I've been wanting to start a conservative progressive party. Conservative politics dictates that you always look before you leap, and that you should never leap if there is a ladder; and yet we are surrounded by progressives who have turned any forward movement into an act of liberal psychosis, jumping off cliffs because there may be something nice at the bottom. The polarized politics in America especially and infesting the rest of the world more-mildly means conservatives don't even want to approach the cliff, when they could very well look over the edge and call for a rappel if there is something worth descending for.
It's not efficient. Moving too fast is not efficient. In American politics, we stick to ideals which are not efficient--liberal progressives want to raise minimum wage and tax the rich, while conservatives want to cut back welfare and shrink government. We don't engineer new tax policies befitting of a country which has grown wealthy thanks to technical progress and trade; we don't replace our welfare system with a more-efficient one which would have destroyed our nation 20 or 50 years ago but would today make it strong and secure; we don't take advantage of Malthusian population behaviors and current economic opportunities to decrease working hours without sacrificing current wealth, and pave the way into a future of higher standard-of-living and greater free time. Instead, we latch on to the same arguments made two generations ago, the same plans, the same efforts, and damn the consequences of doing those things today.
The opportunities for progress are dangerous. I've designed economic and taxation plans which could easily destroy America, or could blow our chances for shorter working hours, or trigger population explosions and a future recession; and I've built-in inherent controls against short-term effects and long-term damage, avoided new modes of abuse, and capitalize on new opportunities. These plans include contingencies in case of certain faults; and even prescribe strategies to hold back the immediate benefits which would lead to sudden population growth, diverting this toward lowering the national debt until the gain in efficiency has reached a point to which releasing such new wealth to the American people will force a reduction of the working week by 8-12 hours.
That's progress. It's dangerous, it's cautious, it's conservative; it's not simply jumping on a new ideal of equality and wealth, but identifying how and why this is now possible, and how to maximize this new opportunity.
We need a conservative-progressive movement. We need a new party who pushes for progress, and demands accountability. We need leaders who refuse to take action hastily, while seeking out those opportunities and searching for the best way to take them. Instead, we have fools who argue over whether we should jump at every new idea or hold fast to the oldest ways they can remember.
I mean, trannies weird me out and shit, and I don't jive with changing the gender pronoun because my brain breaks; on the other hand, it breaks slightly-less using the biologically-correct gender pronoun, because something weird is going on here.
The simple solution to this is I stay the fuck away from those people.
Honestly, you don't like someone? Are they doing anything harmful? No? Then go hang out with someone else. You don't need to start a crusade against everyone who makes you uncomfortable. What part of this do people have trouble grasping?
Also I can usually spot the tranny, but that's largely because I can't see faces, kind of. Mild(?) prosopagnosia. I can identify people by the specific tone of their voice (which isn't just pitch, but frequency distribution), the way they walk, body structure, bone structure, hair, the cadence of their speech, and so forth. Even the way people smell groups by race and gender; the rest of their movement, their facial structure, and their voice changes similarly. Sometimes, the bone structure of a woman's face is kind of masculine, but her facial muscle structure is feminine; the voice, however, always gives it away, though only due to subtle changes in frequency distribution.
You can imagine how that works for me. Sexuality is also kind of bewildering, so putting the two together... I'm faced with something unusual that largely revolves around something not-entirely-comfortable to begin with. I just avoid the whole situation, because that's what grown-ups do when they encounter something they don't quite jive with.
That approach only indicates an equal amount of bias. It doesn't indicate if the Democrat views are expressed where the bulk of evidence suggests their views aren't loony, and the Republican views are expressed where the bulk of evidence suggests they're actually correct.
What if you wrote an article about vaccine causing autism, where you cited 12 rigorously-evaluated scientific opinions, and 12 fervently-espoused lunatic ravings? The article would tally as "unbiased", but it would actually be biased: a preponderance of evidence would discredit the lunatics, yet the article would be shored-up to give them equal footing. In other words: you'd handicap the visibly-correct view and give additional, unmerited support to the visibly-unsupportable view, slanting the article toward a side that can't stand on its own merits.
Well, that's not necessarily an inaccurate assumption.
Bias is hard to examine because it's prone to the examiner's bias. Further, there's a "fair and balanced" fallacy in which you give equal-weight to each side--for example, you might try to remain "fair" by evaluating that 1,000 strong-methodology studies about vaccines not causing autism have as much weight as the massive anti-vaccine movement backed by 1 study using known-fraudulent data, even though one of these only has "evidence" in the form of confirmed lies. In either case, someone can conclude the end-result is less-biased, when it's only really including shoddier information or following a more-popular bias (or just the bias of the reviewers).
When two reviewers of opposing bias review something for bias, you have to then review the reviewers for bias. Turtles.
Actually, once someone has published something not claimed as a copyrighted creative work, it's no longer private and no longer acquired by illegal means. It must be an illegal video (child pornography) after that point.
Before Gawker received the video, it was already circulating without the authorization of Hogan and Clem. Gawker put it into wider circulation, which is technically the same thing as what anyone who distributes anything at any point ever is doing; however, there is an argument that Gawker put it into significantly-wider circulation, moving from "a thing you can find if you dig enough, which most people have been hearing about and only a significantly-large minority have actually obtained" to "it's in everyone's hands now". That is most likely more of a defamation issue, whereas the original acquisition and distribution would have been considered theft.
These cases are largely a matter of venue. If you get a sympathetic judge and jury, they give you different outcomes. "Secret videos" and "leaked photographs" have been mainstays of cheap celebrity gossip for ages, and have gone unchallenged largely because every challenge is essentially laughed out of court. That doesn't mean a judge won't occasionally bring the hammer down or, in this case, that a defendant won't stupidly elect for a jury trial so the plaintiff can cry sympathy.
The report, published as news, of a non-celebrity would be an invasion of privacy. Also, is it an invasion of privacy when a well-known video already being circulated is in question? You've already lost control of that.
Someone suggested it'd be copyright at best. They're probably right.
Ah okay. I thought you were trying to make a point in the direction of UK-should-block-imports. It's been a common line of argument on Slashdot and in America recently, with people thinking high import tariffs and such will increase our wealth, rather than cause us to expend more labor for the same things rather than using that labor to make making more of other things.
It really is advantageous for everyone involved to get trade deals on as-open-or-better; but they can throw tantrums I guess.
And I got this backwards: Malthus to Solow was a paper written in 1992 by someone else, bringing further observations after Malthus (from 1760s-1830s) and Solow got their stuff out there. There have been a few such papers, and I've been bigger on information than academic history. My error.
In the UK, politicians are supposed to understand economics. They go to public school for that in particular. They learn about philosophy, politics, and economics. Now, granted, economics is a fast-changing field, and most economics education is brash and dogmatic; but they should have a grasp on current understandings, at least.
Economics has come a long way since Adam Smith and Karl Marx.
In 1983, Solow got a Nobel Prize for describing a method to separate an economy's growth into technical progress and population growth. An economy gets bigger when you have more people--to the point of scarcity, where e.g. feeding 10% more people requires 22% more labor because you're out of good land, thus need more irrigation and fertilizer to grow on poor land, and more farm hands because you get less yield from that land and need to grow across a wider area and spend more time planting and harvesting across more land per person's-worth of food. An economy also gets bigger when you invent a way to grow twice as much food on that fertile land (e.g. GMOs, irrigation, tractors), thus expend half(-ish) as many labor-hours on the farm, use that labor to make another thing, and come out with more stuff without increasing the amount of work (cost, wages) expended. Solow showed everyone how to figure out how much of each has happened.
In the early 1990s, Malthus raised some additional questions about technical progress to Solow. Malthus observed that an increase in general availability of things like food lead to a population growth to the point of scarcity, among other things. I became aware of Malthus because my own theories line up almost exactly with his, and people started calling me on it; but I haven't read much on him (my understanding of economics is almost exclusively a product of examining economic history and analyzing economic behaviors to exclude what is mathematically-impossible).
Malthusian observations are the basis of my plan to shock the American economy with an extremely-efficient tax and welfare plan, thus causing excessive labor demand which must be curbed by reducing per-capita buying power again--by cutting back working hours to 28-32 per week so that your per-year purchasing power is subsequently reduced, restoring about 5.6% unemployment. The alternate is to allow population to grow rapidly until scarcity sets back in; this doesn't liberate us from working time, and it doesn't raise the per-capita GDP (individual buying-power) in the long run, but it does give America a much-bigger total GDP to brag about (i.e. America is bigger, has more wealth, and can leverage that to make debt payments and take bigger loans). I would rather we all get a bit more wealthy and have half the week to freely enjoy our wealth.
All of this sounds irrelevant, mostly, because it's about technical progress. You invent a way to make a thing with less labor, you make more things cheaply and everyone gets richer.
Trade is technical progress.
Say you make chairs, at a rate of 40 per 40-hours labor, or 1 chair per 1 hour. To pay a chairmaker, you must pay 1/40 of his weekly salary--the amount of money to satisfy his standard-of-living--per each chair.
Somewhere far away, another country has better resources, such as better local iron and thus cheaper tools of higher quality, or local forests and thus no need to import wood from far off. A chairmaker in this country can produce chairs at a rate of 80 per 40-hours labor, or 1 chair per 1/2 hour.. To pay a chairmaker, you must pay 1/80 of his weekly salary as per his standard-of-living per each chair.
Invert this for cushions: your climate is great for cotton, but poor for trees; you make cushions at a rate of 80 per 40-hours labor, and they make cushions at a rate of 40 per 40-hours labor.
Altogether, you make a chair with a cushion for 1.5 hours of labor (1-hour chair, 0.5-hour cushion); they make the same for 1.5 hours of labor (0.5-hour chair, 1
I haven't heard his wife's position on everything. The last I heard was that Hogan was already going through rough times and facing divorce, while Heather was all over him--a common enough behavior, where a girl gets wind that your relationship is over and she's already trying to get on your dick before you finish signing the papers. Maybe that wasn't what was going on; but it's what I heard. As it stands, though, I simply ignore that point because the information I have on it is thin and doesn't have iron-clad credibility.
Whether boning another woman is okay when your current girl has already decided you're done is a grey area. People do stupid shit like both concluding that the relationship is ending, and then considering themselves still in a relationship for weeks or months once they've already decided it's over, before finally officiating it. I think that's a lot of horse shit.
Reporting about public figures is a constant. Have you never been to a supermarket? Magazine covers are full of gossip about who cheated on who, who has a secret sex-party life, who is getting a divorce, and whatnot. If the Olsen Twins get drunk and take turns screwing three guys at a party, the press will have it on ABC, CNN, and Fox News the next day, if they can get an interview with anyone at the party. They'll even publish someone's cellphone recording of the girls walking off into the back room with studs in tow.
Of course Ashley is a little angel; it's Mary Kate who's the cocaine-fueled nightmare whore, and I think she's since broken her crack habit.
There have been a lot of private naked-photos and celebrity sex tape leaks; and we get to hear all kinds of gossip without pictures, like when Bill Clinton got a blowjob. If the press found out Angelina Jolie was cougaring up a college football team, they'd have it on the front page of everything that would print it--and it would just be "news" (well, what passes for news), and not "invasion of privacy".
I'm not arguing whether Gawker is worth a shit or not; I'm arguing whether or not they violated what we expect as our law here. I didn't know they were ordered to remove the video (fat lot of good that does, anyway; and I have issues with that, without more data), and have no defense for that; and for the simple concept of "invasion of privacy", it's been well-established that public figures have less privacy, and sex tapes and other embarrassing publications have happened frequently enough.
To say Gawker invaded Hogan's privacy would tangentially also imply Linda Tripp invaded Bill Clinton's privacy. The President's job is foreign policy and executive branch office; getting a blowjob from a 19-year-old intern falls squarely outside "newsworthy", except for gossip about the President as a celebrity. That did actual damage: it caused a useless impeachment trial, largely because Clinton lied under oath about something irrelevant anyway.
The simple difference is we didn't have pictures of Clinton. As for pictures of Hogan... he denied he'd ever bang another man's wife; accusing him of doing just that under the pretense that you have a video you won't show "for privacy" is essentially bullshit. Meanwhile, nobody's claimed Gawker invaded Heather or Bubba Clem's privacy, and claiming they haven't in this argument would be logically-inconsistent; at the same time, claiming Gawker publishing only a text column detailing what they can confirm of Hogan's sex life without a video is any different in terms of privacy from publishing the video is also logically-inconsistent.
We don't crush people we simply don't like. Tolerance is a level-4 defense mechanism, categorized as a "mature" behavior; that means grown-ups complain about things they don't agree with, but allow them so long as they don't affect us directly. Immature, overgrown children lash out at people and behaviors they don't like; and separating similar behaviors so you can categorize one invasion of privacy as "good" and the other as "bad" is pathological. The fact is the press reports on anything they can find out about celebrities, most of which is none of our damned business, and most of which nobody has a problem with even though it's an enormous cost you pay when you become famous. Crying that Gawker wasn't good-people and deserved to be blown out of existence for behaving in ways we don't like is childish and uncivil.
How is what Hogan did morally-wrong? Bubba Clem was watching and operating the camera while Hogan fucked his wife! He brought her over for the pow-wow!
Uh, they posted a video of an event that occurred and was factual. That's not defamation, libel, or slander; it's reporting on the life of public figures. It's long-established that being a public person cuts away a substantial amount of your privacy protection. What laws were broken?
A Florida Jury found that Gawker violated Hulk Hogan's privacy. Other juries and judges have determined that public figures's privacy can't be violated in that way in many situations. Unless Gawker produced the tape (including hiring someone to have it made, thus invading privacy), it's been long-established that this is simply public gossip about a public figure: a tape was made by Clem (husband of the chick Hogan banged), Clem gave it to Gawker, Gawker published it after Hogan's divorce.
By early 2012, rumors began circulating “in the radio community about a sex tape starring Hogan and Heather Clem,” Peirce said in his deposition.
A month later, still images from the tape appeared on the website The Dirty — and Bubba now recognized the canopy bed as his own and knew it was his tape.
In the fall of 2012, Gawker’s then editor, A.J. Daulerio, received a phone call from Tony Burton, a lawyer who claimed a client of his was interested in mailing him something. A package arrived at the Gawker offices between Sept. 27 and Oct. 4, 2012. There was no return address. Daulerio was on vacation at the time, so the site’s then-managing editor, Emma Carmichael, opened the package and watched the recording inside — it was the sex tape.
So the sex tape was already a matter of public gossip, some stills were out there, someone sent it to Gawker, Gawker published it. Also Hogan had denied that he would ever bang Heather several times--he liked to talk publicly about his sex life.
Hogan made his affair with Heather Clem a public matter. He talked around it, he talked about his sex life in general, he pointed out that she was hot but claimed he wouldn't get on her because she's another dude's wife, and so forth. "Turns out you fucked her brains out!" is actually reasonable information to publish, and somehow that sex tape got made and got floated around.
It's a thin case for you and me; and it's a completely-different ballgame for someone famous who's baited the public interest.
I know that's the theory, and simulations tend to bear it out; but real cows aint spherical, and the military issue is rarely factored in.
Actually, what I stated is based on an analysis of history, not model theory. It's part of why things get cheaper over time.
Japan is fairly protectionist, yet has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the world.
They do, at 3.20%. That's quite-low; anything under 2% is critical, and under 4% is usually not stably-maintained. Their labor force participation rate is 60.4%, comparable to the United States labor force participation rate of 62.9%; both of these are considerably-high, which can mean many things. A high LFPR can indicate more single-adult households (and thus less poverty) or it can indicate more dual-income households from poverty situations (and thus more poverty); both of these situations can occur even if the total wealth is higher.
The number of employed/labor-force/population/employed-per-population in the United States has recovered since its low point in January, 2010. In millions, 2010: 129.8/153.5/309.3/41.97%; 2011: 130.9/153.3/311.7/42.00%; 2012: 133.3/154.4/314.1/42.44%; 2013: 135.3/155.7/316.5/42.75%; 2014: 137.6/155.3/318.9/43.15%; 2015: 140.6/157.0/320.1/43.92%. That means the labor force participation rate has gone down while the number employed, the number employed out of the whole population, and employment rate have all gone up. Those LPR/employed-per-population/employment-rate numbers are 2010: 64.8%/41.97%/9.8%; 2011: 64.2%/42.0%/9.2%; 2012: 63.7%/42.44%/8.3%; 2013: 63.6%/42.44/8.0%; 2014: 62.9%/43.15%/6.6%; 2015: 62.9%/43.92%/5.7%.
Those numbers mean the number of jobs have grown faster than population. If we were to assume the same 64.2% labor force participation rate as 2010, the 2015 unemployment rate would be 5.87%; using the peak 67% labor force participation rate, it would be 6.07%. Our peak unemployment rate was 9.8%.
You may argue they have "less stuff" because of that, but it's up to THEM whether jobs are more important than stuff or vice versa.
As of January 2015, the United States has grown by 10.8 million jobs; 2.3 million of these are a result of population growth, and 8.5 million are a result of productivity increase. Free trade has been a large part of that; the other part has been lay-offs as we obsolete your job with better processes (e.g. automation).. My above post, describing the loss of millions of jobs if we "brought jobs back to America", illustrates the free trade component.
So you can go ahead and argue to 8.5 million people that they should be jobless so you don't have to worry about getting laid off some time. You can also argue to 320 million Americans that they should be poor so you can have slightly-better job security. Tell the American People that you want America to decay into a third-world country because you're afraid that one day someone might find a way to do your job without you. I'm sure you can find some bullshit argument they'll buy, and a knife they'll use to slit their own throats at your command.
Actually, there's a good argument against high taxes, as well as against low taxes; the sticking point is what you define as "high" and "low".
Businesses and anyone with an accounting sense and lots of cash flow definitely try to reduce their tax burden. Lower taxes reduce this pressure. There's a striking advantage to a presence in any locality, and that's balanced against the taxes. If business is 2% advantaged by having a major operation center in Germany (e.g. lower salaries, better access to technology, certain services are cheaper), but taxes are 8% lower in California, then the business moves to California and pays California taxes and comes out roughly 6% ahead.
On the other hand, tax sheltering is a thing as well, but not as much of a problem as it's made out to be. The average actual business profit is around 10%, and some businesses are as low as 2%. Businesses send most of their income out to wages, or to other businesses. Import inputs are, obviously, not taxable (they're a business expense, not income); while wages are taxed. This leaves you with things like Apple's headquarters in Cupertino paying $2 billion in wages every year, fed from money pulled from global sales. Cupertino complains Apple shelters some $10 billion of money they want taxes from--even though Cupertino's economy gets an influx from global trade and wages, plus Apple buying power and utilities. Apple is an egregious example itself, standing alongside Microsoft, and not many others.
That means lower business taxes to attract local businesses and, possibly, become a sheltering target (or make sheltering too much of a complexity hassle to bother with for larger businesses) isn't really worth much; but higher business taxes also aren't worth much.
The economic plan I designed lowered business income taxes by about 12% proportional (around 4.5% marginal tax rate) as a side-effect; I didn't adjust it because I figured that was fine. It's irrelevant and I'm not going to start the argument about how business taxes should be much, much lower; and that would complicate my tax plan, which is what we don't need.
Importantly, that plan lowered the cost of employees by shifting a payroll tax (OASDI, 6.2%) into a new tax that's an income tax replacing much of the existing general-fund tax. In other words: where an employer would hire you at $50,000 and pay $53,100 for you to take home $40,107 (single, 1-adult household) or $42,128 (married, 2-adult household), now the employer hires you at $50,000 and pays only $50,000 for you to take home $46,671 (single, 1-A) or $52,100 (married, 2-A, and yes that happens). The actual cost of producing things goes down, while the consumer income increases. This involves no tax increases; the system is just more-efficient than the current one, largely by stabilizing low-income households in such a way as to reduce the cost-of-risk, thus both reducing costs in existing economic activity and enabling new economic activities which replace inefficient public aid systems.
I was bored one day and decided to solve poverty. I ended up solving or sharply-reducing most current economic problems. It's what I got in trade: I have a psychiatric disorder in which I have zero interest in social relationships and spend all my time alone, and also don't care about other people's ideals or values or morals, so I bluntly point out how the world really works and have to occupy myself. This is the result of a sad little man with no friends listening to liberals and conservatives argue about economic policy and working it out from a blank starting point rather than from an assumption that the current system is essentially-correct and needs to be nudged in one direction or another. (By the by, it turns out that the only economic system that actually exists is roughly-similar to what they call "capitalism", and can't be changed by any means; it can be optimized, though, because it's essentially a behavior--the economy has an overall psychology to it, and so can be affected
Actually, if you cut off people's livelihoods as such, unemployment soars in those areas and a lot of people go hungry. The same rules apply: they have limited income (limited people are buying, and the monetary systems everywhere have a specific amount of total income from which to spend in a given specific span of time), and all goods and services compete for that income, thus all workers providing said products compete for that income.
Trade isn't "letting our jobs slip away". The average labor cost of a Chinese good is $3.50/hr; U.S. minimum wage is $7.25/hr, or twice (2.07x) as much. International shipping in bulk is minor, such that the per-good cost of shipping, e.g., a pair of jeans from China to the port at the U.S. is about 3 cents; the cost of shipping domestically is actually higher per-pair, because boats are huge and efficient at carrying large loads. That means the major cost--around 85%--in the price tag of a pair of jeans (or any good from China) is labor, and they would nearly double in price if made in American factories using minimum-wage workers.
A doubling in price as such would have to draw from the same total income in a given year. People don't wake up with more money to spend, and businesses pay out of revenue: your paycheck isn't `new money[];`, but rather money from goods the company sold that you helped make.
That means people would be able to buy only half as many of these goods.
Now, involved in the price of each good is the cost of the marketing, the packaging, the shipping, the warehousing, the stocking, the retailing, the maintenance of retail centers (labor, materials--floor tiles don't make themselves, or ship themselves), the energy supply (electricity, natural gas), the utilities (water, communication). These costs aren't reduced per-good by moving their manufacture to America; yet the ability to purchase goods reduces.
In other words: if you sell half as many goods, your cashiers still run 980 scans per hour, and half your cashiers become unemployed. Your trucks still carry 24,000 pairs of jeans each; half your truckers become unemployed, as do the proportion of mechanics, vehicle manufacturers, and fuel producers associated with them. Half your inventory workers don't have trucks to unload or shelves to stock, and become unemployed. Retail centers close down like so many Circuit Cities and Best Buys, and the buildings rot; nobody gets paid to power them, to maintain them, to clean the floors, to fix the lights, or simply for rent. A bunch of accountants and lawyers go away, too.
Usually, when you create minor unemployment by technical progress, goods get cheaper. Technical progress includes reducing the barriers to trade so you can get at cheaper goods, e.g. if it takes half as much labor to grow pumpkins in the land over, but twice as much to grow potatoes, you each swap pumpkins for potatoes and not so many wages need paying, thus cheaper food. This reduction in cost leaves consumers with a fraction of their income unspent, and so they buy new things, which then creates new employment opportunities because someone has to manufacture, ship, and retail all those new goods.
(By the way: the hot-blast furnace allowed manufacturing 86,000 pounds of iron using the same labor as the previous process required to manufacture only 400 pounds, thus making railways feasible, dramatically lowering transportation costs. This had enormous impacts on trade. Look up the history of the wooden shipping pallet as well.)
In this case, you've found a way to create major unemployment by rolling back technical progress, reducing total consumer buying power: more must be spent on the same goods, so fewer goods are bought. The fractional cost per-good of shipping and retail isn't reduced, so those jobs are flatly lost. The factory jobs are hewn from a portion of what we lose--which would probably include Netflix, some healthcare, and other luxuries which we can no longer support. IT jobs and other high-level engineering
Part of the U.S. economy's strength is its renewable nature. Norway and Qatar are rich because of oil; but the U.S. has information and services. Much of the U.S. economy runs on retail, shipping, and other domestic services: internal trade makes us self-sufficient, such that our ability to produce food, materials, and energy allows us to pay each other to provide retail, construction, and business services. We get wealthier by taking advantage of international trade; but we're not huge on exports of non-sustainable goods.
The U.S. has the world's largest fertile basin and can produce staple food and fiber (clothing) more-readily (i.e. with lower cost, namely lower human labor) than most nations; and our sewage system converts human waste into fertilizer pellets for farming, plus we use manure from dairy and chicken farms. We have an enormous shipping industry, our own automaker industry, and a massive healthcare and IT system (the Internet is a physical thing, run by data centers and cables; and it takes labor here to keep it running). Much of what we need and what we're good at making is made here.
Importantly, all of that stuff is service and renewable goods. Food is renewable: it's made of sun, air, and soil, extended with GMOs (knowledge and information created by labor) and chemical engineering. Chemical nitrogen fertilizer is made using nitrogen gas as a reducer, not a feed stock: ammonia is rendered from the air, and then natural gas is burned to react the oxygen and get carbon, leaving Hydrogen and CO2. In the future, we could use Audi's eDiesel process to use nuclear, solar, or geothermal energy to make methane for the same purpose. We're not shipping natural gas and nitrogen fertilizer; we're shipping food, and new knowledge will find new ways to make food.
Compare that to Norway and Qatar: they run on oil. When oil becomes scarce, its price will go up; at the same time, new knowledge will bring the cost of manufacturing solar panels down. The United States runs on energy, and buys (imports) oil from OPEC because it's cheaper than producing energy locally and, thus, allows the U.S. to use its labor force for other things, making the U.S. and all its citizens wealthier (more buying power). When that is no longer true--when oil is a costlier alternative than solar or nuclear--the U.S. energy industry will switch to nuclear or solar. It's notable that new nuclear plants are almost cheaper than natural gas, coal, and oil power plants today in terms of TCO: the up-front capital cost plus the fuel cost amortized over the life of the plant is practically on-par between nuclear and fossil fuels, and the fossil fuel plants can be the costlier of the two in many situations. This is a new development (nuclear has historically been much more expensive), so it hasn't just been public sentiment that's held nuclear back; it's been cost.
So imagine oil doesn't become scarce for 100 years yet; but nuclear power becomes cheaper than oil power in 10 years. Well, suddenly we don't need to buy Qatar's oil, or Norway's, or Canada's. These countries lose the United States as a customer, quickly; 20 years later, the U.S. is producing its own power from nuclear fuel mined in Texas and California, because it costs us less--meaning we don't have to work to make as much export goods to sell and leverage for the purchase of fuel, and instead use part of that work to make energy and the rest to make more goods (for us or for export to buy stuff we actually want that someone else makes cheaper).
In that scenario, the United States prospers, but the self-sufficient countries of OPEC falter in the loss of their oil market. They can try to slow the process by lowering oil prices, reducing their income from exports and selling their labor at a lower premium. They will become poor countries while the United States makes food and sells nuclear engineering services to Europe. China, meanwhile, will use its ultimately-renewable manufactur
Actually, I've already got one: a pacemaker is a medical device, and altering its code changes it, thus is verboten. This is a good thing: every time a medical device's firmware changes, it needs re-certification, so they can't just load new shit into their devices and sell them as if they were already FDA-approved and tested to perform their function correctly. It's also a bad thing, because device makers don't update code so as to avoid recertification; we really need a strict-audit process to allow updating for non-behavioral defect correction (including flow behavior: no refactoring) with full code changes and internal verification submitted, which we can at any future time examine to determine if you actually did substantially-modify the software.
There is an FDA approval process for personal-use drugs and devices. For drugs, it has to be a non-controlled, non-approved substance (not another manufacturer's generic of an FDA-approved drug) for personal, non-medical (recreational) use OR such a substance for medical use under the supervision of a healthcare professional. For medical use of such drugs, you don't need a prescription; you only need to tell the FDA what doctor knows what you're using the drug for. I'm not sure what you have to file to inform the FDA of non-approved, modified medical devices.
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I've been wanting to start a conservative progressive party. Conservative politics dictates that you always look before you leap, and that you should never leap if there is a ladder; and yet we are surrounded by progressives who have turned any forward movement into an act of liberal psychosis, jumping off cliffs because there may be something nice at the bottom. The polarized politics in America especially and infesting the rest of the world more-mildly means conservatives don't even want to approach the cliff, when they could very well look over the edge and call for a rappel if there is something worth descending for.
It's not efficient. Moving too fast is not efficient. In American politics, we stick to ideals which are not efficient--liberal progressives want to raise minimum wage and tax the rich, while conservatives want to cut back welfare and shrink government. We don't engineer new tax policies befitting of a country which has grown wealthy thanks to technical progress and trade; we don't replace our welfare system with a more-efficient one which would have destroyed our nation 20 or 50 years ago but would today make it strong and secure; we don't take advantage of Malthusian population behaviors and current economic opportunities to decrease working hours without sacrificing current wealth, and pave the way into a future of higher standard-of-living and greater free time. Instead, we latch on to the same arguments made two generations ago, the same plans, the same efforts, and damn the consequences of doing those things today.
The opportunities for progress are dangerous. I've designed economic and taxation plans which could easily destroy America, or could blow our chances for shorter working hours, or trigger population explosions and a future recession; and I've built-in inherent controls against short-term effects and long-term damage, avoided new modes of abuse, and capitalize on new opportunities. These plans include contingencies in case of certain faults; and even prescribe strategies to hold back the immediate benefits which would lead to sudden population growth, diverting this toward lowering the national debt until the gain in efficiency has reached a point to which releasing such new wealth to the American people will force a reduction of the working week by 8-12 hours.
That's progress. It's dangerous, it's cautious, it's conservative; it's not simply jumping on a new ideal of equality and wealth, but identifying how and why this is now possible, and how to maximize this new opportunity.
We need a conservative-progressive movement. We need a new party who pushes for progress, and demands accountability. We need leaders who refuse to take action hastily, while seeking out those opportunities and searching for the best way to take them. Instead, we have fools who argue over whether we should jump at every new idea or hold fast to the oldest ways they can remember.
I mean, trannies weird me out and shit, and I don't jive with changing the gender pronoun because my brain breaks; on the other hand, it breaks slightly-less using the biologically-correct gender pronoun, because something weird is going on here.
The simple solution to this is I stay the fuck away from those people.
Honestly, you don't like someone? Are they doing anything harmful? No? Then go hang out with someone else. You don't need to start a crusade against everyone who makes you uncomfortable. What part of this do people have trouble grasping?
Also I can usually spot the tranny, but that's largely because I can't see faces, kind of. Mild(?) prosopagnosia. I can identify people by the specific tone of their voice (which isn't just pitch, but frequency distribution), the way they walk, body structure, bone structure, hair, the cadence of their speech, and so forth. Even the way people smell groups by race and gender; the rest of their movement, their facial structure, and their voice changes similarly. Sometimes, the bone structure of a woman's face is kind of masculine, but her facial muscle structure is feminine; the voice, however, always gives it away, though only due to subtle changes in frequency distribution.
You can imagine how that works for me. Sexuality is also kind of bewildering, so putting the two together... I'm faced with something unusual that largely revolves around something not-entirely-comfortable to begin with. I just avoid the whole situation, because that's what grown-ups do when they encounter something they don't quite jive with.
That approach only indicates an equal amount of bias. It doesn't indicate if the Democrat views are expressed where the bulk of evidence suggests their views aren't loony, and the Republican views are expressed where the bulk of evidence suggests they're actually correct.
What if you wrote an article about vaccine causing autism, where you cited 12 rigorously-evaluated scientific opinions, and 12 fervently-espoused lunatic ravings? The article would tally as "unbiased", but it would actually be biased: a preponderance of evidence would discredit the lunatics, yet the article would be shored-up to give them equal footing. In other words: you'd handicap the visibly-correct view and give additional, unmerited support to the visibly-unsupportable view, slanting the article toward a side that can't stand on its own merits.
Well, that's not necessarily an inaccurate assumption.
Bias is hard to examine because it's prone to the examiner's bias. Further, there's a "fair and balanced" fallacy in which you give equal-weight to each side--for example, you might try to remain "fair" by evaluating that 1,000 strong-methodology studies about vaccines not causing autism have as much weight as the massive anti-vaccine movement backed by 1 study using known-fraudulent data, even though one of these only has "evidence" in the form of confirmed lies. In either case, someone can conclude the end-result is less-biased, when it's only really including shoddier information or following a more-popular bias (or just the bias of the reviewers).
When two reviewers of opposing bias review something for bias, you have to then review the reviewers for bias. Turtles.
Actually, once someone has published something not claimed as a copyrighted creative work, it's no longer private and no longer acquired by illegal means. It must be an illegal video (child pornography) after that point.
Before Gawker received the video, it was already circulating without the authorization of Hogan and Clem. Gawker put it into wider circulation, which is technically the same thing as what anyone who distributes anything at any point ever is doing; however, there is an argument that Gawker put it into significantly-wider circulation, moving from "a thing you can find if you dig enough, which most people have been hearing about and only a significantly-large minority have actually obtained" to "it's in everyone's hands now". That is most likely more of a defamation issue, whereas the original acquisition and distribution would have been considered theft.
These cases are largely a matter of venue. If you get a sympathetic judge and jury, they give you different outcomes. "Secret videos" and "leaked photographs" have been mainstays of cheap celebrity gossip for ages, and have gone unchallenged largely because every challenge is essentially laughed out of court. That doesn't mean a judge won't occasionally bring the hammer down or, in this case, that a defendant won't stupidly elect for a jury trial so the plaintiff can cry sympathy.
I've always considered legislature and judiciary as parts of the government.
The report, published as news, of a non-celebrity would be an invasion of privacy. Also, is it an invasion of privacy when a well-known video already being circulated is in question? You've already lost control of that.
Someone suggested it'd be copyright at best. They're probably right.
Ah okay. I thought you were trying to make a point in the direction of UK-should-block-imports. It's been a common line of argument on Slashdot and in America recently, with people thinking high import tariffs and such will increase our wealth, rather than cause us to expend more labor for the same things rather than using that labor to make making more of other things.
It really is advantageous for everyone involved to get trade deals on as-open-or-better; but they can throw tantrums I guess.
And I got this backwards: Malthus to Solow was a paper written in 1992 by someone else, bringing further observations after Malthus (from 1760s-1830s) and Solow got their stuff out there. There have been a few such papers, and I've been bigger on information than academic history. My error.
Actually, it's not that simple.
In the UK, politicians are supposed to understand economics. They go to public school for that in particular. They learn about philosophy, politics, and economics. Now, granted, economics is a fast-changing field, and most economics education is brash and dogmatic; but they should have a grasp on current understandings, at least.
Economics has come a long way since Adam Smith and Karl Marx.
In 1983, Solow got a Nobel Prize for describing a method to separate an economy's growth into technical progress and population growth. An economy gets bigger when you have more people--to the point of scarcity, where e.g. feeding 10% more people requires 22% more labor because you're out of good land, thus need more irrigation and fertilizer to grow on poor land, and more farm hands because you get less yield from that land and need to grow across a wider area and spend more time planting and harvesting across more land per person's-worth of food. An economy also gets bigger when you invent a way to grow twice as much food on that fertile land (e.g. GMOs, irrigation, tractors), thus expend half(-ish) as many labor-hours on the farm, use that labor to make another thing, and come out with more stuff without increasing the amount of work (cost, wages) expended. Solow showed everyone how to figure out how much of each has happened.
In the early 1990s, Malthus raised some additional questions about technical progress to Solow. Malthus observed that an increase in general availability of things like food lead to a population growth to the point of scarcity, among other things. I became aware of Malthus because my own theories line up almost exactly with his, and people started calling me on it; but I haven't read much on him (my understanding of economics is almost exclusively a product of examining economic history and analyzing economic behaviors to exclude what is mathematically-impossible).
Malthusian observations are the basis of my plan to shock the American economy with an extremely-efficient tax and welfare plan, thus causing excessive labor demand which must be curbed by reducing per-capita buying power again--by cutting back working hours to 28-32 per week so that your per-year purchasing power is subsequently reduced, restoring about 5.6% unemployment. The alternate is to allow population to grow rapidly until scarcity sets back in; this doesn't liberate us from working time, and it doesn't raise the per-capita GDP (individual buying-power) in the long run, but it does give America a much-bigger total GDP to brag about (i.e. America is bigger, has more wealth, and can leverage that to make debt payments and take bigger loans). I would rather we all get a bit more wealthy and have half the week to freely enjoy our wealth.
All of this sounds irrelevant, mostly, because it's about technical progress. You invent a way to make a thing with less labor, you make more things cheaply and everyone gets richer.
Trade is technical progress.
Say you make chairs, at a rate of 40 per 40-hours labor, or 1 chair per 1 hour. To pay a chairmaker, you must pay 1/40 of his weekly salary--the amount of money to satisfy his standard-of-living--per each chair.
Somewhere far away, another country has better resources, such as better local iron and thus cheaper tools of higher quality, or local forests and thus no need to import wood from far off. A chairmaker in this country can produce chairs at a rate of 80 per 40-hours labor, or 1 chair per 1/2 hour.. To pay a chairmaker, you must pay 1/80 of his weekly salary as per his standard-of-living per each chair.
Invert this for cushions: your climate is great for cotton, but poor for trees; you make cushions at a rate of 80 per 40-hours labor, and they make cushions at a rate of 40 per 40-hours labor.
Altogether, you make a chair with a cushion for 1.5 hours of labor (1-hour chair, 0.5-hour cushion); they make the same for 1.5 hours of labor (0.5-hour chair, 1
What's weird is trying to claim the Government can't do something without Parliament. Isn't Parliament the government?
I haven't heard his wife's position on everything. The last I heard was that Hogan was already going through rough times and facing divorce, while Heather was all over him--a common enough behavior, where a girl gets wind that your relationship is over and she's already trying to get on your dick before you finish signing the papers. Maybe that wasn't what was going on; but it's what I heard. As it stands, though, I simply ignore that point because the information I have on it is thin and doesn't have iron-clad credibility.
Whether boning another woman is okay when your current girl has already decided you're done is a grey area. People do stupid shit like both concluding that the relationship is ending, and then considering themselves still in a relationship for weeks or months once they've already decided it's over, before finally officiating it. I think that's a lot of horse shit.
Reporting about public figures is a constant. Have you never been to a supermarket? Magazine covers are full of gossip about who cheated on who, who has a secret sex-party life, who is getting a divorce, and whatnot. If the Olsen Twins get drunk and take turns screwing three guys at a party, the press will have it on ABC, CNN, and Fox News the next day, if they can get an interview with anyone at the party. They'll even publish someone's cellphone recording of the girls walking off into the back room with studs in tow.
Of course Ashley is a little angel; it's Mary Kate who's the cocaine-fueled nightmare whore, and I think she's since broken her crack habit.
There have been a lot of private naked-photos and celebrity sex tape leaks; and we get to hear all kinds of gossip without pictures, like when Bill Clinton got a blowjob. If the press found out Angelina Jolie was cougaring up a college football team, they'd have it on the front page of everything that would print it--and it would just be "news" (well, what passes for news), and not "invasion of privacy".
I'm not arguing whether Gawker is worth a shit or not; I'm arguing whether or not they violated what we expect as our law here. I didn't know they were ordered to remove the video (fat lot of good that does, anyway; and I have issues with that, without more data), and have no defense for that; and for the simple concept of "invasion of privacy", it's been well-established that public figures have less privacy, and sex tapes and other embarrassing publications have happened frequently enough.
To say Gawker invaded Hogan's privacy would tangentially also imply Linda Tripp invaded Bill Clinton's privacy. The President's job is foreign policy and executive branch office; getting a blowjob from a 19-year-old intern falls squarely outside "newsworthy", except for gossip about the President as a celebrity. That did actual damage: it caused a useless impeachment trial, largely because Clinton lied under oath about something irrelevant anyway.
The simple difference is we didn't have pictures of Clinton. As for pictures of Hogan... he denied he'd ever bang another man's wife; accusing him of doing just that under the pretense that you have a video you won't show "for privacy" is essentially bullshit. Meanwhile, nobody's claimed Gawker invaded Heather or Bubba Clem's privacy, and claiming they haven't in this argument would be logically-inconsistent; at the same time, claiming Gawker publishing only a text column detailing what they can confirm of Hogan's sex life without a video is any different in terms of privacy from publishing the video is also logically-inconsistent.
We don't crush people we simply don't like. Tolerance is a level-4 defense mechanism, categorized as a "mature" behavior; that means grown-ups complain about things they don't agree with, but allow them so long as they don't affect us directly. Immature, overgrown children lash out at people and behaviors they don't like; and separating similar behaviors so you can categorize one invasion of privacy as "good" and the other as "bad" is pathological. The fact is the press reports on anything they can find out about celebrities, most of which is none of our damned business, and most of which nobody has a problem with even though it's an enormous cost you pay when you become famous. Crying that Gawker wasn't good-people and deserved to be blown out of existence for behaving in ways we don't like is childish and uncivil.
Oh, I didn't catch that Gawker disobeyed a prior court order.
How is what Hogan did morally-wrong? Bubba Clem was watching and operating the camera while Hogan fucked his wife! He brought her over for the pow-wow!
Actually, Gawker published the video after their divorce.
Uh, they posted a video of an event that occurred and was factual. That's not defamation, libel, or slander; it's reporting on the life of public figures. It's long-established that being a public person cuts away a substantial amount of your privacy protection. What laws were broken?
A Florida Jury found that Gawker violated Hulk Hogan's privacy. Other juries and judges have determined that public figures's privacy can't be violated in that way in many situations. Unless Gawker produced the tape (including hiring someone to have it made, thus invading privacy), it's been long-established that this is simply public gossip about a public figure: a tape was made by Clem (husband of the chick Hogan banged), Clem gave it to Gawker, Gawker published it after Hogan's divorce.
By early 2012, rumors began circulating “in the radio community about a sex tape starring Hogan and Heather Clem,” Peirce said in his deposition.
A month later, still images from the tape appeared on the website The Dirty — and Bubba now recognized the canopy bed as his own and knew it was his tape.
In the fall of 2012, Gawker’s then editor, A.J. Daulerio, received a phone call from Tony Burton, a lawyer who claimed a client of his was interested in mailing him something. A package arrived at the Gawker offices between Sept. 27 and Oct. 4, 2012. There was no return address. Daulerio was on vacation at the time, so the site’s then-managing editor, Emma Carmichael, opened the package and watched the recording inside — it was the sex tape.
So the sex tape was already a matter of public gossip, some stills were out there, someone sent it to Gawker, Gawker published it. Also Hogan had denied that he would ever bang Heather several times--he liked to talk publicly about his sex life.
Hogan made his affair with Heather Clem a public matter. He talked around it, he talked about his sex life in general, he pointed out that she was hot but claimed he wouldn't get on her because she's another dude's wife, and so forth. "Turns out you fucked her brains out!" is actually reasonable information to publish, and somehow that sex tape got made and got floated around.
It's a thin case for you and me; and it's a completely-different ballgame for someone famous who's baited the public interest.
I know that's the theory, and simulations tend to bear it out; but real cows aint spherical, and the military issue is rarely factored in.
Actually, what I stated is based on an analysis of history, not model theory. It's part of why things get cheaper over time.
Japan is fairly protectionist, yet has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the world.
They do, at 3.20%. That's quite-low; anything under 2% is critical, and under 4% is usually not stably-maintained. Their labor force participation rate is 60.4%, comparable to the United States labor force participation rate of 62.9%; both of these are considerably-high, which can mean many things. A high LFPR can indicate more single-adult households (and thus less poverty) or it can indicate more dual-income households from poverty situations (and thus more poverty); both of these situations can occur even if the total wealth is higher.
The number of employed/labor-force/population/employed-per-population in the United States has recovered since its low point in January, 2010. In millions, 2010: 129.8/153.5/309.3/41.97%; 2011: 130.9/153.3/311.7/42.00%; 2012: 133.3/154.4/314.1/42.44%; 2013: 135.3/155.7/316.5/42.75%; 2014: 137.6/155.3/318.9/43.15%; 2015: 140.6/157.0/320.1/43.92%. That means the labor force participation rate has gone down while the number employed, the number employed out of the whole population, and employment rate have all gone up. Those LPR/employed-per-population/employment-rate numbers are 2010: 64.8%/41.97%/9.8%; 2011: 64.2%/42.0%/9.2%; 2012: 63.7%/42.44%/8.3%; 2013: 63.6%/42.44/8.0%; 2014: 62.9%/43.15%/6.6%; 2015: 62.9%/43.92%/5.7%.
Those numbers mean the number of jobs have grown faster than population. If we were to assume the same 64.2% labor force participation rate as 2010, the 2015 unemployment rate would be 5.87%; using the peak 67% labor force participation rate, it would be 6.07%. Our peak unemployment rate was 9.8%.
You may argue they have "less stuff" because of that, but it's up to THEM whether jobs are more important than stuff or vice versa.
As of January 2015, the United States has grown by 10.8 million jobs; 2.3 million of these are a result of population growth, and 8.5 million are a result of productivity increase. Free trade has been a large part of that; the other part has been lay-offs as we obsolete your job with better processes (e.g. automation).. My above post, describing the loss of millions of jobs if we "brought jobs back to America", illustrates the free trade component.
So you can go ahead and argue to 8.5 million people that they should be jobless so you don't have to worry about getting laid off some time. You can also argue to 320 million Americans that they should be poor so you can have slightly-better job security. Tell the American People that you want America to decay into a third-world country because you're afraid that one day someone might find a way to do your job without you. I'm sure you can find some bullshit argument they'll buy, and a knife they'll use to slit their own throats at your command.
Yes but I just explained that 12-character, all-lower-case passwords are more-secure than 8-character, 4-class passwords.
Actually, there's a good argument against high taxes, as well as against low taxes; the sticking point is what you define as "high" and "low".
Businesses and anyone with an accounting sense and lots of cash flow definitely try to reduce their tax burden. Lower taxes reduce this pressure. There's a striking advantage to a presence in any locality, and that's balanced against the taxes. If business is 2% advantaged by having a major operation center in Germany (e.g. lower salaries, better access to technology, certain services are cheaper), but taxes are 8% lower in California, then the business moves to California and pays California taxes and comes out roughly 6% ahead.
On the other hand, tax sheltering is a thing as well, but not as much of a problem as it's made out to be. The average actual business profit is around 10%, and some businesses are as low as 2%. Businesses send most of their income out to wages, or to other businesses. Import inputs are, obviously, not taxable (they're a business expense, not income); while wages are taxed. This leaves you with things like Apple's headquarters in Cupertino paying $2 billion in wages every year, fed from money pulled from global sales. Cupertino complains Apple shelters some $10 billion of money they want taxes from--even though Cupertino's economy gets an influx from global trade and wages, plus Apple buying power and utilities. Apple is an egregious example itself, standing alongside Microsoft, and not many others.
That means lower business taxes to attract local businesses and, possibly, become a sheltering target (or make sheltering too much of a complexity hassle to bother with for larger businesses) isn't really worth much; but higher business taxes also aren't worth much.
The economic plan I designed lowered business income taxes by about 12% proportional (around 4.5% marginal tax rate) as a side-effect; I didn't adjust it because I figured that was fine. It's irrelevant and I'm not going to start the argument about how business taxes should be much, much lower; and that would complicate my tax plan, which is what we don't need.
Importantly, that plan lowered the cost of employees by shifting a payroll tax (OASDI, 6.2%) into a new tax that's an income tax replacing much of the existing general-fund tax. In other words: where an employer would hire you at $50,000 and pay $53,100 for you to take home $40,107 (single, 1-adult household) or $42,128 (married, 2-adult household), now the employer hires you at $50,000 and pays only $50,000 for you to take home $46,671 (single, 1-A) or $52,100 (married, 2-A, and yes that happens). The actual cost of producing things goes down, while the consumer income increases. This involves no tax increases; the system is just more-efficient than the current one, largely by stabilizing low-income households in such a way as to reduce the cost-of-risk, thus both reducing costs in existing economic activity and enabling new economic activities which replace inefficient public aid systems.
I was bored one day and decided to solve poverty. I ended up solving or sharply-reducing most current economic problems. It's what I got in trade: I have a psychiatric disorder in which I have zero interest in social relationships and spend all my time alone, and also don't care about other people's ideals or values or morals, so I bluntly point out how the world really works and have to occupy myself. This is the result of a sad little man with no friends listening to liberals and conservatives argue about economic policy and working it out from a blank starting point rather than from an assumption that the current system is essentially-correct and needs to be nudged in one direction or another. (By the by, it turns out that the only economic system that actually exists is roughly-similar to what they call "capitalism", and can't be changed by any means; it can be optimized, though, because it's essentially a behavior--the economy has an overall psychology to it, and so can be affected
Actually, if you cut off people's livelihoods as such, unemployment soars in those areas and a lot of people go hungry. The same rules apply: they have limited income (limited people are buying, and the monetary systems everywhere have a specific amount of total income from which to spend in a given specific span of time), and all goods and services compete for that income, thus all workers providing said products compete for that income.
Trade isn't "letting our jobs slip away". The average labor cost of a Chinese good is $3.50/hr; U.S. minimum wage is $7.25/hr, or twice (2.07x) as much. International shipping in bulk is minor, such that the per-good cost of shipping, e.g., a pair of jeans from China to the port at the U.S. is about 3 cents; the cost of shipping domestically is actually higher per-pair, because boats are huge and efficient at carrying large loads. That means the major cost--around 85%--in the price tag of a pair of jeans (or any good from China) is labor, and they would nearly double in price if made in American factories using minimum-wage workers.
A doubling in price as such would have to draw from the same total income in a given year. People don't wake up with more money to spend, and businesses pay out of revenue: your paycheck isn't `new money[];`, but rather money from goods the company sold that you helped make.
That means people would be able to buy only half as many of these goods.
Now, involved in the price of each good is the cost of the marketing, the packaging, the shipping, the warehousing, the stocking, the retailing, the maintenance of retail centers (labor, materials--floor tiles don't make themselves, or ship themselves), the energy supply (electricity, natural gas), the utilities (water, communication). These costs aren't reduced per-good by moving their manufacture to America; yet the ability to purchase goods reduces.
In other words: if you sell half as many goods, your cashiers still run 980 scans per hour, and half your cashiers become unemployed. Your trucks still carry 24,000 pairs of jeans each; half your truckers become unemployed, as do the proportion of mechanics, vehicle manufacturers, and fuel producers associated with them. Half your inventory workers don't have trucks to unload or shelves to stock, and become unemployed. Retail centers close down like so many Circuit Cities and Best Buys, and the buildings rot; nobody gets paid to power them, to maintain them, to clean the floors, to fix the lights, or simply for rent. A bunch of accountants and lawyers go away, too.
Usually, when you create minor unemployment by technical progress, goods get cheaper. Technical progress includes reducing the barriers to trade so you can get at cheaper goods, e.g. if it takes half as much labor to grow pumpkins in the land over, but twice as much to grow potatoes, you each swap pumpkins for potatoes and not so many wages need paying, thus cheaper food. This reduction in cost leaves consumers with a fraction of their income unspent, and so they buy new things, which then creates new employment opportunities because someone has to manufacture, ship, and retail all those new goods.
(By the way: the hot-blast furnace allowed manufacturing 86,000 pounds of iron using the same labor as the previous process required to manufacture only 400 pounds, thus making railways feasible, dramatically lowering transportation costs. This had enormous impacts on trade. Look up the history of the wooden shipping pallet as well.)
In this case, you've found a way to create major unemployment by rolling back technical progress, reducing total consumer buying power: more must be spent on the same goods, so fewer goods are bought. The fractional cost per-good of shipping and retail isn't reduced, so those jobs are flatly lost. The factory jobs are hewn from a portion of what we lose--which would probably include Netflix, some healthcare, and other luxuries which we can no longer support. IT jobs and other high-level engineering
It's not just that.
Part of the U.S. economy's strength is its renewable nature. Norway and Qatar are rich because of oil; but the U.S. has information and services. Much of the U.S. economy runs on retail, shipping, and other domestic services: internal trade makes us self-sufficient, such that our ability to produce food, materials, and energy allows us to pay each other to provide retail, construction, and business services. We get wealthier by taking advantage of international trade; but we're not huge on exports of non-sustainable goods.
The U.S. has the world's largest fertile basin and can produce staple food and fiber (clothing) more-readily (i.e. with lower cost, namely lower human labor) than most nations; and our sewage system converts human waste into fertilizer pellets for farming, plus we use manure from dairy and chicken farms. We have an enormous shipping industry, our own automaker industry, and a massive healthcare and IT system (the Internet is a physical thing, run by data centers and cables; and it takes labor here to keep it running). Much of what we need and what we're good at making is made here.
Importantly, all of that stuff is service and renewable goods. Food is renewable: it's made of sun, air, and soil, extended with GMOs (knowledge and information created by labor) and chemical engineering. Chemical nitrogen fertilizer is made using nitrogen gas as a reducer, not a feed stock: ammonia is rendered from the air, and then natural gas is burned to react the oxygen and get carbon, leaving Hydrogen and CO2. In the future, we could use Audi's eDiesel process to use nuclear, solar, or geothermal energy to make methane for the same purpose. We're not shipping natural gas and nitrogen fertilizer; we're shipping food, and new knowledge will find new ways to make food.
Compare that to Norway and Qatar: they run on oil. When oil becomes scarce, its price will go up; at the same time, new knowledge will bring the cost of manufacturing solar panels down. The United States runs on energy, and buys (imports) oil from OPEC because it's cheaper than producing energy locally and, thus, allows the U.S. to use its labor force for other things, making the U.S. and all its citizens wealthier (more buying power). When that is no longer true--when oil is a costlier alternative than solar or nuclear--the U.S. energy industry will switch to nuclear or solar. It's notable that new nuclear plants are almost cheaper than natural gas, coal, and oil power plants today in terms of TCO: the up-front capital cost plus the fuel cost amortized over the life of the plant is practically on-par between nuclear and fossil fuels, and the fossil fuel plants can be the costlier of the two in many situations. This is a new development (nuclear has historically been much more expensive), so it hasn't just been public sentiment that's held nuclear back; it's been cost.
So imagine oil doesn't become scarce for 100 years yet; but nuclear power becomes cheaper than oil power in 10 years. Well, suddenly we don't need to buy Qatar's oil, or Norway's, or Canada's. These countries lose the United States as a customer, quickly; 20 years later, the U.S. is producing its own power from nuclear fuel mined in Texas and California, because it costs us less--meaning we don't have to work to make as much export goods to sell and leverage for the purchase of fuel, and instead use part of that work to make energy and the rest to make more goods (for us or for export to buy stuff we actually want that someone else makes cheaper).
In that scenario, the United States prospers, but the self-sufficient countries of OPEC falter in the loss of their oil market. They can try to slow the process by lowering oil prices, reducing their income from exports and selling their labor at a lower premium. They will become poor countries while the United States makes food and sells nuclear engineering services to Europe. China, meanwhile, will use its ultimately-renewable manufactur
Actually, I've already got one: a pacemaker is a medical device, and altering its code changes it, thus is verboten. This is a good thing: every time a medical device's firmware changes, it needs re-certification, so they can't just load new shit into their devices and sell them as if they were already FDA-approved and tested to perform their function correctly. It's also a bad thing, because device makers don't update code so as to avoid recertification; we really need a strict-audit process to allow updating for non-behavioral defect correction (including flow behavior: no refactoring) with full code changes and internal verification submitted, which we can at any future time examine to determine if you actually did substantially-modify the software.
There is an FDA approval process for personal-use drugs and devices. For drugs, it has to be a non-controlled, non-approved substance (not another manufacturer's generic of an FDA-approved drug) for personal, non-medical (recreational) use OR such a substance for medical use under the supervision of a healthcare professional. For medical use of such drugs, you don't need a prescription; you only need to tell the FDA what doctor knows what you're using the drug for. I'm not sure what you have to file to inform the FDA of non-approved, modified medical devices.