The long and short of it is opportunity. You have the opportunity for promotion, and it instead goes to someone else based on your manager's emotional responses to the person. Those of us with developed technical sense about business understand this is mediated by things like rapport: it pays to be social with people who are promoting you, because they get that feeling of comfort and confidence looking at your name, contrasted to a feeling of uncertainty looking at someone else's (better!) performance record.
Nobody likes hoodrats and idiot women. These people can't be trusted with power. You cringe when you think about putting them in charge of anything, despite their historical high performance. You *quickly* skip over their name and promote the next guy, because he's a man, and white, and thus has his shit together and is more-trustworthy.
People perceive this problem, and they don't understand it. They think it's solved by forcing people to put these people into power. In part, a more normalized impression of powerful people--a society in which you can readily identify blacks and women and whatever else who have become well-known for their success--reduces the automatic discriminatory reaction. In another part, *forcing* the issue trains people to be comfortable around white men, and fearful and distrusting of anyone who might claim discrimination--blacks, women, gays, the lot.
Without understanding this, people who perceive themselves as grouped for discrimination will cry about fairness and look for someone to protect them. 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.
Currently, the topic has become so popular it seeps into everything. People perceive a new concept in everything--especially a feared concept, or any highly-emotional concept. This is what witch hunts are.
I subscribe to the ideal that fairness isn't a thing. Anything you define as fair is patently discriminatory against someone else through no fault of their own, and is thus unfair. There are problems, and solutions to problems; and we can address that while understanding that fairness isn't a thing. The concept of fairness is what drives things like people trying to drag more women into programming, imagining that women are brilliant and driven programmers cowering at the edge of the software development world in fear of being made fun of for being programmers. Nobody imagines that maybe more men like that particular task than women, hence why you get 10% female programmers showing up instead of 50%. Then they start compensating for everything by putting the few women in charge of things to balance it all out.
If your thought process starts with, "Hey, we should get a {woman,black,gay} to do this, because they've been underrepresented lately," something is wrong. First off, you don't seem to have a sense that some group is being harassed or otherwise discriminated against; you've just decided X event hasn't happened frequently, so there must be a social problem here. Second, if you *do* see day-to-day harassment creating an unfair disadvantage for a group, YOU HAVEN'T DONE ANYTHING ABOUT IT, and don't seem to care. You're either causing a problem or ignoring it, and making a token gesture at the same time to cover your ego.
That's how fairness-driven social activism works. Ignore problems, complain about things.
The whole thing is essentially political, and not very useful. There's something to be said economically here; and everyone is more-interested in a moral-political ideal, in truth.
Let's first look at the economics. Ireland's unemployment rate is about 9%, and this judgement is equivalent to around $850 billion per year--these are taxes back to 1991. Everyone is salivating over the big, one-time, $21 billion number; the truth is, long-term, this is $15/month for every Irish citizen, or like $30 per household. Not going to pay for your college. If we assume only $10/hr wage jobs, continuous additional tax revenue as such will drop Irish unemployment by 0.9%, which is salient.
What about the politics, the behavior, the social issue?
People are mad about Apple tax sheltering. In the U.S., Apple would pay 40% corporate taxes; in Ireland, the corporate tax rate was 12.5% until the end of 2015, and is now 6.5%. This judgement only pulls more money from a global economy--from Apple U.S., Asia, and Europe--into Ireland, rather than changing the behavior of Apple. To be clear: Apple's behavior of redirecting its income to Ireland is still the most-advantageous, and now Ireland is getting a bigger cut in this partnership.
All of the above sets the reader up for an argument I can quickly and effectively demolish.
Assuming you believe high corporate taxes are moral, Apple *should* move its tax reporting to the U.S.; as I've demonstrated above, this Ireland judgment is an example of a corrupt state making a profit from the same amoral corporate tax sheltering the European judgment purports to combat, if you were to argue that such sheltering is amoral.
There's where the whole thing falls down.
Corporate income is, in truth, about 10% of American income. Corporations draw revenue, which is then distributed as wages (including buying from other corporations, which then behave the same way, up to the origin supplier) or retained as corporate profits. That means actual income is reflected as profit (corporate income) plus wages (individual income). In total, corporate profits are only a small portion of total income.
Capturing that income in taxes doesn't provide a great deal of benefit. It's significant, but it's not important--in the same way $100 is significant but not important when you have $2,000 of discretionary spending per month. Importantly, correcting whatever tax system defects exist won't solve any socio-economic problems such as welfare system defects, unemployment, homelessness, or hunger in America. It won't have a stabilizing effect on our economy. It won't set us up for long-term prosperity.
That means you have two possible arguments: this EU ruling is simple corruption on the part of the EU, trying to grab for money that isn't theirs and belongs to America; or this EU ruling is useless and is chasing a perceived problem that's not impacting us in any meaningful way.
I often argue about Universal Basic Incomes (UBI), having proposed a Universal Social Security (USS) in the United States. In terms of money displaced from one taxpayer's hands into another's (or to the government to be spent), a USS is one trillion dollars cheaper than our modern Welfare system. I've defined that plan including an analysis of risks, transitional considerations, and long-term finances, rather than simple idealism.
There are a few important points here.
Firstly, the USS as defined has domain over more than $1.7 trillion. Every adult is paid an equal income each month out of that $1.7 trillion, meaning the taxes paid to support it are *partially* returned. The lowest income earners get more than they pay in; and compared to current taxes, almost all taxpayers end up with more after-tax money than they do now. The highest income earners pay *slightly* more in my taxes; that can be eliminated (even *their* taxes can be low
I meant to indicate that most people don't understand the biological support mechanism of the foot, and how that interacts with shoes. The arch of the foot and the ankle work together to provide shock-absorption, protecting the knee and hips; a shoe provides arch support, and how and to what degree it supplies this support affects the health of these anatomical components. So does the shoe's profile (raised heel?). The sole is made of complex rubber compounds which affect traction (e.g. some shoes can walk on ice, but not so good on wet wood), and has a tread which provides terrain traction (mud, steel, asphalt; hard, soft, firm, loose, or uneven ground). The entire shoe itself is built of multiple components and layers, and its construction determines how sturdy and effective it is as a shoe in general.
Shoes involve fairly complex engineering. Identifying what kind of shoe you need beyond what the label on the box says (WHICH hiking boot is best, given the trails and conditions in which you hike?) is difficult without knowing quite a lot about shoes. I'm rather certain most shoe-wearers don't know a god damned thing about how a shoe works.
Interesting that you've built your own shoes. It's a process, to be sure, if you took it any seriously. Specialized tools and a hell of a lot of work.
I didn't say it was a bad thing. Why do you think cell phones cost so little now? Just cell phone service for 2 hours of voice per week would cost $550/month right now if it had only followed inflation since 1984 (the first commercially-available cell phones cost $4,000--over $9,000 in today's dollars--and yes, that's what the rates were like).
You have to remember: businesses don't pay wages. Businesses get revenue from product sales. In the end, what isn't taken by profit or taxes somewhere along the line is divided up among employees as wages. If you have an employee making $20/hr and producing 100 things per hour, 20 cents of that thing's price goes to paying this employee's wages; if we give him a way to produce 1,000 things per hour, then 2 cents of its price goes to his wages. That "way" might involve a machine which comes with a cost of, say, 7 cents per thing produced, so the cost falls from 20 cents to 9 cents.
That's why food costs the average middle-class family 11% of their income today, versus 30% in 1950 and 43% in 1900: fewer farm workers, more chemical and engineering workers, and the total comes up to be a smaller proportion of our population in total per yield of food produced. Fewer people are being paid--or, to be specific, fewer wage-hours are being paid--per tonne of food. We transferred that to manufacture first; then we outsourced manufacture for cheaper, and transferred the difference to shit like IT work and fast food, because we like things like Spotify and none of us wants to bag our own groceries.
The world changes. A lot of what you use today is predicated on that change; as well, our ability to provide welfare relies on the easier access to food by the poor (it's cheaper, so it doesn't cost us much to take care of them; plus they're generally more-stable, so less-frequently need aid). We get shifted to unemployment, muddle around a bit, and then new jobs become available because the difference in buying power gets spent on things and, because buying power eventually comes down to wage-labor involvement in making things, we can't actually produce those things without more people (although those people are now needed just to run the machines, hence why we need so few and things are so cheap!).
In the future, we'll all drive Teslas, because it'll take 1/10 as many people to actually produce a Tesla. With 100 times as many being sold, that means there will be 10 times as many jobs involved in making Teslas--most of which will be mind-numbing, and up the line toward mining and milling and shipping the source products that go into Teslas.
It has to be wrong to be ignorant; and it has to be at least almost-true to be insulting.
Someone on Slashdot started talking about IT degrees when I mentioned self-studying Computer Science. If you've ever looked at the two programs, you'd facepalm at warp speed: IT degrees include "general IT", network administration, and IT security; Computer Science is essentially a mathematics discipline based on exploring what can be computed (and how). They're not really equivalent in any sense.
You talk a lot about Docker and, I assume, have a lot of general Unix and perhaps Windows domain administration knowledge. That's good for an IT person. Other IT jobs include racking servers, running cables, and figuring out what size switch to buy. The thing is I learned Docker, too; I made use of it after reading TWO WEB PAGES, and spent several months tweaking and refining my approach. Many of the tools are immature, although that's mostly because clustering is hard--some really smart Computer Science people did a lot of work most of us don't understand, and we've worked out how to use Pacemaker and Corosync to "do the right thing" for us, even if configuration is beastly.
That's the point: it's all surface stuff. I picked up most of my IT administration skills by looking and thinking. Most IT people around me can both give me new information *and* learn from me, because the field changes a lot and I go pretty deep into the one or two things that matter to the tasks I'm trying to accomplish. I'm something of a Systems Engineer more than just an administrator, but not really qualified in the way a dedicated SE is.
All the stuff IT people do is learned by reading a book and working with an IT team for a few weeks or months, depending on how specialized.
IT isn't the domain of scientists, engineers, and frontier researchers; it's the domain of grunt work supporting scientists, engineers, and frontier researchers.
People come to me with requirements about running a software environment or supplying a level of service, and I use some off-the-shelf tools to hand them a solution in about ten minutes; then the programmers write an enormous accounting system using the databases and application servers I provided them on which to run said software. I am not a software engineer.
Network engineers use first principles to design networks, selecting routing protocols and VPN solutions like MPLS or IPSec; very-smart-sciencey-people design those routing protocols, design encryption algorithms, and even design the hardware. I don't understand the graph theory or the electrical engineering involved in making those things.
You want to know why we have so many security problems? IT Security people are operating on a checklist. They know what firewalls do, what encryption is for, and some things about access control. In the end, they're working from first principles: you need anti-virus and don't share passwords. IT Security is so bad because IT Security isn't a first-principle job; we *should* be hiring engineers. I have a Project Management certification, and part of that is an understanding of risk (something I understand *well* beyond PMI's domain); most IT Security people don't understand risk, so they don't project threat models and work out strategies to protect their organizations. They're actually supposed to.
Aside from IT Security being full of people who just plain don't know how to do their jobs, the IT field is essentially a field of mechanics and plumbers. Large IT departments are made primarily of people who can be EASILY REPLACED WITH HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES, if they need to graduate high school at all. Even at places like Amazon, you have high-level engineers designing their services; programmers writing the software to connect together other software supplying that service; and a sea of cable monkeys whose job is to rack servers, run network cabling, and install softwar
IT is the burger-flipping job of the future. It's the people who rack switches, wire up networks, and generally do grunt work. High school students are IT worker stock.
This is Slashdot, where we confuse Computer Science--the elites, the engineers, the mathemeticians, the people who can't do their job because they don't know linear algebra--with IT, simply because most burger-flipping server jockeys have figured out how to use awk and perl, kind of, and think that makes them the same thing as a software engineer.
That's called risk. Risk is manageable by historical information. For example: we have modern programming practices and design patterns, which we know reduces the likelihood of bugs in the first place, and improves maintainability of large and complex code bases. A legacy code base using old design and being updated to fit new technology (new codecs, transports, hardware, APIs, and so forth) will insert small amounts of code into a large basis of high-risk-architecture code, causing risk; a refactor or rewrite into a new architecture will use all lessons learned about the specific threats in this type of software, as well as all lessons learned about the new type of architecture, making bugs less-frequent, less-severe, and easier to fix.
It's easy to determine that such a rewrite is 60%, 80%, 95% likely to be better, or so forth, given enough data about the solution. Risk management is part of writing software, and techniques which allow safe error conditions reduce those risks even when programmer error is to blame. If your software fails to validate user input properly and leads to a condition in which an exception is thrown, it doesn't go any further, and thus doesn't encounter code which could respond by opening up larger bugs and possible security risks, thus reducing the surface affected and thus the likelihood of a security vulnerability.
By the same token, there is a small frequency of not being better, or being worse. That's muddy, too: if you generate 11 vulnerabilities instead of 86, those 11 could be novel--you actually saved yourself from 85 vulnerabilities, had 1 that would have occurred either way, and had 10 more that happened because your new rewrite was imperfect. By the numbers, it's better in total. A separate risk in simply writing software that's ultimately crap exists, and is much less likely.
If the risks in the new set of problems are more-manageable, that's a good strategy. Address space randomization reduces the size of contiguous unallocated memory regions at application load time; applications rarely try to allocate one gigantic contiguous block the size of a significant fraction of the address space, so it's harmless except in 32-bit systems where Linus's e-mail client mmap()s a 2.6GB file directly into what is, in the best case, a 2.8GB VMA region (all of VMA is about a 3GB spread, and you're mapping down from the bottom of the stack), which is going to fail when Linus gets a few thousand more e-mails. New problem, yes; less of a problem than easy code injection.
This is an architectural change, not a patch for a security vulnerability. It doesn't remove a vulnerability; it changes the nature of a type of theoretical vulnerabilities.
Your argument is akin to claiming a company's new product has major new safety features, and thus that they are compelled to perform a safety recall on unsafe defects in prior products which don't have said features. Suddenly all cars made before a certain year must be recalled because they don't have airbags or antilock brakes and are thus defective.
It depends on what you mean by "estimated." Insurers estimate probability by statistical analysis, meaning they have large populations and predictable probability of loss. Probability is given by mean, deviation, and confidence interval; analysts use tools such as Monte Carlo Simulation to produce concrete outcomes which say "X outcome is exactly n% likely", which gives you a graph (a Monte Carlo Histogram). The outcome probability will show you that it's e.g. 90% likely you'll pay less than $1000, and 98% likely you'll pay less than $1,150, and 70% likely you'll pay less than $600, and so forth.
You pick how much risk you can tolerate (2%, 10%, etc.) and assume that a worse event is failure. If you have contingencies for such failures, you can handle that. Ongoing, this is a major concern; for one-time events, it tells you if you can do what you want to do or if you need to find a way to reduce risks.
If you're self-insuring, the funds you set aside can sit in a 1% market fund and collect interest, or in a longer-term fund with bigger payouts. In general, you'll have liquid capital and such investments; if you have a risk event and tap your liquid capital, then you stop putting profits into your investment accounts and top your liquid capital back up. You might need to take a short-term loan and wait 6 months so you can pull money out of your investments--lose an extra 0.5%, pay it back with money that's grown by 11% over the past several years.
Actually, it's simpler than that. If you have one, insure; rare failures mean insurance is cheap, and frequent failures mean you're taking a bad gamble trying to dodge that hefty premium. If you have one thousand, self-insure; you're approaching risk parity with general population, and insurance would have a lesser stabilizing effect.
Self-insurance doesn't really just save you money. In theory, it's marginally-cheaper than buying insurance; and in practice, many insurance companies charge below-cost premiums to buy an opportunity (you're trying to transfer a threat). Progressive Insurance Co., for example, charges $0.96 in premiums for every $1 paid out; they have an income of $1.02 for every $1 paid out because they buy stable investments and collect interest.
Even without that, you have the risk of coming in a standard deviation lower (opportunity: your failure rate is slightly-lower than average and saves you money) or higher (threat: your failures are frequent, and cost you money). When you have few repeatable risk events (e.g. one car), the difference is 100% of cost, often lopsided (e.g. the cost of insurance is 1% of cost). When you have many repeatable risk events (e.g. a fleet of cars), the difference is in a much narrower range, centered more closely around the cost of insurance (e.g. you can expect to pay 0.98%-1.02% versus insurance). Self-insurance is riskier than insurance, and avoids the cost of logistics to manage insurance, while providing opportunities (e.g. you can skip warranty service for a computer fleet and instead self-insure, and self-build, possibly saving costs if your IT helpdesk is frequently underutilized and has time to replace hard drives or upgrade components).
Is this a voodoo divining rod, or an actually-useful tool? It's hard to tell in the field, with so much electronic stuff everywhere. The smell of electronics would be on everything, and the dog wouldn't be able to sniff out anything useful. There's also a ton of stuff everywhere, so you'd easily find stuff without the dog. Then there's the false-positive rate: if the dog looks somewhere but finds nothing useful, that's probably a thing that's going to happen anyway; if the dog keeps looking random places, because of earlier point, he's going to find a lot of random stuff.
If they have a better, patented product, they have 14 years to get people to buy their 5-year phone. With other phones lasting 2-3 years, that means possibly tripling or quadrupling their market (or more, if their market is small and they become a major player). More profits.
Any technology only allows higher capacity with more physical space and mass. You might be able to get a bigger charge on a lithium than a nimh, but if you want to put more mAh in your Li+ you need to add more Li+.
Actually, Microsoft gets Windows 10's newer updates out to tens of thousands of beta testers months in advance. They work though the entire development process, with some only receiving updates a month before they go into production, others receiving new features much earlier. Shit happens when you take something that works for 80,000 users and put it on 80,000,000 users's hardware and unique software configurations.
That "other motivation" would be recent public outcry about a sense of fairness. Legality is one thing; and the other is timeliness: this is happening *now* because the EU cares *now*, and the EU cares now because of a global political dialogue about economics that keeps going from "look how many poor people" to "OMG THE 1% AND BUSINESSES!"
This kind of thing is interesting to me because it doesn't actually help anything, or at least it doesn't in my part of the world (the United States). Over here, business income (as profits) is legitimately like 10% of the total taxable income; and solutions to our social-economic problems don't demand taxing the rich or businesses more than current.
I've been proposing expanding the Social Security system from a retirement and disability benefit to a Universal Social Security as a form of Universal Basic Income. This is funded by a flat income tax (separate from the progressive income tax which provides the general fund), and comes out to a trillion dollars cheaper than modern welfare by way of assuming money moved to low-income households is a tax--that is to say: I targeted a monetary benefit for the bottom 30%-ish of households, and computed the amount of money that would flow toward them as the cost.
It's kind of hand-waving because it's comparing the current system to a new system, and the new system can be said to be both more-expensive (because some money is still moving from the top to the middle-class) and less-expensive (because *all* of that money goes back into the hands of consumers). Essentially, I created a system that's not a direct analogue to our current system, and causes an increase of spendable income at every income level; the "reduced tax burden" is $1 trillion, and the "money going to households above and beyond their actual income" is the rest. Trying to explain that in terms of costs is... a matter of presentation; the only correct comparison is a full description of each system, not a measure of how much each costs.
Anyway, the long and short of it is Apple's yearly profits (about $10 billion) amount to $58.48 per worker per YEAR, or $82.62 per household per year. The total judgment here is less than $10/month per household, in one big shot. Apple's total holdings, if dumped onto America all at once, leaving them bankrupt, could give everyone about $1,400. One time. Not useful, is it?
Taking 100% of all business profits would destabilize businesses (they'd fail all risk events--loss and opportunity, i.e. no cash on hand with which to cover a bad year, nor to grow) and provide about 10% of all income to be spent somehow. In contrast, my Universal Social Security system reduces business taxes slightly (that was unintentional; I just don't mess with it), reduces middle- and lower-class taxes dramatically, reduces payroll taxes, and puts a large amount of money into the hands of low- and no-income individuals and households. The funding source there is 17%, rather than 10%, of all income; and the practical displacement is around 7%. That puts, currently, $7,000 into the hands of the poorest of poor, per adult; for a 2-adult household it's like $14,000.
I get pushback on this type of plan for reasons including, but not limited to, that I don't tax the super-rich above 40%, that I don't increase business taxes, and that I don't increase wages (as if increasing wages is a thing; but that's a whole different economics argument). That's political: those are complaints about fairness and sentiment, rather than effectiveness. That's a particular hot topic now, which is why 15 years of Apple and Microsoft and Google reign went unchecked until, suddenly, "OMG TAXES, PAY YOUR FAIR SHARE!" If people hadn't turned "pay their fair share" and "the 1%" into a media sensation, this EU court case wouldn't exist; that's getting close to the definition of a kangaroo court, excepting that this case ostensibly has some actual validity.
The biggest and best arguments against GMO crops and other genetic engineering is that we just don't know what the long-term results will be.
That's a dogmatic argument: it's made by people who don't understand. I could give a long rebuttal about how GMO is more-predictable than all other methods in use, but the Soylent people have done it right, so I'll just put that here.
We could potentially significantly improve the lives of future generations, but at the cost of treating some number of our current generations' babies essentially the same way we treat lab mice. And that's just not a trade-off we're willing to make in our current society.
I tend to call out ethics as bullshit in a world where we define morals, ethics, and values separately. The word "ethics" comes from the greek word "Ethos", which means "Habit"; and I present, on occasion, the argument that ethics gives you a habit in the form of a bureaucratic definition of right and wrong. That is to say: whatever the situation, whatever the nuance, an ethical rule tells you a certain action is necessary or forbidden regardless of whether that action is helpful or harmful, even if you know with 100% certainty that the ethical thing to do is the wrong thing to do. People often reason this away by claiming that humans will recognize and adjust to the situation; and bureaucracies look upon those humans doing such reasoning and slap them with sanctions, license revocations, and incarceration because ethics systems are there to tell you that we've all figured out what's right in a world where people disagree over that.
From that viewpoint, why not just experiment on poor people?
Some countries have long-standing, currently-unresolvable economic problems such as poor access to nutritious food. The genetic modification I described eliminates a consequence of that situation: it ensures an absolute abolition of vitamin C deficiency. That particular edit is safe, in that it modifies a gene which is currently broken, and would mix with general population by giving you a random chance of having that trait; whereas editing out the atherosclerosis thing would be a complex genetic task involving multiple genes, thus higher-risk when bred back into population. Fortunately, this safe edit is also the one most relevant to these poor countries.
You have a choice, then. You can avoid such experimentation on people who are prone to malnutrition and its deleterious effects on health by the millions; or you can give them a chance to lead the world into a better life, at the cost of some risk for a few people who don't get to volunteer because they're reworked from embryo. One choice *will* leave millions suffering and hundreds of thousands dying of disease; the other will probably not hurt anyone, but *could* hurt dozens.
Machiavelli had an incomplete philosophy. The ends justify the means if and only if all other means of lower moral cost end in increased suffering beyond those you save. When the bodies pile up taller than your moral high ground, you fucked up.
We have never seen this hyperinflation effect from low unemployment
When have you seen low unemployment? Have you ever seen 1% unemployment or a labor shortage in full?
This is probably the worst misattribution I've ever heard for the real estate crisis of 2007-2008. There wasn't a recession because employment was a little high.
Your response here is like responding to the claim that cyanide will kill you as quickly as a stopped heart by pointing out that people who die from heart attacks aren't poisoned by cyanide.
I said you get a minor recession, like in 2008. There would be a recession. It would look like the one in 2008. It would have a different cause. What the hell is wrong with you?
Why the people who work, of course. In a sane world, there would be more employment followed by immigration, global trade, and automation to leverage the people who are already working.
Immigration is a form of localized population expansion. This comes with more production, which brings more wealth, and thus more buying power, thus more demand, thus more need for employment.
Automation increases the amount of production per person, increasing buying power. It also allows for more scaling--it knocks down scarcity.
To make this clear: the technology of 1920 was capable of sustaining about 3 billion people on all of the planet; a global population of 3.5 billion would have faced mass starvation and extreme poverty, as a greater proportion would have needed to work to make food, many of the things we were producing would have to not be produced because those workers would be busy making food, and we would still not have enough food. We made new technology, and then were able to increase population and have the same small proportion of that new population supply food for that growth.
Automation does the same: it increases the output of a single person's work, allowing for further population expansion. This cuts back on the cost of things and allows people to buy more, which in turn requires the production of more, thus employment grows with population. It gives us the ability to employ more labor (in the long run), rather than cutting back labor demand as you suggest.
While there has been some cases of rapid economic growth triggering inflation (eg, 19th Century mining towns in the US West), it's something that has rapidly corrected itself, sometimes by recession.
Which you earlier said doesn't happen.
I don't consider this even within an order of magnitude of your concern.
It's not. Mining town growth provided immediate productive output. It cut the cost of energy, transferred jobs to coal workers, and enabled people in general to live at an elevated standard-of-living that built out with the growth of the mining industry. My Universal Social Security plan is like taking 30-40 years of such economic growth and dumping it onto the country all at once.
Again: Imagine if $1,000,000,000,000 per year were dumped into the economy. Salaries don't go up, so the cost of goods isn't increased. Your employer still pays $50,000 to have you at your desk, but somehow you take home $6,000 more throughout the year, and NOBODY ELSE IS $6,000 POORER to get that money into your hands. Inflation doesn't make this go away: it's divided up as a fixed, scalar proportion of the money supply (17% of all income), and so e.g. 10% inflation means $1,100,000,000,000 more money is landing in people's paychecks, plus the 10% increase in their income they're already getting.
Does that sound like anything that's ever happened in history to you? The total mobilized spending money is about $1.8 trillion, if you count money that's actually displaced (i.e. that this policy moves out of one person's hands and into the hands of another, notably giving poor people money to spend). That's 11.6% of all income ab
It's funny, heart disease is trivial. Human metabolism produces Vitamin C through a four-step process, and a misconfigured gene causes the fourth step to fail. Because of this, food scarcity several tens of thousands of years ago caused death by leaking arteries due to a lack of Vitamin C intake; a mutation which causes the deposit of cholesterol on the arterial walls enabled survival by patching the holes in rotting arteries. We can fix this permanently using modern gene therapy to edit each embryo so as to correct the single Vitamin C gene, and then following up three generations later with an edit to remove cholesterol build-up entirely.
The Vitamin C edit is relatively-cheap now (gene therapy on embryos is new in the market, and not dirt-cheap), and in less than ten years will be feasible as an international humanitarian program offered to any who want to ensure a healthy, permanent Vitamin C supplementation in their children and grandchildren. By the time it's reasonable to remove heart disease, gene therapy technology will have developed such that the edit is trivial. That means this is the last century in which anyone needs to be born with the threat of heart disease.
Of course, that kind of tinkering with human DNA is unethical. It would be wrong to minimize suffering and death.
So our police force has a serious problem with being an enforcement division rather than a peace-keeping division, when it's supposed to be a peace-keeping division. Police have stopped using discretion and working to maintain peace and order, and have become authoritarian in nature; this has changed them from a pillar of stability in the community to a perceived threat, and leads to an increase in violent reaction to police presence, and a general increase in crime due to a perception that the police force and thus the law in general is an antagonizing agent and thus the enemy.
Yours and many others's response is, apparently, "Well we need police, so nothing is wrong."
This stance is similar to telling people water is necessary for life when they complain somebody took a shit in their drinking supply.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a perception that black people have no chance to reach the elite because nobody wants to hire an unevolved ape to handle important, respectable business decisions.
The long and short of it is opportunity. You have the opportunity for promotion, and it instead goes to someone else based on your manager's emotional responses to the person. Those of us with developed technical sense about business understand this is mediated by things like rapport: it pays to be social with people who are promoting you, because they get that feeling of comfort and confidence looking at your name, contrasted to a feeling of uncertainty looking at someone else's (better!) performance record.
Nobody likes hoodrats and idiot women. These people can't be trusted with power. You cringe when you think about putting them in charge of anything, despite their historical high performance. You *quickly* skip over their name and promote the next guy, because he's a man, and white, and thus has his shit together and is more-trustworthy.
People perceive this problem, and they don't understand it. They think it's solved by forcing people to put these people into power. In part, a more normalized impression of powerful people--a society in which you can readily identify blacks and women and whatever else who have become well-known for their success--reduces the automatic discriminatory reaction. In another part, *forcing* the issue trains people to be comfortable around white men, and fearful and distrusting of anyone who might claim discrimination--blacks, women, gays, the lot.
Without understanding this, people who perceive themselves as grouped for discrimination will cry about fairness and look for someone to protect them. 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.
Currently, the topic has become so popular it seeps into everything. People perceive a new concept in everything--especially a feared concept, or any highly-emotional concept. This is what witch hunts are.
I subscribe to the ideal that fairness isn't a thing. Anything you define as fair is patently discriminatory against someone else through no fault of their own, and is thus unfair. There are problems, and solutions to problems; and we can address that while understanding that fairness isn't a thing. The concept of fairness is what drives things like people trying to drag more women into programming, imagining that women are brilliant and driven programmers cowering at the edge of the software development world in fear of being made fun of for being programmers. Nobody imagines that maybe more men like that particular task than women, hence why you get 10% female programmers showing up instead of 50%. Then they start compensating for everything by putting the few women in charge of things to balance it all out.
If your thought process starts with, "Hey, we should get a {woman,black,gay} to do this, because they've been underrepresented lately," something is wrong. First off, you don't seem to have a sense that some group is being harassed or otherwise discriminated against; you've just decided X event hasn't happened frequently, so there must be a social problem here. Second, if you *do* see day-to-day harassment creating an unfair disadvantage for a group, YOU HAVEN'T DONE ANYTHING ABOUT IT, and don't seem to care. You're either causing a problem or ignoring it, and making a token gesture at the same time to cover your ego.
That's how fairness-driven social activism works. Ignore problems, complain about things.
The whole thing is essentially political, and not very useful. There's something to be said economically here; and everyone is more-interested in a moral-political ideal, in truth.
Let's first look at the economics. Ireland's unemployment rate is about 9%, and this judgement is equivalent to around $850 billion per year--these are taxes back to 1991. Everyone is salivating over the big, one-time, $21 billion number; the truth is, long-term, this is $15/month for every Irish citizen, or like $30 per household. Not going to pay for your college. If we assume only $10/hr wage jobs, continuous additional tax revenue as such will drop Irish unemployment by 0.9%, which is salient.
What about the politics, the behavior, the social issue?
People are mad about Apple tax sheltering. In the U.S., Apple would pay 40% corporate taxes; in Ireland, the corporate tax rate was 12.5% until the end of 2015, and is now 6.5%. This judgement only pulls more money from a global economy--from Apple U.S., Asia, and Europe--into Ireland, rather than changing the behavior of Apple. To be clear: Apple's behavior of redirecting its income to Ireland is still the most-advantageous, and now Ireland is getting a bigger cut in this partnership.
All of the above sets the reader up for an argument I can quickly and effectively demolish.
Assuming you believe high corporate taxes are moral, Apple *should* move its tax reporting to the U.S.; as I've demonstrated above, this Ireland judgment is an example of a corrupt state making a profit from the same amoral corporate tax sheltering the European judgment purports to combat, if you were to argue that such sheltering is amoral.
There's where the whole thing falls down.
Corporate income is, in truth, about 10% of American income. Corporations draw revenue, which is then distributed as wages (including buying from other corporations, which then behave the same way, up to the origin supplier) or retained as corporate profits. That means actual income is reflected as profit (corporate income) plus wages (individual income). In total, corporate profits are only a small portion of total income.
Capturing that income in taxes doesn't provide a great deal of benefit. It's significant, but it's not important--in the same way $100 is significant but not important when you have $2,000 of discretionary spending per month. Importantly, correcting whatever tax system defects exist won't solve any socio-economic problems such as welfare system defects, unemployment, homelessness, or hunger in America. It won't have a stabilizing effect on our economy. It won't set us up for long-term prosperity.
That means you have two possible arguments: this EU ruling is simple corruption on the part of the EU, trying to grab for money that isn't theirs and belongs to America; or this EU ruling is useless and is chasing a perceived problem that's not impacting us in any meaningful way.
I often argue about Universal Basic Incomes (UBI), having proposed a Universal Social Security (USS) in the United States. In terms of money displaced from one taxpayer's hands into another's (or to the government to be spent), a USS is one trillion dollars cheaper than our modern Welfare system. I've defined that plan including an analysis of risks, transitional considerations, and long-term finances, rather than simple idealism.
There are a few important points here.
Firstly, the USS as defined has domain over more than $1.7 trillion. Every adult is paid an equal income each month out of that $1.7 trillion, meaning the taxes paid to support it are *partially* returned. The lowest income earners get more than they pay in; and compared to current taxes, almost all taxpayers end up with more after-tax money than they do now. The highest income earners pay *slightly* more in my taxes; that can be eliminated (even *their* taxes can be low
I meant to indicate that most people don't understand the biological support mechanism of the foot, and how that interacts with shoes. The arch of the foot and the ankle work together to provide shock-absorption, protecting the knee and hips; a shoe provides arch support, and how and to what degree it supplies this support affects the health of these anatomical components. So does the shoe's profile (raised heel?). The sole is made of complex rubber compounds which affect traction (e.g. some shoes can walk on ice, but not so good on wet wood), and has a tread which provides terrain traction (mud, steel, asphalt; hard, soft, firm, loose, or uneven ground). The entire shoe itself is built of multiple components and layers, and its construction determines how sturdy and effective it is as a shoe in general.
Shoes involve fairly complex engineering. Identifying what kind of shoe you need beyond what the label on the box says (WHICH hiking boot is best, given the trails and conditions in which you hike?) is difficult without knowing quite a lot about shoes. I'm rather certain most shoe-wearers don't know a god damned thing about how a shoe works.
Interesting that you've built your own shoes. It's a process, to be sure, if you took it any seriously. Specialized tools and a hell of a lot of work.
I didn't say it was a bad thing. Why do you think cell phones cost so little now? Just cell phone service for 2 hours of voice per week would cost $550/month right now if it had only followed inflation since 1984 (the first commercially-available cell phones cost $4,000--over $9,000 in today's dollars--and yes, that's what the rates were like).
You have to remember: businesses don't pay wages. Businesses get revenue from product sales. In the end, what isn't taken by profit or taxes somewhere along the line is divided up among employees as wages. If you have an employee making $20/hr and producing 100 things per hour, 20 cents of that thing's price goes to paying this employee's wages; if we give him a way to produce 1,000 things per hour, then 2 cents of its price goes to his wages. That "way" might involve a machine which comes with a cost of, say, 7 cents per thing produced, so the cost falls from 20 cents to 9 cents.
That's why food costs the average middle-class family 11% of their income today, versus 30% in 1950 and 43% in 1900: fewer farm workers, more chemical and engineering workers, and the total comes up to be a smaller proportion of our population in total per yield of food produced. Fewer people are being paid--or, to be specific, fewer wage-hours are being paid--per tonne of food. We transferred that to manufacture first; then we outsourced manufacture for cheaper, and transferred the difference to shit like IT work and fast food, because we like things like Spotify and none of us wants to bag our own groceries.
The world changes. A lot of what you use today is predicated on that change; as well, our ability to provide welfare relies on the easier access to food by the poor (it's cheaper, so it doesn't cost us much to take care of them; plus they're generally more-stable, so less-frequently need aid). We get shifted to unemployment, muddle around a bit, and then new jobs become available because the difference in buying power gets spent on things and, because buying power eventually comes down to wage-labor involvement in making things, we can't actually produce those things without more people (although those people are now needed just to run the machines, hence why we need so few and things are so cheap!).
In the future, we'll all drive Teslas, because it'll take 1/10 as many people to actually produce a Tesla. With 100 times as many being sold, that means there will be 10 times as many jobs involved in making Teslas--most of which will be mind-numbing, and up the line toward mining and milling and shipping the source products that go into Teslas.
It has to be wrong to be ignorant; and it has to be at least almost-true to be insulting.
Someone on Slashdot started talking about IT degrees when I mentioned self-studying Computer Science. If you've ever looked at the two programs, you'd facepalm at warp speed: IT degrees include "general IT", network administration, and IT security; Computer Science is essentially a mathematics discipline based on exploring what can be computed (and how). They're not really equivalent in any sense.
You talk a lot about Docker and, I assume, have a lot of general Unix and perhaps Windows domain administration knowledge. That's good for an IT person. Other IT jobs include racking servers, running cables, and figuring out what size switch to buy. The thing is I learned Docker, too; I made use of it after reading TWO WEB PAGES, and spent several months tweaking and refining my approach. Many of the tools are immature, although that's mostly because clustering is hard--some really smart Computer Science people did a lot of work most of us don't understand, and we've worked out how to use Pacemaker and Corosync to "do the right thing" for us, even if configuration is beastly.
That's the point: it's all surface stuff. I picked up most of my IT administration skills by looking and thinking. Most IT people around me can both give me new information *and* learn from me, because the field changes a lot and I go pretty deep into the one or two things that matter to the tasks I'm trying to accomplish. I'm something of a Systems Engineer more than just an administrator, but not really qualified in the way a dedicated SE is.
All the stuff IT people do is learned by reading a book and working with an IT team for a few weeks or months, depending on how specialized.
IT isn't the domain of scientists, engineers, and frontier researchers; it's the domain of grunt work supporting scientists, engineers, and frontier researchers.
People come to me with requirements about running a software environment or supplying a level of service, and I use some off-the-shelf tools to hand them a solution in about ten minutes; then the programmers write an enormous accounting system using the databases and application servers I provided them on which to run said software. I am not a software engineer.
Network engineers use first principles to design networks, selecting routing protocols and VPN solutions like MPLS or IPSec; very-smart-sciencey-people design those routing protocols, design encryption algorithms, and even design the hardware. I don't understand the graph theory or the electrical engineering involved in making those things.
You want to know why we have so many security problems? IT Security people are operating on a checklist. They know what firewalls do, what encryption is for, and some things about access control. In the end, they're working from first principles: you need anti-virus and don't share passwords. IT Security is so bad because IT Security isn't a first-principle job; we *should* be hiring engineers. I have a Project Management certification, and part of that is an understanding of risk (something I understand *well* beyond PMI's domain); most IT Security people don't understand risk, so they don't project threat models and work out strategies to protect their organizations. They're actually supposed to.
Aside from IT Security being full of people who just plain don't know how to do their jobs, the IT field is essentially a field of mechanics and plumbers. Large IT departments are made primarily of people who can be EASILY REPLACED WITH HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES, if they need to graduate high school at all. Even at places like Amazon, you have high-level engineers designing their services; programmers writing the software to connect together other software supplying that service; and a sea of cable monkeys whose job is to rack servers, run network cabling, and install softwar
Explain to me how a shoe functions.
IT is the burger-flipping job of the future. It's the people who rack switches, wire up networks, and generally do grunt work. High school students are IT worker stock.
This is Slashdot, where we confuse Computer Science--the elites, the engineers, the mathemeticians, the people who can't do their job because they don't know linear algebra--with IT, simply because most burger-flipping server jockeys have figured out how to use awk and perl, kind of, and think that makes them the same thing as a software engineer.
You should have a look at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Another loony group that sounds legit.
That's called risk. Risk is manageable by historical information. For example: we have modern programming practices and design patterns, which we know reduces the likelihood of bugs in the first place, and improves maintainability of large and complex code bases. A legacy code base using old design and being updated to fit new technology (new codecs, transports, hardware, APIs, and so forth) will insert small amounts of code into a large basis of high-risk-architecture code, causing risk; a refactor or rewrite into a new architecture will use all lessons learned about the specific threats in this type of software, as well as all lessons learned about the new type of architecture, making bugs less-frequent, less-severe, and easier to fix.
It's easy to determine that such a rewrite is 60%, 80%, 95% likely to be better, or so forth, given enough data about the solution. Risk management is part of writing software, and techniques which allow safe error conditions reduce those risks even when programmer error is to blame. If your software fails to validate user input properly and leads to a condition in which an exception is thrown, it doesn't go any further, and thus doesn't encounter code which could respond by opening up larger bugs and possible security risks, thus reducing the surface affected and thus the likelihood of a security vulnerability.
By the same token, there is a small frequency of not being better, or being worse. That's muddy, too: if you generate 11 vulnerabilities instead of 86, those 11 could be novel--you actually saved yourself from 85 vulnerabilities, had 1 that would have occurred either way, and had 10 more that happened because your new rewrite was imperfect. By the numbers, it's better in total. A separate risk in simply writing software that's ultimately crap exists, and is much less likely.
If the risks in the new set of problems are more-manageable, that's a good strategy. Address space randomization reduces the size of contiguous unallocated memory regions at application load time; applications rarely try to allocate one gigantic contiguous block the size of a significant fraction of the address space, so it's harmless except in 32-bit systems where Linus's e-mail client mmap()s a 2.6GB file directly into what is, in the best case, a 2.8GB VMA region (all of VMA is about a 3GB spread, and you're mapping down from the bottom of the stack), which is going to fail when Linus gets a few thousand more e-mails. New problem, yes; less of a problem than easy code injection.
This is an architectural change, not a patch for a security vulnerability. It doesn't remove a vulnerability; it changes the nature of a type of theoretical vulnerabilities.
Your argument is akin to claiming a company's new product has major new safety features, and thus that they are compelled to perform a safety recall on unsafe defects in prior products which don't have said features. Suddenly all cars made before a certain year must be recalled because they don't have airbags or antilock brakes and are thus defective.
It depends on what you mean by "estimated." Insurers estimate probability by statistical analysis, meaning they have large populations and predictable probability of loss. Probability is given by mean, deviation, and confidence interval; analysts use tools such as Monte Carlo Simulation to produce concrete outcomes which say "X outcome is exactly n% likely", which gives you a graph (a Monte Carlo Histogram). The outcome probability will show you that it's e.g. 90% likely you'll pay less than $1000, and 98% likely you'll pay less than $1,150, and 70% likely you'll pay less than $600, and so forth.
You pick how much risk you can tolerate (2%, 10%, etc.) and assume that a worse event is failure. If you have contingencies for such failures, you can handle that. Ongoing, this is a major concern; for one-time events, it tells you if you can do what you want to do or if you need to find a way to reduce risks.
If you're self-insuring, the funds you set aside can sit in a 1% market fund and collect interest, or in a longer-term fund with bigger payouts. In general, you'll have liquid capital and such investments; if you have a risk event and tap your liquid capital, then you stop putting profits into your investment accounts and top your liquid capital back up. You might need to take a short-term loan and wait 6 months so you can pull money out of your investments--lose an extra 0.5%, pay it back with money that's grown by 11% over the past several years.
Actually, it's simpler than that. If you have one, insure; rare failures mean insurance is cheap, and frequent failures mean you're taking a bad gamble trying to dodge that hefty premium. If you have one thousand, self-insure; you're approaching risk parity with general population, and insurance would have a lesser stabilizing effect.
Self-insurance doesn't really just save you money. In theory, it's marginally-cheaper than buying insurance; and in practice, many insurance companies charge below-cost premiums to buy an opportunity (you're trying to transfer a threat). Progressive Insurance Co., for example, charges $0.96 in premiums for every $1 paid out; they have an income of $1.02 for every $1 paid out because they buy stable investments and collect interest.
Even without that, you have the risk of coming in a standard deviation lower (opportunity: your failure rate is slightly-lower than average and saves you money) or higher (threat: your failures are frequent, and cost you money). When you have few repeatable risk events (e.g. one car), the difference is 100% of cost, often lopsided (e.g. the cost of insurance is 1% of cost). When you have many repeatable risk events (e.g. a fleet of cars), the difference is in a much narrower range, centered more closely around the cost of insurance (e.g. you can expect to pay 0.98%-1.02% versus insurance). Self-insurance is riskier than insurance, and avoids the cost of logistics to manage insurance, while providing opportunities (e.g. you can skip warranty service for a computer fleet and instead self-insure, and self-build, possibly saving costs if your IT helpdesk is frequently underutilized and has time to replace hard drives or upgrade components).
Is this a voodoo divining rod, or an actually-useful tool? It's hard to tell in the field, with so much electronic stuff everywhere. The smell of electronics would be on everything, and the dog wouldn't be able to sniff out anything useful. There's also a ton of stuff everywhere, so you'd easily find stuff without the dog. Then there's the false-positive rate: if the dog looks somewhere but finds nothing useful, that's probably a thing that's going to happen anyway; if the dog keeps looking random places, because of earlier point, he's going to find a lot of random stuff.
We know drug-sniffing dogs are bullshit.
If they have a better, patented product, they have 14 years to get people to buy their 5-year phone. With other phones lasting 2-3 years, that means possibly tripling or quadrupling their market (or more, if their market is small and they become a major player). More profits.
Any technology only allows higher capacity with more physical space and mass. You might be able to get a bigger charge on a lithium than a nimh, but if you want to put more mAh in your Li+ you need to add more Li+.
Actually, Microsoft gets Windows 10's newer updates out to tens of thousands of beta testers months in advance. They work though the entire development process, with some only receiving updates a month before they go into production, others receiving new features much earlier. Shit happens when you take something that works for 80,000 users and put it on 80,000,000 users's hardware and unique software configurations.
That "other motivation" would be recent public outcry about a sense of fairness. Legality is one thing; and the other is timeliness: this is happening *now* because the EU cares *now*, and the EU cares now because of a global political dialogue about economics that keeps going from "look how many poor people" to "OMG THE 1% AND BUSINESSES!"
This kind of thing is interesting to me because it doesn't actually help anything, or at least it doesn't in my part of the world (the United States). Over here, business income (as profits) is legitimately like 10% of the total taxable income; and solutions to our social-economic problems don't demand taxing the rich or businesses more than current.
I've been proposing expanding the Social Security system from a retirement and disability benefit to a Universal Social Security as a form of Universal Basic Income. This is funded by a flat income tax (separate from the progressive income tax which provides the general fund), and comes out to a trillion dollars cheaper than modern welfare by way of assuming money moved to low-income households is a tax--that is to say: I targeted a monetary benefit for the bottom 30%-ish of households, and computed the amount of money that would flow toward them as the cost.
It's kind of hand-waving because it's comparing the current system to a new system, and the new system can be said to be both more-expensive (because some money is still moving from the top to the middle-class) and less-expensive (because *all* of that money goes back into the hands of consumers). Essentially, I created a system that's not a direct analogue to our current system, and causes an increase of spendable income at every income level; the "reduced tax burden" is $1 trillion, and the "money going to households above and beyond their actual income" is the rest. Trying to explain that in terms of costs is... a matter of presentation; the only correct comparison is a full description of each system, not a measure of how much each costs.
Anyway, the long and short of it is Apple's yearly profits (about $10 billion) amount to $58.48 per worker per YEAR, or $82.62 per household per year. The total judgment here is less than $10/month per household, in one big shot. Apple's total holdings, if dumped onto America all at once, leaving them bankrupt, could give everyone about $1,400. One time. Not useful, is it?
Taking 100% of all business profits would destabilize businesses (they'd fail all risk events--loss and opportunity, i.e. no cash on hand with which to cover a bad year, nor to grow) and provide about 10% of all income to be spent somehow. In contrast, my Universal Social Security system reduces business taxes slightly (that was unintentional; I just don't mess with it), reduces middle- and lower-class taxes dramatically, reduces payroll taxes, and puts a large amount of money into the hands of low- and no-income individuals and households. The funding source there is 17%, rather than 10%, of all income; and the practical displacement is around 7%. That puts, currently, $7,000 into the hands of the poorest of poor, per adult; for a 2-adult household it's like $14,000.
I get pushback on this type of plan for reasons including, but not limited to, that I don't tax the super-rich above 40%, that I don't increase business taxes, and that I don't increase wages (as if increasing wages is a thing; but that's a whole different economics argument). That's political: those are complaints about fairness and sentiment, rather than effectiveness. That's a particular hot topic now, which is why 15 years of Apple and Microsoft and Google reign went unchecked until, suddenly, "OMG TAXES, PAY YOUR FAIR SHARE!" If people hadn't turned "pay their fair share" and "the 1%" into a media sensation, this EU court case wouldn't exist; that's getting close to the definition of a kangaroo court, excepting that this case ostensibly has some actual validity.
The biggest and best arguments against GMO crops and other genetic engineering is that we just don't know what the long-term results will be.
That's a dogmatic argument: it's made by people who don't understand. I could give a long rebuttal about how GMO is more-predictable than all other methods in use, but the Soylent people have done it right, so I'll just put that here.
We could potentially significantly improve the lives of future generations, but at the cost of treating some number of our current generations' babies essentially the same way we treat lab mice. And that's just not a trade-off we're willing to make in our current society.
I tend to call out ethics as bullshit in a world where we define morals, ethics, and values separately. The word "ethics" comes from the greek word "Ethos", which means "Habit"; and I present, on occasion, the argument that ethics gives you a habit in the form of a bureaucratic definition of right and wrong. That is to say: whatever the situation, whatever the nuance, an ethical rule tells you a certain action is necessary or forbidden regardless of whether that action is helpful or harmful, even if you know with 100% certainty that the ethical thing to do is the wrong thing to do. People often reason this away by claiming that humans will recognize and adjust to the situation; and bureaucracies look upon those humans doing such reasoning and slap them with sanctions, license revocations, and incarceration because ethics systems are there to tell you that we've all figured out what's right in a world where people disagree over that.
From that viewpoint, why not just experiment on poor people?
Some countries have long-standing, currently-unresolvable economic problems such as poor access to nutritious food. The genetic modification I described eliminates a consequence of that situation: it ensures an absolute abolition of vitamin C deficiency. That particular edit is safe, in that it modifies a gene which is currently broken, and would mix with general population by giving you a random chance of having that trait; whereas editing out the atherosclerosis thing would be a complex genetic task involving multiple genes, thus higher-risk when bred back into population. Fortunately, this safe edit is also the one most relevant to these poor countries.
You have a choice, then. You can avoid such experimentation on people who are prone to malnutrition and its deleterious effects on health by the millions; or you can give them a chance to lead the world into a better life, at the cost of some risk for a few people who don't get to volunteer because they're reworked from embryo. One choice *will* leave millions suffering and hundreds of thousands dying of disease; the other will probably not hurt anyone, but *could* hurt dozens.
Machiavelli had an incomplete philosophy. The ends justify the means if and only if all other means of lower moral cost end in increased suffering beyond those you save. When the bodies pile up taller than your moral high ground, you fucked up.
Looks like someone has had enough with these banking breaches.
We have never seen this hyperinflation effect from low unemployment
When have you seen low unemployment? Have you ever seen 1% unemployment or a labor shortage in full?
This is probably the worst misattribution I've ever heard for the real estate crisis of 2007-2008. There wasn't a recession because employment was a little high.
Your response here is like responding to the claim that cyanide will kill you as quickly as a stopped heart by pointing out that people who die from heart attacks aren't poisoned by cyanide.
I said you get a minor recession, like in 2008. There would be a recession. It would look like the one in 2008. It would have a different cause. What the hell is wrong with you?
Why the people who work, of course. In a sane world, there would be more employment followed by immigration, global trade, and automation to leverage the people who are already working.
Immigration is a form of localized population expansion. This comes with more production, which brings more wealth, and thus more buying power, thus more demand, thus more need for employment.
Automation increases the amount of production per person, increasing buying power. It also allows for more scaling--it knocks down scarcity.
To make this clear: the technology of 1920 was capable of sustaining about 3 billion people on all of the planet; a global population of 3.5 billion would have faced mass starvation and extreme poverty, as a greater proportion would have needed to work to make food, many of the things we were producing would have to not be produced because those workers would be busy making food, and we would still not have enough food. We made new technology, and then were able to increase population and have the same small proportion of that new population supply food for that growth.
Automation does the same: it increases the output of a single person's work, allowing for further population expansion. This cuts back on the cost of things and allows people to buy more, which in turn requires the production of more, thus employment grows with population. It gives us the ability to employ more labor (in the long run), rather than cutting back labor demand as you suggest.
While there has been some cases of rapid economic growth triggering inflation (eg, 19th Century mining towns in the US West), it's something that has rapidly corrected itself, sometimes by recession.
Which you earlier said doesn't happen.
I don't consider this even within an order of magnitude of your concern.
It's not. Mining town growth provided immediate productive output. It cut the cost of energy, transferred jobs to coal workers, and enabled people in general to live at an elevated standard-of-living that built out with the growth of the mining industry. My Universal Social Security plan is like taking 30-40 years of such economic growth and dumping it onto the country all at once.
Again: Imagine if $1,000,000,000,000 per year were dumped into the economy. Salaries don't go up, so the cost of goods isn't increased. Your employer still pays $50,000 to have you at your desk, but somehow you take home $6,000 more throughout the year, and NOBODY ELSE IS $6,000 POORER to get that money into your hands. Inflation doesn't make this go away: it's divided up as a fixed, scalar proportion of the money supply (17% of all income), and so e.g. 10% inflation means $1,100,000,000,000 more money is landing in people's paychecks, plus the 10% increase in their income they're already getting.
Does that sound like anything that's ever happened in history to you? The total mobilized spending money is about $1.8 trillion, if you count money that's actually displaced (i.e. that this policy moves out of one person's hands and into the hands of another, notably giving poor people money to spend). That's 11.6% of all income ab
It's funny, heart disease is trivial. Human metabolism produces Vitamin C through a four-step process, and a misconfigured gene causes the fourth step to fail. Because of this, food scarcity several tens of thousands of years ago caused death by leaking arteries due to a lack of Vitamin C intake; a mutation which causes the deposit of cholesterol on the arterial walls enabled survival by patching the holes in rotting arteries. We can fix this permanently using modern gene therapy to edit each embryo so as to correct the single Vitamin C gene, and then following up three generations later with an edit to remove cholesterol build-up entirely.
The Vitamin C edit is relatively-cheap now (gene therapy on embryos is new in the market, and not dirt-cheap), and in less than ten years will be feasible as an international humanitarian program offered to any who want to ensure a healthy, permanent Vitamin C supplementation in their children and grandchildren. By the time it's reasonable to remove heart disease, gene therapy technology will have developed such that the edit is trivial. That means this is the last century in which anyone needs to be born with the threat of heart disease.
Of course, that kind of tinkering with human DNA is unethical. It would be wrong to minimize suffering and death.
So our police force has a serious problem with being an enforcement division rather than a peace-keeping division, when it's supposed to be a peace-keeping division. Police have stopped using discretion and working to maintain peace and order, and have become authoritarian in nature; this has changed them from a pillar of stability in the community to a perceived threat, and leads to an increase in violent reaction to police presence, and a general increase in crime due to a perception that the police force and thus the law in general is an antagonizing agent and thus the enemy.
Yours and many others's response is, apparently, "Well we need police, so nothing is wrong."
This stance is similar to telling people water is necessary for life when they complain somebody took a shit in their drinking supply.
Slashdot's new owners seem to occasionally run anti-UBI articles, but take about 2 minutes to mark any pro-UBI submission as SPAM.