Well, if they used higher-speed chips on current technologies, then the phone battery life would be lower. The phone would run hotter. The chips cost more outright.
You're talking about "the technology actually doesn't exist" and "the technology is clunky, power-hungry, and expensive." Many of these new phones are at the leading-edge of high technology, using low-power processes and the highest feasible execution rates, along with heterogeneous processing (slow and fast cores at the same time, rather than SMP). Scaling up would make the phone hot, make the battery last four hours, and make the total cost of the phone ridiculously high.
Chipmakers are driving technology forward at a high rate. Smartphone manufacturers are upgrading at that rate.
GMOs increase yield per invested unit of energy. That means less fertilizer run-off, less pesticide use, less manufacture and transport of fertilizer and pesticides, less driving the tractor all over millions of acres of land, and so forth.
Many new-model phones are based on the latest reasonable tech. That $400 OnePlus Three uses a state-of-the-art Qualcomm processor with six cores operating in heterogeneous mode--slow and fast cores run at the same time, allowing for power scaling without scaling the whole system down. You can get eight-core or eight-and-eight core phones, if you want to pay $1,000 for them, too.
Packing more cores into the phone doesn't necessarily improve performance. Down the line, your 4-core phone might not be outperformed by an 8-core phone of the same speed; yet the new phones have 4-core processors running at 1.5 the clock rate, with more-efficient processors, consuming less battery and executing at 3x the computational speed. New applications and the sheer load of the stuff you're already running increase, and your phone doesn't work so well anymore.
So a phone that's "Made to last" might require technology that costs 4x as much, eats battery at 6x the rate, and halves the replacement rate. Overall, that phone will cost you twice as much (costs x 4, lifetime x 2). A phone that's made on the state-of-the-art might last 2-3 years, at a stretch.
Then someone releases a new graphics standard, and your phone is incapable of using certain things. Not really important on a phone; it's not like you need the latest OpenGL/Vulcan to run Android.
People think the manufacturers are purposely making phones to wear out after 1-2 years. They don't want to pony up $1,400 for a phone that'll still run well in 6 years, all the while running nearly hot enough to burn a hole in your pocket, with a 4-hour battery life.
Heavy I/O utilization will give you a bad time. As a counter-point, overprovisioning RAM relative to your working set will cut back on some of the I/O--a lot, if you're not on a write-heavy workload or a database. Correct RAM provisioning has to include the working set (application memory) and page cache (which is working set represented on disk, rather than persistently loaded into memory by the application).
PU utilization at 90% during peak is fine, if your applications can handle it. A PHP or C# application that can service 5,000 requests per second only takes, on average, 1/5000th of a second to fully-service a request; if it's designed to queue and thread in some sane way, then it shouldn't stall later requests because an earlier request is waiting for something. Its ability to handle 5,000 requests per second includes all that overhead: you can't automatically scale the HW requirements to service 100 RPS and claim now it does 5,000.
An nginx server at 90% utilization typically operates just fine, because nginx (as a reverse proxy, caching proxy, or static file web server) *does* serialize sanely. It provides one worker per CPU (configurable), and passes requests to workers under the least load. Each worker serializes requests--they service one request at a time--and will basically put a waiting request on hold and immediately start servicing a different request. If a worker is waiting with no request to service, it can take a new request--even if it has 37 requests all waiting for something (I/O, a back-end proxy, an application).
Writing an application to handle parallel requests with that kind of efficiency is *hard*. It's not impossible, and some applications handle it well; others do in fact increase latency significantly with utilization.
Latency will, of course, always increase when utilization exceeds unity. Using more than 100% of all CPUs means something has to wait.
And to answer your last question: Easy. Quintuple the family income and you can feed them at 2% instead of 10% of their income. Not the answer you wanted, I know.
Money again.
If you quintuple the family income without quintupling the productivity--without making it so 1/4 as many labor-hours have to be worked to produce things--you get inflation.
The answer is you have to cut back the number of jobs per output. It takes 1,000 humans working 40-hours per week to make 10,000 loaves of bread? If you want to cut that cost back, you have to make it take 250 humans working 40-hours per week to make 10,000 loaves of bread.
The total supply chain profit margin is roughly 10%. That means you might be able to cut the 10% net income down to 9% while running on zero profits (and all the businesses collapse in a bad year). Without driving actual costs down, you can't get lower.
Even if the money in play remains the same, a more equal distribution leads to more money in circulation.
Money isn't economy. Money spent represent goods and services produced: magically pouring Bill Gates's cash out onto the bottom rung won't suddenly make everyone richer. You have the same production but more cash? Each thing is costing more, and the same number of things are bought.
Otherwise this is true, and it works as long as you move money down. If you pull money from efficient-spenders to other efficient-spenders, it doesn't. You can have an *inefficient* economic system, and can correct for that; I'm only saying that efficient distributions are bounded by production per labor hour (productivity).
In this specific example, I'd like to point out the actual consumer market.
The top 10% income earners make $141,000/year. That means 90% of consumers make less than $141,000. These are people who spend their money; they don't sack 1/3 of it away. Gross, you can put about 16% of that into retirement ($18,000 401(k) plus $5,000 ROTH IRA); however, a married-filing-jointly household will have a net income of $108,000 on that income. Take out the $18,000 and it's $94,000, minus the after-tax ROTH IRA. That's 17.6% that you can stick in your retirement accounts, leaving $89,000/year.
The median income level has $45,000/year of take-home to spend. It's not substantially different: Someone with twice the money can buy a bigger house, fancier cars, better clothes, and other stuff. We just consume more at that level.
That's just the 90%-scope high-consumption market. If you nearly-double the cost of goods, these high-consumption individuals buy half as much. Wages at production play an important role here, and other components should make this less-extreme.
Every load of boat, train, or road freight transportation carries a fixed number of goods. If you pack a freight trailer full of jeans, you get the same number of jeans in there regardless. The same goes for logistics, retail, back-room inventory employees, burger flippers, and so forth. We're assuming the only wage change involved is moving the jobs from China to America here; no wage hikes per se.
A single truck can carry 52 pallets consisting of 20,800 pairs of jeans. Continental shipping is $3,000-$5,000 or $0.14-$0.25 per pair. So in Wal-Mart, that $16 pair of jeans cost 25 cents to ship across the country, at best. The same goes for retail: 500+ scans per hour is the baseline metric Wal-Mart uses for cashiers; some break 1,000 scans per hour in rush period. These people make $8/hr-$10/hr, so maybe 2 cents per item. We're up to $0.27 for jeans.
Unpacking and stocking a truck takes five inventory workers two to four hours. Call it five, times $10, times 4. That's approximately $0.0096--almost a penny per item. That pair of jeans now costs $0.28.
When you add in the corporate overhead, electricity, and other stuff, you don't even hit 10 cents per item. Call it 40 cents in total to get the jeans from the factory to Wal-Mart. While we're at it, Wal-Mart has a 3.12% profit margin, so on average something like a $16 set of jeans would cost $15.52 in total--in reality, some things will have slim margin, some will have large margins. If you're assuming just jeans are coming to America, this is important; if you're assuming *all* manufacture, it doesn't make a difference.
$15.52, minus that 40 cents. $15.12 per pair of jeans. That's the labor cost of $3.50/hr labor. It's 4.32 labor-hours. That includes not just sewing the jeans, but growing the cotton, harvesting it, shipping it, spinning it, dying it, weaving it, producing the dye, and so forth.
If you transfer 100% of all that labor to a $7.25/hr worker, that's $31.32, plus 40 cents, plus 3.12% mark-up. $32.71 instead of $16. Cotton is the big hold-out here; but China grows so much cotton that 40% of all pesticides used in China are applied to cotton crop--that is to
Do you think that, in 1920, it would be possible for the median family to spend 11% of the median income on food?
Do you think competition would have driven those costs down that low? It was 40% then, it's 11% now. Much more of the labor force was required to make that food, meaning more wages would go out.
What made it possible for food to sell for what amounts to 11% of the family's income, as opposed to 40%? What allowed competition to bring prices down that low?
What has to change to make it profitable to sell food for 2% of a family's income--equivalent to a year's worth of food costing the average family $1,080 today, or $90/month for a 3-person household?
You take home a certain amount of money. From that money, you buy necessities (food, utilities, rent, clothes, soap...) and luxuries (Xbox, a bigger house, a fancy car, music, books...). You also save for emergencies and retirement; and you put extra money towards debts you want to settle to stabilize your financial position.
At the end of the year, you have $0 spendable income. That is to say: 100% of your income is allocated. Even savings is income you're not willing to spend, because it's buying financial stability.
So how do you get that money?
Well, you have a job. You get paid a wage. That wage comes out of the revenue of your employer: whatever product or service your employer provides, you have a part in producing it. Your employer employs you because he believes that part is significant and important--you increase profits (your wage, benefits, and payroll taxes are less than your revenue to the company). That means someone else, just like you, getting their own wage, is paying for your job.
How many people do you think have run out of things they want to buy before they run out of money? How many people are trying to buy something which could be supplied at a profit by selling it for a price those people are willing and capable of paying for said product?
Statistically, rich people are storing more money away, as a proportion of their income. Even then, many of those people have the same problems as poor people: the $25,000,000 private jet, the $10,000,000 mortgage, and so forth. They store away a lot of money and have a lot of debts, and they manage their financial position by keeping a bigger chunk in savings. A small percentage have entered a state where they've indeed just stopped buying--they've run out of things they want to buy because they have so much money, rather than because they can't find that thing to buy it.
At any given point, there's basically nobody walking around trying to buy something with all this money they have, but not able to buy it because somebody isn't making it. There are a *lot* of people trying to buy something, but not able to buy it because it costs too much--employing more people to make Tesla cars won't drive the price of Tesla cars down, because Tesla cars actually cost a lot of money to make. Making more doesn't mean selling more.
Where are all these jobs, then?
You essentially suppose there's a profit motive--that somebody, right now, could get friggin' rich by hiring a bunch of these unemployed people--yet that hasn't happened. Businesses grow, new businesses arise, and established businesses make rounds of layoffs as they lose business to competition.
Doesn't it make more sense that the unemployed--the ones searching for jobs and not finding any--are unemployed because there is a limited amount of available consumer spending with which to support those jobs?
It's fine; I don't get bothered too much by much except inaccurate information, and assholes. It's hard to actually offend me--obvious reasons.
Besides, of course I'm a self-centered prick. I don't make social connections; people are basically tools to amuse me. I mean okay, you don't go treating people like shit just for the hell of it, but still.
As for active avoidance; I minimize the amount of information my parents have about me. It prevents them from bothering me with social pressures.
Also if you've got a kid with mild aspergers, get him some treatment. If he can mostly-function, maybe you can avoid the drugs and go with executive function training; it depends on if you have ADHD-inattentive, ADHD-hyperactive, or both. Adrafinil helps me (trying to get a Modafinil prescription) because it doesn't get me high (unlike amphetamines) and lets me actually keep focus on what I want to focus on; and when I'm off it, I have 1-2 days of half-way-there, I think from imprinting a pattern that lets me stay on task. It's still hard, but I can temporarily mime a behavior to drag myself through it, as horrendously rough as that is. If the condition were more-mild, I might be able to just develop some mitigation habits and get by easily enough.
Current interest: Ari Tuckman's books--notably a workbook on ADHD. Might turn out useless; I haven't kept on task long enough to actually bother.
Of course if all that fails, medication is a great option. Medication can be terrible (methylphenidate--concerta, ritalin--made me never sleep; amphetamines make some people never sleep and always feel euphoric and high-on-meth), but also great (some folks go on Concerta or Adderall and it's like their life of failure has come to an immediate close and only success lay on the path forward). Medication can also end up going down really, *really* fast; some people start taking a month's supply of amphetamines in a week because... well, they're idiots. Not drug addicts who can't un-hook themselves (I've seen those, too); some people get it in their head that they just function so much better on so much stimulant, and that the normal dose is just too low. They believe they're treating themselves better than their prescription does. Things to be wary of.
... I've taken a side-interest in ADHD. It's a fascinating topic.
Of course I'm including retirees and minors. Don't be a retard. They still need money to live, and services provided to them
I'm sorry, it was retarded of me to think that an INFANT should work from the day he is born until the day he is died. Won't somebody think of the UNEMPLOYED TODDLERS?!
When you write "you demand every man and woman capable of doing anything go out and get a job", you lie. Blatant, bald-faced, liar.
Your argument was: "Unemployment is NOT lower. The US has a population of 319 million, and only 151 million are employed. That's less than half the work force".
319 million includes retirees and infants. 254 million includes non-retirement-age adults. You claimed 151 / 319 or "less than half" (about 47%); 151 / 254 is 59%, more than half.
To be GENEROUS, you're complaining that there aren't enough jobs BECAUSE EVERYONE WHO CAN WORK ISN'T WORKING. What you ACTUALLY complained about was that EVERY AMERICAN, FROM INFANCY TO RETIREMENT, ISN'T WORKING.
Yes, you complained that new-born infants aren't working. You called out statistics claiming that LESS THAN HALF THE LABOR FORCE was working, and counted babies and 90-year-old women in that labor force.
And the trend is to continue to reduce the need for labor in all jobs, from truck drivers and waiters to surgeons
Now let's get into you just not understanding economics.
In 1890, 90% of America's labor force worked on the farm. They were farm workers. Today, it's under 2%. The trend has been to reduce the need for labor in farm jobs.
In fact, throughout all of human history, the trend has been to reduce the need for labor in all jobs. Farmers, blacksmiths, bellhops, maids, textile makers, fisheries, machinists, accountants, doctors, surgeons, lawyers, clerks, retailers, shippers. I can give you some specific examples, even.
Shipping pallets became popular in the 1930s. The wooden things. In 1931, a railway did a test of shipping canned goods. One shipment of 13,000 canned goods took three days to unload; an identical 13,000 shipment of canned goods was done in 4 hours.
This works on both ends: goods need to be boxed, moved to the shipping car, stacked, transported, and unloaded. Unpalletized, you're stacking the boxes when boxing, moving the boxes by conveyor to transit (lorry, dock, rail car), moving a box at a time to stack into the car, then unstacking, moving, and restacking. This happens every time you change off a fixed location (if you put them on a truck to take them to a rail to move them to a dock, you have to stack and unstack every time you change hands).
With pallets, you stack, wrap, and then move the whole pallet as a block. That means less time spent stacking and unstacking. In fact, it means *fewer dock workers and less wages paid per unit of goods moved*. It cuts back the need for shipping workers a hell of a lot.
Ikea redesigned its Bang mug for this as well. The original Bang fit 864 to a pallet; the third-generation Bang fits 2,204 to a pallet. This reduced shipping costs by 60%--that means for every 10 trucks being driven to carry Bang mugs, we now only drive 4 trucks.
Speaking of rail, do you know why shipping is called shipping? Because it's done by ship.
Overland transport was originally expensive. We had no rails, because rails were expensive. Manual labor to dig iron out of the ground, and then we had to smelt it, then make steel. So why do we have rail now? What changed?
The Hot Blast furnace improved over prior puddling and cold-blast processes. For the labor (jobs, wages) to make 400 tonnes of iron from ore, the Hot Blast furnace could make 86,400 tonnes of iron. Where you needed 216 iron workers, now you only need ONE. This was accompanied by a (then-)new metal rolling process, efficiently manufacturing rails, allowing the creation of rail transport. With so much cheap iron, it became feasible
Like I said: Charity isn't support for a collapsing economy.
As for that $39 loss of price... it's what happens when someone elects to replace last-decade's style with new, futuristic style. Out go those old Teflon pans, in come the ceramic or hard-anodized pans. What happens to all those old Teflon pans that still work? What about that old slow-cooker that was replaced with a fancy digital one? Stock pots replaced by shiny, new pots that look more sleek and stylish?
This actually works a lot better with clothes. When you're making $25/hr in an office, you have to dress properly. Business casual is okay, as long as you don't have rips and tears and patches. Poor people? Poor people can get away with that. The bottom-tier worker at Fedex throws boxes all day; nobody sees this guy. They let him wear jeans. His jeans have patches? So what. These things move down because they have to move down; you cannot work a middle-class office job and come in in ragged, old clothes.
What are you talking about? Money doesn't go to bank vaults to breed or whatever you're babbling about. I know how fractional reserve banking works, and have argued against gold standards because fiat-and-fractional-reserve move more money into consumer spending and provide the benefits of inflation.
You seem to be arguing from the position of not understanding what's being discussed.
I don't get the last statement. My plan is a tax-driven plan which transitions from current public-aid welfare to a universal social security. The USS returns most of the taxes taken to the people paying them, and pays out on a monthly-or-better (e.g. twice per month?) schedule, thus doesn't interfere with cash flow (you don't get a lump sum back at the end of the year or something crazy; the government isn't holding your money for months). It has nothing to do with bond returns or stocks.
Further, those individual investment options are means to transfer money. Money doesn't grow; someone must lose for someone to gain. While that's true of a tax-driven system, investments are haphazard and tax-benefits systems are controlled.
The only investment consideration I make is in diverting the benefit to retirement savings, as compared to current old-age pensions (Social Security retirement benefits). I compare that to guaranteed-income funds as a baseline, because Vanguard bonds can win 14% in a year, but they can also lose 16% in a year; I can only make definitive statements about 1.2% or 1.7% growth in a guaranteed-income, non-losing option like a savings account or CD.
Supply-side (trickle-down) economics assumes if you just get a job, start a business, go out and create a product, do *whatever*, you can make it. This is known not to work because demand-side economics is what runs the world.
Demand-side economics says you can't pay the wages of the worker (if you're running a small business, that's self-employment and all the business expenses) if nobody's buying what the worker's making. In an extreme example: if we re-educated 100% of our labor force into IT, we'd find that people are spending a significant portion of their money on groceries and fast food, and much of the money is flowing to retail jobs and burger flippers. That money *can't* flow to IT workers--whatever service you're selling, I'm broke, so I'm not buying. Oh, sure, I'm buying something; but there's 1,000 of you and it costs $58,000 to buy all your shit and I have $3,000 to spend on it. *Most* of you are going to have to go be burger flippers, since that's where most of my money's going...
Businesses and employment expand mainly by population growth. A new small business can capture a market if the population is 1% larger and it only needs 1% of the population to patronize it--or whatever's left of that 1% after every other business takes a cut. A new small business can otherwise knock down the patronization of another business, creating jobs under NewCarSmell Co. while causing layoffs at OldAndBusted Inc.
Giving people education so they can crawl out of their low-income lives *ALWAYS* either fails or displaces someone else downward *unless* there is a skilled labor shortage. If there is a skilled labor shortage, whatever business takes up OJT and cooperative work strategies gains a strategic advantage, so the problem fixes itself. Short of that, public support for workforce development (college--this branding of college as "education" only allows politicians to avoid addressing our primary education system) inefficiently allocates resources (labor is expended training people for jobs that aren't there), thus wasting the means of production, incurring costs with no return and MAKING MORE PEOPLE POOR.
244sqft single-occupancy apartments are not prevalent in America outside of major cities like New York.
There also aren't 1.6 million well-maintained units ready to go, just waiting for homeless people. There would be some remodeling of unused units to expand to the new demand. This is happening in my city just for the general purpose of meeting population changes--not growth, but rather tearing out walls and re-planning existing units to match the changing demographics (more middle-class in some areas, more poor people in others).
The point is to create a profit motive. If you do X, you will be rich-as-Bill-Gates. In this case, "X" is "put poor, broke, unemployed people in apartments." Those apartments don't exist? Get building!
The title sequence on most shows is limited to 45 seconds; credits are limited to 30. That's regardless of whether it's a half-hour slot or an hour slot.
I have, in fact, timed it; and I hardly ever notice product placement. Many shows use a Brand X placement (McDonny's and Burger Thing), which I notice because it's out of place and occasionally makes for good humor; typically, product placement doesn't interfere with the flow of a television production. On the other hand, Maxwell House seemed to own Deep Space 9; they drank so much coffee there were three minor subplots about people trying to quit drinking so much god damned coffee.
I've got a large collection of associated mental issues, notably low-affect and anhedonia. That means I don't attach to people (I have no friends because friends are annoying; I have never dated) and I don't receive much in the way of rewards (even sex is... not worth the investment; it's impossible to manipulate me with sex because any effort on my part far outweighs the reward of sex).
I used old computer parts that my parents had discarded, and got them to buy things. They interpreted it as a bonding experience; at the time, I didn't notice, because the concept of bonding and attachment and feelings didn't actually occur to me until I was in my 20s. Whatever people mean when they talk about "family" is an entirely-foreign concept to me, so alien that I can acknowledge it as an academic thing but can't really associate any frame of reference.
My doctor tried to tag that as depression, and I told him I feel fine; I just don't have good days because I don't have bad days. He asked if I feel like a failure at life, and I told him I'm cognizant of the fact that I've stacked up years of stuff I was going to do but abandoned, and can't seem to focus, and want to fix that; and that it's not really distressing me, and I could coast like this essentially until I die. Life would be more interesting if I could get shit done; I'm bored, and the reason I'm bored is I have ADHD and never stay focused long enough to do anything interesting.
So yeah. I won't have any children. They'd be nothing more than an annoyance, and, if I was lucky, after 4-5 years they'd get run over by a truck and relieve me of the burden. I'd try to prevent it--because it's important that people work to protect others so that society holds together--but once someone is dead, they're a corpse, not a person, and are no longer relevant. I guess I could try to stress that at no point would I ever find my own children special, but... I don't find anyone special; the concept is alien to me. I'm not sure how to explain this, so I'm rambling.
No it was an off-colored joke at the end of the week. I've stopped taking an amphetamine-like because it was getting me high BEFORE it started fixing my attention system (honestly I think I was just high, and so behaving like an over-stimulated person: look for something to occupy myself); I don't get much done during the week, and take an Adrafinil on the weekends (modafinil plus liver damage). It's... striking. It doesn't feel like anything, but I can focus. I'm actually getting things done now. I got my house clean... some. I'm trying to get a modafinil prescription so I can put my life back together and I'm worried the psychiatrist will just roll his eyes and try to hand me amphetamines.
Anyway you can't fix homelessness and hunger and such by magically giving out jobs or anything. 40% of the U.S. workforce changes over during the year; everyone is hiring because almost half their workforce leaves through the year, and because population expansion and more money in the monetary system to match creates higher demand and a need for new positions--but also more people looking for jobs. There aren't jobs for everyone.
A UBI like a Universal Social Security is the only way to really stabilize the bottom end of the workforce. Even when it's inadequate (e.g. you're a lower-middle-classer and you have bills to pay, and the benefit is less than your monthly bills), it slows down the drain on your finances (e.g. you have $1,100/month of obligations? $600/month means you can go more than twice as long on savings), and so acts as an effiient unemployment bridge. The poorer you are, the more strongly it remediates your unemployment and underemployment finances; the less-poor you are, the more likely you are to be able to save.
The plan was always to sweep up that lower portion--people without enough food and with no housing--into a market that faces little risk and can thus effectively supply housing and food and basic needs to people with nothing. It does a lot more than just that.
First that the goods would cost more, and second that people would buy less
The price of Chinese labor is $3.50/hr. American minimum wage was $7.25/hr but is going up.
As I pointed out elsewhere, the price of a product is not dependent on its cost, cost only dictate whether the product can be produced at a profit
The profit margin of businesses is a rough average 10%. The rest of all costs are wages. If the cost of labor increases by just 10%, prices MUST GO UP or there is no profit and all businesses fold.
Because more jobs means that more people have money to spend.
There's a certain amount of money to be spent. You can't just create those jobs (trickle-down economics); somebody ALREADY HAS TO BE BUYING to bring those jobs into existence. The total income in a year is going to be the same; you're asserting that it will just jump up, that people with $50,000 to spend will now spend $70,000. Where are they all getting the extra $20,000? And don't say "more people have jobs" or "they'll get paid more"; for them to get paid, ANOTHER CONSUMER MUST SPEND ADDITIONAL MONEY, meaning that consumer must already have additional income.
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Well, if they used higher-speed chips on current technologies, then the phone battery life would be lower. The phone would run hotter. The chips cost more outright.
You're talking about "the technology actually doesn't exist" and "the technology is clunky, power-hungry, and expensive." Many of these new phones are at the leading-edge of high technology, using low-power processes and the highest feasible execution rates, along with heterogeneous processing (slow and fast cores at the same time, rather than SMP). Scaling up would make the phone hot, make the battery last four hours, and make the total cost of the phone ridiculously high.
Chipmakers are driving technology forward at a high rate. Smartphone manufacturers are upgrading at that rate.
Naturally or via radiation, which both entail shitloads of risk and have produced toxic results in the past.
Monsanto is evil, but this is all true. When you deal with the devil, make sure you're the one leading.
GMOs increase yield per invested unit of energy. That means less fertilizer run-off, less pesticide use, less manufacture and transport of fertilizer and pesticides, less driving the tractor all over millions of acres of land, and so forth.
Well, it depends.
Many new-model phones are based on the latest reasonable tech. That $400 OnePlus Three uses a state-of-the-art Qualcomm processor with six cores operating in heterogeneous mode--slow and fast cores run at the same time, allowing for power scaling without scaling the whole system down. You can get eight-core or eight-and-eight core phones, if you want to pay $1,000 for them, too.
Packing more cores into the phone doesn't necessarily improve performance. Down the line, your 4-core phone might not be outperformed by an 8-core phone of the same speed; yet the new phones have 4-core processors running at 1.5 the clock rate, with more-efficient processors, consuming less battery and executing at 3x the computational speed. New applications and the sheer load of the stuff you're already running increase, and your phone doesn't work so well anymore.
So a phone that's "Made to last" might require technology that costs 4x as much, eats battery at 6x the rate, and halves the replacement rate. Overall, that phone will cost you twice as much (costs x 4, lifetime x 2). A phone that's made on the state-of-the-art might last 2-3 years, at a stretch.
Then someone releases a new graphics standard, and your phone is incapable of using certain things. Not really important on a phone; it's not like you need the latest OpenGL/Vulcan to run Android.
People think the manufacturers are purposely making phones to wear out after 1-2 years. They don't want to pony up $1,400 for a phone that'll still run well in 6 years, all the while running nearly hot enough to burn a hole in your pocket, with a 4-hour battery life.
I can scan vertically pretty easily; panning left and right is a complex visual operation.
Depends on the utilization patterns.
Heavy I/O utilization will give you a bad time. As a counter-point, overprovisioning RAM relative to your working set will cut back on some of the I/O--a lot, if you're not on a write-heavy workload or a database. Correct RAM provisioning has to include the working set (application memory) and page cache (which is working set represented on disk, rather than persistently loaded into memory by the application).
PU utilization at 90% during peak is fine, if your applications can handle it. A PHP or C# application that can service 5,000 requests per second only takes, on average, 1/5000th of a second to fully-service a request; if it's designed to queue and thread in some sane way, then it shouldn't stall later requests because an earlier request is waiting for something. Its ability to handle 5,000 requests per second includes all that overhead: you can't automatically scale the HW requirements to service 100 RPS and claim now it does 5,000.
An nginx server at 90% utilization typically operates just fine, because nginx (as a reverse proxy, caching proxy, or static file web server) *does* serialize sanely. It provides one worker per CPU (configurable), and passes requests to workers under the least load. Each worker serializes requests--they service one request at a time--and will basically put a waiting request on hold and immediately start servicing a different request. If a worker is waiting with no request to service, it can take a new request--even if it has 37 requests all waiting for something (I/O, a back-end proxy, an application).
Writing an application to handle parallel requests with that kind of efficiency is *hard*. It's not impossible, and some applications handle it well; others do in fact increase latency significantly with utilization.
Latency will, of course, always increase when utilization exceeds unity. Using more than 100% of all CPUs means something has to wait.
They have legal authority for a DMCA takedown notice. Do they have legal authority to demand records of personal information from Reddit?
An IP address is not personally-identifying information; maybe he posted from Panera or a neighbor's wifi.
Why don't they just ask Dropbox? Afraid their lawyers are bigger and will bend them over the witness stand?
And to answer your last question: Easy. Quintuple the family income and you can feed them at 2% instead of 10% of their income. Not the answer you wanted, I know.
Money again.
If you quintuple the family income without quintupling the productivity--without making it so 1/4 as many labor-hours have to be worked to produce things--you get inflation.
The answer is you have to cut back the number of jobs per output. It takes 1,000 humans working 40-hours per week to make 10,000 loaves of bread? If you want to cut that cost back, you have to make it take 250 humans working 40-hours per week to make 10,000 loaves of bread.
The total supply chain profit margin is roughly 10%. That means you might be able to cut the 10% net income down to 9% while running on zero profits (and all the businesses collapse in a bad year). Without driving actual costs down, you can't get lower.
Even if the money in play remains the same, a more equal distribution leads to more money in circulation.
Money isn't economy. Money spent represent goods and services produced: magically pouring Bill Gates's cash out onto the bottom rung won't suddenly make everyone richer. You have the same production but more cash? Each thing is costing more, and the same number of things are bought.
Otherwise this is true, and it works as long as you move money down. If you pull money from efficient-spenders to other efficient-spenders, it doesn't. You can have an *inefficient* economic system, and can correct for that; I'm only saying that efficient distributions are bounded by production per labor hour (productivity).
In this specific example, I'd like to point out the actual consumer market.
The top 10% income earners make $141,000/year. That means 90% of consumers make less than $141,000. These are people who spend their money; they don't sack 1/3 of it away. Gross, you can put about 16% of that into retirement ($18,000 401(k) plus $5,000 ROTH IRA); however, a married-filing-jointly household will have a net income of $108,000 on that income. Take out the $18,000 and it's $94,000, minus the after-tax ROTH IRA. That's 17.6% that you can stick in your retirement accounts, leaving $89,000/year.
The median income level has $45,000/year of take-home to spend. It's not substantially different: Someone with twice the money can buy a bigger house, fancier cars, better clothes, and other stuff. We just consume more at that level.
That's just the 90%-scope high-consumption market. If you nearly-double the cost of goods, these high-consumption individuals buy half as much. Wages at production play an important role here, and other components should make this less-extreme.
Every load of boat, train, or road freight transportation carries a fixed number of goods. If you pack a freight trailer full of jeans, you get the same number of jeans in there regardless. The same goes for logistics, retail, back-room inventory employees, burger flippers, and so forth. We're assuming the only wage change involved is moving the jobs from China to America here; no wage hikes per se.
A single truck can carry 52 pallets consisting of 20,800 pairs of jeans. Continental shipping is $3,000-$5,000 or $0.14-$0.25 per pair. So in Wal-Mart, that $16 pair of jeans cost 25 cents to ship across the country, at best. The same goes for retail: 500+ scans per hour is the baseline metric Wal-Mart uses for cashiers; some break 1,000 scans per hour in rush period. These people make $8/hr-$10/hr, so maybe 2 cents per item. We're up to $0.27 for jeans.
Unpacking and stocking a truck takes five inventory workers two to four hours. Call it five, times $10, times 4. That's approximately $0.0096--almost a penny per item. That pair of jeans now costs $0.28.
When you add in the corporate overhead, electricity, and other stuff, you don't even hit 10 cents per item. Call it 40 cents in total to get the jeans from the factory to Wal-Mart. While we're at it, Wal-Mart has a 3.12% profit margin, so on average something like a $16 set of jeans would cost $15.52 in total--in reality, some things will have slim margin, some will have large margins. If you're assuming just jeans are coming to America, this is important; if you're assuming *all* manufacture, it doesn't make a difference.
$15.52, minus that 40 cents. $15.12 per pair of jeans. That's the labor cost of $3.50/hr labor. It's 4.32 labor-hours. That includes not just sewing the jeans, but growing the cotton, harvesting it, shipping it, spinning it, dying it, weaving it, producing the dye, and so forth.
If you transfer 100% of all that labor to a $7.25/hr worker, that's $31.32, plus 40 cents, plus 3.12% mark-up. $32.71 instead of $16. Cotton is the big hold-out here; but China grows so much cotton that 40% of all pesticides used in China are applied to cotton crop--that is to
Do you think that, in 1920, it would be possible for the median family to spend 11% of the median income on food?
Do you think competition would have driven those costs down that low? It was 40% then, it's 11% now. Much more of the labor force was required to make that food, meaning more wages would go out.
What made it possible for food to sell for what amounts to 11% of the family's income, as opposed to 40%? What allowed competition to bring prices down that low?
What has to change to make it profitable to sell food for 2% of a family's income--equivalent to a year's worth of food costing the average family $1,080 today, or $90/month for a 3-person household?
Let's take a thought experiment.
You take home a certain amount of money. From that money, you buy necessities (food, utilities, rent, clothes, soap...) and luxuries (Xbox, a bigger house, a fancy car, music, books...). You also save for emergencies and retirement; and you put extra money towards debts you want to settle to stabilize your financial position.
At the end of the year, you have $0 spendable income. That is to say: 100% of your income is allocated. Even savings is income you're not willing to spend, because it's buying financial stability.
So how do you get that money?
Well, you have a job. You get paid a wage. That wage comes out of the revenue of your employer: whatever product or service your employer provides, you have a part in producing it. Your employer employs you because he believes that part is significant and important--you increase profits (your wage, benefits, and payroll taxes are less than your revenue to the company). That means someone else, just like you, getting their own wage, is paying for your job.
How many people do you think have run out of things they want to buy before they run out of money? How many people are trying to buy something which could be supplied at a profit by selling it for a price those people are willing and capable of paying for said product?
Statistically, rich people are storing more money away, as a proportion of their income. Even then, many of those people have the same problems as poor people: the $25,000,000 private jet, the $10,000,000 mortgage, and so forth. They store away a lot of money and have a lot of debts, and they manage their financial position by keeping a bigger chunk in savings. A small percentage have entered a state where they've indeed just stopped buying--they've run out of things they want to buy because they have so much money, rather than because they can't find that thing to buy it.
At any given point, there's basically nobody walking around trying to buy something with all this money they have, but not able to buy it because somebody isn't making it. There are a *lot* of people trying to buy something, but not able to buy it because it costs too much--employing more people to make Tesla cars won't drive the price of Tesla cars down, because Tesla cars actually cost a lot of money to make. Making more doesn't mean selling more.
Where are all these jobs, then?
You essentially suppose there's a profit motive--that somebody, right now, could get friggin' rich by hiring a bunch of these unemployed people--yet that hasn't happened. Businesses grow, new businesses arise, and established businesses make rounds of layoffs as they lose business to competition.
Doesn't it make more sense that the unemployed--the ones searching for jobs and not finding any--are unemployed because there is a limited amount of available consumer spending with which to support those jobs?
It's fine; I don't get bothered too much by much except inaccurate information, and assholes. It's hard to actually offend me--obvious reasons.
Besides, of course I'm a self-centered prick. I don't make social connections; people are basically tools to amuse me. I mean okay, you don't go treating people like shit just for the hell of it, but still.
As for active avoidance; I minimize the amount of information my parents have about me. It prevents them from bothering me with social pressures.
Also if you've got a kid with mild aspergers, get him some treatment. If he can mostly-function, maybe you can avoid the drugs and go with executive function training; it depends on if you have ADHD-inattentive, ADHD-hyperactive, or both. Adrafinil helps me (trying to get a Modafinil prescription) because it doesn't get me high (unlike amphetamines) and lets me actually keep focus on what I want to focus on; and when I'm off it, I have 1-2 days of half-way-there, I think from imprinting a pattern that lets me stay on task. It's still hard, but I can temporarily mime a behavior to drag myself through it, as horrendously rough as that is. If the condition were more-mild, I might be able to just develop some mitigation habits and get by easily enough.
Current interest: Ari Tuckman's books--notably a workbook on ADHD. Might turn out useless; I haven't kept on task long enough to actually bother.
Of course if all that fails, medication is a great option. Medication can be terrible (methylphenidate--concerta, ritalin--made me never sleep; amphetamines make some people never sleep and always feel euphoric and high-on-meth), but also great (some folks go on Concerta or Adderall and it's like their life of failure has come to an immediate close and only success lay on the path forward). Medication can also end up going down really, *really* fast; some people start taking a month's supply of amphetamines in a week because... well, they're idiots. Not drug addicts who can't un-hook themselves (I've seen those, too); some people get it in their head that they just function so much better on so much stimulant, and that the normal dose is just too low. They believe they're treating themselves better than their prescription does. Things to be wary of.
Of course I'm including retirees and minors. Don't be a retard. They still need money to live, and services provided to them
I'm sorry, it was retarded of me to think that an INFANT should work from the day he is born until the day he is died. Won't somebody think of the UNEMPLOYED TODDLERS?!
When you write "you demand every man and woman capable of doing anything go out and get a job", you lie. Blatant, bald-faced, liar.
Your argument was: "Unemployment is NOT lower. The US has a population of 319 million, and only 151 million are employed. That's less than half the work force".
319 million includes retirees and infants. 254 million includes non-retirement-age adults. You claimed 151 / 319 or "less than half" (about 47%); 151 / 254 is 59%, more than half.
To be GENEROUS, you're complaining that there aren't enough jobs BECAUSE EVERYONE WHO CAN WORK ISN'T WORKING. What you ACTUALLY complained about was that EVERY AMERICAN, FROM INFANCY TO RETIREMENT, ISN'T WORKING.
Yes, you complained that new-born infants aren't working. You called out statistics claiming that LESS THAN HALF THE LABOR FORCE was working, and counted babies and 90-year-old women in that labor force.
And the trend is to continue to reduce the need for labor in all jobs, from truck drivers and waiters to surgeons
Now let's get into you just not understanding economics.
In 1890, 90% of America's labor force worked on the farm. They were farm workers. Today, it's under 2%. The trend has been to reduce the need for labor in farm jobs.
In fact, throughout all of human history, the trend has been to reduce the need for labor in all jobs. Farmers, blacksmiths, bellhops, maids, textile makers, fisheries, machinists, accountants, doctors, surgeons, lawyers, clerks, retailers, shippers. I can give you some specific examples, even.
Shipping pallets became popular in the 1930s. The wooden things. In 1931, a railway did a test of shipping canned goods. One shipment of 13,000 canned goods took three days to unload; an identical 13,000 shipment of canned goods was done in 4 hours.
This works on both ends: goods need to be boxed, moved to the shipping car, stacked, transported, and unloaded. Unpalletized, you're stacking the boxes when boxing, moving the boxes by conveyor to transit (lorry, dock, rail car), moving a box at a time to stack into the car, then unstacking, moving, and restacking. This happens every time you change off a fixed location (if you put them on a truck to take them to a rail to move them to a dock, you have to stack and unstack every time you change hands).
With pallets, you stack, wrap, and then move the whole pallet as a block. That means less time spent stacking and unstacking. In fact, it means *fewer dock workers and less wages paid per unit of goods moved*. It cuts back the need for shipping workers a hell of a lot.
Ikea redesigned its Bang mug for this as well. The original Bang fit 864 to a pallet; the third-generation Bang fits 2,204 to a pallet. This reduced shipping costs by 60%--that means for every 10 trucks being driven to carry Bang mugs, we now only drive 4 trucks.
Speaking of rail, do you know why shipping is called shipping? Because it's done by ship.
Overland transport was originally expensive. We had no rails, because rails were expensive. Manual labor to dig iron out of the ground, and then we had to smelt it, then make steel. So why do we have rail now? What changed?
The Hot Blast furnace improved over prior puddling and cold-blast processes. For the labor (jobs, wages) to make 400 tonnes of iron from ore, the Hot Blast furnace could make 86,400 tonnes of iron. Where you needed 216 iron workers, now you only need ONE. This was accompanied by a (then-)new metal rolling process, efficiently manufacturing rails, allowing the creation of rail transport. With so much cheap iron, it became feasible
Why are clothes and food cheaper now than they were in 1950 or 1985?
Like I said: Charity isn't support for a collapsing economy.
As for that $39 loss of price... it's what happens when someone elects to replace last-decade's style with new, futuristic style. Out go those old Teflon pans, in come the ceramic or hard-anodized pans. What happens to all those old Teflon pans that still work? What about that old slow-cooker that was replaced with a fancy digital one? Stock pots replaced by shiny, new pots that look more sleek and stylish?
This actually works a lot better with clothes. When you're making $25/hr in an office, you have to dress properly. Business casual is okay, as long as you don't have rips and tears and patches. Poor people? Poor people can get away with that. The bottom-tier worker at Fedex throws boxes all day; nobody sees this guy. They let him wear jeans. His jeans have patches? So what. These things move down because they have to move down; you cannot work a middle-class office job and come in in ragged, old clothes.
Not a government program. There's a profit potential--it's more per year in total than Warren Buffet's life savings--and thus a market.
You basically just tried to characterize all apartments as a massive government housing project.
What are you talking about? Money doesn't go to bank vaults to breed or whatever you're babbling about. I know how fractional reserve banking works, and have argued against gold standards because fiat-and-fractional-reserve move more money into consumer spending and provide the benefits of inflation.
You seem to be arguing from the position of not understanding what's being discussed.
I don't get the last statement. My plan is a tax-driven plan which transitions from current public-aid welfare to a universal social security. The USS returns most of the taxes taken to the people paying them, and pays out on a monthly-or-better (e.g. twice per month?) schedule, thus doesn't interfere with cash flow (you don't get a lump sum back at the end of the year or something crazy; the government isn't holding your money for months). It has nothing to do with bond returns or stocks.
Further, those individual investment options are means to transfer money. Money doesn't grow; someone must lose for someone to gain. While that's true of a tax-driven system, investments are haphazard and tax-benefits systems are controlled.
The only investment consideration I make is in diverting the benefit to retirement savings, as compared to current old-age pensions (Social Security retirement benefits). I compare that to guaranteed-income funds as a baseline, because Vanguard bonds can win 14% in a year, but they can also lose 16% in a year; I can only make definitive statements about 1.2% or 1.7% growth in a guaranteed-income, non-losing option like a savings account or CD.
I did a cost rundown, as well as considerations on long-term retirement impacts. (Note: the married-filing-jointly table on my cost rundown is wrong; I'll have to fix that. The actual computations are correct.)
Education is kind of a red herring.
Supply-side (trickle-down) economics assumes if you just get a job, start a business, go out and create a product, do *whatever*, you can make it. This is known not to work because demand-side economics is what runs the world.
Demand-side economics says you can't pay the wages of the worker (if you're running a small business, that's self-employment and all the business expenses) if nobody's buying what the worker's making. In an extreme example: if we re-educated 100% of our labor force into IT, we'd find that people are spending a significant portion of their money on groceries and fast food, and much of the money is flowing to retail jobs and burger flippers. That money *can't* flow to IT workers--whatever service you're selling, I'm broke, so I'm not buying. Oh, sure, I'm buying something; but there's 1,000 of you and it costs $58,000 to buy all your shit and I have $3,000 to spend on it. *Most* of you are going to have to go be burger flippers, since that's where most of my money's going...
Businesses and employment expand mainly by population growth. A new small business can capture a market if the population is 1% larger and it only needs 1% of the population to patronize it--or whatever's left of that 1% after every other business takes a cut. A new small business can otherwise knock down the patronization of another business, creating jobs under NewCarSmell Co. while causing layoffs at OldAndBusted Inc.
Giving people education so they can crawl out of their low-income lives *ALWAYS* either fails or displaces someone else downward *unless* there is a skilled labor shortage. If there is a skilled labor shortage, whatever business takes up OJT and cooperative work strategies gains a strategic advantage, so the problem fixes itself. Short of that, public support for workforce development (college--this branding of college as "education" only allows politicians to avoid addressing our primary education system) inefficiently allocates resources (labor is expended training people for jobs that aren't there), thus wasting the means of production, incurring costs with no return and MAKING MORE PEOPLE POOR.
244sqft single-occupancy apartments are not prevalent in America outside of major cities like New York.
There also aren't 1.6 million well-maintained units ready to go, just waiting for homeless people. There would be some remodeling of unused units to expand to the new demand. This is happening in my city just for the general purpose of meeting population changes--not growth, but rather tearing out walls and re-planning existing units to match the changing demographics (more middle-class in some areas, more poor people in others).
The point is to create a profit motive. If you do X, you will be rich-as-Bill-Gates. In this case, "X" is "put poor, broke, unemployed people in apartments." Those apartments don't exist? Get building!
The title sequence on most shows is limited to 45 seconds; credits are limited to 30. That's regardless of whether it's a half-hour slot or an hour slot.
I have, in fact, timed it; and I hardly ever notice product placement. Many shows use a Brand X placement (McDonny's and Burger Thing), which I notice because it's out of place and occasionally makes for good humor; typically, product placement doesn't interfere with the flow of a television production. On the other hand, Maxwell House seemed to own Deep Space 9; they drank so much coffee there were three minor subplots about people trying to quit drinking so much god damned coffee.
I've got a large collection of associated mental issues, notably low-affect and anhedonia. That means I don't attach to people (I have no friends because friends are annoying; I have never dated) and I don't receive much in the way of rewards (even sex is... not worth the investment; it's impossible to manipulate me with sex because any effort on my part far outweighs the reward of sex).
I used old computer parts that my parents had discarded, and got them to buy things. They interpreted it as a bonding experience; at the time, I didn't notice, because the concept of bonding and attachment and feelings didn't actually occur to me until I was in my 20s. Whatever people mean when they talk about "family" is an entirely-foreign concept to me, so alien that I can acknowledge it as an academic thing but can't really associate any frame of reference.
My doctor tried to tag that as depression, and I told him I feel fine; I just don't have good days because I don't have bad days. He asked if I feel like a failure at life, and I told him I'm cognizant of the fact that I've stacked up years of stuff I was going to do but abandoned, and can't seem to focus, and want to fix that; and that it's not really distressing me, and I could coast like this essentially until I die. Life would be more interesting if I could get shit done; I'm bored, and the reason I'm bored is I have ADHD and never stay focused long enough to do anything interesting.
So yeah. I won't have any children. They'd be nothing more than an annoyance, and, if I was lucky, after 4-5 years they'd get run over by a truck and relieve me of the burden. I'd try to prevent it--because it's important that people work to protect others so that society holds together--but once someone is dead, they're a corpse, not a person, and are no longer relevant. I guess I could try to stress that at no point would I ever find my own children special, but... I don't find anyone special; the concept is alien to me. I'm not sure how to explain this, so I'm rambling.
No it was an off-colored joke at the end of the week. I've stopped taking an amphetamine-like because it was getting me high BEFORE it started fixing my attention system (honestly I think I was just high, and so behaving like an over-stimulated person: look for something to occupy myself); I don't get much done during the week, and take an Adrafinil on the weekends (modafinil plus liver damage). It's ... striking. It doesn't feel like anything, but I can focus. I'm actually getting things done now. I got my house clean... some. I'm trying to get a modafinil prescription so I can put my life back together and I'm worried the psychiatrist will just roll his eyes and try to hand me amphetamines.
Anyway you can't fix homelessness and hunger and such by magically giving out jobs or anything. 40% of the U.S. workforce changes over during the year; everyone is hiring because almost half their workforce leaves through the year, and because population expansion and more money in the monetary system to match creates higher demand and a need for new positions--but also more people looking for jobs. There aren't jobs for everyone.
A UBI like a Universal Social Security is the only way to really stabilize the bottom end of the workforce. Even when it's inadequate (e.g. you're a lower-middle-classer and you have bills to pay, and the benefit is less than your monthly bills), it slows down the drain on your finances (e.g. you have $1,100/month of obligations? $600/month means you can go more than twice as long on savings), and so acts as an effiient unemployment bridge. The poorer you are, the more strongly it remediates your unemployment and underemployment finances; the less-poor you are, the more likely you are to be able to save.
The plan was always to sweep up that lower portion--people without enough food and with no housing--into a market that faces little risk and can thus effectively supply housing and food and basic needs to people with nothing. It does a lot more than just that.
First that the goods would cost more, and second that people would buy less
The price of Chinese labor is $3.50/hr. American minimum wage was $7.25/hr but is going up.
As I pointed out elsewhere, the price of a product is not dependent on its cost, cost only dictate whether the product can be produced at a profit
The profit margin of businesses is a rough average 10%. The rest of all costs are wages. If the cost of labor increases by just 10%, prices MUST GO UP or there is no profit and all businesses fold.
Because more jobs means that more people have money to spend.
There's a certain amount of money to be spent. You can't just create those jobs (trickle-down economics); somebody ALREADY HAS TO BE BUYING to bring those jobs into existence. The total income in a year is going to be the same; you're asserting that it will just jump up, that people with $50,000 to spend will now spend $70,000. Where are they all getting the extra $20,000? And don't say "more people have jobs" or "they'll get paid more"; for them to get paid, ANOTHER CONSUMER MUST SPEND ADDITIONAL MONEY, meaning that consumer must already have additional income.