My point was that unemployment is temporary, and that new employment doesn't magically materialize. The processes of each take time; and if the rate of technical progress causes unemployment *much* faster, then the percent of the population unemployed at any given time increases. Slower-paced technical progress gives the economy time to adjust--through inflation, new spending habits, trade optimization, and the like--creating new jobs to replace those lost, thus controlling the unemployment rate.
As for technical progress in general, it makes the life of people with income easier. The unemployed need welfare; that's a SECONDARY effect.
In a fairly-poor society (e.g. low-agricultural), people have about enough production to get by. Food, water, the like. Maybe you have to walk 9 miles to the nearest fresh water source every day (Uganda); that's four hours per day spent fetching a pail of water AND NOT making food or clothing or shelter. Maybe agriculture is 90% of your workforce (1790 America), and your middle-class supplement food by hunting and homesteading (more farming). In such societies, welfare isn't a thing; the cost of unemployment insurance, food stamps, and the like is a bigger proportion of income than what's spent on luxuries and thus possible to take without collapsing the economy.
In a more-wealthy society, a lot of money goes to luxuries. If the middle-class spends 70% of its income on food, shelter, clothing, and modern social needs (e.g. transportation), they can afford some taxing; likewise, if roughly 50% of your society's income is spent on non-necessities, you've got some room. For reference, in the United States, the top 10% (people making over $152k) receive 48% of the gross income, and the average middle-class family spends almost 50% of its income on entertainment and luxuries--not counting the luxury of living in larger houses and nicer communities. Such societies are capable of unemployment insurance, food security, and other forms of welfare.
In these societies, productivity gains make the lives of the employed easier. Policy makes the lives of the unemployed easier: a society is now able to implement welfare policy, and does so. Unemployment insurance pays an amount based on your income; food stamps and SNAP buy food; HUD targets housing. These services theoretically should get more efficient, as they require a smaller percentage of income to provide benefits per person; over time, they've become LESS efficient, and are now a huge cost in the United States. Either way, the unemployed get what they are given, rather than a portion of income.
My proposed Universal Social Security (USS) system leaves much more income in taxpayer hands and completely-remediates our welfare system, and provides the unemployed with a buying-power income which increases with productivity. It is a form of Universal Basic Income (UBI) which collects its funding as a separate flat-tax on all income, and is supplemented by a minimally-scoped general-fund (progressive tax sourced) public aid system targeting children of low-income families. That type of system *does* make the life of the unemployed easier as productivity increases.
UBI-type systems are delicate and complex. A lot of people propose blunt solutions such as giving everyone $10,000, carbon cap-and-dividend, or a negative income tax with no specified funding source (sometimes, "Just tax the rich more"); my USS proposal comes from examining retail prices, current tax rates, and Federal spending, and identifying and controlling the risks inherent in such a proposal. As such, I'm quite convinced my system is better than ill-considered and idealistic proposals which don't even account for inflation; but of course I trust my own judgment.
In all cases, a UBI-type system relies on moving around a lot of money. The actual displacement may be small--my USS moves some $1.8 trillion m
Of course it would be more convincing if I altered an alternative; that doesn't change the point. Besides, you didn't really look too hard.
They do this because they don't understand that others perceive them as bringing attack dogs and a short temperament everywhere they go. The technical concept of social rapport and subconscious emotional influence is not intuitive, and people don't realize the damage they do with this behavior, nor the power they gain by being both sociable and unintrusive. It's an incredible engineering exercise most people aren't knowledgeable about.
We're working on building a society where blacks, gays, and women are dangerous, vicious attack dogs flashing teeth and barking for their pack as they move among us. We see them and we shuffle uncomfortably and hope they don't attack. We've taught people that NOT having high enough numbers of these people in certain positions will get the dogs turned on them; we've taught them that these people will turn on them if they're not favored for a reward; we've essentially taught people that these certain types cannot be trusted, should not be trusted, but are too dangerous not to cater to.
This kind of sentiment is EXACTLY why someone looks at a candidate and quickly assesses that the candidate is privileged, untrustworthy, and insufficiently skilled.
Our solution to this reflexive sentiment is to support it with tangible force. These people don't work to diffuse such sentiments, thus nullifying their effect and bringing the issue to a permanent close; they DEMAND THEIR JUST COMPENSATION, thus taking the position of an adversary, threatening the people around them.
One day, America will be fed up. The radicalized middle class argument--the argument of Donald Trump, the argument of his predecessors 30 years ago, and the argument of Adolf Hitler--will point these things out to a people who are tired of feeling this way. They will turn on a vast population of guiltless innocents and begin loading the crematoriums and cyanide showers. That's the kind of mass hysteria you get when you live in fear for so long: eventually, your entire generation carries out what it perceives as the French Revolution, but it's just mass genocide.
You of course get to be smug about it; you'll probably be dead by the time we get there.
The market changes on its own, and consumer purchasing patterns shift such that it's technically impossible to fix your prices to an equal purchasing share. "What the market will bear" leans heavily on direct and indirect competition, meaning consumers who want iPads might suddenly not have $250 for Ugg boots and Crocs, and now you have to cut back to that $25 price tag to capture that market. Some prices kind of stay the same: Super Mario 3 retailed for $450 in the U.S. in 1990, and high-selling game (Player's Choice, etc.) sold for $20 in 2000 (Metroid Prime, for example); today, new games are going for $60, and Player's Choice games... are tagged right at $20, like they have been for almost two decades. Even televisions cost... well, they have a wide range of costs, and $120 32-inch LCD compares pretty favorably with a $250 30-inch CRT from the 90s, likewise with the $400 19-inch monitor I bought in 2006.
The march of inflation hasn't raised the raw dollar price of shoes, clothing, video games, or books in any substance. Some of these have even steadily trended downward, when maintaining the same price would require the raw dollar sale price to increase. How has this happened?
The FACT--the undeniable, salient, historical *AND* mathematical FACT--is that things have progressed exactly in this way. They have and they must, or else we're dealing with mathematical and PHYSICAL impossibilities--we're dealing with more than 100% here.
For me to be incorrect, every year, 60% of ALL MONEY SPENT must be spent on food; 30% of ALL MONEY SPENT must be spent on clothing; 37,000% of ALL MONEY SPENT must be spent on transportation infrastructure; 119,000% of ALL MONEY SPENT must be spent on communications, electronics, and energy; 38,000% of ALL MONEY SPENT must be spent on healthcare. That means out of all debt taken and all wages earned, for every $100 available, millions of dollars must be spent.
So apparently Jesus is real, he started with five loaves of bread, and he gave half a loaf to each of three million people. That's your claim.
Oh, and also, you claim that things which have not gotten expensive in a fucking decade are keeping up with inflation and cost the same proportion of income. You claim that $50 in 1991 is the same as $50 in 2015.
We're actually continuously making technical progress and cutting back jobs. That's what all these layoffs are. Everyone cries that Dell or Hostess killed off 14,000 jobs over two years, but do you really think 14,000 jobs in a labor force of 171,000,000 matters? It's 0.008%. Costs fall, prices don't keep up with inflation, people find more money in their pockets eventually, and they buy more stuff, creating replacement jobs.
The two modes are "lose 60% of jobs in 2 years" or "lose 60% of jobs in 3 decades". The first one wrecks your global economy for 100 years; the second one makes everyone ridiculously rich, although by that time the new generation is complaining about how very poor they are and how their wages have stagnated for 30 years. Oh, they're all driving Teslas and they have open access to healthcare; they've got 90 inch TVs and holographic projectors to play complex video games; and they're carrying around 60 teraflops supercomputers in their pockets; but rich people have even more expensive, fancier shit.
There's a real economic threat here; it's one of rate, not form. A lifetime of cuts and scrapes versus one slice through the carotid artery.
It's not just whether we can do it; if we're talking about a smooth delivery of 6% productivity increase in 5 years, that's... not bad, actually. We might peak at +1% unemployment in that time.
The jobs will get replaced. Productivity improvements cause prices to not keep with inflation in the long run, at the very least; this feeds back into wages not keeping with inflation (because 6% more productivity means you can lag inflation by 6% and still break even), which feeds back into costs and prices. Projecting this forward quickly hits the calculus concept of limits (if you just keep cutting wages back--or not raising them--people *quickly* end out with legitimately less buying power, instead of just everything being free and cheap and their paltry income still being worth more).
That increase in buying power translates to more jobs. It comes, initially, from a removal of jobs in the cost chain, and so you get replacement jobs.
Not theory, but please show a place where lower costs trickled to consumers as opposed to getting eaten up by retailers.
Particular to credit cards or as a general concept?
As a general concept, 100% of all income--that is, the full share of all consumer expense--was dedicated back in the days when barter was a thing. That means there's no room to buy clothing, cars, roads, healthcare, books, computers, coffee, or anything else. It is mathematically impossible for us to exist as we do today, purchasing the things we do today, if what I said about cost reductions trickling down didn't happen.
Let's put this into a better frame.
In a given frame of time, all money spent buys all goods purchased. That's pretty much inviolable: if we spend $1 million on food and $200,000 on clothing and no money on anything else, then we have only bought that much food and that much clothing, and we've spent $1.2 million.
If you double the amount of money being spent and don't double the goods, you get obvious inflation. Spend $2 million on the same food and $400,000 on the same clothing and you have spent $2.4 million on... the same stuff. Assuming you have the same number of people, the same working hours, the same goods purchased, and purchase by way of consumer income, this is only mathematically possible if everyone's wages have doubled--else they can't afford anything.
Between these two scenarios, consumer prices are the same. In the first, you earn a wage of $100 and spend $100; in the second, you earn a wage of $200 and spend $200. In both, you've spent 100% of your income on exactly the same goods.
So in 1900, the median household spent 43% of its income on food; in 1950 it was 30%; today it's roughly 11%. Food's been getting cheaper for a long, long time. This is because a larger proportion of our labor force worked as farmers and as supply to farmers in prior years, and a smaller proportion works as such now: the cost of these things has gone down.
Because of that reduction--and the reduction of spending share on housing (per square foot; we buy bigger houses and apartments now), clothing, healthcare, and stuff like cell phones and computers--we're able to buy more stuff today than in 2005, 1990, 1970, 1950, 1900, 1870, 1790, and so forth.
In other words: We have continuously reduced costs to produce (technical progress), displacing employment, lowering consumer prices, and eventually creating larger purchasing demand, creating new employment making new things. Part of this reduction is bringing expensive goods to the market by making them non-expensive--things like semiconductors, OLEDs, and even iron and steel (the hot blast furnace produced 86,400 tonnes of iron with the same labor as previously required to produce 400 tonnes, making iron cheap and plentiful).
The market changes on its own, and consumer purchasing patterns shift such that it's technically impossible to fix your prices to an equal purchasing share. "What the market will bear" leans heavily on direct and indirect competition, meaning consumers who want iPads might suddenly not have $250 for Ugg boots and Crocs, and now you have to cut back to that $25 price tag to capture that market. Some prices kind of stay the same: Super Mario 3 retailed for $450 in the U.S. in 1990, and high-selling game (Player's Choice, etc.) sold for $20 in 2000 (Metroid Prime, for example); today, new games are going for $60, and Player's Choice games... are tagged right at $20, like they have been for almost two decades. Even televisions cost... well, they have a wide range of costs, and $120 32-inch LCD compares pretty favorably with a $250 30-inch CRT from the 90s, likewise with the $400 19-inch monitor I bought in 2006.
The march of inflation hasn't raised the raw dollar price of shoes, clothing, video games, or books in any substance. Some of these have even steadily trended downward, when maintaining the same price would require t
I didn't claim nothing can be done; I claimed what is being done is harmful and ill-conceived. There's a difference. Your excuse was that *something* should be done, and it may as well be this, even if it means we give everyone a tangible and rational reason to respond to disadvantaged classes with fear, distrust, and loathing.
You'd be surprised how well that doesn't work in practice. I've got pictures of Stepford families holding their kids and posing for the nice middle-class family angle with vile captions attacking the poor and misfortunate, simply because they gave me a good quote to highlight their entitled delusions and complete lack of compassion for other human beings. I bring those pictures out regularly when those people bother me with their privilege and their attacks on the less-fortunate, and they can't seem to do a damned thing about it.
You open yourself up for the Streissand effect and for some extreme criticism when you do shit like this. People will find a way to speak out if they disagree with you; and if you demand the ability to censor others and cultivate a carefully-protected world view free of criticism for your behavior, you get to be the subject of political cartoons and other lampooning. You can bitch about it all you want, but it's still going to happen. The punchline here is that someone is bitching about wanting to censor others for "bullying", and their protests in their own defense can be UTTERLY SILENCED as we demolish them for being completely fucking stupid if they get their way.
I wonder if they'd understand the weapon they handed over after the fact, or if they'd just cry that it's not fair and someone should do something. Unintended consequences don't seem to enter the human consciousness very often, even when they clock you over the head.
You make the assertion that anything people purchase fraudulently comes out of the store's pocket, not yours. Here's the thing: if the cost of fraud is 0.1%, then every $1,000 you spend includes around $1 of fraud coverage. If it's 1%, then it's $10. The difference between these, if you have $70,000/year to spend (e.g. a mid-level IT job, after taxes), is $70 vs $700.
Reductions in fraud translate to reductions in operational costs, and eventually reductions in consumer prices. The long and short of it is that yes, all this fraud comes out of your pocket.
In a larger economic sense, that kind of cost reduces total purchasing power. Firstly, by way of ineffective fraud controls generally requiring more effort per purchase volume; and secondly, by the simple increase of prices, reducing everyone's purchasing power per dollar while translating those stolen proceeds into someone else's hands (i.e. that guy has 100x as much money, and everything costs 1.01x as much, so you're 1% poorer and he's 9,900% richer). A total reduction in purchasing power means less stuff moving, which means less labor involved moving it all, which means fewer jobs and more unemployment.
Cashback comes out of your bank's fees to the merchant. The 1%-2% you actually get in total is compared to a 3.2% per-transaction fee, which bumps prices up. ON TOP OF THAT, the merchant is responsible for any and all fraud, which gets amortized as cost-of-risk. So a $10 good might be 32 cents extra so the merchant can cover those transaction fees and 1 cent extra to cover fraud; you pay an extra 33 cents, and get 20 cents back.
That fraud cost is comparatively small, but it does come out of your pocket eventually. Reducing and controlling fraud reduces those costs, and the bump in prices eventually decays away as inflation devalues money and prices don't increase quite as fast to match (10% more production, 15% more money, ~4.5% inflation; but the added production comes from lower cost in goods, so that $10 good becomes $10.40 instead of $10.45, or some such). Typically, blunt effort fraud controls exponentially increase in cost, and so new strategies are employed; and such new strategies reduce cost per transaction, which allows competitive merchant rates.
You might think of Visa and Amex here, although Visa and Mastercard are considered the big competitors. Visa publishes a huge schedule of fees, and they do in fact charge more if you're using a Signature Rewards card (1.6% for mine, 1.15% for some base cards, and as high as 2.4% for high-end rewards cards). Payment processors build on top of these, for example HELCIM.
The punch line is the total fees paid to banks, payment processors, and credit card companies has increased over the years, although so has the size of the economy--still, $20 billion out of $8.9 trillion vs $45 billion out of $12.5 trillion, or a 50% increase in proportion. We're getting better at fraud, too, so improved fraud detection is an expensive arms race.
So just to be clear, you suggest, instead of looking for a useful solution, we panic and make the situation worse so that we look like we're doing *something*. Shall we also applaud Fidel Castro for his humanitarian solution to HIV in Cuba, effectively slowing the epidemic by arresting all gays and putting them in concentration camps?
There's actually a Change.org petition demanding Instagram give all users the ability to disable comments "to stop bullying." I've considered finding the user's Instagram and creating several sock puppet accounts, then using them to post content (with comments disabled) bullying the user, with no recourse to defend themselves. I can get past libel by just heavily-criticizing them on factual things--like their idiotic demands to restrict people's speech and give them no recourse to comment on images which assault their character.
We use Li+ batteries because they're fast-reacting (release energy quickly) and high-energy-density (lots of charge in little space). That's the point of new battery tech: More current draw (ability to power more-demanding things) for more time (ability to power longer).
That means any future battery tech will lean further toward high power output and high power density. We've got ideas for novel lithium compounds, organic cells, and nano-electrodes that should supply higher voltages, heavier current draw, and more capacity; most of that stuff is hard to make or just plain unstable (i.e. you get like four charge cycles before they're fucked). The only exceptions are slow-discharge batteries designed for low-draw operation, specifically because a high internal resistance extends battery life (can't power a motor, but lasts 15 years in your smoke detector).
In other words: laptops, smartphones, electric cars, and Gameboy are all grabbing at Li+ and better batteries. They're specifically interested in what amount to miniature bombs, and they *will* go boom if mishandled. Safer alternatives are safer for the reasons you state--which is why we don't use them: can't drive a high-power circuit, can't provide power for 60 hours.
You fundamentally have to give up on power output to get a safer battery. If it supplies less current when reacting, it's safer.
I asked for a fire extinguisher once after unplugging a coworker's monitor, because it started hissing loudly and smoking. Our branch chief came over, facepalmed, and lectured the guy about not being allowed to bring his own 35 inch monitor into work.
That's the Politician's Soliloquy. "Something must be done; this is something; therefor, this must be done."
Your response to "this is a waste of time and making the proposed problem even worse" is, essentially, "Well if you're so smart, then what should we do different? You don't know? Oh, what a surprise. Not so smart after all, are you? Neener neener!"
Also, can you explain how being fair by hiring on merit is unfair to someone? For example, removing names from CVs to reduce bias. How is that unfair to anyone?
People aren't hiring on merit; they're looking to find a matching race/gender/whatever to fill an accounting slot. We've loudly advertised efforts to bring WOMEN onto the team because "we need more women in IT". We've got employers declaring their intent to hire more black people for higher-level positions.
How is it hiring on merit if, before you even see any candidate, before you look at any CV, and before you actually declare an opening for a position, you have declared that you're specifically seeking to hire women, blacks, gays, or whatnot? Not "we are committed to treating all candidates equally"; but "we need more diversity, and will seek to hire more-diverse candidates in the future."
Sally, send in America's most-hireable Asian. We have a new position opening and my department needs its diversity numbers up for this quarter.
You are essentially paying a credit card fraud insurance premium. The store pays those fraud costs out of revenues, which are paid out of sales. More credit card fraud means higher prices to cover the cost of risk.
Money doesn't fall from nowhere. The cost of risk is rolled into credit card fees, which merchants need to cover out of their revenue, which comes from their sales. As the credit card fees aren't a fixed cost (it's 1.4% to 5.2% of each sale, depending on the card), they roll directly into prices; fixed costs amortize (i.e. if you pay $80,000/year for rent, selling three times as much stuff means the price of each thing you sell includes 1/3 as much of the cost of rent).
It worked when you only had to pass a credit card number in the clear. Now you have to use a private key issued by the bank to encrypt some data, so the actual identifying information is never exposed. To support that, the bank has to issue a key, and they only do that for trusted partners.
Smart cards are computers with IO ports. When you plug one in, it gets power, takes data, generates a digital signature, and returns it. If it verifies, you're good.
My spending habits are known. I know roughly what I spend on food a month, what's in my bank accounts, what my card balance is, and so forth. I notice when I'm spending excess, e.g. when I start buying expensive meals more frequently than usual.
My finances get reviewed when I get paid. I check how much money was deposited, what's in each account, and what balances my debts carry. I shift money around. I review what I've spent money on each month, and project which expenses are transient and can be discounted for the future. I reduce my spending by paying off loans (including my mortgage, soon--it's been almost four years).
I review my spending when I make discretionary purchases. CPU upgrade, new bed, a $50 tea pot, a $180 punching bag. I have thousands of dollars of unspent income every month; I can spend freely, and still attend to this. The excess money is currently going to my 401(K) to catch up for the year (60% of my paycheck); typically, I build up to $10k of emergency savings, and then start tearing down my debts. Eliminating $700/month of expenses in 2017.
I don't handle cash. It's hard to assess my financial position if I can't see what I'm spending. As a bonus, everyone is charging you for Visa's fees, but I'm the one getting kickbacks from Visa thanks to my Platinum Rewards credit card. I'm aggressively using a credit card that takes money from you and transfers it to me.
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My point was that unemployment is temporary, and that new employment doesn't magically materialize. The processes of each take time; and if the rate of technical progress causes unemployment *much* faster, then the percent of the population unemployed at any given time increases. Slower-paced technical progress gives the economy time to adjust--through inflation, new spending habits, trade optimization, and the like--creating new jobs to replace those lost, thus controlling the unemployment rate.
As for technical progress in general, it makes the life of people with income easier. The unemployed need welfare; that's a SECONDARY effect.
In a fairly-poor society (e.g. low-agricultural), people have about enough production to get by. Food, water, the like. Maybe you have to walk 9 miles to the nearest fresh water source every day (Uganda); that's four hours per day spent fetching a pail of water AND NOT making food or clothing or shelter. Maybe agriculture is 90% of your workforce (1790 America), and your middle-class supplement food by hunting and homesteading (more farming). In such societies, welfare isn't a thing; the cost of unemployment insurance, food stamps, and the like is a bigger proportion of income than what's spent on luxuries and thus possible to take without collapsing the economy.
In a more-wealthy society, a lot of money goes to luxuries. If the middle-class spends 70% of its income on food, shelter, clothing, and modern social needs (e.g. transportation), they can afford some taxing; likewise, if roughly 50% of your society's income is spent on non-necessities, you've got some room. For reference, in the United States, the top 10% (people making over $152k) receive 48% of the gross income, and the average middle-class family spends almost 50% of its income on entertainment and luxuries--not counting the luxury of living in larger houses and nicer communities. Such societies are capable of unemployment insurance, food security, and other forms of welfare.
In these societies, productivity gains make the lives of the employed easier. Policy makes the lives of the unemployed easier: a society is now able to implement welfare policy, and does so. Unemployment insurance pays an amount based on your income; food stamps and SNAP buy food; HUD targets housing. These services theoretically should get more efficient, as they require a smaller percentage of income to provide benefits per person; over time, they've become LESS efficient, and are now a huge cost in the United States. Either way, the unemployed get what they are given, rather than a portion of income.
My proposed Universal Social Security (USS) system leaves much more income in taxpayer hands and completely-remediates our welfare system, and provides the unemployed with a buying-power income which increases with productivity. It is a form of Universal Basic Income (UBI) which collects its funding as a separate flat-tax on all income, and is supplemented by a minimally-scoped general-fund (progressive tax sourced) public aid system targeting children of low-income families. That type of system *does* make the life of the unemployed easier as productivity increases.
UBI-type systems are delicate and complex. A lot of people propose blunt solutions such as giving everyone $10,000, carbon cap-and-dividend, or a negative income tax with no specified funding source (sometimes, "Just tax the rich more"); my USS proposal comes from examining retail prices, current tax rates, and Federal spending, and identifying and controlling the risks inherent in such a proposal. As such, I'm quite convinced my system is better than ill-considered and idealistic proposals which don't even account for inflation; but of course I trust my own judgment.
In all cases, a UBI-type system relies on moving around a lot of money. The actual displacement may be small--my USS moves some $1.8 trillion m
Of course it would be more convincing if I altered an alternative; that doesn't change the point. Besides, you didn't really look too hard.
They do this because they don't understand that others perceive them as bringing attack dogs and a short temperament everywhere they go. The technical concept of social rapport and subconscious emotional influence is not intuitive, and people don't realize the damage they do with this behavior, nor the power they gain by being both sociable and unintrusive. It's an incredible engineering exercise most people aren't knowledgeable about.
We're working on building a society where blacks, gays, and women are dangerous, vicious attack dogs flashing teeth and barking for their pack as they move among us. We see them and we shuffle uncomfortably and hope they don't attack. We've taught people that NOT having high enough numbers of these people in certain positions will get the dogs turned on them; we've taught them that these people will turn on them if they're not favored for a reward; we've essentially taught people that these certain types cannot be trusted, should not be trusted, but are too dangerous not to cater to.
This kind of sentiment is EXACTLY why someone looks at a candidate and quickly assesses that the candidate is privileged, untrustworthy, and insufficiently skilled.
Our solution to this reflexive sentiment is to support it with tangible force. These people don't work to diffuse such sentiments, thus nullifying their effect and bringing the issue to a permanent close; they DEMAND THEIR JUST COMPENSATION, thus taking the position of an adversary, threatening the people around them.
One day, America will be fed up. The radicalized middle class argument--the argument of Donald Trump, the argument of his predecessors 30 years ago, and the argument of Adolf Hitler--will point these things out to a people who are tired of feeling this way. They will turn on a vast population of guiltless innocents and begin loading the crematoriums and cyanide showers. That's the kind of mass hysteria you get when you live in fear for so long: eventually, your entire generation carries out what it perceives as the French Revolution, but it's just mass genocide.
You of course get to be smug about it; you'll probably be dead by the time we get there.
Perhaps you missed this part:
The market changes on its own, and consumer purchasing patterns shift such that it's technically impossible to fix your prices to an equal purchasing share. "What the market will bear" leans heavily on direct and indirect competition, meaning consumers who want iPads might suddenly not have $250 for Ugg boots and Crocs, and now you have to cut back to that $25 price tag to capture that market. Some prices kind of stay the same: Super Mario 3 retailed for $450 in the U.S. in 1990, and high-selling game (Player's Choice, etc.) sold for $20 in 2000 (Metroid Prime, for example); today, new games are going for $60, and Player's Choice games... are tagged right at $20, like they have been for almost two decades. Even televisions cost... well, they have a wide range of costs, and $120 32-inch LCD compares pretty favorably with a $250 30-inch CRT from the 90s, likewise with the $400 19-inch monitor I bought in 2006.
The march of inflation hasn't raised the raw dollar price of shoes, clothing, video games, or books in any substance. Some of these have even steadily trended downward, when maintaining the same price would require the raw dollar sale price to increase. How has this happened?
The FACT--the undeniable, salient, historical *AND* mathematical FACT--is that things have progressed exactly in this way. They have and they must, or else we're dealing with mathematical and PHYSICAL impossibilities--we're dealing with more than 100% here.
For me to be incorrect, every year, 60% of ALL MONEY SPENT must be spent on food; 30% of ALL MONEY SPENT must be spent on clothing; 37,000% of ALL MONEY SPENT must be spent on transportation infrastructure; 119,000% of ALL MONEY SPENT must be spent on communications, electronics, and energy; 38,000% of ALL MONEY SPENT must be spent on healthcare. That means out of all debt taken and all wages earned, for every $100 available, millions of dollars must be spent.
So apparently Jesus is real, he started with five loaves of bread, and he gave half a loaf to each of three million people. That's your claim.
Oh, and also, you claim that things which have not gotten expensive in a fucking decade are keeping up with inflation and cost the same proportion of income. You claim that $50 in 1991 is the same as $50 in 2015.
We're actually continuously making technical progress and cutting back jobs. That's what all these layoffs are. Everyone cries that Dell or Hostess killed off 14,000 jobs over two years, but do you really think 14,000 jobs in a labor force of 171,000,000 matters? It's 0.008%. Costs fall, prices don't keep up with inflation, people find more money in their pockets eventually, and they buy more stuff, creating replacement jobs.
The two modes are "lose 60% of jobs in 2 years" or "lose 60% of jobs in 3 decades". The first one wrecks your global economy for 100 years; the second one makes everyone ridiculously rich, although by that time the new generation is complaining about how very poor they are and how their wages have stagnated for 30 years. Oh, they're all driving Teslas and they have open access to healthcare; they've got 90 inch TVs and holographic projectors to play complex video games; and they're carrying around 60 teraflops supercomputers in their pockets; but rich people have even more expensive, fancier shit.
There's a real economic threat here; it's one of rate, not form. A lifetime of cuts and scrapes versus one slice through the carotid artery.
It's not just whether we can do it; if we're talking about a smooth delivery of 6% productivity increase in 5 years, that's ... not bad, actually. We might peak at +1% unemployment in that time.
The jobs will get replaced. Productivity improvements cause prices to not keep with inflation in the long run, at the very least; this feeds back into wages not keeping with inflation (because 6% more productivity means you can lag inflation by 6% and still break even), which feeds back into costs and prices. Projecting this forward quickly hits the calculus concept of limits (if you just keep cutting wages back--or not raising them--people *quickly* end out with legitimately less buying power, instead of just everything being free and cheap and their paltry income still being worth more).
That increase in buying power translates to more jobs. It comes, initially, from a removal of jobs in the cost chain, and so you get replacement jobs.
Not theory, but please show a place where lower costs trickled to consumers as opposed to getting eaten up by retailers.
Particular to credit cards or as a general concept?
As a general concept, 100% of all income--that is, the full share of all consumer expense--was dedicated back in the days when barter was a thing. That means there's no room to buy clothing, cars, roads, healthcare, books, computers, coffee, or anything else. It is mathematically impossible for us to exist as we do today, purchasing the things we do today, if what I said about cost reductions trickling down didn't happen.
Let's put this into a better frame.
In a given frame of time, all money spent buys all goods purchased. That's pretty much inviolable: if we spend $1 million on food and $200,000 on clothing and no money on anything else, then we have only bought that much food and that much clothing, and we've spent $1.2 million.
If you double the amount of money being spent and don't double the goods, you get obvious inflation. Spend $2 million on the same food and $400,000 on the same clothing and you have spent $2.4 million on ... the same stuff. Assuming you have the same number of people, the same working hours, the same goods purchased, and purchase by way of consumer income, this is only mathematically possible if everyone's wages have doubled--else they can't afford anything.
Between these two scenarios, consumer prices are the same. In the first, you earn a wage of $100 and spend $100; in the second, you earn a wage of $200 and spend $200. In both, you've spent 100% of your income on exactly the same goods.
So in 1900, the median household spent 43% of its income on food; in 1950 it was 30%; today it's roughly 11%. Food's been getting cheaper for a long, long time. This is because a larger proportion of our labor force worked as farmers and as supply to farmers in prior years, and a smaller proportion works as such now: the cost of these things has gone down.
Because of that reduction--and the reduction of spending share on housing (per square foot; we buy bigger houses and apartments now), clothing, healthcare, and stuff like cell phones and computers--we're able to buy more stuff today than in 2005, 1990, 1970, 1950, 1900, 1870, 1790, and so forth.
In other words: We have continuously reduced costs to produce (technical progress), displacing employment, lowering consumer prices, and eventually creating larger purchasing demand, creating new employment making new things. Part of this reduction is bringing expensive goods to the market by making them non-expensive--things like semiconductors, OLEDs, and even iron and steel (the hot blast furnace produced 86,400 tonnes of iron with the same labor as previously required to produce 400 tonnes, making iron cheap and plentiful).
The market changes on its own, and consumer purchasing patterns shift such that it's technically impossible to fix your prices to an equal purchasing share. "What the market will bear" leans heavily on direct and indirect competition, meaning consumers who want iPads might suddenly not have $250 for Ugg boots and Crocs, and now you have to cut back to that $25 price tag to capture that market. Some prices kind of stay the same: Super Mario 3 retailed for $450 in the U.S. in 1990, and high-selling game (Player's Choice, etc.) sold for $20 in 2000 (Metroid Prime, for example); today, new games are going for $60, and Player's Choice games... are tagged right at $20, like they have been for almost two decades. Even televisions cost... well, they have a wide range of costs, and $120 32-inch LCD compares pretty favorably with a $250 30-inch CRT from the 90s, likewise with the $400 19-inch monitor I bought in 2006.
The march of inflation hasn't raised the raw dollar price of shoes, clothing, video games, or books in any substance. Some of these have even steadily trended downward, when maintaining the same price would require t
I didn't claim nothing can be done; I claimed what is being done is harmful and ill-conceived. There's a difference. Your excuse was that *something* should be done, and it may as well be this, even if it means we give everyone a tangible and rational reason to respond to disadvantaged classes with fear, distrust, and loathing.
You'd be surprised how well that doesn't work in practice. I've got pictures of Stepford families holding their kids and posing for the nice middle-class family angle with vile captions attacking the poor and misfortunate, simply because they gave me a good quote to highlight their entitled delusions and complete lack of compassion for other human beings. I bring those pictures out regularly when those people bother me with their privilege and their attacks on the less-fortunate, and they can't seem to do a damned thing about it.
You open yourself up for the Streissand effect and for some extreme criticism when you do shit like this. People will find a way to speak out if they disagree with you; and if you demand the ability to censor others and cultivate a carefully-protected world view free of criticism for your behavior, you get to be the subject of political cartoons and other lampooning. You can bitch about it all you want, but it's still going to happen. The punchline here is that someone is bitching about wanting to censor others for "bullying", and their protests in their own defense can be UTTERLY SILENCED as we demolish them for being completely fucking stupid if they get their way.
I wonder if they'd understand the weapon they handed over after the fact, or if they'd just cry that it's not fair and someone should do something. Unintended consequences don't seem to enter the human consciousness very often, even when they clock you over the head.
You make the assertion that anything people purchase fraudulently comes out of the store's pocket, not yours. Here's the thing: if the cost of fraud is 0.1%, then every $1,000 you spend includes around $1 of fraud coverage. If it's 1%, then it's $10. The difference between these, if you have $70,000/year to spend (e.g. a mid-level IT job, after taxes), is $70 vs $700.
Reductions in fraud translate to reductions in operational costs, and eventually reductions in consumer prices. The long and short of it is that yes, all this fraud comes out of your pocket.
In a larger economic sense, that kind of cost reduces total purchasing power. Firstly, by way of ineffective fraud controls generally requiring more effort per purchase volume; and secondly, by the simple increase of prices, reducing everyone's purchasing power per dollar while translating those stolen proceeds into someone else's hands (i.e. that guy has 100x as much money, and everything costs 1.01x as much, so you're 1% poorer and he's 9,900% richer). A total reduction in purchasing power means less stuff moving, which means less labor involved moving it all, which means fewer jobs and more unemployment.
Cashback comes out of your bank's fees to the merchant. The 1%-2% you actually get in total is compared to a 3.2% per-transaction fee, which bumps prices up. ON TOP OF THAT, the merchant is responsible for any and all fraud, which gets amortized as cost-of-risk. So a $10 good might be 32 cents extra so the merchant can cover those transaction fees and 1 cent extra to cover fraud; you pay an extra 33 cents, and get 20 cents back.
That fraud cost is comparatively small, but it does come out of your pocket eventually. Reducing and controlling fraud reduces those costs, and the bump in prices eventually decays away as inflation devalues money and prices don't increase quite as fast to match (10% more production, 15% more money, ~4.5% inflation; but the added production comes from lower cost in goods, so that $10 good becomes $10.40 instead of $10.45, or some such). Typically, blunt effort fraud controls exponentially increase in cost, and so new strategies are employed; and such new strategies reduce cost per transaction, which allows competitive merchant rates.
You might think of Visa and Amex here, although Visa and Mastercard are considered the big competitors. Visa publishes a huge schedule of fees, and they do in fact charge more if you're using a Signature Rewards card (1.6% for mine, 1.15% for some base cards, and as high as 2.4% for high-end rewards cards). Payment processors build on top of these, for example HELCIM.
The punch line is the total fees paid to banks, payment processors, and credit card companies has increased over the years, although so has the size of the economy--still, $20 billion out of $8.9 trillion vs $45 billion out of $12.5 trillion, or a 50% increase in proportion. We're getting better at fraud, too, so improved fraud detection is an expensive arms race.
So just to be clear, you suggest, instead of looking for a useful solution, we panic and make the situation worse so that we look like we're doing *something*. Shall we also applaud Fidel Castro for his humanitarian solution to HIV in Cuba, effectively slowing the epidemic by arresting all gays and putting them in concentration camps?
To be fair, it is an anachronism.
That ban is dumb, anyway.
There's actually a Change.org petition demanding Instagram give all users the ability to disable comments "to stop bullying." I've considered finding the user's Instagram and creating several sock puppet accounts, then using them to post content (with comments disabled) bullying the user, with no recourse to defend themselves. I can get past libel by just heavily-criticizing them on factual things--like their idiotic demands to restrict people's speech and give them no recourse to comment on images which assault their character.
It'd be even cheaper if they bought Yelp's premium service and removed the review themselves.
What do you mean? Take it into the local T-mobile/Verizon/Target/whatever and swap it off, let the store send your shit phone back.
Colloquially, something has to go boom to explode. We've separated out the idea of squeezing something externally or puncturing a pressure vessel.
Flour has detonated with extreme force. Enough to demolish a building. Thirteen abstract people died.
We use Li+ batteries because they're fast-reacting (release energy quickly) and high-energy-density (lots of charge in little space). That's the point of new battery tech: More current draw (ability to power more-demanding things) for more time (ability to power longer).
That means any future battery tech will lean further toward high power output and high power density. We've got ideas for novel lithium compounds, organic cells, and nano-electrodes that should supply higher voltages, heavier current draw, and more capacity; most of that stuff is hard to make or just plain unstable (i.e. you get like four charge cycles before they're fucked). The only exceptions are slow-discharge batteries designed for low-draw operation, specifically because a high internal resistance extends battery life (can't power a motor, but lasts 15 years in your smoke detector).
In other words: laptops, smartphones, electric cars, and Gameboy are all grabbing at Li+ and better batteries. They're specifically interested in what amount to miniature bombs, and they *will* go boom if mishandled. Safer alternatives are safer for the reasons you state--which is why we don't use them: can't drive a high-power circuit, can't provide power for 60 hours.
You fundamentally have to give up on power output to get a safer battery. If it supplies less current when reacting, it's safer.
Sevengate? Notegate? Galacticgate? Thesuninyourpocketgate?
I asked for a fire extinguisher once after unplugging a coworker's monitor, because it started hissing loudly and smoking. Our branch chief came over, facepalmed, and lectured the guy about not being allowed to bring his own 35 inch monitor into work.
That's the Politician's Soliloquy. "Something must be done; this is something; therefor, this must be done."
Your response to "this is a waste of time and making the proposed problem even worse" is, essentially, "Well if you're so smart, then what should we do different? You don't know? Oh, what a surprise. Not so smart after all, are you? Neener neener!"
Also, can you explain how being fair by hiring on merit is unfair to someone? For example, removing names from CVs to reduce bias. How is that unfair to anyone?
People aren't hiring on merit; they're looking to find a matching race/gender/whatever to fill an accounting slot. We've loudly advertised efforts to bring WOMEN onto the team because "we need more women in IT". We've got employers declaring their intent to hire more black people for higher-level positions.
How is it hiring on merit if, before you even see any candidate, before you look at any CV, and before you actually declare an opening for a position, you have declared that you're specifically seeking to hire women, blacks, gays, or whatnot? Not "we are committed to treating all candidates equally"; but "we need more diversity, and will seek to hire more-diverse candidates in the future."
Sally, send in America's most-hireable Asian. We have a new position opening and my department needs its diversity numbers up for this quarter.
You are essentially paying a credit card fraud insurance premium. The store pays those fraud costs out of revenues, which are paid out of sales. More credit card fraud means higher prices to cover the cost of risk.
Money doesn't fall from nowhere. The cost of risk is rolled into credit card fees, which merchants need to cover out of their revenue, which comes from their sales. As the credit card fees aren't a fixed cost (it's 1.4% to 5.2% of each sale, depending on the card), they roll directly into prices; fixed costs amortize (i.e. if you pay $80,000/year for rent, selling three times as much stuff means the price of each thing you sell includes 1/3 as much of the cost of rent).
It worked when you only had to pass a credit card number in the clear. Now you have to use a private key issued by the bank to encrypt some data, so the actual identifying information is never exposed. To support that, the bank has to issue a key, and they only do that for trusted partners.
Smart cards are computers with IO ports. When you plug one in, it gets power, takes data, generates a digital signature, and returns it. If it verifies, you're good.
My spending habits are known. I know roughly what I spend on food a month, what's in my bank accounts, what my card balance is, and so forth. I notice when I'm spending excess, e.g. when I start buying expensive meals more frequently than usual.
My finances get reviewed when I get paid. I check how much money was deposited, what's in each account, and what balances my debts carry. I shift money around. I review what I've spent money on each month, and project which expenses are transient and can be discounted for the future. I reduce my spending by paying off loans (including my mortgage, soon--it's been almost four years).
I review my spending when I make discretionary purchases. CPU upgrade, new bed, a $50 tea pot, a $180 punching bag. I have thousands of dollars of unspent income every month; I can spend freely, and still attend to this. The excess money is currently going to my 401(K) to catch up for the year (60% of my paycheck); typically, I build up to $10k of emergency savings, and then start tearing down my debts. Eliminating $700/month of expenses in 2017.
I don't handle cash. It's hard to assess my financial position if I can't see what I'm spending. As a bonus, everyone is charging you for Visa's fees, but I'm the one getting kickbacks from Visa thanks to my Platinum Rewards credit card. I'm aggressively using a credit card that takes money from you and transfers it to me.