No, it's not a zero-sum game. But, the more people who have a surplus, the faster things get better for everyone - if all the wealth gets concentrated into a very few hands, you're back at feudal states - and life's not really better for anyone in that scenario, lots of contrast for the guys at the top vs the bottom, but people at the bottom today have it better than the people at the top did back then.
You all are missing something important. The vast majority of the benefits of automation goes to the customers. It's been estimated that roughly 95% of the value of a new innovation is extracted by the customers in terms of better products at lower prices. The $3 billion SnapChat just pulled in is apparently peanuts compared the sum of the value that my daughter, niece and all their friends derive from snapchatting (he writes, shaking his head in bewilderment).
What this means is investors and high skilled workers ("the rich") will make a pile of cash, no two ways about it. Some number of employees, probably low skill ones, will lose their jobs and need to find something else to do. That rots for them, I'd like to help them transition. Some people will be in the middle. And finally, legions of customers will become better off because they get good stuff, cheap.
That's the problem: That doesn't work this time around.
Back when agriculture was modernized so that we didn't need 70+... There is no new sector opening that would hoover up that free workforce this time.
How do you know that? How can you possibly know that? Do you think the farmers of 1880 could have imagined everyone working in factories? Do you think the longshoremen of 1940 could have imagined so many people having desk jobs in offices? Do you think the filing clerks and typists of 1975 could have imagined everyone walking around with their own typewriter/filing cabinet/memo distribution system (and darn good video player)? I think not.
To say there's no possible way to use all the people on Earth betrays a lack of trust in the imagination, curiosity, and drive of 6 billion motivated humans. It hasn't happened in the last 10,000 years, it hasn't happened in the last 250, I don't see any reason to assume it must happen now.
Eventually people pay tax. Wow, that's insightful.
Don't knock it. Many people don't make the connection that corporations only collect the tax and that the tax burden ultimately falls on real individuals. Further they don't understand the burden can fall on several different groups and where it falls will depend on the elasticities of the specific markets. Just look at the arguments for a higher minimum wage. Virtually every proponent just assumes the burden will fall on investors through lower profit margins, not employees, not customers.
Many small businesses are partnerships or sole proprietorship (says the spouse of a former tax accountant). I don't know the mix. There's also this thing, an S-corp versus a C-corp. I think a C-corp is what we all think of as a "corporation". It's been too long for me to remember the difference.
My laptop has higher resolution and subtends a greater viewing angle than my TV. Park it on my lap, park myself on the recliner couch, and I really prefer it to my TV. Granted, my 10 year old 42 inch TV is really too small for the room it's in but it's the TV which fits my family room layout so it's not going to change.
This. Common stock has no value. After nearly thirty years of working for tech companies, I haven't made a penny iff of stock options.
I'm sorry to hear that. Even at big, established companies, options are a gamble. Fortunately, it's pennies from heaven when it pays off.
You want to know how I actually turned paper profits into real ones? I bought a house and was forced to cash some options. I was just going to let them ride as long as I could. Fortunately, my wife wanted a house upgrade, we cashed in some, and the stock crashed soon thereafter. That should have taught me a lesson ("Take the money and run!") but I still struggle with selling at a small profit. For me, greed often wins out over fear.
In my wise old age (no giggles, please), I'm not crying that FASB made stock options obsolete. RSUs and ESPPs have worked out much better than options for me.
Perhaps the whole wealth inequality debate could be applied to entire countries: Would the US be better off if people in the Congo made 10% of someone in SV rather than 1/10%?
(As an aside, you can but it can be misleading to do so. Countries don't earn income, people do. Any change will likely be good for some people and bad for others. Looking at the aggregate will hide that. Countries don't trade either. The US doesn't trade with China, US citizens trade with Chinese citizens. Anyway...)
On one hand, the cost of producing whatever the US imports from the Congo would go up a significant amount but on the other hand, people in the Congo could also afford to purchase more American products. I don't know enough about US/Congo trade to judge which would be more beneficial to America (though its pretty obvious which would be better for the Congolese.)
Here's the thing. You can't just arbitrarily increase the Congolese income relative to the US holding everything else constant. The relative income of US and Congolese workers is by and large determined by the productivity of each. Why does a Congolese farmer earn 0.1% of a SV engineer? Because for all his effort, the barely above subsistence farmer produces very little of value compared to the engineer.
(You can go off on a whole other tangent about why this is and whether this is fair. I mean, seriously, feeding your family is less valuable than producing the yet another Snapchat filter? Set aside the moral judgement for now, the numbers indicate humanity as a whole finds the engineer's output more valuable.)
To raise Congolese incomes relative to the US, you'd have to raise their productivity or decrease ours (I live in the US). Raising Congolese productivity would be a Good Thing for us as a whole. Certain people in the US might have to find different jobs but on a whole, Humanity would be better off. Decreasing US productivity would be bad for similar reasons.
People at this income level get paid what they can negotiate.
Actually, I think that's pretty much true at all levels. I'm in the middle and I get what I can negotiate too. I just don't have the negotiating leverage that Tom Brady has. I have more to offer than my in-college daughters (for now at least) so I earn quite a bit more than them.
If there is less wealth for most people...
You're assuming that if Bill Gates earns more, someone else must be earning less. There's no reason to believe that's generally true. It's entirely possible that the rising tide in fact raised most boats, it just raised Bill's boat more than yours or mine. I think that's exactly what is going on: virtually everyone is actually earning more, some are just earning a lot more while others are only earning a little more. Given that prices for many things are dropping, pretty much everyone has a better standard of living than 10, 20, 30 years ago.
(Yes, I know this is not true in all cases, just in general.)
One could argue that if all things were held constant and Bill earned less, everyone else would get a raise. I suppose. I don't find that a compelling argument for two reasons. First, it's very hard to hold everything constant and make that change. For example, people want to be rewarded for the work and risk of starting companies. Reduce that reward and at the margin, some people will decide it's just barely not worth it (thus reducing the entire economic pie). Second, if you do the math, the rich just don't earn enough to give everyone a huge raise. I don't have the numbers handy but if you reduced the CEO of Walmart's salary and bonus to zero, every employee gets a raise of something like a few pennies per hour. Whoop de do.
That's an argument for closing tax loopholes, not for building regressiveness into the system.
Yeah, I'd like to close all the tax loopholes and make the system much simpler and transparent. The more complicated you make it, the more likely people will find ways to game it. I'm willing to give up a lot of potential perfection and tuning to get simplicity.
We probably need a better definition of "regressive". I think my idea differs from yours. I think we both agree the SS tax is regressive: you tend to pay a lower percentage of your income as your income goes up. Income tax is progressive, you generally pay a higher rate as your income increases. How about your typical state sales tax? I don't think that's progressive or regressive: everyone pays the same rate, regardless of income. It sounds like you believe it is regressive because you're looking at the tax dollar as a percent of income, not a percent of what's being taxed.
I got curious and looked up the definition of a "progressive tax" and found both of our definitions. Wikipedia thinks if the rate goes up as the taxed amount goes up, it's progressive. Investopedia thinks a progressive tax has a higher rate for higher income people, not on the value of what is taxed. Interesting.
I just looked up the federal tax burden progressivity. The first hit was this. If you add up all the taxes, the overall trend is highly progressive now. I'd love to scrap all the taxes (income, SS, excise, estate, capital gains, and corporate income tax) and replace the whole kit and kaboodle.
The common suggestion I hear is to have a tax refund or credit for everyone. Heck, that could even be the guaranteed basic income if the numbers work out. That would make it progressive if that's what you want. One beauty of a national sales tax is it doesn't require a lot of bookkeeping and privacy-invading paperwork.
Obviously. Rich people don't spend their income at equal rates as poor people. If you're living paycheck to paycheck, you spend all of it. If you're rich, you can save money for investments.
And the other way to look at it is that the rich spend way, way more in absolute dollars so they'd pay way, way more actual tax. That's not exactly unfair.
The problem isn't robots or automation, it's corporations like Microsoft and people like Gates that are the problem. They pay taxes at zero or even negative rates and then expect the government to provide "free" healthcare and unemployment for their employees (which in turn makes their employees pay for it).
Microsoft ultimately doesn't pay taxes. Only people bear the burden of taxes. That could be Microsoft's employees (through lower wages), customers (through higher prices) or investors (through lower profits), generally a combination of all three. Microsoft is only the channel the government uses to collect the taxes. That being said, I don't think the Billster avoids all taxes. Very few people pay no taxes.
I'm not sure why Microsoft should provide charity to people. I'd much rather Microsoft (and other companies) focused on producing products and services. Charity and aid to the poor is something else. It should be driven by individuals and/or society as a whole through our government. I think bringing corporations into it just confuses the situation.
I'd say repeal all taxes and only tax things coming in over state borders at one rate and things coming in over national borders at a higher rate for all finished products and "intellectual property".
I'm with you up until the border thing. Economists tend to think the most efficient and least distorting thing to do is toss all existing taxes and replace them all with a single, broad-based consumption tax. I despair of that ever happening. Politicians and lobbyists have way too much interest in putting in as many special provisions as they can.
A nit but corporations are groups of people with all the rights and responsibilities of those individuals. We only treat them as "a person" as legal shorthand.
THEY will pay the tax.
The employees, customers, and/or investors will pay the tax. Corporations just collect the tax. Ultimately all taxes are paid by people.
"Structurally Deficient" has legal and engineering meaning...and does not necessarily mean a bridge is unsafe.
Thank you for clarifying. I'm quite certain the average Joe reading the article thinks "structurally deficient" means "dear Lord, you wouldn't catch me driving over that death trap." I don't think the authors, a construction group, has much interest in clarifying that. They want to drum up fear and dollars.
The solution isn't to make the interfaces simpler, but to standardize them. Make them compatible in function to what users are familiar with.
Interfaces have existed for long enough that time has proven what's effective and what's being used.
I respectfully disagree. It's difficult for me to believe that we've already reached the acme of UI design. I think it's more reasonable to believe smart people are experimenting with new approaches. Some experiments will fail, others will take off. But to believe we should stop experimenting is the road to stagnation.
Let me give you an example. The WIMP (Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointer) GUI paradigm ruled from around the '80s to the mid-aughties, a 20 year run. It works really well, especially for desktop computing. Then mobile devices came out. The WIMP paradigm stinks on touch devices. I don't even think it's all that great on laptops. Material is an attempt to provide an interface which works well on both desktops and mobile. It's doing exactly what you want, creating a standard and compatible interface for a wider range of devices. Should we really have just stuck with WIMP for all devices?
Hate: The creator of "material design" need to be shot.
Love:
Shadows show us what's on top!
Ummm, you do realize that shadows are an important aspect of Material Design, right? To me, that's one of the more Material parts of it, that UI elements have heights above the background. Just sayin'...
...or "It was hard to write, it should be hard to use."
Have a little grace. I use dozens of programs and web sites every day. Very few of them are so important to me that I'm willing to invest a lot of time learning the site or program's quirks and tools. When designing a GUI, I have to assume my users also have lots of things to do and little time to do them. We really try to focus on understanding what you're likely to be trying to do and making sure that works easily and fast.
At work if we have a choice the developers use Linux and the customize the UI the way they want it...
You must work with a different sort of people than I do. I'm pretty sure not a single person in my building has ever asked how to customize our Linux GUIs. To be truthful, most of them consider the Linux GUI to be a bunch of Terminal windows so I wouldn't characterize them as a gaggle of Linux GUI heavyweights.
But seriously, having used GUIs since the X10, Windows 3, and original MacOS days, I find only a tiny minority of users ever bother configuring anything about a GUI (or pretty much anything). Most users, in my experience, just use the defaults and focus on getting their job done.
Today all of that has gone out the window. I'll just give one example. Google's Material Design. Not that I'm criticizing it. But just criticizing the NAME. The name screams it is all about the aesthetics and not how well it interacts with human beings.
Ah. Well, then, you might want to read more about Material Design than the name. It actually has quite a bit about human interactions. Even if it were just about aesthetics, a lot of visual design is about how humans interact with colors, shapes, fonts. No visual designer I've ever worked with picks colors purely because they like that shade of blue.
I like having what I want when I want it. Forms of consumption other than privately owned physical media simply don't allow for this.
Well, good for you. Knock yourself out buying discs. Apparently you're in a shrinking class of people but there it is.
Personally I don't find it surprising at all that many people are finding the convenience of streaming a movie worth more than the quality and security they get from owning a disc. This is exactly what happened to music. I used to buy all my CDs and now am a total streaming convert. The only question I have is whether streaming services will balkanize, so any one movie/show is only available on exactly one service. I am not willing to pay $10/month to Netflix, another $10 to Amazon, another $10 to Paramount, and so forth. But all I can do it vote with my dollars and streaming behavior.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's not a zero-sum game. But, the more people who have a surplus, the faster things get better for everyone - if all the wealth gets concentrated into a very few hands, you're back at feudal states - and life's not really better for anyone in that scenario, lots of contrast for the guys at the top vs the bottom, but people at the bottom today have it better than the people at the top did back then.
You all are missing something important. The vast majority of the benefits of automation goes to the customers. It's been estimated that roughly 95% of the value of a new innovation is extracted by the customers in terms of better products at lower prices. The $3 billion SnapChat just pulled in is apparently peanuts compared the sum of the value that my daughter, niece and all their friends derive from snapchatting (he writes, shaking his head in bewilderment).
What this means is investors and high skilled workers ("the rich") will make a pile of cash, no two ways about it. Some number of employees, probably low skill ones, will lose their jobs and need to find something else to do. That rots for them, I'd like to help them transition. Some people will be in the middle. And finally, legions of customers will become better off because they get good stuff, cheap.
That's the problem: That doesn't work this time around.
Back when agriculture was modernized so that we didn't need 70+... There is no new sector opening that would hoover up that free workforce this time.
How do you know that? How can you possibly know that? Do you think the farmers of 1880 could have imagined everyone working in factories? Do you think the longshoremen of 1940 could have imagined so many people having desk jobs in offices? Do you think the filing clerks and typists of 1975 could have imagined everyone walking around with their own typewriter/filing cabinet/memo distribution system (and darn good video player)? I think not.
To say there's no possible way to use all the people on Earth betrays a lack of trust in the imagination, curiosity, and drive of 6 billion motivated humans. It hasn't happened in the last 10,000 years, it hasn't happened in the last 250, I don't see any reason to assume it must happen now.
Eventually people pay tax. Wow, that's insightful.
Don't knock it. Many people don't make the connection that corporations only collect the tax and that the tax burden ultimately falls on real individuals. Further they don't understand the burden can fall on several different groups and where it falls will depend on the elasticities of the specific markets. Just look at the arguments for a higher minimum wage. Virtually every proponent just assumes the burden will fall on investors through lower profit margins, not employees, not customers.
Many small businesses are partnerships or sole proprietorship (says the spouse of a former tax accountant). I don't know the mix. There's also this thing, an S-corp versus a C-corp. I think a C-corp is what we all think of as a "corporation". It's been too long for me to remember the difference.
My laptop has higher resolution and subtends a greater viewing angle than my TV. Park it on my lap, park myself on the recliner couch, and I really prefer it to my TV. Granted, my 10 year old 42 inch TV is really too small for the room it's in but it's the TV which fits my family room layout so it's not going to change.
This. Common stock has no value. After nearly thirty years of working for tech companies, I haven't made a penny iff of stock options.
I'm sorry to hear that. Even at big, established companies, options are a gamble. Fortunately, it's pennies from heaven when it pays off.
You want to know how I actually turned paper profits into real ones? I bought a house and was forced to cash some options. I was just going to let them ride as long as I could. Fortunately, my wife wanted a house upgrade, we cashed in some, and the stock crashed soon thereafter. That should have taught me a lesson ("Take the money and run!") but I still struggle with selling at a small profit. For me, greed often wins out over fear.
In my wise old age (no giggles, please), I'm not crying that FASB made stock options obsolete. RSUs and ESPPs have worked out much better than options for me.
Perhaps the whole wealth inequality debate could be applied to entire countries: Would the US be better off if people in the Congo made 10% of someone in SV rather than 1/10%?
(As an aside, you can but it can be misleading to do so. Countries don't earn income, people do. Any change will likely be good for some people and bad for others. Looking at the aggregate will hide that. Countries don't trade either. The US doesn't trade with China, US citizens trade with Chinese citizens. Anyway...)
On one hand, the cost of producing whatever the US imports from the Congo would go up a significant amount but on the other hand, people in the Congo could also afford to purchase more American products. I don't know enough about US/Congo trade to judge which would be more beneficial to America (though its pretty obvious which would be better for the Congolese.)
Here's the thing. You can't just arbitrarily increase the Congolese income relative to the US holding everything else constant. The relative income of US and Congolese workers is by and large determined by the productivity of each. Why does a Congolese farmer earn 0.1% of a SV engineer? Because for all his effort, the barely above subsistence farmer produces very little of value compared to the engineer.
(You can go off on a whole other tangent about why this is and whether this is fair. I mean, seriously, feeding your family is less valuable than producing the yet another Snapchat filter? Set aside the moral judgement for now, the numbers indicate humanity as a whole finds the engineer's output more valuable.)
To raise Congolese incomes relative to the US, you'd have to raise their productivity or decrease ours (I live in the US). Raising Congolese productivity would be a Good Thing for us as a whole. Certain people in the US might have to find different jobs but on a whole, Humanity would be better off. Decreasing US productivity would be bad for similar reasons.
People at this income level get paid what they can negotiate.
Actually, I think that's pretty much true at all levels. I'm in the middle and I get what I can negotiate too. I just don't have the negotiating leverage that Tom Brady has. I have more to offer than my in-college daughters (for now at least) so I earn quite a bit more than them.
If there is less wealth for most people...
You're assuming that if Bill Gates earns more, someone else must be earning less. There's no reason to believe that's generally true. It's entirely possible that the rising tide in fact raised most boats, it just raised Bill's boat more than yours or mine. I think that's exactly what is going on: virtually everyone is actually earning more, some are just earning a lot more while others are only earning a little more. Given that prices for many things are dropping, pretty much everyone has a better standard of living than 10, 20, 30 years ago.
(Yes, I know this is not true in all cases, just in general.)
One could argue that if all things were held constant and Bill earned less, everyone else would get a raise. I suppose. I don't find that a compelling argument for two reasons. First, it's very hard to hold everything constant and make that change. For example, people want to be rewarded for the work and risk of starting companies. Reduce that reward and at the margin, some people will decide it's just barely not worth it (thus reducing the entire economic pie). Second, if you do the math, the rich just don't earn enough to give everyone a huge raise. I don't have the numbers handy but if you reduced the CEO of Walmart's salary and bonus to zero, every employee gets a raise of something like a few pennies per hour. Whoop de do.
That's where God keeps Earth's backups.
I wonder how far back the oldest goes?
With seven of them? Clearly a weekly full and daily incrementals.
If they name them after Donald Trump and his family members, NASA will probably get a trillion dollars a year.
Only if he moves there first.
That's an argument for closing tax loopholes, not for building regressiveness into the system.
Yeah, I'd like to close all the tax loopholes and make the system much simpler and transparent. The more complicated you make it, the more likely people will find ways to game it. I'm willing to give up a lot of potential perfection and tuning to get simplicity.
We probably need a better definition of "regressive". I think my idea differs from yours. I think we both agree the SS tax is regressive: you tend to pay a lower percentage of your income as your income goes up. Income tax is progressive, you generally pay a higher rate as your income increases. How about your typical state sales tax? I don't think that's progressive or regressive: everyone pays the same rate, regardless of income. It sounds like you believe it is regressive because you're looking at the tax dollar as a percent of income, not a percent of what's being taxed.
I got curious and looked up the definition of a "progressive tax" and found both of our definitions. Wikipedia thinks if the rate goes up as the taxed amount goes up, it's progressive. Investopedia thinks a progressive tax has a higher rate for higher income people, not on the value of what is taxed. Interesting.
I just looked up the federal tax burden progressivity. The first hit was this. If you add up all the taxes, the overall trend is highly progressive now. I'd love to scrap all the taxes (income, SS, excise, estate, capital gains, and corporate income tax) and replace the whole kit and kaboodle.
The common suggestion I hear is to have a tax refund or credit for everyone. Heck, that could even be the guaranteed basic income if the numbers work out. That would make it progressive if that's what you want. One beauty of a national sales tax is it doesn't require a lot of bookkeeping and privacy-invading paperwork.
Obviously. Rich people don't spend their income at equal rates as poor people. If you're living paycheck to paycheck, you spend all of it. If you're rich, you can save money for investments.
And the other way to look at it is that the rich spend way, way more in absolute dollars so they'd pay way, way more actual tax. That's not exactly unfair.
Ah. Thank you for the clarification.
The problem isn't robots or automation, it's corporations like Microsoft and people like Gates that are the problem. They pay taxes at zero or even negative rates and then expect the government to provide "free" healthcare and unemployment for their employees (which in turn makes their employees pay for it).
Microsoft ultimately doesn't pay taxes. Only people bear the burden of taxes. That could be Microsoft's employees (through lower wages), customers (through higher prices) or investors (through lower profits), generally a combination of all three. Microsoft is only the channel the government uses to collect the taxes. That being said, I don't think the Billster avoids all taxes. Very few people pay no taxes.
I'm not sure why Microsoft should provide charity to people. I'd much rather Microsoft (and other companies) focused on producing products and services. Charity and aid to the poor is something else. It should be driven by individuals and/or society as a whole through our government. I think bringing corporations into it just confuses the situation.
I'd say repeal all taxes and only tax things coming in over state borders at one rate and things coming in over national borders at a higher rate for all finished products and "intellectual property".
I'm with you up until the border thing. Economists tend to think the most efficient and least distorting thing to do is toss all existing taxes and replace them all with a single, broad-based consumption tax. I despair of that ever happening. Politicians and lobbyists have way too much interest in putting in as many special provisions as they can.
No, corporations are people.
A nit but corporations are groups of people with all the rights and responsibilities of those individuals. We only treat them as "a person" as legal shorthand.
THEY will pay the tax.
The employees, customers, and/or investors will pay the tax. Corporations just collect the tax. Ultimately all taxes are paid by people.
"Structurally Deficient" has legal and engineering meaning...and does not necessarily mean a bridge is unsafe.
Thank you for clarifying. I'm quite certain the average Joe reading the article thinks "structurally deficient" means "dear Lord, you wouldn't catch me driving over that death trap." I don't think the authors, a construction group, has much interest in clarifying that. They want to drum up fear and dollars.
...and is distracting from watching the Patriots lose.
Ahem. Distracting you from the greatest comeback in NFL history.
The solution isn't to make the interfaces simpler, but to standardize them. Make them compatible in function to what users are familiar with. Interfaces have existed for long enough that time has proven what's effective and what's being used.
I respectfully disagree. It's difficult for me to believe that we've already reached the acme of UI design. I think it's more reasonable to believe smart people are experimenting with new approaches. Some experiments will fail, others will take off. But to believe we should stop experimenting is the road to stagnation.
Let me give you an example. The WIMP (Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointer) GUI paradigm ruled from around the '80s to the mid-aughties, a 20 year run. It works really well, especially for desktop computing. Then mobile devices came out. The WIMP paradigm stinks on touch devices. I don't even think it's all that great on laptops. Material is an attempt to provide an interface which works well on both desktops and mobile. It's doing exactly what you want, creating a standard and compatible interface for a wider range of devices. Should we really have just stuck with WIMP for all devices?
Hate: The creator of "material design" need to be shot.
Love: Shadows show us what's on top!
Ummm, you do realize that shadows are an important aspect of Material Design, right? To me, that's one of the more Material parts of it, that UI elements have heights above the background. Just sayin'...
tl;dr: It's dumbing down for a dumber generation.
...or "It was hard to write, it should be hard to use."
Have a little grace. I use dozens of programs and web sites every day. Very few of them are so important to me that I'm willing to invest a lot of time learning the site or program's quirks and tools. When designing a GUI, I have to assume my users also have lots of things to do and little time to do them. We really try to focus on understanding what you're likely to be trying to do and making sure that works easily and fast.
At work if we have a choice the developers use Linux and the customize the UI the way they want it...
You must work with a different sort of people than I do. I'm pretty sure not a single person in my building has ever asked how to customize our Linux GUIs. To be truthful, most of them consider the Linux GUI to be a bunch of Terminal windows so I wouldn't characterize them as a gaggle of Linux GUI heavyweights.
But seriously, having used GUIs since the X10, Windows 3, and original MacOS days, I find only a tiny minority of users ever bother configuring anything about a GUI (or pretty much anything). Most users, in my experience, just use the defaults and focus on getting their job done.
Today all of that has gone out the window. I'll just give one example. Google's Material Design. Not that I'm criticizing it. But just criticizing the NAME. The name screams it is all about the aesthetics and not how well it interacts with human beings.
Ah. Well, then, you might want to read more about Material Design than the name. It actually has quite a bit about human interactions. Even if it were just about aesthetics, a lot of visual design is about how humans interact with colors, shapes, fonts. No visual designer I've ever worked with picks colors purely because they like that shade of blue.
I like having what I want when I want it. Forms of consumption other than privately owned physical media simply don't allow for this.
Well, good for you. Knock yourself out buying discs. Apparently you're in a shrinking class of people but there it is.
Personally I don't find it surprising at all that many people are finding the convenience of streaming a movie worth more than the quality and security they get from owning a disc. This is exactly what happened to music. I used to buy all my CDs and now am a total streaming convert. The only question I have is whether streaming services will balkanize, so any one movie/show is only available on exactly one service. I am not willing to pay $10/month to Netflix, another $10 to Amazon, another $10 to Paramount, and so forth. But all I can do it vote with my dollars and streaming behavior.
...researchers announce fire is hot and water is wet.