Go ahead and explain why should some, those with the capacity to
produce be supporting others, who do not have that capacity?
Because that is a purpose of most democracies. My country allows
people to live on it's land and use it's resources. You are not an
island. You live in a society. You are not allowed to set the rules.
Animals that cannot feed themselves die off, that is the
nature of things.
So you justify how to create a society by looking at common animals.
Of course they can try and steal, that is expected. Of course those,
who have something of value will protect themselves, that is also the
nature of things. But to feed and to shelter and to entertain your
would be assailants because they want what you have? That IS
perversion.
You talk about the natural ways that animals behave, while most talk
about how people should behave. A society is built to enforce rules
for the common good of people. If that means taking away some
fraction of the resources of the rich then that is justified. You're
kidding yourself if you think that they didn't earn those resources
off the backs of others. Capitalism is a government created
compromise for the betterment of society. It is not one of your
natural laws.
I suppose *some* level of voluntary charity always existed and will
exist in the future, however beyond some voluntary charity and beyond
the threat of violence what else do you actually think is there?
Religion? There is no god, religion is a useful political tool to keep
the poor at bay (a threat of everlasting violence after death scares a
large number of human animals).
Do you feel superior? Careful, there is always someone smarter than
you. Maybe someday you won't make your cut.
So what is your idea, why should a newly born person be entitled to
the productive output of an existing person?
So how would your great society work? The devil is in the details.
While I agree with your main point, I think these types of articles are
important for people to realize the costs of pollution. The reality
is that the balance between the people and the corporations is heavily
stacked in favor of the corporations.
In more detail, companies have no incentive to control their
pollution, so the government has to step in. It's a classic tragedy
of the commons. As we can see, the corporations just buy off the
politicians and the people do not know to fight. Ironically, in a
true free market, the polluters don't even gain much. The government
needs to step in to prevent a race to the bottom.
Another problem is that alternatives that pollute less are
disadvantaged because of the externalities that the polluters are
exploiting. The government tries to step in and offer incentives to
balance things but then the right starts crying about how this is
against the free market and that regulations are killing jobs. As
technology advances, there should be a constant increase in regulation
to replace these polluters with cleaner technology and level the
playing field.
That sample group actually represents less than
0.00004225% of the population that makes up the NRA membership.
It's actually quite interesting how multiplicative and additive
arguments are easy to mix up. You're essentially making a
multiplicative argument that a percentage is relevant, but in this
case it's the additive argument that matters. I don't care about the
size of the population, all I care is that I have a big enough sample
size to detect what I care about. For example, it might be a sample
of 100 people, but I don't care if I've got a population of a thousand
people or a trillion people.
On the other issues you are correct. How you formulate the
questions and how you sample the population can have a huge effect on
the results.
This is just anecdotal and is biased based on what makes a good news
story. (Watch out for all those sharks.) While it's hard, one needs
to try and get good statistics. Maybe comparing states or countries
with different gun laws will give some insight. Australia is a great
example since they have a fairly recent change in gun laws. Has crime gone up a lot because people can no longer scare off
or kill criminals?
Bill Gates is only going to buy so many TVs, cars, and
houses. Doubling his wealth is not going to change his spending
habits.
It won't change his personal consumption habits, no. Instead he would
spend the extra wealth on capital investments, which improve the
efficiency of production and allow vast numbers of other people to buy
more TVs, cars, and houses at lower prices.
The prices of many of these things don't seem to go down. I guess
things like cars and TVs get better, but price wise they don't go down
much. Inflation is generally positive, so things go up in price.
Economists seem to think deflation is a bad thing...
Consumption is important, of course, but all economic progress comes
from the part of our income which we don't immediately spend on
short-lived consumer goods.
We need both, but I'm not sure how to determine the right balance.
Also how much does investing in things like securities really help
increase productivity. Sure the company owns some of these shares and
they can borrow against it, but a lot of that money is just based on
market perceptions between investors. I don't see that increasing
productivity.
You're also conflating wealth with money. They aren't the same
thing. Bill Gates has a lot of wealth, but most of it isn't in the
form of money. Instead, he owns shares in various investments. Even if
it were, people would simply switch to an alternate form of currency
long before the symptoms you're attributing to "wealth concentration"
became apparent.
Do you have evidence of people successfully switching to an alternate
form of currency because of wealth concentration?
You've got some good ideas and a compelling presentation. I think you
need think through some issues a bit more, but that's what makes this
stuff fun. I've been guilty of some hypocrisy on the whole teaching
thing, but live and learn. Anyway, this has caused me to think
through a bunch of issues, which was my purpose, so thanks for that.
It's not guaranteed to happen; it's unlikely to happen in
the foreseeable future. That is: it's as likely to happen tomorrow as
it was yesterday; it's as likely to happen in 500 years as it is today
There is an argument to be made here, but you need to make it.
Instead you try to say something clever that on inspection is either
wrong or very wrong.
The transition requires entirely-new technology of a form
largely different from what we have today, and technology is not
something that happens by brute force; it's a constant gamble with
results mediated largely by luck.
But you are not an expert in this technology as so you are in no
position to make these claims.
It's generally complex, but shows a trend of minimum wage
increase causing job loss [frbsf.org]. The studies to determine if it
does are statistical, and have problems with confounding. The analysis
I use is mathematical based on supply of income, which is only
representative of the trade of working hours.
This looks to be a good unbiased reference. He gives some
empirical studies which show a somewhat negative outcome. Notice this
doesn't address consumption, which might go up significantly, or the
tax impact of not having to subsidize these low skill workers with
government benefits. It's a complex issue with many possible metrics
for success or failure.
Basically nearly all studies detect a loss of jobs; and
narrow geographical studies show little to no localized impact. San
Francisco may not suffer unemployment by raising minimum wage to
$15/hr, while somewhere else in the country jobs are lost because that
total flow of income has to come from someone's labor hours purchasing
fewer things.
Your own claims contradict you. You claim stable 5% unemployment
and clearly the minimum wage has fluctuated based on decreases from
inflation and increases by law, therefore you've made the empirical
claim that the minimum wage does not effect employment.
However, in the context of the cited paper, you are probably
right, a nationwide increase in minimum wage is probably not the right
thing. In principle, minimum wage should be tied to local cost of
living, but this is probably hard to implement and might have some
unintended consequences.
Bernie likes to start sentences with, "You don't need to
have a Ph.D. in economics to know..." and then say something that's
totally fucking bonkers and doesn't align with objective reality. He
doesn't know a god damned thing about economics and is approximately
the political equivalent of Dr. Oz or Dr. Mercola.
I looked into it, and his $15 has not been studied and is probably too
high. However, when negotiating it's always best to start high. As
for his knowledge, I'm sure he knows more than you or me.
So we want to keep a 2% inflation rate. Assume the above
occurs over 10 years, the $10 chair should cost $12.19. Well, that
chair costs 0.5h because 10 workers make 20 per hour. For those wages
to adjust to this inflation, the workers must make $12.19/hr; but to
have chairs cost $12.19/hr, we must pay workers $24.38/hr. It's
impossible for wages to not exceed inflation in general.
You keep saying this as if you are saying something insightful,
but I'm just not seeing it. It's clear that it's not what happens and
is practically flawed in many ways.
Refuge in ignorance. You don't understand, so you plug your ears. The
truth must be uncomfortable for you.
Look I've been a bit rude, but honestly I find you a bit annoying.
You phrase things as if you are trying to teach me something and you
need to simplify it. Maybe you actually believe what looks to be a
fairly naive picture. Look I've known for a long time that a simple
picture of the ec
Higher salaries for some subset of people can be beneficial. For
example, increasing the minimum wage can boost consumption and
stimulate the economy. In many ways it's just a transfer of wealth
from the richer to the poorer. Fortunately, the poorer are better
consumers and they stimulate the economy creating need for more stuff
and maybe more jobs.
You're right that minimum wage raises are a transfer of money (and, in
fact, buying power) from the richer to the poorer; the problem is the
"richer" here make $12/hr, and the "poorer" just got bumped from
$7.25/hr to $8.25/hr. Minimum wage isn't incorrect; but it doesn't
magically create jobs. It concentrates income into fewer hands.
I never said how much I would increase the minimum wage. At a
minimum, one needs to increase it to a living wage, so tax payers stop
subsidizing the companies that exploit these workers. Since Bernie's
done the research, let's start with $15/hr and set increases based on
inflation.
In the short term, the problem's actually the same: it's cheaper to
get humans to do a lot of things, and humans employ technical means to
reduce their labor. For the foreseeable future, elimination of human
labor is an amusing fantasy taken too seriously by delusional people.
So it will happen, but we just shouldn't worry about it. There
should be a term for that, maybe AI denier.
Well it's been fun, but I probably will not read another
response. Even if I don't accept your novelty or follow your
logic, I do admire your spunk. Keep at it.
That's about where you can stop. You do know you can create gold using
a coat hanger and a glass tube, right? The problem is it takes a hell
of a lot of energy--it's actually less labor-intensive to mine gold.
No I didn't know that was possible... What you probably want to say
is that those resources, such as land, are really just savings from
previous labor. Clearly not all labor is equal.
Governments are also the product of labor; although that's not the
issue here. You're talking about markets, while I'm talking about the
actual capacity to produce things at a given price.
Governments are necessary to form stable markets. I you want to
produce and sell things, you are probably going to want stable
governments.
Consider cost and price as an exchange of labor, instead of an
exchange of money. If you make chairs by the labor of 10 workers each
working 1 hour for $10/hr, that's a $100 chair; if the labor of 10
workers each working 1 hour makes 2 chairs, that's a $50 chair. The
naive first-pass is that the $10/hr workers worked 10 hours to buy 1
chair before, and now work 5 hours to buy 1 chair.
I'm not disputing that wages and efficiencies effect the cost of
goods. I even agree that an economy should be a way to trade "labor".
If we maintain a 2% inflation (we do) and this reduction of labor
occurs over 10 years, then that $10 wage must go up. We want that $100
chair to be a $122 chair. With 5 hours of labor, that's $24.4/hr; and
still, you will work for 5 hours to buy that chair, whereas when it
was a $100 chair you had to work for 10 hours to purchase it.
Clearly you are trying to make some kind of point with your example,
but it's difficult to understand because you example is not based on
reality. Perhaps you could make your point first and then give an
example.
We can do things to make the model imperfect--wage inequality, minimum
wages, taxes, business profits, artificial scarcity, and other market
behaviors. All of those things generally operate to a maximum extent:
people try to get the most wage they can, and businesses try to pay
the least; governments tax what they will tax; businesses take the
maximum profit they can get; and so on. In the long-term, you can
assume that businesses taking a 10% profit margin will lower their
prices 40% if they find a way to make things 40% more-cheaply, simply
because the market conditions don't allow them to take a high profit
margin; although previously-expensive goods which become quite-cheap
can suddenly allow competition on a greater scale, which can push
profit margins down on low-demand luxury goods.
That's the strange thing about the "science" of economics. These
kinds of details are actually the important details. While you can
come up with a simple model, it's not like physics where you can just
apply the ideas of the general model to solve new issues. In
economics, things fall apart.
Re creating jobs: the implication is that an economy didn't have jobs,
and you made jobs. The truth is an economy has the capacity to employ
some people (rather, to spend some money), and so that capacity will
be consumed. If there are 2,000 jobs to be made, Amazon can expand or
Apple can expand or Microcenter can expand or someone else can expand
or start a new business. A business does not create jobs in a vacuum;
an economy as a whole is capable of supporting a given number of jobs,
and businesses take advantage of the capacity to employ.
A business will hire someone if the feel they can make a profit off
that persons labor. That's probably a function of the economy but it
also depends on other things. (Unless you define the economy is some
overly broad way.)
> The net goods bought can go up as the higher salaries increase
> purchas
Labor incurs wage. Wages and profits in aggregate are the
complete price of a good or service--the minimum viable price is the
wage-labor cost.
What about natural resources. While labor is required to extract and
refine them, governments create a market for them by allowing land to
be owned. It's even true of things like spectrum. These effect the
cost of goods since the value of the land can lower with significant
resource extraction. At a minimum there is the cost based on
alternative uses of the money that is tied up in the "land".
Being that wages are paid from revenue, revenue is
obtained from spending, and spending is made out of wages, money is
only a mediator for the (uneven) exchange of human labor. Because of
this, the amount of money spendable in a given time frame is finite:
between two points in time (say, the entire year 2015), only a fixed
amount of money can and will be spent.
OK, but not a surprising claim.
Since the spendable money in a time frame is finite and
wages are paid from revenue, the number of jobs available in any given
time frame under given conditions (trade, technical progress,
population) is finite. QED.
Again not surprising.
You don't "create jobs"; you employ people. When you
employ people, you may be consuming the growth in a market (trade,
technical progress, and population growth allowing more purchasing,
more jobs, etc.), or you may be out-competing a competitor as said
competitor's ability to employ people falls (those jobs eventually go
away, yours replace them; this may happen backwards because businesses
have savings, too).
I don't understand what you are trying to say.
It's even possible to do it backwards. If you implement
protectionist policies and increase the cost of goods, fewer goods are
bought, and less infrastructure is needed.
The net goods bought can go up as the higher salaries increase
purchasing power. This includes having less unemployed people.
The number of purchaseable goods of the sort reduces as
factory worker wages increase, reducing the number of factory worker
jobs created by "bringing jobs back" as well as the number of jobs in
supporting infrastructure. Paying low enough wages can increase total
jobs, although even paying minimum wage increases the cost of goods
produced and the number of working hours every person at every income
level must expend to afford the previously-imported good, making every
person at every income level poorer. Paying higher wages increases
that wage-hour cost even further.
This assumes production goes down. It also doesn't analyze what
happens with our current trade imbalance. As money leaves the
country, it must return otherwise the value of the dollar would
decrease and solve the trade imbalance. Instead the money comes back
and is invested, perhaps in the stock market or real estate. These
tend to make things hard for the poorer people in society as they
don't have the resources to invest. In particular, it raises the
prices of things like houses.
The punch line here is that the labor market adjusts in a
few short years, and the number of jobs sought moves toward about 5%
(U3) unemployment, so you can't even affect total unemployment
long-term.
What evidence do you have for 5% unemployment? Historically it's
probably not true, and if just looking at more modern times, we don't
have enough samples to say anything with significance.
We need to focus on creating wealth and stabilizing the
economy, not "creating jobs". You create wealth by trade and technical
progress; you stabilize the economy by making sure those things don't
happen all-at-once so as to reduce the volatility in employment, as
well as by having good welfare policies.
On reflection, another risk of increasing the minimum wage is
based on international competition and technology. I'm less concerned
about international competition since many of these jobs can't easily
be outsourced, (but I don't really know the statistics). I think
technology is the bigger concern particularly in the long term and
increasing the minimum wage will just accelerate the inevitable loss
of jobs. Perhaps one could use this as a justification to NOT
increase the minimum wage to give us more time to prepare. I'm
skeptical, as I think the real reason we haven't automated more is not
the cost of the technology but the development of that technology.
Capitalism has a fundamental problem that it treats workers as
both consumers and cogs. When that breaks, the current system will
not work. The easy answer seems to basic income funded by taxes. It
would cause the minimum disruption to our current system.
$15/hr * 40 hr/wk * 50 wk/yr (2 weeks vacation) = $30,000/yr. Most
people would consider that a living wage. Federal poverty level for a
family of 4 is just $24,250/yr.
Well the parent claimed the upper bound is for 20 hr/wk. So this
would give $24/hr to make it to poverty for a family of 4. Still it
seems somewhat arbitrary. You want to make minimum wage just enough
for them to squeak by. Why not give people more.
Yes this assumes full employment throughout the year. The minimum wage
has to be tied to productivity because wages are tied to
productivity. If you try to set the minimum wage based on poverty
levels for people not being productive the full year, you end up
eliminating jobs of people who are fully employed and productive the
full year. Inability to find full employment is an employment problem
(number of jobs available), not a wage problem (how much you're paid
for a job).
I don't understand your reasoning. What does poverty levels have to
do with this. The only risk of increasing the minimum wage is
substitution. Businesses will need to increase prices which might
cause people to change how they use their money. For example, people
might not go out to eat if it costs too much. Instead they will cook
at home.
This is compensated by the fact that the people who get more money
have more money to spend and can stimulate the economy. While there
is a concern for inflation, it is limited since only a fraction of the
working force is getting this raise. Roughly, it is more about a
transfer of wealth from the people earning more than the new minimum
wage to the people making less than the new minimum wage.
Poverty levels matter in a different way. Currently we are
subsidizing business that pay below the poverty line. Their employees
need to receive government assistance. Tax payers are essentially
giving money to these businesses.
IMHO the problem isn't the minimum wage, it's the capital gains tax is
way too high for lower income people. People always complain the 15%
capital gains tax is too low without really researching who actually
pays a 15% income tax. The tax rate is graduated meaning just because
you're in the 25% tax bracket doesn't mean you pay a 15% income
tax. The threshold where you actually pay a 15% income tax (single,
standard deduction) is about $58,500. The threshold where the average
American pays 15% income tax (after credits, exemptions, and itemized
deductions) is closer to $90,000 (you can figure this out from the IRS
tax stats). So it makes little sense for people making less than this
to invest their money when it's going to be taxed more than if they
just spent it and increased their income via raises (e.g. raising the
minimum wage) rather than investments/savings.
Again I don't understand your argument. Yes, it does seem unfair that
"poor" people potentially have a higher capital tax rate than income
tax rate, but why would that entice them to spend it as opposed to
invest it. Of course, it's moot since these people don't make enough
money to have significant investment.
Same logic applies to lower income people, except some of them "waste"
their money on big screen TVs, iPhones, car leases, etc.)
They are not wasting their money. They are stimulating and directing
production. People need to consume things generated by these
businesses. Do you expect the rich to drive production. How many
iPhones can they buy? IMHO it would be bad for the economy if more
"poor" people tried to invest. It would damage consumption.
Actually fraud can be much worse with the electoral college. Only a small amount of fraud is needed to flip a swing state. It's not hard to give reasonable examples where a.1% change in a states votes can move the electoral votes 5%. That a factor of 50 increase of influence.
The fundamental mistake physicalists make is to assume
physics is the full, accurate and complete model of the physical
(i.e. of reality). Physics makes no such claim at all. In fact, they
are still searching for the GUT,...
While there is some disagreement on the meaning of Physicalism it
certainly doesn't include thinking the current laws of physics are
complete. Who would make such a ludacrious claim.
Your explanation is deeply flawed. The mistake you are making is
assuming Physicalism as the zero-state, when it is clearly the more
restrictive model by an extreme amount and hence would actually need
extraordinary proof in its favor. What you are doing is
junk-science. And hence it is a pure belief without rational basis. In
fact, it also has some rather strong aspects of a mental illness as it
denies individual existence.
Looks like I touched a nerve. All I said is one can take the
position of Dualism to avoid your fundamental problems with
Physicalism but require extraordinary evidence to actually invoke any
meaningful aspects of Dualism. I guess you claim that the
extraordinary evidence is already reached, but I need something more
than thought experiments based on folk psychology.
As to effects surgery, drugs, or even a simple blindfold,
dualism does not say a persons existence is entirely outside of
physical reality at all. Concrete memory, for example, is clearly
mostly or completely physical. Dualism just says that a part of what
we perceive as ourselves is non-physical. Incidentally, that the brain
is somehow connected to thought is trivially obvious. It does act as
interface to the world, after all.
So as experiments point to more and more aspects of the mind
physically related to the brain you will drop more and more of your
dualistic claims. Perhaps you should study more neuroscience. The
split brain experiments are very interesting.
That does tell us exactly nothing about where that though
happens and what the nature of the person having it is. Seriously, you
are like a child claiming that her iPhone is intelligent, because Siri
lives in it.
More like a child who is waiting to learn (or discover) a
scientific definition of thought and intelligence before spouting off
nonsense about them.
Incidentally, you do not know that your brain is creating
intelligence and insight.
We do know that all kinds of chemicals, surgery, and accidents
that effect the brain also effect how people think. As for giving
Physicalism the pejorative term of religion, I could easily subscribe
to Dualism but require an overwhelming amount of evidence to support
examples where Physicalism is insufficient. To the contrary, we have
overwhelming evidence that the brain is causally connected to thought,
so there is currently no need to invent non-physical causes.
This article is the real deal as they do address what types of
optimization problems and give bounds on the speedups over previous
techniques. In addition, cutting plane techniques have proven to be
very successful at solving integer programming problems and have
yielded good/optimal solutions to large NP-hard problems such as
traveling salesman.
As for the NFL theorem, it's not very surprising. By looking over
all optimization problems you are considering an enormous set of
functions. The "average" function in this set is going to look like
noise. In the discrete case, NFL just amounts to finding the minimum
value in an array. As we all know, you have to look at all the values
to guarantee you found the minimum.
So if woman are better at languages then there are differences (surprise) between the sexes. If you open that door, maybe men are better at programming.
You've forgotten to add the effect of automation on
prices. Suppose you automate away half the jobs at a factory,
saving half your wage bill. Given that manufactured goods are a
highly competitive industry, your increased margins are hardly
likely to last, so the increase in profits gets competed
away. That means that the labour cost saving is being passed to
consumers: that's how the "profits" (that is to say, lower
prices) flow to consumers.
So in the limit, if all the jobs are replaced by robots then
the goods should be priced at the cost of the materials. This is
still too high for someone who doesn't make any money.
This makes no sense. If consumers are the bottleneck, then
who's buying to create the taxable profits in the first
place?
If things continue to head in the same direction, this is where
we'll end up. Fortunately there is still time to increase the
taxes on things like capital gains or high bracket incomes.
Ideally we would have more asset taxation since income tax
largely is spent on protecting American assets. (Some assets
more than others.)
Why is this insightful? Shouldn't this comment have a low moderation value. A high moderation leads people into wasting their time look at this post and into a parent post who needed some help. Why should anyone else care.
Of course this is not the fault of the parent or the poster. Is moderation really this crappy? I guess moderators want to moderate something in this article and there just aren't any good posts.
This doesn't make much sense. If the support for data plans is expensive then just refuse to give data support for people who don't have data plans. Of course, there is the associated cost of dealing with them on the phone and refusing to help. This could be offset by offering them a minimal data plan or a data support plan.
The real reason ATT doesn't want people to use this option is that lots of people would drop their data plans. There's a lot of wifi around and many people would be satisfied with just wifi. I guess this opens up an opportunity for someone to come up with a way to get a phone to report a false id to the cell phone company.
Nice example of equivocation. I say why not give the proper incentives to companies as in incentive to do something, and you change it to a regulatory incentive used by the government to get people to behave in "desirable" ways. While I am proposing government regulation, it is not some arbitrary incentive but is instead a way to correct for externalities.
Slashdot Mirror
Because that is a purpose of most democracies. My country allows people to live on it's land and use it's resources. You are not an island. You live in a society. You are not allowed to set the rules.
So you justify how to create a society by looking at common animals.
You talk about the natural ways that animals behave, while most talk about how people should behave. A society is built to enforce rules for the common good of people. If that means taking away some fraction of the resources of the rich then that is justified. You're kidding yourself if you think that they didn't earn those resources off the backs of others. Capitalism is a government created compromise for the betterment of society. It is not one of your natural laws.
Do you feel superior? Careful, there is always someone smarter than you. Maybe someday you won't make your cut.
So how would your great society work? The devil is in the details.
While I agree with your main point, I think these types of articles are important for people to realize the costs of pollution. The reality is that the balance between the people and the corporations is heavily stacked in favor of the corporations.
In more detail, companies have no incentive to control their pollution, so the government has to step in. It's a classic tragedy of the commons. As we can see, the corporations just buy off the politicians and the people do not know to fight. Ironically, in a true free market, the polluters don't even gain much. The government needs to step in to prevent a race to the bottom.
Another problem is that alternatives that pollute less are disadvantaged because of the externalities that the polluters are exploiting. The government tries to step in and offer incentives to balance things but then the right starts crying about how this is against the free market and that regulations are killing jobs. As technology advances, there should be a constant increase in regulation to replace these polluters with cleaner technology and level the playing field.
It's actually quite interesting how multiplicative and additive arguments are easy to mix up. You're essentially making a multiplicative argument that a percentage is relevant, but in this case it's the additive argument that matters. I don't care about the size of the population, all I care is that I have a big enough sample size to detect what I care about. For example, it might be a sample of 100 people, but I don't care if I've got a population of a thousand people or a trillion people.
On the other issues you are correct. How you formulate the questions and how you sample the population can have a huge effect on the results.
This is just anecdotal and is biased based on what makes a good news story. (Watch out for all those sharks.) While it's hard, one needs to try and get good statistics. Maybe comparing states or countries with different gun laws will give some insight. Australia is a great example since they have a fairly recent change in gun laws. Has crime gone up a lot because people can no longer scare off or kill criminals?
They should sue De Beers.
The prices of many of these things don't seem to go down. I guess things like cars and TVs get better, but price wise they don't go down much. Inflation is generally positive, so things go up in price. Economists seem to think deflation is a bad thing...
We need both, but I'm not sure how to determine the right balance. Also how much does investing in things like securities really help increase productivity. Sure the company owns some of these shares and they can borrow against it, but a lot of that money is just based on market perceptions between investors. I don't see that increasing productivity.
Do you have evidence of people successfully switching to an alternate form of currency because of wealth concentration?
You've got some good ideas and a compelling presentation. I think you need think through some issues a bit more, but that's what makes this stuff fun. I've been guilty of some hypocrisy on the whole teaching thing, but live and learn. Anyway, this has caused me to think through a bunch of issues, which was my purpose, so thanks for that.
There is an argument to be made here, but you need to make it. Instead you try to say something clever that on inspection is either wrong or very wrong.
But you are not an expert in this technology as so you are in no position to make these claims.
This looks to be a good unbiased reference. He gives some empirical studies which show a somewhat negative outcome. Notice this doesn't address consumption, which might go up significantly, or the tax impact of not having to subsidize these low skill workers with government benefits. It's a complex issue with many possible metrics for success or failure.
Your own claims contradict you. You claim stable 5% unemployment and clearly the minimum wage has fluctuated based on decreases from inflation and increases by law, therefore you've made the empirical claim that the minimum wage does not effect employment.
However, in the context of the cited paper, you are probably right, a nationwide increase in minimum wage is probably not the right thing. In principle, minimum wage should be tied to local cost of living, but this is probably hard to implement and might have some unintended consequences.
I looked into it, and his $15 has not been studied and is probably too high. However, when negotiating it's always best to start high. As for his knowledge, I'm sure he knows more than you or me.
You keep saying this as if you are saying something insightful, but I'm just not seeing it. It's clear that it's not what happens and is practically flawed in many ways.
Look I've been a bit rude, but honestly I find you a bit annoying. You phrase things as if you are trying to teach me something and you need to simplify it. Maybe you actually believe what looks to be a fairly naive picture. Look I've known for a long time that a simple picture of the ec
Give some research that backs up your claims. https://www.bloomberg.com/news... http://www.epi.org/publication... https://www.washingtonpost.com...
I never said how much I would increase the minimum wage. At a minimum, one needs to increase it to a living wage, so tax payers stop subsidizing the companies that exploit these workers. Since Bernie's done the research, let's start with $15/hr and set increases based on inflation.
https://9to5mac.com/2016/06/13...
So it will happen, but we just shouldn't worry about it. There should be a term for that, maybe AI denier.
Well it's been fun, but I probably will not read another response. Even if I don't accept your novelty or follow your logic, I do admire your spunk. Keep at it.
No I didn't know that was possible... What you probably want to say is that those resources, such as land, are really just savings from previous labor. Clearly not all labor is equal.
Governments are necessary to form stable markets. I you want to produce and sell things, you are probably going to want stable governments.
I'm not disputing that wages and efficiencies effect the cost of goods. I even agree that an economy should be a way to trade "labor".
Clearly you are trying to make some kind of point with your example, but it's difficult to understand because you example is not based on reality. Perhaps you could make your point first and then give an example.
That's the strange thing about the "science" of economics. These kinds of details are actually the important details. While you can come up with a simple model, it's not like physics where you can just apply the ideas of the general model to solve new issues. In economics, things fall apart.
A business will hire someone if the feel they can make a profit off that persons labor. That's probably a function of the economy but it also depends on other things. (Unless you define the economy is some overly broad way.)
What about natural resources. While labor is required to extract and refine them, governments create a market for them by allowing land to be owned. It's even true of things like spectrum. These effect the cost of goods since the value of the land can lower with significant resource extraction. At a minimum there is the cost based on alternative uses of the money that is tied up in the "land".
OK, but not a surprising claim.
Again not surprising.
I don't understand what you are trying to say.
The net goods bought can go up as the higher salaries increase purchasing power. This includes having less unemployed people.
This assumes production goes down. It also doesn't analyze what happens with our current trade imbalance. As money leaves the country, it must return otherwise the value of the dollar would decrease and solve the trade imbalance. Instead the money comes back and is invested, perhaps in the stock market or real estate. These tend to make things hard for the poorer people in society as they don't have the resources to invest. In particular, it raises the prices of things like houses.
What evidence do you have for 5% unemployment? Historically it's probably not true, and if just looking at more modern times, we don't have enough samples to say anything with significance.
Where does it say anything about human intervention? The thing is learning while it sleeps.
On reflection, another risk of increasing the minimum wage is based on international competition and technology. I'm less concerned about international competition since many of these jobs can't easily be outsourced, (but I don't really know the statistics). I think technology is the bigger concern particularly in the long term and increasing the minimum wage will just accelerate the inevitable loss of jobs. Perhaps one could use this as a justification to NOT increase the minimum wage to give us more time to prepare. I'm skeptical, as I think the real reason we haven't automated more is not the cost of the technology but the development of that technology.
Capitalism has a fundamental problem that it treats workers as both consumers and cogs. When that breaks, the current system will not work. The easy answer seems to basic income funded by taxes. It would cause the minimum disruption to our current system.
Well the parent claimed the upper bound is for 20 hr/wk. So this would give $24/hr to make it to poverty for a family of 4. Still it seems somewhat arbitrary. You want to make minimum wage just enough for them to squeak by. Why not give people more.
I don't understand your reasoning. What does poverty levels have to do with this. The only risk of increasing the minimum wage is substitution. Businesses will need to increase prices which might cause people to change how they use their money. For example, people might not go out to eat if it costs too much. Instead they will cook at home.
This is compensated by the fact that the people who get more money have more money to spend and can stimulate the economy. While there is a concern for inflation, it is limited since only a fraction of the working force is getting this raise. Roughly, it is more about a transfer of wealth from the people earning more than the new minimum wage to the people making less than the new minimum wage.
Poverty levels matter in a different way. Currently we are subsidizing business that pay below the poverty line. Their employees need to receive government assistance. Tax payers are essentially giving money to these businesses.
Again I don't understand your argument. Yes, it does seem unfair that "poor" people potentially have a higher capital tax rate than income tax rate, but why would that entice them to spend it as opposed to invest it. Of course, it's moot since these people don't make enough money to have significant investment.
They are not wasting their money. They are stimulating and directing production. People need to consume things generated by these businesses. Do you expect the rich to drive production. How many iPhones can they buy? IMHO it would be bad for the economy if more "poor" people tried to invest. It would damage consumption.
Actually fraud can be much worse with the electoral college. Only a small amount of fraud is needed to flip a swing state. It's not hard to give reasonable examples where a .1% change in a states votes can move the electoral votes 5%. That a factor of 50 increase of influence.
While there is some disagreement on the meaning of Physicalism it certainly doesn't include thinking the current laws of physics are complete. Who would make such a ludacrious claim.
Looks like I touched a nerve. All I said is one can take the position of Dualism to avoid your fundamental problems with Physicalism but require extraordinary evidence to actually invoke any meaningful aspects of Dualism. I guess you claim that the extraordinary evidence is already reached, but I need something more than thought experiments based on folk psychology.
So as experiments point to more and more aspects of the mind physically related to the brain you will drop more and more of your dualistic claims. Perhaps you should study more neuroscience. The split brain experiments are very interesting.
More like a child who is waiting to learn (or discover) a scientific definition of thought and intelligence before spouting off nonsense about them.
We do know that all kinds of chemicals, surgery, and accidents that effect the brain also effect how people think. As for giving Physicalism the pejorative term of religion, I could easily subscribe to Dualism but require an overwhelming amount of evidence to support examples where Physicalism is insufficient. To the contrary, we have overwhelming evidence that the brain is causally connected to thought, so there is currently no need to invent non-physical causes.
This article is the real deal as they do address what types of optimization problems and give bounds on the speedups over previous techniques. In addition, cutting plane techniques have proven to be very successful at solving integer programming problems and have yielded good/optimal solutions to large NP-hard problems such as traveling salesman.
As for the NFL theorem, it's not very surprising. By looking over all optimization problems you are considering an enormous set of functions. The "average" function in this set is going to look like noise. In the discrete case, NFL just amounts to finding the minimum value in an array. As we all know, you have to look at all the values to guarantee you found the minimum.
So if woman are better at languages then there are differences (surprise) between the sexes. If you open that door, maybe men are better at programming.
You've forgotten to add the effect of automation on prices. Suppose you automate away half the jobs at a factory, saving half your wage bill. Given that manufactured goods are a highly competitive industry, your increased margins are hardly likely to last, so the increase in profits gets competed away. That means that the labour cost saving is being passed to consumers: that's how the "profits" (that is to say, lower prices) flow to consumers.
So in the limit, if all the jobs are replaced by robots then the goods should be priced at the cost of the materials. This is still too high for someone who doesn't make any money.
This makes no sense. If consumers are the bottleneck, then who's buying to create the taxable profits in the first place?
If things continue to head in the same direction, this is where we'll end up. Fortunately there is still time to increase the taxes on things like capital gains or high bracket incomes. Ideally we would have more asset taxation since income tax largely is spent on protecting American assets. (Some assets more than others.)
Let's see, the directors word from his mouth or speculation from your ass...
Why is this insightful? Shouldn't this comment have a low moderation value. A high moderation leads people into wasting their time look at this post and into a parent post who needed some help. Why should anyone else care.
Of course this is not the fault of the parent or the poster. Is moderation really this crappy? I guess moderators want to moderate something in this article and there just aren't any good posts.
This doesn't make much sense. If the support for data plans is expensive then just refuse to give data support for people who don't have data plans. Of course, there is the associated cost of dealing with them on the phone and refusing to help. This could be offset by offering them a minimal data plan or a data support plan.
The real reason ATT doesn't want people to use this option is that lots of people would drop their data plans. There's a lot of wifi around and many people would be satisfied with just wifi. I guess this opens up an opportunity for someone to come up with a way to get a phone to report a false id to the cell phone company.
Nice example of equivocation. I say why not give the proper incentives to companies as in incentive to do something, and you change it to a regulatory incentive used by the government to get people to behave in "desirable" ways. While I am proposing government regulation, it is not some arbitrary incentive but is instead a way to correct for externalities.