I should have said "current known-best monetary system." The alternatives are commodity as currency (e.g. gold, silver) and a non-fractional-reserve system.
Commodity currency is deflationary and inflexible for monetary policy, as well as unstable. Commodity currency doesn't preclude debt; it just makes it a hell of a lot harder on debtors. Imagine if your mortgage payment became a larger proportion of your income as population grows--population in the U.S. increased by 9% from 2004 to 2014, and you have to find money to pay those peoples's wages. If you don't have more gold to issue, well... the purchasing power of coin must increase, and everyone's coinage wage must fall.
Non-fractional-reserve systems limit total debt to total money held by banks, which severely restricts what can be bought.
Think about something like a car. Lots of people work to produce a car, chipping in bits of their time here and there. To buy the car, you must pay their wages; the profit margin on a car manufactured in the United States is somewhere around 5%-6%, including all involved business activity (the gross margin is like 15%; that excludes all of the operational costs of running a business that produces cars, such as maintaining the machinery used to make the cars themselves). If you overestimate the profit margin in total ass 10% and underestimate wages as 90%, then a $15,000 economy car costs $13,600 to make and a $30,000 mid-range vehicle costs $27,300 to make.
You know that 5-year car loan you took for your last vehicle? What if it had to be a 1-year loan? How many people could still buy cars?
A $15,000 car at a 3.11% interest rate for a 5 year repayment term incurs a $270/month payment. For a 1-year repayment term, it's $1,271. For a $30,000 car, the 5-year term incurs a $541/month payment, while the 1-year term incurs a $2,542/month payment.
Besides that nobody can afford this, a non-fractional-reserve system only allows the banks to lend out money they have on hand. Mostly, that means people just can't get loans to begin with--never mind that they simply can't afford them. Once the banks have lent out a significant fraction of the cash kept on-hand, they have to wait for loan repayments--this means banks can then only continue to lend as much money as population growth, plus inflation, plus a loan payment. Longer loans make that last bit really small.
Two questions.
First, what happens to the ability of the middle-class to buy expensive luxuries such as cars and houses?
Second, what happens to the industries producing those things? (Bad logic: you'd want to analyze this starting before those industries existed and suppose debt is a negligible thing that essentially doesn't exist.)
Even businesses wouldn't be able to get loans--it's the same pool--meaning we couldn't build things like solar panel manufactories with a 3-year rate-of-return. Your new business would have to operate out of a shack, and you'd have to be able to pay back any loan in a few months. As it stands today, businesses are able to open new markets and sell their products by taking on enormous debt and sourcing a small fraction of the income of millions of customers to pay that debt down.
Debt in a non-fractional-reserve system is also outright dangerous. What happens when a business decides to use $400 million of its cash savings to build a new manufactory (Intel does sell CPUs without anyone mortgaging their house to buy one) and the bank has to come up with the money for real? Do you remember the Great Depression?
So the necessary behaviors of commodity currencies destabilize the financial position of the middle- and lower-classes, while a non-fractional-reserve system prevents the middle- and lower-classes from buying products involving large amounts of labor. A society without fiat currency and fractional-reserve banking requires a nobility with land parcels and dominion over the associated serfs thereof to retain stability.
The cell's energy is equal to the voltage times the charge. Each gram of lithium represents Faraday's constant/6.941 or 13,901 coulombs. At 3 V, this gives 41.7 kJ per gram of lithium, or 11.6 kWh per kg. This is a bit more than the heat of combustion of gasoline, but does not consider the other materials that go into a lithium battery and that make lithium batteries many times heavier per unit of energy.
On a per-unit-mass basis, the Evm values for battery production are quite large, especially when compared to the overall VMA burden. Indeed, the incremental manufacturing energy rate is 13.3 MJ/kg of vehicle whereas the values are 91 MJ/kg of Li-ion battery and 105 MJ/kg of NiMH battery (Burnham et al., 2006).
91MJ/kg for Li-ion battery manufacture to store 0.0417MJ/kg as of 2006. With 6,000 full discharge cycles, that's 250MJ of energy storage in its lifetime, or 2.75 times the energy required to make the battery itself.
It's ten years later; energy cost of Li-ion manufacturer has fallen with newer manufacture technology. Recent reports suggest anywhere from 6 to 10 times energy stored than used to create the damned things. Pumped storage (raising water behind a turbine) is 210:1 and adiabatic compressed air is 240:1.
It gets a bit worse than that: once a battery is expended, you need to remove and dispose of it. That means disassembly and recovery of the lithium, the housing, etc., along with transportation fees for the extreme weight of the thing. Adiabatic CAES requires recertification or replacement of storage tanks, hoses, fittings, pumps, and the like. The latter is going to be easier to improve than the former, so future CAES will likely be more-efficient and require less maintenance, and plants will benefit from these improvements as they upgrade tanks and turbines; future batteries will be more-efficient, but not likely to as great a degree--definitely not without inventing a whole new type of battery.
The actual cost is higher, too. Imagine the cost per kWh to stabilize a grid when you have to have people constantly remanufacturing and recovering batteries, as well as monitoring the station to make sure the battery bank isn't showing signs of failure which could lead to explosion. Compare that to the cost of people remanufacturing what is essentially a large structure (those tanks aren't going to be trucked in and bolted down; they'll be built on-site from plates and seals) 1/24 as often, and monitoring temperature and pressure for lower-criticality events (a damaged battery may run away and explode immediately; an overpressurized tank should have enough safety overhead and valves to fail more-slowly or, preferably, non-critically). It's not all about energy.
Adiabatic compressed air energy moves the heat from compression into an insulated thermal mass chamber, and uses that to heat the expansion vessel. It recouperates that loss and has 70% total effective energy storage--higher is possible, up to 90%.
Batteries can store and discharge about 6-10 times the energy required to create them in their lifetimes. Adiabatic compressed air energy storage plants can cycle 240 times their energy cost. Batteries are pathetic technology at power grid scale and will never catch up to modern methods of grid-scale energy storage.
An increase in cash wages decreases the number of jobs by concentrating the same money into fewer hands. You can issue more money, increasing wages by raising product prices (if all wages go up by 10%, then all prices must go up by 10% to generate the revenue to pay the salaries); that does nothing.
Money is just a proxy for labor. The question is really how much time you work to buy a product. If you make $20/hr and a product costs $30, you buy it with 1.5 hours of labor. If your salary goes up to $40/hr and the product now costs $60, wages haven't increased: you still work 1.5 hours to buy that product.
Trade finds advantages (wage or technical) to reduce the price of a product, thus allowing people to buy more of that product with the same labor-hours. That makes the population of the importing country wealthier; it also increases the amount of domestic shipping and retailing, while decreasing jobs related to whatever's now being imported. The labor force rapidly adjusts to re-settle unemployment to a stable point (4.5%-5.5% in the United States).
Technical progress is the long-term solution. This reduces labor investment. Say you and 10 people work for $20/hr and produce 20 of a given product--that product costs $20 per unit. Now we invent a new method of making it such that you and 10 people produce 40 of that product per hour. It's now a $10 product. Instead of prices falling, money is issued (mainly via debt) faster than population growth to create inflation: you now work for $50/hr, and the product costs $25.
You might notice that the 250% increase in wages is unavoidable here if the inflation rate is 25% and the labor requirements are 50%. It's also notable that you might not have 10 workers making 40 of that product; it might be 5 making 20, and the other 5 workers... well, half your hour's wage is unspent now, so you can buy something else, and someone has to make, ship, and retail that. The jobs fill back in.
Here's the thing: the minimum wage workers are pegged to a published minimum. If we bump them by inflation, they go from $10/hr to $12.50/hr, while you go from $20/hr to $50/hr. If we raise them by the amount of actual buying power increase the middle-class workers enjoy, then the $10/hr minimum-wage must go to $25/hr. Because you're still trading labor hours in the end, only a set amount of money can be earned in a given time, and thus a set amount can be spent, and thus a set number of jobs can exist; if wages are higher for a subset (e.g. minimum wage), then fewer jobs exist. You've got to decide the trade-off between quality of life of the poor and forcing more people into unemployment while the labor market adjusts to reduce the number of job-seekers (and eventual population) when you make the new policy.
An economy isn't an ideal system surrounded by an infinite supply of consumers with an infinite supply of money.
That's true, I guess; except US citizens are pretty replaceable, too, and mostly living paycheck-to-paycheck due to financial irresponsibility. Minimum-wage workers who get actual full-time hours can afford to get by (barely); someone making $75,000 and living single somehow can't go a month without pay.
I'm pretty mobile and generally end up making 1.5-2x my income if I get booted from one job. I'm not motivated to change jobs, but I can and have. Last one I was escorted off the premises because my clearance was denied (I inquired, and received a paper that only stated, "Your clearance was denied due to derogatory information discovered during your investigation." No shit). Current job's 5 years in, and I've been offered positions making twice my current income but...eh.
I still don't want to lose my job. I built up my 401(k) as a loan base and it now has $30k in it for that; I also had some work done on my house and wound up running on $2,000 of financial contingencies. In the past 2 months, I've paid off half an old loan, started paying into a recent credit card advance, and built up $1,700 in the bank again; I had $10,000 in cash in November. I can liquidate my 401(k) and all if I get fired, but now is not the best time.
By April, I'll have eliminated a $250/month loan payment. By end of 2018, I expect to eliminate my mortgage. Even with $50,000 in cash at that point, losing my job would cost me. A lot. It's an enormous financial setback.
Complaining about my pay and working conditions would be counterproductive anyway. I offer solutions to problems and gather control in that manner; people eventually listen when I talk.
The whole minimum-wage argument is based in bad economics anyway.
The best economic system is fiat currency with a fractional reserve system. Technical progress and trade both reduce the cost of goods, and population expansion increases the number of people who need money; this causes deflation, which is bad ju-ju. Instead, we insert money into the system by allowing the issuance of debt: fiat bought into banks allows fractional reserves to multiply the amount of loans made, and a steady rate of inflation slowly reduces the share of a person's income represented by debts the longer those debts stand.
That gives you a slight problem.
The only way for prices to increase (inflation) is for the wage-labor time (wage x hours) backing a product to increase. That means for a thing to double in price when you invent new technology to halve the amount of labor required to make it, you have to quadruple wages. 10 people make 20 units an hour instead of 10; you pay them $40/hr instead of $10; price per unit goes up from $10 to $20, but people have $40 instead of $10 to spend on the object. There's no way for people to not get richer, in general.
With an established minimum wage, the minimum-wage worker's buying power lags. The minimum-wage worker still has $5/hr, even though prices doubled.
Now there's a problem here: with lower-wage workers, we can buy more stuff--creating more jobs; but the above suggests that those workers are getting poorer and poorer, and so those jobs don't amount to much of anything. Obviously, we need to pay them more. That's an imperative fact of the minimum-wage model. Unfortunately, there's oscillation: as MW lags, we get more jobs; when we restore MW, we lose jobs--mainly MW jobs.
There are further considerations, such as what minimum-wage strategy to use. As you can see above, 100% inflation means a good that cost $10 now costs $20; to keep up with inflation, the $5/hr minimum wage must become $10/hr. At the same time, the purchasing-power of a worker making that $20 good must necessarily have quadrupled--to gain the same growth of buying power (fair share income), that $5 minimum-wage must become $20/hr, which will of course incur more jobs lost than a bump to $10/hr.
In actuality Walmart seems to be slowly realizing that its employment practices lead to high turnover, and the cost of training new employees is actually costing it money. There's something to be said for a decent wage and benefits if you're talking about retention.
From a business perspective, this is true. Essentially, a business can profit more at the expense of others: it can pay workers higher prices, retain more workers, get a better public image, and use its other advantages to exceed over its competitors. That can allow the business to expand and have more employees while ultimately reducing the number of jobs in the total economy and even the quality-of-life of everyone except its own employees (someone has to pay the prices that feed those wages).
Generally, people try to economize: if you do something that makes your product more-expensive than the guy across the street, your customers go there. That behavior doesn't create a standing optimal economy; it moves us toward one continuously, and tends to erode outright-harmful behavior.
In a nutshell, if WalMart can pay its employees better and only incur 0.01% more cost, well... that's some 21,000 American jobs lost in the endeavor, and an increase in prices at WalMart that nobody will care about (a penny here and there); it's utterly unimportant. If WalMart ends up bumping prices by 10% or 15% and causing a real decline in the purchasing power of its customers, they'll all shop at target where people get paid $8.50/hr to stock shelves and WalMart will eventually cease to exist.
Economics is complex. I complained the other day that most people are arguing economics that they learned in high school and ECON101, and someone su
They bring people in that don't have the knowledge about how much the job is actually worth
If another worker is willing to do it cheaper, it's worth less. Jobs don't have inherent wage value.
When everyone is an IT monkey and can rack servers, you'll all be minimum-wage workers. Have fun running cables just like every other moron high school kid.
Having that kind of wealth tends to lead to having the kind of power to make change. It's self-serving for oil tycoons to become solar tycoons; yet it also is beneficial to society. As well, there's plenty of supply and suppliers to go around: if they didn't do it, then someone else would--which is a valid point.
If somebody's going to get their hands dirty either way, it may as well be you--and if getting your hands dirty puts you in a position to change the situation in the future, then you're a fool to keep yourself clean for ideological reasons.
Even if not, think about it. A $14,000 array I was looking at last year now costs about $6,000. SRECs have crashed from $120-$190 down all the way to $20-$30; instead of a 5-year ROI on energy and SREC, I get an 8-year ROI. This is because solar panels now come as cheap as $0.62/watt at high-density 320W panels (255W is the standard for the given size). A big oil tycoon has the power to start buying into land leases for idle farm land to preclude development; he can then lay on-ground sun-tracking grids, put in panels, and build a small control house. We can rip all that stuff out pretty easily, so it's almost-undeveloped farm land still (protects our agricultural lands); and Big Oil Tycoon is going to be frigging-rich Big Solar Tycoon.
Big Solar is cheaper per-watt than Roof Solar. The power you buy off the grid will eventually cost less than the power you pull from your roof--when you reach a 1-year ROI, your Big Solar providers aren't going to have $0.09/kWh power for you. You'll still be grid-tied with roof solar, unless you think a $20,000 battery bank that's a fire hazard (the higher the density, the more power can go boom if damaged) and degrades over usage is better than a grid back-up that costs a few pennies per kWh--you're not getting a 1-year ROI off batteries; the solar-wind grid will use recouperated compressed air storage at city-scale or better.
If you think you can escape the taxes, well... wait until you have to pay an annual Rooftop Generation Tax. Truth of the matter is utility taxes and other forms of sales and use taxes should go away and we should have only income taxes--in which case it still doesn't matter, and grid-tie is still better.
Anita Sarkeesian essentially attempts to endlessly harass everyone she disagrees with by becoming news and changing industry behaviors to do something about it.
The real fix is to ignore the noisy, bitchy, sandy-vagina girls and pay more attention to the nice girls who aren't bitching about every depiction of a size-D chest as some form of objectification.
What do you mean by "lots"? Is it growing as fast as the rate of population growth?
That was phrased poorly. Families at all levels buy new cars--that is, "lots". I was intending to indicate that the price of a new car ranges from $12,700 (Ford Focus) to several million dollars, and people at a broad range of income levels actually buy these things. Your basic premise is that people with X amount of income can't buy a "new" car; the fact is they can, but...
... the used car market is pretty vibrant; it's always been larger than the new car market, and there's a rather lively dispute between people who think "buying a used car is buying someone else's problems" and those who think "new car are sold to the guy paying the $10,000 depreciation cost for my next car" (i.e. buying a new car is financially-unsound and you're a moron for doing so).
More importantly, 95% of Americans own cars; 85% of Americans get to work by car. Most Americans have ownership of a serviceable vehicle (a more important statistic than "did you buy that new, or did you get a $10,000 discount?").
The market has fluctuated recently. In 2009 (deep in the recession), 10.4 million new cars (light vehicles) were sold, and 35.5 used cars were sold, 22.7% vs 77.3%. This compares to 2005 17.0 million new vs 44.14 million used, 27.8% vs 72.2%.
Vehicle sales slowed during the recession--61.13 million total sales in 2005, 59.11 million total sales in 2006, 57.80 million total sales in 2007, 49.80 sales in 2008, and 45.93 million total sales in 2009 (22.7% new). There's a sharp drop around the recession. This accelerated afterwards, with 48.48 million total sales in 2010 (23.9% new); 51.57 million sold in 2011 (24.8% new); 55.01 million in 2012 (26.34% new); and 57.57 million in 2013 (27.1% new).
The average service span of vehicles has been increasing, and consumers have been buying used. The used car market has always been fairly large, and it's grown even larger as vehicles have become better-made and capable of holding in long service. My current vehicle is a 2004 Mazda 3; I'm looking to buy myself a Mazda 3 hatchback soon--possibly a new one, actually, at around $30,000; I can't find one I like used, and the prices for ones I'm interested in are around $20-$22k (yes, I'm considering spending $8,000 to get it in a different color with fancier trim--I make $75k; I can handle that). I bought the 2004 for $14,000 with 40,000 miles, in-dash GPS, leather seats, a sun roof, a 6-CD changer, and built-in Bluetooth module. I've still never had the thing run poorly on me, although one valve is tapping (the lifter is probably sticking).
2) Silicon Valley income is over inflated compared to all US wages. Nice job picking the highest paid workers in the US. People in Flint make far less.
I quoted that directly from the article you gave me. Are you waffling?
4) If you are making $10 an hour then 600 USD a month is unaffordable.
I said $600 USD/month is affordable for someone making $84,000. If you're making $10/hr, you can buy a brand-new Ford Focus for $229/month with no down payment. Yes, people do that.
5) Price per square foot doesn't matter it is the monthly income that matters.
NOPE! You said housing gets more-expensive, I gave a counter-argument. Changing to a different tact doesn't mean you're not wrong.
If costs of goods goes up and incomes lag, workers lose.
That's why we increase minimum wage periodically, although that does eliminate jobs each time we bump it (those jobs come back as wages lag--or rather, the number of jobs expands to meet the amount of goods purchaseable and the labor required to facilitate that purchasing, and lower wages at the lowest end as minimum wage lags facilitate more jobs than are left after raising minimum wage).
So there are limits to the kind of house I can buy today, you cannot ignore it.
This is true. You also can't get a car built out of a big block engine tied to an axle with no management systems or safety systems. Besides regulation, you generally can't buy things which aren't in sufficient demand to warrant their production.
That means the houses which are available are available because they serve a sufficiently-large market--the same proportion of the population as back in 1950, in fact, in terms of affordability and demand.
The average cost of a car has doubled from $16.5k to $31k and I dare say a vehicle is more expensive to maintain today
Ha.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
"A vehicle is more expensive to maintain today." That's rich. God, you people. You could work on cars in the 70s--we know this because you were always working on the car in the 70s; the fucking things never stopped breaking!
You seem to have completely missed the part about the price of things not increasing as fast as the income per person. You're, again, looking at something that cost $10 when you had $100, complaining it costs $15 now that you have $200, and ignoring the fact that you could buy 10 back then but can buy 13 now. You're also making shit up about the cars being supposedly more-expensive to maintain, unless you're trying to count just dollars and not look at the cost in proportion to income.
Let's put this into simple terms: Ignore money and compare all changing costs in terms of hours the median-income worker has to work to pay for a thing.
The article also correctly brings up the fact that the price of a barrel of oil seems to rise and fall but the cost at the pump only rises.
Oil vs gasoline. Looks like gasoline prices fall across America as oil prices fall. Don't let facts get in the way of your Trumpshit, though.
Well, gadgets are food--gadgets like pickles, wheat, and the like. Gadgets are clothes--gadgets like shirts, pants, etc. Air conditioning. TV. Medical technology. Cars. Ovens.
If I strip you naked and drop you into the middle of the African jungle, what's your quality-of-life like?
You linked an article that says cars are more affordable in some cities than others, and that the median-income household can't afford the average price of a new car. That's a statistical trick: you're confounding between different classes. There are economy cars, luxury cars, and loads of things in-between.
In the real world, families buy lots of new cars. The price paid for a new car is typically 56% of the household income--$30,000 for the median income--financed over a 5-year loan. That's been true for decades.
Let's take a look at the argument on your link:
In San Jose, Calif. — the heart of Silicon Valley — the median income is about $84,000, and an “affordable” new car purchase price is about $33,000 — close to, but still below, the average new car price.
$33,000 is only 39% of the median income. How does that compare to history?
In 1950 the average income per year was $3,210.00 and by 1959 was $5,010.00.
In 1950 the average cost of new car was $1,510.00 and by 1959 was $2,200.00
In 1950, the average cost of a new car was 47% of the average income. In 1959, it was 44%.
$33,000 on a 5-year loan at 3.3% is only $600/month. That's out of a $4,900 after-tax income. That's only 12%, and leaves $4,300/month to spend on food, rent, etc. Hell, I'm looking at buying a car at that price, and I don't make $84,000.
Do I have to even link to stories about health care, education, or housing prices
People spend more on healthcare, and buy better healthcare today. They spent 4% in the 1980s and spent 6% in 2000, and received better care.
I addressed housing prices elsewhere. There are a number of issues. One is that mortgage rate changes have caused a $120,000 house that garnered a $1,200/month mortgage to now sell for $350,000 with a $1,200/month mortgage. Another is that houses have gotten bigger over time and, trending over decades, the price of housing per square foot continues to decrease; while trending over shorter terms, it fluctuates due to being a semi-commodity (bought and sold by owners, rather than newly-produced).
Workforce development--the thing used as "education" so we don't have to talk about education--was moved off the risk and responsibility of businesses and onto the shoulders of the individual. This is wasteful and has caused out-of-control costs in the collegiate system. That's a known issue due to specific bad policy.
Your simple model is deeply flawed and doesn't account for things like farmers turning their farms into developments if they can't get good prices for their crops due to over production.
It doesn't attempt to describe that; I described money and technical progress to demonstrate that inflation and income are not tied together as a zero-sum game.
Inflation tells me people are losing ground.
Then you don't understand what inflation is. You understand what you see and inappropriately attribute things you don't like to things you can identify. This is the same as when you go to a poverty-stricken inner city, notice the level of crime, and identify that black people have an in-born genetic propensity to rape, murder, and drugs because 98% of the people in the city are black--as opposed to identifying the social pressures surrounding the people in the city, such as poverty and racism.
And the people who have been out of work for 6 months or a year, how are they tracked? What's that number doing?
That's U-3. They're tracked by knowing the population over age 16 and the jobs taken. When you're legally hired, your employer files identifying documents (SSN, driver's license, etc.--the W-9 stuff) with the IRS. The BLS publishes statistics by counting unique jobholders and comparing that to birth records, death records, immigration records, census, etc. That gives them population, age, and number of employed.
Persons unemployed who have sought employment in the past 4 weeks are U-3. Persons unemployed who have a desire to seek employment but have not sought employment in the past 4 weeks are U-4 (discouraged workers). These are tracked statistically by a monthly survey called the Current Population Survey.
Robots are increasingly cheaper to use than humans for an increasing number of jobs. It's not a steady trend, but it rarely reverses.
Wooden shipping pallets, power tools, electricity, railroads. The hot blast furnace produces 86,000 tonnes of iron per week; an 18th-century cold-blast furnace would produce 400 tonnes per year using the same labor.
Technical progress is the reduction of labor used to produce an outcome. 100% of all increases in total global wealth--that is, increases not localized by trade (we get wealthier by employing low-wage Chinese)--have come from the reduction of labor required to produce an outcome. Even discovering a rich gold or coal mine means you found a mine where less work produces more ore (if you dig out 100 tonnes of mostly-gold, that's the same labor as digging out 100 tonnes of dirt containing 1 tonne of gold--but it's a lot more gold).
Robots are more of the same. The question is if we replace 50% of our jobs in 10 years, or 50% of our jobs in 10 weeks. A steady pace of job replacement by technical progress is safe and profitable; whereas sudden bolts of technology faster than with which the labor market can keep pace cause widespread unemployment.
That's why we need things like regulation to enable the use of self-driving cars. Imagine if 1% of cab drivers and freight drivers lost their jobs every month for the next 5 years. A whole lot of nothing would happen. That's 233,900 cab drives and 1.5 million truckers, or about 1,830,000 Americans. Per-month, a 1% replacement is 18,300 jobs or a 0.012% uptick in unemployment--a loss which would turn over by the end of the year, at which point a total 0.144% would be affected. Note that, currently, the US has around a million layoffs per year due to job obsolescence (both from outsourcing labor to other countries and by blunt technical progress): 183,000/year is a significant number, but not unreasonable.
The other side of this is the cost of freight and cab fair goes down. There's suddenly no need to pay the cabbie or the truck driver, and your main retail products--most notably food--tend to react price-wise in a span of months if not weeks. That means the savings folds back into consumer hands, which means buying more stuff, which means more retail jobs, more mechanic jobs (keeping the self-driving freight trucks running--1 mechanic's hour for several thousand miles rather than 1 trucker's hour per 60 miles, call it 1 mechanic replacing 500 truckers), marketing and sales of these vehicles and of the consumer goods, and so forth. That's how the jobs lost to technology get replaced.
(Jobs lost to trade get replaced by the population and labor force simply not growing as fast for a little while; likewise, job gains result in sudden growth of labor force until unemployment increases to ~5% again.)
Imagine if we didn't get the right regulations in place fast enough.
Rather than replacing those jobs, we spend 5 years developing the technology. Businesses salivate over ready-to-go self-driving cabs and freight trucks while Congress and state legislat
The median $54,000 income in 2015 buys roughly 42% more than what the median income in 2000 bought.
The expense share of food and clothing has fallen. At the same time, cars, phones, computers, and other electronic products have become highly-complex. Rather than spending $20 (in 1995) or $10 (in 2005) to buy a CD with 9 songs, you can spend $10/month and have Spotify. Rather than $21 for a DVD, you have Netflix for $9/month. Rather than $35/month for 128k ISDN (1998), you spend $83/month for 200,000k Cable Internet ($55,000/month worth of ISDN).
You can consume more today with the median income than you did 10 years ago. A lot more.
Here's what people don't realize: inflation doesn't mark the buying power of a labor hour.
Let's say you improve food production by 100%. Instead of paying 4.8 hours of farm labor for a week's worth of a household's food, you pay 2.4 hours of labor. That means maybe there were 3,000,000 farmers, chemists, machinists, oil refiners, and so forth working in the food supply chain, and now there's 1,500,000 supplying the same amount of the same food. They all get paid for the same labor-hours.
Well, if nobody's wage goes up, then the price of food comes down. Those farmers and everyone else involved made $20/hr before, and they make $20/hr now? That means you used to pay $96/week for food, now you pay $48/week. If the median income is $30,000 and your income doesn't go up, then you're only $48 richer.
So now what happens if, across this process--say we don't do this overnight, but over 10 years--we have a 120% increase in wages? We issue more dollars and the incomes go up.
Well, that means those farmers are making $44/hr. The food that cost $96/week now costs $105.60. That's inflation, right? Food costs increased by 10%--so you have 10% inflation.
Caveat: The median income is now $66,000. We've gone from $4,992/year out of $30,000 (16.64%) to $5,491.20/year out of $66,000 (8.32%).
Think about that for a minute. What does inflation really tell you?
Housing is actually an odd market. It's not a productive market per se; it's more of a traded commodity, and speculators have convinced homeowners their houses are worth a lot. At the same time, falling mortgage rates mean the $1,200/month you're willing to pay for a house buys a bigger sale price--$350,000 instead of $120,000--so the same house has a higher price, yet comes with the same mortgage payment. You sort of pay about the same either way.
At the same time, the size of new-construction houses and apartments increases over time. The average new-construction single-family home was 982sqft in 1950, and over 2,300sqft in 2000. People build additions onto their homes. Cities occasionally tear down urban blight and replace cramped row homes with sprawling semi-detached or single-family parcels.
In terms of decades, the price per 1,000sqft of housing has steadily decreased the same as food, clothing, and other goods and services; in terms of continuous running price, the housing market is a somewhat inelastic commodity market and behaves somewhat like a security (stocks, commodities) and somewhat like a product.
The productivity of the American worker is declining because they are burnt out
Productivity is tied to technical progress, and we supply more with less labor today than 10 years ago. We do have some issues with overworked overtime employees; however, they tend to be unproductive because they leave those jobs and go to other businesses instead. Revolving doors in an office environment are incredibly expensive, and the constant turn-over takes its toll on those businesses; I'm working in a rather large shop that had that problem 4 years ago, and has since more than doubled the IT department size and implemented more project management so as to increase the proportion of work successfully completed and decrease strain on employees.
It's notable that the employees of the late-1800s and early-1900s complained a lot because they worked 90-hour work weeks. 6 days per week, 16 hours per day. They won a 60-hour work week--6 days per week, 12 hours per day, two 1-hour lunches--and then the modern 40-hour work week through decades of protests, rioting, and murder. I feel 28-32 hour work weeks should be viable rather soon, if we handle the transition carefully; we'll be less-wealthy than if we just stick to a 40-hour week, since we'll essentially be trading away productivity gains for time instead of wealth (e.g. when you make in 4 hours what you used to make in 5, you work 3.2 hours and make the same--you get no richer nor poorer, but you have more leisure time).
Most people are trying, but they're tired
Most people are just fine. Many people are conditioned by having the same bullshit repeated at them, whether it's by Hillary, Bernie, Trump, Ron Paul, Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, the anchors on CNN, or some other idiot without a clue. They form ideals and they won't break away from them.
Look at minimum wage. Minimum wage is established to ensure a certain amount of labor is compensated for a certain proportion of buying power--that is, we pay minimum wage workers enough to buy a certain amount of things made by people who aren't minimum-wage workers. Debt allows us to move money into the economy at the bottom to handle population expansion and generally avoid deflationary currency; and inflation is necessary for a stable, functional economy--especially one with debt. Inflation reduces the buying power of that minimum wage, so we have to increase it now and then.
Long story short: we need to raise minimum wage to keep up with inflation. It is necessary.
The same people who agree with this also can't accept that increasing minimum wage concentrates the same money into fewer hands, causing some minimum-wage workers to lose jobs as a result of the increase. It doesn't matter how badly they have to violate the simple laws of mathemati
Not really. We have a measure for marginal employment (UE, U6--currently around 9.2%) and a measure for full-time employment (UE3). What's left is minimum wage or its replacement with a universal social security.
All part-time underemployed make up 3.7% of the labor force as of December 2016, with U-3 at 4.7%. In December 2000 (best month in the past 16 years), U-6 was 6.9%, U-5 was 4.7%, and U-3 was 3.9%--so your "Uber sleeping in the parking lot" jobs were 2.2% of the labor force with U-3 at 3.9% and U6 at 6.9%.
So those are similar, although the 2000 statistic looks more-favorable.
December 2009's 9.9% U-3 was part of a 17.1% U-6 and 11.3% U-5. That means 5.8% of the labor force was "Uber sleeping in the parking lot jobs" and "people [...] taking whatever they can".
Between 2009's peak unemployment and now, U-6 has fallen by 7.9%. Of that, we reduced the part-time unemployed "Uber sleeping in the parking lot jobs" portion of the population by 2.1%, and added 5.2% to the "good jobs" portion of the population. We've reduced the amount of shitty jobs and added good jobs.
That's, like, the opposite of what you said, isn't it? A smaller proportion of the labor force is working shitty Uber jobs, and a larger proportion of the labor force is working good, solid employment.
I might notice that more than Google because I actually have Nest products and frequently google for products's interaction with Nest. If Google sees me looking for a thing, it might well assume I'm most-interested in the Google product, because I might be.
It's easy to save on RAM, but RAM is cheap. With the zram module in Linux, you can create a zram block device 2x the size of RAM with mem_limit set to 50% of RAM and experience approximately no performance hit--faulting out of zram is approximately twice as heavy as a worst-case cache miss. I've had a 1GB server run 700MB into zram swap trying to run Gitlab, with 40MB of available RAM (including disk cache), and not show any visible sign of performance degradation; note that that's about 230MB of RAM acting as a compressed cache area for that 700MB, and 770MB of flat RAM available.
This works because CPU isn't pegged to 100% on average across 1 second, and decompression requires something like 23-26 instructions per byte. That means decompressing one page per second on a 1.2GHz core consumes about 0.00887% CPU at 1 cycle per instruction, or 0.0266% at an average 3 cycles per instruction. RAM prefetching is actually huge--a cache miss can cost 48 cycles for 64 bytes (on x86-64) or 0.000256% for a 4096-byte page, at a minimum, with 8-cycle CAS across a CPU, or a whopping 1,200 cycles or 0.0064% for 4096 bytes, although that's never going to happen (it's physically impossible: sequential reads don't need the expensive row precharge before RAS after the first read).
Basically, if your code uses memory infrequently, it has no reason to swap; and if it uses it frequently, then the cost of swapping can be absorbed by prefetch algorithms similar to the ones used by the CPU itself to avoid the above cache miss costs. Standard LRU swap algorithms will prevent swapping out of frequently-used memory; and the delay waiting for a swap-in consumes the bits of unused CPU time in a 99.7%-pegged processor.
The performance hit explodes exponentially at a certain point. If you have 1GB RAM and use 900MB as a compressed swap such that you have 2.8GB available, you're going to have a bad time. If you have 1GB and use 500MB for swap such that you have 2GB available, you'll be fine even under high load.
The problem is the whole phone is made of a SOC which isn't that much cheaper on 1GB versus 2GB; expensive NAND storage; radio chipsets; a battery; an expensive display; and so forth. The SOC isn't even the biggest part, with a cost of like $35 or sometimes in the $20 range for something current-generation for a $400 phone, up to $70-ish for state-of-the-art SOCs. Slap a $100 screen, $80 of TLC NAND, and $40 of boards and components and case around a $30 chip and you have a $250 phone.
Firstly, you apparently didn't read my comment that I wasn't discussing how apt works, only yum.
When Yum downloads something, it fetches a bunch of repo information (like apt-get update), then it downloads files (like apt-get install). To do this, it does... all the shit I described apt doing.
Secondly, the critical issue that you are missing is that if I install a package from an alternate repository (eg EPEL), my systems don't tell the main CENTOS mirrors about those EPEL packages.
No, of course not. You tell Georgia Tech, the NSA CentOS Mirror, or Microsoft's Redmond CentOS mirror, at random, who you are and what you're downloading.
Multiple distributions and mirror maintainers coordinate in secret to keep security exploit details quiet until a patch is ready from everyone. There's an entire network of quiet discussion that happens, intentionally hidden from everyone, to make sure everyone hits the ground running. If you report a remote exploit in Firefox directly to Mozilla, Debian, RedHat, Slackware, or Gentoo, marked as a security bug, they will keep the details private until everyone has patches ready; then they all release at once.
So you believe Microsoft is doing secret things dealing your data to secret partners in secret; but that Linux distributions might not be secretly collecting your data, or that various Linux mirrors who aren't controlled by those distributions aren't under the influence of others. That is: although AT&T was sucking up your phone data and piping it to the NSA, they apparently won't collect what scraps of OS update telemetry data hits their servers in the same way.
You're basically saying there's no network of bad actors out there, so instead of trusting "Debian", you trust everyone.
Finally, there is no fingerprinting involved in the yum transactions. If I have multiple machines behind a single IP address, the server doesn't have sufficient information to distinguish them. As well has having insufficient information to fingerprint individual systems, no user information is transmitted.
We've been able to identify individuals based on their Internet usage and TV usage, even from the same account, device, and browser. We can tell if your 16 year old daughter or her 17 year old sister is currently using the PC or watching TV.
I might have two x86-64 PCs running the same version of Ubuntu, and a Raspberry pi; you can fingerprint at least three systems out of my usage habits, and identify one distinctly at least.
Through all of that...
In summary, yes I am leaking some information, but it is benign.
The leaking of what Microsoft software you've installed to Microsoft's servers is benign as well. Who fucking cares that Microsoft knows you have Office 2013 installed?
There's mandatory telemetry in Firefox, Chrome, IE, Opera, Ubuntu, Fedora, and a whole lot of other stuff. You're leaking data to everyone. Search habits, Web address look-ups, the lot. Some of it can be removed; some of it can be disabled (notably, the malware checks in Firefox); some of it is designed in (the only way to run system updates without sending a random university, ISP, or Canonical- or Redhat-controlled Web server a list of software you have installed which you intend to upgrade today is to make a complete local mirror of the entire repository).
Nobody knows what's in MS telemetry, but they presume it can be any of anything. A lot of what they presume is also what's sent out to random actors through any Linux distribution or other free software you've been using, and the only reason nobody cares is they don't think about it.
Do you know how often I type something into a text box on Reddit or Slashdot, pull up Google to do some research before I post something retarded, and Google immediately suggests exactly what I'm looking for despite me never having searched for that? It's like they can read the text boxes before I even submit the form--or maybe they know I've been on a certain page in some forum where such topic is being discussed, and can guess what I want to know. Either that or the Googlecluster is both self-aware and telepathic.
Slashdot Mirror
I should have said "current known-best monetary system." The alternatives are commodity as currency (e.g. gold, silver) and a non-fractional-reserve system.
Commodity currency is deflationary and inflexible for monetary policy, as well as unstable. Commodity currency doesn't preclude debt; it just makes it a hell of a lot harder on debtors. Imagine if your mortgage payment became a larger proportion of your income as population grows--population in the U.S. increased by 9% from 2004 to 2014, and you have to find money to pay those peoples's wages. If you don't have more gold to issue, well... the purchasing power of coin must increase, and everyone's coinage wage must fall.
Non-fractional-reserve systems limit total debt to total money held by banks, which severely restricts what can be bought.
Think about something like a car. Lots of people work to produce a car, chipping in bits of their time here and there. To buy the car, you must pay their wages; the profit margin on a car manufactured in the United States is somewhere around 5%-6%, including all involved business activity (the gross margin is like 15%; that excludes all of the operational costs of running a business that produces cars, such as maintaining the machinery used to make the cars themselves). If you overestimate the profit margin in total ass 10% and underestimate wages as 90%, then a $15,000 economy car costs $13,600 to make and a $30,000 mid-range vehicle costs $27,300 to make.
You know that 5-year car loan you took for your last vehicle? What if it had to be a 1-year loan? How many people could still buy cars?
A $15,000 car at a 3.11% interest rate for a 5 year repayment term incurs a $270/month payment. For a 1-year repayment term, it's $1,271. For a $30,000 car, the 5-year term incurs a $541/month payment, while the 1-year term incurs a $2,542/month payment.
Besides that nobody can afford this, a non-fractional-reserve system only allows the banks to lend out money they have on hand. Mostly, that means people just can't get loans to begin with--never mind that they simply can't afford them. Once the banks have lent out a significant fraction of the cash kept on-hand, they have to wait for loan repayments--this means banks can then only continue to lend as much money as population growth, plus inflation, plus a loan payment. Longer loans make that last bit really small.
Two questions.
First, what happens to the ability of the middle-class to buy expensive luxuries such as cars and houses?
Second, what happens to the industries producing those things? (Bad logic: you'd want to analyze this starting before those industries existed and suppose debt is a negligible thing that essentially doesn't exist.)
Even businesses wouldn't be able to get loans--it's the same pool--meaning we couldn't build things like solar panel manufactories with a 3-year rate-of-return. Your new business would have to operate out of a shack, and you'd have to be able to pay back any loan in a few months. As it stands today, businesses are able to open new markets and sell their products by taking on enormous debt and sourcing a small fraction of the income of millions of customers to pay that debt down.
Debt in a non-fractional-reserve system is also outright dangerous. What happens when a business decides to use $400 million of its cash savings to build a new manufactory (Intel does sell CPUs without anyone mortgaging their house to buy one) and the bank has to come up with the money for real? Do you remember the Great Depression?
So the necessary behaviors of commodity currencies destabilize the financial position of the middle- and lower-classes, while a non-fractional-reserve system prevents the middle- and lower-classes from buying products involving large amounts of labor. A society without fiat currency and fractional-reserve banking requires a nobility with land parcels and dominion over the associated serfs thereof to retain stability.
Thu
Looking at your Wikipedia link:
The theoretical efficiency of adiabatic storage approaches 100% with perfect insulation, but in practice round trip efficiency is expected to be 70%.
Practically-infeasible?
Well, there's Wikipedia...
The cell's energy is equal to the voltage times the charge. Each gram of lithium represents Faraday's constant/6.941 or 13,901 coulombs. At 3 V, this gives 41.7 kJ per gram of lithium, or 11.6 kWh per kg. This is a bit more than the heat of combustion of gasoline, but does not consider the other materials that go into a lithium battery and that make lithium batteries many times heavier per unit of energy.
There's a paper from a DOE lab that suggests:
On a per-unit-mass basis, the Evm values for battery production are quite large, especially when compared to the overall VMA burden. Indeed, the incremental manufacturing energy rate is 13.3 MJ/kg of vehicle whereas the values are 91 MJ/kg of Li-ion battery and 105 MJ/kg of NiMH battery (Burnham et al., 2006).
91MJ/kg for Li-ion battery manufacture to store 0.0417MJ/kg as of 2006. With 6,000 full discharge cycles, that's 250MJ of energy storage in its lifetime, or 2.75 times the energy required to make the battery itself.
It's ten years later; energy cost of Li-ion manufacturer has fallen with newer manufacture technology. Recent reports suggest anywhere from 6 to 10 times energy stored than used to create the damned things. Pumped storage (raising water behind a turbine) is 210:1 and adiabatic compressed air is 240:1.
It gets a bit worse than that: once a battery is expended, you need to remove and dispose of it. That means disassembly and recovery of the lithium, the housing, etc., along with transportation fees for the extreme weight of the thing. Adiabatic CAES requires recertification or replacement of storage tanks, hoses, fittings, pumps, and the like. The latter is going to be easier to improve than the former, so future CAES will likely be more-efficient and require less maintenance, and plants will benefit from these improvements as they upgrade tanks and turbines; future batteries will be more-efficient, but not likely to as great a degree--definitely not without inventing a whole new type of battery.
The actual cost is higher, too. Imagine the cost per kWh to stabilize a grid when you have to have people constantly remanufacturing and recovering batteries, as well as monitoring the station to make sure the battery bank isn't showing signs of failure which could lead to explosion. Compare that to the cost of people remanufacturing what is essentially a large structure (those tanks aren't going to be trucked in and bolted down; they'll be built on-site from plates and seals) 1/24 as often, and monitoring temperature and pressure for lower-criticality events (a damaged battery may run away and explode immediately; an overpressurized tank should have enough safety overhead and valves to fail more-slowly or, preferably, non-critically). It's not all about energy.
Adiabatic compressed air energy moves the heat from compression into an insulated thermal mass chamber, and uses that to heat the expansion vessel. It recouperates that loss and has 70% total effective energy storage--higher is possible, up to 90%.
Batteries can store and discharge about 6-10 times the energy required to create them in their lifetimes. Adiabatic compressed air energy storage plants can cycle 240 times their energy cost. Batteries are pathetic technology at power grid scale and will never catch up to modern methods of grid-scale energy storage.
To increase wages, you need to...
An increase in cash wages decreases the number of jobs by concentrating the same money into fewer hands. You can issue more money, increasing wages by raising product prices (if all wages go up by 10%, then all prices must go up by 10% to generate the revenue to pay the salaries); that does nothing.
Money is just a proxy for labor. The question is really how much time you work to buy a product. If you make $20/hr and a product costs $30, you buy it with 1.5 hours of labor. If your salary goes up to $40/hr and the product now costs $60, wages haven't increased: you still work 1.5 hours to buy that product.
Trade finds advantages (wage or technical) to reduce the price of a product, thus allowing people to buy more of that product with the same labor-hours. That makes the population of the importing country wealthier; it also increases the amount of domestic shipping and retailing, while decreasing jobs related to whatever's now being imported. The labor force rapidly adjusts to re-settle unemployment to a stable point (4.5%-5.5% in the United States).
Technical progress is the long-term solution. This reduces labor investment. Say you and 10 people work for $20/hr and produce 20 of a given product--that product costs $20 per unit. Now we invent a new method of making it such that you and 10 people produce 40 of that product per hour. It's now a $10 product. Instead of prices falling, money is issued (mainly via debt) faster than population growth to create inflation: you now work for $50/hr, and the product costs $25.
You might notice that the 250% increase in wages is unavoidable here if the inflation rate is 25% and the labor requirements are 50%. It's also notable that you might not have 10 workers making 40 of that product; it might be 5 making 20, and the other 5 workers... well, half your hour's wage is unspent now, so you can buy something else, and someone has to make, ship, and retail that. The jobs fill back in.
Here's the thing: the minimum wage workers are pegged to a published minimum. If we bump them by inflation, they go from $10/hr to $12.50/hr, while you go from $20/hr to $50/hr. If we raise them by the amount of actual buying power increase the middle-class workers enjoy, then the $10/hr minimum-wage must go to $25/hr. Because you're still trading labor hours in the end, only a set amount of money can be earned in a given time, and thus a set amount can be spent, and thus a set number of jobs can exist; if wages are higher for a subset (e.g. minimum wage), then fewer jobs exist. You've got to decide the trade-off between quality of life of the poor and forcing more people into unemployment while the labor market adjusts to reduce the number of job-seekers (and eventual population) when you make the new policy.
An economy isn't an ideal system surrounded by an infinite supply of consumers with an infinite supply of money.
Why didn't they just go with adiabatic compressed air energy storage?
That's true, I guess; except US citizens are pretty replaceable, too, and mostly living paycheck-to-paycheck due to financial irresponsibility. Minimum-wage workers who get actual full-time hours can afford to get by (barely); someone making $75,000 and living single somehow can't go a month without pay.
I'm pretty mobile and generally end up making 1.5-2x my income if I get booted from one job. I'm not motivated to change jobs, but I can and have. Last one I was escorted off the premises because my clearance was denied (I inquired, and received a paper that only stated, "Your clearance was denied due to derogatory information discovered during your investigation." No shit). Current job's 5 years in, and I've been offered positions making twice my current income but...eh.
I still don't want to lose my job. I built up my 401(k) as a loan base and it now has $30k in it for that; I also had some work done on my house and wound up running on $2,000 of financial contingencies. In the past 2 months, I've paid off half an old loan, started paying into a recent credit card advance, and built up $1,700 in the bank again; I had $10,000 in cash in November. I can liquidate my 401(k) and all if I get fired, but now is not the best time.
By April, I'll have eliminated a $250/month loan payment. By end of 2018, I expect to eliminate my mortgage. Even with $50,000 in cash at that point, losing my job would cost me. A lot. It's an enormous financial setback.
Complaining about my pay and working conditions would be counterproductive anyway. I offer solutions to problems and gather control in that manner; people eventually listen when I talk.
The whole minimum-wage argument is based in bad economics anyway.
The best economic system is fiat currency with a fractional reserve system. Technical progress and trade both reduce the cost of goods, and population expansion increases the number of people who need money; this causes deflation, which is bad ju-ju. Instead, we insert money into the system by allowing the issuance of debt: fiat bought into banks allows fractional reserves to multiply the amount of loans made, and a steady rate of inflation slowly reduces the share of a person's income represented by debts the longer those debts stand.
That gives you a slight problem.
The only way for prices to increase (inflation) is for the wage-labor time (wage x hours) backing a product to increase. That means for a thing to double in price when you invent new technology to halve the amount of labor required to make it, you have to quadruple wages. 10 people make 20 units an hour instead of 10; you pay them $40/hr instead of $10; price per unit goes up from $10 to $20, but people have $40 instead of $10 to spend on the object. There's no way for people to not get richer, in general.
With an established minimum wage, the minimum-wage worker's buying power lags. The minimum-wage worker still has $5/hr, even though prices doubled.
Now there's a problem here: with lower-wage workers, we can buy more stuff--creating more jobs; but the above suggests that those workers are getting poorer and poorer, and so those jobs don't amount to much of anything. Obviously, we need to pay them more. That's an imperative fact of the minimum-wage model. Unfortunately, there's oscillation: as MW lags, we get more jobs; when we restore MW, we lose jobs--mainly MW jobs.
There are further considerations, such as what minimum-wage strategy to use. As you can see above, 100% inflation means a good that cost $10 now costs $20; to keep up with inflation, the $5/hr minimum wage must become $10/hr. At the same time, the purchasing-power of a worker making that $20 good must necessarily have quadrupled--to gain the same growth of buying power (fair share income), that $5 minimum-wage must become $20/hr, which will of course incur more jobs lost than a bump to $10/hr.
In actuality Walmart seems to be slowly realizing that its employment practices lead to high turnover, and the cost of training new employees is actually costing it money. There's something to be said for a decent wage and benefits if you're talking about retention.
From a business perspective, this is true. Essentially, a business can profit more at the expense of others: it can pay workers higher prices, retain more workers, get a better public image, and use its other advantages to exceed over its competitors. That can allow the business to expand and have more employees while ultimately reducing the number of jobs in the total economy and even the quality-of-life of everyone except its own employees (someone has to pay the prices that feed those wages).
Generally, people try to economize: if you do something that makes your product more-expensive than the guy across the street, your customers go there. That behavior doesn't create a standing optimal economy; it moves us toward one continuously, and tends to erode outright-harmful behavior.
In a nutshell, if WalMart can pay its employees better and only incur 0.01% more cost, well... that's some 21,000 American jobs lost in the endeavor, and an increase in prices at WalMart that nobody will care about (a penny here and there); it's utterly unimportant. If WalMart ends up bumping prices by 10% or 15% and causing a real decline in the purchasing power of its customers, they'll all shop at target where people get paid $8.50/hr to stock shelves and WalMart will eventually cease to exist.
Economics is complex. I complained the other day that most people are arguing economics that they learned in high school and ECON101, and someone su
They bring people in that don't have the knowledge about how much the job is actually worth
If another worker is willing to do it cheaper, it's worth less. Jobs don't have inherent wage value.
When everyone is an IT monkey and can rack servers, you'll all be minimum-wage workers. Have fun running cables just like every other moron high school kid.
Having that kind of wealth tends to lead to having the kind of power to make change. It's self-serving for oil tycoons to become solar tycoons; yet it also is beneficial to society. As well, there's plenty of supply and suppliers to go around: if they didn't do it, then someone else would--which is a valid point.
If somebody's going to get their hands dirty either way, it may as well be you--and if getting your hands dirty puts you in a position to change the situation in the future, then you're a fool to keep yourself clean for ideological reasons.
Even if not, think about it. A $14,000 array I was looking at last year now costs about $6,000. SRECs have crashed from $120-$190 down all the way to $20-$30; instead of a 5-year ROI on energy and SREC, I get an 8-year ROI. This is because solar panels now come as cheap as $0.62/watt at high-density 320W panels (255W is the standard for the given size). A big oil tycoon has the power to start buying into land leases for idle farm land to preclude development; he can then lay on-ground sun-tracking grids, put in panels, and build a small control house. We can rip all that stuff out pretty easily, so it's almost-undeveloped farm land still (protects our agricultural lands); and Big Oil Tycoon is going to be frigging-rich Big Solar Tycoon.
Big Solar is cheaper per-watt than Roof Solar. The power you buy off the grid will eventually cost less than the power you pull from your roof--when you reach a 1-year ROI, your Big Solar providers aren't going to have $0.09/kWh power for you. You'll still be grid-tied with roof solar, unless you think a $20,000 battery bank that's a fire hazard (the higher the density, the more power can go boom if damaged) and degrades over usage is better than a grid back-up that costs a few pennies per kWh--you're not getting a 1-year ROI off batteries; the solar-wind grid will use recouperated compressed air storage at city-scale or better.
If you think you can escape the taxes, well... wait until you have to pay an annual Rooftop Generation Tax. Truth of the matter is utility taxes and other forms of sales and use taxes should go away and we should have only income taxes--in which case it still doesn't matter, and grid-tie is still better.
Anita Sarkeesian essentially attempts to endlessly harass everyone she disagrees with by becoming news and changing industry behaviors to do something about it.
The real fix is to ignore the noisy, bitchy, sandy-vagina girls and pay more attention to the nice girls who aren't bitching about every depiction of a size-D chest as some form of objectification.
What do you mean by "lots"? Is it growing as fast as the rate of population growth?
That was phrased poorly. Families at all levels buy new cars--that is, "lots". I was intending to indicate that the price of a new car ranges from $12,700 (Ford Focus) to several million dollars, and people at a broad range of income levels actually buy these things. Your basic premise is that people with X amount of income can't buy a "new" car; the fact is they can, but...
... the used car market is pretty vibrant; it's always been larger than the new car market, and there's a rather lively dispute between people who think "buying a used car is buying someone else's problems" and those who think "new car are sold to the guy paying the $10,000 depreciation cost for my next car" (i.e. buying a new car is financially-unsound and you're a moron for doing so).
More importantly, 95% of Americans own cars; 85% of Americans get to work by car. Most Americans have ownership of a serviceable vehicle (a more important statistic than "did you buy that new, or did you get a $10,000 discount?").
The market has fluctuated recently. In 2009 (deep in the recession), 10.4 million new cars (light vehicles) were sold, and 35.5 used cars were sold, 22.7% vs 77.3%. This compares to 2005 17.0 million new vs 44.14 million used, 27.8% vs 72.2%.
Vehicle sales slowed during the recession--61.13 million total sales in 2005, 59.11 million total sales in 2006, 57.80 million total sales in 2007, 49.80 sales in 2008, and 45.93 million total sales in 2009 (22.7% new). There's a sharp drop around the recession. This accelerated afterwards, with 48.48 million total sales in 2010 (23.9% new); 51.57 million sold in 2011 (24.8% new); 55.01 million in 2012 (26.34% new); and 57.57 million in 2013 (27.1% new).
The average service span of vehicles has been increasing, and consumers have been buying used. The used car market has always been fairly large, and it's grown even larger as vehicles have become better-made and capable of holding in long service. My current vehicle is a 2004 Mazda 3; I'm looking to buy myself a Mazda 3 hatchback soon--possibly a new one, actually, at around $30,000; I can't find one I like used, and the prices for ones I'm interested in are around $20-$22k (yes, I'm considering spending $8,000 to get it in a different color with fancier trim--I make $75k; I can handle that). I bought the 2004 for $14,000 with 40,000 miles, in-dash GPS, leather seats, a sun roof, a 6-CD changer, and built-in Bluetooth module. I've still never had the thing run poorly on me, although one valve is tapping (the lifter is probably sticking).
2) Silicon Valley income is over inflated compared to all US wages. Nice job picking the highest paid workers in the US. People in Flint make far less.
I quoted that directly from the article you gave me. Are you waffling?
4) If you are making $10 an hour then 600 USD a month is unaffordable.
I said $600 USD/month is affordable for someone making $84,000. If you're making $10/hr, you can buy a brand-new Ford Focus for $229/month with no down payment. Yes, people do that.
5) Price per square foot doesn't matter it is the monthly income that matters.
NOPE! You said housing gets more-expensive, I gave a counter-argument. Changing to a different tact doesn't mean you're not wrong.
If costs of goods goes up and incomes lag, workers lose.
That's why we increase minimum wage periodically, although that does eliminate jobs each time we bump it (those jobs come back as wages lag--or rather, the number of jobs expands to meet the amount of goods purchaseable and the labor required to facilitate that purchasing, and lower wages at the lowest end as minimum wage lags facilitate more jobs than are left after raising minimum wage).
There are alternate policies to minimum wage
So there are limits to the kind of house I can buy today, you cannot ignore it.
This is true. You also can't get a car built out of a big block engine tied to an axle with no management systems or safety systems. Besides regulation, you generally can't buy things which aren't in sufficient demand to warrant their production.
That means the houses which are available are available because they serve a sufficiently-large market--the same proportion of the population as back in 1950, in fact, in terms of affordability and demand.
The average cost of a car has doubled from $16.5k to $31k and I dare say a vehicle is more expensive to maintain today
Ha.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
"A vehicle is more expensive to maintain today." That's rich. God, you people. You could work on cars in the 70s--we know this because you were always working on the car in the 70s; the fucking things never stopped breaking!
You seem to have completely missed the part about the price of things not increasing as fast as the income per person. You're, again, looking at something that cost $10 when you had $100, complaining it costs $15 now that you have $200, and ignoring the fact that you could buy 10 back then but can buy 13 now. You're also making shit up about the cars being supposedly more-expensive to maintain, unless you're trying to count just dollars and not look at the cost in proportion to income.
Let's put this into simple terms: Ignore money and compare all changing costs in terms of hours the median-income worker has to work to pay for a thing.
The article also correctly brings up the fact that the price of a barrel of oil seems to rise and fall but the cost at the pump only rises.
Oil vs gasoline. Looks like gasoline prices fall across America as oil prices fall. Don't let facts get in the way of your Trumpshit, though.
Well, gadgets are food--gadgets like pickles, wheat, and the like. Gadgets are clothes--gadgets like shirts, pants, etc. Air conditioning. TV. Medical technology. Cars. Ovens.
If I strip you naked and drop you into the middle of the African jungle, what's your quality-of-life like?
Cars are at the point where people are having problems affording them, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/0... [nytimes.com].
You linked an article that says cars are more affordable in some cities than others, and that the median-income household can't afford the average price of a new car. That's a statistical trick: you're confounding between different classes. There are economy cars, luxury cars, and loads of things in-between.
In the real world, families buy lots of new cars. The price paid for a new car is typically 56% of the household income--$30,000 for the median income--financed over a 5-year loan. That's been true for decades.
Let's take a look at the argument on your link:
In San Jose, Calif. — the heart of Silicon Valley — the median income is about $84,000, and an “affordable” new car purchase price is about $33,000 — close to, but still below, the average new car price.
$33,000 is only 39% of the median income. How does that compare to history?
In 1950 the average income per year was $3,210.00 and by 1959 was $5,010.00. In 1950 the average cost of new car was $1,510.00 and by 1959 was $2,200.00
In 1950, the average cost of a new car was 47% of the average income. In 1959, it was 44%.
$33,000 on a 5-year loan at 3.3% is only $600/month. That's out of a $4,900 after-tax income. That's only 12%, and leaves $4,300/month to spend on food, rent, etc. Hell, I'm looking at buying a car at that price, and I don't make $84,000.
Do I have to even link to stories about health care, education, or housing prices
People spend more on healthcare, and buy better healthcare today. They spent 4% in the 1980s and spent 6% in 2000, and received better care.
I addressed housing prices elsewhere. There are a number of issues. One is that mortgage rate changes have caused a $120,000 house that garnered a $1,200/month mortgage to now sell for $350,000 with a $1,200/month mortgage. Another is that houses have gotten bigger over time and, trending over decades, the price of housing per square foot continues to decrease; while trending over shorter terms, it fluctuates due to being a semi-commodity (bought and sold by owners, rather than newly-produced).
Workforce development--the thing used as "education" so we don't have to talk about education--was moved off the risk and responsibility of businesses and onto the shoulders of the individual. This is wasteful and has caused out-of-control costs in the collegiate system. That's a known issue due to specific bad policy.
Your simple model is deeply flawed and doesn't account for things like farmers turning their farms into developments if they can't get good prices for their crops due to over production.
It doesn't attempt to describe that; I described money and technical progress to demonstrate that inflation and income are not tied together as a zero-sum game.
Inflation tells me people are losing ground.
Then you don't understand what inflation is. You understand what you see and inappropriately attribute things you don't like to things you can identify. This is the same as when you go to a poverty-stricken inner city, notice the level of crime, and identify that black people have an in-born genetic propensity to rape, murder, and drugs because 98% of the people in the city are black--as opposed to identifying the social pressures surrounding the people in the city, such as poverty and racism.
And the people who have been out of work for 6 months or a year, how are they tracked? What's that number doing?
That's U-3. They're tracked by knowing the population over age 16 and the jobs taken. When you're legally hired, your employer files identifying documents (SSN, driver's license, etc.--the W-9 stuff) with the IRS. The BLS publishes statistics by counting unique jobholders and comparing that to birth records, death records, immigration records, census, etc. That gives them population, age, and number of employed.
Persons unemployed who have sought employment in the past 4 weeks are U-3. Persons unemployed who have a desire to seek employment but have not sought employment in the past 4 weeks are U-4 (discouraged workers). These are tracked statistically by a monthly survey called the Current Population Survey.
Robots are increasingly cheaper to use than humans for an increasing number of jobs. It's not a steady trend, but it rarely reverses.
Wooden shipping pallets, power tools, electricity, railroads. The hot blast furnace produces 86,000 tonnes of iron per week; an 18th-century cold-blast furnace would produce 400 tonnes per year using the same labor.
Technical progress is the reduction of labor used to produce an outcome. 100% of all increases in total global wealth--that is, increases not localized by trade (we get wealthier by employing low-wage Chinese)--have come from the reduction of labor required to produce an outcome. Even discovering a rich gold or coal mine means you found a mine where less work produces more ore (if you dig out 100 tonnes of mostly-gold, that's the same labor as digging out 100 tonnes of dirt containing 1 tonne of gold--but it's a lot more gold).
Robots are more of the same. The question is if we replace 50% of our jobs in 10 years, or 50% of our jobs in 10 weeks. A steady pace of job replacement by technical progress is safe and profitable; whereas sudden bolts of technology faster than with which the labor market can keep pace cause widespread unemployment.
That's why we need things like regulation to enable the use of self-driving cars. Imagine if 1% of cab drivers and freight drivers lost their jobs every month for the next 5 years. A whole lot of nothing would happen. That's 233,900 cab drives and 1.5 million truckers, or about 1,830,000 Americans. Per-month, a 1% replacement is 18,300 jobs or a 0.012% uptick in unemployment--a loss which would turn over by the end of the year, at which point a total 0.144% would be affected. Note that, currently, the US has around a million layoffs per year due to job obsolescence (both from outsourcing labor to other countries and by blunt technical progress): 183,000/year is a significant number, but not unreasonable.
The other side of this is the cost of freight and cab fair goes down. There's suddenly no need to pay the cabbie or the truck driver, and your main retail products--most notably food--tend to react price-wise in a span of months if not weeks. That means the savings folds back into consumer hands, which means buying more stuff, which means more retail jobs, more mechanic jobs (keeping the self-driving freight trucks running--1 mechanic's hour for several thousand miles rather than 1 trucker's hour per 60 miles, call it 1 mechanic replacing 500 truckers), marketing and sales of these vehicles and of the consumer goods, and so forth. That's how the jobs lost to technology get replaced.
(Jobs lost to trade get replaced by the population and labor force simply not growing as fast for a little while; likewise, job gains result in sudden growth of labor force until unemployment increases to ~5% again.)
Imagine if we didn't get the right regulations in place fast enough.
Rather than replacing those jobs, we spend 5 years developing the technology. Businesses salivate over ready-to-go self-driving cabs and freight trucks while Congress and state legislat
The median $54,000 income in 2015 buys roughly 42% more than what the median income in 2000 bought.
The expense share of food and clothing has fallen. At the same time, cars, phones, computers, and other electronic products have become highly-complex. Rather than spending $20 (in 1995) or $10 (in 2005) to buy a CD with 9 songs, you can spend $10/month and have Spotify. Rather than $21 for a DVD, you have Netflix for $9/month. Rather than $35/month for 128k ISDN (1998), you spend $83/month for 200,000k Cable Internet ($55,000/month worth of ISDN).
You can consume more today with the median income than you did 10 years ago. A lot more.
Here's what people don't realize: inflation doesn't mark the buying power of a labor hour.
Let's say you improve food production by 100%. Instead of paying 4.8 hours of farm labor for a week's worth of a household's food, you pay 2.4 hours of labor. That means maybe there were 3,000,000 farmers, chemists, machinists, oil refiners, and so forth working in the food supply chain, and now there's 1,500,000 supplying the same amount of the same food. They all get paid for the same labor-hours.
Well, if nobody's wage goes up, then the price of food comes down. Those farmers and everyone else involved made $20/hr before, and they make $20/hr now? That means you used to pay $96/week for food, now you pay $48/week. If the median income is $30,000 and your income doesn't go up, then you're only $48 richer.
So now what happens if, across this process--say we don't do this overnight, but over 10 years--we have a 120% increase in wages? We issue more dollars and the incomes go up.
Well, that means those farmers are making $44/hr. The food that cost $96/week now costs $105.60. That's inflation, right? Food costs increased by 10%--so you have 10% inflation.
Caveat: The median income is now $66,000. We've gone from $4,992/year out of $30,000 (16.64%) to $5,491.20/year out of $66,000 (8.32%).
Think about that for a minute. What does inflation really tell you?
Housing is actually an odd market. It's not a productive market per se; it's more of a traded commodity, and speculators have convinced homeowners their houses are worth a lot. At the same time, falling mortgage rates mean the $1,200/month you're willing to pay for a house buys a bigger sale price--$350,000 instead of $120,000--so the same house has a higher price, yet comes with the same mortgage payment. You sort of pay about the same either way.
At the same time, the size of new-construction houses and apartments increases over time. The average new-construction single-family home was 982sqft in 1950, and over 2,300sqft in 2000. People build additions onto their homes. Cities occasionally tear down urban blight and replace cramped row homes with sprawling semi-detached or single-family parcels.
In terms of decades, the price per 1,000sqft of housing has steadily decreased the same as food, clothing, and other goods and services; in terms of continuous running price, the housing market is a somewhat inelastic commodity market and behaves somewhat like a security (stocks, commodities) and somewhat like a product.
The productivity of the American worker is declining because they are burnt out
Productivity is tied to technical progress, and we supply more with less labor today than 10 years ago. We do have some issues with overworked overtime employees; however, they tend to be unproductive because they leave those jobs and go to other businesses instead. Revolving doors in an office environment are incredibly expensive, and the constant turn-over takes its toll on those businesses; I'm working in a rather large shop that had that problem 4 years ago, and has since more than doubled the IT department size and implemented more project management so as to increase the proportion of work successfully completed and decrease strain on employees.
It's notable that the employees of the late-1800s and early-1900s complained a lot because they worked 90-hour work weeks. 6 days per week, 16 hours per day. They won a 60-hour work week--6 days per week, 12 hours per day, two 1-hour lunches--and then the modern 40-hour work week through decades of protests, rioting, and murder. I feel 28-32 hour work weeks should be viable rather soon, if we handle the transition carefully; we'll be less-wealthy than if we just stick to a 40-hour week, since we'll essentially be trading away productivity gains for time instead of wealth (e.g. when you make in 4 hours what you used to make in 5, you work 3.2 hours and make the same--you get no richer nor poorer, but you have more leisure time).
Most people are trying, but they're tired
Most people are just fine. Many people are conditioned by having the same bullshit repeated at them, whether it's by Hillary, Bernie, Trump, Ron Paul, Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, the anchors on CNN, or some other idiot without a clue. They form ideals and they won't break away from them.
Look at minimum wage. Minimum wage is established to ensure a certain amount of labor is compensated for a certain proportion of buying power--that is, we pay minimum wage workers enough to buy a certain amount of things made by people who aren't minimum-wage workers. Debt allows us to move money into the economy at the bottom to handle population expansion and generally avoid deflationary currency; and inflation is necessary for a stable, functional economy--especially one with debt. Inflation reduces the buying power of that minimum wage, so we have to increase it now and then.
Long story short: we need to raise minimum wage to keep up with inflation. It is necessary.
The same people who agree with this also can't accept that increasing minimum wage concentrates the same money into fewer hands, causing some minimum-wage workers to lose jobs as a result of the increase. It doesn't matter how badly they have to violate the simple laws of mathemati
Not really. We have a measure for marginal employment (UE, U6--currently around 9.2%) and a measure for full-time employment (UE3). What's left is minimum wage or its replacement with a universal social security.
All part-time underemployed make up 3.7% of the labor force as of December 2016, with U-3 at 4.7%. In December 2000 (best month in the past 16 years), U-6 was 6.9%, U-5 was 4.7%, and U-3 was 3.9%--so your "Uber sleeping in the parking lot" jobs were 2.2% of the labor force with U-3 at 3.9% and U6 at 6.9%.
So those are similar, although the 2000 statistic looks more-favorable.
December 2009's 9.9% U-3 was part of a 17.1% U-6 and 11.3% U-5. That means 5.8% of the labor force was "Uber sleeping in the parking lot jobs" and "people [...] taking whatever they can".
Between 2009's peak unemployment and now, U-6 has fallen by 7.9%. Of that, we reduced the part-time unemployed "Uber sleeping in the parking lot jobs" portion of the population by 2.1%, and added 5.2% to the "good jobs" portion of the population. We've reduced the amount of shitty jobs and added good jobs.
That's, like, the opposite of what you said, isn't it? A smaller proportion of the labor force is working shitty Uber jobs, and a larger proportion of the labor force is working good, solid employment.
Six years of jobs coming faster than people. Falling unemployment. Lay-offs all over the place by the tens of thousands, job growth by the millions.
If you gave someone a million gold coins, they'd only see the scratch in the dusty used bowl you brought them in.
I might notice that more than Google because I actually have Nest products and frequently google for products's interaction with Nest. If Google sees me looking for a thing, it might well assume I'm most-interested in the Google product, because I might be.
So if he injected himself with all the marijuana the car won't drive him home?
It's easy to save on RAM, but RAM is cheap. With the zram module in Linux, you can create a zram block device 2x the size of RAM with mem_limit set to 50% of RAM and experience approximately no performance hit--faulting out of zram is approximately twice as heavy as a worst-case cache miss. I've had a 1GB server run 700MB into zram swap trying to run Gitlab, with 40MB of available RAM (including disk cache), and not show any visible sign of performance degradation; note that that's about 230MB of RAM acting as a compressed cache area for that 700MB, and 770MB of flat RAM available.
This works because CPU isn't pegged to 100% on average across 1 second, and decompression requires something like 23-26 instructions per byte. That means decompressing one page per second on a 1.2GHz core consumes about 0.00887% CPU at 1 cycle per instruction, or 0.0266% at an average 3 cycles per instruction. RAM prefetching is actually huge--a cache miss can cost 48 cycles for 64 bytes (on x86-64) or 0.000256% for a 4096-byte page, at a minimum, with 8-cycle CAS across a CPU, or a whopping 1,200 cycles or 0.0064% for 4096 bytes, although that's never going to happen (it's physically impossible: sequential reads don't need the expensive row precharge before RAS after the first read).
Basically, if your code uses memory infrequently, it has no reason to swap; and if it uses it frequently, then the cost of swapping can be absorbed by prefetch algorithms similar to the ones used by the CPU itself to avoid the above cache miss costs. Standard LRU swap algorithms will prevent swapping out of frequently-used memory; and the delay waiting for a swap-in consumes the bits of unused CPU time in a 99.7%-pegged processor.
The performance hit explodes exponentially at a certain point. If you have 1GB RAM and use 900MB as a compressed swap such that you have 2.8GB available, you're going to have a bad time. If you have 1GB and use 500MB for swap such that you have 2GB available, you'll be fine even under high load.
The problem is the whole phone is made of a SOC which isn't that much cheaper on 1GB versus 2GB; expensive NAND storage; radio chipsets; a battery; an expensive display; and so forth. The SOC isn't even the biggest part, with a cost of like $35 or sometimes in the $20 range for something current-generation for a $400 phone, up to $70-ish for state-of-the-art SOCs. Slap a $100 screen, $80 of TLC NAND, and $40 of boards and components and case around a $30 chip and you have a $250 phone.
Firstly, you apparently didn't read my comment that I wasn't discussing how apt works, only yum.
When Yum downloads something, it fetches a bunch of repo information (like apt-get update), then it downloads files (like apt-get install). To do this, it does... all the shit I described apt doing.
Secondly, the critical issue that you are missing is that if I install a package from an alternate repository (eg EPEL), my systems don't tell the main CENTOS mirrors about those EPEL packages.
No, of course not. You tell Georgia Tech, the NSA CentOS Mirror, or Microsoft's Redmond CentOS mirror, at random, who you are and what you're downloading.
Multiple distributions and mirror maintainers coordinate in secret to keep security exploit details quiet until a patch is ready from everyone. There's an entire network of quiet discussion that happens, intentionally hidden from everyone, to make sure everyone hits the ground running. If you report a remote exploit in Firefox directly to Mozilla, Debian, RedHat, Slackware, or Gentoo, marked as a security bug, they will keep the details private until everyone has patches ready; then they all release at once.
So you believe Microsoft is doing secret things dealing your data to secret partners in secret; but that Linux distributions might not be secretly collecting your data, or that various Linux mirrors who aren't controlled by those distributions aren't under the influence of others. That is: although AT&T was sucking up your phone data and piping it to the NSA, they apparently won't collect what scraps of OS update telemetry data hits their servers in the same way.
You're basically saying there's no network of bad actors out there, so instead of trusting "Debian", you trust everyone.
Finally, there is no fingerprinting involved in the yum transactions. If I have multiple machines behind a single IP address, the server doesn't have sufficient information to distinguish them. As well has having insufficient information to fingerprint individual systems, no user information is transmitted.
We've been able to identify individuals based on their Internet usage and TV usage, even from the same account, device, and browser. We can tell if your 16 year old daughter or her 17 year old sister is currently using the PC or watching TV.
I might have two x86-64 PCs running the same version of Ubuntu, and a Raspberry pi; you can fingerprint at least three systems out of my usage habits, and identify one distinctly at least.
Through all of that...
In summary, yes I am leaking some information, but it is benign.
The leaking of what Microsoft software you've installed to Microsoft's servers is benign as well. Who fucking cares that Microsoft knows you have Office 2013 installed?
There's mandatory telemetry in Firefox, Chrome, IE, Opera, Ubuntu, Fedora, and a whole lot of other stuff. You're leaking data to everyone. Search habits, Web address look-ups, the lot. Some of it can be removed; some of it can be disabled (notably, the malware checks in Firefox); some of it is designed in (the only way to run system updates without sending a random university, ISP, or Canonical- or Redhat-controlled Web server a list of software you have installed which you intend to upgrade today is to make a complete local mirror of the entire repository).
Nobody knows what's in MS telemetry, but they presume it can be any of anything. A lot of what they presume is also what's sent out to random actors through any Linux distribution or other free software you've been using, and the only reason nobody cares is they don't think about it.
Do you know how often I type something into a text box on Reddit or Slashdot, pull up Google to do some research before I post something retarded, and Google immediately suggests exactly what I'm looking for despite me never having searched for that? It's like they can read the text boxes before I even submit the form--or maybe they know I've been on a certain page in some forum where such topic is being discussed, and can guess what I want to know. Either that or the Googlecluster is both self-aware and telepathic.