Even Europe's industry is supported by the US manufacturing economy scale. Both in American consumers of European products, and in US production of components and materials bought and resold by Europeans.
But indeed, the protection of the US manufacturing economy, and strategic products like vehicles, is better for Americans than for Europeans. As an American, I don't care that it is.
BTW, while you're busy failing to ignore that "then-than" fuckup, you were creating the "uncapitalized inital letter of a sentence" fuckup, and the "an european" definite article and capitalization fuckups.
In short, foreign workers are refusing to get sick for little pay, the same way American workers did a century ago. Which will raise their costs, and reduce their country's comparative advantage.
The foreign advantage in countries like China is primarily subsidized (comparative to US production) by externalized and hidden expenses in the environment and other costs to labor health. The environmental costs are already hitting the wall. The improved communications and emergence of disposable income in the labor pool, along with saturation of the labor supply by all the demand that switched to the comparably advantageous country, mean that workers there are gaining power and aspirations. So they will, as their Euramerican counterparts did as those same developments came in their countries, insist those externalized costs be paid by the producer of the costs, the owner of the production of the products.
Actually, all those things are getting cheaper per productivity. That's the measure that matters. The total expense rising is a reflection of the return on investment of that expense rising, which justifies the higher initial expense.
The oil supply curve is starting to go down the slide. But its curve to date was pulled by very wasteful consumption. At best 25% efficient internal combustion engines. At best 50% efficient building insulation, 80% efficient heaters, 3% efficient lighting. The majority of the population using those engines for over 15% of their work/commute hours between the (work) buildings more efficient during the lower consumption (day) period and the (home) buildings less efficient during the higher consumption (night) period.
Meanwhile other energy sources are rising steeply in their supply curve. They're more efficient, and indeed many are sustainable rather than merely peakable. While consumption is finding dramatic efficiencies in use and reduced use (telecommuting, CPUs instead of ICEs, electric vehicles, mass transit).
And while the people supply is increasing, the rate at which they can do something useful for anyone else in the world is increasing. Education and telecom also makes more of them more valuable. The distribution of value is making the tide go out on some people: unhelpful people in the Euramerican world too long propped up by White Privilege. But overall people are becoming more valuable, as Asia, Africa and South America sees many of its people become valuable to more than just their immediate families for the first time in centuries, or ever.
It's tempting to see redistributions both geographically and into the near future, that underlie overall increases in total value, as a net loss. But when you see the big picture, you can take part in the growth. Or the nearsighted pessimism can lock you out of it, and self fulfill itself.
Except on the way to that ideal future the humans who control the machines will take human stuff from the less powerful humans. The powerful humans generally want to feel materially superior to other humans. Including each other.
We could evolve past that petty scarcity-based social behavior. But the path there doesn't seem to exist.
Machines continue to get more energy efficient. And smarter.
Which means machines will continue to do more low skill jobs. As the "low skill" point rises above merely mechanical and into intellectual, the energy efficiency of machines will jump past even larger fractions of the humans competing with them.
What are you talking about? Oil pricesdeclined> a few dollars from 1948-1974, during which time the Soviet Union only increased its power and wealth. From '74 thru '82 prices skyrocketed to over triple their 1948 price, then plummeted back but stayed about 10-30% over their 1948 price.
Forget the rest of your analysis, including the role of petroleum prices in the Soviet economy. Your basic facts are completely different from reality.
You're a racist. I compete with China solely out of my self interest as an American. As do my fellow Chinese Americans, and all other Americans of every race. You don't know what race I am. And indeed your lumping all the billions of Asians together in your baseless insult to me is quite racist.
You're also an idiot. Every age is a "new age". 2012 is no special boundary.
Well, I was wrong. I inverted a stat, the "medical loss ratio", that is required under the new law to be 85% spent on actual healthcare, to say that the other 15% is profit. It's not - it includes operating the insurer as well as profit. And indeed the insurers reported only a few percent as their profit margin. However, even in 2009 (the worst year for the economy in many generations) their profits were continuing a steep rise that has continued for a decade. In 2010 their profits continued their steep rise. And now under the HCR law, they're cooking the books to keep more profits by labeling operating costs as "medical expenses".
These insurers process $TRILLIONS in medical costs. Their profit margins are counted against the vast American medical expenses that are counted as their costs. So a few percent profit margin is a huge profit, and has gotten only huger. In fact, by portraying their profits in the shadow of the medical expenses, they're incented to allow and even encourage medical expenses to grow, so their profits (and waste in operating costs) look smaller. Now they're directly incented to do so by the law they lobbied hard to get specified to their satisfaction.
This is the point: there's huge and growing profit in running a health insurance corp. You said there isn't, but you're wrong. My stated rebuttal was flawed, but the point we're actually arguing about is still not what you say. It takes a little more than just a google to understand how they're playing and winning this game.
You can press Lunar soil into photovoltaic cells, and beam the power back to the Earth over a satellite network. You can use some of the power to harvest deuterium from the Far Side, and a nuke plant to blast it into more energy beamed back to Earth. And beamed all over the Solar System, pushing probes and miners around the new frontier.
These giant boosters are for launching weapons. Including nukes with a global reach. But also space-based weapons platforms. It's not the bragging rights - it's the military superiority.
What a waste. Better to establish and protect the telecommunications superiority. And use it to explore and exploit the Solar System scientifically and industrially, rather than militarily. More bragging rights for everyone - and more money and power, too.
The Soviet Union produced th biggest rocket ever, bigger than any the US ever produced (and bigger than SpaceX's new "biggest ever"). Financing its space race in competition with the US was the final stroke that killed the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the US is devolving launches into what will be a healthy industry serving global customers, but by US rules.
I like the way this story looks to develop. Because I'm an American who wants to beat China in a race that takes us all into space.
YouTube doesn't need any relationship with GV, or for a GV team to exist, to install a "transfer this video to YouTube" on GV videos. That doesn't seem to be more work that shutting down GV and operating the phase it's in. Keeping more video in the server storage is very little work for YouTube's people. The computers don't complain about the extra work, and the extra work gives more value to YouTube's users - the reason Google operates it.
No one starts new insurance companies? You're totally wrong. Hedge funds buy an sell financial insurance all day long, and pop in and out of business. The health insurance business doesn't get new entrants, only mergers, because it's a cartel run by the most ruthless monopolists.
But we don't have to argue about abstractions. Health insurers make about 15% profit on hundreds of $billions a year. There's so much money in it.
For your information, I have worked for many insurance corps in my tech career, including health insurers. I know quite a lot about insurance. You evidently know little about it.
So the Bush era screwed up Medicare like it screwed up everything else. Fix it. We can't afford the private insurance cartel. That's how we cut costs instead of borrowing.
Besides, it's the Japanese who as big buyers of our debt who now can't afford it anymore, and will be spending their money more in their own country for a while. The reasons the Chinese buy our debt will get even more important, not less.
Why doesn't Google just make all the Google Video content available as YouTube videos instead? Why not even keep redirecting Google Video URLs to the converted YouTube version? It seems like a lot more work for Google to manage the shutdown than to move it to YouTube, to say nothing of the work by users and lost value when video doesn't make the transition.
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.
All that military expense spent on things other than defending the country from physical attack is an extremely wasteful way to do those things. And it creates the powerful constituency that demands more actual war. Which always destroys more than it creates.
If the government spent $500B of the military/intel budget directly on millions of high paying jobs around the nation and the world that directly developed these interests, we'd have a lot more to show for it. And a lot less war. Or just cut it, and the debt would disappear, and the rest of the country's operations (including the remaining over 50% of military/intel spending) would deliver the benefits we want. And a lot less war.
We're not getting our money's worth our of the "Great Society / Welfare State" either. But we're getting more of our money's worth from it than from our military/intel spending.
BTW, the US has about 1.9 million family farms, about 5/6ths of the total number of farms, about 62% of the total US farm acreage, just over 50% of the total product value produced. About 1/3-1/2 of paid farm labor was paid by family farms; family members are typically not paid as labor (but rather in share of profits), so the number of people working on family farms is the majority, as is the amount of money the farms compensate. Maybe when you were in junior high school you thought the family farm disappeared. But that is far from the truth. And indeed your wrongness on that basic issue makes me distrust all of what you posted.
I used the tax spending site. And I added my expenses on private medical insurance to my tax expenses on healthcare. That's 54% of my combined total tax and health insurance spending, and 12% of my income. If I include my employer's expenses on my health insurance (that could otherwise be paid directly to me), that's over 18% of my income. I am several years past the median life expectancy and I've collected as much in health insurance benefits over my lifetime as I pay in a year.
I know I'll be spending a lot more as I get older, especially for the last several years where I'm basically dying. I'd just rather spend that close to 20% of my income directly on Medicare in my taxes. Medicare costs less per care than private insurance. The insurance cartel's gouging and stingy approvals, plus its large profits, atop a mountain of waste, are sucking money from me that will never go to my health, or to anyone else's health other than the insurance corp's shareholders.
Meanwhile, the Republicans are working as hard as they can to destroy Medicare and Medicaid, and force all of our health expenses to funnel through the private insurance skimmer. The worst part of the Healthcare Reform they manipulated into a shadow of what was needed is what they are trying to convert the whole thing into.
Medicare for all. Like the rest of the civilized world. Or bust. Literally.
It doesn't cost over a $TRILLION a year to keep other countries from invading us. Just look at all the other countries that manage it at a tiny fraction of the cost.
The US can be as safe, and even safer, for something like $300B or less a year combined military and "intelligence" spending.
The defense of our rights from threats other than attack or invasion, and promotion of the general welfare, cost far more than that. And defend from a much more real and better funded threat.
No, the government's job is to protect our rights period. From any enemy, foreign or domestic. Like the corporations that routinely attack our rights. And indeed like the government itself, when it routinely attacks our rights.
Everyone you, zippthorne, personally voted for has led the government in attacking, not protecting our rights. Because you're a Republican.
Taxes don't pay for lobbyists. Lobbyists are paid out of the bribes paid directly to officials. Taxes compete with those bribes. That's why lobbyists force taxes down - so there's more left to pay lobbyists.
Well, success requires both opportunity and execution. Just being born at the right time doesn't give you what you have. Look at all the people born at the right time who've failed to collect even enough income to live on. And there are plenty of people born at the right time, into rich families, who squandered what they were given and lost their meal ticket. Luck is usually necessary, but hard work usually counts, too.
SS isn't a ponzi scheme, as you say. But politicians aren't "regularly stealing money from the program". They regularly borrow from the program, and pay about +50% interest every 30 years. Which is the same investment banks make in housing, except the SS investment in the rest of the Federal government is far more safe. The only actual threat of killing Social Security is rightwing politicians trying to actually steal ("privatize") it. And the many Americans who've accepted years of propaganda telling them not to expect to receive benefits when they're old, because of lies like "ponzi scheme" and "the lockbox is already looted".
Slashdot Mirror
Even Europe's industry is supported by the US manufacturing economy scale. Both in American consumers of European products, and in US production of components and materials bought and resold by Europeans.
But indeed, the protection of the US manufacturing economy, and strategic products like vehicles, is better for Americans than for Europeans. As an American, I don't care that it is.
BTW, while you're busy failing to ignore that "then-than" fuckup, you were creating the "uncapitalized inital letter of a sentence" fuckup, and the "an european" definite article and capitalization fuckups.
In short, foreign workers are refusing to get sick for little pay, the same way American workers did a century ago. Which will raise their costs, and reduce their country's comparative advantage.
The foreign advantage in countries like China is primarily subsidized (comparative to US production) by externalized and hidden expenses in the environment and other costs to labor health. The environmental costs are already hitting the wall. The improved communications and emergence of disposable income in the labor pool, along with saturation of the labor supply by all the demand that switched to the comparably advantageous country, mean that workers there are gaining power and aspirations. So they will, as their Euramerican counterparts did as those same developments came in their countries, insist those externalized costs be paid by the producer of the costs, the owner of the production of the products.
Actually, all those things are getting cheaper per productivity. That's the measure that matters. The total expense rising is a reflection of the return on investment of that expense rising, which justifies the higher initial expense.
The oil supply curve is starting to go down the slide. But its curve to date was pulled by very wasteful consumption. At best 25% efficient internal combustion engines. At best 50% efficient building insulation, 80% efficient heaters, 3% efficient lighting. The majority of the population using those engines for over 15% of their work/commute hours between the (work) buildings more efficient during the lower consumption (day) period and the (home) buildings less efficient during the higher consumption (night) period.
Meanwhile other energy sources are rising steeply in their supply curve. They're more efficient, and indeed many are sustainable rather than merely peakable. While consumption is finding dramatic efficiencies in use and reduced use (telecommuting, CPUs instead of ICEs, electric vehicles, mass transit).
And while the people supply is increasing, the rate at which they can do something useful for anyone else in the world is increasing. Education and telecom also makes more of them more valuable. The distribution of value is making the tide go out on some people: unhelpful people in the Euramerican world too long propped up by White Privilege. But overall people are becoming more valuable, as Asia, Africa and South America sees many of its people become valuable to more than just their immediate families for the first time in centuries, or ever.
It's tempting to see redistributions both geographically and into the near future, that underlie overall increases in total value, as a net loss. But when you see the big picture, you can take part in the growth. Or the nearsighted pessimism can lock you out of it, and self fulfill itself.
Except on the way to that ideal future the humans who control the machines will take human stuff from the less powerful humans. The powerful humans generally want to feel materially superior to other humans. Including each other.
We could evolve past that petty scarcity-based social behavior. But the path there doesn't seem to exist.
Machines continue to get more energy efficient. And smarter.
Which means machines will continue to do more low skill jobs. As the "low skill" point rises above merely mechanical and into intellectual, the energy efficiency of machines will jump past even larger fractions of the humans competing with them.
If you can't tell that those two very obvious women are female, then your Republicanism has poisoned your sex senses.
What are you talking about? Oil prices declined> a few dollars from 1948-1974, during which time the Soviet Union only increased its power and wealth. From '74 thru '82 prices skyrocketed to over triple their 1948 price, then plummeted back but stayed about 10-30% over their 1948 price.
Forget the rest of your analysis, including the role of petroleum prices in the Soviet economy. Your basic facts are completely different from reality.
You're a racist. I compete with China solely out of my self interest as an American. As do my fellow Chinese Americans, and all other Americans of every race. You don't know what race I am. And indeed your lumping all the billions of Asians together in your baseless insult to me is quite racist.
You're also an idiot. Every age is a "new age". 2012 is no special boundary.
Well, I was wrong. I inverted a stat, the "medical loss ratio", that is required under the new law to be 85% spent on actual healthcare, to say that the other 15% is profit. It's not - it includes operating the insurer as well as profit. And indeed the insurers reported only a few percent as their profit margin. However, even in 2009 (the worst year for the economy in many generations) their profits were continuing a steep rise that has continued for a decade. In 2010 their profits continued their steep rise. And now under the HCR law, they're cooking the books to keep more profits by labeling operating costs as "medical expenses".
These insurers process $TRILLIONS in medical costs. Their profit margins are counted against the vast American medical expenses that are counted as their costs. So a few percent profit margin is a huge profit, and has gotten only huger. In fact, by portraying their profits in the shadow of the medical expenses, they're incented to allow and even encourage medical expenses to grow, so their profits (and waste in operating costs) look smaller. Now they're directly incented to do so by the law they lobbied hard to get specified to their satisfaction.
This is the point: there's huge and growing profit in running a health insurance corp. You said there isn't, but you're wrong. My stated rebuttal was flawed, but the point we're actually arguing about is still not what you say. It takes a little more than just a google to understand how they're playing and winning this game.
You can press Lunar soil into photovoltaic cells, and beam the power back to the Earth over a satellite network. You can use some of the power to harvest deuterium from the Far Side, and a nuke plant to blast it into more energy beamed back to Earth. And beamed all over the Solar System, pushing probes and miners around the new frontier.
These giant boosters are for launching weapons. Including nukes with a global reach. But also space-based weapons platforms. It's not the bragging rights - it's the military superiority.
What a waste. Better to establish and protect the telecommunications superiority. And use it to explore and exploit the Solar System scientifically and industrially, rather than militarily. More bragging rights for everyone - and more money and power, too.
The Soviet Union produced th biggest rocket ever, bigger than any the US ever produced (and bigger than SpaceX's new "biggest ever"). Financing its space race in competition with the US was the final stroke that killed the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the US is devolving launches into what will be a healthy industry serving global customers, but by US rules.
I like the way this story looks to develop. Because I'm an American who wants to beat China in a race that takes us all into space.
YouTube doesn't need any relationship with GV, or for a GV team to exist, to install a "transfer this video to YouTube" on GV videos. That doesn't seem to be more work that shutting down GV and operating the phase it's in. Keeping more video in the server storage is very little work for YouTube's people. The computers don't complain about the extra work, and the extra work gives more value to YouTube's users - the reason Google operates it.
No one starts new insurance companies? You're totally wrong. Hedge funds buy an sell financial insurance all day long, and pop in and out of business. The health insurance business doesn't get new entrants, only mergers, because it's a cartel run by the most ruthless monopolists.
But we don't have to argue about abstractions. Health insurers make about 15% profit on hundreds of $billions a year. There's so much money in it.
For your information, I have worked for many insurance corps in my tech career, including health insurers. I know quite a lot about insurance. You evidently know little about it.
So the Bush era screwed up Medicare like it screwed up everything else. Fix it. We can't afford the private insurance cartel. That's how we cut costs instead of borrowing.
Besides, it's the Japanese who as big buyers of our debt who now can't afford it anymore, and will be spending their money more in their own country for a while. The reasons the Chinese buy our debt will get even more important, not less.
Why doesn't Google just make all the Google Video content available as YouTube videos instead? Why not even keep redirecting Google Video URLs to the converted YouTube version? It seems like a lot more work for Google to manage the shutdown than to move it to YouTube, to say nothing of the work by users and lost value when video doesn't make the transition.
- From Ozymandias, by Percy Shelley
All that military expense spent on things other than defending the country from physical attack is an extremely wasteful way to do those things. And it creates the powerful constituency that demands more actual war. Which always destroys more than it creates.
If the government spent $500B of the military/intel budget directly on millions of high paying jobs around the nation and the world that directly developed these interests, we'd have a lot more to show for it. And a lot less war. Or just cut it, and the debt would disappear, and the rest of the country's operations (including the remaining over 50% of military/intel spending) would deliver the benefits we want. And a lot less war.
We're not getting our money's worth our of the "Great Society / Welfare State" either. But we're getting more of our money's worth from it than from our military/intel spending.
BTW, the US has about 1.9 million family farms, about 5/6ths of the total number of farms, about 62% of the total US farm acreage, just over 50% of the total product value produced. About 1/3-1/2 of paid farm labor was paid by family farms; family members are typically not paid as labor (but rather in share of profits), so the number of people working on family farms is the majority, as is the amount of money the farms compensate. Maybe when you were in junior high school you thought the family farm disappeared. But that is far from the truth. And indeed your wrongness on that basic issue makes me distrust all of what you posted.
I used the tax spending site. And I added my expenses on private medical insurance to my tax expenses on healthcare. That's 54% of my combined total tax and health insurance spending, and 12% of my income. If I include my employer's expenses on my health insurance (that could otherwise be paid directly to me), that's over 18% of my income. I am several years past the median life expectancy and I've collected as much in health insurance benefits over my lifetime as I pay in a year.
I know I'll be spending a lot more as I get older, especially for the last several years where I'm basically dying. I'd just rather spend that close to 20% of my income directly on Medicare in my taxes. Medicare costs less per care than private insurance. The insurance cartel's gouging and stingy approvals, plus its large profits, atop a mountain of waste, are sucking money from me that will never go to my health, or to anyone else's health other than the insurance corp's shareholders.
Meanwhile, the Republicans are working as hard as they can to destroy Medicare and Medicaid, and force all of our health expenses to funnel through the private insurance skimmer. The worst part of the Healthcare Reform they manipulated into a shadow of what was needed is what they are trying to convert the whole thing into.
Medicare for all. Like the rest of the civilized world. Or bust. Literally.
The general everything is composed of personal everything.
You Teabaggers whine about welfare handouts, except your own. You just love crude word games if they say others don't get what you want for yourself.
We don't worship the people who wrote and signed the Constitution. We use the Constitution to govern our actual modern lives.
It doesn't cost over a $TRILLION a year to keep other countries from invading us. Just look at all the other countries that manage it at a tiny fraction of the cost.
The US can be as safe, and even safer, for something like $300B or less a year combined military and "intelligence" spending.
The defense of our rights from threats other than attack or invasion, and promotion of the general welfare, cost far more than that. And defend from a much more real and better funded threat.
No, the government's job is to protect our rights period. From any enemy, foreign or domestic. Like the corporations that routinely attack our rights. And indeed like the government itself, when it routinely attacks our rights.
Everyone you, zippthorne, personally voted for has led the government in attacking, not protecting our rights. Because you're a Republican.
Taxes don't pay for lobbyists. Lobbyists are paid out of the bribes paid directly to officials. Taxes compete with those bribes. That's why lobbyists force taxes down - so there's more left to pay lobbyists.
Well, success requires both opportunity and execution. Just being born at the right time doesn't give you what you have. Look at all the people born at the right time who've failed to collect even enough income to live on. And there are plenty of people born at the right time, into rich families, who squandered what they were given and lost their meal ticket. Luck is usually necessary, but hard work usually counts, too.
SS isn't a ponzi scheme, as you say. But politicians aren't "regularly stealing money from the program". They regularly borrow from the program, and pay about +50% interest every 30 years. Which is the same investment banks make in housing, except the SS investment in the rest of the Federal government is far more safe. The only actual threat of killing Social Security is rightwing politicians trying to actually steal ("privatize") it. And the many Americans who've accepted years of propaganda telling them not to expect to receive benefits when they're old, because of lies like "ponzi scheme" and "the lockbox is already looted".