The only really defining attribute of Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production. But if the means of production is owned by a bunch of crony capitalist who are also able to control the political system, then the theoretical ability for individuals to own the means of production is meaningless. I have a theoretical chance of winning the lottery, but on an aggregate scale, that is not a solution to poverty. Capitalism thrives when the means of production are distributed among the population. This creates liquidity of labor, ideas and opportunity. Once a small bunch of people own everything, you can have Communism, Capitalism, Feudalism - whatever you want - and it still sucks for those who don't own any assets.
Our present system cannot survive in a democracy. You can see the political shift already starting. My concern is that instead of fixing up the systemic problems (tax loopholes, lack of efficient markets for land etc) there will be a big lurch to the left. What we need is to stop markets being manipulated, and re-calibrate the state so that it is only producing public goods and not acting as corporate welfare. Then leave people to get on with it. My fear is that we just bring in another central control system, and all the capitalist will have a magical epiphany overnight and wonder out the doors of their corporations and into the inner politburo.
The reason is that there are really two issues rolled into the climate change debate. The first is man-made warming itself. The second is environmental conservatism in general. What many climate campaigners would like is for humans to stop destroying our natural environment - cutting down forests, polluting rivers and lakes, that sort of thing. Many of the same people/organisations who were drumming on about environmental conservatism since before the climate change debate, simply used climate change as their latest vehicle to get their message out. Nothing wrong with that.
However, the reason they don't want to talk about geo-engineering, is that if this is seen as a viable option, then the two issues separate again. In other words many people will see a much simpler third way which involves technology preventing global warming, while they continue burning oil and buying endless junk they don't really need.
Sadly, humans being humans, it is likely that this third way will be the one we take. However, the biggest risk I see is that while us rich westerners just buy a few more air conditioners and argue about whether climate change is a thing or not, some country that is bearing the brunt of the problem decides to setup an aerosol plant and begin feeding something into the atmosphere that they think might fix the problem for them. I mean, if your country is starving due to drought, or sea level rise threatens to wipe you out, and the rich western countries are busy arguing about whether they should be able to have enormous cars or giant cars, you might just get desperate and do something risky for the planet.
I would encourage you to think the idea through a bit more. You are correct about the distinction between stock and flow, but consider that the banking system is continually adding to the stock of money in the economy at the moment. This is a necessary function to maintain price stability as the economy grows. So the stock of money is constantly increasing, and my question is simply whether there is a better way to (supplement) the addition of money to the system other than leaving it in the hands of private banks. Note, private banks would still be able to create money, but if they run out of productive investments (which is what is being talked about with the rise of robots etc) then the central bank can step in. The advantage of this is that interest rates can be left to be set by the market, rather than being suppressed by the central banks. Looking at the housing markets in places like London/Australia/Canada/NZ, it seems quite clear that the problem with suppressing interest rates in the hope it will stimulate investment is that it results in a total mis-pricing of risk.
Also consider that you do not need explicit flows of money to transfer the stock of wealth between individuals. That only holds true if inflation is at precisely 0%. If central banks fail in stimulating demand to a level that prevents deflation, this has the same effect as taking money from borrowers and giving it to lenders. Personally I suspect this real deflationary situation is being hidden right now by the massive amounts of money being generated in asset bubbles. Demand is very weak, and industrial capacity is still sitting idle. That smacks of the sort of buyer-seller Mexican standoff I alluded too in my first post. If that is true, then central banks will have to do something drastic eventually, unless they can keep asset bubbles going indefinitely.
BTW, I'm not saying that a UBI transfer wouldn't work. I simply think that it will be extremely hard to enact politically in many countries as it conflates the issues of welfare with the more acute issue of preventing a depression. Don't underestimate a democracy's ability to shoot itself in the foot.
The best way I think to implement the basic income concept is for the central bank to simply helicopter money a citizen's dividend to everyone in the population. The amount of dividend paid each week should be set to target inflation.
If the economy takes off again and things return to pre-07 levels of employment/growth, then the required dividend will fall to zero, and things will continue as 'normal'. However, if it turns out that automation, the end of consumerism, inequality, or a financial system meltdown, lead to a situation where prices continue to deflate and long term unemployment rises, the central bank will be able to generate consumer demand using the citizen's dividend.
The main benefit of this scheme is that it does not require us to determine whether automation is going to destroy all the jobs, or whether capitalism will magically find new jobs for everyone. If the former turns out to be true, then over time the dividend will grow to be a very live-able payment. If a whole lot of new industries pop up, the dividend will fall and people will have to go out and take up the jobs available in those industries. This is why it is important that the central banks set the rate, not politicians or else it will be impossible to ever reduce the dividend.
The other key thing is that such a scheme does not guarantee the dividend amount can replace all current welfare. I think this is important too. Preventing a stupid stagnation situation where people starve while they and their machines/land sit idle, is a thing I think most people can agree we need to avoid. However, deciding on an appropriate level of income redistribution is something that has been argued about since records began and, as a society, we don't seem any closer to agreement. For that reason I think it is both a pipe dream, and potentially consensus destroying to try to roll a social welfare system into our more acute need - which is a post-automation model for capitalism.
Another question: why not have 4 engines instead of 2? Are 2 really more economical than 4 for smallish passenger jets?
Yes, two engines really are much cheaper than four. Every engine requires regular tear down and inspection, and having them a bit larger doesn't add as much cost as having to tear down two extra engines.
Also four engines may not really help you that much when it matters. Twin-jets are quite capable of operations on one engine. There are even approvals now for flights where, in the worst case, the aircraft my have to fly 370 minutes on a single engine over water after a failure. This is a testament to how reliable the engines have become. The main danger to engines now is an external factor that is common to both engines - e.g. hitting a flock of birds, flying through a volcano. In these situations, having four, or even eight engines, only marginally increases your chance of survival for a lot of added cost and complexity.
Seriously, if you want good coffee, just buy the cheapest espresso machine you can (about $100-150 new, half that second hand) and spend 15mins watching some instruction videos. Once you have this all you need to buy is bags of pre-ground beans (or if you what better-than-many-cafe-quality, buy a grinder and roast raw beans on your stove) and you can make a hipster grade latte - including the milk art fern - in a couple of minutes for around 10c.
I have friends who bought expensive pod coffee machines, and their coffee is rubbish. They also have all these weird contraptions to aerate and heat the milk. When I suggest they try using an espresso machine, they always go on about how making coffee with one is really hard because you have to do a professional barrista training course. This is just buying into the whole hipster hype. The hardest thing about being a hipster barrista in a trendy cafe is setting your pompadour in the morning. If you graduated high school I assure you that making espresso coffee is not going to beat you. Pod machines are just the walled garden of the coffee industry.
It's not an authentication chip. It is just a chip that reports what the cable can do. If they didn't do it this way you would either have to design every cable to be able to deliver 50W of power and superspeed channel buffers, or you'd have to come up with a different scheme - such as the variable resistor values used before - to indicate what the cable can do. This also gets complicated fast, and is not easily extendable in the future. The active cable protocol is quite simple, and makes the whole system much more useful. Also, if you don't want any of the advanced features (super speed, high power delivery) then the spec supports passive USB-C cables.
I have been developing on the embedded side of USB since V1.1. The reality is that the protocol has been remarkably successful because it was designed reasonably well right at the start. This meant that each successive extension to the standard was able to do so in a way that preserved backwards compatibility with older standards. The benefit of this now is that if you don't want the new features of USB-C (super-speed, power delivery) then upgrading your device to USB-C is as easy as changing the connector - all the original firmware from 15 years ago will work fine.
With regard to this cable situation, it is really just a problem of USB not being run by a bunch of lawyers who go about suing anyone not paying them their protection money. These cables are simple not compliant with the spec, but there is nobody to really do much about it. I think it has only become a problem for USB-C because the cables now included an optional active element. This is unlikely to be something a cable supplier has much experience with, and I think they are just doing a really rubbish job for now. However, as more USB-C silicon comes out, I think this problem will resolve itself very fast. Basically once cable manufacturers can just rip example circuits from TI and Microchip, the effort of making correct cables will begin to outweigh having to change your amazon brand every week.
It's not DRM. Cables that support the more advanced features of USB-C (such as super speed, alternate modes, high power delivery levels etc) have a small microcontroller inside them which informs the host about what the cable is able to do. This is not required for cables that only support USB low/full/high speed. If this was not present, then a host can't decide whether the cable connecting it to the device is going to fry if it sends 50W of power down it. But the cable just reports and ID and capabilities descriptor. You can make your own cables that do this, and the complete details of the communications protocol is listed on the freely available USB-C spec.
The problem here is that shady manufacturers are saving money by not implementing this function properly. This means the cables are either missing the active component so are unable to do what people thought they would be able to do, or are downright dangerous because they report that they can deliver lots of power when the physical wires are not large enough. The thing is that both these things are very easy for a retailer to check for, but I think the main issue is that the standard is so new that many manufacturers/retailers are simply being lazy.
If only Deutsche Bank was so picky about whom to do business with when it's about VIPs from totalitarian countries, companies evading taxes etc. - but no, they only follow some en vogue PC rules when it's about people's freedom to use either toilet booth. It would be funny if it didn't shed a light on how absolutely insignificant discussions are blown up to create the illusion that "companies care about people's opinion", while they of course do not in the least.
I'd be happy if they were just more picky about investing in truckloads of terrible derivatives. It is looking increasingly likely that DB is (rather ironically for Greece) going to be the bad apple that collapses the eurozone.
Wow, all the comments on this article have completely missed the point of this. IDIOTS are not pushing this - the concept offers very real efficiency improvements.
The primary constraint in modern jet aircraft efficiency is the propulsive efficiency - turning the mechanical shaft power into forward thrust. This is fundamentally limited by the size of your fan for a given airspeed. If you make the fan swept area a little bit bigger, you can get major improvements in the overall efficiency of the aircraft. This is why newer airplanes always have bigger and bigger engines (787 vs 767, 737NG, A320NEO).
However there are limits to how big you can go. One problem is physically fitting a large diameter engine into existing airframe designs. On the 737NG they had to raise the nose landing gear to accommodate the new engines. There are practical limits to how much you can keep doing this sort of thing without having to create a completely new airframe (the 737 is a 1960s airframe). The other problem with larger fan blades is that the tip speed increases with diameter, which means the fan RPM must reduce to prevent supersonic airflow. This then creates a compromise on the turbine section of the engine. The newest generation of engines are now using gearboxes so that the turbine can run at a higher speed than the fan, which lets them go to larger bypass ratios. The cost, however, is in weight and complexity.
The big benefit that hybrid electric could offer is being able to effectively increase the fan area by distributing fans along the wing. This could create massive efficiency gains, and bring jet aircraft closer to the efficiency of turboprops. Imagine a 737 with two large electric fans next to each other. This could double the swept area on the same fuselage. Further, the concpept could make boundary layer ingestion designs practical, and these also offer big advantages in terms of efficiency for future airframe designs.
This is not about making battery powered aircraft. It is about re-arrangement of the aircraft systems to provide better propulsive efficiency.
So what are the big US names involved? Or do they not need these kinds of structures as they have other ways of not paying taxes?
Next week, apparently. The first round was just to get westerners interested in what would have otherwise been a bit of a flash in the pan 'revelation' that rich people don't pay tax. Most people wouldn't have been interested as the details are complex, and they would have figured such schemes are just part of being rich. The Chinese, Russian and Icelandic reactions to the news have succeeded in getting the common westerner's ears pricked up to the thought that this could be a very big scandal indeed.
We will see what happens. I suspect David Cameron might be done next week. He is playing extremely strategic word games about his situation, and I can't see why he would bother being so meticulous unless he is concerned something has a good chance of coming out. I suspect he has a very big skeleton in his closet, and is being very careful to ensure he can only be labelled a hypocrite, not an outright liar.
That's not really fair. The problem with solar energy is that it suffers from a similar problem to the old conundrum about using rockets to travel to another galaxy. Essentially, because rocket technology gets better every time you build a rocket, later rockets will keep overtaking older rockets enroute. So, the argument goes, there is no point building a rocket today, because it will be caught by a newer rocket before it ever reaches the destination.
In the same way, the problem with solar is that as you develop the tech the cost continues to fall. So if you build your plant with today's tech, there is a very good chance that in a few years a competitor will be able to destroy your return-on-investment with a new cheaper plant. If your plant has not paid back its capital costs in that time (and solar has the problem that it has long payback periods right now) then you have a white elephant. If you read the article you will see that this is exactly what investors now believe will happen, and hence are bringing forward the insolvency of those parts of the company. However, once the debts from construction are 'readjusted', the underlying plant will be able to produce profitable returns for the new owners. I'm pretty sure part of the reason for having a complex financial arrangement was so that this rather obvious issue could be hidden from retail investors, so I wouldn't accuse the MBAs from being retarded.
The same problem is going to happen with Elon Musk's giga-factory. I am reasonably certain this is why nobody else is joining him in making their own giga-factory, because they know that until the cost curve flattens out, the first few factories are going to be hopelessly outdated, and possibly unprofitable, before they ever return the initial funding spent to build them.
In the UK there is no such requirement, and in the US it only applies to deposits in transaction accounts. It really ceased being a constraint a long time ago, because central banks must allow money creation to account for the needs of a growing economy, but they really have no useful way to know whether the money banks are asking for is going into bubbles or legitimate requirements. For this reason they just target inflation, which does not account for asset bubbles caused excess funds flooding a market.
Also, hedge funds and private investment banks are not constrained by these sorts of rules. If they believe they can profit by pumping up a market, they are free to do so. As Soros showed, if you are big enough, you can control the market, and make your own 'luck'.
Banks don't lend the money you deposit. That's YOUR money, not the bank's. Banks create the money they lend (out of nothing).
No that is what central banks do. Banks do lend you money from deposits, but guess what the people who you pay that lent money to do with it? They deposit it again. In a bank. Which means the bank can lend it out again, and again, and again.
It's really quite ingeniously stupid:
1. In an area there are three houses, and three people - Alice, Bob and Mary. Mary owns her house, which she bought for $100k with a $10k deposit. The rest just rent.
2. Bob and Alice both want to buy a house. They go to the bank, and the bank says because they are a responsible bank they will only lend up to 90% of the price of the house. They look at the value of sales in the area and determine that houses are worth $100k based on Mary's original purchase. They are prepared to lend each one $90k. At the auction, Bob is able to outbid Alice because he has saved a bigger deposit. He ends up paying $110k for the house. The bank is fine with the price being higher than market value because it knows it can recover the $90k loan by selling the house for $100k if Bob defaults.
3. Mary receives the $110k from Bob, uses it to pay down her mortgage of $90k, and deposits the remaining $20k with the bank. She thinks she did pretty well making $10k off her housing investment.
4. A little while later Mary changes her mind and decides that she wants to buy her house again. Now both her and Alice are in the market for a house. They go to the bank, and the bank says because they are a responsible bank they will only lend up to 90% of the price of the house. They look at the value of sales in the area and determine that houses are now worth $110k, based on Bob's purchase price. They are prepared to lend each one $99k. At the auction, however, Alice is now desperate for a house. Even though Mary has the money she made from the previous house, Alice has saved hard and is able to scrape together enough for a $120k bid. She wins the auction and buys the house. The bank is fine with the price being higher than market value because it knows it can recover the $99k loan by selling the house for $110k if Alice defaults.
4. Bob is overjoyed. He just made $10k from his housing investment. Alice raises the mortage, and pays Bob. He pays down his $90k mortgage and puts his $30k into the bank.
5. Bob then tells Mary she needs to just get into the market and buy because prices are going up so fast. Mary has already made money from housing, so she agrees. Alice hears how much Bob and Mary have made in the housing market, so she looks at buying an investment property. They all go off to the bank again...
QDLCD is not particularly cutting edge. You just swap out the colour filter for a QD film. It has been used in TVs for a while now, but nobody other than Apple is really doing much innovating with LCD in the mobile space (especially now, as the article states, AMOLED is cheaper). Apple's problem is that it is a premium company who doesn't have access to AMOLED panels (I guess Samsung Displays would probably sell to them, but then they end up dependent on them for a key component again).
Major interim benefit of QDLCD is that you don't lose as much energy as with a colour filter. The backlight dominates power consumption in the phone (well, when you're in an urban setting anyway) so reducing this will let them make the battery smaller which seems to be their main design goal these days.
Samsung leads the way with these panels, and puts the best technology into its own flagship models. Apple is quickly trying to fix this problem by investing in AMOLED, and it looks like they will move to the technology in 2018 through a partnership with JDI (just in time for the iPhone 8). In the mean time, I'm guessing the iPhone 7 will have a quantum dot display, as this can match AMOLED for color saturation (interestingly, this strength of AMOLED is something Tim Cook was spreading FUD about last year - I lost a lot of respect for his integrity when he did that), and brings the power consumption difference much closer. The remaining strength of AMOLED is then being much thinner (no backlight), and handling flex better. All in all, this road map will let them make their rounded rectangles progressively thinner.
You're right. It's more like LIBOR or the Goldman Sachs aluminum business. Still dishonest, but not illegal, which is why legitimate investments banks do them.
If every possible action was legal in a game, then there would be no need for any rules. Preventing actions that cause the game to fail is exactly why we have rules. This guy broke a rather clear rule, and now he is getting punished for it.
BTW, his real failure was simply not being creative enough with his dishonesty. Libor, sub-prime, the Goldman Sachs aluminum scam, all demonstrate ways financiers have acted dishonestly without technically breaking a 'rule' and hence get to keep their billions and suffer no punishment. In a perfect world they would all at least lose their money for not playing to the spirit of the rules (like regular workers and small business owners have too), but we don't seem to do that, so they get to keep scamming us and this guy goes to jail.
Anybody can copy that model, use a better name, use better industry clout and eat Facebook's market up easily. It would in no way be hard and in the big picture social networking software will be made by many vendors and Facebook will have no ability to compete against the endless pockets of media companies and software giants. Facebook should keep their business model simple and just make as much money while they can, expanding makes no sense other than to scam people out of capital.
See how ignorant that sounds? The world does not work on who can sit in their bedroom writing the best code or thinking up some great ideas. It works on who can convince a bunch of investors to dump billions into a company that makes no money and is trying to distrupt an entire global industry. Uber might not succeed, but my bet is that the winner won't be a bunch of geeks who spent their lives doing research projects on autonomous cars.
I think the UBI sounds good in practice, but I am concerned that it will be too open to political abuse. In the end I think it is important to not conflate the issues of an economy that is deflating due to inequality, and a socially acceptable amount of inequality. I think you could get general consensus for some kind of UBI to ensure that the economy doesn't fall into a depression, but people will always fight about what level of inequality is acceptable.
For this reason I actually think a helicopter dividend would be better. Central banks should just be given the power to dump money into every citizen's bank account (probably each month) from created funds to ensure they meet their inflation targets. If the predictions that automation will destroy many jobs come to pass, then the amount they will have to pay out to maintain demand and hence inflation will eventually come to equal a UBI. On the other hand, if the economy recovers and full employment magically returns, the dividend will be cut to zero and the bank can use interest rate policy to control inflation as per usual. The other big benefit of this is that they could then return interest rates to a market level, let all the bubbles deflate, and feed helicopter money in until the economy recovers. This would remove the need for them to have to artificially suppress interest rates to stimulate the economy (which has caused much of the mess we are in), and would give them the ability to let big bubbles collapse without risking a deflationary spiral.
Until automation grows to a point where the dividend was sufficient to live off, you would still need government transfer payments to poor people, but this is just such a political issue that I think trying to remove it from the political process by rolling it into a UBI will just undermine the ability to get consensus on the need for change.
I'm always amazed that the rich think they can hide in their gated communities and enjoy the fruits of other people's labor.
But they're not even benefiting from Suzie's labor because she doesn't have a job. The rich are being as fooled by capitalism as the poor are. Free market capitalism is essentially a mindless productivity optimizer. Its goal is to squeeze all human labor out of the system by rewarding productivity improvements (which result in more profit) and innovation (which disrupts entrenched interests), all powered along by competition. All of that is fine until the increases in productivity start to out-pace the un-met demand for human labor from the displaced workforce. At that point the best course of action for the invisible hand is to start ejecting the people who consume more resources than robots. This might be good for GDP per worker, but is neither humane nor sustainable in a democracy. Trying to fix this with things like minimum wages is only going to delay things for a short while.
Many people seem to have turned our current version of capitalism into some kind of religion and that is where I think many of our problems come from. Capitalism is just a program that is running and has arguably worked better than any other program for the last few decades. But that program is not sentient. It just blindly pursues a set of objectives. It is now destroying human society in pursuit of those objectives, and the humans need to put their thinking caps back on, tweek the system (as has been done numerous times in capitalism's history) and then set it loose again. My main concern is that if we don't realise this and make adjustments now, people will start to believe some guy (e.g Trump) can do things better by taking control himself. He probably can, until the power goes to his head and the circle begins again.
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The only really defining attribute of Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production. But if the means of production is owned by a bunch of crony capitalist who are also able to control the political system, then the theoretical ability for individuals to own the means of production is meaningless. I have a theoretical chance of winning the lottery, but on an aggregate scale, that is not a solution to poverty. Capitalism thrives when the means of production are distributed among the population. This creates liquidity of labor, ideas and opportunity. Once a small bunch of people own everything, you can have Communism, Capitalism, Feudalism - whatever you want - and it still sucks for those who don't own any assets.
Our present system cannot survive in a democracy. You can see the political shift already starting. My concern is that instead of fixing up the systemic problems (tax loopholes, lack of efficient markets for land etc) there will be a big lurch to the left. What we need is to stop markets being manipulated, and re-calibrate the state so that it is only producing public goods and not acting as corporate welfare. Then leave people to get on with it. My fear is that we just bring in another central control system, and all the capitalist will have a magical epiphany overnight and wonder out the doors of their corporations and into the inner politburo.
The reason is that there are really two issues rolled into the climate change debate. The first is man-made warming itself. The second is environmental conservatism in general. What many climate campaigners would like is for humans to stop destroying our natural environment - cutting down forests, polluting rivers and lakes, that sort of thing. Many of the same people/organisations who were drumming on about environmental conservatism since before the climate change debate, simply used climate change as their latest vehicle to get their message out. Nothing wrong with that.
However, the reason they don't want to talk about geo-engineering, is that if this is seen as a viable option, then the two issues separate again. In other words many people will see a much simpler third way which involves technology preventing global warming, while they continue burning oil and buying endless junk they don't really need.
Sadly, humans being humans, it is likely that this third way will be the one we take. However, the biggest risk I see is that while us rich westerners just buy a few more air conditioners and argue about whether climate change is a thing or not, some country that is bearing the brunt of the problem decides to setup an aerosol plant and begin feeding something into the atmosphere that they think might fix the problem for them. I mean, if your country is starving due to drought, or sea level rise threatens to wipe you out, and the rich western countries are busy arguing about whether they should be able to have enormous cars or giant cars, you might just get desperate and do something risky for the planet.
I would encourage you to think the idea through a bit more. You are correct about the distinction between stock and flow, but consider that the banking system is continually adding to the stock of money in the economy at the moment. This is a necessary function to maintain price stability as the economy grows. So the stock of money is constantly increasing, and my question is simply whether there is a better way to (supplement) the addition of money to the system other than leaving it in the hands of private banks. Note, private banks would still be able to create money, but if they run out of productive investments (which is what is being talked about with the rise of robots etc) then the central bank can step in. The advantage of this is that interest rates can be left to be set by the market, rather than being suppressed by the central banks. Looking at the housing markets in places like London/Australia/Canada/NZ, it seems quite clear that the problem with suppressing interest rates in the hope it will stimulate investment is that it results in a total mis-pricing of risk.
Also consider that you do not need explicit flows of money to transfer the stock of wealth between individuals. That only holds true if inflation is at precisely 0%. If central banks fail in stimulating demand to a level that prevents deflation, this has the same effect as taking money from borrowers and giving it to lenders. Personally I suspect this real deflationary situation is being hidden right now by the massive amounts of money being generated in asset bubbles. Demand is very weak, and industrial capacity is still sitting idle. That smacks of the sort of buyer-seller Mexican standoff I alluded too in my first post. If that is true, then central banks will have to do something drastic eventually, unless they can keep asset bubbles going indefinitely.
BTW, I'm not saying that a UBI transfer wouldn't work. I simply think that it will be extremely hard to enact politically in many countries as it conflates the issues of welfare with the more acute issue of preventing a depression. Don't underestimate a democracy's ability to shoot itself in the foot.
The best way I think to implement the basic income concept is for the central bank to simply helicopter money a citizen's dividend to everyone in the population. The amount of dividend paid each week should be set to target inflation.
If the economy takes off again and things return to pre-07 levels of employment/growth, then the required dividend will fall to zero, and things will continue as 'normal'. However, if it turns out that automation, the end of consumerism, inequality, or a financial system meltdown, lead to a situation where prices continue to deflate and long term unemployment rises, the central bank will be able to generate consumer demand using the citizen's dividend.
The main benefit of this scheme is that it does not require us to determine whether automation is going to destroy all the jobs, or whether capitalism will magically find new jobs for everyone. If the former turns out to be true, then over time the dividend will grow to be a very live-able payment. If a whole lot of new industries pop up, the dividend will fall and people will have to go out and take up the jobs available in those industries. This is why it is important that the central banks set the rate, not politicians or else it will be impossible to ever reduce the dividend.
The other key thing is that such a scheme does not guarantee the dividend amount can replace all current welfare. I think this is important too. Preventing a stupid stagnation situation where people starve while they and their machines/land sit idle, is a thing I think most people can agree we need to avoid. However, deciding on an appropriate level of income redistribution is something that has been argued about since records began and, as a society, we don't seem any closer to agreement. For that reason I think it is both a pipe dream, and potentially consensus destroying to try to roll a social welfare system into our more acute need - which is a post-automation model for capitalism.
Yeah, if only we had some sort of distributed load shifting infrastructure in everybody's home... Maybe like 400,000 or so to kick things off.
Another question: why not have 4 engines instead of 2? Are 2 really more economical than 4 for smallish passenger jets?
Yes, two engines really are much cheaper than four. Every engine requires regular tear down and inspection, and having them a bit larger doesn't add as much cost as having to tear down two extra engines.
Also four engines may not really help you that much when it matters. Twin-jets are quite capable of operations on one engine. There are even approvals now for flights where, in the worst case, the aircraft my have to fly 370 minutes on a single engine over water after a failure. This is a testament to how reliable the engines have become. The main danger to engines now is an external factor that is common to both engines - e.g. hitting a flock of birds, flying through a volcano. In these situations, having four, or even eight engines, only marginally increases your chance of survival for a lot of added cost and complexity.
Seriously, if you want good coffee, just buy the cheapest espresso machine you can (about $100-150 new, half that second hand) and spend 15mins watching some instruction videos. Once you have this all you need to buy is bags of pre-ground beans (or if you what better-than-many-cafe-quality, buy a grinder and roast raw beans on your stove) and you can make a hipster grade latte - including the milk art fern - in a couple of minutes for around 10c.
I have friends who bought expensive pod coffee machines, and their coffee is rubbish. They also have all these weird contraptions to aerate and heat the milk. When I suggest they try using an espresso machine, they always go on about how making coffee with one is really hard because you have to do a professional barrista training course. This is just buying into the whole hipster hype. The hardest thing about being a hipster barrista in a trendy cafe is setting your pompadour in the morning. If you graduated high school I assure you that making espresso coffee is not going to beat you. Pod machines are just the walled garden of the coffee industry.
It's not an authentication chip. It is just a chip that reports what the cable can do. If they didn't do it this way you would either have to design every cable to be able to deliver 50W of power and superspeed channel buffers, or you'd have to come up with a different scheme - such as the variable resistor values used before - to indicate what the cable can do. This also gets complicated fast, and is not easily extendable in the future. The active cable protocol is quite simple, and makes the whole system much more useful. Also, if you don't want any of the advanced features (super speed, high power delivery) then the spec supports passive USB-C cables.
Yes, it probably is.
I have been developing on the embedded side of USB since V1.1. The reality is that the protocol has been remarkably successful because it was designed reasonably well right at the start. This meant that each successive extension to the standard was able to do so in a way that preserved backwards compatibility with older standards. The benefit of this now is that if you don't want the new features of USB-C (super-speed, power delivery) then upgrading your device to USB-C is as easy as changing the connector - all the original firmware from 15 years ago will work fine.
With regard to this cable situation, it is really just a problem of USB not being run by a bunch of lawyers who go about suing anyone not paying them their protection money. These cables are simple not compliant with the spec, but there is nobody to really do much about it. I think it has only become a problem for USB-C because the cables now included an optional active element. This is unlikely to be something a cable supplier has much experience with, and I think they are just doing a really rubbish job for now. However, as more USB-C silicon comes out, I think this problem will resolve itself very fast. Basically once cable manufacturers can just rip example circuits from TI and Microchip, the effort of making correct cables will begin to outweigh having to change your amazon brand every week.
It's not DRM. Cables that support the more advanced features of USB-C (such as super speed, alternate modes, high power delivery levels etc) have a small microcontroller inside them which informs the host about what the cable is able to do. This is not required for cables that only support USB low/full/high speed. If this was not present, then a host can't decide whether the cable connecting it to the device is going to fry if it sends 50W of power down it. But the cable just reports and ID and capabilities descriptor. You can make your own cables that do this, and the complete details of the communications protocol is listed on the freely available USB-C spec.
The problem here is that shady manufacturers are saving money by not implementing this function properly. This means the cables are either missing the active component so are unable to do what people thought they would be able to do, or are downright dangerous because they report that they can deliver lots of power when the physical wires are not large enough. The thing is that both these things are very easy for a retailer to check for, but I think the main issue is that the standard is so new that many manufacturers/retailers are simply being lazy.
If only Deutsche Bank was so picky about whom to do business with when it's about VIPs from totalitarian countries, companies evading taxes etc. - but no, they only follow some en vogue PC rules when it's about people's freedom to use either toilet booth. It would be funny if it didn't shed a light on how absolutely insignificant discussions are blown up to create the illusion that "companies care about people's opinion", while they of course do not in the least.
I'd be happy if they were just more picky about investing in truckloads of terrible derivatives. It is looking increasingly likely that DB is (rather ironically for Greece) going to be the bad apple that collapses the eurozone.
Telsa's happy days with the media will soon be coming to an end.
Next up, Elon Musk announces his plans to build a global media empire!
Wow, all the comments on this article have completely missed the point of this. IDIOTS are not pushing this - the concept offers very real efficiency improvements.
The primary constraint in modern jet aircraft efficiency is the propulsive efficiency - turning the mechanical shaft power into forward thrust. This is fundamentally limited by the size of your fan for a given airspeed. If you make the fan swept area a little bit bigger, you can get major improvements in the overall efficiency of the aircraft. This is why newer airplanes always have bigger and bigger engines (787 vs 767, 737NG, A320NEO).
However there are limits to how big you can go. One problem is physically fitting a large diameter engine into existing airframe designs. On the 737NG they had to raise the nose landing gear to accommodate the new engines. There are practical limits to how much you can keep doing this sort of thing without having to create a completely new airframe (the 737 is a 1960s airframe). The other problem with larger fan blades is that the tip speed increases with diameter, which means the fan RPM must reduce to prevent supersonic airflow. This then creates a compromise on the turbine section of the engine. The newest generation of engines are now using gearboxes so that the turbine can run at a higher speed than the fan, which lets them go to larger bypass ratios. The cost, however, is in weight and complexity.
The big benefit that hybrid electric could offer is being able to effectively increase the fan area by distributing fans along the wing. This could create massive efficiency gains, and bring jet aircraft closer to the efficiency of turboprops. Imagine a 737 with two large electric fans next to each other. This could double the swept area on the same fuselage. Further, the concpept could make boundary layer ingestion designs practical, and these also offer big advantages in terms of efficiency for future airframe designs.
This is not about making battery powered aircraft. It is about re-arrangement of the aircraft systems to provide better propulsive efficiency.
So what are the big US names involved? Or do they not need these kinds of structures as they have other ways of not paying taxes?
Next week, apparently. The first round was just to get westerners interested in what would have otherwise been a bit of a flash in the pan 'revelation' that rich people don't pay tax. Most people wouldn't have been interested as the details are complex, and they would have figured such schemes are just part of being rich. The Chinese, Russian and Icelandic reactions to the news have succeeded in getting the common westerner's ears pricked up to the thought that this could be a very big scandal indeed.
We will see what happens. I suspect David Cameron might be done next week. He is playing extremely strategic word games about his situation, and I can't see why he would bother being so meticulous unless he is concerned something has a good chance of coming out. I suspect he has a very big skeleton in his closet, and is being very careful to ensure he can only be labelled a hypocrite, not an outright liar.
I do give the company props for giving out the plans, but i'm not sure anybody is going to buy this bike because of this giveaway.
Not because of the giveaway, but definitely from of all the publicity they have gotten from this gimmick.
That's not really fair. The problem with solar energy is that it suffers from a similar problem to the old conundrum about using rockets to travel to another galaxy. Essentially, because rocket technology gets better every time you build a rocket, later rockets will keep overtaking older rockets enroute. So, the argument goes, there is no point building a rocket today, because it will be caught by a newer rocket before it ever reaches the destination.
In the same way, the problem with solar is that as you develop the tech the cost continues to fall. So if you build your plant with today's tech, there is a very good chance that in a few years a competitor will be able to destroy your return-on-investment with a new cheaper plant. If your plant has not paid back its capital costs in that time (and solar has the problem that it has long payback periods right now) then you have a white elephant. If you read the article you will see that this is exactly what investors now believe will happen, and hence are bringing forward the insolvency of those parts of the company. However, once the debts from construction are 'readjusted', the underlying plant will be able to produce profitable returns for the new owners. I'm pretty sure part of the reason for having a complex financial arrangement was so that this rather obvious issue could be hidden from retail investors, so I wouldn't accuse the MBAs from being retarded.
The same problem is going to happen with Elon Musk's giga-factory. I am reasonably certain this is why nobody else is joining him in making their own giga-factory, because they know that until the cost curve flattens out, the first few factories are going to be hopelessly outdated, and possibly unprofitable, before they ever return the initial funding spent to build them.
In the UK there is no such requirement, and in the US it only applies to deposits in transaction accounts. It really ceased being a constraint a long time ago, because central banks must allow money creation to account for the needs of a growing economy, but they really have no useful way to know whether the money banks are asking for is going into bubbles or legitimate requirements. For this reason they just target inflation, which does not account for asset bubbles caused excess funds flooding a market.
Also, hedge funds and private investment banks are not constrained by these sorts of rules. If they believe they can profit by pumping up a market, they are free to do so. As Soros showed, if you are big enough, you can control the market, and make your own 'luck'.
Banks don't lend the money you deposit. That's YOUR money, not the bank's. Banks create the money they lend (out of nothing).
No that is what central banks do. Banks do lend you money from deposits, but guess what the people who you pay that lent money to do with it? They deposit it again. In a bank. Which means the bank can lend it out again, and again, and again.
It's really quite ingeniously stupid:
1. In an area there are three houses, and three people - Alice, Bob and Mary. Mary owns her house, which she bought for $100k with a $10k deposit. The rest just rent.
2. Bob and Alice both want to buy a house. They go to the bank, and the bank says because they are a responsible bank they will only lend up to 90% of the price of the house. They look at the value of sales in the area and determine that houses are worth $100k based on Mary's original purchase. They are prepared to lend each one $90k. At the auction, Bob is able to outbid Alice because he has saved a bigger deposit. He ends up paying $110k for the house. The bank is fine with the price being higher than market value because it knows it can recover the $90k loan by selling the house for $100k if Bob defaults.
3. Mary receives the $110k from Bob, uses it to pay down her mortgage of $90k, and deposits the remaining $20k with the bank. She thinks she did pretty well making $10k off her housing investment.
4. A little while later Mary changes her mind and decides that she wants to buy her house again. Now both her and Alice are in the market for a house. They go to the bank, and the bank says because they are a responsible bank they will only lend up to 90% of the price of the house. They look at the value of sales in the area and determine that houses are now worth $110k, based on Bob's purchase price. They are prepared to lend each one $99k. At the auction, however, Alice is now desperate for a house. Even though Mary has the money she made from the previous house, Alice has saved hard and is able to scrape together enough for a $120k bid. She wins the auction and buys the house. The bank is fine with the price being higher than market value because it knows it can recover the $99k loan by selling the house for $110k if Alice defaults.
4. Bob is overjoyed. He just made $10k from his housing investment. Alice raises the mortage, and pays Bob. He pays down his $90k mortgage and puts his $30k into the bank.
5. Bob then tells Mary she needs to just get into the market and buy because prices are going up so fast. Mary has already made money from housing, so she agrees. Alice hears how much Bob and Mary have made in the housing market, so she looks at buying an investment property. They all go off to the bank again...
QDLCD is not particularly cutting edge. You just swap out the colour filter for a QD film. It has been used in TVs for a while now, but nobody other than Apple is really doing much innovating with LCD in the mobile space (especially now, as the article states, AMOLED is cheaper). Apple's problem is that it is a premium company who doesn't have access to AMOLED panels (I guess Samsung Displays would probably sell to them, but then they end up dependent on them for a key component again).
Major interim benefit of QDLCD is that you don't lose as much energy as with a colour filter. The backlight dominates power consumption in the phone (well, when you're in an urban setting anyway) so reducing this will let them make the battery smaller which seems to be their main design goal these days.
Samsung leads the way with these panels, and puts the best technology into its own flagship models. Apple is quickly trying to fix this problem by investing in AMOLED, and it looks like they will move to the technology in 2018 through a partnership with JDI (just in time for the iPhone 8). In the mean time, I'm guessing the iPhone 7 will have a quantum dot display, as this can match AMOLED for color saturation (interestingly, this strength of AMOLED is something Tim Cook was spreading FUD about last year - I lost a lot of respect for his integrity when he did that), and brings the power consumption difference much closer. The remaining strength of AMOLED is then being much thinner (no backlight), and handling flex better. All in all, this road map will let them make their rounded rectangles progressively thinner.
That's not what the guy did.
You're right. It's more like LIBOR or the Goldman Sachs aluminum business. Still dishonest, but not illegal, which is why legitimate investments banks do them.
If every possible action was legal in a game, then there would be no need for any rules. Preventing actions that cause the game to fail is exactly why we have rules. This guy broke a rather clear rule, and now he is getting punished for it.
BTW, his real failure was simply not being creative enough with his dishonesty. Libor, sub-prime, the Goldman Sachs aluminum scam, all demonstrate ways financiers have acted dishonestly without technically breaking a 'rule' and hence get to keep their billions and suffer no punishment. In a perfect world they would all at least lose their money for not playing to the spirit of the rules (like regular workers and small business owners have too), but we don't seem to do that, so they get to keep scamming us and this guy goes to jail.
Let's adjust your post a bit:
Anybody can copy that model, use a better name, use better industry clout and eat Facebook's market up easily. It would in no way be hard and in the big picture social networking software will be made by many vendors and Facebook will have no ability to compete against the endless pockets of media companies and software giants. Facebook should keep their business model simple and just make as much money while they can, expanding makes no sense other than to scam people out of capital.
See how ignorant that sounds? The world does not work on who can sit in their bedroom writing the best code or thinking up some great ideas. It works on who can convince a bunch of investors to dump billions into a company that makes no money and is trying to distrupt an entire global industry. Uber might not succeed, but my bet is that the winner won't be a bunch of geeks who spent their lives doing research projects on autonomous cars.
I think the UBI sounds good in practice, but I am concerned that it will be too open to political abuse. In the end I think it is important to not conflate the issues of an economy that is deflating due to inequality, and a socially acceptable amount of inequality. I think you could get general consensus for some kind of UBI to ensure that the economy doesn't fall into a depression, but people will always fight about what level of inequality is acceptable.
For this reason I actually think a helicopter dividend would be better. Central banks should just be given the power to dump money into every citizen's bank account (probably each month) from created funds to ensure they meet their inflation targets. If the predictions that automation will destroy many jobs come to pass, then the amount they will have to pay out to maintain demand and hence inflation will eventually come to equal a UBI. On the other hand, if the economy recovers and full employment magically returns, the dividend will be cut to zero and the bank can use interest rate policy to control inflation as per usual. The other big benefit of this is that they could then return interest rates to a market level, let all the bubbles deflate, and feed helicopter money in until the economy recovers. This would remove the need for them to have to artificially suppress interest rates to stimulate the economy (which has caused much of the mess we are in), and would give them the ability to let big bubbles collapse without risking a deflationary spiral.
Until automation grows to a point where the dividend was sufficient to live off, you would still need government transfer payments to poor people, but this is just such a political issue that I think trying to remove it from the political process by rolling it into a UBI will just undermine the ability to get consensus on the need for change.
I'm always amazed that the rich think they can hide in their gated communities and enjoy the fruits of other people's labor.
But they're not even benefiting from Suzie's labor because she doesn't have a job. The rich are being as fooled by capitalism as the poor are. Free market capitalism is essentially a mindless productivity optimizer. Its goal is to squeeze all human labor out of the system by rewarding productivity improvements (which result in more profit) and innovation (which disrupts entrenched interests), all powered along by competition. All of that is fine until the increases in productivity start to out-pace the un-met demand for human labor from the displaced workforce. At that point the best course of action for the invisible hand is to start ejecting the people who consume more resources than robots. This might be good for GDP per worker, but is neither humane nor sustainable in a democracy. Trying to fix this with things like minimum wages is only going to delay things for a short while.
Many people seem to have turned our current version of capitalism into some kind of religion and that is where I think many of our problems come from. Capitalism is just a program that is running and has arguably worked better than any other program for the last few decades. But that program is not sentient. It just blindly pursues a set of objectives. It is now destroying human society in pursuit of those objectives, and the humans need to put their thinking caps back on, tweek the system (as has been done numerous times in capitalism's history) and then set it loose again. My main concern is that if we don't realise this and make adjustments now, people will start to believe some guy (e.g Trump) can do things better by taking control himself. He probably can, until the power goes to his head and the circle begins again.