We're about 300 years into human labor being replaced by automation, and we seem always to be able to invent more jobs. No matter how many jobs are replaced by automation, we as humans will always want more, and so will always find work for one another. It wasn't that long ago that almost everyone worked as a farmer, soldier, or manufacturing worker, but now all three of those have gone the way of the blacksmith and scribe: we found new ways to be productive.
Almost all agriculture jobs have vanished to automation. Almost all manufacturing jobs have vanished to automation. Almost all paper-shuffling jobs have vanished to automation. I don't think whatever's next will somehow be catastrophic when none of the previous cycles were.
Why so? There are many, many tweaks to car motor design that aren't found in a weed wacker, but little of that is specific to a 4-stroke engine. The cheapest possible designs are bad to be sure, since they aren't careful about burning all the fuel, but AFAIK any 2-stroke built for performance (i.e., with a proper exhaust expansion chamber) isn't a fundamentally worse starting point. Of course, it's easier to just us existing, refined 4-stroke designs than to get everything right for emissions on a 2-stroke, so most tools will go that way.
What a bizarre notion. Of course, it's common on Steam for bigger games to be able to pre-download the game and just unlock it when it launches (and then not be able to play because the game servers are completely overloaded, of course), so I guess there's a market for that.
A thermostat is a robot. Automated factories are full of robots, some of which can simply rivet one rivet or whatever, while some can do quite a variety. A tape library certainly contains a robot.
Robotics is just about reacting to the environment to perform some mechanical tasks. The ability to KILL ALL HUMANS is not strictly required.
That's a problem with emissions controls, not with two-stroke vs four-stroke vs rotary engine design. Two-stroke engines are lighter for the same power, so they're common in tools, as is the lack of emissions controls of any sort, but the latter is the real problem.
Big downloads run overnight, just as they always have for me. Still faster and easier than driving to the store. It's not like I'm staring at the progress bar while downloads happen.
Apple sells electronic fashion accessories. It's a great business, but automatically it can't be the standard, because they sell the feeling of "being smarter/better than the standard". If some EU directive forces some parts of Apple products to be standard, then don't worry, Apple will find some other way to distinguish itself from the common user.
Not everyone has enough savings to make brokerage fees worthwhile, or the time to carry out essential market research while holding down two (or more) jobs just to pay the rent. That's part of the reason the inflation tax is so regressive.
Just to touch on this: you're right, but it highlights a major failing in our culture and educational system. This basic knowledge of how money works and why it's important to do more than a saving account should be basic fundamental cultural knowledge, but instead it's almost entirely absent. While people try to attribute the concentration of wealth to malice, I disagree - it's incompetence. We need to make "competence with wealth" a cultural priority now that we've reached this amazing place where half of Americans own stock.
I do like a flat tax across all possible income/gain sources as a starting point, with the possible exception of a break for long-term gains/dividends (but then, once you start using tax law to encourage behavior in any way, where does it stop?).
A proper payroll tax would capture non-cash compensation as well (much like the current income tax does). You need to keep the 100 years of loophole closing in the current income tax law, but push the paperwork burden onto the employer (even small business owners already need accountants, so it wouldn't be an undue burden there I think). But then, my goal there was to get the governments snooping nose out of citizens business - the less the government knows about each of us, the better.
Capital gains "indexed to inflation" may be the most workable system, but would be gamed and complicated. Dividends are still unfavorable compared to capital gains, as they can't be offset by capital losses. You make a good point though that an earnings tax has drag that a gains tax doesn't.
All good points, which is why I tried to qualify with the handwavey "high power". For a few kW, I'm sure (IR) reflective coatings would help. For a few MW, I'd say it's pointless.
You can still try to focus a laser such that it breaks down right before the target, but this is really difficult and unreliable, especially in a real atmosphere.
The airborne laser program did some amazing things with dynamic lenses to compensate for turbulence in real time. I don't know the details (presumably they're classified), but I've wondered whether some game like you describe wasn't part of the reason for the fancy lens.
It's not just physical currency. If you have something whose value is tied to the dollar, and not adjusted for inflation, then you're affected by it. That includes not just cash in your wallet, but also savings and checking accounts, CDs, loans, rents, annuities, other contractual payments, even some foreign currencies
Most of these things are tied to inflation, more or less. Anything where the rate is fixed for more than a few years is different, then you're into the interest rate speculation casino. Savings accounts will pay a bit less than inflation absent government meddling (see below), and the more tied to a market something is, the more closely it will couple to inflation, modulo short term fear about stocks putting pressure on safe investments.
As for savings accounts which pay 1% less than inflation... have you checked the rates recently? A really good 3-year CD might pay 1.2% APY. The best I could find for a high-yield savings account was 1%, with a $10,000 minimum. Please tell me you aren't claiming that inflation is less than 2.2%â"even the BLS says that the CPI increased by around 2.23% annually from 2003 to 2013.
QE has messed badly with bonds and everything that depends from them, because while bond traders know that the rate paid by treasuries is bogus now (it's not a market rate for the first time since the gold shock), everything has been priced relative to treasuries for generations, and it's hard to change something that fundamental.
Also, the Fed is now paying banks interest on bank deposits with the Fed, and that's also twisted pricing in ways I'm not sophisticated enough to understand.
Savings accounts are pretty messed up right now (some premium vs inflation is understandable, but as you highlight it's bad now), but they're in far better shape than in the Cater years where we had double-digit inflation, but savings account and CD rates were legally capped at 5.25%. That punished every American family with cash savings.
But in any case, my point in all of this was it's a mistake to keep a significant amount of savings in cash, whether savings account, CDs, or whatever: it's a bad plan. Beyond 6 months of expenses for emergencies, it's foolish not to invest in some fashion. And we're getting better low-risk bond investment vehicles for individual investors every year, thank goodness. I keep my low-risk money in short-term mid-grade corporate bonds that pay 4% or so right now, but fixed-maturity funds for such short term are a new (and wonderful) thing.
It's a hard problem. For land a property tax works well enough, and a capital gains tax seems redundant (but the US federal government isn't allowed anything that's overtly a property tax). Also, I lay many/most of the problems with modern must-always-be-growth corporate governance at the feet of dividends being taxed unfavorably compared to capital gains, and would hate to exaggerate that.
Just as I'd like to do away with income tax in favor of payroll tax (so that the US government would have no knowledge of individual income), I'd favor a system of taxing earnings over capital gains (no need to tax the owners both ways), as long as it put gains and dividends on exactly the same tax footing.
But "gains" on bitcoin and gold and whatnot, where what you sell is only what you bought? I'm not sure why we need to tax those at all, beyond the government's burning desire to tax all the things.
As others have pointed out, nothing is perfectly reflective. But that somewhat misses the point: a reflective surface only helps against a low-energy laser: one that only damages through radiant heating.
A high power laser weapon in the atmosphere is not a "beam of light" so much as a "column of exploding plasma". If you dump enough energy into the immediate environment of the target, it becomes very difficult to armor against.
There are drugs for OCD these days. Fretting about clean hands is a very common for of OCD - if you find yourself worrying about it on a daily basis, seek professional help for your mental illness.
I like paying Netflix for streaming precisely because it's a rental model. Shows keep disappearing from there too, of course, but at least I don't feel like I've lost what I "bought".
I don't care how many Disney's take their shows back, I'm not subscribing to 50, or even 5 services. I'm happy to pay, but for goodness sake if you're not willing to let an aggregator take a slice, you'll be getting nothing.
Sure, all that's good info. I was trying to emphasize that money is a unit of measure, not really a thing of value in itself, and taxing on the basis of changing the unit of measure is a silly thing to do.
No, that's not quite true. There is another sense in which inflation steals value, which only applies when the inflation is the result of an increase in the currency supply and not a decrease in the demand for currency. Namely, the entity that produces the new money (essentially for free, unless we're talking about a commodity like gold) gets to spend it and receive valuable goods and services at the expense of everyone else holding the currency, or contractual claims on currency, prior to the inflation.
Yes, this is very true, but doesn't go far enough, because the same thing is happening right now even without the inflation. Value is stolen even without the currency inflation (though to be fair, unless the government is completely corrupt presumably some little value is gained through that spending).
It's all well and good to say that it's silly to hold onto cash savings in an inflationary economy, but at any given time someone will be left holding the cash, and the net loss to everyone but the central bank is the same whether it's one person holding a large amount of cash or many people each holding small amounts.
That's only true of physical currency, which is a nearly trivial portion of the banking and financial world. Holding a lot of physical currency is even sillier than a saving account paying 1% less than inflation. As long as we're not talking 100%/day hyper-inflation, I'm not concerned about the cash in my wallet losing a few % a year.
Inflation steals value from past hard work. Deflation steals value from future work. And you canâ(TM)t have zero inflation.
No, that's only true of cash savings, which is a very silly thing to have very much of. For wealth (stock, property, etc), the price in dollars is only indirectly important.
And capital gains tax when the government ramps up inflation is simply a property tax (which is unconstitutional for the federal government, as if that mattered). The amount of stock, proterty, etc you own hasn't changed, just the way the government measures it. It's as if you owned one kilogram of gold, and a few years later the government says "well, now you have 2.2 pounds of gold, so you owe us taxes on the 120% gain".
The only "stolen value" is the tax, the actual worth and usefulness of what's owned isn't directly affected by devaluing the currency.
I'm bitching that you hae no actual arguments to present. You were taught that "progressive taxation is good", and "Walmart is bad" and the other lessons schools teach, and your repeating that back, which I'm sure will earn you praise in your echo chamber - but why.
Why is it OK to hurt group A and not group B? Do they not deserve the rewards of their work because of something? Do they not feel the fail the way you and I do? Those are appalling arguments, moral embarrassments to the species, so if not for those reasons they why?
Sales of D3 measure the reputation earned going in. The damage D3 did to Blizzard's reputation is what will affect the sales of it's next game. Good luck with that.
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We're about 300 years into human labor being replaced by automation, and we seem always to be able to invent more jobs. No matter how many jobs are replaced by automation, we as humans will always want more, and so will always find work for one another. It wasn't that long ago that almost everyone worked as a farmer, soldier, or manufacturing worker, but now all three of those have gone the way of the blacksmith and scribe: we found new ways to be productive.
Almost all agriculture jobs have vanished to automation. Almost all manufacturing jobs have vanished to automation. Almost all paper-shuffling jobs have vanished to automation. I don't think whatever's next will somehow be catastrophic when none of the previous cycles were.
Why so? There are many, many tweaks to car motor design that aren't found in a weed wacker, but little of that is specific to a 4-stroke engine. The cheapest possible designs are bad to be sure, since they aren't careful about burning all the fuel, but AFAIK any 2-stroke built for performance (i.e., with a proper exhaust expansion chamber) isn't a fundamentally worse starting point. Of course, it's easier to just us existing, refined 4-stroke designs than to get everything right for emissions on a 2-stroke, so most tools will go that way.
What a bizarre notion. Of course, it's common on Steam for bigger games to be able to pre-download the game and just unlock it when it launches (and then not be able to play because the game servers are completely overloaded, of course), so I guess there's a market for that.
So why do you spend the time to carefully sut up and conceal snares for yourself? Sport? Self-improvement? Lack of a $5 extension cord?
A thermostat is a robot. Automated factories are full of robots, some of which can simply rivet one rivet or whatever, while some can do quite a variety. A tape library certainly contains a robot.
Robotics is just about reacting to the environment to perform some mechanical tasks. The ability to KILL ALL HUMANS is not strictly required.
That's a problem with emissions controls, not with two-stroke vs four-stroke vs rotary engine design. Two-stroke engines are lighter for the same power, so they're common in tools, as is the lack of emissions controls of any sort, but the latter is the real problem.
Now I want a moose-safe power connector!
Big downloads run overnight, just as they always have for me. Still faster and easier than driving to the store. It's not like I'm staring at the progress bar while downloads happen.
It's odd, I'm fairly clumsy and I've never tripped over a laptop power cord - is running power cords like tripwires really such a common thing?
Apple sells electronic fashion accessories. It's a great business, but automatically it can't be the standard, because they sell the feeling of "being smarter/better than the standard". If some EU directive forces some parts of Apple products to be standard, then don't worry, Apple will find some other way to distinguish itself from the common user.
Not everyone has enough savings to make brokerage fees worthwhile, or the time to carry out essential market research while holding down two (or more) jobs just to pay the rent. That's part of the reason the inflation tax is so regressive.
Just to touch on this: you're right, but it highlights a major failing in our culture and educational system. This basic knowledge of how money works and why it's important to do more than a saving account should be basic fundamental cultural knowledge, but instead it's almost entirely absent. While people try to attribute the concentration of wealth to malice, I disagree - it's incompetence. We need to make "competence with wealth" a cultural priority now that we've reached this amazing place where half of Americans own stock.
I do like a flat tax across all possible income/gain sources as a starting point, with the possible exception of a break for long-term gains/dividends (but then, once you start using tax law to encourage behavior in any way, where does it stop?).
A proper payroll tax would capture non-cash compensation as well (much like the current income tax does). You need to keep the 100 years of loophole closing in the current income tax law, but push the paperwork burden onto the employer (even small business owners already need accountants, so it wouldn't be an undue burden there I think). But then, my goal there was to get the governments snooping nose out of citizens business - the less the government knows about each of us, the better.
Capital gains "indexed to inflation" may be the most workable system, but would be gamed and complicated. Dividends are still unfavorable compared to capital gains, as they can't be offset by capital losses. You make a good point though that an earnings tax has drag that a gains tax doesn't.
All good points, which is why I tried to qualify with the handwavey "high power". For a few kW, I'm sure (IR) reflective coatings would help. For a few MW, I'd say it's pointless.
You can still try to focus a laser such that it breaks down right before the target, but this is really difficult and unreliable, especially in a real atmosphere.
The airborne laser program did some amazing things with dynamic lenses to compensate for turbulence in real time. I don't know the details (presumably they're classified), but I've wondered whether some game like you describe wasn't part of the reason for the fancy lens.
It's not just physical currency. If you have something whose value is tied to the dollar, and not adjusted for inflation, then you're affected by it. That includes not just cash in your wallet, but also savings and checking accounts, CDs, loans, rents, annuities, other contractual payments, even some foreign currencies
Most of these things are tied to inflation, more or less. Anything where the rate is fixed for more than a few years is different, then you're into the interest rate speculation casino. Savings accounts will pay a bit less than inflation absent government meddling (see below), and the more tied to a market something is, the more closely it will couple to inflation, modulo short term fear about stocks putting pressure on safe investments.
As for savings accounts which pay 1% less than inflation... have you checked the rates recently? A really good 3-year CD might pay 1.2% APY. The best I could find for a high-yield savings account was 1%, with a $10,000 minimum. Please tell me you aren't claiming that inflation is less than 2.2%â"even the BLS says that the CPI increased by around 2.23% annually from 2003 to 2013.
QE has messed badly with bonds and everything that depends from them, because while bond traders know that the rate paid by treasuries is bogus now (it's not a market rate for the first time since the gold shock), everything has been priced relative to treasuries for generations, and it's hard to change something that fundamental.
Also, the Fed is now paying banks interest on bank deposits with the Fed, and that's also twisted pricing in ways I'm not sophisticated enough to understand.
Savings accounts are pretty messed up right now (some premium vs inflation is understandable, but as you highlight it's bad now), but they're in far better shape than in the Cater years where we had double-digit inflation, but savings account and CD rates were legally capped at 5.25%. That punished every American family with cash savings.
But in any case, my point in all of this was it's a mistake to keep a significant amount of savings in cash, whether savings account, CDs, or whatever: it's a bad plan. Beyond 6 months of expenses for emergencies, it's foolish not to invest in some fashion. And we're getting better low-risk bond investment vehicles for individual investors every year, thank goodness. I keep my low-risk money in short-term mid-grade corporate bonds that pay 4% or so right now, but fixed-maturity funds for such short term are a new (and wonderful) thing.
That's every bit as credible as a secret warrant issued by a secret court!
It's a hard problem. For land a property tax works well enough, and a capital gains tax seems redundant (but the US federal government isn't allowed anything that's overtly a property tax). Also, I lay many/most of the problems with modern must-always-be-growth corporate governance at the feet of dividends being taxed unfavorably compared to capital gains, and would hate to exaggerate that.
Just as I'd like to do away with income tax in favor of payroll tax (so that the US government would have no knowledge of individual income), I'd favor a system of taxing earnings over capital gains (no need to tax the owners both ways), as long as it put gains and dividends on exactly the same tax footing.
But "gains" on bitcoin and gold and whatnot, where what you sell is only what you bought? I'm not sure why we need to tax those at all, beyond the government's burning desire to tax all the things.
As others have pointed out, nothing is perfectly reflective. But that somewhat misses the point: a reflective surface only helps against a low-energy laser: one that only damages through radiant heating.
A high power laser weapon in the atmosphere is not a "beam of light" so much as a "column of exploding plasma". If you dump enough energy into the immediate environment of the target, it becomes very difficult to armor against.
You're focused on the wrong medicine!
There are drugs for OCD these days. Fretting about clean hands is a very common for of OCD - if you find yourself worrying about it on a daily basis, seek professional help for your mental illness.
I like paying Netflix for streaming precisely because it's a rental model. Shows keep disappearing from there too, of course, but at least I don't feel like I've lost what I "bought".
I don't care how many Disney's take their shows back, I'm not subscribing to 50, or even 5 services. I'm happy to pay, but for goodness sake if you're not willing to let an aggregator take a slice, you'll be getting nothing.
Sure, all that's good info. I was trying to emphasize that money is a unit of measure, not really a thing of value in itself, and taxing on the basis of changing the unit of measure is a silly thing to do.
No, that's not quite true. There is another sense in which inflation steals value, which only applies when the inflation is the result of an increase in the currency supply and not a decrease in the demand for currency. Namely, the entity that produces the new money (essentially for free, unless we're talking about a commodity like gold) gets to spend it and receive valuable goods and services at the expense of everyone else holding the currency, or contractual claims on currency, prior to the inflation.
Yes, this is very true, but doesn't go far enough, because the same thing is happening right now even without the inflation. Value is stolen even without the currency inflation (though to be fair, unless the government is completely corrupt presumably some little value is gained through that spending).
It's all well and good to say that it's silly to hold onto cash savings in an inflationary economy, but at any given time someone will be left holding the cash, and the net loss to everyone but the central bank is the same whether it's one person holding a large amount of cash or many people each holding small amounts.
That's only true of physical currency, which is a nearly trivial portion of the banking and financial world. Holding a lot of physical currency is even sillier than a saving account paying 1% less than inflation. As long as we're not talking 100%/day hyper-inflation, I'm not concerned about the cash in my wallet losing a few % a year.
Inflation steals value from past hard work. Deflation steals value from future work. And you canâ(TM)t have zero inflation.
No, that's only true of cash savings, which is a very silly thing to have very much of. For wealth (stock, property, etc), the price in dollars is only indirectly important.
And capital gains tax when the government ramps up inflation is simply a property tax (which is unconstitutional for the federal government, as if that mattered). The amount of stock, proterty, etc you own hasn't changed, just the way the government measures it. It's as if you owned one kilogram of gold, and a few years later the government says "well, now you have 2.2 pounds of gold, so you owe us taxes on the 120% gain".
The only "stolen value" is the tax, the actual worth and usefulness of what's owned isn't directly affected by devaluing the currency.
I'm bitching that you hae no actual arguments to present. You were taught that "progressive taxation is good", and "Walmart is bad" and the other lessons schools teach, and your repeating that back, which I'm sure will earn you praise in your echo chamber - but why.
Why is it OK to hurt group A and not group B? Do they not deserve the rewards of their work because of something? Do they not feel the fail the way you and I do? Those are appalling arguments, moral embarrassments to the species, so if not for those reasons they why?
Sales of D3 measure the reputation earned going in. The damage D3 did to Blizzard's reputation is what will affect the sales of it's next game. Good luck with that.