The companies will lose their ability to play the game they're currently paying if people have no money to spend. If I run a company selling a product, I do not care if the money someone is using to buy said product comes from wages or income transfers.
- of-course you do, that's because if the money comes from the sources that are unable to actually pay for that money (as in take that money back into their pocket in order to sell you a good or a service, either directly or through a company they work for) then that money is counterfeit, it cannot be used for anything. It's exactly as the Chinese holding all of these American bonds that cannot be used because Americans run trade deficits of 500 BILLION USD/year, so they have nothing to offer for all that money and if a foreign company comes to USA to buy some more or less valuable property (a port for example), the American government can block that purchase as has happened before and thus render that money useless.
It's exactly the same concept - what good is a piece of paper from somebody who cannot back it by any production or commodity or anything useful for that matter?
That piece of paper in itself is nothing at all, the only value is in the productive output of companies. The people owning the companies can trade *with each other* and completely forgo this dance of money being taken from them, handed out to the beggars, who then pretend they have purchasing power because they have something their collective government stole for them.
the bulk of the entire economy will collapse if there is no money for consumers to spend
- so what? What does that mean even for people who own the productive capacity and can exchange *with each other*, they don't need this energy and product consuming mob, they only need others exactly like them, who are productive so that they can trade with them legitimately and equitably.
Automation by its very nature means if we want to maintain economies in their current fashion we cannot continue to measure the worth of an individual in terms of productivity,
- who said 'we want that'? What is it that you want? The population to keep procreating so that a tiny minority of the population is oppressed for the purposes of providing living accommodations, food, clothing, energy, medicine, entertainment, transportation to that population?
Why? Who cares if it is 8billion or 1 billion or 10 million? It doesn't matter, the only thing that matters is that there is no oppression of anybody by anybody under any circumstance for any purpose.
without income they have no capital to start companies.
- you are right. Who destroyed the savings if not the government that manipulates interest rates and currency supply, creating the shit pie of inflation and selling the idea to you as if they have done a gigantic favour for you? The capital is destroyed by the collectivist mob, the mob should be stopped and not allowed to do so. Capital represents the time and life of other people, who have put their time and life into it, the collective is not worth that type of effort only individuals are, and individuals are the ones ground to a pulp by the collective.
Second, the vast majority of people do not posses the skills to run a company that's capable of efficiently competing with large corporations
- who said they need to compete with large corporations? They don't need to, they need to work in their niche, supplying people on their social strata with the solutions those people need. However if the prices by the large corporations are already so low that nobody can compete then where exactly is the problem? If competition is truly impossible because the products are as cheap as they can possibly get (which is not true) then the corporations *are* doing everything to supply the society with everything it needs already.
The people who own productive capacity have no reason to provide their productive output to people who produce nothing, that is not an exchange, that is simple robbery/extortion 'by law'. Well, laws based on mobocracy, where the mob only offers one thing in return - not to steal and murder, is not a good exchange. The trade only makes sense between two productive parties (people who have something to offer to each other, where both parties enter the trade voluntarily, without duress, oppression, coercion, reliance on violence).
If you own a fully automated factory that produces shoes you are not interested in giving your product away, you are interested in exchanging with somebody else for food, energy, entertainment, transportation, medical care, housing and such.
If the people who give you money for your shoes are getting that money from you in the first place, these people cannot provide you with food, energy, entertainment, transportation, medical care, housing and such. Their only offer is not to murder you, should you not cooperate with them while they are taking your shoes away (that is what they are doing with taxes).
So for you it makes sense to trade with other productive people, those who run farms, energy production, transportation companies, builders, etc.
If a large portion of people are only alive because they can take from you by the force of the 'law', then you want to do everything to avoid that law being applied to you. I hope this is clear (or do I have to draw a picture?)
The people who live off of productivity of others returning nothing in exchange should expect that their conditions will not be stable. Children have no autonomy of their own though they are taken care of by the parents for free. They are not legal voters, they cannot dictate what they eat, where they live, how they are cared for, etc.
The unproductive population will find itself in the same situation - their vote will not count, their voice will not count, they think it is unfair, bit they are nothing but children, taken care of by the grown ups (and in nature the grown ups sometimes kill their children).
If you think this is unfortunate, then think of an alternative to creating a situation where some are forced to pay for all. That is not going to work out in the long run no matter what political system you think you can set up. Eventually the reality will sink in, automated production also needs resources, it is not actually free.
The alternative is to remove the taxes and laws that were set up before automation was widespread. These taxes and laws now prevent people from taking care of themselves by starting their own businesses, that can be created to take care of the needs of people in different social strata, and people *are* in different social strata, we are not equal, never were equal and will never be equal. We can aim for equality under law, but this actually goes against the desires of the mob.
The mob wants unequal application of the law, it wants to take away more from those who have more, not even proportionally more but completely in proportionally more. The mob will find it more and more difficult to do so going forward.
How about replacing Jane Kim with a robot (or an inanimate carbon rod), it would cost nothing just sitting there and so it would create all sorts of savings on idiotic proposals for people of San Francisco.
You got 'a lot in return' because you are paying much less than what you are getting, so you are living on a subsidy. On the other hand there are people who are getting much more than what they are getting, so they are subsidising you, which is why this is an injustice, oppression and slavery - collectivism.
So be smart, position yourself to profit from this shift, make sure this works *for* you, not against you, make sure to come up on top, don't just dwell on it, use it to win.
And with all those laws do you see ancient Rome around anymore?
Don't need idiotic laws for this, with automation this will become reality all by itself, with robot trucks driving at night because there is so much less traffic at that time in the first place.
The moral of the story is clear: don't hire Americans, don't hire anybody in the West. They actually believe they are owed a job by a business, that's very interesting but also not something a business wants to deal with.
By the way, discrimination is a human right. You don't lose your right to discriminate just because you run a business, but the way the Western laws are structured: you DO lose your right to discriminate and then you can be a target for various lawsuits based on this oppression of the individual rights by the collectivist system.
So make sure not to hire in the countries that have these types of oppressive regimes and laws in place.
Also I suggest that people who are unusually tall should be shortened at the knees because they can move unfairly faster than others and see further. People with 20/20 vision should have their sight reduced artificially by mandatory cloudy glasses to make it fair for everybody and people who are just too damn pretty should have acid splashed into their faces to make life more equitable on this planet for all.
Those are not necessities. Would you defend rich people being the first to have food and water and shelter?
- of-course I would, most obviously people with more means can get food and water and shelter faster and of higher quality than others. Wealth is a way to set priorities just as well as to do a number of other things, why wouldn't the rich have first access to food, water and shelter?
Wealth is an abstract concept. In nature noone owns anything
- you own your body if you can protect it. You own your territory if you can protect it. There is no difference between nature and us, we are nature.
If you don't own anything then why would you mind if I decided to kill you for food (don't worry, I am a vegetarian, but I may sell your body to others for food). So you see, your property starts with possession of your own body and mind and from there it extends to the work that you do in your life because that work takes your personal time, the time of your life.
Your work is time taken out of your life that you are spending not on pleasure but on work (maybe your work is pleasure for you but that doesn't really change anything). To take what you have worked for and to distribute it to others, who did not do this work is the injustice of oppression imposed by the collectivism that we are observing here and the more of that is happening the more people will fight against it in every possible way.
I am all for people outsourcing, automating, avoiding and evading every tax they can because that is the fight against the oppression and violence of the collectivist mob and it needs to be done.
I've been on this site since around 1998, registered the account within a couple of years I think. As an anarcho capitalist/objectivist I don't see what it is you are seeing (this site becoming more libertarian minded, which means less Statist, less collectivist). For whatever reason the population here is quite happy to be part of a 'larger than self' collective and it's quite happy to use collectivism for protectionism, for taxation and redistribution and such. Where have you seen this shift towards 'Randian garbage' as you call it? Individuals are mostly drowned out in the overall collectivist noise here.
There is no such thing as 'essential service', the entire concept is what created the monopolies / oligopolies that are found around the world. Nothing is an 'essential service' (what I mean is that nothing should ever be touched/supplied by any form of government).
This ideology is what lead to the always rising prices and by the way, what the hell is 'infinite inflation of essential services'?
Inflation is expansion, inflation of money is expansion of money supply. You are talking about prices, prices *rise* and *fall*, they don't expand and contract. Inflation around the world is caused by expansion of the money supply and given the status of USD around the world, inflation today is mostly caused by the USA Federal reserve and Congress.
If you're running a monopoly, and you're running 100% efficient, in what world would you be "making only enough money to survive"?
- you would accumulate savings certainly. However if you pay yourself a salary enough to live on and the rest of the money is always recycled back into the business to ensure that it runs at 100% efficiency what you have then is a fully self sustainable business that consumes almost completely all of the revenue that it generates in order to operate.
Basically if the operational expenses are almost exactly the revenues then there is almost nothing left after all of the expenses are paid. In that case what possible taxes can be applied to a business like that?
Any amount of taxes only would add to the cost of the end product/service and the result is a less than efficient system, where the consumers of the product/service are paying artificially more for getting the product/service.
In reality many businesses operate that way today already, of-course there are larger than average salaries going to the top executives but remove that and you have pretty much nothing left to remove, if you remove more then the business becomes less efficient/prices go up.
So to say that the businesses that will automate all of these jobs away will 'pay taxes' is nonsense, there is no money to pay any taxes. Any taxes added by the government will come out of the pockets of the consumers of the end product/service of the business.
In any case, the so called 'society' will not be able to extract money from businesses to pay for any type of so called 'basic income' or any form of welfare for people who don't work. The money will be extracted from everybody who is *not* a business, so it's quite simple: businesses actually generate all of the wealth and hire all of the people. Adding artificial cost to human labour increases the odds of automation / decreases the odds of new business formation / increases the odds of existing businesses leaving or failing. So the intelligent thing to do is to remove all artificial costs of running a business, removing the government taxes and regulations of business and labour, manipulation of money and interest rates and allow people to work out a natural fluid solution to these questions, not to try and hammer in the idea that those who work are going to be forced to pay for those who do not.
Those who work already provide everybody with all the goods and services that everybody needs, the contribution of any business to the society starts with the product/service the company produces with the added benefit of the person running the company being self reliant and not needing any form of help from anybody. Society should want to encourage people to start businesses and to do that it should remove the barriers to entry, reduce the costs of starting and running business, remove barriers, remove taxes, remove regulations.
The chips will still fall where they may but at least without government interference individuals will start businesses helping other individuals just like themselves. There *will* be separation of companies, some catering to the top tier of buyers, some to the middle and many (most) to the bottom tier. This should be happening now but it cannot because the companies in the top/middle tier prevent the ones at the bottom from competing and they are using the power of the State to destroy the competition by all means, including taxes, laws and money and interest rate manipulation.
Since nobody else paid attention to the 'last ten years' time limit... I would like to play Global Thermonuclear War or tic tac toe, but not a friendly game of chess.
people **on the whole** can be squeezed indefinitely with no consequence
- you are under impression that a company that increases its efficiency at doing what its doing and minimizes the costs is somehow 'squeezing' people. I don't think so at all. A company that maximizes its efficiency is the company that improves the standard of living of people who are using the product/service of that company and on the macro economic level that company minimizes the amount of resources needed to perform its function.
There are literally millions of people working in shipping and logistics, hopefully we can reduce that amount by 99%, so that only 1% of people doing the work today are required for that work 20 years from now and almost everything will be automated. That's the goal of any company - to increase its efficiency to the maximum to the point where there are no inefficiencies left.
Inefficiency is in human labour, in the expenses induced by the system and the government, the labour and business laws, regulations, price controls, money controls, everything that reduces the overall efficiency of the system. This has to be minimized, we have to reduce inefficiency to the maximum to get the most profit out of serving the most markets.
Personally I want to develop a monopoly in my market, to take 100% of everybody's business. Let's say for the sake of the argument that I am successful at that, that there is no competitor left because nobody can compete on price, quality, everything (at least for some time) until some breakthrough shifts the balance towards an innovator.
So lets say that 100,000,000 people are out of work because I replaced them *all* with my perfect (for the time being) business machine that does *all* of that work and requires no other human intervention. Would you say that it is a bad thing or a good thing?
AFAIC that's the best possible outcome. It also means that the only way to 'unsqueeze' those people is by breaking my business into pieces, destroying it so that it is inefficient and by creating this artificial inefficiency to supply many people with a reason for them to exist.
They existed and were able to feed themselves because they were an inefficient machine, I replaced them all with an efficient machine, they have to find something else to do, as they are people and they can adopt to the changing environment.
On the other hand they can attack the machine and try to destroy it to reduce efficiency to gain a piece of that efficiency for their own income. This of-course reduces economic power of the rest of the population, who was now enjoying the most efficient way of getting that service.
Somebody here will argue that the most efficient (biggest in their respective field) businesses need to be taxed more to supply the inefficient people with a form of subsistence. I disagree entirely, there is no reason to build all that efficiency in the first place if you are then going to add the inefficiency back on top of it.
Let's say I run a 100% efficient business, where I am making only enough money to survive and no other salary can be paid at all because the prices are absolute bottom without any space in them to pay another dollar in salaries to anybody else. That business cannot survive long, all businesses need savings to survive, otherwise they have no money to innovate, no money to survive through economic downturns. So an efficient business also has to have a healthy return on interest to allow for those savings. To take those savings away from a business to feed the inefficient is the same thing as running a business without savings at all, not allowing for any unexpected economic slow down.
So what you are calling 'squeezing' I am calling evolution, development and progress, minimizing entropy to achieve the maximum economic outcome.
A path to survive for people has to come through freedom from all forms of government regulations, so that new business ideas can be executed without red tape and without the added artificial inefficiency of regulations and taxes.
You are under impression that for some unfathomable reason people are supposed to be guaranteed positions at businesses, I can't figure out why you (and many others) think that. I run a company, if I can automate some task away I am going to do that and if at some point it means that somebody loses a job (more like a new person doesn't get hired) then that's a great day for me. It means I achieved more efficiency and freed another task from unnecessary human intervention. The company runs more efficiently, the company is my machine that I am building hopefully to make some money, if it can run without human workers that would be fantastic.
From my point of view this technology of sorting parcels with robots is great, it increases productivity of the company (of the owner) and allows him to sort more parcels for the same amount of money so he doesn't have to charge more for that providing competition, pushing prices for shipping lower while quality and predictability of shipment go up. Win win win.
The humans are always a temporary solution to any issue until there is a better solution.
What we really ought to do is declare free communication a human right
- 'free' as in without paying? Why is something without paying a 'human right' exactly? Or is it communications without legal barriers and without government oppression? Then you are onto something, that should be done and not only for communications.
Copyrights and patents prevent speech, prevent innovation, prevent progress.
The only real free market approach to protecting your ideas is a trade secret, that's all. Government must not be allowed to meddle with businesses and protect business models and practices.
When somebody uses his savings to start a woodshop, as an example, if they fail and business dies out and they are out of their investment, there won't be government standing there with a handout, and it shouldn't be - it's personal risk.
Same with copyrights and patents - these are government handouts at the expense of the larger free market economy and it makes no sense to protect one type of investment over any other type. Government shouldn't be subsidising any businesses at all ever (banks, insurance companies and Solyndra come to mind).
Abolish copyrights and patents and check out the link I posted in this comment, it leads to my other comment on the same topic, but it's not my comment that is of interest, it's the response to my comment, with/. readers being vehemently opposed to the idea.
Why are/. readers opposed to this? Because they think that their business model is more important than a woodshop founder's business model. So the woodshop or a restaurant founder can go eat shit if his business fails (and a woodshop and especially a restaurant is a very location based heavy business, if you are in the wrong location, your business will fail, while on the Internet, businesses have access to near global markets, so there is a huge advantage for the software/book/movie/audio, etc. types of businesses there).
It's hypocrisy, it's short-sightedness, it's hubris and it shows the true colours (as in character) of the crowd.
The American Way is supposed to be the way of self reliance, absence of oppression, individualism, basic individual human freedoms from being controlled by the oppressive collective. That's what built the USA, that's why people used to come to that country. That country and that idea is long gone.
The time to be ashamed to be an American is long gone, way past due. American shame started with dismantling of individual rights during the Sherman Act era, then the IRS, income taxation (so theft of human life through theft of the productive output of a human), money destruction (paper fiat in stead of real money), all of the meddling of government in private property, in business, in labour, creating a huge government machine to destroy every possible freedom people used to enjoy in that country. The time to be ashamed is long past due, why be ashamed now? FBI shouldn't even exist in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't care at this point, will not be abused by systemd anymore.
Goodbye and thanks for all the fish.
The companies will lose their ability to play the game they're currently paying if people have no money to spend. If I run a company selling a product, I do not care if the money someone is using to buy said product comes from wages or income transfers.
- of-course you do, that's because if the money comes from the sources that are unable to actually pay for that money (as in take that money back into their pocket in order to sell you a good or a service, either directly or through a company they work for) then that money is counterfeit, it cannot be used for anything. It's exactly as the Chinese holding all of these American bonds that cannot be used because Americans run trade deficits of 500 BILLION USD/year, so they have nothing to offer for all that money and if a foreign company comes to USA to buy some more or less valuable property (a port for example), the American government can block that purchase as has happened before and thus render that money useless.
It's exactly the same concept - what good is a piece of paper from somebody who cannot back it by any production or commodity or anything useful for that matter?
That piece of paper in itself is nothing at all, the only value is in the productive output of companies. The people owning the companies can trade *with each other* and completely forgo this dance of money being taken from them, handed out to the beggars, who then pretend they have purchasing power because they have something their collective government stole for them.
the bulk of the entire economy will collapse if there is no money for consumers to spend
- so what? What does that mean even for people who own the productive capacity and can exchange *with each other*, they don't need this energy and product consuming mob, they only need others exactly like them, who are productive so that they can trade with them legitimately and equitably.
Automation by its very nature means if we want to maintain economies in their current fashion we cannot continue to measure the worth of an individual in terms of productivity,
- who said 'we want that'? What is it that you want? The population to keep procreating so that a tiny minority of the population is oppressed for the purposes of providing living accommodations, food, clothing, energy, medicine, entertainment, transportation to that population?
Why? Who cares if it is 8billion or 1 billion or 10 million? It doesn't matter, the only thing that matters is that there is no oppression of anybody by anybody under any circumstance for any purpose.
without income they have no capital to start companies.
- you are right. Who destroyed the savings if not the government that manipulates interest rates and currency supply, creating the shit pie of inflation and selling the idea to you as if they have done a gigantic favour for you? The capital is destroyed by the collectivist mob, the mob should be stopped and not allowed to do so. Capital represents the time and life of other people, who have put their time and life into it, the collective is not worth that type of effort only individuals are, and individuals are the ones ground to a pulp by the collective.
Second, the vast majority of people do not posses the skills to run a company that's capable of efficiently competing with large corporations
- who said they need to compete with large corporations? They don't need to, they need to work in their niche, supplying people on their social strata with the solutions those people need. However if the prices by the large corporations are already so low that nobody can compete then where exactly is the problem? If competition is truly impossible because the products are as cheap as they can possibly get (which is not true) then the corporations *are* doing everything to supply the society with everything it needs already.
If the p
The people who own productive capacity have no reason to provide their productive output to people who produce nothing, that is not an exchange, that is simple robbery/extortion 'by law'. Well, laws based on mobocracy, where the mob only offers one thing in return - not to steal and murder, is not a good exchange. The trade only makes sense between two productive parties (people who have something to offer to each other, where both parties enter the trade voluntarily, without duress, oppression, coercion, reliance on violence).
If you own a fully automated factory that produces shoes you are not interested in giving your product away, you are interested in exchanging with somebody else for food, energy, entertainment, transportation, medical care, housing and such.
If the people who give you money for your shoes are getting that money from you in the first place, these people cannot provide you with food, energy, entertainment, transportation, medical care, housing and such. Their only offer is not to murder you, should you not cooperate with them while they are taking your shoes away (that is what they are doing with taxes).
So for you it makes sense to trade with other productive people, those who run farms, energy production, transportation companies, builders, etc.
If a large portion of people are only alive because they can take from you by the force of the 'law', then you want to do everything to avoid that law being applied to you. I hope this is clear (or do I have to draw a picture?)
The people who live off of productivity of others returning nothing in exchange should expect that their conditions will not be stable. Children have no autonomy of their own though they are taken care of by the parents for free. They are not legal voters, they cannot dictate what they eat, where they live, how they are cared for, etc.
The unproductive population will find itself in the same situation - their vote will not count, their voice will not count, they think it is unfair, bit they are nothing but children, taken care of by the grown ups (and in nature the grown ups sometimes kill their children).
If you think this is unfortunate, then think of an alternative to creating a situation where some are forced to pay for all. That is not going to work out in the long run no matter what political system you think you can set up. Eventually the reality will sink in, automated production also needs resources, it is not actually free.
The alternative is to remove the taxes and laws that were set up before automation was widespread. These taxes and laws now prevent people from taking care of themselves by starting their own businesses, that can be created to take care of the needs of people in different social strata, and people *are* in different social strata, we are not equal, never were equal and will never be equal. We can aim for equality under law, but this actually goes against the desires of the mob.
The mob wants unequal application of the law, it wants to take away more from those who have more, not even proportionally more but completely in proportionally more. The mob will find it more and more difficult to do so going forward.
How about replacing Jane Kim with a robot (or an inanimate carbon rod), it would cost nothing just sitting there and so it would create all sorts of savings on idiotic proposals for people of San Francisco.
You got 'a lot in return' because you are paying much less than what you are getting, so you are living on a subsidy. On the other hand there are people who are getting much more than what they are getting, so they are subsidising you, which is why this is an injustice, oppression and slavery - collectivism.
So be smart, position yourself to profit from this shift, make sure this works *for* you, not against you, make sure to come up on top, don't just dwell on it, use it to win.
And with all those laws do you see ancient Rome around anymore?
Don't need idiotic laws for this, with automation this will become reality all by itself, with robot trucks driving at night because there is so much less traffic at that time in the first place.
libertarianism
- well sure it is emotion, emotion of not wanting to be a slave to the collective. Anti-slavery emotion, so to speak.
The moral of the story is clear: don't hire Americans, don't hire anybody in the West. They actually believe they are owed a job by a business, that's very interesting but also not something a business wants to deal with.
By the way, discrimination is a human right. You don't lose your right to discriminate just because you run a business, but the way the Western laws are structured: you DO lose your right to discriminate and then you can be a target for various lawsuits based on this oppression of the individual rights by the collectivist system.
So make sure not to hire in the countries that have these types of oppressive regimes and laws in place.
Oh, this is a wonderful comment!
Also I suggest that people who are unusually tall should be shortened at the knees because they can move unfairly faster than others and see further. People with 20/20 vision should have their sight reduced artificially by mandatory cloudy glasses to make it fair for everybody and people who are just too damn pretty should have acid splashed into their faces to make life more equitable on this planet for all.
Those are not necessities. Would you defend rich people being the first to have food and water and shelter?
- of-course I would, most obviously people with more means can get food and water and shelter faster and of higher quality than others. Wealth is a way to set priorities just as well as to do a number of other things, why wouldn't the rich have first access to food, water and shelter?
Wealth is an abstract concept. In nature noone owns anything
- you own your body if you can protect it. You own your territory if you can protect it. There is no difference between nature and us, we are nature.
If you don't own anything then why would you mind if I decided to kill you for food (don't worry, I am a vegetarian, but I may sell your body to others for food). So you see, your property starts with possession of your own body and mind and from there it extends to the work that you do in your life because that work takes your personal time, the time of your life.
Your work is time taken out of your life that you are spending not on pleasure but on work (maybe your work is pleasure for you but that doesn't really change anything). To take what you have worked for and to distribute it to others, who did not do this work is the injustice of oppression imposed by the collectivism that we are observing here and the more of that is happening the more people will fight against it in every possible way.
I am all for people outsourcing, automating, avoiding and evading every tax they can because that is the fight against the oppression and violence of the collectivist mob and it needs to be done.
I've been on this site since around 1998, registered the account within a couple of years I think. As an anarcho capitalist/objectivist I don't see what it is you are seeing (this site becoming more libertarian minded, which means less Statist, less collectivist). For whatever reason the population here is quite happy to be part of a 'larger than self' collective and it's quite happy to use collectivism for protectionism, for taxation and redistribution and such. Where have you seen this shift towards 'Randian garbage' as you call it? Individuals are mostly drowned out in the overall collectivist noise here.
There is no such thing as 'essential service', the entire concept is what created the monopolies / oligopolies that are found around the world. Nothing is an 'essential service' (what I mean is that nothing should ever be touched/supplied by any form of government).
This ideology is what lead to the always rising prices and by the way, what the hell is 'infinite inflation of essential services'?
Inflation is expansion, inflation of money is expansion of money supply. You are talking about prices, prices *rise* and *fall*, they don't expand and contract. Inflation around the world is caused by expansion of the money supply and given the status of USD around the world, inflation today is mostly caused by the USA Federal reserve and Congress.
Probably Apple wants to prevent people from building iPhones from parts like this guy did in China.
It's your choice, the choices are made by millions of individual people every day who buy Apple products, whatever.
that would be fantastic, wouldn't it? I could spend my days having fun while the robot would do my work for me. Where is the problem?
John Galt?
If you're running a monopoly, and you're running 100% efficient, in what world would you be "making only enough money to survive"?
- you would accumulate savings certainly. However if you pay yourself a salary enough to live on and the rest of the money is always recycled back into the business to ensure that it runs at 100% efficiency what you have then is a fully self sustainable business that consumes almost completely all of the revenue that it generates in order to operate.
Basically if the operational expenses are almost exactly the revenues then there is almost nothing left after all of the expenses are paid. In that case what possible taxes can be applied to a business like that?
Any amount of taxes only would add to the cost of the end product/service and the result is a less than efficient system, where the consumers of the product/service are paying artificially more for getting the product/service.
In reality many businesses operate that way today already, of-course there are larger than average salaries going to the top executives but remove that and you have pretty much nothing left to remove, if you remove more then the business becomes less efficient/prices go up.
So to say that the businesses that will automate all of these jobs away will 'pay taxes' is nonsense, there is no money to pay any taxes. Any taxes added by the government will come out of the pockets of the consumers of the end product/service of the business.
In any case, the so called 'society' will not be able to extract money from businesses to pay for any type of so called 'basic income' or any form of welfare for people who don't work. The money will be extracted from everybody who is *not* a business, so it's quite simple: businesses actually generate all of the wealth and hire all of the people. Adding artificial cost to human labour increases the odds of automation / decreases the odds of new business formation / increases the odds of existing businesses leaving or failing. So the intelligent thing to do is to remove all artificial costs of running a business, removing the government taxes and regulations of business and labour, manipulation of money and interest rates and allow people to work out a natural fluid solution to these questions, not to try and hammer in the idea that those who work are going to be forced to pay for those who do not.
Those who work already provide everybody with all the goods and services that everybody needs, the contribution of any business to the society starts with the product/service the company produces with the added benefit of the person running the company being self reliant and not needing any form of help from anybody. Society should want to encourage people to start businesses and to do that it should remove the barriers to entry, reduce the costs of starting and running business, remove barriers, remove taxes, remove regulations.
The chips will still fall where they may but at least without government interference individuals will start businesses helping other individuals just like themselves. There *will* be separation of companies, some catering to the top tier of buyers, some to the middle and many (most) to the bottom tier. This should be happening now but it cannot because the companies in the top/middle tier prevent the ones at the bottom from competing and they are using the power of the State to destroy the competition by all means, including taxes, laws and money and interest rate manipulation.
Since nobody else paid attention to the 'last ten years' time limit... I would like to play Global Thermonuclear War or tic tac toe, but not a friendly game of chess.
War Games, motherfuckers.
people **on the whole** can be squeezed indefinitely with no consequence
- you are under impression that a company that increases its efficiency at doing what its doing and minimizes the costs is somehow 'squeezing' people. I don't think so at all. A company that maximizes its efficiency is the company that improves the standard of living of people who are using the product/service of that company and on the macro economic level that company minimizes the amount of resources needed to perform its function.
There are literally millions of people working in shipping and logistics, hopefully we can reduce that amount by 99%, so that only 1% of people doing the work today are required for that work 20 years from now and almost everything will be automated. That's the goal of any company - to increase its efficiency to the maximum to the point where there are no inefficiencies left.
Inefficiency is in human labour, in the expenses induced by the system and the government, the labour and business laws, regulations, price controls, money controls, everything that reduces the overall efficiency of the system. This has to be minimized, we have to reduce inefficiency to the maximum to get the most profit out of serving the most markets.
Personally I want to develop a monopoly in my market, to take 100% of everybody's business. Let's say for the sake of the argument that I am successful at that, that there is no competitor left because nobody can compete on price, quality, everything (at least for some time) until some breakthrough shifts the balance towards an innovator.
So lets say that 100,000,000 people are out of work because I replaced them *all* with my perfect (for the time being) business machine that does *all* of that work and requires no other human intervention. Would you say that it is a bad thing or a good thing?
AFAIC that's the best possible outcome. It also means that the only way to 'unsqueeze' those people is by breaking my business into pieces, destroying it so that it is inefficient and by creating this artificial inefficiency to supply many people with a reason for them to exist.
They existed and were able to feed themselves because they were an inefficient machine, I replaced them all with an efficient machine, they have to find something else to do, as they are people and they can adopt to the changing environment.
On the other hand they can attack the machine and try to destroy it to reduce efficiency to gain a piece of that efficiency for their own income. This of-course reduces economic power of the rest of the population, who was now enjoying the most efficient way of getting that service.
Somebody here will argue that the most efficient (biggest in their respective field) businesses need to be taxed more to supply the inefficient people with a form of subsistence. I disagree entirely, there is no reason to build all that efficiency in the first place if you are then going to add the inefficiency back on top of it.
Let's say I run a 100% efficient business, where I am making only enough money to survive and no other salary can be paid at all because the prices are absolute bottom without any space in them to pay another dollar in salaries to anybody else. That business cannot survive long, all businesses need savings to survive, otherwise they have no money to innovate, no money to survive through economic downturns. So an efficient business also has to have a healthy return on interest to allow for those savings. To take those savings away from a business to feed the inefficient is the same thing as running a business without savings at all, not allowing for any unexpected economic slow down.
So what you are calling 'squeezing' I am calling evolution, development and progress, minimizing entropy to achieve the maximum economic outcome.
A path to survive for people has to come through freedom from all forms of government regulations, so that new business ideas can be executed without red tape and without the added artificial inefficiency of regulations and taxes.
You are under impression that for some unfathomable reason people are supposed to be guaranteed positions at businesses, I can't figure out why you (and many others) think that. I run a company, if I can automate some task away I am going to do that and if at some point it means that somebody loses a job (more like a new person doesn't get hired) then that's a great day for me. It means I achieved more efficiency and freed another task from unnecessary human intervention. The company runs more efficiently, the company is my machine that I am building hopefully to make some money, if it can run without human workers that would be fantastic.
From my point of view this technology of sorting parcels with robots is great, it increases productivity of the company (of the owner) and allows him to sort more parcels for the same amount of money so he doesn't have to charge more for that providing competition, pushing prices for shipping lower while quality and predictability of shipment go up. Win win win.
The humans are always a temporary solution to any issue until there is a better solution.
What we really ought to do is declare free communication a human right
- 'free' as in without paying? Why is something without paying a 'human right' exactly? Or is it communications without legal barriers and without government oppression? Then you are onto something, that should be done and not only for communications.
I said forever that copyrights and patents must be abolished.
I will post it again:
Copyrights and patents prevent speech, prevent innovation, prevent progress.
The only real free market approach to protecting your ideas is a trade secret, that's all. Government must not be allowed to meddle with businesses and protect business models and practices.
When somebody uses his savings to start a woodshop, as an example, if they fail and business dies out and they are out of their investment, there won't be government standing there with a handout, and it shouldn't be - it's personal risk.
Same with copyrights and patents - these are government handouts at the expense of the larger free market economy and it makes no sense to protect one type of investment over any other type. Government shouldn't be subsidising any businesses at all ever (banks, insurance companies and Solyndra come to mind).
Abolish copyrights and patents and check out the link I posted in this comment, it leads to my other comment on the same topic, but it's not my comment that is of interest, it's the response to my comment, with /. readers being vehemently opposed to the idea.
Why are /. readers opposed to this? Because they think that their business model is more important than a woodshop founder's business model. So the woodshop or a restaurant founder can go eat shit if his business fails (and a woodshop and especially a restaurant is a very location based heavy business, if you are in the wrong location, your business will fail, while on the Internet, businesses have access to near global markets, so there is a huge advantage for the software/book/movie/audio, etc. types of businesses there).
It's hypocrisy, it's short-sightedness, it's hubris and it shows the true colours (as in character) of the crowd.
The American Way is supposed to be the way of self reliance, absence of oppression, individualism, basic individual human freedoms from being controlled by the oppressive collective. That's what built the USA, that's why people used to come to that country. That country and that idea is long gone.
The time to be ashamed to be an American is long gone, way past due. American shame started with dismantling of individual rights during the Sherman Act era, then the IRS, income taxation (so theft of human life through theft of the productive output of a human), money destruction (paper fiat in stead of real money), all of the meddling of government in private property, in business, in labour, creating a huge government machine to destroy every possible freedom people used to enjoy in that country. The time to be ashamed is long past due, why be ashamed now? FBI shouldn't even exist in the first place.