Everything you have sited as an advantage for MongoDB is done better by just about every one of their competitors (RethinkDB included).
Configuration takes about 10 minutes to figure out how to set up from scratch, as of 2.2 (although 2.4 is better), including getting a replica set working, setting up correct roles and access controls, and so forth. I still can't figure out how to make MySQL clusters actually work, mind you, so I'm not exactly the universal IT genius.
So for example if you wanted to keep a leaderboard, say the top 10 scores in a game, you would have to re-compute that every time in most databases (at a minimum scan the index). With RethinkDB it automatically gets modified based on writes in the database, and sent to you. The efficiency improvement is truly huge.
That can be true without being important. For example: running a service with compressed memory (zram, in particular) makes memory access when swapping a pain. When 50% of working set is in swap, you have 26 instructions per access to read, and more to write--when swapping. This is at a minimum twice the performance hit as a worst-case CPU cache miss.
The efficiency improvement of having enough RAM is truly huge; the practical performance impact... is approximately zero for time scales significantly smaller than one second. Largely, unless the CPU is pegged around or above 99% and you're accessing memory at random in flat distribution continuously, your program spends a lot of time working on small chunks of the working set and then moving on. On a frequency of several times per second, you'll end up with time slices that would be CPU-idle for tens of mS at a time--which are larger than the time spent waiting for zram swapping; and that's before operating system memory access management (swap caching and prediction, as well as write-back scheduling) and multiple cores (which will have some idle time to perform further decompression before the program faults to swap) factors in.
As well, a leader board would query for a list of documents based on a range of scores. To stream updates, every single update has to validate against the whole range of scores to determine who is the leader. That's an enormous amount of wasted work to update something when nobody's looking so you can push out an update that says to move #3 down one slot and insert #17 as the new #3. In this scenario, a DBA who isn't incompetent would place a key on the score field, and select for documents in descending order based on that score.
If performance is a problem, then updates to scores could invalidate a cache made each time this is done, such that multiple updates between the polling frequency would not result in leader board recalculation or in repeat querying. That would allow polling at 0.2s intervals or so while updates occur 30 or 3,000 times in the interim, without wasting all that time recomputing leader boards fifteen thousand times per second to decide if a bunch of clients should get changefeeds updates.
So I don't doubt that the specific problem of fetching leaderboard data in a certain type of scenario where the DBA is too incompetent to use indexes correctly is enormously faster in RethinkDB via changefeeds and continuously comparing new scores against a smaller set of cached data; I simply doubt that the amount of actual time spent doing that is tiny compared to the amount of time the application spends doing literally everything else. It's also the specific type of problem you could optimize out using something like Redis as an intermediary cache, or by employing someone who knows how to manage a database in production environments.
The app (indirectly through a server) just opens a changefeed on the list of stocks that you follow, and RethinkDB coordinates who needs to get what updates when they feed in the stream of changes of market prices. They don't have a ton of clients constantly polling in order
As for starting with C? I suggest you take a look at C# Design Pattern Essentials by Tony Beavis. Just give it a read through. I like C# because it lets you define interfaces and classes in ways which are conducive to modern programming; the point here, however, is to give you an exposure to the ideals of modern OOP. These are tools. You won't understand them or their usage; you'll get the general ideal, though, in enough detail to resolve. Modern programming--and modern OOP particularly--is about building tools that can plug universally into other tools, not about building giant programs. An understanding of the destination will give you a way to frame what you learn as you go, as well as something to question fundamentally, and something to measure yourself against.
OOP isn't the only kind of programming; it's the fundamental type of programming. You want OOP for building large, complex applications; for specific problem sets, you'll want some other paradigm. AI, financial analysis, some mathematical problems, and other such things will be vastly easier to solve and less-ugly when implemented in some other type of programming language--meaning not in C#, and not in something like Java or Python that does roughly the same thing as C#. You could build an airplane out of sails and make it flap its wings or something, but you'd probably want jet engines; yet reciprocating internal combustion engines are the type of engine used in almost everything consuming gaseous or liquid fuel, save for jets and rockets which should not be replaced with reciprocating engines.
Acquiring a fragment of a large basis of knowledge is hard. Programming isn't a thing; certain subsets of programming are things. You aren't going to learn all programming, and you can't just learn programming without understanding how problems in computer science are solved--believe me, I've tried, and I always end up working on computer science problems because they're fun and interesting and... well, because I never learned computer science; these aren't familiar things to me. I should rectify that; a quick acquisition of new tools conveys an enormous amount of power, and problems which seemed daunting become trivial.
When you look at all the books I haven't yet read in my library, you quickly realize the frightening truth: this isn't even my final form.
No, and it isn't relevant. This specific brand wasn't on the market in 1980.
Not relevant. Brands of similar products attempt to out-compete each other, often by finding better ways to make things. If Brand X figured out how to make the same quality of tea with half the human labor, it could sell for half what Brand Y sells for.
So I spend a lot of time thinking about global climate change and why it isn't called global warming anymore.
Fair enough, but you get the point; stop being obtuse.
The fact of the matter is the price of products goes down over time. Sometimes, between today and tomorrow, a price fluctuates upwards; sometimes it does that thanks to things like the cost of shipping (oil), or construction. Sometimes speculative markets have an impact. Give it 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, and the cost of everything follows an endless, downward trend.
This doesn't stop being true just because you can find one specific maker who can't run a business profitably without raising prices out of control; that maker will either get back in line or will go out of business. It also doesn't stop being true when people try to play the razor-and-blade model, lose, and have to adjust their prices--e.g. with fast food taking a loss on hamburgers and a giant profit on fries and soda, until people start rejecting soda and the price of burgers has to reflect their actual cost.
That decrease in inputs is technical progress: new technology allows production of the same goods more-cheaply (which enables us to make more-expensive goods, because they're suddenly cheap enough to make and sell).
You keep trying to argue that something changed last week and so it must expand to a general trend. Observe the productivity factor, and its fluctuations; and its trend is decidedly upwards. That's how economy works: we extend our means to achieve the maximum ends. We constantly seek ways to extend our means further--that's things getting cheaper.
By the by, on grocery shopping: the trend in the past 5 years and 10 years and 50 years has been for the proportion of people's income spent on food to go down. Households now average around 10.09% of their income spent on food as of 2015, versus 10.11% in 2014, versus 10.35% in 2013. For food at home ("groceries"), the share is 5.8% 2015, 5.9% 2014, 6.2% 2013, getting bigger going backwards; although that's semi-unfair, because people are spending more eating out at 4.3% 2015, 4.2% 2014, 4.1% 2013. The trend on total food makes more sense because people economize their time as well, and cheap food prepared by someone else becomes more-attractive as food gets cheaper--and becomes a bigger share of the bill. In 2000, the share of consumer income spent on food was around 13.5%.
Smaller and smaller percentages of people's money is going to food, it seems. You can obsess over a jug of tea all you want, but it won't hold back the tides of reality; facts are inconvenient, and the facts display that the price of food has been and continues to fall.
The whole pitch seems to be "Polling your database is slow; push in real-time!" They can make a query and then continue to give results when there are updates. I guess that's fine if you have a WebSockets service providing that, instead of just polling; on the other hand, that's rarely really a design constraint or an engineering problem--frequently, WebSockets are the wrong way to do something, and polling is the right way. For example: WebSockets to have a notification pop up when you get a new reply on a forum while idling on the forum would be wasted additional complexity versus just polling every 15 seconds or so and indexing on status.
Word on the net is this can be slower than MongoDB (although RethinkDB has joins...). Likewise, you could always set up a Redis server for caching, and use the publisher-subscriber model to accomplish the same thing.
I want to say there are already adequate alternatives out there, but it's silly. MongoDB is the document store you want. CouchDB, CouchBase, and others are slow (although CouchBase is much faster than CouchDB alone). MongoDB is easy to configure (which is good, because apparently people can't get as far as enabling security on MongoDB when that's a single-step process--but an explicit one, meaning if you don't do it it isn't there). MongoDB has built-in replication and sharding, and handles write-concerns that require journaling or replication to 50%+1 nodes. It's just fairly peerless in the space within which it operates.
It's the same way with PostgreSQL: it's performant, easy-to-configure, capable of handling enormous amounts of data, standards-compliant, featureful, and stable. PostgreSQL comes by default set to asynchronous updates in clusters (same guarantees on consistency and data safety as MongoDB Majority write-concern), but can be configured to a slower Synchronous mode. If you need a relational database rather than a document store, PostgreSQL will out-scale MS SQL Server and can keep pace with Oracle; the RDBMS space actually has a few decent competitors.
This contrasts with something like git, which is great and all, but wins on popularity for the most part; bzr and a few other DVCS are just as capable. In that space, git trounces svn and cvs largely because centralized VCS is vastly-inferior to DVCS. You want to use git because it will give you access to everything around you instead of leaving you on your own special little island.
No, wages are what an employer is willing to pay for a worker, reflecting the value that that worker brings to the company and the economy. A worker making $200/h is 10x more valuable to the economy than a worker making $20/h.
Uh, no he's not; he's working the same labor-hours, performing some output that's worth that amount of time. He's taking a greater share of purchasing power for his time worked. It may happen that, for some reason, he can charge more for his time; that doesn't mean his time is worth more.
What delusion do you live under in that a person's time somehow has intrinsically more worth than another person's time? Wage inequalities are a matter of markets and negotiating power; if I could prepare someone else to do your job and have them do it at half the price, I'd be perfectly happy to pay them to do it and send you off to McDonalds.
That's not necessarily true. The economically most-economical jobs to outsource are the ones which economize best: the ones which maximize ends for available means.
In other words: if there is demand for shoes at $40/pair and we can outsource shoemaking and get shoes to $40/pair, then that's economical: the most-in-demand thing we can reduce cost for by the greatest margin is shoes. Anything else is less-efficient--in a number of ways.
Let's say you plan on getting that employee for $40k, but you have to get at least a $60k employee. Assume outsourcing shoes is still the most-economical choice, and that this employee labor is half the cost of shoes. Now your $40/pair shoes become $50/pair shoes. The capacity for consumers to purchase shoes decreases--they are less-wealthy. If they need shoes, they'll buy as many; if they can get by without shoes, they'll sacrifice the luxury of new shoes (for style or to have some that aren't half-falling-apart) in favor of something else.
Note that this is relative to the open-market state, not the current state: You might be replacing an $80k employee with this cheaper employee. That means your capacity to purchase goes up in either case--just not as much in the latter case, which is still leaving the population (yes, including middle- and lower-class, primarily) less-wealthy than otherwise.
You could, instead, have to get at least a $150k employee. In this case, it's not even viable to replace the guy making shoes; you have to replace someone making a lot of money. Those jobs are fewer, so your ability to economize is reduced; and, just as above, the amount of economization goes down. Maybe you were going to get a $60k Indian worker rather than a $180k American worker, and Netflix would cost $11.99/month instead of $14.99; instead you got a $150k Indian and Netflix costs $13.99/month. Netflix is still not as large a share of consumer expenses in total as shoes, so even economizing Netflix to $11.99/month as originally planned in lieu of economizing shoes would have been inefficient.
It's also possible consumers simply aren't interested in purchasing Netflix at $13.99/month--that is to say: consumers have limited spending ability, have economized by selecting the goods they want, and Netflix is next in that list if it consumes no more than the $11.99/month they have. Maybe new Cable options only cost $13.99/month; for whatever reason, they aren't interested in Netflix at that price. Now it becomes impossible to provide this service.
You might term that a "shortage of labor", in some way: based on consumer demand, you can afford to pay these employees $60k, or else the consumer won't (be able to) pay the price of your service and you won't be able to use those revenues to pay the salaries you promised. Labor is available at $180k. Can't be done.
You assume "expensive" is the best route for everyone. That's the opposite of everything that economy attempts to achieve. Everyone wants to lean on market economics and talk about how a $1 bag of rice should rightly sell for $9,000 in a certain situation and how shortages are great for business and somehow then claim that's great for everyone--except that's not how macroeconomics works, and maximizing the wealth of every single individual in your economy relies on minimizing the means expended for the ends desired.
No I didn't know that was possible... What you probably want to say is that those resources, such as land, are really just savings from previous labor. Clearly not all labor is equal.
Those resources are really just one way of producing a thing, and happen to be the cheapest way. Making certain things out of metal was the cheapest way to do it until we figured out how to make plastic--although it was impossibly-expensive to make cheap metal work before inventing modern hot-blast furnaces.
Governments are necessary to form stable markets. I you want to produce and sell things, you are probably going to want stable governments.
That's true; my point is you can't magically wave away economic foundations such as the time required to make a thing and the wage of the laborer working for that time by talking about other factors such as governments and markets. Those other factors can change prices around, but they can't magic away costs: if you need to pay some guy $10/hr for 10 hours to make a thing, somehow you need to get $100 into his hands.
Because money is ultimately a proxy for labor, trying to just print more eventually gets you into a situation where you presume someone worked 1,000 to make 100 things, but that hasn't actually happened--so those 100 things don't actually exist, and can't be used. Fat lot of good owning a week's worth of food on paper if you can't actually put any of it in your mouth.
Higher salaries for some subset of people can be beneficial. For example, increasing the minimum wage can boost consumption and stimulate the economy. In many ways it's just a transfer of wealth from the richer to the poorer. Fortunately, the poorer are better consumers and they stimulate the economy creating need for more stuff and maybe more jobs.
This is actually not true.
Higher minimum wages are required because inflation reduces the purchasing power of wages--that is, the minimum wage is actually decreasing at all times, as the minimum-wage worker must work more hours to purchase the same goods. This creates more jobs as a side-effect; increasing minimum wage loses those jobs, and is necessary to keep the minimum-wage worker's buying power in line with the goals of minimum wage (that is: to keep their buying power from decreasing).
Increasing minimum wage may temporarily boost consumption only because it takes a short period for the economy to catch up and adjust. We don't fire people the day their wages go up. When purchasing slides back a bit, we start cutting people because we don't need them.
Most minimum-wage outputs are not things the rich buy in anywhere near as great a proportion to their income as the middle-class. Middle-class and poor are over 90% of this country--the top 10% salaries start at $150,000. As a proportion of income, middle-class eating the same number of meals at McDonalds will spend more of their buying power on McDonalds food than a high-income rich-class person, meaning their actual buying power is reduced more-significantly than the rich guy's.
In short: rich people buy stocks, yachts, golf clubs, mansions, servants, high-end food, and other goods that draw higher than minimum-wage salary in much of their supply chain with most of their money. A greater proportion of middle-class incomes goes to buying minimum-wage-input goods, and the middle- and lower-class make up a much greater proportion of the population.
You're right that minimum wage raises are a transfer of money (and, in fact, buying power) from the richer to the poorer; the problem is the "richer" here make $12/hr, and the "poorer" just got bumped from $7.25/hr to $8.25/hr. Minimum wage isn't incorrect; but it doesn't magically create jobs. It concentrates income into fewer hands.
I don't know what this means or how it is connected to reality
So it costs $6.12 per pair to import Men and Boys's Cotton Trousers and Shorts from China. Importing a 40-foot container from China costs under $1,300, and brings 20,000 pairs of MBCTS to America--at a price of 6.5 cents per share; the Chinese labor cost is thus about $6.06 per pair.
The average retail price of MBCTS is $14.97, although this spans from as low as some $9 to as high as $80 and higher pairs of pants (Lands' End). Roughly half of the cost at the register is domestic shipping (an average of about $8.80 per pair); cashiers perform an average 998 item scans per hour at $8.25/hr minimum wage, or 0.83 cents per item; and stocking and other marginal costs add a few pennies. Corporate net profit margins generally average around 10% over a 10 year span, and can be volatile over shorter time scales (e.g. Adidas shoes swings between +15% and -7% per fiscal year, averaging about 4% total profit margin over a 10-year span).
The median American income is $54,000/year or $27/hr. Minimum wage is $8.25/hr. A General Motors factory line worker makes $21/hr.
For the average $14.97 price, an American making $27/hr must work 0.55 hours; while an American making minimum-wage must work 1.81 hours. Factory workers at $21/hr must work 0.71 hours to buy pants. These numbers assume that the worker pays no income tax; in practice, the worker must work somewhat longer.
Chinese labor averages $3.20/hr, including all social insurances, taxes, and so forth. Benefits and payroll taxes in America average 25%-40%; using a minimal 18% number (6.2% OASDI, 0.2% HI, 11.6% benefits and unemployment insurance), the $21/hr line worker costs $24.78/hr.
If we replace the Chinese labor with $21/hr factory workers, a pair of pants sold at the $14.97 average price rises to $55.78. To earn wages in this amount, an American making $27/hr must work 2.07 hours; an American making minimum-wage must work 6.76 hours; and the factory worker must work 2.66 hours. Note that $46.87 of that price is worker wages replacing Chinese wages, so we can't keep prices low "by cutting profits" or some other strawman.
If we replace the Chinese labor with $8.25/hr factory workers (+18% = $9.74/hr), a pair of pants sold at the $14.97 average price rises to $27.30. To earn wages in this amount, an American making $27/hr must work 1.01 hours; an American making minimum-wage must work 3.31 hours; and an American making $21/hr must work 1.3 hours.
So for price of pants to the median-income middle-class American, in hours that American must work. Chinese-made: h0.55; American-made at $21/hr factory wage: h2.07; American-made at minimum wage: h1.01.
No American worker gets the benefit of third world costs of living while having to compete with third world workers imported by their own government. Imported for the sole purpose of lowering labor costs for corporations.
It looks like every American worker gets that benefit.
By the by, the break-over point in this model (18% overhead) is $18/hr. Above that, the reduced purchasing power of Americans--assuming they spend the same money on pants that they've always spent on pants--creates fewer jobs in factories than it loses jobs in shipping, retail, and retail-related infrastructure. Below $18/hr, more factory-worker jobs are created than retail and shipping jobs lost. The punchline? It doesn't matter either way: the labor force will adjust in size to approach around 5% unemployment. Any job losses or gains are eroded in 1-3 years, depending on magnitude; likely under a year here, since the maximum job gain from the entire MBCTS import trade is about 53,000.
So there's not really a job gain benefit unless we create below-median-income jobs; and even then, that benefit goes away in short order. There's not really a long-term job gain or job loss at all. The only impact on Americans is they get poorer by restriction of trade, and richer by free trade.
You do know price is ultimately restricted by wages, such that you can't lower prices below what you need to charge to pay your workers, right? Consumers pay wages.
Not "valuable"; he's setting a higher price. Immigrant labor is worthwhile because it economizes: it takes less of a limited means (money) to produce the same result (work). That's the whole point.
What you're talking about--raising prices and limiting supply--is a guild system. It's called "Racketeering", and is inherently related to price fixing.
"Worth"? What do you mean "Worth"? Worth is only the replacement cost. What does it cost to get that thing somewhere else?
If the US had a limit on car imports and then changed policies to allow more BMWs and fewer Yugos, that wouldn't "artificially inflate the price of cars", it simply means that the average price of the import goes up because people buy nicer cars.
It would artificially-restrict the quantity of purchaseable low-price cars, though. The thing about cars is they're made by the labor of humans, and BMWs have a lot more high-tech shit in them than Yugos--meaning more labor. A $30,000 BMW isn't a $12,000 Yugo with a bigger margin on it; the Yugo cost less to supply to retail (that is, make and ship) than the BMW--and not $500 less, but quite a number of thousands. A lot more working-hours and total wages are paid to get that car built and brought to the customer.
Wages are just one person pricing their time differently than the next. The cost to feed, house, and otherwise minimally-maintain a person divided by the number of labor-hours you can squeeze out of them per week is their basic wage cost. Anything on top of that is the individual equivalent of profit: it's money you don't need that you somehow think you're entitled to. The fact that you can get it is a market thing: someone else is willing to do the work at acceptable quality for less... until we run out of someone-elses.
Entitlement, I swear. I make what I make because I don't care to move on; I could get myself more income by negotiating at another job--and I've done just that, leaning on published market rates and everything--or by presenting myself as a hard-to-replace resource, which I frequently do. It's not that I'm worth it; it's that I can manipulate people into giving it to me because my arm is stronger than your arm.
My large concern is that trade makes Americans wealthy: the cost of a product in terms of the labor hours an American with a given wage works to purchase that product will increase for any import product which we start producing domestically instead. The creation and elimination of jobs is acute and temporary: you create more jobs by paying Americans less, and lose jobs by paying Americans more; those gains and losses are eroded in a short few years. The end result is simply that Americans--not simply as a whole, but at every single individual level--are poorer, meaning they are capable of purchasing fewer products.
It's a sort of myopia. People say, "Oh, but what if MY job goes away?!" They don't think about why they're so wealthy as to have things like running hot water and high-speed Internet. They don't think about why everything is cheap and gets cheaper. They see that some jobs go away sometimes, and take it as a threat that their job might go away sometimes--which is actually how it works.
The problem is that jobs going away and cycling back in is what technical progress does, and that's how the cost of things--and the amount of labor-hours you work to buy those things--goes down over time. Trade can permanently bump jobs away, and that's fine: the labor market actually adjusts in a variety of ways to clean up small losses like that; it also adjusts to clean up gains, meaning any success in "bringing jobs back" would ultimately be removed in a few short years as the number of job-seekers increases through mechanisms like people leaving college early to enter the workforce, working later into retirement to get more social security money, and so forth (with the final, slow, long-term one being birth rate increases).
The answer to unemployment cycling is welfare. Protectionism is just feeling pain in your right hand and so responding by stabbing your left. This is similar to a union in that many unions are run in a way as to enrich the union boss and secure the immediate job of the worker, but not to enrich the labor force as a whole and so are bad for more people than they're good for (and even bad for the people to whom they do supply a specific benefit).
There's an oscillation between "we're abusing people outside our country" and "we're supporting them with money we're sending out to enrich them when we should be enriching Americans." Both arguments are crap, but not entirely inaccurate.
We're leveraging a wage inequality to increase our wealth. If you work for $20/hr and a guy at McDonalds works for $10/hr, one hour of your work can induce 2 hours of his work. Think about that. You can expend your time and then, as a result, force him to expend twice as much of his time. At the same time, if he wants to get you to work, he has to work twice as much: you make a thing with 1 hour of your time, he has to work 2 hours to afford it. The same is true of importing Indian workers.
As for outsourcing in general, these people and their economies depend on their export markets. Imagine if the Chinese labor rate doubled overnight: instead of $3.20/hr, it's now $6.40/hr. Americans still have the same incomes, and can expend less of that income on Chinese goods. Now, the Chinese import isn't 100% of the goods price--pants, for example, average $14.97 at the register and $6.12 at import time, with just under 6.5 cents of that being the shipping from China to the United States. Doubling the Chinese wage means roughly a 40% increase in the retail price, thus Americans can purchase 71% as much; if that happens flat out on one day--there's a Chinese legal order to increase the wage immediately--then 29% of the Chinese labor involved in the export market will become unemployed because we're no longer buying those goods, thus they're not employable.
So the practical consequences of protectionist policies cutting off or increasing the cost of our trade labor is the price of products in terms of hours worked by Americans in order to purchase those products increases (actual amount of jobs can increase or decrease--decrease if wages paid to Americans are higher, increase if they're below a certain bounds).
The moral consequences of said protectionist policies are the creation of unemployment in foreign lands, destroying the livelihoods of many, causing economic crises, starving children, and general pain and suffering to human beings across the planet.
So protectionist policies make Americans poorer, can reduce the number of American jobs, and actively cause harm and poverty abroad. Nobody really wins here except whatever politician is getting votes and power for bullshitting the American people with bad economics.
(Oh, and to increase the number of American jobs, you have to spread the American income wider--that is, you have to pay those factory workers low wages, and you'll end up eliminating higher-wage jobs and creating more lower-wage jobs.)
If you have a resource that's cheap and you wall it off, what do you call that? Typically, we call it "artificial scarcity." Somehow it's different if the resource is labor.
I suggest you study a history of guilds--something we now call "Racketeering".
What about natural resources. While labor is required to extract and refine them
That's about where you can stop. You do know you can create gold using a coat hanger and a glass tube, right? The problem is it takes a hell of a lot of energy--it's actually less labor-intensive to mine gold.
governments create a market for them by allowing land to be owned.
Governments are also the product of labor; although that's not the issue here. You're talking about markets, while I'm talking about the actual capacity to produce things at a given price.
Consider cost and price as an exchange of labor, instead of an exchange of money. If you make chairs by the labor of 10 workers each working 1 hour for $10/hr, that's a $100 chair; if the labor of 10 workers each working 1 hour makes 2 chairs, that's a $50 chair. The naive first-pass is that the $10/hr workers worked 10 hours to buy 1 chair before, and now work 5 hours to buy 1 chair.
If we maintain a 2% inflation (we do) and this reduction of labor occurs over 10 years, then that $10 wage must go up. We want that $100 chair to be a $122 chair. With 5 hours of labor, that's $24.4/hr; and still, you will work for 5 hours to buy that chair, whereas when it was a $100 chair you had to work for 10 hours to purchase it.
We can do things to make the model imperfect--wage inequality, minimum wages, taxes, business profits, artificial scarcity, and other market behaviors. All of those things generally operate to a maximum extent: people try to get the most wage they can, and businesses try to pay the least; governments tax what they will tax; businesses take the maximum profit they can get; and so on. In the long-term, you can assume that businesses taking a 10% profit margin will lower their prices 40% if they find a way to make things 40% more-cheaply, simply because the market conditions don't allow them to take a high profit margin; although previously-expensive goods which become quite-cheap can suddenly allow competition on a greater scale, which can push profit margins down on low-demand luxury goods.
I don't understand what you are trying to say.
Re creating jobs: the implication is that an economy didn't have jobs, and you made jobs. The truth is an economy has the capacity to employ some people (rather, to spend some money), and so that capacity will be consumed. If there are 2,000 jobs to be made, Amazon can expand or Apple can expand or Microcenter can expand or someone else can expand or start a new business. A business does not create jobs in a vacuum; an economy as a whole is capable of supporting a given number of jobs, and businesses take advantage of the capacity to employ.
The net goods bought can go up as the higher salaries increase purchasing power. This includes having less unemployed people
No, that doesn't happen.
Higher salaries increase the spending and purchasing power for the individual whose salary is higher. Salaries are paid out of revenues: you sell to individuals who get wages. Prices are ultimately fixed to wages based on the level of technical progress at the time, so wages impact prices.
That means higher salaries for everyone just creates inflation, but no additional purchasing power. Higher salaries for some subset of people concentrates the limited amount of spendable income in the given frame of time into fewer hands, meaning fewer jobs.
Businesses don't create money when they write a paycheck; they use money taken from consumers. You can't account for the ability of a complete population to buy by looking at one person and saying, "Oh, he makes more, so he can buy more; that means the next guy can buy more, because he created a job; and so forth!" You need to look back and say, "Oh, he makes more, so the thing he produces by his job costs more; the people buying the
You're forgetting automation. Automation currently is not as cheap for some things as the non-sustainable dirt-cheap labor in countries like China, but we would automate production of many, many things as soon is it was cost effective.
You suggest that automation would still be a higher-wages-paid-in-total process than the current Chinese labor market. This isn't any different.
Isn't that what we want as a society?
What we want as a society is a maximization of buying power. "Economy" is about "economizing", which means using the means you have to achieve the greatest amount of ends. It's not about having a median income of $50,000 or $80,000, or a given minimum wage, or whatever else people yammer about today; it's about what your 40-hours of work actually buys. If you get paid $10,000/week working 60 hours and that's barely enough to afford a 600sqft apartment and the cheapest food you can get, you're still poor.
Technical progress is the continuous march toward a reduction of labor. As you say: we reduce the number of people (really, the number of hours) spent to produce a thing, and those people produce another thing. As a result, we pay less in wages for the thing: $10/hr paid for 10 hours of work is more than $10/hr paid for 5 hours of work. If people are still making $10/hr, it would appear they can buy twice as much stuff if we only employ half as many people to make it.
That reduction isn't about money; money is what you get by wage. In truth, we won't let a $20 chair become a $10 chair; we'll issue more money as chairs become cheaper. Your wage goes from $10/hr to $20/hr, and that chair stays a $20 chair; at the same time, you cease working 2 hours to buy a chair, and instead work only 1 hour to buy that same chair. (Really, we also add a 2% inflation rate, so your wage goes up more than that--but so does the price of a chair, so it's still spending 1 hour instead of 2; you're not getting rich off inflation.)
Trade and technical progress are what create those reductions and allow our labor to exchange for more goods.
Let's pay the price now and absolve ourselves of our reliance on a propped up world economy based on large masses of repressed people earning next to nothing to perform mundane tasks.
We have a labor advantage over these people: the cost of a Chinese worker is $3.20/hr including social insurances (like our Social Security taxes, unemployment, etc.). That means our minimum-wage workers at $8.25 work 1 hour and can induce the labor of 2.58 hours of a Chinese worker through our purchasing ability.
What do you think will happen to the Chinese worker's ability to eat if we stop buying things from them?
Even if we raised the Chinese worker's wage, that just means we can exchange our labor for less of their labor. Increase their wages by 50% and suddenly 1/3 of the portion of their workforce doing anything supporting their export markets become terminally unemployed.
It all sounds good to absolve ourselves of our position over another, powerless person; the problem is our position over them is that we feed them and force them to labor, and our moral high road is to send them naked into the cold to starve and die.
The Chinese wage has actually increased over the past 10 years--nearly doubled, in fact--and the technical progress of the rest of the world (and China itself) has allowed China to retain jobs as such. A doubling of wage overnight would destroy their workforce; but a doubling of wage over 10 years, with increases in purchasing power across their export markets, and with increases in technical progress to reduce the labor-hours invested in their production processes? That kind of wage growth, in that frame, occurs alongside factors which drive their costs down, and thus simply prevents an explosion of labor force population. It's sustainable at that level.
Actually, the exact type of fabric and even its sourcing can be specified by the client ordering the manufacture. I've seen Chinese factories make some of the highest-quality goods on the planet; I've also seen them make the cheapest crap because somebody wanted "a can-opener" that will fit into the $2 bargain bin.
most of the cost of having local workers will be recovered
This is a meaningless statement.
Besides, who says we need to put as much labor into clothes. Maybe simpler easier to make clothes such as rugby pants become more fashionable, rather than blue jeans with all the stitches and rivets.
i.e. we'll get poorer and have to buy lower-quality goods instead of the luxuries we've come to enjoy.
Or maybe the CEO and other Executives of MBCST could figure out how to live on $16 Million per year instead of $20 Million per year to give the employees an extra $5-10 an hour without having to raise the product cost or sacrifice the ever precious Profit Margin.
So CEOs and other executives get a number of compensations.
Firstly, they get your basic Cash compensations, which are salary and bonuses; these are taken from company revenue, just like all salary. Executives pay full income tax on these.
Executives also get stock and stock options as compensation. Stock issuance--whether as a compensation or as a result of exercising an option--is considered income at then-current market value. If a CEO gets 100,000 shares of stock issued at $10/share, that's $1M and is taxed as $1M of income; if he gets an option for 100,000 shares, it's not any actual income until it's exercised, at which point it's income at value of stock. To pay these taxes, the executive must use part of his cash compensation or sell some of the stock immediately.
When a stockholder sells stock, income is based on time. Shares held less than 1 year are direct income: the difference between the purchase (in this case, issuance) price and the sale price is income, taxed as such. Shares held more than 1 year are considered capital gains: the difference in purchase and sale price is taxed at 15%. That means a CEO issued $1M of stock pays $396,000 in taxes; then, 2 years later when he sells it for $1.2M, he pays 15% on $200,000--another $30,000. For the full $1.2M, he pays $426,000 in that scenario (about 35.5%).
Stock issuance devalues stock in the market. That is: if you hold Apple stock and Apple issues more AAPL to its executives, the sale price of your AAPL holdings reflects a slightly-lower value. The fluctuation is typically minor: shave a tenth of a penny off 250 million shares and you have $25 million. This bulk stock compensation allows the company to essentially pay its executives by raiding the retirement accounts and investment portfolios of everyone in the world.
Seriously... what the hell is so wrong with cutting some of the huge numbers at the top by 10 to 20% to increase the meager numbers at the bottom?
So Steve Ells makes $1,526,000 in salary and no bonus as the CEO of Chipotle, circa 2015; he got most of his compensation in stocks ($12M value).
Chipotle has 45,200 employees. $1,526,000 divided up among them is $33.76/year, or 1.69 cents per hour.
Ford has 199,000 employees as of 2016. CEO Mark Fields got $5,215,000 cash compensation or 1.31 cents per employee per hour ($26.20/year per employee); Executive Chairman William Clay Ford Jr. got $2,990,000 cash compensation or 0.75 cents per employee per hour ($15.03/year). The other executives each received less in cash compensation. Together, they could pitch all their salaries and bonuses in to raise all Ford employee wages by 4 cents per hour.
Try it. See how much it matters.
Or maybe the CEO and other Executives of MBCST could figure out how to live on $16 Million per year instead of $20 Million per year to give the employees an extra $5-10 an hour without having to raise the product cost
It can't be done. Corporate profit margins are generally under a 10% average, with risk sometimes making this comical (e.g. a large pharmaceutical company will make 49% profits one year and -27% another year, averaging an astounding 14% over 10 years, or sometimes as low as a 7% 10-year average--the extremely-high gross profit margins let them build up cash holdings in the +50%-profit years to survive the -30%-loss years).
For MBCST, paying the American workers a minimum wage actually costs more than the current sale price of (Chinese-made) trousers in total. If they don't raise prices with the wage, they won't have the money to write paychecks for their minimum-wage workers--that is to say,
If we pull Men's and Boys's Cotton Shorts and Trousers manufacture to American factories from China, a few things will happen depending on a few factors.
If we pay the factory workers more than $18/hr, we'll lose American jobs. There will be fewer American jobs in total. This is because the ability of Americans to buy MBCST decreases thanks to the price increasing. As the wage increases, the price increases; and as the price increases, fewer factory jobs are created and more infrastructure jobs (shipping, retail, etc.) are lost.
If we pay the factory workers less than $18/hr, we'll gain total American jobs for the same reason.
The more we pay the American factory workers, the greater the increase in total hours Americans must work to pay for MBCST. That is to say: Americans become poorer. The median wage today is $27/hr, and the average cost of a pair of MBCST is 0.55 labor hours at $27/hr. If we pay the factory workers $21/hr, then the average cost to the median American income is 1.87 hours; and if we pay them $8.25/hr (minimum wage), the average cost is 0.93 hours.
This works inversely for the factory workers themselves: the less we pay them, the poorer they are. That should be obvious; the only thing worth indicating here is that raising factory worker pay takes the same American monetary spending power (amount of dollars spendable) and concentrates it into fewer hands (number of workers receiving that money). At current, a $21/hr worker pays 0.71 hours for a pair of MBCST; if they were made by $21/hr factory workers, the factory workers would pay 2.4 hours per pair. Likewise, an $8.25/hr worker pays 1.81 hours today for a pair of MBCST; if we pay the factory workers $8.25/hr, then they will pay 3.03 hours per pair.
Of final note: it costs under $1,300 to import a 40-foot shipping container from China, which carries 20,000 pairs of trousers. That's 6.5 cents per pair. The average cost of the trousers at import is $6.12; the average retail price is $14.97. Cashiers perform 998 scans per hour on average--at minimum wage, 0.83 cents per item. Nearly half the ultimate cost of trousers is shipping; and in general the businesses make around a 10% overall profit margin (gross margins are higher than real profit margins because they exclude the cost of running the business itself), so about 90% of the price is generally the actual cost. That means we're not going to save a damned thing on shipping over the water.
Sounds like they restored from a backup. Backups are generally taken once per 24-hours, although PITR on databases is... interesting, and complex as hell to pull off in the real world (I don't know why; it should be a simple operation, but no database seems to make it as easy as "look here for alternate binary logs and play forward until $TIME").
Data loss of 6 hours of issues, MRs, comments, and the like is... data loss of 6 hours. It's a lot in aggregate for something with over 70,000 users and 238,000 projects, but not much for one project unless project members spend all day writing hundreds of issues and comments instead of code.
with expected first example of pilot plant going online in 2018.
Building and then decomissioning an inefficient battery plant in 5-10 years is less-efficient than waiting 2 years on the pilot. I feel they're jumping the gun with batteries at the very least, and taking a huge bet that the new technology won't be viable for decades.
Contrary to what you have said, transporting battery grid stations are trivial effort as they are not one monolithic battery store, but many refrigerator sized units strung together. If one fails, you simply replace that unit.
I had said what I said based on the assumption that they would transport batteries in the most-efficient manner possible, with land freight trucks hauling their maximum load. That seems to be what you're describing.
To put this into perspective: Chinese import Men's and Boys's Cotton Trousers cost an average $14.97 at retail. The import costs $6.12 per pair. Importing a 40-foot shipping container across sea from China costs under $1,300; it contains 20,000 pairs, at 6.5 cents per pair to ship across sea. By contrast, the cost of domestic shipping from the port to the retail center (by truck) represents almost half the retail price; while the minimum-wage cashier performs 998 scans per hour at a cost of 0.83 cents per item retailed.
All indication of the adiabatic system suggests that it requires underground cavern (drilling) to store the vast quantities of pressurized air, not a simple insulated tank out in the open as you have suggested, with many moving parts (motor, cooling tower, compressor, recuperator, high/low pressure turbines, generators, etc) involved
Initial construction costs are higher; long-term maintenance costs are lower. Motors and pumps last quite a long time--especially on modern air bearings (or even electromagnetic bearings). Also, an adiabatic system wouldn't have a cooling tower; you pump the heat into an insulated, underground thermal mass to feed back into the expansion chamber.
battery stations simply need to be charged and can be placed practically anywhere where there is a power line. This also means that battery stations can be a distributed network and not a centralized system.
A centralized system requires less labor to manage. Distributed networks of battery stations would have higher cost.
The risk of explosion is frankly overblown with modern battery technology
The risk is still existent, and mitigation involves greatly increasing the price of battery storage by lowering storage density. Time scales for response to anomalies are smaller. Everything that can go wrong is more-critical and more-costly to contain, and allowing it to just fail and destroy your facility every now and then is even costlier.
Mechanical system risks can be mitigated quite readily so that failures are isolated and easy to remediate, thus requiring fewer resources devoted to continuous risk management.
Predicting things is always a crapshoot. Anyone who can predict will take actions to modify the outcome to their favor, so predictions become a thing leveraged by big businesses and the like. This introduces entropy and causes unpredictable outcomes.
Economic theory lets you understand how an economy works. It lets you say, "If I create policy X, it will make people become wealthier over time at a faster rate;" "if I create policy Y, it will cause higher unemployment temporarily until the labor market adjusts;" and so forth. You can vaguely identify what will cause more-up and more-down overall and in the long run (and also understand why a policy might be good at a certain level of technical progress, but catastrophic at an earlier point in economic development).
Take it out any further than that and you're trying to be a fortune teller.
Jobs are a function of what can be bought and technical progress. That is to say: for a person to purchase good or service, a variety of economic activities must occur (business management, transportation, infrastructure, manufacture, retail). These activities are the product of human labor; the technology employed by that labor determines how much is produced per labor unit and, by reciprocal, how much labor is consumed per unit.
Labor incurs wage. Wages and profits in aggregate are the complete price of a good or service--the minimum viable price is the wage-labor cost.
Being that wages are paid from revenue, revenue is obtained from spending, and spending is made out of wages, money is only a mediator for the (uneven) exchange of human labor. Because of this, the amount of money spendable in a given time frame is finite: between two points in time (say, the entire year 2015), only a fixed amount of money can and will be spent. (Unspent money goes to savings to be spent later; inflation erodes its purchasing power, while trade and technical progress further erode the labor-hours it represents but increase its purchasing power.)
Since the spendable money in a time frame is finite and wages are paid from revenue, the number of jobs available in any given time frame under given conditions (trade, technical progress, population) is finite. QED.
You don't "create jobs"; you employ people. When you employ people, you may be consuming the growth in a market (trade, technical progress, and population growth allowing more purchasing, more jobs, etc.), or you may be out-competing a competitor as said competitor's ability to employ people falls (those jobs eventually go away, yours replace them; this may happen backwards because businesses have savings, too).
It's even possible to do it backwards. If you implement protectionist policies and increase the cost of goods, fewer goods are bought, and less infrastructure is needed. The number of purchaseable goods of the sort reduces as factory worker wages increase, reducing the number of factory worker jobs created by "bringing jobs back" as well as the number of jobs in supporting infrastructure. Paying low enough wages can increase total jobs, although even paying minimum wage increases the cost of goods produced and the number of working hours every person at every income level must expend to afford the previously-imported good, making every person at every income level poorer. Paying higher wages increases that wage-hour cost even further.
The punch line here is that the labor market adjusts in a few short years, and the number of jobs sought moves toward about 5% (U3) unemployment, so you can't even affect total unemployment long-term.
We need to focus on creating wealth and stabilizing the economy, not "creating jobs". You create wealth by trade and technical progress; you stabilize the economy by making sure those things don't happen all-at-once so as to reduce the volatility in employment, as well as by having good welfare policies.
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Everything you have sited as an advantage for MongoDB is done better by just about every one of their competitors (RethinkDB included).
Configuration takes about 10 minutes to figure out how to set up from scratch, as of 2.2 (although 2.4 is better), including getting a replica set working, setting up correct roles and access controls, and so forth. I still can't figure out how to make MySQL clusters actually work, mind you, so I'm not exactly the universal IT genius.
So for example if you wanted to keep a leaderboard, say the top 10 scores in a game, you would have to re-compute that every time in most databases (at a minimum scan the index). With RethinkDB it automatically gets modified based on writes in the database, and sent to you. The efficiency improvement is truly huge.
That can be true without being important. For example: running a service with compressed memory (zram, in particular) makes memory access when swapping a pain. When 50% of working set is in swap, you have 26 instructions per access to read, and more to write--when swapping. This is at a minimum twice the performance hit as a worst-case CPU cache miss.
The efficiency improvement of having enough RAM is truly huge; the practical performance impact... is approximately zero for time scales significantly smaller than one second. Largely, unless the CPU is pegged around or above 99% and you're accessing memory at random in flat distribution continuously, your program spends a lot of time working on small chunks of the working set and then moving on. On a frequency of several times per second, you'll end up with time slices that would be CPU-idle for tens of mS at a time--which are larger than the time spent waiting for zram swapping; and that's before operating system memory access management (swap caching and prediction, as well as write-back scheduling) and multiple cores (which will have some idle time to perform further decompression before the program faults to swap) factors in.
As well, a leader board would query for a list of documents based on a range of scores. To stream updates, every single update has to validate against the whole range of scores to determine who is the leader. That's an enormous amount of wasted work to update something when nobody's looking so you can push out an update that says to move #3 down one slot and insert #17 as the new #3. In this scenario, a DBA who isn't incompetent would place a key on the score field, and select for documents in descending order based on that score.
If performance is a problem, then updates to scores could invalidate a cache made each time this is done, such that multiple updates between the polling frequency would not result in leader board recalculation or in repeat querying. That would allow polling at 0.2s intervals or so while updates occur 30 or 3,000 times in the interim, without wasting all that time recomputing leader boards fifteen thousand times per second to decide if a bunch of clients should get changefeeds updates.
So I don't doubt that the specific problem of fetching leaderboard data in a certain type of scenario where the DBA is too incompetent to use indexes correctly is enormously faster in RethinkDB via changefeeds and continuously comparing new scores against a smaller set of cached data; I simply doubt that the amount of actual time spent doing that is tiny compared to the amount of time the application spends doing literally everything else. It's also the specific type of problem you could optimize out using something like Redis as an intermediary cache, or by employing someone who knows how to manage a database in production environments.
The app (indirectly through a server) just opens a changefeed on the list of stocks that you follow, and RethinkDB coordinates who needs to get what updates when they feed in the stream of changes of market prices. They don't have a ton of clients constantly polling in order
Have a look through the CompSci program at a college. You'll end up with starter books like Python Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Languages: Principles and Paradigms. Obtuse, boring stuff, but a way to start.
As for starting with C? I suggest you take a look at C# Design Pattern Essentials by Tony Beavis. Just give it a read through. I like C# because it lets you define interfaces and classes in ways which are conducive to modern programming; the point here, however, is to give you an exposure to the ideals of modern OOP. These are tools. You won't understand them or their usage; you'll get the general ideal, though, in enough detail to resolve. Modern programming--and modern OOP particularly--is about building tools that can plug universally into other tools, not about building giant programs. An understanding of the destination will give you a way to frame what you learn as you go, as well as something to question fundamentally, and something to measure yourself against.
OOP isn't the only kind of programming; it's the fundamental type of programming. You want OOP for building large, complex applications; for specific problem sets, you'll want some other paradigm. AI, financial analysis, some mathematical problems, and other such things will be vastly easier to solve and less-ugly when implemented in some other type of programming language--meaning not in C#, and not in something like Java or Python that does roughly the same thing as C#. You could build an airplane out of sails and make it flap its wings or something, but you'd probably want jet engines; yet reciprocating internal combustion engines are the type of engine used in almost everything consuming gaseous or liquid fuel, save for jets and rockets which should not be replaced with reciprocating engines.
Acquiring a fragment of a large basis of knowledge is hard. Programming isn't a thing; certain subsets of programming are things. You aren't going to learn all programming, and you can't just learn programming without understanding how problems in computer science are solved--believe me, I've tried, and I always end up working on computer science problems because they're fun and interesting and... well, because I never learned computer science; these aren't familiar things to me. I should rectify that; a quick acquisition of new tools conveys an enormous amount of power, and problems which seemed daunting become trivial.
When you look at all the books I haven't yet read in my library, you quickly realize the frightening truth: this isn't even my final form.
No, and it isn't relevant. This specific brand wasn't on the market in 1980.
Not relevant. Brands of similar products attempt to out-compete each other, often by finding better ways to make things. If Brand X figured out how to make the same quality of tea with half the human labor, it could sell for half what Brand Y sells for.
So I spend a lot of time thinking about global climate change and why it isn't called global warming anymore.
Fair enough, but you get the point; stop being obtuse.
The fact of the matter is the price of products goes down over time. Sometimes, between today and tomorrow, a price fluctuates upwards; sometimes it does that thanks to things like the cost of shipping (oil), or construction. Sometimes speculative markets have an impact. Give it 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, and the cost of everything follows an endless, downward trend.
This doesn't stop being true just because you can find one specific maker who can't run a business profitably without raising prices out of control; that maker will either get back in line or will go out of business. It also doesn't stop being true when people try to play the razor-and-blade model, lose, and have to adjust their prices--e.g. with fast food taking a loss on hamburgers and a giant profit on fries and soda, until people start rejecting soda and the price of burgers has to reflect their actual cost.
Consider the increase in agricultural outputs for non-increasing agricultural inputs and the impact on the expense share of food.
That decrease in inputs is technical progress: new technology allows production of the same goods more-cheaply (which enables us to make more-expensive goods, because they're suddenly cheap enough to make and sell).
You keep trying to argue that something changed last week and so it must expand to a general trend. Observe the productivity factor, and its fluctuations; and its trend is decidedly upwards. That's how economy works: we extend our means to achieve the maximum ends. We constantly seek ways to extend our means further--that's things getting cheaper.
By the by, on grocery shopping: the trend in the past 5 years and 10 years and 50 years has been for the proportion of people's income spent on food to go down. Households now average around 10.09% of their income spent on food as of 2015, versus 10.11% in 2014, versus 10.35% in 2013. For food at home ("groceries"), the share is 5.8% 2015, 5.9% 2014, 6.2% 2013, getting bigger going backwards; although that's semi-unfair, because people are spending more eating out at 4.3% 2015, 4.2% 2014, 4.1% 2013. The trend on total food makes more sense because people economize their time as well, and cheap food prepared by someone else becomes more-attractive as food gets cheaper--and becomes a bigger share of the bill. In 2000, the share of consumer income spent on food was around 13.5%.
Smaller and smaller percentages of people's money is going to food, it seems. You can obsess over a jug of tea all you want, but it won't hold back the tides of reality; facts are inconvenient, and the facts display that the price of food has been and continues to fall.
The whole pitch seems to be "Polling your database is slow; push in real-time!" They can make a query and then continue to give results when there are updates. I guess that's fine if you have a WebSockets service providing that, instead of just polling; on the other hand, that's rarely really a design constraint or an engineering problem--frequently, WebSockets are the wrong way to do something, and polling is the right way. For example: WebSockets to have a notification pop up when you get a new reply on a forum while idling on the forum would be wasted additional complexity versus just polling every 15 seconds or so and indexing on status.
Word on the net is this can be slower than MongoDB (although RethinkDB has joins...). Likewise, you could always set up a Redis server for caching, and use the publisher-subscriber model to accomplish the same thing.
I want to say there are already adequate alternatives out there, but it's silly. MongoDB is the document store you want. CouchDB, CouchBase, and others are slow (although CouchBase is much faster than CouchDB alone). MongoDB is easy to configure (which is good, because apparently people can't get as far as enabling security on MongoDB when that's a single-step process--but an explicit one, meaning if you don't do it it isn't there). MongoDB has built-in replication and sharding, and handles write-concerns that require journaling or replication to 50%+1 nodes. It's just fairly peerless in the space within which it operates.
It's the same way with PostgreSQL: it's performant, easy-to-configure, capable of handling enormous amounts of data, standards-compliant, featureful, and stable. PostgreSQL comes by default set to asynchronous updates in clusters (same guarantees on consistency and data safety as MongoDB Majority write-concern), but can be configured to a slower Synchronous mode. If you need a relational database rather than a document store, PostgreSQL will out-scale MS SQL Server and can keep pace with Oracle; the RDBMS space actually has a few decent competitors.
This contrasts with something like git, which is great and all, but wins on popularity for the most part; bzr and a few other DVCS are just as capable. In that space, git trounces svn and cvs largely because centralized VCS is vastly-inferior to DVCS. You want to use git because it will give you access to everything around you instead of leaving you on your own special little island.
No, wages are what an employer is willing to pay for a worker, reflecting the value that that worker brings to the company and the economy. A worker making $200/h is 10x more valuable to the economy than a worker making $20/h.
Uh, no he's not; he's working the same labor-hours, performing some output that's worth that amount of time. He's taking a greater share of purchasing power for his time worked. It may happen that, for some reason, he can charge more for his time; that doesn't mean his time is worth more.
What delusion do you live under in that a person's time somehow has intrinsically more worth than another person's time? Wage inequalities are a matter of markets and negotiating power; if I could prepare someone else to do your job and have them do it at half the price, I'd be perfectly happy to pay them to do it and send you off to McDonalds.
That's not necessarily true. The economically most-economical jobs to outsource are the ones which economize best: the ones which maximize ends for available means.
In other words: if there is demand for shoes at $40/pair and we can outsource shoemaking and get shoes to $40/pair, then that's economical: the most-in-demand thing we can reduce cost for by the greatest margin is shoes. Anything else is less-efficient--in a number of ways.
Let's say you plan on getting that employee for $40k, but you have to get at least a $60k employee. Assume outsourcing shoes is still the most-economical choice, and that this employee labor is half the cost of shoes. Now your $40/pair shoes become $50/pair shoes. The capacity for consumers to purchase shoes decreases--they are less-wealthy. If they need shoes, they'll buy as many; if they can get by without shoes, they'll sacrifice the luxury of new shoes (for style or to have some that aren't half-falling-apart) in favor of something else.
Note that this is relative to the open-market state, not the current state: You might be replacing an $80k employee with this cheaper employee. That means your capacity to purchase goes up in either case--just not as much in the latter case, which is still leaving the population (yes, including middle- and lower-class, primarily) less-wealthy than otherwise.
You could, instead, have to get at least a $150k employee. In this case, it's not even viable to replace the guy making shoes; you have to replace someone making a lot of money. Those jobs are fewer, so your ability to economize is reduced; and, just as above, the amount of economization goes down. Maybe you were going to get a $60k Indian worker rather than a $180k American worker, and Netflix would cost $11.99/month instead of $14.99; instead you got a $150k Indian and Netflix costs $13.99/month. Netflix is still not as large a share of consumer expenses in total as shoes, so even economizing Netflix to $11.99/month as originally planned in lieu of economizing shoes would have been inefficient.
It's also possible consumers simply aren't interested in purchasing Netflix at $13.99/month--that is to say: consumers have limited spending ability, have economized by selecting the goods they want, and Netflix is next in that list if it consumes no more than the $11.99/month they have. Maybe new Cable options only cost $13.99/month; for whatever reason, they aren't interested in Netflix at that price. Now it becomes impossible to provide this service.
You might term that a "shortage of labor", in some way: based on consumer demand, you can afford to pay these employees $60k, or else the consumer won't (be able to) pay the price of your service and you won't be able to use those revenues to pay the salaries you promised. Labor is available at $180k. Can't be done.
You assume "expensive" is the best route for everyone. That's the opposite of everything that economy attempts to achieve. Everyone wants to lean on market economics and talk about how a $1 bag of rice should rightly sell for $9,000 in a certain situation and how shortages are great for business and somehow then claim that's great for everyone--except that's not how macroeconomics works, and maximizing the wealth of every single individual in your economy relies on minimizing the means expended for the ends desired.
No I didn't know that was possible... What you probably want to say is that those resources, such as land, are really just savings from previous labor. Clearly not all labor is equal.
Those resources are really just one way of producing a thing, and happen to be the cheapest way. Making certain things out of metal was the cheapest way to do it until we figured out how to make plastic--although it was impossibly-expensive to make cheap metal work before inventing modern hot-blast furnaces.
Governments are necessary to form stable markets. I you want to produce and sell things, you are probably going to want stable governments.
That's true; my point is you can't magically wave away economic foundations such as the time required to make a thing and the wage of the laborer working for that time by talking about other factors such as governments and markets. Those other factors can change prices around, but they can't magic away costs: if you need to pay some guy $10/hr for 10 hours to make a thing, somehow you need to get $100 into his hands.
Because money is ultimately a proxy for labor, trying to just print more eventually gets you into a situation where you presume someone worked 1,000 to make 100 things, but that hasn't actually happened--so those 100 things don't actually exist, and can't be used. Fat lot of good owning a week's worth of food on paper if you can't actually put any of it in your mouth.
Higher salaries for some subset of people can be beneficial. For example, increasing the minimum wage can boost consumption and stimulate the economy. In many ways it's just a transfer of wealth from the richer to the poorer. Fortunately, the poorer are better consumers and they stimulate the economy creating need for more stuff and maybe more jobs.
This is actually not true.
Higher minimum wages are required because inflation reduces the purchasing power of wages--that is, the minimum wage is actually decreasing at all times, as the minimum-wage worker must work more hours to purchase the same goods. This creates more jobs as a side-effect; increasing minimum wage loses those jobs, and is necessary to keep the minimum-wage worker's buying power in line with the goals of minimum wage (that is: to keep their buying power from decreasing).
Increasing minimum wage may temporarily boost consumption only because it takes a short period for the economy to catch up and adjust. We don't fire people the day their wages go up. When purchasing slides back a bit, we start cutting people because we don't need them.
Most minimum-wage outputs are not things the rich buy in anywhere near as great a proportion to their income as the middle-class. Middle-class and poor are over 90% of this country--the top 10% salaries start at $150,000. As a proportion of income, middle-class eating the same number of meals at McDonalds will spend more of their buying power on McDonalds food than a high-income rich-class person, meaning their actual buying power is reduced more-significantly than the rich guy's.
In short: rich people buy stocks, yachts, golf clubs, mansions, servants, high-end food, and other goods that draw higher than minimum-wage salary in much of their supply chain with most of their money. A greater proportion of middle-class incomes goes to buying minimum-wage-input goods, and the middle- and lower-class make up a much greater proportion of the population.
You're right that minimum wage raises are a transfer of money (and, in fact, buying power) from the richer to the poorer; the problem is the "richer" here make $12/hr, and the "poorer" just got bumped from $7.25/hr to $8.25/hr. Minimum wage isn't incorrect; but it doesn't magically create jobs. It concentrates income into fewer hands.
I don't know what this means or how it is connected to reality
So it costs $6.12 per pair to import Men and Boys's Cotton Trousers and Shorts from China. Importing a 40-foot container from China costs under $1,300, and brings 20,000 pairs of MBCTS to America--at a price of 6.5 cents per share; the Chinese labor cost is thus about $6.06 per pair.
The average retail price of MBCTS is $14.97, although this spans from as low as some $9 to as high as $80 and higher pairs of pants (Lands' End). Roughly half of the cost at the register is domestic shipping (an average of about $8.80 per pair); cashiers perform an average 998 item scans per hour at $8.25/hr minimum wage, or 0.83 cents per item; and stocking and other marginal costs add a few pennies. Corporate net profit margins generally average around 10% over a 10 year span, and can be volatile over shorter time scales (e.g. Adidas shoes swings between +15% and -7% per fiscal year, averaging about 4% total profit margin over a 10-year span).
The median American income is $54,000/year or $27/hr. Minimum wage is $8.25/hr. A General Motors factory line worker makes $21/hr.
For the average $14.97 price, an American making $27/hr must work 0.55 hours; while an American making minimum-wage must work 1.81 hours. Factory workers at $21/hr must work 0.71 hours to buy pants. These numbers assume that the worker pays no income tax; in practice, the worker must work somewhat longer.
Chinese labor averages $3.20/hr, including all social insurances, taxes, and so forth. Benefits and payroll taxes in America average 25%-40%; using a minimal 18% number (6.2% OASDI, 0.2% HI, 11.6% benefits and unemployment insurance), the $21/hr line worker costs $24.78/hr.
If we replace the Chinese labor with $21/hr factory workers, a pair of pants sold at the $14.97 average price rises to $55.78. To earn wages in this amount, an American making $27/hr must work 2.07 hours; an American making minimum-wage must work 6.76 hours; and the factory worker must work 2.66 hours. Note that $46.87 of that price is worker wages replacing Chinese wages, so we can't keep prices low "by cutting profits" or some other strawman.
If we replace the Chinese labor with $8.25/hr factory workers (+18% = $9.74/hr), a pair of pants sold at the $14.97 average price rises to $27.30. To earn wages in this amount, an American making $27/hr must work 1.01 hours; an American making minimum-wage must work 3.31 hours; and an American making $21/hr must work 1.3 hours.
So for price of pants to the median-income middle-class American, in hours that American must work. Chinese-made: h0.55; American-made at $21/hr factory wage: h2.07; American-made at minimum wage: h1.01.
No American worker gets the benefit of third world costs of living while having to compete with third world workers imported by their own government. Imported for the sole purpose of lowering labor costs for corporations.
It looks like every American worker gets that benefit.
By the by, the break-over point in this model (18% overhead) is $18/hr. Above that, the reduced purchasing power of Americans--assuming they spend the same money on pants that they've always spent on pants--creates fewer jobs in factories than it loses jobs in shipping, retail, and retail-related infrastructure. Below $18/hr, more factory-worker jobs are created than retail and shipping jobs lost. The punchline? It doesn't matter either way: the labor force will adjust in size to approach around 5% unemployment. Any job losses or gains are eroded in 1-3 years, depending on magnitude; likely under a year here, since the maximum job gain from the entire MBCTS import trade is about 53,000.
So there's not really a job gain benefit unless we create below-median-income jobs; and even then, that benefit goes away in short order. There's not really a long-term job gain or job loss at all. The only impact on Americans is they get poorer by restriction of trade, and richer by free trade.
You do know price is ultimately restricted by wages, such that you can't lower prices below what you need to charge to pay your workers, right? Consumers pay wages.
Not "valuable"; he's setting a higher price. Immigrant labor is worthwhile because it economizes: it takes less of a limited means (money) to produce the same result (work). That's the whole point.
What you're talking about--raising prices and limiting supply--is a guild system. It's called "Racketeering", and is inherently related to price fixing.
"Worth"? What do you mean "Worth"? Worth is only the replacement cost. What does it cost to get that thing somewhere else?
If the US had a limit on car imports and then changed policies to allow more BMWs and fewer Yugos, that wouldn't "artificially inflate the price of cars", it simply means that the average price of the import goes up because people buy nicer cars.
It would artificially-restrict the quantity of purchaseable low-price cars, though. The thing about cars is they're made by the labor of humans, and BMWs have a lot more high-tech shit in them than Yugos--meaning more labor. A $30,000 BMW isn't a $12,000 Yugo with a bigger margin on it; the Yugo cost less to supply to retail (that is, make and ship) than the BMW--and not $500 less, but quite a number of thousands. A lot more working-hours and total wages are paid to get that car built and brought to the customer.
Wages are just one person pricing their time differently than the next. The cost to feed, house, and otherwise minimally-maintain a person divided by the number of labor-hours you can squeeze out of them per week is their basic wage cost. Anything on top of that is the individual equivalent of profit: it's money you don't need that you somehow think you're entitled to. The fact that you can get it is a market thing: someone else is willing to do the work at acceptable quality for less... until we run out of someone-elses.
Entitlement, I swear. I make what I make because I don't care to move on; I could get myself more income by negotiating at another job--and I've done just that, leaning on published market rates and everything--or by presenting myself as a hard-to-replace resource, which I frequently do. It's not that I'm worth it; it's that I can manipulate people into giving it to me because my arm is stronger than your arm.
Do you know how much a gallon of prepared tea would have cost in 1980? How about 1850? How would that compare to relative income?
I spend a lot of time thinking about global warming when I notice the temperature getting hotter between September and February.
Kind of.
My large concern is that trade makes Americans wealthy: the cost of a product in terms of the labor hours an American with a given wage works to purchase that product will increase for any import product which we start producing domestically instead. The creation and elimination of jobs is acute and temporary: you create more jobs by paying Americans less, and lose jobs by paying Americans more; those gains and losses are eroded in a short few years. The end result is simply that Americans--not simply as a whole, but at every single individual level--are poorer, meaning they are capable of purchasing fewer products.
It's a sort of myopia. People say, "Oh, but what if MY job goes away?!" They don't think about why they're so wealthy as to have things like running hot water and high-speed Internet. They don't think about why everything is cheap and gets cheaper. They see that some jobs go away sometimes, and take it as a threat that their job might go away sometimes--which is actually how it works.
The problem is that jobs going away and cycling back in is what technical progress does, and that's how the cost of things--and the amount of labor-hours you work to buy those things--goes down over time. Trade can permanently bump jobs away, and that's fine: the labor market actually adjusts in a variety of ways to clean up small losses like that; it also adjusts to clean up gains, meaning any success in "bringing jobs back" would ultimately be removed in a few short years as the number of job-seekers increases through mechanisms like people leaving college early to enter the workforce, working later into retirement to get more social security money, and so forth (with the final, slow, long-term one being birth rate increases).
The answer to unemployment cycling is welfare. Protectionism is just feeling pain in your right hand and so responding by stabbing your left. This is similar to a union in that many unions are run in a way as to enrich the union boss and secure the immediate job of the worker, but not to enrich the labor force as a whole and so are bad for more people than they're good for (and even bad for the people to whom they do supply a specific benefit).
There's an oscillation between "we're abusing people outside our country" and "we're supporting them with money we're sending out to enrich them when we should be enriching Americans." Both arguments are crap, but not entirely inaccurate.
We're leveraging a wage inequality to increase our wealth. If you work for $20/hr and a guy at McDonalds works for $10/hr, one hour of your work can induce 2 hours of his work. Think about that. You can expend your time and then, as a result, force him to expend twice as much of his time. At the same time, if he wants to get you to work, he has to work twice as much: you make a thing with 1 hour of your time, he has to work 2 hours to afford it. The same is true of importing Indian workers.
As for outsourcing in general, these people and their economies depend on their export markets. Imagine if the Chinese labor rate doubled overnight: instead of $3.20/hr, it's now $6.40/hr. Americans still have the same incomes, and can expend less of that income on Chinese goods. Now, the Chinese import isn't 100% of the goods price--pants, for example, average $14.97 at the register and $6.12 at import time, with just under 6.5 cents of that being the shipping from China to the United States. Doubling the Chinese wage means roughly a 40% increase in the retail price, thus Americans can purchase 71% as much; if that happens flat out on one day--there's a Chinese legal order to increase the wage immediately--then 29% of the Chinese labor involved in the export market will become unemployed because we're no longer buying those goods, thus they're not employable.
So the practical consequences of protectionist policies cutting off or increasing the cost of our trade labor is the price of products in terms of hours worked by Americans in order to purchase those products increases (actual amount of jobs can increase or decrease--decrease if wages paid to Americans are higher, increase if they're below a certain bounds).
The moral consequences of said protectionist policies are the creation of unemployment in foreign lands, destroying the livelihoods of many, causing economic crises, starving children, and general pain and suffering to human beings across the planet.
So protectionist policies make Americans poorer, can reduce the number of American jobs, and actively cause harm and poverty abroad. Nobody really wins here except whatever politician is getting votes and power for bullshitting the American people with bad economics.
(Oh, and to increase the number of American jobs, you have to spread the American income wider--that is, you have to pay those factory workers low wages, and you'll end up eliminating higher-wage jobs and creating more lower-wage jobs.)
If you have a resource that's cheap and you wall it off, what do you call that? Typically, we call it "artificial scarcity." Somehow it's different if the resource is labor.
I suggest you study a history of guilds--something we now call "Racketeering".
So the new system artificially inflates wages?
What about natural resources. While labor is required to extract and refine them
That's about where you can stop. You do know you can create gold using a coat hanger and a glass tube, right? The problem is it takes a hell of a lot of energy--it's actually less labor-intensive to mine gold.
governments create a market for them by allowing land to be owned.
Governments are also the product of labor; although that's not the issue here. You're talking about markets, while I'm talking about the actual capacity to produce things at a given price.
Consider cost and price as an exchange of labor, instead of an exchange of money. If you make chairs by the labor of 10 workers each working 1 hour for $10/hr, that's a $100 chair; if the labor of 10 workers each working 1 hour makes 2 chairs, that's a $50 chair. The naive first-pass is that the $10/hr workers worked 10 hours to buy 1 chair before, and now work 5 hours to buy 1 chair.
If we maintain a 2% inflation (we do) and this reduction of labor occurs over 10 years, then that $10 wage must go up. We want that $100 chair to be a $122 chair. With 5 hours of labor, that's $24.4/hr; and still, you will work for 5 hours to buy that chair, whereas when it was a $100 chair you had to work for 10 hours to purchase it.
We can do things to make the model imperfect--wage inequality, minimum wages, taxes, business profits, artificial scarcity, and other market behaviors. All of those things generally operate to a maximum extent: people try to get the most wage they can, and businesses try to pay the least; governments tax what they will tax; businesses take the maximum profit they can get; and so on. In the long-term, you can assume that businesses taking a 10% profit margin will lower their prices 40% if they find a way to make things 40% more-cheaply, simply because the market conditions don't allow them to take a high profit margin; although previously-expensive goods which become quite-cheap can suddenly allow competition on a greater scale, which can push profit margins down on low-demand luxury goods.
I don't understand what you are trying to say.
Re creating jobs: the implication is that an economy didn't have jobs, and you made jobs. The truth is an economy has the capacity to employ some people (rather, to spend some money), and so that capacity will be consumed. If there are 2,000 jobs to be made, Amazon can expand or Apple can expand or Microcenter can expand or someone else can expand or start a new business. A business does not create jobs in a vacuum; an economy as a whole is capable of supporting a given number of jobs, and businesses take advantage of the capacity to employ.
The net goods bought can go up as the higher salaries increase purchasing power. This includes having less unemployed people
No, that doesn't happen.
Higher salaries increase the spending and purchasing power for the individual whose salary is higher. Salaries are paid out of revenues: you sell to individuals who get wages. Prices are ultimately fixed to wages based on the level of technical progress at the time, so wages impact prices.
That means higher salaries for everyone just creates inflation, but no additional purchasing power. Higher salaries for some subset of people concentrates the limited amount of spendable income in the given frame of time into fewer hands, meaning fewer jobs.
Businesses don't create money when they write a paycheck; they use money taken from consumers. You can't account for the ability of a complete population to buy by looking at one person and saying, "Oh, he makes more, so he can buy more; that means the next guy can buy more, because he created a job; and so forth!" You need to look back and say, "Oh, he makes more, so the thing he produces by his job costs more; the people buying the
You're forgetting automation. Automation currently is not as cheap for some things as the non-sustainable dirt-cheap labor in countries like China, but we would automate production of many, many things as soon is it was cost effective.
You suggest that automation would still be a higher-wages-paid-in-total process than the current Chinese labor market. This isn't any different.
Isn't that what we want as a society?
What we want as a society is a maximization of buying power. "Economy" is about "economizing", which means using the means you have to achieve the greatest amount of ends. It's not about having a median income of $50,000 or $80,000, or a given minimum wage, or whatever else people yammer about today; it's about what your 40-hours of work actually buys. If you get paid $10,000/week working 60 hours and that's barely enough to afford a 600sqft apartment and the cheapest food you can get, you're still poor.
Technical progress is the continuous march toward a reduction of labor. As you say: we reduce the number of people (really, the number of hours) spent to produce a thing, and those people produce another thing. As a result, we pay less in wages for the thing: $10/hr paid for 10 hours of work is more than $10/hr paid for 5 hours of work. If people are still making $10/hr, it would appear they can buy twice as much stuff if we only employ half as many people to make it.
That reduction isn't about money; money is what you get by wage. In truth, we won't let a $20 chair become a $10 chair; we'll issue more money as chairs become cheaper. Your wage goes from $10/hr to $20/hr, and that chair stays a $20 chair; at the same time, you cease working 2 hours to buy a chair, and instead work only 1 hour to buy that same chair. (Really, we also add a 2% inflation rate, so your wage goes up more than that--but so does the price of a chair, so it's still spending 1 hour instead of 2; you're not getting rich off inflation.)
Trade and technical progress are what create those reductions and allow our labor to exchange for more goods.
Let's pay the price now and absolve ourselves of our reliance on a propped up world economy based on large masses of repressed people earning next to nothing to perform mundane tasks.
We have a labor advantage over these people: the cost of a Chinese worker is $3.20/hr including social insurances (like our Social Security taxes, unemployment, etc.). That means our minimum-wage workers at $8.25 work 1 hour and can induce the labor of 2.58 hours of a Chinese worker through our purchasing ability.
What do you think will happen to the Chinese worker's ability to eat if we stop buying things from them?
Even if we raised the Chinese worker's wage, that just means we can exchange our labor for less of their labor. Increase their wages by 50% and suddenly 1/3 of the portion of their workforce doing anything supporting their export markets become terminally unemployed.
It all sounds good to absolve ourselves of our position over another, powerless person; the problem is our position over them is that we feed them and force them to labor, and our moral high road is to send them naked into the cold to starve and die.
The Chinese wage has actually increased over the past 10 years--nearly doubled, in fact--and the technical progress of the rest of the world (and China itself) has allowed China to retain jobs as such. A doubling of wage overnight would destroy their workforce; but a doubling of wage over 10 years, with increases in purchasing power across their export markets, and with increases in technical progress to reduce the labor-hours invested in their production processes? That kind of wage growth, in that frame, occurs alongside factors which drive their costs down, and thus simply prevents an explosion of labor force population. It's sustainable at that level.
As we continue to purchase from their export
Actually, the exact type of fabric and even its sourcing can be specified by the client ordering the manufacture. I've seen Chinese factories make some of the highest-quality goods on the planet; I've also seen them make the cheapest crap because somebody wanted "a can-opener" that will fit into the $2 bargain bin.
most of the cost of having local workers will be recovered
This is a meaningless statement.
Besides, who says we need to put as much labor into clothes. Maybe simpler easier to make clothes such as rugby pants become more fashionable, rather than blue jeans with all the stitches and rivets.
i.e. we'll get poorer and have to buy lower-quality goods instead of the luxuries we've come to enjoy.
Or maybe the CEO and other Executives of MBCST could figure out how to live on $16 Million per year instead of $20 Million per year to give the employees an extra $5-10 an hour without having to raise the product cost or sacrifice the ever precious Profit Margin.
So CEOs and other executives get a number of compensations.
Firstly, they get your basic Cash compensations, which are salary and bonuses; these are taken from company revenue, just like all salary. Executives pay full income tax on these.
Executives also get stock and stock options as compensation. Stock issuance--whether as a compensation or as a result of exercising an option--is considered income at then-current market value. If a CEO gets 100,000 shares of stock issued at $10/share, that's $1M and is taxed as $1M of income; if he gets an option for 100,000 shares, it's not any actual income until it's exercised, at which point it's income at value of stock. To pay these taxes, the executive must use part of his cash compensation or sell some of the stock immediately.
When a stockholder sells stock, income is based on time. Shares held less than 1 year are direct income: the difference between the purchase (in this case, issuance) price and the sale price is income, taxed as such. Shares held more than 1 year are considered capital gains: the difference in purchase and sale price is taxed at 15%. That means a CEO issued $1M of stock pays $396,000 in taxes; then, 2 years later when he sells it for $1.2M, he pays 15% on $200,000--another $30,000. For the full $1.2M, he pays $426,000 in that scenario (about 35.5%).
Stock issuance devalues stock in the market. That is: if you hold Apple stock and Apple issues more AAPL to its executives, the sale price of your AAPL holdings reflects a slightly-lower value. The fluctuation is typically minor: shave a tenth of a penny off 250 million shares and you have $25 million. This bulk stock compensation allows the company to essentially pay its executives by raiding the retirement accounts and investment portfolios of everyone in the world.
Seriously... what the hell is so wrong with cutting some of the huge numbers at the top by 10 to 20% to increase the meager numbers at the bottom?
So Steve Ells makes $1,526,000 in salary and no bonus as the CEO of Chipotle, circa 2015; he got most of his compensation in stocks ($12M value).
Chipotle has 45,200 employees. $1,526,000 divided up among them is $33.76/year, or 1.69 cents per hour.
Ford has 199,000 employees as of 2016. CEO Mark Fields got $5,215,000 cash compensation or 1.31 cents per employee per hour ($26.20/year per employee); Executive Chairman William Clay Ford Jr. got $2,990,000 cash compensation or 0.75 cents per employee per hour ($15.03/year). The other executives each received less in cash compensation. Together, they could pitch all their salaries and bonuses in to raise all Ford employee wages by 4 cents per hour.
Try it. See how much it matters.
Or maybe the CEO and other Executives of MBCST could figure out how to live on $16 Million per year instead of $20 Million per year to give the employees an extra $5-10 an hour without having to raise the product cost
It can't be done. Corporate profit margins are generally under a 10% average, with risk sometimes making this comical (e.g. a large pharmaceutical company will make 49% profits one year and -27% another year, averaging an astounding 14% over 10 years, or sometimes as low as a 7% 10-year average--the extremely-high gross profit margins let them build up cash holdings in the +50%-profit years to survive the -30%-loss years).
For MBCST, paying the American workers a minimum wage actually costs more than the current sale price of (Chinese-made) trousers in total. If they don't raise prices with the wage, they won't have the money to write paychecks for their minimum-wage workers--that is to say,
It's also about creating ties at the human level. The level where people matter and count.
Save your bleeding-heart bullshit and point out that trade makes the poor richer.
If we pull Men's and Boys's Cotton Shorts and Trousers manufacture to American factories from China, a few things will happen depending on a few factors.
If we pay the factory workers more than $18/hr, we'll lose American jobs. There will be fewer American jobs in total. This is because the ability of Americans to buy MBCST decreases thanks to the price increasing. As the wage increases, the price increases; and as the price increases, fewer factory jobs are created and more infrastructure jobs (shipping, retail, etc.) are lost.
If we pay the factory workers less than $18/hr, we'll gain total American jobs for the same reason.
The more we pay the American factory workers, the greater the increase in total hours Americans must work to pay for MBCST. That is to say: Americans become poorer. The median wage today is $27/hr, and the average cost of a pair of MBCST is 0.55 labor hours at $27/hr. If we pay the factory workers $21/hr, then the average cost to the median American income is 1.87 hours; and if we pay them $8.25/hr (minimum wage), the average cost is 0.93 hours.
This works inversely for the factory workers themselves: the less we pay them, the poorer they are. That should be obvious; the only thing worth indicating here is that raising factory worker pay takes the same American monetary spending power (amount of dollars spendable) and concentrates it into fewer hands (number of workers receiving that money). At current, a $21/hr worker pays 0.71 hours for a pair of MBCST; if they were made by $21/hr factory workers, the factory workers would pay 2.4 hours per pair. Likewise, an $8.25/hr worker pays 1.81 hours today for a pair of MBCST; if we pay the factory workers $8.25/hr, then they will pay 3.03 hours per pair.
Of final note: it costs under $1,300 to import a 40-foot shipping container from China, which carries 20,000 pairs of trousers. That's 6.5 cents per pair. The average cost of the trousers at import is $6.12; the average retail price is $14.97. Cashiers perform 998 scans per hour on average--at minimum wage, 0.83 cents per item. Nearly half the ultimate cost of trousers is shipping; and in general the businesses make around a 10% overall profit margin (gross margins are higher than real profit margins because they exclude the cost of running the business itself), so about 90% of the price is generally the actual cost. That means we're not going to save a damned thing on shipping over the water.
Sounds like they restored from a backup. Backups are generally taken once per 24-hours, although PITR on databases is ... interesting, and complex as hell to pull off in the real world (I don't know why; it should be a simple operation, but no database seems to make it as easy as "look here for alternate binary logs and play forward until $TIME").
Data loss of 6 hours of issues, MRs, comments, and the like is ... data loss of 6 hours. It's a lot in aggregate for something with over 70,000 users and 238,000 projects, but not much for one project unless project members spend all day writing hundreds of issues and comments instead of code.
with expected first example of pilot plant going online in 2018.
Building and then decomissioning an inefficient battery plant in 5-10 years is less-efficient than waiting 2 years on the pilot. I feel they're jumping the gun with batteries at the very least, and taking a huge bet that the new technology won't be viable for decades.
Contrary to what you have said, transporting battery grid stations are trivial effort as they are not one monolithic battery store, but many refrigerator sized units strung together. If one fails, you simply replace that unit.
I had said what I said based on the assumption that they would transport batteries in the most-efficient manner possible, with land freight trucks hauling their maximum load. That seems to be what you're describing.
To put this into perspective: Chinese import Men's and Boys's Cotton Trousers cost an average $14.97 at retail. The import costs $6.12 per pair. Importing a 40-foot shipping container across sea from China costs under $1,300; it contains 20,000 pairs, at 6.5 cents per pair to ship across sea. By contrast, the cost of domestic shipping from the port to the retail center (by truck) represents almost half the retail price; while the minimum-wage cashier performs 998 scans per hour at a cost of 0.83 cents per item retailed.
All indication of the adiabatic system suggests that it requires underground cavern (drilling) to store the vast quantities of pressurized air, not a simple insulated tank out in the open as you have suggested, with many moving parts (motor, cooling tower, compressor, recuperator, high/low pressure turbines, generators, etc) involved
Initial construction costs are higher; long-term maintenance costs are lower. Motors and pumps last quite a long time--especially on modern air bearings (or even electromagnetic bearings). Also, an adiabatic system wouldn't have a cooling tower; you pump the heat into an insulated, underground thermal mass to feed back into the expansion chamber.
battery stations simply need to be charged and can be placed practically anywhere where there is a power line. This also means that battery stations can be a distributed network and not a centralized system.
A centralized system requires less labor to manage. Distributed networks of battery stations would have higher cost.
The risk of explosion is frankly overblown with modern battery technology
The risk is still existent, and mitigation involves greatly increasing the price of battery storage by lowering storage density. Time scales for response to anomalies are smaller. Everything that can go wrong is more-critical and more-costly to contain, and allowing it to just fail and destroy your facility every now and then is even costlier.
Mechanical system risks can be mitigated quite readily so that failures are isolated and easy to remediate, thus requiring fewer resources devoted to continuous risk management.
Predicting things is always a crapshoot. Anyone who can predict will take actions to modify the outcome to their favor, so predictions become a thing leveraged by big businesses and the like. This introduces entropy and causes unpredictable outcomes.
Economic theory lets you understand how an economy works. It lets you say, "If I create policy X, it will make people become wealthier over time at a faster rate;" "if I create policy Y, it will cause higher unemployment temporarily until the labor market adjusts;" and so forth. You can vaguely identify what will cause more-up and more-down overall and in the long run (and also understand why a policy might be good at a certain level of technical progress, but catastrophic at an earlier point in economic development).
Take it out any further than that and you're trying to be a fortune teller.
It's better than that.
Jobs are a function of what can be bought and technical progress. That is to say: for a person to purchase good or service, a variety of economic activities must occur (business management, transportation, infrastructure, manufacture, retail). These activities are the product of human labor; the technology employed by that labor determines how much is produced per labor unit and, by reciprocal, how much labor is consumed per unit.
Labor incurs wage. Wages and profits in aggregate are the complete price of a good or service--the minimum viable price is the wage-labor cost.
Being that wages are paid from revenue, revenue is obtained from spending, and spending is made out of wages, money is only a mediator for the (uneven) exchange of human labor. Because of this, the amount of money spendable in a given time frame is finite: between two points in time (say, the entire year 2015), only a fixed amount of money can and will be spent. (Unspent money goes to savings to be spent later; inflation erodes its purchasing power, while trade and technical progress further erode the labor-hours it represents but increase its purchasing power.)
Since the spendable money in a time frame is finite and wages are paid from revenue, the number of jobs available in any given time frame under given conditions (trade, technical progress, population) is finite. QED.
You don't "create jobs"; you employ people. When you employ people, you may be consuming the growth in a market (trade, technical progress, and population growth allowing more purchasing, more jobs, etc.), or you may be out-competing a competitor as said competitor's ability to employ people falls (those jobs eventually go away, yours replace them; this may happen backwards because businesses have savings, too).
It's even possible to do it backwards. If you implement protectionist policies and increase the cost of goods, fewer goods are bought, and less infrastructure is needed. The number of purchaseable goods of the sort reduces as factory worker wages increase, reducing the number of factory worker jobs created by "bringing jobs back" as well as the number of jobs in supporting infrastructure. Paying low enough wages can increase total jobs, although even paying minimum wage increases the cost of goods produced and the number of working hours every person at every income level must expend to afford the previously-imported good, making every person at every income level poorer. Paying higher wages increases that wage-hour cost even further.
The punch line here is that the labor market adjusts in a few short years, and the number of jobs sought moves toward about 5% (U3) unemployment, so you can't even affect total unemployment long-term.
We need to focus on creating wealth and stabilizing the economy, not "creating jobs". You create wealth by trade and technical progress; you stabilize the economy by making sure those things don't happen all-at-once so as to reduce the volatility in employment, as well as by having good welfare policies.