What do you think will happen when you punish and tax productivity and employment? This will just increase the attractiveness of moving production to places that won't heavily parasitize the output for some dubious theory of public good.
As I said, we can debate the rates and such, but to argue that it ought to be zero is like arguing that businesses should charge nothing for their services. Even within the US, people (even rich ones) still sometimes choose to live in higher tax localities. Why is that? Possibly because the location itself is desirable for a variety of reasons. Sure, there's a point at which taxes get so high that people say "F- it, I'm moving", but that doesn't imply that any level of taxation is terrible, or that there is an inevitable race to zero taxes. It's a competition, and it often operates very much in a market mechanism.
And once the taxes from robotic production are high enough, they can just switch to providing a minimum basic income for the humans, so there's still enough demand/money to buy the goods the robots produce, and the labor markets don't just implode from scarcity.
This seems to me the endgame of all this mess. A bunch of people starving on some grossly inadequate basic income while the rest of the world moves on.
The rest of the world doesn't have this problem. Automation continues to create new, more valuable jobs just as it has for centuries.
The idea of the basic income isn't that you're stuck with it, it's that it's a baseline. Your basic survival needs are taken care of, so you can spend your time doing things that are important to you without worry that you'll starve. That may well include finding ways to earn money, and while you may not earn much, anything that you do earn will be pure discretionary income. That's part of the beauty of it - not only would there be no need for the traditional byzantine array of social welfare programs, but there would be no need for any minimum wage laws either, because you already have enough to get by. You'd get a more functional labor market, because there wouldn't be the looming threat of "find a job or starve", and if someone wasn't offering to pay you the value of your time and effort, you can freely tell them to get stuffed.
Secondly, today's automation is entirely unlike past advances in technology. We've gone from giving a worker better tools, so he can do more work, to tools that don't need a worker at all. If I hire Joe to pick wheat, he can do a certain amount a day. If I give him a scythe, he can do more. If I give him a combine harvester, he can do even more. But with a self-operating harvester, I don't need him anymore. I still need a few people, but they're the ones I already have. Joe is forced to go find another job, but unfortunately for him, the value of unskilled or low-skilled human labor today is pathetic and dropping like a rock. There are three million truck drivers in the USA. What do you think they'll be able to do if we replace them all with self-driving trucks? They're sure as hell not going to learn to code and become developers. Some might, but they're the vast minority. They won't just be able to switch to jobs maintaining trucks.
In the past, advanced tools have always required direct operators. They served to make a human worker more efficient. By using a power drill, I can drill holes a lot faster and for longer than I can using a hand operated one. But set the drill on the workbench, and it gathers dust. At some point though, we start introducing machines so advanced that they don't need that operator anymore. Sure, there needs to be someone supervising them, but that person already existed - he/she is just supervising machines now instead of people. You're not adding efficiency so much as you're just replacing labor.
Put another way, if I ran a freight shipping company, past technological advances meant my human workers could ship more stuff, faster/farther, than before - but if I wanted to expand capacity at a given technology level, I needed to hire more humans to drive the trucks/pilot the ships/planes, etc. If I can use self-driving trucks though, I don't - and I don't need to add any more dispatch staff or maintenance than I would anyway. The change in productivity is no longer dependent on humans, just on capital outlays for more robots. My business will expand without creating any jobs, at all. It's not a matter of retraining anymore, there's simply no work to be had.
This is the future though. Do you seriously expect to shift your productivity source from humans to machines and not be taxed? Because that's what the entire concept is - taking a share of the productive output of the nation, and using it for things that are deemed to be in the public good. We can argue what the rate should be, or what it should be spent on, but that's pretty much how it works. And this is exactly what governments are going to have to do.
Now, maybe it's sort of silly to try and define a robot as a 'person', and it makes more sense to treat them as a durable investment good, with taxes on things like profits or capital gains, but the end result is generally the same.
And once the taxes from robotic production are high enough, they can just switch to providing a minimum basic income for the humans, so there's still enough demand/money to buy the goods the robots produce, and the labor markets don't just implode from scarcity.
They're not done at all. The vote failed to advance 58-38, with 4 not present. It was actually 59-37, but McConnell switched his vote at the last minute, because that allows him to try the vote again later (by the Senate rules). So now he's going to go arm twist the 4 that weren't present. Given the names that didn't vote, he's almost certainly going to push it forward unless a few of the "yes" votes are persuaded to change their mind.
Here's the full list. Note that 4 didn't vote, so they may try again later - this thing isn't dead by any means. Also, McConnell switched his vote at the last minute so he can bring it up again, so the actual tally is 59.
Likely this is just another angle in internet crime. Stealing credit card information is easy, monetizing that is harder than you think. You can't just use a US credit card to make a bunch of charges in Russia/China/etc. You'd need a way to turn that into money you can use. One of the ways they've done it in the past is to recruit accomplices in the US, usually through those work at home schemes you see spammed into comments in various places. When the accomplice gets busted, all they're out is a patsy. This sounds like it's easier though - buy game codes with stolen cards, resell the game codes for money that goes straight to you with no direct tie to the stolen card.
Artists should be reasonably compensated for their work. The problem is that their definition of what is reasonable compensation far outstrips what the rest of us tend to think is remotely reasonable.
Unfortunately for them, they're trying to put the genie back in the bottle. It won't work. The advance of technology is what enabled me to carry around access to virtually every song there is, not something caused by the absence of artificial legal barriers. Barriers which, I might add, will not enable the recording artists and companies to perpetuate the old model indefinitely - it'll just move it back to the illegal realm, at best, at which point they'll get no money.
Also, increasingly, places like YouTube, along with streaming services, are where people discover new music. I don't listen to radio anymore, so the majority of the new bands I discover come from the suggestions that pop up, or the random songs I let be slotted in based on what I've been listening to. This may not be great for someone like Taylor Swift or Bono who are already famous, but for smaller bands, it's kind of a big deal.
They're also the party of law enforcement and respect for authority.
And really, their concern for "small government" primarily extends to "small in budget", and then for things like spending money on poor people. Spending on the military and law enforcement isn't a problem, as long as said law doesn't impact the sort of people that support them. FBI and CIA they like, but the BATF and IRS not so much.
Generally speaking, if you're blocked from purchasing a gun, they can't hire you for a job that requires you to carry a gun. At least, that's my recollection from the Army - if someone got a conviction for domestic assault, they couldn't join, and if they were already in they were screwed, because they would be barred from transporting a weapon across state lines due to the Lautenberg (sp?) amendment.
My take from all of this is that we're not in any danger of having any restrictions on guns passed, never-mind anything outlandish like having guns outlawed. A large percentage of the public would be literally up in arms about it, even in the aftermath of a massive tragedy.
In the meantime, though, we're definitely having our rights eroded by these expansions of invasive domestic spying. It's far more my concern at the moment than anything to do with loss of rights to firearms.
I's not necessarily fair to say that all Republicans are for more FBI/etc domestic spying - the Libertarian wing of the party certainly isn't. The leadership is though, and in fairness too, so are some Democrats. That said, the right wing does tend to be more sympathetic to law enforcement/authoritarian stuff that doesn't involve taking rich peoples' money - they're inclined to support the cops. The left wing has its nanny-state types too, but also tends to not fall immediately on the side of law enforcement.
As for the other side of things, I think it's a bit exaggerated. Not all Democrats are for a complete ban on guns (which would involve repealing the second amendment) - I'd hazard to say they're a minority, and certainly a minority among elected Democrats. Most of the push is for greater controls and restrictions, which shouldn't be unreasonable - and yet it is, apparently, even for minor ones. I'm a gun owner, and I like going to the range, but it seems ridiculous to me that there's more regulation on operating a vehicle than there is on operating a deadly weapon, or that if I want to go hunting, there's more paperwork involved in getting the approval to kill the animal(s), not buying the firearm to do it with.
What was really fascinating in this latest round of votes in the Senate, was that the Democrats tried to cross the streams, by suggesting that people on the Terrorism watch list be restricted from buying guns. The ACLU lobbied against this, because of the obscurity/undemocratic nature/etc of the watch lists (you don't know if you're on, they won't confirm, and it's near impossible to get removed from it). At the same time, everyone in the Senate pretty much wound up voting on party lines - which I suppose shows that gun control is a stronger issue than the rest of it, at least at the moment.
This is a situation of artificial scarcity, which the scalpers have some role in causing. Essentially, they're speculators on the price of the tickets, buying them all up in anticipation that they'll be able to resell them at higher value. The catch is that's not always the case. They may sell some at higher value, but as the show approaches, they're forced to do exactly what you describe - offer those tickets at a lower and lower price, even to the point of selling some of the tickets at a loss, if only to minimize the amount they lose (since the tickets are worthless after the show).
It nearly happened to me once - I got out of the car and forgot to set the parking brake. My (stupid) first reaction was to try and stop the car physically, since it was on a very gradual slope. Luckily for me, I didn't get caught by anything, nor tripped up, and the car rolled out of the driveway, across the street, and into the uphill driveway on the other side, at which point it slowed enough that I could hurriedly open the door and jump in before it started rolling forward again.
But I can easily see how the immediate reaction would be the bad/dangerous one to not get out of the way.
It's pretty ironic (and awesome) that the one lasting legacy of that anti-piracy ad is a legion of geeks who would be foaming at the mouth for the opportunity to download a car.
People forget that the part of the NSA that does spying is just that - part of it. There's also the Information Assurance Directorate, whose sole job is to make computer and communications systems in the government _more_ secure. They're the people who brought you SE Linux. And of course, never mind the fact that there are foreign countries that probably need spying on (North Korea, just to name one). The problem was never about the NSA's very existence, it's about what it's been pushed into by the people in charge in recent years.
Now, if you want to talk about an agency that's been horribly toxic to civil liberties, and really is not serving a positive purpose at all, to abolish, why don't we talk about the DEA?
Facebook executives need to pat themselves on the back for this. Every time I think they can't manage to make Facebook any worse, they come up with some new innovation to make it even more terrible than before. I see now that even that isn't enough for them - they're going above and beyond to make it completely awful. Keep up the good work, guys!
It depends on who classified it. If she gets something from the CIA/FBI/etc marked classified, she can't just decide it isn't - but anything that the State Department marked as such, she has full authority over.
You've certainly got a point with Trump, since the rules for the Republican contests were all over the map. But that said, he won based on the rules that were set out at the beginning, and he had the largest chunk of the votes at the end of the day. You may not like the rules (and I'm not saying I do either for that matter), but there's a very strong democratic norm of "these are the rules of the election, and who wins fairly, wins fairly." The 30-40% (or whatever percentage) of people that voted for Trump are likely going to be utterly livid if that gets overturned, and not without reasonable cause. Now, that doesn't mean there's anything they can do about it directly, other than give the Republican party the middle finger, but that's probably more than enough to make the party bigwigs not take that step in the first place.
In Hillary's case though, she clearly has won by all metrics. She won the popular vote, the most states, etc. You can argue that she didn't win enough pledged delegates to win without any superdelegates, but that's a terrible measure that's never mattered before. It certainly didn't matter when Obama beat her in 2008 by a smaller margin than she won by this year. They're not going to overturn it, not unless there is some sort of event that radically changes the facts, like Hillary personally setting fire to Planned Parenthood clinics full of baby seals on live national TV while firing an AR-15 into a crowd of schoolchildren. The latest Clinton scandal du jour won't matter, because the right wing has cried wolf on those to the point that even if there really is something rotten there, none of the people who would really be voting for her are listening anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
Senator: "I am shocked—shocked—to find that cheating is going on in here!"
Lobbyist: "Here is your cut, sir."
Senator: "Oh, thank you very much."
The day people actually all read TFA before commenting, is the day Slashdot is no more. :)
What do you think will happen when you punish and tax productivity and employment? This will just increase the attractiveness of moving production to places that won't heavily parasitize the output for some dubious theory of public good.
As I said, we can debate the rates and such, but to argue that it ought to be zero is like arguing that businesses should charge nothing for their services. Even within the US, people (even rich ones) still sometimes choose to live in higher tax localities. Why is that? Possibly because the location itself is desirable for a variety of reasons. Sure, there's a point at which taxes get so high that people say "F- it, I'm moving", but that doesn't imply that any level of taxation is terrible, or that there is an inevitable race to zero taxes. It's a competition, and it often operates very much in a market mechanism.
And once the taxes from robotic production are high enough, they can just switch to providing a minimum basic income for the humans, so there's still enough demand/money to buy the goods the robots produce, and the labor markets don't just implode from scarcity.
This seems to me the endgame of all this mess. A bunch of people starving on some grossly inadequate basic income while the rest of the world moves on. The rest of the world doesn't have this problem. Automation continues to create new, more valuable jobs just as it has for centuries.
The idea of the basic income isn't that you're stuck with it, it's that it's a baseline. Your basic survival needs are taken care of, so you can spend your time doing things that are important to you without worry that you'll starve. That may well include finding ways to earn money, and while you may not earn much, anything that you do earn will be pure discretionary income. That's part of the beauty of it - not only would there be no need for the traditional byzantine array of social welfare programs, but there would be no need for any minimum wage laws either, because you already have enough to get by. You'd get a more functional labor market, because there wouldn't be the looming threat of "find a job or starve", and if someone wasn't offering to pay you the value of your time and effort, you can freely tell them to get stuffed.
Secondly, today's automation is entirely unlike past advances in technology. We've gone from giving a worker better tools, so he can do more work, to tools that don't need a worker at all. If I hire Joe to pick wheat, he can do a certain amount a day. If I give him a scythe, he can do more. If I give him a combine harvester, he can do even more. But with a self-operating harvester, I don't need him anymore. I still need a few people, but they're the ones I already have. Joe is forced to go find another job, but unfortunately for him, the value of unskilled or low-skilled human labor today is pathetic and dropping like a rock. There are three million truck drivers in the USA. What do you think they'll be able to do if we replace them all with self-driving trucks? They're sure as hell not going to learn to code and become developers. Some might, but they're the vast minority. They won't just be able to switch to jobs maintaining trucks.
In the past, advanced tools have always required direct operators. They served to make a human worker more efficient. By using a power drill, I can drill holes a lot faster and for longer than I can using a hand operated one. But set the drill on the workbench, and it gathers dust. At some point though, we start introducing machines so advanced that they don't need that operator anymore. Sure, there needs to be someone supervising them, but that person already existed - he/she is just supervising machines now instead of people. You're not adding efficiency so much as you're just replacing labor.
Put another way, if I ran a freight shipping company, past technological advances meant my human workers could ship more stuff, faster/farther, than before - but if I wanted to expand capacity at a given technology level, I needed to hire more humans to drive the trucks/pilot the ships/planes, etc. If I can use self-driving trucks though, I don't - and I don't need to add any more dispatch staff or maintenance than I would anyway. The change in productivity is no longer dependent on humans, just on capital outlays for more robots. My business will expand without creating any jobs, at all. It's not a matter of retraining anymore, there's simply no work to be had.
This is the future though. Do you seriously expect to shift your productivity source from humans to machines and not be taxed? Because that's what the entire concept is - taking a share of the productive output of the nation, and using it for things that are deemed to be in the public good. We can argue what the rate should be, or what it should be spent on, but that's pretty much how it works. And this is exactly what governments are going to have to do.
Now, maybe it's sort of silly to try and define a robot as a 'person', and it makes more sense to treat them as a durable investment good, with taxes on things like profits or capital gains, but the end result is generally the same.
And once the taxes from robotic production are high enough, they can just switch to providing a minimum basic income for the humans, so there's still enough demand/money to buy the goods the robots produce, and the labor markets don't just implode from scarcity.
They're not done at all. The vote failed to advance 58-38, with 4 not present. It was actually 59-37, but McConnell switched his vote at the last minute, because that allows him to try the vote again later (by the Senate rules). So now he's going to go arm twist the 4 that weren't present. Given the names that didn't vote, he's almost certainly going to push it forward unless a few of the "yes" votes are persuaded to change their mind.
Here's the full list. Note that 4 didn't vote, so they may try again later - this thing isn't dead by any means. Also, McConnell switched his vote at the last minute so he can bring it up again, so the actual tally is 59.
https://www.govtrack.us/congre...
Party breakdown:
For: 46 R, 11D, 1I
Against: 7R, 30D, 1I
Not Voting: 1R, 3D
Likely this is just another angle in internet crime. Stealing credit card information is easy, monetizing that is harder than you think. You can't just use a US credit card to make a bunch of charges in Russia/China/etc. You'd need a way to turn that into money you can use. One of the ways they've done it in the past is to recruit accomplices in the US, usually through those work at home schemes you see spammed into comments in various places. When the accomplice gets busted, all they're out is a patsy. This sounds like it's easier though - buy game codes with stolen cards, resell the game codes for money that goes straight to you with no direct tie to the stolen card.
Artists should be reasonably compensated for their work. The problem is that their definition of what is reasonable compensation far outstrips what the rest of us tend to think is remotely reasonable.
Unfortunately for them, they're trying to put the genie back in the bottle. It won't work. The advance of technology is what enabled me to carry around access to virtually every song there is, not something caused by the absence of artificial legal barriers. Barriers which, I might add, will not enable the recording artists and companies to perpetuate the old model indefinitely - it'll just move it back to the illegal realm, at best, at which point they'll get no money.
Also, increasingly, places like YouTube, along with streaming services, are where people discover new music. I don't listen to radio anymore, so the majority of the new bands I discover come from the suggestions that pop up, or the random songs I let be slotted in based on what I've been listening to. This may not be great for someone like Taylor Swift or Bono who are already famous, but for smaller bands, it's kind of a big deal.
And here I thought that in Soviet Russia, the Bear would eat you.
They're also the party of law enforcement and respect for authority.
And really, their concern for "small government" primarily extends to "small in budget", and then for things like spending money on poor people. Spending on the military and law enforcement isn't a problem, as long as said law doesn't impact the sort of people that support them. FBI and CIA they like, but the BATF and IRS not so much.
One million dollars...
...Ten million dollars!
Two million dollars...
Now, how did you want me to vote again?
Generally speaking, if you're blocked from purchasing a gun, they can't hire you for a job that requires you to carry a gun. At least, that's my recollection from the Army - if someone got a conviction for domestic assault, they couldn't join, and if they were already in they were screwed, because they would be barred from transporting a weapon across state lines due to the Lautenberg (sp?) amendment.
My take from all of this is that we're not in any danger of having any restrictions on guns passed, never-mind anything outlandish like having guns outlawed. A large percentage of the public would be literally up in arms about it, even in the aftermath of a massive tragedy.
In the meantime, though, we're definitely having our rights eroded by these expansions of invasive domestic spying. It's far more my concern at the moment than anything to do with loss of rights to firearms.
I's not necessarily fair to say that all Republicans are for more FBI/etc domestic spying - the Libertarian wing of the party certainly isn't. The leadership is though, and in fairness too, so are some Democrats. That said, the right wing does tend to be more sympathetic to law enforcement/authoritarian stuff that doesn't involve taking rich peoples' money - they're inclined to support the cops. The left wing has its nanny-state types too, but also tends to not fall immediately on the side of law enforcement.
As for the other side of things, I think it's a bit exaggerated. Not all Democrats are for a complete ban on guns (which would involve repealing the second amendment) - I'd hazard to say they're a minority, and certainly a minority among elected Democrats. Most of the push is for greater controls and restrictions, which shouldn't be unreasonable - and yet it is, apparently, even for minor ones. I'm a gun owner, and I like going to the range, but it seems ridiculous to me that there's more regulation on operating a vehicle than there is on operating a deadly weapon, or that if I want to go hunting, there's more paperwork involved in getting the approval to kill the animal(s), not buying the firearm to do it with.
What was really fascinating in this latest round of votes in the Senate, was that the Democrats tried to cross the streams, by suggesting that people on the Terrorism watch list be restricted from buying guns. The ACLU lobbied against this, because of the obscurity/undemocratic nature/etc of the watch lists (you don't know if you're on, they won't confirm, and it's near impossible to get removed from it). At the same time, everyone in the Senate pretty much wound up voting on party lines - which I suppose shows that gun control is a stronger issue than the rest of it, at least at the moment.
This is a situation of artificial scarcity, which the scalpers have some role in causing. Essentially, they're speculators on the price of the tickets, buying them all up in anticipation that they'll be able to resell them at higher value. The catch is that's not always the case. They may sell some at higher value, but as the show approaches, they're forced to do exactly what you describe - offer those tickets at a lower and lower price, even to the point of selling some of the tickets at a loss, if only to minimize the amount they lose (since the tickets are worthless after the show).
It nearly happened to me once - I got out of the car and forgot to set the parking brake. My (stupid) first reaction was to try and stop the car physically, since it was on a very gradual slope. Luckily for me, I didn't get caught by anything, nor tripped up, and the car rolled out of the driveway, across the street, and into the uphill driveway on the other side, at which point it slowed enough that I could hurriedly open the door and jump in before it started rolling forward again.
But I can easily see how the immediate reaction would be the bad/dangerous one to not get out of the way.
It's pretty ironic (and awesome) that the one lasting legacy of that anti-piracy ad is a legion of geeks who would be foaming at the mouth for the opportunity to download a car.
Of course they would assume every car is stolen. After all, they told us "You wouldn't download a car, would you?", right?
People forget that the part of the NSA that does spying is just that - part of it. There's also the Information Assurance Directorate, whose sole job is to make computer and communications systems in the government _more_ secure. They're the people who brought you SE Linux. And of course, never mind the fact that there are foreign countries that probably need spying on (North Korea, just to name one). The problem was never about the NSA's very existence, it's about what it's been pushed into by the people in charge in recent years.
Now, if you want to talk about an agency that's been horribly toxic to civil liberties, and really is not serving a positive purpose at all, to abolish, why don't we talk about the DEA?
Now it'll be even better at making Nazi references while harassing you to join its professional network on LinkedIn.
Facebook executives need to pat themselves on the back for this. Every time I think they can't manage to make Facebook any worse, they come up with some new innovation to make it even more terrible than before. I see now that even that isn't enough for them - they're going above and beyond to make it completely awful. Keep up the good work, guys!
It depends on who classified it. If she gets something from the CIA/FBI/etc marked classified, she can't just decide it isn't - but anything that the State Department marked as such, she has full authority over.
You've certainly got a point with Trump, since the rules for the Republican contests were all over the map. But that said, he won based on the rules that were set out at the beginning, and he had the largest chunk of the votes at the end of the day. You may not like the rules (and I'm not saying I do either for that matter), but there's a very strong democratic norm of "these are the rules of the election, and who wins fairly, wins fairly." The 30-40% (or whatever percentage) of people that voted for Trump are likely going to be utterly livid if that gets overturned, and not without reasonable cause. Now, that doesn't mean there's anything they can do about it directly, other than give the Republican party the middle finger, but that's probably more than enough to make the party bigwigs not take that step in the first place.
In Hillary's case though, she clearly has won by all metrics. She won the popular vote, the most states, etc. You can argue that she didn't win enough pledged delegates to win without any superdelegates, but that's a terrible measure that's never mattered before. It certainly didn't matter when Obama beat her in 2008 by a smaller margin than she won by this year. They're not going to overturn it, not unless there is some sort of event that radically changes the facts, like Hillary personally setting fire to Planned Parenthood clinics full of baby seals on live national TV while firing an AR-15 into a crowd of schoolchildren. The latest Clinton scandal du jour won't matter, because the right wing has cried wolf on those to the point that even if there really is something rotten there, none of the people who would really be voting for her are listening anymore.