Well, basically, yes. We are the wealthiest people that have ever lived, in the sense of "a people": our society is a hell of a lot wealthier than the pharaohcies of ancient Egypt, and so our lowest-class citizens are better off than their lowest- and even middle-class citizens. Our poor may be poorer than most people in the world, but they're on-par with the poor of wealthy countries, and above the poor of undeveloped nations or of the wealthy nations of the past. Our every-day citizens--the lower-middle to upper-middle classes--carry around wonders the prior generation wouldn't hardly understand, and which at some point were utterly unaffordable even once they'd become technically-possible (like $4,000 cell phones in the 80s--$9,000 in today's dollars).
It's not that we squander what we have; it's that it's absolutely-retarded to work 2,000 hours in a year to produce and then not get paid for it. If we all took to a plan of working for 10 years, living as paupers, and then retiring, society would collapse trying to support us with no productive capacity due to a sharply-diminished labor force; a few of us can get away with it, so long as the rest work themselves to retirement at the end of a long life and provide us the material support our stockpiled money can buy. Even so, we'd live like poor people our whole lives, just to avoid working.
Instead, we work, we get money, and we buy things with that money, paying someone else to work to make and import and ship and sell that crap to us. That person uses the portion of price (and thus revenue) representing his working hours to barter his time in the same manner. As I've said: wage inequality means my time has a higher buying power than yours--my $20/hr means 1 hour of my time buys 2 hours of your $10/hr time. For me to buy what you're selling, somebody has to work those 2 hours--that would be you. The difference in power isn't a matter of any sort of value; it's only a social matter: your labor is easily-replaced and the going rate is lower, so you have a weak negotiating position and no force behind demanding higher pay, so you get to work just as hard and be half as rich.
Rich or poor, you maximize your wealth by working, getting paid, and buying. Money isn't worth anything; you buy things with it to exchange your work for something you can enjoy. As we increase productivity, I would quite like to restrict population growth (and economic growth) by cutting back labor hours, thus reducing what we can buy (you didn't work as much, so you didn't get paid as much--no matter the dollar value, it still represents 32 hours instead of 40) and thus the jobs needed. Increased productivity means we wind up producing the same with fewer labor hours, instead of more with the same labor hours; so we all work 3.5 or 4 days per week, instead of 5. Even then, you'd work your 28 or 32 hours, spend all your money, and come out complaining you're broke.
If you think that sounds strange, "Wi-ki-pedia" has an article you might find interesting. People used to demand six days per week, ten hours per day, 60 hours, as relief from excessive working hours and harsh working conditions. All that labor for such meager lives. A 28-hour week could turn America's labor force into its leisure force, if we can muster the economic efficiency to not become ridiculously-poor along the way.
I wonder what people will say if my Universal Social Security actually goes into effect. It cuts welfare out of the general income taxes (a progressive tax), and then levies a 17% flat tax on business and personal income to fund a flat benefit. That means all productivity gets taxed: a 50% productivity gain over 10 years hands back 17% of 50% to everyone, and the biggest impact is the poorest of poor become a full 50% richer. Do you think they'd still claim all the new wealth goes to the top 1%? I bet they would.
That's because of context. People attached to their candidates will back their candidates and forget their own philosophy.
I come across as conservative to liberals and liberal to conservatives--I've actually been toying with starting a progressive-conservative party, and analyzing how much damage I could do to both parties in the process. They'd be forced toward one another onto common ground, because neither could attack my points without attacking their own points--specific details of various policy causes that--and that would essentially make them mirror my own party in most respects. Instead of opposition, I'd have convergence.
Absent large political machinations and carefully-constructed assaults, I just look like the other side to everyone. Liberals hate me because I try to lower taxes, prevent tax raises on the rich, and solve problems with market-driven strategies; conservatives hate me because I advocate progressive taxes, stronger social services, and tax strategies to benefit the poor and middle-class instead of just the businesses. Nobody identifies me as the champion of their philosophy come to slay the evil machinations of their enemy, like they do Trump and Bernie.
I actually have more trouble with liberals than conservatives, which is weird. Ever see a conservative discussion thread? It's a huge pile of stupidity and self-contradictory bullshit from the dumbest people on the planet. Liberals are flat-wrong about a hell of a lot of things--mostly economics--but they have a stable sense of philosophy and policy, and stick to faulty first-principles; conservatives rant about conspiracies and throw out huge amounts of conflicting, internally-inconsistent crap. You'd think the liberals would be the reasonable ones.
The problem is things like a Universal Social Security (a complex form of UBI I designed to be stable and actually work in the short- and long-term) gain liberal-democrat ire for not taxing the rich more (nobody cares about the poor, I guess), while drawing conservative-republican assault for not making lazy drug-addicts work (because of course there are infinite jobs and the poor are just bad people).
Explaining the economic advantages tend to get conservatives thinking about markets, taxes, business costs, and wages, which they agree about in principle, while still remaining staunchly-uncomfortable about giving free shit to lazy poor people without caning them repeatedly until they get jobs. Liberals just handwave and claim all of that stuff is bullshit and start spouting faulty economic logic, and then demand that we take shitloads of money from the rich and the businesses, raise minimum wages "to make the businesses pay" (uh, wages are paid by revenues--you're making the middle-class pay), and also do all the stuff I said plus give loads more social services on top, and pay people free money for every baby they pop out.
I don't understand it. You'd think the frothing rednecks would be the dumb ones, yet they're the ones that listen and consider--so much so that you can get them to back a national healthcare plan by demonstrating it as an economic advantage and a market-driven device. How? Why?
I was pretty sure the tone of that statement could be easily-recognized as facetious-derogatory, essentially an elaborate way of saying "cause-head" or similar. You're always shouting at people for being on the wrong side of some cause--any side of any cause, really--and never seem to agree with anyone at any given time. You dump all over SJWs while getting all angry about people not having gender and orientation equality already--not so much on-the-fence as on both sides at the same time.
Every negative observation about someone isn't projection. It's also notable that many people like to elevate themselves by admitting that they can and have been wrong--but never quite bring anything up to current date into that conversation, essentially maintaining that they're right about everything right now, in context, immediately, and are ambiguously wrong sometimes, in the past, and may be the future, in some as-yet-unforseen situation. This allows them to claim the great virtue of humility while never actually admitting to being wrong at any time.
My observation of you has been that you're pretty much always looking to attack people. Always. The only time you stop is when you rescue baby wildlife and talk about how everyone else is assholes because you rescued baby wildlife and they obviously would have all just stomped on it and paved a shopping mall parking lot. When you show up, it's approximately guaranteed you have some reason why everyone is a moron and an evil asshole. At a point, I do give up on assuming all people are good people, and resort to simply diminishing bad people as a source of amusement; that's not necessarily wholly-mature, either, but I don't hit all of the markers for maturity anyway (I hit quite a few for neurosis, as well as an active personality disorder--not APD or BPD, though). No sense in pretending to be more grown-up than I am, after all.
It's Barbara Hudson. She's an angry feminazi environmentalist vegan transvestite hippy who lives on upwards and downards social comparison--that is, she's pathologically-immature and needs to look down on everybody to make herself feel worthwhile. She's kind of a regular, like the bar dog... she's the Slashdot Bitch.
I've actually gotten frothing conservatives to back me on a national healthcare bill while they scream about Obamacare socialism. It's funny.
Mostly, after a brief discussion of economics explaining that a national healthcare bill is either harmful (poorer nation, can't afford it, causes wide-spread poverty) or helpful (wealthier nation, healthcare per person is a smaller fraction of overall income and productivity, single-payer is more-efficient and thus cheaper than prior model), I point out where the ACA causes bad market behaviors (e.g. encourages underemployment by mandating employer healthcare benefits for full-time employees, thus driving low-wage worker hours down) and where it disconnects the market (consumers buy insurance on the exchange, and the government pays for it with somebody else's money).
When I explain a single-payer system, I describe these things and their impact on markets. I then outline a single-payer system which re-engages the market.
Firstly, all employees are mandated employer healthcare coverage, thus underemployment is reduced (unemployment increases, which is why the opposite was favored: better numbers, since nobody looks at underemployment; the unemployment increase is minor, and vanishes after a few years thanks to Malthusian growth). Employers are now under more pressure to negotiate with health insurance providers, because the impact on the cost of employment is bigger: health insurance for low-wage employees is a larger fraction of their cost than health insurance for higher-wage employees, so saving on per-employee health care coverage is much more significant. This encourages employers to shop around more and make demands for lower prices, since higher employment costs mean higher product prices and lower revenues: there's a building column of pressure from the consumer to the employer, coming down on the insurer, who then puts that pressure onto the healthcare providers to drive prices downward.
Second, I suggest tying the single-payer healthcare premiums to fair market rates. The government is still spending taxpayer money--albeit less, because now the market is engaged in buying, and thus controlling the cost of, health insurance for low-wage employees. Because all such health care is faced with market pressures demanding lower prices, the fair market price is a reasonable metric for health insurance premium costs. This avoids the Government spending someone else's money without itself holding a stake in the price paid for the service purchased: the stakeholders (taxpayers) have already set that price.
The healthcare providers are faced with all of this pressure to lower prices; and they can't charge below a minimum viable price. They have to cover their costs and risks to remain profitable, and will push to raise the price ceiling; that ceiling will never fall below the price floor. What we want is market pressure driving it closer to the floor.
That's a market-driven system in full; it's a beautiful model of red-blooded Capitalism. I've had far too much luck with potato-wagon Trump supporters immediately demanding the ACA be corrected and improved, rather than repealed, once I've run through some of the basics; I'm not a politician, and there's no way I'm that good at persuasion.
Trump is cracking under the pressure. He met with Obama for transition and seemed... overwhelmed. The job is a lot bigger than he thought. He's starting to falter under the stress of realization already.
The only thing worse than a lunatic is a weak lunatic whose ego won't allow him to be controlled. What if he breaks down and starts doing ludicrous shit eventually to try and backpedal on his weak public image? What if he becomes a puppet of a foreign dignitary, instead of a puppet of Congress?
What if he resigns and puts Pence in charge?
Listen, kid, I know this is hard to grasp, but this is bigger than Trump. That's usually only true of Barbra Streissand and Jabba the Hutt, but weak leaders never turn out well. I don't know which outcome is actually worse here.
Unfortunately that's only true initially - because labor are the people buying goods, and the flip side of low labor costs is low consumer income
False. I've dealt with that argument before; and it's ludicrous when you realize that shit keeps getting cheaper--the average American household makes $54,000/year and spends $6,500 on food, while in 1950 this $54,000 household would have spent $17,800 (in current dollars).
The fact is you don't reduce total consumer income. One of two things happens: some consumers have lower wages, and the products they make are cheaper, and so other consumers can buy more, and thus more laborers are required; or some products require fewer labor hours to make, thus the same wages are paid per laborer but fewer laborers work, and so the purchasing power of all employed goes up, creating new jobs as they buy more things. The amount of income in a given time frame is fixed: the Federal Treasury essentially controls how many dollars are available to be spent, and adjusts this to keep as close to a 2% inflation rate as they can; and exports are semi-fixed, in that we can export more if we can make it cheaper, but the demand to buy is still going to be roughly the same dollar amount, unless the importers buy more from us and less from others.
I was also talking *wealth* not purchasing power, which is why I explicitly stated "as distinct from income". Income has largely stagnated, while real wealth has diminished
Tell me again about how much income you don't need. You don't spend nearly a fraction of your income, right? Your wages are wholly-unnecessary, after all; you only bitch so much because you want to buy big, fancy cars and boats so you can boast about all the shit you have.
What was that?
Oh, right. We consume, constantly. Our ability to purchase products and services is predicate on our income; and the purchasing power of our income is what gives us the ability to exercise a standard-of-living. Lower-income means poor, smaller living quarters, financial struggles, pay-day loans loans you can't easily repay when you have to replace a $400 water heater because that money was going to food, and no college fund because you can't afford college.
You eat food, you wash and wear through your clothing, you consume water and electricity, you use cell phone and Internet services which require tens of thousands of workers just to keep running, you drive cars that consume gas and need maintenance, you pay a monthly fee for Netflix and Spotify, you pay servants to cook your food when you feel like dining out, you buy trinkets on Amazon, you listen to an ever-growing collection of audiobooks, you replace light bulbs, and you pay loads and loads in mortgage because you bought the biggest house you can afford--a lot bigger than the average house 30 or 50 years ago.
How do you suppose your holdings--your savings, your land holdings, and so forth--would stand up if you tried to consume so much? The argument you make sounds like a plea for early retirement: if you lived like the rich, you'd burn through rich-people assets in a year; and if you had those assets and didn't work, you could live as a middle-classer, and be essentially a burden on society. The nation's economic power--its actual wealth--is based in production, and it would collapse entirely if nobody worked; there would be no goods for you to purchase, and America would quickly become an impoverished nation.
In other words: income represents the production that makes a nation wealthy. Income is your ability to purchase, and it represents what you've produced. If something requires much labor time to produce, then it's an expensive thing because it takes a lot of income--from a lot of labor time, for people in the same wage range--to pay the workers laboring to produce it. Those things are purchaseable with your income because people like you--making your in
Jobs are created by demand, not by skill and worker availability. You can't sell products to a market with no money to buy them--and that's what demand is: Consumer ability and desire to buy things. We spend it all, then we complain we're poor; we get richer, we buy bigger houses, we spend more money, we buy more things, then we complain we're broke and the rich are taking all the fucking money and wages are stagnant while not looking into the rooms in our mini-mansions to see all the crazy-expensive shit we've stockpiled.
Thing about economics, it has a lot of self-correction when you fuck up. You do damage; but some of the metrics..
Malthusian growth will fill in any new unemployment or buff out any new jobs in short years, not generations. Early retirement, late retirement, the poor dying off, people staying in college longer (grad school because no jobs!), people entering the workforce earlier, birth rates, and even immigration rates all mess with the numbers. Trump's policies can make America poorer, but he'll either get to point and say "LOOK AT THE JOBS I CREATED!" or hide his head during an unemployment spike and then point when unemployment falls to 5% again and say "LOOK AT THE JOBS I CREATED!"
There's also shit like Obama's ACA bullshit "pay healthcare for fulltime only" clause. Paying healthcare for all workers encourages less underemployment--you want fewer workers, so you give them more hours. Paying healthcare for full-time only means more underemployment--you want fewer hours per employee, so you hire more. So the ACA made low-income employees poorer by cutting their hours, and created lots of jobs by opening up new part-time positions without healthcare. Underemployment jumped up (I'm not sure how much--haven't looked, and it could be negligible), and unemployment went down as number of employed went up--creating jobs.
I would have prefered to reduce underemployment at the expense of exacerbating unemployment. Fewer people hurt, less politically-savvy; but the gap would have filled in easily over a couple short years. On the other hand, I have major problems with the ACA in design; I could do much better--so much so that I've gotten die-hard conservatives screaming about Obamacare socialism to quickly side with me on a single-payer system with full understanding of what a single-payer system is. Sometimes I'm just good; usually I'm terrible at politics.
Free trade has made Americans--like, regular, low-income Americans--wealthy. Imagine zero inflation, and pants cost $50 instead of $15. You don't have any more money; you have to spend your money on pants, and have $35 that you spend now on stuff to not spend on that stuff. That stuff you don't buy means that truck drivers, retail cashiers, McDonalds burger flippers, and other manner of workers aren't payable, because their wages come from revenue, and that income is instead going to a factory worker.
You want people to buy less stuff and have a lower standard-of-living. Cutting trade might temporarily create jobs--cutting out the Chinese manufacture of Men and Boys's Cotton Trousers and Shorts, for example, will create jobs if we pay the factory workers less than $18/hr, and destroy jobs if we pay them more. Similarly, reducing minimum wage--reducing wages in general, especially for products that represent large portions of our spending--would create jobs. This is the same mechanism as you recognize--that more products are purchasable when labor costs are low--except you ignore the infrastructure that supports the retail of those products, and the jobs thereof.
though I believe Americans' median wealth (as distinct from income) has declined considerably since then
Increased, actually. There was a dip in median purchasing power after the 2008 recession; we recovered. The American working class--from poor to rich--has experienced continuous growth, just like in any economy in history. It's patently-impossible not to: technical progress lowers the cost of goods and services, spreading the same labor out to make more things; money is essentially you trading your labor for other labor--which does have the implication that your $20/hr salary means you can work for 1 hour and command a $10/hr burger flipper to work for 2.
The increases aren't constant, by any means. For example: Food cost 40% of the median income in 1900, 33% in 1950, 13% in 2000, and something like 12% now (in my case, it's 4.4%; I don't cook food at home, at all, and that can cut my budget bluntly in half). Clothing dropped from 12% in the 90s to 4% today (trade did this). People spend 33% on housing instead of the 28% in 1950; they buy houses that are over twice as big to hold all the crap they're buying for entertainment.
The annoying thing about economics is none of it fits common sense. You need to examine it deeply and thoroughly to figure out what's actually happening. It's also an unmitigated mess with moving parts that cause things to happen differently based on rate, and self-corrects. For example: rapid job loss to trade and technical progress will destroy your economy, while slow job loss to these things is the source of wealth (i.e. the same actions are good or bad depending on how fast they happen); slow job loss to technical progress leads to higher consumer purchasing power and (new) replacement jobs; and any long-term adjustment in job availability (loss or gain) goes away after a few years (not even a generation) due to Malthusian growth (population grows faster in abundance, slower otherwise, so a permanent raise or drop in unemployment will go away as the labor force adapts to fit labor demand).
Instead of having a fucking clue, you get people like Bernie Sanders starting statements with, "You don't need a Ph.D. in Economics to know..." and then saying something so wrong you expect his nose to grow, his pants to catch fire, and black tar to spew forth from his mouth and eyes, all at once.
What I don't want is the continuing idea that globalization and trade are killing jobs. Automation and recycling have killed 5-6 jobs IIRC for 1 job lost to globalization.
Dude, come all the way over already.
"Automation" is a fancy new scare name for technical progress. Technical progress and trade are essentially the same: they create wealth.
Technical progress lead America from a labor force of 90% farm workers in 1790 to 26% in 1900, to 12% in 1950, and to under 2% today. Do you see 88% of our labor force unemployed? Of course not. Neither the farm tractor, nor fertilizer, nor GMO, nor the wooden shipping pallet destroyed all jobs forever; these things freed up labor to perform other tasks. That's why food costs in 1900 were 40% of the median American family's income, in 1950 33%, and today around 12% even though we eat outside of home a lot more. We essentially pay servants to cook and serve our food, and still pay about 1/3 as much to eat as we did 60 years ago.
The threats are a matter of rate. All of them.
If you unemploy 30% of the labor force in one six-month swoop of the guillotine, your economy falls apart. Mass-unemployment means a collapse of consumer purchasing power, removing the revenue streams required to pay other workers, terminating more jobs. Eventually the dust settles on a country that can't raise enough taxes to carry the unemployed because they're all not working--no labor, no production, no wealth.
Money represents what's made and sold, and the making and selling requires labor; technical progress reduces that labor, and half the labor means half the wage paid, thus less money cost, which is how prices eventually fall--with the help of ever-mounting economic pressure.
Unemploy people at a slower rate than those pressures drive prices down and you find consumers gaining additional buying power: wages don't decrease, but wage-hours paid for products do, and the few unemployed are easily supported by our welfare system with only a tiny portion of our gain. We seek to buy new things with the money we have--and the force of hundreds of millions of consumers with just TEN DOLLARS now-unspent means billions of revenue for new products (including buying more of the same old products). One billion dollars represents roughly 60,000 minimum-wage jobs, or nearly 0.04% of the labor force--every 1% swing requires a $150 reduction of expenses per consumer to recover the lost jobs.
That goes for both trade and technical progress. Self-driving cars and flying delivery drones? You want the Government to get regulation out to enable that PDQ. If the technology develops to the point where we know it's ready-to-go, but the Government hasn't given the green-light, eventual regulation to allow it will result in rapid replacement of delivery drivers, freight trucking drivers, and all form of mail carriers. Put up the regulation before anyone's ready to do it, and those job losses will come in patches here and there as the technology develops, as suitability increases, and as businesses individually become comfortable with the risks at different times. Once someone's job is gone, you have to wait for the business to be unable to keep prices at a point to simply take profit--they're certainly not unwilling--and that will happen, but not on the same damned day.
The obsession with creating jobs is a tricky one. I've notated it before. It's both good and bad, depending on your goals. The long-term consequences of Malthusian growth erase either: an increase in unemployment will vanish in several years if the economy doesn't get worse, thanks to more early retirement, longer delays to enter workforce (that whole "everyone goes to grad school in a recession" thing), death of the poorest (sucks), and, ultimately, slower birth rate; while a decrease in unemployment will vanish due to later retirement, faster entry to the workforce, and higher birthrate
Insurance companies typically provide a valuable service, and they pay more than they take in; they float their money on market speculation, and tend to come out ahead. State Farm pays like $1.03 for every $1 of income, but makes more than 3% on investments (even I can do that--I fluctuate between +3% and +6.2% lately; I used to average 1% per day or a 1300% annual rate, but that was ludicrous amounts of work). LifeLock isn't an insurance plan and isn't an insurance company; it's a service that doesn't seem to explain what it really provides, with a marketing hook that doesn't seem like it would ever pay out because those conditions are almost never met.
What does LifeLock even do now? Originally, they just put false fraud alerts on clients's credit; they got sued for that, and now what? How do they monitor?
I'm not sure what LifeLock even provides anymore, besides a target for lawsuits.
Software "married to the system"? You write perl code; you're not talking about kernel modules integrated with a monolyth.
Third, I wrote every line of code for my software. I did every design chart. I decided what it needed to be, and how it would work. I used it for years, and based my entire livelihood on it. I employed dozens of people. Then, with international issues being what they are (CIA directly connected to Rackspace), I changed data centre providers to save over $15'000/year. It still took me three months, and three persons, to set up the old software on the new network, and took me two years to plan the move.
I had a discussion about using AWS versus Azure recently. The concern raised was that moving off AWS if it became hostile would cost years of time and lots of risk in transition.
I created a small document summarizing the advantages of deeply-integrating with AWS, as well as the risks, and the manner in which to isolate those risks. I've done the same with various other softwares to connect various tools. Modern software design is founded on concepts like encapsulation, where a particular part of a system does a particular job, and where the interfaces between these systems are borders; you can rip those borders away and create new borders as you like. In software design patterns, they use things like "bridges" and "adapters" to do this.
Primarily, we design our systems to make all the logical decisions and track all the state they need; then, when we want to interface with some other system, we add a piece of code which can accept our decisions and our state, and can take the relevant actions. Automatic scaling, alerting, or filing information in databases, it's all worked into whatever target. We can switch out any interface at will. It's even possible to store all of our information in some back-end system like MongoDB or PostgreSQL, and then instruct the system to integrate old information with new tools or with an upgraded tool that accepts more of the full data, by which a simple strip of code runs through our back-end information and tells the glue code to find the matching information and update it--bluntly, so that the adapter decides what information the target system handles, and so will add information if that system now handles additional data, without any of the other parts of the programming knowing the details.
Re-engineering in a deeply-integrated migration is small when done as such. It's precisely as large as writing code to talk to the new targets; every other piece is completely-naive about what's on the other end, so no code is written there. Three programmers here could switch from AWS to something completely-different and feature-complete with performance statistics, autoscaling, and S3-like storage in under a month; migrating the actual software might not take as long, since the software moves easily. The biggest problem would be planning the disruption as DNS changes and data migrations took place.
I should know. I've done it twice.
I've also done it in cases where we didn't have the same control. I've dealt with migrations of thousands of Web sites and a media CDN to a completely-new system, with new Web hosting, new Web site software, a new DNS provider, and so forth. We performed migrations in batches of under ten sites per week. Each batch of migrations took under an hour to complete; we moved at an artificially-slowed pace to reduce risk, allowing us to respond to any discrepancies. We retrained the content producers after each migration, as well. It took under six months in total; migration itself--from one system to something completely-different in practically every manner--took about 30 hours, plus a week to write and test the scripts to dump and load the data.
That wasn't a matter of moving software--when I moved the existing CDN software from one system on one OS version to a completely-new system on a new OS version, it took me 4 months to build the new system
I said "source code cannot be turned into software" and "source code requires days of powerful machine time to turn into software". The former is missing the requirements listed in the latter. If you can't compare two sentences, and see the big huge difference, then we're done here.
That's not how language works. You stated an absolute premise when you said source code cannot be turned into software, the same as if you said mere thought cannot bring matter into existence; then you said a machine can turn source code into software. Which is it? That there is no means by to turn source code into software, or that there is a means by which to turn source code into software?
alone, without some amount of help, expertise, documentation, know-how, assistance, time, resources, and understanding, most source code cannot be turned into software merely by commonly available computer hardware.
Categorically false. Most source code can be turned into software with less required effort than creating the source code from a requirements document.
When I don't use a modifier, you don't get to presume I meant "always/forever/in-all-instances/every-time".
Without a modifier, the general or vast-majority case is implied. Logically, there must be minority or specially-crafted cases where the general rule does not follow; depending on what is being discussed, this can be due to obvious practice (as with source code) or to routing around physical impossibilities (e.g. a man cannot fly--unless given a hang glider, jet pack, or other sort of device to modify the way we approach the laws of physics).
You are, in fact, saying what any common English-language reader will interpret as "most". When I say, "Dogs don't meow," it is assumed by a reader unfamiliar with a "dog" that all or nearly-all dogs do not meow; it would be patently-absurd for the reader to assume that some minority or less-than-extreme majority of dogs do not meow based on that statement. Even legal arguments make this interpretation, based entirely on the understanding that a reasonable person will make this interpretation.
Any linguist will tell you that languages contain loads of implied meaning. "Most or all" is the implied meaning of general statements.
You are arguing based on syntax, in a debate based on abstract concepts.
You're trying to hold an indefensible position by arguing that the basic interpretation of English doesn't apply to your statements. Would you like to redefine "the" or "is" as well? Perhaps we should assume the definite case ("is") is the indefinite case ("might be"). Maybe we can redefine MUST as SHOULD, while we're at it.
Your argument is essentially that you can be wrong or flatly lie, because whatever you say has a different meaning that only you can know, and thus that you are not speaking English.
In your nerd-world maybe; in the world of business executives, systems administrators, and line management, "open source" means "free shit that comes with Linux". Half of them don't understand the difference between "open source" and "freeware", and some people call Linux "freeware".
Second, source code cannot be turned into software. I don't know why you think that it can. Some source code requires days of powerful machine time to turn into software.
This is logically-inconsistent. It can't be done, and it takes days to do?
Gentoo compiles from stage 1 in under a day on a modern commodity PC. If you want KDE instead of Gnome, you need 40 hours. To turn that code into software, simply run the build process and go somewhere else for 40 hours. Do other work.
Dude, I build web-sites and even my shitty perl code is useless without three days of custom linux and apache tweaking. It took me three months to configure a plain-jane lamp server -- and that's with my entire business resources behind it -- pushing for a vital and highly profitable supplier change
I converted Dell NetVault's install instructions into a viable Docker container after a half hour of minor reverse-engineering. Turns out it stores some important state data in some files; other files can get wiped between backups with no problem.
I've made a lot of third-party applications run in unsupported ways inside Docker containers, using distributions that they don't support, or otherwise shoehorning it into my requirements. It typically doesn't take very long--a couple of hours, at the worst--and it's easily-replicated after the first time. Once I've figured out how, I can repeat the process in a few minutes.
Maybe you're just bad at what you do. The core of economics is technical progress: find a way to accomplish the same goal with less work (human time investment). Much of what you describe takes me only minutes to do even faced with awkward bullshit; I've gotten good enough at probing strange software to handle the really bad cases in a (large) portion of a day, and that's hardly-ever happened. When I started doing all this crap, it would take me weeks or months to get it quite right; but I got better with time and tools.
People generally equate "open source" in software with the concept of "free" because it is implied you're allowed to have a software without paying for it, and you can convert the source to software.
If your friend makes you a copy of a hammer, he must expend several hours of time, plus money in materials and fuel, to produce that hammer. If your friend makes you a copy of a software, he only needs to drop it into a file share or burn it to a CD--actions which take seconds. A Web site providing copies of software can have so many downloads as to reduce replication cost to many tens if not hundreds of users per penny, with the cost representing--at a minimum--the wages paid to operators (including the infrastructure allowing you to get on the Internet).
Intellectual property is such a big deal in software because software isn't a physical thing. Software's physical existence is in the arrangement of electrons in a material that must exist whether it contains that software or some other software; and transferring the pattern to invest that material with that information is cheap as all hell. Software isn't silicon cells holding a charge or iron-oxide coatings holding a magnetic field; it's what those states represent. It's exclusively information, and so control of who is allowed to have that information is the only control you have over software.
Toolmakers largely want you to pay them for the tools you use to do the work somebody else pays you for. You can't make a good hammer on your own; and even if you could, you'd need a small-scale manufacturing facility to do so efficiently, and you'd have to make thousands of hammers to make them per-unit cheaper than just buying a $22 Eastwing framing hammer from Home Depot, and your hammer would be a lot shittier than anything Eastwing is willing to stick their brand on.
One is that anything that comes out of Redhat's mouthpiece is usually self-aggrandizing bullshit. That's not to say it's always wrong; just it's not well-developed. I can say any stupid thing based on first-observations and be right 0.1% of the time--that's approximately how economic political debates work (everything in economics violates common sense with an unlubricated broom handle). When Redhat is right, it's typically because their bullshit lined up with reality by a chance meeting.
The other is that Free Software Advocates like Stallman are die-hard communists. Stallman doesn't care about your freedoms; he wants to pry your work out of your hands on his terms. Stallman has said, directly and unapologetically, that the GPL's purpose is to force people to release their work to the world for free. He doesn't care about the labor a person puts into making a thing, and about his right to profit from his labor--or to attempt to in whatever way he sees fit, even if that way is misguided. Stallman doesn't believe in markets supplying an alternative. He believes that keeping control of your own work is theft, and that your time and effort belong to the world.
Free software advocates as such like to dismiss this line of reasoning by placing an opaque cover over the 150,000 man-hours used to make a relatively-complex application and point at the 0.001 man-hours used to supply a download pipe to copy it, claiming that's the entire cost they owe for the product, because they're not placing any load on the creator or taking anything away from him for making a copy. Never mind that he has no way to profit from it except by begging that someone pay him out of the very goodness of their hearts; these people believe that, despite not being compelled away from copying the product for free, they wouldn't be compelled to pay any price for it in any circumstance, but that obviously someone else would pay exactly the same for it whether it was given to them for free or dangled there with an attached price tag.
In effect, these people believe that consumers, given two prices ($0 and $50, for example), will always opt for the one the seller actually wants them to pay, or at least will actively-avoid the lowest one and pay the highest they are willing to pay in all cases.
Once you understand that, you never have to listen to them again, because theory-of-mind allows you to estimate what someone will say about anything even when that person's thinking is horribly wrong. Eventually, you don't have to ask RMS what he would say about a thing; you only have to ask yourself what RMS would say.
Back in 1790, 90% of American laborers worked in agriculture--farm work. Women made clothing at home to produce additional income, using skills necessary for economic survival due to the feasibility (or lack thereof) of the average household to afford clothing in the way we generally view as normal. People grew substantial gardens and livestock, hunted, and otherwise supplemented their nutritional needs, due to a lack of affordability of food.
In 1900, 28% of American laborers were agricultural workers. New farming techniques over the prior century increased yield per land area and, consequentially, yield per laborer. With fertilizer, farm tools, and irrigation, a great deal of labor actually supported food production; and food cost a full 40% of the average household's income.
By 1950, the use of the farm tractor, better fertilizers, and other innovations pushed us forward to even lower-labor agriculture. The wide-spread use of the wooden shipping pallet after 1915 greatly reduced shipping costs at all levels of distribution as well. Even so, 1950s agriculture was beastly; one of the great innovations involved an irrigation system by which a farmer connected a pump to a long arm and walked slowly in an enormous circle around a section of crops to lead the irrigating arm. All in all, 12.2% of American laborers worked on the farm, and the average American household still expended 33% of its income on food.
From 90% to 28% to 12% labor on the farm. From supplemental income to 40% to 33% income spent on food.
After the 1980s, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and GMOs had brought advanced farming techniques to current standards. By 2000, only 2% of America's laborers worked in agriculture, and 13% of the average household's income went to food; in 2015, it's below 2%, and food expenditure is as low as 12%. The total work involved between chemical and genetic engineering, irrigation, machinery, fueling, and actual farm labor has fallen greatly since 1950, and continues to fall slowly today; and Americans now eat out of the home much more frequently, essentially directing their savings toward the commission of servants to prepare and serve their food.
Cost of risk is part of cost. When a food recall occurs, that food must be destroyed; labor which went into making that food is lost, with no product to come out of it. Those workers must get paid--the minimum viable price is essentially the cost of labor, with the eventuality that profits pay for expansion or risks, and that risks either involve labor which turns out wasted or involve new labor--and so prices must reflect the risk of food loss.
The cost is of course small. If 1% of food is recalled and we eliminate 90% of that, then roughly 0.9% of the cost of food is eliminated: a $100 grocery shopping trip now costs $99.10. Food recall affects much less than all that, of course. The principle is still sound.
Currently, food-borne illness is identified when a consumer volunteers information about becoming ill from consuming a food. That illness is then cross-referenced with the matching food product the consumer purchased, based on consumer testimony or receipts. Enough of such information identifies a product, which we can then remove.
The proposed method attaches the entire handling chain to the consumer's purchase. Once we identify the receipt and the food, we don't simply recall a product; we look at the specific instance of the food the consumer purchased. That instance's handling chain shows us how it shipped, who packaged it, and where it was produced. We can then narrow down the specific set of affected foods and possibly identify a specific cause of contamination, recalling less product and avoiding similar issues in the future.
In both instances, customers volunteer information about foods they purchased. The receipt relevant to the sale is already in the system; and, if that receipt is attached to a loyalty program or credit card, it has enough information in the database already to identify the individual customer. If the receipt is anonymous (non-loyalty, cash payment), the customer can provide an identifier from his receipt, and the store can look up the receipt, and nobody can identify the individual customer; the block chain still identifies the food's handling chain. If the receipt is identifiable (by loyalty account or last 4 digits of credit card), the store can look up a matching purchase in the given time frame, and obtain the same data.
So, instead of getting all this data together in a database with a FK SerialNumber, it stores all the information in something that changes each time it changes hands, thus allowing them to know all information up to when they obtained it, but not afterwards.
Labor is time, not effort. You have 24 hours in a day; you must sleep for 8 of them; and what of your time to enjoy products you purchase?
We increase wealth through technical progress, which reduces the amount of labor required to make things. 100 people making $10/hr produce 500 bowls in an hour; that bowl has to cost at least $2 per each. You find a way to have 100 people produce 1,000 bowls per hour, you can sell those bowls for $1 per each; yet those people are still making $10 per hour. They're buying half as much labor in each bowl.
Less time here is put in per each bowl; and a person's time--that same 1 hour--buys 10 bowls instead of 5. That person is being paid more (still $10/hr, though; we've just discovered deflation!).
Now, of course, if we don't sell any more bowls, we fire 50 of these people, and employ 50 people making 500 bowls per hour. Since consumers were collectively spending $1,000/hr on bowls and are now spending $500/hr to buy only the same bowls, they have $500/hr of unspent money. Now they buy plates--which we can make by employing 50 people making $10/hr to produce 500 plates per hour.
Now, again, we have 100 people employed, $10 paid per hour of each's employment, and $1,000 consumer dollars spent per hour on the goods they produce; yet before they only produced 500 bowls per hour, and now they produce 500 bowls plus 500 plates per hour, at the same cost.
That's technical progress.
You might notice these laborers make $10/hr, and purchase either bowls for 1/5 of an hour's time OR bowls for 1/10 of an hour's time plus plates for 1/10 of an hour's time. Both cases involve spending 1/10 of an hour's wages to buy 1/10 of an hour's time.
You might also observe that I might make $20/hr, and so I will expend 1/10 of an hour of my time to extract 2/10 of an hour of those laborers's time from them. Likewise, for them to buy my product, they will have to work 2 hours so as to extract 1 hour of my time.
What do you think money is, really? It's labor. Money pays for the time you spend laboring. Maybe you work hard and we pay you shit, while I recline in an air-conditioned office and get paid 3 times as much; I simply call that "Tuesday", and then give you a dollar fifty to make me a hamburger.
The rest of it... well, if you can't be concise, it's not really a point worth making.
Peter Klauser described American idealism: "1. Ignorance is innocence; complicated explanations are suspect; The world is simple, and there must be a simple explanation for everything."
The concise explanation of economics is that nearly-everything in economics violates common sense. If you don't have time to sort through long, complicated explanations of interconnected systems which produce unexpected results, you're best keeping your mouth shut. If you want me to be brief, then you need to stop asking questions and assume everything I say is 100% correct; and a lot of it is going to sound very wrong without a large and thorough explanation.
People's expectations of short and simple economics leads to backwards beliefs like that raising minimum wage creates jobs because there is more money and every $1 gets spent 6 times over and makes the economy go. The bare and simple fact is minimum wage raises keep that minimum wage up with inflation, which is important when your wage system is built on a minimum wage; and every discrete increase reduces the buying-power of a dollar and concentrates money into fewer hands--and creates unemployment, making some minimum-wage earners poorer while making most richer.
You expect to learn all there is to know in life from a simple scrawling on the back of an index card. In short: you are a fool.
Automating it into American factories to lower the cost of products would not create new American jobs. The cost is based on a stable margin placed on top of labor.
If you have $15.0 trillion dollars of income in America in 2016 and you pay for 171 million workers, that's great. Now make a new product, and have Americans make it, making $0.100 trillion. Great! The total income in 2016 is still $15.0 trillion; that $0.100 trillion isn't magicked out of the air, but rather paid out of income, and not paid to some other workers. Hire 3.6 million factory workers and fire 3.6 million McDonalds workers; close some fast food joints.
If you manage to make the factories in America run at the same cost of the factories in China by reducing the labor required (automation), then you still have very few Americans working to make products, but they're paying for the same products.
For Men and Boys's cotton trousers and shorts, we're talking about around 171,000 jobs in total. The American net job loss is 8,000 at $21/hr wage; in theory, you would have to create no more than 25,000 jobs at that rate to match price parity with the Chinese--a 7-fold increase in production efficiency over the Chinese. That is to say: gain is mediated by minimizing either wages or jobs.
Every increase in price over what the Chinese supply decreases the number of unit goods Americans can buy. That means if you only automate to a 6-fold increase, you might need 28,500 factory workers to make as many trousers; but Americans can't afford as many trousers, and you end up with actually fewer factory workers (28,050 vs 28,100). Without as many units shipping, you also have fewer truckers, fewer cashiers, fewer inventory workers stocking shelves, and fewer retail businesses to be fed by electricity and water and building maintenance and all other business services and support--all fractional costs of the per-unit price of trousers, so those lost jobs don't suddenly free that cash up to be spent on other things.
On the other hand, if you have an abundance of jobs (which only happens by making the product cheaper--thus an abundance in general: your money buys more things, less poverty, everyone is richer, standard-of-living goes up), you'll get population growth to fill it (Malthus). The effect actually only lasts a few years because we can grow the labor force in like 6 different ways.
If you can make the factories 1/7 as expensive, then the Chinese can make them 1/7 as expensive as that. Instead of $14.97, you're paying $9.72 for trousers; 35% of the cost of trousers is gone; and more goods can be bought, jumping the American jobs up by 35% of what jobs support the trade market of Chinese MBCT imports (theoretically, 59,000 new American jobs). Malthusian population growth might fill that in a few years, but all those Americans will still be able to buy more stuff and, thus, we'll all be richer anyway.
then you have people like Warren Buffet whose wealth comes entirely from stock options and dividends, therefore not production (at least, not his own).
Warren Buffet's income comes from stock options and dividends. Things don't have actual value; the fact that you work doesn't mean your work is worth what we pay you, just that we imagine it so. Buffet "works" in some capacity, and he gets "paid" a shitload.
Wealth, on the other hand, is more-complex. America is a wealthy nation: 2% of our labor works on the farm, and some 10%-ish goes into actually making and shipping food--including the chemists and GMO engineers, the shipping trucks, and the grocery stores. Mexico used 18% last I looked, but they might have caught up; India made great strides between 1992 and 2003, eliminating literally 98% of the labor required to make food; and some poor African bush countries expend more than half their labor simply obtaining food.
In America, we don't work hard to get food; food represents a tiny share of our labor, and we work hard to have a huge pile of money from which we cut the tiniest sliver and hand it to the people making our food. When 1 hour of your work represents food for 50 people, their 2% of their income fills 100% of yours; of course, they spend 12% of their income, and 1/6 of that gets to you, so you're in the same boat as everyone else. (In reality, there's wage inequality, so the farmer could be richer or poorer; the 12% number is what the median household spends out of their income on food.)
You know what would though? A $640/year raise to all Ford workers [...]. Because that's money that won't sit in bank accounts, but will re-enter economy almost immediately.
Yes, to a degree. To the individual, it's still under $25/paycheck, which isn't going to solve poverty any time soon. There are more-complex considerations here, though. Let's assume you mean that the money is taken away from the executives, and is only money that was getting sidelined and not spent; if the executives were spending it, none of the below is true.
What you describe is almost a change between cost of employment and take-home. I've described economic policies where we reduce the cost of employment, such that an employee takes home more of the money an employer pays. So today an employer may pay a $62,200 for a $50,000 employee, who takes home $42,100/year; if that employer paid $59,000 and the employee took home $45,000/year--and all employment costs experienced this change--then the employee's buying power would increase because the ratio of labor-cost to wage-income would be lower. That means the employee can buy more stuff.
The bluntest consideration is the total combined effect. Assuming all 171 million U.S. workers got a $640/year raise, that's $110 billion, or up to 6.6 million minimum-wage, full-time jobs suffused by people hitting up McDonalds 3 times more each month. It's an important, short-term consideration.
I've used that argument before, and it's actually cut off quickly--in just a few years, actually. Malthusian population growth provides a prototype theory: population expands in abundance, and stops expanding when abundance ends. Essentially, our labor force grows when unemployment is low, and shrinks when it's high. This happens in the long-term by birth rates; in the short-term, people retire earlier or later, more poor people die when there's more unemployment, immigration slows with fewer employment opportunities, and some people even stay in college longer. The short-term effect of losing jobs is something I argue more about, because people want to pretend a minimum-wage increase doesn't mean someone becomes unemployed until either wages fall behind inflation or the labor force falls behind population growth; I don't like distortions of reality.
These two things are actually part of a side-goal of my Universal Social Security plan. That plan ultimately provides
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Well, basically, yes. We are the wealthiest people that have ever lived, in the sense of "a people": our society is a hell of a lot wealthier than the pharaohcies of ancient Egypt, and so our lowest-class citizens are better off than their lowest- and even middle-class citizens. Our poor may be poorer than most people in the world, but they're on-par with the poor of wealthy countries, and above the poor of undeveloped nations or of the wealthy nations of the past. Our every-day citizens--the lower-middle to upper-middle classes--carry around wonders the prior generation wouldn't hardly understand, and which at some point were utterly unaffordable even once they'd become technically-possible (like $4,000 cell phones in the 80s--$9,000 in today's dollars).
It's not that we squander what we have; it's that it's absolutely-retarded to work 2,000 hours in a year to produce and then not get paid for it. If we all took to a plan of working for 10 years, living as paupers, and then retiring, society would collapse trying to support us with no productive capacity due to a sharply-diminished labor force; a few of us can get away with it, so long as the rest work themselves to retirement at the end of a long life and provide us the material support our stockpiled money can buy. Even so, we'd live like poor people our whole lives, just to avoid working.
Instead, we work, we get money, and we buy things with that money, paying someone else to work to make and import and ship and sell that crap to us. That person uses the portion of price (and thus revenue) representing his working hours to barter his time in the same manner. As I've said: wage inequality means my time has a higher buying power than yours--my $20/hr means 1 hour of my time buys 2 hours of your $10/hr time. For me to buy what you're selling, somebody has to work those 2 hours--that would be you. The difference in power isn't a matter of any sort of value; it's only a social matter: your labor is easily-replaced and the going rate is lower, so you have a weak negotiating position and no force behind demanding higher pay, so you get to work just as hard and be half as rich.
Rich or poor, you maximize your wealth by working, getting paid, and buying. Money isn't worth anything; you buy things with it to exchange your work for something you can enjoy. As we increase productivity, I would quite like to restrict population growth (and economic growth) by cutting back labor hours, thus reducing what we can buy (you didn't work as much, so you didn't get paid as much--no matter the dollar value, it still represents 32 hours instead of 40) and thus the jobs needed. Increased productivity means we wind up producing the same with fewer labor hours, instead of more with the same labor hours; so we all work 3.5 or 4 days per week, instead of 5. Even then, you'd work your 28 or 32 hours, spend all your money, and come out complaining you're broke.
If you think that sounds strange, "Wi-ki-pedia" has an article you might find interesting. People used to demand six days per week, ten hours per day, 60 hours, as relief from excessive working hours and harsh working conditions. All that labor for such meager lives. A 28-hour week could turn America's labor force into its leisure force, if we can muster the economic efficiency to not become ridiculously-poor along the way.
I wonder what people will say if my Universal Social Security actually goes into effect. It cuts welfare out of the general income taxes (a progressive tax), and then levies a 17% flat tax on business and personal income to fund a flat benefit. That means all productivity gets taxed: a 50% productivity gain over 10 years hands back 17% of 50% to everyone, and the biggest impact is the poorest of poor become a full 50% richer. Do you think they'd still claim all the new wealth goes to the top 1%? I bet they would.
That's because of context. People attached to their candidates will back their candidates and forget their own philosophy.
I come across as conservative to liberals and liberal to conservatives--I've actually been toying with starting a progressive-conservative party, and analyzing how much damage I could do to both parties in the process. They'd be forced toward one another onto common ground, because neither could attack my points without attacking their own points--specific details of various policy causes that--and that would essentially make them mirror my own party in most respects. Instead of opposition, I'd have convergence.
Absent large political machinations and carefully-constructed assaults, I just look like the other side to everyone. Liberals hate me because I try to lower taxes, prevent tax raises on the rich, and solve problems with market-driven strategies; conservatives hate me because I advocate progressive taxes, stronger social services, and tax strategies to benefit the poor and middle-class instead of just the businesses. Nobody identifies me as the champion of their philosophy come to slay the evil machinations of their enemy, like they do Trump and Bernie.
I actually have more trouble with liberals than conservatives, which is weird. Ever see a conservative discussion thread? It's a huge pile of stupidity and self-contradictory bullshit from the dumbest people on the planet. Liberals are flat-wrong about a hell of a lot of things--mostly economics--but they have a stable sense of philosophy and policy, and stick to faulty first-principles; conservatives rant about conspiracies and throw out huge amounts of conflicting, internally-inconsistent crap. You'd think the liberals would be the reasonable ones.
The problem is things like a Universal Social Security (a complex form of UBI I designed to be stable and actually work in the short- and long-term) gain liberal-democrat ire for not taxing the rich more (nobody cares about the poor, I guess), while drawing conservative-republican assault for not making lazy drug-addicts work (because of course there are infinite jobs and the poor are just bad people).
Explaining the economic advantages tend to get conservatives thinking about markets, taxes, business costs, and wages, which they agree about in principle, while still remaining staunchly-uncomfortable about giving free shit to lazy poor people without caning them repeatedly until they get jobs. Liberals just handwave and claim all of that stuff is bullshit and start spouting faulty economic logic, and then demand that we take shitloads of money from the rich and the businesses, raise minimum wages "to make the businesses pay" (uh, wages are paid by revenues--you're making the middle-class pay), and also do all the stuff I said plus give loads more social services on top, and pay people free money for every baby they pop out.
I don't understand it. You'd think the frothing rednecks would be the dumb ones, yet they're the ones that listen and consider--so much so that you can get them to back a national healthcare plan by demonstrating it as an economic advantage and a market-driven device. How? Why?
I was pretty sure the tone of that statement could be easily-recognized as facetious-derogatory, essentially an elaborate way of saying "cause-head" or similar. You're always shouting at people for being on the wrong side of some cause--any side of any cause, really--and never seem to agree with anyone at any given time. You dump all over SJWs while getting all angry about people not having gender and orientation equality already--not so much on-the-fence as on both sides at the same time.
Every negative observation about someone isn't projection. It's also notable that many people like to elevate themselves by admitting that they can and have been wrong--but never quite bring anything up to current date into that conversation, essentially maintaining that they're right about everything right now, in context, immediately, and are ambiguously wrong sometimes, in the past, and may be the future, in some as-yet-unforseen situation. This allows them to claim the great virtue of humility while never actually admitting to being wrong at any time.
My observation of you has been that you're pretty much always looking to attack people. Always. The only time you stop is when you rescue baby wildlife and talk about how everyone else is assholes because you rescued baby wildlife and they obviously would have all just stomped on it and paved a shopping mall parking lot. When you show up, it's approximately guaranteed you have some reason why everyone is a moron and an evil asshole. At a point, I do give up on assuming all people are good people, and resort to simply diminishing bad people as a source of amusement; that's not necessarily wholly-mature, either, but I don't hit all of the markers for maturity anyway (I hit quite a few for neurosis, as well as an active personality disorder--not APD or BPD, though). No sense in pretending to be more grown-up than I am, after all.
It's Barbara Hudson. She's an angry feminazi environmentalist vegan transvestite hippy who lives on upwards and downards social comparison--that is, she's pathologically-immature and needs to look down on everybody to make herself feel worthwhile. She's kind of a regular, like the bar dog... she's the Slashdot Bitch.
I've actually gotten frothing conservatives to back me on a national healthcare bill while they scream about Obamacare socialism. It's funny.
Mostly, after a brief discussion of economics explaining that a national healthcare bill is either harmful (poorer nation, can't afford it, causes wide-spread poverty) or helpful (wealthier nation, healthcare per person is a smaller fraction of overall income and productivity, single-payer is more-efficient and thus cheaper than prior model), I point out where the ACA causes bad market behaviors (e.g. encourages underemployment by mandating employer healthcare benefits for full-time employees, thus driving low-wage worker hours down) and where it disconnects the market (consumers buy insurance on the exchange, and the government pays for it with somebody else's money).
When I explain a single-payer system, I describe these things and their impact on markets. I then outline a single-payer system which re-engages the market.
Firstly, all employees are mandated employer healthcare coverage, thus underemployment is reduced (unemployment increases, which is why the opposite was favored: better numbers, since nobody looks at underemployment; the unemployment increase is minor, and vanishes after a few years thanks to Malthusian growth). Employers are now under more pressure to negotiate with health insurance providers, because the impact on the cost of employment is bigger: health insurance for low-wage employees is a larger fraction of their cost than health insurance for higher-wage employees, so saving on per-employee health care coverage is much more significant. This encourages employers to shop around more and make demands for lower prices, since higher employment costs mean higher product prices and lower revenues: there's a building column of pressure from the consumer to the employer, coming down on the insurer, who then puts that pressure onto the healthcare providers to drive prices downward.
Second, I suggest tying the single-payer healthcare premiums to fair market rates. The government is still spending taxpayer money--albeit less, because now the market is engaged in buying, and thus controlling the cost of, health insurance for low-wage employees. Because all such health care is faced with market pressures demanding lower prices, the fair market price is a reasonable metric for health insurance premium costs. This avoids the Government spending someone else's money without itself holding a stake in the price paid for the service purchased: the stakeholders (taxpayers) have already set that price.
The healthcare providers are faced with all of this pressure to lower prices; and they can't charge below a minimum viable price. They have to cover their costs and risks to remain profitable, and will push to raise the price ceiling; that ceiling will never fall below the price floor. What we want is market pressure driving it closer to the floor.
That's a market-driven system in full; it's a beautiful model of red-blooded Capitalism. I've had far too much luck with potato-wagon Trump supporters immediately demanding the ACA be corrected and improved, rather than repealed, once I've run through some of the basics; I'm not a politician, and there's no way I'm that good at persuasion.
Bernie might actually have a better grasp of economics than Trump--and Bernie is completely fucking backwards.
This could actually be worse.
Trump is cracking under the pressure. He met with Obama for transition and seemed... overwhelmed. The job is a lot bigger than he thought. He's starting to falter under the stress of realization already.
The only thing worse than a lunatic is a weak lunatic whose ego won't allow him to be controlled. What if he breaks down and starts doing ludicrous shit eventually to try and backpedal on his weak public image? What if he becomes a puppet of a foreign dignitary, instead of a puppet of Congress?
What if he resigns and puts Pence in charge?
Listen, kid, I know this is hard to grasp, but this is bigger than Trump. That's usually only true of Barbra Streissand and Jabba the Hutt, but weak leaders never turn out well. I don't know which outcome is actually worse here.
Unfortunately that's only true initially - because labor are the people buying goods, and the flip side of low labor costs is low consumer income
False. I've dealt with that argument before; and it's ludicrous when you realize that shit keeps getting cheaper--the average American household makes $54,000/year and spends $6,500 on food, while in 1950 this $54,000 household would have spent $17,800 (in current dollars).
The fact is you don't reduce total consumer income. One of two things happens: some consumers have lower wages, and the products they make are cheaper, and so other consumers can buy more, and thus more laborers are required; or some products require fewer labor hours to make, thus the same wages are paid per laborer but fewer laborers work, and so the purchasing power of all employed goes up, creating new jobs as they buy more things. The amount of income in a given time frame is fixed: the Federal Treasury essentially controls how many dollars are available to be spent, and adjusts this to keep as close to a 2% inflation rate as they can; and exports are semi-fixed, in that we can export more if we can make it cheaper, but the demand to buy is still going to be roughly the same dollar amount, unless the importers buy more from us and less from others.
I was also talking *wealth* not purchasing power, which is why I explicitly stated "as distinct from income". Income has largely stagnated, while real wealth has diminished
Tell me again about how much income you don't need. You don't spend nearly a fraction of your income, right? Your wages are wholly-unnecessary, after all; you only bitch so much because you want to buy big, fancy cars and boats so you can boast about all the shit you have.
What was that?
Oh, right. We consume, constantly. Our ability to purchase products and services is predicate on our income; and the purchasing power of our income is what gives us the ability to exercise a standard-of-living. Lower-income means poor, smaller living quarters, financial struggles, pay-day loans loans you can't easily repay when you have to replace a $400 water heater because that money was going to food, and no college fund because you can't afford college.
You eat food, you wash and wear through your clothing, you consume water and electricity, you use cell phone and Internet services which require tens of thousands of workers just to keep running, you drive cars that consume gas and need maintenance, you pay a monthly fee for Netflix and Spotify, you pay servants to cook your food when you feel like dining out, you buy trinkets on Amazon, you listen to an ever-growing collection of audiobooks, you replace light bulbs, and you pay loads and loads in mortgage because you bought the biggest house you can afford--a lot bigger than the average house 30 or 50 years ago.
How do you suppose your holdings--your savings, your land holdings, and so forth--would stand up if you tried to consume so much? The argument you make sounds like a plea for early retirement: if you lived like the rich, you'd burn through rich-people assets in a year; and if you had those assets and didn't work, you could live as a middle-classer, and be essentially a burden on society. The nation's economic power--its actual wealth--is based in production, and it would collapse entirely if nobody worked; there would be no goods for you to purchase, and America would quickly become an impoverished nation.
In other words: income represents the production that makes a nation wealthy. Income is your ability to purchase, and it represents what you've produced. If something requires much labor time to produce, then it's an expensive thing because it takes a lot of income--from a lot of labor time, for people in the same wage range--to pay the workers laboring to produce it. Those things are purchaseable with your income because people like you--making your in
Jobs are created by demand, not by skill and worker availability. You can't sell products to a market with no money to buy them--and that's what demand is: Consumer ability and desire to buy things. We spend it all, then we complain we're poor; we get richer, we buy bigger houses, we spend more money, we buy more things, then we complain we're broke and the rich are taking all the fucking money and wages are stagnant while not looking into the rooms in our mini-mansions to see all the crazy-expensive shit we've stockpiled.
Thing about economics, it has a lot of self-correction when you fuck up. You do damage; but some of the metrics..
Malthusian growth will fill in any new unemployment or buff out any new jobs in short years, not generations. Early retirement, late retirement, the poor dying off, people staying in college longer (grad school because no jobs!), people entering the workforce earlier, birth rates, and even immigration rates all mess with the numbers. Trump's policies can make America poorer, but he'll either get to point and say "LOOK AT THE JOBS I CREATED!" or hide his head during an unemployment spike and then point when unemployment falls to 5% again and say "LOOK AT THE JOBS I CREATED!"
There's also shit like Obama's ACA bullshit "pay healthcare for fulltime only" clause. Paying healthcare for all workers encourages less underemployment--you want fewer workers, so you give them more hours. Paying healthcare for full-time only means more underemployment--you want fewer hours per employee, so you hire more. So the ACA made low-income employees poorer by cutting their hours, and created lots of jobs by opening up new part-time positions without healthcare. Underemployment jumped up (I'm not sure how much--haven't looked, and it could be negligible), and unemployment went down as number of employed went up--creating jobs.
I would have prefered to reduce underemployment at the expense of exacerbating unemployment. Fewer people hurt, less politically-savvy; but the gap would have filled in easily over a couple short years. On the other hand, I have major problems with the ACA in design; I could do much better--so much so that I've gotten die-hard conservatives screaming about Obamacare socialism to quickly side with me on a single-payer system with full understanding of what a single-payer system is. Sometimes I'm just good; usually I'm terrible at politics.
Free trade has made Americans--like, regular, low-income Americans--wealthy. Imagine zero inflation, and pants cost $50 instead of $15. You don't have any more money; you have to spend your money on pants, and have $35 that you spend now on stuff to not spend on that stuff. That stuff you don't buy means that truck drivers, retail cashiers, McDonalds burger flippers, and other manner of workers aren't payable, because their wages come from revenue, and that income is instead going to a factory worker.
You want people to buy less stuff and have a lower standard-of-living. Cutting trade might temporarily create jobs--cutting out the Chinese manufacture of Men and Boys's Cotton Trousers and Shorts, for example, will create jobs if we pay the factory workers less than $18/hr, and destroy jobs if we pay them more. Similarly, reducing minimum wage--reducing wages in general, especially for products that represent large portions of our spending--would create jobs. This is the same mechanism as you recognize--that more products are purchasable when labor costs are low--except you ignore the infrastructure that supports the retail of those products, and the jobs thereof.
though I believe Americans' median wealth (as distinct from income) has declined considerably since then
Increased, actually. There was a dip in median purchasing power after the 2008 recession; we recovered. The American working class--from poor to rich--has experienced continuous growth, just like in any economy in history. It's patently-impossible not to: technical progress lowers the cost of goods and services, spreading the same labor out to make more things; money is essentially you trading your labor for other labor--which does have the implication that your $20/hr salary means you can work for 1 hour and command a $10/hr burger flipper to work for 2.
The increases aren't constant, by any means. For example: Food cost 40% of the median income in 1900, 33% in 1950, 13% in 2000, and something like 12% now (in my case, it's 4.4%; I don't cook food at home, at all, and that can cut my budget bluntly in half). Clothing dropped from 12% in the 90s to 4% today (trade did this). People spend 33% on housing instead of the 28% in 1950; they buy houses that are over twice as big to hold all the crap they're buying for entertainment.
The annoying thing about economics is none of it fits common sense. You need to examine it deeply and thoroughly to figure out what's actually happening. It's also an unmitigated mess with moving parts that cause things to happen differently based on rate, and self-corrects. For example: rapid job loss to trade and technical progress will destroy your economy, while slow job loss to these things is the source of wealth (i.e. the same actions are good or bad depending on how fast they happen); slow job loss to technical progress leads to higher consumer purchasing power and (new) replacement jobs; and any long-term adjustment in job availability (loss or gain) goes away after a few years (not even a generation) due to Malthusian growth (population grows faster in abundance, slower otherwise, so a permanent raise or drop in unemployment will go away as the labor force adapts to fit labor demand).
Instead of having a fucking clue, you get people like Bernie Sanders starting statements with, "You don't need a Ph.D. in Economics to know..." and then saying something so wrong you expect his nose to grow, his pants to catch fire, and black tar to spew forth from his mouth and eyes, all at once.
What I don't want is the continuing idea that globalization and trade are killing jobs. Automation and recycling have killed 5-6 jobs IIRC for 1 job lost to globalization.
Dude, come all the way over already.
"Automation" is a fancy new scare name for technical progress. Technical progress and trade are essentially the same: they create wealth.
Technical progress lead America from a labor force of 90% farm workers in 1790 to 26% in 1900, to 12% in 1950, and to under 2% today. Do you see 88% of our labor force unemployed? Of course not. Neither the farm tractor, nor fertilizer, nor GMO, nor the wooden shipping pallet destroyed all jobs forever; these things freed up labor to perform other tasks. That's why food costs in 1900 were 40% of the median American family's income, in 1950 33%, and today around 12% even though we eat outside of home a lot more. We essentially pay servants to cook and serve our food, and still pay about 1/3 as much to eat as we did 60 years ago.
The threats are a matter of rate. All of them.
If you unemploy 30% of the labor force in one six-month swoop of the guillotine, your economy falls apart. Mass-unemployment means a collapse of consumer purchasing power, removing the revenue streams required to pay other workers, terminating more jobs. Eventually the dust settles on a country that can't raise enough taxes to carry the unemployed because they're all not working--no labor, no production, no wealth. Money represents what's made and sold, and the making and selling requires labor; technical progress reduces that labor, and half the labor means half the wage paid, thus less money cost, which is how prices eventually fall--with the help of ever-mounting economic pressure.
Unemploy people at a slower rate than those pressures drive prices down and you find consumers gaining additional buying power: wages don't decrease, but wage-hours paid for products do, and the few unemployed are easily supported by our welfare system with only a tiny portion of our gain. We seek to buy new things with the money we have--and the force of hundreds of millions of consumers with just TEN DOLLARS now-unspent means billions of revenue for new products (including buying more of the same old products). One billion dollars represents roughly 60,000 minimum-wage jobs, or nearly 0.04% of the labor force--every 1% swing requires a $150 reduction of expenses per consumer to recover the lost jobs.
That goes for both trade and technical progress. Self-driving cars and flying delivery drones? You want the Government to get regulation out to enable that PDQ. If the technology develops to the point where we know it's ready-to-go, but the Government hasn't given the green-light, eventual regulation to allow it will result in rapid replacement of delivery drivers, freight trucking drivers, and all form of mail carriers. Put up the regulation before anyone's ready to do it, and those job losses will come in patches here and there as the technology develops, as suitability increases, and as businesses individually become comfortable with the risks at different times. Once someone's job is gone, you have to wait for the business to be unable to keep prices at a point to simply take profit--they're certainly not unwilling--and that will happen, but not on the same damned day.
The obsession with creating jobs is a tricky one. I've notated it before. It's both good and bad, depending on your goals. The long-term consequences of Malthusian growth erase either: an increase in unemployment will vanish in several years if the economy doesn't get worse, thanks to more early retirement, longer delays to enter workforce (that whole "everyone goes to grad school in a recession" thing), death of the poorest (sucks), and, ultimately, slower birth rate; while a decrease in unemployment will vanish due to later retirement, faster entry to the workforce, and higher birthrate
Insurance companies typically provide a valuable service, and they pay more than they take in; they float their money on market speculation, and tend to come out ahead. State Farm pays like $1.03 for every $1 of income, but makes more than 3% on investments (even I can do that--I fluctuate between +3% and +6.2% lately; I used to average 1% per day or a 1300% annual rate, but that was ludicrous amounts of work). LifeLock isn't an insurance plan and isn't an insurance company; it's a service that doesn't seem to explain what it really provides, with a marketing hook that doesn't seem like it would ever pay out because those conditions are almost never met.
What does LifeLock even do now? Originally, they just put false fraud alerts on clients's credit; they got sued for that, and now what? How do they monitor?
I'm not sure what LifeLock even provides anymore, besides a target for lawsuits.
Software "married to the system"? You write perl code; you're not talking about kernel modules integrated with a monolyth.
Third, I wrote every line of code for my software. I did every design chart. I decided what it needed to be, and how it would work. I used it for years, and based my entire livelihood on it. I employed dozens of people. Then, with international issues being what they are (CIA directly connected to Rackspace), I changed data centre providers to save over $15'000/year. It still took me three months, and three persons, to set up the old software on the new network, and took me two years to plan the move.
I had a discussion about using AWS versus Azure recently. The concern raised was that moving off AWS if it became hostile would cost years of time and lots of risk in transition.
I created a small document summarizing the advantages of deeply-integrating with AWS, as well as the risks, and the manner in which to isolate those risks. I've done the same with various other softwares to connect various tools. Modern software design is founded on concepts like encapsulation, where a particular part of a system does a particular job, and where the interfaces between these systems are borders; you can rip those borders away and create new borders as you like. In software design patterns, they use things like "bridges" and "adapters" to do this.
Primarily, we design our systems to make all the logical decisions and track all the state they need; then, when we want to interface with some other system, we add a piece of code which can accept our decisions and our state, and can take the relevant actions. Automatic scaling, alerting, or filing information in databases, it's all worked into whatever target. We can switch out any interface at will. It's even possible to store all of our information in some back-end system like MongoDB or PostgreSQL, and then instruct the system to integrate old information with new tools or with an upgraded tool that accepts more of the full data, by which a simple strip of code runs through our back-end information and tells the glue code to find the matching information and update it--bluntly, so that the adapter decides what information the target system handles, and so will add information if that system now handles additional data, without any of the other parts of the programming knowing the details.
Re-engineering in a deeply-integrated migration is small when done as such. It's precisely as large as writing code to talk to the new targets; every other piece is completely-naive about what's on the other end, so no code is written there. Three programmers here could switch from AWS to something completely-different and feature-complete with performance statistics, autoscaling, and S3-like storage in under a month; migrating the actual software might not take as long, since the software moves easily. The biggest problem would be planning the disruption as DNS changes and data migrations took place.
I should know. I've done it twice.
I've also done it in cases where we didn't have the same control. I've dealt with migrations of thousands of Web sites and a media CDN to a completely-new system, with new Web hosting, new Web site software, a new DNS provider, and so forth. We performed migrations in batches of under ten sites per week. Each batch of migrations took under an hour to complete; we moved at an artificially-slowed pace to reduce risk, allowing us to respond to any discrepancies. We retrained the content producers after each migration, as well. It took under six months in total; migration itself--from one system to something completely-different in practically every manner--took about 30 hours, plus a week to write and test the scripts to dump and load the data.
That wasn't a matter of moving software--when I moved the existing CDN software from one system on one OS version to a completely-new system on a new OS version, it took me 4 months to build the new system
I said "source code cannot be turned into software" and "source code requires days of powerful machine time to turn into software". The former is missing the requirements listed in the latter. If you can't compare two sentences, and see the big huge difference, then we're done here.
That's not how language works. You stated an absolute premise when you said source code cannot be turned into software, the same as if you said mere thought cannot bring matter into existence; then you said a machine can turn source code into software. Which is it? That there is no means by to turn source code into software, or that there is a means by which to turn source code into software?
alone, without some amount of help, expertise, documentation, know-how, assistance, time, resources, and understanding, most source code cannot be turned into software merely by commonly available computer hardware.
Categorically false. Most source code can be turned into software with less required effort than creating the source code from a requirements document.
When I don't use a modifier, you don't get to presume I meant "always/forever/in-all-instances/every-time".
Without a modifier, the general or vast-majority case is implied. Logically, there must be minority or specially-crafted cases where the general rule does not follow; depending on what is being discussed, this can be due to obvious practice (as with source code) or to routing around physical impossibilities (e.g. a man cannot fly--unless given a hang glider, jet pack, or other sort of device to modify the way we approach the laws of physics).
You are, in fact, saying what any common English-language reader will interpret as "most". When I say, "Dogs don't meow," it is assumed by a reader unfamiliar with a "dog" that all or nearly-all dogs do not meow; it would be patently-absurd for the reader to assume that some minority or less-than-extreme majority of dogs do not meow based on that statement. Even legal arguments make this interpretation, based entirely on the understanding that a reasonable person will make this interpretation.
Any linguist will tell you that languages contain loads of implied meaning. "Most or all" is the implied meaning of general statements.
You are arguing based on syntax, in a debate based on abstract concepts.
You're trying to hold an indefensible position by arguing that the basic interpretation of English doesn't apply to your statements. Would you like to redefine "the" or "is" as well? Perhaps we should assume the definite case ("is") is the indefinite case ("might be"). Maybe we can redefine MUST as SHOULD, while we're at it.
Your argument is essentially that you can be wrong or flatly lie, because whatever you say has a different meaning that only you can know, and thus that you are not speaking English.
First off, "FOSS" needs the "F" for a reason
In your nerd-world maybe; in the world of business executives, systems administrators, and line management, "open source" means "free shit that comes with Linux". Half of them don't understand the difference between "open source" and "freeware", and some people call Linux "freeware".
Second, source code cannot be turned into software. I don't know why you think that it can. Some source code requires days of powerful machine time to turn into software.
This is logically-inconsistent. It can't be done, and it takes days to do?
Gentoo compiles from stage 1 in under a day on a modern commodity PC. If you want KDE instead of Gnome, you need 40 hours. To turn that code into software, simply run the build process and go somewhere else for 40 hours. Do other work.
Dude, I build web-sites and even my shitty perl code is useless without three days of custom linux and apache tweaking. It took me three months to configure a plain-jane lamp server -- and that's with my entire business resources behind it -- pushing for a vital and highly profitable supplier change
I converted Dell NetVault's install instructions into a viable Docker container after a half hour of minor reverse-engineering. Turns out it stores some important state data in some files; other files can get wiped between backups with no problem.
I've made a lot of third-party applications run in unsupported ways inside Docker containers, using distributions that they don't support, or otherwise shoehorning it into my requirements. It typically doesn't take very long--a couple of hours, at the worst--and it's easily-replicated after the first time. Once I've figured out how, I can repeat the process in a few minutes.
Maybe you're just bad at what you do. The core of economics is technical progress: find a way to accomplish the same goal with less work (human time investment). Much of what you describe takes me only minutes to do even faced with awkward bullshit; I've gotten good enough at probing strange software to handle the really bad cases in a (large) portion of a day, and that's hardly-ever happened. When I started doing all this crap, it would take me weeks or months to get it quite right; but I got better with time and tools.
People generally equate "open source" in software with the concept of "free" because it is implied you're allowed to have a software without paying for it, and you can convert the source to software.
If your friend makes you a copy of a hammer, he must expend several hours of time, plus money in materials and fuel, to produce that hammer. If your friend makes you a copy of a software, he only needs to drop it into a file share or burn it to a CD--actions which take seconds. A Web site providing copies of software can have so many downloads as to reduce replication cost to many tens if not hundreds of users per penny, with the cost representing--at a minimum--the wages paid to operators (including the infrastructure allowing you to get on the Internet).
Intellectual property is such a big deal in software because software isn't a physical thing. Software's physical existence is in the arrangement of electrons in a material that must exist whether it contains that software or some other software; and transferring the pattern to invest that material with that information is cheap as all hell. Software isn't silicon cells holding a charge or iron-oxide coatings holding a magnetic field; it's what those states represent. It's exclusively information, and so control of who is allowed to have that information is the only control you have over software.
Toolmakers largely want you to pay them for the tools you use to do the work somebody else pays you for. You can't make a good hammer on your own; and even if you could, you'd need a small-scale manufacturing facility to do so efficiently, and you'd have to make thousands of hammers to make them per-unit cheaper than just buying a $22 Eastwing framing hammer from Home Depot, and your hammer would be a lot shittier than anything Eastwing is willing to stick their brand on.
Okay so there are two take-aways here.
One is that anything that comes out of Redhat's mouthpiece is usually self-aggrandizing bullshit. That's not to say it's always wrong; just it's not well-developed. I can say any stupid thing based on first-observations and be right 0.1% of the time--that's approximately how economic political debates work (everything in economics violates common sense with an unlubricated broom handle). When Redhat is right, it's typically because their bullshit lined up with reality by a chance meeting.
The other is that Free Software Advocates like Stallman are die-hard communists. Stallman doesn't care about your freedoms; he wants to pry your work out of your hands on his terms. Stallman has said, directly and unapologetically, that the GPL's purpose is to force people to release their work to the world for free. He doesn't care about the labor a person puts into making a thing, and about his right to profit from his labor--or to attempt to in whatever way he sees fit, even if that way is misguided. Stallman doesn't believe in markets supplying an alternative. He believes that keeping control of your own work is theft, and that your time and effort belong to the world.
Free software advocates as such like to dismiss this line of reasoning by placing an opaque cover over the 150,000 man-hours used to make a relatively-complex application and point at the 0.001 man-hours used to supply a download pipe to copy it, claiming that's the entire cost they owe for the product, because they're not placing any load on the creator or taking anything away from him for making a copy. Never mind that he has no way to profit from it except by begging that someone pay him out of the very goodness of their hearts; these people believe that, despite not being compelled away from copying the product for free, they wouldn't be compelled to pay any price for it in any circumstance, but that obviously someone else would pay exactly the same for it whether it was given to them for free or dangled there with an attached price tag.
In effect, these people believe that consumers, given two prices ($0 and $50, for example), will always opt for the one the seller actually wants them to pay, or at least will actively-avoid the lowest one and pay the highest they are willing to pay in all cases.
Once you understand that, you never have to listen to them again, because theory-of-mind allows you to estimate what someone will say about anything even when that person's thinking is horribly wrong. Eventually, you don't have to ask RMS what he would say about a thing; you only have to ask yourself what RMS would say.
That's sort of the point, isn't it?
Back in 1790, 90% of American laborers worked in agriculture--farm work. Women made clothing at home to produce additional income, using skills necessary for economic survival due to the feasibility (or lack thereof) of the average household to afford clothing in the way we generally view as normal. People grew substantial gardens and livestock, hunted, and otherwise supplemented their nutritional needs, due to a lack of affordability of food.
In 1900, 28% of American laborers were agricultural workers. New farming techniques over the prior century increased yield per land area and, consequentially, yield per laborer. With fertilizer, farm tools, and irrigation, a great deal of labor actually supported food production; and food cost a full 40% of the average household's income.
By 1950, the use of the farm tractor, better fertilizers, and other innovations pushed us forward to even lower-labor agriculture. The wide-spread use of the wooden shipping pallet after 1915 greatly reduced shipping costs at all levels of distribution as well. Even so, 1950s agriculture was beastly; one of the great innovations involved an irrigation system by which a farmer connected a pump to a long arm and walked slowly in an enormous circle around a section of crops to lead the irrigating arm. All in all, 12.2% of American laborers worked on the farm, and the average American household still expended 33% of its income on food.
From 90% to 28% to 12% labor on the farm. From supplemental income to 40% to 33% income spent on food.
After the 1980s, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and GMOs had brought advanced farming techniques to current standards. By 2000, only 2% of America's laborers worked in agriculture, and 13% of the average household's income went to food; in 2015, it's below 2%, and food expenditure is as low as 12%. The total work involved between chemical and genetic engineering, irrigation, machinery, fueling, and actual farm labor has fallen greatly since 1950, and continues to fall slowly today; and Americans now eat out of the home much more frequently, essentially directing their savings toward the commission of servants to prepare and serve their food.
Cost of risk is part of cost. When a food recall occurs, that food must be destroyed; labor which went into making that food is lost, with no product to come out of it. Those workers must get paid--the minimum viable price is essentially the cost of labor, with the eventuality that profits pay for expansion or risks, and that risks either involve labor which turns out wasted or involve new labor--and so prices must reflect the risk of food loss.
The cost is of course small. If 1% of food is recalled and we eliminate 90% of that, then roughly 0.9% of the cost of food is eliminated: a $100 grocery shopping trip now costs $99.10. Food recall affects much less than all that, of course. The principle is still sound.
There are no new privacy issues in this strategy.
Currently, food-borne illness is identified when a consumer volunteers information about becoming ill from consuming a food. That illness is then cross-referenced with the matching food product the consumer purchased, based on consumer testimony or receipts. Enough of such information identifies a product, which we can then remove.
The proposed method attaches the entire handling chain to the consumer's purchase. Once we identify the receipt and the food, we don't simply recall a product; we look at the specific instance of the food the consumer purchased. That instance's handling chain shows us how it shipped, who packaged it, and where it was produced. We can then narrow down the specific set of affected foods and possibly identify a specific cause of contamination, recalling less product and avoiding similar issues in the future.
In both instances, customers volunteer information about foods they purchased. The receipt relevant to the sale is already in the system; and, if that receipt is attached to a loyalty program or credit card, it has enough information in the database already to identify the individual customer. If the receipt is anonymous (non-loyalty, cash payment), the customer can provide an identifier from his receipt, and the store can look up the receipt, and nobody can identify the individual customer; the block chain still identifies the food's handling chain. If the receipt is identifiable (by loyalty account or last 4 digits of credit card), the store can look up a matching purchase in the given time frame, and obtain the same data.
No new ability to identify the customer is added.
So, instead of getting all this data together in a database with a FK SerialNumber, it stores all the information in something that changes each time it changes hands, thus allowing them to know all information up to when they obtained it, but not afterwards.
Labor is time, not effort. You have 24 hours in a day; you must sleep for 8 of them; and what of your time to enjoy products you purchase?
We increase wealth through technical progress, which reduces the amount of labor required to make things. 100 people making $10/hr produce 500 bowls in an hour; that bowl has to cost at least $2 per each. You find a way to have 100 people produce 1,000 bowls per hour, you can sell those bowls for $1 per each; yet those people are still making $10 per hour. They're buying half as much labor in each bowl.
Less time here is put in per each bowl; and a person's time--that same 1 hour--buys 10 bowls instead of 5. That person is being paid more (still $10/hr, though; we've just discovered deflation!).
Now, of course, if we don't sell any more bowls, we fire 50 of these people, and employ 50 people making 500 bowls per hour. Since consumers were collectively spending $1,000/hr on bowls and are now spending $500/hr to buy only the same bowls, they have $500/hr of unspent money. Now they buy plates--which we can make by employing 50 people making $10/hr to produce 500 plates per hour.
Now, again, we have 100 people employed, $10 paid per hour of each's employment, and $1,000 consumer dollars spent per hour on the goods they produce; yet before they only produced 500 bowls per hour, and now they produce 500 bowls plus 500 plates per hour, at the same cost.
That's technical progress.
You might notice these laborers make $10/hr, and purchase either bowls for 1/5 of an hour's time OR bowls for 1/10 of an hour's time plus plates for 1/10 of an hour's time. Both cases involve spending 1/10 of an hour's wages to buy 1/10 of an hour's time.
You might also observe that I might make $20/hr, and so I will expend 1/10 of an hour of my time to extract 2/10 of an hour of those laborers's time from them. Likewise, for them to buy my product, they will have to work 2 hours so as to extract 1 hour of my time.
What do you think money is, really? It's labor. Money pays for the time you spend laboring. Maybe you work hard and we pay you shit, while I recline in an air-conditioned office and get paid 3 times as much; I simply call that "Tuesday", and then give you a dollar fifty to make me a hamburger.
The rest of it... well, if you can't be concise, it's not really a point worth making.
Peter Klauser described American idealism: "1. Ignorance is innocence; complicated explanations are suspect; The world is simple, and there must be a simple explanation for everything."
The concise explanation of economics is that nearly-everything in economics violates common sense. If you don't have time to sort through long, complicated explanations of interconnected systems which produce unexpected results, you're best keeping your mouth shut. If you want me to be brief, then you need to stop asking questions and assume everything I say is 100% correct; and a lot of it is going to sound very wrong without a large and thorough explanation.
People's expectations of short and simple economics leads to backwards beliefs like that raising minimum wage creates jobs because there is more money and every $1 gets spent 6 times over and makes the economy go. The bare and simple fact is minimum wage raises keep that minimum wage up with inflation, which is important when your wage system is built on a minimum wage; and every discrete increase reduces the buying-power of a dollar and concentrates money into fewer hands--and creates unemployment, making some minimum-wage earners poorer while making most richer.
You expect to learn all there is to know in life from a simple scrawling on the back of an index card. In short: you are a fool.
No.
Automating it into American factories to lower the cost of products would not create new American jobs. The cost is based on a stable margin placed on top of labor.
If you have $15.0 trillion dollars of income in America in 2016 and you pay for 171 million workers, that's great. Now make a new product, and have Americans make it, making $0.100 trillion. Great! The total income in 2016 is still $15.0 trillion; that $0.100 trillion isn't magicked out of the air, but rather paid out of income, and not paid to some other workers. Hire 3.6 million factory workers and fire 3.6 million McDonalds workers; close some fast food joints.
If you manage to make the factories in America run at the same cost of the factories in China by reducing the labor required (automation), then you still have very few Americans working to make products, but they're paying for the same products.
For Men and Boys's cotton trousers and shorts, we're talking about around 171,000 jobs in total. The American net job loss is 8,000 at $21/hr wage; in theory, you would have to create no more than 25,000 jobs at that rate to match price parity with the Chinese--a 7-fold increase in production efficiency over the Chinese. That is to say: gain is mediated by minimizing either wages or jobs.
Every increase in price over what the Chinese supply decreases the number of unit goods Americans can buy. That means if you only automate to a 6-fold increase, you might need 28,500 factory workers to make as many trousers; but Americans can't afford as many trousers, and you end up with actually fewer factory workers (28,050 vs 28,100). Without as many units shipping, you also have fewer truckers, fewer cashiers, fewer inventory workers stocking shelves, and fewer retail businesses to be fed by electricity and water and building maintenance and all other business services and support--all fractional costs of the per-unit price of trousers, so those lost jobs don't suddenly free that cash up to be spent on other things.
On the other hand, if you have an abundance of jobs (which only happens by making the product cheaper--thus an abundance in general: your money buys more things, less poverty, everyone is richer, standard-of-living goes up), you'll get population growth to fill it (Malthus). The effect actually only lasts a few years because we can grow the labor force in like 6 different ways.
If you can make the factories 1/7 as expensive, then the Chinese can make them 1/7 as expensive as that. Instead of $14.97, you're paying $9.72 for trousers; 35% of the cost of trousers is gone; and more goods can be bought, jumping the American jobs up by 35% of what jobs support the trade market of Chinese MBCT imports (theoretically, 59,000 new American jobs). Malthusian population growth might fill that in a few years, but all those Americans will still be able to buy more stuff and, thus, we'll all be richer anyway.
Which number was bigger: 28,000 or 59,000?
then you have people like Warren Buffet whose wealth comes entirely from stock options and dividends, therefore not production (at least, not his own).
Warren Buffet's income comes from stock options and dividends. Things don't have actual value; the fact that you work doesn't mean your work is worth what we pay you, just that we imagine it so. Buffet "works" in some capacity, and he gets "paid" a shitload.
Wealth, on the other hand, is more-complex. America is a wealthy nation: 2% of our labor works on the farm, and some 10%-ish goes into actually making and shipping food--including the chemists and GMO engineers, the shipping trucks, and the grocery stores. Mexico used 18% last I looked, but they might have caught up; India made great strides between 1992 and 2003, eliminating literally 98% of the labor required to make food; and some poor African bush countries expend more than half their labor simply obtaining food.
In America, we don't work hard to get food; food represents a tiny share of our labor, and we work hard to have a huge pile of money from which we cut the tiniest sliver and hand it to the people making our food. When 1 hour of your work represents food for 50 people, their 2% of their income fills 100% of yours; of course, they spend 12% of their income, and 1/6 of that gets to you, so you're in the same boat as everyone else. (In reality, there's wage inequality, so the farmer could be richer or poorer; the 12% number is what the median household spends out of their income on food.)
You know what would though? A $640/year raise to all Ford workers [...]. Because that's money that won't sit in bank accounts, but will re-enter economy almost immediately.
Yes, to a degree. To the individual, it's still under $25/paycheck, which isn't going to solve poverty any time soon. There are more-complex considerations here, though. Let's assume you mean that the money is taken away from the executives, and is only money that was getting sidelined and not spent; if the executives were spending it, none of the below is true.
What you describe is almost a change between cost of employment and take-home. I've described economic policies where we reduce the cost of employment, such that an employee takes home more of the money an employer pays. So today an employer may pay a $62,200 for a $50,000 employee, who takes home $42,100/year; if that employer paid $59,000 and the employee took home $45,000/year--and all employment costs experienced this change--then the employee's buying power would increase because the ratio of labor-cost to wage-income would be lower. That means the employee can buy more stuff.
The bluntest consideration is the total combined effect. Assuming all 171 million U.S. workers got a $640/year raise, that's $110 billion, or up to 6.6 million minimum-wage, full-time jobs suffused by people hitting up McDonalds 3 times more each month. It's an important, short-term consideration.
I've used that argument before, and it's actually cut off quickly--in just a few years, actually. Malthusian population growth provides a prototype theory: population expands in abundance, and stops expanding when abundance ends. Essentially, our labor force grows when unemployment is low, and shrinks when it's high. This happens in the long-term by birth rates; in the short-term, people retire earlier or later, more poor people die when there's more unemployment, immigration slows with fewer employment opportunities, and some people even stay in college longer. The short-term effect of losing jobs is something I argue more about, because people want to pretend a minimum-wage increase doesn't mean someone becomes unemployed until either wages fall behind inflation or the labor force falls behind population growth; I don't like distortions of reality.
These two things are actually part of a side-goal of my Universal Social Security plan. That plan ultimately provides