There's also the the problem that, with the efficiency of workers going up and people working for as long as before, everyone's needs are met by fewer workers.
The error in that analysis is that people's needs aren't constant; the more a society develops, the more it industrializes and automates, the more people's "needs" (really, desires) increase.
Half a century ago, a vacation consisted of a trip to the local beach; today, it's a flight across the country or to some tropical resort; in another half century, it's probably a trip into space. The only reason we can afford to do that is because automation frees workers from menial tasks and allows them to do more.
But since it didn't, fewer workers can provide for everyone's needs and there's a lot of unemployment.
The labor participation rate actually strongly increases as societies industrialize and become more automated. That is, both a larger fraction of the population and a larger total number of people work as societies automate and industrialize. That's pretty much universally true across the globe.
("Unemployment" is a technical short-term measure that is irrelevant to such discussions, but it generally also decreases.)
Keep in mind that Europe's numbers are mostly young people who can't find jobs in the first place.
Europe's primary unemployment problem is with young workers, priced out of the market by regulations. Europe's long-term unemployment problem is a separate problem that affects older workers.
You get fired from an UAW or UMWA job at 55 and you are almost certain to end up banging around in retail or other near-minimum wage occupations
So you're saying someone works a union blue collar 40h/week job and never bothers to learn any new skills or complete their college degree in 30 years. How is that a problem with automation? If you're a web programmer at IBM and you get assigned a new colleague to your team who's been with the company for 30 years, and he tells you "I only do COBOL and I don't want to learn anything new", how would you react?
No society can tolerate that kind of attitude. In socialist societies, they would simply force you to keep your skills updated. In capitalist societies, we assume that people are aware that they can be fired any day and need to keep their skills updated.
In the meantime you'll have to downgrade almost everything, because you aren't making $60k a year anymore.
Yes: if you lose your job, you didn't get insurance, and you don't have savings, you need to downgrade. Again, I fail to see how that is anybody's responsibility but yours.
The problem on the horizon is that capitalism is so good at driving down the price of everything
Good!
that labor costs now represent the majority cost of a commodity [apparently, you mean product],
Labor has always been the biggest cost in making products. And that is why automation is a good thing: by freeing up labor in some industries, that labor becomes available to do jobs that previously couldn't be done at all.
what do we do in a world where there are 0 jobs for the masses?
Automation has always led to increased employment and wealth for the masses.
If it were to occur, it would mean that everybody's needs would be met for free; you wouldn't need a job.
What happened to the idea that automation would generate free time for humans?
It does generate free time: if you choose to consume less, you can work less. But most people choose to consume close to what they are capable of earning. That is, they buy big houses, several cars, Internet, and lots of other stuff.
There are some limits to this kind of choice: many communities, for example, have minimum square foot sizes for homes and apartments, require you to purchase running water and electricity, and impose other costs on you. But even that pales in comparison to the voluntary increased expenditures people make.
Or are you distinguishing between murder and conspiracy to murder, and just don't think the latter is a crime at all?
In Ulbricht's case, the only proof of a conspiracy is a text file of a chat log on his computer, a file that he claims he didn't create. How is he supposed to defend himself against that?
Laws against conspiracies make sense in an ideal justice system where people take "beyond a reasonable doubt" seriously; very few people could get convicted on that.
In the real world, convictions on intent and conspiracy are hard to prove conclusively, hard to defend against if you're innocent, and very likely to be abused by prosecutors. And in Ulbricht's case, the alleged conspiracy wasn't even what he was on trial for, so it wasn't even properly litigated, it was used to increase his sentence to life in prison.
So we should let individual psychotics own nuclear weapons and anthrax grenades and run around raping babies? [...] It's a question of balance.
Yes, it is a question of balance, which is why I said "more important than", not "overrule all other concerns". Using and trading in drugs should not be banned.
I would point out that it is only governments that have mustered the enormous amounts of money to develop "nuclear weapons and anthrax grenades", and actually used it people. In the real world, the only way to waste money on such crap is to take away people's resources and labor by force.
Grow up.
Stop being such a moron, and while you're at it learn to read English.
Great in economic theory. In practice we've never been good at figuring out WTF to do with a 50-year-old guy whose got no marketable skills because the robots took his job.
Long term unemployment is a far bigger problem in Europe than in the US. So whatever we're doing, we're doing it better than Europeans.
Furthermore, pawning the cost of employing the unemployable onto employers in particular industries just isn't going to work; they are competing with employers worldwide, most of which don't have these costs. If society wants 50-year-old guys with no marketable skills not to starve, then society needs to give these people welfare and/or an education.
Of course, your view is both faulty and arrogant; 50 year old guys are perfectly capable of learning new, marketable skills.
This is a field that requires a masters degree and certification.
It's also a field that is remarkably ineffective at delivering results. I think they are not at risk of automation, they are at risk of elimination as a profession.
Any other job that's working class and involves making real money will be automated sooner rather then later, as (at least in the States) working class guys have very little ability to stop their employer from replacing them with machines.
You mean mind-numbing, back-breaking, dangerous jobs will be replaced with safer, more interesting jobs? Great! The sooner the better.
Framing something may perhaps give the artist a new copyright, but that doesn't mean that he has a right to violate other copyrights with what he puts into the frame.
I mean, putting a severed head on a plate may be art, but severing the head would still be murder.
On Monday, in the final hours before the the Department of Justice rested its case against Ulbricht, prosecutor Timothy Howard read aloud from a long series of private messages retrieved from the Silk Road’s market server and user forum.
It says nothing about "authenticated in his own journal found on his seized laptop".
Wikipedia says:
Ulbricht's lawyers contended that Dread Pirate Roberts was really Mark Karpelès, and that Karpelès set up Ulbricht as a fall guy.[42] However, Judge Katherine Forrest ruled that any speculative statements regarding whether Karpelès or anyone else ran Silk Road would not be allowed, and statements already made would be stricken from the record. In the second week of the trial, prosecutors presented documents and chat logs from Ulbricht's computer that, they said, demonstrated how Ulbricht had administered the site for many months, which contradicted the defense's claim that Ulbricht had relinquished control of Silk Road. Ulbricht's attorney suggested that the documents and chat logs were planted there by way of BitTorrent, which was running on Ulbricht's computer at the time of his arrest.
I'm still wondering what the evidence is that proves "beyond a reasonable doubt" that Ulbricht is DPR. It's reasonable to assume that, even probable, but that should not be enough for a felony conviction.
>I know Von Braun's early designs quite well and they were created before he had the experience of Apollo. (he was also a primary designer within Apollo) The problem with those early designs was that they were too large and were hopelessly cumbersome and expensive - try (at least) 10 to 20 times the final cost of the actual program that was built.
You're viewing this from the perspective of getting a man on the moon at all costs. Of course, Apollo was the best choice for that, that's why von Braun did it that way. But that was a pointless goal for a space program to begin with. A much better program would have been to build up launch capabilities and near earth capabilities, with a moon landing as a byproduct.
Richard Nixon, wreaked the plan... But in the 80's the real disaster came when Ronald Reagan crippled...
Gosh, so how is that political process and central planning working out for you for space exploration?
See, the problem with government-financed space exploration is that there are a lot of smart people who have radically different opinions of what should be done. And for none of them, it's their own money at stake, so it's not the best ideas that win, but the people who can talk the best talk. And the politicians these smart people are trying to convince are also concerned with budgets, lobbyists, constituencies, and leaving a legacy. When all is said and done, you end up with the spacecraft equivalent of a $1000 toilet seat, manufactured by the corporations of big lobbyists.
In an ideal world with omniscient and honest politicians, a government-run space program would be great. But in an ideal world with omniscient and honest politicians, central planning would be great.
In the real world, both end up being worse than for the government just to mostly butt out of markets and space.
Using opiates, and at your own dosage, does make sense for many people: people who are suffering badly, who are terminally ill. And the determination of who needs it and who doesn't should be left to the individual. If you think this is a serious social issue, you might perhaps reasonably require counseling and/or labeling (but then, I think you might reasonably require that before abortion too).
Since Ross actually transferred hundreds of thousands of dollars in bitcoins to the presumed hitman,
I haven't followed the case that closely, and my impression is still that it is far from clear that Ulbricht did this. Given that juries are not particularly technically inclined, I'm not sure I trust a jury to make the correct determination "beyond a reasonable doubt".
Can you point at a clear summary of what establishes the identity of Ulbricht as the guy who hired and paid the hitman?
Most countries, actually, until the "war on drugs" that started in the mid-20th century, largely motivated by expanding police powers and political advantages; there was little evidence it was necessary or effective.
And, yes, there is something wrong with human societies that they fall prey to this kind of manipulation and that they keep bowing to statism. Hopefully, we can fix that during this century, as people recognize that individual liberty and free will is more important than any kind of societal objectives.
No. The reason the US never returned to the Moon was for one reason - the cost of the Vietnam war. It was the war that was a huge waste of money, and that achieved little or nothing, and wasted 3 million human lives.
And that's of course also the reason the Soviet Union didn't go back to the moon, right? The moon landings were a PR dick measuring contest with the USSR, a way of developing missile technologies, and a means of funneling money to government-favored corporations (Northrop Grumman, TRW,...).
In fact, both the Vietnam War and the Apollo program are really symptoms of the same problem: overbearing politicians manipulating and forcing the public for their self interest and the benefit of their corporate cronies. In the case of Vietnam, people eventually figured it out (I guess too many dead bodies), in the case of the Apollo program, people are slower to figure it out: lefties like it because it is science-y, and righties like it because a US flag got planted. Nobody really hates it because it didn't leave a visible trail of dead bodies.
Those programs are only stepping stones to future exploration, but they also had a huge boosting effect on science, and they helped open up the whole of humanities future. If you cant see that you are mentally blind. Short term thinking - that's what the cow does.
No, they actually held back science and the future of humanity by tying up a lot of smart people and resources on a badly conceived and badly engineered project. And the fact that the Apollo program was so wasteful and inefficient has instilled the false idea in Americans that going into space is hard and can only be done with massive government spending and ludicrously wasteful rockets:
If it hadn't been for the Apollo programs, we'd probably have a lunar hotel by now; von Braun's original ideas about how to go into space were much more sensible than the crap the Apollo program delivered.
You are being led by your nose, just like a "cow", for the financial and political interests of politicians and corporations. If you like Apollo, you better love Vietnam, because you can't have one without the other. Personally, I prefer to have neither, and instead get cheap and efficient space technologies.
First, a militarized space race will produce technology that will help civilian and commercial space flight, much as early development of the jet engine was for military purposes.
Of course it would. But that doesn't come for free: the resources devoted to a "militarized space race" are resources not available for, say, biotech, medicine, or entertainment. You could even go a step further, turn our nation into a socialist centrally planned state, and then you could devote all resources to space exploration.
Second, the value of materials above LEO is going to be highly dependent on what we want to do there, and how. We would also need to build orbital (or higher) processing plants, since the current value of raw chunks of steel in LEO is negative.
Yes, correct. I'm assuming a rapidly developing space industry. I think that once people know they can get water, iron, and rock reliably and at moderate cost in orbit, that is pretty much inevitable.
(Water would be much more useful.)
Yes, asteroid mining very much refers to water/ice.
Our representative government is lovely at having kept us from falling under tyranny, which is all it was meant to do. From a practical point of view, it is clearly incapable of allocating resources according to popular vote; the budget doesn't represent what the people want, and people on the left and the right agree that Washington has been corrupted by lobbyists.
More fundamentally, though, taxing people and then reallocating the money according to popular vote would be wrong even if our government did it perfectly. Just because a majority of people want something doesn't give them the right to take other people's many to pay for it. For NASA, there isn't even a pretext of needing to spend this money.
Tyson is a rent-seeker and a lobbyist, no different from Lockheed or the Koch brothers. If this were about "convincing" people, we could easily make contributions to NASA an optional item on people's tax returns; that's probably what we should do with a lot of the "discretionary" budget, including the military budget.
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The error in that analysis is that people's needs aren't constant; the more a society develops, the more it industrializes and automates, the more people's "needs" (really, desires) increase.
Half a century ago, a vacation consisted of a trip to the local beach; today, it's a flight across the country or to some tropical resort; in another half century, it's probably a trip into space. The only reason we can afford to do that is because automation frees workers from menial tasks and allows them to do more.
The labor participation rate actually strongly increases as societies industrialize and become more automated. That is, both a larger fraction of the population and a larger total number of people work as societies automate and industrialize. That's pretty much universally true across the globe.
("Unemployment" is a technical short-term measure that is irrelevant to such discussions, but it generally also decreases.)
We should apply the same idea to Congress and the laws it passes: every law should have to be re-approved by every new Congress individually.
Yes, as a simple glance at labor participation rates and GDPs across countries and history shows.
You need to take your own advice.
Europe's primary unemployment problem is with young workers, priced out of the market by regulations. Europe's long-term unemployment problem is a separate problem that affects older workers.
So you're saying someone works a union blue collar 40h/week job and never bothers to learn any new skills or complete their college degree in 30 years. How is that a problem with automation? If you're a web programmer at IBM and you get assigned a new colleague to your team who's been with the company for 30 years, and he tells you "I only do COBOL and I don't want to learn anything new", how would you react?
No society can tolerate that kind of attitude. In socialist societies, they would simply force you to keep your skills updated. In capitalist societies, we assume that people are aware that they can be fired any day and need to keep their skills updated.
Yes: if you lose your job, you didn't get insurance, and you don't have savings, you need to downgrade. Again, I fail to see how that is anybody's responsibility but yours.
Good!
Labor has always been the biggest cost in making products. And that is why automation is a good thing: by freeing up labor in some industries, that labor becomes available to do jobs that previously couldn't be done at all.
Automation has always led to increased employment and wealth for the masses.
If it were to occur, it would mean that everybody's needs would be met for free; you wouldn't need a job.
Corporate profits going up is exactly how people work less:
(1) When you're young, you work and you save and invest in businesses.
(2) When the profits from the business are large enough to sustain you without work, you retire.
Larger corporate profits mean you can retire earlier.
Of course, if you don't save for retirement, then the larger corporate profits won't help you, but that's your own problem.
No, it's stupid and uninformed.
It does generate free time: if you choose to consume less, you can work less. But most people choose to consume close to what they are capable of earning. That is, they buy big houses, several cars, Internet, and lots of other stuff.
There are some limits to this kind of choice: many communities, for example, have minimum square foot sizes for homes and apartments, require you to purchase running water and electricity, and impose other costs on you. But even that pales in comparison to the voluntary increased expenditures people make.
In Ulbricht's case, the only proof of a conspiracy is a text file of a chat log on his computer, a file that he claims he didn't create. How is he supposed to defend himself against that?
Laws against conspiracies make sense in an ideal justice system where people take "beyond a reasonable doubt" seriously; very few people could get convicted on that.
In the real world, convictions on intent and conspiracy are hard to prove conclusively, hard to defend against if you're innocent, and very likely to be abused by prosecutors. And in Ulbricht's case, the alleged conspiracy wasn't even what he was on trial for, so it wasn't even properly litigated, it was used to increase his sentence to life in prison.
Yes, it is a question of balance, which is why I said "more important than", not "overrule all other concerns". Using and trading in drugs should not be banned.
I would point out that it is only governments that have mustered the enormous amounts of money to develop "nuclear weapons and anthrax grenades", and actually used it people. In the real world, the only way to waste money on such crap is to take away people's resources and labor by force.
Stop being such a moron, and while you're at it learn to read English.
Long term unemployment is a far bigger problem in Europe than in the US. So whatever we're doing, we're doing it better than Europeans.
Furthermore, pawning the cost of employing the unemployable onto employers in particular industries just isn't going to work; they are competing with employers worldwide, most of which don't have these costs. If society wants 50-year-old guys with no marketable skills not to starve, then society needs to give these people welfare and/or an education.
Of course, your view is both faulty and arrogant; 50 year old guys are perfectly capable of learning new, marketable skills.
It's also a field that is remarkably ineffective at delivering results. I think they are not at risk of automation, they are at risk of elimination as a profession.
You mean mind-numbing, back-breaking, dangerous jobs will be replaced with safer, more interesting jobs? Great! The sooner the better.
So did I.
Framing something may perhaps give the artist a new copyright, but that doesn't mean that he has a right to violate other copyrights with what he puts into the frame.
I mean, putting a severed head on a plate may be art, but severing the head would still be murder.
So? She is making another "radical context change"!
The article you point to says:
It says nothing about "authenticated in his own journal found on his seized laptop".
Wikipedia says:
I'm still wondering what the evidence is that proves "beyond a reasonable doubt" that Ulbricht is DPR. It's reasonable to assume that, even probable, but that should not be enough for a felony conviction.
You're viewing this from the perspective of getting a man on the moon at all costs. Of course, Apollo was the best choice for that, that's why von Braun did it that way. But that was a pointless goal for a space program to begin with. A much better program would have been to build up launch capabilities and near earth capabilities, with a moon landing as a byproduct.
Gosh, so how is that political process and central planning working out for you for space exploration?
See, the problem with government-financed space exploration is that there are a lot of smart people who have radically different opinions of what should be done. And for none of them, it's their own money at stake, so it's not the best ideas that win, but the people who can talk the best talk. And the politicians these smart people are trying to convince are also concerned with budgets, lobbyists, constituencies, and leaving a legacy. When all is said and done, you end up with the spacecraft equivalent of a $1000 toilet seat, manufactured by the corporations of big lobbyists.
In an ideal world with omniscient and honest politicians, a government-run space program would be great. But in an ideal world with omniscient and honest politicians, central planning would be great.
In the real world, both end up being worse than for the government just to mostly butt out of markets and space.
Using opiates, and at your own dosage, does make sense for many people: people who are suffering badly, who are terminally ill. And the determination of who needs it and who doesn't should be left to the individual. If you think this is a serious social issue, you might perhaps reasonably require counseling and/or labeling (but then, I think you might reasonably require that before abortion too).
I haven't followed the case that closely, and my impression is still that it is far from clear that Ulbricht did this. Given that juries are not particularly technically inclined, I'm not sure I trust a jury to make the correct determination "beyond a reasonable doubt".
Can you point at a clear summary of what establishes the identity of Ulbricht as the guy who hired and paid the hitman?
Most countries, actually, until the "war on drugs" that started in the mid-20th century, largely motivated by expanding police powers and political advantages; there was little evidence it was necessary or effective.
And, yes, there is something wrong with human societies that they fall prey to this kind of manipulation and that they keep bowing to statism. Hopefully, we can fix that during this century, as people recognize that individual liberty and free will is more important than any kind of societal objectives.
And that's of course also the reason the Soviet Union didn't go back to the moon, right? The moon landings were a PR dick measuring contest with the USSR, a way of developing missile technologies, and a means of funneling money to government-favored corporations (Northrop Grumman, TRW, ...).
In fact, both the Vietnam War and the Apollo program are really symptoms of the same problem: overbearing politicians manipulating and forcing the public for their self interest and the benefit of their corporate cronies. In the case of Vietnam, people eventually figured it out (I guess too many dead bodies), in the case of the Apollo program, people are slower to figure it out: lefties like it because it is science-y, and righties like it because a US flag got planted. Nobody really hates it because it didn't leave a visible trail of dead bodies.
No, they actually held back science and the future of humanity by tying up a lot of smart people and resources on a badly conceived and badly engineered project. And the fact that the Apollo program was so wasteful and inefficient has instilled the false idea in Americans that going into space is hard and can only be done with massive government spending and ludicrously wasteful rockets:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
If it hadn't been for the Apollo programs, we'd probably have a lunar hotel by now; von Braun's original ideas about how to go into space were much more sensible than the crap the Apollo program delivered.
You are being led by your nose, just like a "cow", for the financial and political interests of politicians and corporations. If you like Apollo, you better love Vietnam, because you can't have one without the other. Personally, I prefer to have neither, and instead get cheap and efficient space technologies.
Lack of respect for legal and political authority is evidently a far worse crime than actual murder.
Of course it would. But that doesn't come for free: the resources devoted to a "militarized space race" are resources not available for, say, biotech, medicine, or entertainment. You could even go a step further, turn our nation into a socialist centrally planned state, and then you could devote all resources to space exploration.
Yes, correct. I'm assuming a rapidly developing space industry. I think that once people know they can get water, iron, and rock reliably and at moderate cost in orbit, that is pretty much inevitable.
Yes, asteroid mining very much refers to water/ice.
Our representative government is lovely at having kept us from falling under tyranny, which is all it was meant to do. From a practical point of view, it is clearly incapable of allocating resources according to popular vote; the budget doesn't represent what the people want, and people on the left and the right agree that Washington has been corrupted by lobbyists.
More fundamentally, though, taxing people and then reallocating the money according to popular vote would be wrong even if our government did it perfectly. Just because a majority of people want something doesn't give them the right to take other people's many to pay for it. For NASA, there isn't even a pretext of needing to spend this money.
Tyson is a rent-seeker and a lobbyist, no different from Lockheed or the Koch brothers. If this were about "convincing" people, we could easily make contributions to NASA an optional item on people's tax returns; that's probably what we should do with a lot of the "discretionary" budget, including the military budget.