The water company tells you that you should be getting pressure X and flow-rate Y. Well, what if everyone just leaves their faucets and showers running non-stop? You ain't gonna get X and Y. Was the water company lying? No. They didn't build infrastructure for that scenario.
If the water company promises X pressure and Y flow rate, and you don't receive it, then yes, the water company is not delivering their promise.
I'm surprised they predict it will take that long.
The question, of course, is what the humans will do when there half as many jobs. Our economic system is based on the concept that a human who wants to work can find a job.
The obvious solution would be for jobs to work fewer hours. But the economic system seems to have no way to implement that-- what actually happens is that the few who have jobs are overworked and working late every day, while the rest who don't have jobs just stop looking (and hence are removed from the "unemployment" statistics)
Headline is wrong. "Experts say" should be rewritten to "One expert says."
In the body of the summary, the phrase "according to new research" should be rewritten to say "according to one person's opinion," since there actually is no research involved.
See an earlier post in this comment section by someone who did the math: public transport can easily cost MORE than using a car.
It really depends on locality to locality, and also on where you live chose to live that locality. There are places where having a car is unnecessary, and it's expensive to own one, and others where it is highly necessary.
Where I live now you really need a car. There is mass transit, but it stops 3 miles or so away from my work, and also three miles away from my house.
On the other hand, I've also worked places where the nearest parking space is a mile or more away from work, and the cost of parking would have been more than the cost of a car.
Getting his name in the media, the media covering his speeches, the media covering his campaign rallies (while ignoring the comparable events from other candidates), the media covering his talking points-- yep, turns out to be worth about five billion dollars worth of free publicity.
The media covered him because he was outrageous. And he used that.
He seems to be following the model of George M. Cohan: "I don't care what you say about me, as long as you say something about me, and as long as you spell my name right."
Or, to quote another luminary, "there's no such thing as bad publicity."
It's not per se that the media "promoted" a landslide Clinton victory; it's more that they assumed a landslide Clinton victory. In fact, what they did was give Donald Trump tons of free media coverage-- about five billion dollars worth, by some estimates.
http://www.mediaquant.net/2016/11/a-media-post-mortem-on-the-2016-presidential-election/ https://www.thestreet.com/story/13896916/1/donald-trump-rode-5-billion-in-free-media-to-the-white-house.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/09/12/assessing-a-clinton-argument-that-the-media-helped-to-elect-trump/
But if the foreign influence was "pretty clear" before the elections why exactly is this chief security officer not an accomplice of the GRU?
If you read the actual article, he says that the extent of Russian interference was not clear until after the elections.
In fact, the article itself is pretty interesting-- the speculation about Russian motivation is the least important part; the talk about what they did and how they did what they did is more interesting.
Both sides spent roughly a billion dollars on their campaigns.
The closer an election is, the more a small effect will tip the result. The 2016 election turned out to tilt on 80,000 votes in three states, a very small margin in an election in which 57.6 million people voted.
The Russian campaign contributions had a significant advantage; they didn't even have a need to pretend to truth or accuracy or morality. They were aiming for disruption of America by any means necessary, with no concern for collateral damage.
(and note that your figure of "$100K in ads" is the documented part of the advertising budget for their interference-- we don't have any idea of the full extent of it, but that is only the barest tip of the iceberg, not even including the money spent on trolls and fake grass-roots organizations. The full extent was a lot higher than that, and we have no idea how much higher.)
The last line of the summary says it all: "Mick Mulvaney took over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in November and halted the bureau's investigation."
The current administration is not interested in consumer protection.
I wasn't commenting on UBI.
I was commenting on the hypocrisy of people on the right-- like the anonymous coward whose post I was replying to-- who in one breath tell us that anybody who get any sort of support from the government should be sterilized so they can't breed, and in the next breath tell us that government shouldn't give people birth control or support anything other than "abstinence education".
I'm all for UBI when combined with castration/neutering - you want to mooch on other people's back - that's fine but you don't get to procreate and increase the population and ruin the planet.
Nope. Turns out that the people opposed to basic income (and opposed to any form of social assistance for the poor) are also the same people who are opposed to government-provided birth control.
...and, even better yet, they'll hit Walmart as well.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0... https://qz.com/695763/a-web-of-terror-insecurity-and-a-high-level-of-vulnerability-hm-gap-and-walmart-are-accused-of-hundreds-of-acts-of-worker-abuse/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Walmart
What I think is that conference calls sound like a good idea, but I never have any idea who the voices on the phone are. You really need fact to face for that, no substitutes.
Usually what happens is that I listen in for the first one minute of the call, then I just work on my laptop, paying attention with maybe one-tenth of my attention or if something interesting happens.
They are a waste of time, though, since they distract just enough of my attention that I can't accomplish real work, only non-work like catching up with and posting on slashdot.
But the good news is, I get to charge it as time spent on the project whether or not it was actually useful.
Capitalism (or more specifically, free markets) is a system that is efficient on the micro-level (for a certain definition of "efficient".) If the system evolves into a monopoly, however, the free market assumptions no longer hold, and the system is no longer efficient.
I don't think it can even be considered "efficient" when all of its assumptions hold. For example, in an "efficient" market for widget X with 100 suppliers, there is still the waste of creating 100 manufacturing infrastructures for each of the different suppliers. If every supplier has perfect information, then the super-rational solution is to have the lowest cost supplier create all the widgets, sell them at the market price, then share the profits with all the other suppliers.
What I said was that the free market system was efficient on the micro level and qualified that with "(for a certain definition of "efficient")". The certain definition of efficient here is Pareto efficiency. In your simplified case of perfect information, in a free market when there is a trade such that both partners would benefit, that trade will happen, leading to a Pareto efficiency. That is a micro level efficiency-- what you are talking about is a global efficiency-- each individual manufacturer is efficient, but the global system would be more efficient if there were only one.
This is absurd of course. Nobody has perfect information and nobody would distribute their profits, but it does illustrate the limits of the model.
I said a micro level efficiency-- what you are talking about here is a global efficiency-- each individual manufacturer is efficient, but the global system would be more efficient if there were only one.
It is important to note, though, that a free market is not Pareto efficient even on the micro level in the case of monopolies (nor with increasing returns to scale, although increasing returns to scale tends to lead to monopoly, so these are not completely different).
This also shows how Socialism can become more efficient than Capitalism in some cases. The government can become the lowest cost supplier, set the price it thinks should be the market price, then divide profits amongst everyone. This saves on capital, because production infrastructure is built once rather than 100 times.
In practice this does not work for similar reasons to the reason that monopolies are not Pareto efficient. As a monopoly, the government has no incentive to be efficient in any way; in fact, without competition, they have reasons to be inefficient (in the economic sense of inefficient). For example, they would rather use more labor to produce a good than less, since that employs more people (and since they're a monopoly, they can raise the price and still sell product).
The other problem here is the question: who decides? What mechanism urges the people who decide to make the right decisions?
Doing this properly is extremely hard of course, which is why we don't see many successful Socialist countries.
Not merely hard, but arguably impossible. A top-down decision structure in a system with no competition has no driver toward efficiency at all, not to mention no driver toward innovation. In fact, it does not even have a good mechanism for noticing that it is inefficient.
So, basically, the Bitcoin economy consists of using a vast amount of electricity and specialized computers to solve Sudoku puzzles, the prize for which is coupons for unique collectable Beanie-babies. The coupons are then traded with other collectors. (the actual Beanie-babies don't really exist, just the coupons.)
If capitalism is so great, why does it allow monopolies to exist?
Capitalism doesn't really "allow" or "not allow" things. That would be a regulatory scheme.
Capitalism (or more specifically, free markets) is a system that is efficient on the micro-level (for a certain definition of "efficient".) If the system evolves into a monopoly, however, the free market assumptions no longer hold, and the system is no longer efficient.
It seems to me that monopolies are the result of executing your capitalistic business plan successfully. In the physics world, monopolies would represent a low entropy state.
I don't even know what that means. In general, monopolies are a result of entry barriers and economy of scale (which may often be the same: the entry barrier is often because of the economies of scale.)
Once a large corporation enter the scene, there is also an anticompetitive entry barrier: a larger corporation can simply underprice an upstart competitor, using the strategy that they can simply take a loss until their competition goes bankrupt, and once the competitors are all driven out of business, raise their prices to recoup their losses. Is this "executing a capitalistic business plan successfully"? Well, I suppose.
Slashdot Mirror
The water company tells you that you should be getting pressure X and flow-rate Y. Well, what if everyone just leaves their faucets and showers running non-stop? You ain't gonna get X and Y. Was the water company lying? No. They didn't build infrastructure for that scenario.
If the water company promises X pressure and Y flow rate, and you don't receive it, then yes, the water company is not delivering their promise.
The question, of course, is what the humans will do when there half as many jobs. Our economic system is based on the concept that a human who wants to work can find a job.
The obvious solution would be for jobs to work fewer hours. But the economic system seems to have no way to implement that-- what actually happens is that the few who have jobs are overworked and working late every day, while the rest who don't have jobs just stop looking (and hence are removed from the "unemployment" statistics)
In the body of the summary, the phrase "according to new research" should be rewritten to say "according to one person's opinion," since there actually is no research involved.
See an earlier post in this comment section by someone who did the math: public transport can easily cost MORE than using a car.
It really depends on locality to locality, and also on where you live chose to live that locality. There are places where having a car is unnecessary, and it's expensive to own one, and others where it is highly necessary.
Where I live now you really need a car. There is mass transit, but it stops 3 miles or so away from my work, and also three miles away from my house.
On the other hand, I've also worked places where the nearest parking space is a mile or more away from work, and the cost of parking would have been more than the cost of a car.
...In fact, what they did was give Donald Trump tons of free media coverage-- about five billion dollars worth, by some estimates. http://www.mediaquant.net/2016/11/a-media-post-mortem-on-the-2016-presidential-election/
https://www.thestreet.com/stor...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Constant attacks are worth five billion?
Getting his name in the media, the media covering his speeches, the media covering his campaign rallies (while ignoring the comparable events from other candidates), the media covering his talking points-- yep, turns out to be worth about five billion dollars worth of free publicity.
The media covered him because he was outrageous. And he used that.
He seems to be following the model of George M. Cohan: "I don't care what you say about me, as long as you say something about me, and as long as you spell my name right."
Or, to quote another luminary, "there's no such thing as bad publicity."
It's not per se that the media "promoted" a landslide Clinton victory; it's more that they assumed a landslide Clinton victory. In fact, what they did was give Donald Trump tons of free media coverage-- about five billion dollars worth, by some estimates.
http://www.mediaquant.net/2016/11/a-media-post-mortem-on-the-2016-presidential-election/
https://www.thestreet.com/story/13896916/1/donald-trump-rode-5-billion-in-free-media-to-the-white-house.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/09/12/assessing-a-clinton-argument-that-the-media-helped-to-elect-trump/
Yes, I read "IRA" as meaning either "Individual Retirement Account" or "Irish Republican Army". https://acronyms.thefreedictio...
But if the foreign influence was "pretty clear" before the elections why exactly is this chief security officer not an accomplice of the GRU?
If you read the actual article, he says that the extent of Russian interference was not clear until after the elections.
In fact, the article itself is pretty interesting-- the speculation about Russian motivation is the least important part; the talk about what they did and how they did what they did is more interesting.
The closer an election is, the more a small effect will tip the result. The 2016 election turned out to tilt on 80,000 votes in three states, a very small margin in an election in which 57.6 million people voted.
The Russian campaign contributions had a significant advantage; they didn't even have a need to pretend to truth or accuracy or morality. They were aiming for disruption of America by any means necessary, with no concern for collateral damage.
(and note that your figure of "$100K in ads" is the documented part of the advertising budget for their interference-- we don't have any idea of the full extent of it, but that is only the barest tip of the iceberg, not even including the money spent on trolls and fake grass-roots organizations. The full extent was a lot higher than that, and we have no idea how much higher.)
The last line of the summary says it all: "Mick Mulvaney took over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in November and halted the bureau's investigation."
The current administration is not interested in consumer protection.
They are on the side of business, not consumers.
I wasn't commenting on UBI.
I was commenting on the hypocrisy of people on the right-- like the anonymous coward whose post I was replying to-- who in one breath tell us that anybody who get any sort of support from the government should be sterilized so they can't breed, and in the next breath tell us that government shouldn't give people birth control or support anything other than "abstinence education".
Does Amazon pay taxes? Here's some links from left, right, and center-tending media:
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/may/03/bernie-s/amazon-paid-0-federal-income-taxes-2017/
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-not-paying-taxes-trump-bezos-2018-4
https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/amazon-earned-5-6b-in-2017-but-paid-no-federal-taxes
https://itep.org/amazon-inc-paid-zero-in-federal-taxes-in-2017-gets-789-million-windfall-from-new-tax-law/
https://splinternews.com/amazon-made-5-6-billion-in-profits-last-year-and-repor-1823329221
I'm all for UBI when combined with castration/neutering - you want to mooch on other people's back - that's fine but you don't get to procreate and increase the population and ruin the planet.
Nope. Turns out that the people opposed to basic income (and opposed to any form of social assistance for the poor) are also the same people who are opposed to government-provided birth control.
And if there were well-paying jobs just lying around to be "found", that would be easy.
...and, even better yet, they'll hit Walmart as well. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...
https://qz.com/695763/a-web-of-terror-insecurity-and-a-high-level-of-vulnerability-hm-gap-and-walmart-are-accused-of-hundreds-of-acts-of-worker-abuse/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Walmart
Good. Amazon is abusive. And they don't pay taxes. Stop the abuse, make them pay their share, both at once. https://thenextweb.com/insider...
Usually what happens is that I listen in for the first one minute of the call, then I just work on my laptop, paying attention with maybe one-tenth of my attention or if something interesting happens.
They are a waste of time, though, since they distract just enough of my attention that I can't accomplish real work, only non-work like catching up with and posting on slashdot.
But the good news is, I get to charge it as time spent on the project whether or not it was actually useful.
Wow, new bells and widgets. I want improved functionality.
OK, better scrolling on Android might be valuable. If you use Android.
Capitalism (or more specifically, free markets) is a system that is efficient on the micro-level (for a certain definition of "efficient".) If the system evolves into a monopoly, however, the free market assumptions no longer hold, and the system is no longer efficient.
I don't think it can even be considered "efficient" when all of its assumptions hold. For example, in an "efficient" market for widget X with 100 suppliers, there is still the waste of creating 100 manufacturing infrastructures for each of the different suppliers. If every supplier has perfect information, then the super-rational solution is to have the lowest cost supplier create all the widgets, sell them at the market price, then share the profits with all the other suppliers.
What I said was that the free market system was efficient on the micro level and qualified that with "(for a certain definition of "efficient")". The certain definition of efficient here is Pareto efficiency. In your simplified case of perfect information, in a free market when there is a trade such that both partners would benefit, that trade will happen, leading to a Pareto efficiency. That is a micro level efficiency-- what you are talking about is a global efficiency-- each individual manufacturer is efficient, but the global system would be more efficient if there were only one.
This is absurd of course. Nobody has perfect information and nobody would distribute their profits, but it does illustrate the limits of the model.
I said a micro level efficiency-- what you are talking about here is a global efficiency-- each individual manufacturer is efficient, but the global system would be more efficient if there were only one.
It is important to note, though, that a free market is not Pareto efficient even on the micro level in the case of monopolies (nor with increasing returns to scale, although increasing returns to scale tends to lead to monopoly, so these are not completely different).
This also shows how Socialism can become more efficient than Capitalism in some cases. The government can become the lowest cost supplier, set the price it thinks should be the market price, then divide profits amongst everyone. This saves on capital, because production infrastructure is built once rather than 100 times.
In practice this does not work for similar reasons to the reason that monopolies are not Pareto efficient. As a monopoly, the government has no incentive to be efficient in any way; in fact, without competition, they have reasons to be inefficient (in the economic sense of inefficient). For example, they would rather use more labor to produce a good than less, since that employs more people (and since they're a monopoly, they can raise the price and still sell product).
The other problem here is the question: who decides? What mechanism urges the people who decide to make the right decisions?
Doing this properly is extremely hard of course, which is why we don't see many successful Socialist countries.
Not merely hard, but arguably impossible. A top-down decision structure in a system with no competition has no driver toward efficiency at all, not to mention no driver toward innovation. In fact, it does not even have a good mechanism for noticing that it is inefficient.
This seems like a really, really stupid thing.
Not exactly. Light = Electromagnetic radiation (Microwave, X-ray, visible light, gamma, etc)
No dictionary I am aware of defines microwaves as "light".
If capitalism is so great, why does it allow monopolies to exist?
Capitalism doesn't really "allow" or "not allow" things. That would be a regulatory scheme.
Capitalism (or more specifically, free markets) is a system that is efficient on the micro-level (for a certain definition of "efficient".) If the system evolves into a monopoly, however, the free market assumptions no longer hold, and the system is no longer efficient.
It seems to me that monopolies are the result of executing your capitalistic business plan successfully. In the physics world, monopolies would represent a low entropy state.
I don't even know what that means. In general, monopolies are a result of entry barriers and economy of scale (which may often be the same: the entry barrier is often because of the economies of scale.)
Once a large corporation enter the scene, there is also an anticompetitive entry barrier: a larger corporation can simply underprice an upstart competitor, using the strategy that they can simply take a loss until their competition goes bankrupt, and once the competitors are all driven out of business, raise their prices to recoup their losses. Is this "executing a capitalistic business plan successfully"? Well, I suppose.
No. I buy nothing from Amazon. Whether they are worth a trillion dollars or they go out of business tomorrow, it is meaningless to me.
When they drive the last of their competitors out of business, will it still be meaningless to you?
Amazon is working hard to be a monopoly.
They are doing what they are best at - waste... Consider atmospheric absorption,
The atmosphere is transparent to light. You know this because you can see.
...It would have been far more efficient to use a range that is not absorbed by the atmosphere, like directed microwaves or something.
Light is not absorbed by the atmosphere.