I cited the figures showing that real median income has triple, you responded with an article full of feelings, like this bit:
> In fact, three-quarters of Americans polled by the Brookings Institution in 2008 said the dream was harder to attain.
It's interesting that they feel that way. It's also contrary to fact.
The authors added up the cost of a house three times as large, sending two kids to college without them needing to work even a part time job, buying a new 4 wheel drive SUV, etc. Guess what - average people a generation ago actually did NOT have a 3,000 square foot house with a new SUV in the garage, and even high school kids worked summers and after school. Everybody in my family worked FULL TIME while in college to pay their expenses after serving in the military so the GI bill covered tuition.
Why assume my daughter shouldn't have to lift a finger? Why is she owed a college education without needing a part-time job? I probably -could- afford to do that, but that would be a disservice to my daughter. She'll learn about the rewards of work just like her great-parents, grandparents, and parents did (I learned a bit late).
The numbers are what they are. Whatever feelings that spoiled millenials have doesn't change the facts.
I guess you forgot to read any of those pages before you linked to them. Here are a couple of quotes from your first link:
--- Scott qualified his statement to make clear he was referring to executed Japanese military members who faced a variety of war crime charges, including waterboarding, not that they were sentenced to death solely for that offense.... Wallach, in his essay, wrote that six Japanese generals who ordered and permitted water torture were sentenced to death. He added, however, that those generals were also convicted of many other war crimes ---
So yeah, in a few cases, when someone committed "many other war crimes" (primarily intentionally starting the war), and btw they also did waterboarding, a few such people were sentenced to death.
> Based on adjusted GDP/capita, that one income should be able to buy 3 fully furnished homes, 3 cars
And in an amazing non-coincidence, the median family home today is in fact 2.8 times the size it was in the 1960s. You can look at it 20 different ways and it comes out the same - we get three times as much.
It's also not uncommon for a middle class family to have three cars and a lower-income to have two; in 1960 middle class families had one car, lower-income took the bus.
Two notable exceptions to the "three times as much" trend are savings and entertainment (including restaurants). We spend around six times as much on eating out and other entertainment, we don't have three times as much savings. Another not-amazing non-coincidence.
> Yes, the median home is 3X as large. They're also more than 3X as expensive
And (almost by definition) they are what the median family can afford. Three times as much as the median family could afford in the 1960s. Not coincidentally, the government numbers for real income and real disposable income show the same increase - 3 times as much income, 3 times as much disposable income, 3 times as much house compared to the 1960s.
Numerically, we don't have less income, we're simply spoiled and shortsighted; we spend and don't save. ("We" as a whole. Obviously lots of people learned from their grandparents and saved. When I was 19yo and flipping burgers, one of my 19yo co-workers saved 35% or so, and had over $20k in the bank. Most co-workers had car loans from a note lot instead.)
Waterboarding (pouring water over the enemy combatant's face) and hooding (putting a bag over their head so they can't see) are bad. The US shouldn't do those things, as policy. No country should, and especially the US (more on that later*).
On the other hand consider if we captured Osama bin Laden , who knew about plans for future terror attacks. If our interrogation experts thought that putting a bag over his head to annoy him might increase the information he revealed (potentially saving innocent lives), I'd happily fetch a bag for that use. I digress. Generally, those techniques are bad policy.
> The stuff Japanese people were sentenced to death for shortly after their trials at the end of World War II.
The japanese war criminals were convicted of kidnapping all the girls and women in villages they attacked and making them "sexual slaves". In other words, raping these civilians hundreds of times each. They were also convicted of mass murder - men from the villages, once they were too emaciated to work in the forced labor camp, would be lined up and shot.
Again, pouring water on a terrorist's face isn't a very nice thing to do to that terrorist. Systematically raping thousands of girls, many of them hundreds of times each, is a completely different level of horrible.
To say to the survivors of this rape program that their story is no worse than someone who chose to be a terrorist having water poured on them is deeply offensive and shows an incredible lack of perspective or understanding of the world.
I promised more about why the US especially shouldn't be mean to enemy combatants. The US is not historically a people, not an ethnic group or ancient tribe who established borders of the area they control like most nations. Japan is the area that (ethnic) Japanese people control, the area of Japanwse culture. The responsibility of the Japanese government is to the Japanese people, and it should protect Japanese culture and tradition.
The US isn't descended from an ancient tribe or ethnic group. The US wasn't created to define the area of US culture and traditions. Rather, was explicitly founded to protect freedom , justice, and liberty. That's the entire PURPOSE of founding the country, expressed in the founding documents. The US claims to be, aspires to be, "the brightest beacon of freedom to the world". Japan makes no such claim. Therefore, in order to accomplish our explicit purpose, the reason the country exists in the first place, we must treat justice and freedom as our top priorities. When we don't do so, we've failed in a way that other countries don't, because they make no claim of being "the land of liberty". This concept is called "American Exceptionalism". Some disagree, of course. President Obama rejects the concept American Exceptionalism, the idea that the US has a special responsibility to respect people's rights.
That's true, there WERE people stuffing those bills into envelopes, earning $1/hour for it. Median home size was 1/3 of today. Aren't you glad that's not us.
You'll notice real disposable has tripled since the 1960s. With all of that extra money, we've been buying huge homes (compared to then), dining out six times as much, etc.
So you understand all that, great. Sorry if that came across as wrong (I can't think of the word for it). I guessed that you might be a younger person who had mostly been hearing some socialist/communist ideas, but wasn't interested enough to really learn a lot about the US economy. In such cases, starting with the socialist ideal and showing that a workable implementation is through the joint-stock company can sometimes be very effective and informative. Obviously you aren't coming from quite that viewpoint.
Let's address what you call your "central point":
> Compared to somebody in the '60s, for example, their pay is likely less, their expenses more, so fewer than ever can manage that 10% - except that it needs to be closer to 20%.
In fact, compared to the 1960s, median home size is almost three times as large. Spending 20 times as much buying Starbucks coffee instead of making it at home is now common. Here's the big bottom line number, real disposable income since 1960:
In fact real disposable income has tripled. And we dispose of it, buying $600 ipads, $8 cups of coffee, and multiple cars.
We could, if we chose to, live on just TWICE as much real income as our parents or grandparents did, as invest 30% of our income, retiring at age 40 or 50. Most of us don't, because in 1960 people had one car per family, not two cars, a motorcycle, and a jetski. We'd have keep a TV set for 15 years (they kept one for 20). Most of us prefer to replace LCD HD with OLED 4K after five or ten years. That's a personal choice, so I won't say it's wrong. We can, however, instead choose to have a house only twice as big as our parents' house when we're younger, and invest 30% or more of income so we can be rich later.
> And yet they don't do any of those really simple things.
They don't? It seems to me that SOMEONE who vowed destroy the US as we knew and "fundamentay transform" it has been destroying or blocking economically important infrastructure such as pipelines, doubling the debt, vowing to "relentlessly go after" business owners while creating uncertainty for entrepeneurs, and spreading race-based propaganda. Maybe it wasn't a terrorist per se, maybe that was somebody else who blames the US for the fact that the middle east has been at war for 3,000 years.
> One guy using a $600 PC does the work of a roomfull of guys with adding machines, but that guy doesn't get paid more than one of those adding machine guys once you adjust for inflation.
What used to be done by a room full of people with calculators and is now done by one person? Billing comes to mind - no need for a room full of clerks to calculate bills one at a time when a single DBA can handle it Of course the DBA isn't using a $600 computer to do the calculations - he's using that computer to connect to a pair $6,000 computers through a pair of $5,000 routers, but we'll ignore those extra costs. Did you have something else in mind that uses $600 computer to replace a room full of people with calculators, or does billing sound like a common example?
The DBA makes about $100K , maybe $140k depending on local cost of living (Texas is MUCH cheaper than California). The billing clerks made about $3k in 1950, which is $29k in 2016 dollars. So the people in your adding machine to computer example do in fact make three times as much money, in today's dollars.
I don't think getting rid of the marketer Bill Gates would hurt the US economy much. Here are better ways to hurt the US economy:
1) Along with the symbolic buildings they have attacked, they could attack economically significant, but more easily damaged, infrastructure. For example, an oil pipeline can carry $15 billion of oil each year. Destroying a major one would SEVERELY damage the economies of both the areas with refining and reprocessing plants (such as plastics makers) and the economy of the areas producing the oil at the inputs to the pipeline, who would then have to pay much, much more to ship the oil to market in individual train cars.
2) They could do many small attacks, completely unpredictably, but always focused against economic activity (business). Pick new businesses at random - the day a new store opens, blow it up or just light it on fire. As a matter of fact, focusing on new businesses, but otherwise being random would be great - the unpredictability would scare potential entrepreneur and few people would open new businesses.
3) Even better - when they do simple arson against a new business owned by a white person, leave Black Panther markings behind and conversely leave KKK markings when they burn or bomb a business that a black person is starting. That would get US fighting among ourselves, hurting ourselves a lot more than foreign terrorists could hurt us directly.
4) I'm pondering things that drain the economy. The US wastes a trillion dollars ($6,300 per US worker) every year just paying INTEREST on money its federal government has borrowed. If terrorists could influence US policy to double that number, that would take another $6,300 from every American family every year. Can you think of any ways terrorists could get the government to waste a shit load of money?
I didn't just come up with all these on my own, of course. Leaders of radical anti-American groups have been doing them. Especially #1 and #4, along with a weakened version of #2 have been quite effective for the single most dangerous critic of America.
> Who ever thought A/V signatures were a good idea other than a mad man.
They WERE a good idea. He did that in 1987. Intel was selling a lot of 286 processors. The same year IBM announced their first 386 computer, the PS/2, which came with half a MB of RAM and supported of to 4MB if you maxed out the upgrades.
A year earlier the first virus for PC compatibles had come out, called Brain. By 1987 there were several viruses, perhaps a dozen or more. Nothing that caused destruction over a network, though, that wouldn't happen until year-end.
If you're trying to identify a dozen or so programs, and you have maybe 2KB to spare, a simple lookup table of signatures seems like a pretty good way to do it.
> Actually every decade we should kill off the top.01%. That by itself will keep the economy flowing as their cash will keep being moved instead of just sitting there.
I hope you're being sarcastic, but in case you're just young or woefully uninformed, I'll explain it for you. You don't get rich by putting cash under your mattress. You get rich by owning productive capital. The office you're sitting in, the computer you're using at work, and those glossy flyers advertising your company's products are the rich people's money (and our retirement savings). They get and stay rich by having their MONEY work for them rather than them just working for wages. Their money is your office, it's the Tesla factory, their money is the grocery store you shop at. You COULD take their money and use it buy Obama-phones. It is then no longer available build offices, upgrade your office equipment, or print more marketing materials to sell the company's product, or to maintain the grocery store building and equipment. You end up with a "free" phone, but you'd no loner have an office, a computer on your desk, or grocery store with working refrigeration.
They use $4,000 of their money to get you, their employee, training for a new certification and then they have an employee worth $8,000. We could let politicians decide how resources are allocated based on contributions they recieve, or we could do this: Everybody who finds ways to cause money to increase, to use resources in a way that generates more resources, can then manage some of the new resources they created in order to create even more. They can also take a portion of the increase (profit) and distribute it to people who build good things, like cars, houses , and low-power SOCs. The first option (government control of resources) is how Cuba works now and Russia used to work, until it collapsed. The second option (people who efficiently multiply resources manage the resources to create even more and pay people to make stuff) is called capitalism.
Btw, the corollary to the first part is that if you're stuffing your money under your mattress, or spending on Starbucks, you probably won't get rich, or even particularly compfortable. To do well, you'll want to be an owner of productive capital. The easiest way to do that is to share ownership of a company like General Mills or Union Pacific. You can buy shares (part ownership) for as little as $80. To reduce risk, it's best to buy shares in 100 different companies at once. That's called a mutual fund. The best ones have low expenses. IVE and UMBIX are examples of good choices.
> Assuming that the harvester machine only takes a few thousand in maintenance a year and lasts a decade, you've given a highly profitable example. Let's say that we're down south and the machine is used 100 days a year. That's $135k/year. $40k goes to interest/maintenance/cost of capital. You're looking at paying off that harvester in only 4 years.
You've forgotten about 90% of the costs of producing those $135k of berries and bringing them to market - the land, water, everything involved in planting and growing them, fertilizer, pesticide, packing and shipping, reserves set aside for bad years, etc. Picking berries that worth $135k after someone already spent $100k to grow them isn't the same as magically producing $135k from nothing.
The correct comparison would be the cost to harvest with the machine vs without. You figured the machine cost $40,000 per year to own and maintain. Maybe harvesting with machine costs $20,000 for two guys working four months and other related expenses. So using the machine, the total cost to harvest is $60k. You'd then compare the cost of not having the machine and instead hiring 20 people and equipping them with more manual tools. Twenty employees for four months might be $80k wages plus $30k taxes, benefits and govt fees. So $110k without the machine. The machine is $50,000 better. Minus the 20% of years you pay the mortgage on the machine even though the harvest was bust due to drought, too much rain, disease, whatever. It ends up $20,000 better in this example, not $135k better.
> Except your example is terrible because a harvester is way more than a 10x improvement over manual picking.
Not always. There's a reason some crops are still picked by hand. You can probably imagine why berries can be an example where putting them through heavy machinery isn't necesarily better. Saffron harvest may never be mechanized.
> Let's say that we're down south and the machine is used 100 days a year.
That would be a best case scenario, but anyway the exact numbers aren't the point. The point is that when comparing productivity with and without expensive new machinery, you have to take the cost of the machinery into account. Higher productivity doesn't NECESSARILY mean higher efficiency or profit.
> That's actually the problem many people see - It's the people with the capital to OWN the nation's means of production(factories and such)
Owning capital which works for you is certainly preferable to working for wages your entire life. I think we should set up a system where anyone and everyone can be part-owner of the factories, ships, and other capital. Rather than George Soros building a ship with his money; you, me, and 100,000 other people can get in on it, pooling our money to build a ship, factory, or other capital. We can then share in the proceeds. Eventually you and I could be owners of companies like Apple and Google. Or if we want less risk, companies like Proctor & Gamble and General Mills.
Along paying us cash, employers could also pay us an extra amount which is shared ownership in a company. Some people might prefer to own one type of company and other people would prefer another type, so you could choose which companies you wanted shared ownership of. A big company like Proctor & Gamble would have a million ownership receipts and you could choose to have shared ownership of P&G, or Apple, or a solar-electric company if you want to support that - whichever companies you want your capital contribution to go to, and you want part of any profit. Since it's all about shared ownership, we could call the ownership receipts "shares". Each months when you or your employer puts money into your Individual Capital Account (ICA), you could decide whether you wanted shares of Google, of Rickâ(TM)s Cabaret, or whatever. You own part of Rick's, so if Rick's makes a profit, you get some of it.
It would be good for most people to participate. The government could FORCE everyone to participate, but that would have drawbacks because sometimes it's better for you to invest in your education, or in buying a home or some other personal investment, rather than putting that capital into a corporation. Maybe instead of forcing you participate, the politicians could encourage you and your employer to participate by offering lower tax rates on money the employer or you put into your individual capital account (ICA) vs money they pay you in cash, which you then spend.
Hmm, that could be risky, though. What if I chose that I want my share of capital in particular business, and that business doesn't do well? Maybe we could have another layer of sharing so that I'm part owner of 200 different companies. There could be a a bank account with 10,000 owners, and with that bank account we'd buy capital for 200 companies, then split the profits. it would be funded mutually by anyone who wanted to participate.
I bet I could get rich that way (slowly), because in addition to the capital that my employer put into my capital account, I would also put in 10%-15% of my salary, as a kind of savings or investment. By "I would" I of course mean "I do". That's how most millionaires became millionaires - by socking away a lit bit each pay check into IRAs and 401Ks; very often owning mutual finds in those accounts.
When real wages increase, wage earners benefit. That part is simple.
Now let's look at productivity. Assume one worker with a basket can harvest $150 of berries per day. One worker with a $400,000 harvester machine can harvest $1,500 of berries per day.
Productivity (berries per worker) increased 1000%!!! Who benefits from the increased productivity? Quite possibly nobody, because there's the little matter of the mortgage payments on the $400,000 piece of equipment that's only used during harvest season.
The summary also indicates that it would likely REDUCE congestion, at least in some areas.
Suppose right now my 20-mile commute takes 35 minutes, so for 35 minutes I'm causing part of the congestion. I'm in your way from 8:00 to 8:35. The summary says self-driving cars will likely be able to drive much faster (perhaps in what used to be HOV lanes). If my car goes faster, that means the 20-mile commute takes less time. I'd only be on the road(and in your way) for 20 minutes rather than 35 minutes.
Do you have a source for that, or are you completely making things up and then believing your own fiction, as so many Slashdotters sem to do? I don't see anything like that in the terms and conditions myself.
That last sentence is bogus. Their bug-bounty program isn't invitation only. I have the submission form open in another tab right now. The only requirement that differs from any other is that if your first four reports are bogus, they may stop paying attention to you (known as a signal requirement) .
> Solyndra had two buildings: guess who is in one? Musk's SolarCity.
Guess who is losing shit tons of money? Musk's solar city. Investors gave Solar City a bunch of money, and now most of that money is gone. Not at all like Solyndra, right?
> Especially in the case of Solyndra: why did this company collapse? Because the cost of PV cells from their competitors declined faster than Solyndra anticipated.
That, and THEY NEVER MADE SOLAR CELLS. They kept saying that their amazing new solar technology was just around the corner, while they sent investor cash to politicians and received taxpayer money back. There's a reason the FBI raided their homes and offices, and it's not because they were too expensive.
You must be new here (earth). For most of my life, airport security was by private contractors hired by companies that want your business- airlines and airports. There wasn't a two hour wait and cost was far lower.
It's interesting to me that so many people guess what might happen if ______ (something that's happened a lot). We know exactly how private security works, we had it for decades. A lot like people who make predictions about the effect of ignoring the second amendment- we don't have to guess, gun bans have been done numerous times in numerous places and we know what the results have been.
> what other browser doesn't take up space in your Android device's read-only operating system partition?
The default browser on all of my Android devices is called Browser. Chrome is an add-on.
ALL browsers other than whatever the OEM chooses to install "don't take up space in your Android device's read-only operating system partition". Every other browser can be installed on either your 16GB SD card or built-in flash storage. Only the OEM default applications have the DRAWBACK of taking up space on the read-only partition.
> Are you new here or do you legitimately not remember the IE browser tying issues?
Windows had over 90% market share measured at the consumer, and there was exactly ONE significant OEM who wasn't tied to a Windows contract. "Every computer company except one must follow our rules" sounds a lot like a monopoly.
Again, MOST people do not use Chrome. A monopoly is "all, or almost all".
> without (realistic) chance of competition.
Given that Chrome has less than half the market, there's pretty clearly not only a chance of competition, but actual competition.
Slashdot Mirror
I cited the figures showing that real median income has triple, you responded with an article full of feelings, like this bit:
> In fact, three-quarters of Americans polled by the Brookings Institution in 2008 said the dream was harder to attain.
It's interesting that they feel that way. It's also contrary to fact.
The authors added up the cost of a house three times as large, sending two kids to college without them needing to work even a part time job, buying a new 4 wheel drive SUV, etc. Guess what - average people a generation ago actually did NOT have a 3,000 square foot house with a new SUV in the garage, and even high school kids worked summers and after school. Everybody in my family worked FULL TIME while in college to pay their expenses after serving in the military so the GI bill covered tuition.
Why assume my daughter shouldn't have to lift a finger? Why is she owed a college education without needing a part-time job? I probably -could- afford to do that, but that would be a disservice to my daughter. She'll learn about the rewards of work just like her great-parents, grandparents, and parents did (I learned a bit late).
The numbers are what they are. Whatever feelings that spoiled millenials have doesn't change the facts.
I guess you forgot to read any of those pages before you linked to them. Here are a couple of quotes from your first link:
--- ...
Scott qualified his statement to make clear he was referring to executed Japanese military members who faced a variety of war crime charges, including waterboarding, not that they were sentenced to death solely for that offense.
Wallach, in his essay, wrote that six Japanese generals who ordered and permitted water torture were sentenced to death. He added, however, that those generals were also convicted of many other war crimes
---
So yeah, in a few cases, when someone committed "many other war crimes" (primarily intentionally starting the war), and btw they also did waterboarding, a few such people were sentenced to death.
> Based on adjusted GDP/capita, that one income should be able to buy 3 fully furnished homes, 3 cars
And in an amazing non-coincidence, the median family home today is in fact 2.8 times the size it was in the 1960s. You can look at it 20 different ways and it comes out the same - we get three times as much.
It's also not uncommon for a middle class family to have three cars and a lower-income to have two; in 1960 middle class families had one car, lower-income took the bus.
Two notable exceptions to the "three times as much" trend are savings and entertainment (including restaurants). We spend around six times as much on eating out and other entertainment, we don't have three times as much savings. Another not-amazing non-coincidence.
> Yes, the median home is 3X as large. They're also more than 3X as expensive
And (almost by definition) they are what the median family can afford. Three times as much as the median family could afford in the 1960s. Not coincidentally, the government numbers for real income and real disposable income show the same increase - 3 times as much income, 3 times as much disposable income, 3 times as much house compared to the 1960s.
Numerically, we don't have less income, we're simply spoiled and shortsighted; we spend and don't save. ("We" as a whole. Obviously lots of people learned from their grandparents and saved. When I was 19yo and flipping burgers, one of my 19yo co-workers saved 35% or so, and had over $20k in the bank. Most co-workers had car loans from a note lot instead.)
Waterboarding (pouring water over the enemy combatant's face) and hooding (putting a bag over their head so they can't see) are bad. The US shouldn't do those things, as policy. No country should, and especially the US (more on that later*).
On the other hand consider if we captured Osama bin Laden , who knew about plans for future terror attacks. If our interrogation experts thought that putting a bag over his head to annoy him might increase the information he revealed (potentially saving innocent lives), I'd happily fetch a bag for that use. I digress. Generally, those techniques are bad policy.
> The stuff Japanese people were sentenced to death for shortly after their trials at the end of World War II.
The japanese war criminals were convicted of kidnapping all the girls and women in villages they attacked and making them "sexual slaves". In other words, raping these civilians hundreds of times each. They were also convicted of mass murder - men from the villages, once they were too emaciated to work in the forced labor camp, would be lined up and shot.
Again, pouring water on a terrorist's face isn't a very nice thing to do to that terrorist. Systematically raping thousands of girls, many of them hundreds of times each, is a completely different level of horrible.
To say to the survivors of this rape program that their story is no worse than someone who chose to be a terrorist having water poured on them is deeply offensive and shows an incredible lack of perspective or understanding of the world.
I promised more about why the US especially shouldn't be mean to enemy combatants. The US is not historically a people, not an ethnic group or ancient tribe who established borders of the area they control like most nations. Japan is the area that (ethnic) Japanese people control, the area of Japanwse culture. The responsibility of the Japanese government is to the Japanese people, and it should protect Japanese culture and tradition.
The US isn't descended from an ancient tribe or ethnic group. The US wasn't created to define the area of US culture and traditions. Rather, was explicitly founded to protect freedom , justice, and liberty. That's the entire PURPOSE of founding the country, expressed in the founding documents. The US claims to be, aspires to be, "the brightest beacon of freedom to the world". Japan makes no such claim. Therefore, in order to accomplish our explicit purpose, the reason the country exists in the first place, we must treat justice and freedom as our top priorities. When we don't do so, we've failed in a way that other countries don't, because they make no claim of being "the land of liberty". This concept is called "American Exceptionalism". Some disagree, of course. President Obama rejects the concept American Exceptionalism, the idea that the US has a special responsibility to respect people's rights.
That's true, there WERE people stuffing those bills into envelopes, earning $1/hour for it. Median home size was 1/3 of today. Aren't you glad that's not us.
Here's the official data on real disposable income from the BEA:
https://research.stlouisfed.or...
You'll notice real disposable has tripled since the 1960s. With all of that extra money, we've been buying huge homes (compared to then), dining out six times as much, etc.
So you understand all that, great. Sorry if that came across as wrong (I can't think of the word for it). I guessed that you might be a younger person who had mostly been hearing some socialist/communist ideas, but wasn't interested enough to really learn a lot about the US economy. In such cases, starting with the socialist ideal and showing that a workable implementation is through the joint-stock company can sometimes be very effective and informative. Obviously you aren't coming from quite that viewpoint.
Let's address what you call your "central point":
> Compared to somebody in the '60s, for example, their pay is likely less, their expenses more, so fewer than ever can manage that 10% - except that it needs to be closer to 20%.
In fact, compared to the 1960s, median home size is almost three times as large. Spending 20 times as much buying Starbucks coffee instead of making it at home is now common. Here's the big bottom line number, real disposable income since 1960:
https://research.stlouisfed.or...
In fact real disposable income has tripled. And we dispose of it, buying $600 ipads, $8 cups of coffee, and multiple cars.
We could, if we chose to, live on just TWICE as much real income as our parents or grandparents did, as invest 30% of our income, retiring at age 40 or 50. Most of us don't, because in 1960 people had one car per family, not two cars, a motorcycle, and a jetski. We'd have keep a TV set for 15 years (they kept one for 20). Most of us prefer to replace LCD HD with OLED 4K after five or ten years. That's a personal choice, so I won't say it's wrong. We can, however, instead choose to have a house only twice as big as our parents' house when we're younger, and invest 30% or more of income so we can be rich later.
> And yet they don't do any of those really simple things.
They don't? It seems to me that SOMEONE who vowed destroy the US as we knew and "fundamentay transform" it has been destroying or blocking economically important infrastructure such as pipelines, doubling the debt, vowing to "relentlessly go after" business owners while creating uncertainty for entrepeneurs, and spreading race-based propaganda. Maybe it wasn't a terrorist per se, maybe that was somebody else who blames the US for the fact that the middle east has been at war for 3,000 years.
> One guy using a $600 PC does the work of a roomfull of guys with adding machines, but that guy doesn't get paid more than one of those adding machine guys once you adjust for inflation.
What used to be done by a room full of people with calculators and is now done by one person? Billing comes to mind - no need for a room full of clerks to calculate bills one at a time when a single DBA can handle it Of course the DBA isn't using a $600 computer to do the calculations - he's using that computer to connect to a pair $6,000 computers through a pair of $5,000 routers, but we'll ignore those extra costs. Did you have something else in mind that uses $600 computer to replace a room full of people with calculators, or does billing sound like a common example?
The DBA makes about $100K , maybe $140k depending on local cost of living (Texas is MUCH cheaper than California).
The billing clerks made about $3k in 1950, which is $29k in 2016 dollars.
So the people in your adding machine to computer example do in fact make three times as much money, in today's dollars.
I don't think getting rid of the marketer Bill Gates would hurt the US economy much. Here are better ways to hurt the US economy:
1) Along with the symbolic buildings they have attacked, they could attack economically significant, but more easily damaged, infrastructure. For example, an oil pipeline can carry $15 billion of oil each year. Destroying a major one would SEVERELY damage the economies of both the areas with refining and reprocessing plants (such as plastics makers) and the economy of the areas producing the oil at the inputs to the pipeline, who would then have to pay much, much more to ship the oil to market in individual train cars.
2) They could do many small attacks, completely unpredictably, but always focused against economic activity (business). Pick new businesses at random - the day a new store opens, blow it up or just light it on fire. As a matter of fact, focusing on new businesses, but otherwise being random would be great - the unpredictability would scare potential entrepreneur and few people would open new businesses.
3) Even better - when they do simple arson against a new business owned by a white person, leave Black Panther markings behind and conversely leave KKK markings when they burn or bomb a business that a black person is starting. That would get US fighting among ourselves, hurting ourselves a lot more than foreign terrorists could hurt us directly.
4) I'm pondering things that drain the economy. The US wastes a trillion dollars ($6,300 per US worker) every year just paying INTEREST on money its federal government has borrowed. If terrorists could influence US policy to double that number, that would take another $6,300 from every American family every year. Can you think of any ways terrorists could get the government to waste a shit load of money?
I didn't just come up with all these on my own, of course. Leaders of radical anti-American groups have been doing them. Especially #1 and #4, along with a weakened version of #2 have been quite effective for the single most dangerous critic of America.
> Who ever thought A/V signatures were a good idea other than a mad man.
They WERE a good idea. He did that in 1987. Intel was selling a lot of 286 processors. The same year IBM announced their first 386 computer, the PS/2, which came with half a MB of RAM and supported of to 4MB if you maxed out the upgrades.
A year earlier the first virus for PC compatibles had come out, called Brain. By 1987 there were several viruses, perhaps a dozen or more. Nothing that caused destruction over a network, though, that wouldn't happen until year-end.
If you're trying to identify a dozen or so programs, and you have maybe 2KB to spare, a simple lookup table of signatures seems like a pretty good way to do it.
> Actually every decade we should kill off the top .01%. That by itself will keep the economy flowing as their cash will keep being moved instead of just sitting there.
I hope you're being sarcastic, but in case you're just young or woefully uninformed, I'll explain it for you. You don't get rich by putting cash under your mattress. You get rich by owning productive capital. The office you're sitting in, the computer you're using at work, and those glossy flyers advertising your company's products are the rich people's money (and our retirement savings). They get and stay rich by having their MONEY work for them rather than them just working for wages. Their money is your office, it's the Tesla factory, their money is the grocery store you shop at. You COULD take their money and use it buy Obama-phones. It is then no longer available build offices, upgrade your office equipment, or print more marketing materials to sell the company's product, or to maintain the grocery store building and equipment. You end up with a "free" phone, but you'd no loner have an office, a computer on your desk, or grocery store with working refrigeration.
They use $4,000 of their money to get you, their employee, training for a new certification and then they have an employee worth $8,000. We could let politicians decide how resources are allocated based on contributions they recieve, or we could do this:
Everybody who finds ways to cause money to increase, to use resources in a way that generates more resources, can then manage some of the new resources they created in order to create even more. They can also take a portion of the increase (profit) and distribute it to people who build good things, like cars, houses , and low-power SOCs. The first option (government control of resources) is how Cuba works now and Russia used to work, until it collapsed. The second option (people who efficiently multiply resources manage the resources to create even more and pay people to make stuff) is called capitalism.
Btw, the corollary to the first part is that if you're stuffing your money under your mattress, or spending on Starbucks, you probably won't get rich, or even particularly compfortable. To do well, you'll want to be an owner of productive capital. The easiest way to do that is to share ownership of a company like General Mills or Union Pacific. You can buy shares (part ownership) for as little as $80. To reduce risk, it's best to buy shares in 100 different companies at once. That's called a mutual fund. The best ones have low expenses. IVE and UMBIX are examples of good choices.
> Assuming that the harvester machine only takes a few thousand in maintenance a year and lasts a decade, you've given a highly profitable example. Let's say that we're down south and the machine is used 100 days a year. That's $135k/year. $40k goes to interest/maintenance/cost of capital. You're looking at paying off that harvester in only 4 years.
You've forgotten about 90% of the costs of producing those $135k of berries and bringing them to market - the land, water, everything involved in planting and growing them, fertilizer, pesticide, packing and shipping, reserves set aside for bad years, etc. Picking berries that worth $135k after someone already spent $100k to grow them isn't the same as magically producing $135k from nothing.
The correct comparison would be the cost to harvest with the machine vs without. You figured the machine cost $40,000 per year to own and maintain. Maybe harvesting with machine costs $20,000 for two guys working four months and other related expenses. So using the machine, the total cost to harvest is $60k. You'd then compare the cost of not having the machine and instead hiring 20 people and equipping them with more manual tools. Twenty employees for four months might be $80k wages plus $30k taxes, benefits and govt fees. So $110k without the machine. The machine is $50,000 better. Minus the 20% of years you pay the mortgage on the machine even though the harvest was bust due to drought, too much rain, disease, whatever. It ends up $20,000 better in this example, not $135k better.
> Except your example is terrible because a harvester is way more than a 10x improvement over manual picking.
Not always. There's a reason some crops are still picked by hand. You can probably imagine why berries can be an example where putting them through heavy machinery isn't necesarily better. Saffron harvest may never be mechanized.
> Let's say that we're down south and the machine is used 100 days a year.
That would be a best case scenario, but anyway the exact numbers aren't the point. The point is that when comparing productivity with and without expensive new machinery, you have to take the cost of the machinery into account. Higher productivity doesn't NECESSARILY mean higher efficiency or profit.
> That's actually the problem many people see - It's the people with the capital to OWN the nation's means of production(factories and such)
Owning capital which works for you is certainly preferable to working for wages your entire life. I think we should set up a system where anyone and everyone can be part-owner of the factories, ships, and other capital. Rather than George Soros building a ship with his money; you, me, and 100,000 other people can get in on it, pooling our money to build a ship, factory, or other capital. We can then share in the proceeds. Eventually you and I could be owners of companies like Apple and Google. Or if we want less risk, companies like Proctor & Gamble and General Mills.
Along paying us cash, employers could also pay us an extra amount which is shared ownership in a company. Some people might prefer to own one type of company and other people would prefer another type, so you could choose which companies you wanted shared ownership of. A big company like Proctor & Gamble would have a million ownership receipts and you could choose to have shared ownership of P&G, or Apple, or a solar-electric company if you want to support that - whichever companies you want your capital contribution to go to, and you want part of any profit. Since it's all about shared ownership, we could call the ownership receipts "shares". Each months when you or your employer puts money into your Individual Capital Account (ICA), you could decide whether you wanted shares of Google, of Rickâ(TM)s Cabaret, or whatever. You own part of Rick's, so if Rick's makes a profit, you get some of it.
It would be good for most people to participate. The government could FORCE everyone to participate, but that would have drawbacks because sometimes it's better for you to invest in your education, or in buying a home or some other personal investment, rather than putting that capital into a corporation. Maybe instead of forcing you participate, the politicians could encourage you and your employer to participate by offering lower tax rates on money the employer or you put into your individual capital account (ICA) vs money they pay you in cash, which you then spend.
Hmm, that could be risky, though. What if I chose that I want my share of capital in particular business, and that business doesn't do well? Maybe we could have another layer of sharing so that I'm part owner of 200 different companies. There could be a a bank account with 10,000 owners, and with that bank account we'd buy capital for 200 companies, then split the profits. it would be funded mutually by anyone who wanted to participate.
I bet I could get rich that way (slowly), because in addition to the capital that my employer put into my capital account, I would also put in 10%-15% of my salary, as a kind of savings or investment. By "I would" I of course mean "I do". That's how most millionaires became millionaires - by socking away a lit bit each pay check into IRAs and 401Ks; very often owning mutual finds in those accounts.
When real wages increase, wage earners benefit. That part is simple.
Now let's look at productivity.
Assume one worker with a basket can harvest $150 of berries per day.
One worker with a $400,000 harvester machine can harvest $1,500 of berries per day.
Productivity (berries per worker) increased 1000%!!!
Who benefits from the increased productivity? Quite possibly nobody, because there's the little matter of the mortgage payments on the $400,000 piece of equipment that's only used during harvest season.
The summary also indicates that it would likely REDUCE congestion, at least in some areas.
Suppose right now my 20-mile commute takes 35 minutes, so for 35 minutes I'm causing part of the congestion. I'm in your way from 8:00 to 8:35. The summary says self-driving cars will likely be able to drive much faster (perhaps in what used to be HOV lanes). If my car goes faster, that means the 20-mile commute takes less time. I'd only be on the road(and in your way) for 20 minutes rather than 35 minutes.
Do you have a source for that, or are you completely making things up and then believing your own fiction, as so many Slashdotters sem to do? I don't see anything like that in the terms and conditions myself.
That last sentence is bogus. Their bug-bounty program isn't invitation only. I have the submission form open in another tab right now. The only requirement that differs from any other is that if your first four reports are bogus, they may stop paying attention to you (known as a signal requirement) .
It sounds like these guys committed "patronizing a prostitute", which is a misdemeanor:
http://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/defa...
They've been charged with "promoting prostitution"( being a pimp), which a felony:
http://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/defa...
> Solyndra had two buildings: guess who is in one? Musk's SolarCity.
Guess who is losing shit tons of money? Musk's solar city. Investors gave Solar City a bunch of money, and now most of that money is gone. Not at all like Solyndra, right?
> Especially in the case of Solyndra: why did this company collapse? Because the cost of PV cells from their competitors declined faster than Solyndra anticipated.
That, and THEY NEVER MADE SOLAR CELLS. They kept saying that their amazing new solar technology was just around the corner, while they sent investor cash to politicians and received taxpayer money back. There's a reason the FBI raided their homes and offices, and it's not because they were too expensive.
You must be new here (earth). For most of my life, airport security was by private contractors hired by companies that want your business- airlines and airports. There wasn't a two hour wait and cost was far lower.
It's interesting to me that so many people guess what might happen if ______ (something that's happened a lot). We know exactly how private security works, we had it for decades. A lot like people who make predictions about the effect of ignoring the second amendment- we don't have to guess, gun bans have been done numerous times in numerous places and we know what the results have been.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/specialreports/solyndra-scandal/
Solar http://watchdog.org/212170/surprise-solar-liens/
electric is never a http://www.stockgumshoe.com/reviews/energy-advantage/the-greatest-leap-of-mankind-unlimited-free-energy-dr-kent-moors-picks-revealed/
scam
> what other browser doesn't take up space in your Android device's read-only operating system partition?
The default browser on all of my Android devices is called Browser. Chrome is an add-on.
ALL browsers other than whatever the OEM chooses to install "don't take up space in your Android device's read-only operating system partition". Every other browser can be installed on either your 16GB SD card or built-in flash storage. Only the OEM default applications have the DRAWBACK of taking up space on the read-only partition.
> Are you new here or do you legitimately not remember the IE browser tying issues?
Windows had over 90% market share measured at the consumer, and there was exactly ONE significant OEM who wasn't tied to a Windows contract. "Every computer company except one must follow our rules" sounds a lot like a monopoly.
Again, MOST people do not use Chrome. A monopoly is "all, or almost all".
> without (realistic) chance of competition.
Given that Chrome has less than half the market, there's pretty clearly not only a chance of competition, but actual competition.