"if labor is, in fact, subject to the fundamental laws of supply and demand, it should (in a free market environment) achieve an equilibrium price equal to its marginal cost of production"
Did you notice the two (big) conditions I started out with? If labor is not in fact subject to these 'fundamental laws' in the way that commodities are, or it is not priced in a free market environment, or both, then it may well achieve some other equilibrium price.
The post above mine simply asserted that it was subject to those 'laws', and so I noted the implications if it is, in fact, so subject.
Based on the fact that there are still nontrivial pockets of labor that haven't been thoroughly helotized, it seems fairly clear that other factors are at work in the labor market, either because labor is a commodity; but one whose pricing occurs under conditions different from those of a free market, or because it is not, in fact, a commodity like other commodities, or both.
Who needs 'post-scarcity utopia' when you can huddle behind the razor wire that surrounds your gated enclave and watch the battle between the barbarous criminal scum living in filth in the sacrifice zones and SecuriDyne kinetic pacification drones in real time, HD, 24/7 on the fear channel?
Because labor is subject to the same fundamental laws of supply and demand as any other resource. The pool of unskilled labor has a whole lot of supply.
Even more fun, if labor is, in fact, subject to the fundamental laws of supply and demand, it should (in a free market environment) achieve an equilibrium price equal to its marginal cost of production. Good thing that subsistence-level existence isn't horrible or anything.
And, none of this exclusively applies to the unskilled (though, obviously, the marginal cost of production of a college-educated worker is a lot higher, so such workers must earn more in absolute terms in order for their price to be equal to their marginal cost of production). The only people not predicted by 'the fundamental laws of supply and demand' to be reduced to subsistence are those who don't existing in a free market condition (eg. unionized labor, or workers in a category with a certifying association that constrains supply, like doctors and lawyers, or groups like investment bankers whose regulatory capture renders them partially immune to market forces) or who are (by luck or judgement) in possession of skills that face a sudden uptick in demand, allowing them to reap profits during the time it takes to ramp up supply. In gold rushes and oil boomtowns and things, this can even be unskilled labor; but it will more usually be specialists of one sort or another.
So long as labor is a commodity, only deviations from free-market conditions or being on the lucky side of shifts in demand that occur faster than supply can compensate keep anyone ahead of breaking even. Depending on how much it costs to stamp out a given set of skills, the 'break-even' paycheck might be higher or lower; but that'll be a function of educational debt and opportunity cost, not absolute wellbeing.
I, for one, definitely trust an outfit that can't size a bloody datacenter power distribution system to build those magic technical safeguards that are allegedly allowing a spying operation of unprecedented size to occur with no abuses (And that's no bullshit!)
I wonder if we could convince them to switch to a utility that conducts background checks on electrons before sending them to the customer? That would clearly help...
Given the...limited... influence possessed by the ICRC, I find it hard to get worked up about them making requests that, while controversial, are optional and in line with the sort of thing they would care about.
As for whether acceding to their requests is a good idea, I think that that's a matter of genre, or sub-genre. There's plenty of room for games where ICRC-respected rules are irrelevant to, or would be actively detrimental to, gameplay. Are voracious space bugs parties to the geneva convention? Or (with the possible exception of the overmind and the cerebrates) even moral persons? Pfft, grab your pulse rifle. Even in more 'realistic' shooters, if there are nothing but soldiers on the map, and the game's damage mechanics don't include disabling wounds or surrender, and the arsenal doesn't include chemical weapons and the like, it's pretty hard to breach any relevant rules(and, in games that do include civilians, they often do so specifically to add a 'something you aren't supposed to shoot' challenge, whether they enforce it with 'realistic' penalties or just score reductions/round losses).
However, there's also room for games that aim to achieve greater affective punch, and help hide the fact that you are just playing against a few heuristics wrapped in art assets, by creating emotional engagement between the player and the gameworld/characters. In such games, it would arguably be a sign of design success if enduring penalties for certain 'forbidden' actions seemed like a natural outcome. Remember in 'Fallout', where you could gain the 'childkiller' reputation? Did the game cluck, and moralize, and forbid you from harming a hair on their precious little heads? Hell no. You could pull out your gauss rifle and frag 'em. Did the game pull any punches about the fact that you just burned some serious goodwill among every non-sociopath whose help you'll probably need to survive a harsh post-apocalyptic environment? No. It did nothing to stop you; but if pissing off every decent person in the game made your task unwinnable, sucks to be you.
Not all games need to be that way (and, among games that are, nothing requires that treading the path of good be the only option, or even the easiest one...); but especially in RPGs, moral salience, and effective modelling of 'consequences' beyond HP loss and occasionally getting attacked by town guards is arguably something very much worth exploring.
I thought Dishonored did a pretty decent job in that regard as well. You could just fucking kill your way through (and, especially once you got a couple of useful gifts of the Outsider, the combination of being fairly delicate and inhumanly lethal made for a rather pleasantly taut mode of play); but other characters got squeamish about having a total psycho around (and, when I was playing at least, I felt pretty uncomfortable terminating hapless rentacops who were just trying to apprehend the guy they thought was a dangerous assassin) and there were incentives for playing a 'clean' game, without that being a requirement, or preachy or anything. Good old Thief and Thief II also used playing 'clean' as an additional challenge (and for somebody interested in larceny, not an unrealistic one, robbery pays, murder just draws heat). Even Skyrim, in all its lovely-but-not-terribly-deep gameplay threw in a few twists (nothing as good as Oblivion's dark brotherhood storyline, which was just plain fucking with you; but I'll admit that I never charged the Ebony Blade(it gained power if used to kill NPCs; but only if the NPC killed liked and trusted the player at the time. Kills against hostiles had no effect).
Why do you assume that AMD did this voluntarily? Much more likely that this is caused by some idiotic DRM requirement for for HDCP 'protected audio path' or working around some idiotic patent. Likely reason - a DRM requirement to stop people from plugging in devices that strip HDCP.
HDCP doesn't rely on cable behavior (aside from good-enough-for-signal-integrity performance) between sources and sinks to enforce DRM. So, for a mere physical pinout adapter, there should be nothing that a 'malicious' cable could do (unless that 'cable' were a full-fledged HDMI sink baked into a line lump, which would be physically possible but wouldn't really be a 'cable' anymore), nor would there be anything (save blocking the audio entirely) that a 'trusted' cable could do to control a malicious HDMI sink.
Most of human history has been a low-intensity meatgrinder, moderated primarily by the fact that we lacked the technology and competence to field armies much above 'band of thugs' size for more than a few months without disease or starvation killing them off.
We never really stopped tolerating(and often aiding, abetting, and stirring up) ghastly little wars in ghastly little countries nobody cares much about; but post WWII is a crazy peaceful period by historical standards (especially when you factor in the number of countries and non-state actors who could field an army without it starving or dying of cholera and just don't bother).
But, yeah, I'm totally so scared of commies that I'll stoop to their imagined level.
At this point, I'm pretty sure that Bloomberg is just playing SimCity: Because I Fucking Can, That's Why, Edition, rather than actively pandering to anybody in particular
Systems like this, and that super-creepy "modulated ultrasound" stuff, make me glad that I'm not stuck on the IRB that has to shoot down all the neat delusion-disorder related research that would be totally unethical to do with hardware like this...
The horrid tongue arthropod is pretty good. As is the emasculating crab barnacle. Note that #1 on the list you link to is one of the cockroach-zombifying parasitoid wasps, though. Seriously, how sneaky is being able to shove your stinger into the victim's brain and precisely disable volitional movement, while leaving the target otherwise intact. A neurosurgeon would be hard pressed to do as much, and they have the benefit of medical imaging technology, training, and a childhood not spent devouring still-living cockroaches...
And has exciting-but-not-yet-fully-proven correlations with a variety of nasty human psych disorders! No overt mind control; but Team Epidemiology has given us some reason to suspect that rodents and crazy cat ladies aren't the only mammals it infects...
Oh, come now, surely you can see that libertarians have a strong selfish interest in whether we are allowed to implant electrodes in subhuman animals or not...
I completely agree. It's completely unacceptable to force innocent students to used something as restricted and crippled as iOS. For once could someone actually think of the children.
In version 2, the system will prevent the cockroach from having thoughts that aren't cryptographically signed by Apple. True Facts.
And fair enough: if you think humans are bad, 'parasitoids' are a class of organisms that would leave you crying for mommy. A class of organisms that a fair few wasp species belong to.
Oh how very subtle they are: the ones that parasitize caterpillars inject a venom that includes a specialized virus (found nowhere else but the wasp's oviduct, it's more part of the wasps' DNA than a free-living organism) that suppresses the caterpillar's immune response and increase the protein concentration in the hemolymph, perfect for the larvae.
Or the fascinating ones that prey on cockroaches. Those are too heavy to transport after paralysis, so they have specialized sensory capabilities on the tip of their stinger, ideally suited to locating the part of the cockroach brain to disable in order to halt voluntary movement, while leaving the victim otherwise functional and ready to be steered by its antennae back to the burrow where it will be devoured alive by wasp larvae.
And, finally, the ones that prey on spiders, the hunted become the hunter, using their impressive reflexes and even more impressive venom to paralyze spiders (nonlethally, to preserve freshness) so that their larvae can devour them, leaving the vital organs for last (again, to preserve freshness, the victim must live as long as possible while being eaten alive) and then emerge to hunt spiders for their own young.
Parasitoid wasps are badass motherfuckers. Not quite as badass as Cordyceps fungi (not that I'm biased); but pretty fucking badass.
What about mosquitos? those fuckers deserve it. You suck my blood, I amputate your piercing mouthparts and humanely release you to go find other food sources, or starve, whichever comes first.
Agree. While I doubt this turns kids into psychopaths, I disapprove because it reinforces the notion that every other creature on the planet was put there to be our playthings and slaves.
Ah, on the contrary! If every other creature on the planet was put there to be our playthings and slaves, we wouldn't need to learn all this 'science' and 'electronics' nonsense in order to bend them to our will. This is a valuable lesson in why you should bother learning: because it gives you hitherto-undreampt-of power over those who do not. A life lesson, no?
You don't see a difference between killing it and doing this?
This does seem a great deal more educational... If you need a humanities tie-in, you can always read "I have no mouth but I must scream" as you navigate your cockroach around, the pitiless god of its very sensory inputs!!!! Um, I mean, to learn about the invertebrate nervous system....
Any truth to this, or is this just an old legend circulating among the troublemakers?
I have no idea if this is what motivated the people you heard; but the 'Posse Comitatus' and later-partial-offshoot 'Sovereign Citizen' movements have a bit of a...thing... for 'common law'(whether there version would be recognizable to a judge from a common law jurisidction is another question...) and the illegitimacy of power above very local levels. 'Posse Comitatus' was pretty specific about taking sheriffs especially seriously for some reason(presumably vaguely related to shire-level governance in English common law) and some, though by no means all, 'Sovereign Citizens' have some similarities in that respect.
So, what does it cost to get somebody with state power, a badge, and a crazy-strong presumption of right and innocence should anything inconvenient go to court on my side?
Rentacops are rather risible figures; but the opportunity for influence-purchasing inherent in hiring actual cops makes me a trifle nervous. You (probably) couldn't get away with having your own personal death squad or anything; but who's going to ticket the guy who hands out cushy after-hours 'security' gigs?
It wouldn't entirely surprise me if good, old-fashioned, violence is one way of removing NIMBY elements(What do you mean 'your' back yard, citizen?) and generally smoothing over fears about the quality and completeness of destruction (the level at which something becomes useless as a chemical weapon is substantially higher than the level where I'd want it in my drinking water...)
Probably doesn't hurt that both the US and Russia have spent all those years dicking around with procedures and refinements for destroying their own chemical munitions. That makes the tech for doing so practically off-the-shelf, rather than R&D.
Dude, getting sent to the Hague is for losers. As best I can tell, Mr. Assad is still in the 'doing a pretty good job hanging on to his office, thanks' camp, which enjoys near-impunity by virtue of an international consensus of, um, all the people who are doing a pretty good job hanging on to their offices, thanks...
Slashdot Mirror
"if labor is, in fact, subject to the fundamental laws of supply and demand, it should (in a free market environment) achieve an equilibrium price equal to its marginal cost of production"
Did you notice the two (big) conditions I started out with? If labor is not in fact subject to these 'fundamental laws' in the way that commodities are, or it is not priced in a free market environment, or both, then it may well achieve some other equilibrium price.
The post above mine simply asserted that it was subject to those 'laws', and so I noted the implications if it is, in fact, so subject.
Based on the fact that there are still nontrivial pockets of labor that haven't been thoroughly helotized, it seems fairly clear that other factors are at work in the labor market, either because labor is a commodity; but one whose pricing occurs under conditions different from those of a free market, or because it is not, in fact, a commodity like other commodities, or both.
Who needs 'post-scarcity utopia' when you can huddle behind the razor wire that surrounds your gated enclave and watch the battle between the barbarous criminal scum living in filth in the sacrifice zones and SecuriDyne kinetic pacification drones in real time, HD, 24/7 on the fear channel?
That, my friends, is Progress(tm)
Also, 'trajectory' is just a conspiracy by the man to keep you down, not a useful computational construct.
Why can't companies pay better wages?
Because labor is subject to the same fundamental laws of supply and demand as any other resource. The pool of unskilled labor has a whole lot of supply.
Even more fun, if labor is, in fact, subject to the fundamental laws of supply and demand, it should (in a free market environment) achieve an equilibrium price equal to its marginal cost of production. Good thing that subsistence-level existence isn't horrible or anything.
And, none of this exclusively applies to the unskilled (though, obviously, the marginal cost of production of a college-educated worker is a lot higher, so such workers must earn more in absolute terms in order for their price to be equal to their marginal cost of production). The only people not predicted by 'the fundamental laws of supply and demand' to be reduced to subsistence are those who don't existing in a free market condition (eg. unionized labor, or workers in a category with a certifying association that constrains supply, like doctors and lawyers, or groups like investment bankers whose regulatory capture renders them partially immune to market forces) or who are (by luck or judgement) in possession of skills that face a sudden uptick in demand, allowing them to reap profits during the time it takes to ramp up supply. In gold rushes and oil boomtowns and things, this can even be unskilled labor; but it will more usually be specialists of one sort or another.
So long as labor is a commodity, only deviations from free-market conditions or being on the lucky side of shifts in demand that occur faster than supply can compensate keep anyone ahead of breaking even. Depending on how much it costs to stamp out a given set of skills, the 'break-even' paycheck might be higher or lower; but that'll be a function of educational debt and opportunity cost, not absolute wellbeing.
I, for one, definitely trust an outfit that can't size a bloody datacenter power distribution system to build those magic technical safeguards that are allegedly allowing a spying operation of unprecedented size to occur with no abuses (And that's no bullshit!)
I wonder if we could convince them to switch to a utility that conducts background checks on electrons before sending them to the customer? That would clearly help...
Given the...limited... influence possessed by the ICRC, I find it hard to get worked up about them making requests that, while controversial, are optional and in line with the sort of thing they would care about.
As for whether acceding to their requests is a good idea, I think that that's a matter of genre, or sub-genre. There's plenty of room for games where ICRC-respected rules are irrelevant to, or would be actively detrimental to, gameplay. Are voracious space bugs parties to the geneva convention? Or (with the possible exception of the overmind and the cerebrates) even moral persons? Pfft, grab your pulse rifle. Even in more 'realistic' shooters, if there are nothing but soldiers on the map, and the game's damage mechanics don't include disabling wounds or surrender, and the arsenal doesn't include chemical weapons and the like, it's pretty hard to breach any relevant rules(and, in games that do include civilians, they often do so specifically to add a 'something you aren't supposed to shoot' challenge, whether they enforce it with 'realistic' penalties or just score reductions/round losses).
However, there's also room for games that aim to achieve greater affective punch, and help hide the fact that you are just playing against a few heuristics wrapped in art assets, by creating emotional engagement between the player and the gameworld/characters. In such games, it would arguably be a sign of design success if enduring penalties for certain 'forbidden' actions seemed like a natural outcome. Remember in 'Fallout', where you could gain the 'childkiller' reputation? Did the game cluck, and moralize, and forbid you from harming a hair on their precious little heads? Hell no. You could pull out your gauss rifle and frag 'em. Did the game pull any punches about the fact that you just burned some serious goodwill among every non-sociopath whose help you'll probably need to survive a harsh post-apocalyptic environment? No. It did nothing to stop you; but if pissing off every decent person in the game made your task unwinnable, sucks to be you.
Not all games need to be that way (and, among games that are, nothing requires that treading the path of good be the only option, or even the easiest one...); but especially in RPGs, moral salience, and effective modelling of 'consequences' beyond HP loss and occasionally getting attacked by town guards is arguably something very much worth exploring.
I thought Dishonored did a pretty decent job in that regard as well. You could just fucking kill your way through (and, especially once you got a couple of useful gifts of the Outsider, the combination of being fairly delicate and inhumanly lethal made for a rather pleasantly taut mode of play); but other characters got squeamish about having a total psycho around (and, when I was playing at least, I felt pretty uncomfortable terminating hapless rentacops who were just trying to apprehend the guy they thought was a dangerous assassin) and there were incentives for playing a 'clean' game, without that being a requirement, or preachy or anything. Good old Thief and Thief II also used playing 'clean' as an additional challenge (and for somebody interested in larceny, not an unrealistic one, robbery pays, murder just draws heat). Even Skyrim, in all its lovely-but-not-terribly-deep gameplay threw in a few twists (nothing as good as Oblivion's dark brotherhood storyline, which was just plain fucking with you; but I'll admit that I never charged the Ebony Blade(it gained power if used to kill NPCs; but only if the NPC killed liked and trusted the player at the time. Kills against hostiles had no effect).
Why do you assume that AMD did this voluntarily? Much more likely that this is caused by some idiotic DRM requirement for for HDCP 'protected audio path' or working around some idiotic patent. Likely reason - a DRM requirement to stop people from plugging in devices that strip HDCP.
HDCP doesn't rely on cable behavior (aside from good-enough-for-signal-integrity performance) between sources and sinks to enforce DRM. So, for a mere physical pinout adapter, there should be nothing that a 'malicious' cable could do (unless that 'cable' were a full-fledged HDMI sink baked into a line lump, which would be physically possible but wouldn't really be a 'cable' anymore), nor would there be anything (save blocking the audio entirely) that a 'trusted' cable could do to control a malicious HDMI sink.
Were you asleep during history class?
Most of human history has been a low-intensity meatgrinder, moderated primarily by the fact that we lacked the technology and competence to field armies much above 'band of thugs' size for more than a few months without disease or starvation killing them off.
We never really stopped tolerating(and often aiding, abetting, and stirring up) ghastly little wars in ghastly little countries nobody cares much about; but post WWII is a crazy peaceful period by historical standards (especially when you factor in the number of countries and non-state actors who could field an army without it starving or dying of cholera and just don't bother).
But, yeah, I'm totally so scared of commies that I'll stoop to their imagined level.
At this point, I'm pretty sure that Bloomberg is just playing SimCity: Because I Fucking Can, That's Why, Edition, rather than actively pandering to anybody in particular
We have another quarter-million names for your stop-and-frisk list!
Systems like this, and that super-creepy "modulated ultrasound" stuff, make me glad that I'm not stuck on the IRB that has to shoot down all the neat delusion-disorder related research that would be totally unethical to do with hardware like this...
James Tilly Matthews would be proud!
The horrid tongue arthropod is pretty good. As is the emasculating crab barnacle. Note that #1 on the list you link to is one of the cockroach-zombifying parasitoid wasps, though. Seriously, how sneaky is being able to shove your stinger into the victim's brain and precisely disable volitional movement, while leaving the target otherwise intact. A neurosurgeon would be hard pressed to do as much, and they have the benefit of medical imaging technology, training, and a childhood not spent devouring still-living cockroaches...
And has exciting-but-not-yet-fully-proven correlations with a variety of nasty human psych disorders! No overt mind control; but Team Epidemiology has given us some reason to suspect that rodents and crazy cat ladies aren't the only mammals it infects...
and by others they mane people who ahe no clue what a psychopath is?
Is there even any consensus on whether you can manufacture psychopaths?
I have a totally ethically consistent 'only torture delicious animals' policy in place!
Oh, come now, surely you can see that libertarians have a strong selfish interest in whether we are allowed to implant electrodes in subhuman animals or not...
I completely agree. It's completely unacceptable to force innocent students to used something as restricted and crippled as iOS. For once could someone actually think of the children.
In version 2, the system will prevent the cockroach from having thoughts that aren't cryptographically signed by Apple. True Facts.
"I guess they were still afraid of the wasps."
And fair enough: if you think humans are bad, 'parasitoids' are a class of organisms that would leave you crying for mommy. A class of organisms that a fair few wasp species belong to.
Oh how very subtle they are: the ones that parasitize caterpillars inject a venom that includes a specialized virus (found nowhere else but the wasp's oviduct, it's more part of the wasps' DNA than a free-living organism) that suppresses the caterpillar's immune response and increase the protein concentration in the hemolymph, perfect for the larvae.
Or the fascinating ones that prey on cockroaches. Those are too heavy to transport after paralysis, so they have specialized sensory capabilities on the tip of their stinger, ideally suited to locating the part of the cockroach brain to disable in order to halt voluntary movement, while leaving the victim otherwise functional and ready to be steered by its antennae back to the burrow where it will be devoured alive by wasp larvae.
And, finally, the ones that prey on spiders, the hunted become the hunter, using their impressive reflexes and even more impressive venom to paralyze spiders (nonlethally, to preserve freshness) so that their larvae can devour them, leaving the vital organs for last (again, to preserve freshness, the victim must live as long as possible while being eaten alive) and then emerge to hunt spiders for their own young.
Parasitoid wasps are badass motherfuckers. Not quite as badass as Cordyceps fungi (not that I'm biased); but pretty fucking badass.
What about mosquitos? those fuckers deserve it. You suck my blood, I amputate your piercing mouthparts and humanely release you to go find other food sources, or starve, whichever comes first.
Agree. While I doubt this turns kids into psychopaths, I disapprove because it reinforces the notion that every other creature on the planet was put there to be our playthings and slaves.
Ah, on the contrary! If every other creature on the planet was put there to be our playthings and slaves, we wouldn't need to learn all this 'science' and 'electronics' nonsense in order to bend them to our will. This is a valuable lesson in why you should bother learning: because it gives you hitherto-undreampt-of power over those who do not. A life lesson, no?
You don't see a difference between killing it and doing this?
This does seem a great deal more educational... If you need a humanities tie-in, you can always read "I have no mouth but I must scream" as you navigate your cockroach around, the pitiless god of its very sensory inputs!!!! Um, I mean, to learn about the invertebrate nervous system....
Any truth to this, or is this just an old legend circulating among the troublemakers?
I have no idea if this is what motivated the people you heard; but the 'Posse Comitatus' and later-partial-offshoot 'Sovereign Citizen' movements have a bit of a...thing... for 'common law'(whether there version would be recognizable to a judge from a common law jurisidction is another question...) and the illegitimacy of power above very local levels. 'Posse Comitatus' was pretty specific about taking sheriffs especially seriously for some reason(presumably vaguely related to shire-level governance in English common law) and some, though by no means all, 'Sovereign Citizens' have some similarities in that respect.
So, what does it cost to get somebody with state power, a badge, and a crazy-strong presumption of right and innocence should anything inconvenient go to court on my side?
Rentacops are rather risible figures; but the opportunity for influence-purchasing inherent in hiring actual cops makes me a trifle nervous. You (probably) couldn't get away with having your own personal death squad or anything; but who's going to ticket the guy who hands out cushy after-hours 'security' gigs?
It wouldn't entirely surprise me if good, old-fashioned, violence is one way of removing NIMBY elements(What do you mean 'your' back yard, citizen?) and generally smoothing over fears about the quality and completeness of destruction (the level at which something becomes useless as a chemical weapon is substantially higher than the level where I'd want it in my drinking water...)
Probably doesn't hurt that both the US and Russia have spent all those years dicking around with procedures and refinements for destroying their own chemical munitions. That makes the tech for doing so practically off-the-shelf, rather than R&D.
Dude, getting sent to the Hague is for losers. As best I can tell, Mr. Assad is still in the 'doing a pretty good job hanging on to his office, thanks' camp, which enjoys near-impunity by virtue of an international consensus of, um, all the people who are doing a pretty good job hanging on to their offices, thanks...