The problem is capitalism. Games used to be shareable like ideas.
This is the part where capitalism, AKA a free market system was in effect. This is what we call it when people make agreements with each other to exchange things like games and then can do what they want with what they each get.
Somehow someone decided that they should continue getting payment everytime someone plays their game or uses their idea. I no longer own things I purchase and am instead borrowing them.
This is the part where you're complaining about how some people decided to get together and force other people to do stuff they didn't want to by virtue of their numbers and force of arms. In common parlance, that's your local monopoly government in action, paying off their supporters/friends. This has nothing to do with capitalism, nor with free markets. Instead, it's what happens when people allow a government to take over so many parts of life that the people who want power and wealth switch their efforts to persuading the politicians and the bureaucrats to force people to do what they want in the form of laws and regulations rather than needing to convince other people to make mutually beneficial voluntary agreements with them. As outlined in Hayek's book, this is the inevitable result of allowing a government more and more economic power.
Facebook should just ban any advertising or news on their platform mentioning members of the city council positively.
I mean, after all, as long as they are going to have to go through the trouble and expense of setting something up to figure out which advertising might be considered political and may affect city elections, they could just tack that policy on to make good use of it. Alternately, they could just move all offices and employees out of the State and then point to the Interstate Commerce Clause.
Back in the non-seattle-normal-world, advertisers are sometimes required to include who paid for an ad in their ad, but they people they pay to show the advertisement aren't setup to become the arbiters of what is a political ad and what isn't and trace who paid for what. How are they supposed to know if someone's post in support of a politician on their Facebook page is paid advertising or free publicity, for example?
The history of electrical utilities is that as soon as the government lightened up regulations to allow more competition, more competition happened. That's a pretty strong argument that it's been the regulation saying no one is allowed to compete in an area driving the lack of competition, not the other way around. Electrical generation is a lot more competitive now that the government allows it. The government still enforces local monopolies in electrical distribution. Why do they need to make that legally enforced if it's a natural monopoly, meaning no competition would arise if it wasn't illegal? Back in reality, there is still competition creeping in from local solar and natural gas installations who setup right where the power is needed, rather than using the monopolized distribution lines. It's pretty bold to claim "No competition could naturally arise, so therefore we must make any competition illegal!" That contradicts itself, as there would be no need to make competition illegal if it was actually a case of a natural monopoly.
At current pay rates the industry is short 36,500 drivers. That's projected to get worse over time as the current drivers age out, because they're having a more and more difficult time replacing them with new drivers. Long haul trucking is a lousy long-term job, with many drivers away from home as much as 200 days out of the year. Those drivers would much rather work local routes, where they can go home at night.
Effectively, the efficiency gains from self-driving trucks comes from "team" driving and convoys. Instead of a real "team", the driver can sleep on the road as-if there is another driver, but use automation instead to create the required rest breaks. Between popular hubs, one of those single-driver "teams" can run the lead truck while several other trucks are programmed to automatically follow. Just being able to follow like that reduces fuel costs for a convoy of five trucks by 6%.
In the end, every expert I talked to for this story, from the teamsters to academia, believes that the broad strokes of Uber’s analysis have some merit and represent a potential positive path for autonomous trucking to play in the labor market.
You know a staff writer for a left-wing magazine who is (for example) the author of "Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology" is going to do anything they can to come up with arguments to dispute Uber's study. He talked to the Teamsters Union and left-wing academics and couldn't find anyone who could find big flaws in the study.
I'll just note here that the Slashdot editor rewrote the headline and both paragraphs, mostly to insert a lot more quotes from The Atlantic. One sentence of the original submission was kept by BeauHD. So in terms of how the sausage is made, it's not for lack of editorial involvement with the story.
If an unregulated market results in monopolies, how come the closest things we have to longer term monopolies in the U.S. are all the result of government laws and regulations, but we don't have any monopolies which aren't being enforced by government regulation? Empirical reality doesn't match your assertion, but it does match economic theory.
Higher levels of regulations are what economists call a barrier to entry. Barriers to entry reduce competition, they don't increase it. Large companies love regulatory barriers to entry because they can afford to siphon off some overhead to deal with it, while they know a startup trying to compete with them doesn't have the extra cash and established expertise lying around to deal with all the regulations they have to comply with. Not to mention that regulations are written (with the help of industry insiders) to assume things will be done how the large companies already do them, creating a barrier to someone coming along and doing things differently and changing the business model on them.
At least learn to read the thread on the page right in front of you before suggesting someone learn to use a search engine.
Also, percent of GDP as a way to compare the price of virtually anything is ridiculous and only serves to attempt to obscure things. We don't compare prices and spending on most products as percent of GDP, we compare the actual cost. When is the last time someone asked you: How much is your rent as a percent of GDP? How much is a loaf of bread as a percent of GDP? What does a pencil cost in percent of GDP? That's stupid.
I looked at all your links. None of them provide any evidence that single-payer reduced spending when implemented. You keep trying to change the topic to the fact that the U.S. spends more than other countries, but that's not something we've ever disagreed on in this thread. To recap, the discussion is about "why", which you apparently have no knowledge of and no evidence of beyond your own opinion which contradicts the experience of every country which has implemented it.
From the lists I could find online, it appears that the prominent people who have been caught up in the #metoo accusations in 2017 run somewhere between 25-1 or 50-1 in favor of left-wingers and Democrats vs. conservatives/Republicans. They're almost all in left-wing dominated industries, as well.
It's gotten to the point where I actually have a little more sympathy for left-wing accusations of sexual harassment based on the fact that maybe instead of exaggerating, they're just describing their personal experience with how it works in left-wing dominated places like Hollywood, the media, the Democratic Party and academia and the right-wingers just don't understand as much because they don't experience it as much in their institutions.
But it's crazy the left gives Hillary Clinton any credibility at all when it comes to sexual harassment and rape reports, when she's been one of the most consistent enablers out there (for Bill, and Weinstein, and in her own campaign), yet still claims as recently as yesterday that “For most of my life, harassment wasn’t something talked about or even acknowledged.” The article goes on to mention "Except for the bulk of the 1990s, when her husband was accused by multiple women of harassment and by one of rape and Hillary worked to publicly discredit them. Other than that, no knowledge."
Been seeing a lot of headlines like these lately which essentially consist of "Trump Administration attempting to keep campaign promise he made to the people who elected him, journalists shocked they would dare to do that!"
The law of diminishing returns means that as scientific knowledge increases in a field over time, there are less and less of the easier ground-breaking bug discoveries to be made. The big jumps instead tend to come from discovering new fields of study and trans-formative technologies which affect lots of things all at once.
Goal-oriented research, like that the government primarily funds, is the worst kind for making big advances. It's better for small, incremental information. Most big advances end up being something accidental when someone says, "Hmmm... that's weird...." when noticing something unexpected. Directed research tends to just fulfill the bureaucratic terms it's setup for.
We established (including via your links) that single-payer hasn't reduced spending from the pre-single-payer system anywhere else it's been tried. So you're going to have to define "worked" as something other than that if you want to claim switching to single-payer "worked" everywhere.
The primary causes of higher health care spending in the U.S.: 1. People in the U.S. are wealthier. Wealthier people demand, consume and pay for more health care than poorer people who have to prioritize spending on other things first. This is why, for example, people in India spend so much less on books than people in the United States and Indian books which are purchased tend to be lower quality (cheaper paper, bindings, etc...) in order to keep them less expensive. 2. The government in conjunction with the AMA restrict the entry of new providers into the marking, significantly reducing the supply. This is via requirements for practicing (especially those which don't recognize medical training or experience from other countries) and limiting residency spots. 3. The government distorts the health care market via laws, regulations and rules. This includes things like the tax law incentivizing employer-based insurance groups, restrictions on competition between health insurance providers, restrictions preventing opening new hospitals to compete with old ones, restrictions on what someone can purchase in terms of health insurance, medicare/medicaid/va-related distortions, etc... 4. The FDA regulatory process, especially requiring testing for efficacy (not just safety), requiring double-testing (no reason a drug or device which has proven safe in Europe has to start all over in the U.S., to give one wastefule example), ridiculous definitions and rules for "medical" devices.
Try to provide evidence of your assertions, rather than taking a point-in-time correlation and trying to turn it into causation because it fits your preconceived notions.
Also, we were talking about spending levels, not about "costs". There is a difference between the two concepts.
Either way, looking at this chart, can you tell when Australia (to use your example) introduced single-payer? How about any of the other countries? Guess what, their spending per capita went up after introducing single-payer, not down. There's no reason, nor evidence, to suggest the experience in the U.S. would be different. The economic evidence is that costs would go up after switching to single-payer.
Stating you don't actually know something, then drawing a conclusion from your lack of knowledge is an interesting approach, but if you read the rest of the thread, you'd note that spending wasn't reduced by introducing single-payer elsewhere, so there is no reason it would be reduced in the United States by introducing single-payer. (Also, we're talking about spending. "Costs" is a different concept, because it doesn't reflect the interaction of demand vs supply which determines spending.)
"Slowing an increase over a period of years is also known as" speculation.
You've never addresses the original fact that the U.S. spends more on most everything. For example, education. You haven't provided any evidence that single-payer plans would save money in the U.S. Simply saying one of the many difference between countries is single-payer or not and one of the other differences is how much a country spends isn't evidence of anything., it's an unsupported claim to relate them causally.
So if as you state, no other country had their health care costs cut in half (or even decreased) when they switched to single-payer, then you've pretty conclusively proven empirically that there is no reason to think your original assertion that health care costs would be cut in half if the U.S. switched to single-payer is true. Thanks for confirming that for us.
If you want to discuss why the U.S. spends more on health care than other countries, you'll want to come up with something which explains why the U.S. spends more on just about everything than other countries. Or alternately, what are the things driving up health care costs in the United States. Guess what? Laws and regulations are the largest component of why health care is expensive in the U.S. (And please don't cite people who were completely wrong about what Obamacare would do to costs to try and argue otherwise, they've already discredited themselves on the subject.)
Trying to show causation between having a single-payer system and lower costs requires you to actually show empirical evidence that it was single-payer which makes a difference. Otherwise, you might as well claim that countries without as many paved roads causes health spending to be lower, which happens to be a true correlation, but doesn't mean much in terms of causation.
You apparently missed the whole point. No one was arguing about how much each country spends. The point was that switching to single-payer or not isn't a factor which explains the difference in spending in different countries.
Has it occurred to you to look at countries which switched to single-payer and compare their spending levels before and after the switch? What you'll find is that they didn't save money, in fact, they generally increased spending. So what's your evidence a switch in the U.S. would be a special case which would save money?
Countries with actual single payer systems spend half or less per capita with better outcomes for all.
This is a misnomer. You can't compare spending in the U.S. to spending in other countries on just about anything. Spending levels in most countries are driven by wealth levels, AKA, the wealth available to purchase things. For example, the U.S. spends 40% more per student than the OECD average. That in turn is way more than third world countries spend. The U.S. spends more on books, houses, cars, air conditioners, etc... primarily because the U.S. is wealthier and wealthier people spend more on most stuff.
In the U.S., Doctors make more (and their numbers are artificially limited), drug companies spend more on researching new drugs and on getting them through the FDA's hoops, people and insurance companies are willing to spend more (i.e. there is more demand for services), etc... You can change or tweak many of those things, but going to single-payer isn't some magical fix which will create more Doctors and provide more actual healthcare.
Yeah, most of the articles on this emphasize "songwriters", but when you look into the details, it's actually the labels and publishers who get an increased percentage and if someone who actually wrote or performed the song gets any more money it'll mostly be because of the details of their contract after the labels and publishers get their cut. So to call this an increase for "songwriters" is fairly misleading. At best, an increase for rights-holders and music distribution/promotion managers.
Either way, it doesn't matter if automation uses more energy. It'll either happen (and use the energy), or it won't, based on the availability. If it does as part of a normal market process, then people will find other things to do in order to produce even more wealth instead of whatever gets automated and we'll all be wealthier as a result.
After automation and technological improvements, now only 5% (or less) of the population of rich countries work in agriculture and food is cheaper than it ever was, to the point no one starves because no one can afford to feed them, but only when there is someone preventing food from physically reaching them.
We've been down the path of massive automation before and it's resulted in better lives for everyone. Please now show us a counter-example of where automation and technological advance affected a massive number of people's jobs and those people are still around without any ability to earn anything or starved to death as a result.
You forgot to add that US attack subs and various deployed sonar systems from ships, planes and undersea installations routinely follow all Russian subs from the time the leave their base to the time they return. It's not difficult, as there aren't very many of them any more and it gives the attack sub commanders something to do.
Like you say, this is more of an imagined threat than a real one.
Entitlement payments aren't part of this "shutdown", which is basically they close the officially non-essential parts of the government and everyone else keeps on working and they pay some of them later once funding is authorized to make it up.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the part where capitalism, AKA a free market system was in effect. This is what we call it when people make agreements with each other to exchange things like games and then can do what they want with what they each get.
This is the part where you're complaining about how some people decided to get together and force other people to do stuff they didn't want to by virtue of their numbers and force of arms. In common parlance, that's your local monopoly government in action, paying off their supporters/friends. This has nothing to do with capitalism, nor with free markets. Instead, it's what happens when people allow a government to take over so many parts of life that the people who want power and wealth switch their efforts to persuading the politicians and the bureaucrats to force people to do what they want in the form of laws and regulations rather than needing to convince other people to make mutually beneficial voluntary agreements with them. As outlined in Hayek's book, this is the inevitable result of allowing a government more and more economic power.
Facebook should just ban any advertising or news on their platform mentioning members of the city council positively.
I mean, after all, as long as they are going to have to go through the trouble and expense of setting something up to figure out which advertising might be considered political and may affect city elections, they could just tack that policy on to make good use of it. Alternately, they could just move all offices and employees out of the State and then point to the Interstate Commerce Clause.
Back in the non-seattle-normal-world, advertisers are sometimes required to include who paid for an ad in their ad, but they people they pay to show the advertisement aren't setup to become the arbiters of what is a political ad and what isn't and trace who paid for what. How are they supposed to know if someone's post in support of a politician on their Facebook page is paid advertising or free publicity, for example?
Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly and does change in market share. In fact, if you look at consumer computing devices as a whole, instead of focusing only on classic style desktops, Microsoft has dropped way more.
The history of electrical utilities is that as soon as the government lightened up regulations to allow more competition, more competition happened. That's a pretty strong argument that it's been the regulation saying no one is allowed to compete in an area driving the lack of competition, not the other way around. Electrical generation is a lot more competitive now that the government allows it. The government still enforces local monopolies in electrical distribution. Why do they need to make that legally enforced if it's a natural monopoly, meaning no competition would arise if it wasn't illegal? Back in reality, there is still competition creeping in from local solar and natural gas installations who setup right where the power is needed, rather than using the monopolized distribution lines. It's pretty bold to claim "No competition could naturally arise, so therefore we must make any competition illegal!" That contradicts itself, as there would be no need to make competition illegal if it was actually a case of a natural monopoly.
At current pay rates the industry is short 36,500 drivers. That's projected to get worse over time as the current drivers age out, because they're having a more and more difficult time replacing them with new drivers. Long haul trucking is a lousy long-term job, with many drivers away from home as much as 200 days out of the year. Those drivers would much rather work local routes, where they can go home at night.
Effectively, the efficiency gains from self-driving trucks comes from "team" driving and convoys. Instead of a real "team", the driver can sleep on the road as-if there is another driver, but use automation instead to create the required rest breaks. Between popular hubs, one of those single-driver "teams" can run the lead truck while several other trucks are programmed to automatically follow. Just being able to follow like that reduces fuel costs for a convoy of five trucks by 6%.
From The Atlantic article:
You know a staff writer for a left-wing magazine who is (for example) the author of "Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology" is going to do anything they can to come up with arguments to dispute Uber's study. He talked to the Teamsters Union and left-wing academics and couldn't find anyone who could find big flaws in the study.
I'll just note here that the Slashdot editor rewrote the headline and both paragraphs, mostly to insert a lot more quotes from The Atlantic. One sentence of the original submission was kept by BeauHD. So in terms of how the sausage is made, it's not for lack of editorial involvement with the story.
If an unregulated market results in monopolies, how come the closest things we have to longer term monopolies in the U.S. are all the result of government laws and regulations, but we don't have any monopolies which aren't being enforced by government regulation? Empirical reality doesn't match your assertion, but it does match economic theory.
Higher levels of regulations are what economists call a barrier to entry. Barriers to entry reduce competition, they don't increase it. Large companies love regulatory barriers to entry because they can afford to siphon off some overhead to deal with it, while they know a startup trying to compete with them doesn't have the extra cash and established expertise lying around to deal with all the regulations they have to comply with. Not to mention that regulations are written (with the help of industry insiders) to assume things will be done how the large companies already do them, creating a barrier to someone coming along and doing things differently and changing the business model on them.
The actual statement I made, complete with original link containing, oh, evidence, was that "the U.S. spends 40% more per student than the OECD average. That in turn is way more than third world countries spend."
At least learn to read the thread on the page right in front of you before suggesting someone learn to use a search engine.
Also, percent of GDP as a way to compare the price of virtually anything is ridiculous and only serves to attempt to obscure things. We don't compare prices and spending on most products as percent of GDP, we compare the actual cost. When is the last time someone asked you: How much is your rent as a percent of GDP? How much is a loaf of bread as a percent of GDP? What does a pencil cost in percent of GDP? That's stupid.
I looked at all your links. None of them provide any evidence that single-payer reduced spending when implemented. You keep trying to change the topic to the fact that the U.S. spends more than other countries, but that's not something we've ever disagreed on in this thread. To recap, the discussion is about "why", which you apparently have no knowledge of and no evidence of beyond your own opinion which contradicts the experience of every country which has implemented it.
From the lists I could find online, it appears that the prominent people who have been caught up in the #metoo accusations in 2017 run somewhere between 25-1 or 50-1 in favor of left-wingers and Democrats vs. conservatives/Republicans. They're almost all in left-wing dominated industries, as well.
It's gotten to the point where I actually have a little more sympathy for left-wing accusations of sexual harassment based on the fact that maybe instead of exaggerating, they're just describing their personal experience with how it works in left-wing dominated places like Hollywood, the media, the Democratic Party and academia and the right-wingers just don't understand as much because they don't experience it as much in their institutions.
But it's crazy the left gives Hillary Clinton any credibility at all when it comes to sexual harassment and rape reports, when she's been one of the most consistent enablers out there (for Bill, and Weinstein, and in her own campaign), yet still claims as recently as yesterday that “For most of my life, harassment wasn’t something talked about or even acknowledged.” The article goes on to mention "Except for the bulk of the 1990s, when her husband was accused by multiple women of harassment and by one of rape and Hillary worked to publicly discredit them. Other than that, no knowledge."
Been seeing a lot of headlines like these lately which essentially consist of "Trump Administration attempting to keep campaign promise he made to the people who elected him, journalists shocked they would dare to do that!"
The law of diminishing returns means that as scientific knowledge increases in a field over time, there are less and less of the easier ground-breaking bug discoveries to be made. The big jumps instead tend to come from discovering new fields of study and trans-formative technologies which affect lots of things all at once.
Goal-oriented research, like that the government primarily funds, is the worst kind for making big advances. It's better for small, incremental information. Most big advances end up being something accidental when someone says, "Hmmm... that's weird...." when noticing something unexpected. Directed research tends to just fulfill the bureaucratic terms it's setup for.
That's because you still haven't provided any evidence at all that when single-payer systems are implemented, they reduce health care spending.
But hey, at least you finally got some mod points for your alt account.
We established (including via your links) that single-payer hasn't reduced spending from the pre-single-payer system anywhere else it's been tried. So you're going to have to define "worked" as something other than that if you want to claim switching to single-payer "worked" everywhere.
The primary causes of higher health care spending in the U.S.:
1. People in the U.S. are wealthier. Wealthier people demand, consume and pay for more health care than poorer people who have to prioritize spending on other things first. This is why, for example, people in India spend so much less on books than people in the United States and Indian books which are purchased tend to be lower quality (cheaper paper, bindings, etc...) in order to keep them less expensive.
2. The government in conjunction with the AMA restrict the entry of new providers into the marking, significantly reducing the supply. This is via requirements for practicing (especially those which don't recognize medical training or experience from other countries) and limiting residency spots.
3. The government distorts the health care market via laws, regulations and rules. This includes things like the tax law incentivizing employer-based insurance groups, restrictions on competition between health insurance providers, restrictions preventing opening new hospitals to compete with old ones, restrictions on what someone can purchase in terms of health insurance, medicare/medicaid/va-related distortions, etc...
4. The FDA regulatory process, especially requiring testing for efficacy (not just safety), requiring double-testing (no reason a drug or device which has proven safe in Europe has to start all over in the U.S., to give one wastefule example), ridiculous definitions and rules for "medical" devices.
Try to provide evidence of your assertions, rather than taking a point-in-time correlation and trying to turn it into causation because it fits your preconceived notions.
Also, we were talking about spending levels, not about "costs". There is a difference between the two concepts.
Either way, looking at this chart, can you tell when Australia (to use your example) introduced single-payer? How about any of the other countries? Guess what, their spending per capita went up after introducing single-payer, not down. There's no reason, nor evidence, to suggest the experience in the U.S. would be different. The economic evidence is that costs would go up after switching to single-payer.
Stating you don't actually know something, then drawing a conclusion from your lack of knowledge is an interesting approach, but if you read the rest of the thread, you'd note that spending wasn't reduced by introducing single-payer elsewhere, so there is no reason it would be reduced in the United States by introducing single-payer. (Also, we're talking about spending. "Costs" is a different concept, because it doesn't reflect the interaction of demand vs supply which determines spending.)
"Slowing an increase over a period of years is also known as" speculation.
You've never addresses the original fact that the U.S. spends more on most everything. For example, education. You haven't provided any evidence that single-payer plans would save money in the U.S. Simply saying one of the many difference between countries is single-payer or not and one of the other differences is how much a country spends isn't evidence of anything., it's an unsupported claim to relate them causally.
So if as you state, no other country had their health care costs cut in half (or even decreased) when they switched to single-payer, then you've pretty conclusively proven empirically that there is no reason to think your original assertion that health care costs would be cut in half if the U.S. switched to single-payer is true. Thanks for confirming that for us.
If you want to discuss why the U.S. spends more on health care than other countries, you'll want to come up with something which explains why the U.S. spends more on just about everything than other countries. Or alternately, what are the things driving up health care costs in the United States. Guess what? Laws and regulations are the largest component of why health care is expensive in the U.S. (And please don't cite people who were completely wrong about what Obamacare would do to costs to try and argue otherwise, they've already discredited themselves on the subject.)
Trying to show causation between having a single-payer system and lower costs requires you to actually show empirical evidence that it was single-payer which makes a difference. Otherwise, you might as well claim that countries without as many paved roads causes health spending to be lower, which happens to be a true correlation, but doesn't mean much in terms of causation.
You apparently missed the whole point. No one was arguing about how much each country spends. The point was that switching to single-payer or not isn't a factor which explains the difference in spending in different countries.
Has it occurred to you to look at countries which switched to single-payer and compare their spending levels before and after the switch? What you'll find is that they didn't save money, in fact, they generally increased spending. So what's your evidence a switch in the U.S. would be a special case which would save money?
This is a misnomer. You can't compare spending in the U.S. to spending in other countries on just about anything. Spending levels in most countries are driven by wealth levels, AKA, the wealth available to purchase things. For example, the U.S. spends 40% more per student than the OECD average. That in turn is way more than third world countries spend. The U.S. spends more on books, houses, cars, air conditioners, etc... primarily because the U.S. is wealthier and wealthier people spend more on most stuff.
Look at the wide range in spending per inhabitant between Euopean countries. It's not because of "single-payer" causing the differences.
In the U.S., Doctors make more (and their numbers are artificially limited), drug companies spend more on researching new drugs and on getting them through the FDA's hoops, people and insurance companies are willing to spend more (i.e. there is more demand for services), etc... You can change or tweak many of those things, but going to single-payer isn't some magical fix which will create more Doctors and provide more actual healthcare.
Yeah, most of the articles on this emphasize "songwriters", but when you look into the details, it's actually the labels and publishers who get an increased percentage and if someone who actually wrote or performed the song gets any more money it'll mostly be because of the details of their contract after the labels and publishers get their cut. So to call this an increase for "songwriters" is fairly misleading. At best, an increase for rights-holders and music distribution/promotion managers.
Huh, funny how if you drew a trendline, the price of oil fluctuates up and down, but has been essentially flat for the last 40 years. It's almost like your assertion can be disproven with a ten second search on the web.
Either way, it doesn't matter if automation uses more energy. It'll either happen (and use the energy), or it won't, based on the availability. If it does as part of a normal market process, then people will find other things to do in order to produce even more wealth instead of whatever gets automated and we'll all be wealthier as a result.
2/3 of the population of rich countries in the past worked in agriculture. 2/3 of the population in some poor countries still do.
After automation and technological improvements, now only 5% (or less) of the population of rich countries work in agriculture and food is cheaper than it ever was, to the point no one starves because no one can afford to feed them, but only when there is someone preventing food from physically reaching them.
We've been down the path of massive automation before and it's resulted in better lives for everyone. Please now show us a counter-example of where automation and technological advance affected a massive number of people's jobs and those people are still around without any ability to earn anything or starved to death as a result.
You forgot to add that US attack subs and various deployed sonar systems from ships, planes and undersea installations routinely follow all Russian subs from the time the leave their base to the time they return. It's not difficult, as there aren't very many of them any more and it gives the attack sub commanders something to do.
Like you say, this is more of an imagined threat than a real one.
Entitlement payments aren't part of this "shutdown", which is basically they close the officially non-essential parts of the government and everyone else keeps on working and they pay some of them later once funding is authorized to make it up.