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As Robots Eat Our Jobs, Fed Should 'Drop the Money From Helicopters,' Says Bill Gross (janus.com)
As technology continues to change the world -- and kill many jobs -- it may soon change the very nature of what is considered work, said Bill Gross, a renowned American financial manager in his recently released investment outlook. Gross says that in a year or so we will need to start guaranteeing income for everyone. Gross, added that the current crop of national leaders is hopelessly behind the curve, leaving it to central bankers to fix the mess. "Our economy has changed, but voters and their elected representatives don't seem to know what's really wrong," he writes. "They shout: (1) build a wall, (2) balance the budget, (3) foot the bill for college, or (4) make free trade less free. "That will fix it" they discordantly proclaim, and after November's election some unlucky soul may do one or more of the above in an effort to make things better. Similar battles are being fought everywhere." The Sydney Morning Herald reports: Central bank "helicopter money" will avoid a long recession that looms as millions of millennials face losing their jobs to robot technology, Gross says. In news that is sure to depress anyone under the age of 30, Gross says that while presidential hopefuls in the US spout mantras about how they are going to spur growth, none are addressing the reality of the future: that robots and technology are going to render "millions" of jobs redundant. "Virtually every industry in existence is likely to become less labour-intensive in future years as new technology is assimilated into existing business models," Gross writes. Transport is a visible example of this transition and millions of truck and taxi drivers will be out of a job in the next 10 to 15 years due to driverless vehicles, he says. "We should spend money where it's needed most -- our collapsing infrastructure for instance, health care for an aging generation and perhaps on a revolutionary new idea called UBI -- Universal Basic Income."
is just a bunch of robots. SKYNET drops the money as human bait.
Hooray! I'm in my mid 40's and if I'm lucky I'll die of ass cancer in the next 5-10 years! Sucks to be the millenials, their future is much less bright!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Transport is a visible example of this transition and millions of truck and taxi drivers will be out of a job in the next 10 to 15 years due to driverless vehicles,
Visible? I don't see it. Nor do I see putting everyone on welfare as a good plan.
This makes me sick.
The concept of helicopter money's been making the rounds as a more effective alternate to QE money (QE gives the money to governments, who may end up spending it unwisely), but it should be noted that it's a direct response to deflationary pressures around the world that's attacking currencies and sapping credit. Helicopter money the economic concept is only meant to be applied until the threat of deflation goes away - a UBI is a social policy, not a fiscal one.
It would be interesting to explore how a UBI would affect the core consumer price index. My suspicion is that the US might be the only country that could pull it off, only because the dollar is the world's standard reserve currency.
Spilled my drink once I got to "leaving it to central bankers to fix the mess".... Smells like another scam
Bill Gross is a con artist and part of the 0.000001% and made billions through junk bonds. Don't trust anything he says.
But it'll be GREAT!
Just like social security!
Oh wait, that's broke.
Dropping condoms from helicopters would seem to be more effective.
Analysts have been puzzled why inflation has been so low, compared to a typical recovery. Economies typically do best at roughly around 2.2 to 2.5 percent inflation per year. But we've been hovering around 1.7%.
It appears our GDP capability is expending due to automation and outsourcing, yet our money supply is not expending to match. Thus, we have too many idle people and factories.
"Printing money" is one way to make them match. You don't risk runaway inflation if the capacity to produce is expending.
Many dictatorships and non-democracies willingly subsidize the cost of their nation's labor because unemployed people riot and overthrow dictatorships. Thus, they keep their population busy and fed using various gimmicks to under-price their nation's labor (relative to consumption). Therefore, they are practically giving away free labor to protect their position of power.
Robots and de-facto slaves are available to make more stuff, if only the money supply is freed up to allow them.
(The morality of such de-facto slavery is perhaps an issue to be dealt with, but for here I'm focusing on just the economy and money supply.)
Table-ized A.I.
if you don't like to do what the future has to offer then sign up for a one way trip to Mars. Crying because you got a degree in basket weaving using unobtainium is of little help or value.
I'm really sick to death of these idiots saying that hamfisted intervention in the economy (like shitting out trillions of magic rubber inflatobucks from the fed) can produce good results.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
At this point I'm pretty sure that this is all some sort of false flag type thing designed to make the idea of UBI sound so ridiculously stupid that it kills it dead then salts the earth around it and spreads radioactive shit all around in order to make sure that anyone who dares approach the carcass drops dead.
Wake me when we are ready to have a serious discussion about eliminating all of the welfare bureaucracy and replacing dozens of scattershot programs with a single check.
What will happen to all the robots producing fluorescent lights that will lose their jobs once all the other industries are taken over by robots that can work in the dark? How will they afford hydrolic fluid replacements and filter cleanings?
The simple solution is to move to a 20 hour work week.
But it'll never happen.
40 hours is enough to enslave us. 20 will let us explore on our own free will and surely will cause trouble for the illuminati.
You must understand that Bill Gross was speaking in jest. He's a lifelong bond investor and the inflation he predicts from this strategy is anathema to bonds. Now he wouldn't mind some inflation if it meant the net interest rates would rise as a result (ie, interest on bonds minus inflation) but he doesn't expect that from the strategy he proposes in the article. Again, it was written in jest.
the 8-year-old-girl Nike shoe-making model that operates for 18-cents a day will be released for purchase
at those rates I won't need money, I'll have minions
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
I'm constantly amazed by the fact that americans are all pretty happy to acknowledge that their status quo rather bad, yet they are not willing to look for the reasons nor even talk about changing any aspect of the system.
It must be quite a feat of mental gymnastics to demand that everything somehow change for the better while everything remains the same. A three year old might find this idea reasonable, but grown men and women? Come on, this is a textbook definition of an idiot - someone who does the same thing over and over again expecting the results to differ.
As an outsider, it seems to me that most of what americans believe about politics, society and the human nature is rather a twisted picture indeed. Accepting the problem is the first step towards a solution, and luckily, usually the hardest. Yet the steps must be taken, otherwise things will only get worse.
FCKGW 09F9 42
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
transition and millions of truck and taxi drivers will be out of a job in the next 10 to 15 years due to driverless vehicles,
How long have we been saying driverless vehicles will be 10-15 years away?
As H-1Bs continue to change the work force -- and kill many jobs -- it may soon change the very nature of what is considered work, said Jim Bryan, a simple network admin. Jim says that in a year or so we will need to start guaranteeing income for US Citizens. Jim, added that the current crop of national leaders is hopelessly behind the curve, leaving it to central bankers to fix the mess.
Central bank "helicopter money" will avoid a long recession that looms as older workers and millions of millennials face losing their jobs to H-1B contract labor. In news that is sure to depress anyone under the age of 30, Jim says that while presidential hopefuls in the US spout mantras about how they are going to spur coding, none are addressing the reality of the future: that H-1Bs and technology are going to render "millions" of jobs out of reach of the middle class and new college graduates. "Virtually every technology industry in existence is likely to become more dependent on H-1B contract labor in future years as new jobs are assimilated into existing business models," Jim writes. Coding is a visible example of this transition and millions of software engineers, server admins, and network admins will be out of a job in the next 10 to 15 years due to driverless congressmen, he says. "We should spend money where it's needed most -- our collapsing K-12 education system for instance, boot camps for lazy, whiney, millennials, and perhaps on a revolutionary new idea called PAF -- Put Americans First."
Picture of Bill Gross as he was writing this article
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
I am all for a basic income, but 10K is not going to get people off the streets. Beggars on the streets make more than that based of donated pocket-change. 10K is an eat-shit-and-die income. It should be a LIVING WAGE. Not extravagant living, but you shouldn't have to eat cat food and live in a toxic trailer on it. Printing more debt-based currency will only set us up for a larger fail further down the road. The people need to take control of their currency again and END THE FED.
This guy is a complete moron. He manages largest privately held bond fund, he wants his bonds to be propped up by printing, he wants to be 'made whole' when his fund goes belly up (and it will). What he does not seem to understand or care about is that bonds are promises to pay dollars in the future. Well, his idea is leading towards destruction of the dollar itself. He mentions Ron and Rand Paul in his idiotic piece there as well, saying that 'they would be good at it', at what? At dropping dollars out of helicopters? He is a complete nincompoop, Ron Paul stands for sound market money, he is 100% against fiat and fiat printing and always argues against easy money.
Bill Gross proves this: in the age of fake money even a braindead zombie can 'manage a fund'.
You can't handle the truth.
Someone or something has to manage the supply of money. It doesn't manage itself. And always keeping it the same can create problems. Capacity and population typically expand over time, not always at the same rate. Keeping the money supply the same doesn't make sense under such changes.
The gold standard has been suggested to force a consistent standard, but there are a boatload of potential problems with it. Experiment on a smaller country first.
And why not try to patch the holes in the business cycle (boom/bust cylces)? The business cycle has been happening for 400 odd years, and so is not caused by Keynesian economics.
Keynesian economics done right is a form of common sense: save up during the good times so you have spending money for the bad times. I see nothing really wrong that.
Politicians often spend during the good times instead of save up, but they'd do it also without Keynes. You can't blame Keynes for stupid politicians (and stupid voters). If humans don't plan, don't blame the few who attempt to plan.
Table-ized A.I.
It boils down to who can afford it. A basic income is impossible to afford for any country.
Look at Venezuela to see what fuck-ups that type of socialistic thinking brings.
they are not willing to look for the reasons
The reasons are obvious, and generally acknowledged. They are:
1. Technology
2. Globalisation
3. Regressive taxes
nor even talk about changing any aspect of the system.
Everybody talks about changing the system. The problem is that they disagree on the solution.
Maybe he should drop himself from a helicopter?
Liberalism is a mental disorder.
No that is Einstein's definition of insanity. Idiot isn't even English, it's Athenian. And it's definition is a person who thinks their wants are more important than everyone else's needs.
Tell you what: capitalize Americans next time you post, or we'll come over there and depose your tyrant head of state.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Neo-Luddites are always right. I mean, they've always been right with their predictions before, right? And surely, they fully understand economics too, because greater productivity, i.e. greater efficiency, which leads to specialization of labor, has made us all starving brutes.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Why does Slashdot keep running these stories about basic income from Hacker News? Are you stupid?
FTFY
Maybe if you're en engineer... But low level jobs like fast food, cashier, taxi drivers, trucker and what not? Those will be gone because they can easily be replaced by "robots" and AI. Where will the people who aren't qualified for any more advanced job go? To hell ? Great thinking! Thanks for only thinking about yourself like all the other jackasses on Slashdot.
The people who shout "build a wall" are not the same people who shout "pay for our college" as the article implies. Some out of touch moron wrote it, and some out of touch moron threw it up on slashdot.
The Fed helicopters don't fly over normal people. They only have the ability to dump money on banks via mechanisms such as rates so low that the banks can arbitrage. None of that money goes where it's needed to stimulate the economy.
AFAIK, only Congressional helicopters could deliver money to you and I, like they did with the stimulus checks a few years ago. It's almost certainly a fool's errand anyway, since it would screw up the dollar economy via runaway inflation if you did it too much.
IMHO, it would be better to simply extend services like food stamps and housing subsidies to people who would usually be in higher income brackets. Particular sectors of the economy might be weakened, but you wouldn't destroy the monetary system wholesale. People who wanted something better than government cheese would still be encouraged to innovate, strive, and keep progress and productivity humming.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Dropping young people into volcanos has a history of not being all that sure after all
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There are two ways to get rich in the stock market:
* Win the lottery
* Rig the game
Please tell us which of the two you find more likely and why.
So ... capitalism is idiotic, I get it?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
People have been worried about losing their jobs to automation for at least a couple of hundred years. Is there some reason it's suddenly a hot topic? (Is it going to be for real this time?)
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Politicians often spend during the good times instead of save up,
Yep, it looks like we Aussies are at the end of a 30yr long mining boom driven by the expansion of China's infrastructure, it is the longest continuous growth streak for any economy in modern times and we have very little to show from it. Successive conservative (hah) governments pissed it away on tax breaks to miners and cuts to the top tax income tax rate. We are now wondering who's going to pay for lunch tomorrow?
Norway is a counterexample to that very common boom/bust scenario. They taxed the hell out of oil companies during the North Sea oil boom (knowing the boom would end one day), they reinvested the taxes in health and education. The boom is long gone but they were left with a world class health/education system, an educated workforce, and are still regularly at the top of standard of living charts.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
How many bank tellers do you know? Yes, they still exist, but as someone who grew up in the 70s and 80s, I can tell you that most of those jobs are gone - done by robots. And the maintenance on an ATM doesn't even come close to the number of hours it eliminates at the teller window.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I think Mr. Gross should look up the definition of hyperinflation. Sure, you can have free money, but you'll need a wheelbarrow full of it to buy groceries.
How long will it take to do away with the trade system as we know it? I envision a future where production is fully automated and 100% robotic. ALL the jobs are gone. There is a fleet of robots whose sole purpose is to maintain the robots. The robots make more better robots. Goods no longer cost any human time to produce.
Soon the burger factory will have burgers piled to the sky, the car factory will run out of horizontal space and start stacking them and the breweries all over the world will finally have more beer than we can all drink. The owner will stand between these burger mountains/car stacks, and the starving people, rightly demanding payment for his investment.
The big question is: How many will die for the mountains of food and beer and shit before everybody realizes that the only things scarce enough to merit payment anymore are time and human companionship? Will the whole system crumble, or will we finally usher in the golden age of humanity.... or something completely different?
I just removed 9/10 of this post, I really started rambling like an even more crazy person towards the end there...... Boy! Its an exciting time to be alive!
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
Wow. He looks just like one of those Republicans. They're so hateful. So hateful. Their hate is expressed from their humours onto their skin and makes them be this way. It's why Cruz looks like hate. So much like hate. It's how he be.
Morons like Gross are why the US has $18T in debt.
I knew he was bad even before he raped me.
That's how they be.
No, the reasons are foundational and so deeply ingrained that Americans can't see them. It's policies like:
In the land of opportunity, one can lift oneself by one's own bootstraps
Rich people/corporations must be rewarded for being 'job creators'
Corporations have more rights than people
Privatization can fix government/poverty
Socialism is evil
When middle-class America stops enforcing those lies, then agreement will be much closer.
And eyes. You can always tell conservatives by their eyes.
Their kind rapes constantly.
I would say you need to go deeper than that.
Technology in itself is neutral. Why is it a problem? Who are the people who abuse it, what are their incentives, how is it that they are in a position to create problems out of technology?
Globalisation in moderation is quite nice. I mean you like foreign food, goods, people, culture. How has globalisation then evolved into a situation where it craps on everything it touches?
Regressive taxes. Well a society can structure taxes whatever way it likes, there is no right or wrong way besides suitability for a purpose. When I look at the situation in the US, I get more of an impression that the problem is that all the people hate all the taxes. Well taxes are your goddamn phone bill, you do not argue against paying your bills, do you? With taxes you split the bill to purchase services, whether the reason is to save on cost, improve on quality or just make the service happen at all. You all want police, roads and schools, and you want them to be good, right? Then put up or shut up, pay your way and get some QA and accountability into the process.
The thing with reasons is that you need to always look deeper into them. What are the reasons of the reasons? What are the reasons of the reasons of the reasons? You need to find the root reasons and solve those, then you have the possibility for improvement. When you are sick, you don't treat the symptoms, you treat the illness.
FCKGW 09F9 42
I find it funny that we are still doing the 2009, "Obama took our jerbs!" argument, when a simple google search could disprove that republican fantasy right away.
It unfortunately doesn't help when the republicans in question, don't want to change their views in the face of new evidence. This is why Trump is dominating the republican nomination. The GOP is literally falling apart!
Why would the US do better with socialism than say Venezuela, Cuba or North Korea? And before you say Nordic States, remember those are all capitalistic market economies.
It must be quite a feat of mental gymnastics to demand that everything somehow change for the better while everything remains the same. A three year old might find this idea reasonable, but grown men and women?
And for both a Bill Maher reference and a car analogy, here he is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
And it makes good sense.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I've held this as a fun talking point for years. It's a fantastic way for a liberal like myself to break down barriers to discourse with hardcore conservatives about socialist ideology. It's clear that the jobs we are losing to automation are not being replaced by new industries at a fast enough pace to keep our ever growing population at full employment. We need to re-imagine the core of our society in much the same way as we changed during industrialization before the problem comes to a head, or we face the same or even greater pains many of the industrialized nations felt the last time society underwent such massive restructuring.
Wow, critical of the critique, while not pointing out any flaws therein. That has got to be the most original viewpoint I've ever read anywhere.
Tell you what: how about you depose of your own tyrant heads of state first and then we'll see if we can find mine in my run-of-the-mill western democracy.
FCKGW 09F9 42
Which is how they have so many children.
It's not really disagreeing with a solution - there's only been one solution put forward that I've even seen.
There is a very obvious problem of mass unemployment and automation, which is being soundly ignored by a lot of people. Most just flat out refuse to believe it's happening (There will ALWAYS be more jobs!), others accept it but want everyone to suffer (If you can't feed yourself and find a job, fuck you go starve to death).
If people don't like the idea of a guaranteed basic income, then I encourage them to come up with alternative solutions to mass unemployment due to automation, rather than just sitting back and criticizing every single proposed solution and doing nothing to actually contribute.
I'm not married to this GBI concept, but if there's nothing better to solve our economic situation, then I'm sorry but that's exactly what I'm going to vote for and support.
I'm constantly amazed by the fact that americans are all pretty happy to acknowledge that their status quo rather bad, yet they are not willing to look for the reasons nor even talk about changing any aspect of the system.
You're probably talking to Americans who have it alright. So they're saying, "yeah, it's bad (for other people, but I don't have problems)." As soon as it's someone else's problem, there's little motivation to do anything about it.
For example, we can all see that homelessness is a problem in SF, but we mostly ignore it. There are only 7,000 homeless people in SF, amongst a population of a million. If each of us gave a dollar a day, the problem would be easily solved. But when was the last time you gave a dollar to a homeless person? Not very often, if you're average.
tl'dr: the problems in America are the problems of poor people.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
There is an alternative to GBI, and that's public works - the government makes sure that if there are 200 million people that there are 200 million public works jobs available. They could range from childcare to visual arts and engineering. Anything at all that requires a person rather than a machine. Then people have to apply for the positions. This would inspire a little bit of competition and could help satisfy the notion of 'work ethic' that some people have (and seem to want to enforce on other people). The obvious drawback is that it would mean a massivly centralised and centrally controlled government, but hey if a superior AI is contoling everything that might be a good thing.
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
To give a dollar for a homeless guy? Preposterous. If America ever taught me anything, it's that helping thy neighbor is socialism and God hates you for that.
FCKGW 09F9 42
You point to regressive taxes as the reason for Globalization being "abused" but you are overlooking the much larger problem of wage shopping. If you can have a product made for 1/10th the wages and shipped to your country through a plethora of trade agreements that make the shipping as fast and cheap as possible then that's what is going to happen. There is also the differences in labor laws. Steve Jobs once said one of the reasons Apple manufactures in China is they can make a change in their product lines and overnight Foxconn will have every one of their million or so employees working 12 hour shifts servicing that change.
Foxconn's employees live in barracks and they can pull in prisoners and students if they need to and work them as many hours as they want. There's no way that would ever happen in a modern Western nation unless our economy went seriously downhill.
Whatever you subsidize, you get more of. If SF was the best place to get money as a homeless person, you would not see a decline in the number of homeless people.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
There is a very obvious problem of mass unemployment and automation
No there isn't. Unemployment is at 5%, with is basically full employment. Workforce participation isn't back to where it was in 2007, but basically nearly everyone that wants a job can find one. The problem is that the jobs being offered are not very good, and wages are stagnant.
If automation was happening on a massive scale, productivity would be soaring. But productivity is stagnant and barely rising at all. Many manufacturing jobs were lost to automation in the 1970s and 1980s, but that process has mostly run its course, and service jobs, which dominate today's economy, are proving much harder to automate.
Someday, robots may steal all our jobs, but there is very little evidence of that happening today.
I see nothing really wrong that.
Theory and practice are two different things. Do you see anything wrong with spending all of your money on frivolous things during the good times and then be the stuck with a bill during the bad times? How do you enforce discipline on something that has resisted it for millennia? Maybe we should figure out that problem first.
And before you say Nordic States, remember those are all capitalistic market economies.
They also have small homogenous populations, with lots of natural resources, including plenty of offshore oil.
If you take Denmark's system and apply it to America, you get Detroit.
I've been trying to think why suddenly there's all these stories about the government giving out handouts. I didn't clue into why till just now. It's the stupid bankers thinking that their jobs are going to be outsourced. So of course they want another bail out. You didn't hear all this whining about give me money when manufacturing jobs were either being automated or going over seas. Then most of the ivory tower types were claiming that people needed to go back to school and learn a new career.
Where the fuck is this magic money supposed to come from, and if every single person has $10,000 new dollars to spend how does that stop everything from increasing that much in price?
The problem is that we're running up against the limits of the ability of resource utilization to keep up with population growth. The more of us there are, the less resources there are for each of us. Everybody is ignoring this fundamental fact because there's no way to address it with out current economic models. The market needs growth. It cannot function with a static or shrinking economy because nobody would invest in capital for zero or negative returns.
That's the dumbest reason I've ever heard for not helping a person.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You don't quite get it; capitalism is not idiotic, it's intelligence neutral. It's also morally neutral, it's amoral. Which means we need a system of morality to go along with it. True capitalism is not a system, it's the lack of a system.
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
My comment was responding to the idea that you could somehow cure the "homeless problem" (which is, to most people, the problem of having to see homeless people) by giving people money. Nope. You can feel better about yourself, however, which is the usual goal.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
....you really *would* think somebody like Gates would understand how the economy works.
But I guess not.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
the "homeless problem" (which is, to most people, the problem of having to see homeless people)
Those people can die in a fire.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
But everytime somebody proposes a minimum wage that people can live on to correct the "jobs being offered are not very good, and wages are stagnant" problem we're told that this would instantly trigger the automation of all those jobs as well.
The problem is real - and it's only being held at bay by keeping wages so depressed that people *with* jobs are still needing welfare - basically by having taxpayers supplement each other's incomes !
That's silly by every measurement - so bugger raising the minimum wage, scrap it entirely and institute a wage-floor with UBI instead. You get a much more comprehensive way to solve the same problem than the half-arsed hackjob being used right now, with none of the massive downsides, none of the protests and unrest it causes and it costs a LOT less.
We're headed to a world where the only marketable skills will be business-owner, robot-programmer or robotics engineer. So be it, but if the business owners want anybody to be able to buy the things their fully automated businesses produce, we will need some other way for the rest of the population to earn a living.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I work in the robotics field. The #1 biggest driver for automation in our ecosystem is that _you simply can't hire enough people to do the jobs_.
There are lots of crappy jobs that nobody wants. This is one of the most common reasons why people hire guest workers, or illegals, or robots. Can't get stoop labor to pick your strawberries or work in your plant nursery? Hire Central American migrant labor. La migra has driven off all your illegals? Get some ag robots from Harvest Automation.
Lots of fields have perennial labor shortages like this. Farm labor, order fulfillment, nursing, senior care, construction, ... and even when you can find people to hire they're often not the most reliable. Even when the wages are reasonably good, finding people who will show up and actually be productive can be a challenge. I've got long time friends in the nursing and construction industries who have struggled with this fact for decades. One friend's father offered every panhandler who approached him a construction job and never got a single taker. What does that say about the labor market?
There is an alternative to GBI, and that's public works - the government makes sure that if there are 200 million people that there are 200 million public works jobs available. They could range from childcare to visual arts and engineering. Anything at all that requires a person rather than a machine. Then people have to apply for the positions. This would inspire a little bit of competition and could help satisfy the notion of 'work ethic' that some people have (and seem to want to enforce on other people). The obvious drawback is that it would mean a massivly centralised and centrally controlled government, but hey if a superior AI is contoling everything that might be a good thing.
I agree that public works is a good alternative to GBI. It also help people feel like they are contributing. There are plenty of jobs that could be invented from making trails, to picking up trash, to tutoring. Even something as simple as paying people to volunteer at the 501c3 of their choice. Another option though (or maybe in combination) would be to start reducing the work week in sync with the job loss. If the maximum work week was 40 hours and the government mandated 39 this should in theory lower unemployment by approximately 2.5% when companies hire to replace all that lost work. Many people currently work more that 40 so just setting it at 40 should help the unemployment number. Another less drastic option would be to increase overtime pay to 2 times instead of 1.5 times. 1.5 times is probably about break even for a company compared to hiring a new employee. Moving it to 2 times and it would be cheaper for a company to hire extra employees at 30 hours per week so that during crunch time they can go up to 40. Basically, our automation and efficiency has been going up for years but the hours worked per person has either stayed the same or even gone up. It's a wonder our unemployment is as low as it is. It's probably time to start redistributing that efficiency across the board by increasing people's leisure time.
There is a very obvious problem of mass unemployment and automation
No there isn't. Unemployment is at 5%, with is basically full employment. Workforce participation isn't back to where it was in 2007, but basically nearly everyone that wants a job can find one. The problem is that the jobs being offered are not very good, and wages are stagnant.
If automation was happening on a massive scale, productivity would be soaring. But productivity is stagnant and barely rising at all. Many manufacturing jobs were lost to automation in the 1970s and 1980s, but that process has mostly run its course, and service jobs, which dominate today's economy, are proving much harder to automate.
Someday, robots may steal all our jobs, but there is very little evidence of that happening today.
You're arguing a technicality. Yes, there are jobs still available, but as you admit, they are low paying crap jobs. There are whole industries that revolve around taking advantage of cheap human labor and even those are starting to be automated. Just because we can give everyone a job doesn't mean the original good jobs didn't disappear. It's like a nursing home that replaced all it's doctors and nurses with robots and then hired minimum wage "companions" to sit and talk to the elderly. Yes, technically they still employ the same amount of people but the real jobs are gone. That's what a lot of these service jobs are. It's actually worse than that. Many of the service jobs *could* be automated, these people are just cogs in a machine but it's cheaper to pay someone minimum wage than it is to buy and maintain an expensive robot.
Capitalism's amorality is why we need a strong mediator (such as an uncorrupted democratic government) to mediate between the capitalist and the people.
http://www.bls.gov/dolfaq/bls_...
No really, aside real estate, and maybe internet or phone, I am seeing actually a quite wide slice of items. So can you precise exactly what you mean is missing ?
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
In fact I pity millenials because they do not have it as easy as I am getting it, and again I have not gotten it as easy as boomers. They are cominc at the end tail of estate boom, and therre has been not enough re-adjustement toward lower estate prices in many area booming with jobs. Hello rental until the end of your life.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Tell you what: capitalize Americans next time you post, or we'll come over there and depose your tyrant head of state.
Whoa, now. We just put that tyrant in power. It will be at least another decade before we can remove him and proclaim ourselves heroes, especially if we want to put another tyrant in his place.
Perhaps I am naive but surely with enough money there will be no homeless people because you know, we can give them homes and enough to live on.
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
Lack of discipline per voters and/or politicians is not something Keynes or non-Keynes will solve. If a group of people fail to plan out of sloth, shit will happen.
But I'm for some form of balanced budget amendment whereby the debt can't get too high during boom years, barring some big war or threat. Whether it will work is hard to say.
Table-ized A.I.
Just like all nerds, really.
Robots are nowhere close to meeting our needs in ecologically sustainable manner. If anything, agriculture needs more labor intensive but less polluting human touch. Then we got to cleanup the cesspool we left on the planet. Spaceports, high speed trains and wind farms also do not build or maintain themselves at the moment.
Once all of this is done, working 3 days a week on long term average is very healthy to allow folks to take care of children and parents as well as have interests other than work. After all of this done, some future generation can discuss dropping cash, crypto currency or whatever from helicopters.
No, it's not.
Basically you've described imperialism.
So are Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea. Socialism is fundamentally rooted in capitalism, and Marx was not shy about this. It's actually an embarrassment for the left. The US might do better with socialism because conditions are significantly different from the countries you named. But socialism is a band aid at best, and proven to be problematic at worst.
The US would frankly do better burning its institutions down than not. It's hardly fair to pick on socialism in that context.
Technology in itself is neutral.
The fuck it is. Industrial society behaves fundamentally differently from non-industrial society. Same goes for fire, levers and computers. Technology is transformative, and that's not neutral.
What makes you think automation taking jobs is a particularly American phenomena or did this just seem like a good chance to take a potshot at something that irritates you?
Of the three Nordic countries only Norway has lots of oil and gas.
The Basic Income idea is a trojan-horse. It's a trap. That's why you mostly see wealthy people and e.g. tech CEO's/high-ups promoting it.
The Basic Income can be transformed from a worker subsidy, into a business subsidy, just by slashing wages over time by the same amount as the Basic Income.
The Basic Income can be used to completely destroy Welfare entirely, by consolidating all Welfare payments into the Basic Income, and then either slashing it or destroying it outright, once a big enough economic crisis hits (just claim it is unsustainable, and then kill it).
Automation is not the cause of unemployment and the lack of jobs, neither will it be in the future - the amount of work to be done, is effectively infinite - because fields like scientific research, will go on FOREVER - there will never be a lack of work to be done.
The real alternative to the Basic Income, is the Job Guarantee - a government 'employer of last resort' program, that is specifically used for managing inflation levels, while keeping full employment - putting that helicopter money into a Job Guarantee, can keep the economy at full employment (and remember, there's no lack of work to be done...), while also preventing excessive inflation.
Why is 'helicopter money' for the rich and banking/financial industry ok, in the form of QE? Or ok in the form of a wage-turned-business subsidy like the Basic Income? Yet not ok, in the form of funding a government Job Guarantee program, or other public funding measures?
It's because the first two send money to rich and already powerful - and the third is the means of destroying their power over workers/society/politics (which is why the third is always scaremongered as hyperinflationary, and why the first two are suddenly considered neutral inflationary, despite being funded in precisely the same way...put two and two together, hyperinflation scaremongering is bullshít, and elites are more than happy to use money printing in their own favour).
...helicopters drop YOU!
(which is, to most people, the problem of having to see homeless people).
This is such a pain. Fortunately, I see a solution to this once augmented reality becomes ubiquitous. Just overlay some other image over them, ads, or anything else you don't want to see.
d-_-b
Someone or something has to manage the supply of money. It doesn't manage itself.
How do you think it worked before 1913?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Denmark still has some (AFAIK we're a net oil exporter), but we sold most of it to Norway. Yeah, not the best decision ever.
Eat the rich.
400 years? Sounds about the time fractional reserve banking started. Difference is back then lending what you didn't own was illegal, and hidden.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
You will not. There is already talk of replacing Fast Food workers with Robotics.
Or an incurruptible dictator. That's about as likely as your suggestion of an uncorrupted democratic government.
This has been explored in fiction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riders_of_the_Purple_Wage
I am changing my name to Finnegan
"a revolutionary new idea called UBI -- Universal Basic Income."
I'm not sure I'd call The Way Things Are Supposed To Be revolutionary but ok, if you say so. I suppose.
Do they want that? If they don't need Joe Average to produce stuff or provide services for them, wouldn't a typical CEO be happy to have Joe starve to death or be gunned down by security drones?
We've created a system where the most ruthless rise to the top, and are now making ourselves redundant for that system - and thus their power. We've created the inhuman engine of destruction we've been fearing for decades, and indeed computers made it possible - but it's the hand of the worst of us which signs the death warrant of humanity.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
10% minimum, ideally much higher.
How do you earn enough to afford the latest gadget?
Produce something worth enough to trade for it. You know, like a responsible person.
They won't - at least until one or several nations with seemingly less to lose surpasses the U.S. by embracing more forward-thinking policies. This is how empires fall and has always been so throughout recorded history.
To give a dollar for a homeless guy? Preposterous. If America ever taught me anything, it's that helping thy neighbor is socialism and God hates you for that.
Giving a dollar to a homeless guy is charity and is generally considered a good thing for you to do by everyone, even in 'murrica.
Socialism is the government taking four dollars from you at gunpoint and giving one to the homeless guy.
There is a design system that applies to anything from agriculture to energy to economics, and that is fundamentally centered on ethics, in which the objective is obtaining a surplus and these are the "profits" after the sustainable needs of the system (think planet and people) are first satisfied.
It's called Permaculture
The concept of a guaranteed minimum income could work within a system designed under these principles.
Giving a dollar to a homeless guy of your own will is charity. The government taking four dollars from you at gunpoint and giving the homeless dude one of them is socialism.
It used to be that 'workforce productivity' was a major metric in macro economics.
From a very high-level view, if you replace a worker over here, you can free them up to do something over there.
The lag time, of course, might be inconvenient. But the only reason a UBI makes sense is if we run out of productive work to do, and for socialists, that is a very low bar (everybody except the 'elite' political party members has equally (bad) food, education, and healthcare).
In a capitalist system, we, en masse, should just be reaping the rewards of total higher productivity: cheaper necessities, cheaper luxuries, and less physical labor in return for more intellectual labor.
I have on numerous occasions ranted about exactly the same thing on Slashdot. It is not bad that people will be freed from work. But it is going to be hell on Earth if society does not accept certain very basic changes to accommodate that which is already happening. Yes, income will come from the government. taxation will be applied to the businesses. And a basic income will not work. The public will have to be paid enough not only to meet their needs but also enough to have spending money not needed for survival. And the funniest part is that only some sort of socialism can survive in a society in which machines perform all of the work. Whether people love it or hate it capitalism must to a great degree vanish as it can not meet the needs of society any longer. And here is the ultimate crossover point. Or perhaps I should call it a toggle point. You can bet that machines can set up a business such that profits are used to increase the technology within the totally automated company. In other words, the great barrier is ownership. machines could own 100% of the company. And these companies could exist as some sort of mutual insured conglomerate such that if one company started to fail the other robotic companies would step in and get the business running smoothly again.
Better to spend $50,000/yr/person to keep people in PRISON than $30,000 for education. (or just to keep 'em out of trouble)
Of course, you'd have to stop putting people in cages for things that aren't crimes, like smoking dope.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Seriously - when a machine comes into the factory to replace works, you have a few choices.
Be better than the robot (a few will be)
Find another job that hasn't automated yet
Change careers and become the robot overlord.
Maybe someday the robots will repair the robots. But that doesn't look like it'll happen anytime soon (see articles about recent firings of robot Waiters in China).
And if you want a weird movie that takes a different look at the problem watch Automata starring Antonio Banderas. B movie at best - but interesting.
And Hillary would be that "uncorrupted" mediator? Ha Ha Ha Ha.
It goes back to schools pushing for higher standards,
Schools pushing morality and the importance of charity.
Millenials are the product of too much experimentation in liberal school policies.
Sucks to be them.
I agree that public works is a good alternative to GBI. It also help people feel like they are contributing. There are plenty of jobs that could be invented from making trails, to picking up trash, to tutoring. Even something as simple as paying people to volunteer at the 501c3 of their choice. Another option though (or maybe in combination) would be to start reducing the work week in sync with the job loss. If the maximum work week was 40 hours and the government mandated 39 this should in theory lower unemployment by approximately 2.5% when companies hire to replace all that lost work.
The problem with reducing working hours it that by most employer is perceived as "bad" so they'll push for mandate overtime, possibly without pay for it. Especially for things that aren't easily automated: the classic factory forker is already automated but say the maintenance operator is not and its job isn't so easily automatable
The private sector tries to automate some jobs that are not so easily automatable with automation anyway when for instance the work week is well defined and requested, for instance because worker unions are strong and a treacherous or untrained employeee could make big damages.
One example are the banks, where the clerks oprating with cash are replaced with ATM and clerks not operating on cash: this is a big disservice for customers, that if they have to make a special operation or have a problem, or simply the advanced ATM are out of order and they need a cashier' check, they have to wait in long queues or worse find the bank open, but nobody is authorized to make the transaction.
I too have thought about limiting maximum number of hours worked but the problem is that many people in the lower income brackets already have to work two sometimes even three jobs to make ends meet. The lower hours will not change unemployment unless the individual has a salary style income that still gets overtime benefits. Hourly employees would just end up having to find more jobs.
Why would the US do better with socialism than say Venezuela, Cuba or North Korea? And before you say Nordic States, remember those are all capitalistic market economies.
No one is suggesting the US not be a capitalistic market economy. What they are suggesting is that the government step in to address the shortcomings of capitalism; to do the things that need to be done when there is no immediate profit to be made.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Capitalism's amorality is why we need a strong mediator (such as an uncorrupted democratic government) to mediate between the capitalist and the people.
What you are in fact saying is: "We need an uncorrupted populace." Any societal system - including economic - is only as good as as the people using it. As we can see with the current election cycle, we have nominated - and will likely be voting for - either a slandering opportunist, or an unconvicted felon. We, collectively as Americans, are to blame.
As a slight tangent, capitalism's amorality is why it works so well in a nominally diverse moral populace. But as we are finding out, even capitalism has it's limits. Like it or not, the root moral agents are people, not things or systems. (e.g., a brick is amoral. You can use it to smash a car window or build a house depending on whose wielding it). What we have now is a populace that is becoming increasingly divided as to what is moral.
If we have professors teaching moral relativism in the classroom, then why are we shocked when business executives act that way?
For example, we can all see that homelessness is a problem in SF, but we mostly ignore it. There are only 7,000 homeless people in SF, amongst a population of a million. If each of us gave a dollar a day, the problem would be easily solved. But when was the last time you gave a dollar to a homeless person? Not very often, if you're average.
San Francisco spent $241 million on homeless services in 2015, or about $0.82 per day per person. As far as I can tell there is still a big homeless problem, and officials admit they are not able to track the results.
Are you saying that $241 million per year is not enough but $294 million would miraculously solve the problem?
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Technology in itself is neutral. Why is it a problem? Who are the people who abuse it, what are their incentives, how is it that they are in a position to create problems out of technology?
Technology uncaps scarcity, allowing population increase. It also reduces the cost of goods by reducing labor involved in making the good, leaving buying power in consumer hands when the prices come down, which creates new jobs as consumers buy new things which require (a reduced amount of) labor to produce. For example: cell phones were priced at $4,000 in 1983 (~$9,000 in 2010 dollars) and service came at $50/month and 42 cents per minute ($250/mo to talk for 2 hours/week); thanks to improvements in process, many fewer labor hours (and fewer people) are involved in making a cell phone and operating the network, while the cell phone labor itself is shipped to a low-wage-price market ($3.50/hr Chinese workers), giving us a $350 high-end smart phone (much more stuff packed in a little box) and $60/month unlimited everything (voice-data-text, and that's on local-labor infrastructure).
The march of technology has reduced the cost and price of food, clothing, medical care, and housing. In 1950, the average-income household spent 28% of their income on housing, with the average new single-family home being 983sqft; by 2003, the average-income household spent 33% of their income on housing, with the average new single-family home being 2,300sqft--they spent roughly half as much per square foot. Food also cost about half as much (12% of income instead of 30%+); clothing fell to 4% of income; and so forth. The average new car purchased still has a purchase price of 56% of the average income; and that average new car has standard air conditioning (available in 1/3 of new cars in 1950), standard MP3-6CD-USB-satellite-bluetooth radio media center, 4 wheel independent suspension, disc brakes, anti-lock brakes, traction control, precrash systems, airbags, better-designed engines with lower emissions and higher power, better-engineered tires, and all kinds of other safety and comfort systems not purchased in the 1950 reference.
Because of this march of technology, Americans spend upwards of 40% of their income on nonessential goods, and they spend 50% more of their income to purchase more and better-quality healthcare. The lower- and middle-class workers have gotten incredibly rich thanks to technological growth raising the total wealth and the basic standard-of-living.
Globalisation in moderation is quite nice. I mean you like foreign food, goods, people, culture. How has globalisation then evolved into a situation where it craps on everything it touches?
It hasn't; people are simply short-sighted.
People see manufacturing jobs have gone to China. They see a job which they could do being done by a little yellow prick 14,000 miles away for half a cup of rice or whatever it is they imagine the slant-eyed demon gets paid. (Hint: It's about $3.50/hr.) They then complain the little China man has taken their job--*their* job!
Goods produced and shipped from China command a lower price here. They get moved by local shippers to retail centers run by managers, inventory specialists, and cash register operators, all handled by district managers and distribution centers governed by logistics engineers. The goods and the retail centers get marketed by marketers and advertisers. A lot of jobs support getting any physical commodity into an American's hands.
If you cut out China and bring the manufacture back to America, you get $8.25/hr Americans making goods. Everything costs 2.5 times as much to make, and it still has to go through local shippers, distributors, retailers, and so forth; and those entities move things en masse, so the millions of such jobs actually move hundreds of billions of unit goods, and their actual cost impact is fractional.
Result: goods cost twice as much, and Americans end up with half as much b
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It's a great reason to find a more effective solution for the whole of the problem, though.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
How is it that the people who are supposed to be among the most intelligent cannot come up with any solutions?
Is it because you don't understand the technology whatsoever? Haven't you had indicators for years that this was coming, and yet you haven't studied up on it at all?
It depends. If you pay enough, you change the perception of scarcity such that people don't work certain types of jobs, and then the labor availability drops, and your society becomes unsustainable. All the money in the world can't buy food that's not made.
If you don't pay enough, people simply can't get by--we see that already, since they get paid by wages and they have no jobs.
If you pay someone, you need a source. That source has to have enough *labor* to safely move it down into the economy. Every dollar I take from you is something you can't buy, which decreases employment because whoever is making, moving, and selling that has less to do, and eventually we get rid of a few of those guys. Moving that money down gives our poor population the ability to buy something else, which creates employment. If the amount moved down is too big, our society spends too much time maintaining and not enough time growing, and it destabilizes from the shock of the change and creates too many people with no jobs, thus eliminates the income source for this downward movement of money, thus collapses.
In 2013, we hit parity with public aid in America: a subsistence dividend costs just a hair less than modern welfare. In 1950, a subsistence dividend would have bankrupt the country and caused mass starvation and an economic collapse to put the Great Depression to shame. Even so, implementing such a Dividend today is a carefully-instrumented and highly-complex process; the end result is simple, but the path there without hurling a bunch of current welfare-dependent families out into the gutter to die is difficult and kind of expensive.
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Socialism is the government taking four dollars from you at gunpoint and giving one to the homeless guy.
Oh stop it, it's not at gunpoint. Don't be hysterical. You get something for your money when you pay taxes. It's not like they're robbing you.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
I too have thought about limiting maximum number of hours worked but the problem is that many people in the lower income brackets already have to work two sometimes even three jobs to make ends meet. The lower hours will not change unemployment unless the individual has a salary style income that still gets overtime benefits. Hourly employees would just end up having to find more jobs.
Very few of those low income people that are working 2-3 jobs are working full-time jobs and even fewer are likely getting overtime. Capping the week at 40 hours would probably help most of them. If we are going to continue on the employer sponsored healthcare, something else that would help them would be to have healthcare benefits paid out proportional to hours worked. Make it so that every employer has to put $2/hour into a health savings account for employees to buy health insurance regardless of whether they are working 40 hours, 39 hours, 29 hours, or 15 hours per week. That way, someone working multiple part-time jobs could pool the money from their multiple health savings accounts to buy health insurance.
I'm constantly amazed by the fact that americans are all pretty happy to acknowledge that their status quo rather bad, yet they are not willing to look for the reasons nor even talk about changing any aspect of the system.
Well, the problem with changing the system is that everyone wants to do it. Usually in mutually exclusive ways. And by "mutually exclusive", I don't just mean that what Jane wants conflicts with what Joe wants. I mean that what Joe wants conflicts with something else that Joe wants.
And even if we ignore that, the problem with radical change is that it can't be really be done without tearing down most of the existing system, even the parts that most people liked and had no particular problem with. That means a revolution. But people get hurt in a revolution, even people who shouldn't. Most of us just want to live our lives in peace. It's understandable that we wouldn't want to start a revolution just now, what with all the dying and burning and destruction and displaced people and forced migration and pollution and all. Wasn't the last revolution good enough for you? We're still recovering from that one, thank you very much. Maybe you can have another one after we're dead, if that's what you kids really want.
Even if you can find a peaceful way to introduce some miraculous new innovation, if you haven't laid the proper infrastructure it's likely not going to integrate very well, and will subsequently be abandoned. Imagine King Arthur asking Merlin to figure out a way to increase food production, and Merlin gazes into his crystal ball and then magically transports a fleet of tractors to Camelot from the future. They could increase food production, all right. But where are you going to get gas for them? Parts? Merlin's just one guy, and he's old and cranky, and he recently got his magicking hand caught in some machinery. Eventually those tractors are going to run out of gas and break down for good. After that, everybody will just go back to mules.
Change is tricky. You can write a manifesto in an afternoon, but it usually takes a whole generation to change people.
I'll respond to you and not the AC..
Friend, I'm probably as far from being a kid as you are (based on your low user ID number here), so we've both been around and seen life and the world, yes? Now, remember seeing predictions from 50 to 100 years ago, where people were going around talking about how life would be like that old cartoon The Jetsons, and we'd have flying cars, and robots everywhere, and so on and so forth? Notice how none of those things happened? Have you ever read or seen Brave New World? Another (IMO) cautionary tale. 1984 hasn't totally come true, although, sadly, parts of it has. The point I'm trying to make is: you live long enough, you begin to see the cyclic patterns in things. At some regular points in history someone starts talking about how such-and-such is going to 'change the world', and 'nothing will be the same ever again', and it's going to 'destroy our way of life', and so on and so forth, but it never actually happens that way now does it? For the most part, people like dealing with other people, not machines. There are jobs that are done so much better by a human being than by a machine. There are things that are just not safe for a machine to do for another human being. And so on. At the very worst, I see a world where we may not have a human being doing a certain job, but they'll have to be there to supervise a machine, because it won't be able to cover every single exception like a human being can. Honestly, if I had the time I could sit here for an hour or more just coming up with things that maybe you can make a machine to do, but that a human would, in the long run, still do better for that reason alone, or for safety reasons (e.g. so-called 'self-driving cars' for instance). Your example of bank tellers? I don't know about you, but if I need to physically go into a bank, it's usually because I need to talk to a person about something human, and I'd be seriously annoyed if all there was, was another machine.
The core of what I'm talking about is the misnomer of 'AI'; there is not, currently, such a thing as actual 'artificial intelligence'. The term is widely misused; what we actually have is 'expert systems' and 'learning systems', but they're not actually intelligent, just clever. They can't replace a human being! Not even close. If you really want to know, my standard for 'artificial intelligence' is both simple and difficult: You have to be able to sit down with it, and have a conversation with it, and not be able to tell the difference between a human being and a machine. Kind of like the Turning Test, but I'm probably tougher than they are about it. So far I've seen nothing that can even come close to making me believe. So far, I've seen no research or examples that even come close to leading me to believe that they're on the right track. So far, I've also seen no research that leads me to believe that they even come close to understanding how our own brain produces consciousness, self-awareness, and sentience, and so far as I'm concerned there's no reason to believe they can create 'artificial intelligence' until they get a handle on that. Therefore any of these so-called 'AI' systems they trot out, are just pale imitations, very limited, and prone to having big gaps in what it's capable of doing -- and therefore not eligible to 'replace' a human being, not fully; it'd have to be supervised at the very least, it won't likely be capable of dealing with the general public except in a limited-scope sort of way, and really no different than a voicemail-type customer service system, there'll have to be human beings there to cover the things it can't figure out given it's limited scope of understanding.
Really, seriously though, to show I'm fair and not a Luddite about this: I'd love it if I could fire up a piece of software that I could have a human-level conversation with, and know that it actually understands at least as well as a human being would, and that is self-aware, fully consci
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Giving a dollar to a homeless guy of your own will is charity. The government taking four dollars from you at gunpoint and giving the homeless dude one of them is socialism.
And nobody giving anything to the homeless guy is reality.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
Alot of homeless people aren't actually homeless. They chose that lifestyle. It's a job for them. I used to walk to work and I'd see them show up at 8 am and then go home at 4 pm. I actually saw one at the end of his shift cleaning up pull out his cell phone to tell his buddies he'd meet them at the club that night. There's tons of programs to help homeless people. Many homeless people don't want the help because it is easier to just sit on a corner and yell at people for not giving you money.
I give money to people I see that are in genuine dire straights. People who actually need help. Or if the sign makes me laugh I might give something. But professional day after day "homeless"? Not so much.
http://www.mypersonalfinancejo... They actually pull down a decent income for providing no benefit to society.
The main point was that people don't care about the problem, that's why it's not solved. Not giving a dollar or so to poor people is merely a symptom of people not caring.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I have no idea what SF is doing with that money.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Wow, critical of the critique, while not pointing out any flaws therein. That has got to be the most original viewpoint I've ever read anywhere.
Tell you what: how about you depose of your own tyrant heads of state first and then we'll see if we can find mine in my run-of-the-mill western democracy.
As a European living in the US I'll have to defend the GP a little. Some of them really can't help themselves. They are all brainwashed from a very early age & some never manage to overcome it. Now this occurs to some extent in every country, but generally in smaller countries outside influences seep in & provide some perspective. IMO, the US is a victim of its size & geographical isolation.
Of course, we're all conditioned by our environments. And we're often so conditioned that don't see it ourselves. As the product of a run-of-the-mill western democracy myself I am very often at odds with American culture. For example, "socialism" is not a dirty word for me, "patriotism" is. AFAICS in most European democracies folks are not as patriotic as Americans ... and that's a good thing ... because if an outsider makes a point against our society we'll think about what they are saying & respond. Unlike the GP.
Well taxes are your goddamn phone bill, you do not argue against paying your bills, do you?
Phone bill huh? I like this analogy, let's roll with it. Let's say that you're America and you're paying $100.00 a month for your phone bill. The phone itself sends and receives phone calls with an adequate level of service, holds a charge all day long and it's nothing that you can't afford so you should be happy with your service right? But now you look across the street to your neighbor who is paying $115.00 a month for a phone that does everything yours does plus high speed internet, video chat, free video games, unlimited talk time and a battery that lasts for a full week. You would obviously want to switch to his phone service but they don't service your side of the street. You could move, but that would be a huge financial investment, a great personal risk, an inconvenience to your family and you would miss your friends on this side of the street. So you call up your phone company and ask them what the big deal is, why are you getting ripped off and all you hear back is how great your call quality is and how your neighbor has such an inferior service that he is basically living in a mud shack. Despite the obvious bullshit you'd be wasting your time arguing with this drone, so you ask about their internet service only to to be told that your provider doesn't offer even basic service because somebodies grandma told them once that it was a sin. You ask about picture messages but they don't offer that either because it might offend some guy named Burt who never leaves his Mothers basement. You ask about the free video games and the phone company calls you a degenerate pirate with a false sense of entitlement who is just trying to get for free stuff. To top it all off, there is a group of people in the company who are trying to take away your phone charger because some jackass plugged it in wrong and it started a fire. The only other service on your side of the street is a subsidiary of your current provider. You could look for a way to change this but your Home Owners Association won't allow people to vote on it because they don't like change. So yes, I'm going to bitch about my "phone bill" because it's the only thing I can do.
I really like this analogy, I've basically explained what every American goes through politically between the ages of 18 to 25. Things could be better, but at the end of the day I'm still happy enough with the service to pay for it.
There's this bright shining lie (with apologies to Sheehan) in America that one can only achieve salvation -or something- via long, hard work. It's a lie.
There is no reason anyone should work long hours, or even any hours at all (see The Diamond Age) once robotics proliferate. There are plenty of ways to be happy while not having a "job," and it's foolish to think that we should have to pay for goods and services that are produced at little to no cost.
Part of the transition to a truly money-free society is the guaranteed minimum income, or similarly named government distributions to all citizens. It sure would be nice if the next step were to make the "standard' work week 30 or 25 hours. It's certainly doable.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Will be hilarious to see. Then the robot dispatcher will send a robot tow truck to help which will also be jacked up and put on cinder blocks.
I can imagine all kinds of funny stuff to do with driverless vehicles.
The problem is, you can only fund a "subsidence dividend" at the expense of medicare (the federal government's largest expense), and weren't not even close to funding medicare enough. Health care for the elderly runs somewhere around $15k/year, and tends to be very expensive in the last year, $50-200k. We're not there yet, if we want to do both (unless we just stop funding med and pharma research).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Actually, robots create more jobs that are higher payed, and educated.
The only difference is that robots produce more product per time.
I'm not the same AC, but I do agree that it's at gunpoint -- from a certain point of view.
"Socialism is the government taking four dollars from you [in taxes] and giving one to the homeless guy"
If you don't pay your taxes, what happens? You get a nastygram from the IRS. If you ignore the nastygram long enough, what happens? You get arrested. If you don't comply with the arresting officer, what happens? You get shot (or perhaps tased).
Yeah, it takes several steps, but taxes are ultimately enforced at gunpoint. It's a needlessly inflammatory rhetorical device, but it does serve to highlight the salient point -- that paying the tax is compulsory, even if you disagree with the programs funded by the taxes.
I have no idea what SF is doing with that money.
They are taking almost $1 per San Franscisco resident per day, as you suggested, and using that money on homeless programs created by the representatives San Franscisco residents appointed to handle this problem.
I'm only suggesting $1 per day per person is not nearly enough. It either takes far more money and/or very well run programs to make a difference. Just giving homeless money is already known to not be very effective, as most of them need guidance to even know what to do with the money. There is a reason most lottery winners lose all their money in a few years.
If you give $50k to a homeless person it is unlikely it will be spent towards the mental health services and job training he needs to not be in the same situation next year. That person probably already had access to free services before he became homeless in the first place but either mental health problems or simply a lack of education made him not take advantage of them. A run of bad luck can make almost anyone homeless for a short period. But long term homelessness (over a few months) takes real professions to combat, not handouts.
Similar to our education issues, just throwing more money at the problem is highly unlikely to make a significant difference. The problem is not as simple as saying we aren't donating enough. We need to find ways of changing services or even changing our societal values in general. These are not simple problems and there are no simple answers. Even progressive governments spending significant money, like San Francisco, are having real difficulties finding solutions.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
The problem is, you can only fund a "subsidence dividend" at the expense of medicare
Patently false. The till is OASDI, unemployment insurance, food stamps, and HUD housing assistance (17.2% of the total taxed income in 2013) converting into a 17.0% base, plus 1.4% of AGI covering a public aid system (food stamps, UI, OASDI, HUD) only applicable to children and naturalized citizens. That's 100% Federal initiative.
The total from 18 to 82 amortizes over 20 years to just a little less than OASDI (i.e. it pays the same as OASDI from 62 to 82, if you save 100% of it), without adding additional taxes. The plan in total I've designed actually lowers taxes further at most income levels; and besides, even reliable interest-based accounts exceed the performance of OASDI.
That's all without touching any healthcare services, at all. It's enough for 225 square foot of apartment space in most low-income areas, even in California and New York, although such small spaces are usually marketed as luxury apartments instead; plus food, personal care, clothing, and utilities.
That means a single individual actually gets enough to survive. I've got a lot of risk reserve built into that--I used a $1/sqft model for apartment rent (real world is between 60 cents and $1.20 for 1br), but allocated $1.33/sqft, and did similar for the other categories--and the proportional costs drop as technology expands and lowers cost-per-income-per-capita of the various goods. Over time, the poorest of poor get richer by exactly the per-capita marginal technological growth.
There's also an intentional fault in my particular plan: it's aimed to cause a labor shortage crisis. The target is ~118% employment (negative 18% unemployment), at which point we have to make everyone 20% poorer by amending the Fair Labor Standards Act to define full time as 28-32 hours per week. That cuts back working hours per person and the attached income, settling us at 5.6% unemployment--right back where we started, working 1 day less, with the same buying power, although everyone making under ~$625k is a bit better off in it.
The buying power guarantees also smooth out the market a bit (economic downturns aren't so sharp), so you have a more stable economy which can afford more risks--more effort toward technological growth, creating more wealth in shorter time spans while protecting the economy from rising unemployment (humans are slower to replace and faster to re-employ because we pay them an income-tax-sourced Dividend rather than a minimum wage, and because certain payroll taxes are lifted off the cost of employing a human; technological unemployment thus has a blunter edge and a shorter recovery time).
So... yeah. Slow the loss of jobs from every source, speed the eventual creation of replacement jobs, and eliminate all homelessness and hunger by replacing our hardly-functional welfare system. 50 million Americans living without continuous access to enough food; 75% of families qualified for HUD assistance go on a waiting list and NEVER receive it; and Unemployment Insurance relies on continuously cycling people out of jobs and then back into them at fixed intervals (jobs are created by consumer buying power, and the dynamics of technological growth guarantee continuous creation of transitional unemployment, while scarcity and population growth guarantee an unemployment baseline).
We can fund America's welfare system, today, now, as it stands, with a 20% increase in *everyone's* taxes; or we can cut out payroll taxes, reduce business income taxes slightly, and replace all our welfare taxes with an earmarked 17% Dividend tax that accomplishes the same purpose and *much* more, redu
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I would sum up my response to your post as you can't teach an old dog new tricks. And you sir are an old dog who shows a lack of imagination on how many tasks do not require human level interaction. Specialized systems will do certain things very well even if we don't have general AI. I don't need to talk to my car as it drives me to work. You've posted "Get off my lawn" basically.
I guess you aren't aware what religious organizations, such as The Salvation Army, the LDS church, the Catholic Church and other smaller ones do then. "Love thy neighbor as theyself." But of course, lefties DO hate everyone, so...
The US would do better burning down a lot of the institutions created in the 20th century. The basic law of the nation, its constitution, is perfectly fine. It's tonnes of unconstitutional law on top of it that is the problem.
Best link for actual numbers I've found is http://usdebtclock.org/
We spend $306 B on "income security", basically all the "welfare" style programs. That's $1000/year each. Unemployment benefits cost $250B, and all the HUD assistance is small, maybe $50B, so all together we're looking at around $2000/year each for poverty programs.
We spend $899 B on Social Security. That's $3000/year each.
So that's $5000/year. Not really subsistence yet.
Look at it another way, total federal revenue (income, payroll, corporate taxes) is only $10,300/year per citizen. Average cost of health care in the US is around $3000/year. (Cheap Bronze plans on the exchange in 2015 are around $200/month), but these numbers vary a lot state-to-state.
I'm not seeing where we get to subsistence, even with half the government's income. Sure, of course we can always print enough money to pay any income you want "and we all had plenty of money, but there was nothing our money could buy".
BTW, it won't smooth out the economic cycles very much (I'm sure it will help a little), because it's going to be a small % of overall GDP, and people with jobs simply spend less (especially delay big purchases) when the future is uncertain.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Oh stop it, it's not at gunpoint.
It is most certainly at gunpoint; just try not paying and see. They start out with the "soft" approach—threatening letters, leaning on your employer and/or bank—but if they can't get what they want that way they will send out agents with guns to kidnap you and hold you against your will until you pay up, and they will shoot you in the end if you try to resist.
You get something for your money when you pay taxes. It's not like they're robbing you.
It's robbery when someone takes your property without authorization, regardless of whether they deign to give you something in return. Especially when that "something" isn't anything you wanted at any price, and in many cases is actively contrary to your own interests.
The difference between robbery and simple payment for goods or services is consent—an aspect which taxes conspicuously lack.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Make the poor fight for the sport of the rich.....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
We spend $306 B on "income security", basically all the "welfare" style programs.
In 2013: $721 billion Retirement (Social Security Old-Age pensions), $150 billion Sickness and Disability (Social Security Supplemental Disability Insurance), $110 billion Food Security, $170 billion Income Security, $71 billion Federal Unemployment, and $46.7 billion HUD Housing Assistance. $1,268.70 billion at the Federal level, $1,618.90 billion including State and Local.
At the Federal level, those services made up 36.7% of total Federal spending, 45.7% of total Federal tax revenue, and 55.1% of total Federal collected Income tax. This was with a Personal Income measured at $14,301 billion, including $2,417 billion of income from welfare, for a base Personal Income of $11,884 trillion. The taxable income after all deductions (Adjusted Gross Income) was $9,329.10.
That makes our public aid system amount to 17.35% of AGI, including state services for retirement, unemployment, food stamps, and housing assistance. I essentially roll the 6.2% OASDI into income taxes (the payroll tax gets rolled into business income) and cut 55% off Federal spending, then level off the bottom (which is 16.2% by default) and apply a 17.0% tax as a funding source. Because of how the progressive taxes work, it actually comes out roughly even; the nearly 3% tax bump at the top is an artifact. Several state services become obsolete in addition to these reductions in Federal tax.
In 2013, that supplied $549/month or $6,558/year *per* *individual* *adult*. Monthly, for one person, that's $300 rent, $100 food, $30 utilities, $35 clothing, and $35 personal care in 2013; in 2015 those numbers are 6.24% higher ($584/month), although the costs don't keep up (the actual increase in food cost, for example, was 4.2% instead of 6.24%; the income-per-capita increased by 6.24%).
I've actually run trials on this in practice, and found that it's not so nice-and-neat; you get *way* ahead if you combine the food, clothing, and personal care into a single budget, because you can do food in substantially less ($42/month per 2000 kcal) on running average, and the other two are just ridiculously high. To put this into perspective: starting with zero utensils and only the assumption of a stove with which to cook, buying pots and pans, a $45 Sam's Club membership, and all food, I had enough food continuously, plus money saved up for a $200 bread machine 4 months in. I did, in practice, live in a 750sqft apartment with a utility bill below $60/month for 4 years, ending in 2012; I placed the utility bill at half that for less than a third the space.
BTW, it won't smooth out the economic cycles very much (I'm sure it will help a little)
Yes, it will.
Currently, we try to create subsistence by raising the minimum wage. This increases the cost of a subset of low-end goods, slightly reducing the amount of spending power of the enormous consumer base. That is to say: the middle class might pay 15 cents more at McDonalds. Propagate that across the entire country and you get a tiny loss of jobs: you're making some of the poor poorer as well (jobless) and concentrating wealth from the rich middle class (who pay more) and the poorest of poor (who lose their income because it's transferred to a smaller set of poor people).
Notice the loss of jobs: wages get more expensive, the products created by those wages increase in price, and the consumer's ability to buy as many products decreases. Re-hiring these displaced workers is hard because of both the decrease in consumer buying power and the increase in cost of hiring human labor. That creates higher unemployment baselines via faster loss of employment and longer unemployment cycles.
My Dividend provides the baseline income by an income tax. This doesn't raise the direct cost of hiring employees, and it moves the OASDI payroll tax (6.2%) off the attempt (the cost of attempting to make a good--direct
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Not really, the Oljefondet continues to grow from oil money and is being treated as a pension fund. It is the largest pension fund in the world, nearly a trillion US$. That wise investment will ensure Norway's financial future for future generations.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Fuck you.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
I'm well past sick and tired of you jackasses who WANT to not work anymore, think you're going to get free money to live and party on the rest of your life, and think you'll have robot slaves or somesuch shit to wait on you hand and foot. You're living in a fantasy world that will NEVER EXIST. You're going to WORK your shitty job the rest of your life, GET USED TO IT. Oh and fuck you.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
$6,558/year *per* *individual* *adult*.
I can buy that - you're getting the difference by stealing government pensions, BTW (not that I oppose that).
$300 rent, $100 food, $30 utilities, $35 clothing, and $35 personal care in 2013;
What about that legally-mandated health care plan that costs $200/month then? (They can cost $1000/month when you're in your 60s, BTW - it's a common and drastic mistake in retirement planning to underestimate health care costs).
Yes, it will.
I didn't see much argument to that effect, Remember, economic cycles are caused not by actual unemployment, but by the much larger reduction in spending due to future fear of unemployment (and smaller business spending due to fears, but that's a smaller effect).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Mediator? Yes
Uncorrupted? Yes
Democratic? Not if this crowd gets a vote, you all are a bunch of fools
Giving a dollar to any person on the street who appears to be homeless is not a good system. There is no accountability. Is the person really homeless? If they are, is the dollar going towards fixing THAT problem or is it discretionary spending for them, a little cigarette money since they can't even rent a hole in the wall for $1? If they do collect enough money to get a room, are they using it to shower, rest, and look for jobs online using the free wifi and the no-plan smartphone they have even though tyre homeless? If they get a job and rent their own place, are all the donors notified so they know that THEIR dollars actually helped? And if none of this happens, are all the donors notified that THEIR dollars were mismanaged and that SOMEONE will be responsible? Giving a dollar to someone on the street is throwing it away with a fantasy that maybe, somehow, it makes the world a better place for the dollar to be in that persons hand instead of your own. It's just a fantasy, because you don't REALLY know.
It's good to help other people but helping is an enterprise that needs to be well managed so we don't waste our collective goodwill. So don't talk about when was the last time I gave a dollar to someone on the street, because that is not a measurement of what I'm contributing to society and to people in need. My contributions are systematic and I can see the results.
Catholic Church? Child abuse?
Salvation Army? Act out on their homophobia?
LDS? Polygamy?
You sure pick some fine examples...,
But he's come around about one thing: helicopters.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
Money it just a token that represents added value.
When a business pays an employee to bolt part one to part two, it pays that employee because the employee has added value to the two parts by sticking them together properly. When a company pays a miner to bring minerals out of the ground, it pays him because his act of bring the minerals up to the surface has added value to them. When a company pays a highschool kid to flip burger patties on a grill and then jam them into buns with lettuce, tomatoes, etc, it pays him because preparing those burgers added value to the components.
What value are people sitting there awaiting the helicopter-drops of cash adding?
These sorts of un-serious proposals always sound great to stupid college kids who are still in the phase of life where mommy and daddy are showering them with all the stuff they need for free, and while they are listening to leftist academics who live in ivory towers payed for by money poured in by mommies and daddies and by government loans to stupid college kids who have not yet felt the sting of bills.
Back in the real world, this stuff can easily be seen for what it is: a destroyer of the value of currency, and an underminer of responsible economics and politics.
The US is currently over $19,000,000,000,000 in debt - TWICE as far in debt as when Obama took office. Every single American alive today will be paying interest on this debt for the rest of his/her life (and NOT with money dropped from helicopters).
Sorry I missed how this (removing all the new law beyond the general constitutional statements) keeps people fed and sheltered when robots are doing their jobs. Can you clarify?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I believe the Treasury Dept. managed it then.
Table-ized A.I.
I can buy that - you're getting the difference by stealing government pensions, BTW (not that I oppose that).
Not quite. I targeted Social Security Old-Age pensions, not government-supplied pension benefits. Even that has a transitional plan (retiring within 15 years of activation of the Dividend gets you grandfathered; however, you get OASDI minus the Dividend, and the Dividend tops it up to the original promised benefit).
What about that legally-mandated health care plan that costs $200/month then?
The ACA specifies tax subsidies for low-income and no-income individuals and families to cover those plans. People making under a certain amount of income paid $0 the day the exchanges came online; I don't specify anything about that, and simply mandate that the Dividend is not income (not taxable, not counted as income, not garnered, not Alimony) because it's logically your basic right to life (if you can survive on the Dividend, then we can take whatever other money you have; if you have no other money, then taking the Dividend is essentially a death sentence).
Remember, economic cycles are caused not by actual unemployment, but by the much larger reduction in spending due to future fear of unemployment
My entire argument was that employing people costs less under my plan, thus the amount of consumer spending required to create a job is lower. That "reduction in spending" thing doesn't have as much of an impact: it can't create as much unemployment, and the unemployment it does create is relieved more rapidly.
Do you think the economy will recover jobs faster if the new goods we try to sell to consumers cost the consumer $200 per month, or if they cost $20 per month, assuming that either good requires as much labor time to provide?
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AFAICS in most European democracies folks are not as patriotic as Americans ... and that's a good thing ... because if an outsider makes a point against our society we'll think about what they are saying & respond.
That's the most hilarious thing I've read all day! Most Europeans here never specify which country they're from, like you did, so that any specific criticism is avoided in the first place. Any criticism of a specific European country will be deflected with a "no true Scotsman" statement about how that particular country isn't representative of Europe as a whole. If something does happen to hit home, the response is invariably shameless apologism, denial, or most commonly, attempts to bring the criticism back to the US.
I have never ever seen what you describe.
Your education is lacking. Go look up what a "bank note" is.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."