No, that money did all "find it's way back the the States" apart from a very tiny percentage.
The current story indicates otherwise since otherwise there wouldn't be anything to repatriate. I guess I must prepare myself for yet more content-free assertions about Apple's accounting magic.
Hence the value to not doing it. The same as not practicing chemical or biological warfare or other such acts. One can, as the sentiments expressed in the speech, refrain.
The problem here is that it's a prisoners' dilemma situation where there's a lot of problems with cooperation and little downside to defection.
Actually, it was more likely he got briefed with "This is what we're already doing" and ended up being thankful that it didn't blowup that bad on anybody. Of course, given how much effort was put into keeping Stuxnet from being indiscriminate, it isn't hard to see how badly things could have gone. Which in turn leads to a call to not doing it, since seeing the bigger picture is easy.
If he got briefed and he didn't stop it, then he authorized it. And there's indications that the US was deliberately using Stuxnet well into Obama's first term.
Or 3) Russia and China don't say anything when they discover they are compromised.
Even if the US has completely lost the cyberwar or whatever, it remains that Russia and China can hack each other and of course, anyone else with the right tools and knowledge can give it a try too.
The US has been openly accused of releasing Stuxnet but I am pretty sure the Stuxnet authors wanted the target and the world to know who did it and let it serve as an example to others. The most amazing thing about Stuxnet was getting it carried into one of Iran's most heavily guarded labs and inserting it into the USB drive. Compared to this the rest was easy. Can you just imagine how incensed, scared, and worried that little cyber weapon was to Iran's leaders. They realized if someone was able to do this with impunity what else were they capable of.
Capable of? Like the usual state-level shenanigans? Iran already knew that the US could do that sort of stuff with impunity. What they didn't know was how successful those shenanigans could be. I guess they know now.
What's baffling about it? Words mean things. It's hard to "stop going" somewhere that nobody has ever been, particularly, a certain John Smith. Have I gone to Europe just because I saw the Eiffel Tower on TV?
Not to mention, now that I've seen the Eiffel Tower on the TV, do you think it's time I "went" someplace else interesting? After all, I've gone to Europe. It's no longer interesting.
I think there's a profound myopia here to consider a few images and instrumental observations to be going somewhere. And then, for a region with the surface area of the entire land mass of Earth and a truly alien environment, to dismiss it as not interesting any more just because of those few things. This is "been there, done that" taken to a ludicrous extreme.
Do you care to name who has been going to Mars and making it boring for the rest of us? Last I checked it was a bunch of space probes which isn't going anywhere in the long run.
What do you think Apple does with that Irish money? Throw it into a very large hole in the ground? It gets invested locally and generates revenue locally. That leads to more jobs locally.
Who dismissed it as an impossibility? I merely pointed out the obvious, if one outcome (here, shenanigans) is many orders of magnitude more likely than a second one, then why assume the second is true?
Well, insofar as one single explanation does not cover every detail
Nonsense. "Lack of space" doesn't even begin to explain Detroit's problems.
As much as you might want to blame the object of your ire, that's just doctrine, not the whole truth you want it to be.
Then where's all the other cities with Detroit-level problems? Lack of space is a universal problem in cities. Automation and the other problems you cite are universal.
Of course, another factor in Detroit's continuing problems is that the cleanup of their area is very expensive and time-consuming, yet whose responsibility is that?
The people who want it that clean. Again, it's a problem that is far from unique to Detroit.
We have never seen this hyperinflation effect from low unemployment
When have you seen low unemployment? Have you ever seen 1% unemployment or a labor shortage in full?
So show me this 1% unemployment society with the problems you claim it'll have.
Let me break down the problems with the model you provide here. First, there's no evidence for your assertion that extremely low unemployment rates will have any significant effect on an economy aside from making it rather hard to fill jobs. There is some inflation effect, but it is an order of magnitude or more lower than anything you've claimed so far. There is a lot of elasticity in the job market and it's just not going to massively overconsume existing labor unless some urgent need or disaster comes up (like a meter of volcanic ash suddenly appears on the Midwest and the US needs food badly).
Second, your "universal social security" scheme is just not that awesome. We already have a number of similar programs throughout the world which should have similar effects. They act more like friction for the economy than somehow generating decades of economic growth in a short span of time. Again, another key lack of evidence.
Third, there's no linkage between having such a program and the problems you claim will happen. Why would demand for human labor suddenly jump massively just because wealth is being redistributed? There isn't really that much change in the economy. Poor people are just a somewhat bigger sliver. Nor is their spending somehow magic.
Finally, you have the opposite of a solution - doing exactly what it takes to make the problem worse, doesn't fix the problem.
Again: Imagine if $1,000,000,000,000 per year were dumped into the economy. Salaries don't go up, so the cost of goods isn't increased. Your employer still pays $50,000 to have you at your desk, but somehow you take home $6,000 more throughout the year, and NOBODY ELSE IS $6,000 POORER to get that money into your hands. Inflation doesn't make this go away: it's divided up as a fixed, scalar proportion of the money supply (17% of all income), and so e.g. 10% inflation means $1,100,000,000,000 more money is landing in people's paychecks, plus the 10% increase in their income they're already getting.
I've already covered printing money as a source of hyperinflation. That has nothing to do with the employment rate as Zimbabwe has so amply demonstrated.
Does that sound like anything that's ever happened in history to you? The total mobilized spending money is about $1.8 trillion, if you count money that's actually displaced (i.e. that this policy moves out of one person's hands and into the hands of another, notably giving poor people money to spend). That's 11.6% of all income absolutely, and 17% of all taxable income after deductions (including business income). Name one time something like that happened *permanently*, such that any inflation or increase in production would proportionally be reflected in the increased spending power (i.e. that if there's inflation, the amount of extra dollars you get to spend increases by that much, too).
I believe global public entitlements are about an order of magnitude bigger than that. If something awesome was going to happen, we'd see it by now.
My take is that a universal basic income scheme will just be another sort of mild friction in the economy. It takes wealth from people who were doing something really productive and gives it to people who are somewhat less productive. My expectations concerning such a scheme are that it's more something to keep people from starving and/or rioting rather than something that will have a significant benefit or change to the economy's systems.
And as long as you aren't printing money, there should be little to no inflationary effect from the scheme.
In the real world, it's been noted that employment above a certain threshold is unstable. In the United States, Full Employment is usually defined as 95%, meaning our current 4.9% unemployment is higher than full employment; some people speculate we'd be okay as low as 4%, and the 4.9% thing is incorrect anyway (UE4 is 5.6%, which includes people who would work but have given up because they think there aren't jobs for them; UE5 and UE6 include people who would like to work, but can't because their situation precludes employment on its own).
In the real world, we can look at this instability. One thing that is quickly noticed is that it just isn't that unstable. Moving on:
To be fair, economists speculate low unemployment causes inflation. That is to say: at low unemployment rates, a business's strategic advantage for hiring an employee exceeds the cost of market wages, and so businesses pay more. If you cause high employment by providing a ton of extra spendable income, then businesses can raise prices, capture that income, and pay it as higher wages. The benefit vanishes, debts shrink, and savings go away. Such inflation also has all of the other destabilizing effects of inflation; and with a lot of people's savings held in 401(k) markets (which inflate right along with inflation) and increased income allowing further increased spending, you can easily get a hyperinflation effect, followed by a money shortage, followed by extreme unemployment.
We have never seen this hyperinflation effect from low unemployment. We have seen plenty of cases of hyperinflation from the currency issuer printing vast amounts of money often to support extravagant entitlement programs.
Remember when Zimbabwe issued a 100-trillion-dollar bill?
Case in point. Zimbabwe prints a ton of money and gets hyperinflation. This is despite having an insane unemployment rate somewhere in the high double digits (depends on how it's counted and who's doing the counting).
Here's the problem with this alleged hyperinflation threat. Wage money is slow money. Inflation from it is naturally lagged by a great deal because it takes so long to get from higher product prices to higher wages. You simply can't create hyperinflation from the dynamics of the system.
Even your wealth redistribution scheme is slow money. It takes time to take from the wealthy and give to the poor.
Second, this completely ignores two things, that value is created and that there are alternatives to employing people in the region, such as employing people in other regions and automation.Value creation is another reason inflation is mitigated or doesn't happen. And it is the whole point of the economy not the number that currently happens to be assigned to a good in a market.
While it's not universal, there are many jobs that scale and produce more value for more work per person. Arbitrarily forcing people to work less means less gets done.
Finally, on this particular matter, when more value is created, then there is more stuff for money to chase and hence, less inflation.
If the effect is particularly large, your economy collapses outright. If it's not so large, you get a minor recession, like in 2008.
This is probably the worst misattribution I've ever heard for the real estate crisis of 2007-2008. There wasn't a recession because employment was a little high. There was a recession because of a vast malinvestment in real estate which can be traced back to two things, easy central bank money and extreme leverage in the real estate markets.
As for real-world examples of negative unemployment, they don't exist because nobody has ever managed to increase the income efficiency of an economy by 15% before (we take 30% in taxes in the United States; cutting out 50% of that would be a 15% increase in take-home wages, and the way I structured it mostly puts that ba
That's a remarkably thin guilt by association fallacy. Somehow being founded by a person who has received public recognition from a public corporation of the US (with the express purpose of promoting democracy) is now tantamount to being a puppet of the US. And said tenuous recognition is now being largely funded by the US.
Perhaps you could come up with evidence for your assertions?
1) workers receiving 6 to 8 months in prison for protesting unpaid wages.
2) Arbitrary detention of several labor leaders in Guangdong province.
3) Wu Guijun, labor activist detained for more than a year for "gathering a crowd to disrupt traffic", the same activity that you cited in your original post which lead to a short term detention and fine.
The ACFTU is a government run umbrella organization for labor unions in China. But unions do NOT have to join. Even for unions that do join, they have the right to independently declare strikes. The links you provide point out (correctly) that unions in China face big challenges. How is that different than America, where union membership has dramatically declined, and service workers are proving difficult to organize?
One huge difference is that you can get thrown in jail for crossing someone. There's no equivalence here between the Chinese and US labor situations.
The horrible exploitation of labor during this period is what gave rise to Unions and the "Progressive Era."
The "horrible exploitation of labor" is what gave rise to the US as superpower and developed world society. And I doubt labor unions and the "Progressive Era" would have had much traction without the high demand for US labor spurred by the Gilded Era.
It's remarkable how poorly understood and interpreted the Gilded Era is. Somehow they built up a superpower, a vast economy, a set of world-class universities, and the current modern medical system. Yet it's supposedly all bad because labor was exploited. Well, China isn't going to get a shiny developed world society without a vast amount of labor exploitation any more than the US could.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's pretty good for well over two centuries. I doubt most existing democracies will last that long.
By contrast, where it genuinely pioneers, it promptly and inevitably gets left behind. Examples: automobiles, the internet.
Pretty awful examples. But then I don't think your assertion is true here.
That's a great idea. Why don't you do that and get back to us in a few months?
No, that money did all "find it's way back the the States" apart from a very tiny percentage.
The current story indicates otherwise since otherwise there wouldn't be anything to repatriate. I guess I must prepare myself for yet more content-free assertions about Apple's accounting magic.
Hence the value to not doing it. The same as not practicing chemical or biological warfare or other such acts. One can, as the sentiments expressed in the speech, refrain.
The problem here is that it's a prisoners' dilemma situation where there's a lot of problems with cooperation and little downside to defection.
Actually, it was more likely he got briefed with "This is what we're already doing" and ended up being thankful that it didn't blowup that bad on anybody. Of course, given how much effort was put into keeping Stuxnet from being indiscriminate, it isn't hard to see how badly things could have gone. Which in turn leads to a call to not doing it, since seeing the bigger picture is easy.
If he got briefed and he didn't stop it, then he authorized it. And there's indications that the US was deliberately using Stuxnet well into Obama's first term.
Even if the US has completely lost the cyberwar or whatever, it remains that Russia and China can hack each other and of course, anyone else with the right tools and knowledge can give it a try too.
The US has been openly accused of releasing Stuxnet but I am pretty sure the Stuxnet authors wanted the target and the world to know who did it and let it serve as an example to others. The most amazing thing about Stuxnet was getting it carried into one of Iran's most heavily guarded labs and inserting it into the USB drive. Compared to this the rest was easy. Can you just imagine how incensed, scared, and worried that little cyber weapon was to Iran's leaders. They realized if someone was able to do this with impunity what else were they capable of.
Capable of? Like the usual state-level shenanigans? Iran already knew that the US could do that sort of stuff with impunity. What they didn't know was how successful those shenanigans could be. I guess they know now.
Ireland gets a lot more of it than if it found its way back to the States. Keep in mind that those kickbacks have to include the Irish voter too.
What's baffling about it? Words mean things. It's hard to "stop going" somewhere that nobody has ever been, particularly, a certain John Smith. Have I gone to Europe just because I saw the Eiffel Tower on TV?
Not to mention, now that I've seen the Eiffel Tower on the TV, do you think it's time I "went" someplace else interesting? After all, I've gone to Europe. It's no longer interesting.
I think there's a profound myopia here to consider a few images and instrumental observations to be going somewhere. And then, for a region with the surface area of the entire land mass of Earth and a truly alien environment, to dismiss it as not interesting any more just because of those few things. This is "been there, done that" taken to a ludicrous extreme.
I guess because it would be an intentional extinction in the era of modern conservationism.
Do you care to name who has been going to Mars and making it boring for the rest of us? Last I checked it was a bunch of space probes which isn't going anywhere in the long run.
What do you think Apple does with that Irish money? Throw it into a very large hole in the ground? It gets invested locally and generates revenue locally. That leads to more jobs locally.
its obviously an attack
"Attacks" of this sort are still a far cry from an act of war.
Does anyone think for a second that the Russians are going to turn over emails they acquire illegally without editing the content?
Yes. Because editing content or libel as it is otherwise called can be proven. And once it happens the outlet is permanently discredited.
If it's state sponsored this is bordering on an act of war and Wikileaks is party to it.
Bullshit. It's not even remotely close to an act of war.
I don't expect gratitude for showing you the truth.
Who dismissed it as an impossibility? I merely pointed out the obvious, if one outcome (here, shenanigans) is many orders of magnitude more likely than a second one, then why assume the second is true?
Well, insofar as one single explanation does not cover every detail
Nonsense. "Lack of space" doesn't even begin to explain Detroit's problems.
As much as you might want to blame the object of your ire, that's just doctrine, not the whole truth you want it to be.
Then where's all the other cities with Detroit-level problems? Lack of space is a universal problem in cities. Automation and the other problems you cite are universal.
Of course, another factor in Detroit's continuing problems is that the cleanup of their area is very expensive and time-consuming, yet whose responsibility is that?
The people who want it that clean. Again, it's a problem that is far from unique to Detroit.
The problem Detroit had is similar to what Palo Alto is having now - lack of space.
As the AC replier noted, it doesn't have that problem now. Something other than lack of space killed off Detroit.
We have never seen this hyperinflation effect from low unemployment
When have you seen low unemployment? Have you ever seen 1% unemployment or a labor shortage in full?
So show me this 1% unemployment society with the problems you claim it'll have.
Let me break down the problems with the model you provide here. First, there's no evidence for your assertion that extremely low unemployment rates will have any significant effect on an economy aside from making it rather hard to fill jobs. There is some inflation effect, but it is an order of magnitude or more lower than anything you've claimed so far. There is a lot of elasticity in the job market and it's just not going to massively overconsume existing labor unless some urgent need or disaster comes up (like a meter of volcanic ash suddenly appears on the Midwest and the US needs food badly).
Second, your "universal social security" scheme is just not that awesome. We already have a number of similar programs throughout the world which should have similar effects. They act more like friction for the economy than somehow generating decades of economic growth in a short span of time. Again, another key lack of evidence.
Third, there's no linkage between having such a program and the problems you claim will happen. Why would demand for human labor suddenly jump massively just because wealth is being redistributed? There isn't really that much change in the economy. Poor people are just a somewhat bigger sliver. Nor is their spending somehow magic.
Finally, you have the opposite of a solution - doing exactly what it takes to make the problem worse, doesn't fix the problem.
Again: Imagine if $1,000,000,000,000 per year were dumped into the economy. Salaries don't go up, so the cost of goods isn't increased. Your employer still pays $50,000 to have you at your desk, but somehow you take home $6,000 more throughout the year, and NOBODY ELSE IS $6,000 POORER to get that money into your hands. Inflation doesn't make this go away: it's divided up as a fixed, scalar proportion of the money supply (17% of all income), and so e.g. 10% inflation means $1,100,000,000,000 more money is landing in people's paychecks, plus the 10% increase in their income they're already getting.
I've already covered printing money as a source of hyperinflation. That has nothing to do with the employment rate as Zimbabwe has so amply demonstrated.
Does that sound like anything that's ever happened in history to you? The total mobilized spending money is about $1.8 trillion, if you count money that's actually displaced (i.e. that this policy moves out of one person's hands and into the hands of another, notably giving poor people money to spend). That's 11.6% of all income absolutely, and 17% of all taxable income after deductions (including business income). Name one time something like that happened *permanently*, such that any inflation or increase in production would proportionally be reflected in the increased spending power (i.e. that if there's inflation, the amount of extra dollars you get to spend increases by that much, too).
I believe global public entitlements are about an order of magnitude bigger than that. If something awesome was going to happen, we'd see it by now.
My take is that a universal basic income scheme will just be another sort of mild friction in the economy. It takes wealth from people who were doing something really productive and gives it to people who are somewhat less productive. My expectations concerning such a scheme are that it's more something to keep people from starving and/or rioting rather than something that will have a significant benefit or change to the economy's systems.
And as long as you aren't printing money, there should be little to no inflationary effect from the scheme.
In the real world, it's been noted that employment above a certain threshold is unstable. In the United States, Full Employment is usually defined as 95%, meaning our current 4.9% unemployment is higher than full employment; some people speculate we'd be okay as low as 4%, and the 4.9% thing is incorrect anyway (UE4 is 5.6%, which includes people who would work but have given up because they think there aren't jobs for them; UE5 and UE6 include people who would like to work, but can't because their situation precludes employment on its own).
In the real world, we can look at this instability. One thing that is quickly noticed is that it just isn't that unstable. Moving on:
To be fair, economists speculate low unemployment causes inflation. That is to say: at low unemployment rates, a business's strategic advantage for hiring an employee exceeds the cost of market wages, and so businesses pay more. If you cause high employment by providing a ton of extra spendable income, then businesses can raise prices, capture that income, and pay it as higher wages. The benefit vanishes, debts shrink, and savings go away. Such inflation also has all of the other destabilizing effects of inflation; and with a lot of people's savings held in 401(k) markets (which inflate right along with inflation) and increased income allowing further increased spending, you can easily get a hyperinflation effect, followed by a money shortage, followed by extreme unemployment.
We have never seen this hyperinflation effect from low unemployment. We have seen plenty of cases of hyperinflation from the currency issuer printing vast amounts of money often to support extravagant entitlement programs.
Remember when Zimbabwe issued a 100-trillion-dollar bill?
Case in point. Zimbabwe prints a ton of money and gets hyperinflation. This is despite having an insane unemployment rate somewhere in the high double digits (depends on how it's counted and who's doing the counting).
Here's the problem with this alleged hyperinflation threat. Wage money is slow money. Inflation from it is naturally lagged by a great deal because it takes so long to get from higher product prices to higher wages. You simply can't create hyperinflation from the dynamics of the system.
Even your wealth redistribution scheme is slow money. It takes time to take from the wealthy and give to the poor.
Second, this completely ignores two things, that value is created and that there are alternatives to employing people in the region, such as employing people in other regions and automation.Value creation is another reason inflation is mitigated or doesn't happen. And it is the whole point of the economy not the number that currently happens to be assigned to a good in a market.
While it's not universal, there are many jobs that scale and produce more value for more work per person. Arbitrarily forcing people to work less means less gets done.
Finally, on this particular matter, when more value is created, then there is more stuff for money to chase and hence, less inflation.
If the effect is particularly large, your economy collapses outright. If it's not so large, you get a minor recession, like in 2008.
This is probably the worst misattribution I've ever heard for the real estate crisis of 2007-2008. There wasn't a recession because employment was a little high. There was a recession because of a vast malinvestment in real estate which can be traced back to two things, easy central bank money and extreme leverage in the real estate markets.
As for real-world examples of negative unemployment, they don't exist because nobody has ever managed to increase the income efficiency of an economy by 15% before (we take 30% in taxes in the United States; cutting out 50% of that would be a 15% increase in take-home wages, and the way I structured it mostly puts that ba
That's a remarkably thin guilt by association fallacy. Somehow being founded by a person who has received public recognition from a public corporation of the US (with the express purpose of promoting democracy) is now tantamount to being a puppet of the US. And said tenuous recognition is now being largely funded by the US.
Perhaps you could come up with evidence for your assertions?
Because a market with negative unemployment can't sustain itself, and rapidly destabilizes and then collapses.
Ok, what is a real world example of this? Because I find it hard to believe that it can even happen much have such a negative effect.
Several incidents are describe in this story:
1) workers receiving 6 to 8 months in prison for protesting unpaid wages.
2) Arbitrary detention of several labor leaders in Guangdong province.
3) Wu Guijun, labor activist detained for more than a year for "gathering a crowd to disrupt traffic", the same activity that you cited in your original post which lead to a short term detention and fine.
I assume you are referring to the teachers arrested and jailed last month in Minnesota.
Again with the false equivalence. Let's read that story in question.
Minneapolis police reported 21 protesters were arrested willingly after blocking Eighth Street at Nicollet Mall and refusing orders to disperse.
When I said "cross someone", I didn't mean block a road. And what were the consequences?
All 21 of the protesters arrested in Minneapolis were ticketed and released, according to the St. Paul Federation of Teachers.
The ACFTU is a government run umbrella organization for labor unions in China. But unions do NOT have to join. Even for unions that do join, they have the right to independently declare strikes. The links you provide point out (correctly) that unions in China face big challenges. How is that different than America, where union membership has dramatically declined, and service workers are proving difficult to organize?
One huge difference is that you can get thrown in jail for crossing someone. There's no equivalence here between the Chinese and US labor situations.
The horrible exploitation of labor during this period is what gave rise to Unions and the "Progressive Era."
The "horrible exploitation of labor" is what gave rise to the US as superpower and developed world society. And I doubt labor unions and the "Progressive Era" would have had much traction without the high demand for US labor spurred by the Gilded Era.
It's remarkable how poorly understood and interpreted the Gilded Era is. Somehow they built up a superpower, a vast economy, a set of world-class universities, and the current modern medical system. Yet it's supposedly all bad because labor was exploited. Well, China isn't going to get a shiny developed world society without a vast amount of labor exploitation any more than the US could.