Below a certain threshold, upward mobility grows possible for an increasingly smaller threshold of the populace. The way our economy functions, there is a pressure away from the middle class; the further below it you are, the harder you are pushed down, and the fewer people there will be able to fight against that current to work their way. Conversely, the further above it you are, the more you are buoyed up by forces other than your own hard work, and the more it will take spectacular incompetence to fail against those odds. If you started out around the middle class or above, of course "upward mobility" looks obvious. Or if you are an exceptional person able to overcome those downward forces like no other, of course then it looks obvious too.
But an average person starting out far below average can't expect, by their average abilities, to work to an average place in life; their average abilities aren't enough to overcome the downward forces they're facing. While an average person starting out far above average can expect to coast through life if they just show up every day and follow the steps laid out before them. Yes, spectacular talent and dedication can overcome those pressures and let someone rise from the pits to an acceptable life, and spectacular incompetence and mismanagement can wreck an inherited fortune, but that's not the way to bet on a random person in those circumstances.
1. Governments have powers, not rights, so you're technically wrong while trying to be pedantic. Boo. 2. If "USA people" had always supported folk who actually needed help, we wouldn't have had tent cities in Central Park in the Great Depression, or any homelessness or other poverty problems ever. The fact that we obviously do and have had such problems proves that private charity does not fix them; if it did, they would be fixed already. 3. See above.
Glad to see it's not just me! This behavior coincided with me installing a new AdBlock in my browser (after a browser upgrade after an OS upgrade no less) and I thought there was some weird interaction between that and the site's scripting.
But still at the expense of the taxpayer. Housing/feeding/etc prisoners costs the private prisons money, so the government pays them money to do it (more than it costs, so the private prisons profit), and the government gets that money from the taxpayer (either current ones, or future ones via borrowing). One way or another keeping someone in prison costs taxpayer money; the fact that there's a parasitic private entity making it cost even more doesn't change that, it just makes it worse.
After all, it's not like the private prisons are paid by the prisoners, like a hotel or something.
Are you perhaps including prehistory when you say "human history"? Because there were certainly master-slave relations in the civilizations of which we have the earliest written (i.e. historical) records. Manorial serfdom and capitalistic employment didn't come until much later, but those just exhibit newer forms of the same ancient problem.
If you are including prehistory, the ages of hunter-gatherers, nomads, and sparse, scattered villages living off of public, unenclosed land, then yeah, that dwarfs the historical era and does not fit the pattern that would lead automation to be disastrous. But to my knowledge the period of recorded history, and the period where a small group of people have controlled the capital (mostly land) from which everyone else's livelihoods derived, are pretty much coincident.
That condition (of not owning the capital from which one's livelihood ultimately derives) encompasses every employee, serf, and slave that's ever existed, who I'm pretty sure vastly outnumbered their masters, lords, and employers.
When in human history have the bulk of the populace ever lived off of capital that was wholly theirs?
But food and shelter aren't, and those are presently tied to jobs for the vast majority of humanity.
If everyone gets their own AI-bot and the capital necessary for it to labor upon to support them (starting first of all with just a bit of land to exist on in the first place), then we have utopia. Without that widespread capital distribution, the very same automation will doom vast swathes of humanity to destitution and eventual death.
It was worth the price when you paid for it, and a month later after Apple stapled a bunch of useless shit to it and gave it away, it was worth the new price too.
Around the same time that people stop equating "socialism" with "command economies".
Socialism is the opposition to capitalism.
Free markets are the opposite of command economies.
Capitalism and command economies are both bad; combine them together and you have literal fascism, also called corporativism.
Free markets and socialism are both good; combine them together and you'll have the solution to the false dichotomy of "free-market capitalism" vs "command-economy socialism" we've been stuck in.
"Free" is not part of the technical definition of capitalism.
This so much, thank you!
You know what the technical term is for unfree, state-controlled capitalism? The man first who coined it once said in retrospect that "corporatism" might have been a better term, but I think his first choice has the more appropriate emotional connotations today:
A free market, where goods and services are voluntarily and non-coercively trades, is the opposite of a command economy, where the state tells who what goods and services to trade for what and when.
Capitalism, where the means of production are owned predominantly by a subset of the population who control the economy, and subsequently where the economic outcome you get is not so much a product of your skill and hard work but of the prior distribution of capital ownership, is the opposite of socialism, where ownership of the means of production is widely distributed across the whole populace, and consequently economic outcomes are the product of skill and hard work.
It was Marx who suggested that free markets lead to capitalism, and consequently that a command economy was necessary for socialism. If you use "capitalism" like it just means "free market" and "socialism" as though it means "command economy", you are tacitly buying into Marx's ideology.
I'm pretty sure millennials are objecting to capitalism, not free markets per se.
Free markets are not synonymous with capitalism. Which is it that millennials object to: voluntary non-coercive trade of goods and services, or an economy where the outcome you get is not so much a product of your skill and hard work but rather heavily influenced by the prior distribution of capital ownership?
Note well that it was Marx who suggested that the latter was an inevitable consequence of the former, and coined the term "capitalism" to describe the latter, so if you support free markets and treat "capitalism" as though it means just that, you're tacitly buying into Marx's ideology.
Socialism is the opposition to capitalism, not necessarily to free markets. Market socialism is a thing. The opposite of a free market is a command economy, and socialism does not necessitate a command economy.
Not sure how it is in the US, but one problem here is that it is becoming harder for young people to secure a mortgage, even if they have a decent income. That means they have to rent, which is relatively expensive, and instead of building equity they'll be paying a landlord.
Not only that, but those who have a decent income and can secure a mortgage still end up paying more in interest alone than they would otherwise be paying in rent, so have to save up even more enormous down payments to bring the interest down to the point that buying actually brings any financial relief. (Renting money, i.e. paying interest, is no better than renting property; still throwing money down a hole and getting nothing to your name for it). Meanwhile property prices are rising so the amount needed to save up to reach that point continues, and the whole while you're still paying money you'd rather be spending on a house to a landlord undermining your ability to save, and that rent continues to go up, and good luck fighting for your wages to even keep pace with those rising costs much less outpace them, especially if you're already to the right of the curve and your boss is wondering why he pays you more than average...
Are you talking about the government of California, or the people of California? I was talking about the set of all individual Californians and their average personal finances; it sounds like you're talking about the California government.
Good luck taxing 4-year-olds, the homeless, those primarily living on government checks, etc. We tax the employed, and the wealthy.
Having no (or negligible) income, those people would pay effectively (or literally) nothing if we taxed every citizen proportional to their income, so that makes no difference to my proposal. And most of those who do have income, who would pay, would pay much less than the $160k per taxpayer you quote, if we distributed the burden proportional to income, because most of those taxpayers make very little anyway, and a small handful of them make staggeringly, absurdly more and can easily absorb the difference.
That will about cover the interest on the debt (long term average, interest is very cheap now of course). And it misses two key points: we currently tax plenty to pay off the debt, but we spend more.
Yeah, this entire thing is contingent on first stopping the deficit, including the ongoing interest on the debt. But the point is that the amount of debt currently accumulated through that long-running deficit is not yet catastrophic (and consequently, stopping its slow growth is not a "by any means!" urgent priority, though it should certainly be a priority). If the problem stopped where it was now, it wouldn't be very painful at all for one generation to reverse it, provided the burden was properly distributed by ability to bear it. So so long as it's not getting much worse very quickly, we can afford to let it slide and fix other, bigger problems first.
no tax plan has ever sustained more than 20% of GDP as revenue
Maybe you're saying something than I think you're saying, but according to the site you cited, revenue per GDP is presently around 35%, and I recall looking at a similar (probably the very same) site years ago and seeing a similar 35% figure, and from what I've read tax rates are presently lower than they were in far more prosperous eras of American history.
And thus are the ones responsible for most of that debt in the first place.
But the point was not that this would be easy to convince the right people to do, just that it'd be an easy solution if only bad people weren't standing in the way of it.
Websites and social networks are not the same thing.
Well, in some sense they are -- there's not really anything a social network provides the user that a private website wouldn't -- but in the same sense that your private bedroom and a cot in a shelter are both "the same thing".
Proportional to $60,000 income, the federal debt would be $348,000. That's the sort of ratio that led to the 2008 collapse.
That's better than a median-income Californian buying a median-priced home in California, so I guess that entire (most populous in the country) state is fucked.
Also, the national debt is only about one year of mean income per citizen, so if we were to tax all citizens (why are there so few taxpayers compared to citizens anyway?) -- proportional to their income of course, so as not to burden the already-overburdened -- this would not be an issue at all. Charge every citizen 2% of their income and the debt will go away in one working generation (50 years, i.e. people just starting working when it's implemented would retire just as it was finished). And since we'd do that progressively of course, proportional to their income, only people in the 75th percentile (the mean income is about double the median) would actually pay that 2%, three quarters would pay less (most of them much less), and the slack would be taken up by those who can more than afford it at the very top.
Slippery slopes actually exist in law. They're called "precedent". A fundamental principle of common law legal systems whereby something having been done before explicitly justifies doing similar things later. Coupled with fuzzy human judgement about similarity and you have a very real slippery slope that is is in fact prudent to beware of.
Where I live, in the most populous state in the US, vehicle emissions are (rightly) tightly regulated, and most of what comes out of a vehicle is carbon or hydrogen oxides that were already present in the air. Changing the ratios of them in the air can cause long term problems, true, or short term problems in confined spaces, but particulate matter and more directly harmful chemicals are very tightly regulated, so the direct harm from any driver to any passerby is completely negligible.
A car spewing smoke as visible (and odorous) as cigarette smoke wouldn't be allowed on the road here.
Slashdot Mirror
"Shoot the cops" doesn't make sense when we're talking about there not being any cops per se.
I think you missed the part about the fully automated killbots.
Below a certain threshold, upward mobility grows possible for an increasingly smaller threshold of the populace. The way our economy functions, there is a pressure away from the middle class; the further below it you are, the harder you are pushed down, and the fewer people there will be able to fight against that current to work their way. Conversely, the further above it you are, the more you are buoyed up by forces other than your own hard work, and the more it will take spectacular incompetence to fail against those odds. If you started out around the middle class or above, of course "upward mobility" looks obvious. Or if you are an exceptional person able to overcome those downward forces like no other, of course then it looks obvious too.
But an average person starting out far below average can't expect, by their average abilities, to work to an average place in life; their average abilities aren't enough to overcome the downward forces they're facing. While an average person starting out far above average can expect to coast through life if they just show up every day and follow the steps laid out before them. Yes, spectacular talent and dedication can overcome those pressures and let someone rise from the pits to an acceptable life, and spectacular incompetence and mismanagement can wreck an inherited fortune, but that's not the way to bet on a random person in those circumstances.
1. Governments have powers, not rights, so you're technically wrong while trying to be pedantic. Boo.
2. If "USA people" had always supported folk who actually needed help, we wouldn't have had tent cities in Central Park in the Great Depression, or any homelessness or other poverty problems ever. The fact that we obviously do and have had such problems proves that private charity does not fix them; if it did, they would be fixed already.
3. See above.
The obvious solution is to just kill anyone caught stealing/etc.
And not in some costly process with appeals and crap like that, that shit runs even more than jailing them for life. Just shoot them on sight.
While we're at it, why bother paying some other poor person to do the shooting when we can pay some rich buddies to build a robot to do it for us.
We'll just put "do not kill" RFID chips in anyone who can afford to get them and the rest can be assumed poor and therefore criminal.
Bam, problem solved. Killbots are the way of the future!
This guy's company is in Santa Barbara, not San Francisco.
Still, Santa Barbara is yet another place that ordinary people can't afford to live, and I say that as a former resident.
Then again California in general isn't a place ordinary people can really afford to live, and I say that as a current resident.
Glad to see it's not just me! This behavior coincided with me installing a new AdBlock in my browser (after a browser upgrade after an OS upgrade no less) and I thought there was some weird interaction between that and the site's scripting.
But still at the expense of the taxpayer. Housing/feeding/etc prisoners costs the private prisons money, so the government pays them money to do it (more than it costs, so the private prisons profit), and the government gets that money from the taxpayer (either current ones, or future ones via borrowing). One way or another keeping someone in prison costs taxpayer money; the fact that there's a parasitic private entity making it cost even more doesn't change that, it just makes it worse.
After all, it's not like the private prisons are paid by the prisoners, like a hotel or something.
Are you perhaps including prehistory when you say "human history"? Because there were certainly master-slave relations in the civilizations of which we have the earliest written (i.e. historical) records. Manorial serfdom and capitalistic employment didn't come until much later, but those just exhibit newer forms of the same ancient problem.
If you are including prehistory, the ages of hunter-gatherers, nomads, and sparse, scattered villages living off of public, unenclosed land, then yeah, that dwarfs the historical era and does not fit the pattern that would lead automation to be disastrous. But to my knowledge the period of recorded history, and the period where a small group of people have controlled the capital (mostly land) from which everyone else's livelihoods derived, are pretty much coincident.
That condition (of not owning the capital from which one's livelihood ultimately derives) encompasses every employee, serf, and slave that's ever existed, who I'm pretty sure vastly outnumbered their masters, lords, and employers.
When in human history have the bulk of the populace ever lived off of capital that was wholly theirs?
But food and shelter aren't, and those are presently tied to jobs for the vast majority of humanity.
If everyone gets their own AI-bot and the capital necessary for it to labor upon to support them (starting first of all with just a bit of land to exist on in the first place), then we have utopia. Without that widespread capital distribution, the very same automation will doom vast swathes of humanity to destitution and eventual death.
And how the hell do they automatically determine whether an email address is work or school vs personal?
I own a couple domains of my own and have email addresses there. Work or personal?
I have my original email address on a tiny local ISP from decades ago. Work or personal?
I work for a small company that runs their own private mail server. Work or personal?
But that small company prefers we use email addresses on another domain managed by Gmail now. Work or personal?
It was worth the price when you paid for it, and a month later after Apple stapled a bunch of useless shit to it and gave it away, it was worth the new price too.
It used to exist. It was called SoundJam. Apple bought it, stapled a bunch of crap to it, and called it iTunes.
Around the same time that people stop equating "socialism" with "command economies".
Socialism is the opposition to capitalism.
Free markets are the opposite of command economies.
Capitalism and command economies are both bad; combine them together and you have literal fascism, also called corporativism.
Free markets and socialism are both good; combine them together and you'll have the solution to the false dichotomy of "free-market capitalism" vs "command-economy socialism" we've been stuck in.
"Free" is not part of the technical definition of capitalism.
This so much, thank you!
You know what the technical term is for unfree, state-controlled capitalism? The man first who coined it once said in retrospect that "corporatism" might have been a better term, but I think his first choice has the more appropriate emotional connotations today:
"Fascism".
Free market != Capitalism
This, so much! Thank you!
A free market, where goods and services are voluntarily and non-coercively trades, is the opposite of a command economy, where the state tells who what goods and services to trade for what and when.
Capitalism, where the means of production are owned predominantly by a subset of the population who control the economy, and subsequently where the economic outcome you get is not so much a product of your skill and hard work but of the prior distribution of capital ownership, is the opposite of socialism, where ownership of the means of production is widely distributed across the whole populace, and consequently economic outcomes are the product of skill and hard work.
It was Marx who suggested that free markets lead to capitalism, and consequently that a command economy was necessary for socialism. If you use "capitalism" like it just means "free market" and "socialism" as though it means "command economy", you are tacitly buying into Marx's ideology.
I'm pretty sure millennials are objecting to capitalism, not free markets per se.
Free markets are not synonymous with capitalism. Which is it that millennials object to: voluntary non-coercive trade of goods and services, or an economy where the outcome you get is not so much a product of your skill and hard work but rather heavily influenced by the prior distribution of capital ownership?
Note well that it was Marx who suggested that the latter was an inevitable consequence of the former, and coined the term "capitalism" to describe the latter, so if you support free markets and treat "capitalism" as though it means just that, you're tacitly buying into Marx's ideology.
Socialism is the opposition to capitalism, not necessarily to free markets. Market socialism is a thing. The opposite of a free market is a command economy, and socialism does not necessitate a command economy.
Not sure how it is in the US, but one problem here is that it is becoming harder for young people to secure a mortgage, even if they have a decent income. That means they have to rent, which is relatively expensive, and instead of building equity they'll be paying a landlord.
Not only that, but those who have a decent income and can secure a mortgage still end up paying more in interest alone than they would otherwise be paying in rent, so have to save up even more enormous down payments to bring the interest down to the point that buying actually brings any financial relief. (Renting money, i.e. paying interest, is no better than renting property; still throwing money down a hole and getting nothing to your name for it). Meanwhile property prices are rising so the amount needed to save up to reach that point continues, and the whole while you're still paying money you'd rather be spending on a house to a landlord undermining your ability to save, and that rent continues to go up, and good luck fighting for your wages to even keep pace with those rising costs much less outpace them, especially if you're already to the right of the curve and your boss is wondering why he pays you more than average...
Have you seen their pension debt?
Are you talking about the government of California, or the people of California? I was talking about the set of all individual Californians and their average personal finances; it sounds like you're talking about the California government.
Good luck taxing 4-year-olds, the homeless, those primarily living on government checks, etc. We tax the employed, and the wealthy.
Having no (or negligible) income, those people would pay effectively (or literally) nothing if we taxed every citizen proportional to their income, so that makes no difference to my proposal. And most of those who do have income, who would pay, would pay much less than the $160k per taxpayer you quote, if we distributed the burden proportional to income, because most of those taxpayers make very little anyway, and a small handful of them make staggeringly, absurdly more and can easily absorb the difference.
That will about cover the interest on the debt (long term average, interest is very cheap now of course). And it misses two key points: we currently tax plenty to pay off the debt, but we spend more.
Yeah, this entire thing is contingent on first stopping the deficit, including the ongoing interest on the debt. But the point is that the amount of debt currently accumulated through that long-running deficit is not yet catastrophic (and consequently, stopping its slow growth is not a "by any means!" urgent priority, though it should certainly be a priority). If the problem stopped where it was now, it wouldn't be very painful at all for one generation to reverse it, provided the burden was properly distributed by ability to bear it. So so long as it's not getting much worse very quickly, we can afford to let it slide and fix other, bigger problems first.
no tax plan has ever sustained more than 20% of GDP as revenue
Maybe you're saying something than I think you're saying, but according to the site you cited, revenue per GDP is presently around 35%, and I recall looking at a similar (probably the very same) site years ago and seeing a similar 35% figure, and from what I've read tax rates are presently lower than they were in far more prosperous eras of American history.
And thus are the ones responsible for most of that debt in the first place.
But the point was not that this would be easy to convince the right people to do, just that it'd be an easy solution if only bad people weren't standing in the way of it.
Like the solutions to many problems.
Websites and social networks are not the same thing.
Well, in some sense they are -- there's not really anything a social network provides the user that a private website wouldn't -- but in the same sense that your private bedroom and a cot in a shelter are both "the same thing".
Proportional to $60,000 income, the federal debt would be $348,000. That's the sort of ratio that led to the 2008 collapse.
That's better than a median-income Californian buying a median-priced home in California, so I guess that entire (most populous in the country) state is fucked.
Also, the national debt is only about one year of mean income per citizen, so if we were to tax all citizens (why are there so few taxpayers compared to citizens anyway?) -- proportional to their income of course, so as not to burden the already-overburdened -- this would not be an issue at all. Charge every citizen 2% of their income and the debt will go away in one working generation (50 years, i.e. people just starting working when it's implemented would retire just as it was finished). And since we'd do that progressively of course, proportional to their income, only people in the 75th percentile (the mean income is about double the median) would actually pay that 2%, three quarters would pay less (most of them much less), and the slack would be taken up by those who can more than afford it at the very top.
Slippery slopes actually exist in law. They're called "precedent". A fundamental principle of common law legal systems whereby something having been done before explicitly justifies doing similar things later. Coupled with fuzzy human judgement about similarity and you have a very real slippery slope that is is in fact prudent to beware of.
Where I live, in the most populous state in the US, vehicle emissions are (rightly) tightly regulated, and most of what comes out of a vehicle is carbon or hydrogen oxides that were already present in the air. Changing the ratios of them in the air can cause long term problems, true, or short term problems in confined spaces, but particulate matter and more directly harmful chemicals are very tightly regulated, so the direct harm from any driver to any passerby is completely negligible.
A car spewing smoke as visible (and odorous) as cigarette smoke wouldn't be allowed on the road here.