"Correct" has a cognate of "right" as it's root. They both imply value judgements, be they alethic (the right thing to believe, i.e. truth) or deontic (the right thing to do, i.e. good). And FWIW, both of those kinds of judgement can be either "black & white" or "shades of grey".
("Right" as in the direction comes from that same root too; your "right hand" is literally your "good hand". All of them come from an even older sense still found in "right angle", a sense meaning "straight", which in turn also comes from the same root. A bunch of other roots share this same pattern: social norms vs surface normals, orthogonal vs orthodox, a ruler as in a king vs a ruler as in a straight edge, etc. ["Regal" and "royal" and other words relating to kings come from the same root too]. And "regular" and "normal" both originally meant right/normative/correct long before they meant common/typical/average).
The succession follows the order of Vice President, Speaker of the House, President pro tempore of the Senate, and then the heads of federal executive departments who form the US Cabinet
So yeah, if the VP is removed too it falls to the Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan. So we could conceivably end up with a President Ryan if Pence is implicated along with Trump in impeachable offenses. (Also, since the House, and then the Senate who are next in line, would have to be the ones to conduct their impeachment, there's an interesting conflict of interest there that I wonder about the implications of. If Ryan brings impeachment proceedings that could end up making himself President... is that a problem in and of itself?)
This is the point that causes me the most uncertainty in what I hope for. (Not that my hopes have any causal efficacy, but still).
Trump is possibly the first president in my lifetime who I've felt really viscerally disgusted by, however much I may have disagreed with others' policies. For that reason, it's kind of enjoyable to watch him failing so spectacularly. Until I remember that his failures are our failures as he represents the whole American nation. Then I want something done about it. But the only thing I can really see possibly being done about it is removing him from office, which only puts Pence into the same seat. That replaces the incompetent buffoon pushing all the wrong policies with... a (presumably) more competent professional pushing no better policies. Maybe it makes America more respectable and restores some sense of trust in our political process that Trump may be undermining. But is it a good thing to have someone every bit as despicable when it comes to the actual dry concrete policy content, who merely looks more respectable and is more trusted? Mightn't it be better if the villain were obviously evil than able to pretend to be good? I just don't know.
Best guess is most people are buying cars far more expensive than they need to be because they want the latest shiny toy or are afraid of some meaningless social stigma from driving a car that's not seen as cool enough.
[actually reads those links]
Yep, every single one starts off talking about making car payments and paying off loans before going on to tack on the rest of the stuff. If you're borrowing tens of thousands of dollars at interest on a depreciating asset when you could get the same utility out of an alternative that only costs the equivalent of a few months of such payments in cash, well, there's your problem right there. (And then you're probably over-insuring to protect that precarious "investment", adding even more cost on top of that).
I live in California myself, in the area around another of the most expensive cities in the country, Santa Barbara. We don't have the parking insanity that SF has here, thank god, but all the rest of it should be comparable between here and there. Maybe the commute times and distances add to gas costs like you say, too.
You have a point about parking, but good-quality used cars can be had for WAY cheaper than that, and so can insurance. Every car I've ever owned over 15 years add up to about a third of that $35k figure (and it could have been much lower too if I hadn't been a broke-ass stupid kid for part of that time making poor choices about what to buy, when to repair, and how to drive), and since the current car should last me at least another 5-10 years, that "monthly payment" equivalent keeps getting more and more diluted over time. Buying newer cars with loans is for suckers. Wait a few months (if you don't have the savings) and put a couple of those "payments" into a $3,000ish car that will last you another 5-10 years at least.
And sure you can insure yourself against yourself too, and pay tons of money obligately every month to avoid the possibility of paying a fraction of that to cover yourself making a stupid mistake. Or you can get the minimum legally required insurance and pay a quarter of the figure you quoted, pocket the difference, don't drive stupidly, and if you do fuck yourself up, pay for it out of the piles of cash you saved on insurance.
Big loans and hefty insurance are scams, and you can live way more cheaply without them, and cover the "services" they provide by yourself with the difference that you save.
Your $30-50/day "basically free" sounds ridiculously overpriced, and that $700-1000/mo is some kind of fantasy. I just did the math right now and the total cost of ownership for all vehicles I've ever owned over the 15 years I've been driving, including fuel, purchase price, insurance, and maintenance costs, amounts to about $8/day, under $250/mo, TCO.
no one owns homes anymore because the cost of housing has skyrocketed while incomes have stagnated so nobody can buy a home anymore. instead they rent cheaper smaller units of housing that simply aren't available to purchase. (most of my adult life I could only afford to rent a bedroom in someone else's house. you can't buy just a bedroom in a house. now I live in a mobile home on rented land. you can't buy just a plot of land that size to park a mobile home on.) someone owns that rented-out housing, and they are making a profit off of everyone else in doing so, or else they wouldn't be in the business of it.
if renting was actually cheaper overall than owning, then nobody would want to be a landlord -- landlords have to pay the cost of ownership, and get paid the cost of rent, so if the latter is less than the former there's no business to be had there. so they would sell off their rental housing en masse, which would increase supply and decrease price of available housing to purchase until a new equilibrium was met.
renting is necessarily more expensive than owning. it cannot be otherwise.
In any system at all, "the psychopaths" tend to end up in charge. That is the default state of affairs: assholes take all the power and shit sucks for everyone else. It is possible for the rest of the people to fight back against that tendency though, and all the "systems" are just different approaches to doing that. They may have different strengths and weaknesses but they all depend ultimately on people actually using them. "Decentralization" (liberty and equality for all, instead of a few assholes holding all the power, "centrally") is the end-goal of all such systems, it is not a system unto itself. Be careful not to confuse the goal for the means by which you seek to achieve it, otherwise you may thing the best means is just to do nothing, to have "no system", which means you end up with the assholes seizing all of the power and ruining everything, just the opposite of what you wanted.
To translate all of this back into conventional political philosophy terms: assholes holding all the power for themselves is a state. Systems to keep (other) assholes from seizing power over others are forms of governance. Having no state, no assholes holding all the power over everyone, is anarchy. And the only way to maintain it is through some form of governance. Stateless governance. But that's the hard problem: how do you govern without setting yourself up as a state, or else letting someone else get away with doing so? Better forms of governance, that ensure more liberty and more equality, diminish their own statehood more and more, without thereby allowing other states to spring up (in fact if not in name; immensely powerful "private" parties become effective states if they get insufficiently governed). But we haven't figured out how to get all the way there yet: how to do away with the state entirely and still somehow continue governance sufficient to prevent new ones from spontaneously popping out of the vacuum. That's the hard problem.
Wow, never expected to find little local Ojai things like Matilija Dam mentioned on Slashdot.:-)
Not visible in the photo in that article (which apparently was taken during an unusually wet season; I've never seen the dam overflowing like that before) is the interesting graffiti painted on the dam in support of its long-impending demolition.
The dam is so silted up that most days you can see reeds growing out of the surface of the water. (Pics online I can find don't seem to show this, as they all seem to have been taken during times when the reservoir was unusually full of water).
Also, the dam is a major cause of beach erosion at the mouth of the Ventura River that Matilija Creek empties into, as the silt backed up behind the dam would normally have washed out to the river mouth to replenish the beaches around the delta there.
Pretty much this. A good lecture isn't about taking notes down by dictation, or by copying them verbatim from a blackboard.
This so much. Now I know everyone has a different learning style and anecdote is not the singular of data, but in my collegiate experience I was usually the star pupil in every class, and also one of the few students actively engaging with the professor. I also pretty much never took notes, unless something of interest was said that sparked a tangent thought in my mind that I wanted to jot down for my own reference later; I wasn't copying down the words he said or wrote on the board for later reference, I was paying attention right now, including answering questions put to the class (usually after waiting to see if anyone else wants to take it, so I'm not always dominating the conversation), and asking questions. Everyone else meanwhile seemed to be so busy taking notes that they were unable to actually pay attention to the subject matter, and when the professor would try to actually engage with the class... that was just an opportunity for them to rest their writing hands, I guess? Because hardly anybody else ever responded, and I always felt a little sigh in side my mind like "really? anybody? nobody? ok, I guess I'll take this one too..."
That's not how markets work. It's how an ideal, perfectly efficient market would be forced to work, but it's not how real world markets with all their inefficiencies actually work. Every seller of everything is always trying to get the highest price; every buyer of everything is always trying to get the lowest price; and the prices they end up agreeing on are based on the next-best alternatives (that they know about). In some markets, like say commodities markets (trading large volumes of fungible goods between a huge number of buyers and sellers), things are forced to work that way, which is good; while in other markets like housing and cars they work less like that, which is bad, but which information sources help to make better, by informing everyone involved of what their probable next-best alternative would be.
Costs and utility do certainly put limits on the process, of course. If a seller can't routinely sell things for more than it takes to make (or otherwise acquire) them then they're just not going to bother doing it. Which will decrease the available supply of those things on the market, meaning people still looking to buy from others still have fewer alternatives, so those others can demand higher prices since the buyers don't have a next-best alternative to turn to instead, until an equilibrium is met. But of course, the utility of the item to the buyer puts a limit on it for him as well; some prices will just be so high that it's not worth it, even if there is no cheaper alternative. In either of those cases, the trade just doesn't happen; there is no price that's worth it to both parties so at least one party walks away from the deal.
But sometimes, inflexible demand and inflexible supply force buyers and sellers into accepting a bad deal because the next-best alternative is an even worse deal. A business going out of business that still has stock on hand will sell it below cost if need be (that's what a liquidation sale is) because the next best alternative is having to hang on to (and pay to store) useless inventory for a business they don't want to be in anymore. Likewise, a buyer whose next-best alternative to buying something that's priced above it's actual utility to him is some scenario that ends up costing him even more instead (like losing your job because you can't get to it because you don't have a car, say; or paying indefinite money forever renting because you never ended up owning a house) may end up paying the unjustified price to stop the loss elsewhere. Both of these scenarios are just people cutting their losses, because sometimes a positive outcome is just not available, and the best you can do is choose the least-bad outcome.
From what I gather, market prices in different regions vary, and KBB seems to list overall market prices. I live somewhere that lots of things (especially, back on topic, housing) is overpriced, so cars probably generally sell for more here too, while you likely live somewhere the opposite is true.
The invisible hand of the market functions only on the condition of all parties being well informed, and since KBB is compiled from actual market data (what cars are actually selling for) all it's doing is informing all parties and making that invisible hand work more efficiently.
KBB hardly dictates the price of the entire auto resale market. I've only ever found one seller in my entire driving history willing to come down to KBB prices, and that was a close friendly coworker at a car-centric job, and even that was a hard negotiation. Basically nobody is willing to accept "just blue book" for a used car in my experience.
Technically, they don't accept that anything in the Bible is actually wrong, but that since (per their current doctrine) both the Bible and science are infallible, if you think they contradict each other then you misunderstand at least one of them. So their doctrine is basically "whatever interpretation of the Bible makes it sound compatible with science and therefore not retarded, that's the right one, now go figure out how to interpret it that way".
Even simpler, fix the UBI to a percentage of GDP, then fund it with a flat income tax of the same percentage, and the math automatically works out such that everyone below the mean income sees some net benefit, the mean income is exactly neutral, and people above the mean income pay for the benefit of the people below. Where the mean income falls relative to the median income determines what percentage of people fall on either side of the neutral line (currently it'd be about 75% below and 25% above), and mean income relative to median income is a good measure of income (in)equality (under a normal i.e. gaussian distribution you would expect mean and median to be the same, but mean rises above median the more top-heavy it becomes), so the system automatically becomes more progressive in response to growing income inequality, and then scales back again in response to growing income equality.
My political positions are somewhere way off the usual spectrum but would definitely usually be called more left than right by most people (except, weirdly enough, some who call themselves on the left, though they in turn look awfully far to the right to me), so I'm not in exactly the same boat as you. But I share similar sentiments about most presidential candidates in my living memory. I don't exactly like any of them, and whenever a Democrat has been in office my general sentiment about politics could be summed up as "disappointment". But then a Republican gets in office and my god would I love to be merely disappointed again.
The earliest president I can remember really having an opinion about was Clinton (I lived through others but wasn't politically aware yet), and I remember my thoughts on him being swept up in a general "ugh why is our government so dumb and doing dumb things all the time" (though the Republican attacks against Clinton seemed even dumber, trumped up transparently on trivial pretenses).
Then we got Bush in office, and man, the 90s started looking like political glory days in contrast.
Then Obama got elected and... hardly anything changed from when Bush had been president, other than the figurehead of our government no longer sounding like a complete moron ever time he opened his mouth. My overall sentiment was "charming orator, but meh on policy". (And again, the ridiculous frothing-at-the-mouth Republican outrage searching to find any pretense to tear him and his administration down easily drowned out my disappointment in the actual policy getting made).
Now we've got Trump and... "meh" sounds like a nice vacation. It reminds me of an old job of mine, where so many days were just total clusterfucks that "boring" became praise of a day. A boring day was a good day, because the usual alternative to boring was a shitstorm. Obama's politics were boring and did not at all live up to the hype, but god would I love to just have a boring government again now.
A sensibly implemented income tax funded UBI will provide a net gain (UBI received minus taxes paid to fund it) to everyone making less than the mean income, which is currently about 75% of the population and would only go up under the kind of automation crunch we're talking about. The bulk of the UBI will be funded by the people at the very top of the income curve (the ones who drag that mean income so far up above the mean in the first place), who are largely not wage workers to begin with, but rather making unearned incomes off rents and interest lending out their wealth. Those are the people who need to bear the burden of taking care of the people at the bottom, because they're the ones who can. The well-employed but still working-class people you're worried about being over-taxed by an UBI are the very same people I'm proposing the UBI in place of the hours reduction to protect. A straight hours reduction is going to hurt those people, the ones working full tilt to try to get over the hump, the most, to fund a benefit to people who need it even more sure, but at no cost to the people at the top who can afford it best, who thus ought to be bearing the burden instead of the people in the middle.
Someone currently working a 40h week at around $25/hr is making around the mean income right now, and under a sanely implemented UBI would see neither a loss or a gain to their income because of it. But if you reduce the work week by 20%, that person loses around $10,000/year income, some of which might be spread around here or there among the 75% of people making less than him who might see an increase in employment (if further automation to make up the slack isn't cheaper than that); and the actually rich people at the top who aren't wage workers to begin with see no change. So the middle is pulled down a lot, the bottom might get a little bump, the top gets off scot free, and the slope between bottom and top gets even steeper. An income tax funded UBI would have the exact opposite effect, making the slope from poor to rich shallower and easier to climb, by applying a center-ward pressure on everyone's income.
Having the bottom claw the middle down is exactly what the people at the top want.
that will only hurt the middle class and cost the upper class nothing, only increasing the gap between rich and poor
unless you can magically mandate that everyone getting their hours cut gets a commensurate boost to their wages in which case you may as well do the sensible thing and just implement a basic income funded by an income tax which amounts to the same thing.
You're missing a "scis". Just reading that doesn't make someone have too much knowledge; knowing how to read it does. "Si hoc legere" = "if you read this", while "si hoc legere scis" = "if you can read this".
Ah here we see the unfortunately-not-elusive "catch 22" in the wild. Assert that things aren't good enough, ask for better, and leave if you don't get it? You're a whiney complainer. Stay quiet, keep your head down, and don't rock the boat? You're coddled and expect things to be just served up without even asking. Why everyone knows, whenever anything seems not right, the correct response is to stand up and fix it yourself, by sitting down and accepting things just how they are. Right?
Slashdot Mirror
Every possible concept of a god that is not literal nonsense is tantamount to aliens anyway, so same thing either way.
"Correct" has a cognate of "right" as it's root. They both imply value judgements, be they alethic (the right thing to believe, i.e. truth) or deontic (the right thing to do, i.e. good). And FWIW, both of those kinds of judgement can be either "black & white" or "shades of grey".
("Right" as in the direction comes from that same root too; your "right hand" is literally your "good hand". All of them come from an even older sense still found in "right angle", a sense meaning "straight", which in turn also comes from the same root. A bunch of other roots share this same pattern: social norms vs surface normals, orthogonal vs orthodox, a ruler as in a king vs a ruler as in a straight edge, etc. ["Regal" and "royal" and other words relating to kings come from the same root too]. And "regular" and "normal" both originally meant right/normative/correct long before they meant common/typical/average).
There's a cent symbol on my keyboard. It's the same key as the dollar symbol, except instead of shift you hold option.
You have a good point, and also in answer to your question, according to Wikipedia:
The succession follows the order of Vice President, Speaker of the House, President pro tempore of the Senate, and then the heads of federal executive departments who form the US Cabinet
So yeah, if the VP is removed too it falls to the Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan. So we could conceivably end up with a President Ryan if Pence is implicated along with Trump in impeachable offenses. (Also, since the House, and then the Senate who are next in line, would have to be the ones to conduct their impeachment, there's an interesting conflict of interest there that I wonder about the implications of. If Ryan brings impeachment proceedings that could end up making himself President... is that a problem in and of itself?)
This is the point that causes me the most uncertainty in what I hope for. (Not that my hopes have any causal efficacy, but still).
Trump is possibly the first president in my lifetime who I've felt really viscerally disgusted by, however much I may have disagreed with others' policies. For that reason, it's kind of enjoyable to watch him failing so spectacularly. Until I remember that his failures are our failures as he represents the whole American nation. Then I want something done about it. But the only thing I can really see possibly being done about it is removing him from office, which only puts Pence into the same seat. That replaces the incompetent buffoon pushing all the wrong policies with... a (presumably) more competent professional pushing no better policies. Maybe it makes America more respectable and restores some sense of trust in our political process that Trump may be undermining. But is it a good thing to have someone every bit as despicable when it comes to the actual dry concrete policy content, who merely looks more respectable and is more trusted? Mightn't it be better if the villain were obviously evil than able to pretend to be good? I just don't know.
Best guess is most people are buying cars far more expensive than they need to be because they want the latest shiny toy or are afraid of some meaningless social stigma from driving a car that's not seen as cool enough.
[actually reads those links]
Yep, every single one starts off talking about making car payments and paying off loans before going on to tack on the rest of the stuff. If you're borrowing tens of thousands of dollars at interest on a depreciating asset when you could get the same utility out of an alternative that only costs the equivalent of a few months of such payments in cash, well, there's your problem right there. (And then you're probably over-insuring to protect that precarious "investment", adding even more cost on top of that).
I live in California myself, in the area around another of the most expensive cities in the country, Santa Barbara. We don't have the parking insanity that SF has here, thank god, but all the rest of it should be comparable between here and there. Maybe the commute times and distances add to gas costs like you say, too.
You have a point about parking, but good-quality used cars can be had for WAY cheaper than that, and so can insurance. Every car I've ever owned over 15 years add up to about a third of that $35k figure (and it could have been much lower too if I hadn't been a broke-ass stupid kid for part of that time making poor choices about what to buy, when to repair, and how to drive), and since the current car should last me at least another 5-10 years, that "monthly payment" equivalent keeps getting more and more diluted over time. Buying newer cars with loans is for suckers. Wait a few months (if you don't have the savings) and put a couple of those "payments" into a $3,000ish car that will last you another 5-10 years at least.
And sure you can insure yourself against yourself too, and pay tons of money obligately every month to avoid the possibility of paying a fraction of that to cover yourself making a stupid mistake. Or you can get the minimum legally required insurance and pay a quarter of the figure you quoted, pocket the difference, don't drive stupidly, and if you do fuck yourself up, pay for it out of the piles of cash you saved on insurance.
Big loans and hefty insurance are scams, and you can live way more cheaply without them, and cover the "services" they provide by yourself with the difference that you save.
Your $30-50/day "basically free" sounds ridiculously overpriced, and that $700-1000/mo is some kind of fantasy. I just did the math right now and the total cost of ownership for all vehicles I've ever owned over the 15 years I've been driving, including fuel, purchase price, insurance, and maintenance costs, amounts to about $8/day, under $250/mo, TCO.
no one owns homes anymore because the cost of housing has skyrocketed while incomes have stagnated so nobody can buy a home anymore. instead they rent cheaper smaller units of housing that simply aren't available to purchase. (most of my adult life I could only afford to rent a bedroom in someone else's house. you can't buy just a bedroom in a house. now I live in a mobile home on rented land. you can't buy just a plot of land that size to park a mobile home on.) someone owns that rented-out housing, and they are making a profit off of everyone else in doing so, or else they wouldn't be in the business of it.
if renting was actually cheaper overall than owning, then nobody would want to be a landlord -- landlords have to pay the cost of ownership, and get paid the cost of rent, so if the latter is less than the former there's no business to be had there. so they would sell off their rental housing en masse, which would increase supply and decrease price of available housing to purchase until a new equilibrium was met.
renting is necessarily more expensive than owning. it cannot be otherwise.
god that was almost as painful as the real thing, bravo
In any system at all, "the psychopaths" tend to end up in charge. That is the default state of affairs: assholes take all the power and shit sucks for everyone else. It is possible for the rest of the people to fight back against that tendency though, and all the "systems" are just different approaches to doing that. They may have different strengths and weaknesses but they all depend ultimately on people actually using them. "Decentralization" (liberty and equality for all, instead of a few assholes holding all the power, "centrally") is the end-goal of all such systems, it is not a system unto itself. Be careful not to confuse the goal for the means by which you seek to achieve it, otherwise you may thing the best means is just to do nothing, to have "no system", which means you end up with the assholes seizing all of the power and ruining everything, just the opposite of what you wanted.
To translate all of this back into conventional political philosophy terms: assholes holding all the power for themselves is a state. Systems to keep (other) assholes from seizing power over others are forms of governance. Having no state, no assholes holding all the power over everyone, is anarchy. And the only way to maintain it is through some form of governance. Stateless governance. But that's the hard problem: how do you govern without setting yourself up as a state, or else letting someone else get away with doing so? Better forms of governance, that ensure more liberty and more equality, diminish their own statehood more and more, without thereby allowing other states to spring up (in fact if not in name; immensely powerful "private" parties become effective states if they get insufficiently governed). But we haven't figured out how to get all the way there yet: how to do away with the state entirely and still somehow continue governance sufficient to prevent new ones from spontaneously popping out of the vacuum. That's the hard problem.
Wow, never expected to find little local Ojai things like Matilija Dam mentioned on Slashdot. :-)
Not visible in the photo in that article (which apparently was taken during an unusually wet season; I've never seen the dam overflowing like that before) is the interesting graffiti painted on the dam in support of its long-impending demolition.
The dam is so silted up that most days you can see reeds growing out of the surface of the water. (Pics online I can find don't seem to show this, as they all seem to have been taken during times when the reservoir was unusually full of water).
Also, the dam is a major cause of beach erosion at the mouth of the Ventura River that Matilija Creek empties into, as the silt backed up behind the dam would normally have washed out to the river mouth to replenish the beaches around the delta there.
Pretty much this. A good lecture isn't about taking notes down by dictation, or by copying them verbatim from a blackboard.
This so much. Now I know everyone has a different learning style and anecdote is not the singular of data, but in my collegiate experience I was usually the star pupil in every class, and also one of the few students actively engaging with the professor. I also pretty much never took notes, unless something of interest was said that sparked a tangent thought in my mind that I wanted to jot down for my own reference later; I wasn't copying down the words he said or wrote on the board for later reference, I was paying attention right now, including answering questions put to the class (usually after waiting to see if anyone else wants to take it, so I'm not always dominating the conversation), and asking questions. Everyone else meanwhile seemed to be so busy taking notes that they were unable to actually pay attention to the subject matter, and when the professor would try to actually engage with the class... that was just an opportunity for them to rest their writing hands, I guess? Because hardly anybody else ever responded, and I always felt a little sigh in side my mind like "really? anybody? nobody? ok, I guess I'll take this one too..."
That's not how markets work. It's how an ideal, perfectly efficient market would be forced to work, but it's not how real world markets with all their inefficiencies actually work. Every seller of everything is always trying to get the highest price; every buyer of everything is always trying to get the lowest price; and the prices they end up agreeing on are based on the next-best alternatives (that they know about). In some markets, like say commodities markets (trading large volumes of fungible goods between a huge number of buyers and sellers), things are forced to work that way, which is good; while in other markets like housing and cars they work less like that, which is bad, but which information sources help to make better, by informing everyone involved of what their probable next-best alternative would be.
Costs and utility do certainly put limits on the process, of course. If a seller can't routinely sell things for more than it takes to make (or otherwise acquire) them then they're just not going to bother doing it. Which will decrease the available supply of those things on the market, meaning people still looking to buy from others still have fewer alternatives, so those others can demand higher prices since the buyers don't have a next-best alternative to turn to instead, until an equilibrium is met. But of course, the utility of the item to the buyer puts a limit on it for him as well; some prices will just be so high that it's not worth it, even if there is no cheaper alternative. In either of those cases, the trade just doesn't happen; there is no price that's worth it to both parties so at least one party walks away from the deal.
But sometimes, inflexible demand and inflexible supply force buyers and sellers into accepting a bad deal because the next-best alternative is an even worse deal. A business going out of business that still has stock on hand will sell it below cost if need be (that's what a liquidation sale is) because the next best alternative is having to hang on to (and pay to store) useless inventory for a business they don't want to be in anymore. Likewise, a buyer whose next-best alternative to buying something that's priced above it's actual utility to him is some scenario that ends up costing him even more instead (like losing your job because you can't get to it because you don't have a car, say; or paying indefinite money forever renting because you never ended up owning a house) may end up paying the unjustified price to stop the loss elsewhere. Both of these scenarios are just people cutting their losses, because sometimes a positive outcome is just not available, and the best you can do is choose the least-bad outcome.
From what I gather, market prices in different regions vary, and KBB seems to list overall market prices. I live somewhere that lots of things (especially, back on topic, housing) is overpriced, so cars probably generally sell for more here too, while you likely live somewhere the opposite is true.
The invisible hand of the market functions only on the condition of all parties being well informed, and since KBB is compiled from actual market data (what cars are actually selling for) all it's doing is informing all parties and making that invisible hand work more efficiently.
KBB hardly dictates the price of the entire auto resale market. I've only ever found one seller in my entire driving history willing to come down to KBB prices, and that was a close friendly coworker at a car-centric job, and even that was a hard negotiation. Basically nobody is willing to accept "just blue book" for a used car in my experience.
Technically, they don't accept that anything in the Bible is actually wrong, but that since (per their current doctrine) both the Bible and science are infallible, if you think they contradict each other then you misunderstand at least one of them. So their doctrine is basically "whatever interpretation of the Bible makes it sound compatible with science and therefore not retarded, that's the right one, now go figure out how to interpret it that way".
Even simpler, fix the UBI to a percentage of GDP, then fund it with a flat income tax of the same percentage, and the math automatically works out such that everyone below the mean income sees some net benefit, the mean income is exactly neutral, and people above the mean income pay for the benefit of the people below. Where the mean income falls relative to the median income determines what percentage of people fall on either side of the neutral line (currently it'd be about 75% below and 25% above), and mean income relative to median income is a good measure of income (in)equality (under a normal i.e. gaussian distribution you would expect mean and median to be the same, but mean rises above median the more top-heavy it becomes), so the system automatically becomes more progressive in response to growing income inequality, and then scales back again in response to growing income equality.
I wish more people could see things like this.
My political positions are somewhere way off the usual spectrum but would definitely usually be called more left than right by most people (except, weirdly enough, some who call themselves on the left, though they in turn look awfully far to the right to me), so I'm not in exactly the same boat as you. But I share similar sentiments about most presidential candidates in my living memory. I don't exactly like any of them, and whenever a Democrat has been in office my general sentiment about politics could be summed up as "disappointment". But then a Republican gets in office and my god would I love to be merely disappointed again.
The earliest president I can remember really having an opinion about was Clinton (I lived through others but wasn't politically aware yet), and I remember my thoughts on him being swept up in a general "ugh why is our government so dumb and doing dumb things all the time" (though the Republican attacks against Clinton seemed even dumber, trumped up transparently on trivial pretenses).
Then we got Bush in office, and man, the 90s started looking like political glory days in contrast.
Then Obama got elected and... hardly anything changed from when Bush had been president, other than the figurehead of our government no longer sounding like a complete moron ever time he opened his mouth. My overall sentiment was "charming orator, but meh on policy". (And again, the ridiculous frothing-at-the-mouth Republican outrage searching to find any pretense to tear him and his administration down easily drowned out my disappointment in the actual policy getting made).
Now we've got Trump and... "meh" sounds like a nice vacation. It reminds me of an old job of mine, where so many days were just total clusterfucks that "boring" became praise of a day. A boring day was a good day, because the usual alternative to boring was a shitstorm. Obama's politics were boring and did not at all live up to the hype, but god would I love to just have a boring government again now.
A sensibly implemented income tax funded UBI will provide a net gain (UBI received minus taxes paid to fund it) to everyone making less than the mean income, which is currently about 75% of the population and would only go up under the kind of automation crunch we're talking about. The bulk of the UBI will be funded by the people at the very top of the income curve (the ones who drag that mean income so far up above the mean in the first place), who are largely not wage workers to begin with, but rather making unearned incomes off rents and interest lending out their wealth. Those are the people who need to bear the burden of taking care of the people at the bottom, because they're the ones who can. The well-employed but still working-class people you're worried about being over-taxed by an UBI are the very same people I'm proposing the UBI in place of the hours reduction to protect. A straight hours reduction is going to hurt those people, the ones working full tilt to try to get over the hump, the most, to fund a benefit to people who need it even more sure, but at no cost to the people at the top who can afford it best, who thus ought to be bearing the burden instead of the people in the middle.
Someone currently working a 40h week at around $25/hr is making around the mean income right now, and under a sanely implemented UBI would see neither a loss or a gain to their income because of it. But if you reduce the work week by 20%, that person loses around $10,000/year income, some of which might be spread around here or there among the 75% of people making less than him who might see an increase in employment (if further automation to make up the slack isn't cheaper than that); and the actually rich people at the top who aren't wage workers to begin with see no change. So the middle is pulled down a lot, the bottom might get a little bump, the top gets off scot free, and the slope between bottom and top gets even steeper. An income tax funded UBI would have the exact opposite effect, making the slope from poor to rich shallower and easier to climb, by applying a center-ward pressure on everyone's income.
Having the bottom claw the middle down is exactly what the people at the top want.
that will only hurt the middle class and cost the upper class nothing, only increasing the gap between rich and poor
unless you can magically mandate that everyone getting their hours cut gets a commensurate boost to their wages in which case you may as well do the sensible thing and just implement a basic income funded by an income tax which amounts to the same thing.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
You're missing a "scis". Just reading that doesn't make someone have too much knowledge; knowing how to read it does. "Si hoc legere" = "if you read this", while "si hoc legere scis" = "if you can read this".
Ah here we see the unfortunately-not-elusive "catch 22" in the wild. Assert that things aren't good enough, ask for better, and leave if you don't get it? You're a whiney complainer. Stay quiet, keep your head down, and don't rock the boat? You're coddled and expect things to be just served up without even asking. Why everyone knows, whenever anything seems not right, the correct response is to stand up and fix it yourself, by sitting down and accepting things just how they are. Right?