Basically the "work pool" would be the sum of all jobs we'd like people to do if there were human labor available and no automation existed that could do it better.
That is a meaningless statement. "Jobs" aren't quantifiable that way because the demand for labor is elastic.
Humanity has traditionally had a labor shortage that prevented us from filling all of the jobs in the work pool.
There is always an infinite number of jobs available. The only way that anybody ever can't get a job is if you artificially prevent them from taking a job or if you pay them more in government aid than they would be paid for working.
but farming took precedence until enough labor was automated out of that sector to make it worthwhile
But the problem there isn't with automation, it's with society's standards of "worthwhile". If you're willing to live in a home-built shack with an outhouse and eat potatoes all the time, you can live more cheaply today than you could a century ago and hardly need to work at all. That guy whose job was supposedly "automated away" would be able to make ends meet with much less work than he used to. But in most places, you simply can't legally live like that, and you receive numerous government support programs that will end up degrading you to the status of a jobless welfare dependent.
The fact that some people can't or won't work is not the result of less jobs being available, it's the result of government imposing a minimum cost of living on everybody, while at the same time imposing minimum pay and hours on employers. Automation is not a cause but a consequence of those effects: given that market situation, employers need to find alternatives to expensive labor, and they do in the form of automation.
Explain logically why an increase in taxes to 1% of all people necessitates a 100% elimination of taxes to the same people when they own a corporation.
Because the effective corporate tax rate is the sum of the taxes paid on profits by both corporations and investors. So, if you increase capital gains taxes, you need to decrease taxes on corporate profits, otherwise people will invest their money in other things that corporations; and you want people to invest their money in US corporations because that creates jobs.
I actually think eliminating taxes on corporate profits and taxing capital gains as regular income may be a very good thing, because it would make investments much more attractive to people with lower incomes. It would also eliminate this confusing non-issue from future political discussions.
Whether a Rockefeller or Disney heir pays higher taxes hardly matters to them, given how rich they are, so talk is cheap for them. But their fortunes aren't enough to address our budget problems. In fact, the decreasing infrastructure spending is not due to low taxes, but crowding out of all other spending by interest and entitlement programs.
A second problem, though, is that most of this spending shouldn't be federal to begin with. Road infrastructure should largely be paid for by local and state taxes. And federal entitlement programs simply aren't helping people because they are badly designed and badly administered; throwing more money at them won't fix those problems; and if you fix federal entitlement programs, they won't need more money, since we are already spending a lot more than other countries.
There are many problems, but I don't see that in particular as one. There are many ways of reducing silicon dioxide besides using carbon. Even if you want to use carbon, you can use it in a circular process (that is, reduce the CO/CO2 back to carbon). The situation becomes even easier in orbit, since you can use carbonaceous asteroids (about 20% water, 5% carbon, which seems like a good ratio).
Yes, I ignored that point because it's mostly irrelevant. I also ignored other of your incorrect points ("Plus you don't occupy any land or harm any ecosystems, either with the installation or, if you build them in space, with the manufacturing."). Amazing, huh?
Labor force participation rates are not a measure of net change in the size of the work pool.
You used the term "work pool", not me. It's not a term from economics, so I had to guess at what you mean.
Labor force participation rates multiplied by population size tell you the absolute number of jobs that are filled in the economy. If automation destroyed jobs, those would have to go down. But for most of last half century, they have gone up.
If that observation doesn't satisfy you, you need to clarify what you mean by "work pool".
Space-based solar panels wouldn't be in the dark much.
That's where the factor of 3 comes from.
There are a lot of advantages,
I don't think there are "a lot of advantages". Land, silicon, and sun are cheap on earth. If we can cheaply turn lunar regolith or asteroids into solar panels, we can do it even more cheaply in the Mojave or Sahara deserts. Geostationary orbits, on the other hand, are probably more valuable than land on the ground.
I think capturing an asteroid and building stuff from it is great, including making solar panels. But there is no need to point them earthwards.
Increasingly, people just connect to networks via USB connectors. The fact that there is a little USB-to-Ethernet chip at the other end of the cable hardly matters. With high-speed USB-C connectors, you can run networking, display, and power over the same small connector and cable.
The economics of space based solar power make little sense. You gain maybe a factor of three in terms of energy captured, but at the cost of massive launch costs, expensive maintenance, expensive transmission systems and large ground based stations, and the risk of having what amounts to energy beam weapons in space. If you think solar energy is cost effective, just put three times as many solar panels on the ground (in the Sahara and Mojave) and you still come out ahead.
As for self-replication, that would be a neat trick to master just on earth and is probably still a long ways off; but once we do, it works just as well on Earth. Furthermore, the moon is still a fairly deep gravity well; for any kind of orbital construction, it makes much more sense to divert an asteroid into orbit and use that as the raw material for solar panels, space stations, or whatever, rather than launching from the moon.
That's PR bullshit. Apple isn't fighting for the right to provide encryption on their devices; if they did, I'd be cheering them on. What Apple is fighting for is the right to protect flawed encryption from a valid court order. And the problem with that is that no matter whether they win or whether they lose, the public will be worse off as a result.
The encryption on iPhones has gotten more comprehensive at every revision of the hardware/software. That it wasn't bullet proof at d1 or that it isn't bullet proof now is not evidence that it isn't more secure than previous models by leaps and bounds.
Making a cryptographically secure phone has been cheap and easy for more than a decade. So, why did Apple screw up so badly on the iPhone 5C? Furthermore, how do we know they haven't screwed up on more recent phones as well?
In fact, it seems likely that Apple puts back doors into all their phones because while the FBI may be limited by US courts, Chinese and Russian governments won't be.
Right, it's the people who don't own cars that are the rich and privileged. You need to get out more.
No, I said greedy and privileged. And "not owning a car" these days is less a sign of poverty and more often a sign of an ability to live and work in expensive neighborhoods connected by public transportation.
Does making up arbitrary numbers to suit one's ideology fly in your line of work? Interesting.
The fact that BART is heavily subsidized follows from their own budgets; I suggest you look at them. The situation is even worse because, as discussed here, BART themselves admits that even with the massive subsidies they are receiving, they can't even perform necessary maintenance, so in order to keep the system going, they need even more subsidies.
First, this is a rather old phone, an iPhone 5C, that we are talking about. The story is that from the iPhone 5s upwards, the security feature (phone gets erased after 10 incorrect PINs) cannot be disabled on a locked phone, because it is controlled by hardware that isn't controlled by the firmware.
That's a nice story; unfortunately we can't verify it because the software is closed source and so is the chip. In fact, given how badly Apple screwed up on the iPhone 5C, we have to conclude that they either don't give a shit about security, are incompetent, or deliberately created a backdoor. That doesn't bode well for anything they say about future models. The only thing we know is probably true is that iPhone 5C security is weak because Apple has told us it is.
More importantly, Tim Cook can't have it both ways: either unlocking the shooter's iPhone places all phones at risk, or it is a minor problem affecting only old phones that were never designed to be secure in the first place (after all, earlier phones had even weaker security).
In this case, the security comes from the fact that the hack is only possible if you have Apple's firmware signing key, and Apple protects that from all access. What you do is like calling password protection
No, it is not at all like password protection. Passwords are picked by the legitimate owner of the data and decrypt only the owner's data. Apple isn't a legitimate owner of the data, and the combination of source code and firmware signing key (according to the company itself) could provide access to information on all iPhones (or at least all iPhones 5C).
In the end, the fact remains: Tim Cook is cynically exploiting weak security in one of his products for PR purposes.
If you can't make enough money to pay someone minimum wage, then either your business model is fundamentally broken
Correct. Which means that people will not start those kinds of businesses anymore. Therefore, a "minimum wage" isn't something that guarantees someone a living income, it is something that prohibits certain kinds of businesses from operating and that prohibits certain kinds of people from working.
you're not charging enough or, the primary problem for the last few decades, you're taking too much in profit.
That's a nice story, but doesn't hold up to data. Between 1980 and 2005, corporate profits were between 4% and 5%, low by historical standards. Since about 2009, they have been around 10%, a bit higher than historical averages, but that's not because companies are "taking too much profit", it's probably a combination of the recession weeding out bad companies, government stimulus programs, and making up for lost profits in the preceding decades.
My economic schemes worked just fine. They powered post-WW2 America into the greatest and broadest increase in living standards and wealth humanity has ever seen.
In post-WWII America, government spending was about 20% of GDP, compared to 40% today, and welfare spending was about 1% of GDP and stayed below 2% until the end of the 1960's, as opposed to 5% today. There was no Medicare or affirmative action, those kicked in in the late 60's. States had much more autonomy, and the US was essentially at the top in terms of economic freedoms, as opposed to rank 11, behind the UK and Estonia. You want to return to that? I certainly would.
Yours are the ones that took over in the seventies and have been failing for the last thirty years.
Actually, your guys took over in the late 1960's and the result is the crony capitalism and economic stagnation we are seeing today.
For some definition of "developers" that is probably true. In this case, this is "people who use Stackoverflow and self-select in order to respond to survey questions". Their population is heavily biased towards web developers and JavaScript, and 70% are self-taught. So, the needs of most of those people are modest, and their choices tell you little about the quality of a platform. Many of them could probably develop on ChromeOS.
No, when I talk about "security through obscurity", I talk about the fact that iPhones are only secure if people don't have their source code and can't install firmware; that is, only by keeping their source code and firmware install methods secret are their phones protected. That's not my opinion, that's Apple's own assertion.
A correctly implemented secure cryptographic system ensures that data remain secure even if an adversary has full access to hardware, firmware, and source code.
You're shockingly ignorant of the greater SF Bay region if you think that statement makes any sense. It would mean multi-deck city streets, extensive car tunnels under existing roadway, and so forth.
There is plenty of space for more highways on the peninsula, even apart from replacing BART by roads. Just better connectors between 280 and 101 would do wonders.
Right...accessible transit is forcing me into poverty...by making it at all possible for me to get to work.
Obviously, you are on the side of the greedy, privileged minority who enrich themselves at the expense of other tax payers. I mean, who wouldn't have half their transportation costs paid for by other tax payers and then get a special right of way for his troubles?
But of course they are showing in the statistics from the last few decades: where do you think the wealth gap, the increased debt, the stagnating wages or the lowered labour conditions come from?
None of those amount to job losses, so your argument that there simply aren't enough jobs to go around is wrong. There are enough jobs going around, but people just don't take as much money home as they should. And that isn't because of automation (automation generally leads to higher salaries), it's due to cronyism and rent seeking. You know, like when Obama bails out corporations and Wall St and gives handouts to pharmaceutical companies, medical insurers, doctors, and teachers.
. As of now -pardon me for the stupid comparison, it's like warning a tsunami is coming
Oh, we definitely face risks, but they aren't from automation, they are from repeating the same economic mistakes that countries like Greece and Spain have been making.
Like this... both this and the graphs you linked to: do you really think this is an American-only problem, or a problem that USA can deal with on its own
What other countries do is beyond our control. But at this point, several other countries have been much more aggressive on cutting back on the welfare state, regulations, and government spending, and it has worked out well for them. We should do the same thing.
Just an example off the top of my head: switchboard operators, but let's look into the future. Cashiers, delivery drivers, car washers, dishwashers, etc are all fair game to be eliminated within 10 years
Job categories disappear, and they are replaced by new job categories. The overall work pool doesn't shrink.
For example, you'll find virtually zero positions for humans to act as grain reapers now, yet at one time that was a huge use of labor. That shrinks the overall work pool.
No, it does not, because there are tons of new jobs: dog trainers, virtual reality designers, software developers, garden designers, etc. And those are generally nicer, more fulfilling, far less back-breaking jobs than the old jobs they replace.
You will hire them if you want to run a business and make money.
It never makes economic sense to pay someone who produces $10/h in value $15/h in salary. If that's the only option, people will simply not "want to run a business", or they will run a different business, or they will simply invest their money overseas.
Psychopaths who aren't prepared to pay decent wages are exactly why minimum wage laws exist.
Doubtlessly, when your hare brained economic schemes fail, just like the Soviet Union, you want to stick psychopaths like me into reeducation camps, and if that doesn't work just shoot us, right?
Slashdot Mirror
That is a meaningless statement. "Jobs" aren't quantifiable that way because the demand for labor is elastic.
There is always an infinite number of jobs available. The only way that anybody ever can't get a job is if you artificially prevent them from taking a job or if you pay them more in government aid than they would be paid for working.
But the problem there isn't with automation, it's with society's standards of "worthwhile". If you're willing to live in a home-built shack with an outhouse and eat potatoes all the time, you can live more cheaply today than you could a century ago and hardly need to work at all. That guy whose job was supposedly "automated away" would be able to make ends meet with much less work than he used to. But in most places, you simply can't legally live like that, and you receive numerous government support programs that will end up degrading you to the status of a jobless welfare dependent.
The fact that some people can't or won't work is not the result of less jobs being available, it's the result of government imposing a minimum cost of living on everybody, while at the same time imposing minimum pay and hours on employers. Automation is not a cause but a consequence of those effects: given that market situation, employers need to find alternatives to expensive labor, and they do in the form of automation.
No, in fact, we have one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world.
Because the effective corporate tax rate is the sum of the taxes paid on profits by both corporations and investors. So, if you increase capital gains taxes, you need to decrease taxes on corporate profits, otherwise people will invest their money in other things that corporations; and you want people to invest their money in US corporations because that creates jobs.
I actually think eliminating taxes on corporate profits and taxing capital gains as regular income may be a very good thing, because it would make investments much more attractive to people with lower incomes. It would also eliminate this confusing non-issue from future political discussions.
That's one approach. But if you do that, you need to eliminate the corporate tax entirely, otherwise the effective corporate tax is too high.
A second problem, though, is that most of this spending shouldn't be federal to begin with. Road infrastructure should largely be paid for by local and state taxes. And federal entitlement programs simply aren't helping people because they are badly designed and badly administered; throwing more money at them won't fix those problems; and if you fix federal entitlement programs, they won't need more money, since we are already spending a lot more than other countries.
There are many problems, but I don't see that in particular as one. There are many ways of reducing silicon dioxide besides using carbon. Even if you want to use carbon, you can use it in a circular process (that is, reduce the CO/CO2 back to carbon). The situation becomes even easier in orbit, since you can use carbonaceous asteroids (about 20% water, 5% carbon, which seems like a good ratio).
Yes, I ignored that point because it's mostly irrelevant. I also ignored other of your incorrect points ("Plus you don't occupy any land or harm any ecosystems, either with the installation or, if you build them in space, with the manufacturing."). Amazing, huh?
You used the term "work pool", not me. It's not a term from economics, so I had to guess at what you mean.
Labor force participation rates multiplied by population size tell you the absolute number of jobs that are filled in the economy. If automation destroyed jobs, those would have to go down. But for most of last half century, they have gone up.
If that observation doesn't satisfy you, you need to clarify what you mean by "work pool".
That's where the factor of 3 comes from.
I don't think there are "a lot of advantages". Land, silicon, and sun are cheap on earth. If we can cheaply turn lunar regolith or asteroids into solar panels, we can do it even more cheaply in the Mojave or Sahara deserts. Geostationary orbits, on the other hand, are probably more valuable than land on the ground.
I think capturing an asteroid and building stuff from it is great, including making solar panels. But there is no need to point them earthwards.
The net change is easy to measure, and most countries keep detailed records. Here is the data for the US: http://faculty.tamucc.edu/sfri...
Increasingly, people just connect to networks via USB connectors. The fact that there is a little USB-to-Ethernet chip at the other end of the cable hardly matters. With high-speed USB-C connectors, you can run networking, display, and power over the same small connector and cable.
As for self-replication, that would be a neat trick to master just on earth and is probably still a long ways off; but once we do, it works just as well on Earth. Furthermore, the moon is still a fairly deep gravity well; for any kind of orbital construction, it makes much more sense to divert an asteroid into orbit and use that as the raw material for solar panels, space stations, or whatever, rather than launching from the moon.
That's PR bullshit. Apple isn't fighting for the right to provide encryption on their devices; if they did, I'd be cheering them on. What Apple is fighting for is the right to protect flawed encryption from a valid court order. And the problem with that is that no matter whether they win or whether they lose, the public will be worse off as a result.
Making a cryptographically secure phone has been cheap and easy for more than a decade. So, why did Apple screw up so badly on the iPhone 5C? Furthermore, how do we know they haven't screwed up on more recent phones as well?
In fact, it seems likely that Apple puts back doors into all their phones because while the FBI may be limited by US courts, Chinese and Russian governments won't be.
No, I said greedy and privileged. And "not owning a car" these days is less a sign of poverty and more often a sign of an ability to live and work in expensive neighborhoods connected by public transportation.
The fact that BART is heavily subsidized follows from their own budgets; I suggest you look at them. The situation is even worse because, as discussed here, BART themselves admits that even with the massive subsidies they are receiving, they can't even perform necessary maintenance, so in order to keep the system going, they need even more subsidies.
That's a nice story; unfortunately we can't verify it because the software is closed source and so is the chip. In fact, given how badly Apple screwed up on the iPhone 5C, we have to conclude that they either don't give a shit about security, are incompetent, or deliberately created a backdoor. That doesn't bode well for anything they say about future models. The only thing we know is probably true is that iPhone 5C security is weak because Apple has told us it is.
More importantly, Tim Cook can't have it both ways: either unlocking the shooter's iPhone places all phones at risk, or it is a minor problem affecting only old phones that were never designed to be secure in the first place (after all, earlier phones had even weaker security).
No, it is not at all like password protection. Passwords are picked by the legitimate owner of the data and decrypt only the owner's data. Apple isn't a legitimate owner of the data, and the combination of source code and firmware signing key (according to the company itself) could provide access to information on all iPhones (or at least all iPhones 5C).
In the end, the fact remains: Tim Cook is cynically exploiting weak security in one of his products for PR purposes.
Correct. Which means that people will not start those kinds of businesses anymore. Therefore, a "minimum wage" isn't something that guarantees someone a living income, it is something that prohibits certain kinds of businesses from operating and that prohibits certain kinds of people from working.
That's a nice story, but doesn't hold up to data. Between 1980 and 2005, corporate profits were between 4% and 5%, low by historical standards. Since about 2009, they have been around 10%, a bit higher than historical averages, but that's not because companies are "taking too much profit", it's probably a combination of the recession weeding out bad companies, government stimulus programs, and making up for lost profits in the preceding decades.
In post-WWII America, government spending was about 20% of GDP, compared to 40% today, and welfare spending was about 1% of GDP and stayed below 2% until the end of the 1960's, as opposed to 5% today. There was no Medicare or affirmative action, those kicked in in the late 60's. States had much more autonomy, and the US was essentially at the top in terms of economic freedoms, as opposed to rank 11, behind the UK and Estonia. You want to return to that? I certainly would.
Actually, your guys took over in the late 1960's and the result is the crony capitalism and economic stagnation we are seeing today.
They are the "most loved" technologies (probably: what people would like to use), not the "most popular" technologies (what people actually use).
For some definition of "developers" that is probably true. In this case, this is "people who use Stackoverflow and self-select in order to respond to survey questions". Their population is heavily biased towards web developers and JavaScript, and 70% are self-taught. So, the needs of most of those people are modest, and their choices tell you little about the quality of a platform. Many of them could probably develop on ChromeOS.
A correctly implemented secure cryptographic system ensures that data remain secure even if an adversary has full access to hardware, firmware, and source code.
Even as a gay man, I enjoy scantily clad female dancers (as well as scantily clad models in art). So, I hope that that kind of "sexism" won't end.
There is plenty of space for more highways on the peninsula, even apart from replacing BART by roads. Just better connectors between 280 and 101 would do wonders.
Obviously, you are on the side of the greedy, privileged minority who enrich themselves at the expense of other tax payers. I mean, who wouldn't have half their transportation costs paid for by other tax payers and then get a special right of way for his troubles?
None of those amount to job losses, so your argument that there simply aren't enough jobs to go around is wrong. There are enough jobs going around, but people just don't take as much money home as they should. And that isn't because of automation (automation generally leads to higher salaries), it's due to cronyism and rent seeking. You know, like when Obama bails out corporations and Wall St and gives handouts to pharmaceutical companies, medical insurers, doctors, and teachers.
Oh, we definitely face risks, but they aren't from automation, they are from repeating the same economic mistakes that countries like Greece and Spain have been making.
What other countries do is beyond our control. But at this point, several other countries have been much more aggressive on cutting back on the welfare state, regulations, and government spending, and it has worked out well for them. We should do the same thing.
So you are saying that people argue that abortion does not kill a fetus? Really???
Job categories disappear, and they are replaced by new job categories. The overall work pool doesn't shrink.
No, it does not, because there are tons of new jobs: dog trainers, virtual reality designers, software developers, garden designers, etc. And those are generally nicer, more fulfilling, far less back-breaking jobs than the old jobs they replace.
It never makes economic sense to pay someone who produces $10/h in value $15/h in salary. If that's the only option, people will simply not "want to run a business", or they will run a different business, or they will simply invest their money overseas.
Doubtlessly, when your hare brained economic schemes fail, just like the Soviet Union, you want to stick psychopaths like me into reeducation camps, and if that doesn't work just shoot us, right?