Technology marches on. There was a time when expensive recording processes lead to expensive presses to create shellac, and then to the expensive process to record music onto cheaper-to-make tape. Without digital computers to handle all the engineering, engineers had to manually adjust the recording of a record, making the grooves wider or narrower to fit the sound being recorded as you moved toward the inner spiral; this all had to transfer to a master record, used to produce negatives which were then pressed to create records. Those eventually wore out (well, got damaged well before that), and you'd have to make more, until the original masters used to make stamping presses were no longer usable and had to be recreated.
The same problem comes with tape: a copy of a copy loses fidelity, and the master tape eventually wears out from use, so you're using a copy of a copy of a copy (copy the master to the tape used for duplication, then duplicate from that), and the damn tapes take forever to record. The process was simpler, though, and digital mastering tapes are easily copied without error; thus you can have perfect back-ups of the master source, the final mix, and the tapes used in the duplicator to make the analog product.
Digital electronics eventually brought CDs, which are digital, easy to duplicate perfectly, and easier to press than records and tapes. CDs are pressed into polycarbonate, then backed by aluminum foil, and lacquered to protect the foil layer. The material is cheaper and easier to handle than shellac or lacquer; recording is a pressing operation; and the masters are easier to reproduce than gramophone masters. This is a lot cheaper than tape.
Now we have digital distribution, which costs near-nothing. Millions of dollars go into services which distribute millions of songs to millions of subscribers. Spotify has 20 million songs in its portfolio, 40 million *paying* users, over 100 million total users, and 1 billion streams per day. Spotify pays literally several million dollars for its infrastructure costs, and almost $2 billion for licensing fees. The physical cost is around a dollar per 10,000 songs streamed, or 1/100 of a cent per song.
Tell me why they shouldn't ship more units for less revenue when their costs are now damn near nothing. The cost of music production isn't that much lower; but a $2 CD with 10 songs is still 2,000 times as expensive per song as digital distribution. It's so much more expensive that we don't even just download the damned things once; we REPEATEDLY RE-BUY THE SAME SONG BY STREAMING IT OVER AND OVER AGAIN, because the cost of distributing a song is one one-hundredth of a cent and we have to buy it a hundred times to spend a penny. The fair cost, considering production cost, may be 5 cents or it may be a dollar per song; and almost 100% of that is production cost, while distribution costs nothing.
Distribution used to carry a hefty cost. Now any moron with a $50 microphone and a laptop can record, master, and distribute his own music. If you're using digital production (Modplug Tracker), you don't even need special equipment like instruments. Why should the music industry represent the same revenue per unit shipped as it has in the past? If it did that, it would represent literally dozens of times the profit.
They've also got a geothermal region in the east, which would let them produce a lot of geothermal energy. What about the states in West Africa?
It's said that a land area the size of the state of Maine in North Africa could produce enough PV output to power the European Union. Likewise, that area could pipe energy to the rest of Africa, making for a robust power source to drive electric farm equipment instead of diesel. Again: what do the poor west-Africans trade to North Africa to buy their power? I suppose, in this configuration, North Africa could make power, and West Africa could make food; but from where does North Africa get the PV cells?
For a short term, industry in Burkina Faso could shift away from working starving black kids to death (an effective slave-labor arrangement that gives said families their only means to survive--as distasteful as it is to the rest of the world, who would rather they starve to death than work themselves to lifelong illness) onto powering machines to dig, sift, and sort those little flecks of gold, which it could then sell around the world. Eventually the gold and diamonds are going to run out; they're already mainly trace minerals dug out by long hours of barely-sustainable wages spread thin across entire families struggling to survive.
We have plenty of food and cheap oil, so what can the African field workers and expensive geothermal and solar power generators sell that we can't get cheaper from the Arabs?
I suppose there is always more room for industry. The ability to make anything necessitates the ability to trade it. If they can manufacture, then we can make more food and medical supplies, and trade them. The fact that they have a thing to exchange means we can represent that thing as money (representing labor), placing it into our economic structure as demand, creating the purchasing power that supports jobs manufacturing other things. That purchasing power flows both ways: with the Africans buying from us (by selling us their products and turning that money into purchase of our products), we have more money backed by more production (of the things we're selling, and traded into the things we're buying), thus more things, more jobs, more wealth.
That doesn't mean we can just snap our fingers and magically make it all better. We still have to figure out what they're going to sell us in the first place that we can't get cheaper elsewhere--either because elsewhere can't match their prices or because elsewhere is out of labor to meet our endless thirst for such goods.
Africa's technology is shitty in some regions. There are places where their farm practice is actually slash-and-burn without a checker pattern, meaning it's a rolling front of destruction without even the benefit of surrounding jungle to fill back in over the next few years. They don't even have the most advanced hand tools, much less industrial farm machinery, fertilizer, and pesticides. They destroy large swaths of land to feed small numbers of people, and most still can't afford to eat; and there are regions of Uganda where water is far enough that someone has to walk nine miles to gather fresh water every day, which is several hours of labor time used to produce NOTHING.
The solution isn't aid packages of food; it's development of human capital--that is, knowledge. We need to teach these people to leverage what they can access to improve their productivity, starting with food. An infusion of hardware to drill wells, place septic or sewage, and otherwise reduce the load providing water and sanitization would also have merit, especially by way of decreasing the load on what little healthcare they can provide.
By far, the largest challenge is trade. What can Africa produce to trade for fuel to run all this technology?
Housing costs - far beyond anything even remotely rational
Housing is kind of annoying. We actually buy bigger houses now than in prior years, and spend more. In 2010, the average new single-family home was 2,300sqft, and the average housing expense was 33%; whereas in 1950, the average home was 983sqft, and housing expense was 28%. About half of that is actually rent or mortgage in both cases. That means housing in 2010 cost about half as much per square foot as housing in 1950, and we bought 2.3 times as much of it.
Housing is not flexible: if 700sqft apartments are what the market of people with sustainable low incomes buy (up from 400sqft in 1900), nobody is going to supply smaller apartments. On the other hand, people below the income range able to afford only a smaller apartment are unstable, and carry cost of risk--meaning that theoretical 350sqft apartment costs *almost* as much as that 700sqft apartment, because the tenants are much more likely to get evicted and such. Things like a Universal Basic Income can affect this by reducing that risk--a major consideration in my Universal Social Security proposal.
Schooling costs - rising way faster than income
School isn't getting more expensive; WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT has been rebranded as "education", and responsibility has been foisted onto the individual. I can see some rationale for this in terms of economic stability in fast technical growth, and some mitigating factors (40% of the labor force turns over and about 1.5%-2.5% of the labor force retires out and is replaced by new workers every year; are we RETRAINING anyone, or just training new high school grads?). Currently, I take the stance that state provisions to support individual workforce development shouldn't exist; if there's to be a labor shortage, it'll hurt business, and so businesses can fix it.
My rationale on that follows:
An individual must speculate on a market in the future, including general demand for a skill *and* supply of that skill. He must then insert himself into supply for a skill which will be in demand outstripping supply in the future, without knowing how many others are doing the same, or particularly where he will insert himself into the job market. He has high-risk speculation with no risk controls.
Businesses project their needed positions 18-36 months in advance currently, and budget for that. They hire in the 6 month period leading up to need. Anyone who tells you otherwise is full of shit, although there are many situations which can be gently massaged to suggest a constant panic of "WE NEED AN EMPLOYEE WE WOULD HAVE NEVER EXPECTED A NEED FOR TWO WEEKS AGO, BUT DEFINITELY NEED TOMORROW OH SHIT!" Such a continuous hiring situation would only occur in a business that can't project forward, can't project risks, and thus can't function for very long. Businesses are fully-capable of responding to a labor need and shortage by hiring lower-skilled employees early; shifting low-skill, high-time, easily-verifiable work onto them; and taking advantage of the training time to reduce the cost load of work done (the high-dollar employees aren't wasting time on grunt work; the employee-in-training is gaining experience, being sent to school, and getting paid much less for that work).
That business proposition is theoretically more expensive than just scraping a market flooded with cheap, pre-packaged skilled labor. If we can get everyone sent to school, we can avoid begging employees to work for us with enticing benefits and high salaries--and we don't have to send everyone to school to boot! In practice, I've seen businesses and even isolated functional departments hire in the manner I've described and save on costs. I can't explain that.
So my answer to the school problem is it's being hugely mishandled. That it costs a lot is a symptom of a larger problem.
To a degree, yes. At this point, food is easier to afford in, say, 1950, 1860, or 1790. People who can't afford food and shelter for their families can sort of get by on whatever they can scrape together from digging out scrap or begging; and society, at large, has a wide margin allowing it to provide food and shelter without collapsing the economy (an impossible task before the Industrial Revolution).
Circa 2013, the amount of money in play for public policy to flatly end homelessness and hunger in the United States fell stably below the current cost of our major welfare services--meaning it's possible to transition to a zero-homelessness, zero-hunger economy *right* *now*. Circa 1950, you'd have to levy an additional 35% income tax on EVERYONE (including the poor) to make the attempt--and would probably find your economy non-functional. Also, up to the mid-1980s, the top tax bracket was 91%, so an additional 35% on the highest incomes was actually impossible. (The cost of welfare--including Social Security retirement and old-age pensions--in 1950 was 1.28% of all taxable income, so we're talking about a welfare system that would have cost 27 times as much.)
Eliminating jobs slowly makes us richer because prices can't perfectly match inflation. Costs change unevenly between products, and inflation is hard to know; there's universal competition (Ugg boots versus iPhones: can you afford both? Which will make you fit in with the cool kids best?); and, to be historically reductionist, that's the way it's always worked largely because it's mathematically impossible for it to work any other way (how do you think we manage to buy more than just food and loincloths?). This is a continuous process, occurring constantly as we find ways to reduce costs: the only cost is labor.
Because prices don't keep with inflation, we end up with more buying power. The median family has gone from spending 43% of its income on food (1900) to 30% (1950) to 11% (today), and now buys highly-engineered cars (anti-lock brakes, satellite radio, crumple zones, complex suspensions), cell phones, and high-speed internet as well as food. A cell phone in 1983 cost $4,000, and cell phone service was available for $50/week plus 42 cents per minute calling--in today's dollars, that's over $9,000 for the phone and $550/month to make 2 hours per week of voice calls (under 500 minutes--$9 on Ting). Most goods see an increase in price such that something costing $400 in 1983 will cost less than $900 today--meaning you started with $1,000 and spent $400 (40%), and now you have $2,250 and spend $600 (27%), and there's this $300 out of nowhere (16%) that you spend on other stuff.
... money is complex because you get more of it, and you get more stuff being bought with it, and those aren't tied in lock-step. 10% more stuff and 20% more money is inflation; and all that stuff might not all take exactly 10% less labor (thus relative cost) to make, so the prices aren't all relatively the same.
So recovery from lost jobs takes time, meaning if you kill off jobs rapidly--by wealth-creating technical progress--you get an economic crisis of high unemployment. This is bad, as you've noticed. It not only creates tons of poor people all at once, but also strains the economy such that recovering new jobs is hard (jobs come from consumer spending: you have more buying power; you buy more things; someone has to make, ship, and retail those things. Wealth comes from getting more things per each of those someones, thus you pay less into their wages for each thing you buy).
Here's the problem: what if technology matures, but regulation doesn't?
Say we let all these self-driving cars, delivery drones, and whatnot reach a robust, mature state, capable of replacing tens of millions of American jobs. Meanwhile, Congress doesn't get around to telling us we can actually replace those tens of millions of jobs, so we're just hanging onto the tech. A few hundred thousand warehouse jobs get shifted out, but that's it.
Then: Congress tells us to go wild.
Instead of replacing 25 million jobs over 10 years, we replace 25 million jobs over 4 months.
That's suddenly an extra 14.6% unemployment (20% unemployment total), and a drop in demand because these people suddenly aren't consumers. Eventually we settle on 30%-35% total unemployment. Recovery is slow in coming.
If we get this up-front, it's only 1.5% unemployment generated per year. Initially, the new tech is kind of expensive, which isn't ideal (Marx thinks it is), but does mean you're replacing 10 jobs with 8 jobs at first (all those machinists and such), so that 1.5% unemployment is really more like 0.25% unemployment in year 1, reflected as like 70% unemployment in the pizza delivery driver industry (sorry, that's progress). On the other hand, pizza costs like $4 less, so we can all order 5% more pizzas, meaning pizza parlors hire more staff, filling some of the difference.
So you eliminate 1.5% of jobs and create 1.25%, ending in 0.25% down. Then you eliminate 1.5% more and create 1.4%, ending in 0.35% down. Somewhere in the middle, you've gotten
At that point it doesn't much matter. Indicator turned green for unknown reason.
What if you know the phone might be bad, and the indicator doesn't indicate that it's validated it's a safe phone? Is it safe? Did the roll-out miss you? You need some kind of visual confirmation that the test has been done and came back clean, or else you're still in an unknown and unsafe state.
Actually, it's illegal to have a controlled substance of any kind without a prescription (Schedule-I can't be prescribed); however, we have a class of Rx-only substances which aren't controlled, and are illegal to dispense to anyone without a prescription. I'm not certain they're illegal to buy, or have, or use; they are *completely* illegal to share with your friends. These substances include Vyvanse and Strattera, as compared to any Amphetamine (Vyvanse is an amphetamine pro-drug, and produces amphetamine as the active metabolite; it takes like 5x as much to induce toxicity, and it's really hard to get high on it without killing yourself).
I'm not sure it's entirely intelligent to try to dose epinephrine yourself, or load an epipen with epinephrine exposed to non-sterile air. I'm not certain it's actively illegal, though.
As someone who researches my own drugs, assesses my own risks, and has in fact obtained my own stuff, I'd have to agree. I've used Phenylpiracetam as an amphetamine-like stimulant because the toxicity is *far* lower than amphetamine; and I've seen people talking about how they chug down their full month's supply of Adderall in 5 days, and then use 600mg Phenylpiracetam 4-6 times per day--these people are fucking insane. There's a huge array of stuff I won't touch without medical guidance because, even though I'm doing my own research on risks, I'm not going to go on Internet research and my own judgment trying to figure out what seriously-toxic chemicals are doing to me. I'm even fairly cautious with Tylenol because paracetamol is kind of nasty; and Modafinil (I got an Rx) caused a major depressive episode (Modafinil doesn't do that--something is wrong with me, need to cover this with my psychiatrist), but it did completely clear my ADD symptoms.
While I wouldn't call Epinephrine a toxicity risk per-se, whipping up your own epipens from hand-measured stock chemicals is iffy. These things get injected into your blood and go straight to your brain; besides purity (which I can assure), you need to get the dose right (which I can identify the safe range and *probably* hit) *and* guarantee safe handling. I can't do that last one. Pulling sterile epinephrine into a syringe that might be exposed to non-sterile air and then injecting it into the bloodstream wouldn't be harmful; storing that same injection for days or months might allow something to grow, which would subsequently kill you when you used the autoinjector.
Even the great array of drugs I figure are safe aren't necessarily things I want to handle a lot or mix. There are no accepted treatments for anhedonia (a major depression symptom where you don't experience a reward for anything--life is an exercise in avoiding boredom, inconvenience, and pain), and the combination treatments needed for psychiatric disorders are highly-individualized and don't mix well. You might go on 2-4 different drugs including an anti-psychotic, a mood stabilizer, an anti-depressant, and possibly a stimulant (stimulants for depression are out of favor, but there's good argument for starting an antidepressant with amphetamine so you cover the first 2 weeks with something that sets on fast), and all kinds of insane shit can happen. How are you going to self-titrate without poisoning yourself while you have no friggin' clue what's happening and mostly just want to commit suicide?
The assertion was VB.NET didn't gain popularity because people stuck with VB. I asserted most shops don't use VB.NET because they no longer use VB; that is: the shops that use VB.NET are irrelevant for this conversation mainly because the supposed shops sticking to VB6... aren't. Who is still using VB6?
I mean, Ubuntu's tools are #!/usr/bin/python3, and portage is python3-based. Some distros don't even come with python2, but the majority still do seem to have python2.7 as the default python--probably because/bin/env python has always been python2.7, and python3 is now referenced as python3.
That is to say: most.py scripts targeting python 3 look for an executable called "python3", because most.py scripts targeting python2 look for an executable called "python". Unless you can rewrite all existing Python scripts to look for a python2 executable, you probably want "python" to be Python 2.7, and "python3" to be Python 3. Likewise, "perl" will probably never mean "perl6".
Complexity is a matter of how many moving parts you have and how they fit together. If you have non-trivial pieces that someone else built, it's worth eliminating the risk of creating new bugs by using something that's been tested widely.
If your application is 6 megabytes of code, or 0.8 megabytes and some libraries, maybe you should bring in the external code. This is the same reason we have GTK, libsockets, and OpenSSL instead of a bunch of custom implementations of just the bits you need.
The used car market is fed by people who bought new cars and are buying a new car. Those 11-year-old trucks were once new trucks, then 5-year-old trucks that got sold, then bought for cheap by people who might keep them 3, 5, or 8 years.
People aren't buying brand new cars and keeping them on the road for an average of 11 years; and the people buying used cars *definitely* aren't averaging 11 years holding them, because otherwise the average age of the car would be higher.
Automakers and finance can campaign against it, to try to control the public mind and maybe get laws passed to impede the change (rent-seeking behavior). They can't stop it forever. The public mind won't hold up as you change over through a new generation; and, two generations later, congress starts filling with people who won't buy your bullshit. Somewhere along the way, the public mind starts pressing old politicians, so you don't necessarily need to wait 40 years for everything to kick in; the media can also start talking about exciting new opportunities and cause existing public sentiment to shift, enough to create political favor for whomever works to deliver on these ideals, and damn what the banks think about it.
The major defect in his argument is generational: we're all used to driving, to owning, and otherwise to just having our own private car. There's a familiarity in this which is in many ways romantic, filling us with a sense of security as we remain surrounded in our own territory and firmly in control during every commute.
A new generation will have to introduce itself to that familiarity, and to the classical concept of car ownership and of driving. Those of this new generation will spend their lives observing an exciting transition to self-driving cars and chartered transportation without the restrictions of buses and trains. Their decision won't be between a new form of transportation and an old; it will be between two available options, neither of which is a staple of their lives and identities.
That generation will likely abandon the costs, risks, and inconvenience of driving in favor of chartering self-driving cars. Why spend $28,000 every 5 years, plus $3,000 in fuel, plus $7,500 in maintenance, plus $5,000 in insurance? $725/month, or you can spend $10/day and end up with $300/month. The difference comes from the vehicles turning over a large profit per their usual lifetime, being better-utilized between maintenance cycles, having more-efficient insurance (self-driving, large fleet, self-insured), better maintenance (access to mechanics as a factored-in cost), and better lifetimes (due to better maintenance), as well as a tax deduction for their depreciation (eventually cuts 40% of the cost from the purchase price) and all other costs (that base $725/month becomes $435/month to start with).
There's an interesting economic advantage here, too: those enormous tax deductions ($3,480 per car per year) are eliminated from consumer expense. If the taxi service has a higher profit margin, then part of that is captured in taxes (i.e. if they save $3,480 and charge you $3,000 less, that extra $480 is taxed at business 40% rate). Whatever savings go to the consumer are spent on other goods, which eventually get taxed--less taxes on what goes to wages of those other businesses supplying other goods, and the same taxes on those business's profit margins. The enormous tax savings from deductions and depreciation is just captured somewhere else, creating more jobs and more consumer wealth in the process.
Of course, those newly-created jobs aren't an expansion of employment; they just replace the taxi driver and maintenance worker jobs lost in this transition. They also take time to materialize, meaning sudden economic shock (changing to driverless taxis overnight) creates a spike in unemployment, while slowly converting the market (changing to driverless taxis over half a generation) creates visible strain on the taxi driver market (unemployment in that sector) while some other market grows to compensate (e.g. IT jobs, doctors), with a much smaller peak unemployment increase.
Probably. That wasn't a point I addressed; parent painted a picture of an untrusted, uncredentialed, unmonitored hitchhiking program where you just jump in a random stranger's car as the alternative to government regulation. My point was that ride share services like Uber and Lyft are the regulation supplying consumer safety, and that governments apply regulation to those to ensure that they supply a minimum consumer expectation at the least.
Protectionist economic policies and central economic planning are, of course, mistakes that governments love to make. They're popular: even the Slashdot crowd wants restrictions on pricing of pharmaceutical drugs, restrictions on lay-offs, restrictions on trade, restrictions on work visas, and in general central economic planning and protectionist policies that make them feel like they're... well, protected. It seems obvious that price controls, work guarantees, and favoring of local business should be good for the consumer; the large effects of economics in terms of increasing purchasing power are a distant result of a long path through complex economic machinery, and difficult to understand.
Uber, Lyft, and Careen *are* regulation, though. Rather than a random, unknown individual offering a ride, you have a random, unknown individual offering a ride as documented by a service. This differs only from a taxi in that the taxi company is offering the ride and retaining employees, whereas the ride share services are connecting service seekers to service providers (this is the same differentiation between Amazon and Ebay, although Amazon has third-party sellers as well).
Government regulation only stipulates that said service must provide certain protections. It's all well-and-good that Uber provides insurance, traceability, and so forth; but will NewbeRide provide all that, or just say "Ride Share" and not really keep logs or provide insurance? How do you know that Uber and Lyft provide an equivalent minimum baseline at least in terms of consumer protection?
So Uber is about as safe as a Taxi; but we don't know if the next ride share app will be, too.
For anything non-trivial, your argument is essentially, "Don't do any planning, ignore all architecting, and spend 90% of your time refactoring unnecessarily, all while creating endless bugs and breaking anything."
For trivial, 15-line stop-gaps that are going to be thrown out for a real solution in 4 months, your argument is valid.
VB.net is heavily used in the Social Security Administration; their development policy forbids C# because they've standardized on VB.net as a codebase. Most other shops don't use VB.net because they've left VB.
Python 3 is the current standard, used in most new modules, new programs, up-to-date versions of most core distribution utilities written in Python, and in academic works (all books which use Python as a reference language now use Python 3).
Perl is garbage, and anyone who uses Perl is stuck in the 80s. After security and code maintainability became a concern, Perl went out of favor.
It used to disconnect on close; if you sent a signal 9 via a process signaling application, it would close the ad box without closing the connection. No good on Linux, though.
People are talking about how the churches are apparently "highest earners" and "not paying tax", while this covers all kinds of religious organizations with largely-charitable output (i.e. they're buying food and clothing for the poor, and the businesses selling that are paying tax) which would be tax-exempt anyway (to a business, this is an expense; yet there isn't profit on top of it, since you're running a soup kitchen). Folks envision $1.2 trillion with 40% tax--$480 billion in taxes--when it'd be more like $1.2 trillion with pretty much $1.2 trillion of expenses. Even a serious business moving that much money would have like a 10% profit margin, giving $48 billion in taxable income; the whole of our economy is something like $14,000 billion, and the Federal revenue was $3,248 billion.
The truth is most of that $1.2 trillion gets taxed. The revenue buys food and facilities, pays wages to any non-volunteer time, and otherwise gets spent instead of banked. Businesses selling these things pay wages, and get taxed on their profits; and employees receiving wages get taxed. Damn near 100% of all that goes through the tax system, although individuals put a *huge* hole in it with their deductions ($6,200 single/$12,400 married standard deduction), and so the little guy is actually not paying taxes on at least $225 billion of that. Businesses average about 10% profit margin overall, leaving roughly $120 billion--less money to tax from those highest earners than the working-class Americans are deducting off their wages.
As you pointed out, there's a lot of spending here that would be spent anyway; and, without this spending, there would be purchasing dollars pointed at *other* spending. We've identified the church's involvement in the economy, but not their economic impact.
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Technology marches on. There was a time when expensive recording processes lead to expensive presses to create shellac, and then to the expensive process to record music onto cheaper-to-make tape. Without digital computers to handle all the engineering, engineers had to manually adjust the recording of a record, making the grooves wider or narrower to fit the sound being recorded as you moved toward the inner spiral; this all had to transfer to a master record, used to produce negatives which were then pressed to create records. Those eventually wore out (well, got damaged well before that), and you'd have to make more, until the original masters used to make stamping presses were no longer usable and had to be recreated.
The same problem comes with tape: a copy of a copy loses fidelity, and the master tape eventually wears out from use, so you're using a copy of a copy of a copy (copy the master to the tape used for duplication, then duplicate from that), and the damn tapes take forever to record. The process was simpler, though, and digital mastering tapes are easily copied without error; thus you can have perfect back-ups of the master source, the final mix, and the tapes used in the duplicator to make the analog product.
Digital electronics eventually brought CDs, which are digital, easy to duplicate perfectly, and easier to press than records and tapes. CDs are pressed into polycarbonate, then backed by aluminum foil, and lacquered to protect the foil layer. The material is cheaper and easier to handle than shellac or lacquer; recording is a pressing operation; and the masters are easier to reproduce than gramophone masters. This is a lot cheaper than tape.
Now we have digital distribution, which costs near-nothing. Millions of dollars go into services which distribute millions of songs to millions of subscribers. Spotify has 20 million songs in its portfolio, 40 million *paying* users, over 100 million total users, and 1 billion streams per day. Spotify pays literally several million dollars for its infrastructure costs, and almost $2 billion for licensing fees. The physical cost is around a dollar per 10,000 songs streamed, or 1/100 of a cent per song.
Tell me why they shouldn't ship more units for less revenue when their costs are now damn near nothing. The cost of music production isn't that much lower; but a $2 CD with 10 songs is still 2,000 times as expensive per song as digital distribution. It's so much more expensive that we don't even just download the damned things once; we REPEATEDLY RE-BUY THE SAME SONG BY STREAMING IT OVER AND OVER AGAIN, because the cost of distributing a song is one one-hundredth of a cent and we have to buy it a hundred times to spend a penny. The fair cost, considering production cost, may be 5 cents or it may be a dollar per song; and almost 100% of that is production cost, while distribution costs nothing.
Distribution used to carry a hefty cost. Now any moron with a $50 microphone and a laptop can record, master, and distribute his own music. If you're using digital production (Modplug Tracker), you don't even need special equipment like instruments. Why should the music industry represent the same revenue per unit shipped as it has in the past? If it did that, it would represent literally dozens of times the profit.
They've also got a geothermal region in the east, which would let them produce a lot of geothermal energy. What about the states in West Africa?
It's said that a land area the size of the state of Maine in North Africa could produce enough PV output to power the European Union. Likewise, that area could pipe energy to the rest of Africa, making for a robust power source to drive electric farm equipment instead of diesel. Again: what do the poor west-Africans trade to North Africa to buy their power? I suppose, in this configuration, North Africa could make power, and West Africa could make food; but from where does North Africa get the PV cells?
For a short term, industry in Burkina Faso could shift away from working starving black kids to death (an effective slave-labor arrangement that gives said families their only means to survive--as distasteful as it is to the rest of the world, who would rather they starve to death than work themselves to lifelong illness) onto powering machines to dig, sift, and sort those little flecks of gold, which it could then sell around the world. Eventually the gold and diamonds are going to run out; they're already mainly trace minerals dug out by long hours of barely-sustainable wages spread thin across entire families struggling to survive.
We have plenty of food and cheap oil, so what can the African field workers and expensive geothermal and solar power generators sell that we can't get cheaper from the Arabs?
I suppose there is always more room for industry. The ability to make anything necessitates the ability to trade it. If they can manufacture, then we can make more food and medical supplies, and trade them. The fact that they have a thing to exchange means we can represent that thing as money (representing labor), placing it into our economic structure as demand, creating the purchasing power that supports jobs manufacturing other things. That purchasing power flows both ways: with the Africans buying from us (by selling us their products and turning that money into purchase of our products), we have more money backed by more production (of the things we're selling, and traded into the things we're buying), thus more things, more jobs, more wealth.
That doesn't mean we can just snap our fingers and magically make it all better. We still have to figure out what they're going to sell us in the first place that we can't get cheaper elsewhere--either because elsewhere can't match their prices or because elsewhere is out of labor to meet our endless thirst for such goods.
Africa's technology is shitty in some regions. There are places where their farm practice is actually slash-and-burn without a checker pattern, meaning it's a rolling front of destruction without even the benefit of surrounding jungle to fill back in over the next few years. They don't even have the most advanced hand tools, much less industrial farm machinery, fertilizer, and pesticides. They destroy large swaths of land to feed small numbers of people, and most still can't afford to eat; and there are regions of Uganda where water is far enough that someone has to walk nine miles to gather fresh water every day, which is several hours of labor time used to produce NOTHING.
The solution isn't aid packages of food; it's development of human capital--that is, knowledge. We need to teach these people to leverage what they can access to improve their productivity, starting with food. An infusion of hardware to drill wells, place septic or sewage, and otherwise reduce the load providing water and sanitization would also have merit, especially by way of decreasing the load on what little healthcare they can provide.
By far, the largest challenge is trade. What can Africa produce to trade for fuel to run all this technology?
Housing costs - far beyond anything even remotely rational
Housing is kind of annoying. We actually buy bigger houses now than in prior years, and spend more. In 2010, the average new single-family home was 2,300sqft, and the average housing expense was 33%; whereas in 1950, the average home was 983sqft, and housing expense was 28%. About half of that is actually rent or mortgage in both cases. That means housing in 2010 cost about half as much per square foot as housing in 1950, and we bought 2.3 times as much of it.
Housing is not flexible: if 700sqft apartments are what the market of people with sustainable low incomes buy (up from 400sqft in 1900), nobody is going to supply smaller apartments. On the other hand, people below the income range able to afford only a smaller apartment are unstable, and carry cost of risk--meaning that theoretical 350sqft apartment costs *almost* as much as that 700sqft apartment, because the tenants are much more likely to get evicted and such. Things like a Universal Basic Income can affect this by reducing that risk--a major consideration in my Universal Social Security proposal.
Schooling costs - rising way faster than income
School isn't getting more expensive; WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT has been rebranded as "education", and responsibility has been foisted onto the individual. I can see some rationale for this in terms of economic stability in fast technical growth, and some mitigating factors (40% of the labor force turns over and about 1.5%-2.5% of the labor force retires out and is replaced by new workers every year; are we RETRAINING anyone, or just training new high school grads?). Currently, I take the stance that state provisions to support individual workforce development shouldn't exist; if there's to be a labor shortage, it'll hurt business, and so businesses can fix it.
My rationale on that follows:
An individual must speculate on a market in the future, including general demand for a skill *and* supply of that skill. He must then insert himself into supply for a skill which will be in demand outstripping supply in the future, without knowing how many others are doing the same, or particularly where he will insert himself into the job market. He has high-risk speculation with no risk controls.
Businesses project their needed positions 18-36 months in advance currently, and budget for that. They hire in the 6 month period leading up to need. Anyone who tells you otherwise is full of shit, although there are many situations which can be gently massaged to suggest a constant panic of "WE NEED AN EMPLOYEE WE WOULD HAVE NEVER EXPECTED A NEED FOR TWO WEEKS AGO, BUT DEFINITELY NEED TOMORROW OH SHIT!" Such a continuous hiring situation would only occur in a business that can't project forward, can't project risks, and thus can't function for very long. Businesses are fully-capable of responding to a labor need and shortage by hiring lower-skilled employees early; shifting low-skill, high-time, easily-verifiable work onto them; and taking advantage of the training time to reduce the cost load of work done (the high-dollar employees aren't wasting time on grunt work; the employee-in-training is gaining experience, being sent to school, and getting paid much less for that work).
That business proposition is theoretically more expensive than just scraping a market flooded with cheap, pre-packaged skilled labor. If we can get everyone sent to school, we can avoid begging employees to work for us with enticing benefits and high salaries--and we don't have to send everyone to school to boot! In practice, I've seen businesses and even isolated functional departments hire in the manner I've described and save on costs. I can't explain that.
So my answer to the school problem is it's being hugely mishandled. That it costs a lot is a symptom of a larger problem.
Medical costs - rising way faster of income
Relat
To a degree, yes. At this point, food is easier to afford in, say, 1950, 1860, or 1790. People who can't afford food and shelter for their families can sort of get by on whatever they can scrape together from digging out scrap or begging; and society, at large, has a wide margin allowing it to provide food and shelter without collapsing the economy (an impossible task before the Industrial Revolution).
Circa 2013, the amount of money in play for public policy to flatly end homelessness and hunger in the United States fell stably below the current cost of our major welfare services--meaning it's possible to transition to a zero-homelessness, zero-hunger economy *right* *now*. Circa 1950, you'd have to levy an additional 35% income tax on EVERYONE (including the poor) to make the attempt--and would probably find your economy non-functional. Also, up to the mid-1980s, the top tax bracket was 91%, so an additional 35% on the highest incomes was actually impossible. (The cost of welfare--including Social Security retirement and old-age pensions--in 1950 was 1.28% of all taxable income, so we're talking about a welfare system that would have cost 27 times as much.)
It's a matter of rate.
Eliminating jobs slowly makes us richer because prices can't perfectly match inflation. Costs change unevenly between products, and inflation is hard to know; there's universal competition (Ugg boots versus iPhones: can you afford both? Which will make you fit in with the cool kids best?); and, to be historically reductionist, that's the way it's always worked largely because it's mathematically impossible for it to work any other way (how do you think we manage to buy more than just food and loincloths?). This is a continuous process, occurring constantly as we find ways to reduce costs: the only cost is labor.
Because prices don't keep with inflation, we end up with more buying power. The median family has gone from spending 43% of its income on food (1900) to 30% (1950) to 11% (today), and now buys highly-engineered cars (anti-lock brakes, satellite radio, crumple zones, complex suspensions), cell phones, and high-speed internet as well as food. A cell phone in 1983 cost $4,000, and cell phone service was available for $50/week plus 42 cents per minute calling--in today's dollars, that's over $9,000 for the phone and $550/month to make 2 hours per week of voice calls (under 500 minutes--$9 on Ting). Most goods see an increase in price such that something costing $400 in 1983 will cost less than $900 today--meaning you started with $1,000 and spent $400 (40%), and now you have $2,250 and spend $600 (27%), and there's this $300 out of nowhere (16%) that you spend on other stuff.
So recovery from lost jobs takes time, meaning if you kill off jobs rapidly--by wealth-creating technical progress--you get an economic crisis of high unemployment. This is bad, as you've noticed. It not only creates tons of poor people all at once, but also strains the economy such that recovering new jobs is hard (jobs come from consumer spending: you have more buying power; you buy more things; someone has to make, ship, and retail those things. Wealth comes from getting more things per each of those someones, thus you pay less into their wages for each thing you buy).
Here's the problem: what if technology matures, but regulation doesn't?
Say we let all these self-driving cars, delivery drones, and whatnot reach a robust, mature state, capable of replacing tens of millions of American jobs. Meanwhile, Congress doesn't get around to telling us we can actually replace those tens of millions of jobs, so we're just hanging onto the tech. A few hundred thousand warehouse jobs get shifted out, but that's it.
Then: Congress tells us to go wild.
Instead of replacing 25 million jobs over 10 years, we replace 25 million jobs over 4 months.
That's suddenly an extra 14.6% unemployment (20% unemployment total), and a drop in demand because these people suddenly aren't consumers. Eventually we settle on 30%-35% total unemployment. Recovery is slow in coming.
If we get this up-front, it's only 1.5% unemployment generated per year. Initially, the new tech is kind of expensive, which isn't ideal (Marx thinks it is), but does mean you're replacing 10 jobs with 8 jobs at first (all those machinists and such), so that 1.5% unemployment is really more like 0.25% unemployment in year 1, reflected as like 70% unemployment in the pizza delivery driver industry (sorry, that's progress). On the other hand, pizza costs like $4 less, so we can all order 5% more pizzas, meaning pizza parlors hire more staff, filling some of the difference.
So you eliminate 1.5% of jobs and create 1.25%, ending in 0.25% down. Then you eliminate 1.5% more and create 1.4%, ending in 0.35% down. Somewhere in the middle, you've gotten
At that point it doesn't much matter. Indicator turned green for unknown reason.
What if you know the phone might be bad, and the indicator doesn't indicate that it's validated it's a safe phone? Is it safe? Did the roll-out miss you? You need some kind of visual confirmation that the test has been done and came back clean, or else you're still in an unknown and unsafe state.
Actually, it's illegal to have a controlled substance of any kind without a prescription (Schedule-I can't be prescribed); however, we have a class of Rx-only substances which aren't controlled, and are illegal to dispense to anyone without a prescription. I'm not certain they're illegal to buy, or have, or use; they are *completely* illegal to share with your friends. These substances include Vyvanse and Strattera, as compared to any Amphetamine (Vyvanse is an amphetamine pro-drug, and produces amphetamine as the active metabolite; it takes like 5x as much to induce toxicity, and it's really hard to get high on it without killing yourself).
I'm not sure it's entirely intelligent to try to dose epinephrine yourself, or load an epipen with epinephrine exposed to non-sterile air. I'm not certain it's actively illegal, though.
As someone who researches my own drugs, assesses my own risks, and has in fact obtained my own stuff, I'd have to agree. I've used Phenylpiracetam as an amphetamine-like stimulant because the toxicity is *far* lower than amphetamine; and I've seen people talking about how they chug down their full month's supply of Adderall in 5 days, and then use 600mg Phenylpiracetam 4-6 times per day--these people are fucking insane. There's a huge array of stuff I won't touch without medical guidance because, even though I'm doing my own research on risks, I'm not going to go on Internet research and my own judgment trying to figure out what seriously-toxic chemicals are doing to me. I'm even fairly cautious with Tylenol because paracetamol is kind of nasty; and Modafinil (I got an Rx) caused a major depressive episode (Modafinil doesn't do that--something is wrong with me, need to cover this with my psychiatrist), but it did completely clear my ADD symptoms.
While I wouldn't call Epinephrine a toxicity risk per-se, whipping up your own epipens from hand-measured stock chemicals is iffy. These things get injected into your blood and go straight to your brain; besides purity (which I can assure), you need to get the dose right (which I can identify the safe range and *probably* hit) *and* guarantee safe handling. I can't do that last one. Pulling sterile epinephrine into a syringe that might be exposed to non-sterile air and then injecting it into the bloodstream wouldn't be harmful; storing that same injection for days or months might allow something to grow, which would subsequently kill you when you used the autoinjector.
Even the great array of drugs I figure are safe aren't necessarily things I want to handle a lot or mix. There are no accepted treatments for anhedonia (a major depression symptom where you don't experience a reward for anything--life is an exercise in avoiding boredom, inconvenience, and pain), and the combination treatments needed for psychiatric disorders are highly-individualized and don't mix well. You might go on 2-4 different drugs including an anti-psychotic, a mood stabilizer, an anti-depressant, and possibly a stimulant (stimulants for depression are out of favor, but there's good argument for starting an antidepressant with amphetamine so you cover the first 2 weeks with something that sets on fast), and all kinds of insane shit can happen. How are you going to self-titrate without poisoning yourself while you have no friggin' clue what's happening and mostly just want to commit suicide?
The assertion was VB.NET didn't gain popularity because people stuck with VB. I asserted most shops don't use VB.NET because they no longer use VB; that is: the shops that use VB.NET are irrelevant for this conversation mainly because the supposed shops sticking to VB6 ... aren't. Who is still using VB6?
I mean, Ubuntu's tools are #!/usr/bin/python3, and portage is python3-based. Some distros don't even come with python2, but the majority still do seem to have python2.7 as the default python--probably because /bin/env python has always been python2.7, and python3 is now referenced as python3.
That is to say: most .py scripts targeting python 3 look for an executable called "python3", because most .py scripts targeting python2 look for an executable called "python". Unless you can rewrite all existing Python scripts to look for a python2 executable, you probably want "python" to be Python 2.7, and "python3" to be Python 3. Likewise, "perl" will probably never mean "perl6".
Complexity is a matter of how many moving parts you have and how they fit together. If you have non-trivial pieces that someone else built, it's worth eliminating the risk of creating new bugs by using something that's been tested widely.
If your application is 6 megabytes of code, or 0.8 megabytes and some libraries, maybe you should bring in the external code. This is the same reason we have GTK, libsockets, and OpenSSL instead of a bunch of custom implementations of just the bits you need.
How do you know if you have a safe phone or just haven't gotten the notification?
Not really. Google will probably go, "Welp, we're not telling you not to prevent people from blowing up their pants."
Looks like it's 35% now. I thought it'd been raised to 40% recently.
The used car market is fed by people who bought new cars and are buying a new car. Those 11-year-old trucks were once new trucks, then 5-year-old trucks that got sold, then bought for cheap by people who might keep them 3, 5, or 8 years.
People aren't buying brand new cars and keeping them on the road for an average of 11 years; and the people buying used cars *definitely* aren't averaging 11 years holding them, because otherwise the average age of the car would be higher.
Automakers and finance can campaign against it, to try to control the public mind and maybe get laws passed to impede the change (rent-seeking behavior). They can't stop it forever. The public mind won't hold up as you change over through a new generation; and, two generations later, congress starts filling with people who won't buy your bullshit. Somewhere along the way, the public mind starts pressing old politicians, so you don't necessarily need to wait 40 years for everything to kick in; the media can also start talking about exciting new opportunities and cause existing public sentiment to shift, enough to create political favor for whomever works to deliver on these ideals, and damn what the banks think about it.
The major defect in his argument is generational: we're all used to driving, to owning, and otherwise to just having our own private car. There's a familiarity in this which is in many ways romantic, filling us with a sense of security as we remain surrounded in our own territory and firmly in control during every commute.
A new generation will have to introduce itself to that familiarity, and to the classical concept of car ownership and of driving. Those of this new generation will spend their lives observing an exciting transition to self-driving cars and chartered transportation without the restrictions of buses and trains. Their decision won't be between a new form of transportation and an old; it will be between two available options, neither of which is a staple of their lives and identities.
That generation will likely abandon the costs, risks, and inconvenience of driving in favor of chartering self-driving cars. Why spend $28,000 every 5 years, plus $3,000 in fuel, plus $7,500 in maintenance, plus $5,000 in insurance? $725/month, or you can spend $10/day and end up with $300/month. The difference comes from the vehicles turning over a large profit per their usual lifetime, being better-utilized between maintenance cycles, having more-efficient insurance (self-driving, large fleet, self-insured), better maintenance (access to mechanics as a factored-in cost), and better lifetimes (due to better maintenance), as well as a tax deduction for their depreciation (eventually cuts 40% of the cost from the purchase price) and all other costs (that base $725/month becomes $435/month to start with).
There's an interesting economic advantage here, too: those enormous tax deductions ($3,480 per car per year) are eliminated from consumer expense. If the taxi service has a higher profit margin, then part of that is captured in taxes (i.e. if they save $3,480 and charge you $3,000 less, that extra $480 is taxed at business 40% rate). Whatever savings go to the consumer are spent on other goods, which eventually get taxed--less taxes on what goes to wages of those other businesses supplying other goods, and the same taxes on those business's profit margins. The enormous tax savings from deductions and depreciation is just captured somewhere else, creating more jobs and more consumer wealth in the process.
Of course, those newly-created jobs aren't an expansion of employment; they just replace the taxi driver and maintenance worker jobs lost in this transition. They also take time to materialize, meaning sudden economic shock (changing to driverless taxis overnight) creates a spike in unemployment, while slowly converting the market (changing to driverless taxis over half a generation) creates visible strain on the taxi driver market (unemployment in that sector) while some other market grows to compensate (e.g. IT jobs, doctors), with a much smaller peak unemployment increase.
Probably. That wasn't a point I addressed; parent painted a picture of an untrusted, uncredentialed, unmonitored hitchhiking program where you just jump in a random stranger's car as the alternative to government regulation. My point was that ride share services like Uber and Lyft are the regulation supplying consumer safety, and that governments apply regulation to those to ensure that they supply a minimum consumer expectation at the least.
Protectionist economic policies and central economic planning are, of course, mistakes that governments love to make. They're popular: even the Slashdot crowd wants restrictions on pricing of pharmaceutical drugs, restrictions on lay-offs, restrictions on trade, restrictions on work visas, and in general central economic planning and protectionist policies that make them feel like they're ... well, protected. It seems obvious that price controls, work guarantees, and favoring of local business should be good for the consumer; the large effects of economics in terms of increasing purchasing power are a distant result of a long path through complex economic machinery, and difficult to understand.
Uber, Lyft, and Careen *are* regulation, though. Rather than a random, unknown individual offering a ride, you have a random, unknown individual offering a ride as documented by a service. This differs only from a taxi in that the taxi company is offering the ride and retaining employees, whereas the ride share services are connecting service seekers to service providers (this is the same differentiation between Amazon and Ebay, although Amazon has third-party sellers as well).
Government regulation only stipulates that said service must provide certain protections. It's all well-and-good that Uber provides insurance, traceability, and so forth; but will NewbeRide provide all that, or just say "Ride Share" and not really keep logs or provide insurance? How do you know that Uber and Lyft provide an equivalent minimum baseline at least in terms of consumer protection?
So Uber is about as safe as a Taxi; but we don't know if the next ride share app will be, too.
For anything non-trivial, your argument is essentially, "Don't do any planning, ignore all architecting, and spend 90% of your time refactoring unnecessarily, all while creating endless bugs and breaking anything."
For trivial, 15-line stop-gaps that are going to be thrown out for a real solution in 4 months, your argument is valid.
Yes well. This is why we don't use C++ or anything else that tries to not break compatibility. Hilarious artifacts of the past.
VB.net is heavily used in the Social Security Administration; their development policy forbids C# because they've standardized on VB.net as a codebase. Most other shops don't use VB.net because they've left VB.
Python 3 is the current standard, used in most new modules, new programs, up-to-date versions of most core distribution utilities written in Python, and in academic works (all books which use Python as a reference language now use Python 3).
Perl is garbage, and anyone who uses Perl is stuck in the 80s. After security and code maintainability became a concern, Perl went out of favor.
It used to disconnect on close; if you sent a signal 9 via a process signaling application, it would close the ad box without closing the connection. No good on Linux, though.
There's a lot of bad economics here.
People are talking about how the churches are apparently "highest earners" and "not paying tax", while this covers all kinds of religious organizations with largely-charitable output (i.e. they're buying food and clothing for the poor, and the businesses selling that are paying tax) which would be tax-exempt anyway (to a business, this is an expense; yet there isn't profit on top of it, since you're running a soup kitchen). Folks envision $1.2 trillion with 40% tax--$480 billion in taxes--when it'd be more like $1.2 trillion with pretty much $1.2 trillion of expenses. Even a serious business moving that much money would have like a 10% profit margin, giving $48 billion in taxable income; the whole of our economy is something like $14,000 billion, and the Federal revenue was $3,248 billion.
The truth is most of that $1.2 trillion gets taxed. The revenue buys food and facilities, pays wages to any non-volunteer time, and otherwise gets spent instead of banked. Businesses selling these things pay wages, and get taxed on their profits; and employees receiving wages get taxed. Damn near 100% of all that goes through the tax system, although individuals put a *huge* hole in it with their deductions ($6,200 single/$12,400 married standard deduction), and so the little guy is actually not paying taxes on at least $225 billion of that. Businesses average about 10% profit margin overall, leaving roughly $120 billion--less money to tax from those highest earners than the working-class Americans are deducting off their wages.
As you pointed out, there's a lot of spending here that would be spent anyway; and, without this spending, there would be purchasing dollars pointed at *other* spending. We've identified the church's involvement in the economy, but not their economic impact.