The trouble is that when you make it that general, you run into namespace problems. Is "record" a directive to the DVR or the video surveillance system? Is "alarm" the alarm clock or the motion sensors? Is "House" a show or a place? Is the temperature in F or C?
There are also the obvious practical problems with misinterpretation: When you say "repeat" you most emphatically do not mean "delete" no matter how much background noise there is.
Well, that or get someone else to do it and provide a little cooperation.
I find it pretty hard to believe that Mozilla or Google would be unwilling to write code to make Flash supported natively by the browser without a plugin, if Adobe would be willing to answer the occasional question about an ambiguity or incompleteness in the spec, etc.
I've seen ECC errors before. It's frequently because the memory is not seated perfectly and if you reseat it they stop. But if you don't have ECC memory, you don't get an ECC warning, your programs just crash.
You don't have to convert everything. You just have to give Adobe a swift kick in the tail so they do something to fix the problem -- like open source Flash Player or publish RFCs sufficient for someone else to make one.
Except that isn't what happened at all. There is plenty of stuff in a browser -- javascript to name one -- that would be blatantly insecure if the browser makers wrote code of the same quality as Adobe.
The problem is actually a lack of competition: You can visit the same web page in Firefox as in Chrome, so the browser makers get their shit together or they lose users. But if you want to play a flash movie, you have to use Adobe's flash plugin. There is no viable alternative from the user's perspective, so Adobe has no real incentive to spend money fixing their security.
What would need to happen is for web developers to start using HTML5 instead of Flash. Which is starting to happen. But since Adobe is more concerned about selling authoring tools than getting people to install Flash Player, they might just start selling authoring tools that produce HTML5 output and let Flash die the death it deserves rather than trying to fix it.
Once we've met each other, working out the details is remarkably quick.
Is it, though? Do you even agree on the broad strokes? Or do half of you want lower taxes and the other half want more government spending?
The problem is that people spend all their time arguing about the broad strokes and they never even get to the details, even though the details are what matters.
Let me give you an example: If you buy an ownership stake in a corporation (say 100 shares of stock), there are two main ways you can grow your money. The first is by the corporation paying a dividend (that is, giving the shareholders a share of the profit), the second is by holding the stock until its value goes up and then selling it for more than you paid. In theory you should be pretty agnostic as to which form your money comes in: If the share price goes from $10/share to $11/share, that should make you exactly as happy as if you were paid a dividend of $1/share and the share price stayed the same. If you want you can use the dividend to buy additional shares, or sell some of your shares if you want to use the money for something else -- the form the gain comes in would not matter to you.
In comes the tax code. It turns out that those gains get taxed, and the form of the gain changes when the taxes are owed. If a corporation pays a dividend then the shareholder owes income tax on it immediately. If the share price goes up, you don't have to pay tax on the increase until you actually sell the shares. Suddenly shareholders strongly prefer to make their gains in the form of increasing the stock price and not dividends, because it allows them to to put off paying the taxes for many years. In the meantime the money they would have paid is invested and collects returns.
So no big deal, right? Without the tax, when a corporation made a profit they would have issued a dividend and a stockholder who wanted to reinvest the money would just buy some more shares of one stock or another. Now the corporation takes the money and invests directly, which means they're holding more assets and their share price goes up, and the stockholder who wants to spend his gains instead of reinvesting them just sells a few shares to do that. Big whoop.
Except that it turns out to change the way the whole economy works. GE has been known to make more money from its investments in other companies than it does from its own operations. More to the point, it takes the decision of what to invest in out of the hands of investors and into the hands of the executives of big corporations, for all the money that would have otherwise been issued as dividends. All the small and medium businesses that would otherwise have been independent competitors to the big companies suddenly become their wholly owned subsidiaries, because the big companies have to buy something with the money their shareholders don't want as dividends, so why not competitors?
On top of that, it makes it impossible to run a stable company with no growth. Look at the publicly traded telecoms and cable TV providers. They're public utilities -- it's the basic model of a company with minimal growth potential. You have a local monopoly, you have X customers, every month they pay you money and what you sensibly ought to do is issue whatever you have left after operating costs and upgrades as a dividend to your shareholders. But the tax code makes the shareholders not want dividends, it makes them want your stock price to go up. So you buy competitors in other regions, you buy NBC, you buy cellular companies, etc. You have to keep your company growing so the stock price can increase.
And it doesn't end. Is AT&T big enough to make the shareholders happy? Of course not. They want further growth, which means further acquisitions. The death of small companies, media consolidation, etc. Because the tax code taxes dividends differently than capital gains. Is that the sort of thing some mob full of art historians and retail sales people is
Without exaggeration, humanity itself would have been set back a decade. And for what? So a handful of private companies and lawyers could make a little more money.
And not even that. Locking things up is a pie-shrinking enterprise. The company that does it gets a bigger slice than they would have otherwise, but they only come out ahead if they're the only one doing it. If everybody does it, well, what do you get when twenty different companies each do something that increases their own share by 25% but shrinks the whole pie by 10%?
Intellectual property. It prevents the products from having their cost drop to 0 and thus keeps money in the system.
The saddest thing is that it doesn't. In a competitive market, even with copyright, the price of "intellectual property" still approaches zero, because of interbrand competition. If they had actual competition -- if radio stations played songs based on how good they were rather than payola, or independent filmmakers could get their films on the same number of screens as the big studios -- that competition that would drive the price toward the marginal cost the same as it does in any competitive market.
This especially given the dynamics of the market -- most musicians and filmmakers don't make money and in large companies those losses get made up by huge hits that top the charts. If there were more smaller artists who had equivalent distribution opportunities, the ones that fail and lose a bit of their own money wouldn't be financially liked to the ones who succeed, which would allow the winners to charge a small fraction of what is charged today and still come out ahead. People would then consume more because it would cost less, which would increase the number of works that are profitable (by broadening and flattening the revenue curve) and therefore further increase competition.
The only thing keeping those companies in the black today is their distribution cartel. If they had that and there were no copyright, they would still be doing fine. I mean considering how utterly unenforceable copyright has become in practice, that is essentially the state of things today and they're still making big money. What would do them in is that the lack of copyright would hurt their public image by removing any claim to legitimacy and removing the fig leaf they use to rationalize legislation passed to shore up the distribution cartel -- can't use DRM to thwart people from using non-industry channels to obtain media for their living room TV if there is no law supporting DRM, etc.
Not so clear actually. If there is actually an ambiguity then by definition there is not a single correct interpretation.
The trouble is that the alternative to ambiguity is the generality:specificity trade off. You can pass something that is both broad and unambiguous, but enforcing it would be absurd because you almost never want a blanket rule with no exceptions. So then you start adding exceptions and it soon gets so complicated that no one can follow it anymore.
It seems like the only way to win is not to play the game.
A country may try to control its currency value but the market at large has way to compensate for that.
You are still confusing governments acting as legislative authorities to set currency prices with governments acting as market participants. If the government says that there should be a 3:1 currency price and tries to prohibit transactions taking place at another value, they will get a black market. By contrast, if the government exports hundreds of billions of dollars worth of goods and is paid in foreign currency, the government can choose whether to hold that foreign currency or assets denominated in it as opposed to using the foreign currency to buy the government's own currency on the market. The choice allows the government to affect the market price of the currency, because they can remove an enormous amount of demand for their own currency by declining to buy it themselves, which causes the exchange rate to fall based on supply and demand. There is no black market because market forces are setting the price -- it's just that the government is a big enough market actor to be able to adjust prices to its liking.
If they are not forcing the wage to be lower using real forcible mean, the actual wage, after currency adjustment etc., is whatever the labor market can accept.
Again, the market price is affected by government action. Minimum wage is a double edged sword: For jobs that create a lot of value (like manufacturing) but for which the labor required is plentiful and unskilled, the large majority of the profit goes to the manufacturer because he can require otherwise-unemployed workers to underbid each other until they are barely (or not even) making subsistence wages, regardless of how large the owner's profit margin is. A government that sets a minimum wage causes some of those workers to be paid more money at the cost of increasing unemployment: For some employers it is not worth changing the location of their operations to avoid paying the higher wage, and those employees get a raise. For other employers, the minimum wage causes them to lay off employees for one of two reasons: either being forced to pay the higher wage makes it economical for the employer to move the jobs to a country that allows them to pay lower wages, or exporting the jobs is either impossible or not economical and paying the higher wage puts them out of business because the cost of production now exceeds the market value of the product.
By now you want to argue that this is just government interference with the market and the market price in other countries is still the same, but it doesn't. Look at what happens in foreign countries with a lower minimum wage or no minimum wage when this country enacts one: Wages in foreign countries go up while unemployment there goes down, because the demand for labor in those countries increases by the number of jobs moved from the countries with a higher minimum wage. For example, when the US raises the minimum wage from $5 to $8, the average market wage in a country with low or no minimum wage might increase from $3.00 to $3.50, because some companies now find it more profitable to pay in the neighborhood of $3.50/hour plus some shipping and overhead costs in order to avoid paying $8/hour.
So you can see that minimum wage is a tragedy of the commons. If all countries enact the same minimum wage then all employees everywhere will receive a larger share of the fruits of their labor and the only increase in unemployment anywhere would be in the case of jobs that are genuinely uneconomical at that wage, because no employer could flee to a different country to avoid paying the minimum wage. By contrast, if some countries have a higher minimum wage than others, either because they believe the increase in local wages is worth the very large transfer of jobs from that country to others or because they are acting irrationally, the countries with a lower minimum wage are artificially enriched because they
Ehm No. It was never supposed to protect the average citizen, it is to protect the ones who innovate against the ones who copy.
False. It is only supposed to "promote the Progress of... useful Arts" -- you are confusing the means with the ends.
Android isn't about innovation at all, it's about putting things that are already there together and not in an entirely new way, but in a way that it would match the features of modern proprietary OS but using free software. Thus patent system is not supposed to protect Android.
What you're saying is that in any fast-paced industry, one company should have a monopoly -- whoever is first to market should patent everything with any relation to the market, then exclude all others from competition. Then they can innovate at half or a quarter or less of the speed the market would in the absence of the patent system, as long as by the end of 20 years they have used their monopoly power to guide the market in a direction that they had the good sense to file a new crop of patents to cover and so retain their monopoly indefinitely.
Thankfully, you're wrong. The patent system is supposed to protect Android, because Android is doing new and different things. The open model itself is an innovation in the mobile device market -- and is a model that drives other innovation. You look at the variety of Android devices on the market. They're not all the same, so obviously each device is doing something different than the others -- something innovative to separate itself from the pack. That is exactly what the patent system is supposed to be promoting. The fact that it isn't is a blatant flaw that ought to be corrected.
And it's plain hipocrisy that Google claims Apple is attacking Android with bogus patents, which is entirely not true, Apple at least uses their own patents, while most Google patents are bought pieces of IP of other companies, which makes them a lot more bogus to me.
Bogus patents are so because they attempt to patent that which is already in the public domain -- things that are already known or obvious. Google is buying a patent has nothing to do with that -- if Apple doesn't like to be sued for patent infringement then they shouldn't infringe other people's patents. The fact that Google can find patents that Apple is infringing only goes to show how defective the patent system is when the largest company in America with an army of lawyers still can't even avoid infringing.
The value of Yuan wouldn't be off too much from market value, when considering inflation and cost, like the Yen. So it is moot called it undervalued, if the market does not support higher value Yuan.
Are you trying to make some kind of point because I said undervalue instead of devalue? Or are you denying that a country is capable of intentionally reducing the market value of their currency by holding assets in foreign currencies or increasing their currency supply?
There is minimum wage in China, enforced more rigorously in recent years due to high living costs.
Even if they've actually started enforcing it, you know perfectly well that the minimum wage in China is substantially lower than it is in most of the countries China exports to.
I don't see how any of that is inconsistent with what I said. They don't devalue their currency by legislating it anymore, they use economic methods now -- holding the money they receive as compensation for export goods as assets denominated in euros or US dollars (like US bonds), rather than converting it to yuan which would drive down the value of the other currencies and drive up the yuan. They reduce unemployment by causing their people to work for slave wages, not by pointing a gun at them, but by declining to implement a minimum wage or a basic income and then leaving people with the false choice of working for peanuts or starving for lack of peanuts.
It depends what the replacement is. If the new "fuel" is direct sunlight, or wind, or thorium, etc., there is money to be made building and maintaining power plants, but no longer any real money to be made selling fuel -- because the primary cost is building the plant in the first place, not buying something to burn in it.
Doc Brown (1955): No wonder this circuit failed. It says "Made in Japan". Marty McFly (1985): What do you mean, Doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan. Doc Brown (1955): Unbelievable.
And then it will spread to the middle east when europe, the US, China, and India all need a place for cheap manufacturing. And then it will make more sense to produce in Africa. Eventually (In a hundred or so years) every major region of the world will have had an industrial revolution.
No it won't, because there aren't enough people there to do that without significant automation. And if you have almost fully automated factories then labor is no longer the primary cost of production and it makes more sense to build them near where the consumers are and save yourself the shipping costs.
Also, China is very different from previous countries that have done this. They have a billion people, and they aren't a democracy. That makes it very easy for them to have an underclass with a population larger than the entire United States which, by applying a little automation to get some (but not all) of them out of the factories and into a middle class, can make enough goods for both the foreign and domestic markets. Then they can use central planning to implement greater automation at a rate that can slowly increase the size of the middle class, but never in a way that would cause significant unemployment.
The end result is going to be that China will be the last country to employ a large labor force in manufacturing. We could already automate half the stuff that they manufacture by hand there, the only reason we don't is that China doesn't want high unemployment and is more than willing to undervalue their currency and cause their population to work for slave wages in order to keep them working rather than starting an uprising. The second China can get any of those people into a middle class job (or, more realistically, the second any of those people dies or retires and is replaced by a young person with a better education), there will be a machine doing that work instead of a person.
What's not scarce are the implementations once designed. The real problem is that we don't have any way of rewarding ideas without these easily copyable implementations. Nobody so far has come up with a workable solution to this problem. Well, none more workable than copyright.
Sure we do: No software patents + 14 year copyright.
1) Install squid on the server in a non-oppressive country 2) ssh user@server -L 3128:localhost:3128 3) Configure the system proxy settings to use localhost on port 3128
Also, there is a (relatively new) VPN feature in OpenSSH. Look at the -w option.
Converting such a regressive tax as the FICA tax to the general fund is just more shenanigans. If you're going to drop SS then be honest about it and raise the income tax.
That is the rational thing to do whether we keep social security or not. But if people are going to be irrational and want social security to be funded out of a special regressive tax instead of the general fund, they can continue be irrational and prefer to keep the special regressive tax in order to claim that we aren't raising anyone's taxes.
If the US Government doesn't pay off the T-Bills in the SS Trust Fund it's going to have a negative effect on the other T-Bill that the government sells.
No it isn't. For one thing, since the whole thing is just an accounting trick, you can "pay them off" trivially because if there is no more social security then there is nobody who you actually have to give money to. You just have the defunct social security administration turn over its bonds to the general fund, then have the treasury pay the general fund for the bonds out of existing tax revenues.
The reason the trust fund is not in "a diversified investment portfolio" is risk. US T-Bills have always been a sure thing and when they are not any more we're in big trouble.
That's why they call it diversification. If you invest in a thousand different things and hedge your investments you can achieve similarly low risk overall -- arguably even lower because you don't have all your eggs in one basket.
But the point I was making is that the bonds in the social security trust don't have any economic effect so long as they're sitting there. If instead the social security administration were to sell those bonds on the open market and then use the money to buy stocks or commodities or the like (i.e. establish an actual trust fund), the result would be an economic catastrophe -- because the bonds would stop being a legal fiction written on a piece of paper and start having an economic effect, namely to raise interest rates.
Conversely, if the social security administration would turn every single one of them over to the treasury immediately, or light them all on fire, and then pay future social security payments in excess of social security tax receipts out of federal income tax revenues, there would be exactly no difference in the result to anyone anywhere. The bonds have the same fiscal and economic effect as not existing so long as they remain in the hands of the social security administration, which means that there is in actual fact no trust fund.
Over 70% of the people support raising taxes on the wealthy.
Over 90% of people are misinformed. What does it prove about what makes good policy? See also: Absurd consequences of semi-direct democracy in California.
In the 1950's and 1960's the top marginal tax rate was more than 70% and the country did pretty well so I don't see why we can't now.
You can't see why the decades coming out of WWII after all the major powers but us and the soviets had been bombed into the stone age would be different than today?
(And I'm not proposing raising it to 70% again but going back to 39% isn't going to cause much pain).
It also isn't going to generate anywhere near enough revenue. We have a thirteen-digit hole in the budget.
If you do that you're essentially converting the FICA taxes which are dedicated to SS and Medicare/caid into general fund taxes.
You can create a tax with the same characteristics and call it "payroll tax" instead of "FICA" if you like, which means that you're just arguing semantics about the words on the paycheck.
And you're also embezzling the current surplus in the SS trust fund.
There is no trust fund. The idea that the federal government can write itself a bunch of IOUs and call it a trust fund is nothing but a fraud on the American people. And if you don't think so, ask any economist what would happen to interest rates if Uncle Sam decided that the trust fund should adopt a diversified investment portfolio instead of holding exclusively federal bonds.
I don't think that's going to fly very well with most Americans.
You think any of the other solutions are going to fly any better?
More specifically, Amazon closed your accounts because they did not like the prior legislation.
More accurately, the legislation was passed that made it more profitable for Amazon to close your accounts than not. And the legislators could easily have predicted that before passing it, because that is exactly what happened when the other states did it. Is it Amazon's fault that the legislature has created a perverse incentive for it?
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The trouble is that when you make it that general, you run into namespace problems. Is "record" a directive to the DVR or the video surveillance system? Is "alarm" the alarm clock or the motion sensors? Is "House" a show or a place? Is the temperature in F or C?
There are also the obvious practical problems with misinterpretation: When you say "repeat" you most emphatically do not mean "delete" no matter how much background noise there is.
Well, that or get someone else to do it and provide a little cooperation.
I find it pretty hard to believe that Mozilla or Google would be unwilling to write code to make Flash supported natively by the browser without a plugin, if Adobe would be willing to answer the occasional question about an ambiguity or incompleteness in the spec, etc.
I've seen ECC errors before. It's frequently because the memory is not seated perfectly and if you reseat it they stop. But if you don't have ECC memory, you don't get an ECC warning, your programs just crash.
If that was sufficient to make a fully-functional independent implementation then where is the implementation and why doesn't anybody use it?
You don't have to convert everything. You just have to give Adobe a swift kick in the tail so they do something to fix the problem -- like open source Flash Player or publish RFCs sufficient for someone else to make one.
Except that isn't what happened at all. There is plenty of stuff in a browser -- javascript to name one -- that would be blatantly insecure if the browser makers wrote code of the same quality as Adobe.
The problem is actually a lack of competition: You can visit the same web page in Firefox as in Chrome, so the browser makers get their shit together or they lose users. But if you want to play a flash movie, you have to use Adobe's flash plugin. There is no viable alternative from the user's perspective, so Adobe has no real incentive to spend money fixing their security.
What would need to happen is for web developers to start using HTML5 instead of Flash. Which is starting to happen. But since Adobe is more concerned about selling authoring tools than getting people to install Flash Player, they might just start selling authoring tools that produce HTML5 output and let Flash die the death it deserves rather than trying to fix it.
Once we've met each other, working out the details is remarkably quick.
Is it, though? Do you even agree on the broad strokes? Or do half of you want lower taxes and the other half want more government spending?
The problem is that people spend all their time arguing about the broad strokes and they never even get to the details, even though the details are what matters.
Let me give you an example: If you buy an ownership stake in a corporation (say 100 shares of stock), there are two main ways you can grow your money. The first is by the corporation paying a dividend (that is, giving the shareholders a share of the profit), the second is by holding the stock until its value goes up and then selling it for more than you paid. In theory you should be pretty agnostic as to which form your money comes in: If the share price goes from $10/share to $11/share, that should make you exactly as happy as if you were paid a dividend of $1/share and the share price stayed the same. If you want you can use the dividend to buy additional shares, or sell some of your shares if you want to use the money for something else -- the form the gain comes in would not matter to you.
In comes the tax code. It turns out that those gains get taxed, and the form of the gain changes when the taxes are owed. If a corporation pays a dividend then the shareholder owes income tax on it immediately. If the share price goes up, you don't have to pay tax on the increase until you actually sell the shares. Suddenly shareholders strongly prefer to make their gains in the form of increasing the stock price and not dividends, because it allows them to to put off paying the taxes for many years. In the meantime the money they would have paid is invested and collects returns.
So no big deal, right? Without the tax, when a corporation made a profit they would have issued a dividend and a stockholder who wanted to reinvest the money would just buy some more shares of one stock or another. Now the corporation takes the money and invests directly, which means they're holding more assets and their share price goes up, and the stockholder who wants to spend his gains instead of reinvesting them just sells a few shares to do that. Big whoop.
Except that it turns out to change the way the whole economy works. GE has been known to make more money from its investments in other companies than it does from its own operations. More to the point, it takes the decision of what to invest in out of the hands of investors and into the hands of the executives of big corporations, for all the money that would have otherwise been issued as dividends. All the small and medium businesses that would otherwise have been independent competitors to the big companies suddenly become their wholly owned subsidiaries, because the big companies have to buy something with the money their shareholders don't want as dividends, so why not competitors?
On top of that, it makes it impossible to run a stable company with no growth. Look at the publicly traded telecoms and cable TV providers. They're public utilities -- it's the basic model of a company with minimal growth potential. You have a local monopoly, you have X customers, every month they pay you money and what you sensibly ought to do is issue whatever you have left after operating costs and upgrades as a dividend to your shareholders. But the tax code makes the shareholders not want dividends, it makes them want your stock price to go up. So you buy competitors in other regions, you buy NBC, you buy cellular companies, etc. You have to keep your company growing so the stock price can increase.
And it doesn't end. Is AT&T big enough to make the shareholders happy? Of course not. They want further growth, which means further acquisitions. The death of small companies, media consolidation, etc. Because the tax code taxes dividends differently than capital gains. Is that the sort of thing some mob full of art historians and retail sales people is
OTOH, maybe it'd be the push needed to support local (offline) business more?
The problem is that for consumers who are price sensitive enough for sales tax to make the difference, the "local (offline) business" is Walmart.
Without exaggeration, humanity itself would have been set back a decade. And for what? So a handful of private companies and lawyers could make a little more money.
And not even that. Locking things up is a pie-shrinking enterprise. The company that does it gets a bigger slice than they would have otherwise, but they only come out ahead if they're the only one doing it. If everybody does it, well, what do you get when twenty different companies each do something that increases their own share by 25% but shrinks the whole pie by 10%?
Intellectual property. It prevents the products from having their cost drop to 0 and thus keeps money in the system.
The saddest thing is that it doesn't. In a competitive market, even with copyright, the price of "intellectual property" still approaches zero, because of interbrand competition. If they had actual competition -- if radio stations played songs based on how good they were rather than payola, or independent filmmakers could get their films on the same number of screens as the big studios -- that competition that would drive the price toward the marginal cost the same as it does in any competitive market.
This especially given the dynamics of the market -- most musicians and filmmakers don't make money and in large companies those losses get made up by huge hits that top the charts. If there were more smaller artists who had equivalent distribution opportunities, the ones that fail and lose a bit of their own money wouldn't be financially liked to the ones who succeed, which would allow the winners to charge a small fraction of what is charged today and still come out ahead. People would then consume more because it would cost less, which would increase the number of works that are profitable (by broadening and flattening the revenue curve) and therefore further increase competition.
The only thing keeping those companies in the black today is their distribution cartel. If they had that and there were no copyright, they would still be doing fine. I mean considering how utterly unenforceable copyright has become in practice, that is essentially the state of things today and they're still making big money. What would do them in is that the lack of copyright would hurt their public image by removing any claim to legitimacy and removing the fig leaf they use to rationalize legislation passed to shore up the distribution cartel -- can't use DRM to thwart people from using non-industry channels to obtain media for their living room TV if there is no law supporting DRM, etc.
Clearly one of them is wrong.
Not so clear actually. If there is actually an ambiguity then by definition there is not a single correct interpretation.
The trouble is that the alternative to ambiguity is the generality:specificity trade off. You can pass something that is both broad and unambiguous, but enforcing it would be absurd because you almost never want a blanket rule with no exceptions. So then you start adding exceptions and it soon gets so complicated that no one can follow it anymore.
It seems like the only way to win is not to play the game.
A country may try to control its currency value but the market at large has way to compensate for that.
You are still confusing governments acting as legislative authorities to set currency prices with governments acting as market participants. If the government says that there should be a 3:1 currency price and tries to prohibit transactions taking place at another value, they will get a black market. By contrast, if the government exports hundreds of billions of dollars worth of goods and is paid in foreign currency, the government can choose whether to hold that foreign currency or assets denominated in it as opposed to using the foreign currency to buy the government's own currency on the market. The choice allows the government to affect the market price of the currency, because they can remove an enormous amount of demand for their own currency by declining to buy it themselves, which causes the exchange rate to fall based on supply and demand. There is no black market because market forces are setting the price -- it's just that the government is a big enough market actor to be able to adjust prices to its liking.
If they are not forcing the wage to be lower using real forcible mean, the actual wage, after currency adjustment etc., is whatever the labor market can accept.
Again, the market price is affected by government action. Minimum wage is a double edged sword: For jobs that create a lot of value (like manufacturing) but for which the labor required is plentiful and unskilled, the large majority of the profit goes to the manufacturer because he can require otherwise-unemployed workers to underbid each other until they are barely (or not even) making subsistence wages, regardless of how large the owner's profit margin is. A government that sets a minimum wage causes some of those workers to be paid more money at the cost of increasing unemployment: For some employers it is not worth changing the location of their operations to avoid paying the higher wage, and those employees get a raise. For other employers, the minimum wage causes them to lay off employees for one of two reasons: either being forced to pay the higher wage makes it economical for the employer to move the jobs to a country that allows them to pay lower wages, or exporting the jobs is either impossible or not economical and paying the higher wage puts them out of business because the cost of production now exceeds the market value of the product.
By now you want to argue that this is just government interference with the market and the market price in other countries is still the same, but it doesn't. Look at what happens in foreign countries with a lower minimum wage or no minimum wage when this country enacts one: Wages in foreign countries go up while unemployment there goes down, because the demand for labor in those countries increases by the number of jobs moved from the countries with a higher minimum wage. For example, when the US raises the minimum wage from $5 to $8, the average market wage in a country with low or no minimum wage might increase from $3.00 to $3.50, because some companies now find it more profitable to pay in the neighborhood of $3.50/hour plus some shipping and overhead costs in order to avoid paying $8/hour.
So you can see that minimum wage is a tragedy of the commons. If all countries enact the same minimum wage then all employees everywhere will receive a larger share of the fruits of their labor and the only increase in unemployment anywhere would be in the case of jobs that are genuinely uneconomical at that wage, because no employer could flee to a different country to avoid paying the minimum wage. By contrast, if some countries have a higher minimum wage than others, either because they believe the increase in local wages is worth the very large transfer of jobs from that country to others or because they are acting irrationally, the countries with a lower minimum wage are artificially enriched because they
Ehm No. It was never supposed to protect the average citizen, it is to protect the ones who innovate against the ones who copy.
False. It is only supposed to "promote the Progress of ... useful Arts" -- you are confusing the means with the ends.
Android isn't about innovation at all, it's about putting things that are already there together and not in an entirely new way, but in a way that it would match the features of modern proprietary OS but using free software. Thus patent system is not supposed to protect Android.
What you're saying is that in any fast-paced industry, one company should have a monopoly -- whoever is first to market should patent everything with any relation to the market, then exclude all others from competition. Then they can innovate at half or a quarter or less of the speed the market would in the absence of the patent system, as long as by the end of 20 years they have used their monopoly power to guide the market in a direction that they had the good sense to file a new crop of patents to cover and so retain their monopoly indefinitely.
Thankfully, you're wrong. The patent system is supposed to protect Android, because Android is doing new and different things. The open model itself is an innovation in the mobile device market -- and is a model that drives other innovation. You look at the variety of Android devices on the market. They're not all the same, so obviously each device is doing something different than the others -- something innovative to separate itself from the pack. That is exactly what the patent system is supposed to be promoting. The fact that it isn't is a blatant flaw that ought to be corrected.
And it's plain hipocrisy that Google claims Apple is attacking Android with bogus patents, which is entirely not true, Apple at least uses their own patents, while most Google patents are bought pieces of IP of other companies, which makes them a lot more bogus to me.
Bogus patents are so because they attempt to patent that which is already in the public domain -- things that are already known or obvious. Google is buying a patent has nothing to do with that -- if Apple doesn't like to be sued for patent infringement then they shouldn't infringe other people's patents. The fact that Google can find patents that Apple is infringing only goes to show how defective the patent system is when the largest company in America with an army of lawyers still can't even avoid infringing.
The value of Yuan wouldn't be off too much from market value, when considering inflation and cost, like the Yen. So it is moot called it undervalued, if the market does not support higher value Yuan.
Are you trying to make some kind of point because I said undervalue instead of devalue? Or are you denying that a country is capable of intentionally reducing the market value of their currency by holding assets in foreign currencies or increasing their currency supply?
There is minimum wage in China, enforced more rigorously in recent years due to high living costs.
Even if they've actually started enforcing it, you know perfectly well that the minimum wage in China is substantially lower than it is in most of the countries China exports to.
I don't see how any of that is inconsistent with what I said. They don't devalue their currency by legislating it anymore, they use economic methods now -- holding the money they receive as compensation for export goods as assets denominated in euros or US dollars (like US bonds), rather than converting it to yuan which would drive down the value of the other currencies and drive up the yuan. They reduce unemployment by causing their people to work for slave wages, not by pointing a gun at them, but by declining to implement a minimum wage or a basic income and then leaving people with the false choice of working for peanuts or starving for lack of peanuts.
It depends what the replacement is. If the new "fuel" is direct sunlight, or wind, or thorium, etc., there is money to be made building and maintaining power plants, but no longer any real money to be made selling fuel -- because the primary cost is building the plant in the first place, not buying something to burn in it.
Doc Brown (1955): No wonder this circuit failed. It says "Made in Japan".
Marty McFly (1985): What do you mean, Doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan.
Doc Brown (1955): Unbelievable.
And then it will spread to the middle east when europe, the US, China, and India all need a place for cheap manufacturing. And then it will make more sense to produce in Africa. Eventually (In a hundred or so years) every major region of the world will have had an industrial revolution.
No it won't, because there aren't enough people there to do that without significant automation. And if you have almost fully automated factories then labor is no longer the primary cost of production and it makes more sense to build them near where the consumers are and save yourself the shipping costs.
Also, China is very different from previous countries that have done this. They have a billion people, and they aren't a democracy. That makes it very easy for them to have an underclass with a population larger than the entire United States which, by applying a little automation to get some (but not all) of them out of the factories and into a middle class, can make enough goods for both the foreign and domestic markets. Then they can use central planning to implement greater automation at a rate that can slowly increase the size of the middle class, but never in a way that would cause significant unemployment.
The end result is going to be that China will be the last country to employ a large labor force in manufacturing. We could already automate half the stuff that they manufacture by hand there, the only reason we don't is that China doesn't want high unemployment and is more than willing to undervalue their currency and cause their population to work for slave wages in order to keep them working rather than starting an uprising. The second China can get any of those people into a middle class job (or, more realistically, the second any of those people dies or retires and is replaced by a young person with a better education), there will be a machine doing that work instead of a person.
What's not scarce are the implementations once designed. The real problem is that we don't have any way of rewarding ideas without these easily copyable implementations. Nobody so far has come up with a workable solution to this problem. Well, none more workable than copyright.
Sure we do: No software patents + 14 year copyright.
I would have thought this would work pretty well:
1) Install squid on the server in a non-oppressive country
2) ssh user@server -L 3128:localhost:3128
3) Configure the system proxy settings to use localhost on port 3128
Also, there is a (relatively new) VPN feature in OpenSSH. Look at the -w option.
Converting such a regressive tax as the FICA tax to the general fund is just more shenanigans. If you're going to drop SS then be honest about it and raise the income tax.
That is the rational thing to do whether we keep social security or not. But if people are going to be irrational and want social security to be funded out of a special regressive tax instead of the general fund, they can continue be irrational and prefer to keep the special regressive tax in order to claim that we aren't raising anyone's taxes.
If the US Government doesn't pay off the T-Bills in the SS Trust Fund it's going to have a negative effect on the other T-Bill that the government sells.
No it isn't. For one thing, since the whole thing is just an accounting trick, you can "pay them off" trivially because if there is no more social security then there is nobody who you actually have to give money to. You just have the defunct social security administration turn over its bonds to the general fund, then have the treasury pay the general fund for the bonds out of existing tax revenues.
The reason the trust fund is not in "a diversified investment portfolio" is risk. US T-Bills have always been a sure thing and when they are not any more we're in big trouble.
That's why they call it diversification. If you invest in a thousand different things and hedge your investments you can achieve similarly low risk overall -- arguably even lower because you don't have all your eggs in one basket.
But the point I was making is that the bonds in the social security trust don't have any economic effect so long as they're sitting there. If instead the social security administration were to sell those bonds on the open market and then use the money to buy stocks or commodities or the like (i.e. establish an actual trust fund), the result would be an economic catastrophe -- because the bonds would stop being a legal fiction written on a piece of paper and start having an economic effect, namely to raise interest rates.
Conversely, if the social security administration would turn every single one of them over to the treasury immediately, or light them all on fire, and then pay future social security payments in excess of social security tax receipts out of federal income tax revenues, there would be exactly no difference in the result to anyone anywhere. The bonds have the same fiscal and economic effect as not existing so long as they remain in the hands of the social security administration, which means that there is in actual fact no trust fund.
Over 70% of the people support raising taxes on the wealthy.
Over 90% of people are misinformed. What does it prove about what makes good policy? See also: Absurd consequences of semi-direct democracy in California.
In the 1950's and 1960's the top marginal tax rate was more than 70% and the country did pretty well so I don't see why we can't now.
You can't see why the decades coming out of WWII after all the major powers but us and the soviets had been bombed into the stone age would be different than today?
(And I'm not proposing raising it to 70% again but going back to 39% isn't going to cause much pain).
It also isn't going to generate anywhere near enough revenue. We have a thirteen-digit hole in the budget.
While 'F=ma' describes a facet of 'a jet engine', that same facet of 'a jet engine' describes 'F=ma'.
The relation is not symmetrical. The engine is an embodiment, not a description. You cannot leave the ground using only an equation.
If you do that you're essentially converting the FICA taxes which are dedicated to SS and Medicare/caid into general fund taxes.
You can create a tax with the same characteristics and call it "payroll tax" instead of "FICA" if you like, which means that you're just arguing semantics about the words on the paycheck.
And you're also embezzling the current surplus in the SS trust fund.
There is no trust fund. The idea that the federal government can write itself a bunch of IOUs and call it a trust fund is nothing but a fraud on the American people. And if you don't think so, ask any economist what would happen to interest rates if Uncle Sam decided that the trust fund should adopt a diversified investment portfolio instead of holding exclusively federal bonds.
I don't think that's going to fly very well with most Americans.
You think any of the other solutions are going to fly any better?
What makes you think the retailers in one state are selling different kinds of products from the retailers in a different state?
More specifically, Amazon closed your accounts because they did not like the prior legislation.
More accurately, the legislation was passed that made it more profitable for Amazon to close your accounts than not. And the legislators could easily have predicted that before passing it, because that is exactly what happened when the other states did it. Is it Amazon's fault that the legislature has created a perverse incentive for it?