The negative attitude directed at tossing out something approximately nobody used is predictable, since it's super-bitch Barbara Hudson. Her Facebook is basically "EVERYONE IS ASSHOLES LOOK HOW FUCKING ASSHOLES EVERYONE IS" and "I FOUND PUPPIES I'M SO GOOD SOME ASSHOLES DIDN'T RESCUE THESE PUPPIES BEFORE ME SO I HAVE TO RESCUE THEM BECAUSE OTHER PEOPLE ARE ASSHOLES AND I'M AN ANGEL!!!!!!!111" Her M.O. is essentially "you're wrong and an asshole," no matter who you are.
Not many people can claim to be that much of a cunt.
I've had similar considerations, less about identity and more about what people identify with. Reason is useful in reasoned discussions and debate; and persuasion is a different beast, where the person you're addressing is the person who you need to convince.
When persuading, people who are groping for reason will listen to reason; people who need to be persuaded might not, especially if they have an existing position and aren't searching for a new solution. Even beyond reason, though, you need to convince people that the basic idea is sound.
You'll notice what I wrote addresses the problems you list and the concerns you have. You left yourself open with those. The last paragraph is of chief importance, though: it identifies the basic sense of need, the perception of danger, and the perceived environment around these concerns. That's not about how right I am about everything; it's about how important the emotional sense of confusion and uncertainty is, and what to do about it.
I'm not the world's best persuasive speaker, though. I'm horrible at it. I have no social sense and don't have friends. I have observations I can't use very well, and that's it.
I've found conservatives oddly easier to persuade than liberals. I've pointed out the flaws in the ACA and shown how it creates a break in market pressures, essentially allowing some taxpayers to buy things with other taxpayers's money using the government as a mediator. I've described single-payer systems with mandatory healthcare benefits through the employer as a market driver, in which consumers want low prices, employers want low costs so they can lower their prices to compete, insurers want low premiums so they can attract consumers including employers, and healthcare providers want and need revenue that pays their costs. Providers can't lower their prices below costs; and the downward pressure from consumers, through businesses, through insurers, and onto healthcare providers drives prices toward costs. A public option bounded by median negotiated costs to insurers is tied to market forces, and so provides a much better option than the ACA's exchange.
Conservatives cry socialism when you talk about government healthcare; yet the above explanation both strengthens the regulatory demand of employer-provided healthcare (which conservatives hate) and converts a business-provided healthcare option to a government-provided one, and conservatives like this idea. When I describe the ACA and point out why it's broken in the ways they perceive, and then show how to fix it, they find that better; and they find it palatable if I also describe the economics of welfare, which does include the question of whether a public option is truly an advantage yet, but underscores that a public healthcare plan absolutely is cheaper and better in a sufficiently-wealthy economy--an illustration that meshes well with conservative concerns about the government dictating that expensive shit magically be supplied, just like the USSR and Karl Marx, by pointing out that things which are expensive eventually become cheap and thus can only be supplied by policy when their cost has fallen as such.
Liberals are weird. Conservatives are insane, deluded, backwards psychopaths who can make defects of logic so compact that a single sentence contains multiple irreconcilable contradictions; yet they'll listen to reason and change their views on something that makes sense to their sensibilities. Liberals tend to have more-thought-out positions based on a greater application of reason and better facts; yet the moment you violate one of their principles, they stop listening to reason and insist you must be stupid. This has resulted in me disliking conservatives for being dumb, and disliking liberals for forcing me to take a sledgehammer to them repeatedly to get basic shit across.
So you take something basic like minimum wage. Minimum wage has been important in recent history: fractional reserve banking
Population explosion can't happen because a UBI can only supply a portion of purchasing power. Logistically, dollars (money) represent labor time, and labor time spent using a certain production method will necessarily result in a certain amount of output (e.g. old farming methods produced 1/10 as much food as modern intensive methods for the same amount of farm labor).
Population tends to grow to scarcity, then slow down. If you look at labor force growth, you can even see the absolute labor force and the absolute population suddenly grow much more slowly when unemployment is high. Check 2008-2014 in the Civilian Labor Force graph, and look at the population over age 16 from 2008-2012. The starting point of each anomaly correlates with a sudden increase in unemployment rate, and the continuing anomaly follows both real unemployment and subconscious sentiment on the economy (which is partially reflected in media sentiment--although you might notice things like Occupy Everything stopped happening even though everyone kept up the narrative of eternal unemployment).
Food scarcity has historically controlled population pretty well. If you have enough fertile land to grow food for 1,000,000 people and have a population of 500,000 with 10% farmers, you have 50,000 farmers. Grow by 10% and you add 50,000 people; you need 5,000 of those to become farmers, and nothing changes: your labor distribution stays the same (10% of 550,000 people are farmers), the human labor time to make food stays the same, the same jobs are available, the same goods per person are available, and the same proportion of income buys the same stuff. You probably want to print up 10% more money to avoid deflation.
If you run out of this good land, then you can still grow on less-good land; you have to carry water and fertilizer, and you get less yield. You have 1,000,000 people and 100,000 farmers; 10% growth means 100,000 more people--1,100,000. Normally that means 110,000 farmers; but to grow food on this less-good land, you end up needing 17% more people, or 117,000 farmers in total. That's labor that can't make other things; and it's more wages to pay for food. Even if you amortize it, food is now 6.3% more expensive--you're paying $1.06 for a $1 hamburger, and you're not making any more money!
That's going to lower standards of living. That means a sense of scarcity instead of abundance, and less population growth.
So what happens in the context of a UBI?
will we have a huge population spike when food and shelter no longer require time and effort for the masses to obtain?
I proposed a Universal Social Security that has a lot of margin of error for risk (it's a surprisingly-small per-month amount, too). If population starts spinning out of control without providing the labor to compensate--if GDP-per-capita goes down--then the amount of money left over after food and shelter shrinks; the narrow margin of error in your grocery shopping gets narrower, and you have to plan a whole lot more; your apartment sizes eventually start shrinking even smaller than that 244sqft I described for a single-person dwelling; and life, in general, gets a hell of a lot harder for the poor.
Anyone employed is, of course, living beyond their barest needs, so isn't affected by this in any notable way. They get to live at a much higher standard-of-living at the low end, and marginally-better above that (up to no change when you're rich); and they're comfortable with or without the USS.
That's the same general economic stressor that exists today to keep the population in check; it just keeps the poor better-supported, instead of leaving them to starve.
Even if the first two children, or even one, is supported by UBI
Since more and more low skilled jobs - including those of CEOs - get automated, there will be fewer jobs for the population
Actually, we still need the productivity to back any form of UBI. The Universal Social Security I propose directly takes a proportion of all income and divides it evenly; that means it directly gives everyone roughly 17% of the GDP-per-capita (it actually gives everyone 17% minus the taxable proportion of income). Any UBI does that; they just use a different means to source the money, which necessarily can purchase some amount of goods, which is a proportion of all productive activity. In the same way, every tax is an income tax--a sales tax, for example, takes a bigger proportion of poor peoples's income than it does of rich peoples's income, and a regressive income tax could take the same amount of money from the same people.
At the same time, job reduction just spreads jobs. That there are "fewer" jobs means there are still jobs involved in making things. Those jobs mean wages. Those wages need to be paid, which means the businesses involved require revenue. Revenue means prices of goods sold must provide that revenue.
In other words: there aren't "fewer" jobs; there are fewer jobs and fewer labor hours involved in making, shipping, and retailing a product, lowering its cost by lowering the amount of total wage paid to provide the goods and services consumers buy. That means the minimum viable price (and the price at any given profit margin) falls, which means prices move toward their stable profit margin as they do today. Consumers spend a smaller proportion of their income on existing products, and so have more to spend on other products--which, themselves, require fewer jobs than they would have, so the products are cheaper, so we can buy more.
There's an alternate path.
If we all keep working 40 hours per week and we need 1/2 as much labor to do our jobs thanks to new technology, then we all still have 40 hours of income and can buy twice as much since the price of everything reflects half as much wage.
If we all work fewer hours per week, we don't have twice the buying power just because everything costs half as much.
That means rather than a new technology allowing us to buy 20% more stuff, we can respond to the new technology by working 20% less--32-hour work weeks instead of 40. People only buy 4 things instead of 5; but every 5 workers only does the same work as 4, so you get a 1:1 labor market. The difference is we don't all immediately go out to buy Teslas and private yachts because we're not all that much richer, since we've elected to make every weekend a 3-day holiday instead.
Both strategies keep the same rate of employment. One involves less work, and results in a lower standard-of-living in terms of purchasing power--or, in other terms, involves purchasing leisure time with some of our wealth.
Over time, we just become capable of buying more stuff. You have other, non-manpower expenses; has your profit margin increased by 10x, or are you still making that same 7% or 12%? If it hasn't increased, then what's happening is stuff you're selling is getting cheaper, and the left-over money can be spent on something else--not necessarily something in your sector.
How do you think we have so much shit in the hands of the average American family that they couldn't afford to buy in 1995?
Why? It's always going to be non-zero. How many people were murdered by policymakers who didn't allow ethical practices?
When you choose between 10,000 dead and 10,000,000 dead, you still have blood on your hands if you do nothing and allow 10,000,000 to die. It is, in fact, a lot more blood than if you took the knife to the 10,000 throats yourself.
In general, doctors interfacing with a living patient don't know the patient is an organ donor. There's a large amount of protocol to prevent this.
Theoretically, if most all patients are donors, the doctor can simply assume any patient is a donor; and, also theoretically, if most all patients are donors, there should be a huge supply of organs available anyway.
Except that truck driving and delivery is being automated. Order picking and fulfillment is being automated. Stocking and inventory is being automated
There are still human actors involved, which means...
And those jobs with it. To those people, it doesn't matter if the phone is $300 or $50. Without a job and the income it provides, both are equally out of reach
...the products still cost money, because the human actors must get paid.
You want to see a fully-automated factory? Look at, oh, any factory. The jobs done in factories are the ones that require too damned much retooling to automate. It costs $150,000 to retool, but saves you $300,000 over 5 years... but you have to retool every 4 months. Well, humans are cheaper to retool.
Retooling is a fact of technical progress and equipment change. Every time a machine needs to be adjusted to do a new thing, it'll be the grunt work of some moron with an IQ of 70 to unbolt complex part A and bolt in complex part B. 3D printing and other rapid-prototyping technologies don't solve this because rapid prototyping is slow, meaning it requires many more machines, much more factory space, an enormous amount of energy, and a great deal of human labor to keep those machines running and well-maintained. Specialized assembly lines are much more efficient.
That means your automechanic isn't going to be replaced by a universal industrial arm that repairs any make and model of any car. Roads are going to be lain by road crews operating equipment that does all the work for them in an afternoon instead of two months. Waitstaff will remain waitstaff for a while longer, unless we convert all floor restaurants into conveyor sushi bars. People building houses are going to continue to build houses--the crews will be smaller. Plumbers, electricians, and other ad-hoc-labor types will get better tools, and we'll have fewer of them.
You really have no frame of reference to compare America today against America of 1790. That was an America where factory work was unheard of--an America where someone invented a machine that makes nails and the blacksmiths spoke of a world where we would all die because nobody would have jobs. Karl Marx spoke of all jobs being replaced by machines in the mid-1800s--and they were! That happened by the mid-1900s! Why didn't employment rates go down?
What matters to people is some people today won't have their current job tomorrow. That means there will be a time that they're unemployed. You, personally, won't like being unemployed, even if unemployment is lower at that time than it is today--that is, even if a million more Americans have jobs and we're on-balance better, the fact that your job vanished in the process and you suddenly don't have an income will upset you greatly. No shit. Your ability to sit in front of a computer, to order food delivered to your house, and generally to not live in a country like West Uganda where you live in a mud hut and have to walk nine miles to get a bucket of drinking water from the river is built on the backs of billions of people throughout history who have faced exactly that problem--everyone getting richer at the expense of replacing some jobs with some other jobs.
Where are our cobblers, our bakers, our blacksmiths? Where are the TV repairmen? Where is the milkman, and the man who comes to your house each month to read your gas meter and bill you for your usage? Where have these people gone? Our low-unemployment, high-wealth society has no need for them, and they lost their jobs in the turn-over; they probably eventually ended up better-off, with new jobs, although certainly everyone else did.
This is the same problem as an ebola vaccination: nobody wants a shot in the arm; but nobody wants ebola, either.
Technology has become more-viable and less-expensive. It's more-reliable and takes less maintenance to design, build, and operate. Just like replacing hammers with frame nailers, replacing stacked canned goods with palletized goods on the wooden shipping pallet, and replacing armies of accountants with small offices and spreadsheets (and, eventually, with specialized accounting software), we've now started to replace 300-worker assembly lines with 21 logistics and maintenance staff keeping a more-automated line running smoothly.
Expect those $350 smart phones to become $50 smart phones. The materials still need mining; the factories making the components, however, can employ some of these lessons and bring their costs down.
With a $50 smart phone, you've got $300 left... and those $550 smart watches are now $90, and employ another 45 workers--that's 300 workers slimmed down to 46; and you're shipping smart phones and smart watches, meaning there's also 5-10 more truck drivers (well, okay, however many truckers it takes to support the shipping of all smart phones), and a half dozen more retail employees (again, to handle Amazon.com or Microcenter's stores and shelf stocking), and marketers... so not 46 jobs, but 90 or so.
That still leaves us with enough money in consumer pockets to pay some 200 workers--factory, transport, retail, the whole supply chain. Even more miners, farmers, and other materials producers. What are we going to buy, given cheap cell phones and smart watches? Are these "Smart Hats", "Smart Mugs", and "Smart Shoes" going to proliferate even more? Will everyone have something like the Eight Sleep bed cover, Nest thermostats, and a Flair zoning system in their house? I guess we can afford to pay people to make all this crap, since it takes so few now.
It's better than that: the story as reported in the summary sounds a whole hell of a lot like political corruption. Trump gets into office, and a businessman is spending billions of dollars to aid his political status? What are these secret meetings about? What advantage is there now to this spending? Who gets the kickbacks?
QA doesn't take additional time and money; QA is an integrated part of the project management and, afterwards, the ongoing maintenance process. It's a critical component of the product development lifecycle required to minimize the time and money taken to produce and support a product.
QA reduces costly support calls, costly lawsuits, and costly rework. Without QA, you send out products that eventually need bugfixes, and then have to be reworked. Units on shelves are now inadequate, and must be recalled. Customers with grievances now have the right to have you repair or replace their defective product. Customers who have experienced harm might have the right to force you to pay reparations, if it can be shown that harm was at your negligence--which is harder to do when you have good QA.
QA makes the difference between 30% of your product's price being the cost of handling all this shit and 5% of your competitor's much-cheaper-and-better product being the cost of handling all this shit. It makes the difference between a failing business and the competitor who puts you out of business by simply selling a faster, better, cheaper product than you ever could. In the case of medical devices, it could make the difference between being a rich CEO and being an inmate.
QA isn't a feature you pay extra for; it's a process whose output is a reduction in total costs. If QA didn't reduce the cost to supply an adequate product, we wouldn't do it.
They've progressed on that front: fix a flaw and you don't need recertification or even to alert the FDA.
I'm more fond of a single-point-of-failure approach. To access a device, I'd want to connect to it in open mode first, and establish a two-way trust. The device would generate and install its own security key pair, and the device with which I connect would also generate a key pair. Then I could sign a new certificate with my device and use that as an authorized certificate: we just exchanged our keys as Certificate Authorities, and on each end we only trust each other as the CA.
This means the doctor issuing the device (surgeon for internal devices) would have to activate it first (hopefully before putting it into your body). He would send the device a self-signed "Accessor" Public Key, and receive the device's self-signed "Device" Public Key--certificates. The Device private key is kept secret on the device; while the doctor prints out the Accessor private key as a page-sized string (OCR, keyboard entry) and matrix bar-code, to be filed with the medical record.
Now it's possible to scan the paper print-out and use that Accessor private key to sign a certificate for an authorized key.
All of this means you can write the communications interface such that you need to hack the network stack or the signature verification code path to exploit the device. The device only accepts communications (updates, other commands) if it can verify the signature on the communicated packet. That means the device's OS has to read data from an IO and pass it to software; the software has to perform a digital signature verification on that data before it's willing to do anything else about it.
That's a tiny code path operating on end-user data, and it can be made absolutely-secure.
Reading IO is a matter of identifying how much data to read and copying it into a kernel buffer, or mapping that IO to a userspace application--which means you can either identify the fixed length of data to read, or you can identify the risk of a buffer overrun and ensure that you always enlarge your buffer when you approach its capacity. In any case, you don't actually process the data; you're copying some length of bytes to some length of storage, which is impossible to manipulate. The only possible failure here is an egregious programming flaw that will be broken and buggy well enough on its own--like attempting to read the packet length from the wrong register, or using strcpy() instead of memcpy().
Verifying a digital signature is tricky. It's a complex operation that involves iterating over the entire length of a specific body of data and performing a bunch of computations. If implemented correctly, it also doesn't process the data; instead, you have to worry about things like reading the packet in the first place. OpenSSL can verify a digital signature fine; it just occasionally has a bug where the packet says to do something incorrect and OpenSSL happily does it, and then reads data from a memory area bigger than the whole packet. That's what you need to code to avoid.
Once you've gotten a way to pull the packet in and not accept commands like "Read 6,000 bytes from a 30-byte field", you don't have any possible exploits. At all.
Then you're done. If signature verification fails, you refuse the packet--don't even process it. If signature verification succeeds, you've got someone who can do some dangerous shit and doesn't need to hack your device to fuck it up.
Nod. Protectionism is bad for the economy at large for reasons I've mentioned; but this is... well, India has problems not caused by their economic gaffes. That's a long list of pure corruption and poor technical progress, right down to waving around a political talking point of public healthcare while providing nothing of the sort once you get in the door.
Seriously, though, education that's free after you pay for it? That's called "buying something".
They're a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and are legally-obligated to not retain profit above what they can justify. That means they have to maintain stable cash flow to continue to operate but also eliminate excess cash stores when that cash flow is higher than needed.
I'd expect India isn't entirely without homeless and hungry, although I guess that's what you meant by finding something to do for that day. On the other hand, can they afford 4kg of rice, plus rent, and all the other stuff they need?
When the middle class can buy more, it means they can create more jobs. In the long-run, job creation doesn't affect unemployment, due to population (and labor force) growth to fit availability; although the ability of the consumer base to buy many things means they can adapt rapidly to changes in the market, and that such changes don't eliminate as many jobs. Imagine if people bought 5 different things and then one day moved their attention from fancy shoes to fancy pants--so 20% of the market (shoes) goes unemployed, and has to shift over to the production of pants (which becomes 20% of the market). That'd be incredibly unstable. When the market makes many things with little human labor each, any single impact to any single product's demand is smaller--and, of course, everyone gets to be wealthy because they can use tiny bits of their income to buy lots and lots of things.
Anyway my point was that such protectionism just takes from many people and gives to fewer, creating a class of rich elites (rice farmers, in this case). It harms and weakens the economy, but a few powerful individuals benefit from it.
Rice farming has a margin of over 100%? What, is it just that damned cheap? Maybe we should import rice from the Philippines; then our rice farmers can go out of business, and that portion of the labor market can instead produce streaming media or high-end cars or whatever (or else--or in part--just the labor force growth slows as those jobs trickle away--many of which are import labor, anyway, so fewer H1B Visas--and our population adapts to the size of the job market; either way, we'll be buying more things per person, and living more-wealthy lives).
The thing is international shipping (and shipping in general) is cheap; but there's a large chain between the farmer and the store.
In America, farmers hardly ever get more than a 10% margin (they want 20% by convention, and consider it a decades-long crisis they can't get it). The average profit margin across the entire chain from farm to retail is 10%--and the supermarket has a 2% margin. That means nearly 90% of the cost of oranges is actually the cost of oranges, not some major profiteering.
Oranges cost under $11 per box (90lb) at the farm.
5 pounds of oranges costs $8 at the super market.
About half of the supply chain cost goes to shipping. That means $66 to ship a 90 pound crate of oranges. Note we're talking about domestic shipping: a truck driver in America puts a 90 pound crate of oranges on his truck, drives from Florida to a central warehouse, and unloads, after which point the crates are loaded on another truck and taken to regional distribution centers and supermarkets.
I've seen a 1,000 pound pallet shipped from AZ to AK (about 1,200 miles) for $955. We're talking about a 40,000 pound truckload of oranges being shipped between 1,000 and 4,000 miles, in multiple loads (to/from warehouse). If you could get that shipping rate for around $725 per 1,000 pounds, that would make sense; a pallet box of oranges should hold about 900 pounds. Note that $725 per 1,000 pounds would have to account for all miles, total, meaning if a truck took it to a warehouse, then another truck took those oranges to a regional distribution center, then another truck took them to the super market, that would have to cost $725 in total for shipping to make half the price of oranges.
Bear in mind we're talking about shipping domestically--trucks, over land. Carrying 30,000 pounds of those same oranges in a 40-foot shipping container would apparently cost $1,300 from China to the U.S, and then you have domestic shipping hell; but don't forget some Chinese truck drivers got paid to drive their trucks, too. The truck drivers aren't even rich; they have to maintain their trucks (ONE TIRE costs $2,000 and may last 100k miles or so, which is what trucker drive in a year--18 wheels, $36,000 in tires per 1-2 years), buy fuel, and so forth. The big win for overland shipping is it costs more to put something on a boat in Florida and sail it to Texas, then truck it up 3,000 miles to load it on a barge on the Mississippi river, then unload that and truck it to Nevada; and besides, we don't have the shipping bandwidth to do that. The biggest win is we don't truck things 200 miles to the coast, sail them around through Panama, unload them in California, and truck them 500 miles inland--because just trucking them 5,000 miles across the country is cheaper (yes, it's strange, since the Atlantic is huge and floating shit across that is apparently cheap).
So you have a manufacturer in India making $0.5. Then some combination of transportation, logistics, warehousing, grading, and other costs coming to $5; and we haven't established if that includes dying and weaving the cotton (is the shirt maker sourcing cloth or raw fiber?). Then we have the shirt maker (who may be getting the cotton dyed and woven, or may be sourcing the cloth?) using a lot of industrial equipment and labor to make a shirt.
Your "middleman" is about a hundred people along the way, you know.
Men and Boys's Cotton Trousers and Shorts land in America from China for $6.12 per pair. They retail on average for $14.97. $8.85 of that store shelf cost is transportation, logistics, and retail. This involves people making fuel (trucks, power plants), electricity (retail building), running water (retail building), building maintenance, inventory specialists (stocking shelves), loss prevention (security at retail), cashiers (retail), accountants, managers, logistics bookkeepers. That $8.85 pays hundreds of Americans--not by some economic management of "Every dollar spent is $6 in the economy" (that's a giant l
Middlemen and traders are subject to market pressure. If I want to sell you a $20 shirt but the next guy can sell you the exact same shirt for $15, I've got a problem. I can find another supplier who will sell me the cotton for $4 instead of $9, and I'm all set.
If my suppliers are all losing business, they might just cut back the cost of cotton to match. Likewise, if my suppliers can't supply with the same risk--if they're bringing from halfway around the world and the next guy is coming from my back yard and thus not going to have customs issues or backlogs that might take shipping across half the world to correct--then maybe it's worth a bit more than a 10 cent discount for me to stay with someone more-reliable. They'll have to give me a sufficient discount.
Finally, in practice, profit margins for highly-available, fungible goods tend to move to a stable minimum in a market. A global market brings this in concert across the globe--that is, Indian cotton tends to have the same profit margin as American cotton, so the middleman mark-up tends to be the same. The implication is actually the same as when buying direct: if I bought straight from the factory, they might want to make $125 cotton and charge me $450 versus the $500 cotton over here; they won't because I'm bringing them a steady, long-term, multi-hundred-million-dollar cotton purchasing deal, and they don't want me to go to another Indian competitor.
Large purchases don't always go to factories. Middleman suppliers are also competing with each other, and will source your cotton as-required. That means you can buy from a middleman who sources cotton from several Indian supply houses, or pulls it from India and China, or wherever, so long as it meets the specifications you set forth. This costs a little more outflow spending because you're paying the middleman to do the logistics work, whereas in-house you would pay salaries of your own logistics people and a potentially-lower price for the material itself. The middleman reduces your risk.
Interestingly, because the middleman is doing logistics work for hundreds or thousands of customers and taking enormous contracts with multiple competing suppliers, he devotes less work (and cost) to your needs than you would yourself, and so the total cost of sourcing the material through a middleman can actually be lower than sourcing factory-direct when you factor in your own logistics people's work. You also might not source the cheapest cotton; nor might you have the negotiating power to get the best deals--10% profit margin may be fairly universal, but a multi-billion-dollar contract might negotiate 0.1% whereas your multi-million-dollar contract got to pay a 1.5% margin.
So it's actually quite possible for the middleman to save you money; and, in general, the middleman is competing with the cost of material as you can negotiate factory-direct, plus the cost of paying your logistics people to ensure a stable supply chain and find the best prices. The cost of the middleman is in competition with the cost of cutting out the middleman.
There is no such thing as perfection. It is ideal for me to be much, much richer than everyone else, even if they're all poor; it's ideal across the economy for something more-moderate to happen, and such an optimization would make me richer than I am now without making me as rich as I could be; and it's ideal from the perspective of the poor to just win the lottery and never have to work or beg again.
I think "low physical activity" is common enough and well-studied enough that we know what it does and can identify that there's a different outcome here. Fat, lazy bitches don't act like new mothers.
When robots have replaced [nearly] all the workers the median wage will be zero. What will you be able to buy with that?
You say that as if they haven't. 90% of the American labor force in 1870 were farm workers. Did you know nowhere near 90% of Americans aren't working on the farm or on anything which is consumed by the farm today? It's actually closer to 12%.
Not a lot of rail workers today, either. The wooden shipping pallet eliminated a good 90% of dock worker jobs, too, along with anyone else whose job it was to load anything.
When robots have replaced nearly all the workers, we'll pay 1/1000th as much wages to buy a product. Then, we can buy 1000 times as many products. There will be all these people providing tiny fractions of the work involved to build things we're buying--the same proportion of workers today, really--and a thousand times as much product. That of course will probably take centuries; in the next decades, we'll likely see a doubling or two.
Do you like metal?
The hot blast furnace, when it came out, could produce 82,400 tonnes of iron from ore using the same labor that the previous ironworks employed to produce merely 400 tonnes. That means for every 200 workers involved in ironworks to make some tonnes of metal (about 200) before the hot blast furnace, there was only a need for 1 worker. That's a 99.5% elimination rate. They eliminated 99.5% of ironworks jobs. Even the furnace itself was iron and took less labor to produce than a cold-blast furnace.
Do you know what they did with the hot blast furnace?
They produced rolled iron for rails. This eliminated a hell of a lot of labor in transportation, marginalizing the overseas shipping market. You see, it took a lot of labor to carry things overseas, but a lot more to carry them overland. With the sharp reduction in labor to make iron, however, it took less labor in total to make iron furnaces, make iron, refine that iron into steel, roll that steel into steel rail, construct railways, maintain the railways, construct rail cars, operate the rail cars, load the rail cars, and unload the rail cars than it did in total to do all the stuff involved in shipping overseas. Overland shipping was cheaper than overseas shipping where overseas shipping wasn't convenient, so overseas shipping became marginalized to longer travel where rails wouldn't go (especially around mountains, since building a tunnel was still hard). This reduced the jobs involved in shipping any given number of goods.
The very definition of technology is reducing labor. Computers were designed to reduce the jobs needed to accomplish some tasks. Machines. Power tools. New scientific methods of synthesizing chemicals. Mass manufacture. Interchangeable parts. The engine. The plow. The cotton gin. Everything we take up is taken up to reduce jobs. That's how it gets cheaper.
How the hell did we increase from a stable 58%-59% labor force participation rate to a desperate and ludicrous 69% in the United States when all the jobs were getting destroyed by all this automation?
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The negative attitude directed at tossing out something approximately nobody used is predictable, since it's super-bitch Barbara Hudson. Her Facebook is basically "EVERYONE IS ASSHOLES LOOK HOW FUCKING ASSHOLES EVERYONE IS" and "I FOUND PUPPIES I'M SO GOOD SOME ASSHOLES DIDN'T RESCUE THESE PUPPIES BEFORE ME SO I HAVE TO RESCUE THEM BECAUSE OTHER PEOPLE ARE ASSHOLES AND I'M AN ANGEL!!!!!!!111" Her M.O. is essentially "you're wrong and an asshole," no matter who you are.
Not many people can claim to be that much of a cunt.
I've had similar considerations, less about identity and more about what people identify with. Reason is useful in reasoned discussions and debate; and persuasion is a different beast, where the person you're addressing is the person who you need to convince.
When persuading, people who are groping for reason will listen to reason; people who need to be persuaded might not, especially if they have an existing position and aren't searching for a new solution. Even beyond reason, though, you need to convince people that the basic idea is sound.
You'll notice what I wrote addresses the problems you list and the concerns you have. You left yourself open with those. The last paragraph is of chief importance, though: it identifies the basic sense of need, the perception of danger, and the perceived environment around these concerns. That's not about how right I am about everything; it's about how important the emotional sense of confusion and uncertainty is, and what to do about it.
I'm not the world's best persuasive speaker, though. I'm horrible at it. I have no social sense and don't have friends. I have observations I can't use very well, and that's it.
I've found conservatives oddly easier to persuade than liberals. I've pointed out the flaws in the ACA and shown how it creates a break in market pressures, essentially allowing some taxpayers to buy things with other taxpayers's money using the government as a mediator. I've described single-payer systems with mandatory healthcare benefits through the employer as a market driver, in which consumers want low prices, employers want low costs so they can lower their prices to compete, insurers want low premiums so they can attract consumers including employers, and healthcare providers want and need revenue that pays their costs. Providers can't lower their prices below costs; and the downward pressure from consumers, through businesses, through insurers, and onto healthcare providers drives prices toward costs. A public option bounded by median negotiated costs to insurers is tied to market forces, and so provides a much better option than the ACA's exchange.
Conservatives cry socialism when you talk about government healthcare; yet the above explanation both strengthens the regulatory demand of employer-provided healthcare (which conservatives hate) and converts a business-provided healthcare option to a government-provided one, and conservatives like this idea. When I describe the ACA and point out why it's broken in the ways they perceive, and then show how to fix it, they find that better; and they find it palatable if I also describe the economics of welfare, which does include the question of whether a public option is truly an advantage yet, but underscores that a public healthcare plan absolutely is cheaper and better in a sufficiently-wealthy economy--an illustration that meshes well with conservative concerns about the government dictating that expensive shit magically be supplied, just like the USSR and Karl Marx, by pointing out that things which are expensive eventually become cheap and thus can only be supplied by policy when their cost has fallen as such.
Liberals are weird. Conservatives are insane, deluded, backwards psychopaths who can make defects of logic so compact that a single sentence contains multiple irreconcilable contradictions; yet they'll listen to reason and change their views on something that makes sense to their sensibilities. Liberals tend to have more-thought-out positions based on a greater application of reason and better facts; yet the moment you violate one of their principles, they stop listening to reason and insist you must be stupid. This has resulted in me disliking conservatives for being dumb, and disliking liberals for forcing me to take a sledgehammer to them repeatedly to get basic shit across.
So you take something basic like minimum wage. Minimum wage has been important in recent history: fractional reserve banking
Population explosion can't happen because a UBI can only supply a portion of purchasing power. Logistically, dollars (money) represent labor time, and labor time spent using a certain production method will necessarily result in a certain amount of output (e.g. old farming methods produced 1/10 as much food as modern intensive methods for the same amount of farm labor).
Population tends to grow to scarcity, then slow down. If you look at labor force growth, you can even see the absolute labor force and the absolute population suddenly grow much more slowly when unemployment is high. Check 2008-2014 in the Civilian Labor Force graph, and look at the population over age 16 from 2008-2012. The starting point of each anomaly correlates with a sudden increase in unemployment rate, and the continuing anomaly follows both real unemployment and subconscious sentiment on the economy (which is partially reflected in media sentiment--although you might notice things like Occupy Everything stopped happening even though everyone kept up the narrative of eternal unemployment).
Food scarcity has historically controlled population pretty well. If you have enough fertile land to grow food for 1,000,000 people and have a population of 500,000 with 10% farmers, you have 50,000 farmers. Grow by 10% and you add 50,000 people; you need 5,000 of those to become farmers, and nothing changes: your labor distribution stays the same (10% of 550,000 people are farmers), the human labor time to make food stays the same, the same jobs are available, the same goods per person are available, and the same proportion of income buys the same stuff. You probably want to print up 10% more money to avoid deflation.
If you run out of this good land, then you can still grow on less-good land; you have to carry water and fertilizer, and you get less yield. You have 1,000,000 people and 100,000 farmers; 10% growth means 100,000 more people--1,100,000. Normally that means 110,000 farmers; but to grow food on this less-good land, you end up needing 17% more people, or 117,000 farmers in total. That's labor that can't make other things; and it's more wages to pay for food. Even if you amortize it, food is now 6.3% more expensive--you're paying $1.06 for a $1 hamburger, and you're not making any more money!
That's going to lower standards of living. That means a sense of scarcity instead of abundance, and less population growth.
So what happens in the context of a UBI?
will we have a huge population spike when food and shelter no longer require time and effort for the masses to obtain?
I proposed a Universal Social Security that has a lot of margin of error for risk (it's a surprisingly-small per-month amount, too). If population starts spinning out of control without providing the labor to compensate--if GDP-per-capita goes down--then the amount of money left over after food and shelter shrinks; the narrow margin of error in your grocery shopping gets narrower, and you have to plan a whole lot more; your apartment sizes eventually start shrinking even smaller than that 244sqft I described for a single-person dwelling; and life, in general, gets a hell of a lot harder for the poor.
Anyone employed is, of course, living beyond their barest needs, so isn't affected by this in any notable way. They get to live at a much higher standard-of-living at the low end, and marginally-better above that (up to no change when you're rich); and they're comfortable with or without the USS.
That's the same general economic stressor that exists today to keep the population in check; it just keeps the poor better-supported, instead of leaving them to starve.
Even if the first two children, or even one, is supported by UBI
new challenges that will probably require new paradigms
A Universal Social Security puts a trillion dollars less load on the taxpayer.
Since more and more low skilled jobs - including those of CEOs - get automated, there will be fewer jobs for the population
Actually, we still need the productivity to back any form of UBI. The Universal Social Security I propose directly takes a proportion of all income and divides it evenly; that means it directly gives everyone roughly 17% of the GDP-per-capita (it actually gives everyone 17% minus the taxable proportion of income). Any UBI does that; they just use a different means to source the money, which necessarily can purchase some amount of goods, which is a proportion of all productive activity. In the same way, every tax is an income tax--a sales tax, for example, takes a bigger proportion of poor peoples's income than it does of rich peoples's income, and a regressive income tax could take the same amount of money from the same people.
At the same time, job reduction just spreads jobs. That there are "fewer" jobs means there are still jobs involved in making things. Those jobs mean wages. Those wages need to be paid, which means the businesses involved require revenue. Revenue means prices of goods sold must provide that revenue.
In other words: there aren't "fewer" jobs; there are fewer jobs and fewer labor hours involved in making, shipping, and retailing a product, lowering its cost by lowering the amount of total wage paid to provide the goods and services consumers buy. That means the minimum viable price (and the price at any given profit margin) falls, which means prices move toward their stable profit margin as they do today. Consumers spend a smaller proportion of their income on existing products, and so have more to spend on other products--which, themselves, require fewer jobs than they would have, so the products are cheaper, so we can buy more.
There's an alternate path.
If we all keep working 40 hours per week and we need 1/2 as much labor to do our jobs thanks to new technology, then we all still have 40 hours of income and can buy twice as much since the price of everything reflects half as much wage.
If we all work fewer hours per week, we don't have twice the buying power just because everything costs half as much.
That means rather than a new technology allowing us to buy 20% more stuff, we can respond to the new technology by working 20% less--32-hour work weeks instead of 40. People only buy 4 things instead of 5; but every 5 workers only does the same work as 4, so you get a 1:1 labor market. The difference is we don't all immediately go out to buy Teslas and private yachts because we're not all that much richer, since we've elected to make every weekend a 3-day holiday instead.
Both strategies keep the same rate of employment. One involves less work, and results in a lower standard-of-living in terms of purchasing power--or, in other terms, involves purchasing leisure time with some of our wealth.
Over time, we just become capable of buying more stuff. You have other, non-manpower expenses; has your profit margin increased by 10x, or are you still making that same 7% or 12%? If it hasn't increased, then what's happening is stuff you're selling is getting cheaper, and the left-over money can be spent on something else--not necessarily something in your sector.
How do you think we have so much shit in the hands of the average American family that they couldn't afford to buy in 1995?
Seat belts and airbags cause deaths. They also prevent deaths.
Why? It's always going to be non-zero. How many people were murdered by policymakers who didn't allow ethical practices?
When you choose between 10,000 dead and 10,000,000 dead, you still have blood on your hands if you do nothing and allow 10,000,000 to die. It is, in fact, a lot more blood than if you took the knife to the 10,000 throats yourself.
In general, doctors interfacing with a living patient don't know the patient is an organ donor. There's a large amount of protocol to prevent this.
Theoretically, if most all patients are donors, the doctor can simply assume any patient is a donor; and, also theoretically, if most all patients are donors, there should be a huge supply of organs available anyway.
Except that truck driving and delivery is being automated. Order picking and fulfillment is being automated. Stocking and inventory is being automated
There are still human actors involved, which means...
And those jobs with it. To those people, it doesn't matter if the phone is $300 or $50. Without a job and the income it provides, both are equally out of reach
You want to see a fully-automated factory? Look at, oh, any factory. The jobs done in factories are the ones that require too damned much retooling to automate. It costs $150,000 to retool, but saves you $300,000 over 5 years ... but you have to retool every 4 months. Well, humans are cheaper to retool.
Retooling is a fact of technical progress and equipment change. Every time a machine needs to be adjusted to do a new thing, it'll be the grunt work of some moron with an IQ of 70 to unbolt complex part A and bolt in complex part B. 3D printing and other rapid-prototyping technologies don't solve this because rapid prototyping is slow, meaning it requires many more machines, much more factory space, an enormous amount of energy, and a great deal of human labor to keep those machines running and well-maintained. Specialized assembly lines are much more efficient.
That means your automechanic isn't going to be replaced by a universal industrial arm that repairs any make and model of any car. Roads are going to be lain by road crews operating equipment that does all the work for them in an afternoon instead of two months. Waitstaff will remain waitstaff for a while longer, unless we convert all floor restaurants into conveyor sushi bars. People building houses are going to continue to build houses--the crews will be smaller. Plumbers, electricians, and other ad-hoc-labor types will get better tools, and we'll have fewer of them.
You really have no frame of reference to compare America today against America of 1790. That was an America where factory work was unheard of--an America where someone invented a machine that makes nails and the blacksmiths spoke of a world where we would all die because nobody would have jobs. Karl Marx spoke of all jobs being replaced by machines in the mid-1800s--and they were! That happened by the mid-1900s! Why didn't employment rates go down?
What matters to people is some people today won't have their current job tomorrow. That means there will be a time that they're unemployed. You, personally, won't like being unemployed, even if unemployment is lower at that time than it is today--that is, even if a million more Americans have jobs and we're on-balance better, the fact that your job vanished in the process and you suddenly don't have an income will upset you greatly. No shit. Your ability to sit in front of a computer, to order food delivered to your house, and generally to not live in a country like West Uganda where you live in a mud hut and have to walk nine miles to get a bucket of drinking water from the river is built on the backs of billions of people throughout history who have faced exactly that problem--everyone getting richer at the expense of replacing some jobs with some other jobs.
Where are our cobblers, our bakers, our blacksmiths? Where are the TV repairmen? Where is the milkman, and the man who comes to your house each month to read your gas meter and bill you for your usage? Where have these people gone? Our low-unemployment, high-wealth society has no need for them, and they lost their jobs in the turn-over; they probably eventually ended up better-off, with new jobs, although certainly everyone else did.
This is the same problem as an ebola vaccination: nobody wants a shot in the arm; but nobody wants ebola, either.
Technology has become more-viable and less-expensive. It's more-reliable and takes less maintenance to design, build, and operate. Just like replacing hammers with frame nailers, replacing stacked canned goods with palletized goods on the wooden shipping pallet, and replacing armies of accountants with small offices and spreadsheets (and, eventually, with specialized accounting software), we've now started to replace 300-worker assembly lines with 21 logistics and maintenance staff keeping a more-automated line running smoothly.
Expect those $350 smart phones to become $50 smart phones. The materials still need mining; the factories making the components, however, can employ some of these lessons and bring their costs down.
With a $50 smart phone, you've got $300 left... and those $550 smart watches are now $90, and employ another 45 workers--that's 300 workers slimmed down to 46; and you're shipping smart phones and smart watches, meaning there's also 5-10 more truck drivers (well, okay, however many truckers it takes to support the shipping of all smart phones), and a half dozen more retail employees (again, to handle Amazon.com or Microcenter's stores and shelf stocking), and marketers... so not 46 jobs, but 90 or so.
That still leaves us with enough money in consumer pockets to pay some 200 workers--factory, transport, retail, the whole supply chain. Even more miners, farmers, and other materials producers. What are we going to buy, given cheap cell phones and smart watches? Are these "Smart Hats", "Smart Mugs", and "Smart Shoes" going to proliferate even more? Will everyone have something like the Eight Sleep bed cover, Nest thermostats, and a Flair zoning system in their house? I guess we can afford to pay people to make all this crap, since it takes so few now.
Yes, but it's hard to hack an ATM anyway. It happens once in a while, but they're generally secure, so this has not been a concern.
It's better than that: the story as reported in the summary sounds a whole hell of a lot like political corruption. Trump gets into office, and a businessman is spending billions of dollars to aid his political status? What are these secret meetings about? What advantage is there now to this spending? Who gets the kickbacks?
QA doesn't take additional time and money; QA is an integrated part of the project management and, afterwards, the ongoing maintenance process. It's a critical component of the product development lifecycle required to minimize the time and money taken to produce and support a product.
QA reduces costly support calls, costly lawsuits, and costly rework. Without QA, you send out products that eventually need bugfixes, and then have to be reworked. Units on shelves are now inadequate, and must be recalled. Customers with grievances now have the right to have you repair or replace their defective product. Customers who have experienced harm might have the right to force you to pay reparations, if it can be shown that harm was at your negligence--which is harder to do when you have good QA.
QA makes the difference between 30% of your product's price being the cost of handling all this shit and 5% of your competitor's much-cheaper-and-better product being the cost of handling all this shit. It makes the difference between a failing business and the competitor who puts you out of business by simply selling a faster, better, cheaper product than you ever could. In the case of medical devices, it could make the difference between being a rich CEO and being an inmate.
QA isn't a feature you pay extra for; it's a process whose output is a reduction in total costs. If QA didn't reduce the cost to supply an adequate product, we wouldn't do it.
They've progressed on that front: fix a flaw and you don't need recertification or even to alert the FDA.
I'm more fond of a single-point-of-failure approach. To access a device, I'd want to connect to it in open mode first, and establish a two-way trust. The device would generate and install its own security key pair, and the device with which I connect would also generate a key pair. Then I could sign a new certificate with my device and use that as an authorized certificate: we just exchanged our keys as Certificate Authorities, and on each end we only trust each other as the CA.
This means the doctor issuing the device (surgeon for internal devices) would have to activate it first (hopefully before putting it into your body). He would send the device a self-signed "Accessor" Public Key, and receive the device's self-signed "Device" Public Key--certificates. The Device private key is kept secret on the device; while the doctor prints out the Accessor private key as a page-sized string (OCR, keyboard entry) and matrix bar-code, to be filed with the medical record.
Now it's possible to scan the paper print-out and use that Accessor private key to sign a certificate for an authorized key.
All of this means you can write the communications interface such that you need to hack the network stack or the signature verification code path to exploit the device. The device only accepts communications (updates, other commands) if it can verify the signature on the communicated packet. That means the device's OS has to read data from an IO and pass it to software; the software has to perform a digital signature verification on that data before it's willing to do anything else about it.
That's a tiny code path operating on end-user data, and it can be made absolutely-secure.
Reading IO is a matter of identifying how much data to read and copying it into a kernel buffer, or mapping that IO to a userspace application--which means you can either identify the fixed length of data to read, or you can identify the risk of a buffer overrun and ensure that you always enlarge your buffer when you approach its capacity. In any case, you don't actually process the data; you're copying some length of bytes to some length of storage, which is impossible to manipulate. The only possible failure here is an egregious programming flaw that will be broken and buggy well enough on its own--like attempting to read the packet length from the wrong register, or using strcpy() instead of memcpy().
Verifying a digital signature is tricky. It's a complex operation that involves iterating over the entire length of a specific body of data and performing a bunch of computations. If implemented correctly, it also doesn't process the data; instead, you have to worry about things like reading the packet in the first place. OpenSSL can verify a digital signature fine; it just occasionally has a bug where the packet says to do something incorrect and OpenSSL happily does it, and then reads data from a memory area bigger than the whole packet. That's what you need to code to avoid.
Once you've gotten a way to pull the packet in and not accept commands like "Read 6,000 bytes from a 30-byte field", you don't have any possible exploits. At all.
Then you're done. If signature verification fails, you refuse the packet--don't even process it. If signature verification succeeds, you've got someone who can do some dangerous shit and doesn't need to hack your device to fuck it up.
It's called a key for a reason.
Nod. Protectionism is bad for the economy at large for reasons I've mentioned; but this is ... well, India has problems not caused by their economic gaffes. That's a long list of pure corruption and poor technical progress, right down to waving around a political talking point of public healthcare while providing nothing of the sort once you get in the door.
Seriously, though, education that's free after you pay for it? That's called "buying something".
They're probably all lawyers.
They're a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and are legally-obligated to not retain profit above what they can justify. That means they have to maintain stable cash flow to continue to operate but also eliminate excess cash stores when that cash flow is higher than needed.
I'd expect India isn't entirely without homeless and hungry, although I guess that's what you meant by finding something to do for that day. On the other hand, can they afford 4kg of rice, plus rent, and all the other stuff they need?
When the middle class can buy more, it means they can create more jobs. In the long-run, job creation doesn't affect unemployment, due to population (and labor force) growth to fit availability; although the ability of the consumer base to buy many things means they can adapt rapidly to changes in the market, and that such changes don't eliminate as many jobs. Imagine if people bought 5 different things and then one day moved their attention from fancy shoes to fancy pants--so 20% of the market (shoes) goes unemployed, and has to shift over to the production of pants (which becomes 20% of the market). That'd be incredibly unstable. When the market makes many things with little human labor each, any single impact to any single product's demand is smaller--and, of course, everyone gets to be wealthy because they can use tiny bits of their income to buy lots and lots of things.
Anyway my point was that such protectionism just takes from many people and gives to fewer, creating a class of rich elites (rice farmers, in this case). It harms and weakens the economy, but a few powerful individuals benefit from it.
Ah okay, so rice is expensive in the Philippines, not ridiculously-cheap. I guess that's good for the farmers and bad for the poor and middle-class.
Rice farming has a margin of over 100%? What, is it just that damned cheap? Maybe we should import rice from the Philippines; then our rice farmers can go out of business, and that portion of the labor market can instead produce streaming media or high-end cars or whatever (or else--or in part--just the labor force growth slows as those jobs trickle away--many of which are import labor, anyway, so fewer H1B Visas--and our population adapts to the size of the job market; either way, we'll be buying more things per person, and living more-wealthy lives).
The thing is international shipping (and shipping in general) is cheap; but there's a large chain between the farmer and the store.
In America, farmers hardly ever get more than a 10% margin (they want 20% by convention, and consider it a decades-long crisis they can't get it). The average profit margin across the entire chain from farm to retail is 10%--and the supermarket has a 2% margin. That means nearly 90% of the cost of oranges is actually the cost of oranges, not some major profiteering.
Oranges cost under $11 per box (90lb) at the farm.
5 pounds of oranges costs $8 at the super market.
About half of the supply chain cost goes to shipping. That means $66 to ship a 90 pound crate of oranges. Note we're talking about domestic shipping: a truck driver in America puts a 90 pound crate of oranges on his truck, drives from Florida to a central warehouse, and unloads, after which point the crates are loaded on another truck and taken to regional distribution centers and supermarkets.
I've seen a 1,000 pound pallet shipped from AZ to AK (about 1,200 miles) for $955. We're talking about a 40,000 pound truckload of oranges being shipped between 1,000 and 4,000 miles, in multiple loads (to/from warehouse). If you could get that shipping rate for around $725 per 1,000 pounds, that would make sense; a pallet box of oranges should hold about 900 pounds. Note that $725 per 1,000 pounds would have to account for all miles, total, meaning if a truck took it to a warehouse, then another truck took those oranges to a regional distribution center, then another truck took them to the super market, that would have to cost $725 in total for shipping to make half the price of oranges.
Bear in mind we're talking about shipping domestically--trucks, over land. Carrying 30,000 pounds of those same oranges in a 40-foot shipping container would apparently cost $1,300 from China to the U.S, and then you have domestic shipping hell; but don't forget some Chinese truck drivers got paid to drive their trucks, too. The truck drivers aren't even rich; they have to maintain their trucks (ONE TIRE costs $2,000 and may last 100k miles or so, which is what trucker drive in a year--18 wheels, $36,000 in tires per 1-2 years), buy fuel, and so forth. The big win for overland shipping is it costs more to put something on a boat in Florida and sail it to Texas, then truck it up 3,000 miles to load it on a barge on the Mississippi river, then unload that and truck it to Nevada; and besides, we don't have the shipping bandwidth to do that. The biggest win is we don't truck things 200 miles to the coast, sail them around through Panama, unload them in California, and truck them 500 miles inland--because just trucking them 5,000 miles across the country is cheaper (yes, it's strange, since the Atlantic is huge and floating shit across that is apparently cheap).
So you have a manufacturer in India making $0.5. Then some combination of transportation, logistics, warehousing, grading, and other costs coming to $5; and we haven't established if that includes dying and weaving the cotton (is the shirt maker sourcing cloth or raw fiber?). Then we have the shirt maker (who may be getting the cotton dyed and woven, or may be sourcing the cloth?) using a lot of industrial equipment and labor to make a shirt.
Your "middleman" is about a hundred people along the way, you know.
Men and Boys's Cotton Trousers and Shorts land in America from China for $6.12 per pair. They retail on average for $14.97. $8.85 of that store shelf cost is transportation, logistics, and retail. This involves people making fuel (trucks, power plants), electricity (retail building), running water (retail building), building maintenance, inventory specialists (stocking shelves), loss prevention (security at retail), cashiers (retail), accountants, managers, logistics bookkeepers. That $8.85 pays hundreds of Americans--not by some economic management of "Every dollar spent is $6 in the economy" (that's a giant l
Middlemen and traders are subject to market pressure. If I want to sell you a $20 shirt but the next guy can sell you the exact same shirt for $15, I've got a problem. I can find another supplier who will sell me the cotton for $4 instead of $9, and I'm all set.
If my suppliers are all losing business, they might just cut back the cost of cotton to match. Likewise, if my suppliers can't supply with the same risk--if they're bringing from halfway around the world and the next guy is coming from my back yard and thus not going to have customs issues or backlogs that might take shipping across half the world to correct--then maybe it's worth a bit more than a 10 cent discount for me to stay with someone more-reliable. They'll have to give me a sufficient discount.
Finally, in practice, profit margins for highly-available, fungible goods tend to move to a stable minimum in a market. A global market brings this in concert across the globe--that is, Indian cotton tends to have the same profit margin as American cotton, so the middleman mark-up tends to be the same. The implication is actually the same as when buying direct: if I bought straight from the factory, they might want to make $125 cotton and charge me $450 versus the $500 cotton over here; they won't because I'm bringing them a steady, long-term, multi-hundred-million-dollar cotton purchasing deal, and they don't want me to go to another Indian competitor.
Large purchases don't always go to factories. Middleman suppliers are also competing with each other, and will source your cotton as-required. That means you can buy from a middleman who sources cotton from several Indian supply houses, or pulls it from India and China, or wherever, so long as it meets the specifications you set forth. This costs a little more outflow spending because you're paying the middleman to do the logistics work, whereas in-house you would pay salaries of your own logistics people and a potentially-lower price for the material itself. The middleman reduces your risk.
Interestingly, because the middleman is doing logistics work for hundreds or thousands of customers and taking enormous contracts with multiple competing suppliers, he devotes less work (and cost) to your needs than you would yourself, and so the total cost of sourcing the material through a middleman can actually be lower than sourcing factory-direct when you factor in your own logistics people's work. You also might not source the cheapest cotton; nor might you have the negotiating power to get the best deals--10% profit margin may be fairly universal, but a multi-billion-dollar contract might negotiate 0.1% whereas your multi-million-dollar contract got to pay a 1.5% margin.
So it's actually quite possible for the middleman to save you money; and, in general, the middleman is competing with the cost of material as you can negotiate factory-direct, plus the cost of paying your logistics people to ensure a stable supply chain and find the best prices. The cost of the middleman is in competition with the cost of cutting out the middleman.
There is no such thing as perfection. It is ideal for me to be much, much richer than everyone else, even if they're all poor; it's ideal across the economy for something more-moderate to happen, and such an optimization would make me richer than I am now without making me as rich as I could be; and it's ideal from the perspective of the poor to just win the lottery and never have to work or beg again.
I think "low physical activity" is common enough and well-studied enough that we know what it does and can identify that there's a different outcome here. Fat, lazy bitches don't act like new mothers.
When robots have replaced [nearly] all the workers the median wage will be zero. What will you be able to buy with that?
You say that as if they haven't. 90% of the American labor force in 1870 were farm workers. Did you know nowhere near 90% of Americans aren't working on the farm or on anything which is consumed by the farm today? It's actually closer to 12%.
Not a lot of rail workers today, either. The wooden shipping pallet eliminated a good 90% of dock worker jobs, too, along with anyone else whose job it was to load anything.
When robots have replaced nearly all the workers, we'll pay 1/1000th as much wages to buy a product. Then, we can buy 1000 times as many products. There will be all these people providing tiny fractions of the work involved to build things we're buying--the same proportion of workers today, really--and a thousand times as much product. That of course will probably take centuries; in the next decades, we'll likely see a doubling or two.
Do you like metal?
The hot blast furnace, when it came out, could produce 82,400 tonnes of iron from ore using the same labor that the previous ironworks employed to produce merely 400 tonnes. That means for every 200 workers involved in ironworks to make some tonnes of metal (about 200) before the hot blast furnace, there was only a need for 1 worker. That's a 99.5% elimination rate. They eliminated 99.5% of ironworks jobs. Even the furnace itself was iron and took less labor to produce than a cold-blast furnace.
Do you know what they did with the hot blast furnace?
They produced rolled iron for rails. This eliminated a hell of a lot of labor in transportation, marginalizing the overseas shipping market. You see, it took a lot of labor to carry things overseas, but a lot more to carry them overland. With the sharp reduction in labor to make iron, however, it took less labor in total to make iron furnaces, make iron, refine that iron into steel, roll that steel into steel rail, construct railways, maintain the railways, construct rail cars, operate the rail cars, load the rail cars, and unload the rail cars than it did in total to do all the stuff involved in shipping overseas. Overland shipping was cheaper than overseas shipping where overseas shipping wasn't convenient, so overseas shipping became marginalized to longer travel where rails wouldn't go (especially around mountains, since building a tunnel was still hard). This reduced the jobs involved in shipping any given number of goods.
The very definition of technology is reducing labor. Computers were designed to reduce the jobs needed to accomplish some tasks. Machines. Power tools. New scientific methods of synthesizing chemicals. Mass manufacture. Interchangeable parts. The engine. The plow. The cotton gin. Everything we take up is taken up to reduce jobs. That's how it gets cheaper.
How the hell did we increase from a stable 58%-59% labor force participation rate to a desperate and ludicrous 69% in the United States when all the jobs were getting destroyed by all this automation?