No, that's what happens when you raise the minimum wage while keeping interest rates so low that the cost of capital makes automation much cheaper than humans.
Rather than pay people to do stuff, you just borrow money to install machines that do it, instead.
Those people will require food stamps either way, which I'll end up paying for. The only difference is whether you get free labour or have to shell out for machines. So tell me: why should I subsidize your business?
You and your comrades in government are effectively paying corporations to get rid of human employees, just so you can whine about it afterwards.
And the alternative you're proposing is me effectively paying the payroll of those corporations. Even if I'd be willing to do so, which I'm not, it'll become impossible when my job is replaced by automation in turn.
Comrade me all you want, it won't change the fact that the system is breaking down. All defending status quo does is make the crisis deeper and the resulting changes more drastic.
A minimally regulated market which has perfect knowledge by all participants.
Apart from "minimually regulated" being vague, it's in principle impossible to have "perfect knowledge". So claiming yours would be an awesome economic system is a bit like claiming that theocracy would be an awesome political system because it would have an omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent deity at the helm. More than a bit, actually, since such ideologically pure economic systems always end up with deityfying their guiding principles, whether they be the Historical Inevitability of Communism or the Invisible Hand of the Marketplace.
Once again we have a clueless story about automation destroying jobs which ignores that the claimed effect doesn't happen.
Do you have any evidence for this assertion? Because last I looked, most of the developed world continues to struggle with unemployment.
Most of the developing world just doesn't have this problem. It's just another imaginary first world problem.
It sucks that the second and third world have problems. That doesn't mean the problems of the first world don't exist, or aren't potentially lethal.
Instead the problem is the punishing of employers. When you mandate high minimum wages and plush benefits, regulations which drive up the cost of an employee while simultaneously making them hard to fire, and the creation of a variety of liabilities (eg, being exposed to large liabilities due to unsanctioned actions of your employees), you create an environment where it is better for employees to move the work to a better location and/or automate it.
Lowering or removing the minimum wage means that the poor will either starve or receive food stamps. Both jackbooted security forces and food assistance require money. And that, in turn, means the only difference between keeping - or preferably rising - the minimum wage or lowering it is that in the latter case my taxes ultimately go to subsidize McDonald's and Wal-Mart's profits and oppress people.
We will see not only jobs moved to other parts of the world, but the automation as well. Call it "race to the bottom", "exporting the pollution", whatever, but it remains that a growing amount of valuable economic activity has been chased out of the developed world and it's not coming back.
What valuable economic activity would that be? Surely you aren't referring to activities so unprofitable that paying minimum wage for them is a "punishment"?
Copyright infringement is theft because it denies a copyright owner the ability to sell the product for which they have the copyright and thus they lose money. If I sell a knock-off Louis Vuitton bag that looks like a real one to Madame A, I am depriving Louis Vuitton the right to sell a real bag to Madame A.
And since setting up a competing brand does the exact same thing, it follows that competition is theft. Why do you hate freedom so much, comrade?
Copyright infringement is not sharing. If I share my cake with you, I have given up a portion of my delicious cake I can no longer eat. If I share a ride with you, I've given up my personal space and privacy. But if you copy my file, I haven't given up anything. We both have full use of the file.
As I asked another poster: is a company's retail store a profit center? Are the locks on the front door part of that profit center?
Can you make the share price go up for long enough to cash your bonuses by separating those locks from the merchandise they're protecting on the balance sheet and cutting costs?
Like one book on artificial intelligence once said: if you measure the effectiveness of a robotic vacuum by how much dirt it vacuums per time, the AI will do it in the most efficient way possible: dump its internal garbage storage, suck it up, and dump it again, ad infinitum.
Of course, there's always keep your personal shit off the company servers!!!
So now blaming the victims of state-sponsored terrorists gets +5 Insightful. Really?
Bad things happen to people who don't deserve them. That can be scary, because it implies bad things can happen to anyone, including you. But blaming the victims only makes the situation worse, both by causing further suffering for them and also by helping the offenders excuse their actions.
And keep what you do write in company documents at a professional tone.
We have a name for the kind of organization that tries to remove the human element from the equation as thoroughly as possible: bureaucracy.
The price of impersonal professionalism is always performing according to lowest common denominator. If you want efficiency, you have to let members of the organization keep each other updated on relevant facts, which in practice means gossip. Also, human need for social interaction is just as real as the need for food. If you disallow such things at workplace, you'll end up with hungry workers who're just counting seconds before they can leave.
That would sure have mitigated a whole lot of personal pain by these supposedly blameless Sony employees.
Yes, and participants of Boston marathon and employees working at WTC could had stayed home. Mass gatherings are obvious terrorist targets and WTC had been bombed once already. Do you really want to go that way?
The simplest explanation of why it's wrong is that it's Deterministic. i.e. it's part of the "Clockwork universe" and if that's true, then you do not have free will and we should all just throw in the towel now...
While we're at it, the Second Law of Thermodynamics must be wrong because I'd like a perpetual motion machine and conservation of momentum must get temporarily suspended when someone's about to be run over by a truck.
Also, determinism doesn't conflict with free will. Determinism is a concept in physics and free will is a concept in law and philosophy. If you try to contrast them, you'll end up equating free will with randomness: you didn't write your message based on your beliefs which you've formed based on your character and experience (since that would be deterministic), but rather it's the equivalent of "cat/dev/random | strings".
Determinism = fail
No, but even if it was, it in no way would disprove it.
There is one HUGE difference between these factories and a labor camp: In a labor camp, you can't say "I quit" and walk out.
Sure you can. You'll be shot if you do, but that doesn't make you any deader than starving to death after walking out of these factories would.
Rule people through direct violence, and you'll look like a villain. Rule people through only letting them eat if they do what you want, and you'll look like a good capitalist.
The constitution exists to limit the government's power to interfere with your liberty.
Specifically, it can only do so if it thinks it's for the best ("general welfare") or might have any effect whatsoever ("interstate trade").
Only leftist idiots think that it's the government that grants you your rights.
The government doesn't grant people rights, but it oversees and manages the web of institutions which enforce them. The property rights right wing so adores don't mean a thing in a jungle.
That's 100% Nanny State backwards.
"Nanny State" exists because of Gilded Age. Every time economic controls are loosened, it leads to wealth concentration and eventual collapse. It's what's happening right now, and will only end with re-instatement of a Nanny State strong enough to enforce sufficient redistribution of income.
The competition among virtual currencies and their continuing evolution demonstrate their uselessness as stores of value.
Economic value is like potential energy: it only makes sense in the context of some system. A dollar, a bar of gold or unspent transactions in the Bitcoin ledger have no inherent value, but someone might accept any or all of them in exchange for something else. But economy is ever-evolving, and in fact currently going through a major crisis, so economic value cannot be reliably stored for any length of time. The best you can do is watch which way the changes are going and transferring value away from failing forms.
As long as there are cowards, there will be people selling insurance.
As long as some entities have a higher capacity to absorb temporary setbacks than others, they can trade on this ability like any other good. But I suppose that doesn't make as good a soundbite.
Suppose you have 10 people and 10 jobs. One job is eliminated by technology. Now you have 10 people and 9 jobs. That 1 newly unemployed dude tries to get another job, but to do so he'll have to oucompete 1 of the remaining 9 employed people out of their job. So how will he compete? Why, he'll do the job for less money. So now we have 9 people with lower average wage, and 1 unemployed dude. This merry-go-round will then continue. Also, as wages fall so will the total buying power of the workforce, which creates further downward pressure.
Capitalism cannot handle a situation where labour is not the resource that limits production. It predates Industrial Revolution, almost collapsed as a result of it, and is heading back towards the cliffs now that true believers have managed to convince themselves that the fall of Soviet Russia means revolution is no longer possible and dismantled the compensating systems.
The only real question at this point is whether it'll collapse into a dystopia where the poor are kept down by brute force, or incorporate sufficient income redistribution to guarantee a middle-class minimum income. US is trapped to the former fate by the aftereffects of Cold War rhetoric, but Europe and Japan have hope. And China, of course, is a dystopia as is.
"Remaining jobs" need not decline and it's worth noting that they actually aren't declining at present.
According to the article they do. Also, when was the last time job market was good for the employees?
Second thing, most examples given are low wages jobs, then the argument does not hold water if you pretend it is responsible for stagnation of the average wages, the average wages should go up if there is less people with minimum wages.
If you destroy a low-wage job, the workers who previously did it become unemployed, and their wage goes to zero. Also, there's more competition for the remaining jobs, thus even non-zero wages tend to fall.
Airbus, not the most efficient of global corporations, can remain a profitable concern only by making rational commercial decisions. If that means negotiating with a non-European supplier then the good French senator Alain Gournac ought to find out why Ariane 5 (or 6) were deficient and figure out how to make them competitive.
Airbus, a corporation, can only remain profitable by making rational commercial decisions. And France, a nation, can only remain prosperous by making rational political decisions. And since Airbus and France are not the same entity, their interests can and in this case do conflict. In this situation, the good French senator Alain Gournac is doing exactly what he ought: using the resources at his disposal to affect the outcome so it becomes more favorable to his nation. Whether the methods are ethical can be debated, as well as what, exactly speaking, constitutes the short, medium and long-term interests of France. However, simply asserting that Airbus's profitability should be an important concern for either Mr. Gournac, us, or anyone but Airbus stakeholders rises the question:
Why in blazes should a French senator put the interests of Airbus over France?
But that would require the Monsieur Gournac to pull his thumb outta his ass and do some real work.
He did. The very title says he "attacked" Airbus. That you don't agree about his methods doesn't mean they're not "real" work.
I work for a very large storage array manufacturer. Warranty length is *not* the only difference...
Thank you for clearly stating your biases. However, your statement is too vague to be either verified or taken into account in a decision-making process in any meaningful way. Either of these would require knowing at least some of the specific differences.
If I ran a secret tor service site thing, I'd had 5 moderators and 1 administrator and they'd all be me just to mess with people's heads. That would prevent moles.
If I ran a secret tor site, I wouldn't publicly post my security practices, especially on a non-Tor site that doesn't even use SSL. That's the most important security...
"If you sexually harass our students you're done, you're gone, and we don't give a damn whether you are the star quarterback, the uber geek or the processor emeritus."
How do trashed computers harass students? Through improperly wiped picture folder?
Governments can crash their currencies but they have a pretty big incentive not to. Bitcoin, no matter how big it gets, could crash just because anonymous18283@hotmail.com decides he wants to cash out and buy New Zealand.
Wall Street had every incentive to keep status quo intact, yet they crashed worldwide economy anyway. As long as you'll have markets, you'll have people who "win" and get into position to cause havoc. It's the very carrot/stick combo that drives capitalism and gives it efficiency: if you work hard, you might get to wield the whip rather than yield to it.
Tests can be devised to gauge many types or aspects of intelligence. You can measure an individuals aptitude and/or ability, and then use it to predict in a very general way how that individual will perform on various tasks that benefit from such intelligence.
You can measure how well someone performs a task, and use that to predict how well they'll do similar tasks in the future. But what has that to do with intelligence? Why does having this particular skill indicate intelligence, rather than practice?
Slashdot Mirror
No, that's what happens when you pay your employees so little they require public assistance to survive.
Those people will require food stamps either way, which I'll end up paying for. The only difference is whether you get free labour or have to shell out for machines. So tell me: why should I subsidize your business?
And the alternative you're proposing is me effectively paying the payroll of those corporations. Even if I'd be willing to do so, which I'm not, it'll become impossible when my job is replaced by automation in turn.
Comrade me all you want, it won't change the fact that the system is breaking down. All defending status quo does is make the crisis deeper and the resulting changes more drastic.
Apart from "minimually regulated" being vague, it's in principle impossible to have "perfect knowledge". So claiming yours would be an awesome economic system is a bit like claiming that theocracy would be an awesome political system because it would have an omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent deity at the helm. More than a bit, actually, since such ideologically pure economic systems always end up with deityfying their guiding principles, whether they be the Historical Inevitability of Communism or the Invisible Hand of the Marketplace.
Do you have any evidence for this assertion? Because last I looked, most of the developed world continues to struggle with unemployment.
It sucks that the second and third world have problems. That doesn't mean the problems of the first world don't exist, or aren't potentially lethal.
Lowering or removing the minimum wage means that the poor will either starve or receive food stamps. Both jackbooted security forces and food assistance require money. And that, in turn, means the only difference between keeping - or preferably rising - the minimum wage or lowering it is that in the latter case my taxes ultimately go to subsidize McDonald's and Wal-Mart's profits and oppress people.
What valuable economic activity would that be? Surely you aren't referring to activities so unprofitable that paying minimum wage for them is a "punishment"?
To be fair, not many people deny the Earth has an atmosphere.
And since setting up a competing brand does the exact same thing, it follows that competition is theft. Why do you hate freedom so much, comrade?
Maybe you should become the change you want to see?
"Sharing is the joint use of a resource or space."
"In a broader sense, it can also include free granting of use rights to goods that can be treated as nonrival goods, such as information."
This begs the question: do you simply not have a good grasp on the English language, or do you have some bizarre political motivation?
Can you make the share price go up for long enough to cash your bonuses by separating those locks from the merchandise they're protecting on the balance sheet and cutting costs?
Like one book on artificial intelligence once said: if you measure the effectiveness of a robotic vacuum by how much dirt it vacuums per time, the AI will do it in the most efficient way possible: dump its internal garbage storage, suck it up, and dump it again, ad infinitum.
So now blaming the victims of state-sponsored terrorists gets +5 Insightful. Really?
Bad things happen to people who don't deserve them. That can be scary, because it implies bad things can happen to anyone, including you. But blaming the victims only makes the situation worse, both by causing further suffering for them and also by helping the offenders excuse their actions.
We have a name for the kind of organization that tries to remove the human element from the equation as thoroughly as possible: bureaucracy.
The price of impersonal professionalism is always performing according to lowest common denominator. If you want efficiency, you have to let members of the organization keep each other updated on relevant facts, which in practice means gossip. Also, human need for social interaction is just as real as the need for food. If you disallow such things at workplace, you'll end up with hungry workers who're just counting seconds before they can leave.
Yes, and participants of Boston marathon and employees working at WTC could had stayed home. Mass gatherings are obvious terrorist targets and WTC had been bombed once already. Do you really want to go that way?
While we're at it, the Second Law of Thermodynamics must be wrong because I'd like a perpetual motion machine and conservation of momentum must get temporarily suspended when someone's about to be run over by a truck.
Also, determinism doesn't conflict with free will. Determinism is a concept in physics and free will is a concept in law and philosophy. If you try to contrast them, you'll end up equating free will with randomness: you didn't write your message based on your beliefs which you've formed based on your character and experience (since that would be deterministic), but rather it's the equivalent of "cat /dev/random | strings".
No, but even if it was, it in no way would disprove it.
Sure you can. You'll be shot if you do, but that doesn't make you any deader than starving to death after walking out of these factories would.
Rule people through direct violence, and you'll look like a villain. Rule people through only letting them eat if they do what you want, and you'll look like a good capitalist.
We thought their game was through, but they knew the Konami Code.
Specifically, it can only do so if it thinks it's for the best ("general welfare") or might have any effect whatsoever ("interstate trade").
The government doesn't grant people rights, but it oversees and manages the web of institutions which enforce them. The property rights right wing so adores don't mean a thing in a jungle.
"Nanny State" exists because of Gilded Age. Every time economic controls are loosened, it leads to wealth concentration and eventual collapse. It's what's happening right now, and will only end with re-instatement of a Nanny State strong enough to enforce sufficient redistribution of income.
Economic value is like potential energy: it only makes sense in the context of some system. A dollar, a bar of gold or unspent transactions in the Bitcoin ledger have no inherent value, but someone might accept any or all of them in exchange for something else. But economy is ever-evolving, and in fact currently going through a major crisis, so economic value cannot be reliably stored for any length of time. The best you can do is watch which way the changes are going and transferring value away from failing forms.
As long as some entities have a higher capacity to absorb temporary setbacks than others, they can trade on this ability like any other good. But I suppose that doesn't make as good a soundbite.
Suppose you have 10 people and 10 jobs. One job is eliminated by technology. Now you have 10 people and 9 jobs. That 1 newly unemployed dude tries to get another job, but to do so he'll have to oucompete 1 of the remaining 9 employed people out of their job. So how will he compete? Why, he'll do the job for less money. So now we have 9 people with lower average wage, and 1 unemployed dude. This merry-go-round will then continue. Also, as wages fall so will the total buying power of the workforce, which creates further downward pressure.
Capitalism cannot handle a situation where labour is not the resource that limits production. It predates Industrial Revolution, almost collapsed as a result of it, and is heading back towards the cliffs now that true believers have managed to convince themselves that the fall of Soviet Russia means revolution is no longer possible and dismantled the compensating systems.
The only real question at this point is whether it'll collapse into a dystopia where the poor are kept down by brute force, or incorporate sufficient income redistribution to guarantee a middle-class minimum income. US is trapped to the former fate by the aftereffects of Cold War rhetoric, but Europe and Japan have hope. And China, of course, is a dystopia as is.
According to the article they do. Also, when was the last time job market was good for the employees?
If you destroy a low-wage job, the workers who previously did it become unemployed, and their wage goes to zero. Also, there's more competition for the remaining jobs, thus even non-zero wages tend to fall.
No sane person would care if someone did.
"Psychosis". That seems to be pretty much perfect description for condemning someone based on actions you imagined them taking.
Airbus, a corporation, can only remain profitable by making rational commercial decisions. And France, a nation, can only remain prosperous by making rational political decisions. And since Airbus and France are not the same entity, their interests can and in this case do conflict. In this situation, the good French senator Alain Gournac is doing exactly what he ought: using the resources at his disposal to affect the outcome so it becomes more favorable to his nation. Whether the methods are ethical can be debated, as well as what, exactly speaking, constitutes the short, medium and long-term interests of France. However, simply asserting that Airbus's profitability should be an important concern for either Mr. Gournac, us, or anyone but Airbus stakeholders rises the question:
Why in blazes should a French senator put the interests of Airbus over France?
He did. The very title says he "attacked" Airbus. That you don't agree about his methods doesn't mean they're not "real" work.
Thank you for clearly stating your biases. However, your statement is too vague to be either verified or taken into account in a decision-making process in any meaningful way. Either of these would require knowing at least some of the specific differences.
If I ran a secret tor site, I wouldn't publicly post my security practices, especially on a non-Tor site that doesn't even use SSL. That's the most important security...
Oh, crap.
The UK is not assisting Sweden. Both you and Sweden are assisting the US, which is trying to get revenge on Assange for exposing its dirty secrets.
How do trashed computers harass students? Through improperly wiped picture folder?
Wall Street had every incentive to keep status quo intact, yet they crashed worldwide economy anyway. As long as you'll have markets, you'll have people who "win" and get into position to cause havoc. It's the very carrot/stick combo that drives capitalism and gives it efficiency: if you work hard, you might get to wield the whip rather than yield to it.
You can measure how well someone performs a task, and use that to predict how well they'll do similar tasks in the future. But what has that to do with intelligence? Why does having this particular skill indicate intelligence, rather than practice?