Sure, but what makes you think we think employing humans is that important?
Look how the thread started. Sir_Eptishous was concerned that wealth was being concentrated in the hands of a few people via the power of automation. I pointed out how misplaced that concern was due both to a misunderstanding of the past 50 years as well as absence of the effect in places that didn't have expensive labor or punish employers for the act of employment. One of the many benefits of employment is that it lessens such concentration of wealth.
And there's plenty of evidence that we want the benefits of employment whether it be the wages and secondary benefits, or the tax revenue for expansive government programs and policies. Well, I'm here to say that you don't get such benefits without cost.
All I can say here is that a lot of people seem to think that a completely automated society with no place for humans is a bad thing. Employment is one of the tools for keeping that from happening.
Other people think human freedom is a big deal. Employment is one way to empower people and make them more free even in the situation where they're desperate for food or other basic needs. You don't become less needy or more free, if you can't better your situation via employment.
At some point, if you're really thinking, then you need to consider what it takes to get what you want and the consequences of actions. At that point, I think employment will become very important because it solves so many problems simultaneously.
We're far more adaptable and intelligent than a horse. And no one explains how we'll get so poor that we can afford goods made by robots, but not goods made by said poor people.
And despite losing their primary reason for being and being unfortunately as adaptable as the average animal, there's still a lot of horses in the US.
So no, I don't buy it.
No, I think those will lead to more people becoming unemployed.
Comparative advantage is one of the reasons labor is flowing out of the developed world in the first place. Technology is eliminating what comparative advantage labor can offer, turning labor into a fungible commodity.
You do realize that I haven't ever claimed that humans will never do things via automation? There will be labor flowing into automation due to comparative advantage just as there has been for the past few centuries. That was not the point of my mentioning of the effect. Instead, it was that even in the midst of a strong advantage (such as your claimed automation advantage in the future), that there remains an economic reason for employing lesser quality labor - which I might add is not a state we currently are in.
Jevons Paradox would demand us to continuously improve our efficiency in extracting more resources for consumption. This means machines and humans have to improve themselves to meet that demand. Machines improve themselves a lot faster than humans could, as we fleshy humans are limited by our biology. Copying a good tool, a machine, an idea, some software, etc is a lot faster, easier, and more reliable than trying to copy the skills and knowledge of that one good worker you found onto the rest of the labor force.
Your last assertion isn't correct. There are a lot of such tools, machines, and ideas which are not that easy to duplicate. And involve enough matter, it won't be no matter how efficient your processes for copying become.
Also just because something is easier, doesn't mean it is more important to us. We will continue as we have over the past few millennia to spend far more resources on improving humans than on improving machines.
Oh come now, practically every word Naomi Klein ever wrote on climate change has had that it's primary focus. She's hardly unique.
You won't find that in scientific reports however, because climate scientists are not sociologists. They keep their focus to their field of expertise: x causes y, reduce x.
And a casual google reveals that she believes capitalism is incompatible with environmentalism. So no, Klein is not an example, but rather the opposite. Funny, how I still don't believe you.
While you gave interesting evidence that the mortality rate from extreme weather events have gone down you
1) showed no evidence that your theory on WHY this happened is true (it may be - but you have not proven that argument)
2) failed to actively argue how to expand that to the most vulnerable societies
3) assumed that climate mitigation must be done by reducing quality of life (which is not an avenue ANYBODY is pursuing - it only exists as a strawman fallacy from deniers - on the contrary, climate change mitigation strategies are all based on replacing archaic and dangerous technologies with better and newer ones, not abandoning tech - upgrading it).
4) showed absolutely no evidence that this pattern will hold if the degree and frequency of extreme weather events were to increase significantly. That seems highly unlikely since one of the effects of extreme weather events is to be hugely expensive - they cost a lot of money to clean up and recover from. Just look how much it cost to deal with Katrina and we underspent hugely (which upped the deathtoll a lot). So that means - there must be a point where the wealth LOST due to extreme weather events will eradicate so much wealth as to start destroying any mitigating factor wealth may have had on surviving them.
Let's start with point 1. We have a huge reduction in death rate from extreme weather. That's evidence, counter to your assertion that it isn't. We have a dearth of explanations for why that death rate would decline so dramatically in the face of increasing population density and climate change. Maybe Gaia likes polluting, capitalist societies?
As to point 2, what makes a society "most vulnerable"? Poverty is the common characteristic with obvious reasons why poverty creates vulnerability. Thus, by removing poverty, say by implementing one of the historical approaches to developed world status, one removes the vulnerability as well. It wouldn't be hard for a "vulnerable society" to mix and match the historical successes to tailor an approach for their own society.
I'll further note that we already have massive improvement in the well being of these "most vulnerable" societies due to the influence of global trade and some degree of modernization of their societies and infrastructure.
For point 3, the obvious rebuttal is that countries have actually tried "climate mitigation" and it's been both remarkably harmful and ineffective at mitigation. For example, Germany and Denmark doubled the price of their electricity while importing power from places like Poland's coal power plants. Many dead end technologies (solar thermal and biogeneration) have been pursued with many billions of dollars of subsidies to no useful effect. A certain US pipeline has been blocked for a decade without doing anything useful in the process (aside from costing the US and Canada economic benefit and jobs as well as a few lives).
Why would point 4 happen? You don't exactly have a scientific case for extreme weather getting far worse, you know. The researcher-based arguments for example are models all the way down with a very tenuous connection to any data or underlying physics. And the hysteria-based arguments aren't based on anything at all.
Katrina killed a lot of people because the Mayor of New Orleans failed to evacuate the city in
A rocket like the Falcon 9/Heavy is a good combination to address the whole market.
Only if it's allowed to launch.
We already have two examples of potential commercial launch operators being prohibited from operating. In addition to the above Shuttle monopoly, a similar thing happened to E'Prime Aerospace which was at one point working on refurbishing decommissioned Peacekeeper MX missiles for commercial launch to orbit. They lost that option in the late 90s when Russia negotiated the Start II Treaty where one provision was that the MX missiles could no longer be used for commercial launch. The treaty is no longer in force, meaning Orbital Sciences has been able to launch those missiles as a first stage of some of its Minotaur rockets.
Or the FAA or other US government agencies (NASA isn't the only game in town) could require SpaceX to meet ridiculous standards in order to operate (say you have to show that your launch has less than a one in one billion chance of killing someone who is not involved in the launch before you can get FAA approval).
SLS is not going to last long, unprotected, when SpaceX can put up more payload (over several launches rather than the one launch) more reliably for significantly less cost (including the US government not having to spend billions to develop or maintain the Falcon Heavy). The obvious route is to kneecap the competition.
You forgot that any job as complex as driving a car will be done by robots in 2050.
Unless, of course, that doesn't happen. I think comparative advantage and Jevons Paradox will still continue to employ people through the end of the century and probably through the end of the next century as well. I'm not making a demographic prediction past that point, but I think that the advantages of automation are greatly overstated when it comes to eliminating the desire for human labor.
What we are seeing is the transition away from the old economic model, as you described. Assets, wealth, real estate, etc now are being funneled into the possession of a smaller and smaller percentage of people.
In the US! It's worth remembering here that this is strictly a developed world thing and it's not that anything is being "funneled". Rather it is that the pricing of developed world labor has declined in the face of competition from developing world labor. That's it.
As a result, the prices of non-labor components of our economy, which tend to be owned by the rich have fared better relative to labor. It and the subsequent ham-handed responses by society and government thoroughly explains the economic drama of the past 50 years such as stagnant wages, the neverending blaming of developed world problems on "greed", the rich getting richer, decline in labor power and decades of ineffectual labor protectionism, the export of industry and commerce to cheaper parts of the world, and the obsession with solving relatively mild "first world" problems (like climate change which if fully implemented would leave poor, high population density countries at a permanent disadvantage to countries which don't have both those attributes).
So here's my predictions on the matter. First, international business starts running out of "race to the bottom" workers by 2050. This will be the start of the golden age of human labor with global-scale, across-the-board increases in wages, labor power, and some increase in individual freedom (even in parts of the developed world which currently are reverting to police states). I think a historical model for this process will be the late 19th and 20th century (through about 1970) industrialization of the US, which had a similar growth in the value of human labor plus other interesting aspects like a sharp increase in human mobility, decline of the power of the member states, and in the later stages a considerable amount of economic stagnation prior to the oil shocks.
In light of that model, I predict similar increases in human mobility, decline in power of the smaller governments and establishment of more or more extensive supernational governments which may culminate in a genuine global government by 2150, and in later stages stagnation of global industry and commerce perhaps becoming really noticeable around 2100-2150.
Think about how much things have changed since then, then extrapolate the rate of change going forward twenty years from now.
To really face the reality of the situation, we need to be honest with ourselves and start a discussion on how we are going to deal with this.
I think two key realizations should be that things just aren't that bad right now and people should try to adapt to conditions rather than listen to the promises and FUD of political con artists.
So who is worse when it comes to being "responsible" about managing technical risk? Did anyone suggest shutting down the F-35 program while they decided what to do about escalating costs and slipping schedules?
So we should let a boondoggle continue just because the US military is even shittier at ending bad programs?
My take on SLS is that it should have never existed in the first place and it's not too late to end it now. It serves no national interest and we don't need its capabilities; it's enormously expensive and the economics are crappy (particularly, low launch frequency); and it creates a conflict of interest between benefactors of the SLS and the future of a US presence in space.
That last point bears elaboration. There is a long, seedy tradition of aerospace companies using the law and such to backstab and obstruct each other. Usually, it's relatively minor like a rocket being delayed for a few months by bogus concerns or getting kicked off an Air Force launch pad because some competitor wants to mess up one's launch tempo.
But with a huge funding stream like SLS gets, that can fund a lot worse than mere bureaucratic obstruction. For example, NASA delayed commercial space launch by a decade by mandating that all US-origin payloads had to go up on the Space Shuttle back in roughly 1975 (which also had the effect of massively delaying US payloads until the policy was reversed in 1984. Read this report to get an idea of the crap NASA pulled back then.
We don't need a repeat of that regressive failure. The obvious approach is to end the conflict of interest by defunding the SLS and the parasitic ex-Shuttle supply chain. Then there's no one left to care enough to prevent the US private industry from delivering heavy lift vehicles that will actually get used.
Funny how I don't believe you. Anyway, to emphasize my point some more, there's been a huge, century long decline in death from extreme weather. It happened despite climate change and enormous population growth.
At the global level, available data indicate that aggregate annual
mortality and mortality rates owing to extreme weather events have
declined between 93% and 98%, respectively, since the 1920s. Much
of this improvement represents a substantial decline in mortality from
droughts and floods, which apparently caused 92% of the fatalities
from extreme weather events between 1900 and 2008 recorded in the
EM-DAT database. Death rates for the different categories of extreme
events were generally lower in the last two decades than in previous
decades, with the notable exception of extreme temperature, which
was higher because of the 2003 European heat wave. Both mortality
and mortality rates from storms peaked in the 1970s. The average
annual mortality due to storms from 1990-2008 exceeded the average
from 1900-1989 by 82%, while the mortality rate declined by 16%.
Obviously, there's more to extreme weather than the deaths it causes, but the combination of technology and a prosperous society creates a resilience to the effects of global warming that is ignored by climate change alarmism. Maybe this time you will listen than merely "hear"?
At best it might make the poor countries able to better afford the adaption costs.
And there are three other effects here: lower or even negative population growth, wealthy people care more about the environment, and a wealthy society is far more resilient to natural disasters.
The responsibility lies primarily with the developed countries, who have profited the most from the centuries of pollution they've been emitting, to man up and deal with the problem they created.
Ok, how much of a problem is that really? And what of all the other more important problems the developed world is solving like global poverty, overpopulation, pollution, corruption, arable land and habitat destruction, etc? Why does climate change get priority over that?
Doesn't have to be "new" responsibility. It could be the same responsibilities, but more of it. Instead of worrying about living to 30 or 40, we now have to worry about living to 50, then 60, then 70, then 80, etc.
I doubt anyone is going to worry a great deal about what they're doing in 40 years. Sorry, that's not credible.
We still don't have flying cars or space colonies or sexy robot maids. There are still plenty of problems unsolved.
One doesn't go to socialism for its sexy robot maids.
At the moment, we're too busy trying to convert wealthy countries into poor countries. As we funnel more and more assets into the pockets of fewer and fewer people.
Funny how climate change mitigation is being used as a vehicle to further enable that.
Amazing how alike Capitalism and Communism can be sometimes.
What's odd about it? Create a legal means to steal from each other and stealing happens.
The harm from climate change will overwhelmingly hit poor countries far harder than rich ones -despite poor countries overwhelmingly being the least responsible for it.
And yet we never hear of solving the climate change problem by making those poor countries into wealthy countries, especially since poverty will always have a variety of harms, several which are much larger than climate change in terms of environmental or human harm, for which it is vulnerable even in the complete absence of climate change.
Changes like this tend to start locally, and work their way up.
I agree. But they don't work their way up without displacing the status quo. My view is that the national-level political oligopolies need to be heavily disrupted in order for your scheme to work.
And I see it as quite relevant to the current situation. The biggest reform of the US's political system since the Bill of Rights happened during and just after the collapse of the Whig party. I don't think that was coincidence. You want a similarly huge reform of the current electoral process. It won't happen via the Democrats and Republicans, because it's not in their interests.
But as people can live longer, people start to get scared of having to take on it all that extra responsibility by themselves. This is a reason why socialism is inevitable. The more prosperous a society grows (thanks to capitalism or freedom or whatever not-socialist ideology you think is the real engine for growth), the more personal responsibility there is, and that is scary to most people, so people will naturally start voting for socialist policies.
What new personal responsibility? I think rather the problem is absence of problem. A lot of people will continue to worry, because that's one of the things we do, no matter that there's far less to worry about. Thus, fantasy fears will replace the former real ones.
So before your first hundred years of figuring it out are up you have a massive population well out of control.
Unless, of course, that doesn't happen. And if it does, so what? We have that die-off you're angsting over and start over with more experience that overpopulation is bad.
And here's your biggest stupid. What form of life on earth does not age and die? Name one. Why is that? What does life on earth look like if we cure aging? Well, we better well cure the problem of giving birth at the same time, doncha think? Except a few special people will have to be given the privilege, because accidents and disease will still take a toll. Government will have a heavy hand to make this work. Or do you have a miracle biological solution to this?
We'll have centuries to work this out. So no, I don't see what's supposed to be the big problem here. At worst, we have the occasional die-offs of people and curb population growth that way. We solve the problem or it solves itself.
I find it interesting how people obsess in the little problems just because they can't cope with the idea that an end to aging could happen.
If the EU collapses for any reason it won't be because of their border policies. The thing most likely to cause the EU to fail is the problem of fixed exchange rates within the currency union. In a single country like the US, capital and labor can flow relatively freely to where it is needed when there are imbalances between regions. But since the EU is comprised of sovereign countries when you get a region in financial distress (see Greece) they have the problem of effectively having fixed exchange rates between sovereign states with more limited labor and capital mobility.
You do realize that in single countries like the US they have nothing but fixed exchange rates? Texas dollars are the same as California dollars. They also have similar problems to the Greek bailouts (for example, problems with solvency of some of the states/territories in higher debt such as Illinois or Puerto Rico).
The catch with that is any claim they make about hacks is now questionable as they inherently can and will corrupt the evidence. We you set out to so publicly corrupt global infrastructure than you will no longer be believed for any claims you make that result from attacks on that infrastructure ie you are always the initial and most likely suspect for any attack. Much like the US Navy and it's policy of not declaring which vessels have nuclear weapons and which do not. Result is when ever a US naval vessels approaches a foreign country it is not just a naval vessel approaching but a first strike city destroying nuclear threat approaching and that is the US government approach when sending vessels upon that basis, they are in fact at that moment threatening the targeted nation with a first strike nuclear attack.
I notice two things. First, most countries have the ability to "publicly corrupt global infrastructure", but it's only the US's capabilities that you care to complain about.
Second, what is the point of faking a massive cyber espionage campaign from China and Russia? If the US or allies were doing a false flag operation, they've gotten remarkably little return on the effort. To illustrate the kind of return you can get from false flag operations, Nazi Germany staged a fake military attack on a German radio station in order to rationalize the successful invasion of Poland. Nazi Germany didn't need to fake Polish assaults on every single German radio station.
And any such effort would have been leaked by now, given the various whistleblowers that have come out over the past couple of decades.
Sorry, but this is the sort of retarded reasoning that comes from not understanding the situation. We shouldn't trust evidence because USian cooties.
only exists because the First Amendment protects our rights to assemble
No, it only exists because of first-past-the-post elections. And "two party system" says nothing of which two parties are dominant. It would still be the two party system, if it were Libertarians and Greens on top.
It can work well, it can work poorly. It all depends on the costs and benefits of the appropriate strategies. Here, there's a minor benefit to me (since I slightly prefer Trump to Clinton). But the cost is that I waste my vote on one of these clowns. One's going to get elected anyway (unless we have some massive turnover in the next few months). I'd rather vote for someone who far better presents my interests even if their chances, this election cycle are rather slim.
My point is that they didn't get what they wanted by voting for the establishment choice. Voting third party is an extension of that successful strategy.
Dynamics are very different for city level elections. Among other things, there's little barrier to entry for independents and such. You don't have to assemble an extensive political machine just to get your name on the ballot in most of the fifty states.
Further, the stakes are far smaller. The Minneapolis city budget is several orders of magnitude smaller.
As a result, there's far less incentive for established powers to obstruct ranked choice voting at the level of Minneapolis. I can see the US political establishment successfully obstructing ranked choice for many generations. Thus, my emphasis on supporting third parties. The overthrow of an established party is when we'll have the opportunity to change the voting system to something better.
There have been disruptions to the two-party system. Once, it even changed what one of the parties was. Every time, we've settled back down in a two-party system because that's the optimum for the election and governance systems we have.
During the disruption to the two party system, slavery ended and we implemented major constitutional reform.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, but what makes you think we think employing humans is that important?
Look how the thread started. Sir_Eptishous was concerned that wealth was being concentrated in the hands of a few people via the power of automation. I pointed out how misplaced that concern was due both to a misunderstanding of the past 50 years as well as absence of the effect in places that didn't have expensive labor or punish employers for the act of employment. One of the many benefits of employment is that it lessens such concentration of wealth.
And there's plenty of evidence that we want the benefits of employment whether it be the wages and secondary benefits, or the tax revenue for expansive government programs and policies. Well, I'm here to say that you don't get such benefits without cost.
All I can say here is that a lot of people seem to think that a completely automated society with no place for humans is a bad thing. Employment is one of the tools for keeping that from happening.
Other people think human freedom is a big deal. Employment is one way to empower people and make them more free even in the situation where they're desperate for food or other basic needs. You don't become less needy or more free, if you can't better your situation via employment.
At some point, if you're really thinking, then you need to consider what it takes to get what you want and the consequences of actions. At that point, I think employment will become very important because it solves so many problems simultaneously.
Said the horse, about those silly cars
We're far more adaptable and intelligent than a horse. And no one explains how we'll get so poor that we can afford goods made by robots, but not goods made by said poor people.
And despite losing their primary reason for being and being unfortunately as adaptable as the average animal, there's still a lot of horses in the US.
So no, I don't buy it.
No, I think those will lead to more people becoming unemployed.
Comparative advantage is one of the reasons labor is flowing out of the developed world in the first place. Technology is eliminating what comparative advantage labor can offer, turning labor into a fungible commodity.
You do realize that I haven't ever claimed that humans will never do things via automation? There will be labor flowing into automation due to comparative advantage just as there has been for the past few centuries. That was not the point of my mentioning of the effect. Instead, it was that even in the midst of a strong advantage (such as your claimed automation advantage in the future), that there remains an economic reason for employing lesser quality labor - which I might add is not a state we currently are in.
Jevons Paradox would demand us to continuously improve our efficiency in extracting more resources for consumption. This means machines and humans have to improve themselves to meet that demand. Machines improve themselves a lot faster than humans could, as we fleshy humans are limited by our biology. Copying a good tool, a machine, an idea, some software, etc is a lot faster, easier, and more reliable than trying to copy the skills and knowledge of that one good worker you found onto the rest of the labor force.
Your last assertion isn't correct. There are a lot of such tools, machines, and ideas which are not that easy to duplicate. And involve enough matter, it won't be no matter how efficient your processes for copying become.
Also just because something is easier, doesn't mean it is more important to us. We will continue as we have over the past few millennia to spend far more resources on improving humans than on improving machines.
Oh come now, practically every word Naomi Klein ever wrote on climate change has had that it's primary focus. She's hardly unique. You won't find that in scientific reports however, because climate scientists are not sociologists. They keep their focus to their field of expertise: x causes y, reduce x.
And a casual google reveals that she believes capitalism is incompatible with environmentalism. So no, Klein is not an example, but rather the opposite. Funny, how I still don't believe you.
While you gave interesting evidence that the mortality rate from extreme weather events have gone down you 1) showed no evidence that your theory on WHY this happened is true (it may be - but you have not proven that argument)
2) failed to actively argue how to expand that to the most vulnerable societies
3) assumed that climate mitigation must be done by reducing quality of life (which is not an avenue ANYBODY is pursuing - it only exists as a strawman fallacy from deniers - on the contrary, climate change mitigation strategies are all based on replacing archaic and dangerous technologies with better and newer ones, not abandoning tech - upgrading it).
4) showed absolutely no evidence that this pattern will hold if the degree and frequency of extreme weather events were to increase significantly. That seems highly unlikely since one of the effects of extreme weather events is to be hugely expensive - they cost a lot of money to clean up and recover from. Just look how much it cost to deal with Katrina and we underspent hugely (which upped the deathtoll a lot). So that means - there must be a point where the wealth LOST due to extreme weather events will eradicate so much wealth as to start destroying any mitigating factor wealth may have had on surviving them.
Let's start with point 1. We have a huge reduction in death rate from extreme weather. That's evidence, counter to your assertion that it isn't. We have a dearth of explanations for why that death rate would decline so dramatically in the face of increasing population density and climate change. Maybe Gaia likes polluting, capitalist societies?
As to point 2, what makes a society "most vulnerable"? Poverty is the common characteristic with obvious reasons why poverty creates vulnerability. Thus, by removing poverty, say by implementing one of the historical approaches to developed world status, one removes the vulnerability as well. It wouldn't be hard for a "vulnerable society" to mix and match the historical successes to tailor an approach for their own society.
I'll further note that we already have massive improvement in the well being of these "most vulnerable" societies due to the influence of global trade and some degree of modernization of their societies and infrastructure.
For point 3, the obvious rebuttal is that countries have actually tried "climate mitigation" and it's been both remarkably harmful and ineffective at mitigation. For example, Germany and Denmark doubled the price of their electricity while importing power from places like Poland's coal power plants. Many dead end technologies (solar thermal and biogeneration) have been pursued with many billions of dollars of subsidies to no useful effect. A certain US pipeline has been blocked for a decade without doing anything useful in the process (aside from costing the US and Canada economic benefit and jobs as well as a few lives).
Why would point 4 happen? You don't exactly have a scientific case for extreme weather getting far worse, you know. The researcher-based arguments for example are models all the way down with a very tenuous connection to any data or underlying physics. And the hysteria-based arguments aren't based on anything at all.
Katrina killed a lot of people because the Mayor of New Orleans failed to evacuate the city in
A rocket like the Falcon 9/Heavy is a good combination to address the whole market.
Only if it's allowed to launch.
We already have two examples of potential commercial launch operators being prohibited from operating. In addition to the above Shuttle monopoly, a similar thing happened to E'Prime Aerospace which was at one point working on refurbishing decommissioned Peacekeeper MX missiles for commercial launch to orbit. They lost that option in the late 90s when Russia negotiated the Start II Treaty where one provision was that the MX missiles could no longer be used for commercial launch. The treaty is no longer in force, meaning Orbital Sciences has been able to launch those missiles as a first stage of some of its Minotaur rockets.
Or the FAA or other US government agencies (NASA isn't the only game in town) could require SpaceX to meet ridiculous standards in order to operate (say you have to show that your launch has less than a one in one billion chance of killing someone who is not involved in the launch before you can get FAA approval).
SLS is not going to last long, unprotected, when SpaceX can put up more payload (over several launches rather than the one launch) more reliably for significantly less cost (including the US government not having to spend billions to develop or maintain the Falcon Heavy). The obvious route is to kneecap the competition.
You forgot that any job as complex as driving a car will be done by robots in 2050.
Unless, of course, that doesn't happen. I think comparative advantage and Jevons Paradox will still continue to employ people through the end of the century and probably through the end of the next century as well. I'm not making a demographic prediction past that point, but I think that the advantages of automation are greatly overstated when it comes to eliminating the desire for human labor.
What we are seeing is the transition away from the old economic model, as you described. Assets, wealth, real estate, etc now are being funneled into the possession of a smaller and smaller percentage of people.
In the US! It's worth remembering here that this is strictly a developed world thing and it's not that anything is being "funneled". Rather it is that the pricing of developed world labor has declined in the face of competition from developing world labor. That's it.
As a result, the prices of non-labor components of our economy, which tend to be owned by the rich have fared better relative to labor. It and the subsequent ham-handed responses by society and government thoroughly explains the economic drama of the past 50 years such as stagnant wages, the neverending blaming of developed world problems on "greed", the rich getting richer, decline in labor power and decades of ineffectual labor protectionism, the export of industry and commerce to cheaper parts of the world, and the obsession with solving relatively mild "first world" problems (like climate change which if fully implemented would leave poor, high population density countries at a permanent disadvantage to countries which don't have both those attributes).
So here's my predictions on the matter. First, international business starts running out of "race to the bottom" workers by 2050. This will be the start of the golden age of human labor with global-scale, across-the-board increases in wages, labor power, and some increase in individual freedom (even in parts of the developed world which currently are reverting to police states). I think a historical model for this process will be the late 19th and 20th century (through about 1970) industrialization of the US, which had a similar growth in the value of human labor plus other interesting aspects like a sharp increase in human mobility, decline of the power of the member states, and in the later stages a considerable amount of economic stagnation prior to the oil shocks.
In light of that model, I predict similar increases in human mobility, decline in power of the smaller governments and establishment of more or more extensive supernational governments which may culminate in a genuine global government by 2150, and in later stages stagnation of global industry and commerce perhaps becoming really noticeable around 2100-2150.
Think about how much things have changed since then, then extrapolate the rate of change going forward twenty years from now. To really face the reality of the situation, we need to be honest with ourselves and start a discussion on how we are going to deal with this.
I think two key realizations should be that things just aren't that bad right now and people should try to adapt to conditions rather than listen to the promises and FUD of political con artists.
So who is worse when it comes to being "responsible" about managing technical risk? Did anyone suggest shutting down the F-35 program while they decided what to do about escalating costs and slipping schedules?
So we should let a boondoggle continue just because the US military is even shittier at ending bad programs?
My take on SLS is that it should have never existed in the first place and it's not too late to end it now. It serves no national interest and we don't need its capabilities; it's enormously expensive and the economics are crappy (particularly, low launch frequency); and it creates a conflict of interest between benefactors of the SLS and the future of a US presence in space.
That last point bears elaboration. There is a long, seedy tradition of aerospace companies using the law and such to backstab and obstruct each other. Usually, it's relatively minor like a rocket being delayed for a few months by bogus concerns or getting kicked off an Air Force launch pad because some competitor wants to mess up one's launch tempo.
But with a huge funding stream like SLS gets, that can fund a lot worse than mere bureaucratic obstruction. For example, NASA delayed commercial space launch by a decade by mandating that all US-origin payloads had to go up on the Space Shuttle back in roughly 1975 (which also had the effect of massively delaying US payloads until the policy was reversed in 1984. Read this report to get an idea of the crap NASA pulled back then.
We don't need a repeat of that regressive failure. The obvious approach is to end the conflict of interest by defunding the SLS and the parasitic ex-Shuttle supply chain. Then there's no one left to care enough to prevent the US private industry from delivering heavy lift vehicles that will actually get used.
Maybe you don't hear it - I hear it every day.
Funny how I don't believe you. Anyway, to emphasize my point some more, there's been a huge, century long decline in death from extreme weather. It happened despite climate change and enormous population growth.
At the global level, available data indicate that aggregate annual mortality and mortality rates owing to extreme weather events have declined between 93% and 98%, respectively, since the 1920s. Much of this improvement represents a substantial decline in mortality from droughts and floods, which apparently caused 92% of the fatalities from extreme weather events between 1900 and 2008 recorded in the EM-DAT database. Death rates for the different categories of extreme events were generally lower in the last two decades than in previous decades, with the notable exception of extreme temperature, which was higher because of the 2003 European heat wave. Both mortality and mortality rates from storms peaked in the 1970s. The average annual mortality due to storms from 1990-2008 exceeded the average from 1900-1989 by 82%, while the mortality rate declined by 16%.
Obviously, there's more to extreme weather than the deaths it causes, but the combination of technology and a prosperous society creates a resilience to the effects of global warming that is ignored by climate change alarmism. Maybe this time you will listen than merely "hear"?
At best it might make the poor countries able to better afford the adaption costs.
And there are three other effects here: lower or even negative population growth, wealthy people care more about the environment, and a wealthy society is far more resilient to natural disasters.
The responsibility lies primarily with the developed countries, who have profited the most from the centuries of pollution they've been emitting, to man up and deal with the problem they created.
Ok, how much of a problem is that really? And what of all the other more important problems the developed world is solving like global poverty, overpopulation, pollution, corruption, arable land and habitat destruction, etc? Why does climate change get priority over that?
Doesn't have to be "new" responsibility. It could be the same responsibilities, but more of it. Instead of worrying about living to 30 or 40, we now have to worry about living to 50, then 60, then 70, then 80, etc.
I doubt anyone is going to worry a great deal about what they're doing in 40 years. Sorry, that's not credible.
We still don't have flying cars or space colonies or sexy robot maids. There are still plenty of problems unsolved.
One doesn't go to socialism for its sexy robot maids.
At the moment, we're too busy trying to convert wealthy countries into poor countries. As we funnel more and more assets into the pockets of fewer and fewer people.
Funny how climate change mitigation is being used as a vehicle to further enable that.
Amazing how alike Capitalism and Communism can be sometimes.
What's odd about it? Create a legal means to steal from each other and stealing happens.
The harm from climate change will overwhelmingly hit poor countries far harder than rich ones -despite poor countries overwhelmingly being the least responsible for it.
And yet we never hear of solving the climate change problem by making those poor countries into wealthy countries, especially since poverty will always have a variety of harms, several which are much larger than climate change in terms of environmental or human harm, for which it is vulnerable even in the complete absence of climate change.
Changes like this tend to start locally, and work their way up.
I agree. But they don't work their way up without displacing the status quo. My view is that the national-level political oligopolies need to be heavily disrupted in order for your scheme to work.
And I see it as quite relevant to the current situation. The biggest reform of the US's political system since the Bill of Rights happened during and just after the collapse of the Whig party. I don't think that was coincidence. You want a similarly huge reform of the current electoral process. It won't happen via the Democrats and Republicans, because it's not in their interests.
But as people can live longer, people start to get scared of having to take on it all that extra responsibility by themselves. This is a reason why socialism is inevitable. The more prosperous a society grows (thanks to capitalism or freedom or whatever not-socialist ideology you think is the real engine for growth), the more personal responsibility there is, and that is scary to most people, so people will naturally start voting for socialist policies.
What new personal responsibility? I think rather the problem is absence of problem. A lot of people will continue to worry, because that's one of the things we do, no matter that there's far less to worry about. Thus, fantasy fears will replace the former real ones.
So before your first hundred years of figuring it out are up you have a massive population well out of control.
Unless, of course, that doesn't happen. And if it does, so what? We have that die-off you're angsting over and start over with more experience that overpopulation is bad.
And here's your biggest stupid. What form of life on earth does not age and die? Name one. Why is that? What does life on earth look like if we cure aging? Well, we better well cure the problem of giving birth at the same time, doncha think? Except a few special people will have to be given the privilege, because accidents and disease will still take a toll. Government will have a heavy hand to make this work. Or do you have a miracle biological solution to this?
We'll have centuries to work this out. So no, I don't see what's supposed to be the big problem here. At worst, we have the occasional die-offs of people and curb population growth that way. We solve the problem or it solves itself.
I find it interesting how people obsess in the little problems just because they can't cope with the idea that an end to aging could happen.
If the EU collapses for any reason it won't be because of their border policies. The thing most likely to cause the EU to fail is the problem of fixed exchange rates within the currency union. In a single country like the US, capital and labor can flow relatively freely to where it is needed when there are imbalances between regions. But since the EU is comprised of sovereign countries when you get a region in financial distress (see Greece) they have the problem of effectively having fixed exchange rates between sovereign states with more limited labor and capital mobility.
You do realize that in single countries like the US they have nothing but fixed exchange rates? Texas dollars are the same as California dollars. They also have similar problems to the Greek bailouts (for example, problems with solvency of some of the states/territories in higher debt such as Illinois or Puerto Rico).
The catch with that is any claim they make about hacks is now questionable as they inherently can and will corrupt the evidence. We you set out to so publicly corrupt global infrastructure than you will no longer be believed for any claims you make that result from attacks on that infrastructure ie you are always the initial and most likely suspect for any attack. Much like the US Navy and it's policy of not declaring which vessels have nuclear weapons and which do not. Result is when ever a US naval vessels approaches a foreign country it is not just a naval vessel approaching but a first strike city destroying nuclear threat approaching and that is the US government approach when sending vessels upon that basis, they are in fact at that moment threatening the targeted nation with a first strike nuclear attack.
I notice two things. First, most countries have the ability to "publicly corrupt global infrastructure", but it's only the US's capabilities that you care to complain about.
Second, what is the point of faking a massive cyber espionage campaign from China and Russia? If the US or allies were doing a false flag operation, they've gotten remarkably little return on the effort. To illustrate the kind of return you can get from false flag operations, Nazi Germany staged a fake military attack on a German radio station in order to rationalize the successful invasion of Poland. Nazi Germany didn't need to fake Polish assaults on every single German radio station.
And any such effort would have been leaked by now, given the various whistleblowers that have come out over the past couple of decades.
Sorry, but this is the sort of retarded reasoning that comes from not understanding the situation. We shouldn't trust evidence because USian cooties.
Wouldn't cause a brief outage, if they did that during a scheduled downtime of the cable.
only exists because the First Amendment protects our rights to assemble
No, it only exists because of first-past-the-post elections. And "two party system" says nothing of which two parties are dominant. It would still be the two party system, if it were Libertarians and Greens on top.
How well does playing outside the rules work?
It can work well, it can work poorly. It all depends on the costs and benefits of the appropriate strategies. Here, there's a minor benefit to me (since I slightly prefer Trump to Clinton). But the cost is that I waste my vote on one of these clowns. One's going to get elected anyway (unless we have some massive turnover in the next few months). I'd rather vote for someone who far better presents my interests even if their chances, this election cycle are rather slim.
My point is that they didn't get what they wanted by voting for the establishment choice. Voting third party is an extension of that successful strategy.
Dynamics are very different for city level elections. Among other things, there's little barrier to entry for independents and such. You don't have to assemble an extensive political machine just to get your name on the ballot in most of the fifty states.
Further, the stakes are far smaller. The Minneapolis city budget is several orders of magnitude smaller.
As a result, there's far less incentive for established powers to obstruct ranked choice voting at the level of Minneapolis. I can see the US political establishment successfully obstructing ranked choice for many generations. Thus, my emphasis on supporting third parties. The overthrow of an established party is when we'll have the opportunity to change the voting system to something better.
There have been disruptions to the two-party system. Once, it even changed what one of the parties was. Every time, we've settled back down in a two-party system because that's the optimum for the election and governance systems we have.
During the disruption to the two party system, slavery ended and we implemented major constitutional reform.