There's a huge difference between being threatened in person, in a place where you simply cannot avoid going to, and an unknown stranger on the internet speaking to nobody in particular, in a medium you can easily avoid. I mean, just don't follow these people on Twitter in the first place.
I don't understand how a policy position, such as deporting illegal immigrants, is suddenly "hate speech". The ability to speak about policy choices is exactly why we have freedom of speech. Imagine the king and queens of Europe actually succeeded in banning all of the books and writings by the renaissance thinkers. Where would the US be?
Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, they are the books and letters of today. They are our town squares and pubs, where people go to talk about the things they care about. It's true that the 1st amendment doesn't technically apply to them, but the idea of free speech is not limited to the US constitution, and I believe they have a moral responsibility to uphold the freedom of speech, even if they're not legally compelled to do so.
In the long run, UBI is the only choice. A free market works best when it's truly free, and that includes voluntary participation by all parties. It's not really a free market if one side must choose to participate or starve.
Minimum wage is not UBI and does not accomplish anything close to what UBI does. It just shifts income from one group of poor people to another, that is, the ones that are not essential to the business and thus laid off, to the essential ones, who are now paid more. And because it acts as a price floor, it actually reduces the total amount of employment and total amount of wages across the entire market.
Minimum wage also causes illegal immigration and outsourcing, because some businesses need cheap labor and can't survive without it. So they turn to illegal immigrants, who accept whatever wage they're given, and other countries, which have much lower costs in general. The only upside is it also pushes for more automation, which is great, but I've never heard anyone mention that when promoting minimum wage. It's always about "fair pay".
Minimum Wage: Not necessary in general. If you can't live off of the job, then don't take it. If the company can't find anyone, they'll raise the pay.
OSHA: You provide the car. You decide how safely or unsafely you drive. You decide what pickups you accept and the destinations you'll go to. Uber never puts you in any situation you don't want to be in.
Overtime / 40 hour week: Again, you decide what pickups you accept. Stop accepting pickups if you think your work day is too long.
Throwing a bunch of regulations on Uber is only going to make it a shitty service like the taxis already are. The long term result? Fewer people want to live in cities and more people owning cars, contributing to suburban sprawl, congestion and pollution. It's even worse for Uber drivers themselves, because a shitty service attracts less customers, which means no matter how much you regulate, if Uber has no money, it can't pay all of its drivers. Those who are striking for more pay? Well, they'll can happily unemployed instead.
$200 billion is only the clean up costs, not the lost productivity of the irradiated land. Besides, they're not even close to being done with clean up.
Not sure if you are being sarcastic, but I think it's actually a great idea. I can stop worrying about my electronics running out of charge just when I need them the most.
My only concern is disposal, since some people will throw them in the trash bin and they'll end up in a landfill somewhere.
I have a feeling punch card machines causes a lot of erroneous votes because of how hard it is to use correctly. Also, the ballot in every neighborhood is different, so you will need some sort of removable / programmable media to be used in conjunction with the machines.
On the other hand, it only takes one voter to report vote-buying to expose the entire thing. To actually influence elections, the vote buyer would need to buy off hundreds, if not thousands of votes. Moreover, not every voter offered money would be willing to vote a certain way, so to get those hundreds of votes, the vote buyer would need to get in touch with several times as many people, all of whom must not try to report this obviously illegal activity. I don't see how anyone can keep something like that secret.
At that point, it's probably easier to buy off the vote counters or just run attack ads.
Lets remember, China like the US has some major geographical advantages (lots of USABLE land)..
Actually the US has more usable land, with 1,650,062 sq. km of arable land, vs. China's 1,385,905 sq. km. Much of western China is taken up by Tibetan Plateau and the Gobi Desert, whereas the American midwest only turns into a desert if you mismanage it.
In an article about coal power, I think this link is a bit more relevant. Note that Canada is the world's #5 producer, but the rest are more than 20 places down. Even then, Canada is only 1/5th of China.
Is that feasible? Would the material be concentrated enough to extract and process into useful fuel? Because I can also say "fusioning the hydrogen passing through a hydro electric dam's turbines would generate 1000x the energy as what the dam extracts from the water".
In 2015 China became the world's largest producer of photovoltaic power, at 43 GW installed capacity. China also led the world in the production and use of wind power and smart grid technologies...
While China is one of the largest producers of renewable power, due to their size, they are also the largest producer in many other things, including coal. Take a look at where their energy comes from. Most of it is still fossil fuels. In fact, fossil fuel use has been growing like there's no tomorrow.
It's good that their leaders are willing to talk about climate change (at least more than the incoming US president), but talk is cheap. Let's wait until we see some results.
Unfortunately, time spent with family does nothing for the next quarter's profits. This wouldn't be a problem if the workers had any bargaining power, but the workers are also competing against warehouse robots, which work 168 hours a week on a few cents of electricity per hour.
In fact, I'm surprised there are still workers in those warehouses given how much they cost and how they attract negative press for Amazon.
The question is not whether those jobs can be completely automated. Even 90% automation is problematic. If 90% of the jobs that previously existed went away, now you have 90% unemployment. Unless you find millions of other jobs for those people right away, they will be in deep trouble. Thankfully, new jobs have been keeping up so far, but the pace of automation has been increasing, and there may come a tipping point where we're shedding jobs left and right.
As someone who will probably be designing new automatons, the fact that I would have a job does not make me feel at ease if the rest of the country is on the verge of starving. To put it another way, I don't want to be an automation bourgeoisie when the proletariat revolts.
My wife has an expensive coffee machine, yet she still goes out and buys coffee from the guy up the road.
She wants the feeling of being served by a human. Going to the coffee shop is just a way to buy that feeling. It's true that we don't have an automated solution right now, but it's hard to say that will never happen. Eventually robot technology will rise to the point where you can't tell whether someone is a human.
Moreover, can demand for something as whimsical as a feeling can actually support an economy? A person can really only be served by one or two people at any given moment, and not everyone wants to be waited on all the time. Eventually all these people you have to interact with will get annoying and you'll want to be left alone.
To answer your other question: Plenty of things have been completely automated away. Cloth washers, buggy drivers, news delivery people, calculators (as in, people who do arithmetic by hand), to name a few. Many others are 90% or more automated, like farmers, longshoreman, accountants, and of course factory workers. And then there are jobs that are or can soon be automated, like truck drivers, teachers, coal miners and cashiers. All of these jobs will be obsoleted by existing or emerging technology.
Huh? Without the scalper, that someone could have bought the ticket directly from the supplier, at a lower price.
That's simply not true. If there's 200 people who want tickets and only 100 to go around, 100 people will have no tickets. Someone, somewhere, has to choose who gets a ticket and who doesn't. There's no way around that.
Generally, in a capitalist society, scarce goods are distributed according to the buyer's willingness to pay, because that system works really well. Those who really need it will pay more to get it, while those who could live without it goes without. Everyone is happy (or at least not too unhappy). You can pick some other criteria to choose your buyers, but now the burden is on you to show that that system produces a better outcome, that the people who want to go the most gets to go.
Rather than fighting fake news by banning them (and in the process trample all over free speech), why not produce real news? Give people a better option than thinly disguised propaganda. Those that want the red pill can get it. The rest? Well there's nothing you can do if they wholeheartedly want to believe Clinton is the devil or Trump is the next Hitler.
Actually, Facebook, like all multinational corporations, would've gained a lot from a Clinton presidency and the increased globalization she would've brought. When next election comes around, there will be a lot fewer right-leaning posts.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a huge difference between being threatened in person, in a place where you simply cannot avoid going to, and an unknown stranger on the internet speaking to nobody in particular, in a medium you can easily avoid. I mean, just don't follow these people on Twitter in the first place.
I don't understand how a policy position, such as deporting illegal immigrants, is suddenly "hate speech". The ability to speak about policy choices is exactly why we have freedom of speech. Imagine the king and queens of Europe actually succeeded in banning all of the books and writings by the renaissance thinkers. Where would the US be?
Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, they are the books and letters of today. They are our town squares and pubs, where people go to talk about the things they care about. It's true that the 1st amendment doesn't technically apply to them, but the idea of free speech is not limited to the US constitution, and I believe they have a moral responsibility to uphold the freedom of speech, even if they're not legally compelled to do so.
Just curious, how did you manage to get internet in Somalia?
In the long run, UBI is the only choice. A free market works best when it's truly free, and that includes voluntary participation by all parties. It's not really a free market if one side must choose to participate or starve.
Minimum wage is not UBI and does not accomplish anything close to what UBI does. It just shifts income from one group of poor people to another, that is, the ones that are not essential to the business and thus laid off, to the essential ones, who are now paid more. And because it acts as a price floor, it actually reduces the total amount of employment and total amount of wages across the entire market.
Minimum wage also causes illegal immigration and outsourcing, because some businesses need cheap labor and can't survive without it. So they turn to illegal immigrants, who accept whatever wage they're given, and other countries, which have much lower costs in general. The only upside is it also pushes for more automation, which is great, but I've never heard anyone mention that when promoting minimum wage. It's always about "fair pay".
I'm sure Uber's actual employees, the ones who write its app and runs its servers, are paid very well.
Throwing a bunch of regulations on Uber is only going to make it a shitty service like the taxis already are. The long term result? Fewer people want to live in cities and more people owning cars, contributing to suburban sprawl, congestion and pollution. It's even worse for Uber drivers themselves, because a shitty service attracts less customers, which means no matter how much you regulate, if Uber has no money, it can't pay all of its drivers. Those who are striking for more pay? Well, they'll can happily unemployed instead.
$200 billion is only the clean up costs, not the lost productivity of the irradiated land. Besides, they're not even close to being done with clean up.
What about the lost productivity of the land that's now quarantined? Or the tourism money that would've went to Japan if it wasn't for Fukushima?
I'd like to see an honest calculation of how much nuclear power costs, because all the numbers I've seen never takes those into account.
Not sure if you are being sarcastic, but I think it's actually a great idea. I can stop worrying about my electronics running out of charge just when I need them the most.
My only concern is disposal, since some people will throw them in the trash bin and they'll end up in a landfill somewhere.
I have a feeling punch card machines causes a lot of erroneous votes because of how hard it is to use correctly. Also, the ballot in every neighborhood is different, so you will need some sort of removable / programmable media to be used in conjunction with the machines.
Voting booths don't audit people either, they don't even require photo ID.
On the other hand, it only takes one voter to report vote-buying to expose the entire thing. To actually influence elections, the vote buyer would need to buy off hundreds, if not thousands of votes. Moreover, not every voter offered money would be willing to vote a certain way, so to get those hundreds of votes, the vote buyer would need to get in touch with several times as many people, all of whom must not try to report this obviously illegal activity. I don't see how anyone can keep something like that secret.
At that point, it's probably easier to buy off the vote counters or just run attack ads.
Lets remember, China like the US has some major geographical advantages (lots of USABLE land)..
Actually the US has more usable land, with 1,650,062 sq. km of arable land, vs. China's 1,385,905 sq. km. Much of western China is taken up by Tibetan Plateau and the Gobi Desert, whereas the American midwest only turns into a desert if you mismanage it.
In an article about coal power, I think this link is a bit more relevant. Note that Canada is the world's #5 producer, but the rest are more than 20 places down. Even then, Canada is only 1/5th of China.
Is that feasible? Would the material be concentrated enough to extract and process into useful fuel? Because I can also say "fusioning the hydrogen passing through a hydro electric dam's turbines would generate 1000x the energy as what the dam extracts from the water".
In 2015 China became the world's largest producer of photovoltaic power, at 43 GW installed capacity. China also led the world in the production and use of wind power and smart grid technologies...
While China is one of the largest producers of renewable power, due to their size, they are also the largest producer in many other things, including coal. Take a look at where their energy comes from. Most of it is still fossil fuels. In fact, fossil fuel use has been growing like there's no tomorrow.
It's good that their leaders are willing to talk about climate change (at least more than the incoming US president), but talk is cheap. Let's wait until we see some results.
Unfortunately, time spent with family does nothing for the next quarter's profits. This wouldn't be a problem if the workers had any bargaining power, but the workers are also competing against warehouse robots, which work 168 hours a week on a few cents of electricity per hour.
In fact, I'm surprised there are still workers in those warehouses given how much they cost and how they attract negative press for Amazon.
Why do you think you will own the robots?
Someone will own the robots, and they won't be the 99%.
Some people live and die with intersex anatomy without anyone (including themselves) ever knowing.
If nobody knows you're in the wrong bathroom, then there isn't any issue, is there?
If I own the robots, why would I let you take their work for free?
The question is not whether those jobs can be completely automated. Even 90% automation is problematic. If 90% of the jobs that previously existed went away, now you have 90% unemployment. Unless you find millions of other jobs for those people right away, they will be in deep trouble. Thankfully, new jobs have been keeping up so far, but the pace of automation has been increasing, and there may come a tipping point where we're shedding jobs left and right.
As someone who will probably be designing new automatons, the fact that I would have a job does not make me feel at ease if the rest of the country is on the verge of starving. To put it another way, I don't want to be an automation bourgeoisie when the proletariat revolts.
My wife has an expensive coffee machine, yet she still goes out and buys coffee from the guy up the road.
She wants the feeling of being served by a human. Going to the coffee shop is just a way to buy that feeling. It's true that we don't have an automated solution right now, but it's hard to say that will never happen. Eventually robot technology will rise to the point where you can't tell whether someone is a human.
Moreover, can demand for something as whimsical as a feeling can actually support an economy? A person can really only be served by one or two people at any given moment, and not everyone wants to be waited on all the time. Eventually all these people you have to interact with will get annoying and you'll want to be left alone.
To answer your other question: Plenty of things have been completely automated away. Cloth washers, buggy drivers, news delivery people, calculators (as in, people who do arithmetic by hand), to name a few. Many others are 90% or more automated, like farmers, longshoreman, accountants, and of course factory workers. And then there are jobs that are or can soon be automated, like truck drivers, teachers, coal miners and cashiers. All of these jobs will be obsoleted by existing or emerging technology.
The scalper only has the ticket for a short while. He has to sell the ticket to make a profit. Eventually, someone who wants the ticket will get it.
Huh? Without the scalper, that someone could have bought the ticket directly from the supplier, at a lower price.
That's simply not true. If there's 200 people who want tickets and only 100 to go around, 100 people will have no tickets. Someone, somewhere, has to choose who gets a ticket and who doesn't. There's no way around that.
Generally, in a capitalist society, scarce goods are distributed according to the buyer's willingness to pay, because that system works really well. Those who really need it will pay more to get it, while those who could live without it goes without. Everyone is happy (or at least not too unhappy). You can pick some other criteria to choose your buyers, but now the burden is on you to show that that system produces a better outcome, that the people who want to go the most gets to go.
Rather than fighting fake news by banning them (and in the process trample all over free speech), why not produce real news? Give people a better option than thinly disguised propaganda. Those that want the red pill can get it. The rest? Well there's nothing you can do if they wholeheartedly want to believe Clinton is the devil or Trump is the next Hitler.
Actually, Facebook, like all multinational corporations, would've gained a lot from a Clinton presidency and the increased globalization she would've brought. When next election comes around, there will be a lot fewer right-leaning posts.