Not even close. Compare the Wisconsin 2012/2016 numbers. Trump slightly under performed Romney, who lost Wisconsin (1.405m vs 1.407m). Clinton on the other hand, under performed Obama by 240k votes (1.382m vs 1.620m). Also note that Wisconsin had the lowest statewide presidential vote turnout in 20 years.
Clinton's problem was that a sizable chunk of the Democratic vote either stayed home or voted third party. Michigan and Pennsylvania had similar problems. I highlighted Wisconsin as that is where I live.
You can't tell that from the totals. Just because Trump got about the same number of voters as Romney doesn't mean it was the same group of voters. There were likely hundreds of thousands of Republicans that either stayed home or voted 3rd party this election. The reason the numbers were close is because the Democrats who voted for Trump came in and made up the difference. This is the first election ever that I did not vote for the Republican candidate and as I've stated before, I have yet to meet a single democrat who voted libertarian. Every democrat I know voted either for Hillary, Trump, or green party. I'm not saying that there might not be a few democrats that voted libertarian but 300k democrats broke for the libertarian instead of the green party? I doubt that. It makes a lot more sense that most of that 300k were republicans that couldn't stomach Trump and the only reason that Trump didn't lose in a landslide was that Trump was able to get more democrats to cross over and vote for him than he lost in republicans.
The problem with your line of thinking is that you're saying she should have blatantly lied about policy choices in order to win. "Change" is/was not what the US needs, despite a vocal minority shouting at the top of their lungs. We've seen the projections for "change" over the last 8 months - 24 million Americans losing health insurance, regulations lowered or removed altogether on financial institutions and environmental pollution, weakened security due to willful ignorance and insults aimed at our allies.
The so-called "liberals in the big city" are doing well because they're adapting to, not fighting against, economic reality. The stagnation you mention in the rust belt has nothing to do with Obama, or "elitist liberals", or the ACA. It has to do with the economic realities of a 21st century global economy. I'm truly sorry if coal mining is no longer a viable means of supporting your community, but economic and political isolationism isn't the answer. Investments in education and subsidies for emerging markets (like clean energy) are the only real way to avoid the collapse of the rust belt. Unfortunately the GOP is doing its best to undermine both, while making entirely unrealistic promises to their base, like "we'll bring back coal".
You make it sound like Trump's version of change was the only option. Just like Obama, Bernie also offered change. I'm not saying Clinton should have lied. People wanted her to have some sense of a plan. Bernie had a plan. Trump had a plan. Clinton said "everything is great, carry on". If she would have said "let's raise the minimum wage" or "let's provide more education options for people who are displaced" or really anything other than "everything is great, what's your problem?" then she might have had a chance. The tiny glimpse of change that she did manage to squeeze into her platform at the last hour was stolen from Bernie and you're right, I think it was a lie just to try to steal back a few Bernie voters. The coal miners don't necessarily want their coal jobs back, they want their lives back. Clinton didn't campaign on "retraining coal miners to run wind mills", if she did she probably would have won. Just like your post, she campaigned on "everything is great, if you lost your job, it's your problem, the rest of the country is great, you're an acceptable casuality in our march to greatness, maybe I can find you a job at mcdonalds and give you a dollar or two raise" Again, coal miners don't want their jobs back and they don't want a $10 an hour job. They want a job where they can be comfortably middle class just like they were when they had their coal job. Bernie promised this. Trump promised this. Clinton said "nothing is wrong with your current situation"
Maybe everyone is rating movies on inconsistent scales? Maybe even if everyone used the same scale it still wouldn't matter unless they rate exactly like you for all other films you share common?
A good critic should take a non-subjective view when it's deciding on a rating. An audience has no such objective and can rate a movie on whether or not they personally liked it.
My guess is critics are rating horror movies on originality while the audience is rating them on how much it scared them. So something with a high critic rating and low audience rating would be a quality movie that is not super scary while something with a high audience rating but low critic rating would be a really scary movie with maybe not much plot.
I've never looked for this data and am glad you took the time to dig it up. I find it fascinating, especially the Michigan numbers. Between 2012 and 2016 the Democrats lost 300000 votes. To me it is interesting that essentially half of them went to Libertarian, but the other half went to Trump. Sure, you can think of all of those Libertarian votes as fuck Clinton, but the switch to Republican (if in fact they represent the same voters - it may be more likely that 150000 Democrats voted Libertarian and half stayed home, and 150000 more Republicans showed up to vote) would indicate some resonance with his message.
From what I've seen, I think it is much more likely that the vast majority of those 300k democrats voted for Trump and the only reason that Trump didn't win in a complete landslide is because 150k republicans defected to the libertarian party. I have yet to meet a single democrat that says they voted libertarian while I've met a lot of democrats that voted for Trump and a lot of republicans that voted libertarian. It makes more sense to have a double shuffle like this than a complete jump. A defecting democrat has a lot more in common with Trump or the green party than with the libertarian party.
In rural Wisconsin and Michigan a Sanders Democrat and Libertarian have more in common than say a Michigan Democrat and NYC Democrat. Not understanding how people think or even taking the time to come talk to them and understand their motivations has proven to be a bad course of action.
I disagree. I think most of the Sanders democrats voted for Trump not libertarian. The libertarian votes were likely mostly republicans that just couldn't stomach Trump or Clinton. I know several diehard Obama supporters in the rust belt that were fanatical about Bernie in the primaries and then turned and became fanatical about Trump in the general. Yes, they would have rather have Sanders but when Sanders dropped out, they moved over to Trump with hardly a blink. Exit polls backed this up with a large percentage of people voting for Trump wanting "more liberal" policies.
No, oddly enough they voted for Obama's campaign slogan: "Change". People feeling the squeeze of falling jobs, falling incomes, immigration pressures saw Clinton as a continuation of policies that had given them the shaft for the last 20+ years.
The same way that people came to the conclusion that any change in the healthcare system was worth a shot, so they viewed Trump.
Exactly this. The reason Trump won a lot of the same counties that Obama did is because they both ran on basically the same platform. Trump and Obama both campaigned on change while Clinton campaigned on "more of the same". Clinton should have seen this in the primaries when all the "more of the same" candidates on both side quickly fell. The only candidates that survived for any length of time were Bernie (change) and republicans that were also outsiders offering change. Granted Clinton was an exceptionally bad candidate with a lot of people who REALLY disliked her but in her defence, that's not what lost her the election. What lost her the election was that she chose to campaign on the "status quo" while both sides were looking for an outsider to upset the fruit basket.
One of the main reasons that liberals in the big city still have a hard time seeing this is that the last decade has been relatively good to them and they don't see the stagnation that the people in the rust belt see.
Then it isn't universal, and you increase the size of the government department that gets to keep track of who gets paid what. It's already going to be a large department, let's make it bigger, right?
Make it at least sufficient to support the survival of themselves and a child,
Then it isn't a basic income, it's enough to support two people.
and those who avoid having children then have a considerable luxury/investment income in addition to baseline survival.
So it's now a NonUniversal Luxury Income instead of UBI. Can we admit that handing out free money that actually meets UBI limits isn't good enough and we need MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE!? That every program that hands out free stuff will get demands to provide MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE?
That's actually the problem with a UBI or anything like it. Our current system (SNAP) stands for "Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program". It is designed to be both "Supplemental" and "Assistance" but I constantly see articles about how hard it is to buy 100% of a family's food using SNAP. SNAP by it's very definition is suppose to supplement and assist people in getting their nutritional needs not be the sole source of their nutritional needs. UBI would be the same thing. If we give every adult 10k then a family of 2 is going to be ok while a family of 1 or 7 is going to be struggling or we could give 5k per man,woman,child and a family of 1 or 2 are going to be unable to survive while a family of 10 is going to be doing ok. There is no way to provide a fixed UBI that comfortably takes care of all families regardless of size. This is the reason that current assistance programs vary the amount based on family size.
I'm fine with the idea of working less, but we should make sure that we're not moving into centrally-planned "you take the job I tell you to take or else you starve" territory. I like UBI because I feel it's the thing that gives people freedom to choose whether they want a job in order to afford more than UBI allows, choose what to do with their time, etc.
I'm not advocating that government have any say in the type of work just that they cap the number of hours you can be paid to work. Granted, this is not without it's side effects. If you immediately capped work at 20 hours per week you would likely see a lot more self employed people and people working for cash to avoid the limit not to mention huge amounts of labor shortage but starting at 35 hours/week and reducing the hours by 1 hour per year or whatever was needed to stay in sync with job loss based on automation would allow us to finally rid ourself of the arbitrary 40 hour work week. Another advantage of this approach is that if we do start seeing labor shortages, it could easily be adjusted back up the other direction.
The issue is that there are only three practicable solutions based on our current sociopolitical and economic environments:
slaughter the masses who can't meet a bare minimum requirement of being programmers or data analysts
destroy the machines and the people pushing for them
institute universal income
The issue with the first two is that a large segment of the population dies, and we likely lose 20-100 years of productivity as a species while the wounds are being licked and rebellions quelled. The issue with the last option is it is a path to guaranteed class divisions which become set in stone at a generational level over time (if you have free wealth to sustain yourself now you an start a business, because there are businesses to be started, if you have free wealth to sustain yourself along with everyone else there is no such option because anything you can do everyone else can as well.) The current system sucks, but it at least affords some mobility (people born poor can work to middle class, people born middle class can work to wealthy, people born wealthy can work to elite, etc.) Under UBI you end up with everyone starting poor (wealth is by definition a measure of your ability to control labor, if everyone has the same amount it doesn't actually exist) except for a few people who control the industries/machines, who damn well will be plotting to take over other sectors because that's the type of people they are. Under UBI you have a moderate to long period of complacency followed by a guaranteed 2-class system with 1 guy and his family in the upper class.
How about instead of a 2-class system, we try option #4: Everyone work less. If everyone works less then the number of jobs available increases. If we have 10 million people but only have 5 million jobs, then it makes more sense to give everyone 20 hours a week instead of giving 5 million people 40 hours a week and 5 million people zero hours a week.
Also, can't we finally accept that people having to work less could be a feature of more technology, not a bug?
In my opinion, automating away a lot of work and instituting a universal basic income sounds amazing. I'd love to see people freely choosing to spend their time pursuing hobbies, raising their children, pursuing a job out of passion rather than need, getting education, playing games, taking walks in park, reading, watching television, or any of the billion other things that humans can do when we're not chasing paychecks.
I agree that working less should be a feature not a bug. The problem is money and leisure time is not being correctly distributed. The people at the top are working the longest hours, getting the most money per hour, and getting the least leisure time. The people at the bottom are having a hard time even finding full time employment. UBI will not fix this. Even the most generous proposals still have UBI as the bare minimal amount of money to survive. I don't want to live in a country where if your lucky enough to win the "job lottery" then you can live comfortable otherwise you become a ward of the state. We would be much better off if we started reducing the hours the people at the top worked so that some of that work can be done by other people who need the work. Instead of jobs being either "excellent paying but worked to death" or "barely surviving", we would all be better off if the total pay went down a little at the top but the total leisure went up as well. We could start by enforcing the 40 hour work week but going to a 35 hour or even lower work week as automation takes over would benefit everyone. Dropping high paying positions from 40 hours per week to just 38 hours per week (a 5% decrease) should cause a 5% increase in available high paying positions.
Typical self centeeed American, England is a sub national state and has quite different laws compared to wales or Scotland and doZens of other British territories around the world.
American states are very similar to England,Scotland, and Wales. They had and still have in some cases quite different laws from state to state but every year that goes by the laws get more and more homogenized and the states lose more and more powers to the federal. The federal government discovered that it could collect more money than it needed and then give it back with strings attached to make the states comply. The states technically could not comply but only at the cost of not getting their fair share of the federal money.
Oh c'mon... It's only 120 million euros. How much is that in Beluga Caviar?
Yeah, that's what they said when the United States started paying for stuff for the states. Look at us now. The Federal government has all the power and the state governments are a joke. That's exactly where the EU is heading. They modelled their system after the USA and are following the same path where the EU slowly takes more and more power from the individual countries until they cease to exist. An interesting history lesson, the word state used to be synonymous with nation until the USA redefined it and robbed the individual states of their sovereignty.
It is objectively more difficult to get contraband onto an airplane than it was in the 90s. That you can maybe sneak something by does not make it "Theater".
I wasn't stating whether it was or was not theatre. It's probably a combination of both. I was just stating that "effective theatre" is a contradiction. Security theatre is by definition ineffective security only done for show.
If you just had a bomb implanted, you wouldn't be walking through security... They would push you through in a wheelchair.
Not all surgeries require a wheelchair. I never used a wheelchair when I had my gallbladder out and many women have c sections without needing a wheelchair. Removing a 5 pound baby and implanting a 5 pound bomb in a uterus would likely be a very similar operation. Maybe we should start banning all "pregnant" and overweight people from flying.
So what if it's theater? It's very effective theater.
If it's theatre then by definition it's not effective unless by effective you mean "fools people into thinking that travel is safe". Security theatre by definition means that it's pretend security that really doesn't make people safer.
I'm all for stopping H-1B but if it hasn't happened yet I doubt it will.
That's because Silicon Valley would rather talk about UBI as a solution to unemployment and underemployment than actually fix the unemployment/underemployment problem. UBI is a way to sweep the problem under the rug and say "we have a solution" when you really don't. More burger flipping jobs are also not the solution. First, those low skill jobs are getting automated away and secondly those jobs are probably worse than a UBI. What people want and need is a good paying job that they enjoy and feel proud about doing. It's the reason Trump won. He promised those jobs back. The fact that he likely can't deliver is irrelevant. Reducing H1B1s or reducing the workweek would be two ways of increasing the number of available highly skilled jobs. Also needed would be training programs for the underemployed people that are capable of filling those jobs. Not everyone who works at walmart and mcdonalds are capable of filling those highly skilled jobs but even if only 20% are, moving those 20% out of mcdonalds and into highly skilled jobs would put upward pressure on wages at mcdonalds as well benefiting the people who are still at mcdonalds.
Companies hire employees to do jobs because those jobs provide the company more income than they spend on labor. Companies don't just hire people to do nothing. The only thing a tax break might do is adjust the marginal cost of the employee down to where the income exceeds the labor cost. If the job worth to the company is that low to begin with, that job is going to be a very low paying job. A much better solution would be to turn off H1B1s and reduce the number of hours a highly skilled person is allowed to work. This would create a labor shortage in the higher skilled positions so wages would go up to attract people and the number of people needed for those positions would also increase. A slight labor shortage is actually good for wages and employees.
I don't think pilot studies are worth much, because people will act drastically differently when given a guaranteed income for a few years, compared to a guaranteed income for life.
I think the best way to do pilot studies would be to get some of the state lotteries involved. They could easily set up a lottery where the winner wins 10k or 20k for life. Then you could really see if a UBI works. From what I've heard about most lottery winners, it doesn't usually end well.
Not even "make work" jobs are going to be able to stop UBI from happening because of the sheet amount of people that are going to be put out of a job.
There is another solution. Instead of waiting till we have massive unemployment, we could start increasing the number of jobs right now. If we reduced the number of hours worked each week to 38 hours (5% decrease), it would create 5% new jobs because those jobs would still need to be filled. If we slowly decrease the workweek as automation takes over then we can evenly distribute both the work and the idleness instead of having a huge split between the people lucky enough to still have a job and the ones who can no longer find work.
Productivity has been sky rocketing for decades. Wages have not. That's to be expected. As workers produce more demand for their services declines. Massive changes in technology and society might fix that, but even when they do they take decades to happen.
It doesn't take massive changes, it can be done incrementally. We might eventually get to a UBI but we are not ready for it. There is a much smoother transition. As you state, the reason that jobs are declining is because the supply of labor is greater than the demand for labor. The solution is not to put the people out of work on welfare. That really doesn't reduce the supply of labor as people still want good paying job. Instead of jumping straight from full employment to full idleness, it would be better to evenly distribute both the employment and the idleness. This can easily be done by reducing the work week. If we slowly reduced the workweek by say 5 hours a week per decade then as automation takes over, the number of hours each person works slowly drops to take up the slack. Eventually, we might get to the point where everyone only works 5 hours per week or noone works and everyone gets a UBI but we would have done it without creating two classes of people, the class that works and the class that lives on only what UBI provides instead everyone would still get the benefit of still working and everyone would still get the benefit of more leisure. This is a much smoother transition that trying to force UBI on people with the hope that it somehow magically solves poverty. It won't. But reducing the hours worked at high paying jobs by 5% should instantly create 5% more high paying jobs as those hours presumably still have to be filled by someone.
The problem with this is that a single person would have a hard time surviving on a UBI of 10k while a UBI of 50k would be more than a lot of families of 5 currently make.
So if you can get the heads to swing at a certain frequency, you could start a resonant oscillation of the heads which, if tuned right, would cause a complete mechanical failure.
Although this would be interesting, just like the SSD exploit, I'm not sure how useful it would really be in the real world. Drives are pretty cheap. Loss of data is the big deal and if you have physical access to the system then randomly writing to the drive or formatting the drive seems like the simplest and easiest way to destroy the data.
How about donating the current snapshot to a computer museum or a go association? If the hardware costs too much, perhaps do a crowdfunding campaign.
I'd say "the A.I. that beat the best human player" has some cultural value. Granted, the possibility of Google going under any time soon is very low, but this piece of great engineering achievement deserves a backup place of safekeeping to ensure it is not lost to the times.
The cost of the hardware is likely trivial. The problem is likely that alphago is not really a simple program you can install and run. It is a huge dynamic neural net being fed data from multiple humans. It's not as simple as "computer program beats human" but more like "computer program beats human with the help of other humans". It's a parlor trick. Even if the other humans aren't Go masters they are still indirectly giving some of their intelligence to the machine. A truly functional go playing program should be able to be put online where anyone can play against it.
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Not even close. Compare the Wisconsin 2012/2016 numbers. Trump slightly under performed Romney, who lost Wisconsin (1.405m vs 1.407m). Clinton on the other hand, under performed Obama by 240k votes (1.382m vs 1.620m). Also note that Wisconsin had the lowest statewide presidential vote turnout in 20 years.
Clinton's problem was that a sizable chunk of the Democratic vote either stayed home or voted third party. Michigan and Pennsylvania had similar problems. I highlighted Wisconsin as that is where I live.
You can't tell that from the totals. Just because Trump got about the same number of voters as Romney doesn't mean it was the same group of voters. There were likely hundreds of thousands of Republicans that either stayed home or voted 3rd party this election. The reason the numbers were close is because the Democrats who voted for Trump came in and made up the difference. This is the first election ever that I did not vote for the Republican candidate and as I've stated before, I have yet to meet a single democrat who voted libertarian. Every democrat I know voted either for Hillary, Trump, or green party. I'm not saying that there might not be a few democrats that voted libertarian but 300k democrats broke for the libertarian instead of the green party? I doubt that. It makes a lot more sense that most of that 300k were republicans that couldn't stomach Trump and the only reason that Trump didn't lose in a landslide was that Trump was able to get more democrats to cross over and vote for him than he lost in republicans.
The problem with your line of thinking is that you're saying she should have blatantly lied about policy choices in order to win. "Change" is/was not what the US needs, despite a vocal minority shouting at the top of their lungs. We've seen the projections for "change" over the last 8 months - 24 million Americans losing health insurance, regulations lowered or removed altogether on financial institutions and environmental pollution, weakened security due to willful ignorance and insults aimed at our allies.
The so-called "liberals in the big city" are doing well because they're adapting to, not fighting against, economic reality. The stagnation you mention in the rust belt has nothing to do with Obama, or "elitist liberals", or the ACA. It has to do with the economic realities of a 21st century global economy. I'm truly sorry if coal mining is no longer a viable means of supporting your community, but economic and political isolationism isn't the answer. Investments in education and subsidies for emerging markets (like clean energy) are the only real way to avoid the collapse of the rust belt. Unfortunately the GOP is doing its best to undermine both, while making entirely unrealistic promises to their base, like "we'll bring back coal".
You make it sound like Trump's version of change was the only option. Just like Obama, Bernie also offered change. I'm not saying Clinton should have lied. People wanted her to have some sense of a plan. Bernie had a plan. Trump had a plan. Clinton said "everything is great, carry on". If she would have said "let's raise the minimum wage" or "let's provide more education options for people who are displaced" or really anything other than "everything is great, what's your problem?" then she might have had a chance. The tiny glimpse of change that she did manage to squeeze into her platform at the last hour was stolen from Bernie and you're right, I think it was a lie just to try to steal back a few Bernie voters. The coal miners don't necessarily want their coal jobs back, they want their lives back. Clinton didn't campaign on "retraining coal miners to run wind mills", if she did she probably would have won. Just like your post, she campaigned on "everything is great, if you lost your job, it's your problem, the rest of the country is great, you're an acceptable casuality in our march to greatness, maybe I can find you a job at mcdonalds and give you a dollar or two raise" Again, coal miners don't want their jobs back and they don't want a $10 an hour job. They want a job where they can be comfortably middle class just like they were when they had their coal job. Bernie promised this. Trump promised this. Clinton said "nothing is wrong with your current situation"
Maybe everyone is rating movies on inconsistent scales? Maybe even if everyone used the same scale it still wouldn't matter unless they rate exactly like you for all other films you share common?
A good critic should take a non-subjective view when it's deciding on a rating. An audience has no such objective and can rate a movie on whether or not they personally liked it.
My guess is critics are rating horror movies on originality while the audience is rating them on how much it scared them. So something with a high critic rating and low audience rating would be a quality movie that is not super scary while something with a high audience rating but low critic rating would be a really scary movie with maybe not much plot.
I've never looked for this data and am glad you took the time to dig it up. I find it fascinating, especially the Michigan numbers. Between 2012 and 2016 the Democrats lost 300000 votes. To me it is interesting that essentially half of them went to Libertarian, but the other half went to Trump. Sure, you can think of all of those Libertarian votes as fuck Clinton, but the switch to Republican (if in fact they represent the same voters - it may be more likely that 150000 Democrats voted Libertarian and half stayed home, and 150000 more Republicans showed up to vote) would indicate some resonance with his message.
From what I've seen, I think it is much more likely that the vast majority of those 300k democrats voted for Trump and the only reason that Trump didn't win in a complete landslide is because 150k republicans defected to the libertarian party. I have yet to meet a single democrat that says they voted libertarian while I've met a lot of democrats that voted for Trump and a lot of republicans that voted libertarian. It makes more sense to have a double shuffle like this than a complete jump. A defecting democrat has a lot more in common with Trump or the green party than with the libertarian party.
In rural Wisconsin and Michigan a Sanders Democrat and Libertarian have more in common than say a Michigan Democrat and NYC Democrat. Not understanding how people think or even taking the time to come talk to them and understand their motivations has proven to be a bad course of action.
I disagree. I think most of the Sanders democrats voted for Trump not libertarian. The libertarian votes were likely mostly republicans that just couldn't stomach Trump or Clinton. I know several diehard Obama supporters in the rust belt that were fanatical about Bernie in the primaries and then turned and became fanatical about Trump in the general. Yes, they would have rather have Sanders but when Sanders dropped out, they moved over to Trump with hardly a blink. Exit polls backed this up with a large percentage of people voting for Trump wanting "more liberal" policies.
No, oddly enough they voted for Obama's campaign slogan: "Change".
People feeling the squeeze of falling jobs, falling incomes, immigration pressures saw Clinton as a continuation of policies that had given them the shaft for the last 20+ years.
The same way that people came to the conclusion that any change in the healthcare system was worth a shot, so they viewed Trump.
Exactly this. The reason Trump won a lot of the same counties that Obama did is because they both ran on basically the same platform. Trump and Obama both campaigned on change while Clinton campaigned on "more of the same". Clinton should have seen this in the primaries when all the "more of the same" candidates on both side quickly fell. The only candidates that survived for any length of time were Bernie (change) and republicans that were also outsiders offering change. Granted Clinton was an exceptionally bad candidate with a lot of people who REALLY disliked her but in her defence, that's not what lost her the election. What lost her the election was that she chose to campaign on the "status quo" while both sides were looking for an outsider to upset the fruit basket.
One of the main reasons that liberals in the big city still have a hard time seeing this is that the last decade has been relatively good to them and they don't see the stagnation that the people in the rust belt see.
Only pay a UBI to adults.
Then it isn't universal, and you increase the size of the government department that gets to keep track of who gets paid what. It's already going to be a large department, let's make it bigger, right?
Make it at least sufficient to support the survival of themselves and a child,
Then it isn't a basic income, it's enough to support two people.
and those who avoid having children then have a considerable luxury/investment income in addition to baseline survival.
So it's now a NonUniversal Luxury Income instead of UBI. Can we admit that handing out free money that actually meets UBI limits isn't good enough and we need MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE!? That every program that hands out free stuff will get demands to provide MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE?
That's actually the problem with a UBI or anything like it. Our current system (SNAP) stands for "Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program". It is designed to be both "Supplemental" and "Assistance" but I constantly see articles about how hard it is to buy 100% of a family's food using SNAP. SNAP by it's very definition is suppose to supplement and assist people in getting their nutritional needs not be the sole source of their nutritional needs. UBI would be the same thing. If we give every adult 10k then a family of 2 is going to be ok while a family of 1 or 7 is going to be struggling or we could give 5k per man,woman,child and a family of 1 or 2 are going to be unable to survive while a family of 10 is going to be doing ok. There is no way to provide a fixed UBI that comfortably takes care of all families regardless of size. This is the reason that current assistance programs vary the amount based on family size.
I'm fine with the idea of working less, but we should make sure that we're not moving into centrally-planned "you take the job I tell you to take or else you starve" territory. I like UBI because I feel it's the thing that gives people freedom to choose whether they want a job in order to afford more than UBI allows, choose what to do with their time, etc.
I'm not advocating that government have any say in the type of work just that they cap the number of hours you can be paid to work. Granted, this is not without it's side effects. If you immediately capped work at 20 hours per week you would likely see a lot more self employed people and people working for cash to avoid the limit not to mention huge amounts of labor shortage but starting at 35 hours/week and reducing the hours by 1 hour per year or whatever was needed to stay in sync with job loss based on automation would allow us to finally rid ourself of the arbitrary 40 hour work week. Another advantage of this approach is that if we do start seeing labor shortages, it could easily be adjusted back up the other direction.
The issue is that there are only three practicable solutions based on our current sociopolitical and economic environments:
The issue with the first two is that a large segment of the population dies, and we likely lose 20-100 years of productivity as a species while the wounds are being licked and rebellions quelled. The issue with the last option is it is a path to guaranteed class divisions which become set in stone at a generational level over time (if you have free wealth to sustain yourself now you an start a business, because there are businesses to be started, if you have free wealth to sustain yourself along with everyone else there is no such option because anything you can do everyone else can as well.) The current system sucks, but it at least affords some mobility (people born poor can work to middle class, people born middle class can work to wealthy, people born wealthy can work to elite, etc.) Under UBI you end up with everyone starting poor (wealth is by definition a measure of your ability to control labor, if everyone has the same amount it doesn't actually exist) except for a few people who control the industries/machines, who damn well will be plotting to take over other sectors because that's the type of people they are. Under UBI you have a moderate to long period of complacency followed by a guaranteed 2-class system with 1 guy and his family in the upper class.
How about instead of a 2-class system, we try option #4: Everyone work less. If everyone works less then the number of jobs available increases. If we have 10 million people but only have 5 million jobs, then it makes more sense to give everyone 20 hours a week instead of giving 5 million people 40 hours a week and 5 million people zero hours a week.
Also, can't we finally accept that people having to work less could be a feature of more technology, not a bug?
In my opinion, automating away a lot of work and instituting a universal basic income sounds amazing. I'd love to see people freely choosing to spend their time pursuing hobbies, raising their children, pursuing a job out of passion rather than need, getting education, playing games, taking walks in park, reading, watching television, or any of the billion other things that humans can do when we're not chasing paychecks.
I agree that working less should be a feature not a bug. The problem is money and leisure time is not being correctly distributed. The people at the top are working the longest hours, getting the most money per hour, and getting the least leisure time. The people at the bottom are having a hard time even finding full time employment. UBI will not fix this. Even the most generous proposals still have UBI as the bare minimal amount of money to survive. I don't want to live in a country where if your lucky enough to win the "job lottery" then you can live comfortable otherwise you become a ward of the state. We would be much better off if we started reducing the hours the people at the top worked so that some of that work can be done by other people who need the work. Instead of jobs being either "excellent paying but worked to death" or "barely surviving", we would all be better off if the total pay went down a little at the top but the total leisure went up as well. We could start by enforcing the 40 hour work week but going to a 35 hour or even lower work week as automation takes over would benefit everyone. Dropping high paying positions from 40 hours per week to just 38 hours per week (a 5% decrease) should cause a 5% increase in available high paying positions.
Typical self centeeed American, England is a sub national state and has quite different laws compared to wales or Scotland and doZens of other British territories around the world.
American states are very similar to England,Scotland, and Wales. They had and still have in some cases quite different laws from state to state but every year that goes by the laws get more and more homogenized and the states lose more and more powers to the federal. The federal government discovered that it could collect more money than it needed and then give it back with strings attached to make the states comply. The states technically could not comply but only at the cost of not getting their fair share of the federal money.
Oh c'mon... It's only 120 million euros. How much is that in Beluga Caviar?
Yeah, that's what they said when the United States started paying for stuff for the states. Look at us now. The Federal government has all the power and the state governments are a joke. That's exactly where the EU is heading. They modelled their system after the USA and are following the same path where the EU slowly takes more and more power from the individual countries until they cease to exist. An interesting history lesson, the word state used to be synonymous with nation until the USA redefined it and robbed the individual states of their sovereignty.
It is objectively more difficult to get contraband onto an airplane than it was in the 90s. That you can maybe sneak something by does not make it "Theater".
I wasn't stating whether it was or was not theatre. It's probably a combination of both. I was just stating that "effective theatre" is a contradiction. Security theatre is by definition ineffective security only done for show.
There's still land and sea routes. We should just ban all people.
Let's not forget all the thousands of shipping containers. We need to ban those too. The only way to be safe is to go 100% isolationist.
If you just had a bomb implanted, you wouldn't be walking through security... They would push you through in a wheelchair.
Not all surgeries require a wheelchair. I never used a wheelchair when I had my gallbladder out and many women have c sections without needing a wheelchair. Removing a 5 pound baby and implanting a 5 pound bomb in a uterus would likely be a very similar operation. Maybe we should start banning all "pregnant" and overweight people from flying.
So what if it's theater? It's very effective theater.
If it's theatre then by definition it's not effective unless by effective you mean "fools people into thinking that travel is safe". Security theatre by definition means that it's pretend security that really doesn't make people safer.
I'm all for stopping H-1B but if it hasn't happened yet I doubt it will.
That's because Silicon Valley would rather talk about UBI as a solution to unemployment and underemployment than actually fix the unemployment/underemployment problem. UBI is a way to sweep the problem under the rug and say "we have a solution" when you really don't. More burger flipping jobs are also not the solution. First, those low skill jobs are getting automated away and secondly those jobs are probably worse than a UBI. What people want and need is a good paying job that they enjoy and feel proud about doing. It's the reason Trump won. He promised those jobs back. The fact that he likely can't deliver is irrelevant. Reducing H1B1s or reducing the workweek would be two ways of increasing the number of available highly skilled jobs. Also needed would be training programs for the underemployed people that are capable of filling those jobs. Not everyone who works at walmart and mcdonalds are capable of filling those highly skilled jobs but even if only 20% are, moving those 20% out of mcdonalds and into highly skilled jobs would put upward pressure on wages at mcdonalds as well benefiting the people who are still at mcdonalds.
Offer companies a tax break for creating jobs.
Companies hire employees to do jobs because those jobs provide the company more income than they spend on labor. Companies don't just hire people to do nothing. The only thing a tax break might do is adjust the marginal cost of the employee down to where the income exceeds the labor cost. If the job worth to the company is that low to begin with, that job is going to be a very low paying job. A much better solution would be to turn off H1B1s and reduce the number of hours a highly skilled person is allowed to work. This would create a labor shortage in the higher skilled positions so wages would go up to attract people and the number of people needed for those positions would also increase. A slight labor shortage is actually good for wages and employees.
I don't think pilot studies are worth much, because people will act drastically differently when given a guaranteed income for a few years, compared to a guaranteed income for life.
I think the best way to do pilot studies would be to get some of the state lotteries involved. They could easily set up a lottery where the winner wins 10k or 20k for life. Then you could really see if a UBI works. From what I've heard about most lottery winners, it doesn't usually end well.
Not even "make work" jobs are going to be able to stop UBI from happening because of the sheet amount of people that are going to be put out of a job.
There is another solution. Instead of waiting till we have massive unemployment, we could start increasing the number of jobs right now. If we reduced the number of hours worked each week to 38 hours (5% decrease), it would create 5% new jobs because those jobs would still need to be filled. If we slowly decrease the workweek as automation takes over then we can evenly distribute both the work and the idleness instead of having a huge split between the people lucky enough to still have a job and the ones who can no longer find work.
Productivity has been sky rocketing for decades. Wages have not. That's to be expected. As workers produce more demand for their services declines. Massive changes in technology and society might fix that, but even when they do they take decades to happen.
It doesn't take massive changes, it can be done incrementally. We might eventually get to a UBI but we are not ready for it. There is a much smoother transition. As you state, the reason that jobs are declining is because the supply of labor is greater than the demand for labor. The solution is not to put the people out of work on welfare. That really doesn't reduce the supply of labor as people still want good paying job. Instead of jumping straight from full employment to full idleness, it would be better to evenly distribute both the employment and the idleness. This can easily be done by reducing the work week. If we slowly reduced the workweek by say 5 hours a week per decade then as automation takes over, the number of hours each person works slowly drops to take up the slack. Eventually, we might get to the point where everyone only works 5 hours per week or noone works and everyone gets a UBI but we would have done it without creating two classes of people, the class that works and the class that lives on only what UBI provides instead everyone would still get the benefit of still working and everyone would still get the benefit of more leisure. This is a much smoother transition that trying to force UBI on people with the hope that it somehow magically solves poverty. It won't. But reducing the hours worked at high paying jobs by 5% should instantly create 5% more high paying jobs as those hours presumably still have to be filled by someone.
The problem with this is that a single person would have a hard time surviving on a UBI of 10k while a UBI of 50k would be more than a lot of families of 5 currently make.
So if you can get the heads to swing at a certain frequency, you could start a resonant oscillation of the heads which, if tuned right, would cause a complete mechanical failure.
Although this would be interesting, just like the SSD exploit, I'm not sure how useful it would really be in the real world. Drives are pretty cheap. Loss of data is the big deal and if you have physical access to the system then randomly writing to the drive or formatting the drive seems like the simplest and easiest way to destroy the data.
How about donating the current snapshot to a computer museum or a go association? If the hardware costs too much, perhaps do a crowdfunding campaign.
I'd say "the A.I. that beat the best human player" has some cultural value. Granted, the possibility of Google going under any time soon is very low, but this piece of great engineering achievement deserves a backup place of safekeeping to ensure it is not lost to the times.
The cost of the hardware is likely trivial. The problem is likely that alphago is not really a simple program you can install and run. It is a huge dynamic neural net being fed data from multiple humans. It's not as simple as "computer program beats human" but more like "computer program beats human with the help of other humans". It's a parlor trick. Even if the other humans aren't Go masters they are still indirectly giving some of their intelligence to the machine. A truly functional go playing program should be able to be put online where anyone can play against it.