To be fair, the machinations of economics are highly-complex and nonobvious. Common sense dictates the exact opposite of practically everything a close examination of economics will reveal. I doubt a second-grader could call bullshit on anything.
Look at minimum wage. Minimum wage puts more money into the hands of low-income earners. They can then spend more, which means they can buy more, which means more jobs because spending makes the economy go. Makes sense, right? Easy. Common sense should tell you that.
Wages are paid from revenue; revenue is paid from consumer spending; spending comes from income; and income is a product of time. That means there's only a finite amount of total income in a given time span--say, a year. 2015, America had $15.4 trillion of total income; 2014, it was $14.8 trillion; and the difference is from net exports (which are negative) and bank loans (central bank issues money, banks are allowed to loan more, consumers take loans to buy things, that money enters the economy). Raising someone's wage doesn't actually create money; and the total of all income (including that increased wage) can only be spent at the rate of income.
Well, if wages come from revenue, you must increase prices--not like the Conservative line of doubling prices when minimum wage goes up, but more that raising MW from $7.25 to $15 will cause that $8 value meal to cost $8.17. Those price increases combine for a total dollar amount (265 billion customers served by fast food per year; 17 cents increase; $45.05 billion), which represents a number of full-time, minimum-wage jobs ($45.05 billion / ($7.25/hr * 2000hr/year), 3.1 million jobs). Because those 17 cents are spent on one thing, they can't be spent on another; therefor the jobs to produce and retail that other thing can't draw revenue; thus we can't employ those people.
So raising minimum wage reduces jobs. It does this essentially by making everyone slightly-poorer, by unemploying some minimum-wage workers, and by compensating the remaining MW workers enough that their lower-buying-power dollars still stack up to a greater amount of buying power.
That's exactly the opposite of what common sense tells us.
This works for trade (FOUR TIMES--immediate employment impacts, long-term employment impacts, wealth impacts of "making more things", and wealth impacts by the effect on prices), technical progress (new technology's entire function is to eliminate labor time invested in production, thus reducing jobs; we recover the jobs, reduce scarcity, and create more jobs, causing population growth until scarcity sets back in), and even basic concepts like scarcity (I'm the guy who re-defined scarcity as the situation in which a proportional increase in production requires a larger proportional increase in labor, which means there are situations where e.g. food is scarce while the supply of food is in no danger of falling below the demand).
A lot of people even manage to miss the factor of time entirely. Trade and technical progress make us wealthy, and they do so by creating unemployment: either of these will eliminate someone's job, either by sending it offshore or by having 4 people do the same work as 5 by using a shiny new tool of which 1 person can make 1,000 (i.e. for every 1,000 people you unemploy, you create 1 job making the new tool). This lowers costs; and over time, the economic pressures pushing price back to a certain profit margin (i.e. closer to cost) increase, lowering prices. That allows us to create replacement jobs. If you eliminate jobs too rapidly, you destroy your economy; the automation nightmare everyone on Slashdot cries about will happen if it happens overnight. If you eliminate jobs slowly, your economy just gets wealthier; if that automation happens over years and decades, unemployment will wobble a little, while prices fall to a pittance and individual wealth increases rapidly.
It takes a lot more than the average American has time for to identify how economics works.
Trade can create or destroy jobs, typically in small magnitude for small effects. Go 3 paragraphs down for the funny part.
Numbers. Importing a 40-foot long shipping container from China costs under $1,300. They hold 40,000 pants or jackets, at a unit cost of 6.5 cents per each to import. Chinese labor averages roughly $3.50/hr, including wage and social insurances. The import share of MBCT (essentially, the cost of Chinese labor) is $6.12 per unit.
Men and Boys's Cotton Trousers imported from China, for example, represent $1.197 billion (of $2,760 billion) imports into America (versus $2,230 billion exports). If we stopped importing MBCT from China and made them in America, we'd lose jobs if we paid all Americans involved (factory workers, people maintaining the factories, machinists, the people at the power plant, the people making the fuel to generate power, etc) above $18/hr, and gain American jobs if we paid below $18/hr.
Paying the Americans $21/hr ($23.85 when you include benefits and payroll taxes), we would create 50,627 American jobs, and lose 59,627 American jobs. That's a net-loss of 8,630 jobs. For that loss, the average $14.97 price of MBCT would rise to $50.57. At an $8.25/hr minimum wage, we would create nearly American 20,000 jobs, and only raise the average price of MBCT to just over $25.
So here's the best bit: this only matters for a short time. Population grows faster or slower based on scarcity or, as per Malthus, on abundance: if there's overall more wealth, there's less poverty, and population expands until the general effect of poverty causes a slowing of growth.
If blocking trade loses jobs (e.g. in Ohio), then the number of unemployed will decrease in as little as 3-5 years (largely by people going into early retirement at 59 1/2 instead of getting bigger benefits at 70 1/2, in America; also by the poor dying). If blocking trade creates jobs, then the number of job-seekers will expand (partly by discouraged workers becoming active, by less early-retirement, and by less poverty extending lifespans; in the long run, by faster population growth). The opposite is also true: whether trade creates jobs or loses jobs, the employment impact is null within half a generation.
Those pants, however, will stay expensive if you reduce trade.
That goes for things like TVs also. Taiwanese and Korean semiconductors assembled onto Chinese circuit boards and cases in Chinese factories. 52 inch flat screen TV imports to America for $1.80 per unit in a 40-foot container. $487 labor share for a $500 TV. For $21/hr American factory workers making the chips, the screens, the boards, and the plastic components, it's a $3,300 TV; for $8.25/hr minimum wage, it's a $1,450 TV.
Without trade, TVs, computers, cell phones, and the like are luxury goods bought by the same kind of people who buy a Tesla Model S for $85,000 today. Are you going to spend $3,000 or more on a computer, plus $1000+ on the monitor, and buy yourself a new $1,800-$2,500 smart phone every 2-3 years? Even if we go with minimum wage jobs, what minimum-wage worker is going to buy a $1,500 television, or an $8,000 television, or a $2,000 phone?
Bernie Sanders says a lot of things starting with "you don't need a Ph.D. in economics to understand...." Maybe, if he had Ph.D. in Economics, he wouldn't say stupid shit about trade being bad for Americans. Nobody wants to think past "Mexican picking vegetables? An American can pick vegetables!" to "how much would that raise the price of the vegetables? After spending that extra on food, how much less would Americans have to spend on other things? How many jobs does that represent?"
People are dumb enough to think money comes into existence when you receive your paycheck, and can't fathom that there's a finite amount of money in every time frame--2015 had $15.4 trillion of total income because $15.4 trillion of stuff was bought, and the extra $0.6 trillion over 2014 came from a combination of e
Well it's been determined and upheld that public figures have less of a claim to privacy because everybody is trying to get in on their private life. You seem to not like this, but legally you're wrong.
Of course it is protected by copyright. You can cite it, but not copy it. And if you are referring to/. I suggest to scroll down the page and read what is written in the lower right corner.
Do you mean the part where I said, "Slashdot posts at the bottom: 'Comments owned by the poster'"? Yes, I said that in my last message. Read it again.
I also said you will lose any copyright case in any court attempting to claim copyright infringement on comments you made in a public forum. If I copy a bunch of Slashdot discussions into a book and sell it as an omnibus on social commentary, Slashdot has no claim because they don't own those messages. If the individual posters come to sue for infringement, they will all lose because their statements in a public forum are not copyrightable.
Your comments here are non-copyrightable for the same reason everything you say is non-copyrightable. If you are at a party and you start talking at length about the presidency, someone can publish a book with a written transcript of everything you said, and it's not copyrightable; yet if you publish a written transcript of song lyrics, speeches, or the dialogue of plays and movies, that is covered by copyright--even though those things were not delivered as written transcript, but as spoken language. A transcription is a derivative work.
Your comments here are not a creative work; they're dialogue. You can copyright literary works; musical works, including any accompanying words; dramatic works, including any accompanying music; pantomimes and choreographic works; pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works; motion pictures and other audiovisual works; sound recordings; and architectural works. Impromptu speeches and discourses delivered are not considered copyrightable; because dialogue is made in text on the Internet, dialogue in a discussion forum is an impromptu speech or dialogue, and non-copyrightable.
It doesn't work that way. If you got a 30-year fixed mortgage in 1993 at a rate of 2.875%, and rates go up to 35% in 1995, guess what? You pay 2.875%.
If you have a 7/5 ARM, then your rate goes up to 3.875% in 2000, 4.875% in 2005, 5.875% in 2010, and so forth, until it's paid off or reaches the current prime rate. In 1993, the nominal median income was $30,404; in 2000, it was $41,446, or 36% higher. The actual purchasing power increase was 14.5%; the 36% happens because of inflation--each dollar is worth less, and there are more than enough additional dollars to compensate (this happens because of trade and technical progress making each labor-hour capable of producing more, thus a given wage will be capable of purchasing more per hour worked).
So the ARM loan's mortgage goes up by 1%. Payment goes from $622/month in 1993 to $688/month in 2000, an increase of 10.6%. Income should be roughly 36% higher; even minimum wage went from $4.25 (1993) to $5.15 (2000), an increase of 21.2%.
So maybe you should be careful with ARM loans--especially 3/1 loans or 5/1 loans. In general, ARM loans can give you an enormous advantage if handled properly; whereas if you're doing a 3/1 because you think you're flipping the house in 2 years, and then house prices crash because of a mortgage rate hike, you're going to get fucked.
The most-popular mortgage is the 30-year fixed mortgage, and fixed rate mortgages make up almost 90% of all mortgages. ARM loans make up 11% of new mortgages; and unfortunately, the most popular ARM loan is the 5/1, rather than the more-stable 5/5 or 7/5. ARM loans typically limit rate increases to 1% per term; The/5 ARM loans give time for your measly 2%-per-year raise to keep up, while the 7/5 loans give you a 7-year delay so as to improve your financial position and give you inflation leverage against the ARM when the rates adjust./1 loans will fuck you up.
So no, most people aren't going to get screwed over by their mortgage rate suddenly skyrocketing; although the popular 5/1 ARM puts you in that dangerous position. Even with a 5/5 or 7/5 ARM, the early low-interest rate would lower your payments compared to a 30-year fixed, and would leave the increase in payments after adjustment terms lagging behind the increase in income even at minimum wage. If you can afford the 30-year fixed, taking the 5/5 or 7/5 ARM and making the 30-year payment will pull your balance down further, giving you a stronger position against the 1% rate increases at each adjustment term.
Your argument seems kind of akin to the thinking that we should ban alcohol because people aren't responsible enough to take care of their bodies and will drink too much. You're also completely-ignoring the market of new buyers, and by extension the next generation. I described why housing prices fluctuate as they do, and how much people end up paying for shelter, and how shelter costs change over long spans of time--say, 1900 to 1950 to 2000; you started arguing about things that happen when you're financially-irresponsible and get yourself into bad contracts, which has little to do with the price of housing (and, in context, has to do with changes in mortgage prime rates, but nothing to do with the absolute value of a mortgage prime rate on its own).
What exactly are you trying to do? You seem to be jumping away from topics at hand and arguing that some other ideal would cause a problem. That looks like an attempt to imply the original assertion was wrong--even though the original assertion was on a different matter of fact. It's not a very good attempt, considering your new assertions are factually-wrong.
If it went into immediate effect, it would increase the likelihood of being able to switch the election; and it would make people's votes matter in states that are solid. Why would you ever vote in Maryland if you're a Republican? Why bother in Texas if you're a Democrat?
The NPVIC claims it will increase voter turn-out, so why aren't they working to increase voter turn-out by making it possible for voters to turn an election? What if you're a Democrat in a thoroughly-blue state like New York, and you think that the Republican popular vote will turn Maryland red? Your vote can prevent that. If you're a Democrat in a thoroughly-red state like Texas, your vote can make the difference between a Republican Maryland victory and subsequent Presidency or a Maryland that goes Democrat. If you're a Republican anywhere, your vote can help flip those thoroughly-blue states to red.
Prices don't go down because banks and businesses are nice; they go down because of demand.
If interest rates rise, that $350,000 house with the $1,200 mortgage payment becomes a $300,000 house with a $3,600/month mortgage payment. Note that interest rates aren't part of money; who do you think is going to buy all these houses now?
Banks don't set principle amounts, either. Once you buy a house, your interest rate is fixed (ARM-agreements aside, and even then, it's usually 1% per adjustment period--7/5 ARM is 1% per 5 years after the first 7 years, for example). The sale prices drop because a seller goes to sell his $350,000 house and the same buyers are coming, with maybe $1,500/month available, looking for a $1,200/month house, and you're trying to get them to buy it for $3,600/month.
So now you have the same houses and the same buyers; but many fewer buyers can buy. You can't sell unless you lower the price. In realtor speak, your home value plummets.
You seem to be trying to argue that banks will raise your interest rate as prime rates go up, and your payments will skyrocket. That happens only in ARM contracts, and you can control those contracts in a number of ways--like getting a fixed rate to start with. The interest rates affect new sales, and people walking in with $5 aren't going to be able to buy the Hope Diamond.
Dude, Alaska already doesn't matter. They have like 4 electoral votes. You may as well not bother voting if you're in Alaska; it's not like your voice is added to the election.
What candidate has ever won by 270 votes? What candidate has won by 135 votes?
Trump won by 36 votes, meaning 73 votes would flip this election the other way. There are 165 votes available to turn in the current compact, and every single one of those voted for Hillary, giving no traction this time. In 2000, the compact would have switched from Bush to Gore.
So at 165 votes, there's a potential to change or not change the election; but it's enough to have weight. It's enough that a Republican in Maryland might conclude his vote will actually count, and a Democrat in Texas might come to the same. Maybe more people would vote; and then what?
If you bring it up in order to perform a rebuttal, true. However, if you bring it up because that's a widely-held belief (from one side of the debate, but without empirical evidence) and then present the rebuttal because that's another widely-held belief (from the other side, which has empirical evidence) then you've written a balanced article.
Actually, if you bring it up because it's a widely-held belief that is empirically-wrong, you're addressing a topic which your readers will frequently raise to themselves, with likely-wrong conclusions. Bringing it up in order to demolish it is informative and correct.
If you bring up both sides and simply cover that there is an argument, but don't point out that the body of evidence has firmly suggested that one side is full of lunatics and the other is actually correct, you've presented a "controversy" with equal weight to both sides. In other words: if you don't show that the correct side has much more weight behind it, you're holding up the incorrect side and pushing back against the correct side, which is bias.
If you really want to understand the pro-life view you should study it, but the basic definition in question is that human life begins at conception.
It's an ethical argument centering around the ideal that you're committing harm against a person. Harm against a person is wrong because it induces suffering--you can support absolute definitions of "right" and "wrong" by showing that people seek security, and so a society which does not protect people from suffering will have problems up to and including collapse because the insecure portion will lash out against the perceived threat of a society which refuses to protect it.
People essentially want society to protect them from harm; we develop different ideals of what harms us, and so these become our morals, values, and ethics; although ethics are really procedures-. We develop an ethic because a thorough examination of a complex moral problem suggests a certain approach where a different approach would possibly provide a better long-term benefit but might produce unacceptable harm in trade. For example: human experimentation on the terminally-ill or a few children here and there would provide great benefits to society--and would place us all under the immediate and continuous threat of somehow being tortured and mangled, either at the end of our life or at the beginning of it. That terrifies people, so we don't do it; you could easily argue that such experimentation greatly-reduces suffering in total and is the right thing to do, but it would still harm society's ability to provide us with security.
The argument you gave suggests that an abortion is harming a person--the fetus. This doesn't actually place a standing threat against anyone: by the time you can become aware of such a threat to yourself, it's over; you don't actually come to exist as a person by then (no brain capable of sentience).
People are apt to force behaviors on others because they want others to behave in a way they accept and to not behave in ways they don't accept. That has little to do with personal security; it's more related to xenophobia and racism, where something is different and thus is harder to predict, thus bothers you. Life would take less effort if everyone held your own beliefs; forcing them to at least adhere to them is a step in that direction, and reduces the number of things happening that you might not expect or want to think about.
The reason they define human life as beginning at conception is it gives them an argument. It lets them say there's a reason. They're probably not conscious of this; it's more-likely that the behavior upsets them because they think it's wrong for what it is, and accepting that this view is not supportable and not necessarily correct is upsetting. Defining human life as a pile of chemicals with no being and no meaning, no different than a swirl of pureed beef liver in
Housing prices generally don't change: people are willing to pay a certain amount per month, following inflation. At the same time, housing is highly-speculative: people will perceive that houses will become more-expensive, and so will pay more for them, for a time, thus putting themselves into debts with bigger payments and larger total costs.
When mortgage prime rates fall, housing sale prices increase to match. The 2000s market was essentially a big dialogue of "Housing prices are going to go UP UP UP, so buy now and it's an investment!" and people talking about doubling and tripling their money. This happened while interest rates kept falling lower and lower--I got my house for 2.875%, and I only bought it when the housing market was shaken, and then I bought it in a low-income area for $50,000. When you look at the general trend, though, you find that housing prices tend toward a stable point where the sale price plus the interest come to the same total cost, and thus the mortgage payments are the same.
Note I said "trend": the market is volatile, and there isn't a dollar-amount "correct price". In theory, that $120,000 house at 10% mortgage rates is a $1,053/month, 30-year, $379,000 house, and at 4.25% it's going to have a sale price of $215,000 (with a $1,057 payment and $380k total cost). In practice, when people think that house is going to sell for $450,000 two years later, they might actually pay $250k for it and make $1,229 payments, expecting to net $200k (forgetting about the $20k-$40k of interest and closing costs and such, and the risks, but it'd still be a good $150k, right?).
So let's say housing prices don't change like that. Interest plus sale price comes out to the same, regardless of interest rate; houses follow inflation and other economic factors.
We're still left explaining why people paid 28% for housing in 1950 (including utilities) and 33% in 2003.
The average new single-family home in 1950 was 982sqft; in 2003, the average new single-family home size was 2,300 sqft. Note that, to be "average", the market average has to be buying these homes: those 2,300sqft weren't going to the 1% while the middle-class bought hovels. Houses actually got bigger; and, if you look at square footage, the actual cost of housing went down.
That is to say: per 1,000 square feet of shelter, people paid a smaller fraction of the average income.
So why do this? Why spend more of your money on bigger housing? Don't you only need shelter, and the same shelter that always sufficed?
Dude, we're wealthier. We make more shit with the same labor-hours. We buy computers, giant wardrobes of clothing, TVs, appliances, couches, the works. A sprawl of living space is nice, and a luxury we can afford, and so we buy it; and we also simply need bigger houses in which to store all this new crap we can buy.
Over the past century, food, clothing, and personal care items have become a smaller portion of our spending. At the same time, we actually spend more on houses, medical care, and entertainment. We buy or rent larger spaces, we buy more and better medical care (although our medical system has serious issues and is inefficient and expensive--it's just better than 50 years ago), and we still have all this income left over to buy tons and tons of crap like Xbox games and in-home gyms and TVs in every room.
All very interesting. The big take-away is that trade and technical progress increase wealth over time; and I always emphasize that rate is important, because rapidly creating unemployment through new trade and new progress causes economic recessions and other horrible shit. We need progress; but progress requires us to eliminate some jobs while not eliminating the production they provided, and we need to care for the displaced worker (welfare) and let the economy adjust and provide new jobs for them (time). Progress can come only as rapidly as recovery, else you ruin your economy.
You'll find flaws. The ideas are right, but some of the facts are sloppy--those numbers I cited aren't strictly-correct. If adjusted to real-world numbers, you'd see exactly what I described: lower wages means more jobs, higher wages means fewer jobs, and higher labor costs means higher product costs. You get a trade advantage when the reduced cost of production produces prices which more-than-offset the cost of production domestically--when domestic technology or other factors (natural resources, etc.) requires more labor, when domestic wages are higher, or when foreign wages are lower.
That means outsourcing to Canada might produce lower prices, but also a net-loss of American jobs; while outsourcing to China produces a net-gain.
Malthusian population growth actually lets you target labor long-term, because your population will expand to a certain amount of unemployment. Malthus said populations expand in prosperity; I've taken it further by refining the definition of scarcity beyond just "less supply than demand". Scarcity occurs when scaling production rate (volume per time) requires more-than-linear labor.
You have plenty of farmland, and 10% more population needs 10% more food, so you get 10% more farmers out of the new people; but then you run low on GOOD farmland, require more fertilizer and irrigation, and thus more time on that land. After all that, you get lower yield, and so you need to farm more land at this higher labor cost. Now to feed 10% more people, you need 10% more food, and so need 12% more farmers. As you can imagine, paying 12 people's wages costs more than paying 10 people's wages; and if those 12 people make the same amount of food as the last 10 people, that food costs more. Scarcity. Invent GMOs, grow twice as much food per land area, suddenly you're not hitting scarcity.
You might notice that there's actually not less supply than demand above. There's still demand for that much food; just the people buying food have to spend a little more, and so they can't buy as much of something else. That means food is what's scarce, but there's enough food to meet demand; and somebody who is buying food can't afford to buy a car, because food is expensive. Do you know what we call people who can afford food, but can't afford Nintendo and iPhones and non-shitty houses? Poor. You have poor people.
Your entire economy gets poorer. Some product(s) become more-expensive, and so population growth only creates a smaller middle-class and a bigger poor class. Malthusian growth stops your population from expanding as quickly.
So imagine you did outsource to China, and you actually took a small loss on jobs. Sure, the Chinese products are cheaper; but you lost 90,000 jobs and gained 70,000: you just lost 20,000 jobs.
Well, around 360,000 Americans retire every year. If your population winces a little at the economic pressure, Malthusian growth slows you down. It takes 20 years, but you do adjust to the loss, and you end up replacing those laborers with 385,000 new workers per year instead of 395,000.
Meanwhile, we have job growth by actual technical progress, constantly, in many fields. That means we normally create more jobs by laying off no-longer-needed workers, cutting the price of products back a bit, and then having all this extra money to spend. The actual buying power goes up; if it goes up 10% and your wages only keep up for 8%, well, stuff's cheaper still, you're still somewhat richer, and that other 2% can distribute to new jobs.
So technical progress can end up with everyone getting richer (things get cheaper by a total of $1,000 less spent), but with not all of that going to the current workers (inflation makes that $2,000 but you only get $1,600 more wages), and then you get more jobs (the other $400 everyone is missing pays the wages for new people). That's all confusing, and it's easier to just consider: if there are twice as many workers, people must be averaging half as muc
Yes, you can write a balanced article that directly and persistently notates the inaccuracy in the belief that homosexuals are child predators.
You can also write an article that says, "Controversy", subheading, "Pederasty", describing "the concern" that many homosexuals are child predators and will adopt children largely to sodomize and indoctrinate into the gay agenda. In such a style, it appears that this is an open debate of merited concern. You can then claim the article is "balanced".
If you bring up the topic of the homosexuality-pedophilia link to perform a thorough rebuttal, you're not giving weight or credence to that position; if your thorough rebuttal is based on reasonable evidence, you're not producing a biased article. That would be a balanced discussion. If you brought it up as an open concern without exploring merits, you'd give equal weight to both views, where one view in reality has a large weight of evidence behind it and the other does not; that's putting a lot of support behind the unsupportable view, which is not balanced.
That was my point.
As for values, there are actually real facts and solid points behind that, as well. A society should tolerate homosexuality as it does heterosexuality because tolerance is, from a scientific standpoint, a mature defense mechanism. Note that we don't tolerate heterosexuals giving public blowjobs on the front lawn of a high school, and so shouldn't tolerate homosexuals doing such things; we also don't put people in jail for having sex.
Abortion has a lot of real facts surrounding it, as well, most notably that the neurological development of a fetus does not provide consciousness--the brain can't support a sense-of-self until a few weeks (or months) after birth, and earlier-term fetuses have no facilities to speak of (you'll develop things like a brainstem to control the heart and lungs and such first, and then build other pieces, up to the frontal lobe that supports sentient thought). The abortion argument is essentially an argument over whether we want to protect DNA and an imaginary ideal of a person who doesn't yet exist, but realistically could be made to exist in the real world, based on the fact that there are already cells which will become this theoretical person if left alone; we can take the same argument further and say that not having sex constantly prevents the creation of people who could theoretically exist if some bits of existing biological matter were brought together in conception.
Magical thinking is a criteria for schizophrenia-spectrum psychiatric disorders.
Laura Schlessinger sued for copyright infringement and privacy invasion when her boyfriend sold her nudes to a porn site in 1998. He had a judge preside over that trial. The judge told her copyright infringement doesn't work and she's a public figure and doesn't get that kind of privacy protection.
Gawker published Hulk Hoagan's naked sex video in 2015, and then got sued. The idiot lawyer requested a jury trial, and the plaintiff cried crocodile tears for sympathy.
Do you see this post? I'm publishing this post. If you copy and paste it elsewhere, I can't sue you for copyright violation. Slashdot posts at the bottom: "Comments owned by the poster"; however, by publishing this into a public forum, I'm not only publishing a written work not claimed as a copyright work, but I'm publishing in a manner which is common-law considered to be non-copyrightable due to the nature of the material. This post isn't a creative work.
Your titty pictures and private sex tapes aren't creative works, either. Generally, unless it's a pornographic production you created for publication, sex tapes and nudie photos aren't creative works and aren't claimed or claimable as copyrighted.
By contrast, movies in theaters are creative works published as copyrighted material. They're made for publication--they're works. People did work to make them for the purpose of creating a creative work. Their existence isn't incidental of someone's drunken frat party, nor is it selected after-the-fact to be publicized as a property of the creators. At no point prior to its publication was it worked--produced as a creative work, or evaluated for publication as a creative work.
Think about that next time you send a text message: your text message isn't protected by copyright.
The college education thing is more-complex than that. There are arguments for both positions; my argument against individual-responsibility college education is that businesses will get a competitive advantage by hiring, and so a skilled-labor shortage means they have to hire entrants early and leverage them effectively to stay competitive. This works out rather well: it increases productivity (new laborers are working while being developed into skilled laborers) and decreases waste (new laborers aren't all running to college on speculation about the general market, then coming out into a market that wants 400,000 programmers but has 700,000 CompSci programming graduates--that is, the labor of TEACHING PEOPLE IN COLLEGE has been wasted, and could have been used to do other things, such as teaching those people a different skill we actually need).
As for outsourcing itself, it's a trade advantage thing. I used an average Chinese worker cost of $3.50/hr, although $2.50/hr is probably more correct. I worked out that making products in America rather than China would create American jobs only if you pay the American worker less than $18/hr, and would make those products more-expensive; if you pay the American worker more than $18/hr, then you have a net-loss of American jobs (you create like 64,000 and lose 73,000, for example). The break-even point trends in the direction of Chinese wages (e.g. if Chinese labor costs $2.50, you're losing jobs an $18/hr, and you need to pay those Americans less if you want to create American jobs in the process).
That analysis kind of sucks.
Importing a 40-foot shipping container from China costs under $1,300. For men and boys's cotton trousers and shorts, that's 40,000 units, or 6.5 cents per pair. These retail for an average of $14.97, spanning $10 kids's clothes to the $70+ stuff. That $14.97 pair of pants, when adjusting the labor portion up ($6.12), becomes a $50 pair of pants if you're paying American workers $18/hr.
I like to say that your $350 cell phone will cost $1,100, your $500 TV costs $1,500 now, and so forth; but that's not true. The labor portion on the $500 TV is some $487, so you're talking about $3,200 TVs. Computers fully made-in-America would cost over $3,000 at not even the modern level of technology--remember spending $2,000 on a 386 with 8MB of EDO and a 200MB hard disk in 1992?
The long and short of it is we'd lose jobs, we'd have to pay workers less, and all of our money would buy less if we cut back trade. Trade has made America wealthy. People like to repeat that their standard-of-living has gone down as they've gotten poorer since the 90s, with wages stagnating and prices skyrocketing; meanwhile food is a smaller part of their income, cell phones and computers are smaller parts of their incomes, they buy more and better healthcare, they buy more entertainment, they eat out more, their cars have lots of complex suspensions and radios and safety systems, and so forth. People live in bigger houses, they own more stuff, and they spend a greater proportion of their income on entertainment and leisure. They spend it all until they have nothing, and then complain that they're poor. They watch inflation double prices, watch their salary quadruple, and then complain everything is twice as expensive as they conveniently forget they have four times as much money now.
Somehow, people manage to watch unemployment fall and swear we're losing jobs. They pull out some stupid shit about labor force participation rate and a conspiracy theory about the numbers being fake because we don't count everyone; yet a count of the number of employed Americans in 2016 shows it as 4.9% of the labor force, and adjusting it for a labor force size of 67% (the peak) gives under 5.3% unemployment, versus the 10% unemployment peak, and the 6% peak under Bush, and the 5.5% unemployment low-point under bush.
Yes, that's right: if our labor force participation rate was as high as it had been at its peak, right now, an
Low unemployment is probably more to do with social behaviors that control population than anything else. Japan is subject to Malthus, but they do it differently--they breed to 2% unemployment instead of 5%.
Actually, while job outsourcing was happening either way, fewer jobs isn't a thing that's caused by that, in general. Our standard-of-living and our employment rate have increased in a large part due to trade; the other part is due to straight technical progress.
Technology and trade are essentially the same thing: we found a way to do something cheaper. "Cheaper" generally means "with less labor", although in the real world it's labor cost (people tell me cows aren't spherical; this is why they're not). In the long run, "Cheaper" absolutely means "with less labor".
The assembly line made more things-per-hour with the same number of working hands than the artisan process. Seven men carving and producing chairs makes chairs slowly compared to a series of seven men each producing chair parts with the last guy on the end assembling those parts. You only need as many chairs as the chairmakers used to make? Well, we don't need as many chair makers! If chairmaker wages don't increase, well... we're paying less in wages. Cost falls.
The same is true of power tools, the power loom, automation, and even project management. We find ways to invest less time in making things. This has happened since man learned to hunt more-effectively than the first man--and then again with the spear, with the stone-tipped spear, with the bronze age, with the hot-blast furnace (84,000 tonnes of iron produced with the same labor required to produce 400 tonnes by the prior process), with rail shipping (made possible by the hot-blast furnace), and with electricity and then power tools and computers.
Because of how economies work, how markets shift, and the mathematical dissimilarity in changing costs, it's both logistically and mathematically impossible for businesses to just take profit. Even simpler than that, we've eliminated almost every job that's ever existed; why are there so many jobs today? It's because money given to the top doesn't trickle down; but productivity causes shifts in economics that distribute additional wealth unevenly to everyone.
The average American family in 1950 had some $4,200 of annual income, and spent $1,400 of it on food. Today, the average American family has $55,000 of annual income, and spends $6,600 on food. Compare those. 55,000 / 4,200 ~= 13; 13 * 1,400 = $18,200. You don't spend $18,200 on food! Not only that, but the very-poor (minimum wage) spend about 16% of their income on food ($2,600, instead of $5,400).
If American companies are now bailing and leaving jobs behind, or if Americans are now forced to pay for American labor for some things and have less to spend on other things (fewer jobs, and less stuff bought with all your money), then Americans are becoming poorer--and that's not normal. Trade and technical progress are what create wealth. Protectionism like this--tariffs and other trade barriers--reduce it.
Do note this is all dependent on time. Prices don't come down automatically when costs come down; the economy is complex, and it causes pressure on prices. A robust economy will lose jobs to technical progress in many fields at once, while old laborers retire, and while new laborers enter the workforce. Over 360,000 Americans retire every year; slightly more enter the workforce (population growth). Imagine GM losing 10,000 employees per year. 10,000 retiring factory line workers, 10,000 new computer programmers. That's essentially masking that the loss of GM line workers (and their spending money) is coming as the prices for something else that laid off workers are finally coming down to their resting point, and so people are buying Netflix and Spotify with the extra money (hence the computer programmers). It looks stable, but it's really just diversified.
If you suddenly automate 100% of the domestic freight truck industry in 6 months with self-driving cars, your economy goes into an enormous recession as unemployment goes through the fucking roof.
"Wiping out" an industry would be destructive, in the sense that suddenly destroying hundreds of thousands of jobs would be a shock that created lots of unemployment. Bleeding it out over decades isn't, if it reduces product costs, because jobs move, population changes, and the amount of consumer purchasing power increases as a result.
Now there may be times when tariffs are useful, particularly in response to a foreign country dumping, or where they started throwing tariffs on first,
Actually, if a foreign country is throwing up tariffs, they're hurting their own wealth. If we have an export, we can just keep selling it off to everyone else. It'd be nice to have that cash flow, for sure; however, tariffs in retaliation essentially say, "We're $1/hr poorer, so let's make sure we spend $1 more on everything!", which is compounding the problem.
I did a write-up on this recently. The short version is bringing manufacture back from China will cause a net loss of American jobs if we pay any more than $18/hr (GM line worker makes $21/hr), so we'd have to create the lowest-income jobs we could. All of these jobs come out of the same pool of total income over any unique time period, so we have to eliminate other American jobs--we only create more American jobs by lowering the average American income. You'd see things like a $15 pair of pants costing $50, a $350 cell phone costing $1,100, the $500 TVs costing $1,500, while the amount of income doesn't increase--people becoming poorer.
The dirty secret is I don't feel like doing the analysis right. I did it right for clothing; but TVs and cell phones are made from a lot of Chinese labor, and carry a much smaller domestic share. Shipping cost is higher (maybe 50 times higher--$3.25 instead of 6.5 cents), but the domestic costs to retail are the same. That $14.97 pair of pants had a $6.055 share of labor, a 6.5 cent share of international shipping, and a $8.91 share of domestic shipping and retail. Domestic shipping is paltry; if we overestimate it at 6.5 cents there, then what? That $500 52-inch TV? It's $12.16 of domestic labor, $487.84 of Chinese labor. By my numbers, that's $3,161.40 of American labor at $18/hr (the break-even point, where we lose no jobs), and of course it's a $3,173 TV now.
Think about what that means for TVs, cell phones, computers. You see what it means for clothes: $50 pairs of pants and no more jobs--that pair of pants might cost $25.21, if we pay $8.25/hr minimum wage; and how will these factory workers afford clothes? Well I guess a 68% bump in price isn't that bad for people making $16,500/year.
What about cars?
Seriously. Electronic fuel injection, engine management systems, radios, CD players, anti-lock brake sensors. Might bump the price of a car up a few thousand; fortunately most of the cost is just plain steel, right?
nVidia chips are fabricated in Taiwan, and may go to Korea. They're cheap! Those SOCs cost $25. Similar-complexity Intel chips manufactured in the US cost $150-$200. What happens when your $300 processor also needs a $1,500, 256GB SSD--no, that's stupid, sorry, you're buying an $800, 1TB hard disk (scaling down isn't cheaper). Let's not forget the $100 made-in-China motherboard that's now $550-$600. We're getting into $3,000+ PCs--back to 1992 with you!
People, somehow, think this will create jobs and make them richer.
All men do not have a giant, basso larynx, no. They all have a larynx that projects a male voice, even if it's a higher-tone male voice. Male voices have a lower and higher register, with the natural tone in the lower register; female voices have a more-dynamic higher register with greater range.
Women have a greater lumbar curve and an anterior-tilted pelvis, rather than a posterior-tilted pelvis as men. This doesn't just make them walk with an exaggerated hip-swing; it allows them greater and smoother pivoting, giving better balanced and control while walking.
People overcome environmental development factors; but they don't scrub the impact from their personalities. Absolutely every experience in your life defines how you think and act; when you change your thinking, your new basis is built on thoughts and ideals which were built on your old basis. You can learn to tolerate or better-understand the things you were originally more-sensitive about; and you can become mindful of and sympathetic to the things you were less-sensitive about; but you'll never develop a pathological, immature lack of emotional control, or the psychological hot-buttons that get masked over by growing out of it.
Even someone like me is plainly-obvious to read through. My current positions, beliefs, and regards toward everything are built completely from scratch; yet you can read my parents's ideals if you look for the cracks, given the right probing. Think about how that works when you're dealing with a person's basic behavior--what makes them who they are. Do you really think these people live in a deep schizophrenic dissociative episode where they've invented a fantasy identity in their head that grew up in a different world, with different parents, with different experiences, and then forgotten who they were and what really happened, replacing themselves with this new person with false memories?
You're still trying to justify people as people, and imagine them as individuals with control over their destiny and value as persons and whatever. I thought everyone was faking the whole love-and-relationships thing until I was 26, and I still kind of don't believe people really do the dating and marriage thing for any reason other than that they feel pressured into an expected lifestyle. You want to fit people into a generic mold so you can label them; I have to evaluate if a person is a good person or a bad person at every interaction, even though I remember they were an asshole yesterday and know they're probably still an asshole today--but they might not be. I'm looking at all the little changes in tone in the paint on the machine, the imperfections in the surface, and the hums and vibrations coming from the mechanisms inside; you're not.
You'd probably tell chicken sexers they're just voodoo con artists.
Asking for a better approach is usually the last refuge of people who can't prove themselves right. You're also opening yourself up for much of the other arguments I made by claiming what you intuitively expect from the word "balanced": most people expect "balanced" to equate to "informative" and, by extension, "correct."
I maintain that giving less-credible positions similar weight to credible positions is not balance. It would not be balanced to write an article on homosexual adoption that gave equal weight to both the rights of homosexual couples and the ethics of leaving children with a group of people known to be mostly child-predators.
I would question the evidence due to the under-reporting issue you point out, although I'd imagine it's out there and has reasonably-identifiable error bars.
Interestingly, there are statistics for number of murders committed per 100,000 persons, and specific statistics for number of murders committed by both Muslim immigrants (including refugees) and their children (from immigrant families across the last 20-30 years). Last time I dug through the numbers, the Americans committed 20 times as many murders per capita as the Muslims. If we assume Muslim terrorists are generally murderers (a weak-ish assumption, although it's more-likely that most murderers aren't terrorist and most terrorist are murderers than the opposite), that means Trump's insinuation that Muslim refugees and immigrants over the past decades are a flood of mostly-terrorists is actually not backed by facts--and also that red-blooded Americans are 20 times worse than Muslim refugees, on average (most likely concentrated in poverty-stricken, gang-riddled cities).
I haven't identified any information that makes me leery of Muslim refugees; and I'm pretty confident the information on that is pretty solid, especially compared to information about undocumented immigrants.
I'm usually more interested in his faulty economics arguments.
Transvestites are ALSO unnerving, for other reasons--to the same effect: I let them do their thing and stay away from all that.
As for what I believe about someone or not, you seem to be overestimating how easily a man can convert themselves into a woman, or vice-versa. The number of tells span adjustable major development that occurred early in life (such as larynx shape and size--hormone therapy alters this, but doesn't rebuild it from scratch), integral physical characteristics (such as the shape of the pelvis and the associated gait--it is physically-impossible for a man to walk like a woman and vice-versa), and environmental development factors (growing up biologically as one gender places you under the social pressures of that gender, impressing certain behaviors from what people expect of you; the conflict in self-image creates a type of behavioral distortion, and the attempt to change gender-role behavior is always imperfect).
Again: you look at a person and assess what they are. I don't. I can't. I don't see people; I don't see human beings. What I see are behaviors, movements, physical characteristics, patterns, differences. I'm different. I don't understand the concept of family--everyone tries to explain it by describing a situation in which anyone would understand a certain social, emotional sense of belonging or bonding or some bullshit, and I've never experienced that and it took me until I was 26-ish to start maybe-believing that people aren't full of shit (and I'm still uncertain). I don't have friends. Without that ability to socially-bond, I couldn't integrate anyone's value system; I developed my own, which means I've determined that it is the duty of the strong to protect the weak, but I also don't specially value children and so have given people confused looks when they tried to explain that all people consider certain things universally important such as protecting children.
You're a million tiny details, but you're more than that: you're a handful of simple details which, themselves, are spans of ranges of smaller details, which are themselves spans of ranges of even smaller details. When one of those small details doesn't quite fit, you're a disturbance; and then I identify what you are. That "what" isn't just the final category (black, white, gay, whatever), but all the little pieces; the final category is just an easy handle.
You only think you're nothing more nor less than a person; and people think they're special, when they're really not. 3% of the population is like me, and only 1% of those are ever identified, which is why we're invisible to professionals: they don't have enough data to pick us out, and give a misdiagnosis. I'm different, but I'm also rather common.
None of that matters. When you encounter someone who makes you uncomfortable, the only mature option is to identify if they're doing anything actually harmful, and simply cope if not. Avoidance is one way to cope. Crusading to rid the world of those icky people you don't like is pathological.
They provided a definition of "balanced", yes. My point is more that "balanced" is hard to measure and that their definition has procedural flaws.
There's a secondary issue in that people already perceive the concept of "fair" and "balanced" as a positive thing, and so will tend to accept a reasonable ideal of what "balanced" might mean and then accept conclusions. That means a large amount of the population won't scrutinize the semantics in the way I did, and then will accept that a certain set of information is more-accurate because of the emotional sense of a lack of bias, fairness, and other ideals which provide comfort.
At this point, we're getting into complex psychology and persuasive argument. As you say, measuring things against the amount of actual evidence included and excluded and on the emphasis on that evidence would show something akin to reliability. Science can be wrong; it tends to be less-wrong than other approaches, and to improve its correctness over time. At the same time, it's possible to emphasize poorly-supported conclusions and de-emphasize strongly-supported conclusions--for example by talking at length and in detail about something which is plausible given the evidence but unlikely, while talking scantly on something which is almost-certain given large volumes of high-quality evidence. We can abuse science as much as anything else.
That doesn't even get into the Einstein trick--drawing large conclusions from small sets of data. I use that methodology a lot, and frequently to great effect (so much so that I independently re-discovered a large amount of modern macroeconomics in a few days of examining a very small set of samples spanning economic history, including everything Malthus was right about, the advantages of trade, and how technical progress affects an economy, without actually bothering to read up on economics); however, you tend to either be surprisingly-correct or hilariously-wrong for the dumbest reasons. Einstein conjecturing works when you have enough data points to align your trajectory properly; if you're a few degrees off and you reach too far, you miss by enormous margins (often going completely backwards). Usually you want to use it as a guide to figure out what data points you need to improve your understanding, and to verify your facts (i.e. if what you've worked out is true, many things should also be true; are they?).
Stuff like that lets you (cautiously) extend well-established science to further conclusions; compare that against some other fringe-science, and you might find the poorly-supported view is ridiculous--or that it makes a lot of sense, and merits more examination.
Strict analysis is hard. Wikipedia's policy tries to avoid stuff like people drawing long, unsupported bullshit conclusions (Einstein conjecturing ending in stupidity) by banning original research; that doesn't stop people from cherry-picking research, giving you what might look like a strongly-scientific article when really it's a load of horse shit.
Actually, slavery as an economic institution is interesting.
Slaves are efficient in situations where the cost of freedom and free workers is high; however, they're not exactly free. Raising a slave-child requires feeding and caring for something that does nothing useful for over a decade; while kidnapping a new slave from far away is a wasteful and expensive exercise. Adult slaves are useful, but must be fed and cared for; they become less-useful when sick, injured, and exhausted, and then require replacement when they can't be recovered to a healthy-enough state to produce more than their upkeep. Caring for slaves is, thus, expensive; it's less-expensive than alternatives in certain types of poor societies.
In a free economy, we let people breed on their own. They come sign up for work. Population grows to exceed prosperity (Malthusian growth--a very old theory, but one that's roughly-correct), and you get about 4%-8% unemployment. These people work, produce, and then are given a portion of their production to keep; they purchase things, increasing the amount sellable and thus the amount of profit for the richer; and they must purchase their own means of survival, taking the cost and risk of slave upkeep off the employer.
The important economic principle of a free society is simple: If an individual becomes too poor to survive, he dies, and we capitalize on his efforts until that point and avoid most of the costs (and distribute what remains); if the great span of any level of your labor force becomes too poor to survive (notably, minimum-income households), your labor force collapses and your economy fails.
In other words: a nation which doesn't fit into the narrow set of conditions for which slavery makes economic sense actually functions better with a free labor force, because that labor force's well-being is tied to its productivity, and thus laborers work and businesses provide wage sufficient for survival in general. The loss of a slave costs someone a lot of wasted productivity (expressed as money), while the loss of a free laborer who fails financially costs less and is distributed pretty broadly across the entire economy.
As nations become wealthier, the expense of robust welfare falls, while its benefits grow. Early welfare systems used poor houses: we couldn't afford to pay for the poor's survival, so we placed them into what are essentially work-prisons and made them produce, thus lowering the net-cost of caring for the poor by deriving wealth from them. As European and American nations became more-wealthy, unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, and other social programs arose, costing little enough to not harm the economy while benefiting us with the maintenance of the bottom of the labor force. These programs protect the laborer, and they save us the trouble of part of the labor force dying off in poverty--because a reserve laborer (unemployed) is essentially-free, while a dead reserve laborer cannot be employed until some child is grown into an adult ready for labor, at obviously-great expense.
Now, stronger welfare systems are becoming popular, such as specific forms of universal basic incomes (e.g. a universal social security). Such systems cost less if your nation is sufficiently-wealthy--that is: in a rich nation, taxes don't increase on the wealthy, and they sharply-decrease as you move toward the lower incomes. They better stabilize the poor, reducing the cost of damage to the reserve labor force. Most importantly, they increase job replacement rate and spread out job reduction over time: rapid technical progress (e.g. automation) causes its job-reducing impact over a wider time span, and restores lost jobs more-quickly, reducing the severity of associated recessions. This leads to more-stable economies and wealthier nations.
Slavery isn't automatically prosperity because slaves aren't free, and they aren't even particularly efficient.
We exterminated the Native Americans. There are shitloads of blacks in America, and a few sad indigenous peoples on a contractually-provided reservation or intermingled with population. Black people are a social issue: they're outside, getting shot by trigger-happy police, working in McDonalds, teaching in schools, robbing liquor stores, driving cars, and riding bicycles--all the things people in your society do. Native Americans are a walking novelty: if a Cherokee dude shows up in a school, it's most likely so we can use him as a display piece for a history lesson about some far-away culture nobody cares about anymore.
More blacks are from poverty-stricken areas, so they behave like poverty-stricken people: they adapt to their environment, and that's generally-maladaptive in poverty environments. Baltimore and Detroit are full of good people--98% of whom are black--and also full of gangs and murders and crime; and even those good people struggle because they're poor and they have little long-term security to work with, so risking the time to stand back and examine your life and make large changes is risking fatal financial failure and subsequent homelessness. They care less about making too much noise and sounding like vulgar hicks and more about socializing with the neighbors and not getting robbed--and also about paying the bills.
When you look at Haiti or Africa, there's no real trade--kind of like Cuba or Mexico. Look at all the white people in Romania--an extremely-poor nation--or some of the less-affluent Slovakian states--Khazakistanis are pretty pure caucasians, and they look exotic to normal white folk in America (the eyes look almost Asian, but they're not). Out here, we identify the model white folk as Aryan, the kind of Nordic genetic line that stands out as whiter-than-white. Still, some of those poorer nations are, in fact, full of white folk.
Africa is a mess because of no useful trade. Africa has historically been raided: we traded them junk for gold, ivory, and diamonds long ago; and the French and English invaded, colonized, and outright stole those resources. Technology wasn't properly shared, and economic development wasn't stimulated; we only needed people to work the mines.
This is actually part of the nature of trade. Africa had gold, diamonds, ivory, things that we didn't have; and they only needed labor to get the things for us. We didn't need them to make food, or generate power, or trade spices. They gave us what we wanted, and they were so undeveloped at the time that we crushed them with bad trade deals--brute-force-invasion or simply conning them out of their goods with shiny baubles.
North-East Africa could become a highly-civilized, wealthy nation readily. At this point, geothermal power is viable technology; and NE-Africa has an enormous geothermal hot spot. We've also conjectured they could produce lots of power via solar. Either way, they could sell that to Europe--and the rest of Africa, were there something to take in trade. The issue here is Africa can't self-bootstrap in this way, and would need European aid to procure and install new technology so as to enable them to engage in such trade and build an actual civilization.
That's an interesting consideration in itself, because Europe would benefit from such a deal as well. If Africa can produce enough power to significantly supply Europe, then Europe can supply Africa with things like food, medicine, and computer technology--things Africa doesn't have the skill or capital to produce, and would need to expend enormous resources for otherwise. If Africa is advantaged enough by that trade to sell the power to Europe for less cost than Europe can produce its own (optimally, less labor; but if they undersell their labor to sell cheap power and then buy medical supplies for much less than it'd cost them to produce their own, they're ahead), then Europe frees up costs (and labor) from producing power. Europe then can expend the difference in labor (lost jobs) to m
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To be fair, the machinations of economics are highly-complex and nonobvious. Common sense dictates the exact opposite of practically everything a close examination of economics will reveal. I doubt a second-grader could call bullshit on anything.
Look at minimum wage. Minimum wage puts more money into the hands of low-income earners. They can then spend more, which means they can buy more, which means more jobs because spending makes the economy go. Makes sense, right? Easy. Common sense should tell you that.
Wages are paid from revenue; revenue is paid from consumer spending; spending comes from income; and income is a product of time. That means there's only a finite amount of total income in a given time span--say, a year. 2015, America had $15.4 trillion of total income; 2014, it was $14.8 trillion; and the difference is from net exports (which are negative) and bank loans (central bank issues money, banks are allowed to loan more, consumers take loans to buy things, that money enters the economy). Raising someone's wage doesn't actually create money; and the total of all income (including that increased wage) can only be spent at the rate of income.
Well, if wages come from revenue, you must increase prices--not like the Conservative line of doubling prices when minimum wage goes up, but more that raising MW from $7.25 to $15 will cause that $8 value meal to cost $8.17. Those price increases combine for a total dollar amount (265 billion customers served by fast food per year; 17 cents increase; $45.05 billion), which represents a number of full-time, minimum-wage jobs ($45.05 billion / ($7.25/hr * 2000hr/year), 3.1 million jobs). Because those 17 cents are spent on one thing, they can't be spent on another; therefor the jobs to produce and retail that other thing can't draw revenue; thus we can't employ those people.
So raising minimum wage reduces jobs. It does this essentially by making everyone slightly-poorer, by unemploying some minimum-wage workers, and by compensating the remaining MW workers enough that their lower-buying-power dollars still stack up to a greater amount of buying power.
That's exactly the opposite of what common sense tells us.
This works for trade (FOUR TIMES--immediate employment impacts, long-term employment impacts, wealth impacts of "making more things", and wealth impacts by the effect on prices), technical progress (new technology's entire function is to eliminate labor time invested in production, thus reducing jobs; we recover the jobs, reduce scarcity, and create more jobs, causing population growth until scarcity sets back in), and even basic concepts like scarcity (I'm the guy who re-defined scarcity as the situation in which a proportional increase in production requires a larger proportional increase in labor, which means there are situations where e.g. food is scarce while the supply of food is in no danger of falling below the demand).
A lot of people even manage to miss the factor of time entirely. Trade and technical progress make us wealthy, and they do so by creating unemployment: either of these will eliminate someone's job, either by sending it offshore or by having 4 people do the same work as 5 by using a shiny new tool of which 1 person can make 1,000 (i.e. for every 1,000 people you unemploy, you create 1 job making the new tool). This lowers costs; and over time, the economic pressures pushing price back to a certain profit margin (i.e. closer to cost) increase, lowering prices. That allows us to create replacement jobs. If you eliminate jobs too rapidly, you destroy your economy; the automation nightmare everyone on Slashdot cries about will happen if it happens overnight. If you eliminate jobs slowly, your economy just gets wealthier; if that automation happens over years and decades, unemployment will wobble a little, while prices fall to a pittance and individual wealth increases rapidly.
It takes a lot more than the average American has time for to identify how economics works.
Trade can create or destroy jobs, typically in small magnitude for small effects. Go 3 paragraphs down for the funny part.
Numbers. Importing a 40-foot long shipping container from China costs under $1,300. They hold 40,000 pants or jackets, at a unit cost of 6.5 cents per each to import. Chinese labor averages roughly $3.50/hr, including wage and social insurances. The import share of MBCT (essentially, the cost of Chinese labor) is $6.12 per unit.
Men and Boys's Cotton Trousers imported from China, for example, represent $1.197 billion (of $2,760 billion) imports into America (versus $2,230 billion exports). If we stopped importing MBCT from China and made them in America, we'd lose jobs if we paid all Americans involved (factory workers, people maintaining the factories, machinists, the people at the power plant, the people making the fuel to generate power, etc) above $18/hr, and gain American jobs if we paid below $18/hr.
Paying the Americans $21/hr ($23.85 when you include benefits and payroll taxes), we would create 50,627 American jobs, and lose 59,627 American jobs. That's a net-loss of 8,630 jobs. For that loss, the average $14.97 price of MBCT would rise to $50.57. At an $8.25/hr minimum wage, we would create nearly American 20,000 jobs, and only raise the average price of MBCT to just over $25.
So here's the best bit: this only matters for a short time. Population grows faster or slower based on scarcity or, as per Malthus, on abundance: if there's overall more wealth, there's less poverty, and population expands until the general effect of poverty causes a slowing of growth.
If blocking trade loses jobs (e.g. in Ohio), then the number of unemployed will decrease in as little as 3-5 years (largely by people going into early retirement at 59 1/2 instead of getting bigger benefits at 70 1/2, in America; also by the poor dying). If blocking trade creates jobs, then the number of job-seekers will expand (partly by discouraged workers becoming active, by less early-retirement, and by less poverty extending lifespans; in the long run, by faster population growth). The opposite is also true: whether trade creates jobs or loses jobs, the employment impact is null within half a generation.
Those pants, however, will stay expensive if you reduce trade.
That goes for things like TVs also. Taiwanese and Korean semiconductors assembled onto Chinese circuit boards and cases in Chinese factories. 52 inch flat screen TV imports to America for $1.80 per unit in a 40-foot container. $487 labor share for a $500 TV. For $21/hr American factory workers making the chips, the screens, the boards, and the plastic components, it's a $3,300 TV; for $8.25/hr minimum wage, it's a $1,450 TV.
Without trade, TVs, computers, cell phones, and the like are luxury goods bought by the same kind of people who buy a Tesla Model S for $85,000 today. Are you going to spend $3,000 or more on a computer, plus $1000+ on the monitor, and buy yourself a new $1,800-$2,500 smart phone every 2-3 years? Even if we go with minimum wage jobs, what minimum-wage worker is going to buy a $1,500 television, or an $8,000 television, or a $2,000 phone?
Bernie Sanders says a lot of things starting with "you don't need a Ph.D. in economics to understand...." Maybe, if he had Ph.D. in Economics, he wouldn't say stupid shit about trade being bad for Americans. Nobody wants to think past "Mexican picking vegetables? An American can pick vegetables!" to "how much would that raise the price of the vegetables? After spending that extra on food, how much less would Americans have to spend on other things? How many jobs does that represent?"
People are dumb enough to think money comes into existence when you receive your paycheck, and can't fathom that there's a finite amount of money in every time frame--2015 had $15.4 trillion of total income because $15.4 trillion of stuff was bought, and the extra $0.6 trillion over 2014 came from a combination of e
Well it's been determined and upheld that public figures have less of a claim to privacy because everybody is trying to get in on their private life. You seem to not like this, but legally you're wrong.
Of course it is protected by copyright. You can cite it, but not copy it. And if you are referring to /. I suggest to scroll down the page and read what is written in the lower right corner.
Do you mean the part where I said, "Slashdot posts at the bottom: 'Comments owned by the poster'"? Yes, I said that in my last message. Read it again.
I also said you will lose any copyright case in any court attempting to claim copyright infringement on comments you made in a public forum. If I copy a bunch of Slashdot discussions into a book and sell it as an omnibus on social commentary, Slashdot has no claim because they don't own those messages. If the individual posters come to sue for infringement, they will all lose because their statements in a public forum are not copyrightable.
Your comments here are non-copyrightable for the same reason everything you say is non-copyrightable. If you are at a party and you start talking at length about the presidency, someone can publish a book with a written transcript of everything you said, and it's not copyrightable; yet if you publish a written transcript of song lyrics, speeches, or the dialogue of plays and movies, that is covered by copyright--even though those things were not delivered as written transcript, but as spoken language. A transcription is a derivative work.
Your comments here are not a creative work; they're dialogue. You can copyright literary works; musical works, including any accompanying words; dramatic works, including any accompanying music; pantomimes and choreographic works; pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works; motion pictures and other audiovisual works; sound recordings; and architectural works. Impromptu speeches and discourses delivered are not considered copyrightable; because dialogue is made in text on the Internet, dialogue in a discussion forum is an impromptu speech or dialogue, and non-copyrightable.
This is all legally well-understood.
It doesn't work that way. If you got a 30-year fixed mortgage in 1993 at a rate of 2.875%, and rates go up to 35% in 1995, guess what? You pay 2.875%.
If you have a 7/5 ARM, then your rate goes up to 3.875% in 2000, 4.875% in 2005, 5.875% in 2010, and so forth, until it's paid off or reaches the current prime rate. In 1993, the nominal median income was $30,404; in 2000, it was $41,446, or 36% higher. The actual purchasing power increase was 14.5%; the 36% happens because of inflation--each dollar is worth less, and there are more than enough additional dollars to compensate (this happens because of trade and technical progress making each labor-hour capable of producing more, thus a given wage will be capable of purchasing more per hour worked).
So the ARM loan's mortgage goes up by 1%. Payment goes from $622/month in 1993 to $688/month in 2000, an increase of 10.6%. Income should be roughly 36% higher; even minimum wage went from $4.25 (1993) to $5.15 (2000), an increase of 21.2%.
So maybe you should be careful with ARM loans--especially 3/1 loans or 5/1 loans. In general, ARM loans can give you an enormous advantage if handled properly; whereas if you're doing a 3/1 because you think you're flipping the house in 2 years, and then house prices crash because of a mortgage rate hike, you're going to get fucked.
The most-popular mortgage is the 30-year fixed mortgage, and fixed rate mortgages make up almost 90% of all mortgages. ARM loans make up 11% of new mortgages; and unfortunately, the most popular ARM loan is the 5/1, rather than the more-stable 5/5 or 7/5. ARM loans typically limit rate increases to 1% per term; The /5 ARM loans give time for your measly 2%-per-year raise to keep up, while the 7/5 loans give you a 7-year delay so as to improve your financial position and give you inflation leverage against the ARM when the rates adjust. /1 loans will fuck you up.
So no, most people aren't going to get screwed over by their mortgage rate suddenly skyrocketing; although the popular 5/1 ARM puts you in that dangerous position. Even with a 5/5 or 7/5 ARM, the early low-interest rate would lower your payments compared to a 30-year fixed, and would leave the increase in payments after adjustment terms lagging behind the increase in income even at minimum wage. If you can afford the 30-year fixed, taking the 5/5 or 7/5 ARM and making the 30-year payment will pull your balance down further, giving you a stronger position against the 1% rate increases at each adjustment term.
Your argument seems kind of akin to the thinking that we should ban alcohol because people aren't responsible enough to take care of their bodies and will drink too much. You're also completely-ignoring the market of new buyers, and by extension the next generation. I described why housing prices fluctuate as they do, and how much people end up paying for shelter, and how shelter costs change over long spans of time--say, 1900 to 1950 to 2000; you started arguing about things that happen when you're financially-irresponsible and get yourself into bad contracts, which has little to do with the price of housing (and, in context, has to do with changes in mortgage prime rates, but nothing to do with the absolute value of a mortgage prime rate on its own).
What exactly are you trying to do? You seem to be jumping away from topics at hand and arguing that some other ideal would cause a problem. That looks like an attempt to imply the original assertion was wrong--even though the original assertion was on a different matter of fact. It's not a very good attempt, considering your new assertions are factually-wrong.
If it went into immediate effect, it would increase the likelihood of being able to switch the election; and it would make people's votes matter in states that are solid. Why would you ever vote in Maryland if you're a Republican? Why bother in Texas if you're a Democrat?
The NPVIC claims it will increase voter turn-out, so why aren't they working to increase voter turn-out by making it possible for voters to turn an election? What if you're a Democrat in a thoroughly-blue state like New York, and you think that the Republican popular vote will turn Maryland red? Your vote can prevent that. If you're a Democrat in a thoroughly-red state like Texas, your vote can make the difference between a Republican Maryland victory and subsequent Presidency or a Maryland that goes Democrat. If you're a Republican anywhere, your vote can help flip those thoroughly-blue states to red.
Prices don't go down because banks and businesses are nice; they go down because of demand.
If interest rates rise, that $350,000 house with the $1,200 mortgage payment becomes a $300,000 house with a $3,600/month mortgage payment. Note that interest rates aren't part of money; who do you think is going to buy all these houses now?
Banks don't set principle amounts, either. Once you buy a house, your interest rate is fixed (ARM-agreements aside, and even then, it's usually 1% per adjustment period--7/5 ARM is 1% per 5 years after the first 7 years, for example). The sale prices drop because a seller goes to sell his $350,000 house and the same buyers are coming, with maybe $1,500/month available, looking for a $1,200/month house, and you're trying to get them to buy it for $3,600/month.
So now you have the same houses and the same buyers; but many fewer buyers can buy. You can't sell unless you lower the price. In realtor speak, your home value plummets.
You seem to be trying to argue that banks will raise your interest rate as prime rates go up, and your payments will skyrocket. That happens only in ARM contracts, and you can control those contracts in a number of ways--like getting a fixed rate to start with. The interest rates affect new sales, and people walking in with $5 aren't going to be able to buy the Hope Diamond.
Dude, Alaska already doesn't matter. They have like 4 electoral votes. You may as well not bother voting if you're in Alaska; it's not like your voice is added to the election.
The NPVIC is dumb.
What candidate has ever won by 270 votes? What candidate has won by 135 votes?
Trump won by 36 votes, meaning 73 votes would flip this election the other way. There are 165 votes available to turn in the current compact, and every single one of those voted for Hillary, giving no traction this time. In 2000, the compact would have switched from Bush to Gore.
So at 165 votes, there's a potential to change or not change the election; but it's enough to have weight. It's enough that a Republican in Maryland might conclude his vote will actually count, and a Democrat in Texas might come to the same. Maybe more people would vote; and then what?
So wait, Trump got the election with only 270,000 votes behind? That's a smudge; of course he should win even though he has fewer.
If you bring it up in order to perform a rebuttal, true. However, if you bring it up because that's a widely-held belief (from one side of the debate, but without empirical evidence) and then present the rebuttal because that's another widely-held belief (from the other side, which has empirical evidence) then you've written a balanced article.
Actually, if you bring it up because it's a widely-held belief that is empirically-wrong, you're addressing a topic which your readers will frequently raise to themselves, with likely-wrong conclusions. Bringing it up in order to demolish it is informative and correct.
If you bring up both sides and simply cover that there is an argument, but don't point out that the body of evidence has firmly suggested that one side is full of lunatics and the other is actually correct, you've presented a "controversy" with equal weight to both sides. In other words: if you don't show that the correct side has much more weight behind it, you're holding up the incorrect side and pushing back against the correct side, which is bias.
If you really want to understand the pro-life view you should study it, but the basic definition in question is that human life begins at conception.
It's an ethical argument centering around the ideal that you're committing harm against a person. Harm against a person is wrong because it induces suffering--you can support absolute definitions of "right" and "wrong" by showing that people seek security, and so a society which does not protect people from suffering will have problems up to and including collapse because the insecure portion will lash out against the perceived threat of a society which refuses to protect it.
People essentially want society to protect them from harm; we develop different ideals of what harms us, and so these become our morals, values, and ethics; although ethics are really procedures-. We develop an ethic because a thorough examination of a complex moral problem suggests a certain approach where a different approach would possibly provide a better long-term benefit but might produce unacceptable harm in trade. For example: human experimentation on the terminally-ill or a few children here and there would provide great benefits to society--and would place us all under the immediate and continuous threat of somehow being tortured and mangled, either at the end of our life or at the beginning of it. That terrifies people, so we don't do it; you could easily argue that such experimentation greatly-reduces suffering in total and is the right thing to do, but it would still harm society's ability to provide us with security.
The argument you gave suggests that an abortion is harming a person--the fetus. This doesn't actually place a standing threat against anyone: by the time you can become aware of such a threat to yourself, it's over; you don't actually come to exist as a person by then (no brain capable of sentience).
People are apt to force behaviors on others because they want others to behave in a way they accept and to not behave in ways they don't accept. That has little to do with personal security; it's more related to xenophobia and racism, where something is different and thus is harder to predict, thus bothers you. Life would take less effort if everyone held your own beliefs; forcing them to at least adhere to them is a step in that direction, and reduces the number of things happening that you might not expect or want to think about.
The reason they define human life as beginning at conception is it gives them an argument. It lets them say there's a reason. They're probably not conscious of this; it's more-likely that the behavior upsets them because they think it's wrong for what it is, and accepting that this view is not supportable and not necessarily correct is upsetting. Defining human life as a pile of chemicals with no being and no meaning, no different than a swirl of pureed beef liver in
Shelter is actually interesting.
Housing prices generally don't change: people are willing to pay a certain amount per month, following inflation. At the same time, housing is highly-speculative: people will perceive that houses will become more-expensive, and so will pay more for them, for a time, thus putting themselves into debts with bigger payments and larger total costs.
When mortgage prime rates fall, housing sale prices increase to match. The 2000s market was essentially a big dialogue of "Housing prices are going to go UP UP UP, so buy now and it's an investment!" and people talking about doubling and tripling their money. This happened while interest rates kept falling lower and lower--I got my house for 2.875%, and I only bought it when the housing market was shaken, and then I bought it in a low-income area for $50,000. When you look at the general trend, though, you find that housing prices tend toward a stable point where the sale price plus the interest come to the same total cost, and thus the mortgage payments are the same.
Note I said "trend": the market is volatile, and there isn't a dollar-amount "correct price". In theory, that $120,000 house at 10% mortgage rates is a $1,053/month, 30-year, $379,000 house, and at 4.25% it's going to have a sale price of $215,000 (with a $1,057 payment and $380k total cost). In practice, when people think that house is going to sell for $450,000 two years later, they might actually pay $250k for it and make $1,229 payments, expecting to net $200k (forgetting about the $20k-$40k of interest and closing costs and such, and the risks, but it'd still be a good $150k, right?).
So let's say housing prices don't change like that. Interest plus sale price comes out to the same, regardless of interest rate; houses follow inflation and other economic factors.
We're still left explaining why people paid 28% for housing in 1950 (including utilities) and 33% in 2003.
The average new single-family home in 1950 was 982sqft; in 2003, the average new single-family home size was 2,300 sqft. Note that, to be "average", the market average has to be buying these homes: those 2,300sqft weren't going to the 1% while the middle-class bought hovels. Houses actually got bigger; and, if you look at square footage, the actual cost of housing went down.
That is to say: per 1,000 square feet of shelter, people paid a smaller fraction of the average income.
So why do this? Why spend more of your money on bigger housing? Don't you only need shelter, and the same shelter that always sufficed?
Dude, we're wealthier. We make more shit with the same labor-hours. We buy computers, giant wardrobes of clothing, TVs, appliances, couches, the works. A sprawl of living space is nice, and a luxury we can afford, and so we buy it; and we also simply need bigger houses in which to store all this new crap we can buy.
Over the past century, food, clothing, and personal care items have become a smaller portion of our spending. At the same time, we actually spend more on houses, medical care, and entertainment. We buy or rent larger spaces, we buy more and better medical care (although our medical system has serious issues and is inefficient and expensive--it's just better than 50 years ago), and we still have all this income left over to buy tons and tons of crap like Xbox games and in-home gyms and TVs in every room.
All very interesting. The big take-away is that trade and technical progress increase wealth over time; and I always emphasize that rate is important, because rapidly creating unemployment through new trade and new progress causes economic recessions and other horrible shit. We need progress; but progress requires us to eliminate some jobs while not eliminating the production they provided, and we need to care for the displaced worker (welfare) and let the economy adjust and provide new jobs for them (time). Progress can come only as rapidly as recovery, else you ruin your economy.
You'll find flaws. The ideas are right, but some of the facts are sloppy--those numbers I cited aren't strictly-correct. If adjusted to real-world numbers, you'd see exactly what I described: lower wages means more jobs, higher wages means fewer jobs, and higher labor costs means higher product costs. You get a trade advantage when the reduced cost of production produces prices which more-than-offset the cost of production domestically--when domestic technology or other factors (natural resources, etc.) requires more labor, when domestic wages are higher, or when foreign wages are lower.
That means outsourcing to Canada might produce lower prices, but also a net-loss of American jobs; while outsourcing to China produces a net-gain.
Malthusian population growth actually lets you target labor long-term, because your population will expand to a certain amount of unemployment. Malthus said populations expand in prosperity; I've taken it further by refining the definition of scarcity beyond just "less supply than demand". Scarcity occurs when scaling production rate (volume per time) requires more-than-linear labor.
You have plenty of farmland, and 10% more population needs 10% more food, so you get 10% more farmers out of the new people; but then you run low on GOOD farmland, require more fertilizer and irrigation, and thus more time on that land. After all that, you get lower yield, and so you need to farm more land at this higher labor cost. Now to feed 10% more people, you need 10% more food, and so need 12% more farmers. As you can imagine, paying 12 people's wages costs more than paying 10 people's wages; and if those 12 people make the same amount of food as the last 10 people, that food costs more. Scarcity. Invent GMOs, grow twice as much food per land area, suddenly you're not hitting scarcity.
You might notice that there's actually not less supply than demand above. There's still demand for that much food; just the people buying food have to spend a little more, and so they can't buy as much of something else. That means food is what's scarce, but there's enough food to meet demand; and somebody who is buying food can't afford to buy a car, because food is expensive. Do you know what we call people who can afford food, but can't afford Nintendo and iPhones and non-shitty houses? Poor. You have poor people.
Your entire economy gets poorer. Some product(s) become more-expensive, and so population growth only creates a smaller middle-class and a bigger poor class. Malthusian growth stops your population from expanding as quickly.
So imagine you did outsource to China, and you actually took a small loss on jobs. Sure, the Chinese products are cheaper; but you lost 90,000 jobs and gained 70,000: you just lost 20,000 jobs.
Well, around 360,000 Americans retire every year. If your population winces a little at the economic pressure, Malthusian growth slows you down. It takes 20 years, but you do adjust to the loss, and you end up replacing those laborers with 385,000 new workers per year instead of 395,000.
Meanwhile, we have job growth by actual technical progress, constantly, in many fields. That means we normally create more jobs by laying off no-longer-needed workers, cutting the price of products back a bit, and then having all this extra money to spend. The actual buying power goes up; if it goes up 10% and your wages only keep up for 8%, well, stuff's cheaper still, you're still somewhat richer, and that other 2% can distribute to new jobs.
So technical progress can end up with everyone getting richer (things get cheaper by a total of $1,000 less spent), but with not all of that going to the current workers (inflation makes that $2,000 but you only get $1,600 more wages), and then you get more jobs (the other $400 everyone is missing pays the wages for new people). That's all confusing, and it's easier to just consider: if there are twice as many workers, people must be averaging half as muc
Yes, you can write a balanced article that directly and persistently notates the inaccuracy in the belief that homosexuals are child predators.
You can also write an article that says, "Controversy", subheading, "Pederasty", describing "the concern" that many homosexuals are child predators and will adopt children largely to sodomize and indoctrinate into the gay agenda. In such a style, it appears that this is an open debate of merited concern. You can then claim the article is "balanced".
If you bring up the topic of the homosexuality-pedophilia link to perform a thorough rebuttal, you're not giving weight or credence to that position; if your thorough rebuttal is based on reasonable evidence, you're not producing a biased article. That would be a balanced discussion. If you brought it up as an open concern without exploring merits, you'd give equal weight to both views, where one view in reality has a large weight of evidence behind it and the other does not; that's putting a lot of support behind the unsupportable view, which is not balanced.
That was my point.
As for values, there are actually real facts and solid points behind that, as well. A society should tolerate homosexuality as it does heterosexuality because tolerance is, from a scientific standpoint, a mature defense mechanism. Note that we don't tolerate heterosexuals giving public blowjobs on the front lawn of a high school, and so shouldn't tolerate homosexuals doing such things; we also don't put people in jail for having sex.
Abortion has a lot of real facts surrounding it, as well, most notably that the neurological development of a fetus does not provide consciousness--the brain can't support a sense-of-self until a few weeks (or months) after birth, and earlier-term fetuses have no facilities to speak of (you'll develop things like a brainstem to control the heart and lungs and such first, and then build other pieces, up to the frontal lobe that supports sentient thought). The abortion argument is essentially an argument over whether we want to protect DNA and an imaginary ideal of a person who doesn't yet exist, but realistically could be made to exist in the real world, based on the fact that there are already cells which will become this theoretical person if left alone; we can take the same argument further and say that not having sex constantly prevents the creation of people who could theoretically exist if some bits of existing biological matter were brought together in conception.
Magical thinking is a criteria for schizophrenia-spectrum psychiatric disorders.
Laura Schlessinger sued for copyright infringement and privacy invasion when her boyfriend sold her nudes to a porn site in 1998. He had a judge preside over that trial. The judge told her copyright infringement doesn't work and she's a public figure and doesn't get that kind of privacy protection.
Gawker published Hulk Hoagan's naked sex video in 2015, and then got sued. The idiot lawyer requested a jury trial, and the plaintiff cried crocodile tears for sympathy.
Do you see this post? I'm publishing this post. If you copy and paste it elsewhere, I can't sue you for copyright violation. Slashdot posts at the bottom: "Comments owned by the poster"; however, by publishing this into a public forum, I'm not only publishing a written work not claimed as a copyright work, but I'm publishing in a manner which is common-law considered to be non-copyrightable due to the nature of the material. This post isn't a creative work.
Your titty pictures and private sex tapes aren't creative works, either. Generally, unless it's a pornographic production you created for publication, sex tapes and nudie photos aren't creative works and aren't claimed or claimable as copyrighted.
By contrast, movies in theaters are creative works published as copyrighted material. They're made for publication--they're works. People did work to make them for the purpose of creating a creative work. Their existence isn't incidental of someone's drunken frat party, nor is it selected after-the-fact to be publicized as a property of the creators. At no point prior to its publication was it worked--produced as a creative work, or evaluated for publication as a creative work.
Think about that next time you send a text message: your text message isn't protected by copyright.
The college education thing is more-complex than that. There are arguments for both positions; my argument against individual-responsibility college education is that businesses will get a competitive advantage by hiring, and so a skilled-labor shortage means they have to hire entrants early and leverage them effectively to stay competitive. This works out rather well: it increases productivity (new laborers are working while being developed into skilled laborers) and decreases waste (new laborers aren't all running to college on speculation about the general market, then coming out into a market that wants 400,000 programmers but has 700,000 CompSci programming graduates--that is, the labor of TEACHING PEOPLE IN COLLEGE has been wasted, and could have been used to do other things, such as teaching those people a different skill we actually need).
As for outsourcing itself, it's a trade advantage thing. I used an average Chinese worker cost of $3.50/hr, although $2.50/hr is probably more correct. I worked out that making products in America rather than China would create American jobs only if you pay the American worker less than $18/hr, and would make those products more-expensive; if you pay the American worker more than $18/hr, then you have a net-loss of American jobs (you create like 64,000 and lose 73,000, for example). The break-even point trends in the direction of Chinese wages (e.g. if Chinese labor costs $2.50, you're losing jobs an $18/hr, and you need to pay those Americans less if you want to create American jobs in the process).
That analysis kind of sucks.
Importing a 40-foot shipping container from China costs under $1,300. For men and boys's cotton trousers and shorts, that's 40,000 units, or 6.5 cents per pair. These retail for an average of $14.97, spanning $10 kids's clothes to the $70+ stuff. That $14.97 pair of pants, when adjusting the labor portion up ($6.12), becomes a $50 pair of pants if you're paying American workers $18/hr.
I like to say that your $350 cell phone will cost $1,100, your $500 TV costs $1,500 now, and so forth; but that's not true. The labor portion on the $500 TV is some $487, so you're talking about $3,200 TVs. Computers fully made-in-America would cost over $3,000 at not even the modern level of technology--remember spending $2,000 on a 386 with 8MB of EDO and a 200MB hard disk in 1992?
The long and short of it is we'd lose jobs, we'd have to pay workers less, and all of our money would buy less if we cut back trade. Trade has made America wealthy. People like to repeat that their standard-of-living has gone down as they've gotten poorer since the 90s, with wages stagnating and prices skyrocketing; meanwhile food is a smaller part of their income, cell phones and computers are smaller parts of their incomes, they buy more and better healthcare, they buy more entertainment, they eat out more, their cars have lots of complex suspensions and radios and safety systems, and so forth. People live in bigger houses, they own more stuff, and they spend a greater proportion of their income on entertainment and leisure. They spend it all until they have nothing, and then complain that they're poor. They watch inflation double prices, watch their salary quadruple, and then complain everything is twice as expensive as they conveniently forget they have four times as much money now.
Somehow, people manage to watch unemployment fall and swear we're losing jobs. They pull out some stupid shit about labor force participation rate and a conspiracy theory about the numbers being fake because we don't count everyone; yet a count of the number of employed Americans in 2016 shows it as 4.9% of the labor force, and adjusting it for a labor force size of 67% (the peak) gives under 5.3% unemployment, versus the 10% unemployment peak, and the 6% peak under Bush, and the 5.5% unemployment low-point under bush.
Yes, that's right: if our labor force participation rate was as high as it had been at its peak, right now, an
Low unemployment is probably more to do with social behaviors that control population than anything else. Japan is subject to Malthus, but they do it differently--they breed to 2% unemployment instead of 5%.
Actually, while job outsourcing was happening either way, fewer jobs isn't a thing that's caused by that, in general. Our standard-of-living and our employment rate have increased in a large part due to trade; the other part is due to straight technical progress.
Technology and trade are essentially the same thing: we found a way to do something cheaper. "Cheaper" generally means "with less labor", although in the real world it's labor cost (people tell me cows aren't spherical; this is why they're not). In the long run, "Cheaper" absolutely means "with less labor".
The assembly line made more things-per-hour with the same number of working hands than the artisan process. Seven men carving and producing chairs makes chairs slowly compared to a series of seven men each producing chair parts with the last guy on the end assembling those parts. You only need as many chairs as the chairmakers used to make? Well, we don't need as many chair makers! If chairmaker wages don't increase, well... we're paying less in wages. Cost falls.
The same is true of power tools, the power loom, automation, and even project management. We find ways to invest less time in making things. This has happened since man learned to hunt more-effectively than the first man--and then again with the spear, with the stone-tipped spear, with the bronze age, with the hot-blast furnace (84,000 tonnes of iron produced with the same labor required to produce 400 tonnes by the prior process), with rail shipping (made possible by the hot-blast furnace), and with electricity and then power tools and computers.
Because of how economies work, how markets shift, and the mathematical dissimilarity in changing costs, it's both logistically and mathematically impossible for businesses to just take profit. Even simpler than that, we've eliminated almost every job that's ever existed; why are there so many jobs today? It's because money given to the top doesn't trickle down; but productivity causes shifts in economics that distribute additional wealth unevenly to everyone.
The average American family in 1950 had some $4,200 of annual income, and spent $1,400 of it on food. Today, the average American family has $55,000 of annual income, and spends $6,600 on food. Compare those. 55,000 / 4,200 ~= 13; 13 * 1,400 = $18,200. You don't spend $18,200 on food! Not only that, but the very-poor (minimum wage) spend about 16% of their income on food ($2,600, instead of $5,400).
If American companies are now bailing and leaving jobs behind, or if Americans are now forced to pay for American labor for some things and have less to spend on other things (fewer jobs, and less stuff bought with all your money), then Americans are becoming poorer--and that's not normal. Trade and technical progress are what create wealth. Protectionism like this--tariffs and other trade barriers--reduce it.
Do note this is all dependent on time. Prices don't come down automatically when costs come down; the economy is complex, and it causes pressure on prices. A robust economy will lose jobs to technical progress in many fields at once, while old laborers retire, and while new laborers enter the workforce. Over 360,000 Americans retire every year; slightly more enter the workforce (population growth). Imagine GM losing 10,000 employees per year. 10,000 retiring factory line workers, 10,000 new computer programmers. That's essentially masking that the loss of GM line workers (and their spending money) is coming as the prices for something else that laid off workers are finally coming down to their resting point, and so people are buying Netflix and Spotify with the extra money (hence the computer programmers). It looks stable, but it's really just diversified.
If you suddenly automate 100% of the domestic freight truck industry in 6 months with self-driving cars, your economy goes into an enormous recession as unemployment goes through the fucking roof.
Avoiding this involves reducing immediate risk
"Wiping out" an industry would be destructive, in the sense that suddenly destroying hundreds of thousands of jobs would be a shock that created lots of unemployment. Bleeding it out over decades isn't, if it reduces product costs, because jobs move, population changes, and the amount of consumer purchasing power increases as a result.
Now there may be times when tariffs are useful, particularly in response to a foreign country dumping, or where they started throwing tariffs on first,
Actually, if a foreign country is throwing up tariffs, they're hurting their own wealth. If we have an export, we can just keep selling it off to everyone else. It'd be nice to have that cash flow, for sure; however, tariffs in retaliation essentially say, "We're $1/hr poorer, so let's make sure we spend $1 more on everything!", which is compounding the problem.
I did a write-up on this recently. The short version is bringing manufacture back from China will cause a net loss of American jobs if we pay any more than $18/hr (GM line worker makes $21/hr), so we'd have to create the lowest-income jobs we could. All of these jobs come out of the same pool of total income over any unique time period, so we have to eliminate other American jobs--we only create more American jobs by lowering the average American income. You'd see things like a $15 pair of pants costing $50, a $350 cell phone costing $1,100, the $500 TVs costing $1,500, while the amount of income doesn't increase--people becoming poorer.
The dirty secret is I don't feel like doing the analysis right. I did it right for clothing; but TVs and cell phones are made from a lot of Chinese labor, and carry a much smaller domestic share. Shipping cost is higher (maybe 50 times higher--$3.25 instead of 6.5 cents), but the domestic costs to retail are the same. That $14.97 pair of pants had a $6.055 share of labor, a 6.5 cent share of international shipping, and a $8.91 share of domestic shipping and retail. Domestic shipping is paltry; if we overestimate it at 6.5 cents there, then what? That $500 52-inch TV? It's $12.16 of domestic labor, $487.84 of Chinese labor. By my numbers, that's $3,161.40 of American labor at $18/hr (the break-even point, where we lose no jobs), and of course it's a $3,173 TV now.
Think about what that means for TVs, cell phones, computers. You see what it means for clothes: $50 pairs of pants and no more jobs--that pair of pants might cost $25.21, if we pay $8.25/hr minimum wage; and how will these factory workers afford clothes? Well I guess a 68% bump in price isn't that bad for people making $16,500/year.
What about cars?
Seriously. Electronic fuel injection, engine management systems, radios, CD players, anti-lock brake sensors. Might bump the price of a car up a few thousand; fortunately most of the cost is just plain steel, right?
nVidia chips are fabricated in Taiwan, and may go to Korea. They're cheap! Those SOCs cost $25. Similar-complexity Intel chips manufactured in the US cost $150-$200. What happens when your $300 processor also needs a $1,500, 256GB SSD--no, that's stupid, sorry, you're buying an $800, 1TB hard disk (scaling down isn't cheaper). Let's not forget the $100 made-in-China motherboard that's now $550-$600. We're getting into $3,000+ PCs--back to 1992 with you!
People, somehow, think this will create jobs and make them richer.
All men do not have a giant, basso larynx, no. They all have a larynx that projects a male voice, even if it's a higher-tone male voice. Male voices have a lower and higher register, with the natural tone in the lower register; female voices have a more-dynamic higher register with greater range.
Women have a greater lumbar curve and an anterior-tilted pelvis, rather than a posterior-tilted pelvis as men. This doesn't just make them walk with an exaggerated hip-swing; it allows them greater and smoother pivoting, giving better balanced and control while walking.
People overcome environmental development factors; but they don't scrub the impact from their personalities. Absolutely every experience in your life defines how you think and act; when you change your thinking, your new basis is built on thoughts and ideals which were built on your old basis. You can learn to tolerate or better-understand the things you were originally more-sensitive about; and you can become mindful of and sympathetic to the things you were less-sensitive about; but you'll never develop a pathological, immature lack of emotional control, or the psychological hot-buttons that get masked over by growing out of it.
Even someone like me is plainly-obvious to read through. My current positions, beliefs, and regards toward everything are built completely from scratch; yet you can read my parents's ideals if you look for the cracks, given the right probing. Think about how that works when you're dealing with a person's basic behavior--what makes them who they are. Do you really think these people live in a deep schizophrenic dissociative episode where they've invented a fantasy identity in their head that grew up in a different world, with different parents, with different experiences, and then forgotten who they were and what really happened, replacing themselves with this new person with false memories?
You're still trying to justify people as people, and imagine them as individuals with control over their destiny and value as persons and whatever. I thought everyone was faking the whole love-and-relationships thing until I was 26, and I still kind of don't believe people really do the dating and marriage thing for any reason other than that they feel pressured into an expected lifestyle. You want to fit people into a generic mold so you can label them; I have to evaluate if a person is a good person or a bad person at every interaction, even though I remember they were an asshole yesterday and know they're probably still an asshole today--but they might not be. I'm looking at all the little changes in tone in the paint on the machine, the imperfections in the surface, and the hums and vibrations coming from the mechanisms inside; you're not.
You'd probably tell chicken sexers they're just voodoo con artists.
Asking for a better approach is usually the last refuge of people who can't prove themselves right. You're also opening yourself up for much of the other arguments I made by claiming what you intuitively expect from the word "balanced": most people expect "balanced" to equate to "informative" and, by extension, "correct."
I maintain that giving less-credible positions similar weight to credible positions is not balance. It would not be balanced to write an article on homosexual adoption that gave equal weight to both the rights of homosexual couples and the ethics of leaving children with a group of people known to be mostly child-predators.
I would question the evidence due to the under-reporting issue you point out, although I'd imagine it's out there and has reasonably-identifiable error bars.
Interestingly, there are statistics for number of murders committed per 100,000 persons, and specific statistics for number of murders committed by both Muslim immigrants (including refugees) and their children (from immigrant families across the last 20-30 years). Last time I dug through the numbers, the Americans committed 20 times as many murders per capita as the Muslims. If we assume Muslim terrorists are generally murderers (a weak-ish assumption, although it's more-likely that most murderers aren't terrorist and most terrorist are murderers than the opposite), that means Trump's insinuation that Muslim refugees and immigrants over the past decades are a flood of mostly-terrorists is actually not backed by facts--and also that red-blooded Americans are 20 times worse than Muslim refugees, on average (most likely concentrated in poverty-stricken, gang-riddled cities).
I haven't identified any information that makes me leery of Muslim refugees; and I'm pretty confident the information on that is pretty solid, especially compared to information about undocumented immigrants.
I'm usually more interested in his faulty economics arguments.
Transvestites are ALSO unnerving, for other reasons--to the same effect: I let them do their thing and stay away from all that.
As for what I believe about someone or not, you seem to be overestimating how easily a man can convert themselves into a woman, or vice-versa. The number of tells span adjustable major development that occurred early in life (such as larynx shape and size--hormone therapy alters this, but doesn't rebuild it from scratch), integral physical characteristics (such as the shape of the pelvis and the associated gait--it is physically-impossible for a man to walk like a woman and vice-versa), and environmental development factors (growing up biologically as one gender places you under the social pressures of that gender, impressing certain behaviors from what people expect of you; the conflict in self-image creates a type of behavioral distortion, and the attempt to change gender-role behavior is always imperfect).
Again: you look at a person and assess what they are. I don't. I can't. I don't see people; I don't see human beings. What I see are behaviors, movements, physical characteristics, patterns, differences. I'm different. I don't understand the concept of family--everyone tries to explain it by describing a situation in which anyone would understand a certain social, emotional sense of belonging or bonding or some bullshit, and I've never experienced that and it took me until I was 26-ish to start maybe-believing that people aren't full of shit (and I'm still uncertain). I don't have friends. Without that ability to socially-bond, I couldn't integrate anyone's value system; I developed my own, which means I've determined that it is the duty of the strong to protect the weak, but I also don't specially value children and so have given people confused looks when they tried to explain that all people consider certain things universally important such as protecting children.
You're a million tiny details, but you're more than that: you're a handful of simple details which, themselves, are spans of ranges of smaller details, which are themselves spans of ranges of even smaller details. When one of those small details doesn't quite fit, you're a disturbance; and then I identify what you are. That "what" isn't just the final category (black, white, gay, whatever), but all the little pieces; the final category is just an easy handle.
You only think you're nothing more nor less than a person; and people think they're special, when they're really not. 3% of the population is like me, and only 1% of those are ever identified, which is why we're invisible to professionals: they don't have enough data to pick us out, and give a misdiagnosis. I'm different, but I'm also rather common.
None of that matters. When you encounter someone who makes you uncomfortable, the only mature option is to identify if they're doing anything actually harmful, and simply cope if not. Avoidance is one way to cope. Crusading to rid the world of those icky people you don't like is pathological.
They provided a definition of "balanced", yes. My point is more that "balanced" is hard to measure and that their definition has procedural flaws.
There's a secondary issue in that people already perceive the concept of "fair" and "balanced" as a positive thing, and so will tend to accept a reasonable ideal of what "balanced" might mean and then accept conclusions. That means a large amount of the population won't scrutinize the semantics in the way I did, and then will accept that a certain set of information is more-accurate because of the emotional sense of a lack of bias, fairness, and other ideals which provide comfort.
At this point, we're getting into complex psychology and persuasive argument. As you say, measuring things against the amount of actual evidence included and excluded and on the emphasis on that evidence would show something akin to reliability. Science can be wrong; it tends to be less-wrong than other approaches, and to improve its correctness over time. At the same time, it's possible to emphasize poorly-supported conclusions and de-emphasize strongly-supported conclusions--for example by talking at length and in detail about something which is plausible given the evidence but unlikely, while talking scantly on something which is almost-certain given large volumes of high-quality evidence. We can abuse science as much as anything else.
That doesn't even get into the Einstein trick--drawing large conclusions from small sets of data. I use that methodology a lot, and frequently to great effect (so much so that I independently re-discovered a large amount of modern macroeconomics in a few days of examining a very small set of samples spanning economic history, including everything Malthus was right about, the advantages of trade, and how technical progress affects an economy, without actually bothering to read up on economics); however, you tend to either be surprisingly-correct or hilariously-wrong for the dumbest reasons. Einstein conjecturing works when you have enough data points to align your trajectory properly; if you're a few degrees off and you reach too far, you miss by enormous margins (often going completely backwards). Usually you want to use it as a guide to figure out what data points you need to improve your understanding, and to verify your facts (i.e. if what you've worked out is true, many things should also be true; are they?).
Stuff like that lets you (cautiously) extend well-established science to further conclusions; compare that against some other fringe-science, and you might find the poorly-supported view is ridiculous--or that it makes a lot of sense, and merits more examination.
Strict analysis is hard. Wikipedia's policy tries to avoid stuff like people drawing long, unsupported bullshit conclusions (Einstein conjecturing ending in stupidity) by banning original research; that doesn't stop people from cherry-picking research, giving you what might look like a strongly-scientific article when really it's a load of horse shit.
Actually, slavery as an economic institution is interesting.
Slaves are efficient in situations where the cost of freedom and free workers is high; however, they're not exactly free. Raising a slave-child requires feeding and caring for something that does nothing useful for over a decade; while kidnapping a new slave from far away is a wasteful and expensive exercise. Adult slaves are useful, but must be fed and cared for; they become less-useful when sick, injured, and exhausted, and then require replacement when they can't be recovered to a healthy-enough state to produce more than their upkeep. Caring for slaves is, thus, expensive; it's less-expensive than alternatives in certain types of poor societies.
In a free economy, we let people breed on their own. They come sign up for work. Population grows to exceed prosperity (Malthusian growth--a very old theory, but one that's roughly-correct), and you get about 4%-8% unemployment. These people work, produce, and then are given a portion of their production to keep; they purchase things, increasing the amount sellable and thus the amount of profit for the richer; and they must purchase their own means of survival, taking the cost and risk of slave upkeep off the employer.
The important economic principle of a free society is simple: If an individual becomes too poor to survive, he dies, and we capitalize on his efforts until that point and avoid most of the costs (and distribute what remains); if the great span of any level of your labor force becomes too poor to survive (notably, minimum-income households), your labor force collapses and your economy fails.
In other words: a nation which doesn't fit into the narrow set of conditions for which slavery makes economic sense actually functions better with a free labor force, because that labor force's well-being is tied to its productivity, and thus laborers work and businesses provide wage sufficient for survival in general. The loss of a slave costs someone a lot of wasted productivity (expressed as money), while the loss of a free laborer who fails financially costs less and is distributed pretty broadly across the entire economy.
As nations become wealthier, the expense of robust welfare falls, while its benefits grow. Early welfare systems used poor houses: we couldn't afford to pay for the poor's survival, so we placed them into what are essentially work-prisons and made them produce, thus lowering the net-cost of caring for the poor by deriving wealth from them. As European and American nations became more-wealthy, unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, and other social programs arose, costing little enough to not harm the economy while benefiting us with the maintenance of the bottom of the labor force. These programs protect the laborer, and they save us the trouble of part of the labor force dying off in poverty--because a reserve laborer (unemployed) is essentially-free, while a dead reserve laborer cannot be employed until some child is grown into an adult ready for labor, at obviously-great expense.
Now, stronger welfare systems are becoming popular, such as specific forms of universal basic incomes (e.g. a universal social security). Such systems cost less if your nation is sufficiently-wealthy--that is: in a rich nation, taxes don't increase on the wealthy, and they sharply-decrease as you move toward the lower incomes. They better stabilize the poor, reducing the cost of damage to the reserve labor force. Most importantly, they increase job replacement rate and spread out job reduction over time: rapid technical progress (e.g. automation) causes its job-reducing impact over a wider time span, and restores lost jobs more-quickly, reducing the severity of associated recessions. This leads to more-stable economies and wealthier nations.
Slavery isn't automatically prosperity because slaves aren't free, and they aren't even particularly efficient.
We exterminated the Native Americans. There are shitloads of blacks in America, and a few sad indigenous peoples on a contractually-provided reservation or intermingled with population. Black people are a social issue: they're outside, getting shot by trigger-happy police, working in McDonalds, teaching in schools, robbing liquor stores, driving cars, and riding bicycles--all the things people in your society do. Native Americans are a walking novelty: if a Cherokee dude shows up in a school, it's most likely so we can use him as a display piece for a history lesson about some far-away culture nobody cares about anymore.
More blacks are from poverty-stricken areas, so they behave like poverty-stricken people: they adapt to their environment, and that's generally-maladaptive in poverty environments. Baltimore and Detroit are full of good people--98% of whom are black--and also full of gangs and murders and crime; and even those good people struggle because they're poor and they have little long-term security to work with, so risking the time to stand back and examine your life and make large changes is risking fatal financial failure and subsequent homelessness. They care less about making too much noise and sounding like vulgar hicks and more about socializing with the neighbors and not getting robbed--and also about paying the bills.
When you look at Haiti or Africa, there's no real trade--kind of like Cuba or Mexico. Look at all the white people in Romania--an extremely-poor nation--or some of the less-affluent Slovakian states--Khazakistanis are pretty pure caucasians, and they look exotic to normal white folk in America (the eyes look almost Asian, but they're not). Out here, we identify the model white folk as Aryan, the kind of Nordic genetic line that stands out as whiter-than-white. Still, some of those poorer nations are, in fact, full of white folk.
Africa is a mess because of no useful trade. Africa has historically been raided: we traded them junk for gold, ivory, and diamonds long ago; and the French and English invaded, colonized, and outright stole those resources. Technology wasn't properly shared, and economic development wasn't stimulated; we only needed people to work the mines.
This is actually part of the nature of trade. Africa had gold, diamonds, ivory, things that we didn't have; and they only needed labor to get the things for us. We didn't need them to make food, or generate power, or trade spices. They gave us what we wanted, and they were so undeveloped at the time that we crushed them with bad trade deals--brute-force-invasion or simply conning them out of their goods with shiny baubles.
North-East Africa could become a highly-civilized, wealthy nation readily. At this point, geothermal power is viable technology; and NE-Africa has an enormous geothermal hot spot. We've also conjectured they could produce lots of power via solar. Either way, they could sell that to Europe--and the rest of Africa, were there something to take in trade. The issue here is Africa can't self-bootstrap in this way, and would need European aid to procure and install new technology so as to enable them to engage in such trade and build an actual civilization.
That's an interesting consideration in itself, because Europe would benefit from such a deal as well. If Africa can produce enough power to significantly supply Europe, then Europe can supply Africa with things like food, medicine, and computer technology--things Africa doesn't have the skill or capital to produce, and would need to expend enormous resources for otherwise. If Africa is advantaged enough by that trade to sell the power to Europe for less cost than Europe can produce its own (optimally, less labor; but if they undersell their labor to sell cheap power and then buy medical supplies for much less than it'd cost them to produce their own, they're ahead), then Europe frees up costs (and labor) from producing power. Europe then can expend the difference in labor (lost jobs) to m