Well, again that seems simplistic to me. Keynes said you could just bury money in the ground and let people dig it up, and it'd have a stimulative effect, and I'm sure that's true. But I do think it makes a difference what you spend money on. The government should spend money on things like infrastructure that improve private sector productivity when the economy turns around.
That is pretty much Keynes' point. Digging up money in jars (an analogy to mining gold for money - a similarly pointless exercise) would be better than nothing because it would create a stimulatory result, but a much smarter use of that same labour would be to do something useful like, say, building houses.
What's bizzare is watching all these economists try to come up with theories about why wages aren't going up during full employment. A few are finally saying "Unions are dead so workers have no bargaining power" but _very_ few.
Well, if there really was full employment, the lack of unions wouldn't be particularly important.
The real reason is because the economy isn't anywhere close to full employment.
The problem is, most every country other than the US recognizes that receiving tax revenue is a good thing, and having people invest in factories, fabs, etc is good for your country. As Barak Obama said "if you want people to do less of something, tax it". The US taxes investment. They have high taxes on factories, fabs, development centers - companies - because apparently they want people to do less building of companies in the US. Other countries aren't so stupid. They WANT companies like Dell, Google, and Apple to put their operations in their countries, so they don't tax the hell of that like the US does.
We have a massive labor surplus and have for _decades_.
Hence the explosion in bullshit jobs in areas like HR, marketing and middle management, the massive worldwide bubble in education as people desperately try to make themselves more "employable" and the collapse in job security.
How so? Take someone that's being paid, let's say, $5000/month at the moment, and let's take a UBI of $1000/month to have a neat number to work with. With the UBI they'll be getting $6000/mo, but paying back $1000/mo for a net of $5000/mo. That's exactly what they were already getting, so where's the subsidy for the employer?
The $1000 less they have to pay the person to do that job because that component of their worth in the market is being met by the UBI not the employer.
The minimum wage is not the same thing. It is a required minimum amount the employer must pay, not a minimum amount paid by the public.
It's a good point. I quite like the general idea. None of this is going to be viable long term though, because we can automate all of these things too.
Yes. But there needs to be a transitionary step so the people who can't handle the idea of "getting something for nothing" can get their head around it (or die).
They can't just pay $X less and hope to still have people working for them though, unless the resulting wage is high enough that the employee will be paying most or all of their UBI back in taxes, in which case the $X reduction is mostly or completely just a regular pay cut.
That doesn't really address the point ? Even if someone is being paid relatively a lot, the UBI still represents a subsidy to their employer who will be paying them roughly the equivalent of the UBI less than they would be if it didn't exist.
A job guarantee relies on there being jobs available, which as we've established is kind of the problem. I guess you could invent some pointless work for someone to do, but forcing them to spend a significant chunk of their time doing meaningless busy work doesn't strike me as being better than not forcing them to do it.
There is arguably plenty of work that is not so much "pointless" as not particularly profitable. Someone to help little old ladies on and off buses, for example. Or more teachers. Or take back all the jobs around publicly funded services that have been privatised and improve it (eg: cleaning staff).
That is an incredibly convoluted way of saying "reduce the cost to business for employing people".:)
But it doesn't really explain what you're trying to achieve. The last few decades show that reduced costs to business go primarily into CxO bonuses and - maybe - shareholder dividends.
Businesses aren't charities. They won't employ more people without unmet demand. Supply-side economics is bunk.
In that context what really matters is this:
[...] while receiving an extra $269.08 deposit from Social Security every 2 weeks.
Not the reduction in taxes to business (though I agree payroll taxes are bad taxes).
As I said elsewhere, a jobs guarantee is a better and fairer option than a UBI (or similar), at least until we really do have robots that can do anything and current attitudes towards welfare have matured.
Let me put it another way, a UBI of $X is a subsidy of $X to employers who can pay their employees $X less and pocket the difference themselves.
A jobs guarantee (paid employment by Government for anyone who wants it) is a better and fairer solution than a UBI, at least until we really do have robots that can do anything and everything.
And if you don't pay your employees enough, they'll stop working for you[...]
That's OK, there's zillions more employees out there. We already have a massive surplus in workers (hence high unemployment and low wages) and that surplus is only going to keep increasing.
But since people who are working will essentially be giving their UBI back in taxes anyway, I find it hard to see it as a subsidy to businesses.
Employer pays someone a dollar an hour to work 20 hours a week. Worker needs UBI to live.
What scenario are you envisaging where a worker will be paying back their entire UBI in taxes ?
Taxes don't need to be raised on the highest income earners; they can be lowered on businesses, notably on payroll (tax taken based on how much wages you pay).
Believe it or not, there are a number of high profile libertarians advocating basic income over the sprawling welfare state we have.
Of course they are. A UBI is a subsidy to business. If the Government is paying their employees a wage, they won't have to, which means more money in their pocket.
90% of the work we're doing now (and probably closer to 100% of slashdotters' work) doesn't *need* to be done, but we do it anyway.
That's because the alternative is to just give them the things they need to live, which bothers a lot of people who like to take the position that the only moral way to survive is to work.
It has nothing to do with Maslow. If people's time wasn't taken up with bullshit jobs, and they instead were able to do work they found personally fulfilling without having to worry about working to survive, then their esteem and self-actualisation would be taken care of.
Liberalism ("Progressivism") is precisely what has led to the creation of the US prison state and fomented the spread of fascism in the US. I've personally watched it happening in real-time over the last 5+ decades.
Fuck that's funny. Even more so if you actually believe it.
There hasn't been a progressive Government in the USA for the better part of half a century, and 30-40 years for most of the rest of the western world (a handful of European countries aside, and even they've shifted significantly rightwards).
Right-wing Fascism evolved into right-wing Neoliberalism and it has been running the world since - at the absolute latest - the '80s. So the modern world shouldn't surprise anyone - the political right is the side of royalty, corporations, the church, the military, and other similar hereditary, conformist, strictly hierarchical, stratified, undemocratic organisations.
What kind of sustained network Tx/Rx do you see to your nodes. Or - if you keep track of it - what sort of numbers do you see for disk utilisation (in terms of performance) ?
I'm curious how hard those drives are working, in the context of the temperatures you see.
You can't (easily and reliably) stretch a RAID across hosts.
Backblaze take a chunk of data and break it up into 20 smaller chunks (17 data + 3 parity) and then spread those 20 chunks across 20 different physical servers. You can't do that with RAID.
It would also reduce the overall load during disk rebuilds as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, again that seems simplistic to me. Keynes said you could just bury money in the ground and let people dig it up, and it'd have a stimulative effect, and I'm sure that's true. But I do think it makes a difference what you spend money on. The government should spend money on things like infrastructure that improve private sector productivity when the economy turns around.
That is pretty much Keynes' point. Digging up money in jars (an analogy to mining gold for money - a similarly pointless exercise) would be better than nothing because it would create a stimulatory result, but a much smarter use of that same labour would be to do something useful like, say, building houses.
What's bizzare is watching all these economists try to come up with theories about why wages aren't going up during full employment. A few are finally saying "Unions are dead so workers have no bargaining power" but _very_ few.
Well, if there really was full employment, the lack of unions wouldn't be particularly important.
The real reason is because the economy isn't anywhere close to full employment.
LOL.
Boring propaganda is boring.
âoeInvestmentsâ come out of revenue before it is taxed. You donâ(TM)t get taxed âoeinvestingâ in your business.
The problem is, most every country other than the US recognizes that receiving tax revenue is a good thing, and having people invest in factories, fabs, etc is good for your country. As Barak Obama said "if you want people to do less of something, tax it". The US taxes investment. They have high taxes on factories, fabs, development centers - companies - because apparently they want people to do less building of companies in the US. Other countries aren't so stupid. They WANT companies like Dell, Google, and Apple to put their operations in their countries, so they don't tax the hell of that like the US does.
Aren't taxes on profits ?
There's a massive oversupply of labour and not enough jobs.
So employers use degrees (or lack thereof) as a quick way to cull the applicant list for the few jobs they do advertise.
Nobody disagrees the Earth will make it through this.
It's modern human society we're less confident of.
Wage transparency is bad for everyone.
Wage transparency is good for employees and bad for employers (because it means they are dealing with employees more as a group than individuals).
Your definition of "left" and "right" seem diametrically opposed to reality. Are you a Libertarian ?
We have a massive labor surplus and have for _decades_.
Hence the explosion in bullshit jobs in areas like HR, marketing and middle management, the massive worldwide bubble in education as people desperately try to make themselves more "employable" and the collapse in job security.
That's like calling the chestbursters from Alien "self defense".
How so? Take someone that's being paid, let's say, $5000/month at the moment, and let's take a UBI of $1000/month to have a neat number to work with. With the UBI they'll be getting $6000/mo, but paying back $1000/mo for a net of $5000/mo. That's exactly what they were already getting, so where's the subsidy for the employer?
The $1000 less they have to pay the person to do that job because that component of their worth in the market is being met by the UBI not the employer.
The minimum wage is not the same thing. It is a required minimum amount the employer must pay, not a minimum amount paid by the public.
It's a good point. I quite like the general idea. None of this is going to be viable long term though, because we can automate all of these things too.
Yes. But there needs to be a transitionary step so the people who can't handle the idea of "getting something for nothing" can get their head around it (or die).
They can't just pay $X less and hope to still have people working for them though, unless the resulting wage is high enough that the employee will be paying most or all of their UBI back in taxes, in which case the $X reduction is mostly or completely just a regular pay cut.
That doesn't really address the point ? Even if someone is being paid relatively a lot, the UBI still represents a subsidy to their employer who will be paying them roughly the equivalent of the UBI less than they would be if it didn't exist.
A job guarantee relies on there being jobs available, which as we've established is kind of the problem. I guess you could invent some pointless work for someone to do, but forcing them to spend a significant chunk of their time doing meaningless busy work doesn't strike me as being better than not forcing them to do it.
There is arguably plenty of work that is not so much "pointless" as not particularly profitable. Someone to help little old ladies on and off buses, for example. Or more teachers. Or take back all the jobs around publicly funded services that have been privatised and improve it (eg: cleaning staff).
That is an incredibly convoluted way of saying "reduce the cost to business for employing people". :)
But it doesn't really explain what you're trying to achieve. The last few decades show that reduced costs to business go primarily into CxO bonuses and - maybe - shareholder dividends.
Businesses aren't charities. They won't employ more people without unmet demand. Supply-side economics is bunk.
In that context what really matters is this:
[...] while receiving an extra $269.08 deposit from Social Security every 2 weeks.
Not the reduction in taxes to business (though I agree payroll taxes are bad taxes).
As I said elsewhere, a jobs guarantee is a better and fairer option than a UBI (or similar), at least until we really do have robots that can do anything and current attitudes towards welfare have matured.
Let me put it another way, a UBI of $X is a subsidy of $X to employers who can pay their employees $X less and pocket the difference themselves.
A jobs guarantee (paid employment by Government for anyone who wants it) is a better and fairer solution than a UBI, at least until we really do have robots that can do anything and everything.
And if you don't pay your employees enough, they'll stop working for you[...]
That's OK, there's zillions more employees out there. We already have a massive surplus in workers (hence high unemployment and low wages) and that surplus is only going to keep increasing.
But since people who are working will essentially be giving their UBI back in taxes anyway, I find it hard to see it as a subsidy to businesses.
Employer pays someone a dollar an hour to work 20 hours a week. Worker needs UBI to live.
What scenario are you envisaging where a worker will be paying back their entire UBI in taxes ?
Yes, it is.
The only free market is one without any rules. So no property rights, no contracts, no money, no fraud, no standards, nothing.
Anything else and all you're doing is arguing about the extent of regulation you want in your market.
It shouldn't take long with a history book to conclude where "no rules" inevitably ends up.
Taxes don't need to be raised on the highest income earners; they can be lowered on businesses, notably on payroll (tax taken based on how much wages you pay).
What would this achieve ?
Believe it or not, there are a number of high profile libertarians advocating basic income over the sprawling welfare state we have.
Of course they are. A UBI is a subsidy to business. If the Government is paying their employees a wage, they won't have to, which means more money in their pocket.
What's "a LOT" to you ? Half a percent of the population ? One percent ?
The ironic thing is that this is basic investing, that businesses should be glad to be doing. I don't get why this is not done more often.
Socialise the costs, privatise the profits.
Why would businesses pay for something when they can get everyone else to pay for it instead and take the money they would have spent in CxO bonuses ?
90% of the work we're doing now (and probably closer to 100% of slashdotters' work) doesn't *need* to be done, but we do it anyway.
That's because the alternative is to just give them the things they need to live, which bothers a lot of people who like to take the position that the only moral way to survive is to work.
It has nothing to do with Maslow. If people's time wasn't taken up with bullshit jobs, and they instead were able to do work they found personally fulfilling without having to worry about working to survive, then their esteem and self-actualisation would be taken care of.
Why would people not be aware of drugs available to them without drug ads on TV ?
Do you not have doctors and pharmacists in your country ?
Liberalism ("Progressivism") is precisely what has led to the creation of the US prison state and fomented the spread of fascism in the US. I've personally watched it happening in real-time over the last 5+ decades.
Fuck that's funny. Even more so if you actually believe it.
There hasn't been a progressive Government in the USA for the better part of half a century, and 30-40 years for most of the rest of the western world (a handful of European countries aside, and even they've shifted significantly rightwards).
Right-wing Fascism evolved into right-wing Neoliberalism and it has been running the world since - at the absolute latest - the '80s. So the modern world shouldn't surprise anyone - the political right is the side of royalty, corporations, the church, the military, and other similar hereditary, conformist, strictly hierarchical, stratified, undemocratic organisations.
Hi, Brian,
What kind of sustained network Tx/Rx do you see to your nodes. Or - if you keep track of it - what sort of numbers do you see for disk utilisation (in terms of performance) ?
I'm curious how hard those drives are working, in the context of the temperatures you see.
You can't (easily and reliably) stretch a RAID across hosts.
Backblaze take a chunk of data and break it up into 20 smaller chunks (17 data + 3 parity) and then spread those 20 chunks across 20 different physical servers. You can't do that with RAID.
It would also reduce the overall load during disk rebuilds as well.
https://www.google.com.au/sear...