Actually, Stackoverflow answers tend to be light on theory, and strong on "quick-fix" answers. In fact, I've seen more than one case where people have been told off for not being specific enough. I know better places to go when you want to learn the underlying reasons for why you need to do something in such-and-such a way instead of simply copy/paste instructions without understanding. Stackoverflow is good for "Git 'R Dun!", but it's not as useful for becoming an expert on a topic.
The other thing that puts me off is that in the last year or three, a lot of Stackoverflow questions have been marked as "too stupid" or otherwise unworthy of an answer in such an august forum. When I, after all my years in the field look up a question and see "too stupid" as an answer, it really irritates me. I may ask stupid questions, but by now I like to delude myself that they're legitimately stupid questions and not just questions that anyone with skills to google or RTFM wouldn't have to ask. I think that every question deserves a meaningful answer, even if the answer starts out with, "That's a stupid question, but..."
At least they don't outright flame you, but sometimes it can get pretty warm.
Think about it. The government of France has the means to spy on the communication within their country through ISPs since 2006.
Obviously, the ability to know what kind of pornsites you're visiting was very effective in preventing terrorism.
It should be. Pure-Hearted Martyrs for the Faith in organizations such as Al-quaeda are notably fond of alchohol and porn. IIRC, even Bin Laden himself had a stash.
So monitoring porn sites and liquor stores can be very important.
It all comes down to whats more effective. IMHO shutting down recruitment has more value.
I'm inclined to agree. ISIS is outstanding in its application of social media as a recruitment tool. If potential recruits can be frustrated or outed in "honeypot" sites, then a major component of their organization is compromised. If they get reduced to doing their recruiting door-to-door, then it's going to be much harder to enlist people, since their personal behavior is generally not up to the standards of culture and civilization that you'd expect from a pack of rabid dogs. And it would greatly reduce their ability to pull in the gullible and disaffected in target countries. That's always been the problem with ISIS. Al Quaeda has never had much appeal in the USA, but ISIS had.
However, Anonymous had better hope that they live up to their name. This is war, and the other side has already proven that they will take barbaric and bloody revenge on anyone and everyone, and they have less respect for "Innocent until Proven Guilty" than Drug-Free America does.
Also, so called intelligence didn't stop France attacks... so the value of monitoring the sources is even more dubious.
That's armchair quarterbacking, 20/20 hindsight is always easy. What you do with what you know can be more important than the knowledge itself.
There are a lot of "foo[60]" arrays out there, and leap seconds triggering things like writing beyond the end of an array, or overwriting the last entry, losing data for the previous second. And in many cases it goes unnoticed, which can be even worse. Then there are interfacing between systems that handle leap seconds differently. Do you go from 23:59:59 to 23:59:60 or to a second 23:59:59? If the latter, what happens with jobs that are scheduled to run at 23:59:59.500?
In my opinion, the solution isn't to get rid of leap seconds, but for developers to not make assumptions. If you look at time.h, it states:
int tm_sec;/* Seconds. [0-60] (1 leap second) */
So why assume 0-59?
I may be mis-remembering, but it seems like a summer or 2 ago, there was a day with 2 leap seconds in it.
I can see setup networks of interconnected containers using a Minecraft-style GUI as easier than using vi to set up docker-composer files.
What worries me is that it also allows easy visualization of the resulting constructs meaning that PHBs will think that that means they understand them.
"Open source programmers can usually build better code faster, often because their have bosses who pay them to build something that will pay off next quarter, not next century"
You can deny the Gravitational Theory all you want, but if I drop an anvil on your head, you're still dead.
On the other hand, if someone challenges that gravity must inevitably operate in such and such a way and that leads to development of anti-grav technology, that's True science.
The only situation where we don't get more wealth is if we lay off half our workers and they can't get jobs elsewhere.
Which is exactly what we're worried about.
If you can amp up your production of rolls of toilet paper from 1 roll per hour to 2 rolls per hour per worker, then you have now twice as many rolls of toilet paper in the warehouse at the end of the day. That means that you have to get twice as many rolls of toilet paper OUT of the warehouse each day.
OK, supply-side efficiencies means that you can now afford to lower the prices on toilet paper so that more people will want to buy them. Except that in this case, you're talking something people pretty much have to buy all the time, but only in fixed amounts. Absent a plague of diarrhea, those new lower prices are going to make precious little difference.
Well, what about something that's less of a pure commodity, like TV sets? A household can now put a TV in every room. But again, houses have only a finite number of rooms, so eventually, again, the market saturates. Obsolescence can ensure a turnover in TV sets, but unlike toilet paper, it's more of a case where you make the choice to trash-and-replace only if you have disposable income to be able to afford not continuing to use last year's model.
Now consider what we've been doing. One person can make a TV not merely twice as fast, but, perhaps 20 times as fast, thanks to a century's improvements in productivity (and while I cannot quote actual numbers, we have gotten really, really productive in that period of time).
Instead of taking that productivity and give people 3-hour workdays, a lat Jetsons, we've laid off lots of people and actually amped UP the hours that the survivors must work - lest they be considered "unproductive" and laid off in turn. And the increased profitability in terms of labor costs doesn't trickle down to everyone - it just makes bigger and bigger salaries and bonuses at the top. thereby causing a steady erosion of the Middle Class.
We already know that an economy based on "push" works about as well as pushing on a rope. And really talented entrepreneurs are about as rare as really talented machinists. But we're laying off the talented machinists and expecting them to become entrepreneurs. That's not a very realistic thing to do.
The USA and the USSR were in a "space race". The USSR, typically for the Russian mindset, had rocket engines with pure brute force that could easily shove heavy payloads into space.
The USA hadn't invested as much work into powerful engines, so to compensate, they made a virtue of micro-miniaturization. It probably helped that a lot of the groundwork technology (such as the transistor) had been developed using US resources (AT&T and the feds go way back).
The computer you are using today isn't some fuse-blowing vacuum tube behemoth in large part because this self-same miniaturization found its way back into the commercial sphere. I have an old flip-flop IC that I bought from Radio Shack that says "nasa" right on the case, so in some cases, apparently quite literally so.
No, the space program didn't bring us velcro or even Tang, but it did affect computer technology development even though relatively few computers of the day were actually used in the space program.
Some people who are professional economists think that much of the downward pressure on labor prices has to do with the fact that over the last 30 years we've made significant gains in productivity. Cheap labor contributes as well, but eventually labor markets would reach parity. Indian programming costs have been on a steady rise since the early 2000's, for example.
Technological influences, on the other hand, mean that fewer workers of any price are required forevermore. We've seen this already in cases where manufacturing once thought lost to the USA has returned, but automated. Because a machine, unlike a worker, tends to cost about the same no matter where in the world it is, and when people are no longer required as part of the process, the extra expenses of dealing with languages, cultures, time zones and cost/time of material goods shipping tilt the balance back to home manufacture.
Now what? You can't send them back to work. The whole point is that there's no work for them to do. Not even ditch digging or pyramid building. These days we have heavy equipment that does that.
So you incarcerate them in camps? They're hungry. They're bored. They're upset. You're either going to have to provide ways to feed, shelter, and amuse them or they're just going to rise up again and again until you either remedy the situation or commit genocide.
But when you are the government and they're getting stuff for free (after all they cannot work for it) that's supposed to be Socialism isn't it?
Thank you for putting it so succinctly. Too many think that The Market is a benevolent God.
The Market is more like a rain or sun god. A little rain is refreshing. A lot of rain can break a drought. Too much rain in too short a period and you get destructive floods. Over the total surface of the Earth, the Rain God is doing all of the above all the time. Some places get too little, some, too much and some just right. And where those places are shift over time.
Blind faith isn't enough. Sometimes you have to give the gods a good swift kick.
Vehicle manufacture is already highly automated. We've had window-cleaning robots and similar ways to avoid paying expensive humans to do rote work for a long time. Roombas can seek their charging stations without human guidance and so, I'm sure can Teslas.
The ancient and honorable trade of diagnosis and repair mostly went away years ago. These days, it's cheaper to swap out major assemblies and scrap the old ones than it is to track down a broken capacitor. Even back circa 1985 I had bought a pocket calculator whose replacement batteries cost more than the calculator itself. We're now at the point where units can self-diagnose. Before long it will be routine that they can roll up (or be transported by robot "ambulances") to repair stations where Arduino-driven mechanisms remove and replace faulty subsystem modules. When we don't just scrap the whole thing.
And now we're adding even more ways to automate and reduce - 3D printing on demand. We have microprocessors that can automate processes for less than a dollar a chip.
Much of the focus of late-20th Century business was on creating products that, once designed, could be built cheaply by automatic equipment in million-lot runs. Much more cheaply than the old millions of workers producing one unit at a time or even one unit after another on an assembly line. In some cases, with a precision and quality that were essentially impossible for manual workers to produce.
I'm not optimistic unless someone comes up with an alternative model of living. Not just business, but living, because in the end, most of us work to live, not the other way around and if we cannot live, then bad things can be expected and many of them will be to the detriment of business.
Yes, it's absurd that we have people expected to work 70-100 hours a week while laying off thousands, but that's because the current regulatory climate means that it's cheaper to keep one person working longer than 2 or 3 working less hours. Each new employee comes with a fixed overhead cost in addition to ongoing salary. That's probably one of the first things that should be addressed, but before that can happen you'll have to convince a lot of powerful people that they have to adjust the way they do things. Which, since unions are so despised, means government is the only obvious alternative way to apply pressure to the less altruistic, and in turn, that means ending the current anti-regulatory mindset. The one that brought us the Great Recession and other wonderful things.
Tech changes that just do existing work with less human labour do not expand wealth.
Of course they do. If you can automate something and reduce costs, then you can sell your product more cheaply. Cheaper products mean your money is worth more; therefore wealth has been created.
If you lay off all your workers then they will not be able afford your products at any price - not matter how cheap. Therefore you cannot gain wealth and neither can they and nothing has been created.
Unless the change happens overnight, society will adapt to take advantage of the huge surplus workforce for jobs that machines can't do.
That's kind of the point. Since the beginning of the 20th Century, innovation and change have been happening at an increasingly rapid pace.
If we get to the point where disruption happens faster than people can adapt, then everything gets thrown into a cocked hat. Something fundamental will have to change or chaos will result. The kind that brings down empires.
Some think we've already passed that point, based on the fact that real earnings power in the USA has been declining since the 1980s.
In any event, I wouldn't take it on blind faith that everything will sort itself out neatly and painlessly. Considering the fact that the 1980s were also about when it was no longer good enough to be "active" on something and that now everything's got to be "pro-active", the least we could do is be proactive on ensuring that whatever comes up to replace the structures that we have known for the last century give a positive result.
If you think debt is a form of slavery, you don't know what a powerful lever debt can be.
Some of the most successful companies, explorations, and other major human works started when one or more person mortgaged themselves to finance their efforts. Virtually no company considers itself prepared to grow until it has an established line of credit.
Getting into a debt you cannot get out of is slavery. For everything else, there's collateral. And insurance.
IANAL, but I'm sure that someone could enumerate specific cases where things like that have been prosecuted. Consider what the RIAA and MPAA have done to people.
You're assuming a sane and reasonable legal system, and a lot of us doubt that such a thing exists. If there's a law, someone will abuse it.
If your thesis was correct, then Trickle-Down Economics would have worked. And while I won't write Trickle-Down off as 100% failure, it has definitely shown itself to be roughly as effective rowing a boat using a piece of rope. In something like 30 years of varying political and economic climates, Trickle-Down has never been credited with creating massive prosperity - in fact by most metrics the people on the "down" side are worse off economically now that they were when Reagan took office.
Poverty, on the other hand, can bubble up pretty darned fast. Just ask my creditors when I'm not getting paid.
Economists do consider consumption as a vital metric. The US economy has, in fact been designed around it since the end of WWII - think "planned obsolescence". So don't discount it.
On the other hand, the price of luxury items factors very lightly. Very few items will sell for $170 million in a given year. Almost nobody buys another $170 million painting every year. On the other hand, you can be assured that more than 170 million rolls of toilet paper will be sold in the USA alone this year. And again next year, and so forth until something better obsoletes it (or at least some marketer persuades us). And in addition to toilet paper, of course, there's shampoos, soaps, laundry aids, appliances, etc., etc., etc. Again, the wealthy may have laundry rooms with 15 high-end appliances in them, but laundromats have more than that, and those units, being industrial-grade, aren't cheap either. And there's a LOT more laundromats than there are billionaires with tricked-out laundry rooms. Until no one can afford to pay for laundry and they have to go fighting for places down by the river where they can beat clothes with rocks because no one gets paid any more.
Just to hammer it home, who employs more people, Sotheby's Auction House or Kimberly-Clarke, maker of toilet paper? Since, as demonstrated, putting more money in the hands of fewer people has proven ineffective considering that a "healthy" economy is measured in large part by cash in flow, which employer has a greater influence?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Stackoverflow answers tend to be light on theory, and strong on "quick-fix" answers. In fact, I've seen more than one case where people have been told off for not being specific enough. I know better places to go when you want to learn the underlying reasons for why you need to do something in such-and-such a way instead of simply copy/paste instructions without understanding. Stackoverflow is good for "Git 'R Dun!", but it's not as useful for becoming an expert on a topic.
The other thing that puts me off is that in the last year or three, a lot of Stackoverflow questions have been marked as "too stupid" or otherwise unworthy of an answer in such an august forum. When I, after all my years in the field look up a question and see "too stupid" as an answer, it really irritates me. I may ask stupid questions, but by now I like to delude myself that they're legitimately stupid questions and not just questions that anyone with skills to google or RTFM wouldn't have to ask. I think that every question deserves a meaningful answer, even if the answer starts out with, "That's a stupid question, but..."
At least they don't outright flame you, but sometimes it can get pretty warm.
Think about it. The government of France has the means to spy on the communication within their country through ISPs since 2006.
Obviously, the ability to know what kind of pornsites you're visiting was very effective in preventing terrorism.
It should be. Pure-Hearted Martyrs for the Faith in organizations such as Al-quaeda are notably fond of alchohol and porn. IIRC, even Bin Laden himself had a stash.
So monitoring porn sites and liquor stores can be very important.
It all comes down to whats more effective. IMHO shutting down recruitment has more value.
I'm inclined to agree. ISIS is outstanding in its application of social media as a recruitment tool. If potential recruits can be frustrated or outed in "honeypot" sites, then a major component of their organization is compromised. If they get reduced to doing their recruiting door-to-door, then it's going to be much harder to enlist people, since their personal behavior is generally not up to the standards of culture and civilization that you'd expect from a pack of rabid dogs. And it would greatly reduce their ability to pull in the gullible and disaffected in target countries. That's always been the problem with ISIS. Al Quaeda has never had much appeal in the USA, but ISIS had.
However, Anonymous had better hope that they live up to their name. This is war, and the other side has already proven that they will take barbaric and bloody revenge on anyone and everyone, and they have less respect for "Innocent until Proven Guilty" than Drug-Free America does.
Also, so called intelligence didn't stop France attacks ... so the value of monitoring the sources is even more dubious.
That's armchair quarterbacking, 20/20 hindsight is always easy. What you do with what you know can be more important than the knowledge itself.
NTP handles leap seconds, where's the issue?
There are a lot of "foo[60]" arrays out there, and leap seconds triggering things like writing beyond the end of an array, or overwriting the last entry, losing data for the previous second. And in many cases it goes unnoticed, which can be even worse.
Then there are interfacing between systems that handle leap seconds differently. Do you go from 23:59:59 to 23:59:60 or to a second 23:59:59? If the latter, what happens with jobs that are scheduled to run at 23:59:59.500?
In my opinion, the solution isn't to get rid of leap seconds, but for developers to not make assumptions. If you look at time.h, it states:
int tm_sec; /* Seconds. [0-60] (1 leap second) */
So why assume 0-59?
I may be mis-remembering, but it seems like a summer or 2 ago, there was a day with 2 leap seconds in it.
I can see setup networks of interconnected containers using a Minecraft-style GUI as easier than using vi to set up docker-composer files.
What worries me is that it also allows easy visualization of the resulting constructs meaning that PHBs will think that that means they understand them.
Meh. Business as usual then.
Next you'll be saying that there's a difference between code produced by a 10-year old and one trained in advanced Information Technology.
That's a slippery slope that leads to thinking that you can't just hire people to do enterprise-grade IT work for milk and cookies.
GTA makes a great model for systems management!
Not really. An antivirus program will consume more of your computer's resources than the actual working apps do.
An adblocker prevents even MORE slop from consuming network, cpu, graphics and audio resources.
"Open source programmers can usually build better code faster, often because their have bosses who pay them to build something that will pay off next quarter, not next century"
Seriously. WTF????
I don't like winter either, but running the A/C all through September was just plain insane!
Especially since I don't turn it on until temperatures top 85 degrees.
True science needs deniers:
No, True science needs challengers.
You can deny the Gravitational Theory all you want, but if I drop an anvil on your head, you're still dead.
On the other hand, if someone challenges that gravity must inevitably operate in such and such a way and that leads to development of anti-grav technology, that's True science.
The only situation where we don't get more wealth is if we lay off half our workers and they can't get jobs elsewhere.
Which is exactly what we're worried about.
If you can amp up your production of rolls of toilet paper from 1 roll per hour to 2 rolls per hour per worker, then you have now twice as many rolls of toilet paper in the warehouse at the end of the day. That means that you have to get twice as many rolls of toilet paper OUT of the warehouse each day.
OK, supply-side efficiencies means that you can now afford to lower the prices on toilet paper so that more people will want to buy them. Except that in this case, you're talking something people pretty much have to buy all the time, but only in fixed amounts. Absent a plague of diarrhea, those new lower prices are going to make precious little difference.
Well, what about something that's less of a pure commodity, like TV sets? A household can now put a TV in every room. But again, houses have only a finite number of rooms, so eventually, again, the market saturates. Obsolescence can ensure a turnover in TV sets, but unlike toilet paper, it's more of a case where you make the choice to trash-and-replace only if you have disposable income to be able to afford not continuing to use last year's model.
Now consider what we've been doing. One person can make a TV not merely twice as fast, but, perhaps 20 times as fast, thanks to a century's improvements in productivity (and while I cannot quote actual numbers, we have gotten really, really productive in that period of time).
Instead of taking that productivity and give people 3-hour workdays, a lat Jetsons, we've laid off lots of people and actually amped UP the hours that the survivors must work - lest they be considered "unproductive" and laid off in turn. And the increased profitability in terms of labor costs doesn't trickle down to everyone - it just makes bigger and bigger salaries and bonuses at the top. thereby causing a steady erosion of the Middle Class.
We already know that an economy based on "push" works about as well as pushing on a rope. And really talented entrepreneurs are about as rare as really talented machinists. But we're laying off the talented machinists and expecting them to become entrepreneurs. That's not a very realistic thing to do.
The USA and the USSR were in a "space race". The USSR, typically for the Russian mindset, had rocket engines with pure brute force that could easily shove heavy payloads into space.
The USA hadn't invested as much work into powerful engines, so to compensate, they made a virtue of micro-miniaturization. It probably helped that a lot of the groundwork technology (such as the transistor) had been developed using US resources (AT&T and the feds go way back).
The computer you are using today isn't some fuse-blowing vacuum tube behemoth in large part because this self-same miniaturization found its way back into the commercial sphere. I have an old flip-flop IC that I bought from Radio Shack that says "nasa" right on the case, so in some cases, apparently quite literally so.
No, the space program didn't bring us velcro or even Tang, but it did affect computer technology development even though relatively few computers of the day were actually used in the space program.
Some people who are professional economists think that much of the downward pressure on labor prices has to do with the fact that over the last 30 years we've made significant gains in productivity. Cheap labor contributes as well, but eventually labor markets would reach parity. Indian programming costs have been on a steady rise since the early 2000's, for example.
Technological influences, on the other hand, mean that fewer workers of any price are required forevermore. We've seen this already in cases where manufacturing once thought lost to the USA has returned, but automated. Because a machine, unlike a worker, tends to cost about the same no matter where in the world it is, and when people are no longer required as part of the process, the extra expenses of dealing with languages, cultures, time zones and cost/time of material goods shipping tilt the balance back to home manufacture.
And no doubt you are a billionaire. Because you aren't lazy, are you?
Thanks for your anonymous comment, Mr. Ellison!
OK. They've surrendered.
Now what? You can't send them back to work. The whole point is that there's no work for them to do. Not even ditch digging or pyramid building. These days we have heavy equipment that does that.
So you incarcerate them in camps? They're hungry. They're bored. They're upset. You're either going to have to provide ways to feed, shelter, and amuse them or they're just going to rise up again and again until you either remedy the situation or commit genocide.
But when you are the government and they're getting stuff for free (after all they cannot work for it) that's supposed to be Socialism isn't it?
Thank you for putting it so succinctly. Too many think that The Market is a benevolent God.
The Market is more like a rain or sun god. A little rain is refreshing. A lot of rain can break a drought. Too much rain in too short a period and you get destructive floods. Over the total surface of the Earth, the Rain God is doing all of the above all the time. Some places get too little, some, too much and some just right. And where those places are shift over time.
Blind faith isn't enough. Sometimes you have to give the gods a good swift kick.
Vehicle manufacture is already highly automated. We've had window-cleaning robots and similar ways to avoid paying expensive humans to do rote work for a long time. Roombas can seek their charging stations without human guidance and so, I'm sure can Teslas.
The ancient and honorable trade of diagnosis and repair mostly went away years ago. These days, it's cheaper to swap out major assemblies and scrap the old ones than it is to track down a broken capacitor. Even back circa 1985 I had bought a pocket calculator whose replacement batteries cost more than the calculator itself. We're now at the point where units can self-diagnose. Before long it will be routine that they can roll up (or be transported by robot "ambulances") to repair stations where Arduino-driven mechanisms remove and replace faulty subsystem modules. When we don't just scrap the whole thing.
And now we're adding even more ways to automate and reduce - 3D printing on demand. We have microprocessors that can automate processes for less than a dollar a chip.
Much of the focus of late-20th Century business was on creating products that, once designed, could be built cheaply by automatic equipment in million-lot runs. Much more cheaply than the old millions of workers producing one unit at a time or even one unit after another on an assembly line. In some cases, with a precision and quality that were essentially impossible for manual workers to produce.
I'm not optimistic unless someone comes up with an alternative model of living. Not just business, but living, because in the end, most of us work to live, not the other way around and if we cannot live, then bad things can be expected and many of them will be to the detriment of business.
Yes, it's absurd that we have people expected to work 70-100 hours a week while laying off thousands, but that's because the current regulatory climate means that it's cheaper to keep one person working longer than 2 or 3 working less hours. Each new employee comes with a fixed overhead cost in addition to ongoing salary. That's probably one of the first things that should be addressed, but before that can happen you'll have to convince a lot of powerful people that they have to adjust the way they do things. Which, since unions are so despised, means government is the only obvious alternative way to apply pressure to the less altruistic, and in turn, that means ending the current anti-regulatory mindset. The one that brought us the Great Recession and other wonderful things.
Tech changes that just do existing work with less human labour do not expand wealth.
Of course they do. If you can automate something and reduce costs, then you can sell your product more cheaply. Cheaper products mean your money is worth more; therefore wealth has been created.
If you lay off all your workers then they will not be able afford your products at any price - not matter how cheap. Therefore you cannot gain wealth and neither can they and nothing has been created.
Unless the change happens overnight, society will adapt to take advantage of the huge surplus workforce for jobs that machines can't do.
That's kind of the point. Since the beginning of the 20th Century, innovation and change have been happening at an increasingly rapid pace.
If we get to the point where disruption happens faster than people can adapt, then everything gets thrown into a cocked hat. Something fundamental will have to change or chaos will result. The kind that brings down empires.
Some think we've already passed that point, based on the fact that real earnings power in the USA has been declining since the 1980s.
In any event, I wouldn't take it on blind faith that everything will sort itself out neatly and painlessly. Considering the fact that the 1980s were also about when it was no longer good enough to be "active" on something and that now everything's got to be "pro-active", the least we could do is be proactive on ensuring that whatever comes up to replace the structures that we have known for the last century give a positive result.
As they say in the Market:
"Past performance is no guarantee of future results."
If you think debt is a form of slavery, you don't know what a powerful lever debt can be.
Some of the most successful companies, explorations, and other major human works started when one or more person mortgaged themselves to finance their efforts. Virtually no company considers itself prepared to grow until it has an established line of credit.
Getting into a debt you cannot get out of is slavery. For everything else, there's collateral. And insurance.
IANAL, but I'm sure that someone could enumerate specific cases where things like that have been prosecuted. Consider what the RIAA and MPAA have done to people.
You're assuming a sane and reasonable legal system, and a lot of us doubt that such a thing exists. If there's a law, someone will abuse it.
If your thesis was correct, then Trickle-Down Economics would have worked. And while I won't write Trickle-Down off as 100% failure, it has definitely shown itself to be roughly as effective rowing a boat using a piece of rope. In something like 30 years of varying political and economic climates, Trickle-Down has never been credited with creating massive prosperity - in fact by most metrics the people on the "down" side are worse off economically now that they were when Reagan took office.
Poverty, on the other hand, can bubble up pretty darned fast. Just ask my creditors when I'm not getting paid.
Economists do consider consumption as a vital metric. The US economy has, in fact been designed around it since the end of WWII - think "planned obsolescence". So don't discount it.
On the other hand, the price of luxury items factors very lightly. Very few items will sell for $170 million in a given year. Almost nobody buys another $170 million painting every year. On the other hand, you can be assured that more than 170 million rolls of toilet paper will be sold in the USA alone this year. And again next year, and so forth until something better obsoletes it (or at least some marketer persuades us). And in addition to toilet paper, of course, there's shampoos, soaps, laundry aids, appliances, etc., etc., etc. Again, the wealthy may have laundry rooms with 15 high-end appliances in them, but laundromats have more than that, and those units, being industrial-grade, aren't cheap either. And there's a LOT more laundromats than there are billionaires with tricked-out laundry rooms. Until no one can afford to pay for laundry and they have to go fighting for places down by the river where they can beat clothes with rocks because no one gets paid any more.
Just to hammer it home, who employs more people, Sotheby's Auction House or Kimberly-Clarke, maker of toilet paper? Since, as demonstrated, putting more money in the hands of fewer people has proven ineffective considering that a "healthy" economy is measured in large part by cash in flow, which employer has a greater influence?