And you are forgetting costs to teach your average secretary how to use Linux + New Software licenses + migration costs.
To the "average secretary" or business drone, Windows is a complete mystery, and Windows 8 is a jarring change. Moving them onto a Linux desktop actually means they end up having an easier time (because Linux UIs are simpler and cleaner than Windows these days), and they will even feel more familiar with the UI.
Yes, in practice, neither of the two options that I mentioned applies. I was making a simple economic argument under the assumptions that most people who warn of mass unemployment usually make, mainly to illustrate the point that if you impose certain regulations, you're likely to increase unemployment or decrease labor participation.
because it's my opinion that most people lack the intelligence to do anything that can't be done by a robot, or the jobs they can do, are not in high enough demand that we can give everyone a job
That reasoning doesn't work, for the same reason even a nation that is worse at everything than another nation still produces and exports.
But that doesn't work if you force employers to pay people more than they are worth and simultaneously engage in policies that keep the prices of essential goods like food and housing artificially high.
Please read up on the Lump of Labor Fallacy [wikipedia.org]. The idea that an economy has some fixed amount of work to do, and therefore robots displace humans, is nonsense. Economies expand in proportion to the resources available.
I didn't commit the "lump of labor fallacy". I specifically imposed the condition that standards of living remain constant, i.e. that the economy doesn't expand. If you're going to be pedantic, at least get it right.
Capitalism does not guarantee low unemployment. It doesn't guarantee a meritocracy.
Indeed, neither "capitalism" nor free markets (which is what you probably mean) guarantee much of anything. Markets crash, people get screwed, people cheat, etc. But they do that in any economic systems. Free markets are the best system known to man to limit those problems and give the best outcome to everybody, because screwed up as it may be at times, no other system actually works better.
created new jobs for people to apply skills that gave them value to the rich
There is nothing preventing you from putting money into the stock market, and you benefit just as much from it as "the rich". In fact, for many people, a large part of their assets are already in stocks because that's how their retirement is financed (even if they have a "defined benefit plan").
For those who don't already own capital, eventually the only jobs available to humans will be in the entertainment industry.
Yes, and the problem with that is... what? Once the cost of manufacturing falls to nearly zero through automation, people will be giving away the products of manufacturing as gimmicks to attract people to pay for things that are actually hard to produce, like good entertainment. Think movie theaters, game parks, and amusement parks with free foods and free gadgets.
In real life, I see most of the benefit of automation going to the owners/shareholders of the companies, and that money doesn't necessarily stay in the community where the factory is (or even in the same country).
Most businesses have a return on revenues of less than 10% and most have much less than that (you can look at other return-on-... figures if you like too). That tells you that the biggest beneficiary when automation lowers costs is the people buying the products. Furthermore, who do you think those mysterious "owners/shareholders" are? A large part of them are retirement funds. If you reduce benefits to "owners/shareholders", your retirement is in trouble, and cities and states holding pension obligations backed by investments start going bankrupt.
There's a cost of training each employee. Fewer workers working full time is cheaper in some ways than more workers working part time.
Training costs are negligible compared to the huge costs and risks imposed by governmental regulation: it's difficult and costly to fire people, there is a high fixed overhead for every employee no matter how much or how little they work, and there are all sorts of weird regulations that make it better to hire people for 38-40h workweeks.
The overwhelming attitude of technical jobs I have interviewed for lately has been "We expect you to work overtime because we do not want to hire too many people even though we are short-staffed
Yes, and they don't want to hire more people because there are high risks and costs associated with hiring and firing. Part of those are unavoidable (training etc.), but a large part of those costs is related to government regulation. In particular, if you make it hard to fire people, then companies will try to avoid hiring people.
This means that corporations can steal from individuals and make money from works that should be in the public domain via these "collective licensing" schemes, yet orphan works are still not usable by the public at large.
Collective licensing is one of the biggest frauds and rip-offs of the 20th century. These organizations should be abolished completely.
Bah, who cares about shape shifting mobile devices. What about flying mobile devices? I prototyped that yesterday when I knocked my tablet off the table. Flying mobile devices must be just around the corner!
Assume you have an economy consisting entirely of factory workers. Now, half the work gets automated. What happens? Everybody can continue to live at the same standard of living but work only half as much, or half of the people can be unemployed while the other half work full time and pay half their salary to support the unemployed. Which future we get depends entirely on the policies we adopt. Unfortunately, policies intended to help workers and help the unemployed are increasingly looking like they are bringing about the second of these futures.
This seems to be more of a publicity stunt for Cambrian Genomics and their "genome compiler" than anything else. The idea of using biological light sources has been around a long time, and it's starting to get practical.
As for this particular project, since they are just repeating a standard lab procedure (introducing luciferase), they can't really fail, and in the worst case, they can just tweak the system a bit using traditional techniques.
I use Ubuntu on a desktop. Usability and maintainability are better than Windows 8. If you need the functionality of a full OS, Ubuntu is still a good choice, despite the mess that Canonical is making of the UI.
But Android, iOS, and ChromeOS are much easier to install and use than any of the traditional desktop operating systems. They meet the requirements of 90% of users better, and at a lower cost.
I've been using Android on a Transformer for a while and it's decent. But the apps just aren't quite ready for it. Still, the overall experience is a little smoother than Windows 8 RT and there are tons more apps for it.
But Google is trying to push Google Chrome on laptop-like devices, and if they don't fix the issues with Android on laptops, it's just not going to work, since they control the market and they set the standards.
'We, as an industry, need a standard for auditing that allows us to reliably track and record authentication events.
That sounds like a security and privacy nightmare.
but impossible to get users to create different passwords for each site they visit. We've tried education, and it's failed.
Perhaps users just don't give a f*ck whether their account on some third rate e-commerce marketing site gets compromised?
If I were to create an account on LivingSocial, it would get my "disposable" password, the password for accounts I just don't care about at all. Only gradually do accounts and services migrate into the category where I bother remembering a specific and hard password for them.
Well, if Microsoft doesn't like the taxes it has to pay there, it can easily go elsewhere.
They did: they opened an office in Nevada and are selling the software from there. How is (not) paying taxes in Nevada any more arbitrary than paying taxes in Washington? The majority of Microsoft's employees aren't located in Washington State.
Why should Washington State get 1.5% of royalties from Microsoft? What costs do royalties impose on the state? What is the state providing in return that contributes to those royalties?
Why not some other state? Tons of people around the world have contributed to Microsoft's products and royalties; why shouldn't the places they live get a cut? And if it's as arbitrary as it is, what's wrong if Microsoft arbitrarily moves its location to Nevada or anywhere else?
Remember that that money is going to be used either as a business expense, or it is going to be taxed as capital gains or salaries anyway.
If you believe in God, you believe in an invisible omnipresent, omniscient spirit that can talk to you and make things happen for you in the world around you. How is that not a mental illness?
So instead of healing these people, it sounds like they're just substituting one mental illness for another, albeit one that may be a bit less unpleasant to live with.
Please cite the source of the information that devaluations of less than 2:1 are not significant.
You started this thread with the fairy tale that American ills are due to imports and a "strong dollar". As soon as you flesh out that fairy tale with some data and economic theory, then I can tell you more specifically where your errors are.
First, there is no such thing as the "absolute value" of a currency. But if you mean the exchange rate. then your statement is the trade economics equivalent of 2+2=5. Exchange rates (and inflation which changes the real exchange rate) don't affect trade? Wanna buy a car made in Japan if the yen/dollar doubles?
Probably the reason why you fail to understand the second point is because you don't even understand what the term "absolute value" (as opposed to "relative value") means in science. Trade in the world doesn't depend on the absolute (or nominal) value of currencies. You can add a zero to every currency in the world and nothing happens. In order to make any kind of change, you have to change the relative value of currency, the exchange rates, differently between different countries.
Which, since we're talking about foreign debt, means by virtue of a simple and undisputed accounting identity that the trade deficit disappears. No kidding - that's what I was talking about.
"Trade deficits" (i.e., exchanging goods for promises of future repayment) don't "disappear" just because you use different numbers to write them down. Short term, you can get rid of some old debt by inflating it away, but then people will either write contracts taking into account the new level of inflation and the new exchange rates, or they write contracts that require future repayment in something other than US currency. The only way you can get people not to exchange goods for promises of future repayment is to screw up trust, political stability, and the economy so badly that others don't believe they will get repaid in the future.
You obviously don't know anything about biology, especially microbiology.
The human genome has about 3 billion base pairs, and about 25000 genes. That means that the blueprint for a human is objectively much, much smaller than for a 747 and all its parts.
Why do you think it takes medical students years before they are qualified to be doctors?
Because there are lots of things that can go wrong with the human body because, you know, it's not designed.
In human experience, all laws originate in a mind, a human mind. Why could the laws of physics not have originated in a mind far greater than we can even imagine? What is it that is preventing you and so many others from acknowledging that there is a Creator of you and everything else?
Because there is neither evidence nor need for a creator. And if there were a creator, he'd have to be a complete moron, and he'd certainly not give a f*ck about humans based on his past (in)action.
You think the French are an example of an impoverished people?
Not in absolute terms, but they certainly are a lot poorer than we are.
You're 30% is also laughable. Do you think you can make a scary argument by pulling an absurd number out of your posterior? Do you think anyone will believe that's the result of calculation or estimate?
Actually, it's a pretty conservative estimate; if Chinese and European imports double in price (which is what any significant devaluation of the US dollar means), that's roughly like a 30% pay cut for everybody in the US, even if the economy doesn't tank. If it does, it just gets worse.
Moreover, how do you think we're ever going to pay our foreign debts if they keep increasing because of the trade deficit?
People are going to let us borrow as long as they believe they can get the money back, and neither the absolute value of our currency nor the rate of inflation make any significant difference in the long term. The only two ways of stopping borrowing is to (1) stop borrowing, or (2) screw up our economy so badly that the rest of the world doesn't trust us anymore.
Even if it's true, that doesn't mean US salaries should go down, it means that the exchange rate for the USD should go down. We have a persistent trade deficit, and the only reason it's not as bad as a few years ago is that the economy is in the toilet. A lower exchange value for the dollar would fix the trade deficit.
Yeah, and what a better way of ensuring American prosperity than effectively giving everybody a 30% paycut! If we keep doing that, soon we might reach the glorious level of prosperity of the French, or if we really try, the Cubans!
Look at the origin of our strong dollar policy w/ Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin in the 90's
Democrats and Republicans both share in the delusion that they can actually make policy. Well, I admit they can to the degree that they can destroy confidence in the US government and the US economy, and that would, I suppose, make the dollar "weak" as a side-effect, but not in a good way.
Slashdot Mirror
To the "average secretary" or business drone, Windows is a complete mystery, and Windows 8 is a jarring change. Moving them onto a Linux desktop actually means they end up having an easier time (because Linux UIs are simpler and cleaner than Windows these days), and they will even feel more familiar with the UI.
A government run, patented, closed source electronic currency = do not want.
There's nothing "theoretically ideal" about it, that's the way the economy actually works.
Yes, in practice, neither of the two options that I mentioned applies. I was making a simple economic argument under the assumptions that most people who warn of mass unemployment usually make, mainly to illustrate the point that if you impose certain regulations, you're likely to increase unemployment or decrease labor participation.
That reasoning doesn't work, for the same reason even a nation that is worse at everything than another nation still produces and exports.
But that doesn't work if you force employers to pay people more than they are worth and simultaneously engage in policies that keep the prices of essential goods like food and housing artificially high.
I didn't commit the "lump of labor fallacy". I specifically imposed the condition that standards of living remain constant, i.e. that the economy doesn't expand. If you're going to be pedantic, at least get it right.
Indeed, neither "capitalism" nor free markets (which is what you probably mean) guarantee much of anything. Markets crash, people get screwed, people cheat, etc. But they do that in any economic systems. Free markets are the best system known to man to limit those problems and give the best outcome to everybody, because screwed up as it may be at times, no other system actually works better.
There is nothing preventing you from putting money into the stock market, and you benefit just as much from it as "the rich". In fact, for many people, a large part of their assets are already in stocks because that's how their retirement is financed (even if they have a "defined benefit plan").
Yes, and the problem with that is ... what? Once the cost of manufacturing falls to nearly zero through automation, people will be giving away the products of manufacturing as gimmicks to attract people to pay for things that are actually hard to produce, like good entertainment. Think movie theaters, game parks, and amusement parks with free foods and free gadgets.
Most businesses have a return on revenues of less than 10% and most have much less than that (you can look at other return-on-... figures if you like too). That tells you that the biggest beneficiary when automation lowers costs is the people buying the products. Furthermore, who do you think those mysterious "owners/shareholders" are? A large part of them are retirement funds. If you reduce benefits to "owners/shareholders", your retirement is in trouble, and cities and states holding pension obligations backed by investments start going bankrupt.
Training costs are negligible compared to the huge costs and risks imposed by governmental regulation: it's difficult and costly to fire people, there is a high fixed overhead for every employee no matter how much or how little they work, and there are all sorts of weird regulations that make it better to hire people for 38-40h workweeks.
Yes, and they don't want to hire more people because there are high risks and costs associated with hiring and firing. Part of those are unavoidable (training etc.), but a large part of those costs is related to government regulation. In particular, if you make it hard to fire people, then companies will try to avoid hiring people.
Dude, you don't understand: their pay doesn't have to stay the same because the stuff they want costs much less.
This means that corporations can steal from individuals and make money from works that should be in the public domain via these "collective licensing" schemes, yet orphan works are still not usable by the public at large.
Collective licensing is one of the biggest frauds and rip-offs of the 20th century. These organizations should be abolished completely.
Bah, who cares about shape shifting mobile devices. What about flying mobile devices? I prototyped that yesterday when I knocked my tablet off the table. Flying mobile devices must be just around the corner!
Assume you have an economy consisting entirely of factory workers. Now, half the work gets automated. What happens? Everybody can continue to live at the same standard of living but work only half as much, or half of the people can be unemployed while the other half work full time and pay half their salary to support the unemployed. Which future we get depends entirely on the policies we adopt. Unfortunately, policies intended to help workers and help the unemployed are increasingly looking like they are bringing about the second of these futures.
This seems to be more of a publicity stunt for Cambrian Genomics and their "genome compiler" than anything else. The idea of using biological light sources has been around a long time, and it's starting to get practical.
As for this particular project, since they are just repeating a standard lab procedure (introducing luciferase), they can't really fail, and in the worst case, they can just tweak the system a bit using traditional techniques.
I use Ubuntu on a desktop. Usability and maintainability are better than Windows 8. If you need the functionality of a full OS, Ubuntu is still a good choice, despite the mess that Canonical is making of the UI.
But Android, iOS, and ChromeOS are much easier to install and use than any of the traditional desktop operating systems. They meet the requirements of 90% of users better, and at a lower cost.
Not only do you get a shell
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jackpal.androidterm
you get a complete command line based environment with compiler, editor, etc.:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spartacusrex.spartacuside
It doesn't require jailbreaking or root, and it's even free.
I've been using Android on a Transformer for a while and it's decent. But the apps just aren't quite ready for it. Still, the overall experience is a little smoother than Windows 8 RT and there are tons more apps for it.
But Google is trying to push Google Chrome on laptop-like devices, and if they don't fix the issues with Android on laptops, it's just not going to work, since they control the market and they set the standards.
That sounds like a security and privacy nightmare.
Perhaps users just don't give a f*ck whether their account on some third rate e-commerce marketing site gets compromised?
If I were to create an account on LivingSocial, it would get my "disposable" password, the password for accounts I just don't care about at all. Only gradually do accounts and services migrate into the category where I bother remembering a specific and hard password for them.
They did: they opened an office in Nevada and are selling the software from there. How is (not) paying taxes in Nevada any more arbitrary than paying taxes in Washington? The majority of Microsoft's employees aren't located in Washington State.
Why should Washington State get 1.5% of royalties from Microsoft? What costs do royalties impose on the state? What is the state providing in return that contributes to those royalties?
Why not some other state? Tons of people around the world have contributed to Microsoft's products and royalties; why shouldn't the places they live get a cut? And if it's as arbitrary as it is, what's wrong if Microsoft arbitrarily moves its location to Nevada or anywhere else?
Remember that that money is going to be used either as a business expense, or it is going to be taxed as capital gains or salaries anyway.
If you believe in God, you believe in an invisible omnipresent, omniscient spirit that can talk to you and make things happen for you in the world around you. How is that not a mental illness?
So instead of healing these people, it sounds like they're just substituting one mental illness for another, albeit one that may be a bit less unpleasant to live with.
You started this thread with the fairy tale that American ills are due to imports and a "strong dollar". As soon as you flesh out that fairy tale with some data and economic theory, then I can tell you more specifically where your errors are.
Probably the reason why you fail to understand the second point is because you don't even understand what the term "absolute value" (as opposed to "relative value") means in science. Trade in the world doesn't depend on the absolute (or nominal) value of currencies. You can add a zero to every currency in the world and nothing happens. In order to make any kind of change, you have to change the relative value of currency, the exchange rates, differently between different countries.
"Trade deficits" (i.e., exchanging goods for promises of future repayment) don't "disappear" just because you use different numbers to write them down. Short term, you can get rid of some old debt by inflating it away, but then people will either write contracts taking into account the new level of inflation and the new exchange rates, or they write contracts that require future repayment in something other than US currency. The only way you can get people not to exchange goods for promises of future repayment is to screw up trust, political stability, and the economy so badly that others don't believe they will get repaid in the future.
The human genome has about 3 billion base pairs, and about 25000 genes. That means that the blueprint for a human is objectively much, much smaller than for a 747 and all its parts.
Because there are lots of things that can go wrong with the human body because, you know, it's not designed.
Because there is neither evidence nor need for a creator. And if there were a creator, he'd have to be a complete moron, and he'd certainly not give a f*ck about humans based on his past (in)action.
Not in absolute terms, but they certainly are a lot poorer than we are.
Actually, it's a pretty conservative estimate; if Chinese and European imports double in price (which is what any significant devaluation of the US dollar means), that's roughly like a 30% pay cut for everybody in the US, even if the economy doesn't tank. If it does, it just gets worse.
People are going to let us borrow as long as they believe they can get the money back, and neither the absolute value of our currency nor the rate of inflation make any significant difference in the long term. The only two ways of stopping borrowing is to (1) stop borrowing, or (2) screw up our economy so badly that the rest of the world doesn't trust us anymore.
Yeah, and what a better way of ensuring American prosperity than effectively giving everybody a 30% paycut! If we keep doing that, soon we might reach the glorious level of prosperity of the French, or if we really try, the Cubans!
Democrats and Republicans both share in the delusion that they can actually make policy. Well, I admit they can to the degree that they can destroy confidence in the US government and the US economy, and that would, I suppose, make the dollar "weak" as a side-effect, but not in a good way.