No, I pay for my insurance individually but yes, government health care is oppression, not only 'in my mind', it is oppression objectively. It is oppression of an individual, who is forced to participate in it through taxation and who has no choice to opt out.
you seem to be implying that, to compete with automation, humans should be willing to be treated like dirt.
- no, I am implying that the cost of litigation is a consideration for any employer *regardless of the merits*. Anybody can sue anybody else if there is merit, that's one thing, however the labour laws make it too easy for an employee to sue an employer for things like 'wrongful termination' and that's a garbage claim. Same with 'human rights' related lawsuits, there is no such thing as a 'human right to work', human rights are protections against government oppression, not entitlements for the employees and obligations upon the employers, yet that's exactly what 'human rights' lawsuits against employers are: they didn't do something the government puts an obligation on them to do, to satisfy an entitlement that the government deems an employee is supposed to receive from an employer.
Being treated like dirt is one thing, and nobody has to work for an employer who treats people like dirt, being provided government entitlements because an employee and employer are working together is something else, that's one of the 3 main reasons why I outsource most of my development to a different country.
- I completely disagree, individual freedom is more relevant and more important than individual life, i.e., an individual should be able to do with his or her life as he or she pleases, but they should not get any subsidies from anybody based on the oppression of any government apparatus.
This is not about GDP, this is not about society, this is about individual freedoms and I am 100% against anybody being forced to subsidise anybody else, under those conditions buying health insurance is a decision that would be taken much more seriously than if everybody was oppressed by the state and forced to pay into it.
So then you are looking at specialized equipment thinking it can replace a human at a generic job? I think you are doing a couple of things wring here: underestimating our desire to build generic robots while overestimating capacity of specialized equipment to replace people at generic jobs within newer companies that don't have the capital to acquire or build very specialized equipment. In either case I think my points still stand, if the equipment is too specialized and expensive, humans can compete if they can provide quality, if the equipment is so general purpose and ubiquitous that anybody can afford it with a few months of pay, then people would be acquiring it to rent it out to businesses or to do jobs just like the owner operator truck drivers of today.
As to taxes and regulations, obviously they are making human labour less competitive compared to capital, is this even a question? A robot will not sue the company for 'wrongful termination' or for 'sexual harassment' or anything else for that matter (regardless of the merits). Regardless of what/. says, robots will not form unions,there will be no mandate for payroll tax or minimum wage or medical insurance, etc. These are government inventions that make people uncompetitive against labour.
We should hope that AI can learn to code and do it well enough that I could converse with it in a human language, define the problem as I see it and it would immediately (it would be immediate, right) give me a number of ready solutions to pick from. The amount of new product development that could take place would be staggering, we could quickly realise any idea, I hope that the AI would be good enough at that point to do user support and maintenance for the selected solution.
You, guys, are basically looking at it all wrong. Why shouldn't we desire to have systems at our disposal that would be good enough to create software (and at some point hardware) that we could 'program' by explaining high level requirements to a machine? The machine would have to ask more questions, the testing would reveal problems, the machine could do support and maintenance. I see this as a huge net positive, not as something that would hurt us but as something that would save us from decades of sitting on ass, getting less and less active over time, going blind from the screen... And we could never achieve everything we needed anyway at the speed of a human coder.
The script you are running is a bastardized conglomeration of react and xpath that doesn't even close matching brackets, I am not worried until you start killing flies...
No, US bonds are the definition of ponzi scam that even Madoff would be awed by. U S A cannot return the borrowed VALUE of the money, that is what the Fed and the rest of the central banks are involved in, global inflation, writing off the debt without admitting the technicality of the default. The actual USA debt is all of the federal, state, municipal, corporate and personal borrowing that exceeds 221 trillion dollars and cannot be repaid under any circumstances.
Is this the type of an issue you are thinking about when you cast your vote? Who out there is thinking: "I really need the government to exist so that it could set up laws to prevent people from buying concert tickets with bots"?
The actual headline should be: USA government is still able to run the ponzi scams such as SS, Medicare, all other Welfare payments as well as waging its wars thanks to Apple and others who are *STILL* purchasing and holding their bonds.
Apple is getting $6 from each individual in interest rates over *YEARS*? Think about it: over *YEARS* Apple has gained *ONLY* $6 per person while buying insane amount of US debt.
Apple is losing money in this transaction, it could have used that money much more effectively in many other ways and instead they are buying US Treasury debt.
Apple and the rest of the bond holders: what are you going to do when there is a mass exodus from the US debt? Will you be the first in line to dump it? I think you are not going to be the preferred seller.
To the contrary, the Fed employed a large variety of new techniques.
- all of these so called 'new techniques' are the same old technique of printing money. The so called 'operation twist' (it should be called 'operation screw you' instead) was about the Fed taking upon itself to absorb the long side of the curve, buying long term bonds and selling short term bills, which means turning the US debt into short term, variable rate mortgage. Yeah, that worked so well in the housing market, why not do it for the entire government debt, right?
USA is *not* on any path to increase interest rates. That's buying into the nonsensical government propaganda hook line and sinker. USA SHOULD have normal interest rates and should have NEVER went to 1% with Greenspan and to 0 with Bernanke.
Until Bernanke, Greenspan has proven himself to be the worst idiot and after him Bernanke has proven that no amount of idiocy can be unmatched a worse idiot and then Yellen has proven that gender doesn't matter at all, idiots come in all forms, sizes and genders.
Greenspan was an absolute disaster, Bernanke was an absolute disaster, Yellen is an absolute disaster in a skirt. What's funny is that at least Greenspan admits it *now*, maybe it will take Bernanke another 10 years to admit it as well. Yellen will never admit it.
Deflation seems like it helps people who have already accumulated wealth. Inflation seems like it helps people who have not accumulated wealth.
- completely wrong. Deflation favours savings and puts people on the right track to accumulate wealth and to use it productively while inflation favours spending *instead* of production, it gets the borrowers off the hook, because they don't have to give back what they actually borrowed, it hurts savers, encourages borrowing for spending and because it is done with the hand of the government (through the Treasury and the Fed and other banks working together) it moves new money to the preferred and connected people, while causing rising prices for everybody else.
Inflation favours the politically connected and hurts the rest.
- nonsense, that's an unqualified statement. Deflation is not worse than inflation, it is only inconvenient for the debtors and of-course USA government is the biggest debtor out there, but in general USA federal, state, municipal governments are all debtors, also USA corporations and individual are debtors. Of-course now that USA is this unproductive and cannot feed itself without 500Billion/year trade deficit deflation is worse for USA that inflation because Americans want to write off the value of the debt without paying for it.
Deflation increases the value of your savings, thus discouraging you from working
- and yet in the 19th century, on the gold (not standard, just on the gold), USA economy was actually growing and became the most productive economy, turning USA into a net exporter nation from being an importer and an afterthought to the European countries.
Currencies are stable when the money supply expands at about the same rate as the productivity of the country's citizens
- nice try, Orwell, currencies are stable when their value does not fall over time.
This completely Orwellian nonsense redefinition of stability as of something that is losing value at a constant rate is complete garbage that the mainstream and government propaganda has pushed over the last half a century to produce completely economically illiterate population (such as I am observing here now).
The other reason why Orwell would be proud of you today is that you actually bought into the 'increasing productivity of citizens' from your nonsensical government. USA productivity is so ridiculously low that it cannot feed itself without a yearly injection of over 500 Billion USD, which has been more or less the trade deficit for at least 20 years now.
The whole reason we abandoned the gold standard is that it's really stupid to base your economy's health on the gamble that the amount of gold miners dug out of the ground each year would match the rate of growth of your country's GDP.
- Ha ha ha ha, you abandoned the gold standard because your expenses have grown so far beyond your ability to produce that you had to *default* on the dollar and completely get away from the principle of sound money so that you could print your debts away, not for any other reason whatsoever.
As to the amount of gold, it's absolutely irrelevant, the year to year global production increases the total amount of accessible gold by about 1.5%. If USA actually wanted a *STABLE* inflation rate, it could *EASILY* stick to the global gold mining rate.
As to the number of recessions per year, all of them were due to government manipulation of the money supply, introduction/going of off of fiat (talking about the 19th century), introduction of the Federal reserve in 1913 and allowing the Fed to monetize Treasury debt in 1917, printing crazy amounts of money to buy bad UK debt from France in the late 1920s, which caused the bubble that blew up and that recession was turned into depression by Hoover's and FDR's policies of more monetary expansion and other intervention policies.
1971 default simply removed the remaining pretence to any form of stable money and allowed the government to increase inflation to the levels that businesses found it no longer acceptable to try and work within that system and moved production out of the country (and of-course the government growth became unstoppable with the unlimited printing powers, so taxes, laws, regulations became unstoppable as well, normal businesses could not compete with government connected and sponsored ones).
As to Bitcoin, it acts purely as money and has 0 intrinsic value (it has no value beyond being money), so it cannot replace real money that has value whether it is used as money or not. However this does not mean that Bitcoin cannot be used as a very interesting speculative instrument.
Except that the actual USA debt is over 221 Trillion (counting federal, State, municipal, corporate and personal). You are completely underestimating the actual debt, that's first, secondly you are greatly overestimating the earning potential (revenue that can be collected). You are also completely underestimating the inflation level and employment, basically the numbers you are playing with are nonsensical. Of-course the value of USA as a land mass, all of the untapped resources, companies that can still be bought out, things of that nature certainly are valuable, yet what exactly are you proposing to do at this point? USA already mortgaged all of that out, a person can be evicted from his house, will USA population be evicted from the Continent?
If a factory will be able to purchase a humanoid android capable of learning and doing various types of jobs and the price for this robot would be competitive against a few months of salary of a single employee, then we are talking about a society so automated and advanced that even individuals who are not running a factory at a time would be able to purchase similar robots. If an individual is capable of purchasing a robot, an individual would be able to rent that robot at a much lower rate to a factory.
My point is that all of these predictions on how automation will affect individual humans who are all of a sudden unemployable are based on an idea that basically general purpose robots are so affordable that they are almost always preferable to human labour.
If that's the case then individuals will be able to own the robots and the wages of a robot would be much lower than wages of a human, again making it more economical for factories to rent robots from people, who would then not search for their own employment but would act as brokers (agents) to sell labour of their robots.
This is similar to truck owner operators of today, except in this case the robot owner operator would not even have to drive the robot.
OTOH if the robot is less than capable, then the owner operator could remotely control the robot for some parts of the work.
Again and again, people talking about these issues are really not paying attention to the reasons as to why automation today is more economical than hiring people, I am trying to get them to notice that in reality it is the taxes, rules, regulations and inflation (money printing) as well as interest rate manipulation, all done by governments that make labour more expensive than capital investment and it does not have to be that way at all.
My position is that if we get the government out of business, out of money and out of interest rates, allow the people to be free from government oppression, get rid of income and wealth taxes and get rid of government sponsored wars and all other forms of redistribution then the economy can accommodate any number of workers because automation is not free.
Automation is a form of capital investment, some forms of automation are simpler than others. Writing a script to automate server restart and network configuration is much simpler than acquiring a humanoid android capable of arbitrary tasks. It's not impossible, it's just expensive.
A humanoid android will have an upfront cost comparable to other machinery and any company has a choice to incur that cost or to avoid it by hiring some employees and having operational costs as opposed to capital costs.
Capital costs are more difficult to justify for a company anyway because they are much larger than any operational costs. Putting together a fully automated factory takes an effort and a cost, putting together a partially automated factory can be done much faster and the operational costs would be much lower than the initial capital investments into a fully automated factory. Of-course over time more and more could be automated in a factory, my position is that in a free market capitalist system there is no reason why there shouldn't be more factories started by businesses if they had access to some capital savings.
In today's environment there is very little capital savings in the system available to any new businesses, the investments are absorbed by the giant government borrowing and spending machine and the fake ratings provided by the bought rating agencies are not helping the matter, making the government debt look much more attractive than any private investment because it *seems* that government debt is risk free.
Of-course in reality government debt is not simply *not* risk free, it is the riskiest of all assets.
As to communism, obviously it never worked and always caused mass starvation, mass murder, mass oppression, mass suffering. It will not be different in the future, people are not ants, those of us capable of accruing massive amounts of wealth are not doing it to give it all away, they are doing it to build empires, which makes perfect sense, that's our destiny - the most capable of us build empires. Emperors can be charitable but they do not share power and giving away power is a rare thing.
So AFAIC the struggles between those of us who can and those of us who cannot will continue and this struggle and since the masses are unable to accept that they are not the ones occupying the thrones they will always end up revolting.
Of-course in the future revolting against emperors will be as dangerous (if not more dangerous) than in the past. Mass surveillance and robots, drones, automated armies will be able to put down massive revolts.
I think the only way for us not to keep murdering each other is to ensure that our system is based around free market capitalism, because free market capitalism at the very least provides tolerable (and possibly pleasurable) life styles even for people who are not exactly on the top of the highest of pyramids.
Ha, funny that you think that having bad credit is OK for somebody with no production capacity. Good luck feeding yourself once nobody takes your money in exchange for their goods anymore. You think you can restart your productivity without any capital savings and without a credit line? Sure, maybe, but it will take extraordinary sacrifice and possibly a deadly war and if your productivity is negative (USA productivity is negative given over twenty years of half a trillion dollars a year trade deficits) then you are not exactly in a position to wage a prolonged war against a productive adversary either.
I think it is perfectly fine that some people will lose their investments, I did lose quite a bit time and again, you move on and do something else.
I realise we are talking about a large percentage of population that may become economically obsolete in some time from now but I actually think that the problem only exists as long as the governments exist and try to 'help' people. Without government oppression labour *is* competitive against many forms of automation, a general purpose android capable of learning and doing what a human can do is not exactly free, it would carry a significant upfront cost, humans can compete, they just will find difficult to compete with the governments 'helping'.
I get that you are fully invested into this absolute rubbish nonsensical bullshit government main stream garbage propaganda but try to think once in your life by yourself.
There are no problems with the Chinese economy due to savings, that is garbage. Any asset bubbles are purely pricing issues formed due to government creating inflation (printing money) to buy bad USA debt (USD, bonds) from the Chinese based exporters. The economy in China is netter than ever, producing enough to feed, cloth the world.
China is a productive economy, as in it produces what people everywhere want. USA economy is based on insane unpayable debt and lack of production. I know what I prefer for an economy and it is not the one in debt that cannot produce to satisfy demand.
As to robotic workforce, it doesn't matter what property we are talking about. Somebody owns a building and keeps it up and rents it out, should 'we' take it away because it's the 'building doing the work'? Somebody owns a farm and farms there, the work is done by the land, should 'we' take away the land?
There is no difference here as to what type of a capital asset is developed and used for profit, AFAIC it is unacceptable to take away anything from the person owning the asset, how he came to its possession is mildly interesting, some develop it first hand, some get it as inheritance, doesn't matter. As long as they can maintain and keep the profitability of the asset up, they are fully within their rights to use it to generate that profit and I don't see how it is either moral or economically viable to take away from those, who own and successfully run productive (or even unproductive) assets.
My position is that it is the government that destroys value of money and causes inflation and resource mis-allocation through income and property taxation, business and labour regulation, any form of redistribution. Subtract that from the system and allow it to structure itself in purely market driven manner, many people will be able to live off of dividends and some clearly will not, however policy should not be structured around edge cases, it pulls down the entire system.
Children are expected to look after their parents in old age, for example, rather than the state providing as it would in a left wing socialist country
- so the Chinese are *more efficient at looking after the elderly* by not inserting a bureaucracy into the process where none is needed. People save as much as 50% of their income in China, they don't need children to look after them, how much do Americans save?
America - the land of pretend 'capitalism', where nobody has any capital savings.
China - the land of pretend 'communism', where people actually own capital and invest and retire once they worked enough.
in your contrived example, we should just execute Person C because they don't already own a farm and are therefore useless
- it's not contrived and it's not an example, it's a model that explains what is actually happening.
Should 'we' execute somebody? I don't think so. What is 'we'? Let me understand this, the 'we' is the collective, right, government? AFAIC 'we' shouldn't be executing anybody. The collective, the government cannot be given that type of authority over individuals, that's the ultimate oppression against individual freedom.
'We' shouldn't be executing anybody and 'we' shouldn't be oppressing anybody to provide anybody with any fruits of oppression. 'We' should stay out of people's business, 'we' shouldn't be dictating what money and interest rates are, 'we' shouldn't be preventing people from developing the economy in a private manner that corresponds to the principle of individual freedom.
How exactly the free market would solve the problem (or prevent the problem from occurring) that's up to the market to decide, market is a collection of all individual choices, but it must not be decided by oppression and coercion.
The person C may not have anything to trade but his labour, he can do that, he can trade labour (and that's what most people have - their labour) and allow person A or person B to be more productive (produce more) with this extra labour and in exchange for the labour person C can get the food.
Now, it is obvious that person A and person B may want to automate at some point and replace the exact job that the person C could have been hired to do, however the idea is that while one job is automated, this provides opportunity to use the freed labour for other jobs.
Today we have a completely distorted market, one that severely lacks savings and thus can afford very little if any capital investments, this prevents many new businesses from appearing and creating jobs that are *not automated yet*, new jobs. We are not at the end of the line here exactly, where all the things we ever wanted exist and can be purchased at low enough prices for everybody to have them.
People in position of a person C should be able to save and invest some of their savings into businesses that people like A and B run, and without inflation, rules, taxes imposed by the government the dividends from running even a mostly automated business can become substantial source of revenue for people who do not fully own businesses. The actual reason that we don't have that much of that happening today is in the government manipulation of markets, money, interest rates, income and property taxation, regulation, wars.
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No, I pay for my insurance individually but yes, government health care is oppression, not only 'in my mind', it is oppression objectively. It is oppression of an individual, who is forced to participate in it through taxation and who has no choice to opt out.
you seem to be implying that, to compete with automation, humans should be willing to be treated like dirt.
- no, I am implying that the cost of litigation is a consideration for any employer *regardless of the merits*. Anybody can sue anybody else if there is merit, that's one thing, however the labour laws make it too easy for an employee to sue an employer for things like 'wrongful termination' and that's a garbage claim. Same with 'human rights' related lawsuits, there is no such thing as a 'human right to work', human rights are protections against government oppression, not entitlements for the employees and obligations upon the employers, yet that's exactly what 'human rights' lawsuits against employers are: they didn't do something the government puts an obligation on them to do, to satisfy an entitlement that the government deems an employee is supposed to receive from an employer.
Being treated like dirt is one thing, and nobody has to work for an employer who treats people like dirt, being provided government entitlements because an employee and employer are working together is something else, that's one of the 3 main reasons why I outsource most of my development to a different country.
you want everyone to be forced to pay into
- I completely disagree, individual freedom is more relevant and more important than individual life, i.e., an individual should be able to do with his or her life as he or she pleases, but they should not get any subsidies from anybody based on the oppression of any government apparatus.
This is not about GDP, this is not about society, this is about individual freedoms and I am 100% against anybody being forced to subsidise anybody else, under those conditions buying health insurance is a decision that would be taken much more seriously than if everybody was oppressed by the state and forced to pay into it.
So, there is zero risk.
- :) You are being sarcastic I hope, I had a great chuckle (for real) reading this, hopefully you were smiling while writing that, yes?
The only 0 risk in buying government bonds is this: risk of getting back the value of the money you bought the bonds with.
So then you are looking at specialized equipment thinking it can replace a human at a generic job? I think you are doing a couple of things wring here: underestimating our desire to build generic robots while overestimating capacity of specialized equipment to replace people at generic jobs within newer companies that don't have the capital to acquire or build very specialized equipment. In either case I think my points still stand, if the equipment is too specialized and expensive, humans can compete if they can provide quality, if the equipment is so general purpose and ubiquitous that anybody can afford it with a few months of pay, then people would be acquiring it to rent it out to businesses or to do jobs just like the owner operator truck drivers of today.
As to taxes and regulations, obviously they are making human labour less competitive compared to capital, is this even a question? A robot will not sue the company for 'wrongful termination' or for 'sexual harassment' or anything else for that matter (regardless of the merits). Regardless of what /. says, robots will not form unions,there will be no mandate for payroll tax or minimum wage or medical insurance, etc. These are government inventions that make people uncompetitive against labour.
100% wrong. Scalpers make tickets available that otherwise wouldn't be to people who really need to see the show more than someone else.
We should hope that AI can learn to code and do it well enough that I could converse with it in a human language, define the problem as I see it and it would immediately (it would be immediate, right) give me a number of ready solutions to pick from. The amount of new product development that could take place would be staggering, we could quickly realise any idea, I hope that the AI would be good enough at that point to do user support and maintenance for the selected solution.
You, guys, are basically looking at it all wrong. Why shouldn't we desire to have systems at our disposal that would be good enough to create software (and at some point hardware) that we could 'program' by explaining high level requirements to a machine? The machine would have to ask more questions, the testing would reveal problems, the machine could do support and maintenance. I see this as a huge net positive, not as something that would hurt us but as something that would save us from decades of sitting on ass, getting less and less active over time, going blind from the screen... And we could never achieve everything we needed anyway at the speed of a human coder.
The script you are running is a bastardized conglomeration of react and xpath that doesn't even close matching brackets, I am not worried until you start killing flies...
No, US bonds are the definition of ponzi scam that even Madoff would be awed by. U S A cannot return the borrowed VALUE of the money, that is what the Fed and the rest of the central banks are involved in, global inflation, writing off the debt without admitting the technicality of the default. The actual USA debt is all of the federal, state, municipal, corporate and personal borrowing that exceeds 221 trillion dollars and cannot be repaid under any circumstances.
Is this the type of an issue you are thinking about when you cast your vote? Who out there is thinking: "I really need the government to exist so that it could set up laws to prevent people from buying concert tickets with bots"?
retard - government bonds are the risk free interest for when all other options are maxed out for their risk
- retard is he, who believes that government bonds are risk free rather than being most risky assets today, in a country that lives on borrowed time.
The actual headline should be: USA government is still able to run the ponzi scams such as SS, Medicare, all other Welfare payments as well as waging its wars thanks to Apple and others who are *STILL* purchasing and holding their bonds.
Apple is getting $6 from each individual in interest rates over *YEARS*? Think about it: over *YEARS* Apple has gained *ONLY* $6 per person while buying insane amount of US debt.
Apple is losing money in this transaction, it could have used that money much more effectively in many other ways and instead they are buying US Treasury debt.
Apple and the rest of the bond holders: what are you going to do when there is a mass exodus from the US debt? Will you be the first in line to dump it? I think you are not going to be the preferred seller.
To the contrary, the Fed employed a large variety of new techniques.
- all of these so called 'new techniques' are the same old technique of printing money. The so called 'operation twist' (it should be called 'operation screw you' instead) was about the Fed taking upon itself to absorb the long side of the curve, buying long term bonds and selling short term bills, which means turning the US debt into short term, variable rate mortgage. Yeah, that worked so well in the housing market, why not do it for the entire government debt, right?
USA is *not* on any path to increase interest rates. That's buying into the nonsensical government propaganda hook line and sinker. USA SHOULD have normal interest rates and should have NEVER went to 1% with Greenspan and to 0 with Bernanke.
Until Bernanke, Greenspan has proven himself to be the worst idiot and after him Bernanke has proven that no amount of idiocy can be unmatched a worse idiot and then Yellen has proven that gender doesn't matter at all, idiots come in all forms, sizes and genders.
Greenspan was an absolute disaster, Bernanke was an absolute disaster, Yellen is an absolute disaster in a skirt. What's funny is that at least Greenspan admits it *now*, maybe it will take Bernanke another 10 years to admit it as well. Yellen will never admit it.
Deflation seems like it helps people who have already accumulated wealth. Inflation seems like it helps people who have not accumulated wealth.
- completely wrong. Deflation favours savings and puts people on the right track to accumulate wealth and to use it productively while inflation favours spending *instead* of production, it gets the borrowers off the hook, because they don't have to give back what they actually borrowed, it hurts savers, encourages borrowing for spending and because it is done with the hand of the government (through the Treasury and the Fed and other banks working together) it moves new money to the preferred and connected people, while causing rising prices for everybody else.
Inflation favours the politically connected and hurts the rest.
Deflation is worse than inflation.
- nonsense, that's an unqualified statement. Deflation is not worse than inflation, it is only inconvenient for the debtors and of-course USA government is the biggest debtor out there, but in general USA federal, state, municipal governments are all debtors, also USA corporations and individual are debtors. Of-course now that USA is this unproductive and cannot feed itself without 500Billion/year trade deficit deflation is worse for USA that inflation because Americans want to write off the value of the debt without paying for it.
Deflation increases the value of your savings, thus discouraging you from working
- and yet in the 19th century, on the gold (not standard, just on the gold), USA economy was actually growing and became the most productive economy, turning USA into a net exporter nation from being an importer and an afterthought to the European countries.
Currencies are stable when the money supply expands at about the same rate as the productivity of the country's citizens
- nice try, Orwell, currencies are stable when their value does not fall over time.
This completely Orwellian nonsense redefinition of stability as of something that is losing value at a constant rate is complete garbage that the mainstream and government propaganda has pushed over the last half a century to produce completely economically illiterate population (such as I am observing here now).
The other reason why Orwell would be proud of you today is that you actually bought into the 'increasing productivity of citizens' from your nonsensical government. USA productivity is so ridiculously low that it cannot feed itself without a yearly injection of over 500 Billion USD, which has been more or less the trade deficit for at least 20 years now.
The whole reason we abandoned the gold standard is that it's really stupid to base your economy's health on the gamble that the amount of gold miners dug out of the ground each year would match the rate of growth of your country's GDP.
- Ha ha ha ha, you abandoned the gold standard because your expenses have grown so far beyond your ability to produce that you had to *default* on the dollar and completely get away from the principle of sound money so that you could print your debts away, not for any other reason whatsoever.
As to the amount of gold, it's absolutely irrelevant, the year to year global production increases the total amount of accessible gold by about 1.5%. If USA actually wanted a *STABLE* inflation rate, it could *EASILY* stick to the global gold mining rate.
As to the number of recessions per year, all of them were due to government manipulation of the money supply, introduction/going of off of fiat (talking about the 19th century), introduction of the Federal reserve in 1913 and allowing the Fed to monetize Treasury debt in 1917, printing crazy amounts of money to buy bad UK debt from France in the late 1920s, which caused the bubble that blew up and that recession was turned into depression by Hoover's and FDR's policies of more monetary expansion and other intervention policies.
1971 default simply removed the remaining pretence to any form of stable money and allowed the government to increase inflation to the levels that businesses found it no longer acceptable to try and work within that system and moved production out of the country (and of-course the government growth became unstoppable with the unlimited printing powers, so taxes, laws, regulations became unstoppable as well, normal businesses could not compete with government connected and sponsored ones).
As to Bitcoin, it acts purely as money and has 0 intrinsic value (it has no value beyond being money), so it cannot replace real money that has value whether it is used as money or not. However this does not mean that Bitcoin cannot be used as a very interesting speculative instrument.
Except that the actual USA debt is over 221 Trillion (counting federal, State, municipal, corporate and personal). You are completely underestimating the actual debt, that's first, secondly you are greatly overestimating the earning potential (revenue that can be collected). You are also completely underestimating the inflation level and employment, basically the numbers you are playing with are nonsensical. Of-course the value of USA as a land mass, all of the untapped resources, companies that can still be bought out, things of that nature certainly are valuable, yet what exactly are you proposing to do at this point? USA already mortgaged all of that out, a person can be evicted from his house, will USA population be evicted from the Continent?
If a factory will be able to purchase a humanoid android capable of learning and doing various types of jobs and the price for this robot would be competitive against a few months of salary of a single employee, then we are talking about a society so automated and advanced that even individuals who are not running a factory at a time would be able to purchase similar robots. If an individual is capable of purchasing a robot, an individual would be able to rent that robot at a much lower rate to a factory.
My point is that all of these predictions on how automation will affect individual humans who are all of a sudden unemployable are based on an idea that basically general purpose robots are so affordable that they are almost always preferable to human labour.
If that's the case then individuals will be able to own the robots and the wages of a robot would be much lower than wages of a human, again making it more economical for factories to rent robots from people, who would then not search for their own employment but would act as brokers (agents) to sell labour of their robots.
This is similar to truck owner operators of today, except in this case the robot owner operator would not even have to drive the robot.
OTOH if the robot is less than capable, then the owner operator could remotely control the robot for some parts of the work.
Again and again, people talking about these issues are really not paying attention to the reasons as to why automation today is more economical than hiring people, I am trying to get them to notice that in reality it is the taxes, rules, regulations and inflation (money printing) as well as interest rate manipulation, all done by governments that make labour more expensive than capital investment and it does not have to be that way at all.
For sure, I am happy with my OnePlus, will buy another one once this one is totally dead.
My position is that if we get the government out of business, out of money and out of interest rates, allow the people to be free from government oppression, get rid of income and wealth taxes and get rid of government sponsored wars and all other forms of redistribution then the economy can accommodate any number of workers because automation is not free.
Automation is a form of capital investment, some forms of automation are simpler than others. Writing a script to automate server restart and network configuration is much simpler than acquiring a humanoid android capable of arbitrary tasks. It's not impossible, it's just expensive.
A humanoid android will have an upfront cost comparable to other machinery and any company has a choice to incur that cost or to avoid it by hiring some employees and having operational costs as opposed to capital costs.
Capital costs are more difficult to justify for a company anyway because they are much larger than any operational costs. Putting together a fully automated factory takes an effort and a cost, putting together a partially automated factory can be done much faster and the operational costs would be much lower than the initial capital investments into a fully automated factory. Of-course over time more and more could be automated in a factory, my position is that in a free market capitalist system there is no reason why there shouldn't be more factories started by businesses if they had access to some capital savings.
In today's environment there is very little capital savings in the system available to any new businesses, the investments are absorbed by the giant government borrowing and spending machine and the fake ratings provided by the bought rating agencies are not helping the matter, making the government debt look much more attractive than any private investment because it *seems* that government debt is risk free.
Of-course in reality government debt is not simply *not* risk free, it is the riskiest of all assets.
As to communism, obviously it never worked and always caused mass starvation, mass murder, mass oppression, mass suffering. It will not be different in the future, people are not ants, those of us capable of accruing massive amounts of wealth are not doing it to give it all away, they are doing it to build empires, which makes perfect sense, that's our destiny - the most capable of us build empires. Emperors can be charitable but they do not share power and giving away power is a rare thing.
So AFAIC the struggles between those of us who can and those of us who cannot will continue and this struggle and since the masses are unable to accept that they are not the ones occupying the thrones they will always end up revolting.
Of-course in the future revolting against emperors will be as dangerous (if not more dangerous) than in the past. Mass surveillance and robots, drones, automated armies will be able to put down massive revolts.
I think the only way for us not to keep murdering each other is to ensure that our system is based around free market capitalism, because free market capitalism at the very least provides tolerable (and possibly pleasurable) life styles even for people who are not exactly on the top of the highest of pyramids.
Ha, funny that you think that having bad credit is OK for somebody with no production capacity. Good luck feeding yourself once nobody takes your money in exchange for their goods anymore. You think you can restart your productivity without any capital savings and without a credit line? Sure, maybe, but it will take extraordinary sacrifice and possibly a deadly war and if your productivity is negative (USA productivity is negative given over twenty years of half a trillion dollars a year trade deficits) then you are not exactly in a position to wage a prolonged war against a productive adversary either.
I think it is perfectly fine that some people will lose their investments, I did lose quite a bit time and again, you move on and do something else.
I realise we are talking about a large percentage of population that may become economically obsolete in some time from now but I actually think that the problem only exists as long as the governments exist and try to 'help' people. Without government oppression labour *is* competitive against many forms of automation, a general purpose android capable of learning and doing what a human can do is not exactly free, it would carry a significant upfront cost, humans can compete, they just will find difficult to compete with the governments 'helping'.
I get that you are fully invested into this absolute rubbish nonsensical bullshit government main stream garbage propaganda but try to think once in your life by yourself.
There are no problems with the Chinese economy due to savings, that is garbage. Any asset bubbles are purely pricing issues formed due to government creating inflation (printing money) to buy bad USA debt (USD, bonds) from the Chinese based exporters. The economy in China is netter than ever, producing enough to feed, cloth the world.
China is a productive economy, as in it produces what people everywhere want. USA economy is based on insane unpayable debt and lack of production. I know what I prefer for an economy and it is not the one in debt that cannot produce to satisfy demand.
I am not simply a 'UBI opponent', I am an opponent of all collectivism. UBI is just another word for communist oppression and I am opposed to government oppressing people.
As to robotic workforce, it doesn't matter what property we are talking about. Somebody owns a building and keeps it up and rents it out, should 'we' take it away because it's the 'building doing the work'? Somebody owns a farm and farms there, the work is done by the land, should 'we' take away the land?
There is no difference here as to what type of a capital asset is developed and used for profit, AFAIC it is unacceptable to take away anything from the person owning the asset, how he came to its possession is mildly interesting, some develop it first hand, some get it as inheritance, doesn't matter. As long as they can maintain and keep the profitability of the asset up, they are fully within their rights to use it to generate that profit and I don't see how it is either moral or economically viable to take away from those, who own and successfully run productive (or even unproductive) assets.
My position is that it is the government that destroys value of money and causes inflation and resource mis-allocation through income and property taxation, business and labour regulation, any form of redistribution. Subtract that from the system and allow it to structure itself in purely market driven manner, many people will be able to live off of dividends and some clearly will not, however policy should not be structured around edge cases, it pulls down the entire system.
Children are expected to look after their parents in old age, for example, rather than the state providing as it would in a left wing socialist country
- so the Chinese are *more efficient at looking after the elderly* by not inserting a bureaucracy into the process where none is needed. People save as much as 50% of their income in China, they don't need children to look after them, how much do Americans save?
America - the land of pretend 'capitalism', where nobody has any capital savings.
China - the land of pretend 'communism', where people actually own capital and invest and retire once they worked enough.
in your contrived example, we should just execute Person C because they don't already own a farm and are therefore useless
- it's not contrived and it's not an example, it's a model that explains what is actually happening.
Should 'we' execute somebody? I don't think so. What is 'we'? Let me understand this, the 'we' is the collective, right, government? AFAIC 'we' shouldn't be executing anybody. The collective, the government cannot be given that type of authority over individuals, that's the ultimate oppression against individual freedom.
'We' shouldn't be executing anybody and 'we' shouldn't be oppressing anybody to provide anybody with any fruits of oppression. 'We' should stay out of people's business, 'we' shouldn't be dictating what money and interest rates are, 'we' shouldn't be preventing people from developing the economy in a private manner that corresponds to the principle of individual freedom.
How exactly the free market would solve the problem (or prevent the problem from occurring) that's up to the market to decide, market is a collection of all individual choices, but it must not be decided by oppression and coercion.
The person C may not have anything to trade but his labour, he can do that, he can trade labour (and that's what most people have - their labour) and allow person A or person B to be more productive (produce more) with this extra labour and in exchange for the labour person C can get the food.
Now, it is obvious that person A and person B may want to automate at some point and replace the exact job that the person C could have been hired to do, however the idea is that while one job is automated, this provides opportunity to use the freed labour for other jobs.
Today we have a completely distorted market, one that severely lacks savings and thus can afford very little if any capital investments, this prevents many new businesses from appearing and creating jobs that are *not automated yet*, new jobs. We are not at the end of the line here exactly, where all the things we ever wanted exist and can be purchased at low enough prices for everybody to have them.
People in position of a person C should be able to save and invest some of their savings into businesses that people like A and B run, and without inflation, rules, taxes imposed by the government the dividends from running even a mostly automated business can become substantial source of revenue for people who do not fully own businesses. The actual reason that we don't have that much of that happening today is in the government manipulation of markets, money, interest rates, income and property taxation, regulation, wars.