It's a fact hand crafted goods are not only popular but gaining while mass produced automated bullshit burns
It's a fact that people don't give a sit whether or not their farming is automated because it already is (to a large extent) and this won't change it (from the consumer's perspective) one bit except make production more efficient and has drive the cost of food down, which is a good thing, so this whole 'automation makes everything bad' -whine is pretty ridiculous.
We wouldn't have anywhere near the amount of goods to go around without mass production, because handcrafting complex items is time consuming, expensive, and often very, very inefficient. The food production on a global level relies already on automation and machinery to be able to feed the billions of us. If we went your way and started going backwards towards more manual labor, we'd lower the food output and increase starvation. Like honestly, how fucking stupid are you? Do you not understand how industrial farming works and how little this differs from it except being more efficient?
This was just another BS climate change article
The article didn't even mention climate change, but was merely talking about the improvements in efficiency we can get by automating farming. Obviously in the long term this probably has a beneficial effect for the climate as well, but that was in no way the point made in the article, which you'd know if you were able to do basic reading comprehension.
It takes a gigantic moron to look at technological improvements which help us produce more food for people and call it bullshit.
What? We're talking about farming here. Farmwork is already heavily mechanized. Even organic farmers use modern equipment, computers, tractors and so on to help thme do the work and quite many of the fruits and vegetables people eat already are picked up by machines. The only change is that farmer himself will no longer have to be sitting on top of the tractor but instead can monitor the progress of the harvest from his computer. How is that 'taking the craftmanship out of things'??? I don't care one iota if the potato I buy has been picked by a a tractor driven by a guy or one driving itself, as long as it tastes alright.
I'm sure the people living in some sandy shit hole would appreciate automated anything if it meant the difference between starvation and survival
I'm sure people living anywhere in the world appreciate automated anything if it means the difference between paying more and paying less for that same thing. That's why industrial scale automated production is so popular: start making 'hand-crafted' electronics for example and they're going to be so expensive that nearly no-one could buy them.
Long story short this is just another bullshit leftist climate change article
Long story short you just went full retard. Never go full retard.
To replace coal, we're building more nuclear. There's one new reactor being built (actually the biggest in the world at 1700 MW, although the project has been seriously delayed and is unfortunately massively over budget/schedule due to problems with the French contractor (Areva) and one additional reactor being planned for 2024. If both of these are successfully completed, it will more than double our nuclear capabilities and increase our energy production capabilities by almost 3000 MW. and should be more than enough to make up for the gap left by abandoning coal.
I'm a fan of nuclear, especially since we're also building the first ever deep geological repository to handle the waste storage. It's just a shame that the project has turned out to be such a screw.up (granted it is partially because the reacrtor type - European Pressurized Reactor - is new and has never been built before), and I'm hoping the authorities here learn something important from this: bidding these types of projects based solely on the price-tag will lead to issues. I do believe though that Areva will end up paying the fees once the case is settled, though whether or not it will actually have the money to do so (it's over 5 billion) is another matter.
Regardless of the difficulties and the cost, nuclear is really the only way forward for us, because we're pretty much tapped out on Hydro and solar doesn't have much use here at commercial scales because for half the year the sun is pretty much gone. So if we want to be rational and dump both coal and the dependency on Russian import gas, going nuclear with modern is the only viable option at this point.
Germany has gone the opposite direction and is shutting down nuclear power plants which is actually leading to an increase in the use of fossil fuels. Here's a TED talk about why the senseless opposition to nuclear is actually harming the environment because of that.
You are of an opinion that every job will be automated
Yes, in the long term, because as long as we keep improving the information processing of our technology, eventually we're going to reach a point wherein the machines are as intelligent as humans at which point they can essentially take over all jobs and do them faster and better than humans.
the prices for people fall and they are again competitive against automation.
This is flatout wrong. I tried to explain to you but I'll try again. If you look at the example of automated invoicing for example, a machine automates away the need for 15 extra people. The automated systems are capable of doing so much work so muuch more efficiently that it's not possible for human workers to compete with these systems. Automated systems are low cost already and they're vastly more skilled/efficient than even an experienced human employee, so trying to match the automated systems in cost/benefit is not feasible even in the relatively short term really, let alone the long term.
You have an untenable goal: to provide hundreds of millions of jobless individuals with a quality of life that their politicians promised them at the expense of the oppressed individuals and companies and you believe that these individuals and companies will not leave and go to markets that are much less oppressed?
The goal is not untenable. Developed economies already provide this standard of living for people. As production gets more efficient due to humans being taken out of the production loop the economies become more efficient so its not like production goes down. The economies can still produce everything they produce now and more, they just dont need anywhere close the amount of humans in the production. So should the standard of living in western economies collapse just because even though we still have equal production capabilities and material wealth, we no longer need to burden human workers?
This will eventually be the case for the whole world, as the standard of living rises even in the developing world and automating jobs becomes cheaper and cheaper as these systems become more commonplace. Eventually automated systems will be cheaper than even the quasi-slave labor in countries like China, and in fact automation of production facilities in China is already underway in many places because they're able to do the math and see that even though the initial investment can be huge, the long term benefit for the companies is already visible even compared to labor priced at 3 dollars a day.
If the companies leave and produce everything elsewhere either by outsourcing or automation, they will kill off the market they want to sell to. They need people and companies to buy their product, but without income (which people will not be able to get because, as explained above, in the long term human labor CANNOT compete with automation) these people cannot buy products and thus the consumer companies especially will lose their income from these markets and essentially destroy themselves,
So in the long term either the taxes are raised to fund something like UBI make sure people can have a money to acquire goods from the companies and keep the profit motive alive, or the taxes are not raised and the majority of the companies will collapse as there'll be no paying customers to create any demand for the goods and services they provide.
Who do you think can provide a cheaper service, the local developers or outsourced ones (given approximately the same quality)
And when the point arrives that automated systems themselves can do most or all of the development (which is not that far off, as you should know if you're following what's happening) the outsourcing will become inefficient even compared to african dirt-poor development.
There is no way around this: human labor/outsourcing will be able to compete with some of the automated systems for
That's your opinion, not theirs, and certainly not mine. As someone currently running a tech-startup myslef I see things very differently, but this is a minor point in this discussion so I'll leave that be and move on to the more important matter, which is that you are still dodging the issue.
labour and capital are always in competition, government oppression makes labour artificially more expensive, thus providing more incentives for automation that exist otherwise.
This is a total non-sequitur. In the mid-to-long term automation will surpass human workers with or without government 'oppression' (still the wrong word but whatever) because machines are more cost-effective at these jobs. It's simply not possible for a human worker to do for example invoicing or bookkeeping or any repetitive and simple jobs for faster and as well or better than a machine that can handle thousands of transactions in seconds and do so with considerably lower margins of error than a human being.
Even if I grant you to be correct for the sake of argument that government involvement is making this process faster, the overall advancements of technology which are happening and will keep happening mean that jobs requiring only little or no education will eventually be made obsolete by machines, as the technological advancements cannot be stopped barring a major planetary catastrophe.
Simply put, humans are incapable at competing effectively with machines when it comes to information processing, which means we're not in the same market as the machines from the point of view of the corporations. Machines and humans are not equal or equally effective as workers, which is why your supply and demand analogy fails and fails massively.
Again, I know from personal experience having been a part of the process that what now takes around 20 people to run invoice will soon be ran with machines and 3-5 people. This is cheaper and more effective. So please, stop deluding yourself into thinking that slow, error-prone humans are capable of competing with something that does the exactly same job faster, tirelessly and with a lower rate of error. The cost/benefit ratio of an automated system, even if the 20 people were paid HALF of what they used to be paid would still vastly be better. There is no price point at which the labor of these individuals is competitive with a system that has an entirely predictable output rate and a fixed - and relatively low (compared to operating profit) . cost. Machines work 24/7, don't take sick leave, don't complain etc. Once a system like that is set up and working (and like I said, these are not that expensive these days) there's no reason for any company to hire those 20 people at even a dollar per hour wage because the machine is simply a better investment value-wise.
There is no way for human individuals to compete with machines because of this in the long term.
As for education, firstly: bullshit. Education per student is cheaper in western countries where it is provided as public service instead of as a for-profit commodity. It's the combination of private, for-profit universities and private but government backed loans that's making it so ridiculously expensive in the US. When education is a necessity to be able to enter the labor market, it makes no sense to force people into debt just so they can even apply for a job.
But more importantly I was asking what do you imagine the situation to be in your 'ideal' future when, even if one takes debt, there's absolutely no guarantee that you'll get employed because a larger amount of people will be competing for a smaller amount of jobs, meaning the 'investment' one makes into privately acquired education is incredibly risk and has even more of a chance of ruining your life entirely if you don't get a job but are left with the debt and no means to pay it.
So really, what are the options for somebody born into
No, I'm saying they helkd a god damn press release in which they stated they inted to both keep their headquarters located in Helsinki and keep paying both theior personal taxes and corporate taxes here because they want to support the society without which they wouldn't have had the chance to become so successful
"We've received a lot of help from society, and now it is our turn to give something back," Paananen said, writes Helsingin Sanomat.
And again, please explain how your model intends to account for the disappearance of jobs en mass due to automation. Because people will need higher education in the future even more than they do today but it will not guarantee them employment.
So are you really saying that the 98 % of society that isn't extremely wealthy just has to first take massive debt to even be able to compete in the for the few jobs that will remain, and the rest that do not get either employment or education - ie. probably over half the population in 3-4 decades) will have to just hope for donations from the elite class or die?
What? If you take any form of income away from that amount of people,m do you understand what that will do the corporations when they'll lose a significant chunk of consumers, let alone for societal stability overall etc...
So, instead of afressing any of the problems I pointed out in your propsed model taking into consideration that the possibilities for employment will be highly reduced in advanced economies in the coming decades, you ignore all the facts and just choose to keep on with the nonsensical strawman of ''oppression'. The guys behind Supercell (the makes of the Clash of Clans hit and recent billionaires) voluntarily paid their taxes into Finland because they said they consider the system here to be the primary reason for their success, so this oppression angle is just bullshit.
Solid, very solid. How do you expect anyone to take your ideas even vaguely seriously when you cannot even mount an argument to defend them when problems are pointed out?
There shouldn't be any such thing as a 'safety net'
Ah yes, what a glorious future it will be when 90 % of current low to minimum skill jobs are entirely automated and quite a large chunk of normal office jobs as well. Have you not followed the projections on the effects of technology to employment: there is no way there will be jobs for everyone in the future in industrialized nations, because pretty soon we'll reach a point in which a low-skill human is simply inferior/less efficient in most jobs compared to a machine. Do some actual reading::
According to our estimate, 47 percent of total US employment is in the high risk category, meaning that associated occupations are potentially automatable over some unspecified number of years, perhaps a decade or two.
And that's just the estimate for the next couple of decades, the nu,ber will only increase as time goes on. Once we hit AI it will effectively make all human labor pretty much obsolete.
People should save on their own, it needs to be a fully personal responsibility
So where does this saving come from where the chances are that there simply isn't work available for a majority of non/low-educated individuals in a couple devades? How do they save when they have no marketable skills, and in your vision of plutocratic america I assume getting an education that would offer the a slightly better (but not guaranteed) employment also costs a fuckton of money?
If self reliance and family fail, then it's a charity case (if anybody wants to donate)
Ah, so in your vision of an idela society most people who aren't born into a wealthy family simply die off unless some rich asshole manages to have some pity for them. What a place to live in, truly.
but it must *never* be a case of government oppression for the sake of edge cases.
I live in a modern social-democratic country (Finland) in which my tax money is used to fund the education, health care and other basic needs of my fellow citizens. I don't consider this oppression in the least, and I fail to see why anyone sane would. I mean, firstly, the wealthy individuals who run companies here are only able to do so because they enjoy a population of highly educated, healthy individuals and a stable infrastructure. Without these things commerce itself would be impossible, so it makes complete sense, from a both indvidual as well as corporate perspective, to rpvide such base level fundamental services with tax-funds. There's nothing oppressive about societies pooling resources and collectively funding essential services, that's the very reason societies are born in the first place and we don't live in a state of anarchy.
I was born in the USSR, I am fully aware of how socialism works and I reject it fully as well.
Ah yes, the age old 'b-b-b-but the soviet union was horrible' card which conveniently ignores the last half a century of development in northern and western Europe in which socialism is implemented entirely differently from the soviet union and has by all possible metrics achieved vastly superior results.
Have you ever been to the Norodic countries? Germany? France?
Yeah, we aren't exactly living in the soviet union here you doofus, and just because countries like the USSR and others have managed to fuck up socialistic ideals by turning into tyranies doesn't mean that the only feasible way forward is some weird ancap plutocracy in which you have no social mobility whatsoever unless you suck enough rich CEO dick to make them fund your education/living..
Is that really your vision of an ideal society in an age when we're nearing the end of humans as the main factors of production? Because unless you're someone with a doctora
Sure, there are plenty of minimum wage jobs available,
Not for long though. Low-skilled humans are being surpassed by machinery at a fast rate. Self-checkouts, self-driving cars, automated warehousing, automated electronic invoicing, etc etc The Era oif the lowly educated but well paid worker is fast coming to an end. Sure, the automation also creates some jobs, but the further into the future we go, the less and less jobs there will be for people with little to no education simply because they will rarely provide any benefit to having a machine do the same job.
This is why not just America, but all of the industrialized world needs to start re-.inventing the social safety nets and considering something like basic income, because all projections currently point to the amount of unemployment only growing in th future decades. Achieving high employment rate in an environment were humans are unnecessary as factors of production in many fields is not possible.
rather than trying to use their ad service to micromanage what people see and hear
But there's no way for them NOT to do that. Ad-revenue follows the amount of views, which means if they do nothing they're essentially taking a stance of 'we'll facilitate the spread of any type of mis-information as long as it makes us money". So they're already doing it now, they're just slightly changing their parameters. It's their product and platform, they have no obligation whatsoever to spread lies to make money if they don't want to.
Fake news is not good, but it is not Google's job to "correct" it.
And why not? It's a search engine, the point of which is to provide people accurate information. If some trolls/hackers/political shills/whatever try to skew the search results so that upon googling thing X, instead a completely unrelated/false article Y comes up, that means their product is not operating as intended and they should correct it.
Sorry, but I have no faith in numbers from Wiki or the LCOE they cite, and further, they include TCO figures for wind/solar that are largely based on speculation and guesswork
Erhm.
he following data are from the Energy Information Administration's (EIA) Annual Energy Outlook released in 2015 (AEO2015). They are in dollars per megawatt-hour (2013 USD/MWh). These figures are estimates for plants going into service in 2020.[55] The LCOE below is calculated based off a 30-year recovery period using a real after tax weighted average cost of capital (WACC) of 6.1%. For carbon intensive technologies 3 percentage points are added to the WACC. (This is approximately equivalent fee of $15 per metric ton of carbon dioxide CO2)
EA estimates reveal that fossil-fuel subsidies are becoming increasingly concentrated in the major oil- and gas-exporting countries. The share of Middle East oil exporters, for example, in the world total has risen from 35% to 40% over the last four years. The main reason for this trend is that high oil prices over much of the period meant that they, as net oil exporters, did not have the same fiscal incentive to reform energy pricing as that in many other parts of the world. Instead, the rise in government revenues from oil exports allowed an increase in government spending, often on social support programmes, expanding infrastructure and subsidies to food and energy. Over the period 2009-2014, fossil-fuel subsidies for this group of countries have, on average, been equivalent to more than one-quarter of government expenditure.
Soi why would it be wrong to factor in the tax-breaks and susidies given to renewables, when the point of comparison in terms of fossil fuels is also heavily subsidized by producing nations and the environmental damage caused by oil/coal means that the true cost of using these fuels is in fact externalized because there's a delay between using fossil fuel's and seeing the effect of the usage in the climate and thus the global economy?
The inclusion of subsidies does not make the price comparisons invalid, it makes them more accurate. Unless you want to start to calculate the actual, unsubsidized cost of oil/coal as well.
If that were true that they were cheaper everyone would be figuratively storming the gates to use wind/solar, the wind/solar equipment makers couldn't keep the stuff on the shelves, and they'd be abandoning other generation means within a couple years because they'd make more money.
Well, no, that's not quite the case. Onshore wind is already cheaper than coal, and photovoltaic solar energy is essentially pretty much at even when it comes to the costs of a more advanced/modern coal power.
The reason the rush to these forms is not yet happening is that the the big issue with renewables is load-balancing. That is, since wind/solar generation is erratic and depends on the time of day/year, it means that a grid ran primarily using these forms cannot easily answer to increased demand. This is why at the moment with current grids, the efficient way to ditch fossil fuel's is to use a combination of renewables with nuclear, which is also on par or cheaper to coal and can be used to provide additional energy when the renewables don't produce enough.
The danger is that if the share of renewables is increased but nuclear is left out, the additional demand needs to be met with fossil fuels. This in fact is happening in places like germany where the well-intentioned but shortsighted Green party has put a ban on new nuclear power plants and they're driving the existing ones down. So despite the amount of renewable capacity going up, CO2 emissions are also going up because nuclear output is coming down and is being supplemented by coal-plants.
So you're claiming that something so easy to understand can only be understood by those who study it which means that everything you've said is complete an utter horse shit.
No, that's not what I'm claiming you idiot. The greenhouse effect simply means that certain gases such as Co2 and methane bounce back k heat and thus warm the atmosphere, which can and has been easily proved in a laboratory setting. This effect is not in dispute among scientists.
Oh, so do these lab test also account for CMEs and cosmic radiation both of which are well known for quake activity and cloud seeding rates?
Many climate scientists agree that sunspots and solar wind could be playing a role in climate change, but the vast majority view it as very minimal and attribute Earthâ(TM)s warming primarily to emissions from industrial activityâ"and they have thousands of peer-reviewed studies available to back up that claim.
Peter Foukal of the Massachusetts-based firm Heliophysics, Inc., who has tracked sunspot intensities from different spots around the globe dating back four centuries, also concludes that such solar disturbances have little or no impact on global warming. Nevertheless, he adds, most up-to-date climate modelsâ"including those used by the United Nationsâ(TM) prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)â"incorporate the effects of the sunâ(TM)s variable degree of brightness in their overall calculations.
Ironically, the only way to really find out if phenomena like sunspots and solar wind are playing a larger role in climate change than most scientists now believe would be to significantly reduce our carbon emissions. Only in the absence of that potential driver will researchers be able to tell for sure how much impact natural influences have on the Earthâ(TM)s climate.
Based on what?
Based on the simple fact that it's the most prevalent greenhouse has in the atmosphere and thus has the most effect in the heat retaining capability of the atmosphere.
So you're saying if the Sun vanished tomorrow that the CAGW hypothisis would be unaffected?
No you idiot, I never said that the original source of the heat is not the sun and neither did the scientists. The greenhouse effect works by binding/bouncing back heat from the sun thus warming the Earth. No-one's disputing that the heat itself is coming from the sun, the whole point of global warming is that dumping more greenhouse gases such as CO2 into the atmosphere means it will retain more of the heat provided by the sun thus affecting the climate.
So the sun warms the Earth, and increasing the amount of greenhouse gases increases the rate of warming. There's nothing controversial or disputable about this, it's quite simple science.
Where has rain fall or droughts increased?
More heat --> more energy in the atmosphere --> more rains and storms. This logic is not disputed among climatologists.
Oh like what?
Increased foliage in places like deserts and arctic tundras?
No, like such increased rainfall that crops will not grow where they now do. Too much rain will prevent normal food crops from growing, while places close to the equator will get so warm that nothing will grow there,
However, increased warming has ALWAYS 'triggered' the mass emergence of life.
Yes, but that warming has usually occurred over several centuries and millenia. The problem is that the warming being caused by man is happening at a much faster rate t6han any natural cycles that plant/animal life does not have the time to a
You'd have to be a complete fucking idiot if you think CO2 is the control knob the Climate...pfft.
No, you'd have to be a scientist with a working understanding of the greenhouse effect. You can measure the heat trapping ability of CO2 in a lab or test it yourself by building a greenhouse, we can do the math on it and figure out how much an increase in CO in the atmosphere traps more heat. It's not the only controller of heat in the atmosphere but it is the most prevalent and therefore most important
Do you understand that increasing the greenhouse effect has real life implications really fast: sea-levels rising, rainfall increasing in other areas whereas droughts will increase alsewhere, more and bigger storms etc. Plus there's the risk of chain-reactions occurring: once the northern permafrost starts to melt it will release methane which is 20 times stronger as a greenhouse gas the CO2, which will them increase the warming yet again melting more of the frost and creating an unstoppable feedback loop.
We're not in complete control of the climate but we're having a major impact on it in ways which do not bode well for the future. The oil and coal companies are racking up short term profit the total cost of which will be seen in the daces to come when coastal cities start to get flooded and people start dying more from food shortages and droughts. If the oceans get acidified enough for mass extinction of plankton to occur that puts a stop to major oxygen producer and has the change to quite literally wipe us out as well.
These being the realities of the situation anyone favoring oil or coal for energy production at this point has to be an idiot, ignorant or just self-destructive.
FYI, China (the biggest contributor of global emissions) plans a 20% increase in coal by 2020:
Wrong. Their CO2 emissions are rising because of among other things cars/traffic until 2030 when they're projected to peak and turn it around. Providing clean energy for over a billion people is not exactly a project you can achieve overnight. As for coal itself: they're already planning restrictions on coal mining/use because major cities have severe issues with smog/pollutants causing significant damage to the people and industries, they have a vested interest in fixing this stuff.
Paris Agreement targets
China’s NDC, submitted to the UNFCCC on 3 September 2016 includes a number of elements:
Increase the share of non-fossil energy sources in the total primary energy supply to around 20% by 2030; Increase the share of natural gas in the total primary energy supply to around 10% by 2020; Lower the carbon intensity of GDP by 60% to 65% below 2005 levels by 2030; Increase the forest stock volume by around 4.5 billion cubic metres, compared to 2005 levels; Proposed reductions in the production of HCFC22 (35% below 2010 levels by 2020 and 67.5% by 2025) and “controlling” HFC23 production. These elements were all in China’s INDC on 30 June 2015, and were carried over to the NDC submitted to the Paris Agreement on 3 September 2016. China’s NDC also includes a comprehensive list of actions to achieve its 2020 and 2030 targets. A large number of the policies have already been implemented.
2020 pledge
China’s 2020 pledge consists of the following elements:
Overall reduction of CO2 emissions per unit of GDP by 40–45% below 2005 levels by 2020; Increase the share of non-fossil fuels in primary energy consumption to around 15% by 2020; Increase forest coverage by 40 million hectares and forest stock volume by 1.3 billion cubic metres by 2020 from 2005 levels. We analysed the effects of all these targets, including the non-fossil target for 2020 and 2030. To do this, energy-related emissions until 2020 were assumed to follow current policy projections from the IEA WEO 2015,
So let me get this straight, the problem is that there wasn't enough control over the news by the Democratic party?
No, that's not what I took from this story at all.
The problem with social media that this election illustrates on both sides is that because of its nature it seeks to maximize views and shares, it doesn't care whether or not an article comes from a satirical news site, a blog, or a scientific journal. All it cares about is maximizing eyeballs and clickthrough rates. This creates an environment that's ideal for bubbles to form and as people on both sides of the political field share stuff - factual or not - that supports their view.
For democracy to work properly the populace needs to be informed about the state of affairs. When they're not, and when the channels of information they use don't offer them factual information but emotionally appealing content, the result is that populism becomes easier and easier. It's only a day after the election and Trump has started pivoting into his actual positions already. He's stopped talking about jailing Clinton, and his so called 'plan' to ban all muslims just disappeared from his website without any explanation.
As a foreigner I'm not so much worried about Trumps actions as president, but what his run is signalling: you can now lie openly and blatantly and make claims that are so wildly absurd everyone with 2 brain cells or more knows them to be bullshit, and still get elected as the president of the most powerful nation on Earth.
If we want better candidates, step one on that road is to make the voters more aware of how to discern truth from fiction, and the media does play a role in that, especially the social media.
Hoping against hope that this will happen. Shut down the Fed, IRS, FHA, EPA, departments of energy, small business, education, get rid of all departments that are unconstitutional. Get libertarians, objectivists, ancaps into positions in SCOTUS and other powerful positions. Shut down everything public, get rid of SS, Medicare, labour laws and regulations, income and wealth taxes. This planet needs individual freedoms on that level at least in one country.
So, what you're essentially saying is that you want the US to turn into a full-on plutocracy in which one will simply die without a job/income? And this at a time where menial jobs are fast disappearing because automation and machines are fast becoming more effective than human workers? And at the same time you want to make sure getting education becomes more difficult if not altogether impossible for people who cannot afford to take massive debt.
Do you understand what life under such a system would actually be like? It would essentially destroy any social mobility that you guys have left and mean that anyone born into a poor/uneducated family would permanently stay that way.
If this is the direction you guys want to be heading to, I'm doubly glad I'm not american, that's just lunacy.
Neither can a president declare war without their approval.
The US congress has declared war 11 times the last one in 1942.
You went to fucking Vietnam without congressional approval. Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. There's no need for congressional approval for the president to deploy military force, and since this precedent has long since been established I don't think for a second Trump will even try to get congressional approval if he wants to play war-games in the mdddile-east or wherever.
More money in consumers' hands only profits the companies if that money was earned; otherwise they're just getting back a portion of what already belonged to them in the first place.
You're missing the big picture. Under the current situation what is happening is that companies are competing for the money of consumers that already by and large comes from other corporations as most consumers get their income as a salary.
The economy is a giant game in which a large pool of resources are concentrated at the top, from which they're moved via taxation and employment to the pockets of consumers who then circulate it back into the hands of the companies by buying items. In this game the companies compete against each other for consumers' money.
Right now more consumers are getting their money as pay than as social benefits and entitlements, but corporations are already in most advanced economies paying for the upkeep of the low-income/unemployed segment. So really, the only thing that will dramatically change is that as the companies in the future no longer need human employees as factors in production, the costs of employment will plummet as they no longer need as many employees, and the cost of taxes will rise as taxes have to be increased to fund UBI and maintain demand.
There is still profit to be made in this scenario, and quite a lot of it, because a single corporation only pays in a tiny fraction of the UBI, whereas it can get back a lot more by runing a successful business and thus essentially move money from other corporations to themselves, just as they do currently by taking in money that other corporations have initially paid to their customers as salary. From the point of view of the company, the money paid into UBI by other corporations is just as much 'earned' as money that people now get in the form of salaries is and should be competed for in just the same way.
The "charity theory of economics" is one of the nastiest lies modern society is deceiving itself with.
Completely agreed. It's based on a very faulty understanding of economies and demand to begin with: sure, the top 1 % in the future can have insane amounts of money, even more than they do now, but no matter how much money they have, they're not going to be buying billions of bottles of coke or loaves of bread or cars for that matter. They might buy a few very expensive cars, but simply put the consumption of a few multi-billionaires cannot under any circumstance make up for the demand that would be lost if ordinary people were no longer buying items.
Luckily, I do think the billionaires themselves will understand this because the math is relatively straightforward and they'll see that if they want to keep running their companies and gaining any income themselves, they need to make sure the consumers have money to get their products.
Nonsense. There's more than enough money and resources in advanced economies already that industrialized economies can offer a decent standard of living to their citizens. In the future work gets more efficient because of automation which means these economies can output more, not less, which means there is more than enough resources to go around in the future as well. Money itself is just a tool used in trading and allocating these resources, it's not something we can as such run out of as long as we have wealth to trade and distribute, which we will.
2) when taxes get too high the profit incentive disappears and people won't want to operate businesses.
What? Do you understand that consumers are the basis of the profit motive to begin with?. If you leave the vast majority of society without jobs as is bound to happen and don't provide them with sufficient income, this will destroy the possibility of most companies to have any profits at all.
The companies are faced with a choice: since automation is always more effective than paying a human worker to do the same job, they'll naturally gravitate towards it and that's fine. But if eventually all production more or less is automated, there will be nobody left to buy consumer goods if the consumers don't have money.
So in the long term either the taxes are raised to fund UBI make sure people can have a money to acquire goods from the companies and keep the profit motive alive, or the taxes are not raised and the majority of the companies will collapse as there'll be no paying customers to create any demand for the goods and services they provide.
The alternative to no private industry is communism.
Without UBI, the private industry will be largely destroyed as already explained. From a game theory point of view the existence of a consumer class with resources to spend is an existential requirement for private industry to operate.
Because again, there is no incentive to work.
There will be no incentive to work when machines can handle most tasks better, faster and at a lower cost than humans because there will be no sensible reason for any company to hire them. Once AI hits human level this will be true for all intellectual jobs as well.
You cannot solve the issue caused by automation with saying 'oh people just need incentive to work' when the whole source of the situation is that people as factors of production are being made obsolete fast by machines.
You are very misinformed about the Russian situation. The October Revolution was the result of Bolshevik forces co-opting the February Revolution by capturing key infrastructure like railroads. Both the February Revolution and the October Revolution were the work of relative elites and were not popular revolts. (The popular revolt element came in only subsequently with the Civil War, when the peasantry began choosing either the Red or White side.)
I'm very aware of these realities, but the whole point is that the foundations that lead to the civil war after the revolution, and the rise of communism in general wouldn't have existed if it wasn't for the poor proletariat masses created by the industrialization. Communism as an ideal was given birth to by the industrial revolution and the conditions across Europe that it created for the uneducated working poor.
So my point wasn't to say that income inequality was the direct cause of the Russian revolution, but that the inequality was a key component in the chain of events leading to birth of the Soviet union. When you have a mass of people doing badly, they're prone to conflict.
The test is whether Musk would be willing to pay a significantly higher corporation tax to fund the basic income.
You're very correct that all models of UBI require fundamental changes to taxation. However I'd argue that in the long term it's not even about the will of the companies, they'll be forced to. The alternative is to have huge masses of people living in poverty, which is bad for business in numerous ways. Firstly if people have little to no money there'll be little to no money to consume, which will eat at the profits of companies. Secondly the political instability that such a situation would cause is also damaging for corporations and wealthy individuals.
If we look at times when income inequality has been even higher than today, the 1800s are a good example: the wealthy elites enjoying the fruits of the industrial revolution paid little attention to the poor and starving masses, which eventually backlashed and lead to, among other things, the Russian revolution.
If you think about a situation wherein something like 10-20 % of the population is working full or part time and the rest are unemployed, that's not exactly something that can just be ignored. And absurd as that may sound now, that's the direction we're heading in a few decades.
Point being: if the people at the very top of the income and ownership classes have any sense of self-preservation, they'll realize that it's easier to spread some of the wealth and well being around voluntarily, because if that is not done eventually it will tear societies apart and endanger the elites themselves.
And the useful idiots think that Mrs. Clinton is their friend.
As a European I'm not a fan of either of the candidates, but do we have any reason to assume Trump is any better?
Seriously I have not seen Trump make any statements about privacy/mass surveillance/whistleblowers/etc that'd give me a reason to believe that he will somehow change or improve America's status quo when it comes to surveillance. In fact, a quick googling tends to reveal the exact opposite of that:
"I tend to err on the side of security, I must tell you," Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt when asked about the metadata program.
"When you have the world looking at us and would like to destroy us as quickly as possible, I err on the side of security," - -
Trump said his position in favor of the NSA data collection had been the same since before last month's terrorist attacks in Paris, which stoked fears of international terrorism and revived debate over government surveillance measures. - -
Trump said Tuesday that he would be "fine" with restoring provisions of the Patriot Act to allow for the bulk data collection, something candidates such as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush have also called for that was banned with the passage of the USA Freedom Act, which Cruz supported.
"As far as I'm concerned, that would be fine," Trump said.
The problem with this candidates is that both sides of this debate are so heavily polarized that the fanbase of both seems to assume their candidate is better on a given issue simply because the opposing candidate has a bad stance on it.
You may think Trump is the lesser of two evils, but make no mistake: Trump is no champion of civil liberties. If this is your reason for voting him, I suggest re-thinking about it.
Ah that's always ripe, when ethnic majority countries who have fuck all for foreign born citizens laughably telling others to import more. In 5 years the US has let in more foreigners than Finland has population.
That's not the point, the point is you need to bear responsibility for the refugees of this conglict better, because it's you guys who started this mess. I'm not criticising the general US immigration policy, but the handling of this specific crisis.
especially when you have the same refugees fleeing the country due to racism opting to return to the bosom of Sweden. http://mvlehti.net/2015/09/20/
Your 'source' is not a newspaper but a blog ran from spain by a guy who currently has an arrest warrant as he's a supect in several crimes. including fraud, harassment and defamation. They've got an anti-immigration, anti-EU agenda which they push by frequently running entirely fake stories with no sources. Reporters have tested it and they seem to approve any submissions that fit their agenda, so literally it's a comment forum moderated by a suspect criminal for his own personal benefit and political agenda.
So to sum it up: you missed my whole point and countered with a story from a propaganda site masquerading as a news site.
Damn, you couldn't even get a single word out without trying to blatantly skew the issue
What? Are you with an honest face trying to claim that the rebuilding of the state of Iraq as it was handled by the US lead coalition was not a failure that lead to the newfound state of Iraq being so weak that it collapsed into internal conflict almost immediately?
Slashdot Mirror
It's a fact that people don't give a sit whether or not their farming is automated because it already is (to a large extent) and this won't change it (from the consumer's perspective) one bit except make production more efficient and has drive the cost of food down, which is a good thing, so this whole 'automation makes everything bad' -whine is pretty ridiculous.
We wouldn't have anywhere near the amount of goods to go around without mass production, because handcrafting complex items is time consuming, expensive, and often very, very inefficient. The food production on a global level relies already on automation and machinery to be able to feed the billions of us. If we went your way and started going backwards towards more manual labor, we'd lower the food output and increase starvation. Like honestly, how fucking stupid are you? Do you not understand how industrial farming works and how little this differs from it except being more efficient?
The article didn't even mention climate change, but was merely talking about the improvements in efficiency we can get by automating farming. Obviously in the long term this probably has a beneficial effect for the climate as well, but that was in no way the point made in the article, which you'd know if you were able to do basic reading comprehension.
It takes a gigantic moron to look at technological improvements which help us produce more food for people and call it bullshit.
What? We're talking about farming here. Farmwork is already heavily mechanized. Even organic farmers use modern equipment, computers, tractors and so on to help thme do the work and quite many of the fruits and vegetables people eat already are picked up by machines. The only change is that farmer himself will no longer have to be sitting on top of the tractor but instead can monitor the progress of the harvest from his computer. How is that 'taking the craftmanship out of things'??? I don't care one iota if the potato I buy has been picked by a a tractor driven by a guy or one driving itself, as long as it tastes alright.
I'm sure people living anywhere in the world appreciate automated anything if it means the difference between paying more and paying less for that same thing. That's why industrial scale automated production is so popular: start making 'hand-crafted' electronics for example and they're going to be so expensive that nearly no-one could buy them.
Long story short you just went full retard. Never go full retard.
To replace coal, we're building more nuclear. There's one new reactor being built (actually the biggest in the world at 1700 MW, although the project has been seriously delayed and is unfortunately massively over budget/schedule due to problems with the French contractor (Areva) and one additional reactor being planned for 2024. If both of these are successfully completed, it will more than double our nuclear capabilities and increase our energy production capabilities by almost 3000 MW. and should be more than enough to make up for the gap left by abandoning coal.
I'm a fan of nuclear, especially since we're also building the first ever deep geological repository to handle the waste storage. It's just a shame that the project has turned out to be such a screw.up (granted it is partially because the reacrtor type - European Pressurized Reactor - is new and has never been built before), and I'm hoping the authorities here learn something important from this: bidding these types of projects based solely on the price-tag will lead to issues. I do believe though that Areva will end up paying the fees once the case is settled, though whether or not it will actually have the money to do so (it's over 5 billion) is another matter.
Regardless of the difficulties and the cost, nuclear is really the only way forward for us, because we're pretty much tapped out on Hydro and solar doesn't have much use here at commercial scales because for half the year the sun is pretty much gone. So if we want to be rational and dump both coal and the dependency on Russian import gas, going nuclear with modern is the only viable option at this point.
Germany has gone the opposite direction and is shutting down nuclear power plants which is actually leading to an increase in the use of fossil fuels. Here's a TED talk about why the senseless opposition to nuclear is actually harming the environment because of that.
You are of an opinion that every job will be automated
Yes, in the long term, because as long as we keep improving the information processing of our technology, eventually we're going to reach a point wherein the machines are as intelligent as humans at which point they can essentially take over all jobs and do them faster and better than humans.
This is flatout wrong. I tried to explain to you but I'll try again. If you look at the example of automated invoicing for example, a machine automates away the need for 15 extra people. The automated systems are capable of doing so much work so muuch more efficiently that it's not possible for human workers to compete with these systems. Automated systems are low cost already and they're vastly more skilled/efficient than even an experienced human employee, so trying to match the automated systems in cost/benefit is not feasible even in the relatively short term really, let alone the long term.
The goal is not untenable. Developed economies already provide this standard of living for people. As production gets more efficient due to humans being taken out of the production loop the economies become more efficient so its not like production goes down. The economies can still produce everything they produce now and more, they just dont need anywhere close the amount of humans in the production. So should the standard of living in western economies collapse just because even though we still have equal production capabilities and material wealth, we no longer need to burden human workers?
This will eventually be the case for the whole world, as the standard of living rises even in the developing world and automating jobs becomes cheaper and cheaper as these systems become more commonplace. Eventually automated systems will be cheaper than even the quasi-slave labor in countries like China, and in fact automation of production facilities in China is already underway in many places because they're able to do the math and see that even though the initial investment can be huge, the long term benefit for the companies is already visible even compared to labor priced at 3 dollars a day.
If the companies leave and produce everything elsewhere either by outsourcing or automation, they will kill off the market they want to sell to. They need people and companies to buy their product, but without income (which people will not be able to get because, as explained above, in the long term human labor CANNOT compete with automation) these people cannot buy products and thus the consumer companies especially will lose their income from these markets and essentially destroy themselves,
So in the long term either the taxes are raised to fund something like UBI make sure people can have a money to acquire goods from the companies and keep the profit motive alive, or the taxes are not raised and the majority of the companies will collapse as there'll be no paying customers to create any demand for the goods and services they provide.
And when the point arrives that automated systems themselves can do most or all of the development (which is not that far off, as you should know if you're following what's happening) the outsourcing will become inefficient even compared to african dirt-poor development.
There is no way around this: human labor/outsourcing will be able to compete with some of the automated systems for
That's your opinion, not theirs, and certainly not mine. As someone currently running a tech-startup myslef I see things very differently, but this is a minor point in this discussion so I'll leave that be and move on to the more important matter, which is that you are still dodging the issue.
This is a total non-sequitur. In the mid-to-long term automation will surpass human workers with or without government 'oppression' (still the wrong word but whatever) because machines are more cost-effective at these jobs. It's simply not possible for a human worker to do for example invoicing or bookkeeping or any repetitive and simple jobs for faster and as well or better than a machine that can handle thousands of transactions in seconds and do so with considerably lower margins of error than a human being.
Even if I grant you to be correct for the sake of argument that government involvement is making this process faster, the overall advancements of technology which are happening and will keep happening mean that jobs requiring only little or no education will eventually be made obsolete by machines, as the technological advancements cannot be stopped barring a major planetary catastrophe.
Simply put, humans are incapable at competing effectively with machines when it comes to information processing, which means we're not in the same market as the machines from the point of view of the corporations. Machines and humans are not equal or equally effective as workers, which is why your supply and demand analogy fails and fails massively.
Again, I know from personal experience having been a part of the process that what now takes around 20 people to run invoice will soon be ran with machines and 3-5 people. This is cheaper and more effective. So please, stop deluding yourself into thinking that slow, error-prone humans are capable of competing with something that does the exactly same job faster, tirelessly and with a lower rate of error. The cost/benefit ratio of an automated system, even if the 20 people were paid HALF of what they used to be paid would still vastly be better. There is no price point at which the labor of these individuals is competitive with a system that has an entirely predictable output rate and a fixed - and relatively low (compared to operating profit) . cost. Machines work 24/7, don't take sick leave, don't complain etc. Once a system like that is set up and working (and like I said, these are not that expensive these days) there's no reason for any company to hire those 20 people at even a dollar per hour wage because the machine is simply a better investment value-wise.
There is no way for human individuals to compete with machines because of this in the long term.
As for education, firstly: bullshit. Education per student is cheaper in western countries where it is provided as public service instead of as a for-profit commodity. It's the combination of private, for-profit universities and private but government backed loans that's making it so ridiculously expensive in the US. When education is a necessity to be able to enter the labor market, it makes no sense to force people into debt just so they can even apply for a job.
But more importantly I was asking what do you imagine the situation to be in your 'ideal' future when, even if one takes debt, there's absolutely no guarantee that you'll get employed because a larger amount of people will be competing for a smaller amount of jobs, meaning the 'investment' one makes into privately acquired education is incredibly risk and has even more of a chance of ruining your life entirely if you don't get a job but are left with the debt and no means to pay it.
So really, what are the options for somebody born into
No, I'm saying they helkd a god damn press release in which they stated they inted to both keep their headquarters located in Helsinki and keep paying both theior personal taxes and corporate taxes here because they want to support the society without which they wouldn't have had the chance to become so successful
And again, please explain how your model intends to account for the disappearance of jobs en mass due to automation. Because people will need higher education in the future even more than they do today but it will not guarantee them employment.
So are you really saying that the 98 % of society that isn't extremely wealthy just has to first take massive debt to even be able to compete in the for the few jobs that will remain, and the rest that do not get either employment or education - ie. probably over half the population in 3-4 decades) will have to just hope for donations from the elite class or die?
What? If you take any form of income away from that amount of people,m do you understand what that will do the corporations when they'll lose a significant chunk of consumers, let alone for societal stability overall etc...
So, instead of afressing any of the problems I pointed out in your propsed model taking into consideration that the possibilities for employment will be highly reduced in advanced economies in the coming decades, you ignore all the facts and just choose to keep on with the nonsensical strawman of ''oppression'. The guys behind Supercell (the makes of the Clash of Clans hit and recent billionaires) voluntarily paid their taxes into Finland because they said they consider the system here to be the primary reason for their success, so this oppression angle is just bullshit.
Solid, very solid. How do you expect anyone to take your ideas even vaguely seriously when you cannot even mount an argument to defend them when problems are pointed out?
Ah yes, what a glorious future it will be when 90 % of current low to minimum skill jobs are entirely automated and quite a large chunk of normal office jobs as well. Have you not followed the projections on the effects of technology to employment: there is no way there will be jobs for everyone in the future in industrialized nations, because pretty soon we'll reach a point in which a low-skill human is simply inferior/less efficient in most jobs compared to a machine. Do some actual reading::
And that's just the estimate for the next couple of decades, the nu,ber will only increase as time goes on. Once we hit AI it will effectively make all human labor pretty much obsolete.
So where does this saving come from where the chances are that there simply isn't work available for a majority of non/low-educated individuals in a couple devades? How do they save when they have no marketable skills, and in your vision of plutocratic america I assume getting an education that would offer the a slightly better (but not guaranteed) employment also costs a fuckton of money?
Ah, so in your vision of an idela society most people who aren't born into a wealthy family simply die off unless some rich asshole manages to have some pity for them. What a place to live in, truly.
I live in a modern social-democratic country (Finland) in which my tax money is used to fund the education, health care and other basic needs of my fellow citizens. I don't consider this oppression in the least, and I fail to see why anyone sane would. I mean, firstly, the wealthy individuals who run companies here are only able to do so because they enjoy a population of highly educated, healthy individuals and a stable infrastructure. Without these things commerce itself would be impossible, so it makes complete sense, from a both indvidual as well as corporate perspective, to rpvide such base level fundamental services with tax-funds. There's nothing oppressive about societies pooling resources and collectively funding essential services, that's the very reason societies are born in the first place and we don't live in a state of anarchy.
Ah yes, the age old 'b-b-b-but the soviet union was horrible' card which conveniently ignores the last half a century of development in northern and western Europe in which socialism is implemented entirely differently from the soviet union and has by all possible metrics achieved vastly superior results.
Have you ever been to the Norodic countries? Germany? France?
Yeah, we aren't exactly living in the soviet union here you doofus, and just because countries like the USSR and others have managed to fuck up socialistic ideals by turning into tyranies doesn't mean that the only feasible way forward is some weird ancap plutocracy in which you have no social mobility whatsoever unless you suck enough rich CEO dick to make them fund your education/living..
Is that really your vision of an ideal society in an age when we're nearing the end of humans as the main factors of production? Because unless you're someone with a doctora
Not for long though. Low-skilled humans are being surpassed by machinery at a fast rate. Self-checkouts, self-driving cars, automated warehousing, automated electronic invoicing, etc etc The Era oif the lowly educated but well paid worker is fast coming to an end. Sure, the automation also creates some jobs, but the further into the future we go, the less and less jobs there will be for people with little to no education simply because they will rarely provide any benefit to having a machine do the same job.
This is why not just America, but all of the industrialized world needs to start re-.inventing the social safety nets and considering something like basic income, because all projections currently point to the amount of unemployment only growing in th future decades. Achieving high employment rate in an environment were humans are unnecessary as factors of production in many fields is not possible.
But there's no way for them NOT to do that. Ad-revenue follows the amount of views, which means if they do nothing they're essentially taking a stance of 'we'll facilitate the spread of any type of mis-information as long as it makes us money". So they're already doing it now, they're just slightly changing their parameters. It's their product and platform, they have no obligation whatsoever to spread lies to make money if they don't want to.
And why not? It's a search engine, the point of which is to provide people accurate information. If some trolls/hackers/political shills/whatever try to skew the search results so that upon googling thing X, instead a completely unrelated/false article Y comes up, that means their product is not operating as intended and they should correct it.
Erhm.
Link to the report itself.
So, what, exactly is wrong with this? I mean, oil prices are subsidized by themselves by most oil producing countries.
Soi why would it be wrong to factor in the tax-breaks and susidies given to renewables, when the point of comparison in terms of fossil fuels is also heavily subsidized by producing nations and the environmental damage caused by oil/coal means that the true cost of using these fuels is in fact externalized because there's a delay between using fossil fuel's and seeing the effect of the usage in the climate and thus the global economy?
The inclusion of subsidies does not make the price comparisons invalid, it makes them more accurate. Unless you want to start to calculate the actual, unsubsidized cost of oil/coal as well.
Well, no, that's not quite the case. Onshore wind is already cheaper than coal, and photovoltaic solar energy is essentially pretty much at even when it comes to the costs of a more advanced/modern coal power.
The reason the rush to these forms is not yet happening is that the the big issue with renewables is load-balancing. That is, since wind/solar generation is erratic and depends on the time of day/year, it means that a grid ran primarily using these forms cannot easily answer to increased demand. This is why at the moment with current grids, the efficient way to ditch fossil fuel's is to use a combination of renewables with nuclear, which is also on par or cheaper to coal and can be used to provide additional energy when the renewables don't produce enough.
The danger is that if the share of renewables is increased but nuclear is left out, the additional demand needs to be met with fossil fuels. This in fact is happening in places like germany where the well-intentioned but shortsighted Green party has put a ban on new nuclear power plants and they're driving the existing ones down. So despite the amount of renewable capacity going up, CO2 emissions are also going up because nuclear output is coming down and is being supplemented by coal-plants.
No, that's not what I'm claiming you idiot. The greenhouse effect simply means that certain gases such as Co2 and methane bounce back k heat and thus warm the atmosphere, which can and has been easily proved in a laboratory setting. This effect is not in dispute among scientists.
Yes.
Based on the simple fact that it's the most prevalent greenhouse has in the atmosphere and thus has the most effect in the heat retaining capability of the atmosphere.
No you idiot, I never said that the original source of the heat is not the sun and neither did the scientists. The greenhouse effect works by binding/bouncing back heat from the sun thus warming the Earth. No-one's disputing that the heat itself is coming from the sun, the whole point of global warming is that dumping more greenhouse gases such as CO2 into the atmosphere means it will retain more of the heat provided by the sun thus affecting the climate.
So the sun warms the Earth, and increasing the amount of greenhouse gases increases the rate of warming. There's nothing controversial or disputable about this, it's quite simple science.
More heat --> more energy in the atmosphere --> more rains and storms. This logic is not disputed among climatologists.
No, like such increased rainfall that crops will not grow where they now do. Too much rain will prevent normal food crops from growing, while places close to the equator will get so warm that nothing will grow there,
Yes, but that warming has usually occurred over several centuries and millenia. The problem is that the warming being caused by man is happening at a much faster rate t6han any natural cycles that plant/animal life does not have the time to a
No, you'd have to be a scientist with a working understanding of the greenhouse effect. You can measure the heat trapping ability of CO2 in a lab or test it yourself by building a greenhouse, we can do the math on it and figure out how much an increase in CO in the atmosphere traps more heat. It's not the only controller of heat in the atmosphere but it is the most prevalent and therefore most important
Do you understand that increasing the greenhouse effect has real life implications really fast: sea-levels rising, rainfall increasing in other areas whereas droughts will increase alsewhere, more and bigger storms etc. Plus there's the risk of chain-reactions occurring: once the northern permafrost starts to melt it will release methane which is 20 times stronger as a greenhouse gas the CO2, which will them increase the warming yet again melting more of the frost and creating an unstoppable feedback loop.
We're not in complete control of the climate but we're having a major impact on it in ways which do not bode well for the future. The oil and coal companies are racking up short term profit the total cost of which will be seen in the daces to come when coastal cities start to get flooded and people start dying more from food shortages and droughts. If the oceans get acidified enough for mass extinction of plankton to occur that puts a stop to major oxygen producer and has the change to quite literally wipe us out as well.
These being the realities of the situation anyone favoring oil or coal for energy production at this point has to be an idiot, ignorant or just self-destructive.
Wrong. Their CO2 emissions are rising because of among other things cars/traffic until 2030 when they're projected to peak and turn it around. Providing clean energy for over a billion people is not exactly a project you can achieve overnight. As for coal itself: they're already planning restrictions on coal mining/use because major cities have severe issues with smog/pollutants causing significant damage to the people and industries, they have a vested interest in fixing this stuff.
No, that's not what I took from this story at all.
The problem with social media that this election illustrates on both sides is that because of its nature it seeks to maximize views and shares, it doesn't care whether or not an article comes from a satirical news site, a blog, or a scientific journal. All it cares about is maximizing eyeballs and clickthrough rates. This creates an environment that's ideal for bubbles to form and as people on both sides of the political field share stuff - factual or not - that supports their view.
For democracy to work properly the populace needs to be informed about the state of affairs. When they're not, and when the channels of information they use don't offer them factual information but emotionally appealing content, the result is that populism becomes easier and easier. It's only a day after the election and Trump has started pivoting into his actual positions already. He's stopped talking about jailing Clinton, and his so called 'plan' to ban all muslims just disappeared from his website without any explanation.
As a foreigner I'm not so much worried about Trumps actions as president, but what his run is signalling: you can now lie openly and blatantly and make claims that are so wildly absurd everyone with 2 brain cells or more knows them to be bullshit, and still get elected as the president of the most powerful nation on Earth.
If we want better candidates, step one on that road is to make the voters more aware of how to discern truth from fiction, and the media does play a role in that, especially the social media.
So, what you're essentially saying is that you want the US to turn into a full-on plutocracy in which one will simply die without a job/income? And this at a time where menial jobs are fast disappearing because automation and machines are fast becoming more effective than human workers? And at the same time you want to make sure getting education becomes more difficult if not altogether impossible for people who cannot afford to take massive debt.
Do you understand what life under such a system would actually be like? It would essentially destroy any social mobility that you guys have left and mean that anyone born into a poor/uneducated family would permanently stay that way.
If this is the direction you guys want to be heading to, I'm doubly glad I'm not american, that's just lunacy.
The US congress has declared war 11 times the last one in 1942.
You went to fucking Vietnam without congressional approval. Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. There's no need for congressional approval for the president to deploy military force, and since this precedent has long since been established I don't think for a second Trump will even try to get congressional approval if he wants to play war-games in the mdddile-east or wherever.
You're missing the big picture. Under the current situation what is happening is that companies are competing for the money of consumers that already by and large comes from other corporations as most consumers get their income as a salary.
The economy is a giant game in which a large pool of resources are concentrated at the top, from which they're moved via taxation and employment to the pockets of consumers who then circulate it back into the hands of the companies by buying items. In this game the companies compete against each other for consumers' money.
Right now more consumers are getting their money as pay than as social benefits and entitlements, but corporations are already in most advanced economies paying for the upkeep of the low-income/unemployed segment. So really, the only thing that will dramatically change is that as the companies in the future no longer need human employees as factors in production, the costs of employment will plummet as they no longer need as many employees, and the cost of taxes will rise as taxes have to be increased to fund UBI and maintain demand.
There is still profit to be made in this scenario, and quite a lot of it, because a single corporation only pays in a tiny fraction of the UBI, whereas it can get back a lot more by runing a successful business and thus essentially move money from other corporations to themselves, just as they do currently by taking in money that other corporations have initially paid to their customers as salary. From the point of view of the company, the money paid into UBI by other corporations is just as much 'earned' as money that people now get in the form of salaries is and should be competed for in just the same way.
Completely agreed. It's based on a very faulty understanding of economies and demand to begin with: sure, the top 1 % in the future can have insane amounts of money, even more than they do now, but no matter how much money they have, they're not going to be buying billions of bottles of coke or loaves of bread or cars for that matter. They might buy a few very expensive cars, but simply put the consumption of a few multi-billionaires cannot under any circumstance make up for the demand that would be lost if ordinary people were no longer buying items.
Luckily, I do think the billionaires themselves will understand this because the math is relatively straightforward and they'll see that if they want to keep running their companies and gaining any income themselves, they need to make sure the consumers have money to get their products.
Nonsense. There's more than enough money and resources in advanced economies already that industrialized economies can offer a decent standard of living to their citizens. In the future work gets more efficient because of automation which means these economies can output more, not less, which means there is more than enough resources to go around in the future as well. Money itself is just a tool used in trading and allocating these resources, it's not something we can as such run out of as long as we have wealth to trade and distribute, which we will.
What? Do you understand that consumers are the basis of the profit motive to begin with?. If you leave the vast majority of society without jobs as is bound to happen and don't provide them with sufficient income, this will destroy the possibility of most companies to have any profits at all.
The companies are faced with a choice: since automation is always more effective than paying a human worker to do the same job, they'll naturally gravitate towards it and that's fine. But if eventually all production more or less is automated, there will be nobody left to buy consumer goods if the consumers don't have money.
So in the long term either the taxes are raised to fund UBI make sure people can have a money to acquire goods from the companies and keep the profit motive alive, or the taxes are not raised and the majority of the companies will collapse as there'll be no paying customers to create any demand for the goods and services they provide.
Without UBI, the private industry will be largely destroyed as already explained. From a game theory point of view the existence of a consumer class with resources to spend is an existential requirement for private industry to operate.
There will be no incentive to work when machines can handle most tasks better, faster and at a lower cost than humans because there will be no sensible reason for any company to hire them. Once AI hits human level this will be true for all intellectual jobs as well.
You cannot solve the issue caused by automation with saying 'oh people just need incentive to work' when the whole source of the situation is that people as factors of production are being made obsolete fast by machines.
I'm very aware of these realities, but the whole point is that the foundations that lead to the civil war after the revolution, and the rise of communism in general wouldn't have existed if it wasn't for the poor proletariat masses created by the industrialization. Communism as an ideal was given birth to by the industrial revolution and the conditions across Europe that it created for the uneducated working poor.
So my point wasn't to say that income inequality was the direct cause of the Russian revolution, but that the inequality was a key component in the chain of events leading to birth of the Soviet union. When you have a mass of people doing badly, they're prone to conflict.
You're very correct that all models of UBI require fundamental changes to taxation. However I'd argue that in the long term it's not even about the will of the companies, they'll be forced to. The alternative is to have huge masses of people living in poverty, which is bad for business in numerous ways. Firstly if people have little to no money there'll be little to no money to consume, which will eat at the profits of companies. Secondly the political instability that such a situation would cause is also damaging for corporations and wealthy individuals.
If we look at times when income inequality has been even higher than today, the 1800s are a good example: the wealthy elites enjoying the fruits of the industrial revolution paid little attention to the poor and starving masses, which eventually backlashed and lead to, among other things, the Russian revolution.
If you think about a situation wherein something like 10-20 % of the population is working full or part time and the rest are unemployed, that's not exactly something that can just be ignored. And absurd as that may sound now, that's the direction we're heading in a few decades.
Point being: if the people at the very top of the income and ownership classes have any sense of self-preservation, they'll realize that it's easier to spread some of the wealth and well being around voluntarily, because if that is not done eventually it will tear societies apart and endanger the elites themselves.
As a European I'm not a fan of either of the candidates, but do we have any reason to assume Trump is any better?
Seriously I have not seen Trump make any statements about privacy/mass surveillance/whistleblowers/etc that'd give me a reason to believe that he will somehow change or improve America's status quo when it comes to surveillance. In fact, a quick googling tends to reveal the exact opposite of that:
The problem with this candidates is that both sides of this debate are so heavily polarized that the fanbase of both seems to assume their candidate is better on a given issue simply because the opposing candidate has a bad stance on it.
You may think Trump is the lesser of two evils, but make no mistake: Trump is no champion of civil liberties. If this is your reason for voting him, I suggest re-thinking about it.
That's not the point, the point is you need to bear responsibility for the refugees of this conglict better, because it's you guys who started this mess. I'm not criticising the general US immigration policy, but the handling of this specific crisis.
Your 'source' is not a newspaper but a blog ran from spain by a guy who currently has an arrest warrant as he's a supect in several crimes. including fraud, harassment and defamation. They've got an anti-immigration, anti-EU agenda which they push by frequently running entirely fake stories with no sources. Reporters have tested it and they seem to approve any submissions that fit their agenda, so literally it's a comment forum moderated by a suspect criminal for his own personal benefit and political agenda.
So to sum it up: you missed my whole point and countered with a story from a propaganda site masquerading as a news site.
Congratulations, you're an idiot!
What? Are you with an honest face trying to claim that the rebuilding of the state of Iraq as it was handled by the US lead coalition was not a failure that lead to the newfound state of Iraq being so weak that it collapsed into internal conflict almost immediately?