You know what happens if I insist that my software vendor put out a non-Windows version of their software? Absolutely nothing. You know what happens if I insist on not using Windows-only software? I render myself less employable, including missing out on some really good jobs, and that's pretty much it. You know what happens if I look for alternatives to Windows-only software? Sometimes I'll find something that works great, sometimes I'll find something half-assed, and sometimes I'll find nothing at all satisfactory. You know what happens if I insist on writing software to make up the gaps? I starve.
Your attitude is almost stamped "sent from Mom's basement". There is a real world, and it doesn't work the way you seem to think. There are people who really do have to earn a living, and they have to make compromises.
Hate speech, such as indiscriminate derogatory use of "SJW" for leftists, does have a meaning. It doesn't have any legal importance in the US, except possibly as circumstances modifying the penalty assessed for an existing illegal action..
Anyone who criticized Bush II was called unpatriotic. I got called a "black propagandist" for disagreeing with the Bush-accepted interpretations of UN Security Council resolutions. In some respects, it's the coolest thing anyone's ever called me, but I digress.
However, I saw plenty of criticism of Obama, regardless of what the insult du jour for dissenters was. Heck, I criticized the guy myself sometimes.
Whether losing one's investments is a disaster or not depends on the situation. I've lost some, but I was capable of earning more at the time. In the not-too-distant future, I'm going to retire, and then losing investments is going to matter a whole lot more. In this case, we're talking about people who can't earn a decent living, and whose life depends on their investment income.
Labor is only cost-effective against increasing automation if it involves more and more grinding poverty. There's a limit, based on cost of living, of how cheap labor can be. Automation doesn't have to be free, it just has to be less expensive than humans, and there's no reason more advanced automation won't cost less and less. If automation can make widgets at an amortized cost of $1/widget, and that increases as you add minimum-wage humans, nobody's going to hire the human. This is completely independent of anything the government does. Removing government isn't some magic that makes humans worth more.
We may have a generation gap here. When I think of Star Trek, I generally think of the original series. That Enterprise was a warship, although it was only rarely used as such.
GDP is a measure of production, and GDP per capita is a measure of productivity. Production and productivity can increase without giving any particular individual a boost. If it all goes to the upper 10%, the median doesn't change. You seem to think that GDP per capita is what the average person can spend. If your productivity goes up, and you don't get paid more in constant dollars, you don't get any more for your work. Obviously, somebody else does.
We have the idea of constant or inflation-adjusted dollars. This is always going to be a bit iffy and something of a judgment call, but it's useful. Median income in constant dollars is probably the best single number to indicate average income. GDP does not enter into that. Given constant income in constant dollars, it doesn't matter how the GDP changes.
As far as Ahmed Mohamed goes, in what sense was it a fake bomb? It was clearly not a bomb, since his English teacher confiscated it and put it in her desk drawer. He never claimed it was a bomb. I'd think that a fake bomb would either look enough like a bomb to cause a teacher to call for an evacuation, or have someone claim it was a bomb.
If it had been a real bomb, that English class would have been in grave danger, whether or not the police got involved.
There is no set of assumptions under which the reaction was justified. If it looked like it might be a bomb, the school authorities screwed up big-time. If it didn't, the police should not have been involved.
It's perfectly reasonable to support BLM, although that doesn't include supporting certain activities done in the name of BLM. There's a real problem out there, and with every unjustified killing of a black going unprosecuted or unconvicted it gets worse.
In the US, if you actually work for a living, you get hit by FICA taxes. Income taxes are generally the most progressive out there, so it's disingenuous to look at them alone.
And, if their investments prove insufficient, they can just die, and they'll go quietly. Right.
Comparing UBI to Communism, and saying Communism is known not to work, is simply playing word games. A UBI is not what, say, the Soviet Union provided. The economic circumstances it would make sense in are far different from the circumstances Communist governments were in.
A lot of intelligent people have worked hard on finding good comparisons across time and/or economies. It's difficult. If the numbers don't make sense at a glance, look at them harder. The fault is more likely to be with you than with the numbers.
In your example, you're using median household income and GDP per capita as if they were equivalent. They aren't. Median income is what the average household makes, but per capita income is not by itself indicative of what individuals can buy. You have to consider the income distribution. If the upper decile suddenly gets a 10)% raise, the per capita GDP has gone up 10%, and the median income doesn't show any change. In fact, income for the upper classes has been increasing much more than income for the lower classes, It wasn't true that the median income could buy the equivalent of $31K per capita, or that it can by the equivalent of $57K per capita. (Also, the median household income is different from the median personal income by a factor of the average number of people in a household, which can change over time.)
Internet access has become, to many people, a necessity like telephone service. It's no longer just a luxury. The cost of necessities has not been going down like that of certain luxuries.
It's not a collectivist postcapitalist society. The Enterprise is, economically, a warship, and everybody gets what they need because the Federation government is paying for it, and there's really not much you can personally own on even a spacious warship.
If you beam down somewhere, you've got a good chance of being somewhere where capitalism still works. I think the best example is "The Trouble with Tribbles", where we see Cyrano Jones, a wandering trader who's always after a fast credit and doesn't have enough money to get moderately drunk at the station's bar.
And it will be cheaper in almost all cases to provide the AI with a machine to do the work, rather than that idiot who has to be slowly coached through doing things not necessarily well.
It seems to me that you're completely missing the point.
It is very possible that we will soon have hundreds of millions of people who just can't find work, because the work they can do is either automated away or in low demand. That's the idea this discussion is based on. I'm not saying it's definitely going to happen, just that it's reasonably probable. This leaves us with hundreds of millions who would, under the current economic system, be desperate and starving. They aren't going to die quietly.
Your upthread example seems to assume that it's a burden on A and B to produce for C. Given sufficiently good automation, it really isn't.
The idea of buying in for dividends isn't going to work. If every citizen automatically gets a share, we've got the UBI under a different name. If it's necessary to invest, we'll see people winding up with no money and no way to get money...and we're back at starving masses who aren't just going to go away. People with insufficient dividends to live on will wind up selling their investment and impoverishing themselves and their descendants.
You're referring to one incident in which not-well-trained National Guard troops felt threatened. It's stayed in the national consciousness as something to avoid. I don't think it demonstrates anything any more.
If you're offering a standard guaranteed job teaching, you'll soon find that you have far too many teachers, many of whom have no talent or fondness for the job and will do a bad job. The Peace Corps idea has serious problems: will we be sending a hundred and fifty million people out of the country to tell other people how to run things? Do we want a permanent large diaspora? What happens when less developed countries start to catch up, and don't want two million Americans around?
The WPA actually did do a lot of useful work Probably relatively little of it would have been done without the need to employ people, but it wasn't makework.
That would apply to people who work a standard work week, and who are basically interchangeable. Cutting a software developer's week down to 20 hours and hiring another one isn't going to get anywhere near the same productivity. It isn't going to affect anyone who doesn't, for whatever reason, work a standard 40-hour week for an employer. Lots of people don't work for an employer, and, if people can be sure of a basic living no matter what, more people would try it.
You know, I work a demanding job that pays well. One reason I like it is that I have more money than most people. I like having money. Lots of people do.
Are you assuming, for some strange reason, that Basic Income would be all the income people would get? That would be incredibly stupid. Under a Basic Income scheme, you get enough to live on, plus whatever more you earn.
It does mean that people won't have to do arduous, dangerous, or demeaning jobs for minimum wage. They'd have to be better paid.
I've found Apple Maps to be pretty reliable recently (although there was that left turn on Chicago Avenue I don't understand). It had serious problems when they introduced it, but it's been improving.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that a private online forum should not have Liberty, but has to play by your rules?
You know what happens if I insist that my software vendor put out a non-Windows version of their software? Absolutely nothing. You know what happens if I insist on not using Windows-only software? I render myself less employable, including missing out on some really good jobs, and that's pretty much it. You know what happens if I look for alternatives to Windows-only software? Sometimes I'll find something that works great, sometimes I'll find something half-assed, and sometimes I'll find nothing at all satisfactory. You know what happens if I insist on writing software to make up the gaps? I starve.
Your attitude is almost stamped "sent from Mom's basement". There is a real world, and it doesn't work the way you seem to think. There are people who really do have to earn a living, and they have to make compromises.
I don't see that we're disagreeing.
Hate speech, such as indiscriminate derogatory use of "SJW" for leftists, does have a meaning. It doesn't have any legal importance in the US, except possibly as circumstances modifying the penalty assessed for an existing illegal action..
Anyone who criticized Bush II was called unpatriotic. I got called a "black propagandist" for disagreeing with the Bush-accepted interpretations of UN Security Council resolutions. In some respects, it's the coolest thing anyone's ever called me, but I digress.
However, I saw plenty of criticism of Obama, regardless of what the insult du jour for dissenters was. Heck, I criticized the guy myself sometimes.
Whether losing one's investments is a disaster or not depends on the situation. I've lost some, but I was capable of earning more at the time. In the not-too-distant future, I'm going to retire, and then losing investments is going to matter a whole lot more. In this case, we're talking about people who can't earn a decent living, and whose life depends on their investment income.
Labor is only cost-effective against increasing automation if it involves more and more grinding poverty. There's a limit, based on cost of living, of how cheap labor can be. Automation doesn't have to be free, it just has to be less expensive than humans, and there's no reason more advanced automation won't cost less and less. If automation can make widgets at an amortized cost of $1/widget, and that increases as you add minimum-wage humans, nobody's going to hire the human. This is completely independent of anything the government does. Removing government isn't some magic that makes humans worth more.
We may have a generation gap here. When I think of Star Trek, I generally think of the original series. That Enterprise was a warship, although it was only rarely used as such.
GDP is a measure of production, and GDP per capita is a measure of productivity. Production and productivity can increase without giving any particular individual a boost. If it all goes to the upper 10%, the median doesn't change. You seem to think that GDP per capita is what the average person can spend. If your productivity goes up, and you don't get paid more in constant dollars, you don't get any more for your work. Obviously, somebody else does.
We have the idea of constant or inflation-adjusted dollars. This is always going to be a bit iffy and something of a judgment call, but it's useful. Median income in constant dollars is probably the best single number to indicate average income. GDP does not enter into that. Given constant income in constant dollars, it doesn't matter how the GDP changes.
As far as Ahmed Mohamed goes, in what sense was it a fake bomb? It was clearly not a bomb, since his English teacher confiscated it and put it in her desk drawer. He never claimed it was a bomb. I'd think that a fake bomb would either look enough like a bomb to cause a teacher to call for an evacuation, or have someone claim it was a bomb.
If it had been a real bomb, that English class would have been in grave danger, whether or not the police got involved.
There is no set of assumptions under which the reaction was justified. If it looked like it might be a bomb, the school authorities screwed up big-time. If it didn't, the police should not have been involved.
It's perfectly reasonable to support BLM, although that doesn't include supporting certain activities done in the name of BLM. There's a real problem out there, and with every unjustified killing of a black going unprosecuted or unconvicted it gets worse.
That depends on where you live. Salaries vary widely by area. So do costs of living.
In the US, if you actually work for a living, you get hit by FICA taxes. Income taxes are generally the most progressive out there, so it's disingenuous to look at them alone.
And, if their investments prove insufficient, they can just die, and they'll go quietly. Right.
Comparing UBI to Communism, and saying Communism is known not to work, is simply playing word games. A UBI is not what, say, the Soviet Union provided. The economic circumstances it would make sense in are far different from the circumstances Communist governments were in.
A lot of intelligent people have worked hard on finding good comparisons across time and/or economies. It's difficult. If the numbers don't make sense at a glance, look at them harder. The fault is more likely to be with you than with the numbers.
In your example, you're using median household income and GDP per capita as if they were equivalent. They aren't. Median income is what the average household makes, but per capita income is not by itself indicative of what individuals can buy. You have to consider the income distribution. If the upper decile suddenly gets a 10)% raise, the per capita GDP has gone up 10%, and the median income doesn't show any change. In fact, income for the upper classes has been increasing much more than income for the lower classes, It wasn't true that the median income could buy the equivalent of $31K per capita, or that it can by the equivalent of $57K per capita. (Also, the median household income is different from the median personal income by a factor of the average number of people in a household, which can change over time.)
Internet access has become, to many people, a necessity like telephone service. It's no longer just a luxury. The cost of necessities has not been going down like that of certain luxuries.
Raw material essentially costs what it takes to extract it. Given automated mines and farms, that cost goes down.
It's not a collectivist postcapitalist society. The Enterprise is, economically, a warship, and everybody gets what they need because the Federation government is paying for it, and there's really not much you can personally own on even a spacious warship.
If you beam down somewhere, you've got a good chance of being somewhere where capitalism still works. I think the best example is "The Trouble with Tribbles", where we see Cyrano Jones, a wandering trader who's always after a fast credit and doesn't have enough money to get moderately drunk at the station's bar.
Yeah, but for that law to catch on you're going to have to change your name to something easier to say.
And it will be cheaper in almost all cases to provide the AI with a machine to do the work, rather than that idiot who has to be slowly coached through doing things not necessarily well.
It seems to me that you're completely missing the point.
It is very possible that we will soon have hundreds of millions of people who just can't find work, because the work they can do is either automated away or in low demand. That's the idea this discussion is based on. I'm not saying it's definitely going to happen, just that it's reasonably probable. This leaves us with hundreds of millions who would, under the current economic system, be desperate and starving. They aren't going to die quietly.
Your upthread example seems to assume that it's a burden on A and B to produce for C. Given sufficiently good automation, it really isn't.
The idea of buying in for dividends isn't going to work. If every citizen automatically gets a share, we've got the UBI under a different name. If it's necessary to invest, we'll see people winding up with no money and no way to get money...and we're back at starving masses who aren't just going to go away. People with insufficient dividends to live on will wind up selling their investment and impoverishing themselves and their descendants.
You're referring to one incident in which not-well-trained National Guard troops felt threatened. It's stayed in the national consciousness as something to avoid. I don't think it demonstrates anything any more.
If you're offering a standard guaranteed job teaching, you'll soon find that you have far too many teachers, many of whom have no talent or fondness for the job and will do a bad job. The Peace Corps idea has serious problems: will we be sending a hundred and fifty million people out of the country to tell other people how to run things? Do we want a permanent large diaspora? What happens when less developed countries start to catch up, and don't want two million Americans around?
The WPA actually did do a lot of useful work Probably relatively little of it would have been done without the need to employ people, but it wasn't makework.
That would apply to people who work a standard work week, and who are basically interchangeable. Cutting a software developer's week down to 20 hours and hiring another one isn't going to get anywhere near the same productivity. It isn't going to affect anyone who doesn't, for whatever reason, work a standard 40-hour week for an employer. Lots of people don't work for an employer, and, if people can be sure of a basic living no matter what, more people would try it.
How about we take a look at demographics, and be careful about discouraging people from having babies until it's somewhere near replacement level?
You know, I work a demanding job that pays well. One reason I like it is that I have more money than most people. I like having money. Lots of people do.
Are you assuming, for some strange reason, that Basic Income would be all the income people would get? That would be incredibly stupid. Under a Basic Income scheme, you get enough to live on, plus whatever more you earn.
It does mean that people won't have to do arduous, dangerous, or demeaning jobs for minimum wage. They'd have to be better paid.
What are you talking about? Don't you like the tense fifteen minutes in which football is played after the two-minute warning?
I've found Apple Maps to be pretty reliable recently (although there was that left turn on Chicago Avenue I don't understand). It had serious problems when they introduced it, but it's been improving.