He's a shill because he's phrasing his criticism of the president (in the middle of a conversation about the governor of New Jersey) in a way that implies neutrality
His criticism is neutral: he is criticizing the current president.
I would fucking *love it* if the federal government would start making solar panels and selling them to people directly, but certain agitators would start screaming about socialism if the money isn't given to private interests instead.
No, we'd just call you a moron.
When you give money to to private companies there's always the chance that they'll go bankrupt. That's how it works.
Well, yeah, the federal government can't go bankrupt, it can just print more money and tax more. What it can do, however, is wreck the economy, and that's what it has been busy doing for a decade.
If you look at the whole program, rather than just at Solyndra, most of the companies did fine
Yeah, those companies did great: lots of Obama's corporate cronies enriched themselves spectacularly.
a better success rate than most programs like this one.
You can say that again: the amount of money wasted on this useless corporate welfare pales in comparison to what both Democrats and Republicans have been wasting on agriculture, health care, and defense.
It is really telling that your entire list refers to a certain Democratic president
Abuse of power has been far worse under this president than under previous presidents. And that certain Democratic president happens to be our current president.
and mixes in things that (in your opinion) are bad policy
All of the things he lists are actual abuses of power, not mere policy disagreements.
and then there are partisan shills
"Shill" implies a clandestine attempt to influence discussions; there is nothing clandestine about his (or mine) views. And while I can't speak for felrom, I'm not partisan: I disliked Bush with the same fervor as I disliked Obama, but since Bush is thankfully gone, there is no need to criticize him anymore.
it is really telling that the public official closed the bridge illegally and nobody is sitting in jail for this.
"Telling?" If you look at politics, this is business as usual. Bush, Obama, Clinton, Reagan, they all have done much worse. Christie just was particularly stupid because he acted on something that's a bit sensitive and exercised his power out of complete pettiness instead of advancing his career through it. But by the time the next election comes around, voters will have forgotten even this.
This sort of thing is what politicians do every day. There is essentially no legal way to hold the guy responsible.
The only people who can punish Christie are voters. Hopefully they will do just that, although the fact that both Bush and Obama got reelected doesn't make me very confident that voters care about abuse of power.
You can automate 100% of what is currently a specific job/task, but you can't automate 100% of all work.
And as the amount of tasks that people can complete and get paid for approaches zero, people won't be working much at all, and in that case, how much could you possibly pay them?
Let's say 99% of all work is automated. That means labor is 100 times as productive, so either they get paid 100 times as much, or goods cost 1% of what they used to, or some combination thereof.
If 100% of all work is automated, all goods and services are free, so nobody actually needs to get paid anymore.
How much would employers, in reality, want to pay people for doing less and less work?
Profit margins in most industries are a few percent, so what employers "want" is irrelevant; what they pay is determined almost entirely by what they can sell their goods for and by what workers are willing to work for.
The same reason they always work: in order to earn a living. if automation automates half the work, workers need to work half as much for the same standard of living. If automation automates three quarters of the work, workers need to work a quarter as much for the same standard of living. I'm sorry, but why is such a hard concept to grasp?
A few. A grand majority of jobs can be automated.
"Jobs" don't get automated; "jobs" are an artificial constructs into which we divide labor and tasks. Automation just reduces the total amount of work needed to get a given economic output. We can maintain the same number of jobs and people just work proportionately less. Again, what is so hard to grasp about that?
they're building like crazy. it's all $1m condos. developers want to maximize prices.
It's $1m condos because zoning restrictions don't allow developers to build small condos/apartments, because of rent control, because of height restrictions, and because of trying to preserve the "historical character" of SF (i.e., lots of decrepit Edwardians and Victorians that really should be razed).
For developers, it's actually a lot more rational to rent or sell two 400 sq ft apartments than one 800 sq ft apartment. If SF let developers build and rent what they wanted to and how they wanted to, there would be plenty of affordable housing. Developers would be tearing down Victorians and replacing them with huge apartment blocks containing 200-400 sq ft small apartments.
I'm not saying the govt could intervene
Government intervention is what is causing these problems in the first place.
And what do you do when even those jobs are replaced by technology? Eventually, there's going to be a point where there simply aren't nearly enough jobs.
No. Even if no new jobs were created, the effect of automation would simply be that everybody could work less while maintaining the same standard of living. You only lose jobs if government regulation make working shorter hours difficult or more costly. In fact, government regulations do just that, but that means that the job loss is due to bad government regulations, not automation.
Of course, in practice, people will find new jobs to do that can't be automated. Many jobs intrinsically can't be automated because people have a preference for those jobs being carried out by real humans, no matter how well machines might be able to do the work.
There is no "extrapolation" involved. You argued that automation causes unemployment and a century of data clearly contradicts that idea. End of story.
Your error is making assertions without any justification or proof.
No, that is your error. In fact, your predictions just contradict known facts. We have had increasing automation for more than a century and unemployment has been all over the place, without long term trends.
But unemployment would be the wrong number to look at anyway, since it is unrelated to the absolute number of jobs available in the economy. A better number to look at is the labor force participation rate, and that has steadily increased from 1950 to about 2004, a period of vast expansion of automation.
So 10 people will do the work of 100. 90 laid off.
They may get laid off. If they do, they will find new jobs. Or the demand for the now much cheaper product will increase tenfold, in which case nobody gets laid off.
10 people will be able to afford much more, but 90 people cannot afford anything.
All 100 people will have jobs and will be able to afford more than they could before.
Your error is in assuming that being laid off results in some kind of permanent state of unemployment.
They sound great, but are not at all practical to implement. Reality is far more complex and riddled with exceptions that broad Libertarian theories never seem to account for.
You're putting up a caricature of libertarian views and merely waving your hands. Contrary to your caricature, libertarians aren't against all government regulation. We simply recognize that government regulation comes at a high cost, and is frequently used by corporate and other special interests to enrich themselves. Therefore, government regulation and interference needs to be clearly justified and such policies should only remain in effect for as long as they are provably and substantially beneficial to society as a whole.
For housing, automobiles, and health care, it is quite clear that they have not become cheaper along with other goods or services. It is also quite clear why: in large part, powerful special interests lobby government to keep prices and profits high. Society would benefit from reducing many (though not all) laws and regulations in these areas.
And when challenged, the usual Libertarian responds with the typical Darwinian propaganda, something I choose to reject on moral grounds.
Libertarianism has nothing to do with Social Darwinism, libertarianism has to do with liberty. In fact, many libertarians favor some kind of basic income or negative income tax, in place of the complex and degrading set of welfare "benefits" and social engineering policies progressives and "liberals" advocate.
And you are right that these are moral issues, and it is morally wrong to make people's lives worse in order to support big corporations and special interests by tax dollars, which is what the policies you seem to favor amount to.
You seem so emotionally worked up so as to not be able to argue and reason effectively
Says the guy who keeps ranting and raving about "inequality", "malaise", and "consumer society".
Wise up and start laying down rational arguments, and get off you ass and reason!
Again, it's you who has failed to make a coherent argument or present data.
The divide in our country seems to be sparked by emotive words on people who lack the means to pick propaganda apart and discuss with any civility.
You're behaving like a jerk; I think I have been more than civil with you. Do what you ask other people to do: present data and a reasoned argument, and treat other people with respect.
And stop being an unthinking mouthpiece for plutocrats and corporate interests, because that's exactly what you and people like you are: all those reforms you propose supposedly for the benefit of the people end up being means by which corporations enrich themselves further and in which competition and choice is stifled.
I think it's pretty depressing what a low opinion you have of your fellow human beings. Even 10 or 20 years ago, factory work already wasn't mindless assembly work anymore. And these people are human beings and capable of learning and growing.
What could they do? Landscaping, gardening, custom wood or metal work, junk removal, uber cab driving, grocery delivery, web content quality control, furniture assembly, 3D printer operator, etc. There are tons of useful jobs an average human being can learn within a few months and make a good living at.
What makes the process of changing jobs and learning a new profession so problematic is all the regulations: companies can't just let you try out a job, they end up facing all sorts of commitments and legal obligations. And starting your own business has become a major headache in places like California, with all the licensing and regulatory overhead. It's those obstacles we should remove and all of a sudden automation and the resulting job changes would become something much less scary and much more positive.
I disagree that there is a problem automation doesn't cause unemployment, and individuals are very good at solving such problems for themselves provided regulations and laws catering to special interests don't artificially prevent them from doing so.
People postulate these nonexistent problems in order to push for more special interest legislation, whether it's outdated corporations or unions for outdated professions.
Did I say "no regulation"? No. Some level of regulation of these markets, like all markets, is a necessary evil. But we are far beyond that. Most of the regulation of these markets are anti competitive ways and ways in which big corporations enrich themselves at the cost of consumers and tax payers.
And the fact that you continue to insist on the idiotic notion that automation by itself causes unemployment doesn't make it true. Workers that get displaced by automation will find better, more productive, more rewarding jobs, or they can simply work less for the same income. That's the way it has worked for a hundred years, and it's going to continue to work that way.
If people only want to work 20h, then it doesn't matter what companies want. But right now, almost nobody has that choice because jobs that are considered less than full time are so strongly discriminated against by public policy and the tax system.
In different words, you can't blame automation for a problem that so far is mainly a consequence of governmental policies and individual choice.
You didn't read what I said. The middle class did receive a lot of those rewards: they moved up in the income distribution. That is why the middle class has shrunk.
Your claim that the low income quintile has moved down is just false.
The middle class has shrunk somewhat, because people have been moving out of it towards higher incomes.
And the idea that there is only a "finite pie" is bullshit. The economy is labor-limited. If we make labor more effective and efficient through automation, the economy grows accordingly. In the short term, there is some disruption as people need to be retrained, but that is something we have always handled well as a society.
What are you worried about? The changes in technology mean that we can make the same stuff with much less work. In principle, that means either that people can do other, more interesting and productive work, or that they are going to have more leisure time.
If you leave it up to market mechanisms, things will automatically adjust accordingly: products will get so cheap that people, with very little work, will be able to afford them. We're already seeing that, with everything from phones to TVs costing less and less and doing more and more.
The big failures are in areas where government interferes: housing, automobiles, and health care are not getting cheaper and better, precisely because they are highly regulated. Likewise, you can't just reduce your working hours arbitrarily because more government regulations kick in.
The thing to be afraid of is not technology reducing the amount of labor we need to produce the products we need: that's alway a good thing. The thing to be afraid of is that special interests hijack government and government regulations to enrich themselves and profit disproportionately from these technological advances. And when they do that, they usually do it by pretending to "save jobs", "help the poor" and "reduce inequality".
Imagine we could make everything we make today with half as much work. What would happen? In a rational society, everybody could choose to work half as much, earn just as much, and enjoy the extra leisure time. Why isn't that happening? Simple: hiring two workers that each work less is a lot harder for companies than hiring a single "full time" worker: there are all sorts of costs and overheads associated with each new worker. Additionally, taxes and regulations mean that it is hard simply to exist as a part time worker, since there is a high "cost of entry" simply for existing as an independent human being in this society. The fault isn't with "rich people", it's with progressive social policies that are increasingly harmful.
What you propose, a massive welfare state, isn't the answer to these problems; half the nation working "full time" while supporting an underclass of jobless is demeaning and wrong. The answer is to remove the obstacles and to allow people to live and work more flexibly.
If you want to get micropayments for content you create, go ahead, try to charage: if your content is good enough, people will pay. They are paying, after all, for apps, digital subscriptions, etc. The legal framework exists, all you need to supply is a product.
Charging "every time your information is used", however, is a non-starter. In a free society, being able to talk about each other freely is essential. Trying to restrict this amounts to fascism. But, then, a lot of these gurus that promise to reorganize our society in better ways are really fascists at heart, both on the left and on the right.
If you look at actual income distributions, you'll find that the middle class is alive and well. It has shrunk a little, mostly because some people, like software developers and engineers, have moved from the peak of the income distribution to the high end tail. But (statistically) no part of the middle class, or any part of the income distribution, has moved downwards over the last few decades.
Let's hope the middle class will continue to "disappear" like this.
Sorry, you're wrong. The treatment for broken bones is the same regardless of how you broke them: you immobilize the fragments relative to one another and let them grow together. There are some variations on how that is accomplished mechanically, but the principle is always the same.
There is no single principle for effectively treating cancer. Chemotherapy and surgery were attempts at a single approach, but they are not particularly effective. Effective cancer treatments require completely different interventions and completely different principles depending on the type of cancer.
Slashdot Mirror
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fast_and_Furious
I'm not even going to bother debunking the rest of your b.s. You are either f*cking insane or a pathological liar.
His criticism is neutral: he is criticizing the current president.
No, we'd just call you a moron.
Well, yeah, the federal government can't go bankrupt, it can just print more money and tax more. What it can do, however, is wreck the economy, and that's what it has been busy doing for a decade.
Yeah, those companies did great: lots of Obama's corporate cronies enriched themselves spectacularly.
You can say that again: the amount of money wasted on this useless corporate welfare pales in comparison to what both Democrats and Republicans have been wasting on agriculture, health care, and defense.
Abuse of power has been far worse under this president than under previous presidents. And that certain Democratic president happens to be our current president.
All of the things he lists are actual abuses of power, not mere policy disagreements.
"Shill" implies a clandestine attempt to influence discussions; there is nothing clandestine about his (or mine) views. And while I can't speak for felrom, I'm not partisan: I disliked Bush with the same fervor as I disliked Obama, but since Bush is thankfully gone, there is no need to criticize him anymore.
"Telling?" If you look at politics, this is business as usual. Bush, Obama, Clinton, Reagan, they all have done much worse. Christie just was particularly stupid because he acted on something that's a bit sensitive and exercised his power out of complete pettiness instead of advancing his career through it. But by the time the next election comes around, voters will have forgotten even this.
This sort of thing is what politicians do every day. There is essentially no legal way to hold the guy responsible.
The only people who can punish Christie are voters. Hopefully they will do just that, although the fact that both Bush and Obama got reelected doesn't make me very confident that voters care about abuse of power.
You can automate 100% of what is currently a specific job/task, but you can't automate 100% of all work.
Let's say 99% of all work is automated. That means labor is 100 times as productive, so either they get paid 100 times as much, or goods cost 1% of what they used to, or some combination thereof.
If 100% of all work is automated, all goods and services are free, so nobody actually needs to get paid anymore.
Profit margins in most industries are a few percent, so what employers "want" is irrelevant; what they pay is determined almost entirely by what they can sell their goods for and by what workers are willing to work for.
The same reason they always work: in order to earn a living. if automation automates half the work, workers need to work half as much for the same standard of living. If automation automates three quarters of the work, workers need to work a quarter as much for the same standard of living. I'm sorry, but why is such a hard concept to grasp?
"Jobs" don't get automated; "jobs" are an artificial constructs into which we divide labor and tasks. Automation just reduces the total amount of work needed to get a given economic output. We can maintain the same number of jobs and people just work proportionately less. Again, what is so hard to grasp about that?
It's $1m condos because zoning restrictions don't allow developers to build small condos/apartments, because of rent control, because of height restrictions, and because of trying to preserve the "historical character" of SF (i.e., lots of decrepit Edwardians and Victorians that really should be razed).
For developers, it's actually a lot more rational to rent or sell two 400 sq ft apartments than one 800 sq ft apartment. If SF let developers build and rent what they wanted to and how they wanted to, there would be plenty of affordable housing. Developers would be tearing down Victorians and replacing them with huge apartment blocks containing 200-400 sq ft small apartments.
Government intervention is what is causing these problems in the first place.
No. Even if no new jobs were created, the effect of automation would simply be that everybody could work less while maintaining the same standard of living. You only lose jobs if government regulation make working shorter hours difficult or more costly. In fact, government regulations do just that, but that means that the job loss is due to bad government regulations, not automation.
Of course, in practice, people will find new jobs to do that can't be automated. Many jobs intrinsically can't be automated because people have a preference for those jobs being carried out by real humans, no matter how well machines might be able to do the work.
There is no "extrapolation" involved. You argued that automation causes unemployment and a century of data clearly contradicts that idea. End of story.
No, that is your error. In fact, your predictions just contradict known facts. We have had increasing automation for more than a century and unemployment has been all over the place, without long term trends.
But unemployment would be the wrong number to look at anyway, since it is unrelated to the absolute number of jobs available in the economy. A better number to look at is the labor force participation rate, and that has steadily increased from 1950 to about 2004, a period of vast expansion of automation.
They may get laid off. If they do, they will find new jobs. Or the demand for the now much cheaper product will increase tenfold, in which case nobody gets laid off.
All 100 people will have jobs and will be able to afford more than they could before.
Your error is in assuming that being laid off results in some kind of permanent state of unemployment.
You're putting up a caricature of libertarian views and merely waving your hands. Contrary to your caricature, libertarians aren't against all government regulation. We simply recognize that government regulation comes at a high cost, and is frequently used by corporate and other special interests to enrich themselves. Therefore, government regulation and interference needs to be clearly justified and such policies should only remain in effect for as long as they are provably and substantially beneficial to society as a whole.
For housing, automobiles, and health care, it is quite clear that they have not become cheaper along with other goods or services. It is also quite clear why: in large part, powerful special interests lobby government to keep prices and profits high. Society would benefit from reducing many (though not all) laws and regulations in these areas.
Libertarianism has nothing to do with Social Darwinism, libertarianism has to do with liberty. In fact, many libertarians favor some kind of basic income or negative income tax, in place of the complex and degrading set of welfare "benefits" and social engineering policies progressives and "liberals" advocate.
And you are right that these are moral issues, and it is morally wrong to make people's lives worse in order to support big corporations and special interests by tax dollars, which is what the policies you seem to favor amount to.
Says the guy who keeps ranting and raving about "inequality", "malaise", and "consumer society".
Again, it's you who has failed to make a coherent argument or present data.
You're behaving like a jerk; I think I have been more than civil with you. Do what you ask other people to do: present data and a reasoned argument, and treat other people with respect.
And stop being an unthinking mouthpiece for plutocrats and corporate interests, because that's exactly what you and people like you are: all those reforms you propose supposedly for the benefit of the people end up being means by which corporations enrich themselves further and in which competition and choice is stifled.
I think it's pretty depressing what a low opinion you have of your fellow human beings. Even 10 or 20 years ago, factory work already wasn't mindless assembly work anymore. And these people are human beings and capable of learning and growing.
What could they do? Landscaping, gardening, custom wood or metal work, junk removal, uber cab driving, grocery delivery, web content quality control, furniture assembly, 3D printer operator, etc. There are tons of useful jobs an average human being can learn within a few months and make a good living at.
What makes the process of changing jobs and learning a new profession so problematic is all the regulations: companies can't just let you try out a job, they end up facing all sorts of commitments and legal obligations. And starting your own business has become a major headache in places like California, with all the licensing and regulatory overhead. It's those obstacles we should remove and all of a sudden automation and the resulting job changes would become something much less scary and much more positive.
I disagree that there is a problem automation doesn't cause unemployment, and individuals are very good at solving such problems for themselves provided regulations and laws catering to special interests don't artificially prevent them from doing so.
People postulate these nonexistent problems in order to push for more special interest legislation, whether it's outdated corporations or unions for outdated professions.
Did I say "no regulation"? No. Some level of regulation of these markets, like all markets, is a necessary evil. But we are far beyond that. Most of the regulation of these markets are anti competitive ways and ways in which big corporations enrich themselves at the cost of consumers and tax payers.
And the fact that you continue to insist on the idiotic notion that automation by itself causes unemployment doesn't make it true. Workers that get displaced by automation will find better, more productive, more rewarding jobs, or they can simply work less for the same income. That's the way it has worked for a hundred years, and it's going to continue to work that way.
If people only want to work 20h, then it doesn't matter what companies want. But right now, almost nobody has that choice because jobs that are considered less than full time are so strongly discriminated against by public policy and the tax system.
In different words, you can't blame automation for a problem that so far is mainly a consequence of governmental policies and individual choice.
You didn't read what I said. The middle class did receive a lot of those rewards: they moved up in the income distribution. That is why the middle class has shrunk.
Your claim that the low income quintile has moved down is just false.
The middle class has shrunk somewhat, because people have been moving out of it towards higher incomes.
And the idea that there is only a "finite pie" is bullshit. The economy is labor-limited. If we make labor more effective and efficient through automation, the economy grows accordingly. In the short term, there is some disruption as people need to be retrained, but that is something we have always handled well as a society.
What are you worried about? The changes in technology mean that we can make the same stuff with much less work. In principle, that means either that people can do other, more interesting and productive work, or that they are going to have more leisure time.
If you leave it up to market mechanisms, things will automatically adjust accordingly: products will get so cheap that people, with very little work, will be able to afford them. We're already seeing that, with everything from phones to TVs costing less and less and doing more and more.
The big failures are in areas where government interferes: housing, automobiles, and health care are not getting cheaper and better, precisely because they are highly regulated. Likewise, you can't just reduce your working hours arbitrarily because more government regulations kick in.
The thing to be afraid of is not technology reducing the amount of labor we need to produce the products we need: that's alway a good thing. The thing to be afraid of is that special interests hijack government and government regulations to enrich themselves and profit disproportionately from these technological advances. And when they do that, they usually do it by pretending to "save jobs", "help the poor" and "reduce inequality".
Imagine we could make everything we make today with half as much work. What would happen? In a rational society, everybody could choose to work half as much, earn just as much, and enjoy the extra leisure time. Why isn't that happening? Simple: hiring two workers that each work less is a lot harder for companies than hiring a single "full time" worker: there are all sorts of costs and overheads associated with each new worker. Additionally, taxes and regulations mean that it is hard simply to exist as a part time worker, since there is a high "cost of entry" simply for existing as an independent human being in this society. The fault isn't with "rich people", it's with progressive social policies that are increasingly harmful.
What you propose, a massive welfare state, isn't the answer to these problems; half the nation working "full time" while supporting an underclass of jobless is demeaning and wrong. The answer is to remove the obstacles and to allow people to live and work more flexibly.
If you want to get micropayments for content you create, go ahead, try to charage: if your content is good enough, people will pay. They are paying, after all, for apps, digital subscriptions, etc. The legal framework exists, all you need to supply is a product.
Charging "every time your information is used", however, is a non-starter. In a free society, being able to talk about each other freely is essential. Trying to restrict this amounts to fascism. But, then, a lot of these gurus that promise to reorganize our society in better ways are really fascists at heart, both on the left and on the right.
If you look at actual income distributions, you'll find that the middle class is alive and well. It has shrunk a little, mostly because some people, like software developers and engineers, have moved from the peak of the income distribution to the high end tail. But (statistically) no part of the middle class, or any part of the income distribution, has moved downwards over the last few decades.
Let's hope the middle class will continue to "disappear" like this.
Sorry, you're wrong. The treatment for broken bones is the same regardless of how you broke them: you immobilize the fragments relative to one another and let them grow together. There are some variations on how that is accomplished mechanically, but the principle is always the same.
There is no single principle for effectively treating cancer. Chemotherapy and surgery were attempts at a single approach, but they are not particularly effective. Effective cancer treatments require completely different interventions and completely different principles depending on the type of cancer.