"If that wasn't true, then the transaction wouldn't occur. When the transaction does occur, value is created. The pie gets bigger."
No it doesn't, it is often just difficult to measure and follow where the value came from. What you are describing is nothing more than inflation.
"And it didn't require the people in middle and high income countries to earn less."
I think you are giving capitalism credit for advances that belong almost entirely to technology, medicine, science, and knowledge. Capitalism doesn't drive those things, it monetizes them.
"it didn't require sacrifice from the developed world"
It absolutely did. Our technology and manufacturing techniques have been handed over to the developing world and the people who actually developed that science, technology, and medicine will be left behind soon enough while a wealthy elite class transitions to the newer and larger markets where the infrastructure has been built entirely from newer shiner and more advanced technology from the start.
Aside from that the quality of goods and services has gone down dramatically, debt has gone through the roof and savings has dropped massively. The obesity is part of the sacrifice, it isn't eating to excess so much as empty carbohydrates and water being used to fill out food products and corn feeding the population.
"Production capacity limits wealth and ressources."
And ACTUAL wealth and resource limits limit the maximum production capacity. You can shift around who has the pie but there is most definitely only so much pie to be shared.
"Improve your skillsets, move elsewhere, start a company, etc... All these things will allow you to get upward mobility. Its not up to anyone else to improve your lot in life, its your own responsibility."
I'm not denying those things can and do work, not that they are any sort of guarantee of success. It is more like increasing your odds by playing multiple hands at a poker table. It doesn't change that your winnings come at the expense of the other people playing. People who think like you pretend that having ideas like setting more chairs and increasing buy in, etc, have magically created wealth out of the air because there is more in the pot... but it isn't a magical increase, it all comes from the pockets of the other people playing.
"But hey, you need a reason to ignore those allegations to overturn Roe, so I'm sure that distinction won't quite matter to you."
I think you are confusing me with a Republican, your immediate jump to that despite my post targeting R's and D's suggests you are partisan politically, in other words you don't use the reasoning centers of your brain with regard to anything you perceive as political (or at least that is what fancy fMRI studies have shown). So my response isn't really for you, no offense but it would make about as much sense having a conversation with you as a conversation as it does for an agnostic to try to have a conversation with a true believer disparaging the beliefs of another religion.
I do want to see Roe v Wade overturned. It's a bad ruling that happens to prevent the enforcement of some bad state laws. It is the state laws that need changed. Parents do have a right to be informed; so do the fathers and spouses. Abortion should not be a way to dodge facing the music for your actions. Roe v Wade makes it one.
Doctors have a right to a full medical history so they can ethically refuse chronic abuse in the same way they refuse plastic surgery at some point. Especially given that the morning after (really more like 3 day after) pill is readily available and accessible. Roe v Wade prevents this.
These may not be babies and it may not be murder but it is the termination of human potential and everything that life would have become and in a society where courts represent the interests of children vs their parents it logically follows that there should some level of enforced respect for that concept as well. Mothers can give children up for adoption or have an abortion and drop liability for a child. Fathers should have the same right. Currently, Roe v Wade makes this impractical in many ways. The fetus is not part of her body, it is just temporarily incubated in it. It is 50% the father and he has rights. In that respect, paternity tests (which are quite safe) should be standard procedure as part of the care through pregnancy but while related to these other issues this bit has little relation to Roe v Wade specifically.
The big money maker industry driving the economy is tech and tech companies are dumping people at record rates. You don't have new unemployment claims when people are being forced onto contract terms and being given severance packages because they always include strings to prevent unemployment claims. New jobs don't mean much when it's just people taking a second job driving for Uber or one of the 4000 make your own hour delivery services in the evenings or it's just someone moving from one contract to another or worse insourced H1B/Student Visa workers filling rolls.
Actual increases in job retention and reduction in unemployment would mean actual rising wages. Amazon's adjustment probably raised some big stat moving figures but that was a political move and is at the bottom. Rising wages are needed where the actual merit is found, in the middle class.
In this country they just installed a new supreme court justice who believes providers modifying your communications in flight is protected by their right to free speech.
People might have had an issue with that but they were too busy being distracted by a movement to make the lawmakers throw out the judge on the basis of unproven allegations... in a country which holds as its primary legal value innocent until proven guilty. Sort of a two for one special, they get to install a supreme who will allow their ISP friends to modify news and information transparently in flight AND drum up a bunch of public sentiment in opposition to the legal principle that protects us from legal persecution. Big day for the R&D club.
"Seems like bad business since you will have to retrain someone new, but there you go."
Yup, like an H1B. There are numerous benefits, hell race doesn't impact performance and is an evil thing to discriminate against but somehow diversity boosts performance!!! Nvm that diversity programs tend to be pushed out at high performing and growing companies so the stats aren't caused by the diversity but the environment that breeds these kind of programs.
And hey, it is great for universities because many of these insourced workers come on student visas and their tech employers pay for their post grad, sometimes even undergrad education at the highest possible non-resident rates!
$15/hr doesn't go very far these days. Anyone who works a 40/hr week should be well over the poverty line.
If you run a service company your hourly billing rate is based on what you need to make to live. It doesn't matter what the number is or what people perceive as high, if you aren't making that you raise your rate or you come up with some other gimmick or scheme that results in charging more while making the raw rate seem more palatable.
There is no job that if worked full time shouldn't pay enough to live at least a lower middle class lifestyle including flipping burgers. If that means an end to burgers that are actually cheaper than it costs to make them at home so be it. If that means there is no room for a franchiser to scrape cream off the top anymore, so be it. I
f that means we have to stop pretending that the actual work a manager performs is more valuable than that of those they manage, again so be it. Some managers are better than others, that is no different than any profession but it isn't rocket science and certainly shouldn't be compensated anywhere near as highly let alone more highly than rocket science! A good grill cook is more rare than a good manager.
"Climbing the ladder is is not about making money at the expense of others. That is an absurd sentiment that promotes some sort of class war/envy which does nothing to better anyone's life. Whining never helped anyone."
That is an absurd statement that pretends wealth and resources aren't limited. It only feels that way because you have plenty of them.
I know, it is so sad. And all these suckers resisting immigration reform think it is about some Mexican sneaking across the border and then cleaning houses, mowing lawns, picking oranges and trying to get by. In reality the immigration issue is H-1Bs and student visa immigrants being insourced to displace high paid american workers or fill jobs instead of them.
Salary increases? Why would you increase salaries, if you get people to quite you can replace them with immigrants a little at a time without doing any kind of layoff or paying unemployment. That's the whole reason for the churn and gig economy concept in the first place. It's no different than cell carriers giving better deals to new customers, they want people to keep cycling around so they are both buying phones and recycling onto new contract terms instead of the carrier being locked into older terms.
That is a localized effect in some lake, which might be sad for those fish and people whose hearts go out to them.
This is the problem with zero tolerance stances on things like nature and the environment, you lose perspective of relative scale of offense. I'm talking about sinking most of the light energy across giant swaths of continents. Saying the two are equally environmentally altering is like claiming a bullet and a nuclear warhead are equally bad because either will make a person just as dead.
Heating the sidewalk IS doing something, it may not be doing much for you and I in any obvious way but it most definitely is doing something. Cooling down a sidewalk probably not such a big deal, cooling down EVERY sidewalk across an entire continent might just have some unexpected consequences, and worse we might not know what they are for another hundred years.
I agree with your conservation of energy estimate. The part people are forgetting is the energy you are using now is coming from fission and burning of coal either of which remains mass if we don't process it to convert to energy.
And yet another disaster is inevitable with the shoddy maintenance we are doing now. But we have those failsafe's designed. Nobody is building modern reactor designs.
"which by various roundabout ways eventually becomes waste heat of some kind. It's all conservation of energy, you don't have to do the math."
Of course it all eventually becomes heat somewhere, sometime. But not right there, at that time, in that heating and cooling pattern on the Earth's crust and all the things which interact with it.
Also, at present you have that sunlight converting to heat + the heat from your electrical usage, if you convert the sunlight into electrical usage your electrical usage doesn't change but the sunlight converting to heat on your roof does. Yes, that is a net reduction. The relevant law is conservation of energy and mass, conservation of energy alone is part of an old broken model but either way there is nothing saying HOW LONG eventually would be, it could be millions of years, for instance all that solar energy from the past that is now being released by burning coal.
"Niobdynium is only rare because it is mostly mined as side product of iron. As most steel in our days is produced from recycled steel, there is not much supply of fresh Niob on the market. If you simply target mines for Niob you would have enough."
These energy sources are already too expensive to be viable WITH these materials. You are talking about falling back on dramatic price increasing sources. We don't have time for this. We need to start construction on nuclear plants today and start figuring out how to sequester enough carbon BEYOND what we can save by "going green" to make up the difference not add decades seeking alternate solutions or pretend we can utilize less efficient solutions that don't offer enough density to actually solve the problem at scale.
"And as prices go up other alternatives will be investigated and identified."
That is several assumptions rolled into one, you are assuming there are easy alternatives to be found, that those alternatives will be economical, and that those alternatives will be efficient enough to make a difference in the timescales available. We are already beyond the point where adopting clean energy is going to fix the problem, and in high technology industry the kind of timescales you assume haven't even remotely panned out so far.
"So 1000 wind mills set in a grid of 31 x 32 10 miles offshore out in the ocean cause more damage to the environment than a open pit mine for uranium feeding a nuclear plant of similar capacity?"
Yes, a lot more damage.
"The problems of the planet are two: idiots like you, and idiots like you running for president."
You are making bold and uninformed off the cuff assumptions and think I'M the idiot?
Really? And you've run the numbers and measured the millions of local geological conditions that would be impacted by suddenly disrupting billions upon billions of watts of systemic and consistent heat cycles?
The answer is no, I know it is no because nobody has that data. Without regard for damage we've disrupted a lot, this is a hell of a lot more.
"Yeah....nuclear has had no effect on the environment.:eyeroll:"
Says the guy with witty snark and no actual argument.
"Physics isn't your strong suit, is it?"
Oh please wise one, enlighten me and all the physicists on the thread with YOUR specific and detailed physics based argument on this point. I mean, it's a topic for a geologist and not a climatologist or physicist but I'm sure you've got that covered. By all means regale us with your oversimplified half dozen axiom model for complex geologic systems with millions of variable local states and conditions that operate on multi-billion year time scales. I'm quite certain you are going to hit me with some data derived from a statistically significant period of observation on that timescale and not waste time with basic conservation of energy which I've already accounted for.
Sure but are more efficient overall and don't require nearly as much neodymium. In terms of resources (and most everything else) it is dramatically less expensive to build a handful of high output nuclear plants than thousands of small wind generators.
I think you are making the wrong calculation, we aren't absorbing the energy from ALL the winds on earth. Those turbines are built in farms. Also, the argument is human energy consumption is shaping the globe, offsetting it from any power source is a potentially globe shaping scale impact.
I know I'm the one advoacting the nuclear so I should let a "pro" argument stand. But in this case we are offsetting the same amount of energy usage, nuclear, solar, wind, whatever we'll be offsetting the same amount of watts of power and therefore be dissipating the same amount of heat. The benefit of nuclear is that heat doesn't rob any natural system that depends on it or generate a dramatic localized cooling effect on the earth in thousands or millions of substantial locations in a sudden manner over a couple decades.
Significantly altering the heating patterns of the Earth's crust by absorbing the solar energy that would normally fall on it could cause massive earthquakes on unexpected scales and do things like drop California into the ocean. Localized environmental concerns are valid concerns but not relative climate change and widescale tapping of natural energy systems on a global scale.
A few solar installations on your block are a drop in the bucket. Do that at scale on every house (or near enough) in a major city, across a state, across a region, across a continent. We can't even begin to estimate what would happen with plausible accuracy, there is too much we don't know about effects of geologic timescale suddenly shifting in decades.
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"If that wasn't true, then the transaction wouldn't occur. When the transaction does occur, value is created. The pie gets bigger."
No it doesn't, it is often just difficult to measure and follow where the value came from. What you are describing is nothing more than inflation.
"And it didn't require the people in middle and high income countries to earn less."
I think you are giving capitalism credit for advances that belong almost entirely to technology, medicine, science, and knowledge. Capitalism doesn't drive those things, it monetizes them.
"it didn't require sacrifice from the developed world"
It absolutely did. Our technology and manufacturing techniques have been handed over to the developing world and the people who actually developed that science, technology, and medicine will be left behind soon enough while a wealthy elite class transitions to the newer and larger markets where the infrastructure has been built entirely from newer shiner and more advanced technology from the start.
Aside from that the quality of goods and services has gone down dramatically, debt has gone through the roof and savings has dropped massively. The obesity is part of the sacrifice, it isn't eating to excess so much as empty carbohydrates and water being used to fill out food products and corn feeding the population.
"Production capacity limits wealth and ressources."
And ACTUAL wealth and resource limits limit the maximum production capacity. You can shift around who has the pie but there is most definitely only so much pie to be shared.
"Improve your skillsets, move elsewhere, start a company, etc... All these things will allow you to get upward mobility.
Its not up to anyone else to improve your lot in life, its your own responsibility."
I'm not denying those things can and do work, not that they are any sort of guarantee of success. It is more like increasing your odds by playing multiple hands at a poker table. It doesn't change that your winnings come at the expense of the other people playing. People who think like you pretend that having ideas like setting more chairs and increasing buy in, etc, have magically created wealth out of the air because there is more in the pot... but it isn't a magical increase, it all comes from the pockets of the other people playing.
"But hey, you need a reason to ignore those allegations to overturn Roe, so I'm sure that distinction won't quite matter to you."
I think you are confusing me with a Republican, your immediate jump to that despite my post targeting R's and D's suggests you are partisan politically, in other words you don't use the reasoning centers of your brain with regard to anything you perceive as political (or at least that is what fancy fMRI studies have shown). So my response isn't really for you, no offense but it would make about as much sense having a conversation with you as a conversation as it does for an agnostic to try to have a conversation with a true believer disparaging the beliefs of another religion.
I do want to see Roe v Wade overturned. It's a bad ruling that happens to prevent the enforcement of some bad state laws. It is the state laws that need changed. Parents do have a right to be informed; so do the fathers and spouses. Abortion should not be a way to dodge facing the music for your actions. Roe v Wade makes it one.
Doctors have a right to a full medical history so they can ethically refuse chronic abuse in the same way they refuse plastic surgery at some point. Especially given that the morning after (really more like 3 day after) pill is readily available and accessible. Roe v Wade prevents this.
These may not be babies and it may not be murder but it is the termination of human potential and everything that life would have become and in a society where courts represent the interests of children vs their parents it logically follows that there should some level of enforced respect for that concept as well. Mothers can give children up for adoption or have an abortion and drop liability for a child. Fathers should have the same right. Currently, Roe v Wade makes this impractical in many ways. The fetus is not part of her body, it is just temporarily incubated in it. It is 50% the father and he has rights. In that respect, paternity tests (which are quite safe) should be standard procedure as part of the care through pregnancy but while related to these other issues this bit has little relation to Roe v Wade specifically.
The big money maker industry driving the economy is tech and tech companies are dumping people at record rates. You don't have new unemployment claims when people are being forced onto contract terms and being given severance packages because they always include strings to prevent unemployment claims. New jobs don't mean much when it's just people taking a second job driving for Uber or one of the 4000 make your own hour delivery services in the evenings or it's just someone moving from one contract to another or worse insourced H1B/Student Visa workers filling rolls.
Actual increases in job retention and reduction in unemployment would mean actual rising wages. Amazon's adjustment probably raised some big stat moving figures but that was a political move and is at the bottom. Rising wages are needed where the actual merit is found, in the middle class.
"Second, the proximity to the anniversary of the NN deregulation is both specious and disingenuous."
I doubt it. Frontier celebrated by silently throttling Netflix on at least their FIOS service.
In this country they just installed a new supreme court justice who believes providers modifying your communications in flight is protected by their right to free speech.
People might have had an issue with that but they were too busy being distracted by a movement to make the lawmakers throw out the judge on the basis of unproven allegations... in a country which holds as its primary legal value innocent until proven guilty. Sort of a two for one special, they get to install a supreme who will allow their ISP friends to modify news and information transparently in flight AND drum up a bunch of public sentiment in opposition to the legal principle that protects us from legal persecution. Big day for the R&D club.
"Seems like bad business since you will have to retrain someone new, but there you go."
Yup, like an H1B. There are numerous benefits, hell race doesn't impact performance and is an evil thing to discriminate against but somehow diversity boosts performance!!! Nvm that diversity programs tend to be pushed out at high performing and growing companies so the stats aren't caused by the diversity but the environment that breeds these kind of programs.
And hey, it is great for universities because many of these insourced workers come on student visas and their tech employers pay for their post grad, sometimes even undergrad education at the highest possible non-resident rates!
$15/hr doesn't go very far these days. Anyone who works a 40/hr week should be well over the poverty line.
If you run a service company your hourly billing rate is based on what you need to make to live. It doesn't matter what the number is or what people perceive as high, if you aren't making that you raise your rate or you come up with some other gimmick or scheme that results in charging more while making the raw rate seem more palatable.
There is no job that if worked full time shouldn't pay enough to live at least a lower middle class lifestyle including flipping burgers. If that means an end to burgers that are actually cheaper than it costs to make them at home so be it. If that means there is no room for a franchiser to scrape cream off the top anymore, so be it. I
f that means we have to stop pretending that the actual work a manager performs is more valuable than that of those they manage, again so be it. Some managers are better than others, that is no different than any profession but it isn't rocket science and certainly shouldn't be compensated anywhere near as highly let alone more highly than rocket science! A good grill cook is more rare than a good manager.
"Climbing the ladder is is not about making money at the expense of others. That is an absurd sentiment that promotes some sort of class war/envy which does nothing to better anyone's life. Whining never helped anyone."
That is an absurd statement that pretends wealth and resources aren't limited. It only feels that way because you have plenty of them.
They STILL are handing out pink slips? Did you not read the Verizon "voluntary seperation" story not far back?
I worked at Verizon, they call it "voluntary" because you agree to take their deal rather than be fired and sue or seek unemployment.
HPE just did another round of layoff and I'm sure others as well. Pinks slips abound.
I know, it is so sad. And all these suckers resisting immigration reform think it is about some Mexican sneaking across the border and then cleaning houses, mowing lawns, picking oranges and trying to get by. In reality the immigration issue is H-1Bs and student visa immigrants being insourced to displace high paid american workers or fill jobs instead of them.
Salary increases? Why would you increase salaries, if you get people to quite you can replace them with immigrants a little at a time without doing any kind of layoff or paying unemployment. That's the whole reason for the churn and gig economy concept in the first place. It's no different than cell carriers giving better deals to new customers, they want people to keep cycling around so they are both buying phones and recycling onto new contract terms instead of the carrier being locked into older terms.
"No? ... go back to school!"
Sorry, it all ends up as heat in the end. Just not in the same patterns and cycles as the sunlight.
That is a localized effect in some lake, which might be sad for those fish and people whose hearts go out to them.
This is the problem with zero tolerance stances on things like nature and the environment, you lose perspective of relative scale of offense. I'm talking about sinking most of the light energy across giant swaths of continents. Saying the two are equally environmentally altering is like claiming a bullet and a nuclear warhead are equally bad because either will make a person just as dead.
"we use that 100W that was heating the sidewalk"
Heating the sidewalk IS doing something, it may not be doing much for you and I in any obvious way but it most definitely is doing something. Cooling down a sidewalk probably not such a big deal, cooling down EVERY sidewalk across an entire continent might just have some unexpected consequences, and worse we might not know what they are for another hundred years.
I agree with your conservation of energy estimate. The part people are forgetting is the energy you are using now is coming from fission and burning of coal either of which remains mass if we don't process it to convert to energy.
And yet another disaster is inevitable with the shoddy maintenance we are doing now. But we have those failsafe's designed. Nobody is building modern reactor designs.
"which by various roundabout ways eventually becomes waste heat of some kind. It's all conservation of energy, you don't have to do the math."
Of course it all eventually becomes heat somewhere, sometime. But not right there, at that time, in that heating and cooling pattern on the Earth's crust and all the things which interact with it.
Also, at present you have that sunlight converting to heat + the heat from your electrical usage, if you convert the sunlight into electrical usage your electrical usage doesn't change but the sunlight converting to heat on your roof does. Yes, that is a net reduction. The relevant law is conservation of energy and mass, conservation of energy alone is part of an old broken model but either way there is nothing saying HOW LONG eventually would be, it could be millions of years, for instance all that solar energy from the past that is now being released by burning coal.
"Niobdynium is only rare because it is mostly mined as side product of iron. As most steel in our days is produced from recycled steel, there is not much supply of fresh Niob on the market. If you simply target mines for Niob you would have enough."
These energy sources are already too expensive to be viable WITH these materials. You are talking about falling back on dramatic price increasing sources. We don't have time for this. We need to start construction on nuclear plants today and start figuring out how to sequester enough carbon BEYOND what we can save by "going green" to make up the difference not add decades seeking alternate solutions or pretend we can utilize less efficient solutions that don't offer enough density to actually solve the problem at scale.
"And as prices go up other alternatives will be investigated and identified."
That is several assumptions rolled into one, you are assuming there are easy alternatives to be found, that those alternatives will be economical, and that those alternatives will be efficient enough to make a difference in the timescales available. We are already beyond the point where adopting clean energy is going to fix the problem, and in high technology industry the kind of timescales you assume haven't even remotely panned out so far.
"So 1000 wind mills set in a grid of 31 x 32 10 miles offshore out in the ocean cause more damage to the environment than a open pit mine for uranium feeding a nuclear plant of similar capacity?"
Yes, a lot more damage.
"The problems of the planet are two: idiots like you, and idiots like you running for president."
You are making bold and uninformed off the cuff assumptions and think I'M the idiot?
Really? And you've run the numbers and measured the millions of local geological conditions that would be impacted by suddenly disrupting billions upon billions of watts of systemic and consistent heat cycles?
The answer is no, I know it is no because nobody has that data. Without regard for damage we've disrupted a lot, this is a hell of a lot more.
"Yeah....nuclear has had no effect on the environment. :eyeroll:"
Says the guy with witty snark and no actual argument.
"Physics isn't your strong suit, is it?"
Oh please wise one, enlighten me and all the physicists on the thread with YOUR specific and detailed physics based argument on this point. I mean, it's a topic for a geologist and not a climatologist or physicist but I'm sure you've got that covered. By all means regale us with your oversimplified half dozen axiom model for complex geologic systems with millions of variable local states and conditions that operate on multi-billion year time scales. I'm quite certain you are going to hit me with some data derived from a statistically significant period of observation on that timescale and not waste time with basic conservation of energy which I've already accounted for.
Sure but are more efficient overall and don't require nearly as much neodymium. In terms of resources (and most everything else) it is dramatically less expensive to build a handful of high output nuclear plants than thousands of small wind generators.
I think you are making the wrong calculation, we aren't absorbing the energy from ALL the winds on earth. Those turbines are built in farms. Also, the argument is human energy consumption is shaping the globe, offsetting it from any power source is a potentially globe shaping scale impact.
I know I'm the one advoacting the nuclear so I should let a "pro" argument stand. But in this case we are offsetting the same amount of energy usage, nuclear, solar, wind, whatever we'll be offsetting the same amount of watts of power and therefore be dissipating the same amount of heat. The benefit of nuclear is that heat doesn't rob any natural system that depends on it or generate a dramatic localized cooling effect on the earth in thousands or millions of substantial locations in a sudden manner over a couple decades.
Significantly altering the heating patterns of the Earth's crust by absorbing the solar energy that would normally fall on it could cause massive earthquakes on unexpected scales and do things like drop California into the ocean. Localized environmental concerns are valid concerns but not relative climate change and widescale tapping of natural energy systems on a global scale.
A few solar installations on your block are a drop in the bucket. Do that at scale on every house (or near enough) in a major city, across a state, across a region, across a continent. We can't even begin to estimate what would happen with plausible accuracy, there is too much we don't know about effects of geologic timescale suddenly shifting in decades.
.