The government should be out of the business of training workforce members.
Are you saying that nothing should be taught in public schools that is of relevance to the world of work...?
A computer is a tool that can be used in any field of work, so it's a major nuisance for most industries that they have subject area specialists who can't understand computers, and computer specialists who can't understand the subject area, and the two have to exchange information in terms each other understands in order to develop a business application together. The inevitable miscommunications and incomplete communications lead to suboptimal code for the task at hand.
The more people know about how computers work, the easier it will be for them to help in designing the systems, even if it still takes a specialist programmer to do the job.
At the moment I don't have a hand-built guitar. But it's on my list of themed holidays -- travel to Andalusia, visit a couple of lutheries, commission a hand-made flamenco guitar to my spec. I nearly did it about 6 years ago, but then I decided to change careers -- going back to uni doesn't leave you with that sort of disposable income. As for bikes, many bikes are mass-produced, but there's still a lot of work in assembling and fitting -- any bike can benefit from an expert fit, and there's several good hours' work in that.
The main thing about the leisure market, though, is that it's composed of a lot of niches, and as automation thrives on economies of scale, leisure is more labour intensive. Compare camper vans to minibuses -- similar construction, but camper vans are notably more expensive as they're not on the same scale.
Do you really think welfare leads to a comfortable living? The reasons for the "welfare trap" are more complex than just "lazy good-for-nothing layabouts", but that is certainly part of it, because when society labels you as a lazy, good for nothing layabout, you either internalise that criticism and accept it as true, or you reject the society that judges you and disengage.
The idea of a basic income is not directly related to the ownership of the means of production, so cannot be labelled with any of these terms. The reason I feel BI is fair and equitable is that the existence of "society" and the notion of "property" rely on relinquishing certain natural rights. Without society, I would be allowed to hunt, fish or gather wherever I wanted to.
If by natural rights you mean as found in nature, you'd find most animals are far more possessive of their territory and companions and far more likely to resort to acts of aggression and violence including lethal force than humans. It's all might make right and if you can take it and keep it then it's yours. It works both ways, sure you can't take other people's property but they can't take yours. And it's the little guy who needs protection, the rich and powerful protected themselves just fine long before society got involved.
True and false. Modern society is certainly better for the little guy than feudal society, but it's great for the big guy too, because he no longer has to hire a personal army -- he can expect the aid of public law enforcement when it comes to protecting his property. In a lawless environment, yes one party can use violence as a means of controlling resources, but that's not "property", not "ownership", just (as you say) "possession" -- you hold it, you control it; you let it go, you lose control and someone else can pick it up. The notion of "property"/"ownership" is a mechanism for increased productivity -- if you can reasonably expect others to respect property, you don't have to dedicate as much effort or resource to maintaining possession, and you can get more productive work done. But your right of property denies others their natural right of possession, so there has to be some quid pro quo.
Moron. No one is saying robots don't exist. But they aren't taking the jobs. Jobs are being shifted to cheaper places. Vietnam, China, Singapore. You know who is going to replace you? Not a robot. Just a cheaper human.
I'm not just a moron -- I must be delusional too, because I distinctly remember being in a fish processing plant in Scotland a month ago and watching salmon being gutted by machine, the categorised by people, then either boxed by machine as whole fish, or deheaded and boned by machine, trimmed by machine (with the aid of stroboscopic photography and high-speed computer image processing), then a short bit of pinboning by machine before the fillets were boxed automatically. Quite a few people still worked in the factory, but a staggering amount of the work was done by machine.
Education, day care, police work, and Medicine are still labor intensive.
Here in Scotland there's a pilot "virtual high school" being implemented to try and address a shortage of teachers by getting remote teachers to teach kids from multiple locations. There are always ways to reduce labour.
People still like labor intensive restaurants. I want a lot more unemployment before I will give basic income further consideration.
Labour intensive restaurants are part of what basic income is about. In a post-scarcity economy, subsistence shouldn't need to be an incentive for work -- luxury and leisure should do the job quite nicely. If I have clothes to wear, food to eat and a house to sleep in, then one day's work pays for eating out all week. A week's work, and I might buy myself a basic tailored suit. And for the chef and the tailor, every penny they earn is reward, not survival.
Look at jobs that can't be offshored, like retail and mail order. Amazon fulfilment centres and huge supermarkets have high worker productivity, doing lots of work with few people, driving competitors with higher employment:turnover ratios out of business.
Even if I don't need to work for food and housing, I'll still need to work to buy guitars, cycling gear and travel tickets. But I'll also have more time to play guitars, go cycling and travel. In doing so, I'll be paying people to make guitars and cycling gear, and to fly planes. Take a look at the amount of money people who aren't poor already spend on leisure pursuits -- you can have a healthy economy based entirely on leisure and luxury even if the state supplied and paid for food, basic clothing and a minimum standard of housing. Increased leisure time also tends to result in a healthier populace, which means higher productivity and lower healthcare costs. The equation is complex and there's no way of really knowing how it would pan out, but it's certainly not as simple as "basic income = no incentive to work"
It's not communism -- communism is an industrial philosophy, and the key point about all industrial philosophies is who owns the means of production. Communism places ownership at the community level, socialism at the level of "society" (in oractical terms almost always defaulting to "state socialism"), cooperativism is about the workers, and capitalism states that ownership starts with money (so how do you get into the system in the first place?)
The idea of a basic income is not directly related to the ownership of the means of production, so cannot be labelled with any of these terms. The reason I feel BI is fair and equitable is that the existence of "society" and the notion of "property" rely on relinquishing certain natural rights. Without society, I would be allowed to hunt, fish or gather wherever I wanted to. Because of society, though, there are rivers that I'm not allowed to fish and deer that I'm not allowed to stalk. Society has removed my right to feed myself for free, and forced me instead to buy food, and therefore has created the need for money. This process has made humanity more efficient and productive (a farmer with a combine harvester can feed hundreds, a hunter with a spear can feed a dozen or so) which improves the average standard of life immeasurably. But if one man can't eat because of that, where is the justice? What have we given him in return for the removal of his natural right to feed himself?
Welfare systems and/or basic income schemes are how we compensate for the loss of those natural rights. Food that buys your hunting rights; housing that buys out your right to pitch a cowhide tent wherever you please.
I don't see robots doing work. I see people making pennies assembling iPhones in China, children working in sweatshops in Vietnam making Nike clothing. This man is a fool. The problem isn't robots. People are cheaper than robots are.
Is the world-renowned economics lecturer a fool, or is the pseudonymous nobody who calls him a fool the real fool? Modern production lines are hybrid systems. The components people who assemble iPhones stick together are made by robots out of items made by robots. It is surprising quite how much is still done by hand, but the hybridisation is there. I visited a fish factory recently, and I wouldn't have been able to predict beforehand which parts of the process were done by hand and which by machine. I'm sure more would be done by hand in a lower-wage economy, but with fresh produce, the first stage of prep needs to be done too near the harvest site for that to happen. Then there are other unoffshorable activities, like Amazon despatch -- the process involves people, but a major part of the retrieval process is robotic.
Dunno... some of the idols I've seen for sale in fancy delicatessens are pretty expensive. I even had someone try to sell me a machine for making FSM idols, in chromed steel.
In that case there aren't very many Christians, are there? Real followers don't judge others, and give away what they have to the poor.
There aren't many real apples, because real oranges have peel. Christians believe that God had a son around 2 millenia ago to a virgin who was engaged to be married, that he was nailed to a bit of wood and walked out of his tomb. That many self-identifying Christians fail to live up to one of the two central tenets of the faith (love your neighbour) doesn't mean they don't believe in God, Jesus and the Resurrection.
You can -- of course you can. This isn't about means of worship, it's that this isn't worship because the guy in question doesn't actually believe there is a flying spaghetti monster.
But dismissing the entire thing as not a religion because satire, well, no. Sorry, that just doesn't fly.)
In what sense? A religion is a formal structure incorporating a belief system. What do "pastafarians" believe? None of the professed beliefs on the website are genuine beliefs -- they're just a parody of other people's beliefs. No belief, no religion.
As a cyclist, I say it's six and half-a-dozen quality-wise -- sensor sizes and codecs are a minor issue compared with the interaction of rolling shutter and road vibration. If GoPro were to release a total shutter model, I'd probably by the first in the queue, but I'm not going to pay all that money if I'm still going to have video that gives most viewers headaches.
I've never understood the GoPro fetish. As you say, it's a camera attached to storage in a shockproof/waterproof box with a high price tag.
Does no one else make anything similar for much less?
Are they really as good as the hype claims?
No. There is not a single decent action camcorder on the market. When you're doing something that makes your camera shake, what you don't want is a camera with rolling shutter, because you'll get the "jellification" of things squashing up and stretching out, and if you're moving quickly, you might well also end up with horizontal sheering of the image.
Just look at any GoPro sponsored professional videos on YouTube. Or don't -- they're often unwatchable. A mountain biker skipping down a rocky slope at stupid speeds just becomes a wobbly, blurry mess that you can't really process.
If GoPro can't even supply their sponsored sportsmen with a jelly-free total shutter camera, there really is no point in the whole exercise.
Yes, but the amount of rinsing required varies based on the particular soap used, and the effectiveness of the rinse depends on the volume and rate of flow. Every washroom is different and I sometimes misjudge the rinse. To err is human, mate.
Germs get spread 60 time more by a Dyson than a normal hand-dryer.
In order to achieve that figure, we have to take the radius of dispersal and map it to the volume of a sphere. I'm afraid I've not seen a Dyson dryer mounted at least 3 meters above the floor, at least 3 meters from any wall, and at least 3 meters from the ceiling. I'm not entirely sure how I'd be able to use such a device -- having to climb a ladder after going for a pee would be pretty unhygienic.
But even in such a scenario, the figures are buggered, by the simple law of "what goes up must come down", as all of the germs are going to end up on the floor, no suspended in air uniformly across the volume. The 3m dispersal radius assumes a typically installation with the floor around 70cm below the nozzles, so if we raise the device, basic Newtonian mechanics is going to mean the dispersal radius will increase.
You could potentially argue the case for using 2D area as a legitimate comparison (1.76 square meters for hot air vs 28.3 sq m for airblade = approx. 16 times) by virtue of the floor describing a 2D plane, but I'm not sure that the linear comparison isn't the most accurate here -- "Dyson Airblade spreads germs 4 times further than standard hot air dryers.
Even worse than bad smelling soap is nice smelling stuff. If I go to a fancy restaurant or an expensive whisky bar, I expect to be able to taste the expensive food and drink. If the hand raising the fork or glass to my mouth smell or orange, cardamom and aloe, I cannot taste your food.
Washing transfers dirt and other contaminants from the surface of an item (in this case your hands) to the washing medium (in this case soap and water). If the water is still on your hands, the contaminants (including bacteria) are still present. Drying out the water by evaporation will simply precipitate out the contaminants back onto your skin. Have you never, for example, had to rewash your hands after using a drier because you find a slimy smear of soap left behind?
Reasonable rates, and companies will still on-shore profits because it does allow you to leverage your cash in your own domestic markets and financials.
All well and good for companies that do indeed have such thing as their own domestic markets, but multinationals typically don't. "Reasonable rates" only work when offshoring has its own inertia and involves significant costs, but when you're a huge multi-billion dollar operation with wholly-owned subsidiaries in several dozen countries, the mechanisms to offshore profits are essentially already in place. Even if it means creating an additional wholly-owned subsidiary, the business processes are already in place to manage multiple geographically diverse subsidiaries, so the benefits of tax havens always outweigh the costs for them. The effects of this are a double-hit in competition: domestic rivals have to compete both against their global counterparts' economies of scale and their low tax burden.
I surmise if the US corporate tax rate was down around the OECD average, you'd have a lot less offshoring of profits and operations.
Only two things stop off-shoring of profits. 1) having the lowest tax rate. 2) making it illegal.
The structure that should not be legal is for wholly owned subsidiaries to have cross-border single-supplier agreements with parent companies or companies with a shared parent. If you have to buy from a company that's owned by the same people as you, that really should be taxed as though it's the same company.
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The government should be out of the business of training workforce members.
Are you saying that nothing should be taught in public schools that is of relevance to the world of work...?
A computer is a tool that can be used in any field of work, so it's a major nuisance for most industries that they have subject area specialists who can't understand computers, and computer specialists who can't understand the subject area, and the two have to exchange information in terms each other understands in order to develop a business application together. The inevitable miscommunications and incomplete communications lead to suboptimal code for the task at hand.
The more people know about how computers work, the easier it will be for them to help in designing the systems, even if it still takes a specialist programmer to do the job.
At the moment I don't have a hand-built guitar. But it's on my list of themed holidays -- travel to Andalusia, visit a couple of lutheries, commission a hand-made flamenco guitar to my spec. I nearly did it about 6 years ago, but then I decided to change careers -- going back to uni doesn't leave you with that sort of disposable income. As for bikes, many bikes are mass-produced, but there's still a lot of work in assembling and fitting -- any bike can benefit from an expert fit, and there's several good hours' work in that.
The main thing about the leisure market, though, is that it's composed of a lot of niches, and as automation thrives on economies of scale, leisure is more labour intensive. Compare camper vans to minibuses -- similar construction, but camper vans are notably more expensive as they're not on the same scale.
Do you really think welfare leads to a comfortable living? The reasons for the "welfare trap" are more complex than just "lazy good-for-nothing layabouts", but that is certainly part of it, because when society labels you as a lazy, good for nothing layabout, you either internalise that criticism and accept it as true, or you reject the society that judges you and disengage.
The idea of a basic income is not directly related to the ownership of the means of production, so cannot be labelled with any of these terms. The reason I feel BI is fair and equitable is that the existence of "society" and the notion of "property" rely on relinquishing certain natural rights. Without society, I would be allowed to hunt, fish or gather wherever I wanted to.
If by natural rights you mean as found in nature, you'd find most animals are far more possessive of their territory and companions and far more likely to resort to acts of aggression and violence including lethal force than humans. It's all might make right and if you can take it and keep it then it's yours. It works both ways, sure you can't take other people's property but they can't take yours. And it's the little guy who needs protection, the rich and powerful protected themselves just fine long before society got involved.
True and false. Modern society is certainly better for the little guy than feudal society, but it's great for the big guy too, because he no longer has to hire a personal army -- he can expect the aid of public law enforcement when it comes to protecting his property. In a lawless environment, yes one party can use violence as a means of controlling resources, but that's not "property", not "ownership", just (as you say) "possession" -- you hold it, you control it; you let it go, you lose control and someone else can pick it up. The notion of "property"/"ownership" is a mechanism for increased productivity -- if you can reasonably expect others to respect property, you don't have to dedicate as much effort or resource to maintaining possession, and you can get more productive work done. But your right of property denies others their natural right of possession, so there has to be some quid pro quo.
Moron. No one is saying robots don't exist. But they aren't taking the jobs. Jobs are being shifted to cheaper places. Vietnam, China, Singapore. You know who is going to replace you? Not a robot. Just a cheaper human.
I'm not just a moron -- I must be delusional too, because I distinctly remember being in a fish processing plant in Scotland a month ago and watching salmon being gutted by machine, the categorised by people, then either boxed by machine as whole fish, or deheaded and boned by machine, trimmed by machine (with the aid of stroboscopic photography and high-speed computer image processing), then a short bit of pinboning by machine before the fillets were boxed automatically. Quite a few people still worked in the factory, but a staggering amount of the work was done by machine.
Education, day care, police work, and Medicine are still labor intensive.
Here in Scotland there's a pilot "virtual high school" being implemented to try and address a shortage of teachers by getting remote teachers to teach kids from multiple locations. There are always ways to reduce labour.
People still like labor intensive restaurants. I want a lot more unemployment before I will give basic income further consideration.
Labour intensive restaurants are part of what basic income is about. In a post-scarcity economy, subsistence shouldn't need to be an incentive for work -- luxury and leisure should do the job quite nicely. If I have clothes to wear, food to eat and a house to sleep in, then one day's work pays for eating out all week. A week's work, and I might buy myself a basic tailored suit. And for the chef and the tailor, every penny they earn is reward, not survival.
In the alternative universe where human beings aren't by nature racist xenophobes prone to rash overgeneralisation.
Look at jobs that can't be offshored, like retail and mail order. Amazon fulfilment centres and huge supermarkets have high worker productivity, doing lots of work with few people, driving competitors with higher employment:turnover ratios out of business.
Even if I don't need to work for food and housing, I'll still need to work to buy guitars, cycling gear and travel tickets. But I'll also have more time to play guitars, go cycling and travel. In doing so, I'll be paying people to make guitars and cycling gear, and to fly planes. Take a look at the amount of money people who aren't poor already spend on leisure pursuits -- you can have a healthy economy based entirely on leisure and luxury even if the state supplied and paid for food, basic clothing and a minimum standard of housing. Increased leisure time also tends to result in a healthier populace, which means higher productivity and lower healthcare costs. The equation is complex and there's no way of really knowing how it would pan out, but it's certainly not as simple as "basic income = no incentive to work"
Ah yes, when I think of where I want financial advice from the first place I think of is Greece........... /s
If you think of "where" you want advice from, you fall into a trap of narrow-minded xenophobia and racism.
It's not communism -- communism is an industrial philosophy, and the key point about all industrial philosophies is who owns the means of production. Communism places ownership at the community level, socialism at the level of "society" (in oractical terms almost always defaulting to "state socialism"), cooperativism is about the workers, and capitalism states that ownership starts with money (so how do you get into the system in the first place?)
The idea of a basic income is not directly related to the ownership of the means of production, so cannot be labelled with any of these terms. The reason I feel BI is fair and equitable is that the existence of "society" and the notion of "property" rely on relinquishing certain natural rights. Without society, I would be allowed to hunt, fish or gather wherever I wanted to. Because of society, though, there are rivers that I'm not allowed to fish and deer that I'm not allowed to stalk. Society has removed my right to feed myself for free, and forced me instead to buy food, and therefore has created the need for money. This process has made humanity more efficient and productive (a farmer with a combine harvester can feed hundreds, a hunter with a spear can feed a dozen or so) which improves the average standard of life immeasurably. But if one man can't eat because of that, where is the justice? What have we given him in return for the removal of his natural right to feed himself?
Welfare systems and/or basic income schemes are how we compensate for the loss of those natural rights. Food that buys your hunting rights; housing that buys out your right to pitch a cowhide tent wherever you please.
I don't see robots doing work. I see people making pennies assembling iPhones in China, children working in sweatshops in Vietnam making Nike clothing. This man is a fool. The problem isn't robots. People are cheaper than robots are.
Is the world-renowned economics lecturer a fool, or is the pseudonymous nobody who calls him a fool the real fool? Modern production lines are hybrid systems. The components people who assemble iPhones stick together are made by robots out of items made by robots. It is surprising quite how much is still done by hand, but the hybridisation is there. I visited a fish factory recently, and I wouldn't have been able to predict beforehand which parts of the process were done by hand and which by machine. I'm sure more would be done by hand in a lower-wage economy, but with fresh produce, the first stage of prep needs to be done too near the harvest site for that to happen. Then there are other unoffshorable activities, like Amazon despatch -- the process involves people, but a major part of the retrieval process is robotic.
Dunno... some of the idols I've seen for sale in fancy delicatessens are pretty expensive. I even had someone try to sell me a machine for making FSM idols, in chromed steel.
In this case, it's clear and unambiguous that pastafarianism is not a religion, and no-one actually believes it.
In that case there aren't very many Christians, are there? Real followers don't judge others, and give away what they have to the poor.
There aren't many real apples, because real oranges have peel. Christians believe that God had a son around 2 millenia ago to a virgin who was engaged to be married, that he was nailed to a bit of wood and walked out of his tomb. That many self-identifying Christians fail to live up to one of the two central tenets of the faith (love your neighbour) doesn't mean they don't believe in God, Jesus and the Resurrection.
well, why can't you worship through satire?
You can -- of course you can. This isn't about means of worship, it's that this isn't worship because the guy in question doesn't actually believe there is a flying spaghetti monster.
But dismissing the entire thing as not a religion because satire, well, no. Sorry, that just doesn't fly.)
In what sense? A religion is a formal structure incorporating a belief system. What do "pastafarians" believe? None of the professed beliefs on the website are genuine beliefs -- they're just a parody of other people's beliefs. No belief, no religion.
As a cyclist, I say it's six and half-a-dozen quality-wise -- sensor sizes and codecs are a minor issue compared with the interaction of rolling shutter and road vibration. If GoPro were to release a total shutter model, I'd probably by the first in the queue, but I'm not going to pay all that money if I'm still going to have video that gives most viewers headaches.
I've never understood the GoPro fetish. As you say, it's a camera attached to storage in a shockproof/waterproof box with a high price tag.
Does no one else make anything similar for much less?
Are they really as good as the hype claims?
No. There is not a single decent action camcorder on the market. When you're doing something that makes your camera shake, what you don't want is a camera with rolling shutter, because you'll get the "jellification" of things squashing up and stretching out, and if you're moving quickly, you might well also end up with horizontal sheering of the image.
Just look at any GoPro sponsored professional videos on YouTube. Or don't -- they're often unwatchable. A mountain biker skipping down a rocky slope at stupid speeds just becomes a wobbly, blurry mess that you can't really process.
If GoPro can't even supply their sponsored sportsmen with a jelly-free total shutter camera, there really is no point in the whole exercise.
Yes, but the amount of rinsing required varies based on the particular soap used, and the effectiveness of the rinse depends on the volume and rate of flow. Every washroom is different and I sometimes misjudge the rinse. To err is human, mate.
Germs get spread 60 time more by a Dyson than a normal hand-dryer.
In order to achieve that figure, we have to take the radius of dispersal and map it to the volume of a sphere. I'm afraid I've not seen a Dyson dryer mounted at least 3 meters above the floor, at least 3 meters from any wall, and at least 3 meters from the ceiling. I'm not entirely sure how I'd be able to use such a device -- having to climb a ladder after going for a pee would be pretty unhygienic.
But even in such a scenario, the figures are buggered, by the simple law of "what goes up must come down", as all of the germs are going to end up on the floor, no suspended in air uniformly across the volume. The 3m dispersal radius assumes a typically installation with the floor around 70cm below the nozzles, so if we raise the device, basic Newtonian mechanics is going to mean the dispersal radius will increase.
You could potentially argue the case for using 2D area as a legitimate comparison (1.76 square meters for hot air vs 28.3 sq m for airblade = approx. 16 times) by virtue of the floor describing a 2D plane, but I'm not sure that the linear comparison isn't the most accurate here -- "Dyson Airblade spreads germs 4 times further than standard hot air dryers.
Even worse than bad smelling soap is nice smelling stuff. If I go to a fancy restaurant or an expensive whisky bar, I expect to be able to taste the expensive food and drink. If the hand raising the fork or glass to my mouth smell or orange, cardamom and aloe, I cannot taste your food.
Even within TED itself they diluted the brand years ago by letting people buy in to make it part of their book tours.
Washing transfers dirt and other contaminants from the surface of an item (in this case your hands) to the washing medium (in this case soap and water). If the water is still on your hands, the contaminants (including bacteria) are still present. Drying out the water by evaporation will simply precipitate out the contaminants back onto your skin. Have you never, for example, had to rewash your hands after using a drier because you find a slimy smear of soap left behind?
Reasonable rates, and companies will still on-shore profits because it does allow you to leverage your cash in your own domestic markets and financials.
All well and good for companies that do indeed have such thing as their own domestic markets, but multinationals typically don't. "Reasonable rates" only work when offshoring has its own inertia and involves significant costs, but when you're a huge multi-billion dollar operation with wholly-owned subsidiaries in several dozen countries, the mechanisms to offshore profits are essentially already in place. Even if it means creating an additional wholly-owned subsidiary, the business processes are already in place to manage multiple geographically diverse subsidiaries, so the benefits of tax havens always outweigh the costs for them. The effects of this are a double-hit in competition: domestic rivals have to compete both against their global counterparts' economies of scale and their low tax burden.
I surmise if the US corporate tax rate was down around the OECD average, you'd have a lot less offshoring of profits and operations.
Only two things stop off-shoring of profits. 1) having the lowest tax rate. 2) making it illegal.
The structure that should not be legal is for wholly owned subsidiaries to have cross-border single-supplier agreements with parent companies or companies with a shared parent. If you have to buy from a company that's owned by the same people as you, that really should be taxed as though it's the same company.