The original argument attempts to imply that companies somehow "eat" the losses. They don't. Their ability to manage risk is built-in.
Businesses don't price everything to fit a happy world where nothing ever goes wrong, then accept a loss or "pass it on to the consumer" when something breaks. They assess the cost of risk, factor that into the cost of business, and derive price from that cost. When something goes wrong and prices don't go up, it's because prices already factor in something going wrong now and then.
You're a certified accountant; you're not an MBA or a risk officer. You track where money comes from and where it goes. If you're doing Monte-Carlo simulations to figure out where your money goes, you're a really bad accountant; we don't guess where money *probably* has gone.
Tesla batteries are built for failure. Like all batteries, they're designed not to fail that way; unlike a cell phone, they might take impact damage. Tesla batteries are compartmentalized, so a failure in one cell might not necessarily cause failures in adjacent cells--even a puncture failure. If that design proves unsafe, Tesla has an alternate battery design which adds an expanding foam sealant to automatically contain and attempt to smother the fire, although this would make the batteries more expensive and less dense (so far it's not been a problem, so it's not worth doing).
Tesla responded to early puncture damage by equipping all cars with an aluminum plate. As the cars didn't burn up rapidly and drivers were easily able to exit and return, the batteries as-is provide a surprisingly-low amount of risk even in the event of physical damage and subsequent fire; thus Tesla hasn't yet implemented advanced self-containing designs. They'll do it eventually, if either the risk of injury proves higher in wide deployment or if their engineers figure a way to do it cheaply and without cutting down on battery life too much.
Difference between a battery in your pocket and a battery on the bottom of a vehicle going 70mph.
Actually, that's exactly how it works. Samsung's profits are, in part, a hedge on cost of risk; or they have insurance against shit like this, which they cover a deductible for (from cash holdings built by profits), and the insurer essentially manages that cost. Either way, there's a chunk of cost that goes to covering these problems.
You have to remember everything is wages. In the U.S., the average profit rate is 10%--that is, out of all of the income, 90% is individual and 10% is business. Some businesses fluctuate between a negative and positive income; some have crazy 28% profit margins; Wacom has 4.5%. People like to talk a lot about the profit margin on a product, or money flowing out to Irish banks to dodge taxes; but at the end of the day, this is how money flows, and all of this money comes from revenues--the price of your product.
Somebody made those batteries. Somebody mined the lithium. Somebody refined it. Somebody transported it. The cost of the phones, the batteries, the plastic, the metal, the shipping, the packaging, the advertising. All of that is somebody's wage. All that shit blew up? Well, those people still need to get paid. Risks are factored into price so wages keep getting paid. Prices don't go up after the fact because they were already raised in anticipation of this shit happening now and then.
It takes just as much effort to make HIPAA compliance, which means it adds the same amount of effort. If it takes you 15,000 hours per year to manage your VMware data center and 5,000 hours per year to manage HIPAA compliance, that's 20,000 hours; if AWS IAAS takes 5,000 hours per year to manage infrastructure, that's 10,000 hours.
You can control the risk of dependency by building your applications to be movable. Unix applications running under Docker can move quite well; likewise, most database software can run on any provider, so moving your application to a new provider who gives you SQL Server or Postgres means you can just load your database into their DB solution (even if that's just hosting the RDBMS yourself on a cloud server, not e.g. RDS) and go. That minimizes the risk if you need to move by giving you contingencies (i.e. it's just as likely to happen, and you have a way to reduce the severity at risk event).
At the same time, you have an opportunity risk of integrating with a given provider, and a threat risk of doing the same.
Integrating with your provider means you can take advantage of AWS automatic scaling using custom AMIs and load balancers. It means you can take advantage of S3 as a storage back-end, and set policies to reduce the costs by using different storage tiers. You can integrate self-healing, so if a node misbehaves you tear it down and scale up a new one. These all reduce workload and costs (including cost of risk: automatic scaling and self-healing reduce the probability or severity of potential threats).
At the same time, as you point out, all of this integration means a change in provider APIs or political situation impacts your software in ways which aren't resolved by just moving your Docker containers and databases to a new hosting provider. That's a threat.
You can minimize the threat risk and maximize the opportunity risk by building your application and infrastructure more modularly. Using modern object-oriented programming, custom applications (or commercial applications you intend to license) can operate on "Storage Backend", with S3, Azure, local disk, shares, and other back-ends operating as plug-ins. The same goes for any sort of auto-scaling or self-healing: health checks for load or failure can trigger events, and a plug-in can respond by activating auto-scaling or otherwise managing the infrastructure.
This approach minimizes the cost in a risk event: rather than reworking your complex management system or highly-integrated application, you simply switch to or write a new plug-in for a new target platform. Because you touch very little of the application, there's less risk of anything breaking, thus less effort required to transition. The potential severity of a hosting provider issue requiring migration to new APIs or an entirely new provider is diminished.
At some point, you're likely still reliant on Postgres, SQL Server, Active Directory,.NET, Docker Hub, Jenkins, or some other provider. Those are risks as well; but it's okay, because outsourcing generally saves money. Writing your own source code management tool would be expensive and error-prone (losing your entire repository!) versus running Gitlab in Docker on Ubuntu 16.04, even though any of Gitlab, Docker, Ubuntu, or Git could go in a direction not suitable for your needs one day. No need to roll your own distribution when somebody else can manage patches for you, even though transitioning from one to the other when they no longer suit your needs is complex and costly; it's, in total, more complex and costly to manage your own distribution and keep up on security patching without altering applications to get new bug fixes and security updates without bringing in breaking changes from the newer, supported versions.
Honestly, redundancy over redundancy is retarded. AWS and Azure have back-ups, disaster recovery plans, multiple data-centers, and multiple peerings per data center. Amazon's Virginia data center has a connection to Verizon, Comcast, Level-3, AT&T, and XO. They have off-site backups. They've got a lot of visibility if they do go down (it happened in 2011, and there was a partial outage in 2015). AWS also has built-in redundancy so you can run your servers and network connections in different availability zones, either in the same data center or halfway across the country.
Imagine if you built a data center and gave it back-up power and fail-over VMware HA. Then, as a back-up, you built another data center on the opposite coast, and replicated SAN so that a failure of the east coast data center would have all your VMware stuff come up on the West coast and restore operations.
Then, you decided to replicate that entire fail-over model by exporting all your VMware stuff to OVF and importing it into OpenStack, getting two more data centers, and somehow contriving the data up so that your OpenStack fail-over data centers were fed by your VMware fail-over data centers, in case both data centers in your business had a meltdown related to VMware being crap.
That's what happens when you decide going all-AWS or all-Azure is risky, and you need to use services on both.
It's a bloated and silly explanation, I know. Maybe if you were a CRO (Chief Risk Officer) or a project manager. Mind you, I'm only listed in the PMI Credential Registry since 19 October 2015. The field really is ridiculous, and I leave things like monte-carlo simulation to experts (it requires more than just algebra).
Bailing out so easily? I guess it's long-past the point where you can make deformed arguments without spouting utter lunacy like we'd expect out of Joseph Mercola.
You didn't even suggest where I might be wrong. I was expecting you to make some argument about money being infinite and being backed by some sort of imaginary value, instead of representative of labor (time) and backed by production (output). Usually these arguments get around to someone suggesting we can solve our problems by printing enough money for everyone to be a billionaire; but I guess I cut off that line of reasoning already.
Did you finally run out of bullshit you didn't think I could counter? Am I just causing you pain and trauma by making it hard to hold your delusional world view? I've seen people have panic attacks when their extreme projections become unmaintainable--hell, I've done that to people I don't like on purpose--but I don't have enough information about you to know how to make you crack.
As for what I know about economics and psychology, I've had trouble with the field before. I started tearing apart all the economic theories they taught us in high school and college, pointing out places where they were wrong and broken, a couple years ago. Eventually, someone showed me Solow and Malthus; it turns out real economists already knew in the 90s what I was figuring out after 2010, and my "new theories" were crude versions of the currently-accepted economic literature. I'm not exactly a Nobel Prize candidate.
Psychology, on the other hand, is a joke. The field's useful when arguing in the abstract about how individual humans behave; but what you really want is statistics and behavioral economics. That's what the Mincome experiment was about: identifying how large populations react to policy changes such as a partial unconditional income, notably by identifying what economic decisions people make about it. Again, they found that only two population demographics worked less: mothers of newborn children and teenagers of low-income households. This increased the graduation rate, because the teenagers weren't under pressure to keep the household out of poverty, and could focus on school.
That's behavioral economics: most people continued working, and simply had more money to spend; people with a large trade-off made a selection between a specific cost of employment (notably, security of raising children, or strain on their education) and the benefit of employment (money). I suppose you don't like that people can make that decision, although it doesn't matter when those so-called people are 16-year-old high school students; not sure what you expect to do with mothers who can't afford daycare and elect to tend to an infant rather than search for a job.
Before the MINCOME experiment, women aged less than 25 were more likely to have given birth. By the end of MINCOME, they were less-likely to have given birth. Total number of births to women under 25 was significantly lowered by the MINCOME experiment (i.e. free money with no oversight reduced the number of births). The study notes the same effect observed for women under age 19, but the number of births makes the measure insignificant (i.e. that effect could be random chance).
MINCOME reduced the likelihood of hospitalization and the length of hospital stays. That holds true for mental health, accidents, and injuries.
Seven years after MINCOME ended and the money stopped coming, subjects in Dauphin (the city where free money flowed to all) had re-normalized to match controls (other cities who weren't given a benefit). That means removing the free money eliminated all of the societal benefits and harmed society.
All of that, by the way, with zero statistical effect on employment of primary earners, while married women returned to work less-quickly after childbirth, and ad
Layoffs eliminate redundancy. They get rid of "dead wood" by pruning branches: your department is no longer necessary, your job role is no longer required. That doesn't mean you aren't damned-good at your job; it means we can't use you. An accounting firm can't make much use of a biochemical engineer, either.
It's good management practice to attempt to retain valuable employees. Layoffs are an unfortunate necessity and, barring a complete sociopath or someone with highly-matured defense mechanisms (yeah, there's a healthy and an unhealthy way to accept the dirty work you have to do), the person in the room who's about to have the worst day the morning the notice goes out is the manager doing the hatchet work. Highly-skilled and effective managers will create profiles of employee skills and competency, and slot them into new positions opening into the company. That usually only captures a small proportion of the staff, but it still lets you retain your most-suitable employees; the ones you let go are a mix of better and worse employees, and all ill-suited for whatever positions you need to fill in the coming months.
Good management practice is hard, though; and many people would have trouble selecting the most-suited employees for upcoming positions and at least retaining them. A lot of people might resort to detachment, temporarily forgetting that these people are human beings, only identifying their relative usefulness, and not letting themselves acknowledge that there aren't just better people who are getting let go for not fitting the few up-and-coming positions you need filled, but also that even the less-skilled workers aren't bad people and don't deserve to be tossed out. Most people simply can't handle it emotionally, and either throw the whole department out so they don't have to look too hard at individual names and faces, or distance themselves.
Most of us engineers get a job in a week. Some of us don't. There are only so many jobs, and someone has to pay salaries; we're all trying to cut someone else's throat and pick someone else's pocket to keep ourselves in the game. I'm not remiss about actively working to improve things to the point that even my own job goes obsolete in the process; I don't worry over who has to sit out and starve because I get to eat and sleep in a real bed.
That doesn't mean I haven't tried to fix it. Unfortunately, most people either talk about the poor and then immediately get mad you didn't hurt the rich, or they have a fantasy about the poor so strong that "you, personally, would have $12,000 more money to spend every year" is responded to with "yeah but only if you can make sure the poor people can't have anything!" The whole job protectionism thing is based on backwards economics, but that I can at least understand--people are scared about their security; they like reaping the benefit of everyone else going through lay-offs and outsourcing, but they're afraid they personally might get hurt one day.
The point of "the cloud" *air quotes to show how much better I am than silly plebs who use weird street phrases they don't understand* *more air quotes* *smug look* is that it takes 20 IT workers to manage the infrastructure at 5 businesses, or it takes 5 IT workers to manage the infrastructure for 20 businesses.
In other words: per unit of useful output, we want fewer IT workers. Running high-availability Web servers, databases, accounting systems, payroll systems, groupware backbone, user management (e.g. Active Directory), and disaster recovery (backups etc.) shouldn't require us to pay 2 DBAs, 3 system administrators, 2 network engineers, plus maintenance, plus purchase power hardware and maintenance from the UPS and generator company. 2 DBAs, 3 system administrators, and 2 network engineers can provide those services for literally dozens of companies; and the power redundancy and maintenance required for all of that is only marginally higher (double, triple, instead of 20 or 40 times) than the per-each on-site infrastructure.
What do you think hyperconvergent data center design is for? In 5 years, we won't have SAN; VMware clusters will use all local storage shared by VSAN, handling data redundancy and locality based on criticality, allocating data from the local drives in each server, and communicating across a dedicated backbone (i.e. redundant, multi-channel 10GbE or higher fiber). CISCO's HyperFlex brand is putting on a marketing show about how you can rack servers and have them all share their CPU and storage resources as if they're just one giant server. The engineering has to happen once, at the vendor; repeating the engineering work at millions of businesses is a thing of the past, and that means those engineers are no longer necessary.
The other side of this is everything's cheap, so we can make more. Paying only 93% in total to make things? 7% more things can be made at the same cost! That's basically how we got where we are today (i.e. it's why food cost 40% of the middle-class household budget in 1900, 33% in 1950, and 11% today, etc.).
Of course, rapid job loss doesn't give the economy time to adjust (pressure prices to normalization, then recycle the reclaimed consumer buying power to create replacement jobs), so e.g. overnight automation of 20% of our infrastructure would cause a massive economic collapse (see: The Great Depression), while automation of 20% of our infrastructure across 10 years would cause a bunch of stuff in the media and basically the post-90s. Lengthening the transition allows recovery during transition, and more pressure is applied to older technical progress (i.e. the cost-savings that laid off 20,000 workers in 2016 should remediate in 2017, and will be facing stronger downward price pressure in 2018, and even stronger in 2019, and so forth). Even largely-disruptive changes usually have a snap-back effect after the initial shock, and eventually you're only a couple months behind the growth curve: unemployment ticks up 0.5%, then jobs recovery reaches an equilibrium rate, and you end up with a stable unemployment rate during the rest of the rapid growth span.
I'm not kidding about the 10-years sudden growth thing, either. Look at 1990, 1995, 2000, 2010... can you remember when a CORDLESS TELEPHONE and an answering machine that didn't require a looped tape was considered high-tech? What about v.90's blazing-fast speeds? V.90 56k modems were supported by half of all ISPs in 1997. 56k was destined for failure, and V.92 isn't familiar to people who lived through the V.90 era; instead, we're all struck by the nostalgia of something that came out in 1996, advertised as "Comcast@Home". Cell phones cost $4,000 in 1983, and service for 2 hours of voice per week would run you $240/month (today, that's over $9,000 with $550/month); instead, I have a $350 OnePlus One and I pay Ting $28/month, while other people shell out $70/month to have unlimited high-speed LTE4+ everywhere all the time (I use less than 500MB).
"Starting your own business" only works if there's a market. To be more complete (but still horribly undetailed to the point of inaccuracy): there's a total amount of income each year and, thus, a total amount of spendable money in one year's time frame, and what can be sold is what can be produced for less than that amount of money. Products are made by labor time, labor time incurs wages, wages are paid out of revenues, revenues come from consumer purchasing, purchasing comes from income.
A new business either draws purchasing away from an old business or it competes for new purchasing available as population or productivity (amount of stuff made per labor-hour, thus decrease in cost and thus price relative to number of spendable consumer dollars) increase.
More to the point: unemployment has decreased during 2016. The labor force participation rate has increased by 0.5% since September 2015, and the number of employed Americans has increased by 3 million while the number of unemployed Americans has increased by 0.014 million (we didn't add as many jobs as we added people in the workforce, but we added more jobs than the proportional employment rate, thus the unemployment rate went down, the number of employed went up, and the number of unemployed also went up).
Per the past three months, the number of unemployed increased by 0.169 million since July 2016, while the number of employed increased by 0.469.
[...]some 330,000 in all at major tech companies.[...]
[...]"The layoffs I predicted have been occurring." And worse, he says, these laid-off workers are never again going to find tech jobs: "They will always remain unemployed," at least in tech, he said. "Their skills will be obsolete."[...]
I don't see 330,000 newly forever-unemployed IT workers. That would be literally 8.25% of the computer and mathematics workforce. We'd be talking about 13% unemployment today.
Unfortunately, I don't have occupational employment statistics newer than May, 2015. At that time, employment in computer and mathematical occupations number 4,005,250. Some longer-term analysis includes charts that show only normal fluctuation, although computers and mathematical has a long-running up-trend and a current down-trend not substantially different from 2008-2009.
That is often true. But it is not an example of operant behaviors and reinforcements, it's an example of cognitive processes and rational behavior. You keep confusing the two, which shows that you know very little about psychology.
When you face a punishment (e.g. loss of benefits) for an action, that leads to extinguishing.
My system increases the amount of benefit (reward) for taking employment, which is reinforcing. Instead of 7 cookies, you get 10.
Cognitive processes are a separate behavior; however, humans are able to project rewards and punishments, which creates operant behavior.
Well, experience from Europe suggests otherwise.
Europe doesn't have any system sharing the characteristics of my system. Full stop. The system I describe doesn't exist anywhere in the world. Europe has a cash benefit system, which is superficially-similar to my system in the same way slavery is superficially-similar to employment.
True. But your problem is that you erroneously believe that it is due to a "limited number of jobs" or lack of "incentives". Since you don't understand why people are jobless, you come up with incorrect solutions.
Every year, there is an amount of income earned. That income is earned primarily through employment; but the simple fact is a number of dollars reach people's hands.
Wages are paid out of revenues. When you buy a product, a lot of people work to produce and retail it. There's energy (oil prospecting, refineries, power companies, fuel), materials (mines, mills), parts manufacture, deliverable manufacture, shipping, warehousing, retailing, management. The price you pay covers the wages for the fraction of labor-hours invested in the production of those products, plus the profit margin made in total by the businesses involved.
As a matter of mathematical fact, there will not be more dollars in the system unless more dollars are added to the system. That means loans (fractional reserve), digging into savings, or the central bank issuing new currency.
The products and services which can be purchased are ultimately limited by the money consumers are capable and willing to spend. Eventually, there is no more consumer spending available.
That means jobs come from consumers buying things. If consumers can (and do) suddenly buy 10% more stuff, then we must produce 10% more stuff. To produce, ship, and retail 10% more goods and services, we need to employ 10% more labor (until scarcity, at which point making 10% more stuff requires more than 10% more labor).
The cause of long-term unemployment is unknown and probably unknowable. The cause of an unemployment rate is a limited amount of jobs due to a lack of consumer demand for products and services. That is to say: we would employ more people, but we wouldn't be able to sell what they make, and so they would suck payroll and not earn us a profit; and then we'd have to cover their costs from revenue, raising the price of products, lowering the amount of products purchaseable, and reducing consumer demand further.
Long-term unemployment might, sometimes, just be a result of failure to compete--that is, there are 10 people and 7 jobs, and you're one of the three who wasn't positioned better than everyone else. That's an individual matter. As a matter of an economy, the fact that X number of job-desiring individuals are unemployed at any given time--or that only some number E of individuals are employed--roughly reflects the capability of the population to produce products which can be sold.
In other words: there aren't an endless amount of jobs.
You make $20,000/year. Food costs $2,000; your car costs $5,000; your home costs $12,000. You can purchase $70/month Cable TV for $840/year, or you can spend $50/month on Internet for $600/year; you can't have both. You buy the Internet package, and now you have $400 left. New technology means y
But the jobless don't have employment, and it's a lot of work to get one, so it's not a behavior you can reinforce.
Nevertheless, a static environmental condition does not reinforce *remaining* jobless. You asserted that an unchanging condition would reinforce joblessness and actively-encourage people to seek unemeployment.
A means-tested benefit with a gradual phase-out is financially similar to your proposal, but it makes it easier for government to tune the reward for every extra dollar earned than your proposal.
My system is self-tuning. It requires zero input after initiation. It is 100% unaffected by changes in wealth distribution; what you propose, on the other hand, would require the government to raise additional funds when unemployment increases, or when there are more low-wage jobs. Maintaining a gradual phase-out system requires constant heavy analysis of census data, income data, market data, inflation data, and purchasing power. Maintaining a universal benefit doesn't.
And you have provided no argument why this shouldn't be coupled to government supervision and requirements for recipients other than that you don't like it.
Because coupling it to government supervision doesn't provide a benefit.
Because, yes, people see that doing X grants Y, and Y is desirable, so they do Y. If they didn't, they would be retarded. The human intellect is based on the ability to assess information and project the future based on proposed actions--this is called planning, and it's part of something called Executive Function. To propose that humans don't do this is to propose that humans would never think to get a job for any reason--to the point that they would dismiss your demand that they should get a job.
Because there aren't an endless amount of jobs. A certain proportion of the population will be unemployed; you want them to push against that wall when there is nothing there for them.
Because your government office of supervision will fuck up and cancel benefits for individuals, destroying their financial situation for no reason other than because it's impossible to 100% perfectly identify who is qualified and who is not.
Because the risk of loss of benefits is carried by landlords who rent to tenants and must factor in the risk of evictions and empty units, and so raises the cost of rent for lower-income tenants.
You have provided no argument except broken logic and factually-inaccurate claims. You're now grasping so badly that you want the audience to believe humans don't reason that a job will do them any good, and have to be forced into a job. You have actually declared that people can't reason that a job provides income, and income provides the means to obtain desirable things. People who are incapable of such reasoning are functionally retarded; they would have to be missing an enormous part of the human neurological system to fail to carry out that reasoning intrinsically. Either that, or they'd have to be unaware that workplaces actually pay people--they'd need to believe everyone worked for free, and have no clue where anyone gets all this money.
I can find plenty of people who share your concern about just handing out free money; but I can't find anyone who actually agrees with any of your reasoning. One of my more broadly-experienced acquaintances suggested you don't know what you're talking about and are just too arrogant to have noticed, and then went on to talk about Hanlon's razor and stuff. I suppose I could ask the crowd on/r/idiots to rate the debate as well; but you'd probably just declare they're obviously not as smart as you--not that it matters what you think when you're still wrong.
In conclusion: it's obvious to everyone you stuck your tongue to a frozen pole in the fourth grade, and it's still there.
Most of those no, but sort of for slavery. Slavery actually is an interesting example: the minimum cost of labor is essentially the cost to keep slaves. Raising a new slave from child is expensive, and poor slave health reduces productivity; thus food, medical care, shelter, and even proper tools are all required to maximize the efficiency of keeping slaves.
It's the same way in a non-slavery system: welfare and income must support the labor force, or else your labor force deteriorates and your economy collapses. Sub-subsistence minimum wage leads to a die-off of the lower levels of labor, or else you pay welfare to cover them. Even if the middle-classes produce enough children to replace population, there's an additional economic cost in having larger families and short lower-class lifespans versus smaller families and longer lower-class lifespans. That is to say: if the poor die when they're 30-40 and get replaced by middle-class fourth-children who didn't make it big, you have to raise a lot of middle-class fourth children through 20 years of non-productive life, whereas poor people living to 60 will provide 20 years of productive life instead (and you can stop at the middle-class third child).
So it turns out free markets, modern welfare systems, minimum wages, and new systems like UBI (e.g. my Universal Social Security proposal, because of course I would) are technologies which replace older systems like serfdom and slavery. A slavery system places the expense of death squarely on the slave-owner; while a non-slavery system allows the business to simply replace the employee, and the expense of death and poverty diffuses through the population. This smooths out the economic fluctuations caused by workforce health defects, and allows centralization of workforce welfare (i.e. government aid).
Slavery is inefficient. By contrast, my Universal Social Security aims to improve employment efficiency directly by lowering payroll taxes (your employer pays fewer dollars per dollar you take home) and increasing consumer take-home in relation to wage paid (you take home a larger percentage of the dollars your employer pays to keep you). That means a toaster costs $40 to produce today might retail for $44 (10% profit) and send the employees involved home with a total $25 (6.2% OASDI, 3.8% benefits, then the employee pays 30% in total taxes); whereas under USS, that toaster costs $38.50 (6.2% OASDI is removed), retails for $42.40 (10% profit), and sends the employees involved home with a total of $30. USS is efficient, to the tune of 62.5% (current) vs 77.9% (USS).
The original goal of my USS was to reduce landlord risk by stabilizing low incomes (you can't lose the USS benefit; it doesn't end, it doesn't cut your hours, and it doesn't fire you). That reduces rental costs at low income levels, allowing landlords to profitably rent housing. That's only covered by half the benefit; the remainder covers food, clothing, personal care, and utilities. There's additional risk margin built in at every level. It turns out ending homelessness and hunger and immediately remediating all of the problems in our welfare system is a hell of a lot more efficient now. This is newly-possible because our economy is wealthier than ever; if we did this in 1950, we'd have leveled most incomes, and then collapsed like the USSR (but probably faster).
So, to recap: Slavery is inefficient and expensive; solving poverty is efficient and cheap. This new economic model is a type of technology which more-efficiently accomplishes the goals of welfare and minimum wage, while stabilizing the economy against recessions, sudden technical progress (e.g. automation), and other damaging factors. I've essentially improved the technology used by Government.
... unless you think Feudalism would be a cheaper, more-efficient system?
You said that the basis of your analysis was "operant behavior". I'm simply pointing out that that analysis is incorrect: reinforcements only apply to actual behaviors, and someone who is jobless, by definition, doesn't engage in the actual behavior of "holding a job" so that behavior never gets reinforced.
Obtaining employment under current welfare: punishment. Welfare benefits vanish. Job bad. Operant response: avoid.
Obtaining employment under my system: 100% of benefit from employment is conveyed. No punishment. Job good. Operant response: reward, repeat.
A person with no job and a limited income has many behaviors which are mediated by money. A person lacking sufficient money to engage in rewarding behaviors will seek to increase income, perhaps by getting a job; however, as stated, punishing a person for getting a job diminishes job-seeking behavior.
That is a property that pretty much all welfare systems already have.
Unemployment: When you become employed, benefits discontinue immediately. Loss of job requires re-application; benefits are only provided under specific job-loss conditions. An at-fault termination (you were fired, not laid-off) disqualifies you for unemployment benefits, thus taking a job is risky. Loss of employment more than thrice in three years disqualifies you for unemployment benefits, thus seeking jobs repeatedly is dangerous.
HUD: HUD pays the lesser of 30% of your rent OR 30% of the standard minus your income. An income increase removes HUD benefits and makes you responsible for more of the rent, thus an income increase reduces income. HUD is, however, less useful in this examination, because HUD families already have jobs; they might gain additional income by working more, if underemployed (which, of course, requires occupying a job out of what is, at any given moment, a limited pool of jobs, thus excluding someone else from working those hours).
SNAP: DO NOT ACCRUE ANY SAVINGS. SNAP benefits END if you have more than $2,250 of bank accounts and other countable resources; some (15) states actually count your car as a resource, and won't pay you a benefit until you sell your car and spend the money on food (and then how do you get to work?). Households with above $990 + $347/person monthly income are disqualified. SNAP benefits are reduced to zero at a rate of 30% of monthly income; the reward value of gainful employment is thus reduced by 30% (i.e. $10/hr? No, it's only $7/hr).
The Welfare Trap has an income plateau at $8.25/hr full-time in Illinois, and drops off above $12/hr. Total income reaches a low point at $18/hr full-time; recovery is roughly $38/hr full-time. Here's a picture.
Now what's really interesting is this graph doesn't actually show unemployment. That's because unemployment is based on your income at your prior job, and is limited to 6 months. In Maryland, the current maximum is $430/week or $10.75/hr; in Illinois, it's $418/week or $10.45/hr. That means unemployment pays more than full-time $8.25/hr--which is almost the maximum income level when benefits are included. Further, unemployment is 47% of your income over the past 6 months, which means you would have been making $22.25/hr to get $418/week.
That means, in Illinois, being on unemployment and every other Welfare system pays more than a replacement job at your prior wage, unless you made more than $38/hr ($76,000).
The median household income is $54,000, which means more than 50% of all households are better off holding out on welfare as long as possible.
What was that feature you were talking about? The feature that this shit doesn't happen? Because this is how it works in the real world. If you make less than $60,000 or $75,000 or something, get yourself laid off, get on unemployment, get all benefits possible, then fi
People are paid enough to live at a standard-of-living at which similar pay in the United States would fail to yield. That's a bit different than "simply paid less". Granted, their standard-of-living is lower; but at 1/2 pay, their SOL isn't 1/2 as high.
China has a 92.2% literacy rate, versus the U.S. 99%. In 2013, it had lower unemployment than the USA; a 73-year male life expectancy versus 76 in the US; and a 77-year female life expectancy versus 81 in the US. On the other hand, 77.9% of the US population were Internet users, while 38.3% of Chinese used the Internet.
China in 2012 had 6.5% of its population in Poverty, whereas the U.S. in 2014 celebrated a reduction in poverty to 14.5% from its previous level of 15% in 2012; however, a different analysis suggests that the real poverty rate in the U.S. is 4.5%, and that 14.5% only counts people below the poverty line.
0.37% of Chinese (about 5 million) are homeless, including 1 million children; in the United States, it's 0.50% (about 1.6 million), with 600,000 not able to find a homeless shelter. 48 million in the United States are food-insecure (hunger), which is about 14.8%; globally, 11% of the world population faces hunger. I can't get statistics on China; they have a robust culture around food (seriously) and the government has made food security a top-priority for a long time, but that doesn't tell me how many people there aren't eating.
China's somewhat behind in infrastructure, but has the economic power to bring this up to speed at a reasonable pace. They've been doing that. They're actually pretty developed in terms of healthcare, poverty, and literacy. They've weathered enormous disasters such as the flooding of major agricultural regions, as well, which has set the country back severely. It would be inaccurate to say China is just as well-off as the U.S.; and it's equally-inaccurate to claim it's one giant ghetto with a tiny elite class and a population of billions of destitute.
Notably, China's ability to improve its economy is rested on its ability to establish local food security (hence the agriculture stuff: they're trying to get modern agriculture and infrastructure to become food-independent) and to exploit its manufacture capabilities as a global export resource. China makes a lot of stuff and makes it well--better than we can make it in the U.S., though we often ask them to squeeze the quality down as far as possible to cut costs--and that's exactly what has brought them from 88% poverty to 6.5% in the past century.
Technology is the development of new approaches (techniques) to solve problems. Trade is technology. Methods of education are technology. Mnemonics are technology. Language is technology. The scientific process is technology. "Technology" does not mean "machines and computers"; it means methods.
Perhaps the second country has access to resources like local renewable hardwood, and the infrastructure investment to grow hardwood is a waste of time because your country's farmland, skills, and existing machinery are all suitable for growing cotton. They have better woodworking mills, you have better industrial textile mills.
It is a fact that potatoes grow better in clay soil with a high potassium content, while carrot prefers loam. It's also a fact that you can grow oranges in greenhouses if you can supply the materials, power, and labor; or you could grow cherries in the cold climates and trade them for oranges from Florida and California.
You seem to dispute these things, as if both the earth's biosphere and the infrastructural capabilities of various economies are completely homogeneous.
People don't need cable TV; a lot of people are ditching cable TV; Satellite TV and Verizon's new TV services are competing; and they don't overlap in all markets.
Internet is the utility; however, it's still an oligopoly, since you can get FiOS or Cable in many places.
I described that two countries could work 60 hours and make 40 chairs with cushions; or they could trade chairs for cushions and work 40 hours making 40 chairs with cushions, leaving 20 hours of labor available to make new things, thus totaling the same work and producing more wealth per individual.
For people who already don't have jobs (either because they lost them or because they are just leaving home), the operant behavior is "not working" and, under your proposal, the reinforcement is "gets money from the government".
Actually, getting money from the government isn't a reinforcement. You see, under your proposal, the operant behavior is "Get a job", and the punishment is "Lose money from the government." In my system, when you are working a 9-5 job making $26,444,379/year, THE GOVERNMENT PAYS YOU THE SAME ADDITIONAL INCOME AS A HOMELESS MAN.
You just claimed the government would reinforce unemployment by paying a benefit to being unemployed. Guess what? That $600/month deposit you got from Social Security this month? You were getting it 3 months ago, WHEN YOU WERE WORKING AT MCDONALDS. You were getting it a year ago, WHEN YOU HAD 9 YEAR TENOR AS AN ENGINEER AT NASA. That's right: The government has been paying that paycheck.
Are you going to tell me access to AIR is also an operant reinforcement of being unemployed?
For a while, people may still reason that going through the trouble of getting a job might result in future benefits and might overcome your reinforcement of "not working", but the longer you reinforce, the less likely that is to happen.
A reinforcement has to be a reward tied to a behavior. A constant condition is not a reinforcement. The sun coming up every day is not a reinforcement, because it will do that regardless of your behavior.
Taking the action, "Do not get a job", does not generate the result, "Get government money." BEING NOT-DEAD generates the result, "Get government money."
Let's try this another way: You provide your child with candy when he does his homework. This encourages him to do his homework, because he gets a reward. That's employment.
By the same token, as you observe, if you provide your child with candy when he does not do his homework, then he will avoid homework because doing homework ilicits a negative punishment (removal of reward: candy). That's welfare: you get a job and you lose your government money.
So I suggest that you give your child candy every day. Your child gets a mini bag of MNMs every day, homework or no homework. THAT'S NOT A REWARD. It's attached to no behavior.
If your child does his homework, he gets a second bag of MNMs. Under operant behavior, THAT'S A REWARD AND WOULD ENCOURAGE YOUR CHILD TO DO HOMEWORK.
If your child consistently gets good grades, he gets several additional bags of MNMs. Under operant behavior, THAT'S A REWARD AND WOULD ENCOURAGE YOUR CHILD TO PERFORM BETTER.
You're telling me the presence of a small, inadequately-satisfying bag of MNMs where a more-satisfying, desired supply of MNMs is available would reward the child for not obtaining more MNMs?
You obviously have no idea what you're talking about. Here's where you fucked up:
For a while, people may still reason that going through the trouble of getting a job might result in future benefits and might overcome your reinforcement of "not working",
In the current system, and the system you describe, going to the trouble of getting a job might result in future benefits: first you lose your welfare benefit (negative punishment), and then later, you might get a raise, which would pay more, and get you a better position.
In the system I describe, getting a job results in an immediate benefit. When you get a job, you do not lose your welfare income. In fact, at no point in your life will you ever lose your welfare income. Instead, you get a job and you immediately begin collecting a paycheck, which is added in full on top of your welfare income. That's a reinforcement by way of an immediate reward.
But can you build robots that build robots that do new jobs? Can you build robots that run all human enterprise, all human research, and all human needs? Will the robots produce all products and services? Will they decide where fast food goes, where retail centers go, how to run power and data? Will they mine oil, plan out a solar and wind power grid, and distribute energy? Will they create supply chains and carry products out of the mines to refine into materials for products? Will they bring new products to market?
Will you hold an iPhone and recognize that no human was involved at any level in its production and delivery? A human didn't design it; a human didn't sell it to you; the retail business that sold it is managed by no human; the self-driving delivery vehicle was commissioned by a non-human-managed business; the phone's components were designed and built by machines, using materials refined by machines, using raw materials mined by machines; every facility, every process, and every vehicle used energy--electricity, oil--mined, refined, and delivered by machine, including infrastructure planned and maintained by machine. Will you?
Will the machines build those machines?
There are no rich people. Machines designed business plans, started their own companies, and managed to out-compete human-owned firms. Humans don't own these businesses; they are the self-originating property of machines.
Actually my Universal Social Security proposal has a slight side-effect in that regard: it relieves a complex system of inefficiencies in the U.S. economy, and ends up raising consumer buying power beyond labor supply. That is to say: we end up with negative unemployment (-18% to -23% by my simple models).
The immediate remediation is to make everyone poorer by reducing productivity by 20%. To do this, you'd reduce working hours to 32/week (4 days). That means each human being is only applying 32 hours of productive time rather than 40 hours, and so the amount of purchasing power per capita goes down. That lands you back to ~5.6% unemployment.
That remediation may be incomplete: salaried office workers have a lot of slack time, and many services workers are part-time. Full-time defined as 26-32 hours would still leave all service workers of 3 or fewer working days with no change in productivity. When you couple these effects, my remediation may only be half-effective; we may actually need a 4-day, 28-hour work week with full-time defined as 25-28 hours to reach remediation. (As you reduce working hours, the slack time and underemployment impact decreases; thus decreasing to a 3-day week would overshoot.)
So it's possible to have four 7-hour days or a 3.5 day work week as standard under current United States economic conditions simply to prevent an economic collapse caused by remediating our welfare system, ending homelessness and hunger, and relieving the U.S. taxpayer of $1 trillion of burden.
I don't think I can get below 28 hours as-is. There's a Federal Reserve policy and a mortgage system adjustment that would eliminate inefficiency in debt management and extend the purchasing power of the average consumer by about 11% in total, which might require a 3-day work week; but our productive capacity would also fall at that point, and it might hobble the U.S. economy. Even the model I described would require a slower transition (which it has built-in); and the alternative is to control the change by taxing the American consumer (that is, middle- and upper-middle class) enough to minimize their financial benefit and divert that tax money to paying off the National Debt (which gives government flexibility for future major efforts). Then you could slowly adjust working hours down, more slowly than productivity gains, to prevent a loss of national wealth (GDP-per-capita).
Given 20 years's time, I could adjust the United States's full-time working hours to a 24-hour, 3-day work week. At this time, I cannot predict a shorter work week.
Slashdot Mirror
The original argument attempts to imply that companies somehow "eat" the losses. They don't. Their ability to manage risk is built-in.
Businesses don't price everything to fit a happy world where nothing ever goes wrong, then accept a loss or "pass it on to the consumer" when something breaks. They assess the cost of risk, factor that into the cost of business, and derive price from that cost. When something goes wrong and prices don't go up, it's because prices already factor in something going wrong now and then.
You're a certified accountant; you're not an MBA or a risk officer. You track where money comes from and where it goes. If you're doing Monte-Carlo simulations to figure out where your money goes, you're a really bad accountant; we don't guess where money *probably* has gone.
An accountant is a mechanic, not an engineer.
No, that's why Teslas are armored.
Tesla batteries are built for failure. Like all batteries, they're designed not to fail that way; unlike a cell phone, they might take impact damage. Tesla batteries are compartmentalized, so a failure in one cell might not necessarily cause failures in adjacent cells--even a puncture failure. If that design proves unsafe, Tesla has an alternate battery design which adds an expanding foam sealant to automatically contain and attempt to smother the fire, although this would make the batteries more expensive and less dense (so far it's not been a problem, so it's not worth doing).
Tesla responded to early puncture damage by equipping all cars with an aluminum plate. As the cars didn't burn up rapidly and drivers were easily able to exit and return, the batteries as-is provide a surprisingly-low amount of risk even in the event of physical damage and subsequent fire; thus Tesla hasn't yet implemented advanced self-containing designs. They'll do it eventually, if either the risk of injury proves higher in wide deployment or if their engineers figure a way to do it cheaply and without cutting down on battery life too much.
Difference between a battery in your pocket and a battery on the bottom of a vehicle going 70mph.
Yes, and the Samsung batteries are blowing up because they're mis-assembled. Regular use causes them to explode.
Tesla batteries are blowing up because people are driving iron rods through them.
Actually, that's exactly how it works. Samsung's profits are, in part, a hedge on cost of risk; or they have insurance against shit like this, which they cover a deductible for (from cash holdings built by profits), and the insurer essentially manages that cost. Either way, there's a chunk of cost that goes to covering these problems.
You have to remember everything is wages. In the U.S., the average profit rate is 10%--that is, out of all of the income, 90% is individual and 10% is business. Some businesses fluctuate between a negative and positive income; some have crazy 28% profit margins; Wacom has 4.5%. People like to talk a lot about the profit margin on a product, or money flowing out to Irish banks to dodge taxes; but at the end of the day, this is how money flows, and all of this money comes from revenues--the price of your product.
Somebody made those batteries. Somebody mined the lithium. Somebody refined it. Somebody transported it. The cost of the phones, the batteries, the plastic, the metal, the shipping, the packaging, the advertising. All of that is somebody's wage. All that shit blew up? Well, those people still need to get paid. Risks are factored into price so wages keep getting paid. Prices don't go up after the fact because they were already raised in anticipation of this shit happening now and then.
You can't just move to AWS and say you are HIPAA compliant.
You can't just lay down physical servers and say you're HIPAA compliant, either; and AWS can provide HIPAA-compliant infrastructure.
It takes just as much effort to make HIPAA compliance, which means it adds the same amount of effort. If it takes you 15,000 hours per year to manage your VMware data center and 5,000 hours per year to manage HIPAA compliance, that's 20,000 hours; if AWS IAAS takes 5,000 hours per year to manage infrastructure, that's 10,000 hours.
At that point, what other option is there to fall back on? Everything died; your second, third, and fourth options died.
That's true; it's a trade-off of risk.
You can control the risk of dependency by building your applications to be movable. Unix applications running under Docker can move quite well; likewise, most database software can run on any provider, so moving your application to a new provider who gives you SQL Server or Postgres means you can just load your database into their DB solution (even if that's just hosting the RDBMS yourself on a cloud server, not e.g. RDS) and go. That minimizes the risk if you need to move by giving you contingencies (i.e. it's just as likely to happen, and you have a way to reduce the severity at risk event).
At the same time, you have an opportunity risk of integrating with a given provider, and a threat risk of doing the same.
Integrating with your provider means you can take advantage of AWS automatic scaling using custom AMIs and load balancers. It means you can take advantage of S3 as a storage back-end, and set policies to reduce the costs by using different storage tiers. You can integrate self-healing, so if a node misbehaves you tear it down and scale up a new one. These all reduce workload and costs (including cost of risk: automatic scaling and self-healing reduce the probability or severity of potential threats).
At the same time, as you point out, all of this integration means a change in provider APIs or political situation impacts your software in ways which aren't resolved by just moving your Docker containers and databases to a new hosting provider. That's a threat.
You can minimize the threat risk and maximize the opportunity risk by building your application and infrastructure more modularly. Using modern object-oriented programming, custom applications (or commercial applications you intend to license) can operate on "Storage Backend", with S3, Azure, local disk, shares, and other back-ends operating as plug-ins. The same goes for any sort of auto-scaling or self-healing: health checks for load or failure can trigger events, and a plug-in can respond by activating auto-scaling or otherwise managing the infrastructure.
This approach minimizes the cost in a risk event: rather than reworking your complex management system or highly-integrated application, you simply switch to or write a new plug-in for a new target platform. Because you touch very little of the application, there's less risk of anything breaking, thus less effort required to transition. The potential severity of a hosting provider issue requiring migration to new APIs or an entirely new provider is diminished.
At some point, you're likely still reliant on Postgres, SQL Server, Active Directory, .NET, Docker Hub, Jenkins, or some other provider. Those are risks as well; but it's okay, because outsourcing generally saves money. Writing your own source code management tool would be expensive and error-prone (losing your entire repository!) versus running Gitlab in Docker on Ubuntu 16.04, even though any of Gitlab, Docker, Ubuntu, or Git could go in a direction not suitable for your needs one day. No need to roll your own distribution when somebody else can manage patches for you, even though transitioning from one to the other when they no longer suit your needs is complex and costly; it's, in total, more complex and costly to manage your own distribution and keep up on security patching without altering applications to get new bug fixes and security updates without bringing in breaking changes from the newer, supported versions.
I told you I like risk.
Ten times the redundancy?
Honestly, redundancy over redundancy is retarded. AWS and Azure have back-ups, disaster recovery plans, multiple data-centers, and multiple peerings per data center. Amazon's Virginia data center has a connection to Verizon, Comcast, Level-3, AT&T, and XO. They have off-site backups. They've got a lot of visibility if they do go down (it happened in 2011, and there was a partial outage in 2015). AWS also has built-in redundancy so you can run your servers and network connections in different availability zones, either in the same data center or halfway across the country.
Imagine if you built a data center and gave it back-up power and fail-over VMware HA. Then, as a back-up, you built another data center on the opposite coast, and replicated SAN so that a failure of the east coast data center would have all your VMware stuff come up on the West coast and restore operations.
Then, you decided to replicate that entire fail-over model by exporting all your VMware stuff to OVF and importing it into OpenStack, getting two more data centers, and somehow contriving the data up so that your OpenStack fail-over data centers were fed by your VMware fail-over data centers, in case both data centers in your business had a meltdown related to VMware being crap.
That's what happens when you decide going all-AWS or all-Azure is risky, and you need to use services on both.
It's a bloated and silly explanation, I know. Maybe if you were a CRO (Chief Risk Officer) or a project manager. Mind you, I'm only listed in the PMI Credential Registry since 19 October 2015. The field really is ridiculous, and I leave things like monte-carlo simulation to experts (it requires more than just algebra).
Bailing out so easily? I guess it's long-past the point where you can make deformed arguments without spouting utter lunacy like we'd expect out of Joseph Mercola.
You didn't even suggest where I might be wrong. I was expecting you to make some argument about money being infinite and being backed by some sort of imaginary value, instead of representative of labor (time) and backed by production (output). Usually these arguments get around to someone suggesting we can solve our problems by printing enough money for everyone to be a billionaire; but I guess I cut off that line of reasoning already.
Did you finally run out of bullshit you didn't think I could counter? Am I just causing you pain and trauma by making it hard to hold your delusional world view? I've seen people have panic attacks when their extreme projections become unmaintainable--hell, I've done that to people I don't like on purpose--but I don't have enough information about you to know how to make you crack.
As for what I know about economics and psychology, I've had trouble with the field before. I started tearing apart all the economic theories they taught us in high school and college, pointing out places where they were wrong and broken, a couple years ago. Eventually, someone showed me Solow and Malthus; it turns out real economists already knew in the 90s what I was figuring out after 2010, and my "new theories" were crude versions of the currently-accepted economic literature. I'm not exactly a Nobel Prize candidate.
Psychology, on the other hand, is a joke. The field's useful when arguing in the abstract about how individual humans behave; but what you really want is statistics and behavioral economics. That's what the Mincome experiment was about: identifying how large populations react to policy changes such as a partial unconditional income, notably by identifying what economic decisions people make about it. Again, they found that only two population demographics worked less: mothers of newborn children and teenagers of low-income households. This increased the graduation rate, because the teenagers weren't under pressure to keep the household out of poverty, and could focus on school.
That's behavioral economics: most people continued working, and simply had more money to spend; people with a large trade-off made a selection between a specific cost of employment (notably, security of raising children, or strain on their education) and the benefit of employment (money). I suppose you don't like that people can make that decision, although it doesn't matter when those so-called people are 16-year-old high school students; not sure what you expect to do with mothers who can't afford daycare and elect to tend to an infant rather than search for a job.
Perhaps that would be interesting to explore further.
Before the MINCOME experiment, women aged less than 25 were more likely to have given birth. By the end of MINCOME, they were less-likely to have given birth. Total number of births to women under 25 was significantly lowered by the MINCOME experiment (i.e. free money with no oversight reduced the number of births). The study notes the same effect observed for women under age 19, but the number of births makes the measure insignificant (i.e. that effect could be random chance).
MINCOME reduced the likelihood of hospitalization and the length of hospital stays. That holds true for mental health, accidents, and injuries.
Seven years after MINCOME ended and the money stopped coming, subjects in Dauphin (the city where free money flowed to all) had re-normalized to match controls (other cities who weren't given a benefit). That means removing the free money eliminated all of the societal benefits and harmed society.
All of that, by the way, with zero statistical effect on employment of primary earners, while married women returned to work less-quickly after childbirth, and ad
Layoffs eliminate redundancy. They get rid of "dead wood" by pruning branches: your department is no longer necessary, your job role is no longer required. That doesn't mean you aren't damned-good at your job; it means we can't use you. An accounting firm can't make much use of a biochemical engineer, either.
It's good management practice to attempt to retain valuable employees. Layoffs are an unfortunate necessity and, barring a complete sociopath or someone with highly-matured defense mechanisms (yeah, there's a healthy and an unhealthy way to accept the dirty work you have to do), the person in the room who's about to have the worst day the morning the notice goes out is the manager doing the hatchet work. Highly-skilled and effective managers will create profiles of employee skills and competency, and slot them into new positions opening into the company. That usually only captures a small proportion of the staff, but it still lets you retain your most-suitable employees; the ones you let go are a mix of better and worse employees, and all ill-suited for whatever positions you need to fill in the coming months.
Good management practice is hard, though; and many people would have trouble selecting the most-suited employees for upcoming positions and at least retaining them. A lot of people might resort to detachment, temporarily forgetting that these people are human beings, only identifying their relative usefulness, and not letting themselves acknowledge that there aren't just better people who are getting let go for not fitting the few up-and-coming positions you need filled, but also that even the less-skilled workers aren't bad people and don't deserve to be tossed out. Most people simply can't handle it emotionally, and either throw the whole department out so they don't have to look too hard at individual names and faces, or distance themselves.
Most of us engineers get a job in a week. Some of us don't. There are only so many jobs, and someone has to pay salaries; we're all trying to cut someone else's throat and pick someone else's pocket to keep ourselves in the game. I'm not remiss about actively working to improve things to the point that even my own job goes obsolete in the process; I don't worry over who has to sit out and starve because I get to eat and sleep in a real bed.
That doesn't mean I haven't tried to fix it. Unfortunately, most people either talk about the poor and then immediately get mad you didn't hurt the rich, or they have a fantasy about the poor so strong that "you, personally, would have $12,000 more money to spend every year" is responded to with "yeah but only if you can make sure the poor people can't have anything!" The whole job protectionism thing is based on backwards economics, but that I can at least understand--people are scared about their security; they like reaping the benefit of everyone else going through lay-offs and outsourcing, but they're afraid they personally might get hurt one day.
A tenth as many architects, since it's all in one place, on one platform, and managed using repeatable and low-effort techniques.
The point of "the cloud" *air quotes to show how much better I am than silly plebs who use weird street phrases they don't understand* *more air quotes* *smug look* is that it takes 20 IT workers to manage the infrastructure at 5 businesses, or it takes 5 IT workers to manage the infrastructure for 20 businesses.
In other words: per unit of useful output, we want fewer IT workers. Running high-availability Web servers, databases, accounting systems, payroll systems, groupware backbone, user management (e.g. Active Directory), and disaster recovery (backups etc.) shouldn't require us to pay 2 DBAs, 3 system administrators, 2 network engineers, plus maintenance, plus purchase power hardware and maintenance from the UPS and generator company. 2 DBAs, 3 system administrators, and 2 network engineers can provide those services for literally dozens of companies; and the power redundancy and maintenance required for all of that is only marginally higher (double, triple, instead of 20 or 40 times) than the per-each on-site infrastructure.
What do you think hyperconvergent data center design is for? In 5 years, we won't have SAN; VMware clusters will use all local storage shared by VSAN, handling data redundancy and locality based on criticality, allocating data from the local drives in each server, and communicating across a dedicated backbone (i.e. redundant, multi-channel 10GbE or higher fiber). CISCO's HyperFlex brand is putting on a marketing show about how you can rack servers and have them all share their CPU and storage resources as if they're just one giant server. The engineering has to happen once, at the vendor; repeating the engineering work at millions of businesses is a thing of the past, and that means those engineers are no longer necessary.
The other side of this is everything's cheap, so we can make more. Paying only 93% in total to make things? 7% more things can be made at the same cost! That's basically how we got where we are today (i.e. it's why food cost 40% of the middle-class household budget in 1900, 33% in 1950, and 11% today, etc.).
Of course, rapid job loss doesn't give the economy time to adjust (pressure prices to normalization, then recycle the reclaimed consumer buying power to create replacement jobs), so e.g. overnight automation of 20% of our infrastructure would cause a massive economic collapse (see: The Great Depression), while automation of 20% of our infrastructure across 10 years would cause a bunch of stuff in the media and basically the post-90s. Lengthening the transition allows recovery during transition, and more pressure is applied to older technical progress (i.e. the cost-savings that laid off 20,000 workers in 2016 should remediate in 2017, and will be facing stronger downward price pressure in 2018, and even stronger in 2019, and so forth). Even largely-disruptive changes usually have a snap-back effect after the initial shock, and eventually you're only a couple months behind the growth curve: unemployment ticks up 0.5%, then jobs recovery reaches an equilibrium rate, and you end up with a stable unemployment rate during the rest of the rapid growth span.
I'm not kidding about the 10-years sudden growth thing, either. Look at 1990, 1995, 2000, 2010... can you remember when a CORDLESS TELEPHONE and an answering machine that didn't require a looped tape was considered high-tech? What about v.90's blazing-fast speeds? V.90 56k modems were supported by half of all ISPs in 1997. 56k was destined for failure, and V.92 isn't familiar to people who lived through the V.90 era; instead, we're all struck by the nostalgia of something that came out in 1996, advertised as "Comcast@Home". Cell phones cost $4,000 in 1983, and service for 2 hours of voice per week would run you $240/month (today, that's over $9,000 with $550/month); instead, I have a $350 OnePlus One and I pay Ting $28/month, while other people shell out $70/month to have unlimited high-speed LTE4+ everywhere all the time (I use less than 500MB).
At on
"Starting your own business" only works if there's a market. To be more complete (but still horribly undetailed to the point of inaccuracy): there's a total amount of income each year and, thus, a total amount of spendable money in one year's time frame, and what can be sold is what can be produced for less than that amount of money. Products are made by labor time, labor time incurs wages, wages are paid out of revenues, revenues come from consumer purchasing, purchasing comes from income.
A new business either draws purchasing away from an old business or it competes for new purchasing available as population or productivity (amount of stuff made per labor-hour, thus decrease in cost and thus price relative to number of spendable consumer dollars) increase.
More to the point: unemployment has decreased during 2016. The labor force participation rate has increased by 0.5% since September 2015, and the number of employed Americans has increased by 3 million while the number of unemployed Americans has increased by 0.014 million (we didn't add as many jobs as we added people in the workforce, but we added more jobs than the proportional employment rate, thus the unemployment rate went down, the number of employed went up, and the number of unemployed also went up).
Per the past three months, the number of unemployed increased by 0.169 million since July 2016, while the number of employed increased by 0.469.
[...]some 330,000 in all at major tech companies.[...]
[...]"The layoffs I predicted have been occurring." And worse, he says, these laid-off workers are never again going to find tech jobs: "They will always remain unemployed," at least in tech, he said. "Their skills will be obsolete."[...]
I don't see 330,000 newly forever-unemployed IT workers. That would be literally 8.25% of the computer and mathematics workforce. We'd be talking about 13% unemployment today.
Unfortunately, I don't have occupational employment statistics newer than May, 2015. At that time, employment in computer and mathematical occupations number 4,005,250. Some longer-term analysis includes charts that show only normal fluctuation, although computers and mathematical has a long-running up-trend and a current down-trend not substantially different from 2008-2009.
That is often true. But it is not an example of operant behaviors and reinforcements, it's an example of cognitive processes and rational behavior. You keep confusing the two, which shows that you know very little about psychology.
When you face a punishment (e.g. loss of benefits) for an action, that leads to extinguishing.
My system increases the amount of benefit (reward) for taking employment, which is reinforcing. Instead of 7 cookies, you get 10.
Cognitive processes are a separate behavior; however, humans are able to project rewards and punishments, which creates operant behavior.
Well, experience from Europe suggests otherwise.
Europe doesn't have any system sharing the characteristics of my system. Full stop. The system I describe doesn't exist anywhere in the world. Europe has a cash benefit system, which is superficially-similar to my system in the same way slavery is superficially-similar to employment.
True. But your problem is that you erroneously believe that it is due to a "limited number of jobs" or lack of "incentives". Since you don't understand why people are jobless, you come up with incorrect solutions.
Every year, there is an amount of income earned. That income is earned primarily through employment; but the simple fact is a number of dollars reach people's hands.
Wages are paid out of revenues. When you buy a product, a lot of people work to produce and retail it. There's energy (oil prospecting, refineries, power companies, fuel), materials (mines, mills), parts manufacture, deliverable manufacture, shipping, warehousing, retailing, management. The price you pay covers the wages for the fraction of labor-hours invested in the production of those products, plus the profit margin made in total by the businesses involved.
As a matter of mathematical fact, there will not be more dollars in the system unless more dollars are added to the system. That means loans (fractional reserve), digging into savings, or the central bank issuing new currency.
The products and services which can be purchased are ultimately limited by the money consumers are capable and willing to spend. Eventually, there is no more consumer spending available.
That means jobs come from consumers buying things. If consumers can (and do) suddenly buy 10% more stuff, then we must produce 10% more stuff. To produce, ship, and retail 10% more goods and services, we need to employ 10% more labor (until scarcity, at which point making 10% more stuff requires more than 10% more labor).
The cause of long-term unemployment is unknown and probably unknowable. The cause of an unemployment rate is a limited amount of jobs due to a lack of consumer demand for products and services. That is to say: we would employ more people, but we wouldn't be able to sell what they make, and so they would suck payroll and not earn us a profit; and then we'd have to cover their costs from revenue, raising the price of products, lowering the amount of products purchaseable, and reducing consumer demand further.
Long-term unemployment might, sometimes, just be a result of failure to compete--that is, there are 10 people and 7 jobs, and you're one of the three who wasn't positioned better than everyone else. That's an individual matter. As a matter of an economy, the fact that X number of job-desiring individuals are unemployed at any given time--or that only some number E of individuals are employed--roughly reflects the capability of the population to produce products which can be sold.
In other words: there aren't an endless amount of jobs.
You make $20,000/year. Food costs $2,000; your car costs $5,000; your home costs $12,000. You can purchase $70/month Cable TV for $840/year, or you can spend $50/month on Internet for $600/year; you can't have both. You buy the Internet package, and now you have $400 left. New technology means y
But the jobless don't have employment, and it's a lot of work to get one, so it's not a behavior you can reinforce.
Nevertheless, a static environmental condition does not reinforce *remaining* jobless. You asserted that an unchanging condition would reinforce joblessness and actively-encourage people to seek unemeployment.
A means-tested benefit with a gradual phase-out is financially similar to your proposal, but it makes it easier for government to tune the reward for every extra dollar earned than your proposal.
My system is self-tuning. It requires zero input after initiation. It is 100% unaffected by changes in wealth distribution; what you propose, on the other hand, would require the government to raise additional funds when unemployment increases, or when there are more low-wage jobs. Maintaining a gradual phase-out system requires constant heavy analysis of census data, income data, market data, inflation data, and purchasing power. Maintaining a universal benefit doesn't.
And you have provided no argument why this shouldn't be coupled to government supervision and requirements for recipients other than that you don't like it.
Because coupling it to government supervision doesn't provide a benefit.
Because, yes, people see that doing X grants Y, and Y is desirable, so they do Y. If they didn't, they would be retarded. The human intellect is based on the ability to assess information and project the future based on proposed actions--this is called planning, and it's part of something called Executive Function. To propose that humans don't do this is to propose that humans would never think to get a job for any reason--to the point that they would dismiss your demand that they should get a job.
Because there aren't an endless amount of jobs. A certain proportion of the population will be unemployed; you want them to push against that wall when there is nothing there for them.
Because your government office of supervision will fuck up and cancel benefits for individuals, destroying their financial situation for no reason other than because it's impossible to 100% perfectly identify who is qualified and who is not.
Because the risk of loss of benefits is carried by landlords who rent to tenants and must factor in the risk of evictions and empty units, and so raises the cost of rent for lower-income tenants.
You have provided no argument except broken logic and factually-inaccurate claims. You're now grasping so badly that you want the audience to believe humans don't reason that a job will do them any good, and have to be forced into a job. You have actually declared that people can't reason that a job provides income, and income provides the means to obtain desirable things. People who are incapable of such reasoning are functionally retarded; they would have to be missing an enormous part of the human neurological system to fail to carry out that reasoning intrinsically. Either that, or they'd have to be unaware that workplaces actually pay people--they'd need to believe everyone worked for free, and have no clue where anyone gets all this money.
I can find plenty of people who share your concern about just handing out free money; but I can't find anyone who actually agrees with any of your reasoning. One of my more broadly-experienced acquaintances suggested you don't know what you're talking about and are just too arrogant to have noticed, and then went on to talk about Hanlon's razor and stuff. I suppose I could ask the crowd on /r/idiots to rate the debate as well; but you'd probably just declare they're obviously not as smart as you--not that it matters what you think when you're still wrong.
In conclusion: it's obvious to everyone you stuck your tongue to a frozen pole in the fourth grade, and it's still there.
Most of those no, but sort of for slavery. Slavery actually is an interesting example: the minimum cost of labor is essentially the cost to keep slaves. Raising a new slave from child is expensive, and poor slave health reduces productivity; thus food, medical care, shelter, and even proper tools are all required to maximize the efficiency of keeping slaves.
It's the same way in a non-slavery system: welfare and income must support the labor force, or else your labor force deteriorates and your economy collapses. Sub-subsistence minimum wage leads to a die-off of the lower levels of labor, or else you pay welfare to cover them. Even if the middle-classes produce enough children to replace population, there's an additional economic cost in having larger families and short lower-class lifespans versus smaller families and longer lower-class lifespans. That is to say: if the poor die when they're 30-40 and get replaced by middle-class fourth-children who didn't make it big, you have to raise a lot of middle-class fourth children through 20 years of non-productive life, whereas poor people living to 60 will provide 20 years of productive life instead (and you can stop at the middle-class third child).
So it turns out free markets, modern welfare systems, minimum wages, and new systems like UBI (e.g. my Universal Social Security proposal, because of course I would) are technologies which replace older systems like serfdom and slavery. A slavery system places the expense of death squarely on the slave-owner; while a non-slavery system allows the business to simply replace the employee, and the expense of death and poverty diffuses through the population. This smooths out the economic fluctuations caused by workforce health defects, and allows centralization of workforce welfare (i.e. government aid).
Slavery is inefficient. By contrast, my Universal Social Security aims to improve employment efficiency directly by lowering payroll taxes (your employer pays fewer dollars per dollar you take home) and increasing consumer take-home in relation to wage paid (you take home a larger percentage of the dollars your employer pays to keep you). That means a toaster costs $40 to produce today might retail for $44 (10% profit) and send the employees involved home with a total $25 (6.2% OASDI, 3.8% benefits, then the employee pays 30% in total taxes); whereas under USS, that toaster costs $38.50 (6.2% OASDI is removed), retails for $42.40 (10% profit), and sends the employees involved home with a total of $30. USS is efficient, to the tune of 62.5% (current) vs 77.9% (USS).
The original goal of my USS was to reduce landlord risk by stabilizing low incomes (you can't lose the USS benefit; it doesn't end, it doesn't cut your hours, and it doesn't fire you). That reduces rental costs at low income levels, allowing landlords to profitably rent housing. That's only covered by half the benefit; the remainder covers food, clothing, personal care, and utilities. There's additional risk margin built in at every level. It turns out ending homelessness and hunger and immediately remediating all of the problems in our welfare system is a hell of a lot more efficient now. This is newly-possible because our economy is wealthier than ever; if we did this in 1950, we'd have leveled most incomes, and then collapsed like the USSR (but probably faster).
So, to recap: Slavery is inefficient and expensive; solving poverty is efficient and cheap. This new economic model is a type of technology which more-efficiently accomplishes the goals of welfare and minimum wage, while stabilizing the economy against recessions, sudden technical progress (e.g. automation), and other damaging factors. I've essentially improved the technology used by Government.
You said that the basis of your analysis was "operant behavior". I'm simply pointing out that that analysis is incorrect: reinforcements only apply to actual behaviors, and someone who is jobless, by definition, doesn't engage in the actual behavior of "holding a job" so that behavior never gets reinforced.
Obtaining employment under current welfare: punishment. Welfare benefits vanish. Job bad. Operant response: avoid.
Obtaining employment under my system: 100% of benefit from employment is conveyed. No punishment. Job good. Operant response: reward, repeat.
A person with no job and a limited income has many behaviors which are mediated by money. A person lacking sufficient money to engage in rewarding behaviors will seek to increase income, perhaps by getting a job; however, as stated, punishing a person for getting a job diminishes job-seeking behavior.
That is a property that pretty much all welfare systems already have.
Unemployment: When you become employed, benefits discontinue immediately. Loss of job requires re-application; benefits are only provided under specific job-loss conditions. An at-fault termination (you were fired, not laid-off) disqualifies you for unemployment benefits, thus taking a job is risky. Loss of employment more than thrice in three years disqualifies you for unemployment benefits, thus seeking jobs repeatedly is dangerous.
HUD: HUD pays the lesser of 30% of your rent OR 30% of the standard minus your income. An income increase removes HUD benefits and makes you responsible for more of the rent, thus an income increase reduces income. HUD is, however, less useful in this examination, because HUD families already have jobs; they might gain additional income by working more, if underemployed (which, of course, requires occupying a job out of what is, at any given moment, a limited pool of jobs, thus excluding someone else from working those hours).
SNAP: DO NOT ACCRUE ANY SAVINGS. SNAP benefits END if you have more than $2,250 of bank accounts and other countable resources; some (15) states actually count your car as a resource, and won't pay you a benefit until you sell your car and spend the money on food (and then how do you get to work?). Households with above $990 + $347/person monthly income are disqualified. SNAP benefits are reduced to zero at a rate of 30% of monthly income; the reward value of gainful employment is thus reduced by 30% (i.e. $10/hr? No, it's only $7/hr).
The Welfare Trap has an income plateau at $8.25/hr full-time in Illinois, and drops off above $12/hr. Total income reaches a low point at $18/hr full-time; recovery is roughly $38/hr full-time. Here's a picture.
Now what's really interesting is this graph doesn't actually show unemployment. That's because unemployment is based on your income at your prior job, and is limited to 6 months. In Maryland, the current maximum is $430/week or $10.75/hr; in Illinois, it's $418/week or $10.45/hr. That means unemployment pays more than full-time $8.25/hr--which is almost the maximum income level when benefits are included. Further, unemployment is 47% of your income over the past 6 months, which means you would have been making $22.25/hr to get $418/week.
That means, in Illinois, being on unemployment and every other Welfare system pays more than a replacement job at your prior wage, unless you made more than $38/hr ($76,000).
The median household income is $54,000, which means more than 50% of all households are better off holding out on welfare as long as possible.
What was that feature you were talking about? The feature that this shit doesn't happen? Because this is how it works in the real world. If you make less than $60,000 or $75,000 or something, get yourself laid off, get on unemployment, get all benefits possible, then fi
People are paid enough to live at a standard-of-living at which similar pay in the United States would fail to yield. That's a bit different than "simply paid less". Granted, their standard-of-living is lower; but at 1/2 pay, their SOL isn't 1/2 as high.
China has a 92.2% literacy rate, versus the U.S. 99%. In 2013, it had lower unemployment than the USA; a 73-year male life expectancy versus 76 in the US; and a 77-year female life expectancy versus 81 in the US. On the other hand, 77.9% of the US population were Internet users, while 38.3% of Chinese used the Internet.
China in 2012 had 6.5% of its population in Poverty, whereas the U.S. in 2014 celebrated a reduction in poverty to 14.5% from its previous level of 15% in 2012; however, a different analysis suggests that the real poverty rate in the U.S. is 4.5%, and that 14.5% only counts people below the poverty line.
0.37% of Chinese (about 5 million) are homeless, including 1 million children; in the United States, it's 0.50% (about 1.6 million), with 600,000 not able to find a homeless shelter. 48 million in the United States are food-insecure (hunger), which is about 14.8%; globally, 11% of the world population faces hunger. I can't get statistics on China; they have a robust culture around food (seriously) and the government has made food security a top-priority for a long time, but that doesn't tell me how many people there aren't eating.
China's somewhat behind in infrastructure, but has the economic power to bring this up to speed at a reasonable pace. They've been doing that. They're actually pretty developed in terms of healthcare, poverty, and literacy. They've weathered enormous disasters such as the flooding of major agricultural regions, as well, which has set the country back severely. It would be inaccurate to say China is just as well-off as the U.S.; and it's equally-inaccurate to claim it's one giant ghetto with a tiny elite class and a population of billions of destitute.
Notably, China's ability to improve its economy is rested on its ability to establish local food security (hence the agriculture stuff: they're trying to get modern agriculture and infrastructure to become food-independent) and to exploit its manufacture capabilities as a global export resource. China makes a lot of stuff and makes it well--better than we can make it in the U.S., though we often ask them to squeeze the quality down as far as possible to cut costs--and that's exactly what has brought them from 88% poverty to 6.5% in the past century.
Technology is the development of new approaches (techniques) to solve problems. Trade is technology. Methods of education are technology. Mnemonics are technology. Language is technology. The scientific process is technology. "Technology" does not mean "machines and computers"; it means methods.
Comcast Cable isn't available everywhere; in some locations, Verizon DSL is your only option.
Perhaps the second country has access to resources like local renewable hardwood, and the infrastructure investment to grow hardwood is a waste of time because your country's farmland, skills, and existing machinery are all suitable for growing cotton. They have better woodworking mills, you have better industrial textile mills.
It is a fact that potatoes grow better in clay soil with a high potassium content, while carrot prefers loam. It's also a fact that you can grow oranges in greenhouses if you can supply the materials, power, and labor; or you could grow cherries in the cold climates and trade them for oranges from Florida and California.
You seem to dispute these things, as if both the earth's biosphere and the infrastructural capabilities of various economies are completely homogeneous.
People don't need cable TV; a lot of people are ditching cable TV; Satellite TV and Verizon's new TV services are competing; and they don't overlap in all markets.
Internet is the utility; however, it's still an oligopoly, since you can get FiOS or Cable in many places.
I described that two countries could work 60 hours and make 40 chairs with cushions; or they could trade chairs for cushions and work 40 hours making 40 chairs with cushions, leaving 20 hours of labor available to make new things, thus totaling the same work and producing more wealth per individual.
You respond with snark.
For people who already don't have jobs (either because they lost them or because they are just leaving home), the operant behavior is "not working" and, under your proposal, the reinforcement is "gets money from the government".
Actually, getting money from the government isn't a reinforcement. You see, under your proposal, the operant behavior is "Get a job", and the punishment is "Lose money from the government." In my system, when you are working a 9-5 job making $26,444,379/year, THE GOVERNMENT PAYS YOU THE SAME ADDITIONAL INCOME AS A HOMELESS MAN.
You just claimed the government would reinforce unemployment by paying a benefit to being unemployed. Guess what? That $600/month deposit you got from Social Security this month? You were getting it 3 months ago, WHEN YOU WERE WORKING AT MCDONALDS. You were getting it a year ago, WHEN YOU HAD 9 YEAR TENOR AS AN ENGINEER AT NASA. That's right: The government has been paying that paycheck.
Are you going to tell me access to AIR is also an operant reinforcement of being unemployed?
For a while, people may still reason that going through the trouble of getting a job might result in future benefits and might overcome your reinforcement of "not working", but the longer you reinforce, the less likely that is to happen.
A reinforcement has to be a reward tied to a behavior. A constant condition is not a reinforcement. The sun coming up every day is not a reinforcement, because it will do that regardless of your behavior.
Taking the action, "Do not get a job", does not generate the result, "Get government money." BEING NOT-DEAD generates the result, "Get government money."
Let's try this another way: You provide your child with candy when he does his homework. This encourages him to do his homework, because he gets a reward. That's employment.
By the same token, as you observe, if you provide your child with candy when he does not do his homework, then he will avoid homework because doing homework ilicits a negative punishment (removal of reward: candy). That's welfare: you get a job and you lose your government money.
So I suggest that you give your child candy every day. Your child gets a mini bag of MNMs every day, homework or no homework. THAT'S NOT A REWARD. It's attached to no behavior.
If your child does his homework, he gets a second bag of MNMs. Under operant behavior, THAT'S A REWARD AND WOULD ENCOURAGE YOUR CHILD TO DO HOMEWORK.
If your child consistently gets good grades, he gets several additional bags of MNMs. Under operant behavior, THAT'S A REWARD AND WOULD ENCOURAGE YOUR CHILD TO PERFORM BETTER.
You're telling me the presence of a small, inadequately-satisfying bag of MNMs where a more-satisfying, desired supply of MNMs is available would reward the child for not obtaining more MNMs?
You obviously have no idea what you're talking about. Here's where you fucked up:
For a while, people may still reason that going through the trouble of getting a job might result in future benefits and might overcome your reinforcement of "not working",
In the current system, and the system you describe, going to the trouble of getting a job might result in future benefits: first you lose your welfare benefit (negative punishment), and then later, you might get a raise, which would pay more, and get you a better position.
In the system I describe, getting a job results in an immediate benefit. When you get a job, you do not lose your welfare income. In fact, at no point in your life will you ever lose your welfare income. Instead, you get a job and you immediately begin collecting a paycheck, which is added in full on top of your welfare income. That's a reinforcement by way of an immediate reward.
There is no "might result in
But can you build robots that build robots that do new jobs? Can you build robots that run all human enterprise, all human research, and all human needs? Will the robots produce all products and services? Will they decide where fast food goes, where retail centers go, how to run power and data? Will they mine oil, plan out a solar and wind power grid, and distribute energy? Will they create supply chains and carry products out of the mines to refine into materials for products? Will they bring new products to market?
Will you hold an iPhone and recognize that no human was involved at any level in its production and delivery? A human didn't design it; a human didn't sell it to you; the retail business that sold it is managed by no human; the self-driving delivery vehicle was commissioned by a non-human-managed business; the phone's components were designed and built by machines, using materials refined by machines, using raw materials mined by machines; every facility, every process, and every vehicle used energy--electricity, oil--mined, refined, and delivered by machine, including infrastructure planned and maintained by machine. Will you?
Will the machines build those machines?
There are no rich people. Machines designed business plans, started their own companies, and managed to out-compete human-owned firms. Humans don't own these businesses; they are the self-originating property of machines.
Actually my Universal Social Security proposal has a slight side-effect in that regard: it relieves a complex system of inefficiencies in the U.S. economy, and ends up raising consumer buying power beyond labor supply. That is to say: we end up with negative unemployment (-18% to -23% by my simple models).
The immediate remediation is to make everyone poorer by reducing productivity by 20%. To do this, you'd reduce working hours to 32/week (4 days). That means each human being is only applying 32 hours of productive time rather than 40 hours, and so the amount of purchasing power per capita goes down. That lands you back to ~5.6% unemployment.
That remediation may be incomplete: salaried office workers have a lot of slack time, and many services workers are part-time. Full-time defined as 26-32 hours would still leave all service workers of 3 or fewer working days with no change in productivity. When you couple these effects, my remediation may only be half-effective; we may actually need a 4-day, 28-hour work week with full-time defined as 25-28 hours to reach remediation. (As you reduce working hours, the slack time and underemployment impact decreases; thus decreasing to a 3-day week would overshoot.)
So it's possible to have four 7-hour days or a 3.5 day work week as standard under current United States economic conditions simply to prevent an economic collapse caused by remediating our welfare system, ending homelessness and hunger, and relieving the U.S. taxpayer of $1 trillion of burden.
I don't think I can get below 28 hours as-is. There's a Federal Reserve policy and a mortgage system adjustment that would eliminate inefficiency in debt management and extend the purchasing power of the average consumer by about 11% in total, which might require a 3-day work week; but our productive capacity would also fall at that point, and it might hobble the U.S. economy. Even the model I described would require a slower transition (which it has built-in); and the alternative is to control the change by taxing the American consumer (that is, middle- and upper-middle class) enough to minimize their financial benefit and divert that tax money to paying off the National Debt (which gives government flexibility for future major efforts). Then you could slowly adjust working hours down, more slowly than productivity gains, to prevent a loss of national wealth (GDP-per-capita).
Given 20 years's time, I could adjust the United States's full-time working hours to a 24-hour, 3-day work week. At this time, I cannot predict a shorter work week.