With basic necessities removed from the economy, There will still be plenty of work. What percentage of the current economy is basic necessities, do you think? Heck, a third of us will likely be involved in providing hands-on medical and elder care at the peak of the Boomers dying off. Most of what I spend money on is for mild luxury - stuff beyond basic necessities. And I don't care for status symbols - most people do. Anything a robot can make can't be a status symbol - that entire section of the economy will remain untouched.
Did you know that, in some places in the US, McDs is starting to offer table service? Same number of employees, just doing different work. Automation can also mean more meat-interaction, as humans are freed from some kinds of labor.
When all work can be done by robots you'd propose a universal basic income? Get your head out of the 20th century. All that does is give the government ultimate power over everyone who needs that check.
It's the 21st century. Think universal basic robots. Everyone owns the means of production - at home. Power to the people - well, unless the power goes out.
When I was young and worked at a pizza place, we made pies, dammit. Very thick, with a layer of bread on top. Thin pizzas are one variant, sure, but at one time, even pizzas without a cover had the edges of a pie - the crust at the outside went up because the pizza was made in a deep pan, not a flat grill.
IMO certain chain restaurants ruined everything in the late 80s/early 90s by putting disgusting amounts of oil in the pan, so that rather than getting a nice firm crust, the bread was just sopping with oil. Nasty. As fatty foods became unfashionable, people started preferring pizza styles that couldn't be ruined this way, and pizzas cooked on a sort of grille, rather then a pan, became popular. I won't even speak of thin-crust pizzas: abomination.
Early PCs did not have both an Enter and a Return key
When did I say "early PCs"? PCs have only been around since the late 70s. Computing and human interfaces were around for decades before personal computers. Do you know what a terminal is?
You know that home computers only became popular (beyond a tiny geek hobby) about halfway through the history of general-purpose computers, right? And that getting and posting forms was the norm for user interaction from almost the beginning?
At some point we as a nation need to accept that the Constitution is outdated and ill-suited to function as the blueprint of our government.
... said every tyrant ever. There's a process for amending the Constitution. It requires a supermajority for a reason. The fact that a slim majority can't run rampant over the 49% is a feature, not a bug.
Why do you think the key is called "Enter" to begin with? Think about it. It was the key that entered (submitted) form data. That's what the key meant for 30+ years before the PC (let alone the mouse) was invented. "Return" was a different key entirely, one that took the same action as a carriage return on a typewriter (and sometimes labeled with the down-and-right arrow).
The real mistake was combining the functions of these two, distinct keys in the early PC days - at the time, terminal keyboards still did it right. Then a bunch of kids re-invented form submission, ignoring decades of best practices in usability.
Enter for form submission was the standard and the correct standard since before you were born. That's what the name of the key means ffs. Now get off my lawn!
Actually, the basic problem with Word is far simpler, and deeply, deeply stupid: Word doesn't set absolute margin sizes, instead it relies on the printer driver to tell Word the size of the page, then calculates the size remaining for text relative to that.
It's one of the more ridiculous and stupid design decisions ever made. Rounding errors in page sizes as reported from different printers cause the lines to wrap differently depending on your default printer. And since you can't even view a document without a printer, Word includes a fake printer driver. Of course, the fake printer driver is an actual driver, allowing for privilege escalation exploits. It's completely insane.
Doesn't change my point - the total amount of cash the Amazon executives took home is public record, and it's entirely unimpressive. Dividing it up between hundreds of thousands of employees wouldn't make any difference.
This is just envy and jealousy. If you look at most large corporations where the founder is no longer running things, the CEO is typically making a dollar or two per month per employee. That may add up to a nice number, but he's not impoverishing the employees to pay himself. When the founder is still involved he's typically quite rich because he owns a chunk of the company he created - hard to see that as unfair.
Cut executive salaries in half, put the savings in your hypothetical fund, and I bet you'll find it has plenty of money.
Amazon has a salary cap. No one makes more than ~$180k in salary. Perhaps you wanted a different word? In total executive compensation, the CEO made 1.6M, and one other guy made $230k. So try doing the research next time. http://finance.yahoo.com/quote...
Bezos is vastly wealthy because he founded the company and owns a non-trivial percentage of the stock. The other executives are no doubt also worth many millions, for the same reason - they held on to early stock grants. Amazons average profit per employee is ~$2600. Of course, their gross profit is much higher, but they spend most of it hiring more people, and buying servers.
All of this is public record. But you seem to prefer ignorance.
Heck, the FBI was involved in the one big conspiracy-coverup we know was true from the 20th century - and the UFO investigations were key to it.
When game-changing new airplane designs from stealth technology to the SR-71 were being invented, during the height of the cold war, it was all about secrecy - but what do you do about eye-witnesses to these odd-looking planes, including people like pilots that it's hard to write off as kooks? You investigate each reported sighting as a "UFO sighting", and then loudly deny that you're investigating UFO sightings.
The plan seems to have worked pretty well - eye witness reports and even some photographs of experimental aircraft were dismissed as fakes by the public - and as far as we know, by the Russians. The more interesting the reports - triangular aircraft with no tails, aircraft moving faster and higher than anything known - the more easily it was dismissed as "UFO nuts". Brilliant plan, really, and the only modern conspiracy I know of that actually kept a secret long enough to matter.
Energy storage is making progress, though. It doesn't really matter the form it takes: chemical, thermal, kinetic, hydrogen, whatever: as long as progress keeps being made in energy storage, "renewables" (i.e., easy ways to tap fusion power) will eventually be practical for base load. Eventually.
Today, however, solar + natural gas is quite practical, efficient, and clean, but it's exactly the wrong politics, just like modern fission. You can tell people don't really care about global warming, as ideological purity wins over practicality.
It can sometimes work that way, but there's no guarantee. If the buyer meets the sellers price, there's no one in between - the deal is done. But the moment that happens, the market is back to normal, with a gap between buyer and seller.
If the highest current outstanding bid (WTB) is $100, and the highest current outstanding ask (WTS) is $104, how's the bot going to make money - buy at 104 and sell at 100? No. The bot makes money when someone wants to sell "at market" the bot buys at 101, and the seller makes $1 more. Later, if the price hasn't moved, and someone is buying "at market", the bot may sell at 103, and the buyer saves $1.
Do you understand how this works? And why it's risky? If there's only 1 bot, it is reasonably safe, but it benefits both buyer and seller, so why complain. But there's usually more than one bot racing each other, so it's more like buy at 101.95 and sell at 102.05, which is great for the casual, small-time guy like me. I remember how it was last century, and it sucked.
If the bot goes overboard it will get stuck with an overpriced stock. That's always been the risk market makers take.
Front-running is illegal, bot or not. Without illegal front-running, bots just increase liquidity through competition with each other. Providing liquidity is the way that market makers make a profit - they buy when no one else is willing to, then later sell when no one else is willing to, and make a profit off the sporadic timing in thinner markets - but the result is a better price for "real" buyers and sellers.
If you prefer a different term for "assets that increase in value over time: the means of production", well, that's fine, but inflation is not a tax on that stuff, and that stuff is what "wealthy people" mostly own. Inflation is not a transfer of wealth from "wealthy people" to whomever the government sends money to, because "assets that increase in value over time: the means of production" hold value.
Even if you want to claim that savings accounts are wealth, the rate of inflation doesn't change the rate at which savings accounts lose value, except at the extremes. You pay for safety (you pay disproportionately to the actual risk). Higher inflation, in the 1-5% range where stable economies lie, is not a higher tax on savings accounts. Even if there were no inflation, savings accounts would have some fee structure (or negative interest rates), because people will pay for safety.
As far as money failing as a store of value, yep, what else is new? The only thing that holds value remains "assets that increase in value over time: the means of production".
If you're trying to make a point, or explain an argument, it's lost in your noise. If you're talking about "demand for money" in the usual economic sense, that of demand for borrowed money, then that directly affects interest rates, but affects inflation only indirectly. (If you're talking about demand for physical currency to stuff in a mattress, that's something different.) Obviously, money supply can affect inflation but it's elastic - inflation really isn't the time derivative of the money supply, unless the currency has already collapsed.
That's an interesting definition, could you cite, where you got it from?
It's the old-school definition, the definition one uses to become or remain wealthy. The means of production are really the only thing that has value by something other than convention.
it totally ignores non-productive wealth, such as precious metals, Bitcoins, intellectual property, and currency. By your definition, an owner of, say, a shoe-repair shop is richer than a guy with a $10 mln bank-account...
Many things have value, but not all valuable things are wealth. Roughly speaking, you have: * "bling" - stuff that costs significant money to maintain, like a fancy car * parked money - non-productive land, gold, safe loans, etc * speculative gambling * wealth - ownership of the means of production
Wealth is the thing that (long-term average) grows over time. Everything else is a (risk- and inflation-adjusted) loss on average. For centuries, wealth was "assets that produce income", which was basically only farmland. Land was valued not by it's purchase price (a newer notion than you'd think) but by its annual income. As economy theory grew up, "the means of production" became the more clear concept.
Note that there's a useful notion of wealth that includes your labor - you have a sort of inherent wealth because you can be productive. Sometimes that's a very useful notion of wealth.
Which means, that whoever earned those dollars lost some of their value. Where did it go
They had value only by convention and that convention changed.
Now, it is not tax on all forms of wealth, merely on savings held in dollars.
Assuming you shop around for savings accounts (instead of just getting taken by the place you happen to have a checking account with), you can consistently get a bit less interest than inflation. When inflation rises, the interest rate for the best savings accounts will rise as well (ditto new CDs). Rising inflation shouldn't really be a tax on savings, except people are too lazy to move their savings if needed when rates rise and banks take great advantage of this.
Of course, all that's out the windows when US savings interest rates hit the legal maximum of 5.25%, but that's how euro-dollars came to be (dollar savings accounts at a European bank - all the rage in the Carter years).
Everyone's a space nutter to that guy, but if you love Ranch on Mars by Galactic Cowboys from their album Space in Your Face, you might be a space nutter.
Your fallacy of poisoning the well does not constitute an argument. Sophistry, sure, but that's different.
You have asserted "without the marketing by these entities you would never have found your favorite bands," but you have yet to make an argument for that position. I'm beginning to doubt that you can.
You're talking about per-user airtime. I'm talking about "only X songs will be played on the air in this city this week, how much am I bid for your song to be one of them". The latter is why the record labels were so important.
I haven't found music through marketing since I was a teen. Sure, marketing in any industry will always be able to sell inferior crap to the ignorant, and that may never change, but there are plenty of ways to discover music these days. Heck, do labels even bother with payola any more (do kids still listen to the radio?).
These days I usually discover new artists through the various "people who bought/listened to X also bought/listened to Y" algorithms on Amazon, YouTube, etc. I think a lot of people find new music through Spotify's algorithms (has there been a Spotify payola scandal yet?).
Marketing was just more important in the days of broadcast media and limited distribution channels for records. Now there's no scarcity of airtime or shelf space.
Slashdot Mirror
And if we're all the "robot owners"?
With basic necessities removed from the economy, There will still be plenty of work. What percentage of the current economy is basic necessities, do you think? Heck, a third of us will likely be involved in providing hands-on medical and elder care at the peak of the Boomers dying off. Most of what I spend money on is for mild luxury - stuff beyond basic necessities. And I don't care for status symbols - most people do. Anything a robot can make can't be a status symbol - that entire section of the economy will remain untouched.
Plenty of use for money.
Pizza is American food, not Italian, as everyone knows.
Did you know that, in some places in the US, McDs is starting to offer table service? Same number of employees, just doing different work. Automation can also mean more meat-interaction, as humans are freed from some kinds of labor.
Unless it has chicago[sic] in the name it probably isn't pizza
FTFY. If it ain't a pie, it ain't pizza.
When all work can be done by robots you'd propose a universal basic income? Get your head out of the 20th century. All that does is give the government ultimate power over everyone who needs that check.
It's the 21st century. Think universal basic robots. Everyone owns the means of production - at home. Power to the people - well, unless the power goes out.
When I was young and worked at a pizza place, we made pies, dammit. Very thick, with a layer of bread on top. Thin pizzas are one variant, sure, but at one time, even pizzas without a cover had the edges of a pie - the crust at the outside went up because the pizza was made in a deep pan, not a flat grill.
IMO certain chain restaurants ruined everything in the late 80s/early 90s by putting disgusting amounts of oil in the pan, so that rather than getting a nice firm crust, the bread was just sopping with oil. Nasty. As fatty foods became unfashionable, people started preferring pizza styles that couldn't be ruined this way, and pizzas cooked on a sort of grille, rather then a pan, became popular. I won't even speak of thin-crust pizzas: abomination.
Early PCs did not have both an Enter and a Return key
When did I say "early PCs"? PCs have only been around since the late 70s. Computing and human interfaces were around for decades before personal computers. Do you know what a terminal is?
You know that home computers only became popular (beyond a tiny geek hobby) about halfway through the history of general-purpose computers, right? And that getting and posting forms was the norm for user interaction from almost the beginning?
At some point we as a nation need to accept that the Constitution is outdated and ill-suited to function as the blueprint of our government.
... said every tyrant ever. There's a process for amending the Constitution. It requires a supermajority for a reason. The fact that a slim majority can't run rampant over the 49% is a feature, not a bug.
You can no longer discover the keyboard shortcuts in Windows. Discoverability is the victim in the latest user-hostile UI fads.
Why do you think the key is called "Enter" to begin with? Think about it. It was the key that entered (submitted) form data. That's what the key meant for 30+ years before the PC (let alone the mouse) was invented. "Return" was a different key entirely, one that took the same action as a carriage return on a typewriter (and sometimes labeled with the down-and-right arrow).
The real mistake was combining the functions of these two, distinct keys in the early PC days - at the time, terminal keyboards still did it right. Then a bunch of kids re-invented form submission, ignoring decades of best practices in usability.
Enter for form submission was the standard and the correct standard since before you were born. That's what the name of the key means ffs. Now get off my lawn!
Actually, the basic problem with Word is far simpler, and deeply, deeply stupid: Word doesn't set absolute margin sizes, instead it relies on the printer driver to tell Word the size of the page, then calculates the size remaining for text relative to that.
It's one of the more ridiculous and stupid design decisions ever made. Rounding errors in page sizes as reported from different printers cause the lines to wrap differently depending on your default printer. And since you can't even view a document without a printer, Word includes a fake printer driver. Of course, the fake printer driver is an actual driver, allowing for privilege escalation exploits. It's completely insane.
Doesn't change my point - the total amount of cash the Amazon executives took home is public record, and it's entirely unimpressive. Dividing it up between hundreds of thousands of employees wouldn't make any difference.
This is just envy and jealousy. If you look at most large corporations where the founder is no longer running things, the CEO is typically making a dollar or two per month per employee. That may add up to a nice number, but he's not impoverishing the employees to pay himself. When the founder is still involved he's typically quite rich because he owns a chunk of the company he created - hard to see that as unfair.
Cut executive salaries in half, put the savings in your hypothetical fund, and I bet you'll find it has plenty of money.
Amazon has a salary cap. No one makes more than ~$180k in salary. Perhaps you wanted a different word? In total executive compensation, the CEO made 1.6M, and one other guy made $230k. So try doing the research next time. http://finance.yahoo.com/quote...
Bezos is vastly wealthy because he founded the company and owns a non-trivial percentage of the stock. The other executives are no doubt also worth many millions, for the same reason - they held on to early stock grants. Amazons average profit per employee is ~$2600. Of course, their gross profit is much higher, but they spend most of it hiring more people, and buying servers.
All of this is public record. But you seem to prefer ignorance.
Heck, the FBI was involved in the one big conspiracy-coverup we know was true from the 20th century - and the UFO investigations were key to it.
When game-changing new airplane designs from stealth technology to the SR-71 were being invented, during the height of the cold war, it was all about secrecy - but what do you do about eye-witnesses to these odd-looking planes, including people like pilots that it's hard to write off as kooks? You investigate each reported sighting as a "UFO sighting", and then loudly deny that you're investigating UFO sightings.
The plan seems to have worked pretty well - eye witness reports and even some photographs of experimental aircraft were dismissed as fakes by the public - and as far as we know, by the Russians. The more interesting the reports - triangular aircraft with no tails, aircraft moving faster and higher than anything known - the more easily it was dismissed as "UFO nuts". Brilliant plan, really, and the only modern conspiracy I know of that actually kept a secret long enough to matter.
Energy storage is making progress, though. It doesn't really matter the form it takes: chemical, thermal, kinetic, hydrogen, whatever: as long as progress keeps being made in energy storage, "renewables" (i.e., easy ways to tap fusion power) will eventually be practical for base load. Eventually.
Today, however, solar + natural gas is quite practical, efficient, and clean, but it's exactly the wrong politics, just like modern fission. You can tell people don't really care about global warming, as ideological purity wins over practicality.
It can sometimes work that way, but there's no guarantee. If the buyer meets the sellers price, there's no one in between - the deal is done. But the moment that happens, the market is back to normal, with a gap between buyer and seller.
If the highest current outstanding bid (WTB) is $100, and the highest current outstanding ask (WTS) is $104, how's the bot going to make money - buy at 104 and sell at 100? No. The bot makes money when someone wants to sell "at market" the bot buys at 101, and the seller makes $1 more. Later, if the price hasn't moved, and someone is buying "at market", the bot may sell at 103, and the buyer saves $1.
Do you understand how this works? And why it's risky? If there's only 1 bot, it is reasonably safe, but it benefits both buyer and seller, so why complain. But there's usually more than one bot racing each other, so it's more like buy at 101.95 and sell at 102.05, which is great for the casual, small-time guy like me. I remember how it was last century, and it sucked.
If the bot goes overboard it will get stuck with an overpriced stock. That's always been the risk market makers take.
Front-running is illegal, bot or not. Without illegal front-running, bots just increase liquidity through competition with each other. Providing liquidity is the way that market makers make a profit - they buy when no one else is willing to, then later sell when no one else is willing to, and make a profit off the sporadic timing in thinner markets - but the result is a better price for "real" buyers and sellers.
If you prefer a different term for "assets that increase in value over time: the means of production", well, that's fine, but inflation is not a tax on that stuff, and that stuff is what "wealthy people" mostly own. Inflation is not a transfer of wealth from "wealthy people" to whomever the government sends money to, because "assets that increase in value over time: the means of production" hold value.
Even if you want to claim that savings accounts are wealth, the rate of inflation doesn't change the rate at which savings accounts lose value, except at the extremes. You pay for safety (you pay disproportionately to the actual risk). Higher inflation, in the 1-5% range where stable economies lie, is not a higher tax on savings accounts. Even if there were no inflation, savings accounts would have some fee structure (or negative interest rates), because people will pay for safety.
As far as money failing as a store of value, yep, what else is new? The only thing that holds value remains "assets that increase in value over time: the means of production".
If you're trying to make a point, or explain an argument, it's lost in your noise. If you're talking about "demand for money" in the usual economic sense, that of demand for borrowed money, then that directly affects interest rates, but affects inflation only indirectly. (If you're talking about demand for physical currency to stuff in a mattress, that's something different.) Obviously, money supply can affect inflation but it's elastic - inflation really isn't the time derivative of the money supply, unless the currency has already collapsed.
That's an interesting definition, could you cite, where you got it from?
It's the old-school definition, the definition one uses to become or remain wealthy. The means of production are really the only thing that has value by something other than convention.
it totally ignores non-productive wealth, such as precious metals, Bitcoins, intellectual property, and currency. By your definition, an owner of, say, a shoe-repair shop is richer than a guy with a $10 mln bank-account...
Many things have value, but not all valuable things are wealth. Roughly speaking, you have:
* "bling" - stuff that costs significant money to maintain, like a fancy car
* parked money - non-productive land, gold, safe loans, etc
* speculative gambling
* wealth - ownership of the means of production
Wealth is the thing that (long-term average) grows over time. Everything else is a (risk- and inflation-adjusted) loss on average. For centuries, wealth was "assets that produce income", which was basically only farmland. Land was valued not by it's purchase price (a newer notion than you'd think) but by its annual income. As economy theory grew up, "the means of production" became the more clear concept.
Note that there's a useful notion of wealth that includes your labor - you have a sort of inherent wealth because you can be productive. Sometimes that's a very useful notion of wealth.
Which means, that whoever earned those dollars lost some of their value. Where did it go
They had value only by convention and that convention changed.
Now, it is not tax on all forms of wealth, merely on savings held in dollars.
Assuming you shop around for savings accounts (instead of just getting taken by the place you happen to have a checking account with), you can consistently get a bit less interest than inflation. When inflation rises, the interest rate for the best savings accounts will rise as well (ditto new CDs). Rising inflation shouldn't really be a tax on savings, except people are too lazy to move their savings if needed when rates rise and banks take great advantage of this.
Of course, all that's out the windows when US savings interest rates hit the legal maximum of 5.25%, but that's how euro-dollars came to be (dollar savings accounts at a European bank - all the rage in the Carter years).
Everyone's a space nutter to that guy, but if you love Ranch on Mars by Galactic Cowboys from their album Space in Your Face, you might be a space nutter.
Your fallacy of poisoning the well does not constitute an argument. Sophistry, sure, but that's different.
You have asserted "without the marketing by these entities you would never have found your favorite bands," but you have yet to make an argument for that position. I'm beginning to doubt that you can.
You're talking about per-user airtime. I'm talking about "only X songs will be played on the air in this city this week, how much am I bid for your song to be one of them". The latter is why the record labels were so important.
You've made an assertion, and now repeated that assertion. Would you care to make an argument?
You forgot to call me a troll though, so you lose bonus points.
Abuse is across the hall, in room 12.
I haven't found music through marketing since I was a teen. Sure, marketing in any industry will always be able to sell inferior crap to the ignorant, and that may never change, but there are plenty of ways to discover music these days. Heck, do labels even bother with payola any more (do kids still listen to the radio?).
These days I usually discover new artists through the various "people who bought/listened to X also bought/listened to Y" algorithms on Amazon, YouTube, etc. I think a lot of people find new music through Spotify's algorithms (has there been a Spotify payola scandal yet?).
Marketing was just more important in the days of broadcast media and limited distribution channels for records. Now there's no scarcity of airtime or shelf space.