Re:Freedom of Capital vs Freedom of Labour
on
No Americans Need Apply
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The temporary movement of labor is known better as Temporary Movement of Natural Persons. It turns out that the price differential for labor between developed and undeveloped countries tends to be much larger than the price differential for goods, thus is more important for a global marketplace than free trade of goods. TMNP allows for flexible labor movement without worrying about sovereignty issues (as permanent movement would).
Studies show that by increasing developed economies' quotas on inward movements of both skilled and unskilled labour by just 3% of their labour forces, world welfare would rise by $156 billion - about 0.6% of world income.
Further liberalization of labor movement could double world income and imply proportionately even larger gains for the developing countries.
Keep in mind that what we consider "poor" has changed over the years. In 1950, half of the households in the US did not have indoor plumbing. Today, even many of the poorest in the US have refrigerators, indoor plumbing, at least one television, a microwave oven, and increasingly, a computer (though often used).
Denmark. They are currently working on converting 90% of their entire COUNTRY to using solely wind power.
Incorrect. Denmark currently consumes about 20 GWe, and has about 1.4 GWe from wind (7%). The most optimistic plan is 10 GWe (50%) by 2030. 90% is not in the cards.
Reason #1) The largest windfarms have about 10 MWe capacity, you need hundreds of windfarms, each one with 10-20 turbines.
Reason #2) Ironically, in the UK, 90% of wind farm projects since 1994 have been rejected by local planning authorities on environmental grounds.
In France, which gets most of its electrical power from Nuclear, they produce about 1.2 kg of spent nuclear fuel per year. This is in comparison with 100 kg of industrial toxic waste, 1000 kg of industrial waste, and 7300 kg of agricultural waste per year.
To look at it another way, a cubic meter holds enough nuclear waste for 20,000 people for a year.
Another way of looking at it, a cube 80m on a side would hold enough nuclear waste for a year of 10 billion people using the same amount of electricity that French people use.
Anyway, you are right, Australia is where people are looking at storing nuclear waste.
With 400 GWe of coal-fired power plants in the world, there is estimated to be about 320 deaths per year due to radioactivity released into the atmosphere from uranium, thorium, radium, radon, and polonium.
Interestingly enough, more deaths come from radioactivity of coal power plant ash being incorporated into housing. With 5% of the ash going into concrete for dwellings, coal ash kills 2000 per year.
Fully-spent nuclear fuel is not a significant nuclear proliferation hazard because it contains a mix of "good" and "bad" Plutonium isotopes for bombs, as well as lots of highly radioactive fission products. Which is a good thing because it makes it harder to steal spent nuclear fuel. Plutonium only represents about 10% of the radioactivity of spent fuel when it comes out of the reactor. The worst offenders over the short term are Curium-244 and Americurium-241.
But of course, if you reprocess it and get rid of all the nasty fission products, it becomes much more easy to steal...
There is absolutely no economic reason to reprocess spent uranium fuel right now. Uranium remains incredibly cheap because of new finds and lack of new nuclear power plants.
Even if a geologic repository will ever come on line (which does not look certain) spent fuel material could be recovered from the repository should there ever be a significant need for fuel to be reprocessed.
Also, it is very likely that advanced fission reactors such as accelerator driven fission could be initially fueled with thorium, which is much more common than uranium.
I suggest everyone who works in an organization with a bunch of Windows boxes do a tcpdump/windump of ICMP packets. The worm is the telltale pinging of every IP on your subnet. Tcpdump port 135 as well, and you will see the worm try to infect all hosts that reply to the ping.
I found six today...and this is despite what I consider very aggressive remote auto-updating and anti-virus campaign where I work.
Every morning, I see a disabled lady using her Segway to go to and from the a Washington, DC rail station. Sometimes when I'm waiting for a train and reading, I'll hear a quiet whizzing sound, look up, and she just went right by me! It makes Segways less of a joke to me.
DC traffic is horrible, and the slow rebuilding of the Wilson Bridge across the Potomac is making is even worse.
On the other hand, DC has many public marinas on the Potomac with boat ramps. There is one in Georgetown, one near National Airport, two in Alexandria, and a few in southern PG county.
I'm impressed that you have a grasp of the past. Now, how about looking to the future?
Betting on price increases for any raw material over the last 100 years has tended to be a losing game. Oil in particular has been sold as "running out in 20 years" several times.
Moderate oil price rises mean that oil can be produced profitably from more expensive wells, which moderates the price rise. Infact it is only OPEC holding back on production that makes Texas or Russian crude oil profitable. With one or two glitches, OPEC has done a good job maximizing their return on oil by keeping the price high enough to make money, but low enough to make alternative energy sources economical.
We've already seen an example of government betting on rising oil prices and loosing. In the early 70's, several goverments began a nuclear fuel reprocessing scheme (for billions of dollars). They thought oil prices would stay high, and that we'd need to get the plutonium out of spent nuclear fuel since we would no doubt be running out of uranium by now.
In fact, so little nuclear has been used, and so much uranium has been found, that uranium prices continue to drop, and you can't even give away spent nuclear fuel rods, let alone get paid to reproccess them.
Gasoline prices at the pump in the US are actually below all-time highs. You can read more about the details here.
In a nutshell, today's US gasoline pump price, in inflation-adjusted dollars, is as cheap as it was in 1986, and cheaper than it ever was before 1969. And when you consider that gasoline taxes have been raised continuously over the years (now to $0.43 per gallon), gasoline itself seems very cheap.
If you want to look at inflation-adjusted crude oil prices, look at this. More recent crude oil prices ($27-$30 / barrel) are up a bit above the hundred-year median price, but still below the highs of the late 70's/early 80's.
Crude oil cost makes up about 40% of gasoline prices, manufacturing and distribution makes up 37%, the rest is taxes.
Should oil prices ever rise, I would expect that plastics would be made with biotechnology, indeed there could be a carbohydrate economy using biotech enzymes to convert cellulose to sugar and then to ethanol.
On giving back, in 2003, individuals gave $180 billion to charity, and all charitable giving (including corporations and foundations) was $240 billion.
What really scares me is how IGNORANT of ECONOMICS most Slashdot users are. You folks are generally pretty educated about technology and science, but you have no clue when it comes to economics.
We live in a world where the expansion of the free market has transformed a planet of people whose daily challenge was to feed themselves, into one where we see poverty going away rapidly. In 1950, only half of Americans had indoor plumbing. Now even some of the poorest Americans have microwave ovens and television sets, let alone indoor plumbing.
Not only has the super-rich West been moving forward. In 1970, the percentage of humanity living at under $2 per day was 40%, under $1 per day was 16%. By 1998, less than 20% of humanity lived under $2 per day, and less than 7% live on under $1 per day (all measurements in 1985 dollars).
We have a long way to go still. But thanks to economic liberalization in countries such as India and China, these numbers are expected to continue dropping.
The author's suggestion of putting everyone on a $25,000 per year stipend means that there will be an effective increase in unemployment.
Europe lives this right now through its expanded unemployment systems, France is at 9.6%, Germany is at 10.6%.
While I think it is great that Harry Potter was written, it is most probably that a lot of those near 10% of French and Germans are probably not going to pen the next billion-dollar media event, and could probably use other mechanisms to contribute to their own well being and that of society.
And frankly, I know alot of people in the US who if they would be paid $25,000 a year would do absolutely nothing but drink and take drugs all day and play video games.
The other issue is that if you paid everyone $25,000 per year, it would change other prices in a free market economy. I still believe that the minimum wage is slightly inflationary, although this is offset by its effect of slowing wage growth for more senior service workers, and its effect on encouraging a black market for illegal alien labor (around here, you can drop by any 7-11 and pick up a crew willing to do labor below minimum wage). The "stipend" would make the minimum wage inflation and dislocation effect look mild in comparison.
The author does note that Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme which will shortly begin to fail as the population age structure inverts. I suggest instead ending the payroll tax (the most regressive tax in the US), and allowing individuals to invest in themselves (through school) or in business investments (like stock) which would allow them to become part of the owner class, and build wealth. There are now several countries moving to a partially-privatized old age pension scheme including the UK and Chile.
I also suggest a highly liberalized temporary movement of natural persons (TMNP) to allow foreign workers to come work in the US and other rich countries legally. This would represent a tremendous expansion of wealth of the world's poor.
What would people put out of work by robots (or foreign workers) do? They'd have to figure out something, or someone smart would figure out something and hire them. Fortunately, people are better than robots at working out solutions to these kinds of problems.
Let me first begin with the theory of Comparative Advantage which implies that if countries concentrate on the industries they are most efficient at, all countries will benefit. There will, of course, occasionally be shifts in who has the comparative advantage of what, and we might be seeing a shift in call centers and perhaps a shift in lower-level programming.
Secondly, there is no massive movement of foreign direct investment to India or China, as one would expect if there was truly a threat to the US economy from there. American companies own only $10.5 billion in investments in China and $1.7 billion in India. Compare this with $132 billion in the Netherlands. Even in manufacturing, 94% of outward U.S. foreign direct manufacturing investment in 2001 flowed to other rich countries.
Investing in China and India is still tough because of because of their underdeveloped infrastructure and legal systems, undereducated workforces (with notable small groups of highly educated workers), remaining trade barriers, and limited consumer markets.
The US today account for 12% of global exports, the same amount it did 20 years ago, and three times as much as China.
US productivity has risen 4.8% over the last year, so even though Americans are well paid, they are producing enough to warrant it.
If you are concerned about NAFTA, in the first eight years of NAFTA manufacturing output in the United States rose at an annual average rate of 3.7%, 50 percent faster than during the eight years before the agreement took effect.
Americans continue to earn more, become more productive, manufacture more, and export more each year.
Here is the deal - the US benefits from people in developing countries making more money. They won't be "stealing" our jobs. The stronger the global economy, the better off we all will be.
Look at India. It's telephone penetration rate is 4 lines per 100 people. India's telecommunication systems market now has annual growth of 22%, and has tremendous growth potential. This means companies like Alcatel, Lucent, Siemens, Fujitsu, AT&T, Ericsson, and NEC will be brought in to finish up the wiring of hundreds of millions of Indian homes. Sure, a piece of the pie will go to many countries, but much of that will go to the US.
Meanwhile, US industry will be saving costs by outsourcing call centers and low-level IT operations to India. When you reduce costs, you can hire MORE productive Americans, not less!
Anyway, I'm not saying "don't worry about it," but we all need to be flexible as parts of the developing world develop. It means we need to concentrate on the things that Americans can do best. All of humanity will be better off in the end.
MD5 exists to ensure that files are 100% exactly the same, bit per bit. If I were them, I would use a hash with a property of allowing a little more Hamming distance between inputs to map to the same hash to avoid people just flipping one bit and making it untraceable.
The main meme of Ethernet is carrier-sense multiple access (CSMA), i.e., talk if it is quiet, don't if it isn't, asynchronously. This is in direct opposition to synchronous protocols of all kinds (including TDMA), CDMA, or token passing.
So, OK, Wi-Fi (CSMA/CA) is not really Ethernet (CSMA/CD), but it has the same asynchronous spirit (CSMA)...
Yes, in 1995 no one thought there was a call for 100BT to the desktop either. And in 2002, no one thought there was a need for GigE to the desktop either.
(I write this after I just did a 500 Mbps ftp transfer of a 7GB video file over GigE...)
NASA is the only organization that can work on nuclear rockets, which I believe will prove to be the only efficient way to get into orbit for reasonable prices. Other aspects should be left to private enterprise.
I hazzard a guess that the long-term benefit to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan of the recent US interventions will be much larger than the benefit to them of the Space Shuttle.
I think blogs can communicate the thoughts that people are having that might otherwise go uncommunicated to others. While there are plenty of thoughts that are pretty much worthless, no doubt looking through enough blogs one will find insights into technology, philosophy, humanity, politics, and psychology.
Of course, a lot of the psychology is that people are nuts!
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The temporary movement of labor is known better as Temporary Movement of Natural Persons. It turns out that the price differential for labor between developed and undeveloped countries tends to be much larger than the price differential for goods, thus is more important for a global marketplace than free trade of goods. TMNP allows for flexible labor movement without worrying about sovereignty issues (as permanent movement would).
Studies show that by increasing developed economies' quotas on inward movements of both skilled and unskilled labour by just 3% of their labour forces, world welfare would rise by $156 billion - about 0.6% of world income.
Further liberalization of labor movement could double world income and imply proportionately even larger gains for the developing countries.
Interesting factoid, HP OpenView on Solaris, Linux, and HP-UX was affected by the blaster worm as well through RPC:
HP document on the vulnerability.
Keep in mind that what we consider "poor" has changed over the years. In 1950, half of the households in the US did not have indoor plumbing. Today, even many of the poorest in the US have refrigerators, indoor plumbing, at least one television, a microwave oven, and increasingly, a computer (though often used).
Looking at Ebay, I see a Compaq Deskpro Pentium II/P2 350MHz 6.4GB which is fine for Net surfing and playing simple games. The price: $35.
Compared with rent of $500-$1000 per month in US urban areas, computers are no longer a "luxury," even for people living near the poverty line.
Denmark. They are currently working on converting 90% of their entire COUNTRY to using solely wind power.
Incorrect. Denmark currently consumes about 20 GWe, and has about 1.4 GWe from wind (7%). The most optimistic plan is 10 GWe (50%) by 2030. 90% is not in the cards.
Reason #1) The largest windfarms have about 10 MWe capacity, you need hundreds of windfarms, each one with 10-20 turbines.
Reason #2) Ironically, in the UK, 90% of wind farm projects since 1994 have been rejected by local planning authorities on environmental grounds.
In France, which gets most of its electrical power from Nuclear, they produce about 1.2 kg of spent nuclear fuel per year. This is in comparison with 100 kg of industrial toxic waste, 1000 kg of industrial waste, and 7300 kg of agricultural waste per year.
To look at it another way, a cubic meter holds enough nuclear waste for 20,000 people for a year.
Another way of looking at it, a cube 80m on a side would hold enough nuclear waste for a year of 10 billion people using the same amount of electricity that French people use.
Anyway, you are right, Australia is where people are looking at storing nuclear waste.
With 400 GWe of coal-fired power plants in the world, there is estimated to be about 320 deaths per year due to radioactivity released into the atmosphere from uranium, thorium, radium, radon, and polonium.
Interestingly enough, more deaths come from radioactivity of coal power plant ash being incorporated into housing. With 5% of the ash going into concrete for dwellings, coal ash kills 2000 per year.
Fully-spent nuclear fuel is not a significant nuclear proliferation hazard because it contains a mix of "good" and "bad" Plutonium isotopes for bombs, as well as lots of highly radioactive fission products. Which is a good thing because it makes it harder to steal spent nuclear fuel. Plutonium only represents about 10% of the radioactivity of spent fuel when it comes out of the reactor. The worst offenders over the short term are Curium-244 and Americurium-241.
But of course, if you reprocess it and get rid of all the nasty fission products, it becomes much more easy to steal...
There is absolutely no economic reason to reprocess spent uranium fuel right now. Uranium remains incredibly cheap because of new finds and lack of new nuclear power plants.
Even if a geologic repository will ever come on line (which does not look certain) spent fuel material could be recovered from the repository should there ever be a significant need for fuel to be reprocessed.
Also, it is very likely that advanced fission reactors such as accelerator driven fission could be initially fueled with thorium, which is much more common than uranium.
I suggest everyone who works in an organization with a bunch of Windows boxes do a tcpdump/windump of ICMP packets. The worm is the telltale pinging of every IP on your subnet. Tcpdump port 135 as well, and you will see the worm try to infect all hosts that reply to the ping.
I found six today...and this is despite what I consider very aggressive remote auto-updating and anti-virus campaign where I work.
You find me one person, just one person who's lost their job because of a drop in CD sales
Well, music and movie retailer Tower Records has been closing stores, and in the DC area discounter Kemp Mill Records is closing as well.
Every morning, I see a disabled lady using her Segway to go to and from the a Washington, DC rail station. Sometimes when I'm waiting for a train and reading, I'll hear a quiet whizzing sound, look up, and she just went right by me! It makes Segways less of a joke to me.
DC traffic is horrible, and the slow rebuilding of the Wilson Bridge across the Potomac is making is even worse.
On the other hand, DC has many public marinas on the Potomac with boat ramps. There is one in Georgetown, one near National Airport, two in Alexandria, and a few in southern PG county.
I'm impressed that you have a grasp of the past. Now, how about looking to the future?
Betting on price increases for any raw material over the last 100 years has tended to be a losing game. Oil in particular has been sold as "running out in 20 years" several times.
Moderate oil price rises mean that oil can be produced profitably from more expensive wells, which moderates the price rise. Infact it is only OPEC holding back on production that makes Texas or Russian crude oil profitable. With one or two glitches, OPEC has done a good job maximizing their return on oil by keeping the price high enough to make money, but low enough to make alternative energy sources economical.
We've already seen an example of government betting on rising oil prices and loosing. In the early 70's, several goverments began a nuclear fuel reprocessing scheme (for billions of dollars). They thought oil prices would stay high, and that we'd need to get the plutonium out of spent nuclear fuel since we would no doubt be running out of uranium by now.
In fact, so little nuclear has been used, and so much uranium has been found, that uranium prices continue to drop, and you can't even give away spent nuclear fuel rods, let alone get paid to reproccess them.
Gasoline prices at the pump in the US are actually below all-time highs. You can read more about the details here.
In a nutshell, today's US gasoline pump price, in inflation-adjusted dollars, is as cheap as it was in 1986, and cheaper than it ever was before 1969. And when you consider that gasoline taxes have been raised continuously over the years (now to $0.43 per gallon), gasoline itself seems very cheap.
If you want to look at inflation-adjusted crude oil prices, look at this. More recent crude oil prices ($27-$30 / barrel) are up a bit above the hundred-year median price, but still below the highs of the late 70's/early 80's.
Crude oil cost makes up about 40% of gasoline prices, manufacturing and distribution makes up 37%, the rest is taxes.
Should oil prices ever rise, I would expect that plastics would be made with biotechnology, indeed there could be a carbohydrate economy using biotech enzymes to convert cellulose to sugar and then to ethanol.
Nuclear Thermal Rockets are the only real hope for SSTO. The challenge is doing it safely.
On giving back, in 2003, individuals gave $180 billion to charity, and all charitable giving (including corporations and foundations) was $240 billion.
What really scares me is how IGNORANT of ECONOMICS most Slashdot users are. You folks are generally pretty educated about technology and science, but you have no clue when it comes to economics.
We live in a world where the expansion of the free market has transformed a planet of people whose daily challenge was to feed themselves, into one where we see poverty going away rapidly. In 1950, only half of Americans had indoor plumbing. Now even some of the poorest Americans have microwave ovens and television sets, let alone indoor plumbing.
Not only has the super-rich West been moving forward. In 1970, the percentage of humanity living at under $2 per day was 40%, under $1 per day was 16%. By 1998, less than 20% of humanity lived under $2 per day, and less than 7% live on under $1 per day (all measurements in 1985 dollars).
We have a long way to go still. But thanks to economic liberalization in countries such as India and China, these numbers are expected to continue dropping.
The author's suggestion of putting everyone on a $25,000 per year stipend means that there will be an effective increase in unemployment.
Europe lives this right now through its expanded unemployment systems, France is at 9.6%, Germany is at 10.6%.
While I think it is great that Harry Potter was written, it is most probably that a lot of those near 10% of French and Germans are probably not going to pen the next billion-dollar media event, and could probably use other mechanisms to contribute to their own well being and that of society.
And frankly, I know alot of people in the US who if they would be paid $25,000 a year would do absolutely nothing but drink and take drugs all day and play video games.
The other issue is that if you paid everyone $25,000 per year, it would change other prices in a free market economy. I still believe that the minimum wage is slightly inflationary, although this is offset by its effect of slowing wage growth for more senior service workers, and its effect on encouraging a black market for illegal alien labor (around here, you can drop by any 7-11 and pick up a crew willing to do labor below minimum wage). The "stipend" would make the minimum wage inflation and dislocation effect look mild in comparison.
The author does note that Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme which will shortly begin to fail as the population age structure inverts. I suggest instead ending the payroll tax (the most regressive tax in the US), and allowing individuals to invest in themselves (through school) or in business investments (like stock) which would allow them to become part of the owner class, and build wealth. There are now several countries moving to a partially-privatized old age pension scheme including the UK and Chile.
I also suggest a highly liberalized temporary movement of natural persons (TMNP) to allow foreign workers to come work in the US and other rich countries legally. This would represent a tremendous expansion of wealth of the world's poor.
What would people put out of work by robots (or foreign workers) do? They'd have to figure out something, or someone smart would figure out something and hire them. Fortunately, people are better than robots at working out solutions to these kinds of problems.
Let me first begin with the theory of Comparative Advantage which implies that if countries concentrate on the industries they are most efficient at, all countries will benefit. There will, of course, occasionally be shifts in who has the comparative advantage of what, and we might be seeing a shift in call centers and perhaps a shift in lower-level programming.
Secondly, there is no massive movement of foreign direct investment to India or China, as one would expect if there was truly a threat to the US economy from there. American companies own only $10.5 billion in investments in China and $1.7 billion in India. Compare this with $132 billion in the Netherlands. Even in manufacturing, 94% of outward U.S. foreign direct manufacturing investment in 2001 flowed to other rich countries.
Investing in China and India is still tough because of because of their underdeveloped infrastructure and legal systems, undereducated workforces (with notable small groups of highly educated workers), remaining trade barriers, and limited consumer markets.
The US today account for 12% of global exports, the same amount it did 20 years ago, and three times as much as China.
US productivity has risen 4.8% over the last year, so even though Americans are well paid, they are producing enough to warrant it.
If you are concerned about NAFTA, in the first eight years of NAFTA manufacturing output in the United States rose at an annual average rate of 3.7%, 50 percent faster than during the eight years before the agreement took effect.
Americans continue to earn more, become more productive, manufacture more, and export more each year.
Here is the deal - the US benefits from people in developing countries making more money. They won't be "stealing" our jobs. The stronger the global economy, the better off we all will be.
Look at India. It's telephone penetration rate is 4 lines per 100 people. India's telecommunication systems market now has annual growth of 22%, and has tremendous growth potential. This means companies like Alcatel, Lucent, Siemens, Fujitsu, AT&T, Ericsson, and NEC will be brought in to finish up the wiring of hundreds of millions of Indian homes. Sure, a piece of the pie will go to many countries, but much of that will go to the US.
Meanwhile, US industry will be saving costs by outsourcing call centers and low-level IT operations to India. When you reduce costs, you can hire MORE productive Americans, not less!
Anyway, I'm not saying "don't worry about it," but we all need to be flexible as parts of the developing world develop. It means we need to concentrate on the things that Americans can do best. All of humanity will be better off in the end.
Apu may speak English better than many Americans, however. And he will call himself "Bob" on the phone anyway.
Flipping just ONE BIT will change the MD5 hash.
MD5 exists to ensure that files are 100% exactly the same, bit per bit. If I were them, I would use a hash with a property of allowing a little more Hamming distance between inputs to map to the same hash to avoid people just flipping one bit and making it untraceable.
The main meme of Ethernet is carrier-sense multiple access (CSMA), i.e., talk if it is quiet, don't if it isn't, asynchronously. This is in direct opposition to synchronous protocols of all kinds (including TDMA), CDMA, or token passing.
So, OK, Wi-Fi (CSMA/CA) is not really Ethernet (CSMA/CD), but it has the same asynchronous spirit (CSMA)...
Yes, in 1995 no one thought there was a call for 100BT to the desktop either. And in 2002, no one thought there was a need for GigE to the desktop either.
(I write this after I just did a 500 Mbps ftp transfer of a 7GB video file over GigE...)
NASA is the only organization that can work on nuclear rockets, which I believe will prove to be the only efficient way to get into orbit for reasonable prices. Other aspects should be left to private enterprise.
I hazzard a guess that the long-term benefit to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan of the recent US interventions will be much larger than the benefit to them of the Space Shuttle.
I think blogs can communicate the thoughts that people are having that might otherwise go uncommunicated to others. While there are plenty of thoughts that are pretty much worthless, no doubt looking through enough blogs one will find insights into technology, philosophy, humanity, politics, and psychology.
Of course, a lot of the psychology is that people are nuts!