Just like Office for free would never happen? Just like.NET would never be open sourced?
MS has money, they need footprint. They'll do whatever works to make that happen, assuming there is any such thing left. They're entirely focused on "cloud and mobile" as a business model.
An overly-simplistic misunderstanding. A free market exists where the government isn't fixing prices, or choosing who gets to participate. All markets have rules.
Shit jobs are shit jobs. I've worked my share of them. Any job you can learn on the job without prior training is going to suck, both in pay and working conditions, because you can be replaced with anyone who can fog a mirror.
Very few people can only do unskilled labor, but if your IQ is low enough then that's what you're stuck with. Nothing but sympathy for anyone in that boat, and it's the biggest looming economic problem in the US, because those are exactly the jobs that robots will replace in the next couple of decades.
If you're smart enough to learn a skill, it's on you to get out of that unskilled job. We could do a better job helping people get training, especially for the trades, but community colleges aren't terrible here. But we as a society better figure out how to help those who aren't that smart (and only giving them money isn't enough - most people still have a work ethic, and need something to do to feel that they're contributing).
Yeah, an unfortunate consequence of allowing monopolies to thrive.
Amazon has something like 5% of the retail market. What does that have to do with monopolies? Somehow Amazon keeps coming up in stories about monopolies, and I don't get it. They're smaller than Walmart, in retail.
AWS is very much the dominant player in "cloud", but Azure has enough market share that you can't call AWS a monopoly either.
and you think capitalism does work? enjoy licking those boots!
I don't think "capitalism" means what you think it means. It does not imply unregulated free markets, or anarchy.
Capitalism is a system where the means of production are owned and controlled through money - you can start or buy any business just by having the money to do so. Regulating the operation of those businesses is still within capitalism.
Contrast feudalism, where the means of production are acquired through military victory. Contrast socialism, where the means of production are acquired through political influence. Contrast communism, where the means of production are acquired by genocidal murder of tens of millions of people.
This part of the "free market" is already regulated under OSHA in the US. There are plenty of regs around workplace safety, especially around items falling on you from above.
Enforcement is a different issue, of course, but there are anonymous tip lines.
There's also worker's comp, which she eventually took advantage of, which was created to cope with just such situations as minor injuries preventing work for a short time. (It's a rotten deal for permanent injuries, as lawsuits yield much higher awards.)
Amazon is just terrible about fixing minor safety risks in their warehouses, but the regulatory protection is already in place. (Amazon is actually very good with risks to big to hide, like major structural damage to buildings, but that's a different topic.)
Meanwhile, the geniuses at Microsoft are planning to move Windows to a rental model.
I don't think that's how it's going to work out, long term, at least in the consumer space. I expect Windows will eventually be free, or nearly so, while Office and other MS cloud offerings are monetized as a subscription. Heck, isn't Office free on mobile, since people aren't used to paying for mobile apps?
MS has realized the end is coming for their traditional consumer revenue model. As everyone moves to mobile, Office is the only footprint MS really has. They really want to make money for cloud services for mobile users - which will of course be subscription-based. Good luck with that - it's a crowded space.
Of course, their enterprise products have always been subscription based, as the real money was in the support contracts.
College professors are paid no better or worse than they were in the 1950s.
It really is the worst bubble yet. At least in the dot com bubble some tech workers got rich. The tuition bubble is only making a few administrators (and coaches) rich. On the plus side, there's the job creation from all the needless buildings that have been built, and now need to be maintained.
You joke, but maybe it will help pop the tuition bubble. State school tuition is something like 30x what it was when I was young - it's insane. The more money the government threw at the problem, the more universities raised tuition to vacuum up all that financial aid plus all the money they can from their students' families.
Like all bubbles popping, it's going to suck for a while. But university tuitions need to revert to something affordable when working part time, and that will never happen as long as the government funnels money though (some) students to the universities.
It's a bit pointless to think in terms of dollars, since we can't guess the effect UBI would have on inflation.
What you're thinking about is having the government take control of 40% of all goods and services produced in the US, and redistributing them. You can argue "it's less than 40%, because it will just be an accounting trick for most", but still, a huge chunk of the economy. There's no evidence such a thing is possible, and plenty of evidence of abuse of that sort of concentration of power.
Especially, there's no evidence it's possible for federal revenue to be sustained above 20% of GDP. The assertion "this time it's different" can thus be dismissed without evidence.
Sure, increase taxes to offset the cost of the UBI, but just use the usual marginal rate system
I'm not sure it's possible for the US government to collect that much. Income tax revenue has never been sustained about ~20% of GDP. Much higher marginal tax rates, even 90%, didn't get above that for long. People respond to incentives, and arrange on way or another to stop earning wages when they don't keep enough of it, either by adjusting where, when, and how they get paid, or simply by working less and retiring earlier.
20% of GDP distributed equally to all US citizens is about $12k. But you need to pay for government too, especially it's biggest expense: Medicare.
And I'm certain there will still need to be some privilege re-leveling payments; old age, disability etc.
Not sure I can translate that from progressive to English. Does UBI replace programs like unemployment and disability? Do you pay the elderly more (who, on average, are much wealthier than the overall average)? Do you pay everyone enough for the elderly to subsist on cat food? But that's about $24k, which is untenable.
UBI must come from business success, the dividends, not from business hindrances, such as wages.
Total earnings of all US public corps is something like 5% of total wages. Dividends in particular are closer to 2%. Not sure what you can do with that.
So basically, UBI would be obligatory possession of certain minimal amount of SPX for every citizen, bought by taxes and granted by government
Sure, but the math doesn't work. Distribute ownership of all public corporations equally, let's say, setting aside the problems with that. Great: * Total dividends right now are ~2.4% of GDP. * Total wages are always about equal to GDP.
So, with a bit of obvious math, you'll see that even if we eat the rich, The average UBI benefit would be about.024 * GDP / USPop = ~$1500. Hardly going to replace existing welfare programs.
Social security is just barely subsistence right now: after the costs of Medicare and related health costs, it's pretty much "cat food retirement". That's about $24k. Your idea pays about 1/16th of that.
The math doesn't work. Same problems with all these ideas - off by an order of magnitude.
What's the difference between "roll-off of benefits" and taxes? It works out to the same thing. And without a seriously high tax rate on almost all workers, there's no way to fund any sort of UBI.
I expect there would be a lot of jobs that pay next to nothing, because there's no need to pay enough to live on, and people get bored, so of course that will be exploited.
Also, UBI fails to take into account that old people just need more money to get by than young people - what you used to be able to do yourself, now you must pay others to do. So are we paying different groups of people different amounts (inevitably based on political influence), or are we keeping Social Security?
nah, normally 4 vectors are used which are NOT quaternions.
You're thinking of General Relativity, not Quantum Mechanics. QM math is all about matrices of complex numbers..
Quaternions and and matrices are somewhat annoying, as they're not commutative. Octonions are neither commutative nor distributive, which makes them harder still to work with.
As much as I deeply enjoy mocking Europe, they have much better consumer privacy protection than the US. It would be great to catch up a little. Plus: Trump making the US more like the EU? The heads exploding would be like the end of Kingsmen.
Each Uber Pool car takes 2 replaces 2 or more cars, unless people switch from mass transit. Somehow it's bad that people then choose a higher standard of living and carpool rather than take government transport.
If you can pay 3X as much to have a quiet, private car that takes you right to your destination rather than a noisy, crowded subway train, or bus that doesn't... lots of people will do that. I think it's going to get very bad if cities don't do something.
Translation: people will have a higher standard of living. Government must stop that!
he solution seems obvious to me, though: Make surface transportation more expensive.
Translation: the solution is obvious: the government should just arbitrarily lower the standard of living of enough people, though imposed costs, to prevent the above-mentioned horror.
I am not a fan of your ideas, and do not wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
No. Mass Transit simply sucks. There is no getting around it. Private transport sucks far less.
True in the abstract, but commute times can change the equation. Anything that gives people the choice of a reasonable commute time and door-to-door transport is obviously a net win.
UberPool/Lyft Line is often close in price to a subway trip and you go door to door.
Heck, the TFA has the wrong end of the problem to begin with. The problem isn't traffic, the problem is people being forced into transport that's not door-to-door. If more people are benefiting from more convenient transport, it's a win. Trying to force people into public transport to reduce traffic is exactly backwards - serve the people, not some personal ideal of how people should move.
National crime statistics are meaningless on the ground. Local crime statistics vary rather a lot from th national average. Crime on e.g. the BART in Oakland really is a problem, and it's disingenuous to pretend that there's not a problem with crime on public transport because of some national number.
Slashdot Mirror
Google's pretty good at going after that "99% of people" edge use case.
Windows free? Nope. Not gonna happen.
Just like Office for free would never happen? Just like .NET would never be open sourced?
MS has money, they need footprint. They'll do whatever works to make that happen, assuming there is any such thing left. They're entirely focused on "cloud and mobile" as a business model.
That's not what history reveals. But then, I'm talking about how systems actually work, since I'm an engineer.
If it's regulated then it's not free.
An overly-simplistic misunderstanding. A free market exists where the government isn't fixing prices, or choosing who gets to participate. All markets have rules.
Shit jobs are shit jobs. I've worked my share of them. Any job you can learn on the job without prior training is going to suck, both in pay and working conditions, because you can be replaced with anyone who can fog a mirror.
Very few people can only do unskilled labor, but if your IQ is low enough then that's what you're stuck with. Nothing but sympathy for anyone in that boat, and it's the biggest looming economic problem in the US, because those are exactly the jobs that robots will replace in the next couple of decades.
If you're smart enough to learn a skill, it's on you to get out of that unskilled job. We could do a better job helping people get training, especially for the trades, but community colleges aren't terrible here. But we as a society better figure out how to help those who aren't that smart (and only giving them money isn't enough - most people still have a work ethic, and need something to do to feel that they're contributing).
Yeah, an unfortunate consequence of allowing monopolies to thrive.
Amazon has something like 5% of the retail market. What does that have to do with monopolies? Somehow Amazon keeps coming up in stories about monopolies, and I don't get it. They're smaller than Walmart, in retail.
AWS is very much the dominant player in "cloud", but Azure has enough market share that you can't call AWS a monopoly either.
Did Abe Lincoln fight for the unions? Of course not.
Well, he didn't carry a rifle, but I'm pretty sure he was on the Union side. Not sure what schools teach these days, of course.
and you think capitalism does work? enjoy licking those boots!
I don't think "capitalism" means what you think it means. It does not imply unregulated free markets, or anarchy.
Capitalism is a system where the means of production are owned and controlled through money - you can start or buy any business just by having the money to do so. Regulating the operation of those businesses is still within capitalism.
Contrast feudalism, where the means of production are acquired through military victory. Contrast socialism, where the means of production are acquired through political influence. Contrast communism, where the means of production are acquired by genocidal murder of tens of millions of people.
This is the free market at work.
This part of the "free market" is already regulated under OSHA in the US. There are plenty of regs around workplace safety, especially around items falling on you from above.
Enforcement is a different issue, of course, but there are anonymous tip lines.
There's also worker's comp, which she eventually took advantage of, which was created to cope with just such situations as minor injuries preventing work for a short time. (It's a rotten deal for permanent injuries, as lawsuits yield much higher awards.)
Amazon is just terrible about fixing minor safety risks in their warehouses, but the regulatory protection is already in place. (Amazon is actually very good with risks to big to hide, like major structural damage to buildings, but that's a different topic.)
Meanwhile, the geniuses at Microsoft are planning to move Windows to a rental model.
I don't think that's how it's going to work out, long term, at least in the consumer space. I expect Windows will eventually be free, or nearly so, while Office and other MS cloud offerings are monetized as a subscription. Heck, isn't Office free on mobile, since people aren't used to paying for mobile apps?
MS has realized the end is coming for their traditional consumer revenue model. As everyone moves to mobile, Office is the only footprint MS really has. They really want to make money for cloud services for mobile users - which will of course be subscription-based. Good luck with that - it's a crowded space.
Of course, their enterprise products have always been subscription based, as the real money was in the support contracts.
College professors are paid no better or worse than they were in the 1950s.
It really is the worst bubble yet. At least in the dot com bubble some tech workers got rich. The tuition bubble is only making a few administrators (and coaches) rich. On the plus side, there's the job creation from all the needless buildings that have been built, and now need to be maintained.
I cover this elsewhere on this thread, but it was cuts to federal subsidies that raised tuition, not loans
You're asserting that government subsidies lowered prices? Is there any lie too blatant for a socialist?
maybe it will solve the obesity issue
You joke, but maybe it will help pop the tuition bubble. State school tuition is something like 30x what it was when I was young - it's insane. The more money the government threw at the problem, the more universities raised tuition to vacuum up all that financial aid plus all the money they can from their students' families.
Like all bubbles popping, it's going to suck for a while. But university tuitions need to revert to something affordable when working part time, and that will never happen as long as the government funnels money though (some) students to the universities.
It's a bit pointless to think in terms of dollars, since we can't guess the effect UBI would have on inflation.
What you're thinking about is having the government take control of 40% of all goods and services produced in the US, and redistributing them. You can argue "it's less than 40%, because it will just be an accounting trick for most", but still, a huge chunk of the economy. There's no evidence such a thing is possible, and plenty of evidence of abuse of that sort of concentration of power.
Especially, there's no evidence it's possible for federal revenue to be sustained above 20% of GDP. The assertion "this time it's different" can thus be dismissed without evidence.
Sure, increase taxes to offset the cost of the UBI, but just use the usual marginal rate system
I'm not sure it's possible for the US government to collect that much. Income tax revenue has never been sustained about ~20% of GDP. Much higher marginal tax rates, even 90%, didn't get above that for long. People respond to incentives, and arrange on way or another to stop earning wages when they don't keep enough of it, either by adjusting where, when, and how they get paid, or simply by working less and retiring earlier.
20% of GDP distributed equally to all US citizens is about $12k. But you need to pay for government too, especially it's biggest expense: Medicare.
And I'm certain there will still need to be some privilege re-leveling payments; old age, disability etc.
Not sure I can translate that from progressive to English. Does UBI replace programs like unemployment and disability? Do you pay the elderly more (who, on average, are much wealthier than the overall average)? Do you pay everyone enough for the elderly to subsist on cat food? But that's about $24k, which is untenable.
UBI must come from business success, the dividends, not from business hindrances, such as wages.
Total earnings of all US public corps is something like 5% of total wages. Dividends in particular are closer to 2%. Not sure what you can do with that.
So basically, UBI would be obligatory possession of certain minimal amount of SPX for every citizen, bought by taxes and granted by government
Sure, but the math doesn't work. Distribute ownership of all public corporations equally, let's say, setting aside the problems with that. Great:
* Total dividends right now are ~2.4% of GDP.
* Total wages are always about equal to GDP.
So, with a bit of obvious math, you'll see that even if we eat the rich, The average UBI benefit would be about .024 * GDP / USPop = ~$1500. Hardly going to replace existing welfare programs.
Social security is just barely subsistence right now: after the costs of Medicare and related health costs, it's pretty much "cat food retirement". That's about $24k. Your idea pays about 1/16th of that.
The math doesn't work. Same problems with all these ideas - off by an order of magnitude.
What's the difference between "roll-off of benefits" and taxes? It works out to the same thing. And without a seriously high tax rate on almost all workers, there's no way to fund any sort of UBI.
I expect there would be a lot of jobs that pay next to nothing, because there's no need to pay enough to live on, and people get bored, so of course that will be exploited.
Also, UBI fails to take into account that old people just need more money to get by than young people - what you used to be able to do yourself, now you must pay others to do. So are we paying different groups of people different amounts (inevitably based on political influence), or are we keeping Social Security?
Meh, the math just doesn't work at all.
nah, normally 4 vectors are used which are NOT quaternions.
You're thinking of General Relativity, not Quantum Mechanics. QM math is all about matrices of complex numbers..
Quaternions and and matrices are somewhat annoying, as they're not commutative. Octonions are neither commutative nor distributive, which makes them harder still to work with.
As much as I deeply enjoy mocking Europe, they have much better consumer privacy protection than the US. It would be great to catch up a little. Plus: Trump making the US more like the EU? The heads exploding would be like the end of Kingsmen.
I'm just happy to see the sort of science that makes accurate predictions (to multiple significant figures!) make headlines for once.
Each Uber Pool car takes 2 replaces 2 or more cars, unless people switch from mass transit. Somehow it's bad that people then choose a higher standard of living and carpool rather than take government transport.
If you can pay 3X as much to have a quiet, private car that takes you right to your destination rather than a noisy, crowded subway train, or bus that doesn't... lots of people will do that. I think it's going to get very bad if cities don't do something.
Translation: people will have a higher standard of living. Government must stop that!
he solution seems obvious to me, though: Make surface transportation more expensive.
Translation: the solution is obvious: the government should just arbitrarily lower the standard of living of enough people, though imposed costs, to prevent the above-mentioned horror.
I am not a fan of your ideas, and do not wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
No. Mass Transit simply sucks. There is no getting around it. Private transport sucks far less.
True in the abstract, but commute times can change the equation. Anything that gives people the choice of a reasonable commute time and door-to-door transport is obviously a net win.
UberPool/Lyft Line is often close in price to a subway trip and you go door to door.
Heck, the TFA has the wrong end of the problem to begin with. The problem isn't traffic, the problem is people being forced into transport that's not door-to-door. If more people are benefiting from more convenient transport, it's a win. Trying to force people into public transport to reduce traffic is exactly backwards - serve the people, not some personal ideal of how people should move.
National crime statistics are meaningless on the ground. Local crime statistics vary rather a lot from th national average. Crime on e.g. the BART in Oakland really is a problem, and it's disingenuous to pretend that there's not a problem with crime on public transport because of some national number.