I suspect in a true double-blind experiment you'd find that minimum wage's biggest effect was in inflation. Businesses are much more likely to respond to a government-mandated increase of their costs by 2%, with a 5% price hike then by firing people. Mass firings look terrible on TV, while reducing both revenue and profit. OTOH raising prices by more then your costs grow increases both revenue and profit, and allows you to shove the blame onto somebody else. In the long term it could affect job growth (if people cost more, you hire less of them), but that should be somewhat mitigated by increased demand for jobs caused by minimum wage workers spending more money. This comparison seems to indicate that reduced job sup[ply is mitigated by increased job demand. The fact that it's so simple is partly encouraging (clearly the researchers didn't engage in any trickery to massage the numbers), but partly discouraging (there could be something very basic they should have factored in).
This would actually be really hard to prove or disprove by experiment even if it was ethical to do this kind of thing to people. The problem is that if you just take 50 people and drop them on one deserted tropical island, and put another 50 people on another, you have completely different groups of people. Somebody probably has great Island Survival Skills, which will mean his island will end up doing a whole lot better then the other island, regardless of minimum wage. If you try increasing it, the problem becomes how did you increase it? If you did it by decree of the guy you gave a gun and a radio the islanders will probably figure out that they're part of an experiment on the minimum wage, and since they probably don;t like you very much they'll probably try to sabotage the experiment. It's always unfortunate when PoliSci destroys the experiments of another discipline.
So to do this, you'd not only need to gut ethics standards completely; you'd also need the physical ability to copy people. That way you'd be 100% sure that Island A was doing better because island A had different laws. You'd also need a bunch of starting people socialized to obey a computer terminal without question, because that's the only way you'd be able to implement a minimum wage without that nasty political science invading your precious economics experiment. Even then you'd need to repeat the experiment a couple times to ensure the result wasn't simple an artifact of the 50 people you;d selected for the experiment.
In at least one of those 13 minimum wage is legally required to go up every year. Ohio pegged it's minimum wage to inflation back in the Strickland administration.
Which means that if job growth was negatively affected by an increasing minimum wage Ohio would be worse off then Michigan, and this would be part of a multi-year trend. The opposite is true.
I doubt it will be fewer jobs. If you need a new cashier because your customers are getting pissed at the wait time you hire her, and then worry about whether increased customer satisfaction is worth $10k (below her salary) or $20k (above it) later.
Higher prices are significantly more likely, but since I think inflation is too low to for healthy economic growth I don't see that as a problem.
Then people can go to where the laws are how they like them instead of having bad ones forced on them at a federal level.
For one, not everyone wants to move. Many of the people who call for a hands-off federal government would be quick to emphasize the value of family and stable local communities. Conservatives everywhere deplore the brain-drain and family disruption that comes with people migrating away from an area for better work elsewhere.
It's really, really hard for a minimum-wage (or even minimum wage + 50%) level worker to move for a couple reasons:
1) They tend to be dependent on the local social network for an array of services. If you know a mechanic in Cleveland who will work on your car cheap, and you can't afford a car that is actually reliable, you ain't gonna drop everything and move to North Dakota even if every economist personally calls your ass to show you precisely how much better off you'd be.
2) They tend to have kids and unstable romantic lives. My coworkers at Home Depot are almost all in their late teens or early 20s. About half of them are parents. One of them is still with the baby-daddy. Moving brings up all kinds of issues with visitation, child-care (ie: grandma in Cleveland can;t be free day care if work is not in Cleveland), custody, etc.
A lot of these issues would be strongly mitigated if a the Democrats had full control of everything. A much higher minimum wage would mean that my coworkers could afford better cars, they could afford to work out trips from North Dakota to Cleveland so the little one could visit dad, etc. Conservatives truly do not, on a very fundamental level, understand how hard it is to move up rungs on the income ladder when you're at the bottom.
To do the conservative fantasy, and take smart risks which hard work turns into prosperity you need something to risk. Which you don't have unless you're in a City with a) a very high minimum wage or b) excellent mass transit. In the US b) means Chicago or New York.
But even when people want to move, there's a general expectation that things work more or less the same everywhere. Sure, there are still some cultural differences between large regions, but the US isn't 13 distinct colonies any more. If the American Revolution happened today in our hyper-connected world, there definitely wouldn't be the same call for devolution and autonomy as in the days of the Founding Fathers.
That's a very annoying fact. I am politically active. I have lived in Michigan and Ohio. This means I can tell you the basic requirements to vote in those states. Yet I get questions from cousins everywhere, because apparently I'm a psychic who knows whether a weed conviction from North Carolina bars you from voting in California. I can tell you what you'd need to know before you called someone who actually lives in those states to find out the actual answer, but I ain't gonna be able to supply a yes or no to that one.
Having a Federal system where 50 states try vastly different development strategies simply does not work if everyone isn't willing to put in a couple a hours a week for several months learning about their new states plan every single fucking time they move. You end up with what we've got:
Everything is expressed in terms of two parties (because if you know Alabama's Fucking Conservative, and you know what Fucking Conservatives stereotypically go for, you'll have a very good idea of what your new state's legal system is like; OTOH California's fucking liberal, so you have to know what Fucking Liberals want, etc.).
I know places like NYC have lots of under-the-table employees, but almost none of them make less then the $8 an hour minimum wage because if you only make $5 an hour in Manhattan you starve to death. They're under-the-table because the employer does not want to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes, or do the paperwork required to issue a 1099. Most of the employers are actually upper-middle-class to rich employers who could easily do the paperwork, they simply don't bother because none of their friends bother.
I actually work at a Home Depot, which the anti-immigration activists are convinced means I know hundreds of Salvadoreans working for below the minimum wage. It just doesn't happen. It probably happened back in 2008, before the economy went to hell, but since then nope. It's probably much more common in areas with low (or no) minimum wages simply because the cost of living is low enough that somebody who is used to a lower-class standard of living in Mexico or Central America could get by on $6 an hour and still have enough left over to send a couple hundred a month home.
You do realize that it would be fairly trivial for a business to of sufficient size to acquire some bit of the internet pipeline that all data goes through? The right bit of internet backbone and you've got a lot of traffic. It would be no less likely then that time a single business got so much of the oil industry it was actually named Standard Oil. And if you're increasing corporate power relative to the government, that's pretty damn likely because the only thing stopping it is anti-trust rules.
You're assuming industry-standard valves, that are quite robust. in the near-future neither is likely because any cool idea Kohler has to improve it's toilets will be patented, and thus unavailable to companies like Glacier Bay. Moreover, since the idea is by definition new, we won't know the bugs that will appear after it's been mass-deployed for a few decades. Semiconductors are fairly reliable technology, but they weren't available to the pioneers of computing until the 50s.Moreover semiconductors don't swap out the way you're assuming toilet valves will. You can't switch an Intel processor for an AMD processor. You can't even switch one AMD processor for another without some pretty detailed internet research on precisely which processors your motherboard supports. The modern tyoilets you describe won;t be quite that complex, but if they're deciding exactly how much water to flush based upon the load that's been dropped, then they clearly have multiple sensors to decide things like a) quantity of shit, b) quality of shit (diarrhea probably requires different treatment then a really dry load), placement of shit (ie: if some's smeared on the side of the bowl you'll need a water jet or three to get rid of it), etc. Those sensors have to hook up to a computer, which needs to tell the valve how much water to let through.
Which means that if something breaks in the brand new Kohler Supervalve technology ordinary consumers have to know which super-valve replacement part to buy. They won't know how to connect the super-sensor connectivity line to the Supervalve Data Input port B.
Take it from somebody who works at Home Depot. Most consumers have no fucking clue who made their toilet. They'll pay a plumber with a van full of every possible valve to drive to their House, pick the valve, and install it himself. He'll get paid the cost of the part (which he will mark up by at least 100%), plus something on the order of $150 an hour.
That's gonna be the case for the foreseeable future. Patents alone will make standardizing toilet supervalves impossible until the OP's niece is in her 40s. Unless a market-dominating toilet firm appears and wipes out the others, there will probably still be competing technologies when she retires 50 years from now, and if there are competing technologies people will need a toilet expert (ie: a plumber) to help them figure it out.
Keep in mind the original question isn't about the future of toilet technology, it's about the future of work.
And more complex toilets will be more efficient then the current crop, but they'll also be really complex. There will be multiple failure points, and (this is the key thing), when a failure happens an amateur with a wrench and a basic knowledge of physics will have no fucking clue how to fix it. On the whole, the toilet will probably break less, but demand for toilet repair services will probably stay the same, or increase. It will probably be a lot like the dynamic with cars. Since the 70s and 80s when computers started being standard equipment cars have gotten much better, and become orders of magnitude more reliable; but demand for mechanics hasn't collapsed because most of those repairs were done by the car-owner (or a close friend) in the back yard.
So if the OP's niece gets training as a plumber she'll be fine.
Or hell, look at the Fourth Amendment. You're concerned about a program that could (theoretically) be used to abuse millions of Americans. When asked to provide evidence that anyone has actualy been hurt you respond with a) abstract compalints about how bad you feel that the government knows whom you've been emailing, and b) claims that of course nobody has evidence of more then a handful of people being oppressed via NSA information because it's secret.
I haven't been so asked. But since you mentioned it, widespread contempt for the law is something that should be scourged from government at any level.
Sure, that's an abstract observation. But I don't see the need for anything more. Government routinely oversteps the bounds we attempt to put on it.
You're exaggerating the level of law-breaking going on here.
Police are allowed to do any search, reasonable or otherwise, with a warrant. They have the warrant. Which means that, by definition, it's not the government breaking the law. it's the Court that issued the warrant.
That's kinda why the anti-NSA side keeps losing in Court. They think of this as the NSA breaking the law, when the NSA is doing precisely what it is supposed to do : gather all information for which they have a warrant.
As to point b), that is a rather obvious argument. Notice that no corporation gets to protect its secrecy like that (unless of course, they're contractors for the US military or intelligence and can protect their inner workings with these secrecy laws).
Have you ever tried to reveal an Apple trade secret? At one point they actually had a San Fran PD officer back them up.
If you incre3ase corporate power you will (by definition) give companies like Apple more power to keep secrets. You will also reduce the power of the sole insitution that can check them: the Federal government.
Let me put it to you this way: if Google had a secret Eviler then NSA database how would you fix that problem under the current system?
You probably couldn't, because google can vet it's employees for political reliability before transferring them to the Evil division, and can then use NDAs and other legal tactics to keep their damn mouths shut. Moreover such a database would not be front-page news, so even if a Snowden-Googler got his hands on the documents it probably wouldn't matter.
Unless the Feds got involved.
And you're proposing giving Google power relative to the Federal government.
Either increasing corporate power relative to the Feds is pro-freedom or it isn't.
Either the sky is green or it is purple. False dichotomy is false.
My view is that there is in the current situation some freedom to be gained from making business and the private world more powerful with respect to the federal government. I consider it an informal balance of power, much like the official ones between states and federal government or between the branches of the federal government.
Sure, I can see situations where increasing business power beyond a certain extent causes a decrease in personal freedom. But I think it's foolish to think we're in that sort of situation now.
It's very hard for me to see that.
The track record of businesses is much worse then the Feds on pretty much every issue. Generally the entire reason the feds got their current powers is because some businessman 40 years ago decided to oppress some private citizen.
Remember: the only reason you know google isn't reading your gmail account (or reading the accounts of anyone you send email to) is that they pinky-swear they ain't doing that shit. They say their encryption works, has no backdoors, is applied to all backups on their servers, etc.
To an extent competition will protect you (they know if they get caught Bing rules the universe), but if they figure out some way to make their search algorithms bette
All I said about myself was I managed to get through Grad School with no marketable skills. If you want the whole sad story, I can give it to you. But since it involves a combination of mental illness, an unscrupulous for-profit graduate school, and poor decision making at 23 I'm pretty sure you don't want to hear it. In my defense, of all the stories you've heard involving these elements I'm probably the only one who is paying his student loans in full every month. Damn near everybody else (even the ones who got marketable degrees like MD or JD) owes more then 10% of their income every month, and is therefore on a payment plan.
It was actually the University of Michigan. And I'll admit there's some hyperbole in my post. But even at U of M I knew a Prof who scheduled classes at 8 AM specifically to avoid a certain class of student. Everyone bitched about getting up no matter when they got up, because bitching about getting up is what you do when you're 22.
"Work" is a relative term. In a Liberal Arts Major, almost no classwork or assigned reading can actually be considered work, because the entire reason you picked that class is you wanted to learn more about the subject. If you didn't want to spend six hours reading an obscure tract about an obscure people in the DRCongo you probably would have picked a different class. Tests were never work to me. Essays were work, but in terms of actual hours worked at University I was doing a whole hell of a lot less of it then I have done at any point since.
OTOH, the HS grads I'm working with today all get to work by 7 AM. Five days a week. No University class I have ever heard of, at any school, anywhere, is five days a week at 6 AM.
I'm not arguing that University isn't work, or that you aren't well-served by doing it. I'm arguing that the OP has absolutely no clue what life is like for HS-Educated people in their 20s. They have their own places, they tend to have jobs. They show up to those jobs at much higher rates then college-students, because college students can get away with sleeping in as long as they don't blow the test; where as employees don't get paid unless they are actually at work.
Most four-year college kids aren't in technical program. They're in liberal arts programs. Typically they have lots of trouble getting up early enough to get to a 10 AM class, and bitch and moan that an 8-hour day is required to earn an A. They spend most of their time getting drunk and getting laid, and call it "networking." They spend a significant proportion of their study time debating fields that are (pretty much by definition) intellectual masturbation, like philosophy or theology. Then they go home and spend a few years on the couch waiting for the economy to improve, and/or frantically trying to get into grad school. They don't actually enter a field where the boss expects you to there at 8 AM every day until they hit their late 20s. And I know this because I went to a four-year-college for Histyory and Political Science, and then spent a year-and-a-half in Grad School; and ended up with absolutely no marketable skills.
OTOH, HS-educated kid tend to get thrown out at 18. Most of my co-workers at Home Depot had their own places, which they got with no help from Mom at all, at that age. The ones actually in their 20s generally have really shitty 10-year-old car, or no cars at all. The younger ones tend not to work a full 40 hours, because the company really prefers the scheduling flexibility four part-timers get you to two full-timers; and if you;re around a couple years you generally get full-time; but they are there at 6 AM when their schedule says "be there at 6 AM," and they stay until 10 PM on those days. Almost alkl of them have to do one of these a week, so they don;t have anything a middle-class person would call a "sleep schedule."
Note that this is not a blind endorsement of government power. The number one tool my neighbors could use to oppress me (or I could use to oppress them), is the state government.
The federal government is the tool of choice these days. I don't go off of history when federal government power is at unprecedented levels of power and degree of intrusiveness. After all, it's not the state of California which is running the NSA (my example from before) or taking your coworker's money.
Really?
Ever tried fighting a ticket issued by another state? Or looked at the size of the Federal prison population vs. state populations? Most drug war victims are in state pens, not Federal Prison.
Or hell, look at the Fourth Amendment. You're concerned about a program that could (theoretically) be used to abuse millions of Americans. When asked to provide evidence that anyone has actualy been hurt you respond with a) abstract compalints about how bad you feel that the government knows whom you've been emailing, and b) claims that of course nobody has evidence of more then a handful of people being oppressed via NSA information because it's secret.
OTOH under Michael Bloomberg the NYPD actually oppressed the city's entire African-American male population via stop-and-frisk.
State cops kill a lot more people then federal cops, and in turn local cops kill more then state cops. Thousands of Americans' right to vote is questionable because of Voter ID laws.
So basically what's actually going on is the states are oppressing the hell out of everyone, but you don't give a shit because you prefer actually being oppressed by the states to having a Federal government which could theoretically oppress you at some point in the future.
So you're arguing that, under a pro-corporate Constitutional reform, private for-profit corporations would be able to get police into using their powers to advance the interests of said private, for-profit corporations, and that this would be a good thing, because at least it wouldn;t be the FEDERAL government harassing people?
No. You made a claim about the Pinkertons. I showed how that claim was incorrect.
Either increasing corporate power relative to the Feds is pro-freedom or it isn't.
If I was right and they went off on their own investigations regardless of the Fourth Amendment then it clearly isn't pro-freedom. If you;re right and they had local police help to massacre unions then it logically follows that increasing corporate power relative to the Feds is a bad thing because that would allow private corporations to massacre recalcitrant employees. Again.
And how often have you heard of a Congressperson actually winning a dispute like that?
Not very much either way.
They do quite well against the Feds. The whole Lois Lerner thing started as a Congressman's letter.
They have trouble with disputes with corporations because a) they don;t have a guy on-staff who instinctively understands all paperwork every corporation in the country issues, and b) very few private companies have a boss who fears Congressional hearings.
Your ignorance of how tax refunds work is showing.
The IRS won't send you your refund if any agency from a fairly long list (child support, Social Security, student loans, some state tax agencies, etc.) claims you owe them money. Disputing the matter with the IRS doesn't help because the IRS can't order these other agencies around.
I guess you just don't get it. Why should anything be on that list? I don't get to take your money in that way, why should anyone else get to via the agency of the IRS? As a US citizen, the federal government is in a unique position to control and seize your wealth.
Why should anything be on that list? Because Congress said so, and in a free co
You do realize we tried the stronger corporations/weaker government model during the late 19th/early 20th centuries, and the result was not an absolute utopia of freedom.
Yes. It wasn't that bad. It amazes me how much power people are willing to hand governments to avoid the possibility of "sweat shops", "child labor", and other obsolete 19th century dangers.
I'm a US Citizen, not a German or Russian citizen.
Historically the only threat to my freedom has been my fellow Americans, therefore to CXheck and Balance the power of my neighbors I strongly prefer stronger Federal powers.
Note that this is not a blind endorsement of government power. The number one tool my neighbors could use to oppress me (or I could use to oppress them), is the state government. They have most of the jail-space, virtually unlimited authority (they can do almost anything save violate the Bill of Rights, and they're very good at weaseling their way around the Bill of Rights), etc.
Corporations are a potential threat, because they'll do anything to screw their business partners, and as a relatively poor person I can;t fight back very effectively when they screw me. Moreover their nearly unlimited resources mean they can generally buy state governments if they want.
Government contracts for the Pinkertons dries up after the Civil War, but private contracts made up for it. They had more agents then the Army had troops in the 1890s. You're just making shit up on their relationship with law enforcement.
Read some history on how Pinkerton operated. They didn't go after outlaws or bush unions without law enforcement support. It might just be a token deputy riding with a bunch of Pinkertons, but they had their backside covered.
So you're arguing that, under a pro-corporate Constitutional reform, private for-profit corporations would be able to get police into using their powers to advance the interests of said private, for-profit corporations, and that this would be a good thing, because at least it wouldn;t be the FEDERAL government harassing people?
You must be really fucking rich mas'r Khallow, if you're sure that everyone you love is rich enough to out-bid Bill Gates when he decides to send them to jail.
As I said she is fighting the Social Security Administration (not the IRS) through her Congressperson. That does not require money up-front, which means she can actually do it; whereas in any dispute with a private corporation she only has a theoretical right to fight.
But at least in the latter case, she can get her money back. She could also beg that congressperson for any private disputes as well. That option doesn't vanish merely because the problem is private.
And how often have you heard of a Congressperson actually winning a dispute like that?
At best you get a letter saying:"this is what their lawyers will say when you decide to sue them, here is a list of charities that might help you sue."
OTOH the entire dispute with Lois lerner and the IRS started with a Congressman asking questions.
And as to my "reading comprehension", I guess you should have written something other than:
Back in the real world, the IRS ruling hurts my poor coworker, but she wasn't depending on that money to pay her bills because you can't depend on tax refund money to do that. The Feds refuse to finalize the tax Code until the very last minute, so you never know what your refund is going to be until you do your return.
and
and the IRS took her whole refund because Social Security had changed it's mind
Your story completely undermines your claim that it was just a dispute with Social Security.
Your ignorance of how tax refunds work is showing.
Moreover just because a strong government wins one case you disagree with, it does not follow that a fundamentally different system, with significantly stronger private corporations and a significantly weaker government, would result in rulings you like 100% of the time.
It would be less dangerous. Corporations and other businesses are more vulnerable than governments. And I'm not interested in achieving a society that matches my interests perfectly.
Really?
You do realize we tried the stronger corporations/weaker government model during the late 19th/early 20th centuries, and the result was not an absolute utopia of freedom.
In particular it's impossible for mew to conceive of a system with a weaker government, and stronger private corporations, where there wasn't a private NSA with more data then the real NSA, and more power too. The Pinkertons never bothered with warrants.
The Pinkertons always worked with law enforcement to provide legal cover for their actions. And they became that powerful due to numerous government-related contracts. And I have to roll my eyes at the claim that a "private NSA" could have as much data as the real one. Especially, since the "private NSA" wouldn't have the sorts of powers that allow the real NSA to collect so much data.
If you're talking about size of database both google and Facebook dwarf the NSA. And your ability to stay out the crosshairs of evil google is limited if evil google has a group like the Pinkertons, who can find out which accounts belong to your sister.
Government contracts for the Pinkertons dries up after the Civil War, but private contracts made up for it. They had more agents then the Army had troops in the 1890s. You're just making shit up on their relationship with law enforcement.
They;'d run their own investigations, without warrants, and then give the results to the cops. The "bad guy"s conviction would be immediately rubber-stamped by the Courts. because in the 1890s that's how freedom worked..
It must be nice to live like you. So much money that you don't care that your credit is busted. Hell even a $10k debt probably wouldn't move your debt to income ratio. You just have that much income. Congratulations. If you ever get really annoyed you can just drop $5k on a lawyer and know that you'll get it back eventually. And you get to laugh laugh laugh at all the poor peons who don't have that much money lying around to pay a lawyer. Yes Mas'r Khallow you live a wonderful life.
Back in the real world, the IRS ruling hurts my poor coworker, but she wasn't depending on that money to pay her bills because you can't depend on tax refund money to do that. The Feds refuse to finalize the tax Code until the very last minute, so you never know what your refund is going to be until you do your return. OTOH if she'd had this problem with a private business her ability to find a new job would be hurt, her ability to move would be hurt (landlords frequently do credit checks), her ability to buy a car would be hurt. For those of us who are below you, Mas'r Khallow, the IRS taking a tax refund is a lot less disastrous then some scam artist putting a fake debt on our credit report. We can fight the IRS through our local Congresspeople, if we could fight the scam artists they wouldn't have careers.
In other words, the IRS just took her money while she'd have a chance against a private institution doing the same.
A dick and illiterate. Such a winning combination Mas'r Khallow.
As I said she is fighting the Social Security Administration (not the IRS) through her Congressperson. That does not require money up-front, which means she can actually do it; whereas in any dispute with a private corporation she only has a theoretical right to fight.
It's because it's much easier for somebody who isn't rich to appeal decisions by the government.
I don't buy that. When are the NSA's poor and unlawful decisions going to get appealed?
It's in court all the time. The problem is the Courts think you're wrong. I'd love it if John Roberts was our mental slave, and he was going to rule that the Fourth Amendment covers email surveillance, but he's not our slave and he's not gonna make that ruling.
Moreover just because a strong government wins one case you disagree with, it does not follow that a fundamentally different system, with significantly stronger private corporations and a significantly weaker government, would result in rulings you like 100% of the time.
In particular it's impossible for mew to conceive of a system with a weaker government, and stronger private corporations, where there wasn't a private NSA with more data then the real NSA, and more power too. The Pinkertons never bothered with warrants.
For example, can you imagine the vast amount5s of power over your life google would wield if they coordinated with Bounty Hunters and Debt Collection Agencies?
And your IRS versus private business example is laughable. Notice that the IRS took the money straight away while the private business would attempt to do by less sure means. And if you win a private case against a business, you can get your lawyer money back from the business.
It must be nice to live like you. So much money that you don't care that your credit is busted. Hell even a $10k debt probably wouldn't move your debt to income ratio. You just have that much income. Congratulations. If you ever get really annoyed you can just drop $5k on a lawyer and know that you'll get it back eventually. And you get to laugh laugh laugh at all the poor peons who don't have that much money lying around to pay a lawyer. Yes Mas'r Khallow you live a wonderful life.
Back in the real world, the IRS ruling hurts my poor coworker, but she wasn't depending on that money to pay her bills because you can't depend on tax refund money to do that. The Feds refuse to finalize the tax Code until the very last minute, so you never know what your refund is going to be until you do your return. OTOH if she'd had this problem with a private business her ability to find a new job would be hurt, her ability to move would be hurt (landlords frequently do credit checks), her ability to buy a car would be hurt. For those of us who are below you, Mas'r Khallow, the IRS taking a tax refund is a lot less disastrous then some scam artist putting a fake debt on our credit report. We can fight the IRS through our local Congresspeople, if we could fight the scam artists they wouldn't have careers.
Or instead of giving subsidies, maybe the governor should give out monetary prizes for results like the X-Prizes. Subsidies is just asking for abuse and a waste of tax payer money. But giving out prizes for results would probably be cheaper and more effective.
The problem with this argument is that energy production isn't a wide-open field. Everybody already uses energy.
Lets say you've got a state with 35 million people, and 10 prizes. The prize goes to the people who cut their energy use most in percentage terms. At least 30 million of them aren't gonna change squat because a) changing their lifestyles would cost tens of thousands of dollars, and b) they know the guy down the street who bikes to work, only uses his Toyota to pick up groceries, doesn't have kids, etc. is gonna be able to cut his energy use a lot more then them simply by switching to a Prius and setting his AC to 7 For them buying a $25k car, spending $10-$15k on solar roof panels, etc. just does not make sense. Let's say you do it in absolute terms. A trucker who takes a month off the job wins. You don't actually reduce global warming either way. In the latter case you probably increase it because he's gonna be on the job again next month, and he'll probably use the money to buy a bigger (and less fuel efficient) truck.
OTOH let's say you have a subsidy for roof panels, and a system similar to Germany's where anyone can make money from the panels. Lots of people probably put up the panels because they are low cost. Then you have to have some way of dealing with having an electrical grid flooded with energy in the middle of the day, and with very little at night, but the Germans clearly make that work and they have a lot more rain then Cali does.
If you have enough money to choose whether you do business with people it's fairly simple to choose your government. Quite a few of them will actually sell you citizenship.
It's because it's much easier for somebody who isn't rich to appeal decisions by the government. Congress exists, everyone has a Congressperson, and every Congressperson has an office with 25 staff. Quite a few of those people are devoted to something called "constituent service," which is helping people deal with government bureaucracies.For example I have a coworker who had some income from Social Security when she was a child. She's not really a sophisticated consumer of government documents, so she had her Mom fill out the form they use to close out their cases. They ruled they owed her $6k. Four years or so later I did her taxes, and the IRS took her whole refund because Social Security had changed it's mind. She had no idea why they gave the money in the first place so she really really really does not know why they decided that was the wrong thing to do.
But Congresswoman Fudge has a guy for that, and she's talking to him. I have no idea if she'll get any money back, but she'll at least know what's going on. I guess either Social Security screwed up or her Mom put something on the form Social Security thinks is not true, but either way she should know soon.
Let's say a private corporation were doing the equivalent. They have a lien on her car and a debt on her credit report. Her choices would be a) never sell the car or do anything that includes a credit check, and b) pay a lawyer $150-200 an hour to deal figure out what they're talking about. She makes about $10.50 an hour, and has to feed a kid.
Now if Libertarians were willing to include a tax hike to pay for lawyers for poor people, or switch our Justice System from the expensive/high BS confrontational model to one where the judge is supposed to advocate for the guy whose being outspent (this would take a Constitutional Amendment); then my calculus changes and I'm, more sympathetic to increasing corporate power relative to the government.
...but that's exactly what the ruling does. The original case was a businessman objecting to Google links to newpaper stories about his life. This is no different.
Fact is, the court that issued this ruling screwed up big time. Perhaps, if Google can find a few more egregious deletions to make, the European Parliament will correct the error.
I think the big problem here is that Google are expected to be the judge, jury and executioner and are getting smacked down when someone thinks they made the wrong judgement call. This stuff should be going to an independent judge instead of expecting Google to uphold a new law that has a fairly vague scope.
And not only do they have to be judge, jury, and executioner; they have to do it in every language anyone in Europe speaks.
If an Italian gets in a car wreck on the Isle of Lewis, and then wants to be forgotten 10 years later, you have to have someone who knows Gaelic on hand to read the blog post the other guy wrote about it.
European legal system is a big scam and shouldn't be listened to. Got it.
The system he describes is actually pretty common.
Under the actual words written into Canadian law, for example, the Prime Minister is a person who gets paid, not an important leader, because the only mention of a Prime Minister in the Canadian Constitution or statutes is his salary. The Constitution describes a guy who acts like a mini-Prime Minister on the Queen's behalf (the "chair of the Privy Council"), but pretty much the entire legal basis for the Canadian government is (and always has been) a phrase in the preamble to their Constitution that says the Constitution is "a Constitution similar in Principle to that of the United Kingdom."
A lot of very important stuff is totally unwritten, except for a Court decision saying that if they need the law in the future they damn well better write it. Their Constitution, for example, has a long list of the balance of power between the Federal government and the provinces (note: provinces are a lot more powerful then states), but says nothing about secession. Then Quebec wanted to do it, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that they had to have that right or freedom was BS, and that the Federal Parliament would just have to go along with their secession by passing a law governing said secession; but said law has never been passed because the referendum failed. So the actual text of all Canadian law on secession is that one Court decision saying "Deal with it motherfuckers."
Politician's ability to change their minds is remarkable.
Most of the members of the US House who were there under GW Bush voted for everything he wanted. Now almost all of them identify him as an un-conservative deficit-spending big government hypocrite. Paul Ryan is the best example.
In this case it would be fairly simple to solve the problem: send a couple dozen of their multi-lingual lawyers to a google campus to go through the requests with google. That actually does not require that they change their minds at all, it just requires that they decide to spend money. If they get embaressed enough they'll find the4 money, blame the cuts/taxes/etc.. on Google, and watch their poll-numbers skyrocket.
The original case was a newspaper notice of a personal bankruptcy of a pretty obscure person, while this is a story about a very public CEO resignation. The decision is a bit of a mess, I agree, but this case pretty clearly falls outside its scope, which explicitly says that stories involving public roles are excluded (which resigning as CEO of Merill Lynch certainly counts as).
From the explanatory summary (pdf) that accompanied the decision, explaining when search-engine operators may turn down removal requests:
The request may for example be turned down where the search engine operator concludes that for particular reasons, such as for example the public role played by John Smith, the interest of the general public to have access to the information in question justifies showing the links in Google search results.
I don't believe you understand why google's pissed.
They're a for-profit American corporation. They make money selling information to people. They keep costs low but refusing to use actual humans to do any of the work, when computer algorithm will work fine.
But this ruling specifically assumes they have an actual person sitting around, with nothing to do but read these requests, and then spend an hour trying to figure out if Jose Juerez in this story is a nobody who can use his right to be forgotten, or he's a Jose Juarez who is a figure of public interest. Moreover the guy has to know every EU language, every EU minority language (so Sorbian with an 'o' counts, because German citizen Sorbians are also EU Citizens), prominent local non-EU languages (such as Serbian, with an e), and probably also at least a smattering or major world languages like Russian and Chinese.
Since that person does not actually exist, they either have to hire a staff of several dozen, or they have to hire a couple really good lawyers who know the more prominent EU languages (ie: a Frenchmen, an Englishman, a German, maybe a Scandinavian because most of them can at least BS their way through all four of those languages, etc.), and then pull poor Nicolo Popescu from his team in analytics when a Romanian has a request. Then you have to hope Nicolo (hired for his ability to see patterns in data, not his communications skills), and the EU-fluent-lawyer he's talking to can communicate some very sophisticated legal concepts to each-other.
So even if they only have 50k requests, as the BBC reported, this is not a cheap program for them to administer. They're paying something on the order of $150-400 an hour per person they hire because you need multi-lingual lawyers, they need to bring in the random dude who happens to know Gaelic once a month, they need to do some pretty strong googling of their own to confirm the complaints aren't BS generated by Yahoo bots specifically to fuck over their bottom line, etc. 50,000 complaints times $150 is $7,500,000 so even if each one only takes an hour (and it'll be more like five, especially for EU languages that aren't world languages like Italian or Portuguese), 250k complaints (as in this summary) is nearly $40 million assuming that they only take an hour. It's probably gonna be closer to the $250 million range by the time they actually get done investigating. And that's in seven weeks. Over a full year this is is is almost certainly gonna cost them $1-$2 Billion.
So in other words google has two option. Agree to hire it's own Eurocrats for roughly $1 Billion a year, or make an algorithm that automatically accepts any request. As an American corporation they are loathe to spend that money on regulatory compliance until the actual regulators actually rule they actually have to have staff costing an actual $1 Billion. Note that, in general, each use of 'actual' in that last sentence requires at least one court ruling. American corporations really, really, really hate spending
More importantly you;re doing that thing conservatives do where they attack a major element of public policy but offer no replacements.
It isn't necessary to supply a new parasite when what you're trying to do is excise a parasite. You're doing what statist liberals do: assuming that there's a necessary 'major element of public policy.'
This is a democracy. An extremely flawed democracy, that's damn close to Oligarchy, but a democracy nonetheless.
If 50%+1 decided that free boob jobs were so important that taxes absolutely had to go up so the government could start the Federal Breast Enhancement Agency, then the new FBEA would be a necessary element of public policy.
The American people think universal access to education is a necessary element of public policy. Student Loans are in many ways the most conservative solution to the problem. There's moral hazard: art students get screwed unless they're really good at starting a business selling art. There's individual initiative: students in high demand field make a huge profit. In theory the government should at least break even on the loans. It does not increase Federal control over the economy significantly because students decide where they'll go to school.
It's interesting that you didn't complain at all about student loans until Obama fired the middlemen. You don't actually oppose student loans, or governmental power. What you oppose is governmental programs that sketchy MBAs can't get rich off of.
It's all a bunch of wankers wet-dreaming that denouncing Federal power will magically result in Federal power disappearing.
When you cut off a parasite's supply of resources (power, funding, etc.) it goes away. Unfortunately, you're right that the bloodsuckers in government won't just disappear if we defund them.
That's the theory the right has been hawking for decades.
It never works because the right prefers to engage in ridiculous denunciations of things the American people really like (ie: student loans), to convincing said American people to change their minds about the goals of public policy.
The "parasites" line of reasoning is incredibly over the top, and won't convince the 53% who voted for Obama of anything but your need for more medication. Especially when combined with the fact that you didn't oppose student loans until Obama realized the MBA middlemen were getting paid for nothing.
I honestly feel bad for these people, but they think it's bad now, just wait.
A first semester physics class pretty much covers the same material at every university and doesn't really change from year to year. In this day and age, there's really no reason other than tradition why we need to keep hiring thousands of people to present essentially identical lectures over and over.
Technical profs like Physics aren't in this boat quite yet. They make a lot more, and have more tenure track opportunities. They also have the advantage that they can get grants to do research, which justifies their salaries even if they have no students. So I doubt Physics profs will be quite a s screwed as history profs anytime soon.
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I suspect in a true double-blind experiment you'd find that minimum wage's biggest effect was in inflation. Businesses are much more likely to respond to a government-mandated increase of their costs by 2%, with a 5% price hike then by firing people. Mass firings look terrible on TV, while reducing both revenue and profit. OTOH raising prices by more then your costs grow increases both revenue and profit, and allows you to shove the blame onto somebody else. In the long term it could affect job growth (if people cost more, you hire less of them), but that should be somewhat mitigated by increased demand for jobs caused by minimum wage workers spending more money. This comparison seems to indicate that reduced job sup[ply is mitigated by increased job demand. The fact that it's so simple is partly encouraging (clearly the researchers didn't engage in any trickery to massage the numbers), but partly discouraging (there could be something very basic they should have factored in).
This would actually be really hard to prove or disprove by experiment even if it was ethical to do this kind of thing to people. The problem is that if you just take 50 people and drop them on one deserted tropical island, and put another 50 people on another, you have completely different groups of people. Somebody probably has great Island Survival Skills, which will mean his island will end up doing a whole lot better then the other island, regardless of minimum wage. If you try increasing it, the problem becomes how did you increase it? If you did it by decree of the guy you gave a gun and a radio the islanders will probably figure out that they're part of an experiment on the minimum wage, and since they probably don;t like you very much they'll probably try to sabotage the experiment. It's always unfortunate when PoliSci destroys the experiments of another discipline.
So to do this, you'd not only need to gut ethics standards completely; you'd also need the physical ability to copy people. That way you'd be 100% sure that Island A was doing better because island A had different laws. You'd also need a bunch of starting people socialized to obey a computer terminal without question, because that's the only way you'd be able to implement a minimum wage without that nasty political science invading your precious economics experiment. Even then you'd need to repeat the experiment a couple times to ensure the result wasn't simple an artifact of the 50 people you;d selected for the experiment.
In at least one of those 13 minimum wage is legally required to go up every year. Ohio pegged it's minimum wage to inflation back in the Strickland administration.
Which means that if job growth was negatively affected by an increasing minimum wage Ohio would be worse off then Michigan, and this would be part of a multi-year trend. The opposite is true.
I doubt it will be fewer jobs. If you need a new cashier because your customers are getting pissed at the wait time you hire her, and then worry about whether increased customer satisfaction is worth $10k (below her salary) or $20k (above it) later.
Higher prices are significantly more likely, but since I think inflation is too low to for healthy economic growth I don't see that as a problem.
For one, not everyone wants to move. Many of the people who call for a hands-off federal government would be quick to emphasize the value of family and stable local communities. Conservatives everywhere deplore the brain-drain and family disruption that comes with people migrating away from an area for better work elsewhere.
It's really, really hard for a minimum-wage (or even minimum wage + 50%) level worker to move for a couple reasons:
1) They tend to be dependent on the local social network for an array of services. If you know a mechanic in Cleveland who will work on your car cheap, and you can't afford a car that is actually reliable, you ain't gonna drop everything and move to North Dakota even if every economist personally calls your ass to show you precisely how much better off you'd be.
2) They tend to have kids and unstable romantic lives. My coworkers at Home Depot are almost all in their late teens or early 20s. About half of them are parents. One of them is still with the baby-daddy. Moving brings up all kinds of issues with visitation, child-care (ie: grandma in Cleveland can;t be free day care if work is not in Cleveland), custody, etc.
A lot of these issues would be strongly mitigated if a the Democrats had full control of everything. A much higher minimum wage would mean that my coworkers could afford better cars, they could afford to work out trips from North Dakota to Cleveland so the little one could visit dad, etc. Conservatives truly do not, on a very fundamental level, understand how hard it is to move up rungs on the income ladder when you're at the bottom.
To do the conservative fantasy, and take smart risks which hard work turns into prosperity you need something to risk. Which you don't have unless you're in a City with a) a very high minimum wage or b) excellent mass transit. In the US b) means Chicago or New York.
But even when people want to move, there's a general expectation that things work more or less the same everywhere. Sure, there are still some cultural differences between large regions, but the US isn't 13 distinct colonies any more. If the American Revolution happened today in our hyper-connected world, there definitely wouldn't be the same call for devolution and autonomy as in the days of the Founding Fathers.
That's a very annoying fact. I am politically active. I have lived in Michigan and Ohio. This means I can tell you the basic requirements to vote in those states. Yet I get questions from cousins everywhere, because apparently I'm a psychic who knows whether a weed conviction from North Carolina bars you from voting in California. I can tell you what you'd need to know before you called someone who actually lives in those states to find out the actual answer, but I ain't gonna be able to supply a yes or no to that one.
Having a Federal system where 50 states try vastly different development strategies simply does not work if everyone isn't willing to put in a couple a hours a week for several months learning about their new states plan every single fucking time they move. You end up with what we've got:
Everything is expressed in terms of two parties (because if you know Alabama's Fucking Conservative, and you know what Fucking Conservatives stereotypically go for, you'll have a very good idea of what your new state's legal system is like; OTOH California's fucking liberal, so you have to know what Fucking Liberals want, etc.).
How large is large?
I know places like NYC have lots of under-the-table employees, but almost none of them make less then the $8 an hour minimum wage because if you only make $5 an hour in Manhattan you starve to death. They're under-the-table because the employer does not want to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes, or do the paperwork required to issue a 1099. Most of the employers are actually upper-middle-class to rich employers who could easily do the paperwork, they simply don't bother because none of their friends bother.
I actually work at a Home Depot, which the anti-immigration activists are convinced means I know hundreds of Salvadoreans working for below the minimum wage. It just doesn't happen. It probably happened back in 2008, before the economy went to hell, but since then nope. It's probably much more common in areas with low (or no) minimum wages simply because the cost of living is low enough that somebody who is used to a lower-class standard of living in Mexico or Central America could get by on $6 an hour and still have enough left over to send a couple hundred a month home.
You do realize that it would be fairly trivial for a business to of sufficient size to acquire some bit of the internet pipeline that all data goes through? The right bit of internet backbone and you've got a lot of traffic. It would be no less likely then that time a single business got so much of the oil industry it was actually named Standard Oil. And if you're increasing corporate power relative to the government, that's pretty damn likely because the only thing stopping it is anti-trust rules.
You're assuming industry-standard valves, that are quite robust. in the near-future neither is likely because any cool idea Kohler has to improve it's toilets will be patented, and thus unavailable to companies like Glacier Bay. Moreover, since the idea is by definition new, we won't know the bugs that will appear after it's been mass-deployed for a few decades. Semiconductors are fairly reliable technology, but they weren't available to the pioneers of computing until the 50s.Moreover semiconductors don't swap out the way you're assuming toilet valves will. You can't switch an Intel processor for an AMD processor. You can't even switch one AMD processor for another without some pretty detailed internet research on precisely which processors your motherboard supports. The modern tyoilets you describe won;t be quite that complex, but if they're deciding exactly how much water to flush based upon the load that's been dropped, then they clearly have multiple sensors to decide things like a) quantity of shit, b) quality of shit (diarrhea probably requires different treatment then a really dry load), placement of shit (ie: if some's smeared on the side of the bowl you'll need a water jet or three to get rid of it), etc. Those sensors have to hook up to a computer, which needs to tell the valve how much water to let through.
Which means that if something breaks in the brand new Kohler Supervalve technology ordinary consumers have to know which super-valve replacement part to buy. They won't know how to connect the super-sensor connectivity line to the Supervalve Data Input port B.
Take it from somebody who works at Home Depot. Most consumers have no fucking clue who made their toilet. They'll pay a plumber with a van full of every possible valve to drive to their House, pick the valve, and install it himself. He'll get paid the cost of the part (which he will mark up by at least 100%), plus something on the order of $150 an hour.
That's gonna be the case for the foreseeable future. Patents alone will make standardizing toilet supervalves impossible until the OP's niece is in her 40s. Unless a market-dominating toilet firm appears and wipes out the others, there will probably still be competing technologies when she retires 50 years from now, and if there are competing technologies people will need a toilet expert (ie: a plumber) to help them figure it out.
Keep in mind the original question isn't about the future of toilet technology, it's about the future of work.
And more complex toilets will be more efficient then the current crop, but they'll also be really complex. There will be multiple failure points, and (this is the key thing), when a failure happens an amateur with a wrench and a basic knowledge of physics will have no fucking clue how to fix it. On the whole, the toilet will probably break less, but demand for toilet repair services will probably stay the same, or increase. It will probably be a lot like the dynamic with cars. Since the 70s and 80s when computers started being standard equipment cars have gotten much better, and become orders of magnitude more reliable; but demand for mechanics hasn't collapsed because most of those repairs were done by the car-owner (or a close friend) in the back yard.
So if the OP's niece gets training as a plumber she'll be fine.
Or hell, look at the Fourth Amendment. You're concerned about a program that could (theoretically) be used to abuse millions of Americans. When asked to provide evidence that anyone has actualy been hurt you respond with a) abstract compalints about how bad you feel that the government knows whom you've been emailing, and b) claims that of course nobody has evidence of more then a handful of people being oppressed via NSA information because it's secret.
I haven't been so asked. But since you mentioned it, widespread contempt for the law is something that should be scourged from government at any level.
Sure, that's an abstract observation. But I don't see the need for anything more. Government routinely oversteps the bounds we attempt to put on it.
You're exaggerating the level of law-breaking going on here.
Police are allowed to do any search, reasonable or otherwise, with a warrant. They have the warrant. Which means that, by definition, it's not the government breaking the law. it's the Court that issued the warrant.
That's kinda why the anti-NSA side keeps losing in Court. They think of this as the NSA breaking the law, when the NSA is doing precisely what it is supposed to do : gather all information for which they have a warrant.
As to point b), that is a rather obvious argument. Notice that no corporation gets to protect its secrecy like that (unless of course, they're contractors for the US military or intelligence and can protect their inner workings with these secrecy laws).
Have you ever tried to reveal an Apple trade secret? At one point they actually had a San Fran PD officer back them up.
If you incre3ase corporate power you will (by definition) give companies like Apple more power to keep secrets. You will also reduce the power of the sole insitution that can check them: the Federal government.
Let me put it to you this way: if Google had a secret Eviler then NSA database how would you fix that problem under the current system?
You probably couldn't, because google can vet it's employees for political reliability before transferring them to the Evil division, and can then use NDAs and other legal tactics to keep their damn mouths shut. Moreover such a database would not be front-page news, so even if a Snowden-Googler got his hands on the documents it probably wouldn't matter.
Unless the Feds got involved.
And you're proposing giving Google power relative to the Federal government.
Either increasing corporate power relative to the Feds is pro-freedom or it isn't.
Either the sky is green or it is purple. False dichotomy is false.
My view is that there is in the current situation some freedom to be gained from making business and the private world more powerful with respect to the federal government. I consider it an informal balance of power, much like the official ones between states and federal government or between the branches of the federal government.
Sure, I can see situations where increasing business power beyond a certain extent causes a decrease in personal freedom. But I think it's foolish to think we're in that sort of situation now.
It's very hard for me to see that.
The track record of businesses is much worse then the Feds on pretty much every issue. Generally the entire reason the feds got their current powers is because some businessman 40 years ago decided to oppress some private citizen.
Remember: the only reason you know google isn't reading your gmail account (or reading the accounts of anyone you send email to) is that they pinky-swear they ain't doing that shit. They say their encryption works, has no backdoors, is applied to all backups on their servers, etc.
To an extent competition will protect you (they know if they get caught Bing rules the universe), but if they figure out some way to make their search algorithms bette
Really?
All I said about myself was I managed to get through Grad School with no marketable skills. If you want the whole sad story, I can give it to you. But since it involves a combination of mental illness, an unscrupulous for-profit graduate school, and poor decision making at 23 I'm pretty sure you don't want to hear it. In my defense, of all the stories you've heard involving these elements I'm probably the only one who is paying his student loans in full every month. Damn near everybody else (even the ones who got marketable degrees like MD or JD) owes more then 10% of their income every month, and is therefore on a payment plan.
It was actually the University of Michigan. And I'll admit there's some hyperbole in my post. But even at U of M I knew a Prof who scheduled classes at 8 AM specifically to avoid a certain class of student. Everyone bitched about getting up no matter when they got up, because bitching about getting up is what you do when you're 22.
"Work" is a relative term. In a Liberal Arts Major, almost no classwork or assigned reading can actually be considered work, because the entire reason you picked that class is you wanted to learn more about the subject. If you didn't want to spend six hours reading an obscure tract about an obscure people in the DRCongo you probably would have picked a different class. Tests were never work to me. Essays were work, but in terms of actual hours worked at University I was doing a whole hell of a lot less of it then I have done at any point since.
OTOH, the HS grads I'm working with today all get to work by 7 AM. Five days a week. No University class I have ever heard of, at any school, anywhere, is five days a week at 6 AM.
I'm not arguing that University isn't work, or that you aren't well-served by doing it. I'm arguing that the OP has absolutely no clue what life is like for HS-Educated people in their 20s. They have their own places, they tend to have jobs. They show up to those jobs at much higher rates then college-students, because college students can get away with sleeping in as long as they don't blow the test; where as employees don't get paid unless they are actually at work.
Apparently you never went to college.
Most four-year college kids aren't in technical program. They're in liberal arts programs. Typically they have lots of trouble getting up early enough to get to a 10 AM class, and bitch and moan that an 8-hour day is required to earn an A. They spend most of their time getting drunk and getting laid, and call it "networking." They spend a significant proportion of their study time debating fields that are (pretty much by definition) intellectual masturbation, like philosophy or theology. Then they go home and spend a few years on the couch waiting for the economy to improve, and/or frantically trying to get into grad school. They don't actually enter a field where the boss expects you to there at 8 AM every day until they hit their late 20s. And I know this because I went to a four-year-college for Histyory and Political Science, and then spent a year-and-a-half in Grad School; and ended up with absolutely no marketable skills.
OTOH, HS-educated kid tend to get thrown out at 18. Most of my co-workers at Home Depot had their own places, which they got with no help from Mom at all, at that age. The ones actually in their 20s generally have really shitty 10-year-old car, or no cars at all. The younger ones tend not to work a full 40 hours, because the company really prefers the scheduling flexibility four part-timers get you to two full-timers; and if you;re around a couple years you generally get full-time; but they are there at 6 AM when their schedule says "be there at 6 AM," and they stay until 10 PM on those days. Almost alkl of them have to do one of these a week, so they don;t have anything a middle-class person would call a "sleep schedule."
Note that this is not a blind endorsement of government power. The number one tool my neighbors could use to oppress me (or I could use to oppress them), is the state government.
The federal government is the tool of choice these days. I don't go off of history when federal government power is at unprecedented levels of power and degree of intrusiveness. After all, it's not the state of California which is running the NSA (my example from before) or taking your coworker's money.
Really?
Ever tried fighting a ticket issued by another state? Or looked at the size of the Federal prison population vs. state populations? Most drug war victims are in state pens, not Federal Prison.
Or hell, look at the Fourth Amendment. You're concerned about a program that could (theoretically) be used to abuse millions of Americans. When asked to provide evidence that anyone has actualy been hurt you respond with a) abstract compalints about how bad you feel that the government knows whom you've been emailing, and b) claims that of course nobody has evidence of more then a handful of people being oppressed via NSA information because it's secret.
OTOH under Michael Bloomberg the NYPD actually oppressed the city's entire African-American male population via stop-and-frisk.
State cops kill a lot more people then federal cops, and in turn local cops kill more then state cops. Thousands of Americans' right to vote is questionable because of Voter ID laws.
So basically what's actually going on is the states are oppressing the hell out of everyone, but you don't give a shit because you prefer actually being oppressed by the states to having a Federal government which could theoretically oppress you at some point in the future.
So you're arguing that, under a pro-corporate Constitutional reform, private for-profit corporations would be able to get police into using their powers to advance the interests of said private, for-profit corporations, and that this would be a good thing, because at least it wouldn;t be the FEDERAL government harassing people?
No. You made a claim about the Pinkertons. I showed how that claim was incorrect.
Either increasing corporate power relative to the Feds is pro-freedom or it isn't.
If I was right and they went off on their own investigations regardless of the Fourth Amendment then it clearly isn't pro-freedom. If you;re right and they had local police help to massacre unions then it logically follows that increasing corporate power relative to the Feds is a bad thing because that would allow private corporations to massacre recalcitrant employees. Again.
And how often have you heard of a Congressperson actually winning a dispute like that?
Not very much either way.
They do quite well against the Feds. The whole Lois Lerner thing started as a Congressman's letter.
They have trouble with disputes with corporations because a) they don;t have a guy on-staff who instinctively understands all paperwork every corporation in the country issues, and b) very few private companies have a boss who fears Congressional hearings.
Your ignorance of how tax refunds work is showing.
The IRS won't send you your refund if any agency from a fairly long list (child support, Social Security, student loans, some state tax agencies, etc.) claims you owe them money. Disputing the matter with the IRS doesn't help because the IRS can't order these other agencies around.
I guess you just don't get it. Why should anything be on that list? I don't get to take your money in that way, why should anyone else get to via the agency of the IRS? As a US citizen, the federal government is in a unique position to control and seize your wealth.
Why should anything be on that list? Because Congress said so, and in a free co
You do realize we tried the stronger corporations/weaker government model during the late 19th/early 20th centuries, and the result was not an absolute utopia of freedom.
Yes. It wasn't that bad. It amazes me how much power people are willing to hand governments to avoid the possibility of "sweat shops", "child labor", and other obsolete 19th century dangers.
I'm a US Citizen, not a German or Russian citizen.
Historically the only threat to my freedom has been my fellow Americans, therefore to CXheck and Balance the power of my neighbors I strongly prefer stronger Federal powers.
Note that this is not a blind endorsement of government power. The number one tool my neighbors could use to oppress me (or I could use to oppress them), is the state government. They have most of the jail-space, virtually unlimited authority (they can do almost anything save violate the Bill of Rights, and they're very good at weaseling their way around the Bill of Rights), etc.
Corporations are a potential threat, because they'll do anything to screw their business partners, and as a relatively poor person I can;t fight back very effectively when they screw me. Moreover their nearly unlimited resources mean they can generally buy state governments if they want.
Government contracts for the Pinkertons dries up after the Civil War, but private contracts made up for it. They had more agents then the Army had troops in the 1890s. You're just making shit up on their relationship with law enforcement.
Read some history on how Pinkerton operated. They didn't go after outlaws or bush unions without law enforcement support. It might just be a token deputy riding with a bunch of Pinkertons, but they had their backside covered.
So you're arguing that, under a pro-corporate Constitutional reform, private for-profit corporations would be able to get police into using their powers to advance the interests of said private, for-profit corporations, and that this would be a good thing, because at least it wouldn;t be the FEDERAL government harassing people?
You must be really fucking rich mas'r Khallow, if you're sure that everyone you love is rich enough to out-bid Bill Gates when he decides to send them to jail.
As I said she is fighting the Social Security Administration (not the IRS) through her Congressperson. That does not require money up-front, which means she can actually do it; whereas in any dispute with a private corporation she only has a theoretical right to fight.
But at least in the latter case, she can get her money back. She could also beg that congressperson for any private disputes as well. That option doesn't vanish merely because the problem is private.
And how often have you heard of a Congressperson actually winning a dispute like that?
At best you get a letter saying :"this is what their lawyers will say when you decide to sue them, here is a list of charities that might help you sue."
OTOH the entire dispute with Lois lerner and the IRS started with a Congressman asking questions.
And as to my "reading comprehension", I guess you should have written something other than:
Back in the real world, the IRS ruling hurts my poor coworker, but she wasn't depending on that money to pay her bills because you can't depend on tax refund money to do that. The Feds refuse to finalize the tax Code until the very last minute, so you never know what your refund is going to be until you do your return.
and
and the IRS took her whole refund because Social Security had changed it's mind
Your story completely undermines your claim that it was just a dispute with Social Security.
Your ignorance of how tax refunds work is showing.
The IR
Moreover just because a strong government wins one case you disagree with, it does not follow that a fundamentally different system, with significantly stronger private corporations and a significantly weaker government, would result in rulings you like 100% of the time.
It would be less dangerous. Corporations and other businesses are more vulnerable than governments. And I'm not interested in achieving a society that matches my interests perfectly.
Really?
You do realize we tried the stronger corporations/weaker government model during the late 19th/early 20th centuries, and the result was not an absolute utopia of freedom.
In particular it's impossible for mew to conceive of a system with a weaker government, and stronger private corporations, where there wasn't a private NSA with more data then the real NSA, and more power too. The Pinkertons never bothered with warrants.
The Pinkertons always worked with law enforcement to provide legal cover for their actions. And they became that powerful due to numerous government-related contracts. And I have to roll my eyes at the claim that a "private NSA" could have as much data as the real one. Especially, since the "private NSA" wouldn't have the sorts of powers that allow the real NSA to collect so much data.
If you're talking about size of database both google and Facebook dwarf the NSA. And your ability to stay out the crosshairs of evil google is limited if evil google has a group like the Pinkertons, who can find out which accounts belong to your sister.
Government contracts for the Pinkertons dries up after the Civil War, but private contracts made up for it. They had more agents then the Army had troops in the 1890s. You're just making shit up on their relationship with law enforcement.
They;'d run their own investigations, without warrants, and then give the results to the cops. The "bad guy"s conviction would be immediately rubber-stamped by the Courts. because in the 1890s that's how freedom worked..
It must be nice to live like you. So much money that you don't care that your credit is busted. Hell even a $10k debt probably wouldn't move your debt to income ratio. You just have that much income. Congratulations. If you ever get really annoyed you can just drop $5k on a lawyer and know that you'll get it back eventually. And you get to laugh laugh laugh at all the poor peons who don't have that much money lying around to pay a lawyer. Yes Mas'r Khallow you live a wonderful life.
Back in the real world, the IRS ruling hurts my poor coworker, but she wasn't depending on that money to pay her bills because you can't depend on tax refund money to do that. The Feds refuse to finalize the tax Code until the very last minute, so you never know what your refund is going to be until you do your return. OTOH if she'd had this problem with a private business her ability to find a new job would be hurt, her ability to move would be hurt (landlords frequently do credit checks), her ability to buy a car would be hurt. For those of us who are below you, Mas'r Khallow, the IRS taking a tax refund is a lot less disastrous then some scam artist putting a fake debt on our credit report. We can fight the IRS through our local Congresspeople, if we could fight the scam artists they wouldn't have careers.
In other words, the IRS just took her money while she'd have a chance against a private institution doing the same.
A dick and illiterate. Such a winning combination Mas'r Khallow.
As I said she is fighting the Social Security Administration (not the IRS) through her Congressperson. That does not require money up-front, which means she can actually do it; whereas in any dispute with a private corporation she only has a theoretical right to fight.
It's because it's much easier for somebody who isn't rich to appeal decisions by the government.
I don't buy that. When are the NSA's poor and unlawful decisions going to get appealed?
It's in court all the time. The problem is the Courts think you're wrong. I'd love it if John Roberts was our mental slave, and he was going to rule that the Fourth Amendment covers email surveillance, but he's not our slave and he's not gonna make that ruling.
Moreover just because a strong government wins one case you disagree with, it does not follow that a fundamentally different system, with significantly stronger private corporations and a significantly weaker government, would result in rulings you like 100% of the time.
In particular it's impossible for mew to conceive of a system with a weaker government, and stronger private corporations, where there wasn't a private NSA with more data then the real NSA, and more power too. The Pinkertons never bothered with warrants.
For example, can you imagine the vast amount5s of power over your life google would wield if they coordinated with Bounty Hunters and Debt Collection Agencies?
And your IRS versus private business example is laughable. Notice that the IRS took the money straight away while the private business would attempt to do by less sure means. And if you win a private case against a business, you can get your lawyer money back from the business.
It must be nice to live like you. So much money that you don't care that your credit is busted. Hell even a $10k debt probably wouldn't move your debt to income ratio. You just have that much income. Congratulations. If you ever get really annoyed you can just drop $5k on a lawyer and know that you'll get it back eventually. And you get to laugh laugh laugh at all the poor peons who don't have that much money lying around to pay a lawyer. Yes Mas'r Khallow you live a wonderful life.
Back in the real world, the IRS ruling hurts my poor coworker, but she wasn't depending on that money to pay her bills because you can't depend on tax refund money to do that. The Feds refuse to finalize the tax Code until the very last minute, so you never know what your refund is going to be until you do your return. OTOH if she'd had this problem with a private business her ability to find a new job would be hurt, her ability to move would be hurt (landlords frequently do credit checks), her ability to buy a car would be hurt. For those of us who are below you, Mas'r Khallow, the IRS taking a tax refund is a lot less disastrous then some scam artist putting a fake debt on our credit report. We can fight the IRS through our local Congresspeople, if we could fight the scam artists they wouldn't have careers.
Or instead of giving subsidies, maybe the governor should give out monetary prizes for results like the X-Prizes. Subsidies is just asking for abuse and a waste of tax payer money. But giving out prizes for results would probably be cheaper and more effective.
The problem with this argument is that energy production isn't a wide-open field. Everybody already uses energy.
Lets say you've got a state with 35 million people, and 10 prizes. The prize goes to the people who cut their energy use most in percentage terms. At least 30 million of them aren't gonna change squat because a) changing their lifestyles would cost tens of thousands of dollars, and b) they know the guy down the street who bikes to work, only uses his Toyota to pick up groceries, doesn't have kids, etc. is gonna be able to cut his energy use a lot more then them simply by switching to a Prius and setting his AC to 7 For them buying a $25k car, spending $10-$15k on solar roof panels, etc. just does not make sense. Let's say you do it in absolute terms. A trucker who takes a month off the job wins. You don't actually reduce global warming either way. In the latter case you probably increase it because he's gonna be on the job again next month, and he'll probably use the money to buy a bigger (and less fuel efficient) truck.
OTOH let's say you have a subsidy for roof panels, and a system similar to Germany's where anyone can make money from the panels. Lots of people probably put up the panels because they are low cost. Then you have to have some way of dealing with having an electrical grid flooded with energy in the middle of the day, and with very little at night, but the Germans clearly make that work and they have a lot more rain then Cali does.
If you have enough money to choose whether you do business with people it's fairly simple to choose your government. Quite a few of them will actually sell you citizenship.
It's because it's much easier for somebody who isn't rich to appeal decisions by the government. Congress exists, everyone has a Congressperson, and every Congressperson has an office with 25 staff. Quite a few of those people are devoted to something called "constituent service," which is helping people deal with government bureaucracies.For example I have a coworker who had some income from Social Security when she was a child. She's not really a sophisticated consumer of government documents, so she had her Mom fill out the form they use to close out their cases. They ruled they owed her $6k. Four years or so later I did her taxes, and the IRS took her whole refund because Social Security had changed it's mind. She had no idea why they gave the money in the first place so she really really really does not know why they decided that was the wrong thing to do.
But Congresswoman Fudge has a guy for that, and she's talking to him. I have no idea if she'll get any money back, but she'll at least know what's going on. I guess either Social Security screwed up or her Mom put something on the form Social Security thinks is not true, but either way she should know soon.
Let's say a private corporation were doing the equivalent. They have a lien on her car and a debt on her credit report. Her choices would be a) never sell the car or do anything that includes a credit check, and b) pay a lawyer $150-200 an hour to deal figure out what they're talking about. She makes about $10.50 an hour, and has to feed a kid.
Now if Libertarians were willing to include a tax hike to pay for lawyers for poor people, or switch our Justice System from the expensive/high BS confrontational model to one where the judge is supposed to advocate for the guy whose being outspent (this would take a Constitutional Amendment); then my calculus changes and I'm, more sympathetic to increasing corporate power relative to the government.
...but that's exactly what the ruling does. The original case was a businessman objecting to Google links to newpaper stories about his life. This is no different.
Fact is, the court that issued this ruling screwed up big time. Perhaps, if Google can find a few more egregious deletions to make, the European Parliament will correct the error.
I think the big problem here is that Google are expected to be the judge, jury and executioner and are getting smacked down when someone thinks they made the wrong judgement call. This stuff should be going to an independent judge instead of expecting Google to uphold a new law that has a fairly vague scope.
And not only do they have to be judge, jury, and executioner; they have to do it in every language anyone in Europe speaks.
If an Italian gets in a car wreck on the Isle of Lewis, and then wants to be forgotten 10 years later, you have to have someone who knows Gaelic on hand to read the blog post the other guy wrote about it.
European legal system is a big scam and shouldn't be listened to. Got it.
The system he describes is actually pretty common.
Under the actual words written into Canadian law, for example, the Prime Minister is a person who gets paid, not an important leader, because the only mention of a Prime Minister in the Canadian Constitution or statutes is his salary. The Constitution describes a guy who acts like a mini-Prime Minister on the Queen's behalf (the "chair of the Privy Council"), but pretty much the entire legal basis for the Canadian government is (and always has been) a phrase in the preamble to their Constitution that says the Constitution is "a Constitution similar in Principle to that of the United Kingdom."
A lot of very important stuff is totally unwritten, except for a Court decision saying that if they need the law in the future they damn well better write it. Their Constitution, for example, has a long list of the balance of power between the Federal government and the provinces (note: provinces are a lot more powerful then states), but says nothing about secession. Then Quebec wanted to do it, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that they had to have that right or freedom was BS, and that the Federal Parliament would just have to go along with their secession by passing a law governing said secession; but said law has never been passed because the referendum failed. So the actual text of all Canadian law on secession is that one Court decision saying "Deal with it motherfuckers."
Politician's ability to change their minds is remarkable.
Most of the members of the US House who were there under GW Bush voted for everything he wanted. Now almost all of them identify him as an un-conservative deficit-spending big government hypocrite. Paul Ryan is the best example.
In this case it would be fairly simple to solve the problem: send a couple dozen of their multi-lingual lawyers to a google campus to go through the requests with google. That actually does not require that they change their minds at all, it just requires that they decide to spend money. If they get embaressed enough they'll find the4 money, blame the cuts/taxes/etc.. on Google, and watch their poll-numbers skyrocket.
The original case was a newspaper notice of a personal bankruptcy of a pretty obscure person, while this is a story about a very public CEO resignation. The decision is a bit of a mess, I agree, but this case pretty clearly falls outside its scope, which explicitly says that stories involving public roles are excluded (which resigning as CEO of Merill Lynch certainly counts as).
From the explanatory summary (pdf) that accompanied the decision, explaining when search-engine operators may turn down removal requests:
I don't believe you understand why google's pissed.
They're a for-profit American corporation. They make money selling information to people. They keep costs low but refusing to use actual humans to do any of the work, when computer algorithm will work fine.
But this ruling specifically assumes they have an actual person sitting around, with nothing to do but read these requests, and then spend an hour trying to figure out if Jose Juerez in this story is a nobody who can use his right to be forgotten, or he's a Jose Juarez who is a figure of public interest. Moreover the guy has to know every EU language, every EU minority language (so Sorbian with an 'o' counts, because German citizen Sorbians are also EU Citizens), prominent local non-EU languages (such as Serbian, with an e), and probably also at least a smattering or major world languages like Russian and Chinese.
Since that person does not actually exist, they either have to hire a staff of several dozen, or they have to hire a couple really good lawyers who know the more prominent EU languages (ie: a Frenchmen, an Englishman, a German, maybe a Scandinavian because most of them can at least BS their way through all four of those languages, etc.), and then pull poor Nicolo Popescu from his team in analytics when a Romanian has a request. Then you have to hope Nicolo (hired for his ability to see patterns in data, not his communications skills), and the EU-fluent-lawyer he's talking to can communicate some very sophisticated legal concepts to each-other.
So even if they only have 50k requests, as the BBC reported, this is not a cheap program for them to administer. They're paying something on the order of $150-400 an hour per person they hire because you need multi-lingual lawyers, they need to bring in the random dude who happens to know Gaelic once a month, they need to do some pretty strong googling of their own to confirm the complaints aren't BS generated by Yahoo bots specifically to fuck over their bottom line, etc. 50,000 complaints times $150 is $7,500,000 so even if each one only takes an hour (and it'll be more like five, especially for EU languages that aren't world languages like Italian or Portuguese), 250k complaints (as in this summary) is nearly $40 million assuming that they only take an hour. It's probably gonna be closer to the $250 million range by the time they actually get done investigating. And that's in seven weeks. Over a full year this is is is almost certainly gonna cost them $1-$2 Billion.
So in other words google has two option. Agree to hire it's own Eurocrats for roughly $1 Billion a year, or make an algorithm that automatically accepts any request. As an American corporation they are loathe to spend that money on regulatory compliance until the actual regulators actually rule they actually have to have staff costing an actual $1 Billion. Note that, in general, each use of 'actual' in that last sentence requires at least one court ruling. American corporations really, really, really hate spending
More importantly you;re doing that thing conservatives do where they attack a major element of public policy but offer no replacements.
It isn't necessary to supply a new parasite when what you're trying to do is excise a parasite. You're doing what statist liberals do: assuming that there's a necessary 'major element of public policy.'
This is a democracy. An extremely flawed democracy, that's damn close to Oligarchy, but a democracy nonetheless.
If 50%+1 decided that free boob jobs were so important that taxes absolutely had to go up so the government could start the Federal Breast Enhancement Agency, then the new FBEA would be a necessary element of public policy.
The American people think universal access to education is a necessary element of public policy. Student Loans are in many ways the most conservative solution to the problem. There's moral hazard: art students get screwed unless they're really good at starting a business selling art. There's individual initiative: students in high demand field make a huge profit. In theory the government should at least break even on the loans. It does not increase Federal control over the economy significantly because students decide where they'll go to school.
It's interesting that you didn't complain at all about student loans until Obama fired the middlemen. You don't actually oppose student loans, or governmental power. What you oppose is governmental programs that sketchy MBAs can't get rich off of.
It's all a bunch of wankers wet-dreaming that denouncing Federal power will magically result in Federal power disappearing.
When you cut off a parasite's supply of resources (power, funding, etc.) it goes away. Unfortunately, you're right that the bloodsuckers in government won't just disappear if we defund them.
That's the theory the right has been hawking for decades.
It never works because the right prefers to engage in ridiculous denunciations of things the American people really like (ie: student loans), to convincing said American people to change their minds about the goals of public policy.
The "parasites" line of reasoning is incredibly over the top, and won't convince the 53% who voted for Obama of anything but your need for more medication. Especially when combined with the fact that you didn't oppose student loans until Obama realized the MBA middlemen were getting paid for nothing.
I honestly feel bad for these people, but they think it's bad now, just wait.
A first semester physics class pretty much covers the same material at every university and doesn't really change from year to year. In this day and age, there's really no reason other than tradition why we need to keep hiring thousands of people to present essentially identical lectures over and over.
Technical profs like Physics aren't in this boat quite yet. They make a lot more, and have more tenure track opportunities. They also have the advantage that they can get grants to do research, which justifies their salaries even if they have no students. So I doubt Physics profs will be quite a s screwed as history profs anytime soon.