It probably has more to do with torturing people, blowing up innocent women and children via drones, 100+ years of interference in other governments (including supporting drug smugglers, funding violent overthrow of democratically elected leaders, funding oppressive regimes, funding death squads), domestic police murdering people, and generally being a dick that sees no wrong with itself.
How many people do you know that actually do that? Small number right? How many people do you know that just go along with that and don't question anything? Large number right? That last group is the "everyone's a winner" crowd.
I think we are getting somewhere. Where is the evidence for this statement? That is what I ask for. Show me one paper studying peoples behaviour purposefully spreading measles.
And what would the point of that paper be, aside from causing a considerable amount of human suffering? You have yet to explain why we should do that. I don't see the point of having a tiny bit more confidence in our vaccine by having a somewhat more rigorous test at such a cost.
I have provided quotes indicating it is plausible one of these behavioral effects account for up to 90% of the effect
No. 90% is just one order of magnitude. You have provided quotes that indicate up to one order of magnitude out of more than three orders of magnitude might be due to such effects.
I also find it implausible there were only 100-200k cases of chicken pox in the united states per year when nearly everyone I know had it.
Here is evidence. In 2014, the US had 610 reported cases through mid-November this year. In most of the previous years, reported cases were under 100. Even if we took this high as an annual average, underreported by a factor of ten, and a human lifespan of a century, we get a life time risk of catching measles at 0.2% in the US. Meanwhile let's look at the related disease, chicken pox.
Note this has a graph showing chicken pox cases consistently over 140,000 per year in the US for two decades prior to 1995, when a vaccine for that was introduced. Since 1999, no year has experienced over 50,000 reported cases and most years exhibit far fewer cases. Eyeballing the graph, I believe I would get roughly 50% of the population experiencing a reported case of chicken pox using the same calculation as above for the pre-vaccination years. This would roughly be the average annual rate of measles, were it not being severely curbed by something.
Note also that the decline in reported measles cases and the decline in chicken pox cases do not correlate, meaning that it probably isn't a change in human behavior responsible. Similarly, they experience a huge, sharp decline immediately following introduce of the respective vaccines.
Note also the reported number of cases of measles peaks at almost 800,000 cases in 1958! We have more than three orders of magnitude reduction of reported measles cases in 56 years with a growing population which doesn't correlate with human behavior.
Perhaps you are not familiar with the "evidence-based medicine" movement which calls blinded RCTs the "gold-standard" of evidence when testing a treatment.
Again, absence of a blind RCT study doesn't mean the observation is wrong.
A more than three orders of magnitude change doesn't require blinded RCTs to be observed. The "gold standard" is sufficient, but it is not necessary, to confirm observations that are orders of magnitude in strength. Finally, a blind RCT requires that some people get exposed to measles without the protection of the vaccine (the "controls"). That creates significant suffering and risk of death or major injury in order to confirm a strong signal. What is there to gain scientifically that justifies that price in suffering? I see no justification for it.
Where's the ultra cheap energy coming from? I'll point out also, that if you have ultra cheap energy, you have ultra cheap living costs too. That means humans stay competitive longer.
I don't see that as even remotely relevant. The point as I see it, is that NASA prior to Apollo used its contemporary advantages to wring as much value out of its funding and available resources, such as using rockets which were already mostly developed rather than rolling its own or exploiting economies of scale. Modern NASA does not. There is a remarkable blindness to cost, outcome, and goals.
One of the big drivers for MSL and the skycrane landing system was the ability to put more mass in a precise location on the surface of Mars, which is something you kind of need for sample return.
No, you don't need that level of precision. And you could have always worked on getting that precision with the MERs. Six more vehicles gives you plenty of opportunity to improve landing precision.
And the quest for more capability is a common NASA failure mode. What is the point of obtaining costly capabilities you don't use?
We're talking about future developments that will apply everywhere.
I notice that you say a number of wrong things in your comments on this story. The most important is this one:
The problem is that median wages have been stagnating for decades.
Not in the developing world. For example, the first chart at this link shows over 60% growth in real income (adjusted for inflation) for the global median wage over the period 1988-2008. How does a 60+% growth in global median wages translate into "have been stagnating for decades"? They don't. You are ignoring 4/5 of the world's population.
The whole point of this topic is that as the supply of labor (provided by workers and/or robots) goes up, the value goes down
No mention of demand for that labor. Supply of labor has been going up for centuries, yet it is more valued than ever.
If the demand for productive labor can be filled by more robots, the value of human labor can still stay at zero.
The non sequitur.
You certainly could get to a point where it's just too much of a bother to even keep track of a low-achieving human employee vs. having a robot do it. Those people could essentially become unemployable.
We could always make it less of a bother to keep track of low-achieving humans. This is my theme throughout this discussion.
So why should I believe what you have to say about the future, when you are so painfully wrong about the present?
Maybe, just maybe, if the USPS wasn't required to prepay the retirement benefits for employees who haven't even been born yet
If they're prepaying retirement benefits for employees who are retired now, then that makes them near unique in the US government/public corporation realm already. I'm not going to go that far. The only legitimate purpose of public accounting is the comedy.
Yes. Look at what's missing from your analysis. How much it cost and whether it could have been done more often, faster, better, and cheaper.
Come to think of it, you don't mention manned spaceflight at all. They spend at least a quarter of their budget on that. I'm not going to say that NASA's current manned spaceflight program is worthy of mention in your list - it's not. But that's a quarter of NASA that didn't make the "not do badly" cut.
The key two things missing from usual analyses of NASA are opportunity cost and the economics and engineering of more frequent rather than bigger or more costly activities.
Since we're discussing the features of NASA's unmanned space program, it's worth noting that NASA has peculiar lapses of attention. For example, they have yet to conduct any non-impact surface missions on the Moon since Apollo. They have four impact missions (LCROSS was the only impact mission which was oriented around the impact). Does anyone really believe that there is nothing more to discover about the Moon since Apollo that we couldn't have sent more lunar landers?
Another example to consider is the Hubble Space Telescope. We have an extremely useful space probe. probably one of the top two or three unmanned space-side scientific instruments so far in existence in terms of productivity and flexibility. Further, it had a huge backlog. So why not launch another space telescope to help handle that backlog? This is particularly grating given that the funds used in repairing the Hubble Telescope since its launch could have instead gone to building and launching two or three more such telescopes - without the flaws that damned the first telescope.
These two examples demonstrate the first problem of NASA space activities. They are still driven by prestige and status signalling, not by the desire for scientific output or other relatively valuable considerations.
My final example are the recent Mars surface probes, the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) and the subsequent Mars Science Laboratory mission. THE MER probes, called "Spirit" and "Opportunity" were launched in 2003 and landed the following year. MSL was currently in early stages of development by this point. It launched in late 2011 and landed the following year. That's eight years after the MERs landed.
But here's a demonstration of opportunity cost. For the same cost as MSL took to develop, build, launch, and operate, including the inevitable cost overruns, we could put 5 or 6 more MERs on Mars (depending largely on whether the cheaper Delta II could be used for future launches or not). And if we launched two more every two years (during the optimal launch window to Mars), we could have all of them on the ground all over the surface of Mars and gathering data before MSL even launched. The MSL is somewhat more capable, but that came at a considerable sacrifice in time and money. Mars researchers don't live forever. Money doesn't grow on trees. Capacity isn't the only consideration, it's also important what you're going to do with that capacity.
The key driver of the lower costs of the MERs is that R&D is a one-time cost. Once you design them and figure out how to make them, those costs don't happen again. There are other one time costs, such as the three year selection of landing sites. In addition, some costs like operations, scale well with multiple vehicles. Directing 8 MER probes is not significantly harder or requires much more man-power than directing 1 MER. The communication bandwidth of 8 MER is not significant different than the bandwidth of a single MSL probe plus 2 MER.
My view is that the reason NASA went with the MSL option is because it generates more funding for NASA recent centers and more profit for NASA contractors. It has nothing to do with the capabilities of the MSL or the drive for something of val
When they are built at zero marginal cost, they will be free, just like internet content.
They won't be. The cost might be "too cheap to meter" just like internet content, but that depends on a radical drop in the cost of the basic resources too.
To move forward, you'll need to fund a blinded RCT of a measles vaccine.
And as I already noted, absence of rigor is not proof something is wrong. Your p=0.05 standard is rather weak too. Even from a frequentist (holding to certain "large data" statistical assumptions) viewpoint, that's still a large 1 in 20 chance of being wrong. Empiricism can't deal in absolute certainty. Sure, you might be right.
But I find it interesting that what you use as evidence is also evidence of the great drop in prevalence of measles. After all, measles doesn't suddenly stop becoming highly infectious just because people don't try to be deliberately infected as children. We should be seeing most adults infected by measles, if they don't have some sort of immunity (it's been a while since the measles vaccine was introduced). Similarly, doctors don't suddenly start misdiagnosing measles just because there is a vaccine out there. These changes indicate a sudden large drop in the infectiousness of measles which can be readily explained by the widespread use of the measles vaccine (which according to Wikipedia was first available in 1963 and became part of the MMR vaccine package in 1971). Where's the vast number of infections of people under the age of 40 in the developed world?
The problem with your unregulated utopia is that psychopaths exist who would quickly corrupt it and turn it to their own benefit. Human nature will ruin any attempt at a pure "free" market. We've already seen the effects of businesses being able to do whatever they want in the pursuit of profit. The Cuyahoga river caught on fire 13 times.
That's only a problem if you don't anticipate it. How are those psychopaths going to stay employed? How are those psychopaths going to get people to work for them? br.
As to regulation, I don't rule it out. Sure, we need some environmental regulation.
That's a pretty dumb argument since it leaves the opinion of what a threshold of "poison" is to one side of such a conflict. "They" might rather not be poisoned at all, but that's not a right especially with toxins that are normally present in the environment, sometimes in high concentrations.
One of the real world arguments against the EPA is that it frequently establishes levels of toxins which are far lower sometimes by orders of magnitude than what are required to poison you, sometimes considerably lower than the natural levels of the toxin. And that it does so in a way that frequently ignores cost of compliance.
The EPA also has a variety of tools at its disposal which violate basic constitutional principles (ex post facto laws such as Superfund, punishment without being charged for a crime via wetland regulations, etc).
The question is not who employes them, the question is who pays for their living expenses. If companies don't pay a living wage, then that's you and me.
So what? We already made that choice to do so. Forcing companies to go with automation over employment doesn't make this situation any better.
Government money should only got to things *I* like!
I don't mind government money not going to things *I* like as long as society doesn't suffer greatly by elimination of important services. But I do mind government money going to things I despise. That's pretty much most of US federal government level spending right now.
Welfare need not be something I despise, but advocates just don't get the point of it. The point of welfare is not to provide stuff that we can get for ourselves, should we care enough (pensions and health care being notorious examples), it's not to create subsidies, rent seekers, grotesque inflation of the cost of vital services (health care and education being great examples of that), anti-social behavior that we then must stamp out with more government spending (such as the crackdown on student loan defaults in the US or those mean corporations that pay near minimum wage), and it's not a massive behavior modification sand box for somebody's entertainment. It should just be relative small amounts of spending for people genuinely down on their luck or suffering in a way that can be greatly alleviated with a little money. I recognize that even my small amount of welfare will have unpleasant and unintended consequences. But at least it'll be small enough that it doesn't obsessively drive social policy, class/ethnic conflict, or endless streams of government regulation.
As an aside, note that the "base income" advocates on Slashdot all state that one of the prime purposes of the base income approach is to reduce the desperation of workers. That sounds to me a lot like being able to command a higher wage, for those who choose to work. While food stamps and other such welfare programs aren't a plug-in replacement for the base income, they're close enough that they should have similar effects.
Of course they're benefiting from government assistance. When employees cannot survive on low wages, the government makes up the difference, thereby providing business with the continuing ability to pay lower than adequate wages. No health care? Government. Not enough food? Government. Can't pay the rent? Rent assistance. Not enough for day care? Childcare assistance.
Then you ought to be able to come up with support for your assertion. This current argument is just the fallacy of argument from obviousness. It is not obvious, else we wouldn't have this argument in the first place. Keep in mind that you haven't shown even step one, that Walmart's labor costs are lower because people have benefits.
It's a shell game: hiding the actual costs of producing and serving and supplying goods (eg pizza, walmart's merchandise) behind a curtain of indirect government support.,
But let's suppose you're right for a moment. This is your shell game. These are companies responding to the incentives you put in place. This is your supposed problem that you created. You have two choices as I see it: eliminate the welfare that leads to these alleged subsidies or suck it up.
I think this is the most obnoxious part of the welfare state. The tool that created the unintended consequence gets used again and again, creating more and more unintended consequences as it goes. There never is any learning from failure by the masters of the tool of welfare. It's always the fault of all those counterrevolutionaries/greedy corporations/Tea Baggers/whatever who don't behave the way they're supposed to behave.
How does the current approach in the developed world do anything to avoid "angry mobs"? I keep pointing out the obvious. This problem of unemployable people is a first world problem. It's not a developing world problem which has somehow figured out how to keep those people employable.
No. But YOU have not explained WHO would clean up the YEARS of pollution or WHY they would do so.
They will do it themselves. The first world was in similar straits in the 1950s. The first world cleaned up their YEARS of pollution because they had and wanted to. Every place has done this once their residents became wealthy enough to care.
If the EU ceases to be developed world,...
HOW would that happen?
We have a number of countries with the same sort of difficulties Greece has. Drive off your work force and who will pay for the infrastructure that maintains your economy and your quality of life? The wealthy? They're even more mobile. The clean environments of the developed world are due to both a wealthy citizenry that cares about the environment and enough tax revenue to enforce the necessary regulatory environment. The current dysfunctionality undermines both.
And, again, it is the WORKERS who are pursuing jobs in other 1st world countries.
It is NOT the OWNERS OF THE COMPANIES moving to the 3rd world. The OWNERS OF THE COMPANIES are moving the manufacturing jobs to the 3rd world while they keep their families in the 1st world.
And they'll move when they move. I don't see the point of this argument. It remains irrelevant. The OWNERS OF THE COMPANIES aren't remotely close to a majority of the population of the first world. And they have a variety of ways to avoid taxes should they get excessively leaned on for such.
Your phrasing implies that they would work, if they were actually possible.
Yes. The next step is to ask whether we can get close enough to the ideal to have something more useful than present day labor markets? I believe we can do that.
Slashdot Mirror
It probably has more to do with torturing people, blowing up innocent women and children via drones, 100+ years of interference in other governments (including supporting drug smugglers, funding violent overthrow of democratically elected leaders, funding oppressive regimes, funding death squads), domestic police murdering people, and generally being a dick that sees no wrong with itself.
How many people do you know that actually do that? Small number right? How many people do you know that just go along with that and don't question anything? Large number right? That last group is the "everyone's a winner" crowd.
I think we are getting somewhere. Where is the evidence for this statement? That is what I ask for. Show me one paper studying peoples behaviour purposefully spreading measles.
And what would the point of that paper be, aside from causing a considerable amount of human suffering? You have yet to explain why we should do that. I don't see the point of having a tiny bit more confidence in our vaccine by having a somewhat more rigorous test at such a cost.
I have provided quotes indicating it is plausible one of these behavioral effects account for up to 90% of the effect
No. 90% is just one order of magnitude. You have provided quotes that indicate up to one order of magnitude out of more than three orders of magnitude might be due to such effects.
I also find it implausible there were only 100-200k cases of chicken pox in the united states per year when nearly everyone I know had it.
Reported cases of chicken pox.
Note this has a graph showing chicken pox cases consistently over 140,000 per year in the US for two decades prior to 1995, when a vaccine for that was introduced. Since 1999, no year has experienced over 50,000 reported cases and most years exhibit far fewer cases. Eyeballing the graph, I believe I would get roughly 50% of the population experiencing a reported case of chicken pox using the same calculation as above for the pre-vaccination years. This would roughly be the average annual rate of measles, were it not being severely curbed by something.
Note also that the decline in reported measles cases and the decline in chicken pox cases do not correlate, meaning that it probably isn't a change in human behavior responsible. Similarly, they experience a huge, sharp decline immediately following introduce of the respective vaccines.
Note also the reported number of cases of measles peaks at almost 800,000 cases in 1958! We have more than three orders of magnitude reduction of reported measles cases in 56 years with a growing population which doesn't correlate with human behavior.
Perhaps you are not familiar with the "evidence-based medicine" movement which calls blinded RCTs the "gold-standard" of evidence when testing a treatment.
Again, absence of a blind RCT study doesn't mean the observation is wrong.
A more than three orders of magnitude change doesn't require blinded RCTs to be observed. The "gold standard" is sufficient, but it is not necessary, to confirm observations that are orders of magnitude in strength. Finally, a blind RCT requires that some people get exposed to measles without the protection of the vaccine (the "controls"). That creates significant suffering and risk of death or major injury in order to confirm a strong signal. What is there to gain scientifically that justifies that price in suffering? I see no justification for it.
And here's some keywords: you are ignoring evidence.
Where's the ultra cheap energy coming from? I'll point out also, that if you have ultra cheap energy, you have ultra cheap living costs too. That means humans stay competitive longer.
I don't see that as even remotely relevant. The point as I see it, is that NASA prior to Apollo used its contemporary advantages to wring as much value out of its funding and available resources, such as using rockets which were already mostly developed rather than rolling its own or exploiting economies of scale. Modern NASA does not. There is a remarkable blindness to cost, outcome, and goals.
One of the big drivers for MSL and the skycrane landing system was the ability to put more mass in a precise location on the surface of Mars, which is something you kind of need for sample return.
No, you don't need that level of precision. And you could have always worked on getting that precision with the MERs. Six more vehicles gives you plenty of opportunity to improve landing precision.
And the quest for more capability is a common NASA failure mode. What is the point of obtaining costly capabilities you don't use?
No, he's contradicting the claim that losing money is a sign of inefficency, by identifying factors that are not affected by efficiency.
Such as an external party, US Congress mandating inefficiencies in the Post Office? Sounds like a logical fail then.
We're talking about future developments that will apply everywhere.
I notice that you say a number of wrong things in your comments on this story. The most important is this one:
The problem is that median wages have been stagnating for decades.
Not in the developing world. For example, the first chart at this link shows over 60% growth in real income (adjusted for inflation) for the global median wage over the period 1988-2008. How does a 60+% growth in global median wages translate into "have been stagnating for decades"? They don't. You are ignoring 4/5 of the world's population.
The whole point of this topic is that as the supply of labor (provided by workers and/or robots) goes up, the value goes down
No mention of demand for that labor. Supply of labor has been going up for centuries, yet it is more valued than ever.
If the demand for productive labor can be filled by more robots, the value of human labor can still stay at zero.
The non sequitur.
You certainly could get to a point where it's just too much of a bother to even keep track of a low-achieving human employee vs. having a robot do it. Those people could essentially become unemployable.
We could always make it less of a bother to keep track of low-achieving humans. This is my theme throughout this discussion.
So why should I believe what you have to say about the future, when you are so painfully wrong about the present?
Maybe, just maybe, if the USPS wasn't required to prepay the retirement benefits for employees who haven't even been born yet
If they're prepaying retirement benefits for employees who are retired now, then that makes them near unique in the US government/public corporation realm already. I'm not going to go that far. The only legitimate purpose of public accounting is the comedy.
So you're aggressively agreeing with the assertion that post offices aren't incredibly efficient? I guess that's the end of the conversation then.
Really, has NASA done that badly?
Yes. Look at what's missing from your analysis. How much it cost and whether it could have been done more often, faster, better, and cheaper.
Come to think of it, you don't mention manned spaceflight at all. They spend at least a quarter of their budget on that. I'm not going to say that NASA's current manned spaceflight program is worthy of mention in your list - it's not. But that's a quarter of NASA that didn't make the "not do badly" cut.
The key two things missing from usual analyses of NASA are opportunity cost and the economics and engineering of more frequent rather than bigger or more costly activities.
Since we're discussing the features of NASA's unmanned space program, it's worth noting that NASA has peculiar lapses of attention. For example, they have yet to conduct any non-impact surface missions on the Moon since Apollo. They have four impact missions (LCROSS was the only impact mission which was oriented around the impact). Does anyone really believe that there is nothing more to discover about the Moon since Apollo that we couldn't have sent more lunar landers?
Another example to consider is the Hubble Space Telescope. We have an extremely useful space probe. probably one of the top two or three unmanned space-side scientific instruments so far in existence in terms of productivity and flexibility. Further, it had a huge backlog. So why not launch another space telescope to help handle that backlog? This is particularly grating given that the funds used in repairing the Hubble Telescope since its launch could have instead gone to building and launching two or three more such telescopes - without the flaws that damned the first telescope.
These two examples demonstrate the first problem of NASA space activities. They are still driven by prestige and status signalling, not by the desire for scientific output or other relatively valuable considerations.
My final example are the recent Mars surface probes, the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) and the subsequent Mars Science Laboratory mission. THE MER probes, called "Spirit" and "Opportunity" were launched in 2003 and landed the following year. MSL was currently in early stages of development by this point. It launched in late 2011 and landed the following year. That's eight years after the MERs landed.
But here's a demonstration of opportunity cost. For the same cost as MSL took to develop, build, launch, and operate, including the inevitable cost overruns, we could put 5 or 6 more MERs on Mars (depending largely on whether the cheaper Delta II could be used for future launches or not). And if we launched two more every two years (during the optimal launch window to Mars), we could have all of them on the ground all over the surface of Mars and gathering data before MSL even launched. The MSL is somewhat more capable, but that came at a considerable sacrifice in time and money. Mars researchers don't live forever. Money doesn't grow on trees. Capacity isn't the only consideration, it's also important what you're going to do with that capacity.
The key driver of the lower costs of the MERs is that R&D is a one-time cost. Once you design them and figure out how to make them, those costs don't happen again. There are other one time costs, such as the three year selection of landing sites. In addition, some costs like operations, scale well with multiple vehicles. Directing 8 MER probes is not significantly harder or requires much more man-power than directing 1 MER. The communication bandwidth of 8 MER is not significant different than the bandwidth of a single MSL probe plus 2 MER.
My view is that the reason NASA went with the MSL option is because it generates more funding for NASA recent centers and more profit for NASA contractors. It has nothing to do with the capabilities of the MSL or the drive for something of val
When they are built at zero marginal cost, they will be free, just like internet content.
They won't be. The cost might be "too cheap to meter" just like internet content, but that depends on a radical drop in the cost of the basic resources too.
To move forward, you'll need to fund a blinded RCT of a measles vaccine.
And as I already noted, absence of rigor is not proof something is wrong. Your p=0.05 standard is rather weak too. Even from a frequentist (holding to certain "large data" statistical assumptions) viewpoint, that's still a large 1 in 20 chance of being wrong. Empiricism can't deal in absolute certainty. Sure, you might be right.
But I find it interesting that what you use as evidence is also evidence of the great drop in prevalence of measles. After all, measles doesn't suddenly stop becoming highly infectious just because people don't try to be deliberately infected as children. We should be seeing most adults infected by measles, if they don't have some sort of immunity (it's been a while since the measles vaccine was introduced). Similarly, doctors don't suddenly start misdiagnosing measles just because there is a vaccine out there. These changes indicate a sudden large drop in the infectiousness of measles which can be readily explained by the widespread use of the measles vaccine (which according to Wikipedia was first available in 1963 and became part of the MMR vaccine package in 1971). Where's the vast number of infections of people under the age of 40 in the developed world?
History has shown that the freer the market is, the faster it gets overtaken by monopolies.
Then you should be able to provide examples. Be warned, I will show how your reasoning is flawed as you do so.
Once the monopolies are established, they use their economic means to ensure that the market is anything *but* free.
Established? How? Already we have a non-free market mechanism in the works via your "locking" mechanism.
Bear in mind that I also am not concerned by temporary monopolies. They create pricing signals that lure in new competition.
The problem with your unregulated utopia is that psychopaths exist who would quickly corrupt it and turn it to their own benefit. Human nature will ruin any attempt at a pure "free" market. We've already seen the effects of businesses being able to do whatever they want in the pursuit of profit. The Cuyahoga river caught on fire 13 times.
That's only a problem if you don't anticipate it. How are those psychopaths going to stay employed? How are those psychopaths going to get people to work for them?
br. As to regulation, I don't rule it out. Sure, we need some environmental regulation.
That's a pretty dumb argument since it leaves the opinion of what a threshold of "poison" is to one side of such a conflict. "They" might rather not be poisoned at all, but that's not a right especially with toxins that are normally present in the environment, sometimes in high concentrations.
One of the real world arguments against the EPA is that it frequently establishes levels of toxins which are far lower sometimes by orders of magnitude than what are required to poison you, sometimes considerably lower than the natural levels of the toxin. And that it does so in a way that frequently ignores cost of compliance.
The EPA also has a variety of tools at its disposal which violate basic constitutional principles (ex post facto laws such as Superfund, punishment without being charged for a crime via wetland regulations, etc).
The question is not who employes them, the question is who pays for their living expenses. If companies don't pay a living wage, then that's you and me.
So what? We already made that choice to do so. Forcing companies to go with automation over employment doesn't make this situation any better.
Government money should only got to things *I* like!
I don't mind government money not going to things *I* like as long as society doesn't suffer greatly by elimination of important services. But I do mind government money going to things I despise. That's pretty much most of US federal government level spending right now.
Welfare need not be something I despise, but advocates just don't get the point of it. The point of welfare is not to provide stuff that we can get for ourselves, should we care enough (pensions and health care being notorious examples), it's not to create subsidies, rent seekers, grotesque inflation of the cost of vital services (health care and education being great examples of that), anti-social behavior that we then must stamp out with more government spending (such as the crackdown on student loan defaults in the US or those mean corporations that pay near minimum wage), and it's not a massive behavior modification sand box for somebody's entertainment. It should just be relative small amounts of spending for people genuinely down on their luck or suffering in a way that can be greatly alleviated with a little money. I recognize that even my small amount of welfare will have unpleasant and unintended consequences. But at least it'll be small enough that it doesn't obsessively drive social policy, class/ethnic conflict, or endless streams of government regulation.
As an aside, note that the "base income" advocates on Slashdot all state that one of the prime purposes of the base income approach is to reduce the desperation of workers. That sounds to me a lot like being able to command a higher wage, for those who choose to work. While food stamps and other such welfare programs aren't a plug-in replacement for the base income, they're close enough that they should have similar effects.
Of course they're benefiting from government assistance. When employees cannot survive on low wages, the government makes up the difference, thereby providing business with the continuing ability to pay lower than adequate wages. No health care? Government. Not enough food? Government. Can't pay the rent? Rent assistance. Not enough for day care? Childcare assistance.
Then you ought to be able to come up with support for your assertion. This current argument is just the fallacy of argument from obviousness. It is not obvious, else we wouldn't have this argument in the first place. Keep in mind that you haven't shown even step one, that Walmart's labor costs are lower because people have benefits.
It's a shell game: hiding the actual costs of producing and serving and supplying goods (eg pizza, walmart's merchandise) behind a curtain of indirect government support.,
But let's suppose you're right for a moment. This is your shell game. These are companies responding to the incentives you put in place. This is your supposed problem that you created. You have two choices as I see it: eliminate the welfare that leads to these alleged subsidies or suck it up.
I think this is the most obnoxious part of the welfare state. The tool that created the unintended consequence gets used again and again, creating more and more unintended consequences as it goes. There never is any learning from failure by the masters of the tool of welfare. It's always the fault of all those counterrevolutionaries/greedy corporations/Tea Baggers/whatever who don't behave the way they're supposed to behave.
How does the current approach in the developed world do anything to avoid "angry mobs"? I keep pointing out the obvious. This problem of unemployable people is a first world problem. It's not a developing world problem which has somehow figured out how to keep those people employable.
Science.
Science is evidence driven.
No. But YOU have not explained WHO would clean up the YEARS of pollution or WHY they would do so.
They will do it themselves. The first world was in similar straits in the 1950s. The first world cleaned up their YEARS of pollution because they had and wanted to. Every place has done this once their residents became wealthy enough to care.
If the EU ceases to be developed world, ...
HOW would that happen?
We have a number of countries with the same sort of difficulties Greece has. Drive off your work force and who will pay for the infrastructure that maintains your economy and your quality of life? The wealthy? They're even more mobile. The clean environments of the developed world are due to both a wealthy citizenry that cares about the environment and enough tax revenue to enforce the necessary regulatory environment. The current dysfunctionality undermines both.
And, again, it is the WORKERS who are pursuing jobs in other 1st world countries.
It is NOT the OWNERS OF THE COMPANIES moving to the 3rd world. The OWNERS OF THE COMPANIES are moving the manufacturing jobs to the 3rd world while they keep their families in the 1st world.
And they'll move when they move. I don't see the point of this argument. It remains irrelevant. The OWNERS OF THE COMPANIES aren't remotely close to a majority of the population of the first world. And they have a variety of ways to avoid taxes should they get excessively leaned on for such.
"Obdurate" is a better term. I change my opinions when there is a reason to change them.
Your phrasing implies that they would work, if they were actually possible.
Yes. The next step is to ask whether we can get close enough to the ideal to have something more useful than present day labor markets? I believe we can do that.