs to be changed.
Get rid of traditional farming and invest in aquaponics and instantly half the cost of food, one of the biggest spends in a household.
Invest in more renewables to lower the price of energy. Invest in low-energy devices.
All of these things would cost money, they absolutely would, but they would also save money very quickly, aquaponics especially. Throw in insect farming on top.
Artificial crap like the costs of houses because "oh, it has a view of some blue and orange"* needs to be dealt with. This is one of the most complex of problems because it is at the root of how most large countries work.
But then again, full capitalism is never a good thing, neither is communism or socialism.
Mixes of all 3 are needed for stability on the scale the human race is at now.
A large number of countries are a mix of capitalism and socialism and do very well, but companies still have the final say in the end, the "free" market is the problem. And for some reason, these countries still bend over backwards to accommodate them. Quite frankly, I would never miss a single one of these abusive companies. Google as well, they can go die for all I care. I wrote my own web crawler when I was 15.
They have gotten away with so much scummy shit for decades, poisoning billions of people and acres of land.
When are we going to finally wake up and say "enough is enough!" and regulate the markets to some extent?
At present, we are like a parent that lets their kids run around screaming at a restaurant. Some parenting is required. We barely do any, besides "hey, quiet down will ya?" and they don't listen.
Automation is at a point where it CAN now replace a large number of jobs across so many markets. Billions of people can be put out of work right NOW, it just hasn't happened yet due to the issues (demand) of scaling up production. But more and more companies are getting behind it.
It is only a matter of time before you get that last pay...
The robotic future is going to demand we adapt. Out of necessity or force.
* The beach isn't even all that anyway, it is noisy and draughty at night, gee, great, just what I wanted, some fresh salty air in my lungs.
Oh no wait, *those* guys protect themselves every way they can, but regulation is bad, hmm.
Just quick note. Rats in the feed become competitive advantage, they are ground up, grilled and served up as rat-patty. Nice!
Pass the ketchup!
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
"The CEO of Carl's Jr., Andy Puzder, has been inspired by the 100-percent automated restaurant, Eatsa, as he looks for ways to deal with rising minimum wages." We know where he really got his inspiration from.
In an ideal world which meets the assumptions of the models we studied in Econ 101 you're unassailably right. However in the real world empirical evidence that a minimum wage results in less labor demanded is mixed. Why would that be? Clearly it must mean that wages are unnaturally lower than what the model regards as optimal.
As the Economist notes:
If the real world doesn't behave as your model predicts, it's not the real world that is wrong (unless you're Austrian School). Since in this case the model's predictive results are mixed, it makes the most sense to regard it as useful but too simplistic to be absolutely reliable.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The problem is not fast food labor. The problem is that a large percentage of jobs are in China. There are fewer hi-tech manufacturing jobs in the United States. Life in the U.S. is rapidly degrading.
It's good that low-level jobs are taken by machines. It's bad if the hi-level jobs of designing, manufacturing, and maintaining those machines are all taken by Chinese.
In Hong Kong, a long time ago, I met a man who was having golf clubs made in China. He said he taught a Chinese man to design the factory. He found later that the Chinese man's brother was building an identical factory to make golf clubs that would compete with his business.
This is an excellent book that tells one part of the story of degradation: Poorly Made in China: An Insider's Account of the Tactics Behind China's Production Game. There are many other, related issues.
You need money to move around, whatever else is going on. As current events show, there's essentially no bottom to people's greed, and without some mechanism to force some money out of people they would hoard all the money while their workers lived in the dumpster behind the store and ate cast-off flour and rotting olives. There's no benefit to society there. I've lived in a (former-ish) banana republic like that. Nothing new or innovative happens there, because it all falls into nepotism or crony capitalism. Money has to circulate and people have to be able to create enough of a cushion to take a chance, go to school at night, etc. If we don't have that, we'll be out-competed by societies that do. If you look at our history we did best when the tax structure, minimum wage laws, the GI Bill and union numbers did not favor the rich, they moved money around to people who wouldn't get it in a purely capitalist society.
Minimum wage exists to set a floor on living standards. Society says even the poorest people prepared to put in a day's work should be able to afford shelter, food, etc.
At a macro scale, arguing against a minimum wage us arguing the economy can not be productive enough to support all of its participants.
If you can't afford to pay someone minimum wage, you are implicitly saying they cannot be productive enough to be worth keeping at a level society deems satisfactorily minimal for survival.
When you are prepared to stand in front of poor people and tell them they can't contribute enough to justify a basic level of existence, you are prepared to argue minimum wage laws shouldn't exist.
Finally, moral issues aside, there's the simple maths problem of a race to the bottom: once you've successfully impoverished all but a handful of rich people, who's going to buy the stuff they're selling ?
Assuming for the sake of argument that we ALL have a stake in, and ALL have contributed to, the progress that our civilization has enjoyed - why is society becoming so extremely polarized at the very rich and very poor ends of the economic spectrum? In other words, why is the middle class disappearing?
Don't get me wrong - I understand that hard work, intelligence, and creativity, (along with a HUGE amount of sheer luck that is usually unnoticed, much less acknowledged), engender differential material gain and economic stratification, to some extent. We will always have inequality - it seems to be the law of the universe. But I don't believe that we must have the extreme inequality that has taken hold over the last three decades or so. Victor Yakovenko has some interesting things to say about the matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
We use artificial mechanisms to protect ourselves from extreme weather, disease, natural disasters, etc. Now, how can we all pull together to protect ourselves from extreme economic conditions? For this kind of polarization is unstable - like a lightning storm, major discharges will occur. Many of these 'discharges' will be very destructive - global war, famine, climate change, bloody revolution... Andy Puzder sounds both self-righteous and somewhat panicked at the prospect of having to defend his masters' hoard against those who insist on a decent living wage for Carl's Jr. employees - he really sounds like he's talking about war tactics and strategies. Why can't we arrange it that 'more than enough' is considered the end of this fight for wealth concentration? How can we tame the collective gluttony which both feeds on the misery of our fellow man and steals a staggering amount of opportunity from our children's children's children?
I ask these questions and make these observations in the context of TFA and TFS because with all of the automation and efficiencies of production our civilization has gained over the past several decades, we ALL should be working fewer hours while having both a better standard of living and a better quality of life.
Apologies for seeming a bit rambling and unfocused. This is a very complex, very broad issue, and it's hard to formulate thoughts and questions at all, much less do it in the space of a Slashdot comment.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Your premise is that a social safety net must exist.
I'm always amazed by the consumer who thinks that he can demand production and enjoy the benefits of other people's capital.
People used to tell me I should be against abortion because, originally, the intent of abortion was to kill black people. This is the same silly argument.
82 posts in and no Idiocracy reference?!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt03...
It's impossible to have a society where a large fraction of people can't find work that pays a living wage. Those people will vote (or act in other ways) to overturn the system that is making their lives impossible.
With real wages having gone nowhere for decades, we're arguably well into that scenario now. How much longer do you think we've got ?
When the wealthy have a police state with killbots on their side, what chance do you think the people have ?
I can't say it any better than this...
Carl's Jr. Computer: Enjoy your EXTRA BIG ASS FRIES!
Woman at Carl's Jr.: You didn't give me no fries, I got an empty box.
Carl's Jr. Computer: Would you like another EXTRA BIG ASS FRIES?
Woman at Carl's Jr.: I said I didn't get any!
Carl's Jr. Computer: Thank you! Your account has been charged. Your balance is zero. Please come back when you can afford to make a purchase.
Woman at Carl's Jr.: What? Oh no, NO!
[She hits the machine. An alarm goes off, and a sign appears on the computer saying "WARNING! Carl's Jr. Frowns Upon Vandalism"]
Carl's Jr. Computer: I'm sorry you're having trouble. I'm sorry you're having trouble.
Woman at Carl's Jr.: Come on! My kids are starvin'!
Carl's Jr. Computer: [the woman kicks the computer, and it sprays a fast-acting tranquilizer in her face] This should help you calm down. Please come back when you can afford to make a purchase. Your kids are starving. Carl's Jr. believes no child should go hungry. You are an unfit mother. Your children will be placed in the custody of Carl's Jr. Carl's Jr... "F*ck You, I'm Eating."
[Joe approaches the computer]
Carl's Jr. Computer: Welcome to Carl's Jr. Would you like to try our EXTRA BIG ASS TACO? Now with more MOLECULES!
SD
âoeWho knew something as harmless as willful ignorance could end up having real consequences?â
Not come across Eatsa before - interesting idea. I am amused by the "Now Hiring" section of their website. 22 vacancies, it seems, across two restaurants.
Owl tried to think of something wise to say, but couldn't.
Wanted: Kill-bots that only target CEOs.
If Puzder is going to fire Suzie rather than give her a $3 raise, then his taxes are going to go up to pay for her social safety net costs.
He has bought the politicians. So he thinks he is covered there on the tax issue. But the damn fool does not realize, his machines won't need food, would not buy entertainment, would not buy a home or pay for college. As more and more employers automate more and more functions and lay off more and more people, he will end up with lots of shiny new machines willing sell food at great profit.... if only there are people with money to buy them.
It is really very short sighted of a food industry CEO to go this way. No matter how much money you have, the top 1% can not eat 99 times more to make up for the loss of income at the lower scales. The industries that serve the poorer people, fast food, low end restaurants, low end retail, low end consumables, low end groceries, should be at the forefront of supporting government assistance to the poor.
Every dollar spent, or wasted, if you want to call it that, by the government is a dollar of income to someone. The captains of these industries should be lobbying for increased government spending on welfare, if they have any sense.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
...that's what technology is supposed to do, yes. The rising tide, and all that. Why do you subscribe to a Bronze Age mentality in 2016?
I'm always amazed by the consumer who thinks that he can demand production and enjoy the benefits of other people's capital.
I'm always amazed that people think their "capital" has any sort of meaning unless the mass of society can benefit from it. Guess what, the only thing preventing the masses from stringing you up and taking your capital is the basic social contract that allows you to get rich as long as standards for the masses don't fall too far. You violate that social contract no amount of funny money or gold bars or factories is going to save your head from getting blown off as the police officers and military you depend on to live find it expedient to slay you.
Monstar L
I'm always amazed that the rich think they can hide in their gated communities and enjoy the fruits of other people's labor.
I'm always amazed that people don't get this simple truth:People tend to avoid whatever the government makes more expensive and gravitate toward whatever the government makes cheaper
This can be accomplished by active tax policy (e.g., raising taxes on luxury items or "sin taxes," enacting tax credits like for having children or performing energy saving upgrades to your primary residence), or by passive tax policy (e.g., allowing nearby jurisdictions to be more competitive from a taxation stand point).
For example, this is precisely why people constantly travel from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and even further away to buy stuff in Delaware. NJ, PA, & MD all have relatively high sales taxes, while DE has none. This is also why lots of big US companies (Microsoft is the only one that springs to mind recently, but there are others) funnel lots of their revenue and profits through affiliates in Ireland (which has a much lower corporate tax rate than most other industrialized nations). This isn't rocket science, it is simply understanding fundamental human behavior.
The biggest flaw in your assumption, however, is that we can keep widening the social safety net indefinitely. Eventually, people will need to become responsible for themselves again and own their own fate.
Start a franchise, pretty much any big name brand restaurant. Your contract has set costs, your contract for the building set in stone, your overhead minus labor, non-negotiable... that leaves labor.
So you want more money in your pocket, the only place to grab it is from your workers somehow. I knew a woman that was an "assistant manager" at a Culver's. They cut the health care coverage to the bare bones & made the employees (managers & assistant managers) pay 100% for it. The owners (they had 3 Culver's) saved 10K. Just enough take their families to Hawaii for 2 weeks over Christmas.
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
Actually you've got that backwards, fighting against minimum wage laws illistrates economic and historical ignorance at the highest level.
Historically they were associated in a huge increase in the middle class. What you're arguing for is the creation and maintenance of an underclass to keep the wealth centralised in the current upper classes.
But you said it best
Your superstitions need to die out, sadly this is taking a long time.
Your assumptions are based on conditions that dont exist in the real world because of a little economic principle called "externalities". Keynesian and Libertarian economists love to ignore externalities because they 1) Aren't immediately apparent on a balance sheet and 2) completely screw up their chosen economic dogma. OK, so lets allow businesses to decide what is the minimum wage, the first thing they're going to find out is that fewer people can afford to buy they're product. This alone will reduce the available workforce because unlike companies, workers can pick up and leave when they cant make a liveable wage. As a result, anyone with any skill, talent or worth will move to a place with wage laws so all that CEO Stingy-pants will be left with are the most uneducated employees, literally the people who cant get. a job anywhere else.
A good historical example was Henry Ford. Instead of paying the lowest wages possible, he paid the highest and what he saw was a huge uptick in sales because his own workers could now afford to buy his cars. It wasn't just Ford that benefited from this, his workers could now afford other luxuries like a refrigerator.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Um... Puzder has enough clout that even though Suzie gets fired, he won't be paying taxes to keep the social safety net going.
The rich can... if things get bad, the gated communities get armed guards, and they will continue to enjoy the fruits of other people's labor. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Mexico, and many other countries show this happening. Voting is nice, but few people bother to do that. At an extreme, revolution is talked about, but realistically, it is impossible. Look at Syria as an example.
I'm always amazed at the corporate shill who doesn't understand that without customers you have no business, and with no business, you're unemployed and penniless.
Without workers, you either have to do the work all yourself (in which case you need to get some thousands of hours per day work done, good luck with that) or you have no goods to sell. And if you have no goods to sell, your customers won't be buying anythin from you and you will go out of business and be unemployed and penniless.
Without you in charge, the business with customers to buy and workers to make the stuff to buy, the business will work absolutely fine and make money. They will be employed and you will be unemployed and penniless.
As long as you rely on the majority, you owe them for your existence and wealth. They owe you shit all. If you weren't getting more from their work than they did, you wouldn't get paid. You sure as shit don't do the work yourself.
My wife's car was broken into several times when she lived in Antwerp for eight months, but never in years of living in Denver, Pittsburgh, Houston or Washington DC. Maybe Belgium hasn't worked out "social peace"?
Perhaps it's time to start shifting the economic model? It'll likely happen whether you like it or not. Automation will continue to take over jobs and it'll continue to shrink the available job pool. Advances in material science and engineering will lower the amount of maintenance needed for a machine and may provide opportunities to automate machine maintenance. There will come a point where "having a job" won't simply be possible for the vast majority of people. Not everyone can be programmers or senior executives. Whether you like it or not we're moving that way and it won't stop or slow down. The human worker is becoming obsolete and the way we take of our weaker parts of society will set the stage for how we take care of ourselves in the future.
I've seen all those movies. In the short term, it's bad for humans, both the innocent as well as the idiots that made the killbots. But usually humans prevail in the end. So I'm putting my money on the humans.
When the wealthy have a police state with killbots on their side, what chance do you think the people have ?
Just the killbots. Otherwise they'd need to pay and equip the police, who being human would probably keep demanding more money until the point that they would also need to become killbot fodder.
Historically, how well has that worked for the working poor?
It sure seems like the only time the typical worker gets ahead is when major historical changes occur that alter the playing field in ways that economic power and the force of establishment violence can't change -- the mass deaths during the plague, the combination of economic depression and World War II, or outright political revolution, which seems to have enough negative outcomes that it can't really be endorsed.
Other than that, political and economic systems seem to be capable of withstanding and even thriving with a narrow economic and political elite and the masses held in working poverty or outright slavery. Rome built one of the greatest empires known on a slave economy. European feudalism lasted for centuries, a grip only loosened by the labor imbalance of the plague and took centuries and the influence of Marxism to truly wane.
While the economies of scale and mass production seem capable of altering the equation through broader material prosperity, the trends don't exactly appear encouraging. Wage stagnation, wealth concentration, race-to-the-bottom labor practices, and financial corruption of the political process don't seem to be stacking the odds in favor of the typical worker.
The current political process seems to indicate a disaffection for the status quo, but would even an election of Sanders be enough to actually rebalance the equation? We're due again for our usual post-administration review of the accomplishments or lack thereof of Presidential power as a reminder of how voting for "change" seldom results in lasting positive change for the masses.
Simple: there aren't that many minimum wage workers to begin with, minimum wage increases are so low that they don't usually have much of an effect, people are measuring the wrong thing, and people are confusing absence of evidence with evidence of absence.
For example, many studies look at employment numbers; but minimum wages jobs have an extremely high turnover, so the fact that you have 10000 fast food jobs in Seattle before a minimum wage increase and 10000 fast food jobs afterwards tells you next to nothing about the effect of the minimum wage on individual employment; the populations that are employed before and afterwards can be totally different.
You misunderstand. Free market advocates like myself say that we should have free markets precisely because markets are not perfectly competitive and we don't have any good models or predictions for markets and market interventions. Governments and regulators have even less information on the market than the individual participants. And market interventions add the problems of coercion and rent seeking to the problems a market may already have.
With fast-food chains going after anything human with their human employees, it is no wonder they found that machines are more effective.
When the person taking orders has to follow a precise script and take order within a certain time, that the kitchen is all about timers and calibrated doses, what's the advantage of having humans in the first place?
In a real restaurant, you can ask for advise, make special demands (within limits), the chef can compose with unusual ingredients. Commercially, they know the little attentions that can make you a returning customer. This is what humans are for. And this is part of the reason people are ready to pay more in a good restaurant, because you have real, competent humans rather than robots in human bodies.
Sure, let's prevent the low income groups from getting hurt and join them with the Bangladeshian sweatshop crew.
I'm not into history or economics but I have enough experience in life to know there
never has been such a thing as a free market, never is and never will be; power corrupts and people tend to group in peers.
Having large groups of people with and without money in the same area is a recipe for unrest -- bad for business.
I do. Which is why I don't want the right wing extremism, political extremism, massive unemployment, xenophobia, and other social and political problems from Europe to come to the US.
Washington D.C. does have a lower rate of theft than the national average.
Of course it also has 2x the national average rate of rapes, 3x the rate of murder and 5x the rate of muggings so, while you may get mugged, raped and murdered, your parked car is fairly safe.
The most xenophobic people in Europe are the immigrants.
The fact that abortion kills a fetus is not in dispute regardless of whether you approve of it or not. But the fact that minimum wage laws hurt low income minorities is in dispute. In that regard, it is quite relevant that large numbers of people (in particular, progressives, unions, and Democrats, the same groups advocating this now) believed this to be true.
That was my thinking too. The combination of machines making food and people not being needed to do mind-numbing tedious tasks brings us one step closer to the Star Trek utopia.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Pretty sure in the bronze age a horde of barbarians would kill him and take his "capital", possibly also raping him and his family. Beginning mostly with feudalism a group of very low wage earners protects him militarily while a group of other low wage earners and machinery designed by other low wage earners takes his capital and gives it back to him with interest. Those people, while unquestionably delivering more to his (and each others) bottom line than he is compensating them for, refrain from barbaric behavior because their pathetic wages are still better than raping and pillaging. In the modern age there has been a push to realize that simply possessing money is probably not a contribution to society and such people are effectively the same useless parasites their poor non-job seeking equivalents are, unless they are also capable of using that money effectively. Due to the need to maintain the semblance of a meritocracy and stability in society, we do not simply take their money away and redistribute it, this might undermine the productivity of capable and motivated low wage earners ambitions. Regardless, devoid of income and hope the low wage earners that do produce a better world are likely to return to the bronze age or earlier when it becomes the lesser of evils. The latest fashion out of paris suggests a return to togas and horned helmets.
I don't know why anyone would do it, but they do: there are plenty of vids online of exactly that.
As well as some of people pissing in food.
You are right, it's stupid and counterproductive, but that doesn't stop it from happening.
machines don't forget to wash their hands after pooping in order to spread their intestinal viruses.
Unfortunately people's buying behaviour is not in general altruistic, it's based upon self interest.
Greed is the root of all evil.
https://youtu.be/7Pq-S557XQU
What about the worker on site who has to maintain it? Machines and moving parts wear out, sanitation laws must be met, inspections must be done, and so on. There is no way a fast food business can run completely unmanned.
Even if the machines worked perfectly, there will be people trying their best to screw around with them in hopes of getting them to fuck up, then suing the fast food joint for millions because the automated coffee maker didn't realize the cup was yanked out of the slot, or the sliding door was jammed with a stick.
Over the past couple of centuries, automation has never shrunk the available work pool. Why would it start doing that now?
Ah, the rallying cry of the Luddites since the early 1800s!
"Paid for by the corporations through taxes because they put all of the people out of work."
Corporations simple pass any added taxes and costs on to the customer. Thus if you add taxes to a corporation they simple raise the price and pass that added expense on to the customer.
A CEO I worked for once said "People are idiots, they think they can raise minimum wadge or add taxes to a company to pay for some social benefit. Corporations pass the added expense on to the customer. Thus they never realize they are the ones paying the taxes not the company.
A corporations job is to make money, that means that we take what ever expenses we have including taxes, add them up, attach a profit margin to it, and sell it. Otherwise we would not be making money."
You overestimate the importance of the US president; he can't and won't change what Americans think or feel. And once you get past the showmanship, Trump is politically rather moderate by European standards; I mean look at the numerous buffoons and crooks that have been at the head of European governments for the past half century.
Shouldn't that be catchup?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I am all for automation: start with the CEO and the owners, replace them with voting systems.
There is also the fact that if one stands up and tells people that they can't contribute enough to justify a basic level of existence, those people don't have to keep following the rules. It doesn't take much to take a miserable and depressed populace who is told over and over again that they don't matter, and turn them into a violent insurgency.
Personally, if push comes to shove, having a citizen's dividend is a lot cheaper than having to pay for troops, weapons, jails, courts, refugee camps, and other stuff to crack down on crime and domestic terrorism should people realize they have no way of earning any type of wage and feeding their families, and turn to rioting.
Ratburgers ? Ask Sylvester Stallone. He traded a fine watch for one, and was quite satisfied. . . (grin)
"Fuck you, I'm eating". . . . (bigger grin)
Yes, and that illustrates the problem. First, you assume that society can actually determine what is "satisfactorily minimal for survival", across the country, for everybody. Yet, a 16 year old kid living with their parents, a retired person with retirement savings, and a single 20-something immigrant all have entirely different needs.
Second, no law is going to change someone's productivity. If someone isn't productive enough to make it worthwhile to pay them minimum wage, they'll simply not get hired.
Actually, that is the question you should be asking, because with policies like the minimum wage, you create a large class of jobless poor, people who you prevent from working by law. That is exactly the "race to the bottom" we are experiencing in our society. Just look at cities like DC or Detroit.
Sooner or later the capitalists of our world that look to maximize profits will realise a person without an income makes for a horrible consumer.
What an idiotic fantasy you have.
What really happens is -
Money goes out of the country, usually to another country where costs are lower. In the 19th and 20th centuries, money went from the UK to the US. Now it has gone from the US to China.
Businesses relocate to where the money is, or they fail and close.
The now impoverished country becomes a shithole (repressive government, tax avoidance, etc.)
"Corporations simple pass any added taxes and costs on to the customer. Thus if you add taxes to a corporation they simple raise the price and pass that added expense on to the customer."
No, they don't. Or, at least, they don't do it *automatically*. That's what competition is about.
Currently we all see how high officials' overall wages and shares' profits are increasing well over average/median salaries. This means that given strong competition they can absorb increased costs by reducing their profit margins and still stay in business (of course, this doesn't mean they would accept it out of their free will, but that they'll do if there's no other way).
"A corporations job is to make money, that means that we take what ever expenses we have including taxes, add them up, attach a profit margin to it, and sell it."
Exactly this. Which in turn means that, as long as the profit margin is higher than "the fair profit for money" (in Adam Smith's words), they can possibly reduce their margin and still stay in business (because it's still better to accept the reduced profits than putting their money anywhere else with even lower margins). As an extreme example, you can see how as of now "the money" is accepting even negative returns on long term bonds from healthy economies.
"They're always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there's never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case"
He complains about wages, and then lists the reasons he'll automate no matter what the minimum wage is, no matter what the regulations are. Sounds about right.
And after the masses string up the producers for their wealth. Then there are no more producers and then what? Nobody making money and more importantly nobody producing products for the masses to buy. How long will most of modern society last if the farmers stop producing more than they need to survive? How many people even have enough land to be self sustaining food wise let alone clothing and other items?
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
Consider this alternative future:
1) Wealth and control of resources concentrates in the hands of a few.
2) These people stop considering the rest of humanity "humans", or just believe that what is theirs is theirs and no one else has a right to anything. They also don't need labor very much at all because it is automated. So people who have only their labor to offer are frozen out economically.
3) The owners use automated weaponry to enforce their rights of ownership
4) The power of the few snowballs and they eventually own the entire planet and all means of production, and the rest live in misery on whatever pittiance is allowed them or is outright exterminated via automated weaponry.
To see this in its infancy, look at Detroit. People there can't sell their labor, don't have means to leave, and have resorted to subsistence farming. However, if a "landowner" comes along with the means of ejecting the "squatters", they won't even be able to subsistence farm.
Societies that *do* what you say is inevitable (basic income) will avoid this. Societies which allow ever increasing concentration of wealth into the hands of a few might not. The USA's trend on this is pretty scary, witness the almost complete capture of the political system by money.
-PM
Since he's so enamored with reducing head count because of labor costs, get rid of him and replace him with a computer.
Faster, more nimble, doesn't require any sleep (though needs 24/7 electricity), no healthcare costs, certainly far less expensive to keep around than someone making millions who does so little.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"Hoarding money" means losing it. The only way to keep your money is to invest it.
True, but it doesn't follow that forcing money to move around artificially helps anybody.
Ah, you sound like a white middle class American male waxing nostalgic about the good old mid-century, when the rest of the world was in shambles and women and minorities still were oppressed.
In absolute terms, Americans across the board are much better off now than they were back then.
I'm always amazed that the rich think they can hide in their gated communities and enjoy the fruits of other people's labor.
But they're not even benefiting from Suzie's labor because she doesn't have a job. The rich are being as fooled by capitalism as the poor are. Free market capitalism is essentially a mindless productivity optimizer. Its goal is to squeeze all human labor out of the system by rewarding productivity improvements (which result in more profit) and innovation (which disrupts entrenched interests), all powered along by competition. All of that is fine until the increases in productivity start to out-pace the un-met demand for human labor from the displaced workforce. At that point the best course of action for the invisible hand is to start ejecting the people who consume more resources than robots. This might be good for GDP per worker, but is neither humane nor sustainable in a democracy. Trying to fix this with things like minimum wages is only going to delay things for a short while.
Many people seem to have turned our current version of capitalism into some kind of religion and that is where I think many of our problems come from. Capitalism is just a program that is running and has arguably worked better than any other program for the last few decades. But that program is not sentient. It just blindly pursues a set of objectives. It is now destroying human society in pursuit of those objectives, and the humans need to put their thinking caps back on, tweek the system (as has been done numerous times in capitalism's history) and then set it loose again. My main concern is that if we don't realise this and make adjustments now, people will start to believe some guy (e.g Trump) can do things better by taking control himself. He probably can, until the power goes to his head and the circle begins again.
Yeah about that... Applebees has new touchscreen things that they put at our table. You can order from it, pay your bill from it, and request server assistance. Except the server assistance request never worked. Worst service I've ever gotten... If the digital screen is doing 80% of the serving, is it acceptable to reduce the tip by 80%?
The digital screens also show you ads for their stupid games during your meal as well. Luckily the screen is portable so you can just turn it around. What marketing idiot decided that people would pay $3 to play a cell phone game during a meal? If I wanted to pay $3 for a cell phone game, I'd do it on my cell phone where I would be able to play it later as well...
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
If the humanity as a whole can produce the same amount of goods/services with less human effort, this seems to be a positive thing. The only thing to fix is the way to make all humans to have access to this goods/services, but that's not something to fix on the production part, it's somewhere else in the system.
Over the past couple of centuries, automation has never shrunk the available work pool. Why would it start doing that now?
Don't you know? Economics is a zero sum game [based on the arguments of progressives.]
"His name was James Damore."
Interesting, isn't it, that this mythical "social contract" depends on the assumption that violence will exist without it, yet this "social contract" requires violence to enforce. It's almost as if it's a violent measure in and of itself, isn't it?
This is why we should not be giving general amnesty to all illegals. Otherwise, there will be lots of unemployment to pay.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Your implication is that the existence of a minimum wage law somehow guarantees that the economy will be productive enough. It doesn't guarantee anything, and it can't guarantee anything. You can make the minimum wage $100/h, but that doesn't mean that anyone will be employed to do jobs at that rate. Certainly, tinkering with whether the minimum wage is a measly $7/h or a paltry $12/h doesn't change anything meaningful, and practically nobody thinks it is viable to make it what it actually needs to be to actually serve a useful and fair purpose - say $30/h.
It is evident that the economy IS productive enough to support everyone. Not just participants, but everyone. The problem is profit and greed, the skewed distribution of the proceeds. I.e., the problem is capitalism. Not free enterprise, but capitalism. The warped entitlement that having money gets you more money. Scads and oodles of money.
"He has bought the politicians. So he thinks he is covered there on the tax issue. But the damn fool does not realize, his machines won't need food, would not buy entertainment, would not buy a home or pay for college."
How's this any different to how it has been for ages? And the one-percenters haven't suffered too much for that being the case, right?
"It is really very short sighted of a food industry CEO"
It is really very short sighted to think about this man as a "food industry CEO" when he's just "a CEO that happens to be in the food industry right now". On one hand, he'll still be a one-percenter even if his current company folds; on the other, he still can move to a different sector as CEO if the food business fails.
"The captains of these industries should be lobbying for increased government spending on welfare, if they have any sense."
The one advantage about money is that it is not tied to any specific good: money is agnostic, as it is usually said. So these people can either stick to their current industry or take their money anywhere else, at their choice.
Despite what Fox News says, the vast majority of the poor are working poor, and most of them grab every job they can to make ends meet. Many of the ones Fox News points at are poor people with illnesses and mental illness, who are hard put to hold a job. The viewpoint you wink at is a wildly inaccurate stereotype.
NEWS FLASH: People have never stopped being responsible for their own fate.
Don't step on the baby.
Yes, and that illustrates the problem. First, you assume that society can actually determine what is "satisfactorily minimal for survival", across the country, for everybody.
I don't assume it, I think it's one of the key aspects of having a civilised society.
Yet, a 16 year old kid living with their parents, a retired person with retirement savings, and a single 20-something immigrant all have entirely different needs.
Not entirely different, but certainly somewhat different.
Second, no law is going to change someone's productivity. If someone isn't productive enough to make it worthwhile to pay them minimum wage, they'll simply not get hired.
The shittiest, simplest, lowest-skilled, full-time job should provide sufficient income for someone to live on. Otherwise, as mentioned, you are implicitly telling people that they are disposable - you need them to do some work, but you can't pay them enough to live.
You can calibrate upwards from that baseline.
Actually, that is the question you should be asking, because with policies like the minimum wage, you create a large class of jobless poor, people who you prevent from working by law.
No, that class of people is created by those unwilling to pay decent wages.
That is exactly the "race to the bottom" we are experiencing in our society. Just look at cities like DC or Detroit.
I'm not American, so I don't know what those cities look like today. But the whole western world has been circling the drain as the kind of barbaric and destructive policies you advocate have become more and more commonplace, siphoning wealth upwards away from its creators (as they are designed to do).
America didn't get rich by impoverishing its people.
"Unfortunately in our society, we have been brainwashed and worship capitalism like it's some sort of natural law or god"
This is EXACTLY the problem, except that underlying it all is the belief that "money" is the god. Everything else is just politics. Have you ever noticed how angry people get when you threaten capitalism? Irrationally angry, as if you're insulting their God, like you say. Like really really angry. You don't get angry about something like that unless you fear it, and the only reason to fear something you already have is it being taken away, but only if that thing benefits you in some way. However, the only people that capitalism benefits are the top of the pyramid, because it's designed to be exploitive -- the money always flows upwards. But money is the thing that everybody wants, and capitalism is the religion of getting money, or at least that what we've been suckered into believing. But really, your chances of getting money from capitalism are slim. It seems only about "1%" of people actually get any money. But despite all evidence that capitalism is bad, people religiously support capitalism, because it offers false hope. That is the hallmark of brainwashing.
Someone else will take his place.
Isn't that the argument that you libertarian fucks always like to use when arguing against minimum wage and the like?
Eat the rich.
Now we just need to dress the worthless people in red shirts and organize some landing parties.
He will ask government to subsidy his food, so that he can distribute it to the unemployed people.
Hopefully they will, which means abolishing laws that make it illegal for them to work. You know, like minimum wage laws.
I don't know why more people don't own stock. I have accumulated enough over the years where I cheer this kind of cost cutting. Indeed, I insist upon it! It provides me, as you say, a basic income.
You're talking as if this is all theoretical. But you do well to remember a few things:
1) Masses don't string up producers, they string up the wealthy. In a typical society the people getting rich are not the producers but middle men. Suzie can still flip burgers just as well as she used to, and best of all she and the other employees no longer need to share their wealth with a fat CEO.
2) Farmers are not the ones getting strung up, they will be lining up with strings in their hands right along side the rest of the lower class.
3) Society doesn't break down when the top are axed.
4) This isn't theoretical. This has happened many times in many governments in history. Google Peasant's Revolt for an example. Society will live on because the people who society are built upon ARE the middle-lower class.
Yeah. Fiduciary responsibilities. Corporations have a fiduciary responsibility to their SHAREHOLDERS. In the system we have set up, corporations are REQUIRED to act in the best interest of their shareholders. They are not required to employ a single person, and to the extent that they HAVE TO (sigh) employ people in order to conduct business, they are not required to act in the best interest of those employees or pay them any more than legally required, or necessitated by market conditions.
If we want to fix it, we need to change the parameters of the political/economical system. We need to tax capital gains more, and working wages less. We also need to find a way to enable people to make valuable contributions to society - by using some of the capital to educate the population, and to provide better chances for economically and socially disadvantaged people. A basic income would be one way to provide people with the time to get educated, but in itself, it does little to provide the motivation. Better schools and free university education would help. Intelligent programming on TV and the net would also be a boon. But it's probably not going to pay the same dividends as "Real Housewifes of the WWF", so we might need some good public programming.
On a societal level, this would probably even be economically advantageous. I'd rather pay for a poor kid to go to university than for a cop to keep me safe from it - maybe that kid will invent a cancer cure, or a new video game, instead of going to prison. However, it's far from trivial to align the interest of the major economic and political players with the interests of society as a whole. Even if any program creates a net benefit, as long as some players lose out (or only fear to lose out), they will stonewall any changes. In the long run, things will probably even out - but we do want to avoid cataclysmic events like the French or Russian revolutions.
Stephan
But the damn fool does not realize, his machines won't need food, would not buy entertainment, would not buy a home or pay for college. As more and more employers automate more and more functions and lay off more and more people, he will end up with lots of shiny new machines willing sell food at great profit.... if only there are people with money to buy them.
And this is the point at which he instead tasks his machines with making more and better machines (instead of now-worthless food).
And that's how the singularity happens.
What makes you think that those who 'string up' the producers won't claim and redistribute the wealth that allowed the production? Someone will certainly keep producing. It just won't be the one it was before. Heck it could become the dreaded 'communism' where the laborers take the means of production and use it to make goods and services without an 'overlord' who thinks they are entitled to all the profits form their efforts.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
I think the UBI sounds good in practice, but I am concerned that it will be too open to political abuse. In the end I think it is important to not conflate the issues of an economy that is deflating due to inequality, and a socially acceptable amount of inequality. I think you could get general consensus for some kind of UBI to ensure that the economy doesn't fall into a depression, but people will always fight about what level of inequality is acceptable.
For this reason I actually think a helicopter dividend would be better. Central banks should just be given the power to dump money into every citizen's bank account (probably each month) from created funds to ensure they meet their inflation targets. If the predictions that automation will destroy many jobs come to pass, then the amount they will have to pay out to maintain demand and hence inflation will eventually come to equal a UBI. On the other hand, if the economy recovers and full employment magically returns, the dividend will be cut to zero and the bank can use interest rate policy to control inflation as per usual. The other big benefit of this is that they could then return interest rates to a market level, let all the bubbles deflate, and feed helicopter money in until the economy recovers. This would remove the need for them to have to artificially suppress interest rates to stimulate the economy (which has caused much of the mess we are in), and would give them the ability to let big bubbles collapse without risking a deflationary spiral.
Until automation grows to a point where the dividend was sufficient to live off, you would still need government transfer payments to poor people, but this is just such a political issue that I think trying to remove it from the political process by rolling it into a UBI will just undermine the ability to get consensus on the need for change.
Your implication is that the existence of a minimum wage law somehow guarantees that the economy will be productive enough.
No, it’s not.
I didn’t say anything about whether the economy _could_ support everyone. I said if you are arguing against a minimum wage, you are implicitly stating it cannot.
It may well be the economy cannot support everyone to a particular minimum standard. In which case either the standard has to drop, people have to leave, or productivity needs to increase.
Certainly, tinkering with whether the minimum wage is a measly $7/h or a paltry $12/h doesn't change anything meaningful, and practically nobody thinks it is viable to make it what it actually needs to be to actually serve a useful and fair purpose - say $30/h.
For something that doesn’t change anything meaningful, it sure draws a lot of opposition. :)
$30/hr is sixty-ish grand a year for a full-time job. I'm not American but from memory that's above median _household_ income there. I think it might even be above per-capita GNI. So that’s probably too high for a job flipping burgers or cutting lawns.
It is evident that the economy IS productive enough to support everyone. Not just participants, but everyone. The problem is profit and greed, the skewed distribution of the proceeds. I.e., the problem is capitalism. Not free enterprise, but capitalism. The warped entitlement that having money gets you more money. Scads and oodles of money.
Agreed.
Nobody "needs" anybody to do any work: not hiring someone and not starting a business is always a perfectly good option. Furthermore, I could pay them enough to live, but I won't if they aren't worth it. Call me a big meanie, but minimum wage laws aren't going to change that.
The western world has been circling the drain as the kind of barbaric and destructive policies you advocate have become more and more commonplace,
This is a guy focused on the short term costs and not the customer. Paying for labor does two things - it allows for a better grade of employee and potentially more customers. This mentality is not new to business, but companies that focus on costs are often the ones that go out of business because all that time and energy spent on cost control is not spent on customer service and product quality. Every company that I can recall that has gone down this road has usually ended up with a bad reputation for service and quality and is ripe for losing their position in the market by someone who does focus on the customer and product quality.
Creative Spelling Copyright (2002). May use without Persimmons
Corporations that pass through 100% of the cost increases are either in the commodity business, or aren't in a competitive arena. There is always an attempt to trim some in order to offset the new costs, simply because you know that your competitors are looking at this as an opportunity to steal some of your customers if they happen to raise their price less.
I'm always amazed by people who breed when they can't afford to take care of themselves and then expect others to take care of them. One of the many solutions in a post job, post scarcity world is less breeding.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
This has ahll been tried, repeatedly. You say "they can possibly", let's look at what people ACTUALLY DO.
> as the profit margin is higher than "the fair profit for money" (in Adam Smith's words), they can possibly reduce their margin and still stay in business
They "possibly could", I suppose. Here's what is in fact happening. Each paycheck, I have a certain amount set aside for retirement, and to buy a house again, because I'm trying to be a responsible adult. That money that is set aside is of course "capital". (it's worth recognizing that in the US, with our system of public companies, the word "capital" mostly means "retirement savings").
So anyway I have this retirement money, or capital, and I need to do something with it. I -could- put my money in a Detroit car company, who pays relatively high wages but makes no money. If I choose to do that, I can retire when I'm 85. Or I can put my savings into another car company which makes cars in Texas, Mexico, and other places with lower regulatory costs, and therefore makes money. If I do that, I can retire when I'm 65.
So retire at 85 via a Detroit company with Detroit costs, or retire at 65 via a multinational with Texas and Mexico costs. Which would YOU choose. Virtually nobody is choosing to put their savings (capital) into companies with high costs and low profits. A few choose their investments based on being a fan of this or that, but most people want to retire sooner rather than later, so their money goes to places that have lower costs.
China and India have had much lower costs than the east coast of the US does, so businesses operating in China and India (and creating jobs there) are the ones doing well. The jobs in Detroit are gone. They HAD very high benefits and wages due to unions and regulation there, and that's why they are gone.
Of course, that fact that legislating higher pay doesn't work is unacceptable to some people; their first instinct is to deny it, though of course it's fairly obvious. What about those poor assembly line workers, warehouse workers, etc.? We have to do something! I'd agree, somewhat. I'd say "we have to do something THAT WILL BE EFFECTIVE." All too often we think "we have to do something" and then politician X suggests plan Z. Well plan Z is something, and we have to do something, so we have to plan Z. Well, no, plan Z has been tried many times and it doesn't work. We need to do something that actually works.
The main thing that actually works is vocational training / education. I started to just write "education", but getting a bunch of people degrees in Russian Literature isn't all that effective; we can get better results from our limited resources with training in welding, IT fields, etc. If someone is 36 years old and they're worth the same wage as a 16 year old, if they haven't managed to improve their skills and knowledge in 20 years, that's something we need to look at.
We also have to recognize a very uncomfortable fact. Gas stations and fast food places around Texas are offering $10-12/hour to start, which, with the low cost of living in Texas, is a decent wage. That's just the starting wage, for teenagers with no experience, show up on time for a year and you start getting raises. Yet there are a bunch of people not working! There are even people getting fired from Taco Bell because they won't show up on time and when they do show up they're stoned. It's a lot harder to help those people. I'm not sure how to help people who won't show up, except I've done one thing that has helped in some cases. I've given them two choices - show up, sober, and get paid well, or don't get paid at all. They'd like to show up drunk or stoned, figuring they are then worth about $6/hour, but I don't give them that option. About half of them then decide they'd rather have a job where they show up on time, sober, for $10, then have no job and no money for beer. The other half - I don't know how to help them.
I refuse to use self-service lines. Why the fuck am I going to work as a cashier and not get paid for it, and not even get a discount on the items? No, I want a human who is trying to make a living to ring up my items for me. If you try to "force" people to use self-checkout by having only one register + 6 self-checkout lanes open I'll leave the cart full of groceries and walk out and buy from your competitor instead.
If you're going to have robots running the fast food joint, I'll give it a miss and go to the salad bar at Whole Foods instead and I'll be better off with that healthier food choice anyhow. :)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
"The fact that abortion kills a fetus is not in dispute regardless of whether you approve of it or not."
In fact, no, it isn't undisputed. Some people will argue that, at least before certain date, taking out a fetus is not qualitatively different to cutting your nails or taking out a wart.
No way you would ever replace an even an only moderately reliable machine with a human employee. Pointless to use this as an argument against raising the minimum wage. If a human had to replace a machine at the same cost he/she would starve to death.
Raising the minimum wage might speed up the adoption of automation, but not by much.
I'm not sure if we're going to have to wait 500 years for Idiocracy. Carl's Jr. Fuck you, I'm eating
And that mindset is DEAD WRONG. Corporations only exists because the laws allow them to. Those laws need to change to hold these corporations accountable to the populations of the countries they operate in.
and what happens when Suzie beats the shit out of the robo restaurant as she wants to sleep in side tonight at the jail?
" Over the past couple of centuries, automation has never shrunk the available work pool. Why would it start doing that now?"
Because now, and that's qualitatively different from the past, two things have been achieved:
1) A fair share of society already is above the starving level (capital is already countering this by outsourcing -which can't work for always)
2) The machines' support itself is also automated (mainly by software).
These two taken together mean that you don't have an "unexploted pool of customers" just waiting for the industrialization to take place and buy your products and that there's no relationship at all between productivity and number of people employed.
So, no, the industrial revolution can't be taken here for an example of what will happen in the future.
"With government driving up the cost of labor, it's driving down the number of jobs," he says"
Yeah, and to back that up we link to an article he wrote.
Does anyone here believe for even a second he wouldn't replace these same jobs even if they got cheaper?
You can babble on about living wages, greed, and similar crap, but that rhetoric doesn't get Suzie that job or feed her. $0 per hour is much further from a living wage than whatever Suzie was making before.
I'm always amazed that the rich think they can hide in their gated communities and enjoy the fruits of other people's labor.
What's amazing about it? It's true. And if it comes to societal breakdown so that the gated communities no longer offer sufficient protection, they can hop on a plane and be somewhere else in the world in hours. Your threats are empty.
I get tired of people using the excuse of poverty or worse, some vapid notion of "inequality" to make things worse for everyone.
No, they don't. Or, at least, they don't do it *automatically*. That's what competition is about.
Competition doesn't help, if all companies are taxed equally.
In other words, he is running a failed business model which should be taxed out of existence because it adds no value to society.
Whether his business ads value to society depends on what product/service they provide for a certain price, not how much taxes they pay. In fact, if we get rid of company taxes, society would save a lot of money on useless company tax advisors, and experts trying to close loopholes in tax laws.
Yeah about that... Applebees has new touchscreen things that they put at our table. You can order from it, pay your bill from it, and request server assistance.
I hate those things. The one time I had to use them, because Red Robbin supposedly won't let you order a malt unless it is through that fucking machine, it didn't work and even the server couldn't get it to work. Now I am a dick and if the server isn't around and no one else is I shuffle them around the dining room so they don't match up with the tables.
Time to offend someone
So it's better to pay their salaries with welfare rather than increased wages? The way I look at it, Joe Taxpayer is stuck with the bill no matter how you cut it.
As someone who has automated my own job out of existence before, all I can say is there are other jobs. I moved laterally within my company when my job went away, but two of the guys got laid off. That project had the misfortune of ending in late August of 2001 and we had 40% layoffs October 1 with 30% more on top of that November 15 (so about 48% of employees got laid off in those two months). I happened to move to QA lead on a project that wasn't expendable and had all of its engineers outsourced already, but they needed a US lead (specifically, it was test automation). I didn't want to stay in that position, but it was a good place to be to survive layoffs.
It is the ideal feeding ground to get someone into power that promises to solve it all by blaming one group.
It has happened before. It could happen again. Due to Godwins law, I am not allowed to reveal who it was.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
>> He will ask government to subsidy his food, so that he can distribute it to the unemployed people.
You might think you are joking, but this is already a thing.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2011/09/fast-food-chains-getting-into-the-food-stamp-act/
On a positive note, if Fast Food switches over to a non-human workforce, the possibility of getting a burger that looks like the one they advertise gets better :)
In the rare event I have to eat at one of these places, it seems the ability to assemble the "food" into something that remotely resembles their advertised product isn't a requirement to work there.
That shouldn't be amazing. No matter what happens in other businesses, or society as a whole, Puzder is still making the optimal choice for himself.
For this moment, maybe.
So now that the optimum situation is to have no employees, we need a plan of what to do with the number one enemy of the corporate state, the human taker.
Do we line 'em up and shoot them?
Do we pay higher taxes to support them?
Then who on earth do we sell our stuff to?
Taxes are almost as unacceptable as employees, so I guess we start lining people up. Investor tip! Fertilizers will be a growth industry. There is an old adage about people eating their seed corn.
Modern corporate "no employees" outlook is like that, only they are purposely getting rid of customers.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
cut full time down to 32-35 hours and later 25-20
When everybody always chooses the optimal choice for themselves, not having babies, not feeding other people, not keeping infrastructure, society will just simply... cease.
Captcha: copied
I can't stand online shopping for most goods for one reason: I can't inspect items before purchasing them. (Incidentally, retailers are starting to learn there are massive costs associated with online store returns for this reason.)
Now, if I'm buying something like a video or book or perhaps a particular piece of electronics, where there is no ambiguity in the product, online shopping is great. But if it's a tool, or a piece of clothing, or a piece of furniture, I really really want to be able to look at the items before purchasing.
Things like build quality, fit and finish, etc. are not things that are put in a spec sheet in an online store.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
This is a simple problem really.
You work at Mcburgerbelldees and you want 15 dollars/hour cause minimum wage just isn't cutting it.
You're right, but the thing is, you should be working towards a better job, flipping burgers or dropping fries in hot oil isn't and shouldn't be a career goal, nor does it merit 15 dollars/hour.
Minimum wage jobs are there for supplemental income and those who are just starting work for the first time.
I understand, shit's expensive, I've been there and done that. Used to work in convenience for 6 years before I started work with a Fortune 500 company making great money for the area I live in, 7 years later and I've moved into the office as part of the management staff. It's not a hard concept to grasp, but if you're not willing to work hard, towards a goal that doesn't involve doing as little work as possible, you'll never get anywhere.
As an aside, if you go into any Wawa or Royal Farms in this area, they have already done away with the waiters, they have been replaced by an automated kiosk. And guess what, they're always to work on time, always do their job and never get the order wrong unless you entered it that way.
So what makes more sense to you? Paying a snotty over-privileged 20 something 15/hour, or buying a 500~ dollar kiosk that never complains? The decision seems cut and dry to me.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
"No, they don't. Or, at least, they don't do it *automatically*. That's what competition is about.
Competition doesn't help, if all companies are taxed equally."
Since not all companies are equal they are not going to be taxed equally either.
Here I was not talking about "niche competition" i.e. this fast food company against that other fast food company, but about "competition for money", i.e. where will you invest you capital.
Say you have a business sector where you can get a 20% profit margin and then another sector where profit is just 10%. Of course you would put your money in the 20% sector. But then, say you increase costs in the 20% sector (i.e. by increasing taxes, wages, costs of raw materials... whatever). Of course the natural tendency of the agents on that market will be to load the increased costs into the price tag to retain their 20% cut on profits. Here is were competition comes: say one company absorbs the increased costs and goes with just a 15% profit margin. Within its sector it will outprice its competition out, but it still will get investing money since the alternative is moving it to the other sector where profit is even lower at a 10%.
On a side note, that's why traditionally increasing the minimum wages work *provided there's no market substitution*, instead of being the apocalypse some armchair economists tend to say: increasing minimum wages impacts the profit for the capitalist but, since it's something that goes through all industries (at least those strongly dependant on lowly qualified labour as it was the case along most of the industrial revolution), the capitalist has no better place to move his money to and just accepts the reduced profits and overall society takes the benefit in the long run (even the capitalist, since the more evenly spreaded wealth returns in more and better investment opportunities).
The problem here, of course, is that markets are like "traditional industrial revolution" no more: on one hand, the pool of "new customers" is depleting (capital is working on that by pushing for outsourcing and globalization -and it's working for them... for a while); on the other, technology has came to a point where new technology doesn't mean new classes of low qualified labour-intensive niches appearing as it used to be the case, so all minimum wages laws can achieve is a higher rate of automation adoption (the market substitution I talked above).
It is obvious -at least it is obvious to me, that the only rational output is for a society organization where subsistence and work are not tied (be it by means of basic income, moving "standard of living" producings from private to public hands, or whatever), but it is also obvious that society is still not ready (and, maybe, never will be) to plan and act in the "as-is -> to-be" project for that.
So now that the optimum situation is to have no employees
It's the optimum for the business that Puzder is responsible for. Your questions are good questions, but they are questions for society as a whole, not questions for Mr. Puzder to answer. If society allows people to run businesses with no employees, and it makes sense from a business perspective to do so, you can't blame individual business owners for making that choice.
"I'm always amazed by the consumer who thinks that he can demand production and enjoy the benefits of other people's capital."
Given that as of now, and since quite long time, "capital" is nothing but a fiat convention, I'm always amazed by the capitalist who thinks he in fact owns anything unless a majority of people abides by it.
Soylent green, yo...
If revenue from taxes gets disbursed to the public, but also costs to companies get passed on to the public
-- then that's not an argument either way! It says things balance out so there's no net advantage or disadvantage. Therefore your CEO, if honest, would have had no beef with higher taxes.
Of course this analysis and your CEOs characterization omit the redistributive effect, which is kind of the central point of taxes, which make it a dumb characterization.
Sadly, "society" says no such thing. And even if they did, trying to address it only on the wage side is a losing proposition; you will never decrease the cost of something by giving someone more currency units to pay for it; in fact, you will only increase its price in that case (look at US medical costs, college tuition, housing, and even equities and commodities in general).
The only way to decrease the cost of something with constant or increasing demand is to increase supply faster than demand (through competition or productivity or legal fiat), and generally this is the part "society" forgets when it tries to improve standard of living through minimum wage increases.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Companies hate their employees. Labor costs are a barrier to higher profits. Employees are treated as liabilities.
increasing minimum wages impacts the profit for the capitalist but, since it's something that goes through all industries
Except the ones abroad. That's why China has such a big manufacturing industry compared to other countries.
If those machines now do the job of employees for less than $15 an hour then the nation has just gotten more productive. It has freed up labor that can be used elsewhere. With increased productivity there will be new jobs elsewhere. In the end everyone is better off on average. I suppose it's possible that there are people whose maximum capability after a lifetime to training is burger assembly at carls junior but I doubt there are many such people. Unless you consider this make-work in a climate where there are no jobs this is not a bad thing. If it is make-work then the GOvt should be taxing people who have jobs to pay for the make-work. I don't think were in a period of time where make-work is needed.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
This entire thread is based on a false idea that if people are thrown out of minimum wage jobs that they'll be unemployed forever.
This has been proven countless times since the 1700's to be absolutely false.
Once a technological innovation disrupts employment - the loom, the cotton gin, the computer, the combine planter/harvester, the robot - those who were displaced from employment find new jobs in higher paying sectors, at least in the aggregate. How many file clerks do you know? Know anybody picking corn, wheat, or soybeans by hand? Yet unemployment is around 5%.
The people slinging burgers will find new work. They'll have to. New employment opportunities will open up; they always have.
I can't wait for the throngs of homeless in your scenario!
But fuck 'em right? Lazy bums.
... that hasn't figured out that people without a job don't buy things beyond the essentials. Nor do people who are paid so little that they have to sign up for food stamps and other welfare programs. Neither group has much in the way disposable income to be buying fast food. Not even the stuff Puzder dreams of selling from automated kiosks.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
It's not going to be such a optimal choice if it gets to the point where there are large masses of people who are hungry and desperate, and you're the guy living in the mansion with tons of food. Better hire a merc army for security (and hope they don't turn on you and take everything for themselves).
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Just looking at some numbers for viability...
Wikipedia says the average US household income is $50,756 at an average size of 2.54 people, and about 20% are under 21yo. I suspect capital gains are not included in that, and would make the picture far rosier.
So 1*share*0.8 + 0.5*share*0.2 = $50,756/2.54
-> share = $22,202
So, if 100% of all income were spread equally among the population (with children counting for 50%), every adult would get $22,202/year, or $1,850/month. Your $500/month would amount to 27% of that.
So, very roughly, if it were implemented as a flat tax you would be talking about taking 27% of the average income and redistributing it equally, with everybody with a below-average income (probably about 65% of the population) coming out ahead, and everybody making more than that shouldering the burden.
Honestly I kind of like it - essentially you'd be saying ~1/4 of everyone's income is shared equally. Is 1/4 a good reflection of the amount of your earnings that are thanks to society's current status quo rather than your personal efforts? I have no idea, but it's a nice round number for a starting point.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The only problem with this idea that the unemployed will find work is that the number of people required to design/operate/maintain technology is much smaller than the number of people required to do the work the technology replaces. Three people can each work a full time job at the same task in a 24 hour a day. One machine can work 24 hours straight, displacing three jobs. Even if we assume it takes one person a full time job to maintain that one machine, that is still a net negative two jobs.
Parent absolutely deserves to be modded up. Xerox machines were banned in communist countries when they came out for the same reason people think these robots are a bad idea. The only danger we haven't already faced is a rate of automation that exceeds the speed at which people can train for new jobs.
Service by humans won't go away. Eating out is often about the social experience. That aside, if it's about the quick chow and I bring my buddies along I don't really care to much if it's made by a robot - if it is good enough.
Then again, I doubt a robot or any fast-food chain can beat the turkish family-run falafel and kebab shop around the corner when it comes to speed, tastyness, nourishment and food-for-euro.
Do they expect me to type in my special whishes with that food-bot?
With the kebab guy I just yell it over the counter and the 20 other people standing in line.
And I can watch him preparing it right in front of me on a bright lit counter.
Don't see a robot beating that. Not any time soon that's for sure.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
no age discrimination? - tell it to my old toaster!!!
Here's how it went. Really.
Starting with the Viking invasions, a village-full of struggling subsistence farmers agreed to equip one large ferocious man with a sword, armor, and horse, so that he could protect them from longboats. Other villages saw that, and did it to. So there arose a gang of men all with similar interests based on their relationship to the means of production. (This is what Karl Marx called a "class.") And that class found that its monopoly on armed force could serve not only against Vikings, but also to punish or kill any villager who got out of hand.
Now you have the feudal system!
That worked well for the ruling class until the invention of disciplined, well-armed infantry, at which point the struggling little people broke the knights' monopoly on effective armed force. As a result, the "people" eventually gained political power themselves, which, as always, went to those who shared the obligation and right to exert armed force. As more people fought, more people needed to be called up to fight, until there is total war, followed by total suffrage. Hello modernity: we have arrived back at the political economy of the Roman Republic.
In the post-modern age, we again have mercenary armies and heavily armed gendarmes (police) who control the peasants, because the weapons that the little people can carry are no longer "effective armed force." Voila! Back to the feudal system! Only now, the knights are the ultra-rich, and, above all, the enormous corporations, who control the funds that hire the people who form "an effective monopoly on armed force" and keep the little people in line.
It is the same story wherever you look. Start reading with Otto Hintze, or Hans Delbrueck, and see how the modern western state, which is the most powerful force ever, even more powerful than Javascript, came into being again, after the fall of the Roman empire. Or if you are Chinese, you can do exactly the same with Chinese history. Or Japanese. Or anywhere.
Then it will become crystal clear why the second amendment was second--second only to freedom of speech--in its importance to the Founders: because they knew, from reading about the past, that only people who bear arms and fight for the political order have any real political influence over that order. Read Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, to understand the influence of Florentine urban militias on the Founders' constitutional thinking.
Anyway, even if you don't want to learn something, please stop just making stuff up about political economy from the Bronze Age.
That's only partially true. During the times of the Luddites, it took 3 generations (70 odd years) for employment to increase to close to full, after a significant proportion of the population was shipped of to the new world.
Around the turn of the 20th century a move was made to reduce the number of people in the workforce due to automation. Woman were turned into homemakers and children were taken out of the workforce, as well as limits being put on the hours worked by everyone else.
The trend of taking children out of the workforce continues with the length of time that people stay in school continuing to increase. My parents get by fine with about a 8th grade education. My brother graduated out of grade 10 to go to technical school and become a well paid glazier. Now kids are expected to spend at least 4 years in collage/university.
Things were also pretty horrible for the poor in 18th century England and only the large amount of land available in the New World etc made things bearable in the colonies and the new nation of the USA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
In one of these stories "James Bolivar DiGriz" goes on the lam, holes up in a fully automated fast food restaurant, and only steals enough food to survive. He is never noticed by the automatons.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
If you look at how successful a bunch of uneducated bearded guys with AKs and some explosive training were against US military in the Middle East, why do you think motivated and technically-inclined Western population won't be even more successful? The technology gap between these kilbot overlords and angry masses must be much bigger than between AK (1940s technology) and Drones and Satellites (2010s technology) for this to work. It won't happen.
It's as if what constitutes a living wage keeps increasing making that term more and more and more and more expensive. This is what inflation looks like.
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson
Another reminder that the true minimum wage is $0 an hour.
And no other jobs come to fill their places?
By your logic, we'd be at 75% unemployment (figure pulled out of my ass, admittedly, but just making a point here...) right now with all the technological advances since the 1970s. What do you think happened to our economy to achieve our current 5% unemployment rate? Are all those file clerks and bookkeepers still out of work or did they find something else to do?
People made the same arguments you're making for every technological leap forward. The net result has always been people thrown out of low wage, miserable jobs have found higher wage, less miserable jobs, given enough time.
It's called Structural Unemployment. It is a problem for workers who are too old to retrain - think people in their upper 50's trying to sprint to retirement - but for the vast majority of the workforce, it's a net benefit in the long run at the cost of a little short term pain.
Look, obsoleting certain monotonous, low-skill jobs isn't a problem. When cashiers, burger-flippers, and other basic/front-line customer-facing jobs can be eliminated and replaced with automation all that's really happened is the available jobs in a society have shifted to OTHER industries.
No more cashiers because of self-checkout lanes at the grocery store? Fine, now there's a whole sector of NEW jobs for building, installing, and maintaining those self-checkout machines.
Can Suzie, who lost her cashier job, now take one of those new jobs to maintain the auto-cashier? Of course she can. Can she do it without additional training? It depends, but most likely not. All that tells me is that if people really want a higher wage, then they need higher-paying skills. They better hurry, too, because their current job is about to go the way of the dodo.
Now, is this a very black and white viewpoint of this situation? Probably.
Is it as easy as just showing up at classes at the local community college for Suzie to get the skills needed? Not really.
However, that IS the solution. Education. It's almost ALWAYS the solution for most problems in society. Instead of artificially propping up low-skill jobs with arbitrary increases to the minimum wage*, we should really be investing in getting additional training for those with low-skill/low-paying jobs. These jobs were meant for teenagers (in high school) and college-age people anyways, people that by the nature of their age group should be in an educational institute as it is.
The entire problem came about when adults simply stayed in their high school jobs and had little to no ambition to do more. Or maybe it truly was the only job they could find. The solution is to get MORE SKILLS, not demand more money. More skills means you've earned that extra money. Demanding an increase to wages for a job that ANY jackass can do simply passes the cost on to the consumer, including the employee that got the raise...making the raise worthless.
* I do recognize that the minimum raise has not kept up with inflation. I would be comfortable tying the minimum wage to changes in the value of the dollar (due to inflation or whatever). That's different than an arbitrary $15...even if the changes in inflation would necessitate a higher value than $15. At least it would be a rational reason rather than just, "I feel like I'm worth $15 an hour", when they are obviously not.
You're right, he's bluffing, and bowlshyting. Mr. Puzder is trying to divert attention by blaming the Federal government for his problems, when what's really going on is the labor market: it's lost a lot of the slack Puzder and his ilk have been coasting on for six years, and thus he's looking at having to raise wages to get and retain staff.
If wage pressures become high enough, CKE Restaurants will invest in technologies to improve productivity members. This is a good thing, since if people were always cheaper than capital equipment, we'd still be using manual typewriters... if we had any time to spare after working the fields with a scathe. Taken at face value, that's the model Puzder apparently prefers.
Luke, help me take this mask off
"increasing minimum wages impacts the profit for the capitalist but, since it's something that goes through all industries [...] Except the ones abroad."
Yes, increasing minimum wages only impacts costs for industries increasing minimum wages.
Thank you, Rear Admiral Obvious.
Which part of ""The fact that abortion kills a fetus is not in dispute" did you not understand?
Hey, remind me: Which political party has ruled Detroit as a essentially a one party state the last 50 years?
Oh yeah, that one.
The one pushing the minimum wage hike.
The one pushing for higher welfare payments and eliminating work requirements.
If the policies of the Democratic Party worked, Detroit should already be one of the best places to live in America.
How did that work out?
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
In European cities, the rich and poor tend to live near each other due to the countries being more compact. In the US, the rich live in gated suburbs. Even if they don't have gates, they are essentially gated. The police will come up with an excuse to make a traffic stop for anybody driving a car that doesn't fit the demographic of the community. If the worst thing you have in Belgium is a car break-in, I would say that social peace has been met. Also if she doesn't want somebody to break into her car, the solution is simple. Don't leave valuables in the car and leave it unlocked. Also in the wealthy parts of the US we tend to park in garages which significantly reduces vehicle breakins!
Shortly after this happens, some labor intensive industry will appear and there will be a shortage of labor. Labor prices will go through the roof. This will lead to automation in other industries. After that another mass die-off due to starvation and the cycle continues. Or we could, you know, have social programs to ensure that people in the reserve labor force (what we should really call unemployed people) can eat.
Wow, all I can say is that the first half of your response is a very big pile of stinky judgmental vitriol. It's really easy to sit on a high horse and judge others, especially those who are poor, as it deflects any judgment of your own poor decisions over your life. And I'd put a lot of money on there being at least a decent number of mistakes in your own past. I guess you've never been poor because if you were, you'd understand just HOW rigged the system is against you. Let me ask you this: In this day an age, WHY must people work? How is it somehow morally required to work and toil when technology has obsoleted us in so many ways already, and will only continue to do so?
Capital is money invested in producing something of value. If you steal it, it's no longer capital and the production it was enabling ends.
Stealing capital is like a farmer eating his seeds instead of planting them. Next year he will starve.
You can't vote against math. Nobody is going to pay for something than it is worth - if a task is worth $7/hr to you but costs $15/hr, you find an alternative that isn't overvalued by 214%. I'm happy to pay $20 to have my lawn mowed, but if it costs $50, I'll do it my damn self. If I can by a robotic lawnmower for less than what it would cost to pay someone to do it for two years (a Yarba? Lawnba? Waiting on you iRobot), I'm doing it.
Yes, workers are displaced, and in the short term unemployment can rise. Automation doesn't eliminate all workers, however, it makes the workers that remain more productive. Let's say that instead of 20 employees a Carl's Jr location can get by with only three. The productivity of those three employees becomes the same as that of 20. By making labor more productive it makes labor more valuable as long as you can figure out useful work to be done. That creates an incentive to hire workers over the long run. Eventually unemployment goes down again and wages rise up to the new higher value of labor. This makes employing people in low productive jobs too expensive and creates an incentive to automate those jobs. What you are arguing against is what used to be called Progress.
The only problem with this idea that the unemployed will find work is that the number of people required to design/operate/maintain technology is much smaller than the number of people required to do the work the technology replaces.
We've gone from 95% of people doing agricultural work to less than 5%. Yet people found new jobs: almost everyone did. Same thing with manufacturing. But somehow not with burger flipping jobs? Those are magic? Seems unlikely.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
That situation has existed for decades.
I should hope not. Productivity is an intensive quantity, while number of people is an extensive; the two are largely unrelated.
Two centuries spans a lot more than the industrial revolution.
If you think that a cashier at the local burger chain adds any value to society, you're an idiot
Depends on how you define "society". Until cashiers are replaced by a robot, they are most certainly adding economic activity to the local economy.
the Automat was done 60 years ago. it went under 40 years ago. and there is still the little issue of somebody has to prepare the "food" that goes into machines.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I'm not saying that there's nothing to worry about, but it isn't nearly as severe as you suggest.
When you try to implement communism, all you end up with is a different set of middle men. You trade one kind of Czar for another. People all over tend to devalue specialized skills. This includes the ability to manage and run things. If you kill the managing class, you don't get rid off the problem. You just cripple your society or a new management class arises.
The problem with Communism is that proles for the most part just aren't up to running anything. Otherwise they would already. They don't have what it takes to be equal participants in the end state Communist Utopia.
People that come up with these ideas (and support them) tend to be sheltered nitwits that know nothing about the proles and would probably active avoid being around them.
Of course as a bunch of geeks we do the same thing in terms of devaluing other skill sets (including management).
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
If you replace people slowly enough, the unemployment gain comes more slowly than the replacement jobs created by the increased consumer buying power. Unemployment remains stable, goods become cheaper, people find new jobs, and everyone becomes wealthier. You can improve this by keeping labor cheap, notably by using alternate strategies to minimum wage (e.g. a non-wage Citizen's Dividend), replacing payroll taxes with income taxes, eliminating sales and VAT taxes, and reducing working-class income taxes (by using a progressive tax system and leaving the high-income tax brackets static while lowering the low-income marginal taxes as the income gap widens).
If you do it quickly enough, you create massive unemployment and get the Industrial Revolution.
We have the Luddites, who believe these changes eliminate jobs *forever*; and the Technocrats, who believe new technology creates new jobs immediately. A lot of the Basic Income dialogue isn't about slowing and steadying the movement onto new technology and keeping people employable so we can create new jobs faster; it's about saving us when we make employment an obsolete concept. A lot of people also think we should raise minimum wage to *encourage* businesses to move onto machines, since that will somehow bring us prosperity by making things cheaper; they ignore that they're trying to make people to move onto machines that are more expensive than modern methods, thus making things more expensive.
Lots of people with no concept of economics. Even economists have no concept of economics. I have made a *lot* of economic discourse to explain why supply-and-demand works or how technology affects employment to people who have degrees in economics because modern theory can spot things like this as effects, but can't identify the mechanism. We have people with Ph.D.s in economics arguing over whether automation is going to cause one thing or the other, and I'm over here like, "You're both right, and you're both wrong; your models track the effect, but not the cause."
Imagine what it's like dealing with armchair economists who read something about supply-and-demand on Wikipedia, but have never taken the time to study economic history and work out any behavioral models. Every other word is "competition", and they keep babbling about an economy getting wealthier by the same dollar being spent over and over again rapidly.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
This is the result of the globalization put and free trade zones. Free trade (without tarriff) only work when both sides have the same to gain or lose. Did Steve Jobs care that he moved 1 million i-device making jobs to China? No, he was able to side step labor, environment, intellectual property laws and buy is 100Million yacht. Who cares of a million US citizens lose the ability to pay rent, buy food, have health care when there's a 1.5 Bl Chinese and another billion Indians clamoring for your shiny toys? Absence of conscious and social responsibility while employing Federal Law enforcement to ensure to profitably via some artificial intellectual property ruse has undermined the "Land of Opportunity, Home of the Free and the Brave". America isn't first in anything anymore. Quite honestly, the only way to get it back is campaign finance reform.
What do you think happened to our economy to achieve our current 5% unemployment rate?
What happened is that the powers-that-be pulled a fast one on you and you're too foolish to see it. You've been hand fed a statistic that is false on its face but you didn't care to look into the truth...
Check out the population-employment ratio numbers and they speak a much different story. You see, the unemployment rate that is mainly touted is the U3 rate. The U3 rate is made up of people with no job who've actively tried to find one in the last month. Today we have a good number of discouraged workers* and a vast number of people who have no intentions of ever being employed again. And these numbers are likely to continue to grow. And this doesn't even take into account the underemployed either.
That 5% number you're kicking around means nothing in the real world but keeps the sheep voting under the illusion of what is good/bad in the economy.
*Discouraged workers are people who want to be employed and have looked for work in the last year but have stopped looking due to poor prospects.
The peasant revolts are a bad example unless you're trying to show that revolting against a well armed ruthless nobility is useless as not one of the peasant revolts succeeded.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Eliminating workers in FF has been an idea for a long time. Example from 2003: https://www.techdirt.com/artic... when it is economically viable, it will happen. However, unlikely that we will see these totally unsupervised for a long time.
Corporations simple pass any added taxes and costs on to the customer. Thus if you add taxes to a corporation they simple raise the price and pass that added expense on to the customer.
If the corporation could raise the price without losing sales, wouldn't they do so regardless of any increase in costs? Isn't that one of the fundamental rules of a free, supply-and-demand market?
So now that the optimum situation is to have no employees, we need a plan of what to do with the number one enemy of the corporate state, the human taker.
Ultimately there are only three choices
1) Keep spreading the limited resources thinner and thinner across a growing population,
2) Limit population growth
3) Increase productivity
Humans have been mostly depending on #1 and 3 until the resources run out, at which point genocide, famine, and war drop them into #2.
At some point a controlled application of #2 will be required, maybe better than China's attempt.
Very true, and I agree with everything you said. That works very well in a free(ish) market. But when government thinks it can centrally command the economy and set artificially high wages, then that breaks down. People won't be rehired until employers see it as sensible, and artificially high wages raise the bar as to what is still sensible.
You're an idiot. You're probably some suburbanite born with a silver spoon in his mouth just spouting liberal propaganda from NPR and other highly liberal sources.
I have actually "been there" and "done that".
Now I have an approach similar to the OP. I have tried to take advantage of what opportunities good timing has exposed me to. I have avoided the folly of buying into American consumerism too much.
People do have real choices and they do have self-determination despite what communist wannabes might want to tell you.
It's easier to tell yourself you aren't in control of your own destiny. It conveniently avoids facing up to your own failure and laziness.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
People have been saying we are about to enter that era for 150 years.
We didn't have cell phones in the 1700s.
There's population versus technology, there's people spending less on food and clothes while buying bigger houses, the increase in non-necessity expenditures as a percentage of income, and all kinds of other data showing we actually do increase the number of people in the economy.
You're right, though: The number of people needed to do a job doesn't increase. That's the point: technology *decreases* the number of people required to do a job, freeing their labor time up for other tasks. That's why we've moved people out of agriculture and manufacture and into construction, medicine, retail, and business services. Somebody has to sell those products from China; somebody has to handle the logistics, the distribution, the shipping; somebody has to drive the trucks; somebody has to run the involved IT systems.
Even after we've reduced the share of labor per product in *all* of these types of jobs, we create more jobs by buying more products. You buy 3 times as much shit, you need 3 times as much logistics. Maybe it takes 1/5 as much labor to provide those logistics, so you have 60% as many people doing that; the other 40% are running Spotify and Netflix.
We don't create higher-class jobs; we reduce costs and improve the standard-of-living of the lowest income earners. We may create more or fewer poor people; those poor people will be objectively wealthier than last generation's poor people, but they're still poor because literally everyone else has more than they do. Some of the replacement jobs are higher-income-class, some are lower-income-class, and we wind up with more things produced per wage-labor hour, more stuff per-capita, and more luxuries in the hands of everyone as their basic needs become cheaper.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Silly business people think that people with no money for food will somehow buy their products or that other businesses with no customers will buy their products. Silly rich people think they can live in luxury while most of the population starve and they somehow won't lose their heads this time.
Keep in mind, if you can replace all your employees with machines, that means the "unwashed masses" can replace your whole corporation with machines. You can only hide out in your panic room for so long before you get dragged out in your boxers like Saddam.
It can go easy or hard and bloody, but one way or another the masses will not just obediently curl up and die for the benefit of the few. Ignore that at your peril.
We all know that. But if the idiotic left is going to continue to use that number, we are going to throw it back in their faces during arguments. Use it when it is advantageous, use the other numbers when it is advantageous.
As well as making labor more productive, you get the double whammy of lower prices. As long as regulators stay out of it, that is.
And after the masses string up the producers for their wealth.
Nobody's talking about stringing up the producers for their wealth. They're talking about stringing up the parasites for their wealth. Let's face it, nobody is productive enough to become wealthy from their own productivity - even the best brain surgeons and rocket scientists are barely rich. Those that have become truly wealthy have done so through business - by exploiting the labor of others - or by exploiting markets - simply taking the wealth of others. These people don't make a net positive contribution to society, and yet they're the ones that amass all the wealth. It's the producers that are losing wealth, as the middle class is eroded, and wealth stratification continues to worsen.
If you disagree, can you explain to me how stringing up, say, the Walton family would meaningfully impact society? Would we be lost in a world incapable of conducting retail sales operations without the Waltons? Would the lack of their high-volume low-margin retail empire really result in a world where nobody produces anything, farmers stop farming, cats and dogs start living together? By what mechanism?
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
You're wrong; we'd be at -27,000% employment. What defect of thinking would lead you to believe we've only eliminated 3/4 of the jobs that ever existed since the 70s? We eliminated half of them, and then created new jobs; and we then eliminated half of those and created new ones; and eliminated half of those. Over a decade, we eliminate more jobs than the entire workforce population.
People don't find higher-wage employment by magic; we create new lower-wage jobs to replace lost jobs first. We can only buy new employment using the consumer dollars saved by eliminating existing jobs. The fact that those wages now can buy more stuff causes population to expand (until scarcity starts setting in again), and also allows us to pay wages representing an even lower share of the total income and still give people the same buying power.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
I nobody can buy how are you going to get rich and live in mansion by selling food to poor people?
Well the other option is to accept that there may be mass starvation, social unrest and possibly a civil war. Frankly a social safety net sounds cheaper.
"That situation has existed for decades."
And it's been decades that the paint has been in the wall (since more or less Reagan/Tatcher's presidency in the economy side and since Windows 95, or maybe Google, on the technology one, to make two clear marks). So? You don't think these kind of changes happen overnight, do you?
"I should hope not. Productivity is an intensive quantity, while number of people is an extensive; the two are largely unrelated."
Ok. I'll give you that; it's my fault for not using the proper term. Gross production income, then. And effects of scale too. These used to be related to the headcount but that's changing at a fast pace.
"Two centuries spans a lot more than the industrial revolution."
If you mean the industrial revolution itself (i.e.: going from a rural-based economy to an industrialized one) you are right, but we have been in the industrial era for more or less these last two centuries and that's what matter: the ways of the economy, and those are the ones that probably are changing now, just like Watt's steam engine back in 1775 opened the change back then, so what's being a useful predictor for these two centuries is a good predictor no more.
Well, there are two sides to this.
There's the fascist side and the communist side. So there is also a Lenin to consider and we have one of those this election cycle.
It makes perfect sense actually. We had a recession that probably qualifies as a full blown depression in 19th century terms. The end result of that is pretty obvious once you think it through. You end up with the same kinds of wingnuts suddenly gaining traction.
The wingnut who should not be named was considered a kook until the economy seriously tanked.
THIS is why the 1% should pay more attention and be somewhat less greedy. They should stop trying to undermine the measures that were put in place the last time things got ugly. Of course human nature prevents that.
People are both arrogant and greedy.
So the cycle of history repeats...
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It all depends on how good the killbots are and of course whether or not they have a pre-set kill limit.
Most definitions of a living wage I've seen look pretty reasonable. Food, housing, clothing, utilities, basic transportation, health care, a minimal amount of recreation. That's about as low as you can go without just being human cattle.
That's if you think every job is a "living wage" job. These jobs are not meant to support a family. They are either for younger people or supplemental income. They are not meant to be life long jobs. People said this would happen if the push for ridiculous wages for these jobs kept up. It is and now you are mad? And btw, how do you think this guy got "rich"? It's that scary words all the liberal douche bags hate so much HARD WORK!!
If those killbots are made by Microsoft, there's an excellent chance they'll get re-targeted.
In the likely scenario where the wealthy are technologically incompetent and pay others (poorly as usual) to take care of the killbots for them, there is also a very high probability that the killbots get re-targeted. Then the rest of the robots get busy providing for the masses.
Chili's has had those things for years. I've managed to pay the bill with them twice out of dozens of visits. I never got a chance to use them for ordering meals since the waiter was always stopping by faster than I could navigate the menus on the device. I did order dessert once, but the waiter stopped by and asked if I wanted to order any dessert and I had to tell him I had submitted an order 5 minutes ago on the device, he seemed shocked and didn't know what to do so he ran off to find his manager for help. The one thing I liked about the devices was being able to read the news headlines and weather forecast. With smartphones these days those devices are completely obsolete.
Spoons had the devices in their bar area and you could use them to participate in a trivia contest that was shown on the TV's when there was no sports game on, but that was about all they were good for.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
Look, it get it. Paying people wages and benefits sucks. And your customers are getting poorer and poorer by the generation and you can't sawdust the food anymore. I get that. But please, do not pretend to me that all these fancy gadgets are somehow saving you time or money or resulting in in any way better value for your customers money. You are commiditising your niche of the market and it is the sword you will fall on.
I don't think he's pretending, buttercup. It's interesting how people still push these myths despite half a century in the US that reality doesn't work that way.
This allows further specialization, and thus more things to buy.
There is a "common sense" screed about too many things to buy, conspicuous consumption, and consumption of non-necessities just for the purpose of consumption. Yet this is what progress enables us to do, when basic needs are satisfied, for very cheap.
The cheaper it is to make things, the more things a minimum wage can buy. This is the direction of the future, same as the past 150 years. Not just cheaper necessities, but more varied things to buy.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The answer is to make this happen more slowly by controlling employment costs.
A Dividend instead of a minimum wage eliminates the cost consequence of employment attached to a minimum-standard-of-living policy. Rather than passing a policy (minimum wage raise) forcing employers to pay more per unit wage-labor time, you pass a policy moving money to the working class (in the case of a Dividend or other UBI scheme, to a universal class e.g. all Adults) from a general funding source (an earmarked flat income tax is the most stable). Employers retaining employees face no disadvantage resulting from the policy change, whereas a minimum wage increase creates an added cost per wage-hour for employees previously below the new minimum.
Moving payroll taxes to general income taxes also reduces the cost per wage-hour. The argument is similar to the minimum wage argument.
A progressive general fund tax system allows the high-income-earner marginal tax brackets to remain static while the income gap increases (by way of high-income earners and businesses keeping a greater portion of any increasing wealth--the poor get richer, the rich get richer *faster*), allowing a reduction of taxes on the working class. This allows for a reduction of wages without a reduction of take-home wages, an increase in take-home wages without an increase in wages, or a middle-ground.
All of these efforts reduce the wage-labor cost basis of products, allowing prices to fall lower than otherwise possible while retaining profit margins. This increases the buying power of the consumer, as the proportion of the consumer's income which actually survives to expenditure (i.e. the part left after taxes) is increased. That creates more jobs.
Such efforts allow lower wage-labor costs, providing an advantage over newer low-labor techniques. This encourages businesses to wait for a strategic entry point: they may pay a worker $8/hr rather than replace him with a machine for $7.50/hr if they think the machine will be a 30-year, multi-million-dollar investment that pays off on the TCO of $5.50/hr *next* year. Each businesses has a different risk appetite (the amount of cost they *want* to put on the table for a possible benefit) and risk threshold (the point at which they no longer accept a risk), and so extending these strategic periods causes a spreading of labor replacement: instead of everyone buying machines one year, they start replacing workers over a span of ten years.
At the same time, the lower wage-labor cost means consumer buying power has a lower threshold before it can create new jobs; and the higher efficiency of wage-to-buying-power (how much of your paycheck you actually keep) increases the rate at which consumer buying power reaches that threshold. Paying employees lower wages and allowing them to take a bigger portion of that wage home leaves them more capable of affording new goods, which means you can more quickly replace lost jobs, keeping up with the above technological obsolescence.
Turn your study of technological history into plans and strategies. We need them. Our economists are so backwards they actually believe a sales tax is a good idea.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Hell, when farming became more and more automated, and with better fertilizers, politicians stomped and slammed around screaming where the hell would all these former farm hands find jobs?
Oh. My. God.
Suggest to someone back then we'd have less than 2% of the population working farms, and they'd scream for laws outlawing farm automation.
Thank god that stupidity was largely ignored, as should this.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
It may be obvious, but you missed it in your analysis where the investor's funds go. They'll go overseas too.
It's just one case of many but it proves a nice point none the less. How long do you think the rich will stay rich if they start slaying their slaves?
So, if 100% of all income were spread equally among the population
As soon as you do that, the income will drop, as people will lose motivation to work their asses off.
Part of that just could be that the Chinese govt. has been doing everything they can to get other countiries to move all their jobs into China. Their monetary manipulation makes China's economy look like an desirable place to invest. Don't like those pesky environmental regulations? Hey we've got none of those. They've been allowing their manufacturing sector to pollute the country to the point that some areas should be considered toxic waste disposal sites. But it's all good: Chinese workers are employed. They're not paid enough to really make a decent living so they're often forced to live in company-owned dormitories and the factories have to have nets installed to prevent workers from hurling themselves from the roofs but, hey, they're employed and that's all that counts. Corporations aren't allowed to get away with that in most other countries -- not for long, anyway.
Corporations used to have to serve the public good as part of their having been granted their charter -- it wasn't just about shareholder profits ($DIETY, even Chainsaw Al eventually came around to view that idea as crazy and if you've lost Al...). Maybe it's time that requirement was brought back. Nowadays, whenever the goin' gets tough for a corporation, they just pull up stakes, and move to someplace that'll promise them the moon -- or at least no taxes for N years. Then when the goin' gets tough again -- usually in N-1 years -- they start complaining about the hostile business environment and threaten to shut down and move (to take advantage of the next bunch of suckers). Modern international corporations do this on a country level.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Over the past couple of centuries, automation has never shrunk the available work pool. Why would it start doing that now?
False, the available work pool has shrunk enormously, it's just that despite shrinkage it's always still been larger than the labor pool. We appear to be approaching a situation where that may no longer be the case.
Oh, he can't afford to pay Sally *and* Suzie a living wage? What's the CEO's salary?
Pardon me, I'm having trouble finding the world's smallest violin that I dropped.
mark "and double his taxes, while we're at it"
Yes, if technology causes people to become be permanently pushed out of the labor force, I expect that to show up in some statistics over the span of decades.
Even if we did see that kind of effect, it wouldn't necessarily be bad: it would mostly mean people retiring earlier, kids getting more education, and parents spending more time with their families. You know, all the things that progressives say we should want. It's bizarre that the same people who say we should work less throw such a tizzy when people actually might achieve that.
total GDP, per capita GDP, labor force participation rate
Both GDP and labor force participation rate have been steadily climbing over most of the last several decades. Labor force participation has been going down a bit since 2000, first because of demographics, then arguably because of Obama's welfare policies.
Sorry, but there is nothing in the data that suggests that people are permanently becoming unemployed because of automation. Long term unemployment is, in fact, much less of a problem in the US than in other countries.
Within 20 to 30 years, unless civilization collapses first, people will not be able to compete with automated processes in any but a very few fields. All means of production will become automated.
So, how does the economy work then? With no one able to be gainfully employed how does the oligarchy continue to make money and stay in power?
We need a new economic theory, and I have seen none that involve zero value. So, the obvious solution? The oligarchy takes the products to improve their lives, and the rest of humanity is left to die trying to scratch out a living on the burned out husk of our planet. The oligarchy will be much happier with us gone so they can turn their robots lose to turn the world into one large park for them to play in.
Just because this has been true in the past doesn't mean it will continue to be true in the future. Things change.
Yes, because minimum wage laws and other laws have increasingly priced people out of the market. That's not due to automation; automation is just the response.
Yes, if people keep raising minimum wages, keep imposing regulations and mandates of employers, and keep taxing employment, that may well happen. It just isn't due to automation.
Liberals just don't get basic economics.
.. sir, you do realize that the study of economics - the intellectual pursuit - was conceived of and advanced by academics.. right? ... and that academia and liberalism historically have been strongly intertwined?
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
This entire thread is based on a false idea that if people are thrown out of minimum wage jobs that they'll be unemployed forever.
This has been proven countless times since the 1700's to be absolutely false.
Once a technological innovation disrupts employment - the loom, the cotton gin, the computer, the combine planter/harvester, the robot - those who were displaced from employment find new jobs in higher paying sectors, at least in the aggregate...
Real history shows that it is THIS claim that is absolutely false. The people displaced in the original Industrial Revolution did not ever find new employment, in high paying jobs or elsewhere. They became destitute. Eventually the productivity increase of the IR created a wealthy enough society that decent employment was restored for the full population, but it took 70 years to do this. Most of the people whose livelihoods that were destroyed in 1770 did not ever get decent jobs again. Their children did not. Their grandchildren did not. Their great-grandchildren did however, around 1840.
The beggars, squalid poverty, workhouses, debtors prisons of Dickens time were all very real.
Interestingly, that little clause you stuck in there "at least in the aggregate" indicates you realize to some degree the falseness of your claim. It is exactly the problem that people exist as people, not as aggregates, that makes the average increase in wealth from automation completely useless to the people put out of work.
If robotics puts people out of work in large numbers today, we need a solution that helps the people put out of work as soon as it happens - not in 2086 after they are long dead.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
I did the exact same thing as Puzder when I went home for lunch yesterday instead of eating fast food, but nobody flamed me for doing that. Why?
I did the same thing as him, when I bought a 3-year-old used car (and shopped around while doing it) instead of a new car. Nobody suggested I was out-of-touch bourgeoisie.
I did the same thing when I last compared two vendor's prices and then chose the lower one. Where were your cautionary words then?
You and I cut unnecessary expenses every chance that we get, and it's seen as prudent and efficient. And I don't know if your personality is anything like mine, but I actually look down a little bit on wasteful people. When someone burns money, I think less of them.
But the expense of hiring people is somehow a religious exception?
Nobody is advocating that people shouldn't have a living wage (indeed, they might even advocate that everyone figure out a way to make a lot more money than that); they just don't want to be the one who pays it. They're just saying "This expense shouldn't be this high, because I think I see how to get it done for less." If that means it's less than a living wage, then perhaps humans shouldn't be doing that particular job anymore (or perhaps different employees have a different idea about how much a living wage really is).
I don't get why employers are called bad guys for issuing low offers. When someone makes me an offer that I reject, I don't get offended. The rejection is enough, and then it's their problem, not mine.
Except it's not the rich, it's every single one of us. Everyone is "the rich" whenever they're spending their own money. When your ISP asks you for a raise, I bet you'll say, "No. Get the fuck out of my office, and if you bring this up again, I'm firing your ass."
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
"They're always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there's never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case,"
What's more important, they don't go to the bathroom without washing their hands afterwards.
But nonetheless, that CEO is an asshole, no had washing will ever cure that.
If all the corporations are getting taxed, there is no competition. You would end up with more companies leaving the country, or going out of business. People don't seem to realize that people are taxed on net income, while corporations are taxed on profit, all they have to do is spend all the profit and you get $0 taxes. If you want to raise tax money, you need to tax people. The problem is, taxes are unpopular, so instead they try to tax companies as that is a hidden tax on everyone.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
In fact, if we get rid of company taxes, society would save a lot of money on useless company tax advisors, and experts trying to close loopholes in tax laws.
Right - now there's a well thought-out concept.
Let's ensure that the people pay to keep the infrastructure that businesses use in good repair - even though the value that each citizen gets from that infrastructure varies across different earnings demographics. But no matter, those good-for-nothing poor people should pay to keep our corporate infrastructure in place, otherwise the rich will have to shoulder the burden - and that would be unfair to those who reap the greatest rewards from this system. Is that the point you were trying to make?
After all, think of the poor multinationals who pay little to no tax to the US government already. Why should those poor overvalued businesses have to contribute to our society in any meaningful manner? Look at the incredible myriads f benefit that the Trump corporate structure delivers to Americans. How could we live without the crap he foists on us and then brags about this garbage as if we couldn't live without him.
The only problem with this idea that the unemployed will find work is that the number of people required to design/operate/maintain technology is much smaller than the number of people required to do the work the technology replaces.
We've gone from 95% of people doing agricultural work to less than 5%. Yet people found new jobs: almost everyone did. Same thing with manufacturing. But somehow not with burger flipping jobs? Those are magic? Seems unlikely.
This gets the story of the switch from agriculture to manufacturing and white collar work completely backwards.
It was not a process of automation on the farm putting farmers out of work who then migrated to other jobs.
It was a process of new high labor-demand industries (the original factory system), and clerical work of new complex economy, that paid higher wages pulling people away from farms that caused this switch. It was a labor-demand driven process.
As people left farming for better jobs, farms got sold and assembled into ever larger farms which could then support the high capital requirement for automation to replace the now non-existent plow boys and girls.
See for example which depicts the ag side of this transformation.
A process that eliminates jobs, and reduce labor demand, which we are now facing, is completely different
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
"It may be obvious, but you missed it in your analysis where the investor's funds go."
Except, of course, I didn't.: "capital is working on that by pushing for outsourcing and globalization -and it's working for them... for a while"
Is there any internal coherence in your message or is it merely a rant?
You talk about monetary policy, and then exemplify it by their environmental regulations. You mention the labour conditions on a paragraph that looks like word by word taken out from a Dickens novel and then contrast it saying that corporations used to have to serve the public good.
Not saying what China is doing is OK nor that occidental governments aren't bought by big corps to allow it but then, do you think China is doing anything even remotely original? They have bought the occidental industrial revolution book and put it in practice to the comma, so it's difficult to blame them for that.
You are suffering from a failure of imagination.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
"If all the corporations are getting taxed, there is no competition."
How is it? Corporations *are* already taxed and they still compete.
"You would end up with more companies leaving the country, or going out of business."
I carefully talked about conditions for them not to go out of business (which, on the other hand, is pretty obvious, since they already are taxed and still there are companies around). With regards to off-shoring, governments have more than one tool for their policies. In this case, i.e. sane import tariffs could be part of a solution.
I'm with you in that taxes should be strongly biased towards direct and personal and less towards indirect taxes, but I don't think it's a black-or-white situation: all available tools at hand should have to be properly used.
2) Farmers are not the ones getting strung up
Following the Russian Revolution, millions of Ukrainian farmers were intentionally starved to death in the Holodomor. About 98% of the 30 million people that died during the Great Leap Forward were farmers.
they will be lining up with strings in their hands right along side the rest of the lower class.
Farmers in America have an average income more than twice the median. They are not "lower class", and they are the most reliable Republican voters.
Google Peasant's Revolt for an example.
The Peasant's Revolt in 1381 was primarily a revolt against high taxes. So that is a poor example to use when advocating for higher taxes to fund redistribution.
I realize that. I didn't mean more expensive as in "they keep adding more stuff". I meant more expensive as in, our money is constantly worth less due to inflation therefore the cost of a living wage continually goes up.
That's why the minimum wage has to keep increasing.
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson
"Paid for by the corporations through taxes because they put all of the people out of work."
Corporations simple pass any added taxes and costs on to the customer. Thus if you add taxes to a corporation they simple raise the price and pass that added expense on to the customer.
Except that it isn't true. Look, for example, at this discussion by conservative economist, and former Reagan adviser Bruce Bartlett.
Some key excerpts:
All economists reject that idea. They point out that prices are set by market forces and the suppliers of goods and services aren’t only C-corporations, which pay taxes on the corporate tax schedule, but also sole proprietorships, partnerships and S-corporations that are taxed under the individual income tax. Other suppliers include foreign corporations and nonprofits.
Therefore, corporations cannot raise prices to compensate for the corporate income tax because they will be undercut by businesses to which the tax does not apply. It should also be noted that the states have substantially different corporate tax regimes, including some that do not tax corporations at all, and we do not observe that prices for goods and services vary from state to state depending on its taxation of corporations.
In 1962, the University of Chicago economist Arnold C. Harberger, published an important article arguing that the corporate tax was borne entirely by shareholders. This was unquestionably true in the first instance; that is, when the corporate income tax was first imposed. The tax simply reduced corporate profits and had to come out of the pockets of shareholders, given that it could not be shifted onto consumers.
But as time went by, some economists argued that a substantial portion of the corporate income tax was ultimately paid by workers in the form of lower wages...
...The Treasury economists conclude that 82 percent of the corporate tax falls on capital and 18 percent on labor. This is very close to the methodology of the private Tax Policy Center, whose analyses are frequently cited in policy debates. It assumes that 80 percent of the corporate tax is borne by capital and 20 percent by labor.
So no, consumers do not pay that tax. Those with capital, the shareholders do, and to a small extent, eventually, workers. 70% of all shares are held by the top 5% of the population (by wealth) by the way, 42% by just the top 1%. But if productivity gains from automation are being passed on to workers (unlike what has happened since 1972) then their real wages will be rising anyway.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
> This has been proven countless times since the 1700's to be absolutely false.
Yes because new jobs come along all the time that people gradually shift to that are too complex to be automated. People stopped making cloth by hand when looms and later power looms came in, people stopped farming when tractors became a thing, assembly line workers were somewhat phased out when specialized robots came to the line, etc. The difference this time is we are finally on the cusp of general machine learning.
In the not too distant future robots and computers are going to be in a position to replace not only easily-repeatable low skill labor, but almost ANY job not requiring super specialized knowledge or skills. Those in high paying "intellectual" jobs are also going to be on the receiving end of a pink slip. It's already starting to happen. Lawyer firms used to employ armies of articlers and clerks to do discovery and research on case law, and are already being replaced by automated systems that do the same work in less time. RBS just the other day cut 400+ investment adviser positions to be replaced with their digital robo-adviser system that recently rolled out.
When a machine can learn to do anything you can do, and do it consistently without error, even if it only works at 1//4 your speed you're gone. The machine won't take coffee breaks, surf /. or get sick while it works at its task 24/7/365. And it will get faster over time as the hardware and software inevitably improves.
"Large masses of people who are hungry and desperate" are caused, now as always, by government preventing people from performing the harmless actions they want to.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
People that spend most of the day worrying about how to pay for food, transportation and rent have little mental energy left over to make other decisions. Multiple studies have shown that people subjected to mentally stressful situations tend to make decisions that satisfy their current desires rather than their long term goals. Buying a $shiny you can't really afford, or not worrying about using protection falls right into that current desire scenario.
The average profit margin for the S&P 500 is below 8%. What do you think is going to happen if a 20% surtax is added onto sales? How long is a manufacturer going to stay in business losing 12% on every sale - until it realizes it's losing money, until it can't pay its bills, or until its creditors sue it into bankruptcy and out of existence?
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Yes. I've seen a few of those studies as well.
I've been in that situation. I must still be "haunted" by the experience as I always have way too much rice and dried beans at home. Nonetheless I didn't breed when I was in the position.
Still, I suppose the point is, as scarcity drops perhaps there will be less breeding. I hope so. I also hope we start actively pushing the idea hat breeding while in abject poverty only perpetuates the cycle. Breeding is a luxury.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
If the information you referenced is true, then 50.4% of minimum wage workers are age 24 or younger. So not false. That means the the other 49.6% of workers are not advancing or making good career choices
Also, what does supplemental mean? I guess you've never had a second job that paid less than your primary one eh?
I said it in the parent already, minimum wage jobs are not career paths.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
""The fact that abortion kills a fetus is not in dispute" did you not understand?"
The part that this is, in fact, disputed.
Why must I give up my property at gunpoint to someone claiming to act for those who refuse to work?
In the final analysis, those are the only two choices.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
"Yes, if technology causes people to become be permanently pushed out of the labor force, I expect that to show up in some statistics over the span of decades. "
But of course they are showing in the statistics from the last few decades: where do you think the wealth gap, the increased debt, the stagnating wages or the lowered labour conditions come from? It is a multifactor problem, on a buffered system, with long running effects so don't expect a big flashing neon saying "look at me".
"Both GDP and labor force participation rate have been steadily climbing over most of the last several decades."
Even in your graphs, force participation rate has been stagnant since the late eigthties and given that in the previous decades the real participation potential rose about 50% because of women, even before that we need to look suspiciously at the relationship between headcount and gross output.
"Even if we did see that kind of effect, it wouldn't necessarily be bad"
No, of course it wouldn't necessarily be bad, only it looks like dangerously being for the bad. Of course *some* people are coasting more or less fine (i.e.: baby boomers, probably you and me...), and of course is not blatantly obvious... yet (or else, we wouldn't be having this conversation), and it might even happen that a decent solution is found (I don't think it's too late). As of now -pardon me for the stupid comparison, it's like warning a tsunami is coming and some people saying "bollocks! look the sea level: is not only not growing up but the coastal line has receded one hundred feet".
"Long term unemployment is, in fact, much less of a problem in the US than in other countries."
Like this... both this and the graphs you linked to: do you really think this is an American-only problem, or a problem that USA can deal with on its own instead of a global one with consequences that, while already showing, if you are a bit lucky, only your children of even your grand-children will feel to full effect?
So he wants to recreate an automat? or maybe this: http://www.petnet.io/
And here I thought it was because they didn't have food or the money to buy it. Turns out it was just Uncle Sam getting in the way of them having all the food they want.
Back into your hole, John Galt!
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
No, they don't. Or, at least, they don't do it *automatically*. That's what competition is about.
If a government entity raises the minimum wage you can bet every employer with a minimum wage employee will raise prices accordingly automatically, and as a group. There is no competition when everybody's input cost is the same.
To retain the same profit percentage, companies do, and must, pass along more that 100% of cost increases.
Consider a company making widgets that sell for $100 each, that have a total cost (labor, materials, overhead, whatever) of $90. Their profit margin is 10%, not healthy, but adequate for a stable company in a stable industry.
Now consider that same company, heavily taxed and working under regulations that drastically impair efficiency, all of whose suppliers are heavily taxed and regulated, and all of the supplier's suppliers are heavily taxed and regulated, and so on ad infinitum. Assume the total cost to build a widget is now $990, and if the increase of $900 is passed along the widget's selling price will be $1000. The profit margin is now 1%, which indicates a company in trouble, unworthy of investment and a likely candidate for a hostile takeover.
To return the profit margin to 10%, the new price must be $1100, an increase of $1000 when expenses "only" went up by $900.
Ignoring facts of this sort is part of the reason that politicians and faux economists think that their destructive policies do no harm.
In the early 20th century, populists and faux economists were telling people that the national debt was no problem because "we owe it to ourselves" (a multiple lie). Don't accept such foolishness.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
I say we just institute a robot tax and use that to support a Citizen Dividend.
My rate proposal is 25% of the pay of the displaced humans.
If they won't pay, just confiscate their robots and give them a 10 year ban on using automation technologies.
"The average profit margin for the S&P 500 is below 8%. What do you think is going to happen if a 20% surtax is added onto sales?"
You put the numbers, not me, but then, now that you ask, that would mean (provided there's no other "financial engineering" in place) that the average profit margin for the S&P 500 would go from below 8% to around 6%. Given that as of today the 10 year USA bond is sold at a 2.43% discount, do you think capital would flee? where to?
"How long is a manufacturer going to stay in business losing 12% on every sale"
You don't know how to operate on percentages nor how taxation on profits work, do you?
Unemployment numbers only count those that are still looking for work, but can't find it. Once you stop looking for work and go on welfare you are no longer counted as unemployed.
"There is no competition when everybody's input cost is the same."
There is no competition *on costs* and *on equilibrium* and *on a perfectly optimized market* when everybody's input costs are the same.
The three highlights are of some interest here.
Subtract 100 years and talk about horse carriages and it is an excellent argument that the horse-drawn carriage is not going anywhere. This has been proven countless times since the 1600s (or possibly earlier!).
If you take automation to the extreme, to Star Trek "replicator," then it may be that those jobs would not come back. And if you consider the part-way-there, which is where we are now, where there are robots that can do some of the jobs, there is not any obvious reason why the robots would then lose the job back to the humans. That actually seems a bit silly and hand-wavy.
Jobs lost to business cycles will likely come back the next cycle. Jobs lost to automation likely will not come back during the current civilization era.
The rich will still need 2 or 3 human workers per restaurant, for the pleasure of being served by those below their station. But that doesn't help the minimum wage workers; it just means a couple percent of the employees at fancy restaurants won't lose their jobs.
People have been saying we are about to enter that era for 150 years.
And we've been moving in that direction that whole time.
What somebody predicted the timing wrong?! Say it isn't so! LMFAO
That isn't even an argument against it, did you realize that?
What do you think happened to our economy to achieve our current 5% unemployment rate?
Workers gave up looking for work and are thus no longer considered unemployed. They still don't have a job, they just don't count anymore.
You have no clue what communism is. Commuinism doesn't say 'Russia' or even 'China' neither is actually a communist state. Both were autocratic (with the Chinese version still being a single party democracy that is effectively autocractic). Communism can never be a form of government (it literally has nothing to do with governing). Large scale communism fails because it's never actually been used as intended. It is however a contemporary of Capitalism as both are a system of economics. Communism doesn't remove managers, it changes how they relate to the company as a whole.
Communism is simply the means of production in the hands of the workers. A very successful Spanish company is a modern communist one with each worker having a say in the whole. Because the 'shares' are all owned by the workers, they all have a vested interest in the company and in turn the company has a vested interest in them. While the Spanish economy has suffered lately that company has done fairly well and did well without having to fire thousands of people to make stockholders happy like a traditional american company. That doesn't mean hard choices aren't made, but it does change how those choices are made. Ironically this makes communist companies more democractic than capitalist ones.
There are still managers in such a company, however those people can't fuck the employees because the employees in turn collectively have authority. If everyone hates a upper management decision, that decision will be undone and the one who forced it on everyone may suffer as a consequence. Management is held responsible for their actions. Which by the way is the failing of management in a Capitalist company. Shareholders have no real interest in keeping bad decisions form hurting anyone except themselves and they don't work for the company the have shares in. So no one is there to keep management in line.
Co-ops are another modern take on 'communist' companies. Where a group of people get together to collectively accomplish a goal and then share the decision making and rewards between all parties involved. ISPs, small power companies, and other ventures have had very good success as cooperative ventures.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
we need a solution that helps the people put out of work as soon as it happens - not in 2086 after they are long dead.
Solution = Robot Tax + Citizens Dividend
In the near future, we may have 0.000000001% working farms, janitor jobs, cooking, services, etc.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
You have failed to understand the entire argument as presented. Running a business with no employees inevitably results in a business with no customers (because people without incomes won't be customers). There may be a businesses where this is the optimal choice, but restaurant isn't one of them.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
Having been wrong 99 times in the past in exactly similar situations is not an argument against something? 97% of the population used to farm, now it's 2%. Do we have 95% unemployment?
Before that about 50% used to hunt and 50% gather. Now it's 0% (with some rounding).
If you think 'this one is different', it's up to you to show why.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It is easy to be observant of what is going on out there today in the workplace and society.
First, YES, I've been poor.....its a pretty natural thing (or it used to be) when I got out of school and on my own, I supported myself working retail...restaurants (waiting and bartending)....I didn't make much money at all.
But I worked, and kept trying. Got in with the right people...and took a path on life that I'd not previously really thought about (IT work)....so far, that is been good to me.
Poor judgement? YEP...I've been the king of it, and I've also still made bad judgements. However, I've lived with what I've done, and tried to learn lessons and move on. I don't use it as a crutch.
For most the "system" is not rigged against them...IF, they are willing to value and seek an education, to put in EFFORT and work from the bottom up.
It isn't rigged if you work, and don't depend on someone else to do this, or do that...or take care of you. That's not society's job...it is YOUR job. It is up to you to be a responsible adult...grow up and act like one.
What gets me...you seriously (I think) are asking in this day in age "why must people work"...if you are not kidding, then I posit to you...
WHO is going to provide the services?
Who is going to make the products?
Who or how is money and resources going to be earned and used to pay for everyone to not fucking work?!?!
Why should anyone have to work so that someone else (able bodied of course) doesn't have to?
Who decides who has to work and turn over their hard worked earnings to someone so they don't have to?
Technology rarely takes away work...it just moves it to different forms. A machine replaces a formerly human job? Well, someone has to take care of that machine, improve it....replace it when it gets old and need of repair.
As someone who has lived a decent bit of life so far, who has made mistakes, who has depend upon himself for sustainment, growth and success....I certainly feel well placed to have an opinion, and I've no problem voicing it.
IN the end...no one gets a free ride. For all the technology in the world and "progress" we've made as a society, there's no getting away from what we are...
We are animals, in competition for life's resources. We eat, we reproduce and we compete for things in life.
The only difference between us and the rest of the animal inhabitants of this planet is that we are currently at the top of the food chain.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
You don't get unemployment unless you, at least, say you are looking.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You are suffering from a failure of imagination.
AC explained it. It is quite likely that you are failing in imagination or perhaps are merely overly optimistic about the average person. Idiocracy is a scary concept, if you look at it in this light.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
What's preventing anyone from breaking in to my house and stealing my property, that I have spent my whole life earning, is that I'll kill the person who tries.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
And, in the past there were long, long lists of things people would do if they had the time.
Automation eventually gets us to where people individually don't have anything on that list that is really important to them. It was a long list, starting from humans plowing the fields with stone hoes. A better plow, another better plow, another better plow, a better grinder, the work horse, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.. Eventually, air travel, air mail, international air travel. There is still room for improvement in air travel; people desire to visit distant relatives on a day trip. But if it took 30 minutes to fly around the world, would faster air travel still matter to people? No. There is a point where all the creature comforts are available all day; all the places are reachable quickly; all of the technical questions programmed into the expert systems (such as automated banking advice, siri, etc); all of the factories able to output whatever products are ordered without human intervention.
This can be utopia or dystopia depending on the availability and participation systems that we choose to use for a post-scarcity economy. The problem is, are we going to make compatible changes while scarcity still exists, but is simply going down, or are we going to repeat the history of the Industrial Revolution and let the workers starve to death before reorganizing society?
I'm glad you had the guts to not post as AC, for that I actually have respect. But your argument is very weak if all you can do is call me an idiot. And sorry, not everybody can be as Superman as you are. All you've done is knock the empathy out of your body with every self-pat-on-the-back you give yourself. And I have news for you: your fate is only partially in your hands. Or you're going to tell me that a guy like Bill Gates got where he is completely and totally on his own?
Your argument is that there's always another sucker, and you think that's a good thing. That's not a standpoint of high moral character.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Having been wrong 99 times in the past in exactly similar situations is not an argument against something?
Correct.
It was not a process of automation on the farm putting farmers out of work who then migrated to other jobs.
It was a big factor. The steam tractor made a huge difference in the amount of labor required for farming, first in threshing rigs and then in ploughing, and innovation was quite rapid during the industrial revolution. It's tied quite closely to the rise in the size of farms, and the economies of scale that make small farms impractical.
We're arguing correlation vs causation, which can be hard to sort out historically. Certainly automation on the farm happened at the same time farm jobs vanished, and of the new manufacturing jobs very few were making farm equipment.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Zimbabwe. Q.E.D.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
If you're in the USA, you're already giving a LOT more money to corporations in the form of corporate welfare, tax breaks, and other sweetheart deals while the big boys pay their heads exorbitant incomes. For example, why was it that we bailed out those banks again? Please remind me... I'd rather at least give food to people to eat or a roof over their head. And yes, you do already pay for that at gunpoint, or at least under threat of jail time.
"Over the past couple of centuries, automation has never shrunk the available work pool. Why would it start doing that now?"
Just an example off the top of my head: switchboard operators, but let's look into the future. Cashiers, delivery drivers, car washers, dishwashers, etc are all fair game to be eliminated within 10 years. We can see cases today where automation has shrunk the job pool for these positions today. Machines are increasing doing things like counting pills at pharmacies and providing customer service features. The very act of shrinking available jobs is enough to hurt, you don't even have to eliminate them 100%...just enough. Another big area of jobs that are shrinking today, very rapidly, are within the farming sector. Farmers need fewer and fewer farmhands. Heck, farmers have had self-driving tractors for a couple of decades now and remote monitoring is becoming a thing for the larger operations.
Take a look at the Russia under Bolshevism, where people were murdered to keep them from escaping. Production, goods, and services collapsed.
Without willing minds, civilization crumbles. Unless, of course, you consider starving in mud and thatch huts civilization.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Automation actually helps poor people. It doesn't help them to become rich, but it means that it is cheaper to live, and consequently it is cheaper to provide a better social safety net. Taken to the extreme, it will eventually take no human effort to provide human beings with food, shelter, healthcare, entertainment, etc, and therefore the cost will become zero (ignoring opportunity cost, etc).
Will there be a huge wealth disparity in a world with unskilled labor provided only by machines? Probably, but if wealth inequality is the only downside of providing adequate living conditions to the poor, I think I am OK with that.
Not everyone will agree with me, but I wouldn't take any solace in the fact that there was low wealth inequality if there are still lots of people struggling just to survive.
I appreciate that you at least took the time to put thought into your response. I see at least two problems in your responses: they are still framed in the way things were, not in the way they are changing to, and they neglect the opportunity costs involved in getting that education when you can barely afford to pay the rent right now (not everybody has what you perceive to be your abilities, but should they be left to rot as the income disparity continues to grow? Should they be treated as subhuman because they are "lazy slobs" ?). Beyond our basic needs, the vast majority of folks do not need to be employed full time anymore. A lot of our jobs are just useless jobs we have to keep people busy. Maybe our future is maybe still having similar employment rates as now but at 10-15 hours a week instead of 40+ hours a week? Morally there is no reason to have to work for the sake of work. It is not an end unto itself.
Soylent green, yo...
And after that, we'll all eat cake.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Price is not cost + profit margin.
Micro not marco economics are in play. With globalization virtually all companies are price takers. Wait for it...so are taxing authorities.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You just sent all the capital overseas dimwit.
There is a reason that (1 - corporate tax rate) * (1 - capital gains rate) * (Average national ROI) is, more or less, the same in all 1st world nations. They are competing for capital.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
We have a real world example of minimum wage laws taking place right now in Seattle. Seattle implemented new minimum wage laws last year and have since seen employment drop half a percent. Their neighboring areas, having not implemented these new laws, have seen historic employment increases.
Of course that's just my opinion...... you could be wrong!
People "abide by it" because at some level they realize that they benefit from it. They know, or should know, these two things: 1. Capital in capable hands enables the production that improves the life of others. 2. Once the principle of private ownership of capital is lost, everybody's ownership of property is vulnerable.
Capital is the basis of advanced civilization, and to maintain that civilization the right to own capital must be maintained. Lose either one and the other follows.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
We already have large masses of people who are hungry and desperate, just not as many in the United States. Working toward a future with lower cost required to produce food is a step in the right direction.
Regardless of whether you are a capitalist or a socialist, wasting human effort on tasks that require no skill that can be done more efficiently by a machine makes no sense.
A capitalist will say, producing food more efficiently will allow the poor to buy food more easily. A socialist will say, that producing food more efficiently will allow us to provide more food to the poor given our limited resources.
Even if you felt that work was a virtue in itself, and forcing people to work was a good thing, we still should force people to do only the work that machines can't.
The only wrong answer is "Let's have people wasting their lives doing work that could simply be done by machines."
We all know that. But if the idiotic left is going to continue to use that number, we are going to throw it back in their faces during arguments. Use it when it is advantageous, use the other numbers when it is advantageous.
Those are the words of a dishonest jackass who only cares about winning arguments. Is that really the person you want to be?
Fanatically anti-fanatical
The food is shipped in from automated factories. The manual labor required is unloading boxes and shoveling the mess into hoppers. Also cleaning and maintenance.
Automats were Kabuki Theatre, the illusion of automation much like Maelzel's Chess Player. It wasn't a particularly efficient setup; it was something of a fad. What it isn't, is a valid analogy.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
This entire thread is based on a false idea that if people are thrown out of minimum wage jobs that they'll be unemployed forever.
This has been proven countless times since the 1700's to be absolutely false.
And because Malthus has been wrong a few times, that means that the earth can support an infinite number of people forever.
The problem is that there are already people who will never work again. Laid off from small town mills and manufacturing as their jobs. No where to go to get another job. Packing up and moving? Where? To get what job? These are 50 something year olds, who even if they get some sort of job training, who is going to hire an entry level worker who is near retirement age.
So what do they do? Untill we decide to go Logan's Run on people, or maybe Hunger games or simple target practice, we've allowed them on Social Security Disability. Which by the way, conveniently removes them from the unemployment picture. http://www.thisamericanlife.or... http://www.npr.org/sections/mo...
Once a technological innovation disrupts employment - the loom, the cotton gin, the computer, the combine planter/harvester, the robot - those who were displaced from employment find new jobs in higher paying sectors, at least in the aggregate.
Okay, what are the new jobs going to be. You've set up an inviolable truth, that all innivation will create new work. Elucidate. Teach those who are wrong, wrong because being wrong in the past means (according to you) the premise will always be wrong. You can try to diminish the argument all day long that way, but do what I did, Present some evidence of what ex fast food workers will do when there are no fast food work jobs any more.
Which by the way, sounds an awful lot like saying tht since man wasn't created to fly, he never will fly.
This is going to happen, but there needs to be something for the new leisure class to do. You need to tell us what that is.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Or maybe they'll just shoot you and take your wallet. Desparate people are dangerous and social security nets keep the crime rate low.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Wrong about many details. But right about the importance of being armed.
Any one man was dead against the Vikings. What eventually stopped them were coastal fortifications. Hold out for long enough to mass you defenders against the raiders. Happened in the context of feudalism, but did not create it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Look, if the left is going to constantly use argument like 97% percent of scientists agree, and the economy is great because 5%, or women only make 5% of what men make doing the same job, or 1 out of 5 dogs will be raped in doggy daycare, or machine guns kill millions of children in the US every day, the time for letting them get away with those methods is over.
> are we going to repeat the history of the Industrial Revolution and let the workers starve to death before reorganizing society?
Well, one big difference there is the job/scarcity revolution will be taking place in first world countries first, because in developing countries the labor is still cheaper than automation. And one first world country in particular has hundreds of millions of guns in the hands of those who will be on the starving end of the equation. I have a feeling if there isn't a good effort put forth like universal basic income or similar that the revolution will look less like the starving masses of the Industrial Revolution and a lot more like the terror purges of the elites during the French Revolution. And UBI or similar is going to be necessary as these businesses shift to automated labor because if half the consumers are out of a job, who is going to buy their shit? Which will cause a downward spiral as even more companies go out of business due to shrinking demand, which means more people out of work, which means even further shrinking of demand.....
Current day 'liberals' aren't. It is that simple. They have redefined a term to mean it's opposite.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You misunderstand the point. Mr Puzder's choices only affect the dozen or so people that would work in his restaurant, not "large masses of people". If he decides to hire minimum wage workers instead of robots, he'll still end up facing the "large masses of people minus a dozen or so", but he wouldn't be able to hire a merc army to protect himself.
Maybe he plans to become Burger-G?
Also, Pudzer's being more than a little dishonest. If $3 an hour is the difference between human or robot service now and he's willing to swich and the cost of automation is decreasing, then one of two things must be true either he's lying about these facts, or "Suzie" is going to end up without of a job regardless of whether we raise the minimum wage. So increasing the minimum wage will have pretty much no effect (the research indicates that raising the minimum wage tends to have a mildly positive effect on employment), or not increasing the minimum wage would, at best, keep Suzie working in a terrible job for a couple of additional years until she's replace by a slightly cheaper robot.
Frankly, I would place my bet on Pudzer being entirely full of shit. This isn't about jobs at all, it's about Pudzer's company not having to pay it's employees more money. It seems to me, that this putz would say anything at all to try and make it so they don't have to pay them a single penny more and he can collect a multi-million dollar bonus for keeping costs down.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
I think we are heading into new territory now. Up until now, automating simple, repetitive tasks has improved the human condition. Thus far, demand for other services has always pulled these people back into the labor force. Just because it has been that way for 30, 300, or even 3,000 years does not mean it will always continue that way.
I think we are on the verge of creating a new category of structural unemployment. No longer will it just be a problem for the 50+, and medically disabled crowed. I think we will be adding people who's only marketable ability is their visual and auditory recognition systems.
Certainly the majority of the work force will be able to adapt. But I'd guess we'll shift at least 5% of the work force into this structurally unemployed group. I doubt we'd see more than 30% of the workforce shift into this group, at least I really hope not. Either way I think it will be large enough to cause major economic shifts, which will in turn lead to political shifts.
Those holding on to the reigns of power who choose to ignore that, will discover they have a spooked team of horses pulling their carriage towards a cliff. They best figure out a system that accommodates this new reality in a palatable way.
I've seen several sales tax increases, and usually vendors see it as an opportunity to jack the prices up by more than needed. Because all the prices are changing, it makes it hard for customers to see exactly how much the price went up, so they might as well round it up a bit. On the other hand, when prices of raw materials go up, they are far more likely to absorb the price themselves, because they don't want to be caught increasing the prices. But of course, when we're talking about corporate taxes that stay the same for a long time, and that are the same for competing companies, then it doesn't really matter. Everybody adds the taxes to the end product, and they'll compete on what's left.
Interesting discussion, and it's one I was planning on staying out of because there's two sides, and nothing anybody says will convince the others.... kind of like politics, with two "sides" and very few in-betweens.
Anyway, I read your response, and a vision of my brother (died of a heart attack - and the accident it caused - before the age of 50, due to smoking, drug, and alcohol abuse). He spent most of his life making excuses instead of looking for a job, and he was one of those people who'd quit rather than show up on time and sober. When he was sober, he'd give up on looking for work because of his record and "no one will hire me anyway" mentality.
Something I tell my kids - and something I was lucky to learn early on - you can't possibly succeed if you don't try. Most people seem to have given up, blaming "the man" or the economy or anybody but themselves.
Bottom line is to stop making excuses and keep trying.
Now, at the same time, despite my ideological belief in libertarianism, my pragmatic (and human) belief is you can't "just" abandon the ones that don't try. Like it or not, they often breed; they turn to crime, they become burdensome in other ways. With as hard as I've worked my entire life - from school to paper routes and cutting people's lawns, a lot of manual labor before settling in my career, and without ever getting any benefits - no welfare, no food stamps, no "Obama" (really Bush) phone, the idea of handing it out to people who often won't even try and have simply made piss poor decisions their entire lives is really repulsive. At the same time, you can't just abandon people... It's a kind of extortion - pay or, or we'll make your lives difficult in other ways; but what are you going to do? And then there's the fact that some people have just gotten bad deals, and they are often the people who, given a chance, will eventually get back on their feet and be positive contributors to society. What about them? And without spending billions in bureaucracy, how to tell the difference?
Still, the bottom line is that people who won't try (or only try half ass because they don't believe in themselves) are doomed to fail from the start.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
It says things balance out so there's no net advantage or disadvantage. Therefore your CEO, if honest, would have had no beef with higher taxes.
Except that in the case of corporate taxes, you need a bunch of people making tax laws, lawyers to find loopholes, other experts to close loopholes, and accountants and tax inspectors to make sure everybody is following the rules. It would a lot more efficient to get rid of corporate taxes, and only tax people. The redistributive effect is a valid argument, but I don't think the impact is big for regular corporate taxes that are pretty much equal for all companies. The poor pay for these taxes through products they buy just as much as the rich, so they could be replaced by sales taxes without much bad side effects.
Why is it more likely that we will have a new world with 1 machine, 1 employed person, and 2 unemployed people making the same amount of stuff as before, rather than 3 machines and 3 employed people making 3 times the stuff they were making before? Or 2 people working on 2 machines making twice as much as before, with one person employed building the 2 machines in such a way that the 2 other people can use them effectively?
The current problem is that jobs that just need a body are going to decrease in number. We need more and more educated people but less and less people with a minimal education. Gone are the days where you can get out of high school and go work in a factory and make a good wage.
We really need to bring back vocational education. It was seen as shameful to not have every child aim for a college education. Truth is that that a plumber or electrician can make a good living today.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Here's a pro tip: Read the whole comment before you click on the "Reply to This" link and prove you're an idiot.
In case you still don't get it: He's not suggestion we do that, he 's calculating the percentage of total income a $500 basic income would represent.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Having been wrong 99 times in the past in exactly similar situations is not an argument against something?
Correct.
In a formal, logical sense you are right. But as the philosopher David Hume said (I am paraphrasing just a bit): "The fact that the sun has come up yesterday, and the day before, and so on every day we remember is not proof that the sun will come up tomorrow. But it is a very persuasive indicator."
"95% of all Slashdot
Yes, because minimum wage laws and other laws have increasingly priced people out of the market. That's not due to automation; automation is just the response.
That is indeed something that happens when the minimum wage is increased due to some jobs not being economic at the new minimum price. That's not what I was talking about though, technology has eliminated huge numbers of jobs. For example, you'll find virtually zero positions for humans to act as grain reapers now, yet at one time that was a huge use of labor. That shrinks the overall work pool. At the time, it didn't matter so much because the work pool was still vastly larger than the labor pool, so after a very painful period of readjustment those workers mostly moved on to other positions. (largely in manufacturing)
steam shovels replaced men with picks and shovels? How many secretaries in typing pools were displaced by desktop computers and xerox machines and laser printers?
Any number of jobs have been lost over the years to automation large and small, but do you really think we'd be better off returning to the pre-automation way of doing those jobs?
Well put. The skilled trades are really better jobs than most people realize - the first 5 or so years suck, but that's true with most jobs anyway. I think we're also all underestimating the changes that "micro-manufacturing" will bring (3D printers, CnC mills, lost-wax casting equipment and so on). From a new class of jobs operating those machines (much like jobs at Kinkos or a print shop 20 years ago) to a whole new category of jobs "customizing things for other people". Plus a whole new arena of person-to-person service jobs, as the cost of manufactured goods declines.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
"Enjoy your EXTRA BIG ASS FRIES..."
"You didn't give me any fries.. I got an empty box."
"Please come back when you can afford to make a purchase. Your kids are starving. Carl's Jr. believes no child should go hungry. You are an unfit mother. Your children will be placed in the custody of Carl's Jr.
"Carls' Jr. Fuck You! I'm eating!"
No sig for you! Come back one year!
Even the CBO understands that...
[CBO report "THE INCIDENCE OF THE CORPORATE INCOME TAX"]
"A corporation may write its check to the Internal Revenue Service for payment of the corporate income tax, but that money must come from somewhere: from reduced returns to investors in the company, lower wages to its workers, or higher prices that consumers pay for the products the company produces."
Although economists are far from a consensus about exactly who bears how much of the burden of the corporate income tax, the existing studies highlight the significant types of economic mechanisms as well as the empirical estimates necessary for further quantifying the burdens. CBO's review of the studies yields the following conclusions:
o The short-term burden of the corporate tax probably falls on
stockholders or investors in general, but may fall on some more than
on others, because not all investments are taxed at the same rate.
o In the context of international capital mobility, the burden of the
corporate tax may be shifted onto immobile factors (such as labor or
land), but only to the degree that the capital and outputs of different
countries can be substituted.
o In the very long term, the burden is likely to be shifted in part to
labor, if the corporate tax dampens capital accumulation.
You have failed to understand the entire argument as presented. Running a business with no employees inevitably results in a business with no customers (because people without incomes won't be customers)
No, it is you that have failed to understand my argument. The guy can run a business just fine serving food to people who work at other businesses. Now, you'll probably start yelling that "but, but, but, if every other business did the same thing, then there would be no customers left", to which I will respond that Mr Puzder has no responsibility for those other businesses, and his choices don't affect them. We can be sure that somebody will move to robots, and they'll gain a competitive advantage, either driving Mr Puzder to quit or to do the same thing.
Competition doesn't help here, because all of the competitors will face exactly the same unavoidable government-imposed increased costs and will increase their prices by the same amount. Unless they can figure some way around those costs, like moving production or headquarters off-shore. Then you get even less taxes from them.
You might want to ask Marie Antoinette.
Oh, wait ...
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
You are talking in absolutes: black and white. The real world is shades of gray. What about a business with FEWER employees? Guess what? This happens!
Imagine making a car these days without ANY robots. Or, can you imagine making a cell phone with using just hand-soldering? Me neither.
It is all about making things more affordable. When is the last time that you purchased an American-made DVD player? They don't exist, and if one did exist, it would be more expensive. So, in order to save money, manufacturing is moved away from American employees to something else (automation and/or foreign workers).
You can't blame a guy who runs a business for trying to keep his costs down.
And for those who complain about "living wages," well, that comes with having SKILL. If you artificially raise the minimum wage, then people with MORE skilled jobs will want a raise too -- should an ambulance driver make the same as a burger flipper? This will then cause a ripple effect up the entire wage line, and result in EVERYTHING being more expensive. Suddenly a "living wage" is not a living wage any more, and you have to raise everything again.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
Still, the numbers work out in his favor, and that's assuming she's going to be provided with a social safety net.
Monetary compensation is flat, but people are receiving more in total compensation. The extra money has gone to health care.
What marketing idiot decided that people would pay $3 to play a cell phone game during a meal?
That would be the marketing idiot who has watched spoiled kids' behaviour when parents arrive without a full charge on their fondleslabs.
Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
This is why basic income is inevitable.
Basic income is not inevitable. If the teabaggers get their way, the unemployed poverty stricken people will be ignored and thus "reduce the surplus population".
My wife's car was broken into several times when she lived in Antwerp for eight months, but never in years of living in Denver, Pittsburgh, Houston or Washington DC. Maybe Belgium hasn't worked out "social peace"?
I live in a fairly desirable section of Seattle and our neighbors are reporting regular car break-ins.
Anecdotes are not data.
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
I mean, how many people has a web site replaced? Or Apache? I mean a 25% tax on Apache is going to pay for homes for a whole lot of the homeless! Or maybe IIS deserves to go to jail for tax delinquency?
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
If it's working so great in Europe, why do so many countries have double-digit youth unemployment? Did you ever consider the possibility you think it "worked great" because you can't see the millions of jobs not created?
Those doing the protecting were usually highly paid and trained. Knights got the best meat steaks, training, the best armor, and they were given some land as well. Archers got similar perks with food. They needed the strength to be able to fire six arrows a minute using a 2 meter long English longbow with a range of 25 meters.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
The other way to look at that is "Society says that if you labor isn't worth at least $x, you should have nothing."
I might add, production might be restarted in a much more efficient and fair way than it was before. More cooperatives where the producers have a part of the take and less private organizations sending money to people who have nothing to do with production.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Nobody "needs" anybody to do any work: not hiring someone and not starting a business is always a perfectly good option. Furthermore, I could pay them enough to live, but I won't if they aren't worth it. Call me a big meanie, but minimum wage laws aren't going to change that.
You will hire them if you want to run a business and make money. Psychopaths who aren't prepared to pay decent wages are exactly why minimum wage laws exist.
The only way to decrease the cost of something with constant or increasing demand is to increase supply faster than demand (through competition or productivity or legal fiat), and generally this is the part "society" forgets when it tries to improve standard of living through minimum wage increases.
Not in the slightest. The western world has a supply surplus of just about everything. People aren't going hungry in America because there isn't enough food for them.
No, the government was supposed to be the entity with the responsibilities.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
And there's a minor variance there - the sun and the earth obey a certain set of well defined laws, so we can say with some certainty that it will come up tomorrow. We can also state with lesser certainty the time when it no longer will. For jobs, the argument is similarly persuasive that if automation can handle all manufacturing and services, then the amount of jobs available will significantly shrink because even new jobs that might be created will be automated.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Not quite. CEOs think people are idiots, who will take what CEOs as truth.
Corporate income taxes are paid on profit, which means that the exact same actions that make the profit highest a a low corporate tax rate are the same that make the profit highest at a high corporate tax rate. Corporate income taxes are borne by the business, or arguably the stockholders.
Raising the minimum wage is more complex, but most corporations don't have that many minimum wage workers, and the one who do practice enough wage theft to make up for such a raise.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The vast majority do. Pursuing is not the same as finding. Of the ones who don't, it's because they can't get a job that will allow them to live. For some odd reason, welfare recipients don't tend to step into jobs with medical coverage, or necessarily enough money to allow even minimum child care. Provide a first-world health care system and many welfare recipients will be able to get off welfare. Provide some help towards actually keeping a job, and more will. Before the ACA, kicking a mother with a child with a serious medical problem off Medicaid was effectively homicide. In general, mothers will do whatever it takes to protect their children.
Did you know it's a lot cheaper to pay someone enough to live in reasonable dignity than to keep them imprisoned? Did you know that having a criminal record makes it even harder to get a decent job? That, after they get desperate once, and get convicted, work ethics and responsibility aren't going to help them turn straight all that much?
If you think "coddling" is applicable to the current situation with the poor in any way, you have no idea of the real world, but simply make crap up so you can stay smug. Instead of listening to right-wing propaganda, do a little research into what actually happens on welfare.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I know, I know! It's Trump, and you need to realign your time machine because you came in a few years early.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The problem is that both sides are right:
The employee needs enough money to live on.
The employer still needs to make a profit, and some jobs do not generate a lot of that.
There are two solutions: increase productivity (which might hurt employment), or provide in work benefits.
"If they choose crime, then fsck'em, jail them."
Yeah. I think some Jean Valjean wrote a book about it, or something like that.
At some point all that employment is going to plateau for the people creating all the shit for people (arguably now, or in the next 20 years). To use the GP's point, if a machine replaces 3 workers (that only requires 1 worker for machine maintenance), then that leaves 2 people unemployed. And your point is spot on here too; those 2 displaced workers will generally have to find work in another industry (services), as all the ex-farmers and ex-factory workers have had to do in the last 100 years or so.
But at some point, what we refer to as "jobs" now are diminishing. The numbers of human laborers needed for general manufacturing or farming is at an all time low and generally sufficient for the population in developed countries. Look at how much stuff we have already; the demand for more luxuries isn't going to increase (at least, not as much as it will displace workers. We'll probably see some increase in services, but this will eventually plateau too.
I guess the point I was trying to get at, was what's considered a "job" (at least the GPs definition) will be scarcer at some point in history, and there aren't going to be replacement jobs. There's only so many doctors, nurses, dentists, assistants, other service jobs necessary to keep the population comfortable and happy, while the lion's share of production and transportation will be done by robots. Maybe we'll see people keeping themselves busy with more volunteering, creating art or music, playing sports, or just playing video games & socializing. But those aren't "jobs" by today's definition (maybe for the 0.1% of artists and athletes that can actually make a living at it). So yeah, maybe if we have a basic income and everyone can live somewhat comfortably on that, then we can redefine what those "jobs" are (I'd love to do this and just play / create music, personally). But there won't be enough of those jobs out there by today's definition.
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
And governments were always supposed to serve the best interests of the citizens of the nations that they governed, not their corporate masters.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Seriously? This tired old argument again?
Apple didn't move a million jobs to China, or anywhere else. Those jobs DID NOT EXIST when Apple was doing their manufacturing in-house. When Steve Jobs returned in 1997, Apple had 8,437 employees worldwide plus 1,739 temporary employees and contractors. Those numbers include Apple's in-house manufacturing employees in the three factories they operated at the time. Yes, when the iPod was released, Apple began to shift manufacturing to China. But that did not mean a net loss of jobs in the US, because they were expanding the rest of their business simultaneously. In 2015, Apple had approximately 110,000 full-time employees worldwide, NOT including the outsourced manufacturing in China.
The new headquarters building alone (And they're not shutting down the rest of their Cupertino facilities.) will have more workers than their entire global workforce before the manufacturing was outsourced. Cuperting in general will probably have twice as many employees as Apple had worldwide in 1997. So no, buying an iPhone made under contract by Foxxcon did not deprive a single American of his or her job.
Source of my numbers? Apple's 10-K Annual Report SEC filings.
Imagine all the people...
"Competition doesn't help here, because all of the competitors will face exactly the same unavoidable government-imposed increased costs and will increase their prices by the same amount"
Competition is a complex thing. Yes, there is what we usually think of competition (in this case a fast food chain against other fast food chains), but then, there is "competition", i.e. fast food chains against vendor machines and even "competition", i.e. fast food chains against movie theaters (read about, say, Porter's five forces, mainly competition, rivalry and substitution).
In this regard, since different competition will have different cost sheets they'll suffer different taxations (i.e.: if you somehow tax on labour costs, those more labour-intensive business will suffer more; if you increase the minimum wages, those with the more minimally waged employees per invested dollar).
But I wasn't focusing on that but just on the fact that shaking an otherwise mature market (i.e. by changing its tax envelope) may end up with a different, maybe more adjusted one (at a lower profit margin without it being translated to customers). Prime example is low-cost airlines: traditional airlines were accomodated to a given service level and a given profit margin till, due to changing circumstances some players decide to change both the service perception *and* the accepted profit margin. In this case you got both new players (i.e. Virgin or Ryanair) and old ones adapting to the new times (and also old players unable to adapt and thus folding down). And you will be with me that a lot of things can be said about low-cost airlines but uneedingly pushing increased costs to their customers is not one of them.
"Unless they can figure some way around those costs, like moving production or headquarters off-shore."
Exactly what I said: you can find the ways to vary the cost of any entry item, or you can work on shuffling around the relative weight of your cost entries. In this article, the Fast Food CEO is trying both at a time since he's trying to reduce their labour costs under the menace of substituting them with CAPEX. In any way, provided healthy competition, cost increases are *not* pushed down to the customer till the profit margin is the barely acceptable (while, at the same time, all companies will be pressing to increase their profit margins, sometimes by reducing costs, sometimes by increasing prices, as much as they can go away with).
"People "abide by it" because at some level they realize that they benefit from it."
You are absolutely right... while it works.
A bit over the board, but Marie Antoinette was also absolutely right about thinking peasants would understand that despite the inequalities of the ancien regime, they were safer under it than under the upcoming anarchy of a revolution... till she wasn't.
More on this...
"They know, or should know, these two things:
1. Capital in capable hands enables the production that improves the life of others."
People is starting to openly question the ability of the hands that hold the (most of) capital.
"2. Once the principle of private ownership of capital is lost, everybody's ownership of property is vulnerable."
Not yet so far than regarding point one and not still anywhere near to the point of no return but people too is feeling that their ownership is not secured anyway against the privileges of a short bunch that are seemingly not only above law but even capable of rewriting the laws to their advantage.
In the end it is old Hobbes' and Rosseau's Social Contract: to the advantage of those in power, it's usually invisible and accepted by fiat by the masses (not even "accepted by fiat" but being more like a jail of invisible bars), but currently there's more and more people questioning it at all levels -not a significant portion of the population yet, but quite a vocal one in proportion. It doesn't even need to be expressed in explicit terms to induce a change: last time social contract was (implicitly) challenged in first world we ended up with a World War so, even if chances are low, it is something requesting careful analysis.
How do you expect people to learn the lesson of that adage when they re-buy their seed corn from Monsanto every year?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
"Why must I give up my property at gunpoint to someone claiming to act for those who refuse to work?"
If I take your sentence at face value, no, you don't forcibly have to give up your property at gunpoint, you just need to if you want to stay alive after the encounter.
But I suppose you are not talking about any real gang of armed robbers but that you are allegorically talking about taxes and the government power to collect them.
On one hand, what in hell makes you think that even a minimally significant part of your taxes are collected "for those who refuse to work"? Not facts, for sure.
On the other hand, about the wider issue about taxes, no, you are not giving up your property *at all*. Government only collect taxes in the form of money. Now, take a bill from your wallet and look carefully at it: you see? it is *not* your property; it is just a government issued certificate for all debts, public or private so whatever portion the government reclaims of it, it's still nothing of yours but something you shouldn't have in your control to start with. You can barter your cows for grain instead, if so you like.
And, of course, in the wider issue of social contract, what are you really claiming to be "yours"? You are able to make a living because of a society you didn't built up, going to work over roads you didn't built up, with a level of security you didn't built up, trading things over both national and international channels you didn't built up, tradings that are secured because of a legal system you didn't built up, using a legal tender whose confidence you didn't built up... need I to follow? And still you whine about "giving up your property at gunpoint"? What property at all would you own without all that coverage you didn't built up and that you wouldn't possibly build up even if you lived one thousand lives exclusively devoted to that task?
It is of course legit to ask for always greater levels of scrutiny and efficiency about our taxes, but taxes themselves? I won't tell here what I think of that kind of people... Anyway, there must be some place, somewhere, where you can be left alone. Just don't bother calling 911 to the rescue if you ever happen to break a leg, you never payed for it, you know.
"They can die in the streets; they are objectively worthless."
Of course yes. But even then, they are going to cost you money: you don't want their corpses rotting in the streets, do you? It becomes quite unhealthy after a while, you know.
And once you start considering those worthless meatbags in terms of the money they are going to cost you anyway, why don't you start thinking how you can maximize your investment while, at the same time, minimizing your risk and exposition to that scum? Hungry meatbags with forks and torches are no good prospective for your lucrative business' continuity, after all.
It never makes economic sense to pay someone who produces $10/h in value $15/h in salary. If that's the only option, people will simply not "want to run a business", or they will run a different business, or they will simply invest their money overseas.
Doubtlessly, when your hare brained economic schemes fail, just like the Soviet Union, you want to stick psychopaths like me into reeducation camps, and if that doesn't work just shoot us, right?
No, it does not, because there are tons of new jobs: dog trainers, virtual reality designers, software developers, garden designers, etc. And those are generally nicer, more fulfilling, far less back-breaking jobs than the old jobs they replace.
Job categories disappear, and they are replaced by new job categories. The overall work pool doesn't shrink.
So you are saying that people argue that abortion does not kill a fetus? Really???
My anecdotes are at least based in fact, unlike Opportunist's paranoia about the US, which is apparently backed by nothing more than ethnic animus.
If you think that "social peace" includes leaving your doors unlocked so that criminals can help themselves to your property without breaking and entering, you are even more deluded than the guy who seems to have confused the US for a Wild West movie while simultaneously forgetting that Europe has a rather big immigrant-assimilation problem that drives both violent and property crime. Some suburbs of Paris are more dangerous than basically anywhere in the US.
None of those amount to job losses, so your argument that there simply aren't enough jobs to go around is wrong. There are enough jobs going around, but people just don't take as much money home as they should. And that isn't because of automation (automation generally leads to higher salaries), it's due to cronyism and rent seeking. You know, like when Obama bails out corporations and Wall St and gives handouts to pharmaceutical companies, medical insurers, doctors, and teachers.
Oh, we definitely face risks, but they aren't from automation, they are from repeating the same economic mistakes that countries like Greece and Spain have been making.
What other countries do is beyond our control. But at this point, several other countries have been much more aggressive on cutting back on the welfare state, regulations, and government spending, and it has worked out well for them. We should do the same thing.
We have a real world example here too, the whole country has a far higher minimum wage than the US, and similar unemployment levels.
Explain that.
An arsehole like this is inevitably going to replace all his workers when machines become cheaper than humans anyway, regardless of whether the minimum wage is increased or not.
he's just:
a) propagandising an excuse for doing so
and
b) pushing propaganda against raising the minimum wage in order to minimise his wage expenses until machines are cheaper than humans.
You are talking in absolutes: black and white. The real world is shades of gray. What about a business with FEWER employees? Guess what? This happens!
Imagine making a car these days without ANY robots.
You kinda went off the shades of gray path yourself. There may be some folks arguing for a return to the woods subsistance living where you produced or were set out to freeze in the winter.
It's the one sidedness of it all. A fast food place with no employees. Imagine that. If successful, there might be many more.
And I believe this is going to happen, unless we get some oddball form of governance that makes up jobs. My argument isn't that it shouldn't be done, because we live in a world where business does not have a moral compass. If people die in the pursuit of profit, then they will die. Whatever, its just how things work.
The prospect of almost everyone out of work with no social plan at all is frightening, and if you don't think it's frightening, you aren't paying attention.
We are already in the stage where the youngest and oldest are having issues. If you are terminated past 50, and don't have an excellent skill set, you are most likely never working again. Or if you do, you're now a greeter or stockperson at Walmart, removing an entry level job from a young person.
And really, we do not want a large number of unemployed young males with a lot of time on their hands? No - we don't.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
"So you are saying that people argue that abortion does not kill a fetus? Really???"
Really. That's what "disputed" means.
In fact, I find the strange part being you thinking there can be no dispute, given that there isn't even legal consensus on what a fetus is: "A fetus is typically defined as a developing human at a certain point after conception to birth. The precise definition varies by applicable laws". At the very least, an abortion before a developing human is legally considered a fetus (prior to this, it is considered an embryo) can't do anything to the fetus -much less killing it.
And that's before even considering what "to kill" is in this given context.
If robotics puts people out of work in large numbers today, we need a solution that helps the people put out of work as soon as it happens - not in 2086 after they are long dead.
Or basic income / citizen's dividend. Why, in the most wealthy country in the history of the world, do we have people who are so destitute?
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Corporations simple pass any added taxes and costs on to the customer
This is provably false. There is a demand/price curve inclusive of taxes where adding to the price lowers the overall margins.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
And after the masses string up the producers for their wealth.
Nobody's talking about stringing up the producers for their wealth. They're talking about stringing up the parasites for their wealth. Let's face it, nobody is productive enough to become wealthy from their own productivity - even the best brain surgeons and rocket scientists are barely rich. Those that have become truly wealthy have done so through business - by exploiting the labor of others - or by exploiting markets - simply taking the wealth of others. These people don't make a net positive contribution to society, and yet they're the ones that amass all the wealth. It's the producers that are losing wealth, as the middle class is eroded, and wealth stratification continues to worsen.
So Kleptocracy?
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Having been wrong 99 times in the past in exactly similar situations is not an argument against something?
I have a coin I've been flipping. 99 times in a row, it came up heads.
What are the odds it will come up heads on the 100th flip? Its like saying Malthus was wrong a few times, so he will always be wrong. Which menas the earth can support infinite numbers of people forever.
I'm jut hoping that cool heads will prevail with this change. Because if the 75 percent of jobs lost to automation comes true, http://issues.org/30-3/stuart/ the impact will make those other 99 times (if I told you once, I've told you a million times not to exaggerate) look like a walk in the park. That's a whole lot of the new replacement jobs to make.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Having been wrong 99 times in the past in exactly similar situations is not an argument against something?
Correct.
In a formal, logical sense you are right. But as the philosopher David Hume said (I am paraphrasing just a bit): "The fact that the sun has come up yesterday, and the day before, and so on every day we remember is not proof that the sun will come up tomorrow. But it is a very persuasive indicator."
So Malthus will always be wrong? The world can sustain an infinite number of people forever?
And when all jobs are taken by automation, everyone will be employed.
That's ridiculous. So let's not argue ridiculous things
For my own thoughts, we probably will end up as societies with a lot more lesiure time. And eventually it will be a good thing for humanity.
But y'all are glossing over the different disruptions that have happend as if they never happened. Unless we do some amazing prep, this one will be more bloody than the others. After all those 99 other times hat you folks have been very accurately cited, dismissing did have some serious upheaval with people dying,
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Look, if the left is going to constantly use argument like 97% percent of scientists agree, and the economy is great because 5%, or women only make 5% of what men make doing the same job, or 1 out of 5 dogs will be raped in doggy daycare, or machine guns kill millions of children in the US every day, the time for letting them get away with those methods is over.
Oh seriously left or right, you're a fucking liar.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
"None of those amount to job losses, so your argument that there simply aren't enough jobs to go around is wrong. There are enough jobs going around, but people just don't take as much money home as they should. "
That *is* the coastal receding before the tsunami.
"it's due to cronyism and rent seeking."
You have had enough of that all along since the industrial revolution (and before), so it's no explanation for anything new.
"automation generally leads to higher salaries"
True. For those that still have a job.
But as long as head count and overall productivity become unrelated there *will* be a point where there will be less job positions than people wanting a job unless unseen-for new fields open (that's what happened along the industrial era and it becomes increasingly uncertain now, because of the very nature of the new kind of technological advances), or world population reaches a plateau and starts falling, or new legislation comes in to limit people's work load, or limits the need to have a job altogether. For a while, offer and demand will buffer it, because of the excessive labour offer with lower wages and worse work conditions, but unless there's a change, it won't last long.
When I read this article, I had a strong sense of deja vu: a sister of mine worked for some two years as a mid manager at a factory in China. The same corp owns another similar factory in Europe only fully automated while the one in China offered jobs to about 500 people. You can imagine why one is fully automated while the other is still labour-intensive. And you also can imagine what will eventually happen (and it will happen sooner than later). That's not an isolated example: it's happening all around the world in basically all industries.
"What other countries do is beyond our control."
Up to a point, even what your country does is beyond your control, so that's no argument not to think about it or worry about it; on the other hand, even if it is out of our control, if it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen.
"at this point, several other countries have been much more aggressive on cutting back on the welfare state, regulations, and government spending, and it has worked out well for them."
Maybe it has worked out well for the countries, doubtful about the individuals in those countries. Germany easily comes to mind. And even then, it very well might be a just a short term band-aid at the expense of the citizenship well being.
"You're playing meaningless semantic games. You're obviously an idiot."
Yes, sure.
And ooloorie is somebody that thinks that something that is obviously a disputed field (seeking "abortion does not kill a fetus" at Google returns 12.900.000 results) is not disputed.
And he is not a True Scotsman either.
History has many cases of the rich killing off their slaves, it's very common as the rich are usually very paranoid about the slaves revolting. The worst that usually happens is that the rich have some lean times, where lean means having to cut back on their yacht purchases and such.
Occasionally the not quite as rich team up with the poor and do kill off the rich, which usually leads to the "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" situation. And of course it is the poor that are volunteered to be cannon fodder
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I'm pretty sure I got the mean. Perhaps as I feared that was only wages and not all capital gains and other income. ...or perhaps you added a zero. (7.723*10^12)/(301.2*10^6) = 25,640, about the same as my numbers.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Except that in all experiments where basic incomes have been offered, only very slight reductions have been seen, and those are due primarily to a very short list of causes:
- New parents taking a bit longer off to be with their infants.
- More people investing in higher education at the expense of immediate income
- More people starting their own businesses, with the initial loss of income that normally entails
- Unemployed people spending a bit longer looking for a new job rather than settling for the first one they find.
And in the long term, all of those are to be encouraged.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Before the industrial revolution, employment was close to a 100%, now it is probably less then 50%. We have whole classes of people who have left the workforce. The 5-25 year olds by themselves make up a good chunk of the population. The stay at home Moms who look after the unemployed young. The old who used to decently drop dead when they seized to be productive. The disabled population has grown a lot as well. The people the government counts as unemployed.
Then there are all the slackers who don't even put in 66 hours a week.
We're a long ways from full employment.
Of course we're also rich enough that we can afford to remove many groups from the employable and could remove even more, but to pretend that we haven't removed close to a majority of people from the employable list is dishonest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Welcome our new robotic food overlords!
I think most people prefer the accuracy of dealing with a well designed machine rather than try and translate your food order to Spanglish. "Welcome to Yack in the box"?!?!
How many here would wait in line for an ATM transaction rather than go to a live teller at your local bank?
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
So you're honestly trying to compare a country with 1/10th the population, 1/10th the population density and the ethnic diversity of the Swedish Bikini Team to the US.
One reason there is no comparison is the US has almost as many illegal immigrants (and in some estimations more) than Aus has residents and while in the US that number generally rises, in Aus last year there was 0 illegal immigration for the first 6+ months. Illegals greatly dampen the wage market because if in large supply it's easier for businesses who don't care to hire cheap illegal workers than pay high wages for a legal worker that will also require extra costs in benefits. It sux but it's a simple fact.
Aus is also as close to a closed system as you can get so almost any policy put in place there can't be well transferred to any other place on earth. No matter how ridiculous they make their minimum wage there is only so far employment can fall. All societies require a certain level of service and in Australia's case, you either get it in house or not at all so there is a lot less fluctuation in the job market in response to federally mandated changes in wages.
In other parts of the world, people have choices and if their local area isn't providing a good or service at a reasonable rate they can easily move or simply make a short trip to get it someone else. For example, if you're anywhere near the 12,000+ km of border (excluding coasts) in the US you can simply drive a few minutes to get to a Mexican or Canadian town to get cheaper services (and vice versa), if local pricing is too high. In Aus, you have 0 cm of border and your closest neighbor is boat ride or flight away making a quick round trip if not an impossibility for most, much more problematic. It's so easy to cross the Can/US border I have friends that routinely drive to the States to pick up parcels (so they can use US shipping rates) and be back to their offices before lunch. I've know people to cross over because their favorite burrito place uses a different spice mixture in their US franchises than their Canadian ones.
The Seattle example I gave above is a real world example of how an much more open system reacts to artificial forces. In Australian terms it would be the equivalent of 1 neighborhood in Melbourne deciding to raise their minimum wage to $20 while the all the others left it at about $13.50. While many businesses are geographically tied to their customer base, those that had the option decided to move/expand in the cheaper parts of town.
Of course that's just my opinion...... you could be wrong!
Or maybe they'll just shoot you and take your wallet. Desparate people are dangerous and social security nets keep the crime rate low.
- that's why it makes total sense to arm yourself with something heavier than what a 'desperate person' has. There is 0 reason to have a problem with protecting yourself against somebody who is coming to steal and murder you, 0 reason to not shoot back or even shoot first.
You can't handle the truth.
You are able to make a living because of a society you didn't built up, going to work over roads you...
- this drivel is based on the assumptions that those things require any form of government theft and gun point robber to exist, they do not. All of those things can be and generally are built by individuals who act for their self interest. Free individuals acting out of sheer self interest build, make and trade things with each other without any 'help' from any form of government.
Government only collect taxes in the form of money. Now, take a bill from your wallet and look carefully at it: you see? it is *not* your property; it is jus...
- this drivel is supposed to make somebody think that representation of value in any currency does not equal the actual productive output of work of an individual. Government doesn't care actually how you trade, it wants a cut. Just because the cut can be measure din those pieces of paper doesn't mean actual productive output is not stolen from an individual, who is forced to forgo more investment or consumption and instead give to the government part of the person's life's output, which is time, which is again - part of life.
No government theft is worth any amount of life from any individual. Of-course government does come with guns, so that's a conundrum that we are going to see resolve one way or another.
Just don't bother calling 911 to the rescue if you ever happen to break a leg, you never payed for it, you know.
- government ran 911 shouldn't even exist, nor should any type of business or operation or agency.
You can't handle the truth.
Businesses exist because people need them to exist and people are interested in buying from businesses, maybe working for them, investing with them. Governments with all the laws can prevent many types of businesses from existing, governments can prevent people from being hired based on what a company is offering, government can do everything that is destructive. Nothing that a government can do is constructive, it is always prohibitive, destructive, oppressive and violent.
Businesses are individual people making things for other people. Governments are collectives, mobs that want to steal and enjoy the proceeds of the theft.
You can't handle the truth.
Lawyer firms used to employ armies of articlers and clerks to do discovery and research on case law, and are already being replaced by automated systems that do the same work in less time.
Every heard of the buzzword "e-discovery"? A lot of people have been hired to develop, use, and maintain the software systems that are involved in legal cases in the 21st century.
The idea of a machine taking your job becomes meaningless when your job is defined as automating or doing manually what hasn't been automated yet. Obviously not everything has been automated at once, or ever will be finished. So there is always somewhere for new graduates to start.
Virtually nobody is choosing to put their savings (capital) into companies with high costs and low profits.
Have you looked at the stock market recently? Take Amazon for example - they're the poster child for success via low profits.
And after the masses string up the producers for their wealth.
Nobody's talking about stringing up the producers for their wealth. They're talking about stringing up the parasites for their wealth. Let's face it, nobody is productive enough to become wealthy from their own productivity - even the best brain surgeons and rocket scientists are barely rich. Those that have become truly wealthy have done so through business - by exploiting the labor of others - or by exploiting markets - simply taking the wealth of others. These people don't make a net positive contribution to society, and yet they're the ones that amass all the wealth. It's the producers that are losing wealth, as the middle class is eroded, and wealth stratification continues to worsen.
If you disagree, can you explain to me how stringing up, say, the Walton family would meaningfully impact society? Would we be lost in a world incapable of conducting retail sales operations without the Waltons? Would the lack of their high-volume low-margin retail empire really result in a world where nobody produces anything, farmers stop farming, cats and dogs start living together? By what mechanism?
I feel like you're the one saying it would impact society. Once the people you hate are gone, what does change? The signs on the stores that now say "Wal-Mart" say something else? How does entering someone else's name in the global financial system somewhere as the owner of X million shares of stock meaningfully impact society?
England and many European countries. Q.E. right back at you.
"I'm always amazed by the consumer who thinks that he can demand production and enjoy the benefits of other people's capital."
Given that as of now, and since quite long time, "capital" is nothing but a fiat convention, I'm always amazed by the capitalist who thinks he in fact owns anything unless a majority of people abides by it.
All capital represents someone's labor - but that doesn't mean the person using the capital performed the labor to create it. Like Obama said "you didn't build that".
But the damn fool does not realize, his machines won't need food, would not buy entertainment, would not buy a home or pay for college. As more and more employers automate more and more functions and lay off more and more people, he will end up with lots of shiny new machines willing sell food at great profit.... if only there are people with money to buy them.
And this is the point at which he instead tasks his machines with making more and better machines (instead of now-worthless food).
And that's how the singularity happens.
A Japanese robot company called FANUC (Factory Automatic NUmerical Control) has been operating a "lights-out" automated factory employing robots that make other robots for years. They are said to run for 30 days unsupervised at a time, making 50 robots a day. And I'm getting this from articles from 6 years ago.
It never makes economic sense to pay someone who produces $10/h in value $15/h in salary.
Yep. Minimum wage is set so that the value of base jobs is implicitly sufficient to meet minimal living standards.
If you can't make enough money to pay someone minimum wage, then either your business model is fundamentally broken, you're not charging enough or, the primary problem for the last few decades, you're taking too much in profit.
If that's the only option, people will simply not "want to run a business", or they will run a different business, or they will simply invest their money overseas.
The first is irrelevant, the second is perfectly reasonable, the third is addressed by legislation.
Doubtlessly, when your hare brained economic schemes fail [...]
My economic schemes worked just fine. They powered post-WW2 America into the greatest and broadest increase in living standards and wealth humanity has ever seen.
Yours are the ones that took over in the seventies and have been failing for the last thirty years.
If you look at how successful a bunch of uneducated bearded guys with AKs and some explosive training were against US military in the Middle East, why do you think motivated and technically-inclined Western population won't be even more successful?
They're only "successful" (WTF is "successful" in your book - those countries and their people have been devastated) because the US military isn't playing to win.
If they were they would have just glassed the whole place and walked away.
"All capital represents someone's labor"
So, where's the labor that vanished away in 2008 crysis?
"You are able to make a living because of a society you didn't built up, going to work over roads you...
- this drivel is based on the assumptions that those things require any form of government theft and gun point robber to exist, they do not."
And your answer is based on your opinions about how things shouldn't be the way they are, but still, they are. Money very well "shouldn't" be a government monopoly but it still *is* a government monopoly and, then again, on a democratic society government is nothing but the construct of a set of free individuals acting out of sheer self interest, just like you'd expect from your anarcho-libertarian Arcadia. I see you now for what you are, and I know it's simply wasted time talking to somebody that just reject thinking in a coherent manner: anarcho-libertarianism, despite it's obvious attractive, only can work on minds lacking internal coherence; a conundrum of "patches" with some internal coherence but contradicting one another.
But then, just a last question: Within your world without government and just agreements among free individuals acting together, what's the problem on a group of free individuals acting out of sheer self interest to build... an standing army to steal your productive output at the point of their guns? Or is it that, despite your egalitarian claims, you erect yourself as the unquestionable guru that says what other groupings of free individuals acting together can or can't do?
While I do agree that western societies do have kind of messed up food distribution issues, I'm not sure I understand how that applies to the assertion that increasing minimum wage affects only the demand curve.
What you are suggesting would require a shift in the supply curve (it would have to shift, because supply curves generally don't have negative slope!). Shifts in supply curves are due only to productivity, competition, or legal changes. Minimum wage changes only affect demand curves, yes?
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
While I do agree that western societies do have kind of messed up food distribution issues, I'm not sure I understand how that applies to the assertion that increasing minimum wage affects only the demand curve.
Food was a random example. Cars would have worked just as well.
The point is that the problem is not that we do not have enough stuff for people, it's that people can't afford the stuff because most of them are on the wrong side of decades of wage suppression. Minimum wage earners are simply the bottom end of that scale.
In the most recent quarter, Amazon posted record profits, but they weren't high enough, so the value of their shares (what people are willing to pay to invest their money in Amazon) plunged 13%. So I guess you're right, that IS a perfect example of low profits = investors flee.
http://www.reuters.com/article...
Amazon is still in, though preparing to graduate from, the early phase of the cloud business in which the goal is to gain and hold market share in order to reap high profits later, after the cloud industry stabilizes. People were buying Amazon based on the high profits expected in 2018, 1019, 2020, etc, not for last years low profits. As they've recently failed to make the turn, investors are leaving.
I disagree with the statement that "we have enough stuff for people but they can't afford it". If there is enough stuff out there and people aren't buying it, prices would drop so it is all sold and/or producers would stop producing so much (unsold goods are expensive!) so there would no longer be any excess.
So this means that there isn't enough stuff for everyone, so an examination of why this the case should be made. Even without that - simply giving people more money (increasing demand) is not going to magically increase supply, although in the short term it might allow people to purchase existing inventory before the prices inevitably rise.
I will be clear - I'm all for making things more affordable for everyone but I strongly believe that simply mandating people be paid more isn't sufficient to provide sustainable affordability - and I think history proves this out.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Correct. Which means that people will not start those kinds of businesses anymore. Therefore, a "minimum wage" isn't something that guarantees someone a living income, it is something that prohibits certain kinds of businesses from operating and that prohibits certain kinds of people from working.
That's a nice story, but doesn't hold up to data. Between 1980 and 2005, corporate profits were between 4% and 5%, low by historical standards. Since about 2009, they have been around 10%, a bit higher than historical averages, but that's not because companies are "taking too much profit", it's probably a combination of the recession weeding out bad companies, government stimulus programs, and making up for lost profits in the preceding decades.
In post-WWII America, government spending was about 20% of GDP, compared to 40% today, and welfare spending was about 1% of GDP and stayed below 2% until the end of the 1960's, as opposed to 5% today. There was no Medicare or affirmative action, those kicked in in the late 60's. States had much more autonomy, and the US was essentially at the top in terms of economic freedoms, as opposed to rank 11, behind the UK and Estonia. You want to return to that? I certainly would.
Actually, your guys took over in the late 1960's and the result is the crony capitalism and economic stagnation we are seeing today.
Money is not a government monopoly of-course, basically all governments gave up on actual money and are printing funny pieces of paper that may look to you like money but they are not.
Money is store of value, medium of exchange and unit of account. Sure, you can exchange with government money, you can account with it but you cannot store value in it, not in any meaningful way with the government expanding the supply of money (inflating), so what you are referring to as money is just a medium of exchange. I do not store money in dollars, maybe you do.
I see you now for what you are, and I know it's simply wasted time talking to somebody that just reject thinking in a coherent manner: anarcho-libertarianism
- actually anarcho capitalism, that should be obvious to anybody who spent any considerable amount of time on this site since I stated it only a few hundreds times here.
You 'see me for what I am'? I don't think so, I am a person who sees the world for what it is and plans accordingly, do you ever plan anything?
an standing army to steal your productive output at the point of their guns
- I know that people are thieves, which is why I am perfectly willing to pay for private security, which is the way security should be handled.
You can't handle the truth.
So, what is the secret to making sure that automation does not take over every conceivable job? Maybe not force the cost of labor so high, as a first thought.
Minimum wage jobs are not MEANT to provide a "living wage." Those jobs are for part-time jobs for kids in high school. A true living wage comes from having skills.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
If you don't like automation or even outsourcing our jobs over seas then I say fight back. Don't purchase stuff made in China, don't do business with companies that have all of this automation. Do business with local people you know and trust. Go to old fashioned diners. The sort of fast food restaurants like McDonald's is not the place that any human should be purchasing food from anyways. If you must go out and eat go to your local diner or bistro. If you want code written do it yourself or work with your buddies on it. Don't purchase a web site from Pakistan or someplace over seas. If you want a motorcycle part make it your self or go to your local machine shop and give them your specs and blue prints. My point is if we all bit the bullet and did business this way then large corporations would amend their business practices to accommodate they way we want business done. Pissing and moaning about it will never get it done. Take action with your checking account.
Paul E. Bahre
The range of longbows was an order of magnitude higher, with competent archers being able to shoot 200 to 300 meters.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Just remember 18th century France. The top 1% (or is that the top 0.1%) will feel the blade.
Live in a world where he has no employees. So does every other CEO.
Guess what happens when nobody has any employees.
Nobody has any customers, either.
"Money is not a government monopoly of-course"
Only, of course, it is. And it is willing to stand for it with the power of its guns.
"basically all governments gave up on actual money and are printing funny pieces of paper"
Only, of course, those funny pieces of paper are, in fact, actual money.
"Money is store of value, medium of exchange and unit of account."
I know English has that problem Roman languages don't have in that the verb 'to be' stands for both existence and quality but, sorry, you are wrong: money is not a store of value, medium of exchange and unit of account but those are *money's properties* in that something that has those properties *and* is called money *is* money.
"Sure, you can exchange with government money, you can account with it but you cannot store value in it"
Funny then, that this very morning I went to the supermarket and depleted part of the value storaged in my pocket in exchange for some supplies. Good the shop attendant didn't know I can't store value in bank notes because otherwise he probably wouldn't find funny to exchange supplies for nothing.
" - I know that people are thieves, which is why I am perfectly willing to pay for private security, which is the way security should be handled."
I know a lot of things. That you didn't answer my question, for instance.
I missed a zero there. 300 meters isn't a bad range. That's the length of Ryde pier on the Isle of Wight.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
So Malthus will always be wrong? The world can sustain an infinite number of people forever?
Malthus will always be wrong because his base assumptions were wrong(That there will be no increase in food production per acre and that the rate of population increase will increase exponentially - both of which we know are wrong). That does not mean Earth can support an infinite number of people, but it can support more people than are going to live on earth in any rational future projection, since population increase slows down as technology improves. Replacement birthrate in a modern society is ~2.1 U.S, Germany, France and many other countries have a birth rate well BELOW replacement rates. http://data.worldbank.org/indi...
So, what is the secret to making sure that automation does not take over every conceivable job? Maybe not force the cost of labor so high, as a first thought.
This is going to happen no what the minimum wage is. It's up to us to keep it from disrupting society as it happens.
Minimum wage jobs are not MEANT to provide a "living wage." Those jobs are for part-time jobs for kids in high school. A true living wage comes from having skills.
Sorry, that is a bogus argument that I hear all of the time. You can make the same argument the whole way up the food chain. I don't know what you do for a living, but If I did, I could mke a fine argument that you are being paid too much.
That's why the job creators have figured out that they can bring people form other countries ove to replace you. Its a weird form of the employee as the enemy, the cancer upon the system that must be eliminated at all costs. Amazingly a lot of employees buy into it. Some of us buy into it until we're replaced by that guy from India who we have to train. Just be happy that your replacement will be helping the economy making American corporations more profitable. the perfect system.And once you are replaced, that minimum wage job at a fast food joint might just be your next job. Agitate for how bad it is then.
And it will work for awhile, until one day the job creators wake up and no overpaid Americans can afford their shit any more. Because they aren't working any more, or are now at McDonald's and on Guvmint assistance and food stamps.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
So Malthus will always be wrong? The world can sustain an infinite number of people forever?
Malthus will always be wrong /a>
Um huh. Seems like the famines in China around 1960 were an example of running past sustainability.
And while it's fun to point out the below replacement birth rates in some countries, I hope you aren't arguing that there isn't any population increase.
Oh - wait, I know - the famines like in China were a natural adjustment that proves Malthus wrong. After all, people dying of starvation is a completely natural thing.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
You say his choices don't effect others, then in the very next sentence say if others did it first, it would drive him to quit or emulate them. Sounds a lot like their choices effect others... so which is it?
If you follow news about uprisings around the world, it doesn't look like small arms are a significant threat to government. Are the police and military willing to shoot into crowds, or not? That is a much bigger determining factor in uprisings than small arms.
And in this sort of scenario, the rich might not need to protect "public order" for confidence in government, as is normally an issue in uprisings; it might be enough simply to define protected zones and protect those, even with private security and gun towers. Americans have lots of small arms, but they don't have easy access to mortars or artillery. Even RPGs are very rare here. It isn't reasonable to attack a machine gun nest with rifles, even military rifles.
A "downward spiral" is still profitable for those already in power, at least for most of the way down. And they can outlast the resulting depression easily. It isn't obvious at all that that is any sort of brake on the problem. In business cycles, they proved themselves to prefer boom/bust to steady growth, which is why we have a central bank managing lending rates to try to keep it near the middle.
So Malthus will always be wrong? The world can sustain an infinite number of people forever?
Malthus will always be wrong /a>
Um huh. Seems like the famines in China around 1960 were an example of running past sustainability.
And while it's fun to point out the below replacement birth rates in some countries, I hope you aren't arguing that there isn't any population increase.
Oh - wait, I know - the famines like in China were a natural adjustment that proves Malthus wrong. After all, people dying of starvation is a completely natural thing.
China's population recovered and grew, and since population has continued to increase since then, yeah, the idea that the Chinese famines were from reaching some sort of carrying limit is both silly and absurd.
Especially when you understand that there is a food surplus today, and there was a food surplus during the famines.
Why would automation not increase the available amount of food? I can build a greenhouse next to a equal-sized outdoor garden plot and prove that one pretty easy. ;)
Why can't food be grown in space on artificial stations? Why can't those ag stations be built from raw materials elsewhere in the solar system? Seems hard to find a physical limit. The more pedestrian thing of just using the ocean surface to float farm boats could double, triple, or more the arable "land" just here on Earth.
As to the general question of Malthus being wrong, lets consider some of his words:
We know in modern times that it is not that simple; educated people have less offspring, for example. And yet, they do not have less sexual passion. So we have learned that while passion may be fixed for these purposes, reproductive behavior is not. There are a lot of things about Malthus' ideas that ensure he will always be wrong, not least of which is that his ideas were mostly conjecture and hundreds of years of data have come between then and now. Disease is less limiting on population now than it was in 1798, and it gets less limiting all the time. Maybe that will reverse, but there is no pattern of reversal to point to, no limit that can be identified. Nor is there a strong basis for a theoretical limit on the future capabilities of medical technology.
Automation technology that replaces humans.
Your complaint seems a bit hand-wavy. What is your point regarding apache? You seem to have some idea about it, but you didn't actually say it. Why would "IIS", a product, be on the hook for tax delinquency? You seem to have left out the hypothetical scenario that you wish to discuss.
I dunno...Humans have been survivors since their beginnings on this earth.....
I somehow doubt that the masses will either give up and die on the streets or become criminals.
My thoughts are that if you force most people to get off the dole...they will do something to get work and survive.
I can't believe the majority will resort to crime or just give up...that's now how humans work.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
If there is enough stuff out there and people aren't buying it, prices would drop so it is all sold and/or producers would stop producing so much (unsold goods are expensive!) so there would no longer be any excess.
This is a religious statement.
People are buying - though fewer and fewer every day, hence the economic stagnation - but they have been funding it for the last couple of decades with a massive run-up in debt due to stagnant incomes, increasing unemployment, decreasing job stability, etc, etc.
Even without that - simply giving people more money (increasing demand) is not going to magically increase supply, although in the short term it might allow people to purchase existing inventory before the prices inevitably rise.
We are suffering from a demand deficit, not a supply deficit. Like I said, nobody is going hungry because there’s not enough food. Nobody is walking because there aren’t enough cars. Nobody is sleeping on the street because we don’t have - or can’t build - enough houses.
All the excess that should be “buying” these things is being funnelled into the top percent, and even more so into the top fractions of a percent. Hence the massive increase in their incomes and wealth. Hence the increase wealth gaps. Hence the massive shift of GDP share from labour to capital.
I will be clear - I'm all for making things more affordable for everyone but I strongly believe that simply mandating people be paid more isn't sufficient to provide sustainable affordability - and I think history proves this out.
Reality shows we have a demand problem. It is being caused by the wealthy - particularly the finance industry - suppressing wages and sucking up what little remains with rent-seeking behaviours.
Fundamentally we need to return bargaining power to workers. The minimum wage is but one aspect of this. Some others are strengthening wrongful dismissal laws, strong publicly funded healthcare so workers are not bound to employers, strong publicly funded education to give people opportunities at highly productive labour, high income taxes to soak up all the excess money that inevitably bubbles to the top and is hoarded or used to pump up asset prices, reduced immigration to decrease unemployment, etc, etc.
All the shit that got done in the 40s, 50s, and 60s in capitalism's golden age before the neoliberal psychopaths took over in the seventies and parasitised everything. When the objective was to get everyone a job. Increase everyone's incomes and living standards. Give everyone a chance.
But the experience of the western world today is just a small-scale taste of what's to come - at some point in the not too distant future, half the population (at least!) is going to be literally unemployable because there is simply nothing they can do that a robot or computer can't do better. When billions of people want stuff, and we have the capability to make it for them, how is it moral or ethical to not do so because of some absurd idea based in religios belief about them not deserving something they haven't worked for ?
I love it when Americans make up facts about Australia.
We have lots of 457 visa workers, and, illegals still arrive every day, they just come by plane not boat.
We have a diverse range of cultures, and as many ethnic groups as the US.
Pretty much every single point you make is wrong.
Ah, well... that drifted quite far from a basic economics discussion. I wasn't quite expecting that.
From a certain point of view I can see why it might appear this way. A more accurate statement is that there is decreasing demand for the goods and services on which most people have depended there being demand for trading for the things they need.
Ok, I think I see what you are trying to say. The demand (and actual goods) isn't being funneled to the richest, but ownership of capital is being concentrated with the richest. And I agree with that observation. What I don't agree with is the terminology that is a "demand problem". I still say it is a supply problem, and from the rest of your post I think you agree: the people that own the capital aren't producing things (and selling it) to the people that need the things that capital can produce "at affordable prices" or any other.
I agree that things like rent seeking and simply choosing to let capital run idle, or only using capital to obtain more capital are getting out of control.
I agree with what I think is the proposed goal here - to prevent the concentration of ownership of capital. Where I am skeptical is the means proposed. I don't see how minimum wage does this, because it doesn't change the system. The rest of your proposals I think kind of hint at some solutions - breaking some of the bonds that tie health care to employment for instance. Changing the tax scheme is also good, but I'd say that income taxes aren't the solution; in order to address the wealth concentration effect, we have to tax the concentration of wealth, not income or consumption. I'd also say getting rid of things like mortgages would help, even though that would be painful; putting people in debt for 30 years (!) feels like there is a lot of room for improvement (especially because homes aren't generally productive assets). Zoning laws could also use some work, though you've got to be careful there because it's still wise to consider environmental impacts. Residential property tax is also another opportunity (e.g., you could probably do good things by eliminating owner-occupied property taxes entirely, as this would help stop people from losing their homes. Maybe a compromise is to do that only if people are retired or on disability or something; I dunno.)
In essence I agree that we are going to have to, as a society, really rethink the concepts of ownership if we do start approaching the point where "robots" do displace too many workers. I don't know how this transition is going to work, but it's going to be interesting, and I hope we do it without use of force.
As for religious aspects - well, it's very interesting that you mentioned the idea of only deserving things because you work
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
He's not the only one who's going to be taxed for that.
See Father Guido Sarducci's analysis of the bill for the Last Supper for an explanation. That analysis also applies here.
Hope this helps.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
http://www.theautomat.net/
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Just quick note. Rats in the feed become competitive advantage, they are ground up, grilled and served up as rat-patty. Nice!
well, I'll have a slice without so much rat in it.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
If Puzder is going to fire Suzie rather than give her a $3 raise, then his taxes are going to go up to pay for her social safety net costs. It's impossible to have a society where a large fraction of people can't find work that pays a living wage. Those people will vote (or act in other ways) to overturn the system that is making their lives impossible.
I'm always amazed that the rich think they can hide in their gated communities and enjoy the fruits of other people's labor.
hey, remember when papa john's was going to face disaster because they were being forced to get obamacare for their employees, or else pay into the subsidy fund to cover those who went onto the exchanges? and it turned out that it would cost 14 cents per pizza?
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
That shouldn't be amazing. No matter what happens in other businesses, or society as a whole, Puzder is still making the optimal choice for himself.
For this moment, maybe.
So now that the optimum situation is to have no employees, we need a plan of what to do with the number one enemy of the corporate state, the human taker.
Do we line 'em up and shoot them?
Do we pay higher taxes to support them?
Then who on earth do we sell our stuff to?
Taxes are almost as unacceptable as employees, so I guess we start lining people up. Investor tip! Fertilizers will be a growth industry. There is an old adage about people eating their seed corn.
Modern corporate "no employees" outlook is like that, only they are purposely getting rid of customers.
trump will fix it. if he can have all the clothing in his clothing lines manufactured overseas without taking jobs away from america, this ought to be simple.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
This entire thread is based on a false idea that if people are thrown out of minimum wage jobs that they'll be unemployed forever.
This has been proven countless times since the 1700's to be absolutely false.
Once a technological innovation disrupts employment - the loom, the cotton gin, the computer, the combine planter/harvester, the robot - those who were displaced from employment find new jobs in higher paying sectors, at least in the aggregate. How many file clerks do you know? Know anybody picking corn, wheat, or soybeans by hand? Yet unemployment is around 5%.
The people slinging burgers will find new work. They'll have to. New employment opportunities will open up; they always have.
while in the long run, the industrial revolution certainly raised the living standard of the industrialized nations, it is also certain that those displaced represented a wave of poverty, hunger, disease etc that served as the inspiration for a lot of literature.
the problem with these disruptive but beneficial events is to cushion the lot of the disrupted. on the one hand, there is the modern british solution; put them all on the dole. failure. or the conservative solution: let them starve, it will motivate them to find something new. probably worse failure.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
What do you think happened to our economy to achieve our current 5% unemployment rate? What happened is that the powers-that-be pulled a fast one on you and you're too foolish to see it. You've been hand fed a statistic that is false on its face but you didn't care to look into the truth... Check out the population-employment ratio numbers and they speak a much different story. You see, the unemployment rate that is mainly touted is the U3 rate. The U3 rate is made up of people with no job who've actively tried to find one in the last month. Today we have a good number of discouraged workers* and a vast number of people who have no intentions of ever being employed again. And these numbers are likely to continue to grow. And this doesn't even take into account the underemployed either. That 5% number you're kicking around means nothing in the real world but keeps the sheep voting under the illusion of what is good/bad in the economy.
*Discouraged workers are people who want to be employed and have looked for work in the last year but have stopped looking due to poor prospects.
sure, donald trump says "I actually saw a number of 42 percent unemployment. Forty-two percent." he'd know, he's a business genius and all
The bureau of labor statistics also calculates the U-6 rate, which includes the U-3 unemployed plus those working part time who would rather work full time plus those discouraged workers who want to work but have not officially looked for work recently. Currently the U-6 rate is 10%
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
The only problem with this idea that the unemployed will find work is that the number of people required to design/operate/maintain technology is much smaller than the number of people required to do the work the technology replaces.
We've gone from 95% of people doing agricultural work to less than 5%. Yet people found new jobs: almost everyone did. Same thing with manufacturing. But somehow not with burger flipping jobs? Those are magic? Seems unlikely.
of course we had dickensian london and poorhouses for decades, but they're dead now so screw em. we could eat the surplus population.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
As well as making labor more productive, you get the double whammy of lower prices. As long as regulators stay out of it, that is.
https://www.google.com/search?...
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
> This has been proven countless times since the 1700's to be absolutely false.
Yes because new jobs come along all the time that people gradually shift to that are too complex to be automated. People stopped making cloth by hand when looms and later power looms came in, people stopped farming when tractors became a thing, assembly line workers were somewhat phased out when specialized robots came to the line, etc. The difference this time is we are finally on the cusp of general machine learning.
In the not too distant future robots and computers are going to be in a position to replace not only easily-repeatable low skill labor, but almost ANY job not requiring super specialized knowledge or skills. Those in high paying "intellectual" jobs are also going to be on the receiving end of a pink slip. It's already starting to happen. Lawyer firms used to employ armies of articlers and clerks to do discovery and research on case law, and are already being replaced by automated systems that do the same work in less time. RBS just the other day cut 400+ investment adviser positions to be replaced with their digital robo-adviser system that recently rolled out.
When a machine can learn to do anything you can do, and do it consistently without error, even if it only works at 1//4 your speed you're gone. The machine won't take coffee breaks, surf /. or get sick while it works at its task 24/7/365. And it will get faster over time as the hardware and software inevitably improves.
of course, the next step after that is to eliminate the machine, and just make a profit on financial systems. the mortgage works 24/7/365 and never needs repair or maintenance.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
"Paid for by the corporations through taxes because they put all of the people out of work."
Corporations simple pass any added taxes and costs on to the customer. Thus if you add taxes to a corporation they simple raise the price and pass that added expense on to the customer.
A CEO I worked for once said "People are idiots, they think they can raise minimum wadge or add taxes to a company to pay for some social benefit. Corporations pass the added expense on to the customer. Thus they never realize they are the ones paying the taxes not the company.
A corporations job is to make money, that means that we take what ever expenses we have including taxes, add them up, attach a profit margin to it, and sell it. Otherwise we would not be making money."
except that the corporation doesn't pay taxes on wages. and at minimum wages, neither do the recipients, by and large, unless they also happen to have extensive investment portfolios raising their tax bracket.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
What I don't agree with is the terminology that is a "demand problem". I still say it is a supply problem, and from the rest of your post I think you agree: the people that own the capital aren't producing things (and selling it) to the people that need the things that capital can produce "at affordable prices" or any other.
No, I don't agree it's a supply problem because it's not. There's plenty of stuff. There's plenty of idle capacity (un- and under-employment are huge, for example).
The problem is on the demand side. People don't have any surplus because that surplus has been systemically taken away from them in the form of suppressed incomes and increasing debt burden.
Or, put more simply, most but the wealthiest are broke. They can't consume, to stimulate production, to drive growth and productivity and innovation and living standards and all that good stuff because they don't have any money.
Minimum wage puts more money in people's pockets, which should allow them to save and not live desperate paycheque-to-paycheque lives. It also acts against business owners, who have demonstrated time and time again propensity to try and drive down wages to increase profits.
Income taxes are there to soak up excess money, which inevitably rises upwards. Wealth taxes also need to play a part (land-value taxes are one of the best wealth taxes known).
There's nothing wrong with mortgages, the problem has come from the dangerous games played behind the scenes. The solution is a simple, publicly-funded banking system to handle core needs of savings, transactions and homeloans.
As I said, this is only a taste. The "problem" of excess supply and inadequate demand is only going to continue increasing as more jobs are automated, wages are driven further and further down, and wealth continues to concentrate.
I'm still confused by a few things... I'm trying to clarify.
This is one of the points of confusion for me. Mostly because I don't count "surplus" as being related to demand at all. Is this just saying that the lack of disposable income for the non-wealthy is preventing them from ever-increasing their spending?
I agree with the first part of this statement, but only partially with the second. While minimum wage does increase income, most people in those income brackets don't save the excess, they simply increase spending. There are many reports out there on the multiplier effect of minimum wage increase versus, say, quantitative easing.
Also, if all you're doing with your excess is paying off debt, you are improving your situation, but paying off debt is not really a productive (in the sense of "it doesn't actually produce any goods or services) use of money. In fact in most fractional reserve systems, paying off debt reduces money supply.
We'll have to disagree on land-value taxes and mortgages though. I have problems with any tax system that will force people to relinquish their property if they don't pay that tax (that's one thing I like about income tax over property tax). For mortgages - the problem with them is large fixed payments for such a long period of time, which means any shock to income (illness, market changes, weather disasters, etc.) and the fact that usually a single missed payment can put you at risk of losing your property, means that mortgages are a lurking burden. Some of this is intertwined, yes, because if a medical event wouldn't bankrupt you, and if wages never went down or you didn't ever get laid off, then 30 year (or even 15 year) mortgages wouldn't be an issue. But those other parts aren't solved, so it would be far easier to say "mortgages can be no longer than 10 years", eat the short-term reset in property values (maybe give some kind of amnesty where the government just writes off the difference somehow), then you get to a place where people actually own their homes quickly rather than over the course of a generation.
I just had a realization: are you talking about excess supply and inadequate demand for labor?
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
I'm singing in the rain as The Butlerian Jihad comes marching down the road.
Fuck off. A full-time job should pay a living wage. End of story.
Eat the rich.
Yes, there is always another sucker.
But there is also a replacement who will resist exploiting his workers, and actually have a responsible social profile. We'll just keep killing the leeches from the bourgeoise until we weed out the bad ones. It's time to sharpen the guillotine.
Eat the rich.
Not a new concept at all. 20 or 30 years ago when auto makers were implementing robots, taxing them the same as hourly workers was discussed. Not sure if it went anywhere but this guy needs a wake-up call from reality. In a world of robots, someone or something has to pay the politicians.
This is one of the points of confusion for me. Mostly because I don't count "surplus" as being related to demand at all. Is this just saying that the lack of disposable income for the non-wealthy is preventing them from ever-increasing their spending?
It's preventing them from maintaining their consumption. For some, this is starting to impact consumption of essentials like food. For most, it's just eating into disposable income otherwise spent on general consumer goods - ie: the engine house of the economy. A larger and larger portion of people's incomes is going into essentials (food, shelter, etc) and debt repayments.
We'll have to disagree on land-value taxes and mortgages though. I have problems with any tax system that will force people to relinquish their property if they don't pay that tax (that's one thing I like about income tax over property tax).
But you previously suggested wealth taxes ? This principle would apply to any wealth tax (if you can't pay the tax you may need to sell assets to be able to do so).
For mortgages - the problem with them is large fixed payments for such a long period of time [...]
Historically, most people (who haven't over-extended) have paid their mortgages off in ca. ten years. This should be doable with affordable, 3x-median-multiple housing. They frequently don't any more due to a combination of a) aforementioned decades of wage suppression and b) the property bubbles that have engulfed most of the western world driving up the cost of property.
I just had a realization: are you talking about excess supply and inadequate demand for labor?
There is certainly a massive oversupply of labour in developed economies, but there's also a general supply surplus of goods. TVs, cars, food, etc.
Not to mention the interstate highway system... Or the once function FDA for monitoring food quality...
Only one minor point of clarification I think here:
My personal go-to proposal on a "wealth tax" is to tax income at a rate determined by owned wealth. So if you have lots of wealth but no income, no tax. If you have lots of income but no wealth, no tax. And if you make the tax rate progressive not on nominal value of wealth, but on wealth percentile, there's never any need to constantly mess around with inflation multipliers; the only tunable parameters are the overall tax rate and the shape of the tax curve. (My thought is that a curve of the form tax rate = (wealth percentile)^power where power is something greater than 1 is the desired shape; this gives low wealth percentiles a very very low rate, but nonzero, while the closer you get to the top, the tax rates get larger faster.)
This has the advantages of avoiding windfall penalties on the poor, since increasing their incomes briefly won't really change their owned wealth, so their tax rates remain very low. It discourages wealth concentration because taxes go up as wealth is concentrated, but doesn't discourage overall increases in wealth because if everyone increases in wealth, percentiles don't change. If you are infirm or retired, you are shielded from losing your assets explicitly because you no longer have any income.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
I'm going to go out on a limb and say you've never seen a slum before. Take a look at India or Central America sometime. If you're okay with that, then I guess we just can't see eye to eye on this.
That's not the type of thing we'd ever have risk seeing in the US.
We don't have the caste system here, so that type of desolation ain't gonna happen here.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
What I'm saying is that parking your car in a locked garage reduces vehicle break-ins!
I'm going to go out on a limb and say you've never seen a ghetto before in the US. Take a look at Detroit or Mississippi sometime. If you're okay with that, then I guess we just can't see eye to eye on this. ;-)
At some point all that employment is going to plateau for the people creating all the shit for people
It has and it does. That's what scarcity is, or at least one of the major effects.
Think about growing enough food to feed 12 people in 1 hectare of land (this is about 6 tonnes of rice per hectare, which is what India grew in 2000; in 1970, India could grow 2 tonnes per hectare). You need about 10 people full-time to work 4 hectares of land, and food costs roughly 2% of income as a result (add shipping and marketing and processing and such and you get the 13% of income).
So your population expands. 120 new people, 10 more hectares of land in use, 25 new people working that land, great. No change: more people working, more people buying, it's in the same proportion as current population, so population can grow like this FOREVER and will keep creating the same jobs in the same proportion.
Then you run out of arable land.
You have this dry, cracked land to work with. It's a bit harder. It's less fertile. You have to employ 10 people to work 4 hectares of land, plus 2 more people to make and supply fertilizer, plus 1 more person to supply irrigation. Even then, you get 50% as much yield from this land, so you can feed 6 people per hectare. You need about 13 people full-time to work 4 hectares of land, but that land feeds half as many people: to feed the original 48 people (previously from 4 hectares of land), you work 8 hectares with 26 people.
Food now costs more than twice as much to produce. For 120 new people, you put 20 more hectare of land in use, 65 people working full time. Notice this is 40 more people: where before you had 95 people to do other jobs, you only have 55 people to do other jobs. Even if we assume the consumer can buy all the same luxuries, nobody could make them to supply the consumer; and the idea that the consumer can buy them is ludicrous because the consumer must pay those 40 salaries to the food-makers. That makes consumers more poor.
This scarcity tends to raise the general cost of the scarce good, which can decrease the consumer market's broad buying power (everyone's food costs a little more, instead of the new kid's food costing a lot more), which can ultimately create a net-decrease in percentage employment. Other economic factors (notably, taxation of the middle class, and taxation on employment or sales) directly remove wage-labor income from consumers, thus factoring part of the cost of goods out of the buying power of consumers; those policy defects are much more powerful job-destroying factors, since scarcity of goods tends to move jobs and so doesn't have 100% destructive impact.
To use the GP's point, if a machine replaces 3 workers (that only requires 1 worker for machine maintenance), then that leaves 2 people unemployed. And your point is spot on here too; those 2 displaced workers will generally have to find work in another industry (services), as all the ex-farmers and ex-factory workers have had to do in the last 100 years or so.
Yes, and this becomes a problem if you lose workers too fast. If you pull an Industrial Revolution and unemploy 80% of your labor force in 5 years, you probably won't see new jobs.
The Information Age was interesting. We had a lot of information-heavy bottlenecks, like managing growing collections of legal contracts or accounting ledgers, and freeing that up actually uncorked the consumer machine. This contrasts strongly with the Industrial Revolution, which simply cut jobs without relieving scarcity.
Let's take American Express for example.
American Express originally checked *every* transaction through an Authorizer. The Authorizer would run a few quick checks and identify fraudulent transactions. If the transaction looked good, he'd allow it through, and everything was fabulous.
American Express could originally hire one (1) authorizer per 10,000 accounts. As American Express
Support my political activism on Patreon.
I feel like you're the one saying it would impact society.
I meant to imply 'negatively'. If this wasn't apparent from context, I apologize.
Once the people you hate are gone, what does change?
To clarify, at no point in time did I indicate my own personal preferences for individuals based on their wealth, nor did I imply that I hate anyone in particular. In the interest of moving the conversation along, I'll assume that here you refer to wealthy people. The premises of this conversation did not entail wealthy people being gone, merely that their wealth be redistributed. Anyway, to answer your question, it would change the velocity of money, as wealth would be transferred from those who don't spend (the wealthy) to those who do (the poor).
The signs on the stores that now say "Wal-Mart" say something else?
Likely, but not really meaningful in this context.
How does entering someone else's name in the global financial system somewhere as the owner of X million shares of stock meaningfully impact society?
I don't understand the question. Are you asking how transferring a large number of equity shares from one wealthy person to someone else would meaningfully impact society? I'm not sure how to answer that, but I'm also not sure how that's relevant to the discussion.
I was talking about distributing wealth from a relatively small number of wealthy people to a relatively large number of poor people, which implies that wealth is transferred from the few to the many, not from one individual to another one. This is qualitatively different because in the former case (but not the latter), the median wealth per capita increases, necessarily.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
Yes, those other things increase the work pool. The net change is tough to measure though.
Australia's fractionalization rating is 0.093 (yes that's zero point zero nine three) with a population that is 92% white. That means if you grab two random people off the street in Australia there is less than 1% chance that those two people don't share significant cultural similarities. Using a different more favorable methodology, Australia moves all the way up to 0.149, giving it the rank of 140th most diverse country in the world.
The Unites State on the other hand rates a 0.49 (the same using both systems) ranking it 85th.
Just for comparison, Canada (where I'm actually from) rates a 0.71 (or .59 using the other system) which gives us the 60th spot on the diversity rankings.
I should actually apologize for my erroneous comparison to the Swedish Bikini team since Sweden, being ranked 128th, actually ranks higher in diversity than Australia.
Of course that's just my opinion...... you could be wrong!
Malthus will always be wrong, because he neglected many important factors.
He might someday 'be right', but only in the 'broken clock' way.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The net change is easy to measure, and most countries keep detailed records. Here is the data for the US: http://faculty.tamucc.edu/sfri...
Oops, missing a zero above, it should be:
That means if you grab two random people off the street in Australia there is less than 10% chance that those two people don't share significant cultural similarities.
Of course that's just my opinion...... you could be wrong!
I own a SKS made by the Chinese while they had bad famines.
In a classic guns/butter trade-off, that rifle likely represents a dead Chink or two, I paid $200.
I had this conversation with a former coworker, he's under 5 foot, his growth was stunted by Mao's famines. Liked shooting the SKS though. Was a little disturbed to learn it was basically a disposable POS.
Those famines are owned lock stock and stinking piles of corpses, by the worlds leftists. Nothing natural about it, except the nature of power corrupting.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Malthus will always be wrong, because he neglected many important factors.
He might someday 'be right', but only in the 'broken clock' way.
The issue with Malthus is that like so many people have done for just about ever, he didn't take into consideration the fact that technology moves on.
As a cleric living at the beginning of the industrial revolution, he did not correctly predict just how much that revolution would allow more people to be supported.
Then the so called green revolution came along. Another technology improvement that allows more people to be fed for less.
Want to know another failure? People who seem to think that we are running below replacment rates.
http://www.worldometers.info/w...
We're still adding, and as long as there is the celebration of Duggarism, we still will.
Now, if I were to look into my scrying mirror to predict how we can support even more people, how about this.....
In the world of the future, assuming that we don't accidentally kill ourselves off, we will be able to support many more people even than now, futrher proving Malthus wrong.
Humans have long since obliterated most other living creatures, and spread out to most livable space on the earth, and found moving underground as a cost effective place to creat more living room. To feed this number of people, millions of acres of surfce area are filled with vats of algae, with water and nutrients that bubble through the vats. Solar mirrors or nuclear powerd light generation allow great efficiencies of scale, and hundreds of thousands can be fed with the output of each vat. The resultant algae is dried and processed into different food shapes, flavors and textures.
Proteins as well, will be grown in vats.
Fresh water will be needed, so nuclear powered desalination plants will be needed. Most of the surface will be used to provide food and water to the now subterranean human race. Limitations to population growth will be amount of space that people can occupy. As we build down, efficient air conditioning will be needed to keep temperature and humidity at life sustining levels.
I'm making a wild-ass guess of a few trillion people.
As well, instead of the present day size of humans, we can be genetically engineerd to be much smaller. This would have the added advantage of humans using less food per capita, as well as allowing each level of the earth to be at a smaller heights, important as we bore down to create new areas , as each lower level in a sphere has less available area.
Perhaps we can double the number after the big people die off (another interesting issue, with some people believing humans may soon become immortal.
It will be like turning the earth into a sort of reverse Dyson sphere, the energy still coming from the outside, but with many internal shell levels.
And that is within the llimitations of anything I can imagine, humanity could become cave dwellers in the future, and extrapolation of present day technology. Of course, things come along that no one can imagine - all of my ideas are technically feasible using improvements in what we know now.
That would prove Malthus wrong for a long, long time.
Doesn't sound like my idea of fun, but hey, it's almost like a lot of us living in Mom's basement, surviving on Cheetos and Red Bull. Ahead of the curve.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Labor force participation rates are not a measure of net change in the size of the work pool.
NEWS FLASH: People know how to milk the government safety net systems. AND THEY DO. AND IT'S ALLOWED, AND IN FACT, ENCOURAGED.
When I see an unemployed female, with 4 kids and another on the way, with no job but still able to drive an Escalade and purchase designer jeans and jewelry, there's obviously something wrong with the social safety net. Because, to this demographic (and there are lots and lots of these out there), the social safety net is the employer, and the job is simply having more and more kids. This kind of unchecked abuse is exactly what is destroying the programs that are supposed to help the sick, and those who have fallen on unfortunate times to bouy them until they can again support themselves.
When the program has "evolved" (or been bastardized enough by political correctness) to where a normal, healthy person can make a living sitting at home on the program having kids, rather than going out and getting a job to support themselves and their family and contribute to the workforce and the country, and that program allows the behavior, there's a problem with the program. It's no longer a safety net, it's now a drain on society and unfair to those who do indeed work and produce and support those sitting on their collective asses. And they absolutely hate it when that is pointed out.
Let the flaming begin.
You used the term "work pool", not me. It's not a term from economics, so I had to guess at what you mean.
Labor force participation rates multiplied by population size tell you the absolute number of jobs that are filled in the economy. If automation destroyed jobs, those would have to go down. But for most of last half century, they have gone up.
If that observation doesn't satisfy you, you need to clarify what you mean by "work pool".
You used the term "work pool", not me. It's not a term from economics, so I had to guess at what you mean.
It wasn't my choice, a previous poster used it and I just rolled with it. Basically the "work pool" would be the sum of all jobs we'd like people to do if there were human labor available and no automation existed that could do it better. It's a superset that includes the jobs currently in the economy as well as ones that aren't but could be. Humanity has traditionally had a labor shortage that prevented us from filling all of the jobs in the work pool. For example, many manufacturing jobs were in the pool, making more shovels for example, but farming took precedence until enough labor was automated out of that sector to make it worthwhile. There are other ways to explain this phenomenon of course.
I live in New Orleans...I've seen the numerous projects here...thankfully we're getting rid (finally) of most of the post Katrina, but there are some still here and yes, I know what they are like.
Agreeing to disagree is cool...that's part of rational discourse, something that is unfortunately fading in the US these days. But I'm good with it.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
That is a meaningless statement. "Jobs" aren't quantifiable that way because the demand for labor is elastic.
There is always an infinite number of jobs available. The only way that anybody ever can't get a job is if you artificially prevent them from taking a job or if you pay them more in government aid than they would be paid for working.
But the problem there isn't with automation, it's with society's standards of "worthwhile". If you're willing to live in a home-built shack with an outhouse and eat potatoes all the time, you can live more cheaply today than you could a century ago and hardly need to work at all. That guy whose job was supposedly "automated away" would be able to make ends meet with much less work than he used to. But in most places, you simply can't legally live like that, and you receive numerous government support programs that will end up degrading you to the status of a jobless welfare dependent.
The fact that some people can't or won't work is not the result of less jobs being available, it's the result of government imposing a minimum cost of living on everybody, while at the same time imposing minimum pay and hours on employers. Automation is not a cause but a consequence of those effects: given that market situation, employers need to find alternatives to expensive labor, and they do in the form of automation.
Because all white people are from the same culture? If you actually lived here, you would see cultural difference everywhere, when i go to the local shops, i see Chinese, greeks, Italians, Thais, Somalis and many more every time.
I dontbknow what dream world you are getting your "facts" from, but it bears no resmblance to reality.
And she has a boyfriend who finances her idiocy. Nobody gets escalades from gubmint handouts except defense contractors, and even they have to do a little work. You're just spouting stereotypes. That story can't stand up to a moment's scrutiny.
Don't step on the baby.
I wish business folks and conservative pundits would stop pretending that the minimum wage going up/down is somehow motivating owners to automate. Every single business with any labor costs is going to be 100% automated regardless of the minimum wage if there exists a robot/machine that can do the job cheaply (which, for most types of service/labor work, will happen in every single industry eventually).
And at that point in time, when even something like a programming job can be fully automated, it will be time to vote for a different society. A post scarcity society, with a guaranteed minimum income for just being alive.
There are a ton of sci-fi books that describe a post scarcity society, and they are all share one thing in common: it will not be the status quo anymore. The major motivators and power structures of society will shift. And it isn't something that a 'bad' congress can even prevent, no matter how many bribes they take to maintain the status quo.
The day that technology can fully replace most skilled labor, is the day that technology will likely be cheap enough for most people to own it. And once most people can own most, if not all, of the means of production to live, the concept of "for profit" is going to disappear. At least from the raw resource / manufacturing standpoint. I'm sure we will invent new luxuries that people 'must have'. But all the old ones will be gone. If I can throw a shovel of dirt into my 'nano forge' and out pops a diamond, it will be a new world. 3d printers are a baby first step.
Anon coward, repeating conservative talking points. Must be an election year.
Corporations simple pass any added taxes and costs on to the customer.
Bullshit. Corporations charge the highest possible price the market will pay, always. Lowering their taxes isn't going to lower their prices, as if they have some responsibility to pass the savings along... They will keep the price as high as people are willing to pay. Taxes are irrelevant to that equation.
No, we do actually get it. Mr Puzler is not responsible. You are 100 percent correct.
You were so on track here, then it went off the rails...
ther really cool thing is, if in a hypothetical situation, everyone gets rid of all their employees, and the whole industry collapses, no one at all is responsible, Innocent as teh day they were born.
A good gig if you can get it.
That is indeed a possible problem, but it is one for society to solve, not Mr. Puzder.
Seriously, we understand 100 percent that you don't hold him responsible for shortsighted and unltimately self destructive actions.
They are not short-sighted for HIM or his COMPANY... Perhaps society, but that is not his problem to fix, nor is he in any position to do anything about it.
Old Heny Ford had a lot of strange ideas, but the idea of having employees who could buy stuff wasn't one of them.
Henry Ford lived in another time, a lot of what he wanted to do wouldn't work today.
I wish business folks and conservative pundits would stop pretending that the minimum wage going up/down is somehow motivating owners to automate.
It pushes them to do it sooner.
If Bernie was elected and got a $15/min wage put into place overnight, you'd see a mad scramble to push automation forward more quickly.
Yes, it will happen everywhere, our current economic system won't survive that, but that's ok, maybe it shouldn't. The transition won't be pleasant however as the existing people in power hold very tightly to that power and won't let go easily.
Which is why I laugh when liberals want to give up their guns. You'll need them to change the economic system, I don't think it'll happen without a civil war. I would be pleased to be proven wrong, but I think it'll come to that before it changes.
And really, we do not want a large number of unemployed young males with a lot of time on their hands? No - we don't.
A basic income would go a long way towards addressing that concern...
They can work 10-15 hours a week serving the state, cleaning roads, learning a trade, whatever... The rest of the time, they can play video games...
That is clearly where it is going in the long run, as robots end up being able to make everything we all need. The trade off will be government controls on who can breed, which will not make everyone happy, but we'll have to have that to go along with a basic income.
On the face of it that sounds like a system that will put the bulk of the tax burden on the middle classes and serves neither the conservative "taxes fund expenditure" nor modern "taxes are for controlling inflation, wealth distribution and behaviour" objectives. It appears to be aimed at serving "elites" - either those who have inherited large amounts of wealth (so do not need high incomes to live in luxury), or who are able to easily hide their wealth outside the system (ie: highly-mobile, highly-paid expatriate types) while leaving the average grunt to pay all the tax.
Ideally, I think you would aim to tax primarily wealth, with a relatively high tax-free threshold, relatively low rate throughout the middle-income range (say, up to about 5x median where most white collar professionals start to top out), then a steady increase to very high (75%+) marginal rates at the top end (say, 25x median and upwards).
The predictable "granny can't pay her taxes because she's on the pension so she'll get kicked out of her house" complaint is trivially addressed by accruing the taxes payable against the estate to be paid out after death.
They are not short-sighted for HIM or his COMPANY... Perhaps society, but that is not his problem to fix, nor is he in any position to do anything about it.
As Carly Fiorina is my witness, many CEO's make bad decisions, short-sighted decisions. Happens every day. And your comments indicate you have already declared Puzler's idea a winner before it is even implemented.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
This is only inevitable if ALL businesses act like this (or if all customers are customers of your business, and of no other business). That, or the word "inevitable" doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
I suppose one would have to look at the actual typical incomes of the "rich" relative to their wealth compared to the middle class and perform the integrations to see where the bulk of the tax burden would actually lie, but I don't think it will be as skewed toward the middle class as one might think. How would this proposal benefit 'elites', who right now have huge gains (not counted as income, but should be) on their huge capital? I would treat all capital gains as income, the same as any other income from any sale of any asset or any wage. Income is income is income. This proposed scheme also avoids the madness that allows depreciation to offset income; depreciation in this proposal would just reduce the tax rate based on wealth percentile, rather than reducing the taxable income. So if you've got a billion dollars in capital that depreciates 5%, you can't write it off against $50M of what would otherwise be profit; you'd still get taxed (at a slightly lower rate) on that $50M rather than on $0. I'd wager that would make a huge difference, especially for corporate taxes.
Also remember that for a rich person to enjoy wealth, assets must be liquidated (because most rich people don't live the high life off their cash, but off their assets) and if you count that liquidation as income (which you should), it would be taxed. You also don't really have to worry about the rich taking out loans backed against their assets, again, because to repay the loan they'd have to liquidate an asset.
As for expatriating wealth...I suppose in the limit there might be some person who has no "recorded" wealth and continuously funnels all their income overseas; I grant that's a flaw. After thinking about it, a simple (if anything can be "simple") export tariff could be established based on the ratio of accumulated exported funds to accounted-for-wealth. So if your exported funds are extremely high compared to recorded wealth, they are tariffed at a huge rate (90%+ I'd say; you could make it a form like tax rate = amount you want to expat / (10/9 * amount to expat + recorded wealth) to put it at 90% if you declare zero wealth). So if you have underreported your wealth and are exporting funds, this wouldn't be a huge benefit. So that would work from a tax standpoint, and would keep funds local, and help people store wealth overseas (by limiting how much they can send out), but I don't know what other ill effects would result because of it; the most obvious ill effect is penalizing the relatively poor sending large amounts of their income to poor international relatives.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
If Bernie was elected and got a $15/min wage put into place overnight, you'd see a mad scramble to push automation forward more quickly.
Evidence for that? Because cities that have that already implemented 15/hr wages have not seen a rush to automate. At least, I've never heard of San Fran or Seattle having all their McDonalds automated overnight or anything like that.
But look at it another way: If you make 7 bucks an hour, you are very likely to need government assistance to make ends meet.
Would you rather have a large segment of adults (more adults make min. wage than 18-20 year olds by far) earning 7 dollars an hour, supplemented by food stamps and other government handouts, or would you rather have the 'bottom' wage be liveable, and people able to support themselves without government assistance?
I'm kinda sick of my tax dollars subsidizing Walmart's workforce. And I'd rather reward people who are working with the dignity to be able to afford their own food.
And the real nail in the coffin, so to speak, is that goods and services do become that much more expensive even when doubling wages. Last time I saw the numbers run, a Big Mac would cost 50 cents more. That is way worth it to me if 90% of people could live without government handouts.
Evidence for that? Because cities that have that already implemented 15/hr wages have not seen a rush to automate.
I don't mean to be rude, but please, put on the critical thinking hat.
When one or two cities raise the min wage, there isn't enough of a reason to invest the billions of dollars required to replace half the workers in McDonalds with robots.
When it happens NATIONALLY, then there is now reason to do it.
It is far easier to just raise prices a bit in those areas where the wages went up, than to spend billions to replace a few thousand people. Make min wage $15/hr nationally, and that changes. This is why it hasn't happened in Australia, where min wage is already over $15/hr, because with only 22 million people, the market isn't big enough. But it is starting down that road.
http://fortune.com/2016/03/23/...
Dominos in Australia is testing robot delivery today with the goal of rolling it out nationally in 2-3 years. It is getting too expensive to hire people to do this.
Would you rather have a large segment of adults (more adults make min. wage than 18-20 year olds by far) earning 7 dollars an hour, supplemented by food stamps and other government handouts, or would you rather have the 'bottom' wage be liveable, and people able to support themselves without government assistance?
You left out option 3: Would you rather have large segment of adults out of work completely and needing all $15/hr in the form of government assistance?
You don't think that can happen, but it can.
I'm kinda sick of my tax dollars subsidizing Walmart's workforce.
Would you prefer they lay off half the workforce and replace them with robots?
https://youtu.be/rVlhMGQgDkY
Seriously, it isn't THAT far off... Atlas now works without a tether and on rough ground... Another few years and that robot may well stock shelves in a Walmart better than humans do.
And the real nail in the coffin, so to speak, is that goods and services do become that much more expensive even when doubling wages. Last time I saw the numbers run, a Big Mac would cost 50 cents more. That is way worth it to me if 90% of people could live without government handouts.
I don't disagree, you're right, it won't double prices to do it...
But consider that if Atlas up there can make your Big Mac and the price went DOWN 50 cents rather than UP 50 cents, you might like that even more.
BTW, why do you want people making burgers anyway? It is a stupid job, let robots do it.
If I could teleport to the year 2150, I'd be shocked if we didn't have a basic income at that point with robots making everything anyway. I just don't think it will be pretty getting there, the current people in power will fight tooth and nail along the way.
That was added to Tay yesterday. AIs can learn!
(Not that Tay isn't anything more than a rehashed 30 year old Eliza program. M$ sucks.)
This entire thread is based on a false idea that if people are thrown out of minimum wage jobs that they'll be unemployed forever.
This has been proven countless times since the 1700's to be absolutely false.
Once a technological innovation disrupts employment - the loom, the cotton gin, the computer, the combine planter/harvester, the robot - those who were displaced from employment find new jobs in higher paying sectors, at least in the aggregate. How many file clerks do you know? Know anybody picking corn, wheat, or soybeans by hand? Yet unemployment is around 5%.
The people slinging burgers will find new work. They'll have to. New employment opportunities will open up; they always have.
But these are the hamburger slingers that are being put out to the street by automation. Are you saying that its only one automation site and only those workers will be on the street.
What about your own job. When AI automates it out of existence, do you have skills to adapt, or will you look to maintaining the automation, the hamburger flipping machines.
The bottom line is "Businesses are for profit and for society", A business that produces reasonable profit (define reasonable), owes society and their employees some kind of security. When society puts them out to the street, you also put out customers. Yes, profits today, but no customers tomorrow.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
And no other jobs come to fill their places?
By your logic, we'd be at 75% unemployment (figure pulled out of my ass, admittedly, but just making a point here...) right now with all the technological advances since the 1970s. What do you think happened to our economy to achieve our current 5% unemployment rate? Are all those file clerks and bookkeepers still out of work or did they find something else to do?
People made the same arguments you're making for every technological leap forward. The net result has always been people thrown out of low wage, miserable jobs have found higher wage, less miserable jobs, given enough time.
It's called Structural Unemployment. It is a problem for workers who are too old to retrain - think people in their upper 50's trying to sprint to retirement - but for the vast majority of the workforce, it's a net benefit in the long run at the cost of a little short term pain.
The unemployment rate is based on people drawing unemployment insurance. When that runs out, they are no longer part of the statistics. I agree if a person has skills and can move onto something better, that this action (automation) is an incentive to do better. Just look at small towns where Walmart arrived. What happened there. Look at the infrastructure of these towns. Is the infrastructure being sustained?
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
"Old Heny Ford had a lot of strange ideas, but the idea of having employees who could buy stuff wasn't one of them."
That was actually secondary.
His primary motivation for increasing wages was to reduce staffing turnover and therefore the highs costs of training new hires or repairing their botchups.
This is the same problem that chinese manufacturers are facing and why some are heavily investing in robots (Foxconn) along the coastal provinces whilst others are taking advange of improved transport links and relocating their factories inland where the employees actually live.
The added cost of the latter course of action is offset by being able to pay lower wages, not having to deal with 25% turnover each year and not having to provide accomodation or evening meals.
"How many file clerks do you know?"
The secondary effects of the loss of such jobs is often missed.
For some reason the largest market for 45rpm single records was 16-18yo female filing clerks. The decline in singles sales since the 1960s _directly_ matches the loss of such jobs with increasing automation.
Making sales 1% of the industry's peak is now a big deal in the top40, when that chart is irrelevant - even lumping streaming sales into the mix makes no dent in the loss of absolute numbers since the end of the 1960s.
The reason the recording industry is getting so nasty about copyrights is because it's increasingly desperate for income. It's acting like a cornered wild animal.
"One machine can work 24 hours straight, displacing three jobs"
More than that. One machine works 24*7 with the lights out, faster than the humans, with no breaks and doesn't require as much supervision, so it's it's more like 3.5 to 4 jobs once you factor in the knock-on effects.
On the other hand, most machines are replacing humans for dirty/inconvenient jobs that noone really wants to do. Fast food is no different in this respect to working in the pickling tanks of an automobile factory (and where the easiest way to replace humans once the really nasty jobs were eliminated was simply to let the existing ones retire, not training replacements).
Additionally, if a machine is reprogrammed to cut corners on cooking time and that results in food poisoning incidents (this is what drove a number of severe outbreaks in London MacDonalds branches in the 1980s-90s and has been fingered in tens of thousands of USA outbreaks) then the blame can be firmly placed on the head of whoever made that change, rather than blaming minimum wage employees who were simply doing what they were told lest they be fired.
"People have been saying we are about to enter that era for 150 years."
It's actually the core of the communist manifesto - what happens in a post-capitalist economy.
The Bolshevecks attempted to leapfrog the capitalist part and it didn't work out so well (what we call "communism" bears little relationship to what Marx originally proposed)
Yeah, economic systems that have to be imposed on a people, will never work as the system put in place by nature.
Well as, damn phone.
"Replacement birthrate in a modern society is ~2.1 U.S, Germany, France and many other countries have a birth rate well BELOW replacement rates."
Closer study of those stats and the underlaying economies leads one to the conclusion that the best way to deal with the population crisis is to actively bring the poor and poor countries out of that privation.
Cheap energy is the key - over the last few hundred years that's been carbon driven, but it's clear we can't continue down that path without poisoning the ecosphere (Anoxic oceanic events are a bigger risk factor than sea level rises) and wind/solarPV are boondoggles. The way forward is nuclear molten salt - and it's increasingly likely that the country selling these will be china. (Fuson won't be viable until it's viable and that is unlikely in the lifetime of even my great grandchildren.)
One of the things to bear in mind is that the big driver of _new_ employment as technologies have obsoleted old ones has seldom been seen coming until it was actually fairly well established. Fast food has existed for centuries but it was the development of automobile strip-malls and production line techniques which allowed it to become a major industry.
At the same time that robotisation allows the turning out of myriad identical meals (or a small set of the same), consumer demand is driving greater individual variation. This is an opposing force which will require more robotic complexity (and hence greater expense) or will result in the spectre of automated fast food joints being a decade-long fad before becoming yet abandoned storefronts along the roadside.
"Most of the surface will be used to provide food and water to the now subterranean human race"
Where the surface is rooftops and subterranean is the lower floors.
It's already starting to happen.
I live in England at the moment. The entire countryside is artificial(*). Farmers are fully aware of that, yet they're facing restrictions on using greenhouses (which are startlingly more efficient than open land and usually result in almost zero application of pesticides) on the basis that they "disrupt the natural character of the countryside"
(*) There is nothing natural whatsoever about green fields or stone walls and even England's woods or forests are almost entirely plantations (the amount of acres of actual 2000+ year old natural wild forest is a number closely approximating zero)
There's also the shell game played in the rates of employment.
1 worker working 1 40-hour/week job is one job.
1 worker working 4 4 hour/week jobs is four jobs.
1 worker on a zero hours contract - and working zero hours - is one job.
Never mind that the latter two cases won't pay the bills for the worker and in the latter case those contracts usually include clauses preventing working for anyone else.
If you want to see _real_ employment stats then always insist on seeing full time equivalent figures
"The steam tractor made a huge difference in the amount of labor required for farming, first in threshing rigs and then in ploughing, and innovation was quite rapid during the industrial revolution. "
Correct. The rapid growth of european cities during the industrial revolution was a direct result of people having the choice of staying put in the countryside and starving to death or moving to cities, taking shitty pay and not starving to death.
"A lot of people have been hired to develop, use, and maintain the software systems that are involved in legal cases in the 21st century."
But not as many as the clerks that were replaced. That's why e-discovery continues expanding.
I now believe in reincarnation.
Welcome back, Ned Ludd!
P.S. There have been some remarkable theoretical and empirical developments in economics while you were away. You may want to look into them.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
"They're always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there's never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case," says Puzder in regard to replacing employees with machines." And, even more importantly, they never fail to understand an order, regardless of the speaker's accent, special orders don't upset them, they need no maintenance, need no repair, never crash, and, if they don't work out, they can easily be fired and replaced with a walk-in, simply by placing a "HELP WANTED" sign in the window.
Require a certain amount of on-site human attendance across various skill levels.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Remember how they told us that there would be no IT jobs left in the US because everything can be done so much cheaper in India?
Yet the entry to that line of work has been negatively impacted by (fraud-based) offshoring. They're right, you're wrong.
For the case of burger flipping, that means the entry to *any* kind of work is negatively impacted by HR-demanded robotics.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Really? I personally witness this DAILY. They CAN and DO get enough to live a lifestyle that's above and beyond what a normal, middle-class double-income family does. This is NOT a stereotype, this is observation.
Is there a boyfriend? Possibly. Live in? Probably. Unclaimed for "gubmint handouts" as you so redneck-edly put it? Definitely. But typically, they don't hold down jobs either. They bounce around between jobs, never keeping one for very long.
I really don't care if you believe me or not. I am not here to convince you or anyone else. But this is happening, every day, and those who really really need the help are not getting it because of this kind of abuse.