Overuse of antibiotics is a problem; but I would have assessed the risk of antibiotics versus the risk of a bad lab test or later contraction (exposure is obvious here) and leaned toward antibiotics as a preventative at least. I'm not a doctor, though; and there's probably a whole hell of concerns about preventative antibiotics. It messes with your gut flora, it has all the risks of normal use (supergerms!), etc. Plenty of reasons to wait on that; although also plenty of reason to consider the risk of a faulty test as well.
Risk is kind of my thing. I can extend myself pretty far into fields I know nothing about if I can get a subject matter expert to give me information; but I'm not an SME in most things. Most SMEs aren't risk engineers and have trouble with decision making. Think about how you make decisions in complex situations; I'd bet it's not very efficient, and involves straining to work out which action you think is best rather than performing any kind of systematic analysis. There are highly-refined systems for basic decision making, and there's an entire field (and a C-level executive position) for risk management. Humans are efficient at applying experience; a little technique can give a boost, though.
So you told your doctor what was wrong, he looked at it, determined it makes sense, and went with it? Welp. Makes sense.
I like that he handled the semantic pollution by finding someone who had nfc what might be going on and asking them to diagnose in a vacuum. Interesting technique.
I usually have the opposite problem. I can't identify or understand my symptoms, and often tell the doctors I need to find counseling and dig around a bit; they try to diagnose me anyway. That's why I have a diagnosis for anhedonia as a symptom of ADHD (as opposed to depression), which is correct; but I also have no idea how to measure treatment, which is bad. The drugs I'm on (amphetamine) have made me more-responsive, more outgoing, more engaged, and generally identifiable as a happier and more-emotionally-active person; but I don't feel any of it internally. I can see my behavior, but I don't feel anything about it.
So my rewards system is broken. This is kind of cool, because I respond to drug problems by discontinuing the drug instead of struggling with addiction (btw, sudden-discontinuation of Adderall hurts). It sucks because, lacking a sensation of pleasure and an activation of the rewards mechanism, it's really hard for me to set up rewards structures for reframing--my dorsolateral prefrontal cortex has to work to get me to do things, and eventually the load is beyond the effort I'm willing to put out, and I can't reduce the load by making something I want (i.e. a thing that causes a sense of pleasure indicating to my brain that I should repeat that behavior) a recognized outcome of something I have to do (i.e. a thing that demands effort and thus should be avoided to conserve energy).
Amphetamine was the first attempt, and the dose I'm on now is great: no symptoms, broader span of mood, weird side-effects at 10mg and 20mg are gone (15mg all side effects vanish, lower or higher starts to hurt, what?!), and the attention issues went away. I can now focus. I don't feel bad, but I also don't feel awesome; my mood seems to be slightly better (general feeling of well-being?). Maybe if I stay on this long enough, get some physical exercise in, and address some sleep issues (which aren't caused by amphetamine), it'll work itself out.
So here's the thing.
My doctor is talking about putting me on Wellbutrin. He wants to fix the anhedonia. I'm not entirely comfortable with Wellbutrin; it's more-complex, with prescribing information instructing to take it at the same time each day, and to skip it if you forgot to take it (do not take the medication when you remember later). MAS ER says to take in the morning, and possibly after breakfast if it causes appetite problems; you can float your MAS ER dose around by an hour or so (probably 4 hours) safely, and nobody is instructing anyone to keep it on an absolutely-strict schedule or to not take it a little later one day. That's more risk and more effort (see the pattern?).
*I* want to try adding Atomoxetine to the amphetamine. It won't fix the anhedonia; it'll either make me vomit a lot, or it'll raise serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine levels in the prefrontal cortex (it's an SNRI, but dopamine uptake is primarily mediated by NET in that region instead of DAT), which should lower the threshold of effort required for me to self-start and stay on the tasks I want to be on. I can focus, and now I want to tweak motivation; with no useful rewards system--with no impulse to pursue a sensation of pleasure from accomplishing goals--I can't lower the load on my dlPFX, so I want to increase its load capacity. This has worked for some people; it may or may not work for me, and could be a huge mistake and result in hilariously-shitty side-effects for a couple weeks, which I'm okay with because it might work and it won't actually injure me in the attempt.
I don't lie to my doctors; I just argue with them a lot, and sometimes leave out details (nobody asked me if I was schizotypal...). Sometimes I tell them I'm not even sure wtf is going on in my head, and that I don't know if I can reliably answer questions about a certain condition; an actual psychiatrist will usually respond to this by probing for detailed information instead of laying out a standard questionnaire. I still feel like there's some problem here, and I'm not sure where; I've probably got different concerns than the doctors.
You know maybe you're retarded, or have aspergers. You should get some ritalin. I can tell because you disagree with me and a lot of aspies disagree with me./inarguable Fark diagnosis
Seriously, though, people who have nfc about medicine (or any field) will recognize a set of familiar things and tie it to their experience. Their experience is going to be the most common thing anyone encounters, so they'll identify what looks vaguely like that as that.
Software development is production. Jesus, man, are you going to argue that software developers are worthless because they don't really make anything?
We have local IT. Maybe you forgot, but satellite networks are slow, expensive, bandwidth-hoggish pieces of shit. Infrastructure includes all those wires and cables and switches and the bare engineering to keep it all running, and we need people in-house for that. Kareem in Bengali isn't going to rack your switches and plug in your cables for you--he might be able to do some of the network design.
Second, even if that person gets a job, it may be for less money. Given that, it means a reduction in tax revenue directly through employment taxes and a reduction in tax revenue in reduced spending.
That's a tricky accusation. Your argument isn't quite correct even for what it's trying to argue.
If something costs half as much, that means there's more buying power. On the first level, if you spend $10,000,000 less in wage and keep it as profit, the Government taxes the business for that (at 38.9% now). On the second, if you keep the same profit margin, then your product price is lower per-unit, meaning American consumers have left-over money to spend and can buy more products and services--meaning more jobs, including American jobs, and in general following the distribution of labor (i.e. if 15% of all labor involved in all production consumed here are outsource, then a 10% increase in consumer purchasing power means creating 8.5% more domestic jobs and 1.5% foreign jobs).
At the same time, money spent on imports--including import labor--isn't business income. That means the $10 raw material or product pulled from China isn't taxed here; it also means that money went out of the country. Money paid to outsource labor, similarly, isn't taxed--and isn't paid here, to be spent here, for what that means.
That itself is a complex consideration. So long as the actual distribution doesn't change--or doesn't change significantly--an outsource has little impact. The revenue still comes from sales, and so sales volume has to stay high to keep the business running and the jobs in play. Sales volume from outside (IBM, Apple, Spotify, Microsoft) draws money to the U.S., and you knew that already--it's just export markets.
If the distribution of labor doesn't outweigh the cost savings, then you end up with an actual net gain. That is to say: if you shift 0.1% of the labor out of America and reduce the cost of a certain product by, say, 30% in the process, consumers as a whole have more money. If that product is 1% of the consumer's normal spending, then the consumer suddenly is only spending 0.7% on it and has 0.3% of their income remaining unspent. 0.3% is more than 0.1%--you've lost 0.1% of all jobs, but gained 0.3% of all consumer buying power, meaning the consumer can purchase 0.3% more, and increase jobs by 0.3%. That leaves you with a 0.2% increase in employment.
... I'm sorry, it's a lot of numbers.
One thing you might notice is that the percentage of all spent dollars which are taxable does change, yet the percentage of all spent dollars required to purchase a given set of goods also changes. In short: the above example suggests that the Government also gets 0.1% lower tax revenue, and spends 0.3% less to supply the same government services--i.e. the Government collects more purchasing power in taxes.
The opposite can happen, as well. I'm not arguing that it can't; I'm just arguing that the simple statement that a certain outcome does occur in the short term is a wild misrepresentation. Long-term, we tend to increase local wealth everywhere; but that doesn't mean we won't cause some economic damage along the way--we could, or we couldn't.
IT is a service industry and there's not increase in efficiency by moving jobs over seas. Actually it tends to hurt companies long term since the service returned most tim
I'm not arguing that; my argument is that what those workers fought against was an immediate threat to themselves, and was and is also the action which leads to the greater wealth we experience. It happened to their forefathers, and lead to the wealth they themselves enjoyed. It will happen to us, and lead to the wealth our descendants enjoy.
In other words: the things you complain about today are exactly the things that happened over the last century to make you and everyone else here in America (and the world) as well-off as they are today. They are also the things that will lead to you and everyone else being more well-off in the future. It's like complaining that physical exercise is a chore and makes you feel tired: doing it enough will make you stronger in the future, and continuing to do it will make you even stronger (to a maximum). That analogy's limits are that the cost and benefit are societal, and unbounded: your strength, your health, and your lifespan are limited, but improved in the analogy; whereas society's wealth and stability will continue to improve forever, and the benefits will be seen by population rather than strictly by individuals (the ones who pay the most may or may not be the ones who benefit the most).
The simplest point I've made is this: revenues pay wages. The product price includes all wages involved in every stage of making that product. To make better, cheaper, and more things--to improve the accessibility of food and shelter to the poor, to get technology like computers and cell phones into our hands, and to develop medicine and Tesla cars and planes--we must reduce the wages invested in making a unit of a product. Half as many people working to make food for the same number of people means food costs half as much; and it also means a bunch of farm workers got displaced from their jobs. The farm workers aren't happy about this.
Choose: poor healthcare, expensive clothing, high food prices, and a primitive society without power, running water, or proper sanitization; or a rich, high-tech society, secure access to food and healthcare, education opportunities, personal liberty and mobility, and security for the poor by the provision of affordable and effective welfare--all at the cost of somebody's job, somewhere, getting eroded along the way, and replaced with new jobs at a later date. Now and then, maybe you or I find ourselves swept up in the path of progress, and then we spend months seeking new jobs, or maybe have to work at FedEx throwing boxes (filled with all the shit people are buying with their newly-delivered wealth) until an opportunity requiring our skill opens up and we nab it before the next high-level engineer. I find that preferable to living in 1940--I'd still be pretty well-off living on a FedEx warehouse wage, at least compared to the middle-class of a primitive 1900s society.
No, I simply understand both economics and the history of welfare a bit better than you do.
I advise you to leave off the presumption next time you make a statement like that. I've spent quite a lot of time and effort examining economic history and human behavioral patterns; your statement is essentially, "I've seen a thing in the past that looks similar to this thing, and thus they must be identical."
Analogical reasoning is *the* most powerful tool you have; it is also highly error-prone. I've been wrong before; you've been wrong before; entire generations have been wrong before; and this will not change, ever. The fact remains that all human intelligence is based on our ability to examine the past and reason out the future; errors happen, and we must consider the potential, and this is still the most powerful tool we have.
It is merely your ignorance of economics and human behavior that leads you to misinterpreting other people's motives that way.
My understanding of people's motives is they want to maximize their outcomes with minimal effort. They want to avoid risks and pain while increasing rewards and pleasure. That means a number of things.
For one thing, it means people will perceive threats, gauge them, and avoid them if they're too scary. That's what welfare traps are: you get a job, you lose welfare; you lose your job, you get denied by welfare, you become homeless, you starve.
It also means people will gauge losses, but they're not driven to do thorough analysis (too much effort). So if they lose a welfare benefit, they'll estimate what it's worth (and how scary losing it would be) in a non-numerical sense. I get a job at McDonalds, but lose my housing voucher and have to pay rent? I mean that sounds scary and I lose something (big) and don't feel like working out (effort) how it compares. Never mind that the analysis might show that you just got a $0.50/hr job.
These are the pressures of the current system, which is means-tested. The current system says you can have things if we believe you need them; it places the pressure of game theory on low-income families: the outcome of your decision to get a job is predicate on the outcome of the state's decision to remove your benefits; and, further, by their decision on whether to re-instate benefits if you lose that job (they might decide not to). In other words: YOU ARE NOT IN CONTROL.
The system I describe is simpler: there is no game theory, and there is no risk. You derive a known, assessable benefit from getting a job; you don't face a risk of loss for this action, and nobody's decision determines the outcome of anything except whether you get hired or stay employed. The cost associated with seeking employment and exiting welfare is eliminated, and the rewards are improved.
In terms of interaction with human nature, the system I describe is functionally-superior. It removes punishments and improves rewards.
(1) replace welfare programs with a simple cash benefit, and (2) couple that cash benefit with supervision and a requirement to actively look for work and accept jobs.
We agree on (1). As for (2), you have presented no argument to demonstrate that it is in any way problematic or disadvantageous.
I'm sure we can agree that there are not enough jobs for everyone and, thus, that the movement of people off welfare and into jobs is, in a mathematical sense, a shell game to keep the pieces moving. In a practical sense, it has its merits, insomuch as it turns unemployment (not employed) into underemployment (employed some months on, some months off) and thus spreads the benefits of employment at the base. Further, moving people into employment as new employment opportunities arrive--as population growth raises the absolute number of jobs represented by "95% employment at 63% labor participation rate"--is obviously required.
Well, kind of. What lead to it is out of my scope; but I can point out that our welfare system--including Social Security--cost 1.28% of all taxable income in 1950. In 2013, it cost around 17%. That's not "Billions of dollars more expensive"; that's actually taking a bigger portion of each person's income to fuel it. We started with $100 and spent $1 for this; now we have $1,000 and spend $170 for this--shouldn't it only be $10?
The system I describe remediates this. Forever. Someone will eventually find a better system, after economic conditions change and such a system becomes possible and obvious; and until then, one of the primary features of my system is it actually provides more buying power *per* *person* as productivity increases--a situation which is impossible to avoid without destroying the economy. It never needs to take in a proportionally-higher cost, because the same proportional cost provides a larger benefit as time goes on. The only likely crisis is we eventually find it's too efficient, and need to cut back the proportional cost and lower the benefit; and that's unlikely because the gap between working-lower-middle-class and non-working-poor-unemployed will continue to widen, so the only obvious crisis (a lack of benefit from employment) becomes less-likely over time.
Your assertion that trade is not technical progress is a strawman.
Everything you said is already considered. Trade has increased our purchasing power--the amount of goods and services purchaseable per-person given all of our income. That means trade has changed the situation such that taking everything from everyone and dividing it up evenly would give everyone more stuff than they would have had before trade.
The system you yourself suggest would potentially fail because of this globalization as well.
The system I suggest works, in part, because of globalization. If we cut off China and brought those jobs back to America, the American economy would be too poor to operate under the system I designed, and would collapse from the attempt. It would be unaffordable.
Actually my analysis of how economics works starts with hunter-gatherers and the invention of agriculture; although I've taken it ad absurdium to describe the process of evolution itself.
Not exactly. Trade is a technical improvement as well.
Let's first talk about technological improvement, which you seem to understand. I just want to create the frame so we don't encounter an unpredicted communications issue.
Say you make 40 chairs in 40 hours. To buy a chair requires the payment of 1 hour's wage. Simple.
You find a new way to make chairs--maybe even just a new order of doing things with the same tools. That's technical progress (the economic term for development of new technology). You now make 40 chairs in 20 hours. To buy a chair requires the payment of 1/2 hour's wage.
So you still work 40 hours, you make 80 chairs. People don't need all these damned chairs. Using your technology, chair manufacture is revolutionized; 50% of all chairmakers become unemployed. (It's okay: they make up 0.1% of the workforce.)
Over time, the price of chairs falls. What I described above happens at different rates for different things; inflation makes it impossible to keep all costs relatively the same; and competition (not just chairs-against-chairs, but trying to sell things to a market with a limited amount of income from which to spend money--you're competing with *everything*, including the behavior of saving) drives prices down.
At this point, chairs are actually priced at half as much. Consumers have money left over to spend.
As it turns out, we can also make 40 cushions in 20 hours. Consumers have that 1/2 hour of wage left to spend. As a result, 40 hours now makes 40 chairs WITH CUSHIONS.
So that's technology: some people lost their job, costs came down, prices eventually followed, consumer buying power went up, bought more shit.
What about trade?
Let's say you can make 40 chairs in 40 hours; but China can make 40 chairs in 20 hours.
You can make 40 cushions in 20 hours; China can make 40 cushions in 40 hours.
So, you and China, each, can make 40 chairs with cushions in 60 hours.
You outsource all your chair manufacture to China; and China buys all their cushions from you. Now, together, you spend 40 hours making 40 chairs and 40 cushions. You just found a way to reduce the labor making 40 chairs with cushions from 60 hours to 40 hours.
That's technical progress. That's new technology.
While China is building all our shit, we're graduating doctors and IT professionals. We consume a lot, and have a lot of retail centers; and clothing, food, and the like cost a smaller proportion of our income. We're buying more and better products and services, including better healthcare.
The buying power per capita in the United States has increased thanks to shifting work into the hands of economies who have greater expertise and capability to do the work, and instead doing work at which we're more-efficient. That's new technology.
It looks different because you shifted 100 hours of work in the house doing everything yourself first to 80 hours of work spread across people in your local community, then to 60 hours of work spread across the region, then to 40 hours of work spread across the state, and now to even less spread around the world. A lot of it has moved out of sight.
The United States has a higher labor force participation rate than it did before 1970--and higher than other developed countries--and still has around 5% unemployment. We've had unemployment ups and downs constantly, even as far back as the 1890s. Between the 60s and 70s, we outsourced a lot to Japan; then Korea; about 20% of our outsource is to China now.
Sometimes, people try to compare unemployment to imports, to show one correlation or the other--for example, that unemployment falls as imports rise
That's the same thing that's happened for thousands of years already, starting with the spear.
Seriously, though. What do you think power tools did? Why do you think we don't have 90% of our population working on a farm anymore? We destroyed all our jobs already.
The Industrial Revolution did this way too fast--that's the threat. Self-driving cars, drones, automated fast food, automated shipping, automated everything deployed in the next 2 years will mean 80% unemployment in the U.S. That will ruin our economy for like 100 years.
We've been doing it steadily since forever, though. If we deploy all that automation over the next 10-15 years, we'll only uptick unemployment a little during the transition. The whole post-scarcity thing isn't coming; technology tends to make new skilled jobs and increase the number of unskilled jobs, and we're not automating 100% of everything from the base infrastructure up. Nearly 100% of all things in history have been automated away already, and all our modern jobs have replaced old jobs.
In other words: a protracted roll-out would result in economic recovery during the economic decline, thus reducing the peak of economic damage and speeding recovery in total. We'll end up with more jobs (skilled and unskilled) because working consumers will have more buying power and thus buy more things, which will drive new jobs as long as the increased unemployment at that moment isn't substantial (i.e. 2%, wince; 20%, die).
Yes, that means "automation" doesn't magically lead to an outcome; a large number of factors ultimately coming down to *time* lead to an outcome.
One of those factors is cost of employment, which is why I want to lower payroll taxes: if I pay you $50,000 and have to pay 10% in payroll tax, you cost $55,000; if I pay you $50,000 and have to pay 1% in payroll tax, you cost $50,500--cheaper, which means a $52,000 TCO machine is a bad bet, and a $50,000 machine might become cheaper over time and thus paying the opportunity cost of keeping you employed could net me a big gain in 3 years when that machine's only $35,000 TCO (because they cost millions in up-front investment, so rip if you wanted to switch to a newer model in a couple years--think like if you replaced your car every year to get the higher-mileage model). With different risk appetites and tolerances, businesses would spread adoption as wages lower, and cluster adoption over a shorter time as wages rise.
Another factor is consumer buying power, which is necessarily-improved by a non-wage income. If you get an extra $5/hr without your employer having to pay for it, you've got $5/hr to spend, but the products you're making don't need a price tag high enough to net revenue covering that extra $5/hr. In other words: A Big Mac extra value meal doesn't get 17 cents more expensive (yeah, doubling minimum wage isn't going to double prices at McDonalds). In aggregate, that's a lot of extra money to spend without an increase in costs of goods: more demand, more jobs. Job recovery is faster, so the slow bleed of jobs to automation doesn't pile unemployment up so high.
I've seriously put a lot of thought into this stuff.
On the one hand, a job search isn't the answer. Jobs have to be paid out of buying power: all income represents all spending, and all products produced and sold (you may need to extend the time frame to incorporate retained stock e.g. strategic reserve in the "sold" part). Wages are paid out of revenue, which is paid by this income. After a lot of economic handwaving and complex systems that operate in feedback mode, it just comes down to a lack of availability of jobs. There isn't a job for everyone, because eventually you make something and nobody's got the money to spend to buy it. You can call out something about savings; but savings are stock resources and deplete eventually, which means tapping into bank accounts is unsustainable (savings and retirement are essentially a system by which a reserve is filled and emptied at an equilibrium rate, so generally functions as a flow resource until you start drawing more money out without increasing the amount being put in).
Even government jobs do this. We're ultimately trading labor time, and government jobs have to pay money somehow. This can be by inflation. Generally, population grows until resources become scarce--that is, 10% more population means 10% more labor to make 10% more product, and that's fine; eventually, 10% more population means 25% more labor to produce 10% more product, and suddenly we're completely-incapable of producing more product, or just some products tick up in price (2.5 times the wages to pay for the last run of production), which means consumers end up spending all their money on the same things and run out of buying power. If you put more money out there, you're pushing against that, which means things start getting more expensive faster than the rate of new money coming in--inflation.
That whole pile of gobbledy-gook essentially means pulling in some poor people and paying them to do a job when the economy can't support that many jobs will just eliminate jobs elsewhere. It's more-complex than that, but that's what happens.
Simply shoving money into people's hands doesn't seem to work very well.
That's an over-simplified view. One could say employment is "simply shoving money into people's hands", as ludicrous as the statement would be. In this context, you need to look at the conditions surrounding the money transfer, and the conditions of the money transfer.
The amount of money isn't contingent on conditions, so there's no welfare trap. The U.S. has a number of problems with welfare, ranging from its complete failure (75% of housing assistance households qualify and go on a waiting list, and NEVER RECEIVE BENEFITS; 50 million Americans go without enough food) to the simple economic dilemma of negative work incentive (if you get a job making $8/hr, you lose $14/hr of welfare; you might actually suddenly not have enough to live!). A UBI-type scheme solves both of those, hence the USS.
It's also not a luxurious sum. My model is based on market prices, and I had to do a lot of examination of housing in particular. Housing has a risk problem: lower-income tenants are less-stable, and incur greater per-unit costs for non-payment, evictions, and empty units. Lower-income tenants rent smaller apartments, so there's geometric growth on the per-square-foot cost (higher risk per-unit, divided by smaller square-footage per-unit). The stability of the USS reduces risks and cost-of-risk, and some other policies could reduce that further. In the end, I projected a 244sqft apartment on a theoretical floor plan that would be livable for a single individual; it's better than a wet cardboard box.
I also retained a small public aid program for children of low-income households. Many UBI proponents want to just give everyone $4,000 per child; I'm sure you can see the problem: it's either inadequate for many, or it's *more* than adequate for most and thus a profit opportunity for poor households who pop out lots of bab
Farm jobs, 1790, 90% of the labor force. Manufacturing took all our hard-working farm jobs.
Dock and rail worker jobs, 1920. The shipping pallet cut 4 days work down to 4 hours.
Manufacturing jobs, 1990. Globalization took away all our jobs.
IT jobs, 2015. H1B foreigners are taking our jobs.
Long-term result has been expansion of population, increase in per-capita GDP, increase in the buying power of the middle- and lower-class families, a stronger job market, people spending less on food and clothing and more on entertainment and HEALTHCARE of all things, and the development of things like IT jobs instead of just a bunch of factory workers and shit shovelers. The long-term result has ALSO been the creation of a lot of retail and service (fast food) jobs, and a lot of domestic shipping jobs.
The short-term result has always been a displacement of workers. 40% of the U.S. workforce turns over every year (which is why there's always Help Wanted signs--no, folks, the 5% unemployed aren't lazy drug addicts abusing the welfare system; there are legitimately just not jobs for everyone), and some 1.5%-2% retire and get replaced by new workers (college graduates), which means a skill replacement rate of some 1%-2% is safe. Still, those displaced workers mean the rest of us get richer, and even they benefit in the long run; but 6 months from now is a distant thought when you've just lost your job.
I get it, really. I don't want to lose my job. You don't want to lose your job. I also don't want to live in 1990 forever. You see all these cell phones, high-speed Internet, and all the cheap food? The sheer buying power of the middle-class, the increase in available health care, and the massive amount of shit like video games and tablets and audiobooks we buy? Netflix, the entire IT industry (which only exists because it can sell things like Netflix), the like? That's the result of people losing their jobs for a little while along the way. What brought us from 1990 to 2016 is this kind of shit.
Yes, it's irritating. It's sad. It's unfair. It's ALL unfair. We either kick a few good people out on the street and wait for the economy to cycle around and get them (or a proportional number of others who were facing terminal unemployment) back into new jobs to enjoy the new economy; or we protect their jobs and make *everyone* suffer a stagnant, decaying economy until, 50 years from now, we look like North Korea. Which is fair?
I keep pushing for a Universal Social Security. No tax increase required. Remediates the welfare system completely. Gives everyone an absolute share of technical progress--the savings these steps forward bring us, the new wealth, has a fraction cleaved off and distributed equally to all Americans. The poorest benefit most; the richest aren't taxed anything more for it; everyone else kind of scales.
It's a contemporary fix. If we did it in 1950, everyone from the lower-middle-class up would have to give up nearly *all* their money and receive the standard stipend; the richest of rich would be barely more wealthy than the poorest-of-poor, and we'd collapse like the USSR. Since 2013, it's been doable without cutting the rich down, and without substantially narrowing the income distribution. This creates a firm, stable basis for the poorest-of-poor and, importantly, for the people who lose their jobs to these things.
No, it's not fair. The system I propose is better than today, doesn't cut into anyone, lowers business taxes, reduces the cost of paying employees (read: more jobs, cheaper products), and lessens the financial damage done to an individual who loses his job. It's still not fair, because that guy is still (temporarily) the sacrificial lamb that takes us all into a better future. It's less-bad, and more-optimal. That happens to be important.
Yes, I found a way to at least give the child of Omelas better food without destroying society, even if we still have to keep him locked up in the basement.
Yeah, I misread "last quarter" as "last year" from the OP; but the point still stands: net income is the number we're looking for, not revenue. Hollywood aside, revenue is meaningless in this context.
You seem to have missed my point that a market without robust competition will necessarily lose jobs if one of the few major players in an oligarchy (especially a regional one) gets a big financial hit like a fine. That is to say: robust competition lets you sue a business out of existence and shift the load around before anything bad happens; duopolies and regional monopolies let you sue a business not nearly enough for them to stop laughing at you, but enough that the backswing is a lot of low-income workers getting thrown off into the streets as the business's prices are affected (increased).
Low-competition markets are essentially poison pills: you attack the businesses, you destroy the lives of the workers.
We tend to fail to actually make-right. We should probably start there. Comcast should be required to cooperate with an investigation determining its impact on those wronged, and then made to pay them back with interest and penalty. Maybe that turns out to be a laughably-small cost, or maybe it's large and we have to diffuse it over years to prevent the poison-pill from breaking; either way, it's the closest thing to fair we have, and it addresses an actual problem instead of slapping someone hard enough to make us feel good or not hard enough to worry about breaking something.
The investigation alone would make them shit their pants. Who wants the government looking that closely?
Most business executives are making very little per employee. For example, Michael Cavanagh takes home $262 per employee per year. If all employees were minimum wage, he'd be taking home 1.62% of Comcast's direct wage costs (i.e. $40 million out of $2,219 million); salaries range from $14/hr ($28k) to $140,000/year (software engineers). That means Comcast's CFO takes home far less than 1% of all wages, which itself makes up for only a fraction of Comcast's operating expenses (rent (land, tower, antenna, offices), power, rebroadcast deals, advertising, maintenance, equipment...).
So the really fat cats represent around 0.2% of the expenses, each. The CEO makes less than the CFO, somehow.
Also, the cash involved is about $8 million, or $52 per employee; the rest is stock or stock options, which are issued without cost to Comcast, dilute the value of stocks on the market when exercised, and only get paid out based on the securities market performance of the company. That means the impact of Cavanagh's actual salary and bonuses is under 0.045% of Comcast's total expenses, and less than 0.2% of wages.
By far, the biggest payroll cost to Comcast is non-executive wages.
That was the whole point. Someone wanted to talk about the business's revenue as a measure of how much money it has coming in; revenue isn't income except in an accounting sense. From a tax sense and from the sense of how much money a business is making, profits are income. Using different domains or different concepts to try to make a statement about something is an equivocation fallacy.
Repetition of the same behavior would, most likely, personally offend some powerful people who will no longer want to play with you. The fines get bigger and ridiculous shit like investigations and audits start happening until it's clearly established who has the power position in this relationship.
Revenues are used only by deceptive politicians to describe a business's position. A business with $20 billion of revenues and an 8% profit margin has $1.6 billion of profitability, and that's its real income. Granted, that's still large; but keep your head out of your ass, at least.
Think about it. If businesses actually paid wages, their bank accounts would run out and they'd fold. A person works in part of a production process to provide a product or service; that person's effort goes into some number of shipped units--say, you work on an assembly line that makes 2,000 TVs per 8 hours, 14.4 seconds of your time goes in. Put all that effort together and you have cost--say, 118 staff in the factory, average $18/hr, that's 0.472 hours or $8.50 per TV.
So you buy a TV. $8.50 of that TV goes to the factory wages--the income of the line workers, managers, and maintenance staff. The factory buys components from another factory, who gets their source components from a refinery, who buys from a mine; there's energy involved, as well. At each level, the wages are paid out and become income (of workers); therefor, those wages aren't business income--meaning what the factory buys is not part of its income.
At each level, there's also profit. The factory keeps 10% profit. Each of its suppliers keeps 10% profit, down the line. Total up all the wages involved everywhere, and you've got 90% of the money--that's income. This other 10% is profit. That's ALSO income.
This is an important concept because taxing wages (and, thus, outsourced expenses) as income means you're raising the cost of a worker. If a $36,000/year worker is paid from revenue *and* you call revenue "income", taxing the business for it, then that $36,000/year worker actually costs $60,000/year (40% business income tax). Why? Because to pay his $36,000 wage *plus* the tax on that wage, you have to collect $60,000, pay 40% in taxes ($24,000), and then give the rest to the worker--who then also pays taxes on it.
What would that do to the price of goods and services?
When you assess how much money a business has coming in, you're going to want to look at their profits. Profits tell you what the business is making. Profits are the business's "wage"; the rest is reimbursement for expenses involved in the business doing the job we pay them for.
Problem: fining the business too much into its profits means raising the costs, thus prices required for operation. That leads to lower consumer spending power, consumer purchase of fewer goods and services, less need for (and market capacity to support) production, and fewer jobs. Fining a business is a useful strategy because they're the first one to feel pain, and they feel it most directly; it has economic consequences. The more robust your market is, the more a fine impacts the business by opening them up to competition--the next firm may outcompete them and cut into their profits, which may cause the fined firm to lose jobs while the competitor grows and produces new jobs. Some people get hurt in the process, about the same number of (partially) other people get lifted out of unemployment, and we get a net zero loss (or at least, we approach a net-zero loss the stronger competition is).
In short: Fining businesses hurts consumers and creates unemployment as we approach low competition; it has a net-zero effect on consumers and unemployment as we approach robust competition. Robust competition makes fines a more powerful tool for punishing misbehaving businesses, as it reduces the amount of harm done to consumers and workers by the levying of such a fine. The magnitude of impact of a fine is proportional to the business profit, not the business revenue.
Interesting. It's important to remember that attacking a pin-tumbler lock is way more complex than attacking a ward lock (a skeleton key will bypass a ward lock; pin-tumbler locks require more-complex manipulation, and can be hardened against some attacks). It's difficult to make a device resistant to physical compromise (false-negative: no attack detected) without having the device fail permanently under false-positive states.
This seems like bullshit. They tagged on encryption and wireless identification to create what looks like a fragile system that could decide to do a data wipe at any time. If you try to break into it, it wipes your data. I wonder if that's preventable?
Maybe you could couple an inductor to the hard drive ribbon to prevent signalling while you cut through the case (and ribbon), then extract the drive; but the key is probably stored elsewhere, and wipeable. There's got to be a way into this thing.
It's actually better than that. Not to support Hillary--she takes opposing stances depending on venue (i.e. lying)--but multiple positions based on audience are actually valid.
As you may well be aware, I am an advocate of a Universal Social Security as a sensible, well-engineered remediation for our welfare system. The Universal Social Security, as I have defined it, has numerous features: It immediately remediates many defects in the current Public Aid model, ensuring aid reaches many more households in need; it carries the capacity to eliminate homelessness and hunger in the United States; it puts a final end to growing Welfare costs; it puts an end to Minimum Wage raises by more-efficiently accomplishing the goals of a Minimum Wage, setting a minimum standard-of-living and supplementing not only the employed, but the underemployed and unemployed; it stabilizes jobs, reducing unemployment spikes and more-quickly recovering from recessions; and it reduces the effective tax burden on Americans by over $1 trillion, allowing us to implement this system without raising taxes on any class--and even with lowered business income and payroll taxes.
These impacts range from providing for the poor to increasing the spendable money--and actual purchasing power--in the pockets of the upper-middle-class. This system improves worker security; decreases taxes on businesses; and immediately provides the 75% of HUD-qualified families who will remain on a waiting list and *never* receive benefits with a supplemental income. It avoids raising taxes on high-income earners, while tangibly improving the welfare of the lower-income earners.
You will select a different narrative when pitching this system to a crowd in Baltimore City than to a crowd in New York City. The upper-middle-class don't want to hear about supplementing minimum wage, raising the minimum standard of living, and protecting welfare families; they want to know they're not going to get squeezed for even more taxes, that minimum wage increases aren't going to jack up product prices, and that their jobs are more-secure. The upper-upper-class will be happy to hear their businesses will experience lower employment costs (reduced payroll tax) and income taxes; that consumers will bring more money to spend, increasing revenues and profits; and that their personal income won't be tapped to make all this happen.
The many different positions you can take, the emphasis on what is and is not important, can change without becoming internally-inconsistent. Granted, that's patently-impossible with a compromise plan or a politically-driven policy; it works well when you've developed a well-engineered plan to cover an issue more-efficiently than current methods, including transitional plans to get from here to there, with a full analysis of risks and robust controls. If you have that, you can make wildly-different arguments about the issue, all of which are in the same direction, and all of which are correct.
The point is you do want to go watch a film. If you didn't, you wouldn't go. Guess what? Employees have to get paid; rent has to get paid; utilities have to get paid. Do you know who pays all that shit? The customers. If not, the theater closes, and you can stay at home and wait for release on Netflix.
Even with $10 tubs of popcorn, and profit margins on concessions of 85 percent, profit margins for a whole theater average around 4.3 percent for the industry
Apparently movie theaters are expensive. Movie theaters get to keep 10% of the revenue from the ticket--that $10 ticket is $1 for the theater, $9 for the rights holder. For an 18-screen theater, the national average attendance per showing is 25 (daytime showings are usually sparse, but actually running a movie costs nothing so they don't just close during the slow times), so about 2,250 tickets and thus $2,250 per day. That gives a movie theater a bit more than $800,000 per year of revenue.
With two people taking tickets, four ticket register operators, fourteen concession stand operators (three on each wing, eight up front), eighteen projection room operators (who stay there all day), and ten miscellaneous staff (ushers, janitors, maintenance), plus some five or so managers (Complex manager, managing director, operations manager...), you've got a good 53 or so staff (I've seen average staff numbers as high as 115 for an 18-screen theater). Call the managers $40k ($200k) and everyone else $20k ($960k) and that's already $1.16 million. Remember we're talking about a projector operator making $8/hr, so more than 8 seats in that theater means profit.
What about facilities, utilities, material costs?
What a pain, right? Needs more automation; then the movie theaters can be cheaper, more people can go to the movies, the seats can be more-full all the time, more food will sell (because it's cheaper), we'll need more people at Hershey making candy, we'll need more people operating hotdog factories, we'll need more people driving the trucks to deliver all this junk food, and all those $8/hr movie theater workers will become $8/hr factory line workers. Nobody's got any less income at the stable point, and they can all afford more movie theater junk (the costs are the same; but you're paying people to make and ship candy, rather than to vend already-made candy to you, thus more candy in total).
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Overuse of antibiotics is a problem; but I would have assessed the risk of antibiotics versus the risk of a bad lab test or later contraction (exposure is obvious here) and leaned toward antibiotics as a preventative at least. I'm not a doctor, though; and there's probably a whole hell of concerns about preventative antibiotics. It messes with your gut flora, it has all the risks of normal use (supergerms!), etc. Plenty of reasons to wait on that; although also plenty of reason to consider the risk of a faulty test as well.
Risk is kind of my thing. I can extend myself pretty far into fields I know nothing about if I can get a subject matter expert to give me information; but I'm not an SME in most things. Most SMEs aren't risk engineers and have trouble with decision making. Think about how you make decisions in complex situations; I'd bet it's not very efficient, and involves straining to work out which action you think is best rather than performing any kind of systematic analysis. There are highly-refined systems for basic decision making, and there's an entire field (and a C-level executive position) for risk management. Humans are efficient at applying experience; a little technique can give a boost, though.
So you told your doctor what was wrong, he looked at it, determined it makes sense, and went with it? Welp. Makes sense.
I like that he handled the semantic pollution by finding someone who had nfc what might be going on and asking them to diagnose in a vacuum. Interesting technique.
I usually have the opposite problem. I can't identify or understand my symptoms, and often tell the doctors I need to find counseling and dig around a bit; they try to diagnose me anyway. That's why I have a diagnosis for anhedonia as a symptom of ADHD (as opposed to depression), which is correct; but I also have no idea how to measure treatment, which is bad. The drugs I'm on (amphetamine) have made me more-responsive, more outgoing, more engaged, and generally identifiable as a happier and more-emotionally-active person; but I don't feel any of it internally. I can see my behavior, but I don't feel anything about it.
So my rewards system is broken. This is kind of cool, because I respond to drug problems by discontinuing the drug instead of struggling with addiction (btw, sudden-discontinuation of Adderall hurts). It sucks because, lacking a sensation of pleasure and an activation of the rewards mechanism, it's really hard for me to set up rewards structures for reframing--my dorsolateral prefrontal cortex has to work to get me to do things, and eventually the load is beyond the effort I'm willing to put out, and I can't reduce the load by making something I want (i.e. a thing that causes a sense of pleasure indicating to my brain that I should repeat that behavior) a recognized outcome of something I have to do (i.e. a thing that demands effort and thus should be avoided to conserve energy).
Amphetamine was the first attempt, and the dose I'm on now is great: no symptoms, broader span of mood, weird side-effects at 10mg and 20mg are gone (15mg all side effects vanish, lower or higher starts to hurt, what?!), and the attention issues went away. I can now focus. I don't feel bad, but I also don't feel awesome; my mood seems to be slightly better (general feeling of well-being?). Maybe if I stay on this long enough, get some physical exercise in, and address some sleep issues (which aren't caused by amphetamine), it'll work itself out.
So here's the thing.
My doctor is talking about putting me on Wellbutrin. He wants to fix the anhedonia. I'm not entirely comfortable with Wellbutrin; it's more-complex, with prescribing information instructing to take it at the same time each day, and to skip it if you forgot to take it (do not take the medication when you remember later). MAS ER says to take in the morning, and possibly after breakfast if it causes appetite problems; you can float your MAS ER dose around by an hour or so (probably 4 hours) safely, and nobody is instructing anyone to keep it on an absolutely-strict schedule or to not take it a little later one day. That's more risk and more effort (see the pattern?).
*I* want to try adding Atomoxetine to the amphetamine. It won't fix the anhedonia; it'll either make me vomit a lot, or it'll raise serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine levels in the prefrontal cortex (it's an SNRI, but dopamine uptake is primarily mediated by NET in that region instead of DAT), which should lower the threshold of effort required for me to self-start and stay on the tasks I want to be on. I can focus, and now I want to tweak motivation; with no useful rewards system--with no impulse to pursue a sensation of pleasure from accomplishing goals--I can't lower the load on my dlPFX, so I want to increase its load capacity. This has worked for some people; it may or may not work for me, and could be a huge mistake and result in hilariously-shitty side-effects for a couple weeks, which I'm okay with because it might work and it won't actually injure me in the attempt.
I don't lie to my doctors; I just argue with them a lot, and sometimes leave out details (nobody asked me if I was schizotypal...). Sometimes I tell them I'm not even sure wtf is going on in my head, and that I don't know if I can reliably answer questions about a certain condition; an actual psychiatrist will usually respond to this by probing for detailed information instead of laying out a standard questionnaire. I still feel like there's some problem here, and I'm not sure where; I've probably got different concerns than the doctors.
It actually sounds like people to me.
You know maybe you're retarded, or have aspergers. You should get some ritalin. I can tell because you disagree with me and a lot of aspies disagree with me. /inarguable Fark diagnosis
Seriously, though, people who have nfc about medicine (or any field) will recognize a set of familiar things and tie it to their experience. Their experience is going to be the most common thing anyone encounters, so they'll identify what looks vaguely like that as that.
Software development is production. Jesus, man, are you going to argue that software developers are worthless because they don't really make anything?
We have local IT. Maybe you forgot, but satellite networks are slow, expensive, bandwidth-hoggish pieces of shit. Infrastructure includes all those wires and cables and switches and the bare engineering to keep it all running, and we need people in-house for that. Kareem in Bengali isn't going to rack your switches and plug in your cables for you--he might be able to do some of the network design.
Second, even if that person gets a job, it may be for less money. Given that, it means a reduction in tax revenue directly through employment taxes and a reduction in tax revenue in reduced spending.
That's a tricky accusation. Your argument isn't quite correct even for what it's trying to argue.
If something costs half as much, that means there's more buying power. On the first level, if you spend $10,000,000 less in wage and keep it as profit, the Government taxes the business for that (at 38.9% now). On the second, if you keep the same profit margin, then your product price is lower per-unit, meaning American consumers have left-over money to spend and can buy more products and services--meaning more jobs, including American jobs, and in general following the distribution of labor (i.e. if 15% of all labor involved in all production consumed here are outsource, then a 10% increase in consumer purchasing power means creating 8.5% more domestic jobs and 1.5% foreign jobs).
At the same time, money spent on imports--including import labor--isn't business income. That means the $10 raw material or product pulled from China isn't taxed here; it also means that money went out of the country. Money paid to outsource labor, similarly, isn't taxed--and isn't paid here, to be spent here, for what that means.
That itself is a complex consideration. So long as the actual distribution doesn't change--or doesn't change significantly--an outsource has little impact. The revenue still comes from sales, and so sales volume has to stay high to keep the business running and the jobs in play. Sales volume from outside (IBM, Apple, Spotify, Microsoft) draws money to the U.S., and you knew that already--it's just export markets.
If the distribution of labor doesn't outweigh the cost savings, then you end up with an actual net gain. That is to say: if you shift 0.1% of the labor out of America and reduce the cost of a certain product by, say, 30% in the process, consumers as a whole have more money. If that product is 1% of the consumer's normal spending, then the consumer suddenly is only spending 0.7% on it and has 0.3% of their income remaining unspent. 0.3% is more than 0.1%--you've lost 0.1% of all jobs, but gained 0.3% of all consumer buying power, meaning the consumer can purchase 0.3% more, and increase jobs by 0.3%. That leaves you with a 0.2% increase in employment.
One thing you might notice is that the percentage of all spent dollars which are taxable does change, yet the percentage of all spent dollars required to purchase a given set of goods also changes. In short: the above example suggests that the Government also gets 0.1% lower tax revenue, and spends 0.3% less to supply the same government services--i.e. the Government collects more purchasing power in taxes.
The opposite can happen, as well. I'm not arguing that it can't; I'm just arguing that the simple statement that a certain outcome does occur in the short term is a wild misrepresentation. Long-term, we tend to increase local wealth everywhere; but that doesn't mean we won't cause some economic damage along the way--we could, or we couldn't.
IT is a service industry and there's not increase in efficiency by moving jobs over seas. Actually it tends to hurt companies long term since the service returned most tim
I'm not arguing that; my argument is that what those workers fought against was an immediate threat to themselves, and was and is also the action which leads to the greater wealth we experience. It happened to their forefathers, and lead to the wealth they themselves enjoyed. It will happen to us, and lead to the wealth our descendants enjoy.
In other words: the things you complain about today are exactly the things that happened over the last century to make you and everyone else here in America (and the world) as well-off as they are today. They are also the things that will lead to you and everyone else being more well-off in the future. It's like complaining that physical exercise is a chore and makes you feel tired: doing it enough will make you stronger in the future, and continuing to do it will make you even stronger (to a maximum). That analogy's limits are that the cost and benefit are societal, and unbounded: your strength, your health, and your lifespan are limited, but improved in the analogy; whereas society's wealth and stability will continue to improve forever, and the benefits will be seen by population rather than strictly by individuals (the ones who pay the most may or may not be the ones who benefit the most).
The simplest point I've made is this: revenues pay wages. The product price includes all wages involved in every stage of making that product. To make better, cheaper, and more things--to improve the accessibility of food and shelter to the poor, to get technology like computers and cell phones into our hands, and to develop medicine and Tesla cars and planes--we must reduce the wages invested in making a unit of a product. Half as many people working to make food for the same number of people means food costs half as much; and it also means a bunch of farm workers got displaced from their jobs. The farm workers aren't happy about this.
Choose: poor healthcare, expensive clothing, high food prices, and a primitive society without power, running water, or proper sanitization; or a rich, high-tech society, secure access to food and healthcare, education opportunities, personal liberty and mobility, and security for the poor by the provision of affordable and effective welfare--all at the cost of somebody's job, somewhere, getting eroded along the way, and replaced with new jobs at a later date. Now and then, maybe you or I find ourselves swept up in the path of progress, and then we spend months seeking new jobs, or maybe have to work at FedEx throwing boxes (filled with all the shit people are buying with their newly-delivered wealth) until an opportunity requiring our skill opens up and we nab it before the next high-level engineer. I find that preferable to living in 1940--I'd still be pretty well-off living on a FedEx warehouse wage, at least compared to the middle-class of a primitive 1900s society.
No, I simply understand both economics and the history of welfare a bit better than you do.
I advise you to leave off the presumption next time you make a statement like that. I've spent quite a lot of time and effort examining economic history and human behavioral patterns; your statement is essentially, "I've seen a thing in the past that looks similar to this thing, and thus they must be identical."
Analogical reasoning is *the* most powerful tool you have; it is also highly error-prone. I've been wrong before; you've been wrong before; entire generations have been wrong before; and this will not change, ever. The fact remains that all human intelligence is based on our ability to examine the past and reason out the future; errors happen, and we must consider the potential, and this is still the most powerful tool we have.
It is merely your ignorance of economics and human behavior that leads you to misinterpreting other people's motives that way.
My understanding of people's motives is they want to maximize their outcomes with minimal effort. They want to avoid risks and pain while increasing rewards and pleasure. That means a number of things.
For one thing, it means people will perceive threats, gauge them, and avoid them if they're too scary. That's what welfare traps are: you get a job, you lose welfare; you lose your job, you get denied by welfare, you become homeless, you starve.
It also means people will gauge losses, but they're not driven to do thorough analysis (too much effort). So if they lose a welfare benefit, they'll estimate what it's worth (and how scary losing it would be) in a non-numerical sense. I get a job at McDonalds, but lose my housing voucher and have to pay rent? I mean that sounds scary and I lose something (big) and don't feel like working out (effort) how it compares. Never mind that the analysis might show that you just got a $0.50/hr job.
These are the pressures of the current system, which is means-tested. The current system says you can have things if we believe you need them; it places the pressure of game theory on low-income families: the outcome of your decision to get a job is predicate on the outcome of the state's decision to remove your benefits; and, further, by their decision on whether to re-instate benefits if you lose that job (they might decide not to). In other words: YOU ARE NOT IN CONTROL.
The system I describe is simpler: there is no game theory, and there is no risk. You derive a known, assessable benefit from getting a job; you don't face a risk of loss for this action, and nobody's decision determines the outcome of anything except whether you get hired or stay employed. The cost associated with seeking employment and exiting welfare is eliminated, and the rewards are improved.
In terms of interaction with human nature, the system I describe is functionally-superior. It removes punishments and improves rewards.
(1) replace welfare programs with a simple cash benefit, and (2) couple that cash benefit with supervision and a requirement to actively look for work and accept jobs.
We agree on (1). As for (2), you have presented no argument to demonstrate that it is in any way problematic or disadvantageous.
I'm sure we can agree that there are not enough jobs for everyone and, thus, that the movement of people off welfare and into jobs is, in a mathematical sense, a shell game to keep the pieces moving. In a practical sense, it has its merits, insomuch as it turns unemployment (not employed) into underemployment (employed some months on, some months off) and thus spreads the benefits of employment at the base. Further, moving people into employment as new employment opportunities arrive--as population growth raises the absolute number of jobs represented by "95% employment at 63% labor participation rate"--is obviously required.
As for requiring the demonstratio
Amphetamine.
Well, kind of. What lead to it is out of my scope; but I can point out that our welfare system--including Social Security--cost 1.28% of all taxable income in 1950. In 2013, it cost around 17%. That's not "Billions of dollars more expensive"; that's actually taking a bigger portion of each person's income to fuel it. We started with $100 and spent $1 for this; now we have $1,000 and spend $170 for this--shouldn't it only be $10?
The system I describe remediates this. Forever. Someone will eventually find a better system, after economic conditions change and such a system becomes possible and obvious; and until then, one of the primary features of my system is it actually provides more buying power *per* *person* as productivity increases--a situation which is impossible to avoid without destroying the economy. It never needs to take in a proportionally-higher cost, because the same proportional cost provides a larger benefit as time goes on. The only likely crisis is we eventually find it's too efficient, and need to cut back the proportional cost and lower the benefit; and that's unlikely because the gap between working-lower-middle-class and non-working-poor-unemployed will continue to widen, so the only obvious crisis (a lack of benefit from employment) becomes less-likely over time.
Your assertion that trade is not technical progress is a strawman.
Everything you said is already considered. Trade has increased our purchasing power--the amount of goods and services purchaseable per-person given all of our income. That means trade has changed the situation such that taking everything from everyone and dividing it up evenly would give everyone more stuff than they would have had before trade.
The system you yourself suggest would potentially fail because of this globalization as well.
The system I suggest works, in part, because of globalization. If we cut off China and brought those jobs back to America, the American economy would be too poor to operate under the system I designed, and would collapse from the attempt. It would be unaffordable.
Actually my analysis of how economics works starts with hunter-gatherers and the invention of agriculture; although I've taken it ad absurdium to describe the process of evolution itself.
Not exactly. Trade is a technical improvement as well.
Let's first talk about technological improvement, which you seem to understand. I just want to create the frame so we don't encounter an unpredicted communications issue.
Say you make 40 chairs in 40 hours. To buy a chair requires the payment of 1 hour's wage. Simple.
You find a new way to make chairs--maybe even just a new order of doing things with the same tools. That's technical progress (the economic term for development of new technology). You now make 40 chairs in 20 hours. To buy a chair requires the payment of 1/2 hour's wage.
So you still work 40 hours, you make 80 chairs. People don't need all these damned chairs. Using your technology, chair manufacture is revolutionized; 50% of all chairmakers become unemployed. (It's okay: they make up 0.1% of the workforce.)
Over time, the price of chairs falls. What I described above happens at different rates for different things; inflation makes it impossible to keep all costs relatively the same; and competition (not just chairs-against-chairs, but trying to sell things to a market with a limited amount of income from which to spend money--you're competing with *everything*, including the behavior of saving) drives prices down.
At this point, chairs are actually priced at half as much. Consumers have money left over to spend.
As it turns out, we can also make 40 cushions in 20 hours. Consumers have that 1/2 hour of wage left to spend. As a result, 40 hours now makes 40 chairs WITH CUSHIONS.
So that's technology: some people lost their job, costs came down, prices eventually followed, consumer buying power went up, bought more shit.
What about trade?
Let's say you can make 40 chairs in 40 hours; but China can make 40 chairs in 20 hours.
You can make 40 cushions in 20 hours; China can make 40 cushions in 40 hours.
So, you and China, each, can make 40 chairs with cushions in 60 hours.
You outsource all your chair manufacture to China; and China buys all their cushions from you. Now, together, you spend 40 hours making 40 chairs and 40 cushions. You just found a way to reduce the labor making 40 chairs with cushions from 60 hours to 40 hours.
That's technical progress. That's new technology.
While China is building all our shit, we're graduating doctors and IT professionals. We consume a lot, and have a lot of retail centers; and clothing, food, and the like cost a smaller proportion of our income. We're buying more and better products and services, including better healthcare.
The buying power per capita in the United States has increased thanks to shifting work into the hands of economies who have greater expertise and capability to do the work, and instead doing work at which we're more-efficient. That's new technology.
It looks different because you shifted 100 hours of work in the house doing everything yourself first to 80 hours of work spread across people in your local community, then to 60 hours of work spread across the region, then to 40 hours of work spread across the state, and now to even less spread around the world. A lot of it has moved out of sight.
The United States has a higher labor force participation rate than it did before 1970--and higher than other developed countries--and still has around 5% unemployment. We've had unemployment ups and downs constantly, even as far back as the 1890s. Between the 60s and 70s, we outsourced a lot to Japan; then Korea; about 20% of our outsource is to China now.
Sometimes, people try to compare unemployment to imports, to show one correlation or the other--for example, that unemployment falls as imports rise
That's the same thing that's happened for thousands of years already, starting with the spear.
Seriously, though. What do you think power tools did? Why do you think we don't have 90% of our population working on a farm anymore? We destroyed all our jobs already.
The Industrial Revolution did this way too fast--that's the threat. Self-driving cars, drones, automated fast food, automated shipping, automated everything deployed in the next 2 years will mean 80% unemployment in the U.S. That will ruin our economy for like 100 years.
We've been doing it steadily since forever, though. If we deploy all that automation over the next 10-15 years, we'll only uptick unemployment a little during the transition. The whole post-scarcity thing isn't coming; technology tends to make new skilled jobs and increase the number of unskilled jobs, and we're not automating 100% of everything from the base infrastructure up. Nearly 100% of all things in history have been automated away already, and all our modern jobs have replaced old jobs.
In other words: a protracted roll-out would result in economic recovery during the economic decline, thus reducing the peak of economic damage and speeding recovery in total. We'll end up with more jobs (skilled and unskilled) because working consumers will have more buying power and thus buy more things, which will drive new jobs as long as the increased unemployment at that moment isn't substantial (i.e. 2%, wince; 20%, die).
Yes, that means "automation" doesn't magically lead to an outcome; a large number of factors ultimately coming down to *time* lead to an outcome.
One of those factors is cost of employment, which is why I want to lower payroll taxes: if I pay you $50,000 and have to pay 10% in payroll tax, you cost $55,000; if I pay you $50,000 and have to pay 1% in payroll tax, you cost $50,500--cheaper, which means a $52,000 TCO machine is a bad bet, and a $50,000 machine might become cheaper over time and thus paying the opportunity cost of keeping you employed could net me a big gain in 3 years when that machine's only $35,000 TCO (because they cost millions in up-front investment, so rip if you wanted to switch to a newer model in a couple years--think like if you replaced your car every year to get the higher-mileage model). With different risk appetites and tolerances, businesses would spread adoption as wages lower, and cluster adoption over a shorter time as wages rise.
Another factor is consumer buying power, which is necessarily-improved by a non-wage income. If you get an extra $5/hr without your employer having to pay for it, you've got $5/hr to spend, but the products you're making don't need a price tag high enough to net revenue covering that extra $5/hr. In other words: A Big Mac extra value meal doesn't get 17 cents more expensive (yeah, doubling minimum wage isn't going to double prices at McDonalds). In aggregate, that's a lot of extra money to spend without an increase in costs of goods: more demand, more jobs. Job recovery is faster, so the slow bleed of jobs to automation doesn't pile unemployment up so high.
I've seriously put a lot of thought into this stuff.
It's more-complex than that.
On the one hand, a job search isn't the answer. Jobs have to be paid out of buying power: all income represents all spending, and all products produced and sold (you may need to extend the time frame to incorporate retained stock e.g. strategic reserve in the "sold" part). Wages are paid out of revenue, which is paid by this income. After a lot of economic handwaving and complex systems that operate in feedback mode, it just comes down to a lack of availability of jobs. There isn't a job for everyone, because eventually you make something and nobody's got the money to spend to buy it. You can call out something about savings; but savings are stock resources and deplete eventually, which means tapping into bank accounts is unsustainable (savings and retirement are essentially a system by which a reserve is filled and emptied at an equilibrium rate, so generally functions as a flow resource until you start drawing more money out without increasing the amount being put in).
Even government jobs do this. We're ultimately trading labor time, and government jobs have to pay money somehow. This can be by inflation. Generally, population grows until resources become scarce--that is, 10% more population means 10% more labor to make 10% more product, and that's fine; eventually, 10% more population means 25% more labor to produce 10% more product, and suddenly we're completely-incapable of producing more product, or just some products tick up in price (2.5 times the wages to pay for the last run of production), which means consumers end up spending all their money on the same things and run out of buying power. If you put more money out there, you're pushing against that, which means things start getting more expensive faster than the rate of new money coming in--inflation.
That whole pile of gobbledy-gook essentially means pulling in some poor people and paying them to do a job when the economy can't support that many jobs will just eliminate jobs elsewhere. It's more-complex than that, but that's what happens.
Simply shoving money into people's hands doesn't seem to work very well.
That's an over-simplified view. One could say employment is "simply shoving money into people's hands", as ludicrous as the statement would be. In this context, you need to look at the conditions surrounding the money transfer, and the conditions of the money transfer.
The amount of money isn't contingent on conditions, so there's no welfare trap. The U.S. has a number of problems with welfare, ranging from its complete failure (75% of housing assistance households qualify and go on a waiting list, and NEVER RECEIVE BENEFITS; 50 million Americans go without enough food) to the simple economic dilemma of negative work incentive (if you get a job making $8/hr, you lose $14/hr of welfare; you might actually suddenly not have enough to live!). A UBI-type scheme solves both of those, hence the USS.
It's also not a luxurious sum. My model is based on market prices, and I had to do a lot of examination of housing in particular. Housing has a risk problem: lower-income tenants are less-stable, and incur greater per-unit costs for non-payment, evictions, and empty units. Lower-income tenants rent smaller apartments, so there's geometric growth on the per-square-foot cost (higher risk per-unit, divided by smaller square-footage per-unit). The stability of the USS reduces risks and cost-of-risk, and some other policies could reduce that further. In the end, I projected a 244sqft apartment on a theoretical floor plan that would be livable for a single individual; it's better than a wet cardboard box.
I also retained a small public aid program for children of low-income households. Many UBI proponents want to just give everyone $4,000 per child; I'm sure you can see the problem: it's either inadequate for many, or it's *more* than adequate for most and thus a profit opportunity for poor households who pop out lots of bab
Farm jobs, 1790, 90% of the labor force. Manufacturing took all our hard-working farm jobs.
Dock and rail worker jobs, 1920. The shipping pallet cut 4 days work down to 4 hours.
Manufacturing jobs, 1990. Globalization took away all our jobs.
IT jobs, 2015. H1B foreigners are taking our jobs.
Long-term result has been expansion of population, increase in per-capita GDP, increase in the buying power of the middle- and lower-class families, a stronger job market, people spending less on food and clothing and more on entertainment and HEALTHCARE of all things, and the development of things like IT jobs instead of just a bunch of factory workers and shit shovelers. The long-term result has ALSO been the creation of a lot of retail and service (fast food) jobs, and a lot of domestic shipping jobs.
The short-term result has always been a displacement of workers. 40% of the U.S. workforce turns over every year (which is why there's always Help Wanted signs--no, folks, the 5% unemployed aren't lazy drug addicts abusing the welfare system; there are legitimately just not jobs for everyone), and some 1.5%-2% retire and get replaced by new workers (college graduates), which means a skill replacement rate of some 1%-2% is safe. Still, those displaced workers mean the rest of us get richer, and even they benefit in the long run; but 6 months from now is a distant thought when you've just lost your job.
I get it, really. I don't want to lose my job. You don't want to lose your job. I also don't want to live in 1990 forever. You see all these cell phones, high-speed Internet, and all the cheap food? The sheer buying power of the middle-class, the increase in available health care, and the massive amount of shit like video games and tablets and audiobooks we buy? Netflix, the entire IT industry (which only exists because it can sell things like Netflix), the like? That's the result of people losing their jobs for a little while along the way. What brought us from 1990 to 2016 is this kind of shit.
Yes, it's irritating. It's sad. It's unfair. It's ALL unfair. We either kick a few good people out on the street and wait for the economy to cycle around and get them (or a proportional number of others who were facing terminal unemployment) back into new jobs to enjoy the new economy; or we protect their jobs and make *everyone* suffer a stagnant, decaying economy until, 50 years from now, we look like North Korea. Which is fair?
I keep pushing for a Universal Social Security. No tax increase required. Remediates the welfare system completely. Gives everyone an absolute share of technical progress--the savings these steps forward bring us, the new wealth, has a fraction cleaved off and distributed equally to all Americans. The poorest benefit most; the richest aren't taxed anything more for it; everyone else kind of scales.
It's a contemporary fix. If we did it in 1950, everyone from the lower-middle-class up would have to give up nearly *all* their money and receive the standard stipend; the richest of rich would be barely more wealthy than the poorest-of-poor, and we'd collapse like the USSR. Since 2013, it's been doable without cutting the rich down, and without substantially narrowing the income distribution. This creates a firm, stable basis for the poorest-of-poor and, importantly, for the people who lose their jobs to these things.
No, it's not fair. The system I propose is better than today, doesn't cut into anyone, lowers business taxes, reduces the cost of paying employees (read: more jobs, cheaper products), and lessens the financial damage done to an individual who loses his job. It's still not fair, because that guy is still (temporarily) the sacrificial lamb that takes us all into a better future. It's less-bad, and more-optimal. That happens to be important.
Yes, I found a way to at least give the child of Omelas better food without destroying society, even if we still have to keep him locked up in the basement.
Yeah, I misread "last quarter" as "last year" from the OP; but the point still stands: net income is the number we're looking for, not revenue. Hollywood aside, revenue is meaningless in this context.
You seem to have missed my point that a market without robust competition will necessarily lose jobs if one of the few major players in an oligarchy (especially a regional one) gets a big financial hit like a fine. That is to say: robust competition lets you sue a business out of existence and shift the load around before anything bad happens; duopolies and regional monopolies let you sue a business not nearly enough for them to stop laughing at you, but enough that the backswing is a lot of low-income workers getting thrown off into the streets as the business's prices are affected (increased).
Low-competition markets are essentially poison pills: you attack the businesses, you destroy the lives of the workers.
We tend to fail to actually make-right. We should probably start there. Comcast should be required to cooperate with an investigation determining its impact on those wronged, and then made to pay them back with interest and penalty. Maybe that turns out to be a laughably-small cost, or maybe it's large and we have to diffuse it over years to prevent the poison-pill from breaking; either way, it's the closest thing to fair we have, and it addresses an actual problem instead of slapping someone hard enough to make us feel good or not hard enough to worry about breaking something.
The investigation alone would make them shit their pants. Who wants the government looking that closely?
Most business executives are making very little per employee. For example, Michael Cavanagh takes home $262 per employee per year. If all employees were minimum wage, he'd be taking home 1.62% of Comcast's direct wage costs (i.e. $40 million out of $2,219 million); salaries range from $14/hr ($28k) to $140,000/year (software engineers). That means Comcast's CFO takes home far less than 1% of all wages, which itself makes up for only a fraction of Comcast's operating expenses (rent (land, tower, antenna, offices), power, rebroadcast deals, advertising, maintenance, equipment...).
So the really fat cats represent around 0.2% of the expenses, each. The CEO makes less than the CFO, somehow.
Also, the cash involved is about $8 million, or $52 per employee; the rest is stock or stock options, which are issued without cost to Comcast, dilute the value of stocks on the market when exercised, and only get paid out based on the securities market performance of the company. That means the impact of Cavanagh's actual salary and bonuses is under 0.045% of Comcast's total expenses, and less than 0.2% of wages.
By far, the biggest payroll cost to Comcast is non-executive wages.
That was the whole point. Someone wanted to talk about the business's revenue as a measure of how much money it has coming in; revenue isn't income except in an accounting sense. From a tax sense and from the sense of how much money a business is making, profits are income. Using different domains or different concepts to try to make a statement about something is an equivocation fallacy.
Repetition of the same behavior would, most likely, personally offend some powerful people who will no longer want to play with you. The fines get bigger and ridiculous shit like investigations and audits start happening until it's clearly established who has the power position in this relationship.
Revenues are used only by deceptive politicians to describe a business's position. A business with $20 billion of revenues and an 8% profit margin has $1.6 billion of profitability, and that's its real income. Granted, that's still large; but keep your head out of your ass, at least.
Think about it. If businesses actually paid wages, their bank accounts would run out and they'd fold. A person works in part of a production process to provide a product or service; that person's effort goes into some number of shipped units--say, you work on an assembly line that makes 2,000 TVs per 8 hours, 14.4 seconds of your time goes in. Put all that effort together and you have cost--say, 118 staff in the factory, average $18/hr, that's 0.472 hours or $8.50 per TV.
So you buy a TV. $8.50 of that TV goes to the factory wages--the income of the line workers, managers, and maintenance staff. The factory buys components from another factory, who gets their source components from a refinery, who buys from a mine; there's energy involved, as well. At each level, the wages are paid out and become income (of workers); therefor, those wages aren't business income--meaning what the factory buys is not part of its income.
At each level, there's also profit. The factory keeps 10% profit. Each of its suppliers keeps 10% profit, down the line. Total up all the wages involved everywhere, and you've got 90% of the money--that's income. This other 10% is profit. That's ALSO income.
This is an important concept because taxing wages (and, thus, outsourced expenses) as income means you're raising the cost of a worker. If a $36,000/year worker is paid from revenue *and* you call revenue "income", taxing the business for it, then that $36,000/year worker actually costs $60,000/year (40% business income tax). Why? Because to pay his $36,000 wage *plus* the tax on that wage, you have to collect $60,000, pay 40% in taxes ($24,000), and then give the rest to the worker--who then also pays taxes on it.
What would that do to the price of goods and services?
When you assess how much money a business has coming in, you're going to want to look at their profits. Profits tell you what the business is making. Profits are the business's "wage"; the rest is reimbursement for expenses involved in the business doing the job we pay them for.
Problem: fining the business too much into its profits means raising the costs, thus prices required for operation. That leads to lower consumer spending power, consumer purchase of fewer goods and services, less need for (and market capacity to support) production, and fewer jobs. Fining a business is a useful strategy because they're the first one to feel pain, and they feel it most directly; it has economic consequences. The more robust your market is, the more a fine impacts the business by opening them up to competition--the next firm may outcompete them and cut into their profits, which may cause the fined firm to lose jobs while the competitor grows and produces new jobs. Some people get hurt in the process, about the same number of (partially) other people get lifted out of unemployment, and we get a net zero loss (or at least, we approach a net-zero loss the stronger competition is).
In short: Fining businesses hurts consumers and creates unemployment as we approach low competition; it has a net-zero effect on consumers and unemployment as we approach robust competition. Robust competition makes fines a more powerful tool for punishing misbehaving businesses, as it reduces the amount of harm done to consumers and workers by the levying of such a fine. The magnitude of impact of a fine is proportional to the business profit, not the business revenue.
Interesting. It's important to remember that attacking a pin-tumbler lock is way more complex than attacking a ward lock (a skeleton key will bypass a ward lock; pin-tumbler locks require more-complex manipulation, and can be hardened against some attacks). It's difficult to make a device resistant to physical compromise (false-negative: no attack detected) without having the device fail permanently under false-positive states.
This seems like bullshit. They tagged on encryption and wireless identification to create what looks like a fragile system that could decide to do a data wipe at any time. If you try to break into it, it wipes your data. I wonder if that's preventable?
Maybe you could couple an inductor to the hard drive ribbon to prevent signalling while you cut through the case (and ribbon), then extract the drive; but the key is probably stored elsewhere, and wipeable. There's got to be a way into this thing.
It's actually better than that. Not to support Hillary--she takes opposing stances depending on venue (i.e. lying)--but multiple positions based on audience are actually valid.
As you may well be aware, I am an advocate of a Universal Social Security as a sensible, well-engineered remediation for our welfare system. The Universal Social Security, as I have defined it, has numerous features: It immediately remediates many defects in the current Public Aid model, ensuring aid reaches many more households in need; it carries the capacity to eliminate homelessness and hunger in the United States; it puts a final end to growing Welfare costs; it puts an end to Minimum Wage raises by more-efficiently accomplishing the goals of a Minimum Wage, setting a minimum standard-of-living and supplementing not only the employed, but the underemployed and unemployed; it stabilizes jobs, reducing unemployment spikes and more-quickly recovering from recessions; and it reduces the effective tax burden on Americans by over $1 trillion, allowing us to implement this system without raising taxes on any class--and even with lowered business income and payroll taxes.
These impacts range from providing for the poor to increasing the spendable money--and actual purchasing power--in the pockets of the upper-middle-class. This system improves worker security; decreases taxes on businesses; and immediately provides the 75% of HUD-qualified families who will remain on a waiting list and *never* receive benefits with a supplemental income. It avoids raising taxes on high-income earners, while tangibly improving the welfare of the lower-income earners.
You will select a different narrative when pitching this system to a crowd in Baltimore City than to a crowd in New York City. The upper-middle-class don't want to hear about supplementing minimum wage, raising the minimum standard of living, and protecting welfare families; they want to know they're not going to get squeezed for even more taxes, that minimum wage increases aren't going to jack up product prices, and that their jobs are more-secure. The upper-upper-class will be happy to hear their businesses will experience lower employment costs (reduced payroll tax) and income taxes; that consumers will bring more money to spend, increasing revenues and profits; and that their personal income won't be tapped to make all this happen.
The many different positions you can take, the emphasis on what is and is not important, can change without becoming internally-inconsistent. Granted, that's patently-impossible with a compromise plan or a politically-driven policy; it works well when you've developed a well-engineered plan to cover an issue more-efficiently than current methods, including transitional plans to get from here to there, with a full analysis of risks and robust controls. If you have that, you can make wildly-different arguments about the issue, all of which are in the same direction, and all of which are correct.
The point is you do want to go watch a film. If you didn't, you wouldn't go. Guess what? Employees have to get paid; rent has to get paid; utilities have to get paid. Do you know who pays all that shit? The customers. If not, the theater closes, and you can stay at home and wait for release on Netflix.
Even with $10 tubs of popcorn, and profit margins on concessions of 85 percent, profit margins for a whole theater average around 4.3 percent for the industry
Apparently movie theaters are expensive. Movie theaters get to keep 10% of the revenue from the ticket--that $10 ticket is $1 for the theater, $9 for the rights holder. For an 18-screen theater, the national average attendance per showing is 25 (daytime showings are usually sparse, but actually running a movie costs nothing so they don't just close during the slow times), so about 2,250 tickets and thus $2,250 per day. That gives a movie theater a bit more than $800,000 per year of revenue.
With two people taking tickets, four ticket register operators, fourteen concession stand operators (three on each wing, eight up front), eighteen projection room operators (who stay there all day), and ten miscellaneous staff (ushers, janitors, maintenance), plus some five or so managers (Complex manager, managing director, operations manager...), you've got a good 53 or so staff (I've seen average staff numbers as high as 115 for an 18-screen theater). Call the managers $40k ($200k) and everyone else $20k ($960k) and that's already $1.16 million. Remember we're talking about a projector operator making $8/hr, so more than 8 seats in that theater means profit.
What about facilities, utilities, material costs?
What a pain, right? Needs more automation; then the movie theaters can be cheaper, more people can go to the movies, the seats can be more-full all the time, more food will sell (because it's cheaper), we'll need more people at Hershey making candy, we'll need more people operating hotdog factories, we'll need more people driving the trucks to deliver all this junk food, and all those $8/hr movie theater workers will become $8/hr factory line workers. Nobody's got any less income at the stable point, and they can all afford more movie theater junk (the costs are the same; but you're paying people to make and ship candy, rather than to vend already-made candy to you, thus more candy in total).