Live off $250K for the rest of my life? Depending on my investment strategy and my forecasted lifespan, I could probably do it. I live cheap, I have almost no debt, and I don't have a family to support.
But that's beside the point. The definition of "winning" that you're using is "never having to work again." If you make $250K for even one year, you can live quite comfortably while stashing away most of it. Do it for a few years in a row, and you can retire. Given the current state of the country, that sounds an awful lot like winning to me.
And it's not as though we're asking a whole lot from the $250K crowd by taking away the Bush tax cuts. If you make $250K on the nose, your taxes aren't increased. If you make $250,001, your taxes go up by a few cents. If you make $260K, your taxes go up by $500. Not enough to substantially change your buying habits or cause any sane, reasonable person to "go Galt."
The Making Work Pay tax break was a new tax break, and therefore increased taxes on nobody.
Yes, people do pay other taxes besides federal income taxes. State taxes, local taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, use fees, payroll taxes, the works. Which is why the whiners who whine that "half of Americans don't pay any taxes" are just being whining whiners who whine whinily.
Please explain to me why it's fair for us to tax capital gains at a lower rate than income.
Like my dad always said, "I'd love to be earning enough to pay that much in taxes." Yes, close to half of Americans aren't paying federal income tax. But they may be paying state income taxes. They're probably paying property taxes, use fees, sales taxes, and payroll taxes. If you put them together, my understanding is that the tax structure is regressive overall.
My dad also says "statistics prove that you can prove anything with statistics." When you say,
Additionally, a larger share of Federal tax revenues are paid by the top 1% of income earners today than was paid by them before the Bush tax cuts were passed.
what you leave out is that during the Bush administration, the average person's income actually went down (even excluding the economic collapse), while the top 1% (and especially the top 0.01%) were lavished with more money than they knew what to do with.* When you point out that the top 10% pay 50% of the income tax without at the same time pointing out that they have 70% of the wealth, you're using statistics to conceal the truth, not reveal it.
* What they did with the money was send it to Wall Street. Wall Street, completely failing in its societal function of putting money into investments that would yield long-term value, used it to inflate commodities bubbles, bet on derivatives and credit default swaps, and sell investors on investments that they themselves were betting against. Well done, free enterprise.
No, the morons who whine "half of Americans don't pay taxes!" are the ones who are trying to tax those attempting to become rich. By the time you're up to the sort of income where liberals like me want to raise your taxes, you've already made it into the winner's circle.
True. But how does that make us special? Right now, nearly everyone except for upper management and investors are being underpaid for the intrinsic value that they create. The sweatshop worker who adds a few stitches of value to each of a hundred pairs of shoes in a day, and gets paid $3 for her work? Undervalued. The dude making $8/hr assembling thirty McMeals an hour, which will easily retail for over 20x that? Undervalued. Front line Wal-Mart employees? Screwed over, with the savings divided between customers and the Waltons.
But the guy whose only "contribution" was buying a crapload of stock from the guy who bought the stock from the guy who bought the stock from the guy who got in on the IPO before immediately turning around and selling it? He gets to decide how the company operates, and gets paid handsomely for the privilege, regardless of whether he has any skill or interest (or even knows where his money is invested).
Take Carly Fiorina, the former HP CEO who made hundreds of millions of dollars off a simple theory: When you ram two companies together, the stock price goes up for a while, even if the result looks less like a merger and more like a train wreck. The day Carly resigned, HP's stock price jumped dramatically. Then, with her newfound fortune and "high-level business experience," she tried to buy one of California's senate seats. Hundreds of millions of dollars that could have gone to the people actually making the company valuable were instead squandered on incompetence and poor decision making, with a healthy dose of corruption thrown in for good measure.
This is a big part of the reason that you're undervalued.
Your claim that unemployment mostly resides in the housing sector is wrong. As Paul Krugman wrote last year:
[T]here should be significant labor shortages somewhere in America — major industries that are trying to expand but are having trouble hiring, major classes of workers who find their skills in great demand, major parts of the country with low unemployment even as the rest of the nation suffers.
None of these things exist. Job openings have plunged in every major sector, while the number of workers forced into part-time employment in almost all industries has soared. Unemployment has surged in every major occupational category. Only three states, with a combined population not much larger than that of Brooklyn, have unemployment rates below 5 percent.
Oh, and where are these firms that “can’t find appropriate workers”? The National Federation of Independent Business has been surveying small businesses for many years, asking them to name their most important problem; the percentage citing problems with labor quality is now at an all-time low, reflecting the reality that these days even highly skilled workers are desperate for employment.
So all the evidence contradicts the claim that we’re mainly suffering from structural unemployment.
"Good. Because a union would mean that not only would the company not be able to lay off the incompetent developers, but they'd be forced to pay them the same as me."
Ever noticed how 90% of developers think they're above average?
Over the last couple of years, median income has actually fallen.
Please explain to me what the truck drivers and ditch diggers of the world will be doing in two decades, after those jobs have disappeared. Explain to me what they will be doing to exchange their labor for a share of the economy that's greater than what a Pakistani bricklayer earns.
Looking at total compensation only makes the picture worse, as more and more jobs are dropping or cutting back on health insurance. Virtually all of the increase in median household income over the last couple of years comes from increased working hours (more women entering the workforce, longer hours for workers). In order to say that we're better compensated for our labor than we were thirty years ago, you have to assume weird things from the get-go. Like "economists have no idea how to calculate inflation, but I do." Or, "since you couldn't buy an iPad in 1980, they're worth eleventy-bajillion dollars."
Meanwhile, the compensation given to the top 0.1% has increased by orders of magnitude.
Yes, people have always found other jobs. But you're ignoring everything that makes the modern era unlike those that preceded it. We've never had seven billion people on the planet. We've never had intense, direct competition between laborers around the globe. Last but not least, we've never had automating technology that allows machines to do damned near anything a human can do, but cheaper and better.
If we don't tear up the social contract that says "you don't work, you don't eat," then the choice we're left with is between revolution and feudalism.
>> "What you and everyone else is missing is that as productivity increases most people have to work less."
No, over the last thirty years, as productivity increased, most people have worked more, but been paid less. The bounty that comes from increased productivity have mostly come from the top.
>> "How many hours a year at minimum wage do you have to work to live as good as someone in the middle class from 60 years ago?"
There are so many things wrong with this approach, it beggars belief.
First, people don't generally evaluate their happiness by comparing their status to that of their ancestors from three or thirty generations back. You could just as plausibly argue that we're all living like the kings of 2000 years ago. Does that mean the poor should just shut the hell up and relish their wealth?
No. People compare their standing to that of the people they come in contact with. And they generally spend more of their time comparing themselves to those above them. If everyone around you has a nicer car, a bigger house with more amenities, take more extravagant vacations, and have better health care, it is simply unreasonable to expect them to be happy with their lot in life.
Internet, cable, and cell phones are close to necessities in modern life. Back in 1950, they didn't even have answering machines. Today, people expect to be able to reach just about anybody at any time, or at least leave a message and have it returned promptly.
You can't buy some of the things on your list today. You can't buy 1950's era health care at any price. A good doctor today would feel it irresponsible to try. The unsafe, polluting, gas-guzzling autos of the 1950s can still be bought, but only as expensive hobbyist toys.
You can get a small, cheap house. But you pretty much have to build it yourself and fight city planners tooth and nail for the privilege.
It's more expensive to live a respectable life these days. Case closed.
>> "There is so much food available so cheaply that the poor are fat form the same reason they are poor. They lack self control and the ability to delay gratification."
Have you ever noticed that your self-control is lowest when you're under stress, or when you feel ill. Being poor means being constantly stressed and sick. When every dollar is precious and every month is a race between your bills and your bank account, life suddenly gets really, really hard. Try it.
Moreover, when you're impoverished, when you've been down your entire life, when you've never seen any of your friends make it out of poverty, hopelessness is a defense mechanism. You try to get a better job, only to lose it when your kid gets sick or your car breaks down. You try to get an education, only to end up deeply indebted to one of the shady for-profit colleges built to fleece the government of student loan money. You try to build up a nest egg, only to have a friend fall on hard times or rip you off. So you say, "screw it." You're done following the rules. Society keeps telling you to work hard and dream big, then shoving you back every time you try. So put off your landlord, buy some pizza and beer, and hang out with your broke-ass friends. At least you're happy for a moment.
In short, you're being heartless, sanctimonious, and ignorant. Knock it off.
Um, wages in the US have been stagnant for nearly thirty years now for most of the population. And we've never been at a point technologically where computers could take over complex tasks like driving or trivia games. Do you really think that if we automate away all the fast food jobs (currently employing 7.7M Americans) that we're going to make up for it by having 7.7M more plumbers and hairdressers? If the tens of thousands of taxis in New York are automated, will those who have been displaced become WoW gold farmers?
Hell, for most of the 2000's, the biggest-growing sector of the economy was finance. That turned out to be mostly imaginary.
The argument has been perfectly correct for decades, and will be going into overdrive in the next two decades.
I hate the whole "this will create jobs" attitude. The more productive something is, the fewer jobs it creates. I mean, honestly, rather than having four million people schlep to and from work to keep the lights on, it would be better to have some magical, maintenance-free "free energy" machine that would do it without anyone having to lift a finger. Society as a whole would be much richer.
But there's the contradiction: we'd be richer, but unemployment would go up, so some of us would be more miserable.
At some point, automation and technology are going to make us so productive that most of us won't be necessary to keep the economy running. At that point, if we're still in the "you have to earn your keep" mindset, we'll end up with a permanently oppressed, permanently unemployed underclass. Cars start driving themselves, putting a million cabbies, a million truckers, and a bunch of bus drivers out of work. Thanks to improved handwriting recognition, the Post Office has been shutting down Remote Encoding Centers left and right. The next wave of automated checkout stations could eliminate millions of grocery checkout and fast food jobs. Online shopping is killing retail jobs as we speak. Had we not boxed up our entire manufacturing infrastructure and sent it to China, we would have lost most of those jobs to robots anyways.
And now the robots are kicking our asses at Jeopardy. Does anyone here really feel that their particular skillset cannot be obsoleted in the next fifteen or twenty years? That you'll continue to be able to use your mind and hands to extract a living wage from those who own every damned thing?
Society becomes richer, while most of its people become poorer. It can't continue. Time to dust off Karl Marx.
>> And the subsidies will get killed off. Because we are broke.
That's a total right wing lie. Our government is 'broke' because we're not charging the taxes necessary to pay for the services we provide. And with the interest rate on Treasury bonds hovering at 3%, it seems like now would be an ideal time to go into more debt to build the infrastructure that we'll be needing soon.
>> Green energy is energy without consequences and that just doesn't exist.
Strawman. Wise technological progress has always consisted of replacing one set of problems with a hopefully smaller set.
>> suddenly realize that making photovoltaic solar panels is a very nasty industrial process that consumes almost as much energy in producing a panel as it produces
Another right-wing lie. The actual energy payback time for a modern solar panel is 6-18 months. And it's going down. Nor is any "industrial process" static. If they have a mind to, they can redesign the processes to use less energy, fewer and less toxic chemicals, etc. The Rocky Mountain Institute has a long and rich history of assisting in such redesigns.
>> that large scale solar farms destroy the fragile desert ecology
The solution being to site on already degraded land and to build carefully. Or to put panels right on top of the buildings they provide power to. As solar power becomes cheaper (and it will, since the cost has been steadily cutting in half every six years for decades) it will make less sense to find the absolute sunniest possible place to put them.
>> Wind is just as bad. Sounds wonderful until you imagine a few hundred square miles of endless windmills making mincemeat out of the bird population
Bird kills are a concern, but they're greatly exaggerated. The Audubon Society is fully behind wind power. That should tell you something.
And the amount of land required may be overstated. A recent breakthrough showed the way forward for increasing the energy collected per acre tenfold. The basic technique is using small, vertical turbines sited closely together, spinning in opposite directions to create constructive interference.
If the efficiency breakthrough holds up, and is widely adopted, wind power providers will have greater leeway in where they put the installations. They won't have to reach as high into the sky.
But the broader point is that none of these problems are insoluble.
>> and the huge transmission lines to bring the power from the uninhabited barren wastelands that tend to have reliable wind to the coastal hives where people live.
We need a stronger national grid in any case. But as I said, if we can learn to harvest wind power more efficiently, siting will become less of an issue, and generation will migrate toward the areas that actually need the energy.
For any reasonable definition of "practical and efficient", you're entirely wrong. The solar panels of 1950 (hell, even up to 1990) were incredibly expensive, and impractical for any but the most extreme use cases.
But since their invention, photovoltaic solar has been churning along, cutting its cost per watt in half approximately every six years. The trend is accelerating now, because we're finally achieving some economies of scale. That's why the CEO of GE recently stated that he expected new solar to be cheaper than new coal within five years.
>> One can argue he got into Yale as a legacy because of Bush Sr., however that doesn't explain also getting a degree from Harvard and having grades on par with "super smart" Al Gore or Kerry.
Harvard is kinda tough to get into, really difficult to pay for, but otherwise not that difficult to graduate from. Especially if you're getting an MBA rather than a real degree.
Constitutional Law without the backing of Daddy's political connections is a higher bar to clear.
>> Btw, when are we going to actually see the grades of the 'smartest man to ever sit in the Oval Office?'
Write to the College of William and Mary. I'm sure they'll send you Thomas Jefferson's transcripts for the price of postage.
Oh, wait. You were referring to Obama, as if the claim of:::googles a bit::: some random history professor on the Don Imus Show has to be defended by everyone left of Joe Lieberman.
>> Time to face up to reality, W isn't stupid and making fun of a minor speech impediment on anyone else would get you sent to the reeducation camp because making jokes about the disabled is a major no-no these days.
W wasn't just a brilliant mind hamstrung by a speech impediment. He was narrow, dogmatic, intellectually disengaged, and had absolutely no interest in ideas that were not already his own. Worse, he surrounded himself with people who were incompetent and vicious, but loyal to him. It doesn't matter how smart you are if you're too busy clearing brush to read memos entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside U.S."
Whatever intellectual firepower Bush had was expended in the pursuit of passing tax cuts that we couldn't afford and selling a war we never should have entered into. He clearly didn't give much thought to whether they were good ideas.
Sunk costs is important here. We've already spent several billion dollars on the telescope. Now we have the choice to either spend a couple billion more and have the most advanced telescope in the known universe, or save that couple billion and have a bunch of useless parts in a warehouse somewhere. The money that's already been spent, has already been spent.
So you, as an employer, are afraid of not having your employee's thumbs in a vise. Would you feel the same way if a candidate, during an interview, somehow let it slip that she had $2M in the bank and didn't actually need your salary? After all, she also has the power to slack off, or walk out without notice. Would you be interested in her criminal background moreso than other candidates?
What if a candidate said that his wife is a doctor, and makes twice what he did at his last job? Again, it's a sign that you can't just dangle a paycheck above him and expect him to sit up and beg. You'll have to trust that he has other motivations, like pride in his skills and a desire to tackle problems.
The truth is, the salary you offer only provides so much incentive to your employees. You can pay someone twice the going rate and they could still walk off the job one day and never come back. But because you're a libertarian who wants to deny the obvious consequences of his own philosophy, you have to pretend that employers have strong incentives to be generous in doling out salaries and benefits to their employees.
But you give the game away by saying that you fear not having full control over your employees. It's never in an employer's interest to have an employee who has financial independence from their employment. Employers want their employees broke and desperate and willing to do anything they ask.
My point about tai chi isn't that it's good or bad. It's more about your respective approaches to life-extension. You like tai chi. I have no problem with that. You think it will make you live longer. I have a little bit of a problem with that, but nothing that couldn't be overcome by a well-designed study that dealt specifically with life extension and separated the benefits of tai chi from the benefits of other forms of exercise.
I do have a problem with the idea that you, while only being dimly aware of the details of Kurzweil's regimen or what studies inform it, are happy to declare tai chi superior. The sorts of evidence you cite are marginally relevant (the NIH) study, completely fallacious (tai chi is old and popular) or inaccessible (untranslated Chinese studies).
Not a big problem, mind you. People believe false -- or merely not-yet-proven -- things all the time. But bring evidence before dismissing what seems like a scientific approach to the problem.
Re: lifespans. Wikipedia has some stats on the fringes of extreme old age. It looks like, since 1950, the age of the "oldest person living" has snuck up from 109 to 114, which is an increase of one year every ten years. So it's moving, but slowly enough that I'll grant the point. I also suspect that it's more due to overall population increase than medical advances. A bigger population means more people angling for a shot at the record.
But as to "keeping young people alive," no. Unless by "young people" you mean people in their fifties and sixties. Kurzweil could be kept alive for another thirty or forty years relying only on the "helping more people reach the maximum possible lifespan" model alone, even if his claims for his regimen are mostly false. But beyond that, there does need to be some fundamental advances in stalling or reversing the aging process. You're right that we've shown little capacity for such breakthroughs so far.
"Specialization is for insects." -- Robert Heinlein
The question rubs me the wrong way. I understand the desire to stay focused. But you want to be well-rounded. You should want to be able to write well, to have a broad grasp of the way the universe works and how you fit into it. You should want to make your body stronger and more graceful than it is today. You should want to learn to sing, or play a musical instrument.
And this might be your last chance to do any of that in a supportive setting like college. Once you get into the rat race, it's hard to jump back out and go exploring. Really hard.
We have a saying in the software engineering world: Avoid premature optimization. You don't go crazy optimizing your program before you really understand what you want it to be. You don't optimize before you know what sections of the program will be the real bottlenecks. You don't optimize at the expense of the flexibility and readability of the code. What you're demanding to do to yourself right now strikes me as a form of premature optimization.
Here are his achievements, which seem pretty substantial. Not 'greatest genius to ever genius' level, but he's got a solid track record.
What has he leveraged these achievements into? Some book sales. A small but devoted following of nerds. A not-entirely deserved reputation as a crackpot.
Frankly, I'd love it if Kurzweil got a following among the people who decide things. An immortality equivalent of the Manhattan Project would be friggin' awesome.
1) Alkalized water notwithstanding, Kurzweil seems to have a method to his longevity regime madness. Please link to the studies that show the longevity benefits of tai chi.
2) Dude, he's 62. He could easily live another 20 years. 30, if his regime is beneficial. If we see as much advancement in medicine between now and 2031 as we deed between 1981 and today, I think you could tack another 10 years onto that. But according to Kurzweil, we're going to see a lot more.
3) If Kurzweil dies, that says little about the timeframe for technological immortality. Okay, it establishes a floor level. But rooting for him to fail proves what, exactly?
Full disclosure: I'm certain that immortality is possible, though uncertain about the timeline. I find Kurzweil's reasoning somewhat persuasive, but it's very difficult to tell if his law of accelerating returns is justified.
Demonstrated ability to run a government? She ran:
* A state with the population of a mid-sized urban area, * Where the residents pay no taxes and in fact are paid by the state to live there, * For less than two years.
Slashdot Mirror
See? Third world country.
They really should have named it glubziclou. No hits for that one.
Live off $250K for the rest of my life? Depending on my investment strategy and my forecasted lifespan, I could probably do it. I live cheap, I have almost no debt, and I don't have a family to support.
But that's beside the point. The definition of "winning" that you're using is "never having to work again." If you make $250K for even one year, you can live quite comfortably while stashing away most of it. Do it for a few years in a row, and you can retire. Given the current state of the country, that sounds an awful lot like winning to me.
And it's not as though we're asking a whole lot from the $250K crowd by taking away the Bush tax cuts. If you make $250K on the nose, your taxes aren't increased. If you make $250,001, your taxes go up by a few cents. If you make $260K, your taxes go up by $500. Not enough to substantially change your buying habits or cause any sane, reasonable person to "go Galt."
The Making Work Pay tax break was a new tax break, and therefore increased taxes on nobody.
Yes, people do pay other taxes besides federal income taxes. State taxes, local taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, use fees, payroll taxes, the works. Which is why the whiners who whine that "half of Americans don't pay any taxes" are just being whining whiners who whine whinily.
Please explain to me why it's fair for us to tax capital gains at a lower rate than income.
Like my dad always said, "I'd love to be earning enough to pay that much in taxes." Yes, close to half of Americans aren't paying federal income tax. But they may be paying state income taxes. They're probably paying property taxes, use fees, sales taxes, and payroll taxes. If you put them together, my understanding is that the tax structure is regressive overall.
My dad also says "statistics prove that you can prove anything with statistics." When you say,
what you leave out is that during the Bush administration, the average person's income actually went down (even excluding the economic collapse), while the top 1% (and especially the top 0.01%) were lavished with more money than they knew what to do with.* When you point out that the top 10% pay 50% of the income tax without at the same time pointing out that they have 70% of the wealth, you're using statistics to conceal the truth, not reveal it.
* What they did with the money was send it to Wall Street. Wall Street, completely failing in its societal function of putting money into investments that would yield long-term value, used it to inflate commodities bubbles, bet on derivatives and credit default swaps, and sell investors on investments that they themselves were betting against. Well done, free enterprise.
No, the morons who whine "half of Americans don't pay taxes!" are the ones who are trying to tax those attempting to become rich. By the time you're up to the sort of income where liberals like me want to raise your taxes, you've already made it into the winner's circle.
True. But how does that make us special? Right now, nearly everyone except for upper management and investors are being underpaid for the intrinsic value that they create. The sweatshop worker who adds a few stitches of value to each of a hundred pairs of shoes in a day, and gets paid $3 for her work? Undervalued. The dude making $8/hr assembling thirty McMeals an hour, which will easily retail for over 20x that? Undervalued. Front line Wal-Mart employees? Screwed over, with the savings divided between customers and the Waltons.
But the guy whose only "contribution" was buying a crapload of stock from the guy who bought the stock from the guy who bought the stock from the guy who got in on the IPO before immediately turning around and selling it? He gets to decide how the company operates, and gets paid handsomely for the privilege, regardless of whether he has any skill or interest (or even knows where his money is invested).
Take Carly Fiorina, the former HP CEO who made hundreds of millions of dollars off a simple theory: When you ram two companies together, the stock price goes up for a while, even if the result looks less like a merger and more like a train wreck. The day Carly resigned, HP's stock price jumped dramatically. Then, with her newfound fortune and "high-level business experience," she tried to buy one of California's senate seats. Hundreds of millions of dollars that could have gone to the people actually making the company valuable were instead squandered on incompetence and poor decision making, with a healthy dose of corruption thrown in for good measure.
This is a big part of the reason that you're undervalued.
Your claim that unemployment mostly resides in the housing sector is wrong. As Paul Krugman wrote last year:
"Good. Because a union would mean that not only would the company not be able to lay off the incompetent developers, but they'd be forced to pay them the same as me."
Ever noticed how 90% of developers think they're above average?
"many unions seem to still have a greedy, self-destructive attitude that continues to drive entire industries out of business"
You mean like, "We don't want to work for third world wages?" </snark>
s/years/decades/ Oops.
Over the last couple of years, median income has actually fallen.
Please explain to me what the truck drivers and ditch diggers of the world will be doing in two decades, after those jobs have disappeared. Explain to me what they will be doing to exchange their labor for a share of the economy that's greater than what a Pakistani bricklayer earns.
Looking at total compensation only makes the picture worse, as more and more jobs are dropping or cutting back on health insurance. Virtually all of the increase in median household income over the last couple of years comes from increased working hours (more women entering the workforce, longer hours for workers). In order to say that we're better compensated for our labor than we were thirty years ago, you have to assume weird things from the get-go. Like "economists have no idea how to calculate inflation, but I do." Or, "since you couldn't buy an iPad in 1980, they're worth eleventy-bajillion dollars."
Meanwhile, the compensation given to the top 0.1% has increased by orders of magnitude.
Yes, people have always found other jobs. But you're ignoring everything that makes the modern era unlike those that preceded it. We've never had seven billion people on the planet. We've never had intense, direct competition between laborers around the globe. Last but not least, we've never had automating technology that allows machines to do damned near anything a human can do, but cheaper and better.
If we don't tear up the social contract that says "you don't work, you don't eat," then the choice we're left with is between revolution and feudalism.
>> "What you and everyone else is missing is that as productivity increases most people have to work less."
No, over the last thirty years, as productivity increased, most people have worked more, but been paid less. The bounty that comes from increased productivity have mostly come from the top.
>> "How many hours a year at minimum wage do you have to work to live as good as someone in the middle class from 60 years ago?"
There are so many things wrong with this approach, it beggars belief.
First, people don't generally evaluate their happiness by comparing their status to that of their ancestors from three or thirty generations back. You could just as plausibly argue that we're all living like the kings of 2000 years ago. Does that mean the poor should just shut the hell up and relish their wealth?
No. People compare their standing to that of the people they come in contact with. And they generally spend more of their time comparing themselves to those above them. If everyone around you has a nicer car, a bigger house with more amenities, take more extravagant vacations, and have better health care, it is simply unreasonable to expect them to be happy with their lot in life.
Internet, cable, and cell phones are close to necessities in modern life. Back in 1950, they didn't even have answering machines. Today, people expect to be able to reach just about anybody at any time, or at least leave a message and have it returned promptly.
You can't buy some of the things on your list today. You can't buy 1950's era health care at any price. A good doctor today would feel it irresponsible to try. The unsafe, polluting, gas-guzzling autos of the 1950s can still be bought, but only as expensive hobbyist toys.
You can get a small, cheap house. But you pretty much have to build it yourself and fight city planners tooth and nail for the privilege.
It's more expensive to live a respectable life these days. Case closed.
>> "There is so much food available so cheaply that the poor are fat form the same reason they are poor. They lack self control and the ability to delay gratification."
Have you ever noticed that your self-control is lowest when you're under stress, or when you feel ill. Being poor means being constantly stressed and sick. When every dollar is precious and every month is a race between your bills and your bank account, life suddenly gets really, really hard. Try it.
Moreover, when you're impoverished, when you've been down your entire life, when you've never seen any of your friends make it out of poverty, hopelessness is a defense mechanism. You try to get a better job, only to lose it when your kid gets sick or your car breaks down. You try to get an education, only to end up deeply indebted to one of the shady for-profit colleges built to fleece the government of student loan money. You try to build up a nest egg, only to have a friend fall on hard times or rip you off. So you say, "screw it." You're done following the rules. Society keeps telling you to work hard and dream big, then shoving you back every time you try. So put off your landlord, buy some pizza and beer, and hang out with your broke-ass friends. At least you're happy for a moment.
In short, you're being heartless, sanctimonious, and ignorant. Knock it off.
Um, wages in the US have been stagnant for nearly thirty years now for most of the population. And we've never been at a point technologically where computers could take over complex tasks like driving or trivia games. Do you really think that if we automate away all the fast food jobs (currently employing 7.7M Americans) that we're going to make up for it by having 7.7M more plumbers and hairdressers? If the tens of thousands of taxis in New York are automated, will those who have been displaced become WoW gold farmers?
Hell, for most of the 2000's, the biggest-growing sector of the economy was finance. That turned out to be mostly imaginary.
The argument has been perfectly correct for decades, and will be going into overdrive in the next two decades.
I hate the whole "this will create jobs" attitude. The more productive something is, the fewer jobs it creates. I mean, honestly, rather than having four million people schlep to and from work to keep the lights on, it would be better to have some magical, maintenance-free "free energy" machine that would do it without anyone having to lift a finger. Society as a whole would be much richer.
But there's the contradiction: we'd be richer, but unemployment would go up, so some of us would be more miserable.
At some point, automation and technology are going to make us so productive that most of us won't be necessary to keep the economy running. At that point, if we're still in the "you have to earn your keep" mindset, we'll end up with a permanently oppressed, permanently unemployed underclass. Cars start driving themselves, putting a million cabbies, a million truckers, and a bunch of bus drivers out of work. Thanks to improved handwriting recognition, the Post Office has been shutting down Remote Encoding Centers left and right. The next wave of automated checkout stations could eliminate millions of grocery checkout and fast food jobs. Online shopping is killing retail jobs as we speak. Had we not boxed up our entire manufacturing infrastructure and sent it to China, we would have lost most of those jobs to robots anyways.
And now the robots are kicking our asses at Jeopardy. Does anyone here really feel that their particular skillset cannot be obsoleted in the next fifteen or twenty years? That you'll continue to be able to use your mind and hands to extract a living wage from those who own every damned thing?
Society becomes richer, while most of its people become poorer. It can't continue. Time to dust off Karl Marx.
>> And the subsidies will get killed off. Because we are broke.
That's a total right wing lie. Our government is 'broke' because we're not charging the taxes necessary to pay for the services we provide. And with the interest rate on Treasury bonds hovering at 3%, it seems like now would be an ideal time to go into more debt to build the infrastructure that we'll be needing soon.
>> Green energy is energy without consequences and that just doesn't exist.
Strawman. Wise technological progress has always consisted of replacing one set of problems with a hopefully smaller set.
>> suddenly realize that making photovoltaic solar panels is a very nasty industrial process that consumes almost as much energy in producing a panel as it produces
Another right-wing lie. The actual energy payback time for a modern solar panel is 6-18 months. And it's going down. Nor is any "industrial process" static. If they have a mind to, they can redesign the processes to use less energy, fewer and less toxic chemicals, etc. The Rocky Mountain Institute has a long and rich history of assisting in such redesigns.
>> that large scale solar farms destroy the fragile desert ecology
The solution being to site on already degraded land and to build carefully. Or to put panels right on top of the buildings they provide power to. As solar power becomes cheaper (and it will, since the cost has been steadily cutting in half every six years for decades) it will make less sense to find the absolute sunniest possible place to put them.
>> Wind is just as bad. Sounds wonderful until you imagine a few hundred square miles of endless windmills making mincemeat out of the bird population
Bird kills are a concern, but they're greatly exaggerated. The Audubon Society is fully behind wind power. That should tell you something.
And the amount of land required may be overstated. A recent breakthrough showed the way forward for increasing the energy collected per acre tenfold. The basic technique is using small, vertical turbines sited closely together, spinning in opposite directions to create constructive interference.
If the efficiency breakthrough holds up, and is widely adopted, wind power providers will have greater leeway in where they put the installations. They won't have to reach as high into the sky.
But the broader point is that none of these problems are insoluble.
>> and the huge transmission lines to bring the power from the uninhabited barren wastelands that tend to have reliable wind to the coastal hives where people live.
We need a stronger national grid in any case. But as I said, if we can learn to harvest wind power more efficiently, siting will become less of an issue, and generation will migrate toward the areas that actually need the energy.
For any reasonable definition of "practical and efficient", you're entirely wrong. The solar panels of 1950 (hell, even up to 1990) were incredibly expensive, and impractical for any but the most extreme use cases.
But since their invention, photovoltaic solar has been churning along, cutting its cost per watt in half approximately every six years. The trend is accelerating now, because we're finally achieving some economies of scale. That's why the CEO of GE recently stated that he expected new solar to be cheaper than new coal within five years.
You asked for it.
>> One can argue he got into Yale as a legacy because of Bush Sr., however that doesn't explain also getting a degree from Harvard and having grades on par with "super smart" Al Gore or Kerry.
Harvard is kinda tough to get into, really difficult to pay for, but otherwise not that difficult to graduate from. Especially if you're getting an MBA rather than a real degree.
Constitutional Law without the backing of Daddy's political connections is a higher bar to clear.
>> Btw, when are we going to actually see the grades of the 'smartest man to ever sit in the Oval Office?'
Write to the College of William and Mary. I'm sure they'll send you Thomas Jefferson's transcripts for the price of postage.
Oh, wait. You were referring to Obama, as if the claim of :::googles a bit::: some random history professor on the Don Imus Show has to be defended by everyone left of Joe Lieberman.
>> Time to face up to reality, W isn't stupid and making fun of a minor speech impediment on anyone else would get you sent to the reeducation camp because making jokes about the disabled is a major no-no these days.
W wasn't just a brilliant mind hamstrung by a speech impediment. He was narrow, dogmatic, intellectually disengaged, and had absolutely no interest in ideas that were not already his own. Worse, he surrounded himself with people who were incompetent and vicious, but loyal to him. It doesn't matter how smart you are if you're too busy clearing brush to read memos entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside U.S."
Whatever intellectual firepower Bush had was expended in the pursuit of passing tax cuts that we couldn't afford and selling a war we never should have entered into. He clearly didn't give much thought to whether they were good ideas.
Sunk costs is important here. We've already spent several billion dollars on the telescope. Now we have the choice to either spend a couple billion more and have the most advanced telescope in the known universe, or save that couple billion and have a bunch of useless parts in a warehouse somewhere. The money that's already been spent, has already been spent.
So you, as an employer, are afraid of not having your employee's thumbs in a vise. Would you feel the same way if a candidate, during an interview, somehow let it slip that she had $2M in the bank and didn't actually need your salary? After all, she also has the power to slack off, or walk out without notice. Would you be interested in her criminal background moreso than other candidates?
What if a candidate said that his wife is a doctor, and makes twice what he did at his last job? Again, it's a sign that you can't just dangle a paycheck above him and expect him to sit up and beg. You'll have to trust that he has other motivations, like pride in his skills and a desire to tackle problems.
The truth is, the salary you offer only provides so much incentive to your employees. You can pay someone twice the going rate and they could still walk off the job one day and never come back. But because you're a libertarian who wants to deny the obvious consequences of his own philosophy, you have to pretend that employers have strong incentives to be generous in doling out salaries and benefits to their employees.
But you give the game away by saying that you fear not having full control over your employees. It's never in an employer's interest to have an employee who has financial independence from their employment. Employers want their employees broke and desperate and willing to do anything they ask.
My point about tai chi isn't that it's good or bad. It's more about your respective approaches to life-extension. You like tai chi. I have no problem with that. You think it will make you live longer. I have a little bit of a problem with that, but nothing that couldn't be overcome by a well-designed study that dealt specifically with life extension and separated the benefits of tai chi from the benefits of other forms of exercise.
I do have a problem with the idea that you, while only being dimly aware of the details of Kurzweil's regimen or what studies inform it, are happy to declare tai chi superior. The sorts of evidence you cite are marginally relevant (the NIH) study, completely fallacious (tai chi is old and popular) or inaccessible (untranslated Chinese studies).
Not a big problem, mind you. People believe false -- or merely not-yet-proven -- things all the time. But bring evidence before dismissing what seems like a scientific approach to the problem.
Re: lifespans. Wikipedia has some stats on the fringes of extreme old age. It looks like, since 1950, the age of the "oldest person living" has snuck up from 109 to 114, which is an increase of one year every ten years. So it's moving, but slowly enough that I'll grant the point. I also suspect that it's more due to overall population increase than medical advances. A bigger population means more people angling for a shot at the record.
But as to "keeping young people alive," no. Unless by "young people" you mean people in their fifties and sixties. Kurzweil could be kept alive for another thirty or forty years relying only on the "helping more people reach the maximum possible lifespan" model alone, even if his claims for his regimen are mostly false. But beyond that, there does need to be some fundamental advances in stalling or reversing the aging process. You're right that we've shown little capacity for such breakthroughs so far.
"Specialization is for insects." -- Robert Heinlein
The question rubs me the wrong way. I understand the desire to stay focused. But you want to be well-rounded. You should want to be able to write well, to have a broad grasp of the way the universe works and how you fit into it. You should want to make your body stronger and more graceful than it is today. You should want to learn to sing, or play a musical instrument.
And this might be your last chance to do any of that in a supportive setting like college. Once you get into the rat race, it's hard to jump back out and go exploring. Really hard.
We have a saying in the software engineering world: Avoid premature optimization. You don't go crazy optimizing your program before you really understand what you want it to be. You don't optimize before you know what sections of the program will be the real bottlenecks. You don't optimize at the expense of the flexibility and readability of the code. What you're demanding to do to yourself right now strikes me as a form of premature optimization.
Here are his achievements, which seem pretty substantial. Not 'greatest genius to ever genius' level, but he's got a solid track record.
What has he leveraged these achievements into? Some book sales. A small but devoted following of nerds. A not-entirely deserved reputation as a crackpot.
Frankly, I'd love it if Kurzweil got a following among the people who decide things. An immortality equivalent of the Manhattan Project would be friggin' awesome.
1) Alkalized water notwithstanding, Kurzweil seems to have a method to his longevity regime madness. Please link to the studies that show the longevity benefits of tai chi.
2) Dude, he's 62. He could easily live another 20 years. 30, if his regime is beneficial. If we see as much advancement in medicine between now and 2031 as we deed between 1981 and today, I think you could tack another 10 years onto that. But according to Kurzweil, we're going to see a lot more.
3) If Kurzweil dies, that says little about the timeframe for technological immortality. Okay, it establishes a floor level. But rooting for him to fail proves what, exactly?
Full disclosure: I'm certain that immortality is possible, though uncertain about the timeline. I find Kurzweil's reasoning somewhat persuasive, but it's very difficult to tell if his law of accelerating returns is justified.
Good looking? Perhaps.
Intelligent? Anything but.
Demonstrated ability to run a government? She ran:
* A state with the population of a mid-sized urban area,
* Where the residents pay no taxes and in fact are paid by the state to live there,
* For less than two years.
Cake, meet walk.