In physics you can do a bunch of work to push a large weight to a high place. You have converted chemical energy in your body into mechanical potential energy. When you allow the weight to go back down you convert the mechanical potential energy to kinetic energy that can be used for other things (with some of it lost to heat)
If you do mental work to make a computer, you now have potential to some things you couldn't do before. But the ability to do these things is not "used up" in the case of the energy. Once you invent something you can use this knowledge ad infinitum for no extra cost. Also unlike the case of energy, when you destroy this potential (smashing all your inventions and forgetting your discoveries) you don;t get the work you did back like you did when you push a heavy thing up to a high place.
Our wealth in terms of raw resources may be fixed (for the time being) on earth, but the utility that we can extract from these resources is exponentially increasing with the advance of technology.
Shouldn't the fruits of labor to be considered wealth? Someone who has spent the whole day cleaning his house is surely wealthier than if he has spent all day playing video games (because he now has a clean house rather than a dirty house). OF course this person had to sacrifice leisure time in order to make this wealth. If he had a robot he would only need to spend money on electricity to power the robot.
A world where robots perform the labor is a world where you have more free time to spend on leisure, or making art, or inventing things. Every hour you spend doing a skill-less manual job that a robot could do is an hour wasted (unless you derive pleasure from doing it).
Of course wealth can be created and destroyed in addition to being transferred. There is far more wealth now in the world than at any point in history. I am not talking about gold. I am talking about knowledge. We can't create matter/energy, but we can rearrange matter/energy in ways where they are far more useful to us. We can gain knowledge that allows us to get more of what we want with less effort.
Similarly, if you smash a brand new $5000 computer, you have now just lost $5000 of wealth. You still have all the matter. You have converted some chemical potential energy in your body into heat. But this new configuration of matter and energy (i.e. broken computer) has much less utility. And it will cost much more effort ($5000 worth) to make/buy a new one.
Energy is actually quite similar. While you cannot create or destroy energy, it can be lost to entropy. It's still there, you just can't ever use it again. The "heat death of the universe" describes the situation where all useable energy in the universe has been converted to heat.
How many hours must you work to afford to buy a bed from ikea?
How many hours would it take for you to make your own bed?
How much does it cost to ship a package to L.A.?
How much does it cost to ship a package to Siberia?
How much does it cost for a megawatt*hour of electricity in L.A.?
How much does it cost for a megawatt*hour of electricity in Siberia?
Graft Greed and Corruption have existed for all of human history. They existed back when the largest human cities were smaller than a small town today. Do you really think rural areas have less greed and corruption per capita? All you need is 1 guy in a town of 10 people to be greedy for 10% of the town to be greedy.
If farmers have to pay for everything with no cost burden sharing, do you know what happens? First, in order to afford Internet, water, electricity, garbage collection, sewer, etc. they have to raise the prices on what they sell.
Yes that's what *should* happen. Bringing food from the rural parts of the country and having the workers live in areas without luxuries *is* expensive and these expenses should be paid by the consumers that consume these goods.
This means that all these resources that cities depend on are suddenly inflated. End result? Either cities suffer mass inflation, or they get their resources from somewhere else that doesn't have the same expenses. If they do the second, the people in their area who WERE supplying those resources are forced to close up shop and move to the city, decreasing choice and diversity, and also shifting municipal dependency on to people who are willing to subsist at a significantly lower standard of living than the people they're supporting. This never ends well in the long run.
If people are willing to provide the food for a low cost, then that is the market cost of production. If we decide to pay local farmers more money to do the job instead, all we are doing is redistributing wealth from the consumer and the foreign farmer to the American farmer. I don't see a good reason why we should do that.
The truth is that people in general always have to pay the true cost of what is consumed... the cost can be deferred, or shifted on to a minority group, but the cost still exists. Under the free market, countries willing to live at a lower standard of living will be equalized with the consumer countries, until the standards of living balance -- that's how the global economy works.
A pretty definition of wealth is that you're potential standard of living is higher. You can increase wealth by producing and you decrease your wealth by consuming. We are transferring wealth to 3rd world countries by consuming the cheap labor they produce. The newly industrialized world is catching up by producing more than they consume.
We can slow down this equalization by only buying American goods and in effect lowering our own consumption/production ratio, but why would we want to do that? That's like a doctor spending all his time cleaning his house. He should spend his money on a housekeeper. She could use the money and his skills can be put to better use. Even if you were a socialist and believed the doctor and the housekeeper should have equal standard of living, housekeeping is still a less valuable skill (it requires less effort to develop), and the doctor should still be using his time practicing medicine while housekeepers clean his house.
It doesn't even matter much because this era of cheap labor is about to end. Not only are countries like China raising their standard of living, but increase of automation will cause the price of skillless labor to nearly 0. Soon we will not need people to perform any tasks except those that require intelligence.
in the US it used to be that about half the people were farmers and each farmer could feed about 6 people. Now the number of farmers is like 1-2% and each farmer can feed like 200-300 people. There are tractors driving themselves with GPS. Farming has become 2 orders of magnitude more efficient. How long will it be before farming is an order of magnitude more efficient than it is now, and farmers can feed 2000-3000 people per farmer?
Not only can we share the wealth, we can also just make more wealth through robot slaves, and have a bigger pie from which to divide.
So like â16,000 per farmer? I get almost that much in tax breaks for having a mortgage in the US. While I think doing away with all these subsidies and taxes that are not for offsetting externalities, I am not going to send my tax break money back to the government because I don't believe those tax breaks should exist.
Well when I said "benefits of living in a metropolis", I was referring to the *benefits* not the disadvantages.
Furthermore, not everyone living in a city has all the disadvantages you described. I live in the outskirts of San Diego. I live in a 2 story house. I have green grass and trees in my front and back yards. I can't really hear the traffic, but I can hear airplanes. I have windows open all the time. I don;t get any fumes. San Diego does but a bit hot in the summer, but I thought that was a good thing.
What are the benefits of living in the rural areas? Attacks from wild animals and lack of entertainment?
I never said it was done by individuals. A group of individuals can form a cooperative and take on big projects like the ones described in the article.
The government itself is a cooperative formed by it's citizens. Ideally this cooperative would be working for the best interest of it's members, but as Bengie pointed out, this government cooperative would actually be profiting from it's members.
If this profit is significant enough, then it makes financial sense to form a cooperative and perform the work instead of having the government do it. Lets say the government was going to use this surplus of money to build a nice park in the town. If you want this money to be spent on the park, then everything is good. If you don't then your money is being spent on things you don't want.
It all boils down to whether you think you can spend your own money or whether a cooperative thinks they can spend their collective money better than a different cooperative consisting of a different set of people (the government).
And before cable there were fox affiliate stations that had news programs. This is different than "Fox News Channel", a cable channel, that was created in 1996 and I am pretty sure is what tibit was referring to.
There aren't that many people in rural america. By definition it's the part with less people. The last census indicated that only 16% of Americans live in rural areas. Also, they already have internet, they just don't have internet that is as fast for the price as in the city on average. You don't need fast internet to read a newspaper or Wikipedia article.
In order for rural people to get Fox News, it means they have basic cable or satellite TV. Fox News is only 1 television station. I know people who only watch Fox News. They *could* watch other news stations, they choose not to. Also most people in rural areas are willing to pay high prices for fast internet (and do). They *should* pay these high prices because it costs a lot of money to create good internet infrastructure, and they are choosing to live in areas without it.
Ideally fast internet in big cities should be an incentive to move to the city. Urbanization is one of the few positive forces in a world with an exponentially increasing population and CO2 emissions.
So if the state would be making a lot of money by bringing internet to rural areas, that means the people living in these rural areas would save a lot of money by doing it themselves. The question is whether this money does more good in the hands of the residents of these towns or in the general fund of whichever level of government.
In all seriousness why do we want access in rural areas to be subsidized? If it is expensive to bring access to these places, why shouldn't it be the ones who want it to pay for it?
Economies of scale is one of the benefits of living in an urban area. You get cheap internet, cheap water, cheap electricity, cheap garbage collection, cheap sewer, etc. When you live out in the boonies the land is cheap, but you don;t get the benefits of living in a metropolis.
If you want to live in the forest, that's awesome. If you want high speed internet in the forest, then I support allowing you to have the fewest restrictions possible to allow you to pay for that getting that infrastructure yourself. I don't think it's fair to subsidize rural internet costs anymore than it would be fair to subsidize rent in urban because it's "too expensive". The free market decides what things cost, and we should be trying to achieve a free market (externalities accounted for) so that everyone pays the true cost of what they consume (people, corporations, everybody).
1. I was being sarcastic
2. I said the private cooperative was a *perversion* of the crony capitalist system (i.e. it's not crony capitalism, like it should be/s)
You could just lobby your legislators to pass a law requiring ISPs to provide sparse areas with cheap broadband access, effectively subsidizing the internet costs of a few by raising rate on everyone else. I mean that's how government works right? Everyone lobbies their legislature for special favors until everyone has special favors and everyone is paying for everyone else's stuff in addition to providing much needed jobs for lawyers, lobbyists, politicians, regulators, etc.
Forming a private cooperative to build their own internet infrastructure seems like a perversion of the crony capitalist system that is the foundation of western society.
OK I see. So when you said "effectively analog" you were talking about in terms of output quality, assuming perfect quality of analog medium.
I don't necessarily associate either analog or digital with high quality. There are good and bad quality analog representations of data, and good and bad quality digital representations of data. This is why I was confused by your description of making digital quality good enough to be effectively analog.
IP over anything is a purely digital communication system. IP is a digital protocol. You can send other things like analog audio over your copper wires if you want, but that isn't IP. CD were designed to store digital information. If *anything* can be considered a digital medium than CDs are a digital medium. Copper wires in general have historically been used to send both digital and analog information. I think people still use CATX for analog phone lines depending on where they are plugged in. I know I use some of them them for that in my house.
Yes CDs are digital. They are a medium for storing digital data. If you draw a picture on a CD with a sharpie, ok now it's analog.
The physical mechanism for how data is read from the digital medium doesn't matter. What do you think a USB drive does that is so magical? It is just transmitting electrical signals via analog voltage differences.
You can use a radio to transmit/receive analog or digitally encoded data. In the case of WIFI this data is digital.
A cassette tape with analog encoded data on it is analog. A cassette tape with a digital computer game on it is digital. Printed text is digital. Braille is digital. Smoke signals are digital. Morse code is digital.
You seem to be confusing the concepts of digital and analog with something else like data integrity or whether something is electronic or not.
Lossy just means that when you converted from one digital format to another, some information was lost and now you can't go back anymore. You can convert song on a cd to an mp3, but you lose some information. You can convert that mp3 back to a format that can go on a CD, but it is now different.
If you had used a lossless encoding (e.g. flac) instead of mp3, you could go back to cd without any loss of information. A simple form of lossless encoding would be like putting a word document in a zip file. You have changed the data, but you can still get your original encoding of the information (i.e. the word document) back from the zip file.
Imagine if you had another kind of zip file that could encode your documents even smaller, but when you decode (i.e. unzip) your documents, all the fonts types sizes bols/italics/underlining were gone. That would be lossy encoding because you have lost some information that you can't get back.
The fact that there are data integrity issues with CDs does not mean they are analog. Every digital medium has some >0% error rate, it just happens to be uncomfortably high for CDs compared to other electronic digital media. Whether something is digital has to do with how the data is encoded. Other digital systems include alphabet, braille, smoke signals, Morse code, etc.
Things that are digital can be reproduced using a finite number of bits of information. In the same way that you can talk about how many bits of information are on a CD, you can talk about how many bits of information are in a Morse code transmission or a smoke signal.
How many bits of information are in a live performance at a concert? Well it depends how you are doing the analog to digital conversion (i.e. ADC). Are you using a sound recorder? or a hi def camera? or just translating the lyrics to Morse code?
In a physical sense, everything is governed by quantum mechanics, and therefore the whole universe can be represented by some (albeit astronomically large amount of qubits of information). Therefore everything is ultimately digital. And in fact quantum computers are using the most basic units of the universe (e.g. electrons, photons, etc) to perform computation.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess a better way of saying it is...
In physics you can do a bunch of work to push a large weight to a high place. You have converted chemical energy in your body into mechanical potential energy. When you allow the weight to go back down you convert the mechanical potential energy to kinetic energy that can be used for other things (with some of it lost to heat)
If you do mental work to make a computer, you now have potential to some things you couldn't do before. But the ability to do these things is not "used up" in the case of the energy. Once you invent something you can use this knowledge ad infinitum for no extra cost. Also unlike the case of energy, when you destroy this potential (smashing all your inventions and forgetting your discoveries) you don;t get the work you did back like you did when you push a heavy thing up to a high place.
Our wealth in terms of raw resources may be fixed (for the time being) on earth, but the utility that we can extract from these resources is exponentially increasing with the advance of technology.
Shouldn't the fruits of labor to be considered wealth? Someone who has spent the whole day cleaning his house is surely wealthier than if he has spent all day playing video games (because he now has a clean house rather than a dirty house). OF course this person had to sacrifice leisure time in order to make this wealth. If he had a robot he would only need to spend money on electricity to power the robot.
A world where robots perform the labor is a world where you have more free time to spend on leisure, or making art, or inventing things. Every hour you spend doing a skill-less manual job that a robot could do is an hour wasted (unless you derive pleasure from doing it).
Of course wealth can be created and destroyed in addition to being transferred. There is far more wealth now in the world than at any point in history. I am not talking about gold. I am talking about knowledge. We can't create matter/energy, but we can rearrange matter/energy in ways where they are far more useful to us. We can gain knowledge that allows us to get more of what we want with less effort.
Similarly, if you smash a brand new $5000 computer, you have now just lost $5000 of wealth. You still have all the matter. You have converted some chemical potential energy in your body into heat. But this new configuration of matter and energy (i.e. broken computer) has much less utility. And it will cost much more effort ($5000 worth) to make/buy a new one.
Energy is actually quite similar. While you cannot create or destroy energy, it can be lost to entropy. It's still there, you just can't ever use it again. The "heat death of the universe" describes the situation where all useable energy in the universe has been converted to heat.
How many hours must you work to afford to buy a bed from ikea?
How many hours would it take for you to make your own bed?
How much does it cost to ship a package to L.A.?
How much does it cost to ship a package to Siberia?
How much does it cost for a megawatt*hour of electricity in L.A.?
How much does it cost for a megawatt*hour of electricity in Siberia?
Graft Greed and Corruption have existed for all of human history. They existed back when the largest human cities were smaller than a small town today. Do you really think rural areas have less greed and corruption per capita? All you need is 1 guy in a town of 10 people to be greedy for 10% of the town to be greedy.
If farmers have to pay for everything with no cost burden sharing, do you know what happens? First, in order to afford Internet, water, electricity, garbage collection, sewer, etc. they have to raise the prices on what they sell.
Yes that's what *should* happen. Bringing food from the rural parts of the country and having the workers live in areas without luxuries *is* expensive and these expenses should be paid by the consumers that consume these goods.
This means that all these resources that cities depend on are suddenly inflated. End result? Either cities suffer mass inflation, or they get their resources from somewhere else that doesn't have the same expenses. If they do the second, the people in their area who WERE supplying those resources are forced to close up shop and move to the city, decreasing choice and diversity, and also shifting municipal dependency on to people who are willing to subsist at a significantly lower standard of living than the people they're supporting. This never ends well in the long run.
If people are willing to provide the food for a low cost, then that is the market cost of production. If we decide to pay local farmers more money to do the job instead, all we are doing is redistributing wealth from the consumer and the foreign farmer to the American farmer. I don't see a good reason why we should do that.
The truth is that people in general always have to pay the true cost of what is consumed... the cost can be deferred, or shifted on to a minority group, but the cost still exists. Under the free market, countries willing to live at a lower standard of living will be equalized with the consumer countries, until the standards of living balance -- that's how the global economy works.
A pretty definition of wealth is that you're potential standard of living is higher. You can increase wealth by producing and you decrease your wealth by consuming. We are transferring wealth to 3rd world countries by consuming the cheap labor they produce. The newly industrialized world is catching up by producing more than they consume.
We can slow down this equalization by only buying American goods and in effect lowering our own consumption/production ratio, but why would we want to do that? That's like a doctor spending all his time cleaning his house. He should spend his money on a housekeeper. She could use the money and his skills can be put to better use. Even if you were a socialist and believed the doctor and the housekeeper should have equal standard of living, housekeeping is still a less valuable skill (it requires less effort to develop), and the doctor should still be using his time practicing medicine while housekeepers clean his house.
It doesn't even matter much because this era of cheap labor is about to end. Not only are countries like China raising their standard of living, but increase of automation will cause the price of skillless labor to nearly 0. Soon we will not need people to perform any tasks except those that require intelligence.
in the US it used to be that about half the people were farmers and each farmer could feed about 6 people. Now the number of farmers is like 1-2% and each farmer can feed like 200-300 people. There are tractors driving themselves with GPS. Farming has become 2 orders of magnitude more efficient. How long will it be before farming is an order of magnitude more efficient than it is now, and farmers can feed 2000-3000 people per farmer?
Not only can we share the wealth, we can also just make more wealth through robot slaves, and have a bigger pie from which to divide.
So like â16,000 per farmer? I get almost that much in tax breaks for having a mortgage in the US. While I think doing away with all these subsidies and taxes that are not for offsetting externalities, I am not going to send my tax break money back to the government because I don't believe those tax breaks should exist.
Well when I said "benefits of living in a metropolis", I was referring to the *benefits* not the disadvantages.
Furthermore, not everyone living in a city has all the disadvantages you described. I live in the outskirts of San Diego. I live in a 2 story house. I have green grass and trees in my front and back yards. I can't really hear the traffic, but I can hear airplanes. I have windows open all the time. I don;t get any fumes. San Diego does but a bit hot in the summer, but I thought that was a good thing.
What are the benefits of living in the rural areas? Attacks from wild animals and lack of entertainment?
"the government ALREADY forces phone companies to provide rural service"
Every government does this?
I never said it was done by individuals. A group of individuals can form a cooperative and take on big projects like the ones described in the article.
The government itself is a cooperative formed by it's citizens. Ideally this cooperative would be working for the best interest of it's members, but as Bengie pointed out, this government cooperative would actually be profiting from it's members.
If this profit is significant enough, then it makes financial sense to form a cooperative and perform the work instead of having the government do it. Lets say the government was going to use this surplus of money to build a nice park in the town. If you want this money to be spent on the park, then everything is good. If you don't then your money is being spent on things you don't want.
It all boils down to whether you think you can spend your own money or whether a cooperative thinks they can spend their collective money better than a different cooperative consisting of a different set of people (the government).
ok, before fox news was on cable, not before cable existed.
So internet to rural areas need to be subsidized to help them make more money? Why don't we just cut out the middle man and send them a check.
And before cable there were fox affiliate stations that had news programs. This is different than "Fox News Channel", a cable channel, that was created in 1996 and I am pretty sure is what tibit was referring to.
There aren't that many people in rural america. By definition it's the part with less people. The last census indicated that only 16% of Americans live in rural areas. Also, they already have internet, they just don't have internet that is as fast for the price as in the city on average. You don't need fast internet to read a newspaper or Wikipedia article.
In order for rural people to get Fox News, it means they have basic cable or satellite TV. Fox News is only 1 television station. I know people who only watch Fox News. They *could* watch other news stations, they choose not to. Also most people in rural areas are willing to pay high prices for fast internet (and do). They *should* pay these high prices because it costs a lot of money to create good internet infrastructure, and they are choosing to live in areas without it.
Ideally fast internet in big cities should be an incentive to move to the city. Urbanization is one of the few positive forces in a world with an exponentially increasing population and CO2 emissions.
So if the state would be making a lot of money by bringing internet to rural areas, that means the people living in these rural areas would save a lot of money by doing it themselves. The question is whether this money does more good in the hands of the residents of these towns or in the general fund of whichever level of government.
When you refer to "the government" in a context where multiple countries are involved, it doesn't make any sense.
In all seriousness why do we want access in rural areas to be subsidized? If it is expensive to bring access to these places, why shouldn't it be the ones who want it to pay for it?
Economies of scale is one of the benefits of living in an urban area. You get cheap internet, cheap water, cheap electricity, cheap garbage collection, cheap sewer, etc. When you live out in the boonies the land is cheap, but you don;t get the benefits of living in a metropolis.
If you want to live in the forest, that's awesome. If you want high speed internet in the forest, then I support allowing you to have the fewest restrictions possible to allow you to pay for that getting that infrastructure yourself. I don't think it's fair to subsidize rural internet costs anymore than it would be fair to subsidize rent in urban because it's "too expensive". The free market decides what things cost, and we should be trying to achieve a free market (externalities accounted for) so that everyone pays the true cost of what they consume (people, corporations, everybody).
1. I was being sarcastic 2. This was a story about British farmers and you are talking about the US government and American companies.
1. I was being sarcastic 2. I said the private cooperative was a *perversion* of the crony capitalist system (i.e. it's not crony capitalism, like it should be /s)
Must I add /s to everything?
You could just lobby your legislators to pass a law requiring ISPs to provide sparse areas with cheap broadband access, effectively subsidizing the internet costs of a few by raising rate on everyone else. I mean that's how government works right? Everyone lobbies their legislature for special favors until everyone has special favors and everyone is paying for everyone else's stuff in addition to providing much needed jobs for lawyers, lobbyists, politicians, regulators, etc.
Forming a private cooperative to build their own internet infrastructure seems like a perversion of the crony capitalist system that is the foundation of western society.
OK I see. So when you said "effectively analog" you were talking about in terms of output quality, assuming perfect quality of analog medium.
I don't necessarily associate either analog or digital with high quality. There are good and bad quality analog representations of data, and good and bad quality digital representations of data. This is why I was confused by your description of making digital quality good enough to be effectively analog.
Can you provide an example?
IP over anything is a purely digital communication system. IP is a digital protocol. You can send other things like analog audio over your copper wires if you want, but that isn't IP. CD were designed to store digital information. If *anything* can be considered a digital medium than CDs are a digital medium. Copper wires in general have historically been used to send both digital and analog information. I think people still use CATX for analog phone lines depending on where they are plugged in. I know I use some of them them for that in my house.
Yes CDs are digital. They are a medium for storing digital data. If you draw a picture on a CD with a sharpie, ok now it's analog.
The physical mechanism for how data is read from the digital medium doesn't matter. What do you think a USB drive does that is so magical? It is just transmitting electrical signals via analog voltage differences.
You can use a radio to transmit/receive analog or digitally encoded data. In the case of WIFI this data is digital.
A cassette tape with analog encoded data on it is analog. A cassette tape with a digital computer game on it is digital. Printed text is digital. Braille is digital. Smoke signals are digital. Morse code is digital.
You seem to be confusing the concepts of digital and analog with something else like data integrity or whether something is electronic or not.
Lossy just means that when you converted from one digital format to another, some information was lost and now you can't go back anymore. You can convert song on a cd to an mp3, but you lose some information. You can convert that mp3 back to a format that can go on a CD, but it is now different.
If you had used a lossless encoding (e.g. flac) instead of mp3, you could go back to cd without any loss of information. A simple form of lossless encoding would be like putting a word document in a zip file. You have changed the data, but you can still get your original encoding of the information (i.e. the word document) back from the zip file.
Imagine if you had another kind of zip file that could encode your documents even smaller, but when you decode (i.e. unzip) your documents, all the fonts types sizes bols/italics/underlining were gone. That would be lossy encoding because you have lost some information that you can't get back.
The fact that there are data integrity issues with CDs does not mean they are analog. Every digital medium has some >0% error rate, it just happens to be uncomfortably high for CDs compared to other electronic digital media. Whether something is digital has to do with how the data is encoded. Other digital systems include alphabet, braille, smoke signals, Morse code, etc.
Things that are digital can be reproduced using a finite number of bits of information. In the same way that you can talk about how many bits of information are on a CD, you can talk about how many bits of information are in a Morse code transmission or a smoke signal.
How many bits of information are in a live performance at a concert? Well it depends how you are doing the analog to digital conversion (i.e. ADC). Are you using a sound recorder? or a hi def camera? or just translating the lyrics to Morse code?
In a physical sense, everything is governed by quantum mechanics, and therefore the whole universe can be represented by some (albeit astronomically large amount of qubits of information). Therefore everything is ultimately digital. And in fact quantum computers are using the most basic units of the universe (e.g. electrons, photons, etc) to perform computation.