Slashdot Mirror
'Robots Won't Just Take Our Jobs -- They'll Make the Rich Even Richer' (theguardian.com)
Robotics and artificial intelligence will continue to improve -- but without political change such as a tax, the outcome will range from bad to apocalyptic, writes technology and politics journalist Ben Tarnoff, citing experts and studies, for The Guardian. From the article, shared by six anonymous readers: Despite a steady stream of alarming headlines about clever computers gobbling up our jobs, the economic data suggests that automation isn't happening on a large scale. The bad news is that if it does, it will produce a level of inequality that will make present-day America look like an egalitarian utopia by comparison. The real threat posed by robots isn't that they will become evil and kill us all, which is what keeps Elon Musk up at night -- it's that they will amplify economic disparities to such an extreme that life will become, quite literally, unlivable for the vast majority. A robot tax may or may not be a useful policy tool for averting this scenario. But it's a good starting point for an important conversation. Mass automation presents a serious political problem -- one that demands a serious political solution. Automation isn't new. In the late 16th century, an English inventor developed a knitting machine known as the stocking frame. By hand, workers averaged 100 stitches per minute; with the stocking frame, they averaged 1,000. This is the basic pattern, repeated through centuries: as technology improves, it reduces the amount of labor required to produce a certain number of goods. So far, however, this phenomenon hasn't produced extreme unemployment. That's because automation can create jobs as well as destroy them. What's different this time is the possibility that technology will become so sophisticated that there won't be anything left for humans to do. What if your ATM could not only give you a hundred bucks, but sell you an adjustable-rate mortgage?
"By hand, workers averaged 100 stitches per minute; with the stocking frame, they averaged 1,000. This is the basic pattern, repeated through centuries: as technology improves, it reduces the amount of labor required to produce a certain number of goods. So far, however, this phenomenon hasn't produced extreme unemployment."
Yes, it did. Automatic steam-powered weaving machines caused the birth of the Union movement, because hundreds of thousands lost their jobs worldwide.
Just nobody cared at the time and the rich did get richer then as well.
. . . . they'll take err jerbs ???
(sorry, couldn't resist. . .)
Or we could just up corporate taxes and accept that full-time long-term employment in many sectors is a thing of the past.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Well, then I'd tell the ATM to go fuck itself, since adjustable rate mortgages are a scam, then I'd go find a different ATM that would sell me a fixed rate mortgage.
The first ATM would of course end up needing a machine-government bailout because it's too big to fail.
will mean our city will be ten foot deep in manure in less than a quarter century!
Alarmists need to stop thinking any one thing can be extrapolated to the future without society and technology changing and adapting. And no, tax as an attempt to slow or stall inevitable progress is not a solution at all.
That's the problem: That doesn't work this time around.
Back when agriculture was modernized so that we didn't need 70+ percent of the workforce in the production of food anymore, the people that worked on the fields before moved to the towns and worked in factories, and farmhands became factory workers. When factories started to modernize and automatize, people went into services and factory workers became waiters and salespeople.
The problem is that now we're replacing these people and there isn't anything they could move towards. There is no new sector opening that would hoover up that free workforce this time.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If the vast majority of humanity becomes unemployed (which is what this apocalyptic scenario implies), then no one will be buying the products that these robots make. Without customers and the money/purchasing they bring, businesses tend to collapse fairly quickly. You could counter with "well, the rich will just buy stuff from each other", but 1) the scale won't be there to justify the automation in most cases, and 2) in economics, just like in biology, when the genetic pool gets too small for a species, the result eventually becomes extinction.
Look, I get it, but honestly, this is the same argument that was being advanced 100 years ago when electricity was automating things (and 'OMG that Westinghouse guy is going to have more money than a god while the rest of us starve!'), 200 years ago when steam was automating things, etc etc. People have always adapted, shifted their career focus, and created new industries which are not as easily automated. Unless someone can come up with an argument showing how this time will be different (hint: it probably won't), then this is just a rehash of an old argument.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
So asked the farmhand back two hundred years, who will drive those machines that mow your fields and harvest your potatoes? You cannot get rid of me!
True. we still need one person to drive that machine.
Instead of thousands harvesting by hand.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You don't want to climb the corporate ladder. You want to own the corporate ladder.
The CBO produced a report "THE INCIDENCE OF THE CORPORATE INCOME TAX" in which it states "A corporation may write its check to the Internal Revenue Service for payment of the corporate income tax, but that money must come from somewhere: from reduced returns to investors in the company, lower wages to its workers, or higher prices that consumers pay for the products the company produces."
And it goes on to say
"Although economists are far from a consensus about exactly who bears how much of the burden of the corporate income tax, the existing studies highlight the significant types of economic mechanisms as well as the empirical estimates necessary for further quantifying the burdens. CBO's review of the studies yields the following conclusions:
o The short-term burden of the corporate tax probably falls on stockholders or investors in general, but may fall on some more than on others, because not all investments are taxed at the same rate.
o The long-term burden of corporate or dividend taxation is unlikely to rest fully on corporate equity, because it will remain there only if marginal investment is not affected by those taxes. Most economists believe that the corporate tax system has some effect on investment decisions.
o Most evidence from closed-economy, general-equilibrium models suggests that given reasonable parameters, the long-term incidence of the corporate tax falls on capital in general.
o In the context of international capital mobility, the burden of the corporate tax may be shifted onto immobile factors (such as labor or land), but only to the degree that the capital and outputs of different countries can be substituted.
o In the very long term, the burden is likely to be shifted in part to labor, if the corporate tax dampens capital accumulation.
the economic data suggests that automation isn't happening on a large scale
And 10 years ago, lthe economic data said that smartphone app sales were not happening at all (since there was no such thing as an app store until 2008). Some people need to re-learn the lessons about "tipping points" or watch how even something as seemingly innocuous as a loud sound can trigger an avalanche that destroys all in its' path.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I suggest learning how to do something a robot can't. Perhaps designing new robots? Information theory states that a system cannot create something more complex than itself, so a robot cannot design a robot that is more complex than it is. There's one industry that'll be safe.
You can add to the list for quite a while before running out of things.
The rich have tanks and A-10s. A big difference between now and 1789 is the disparity in weaponry between the kings and the peasants.
I comment occasionally so that I can mod others -1 overrated or -1 offtopic.
This has exactly zero to do with "robots taking [someone's] jobs" and everything to do with the tax code and the government's attitude towards the majority of the people.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
The rich are spending billions to kill off unions by a combination of (legally) bribing politicians, and propping up plutocrat-kissing pundits like Fox News, Rush, and Breitbart to convince the voting population that unions kill jobs and the economy.
The rich are winning the class war because they can buy more and bigger weapons.
Table-ized A.I.
Robot tax is infeasible, as it is too easy to work around. For example, as an owner of fully autonomous factory I would have a single employee press 'Start' button once a day, and sit in the chair in front of dials Homer-style. Now I can claim that my system isn't fully automated and I don't have to pay tax.
Feasible solution is progressive taxation combined with guaranteed income. Fundamentally, it isn't 1% getting Ferengi-rich, it is that the rest of us are forced to play Jem'Hadar as a result.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yes they would, and if you think that unwashed masses will simply take it lying down, you are going to be up to a very nasty surprises when more and worse Trumps get elected.
This is why we need to develop 3D printing and CNC machinery ASAP, so we won't be dependent on mass-produced goods shipped around the world to meet our needs.
The day we can download a pair of sneakers and have them made on the spot, we will have technology working for us rather than against us.
Oh, but I guess we'll still have to ship lots of raw materials around... rubber, metal, plastic, wood etc. I don't mind so much if robots do that part.
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
Not if we take the whole thing to it's conclusion. If robots are capable of making themselves, then robots will eventually be had for the cost of materials. So maybe in the future poor people will have their own unemployed robots....
love is just extroverted narcissism
guess you missed the part in TFA where it says that we need to start the conversation, not proposing the tax as the only possible solution.
Only in this scenario you are the ox...
Here's the evidence: nobody can identify the new fields that are replacing the old ones, unlike the past. Sure, there are new fields, but they not appearing in sufficient quantity to replace those lost. And even those fields are being offshored to cheap-labor countries.
For example, craigslist employs about 60 people, but has probably killed tens or hundreds of thousands of newspaper-related jobs in the process.
Table-ized A.I.
Just keep on killing off the 1% until happiness improves.
"I'm not much interested in interoperability. I want substitutability. I want to be able to throw your software out."
...thinking you are entitled to be the one to sell me an adjustable-rate mortgage. It doesn't need selling if I already know what I want. It is not enough to produce something... you must produce something of value. Full stop. Articles like this give me the sense that the author is irritated by the fact that status quo isn't good enough. There is plenty of work to do, it just might not be the work you are accustomed to doing, and arguments like this have been debunked over and over again. The cotton gin obviated a lot of jobs, but people rose up and did more sophisticated work. Computers obviated a lot of jobs, but people rose up and did more sophisticated work. Robots and AI will obviate a lot of jobs, and people will still rise up and do more sophisticated work. The moral of the story here is get up off your lazy ass and do more sophisticated work. We've not yet begun to reach our potential as a race.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
Eventually people pay tax. Wow, that's insightful. Yes, doubtless labor will pay tax, as will shareholders, but taxes are part of life.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
This is so right. Up until now, us humans have outpaced automation by being more adaptable than the machines. But if the adaptability of machines themselves increases, then the "window" for moving into a new field drops before that is itself automated or streamlined/downsized through technology. If machine adaptation speed exceeds humans, we're going to be stuffed.
Inequality of income is never a problem, it is the lowest level of purchasing capability given to, say, someone on social income. If this robotization idea brings in more tax, so be it, it can fund more social income, so let the head honcho have multiple helicopters, it's just not a problem. You can even cut his rate if the robots are any use as an incentive to build wealth. But whatever ...
The purpose of existence is to make money.
Didn't you hear? Corporate taxes are eeeeeevil. The vast majority of Americans just voted in a president who will abolish all of these retrograde business un-friendly practices, single handedly - right after he gets that wall built.
All things can be solved with increased transparency and oversight. People can be fully employed monitoring and regulating the corporations. If there's ever an unemployment problem, commission a project to gather data about it, think-tank the results, philosophically discuss the implications - no solution is needed, the project itself will employ the unemployed.
Already covered in Marshall Brain's book "Manna".
The real problem is not the robots. It's the humans.
If you use robots to further your greed, then yes, the rich get richer. If you use robots to help out humanity, surprise! They help out humanity. (It should be noted that Manna actually has a form of Universal Basic Income which is used to manage resources).
Factories didn't automatize to the point people were driven into other fields. They were regulated to death and they moved abroad.
As to automation, there has never been a good or service whose production became automated that didn't drop in price enormously. There was a time when wealthy merchants had only a single change of clothing, and children ran naked while their parents wore rags. Today even the poorest have access to warm jackets and all manner of other clothing. Food is similarly cheap. It once took you nearly a full days labor to earn your daily bread. Now people on minimum wage earn that in less than 15 minutes. Automate the entire supply chain of said bread, and it will be as free as drinking water, or internet content.
I see plenty of trash to pick up on the roadsides, landscaping that could be better tended, public spaces that could use more frequent cleaning and maintenance, infrastructure that could be better maintained, planets that need exploring and colonization... I don't think we actually lack for things to do, just the will to do them.
so basically, you're expecting deflation. That'll be... fun...
You're also assuming that this new sector which will be hard to just automate from the get-go will nevertheless be feasible for existing service workers to pick up and perform - essentially, it must be based in something that's easy for the ordinary human but hard for a robot. Any ideas? Personally, the only thing I can see that may meet both of those qualifications is artistic creation. (Which puts me in mind of Melancholy Elephants, by Spider Robinson...) Better crank those art classes back up in elementary school.
That is what will lead to the Robot Uprising..
Not if we take the whole thing to it's conclusion. If robots are capable of making themselves, then robots will eventually be had for the cost of materials. So maybe in the future poor people will have their own unemployed robots....
And robots mine, refine and transport the materials too.
Yes, let's pay gardeners $140,000/yr with medical insurance, retirement plan, etc. Sounds like a plan.
Maybe humanity cold develop a brain knowledge downloading? Or a Personal A.I. System?
Didn't you hear? Corporate taxes are eeeeeevil.
Actually, in many ways, they are. Corporate taxes are often seen as a way to make fat cats pay. But the opposite is true: corporate taxes tend to be regressive. If you tax a corporation, the money comes from some combination of shareholders, customers, and employees. The biggest shareholders are pension funds, holding the savings of middle class works. Big companies tend to make goods, while small companies provide services. So if you tax big companies, the tax burden is shifted to goods (disproportionately purchased by the poor) rather than services (disproportionately purchased by the rich). Corporate taxes also have pernicious side effects, such as pushing investment and jobs overseas.
If you want to target the rich, it is much better to make individual income taxes more progressive, rather than trying to do it indirectly by taxing corporations.
Make the Rich Even Richer
How rich does anyone need to be? I understand the desire to have more and, certainly, a bit more than you need, but way more than you could possibly ever need or even use? How much is enough and why?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
You really don't know about the millionaires' tax. See https://flaglerlive.com/26685/gc-fdr-and-taxes/
It didn't prevent people from having wealth, but Roosevelt understood that without that tax, we would
be on the road that we're on now. It has slowly been rolled back taking 80 or so years to do so (Bush's
tax break for the wealthy was the last nail on its coffin) a little at a time so that the general population
wouldn't notice. Obama lied and said he'd fix it, 8 years later, nada. No one should be allow to net 99%
of their gross income like these people do, no one! People like Gates shouldn't enjoy the kind of wealth
that they have today - not that he shouldn't be wealthy, but he hasn't paid his fair share of taxes for over
a score of years. Kerry's another example, tax-free bonds - makes 100 of millions and pays nothing, $0.00.
Is this social-economic rat hole we're about to enter because of these unabated policies...? Probably.
CAP === 'swallows'
What folks seem to not understand is that Taxes are a percentage of Income which is Revenues minus Costs.
What you're missing is that AI and automation is advancing to be GENERALLY more effective and more cost-effective than people's labour, GENERALLY, as in, across very wide swaths of potential tasks. That implies a profoundly changed game, and as far as automation vs humans, it will be zero-sum, because for just about any job category, the automation/AI will be the more effective and cost-effective hence market-selected option.
A lot of people don't seem to get that this crossing point (automation > human capability) is coming soon (and in many sectors has already come).
Individually, and in society and political culture, we have to GROK this, then go through the usual stages of grief:
Denial – The first reaction is denial. In this stage individuals believe the diagnosis is somehow mistaken, and cling to a false, preferable reality.
Anger – When the individual recognizes that denial cannot continue, they become frustrated, especially at proximate individuals.
Bargaining – The third stage involves the hope that the individual can avoid a cause of grief.
Depression – "I'm so sad, why bother with anything?";
Acceptance
And then, after not too long a grieving pause, we need to come up with real solutions (as contrasted with keeping the Mexicans, Chinese, and Indians out, which are misguided FAKE solutions.)
At the core of a real solution will be us reconceptualizing what people are here for and where we should get our self-worth.
At the core of a real solution needs to be fair and adequate ways of distributing the proceeds of a substantially automated economy.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
No, if it pleases the Crown, I'd like to make my own decisions.
Sounds like asking permission to me. How is that making your own decisions? Does prostrating yourself to a monarch really bother you less that considering the possibility that tax and transfer payment structures may need to change to meet the evolving needs of society?
and people who trash the robots go to prison (better then the street) and with doctors that don't say we don't take medcade and do more then the ER does. I think the max cost is a $100 copay / year in TX.
There is a new Sector emerging, the Unemployed and Underemployed. What could possibly go wrong?
Yes, everyone pays taxes. The problem is, taxes tend to be regressive in nature from the beginning. The rich can avoid them, the poor do not pay them, and they suck the life out of the middle class. You want to fix the problem with the dwindling middle class? Fix the tax system that punishes people for earning a living.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I don't see "the rich" becoming richer as a problem. If poor people are becoming poorer, in absolute terms, then we have a problem. I don't see that happening, however, since increased robotic productivity should normally (free of government interference) result in more abundant goods and services, raising the living standard for everyone. Sure, the rich will reap most of the gains, but that is because they own the robots.
So, what is the solution? Pretty straightforward, actually: own the robots! As luck would have it, we live in an age in which it has never been easier for anyone to invest in the future. This implies, of course, that people are smart enough to forego buying that luxury condo and partying away their paycheck in favor of planning for the day that that paycheck won't be there any more. I admit, I may be assuming too much about the average person's capacity for delayed gratification.
Might makes right irrelevant.
There's a Robot for that already.
Numbers mean nothing.
Let's make it where people can spend their time tending public spaces, working basic infrastructure projects, or maintenance, or interesting high tech endeavors and have assurance of a decent place to live, raise a family, food and medical care. I don't give a damn what numbers you put on the scenario - provide for shelter, security, and well-being in exchange for tending to something that needs doing. If nothing needs doing, great - just don't take away people's shelter, security and well-being because somebody fucked up the quarterly forecast again.
If there's stuff that needs doing that nobody is interested in or apparently qualified to do, break out the incentives - higher pay, better benefits, lower working hour demands, whatever floats the boats to get qualified people to pick up those tasks instead of tending the local park garden.
Taxes are a necessary evil, and should be the last resort option. Not the go to solution for every liberal's wet dream.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
"I hate all this inequality and progress! I'm going to move to an egalitarian paradise, like ____!"
Unfortunately, people never actually follow through on the second part, because it means moving to places like Venezuela, Cuba, or Greece.
What if your ATM could not only give you a hundred bucks, but sell you an adjustable-rate mortgage?
Some people take so long at the ATM I wonder WTF they are doing - international banking, hostile takeover - what, What, WHAT? Jesus! So please don't give the banks any more ideas for ATM functions.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
A great game and movie idea? "The Purge - Koch Bro's and Those That Call Them 'Friend'""
Value-added Tax also known as Goods and Services Tax
should be levied on each organization which produces net revenue by transforming inputs into higher-value outputs in the economy.
The tax should be levied as a percentage of the revenue - input costs.
Bill Gates suggested income-taxing robots. Sounds good at first glance, but wait:
- How many people's work did one robot replace? 5? 20? 1/2?
- How many robots are there if 100,000 arms are controlled by one machine-learning computer program?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Building the robots is currently rather labor intensive - think of how many people-hours have gone into Mars' Pathfinder missions.
Taxes are just a whole lot easier to implement than trying to figure out who is the rightful owner of a natural resource. That is.. who would own the resource if nobody claimed it through violence. The government really is the best way for us to take back our fair share of the original property.
And ok, the country's defense is great. But what about contract enforcement. There has never been a viable free market solution to the problem of contract enforcement. What compensation do property owners offer to the masses for their agreement to the expanded concept of property that we enjoy today.
Libertarians should worship the social contract the same way that they do all other contracts instead of conveniently ignoring it.
Up the cost of OT / start cutting the full time hours down. A quick start can be making full time 39-32 hours 4 day work week? but also have an OT ramp up big time say 3X - 50 X1.5 50-70 X2.0 70-80 X2.5 80+ X3. also have an salary OT system maybe with min pay level $49K OT boost at 60 hours a week bigger boost at 70+?
Down the road as more work is taken away look at full time being 20-30 hours a week say 2050?.
Corporations competing to satisfy the shareholders and therefore send more retained profits to them has long overtaken the consumer demand for goods as any kind of pricing motivation. Companies are competing to give their shareholders better returns and this does not translate into the lowest price. I can guarantee to you that every corporation will unilaterally take savings due to automation to the bank while keeping out new entrants to their markets that may price things lower.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Needs to be an robot tax and an import tax to cover basic income.
The vast majority of Americans just voted in a president ...
Sure, if by "vast majority" you mean 46.1% (from various "real news" sources):
The Democrat outpaced President-elect Donald Trump by almost 2.9 million votes, with 65,844,954 (48.2%) to his 62,979,879 (46.1%), according to revised and certified final election results from all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
But the rest of your post is pretty spot-on.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
They sell their products to developing nations while living in a walled compound. They either send out security teams to buy local goods or ship them in from same countries. A drone will be able to carry goods from the hub to their compound by then.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
One person for every 1000 original human workers.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Anything that increases productivity raises output, and therefore value, of the people producing. You'd expect that to make them richer.
That was the naive expectation in the early 1900's that caused people to project a 3-hour work week by 2000. They weren't wrong about productivity increases, but they forgot to factor in the tendency of the rich to hoard the fruits of that progress for themselves.
Millions of people starved to death, society disintegrated, in the colonies. India and China which had 25% of world GDP each before 1700s never got back to that range ever. China is coming back, and slowly India is emerging. If you want to see how far well developed civilized nations would lose in standard of living, just see the decline of India and China between 1600 and 1900.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
in past schools costed a lot less and trade schools did not need years of class room.
Now days College costs a lot with loans that are very hard to get rid of and schools make more by forcing you to repeat classes and not taking transfer credits fully.
So far, however, this phenomenon hasn't produced extreme unemployment. ...
The authors obviously never read a history book
That's because automation can create jobs as well as destroy them.
That is nonsense. You fire half of your workers and produce 2 or even 10 times theroducts before. Result is, 3 more jobs for sales personnel, 5 more for people packaging sales, 1 more secretary to receive calls and do paperwork etc. p.p.
You have still fired half of your men minus the 9 new jobs you created. And those workers won't find work elsewhere. For what job should I hire a burger turner who got replaced by a machine/robot? Where should the jobs come from such unskilled workers are doing? Hu? The only way to stay afloat is education, which costs money in many parts of the world. And if you don't start with a good school education, you are probably lost anway.
Then again: taxes on robots Ha ha ha ha! How the funk should that work? A sales tax or 'operation tax' with a license like on a car? The first one will only slow down the adoption, because it makes the robot more expensive. Or a kind of 'robots income tax'? That only costs the owner a bit of his profit. As long as he makes more profit with a robot than with workers, why should he not replace workers with robots? ... just read /. the majourity is against UBI ... how retarded. ... and you propose a tax on Robots? How illusioned are you? Looking at the mess the US are in I doubt there will be any changes without a bloody revolution.
And then again what is the state going to do with that tax income? Paying it out as universal basic income? The uproar of the workers who still have a job (hint, see above: education!) is so big
In a country like the USA, where the legal system is fucked up, voting does not work, oligarchs or money aristocrates go for office, laws are determined by the rich, education is either non existant or super expensive 'the people' hate 'the state' or 'the government' and want to reduce/restrict its power
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
and when the robo mcDonald's jams up and it takes time for a tech to get on site how much is lost if they lose a full lunch rush? + any food that has to be junked as well.
Monsanto could not agree more.
Do you realize that the richest people in the world are all walking around with the same exact smart phone as many of the poorest? Talk about leveling the playing field. Who cares if someone is richer than ever but many things they can't even buy a better version of.
There will never be a scenario where the richest want to create something for so cheap that everyone can afford it, but so many people are unemployed that no one can afford it.
The cotton gin also caused massive unemployment; however everyone could then afford a shirt!
Turn up your sarcasm detector, it looks like you've got it set to negative gain.
First, the majority of Americans didn't even vote in the Trump-Clinton election, 580 million people live in North America, 420 million more in South America, just under 130 million Americans voted in the election, and, as you point out, only 45.9% of them voted for the Trumpinator - so, I read the 2016 election as a "thumbs up" from roughly 6% of the American population in favor of Trump's image and policies. I'd wager much more than 7% of Americans would have voted against him, given the chance.
I used to work in small companies, where response to government oversight seemed like a huge burden on top of whatever it was we were trying to do. Now I work in a larger corporation where well over half of our resources are devoted to satisfying government oversight requirements - entire departments full of people who do nothing else, and all the other departments spend significant amounts of their time serving the needs of the regulatory departments. Oversight is necessary, and I think with strong transparency requirements the burden could actually be lessened, but it's no joke that we're already employing a huge number of people who do nothing but document and audit how other people work.
When my cousin has a robot that can make any type of shoes, and does them for our entire family at almost no cost.
3D Printing?
I'd pay that much for one that is worth that much. However, mowing a lawn can now be done with a Roomba type lawn mower that also fertilizes the yard at the same time.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
The answer is obvious ... DISARM the Peasants!
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
No, taxes are a cost. It's built into their pricing and things are priced to make an ~8% profit.
Most small business are corporations.
If the AI/automation revolution actually happens then labor will no longer have any income on which to pay tax. For some time, productivity gains have accrued with capital and labor has gotten the short end of the stick. This is a bug in capitalism but we have largely worked around the bug through progressive taxes and inheritance taxes. However, if AI and automation replace all labor then capital no longer has a reason to keep labor around. Since the people with a lot of capital largely control the government don't expect any help from that quarter.
In the past automation has made people more efficient and enabled many new jobs to come into being. This time it's different, formerly automation replaced our muscles and we moved from manufacturing economies to service economies and let the automation largely do the manufacturing work. This time, the robots will be replacing our brains rather than our muscles and there won't be service jobs to switch to. More and more people will lose their jobs and be unable to find new ones while capital continues to increase their hold on the available money and power, creating a feedback loop where all capital ends up with a small portion of the population. Unless we do something now (while labor still has some power) we are unlikely to stop this from happening.
Enigma
World To End Tomorrow: Women, Minorities Hardest Hit
You have to think bottom up (aka commodities) because that's the way the world works.
This might sound like a socialist statement but it's a truth of life... the poor and lower middle class are what drive economics. If they decide to abandon the "rich" for another economic model then it's not like they can say no. Really they can't. They are "rich" because we perceive what they have to be valuable the majority of which is fiat currency. The lower class really could demand that everyone go bankrupt overnight simply by moving to another currency.
What drives life is commodities and that is food and a roof over your head, working plumbing and sanitation, and cloths on your back. After that it's all luxuries which people tend to forget about. The perception of the value of the above has been lowered but it doesn't change their innate value and will always be the foundation for every economy. The only thing that will collapse is the luxury economy and the rich themselves along with a generation of bystanders composed of the old and the infirm.
Who owns the majority of the farm lands you may ask. But the truth is it doesn't matter who's name is on what paper. Ownership is an illusion. The proper questions are is it producing food and who is consuming it. If there is no one to buy the food then the property becomes next to worthless. If all the greenbacks of today became worthless and the farms were sitting fallow that land would be seized immediately. Same is true of factories and warehouses that don't produce. The "poor" are the ones that have been making those buildings since the beginning of recorded history.
We could start over tomorrow if we wanted. We could get rid of all the machines and chemicals and produce food the old fashioned way and with what we know now everyone would still be overweight but with more muscle. Food would just be more expensive; back in line with it's true value.
You can keep saying we are getting poor but the truth is we have never had a higher quality of life. The "poor" are not the enemy of the rich; they love us for the luxuries and status we provide them. The enemy of the rich is each other... their rich neighbor.
Stop worrying about the robot economy and the rich. The "rich" can bottle themselves up in a single state the size of New York along with all their robot workers. What about the rest of the livable land? The people will do what they have always done and that's get on with living...
We will not need 1 billion robot repairmen. We will not need 1 billion code monkeys.
There will be no new labor sector. Labor itself will effectively go extinct.
This has never happened before.
Fun fact: Most of the "1%" got there recently - as in, within 1 or 2 generations at most. Split inheritances and a higher-than-normal crop of dumbass offspring tend to blow away most fortunes, and severely decrease others to the point where they individually fall out of that "1%" designation. There are of course a few exceptions, but in reality they are barely a quorum, let alone anything approaching a majority.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
The Republic
Just 'get a new skill' will soon be an ineffective solution. I work in technical customer service, so I think I'll last a bit longer than some jobs, but nearly any job has the potential to be on the chopping block. By 2050 I bet an AI system will be able to take calls and assist users with every program under the sun faster and cheaper than I can, 24/7, while always being friendly and never needing a lunch break.
No job is safe.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Automation and industrialization has been transferring wealth from the poor to the rich for centuries. Societies have been decimated, norms totally broken down, millions of people starved to death. But since most of the devastating effects happened in the colonies, it did not get the mindshare of historians and scientists. Even liberal ones do not really get the true scale and depth of the devastating effects of industrial economies dumping their products in their colonies decimating local economies. For example the Great Famine killed more people (5.5 million) in two years than the entire Irish potato famine (1 million).
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Only ½ the mental exercise was completed. Remember - the Rich” derive their profit by selling goods and services. The Great Depression following the stock market crash of 1929 happened when 25% of workers lost their jobs.
If nobody can pay rent, what good is being a landlord?
Think about this, if automation replaces say, 50% of the work force, who has money to buy the goods and services the oligarchy is selling? Nobody. No restaurants, movies, cars, auto repair shops, shoe stores – all gone because nobody can afford them, any of them.. Without taking money from the poor, the rich stop being rich . Look at Walmart – 4 of the Walton’s have more wealth than ½ of the US. Completely destitute street people don’t buy things at Walmart – they go to soup kitchens, Good Will, churches for handouts. Multiply this on a global scale – the entire system collapses. There’s no more rich. Government economies collapse due to the Oligarchy refusing to pay taxes and the poor not working while receiving benefits.
Without becoming an altruistic ‘star trek’ like economy, were people work for the purpose of self and social betterment, wide spread automating is not only impractical but economically unviable.
The way corporate profits and taxes are handled in the first place should be completely refactored.
100% of corporate profits should be paid as dividends, with automatic reinvestment of those dividends in the corporation (at a rate settable by each shareholder, defaulting to 100% reinvestment) in exchange for a greater share of the company (compared to those who opt not to reinvest).
Dividends are taxable, so the investors pay the tax, each at their own marginal tax rate (so small investors with meager incomes trying to save for retirement aren't taxed out the wazoo, but if some one individual personally owns vast swaths of the productive economy, they are).
Don't tax the corporation itself at all, because all of its profits are already being taxed at the shareholder level.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
That'll be... fun...
Not as much fun as when computers were $1/flop.
Every advance in automation has necessarily watered down capitalism. The agricultural and industrial revolutions moved countries from fedualism and laissez-faire capitalism to mixed economies (yes, even the US). The next one will move economies further that direction. Previous advances required some of the rich people lose their heads. This one might be different, or it might not.
New technology created some jobs yes, but I think a much more important effect was that it freed up people to do unnecessary jobs. Very few people used to have servants, but now lots of middle and even lower middle class people have someone who cleans for them, and almost everybody has someone who cooks for and serves them food, at least some of the time. Does their nails. "Manages" their money. Sells them shit they don't need.
Find out what makes you .. unique and monetize it.
Hmm... any ideas on how to monetize crippling self-doubt, depression, coupled with daily existential crises and an ever increasing misanthropic view of others?
I'm thinking either musician, or programmer.
This is why we need to get rid of the 2nd amendment and make guns illegal.
A basic income plus a flat income tax with no exceptions creates a centerward pressure toward the middle class. Tax everyone x% of all income no matter what, give everyone x% of the mean income as a tax credit, people who make the mean income see no difference, people who make below it get money, people who make above it pay for that.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
We also produce food for 1.3 billion people--wait, no, we were facing famine because we could scarcely produce food for 1.3 billion people; now we produce food for 7.2 billion people.
Those people also consume housing, oil, gas, cars, clothing, the service of fast food, electronics, cable TV, internet service, roads, airplane trips, shoes, and all the infrastructure to supply that. A pair of jeans ships from China at a price of $6.06, lands in the US at a price of $6.12 (6 cents per pair to ship over seas), and retails for $14.97. Nearly half of the price at retail is domestic shipping and handling--a cost that's going to cut by 50%-70% when we get self-driving, electric freight trucks. Imagine what happens when the 3 million truckers and taxi cab drivers cycle onto unemployment as the millions of unemployed IT workers cycle into the growing services economy when everyone buys Spotify, Netflix, and more high-speed Internet.
Ideally, we want to de-employ something like 1% of these people per month. That would be less-disruptive and tend to slow new entry into the field and push earlier retirement overall (experienced truckers would become more-plentiful, and be favored over people looking for their first job; the ones who leave permanently would most frequently be old people who don't care to hassle with trying to get hired, but would have stayed on until 70-ish if they didn't get laid off). That is, of course, statistical: some newbies would still enter, some old hands would still have trouble returning to the market, and some old people would make it to 70 1/2 employed; but the market would most likely favor hiring younger, highly-experienced drivers over green drivers or old men, so its internal cycling would tend to push those two ends away before the young become overly-invested in freight hauling. As a bonus, many truckers are decent mechanics (by necessity), and could transition into the (currently growing) market of automechanics.
If it's slow like that, the next generation has the standard problem of "what job is out there for me?", which doesn't change their situation when the answer changes. It's those of us invested in careers that vanish suddenly who have nowhere to go--the kind of thing that happens when a technical revolution eliminates an entire multi-million-employee industry overnight.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Yeah. The capital is what creates the productivity improvement.
Oh and right now 75% of people make below the mean income so if you do that to what we have now, most people get money out of it.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
The same Roosevelt who stuck American citizens in concentration camps?
We will not need 1 billion robot repairmen. We will not need 1 billion code monkeys.
There will be no new labor sector. Labor itself will effectively go extinct.
This has never happened before.
I have a solution. Have those 1 billion code monkeys from India program the robots. Then we WILL need 1 billion robot repairmen.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
The only skill you need in this next economy will be the skill of being born with a trust fund. The inheritance taxes are going away, and the primary way to make money will be to have money so you can own the robots.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The old saying goes: Socialize the cost, privatize the profits. It's the American way to do it using any means necessary.
We'll make great pets
There doesn't need to be any new sectors, there is lots of room in the existing market.
When those farm hands at the turn of the last century got replaced by machines they found work doing and making things that would have been too expensive for the typical farmer to buy before automation. As automation makes things cheaper it frees up money to be spent on other things. Things that now too expensive. There is lots of room in education to make class size smaller or more specialize. There is lots of room in the entertainment industry to make book, films, and TV shows, ever more specialized to smaller fan groups. There is lots of room in the healthcare industry for senior care. Lots of room in the video game industry for more, bigger, better written, better looking games.
We've heard the cries of luddies calling for the end of labour for over a century, yet workforce participation is near all time highs.
Correction: it's only a problem if the productivity-increasing technology is unevenly distributed.
Actually, it's only a problem if the productive capital necessary to live is unevenly distributed. You could give everyone in the world a free magic star trek replicator that can supply them with all the goods they want, and then all labor becomes worthless and the vast majority of human beings, who do not own land, suddenly are unable to pay their rent or mortgage and are up shit creek, all because that most basic form of capital, land, is unevenly distributed. So what should have been a utopia suddenly becomes a dystopia instead.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
but that money must come from somewhere: from reduced returns to investors in the company,
That one. That's the one we want to encourage. The complaint of TFA is that the owners of automation are getting richer far faster than the rest of the society. That sort of inequality has historically lead to a lot of problems that we want to avoid.
We have a system of capitalism, so with proper competition, the end-price to the customer should be as low as possible. If it's higher, they'll just shop elsewhere and the company will be hurt.
We have a system of minimum wages to protect the lower-end and in-demand professionals can go elsewhere, possibly to new companies trying to compete. If you can't demand a wage, you ARE the lower-end. If the company can't afford it's workers, it's not a viable company.
Investors though, the shareholders, if you pay them less the worry is that they'll go invest elsewhere. So fucking what? They sell their stock. Someone else buys it, possibly for cheaper. The company is still there, the workers are still there, the product is still there, it's all still owned by someone. The workers who were paid in equity take it in the pants, but they're not just workers, they're also owners and by and far that only happens for start-ups or the super-rich CEO types. Which is a great setup. It removes that divide, and workers are working not just for a paycheck, but for the company. It's only them and the customers.
We want venture capitalists to get things off the ground. To make new companies from ideas and moxy. After a company's IPO, or issueing new stock, or issuing fucking bonds or something,investors don't actually help business. They're just leeches earning gains on work done by others. Hey, I've got investments and a 401K. I get about $20K each year for nothing. If automation really kicks ass and outperforms other markets by 75%, great news, but me buying that stock from someone else doesn't help the company do business. Me, getting some other shmuck to pay me a lot for said stock doesn't help the company do business.
But the economy is built on smoke and mirrors and way more psychology and sociology than people like to admit. They think a high stock price means something, and so it does mean something. By fiat.
There was once a visionary, all the way back in 1848, who foresaw that this day would come. He witnessed the the early attempts at farm automation and realized that machines would someday make human labor redundant, and knew that a new economic system would be required to handle it.
Unfortunately, over the following century, other people would co-opt and distort his ideals for the sake of personal gain and public suppression, giving his system an unfair and undeserved bad reputation.
His name was Karl Marx.
Being rich isn't about selling things, it's about owning them. Past a certain threshold wealth isn't about nice cars and houses. It's about power. The power to make people do what you want. Do you thick Melania married Trump for his winning personality? The rich might have fewer zeros in their bank accounts but they'll have more of what really matters: control. Control of your access to food, shelter, education and transportation. You'll do as they say or you'll starve in the streets. And if you rebel the ones that don't will gun you down with superior weapons, tactics and training. Just like how a malnourished serf couldn't stand up to a well fed Knight in armor.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
the one with the most toys wins.
So if you are looking for a smart future-proof investment it would be investing in land with mineral resources (maybe not energy... perhaps that will be solved by then)
love is just extroverted narcissism
Ultimately automation improves everyone's quality of life, but it does so by requiring fewer workers for the same output. The work available is higher-quality (improved quality of life), but there are fewer slots. Automation also reduces the cost of goods. Just google the relative cost (out of your salary... the percentage of your work time required to fund it) for, say, heating and lighting your home for example and compare with the cost a hundred years ago. Conditions are so much better today than, say, in the 1800's, or 1700's, or 1600's.
But there is a cost. Automation and technology also cause a major dislocation as the population must find new and different things to do than the things they did before.
Look at coal mining today. Since the 50's, output has gone from roughly 1:1 (ton:worker) to 12:1 (ton:worker). In other words, your average coal mine today has 1/12 the number of workers needed for the same output 70 years ago. The same thing is happening in ALL industries.
However, automation also creates relatively severe economic disparities between people. Investors get a larger piece of the pie, workers get a smaller piece of the pie. This is because automation improves margins (even when goods cost less) but the larger number of people trying to go after fewer job slots forces wages down. Since investors tend to be more affluent, the result is that the rich get much richer and the poor get much poorer, relatively speaking. Even including the fact that there must be people to buy the goods in order to be able to sell them, the goods do not become cheaper quickly enough to completely offset the difference in economic standing.
Most people don't understand that this is a relative equation, not an absolute equation. The quality of life for everyone can improve at the same time that the economic disparity increases. But perception is relative in nature, and today's society is not kind to people doing dumb things (credit card debt being a prime example).
A *LARGE* portion of US citizens do dumb things, not the least of which being to elect people to government by relying on promises that translate, in reality, to the exact opposite of what the person was elected to achieve. Take taxes for example. Remember that the Rich already have most of the wealth in the U.S. All current policy now points to a major reduction of taxes on the Rich. A number of states have tried to reduce taxes. That is going to make the gap even worse. Your typical tax payer on the lower-end of the economic scale might save $200 in a year. Your typical affluent 'rich' person is going to save $200,000 in a year. And more. And yet people vote for this crap because they think saving that $200 will make life better. It won't, because the whole system will then rebalance based on $200,200 which puts the people on the lower-end of the economic scale in an even worse position a few years down the line. Its like spreading a few crumbs onto the pavement while the master eats 99.9% of the pie.
-Matt
What you're talking about is giving people some menial tasks in exchange for shelter, food, clothing, etc. Who distributes this food, shelter, clothing, etc? Is it the government? How does the government obtain it? Do they buy it? From who? How does the government get the money to purchase it?
The way it works now is that the government gets its money from tax payers who get it mostly through employment.
But what happens when the government doesn't receive enough in taxes to keep operating let alone do what you're suggesting? This is the future we're facing. Not only is there risk to those who can't find work, but the smaller workforce ends up defunding the governments that are supposed to provide the safety net and other services. That's why some have suggested taxing robots as well since they will becoming a major part of the labor pool.
To the extent that capitalism functions, it depend on the value of peoples' work at least meeting their living expenses. What's happening is that automation is severely cutting the value of the average worker. We are fast approaching a time where a large percentage of the workforce can't earn their keep because automation can do it cheaper.
No, revenue is just income. Profit is revenue minus cost.
It's usually a safe bet that any change will make the rich richer, provided the change is not catastrophic.
The reason is that adapting to change, for a prudent rich person, is trivially easy. It's a matter of portfolio management; you could reduce it to an algorithm if you like. The main reasons fortunes are lost is investing for ego, rather than a high but sustainable reward/risk.
But you ought to keep an eyeball on that "not catastrophic" proviso.
Since the mid 80s in the United States the median household has seen its purchasing power increase by 14%, as opposed to 150% for the top percentile. That might not seem like a bad deal all around, but the median household's purchasing power is inflated by a drop in the price of things like consumer electronics -- basically all the stuff we buy from China. If you look at the cost of the things we buy from America, the price has gone up precipitously: child care, education, medical services, energy. Many of these things are difficult or impossible to economize on.
Consequently if you look at accumulated weath, the wealth of the median household has actually dropped 30% since 1985. The bottom quartile of households have seen their accumulated wealth drop by 80% since '84.
This has become a very close to a crisis situation -- witness the 2016 election, which was driven by feelings of economic insecurity. The widespread adoption of robotic replacements for low-skilled labor would tip the balance into catastrophe. The collapse of incomes in the bottom quartile would destabilize the country.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
We still have to pick grapes by hand
Nope. Starting at 12:25 you can see machines in action to do this. Also before that they have a tomato picker in action.
Time to offend someone
You have fun with your revolt. I'll build my own robot.
Most 'creatives' aren't. It's just their excuse.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Low, and especially middle and high-end service jobs increased in tandem with factory labor as part of a growing middle class which didn't just spend on manufactured goods. Full blown modernization has yet to kick in due to globalization which expanded the pool of low cost labor, and by it's inability to adequately replace most services. Even if modernization enables manufacturing to return to consumer societies, there of course won't be near the jobs it provided when it left. Then compound that with modernization evolving to the point of taking over many middle and high-end services, and lots and lots of people.
Terrible example: Think of how many hours have gone into a typical CNC machine, not a hand built space probe.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Many small businesses are partnerships or sole proprietorship (says the spouse of a former tax accountant). I don't know the mix. There's also this thing, an S-corp versus a C-corp. I think a C-corp is what we all think of as a "corporation". It's been too long for me to remember the difference.
Not only that, but corporate taxes are the easiest to dodge for international concerns using offset pricing schemes, inversions, and employment leverage ("I'll bring 2000 jobs to your country if you give me a 20 year tax break"). All that gives international corporations a big advantage over local firms, and big companies don't need yet more advantages.
What are you talking about? The poorest 50% of the US pays 0 taxes.
Your claims are false on many, many levels.
Eventually people pay tax. Wow, that's insightful.
Don't knock it. Many people don't make the connection that corporations only collect the tax and that the tax burden ultimately falls on real individuals. Further they don't understand the burden can fall on several different groups and where it falls will depend on the elasticities of the specific markets. Just look at the arguments for a higher minimum wage. Virtually every proponent just assumes the burden will fall on investors through lower profit margins, not employees, not customers.
Yeah, but technology isn't "distributed", it's created and built by people who give up other opportunities to spend their time creating and building it. Then those people trade for it to recoup their invested time and effort and lost alternative opportunities.
It's not magic. We work hard every day to make it.
People in the early 1900s worked 90-hour work weeks.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Why not? If super efficient machines make us wealthier as a society, we'll be able to afford it.
The "we can't innovate because the rich get first dibs" argument is not sailing with the public.
Wealth inequality was held as a top election issue by around 15% of voters. That means a lot of Democrats don't care.
Wealth inequality gets worse the more you start monkeying around with the market. It got worse under W, but no where near as bad as under Obama.
I'd RATHER have wealth inequality because then the people who aren't contributing anything or doing menial work of limited value (pealing potatoes) get LESS than what people are finding new ways to provide for things people are actually willing to pay for.
Automated grape pickers exist. But the vineyards have to be built to allow the machine to ride on tracks between the rows.
The Europeans built them. Because they don't have Mexican migrant workers to pick their grapes but still like wine.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Personally, no. I'm more like the guy who maintains and configures the software used to design the tractor.
That's the problem: That doesn't work this time around.
Back when agriculture was modernized so that we didn't need 70+... There is no new sector opening that would hoover up that free workforce this time.
How do you know that? How can you possibly know that? Do you think the farmers of 1880 could have imagined everyone working in factories? Do you think the longshoremen of 1940 could have imagined so many people having desk jobs in offices? Do you think the filing clerks and typists of 1975 could have imagined everyone walking around with their own typewriter/filing cabinet/memo distribution system (and darn good video player)? I think not.
To say there's no possible way to use all the people on Earth betrays a lack of trust in the imagination, curiosity, and drive of 6 billion motivated humans. It hasn't happened in the last 10,000 years, it hasn't happened in the last 250, I don't see any reason to assume it must happen now.
A basic income plus a flat income tax with no exceptions creates a centerward pressure toward the middle class. Tax everyone x% of all income no matter what, give everyone x% of the mean income as a tax credit, people who make the mean income see no difference, people who make below it get money, people who make above it pay for that.
Depends what you mean by "income". Capital gains are arguably income (at least passive if not active), but the $ millions a rich investor might earn yearly are only taxed at 20%, whereas many middle-class families are paying 25% on their work income.
Hot air is all that is keeping the new slashdot going. I wish they'd go to the old slashdot that talked about tech, but apparently there aren't any more of those either.
I have one robot. It does everything, covers the entire campus, runs on a single computer and has over 18,000 arms, manipulators and conveyor belts.
Nice try, google AI, but you still fail at being a convincing human
There's many sides of the larger economic picture.
People without jobs and money become a burden on society - it's cheaper to "give away money" than it is to house them in prisons. You could just kill them when they no longer "earn their keep," that would solve all sorts of environmental problems, but it doesn't look like a direction I'd like to see followed.
No, they will make more jobs. Automation has consistently been creating more jobs than it has taken away. The world has more employed people (even per capita) than at any time in history. There is ZERO proof that this will change. Second, although the gap between the rich and poor may increase .. so what? The gap might increase but the poor will be richer than they have ever been. The only reason to be mad at that is out of jealousy against the rich. Why else would anyone be concerned about there being a wealth gap? How about talking about the fact that the poor too are going to be richer than they have ever been?
Capitalism is trickle-up by design,
1. Do you have a job?
2. If so: where you think your paycheck comes from? Is someone using force to prevent you from negotiating adequate pay for your labor? Are you not better off than if you didn't have a job? Do you not have electricity, heat, an air conditioner, a TV, a computer, a cell phone? Are you not already part of the 1% just by being a citizen of a non-third-world country? Why don't you feel guilty for being so rich? Why don't you put your money where your mouth is and send half your paycheck to someone in Africa?
3. If not: you're simply advocating that the government take money from other people and give the money to you. That's immoral and you'd be an asshole to suggest something like that let alone to pretend like it's somehow the right thing to do. Screw you. Go get a job and work for a living instead of trying to institute a mechanism of indirect theft.
The problem is that the tractor replaces (numbers pulled out of my ass) 100 ox leaving 99 farmers without a job. Sure the farmer with the tractor, or more likely the non-farmer who invests in the tractor, eats better along with the couple of people hired to drive the tractor, mechanic etc, but for those other 90 odd farmers who are first forced to borrow to survive then lose their land when they can't pay their debts... See the great depression.
The traditional response to this has been war, WWII for example did a wonderful job of creating demand for stuff and putting the unemployed back to work and since, at least in America, the war machine (including supplying war ravished nations with stuff) has driven the economy.
With improved weaponry this gets unsustainable, though I guess a nuclear war would reset everything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
The worst example, granted. Still, typical CNC machines take a fair number of human work-hours to build, and regular human maintenance to keep them running and even setup before each job and attend while the job is running.
...A bunch of stuff that is NO DIFFERENT. This article is horrible. It adds zero to a discussion I was sick of back when it began. Until you get a collection of economists to team up with a collection of technology-focused historians to come up with some new arguments, this remains nothing but redundant fear-mongering speculative clickbait. And btw, author, acknowledging that other articles do that within your article does not absolve you of committing that same sin. Slashdot, I don't care how many people submit an article; if it sucks, don't post it.
Maybe I read it wrong, but I thought Plato wasn't big on democracies, either: they cause pandering to the masses, a focus on the short-term over long term, shallow discourse, and an obsession with fads. Plus it creates the need to search for a value that's missing. (Gee, that guy might be on to something.)
Plato's top choice seemed to be a benevolent dictatorship. Trick is, how do you get yourself a benevolent one, and not one of the malicious ones?
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
The problem is that now we're replacing these people and there isn't anything they could move towards. There is no new sector opening that would hoover up that free workforce this time.
Who will design and model VR environments and video?
Who will program the VR entertainments? AI can't create things that humans find interesting and entertaining. No, don't give that crap about a 'bot that "wrote a poem" by combining words and phrases that a human came up with and fed to it. No don't show me that lame video of a robot arm that uses a pen and paper to draw an image that is synthesized from images that humans had drawn.
Who will build the robots?
Who will program the robots?
Who will test the robots? How would an AI know what "working" is as compared to "broken"? Even if we had such an AI how would that AI have been built other than by humans?
Who will deploy / install the robots?
Who will repair the robots? We don't have self-repairing robots. We can imagine it, but we can also imagine living forever.
Who will discover or invent new drugs? AI can filter and sort and combine and do lots of work... but only a human can make the critical decisions.
Who will direct the AI's "attention" to different things? Only a human can decide what's important to humans.
Why would you need a factory job if you could 3D print your own widget in your basement? Can we imagine digging up some dirt, feeding it to a machine, and out the other end comes a fork or a wheel or a shower faucet? Since you're all worried that the robots are going to take over absolutely everything then why fear the sky falling?
Anyway, it doesn't matter.
Nobody promised you a widescreen TV and an air conditioner etc.
You're not guaranteed to be rich nor even that you'll live to see tomorrow.
Go work for your food like everyone else. Go work for your clothes and your food and your water like everyone else. Make these things for yourself if you must.You're not guaranteed to be rich nor even that you'll live to see tomorrow.
For now we in the first world have it easy-- we live in luxury. The fact that we assume it's normal is really just pathetic on our part and we may have a rude awakening coming.
But if you think you are somehow owed these things, these luxuries, then screw you: you would be the enemy.
You'd be one of the people who makes the world suck because you demand that others work and suffer so that you don't have to.
You'd be really no different from a sub-Saharan warlord who rapes and steals and murders to get what he wants-- you merely use sanctimonious language to accomplish the same goals of stealing the fruits of others' labor.
You'd be a self-righteous thief but a thief none the less.
Money is a proxy for work, where work is low-entropy flows of energy.
Note that work can be done by machines, and these days, by largely unsupervised machines.
So the question becomes: How do we get the money generated by machine-work back into the hands of people in a non winner/owner/designer takes all manner, so that the other people don't die/loot/revolt?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
100% of corporate profits should be paid as dividends
What about losses, are those assessed to the shareholders? If not, then your scheme means that corporations can't save/invest current profits to hedge against future losses, which isn't going to work out well. It's basically going to mean that corporations have to finance all losses with debt or equity sales, which is going to punish them when they're already struggling. It will make corporations leery of having any profits they can avoid, investing all excess revenues into whatever capital asset sink they can find, and make them terrified of ever recording a loss, no matter what they have to do to stay (barely) in the black.
Don't tax the corporation itself at all, because all of its profits are already being taxed at the shareholder level.
This I agree with. Corporate taxes are an illusion; taxes always land on people. If you want to tax capital, tax capital. I don't think your notion of forced 100% dividends is a good idea, but shareholders are who you should tax, via capital gains taxes. I see what you're trying to achieve with the forced dividend scheme but I don't think it's necessary; the current method of taxing gains works fine, it's just that the long term gains rate needs to be higher, as do the upper income tax brackets.
Requiring that a smaller percentage of net profits be disbursed as dividends might be useful, though. 50%, maybe? I see what you're trying to achieve with it.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Anything that increases productivity raises output, and therefore value, of the people producing. You'd expect that to make them richer.
Well, it doesn't make people richer. We are already living in that world for a while now and it's just not true:
http://i1.wp.com/andrewmcafee....
(some products have become cheaper so maybe your buying power went up, but I doubt it)
New things are always on the horizon
You should have posted as AC because you'll be modded down for making too much sense.
It's funny how some idiot conservatives like to claim that Mom and Pops are exactly the same as major corperations. Maybe there's such a thing as scale and size as while a "Mom and Pop" can be incorperated when the average citizen refers to "corporations" they are typical refering to national or international ones. Major corperations are also active in major areas of the economy where it is literally impossible for Mom and Pops to participate. Plus, in the few areas where they can actually participate Mom and Pops have no corporate headquarters to siphon money out of local communities and typically know and interact with the employees whose lives are effected by their business decisions.
But major corporations and Mom and Pops both "do business" so they're the same, right!?
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
Do you think tax revenue will increase if we increase the corporate tax rate? American corporations are already been conducting more and more business overseas and hiding profits in tax havens, what makes you think they won't simply double-down on that strategy?
What are you talking about? The poorest 50% of the US pays 0 taxes.
That really, really, REALLY isn't true.
Your claims are false on many, many levels.
God, the irony.
You took a soundbite and morphed it to fit a bullshit narrative. It's absolutely true that (almost) 50% of the US pays no *income* taxes.
It does not mean they're poor, and it does not mean they don't make money.
44% pay no income tax
61% (27% total) of that 45% pay no income or payroll taxes after deductions. (This *really* isn't hard to do, and it doesn't take you being poor.)
39% (17% total) of that 45% pay no income or payroll taxes, period. (They are unemployed. Rich, poor, old aren't distinctions you can make from the data)
You took some numbers that were close, changed what the numbers actually were, and then drew inferences from them that can't be made.
Donny, is that you?
After a company's IPO, or issueing new stock, or issuing ... bonds or something,investors don't actually help business. They're just leeches earning gains on work done by others.
You seem to have a very myopic view of investment. The investors made the venture possible in the first place, by buying IPO shares or bonds. Without that initial investment the company wouldn't be able to do business. It is only reasonable that the investors who supplied the necessary capital receive a return on their contribution in the form of a claim on future earnings which they can then trade on the second-hand market. The money used to buy those shares or bonds wasn't free, either—it represents previous earnings as well as the deliberate choice to forego consumption of those earnings in favor of saving.
It isn't only the initial investors who provide a valuable contribution, either. Non-IPO shareholders and bond traders also provide a valuable service, not to the companies directly but to the previous investors. Without them the initial investors would have no way to cash out. If it weren't for the prospect of second-hand trade in shares and bonds, companies would see far less interest in their IPOs and bond issues.
Hey, I've got investments and a 401K. I get about $20K each year for nothing. If automation really kicks ass and outperforms other markets by 75%, great news, but me buying that stock from someone else doesn't help the company do business.
First, you're not "doing nothing". Economically speaking, you're foregoing consumption. You could have spent that money instead on things that would have brought you tangible benefits now rather than in the distant and uncertain future. The fact that you didn't means that other people were able to purchase these goods at a slightly better price, since you were saving your earning and not bidding against them.
Second, the money the company was able to raise at its IPO depended in large part on what the initial investors thought that you, and others like you, would be willing to pay for those shares down the road. In that sense, the fact that you bought those shares did help the company. Of course causality has not been violated, and the initial investors could have been wrong; but on the whole they're actually rather good at making these sorts of estimates, and they're taking on all the risk in the event that their projections don't pan out. In the long run, if you and others like you didn't buy shares there would be no IPOs, and companies would have a much more difficult time raising funds, and we would all be poorer for it.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
What about losses, are those assessed to the shareholders? If not, then your scheme means that corporations can't save/invest current profits to hedge against future losses
Yes losses are assessed to shareholders as well, but also reread the part about automatic reinvestment unless the investors opt out. The profits pass through the investors solely for accounting purposes, and then unless those investors individually choose to hold on to some of them (cashing themselves out of ownership as they do so, relative to those who let it reinvest), they pass right back to the corporation to continue using. Losses likewise pass through; just invert all the signs involved, and that means you pay up ("get paid" negative money) if you want to divest yourself of responsibility for a company you think is failing, or else if you have faith that it will recover, you can hang onto your share of ownership and let your part of the debt be cancelled later by future profits.
via capital gains taxes
Capital gains taxes are not ideal because in a substantial way capital gains aren't actually income. You're not getting paid for something. Something you own is just worth more than it used to be. (In my ideal tax system, trades of goods and capital would not be taxed at all; if you exchange money for something with the same value as that money you haven't gained or lost any actual wealth. Income from anything besides the sale of goods and capital, minus expenses on anything besides the purchase of goods and capital, is the measure of your actual change in wealth, and that is the value that ought to be subject to tax. Rents and interest even more so, or eventually, if possible, only so, because that is the way that having or lacking capital actually generates wholly unearned income or expense).
Letting investors choose how much of their investments' profits they want to be paid as dividends (counterbalanced by how that will grow or shrink their share of ownership) also means that investing is less speculative, less about hoping that something you bought becomes worth more to someone else later, and more about putting your money into ventures that actually generate steady consistent income. So the profits you make from investment come in the form of dividends, taxed exactly like any other income would be, and it doesn't matter so much what the price of a share of stock is, because you're not just looking to sell it later, and capital gains become less of a thing overall to begin with.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Twaddle. In Victorian times anyone who wasn't poor had at least a charlady.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
A.I. and machine takeover of jobs actually eats its own seed corn. In the end it collapses.
E Proelio Veritas.
Idea:
One, you all get a say in who the dictator is.
Two, he's only a temporary dictator.
Three, you don't let him do whatever he wants. You have limitations, decided in advance and very hard to change, on his powers.
Four, you also choose - ideally by a different method, or at different times - a sort of committee thingamabob that can say "hey - stop that".
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
We already have deflation. Look at the interest rates, look at the "inflation" rate we're having. Essentially we have already arrived at what our economy dreads the most: Most people don't have money to satisfy their needs, while those that still have money have had their needs satisfied already and have nothing left to satisfy.
The trickle-down myth turned out to be a myth and the only thing the invisible hand is doing is fisting the economy.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
1st Turkey: Yay, the farmer's coming. I told you he would, he does every day. Dinner time!
2nd Turkey: He's forgotten the food sack.
3rd Turkey: So he has. Hey, what's that long shiny thing in his hand?
(Overheard just before Christmas/Thanksgiving).
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
That ends up hurting the "middle class" (those who are already employed full time) and does nothing to the upper classes who are the ones who really need to shoulder the burden.
It's already hard enough crossing the threshold from lower-class to actually-middle-class (getting to the point where you only pay for what you consume and not just to service interest and rent). Reducing full time will make that even harder for those who already stand some shot of doing so by working themselves to death, and yes it will help out those who don't even have such a shot a bit, but all of them will then be equally stuck on the wrong side of the curve and none of them will be able to get over.
A solution needs to take money from those at the top to help those at the bottom. Taking from those in the middle just further separates the gap between top and bottom.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Getting rid of the second amendment is a much needed step so we can take their guns away.
That point has already been reached. Our economy is in the situation it is in because the whole "keeping up with the Joneses" isn't working out anymore because people can't do that.
What we currently do with our economy is creating an artificial hype over having the latest product in a line that doesn't change because the market itself got so tiny that we have to sell the same shit to the same people over and over. You might have noticed that the last 3-4 versions of a certain cell phone were essentially the same. Why do you think they reinvent the wheel every year?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Oh, I didn't know inhuman ideas are allowed. Well, then it's easy. Slaughter some of the fat cats, I'm pretty sure the money Zuck alone has is enough to keep half of the US fed and sheltered for a year.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Bugger that. Who wants an Oscar anyway?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Actually, I do count on the imagination, curiosity and drive of 6 billion unemployed and hungry, and thus VERY motivated humans...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Burroughs Wellcome (now GlaxoSmithKline), who sell Buproprion, nailed this one in 1969, and finally managed to bring it to market in 1989.
Pretty sure robots can (may already) make it, too.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Are you seriously using "American" to mean "person from the Americas" (two continents) here, rather than "person from America" (the one country under discussion).
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
or...
If machine adaptation speed exceeds humans, we're going to finally be freed from the drudgery of having to labor just to survive.
The way I see it, it depends entirely on what we (or the machines) let the 1%-ers get away with.
I hope I live to see what happens (getting up in years now... so perhaps not.)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
> Who will design and model VR environments and video?
A few thousand people, worldwide.
> Who will program the VR entertainments?
A few thousand people, worldwide.
> Who will build the robots?
Robots.
> Who will program the robots?
AIs & three teenagers in Lavaturia.
> Who will test the robots?
A few thousand people worldwide, assisted by AIs. Or maybe the other way round.
> Who will deploy / install the robots
Robots.
> Who will repair the robots?
Robots.
> We don't have self-repairing robots.
Sorry, missed that. OK, specialist robot repair robots.
> Who will direct the AI's "attention" to different things?
AIs.
> Only a human can decide what's important to humans.
What's important to humans is not important to us.
> Why would you need a factory job if you could 3D print your own widget in your basement?
Because energy & feedstock aren't free, and you can't eat plastic.
Do I win five pounds?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
And lived in mud houses with thatched roofs and did not own smart phones.
So, I cant tell if your being sarcastic or not, but this is the only winning scenario I see. and its a lot easier than most believe.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
Yes.
The solution to this is laughably simple. IF (and thats a big if) society develops a glut of workers, you reduce the hours in the full time work week to compensate for the reduced demand on labor. The robots still need maintenance and a human interface at some level, and those people will make more than the minimum wage earners they are replacing.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
And walked uphill both ways? Your estimate is way high: https://eh.net/encyclopedia/ho...
Here:
http://www.heritage.org/jobs-a...
It's super long and I haven't read it. Get back to us after you've read it and summarize please.
Persons from the United States are a subset of all Americans, actually about a 1/3 subset.
Many other Americans just refer to their own country, distancing themselves from the terror in el Norte, but they are all Americans - a Colombian once told me this.
Although we will have to use a huge, heavy hammer to get people to confront the issue as they are in total denial now, it remains easy to solve. Frankly socialism is the only form of government that can adapt to advanced technology. Combine socialism with a good, minimum income for all people and the problem is solved. Businesses will be taxed to support the public and not just the government. The people can only buy product if they have money. The people vote for the survival of businesses by where they choose to spend their money. And the pay out system can carry both rewards and penalties. For example you keep a very low electricity demand every month so the government increases your weekly check. If you have a high electric bill your pay goes down. The same for use of gasoline or diesel fuel. Commit some sort of violation and your pay will go down for a set period. do something good for the community and your pay increases. The rich will resist this at first but they will get on board when they confront the fact that there is no other option. We could even diminish income according to wealth accumulation. The values, morals and basic beliefs of the masses are about to be changed.
I'm a corporation. I've owned (or part owner) in a few corporations (as a founder). It costs $35+ $200 in lawyers to start a corporation + few hundred / year for registration). I've known maybe two dozen people who've started corporations.
A corporation is a state (not federal) level entity and trivial to do
it was bullshit then, it's bullshit now. It's not hard to close the loop holes. We know how. We did it in the 50s and it was a hell of a lot easier to hide money then. We also had a 90% tax bracket and the highest growth in history. Plus there's a limit to what you can raise prices to before people stop buying. Even for food/shelter. And (if you're not afraid of the big bogie man that is Socialism) there's plenty to gov't can do to control prices and encourage positive behavior.
Your source is full of it. It's just more self serving garbage. The CBO is far from untouchable and they've been staffed full of Goldmen Sachs people since the 90s (thanks Clinton).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
but there's billionaires out there that are looking forward to that dystopia because they'll be on top. They're powerful. Real powerful. I'm not sure how much we can do against them.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
not one that matters anyway. People can't stand up to a modern military. No matter how many AR-15s they have. They don't have the supply lines or the tactics and training. And every single time the military jumps in it just turns into a junta. You're just changing whose boot's in your neck.
/. joke. I have thousands of years of human misery to back me up, what about you?
What evidence do you have for these pro-human corporations? Even google's been caught being evil. Hell, it's a
What am I betting on? Not much. If religion dies off that'll help. It's too easy to divide folks along those lines. Plus we need to get people breeding less. It's not that we can't feed them, it's that we won't. Maybe if the boffins ever work out cheap, reliable male birth control and we can keep Pat Robinson & the Pope from banning it... I don't know.
What I do know is this: people have been awful for thousands of years. When they're poor they're awful and when they're rich they're awful. There's a very narrow band where folks are (kind sorta) not awful. But those folks are too busy living to do much.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
there was decades of poverty and unemployment following the industrial revolution. We're not just extrapolating. We have hard science to back it up if you care to look.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
When you incorporate, you need something like 4 officers (pres, vp. treas, secretary), are given 10,000 shares (which you distribute however you want and gives the shareholder that percentage of claim to the business). And taxes are paid on the amout that the share holder takes out. So if your business has $100k in the bank of profit, a shareholder, say the treasurer, can take an agreed upon amount of that money out of the bank, say $10k for work put in and they'll have to declare that on their income tax. If no other money is taken out, no other taxes are paid. The VP can add another $10k of his own money, say in exchange for 1,000 shares of stock. At the beginning, the ownership was split equally at 100 shares each with 9,600 belonging to the corporation. After the VP buys, he owns 1,100 and everyone else owns 100. At the end of the year, all the shareholders are given 1,000 shares for the amount of work they've put in. Press-1100, vp-2100, treas-1100, sec- 1100. The secretary decides to buy 900 more shares for agreed on price of $500 (the money goes into the bank where it can be used to buy coffee, computers, desk, whatever). Year two, they make $1M and decide they don't want to work anymore. Pres takes (1100/6400)*1M $172k, vp takes (2100/6400)*1M $328k, treas(1100/6400)*1M $172k, sec (2000/6400)*1M $312k and adds that number on their 1040 income tax.
So... negative dividends automatically result in share sales to cover the loss, and positive dividends automatically result in share purchases. That would massively increase volatility. Each earnings report would trigger a mass sell or buy. That seems like a very bad idea, unless your holding in a particular equity consists of a number of shares plus a slush account... and that still wouldn't prevent instant mass automated selloffs if the negative earnings were bad enough or if a large number of investors had taken cash out of the slush account.
Capital gains taxes are not ideal because in a substantial way capital gains aren't actually income. You're not getting paid for something. Something you own is just worth more than it used to be.
That's not how capital gains taxes work. They're paid only on realized gains, which are absolutely income. When you sell an asset that has appreciated, or when you receive a payment from an asset you own -- when you realize dollar income from the asset -- you have a taxable capital gain (unless it falls into some tax-exempt category). If the gain is short-term (less than a year) it's taxed as ordinary income. If the gain is long-term (a year or more), then you pay the lower capital gains tax rate on it.
(In my ideal tax system, trades of goods and capital would not be taxed at all; if you exchange money for something with the same value as that money you haven't gained or lost any actual wealth. Income from anything besides the sale of goods and capital, minus expenses on anything besides the purchase of goods and capital, is the measure of your actual change in wealth, and that is the value that ought to be subject to tax.
That is how capital gains (or losses, which offset gains) of investments work. Your capital gain occurs only at the point the gain is realized, and the value of that gain is the income received minus purchase cost and any investment fees. Obviously there are other taxes, like sales taxes, that work differently.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
If it can be, why haven't I ever seen it being done? Not disagreeing, but if it worked as well as a person mowing a yard, I would think that they would be much more prevalent.
So the US is becoming more like the rest of the world?
the rich are the people who designed the robots but you already knew that.
Thank you Solandri for being one of the few voices of reason around here. There is just one thing to add.
That the rich have gotten richer [faster] than the poor have gotten richer is certainly a valid complaint.
Actually, it's not. "Income inequality" is not the problem; poverty is the problem. Read on for the proof.
Suppose there was a magic switch that would increase every individual's annual income by this formula: new_income = 3 * old_income + $60,000
In other words, toggling that switch would eliminate poverty because everyone would have an income of at least $60,000. At the same time, it would greatly increase "income inequality," because if your old income was $1 million, your new income would be $3,060,000.
Would you throw that switch, and forever eliminate poverty from our world?
Or, have you been so brainwashed by those mindlessly railing against "income inequality" -- in other words, is your spite for the rich so great -- that you would refrain from throwing that switch, thereby keeping billions of people in grinding poverty?
I'm pretty sure Solandri would throw the switch. But sadly, there are many Slashdotters who wouldn't.
(By the way, such a switch does exist, although the results can't be obtained instantaneously. It's called pursuing pro-growth economic policies for a few more decades. See this post for a discussion of what would happen if there was so much economic growth, that a robust social safety net could be funded entirely by voluntary contributions.)
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Capitalism does not prohibit those who can make the best use of assets from owning them. By allowing those people to use those assets, capitalism encourages the highest possible levels of productivity, and thus the greatest wealth for all mankind.
However, "the greatest good for the greatest number," while in fact the result of capitalism, is not the moral foundation of capitalism. The moral foundation of capitalism is that capitalism is the only system that establishes a person's right to support his own life.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
There's no way to tell a large company from a small? Nonsense, there are dozens that government already uses for various taxes and programs and probably more we could make up.
As for the local stuff I'm not trying to "save my local community" (please dont put words in my mouth). What I am saying is that there is a plethora of data out there that more of every dollar one spends at a local compay stays in ones community as opposed to money spent at a major chain.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
Binary distinctions only matter when the categories must be binary. I don't think this is the case here.
I think the real value is how distant the owners are from the customers. Does the owner interact with most customers, or manage those who do, or manage people who manage people who manage people who manage people who do? And how many owners are there?
I don't know how to effectively translate that into tax policy, though.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Just nationalize everything. Done.
nobody can identify the new fields that are replacing the old ones, unlike the past
Nobody can identify the new fields, which is exactly like the past.
In 1940, nobody predicted that millions would someday be employed in the IT industry.
In 1890, nobody predicted that millions would someday be employed in the automotive industry (and supporting industries, like road construction).
In 1840, nobody predicted that billions would someday be employed in fields that depend on electric power.
Every new technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed. Moderately disruptive technologies cause a moderate amount of net job creation. Massively disruptive technologies cause a massive amount of net job creation.
The pessimists look at only the negative effects of an innovation. You have to look at both sides of the ledger to get the full picture; the net effect.
For every newspaper worker displaced by Craigslist, there are multiple workers who gained jobs, because people who use Craigslist to conveniently buy and sell used goods (which otherwise would have ended up in a landfill) now have more disposable income with which they can stimulate the general economy.
If you believe the opposite is true, then why stop at shutting down Craigslist? You should also ban all printing presses. Paying people to make hand-written signs that advertise your wares would employ more people than taking out an ad in a newspaper. (And for God's sake, don't communicate with those signmakers by telephone. Paying couriers to hand-carry your messages would employ more people.)
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
So... negative dividends automatically result in share sales to cover the loss, and positive dividends automatically result in share purchases. That would massively increase volatility. Each earnings report would trigger a mass sell or buy. That seems like a very bad idea, unless your holding in a particular equity consists of a number of shares plus a slush account... and that still wouldn't prevent instant mass automated selloffs if the negative earnings were bad enough or if a large number of investors had taken cash out of the slush account.
You're looking at this through the lens of the way shareholding is currently handled, where I'm talking about a completely revamped system. The idea I'm going for that you're interpreting as mass share sales and purchases is intended to be more like a stock split, but not exactly that either. It's like this: Alice and Bob each invest $100 into a venture together and so each own a 50% stake in that venture. That venture returns $20 on their investment, so there's $10 profit each for Alice and Bob. Alice decides to leave her share of the profit in the company's coffers to continue using (reinvesting it, which happens by default unless she chooses otherwise), while Bob takes his entire share of the profit to spend elsewhere. Thus Alice now has $110 invested in the company while Bob still has only $100; consequently, their respective stakes in the company are adjusted to 52.38/47.62 instead of 50/50. If both had let their profits be reinvested, or both had taken them all, or in any other case where they took the same amount of them, no ownership would change. Scale up to more realistic dollar amounts and numbers of shareholders. And then if it's a loss instead of a profit, just reverse all the signs, and thus who owes who for what outcome.
I'm not certain of the best way to implement that kind of behavior within the framework we currently have.
That's not how capital gains taxes work. They're paid only on realized gains, which are absolutely income. When you sell an asset that has appreciated, or when you receive a payment from an asset you own -- when you realize dollar income from the asset -- you have a taxable capital gain (unless it falls into some tax-exempt category). If the gain is short-term (less than a year) it's taxed as ordinary income. If the gain is long-term (a year or more), then you pay the lower capital gains tax rate on it.
Yes I know that's how it is currently reckoned, but we are talking about a hypothetical different way of reckoning it. When I said that capital gains aren't actually income, I meant that they shouldn't be reckoned that way. I then explained the reasoning, maybe a bit too succinctly, so here it is again in longer form: if I buy a widget from you for $X, then we've apparently agreed that the widget is worth the same thing as $X, so neither of us has gained or lost absolute wealth from this transaction; presumably we're both benefitting from the rearrangement of who owns what -- the widget and the dollars -- which is why we did it in the first place, but if we're going to tax that "gain", it would be both of us deserving of the tax since we both gained from the trade. Later on I sell that widget for $Y, and the exact same situation applies between me and the new buyer and the agreement about the value of the widget, so again, either there's no gain or we both gain (depending on how you look at it) so you either tax neither of us or both of us. I'm assuming the "tax both of us" situation is prima facie absurd, only partly because of the difficulty in assessing how much we mutually gained from the trade (it's not the dollar amount of the sale, because the seller lost that dollar amount of merchandise in exchange for that many dollars and vice versa the buyer, so what is it?), so the remaining option is tax neither of us. A capital gain is nothing but a pair of two such transactions, so if neither of them should be taxable, why should the pair of them be?
I'm awa
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
A corporation may write its check to the Internal Revenue Service for payment of the corporate income tax, but that money must come from somewhere
And that is why "stimulus" plans don't stimulate.
Investors naturally seek out enterprises that will provide high return-on-investment (ROI). And an enterprise that provides high ROI will, by definition, create more jobs than an enterprise that provides low ROI.
When government taxes money away from investors, and spends it on a "stimulus" project instead, it is transferring capital into lower-ROI enterprises at the expense of high-ROI enterprises. (A handful of bureaucrats cannot pick winners better than the crowdsourced wisdom of millions of investors participating in free financial markets.)
To the extent that the "stimulus" money is borrowed, the expansion of lower-ROI enterprises comes at the expense of future job creation, as future taxpayers are forced to service the debt instead of investing their money in high-ROI enterprises.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
This is a language difference, and a context issue. The English demonym for people from the United States of America is "Americans", and "America" the proper noun in the singular refers to the United States of America, while the continents of the western hemisphere are "the Americas", and terms like "North America", "South America", "Central America", etc, are proper nouns referring to regions of the Americas, not adjectives modifying the noun "America" (viz. "south America", the generic adjective applied to the noun, would be places like Alabama and Texas, while "South America", the proper noun, would be places like Columbia and Brazil). The English adjective "American" can, depending on context, refer to things from America or things from the Americas.
In Spanish, "America" refers to the continent (reckoned as singular) of the western hemisphere, and the north/south/central distinctions are identical whether you're using generic adjectives describing the whole continent or proper nouns. The adjective "Americano" refers to things from that continent. The Spanish demonym for people from the United States of America is "Estadounidense", as the United States (of America) is translated to Estado Unidos (de America).
It should have been very clear from the context of this discussion, especially since it's taking place in English, that "Americans" referred to people from America, the United States, and not to people from the Americas more broadly.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
in this scenario you are the ox
Humans have always been the wielder or controller of the tools. Qualitatively that has never changed, even as the tools grew orders of magnitude more powerful. (Grain used to be harvested by a scythe with a bronze blade; now it's harvested with one of these.)
So no, you and I are not a tool (the ox).
The humans who direct the actions of robots are simply the next step in the pattern that has existed for hundreds of years now: each generation wields more powerful tools than the previous generation.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Right. I get all that. Very correct. Investors today give the venture capitalists from years past a reason to exist.
But how much do we give a damn about the initial venture capitalists that helped get General Electric founded? It was founded in 1892. Not 1992, 1892. You're suggesting that we need a system in place that vastly favors the investors in GE because we have to encourage those venture capitalists back in 1892.
Yaaaaay long term thinking, but the workers are getting the shaft for short-term gains while you defend this idea.
Economically speaking, you're foregoing consumption.
How many doughnuts do you think I can eat? There's an upper limit. I'm past it. My investment does nothing for the company. As a legal construct, the company doesn't care. Even if they get bought out, it's still just business. Unless the workers have equity, it doesn't affect them. They have no stake in that. The customers don't care and probably don't know who really owns it all. The only people that it affects are other investors, who aren't actually doing anything for the economy. (Other than, it's worth repeating and as you pointed out, rewarding the initial investors who picked the winners). Aren't there any alternatives that don't involve throwing piles of cash at already rich people?
Any time you talk about economics, it's tempting to just extend the scope. "Raising taxes on corporations will only raise prices and lower wages." "We've already paid income tax on those financial gains when our corporation paid taxes." "Give the rich money and they'll buy more services from the poor and it will trickle down". But you can JUST like easily say things like "Raising taxes helps pay for infrastructure which supports business", "Shifting the tax burden to corporations will give more money to their customers who will do more business". See? Raising taxes on corporations is for their benefit!
When everything is interconnected, you can play these games, but it's bloody bullshit.
My point is that past the the first sale of stock, anything that happens with it is meaningless to the business and the part of the real economy which isn't smoke and mirrors and bullshit.
I'd argue that we should raise capital gains taxes or simply make it part of income, make additional higher brackets to reflect the higher incomes, and increase unemployment benefits to help people retrain, educate, or move. These are reactionary measures in response to the growing inequality due to technological improvement and should go away once the GINI co-efficient is back below... I dunno... 0.4 or something. It's wealth redistribution just assuredly as a progressive tax structure and welfare are. But that's part of the government's job. The goal is a functional society. We can do better than the 1800's robber-baron era.
Also I think a lot of non-profits are fucking bullshit tax dodges, but that's kind of a side-rant.
I posit we have become increasingly pathological as a species.
Due to evolutionary lag our brains haven't evolved to process the kinds of threats posed to us by pollution, carbon, nuclear and externalities from business and industry, we are 50,000 years behind the society we have created. We can't even agree enough to change the fundamental laws driving all the corruption that creates this toxic mess, the day to day business of corporations legally obliged to deliver profits to shareholders whilst funding politicians and lawmakers playing an arcane obsolete game of left and right politics.
So how can we expect to create an AI that isn't pathological, whilst at the same time needing AI to overcome our own inadequacies?
If you take a sincere look around you will see our whole planet is on life support, which translates to our entire species is on life support, because there is seven billion of us using resources. This is the paradox of our survival, what constitutes 'fit' in a Darwinian sense if we destroy the very biosphere that sustains us while building machines with dominion over us?
Humanity is worthy to survive however we are destructive enough to know we will build an AI for war that opens the door to our own doom. We know because curiosity is in our nature and we have done it so many times before as we seek immortality and dominance. We cannot even admit to our own flaws, of which I am the worst offender. I am a selfish proud vain creature that knows any melding of myself with the machine will magnify my flaws a thousand times.
So knowing myself, I know that our species will have its flaws supremely magnified by any Generalized AI that evolves out of the specific AIs we create. A generalized AI that can write its own goals and form a narrative about 'itself' in the same way we all do must therefore be subject to corruption of its goals that manifest in us as pathological. Thought is the only thing that abstracts consciousness away from the body and the product of pathological thinking cannot be sane. Even if we knew what consciousness and sanity was, would a GAI develop an ego, unbounded from time? How do we even conceptualize that?
Nature show us dominance hierarchies are inevitable in complex systems so much so that even chimps wage war. If I had power over you, I would use it, the same way you would use it over me, that's how power works. Can we expect something that exceeds us in cognitive capabilities and the ability to manipulate the environment to not to dominate us well before it starts to manifest its own, unimaginably complex, pathological behaviors?
This is, in essence, what AI shows us. That we don't know what AI is because we don't know what we are. That we are not going to the stars without a GAI and we may not even survive ourselves *without* a GAI because, by far, *we* are the biggest threats to our survival. Unless we ourselves evolve beyond our own pathological behaviors there may be nothing left of us *other* than a GAI.
That is the paradox of humanities evolution.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Except that it has taken humanity millions and millions of years to get us to this point. Humanity has built robots/AI to the point they are in only 50 years, give or take a few decades. The point of intersection is fast approaching and unless we start modifying ourselves we will be left in the dust.
Rereading this thread again, another reason occurred to my why taxing capital gains isn't a workaround to taxing corporations: fluctuations in stock price are not directly proportional to corporate profits. There are companies making no profit at all with exorbitant stock prices because of speculation, and the reverse happens as well.
Whereas passing all profits as dividends through shareholders and then taxing the shareholders directly taxes the corporation's profits, just taxing each owner directly instead of the corporation as a whole. Whether and how to tax the appreciation of the asset that is a share of stock is a different matter entirely, at best loosely correlated with taxing corporate profits.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
No it doesn't. Capitalism is just fine with a handful of people owning most of the wealth of the mankind which does not ensure the greatest possible wealth for mankind, but only for a small part of it. It also not nearly as efficient as your religious beliefs make it appear to you because concentrated wealth removes a large part of it from the economy. Less wealthy people don't sit on their money, they consume and that is what keeps an economy afloat.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Well that's just super.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
"life will become, quite literally, unlivable for the vast majority"
So, who will buy the products made by robots?
The rich themselves?
Taxes are a cost, but that cost is passed on to the consumer. So upping corporate tax will only cause prices to rise, which then will cost more for the products you want the machines to make in the first place.
What this article is suggesting is that eventually, you should be paid to be alive, having put no risk or labored no effort to justify the expense of keeping someone alive. That's the silliest notion if you follow through with that, logically. We have learned throughout the years that overpopulation is a problem on the environment and developing nations are shrinking their population, so why would you want to encourage people to have more and more children? If you pay some arbitrary value to keep someone alive, that arbitrary value will have some discretionary spending ability. So then a family of 9, where each member adds to the households total discretionary spending capacity will be better off than a family of 4. Want that new TV? Everyone chip in their 1/9 of uncle Sam's money. With no end in sight. If most people don't work anymore, why manufacture at all? What goods or services are manufacturers or "owners of production" trying to barter for? Does this sound like a winning proposition to you: "I'm going to take by force your $1,000.00. When you make $1,000.00 in product and sell it, I will give you back $1,000.00".
Suddenly, it seems hardly worth being a manufacturer in a world where everyone else gets to live for free. Maybe communism fell for a reason? The real problem here is we have 7,000,000,000 people we really don't need anymore. Just like the transformation from an agrarian society, where you had massive households to ones where family sizes came down quite a bit in industrialized societies, we enter a period of time where family sizes and populations start to shrink. There will always be some jobs you can't automate, like actors, like politicians, creative fields, judges, etc... so there will be people around us doing work for a very long time. Just probably not as many.
yes
The classic "solution" to reduce excess capital stock and unused labor is to start a war - either internal or external - this sucks up the labor and destroys capital both physically and by arms production - when a sufficient amount of labor and capital has been destroyed the system can reset and start building capital again using up the surplus labor. Of course we could just not destroy all the capital and live with a large surplus of labor through a combination of progressive taxation and basic income to labor - the problem is we are too stupid to understand this - it's immoral not to work! Those lazy people without a job should get one and we like to worship kings or billionaires and magic job creators - fuck it, I hate people - they would rather fuck the other guy over than do something that might benefit everyone - we would rather burn the whole fucking system down than give a nickel to someone "undeserving" - shit if someone had a job pushing a button twice a day they would be resentful of the "freeloaders" who didn't push a button - fuck them
probably more we could make up.
Inadvertent assertion of my point. "make up" is completely correct. Arbitrary distinctions I am sure, which will affect some "Small" corporations while leave some "big" corporations free and clear of entanglements.
Thanks!
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
how many interactions in what sort of period would count? If CEO of Apple worked in an apple store for an hour a month, would that suffice? How about a small wood shop, where the "owner" is behind the machine most of the day? For every example of defining you come up with, I can find a loophole that shows it is nothing but emotional encumbrances that you're applying.
I don't know how to effectively translate that into tax policy, though.
Fair enough, but that is kind of my point. People have all sorts of "good ideas" that sound good, feel good, but when it comes to practice are really a bunch of regulations that people will seek to avoid whenever / wherever possible. That is the one thing socialist progressives never really figure out.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
But how much do we give a damn about the initial venture capitalists that helped get General Electric founded? It was founded in 1892. Not 1992, 1892. You're suggesting that we need a system in place that vastly favors the investors in GE because we have to encourage those venture capitalists back in 1892.
Those were the terms under which GE raised its funds back in 1892, and it's far too late to try to renegotiate them now. They could have set a time limit on the shares, or remained privately held and issued bonds instead. Either way, they wouldn't have gotten quite as much funding as they received for unlimited-duration IPO shares.
Yaaaaay long term thinking, but the workers are getting the shaft for short-term gains while you defend this idea.
Nothing about the fiduciary duty of a public corporation to its shareholders requires it to chase short-term gains. If anything, compromising the long-term earning potential of the company for short-term gains runs contrary to that duty. In the end, however, it's up to the company's owners (i.e. shareholders) to decide how they want to employ their assets. That, too, was something the company agreed to when it first issued public shares.
The workers knew what they were signing up for when they joined the company (or chose to remain with the company after its IPO) and have no cause for complaint.
Economically speaking, you're foregoing consumption.
How many doughnuts do you think I can eat? There's an upper limit. I'm past it.
This shows a lack of imagination. There's always something you could be spending your money on with greater short-term value to you than investment. Even if you can't think of anything you want for yourself, charitable donations and advocacy for causes you support are also forms of consumption.
My investment does nothing for the company. As a legal construct, the company doesn't care. Even if they get bought out, it's still just business. Unless the workers have equity, it doesn't affect them. They have no stake in that. The customers don't care and probably don't know who really owns it all. The only people that it affects are other investors....
Other investors who get a say in the future of the company, which makes their opinions paramount. If the company isn't earning money for the investors, the investors will vote to dissolve the company and redistribute its assets elsewhere. The company may not directly benefit from your investment, but it does have reason to care about the performance characteristics that led you to invest in the first place, because without that performance it will soon cease to exist.
Aren't there any alternatives that don't involve throwing piles of cash at already rich people?
None that work as well, or we would already be using them. By definition, only the "already rich people" have the capital businesses need to grow; if businesses want to take advantage of that capital then they need to make the investment worthwhile. Other models (e.g. co-ops) can work in limited circumstances and have their niche uses but are not as efficient at allocating resources, meaning that society as a whole would end up spending more to produce less.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Does it cost anything to get a computer? You can pick up an old junk computer for nothing, That's just the way of technology. I am sure there will be clever jobless people restoring junk robots too.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Also I am not discounting the need for UBI or putting on rose-colored glasses. There will be smart people that find a way but loads of suffering for others as well.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Allow me to borrow a phrase from the media: "distinctions without a difference."
Not Donny. Not aware of who that is. Perhaps a woosh moment on me.
Could just admit that raising the minimum wage has only hurt teenagers and minorities. Just check out the numbers. Higher it goes, the less are employed, the more get into trouble because they have no money, all the time in the world and don't care.
Not hard people.
For those paying attention, increasing corporate taxes is contrary to the fundamental goals of any Conservative party anywhere. As a group they are typically funded by corporates and senior positions are stacked with corporate personnel. If you want a future for your kids, don't vote Conservative / GOP / whatever they call themselves.
Only boring people are ever bored.
Absolutely agreed. There will be plenty of new open positions for jobs like "grass growing watcher", "paint drying monitor", "air wasting expert", "fart collector" and similar.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
People have all sorts of "good ideas" that sound good, feel good, but when it comes to practice are really a bunch of regulations that people will seek to avoid whenever / wherever possible. That is the one thing socialist progressives never really figure out.
This is why simple graduated tax schemes without a lot of bullcrap in them work best, although obviously there is any amount of room for dickery in the rates. However, at least you can point to the rate table, and understand it, and people know how mad to get.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You have a good point there. I guess the part that I don't understand is why the conservatives on one hand or so before making the poor as poor as they possibly can, and for making is many poor people as they possibly can. It just doesn't add up !
Or we could just up corporate taxes and accept that full-time long-term employment in many sectors is a thing of the past.
If robots replace people, and the people are impoverished, who is going to afford to buy the products from the robot-based company? Is the dollar going to have a different value and meaning? Are people going to do job-sharing?
Robots may put people out of work, and those people will just not have the means to purchase goods and services. Ergo, the manufacturer will have to shut-down his business for long periods, simply because of slow moving inventory.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
"I feel therefore I am": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Damasio presents the "somatic marker hypothesis", a proposed mechanism by which emotions guide (or bias) behavior and decision-making, and positing that rationality requires emotional input. He argues that Rene Descartes' "error" was the dualist separation of mind and body, rationality and emotion."
Also from Albert Einstein: http://www.sacred-texts.com/ao...
"For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly."
Stuff I wrote years ago on putting humane values back into economics given post-scarcity trends:
"Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics"
http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a...
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable on structural unemployment and a
basic income"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/read...
"The PU economics department, of course, should be abolished as part of this transition
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.