But balancing the books is NOT an in-order financial house for a government because government budgets have less than nothing in common with household budgets.
Let me explain by way of example. Say I earn $10. I spend $2 on a soda. I now have $8. If I didn't buy the soda, I would have $10. That's a household budget in a nutshell. If I spend less, I have more.
Now say I earn $10. I spend $2 on a soda and the soda vendor has to give me 50c back. He takes that $2 note to buy a hotdog. I take 50c from the hotdog vendor. The hotdog vendor now spends the $2 on ketchup for his stand. I take 50c from the ketchup vendor. The ketchup vendor uses the $2 to pay the guy who squashes his tomatoes for him. I take 50c from the tomato squasher (note I have now made my $2 back). The tomato squasher spends the $2 a sandwhich. I take 50c from the sandwhich vendor. Now I'm 50c up. That $2 will on average be changing hands another 2000 times before it's destroyed, and I'll get 50c every time. So... if I buy the soda, I now have $508 dollars. That's government budgets in a nutshel.
Money the government spends becomes somebody's income - which is taxed, they spend it and it becomes somebody else's income which is taxed etc. etc. etc.
That's why austerity inevitably makes deficites and debts WORSE - it's never, ever made them better, it can't, because while austerity does reduces expenses it reduces income by exponentially more. Austerity is the economic equivalent of trying to save on your heating bill by cashing your paycheck for singles and burning them.
>you need (in the real meaning of the word) a lot of labor trade in order for the society to function
You're confusing "How we did it" with "How it has to be done" - that's an appeal to tradition fallacy. We've had civilization for some ten-thousand years now, depending which great leap forward you choose as a start - and we've had employer/employee relationships for 200 years -it is not the only way to produce anything. It is not even the only way to trade labour. Hell in the very next paragraph I gave you an example of labour trade that doesn't involve employers and employees (worker-owned coops).
The thing you're ignoring is that trading labour is trading the single most valuable resource on earth - for pennies. You're trading your time alive to another. A resource you cannot renew. A resource you can never replace. Hell it's a resource that even if you buy it you cannot get more off. And you get way too little of it to sell it for less than a good life.
>Those additional wages mean less need that a welfare system has to cover. So why are you pushing for a system where wages are fewer ? And what makes you think there will ever again be enough work for more than a fraction of us to have work. You are aware that almost every welfare earner in the US actually DOES have a job - in fact, most of them have 2 ? You say we 'punish' employment, which is odd in a country where we've allowed corporations to actually outsource a huge chunk of their wagebill to the taxpayers (and claim the remainder as an expense against their own taxes) !
>And further, we have strong evidence gathered over the past few centuries, that this route works amazingly well with many billions of people, most of the world, currently benefiting from this exchange of labor.
So something invented a mere few centuries ago, that worked well - is therefore the end of invention ? By your logic we would still be on steam engines (Which, by the way, were invented [or at least made practical] around the same time and led to huge advances that benefitted lots of people). I'm arguing we should KEEP inventing - even if you think this system is 'good' (a purely subjective assessment which I don't agree with since I consider the flaws far more egregious and important than you do) - it's ridiculous to claim we can't do better.
>And the academic world has reasons, such as an alleged concern in protecting academic free speech and scientific integrity, which just don't apply in the rest of the world
Actually - they do. Terry Pratchett wrote that the single greatest tragedy in the world is all the people who never get to discover what they are great at. All the fantastic poets who instead spend their lives as mediocre blacksmiths - and all the fantastic blacksmiths who never learned smithing and spend their lives writing bad poetry. It's a tragedy that's a direct consequence of the system you are defending so passionately - the need to have work to live, means doing what you can convince somebody to pay you to do - not doing what you are great at, and we're ALL poorer when people don't discover the thing they are a genius at. >When there's no longer the threat of losing one's job from slacking off, You can't lose a job if your job is voluntary - which is the only kind of job worth having, nor is it a problem if people slack off - that's the whole point. Slacking off is a phrase from that calvinist moralism I already said I do not share. It's impossible to 'slack off'. The phrase means 'not doing what other people want you to be doing'. If what YOU want to be doing is spending your life sitting on a couch watching bad reality TV (which is true of very, very few people) then you ought to be able to do that. The proof you're wrong is that hobbies are a multi-billion dollar industry. People spend a fortune to be able to do things that make them happy which they don't do for money or profit. Just to be able to spend a little bit of time on something that makes them happy. From model trains to gaming to cr
Something else is going to grow an economy if we don't ?
What are you ? High ?
There are lots of ways to grow - we have a solar system with quite a few teraformable places we can colonize and a galaxy to explore. None of that, not one single thing, depends on growing the ECONOMY. They depend on growing knowledge - there is no link between the two.
Just to underscore my point. We've known how to protect miners from silicosis since the 1930s. So why is there, right now, here in my country a class action suit against mining companies for tens of thousands of former miners who are dying from silicosis, most of whom won't live to see a verdict and are just hoping one will ultimately help care for their families when the disease takes them after cutting their lives and careers too short for them to build up adequate pensions.
Why ? Because watering a mine costs money. The water itself is expensive, and worse - it takes a few hours during which you can't mine - which is a lot of money you lose every day. And throughout the 1980s - mining companies chose to kill employees by doing it rarely or never instead of losing that money. This didn't end until the 1990s when a new government changed the law and made failure to adequately water the mines something mining bosses would go to jail for.
We punish employers because if we don't - they kill us.
We need zero employers. We also need zero employees. There is nothing but quaint calvinist moralism behind the belief that we need either.
We need people to all have adequate food and shelter. Employers and employees are one way to achieve that - it's a massively flawed way with a terrible failure rate (every person who doesn't have both is a failure of the system) which we have had to prop up with all sorts of welfare systems to try and keep the failures from ripping the whole thing to shreds. On top of that we found that, if you don't have lots of laws about how that relationship works - most of those employees end up dead. It's ALWAYS cheaper to kill employees than to not kill them. Fire escapes cost money. Fire extinguishers are expensive. Actually getting people who get sick healed instead of just firing and replacing them will always be more expensive. And employers are fucking assholes who will NEVER show a shred of humanity to the people they employ because if you aren't a fucking asshole you would never have had any desire to be somebody's boss. It requires an asshole to want authority over others.
The best you can say about this system is that it is the least bad system we've tried - and that is seriously debateable. I would argue that systems of worker owned coops as supply 80% of Argentina's employment today, and drove Spanish anarchist societies in the early 20th century worked much better.
And even they are not a utopia - there are still problems and some of them glaring, just less than this system.
See - I think we are seeing an automation that really will not follow the old patterns. The old pattern was - automation destroys some job, but the cost savings it brings in grows other parts of the economy which cannot be automated - and this creates more job demand than was lost. That however falls appart when there is no longer ANY job that can't be automated - which is where we're headed. We're headed to a world where everything anbyody wants to buy can be produced automatically. A world that will NEED to employ maybe 100 programmers and 10-thousand robotics engineers. We just won't need anybody else to produce anything.
And I see that as an opportunity rather than a disaster. The time has come to extend the academic model to the entire economy. Give the whole world the equivalent of tenure. We invented tenure in academia because we realized that academic freedom cannot exist if researchers have to worry about job security. Science would stagnate entirely if researchers could not risk investigating ideas that are unlikely to bear fruit. Sticking to safe and predictable results research rules out all revolutionary discoveries. It's better to go down a billion dead end intellectual roads than to miss the one that leads to the future. So we have a system for removing people entirely from market forces - without them being idle, to let people do what they want - what makes them happy,and take care of them. We did it in academia because the one in a million scientists who goes down the right road makes all our lives better.
Now we have the capacity to do that for everybody. Not bolshevism, not even communism because there's no 'from each' part and need doesn't have to come into it. We have the capacity to build a society that's 'to each according to his desires' - and the only restraint is - you can't intrude on anybody else's and you can't destroy things other people love or need. To put it simply - we are on the verge of having the means to live in the kind of world Roddenberry envision in Star Trek TNG. So instead of defending the status quo out of some moralistic belief that people don't deserve to live if they don't do marketable work (in a world where that already does not exist in sufficient amounts for everybody to be able to and never will again and will only get less) - embrace a future where nobody works for a boss. Where we work or play as we wish, on what we wish to. We won't even need to worry about the small workforce to maintain the automation - because there are plenty of people who will be doing that because they enjoy it - I'll be one of them.
And this isn't centuries away - it's decades at worst.
The only example to do it some sort of 'good' in the last while was Avengers - and 90% of what made it good wasn't in that movie, it was in Agents of Shield and the follow-up marvel films (especially winter soldier). The actual political and social fall-out of the destruction being investigated - and real stories being told in the mess that came after.
That doesn't exist for almost anything else - so it actually had a new story and vision to tell. Avengers was spectacle - but actually dealing with the consequences of the spectacle was the most original thing in movies in a long time.
The closest parallel I can think of would be the series Dark Skies which only starts AFTER a successful and hugely destructive invasion and focuses on the survivors attempts to fight back and reclaim what was conquered. That was a great series the first few seasons but after season 4 it seems to have run out of stories. They had a few big successes and now what ? If they win - you get no more story, if you knock them back too far - then it gets too repetitive, the writers have tried to come up with an interesting way to keep the story going but I've not been impressed by the last two seasons, it lacked the substance and sense of hopeful desperation that made the early ones work. A key part of that formula lay in story and acting. The core of the plot was the former history professor becoming a major military leader - by drawing on his knowledge of past campaigns, he knows when and how underdogs have won and uses this to give his band of underdog refugees a fighting chance. But you don't have a story anymore if the underdogs win (there the movie format works better - it lets the story end after the victory).
It's easy to show massive destruction and, as you correctly point out, we're tired of it. The impacts on the lives of the people no longer jump up in our minds when we see it because we've seen it a million times and our lives haven't changed because of it - so I think Marvell is on the right track there, the only way to care about the destruction is to, once more, care about what it means for all the people who are NOT part of the big battles, and you can tell great stories with that. Daredevil did that especially well - a great deal of the season one plotline was around corruption in the process to rebuild what the avengers invasion had destroyed.
>Cut them some slack, they're French. They probably didn't even know there's any other language where that funny word "torrent" actually means something and isn't just some made up cute term.
Except that 'torrent' is, in fact, a French word. It means the exact same thing as in English. English got the word from French which in turn got it from Latin. Being of latin descent the word 'torrent' and close variations are common in over a dozen languages.
>More seriously, if a person is dead, it is not unreasonable to, well, notify the DMV and such
Well, as it happens - the OPPOSITE seems to be more common. The social security department gave figures for how often living people get misfiled as deceased - and it comes to around 480 people every month.
That's rather a lot of people who are believed dead by the state long before they actually passed away. So it's actually very likely that the vast majority of those 'dead people voting' were never dead in the first place.
Of course voter fraud of the "I went and voted twice" variety does exist - it's just extraordinarily rare -as in single digit cases across an entire election. There's a good reason it's rare too: the risks are massive and the rewards are uselessly small. You're never going to change the outcome of your state ballot by voting more than once - you would need thousands of people in just your own polling area to do it, and there's no way to cover THAT up (the odds of success of a conspiracy is exponentially disproportional to the number of people in it - successful conspiracies involve less than 5 people who all have everything to lose by talking).
So since it won't help you achieve your goal in any measureable way - and the punishment if you are caught is massive - only a few crazy people ever attempt it.
Successful electoral fraud can only be committed by individuals with the power to change the balance of an election without being arrested, like the current elected officials - who have the power to do things like gerrymander the district lines to their own benefit (take all the areas that vote against you - split them up and join them into surrounding areas that vote for you where they will be outnumbered), or instituting onerous restrictions to keep people less likely to vote for you from being able to vote. It's not a conspiracy theory that republicans make these rules SPECIFICALLY to prevent black people voting - they've publicly admitted it ! More than one official has, in interviews, said that the reason for these rules are 'to ensure the democrats cannot win here' - which you do by preventing as many potential democrat voters as possible from being able to vote.
You want voter fraud dealt with ? Deal with the republican officials who commit nearly all of it. Or, better yet, remove political parties and elected officials entirely from the process of running elections. The rest of the world has long since figured that out. Elections are run by independent agencies without elected officials in them - who are accountable only to the court system. Parties can bring a court challenge if they believe the agency acted in a partisan way and a court would weigh the evidence - but a party has no influence whatsoever on any part of the election process up to and including no say in where district lines are drawn or what requirements voters have to meet.
Now think about this - you may not like that republicans have been the committers of 99% of all voter fraud for the better part of two decades, but the REASON is that they have been in charge of most state and local governments - and doing it kept them there. Instead of defending this - imagine the very likely scenario that thanks to Trump we see another goldwater level avalanche in this election and a huge chunk of those downballot areas swing democrat. Do you want the democrats to have the power to split white neighbourhoods into tiny subsections of surrounding black neighbourhoods - effectively negating their votes ? If you don't trust the other guy with a power, you can't have it for your own guys.
You've clearly not paid much attention - again. In the second article (the one about economics) he spells out exactly what the limits are of what we can reach by increasing efficiency and when we will reach them - it's already factored into the maths. To maintain current economic growth rates we would need, within 400 years, all the energy from all the stars in the galaxy.
The whole point is that it's absurd to think we can do that. The one resource that we absolutely cannot grow the economy without is energy - and efficiency only slows the rate - but it cannot do so indefinitely, thermodynamics flat out excludes that as a possibility. That 400 year level is assuming we can reach 90% efficiency on all devices.
So the argument isn't to panic. It's to start thinking of how to structure an economy that's not based on borrowing against future growth but on producing enough for everybody and producing the same amount next year and every year. The answer is a steady state economy - which produces enough not to have poverty in it. We need to grow for a while yet, but we're close enough to the maximum point of growth that we ought to start thinking of how to transition from that model. Now since the kind of automation routes we are opening today will force a major restructuring of the economy anyway - to my mind, it makes sense if you need two major economic overhauls to do them at the same time and cut the associated painful transition times in half.
>fifty years of US history that shafting employers doesn't create better jobs in the US.
What delusional world do you live in ? The past 50 years in the US has almost entirely consisted of the very policies you're defending - shafting WORKERS and sucking up to employers - and it has caused all the problems you are seeing today. The US has the most employer friendly laws in the entire developed world - even before you started stripping away every worker's right fifty years ago. Seriously - your'e one more republican president away from it being legal to shoot employees as a motivational tool.
>Also, it appears you haven't noticed that the US is already "racing to the bottom" by remaining stagnant in wages and whatnot while China, India, and other countries catch up in their standards of living.
Actually you're proving MY point with that piece of data, not yours. The US wages are stagnating because of policies based on the very ideas your spouting. And so it's standard of living is dropping. Those other countries are not 'catching up' - just getting ever so slightly higher than they were before.
The countries which had a comparable standard of living to the US in the 1980s and did NOT embrace Reagan and Thatcher's approach to employment (the same one you're defending) - their standard of living has gone up since then and are now far higher than the US. That's why you had a presidential candidate this year calling for you to emulate the success of countries like Denmark.
Oh by the way - let's cite that real world you love so much. 4 years ago Alabama elected a republican governor who instituted a set of economic policies straight out of the Ayn Rand playbook. He shrank the civil service to a fraction of it's former self. He privatized everything he could get a buyer for. He dropped taxes to almost nothing (Alabama taxes on the wealthiest individuals is now around 0.5%). He broke down union protections and passed anti-union laws galore. Paul Ryan said Alabama was going to be the test case to show America how well economic conservatism works for everybody, Rand Paul called it the greatest leap forward for liberty in 150 years. At the time of the election Alabama had an unemployment rate of just under 3%, a small but consistently shrinking deficit and manageable debt.
Today after 4 years of that kind of economics the unemployment rate in Alabama is well over 6% and expected to reach 8% before the year is out (note that every single one of Alabama's neighbours saw their unemployment rates go down over the same period). Alabama's deficite is now larger than the total state revenue. The state is so far in debt that it can probably never pay it off. Poverty rates have gone through the roof. Alabama businesses are smiling all the way to the bank - they have a steady supply of people so desperate for work they'll take any job in any conditions at any pay and never complain. Everybody else is screwed.
There's your reality. High level republicans don't talk about Alabama anymore... they really don't want you to go see how the test case to prove conservative economics worked out in reality.
Reality - is what you get from actual facts, not from ideology.
It's also what makes the difference between real economics and the voodoo economics of the right. Real economics are adjusted based on empirical data and testing. Rightwing ideology is based on Austrian economics which claims that empirical data cannot disprove it.
In other words - I'm citing science and you're citing a cult - and science is the thing that gives you reality.
Actually they do. The proof is all the other domestic problems the US has up to and including the nomination of Donald Trump. They are all caused by the very race to the bottom you are advocating for.
>I guess I need to point out, once again, that we're seeing a massive, global departure from slavery. On the contrary you moron. There are more slaves in the world right now (and I'm not talking sweatshops and other edge-cases - I'm talking kidnapped from home, chained up and whipped slaves) than was sold in the entire 300 year existence of the transatlantic slave trade. [At least] 70% of the world's chocolate is made from beans picked by child slaves, kidnapped from their homes into forced labour - many as young as 6. The entire world's supply of granite and marble are mined by slaves. Slavery provides at least 90% of the rare earth minerals that supply your electronics. You heard rare earths come from China ? You heard wrong. China has almost no deposits of rare earths. They are, however, bought from China - which in turn mostly buys it from Africa, and the mines there are almost exclusively worked by slaves. Slavery produces 45% of the world's total C02 emissions - it's the single largest contributor to climate change (and the hardest to reduce).
And you call that 'moving away'?
And that's just the hardcore chained-up variety. I consider ANY situation where you cannot afford to tell your boss to stick his job where the sun don't shine to be slavery. If you can't afford to quit- you aren't free to quit and you are a slave.
>When you make it harder to fire someone, then you punish employment. No. When you make it easy to fire somebody without good reason then you destroy any semblence of a free market since the threat of destitution hangs over any contract negotation.
That's the dumbest argument in history. You CANNOT punish the act of employment and NOBODY has ever done that. There is no such thing as a bad labour law. There is slavery or there is regulated labour. Nothing in between has ever or could ever exist.
The only thing you are right about: it's rather hard to compete with slavery. But that's an argument to end slavery elsewhere, not to engage in it at home.
No, it doesn't. Nowhere does it assume that. In fact - it specifically mentions it - and points out that this is not the subject of discussion.
It assumes that economic growth must be based on increases in productivity. Productivity = work = energy. So to grow the economy we MUST also grow our energy supplies.
Nope, not aware of any creature that can live in that, but we've found creatures in every environment on earth no matter how inhospitable to all other known life. Extremeophile bacteria living around volcanic vents in the deepest trenches of the ocean. Single celled organisms that live in the dead sea.
Nothing like that exists - but if the change is gradual enough - something might. Live seems to live everywhere it can't.
The alternative to austerity is not overspending - it's smart spending. Plenty of governments actually do that very well. It seems, actually, that it's mostly Anglo and African governments that truly suck at it. Smart spending is to identify those cases where - if you spend big now, you save more than you spent tomorrow.
A great example is college. Free college is not an expense - it's an investment. I did the math for my country (in the US the difference should be smaller but the point stands). A person who could go to college and graduate, but doesn't because they can't afford to and earn minimum wage for life - cost me about R5-million assuming they live to be 70 (from age 18 onwards). Sending that person to university would cost R500000.
So I would rather have my taxes spend R500K today, than 5-million over the rest of my life. This was calculated assuming the person does NOT claim any welfare except public hospitals (which we do have). That's just the cost of the public services we all get (police, military, roads, sewage etc. etc.) which they use - but are not contributing to because they don't earn enough to pay tax. So I have to pay for their usage of these services. Poor people use no less public services than the rich (and some they use far more -like public transport) - but they cannot contribute to the cost of these services and the cost of subsidizing that far exceeds the costs of just sending the smart ones to college for free.
Brazil has a fantastic system for that - a very high standard entrance exam gets you free university. There are also private universities where, if you don't get into the public universities, you can go on your own money - so the people who just fall short will often, if they can afford it, spend their money there. Interestingly a public university degree in Brazil is far, far more prestigious than a private university - because the standard for entry is exceptionally high. But if you can get in, you don't have to worry about money.
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But balancing the books is NOT an in-order financial house for a government because government budgets have less than nothing in common with household budgets.
Let me explain by way of example.
Say I earn $10. I spend $2 on a soda. I now have $8.
If I didn't buy the soda, I would have $10.
That's a household budget in a nutshell. If I spend less, I have more.
Now say I earn $10. I spend $2 on a soda and the soda vendor has to give me 50c back. He takes that $2 note to buy a hotdog. I take 50c from the hotdog vendor. The hotdog vendor now spends the $2 on ketchup for his stand. I take 50c from the ketchup vendor. The ketchup vendor uses the $2 to pay the guy who squashes his tomatoes for him. I take 50c from the tomato squasher (note I have now made my $2 back). The tomato squasher spends the $2 a sandwhich. I take 50c from the sandwhich vendor. Now I'm 50c up. That $2 will on average be changing hands another 2000 times before it's destroyed, and I'll get 50c every time. ... if I buy the soda, I now have $508 dollars.
So
That's government budgets in a nutshel.
Money the government spends becomes somebody's income - which is taxed, they spend it and it becomes somebody else's income which is taxed etc. etc. etc.
That's why austerity inevitably makes deficites and debts WORSE - it's never, ever made them better, it can't, because while austerity does reduces expenses it reduces income by exponentially more.
Austerity is the economic equivalent of trying to save on your heating bill by cashing your paycheck for singles and burning them.
>you need (in the real meaning of the word) a lot of labor trade in order for the society to function
You're confusing "How we did it" with "How it has to be done" - that's an appeal to tradition fallacy. We've had civilization for some ten-thousand years now, depending which great leap forward you choose as a start - and we've had employer/employee relationships for 200 years -it is not the only way to produce anything. It is not even the only way to trade labour. Hell in the very next paragraph I gave you an example of labour trade that doesn't involve employers and employees (worker-owned coops).
The thing you're ignoring is that trading labour is trading the single most valuable resource on earth - for pennies. You're trading your time alive to another. A resource you cannot renew. A resource you can never replace. Hell it's a resource that even if you buy it you cannot get more off. And you get way too little of it to sell it for less than a good life.
>Those additional wages mean less need that a welfare system has to cover.
So why are you pushing for a system where wages are fewer ? And what makes you think there will ever again be enough work for more than a fraction of us to have work. You are aware that almost every welfare earner in the US actually DOES have a job - in fact, most of them have 2 ? You say we 'punish' employment, which is odd in a country where we've allowed corporations to actually outsource a huge chunk of their wagebill to the taxpayers (and claim the remainder as an expense against their own taxes) !
>And further, we have strong evidence gathered over the past few centuries, that this route works amazingly well with many billions of people, most of the world, currently benefiting from this exchange of labor.
So something invented a mere few centuries ago, that worked well - is therefore the end of invention ? By your logic we would still be on steam engines (Which, by the way, were invented [or at least made practical] around the same time and led to huge advances that benefitted lots of people).
I'm arguing we should KEEP inventing - even if you think this system is 'good' (a purely subjective assessment which I don't agree with since I consider the flaws far more egregious and important than you do) - it's ridiculous to claim we can't do better.
>And the academic world has reasons, such as an alleged concern in protecting academic free speech and scientific integrity, which just don't apply in the rest of the world
Actually - they do. Terry Pratchett wrote that the single greatest tragedy in the world is all the people who never get to discover what they are great at. All the fantastic poets who instead spend their lives as mediocre blacksmiths - and all the fantastic blacksmiths who never learned smithing and spend their lives writing bad poetry. It's a tragedy that's a direct consequence of the system you are defending so passionately - the need to have work to live, means doing what you can convince somebody to pay you to do - not doing what you are great at, and we're ALL poorer when people don't discover the thing they are a genius at.
>When there's no longer the threat of losing one's job from slacking off,
You can't lose a job if your job is voluntary - which is the only kind of job worth having, nor is it a problem if people slack off - that's the whole point. Slacking off is a phrase from that calvinist moralism I already said I do not share. It's impossible to 'slack off'. The phrase means 'not doing what other people want you to be doing'. If what YOU want to be doing is spending your life sitting on a couch watching bad reality TV (which is true of very, very few people) then you ought to be able to do that.
The proof you're wrong is that hobbies are a multi-billion dollar industry. People spend a fortune to be able to do things that make them happy which they don't do for money or profit. Just to be able to spend a little bit of time on something that makes them happy. From model trains to gaming to cr
Something else is going to grow an economy if we don't ?
What are you ? High ?
There are lots of ways to grow - we have a solar system with quite a few teraformable places we can colonize and a galaxy to explore. None of that, not one single thing, depends on growing the ECONOMY. They depend on growing knowledge - there is no link between the two.
Just to underscore my point. We've known how to protect miners from silicosis since the 1930s. So why is there, right now, here in my country a class action suit against mining companies for tens of thousands of former miners who are dying from silicosis, most of whom won't live to see a verdict and are just hoping one will ultimately help care for their families when the disease takes them after cutting their lives and careers too short for them to build up adequate pensions.
Why ? Because watering a mine costs money. The water itself is expensive, and worse - it takes a few hours during which you can't mine - which is a lot of money you lose every day. And throughout the 1980s - mining companies chose to kill employees by doing it rarely or never instead of losing that money. This didn't end until the 1990s when a new government changed the law and made failure to adequately water the mines something mining bosses would go to jail for.
We punish employers because if we don't - they kill us.
We need zero employers. We also need zero employees. There is nothing but quaint calvinist moralism behind the belief that we need either.
We need people to all have adequate food and shelter. Employers and employees are one way to achieve that - it's a massively flawed way with a terrible failure rate (every person who doesn't have both is a failure of the system) which we have had to prop up with all sorts of welfare systems to try and keep the failures from ripping the whole thing to shreds. On top of that we found that, if you don't have lots of laws about how that relationship works - most of those employees end up dead. It's ALWAYS cheaper to kill employees than to not kill them. Fire escapes cost money. Fire extinguishers are expensive. Actually getting people who get sick healed instead of just firing and replacing them will always be more expensive.
And employers are fucking assholes who will NEVER show a shred of humanity to the people they employ because if you aren't a fucking asshole you would never have had any desire to be somebody's boss. It requires an asshole to want authority over others.
The best you can say about this system is that it is the least bad system we've tried - and that is seriously debateable. I would argue that systems of worker owned coops as supply 80% of Argentina's employment today, and drove Spanish anarchist societies in the early 20th century worked much better.
And even they are not a utopia - there are still problems and some of them glaring, just less than this system.
See - I think we are seeing an automation that really will not follow the old patterns. The old pattern was - automation destroys some job, but the cost savings it brings in grows other parts of the economy which cannot be automated - and this creates more job demand than was lost.
That however falls appart when there is no longer ANY job that can't be automated - which is where we're headed. We're headed to a world where everything anbyody wants to buy can be produced automatically. A world that will NEED to employ maybe 100 programmers and 10-thousand robotics engineers. We just won't need anybody else to produce anything.
And I see that as an opportunity rather than a disaster. The time has come to extend the academic model to the entire economy. Give the whole world the equivalent of tenure. We invented tenure in academia because we realized that academic freedom cannot exist if researchers have to worry about job security. Science would stagnate entirely if researchers could not risk investigating ideas that are unlikely to bear fruit. Sticking to safe and predictable results research rules out all revolutionary discoveries. It's better to go down a billion dead end intellectual roads than to miss the one that leads to the future. So we have a system for removing people entirely from market forces - without them being idle, to let people do what they want - what makes them happy,and take care of them.
We did it in academia because the one in a million scientists who goes down the right road makes all our lives better.
Now we have the capacity to do that for everybody. Not bolshevism, not even communism because there's no 'from each' part and need doesn't have to come into it. We have the capacity to build a society that's 'to each according to his desires' - and the only restraint is - you can't intrude on anybody else's and you can't destroy things other people love or need.
To put it simply - we are on the verge of having the means to live in the kind of world Roddenberry envision in Star Trek TNG. So instead of defending the status quo out of some moralistic belief that people don't deserve to live if they don't do marketable work (in a world where that already does not exist in sufficient amounts for everybody to be able to and never will again and will only get less) - embrace a future where nobody works for a boss. Where we work or play as we wish, on what we wish to. We won't even need to worry about the small workforce to maintain the automation - because there are plenty of people who will be doing that because they enjoy it - I'll be one of them.
And this isn't centuries away - it's decades at worst.
The only example to do it some sort of 'good' in the last while was Avengers - and 90% of what made it good wasn't in that movie, it was in Agents of Shield and the follow-up marvel films (especially winter soldier). The actual political and social fall-out of the destruction being investigated - and real stories being told in the mess that came after.
That doesn't exist for almost anything else - so it actually had a new story and vision to tell. Avengers was spectacle - but actually dealing with the consequences of the spectacle was the most original thing in movies in a long time.
The closest parallel I can think of would be the series Dark Skies which only starts AFTER a successful and hugely destructive invasion and focuses on the survivors attempts to fight back and reclaim what was conquered. That was a great series the first few seasons but after season 4 it seems to have run out of stories. They had a few big successes and now what ? If they win - you get no more story, if you knock them back too far - then it gets too repetitive, the writers have tried to come up with an interesting way to keep the story going but I've not been impressed by the last two seasons, it lacked the substance and sense of hopeful desperation that made the early ones work. A key part of that formula lay in story and acting. The core of the plot was the former history professor becoming a major military leader - by drawing on his knowledge of past campaigns, he knows when and how underdogs have won and uses this to give his band of underdog refugees a fighting chance.
But you don't have a story anymore if the underdogs win (there the movie format works better - it lets the story end after the victory).
It's easy to show massive destruction and, as you correctly point out, we're tired of it. The impacts on the lives of the people no longer jump up in our minds when we see it because we've seen it a million times and our lives haven't changed because of it - so I think Marvell is on the right track there, the only way to care about the destruction is to, once more, care about what it means for all the people who are NOT part of the big battles, and you can tell great stories with that. Daredevil did that especially well - a great deal of the season one plotline was around corruption in the process to rebuild what the avengers invasion had destroyed.
You mean like "Saving Private Ryan" ?
>Cut them some slack, they're French. They probably didn't even know there's any other language where that funny word "torrent" actually means something and isn't just some made up cute term.
Except that 'torrent' is, in fact, a French word. It means the exact same thing as in English. English got the word from French which in turn got it from Latin. Being of latin descent the word 'torrent' and close variations are common in over a dozen languages.
He said "fan film" - presumably at least some of those are legal.
An inherritted problem is only an excuse if you did something to fix it.
>More seriously, if a person is dead, it is not unreasonable to, well, notify the DMV and such
Well, as it happens - the OPPOSITE seems to be more common. The social security department gave figures for how often living people get misfiled as deceased - and it comes to around 480 people every month.
That's rather a lot of people who are believed dead by the state long before they actually passed away. So it's actually very likely that the vast majority of those 'dead people voting' were never dead in the first place.
Of course voter fraud of the "I went and voted twice" variety does exist - it's just extraordinarily rare -as in single digit cases across an entire election. There's a good reason it's rare too: the risks are massive and the rewards are uselessly small.
You're never going to change the outcome of your state ballot by voting more than once - you would need thousands of people in just your own polling area to do it, and there's no way to cover THAT up (the odds of success of a conspiracy is exponentially disproportional to the number of people in it - successful conspiracies involve less than 5 people who all have everything to lose by talking).
So since it won't help you achieve your goal in any measureable way - and the punishment if you are caught is massive - only a few crazy people ever attempt it.
Successful electoral fraud can only be committed by individuals with the power to change the balance of an election without being arrested, like the current elected officials - who have the power to do things like gerrymander the district lines to their own benefit (take all the areas that vote against you - split them up and join them into surrounding areas that vote for you where they will be outnumbered), or instituting onerous restrictions to keep people less likely to vote for you from being able to vote.
It's not a conspiracy theory that republicans make these rules SPECIFICALLY to prevent black people voting - they've publicly admitted it ! More than one official has, in interviews, said that the reason for these rules are 'to ensure the democrats cannot win here' - which you do by preventing as many potential democrat voters as possible from being able to vote.
You want voter fraud dealt with ? Deal with the republican officials who commit nearly all of it. Or, better yet, remove political parties and elected officials entirely from the process of running elections. The rest of the world has long since figured that out. Elections are run by independent agencies without elected officials in them - who are accountable only to the court system. Parties can bring a court challenge if they believe the agency acted in a partisan way and a court would weigh the evidence - but a party has no influence whatsoever on any part of the election process up to and including no say in where district lines are drawn or what requirements voters have to meet.
Now think about this - you may not like that republicans have been the committers of 99% of all voter fraud for the better part of two decades, but the REASON is that they have been in charge of most state and local governments - and doing it kept them there. Instead of defending this - imagine the very likely scenario that thanks to Trump we see another goldwater level avalanche in this election and a huge chunk of those downballot areas swing democrat. Do you want the democrats to have the power to split white neighbourhoods into tiny subsections of surrounding black neighbourhoods - effectively negating their votes ? If you don't trust the other guy with a power, you can't have it for your own guys.
Apparently he thinks hermits don't have a right to vote... I wonder who ELSE he thinks should not have the right to vote ?
You've clearly not paid much attention - again. In the second article (the one about economics) he spells out exactly what the limits are of what we can reach by increasing efficiency and when we will reach them - it's already factored into the maths. To maintain current economic growth rates we would need, within 400 years, all the energy from all the stars in the galaxy.
The whole point is that it's absurd to think we can do that. The one resource that we absolutely cannot grow the economy without is energy - and efficiency only slows the rate - but it cannot do so indefinitely, thermodynamics flat out excludes that as a possibility. That 400 year level is assuming we can reach 90% efficiency on all devices.
So the argument isn't to panic. It's to start thinking of how to structure an economy that's not based on borrowing against future growth but on producing enough for everybody and producing the same amount next year and every year. The answer is a steady state economy - which produces enough not to have poverty in it. We need to grow for a while yet, but we're close enough to the maximum point of growth that we ought to start thinking of how to transition from that model.
Now since the kind of automation routes we are opening today will force a major restructuring of the economy anyway - to my mind, it makes sense if you need two major economic overhauls to do them at the same time and cut the associated painful transition times in half.
>fifty years of US history that shafting employers doesn't create better jobs in the US.
What delusional world do you live in ? The past 50 years in the US has almost entirely consisted of the very policies you're defending - shafting WORKERS and sucking up to employers - and it has caused all the problems you are seeing today.
The US has the most employer friendly laws in the entire developed world - even before you started stripping away every worker's right fifty years ago. Seriously - your'e one more republican president away from it being legal to shoot employees as a motivational tool.
>Also, it appears you haven't noticed that the US is already "racing to the bottom" by remaining stagnant in wages and whatnot while China, India, and other countries catch up in their standards of living.
Actually you're proving MY point with that piece of data, not yours. The US wages are stagnating because of policies based on the very ideas your spouting. And so it's standard of living is dropping. Those other countries are not 'catching up' - just getting ever so slightly higher than they were before.
The countries which had a comparable standard of living to the US in the 1980s and did NOT embrace Reagan and Thatcher's approach to employment (the same one you're defending) - their standard of living has gone up since then and are now far higher than the US. That's why you had a presidential candidate this year calling for you to emulate the success of countries like Denmark.
Oh by the way - let's cite that real world you love so much.
4 years ago Alabama elected a republican governor who instituted a set of economic policies straight out of the Ayn Rand playbook. He shrank the civil service to a fraction of it's former self. He privatized everything he could get a buyer for. He dropped taxes to almost nothing (Alabama taxes on the wealthiest individuals is now around 0.5%). He broke down union protections and passed anti-union laws galore. Paul Ryan said Alabama was going to be the test case to show America how well economic conservatism works for everybody, Rand Paul called it the greatest leap forward for liberty in 150 years.
At the time of the election Alabama had an unemployment rate of just under 3%, a small but consistently shrinking deficit and manageable debt.
Today after 4 years of that kind of economics the unemployment rate in Alabama is well over 6% and expected to reach 8% before the year is out (note that every single one of Alabama's neighbours saw their unemployment rates go down over the same period). Alabama's deficite is now larger than the total state revenue. The state is so far in debt that it can probably never pay it off. Poverty rates have gone through the roof.
Alabama businesses are smiling all the way to the bank - they have a steady supply of people so desperate for work they'll take any job in any conditions at any pay and never complain. Everybody else is screwed.
There's your reality. High level republicans don't talk about Alabama anymore... they really don't want you to go see how the test case to prove conservative economics worked out in reality.
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I call yours ignorant in the extreme.
Reality - is what you get from actual facts, not from ideology.
It's also what makes the difference between real economics and the voodoo economics of the right. Real economics are adjusted based on empirical data and testing. Rightwing ideology is based on Austrian economics which claims that empirical data cannot disprove it.
In other words - I'm citing science and you're citing a cult - and science is the thing that gives you reality.
Actually they do. The proof is all the other domestic problems the US has up to and including the nomination of Donald Trump. They are all caused by the very race to the bottom you are advocating for.
>I guess I need to point out, once again, that we're seeing a massive, global departure from slavery.
On the contrary you moron. There are more slaves in the world right now (and I'm not talking sweatshops and other edge-cases - I'm talking kidnapped from home, chained up and whipped slaves) than was sold in the entire 300 year existence of the transatlantic slave trade. [At least] 70% of the world's chocolate is made from beans picked by child slaves, kidnapped from their homes into forced labour - many as young as 6.
The entire world's supply of granite and marble are mined by slaves. Slavery provides at least 90% of the rare earth minerals that supply your electronics. You heard rare earths come from China ? You heard wrong. China has almost no deposits of rare earths. They are, however, bought from China - which in turn mostly buys it from Africa, and the mines there are almost exclusively worked by slaves.
Slavery produces 45% of the world's total C02 emissions - it's the single largest contributor to climate change (and the hardest to reduce).
And you call that 'moving away'?
And that's just the hardcore chained-up variety. I consider ANY situation where you cannot afford to tell your boss to stick his job where the sun don't shine to be slavery. If you can't afford to quit- you aren't free to quit and you are a slave.
>When you make it harder to fire someone, then you punish employment.
No. When you make it easy to fire somebody without good reason then you destroy any semblence of a free market since the threat of destitution hangs over any contract negotation.
You only get stupider from there on in.
That's the dumbest argument in history. You CANNOT punish the act of employment and NOBODY has ever done that. There is no such thing as a bad labour law. There is slavery or there is regulated labour. Nothing in between has ever or could ever exist.
The only thing you are right about: it's rather hard to compete with slavery. But that's an argument to end slavery elsewhere, not to engage in it at home.
No, it doesn't. Nowhere does it assume that. In fact - it specifically mentions it - and points out that this is not the subject of discussion.
It assumes that economic growth must be based on increases in productivity. Productivity = work = energy. So to grow the economy we MUST also grow our energy supplies.
At least READ the post before you dismiss it.
Nope, not aware of any creature that can live in that, but we've found creatures in every environment on earth no matter how inhospitable to all other known life. Extremeophile bacteria living around volcanic vents in the deepest trenches of the ocean. Single celled organisms that live in the dead sea.
Nothing like that exists - but if the change is gradual enough - something might. Live seems to live everywhere it can't.
The alternative to austerity is not overspending - it's smart spending. Plenty of governments actually do that very well. It seems, actually, that it's mostly Anglo and African governments that truly suck at it.
Smart spending is to identify those cases where - if you spend big now, you save more than you spent tomorrow.
A great example is college. Free college is not an expense - it's an investment. I did the math for my country (in the US the difference should be smaller but the point stands). A person who could go to college and graduate, but doesn't because they can't afford to and earn minimum wage for life - cost me about R5-million assuming they live to be 70 (from age 18 onwards).
Sending that person to university would cost R500000.
So I would rather have my taxes spend R500K today, than 5-million over the rest of my life. This was calculated assuming the person does NOT claim any welfare except public hospitals (which we do have). That's just the cost of the public services we all get (police, military, roads, sewage etc. etc.) which they use - but are not contributing to because they don't earn enough to pay tax. So I have to pay for their usage of these services.
Poor people use no less public services than the rich (and some they use far more -like public transport) - but they cannot contribute to the cost of these services and the cost of subsidizing that far exceeds the costs of just sending the smart ones to college for free.
Brazil has a fantastic system for that - a very high standard entrance exam gets you free university. There are also private universities where, if you don't get into the public universities, you can go on your own money - so the people who just fall short will often, if they can afford it, spend their money there. Interestingly a public university degree in Brazil is far, far more prestigious than a private university - because the standard for entry is exceptionally high. But if you can get in, you don't have to worry about money.