So what you are saying is that attacking civilian targets and killing many including children from a position of military power backed by a large government and from a nice safe distance is somehow OK but a bunch of seperarist religious nuts attacking civilians is unforgivable and the traction should be wars against reasonably moderate states?
What large government is attacking civilian targets? Just because there are civilians near a military target who are harmed or killed by a subsequent attack doesn't make the target a civilian target.
While on the other hand, it is quite clear that the Paris attacks targeted civilians without regard for any military justification.
And what wars against what "reasonably moderate" states?
Unless you see and agree both are horrific and needed to be addressed you are just part of the problem.
Horrific is a matter of degree. It's not a bit you set. I hope you think that killing 100 people in a concert is more horrific than wearing plaid and stripes, but I can't tell from your words how discerning you are. War ultimately is about not playing by rules. The more ethical rules you can actually get participants in a war to follow, the relatively more humane the war will be. But when such as in the case of ISIS, one party isn't following any rules to reduce harm to civilians, then you should expect lots of civilian deaths, no matter how horrific you find this sort of thing to be.
Refugees are mostly women and children, since danger at home puts them at the most risk. The invaders are mostly military age men, wearing designer clothes, talking on modern cell phones with no shortage of minutes, and apparently well enough fed that they can be picky about which food they accept as gifts.
When the danger is a shooting war in which women and children don't participate, then the military age men are the most at risk.
Sorry, but the topic here is clearly the developed world at the moment. The first time I saw you re-defining terms and moving the goalposts when you were painted in a corner, it was mildly (very mildly) amusing, but now it is merely a waste of everyone's time, so shoo! Come back when you are ready to meaningfully contribute to the conversation.
When you speak in universal terms, there's only one set of goalposts that matter. And while it is nice that you suddenly care about rhetoric and rational debate. I only hope that concern lasts past your next post.
For your edification, the 9/11 attacks were "from the you-can't-make-this-stuff-up dept". They've been keeping it classy for a long time. At least, nobody back then whined about it.
I should just be stating the obvious here, but parity between US and India hasn't been reached yet. Thus, any predictions which depend on parity being reached aren't yet valid. Cheap labor is not only going to contribute for decades to come, it will remain the most important dynamic over that time period.
Technological influences, on the other hand, mean that fewer workers of any price are required forevermore. We've seen this already in cases where manufacturing once thought lost to the USA has returned, but automated.
No, we haven't. I tend to agree that there is considerable mostly automated manufacture in the US, but I don't agree with the interpretation (which completely ignores what is going on in the rest of the world) that automation is destroying jobs permanently. Instead, if we look at the global scale, we continue to see job creation in concurrence with automation and continued movement of jobs between countries and whatnot.
We still see the centuries long progression of increasing value and wages of labor combined with increasing automation.
Here's some US examples: minimum wage, labor hour policy, H1-B, and a variety of low value benefits like Social Security and overpriced health insurance. The first rule of being trapped in a hole: don't dig it deeper.
Were it not for those, our air would be worse than China's, our water pretty much undrinkable, and we'd have no idea how much of that steak is cow and how much is roach.
Obviously, we only have the choices of complete anarchy or the current ridiculous morass of regulation (with new regulation applied faster than a human can read it). There can't possibly be any other choice here.
That must be why unemployment is a negative number and workforce participation is at an all time high while wages are rising faster than inflation across the board.
Workforce participation is increasing and I imagine it is at or near an all time high, though mostly due to increased participation by women. Wages are rising faster than inflation for at least two thirds of humanity, just not for the developed world.
OH, wait!, none of those things are happening.
I have to roll my eyes at such pronouncements. Have you never bothered to look? Have you never wondered how the rest of the world can slowly acquire the trappings of the developed world without accumulating wealth in the process?
If you really believe in markets, then you believe that demand for labor is down since any reasonable market theory would predict that given the figures.
Let's see these "figures" at the scale of the entire world.
If you believe demand for labor is up and yet we have unemployment and a depressed workforce participation and stagnant wages, then you clearly don't actually believe market theory.
Who is "we"? The developed world is not the world. You are looking at the wrong scale. The traditional model of supply and demand adequately explains the problem that the developed world has right now. Because of improving and liberalizing global trade, we now have a pool of labor effective much larger than we had in say, 1970, even including population growth. Any market theory would have told you that the price of labor would decline which in our complex world with all sorts of non-market tricks for shoring up wages, translates into declining labor power for any sector which is exposed to competition with the developing world.
Developed world capital has indeed increased with respect to developed world wages. Public sector labor unions have more power than private sector labor unions. The developed world has all sorts of problems with transfer of work to the developing world, automation, and mere closure of business, which the developing world doesn't have.
Some of use want to breathe clean air and drink clean water and eat safe food and not drink and bathe in a river that is basically a chemical dump. Companies, even regulated, will try to cheat (VW emissions, anyone?). Imagine what a race to the bottom an unregulated market would be...
Want != get. There are multiple conflicting wants here and most have one or more non-market regulatory kluges to realize that want in some way. The consequences are that everyone tries to route economic activity away from the zone of conflict.
This isn't a case of an unregulated market running untrammeled over the environment and workers of the US. It's a heavily regulated (in many ways) market which has a bunch of haphazard junk jammed into the gears.
I think we could have a better market for jobs that still maintains current levels of environmental, safety, and labor policy quality just by rethinking regulations so as to reduce the cost of them. It probably would still be a slowly sinking ship just due to the self-defeating and conflicting nature of the overall policies and programs that are funded, but IMHO things are so bad, that we're not even looking for low lying fruit to pick.
Totalitarian governments can collapse quickly when they collapse.
That's because they aren't stable.
Are you of the opinion that global warming-driven climate change won't have real-world effects? We've got it now, and it has some effects, and some of those affect the everyday world. It increases the frequency of droughts, and that decreases food supply, and that can have consequences.
I'm of the opinion that current and future consequences of AGW have been greatly exaggerated and overplayed.
Are you of the opinion that global warming-driven climate change won't have real-world effects? We've got it now, and it has some effects, and some of those affect the everyday world. It increases the frequency of droughts, and that decreases food supply, and that can have consequences.
Unless, of course, that isn't happening. That is the obvious rebuttal to an assertion made without supporting evidence.
As far as mitigation goes, there's things we can do relatively cheaply. It isn't a matter of either giving up fossil fuels altogether or doing nothing, at least not in anything like the short term.
Why doesn't the IPCC discuss the low lying fruit as an official strategy? Instead it's all discussion of the need to eliminate almost all greenhouse gases emissions by 2050 to avoid hitting an arbitrary CO2 equivalent concentration level. Where's the plan B?
When they end up with $5K in extra expenses travelling to both jobs, $10K in medical bills and $20K in lost income while they can't work due to health problems, and then having their home foreclosed because they can't pay the mortgage they got based on all this extra income that unexpectedly disappeared, it's not really a good deal after all.
Then they buy health insurance and resolve that problem. They end up with more money and the health care they want. It is amazing how people fail to understand the financial side of this or the perverse incentives that have been created over the years.
Only an idiot would turn down $100K/yr + benefits @ 40 hours a week vs $30/hr part time - through tax incentives (positive and negative) the government could make it more attractive for employers to offer jobs with benefits and good salaries (corporate tax credit for each employee earning more than a threshold amount, etc. etc.) but the way it is structured now, that's not happening.
but yes if you want to go there, wealth has been increasing world-wide. The reason it has is because there is a never ending search for ways to produce goods for less money. So far that has been achieved through both automation and finding sources of cheaper labor. That has elevated the level of wealth for people in those regions with cheap labor. But what is starting to happen is that even dirt cheap labor is becoming more expensive than automation. China's growth economic growth is slowing down for that reason.
That's been going on for centuries. You aren't describing anything new.
The choice to go to college? Not knowing which jobs will be automated 25 years from now?
No, making stupid choices.
I'm not saying it's anyone individual's fault. I'm saying that we are fast approaching a time where AI and robotics will replace humans at a faster rate than humans can retrained to do the work that's not already being done by machines. There is just less and less that people can do that machines can't do cheaper.
And I'm saying you have absolutely no supporting evidence for your opinion. The developing world doesn't have this problem you claim is a problem. It's only developed world countries which are trying really hard to keep people from being employed which supposedly have this problem.
Well, guess what. When you discourage a thing with higher cost and regulation, you get less of that thing. It's not magic.
If you're suddenly made redundant, a new job does not magically pop up elsewhere to accomodate you. The vast majority of people can not create jobs for themselves.
The mechanics may be slightly different than you say, but the outcome is the same.
Some think we've already passed that point, based on the fact that real earnings power in the USA has been declining since the 1980s.
That's because some people ignore labor competition from the developing world. Supply of labor increased, price of labor dropped. It's basic economics.
So no, throwing up our hands and claiming "the market will take care of it" doesn't suffice when the "product" is human beings. The market (and the economy it lives in) is a construct of man that should serve our needs, not the other way around. If the economy does not serve our needs, it must be changed.
Except markets are more than adequate at employing people as long as you don't grossly obstruct them. Let us recall here that all these complaints about how the markets aren't working come from parts of the world where regulators force huge costs and liabilities on employers. The market is not so all-powerful that it can thwart your attempts to break it.
I don't know. I don't think the job market for oxen and horses has ever really recovered.
They're still employed though. And you ignore that humans are a bit more flexible than oxen and horses.
The crux of your argument seems to be that automation has not lead to mass unemployment in the past, so why would it in the future? Why worry about it now?
I'd argue that while it hasn't lead to mass unemployment yet, it's more recently lead to under-employment and a decline in wealth for everyone except for an increasingly small number of people.
You could argue that, but that's not happening. Sure, there are a small wealthy portion of the world which does well no matter what. But most of the world's population has been getting wealthier and this trend has continued to the present.
Life's too short to trust in falsehoods.
Now to get a decent job, most people have got to spend a small fortune on a college education. Most skilled workers start their careers in serious debt. And of course as soon as they start working, they need to start saving for retirement because almost nobody has pensions anymore. Then somewhere down the line they will find that their skills are no longer relevant so they get spend a small fortune on college again, - while trying to save for the kids' college education and their retirement. That's even if a 50 year recent college grad can find work.
It's not my fault some college students made very poor life choices.
Yes, it's absurd that we have people expected to work 70-100 hours a week while laying off thousands, but that's because the current regulatory climate means that it's cheaper to keep one person working longer than 2 or 3 working less hours. Each new employee comes with a fixed overhead cost in addition to ongoing salary. That's probably one of the first things that should be addressed, but before that can happen you'll have to convince a lot of powerful people that they have to adjust the way they do things.
Because a lot of powerful people like paying lots of overhead per employee? Sure.
Which, since unions are so despised, means government is the only obvious alternative way to apply pressure to the less altruistic, and in turn, that means ending the current anti-regulatory mindset. The one that brought us the Great Recession and other wonderful things.
You claimed that regulation is the primary cause of the problem of overwork not the usual lack of altruism among employers. So why again are you advocating even more regulation and even more introduction of problems? This creates a perpetual cycle of failure where new poorly thought out regulation is created to patch over the failures in the previous generation of poorly thought out regulation.
It's also worth noting here that a lot of people do want to work long hours to the degree that when they can't find full time work, they work multiple part time jobs.
That's the elephant in the room. Economists (especially those who occupy armchairs or political office) have miossed that the industrialization that improved everyone's life in a free(-ish) market did so because there was a severe labor shortage and even then, it only worked out after a great deal of civil unrest including a number of fatal confrontations.
My belief is that there will be such a labor shortage again. The real elephant in this room is the fact that we are still seeing increasing demand for labor along with that increasing automation and increasing wages. This is the same trend that has been going on for centuries. It's just happening on a global scale rather than a developed world scale of the past.
The current industrial revolution is taking place during a labor surplus. Freeing humans from the need to labor is a laudible and achievable goal but the labor market and it's imaginary magical invisible hand isn't up to the task.
It's sad that people are so eager to discount the power of markets even when there's strong evidence the markets are working as advertised.
Slashdot Mirror
So what you are saying is that attacking civilian targets and killing many including children from a position of military power backed by a large government and from a nice safe distance is somehow OK but a bunch of seperarist religious nuts attacking civilians is unforgivable and the traction should be wars against reasonably moderate states?
What large government is attacking civilian targets? Just because there are civilians near a military target who are harmed or killed by a subsequent attack doesn't make the target a civilian target.
While on the other hand, it is quite clear that the Paris attacks targeted civilians without regard for any military justification.
And what wars against what "reasonably moderate" states?
Unless you see and agree both are horrific and needed to be addressed you are just part of the problem.
Horrific is a matter of degree. It's not a bit you set. I hope you think that killing 100 people in a concert is more horrific than wearing plaid and stripes, but I can't tell from your words how discerning you are. War ultimately is about not playing by rules. The more ethical rules you can actually get participants in a war to follow, the relatively more humane the war will be. But when such as in the case of ISIS, one party isn't following any rules to reduce harm to civilians, then you should expect lots of civilian deaths, no matter how horrific you find this sort of thing to be.
So you at least admit that there's no side worth fighting for.
Doesn't that make them cowards then for fleeing when they should be fighting for one of the sides?
You tell me which side they should be fighting for.
Refugees are mostly women and children, since danger at home puts them at the most risk. The invaders are mostly military age men, wearing designer clothes, talking on modern cell phones with no shortage of minutes, and apparently well enough fed that they can be picky about which food they accept as gifts.
When the danger is a shooting war in which women and children don't participate, then the military age men are the most at risk.
No, it wouldn't. Mass isn't cheap. But development of radically new spacecraft aren't either.
No the best hope for is that through education, and caring you can limit the numbers who support it.
I'm still hoping I can learn how not to die. Would be a useful life skill.
Peace won't happen now for centuries.
Something that fragile never existed in the first place.
Sorry, but the topic here is clearly the developed world at the moment. The first time I saw you re-defining terms and moving the goalposts when you were painted in a corner, it was mildly (very mildly) amusing, but now it is merely a waste of everyone's time, so shoo! Come back when you are ready to meaningfully contribute to the conversation.
When you speak in universal terms, there's only one set of goalposts that matter. And while it is nice that you suddenly care about rhetoric and rational debate. I only hope that concern lasts past your next post.
Why are there 90+ comments to a 45 minute old story?
Terrorism isn't an effective tool to achieve goals.
Except when it is. We'll see if there was any "clearly aim" terrorism present today.
For your edification, the 9/11 attacks were "from the you-can't-make-this-stuff-up dept". They've been keeping it classy for a long time. At least, nobody back then whined about it.
No, my position that the elites, that would be me, need to feed the ignorant masses, that would be you, to the hungry maws of our machine gods. /sarc
but eventually labor markets would reach parity
I should just be stating the obvious here, but parity between US and India hasn't been reached yet. Thus, any predictions which depend on parity being reached aren't yet valid. Cheap labor is not only going to contribute for decades to come, it will remain the most important dynamic over that time period.
Technological influences, on the other hand, mean that fewer workers of any price are required forevermore. We've seen this already in cases where manufacturing once thought lost to the USA has returned, but automated.
No, we haven't. I tend to agree that there is considerable mostly automated manufacture in the US, but I don't agree with the interpretation (which completely ignores what is going on in the rest of the world) that automation is destroying jobs permanently. Instead, if we look at the global scale, we continue to see job creation in concurrence with automation and continued movement of jobs between countries and whatnot.
We still see the centuries long progression of increasing value and wages of labor combined with increasing automation.
Were it not for those, our air would be worse than China's, our water pretty much undrinkable, and we'd have no idea how much of that steak is cow and how much is roach.
Obviously, we only have the choices of complete anarchy or the current ridiculous morass of regulation (with new regulation applied faster than a human can read it). There can't possibly be any other choice here.
That must be why unemployment is a negative number and workforce participation is at an all time high while wages are rising faster than inflation across the board.
Workforce participation is increasing and I imagine it is at or near an all time high, though mostly due to increased participation by women. Wages are rising faster than inflation for at least two thirds of humanity, just not for the developed world.
OH, wait!, none of those things are happening.
I have to roll my eyes at such pronouncements. Have you never bothered to look? Have you never wondered how the rest of the world can slowly acquire the trappings of the developed world without accumulating wealth in the process?
If you really believe in markets, then you believe that demand for labor is down since any reasonable market theory would predict that given the figures.
Let's see these "figures" at the scale of the entire world.
If you believe demand for labor is up and yet we have unemployment and a depressed workforce participation and stagnant wages, then you clearly don't actually believe market theory.
Who is "we"? The developed world is not the world. You are looking at the wrong scale. The traditional model of supply and demand adequately explains the problem that the developed world has right now. Because of improving and liberalizing global trade, we now have a pool of labor effective much larger than we had in say, 1970, even including population growth. Any market theory would have told you that the price of labor would decline which in our complex world with all sorts of non-market tricks for shoring up wages, translates into declining labor power for any sector which is exposed to competition with the developing world.
Developed world capital has indeed increased with respect to developed world wages. Public sector labor unions have more power than private sector labor unions. The developed world has all sorts of problems with transfer of work to the developing world, automation, and mere closure of business, which the developing world doesn't have.
Some of use want to breathe clean air and drink clean water and eat safe food and not drink and bathe in a river that is basically a chemical dump. Companies, even regulated, will try to cheat (VW emissions, anyone?). Imagine what a race to the bottom an unregulated market would be ...
Want != get. There are multiple conflicting wants here and most have one or more non-market regulatory kluges to realize that want in some way. The consequences are that everyone tries to route economic activity away from the zone of conflict.
This isn't a case of an unregulated market running untrammeled over the environment and workers of the US. It's a heavily regulated (in many ways) market which has a bunch of haphazard junk jammed into the gears.
I think we could have a better market for jobs that still maintains current levels of environmental, safety, and labor policy quality just by rethinking regulations so as to reduce the cost of them. It probably would still be a slowly sinking ship just due to the self-defeating and conflicting nature of the overall policies and programs that are funded, but IMHO things are so bad, that we're not even looking for low lying fruit to pick.
Totalitarian governments can collapse quickly when they collapse.
That's because they aren't stable.
Are you of the opinion that global warming-driven climate change won't have real-world effects? We've got it now, and it has some effects, and some of those affect the everyday world. It increases the frequency of droughts, and that decreases food supply, and that can have consequences.
I'm of the opinion that current and future consequences of AGW have been greatly exaggerated and overplayed.
Are you of the opinion that global warming-driven climate change won't have real-world effects? We've got it now, and it has some effects, and some of those affect the everyday world. It increases the frequency of droughts, and that decreases food supply, and that can have consequences.
Unless, of course, that isn't happening. That is the obvious rebuttal to an assertion made without supporting evidence.
As far as mitigation goes, there's things we can do relatively cheaply. It isn't a matter of either giving up fossil fuels altogether or doing nothing, at least not in anything like the short term.
Why doesn't the IPCC discuss the low lying fruit as an official strategy? Instead it's all discussion of the need to eliminate almost all greenhouse gases emissions by 2050 to avoid hitting an arbitrary CO2 equivalent concentration level. Where's the plan B?
When they end up with $5K in extra expenses travelling to both jobs, $10K in medical bills and $20K in lost income while they can't work due to health problems, and then having their home foreclosed because they can't pay the mortgage they got based on all this extra income that unexpectedly disappeared, it's not really a good deal after all.
Then they buy health insurance and resolve that problem. They end up with more money and the health care they want. It is amazing how people fail to understand the financial side of this or the perverse incentives that have been created over the years.
Only an idiot would turn down $100K/yr + benefits @ 40 hours a week vs $30/hr part time - through tax incentives (positive and negative) the government could make it more attractive for employers to offer jobs with benefits and good salaries (corporate tax credit for each employee earning more than a threshold amount, etc. etc.) but the way it is structured now, that's not happening.
So what? I'm not going to pay you more either.
I was talking about the US in particular,
Exactly my point. Your outlook was provincial.
but yes if you want to go there, wealth has been increasing world-wide. The reason it has is because there is a never ending search for ways to produce goods for less money. So far that has been achieved through both automation and finding sources of cheaper labor. That has elevated the level of wealth for people in those regions with cheap labor. But what is starting to happen is that even dirt cheap labor is becoming more expensive than automation. China's growth economic growth is slowing down for that reason.
That's been going on for centuries. You aren't describing anything new.
The choice to go to college? Not knowing which jobs will be automated 25 years from now?
No, making stupid choices.
I'm not saying it's anyone individual's fault. I'm saying that we are fast approaching a time where AI and robotics will replace humans at a faster rate than humans can retrained to do the work that's not already being done by machines. There is just less and less that people can do that machines can't do cheaper.
And I'm saying you have absolutely no supporting evidence for your opinion. The developing world doesn't have this problem you claim is a problem. It's only developed world countries which are trying really hard to keep people from being employed which supposedly have this problem.
Well, guess what. When you discourage a thing with higher cost and regulation, you get less of that thing. It's not magic.
...it's like they don't even realize a problem exists.
You might want to think about why that happens when there is so much evidence of the problem online and in the news.
If you're suddenly made redundant, a new job does not magically pop up elsewhere to accomodate you. The vast majority of people can not create jobs for themselves.
The mechanics may be slightly different than you say, but the outcome is the same.
Some think we've already passed that point, based on the fact that real earnings power in the USA has been declining since the 1980s.
That's because some people ignore labor competition from the developing world. Supply of labor increased, price of labor dropped. It's basic economics.
So no, throwing up our hands and claiming "the market will take care of it" doesn't suffice when the "product" is human beings. The market (and the economy it lives in) is a construct of man that should serve our needs, not the other way around. If the economy does not serve our needs, it must be changed.
Except markets are more than adequate at employing people as long as you don't grossly obstruct them. Let us recall here that all these complaints about how the markets aren't working come from parts of the world where regulators force huge costs and liabilities on employers. The market is not so all-powerful that it can thwart your attempts to break it.
I don't know. I don't think the job market for oxen and horses has ever really recovered.
They're still employed though. And you ignore that humans are a bit more flexible than oxen and horses.
The crux of your argument seems to be that automation has not lead to mass unemployment in the past, so why would it in the future? Why worry about it now?
I'd argue that while it hasn't lead to mass unemployment yet, it's more recently lead to under-employment and a decline in wealth for everyone except for an increasingly small number of people.
You could argue that, but that's not happening. Sure, there are a small wealthy portion of the world which does well no matter what. But most of the world's population has been getting wealthier and this trend has continued to the present.
Life's too short to trust in falsehoods.
Now to get a decent job, most people have got to spend a small fortune on a college education. Most skilled workers start their careers in serious debt. And of course as soon as they start working, they need to start saving for retirement because almost nobody has pensions anymore. Then somewhere down the line they will find that their skills are no longer relevant so they get spend a small fortune on college again, - while trying to save for the kids' college education and their retirement. That's even if a 50 year recent college grad can find work.
It's not my fault some college students made very poor life choices.
Yes, it's absurd that we have people expected to work 70-100 hours a week while laying off thousands, but that's because the current regulatory climate means that it's cheaper to keep one person working longer than 2 or 3 working less hours. Each new employee comes with a fixed overhead cost in addition to ongoing salary. That's probably one of the first things that should be addressed, but before that can happen you'll have to convince a lot of powerful people that they have to adjust the way they do things.
Because a lot of powerful people like paying lots of overhead per employee? Sure.
Which, since unions are so despised, means government is the only obvious alternative way to apply pressure to the less altruistic, and in turn, that means ending the current anti-regulatory mindset. The one that brought us the Great Recession and other wonderful things.
You claimed that regulation is the primary cause of the problem of overwork not the usual lack of altruism among employers. So why again are you advocating even more regulation and even more introduction of problems? This creates a perpetual cycle of failure where new poorly thought out regulation is created to patch over the failures in the previous generation of poorly thought out regulation.
It's also worth noting here that a lot of people do want to work long hours to the degree that when they can't find full time work, they work multiple part time jobs.
That's the elephant in the room. Economists (especially those who occupy armchairs or political office) have miossed that the industrialization that improved everyone's life in a free(-ish) market did so because there was a severe labor shortage and even then, it only worked out after a great deal of civil unrest including a number of fatal confrontations.
My belief is that there will be such a labor shortage again. The real elephant in this room is the fact that we are still seeing increasing demand for labor along with that increasing automation and increasing wages. This is the same trend that has been going on for centuries. It's just happening on a global scale rather than a developed world scale of the past.
The current industrial revolution is taking place during a labor surplus. Freeing humans from the need to labor is a laudible and achievable goal but the labor market and it's imaginary magical invisible hand isn't up to the task.
It's sad that people are so eager to discount the power of markets even when there's strong evidence the markets are working as advertised.