The EU is the champion of globalism - the epitome of globalism - the essence of the ideal globalism as realized in the practical world. And German leadership has been the strongest force pushing for the creation and growth of the EU. You don't get more "pro-globalism" than Germany. An example of rejecting globalism is Brexit.
So like I said shoplifting as we know it is not possible
I wouldn't quite go that far. It's going to take someone pretty clever to manage it, but we live in a world where people can open a slot machine, replace the ROM, and close it again in the couple of seconds before the alarm sounds. Still, as long as the effort to shoplift something is higher than just getting a job, I'd guess the problem will be minimal.
The whole point is they're not suing RFID stickers - those suckers aren't cheap. They're using cameras (and some other sensors in the shelves), with facial recognition and some sort of recognition of how much you take off the shelf.
It is just a system like CVS has had for years, but hooked to a smartphone app.
Wait, do you understand how this actually works? It's not self-checkout, and there are no RFIDs or anything like that.. The cameras really do follow your every move, and you get charged for whatever you take out of the store. I have some friends who were in on the beta, and they played all kinds of games with it - picking stuff out, carrying it around, putting it back, taking it again later, all that sort of stuff. It was remarkably accurate.
It's not obvious how you'd shoplift, beyond simply not scanning in at the door. There's probably something possible with camera placement, obscuring views, and sleight-of-hand, but there are a lot of cameras and I'm sure they thought about that.
People want more health care than they can afford. It's the biggest financial problem for America long term. Anything that makes the same level of care cheaper will be absorbed without the industry shrinking in any way, because the demand is not for specific services, it for all the services we can afford.
You can get 1970s-level medical care very cheap - no PET scans, no CAT scans, no modern surgical techniques, none of the vast wonders of the modern pharmacy. Not in the US, of course, it would probably be illegal, but Mexico will help you out. You have to compare like for like.
Food is much cheaper, as a percentage of income than it was in the 70s. People like to buy fast food now, of course, but basic foodstuffs are cheap (not specialty hipster food of course). Basic housing is hard to compare, because location is the most important factor, but do note that in the 70s you averaged about 2 people per bedroom, and now the expectation is a bedroom for every kid.
The problem is not that automation is gradually raising the IQ requirement for jobs. The real problem is there are no jobs.
I have a job. Therefore your statement that there are no jobs is false. Maybe you meant open jobs? Over a million skilled manufacturing jobs are seeking workers, and around here construction is going crazy and there's a serious shortage in the skilled trades.
The problem is there are very few unskilled jobs, and not everyone is able to retrain - it takes a certain minimum IQ.
Even winning a few thousand (with no media attention) increases your chance of bankruptcy. A loan to a small business though? Or directly invested in infrastructure? Of course, most "foreign aid" ends up in Swiss bank accounts, but that's a different story.
You seem to have a naive idea about the very rich. You can earn a lot of money and have no income to tax, as long as it's part of a business that has matching expenses. And your wealth can keep up with inflation just fine, if it's something like land. Of course, there's the upkeep, but that's your business expense. As long as the cashflow you're living on is a tiny portion of your wealth, the taxes you pay will be smaller still. Or, you can just earn money by loaning it to the government.
But all of that is beside the point. If you have the habit of accumulating wealth, it doesn't matter if the government takes a bit of it and gives it to someone who doesn't - they'll just spend it and it will end up back in your pocket, or someone just as rich, one way or another.
Charity certainly has its place, but it won't change wealth distribution.
Purchasing power has gone way up since the 70s. We're swimming in futuristic stuff that was not available at any price in the 70s. For example, bottom-of-the-line cars today blow away typical 70s cars for power, performance, reliability, and safety - but people will compare a typical car today with a typical car of the 70s as if they were equivalent. Compare purchasing power for equivalent functionality, not equivalent social signalling, and wages have risen considerably.
These discussions always devolve into people talking past eash other, because they have differing discussions about the topic: are we talking post-Singularity here?
If we're talking about human-equivalent AI, then we're very quickly talking about AI vastly exceeding human-equivalent, and the best we can hope for is that we'll make great pets. Jobs will be the least of our worries.
If, OTOH, we're talking about the continued gradual increase in automation, then there's no reason to think there won't be new jobs. There always have been thus far. Humans just want more, and we seems to simply be moving up Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If there are no jobs left making food or simple cloths or basic shelter, that just leaves people with more time to produce social status symbols, entertainment, customization of robot-produced goods, and so on.
Economies are remarkably self organizing. Given that humans will keep wanting more, whatever humans still want after having all the basics for (effectively) free will be the new economy. It's not about having money, money just mediates barter, it's just people providing what other people want - the money will sort itself out.
Unskilled manufacturing jobs went the way of farm labor decades ago. That's not what anyone is talking about.
This discussion is about all the service jobs that replaced all the manufacturing jobs that replaced all the farm jobs. Service jobs are gradually being automated now, so now what?
There are plenty of skilled blue collar jobs going hungry right now, so training would have huge benefits. But not everyone can be trained for the remaining jobs, so what about them? It's not obvious what to do.
So people are just too stupid to do the work, got it.:P
This is the biggest problem facing modern society. Every job has an IQ below which you're not going to be able to do that job acceptably. Sure there's a fuzzy area where conscientiousness and drive can make up for low IQ, but there's also a point at which it's just not going to happen.
Automation is gradually raising that minimum IQ bar, because the jobs that are easiest to automate are exactly those which take the least thought in order to do. It's not uniform across all jobs, of course, but unskilled jobs outside of agriculture are very scarce these days. Unskilled manufacturing is mostly gone, and millions of skilled manufacturing jobs sit empty for lack of qualified people.
I don't know how we solve the larger problem here, but some combination of government and industry providing free training for skilled blue-collar jobs would be a huge help! Germany has a great system for this, where by high school you begin your vocational training - often for a specific employer on their specific processes. You have a job waiting for you if you're not a complete fuckup. In the US is seems we'd rather have millions on welfare and millions of jobs waiting for people to be trained.
We can beat this with tax policy. Our reality is not ruled with an iron fist by a malevolent rule of thumb.
Interesting claim. Is our reality ruled by gravity? By evolution? By entropy? We believe it's possible to not be ruled by one of those, maybe more but it's not obvious how. Best not to dismiss "the way things have been observed to work across many unrelated systems" as something minor.
In any model or game where people are allowed to trade, a Pareto distribution emerges. In any creative human endeavor from song popularity to lifetime home runs scored, a Pareto distribution emerges. It's not at all obvious how to prevent that in economics without complete totalitarian control (which in practice is even worse, thanks to corruption). It's not at obvious that we want to avoid a Pareto distribution.
How would that even work? Would you make it illegal for a person not to own a house? Would you make it illegal for a person not to own a car? Would you make it illegal for a person to accumulate wealth as they age?
Income redistribution leads to wealth redistribution over the long term
There's no evidence to back this up, and plenty of evidence to the contrary, unless you mean "redistribution to different rich people". Wealth is a habit. Giving people money (in non-trivial amounts) usually ends badly, unless the recipient already had the habits of wealth. For example, look at the studies of lottery winners: the rate of bankruptcy increases when you win the lottery, even when you win smaller amounts (thousands), as does the rate of death and of addiction.
Most "socialist" states have reasonable inheritance taxes or equivalent
There are far richer families, and more very rich families, in Europe than the US, so I doubt the effectiveness of such measures. In the US we think of people like Buffet and Gates and Bezos - people who earned billions in their own lifetimes. But that's a small and temporary concentration of wealth compared to the old rich (e.g., the family wealth of the Rothschilds, who were newly rich in the 1700s, is about $1 trillion).
inflation means that if your wealth isn't generating an income it will evaporate away
Not so. If you spend it all on bling it will go away, as is normal for trust fund babies. Being taught about money by your parents is a better predictor of future wealth than having rich parents. (N.b., IQ is abetter predictor of future wealth in the US than rich parents - a good sign about social mobility.)
Taxing income makes it harder for someone to become wealthy, but does little for those already wealthy and well versed in the system. Plenty of ways to live well and preserve your wealth while showing very little in the way of visible income. You need cashflow to pay staff and for upkeep of real property, but often that's wrapped in a business that just breaks even (having paid for staff etc).
Sure, you get some tax money from the upper middle class, who spend a lot on appearances and so need a lot of cashflow, but so what? Giving people money doesn't make them wealthy, unless they already have the habits of wealth.
t's an elite-focused system without even a pretense of noblesse oblige and a terribly smug disdain for the "wrong people" almost all of whom are poor or poorish.
This. Systems based on an aristocracy are very bad economic systems, but their one redeeming quality was the expectation of reciprocation: the nobles who took most of the food the serfs grew were in turn responsible for feeding them through a harsh winter, and the church held them accountable to that. Now we've removed the idea of any moral authority distinct from the elite, as well as the one redeeming feature of an aristocracy.
Socialist states don't redistribute wealth, but income. Genocidal communist states redistribute wealth, but only to different wealthy people, not the shape of the curve. The Pareto principle (exponential wealth distribution) holds whenever you have any sort of freedom, and is the best case when you don't (Feudal systems concentrate wealth even beyond 80/20).
Which is pretty amazing, if you've watched modern construction. Excavation for a large site might only take a half-dozen guys on site, because the earth-moving equipment is so good. Framing for wood construction is usually complete wall segments arriving on the back of a truck and just a few guys nailing them together with nail guns.
So is takes maybe 10% of the people to build as it used to. Demand grew to keep employment high. Humans are like that - we always want more.
Oddly, that didn't happen in America. People fled to the cities here (just like they're doing elsewhere now) because the conditions were much better than the grinding rural poverty they left. Heck, those city jobs actually payed money for work, not just room and board. Farm automation lagged the growth of cities, as demand rose for automation to replace the people who had left.
Working on a farm when you're not the one who owns the land has always been terrible work.
Which is what I said in the rest of the comment you replied to. An electricians work is deceptively hard. If it were obvious how hard the details were, the market would solve the problem in one way or another - e.g., relying on inspection every so often, insurance requirements, expecting electricians to serve an apprenticeship: stuff we do anyhow.
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The EU is the champion of globalism - the epitome of globalism - the essence of the ideal globalism as realized in the practical world. And German leadership has been the strongest force pushing for the creation and growth of the EU. You don't get more "pro-globalism" than Germany. An example of rejecting globalism is Brexit.
Also, 2+4=4, and water is wet.
Who needs TP . . . ? A good Japanese toilet will wash your hairy ass clean, and then blow dry it.
Just don't hit the "remove tampon" button by mistake.
They do have a security guard. They'll probably always have to, for just those reasons.
So like I said shoplifting as we know it is not possible
I wouldn't quite go that far. It's going to take someone pretty clever to manage it, but we live in a world where people can open a slot machine, replace the ROM, and close it again in the couple of seconds before the alarm sounds. Still, as long as the effort to shoplift something is higher than just getting a job, I'd guess the problem will be minimal.
The whole point is they're not suing RFID stickers - those suckers aren't cheap. They're using cameras (and some other sensors in the shelves), with facial recognition and some sort of recognition of how much you take off the shelf.
It is just a system like CVS has had for years, but hooked to a smartphone app.
Wait, do you understand how this actually works? It's not self-checkout, and there are no RFIDs or anything like that.. The cameras really do follow your every move, and you get charged for whatever you take out of the store. I have some friends who were in on the beta, and they played all kinds of games with it - picking stuff out, carrying it around, putting it back, taking it again later, all that sort of stuff. It was remarkably accurate.
It's not obvious how you'd shoplift, beyond simply not scanning in at the door. There's probably something possible with camera placement, obscuring views, and sleight-of-hand, but there are a lot of cameras and I'm sure they thought about that.
I for one welcome our checkout-free overlords.
People want more health care than they can afford. It's the biggest financial problem for America long term. Anything that makes the same level of care cheaper will be absorbed without the industry shrinking in any way, because the demand is not for specific services, it for all the services we can afford.
we care barely pay the rent and the doctor
You can get 1970s-level medical care very cheap - no PET scans, no CAT scans, no modern surgical techniques, none of the vast wonders of the modern pharmacy. Not in the US, of course, it would probably be illegal, but Mexico will help you out. You have to compare like for like.
Food is much cheaper, as a percentage of income than it was in the 70s. People like to buy fast food now, of course, but basic foodstuffs are cheap (not specialty hipster food of course). Basic housing is hard to compare, because location is the most important factor, but do note that in the 70s you averaged about 2 people per bedroom, and now the expectation is a bedroom for every kid.
And those wouldn't be produced by AI/Robotics because........?
Because we're explicitly not talking about human-equivalent AI. Or didn't you read the bit before what you quoted.
so, you're talking about employing roughly 10 billion people. You can't employ all of them by customizing stuff for 10 million wealthy people.
Of course not, you employ them by customizing stuff for 10 billion people. The economy is nothing more that what we make and do for one another.
How about we discuss this transition and plan for it instead of having to go through that violence?
Perhaps a 5-Year Plan? No economy was ever made better by central planning.
The problem is not that automation is gradually raising the IQ requirement for jobs. The real problem is there are no jobs.
I have a job. Therefore your statement that there are no jobs is false. Maybe you meant open jobs? Over a million skilled manufacturing jobs are seeking workers, and around here construction is going crazy and there's a serious shortage in the skilled trades.
The problem is there are very few unskilled jobs, and not everyone is able to retrain - it takes a certain minimum IQ.
Germany also protects its industrial base as they are not slavishly following the globalization agenda.
What did you just type? What did you just smoke before you typed it? Good stuff man, good stuff. Heard of the EU maybe?
Right, that's what made Detroit, Baltimore, Pittsburgh and all the other smokestack cities the urban paradises they are today.
They were each great cities one, for about a lifetime. But there's only so much Democrat rule any city can survive.
Even winning a few thousand (with no media attention) increases your chance of bankruptcy. A loan to a small business though? Or directly invested in infrastructure? Of course, most "foreign aid" ends up in Swiss bank accounts, but that's a different story.
You seem to have a naive idea about the very rich. You can earn a lot of money and have no income to tax, as long as it's part of a business that has matching expenses. And your wealth can keep up with inflation just fine, if it's something like land. Of course, there's the upkeep, but that's your business expense. As long as the cashflow you're living on is a tiny portion of your wealth, the taxes you pay will be smaller still. Or, you can just earn money by loaning it to the government.
But all of that is beside the point. If you have the habit of accumulating wealth, it doesn't matter if the government takes a bit of it and gives it to someone who doesn't - they'll just spend it and it will end up back in your pocket, or someone just as rich, one way or another.
Charity certainly has its place, but it won't change wealth distribution.
Purchasing power has gone way up since the 70s. We're swimming in futuristic stuff that was not available at any price in the 70s. For example, bottom-of-the-line cars today blow away typical 70s cars for power, performance, reliability, and safety - but people will compare a typical car today with a typical car of the 70s as if they were equivalent. Compare purchasing power for equivalent functionality, not equivalent social signalling, and wages have risen considerably.
These discussions always devolve into people talking past eash other, because they have differing discussions about the topic: are we talking post-Singularity here?
If we're talking about human-equivalent AI, then we're very quickly talking about AI vastly exceeding human-equivalent, and the best we can hope for is that we'll make great pets. Jobs will be the least of our worries.
If, OTOH, we're talking about the continued gradual increase in automation, then there's no reason to think there won't be new jobs. There always have been thus far. Humans just want more, and we seems to simply be moving up Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If there are no jobs left making food or simple cloths or basic shelter, that just leaves people with more time to produce social status symbols, entertainment, customization of robot-produced goods, and so on.
Economies are remarkably self organizing. Given that humans will keep wanting more, whatever humans still want after having all the basics for (effectively) free will be the new economy. It's not about having money, money just mediates barter, it's just people providing what other people want - the money will sort itself out.
Unskilled manufacturing jobs went the way of farm labor decades ago. That's not what anyone is talking about.
This discussion is about all the service jobs that replaced all the manufacturing jobs that replaced all the farm jobs. Service jobs are gradually being automated now, so now what?
There are plenty of skilled blue collar jobs going hungry right now, so training would have huge benefits. But not everyone can be trained for the remaining jobs, so what about them? It's not obvious what to do.
So people are just too stupid to do the work, got it. :P
This is the biggest problem facing modern society. Every job has an IQ below which you're not going to be able to do that job acceptably. Sure there's a fuzzy area where conscientiousness and drive can make up for low IQ, but there's also a point at which it's just not going to happen.
Automation is gradually raising that minimum IQ bar, because the jobs that are easiest to automate are exactly those which take the least thought in order to do. It's not uniform across all jobs, of course, but unskilled jobs outside of agriculture are very scarce these days. Unskilled manufacturing is mostly gone, and millions of skilled manufacturing jobs sit empty for lack of qualified people.
I don't know how we solve the larger problem here, but some combination of government and industry providing free training for skilled blue-collar jobs would be a huge help! Germany has a great system for this, where by high school you begin your vocational training - often for a specific employer on their specific processes. You have a job waiting for you if you're not a complete fuckup. In the US is seems we'd rather have millions on welfare and millions of jobs waiting for people to be trained.
We can beat this with tax policy. Our reality is not ruled with an iron fist by a malevolent rule of thumb.
Interesting claim. Is our reality ruled by gravity? By evolution? By entropy? We believe it's possible to not be ruled by one of those, maybe more but it's not obvious how. Best not to dismiss "the way things have been observed to work across many unrelated systems" as something minor.
In any model or game where people are allowed to trade, a Pareto distribution emerges. In any creative human endeavor from song popularity to lifetime home runs scored, a Pareto distribution emerges. It's not at all obvious how to prevent that in economics without complete totalitarian control (which in practice is even worse, thanks to corruption). It's not at obvious that we want to avoid a Pareto distribution.
How would that even work? Would you make it illegal for a person not to own a house? Would you make it illegal for a person not to own a car? Would you make it illegal for a person to accumulate wealth as they age?
Income redistribution leads to wealth redistribution over the long term
There's no evidence to back this up, and plenty of evidence to the contrary, unless you mean "redistribution to different rich people". Wealth is a habit. Giving people money (in non-trivial amounts) usually ends badly, unless the recipient already had the habits of wealth. For example, look at the studies of lottery winners: the rate of bankruptcy increases when you win the lottery, even when you win smaller amounts (thousands), as does the rate of death and of addiction.
Most "socialist" states have reasonable inheritance taxes or equivalent
There are far richer families, and more very rich families, in Europe than the US, so I doubt the effectiveness of such measures. In the US we think of people like Buffet and Gates and Bezos - people who earned billions in their own lifetimes. But that's a small and temporary concentration of wealth compared to the old rich (e.g., the family wealth of the Rothschilds, who were newly rich in the 1700s, is about $1 trillion).
inflation means that if your wealth isn't generating an income it will evaporate away
Not so. If you spend it all on bling it will go away, as is normal for trust fund babies. Being taught about money by your parents is a better predictor of future wealth than having rich parents. (N.b., IQ is abetter predictor of future wealth in the US than rich parents - a good sign about social mobility.)
Taxing income makes it harder for someone to become wealthy, but does little for those already wealthy and well versed in the system. Plenty of ways to live well and preserve your wealth while showing very little in the way of visible income. You need cashflow to pay staff and for upkeep of real property, but often that's wrapped in a business that just breaks even (having paid for staff etc).
Sure, you get some tax money from the upper middle class, who spend a lot on appearances and so need a lot of cashflow, but so what? Giving people money doesn't make them wealthy, unless they already have the habits of wealth.
t's an elite-focused system without even a pretense of noblesse oblige and a terribly smug disdain for the "wrong people" almost all of whom are poor or poorish.
This. Systems based on an aristocracy are very bad economic systems, but their one redeeming quality was the expectation of reciprocation: the nobles who took most of the food the serfs grew were in turn responsible for feeding them through a harsh winter, and the church held them accountable to that. Now we've removed the idea of any moral authority distinct from the elite, as well as the one redeeming feature of an aristocracy.
Frankly, I prefer democratic capitalism.
Socialist states don't redistribute wealth, but income. Genocidal communist states redistribute wealth, but only to different wealthy people, not the shape of the curve. The Pareto principle (exponential wealth distribution) holds whenever you have any sort of freedom, and is the best case when you don't (Feudal systems concentrate wealth even beyond 80/20).
Which is pretty amazing, if you've watched modern construction. Excavation for a large site might only take a half-dozen guys on site, because the earth-moving equipment is so good. Framing for wood construction is usually complete wall segments arriving on the back of a truck and just a few guys nailing them together with nail guns.
So is takes maybe 10% of the people to build as it used to. Demand grew to keep employment high. Humans are like that - we always want more.
Oddly, that didn't happen in America. People fled to the cities here (just like they're doing elsewhere now) because the conditions were much better than the grinding rural poverty they left. Heck, those city jobs actually payed money for work, not just room and board. Farm automation lagged the growth of cities, as demand rose for automation to replace the people who had left.
Working on a farm when you're not the one who owns the land has always been terrible work.
Which is what I said in the rest of the comment you replied to. An electricians work is deceptively hard. If it were obvious how hard the details were, the market would solve the problem in one way or another - e.g., relying on inspection every so often, insurance requirements, expecting electricians to serve an apprenticeship: stuff we do anyhow.