Do we really give a Flying F--- that the FBI can't get at the data of shooters and terrorists, as long as they can get at the shooters and terrorists themselves?
I don't give a flying f*ck what the FBI does about the San Bernadino shooter data. What I do care about is the fact that Apple and the FBI both are pretending that security through obscurity works, and that a lot of tech geeks are eating up that bullshit instead of demanding that Apple make their phones actually secure.
False, the available work pool has shrunk enormously,
Yes, because minimum wage laws and other laws have increasingly priced people out of the market. That's not due to automation; automation is just the response.
We appear to be approaching a situation where that may no longer be the case.
Yes, if people keep raising minimum wages, keep imposing regulations and mandates of employers, and keep taxing employment, that may well happen. It just isn't due to automation.
So? You don't think these kind of changes happen overnight, do you?
Yes, if technology causes people to become be permanently pushed out of the labor force, I expect that to show up in some statistics over the span of decades.
Even if we did see that kind of effect, it wouldn't necessarily be bad: it would mostly mean people retiring earlier, kids getting more education, and parents spending more time with their families. You know, all the things that progressives say we should want. It's bizarre that the same people who say we should work less throw such a tizzy when people actually might achieve that.
Both GDP and labor force participation rate have been steadily climbing over most of the last several decades. Labor force participation has been going down a bit since 2000, first because of demographics, then arguably because of Obama's welfare policies.
Sorry, but there is nothing in the data that suggests that people are permanently becoming unemployed because of automation. Long term unemployment is, in fact, much less of a problem in the US than in other countries.
And the FBI is playing along because it supports their story that "strong cryptography is preventing us to get at the data of shooters and terrorists".
Ripping out BART and replacing it with roads and buses would be a start. There is plenty more space.
Then try moving somewhere there are no taxes. See how much better off you are. Toodles!
I have no problem with paying taxes per se (that means "by itself"). I have a problem with rent seeking, corruption, waste, and forcing people into poverty.
1) A fair share of society already is above the starving level (capital is already countering this by outsourcing -which can't work for always)
2) The machines' support itself is also automated (mainly by software). These two taken together mean that you don't have an "unexploted pool of customers" just waiting for the industrialization to take place and buy your products
That situation has existed for decades.
and that there's no relationship at all between productivity and number of people employed.
I should hope not. Productivity is an intensive quantity, while number of people is an extensive; the two are largely unrelated.
So, no, the industrial revolution can't be taken here for an example of what will happen in the future.
Two centuries spans a lot more than the industrial revolution.
Ok, so I'm guessing that you're going on the traditional "everyone on welfare are lazy sacks of shit, go get a job" bullshit, ok fine. What jobs are there in Detroit?
No, I'm going with the "government has destroyed most of the jobs in Detroit, destroyed property values, taxed people into poverty, raised the prices for basic necessities, destroyed families, destroyed job skills, thrown fathers into jails, shot teenagers, and failed to educate their kids". That's all the while politicians, public employees, and crony corporations enriched themselves with every dollar they took away from those people.
My only request is that before you speak, actually stop and consider the situation the residents of Detroit, and of anyone else on government assistance for that matter, and what their real options are.
They have no options. "Fuckwits" (to use your term) like you voted for the people that took away their options, while at the same time wallowing in the delusion of what a wonderful person you are by talking endlessly about how great it would be if you could only force someone else to pay them a "living wage".
Otherwise, as mentioned, you are implicitly telling people that they are disposable - you need them to do some work, but you can't pay them enough to live.
Nobody "needs" anybody to do any work: not hiring someone and not starting a business is always a perfectly good option. Furthermore, I could pay them enough to live, but I won't if they aren't worth it. Call me a big meanie, but minimum wage laws aren't going to change that.
But the whole western world has been circling the drain as the kind of barbaric and destructive policies you advocate have become more and more commonplace, siphoning wealth upwards away from its creators (as they are designed to do).
The western world has been circling the drain as the kind of barbaric and destructive policies you advocate have become more and more commonplace,
To see this in its infancy, look at Detroit. [...] Societies that *do* what you say is inevitable (basic income) will avoid this.
Quite the opposite: Detroit is such a basket case precisely because most of its residents already receive a "basic income" from the government.
The power of the few snowballs and they eventually own the entire planet and all means of production, and the rest live in misery on whatever pittiance is allowed them or is outright exterminated via automated weaponry.
Yes, that is the future we face if we give government the power to hand out a "basic income", to control private weapons ownership, to restrict entry into markets and businesses, etc. And people like you are working hard to make it happen.
An individual driver doesn't cause congestion for himself, he causes it for everybody else.
We're discussing whether drivers pay for the costs that their choice of transportation incurs. They do, as a group, even when it comes to congestion, since the cost of congestion balances out between drivers (if I slow down your commute, you slow down my commute, so I do pay this "externality").
Of course, congestion would be almost non-existent if it weren't for government mismanagement of transportation and roads in the first place.
And as I already pointed out, people on trains aren't causing it at all.
Trains cause numerous externalities, including congestion, noise, and pollution. More importantly, though, they are heavily subsidized, which isn't so much an "externality" as simple crony capitalism and corruption.
As current events show, there's essentially no bottom to people's greed, and without some mechanism to force some money out of people they would hoard all the money while their workers lived in the dumpster behind the store and ate cast-off flour and rotting olives.
"Hoarding money" means losing it. The only way to keep your money is to invest it.
You need money to move around, whatever else is going on.
True, but it doesn't follow that forcing money to move around artificially helps anybody.
If you look at our history we did best when the tax structure, minimum wage laws, the GI Bill and union numbers did not favor the rich, they moved money around to people who wouldn't get it in a purely capitalist society.
Ah, you sound like a white middle class American male waxing nostalgic about the good old mid-century, when the rest of the world was in shambles and women and minorities still were oppressed.
In absolute terms, Americans across the board are much better off now than they were back then.
If you can't afford to pay someone minimum wage, you are implicitly saying they cannot be productive enough to be worth keeping at a level society deems satisfactorily minimal for survival.
Yes, and that illustrates the problem. First, you assume that society can actually determine what is "satisfactorily minimal for survival", across the country, for everybody. Yet, a 16 year old kid living with their parents, a retired person with retirement savings, and a single 20-something immigrant all have entirely different needs.
Second, no law is going to change someone's productivity. If someone isn't productive enough to make it worthwhile to pay them minimum wage, they'll simply not get hired.
Finally, moral issues aside, there's the simple maths problem of a race to the bottom: once you've successfully impoverished all but a handful of rich people, who's going to buy the stuff they're selling ?
Actually, that is the question you should be asking, because with policies like the minimum wage, you create a large class of jobless poor, people who you prevent from working by law. That is exactly the "race to the bottom" we are experiencing in our society. Just look at cities like DC or Detroit.
You overestimate the importance of the US president; he can't and won't change what Americans think or feel. And once you get past the showmanship, Trump is politically rather moderate by European standards; I mean look at the numerous buffoons and crooks that have been at the head of European governments for the past half century.
Automation will continue to take over jobs and it'll continue to shrink the available job pool.
Over the past couple of centuries, automation has never shrunk the available work pool. Why would it start doing that now?
The human worker is becoming obsolete and the way we take of our weaker parts of society will set the stage for how we take care of ourselves in the future.
Ah, the rallying cry of the Luddites since the early 1800s!
Historically they were associated in a huge increase in the middle class.
Evidence? Oh, right...
Keynesian and Libertarian economists
That's sort of like lumping together Catholics and atheists.
OK, so lets allow businesses to decide what is the minimum wage, the first thing they're going to find out is that fewer people can afford to buy they're product.
That is roughly the level of Villard de Honnecourt's "Many a time have skilful workmen tried to contrive a wheel that should turn of itself; here is a way to make such a one, by means of an uneven number of mallets, or by quicksilver (mercury)....there will always be four on the downward side of the wheel and only three on the upward side; thus the mallet or bag will always fall over to the left as it reaches the top, ad infinitum."
A good historical example was Henry Ford. Instead of paying the lowest wages possible,
Henry Ford voluntarily increased wages for his work force. He did so because he made the calculation that he could afford it and that it was good for his business. That's not a minimum wage law.
The fact that abortion kills a fetus is not in dispute regardless of whether you approve of it or not.
But the fact that minimum wage laws hurt low income minorities is in dispute. In that regard, it is quite relevant that large numbers of people (in particular, progressives, unions, and Democrats, the same groups advocating this now) believed this to be true.
But I don't expect you to understand the value of "social peace".
Ah, what a typical European attitude, a slightly weaker form of the 1930's "oh, that poor disabled kid, his life is just not worth living, so let's just put him out of his misery".
But I don't expect you to understand the value of "social peace".
I do. Which is why I don't want the right wing extremism, political extremism, massive unemployment, xenophobia, and other social and political problems from Europe to come to the US.
However in the real world empirical evidence that a minimum wage results in less labor demanded is mixed. Why would that be?
Simple: there aren't that many minimum wage workers to begin with, minimum wage increases are so low that they don't usually have much of an effect, people are measuring the wrong thing, and people are confusing absence of evidence with evidence of absence.
For example, many studies look at employment numbers; but minimum wages jobs have an extremely high turnover, so the fact that you have 10000 fast food jobs in Seattle before a minimum wage increase and 10000 fast food jobs afterwards tells you next to nothing about the effect of the minimum wage on individual employment; the populations that are employed before and afterwards can be totally different.
Nor is a moderate minimum wage as undesirable as neoclassical purists suggest. Unlike those in textbooks, real labour markets are not perfectly competitive. If the real world doesn't behave as your model predicts,
You misunderstand. Free market advocates like myself say that we should have free markets precisely because markets are not perfectly competitive and we don't have any good models or predictions for markets and market interventions. Governments and regulators have even less information on the market than the individual participants. And market interventions add the problems of coercion and rent seeking to the problems a market may already have.
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I don't give a flying f*ck what the FBI does about the San Bernadino shooter data. What I do care about is the fact that Apple and the FBI both are pretending that security through obscurity works, and that a lot of tech geeks are eating up that bullshit instead of demanding that Apple make their phones actually secure.
Yes, because minimum wage laws and other laws have increasingly priced people out of the market. That's not due to automation; automation is just the response.
Yes, if people keep raising minimum wages, keep imposing regulations and mandates of employers, and keep taxing employment, that may well happen. It just isn't due to automation.
Yes, if technology causes people to become be permanently pushed out of the labor force, I expect that to show up in some statistics over the span of decades.
Even if we did see that kind of effect, it wouldn't necessarily be bad: it would mostly mean people retiring earlier, kids getting more education, and parents spending more time with their families. You know, all the things that progressives say we should want. It's bizarre that the same people who say we should work less throw such a tizzy when people actually might achieve that.
total GDP, per capita GDP, labor force participation rate
Both GDP and labor force participation rate have been steadily climbing over most of the last several decades. Labor force participation has been going down a bit since 2000, first because of demographics, then arguably because of Obama's welfare policies.
Sorry, but there is nothing in the data that suggests that people are permanently becoming unemployed because of automation. Long term unemployment is, in fact, much less of a problem in the US than in other countries.
And the FBI is playing along because it supports their story that "strong cryptography is preventing us to get at the data of shooters and terrorists".
Why the rush? Because Mars needs Women!
We'll never have small nuclear reactors capable of propelling anything. Why, next thing you know someone is going to propose nuclear submarines!
This post summarizes cost per passenger miles quite well and provides sources: http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=8...
Ripping out BART and replacing it with roads and buses would be a start. There is plenty more space.
I have no problem with paying taxes per se (that means "by itself"). I have a problem with rent seeking, corruption, waste, and forcing people into poverty.
That situation has existed for decades.
I should hope not. Productivity is an intensive quantity, while number of people is an extensive; the two are largely unrelated.
Two centuries spans a lot more than the industrial revolution.
No, I'm going with the "government has destroyed most of the jobs in Detroit, destroyed property values, taxed people into poverty, raised the prices for basic necessities, destroyed families, destroyed job skills, thrown fathers into jails, shot teenagers, and failed to educate their kids". That's all the while politicians, public employees, and crony corporations enriched themselves with every dollar they took away from those people.
They have no options. "Fuckwits" (to use your term) like you voted for the people that took away their options, while at the same time wallowing in the delusion of what a wonderful person you are by talking endlessly about how great it would be if you could only force someone else to pay them a "living wage".
Which part of ""The fact that abortion kills a fetus is not in dispute" did you not understand?
Everyone would benefit even more if the subsidies that currently went to BART would be invested in road upgrades and new highways.
See, robbing me at gunpoint and then giving me back $5 to catch a bus home doesn't mean that I'm better off than if I hadn't been robbed at all.
You are a testament to the quality of a modern Oxford education.
Nobody "needs" anybody to do any work: not hiring someone and not starting a business is always a perfectly good option. Furthermore, I could pay them enough to live, but I won't if they aren't worth it. Call me a big meanie, but minimum wage laws aren't going to change that.
The western world has been circling the drain as the kind of barbaric and destructive policies you advocate have become more and more commonplace,
Hopefully they will, which means abolishing laws that make it illegal for them to work. You know, like minimum wage laws.
Quite the opposite: Detroit is such a basket case precisely because most of its residents already receive a "basic income" from the government.
Yes, that is the future we face if we give government the power to hand out a "basic income", to control private weapons ownership, to restrict entry into markets and businesses, etc. And people like you are working hard to make it happen.
We're discussing whether drivers pay for the costs that their choice of transportation incurs. They do, as a group, even when it comes to congestion, since the cost of congestion balances out between drivers (if I slow down your commute, you slow down my commute, so I do pay this "externality").
Of course, congestion would be almost non-existent if it weren't for government mismanagement of transportation and roads in the first place.
Trains cause numerous externalities, including congestion, noise, and pollution. More importantly, though, they are heavily subsidized, which isn't so much an "externality" as simple crony capitalism and corruption.
"Hoarding money" means losing it. The only way to keep your money is to invest it.
True, but it doesn't follow that forcing money to move around artificially helps anybody.
Ah, you sound like a white middle class American male waxing nostalgic about the good old mid-century, when the rest of the world was in shambles and women and minorities still were oppressed.
In absolute terms, Americans across the board are much better off now than they were back then.
Actually, it's just that poor attempts at sarcasm are often indistinguishable from stupidity. Try doing better next time.
Yes, and that illustrates the problem. First, you assume that society can actually determine what is "satisfactorily minimal for survival", across the country, for everybody. Yet, a 16 year old kid living with their parents, a retired person with retirement savings, and a single 20-something immigrant all have entirely different needs.
Second, no law is going to change someone's productivity. If someone isn't productive enough to make it worthwhile to pay them minimum wage, they'll simply not get hired.
Actually, that is the question you should be asking, because with policies like the minimum wage, you create a large class of jobless poor, people who you prevent from working by law. That is exactly the "race to the bottom" we are experiencing in our society. Just look at cities like DC or Detroit.
You overestimate the importance of the US president; he can't and won't change what Americans think or feel. And once you get past the showmanship, Trump is politically rather moderate by European standards; I mean look at the numerous buffoons and crooks that have been at the head of European governments for the past half century.
Over the past couple of centuries, automation has never shrunk the available work pool. Why would it start doing that now?
Ah, the rallying cry of the Luddites since the early 1800s!
Evidence? Oh, right...
That's sort of like lumping together Catholics and atheists.
That is roughly the level of Villard de Honnecourt's "Many a time have skilful workmen tried to contrive a wheel that should turn of itself; here is a way to make such a one, by means of an uneven number of mallets, or by quicksilver (mercury). ...there will always be four on the downward side of the wheel and only three on the upward side; thus the mallet or bag will always fall over to the left as it reaches the top, ad infinitum."
Henry Ford voluntarily increased wages for his work force. He did so because he made the calculation that he could afford it and that it was good for his business. That's not a minimum wage law.
The fact that abortion kills a fetus is not in dispute regardless of whether you approve of it or not. But the fact that minimum wage laws hurt low income minorities is in dispute. In that regard, it is quite relevant that large numbers of people (in particular, progressives, unions, and Democrats, the same groups advocating this now) believed this to be true.
Ah, what a typical European attitude, a slightly weaker form of the 1930's "oh, that poor disabled kid, his life is just not worth living, so let's just put him out of his misery".
I do. Which is why I don't want the right wing extremism, political extremism, massive unemployment, xenophobia, and other social and political problems from Europe to come to the US.
Simple: there aren't that many minimum wage workers to begin with, minimum wage increases are so low that they don't usually have much of an effect, people are measuring the wrong thing, and people are confusing absence of evidence with evidence of absence.
For example, many studies look at employment numbers; but minimum wages jobs have an extremely high turnover, so the fact that you have 10000 fast food jobs in Seattle before a minimum wage increase and 10000 fast food jobs afterwards tells you next to nothing about the effect of the minimum wage on individual employment; the populations that are employed before and afterwards can be totally different.
You misunderstand. Free market advocates like myself say that we should have free markets precisely because markets are not perfectly competitive and we don't have any good models or predictions for markets and market interventions. Governments and regulators have even less information on the market than the individual participants. And market interventions add the problems of coercion and rent seeking to the problems a market may already have.