Who wants an LTS desktop OS? It'd be like running Windows XP today, if XP were supported: ancient garbage that no longer handles today's modern tasks. You want to bump up to those new releases every 6 months.
I'm sure you would look at a picture of an arithmetic logic unit and say the proper descriptive term is "microchip thingy", too; you'd also be wrong.
According to your definition, every linux user would have a stake in every single Windows laptop.
Actually, when developing a Windows laptop, one consideration is its impact on your user base of other products. If the laptop would tend to draw Linux users to use it, you have to decide how to handle that. That can be handled by either ignoring them (e.g. if you don't market to them), adjusting the design (to capture the Linux user market by making sure it works with Linux distributions such as Ubuntu), or marketing it differently (e.g. providing a "Linux-Ready" branding on your Linux-ready laptops, and not branding it on the product page for that laptop).
HP actually had a laptop known for its broken ACPI BIOS code for a while--I actually replaced the BIOS firmware with a modified version. Once the problem was identified, Linux users avoided the entire product line. The practical impact of this is HP no longer had the ability to market any media laptop to Linux users, which also influenced casual users who went asking their nerdy friends what media laptop to buy. There's no other market for HP in that space: users prone to do their own research would frequently buy Toshiba; users looking for the best-marketed or shiniest thing were buying Sony Vaio; and users who wanted something cheap and good for that use case but didn't know or care how to evaluate it for their own needs would ask their tech-savvy friends if the laptop they were looking at was "good"--in which case, any Linux user would end up Googling it, find hardware issues, and indicate that it is in fact a broken piece of shit. Oops?
The outcome in this space is usually not that extreme, and usually not that quiet when it is.
A stakeholder is generally thought to be someone actively affected or involved, not people who haven't bought into it and will avoid it like the plague because they checked behind the marketing bs to see the reality.
We consider stakeholders who are indirectly affected and who only think they're affected in some way because they can become loud and annoying. Look at the stakeholders of the oil pipelines of late--protesters standing around near burial grounds complaining about the oil pipeline and its cultural impacts. Many of these are people from far away who aren't impacted by the oil pipeline in any direct manner--they don't rely on and didn't even know about the ancient burial grounds until someone told them about it; then they became angry hippies. They sure have managed to cost the oil companies a shitload of money and bad publicity interfering with the development of their oil pipeline; and their behavior has drawn attention of politicians (high-power stakeholders), who can directly interfere with the project.
I guess you would say those people aren't stakeholders, ignore them, and then get your face raped off and continue to swear that you were in the right to pretend they didn't exist right until you got beat down by people you didn't account for.
They are marketing it to Linux users, yet Linux users aren't a stakeholder?
A stakeholder is any person or group who affects, is affected by, or perceives themselves to be affected by any activity or change involved in the execution of a project. Razor is executing a program (a collection of projects, subprograms, and related organizational work) to market a particular product to a particular group--Linux users,in this case--which includes ensuring that the laptop itself is suitable for that group's use case.
So it appears that Razor is executing a number of projects in which Linux users are the primary stakeholders and the primary drivers of requirements within those projects. Indeed, the people Razor sees as mainly affected by the activities of this project are potential customers who are Linux users, thus those are the people Razor has declared have the greatest stake in this project. If the stakeholders aren't satisfied, then the project fails--which is why Linux users are being asked to detail their needs. If they weren't stakeholders, then there would be no reason to ask for their input, because the project wouldn't affect or be affected by them.
This is, of course, the kind of thing you have to be able to accurately recognize to function in business and project management. There are even tests and certifications which challenge you with these sorts of situations and require you to determine what is happening, in a technical sense, based on such information.
I've applied exactly that reasoning and drawn correct conclusions here; you haven't, because of course you have a need for me and everyone else to be wrong, so you take whatever position is contrary and then try to position yourself as smart. That is a subtle symptom of anti-social personality disorder: you satisfy your social needs by finding ways to attack and abuse others. You should see a mental health professional and present for psychiatric care.
Would you next like to argue that steel is not an alloy, or that the sun is a yellow star?
The Chevrolet Volt second generation gets some 50+ miles of electric range per charge, with a 4-hour charge time at 240V, 3.3kW (most electric vehicles charge at 6kW). 90% of all miles driven in Chevrolet Volt first-generation vehicles (38 mile electric range) are electric. PHEVs with 50-100 miles of range, even with only a 3.3kW continuous-load charger (capable of taking 40kW or so from regen for maybe 30 seconds, but not 6.6kW from wall for several minutes), will eliminate most of the outdoor air pollution issue, since the greatest source of localized air pollution is cars (they're not the greatest source of total pollution; they're just all over the place belching out the pollution currently hanging around residential and commercial streets, which blows away in like, what, an hour?).
ERVs in homes exchange the indoor air with outside air in the return system, just before the furnace air filter (which you should replace with a 4-inch-thick, high-MERV medium, since that will give you better airflow 6 months into its life than a brand-new 1-inch filter). They retain latent heat (absorbed by water to cause humidity) as well as just the heat in the air by exchanging these as outdoor and indoor air pass each other. Indoor air pollution, thus, becomes a problem of the past, as outdoor air is brought into the house every time the central air blower runs.
So the problems caused by industrial technology will be solved by more industrial technology.
It's a broken line of thinking. They eliminate the human work of taking orders--those hours of labor are gone--and then say that there will be more work in the kitchen, thus more work overall. It seems to me that if 3 employees working 8 hours per day each move from the register to the kitchen, you still have 24 human working hours there--but those hours are actually making burgers, not simply handling orders.
to the point where that human labor will be an insignificant portion of the activity (physical and information processing) going into the operation of the automated economy and the production of valuable goods and services by that economy,
We invented a furnace about 200 years ago which changed the amount of human labor invested in the making of iron. The labor required to make a tonne of iron with the new furnace was 0.23% as much as the labor required previously. On top of that, some dude invented a new method for rolling steel, allowing the production of railway rails for cheap. Prior to those two inventions, the production of a national railway would have required dozens of times the available labor on the planet; once those inventions were complete, it required only a fraction of available labor.
Today, the human labor invested in production is essentially nothing, if you compare it with the human labor required to produce the technical outcomes of today in Roman times on Roman technology. That means if the Romans can build a thing, physically, they build it with more labor; if they can't, they use a different method to achieve its results--for example, the Romans can't build a computer, so they would have to do all the computations of modern computers by hand, which would take a lot of Romas mathemeticians a very long time.
You're a Roman, and you're looking at today's level of technology, and you're saying it will eliminate all work.
So in such an automated economy, how exactly is money a proxy for human labor? When the amount of human labor will have been largely de-coupled from the amount of value of goods and services produced?
That's the economy we have today. You're still talking about an economy where humans input labor and multiply it--the multiple is just 10 or 15 times bigger in this new, "automated" economy. The multiplier on human labor is already quite large--human labor has been halved and decimated many times. If we assume a baseline of halving the human labor every 100 years (which would not be accurate) over the past 6,000 years, you're talking about each human labor hour being multiplied over 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 times in today's developed economies. That means each human today produces more than all humans ever born in history could have produced if they used ancient China's technology.
Your "proxy" equation breaks down in this scenario, in an analogous way to how using fossil-fuel energy consumption growth as a proxy for GDP growth will break down when energy production is technologically weaned away from fossil fuels.
The economy you're trying to imagine is similar in principle to talking about the upcoming colonization of thousands of planets using instantaneous human teleportation between star systems. We aren't capable of predicting when we will be able to invent a stargate.
Further, the economy you're discussing assumes that we'll somehow invent new humans--metal humans, like Commander Data--who then won't bitch about wanting things like rights and freedom and shit. You're trying to imagine a new slave caste that produces enough for itself. it is unlikely we can replace humans with anything that isn't functionally as complex as a human--meaning intelligent and adaptable.
On s personal note, being insulting when you clearly didn't understand what was being said does not look good on you
Oh I understand what's being said; the problem is I was a child once and believed things you believe, and then realized I WAS WRONG. You are now telling me, who has once believed as you, that you're right and I'm wrong; and I'm lo
Which is essentially what I just said stakeholder management attempts to identify. Are their stakeholders 2016 Tesla buyers or 1991 Ford Taurus buyers?
Stakeholder management. The stakeholders are Linux users who want a laptop, therefor they are the only ones who can suggest their requirements. Involving the stakeholders in this decision gives them a sense of ownership, so the product is more-likely to be accepted.
Imagine if they develop the best... a $1,999 beast with excellent hardware support and the highest performance available to the Linux desktop, at a price point nobody wants to pay. Contrast that with something cheaper, lighter, with a good high-performance M2 SSD--a development environment that can build a kernel in 15 minutes instead of 11, sure, but it works fine, has better battery life, and only costs $499.
Obviously two different groups of users will argue over which of these are better. Which group are they largely looking at for Linux uses, particularly developers? If they target their market appropriately, then their stakeholders will have an option which more-closely approximates what they need--paying for fewer useless features, and incorporating more desired functionality. Why pay the extra $30 for a Lightning port when all your devices are USB 3.0?
VAL-U-A-TION. The whole idea of value is a point of economics which is known by modern economics to be fucked up and stupid. Objects do not have value; value is not a property of an object. A person looks at an object and imagines it has a value; a different person imagines it has a different value. People express valuation for an object.
Economically speaking, if you have to pay $10,000 of wages to produce an object that can't sell for more than $1,000, then that object can't be produced and sold, and so it can't be produced. Your economy can't support it.
My god I'm dealing with children here. You might as well try explaining spontaneous creation to show how mice are popped into existence by the conditions of wrapping a shirt in straw--at once believed a valid scientific explanation. Louis Pasteur famously debunked spontaneous creation.
Objects don't have value. "The only value an object has is" nothing! It has no value! Nothing has value! Objects can be produced for a cost, in labor, at a priced wage rate, thus are priced at a minimum of wage-labor cost and no lower than that.
Uh, machines are produced and maintained by human labor, and the cost of the machine's work is the human labor involved in building, operating, and maintaining those machines. Machines don't draw any cost except the human labor involved. Do you think machines walk into their boss's office and demand a pay raise?
But now, only 50% of the people have jobs. So there are fewer households that can afford the $1,800 models.
There are 4 farmers.
1850. Total population: 23,191,786; farm population; 11,680,000 (est.); farmers 64% of labor force; Number of farms: 1,449,000; average acres: 203
1900. Total population: 75,994,266; farm population: 29,414,000 (est.); farmers 38% of labor force; Number of farms: 5,740,000; average acres: 147
1950. Total population: 151,132,000; farm population: 25,058,000; farmers 12.2% of labor force; Number of farms: 5,388,000; average acres: 216; irrigated acres: 25,634,869.
1990. Total population: 261,423,000; farm population: 2,987,552; farmers 2.6% of labor force; Number of farms: 2,143,150; average acres: 461; irrigated acres: 49,404,000 (1992)
That is the United States farm population history as farm technology reduced farmers as part of the labor force--and total number of farm workers at all.
Observe the labor force participation rate. Since 1950, we've gone from 25 million farmers to 2 million farmers. How much has the labor force decreased, considering participation rate has become somewhat higher and unemployment is around 5% today?
You should account for time and scope. Let me show you.
So the resulting reduction from the layoffs does not significantly reduce the number of total households that can afford the $1,800 models. However, what if all the other factories do the same thing?
If this factory cuts back, then, as you observe, tens of million of households can now afford these stoves. This factory must scale its production, leading to more jobs lost; or other factories must follow suit. However, the lost $1,400 of wages at $8.25/hr minimum wage represents one minimum-wage job lost per 11.78 stoves. For every household in the country (all 121 million of them), that's 10.3 million jobs. That's your maximum job loss in total on stoves. We're assuming 20.6 million Americans out of a workforce of 151 million are devoted to building $3,200 stoves, however.
On the other hand, households tend to replace stoves... when? Once every 10 years? Call that a 10-year turn-around. Now we're talking about 1.03 million jobs lost per year, a bump of 0.68% in unemployment, 0.057% per month. The economy can actually handle that.
This is still a bad analysis. For one, we'd be moving tiers of stove tech downward, so now your $500 stove is a much better stove because it's a $1,000 stove made with half the labor. There's another problem: an $1,800 stove is still an $1,800 stove; a $500 stove is still a $500 stove. These are essentially priced based on the amount of labor involved, so the same number of people are employed to make these. That means if we make an even better $3,200 stove and the people who were buying the now-$1,800 stove instead by that, no jobs are lost, in total, once this new model is in production and being sold.
Let's try a different model, then.
Assume that people buy the same stove they ever would.
So now we can go back to those job losses. We're talking about 0.057% unemployment per month; but, each of these $3,200 stoves is now sold for $1,800. That means each household buying a stove has $1,400 more spendable income after the transaction--per month, for 121 million households over 10 years, this is $1,411,666,662. That represents 85,556 minimum-wage jobs per month, 1.026 million jobs per year.
What happens when they try to spend that other $1,400?
Obviously, if we unemployed 10 million people at once, that would hurt; if we unemployed 10 million people across 10 years, not so much. The above turn-over ends in a ton of money that's no longer getting spent each month, and a tiny fraction of additional unemployment. The unspent
It contends that people who are not earning more in dollars are richer because their technology is better, but that improvement isn't reflected in the price of the technology somehow? What sense does that make?
It kind of is. Think about if you had a car priced at 52% of the median income--that's $54,000 of income in 2015, so a $28,000 car. In 1950, such a car priced at 52% of the 1950 median income didn't come with an FM radio, air conditioning, independent suspension, high-performance disc brakes, fuel injectors, anti-lock brakes, or the like. Today, a $28,000 car comes with all of those things, plus electronic stability control, plus bluetooth radio, multi-CD changers, USB to read and play MP3s, rear-view camera, lane tracking, cruise control, and a satellite navigation system.
Do you think you're getting all that shit for free?
How is the "hidden value in water cleanliness" argument different from the "hidden value in technology" argument?
Water cleanliness actually is valuable. In your argument, however, the dictator is running an inefficient economy and has hobbled growth: these people should also be living with better access to food, information, electricity, and healthcare, but aren't. In developed economies, clean water, information technology, electricity, and healthcare have all advanced, and we pay for these things--we pay less for these things than they would have cost decades ago, as a proportion of our income, and they are thus widely-available to us now.
Since the hidden value can't be quantified, is it even possible to calculate how much "richer" the people are for having clean water?
Yes. Take the prior level of technology and quantify how many labor-hours (cost) are required to provide clean water; then take the current level of technology and quantify same. Take the difference. Likewise, take the prior cost of water acquisition at all, and compare the cost to acquire water excluding the new efforts involved in cleaning it; the difference there is the reduction in cost of the water itself, and the cost of cleaning is then added on top of that.
You are, of course, welcome to live in a mud hut and walk 9 miles to fish water out of a river every day. Perhaps if you don't like paying for your new technology, you can relegate yourself to postal service and dip pens?
I don't account for a growing wealth gap as a good thing or a bad thing. I don't believe it's problematic at this time; however, I do believe excessive taxes on the rich and on businesses are problematic.
I designed a Universal Social Security system. The tax rate adjustments don't raise or lower taxes for the highest-income individuals; lower taxes for businesses (notably payroll taxes--which directly increase the cost of employees and the price of goods); and trend toward a reduction of tax burden and increase of buying power as you move to lower incomes. That means the top earners taking home e.g. $5,850,000 still take home $5,850,000; a middle-class family taking home $62,000 may take home $71,000 instead; and an unemployed man with no welfare support at least gets $7,000 or so.
As for power, you're not going to get power over the rich. That gap isn't getting bigger; it's already fixed. We're not talking about the middle-class 90% at $80k and the upper-upper 0.1% at $110k here; the top 10% income earners pull $151k, and the top 1% pull millions in cash compensation (at rates like 0.7 cents per employee per hour for CEOs) and three to ten times as much by having stock issued to them (which just reduces the earnings of stockholders--it's not money you can actually pay to employees). Some of these people make $25 million in a year.
You might think, hey, our little interest group could get together and... and what? Your little interest group might get $100 of donations from everyone; maybe you'll get $1,000 of donations from 10,000 people for one big issue, and so you have $10 million. There's lobby money for you. The rich and powerful, however, don't simply have their own income; they have businesses which generate the salaries and bonuses paid to them. That $25m/year executive is one person who can conceivably match your $10m interest; or he could argue to the Board that Net Neutrality rules need careful consideration, and the whole $2 billion business in a $500 billion industry devotes $40 or $60 million squarely to lobbying congress, producing advertisements to sway the masses (creating special interests opposing you), and allying with the rest of the players in its industry to generate a SuperPAC.
You think the growing wealth gap is making that worse? You have an extremely inflated sense of self-importance. People making $150k don't care, because they're well-off; people making $30k might care, but don't have money; and people making $250,000 as CEOs at small-ish businesses have one hell of a lot more power than people making $200k as individual interests. Even they can influence industries.
You can still win the small bets. $7,000 is about all that's viable today (it was somewhat less--$6,753--in 2013) for a Universal Social Security as I described; that's also $1 trillion cheaper to fund, and the plan I designed grandfathers things like OASDI retirement pensions and avoids disrupting the welfare system (it eliminates those things, eventually, and so has to transition that way without causing damage). Still, it represents an enormous profit potential for landlords--a complex discussion I've had too many times, with the main highlight being I used areas spanning from New England to California (around Seattle, even) as samples, and added ~30% extra padding as a risk reserve to make sure there's a large enough income to guarantee a profitable and stable market.
That kind of system does something to the world. There are so many landlords, and so many people who could become landlords (as in, they're actually capable of doing so, with the knowledge and the money); there's approximately zero chance that the entire population of people who could become rich as fuck overnight would close up to protect other people from losing power. Now people have a 0% chance of ever becoming homeless or going hungry, so long as they don't go blacklisting themselves as renters or blowing all their cash on booz
Answer: Goods are made by the application of labor. If you have a method by which you slowly assemble a chair, you can make 1 chair per hour; thus, for us to buy those chairs, we must pay you a fraction of your labor time--if you work 40 hours per week, we must pay you 1/40th--in terms of a wage equal to that fraction of your living expense. Carry this out, and the money you must receive has to pay the wages involved in producing those things that you buy. That is the minimum.
If you find a way to do it in half the time, you make 2 chairs per hour, and you live at the standard of living produced by 80 times the price at which you sell a chair.
he assumed that if X amount of labor went into an object, then it's worth X (whatever X is in inflation adjusted dollars).
The chair isn't worth X; if you make 100 chairs for 10 hours of labor and someone immediately figures out how to do 100 chairs in 1 hour of labor, everyone buys his chairs and yours rot. That means...
if no one wants to buy that widget, then it's not worth three hours of labor.
It's not going to sell for three hours's worth of labor; it's going to sell for what people are willing to buy.
many objects are worth much more than the labor required to produce them.
No, many objects sell for much more than the labor required to produce them. Primarily, things which are quite expensive or for which most people do not have a need or desire have a very small demand market. This low demand means entering the supplier market is risky, and tends to lead to failure. As such, there is little competition; and the people buying your stuff tend to be quite well-funded, so hiking prices is actually viable.
Many luxury objects have entered the realm of cheap mass-production as technology marches on. When they do, the net margins of businesses producing them--that is, the labor required to produce plus the labor required to organize as the cost underlies the price--tend to shrink. Suppliers can enter the market readily due to the ability to produce cheaper than the next guy and a vast basis of consumers.
Goods do not have value. People have an imaginary valuation of a good: they envision, in their minds and as a property of their own beliefs, that a value is attributable to a good. The good does not have any such worth; it has a cost and a price.
That cost is labor--or the wage-labor as the price of labor times the amount of labor. Wage inequality essentially means my 1 hour of $20/hr work can induce another man to work 2 hours at $10/hr; and taxes, profits, and even savings generally tend to pay wages eventually, by infrastructure and government services, expansion and risk controls (business profits cover later losses), or delayed spending. Some money does vanish off into giant stockpiles, and is replaced by more debt issued into the economy.
The only thing that has to balance out, absolutely, is the labor exchange: all exchanged goods and services must equate, eventually, to all labor which has been invested in the exchange of those goods and services--including idle labor which was drawing a paycheck and accounted for in the price of goods and services exchanged. That's a physical law. You can't spend 100 hours making cars at a rate of 1 car per 50 hours and end up with 3 cars.
Yes, that means some of your money goes into idle workers, into goods produced and unsold and taken as a loss, and into all kinds of other horse shit that doesn't materialize as an addition of wealth. It happens.
Tesla cars. We require 25% as much labor to make them because the factories are sufficiently-automated to need very little labor; thus the gasoline engine factory worker is eliminated and the battery worker rises. Because we require 25% as much labor per car to make them, they cost $22.5k instead of $90k. Because they cost $22.5k, normal people can buy them. Because normal people can buy them, we supply millions of them instead of thousands. Because we supply millions, we need 1/4 of thousands more workers.
Adjustable Rate Mortgages are a powerful debt management object. ARM terms are highly-flexible and can be dangerous or heavily advantageous.
Generally, a middle-class buyer is a salaried worker with regular raises. Inflation is roughly 2% per year (the Fed intentionally tries to maintain this), so your salary should increase by at least that. Likewise, you may escape loans in that time, depending on salary situation.
My bank supplies 3/1 ARMs, 5/5 ARMs, and 7/5 ARMs for 30-year periods. The terms on these are a maximum of a 1% increase in interest rate per adjustment period for a maximum of 6% increase over the lifetime of the loan. I have seen 3/1 ARMs with a maximum 2% increase per period and a lifetime maximum of 9%--that means you could get a 2.8% 3/1 ARM and have your years go by as 2.8%, 2.8%, 2.8%, 4.8%, 6.8%, 8.8%, 10.8%, 11.8%, and then 11.8% from there. A 2.8% 5/5 ARM with a 1% adjustment would be a 3.8% loan where the 3/1 example is an 8% loan; its 11th year would be a 4.8% loan, versus an 11.8% loan.
I have a 36-month auto loan. If it's 2 years old and I get a 5/5 ARM at 2.8%, then I have an extra $320/month to apply to my mortgage for 4 years at 2.8%. That's $15,360 cut back on my loan, as well as a substantial savings on interest (although it's more-substantial if you start at a high interest rate to begin with). Likewise, in 5 years of 2% raises, my salary is 10% higher; along the way, I can increase my mortgage payment by an eventual 10%. For a $1,000 mortgage, that's an extra $3,600, bringing me up to around $19,000 plus saved interest.
Currently, Pentagon Federal offers a 4.125% 30-year fixed rate, 3.750% 15/15 ARM (limit of 6% increase at 15 years), and a 3.000% 5/5 ARM (limit of 2% increase at each 5 year period, maximum 5% increase over lifetime). For the 5/5 ARM, this is a $253/month difference; if you intend to do any form of up-front prepayment, adding this $253 will help cut back your mortgage balance. For example: if you had intended to prepay $500 per month on a $400,000, 30-year loan, then you can instead take a 5/5 ARM and prepay $750/month. The 4.125%, 30-year fixed will have payments of $1,939; the 5/5 ARM at 3% will start at $1,686; and, after 5 years on the 5/5 ARM with $750/month prepay, your payment will adjust up to $1,794. It takes a few rounds to hit the original $1,939.
Do note I have a 15-year fixed mortgage on which I prepayed $1,000/month for the first year. I then started diverting my income to 401(k) (I put $18,000 in last year) and other debt management; I wasn't locked into that financial decision. I'm in the group who would have been able to benefit heavily from a 5/5 ARM if my choices were 4.125% vs 3.000%.
Maybe you're just the kind of fool who would think, "I can't afford $2,200, but I can afford $1,900 if I take this 3/1 ARM!" You take a 5/5 or a 7/5 ARM if the terms are good and you can afford the fixed rate and it saves you substantial payments and you intend to divert that extra savings to diminishing the loan balance up-front.
We also produce food for 1.3 billion people--wait, no, we were facing famine because we could scarcely produce food for 1.3 billion people; now we produce food for 7.2 billion people.
Those people also consume housing, oil, gas, cars, clothing, the service of fast food, electronics, cable TV, internet service, roads, airplane trips, shoes, and all the infrastructure to supply that. A pair of jeans ships from China at a price of $6.06, lands in the US at a price of $6.12 (6 cents per pair to ship over seas), and retails for $14.97. Nearly half of the price at retail is domestic shipping and handling--a cost that's going to cut by 50%-70% when we get self-driving, electric freight trucks. Imagine what happens when the 3 million truckers and taxi cab drivers cycle onto unemployment as the millions of unemployed IT workers cycle into the growing services economy when everyone buys Spotify, Netflix, and more high-speed Internet.
Ideally, we want to de-employ something like 1% of these people per month. That would be less-disruptive and tend to slow new entry into the field and push earlier retirement overall (experienced truckers would become more-plentiful, and be favored over people looking for their first job; the ones who leave permanently would most frequently be old people who don't care to hassle with trying to get hired, but would have stayed on until 70-ish if they didn't get laid off). That is, of course, statistical: some newbies would still enter, some old hands would still have trouble returning to the market, and some old people would make it to 70 1/2 employed; but the market would most likely favor hiring younger, highly-experienced drivers over green drivers or old men, so its internal cycling would tend to push those two ends away before the young become overly-invested in freight hauling. As a bonus, many truckers are decent mechanics (by necessity), and could transition into the (currently growing) market of automechanics.
If it's slow like that, the next generation has the standard problem of "what job is out there for me?", which doesn't change their situation when the answer changes. It's those of us invested in careers that vanish suddenly who have nowhere to go--the kind of thing that happens when a technical revolution eliminates an entire multi-million-employee industry overnight.
One problem with your theory. The rich can't get richer if the masses can't afford to buy the shiny new toys being made by the robots.
You're still trying to think of money as an absolute. Money is a proxy for labor, and represents buying power.
What happens when you pay your workers the same wage and have them work the same hours, but you only employ 50% as many workers? You're making high-end induction stoves for $2,800 today and selling them for $3,200 (14% gross profits, and 9% net profits in your business). Suddenly, it costs you $1,400 to make that high-end induction stove; if your business keeps its 9% net operating profit, you can sell that machine at a 19% gross profit--$1,673.
Mind you, because that stove is only $1,673, the households which historically bought the $1,800 models can now buy your previously-$3,200 model in the same budget (although the $1,800 models will also be cheaper). Most likely, you'll move more product, so the net operating costs will diffuse--that is, your proportional main operating expenses ( total $135 per stove if you move X, and $112 per stove if you move X+20%, so you can keep your 9% net operating profit when moving 20% more stoves by selling them for only a 17% gross profit.
In the end, the mid-tier, $1,800 stoves become your standard sub-$1,000 stoves; people who would have bought $1,800 stoves before still buy them, but get what was a $3,200 stove last decade; and... well, we're spending the same tier of income on something that used to represent upper-upper-end luxury; we're basically richer, in the same way that we'd be richer if we could each buy a private helicopter for $500 and fly wherever we want in the country for the cost of a Starbucks latte.
Technical progress makes the poor and middle-classes richer. The pie gets twice as big, everyone gets like 1.9x as much, and the rich get 2.1x as much, and people go, "Oh god, the wealth gap is growing! Rich get richer while the poor get poorer!" because their slice appears to be a smaller radius of the (now-enormous) pie than it was of the (then-anemic) one they had before. They all get fat off cheap calories when their great-grandparents were struggling to get barely enough food to survive, and they still bitch that they're poorer than the hard-working men of the 1820s.
Rapid deployment of technology caused unemployment faster than the economy adjusted; it will always be this way. If the robots take half our jobs in a span of 10 years, no big deal; if they take half our jobs in the span of 10 months, expect the Great Depression to become a footnote in history as America collapses from economic fall-out.
Don't forget about the $2000 EVERY person in America (on average) pays to have a ludicrously oversized military, the $750 every person pays for interest on our national debt, the $1500 or so the government "borrows" from you from you every year to fund our government
Actually, I was only accounting for consumer spending out of their take-home income, and not taxes. So the government takes all that shit and consumers today spend vastly more of their take-home money on luxuries and much less on necessities.
By the by, that "borrowing" is voluntary: the Government sells treasury debt objects, and people buy them under the belief that they'll mature in 20 years to be worth more than inflation, thus acting as a source of investment income. The government doesn't raid your paycheck; you go to the government and offer them a loan.
Oh and those safety net programs the conservatives hate so much? They cost around $1000 per person every year per person - curiously barely more than the interest on the debt we pay every year to finance their aversion to taxes.
Actually no. The total cost of those programs is roughly $1.68 trillion in 2013. I know this because I did a lot of math, risk analysis, and transitional planning to design a much better system that takes over $1 trillion less from American taxpayers while moving more support more reliably to the needy. It's notable that current HUD puts 75% of qualified applicants on a waiting list and never pays them benefits; while Social Security retirement benefits pay less out for the poorest and more out for the wealthier, with as little as $728/month going to a full-time minimum-wage worker who worked 40 hours every week his whole life, and zero going to one who averaged 30 hours (didn't make enough money, so you get nothing).
We've built a system that takes $15,000 from a middle-class income and inadequately shelters the poor and transitionally-unemployed; we can transition it to a system that pays full benefits to all adults while grandfathering current beneficiaries (notably Social Security retirees) and still lower taxes, with no corresponding tax raise on anyone, anywhere. The next generation ends up breaking even, on average, in terms of welfare benefit; except everyone is covered, completely, reliably.
You seem to overestimate the available capital in the current system, underestimate the current cost of welfare, and not understand the full extent of what's actually achievable. America isn't wastefully throwing away its riches into government programs that keep everything running and provide little services like defense; it's hurling tons of money into a Welfare black hole that doesn't do its job. That's largely because of progress: implement the Universal Social Security I designed in 1950 and the United States economy collapses faster than the USSR; do it in 2013 and tax burden falls like crazy, poverty vanishes entirely, markets get stronger, and the income hierarchy remains unchanged (just the people at the bottom aren't starving and neglected, and the people in the middle are a fair deal richer). It's time to change.
We're talking about people making $170k here; and I find that driving to the McDonalds 2 blocks from my house, getting food, and coming back takes around 25-35 minutes. I can actually prepare meals in 25-35 minutes; Jacques Pepin is better at this than I.
Slashdot Mirror
Who wants an LTS desktop OS? It'd be like running Windows XP today, if XP were supported: ancient garbage that no longer handles today's modern tasks. You want to bump up to those new releases every 6 months.
I'm sure you would look at a picture of an arithmetic logic unit and say the proper descriptive term is "microchip thingy", too; you'd also be wrong.
According to your definition, every linux user would have a stake in every single Windows laptop.
Actually, when developing a Windows laptop, one consideration is its impact on your user base of other products. If the laptop would tend to draw Linux users to use it, you have to decide how to handle that. That can be handled by either ignoring them (e.g. if you don't market to them), adjusting the design (to capture the Linux user market by making sure it works with Linux distributions such as Ubuntu), or marketing it differently (e.g. providing a "Linux-Ready" branding on your Linux-ready laptops, and not branding it on the product page for that laptop).
HP actually had a laptop known for its broken ACPI BIOS code for a while--I actually replaced the BIOS firmware with a modified version. Once the problem was identified, Linux users avoided the entire product line. The practical impact of this is HP no longer had the ability to market any media laptop to Linux users, which also influenced casual users who went asking their nerdy friends what media laptop to buy. There's no other market for HP in that space: users prone to do their own research would frequently buy Toshiba; users looking for the best-marketed or shiniest thing were buying Sony Vaio; and users who wanted something cheap and good for that use case but didn't know or care how to evaluate it for their own needs would ask their tech-savvy friends if the laptop they were looking at was "good"--in which case, any Linux user would end up Googling it, find hardware issues, and indicate that it is in fact a broken piece of shit. Oops?
The outcome in this space is usually not that extreme, and usually not that quiet when it is.
A stakeholder is generally thought to be someone actively affected or involved, not people who haven't bought into it and will avoid it like the plague because they checked behind the marketing bs to see the reality.
Is that so?
We consider stakeholders who are indirectly affected and who only think they're affected in some way because they can become loud and annoying. Look at the stakeholders of the oil pipelines of late--protesters standing around near burial grounds complaining about the oil pipeline and its cultural impacts. Many of these are people from far away who aren't impacted by the oil pipeline in any direct manner--they don't rely on and didn't even know about the ancient burial grounds until someone told them about it; then they became angry hippies. They sure have managed to cost the oil companies a shitload of money and bad publicity interfering with the development of their oil pipeline; and their behavior has drawn attention of politicians (high-power stakeholders), who can directly interfere with the project.
I guess you would say those people aren't stakeholders, ignore them, and then get your face raped off and continue to swear that you were in the right to pretend they didn't exist right until you got beat down by people you didn't account for.
They are marketing it to Linux users, yet Linux users aren't a stakeholder?
A stakeholder is any person or group who affects, is affected by, or perceives themselves to be affected by any activity or change involved in the execution of a project. Razor is executing a program (a collection of projects, subprograms, and related organizational work) to market a particular product to a particular group--Linux users,in this case--which includes ensuring that the laptop itself is suitable for that group's use case.
So it appears that Razor is executing a number of projects in which Linux users are the primary stakeholders and the primary drivers of requirements within those projects. Indeed, the people Razor sees as mainly affected by the activities of this project are potential customers who are Linux users, thus those are the people Razor has declared have the greatest stake in this project. If the stakeholders aren't satisfied, then the project fails--which is why Linux users are being asked to detail their needs. If they weren't stakeholders, then there would be no reason to ask for their input, because the project wouldn't affect or be affected by them.
This is, of course, the kind of thing you have to be able to accurately recognize to function in business and project management. There are even tests and certifications which challenge you with these sorts of situations and require you to determine what is happening, in a technical sense, based on such information.
I've applied exactly that reasoning and drawn correct conclusions here; you haven't, because of course you have a need for me and everyone else to be wrong, so you take whatever position is contrary and then try to position yourself as smart. That is a subtle symptom of anti-social personality disorder: you satisfy your social needs by finding ways to attack and abuse others. You should see a mental health professional and present for psychiatric care.
Would you next like to argue that steel is not an alloy, or that the sun is a yellow star?
The Chevrolet Volt second generation gets some 50+ miles of electric range per charge, with a 4-hour charge time at 240V, 3.3kW (most electric vehicles charge at 6kW). 90% of all miles driven in Chevrolet Volt first-generation vehicles (38 mile electric range) are electric. PHEVs with 50-100 miles of range, even with only a 3.3kW continuous-load charger (capable of taking 40kW or so from regen for maybe 30 seconds, but not 6.6kW from wall for several minutes), will eliminate most of the outdoor air pollution issue, since the greatest source of localized air pollution is cars (they're not the greatest source of total pollution; they're just all over the place belching out the pollution currently hanging around residential and commercial streets, which blows away in like, what, an hour?).
ERVs in homes exchange the indoor air with outside air in the return system, just before the furnace air filter (which you should replace with a 4-inch-thick, high-MERV medium, since that will give you better airflow 6 months into its life than a brand-new 1-inch filter). They retain latent heat (absorbed by water to cause humidity) as well as just the heat in the air by exchanging these as outdoor and indoor air pass each other. Indoor air pollution, thus, becomes a problem of the past, as outdoor air is brought into the house every time the central air blower runs.
So the problems caused by industrial technology will be solved by more industrial technology.
It's a broken line of thinking. They eliminate the human work of taking orders--those hours of labor are gone--and then say that there will be more work in the kitchen, thus more work overall. It seems to me that if 3 employees working 8 hours per day each move from the register to the kitchen, you still have 24 human working hours there--but those hours are actually making burgers, not simply handling orders.
Linux users are certainly not stake-holders. This is a Windows-centric business
The project is to create a Linux laptop for Linux users. Linux users are the primary stakeholders. Are you a moron?
Going forward, the machines will need less human labor
That's called technical progress.
to the point where that human labor will be an insignificant portion of the activity (physical and information processing) going into the operation of the automated economy and the production of valuable goods and services by that economy,
We invented a furnace about 200 years ago which changed the amount of human labor invested in the making of iron. The labor required to make a tonne of iron with the new furnace was 0.23% as much as the labor required previously. On top of that, some dude invented a new method for rolling steel, allowing the production of railway rails for cheap. Prior to those two inventions, the production of a national railway would have required dozens of times the available labor on the planet; once those inventions were complete, it required only a fraction of available labor.
Today, the human labor invested in production is essentially nothing, if you compare it with the human labor required to produce the technical outcomes of today in Roman times on Roman technology. That means if the Romans can build a thing, physically, they build it with more labor; if they can't, they use a different method to achieve its results--for example, the Romans can't build a computer, so they would have to do all the computations of modern computers by hand, which would take a lot of Romas mathemeticians a very long time.
You're a Roman, and you're looking at today's level of technology, and you're saying it will eliminate all work.
So in such an automated economy, how exactly is money a proxy for human labor? When the amount of human labor will have been largely de-coupled from the amount of value of goods and services produced?
That's the economy we have today. You're still talking about an economy where humans input labor and multiply it--the multiple is just 10 or 15 times bigger in this new, "automated" economy. The multiplier on human labor is already quite large--human labor has been halved and decimated many times. If we assume a baseline of halving the human labor every 100 years (which would not be accurate) over the past 6,000 years, you're talking about each human labor hour being multiplied over 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 times in today's developed economies. That means each human today produces more than all humans ever born in history could have produced if they used ancient China's technology.
Your "proxy" equation breaks down in this scenario, in an analogous way to how using fossil-fuel energy consumption growth as a proxy for GDP growth will break down when energy production is technologically weaned away from fossil fuels.
The economy you're trying to imagine is similar in principle to talking about the upcoming colonization of thousands of planets using instantaneous human teleportation between star systems. We aren't capable of predicting when we will be able to invent a stargate.
Further, the economy you're discussing assumes that we'll somehow invent new humans--metal humans, like Commander Data--who then won't bitch about wanting things like rights and freedom and shit. You're trying to imagine a new slave caste that produces enough for itself. it is unlikely we can replace humans with anything that isn't functionally as complex as a human--meaning intelligent and adaptable.
On s personal note, being insulting when you clearly didn't understand what was being said does not look good on you
Oh I understand what's being said; the problem is I was a child once and believed things you believe, and then realized I WAS WRONG. You are now telling me, who has once believed as you, that you're right and I'm wrong; and I'm lo
Oh. Barbra Hudson has stooped to outright dishonesty to maximize her constant criticism of everyone and everything, okay. Unsurprising.
Which is essentially what I just said stakeholder management attempts to identify. Are their stakeholders 2016 Tesla buyers or 1991 Ford Taurus buyers?
Stakeholder management. The stakeholders are Linux users who want a laptop, therefor they are the only ones who can suggest their requirements. Involving the stakeholders in this decision gives them a sense of ownership, so the product is more-likely to be accepted.
Imagine if they develop the best... a $1,999 beast with excellent hardware support and the highest performance available to the Linux desktop, at a price point nobody wants to pay. Contrast that with something cheaper, lighter, with a good high-performance M2 SSD--a development environment that can build a kernel in 15 minutes instead of 11, sure, but it works fine, has better battery life, and only costs $499.
Obviously two different groups of users will argue over which of these are better. Which group are they largely looking at for Linux uses, particularly developers? If they target their market appropriately, then their stakeholders will have an option which more-closely approximates what they need--paying for fewer useless features, and incorporating more desired functionality. Why pay the extra $30 for a Lightning port when all your devices are USB 3.0?
VAL-U-A-TION. The whole idea of value is a point of economics which is known by modern economics to be fucked up and stupid. Objects do not have value; value is not a property of an object. A person looks at an object and imagines it has a value; a different person imagines it has a different value. People express valuation for an object.
Economically speaking, if you have to pay $10,000 of wages to produce an object that can't sell for more than $1,000, then that object can't be produced and sold, and so it can't be produced. Your economy can't support it.
My god I'm dealing with children here. You might as well try explaining spontaneous creation to show how mice are popped into existence by the conditions of wrapping a shirt in straw--at once believed a valid scientific explanation. Louis Pasteur famously debunked spontaneous creation.
Objects don't have value. "The only value an object has is" nothing! It has no value! Nothing has value! Objects can be produced for a cost, in labor, at a priced wage rate, thus are priced at a minimum of wage-labor cost and no lower than that.
Uh, machines are produced and maintained by human labor, and the cost of the machine's work is the human labor involved in building, operating, and maintaining those machines. Machines don't draw any cost except the human labor involved. Do you think machines walk into their boss's office and demand a pay raise?
Explain your stupid fucking delusion.
But now, only 50% of the people have jobs. So there are fewer households that can afford the $1,800 models.
There are 4 farmers.
1850. Total population: 23,191,786; farm population; 11,680,000 (est.); farmers 64% of labor force; Number of farms: 1,449,000; average acres: 203
1900. Total population: 75,994,266; farm population: 29,414,000 (est.); farmers 38% of labor force; Number of farms: 5,740,000; average acres: 147
1950. Total population: 151,132,000; farm population: 25,058,000; farmers 12.2% of labor force; Number of farms: 5,388,000; average acres: 216; irrigated acres: 25,634,869.
1990. Total population: 261,423,000; farm population: 2,987,552; farmers 2.6% of labor force; Number of farms: 2,143,150; average acres: 461; irrigated acres: 49,404,000 (1992)
That is the United States farm population history as farm technology reduced farmers as part of the labor force--and total number of farm workers at all.
Observe the labor force participation rate. Since 1950, we've gone from 25 million farmers to 2 million farmers. How much has the labor force decreased, considering participation rate has become somewhat higher and unemployment is around 5% today?
You should account for time and scope. Let me show you.
So the resulting reduction from the layoffs does not significantly reduce the number of total households that can afford the $1,800 models. However, what if all the other factories do the same thing?
If this factory cuts back, then, as you observe, tens of million of households can now afford these stoves. This factory must scale its production, leading to more jobs lost; or other factories must follow suit. However, the lost $1,400 of wages at $8.25/hr minimum wage represents one minimum-wage job lost per 11.78 stoves. For every household in the country (all 121 million of them), that's 10.3 million jobs. That's your maximum job loss in total on stoves. We're assuming 20.6 million Americans out of a workforce of 151 million are devoted to building $3,200 stoves, however.
On the other hand, households tend to replace stoves ... when? Once every 10 years? Call that a 10-year turn-around. Now we're talking about 1.03 million jobs lost per year, a bump of 0.68% in unemployment, 0.057% per month. The economy can actually handle that.
This is still a bad analysis. For one, we'd be moving tiers of stove tech downward, so now your $500 stove is a much better stove because it's a $1,000 stove made with half the labor. There's another problem: an $1,800 stove is still an $1,800 stove; a $500 stove is still a $500 stove. These are essentially priced based on the amount of labor involved, so the same number of people are employed to make these. That means if we make an even better $3,200 stove and the people who were buying the now-$1,800 stove instead by that, no jobs are lost, in total, once this new model is in production and being sold.
Let's try a different model, then.
Assume that people buy the same stove they ever would.
So now we can go back to those job losses. We're talking about 0.057% unemployment per month; but, each of these $3,200 stoves is now sold for $1,800. That means each household buying a stove has $1,400 more spendable income after the transaction--per month, for 121 million households over 10 years, this is $1,411,666,662. That represents 85,556 minimum-wage jobs per month, 1.026 million jobs per year.
What happens when they try to spend that other $1,400?
Obviously, if we unemployed 10 million people at once, that would hurt; if we unemployed 10 million people across 10 years, not so much. The above turn-over ends in a ton of money that's no longer getting spent each month, and a tiny fraction of additional unemployment. The unspent
It contends that people who are not earning more in dollars are richer because their technology is better, but that improvement isn't reflected in the price of the technology somehow? What sense does that make?
It kind of is. Think about if you had a car priced at 52% of the median income--that's $54,000 of income in 2015, so a $28,000 car. In 1950, such a car priced at 52% of the 1950 median income didn't come with an FM radio, air conditioning, independent suspension, high-performance disc brakes, fuel injectors, anti-lock brakes, or the like. Today, a $28,000 car comes with all of those things, plus electronic stability control, plus bluetooth radio, multi-CD changers, USB to read and play MP3s, rear-view camera, lane tracking, cruise control, and a satellite navigation system.
Do you think you're getting all that shit for free?
How is the "hidden value in water cleanliness" argument different from the "hidden value in technology" argument?
Water cleanliness actually is valuable. In your argument, however, the dictator is running an inefficient economy and has hobbled growth: these people should also be living with better access to food, information, electricity, and healthcare, but aren't. In developed economies, clean water, information technology, electricity, and healthcare have all advanced, and we pay for these things--we pay less for these things than they would have cost decades ago, as a proportion of our income, and they are thus widely-available to us now.
Since the hidden value can't be quantified, is it even possible to calculate how much "richer" the people are for having clean water?
Yes. Take the prior level of technology and quantify how many labor-hours (cost) are required to provide clean water; then take the current level of technology and quantify same. Take the difference. Likewise, take the prior cost of water acquisition at all, and compare the cost to acquire water excluding the new efforts involved in cleaning it; the difference there is the reduction in cost of the water itself, and the cost of cleaning is then added on top of that.
You are, of course, welcome to live in a mud hut and walk 9 miles to fish water out of a river every day. Perhaps if you don't like paying for your new technology, you can relegate yourself to postal service and dip pens?
I don't account for a growing wealth gap as a good thing or a bad thing. I don't believe it's problematic at this time; however, I do believe excessive taxes on the rich and on businesses are problematic.
I designed a Universal Social Security system. The tax rate adjustments don't raise or lower taxes for the highest-income individuals; lower taxes for businesses (notably payroll taxes--which directly increase the cost of employees and the price of goods); and trend toward a reduction of tax burden and increase of buying power as you move to lower incomes. That means the top earners taking home e.g. $5,850,000 still take home $5,850,000; a middle-class family taking home $62,000 may take home $71,000 instead; and an unemployed man with no welfare support at least gets $7,000 or so.
As for power, you're not going to get power over the rich. That gap isn't getting bigger; it's already fixed. We're not talking about the middle-class 90% at $80k and the upper-upper 0.1% at $110k here; the top 10% income earners pull $151k, and the top 1% pull millions in cash compensation (at rates like 0.7 cents per employee per hour for CEOs) and three to ten times as much by having stock issued to them (which just reduces the earnings of stockholders--it's not money you can actually pay to employees). Some of these people make $25 million in a year.
You might think, hey, our little interest group could get together and... and what? Your little interest group might get $100 of donations from everyone; maybe you'll get $1,000 of donations from 10,000 people for one big issue, and so you have $10 million. There's lobby money for you. The rich and powerful, however, don't simply have their own income; they have businesses which generate the salaries and bonuses paid to them. That $25m/year executive is one person who can conceivably match your $10m interest; or he could argue to the Board that Net Neutrality rules need careful consideration, and the whole $2 billion business in a $500 billion industry devotes $40 or $60 million squarely to lobbying congress, producing advertisements to sway the masses (creating special interests opposing you), and allying with the rest of the players in its industry to generate a SuperPAC.
You think the growing wealth gap is making that worse? You have an extremely inflated sense of self-importance. People making $150k don't care, because they're well-off; people making $30k might care, but don't have money; and people making $250,000 as CEOs at small-ish businesses have one hell of a lot more power than people making $200k as individual interests. Even they can influence industries.
You can still win the small bets. $7,000 is about all that's viable today (it was somewhat less--$6,753--in 2013) for a Universal Social Security as I described; that's also $1 trillion cheaper to fund, and the plan I designed grandfathers things like OASDI retirement pensions and avoids disrupting the welfare system (it eliminates those things, eventually, and so has to transition that way without causing damage). Still, it represents an enormous profit potential for landlords--a complex discussion I've had too many times, with the main highlight being I used areas spanning from New England to California (around Seattle, even) as samples, and added ~30% extra padding as a risk reserve to make sure there's a large enough income to guarantee a profitable and stable market.
That kind of system does something to the world. There are so many landlords, and so many people who could become landlords (as in, they're actually capable of doing so, with the knowledge and the money); there's approximately zero chance that the entire population of people who could become rich as fuck overnight would close up to protect other people from losing power. Now people have a 0% chance of ever becoming homeless or going hungry, so long as they don't go blacklisting themselves as renters or blowing all their cash on booz
How do goods get made?
Answer: Goods are made by the application of labor. If you have a method by which you slowly assemble a chair, you can make 1 chair per hour; thus, for us to buy those chairs, we must pay you a fraction of your labor time--if you work 40 hours per week, we must pay you 1/40th--in terms of a wage equal to that fraction of your living expense. Carry this out, and the money you must receive has to pay the wages involved in producing those things that you buy. That is the minimum.
If you find a way to do it in half the time, you make 2 chairs per hour, and you live at the standard of living produced by 80 times the price at which you sell a chair.
he assumed that if X amount of labor went into an object, then it's worth X (whatever X is in inflation adjusted dollars).
The chair isn't worth X; if you make 100 chairs for 10 hours of labor and someone immediately figures out how to do 100 chairs in 1 hour of labor, everyone buys his chairs and yours rot. That means...
if no one wants to buy that widget, then it's not worth three hours of labor.
It's not going to sell for three hours's worth of labor; it's going to sell for what people are willing to buy.
many objects are worth much more than the labor required to produce them.
No, many objects sell for much more than the labor required to produce them. Primarily, things which are quite expensive or for which most people do not have a need or desire have a very small demand market. This low demand means entering the supplier market is risky, and tends to lead to failure. As such, there is little competition; and the people buying your stuff tend to be quite well-funded, so hiking prices is actually viable.
Many luxury objects have entered the realm of cheap mass-production as technology marches on. When they do, the net margins of businesses producing them--that is, the labor required to produce plus the labor required to organize as the cost underlies the price--tend to shrink. Suppliers can enter the market readily due to the ability to produce cheaper than the next guy and a vast basis of consumers.
Goods do not have value. People have an imaginary valuation of a good: they envision, in their minds and as a property of their own beliefs, that a value is attributable to a good. The good does not have any such worth; it has a cost and a price.
That cost is labor--or the wage-labor as the price of labor times the amount of labor. Wage inequality essentially means my 1 hour of $20/hr work can induce another man to work 2 hours at $10/hr; and taxes, profits, and even savings generally tend to pay wages eventually, by infrastructure and government services, expansion and risk controls (business profits cover later losses), or delayed spending. Some money does vanish off into giant stockpiles, and is replaced by more debt issued into the economy.
The only thing that has to balance out, absolutely, is the labor exchange: all exchanged goods and services must equate, eventually, to all labor which has been invested in the exchange of those goods and services--including idle labor which was drawing a paycheck and accounted for in the price of goods and services exchanged. That's a physical law. You can't spend 100 hours making cars at a rate of 1 car per 50 hours and end up with 3 cars.
Yes, that means some of your money goes into idle workers, into goods produced and unsold and taken as a loss, and into all kinds of other horse shit that doesn't materialize as an addition of wealth. It happens.
Tesla cars. We require 25% as much labor to make them because the factories are sufficiently-automated to need very little labor; thus the gasoline engine factory worker is eliminated and the battery worker rises. Because we require 25% as much labor per car to make them, they cost $22.5k instead of $90k. Because they cost $22.5k, normal people can buy them. Because normal people can buy them, we supply millions of them instead of thousands. Because we supply millions, we need 1/4 of thousands more workers.
People in the early 1900s worked 90-hour work weeks.
Adjustable Rate Mortgages are a powerful debt management object. ARM terms are highly-flexible and can be dangerous or heavily advantageous.
Generally, a middle-class buyer is a salaried worker with regular raises. Inflation is roughly 2% per year (the Fed intentionally tries to maintain this), so your salary should increase by at least that. Likewise, you may escape loans in that time, depending on salary situation.
My bank supplies 3/1 ARMs, 5/5 ARMs, and 7/5 ARMs for 30-year periods. The terms on these are a maximum of a 1% increase in interest rate per adjustment period for a maximum of 6% increase over the lifetime of the loan. I have seen 3/1 ARMs with a maximum 2% increase per period and a lifetime maximum of 9%--that means you could get a 2.8% 3/1 ARM and have your years go by as 2.8%, 2.8%, 2.8%, 4.8%, 6.8%, 8.8%, 10.8%, 11.8%, and then 11.8% from there. A 2.8% 5/5 ARM with a 1% adjustment would be a 3.8% loan where the 3/1 example is an 8% loan; its 11th year would be a 4.8% loan, versus an 11.8% loan.
I have a 36-month auto loan. If it's 2 years old and I get a 5/5 ARM at 2.8%, then I have an extra $320/month to apply to my mortgage for 4 years at 2.8%. That's $15,360 cut back on my loan, as well as a substantial savings on interest (although it's more-substantial if you start at a high interest rate to begin with). Likewise, in 5 years of 2% raises, my salary is 10% higher; along the way, I can increase my mortgage payment by an eventual 10%. For a $1,000 mortgage, that's an extra $3,600, bringing me up to around $19,000 plus saved interest.
Currently, Pentagon Federal offers a 4.125% 30-year fixed rate, 3.750% 15/15 ARM (limit of 6% increase at 15 years), and a 3.000% 5/5 ARM (limit of 2% increase at each 5 year period, maximum 5% increase over lifetime). For the 5/5 ARM, this is a $253/month difference; if you intend to do any form of up-front prepayment, adding this $253 will help cut back your mortgage balance. For example: if you had intended to prepay $500 per month on a $400,000, 30-year loan, then you can instead take a 5/5 ARM and prepay $750/month. The 4.125%, 30-year fixed will have payments of $1,939; the 5/5 ARM at 3% will start at $1,686; and, after 5 years on the 5/5 ARM with $750/month prepay, your payment will adjust up to $1,794. It takes a few rounds to hit the original $1,939.
Do note I have a 15-year fixed mortgage on which I prepayed $1,000/month for the first year. I then started diverting my income to 401(k) (I put $18,000 in last year) and other debt management; I wasn't locked into that financial decision. I'm in the group who would have been able to benefit heavily from a 5/5 ARM if my choices were 4.125% vs 3.000%.
Maybe you're just the kind of fool who would think, "I can't afford $2,200, but I can afford $1,900 if I take this 3/1 ARM!" You take a 5/5 or a 7/5 ARM if the terms are good and you can afford the fixed rate and it saves you substantial payments and you intend to divert that extra savings to diminishing the loan balance up-front.
We also produce food for 1.3 billion people--wait, no, we were facing famine because we could scarcely produce food for 1.3 billion people; now we produce food for 7.2 billion people.
Those people also consume housing, oil, gas, cars, clothing, the service of fast food, electronics, cable TV, internet service, roads, airplane trips, shoes, and all the infrastructure to supply that. A pair of jeans ships from China at a price of $6.06, lands in the US at a price of $6.12 (6 cents per pair to ship over seas), and retails for $14.97. Nearly half of the price at retail is domestic shipping and handling--a cost that's going to cut by 50%-70% when we get self-driving, electric freight trucks. Imagine what happens when the 3 million truckers and taxi cab drivers cycle onto unemployment as the millions of unemployed IT workers cycle into the growing services economy when everyone buys Spotify, Netflix, and more high-speed Internet.
Ideally, we want to de-employ something like 1% of these people per month. That would be less-disruptive and tend to slow new entry into the field and push earlier retirement overall (experienced truckers would become more-plentiful, and be favored over people looking for their first job; the ones who leave permanently would most frequently be old people who don't care to hassle with trying to get hired, but would have stayed on until 70-ish if they didn't get laid off). That is, of course, statistical: some newbies would still enter, some old hands would still have trouble returning to the market, and some old people would make it to 70 1/2 employed; but the market would most likely favor hiring younger, highly-experienced drivers over green drivers or old men, so its internal cycling would tend to push those two ends away before the young become overly-invested in freight hauling. As a bonus, many truckers are decent mechanics (by necessity), and could transition into the (currently growing) market of automechanics.
If it's slow like that, the next generation has the standard problem of "what job is out there for me?", which doesn't change their situation when the answer changes. It's those of us invested in careers that vanish suddenly who have nowhere to go--the kind of thing that happens when a technical revolution eliminates an entire multi-million-employee industry overnight.
Dumping additional money into the economy without both labor to perform work and technology to scale production rate is called "inflation".
One problem with your theory. The rich can't get richer if the masses can't afford to buy the shiny new toys being made by the robots.
You're still trying to think of money as an absolute. Money is a proxy for labor, and represents buying power.
What happens when you pay your workers the same wage and have them work the same hours, but you only employ 50% as many workers? You're making high-end induction stoves for $2,800 today and selling them for $3,200 (14% gross profits, and 9% net profits in your business). Suddenly, it costs you $1,400 to make that high-end induction stove; if your business keeps its 9% net operating profit, you can sell that machine at a 19% gross profit--$1,673.
Mind you, because that stove is only $1,673, the households which historically bought the $1,800 models can now buy your previously-$3,200 model in the same budget (although the $1,800 models will also be cheaper). Most likely, you'll move more product, so the net operating costs will diffuse--that is, your proportional main operating expenses ( total $135 per stove if you move X, and $112 per stove if you move X+20%, so you can keep your 9% net operating profit when moving 20% more stoves by selling them for only a 17% gross profit.
In the end, the mid-tier, $1,800 stoves become your standard sub-$1,000 stoves; people who would have bought $1,800 stoves before still buy them, but get what was a $3,200 stove last decade; and ... well, we're spending the same tier of income on something that used to represent upper-upper-end luxury; we're basically richer, in the same way that we'd be richer if we could each buy a private helicopter for $500 and fly wherever we want in the country for the cost of a Starbucks latte.
Technical progress makes the poor and middle-classes richer. The pie gets twice as big, everyone gets like 1.9x as much, and the rich get 2.1x as much, and people go, "Oh god, the wealth gap is growing! Rich get richer while the poor get poorer!" because their slice appears to be a smaller radius of the (now-enormous) pie than it was of the (then-anemic) one they had before. They all get fat off cheap calories when their great-grandparents were struggling to get barely enough food to survive, and they still bitch that they're poorer than the hard-working men of the 1820s.
Unemployment in the U.S. is 5% with a labor force higher than historical levels.
Rapid deployment of technology caused unemployment faster than the economy adjusted; it will always be this way. If the robots take half our jobs in a span of 10 years, no big deal; if they take half our jobs in the span of 10 months, expect the Great Depression to become a footnote in history as America collapses from economic fall-out.
Maybe if you get them at Whole Foods. Vegetables can be very economical if one bothers to shop carefully.
Dry pinto beans: $0.99 per 2,000kcal. Bread flour: 28 cents per 2,000kcal. Cheapest bag of frozen mixed vegetables I can find: $11.63 per 2,000kcal.
Don't forget about the $2000 EVERY person in America (on average) pays to have a ludicrously oversized military, the $750 every person pays for interest on our national debt, the $1500 or so the government "borrows" from you from you every year to fund our government
Actually, I was only accounting for consumer spending out of their take-home income, and not taxes. So the government takes all that shit and consumers today spend vastly more of their take-home money on luxuries and much less on necessities.
By the by, that "borrowing" is voluntary: the Government sells treasury debt objects, and people buy them under the belief that they'll mature in 20 years to be worth more than inflation, thus acting as a source of investment income. The government doesn't raid your paycheck; you go to the government and offer them a loan.
Oh and those safety net programs the conservatives hate so much? They cost around $1000 per person every year per person - curiously barely more than the interest on the debt we pay every year to finance their aversion to taxes.
Actually no. The total cost of those programs is roughly $1.68 trillion in 2013. I know this because I did a lot of math, risk analysis, and transitional planning to design a much better system that takes over $1 trillion less from American taxpayers while moving more support more reliably to the needy. It's notable that current HUD puts 75% of qualified applicants on a waiting list and never pays them benefits; while Social Security retirement benefits pay less out for the poorest and more out for the wealthier, with as little as $728/month going to a full-time minimum-wage worker who worked 40 hours every week his whole life, and zero going to one who averaged 30 hours (didn't make enough money, so you get nothing).
We've built a system that takes $15,000 from a middle-class income and inadequately shelters the poor and transitionally-unemployed; we can transition it to a system that pays full benefits to all adults while grandfathering current beneficiaries (notably Social Security retirees) and still lower taxes, with no corresponding tax raise on anyone, anywhere. The next generation ends up breaking even, on average, in terms of welfare benefit; except everyone is covered, completely, reliably.
You seem to overestimate the available capital in the current system, underestimate the current cost of welfare, and not understand the full extent of what's actually achievable. America isn't wastefully throwing away its riches into government programs that keep everything running and provide little services like defense; it's hurling tons of money into a Welfare black hole that doesn't do its job. That's largely because of progress: implement the Universal Social Security I designed in 1950 and the United States economy collapses faster than the USSR; do it in 2013 and tax burden falls like crazy, poverty vanishes entirely, markets get stronger, and the income hierarchy remains unchanged (just the people at the bottom aren't starving and neglected, and the people in the middle are a fair deal richer). It's time to change.
We're talking about people making $170k here; and I find that driving to the McDonalds 2 blocks from my house, getting food, and coming back takes around 25-35 minutes. I can actually prepare meals in 25-35 minutes; Jacques Pepin is better at this than I.