By effectively releasing a somewhat captive workforce from their NEED to continue doing those jobs, expect the salaries in such fields to have to rise dramatically overnight in order for them to remain sustainable when a large percentage of current workers say "screw this!" and quit.
So you're basically saying slavery is good for the economy. Many of these jobs are manual because slave labor is cheap and plentiful. We have fruit picker robots, but they have a hard time gaining traction because their competition works for almost nothing. By releasing the fruit picker workforce, you will be forcing a shift to robotics, which is great for everyone in the long term. Meanwhile, some of the fruit pickers will take up jobs as robot maintainers. The rest can live off of UBI.
UBI should not, and does not give you a great lifestyle, it gives you a very meager one. Most working people would not accept living like that. Any job worth doing should still have no trouble finding people. And with UBI, there's no longer need for minimum wage, so some marginal work that's currently not done can be done again.
I think you're right to be worried about disruption. But the solution there is to ramp up very slowly. $200 a month at the beginning, so theoretically you can live off of that if you move to the poorest parts of the country. Then increase it to $300 in a few years, and then $400 and so on. If at any point you start to see heavy inflation or mass exit from the job market, you stop increasing that number.
As for maintaining a domestic agriculture industry, it's a strategic problem with a strategic solution. Simply store 5 years of food at all times, together with seeds, fertilizers and farming equipment necessary to restart production at any time. It's good practice anyways because you never know when some natural disaster strikes and food production is hurt worldwide.
While that's great for some of us, why would China agree to a metric that's so stacked against them? Why would any third world country agree to it? You're not going to convince other countries to follow suit on an import tax, especially not countries that export heavily to China (that would be Japan, South Korea, Australia and Brazil). China is the #3 export partner for both the EU and the US too. So you'll have a hard time convincing Congress to do anything about it, let alone other countries. They are just going to ignore you.
But let's say you somehow convince the first world countries to follow suit, would that really be good for humanity? Every developing nation would continue burning coal and oil, because they can't support themselves otherwise. And since the US and EU stopped using so much of it, it's cheaper than ever. Meanwhile, the economic schism goes on to cause trillions of dollars in economic damages across the world as industries are torn down because they couldn't export anymore and new ones must be built for what used to be imported goods (and in case you think this is a good thing, go read up on the broken window fallacy). Not only will you make the entire world a much worse place, you'd also have done nothing for global warming.
Explain to me why they'd go to all that trouble to buy or build an apartment only to not make money on it. Have you actually spoken to them? Maybe they're not even aware of the problem because they handed the property over to a shitty management firm.
I agree it's a good direction to be heading in, but SF is not the best place to do this. First, SF is perpetually foggy, meaning ROI for solar panels is much lower there than the surrounding Bay Area. Second, this limits the tech to just solar. Other tech, such as wind turbines now have no chance to compete, even though I think they're much better suited to the windy SF weather. And finally, this law applies to new construction, which SF has almost none of. If anything, this will make new construction even harder, exacerbating rent problems.
Overall this is a feel-good, do nothing legislation, a bit like the UN passing a resolution condemning terrorist attacks.
The chip won't work. Criminal intent is not detectable via chip implants, and a crime can be committed anywhere. More over, some crimes are committed without intent.
And by the way, your money is worthless without the rest of the world. In one way or another, their well-being translates into your well-being. Don't be so selfish and short-sighted.
Rehabilitation is possible. For someone who committed the crime in one single incident, the possibility of rehabilitation is actually very high, because they may have been influenced by extremist ideology that can be corrected with reeducation.
But that doesn't mean he should be allowed to leave. Let's say the chance of recidivism is 20% (I'm taking the optimistic rate for Norway). That means there's a 20% chance of him going off to kill another 70 people. Is that acceptable? Is the value he can bring 80% of the time by being a productive member of society great enough to offset the next 70 people he would kill 20% of the time (14 people on average)?
Let's say the answer is no. Then consider why he should be kept alive at all. What value does he have by being alive and imprisoned? Is it just so others can feel good about the government having done the "right thing"? Is that worth however much it costs to imprison him for life?
If it were a country like India, the several million dollars spent jailing this one man could provide food and shelter to hundreds of others. They'd execute him without a second thought. But Norway doesn't have a need for that kind of money. So the ideal situation then, from a humanist perspective, is having Norway execute him, then give $5 million to India. Do this every time someone commits mass murder. Then maybe when India is as rich as Norway, they would stop executing people too.
Rehabilitation is possible actually. For someone who committed the crime in one single incident, the possibility of rehabilitation is very high, because they were influenced by extremist ideology that, given time, can be corrected with reeducation.
But that doesn't mean he should be allowed to leave. Let's say the chance of recidivism is 20% (I'm taking the optimistic rate for Norway). That means there's a 20% chance of him going off to kill another 70 people. Is that acceptable? Is the value he can bring 80% of the time by being a productive member of society great enough to offset the next 70 people he would kill 20% of the time (14 people on average)?
Let's say the answer is no. Then consider why he should be kept alive at all. What value does he have by being alive and imprisoned? Is it just so others can feel good about the government having done the "right thing"? Is that worth however much it costs to imprison him for life?
If it were a country like India, the several million dollars spent jailing this one man could provide food and shelter to hundreds of others. They'd execute him without a second thought. But Norway doesn't have a need for that kind of money. So the ideal situation then, from a humanist perspective, is having Norway execute him, then give $5 million to India. Do this every time someone commits mass murder. Then maybe when India is as rich as Norway, they can stop executing people too.
Homicides rate to death penalty in different countries are not comparable, since the propensity for crime are not the same from one country to the next. If anything, a country with more crime is more likely to pass laws allowing the death penalty, because it's seen as a deterrent. In other words, the causation goes the other way.
I think that says more about the quality of reading material than anything else. Density definitely has an effect. Classics take much longer to read because they pack more substance into the same number of words. Some of the philosophical ramblings require you to stop reading and actually think about what they're saying. It happens all the time with research papers too. Try reading this in 10 minutes or less (hint: you can't).
If you knew beforehand your post wouldn't be seen, why bother writing it up and posting it to Facebook? At least with a blog, someone could search for and find what you wrote years down the line, and maybe save them a couple of minutes.
As for friends, I suspect most people here don't even use Facebook to interact with them. Not the real ones anyways.
Whether he's legally entitled to it doesn't matter. Apple should not be forced to do work for him if they don't want to. Imagine the kid died in a car crash, and the phone was in pieces. Would it be reasonable to force Apple to reconstruct the phone so he could recover data from it? He had so many chances to have the phone decrypted before the kid died, it's his own fault.
Moreover, memories are not the same as bank accounts. There's no evidence that the contents of the boy's phone has any value, including emotional value. He's better off writing down what he can remember about his son, since that's going to fade pretty quickly.
In your scenario, the problem is caused by automation in the beginning, not a rise in minimum wage. Businesses can easily avoid higher labor costs incurred by minimum wage by transitioning full time workers to part time or decreasing the amount of hours worked.
The chain of events also seems to be very tenuous logic. Here's another cycle based on the same type of reasoning: The minimum wage will increase earnings in the time between the law changing and people getting laid off. A bunch of people with extra money is a boom to business, which leads them to hire more to handle demand, which in turn raises wages further, completely averting the recessionary cycle. A cursory glance suggests both cycles are possible. So how do we know which one makes sense? We look at experimental data. There's a number of studies done on the subject, but I think the Dept. of Labor is a good place to start.
Trump is not for free speech, or at least, not for free speech that he disagrees with.
The relevant bit here:
One of the things I'm going to do if I win... I'm going to open up our libel laws so when [newspapers] write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money... So when The New York Times writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace or when The Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they're totally protected.
To me that sounds like what a dictator might say. I doubt Trump is capable of pulling it off though, he's widely ridiculed by half of the country, and that's worse than simply being hated.
By the age of 18, the average person has created a negative value of $250k for all of society. It takes quite a long time to pay it back. Even in the hypothetically impossible situation where someone does not cause loss when they die, they would still have costed society money without having paid it back yet.
This line of reasoning is a bit of a slippery slope. Let's accept that a 18-year old cost society $250k to raise. If you view this as $250k debt to society, then you can demand that they pay that back somehow. If they commit suicide, then they've done a moral wrong on par with deliberate debt evasion. They took the money and never paid it back.
However, by that same logic, society can also demand that they do work that pays taxes, and if they don't pay taxes at the rate such that their lifetime contributions exceeds $250k, then they should be forced to work harder, longer, and at higher paying jobs. Obviously there are problems with this. Besides the impossibility of forcing them into higher paying jobs, forcing them to work is indentured servitude, bordering on slavery.
A better way of looking at the problem is to think of the $250k as an investment. Money invested do not have to be paid back if the investment did not profit. Indeed, the majority of people will not contribute their fair share of what was invested in them. However, investors (and governments) don't need them to. As long as there's a few successes that pays out 50x or 100x their investment, the cycle can keep going.
Moreover, it would not be fair to demand $250k from 18-year-olds. None of them asked to have $250k spent on them, and most of that $250k is spent by people other than themselves, often in a wasteful manner, in which the 18-year-olds have no control. If you feel the amount is too large, then blame should be laid at the feet of those spending that money, namely the government and those who elected them.
I think it's so they can come back in another 20 years and "offer" to upgrade DSL to 100 mbit fiber (which by then will be outdated too) for another $300 million.
What you call an argument, I call a discussion. Why else come to slashdot?
I've basically followed a few rules in life and I've done great:
1. Do what you love and do it really well
2. Focus on your life goal
3. Treat others kindly
Every other rule is either a more specific (and therefore less useful) version of the above, or a moronic rule made by some asshat authoritarian to keep you down.
Yet, I suspect if you look at where I am and where you are - and then at who followed the rules, you would still just want to argue.
Reread GP's post again. He said solar thermal, not solar and thermal. Solar thermal the concentrating variant of solar power that use mirrors rather than photovoltaics.
Unfortunately, doing nuclear safely is like doing Communism correctly. In theory, everything's great, but in practice, people are people. Those operating the plants will always have an incentive to cut corners, and that will always lead to a disaster every once in a while. The question is whether a major meltdown every 30 years an acceptable risk.
Maybe new reactors can mitigate some of that risk, but we haven't operated those reactors for long enough to be sure. And as is with everything new and untested, there's risk that some part of the design is flawed, and a failsafe that was supposed to be foolproof simply doesn't work.
Or they might rebel and discover they're not as powerless as they previously thought. I'm sure their family and friends already tried the being supportive route, so if that's not working, why not try something different? Maybe a drill sergeant is what they need.
Following rules doesn't get you very far in life. At best you'll be just another cog in the global market, soon to be replaced by a computer, whose low cost is only matched by its ability to follow rules, however stupid those rules are.
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By effectively releasing a somewhat captive workforce from their NEED to continue doing those jobs, expect the salaries in such fields to have to rise dramatically overnight in order for them to remain sustainable when a large percentage of current workers say "screw this!" and quit.
So you're basically saying slavery is good for the economy. Many of these jobs are manual because slave labor is cheap and plentiful. We have fruit picker robots, but they have a hard time gaining traction because their competition works for almost nothing. By releasing the fruit picker workforce, you will be forcing a shift to robotics, which is great for everyone in the long term. Meanwhile, some of the fruit pickers will take up jobs as robot maintainers. The rest can live off of UBI.
UBI should not, and does not give you a great lifestyle, it gives you a very meager one. Most working people would not accept living like that. Any job worth doing should still have no trouble finding people. And with UBI, there's no longer need for minimum wage, so some marginal work that's currently not done can be done again.
I think you're right to be worried about disruption. But the solution there is to ramp up very slowly. $200 a month at the beginning, so theoretically you can live off of that if you move to the poorest parts of the country. Then increase it to $300 in a few years, and then $400 and so on. If at any point you start to see heavy inflation or mass exit from the job market, you stop increasing that number.
As for maintaining a domestic agriculture industry, it's a strategic problem with a strategic solution. Simply store 5 years of food at all times, together with seeds, fertilizers and farming equipment necessary to restart production at any time. It's good practice anyways because you never know when some natural disaster strikes and food production is hurt worldwide.
While that's great for some of us, why would China agree to a metric that's so stacked against them? Why would any third world country agree to it? You're not going to convince other countries to follow suit on an import tax, especially not countries that export heavily to China (that would be Japan, South Korea, Australia and Brazil). China is the #3 export partner for both the EU and the US too. So you'll have a hard time convincing Congress to do anything about it, let alone other countries. They are just going to ignore you.
But let's say you somehow convince the first world countries to follow suit, would that really be good for humanity? Every developing nation would continue burning coal and oil, because they can't support themselves otherwise. And since the US and EU stopped using so much of it, it's cheaper than ever. Meanwhile, the economic schism goes on to cause trillions of dollars in economic damages across the world as industries are torn down because they couldn't export anymore and new ones must be built for what used to be imported goods (and in case you think this is a good thing, go read up on the broken window fallacy). Not only will you make the entire world a much worse place, you'd also have done nothing for global warming.
Explain to me why they'd go to all that trouble to buy or build an apartment only to not make money on it. Have you actually spoken to them? Maybe they're not even aware of the problem because they handed the property over to a shitty management firm.
I agree it's a good direction to be heading in, but SF is not the best place to do this. First, SF is perpetually foggy, meaning ROI for solar panels is much lower there than the surrounding Bay Area. Second, this limits the tech to just solar. Other tech, such as wind turbines now have no chance to compete, even though I think they're much better suited to the windy SF weather. And finally, this law applies to new construction, which SF has almost none of. If anything, this will make new construction even harder, exacerbating rent problems.
Overall this is a feel-good, do nothing legislation, a bit like the UN passing a resolution condemning terrorist attacks.
If the luxury apartments aren't being used, then the owners not getting any rental income. It's a bigger problem for them than it is for you.
The chip won't work. Criminal intent is not detectable via chip implants, and a crime can be committed anywhere. More over, some crimes are committed without intent.
And by the way, your money is worthless without the rest of the world. In one way or another, their well-being translates into your well-being. Don't be so selfish and short-sighted.
Rehabilitation is possible. For someone who committed the crime in one single incident, the possibility of rehabilitation is actually very high, because they may have been influenced by extremist ideology that can be corrected with reeducation.
But that doesn't mean he should be allowed to leave. Let's say the chance of recidivism is 20% (I'm taking the optimistic rate for Norway). That means there's a 20% chance of him going off to kill another 70 people. Is that acceptable? Is the value he can bring 80% of the time by being a productive member of society great enough to offset the next 70 people he would kill 20% of the time (14 people on average)?
Let's say the answer is no. Then consider why he should be kept alive at all. What value does he have by being alive and imprisoned? Is it just so others can feel good about the government having done the "right thing"? Is that worth however much it costs to imprison him for life?
If it were a country like India, the several million dollars spent jailing this one man could provide food and shelter to hundreds of others. They'd execute him without a second thought. But Norway doesn't have a need for that kind of money. So the ideal situation then, from a humanist perspective, is having Norway execute him, then give $5 million to India. Do this every time someone commits mass murder. Then maybe when India is as rich as Norway, they would stop executing people too.
It's a win-win for everybody.
Rehabilitation is possible actually. For someone who committed the crime in one single incident, the possibility of rehabilitation is very high, because they were influenced by extremist ideology that, given time, can be corrected with reeducation.
But that doesn't mean he should be allowed to leave. Let's say the chance of recidivism is 20% (I'm taking the optimistic rate for Norway). That means there's a 20% chance of him going off to kill another 70 people. Is that acceptable? Is the value he can bring 80% of the time by being a productive member of society great enough to offset the next 70 people he would kill 20% of the time (14 people on average)?
Let's say the answer is no. Then consider why he should be kept alive at all. What value does he have by being alive and imprisoned? Is it just so others can feel good about the government having done the "right thing"? Is that worth however much it costs to imprison him for life?
If it were a country like India, the several million dollars spent jailing this one man could provide food and shelter to hundreds of others. They'd execute him without a second thought. But Norway doesn't have a need for that kind of money. So the ideal situation then, from a humanist perspective, is having Norway execute him, then give $5 million to India. Do this every time someone commits mass murder. Then maybe when India is as rich as Norway, they can stop executing people too.
It's a win-win for everybody.
Homicides rate to death penalty in different countries are not comparable, since the propensity for crime are not the same from one country to the next. If anything, a country with more crime is more likely to pass laws allowing the death penalty, because it's seen as a deterrent. In other words, the causation goes the other way.
Taxis makes every place reachable by public transport.
I think that says more about the quality of reading material than anything else. Density definitely has an effect. Classics take much longer to read because they pack more substance into the same number of words. Some of the philosophical ramblings require you to stop reading and actually think about what they're saying. It happens all the time with research papers too. Try reading this in 10 minutes or less (hint: you can't).
If you knew beforehand your post wouldn't be seen, why bother writing it up and posting it to Facebook? At least with a blog, someone could search for and find what you wrote years down the line, and maybe save them a couple of minutes.
As for friends, I suspect most people here don't even use Facebook to interact with them. Not the real ones anyways.
Or they could, you know, create a progressive tax, starting from 0% tax rate up to 60 or 70% for the largest and wealthiest corporations.
Whether he's legally entitled to it doesn't matter. Apple should not be forced to do work for him if they don't want to. Imagine the kid died in a car crash, and the phone was in pieces. Would it be reasonable to force Apple to reconstruct the phone so he could recover data from it? He had so many chances to have the phone decrypted before the kid died, it's his own fault.
Moreover, memories are not the same as bank accounts. There's no evidence that the contents of the boy's phone has any value, including emotional value. He's better off writing down what he can remember about his son, since that's going to fade pretty quickly.
In your scenario, the problem is caused by automation in the beginning, not a rise in minimum wage. Businesses can easily avoid higher labor costs incurred by minimum wage by transitioning full time workers to part time or decreasing the amount of hours worked.
The chain of events also seems to be very tenuous logic. Here's another cycle based on the same type of reasoning: The minimum wage will increase earnings in the time between the law changing and people getting laid off. A bunch of people with extra money is a boom to business, which leads them to hire more to handle demand, which in turn raises wages further, completely averting the recessionary cycle. A cursory glance suggests both cycles are possible. So how do we know which one makes sense? We look at experimental data. There's a number of studies done on the subject, but I think the Dept. of Labor is a good place to start.
The relevant bit here:
One of the things I'm going to do if I win... I'm going to open up our libel laws so when [newspapers] write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money... So when The New York Times writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace or when The Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they're totally protected.
To me that sounds like what a dictator might say. I doubt Trump is capable of pulling it off though, he's widely ridiculed by half of the country, and that's worse than simply being hated.
By the age of 18, the average person has created a negative value of $250k for all of society. It takes quite a long time to pay it back. Even in the hypothetically impossible situation where someone does not cause loss when they die, they would still have costed society money without having paid it back yet.
This line of reasoning is a bit of a slippery slope. Let's accept that a 18-year old cost society $250k to raise. If you view this as $250k debt to society, then you can demand that they pay that back somehow. If they commit suicide, then they've done a moral wrong on par with deliberate debt evasion. They took the money and never paid it back.
However, by that same logic, society can also demand that they do work that pays taxes, and if they don't pay taxes at the rate such that their lifetime contributions exceeds $250k, then they should be forced to work harder, longer, and at higher paying jobs. Obviously there are problems with this. Besides the impossibility of forcing them into higher paying jobs, forcing them to work is indentured servitude, bordering on slavery.
A better way of looking at the problem is to think of the $250k as an investment. Money invested do not have to be paid back if the investment did not profit. Indeed, the majority of people will not contribute their fair share of what was invested in them. However, investors (and governments) don't need them to. As long as there's a few successes that pays out 50x or 100x their investment, the cycle can keep going.
Moreover, it would not be fair to demand $250k from 18-year-olds. None of them asked to have $250k spent on them, and most of that $250k is spent by people other than themselves, often in a wasteful manner, in which the 18-year-olds have no control. If you feel the amount is too large, then blame should be laid at the feet of those spending that money, namely the government and those who elected them.
No need to be skeptical. I've ridden it, and it's not noticeably smoother than other light rail lines.
I think it's so they can come back in another 20 years and "offer" to upgrade DSL to 100 mbit fiber (which by then will be outdated too) for another $300 million.
I've basically followed a few rules in life and I've done great:
1. Do what you love and do it really well
2. Focus on your life goal
3. Treat others kindly
Every other rule is either a more specific (and therefore less useful) version of the above, or a moronic rule made by some asshat authoritarian to keep you down.
Yet, I suspect if you look at where I am and where you are - and then at who followed the rules, you would still just want to argue.
So is this a dick-measuring contest now?
Reread GP's post again. He said solar thermal, not solar and thermal. Solar thermal the concentrating variant of solar power that use mirrors rather than photovoltaics.
Unfortunately, doing nuclear safely is like doing Communism correctly. In theory, everything's great, but in practice, people are people. Those operating the plants will always have an incentive to cut corners, and that will always lead to a disaster every once in a while. The question is whether a major meltdown every 30 years an acceptable risk.
Maybe new reactors can mitigate some of that risk, but we haven't operated those reactors for long enough to be sure. And as is with everything new and untested, there's risk that some part of the design is flawed, and a failsafe that was supposed to be foolproof simply doesn't work.
Or they might rebel and discover they're not as powerless as they previously thought. I'm sure their family and friends already tried the being supportive route, so if that's not working, why not try something different? Maybe a drill sergeant is what they need.
Following rules doesn't get you very far in life. At best you'll be just another cog in the global market, soon to be replaced by a computer, whose low cost is only matched by its ability to follow rules, however stupid those rules are.
Then he already compares favorably to the rest of them, who won't even mention offshoring, or in the case of Clinton, actively pushing for more of it.