Meanwhile, they keep adding these gimmicks, like a streaming video service that is basically a pay per view service with an attached monthly fee while much of their content is offered at a flat rate on netflix, hbo, hulu, and others.
You don't need to be a prime member for their pay-per-view content. Prime Video works the same as netflix. You have a bunch of videos you can watch for free. The difference is that unlike netflix not everything available to stream is free. Their free selection is very comparable to netflix The problem I have is that especially with kids, having it mixed together tempts you to pay for the non-free stuff and their non-free stuff is way too expensive.
Prime is one of those services that relies on most people not getting their money's worth from it. It basically amortises the cost of two day shipping over everyone using it. Some will win, some will lose.
They probably have a few people who don't get their money's worth but that's not their main business plan. By having an upfront sunk cost, they are actually hoping that once you have a membership that you order everything from them. That's exactly what most people I know who have prime do. That are ordering almost everything from amazon so amazon breaks even on the shipping and makes it up with the increased volume.
In the beginning, everybody was unemployed. What happened?
Land ownership or the lack thereof. But even then nobody was unemployed. They had to find food, build shelter, etc... to survive. These type of articles are talking about what happens when growing food, building shelter, etc... are all easier done by machines. You still have the option today of finding 20 acres somewhere and growing all your own food but it's more cheaper and more efficient to buy food than to grow it yourself.
Clearly, if every job is automated, then everyone will be unemployed by definition. However, as you point out, there have been huge economic benefits to automation.
It's a fundamental law of mathematics that any function which is increasing at one point and decreasing at another contains at least one extrema in between.
The problem isn't when everyone is unemployed. At that point it should be relatively easy to come up with a fair distribution method. The problem is when 20% of the population still has to work long hours while the other 80% have nothing to do. Currently we distribute wealth roughly based on the amount of work you do (or capital you control that does the work for you). That is obviously not going to work very well when only 20% of the population is working and only 1% controls the capital. The solutions are to change the way we distribute wealth, distribute capital more evenly, or distribute work more evenly. UBI is in the #1 camp. #2 is communism. #3 seems the most viable in the USA. We could do this by reducing the workweek below 40 in lockstep with the gains in automation until everyone is only required to work 10 hours a week to get their share of the pie.
How is that gloomier? If Korea has already managed to automate away most of the jobs than can be automated away and they don't already have mass unemployment then that should be a positive sign that other countries can do the same.
As a devil's advocate, ransomware may be a good thing. It stops a company from functioning, which PHBs might consider something that doesn't "optimize their synergies", so they might actually give a thought to security.
Ransomware insurance should achieve the same effect as presumably by proving you are more secure (or that it's less costly to recover your data) your premiums should be lower which would make the PHBs happier.
We already kindof do. We have cracker for the bad hacker and maker for the good hacker. Makerspaces use the term maker. We have cracking for bad hacking but I've never seem "making" used for good hacking. We also have the word tinkerers. Many places still use the term hackerspace but many more use the more politically correct makerspace to distance themselves from the bad connotations of hacking.
A company can have a 100% backup solution and it may still be worth their while to pay the ransom.
Yes, assuming you can trust the criminal, it could possibly be cheaper but you should NEVER pay a ransom. It only open you and everyone else up for more ransom. I would much rather see paying ransoms outlawed and the government require everyone to carry ransom insurance and then have the insurance company pay to fix the problem. The advantage of this approach would be that if the insurance company pays for the recovery it reduces the incentive to pay the ransom and hopefully ransomware disappears. If we want ransomware to disappear, we need to make sure that it's cheaper and easier to not pay a ransom than it is to pay a ransom so that noone is tempted to pay a ransom. Another alternative is to make sure that the penalty for paying the ransom is so severe that noone is tempted.
I was all about pirating content when I was younger... then I became a software developer and suddenly it finally clicked in that even though its just a copy, its still is taking things away from those who made it. If one person buys my software and just gives copies to everyone else, I can't sustain the process of making software. Its that simple.
Sadly, the best way to prevent software piracy is online only apps where you don't purchase the software only rent/use them. If media could figure out a way to do this I would expect media to follow suit. The problem is that unlike interactive software, it's too easy to record movies. I wouldn't be surprised though if movies start becoming more interactive as a way to prevent piracy.
Universal Basic Income = Welfare = Bad (which it is) Universal Equal Income = Communism = Good
I never said either one was good or bad. I think both are a bad idea. My personal preference is actually to slowly lower the number of hours everyone can legally work.
It looks like the industry average is to spend about 17% of revenues on R&D. More than 17% is spent on marketing.
So I'd say that recovering R&D is definitely NOT the main reason for the price, though "increasing profits" (the largest part of revenues) does sound rather less noble.
It doesn't sound like they are trying to "increase profits" but rather trying to "keep profits the same" now that it's likely that doctors are going to start prescribing a lower dose. Without looking at their books and seeing what their R&D debt is, the number of actual and potential patients each year, etc... there is no way to really know whether they are gouging the patient or not.
The 40 hours is already much lower than the 12 hours a day, six and a half days a week many people worked in the 1800s.
But it stopped. High income people now work longer hours than low income people. Also, the 12 hours 6.5 days a week was very short lived. Before the invention of the light bulb the number of hours worked per year was considerably less that 40 hours per week. The revolt against the light bulb is what got us the 40 hour work week but today a large percentage work more than 40 hours a week even though our efficiency is many order of magnitudes higher than it was in the 1800s.
I'm assuming this is because they are trying to get back the fixed R&D cost. Maybe the solution should be an incremental cost for the medicine and the fixed cost divided by the number of users. That way the more people who sign up, the lower the cost is to all. Or maybe the government should buy out the fixed cost and let the company collect the incremental cost.
Socialism tends to run on the assumption that people enjoy working.
I enjoy working. I like building stuff in my basement. I like planting flowers in my garden. I enjoy fixing broken electronics. I have lots of personal projects. I also enjoy trying new things so might even be willing to jump on a garbage truck for a day. But we are nowhere close to being to the point where people can work on personal hobbies in their basement and robots do everything else. We could start by lowering the 40 hour work week slowly but just giving everyone a salary to sit at home and play with legos is not going to work.
Given our technology and resources, universal basic income is the rational, sensible prediction.
Universal Basic Income is just another name for welfare. It will only make the haves vs have nots worse. The people with good jobs will have stuff and the people with UBI will be barely scraping by. Now, if you are talking about zero work and Universal Equal Income then we are probably 100 years or more away from that (and that's assuming the AI doing all the work doesn't decide that we aren't leeches and exterminate us).
The AC is correct. Many studies have shown that around 80k/year is where happiness levels peak. Sure there are places like silicon valley where you likely need more to be comfortable. That 80k is also interesting as that's also approximately the same point where your kids are more likely to make less that you do. Below that point your kids generally make more that you do and above that point your kids tend to make less that you do. Basically, that's the point where you can live comfortable without struggling and after that point extra money isn't a major factor in happiness. Quality of life, work life balance, etc... start to play a more important role. I make 90k per year with 3 kids and have more than enough money to live comfortably. My focus for several years has been to try to reduce my hours worked while keeping my salary the same.
That's really no different than where I work. Where I work everyone is hourly and you are allowed up to 10 hours a week of unpaid time off. Basically, as long as your hours stay above 30 for health insurance it's not a problem. You aren't directly paying for vacation but it works out the same because if you use unpaid vacation instead or paid vacation to make up the hours then your paycheck drops. Buying vacation is really no different that taking unpaid time off.
It really depends on the tax brackets. Both the USA and Britain have had top tax brackets above 80%. At that point, what's the point? Even above 50%, it gets to the point where you start to think that it's not worth the effort when you only get to keep a fraction of what you make.
There is an old man who mows most of my neighborhood basically for free. I would gladly fix stuff for people for free. I also would gladly volunteer to do a trash route once a month. There are definitely things that need to be done but there might be better ways to accomplish it. The specialization and optimizing the fun out of jobs is killing us. My brother once said that on any given day he would prefer an outside job but on any given month he prefers a desk job. We would all be better off and healthier if we could get a better blend of daily tasks.
That's still not a good test unless you also give all of the winner's descendants the same allowance (adjusted for inflation of course).
Anecdotally, someone who lives a couple of miles from me actually did hit a million dollar lottery. He took the $50K for twenty years, moved his girlfriend into his house along with his wife and lived like his version of a king for twenty years.
But did he continue to work for those 20 years? The basic idea of a UBI is that people will still continue to look for work even after their basic needs are met. I disagree that their descendants need to be included for it to be effective. The problem with a short duration (or even 20 year) program is that people still have a sense of insecurity. If you knew that no matter what you did, you would still have basic food and shelter then your calculations are going to be different than if you don't have that safety net. As far as descendants, it might change the equation slightly. If I knew that I had my basic needs covered for the rest of my life but not my kids then my priorities would likely shift to ensuring that my kids were covered by either continuing to work to put money into a college fund or making other sacrifices to ensure they would be taken care. I would also likely take out a life insurance policy and be more willing to take more risky decisions like moving for their college, etc... because I know I have a large safety net.
So, we can't try it out to see if it works, we have to implement it on a massive scale and only then can we know? Yeah, we're not going to experiment with all of society like that. Those kind of social experiments have a bad history of negative outcomes, something that educated people know.
Plus you pull out something completely new, that is also untested and unknown? Huh?
We already have a ton of test cases. Just look at lottery winners. If you want even better data, create some more specific lotteries. Sell lottery tickets that give the winner 20k for life (or whatever amount you decide you want to test). It's not completely random because it has a slight selection bias of those people that buy lottery tickets but it's a big enough pool that it's close enough and it requires no tax money to do it.
If only that is what they used the tobacco tax for. Now, with so many people quitting, states that relied on this funding are hurting and having to push up the tax even higher (or tax other stuff) just to make up for the lost revenue.
Exactly. They never keep it separate. Even when they do, like with lottery money and education, they end up reducing general funds at an equal rate so they start to depend on it anyways. Sin/consumption/use taxes that are designed to reduce consumption should take that into account and make sure that they have a plan if it really does reduce consumption like it is supposed to. If the tax is actually used to mitigate the use then presumably as consumption goes down then the tax revenue needed also drops as well which is an ideal use for the extra tax.
I would have no problem supporting taxing environmentally unfriendly stuff like this especially if we offset it by lowering taxes elsewhere.
Surely it would make sense to use these additional funds to clean up environmental problem areas? Developing and building recycling centres for old batteries perhaps? As you mention, as the undesirable products die out this type of infrastructure can eventually be discontinued or re-tasked.
I don't have a big problem with the tax mitigating the problem for instance using the tobacco tax for smoking cessation programs or lung cancer research or using an additional battery tax to properly recycle single use batteries. This would have the added benefit of the tax slowly disappearing as the usage declines. If done correctly, taxes like this could help pay for the external costs that many environmentally destructive products have. The only drawback to this approach is that for the tax on something like the incandescent bulb to be effective it would likely have to be significantly higher than the direct external cost so some committee somewhere would have to decide how to best spend that money to clean up power plants, buy carbon offsets, etc...
That's why we need to ban disposable batteries so that we can force all the old stuff to break. We also need a law that forces all manufactors to replace anything for free that breaks due to the ban and pay each person for the inconvenience of being out whatever broke. And we also need a law stating these companies should also buy everyone a pony.
I realize you are joking but banning stuff like incandescent light bulbs and disposable light bulbs can cause major problems especially for fringe uses that may not be able to switch. On the other hand, I would have no problem supporting taxing environmentally unfriendly stuff like this especially if we offset it by lowering taxes elsewhere. You tend to get less of stuff you tax so taxing stuff like energy usage or enviromentally unfriendly stuff makes more sense than taxing sales/income.
In this case, the "cure" is likely monthly doses of this particular medicine for the rest of your life. This is exactly the type of "cure" that a company wants to have. Even in a case where you could completely cure someone, a company who sells expensive medicine for it might not have an incentive to cure it but a different company without a conflict of interest still has an incentive to develop an expensive one time cure for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Meanwhile, they keep adding these gimmicks, like a streaming video service that is basically a pay per view service with an attached monthly fee while much of their content is offered at a flat rate on netflix, hbo, hulu, and others.
You don't need to be a prime member for their pay-per-view content. Prime Video works the same as netflix. You have a bunch of videos you can watch for free. The difference is that unlike netflix not everything available to stream is free. Their free selection is very comparable to netflix The problem I have is that especially with kids, having it mixed together tempts you to pay for the non-free stuff and their non-free stuff is way too expensive.
Prime is one of those services that relies on most people not getting their money's worth from it. It basically amortises the cost of two day shipping over everyone using it. Some will win, some will lose.
They probably have a few people who don't get their money's worth but that's not their main business plan. By having an upfront sunk cost, they are actually hoping that once you have a membership that you order everything from them. That's exactly what most people I know who have prime do. That are ordering almost everything from amazon so amazon breaks even on the shipping and makes it up with the increased volume.
In the beginning, everybody was unemployed. What happened?
Land ownership or the lack thereof. But even then nobody was unemployed. They had to find food, build shelter, etc... to survive.
These type of articles are talking about what happens when growing food, building shelter, etc... are all easier done by machines.
You still have the option today of finding 20 acres somewhere and growing all your own food but it's more cheaper and more efficient
to buy food than to grow it yourself.
Clearly, if every job is automated, then everyone will be unemployed by definition. However, as you point out, there have been huge economic benefits to automation.
It's a fundamental law of mathematics that any function which is increasing at one point and decreasing at another contains at least one extrema in between.
The problem isn't when everyone is unemployed. At that point it should be relatively easy to come up with a fair distribution method. The problem is when 20% of the population still has to work long hours while the other 80% have nothing to do. Currently we distribute wealth roughly based on the amount of work you do (or capital you control that does the work for you). That is obviously not going to work very well when only 20% of the population is working and only 1% controls the capital. The solutions are to change the way we distribute wealth, distribute capital more evenly, or distribute work more evenly. UBI is in the #1 camp. #2 is communism. #3 seems the most viable in the USA. We could do this by reducing the workweek below 40 in lockstep with the gains in automation until everyone is only required to work 10 hours a week to get their share of the pie.
How is that gloomier? If Korea has already managed to automate away most of the jobs than can be automated away and they don't already have mass unemployment then that should be a positive sign that other countries can do the same.
As a devil's advocate, ransomware may be a good thing. It stops a company from functioning, which PHBs might consider something that doesn't "optimize their synergies", so they might actually give a thought to security.
Ransomware insurance should achieve the same effect as presumably by proving you are more secure (or that it's less costly to recover your data) your premiums should be lower which would make the PHBs happier.
We already kindof do. We have cracker for the bad hacker and maker for the good hacker. Makerspaces use the term maker. We have cracking for bad hacking but I've never seem "making" used for good hacking. We also have the word tinkerers. Many places still use the term hackerspace but many more use the more politically correct makerspace to distance themselves from the bad connotations of hacking.
A company can have a 100% backup solution and it may still be worth their while to pay the ransom.
Yes, assuming you can trust the criminal, it could possibly be cheaper but you should NEVER pay a ransom. It only open you and everyone else up for more ransom. I would much rather see paying ransoms outlawed and the government require everyone to carry ransom insurance and then have the insurance company pay to fix the problem. The advantage of this approach would be that if the insurance company pays for the recovery it reduces the incentive to pay the ransom and hopefully ransomware disappears. If we want ransomware to disappear, we need to make sure that it's cheaper and easier to not pay a ransom than it is to pay a ransom so that noone is tempted to pay a ransom. Another alternative is to make sure that the penalty for paying the ransom is so severe that noone is tempted.
I was all about pirating content when I was younger ... then I became a software developer and suddenly it finally clicked in that even though its just a copy, its still is taking things away from those who made it. If one person buys my software and just gives copies to everyone else, I can't sustain the process of making software. Its that simple.
Sadly, the best way to prevent software piracy is online only apps where you don't purchase the software only rent/use them. If media could figure out a way to do this I would expect media to follow suit. The problem is that unlike interactive software, it's too easy to record movies. I wouldn't be surprised though if movies start becoming more interactive as a way to prevent piracy.
Universal Basic Income = Welfare = Bad (which it is)
Universal Equal Income = Communism = Good
I never said either one was good or bad. I think both are a bad idea. My personal preference is actually to slowly lower the number of hours everyone can legally work.
It looks like the industry average is to spend about 17% of revenues on R&D. More than 17% is spent on marketing.
So I'd say that recovering R&D is definitely NOT the main reason for the price, though "increasing profits" (the largest part of revenues) does sound rather less noble.
It doesn't sound like they are trying to "increase profits" but rather trying to "keep profits the same" now that it's likely that doctors are going to start prescribing a lower dose. Without looking at their books and seeing what their R&D debt is, the number of actual and potential patients each year, etc... there is no way to really know whether they are gouging the patient or not.
The 40 hours is already much lower than the 12 hours a day, six and a half days a week many people worked in the 1800s.
But it stopped. High income people now work longer hours than low income people. Also, the 12 hours 6.5 days a week was very short lived. Before the invention of the light bulb the number of hours worked per year was considerably less that 40 hours per week. The revolt against the light bulb is what got us the 40 hour work week but today a large percentage work more than 40 hours a week even though our efficiency is many order of magnitudes higher than it was in the 1800s.
I'm assuming this is because they are trying to get back the fixed R&D cost. Maybe the solution should be an incremental cost for the medicine and the fixed cost divided by the number of users. That way the more people who sign up, the lower the cost is to all. Or maybe the government should buy out the fixed cost and let the company collect the incremental cost.
Socialism tends to run on the assumption that people enjoy working.
I enjoy working. I like building stuff in my basement. I like planting flowers in my garden. I enjoy fixing broken electronics. I have lots of personal projects. I also enjoy trying new things so might even be willing to jump on a garbage truck for a day. But we are nowhere close to being to the point where people can work on personal hobbies in their basement and robots do everything else. We could start by lowering the 40 hour work week slowly but just giving everyone a salary to sit at home and play with legos is not going to work.
Given our technology and resources, universal basic income is the rational, sensible prediction.
Universal Basic Income is just another name for welfare. It will only make the haves vs have nots worse. The people with good jobs will have stuff and the people with UBI will be barely scraping by. Now, if you are talking about zero work and Universal Equal Income then we are probably 100 years or more away from that (and that's assuming the AI doing all the work doesn't decide that we aren't leeches and exterminate us).
The AC is correct. Many studies have shown that around 80k/year is where happiness levels peak. Sure there are places like silicon valley where you likely need more to be comfortable. That 80k is also interesting as that's also approximately the same point where your kids are more likely to make less that you do. Below that point your kids generally make more that you do and above that point your kids tend to make less that you do. Basically, that's the point where you can live comfortable without struggling and after that point extra money isn't a major factor in happiness. Quality of life, work life balance, etc... start to play a more important role. I make 90k per year with 3 kids and have more than enough money to live comfortably. My focus for several years has been to try to reduce my hours worked while keeping my salary the same.
That's really no different than where I work. Where I work everyone is hourly and you are allowed up to 10 hours a week of unpaid time off. Basically, as long as your hours stay above 30 for health insurance it's not a problem. You aren't directly paying for vacation but it works out the same because if you use unpaid vacation instead or paid vacation to make up the hours then your paycheck drops. Buying vacation is really no different that taking unpaid time off.
It really depends on the tax brackets. Both the USA and Britain have had top tax brackets above 80%. At that point, what's the point? Even above 50%, it gets to the point where you start to think that it's not worth the effort when you only get to keep a fraction of what you make.
There is an old man who mows most of my neighborhood basically for free. I would gladly fix stuff for people for free. I also would gladly volunteer to do a trash route once a month. There are definitely things that need to be done but there might be better ways to accomplish it. The specialization and optimizing the fun out of jobs is killing us. My brother once said that on any given day he would prefer an outside job but on any given month he prefers a desk job. We would all be better off and healthier if we could get a better blend of daily tasks.
That's still not a good test unless you also give all of the winner's descendants the same allowance (adjusted for inflation of course).
Anecdotally, someone who lives a couple of miles from me actually did hit a million dollar lottery. He took the $50K for twenty years, moved his girlfriend into his house along with his wife and lived like his version of a king for twenty years.
But did he continue to work for those 20 years? The basic idea of a UBI is that people will still continue to look for work even after their basic needs are met. I disagree that their descendants need to be included for it to be effective. The problem with a short duration (or even 20 year) program is that people still have a sense of insecurity. If you knew that no matter what you did, you would still have basic food and shelter then your calculations are going to be different than if you don't have that safety net. As far as descendants, it might change the equation slightly. If I knew that I had my basic needs covered for the rest of my life but not my kids then my priorities would likely shift to ensuring that my kids were covered by either continuing to work to put money into a college fund or making other sacrifices to ensure they would be taken care. I would also likely take out a life insurance policy and be more willing to take more risky decisions like moving for their college, etc... because I know I have a large safety net.
So, we can't try it out to see if it works, we have to implement it on a massive scale and only then can we know? Yeah, we're not going to experiment with all of society like that. Those kind of social experiments have a bad history of negative outcomes, something that educated people know.
Plus you pull out something completely new, that is also untested and unknown? Huh?
We already have a ton of test cases. Just look at lottery winners. If you want even better data, create some more specific lotteries. Sell lottery tickets that give the winner 20k for life (or whatever amount you decide you want to test). It's not completely random because it has a slight selection bias of those people that buy lottery tickets but it's a big enough pool that it's close enough and it requires no tax money to do it.
If only that is what they used the tobacco tax for. Now, with so many people quitting, states that relied on this funding are hurting and having to push up the tax even higher (or tax other stuff) just to make up for the lost revenue.
Exactly. They never keep it separate. Even when they do, like with lottery money and education, they end up reducing general funds at an equal rate so they start to depend on it anyways. Sin/consumption/use taxes that are designed to reduce consumption should take that into account and make sure that they have a plan if it really does reduce consumption like it is supposed to. If the tax is actually used to mitigate the use then presumably as consumption goes down then the tax revenue needed also drops as well which is an ideal use for the extra tax.
I would have no problem supporting taxing environmentally unfriendly stuff like this especially if we offset it by lowering taxes elsewhere.
Surely it would make sense to use these additional funds to clean up environmental problem areas? Developing and building recycling centres for old batteries perhaps? As you mention, as the undesirable products die out this type of infrastructure can eventually be discontinued or re-tasked.
I don't have a big problem with the tax mitigating the problem for instance using the tobacco tax for smoking cessation programs or lung cancer research or using an additional battery tax to properly recycle single use batteries. This would have the added benefit of the tax slowly disappearing as the usage declines. If done correctly, taxes like this could help pay for the external costs that many environmentally destructive products have. The only drawback to this approach is that for the tax on something like the incandescent bulb to be effective it would likely have to be significantly higher than the direct external cost so some committee somewhere would have to decide how to best spend that money to clean up power plants, buy carbon offsets, etc...
That's why we need to ban disposable batteries so that we can force all the old stuff to break. We also need a law that forces all manufactors to replace anything for free that breaks due to the ban and pay each person for the inconvenience of being out whatever broke. And we also need a law stating these companies should also buy everyone a pony.
I realize you are joking but banning stuff like incandescent light bulbs and disposable light bulbs can cause major problems especially for fringe uses that may not be able to switch. On the other hand, I would have no problem supporting taxing environmentally unfriendly stuff like this especially if we offset it by lowering taxes elsewhere. You tend to get less of stuff you tax so taxing stuff like energy usage or enviromentally unfriendly stuff makes more sense than taxing sales/income.
Do we even want a cure? Alzheimers generates a lot of revenue....
In this case, the "cure" is likely monthly doses of this particular medicine for the rest of your life. This is exactly the type of "cure" that a company wants to have.
Even in a case where you could completely cure someone, a company who sells expensive medicine for it might not have an incentive to cure it but a different company without a conflict of interest still has an incentive to develop an expensive one time cure for it.