Note that if any CEO of a company managed retirement funds like the state legislature does, he/she would be in jail. I don't know if Illinois has a similar problem, but I do know enough about politicians to think Governor Quinn is not telling the whole truth.
Uh, CEOs do this sort of thing all the time. Go ask the employees of United Airlines how they're enjoying the pensions they worked for all those years.
At work they're switching from a defined benefit to defined contribution plan, and basically anybody who is in their late 30s is screwed. The old curve basically assigned all pension earnings in the last decade of employment, and the new curve makes it linear and lower overall. So mid-career employees didn't get the chance to earn more when they were younger, and they won't get the chance to earn more when they're older. Courts have of course ruled that this is perfectly legal, so just about every big company is making the accounting switch, with only people within maybe a decade of retirement getting grandfathered. Everybody else put in their time for the promise to participate in a plan that will no longer exist.
If I were in charge I'd ban any kind of deferred compensation whatsoever. By all means make employee-owned retirement accounts available and offer to pay fees and such (though I wouldn't allow the money to be locked in the way 401ks are), and by all means have tax-deferred plans like 401ks and IRAs (though again I'd allow employees to move between them penalty free at any time). However, at the end of each pay period the employer and employee should be completely even, with nothing owed beyond that, other than maybe a vacation/sick/etc pool that never goes beyond a year and which is payable in cash on separation if unspent. The employer can even put money into that employee-owned/controlled retirement plan as compensation, but again that money is 100% employee-owned and beyond any dealings with the IRS should they want to cash it out early, the employer does not have any power to touch the money in bankruptcy/etc. Employers could not advertise the theoretical future value of those accounts, only the actual contributions.
Employers could pay as much or as little as they like, and employees could take the job they want, but nobody gets promised or mislead and in bankruptcy the employees can't lose anything because they aren't owed anything.
I'd do the same for state employees. They shouldn't be robbed, and neither should taxpayers down the road be liable for promises made when they weren't even old enough to vote. If you want to pay state employees more go ahead and do it, but pay them out of this year's budget. Likewise I'd get rid of government debt except in situations like war or major disaster, or to fund infrastructure where the repayment of the loan is no longer than the expected life of the infrastructure financed. Let the generation who benefits from the spending pay for it.
Honestly, if what you said were true in reality, then we wouldn't see the kinds of messes we see in the US economy every year. Sure, investors profess to care about the future, but if they were any good at it you wouldn't have things like the housing crisis.
Uh, I'd be clearing an extra $1000 a month or so in mortgage payments if I lived in an area where the cost to run phone lines was a concern. I think with that money I could afford to pay a few extra bucks for phone service.
Face it, living costs money. I'm all for basic income for those who have no way to earn an income, but why not give people the price messages they need to make wise choices?
Agreed. This is hardly the first time that the phone system has had a dumb regulator-imposed pricing system imposed. Often they're lobbied for by phone companies leveraging for an advantage, and sometimes it backfires. In this case rural companies diminish the value of their service by getting the ability to charge more to terminate calls, thus causing other companies to refuse to do business with them.
A previous example that comes to mind also involved termination fees - when competitive local carriers started to take off the big phone companies lobbied for the ability to charge to terminate local calls, figuring that since they had most of the numbers they'd collect most of the fees. Then competitive companies started contracting with ISPs to give really cheap incoming-only lines for modem banks, and started billing the major carriers for tons of fees.
It seems like passing along costs is the fairest option. Either let rural consumers pay more to bear the costs, or let those calling them pay more to reach them.
Well, robots generally are used for anything where it makes sense. Also, if the UAW was involved then that changes the equation, since you can't just fire people to replace them with robots. If you are given the choice of paying somebody to do n jobs per day, or buying a robot to do n jobs per day and also paying the employee to do nothing, the former is often more attractive. That said, I've heard that many union employees just show up to a big building to clock in, be told they can leave early, and then go home doing nothing but sit and read in the meantime. Sometimes the robot is just that much better.
Also, a single robot can do a LOT of work. Keep in mind that it just plods along at the same speed potentially 24x7 without a single break. It also tightens every bolt to the exact same torque and never misses one, so you wipe out a ton of quality issues and the resulting rework and downstream issues.
However, not all employers are that competitive. Often there are regulatory barriers that help them to remain in business as such, or external pressures to not outsource. A common mistake I've seen is to incorrectly experiment with automation and consider it a failure. The usual way this goes is that you take your best worker and give him an extra duty assignment to get some expensive robot to work. It sort-of does something, but never really works out. The problem is that your best worker for task A is not necessarily the best choice for a robot engineer, and usually the best automated process is not the same as the manual process. Often things need to be engineered from scratch to work on an automated process, so it makes more sense to hire an engineer, have them work with subject matter experts on a new project, and automate the new project from scratch, having never invested in a manual process for it at all.
Yup. Guaranteed-to-be-obsolete technology is a perfect way to increase planned obsolescence, since they aren't subject to warranty claims.
If you make the engine die at 50k miles, there is always the problem that some will die at 30k miles and you're stuck fixing them all.
If you ensure that the car's phone integration only works with an iPhone 4s, then when somebody complains in two years that it doesn't work on "the new iPhone" you just pull out an iPhone 4s from the closet, dust off the cobwebs, and demonstrate that it works fine, and bill them $150 for the diagnostic time.
They'll stop putting $1000 GPS units in the dashboard when consumers stop paying $1000 for a GPS inferior to that on a $350 cell phone.
Yup. That's actually one of the benefits of automation. You can start turning the risk questions into engineering ones with hard numbers attached. That is also one of the reasons why it might never happen without legislative reform - there will always be some piece of paper that documents in black and white that somebody assigned a value to human life, and people just don't like to think about that. The only way to make it work is if a regulator sets that value.
Sophisticated investors like mutual funds certainly care about long-term performance. Why, they try to anticipate performance several quarters into the future! The problem is that when you calculate net-present-value just about anything that happens more than three years out is almost completely irrelevant, unless you're talking about something like a start-up with minimal capital investment and the ability to potentially create some huge market and have near-exclusive access to it. Net present value still butchers those returns, but when you're talking about investing a million to make 100x that back, the question as to whether that is really only worth 10x or 50x doesn't matter as much.
And performance is nothing more than whatever the books say it is. Whether you're Ken Lay or Jack Welch there is tremendous pressure to manage your numbers, or analyst expectations.
That means you're better off accepting the inevitable consequence that the road will be full of idiots, and find some way to mitigate that problem.
I thought the way to mitigate the problem was to revoke the drivers license and have steep fines for driving without a valid drivers license.
Hence the first part of my post: "The problem with this kind of logic is that you're basically saying that we should pretend we live in some imaginary world where...those of us who are not idiots can just get the idiots to stay at home all day and out of sight."
We don't live in that world. The idiots outnumber both you and I, and to be honest I'm a bit concerned that you might be one of them, just like every other person I've met.:)
Sure, getting everybody off the road but myself (and I'll let you drive as well as long as you stay on the other side of the country) would solve the problem. However, that could be a tough sell to the politicians.
That would work as long as liability is associated with the owner, not the manufacturer. Otherwise it buys you nothing, as mandatory insurance for the manufacturer only costs them more than liability would, as insurance increase cost in exchange for balancing risk, and at a manufacturer's scale risk is already balanced.
The issue is the US tort system. If two people get in a crash the bill comes to thousands of dollars, or maybe $100k or so if there is injury involved. If you get a manufacturer involved then suddenly people are talking about millions of dollars.
The point is that you are still making a moral decision, and that does need to be accounted for.
I agree that some issues can be avoided by things like slowing cars when pedestrians are around, building fences, etc. However, in the absence of fences in a congested area do you really want all your cars going at the speed of the slowest bike in town?
Oh, I agree entirely, but sometimes removing the conflict might require choices that society is unwilling to make, like putting fences alongside roads, or having traffic slow anytime a pedestrian is walking down an unfenced sidewalk.
When a light turns yellow and it has a camera mounted I'm confronted with a choice - stop or continue. I need to consider the fact that many jurisdictions shorten yellow lights on intersections with cameras. All of this leads me to make a decision to stop when I would otherwise tend to continue. If I'm making this decision absurdly close to the intersection, then I'm going to have to use the ABS to accomplish this, and anybody following me will need to do the same.
Not really relevant. You're making violators pay $600k per year in fines to save $50k/yr in damages. Due to perverse incentives for things like yellow-light shortening it is hard to really consider the violators guilty of much of anything.
If you instead just lengthened the yellow lights a bit chances are you'd save far more in costs, and there would be no overhead beyond the cost to set it up.
The problem with this kind of logic is that you're basically saying that we should pretend we live in some imaginary world where either most people aren't idiots, or where those of us who are not idiots can just get the idiots to stay at home all day and out of sight.
Face it, most people are idiots, and since we live in a democracy that means that they will continue to elect people to office who promise to treat them well.
That means you're better off accepting the inevitable consequence that the road will be full of idiots, and find some way to mitigate that problem.
Yup, major success in the US is about 5% skill and 95% luck. Skill plays a part, so you'll find more smart people become rich than dumb. However, for every smart guy who strikes it rich there are a hundred others, at least as smart, who have failed.
Keep in mind that companies keep the lion's share of profits to themselves, paying as little to the employee as wages as they can get away with (and they can get away with a lot). So, while the week of vacation is only a 2% raise from the employee's position, it is a much larger loss from the employer's position since they employee makes WAY more for their employer in that week than they actually get paid.
That is why employers in the US get so touchy about vacation time.
Just look at someplace like Foxconn as an ultimate example of this in action. They house the employees at work, and wake them up in the middle of the night to make more iPhones. If the employee makes $200 per week then you might say that a week's vacation only costs the employer $200, but Apple makes $300 per iPhone and how many iPhones could that slave, err, employee build in a week - oh the horror of lost profits!
Read his post - his first item was institutions who care about beating the numbers. So, the managers make sure the company beats the numbers, especially really good managers like Kenneth Lay.
The problem with this logic is that the employer credits to themselves the output of automation, not to the workers who set it up. Hence the world "capital" in "capitalism." So, in the PHB's mind you aren't getting 10x what the junior guy gets done - you're just sipping coffee all day.
It's people who never had any "best years and best ideas" to begin with, but who do know one thing: how to "squeeze the last drop of blood out and make sure every last cent is off the table" by preying on the people who do have the good years and good ideas.
Uh, news flash. People who don't have the "best years and best ideas" form about 99.5% of the population. Unless your plan is for them to starve themselves to death, they're going to find some way to obtain food, and since right now the only real way for them to do that is to be employed, they're going to find some way to be employed.
It is only with the increasing levels of automation that we can afford as a society to more exclusively hire those with the "best years and best ideas." Eventually automation will get to the point where only those with the "best years and best ideas" will be employable, and then you can be happy that you don't have any dead weight in your workplace. Of course, your now-astronomical paycheck will have 90% income taxes deducted from it to pay for food for all the unemployed.
If you want people who have little to contribute to give up on the job market, then you need to give them something else to do with their time, and some means of earning a reasonable living. Believe it or not, average people also need to eat.
Machines certainly can make these decisions, but inevitably they make them in accordance with values that went into their designs. The bigger issue is that humans can't even agree on those values in the first place. Source: The same article you read.
While driverless cars should greatly reduce the frequency of collisions by eliminating carelessness, inability, and increasing the amount of data available for decision making, there is some knowledge that just will never exist, and simply can't be known. Things happen that aren't predictable, and aren't always avoidable. I don't expect my driverless car to be able to anticipate the deer jumping out on to the highway from behind a tree, nor do I expect it to notice the kid who appears from behind a parked car immediately in front of my vehicle.
Actually, those sorts of incidents are completely preventable, though as a society we choose not to prevent them. You can avoid deer jumping from behind trees if you don't drive above a certain speed when there is a tree within so many meters of the road. You can avoid kids jumping from between cars in a similar way. As a society we choose the convenience of having roads without fences/etc over the safety of having them in place.
This is really just the Trolley Problem in another form. Under what circumstances is it moral to take another life through action or inaction, especially in situations where it is inevitable that a life will be taken?
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Note that if any CEO of a company managed retirement funds like the state legislature does, he/she would be in jail. I don't know if Illinois has a similar problem, but I do know enough about politicians to think Governor Quinn is not telling the whole truth.
Uh, CEOs do this sort of thing all the time. Go ask the employees of United Airlines how they're enjoying the pensions they worked for all those years.
At work they're switching from a defined benefit to defined contribution plan, and basically anybody who is in their late 30s is screwed. The old curve basically assigned all pension earnings in the last decade of employment, and the new curve makes it linear and lower overall. So mid-career employees didn't get the chance to earn more when they were younger, and they won't get the chance to earn more when they're older. Courts have of course ruled that this is perfectly legal, so just about every big company is making the accounting switch, with only people within maybe a decade of retirement getting grandfathered. Everybody else put in their time for the promise to participate in a plan that will no longer exist.
If I were in charge I'd ban any kind of deferred compensation whatsoever. By all means make employee-owned retirement accounts available and offer to pay fees and such (though I wouldn't allow the money to be locked in the way 401ks are), and by all means have tax-deferred plans like 401ks and IRAs (though again I'd allow employees to move between them penalty free at any time). However, at the end of each pay period the employer and employee should be completely even, with nothing owed beyond that, other than maybe a vacation/sick/etc pool that never goes beyond a year and which is payable in cash on separation if unspent. The employer can even put money into that employee-owned/controlled retirement plan as compensation, but again that money is 100% employee-owned and beyond any dealings with the IRS should they want to cash it out early, the employer does not have any power to touch the money in bankruptcy/etc. Employers could not advertise the theoretical future value of those accounts, only the actual contributions.
Employers could pay as much or as little as they like, and employees could take the job they want, but nobody gets promised or mislead and in bankruptcy the employees can't lose anything because they aren't owed anything.
I'd do the same for state employees. They shouldn't be robbed, and neither should taxpayers down the road be liable for promises made when they weren't even old enough to vote. If you want to pay state employees more go ahead and do it, but pay them out of this year's budget. Likewise I'd get rid of government debt except in situations like war or major disaster, or to fund infrastructure where the repayment of the loan is no longer than the expected life of the infrastructure financed. Let the generation who benefits from the spending pay for it.
Sure, but a few sophisticated investors managed to go bankrupt in the process.
Honestly, if what you said were true in reality, then we wouldn't see the kinds of messes we see in the US economy every year. Sure, investors profess to care about the future, but if they were any good at it you wouldn't have things like the housing crisis.
Uh, I'd be clearing an extra $1000 a month or so in mortgage payments if I lived in an area where the cost to run phone lines was a concern. I think with that money I could afford to pay a few extra bucks for phone service.
Face it, living costs money. I'm all for basic income for those who have no way to earn an income, but why not give people the price messages they need to make wise choices?
Agreed. This is hardly the first time that the phone system has had a dumb regulator-imposed pricing system imposed. Often they're lobbied for by phone companies leveraging for an advantage, and sometimes it backfires. In this case rural companies diminish the value of their service by getting the ability to charge more to terminate calls, thus causing other companies to refuse to do business with them.
A previous example that comes to mind also involved termination fees - when competitive local carriers started to take off the big phone companies lobbied for the ability to charge to terminate local calls, figuring that since they had most of the numbers they'd collect most of the fees. Then competitive companies started contracting with ISPs to give really cheap incoming-only lines for modem banks, and started billing the major carriers for tons of fees.
It seems like passing along costs is the fairest option. Either let rural consumers pay more to bear the costs, or let those calling them pay more to reach them.
Well, robots generally are used for anything where it makes sense. Also, if the UAW was involved then that changes the equation, since you can't just fire people to replace them with robots. If you are given the choice of paying somebody to do n jobs per day, or buying a robot to do n jobs per day and also paying the employee to do nothing, the former is often more attractive. That said, I've heard that many union employees just show up to a big building to clock in, be told they can leave early, and then go home doing nothing but sit and read in the meantime. Sometimes the robot is just that much better.
Also, a single robot can do a LOT of work. Keep in mind that it just plods along at the same speed potentially 24x7 without a single break. It also tightens every bolt to the exact same torque and never misses one, so you wipe out a ton of quality issues and the resulting rework and downstream issues.
However, not all employers are that competitive. Often there are regulatory barriers that help them to remain in business as such, or external pressures to not outsource. A common mistake I've seen is to incorrectly experiment with automation and consider it a failure. The usual way this goes is that you take your best worker and give him an extra duty assignment to get some expensive robot to work. It sort-of does something, but never really works out. The problem is that your best worker for task A is not necessarily the best choice for a robot engineer, and usually the best automated process is not the same as the manual process. Often things need to be engineered from scratch to work on an automated process, so it makes more sense to hire an engineer, have them work with subject matter experts on a new project, and automate the new project from scratch, having never invested in a manual process for it at all.
Yup. Guaranteed-to-be-obsolete technology is a perfect way to increase planned obsolescence, since they aren't subject to warranty claims.
If you make the engine die at 50k miles, there is always the problem that some will die at 30k miles and you're stuck fixing them all.
If you ensure that the car's phone integration only works with an iPhone 4s, then when somebody complains in two years that it doesn't work on "the new iPhone" you just pull out an iPhone 4s from the closet, dust off the cobwebs, and demonstrate that it works fine, and bill them $150 for the diagnostic time.
They'll stop putting $1000 GPS units in the dashboard when consumers stop paying $1000 for a GPS inferior to that on a $350 cell phone.
I see you've met my wife.
Yup. That's actually one of the benefits of automation. You can start turning the risk questions into engineering ones with hard numbers attached. That is also one of the reasons why it might never happen without legislative reform - there will always be some piece of paper that documents in black and white that somebody assigned a value to human life, and people just don't like to think about that. The only way to make it work is if a regulator sets that value.
Sophisticated investors like mutual funds certainly care about long-term performance. Why, they try to anticipate performance several quarters into the future! The problem is that when you calculate net-present-value just about anything that happens more than three years out is almost completely irrelevant, unless you're talking about something like a start-up with minimal capital investment and the ability to potentially create some huge market and have near-exclusive access to it. Net present value still butchers those returns, but when you're talking about investing a million to make 100x that back, the question as to whether that is really only worth 10x or 50x doesn't matter as much.
And performance is nothing more than whatever the books say it is. Whether you're Ken Lay or Jack Welch there is tremendous pressure to manage your numbers, or analyst expectations.
I thought the way to mitigate the problem was to revoke the drivers license and have steep fines for driving without a valid drivers license.
Hence the first part of my post: "The problem with this kind of logic is that you're basically saying that we should pretend we live in some imaginary world where...those of us who are not idiots can just get the idiots to stay at home all day and out of sight."
We don't live in that world. The idiots outnumber both you and I, and to be honest I'm a bit concerned that you might be one of them, just like every other person I've met. :)
Sure, getting everybody off the road but myself (and I'll let you drive as well as long as you stay on the other side of the country) would solve the problem. However, that could be a tough sell to the politicians.
That would work as long as liability is associated with the owner, not the manufacturer. Otherwise it buys you nothing, as mandatory insurance for the manufacturer only costs them more than liability would, as insurance increase cost in exchange for balancing risk, and at a manufacturer's scale risk is already balanced.
The issue is the US tort system. If two people get in a crash the bill comes to thousands of dollars, or maybe $100k or so if there is injury involved. If you get a manufacturer involved then suddenly people are talking about millions of dollars.
The point is that you are still making a moral decision, and that does need to be accounted for.
I agree that some issues can be avoided by things like slowing cars when pedestrians are around, building fences, etc. However, in the absence of fences in a congested area do you really want all your cars going at the speed of the slowest bike in town?
Oh, I agree entirely, but sometimes removing the conflict might require choices that society is unwilling to make, like putting fences alongside roads, or having traffic slow anytime a pedestrian is walking down an unfenced sidewalk.
When a light turns yellow and it has a camera mounted I'm confronted with a choice - stop or continue. I need to consider the fact that many jurisdictions shorten yellow lights on intersections with cameras. All of this leads me to make a decision to stop when I would otherwise tend to continue. If I'm making this decision absurdly close to the intersection, then I'm going to have to use the ABS to accomplish this, and anybody following me will need to do the same.
Not really relevant. You're making violators pay $600k per year in fines to save $50k/yr in damages. Due to perverse incentives for things like yellow-light shortening it is hard to really consider the violators guilty of much of anything.
If you instead just lengthened the yellow lights a bit chances are you'd save far more in costs, and there would be no overhead beyond the cost to set it up.
The problem with this kind of logic is that you're basically saying that we should pretend we live in some imaginary world where either most people aren't idiots, or where those of us who are not idiots can just get the idiots to stay at home all day and out of sight.
Face it, most people are idiots, and since we live in a democracy that means that they will continue to elect people to office who promise to treat them well.
That means you're better off accepting the inevitable consequence that the road will be full of idiots, and find some way to mitigate that problem.
Yup, major success in the US is about 5% skill and 95% luck. Skill plays a part, so you'll find more smart people become rich than dumb. However, for every smart guy who strikes it rich there are a hundred others, at least as smart, who have failed.
Keep in mind that companies keep the lion's share of profits to themselves, paying as little to the employee as wages as they can get away with (and they can get away with a lot). So, while the week of vacation is only a 2% raise from the employee's position, it is a much larger loss from the employer's position since they employee makes WAY more for their employer in that week than they actually get paid.
That is why employers in the US get so touchy about vacation time.
Just look at someplace like Foxconn as an ultimate example of this in action. They house the employees at work, and wake them up in the middle of the night to make more iPhones. If the employee makes $200 per week then you might say that a week's vacation only costs the employer $200, but Apple makes $300 per iPhone and how many iPhones could that slave, err, employee build in a week - oh the horror of lost profits!
Read his post - his first item was institutions who care about beating the numbers. So, the managers make sure the company beats the numbers, especially really good managers like Kenneth Lay.
The problem with this logic is that the employer credits to themselves the output of automation, not to the workers who set it up. Hence the world "capital" in "capitalism." So, in the PHB's mind you aren't getting 10x what the junior guy gets done - you're just sipping coffee all day.
It's people who never had any "best years and best ideas" to begin with, but who do know one thing: how to "squeeze the last drop of blood out and make sure every last cent is off the table" by preying on the people who do have the good years and good ideas.
Uh, news flash. People who don't have the "best years and best ideas" form about 99.5% of the population. Unless your plan is for them to starve themselves to death, they're going to find some way to obtain food, and since right now the only real way for them to do that is to be employed, they're going to find some way to be employed.
It is only with the increasing levels of automation that we can afford as a society to more exclusively hire those with the "best years and best ideas." Eventually automation will get to the point where only those with the "best years and best ideas" will be employable, and then you can be happy that you don't have any dead weight in your workplace. Of course, your now-astronomical paycheck will have 90% income taxes deducted from it to pay for food for all the unemployed.
If you want people who have little to contribute to give up on the job market, then you need to give them something else to do with their time, and some means of earning a reasonable living. Believe it or not, average people also need to eat.
That depends greatly on whether you view the purpose of the car as being the unconditional service of its owner or not.
Machines certainly can make these decisions, but inevitably they make them in accordance with values that went into their designs. The bigger issue is that humans can't even agree on those values in the first place. Source: The same article you read.
While driverless cars should greatly reduce the frequency of collisions by eliminating carelessness, inability, and increasing the amount of data available for decision making, there is some knowledge that just will never exist, and simply can't be known. Things happen that aren't predictable, and aren't always avoidable. I don't expect my driverless car to be able to anticipate the deer jumping out on to the highway from behind a tree, nor do I expect it to notice the kid who appears from behind a parked car immediately in front of my vehicle.
Actually, those sorts of incidents are completely preventable, though as a society we choose not to prevent them. You can avoid deer jumping from behind trees if you don't drive above a certain speed when there is a tree within so many meters of the road. You can avoid kids jumping from between cars in a similar way. As a society we choose the convenience of having roads without fences/etc over the safety of having them in place.
This is really just the Trolley Problem in another form. Under what circumstances is it moral to take another life through action or inaction, especially in situations where it is inevitable that a life will be taken?