No, I'm not talking about the VM crashing because of badly-written code; I'm talking about the VM allowing you to make it do things.
It's possible to write Perl code that opens a program and runs it, or opens a file and writes it. It's *also* possible to write a perl program which does nothing of the sort, except--oops--it does, because of the way perl's language features work, and all the unexpected shit that can happen when using perl. The VM doesn't crash; it operates *exactly* as designed, and that design is arcane, confusing, and ridiculous.
Again: real-world examples include users getting lists into perl, purpose-written libraries (e.g. CGI, DBI) validating that user input as safe, and then that user input telling Perl to execute programs or to make function calls in which the user has supplied the value of parameters specifically *not* supplied by the user.
So your "Maliciously-written code" includes Bugzilla, CGI, and DBI.
Yes, but the Slashdot crowd has (correctly) observed the RIAA was dragged kicking and screaming into an age where you don't even keep your own digital music, DRM or not; we're all Pandora-Spotify-Netflix now. On the opposite end, Amazon does sell non-DRM MP3s and allows you to download Prime Video titles you purchase (up to four downloads) for playback through standard hardware, right along with streaming.
Every business model relies on producing something; and every production relies on immature technology. Power production? We'll have orbital space stations one day; we'll have a dyson sphere one day; we'll create some kind of contained black hole to siphon power out of the quantum ether and generate infinite energy forever; we'll miniaturize the black hole magic thingamabob to fit in the molecular implants in your skull that let you telepathically control your cell phone. Beyond imaginative sci-fi machines, we'll figure out how to make Twinkies without investing so many human hours.
I keep citing this: 1870 America had 90% of its labor force working on farms, and the average family had a small farm and hunted to supplement their purchased food. In 1900, it was 28%, and we spent 43% of our income on food. In 1950, it was 12% and we spent 30% of our income on food. Today it's under 2% and we spend 11% of our income on food. You'll notice 90% of America's labor force isn't farming; at some point it became 2/3 manufacture, and today it's largely IT services, business services, food services, retail, medical, and shipping. We have all these things because we spend less of our money paying the wages of people who make things we already had, because we have fewer people doing that work; we spend the other money buying other stuff, and so the distribution of work moves according to the demand market.
You're going to lay off employees. It's going to happen. You'll find a way to make routers more cheaply, or to deliver hamburgers without as many employees, and the cost of those things won't keep up with inflation anymore--not after you fire half of everyone involved in making them. Consumers will shift their spending elsewhere and have more stuff. In between, some people are going to find themselves put out of a job for a while.
Which goes back to the original point: John Deere is making a 5% profit margin, meaning they can't lower their total prices by 5%. That means a $15,000 tractor is a $14,250 tractor if the business takes zero profit--and any bad year means JD goes out of business. If they're competing with an $11,000 tractor, they can either lose customers and lay off their staff--in which case everyone will cry foul at John Deere's thousands of lay-offs and accuse them of trying to bleed profits--or they can cheat and try to hide the costs. Personally, I'd prefer shipping those American jobs off to Japan or China, getting the cheaper tractors, lowering the cost of food, and letting the economy catch up in 2-3 years and create new, different American jobs, thus making us all richer in the end; but John Deere wants to keep operating as a business, and so is going to play tricks to hide costs.
The only greedy behavior here is John Deere not liquidating and sending all its customers to buy from a Chinese tractor maker.
That's poor business theory. It stems from an invalid hypothesis that businesses have an obligation to maximize the benefit to all stakeholders (shareholders, employees, and customers), and that the benefit to all stakeholders can't be known, and thus a business should maximize profits because stakeholders will cause a reduction in profits if the business is doing something against the interests of its customers or employees.
That said, I also don't believe the tax issues are important (the impact is minor and non-critical), and regulations to control that behavior are nearly-impossible and incur high amounts of risk. Modifying the current tax system to do ridiculous shit like fix the welfare system, eliminate all homelessness and hunger, and increase employment to 118% (causing an economic crisis by labor shortage, which we fix by making everyone 20% poorer by redefining Full Time as a 32 hour work week, restoring 5.6% unemployment) is doable without closing loopholes, eliminating deductions, or taxing the highest income earners more than 40% (they pay 39.6% now). A lot of people want to also roll in some kind of regulations to make people/businesses/whatever "pay their fair share", which introduces risk, which means they may find new ways around your taxes or they may move out in a way that reduces your tax revenue, breaking these new tax systems entirely and fucking up your national finances.
As you say, something is legal or it's not; but when both the legal and illegal actions have the same outcome, we have a bad law. It needs to be abolished or altered such that either the legal actions which circumvent its purpose are now illegal *or* the law better-defines its purpose such that the illegal actions no longer need to be illegal.
Something tells me you have no idea what kinds of things perl is vulnerable to. Things like the user feeding a list as input, which causes all variables in a function call to shift down, thus giving the user control over variables which aren't user-input variables. The remote execution bug from CGI was from Perl::CGI validating an HTTP post with a foo=ARGV and a file upload named foo as foo being a file (because foo is ALSO a file), then passing foo (which should be an open file stream) to a while() loop, which caused perl to open the value of the first query parameter (which was "bar=|/bin/ifconfig"). Fortunately. Perl::CGI has been replaced by more-advanced systems which let the client pass a query parameter as a hash or an array of hashes or a hash of files or a hash of lists or a list of hashes, so even Perl's strict, secure mode, which knows not to trust that kind of user input in certain function calls, can be bypassed, because Perl considers hashes secure, since user input can't be passed into hashes.
Network-exposed perl code is just waiting for anal rape, because the security model of the language is non-existent and the things that break the language are *extremely* hard to identify. It's ripe for dancing around user input validation, which is exactly what most security vulnerabilities in Perl applications have been: the programmer wrote code specifically to protect against bad user input, and someone passed user input that causes Perl to successfully validate bad input by somehow coupling it to good input. This is how people figured out how to turn off all that SQL magic quoting in Perl::DBI and carry out SQL injections on applications which properly protected against SQL injections. It's why finding half a dozen ways to get admin access to anyone's Bugzilla is a weekend project for a bored teenager.
Tell that to the RIAA. Maybe their business wouldn't have become obsolete when digital streaming became a thing; people could just keep spending $10 on CDs instead of $8 on iTunes downloads.
I'm pretty sure you realize that most people mean "makes more" to be absolute dollars.
I thought we were discussing farming as a business rather than an occupation. Farms employ lots of agricultural workers and pay wages as well.
In any case, the same rules apply: if the farmers had ginormous mega-farms and owned 20 million acres instead of 120, their profit margins would indicate more money. Likewise, whether it's one giant farming conglomerate or tens of thousands of independent farms, higher farm profit margins directly translates to higher food prices, more poor families struggling to survive, and fewer American jobs.
A lot of economics discussions in this vein laud competition as helping to pull those prices down (by pulling down profit margins). You've found the other side of it: two farmers are each making less revenue and, at the same profit margin, less absolute profit. Many people will cry about this unfairness as a knee-jerk reaction, the poor small businesses not making tons of money; any amount of thought on the subject will make this situation obvious, and people will typically ignore this as plain common-sense (which is itself error-prone, but correct in this case). South Park just made fun of people for hating on Wal-Mart (which I used to do, a lot; I still have my grievances, just not about the phenomena of chain stores in general).
You've also missed something: under 2% of the labor is on the farm; the rest of that 11% food cost comes from chemists laboring to make fertilizer and pesticide, oil supply chains laboring to drill and refine oil, and... of course... machine companies making the farm equipment. The farms are small operations, and John Deere is a part of many of those farms--and its profits reflect those farm operations as if they were one mega-farm. This is not unlike how you work for some company making massive amounts of toasters or notebooks and serving millions of customers, and you only make like $65,000, while the company has hundreds of millions in revenue and ten million in profits: you're working with thousands of coworkers who are also making ~$65,000, and the company is supplying structure and the machines and logistics to produce and sell these things.
In other words: maybe John Deere's revenues (and absolute profits--5% of a lot is still more than 5% of a little) are so damn big because John Deere is a part of *every* farm, and the farmer's revenues (and profits) are so small because they reflect a tiny amount of production compared to John Deere.
In either case, large or small, the profit margins per year and the fluctuations thereof represent business effectiveness and risk. You can be a $250 billion business and still need a 17% profit margin because many years are spent at a -23% profit margin. Microsoft has those kinds of huge swings; John Deere doesn't; and farmers themselves are woefully unstable due to, of all things, competition and the weather. Honestly if a farmer has a big loss on soy but does good on corn, he might not be able to get soy prices up in the market against other farmers who did well on soy; and yet an oversupply of corn means he and other farmers will cut their prices to the bone, decreasing their profits from corn. Result? No profiting from corn to make up for the net loss on soy, and a 4% net loss this year thanks to too much rain in your region.
That kind of supply chain instability is what originally made command economies (socialism) attractive: Marx had this weird evangelist concept of human good will, but the powerful governments were more concerned about destructive feedback loops creating new famines. Government command over the supply chain would centralize the logistics and eliminate that problem entirely, except for one little problem: it doesn't fucking work. That's not universal; single-payer systems and municipal utilities are often more-optimal solutions than private utilities, and sponsoring a monopoly of private utilities is often m
I've seen farm tractors at $25,000 used, and big combines that go for over $100,000. There are also small tractors around $5,000 (new) suitable for commercial farms on the order of a few acres. There are also $800 tractors you use to mow your lawn twice a month on a 2/3 acre plot.
You don't need a quarter-million-dollar single piece of equipment for a 50-acre farm. You literally don't need it; the duty cycle is much lower, and the equipment won't be put under the same kind of stress as tending 400 or 1,000 acres.
yeah, because I'd much rather have 10% net profit margin on a million annually than 5% net profit margin on 100 million annually.
It depends. If your revenue stream is unstable (see: Adidas), you have an average ~4% profit margin, with as much as 7% profits in some years and 11% losses in others over a 5-year span.
On the other hand, a 10% profit on a million annually is only taking a million dollars from consumer pockets, leaving the other $99 million to go to other businesses, and thus other jobs. A 5% profit on 100 million is sending a larger portion of that income toward things like wages, which means a stronger economy due to more consumer buying power (price of goods more in line with the cost of goods; the amount you're paid is more in line with the amount the businesses charge for goods). That's not so much what the business wants as what the broad consumer base and population want.
People love percentages because they hide facts
As opposed to ignoring how much a company is or isn't profiting, and talking only about how much business they're getting? If a company starts with $1 million of revenue at 10% profit margin and ends with $100 million at 2% profit margin, their profits are sliding. Continue the growth trend in that way and you have a business that eventually fails.
Take American Express for instance. American Express had originally been able to hire 1 authorizer per 10,000 accounts. With the increase in account activity and in the amount of data you'd need to analyze per transaction to detect fraud, an authorizer was only able to handle 5,000 accounts eventually, and then 2,000. At some point, AmEx was projecting one new authorizer per three new accounts--credit card fees amounting to 1/3 of the authorizer's salary! Revenue might increase as they add tons of accounts, but so would expenses; the profit margin slims until it goes away, and the company collapses.
AmEx created the Authorizer's Assistant, an expert system which did most of the work and provided a complete report to an authorizer. This allowed scaling to many more accounts and much greater analysis. That is to say: rather than reducing the work by 70% and allowing the people to handle 70% more accounts, it reduced the work by 70% **and kept it from scaling nearly as fast with the addition of more accounts**. Suddenly they could handle 100 times as many accounts and only increase staff by a factor of 100. In that position, their revenue could increase in line with growth, with no increase nor decrease of profit margin.
So you can say some business expanded its revenues by 100% or 500% or 10,000%, and you're not saying anything about the business's actual ability to scale or to hold prices down. They could be gouging the customer something fierce, or they could be struggling to hold the bottom line. Their risks may become lower--they could go from a 3% fluctuation to a 1% fluctuation, allowing lower profit margins without threatening the business--or they could stay the same, or even increase, requiring a higher profit margin for the business to continue functioning.
Claiming revenues alone lets you claim a business "had $500 billion last year" without talking about how much of that went out to expenses (wages or other business services that eventually become profits and wages), which doesn't tell you how a business is operating.
It sounds smart; my grasp on the situation is... approximate. I'm probably more-correct on the manner of thinking that goes into the larger social reflexes (i.e. the concept that things like looming terrorism or pollution with murderous intent are believed by all these nutjobs on the basis of group hysteria rather than malicious politics), and less-correct on the specific details (to which my exposure has been thin). In emerging situations, I can mostly only repeat what I've heard (that's technically true of everything); the constants are refined and better-understood over the long term.
Yes. Come on, man, you know how the world works: if you aren't cheating, you aren't trying hard enough. That's the basis of human civilization. Animals have claws and teeth, and we have hands and bash things with rocks... until we figured out we can sharpen a stick and stab things from 18 feet away. Then we started just keeping them in fenced pens. Back-breaking farm work? Build a machine to do it; send 60% of the workforce out to build houses, fancy clothes, and computers. Shit is 200 miles away? Invent a better steel-making process (instead of 400 tonnes of iron from puddling, the hot-blast furnace could manufacture 80,000 tonnes of iron with the same labor) and make cars a lower-middle-class commodity good. 2,000 miles away? FLY THERE EVEN THOUGH YOUR SPECIES DOESN'T HAVE WINGS.
Competing with another restaurant? Hide the menu prices by paying ass-low wages and creating a culture of tipping, thus writing "$7.99" when your customer is really going to pay $10. Competing with car manufacturers? Convince the customer your car is not only $2,000 cheaper, but that it's even cheaper in the long run because they bought a $3,000 service plan and $2,000 warranty which will save them thousands in service over the next 10 years; only advertise the vehicle's base price.
the manufacturer will be forced to provide a good value for the money?
I'm not sure if I should call this one. Value isn't a real thing (I've been writing economic theory and REJECTED THE CONCEPT OF VALUE). *Valuation* is. The difference is that value is an innate property of a thing, while valuation is a property of a consumer (a person attributes the property of a value to a thing).
In the past, theories of value have suggested that objects intrinsically are worth the labor invested into them, or the labor they save a person over getting it himself, or the labor they save over his other labor if he doesn't have the object. Karl Marx theorized that technical progress makes us poorer, because a tractor made with half the labor time has half the value; this is ridiculous, because using half the labor time to make tractors means we can put the same people to work making other things, pay everyone the same wages, and suddenly tractors cost half as much and the other things they're making combine to cost the difference--same cost, more stuff, more wealth.
The cheapest you can charge for a product is the labor invested in the product. Any less and you go out of business. When businesses source from other businesses, they have to roll the profit of each business into the final product; and, of course, if two businesses supply steel at a 20% profit margin, GM can bid for a 100-million-tonne contract, and they can squeeze their margins down to 1%, and they can get contracts with the coal maker on contingency of the GM contract (you need coal for coke for steel) and squeeze the profit margin on coal down, and everyone makes a hundred million dollars a year of profit which they would otherwise flatly not have. In this whole stack of bulk purchasing, the aggregate profits get squeezed out; and that squeezing can *never* take the price charged by any given business below the cost of the wages involved in all of its products (both the transformation it does and the product it sources from).
So I'm not sure if I can call you on "provide a good value for the money", because I don't think you used the term "value" in an economic sense, even though I think value isn't a real thing and doesn't describe what economists want it to describe (honestly, I don't think they know what they're trying to describe, and just want to fill in for a concept they can't identify, understand, or explain). I still want to point out that a product's basic price has nothing to do with how much you or anyone else thinks it's worth; they can only "provide value" in as much as they can manufacture a product at a given price, and not below it. If you're willing to pay more and the market can't compensate for t
You'll cry no tears today; you'll probably be back to attack them for being heartless, greedy bastards for laying off thousands of workers to pad their bottom line--never mind that their business model became obsolete and food became cheaper.
Shortly after this started, someone reported that GM, Chrysler, and Ford performed substantially-similar to Volkswagen, with the caveat that Volkswagen was more efficient: everyone's vehicles are tuned to hit emissions standards in testing conditions, and quickly increase their output as you leave those standards; Volkswagen happened to enter a different mode of behavior under testing conditions, instead of playing the wink-and-nudge.
Someone accused everyone involved of protectionism, trying to push foreign companies out in order to strengthen local manufacture. I think it's more that people are more forgiving of villains who twirl their moustaches at you while you interact, as they feel they've gotten a fairer deal when someone violates the spirit of the rules than if the terms were hammered out and the other guy just bluntly cheated. Same outcome, but one of these pisses people off.
Those of us who are more level-headed (read: introverts) tend to miss the group-think and not care as much about the other guy being a dick (because of a lack of investment in squishy feelings of companionship), and so are a little less misgiving about the guy who brazenly cheated, and a little more concerned with the rules being set up such that cheating and playing by the rules are essentially the same thing, since this implies that the rules don't work (why have them at all if breaking them doesn't actually change anything?).
So my understanding is there is a larger problem here in which everyone gets to cheat, but most people do so in an acceptable way, and this is all a bunch of feel-good measure being taken to quell people's personal feelings of unfairness, and has actually no material impact on the world. That is to say: all the stuff about polluting your air and defrauding consumers is bullshit by way of literally every alternative being both acceptable and functionally identical.
Business taxes are a huge red herring. Most businesses pay the largest amount of their money out in wages; even when they don't, they end up paying much of their money out to other businesses, which pay wages, and so forth. These wages aren't just tax revenue; they pay money directly to workers, who then go on to buy things, creating demand and other jobs.
Most businesses keep about 5-10% profits. Most businesses pay over a third of their income as wages, and often over 50% in the service industry. In the United States, in 2013, $7,229 billion of the reported income was wages, while $2,100 was business net profits; the standard deduction, considering the filing status distribution (33.6% non-family, 122.46 million households), amounted to $1,255 billion. That means $3,400 billion of business profits before deductions (out of a total $11,884 in wage and business income; I've excluded income from welfare programs) and $8,484 of individual income.
In short: People are talking a lot about 40% of $2,100 or $840 billion while businesses are pouring ten times that into wages. In the United States, you pay a lot of payroll tax on those wages (more money you, the consumer, must pony up to pay for the cost of labor for a job, but don't see in your paycheck). In any case, it's all getting moved down into the economy (money doesn't trickle down; wages are the bottom, even if that bottom is huge), and people are mad that a business is operating in their back yard, hiring their citizens, paying those citizens money, producing a thing consumed by those citizens, enriching their economy, and not exuding even more blood from that particular stone. Cupertino--a single city--gets over $2 billion of money flowing into it from all over the world because of Apple's wages paid to its 13,400 HQ employees, and they want to rake Apple for another hundred million or so in taxes they think Apple owes them.
It's pure greed on everyone's part. People also believe in this trickle-down economics idea where businesses have infinite money and pay wages, and don't understand that the money they pay at the till is what pays the guy bagging your groceries.
Deere Co's profits are like 5%. They'd just shift those revenues to tractor prices, which might push farmers toward buying someone else's tractor. That's the big fear they have: good American business goes to China or Japan, and the American company folds.
Mind you, if the actual cost goes down, then the cost of food goes down. This affects the food's price (it goes down--eventually), which means that monetary difference goes into the consumer's pocket, creating demand for some other good, thus creating replacement jobs. This can take months or years to turn over, hence why we have welfare: those specific people might get a job next week, but the 0.1% uptick in unemployment means someone, somewhere, still doesn't have a job until this resolves itself. In the end, we all wind up richer (cheaper food means we can buy other stuff with our money), so this is a good thing, if you can keep it stable (again: welfare; also if you eliminate too many jobs in too short a time, no amount of welfare will save you from economic collapse).
Of course, when that happens, John Deere will have fewer customers, thus less demand. It'll cut staff and deliver a round of 17,000 lay-offs, and then everyone will cry about the business laying off good, working men in the pursuit of profit, even though those working men aren't needed anymore, because everyone is a Marxist at heart.
Revenue is a bullshit number used for politics. Revenue excludes all expenses, and so doubling your revenue while operating on slimmer margins and drawing more profits lets you report hundreds of billions of dollars more money when you're managing to *lose* profits and going into deeper debt.
Deere and Company's gross profits are about 30% consistently; their net profits (after all expenses) are around 5%. Farmers shoot for a 20% net profit margin, but usually take in around 10%. Cliff Bar Company has revenue about $230 million, but no word on profits. Mozilla corporation has about a 3% net profit margin.
So the farmers have bigger profits than Deere or Monsanto (7.57%). Maybe the little guy is the evil greedy bastard?
Mules are for livestock farms. They get along well enough with the goats and sheep, and they get pissed off at invasion by coyotes and go and kick the shit out of them.
It would still reduce revenues. The tractor repairs are priced in money, and that income would go away.
This is like tipping and delivery fees. Abolishing tipping and delivery fees wouldn't reduce profits for pizza delivery shops and sit-down restaurants; instead, they would run directly into the red, unable to continue business due to the cost of wages paying their drivers $20/hr and their waitstaff above minimum wage unless they ROLL THOSE PRICES INTO THE MENU. To be clear: that $12 pizza has a $2 delivery fee and a $3 tip attached; that means instead of $11.99, the menu should say $16.99, and how many people will go straight to Dominos instead and call in an $11.99 pizza to avoid your $5 higher price tag?
So no, John Deere isn't going to go unprofitable, and it isn't getting all of its revenues from leasing; it will lose the revenues of tractor repair and have to price its $15,000 tractors at $18,000, at which point some farmers will look at their $2 million fleet upgrade and seem awfully interested in those $16,000 Japanese tractors....
So hard to encounter by accident that a five-line perl script allowed remote execution because someone used while(<file>) on a variable that they checked was a file, which turned out to also be a string, which turned out to contain the value "ARGV".
That perl script was directly sourced from the perl documentation.
When poor people are given money, they will spend it, which would boost the economy. A lot of people would start new businesses if they had the ability to do so without fear of failing and going hungry, which would create jobs and improve the economy. Both these would increase tax revenue, meaning it would be as if the program cost that much less.
It doesn't actually work that way. Money isn't wealth; money is backed by the productive output of labor. Every dollar spent goes to buy a product, and becomes the income of an individual (wages) or a business (net profits). More money without more production means inflation; more production without more money means deflation.
The gain from a basic income is the efficiency gain in reducing risks and reducing wage:income ratio.
Risk comes with unstable markets, unstable employment, and unstable incomes. To rent apartments, for example, you need to recover the loss in empty units, in tenant evictions, and in tenant damage. As income levels decrease, the stability of an income falls: resilience to financial emergencies, fluctuating hours in part-time jobs, loss of part-time work, and loss of unemployment. That means more evictions and empty units, increasing the cost per square foot charged for apartments marketed to these levels. Below a certain income level, the costs are more than the tenant can pay, so certain sized apartments marketed to certain levels of income just don't exist.
This is loss: evictions and empty units are worthless; they produce nothing, they do nothing to enrich society, yet they carry a cost. Evictions require labor for legal action, for moving action (removing all your stuff), and so forth; they also frequently destroy a person's possessions, as the evicted has nowhere to go, and thus said possessions can only be reclaimed by expending new labor to make more. An empty unit requires upkeep and consumes heat and electricity, yet provides no one a home; and it cannot be rented out for free, lest other tenants pay to cover the costs--the wealth represented by housing is the support of labor which produces other things.
As for wages, your employer pays your wage, your benefits, and payroll taxes. You might make $50,000/year, but your employer is paying $56,000/year; likewise, you only take home $42,000/year. For every dollar your employer pays to have you, you as a consumer receive 75 cents; yet, as a consumer, you must pay the wages incurred by the time invested in making any product you purchase. Narrow this gap and the consumer can purchase more.
These are mechanism. If you just handed out money, or just took more money from one place and sent it to be spent in another, you wouldn't increase labor time and, thus, produced output; you would only either exhaust the economy (make everyone spend until they're in deep, deep debt) or create inflation.
My main fear is the same as that of many others -- that too many people would simply choose not to work. This one problem could be the doom of the whole idea.
Modern welfare sharply reduces your wealth and devalues employment if you seek employment.
When I was on unemployment, I took in the equivalent of $10.25/hr. Would that Fedex offered me $10.50/hr, I'd have laughed them off; 40 hours a week for only $0.25/hr? I can stay home and get checks from the Government for near as much.
Any form of UBI has the advantage of continuing to provide income as you move into employment. The decision between $X and not working vs $Y and working has to compare ($Y-$X) to the effort of working; whereas the decision between $X and not working vs. $X+$Y and working only has to consider the value proposition of $Y in comparison to the effort of working.
This is bolstered by security: if you take a job when receiving welfare benefits and then lose it, you risk being denied further benefits. If you take a job under a UBI system, your benefits never stop. The individual doesn
To be fair, a hell of a lot of poor people live on budgets that middle-class "they'll spend all their money on drugs!" people can't understand. Ghettos are full of people living on $20,000/year or less with 2 adults and multiple children in the household--SOMEHOW. Bear in mind that only 1/4 of all HUD-qualified families get assistance; the other 75% go on a waiting list forever. Many of these households receive food stamp benefits; most receive only the benefit of a $6,000 standard deduction giving them $14,000 or less of taxable income, meaning they only pay about $130/month in Federal taxes plus $100/month in OASDI.
A study of those making the various arguments has shown that the people arguing individual poor choice are making objectively-worse financial decisions than those individuals they're criticizing.
No, what the hell would that do? It would annoy rich people and do nothing more than spread money into the economy--unbacked money. There isn't enough demand for employment to supply even a 6% increase in employment; and only income is sustainable, just like raiding grain silos to try to feed your population isn't sustainable (eventually you have to produce enough food to refill those silos).
Want to do the numbers? I'll even put a tl;dr summary at the end.
In 2013, the cost was $1.678 trillion, with $1.276 trillion spent on Federal programs.
In 2013, retail for apartment rent in low-income areas spanned from $0.62 cents per square foot to $1.10, with a general median around $1/sqft. This included samples spanning from California and Washington to New York state (mostly Western New York, but also some of the ghettos of Manhattan, near the big city centers) and Baltimore.
Renting an apartment to someone with a low income poses business risk: empty units and tenant evictions are expensive, and low-income individuals are prone to lose their unemployment income or face reductions in working hours at their part-time jobs; these risks are offset by raising the rental pricing, which makes renting unaffordable to these income levels, and thus excludes the market. A stable, guaranteed income eliminates this risk and the associated cost-of-risk, allowing lower rental prices with the same profit margin (about 33%, typically, although I didn't account for anything but retail).
To that end, I estimate the housing cost in 2013 at $1.33/sqft, being $1/sqft plus a 33% risk reserve (i.e. I might be wrong about $1/sqft; I'm less likely to be wrong about $1.10/sqft; I'm approximately 100% guaranteed to be above the threshold at $1.33/sqft). Budget: $300/month, single-person, 244sqft. That gives a 6x9 bedroom, 6x10 main room, a bathroom (shower stall with corner sink integrated, plus a toilet outside the stall), and a small kitchen (I've lived in an apartment where the kitchen was ~6 feet wide, with only a 3 foot wide floor space). That can be shaved a bit at the edges (it's 255sqft), or fit as-is, or widened, to fit to budget.
Utilities for a space of that size range around $30. I know because I've heated a 700sqft apartment for $56/month utilities (gas and electric), and it had poor insulation. We may need to mandate better insulation standards for micro-units; the cost to insulate well when you're already doing demolition and construction (to subdivide for the new market) is cheap. Good R-23 stone wool insulation only costs like $50 for the whole apartment's 16 foot back wall; $100 if you have to do one of the side walls, and $200 if you have to do the side walls and ceiling. In-wall foam sealing would cost about $50 per apartment. A normal 1 bedroom costs around $58,000 to build; these smaller ones would cost around $25,000, including the replicated cost of stove, sink, and bathroom, so this additional cost is not onerous if implemented during already-planned remodeling. Such insulation stabilizes utility costs, thus decreasing risk of tenants coming up short.
Moving on.
I've run estimates on food as recently as April, 2016, and gotten as low as $25/month for 2000kcal/day 30day spans, including lots of beans, rice, frozen mixed vegetables, the occasional rotisserie chicken, bread, eggs, and so forth. This actually spans a fair variety of food (pancake vs bread, rice dishes, and so forth combine a surprisingly-consistent set of ingredients), although nothing luxurious.
My original estimate was $100/month per person in 2016, because of extreme risk if the food budget deviates (which can happen *easily*). While that remains valid, I also overestimated personal care ($35 in my original budget) and clothing (another $35). It turns out tooth paste and soap are pretty cheap, less than $5/month per person. To that end, I used a combined Food-Clothing-Personal Care budget of $170/month in my models: personal care is cheap and clothing is elastic; food is inelastic and volatile.
That all left about $56/month in the 17% figure of the time--another risk reserve. That gave a total of $546/month per single adult. Total inflation in the following two years was 4.24%, and per-capita GDP increase was 6.24%; that means the inflation-adjusted equivalent would be $569 in 2015, and the *actual* income per adult would be $580/month. That makes sense bec
Eh it's a LW interview, of course he's going to talk up Perl 6 and should get props based on that assumption; no use bashing--wait, what?
Somehow PHP has managed to convince a horde of programmers that if their programs are flakey or hard to maintain, it must somehow be the programmer's fault.
Followed by "Perl is objectively a broken language"...
"Doctor, it hurts when I do this!"
"Well then, don't do that."
PHP sucks because PHP is broken, and PHP has conned programmers into thinking it's their fault and not the fault of their shitty language. If you found certain language features lead to really shitty perl, it must be your fault and not the language's fault.
Slashdot Mirror
They primarily sell the kind of trashy sandals worn by people who leave the house in sweatpants.
You mean like the left-wing liberals in Texas what boarded themselves up in a Federal building with AR-15s?
No, I'm not talking about the VM crashing because of badly-written code; I'm talking about the VM allowing you to make it do things.
It's possible to write Perl code that opens a program and runs it, or opens a file and writes it. It's *also* possible to write a perl program which does nothing of the sort, except--oops--it does, because of the way perl's language features work, and all the unexpected shit that can happen when using perl. The VM doesn't crash; it operates *exactly* as designed, and that design is arcane, confusing, and ridiculous.
Again: real-world examples include users getting lists into perl, purpose-written libraries (e.g. CGI, DBI) validating that user input as safe, and then that user input telling Perl to execute programs or to make function calls in which the user has supplied the value of parameters specifically *not* supplied by the user.
So your "Maliciously-written code" includes Bugzilla, CGI, and DBI.
Yes, but the Slashdot crowd has (correctly) observed the RIAA was dragged kicking and screaming into an age where you don't even keep your own digital music, DRM or not; we're all Pandora-Spotify-Netflix now. On the opposite end, Amazon does sell non-DRM MP3s and allows you to download Prime Video titles you purchase (up to four downloads) for playback through standard hardware, right along with streaming.
Every business model relies on producing something; and every production relies on immature technology. Power production? We'll have orbital space stations one day; we'll have a dyson sphere one day; we'll create some kind of contained black hole to siphon power out of the quantum ether and generate infinite energy forever; we'll miniaturize the black hole magic thingamabob to fit in the molecular implants in your skull that let you telepathically control your cell phone. Beyond imaginative sci-fi machines, we'll figure out how to make Twinkies without investing so many human hours.
I keep citing this: 1870 America had 90% of its labor force working on farms, and the average family had a small farm and hunted to supplement their purchased food. In 1900, it was 28%, and we spent 43% of our income on food. In 1950, it was 12% and we spent 30% of our income on food. Today it's under 2% and we spend 11% of our income on food. You'll notice 90% of America's labor force isn't farming; at some point it became 2/3 manufacture, and today it's largely IT services, business services, food services, retail, medical, and shipping. We have all these things because we spend less of our money paying the wages of people who make things we already had, because we have fewer people doing that work; we spend the other money buying other stuff, and so the distribution of work moves according to the demand market.
You're going to lay off employees. It's going to happen. You'll find a way to make routers more cheaply, or to deliver hamburgers without as many employees, and the cost of those things won't keep up with inflation anymore--not after you fire half of everyone involved in making them. Consumers will shift their spending elsewhere and have more stuff. In between, some people are going to find themselves put out of a job for a while.
Which goes back to the original point: John Deere is making a 5% profit margin, meaning they can't lower their total prices by 5%. That means a $15,000 tractor is a $14,250 tractor if the business takes zero profit--and any bad year means JD goes out of business. If they're competing with an $11,000 tractor, they can either lose customers and lay off their staff--in which case everyone will cry foul at John Deere's thousands of lay-offs and accuse them of trying to bleed profits--or they can cheat and try to hide the costs. Personally, I'd prefer shipping those American jobs off to Japan or China, getting the cheaper tractors, lowering the cost of food, and letting the economy catch up in 2-3 years and create new, different American jobs, thus making us all richer in the end; but John Deere wants to keep operating as a business, and so is going to play tricks to hide costs.
The only greedy behavior here is John Deere not liquidating and sending all its customers to buy from a Chinese tractor maker.
That's poor business theory. It stems from an invalid hypothesis that businesses have an obligation to maximize the benefit to all stakeholders (shareholders, employees, and customers), and that the benefit to all stakeholders can't be known, and thus a business should maximize profits because stakeholders will cause a reduction in profits if the business is doing something against the interests of its customers or employees.
That said, I also don't believe the tax issues are important (the impact is minor and non-critical), and regulations to control that behavior are nearly-impossible and incur high amounts of risk. Modifying the current tax system to do ridiculous shit like fix the welfare system, eliminate all homelessness and hunger, and increase employment to 118% (causing an economic crisis by labor shortage, which we fix by making everyone 20% poorer by redefining Full Time as a 32 hour work week, restoring 5.6% unemployment) is doable without closing loopholes, eliminating deductions, or taxing the highest income earners more than 40% (they pay 39.6% now). A lot of people want to also roll in some kind of regulations to make people/businesses/whatever "pay their fair share", which introduces risk, which means they may find new ways around your taxes or they may move out in a way that reduces your tax revenue, breaking these new tax systems entirely and fucking up your national finances.
As you say, something is legal or it's not; but when both the legal and illegal actions have the same outcome, we have a bad law. It needs to be abolished or altered such that either the legal actions which circumvent its purpose are now illegal *or* the law better-defines its purpose such that the illegal actions no longer need to be illegal.
You mean like Bugzilla? Or did you mean DBI?
Something tells me you have no idea what kinds of things perl is vulnerable to. Things like the user feeding a list as input, which causes all variables in a function call to shift down, thus giving the user control over variables which aren't user-input variables. The remote execution bug from CGI was from Perl::CGI validating an HTTP post with a foo=ARGV and a file upload named foo as foo being a file (because foo is ALSO a file), then passing foo (which should be an open file stream) to a while() loop, which caused perl to open the value of the first query parameter (which was "bar=|/bin/ifconfig"). Fortunately. Perl::CGI has been replaced by more-advanced systems which let the client pass a query parameter as a hash or an array of hashes or a hash of files or a hash of lists or a list of hashes, so even Perl's strict, secure mode, which knows not to trust that kind of user input in certain function calls, can be bypassed, because Perl considers hashes secure, since user input can't be passed into hashes.
Network-exposed perl code is just waiting for anal rape, because the security model of the language is non-existent and the things that break the language are *extremely* hard to identify. It's ripe for dancing around user input validation, which is exactly what most security vulnerabilities in Perl applications have been: the programmer wrote code specifically to protect against bad user input, and someone passed user input that causes Perl to successfully validate bad input by somehow coupling it to good input. This is how people figured out how to turn off all that SQL magic quoting in Perl::DBI and carry out SQL injections on applications which properly protected against SQL injections. It's why finding half a dozen ways to get admin access to anyone's Bugzilla is a weekend project for a bored teenager.
Tell that to the RIAA. Maybe their business wouldn't have become obsolete when digital streaming became a thing; people could just keep spending $10 on CDs instead of $8 on iTunes downloads.
I'm pretty sure you realize that most people mean "makes more" to be absolute dollars.
I thought we were discussing farming as a business rather than an occupation. Farms employ lots of agricultural workers and pay wages as well.
In any case, the same rules apply: if the farmers had ginormous mega-farms and owned 20 million acres instead of 120, their profit margins would indicate more money. Likewise, whether it's one giant farming conglomerate or tens of thousands of independent farms, higher farm profit margins directly translates to higher food prices, more poor families struggling to survive, and fewer American jobs.
A lot of economics discussions in this vein laud competition as helping to pull those prices down (by pulling down profit margins). You've found the other side of it: two farmers are each making less revenue and, at the same profit margin, less absolute profit. Many people will cry about this unfairness as a knee-jerk reaction, the poor small businesses not making tons of money; any amount of thought on the subject will make this situation obvious, and people will typically ignore this as plain common-sense (which is itself error-prone, but correct in this case). South Park just made fun of people for hating on Wal-Mart (which I used to do, a lot; I still have my grievances, just not about the phenomena of chain stores in general).
You've also missed something: under 2% of the labor is on the farm; the rest of that 11% food cost comes from chemists laboring to make fertilizer and pesticide, oil supply chains laboring to drill and refine oil, and... of course... machine companies making the farm equipment. The farms are small operations, and John Deere is a part of many of those farms--and its profits reflect those farm operations as if they were one mega-farm. This is not unlike how you work for some company making massive amounts of toasters or notebooks and serving millions of customers, and you only make like $65,000, while the company has hundreds of millions in revenue and ten million in profits: you're working with thousands of coworkers who are also making ~$65,000, and the company is supplying structure and the machines and logistics to produce and sell these things.
In other words: maybe John Deere's revenues (and absolute profits--5% of a lot is still more than 5% of a little) are so damn big because John Deere is a part of *every* farm, and the farmer's revenues (and profits) are so small because they reflect a tiny amount of production compared to John Deere.
In either case, large or small, the profit margins per year and the fluctuations thereof represent business effectiveness and risk. You can be a $250 billion business and still need a 17% profit margin because many years are spent at a -23% profit margin. Microsoft has those kinds of huge swings; John Deere doesn't; and farmers themselves are woefully unstable due to, of all things, competition and the weather. Honestly if a farmer has a big loss on soy but does good on corn, he might not be able to get soy prices up in the market against other farmers who did well on soy; and yet an oversupply of corn means he and other farmers will cut their prices to the bone, decreasing their profits from corn. Result? No profiting from corn to make up for the net loss on soy, and a 4% net loss this year thanks to too much rain in your region.
That kind of supply chain instability is what originally made command economies (socialism) attractive: Marx had this weird evangelist concept of human good will, but the powerful governments were more concerned about destructive feedback loops creating new famines. Government command over the supply chain would centralize the logistics and eliminate that problem entirely, except for one little problem: it doesn't fucking work. That's not universal; single-payer systems and municipal utilities are often more-optimal solutions than private utilities, and sponsoring a monopoly of private utilities is often m
I've seen farm tractors at $25,000 used, and big combines that go for over $100,000. There are also small tractors around $5,000 (new) suitable for commercial farms on the order of a few acres. There are also $800 tractors you use to mow your lawn twice a month on a 2/3 acre plot.
You don't need a quarter-million-dollar single piece of equipment for a 50-acre farm. You literally don't need it; the duty cycle is much lower, and the equipment won't be put under the same kind of stress as tending 400 or 1,000 acres.
yeah, because I'd much rather have 10% net profit margin on a million annually than 5% net profit margin on 100 million annually.
It depends. If your revenue stream is unstable (see: Adidas), you have an average ~4% profit margin, with as much as 7% profits in some years and 11% losses in others over a 5-year span.
On the other hand, a 10% profit on a million annually is only taking a million dollars from consumer pockets, leaving the other $99 million to go to other businesses, and thus other jobs. A 5% profit on 100 million is sending a larger portion of that income toward things like wages, which means a stronger economy due to more consumer buying power (price of goods more in line with the cost of goods; the amount you're paid is more in line with the amount the businesses charge for goods). That's not so much what the business wants as what the broad consumer base and population want.
People love percentages because they hide facts
As opposed to ignoring how much a company is or isn't profiting, and talking only about how much business they're getting? If a company starts with $1 million of revenue at 10% profit margin and ends with $100 million at 2% profit margin, their profits are sliding. Continue the growth trend in that way and you have a business that eventually fails.
Take American Express for instance. American Express had originally been able to hire 1 authorizer per 10,000 accounts. With the increase in account activity and in the amount of data you'd need to analyze per transaction to detect fraud, an authorizer was only able to handle 5,000 accounts eventually, and then 2,000. At some point, AmEx was projecting one new authorizer per three new accounts--credit card fees amounting to 1/3 of the authorizer's salary! Revenue might increase as they add tons of accounts, but so would expenses; the profit margin slims until it goes away, and the company collapses.
AmEx created the Authorizer's Assistant, an expert system which did most of the work and provided a complete report to an authorizer. This allowed scaling to many more accounts and much greater analysis. That is to say: rather than reducing the work by 70% and allowing the people to handle 70% more accounts, it reduced the work by 70% **and kept it from scaling nearly as fast with the addition of more accounts**. Suddenly they could handle 100 times as many accounts and only increase staff by a factor of 100. In that position, their revenue could increase in line with growth, with no increase nor decrease of profit margin.
So you can say some business expanded its revenues by 100% or 500% or 10,000%, and you're not saying anything about the business's actual ability to scale or to hold prices down. They could be gouging the customer something fierce, or they could be struggling to hold the bottom line. Their risks may become lower--they could go from a 3% fluctuation to a 1% fluctuation, allowing lower profit margins without threatening the business--or they could stay the same, or even increase, requiring a higher profit margin for the business to continue functioning.
Claiming revenues alone lets you claim a business "had $500 billion last year" without talking about how much of that went out to expenses (wages or other business services that eventually become profits and wages), which doesn't tell you how a business is operating.
It sounds smart; my grasp on the situation is ... approximate. I'm probably more-correct on the manner of thinking that goes into the larger social reflexes (i.e. the concept that things like looming terrorism or pollution with murderous intent are believed by all these nutjobs on the basis of group hysteria rather than malicious politics), and less-correct on the specific details (to which my exposure has been thin). In emerging situations, I can mostly only repeat what I've heard (that's technically true of everything); the constants are refined and better-understood over the long term.
Still, sounding smart is a thing.
Yes. Come on, man, you know how the world works: if you aren't cheating, you aren't trying hard enough. That's the basis of human civilization. Animals have claws and teeth, and we have hands and bash things with rocks... until we figured out we can sharpen a stick and stab things from 18 feet away. Then we started just keeping them in fenced pens. Back-breaking farm work? Build a machine to do it; send 60% of the workforce out to build houses, fancy clothes, and computers. Shit is 200 miles away? Invent a better steel-making process (instead of 400 tonnes of iron from puddling, the hot-blast furnace could manufacture 80,000 tonnes of iron with the same labor) and make cars a lower-middle-class commodity good. 2,000 miles away? FLY THERE EVEN THOUGH YOUR SPECIES DOESN'T HAVE WINGS.
Competing with another restaurant? Hide the menu prices by paying ass-low wages and creating a culture of tipping, thus writing "$7.99" when your customer is really going to pay $10. Competing with car manufacturers? Convince the customer your car is not only $2,000 cheaper, but that it's even cheaper in the long run because they bought a $3,000 service plan and $2,000 warranty which will save them thousands in service over the next 10 years; only advertise the vehicle's base price.
the manufacturer will be forced to provide a good value for the money?
I'm not sure if I should call this one. Value isn't a real thing (I've been writing economic theory and REJECTED THE CONCEPT OF VALUE). *Valuation* is. The difference is that value is an innate property of a thing, while valuation is a property of a consumer (a person attributes the property of a value to a thing).
In the past, theories of value have suggested that objects intrinsically are worth the labor invested into them, or the labor they save a person over getting it himself, or the labor they save over his other labor if he doesn't have the object. Karl Marx theorized that technical progress makes us poorer, because a tractor made with half the labor time has half the value; this is ridiculous, because using half the labor time to make tractors means we can put the same people to work making other things, pay everyone the same wages, and suddenly tractors cost half as much and the other things they're making combine to cost the difference--same cost, more stuff, more wealth.
The cheapest you can charge for a product is the labor invested in the product. Any less and you go out of business. When businesses source from other businesses, they have to roll the profit of each business into the final product; and, of course, if two businesses supply steel at a 20% profit margin, GM can bid for a 100-million-tonne contract, and they can squeeze their margins down to 1%, and they can get contracts with the coal maker on contingency of the GM contract (you need coal for coke for steel) and squeeze the profit margin on coal down, and everyone makes a hundred million dollars a year of profit which they would otherwise flatly not have. In this whole stack of bulk purchasing, the aggregate profits get squeezed out; and that squeezing can *never* take the price charged by any given business below the cost of the wages involved in all of its products (both the transformation it does and the product it sources from).
So I'm not sure if I can call you on "provide a good value for the money", because I don't think you used the term "value" in an economic sense, even though I think value isn't a real thing and doesn't describe what economists want it to describe (honestly, I don't think they know what they're trying to describe, and just want to fill in for a concept they can't identify, understand, or explain). I still want to point out that a product's basic price has nothing to do with how much you or anyone else thinks it's worth; they can only "provide value" in as much as they can manufacture a product at a given price, and not below it. If you're willing to pay more and the market can't compensate for t
You'll cry no tears today; you'll probably be back to attack them for being heartless, greedy bastards for laying off thousands of workers to pad their bottom line--never mind that their business model became obsolete and food became cheaper.
Shortly after this started, someone reported that GM, Chrysler, and Ford performed substantially-similar to Volkswagen, with the caveat that Volkswagen was more efficient: everyone's vehicles are tuned to hit emissions standards in testing conditions, and quickly increase their output as you leave those standards; Volkswagen happened to enter a different mode of behavior under testing conditions, instead of playing the wink-and-nudge.
Someone accused everyone involved of protectionism, trying to push foreign companies out in order to strengthen local manufacture. I think it's more that people are more forgiving of villains who twirl their moustaches at you while you interact, as they feel they've gotten a fairer deal when someone violates the spirit of the rules than if the terms were hammered out and the other guy just bluntly cheated. Same outcome, but one of these pisses people off.
Those of us who are more level-headed (read: introverts) tend to miss the group-think and not care as much about the other guy being a dick (because of a lack of investment in squishy feelings of companionship), and so are a little less misgiving about the guy who brazenly cheated, and a little more concerned with the rules being set up such that cheating and playing by the rules are essentially the same thing, since this implies that the rules don't work (why have them at all if breaking them doesn't actually change anything?).
So my understanding is there is a larger problem here in which everyone gets to cheat, but most people do so in an acceptable way, and this is all a bunch of feel-good measure being taken to quell people's personal feelings of unfairness, and has actually no material impact on the world. That is to say: all the stuff about polluting your air and defrauding consumers is bullshit by way of literally every alternative being both acceptable and functionally identical.
Business taxes are a huge red herring. Most businesses pay the largest amount of their money out in wages; even when they don't, they end up paying much of their money out to other businesses, which pay wages, and so forth. These wages aren't just tax revenue; they pay money directly to workers, who then go on to buy things, creating demand and other jobs.
Most businesses keep about 5-10% profits. Most businesses pay over a third of their income as wages, and often over 50% in the service industry. In the United States, in 2013, $7,229 billion of the reported income was wages, while $2,100 was business net profits; the standard deduction, considering the filing status distribution (33.6% non-family, 122.46 million households), amounted to $1,255 billion. That means $3,400 billion of business profits before deductions (out of a total $11,884 in wage and business income; I've excluded income from welfare programs) and $8,484 of individual income.
In short: People are talking a lot about 40% of $2,100 or $840 billion while businesses are pouring ten times that into wages. In the United States, you pay a lot of payroll tax on those wages (more money you, the consumer, must pony up to pay for the cost of labor for a job, but don't see in your paycheck). In any case, it's all getting moved down into the economy (money doesn't trickle down; wages are the bottom, even if that bottom is huge), and people are mad that a business is operating in their back yard, hiring their citizens, paying those citizens money, producing a thing consumed by those citizens, enriching their economy, and not exuding even more blood from that particular stone. Cupertino--a single city--gets over $2 billion of money flowing into it from all over the world because of Apple's wages paid to its 13,400 HQ employees, and they want to rake Apple for another hundred million or so in taxes they think Apple owes them.
It's pure greed on everyone's part. People also believe in this trickle-down economics idea where businesses have infinite money and pay wages, and don't understand that the money they pay at the till is what pays the guy bagging your groceries.
Deere Co's profits are like 5%. They'd just shift those revenues to tractor prices, which might push farmers toward buying someone else's tractor. That's the big fear they have: good American business goes to China or Japan, and the American company folds.
Mind you, if the actual cost goes down, then the cost of food goes down. This affects the food's price (it goes down--eventually), which means that monetary difference goes into the consumer's pocket, creating demand for some other good, thus creating replacement jobs. This can take months or years to turn over, hence why we have welfare: those specific people might get a job next week, but the 0.1% uptick in unemployment means someone, somewhere, still doesn't have a job until this resolves itself. In the end, we all wind up richer (cheaper food means we can buy other stuff with our money), so this is a good thing, if you can keep it stable (again: welfare; also if you eliminate too many jobs in too short a time, no amount of welfare will save you from economic collapse).
Of course, when that happens, John Deere will have fewer customers, thus less demand. It'll cut staff and deliver a round of 17,000 lay-offs, and then everyone will cry about the business laying off good, working men in the pursuit of profit, even though those working men aren't needed anymore, because everyone is a Marxist at heart.
Revenue is a bullshit number used for politics. Revenue excludes all expenses, and so doubling your revenue while operating on slimmer margins and drawing more profits lets you report hundreds of billions of dollars more money when you're managing to *lose* profits and going into deeper debt.
Deere and Company's gross profits are about 30% consistently; their net profits (after all expenses) are around 5%. Farmers shoot for a 20% net profit margin, but usually take in around 10%. Cliff Bar Company has revenue about $230 million, but no word on profits. Mozilla corporation has about a 3% net profit margin.
So the farmers have bigger profits than Deere or Monsanto (7.57%). Maybe the little guy is the evil greedy bastard?
Mules are for livestock farms. They get along well enough with the goats and sheep, and they get pissed off at invasion by coyotes and go and kick the shit out of them.
It would still reduce revenues. The tractor repairs are priced in money, and that income would go away.
This is like tipping and delivery fees. Abolishing tipping and delivery fees wouldn't reduce profits for pizza delivery shops and sit-down restaurants; instead, they would run directly into the red, unable to continue business due to the cost of wages paying their drivers $20/hr and their waitstaff above minimum wage unless they ROLL THOSE PRICES INTO THE MENU. To be clear: that $12 pizza has a $2 delivery fee and a $3 tip attached; that means instead of $11.99, the menu should say $16.99, and how many people will go straight to Dominos instead and call in an $11.99 pizza to avoid your $5 higher price tag?
So no, John Deere isn't going to go unprofitable, and it isn't getting all of its revenues from leasing; it will lose the revenues of tractor repair and have to price its $15,000 tractors at $18,000, at which point some farmers will look at their $2 million fleet upgrade and seem awfully interested in those $16,000 Japanese tractors....
So hard to encounter by accident that a five-line perl script allowed remote execution because someone used while(<file>) on a variable that they checked was a file, which turned out to also be a string, which turned out to contain the value "ARGV".
That perl script was directly sourced from the perl documentation.
When poor people are given money, they will spend it, which would boost the economy. A lot of people would start new businesses if they had the ability to do so without fear of failing and going hungry, which would create jobs and improve the economy. Both these would increase tax revenue, meaning it would be as if the program cost that much less.
It doesn't actually work that way. Money isn't wealth; money is backed by the productive output of labor. Every dollar spent goes to buy a product, and becomes the income of an individual (wages) or a business (net profits). More money without more production means inflation; more production without more money means deflation.
The gain from a basic income is the efficiency gain in reducing risks and reducing wage:income ratio.
Risk comes with unstable markets, unstable employment, and unstable incomes. To rent apartments, for example, you need to recover the loss in empty units, in tenant evictions, and in tenant damage. As income levels decrease, the stability of an income falls: resilience to financial emergencies, fluctuating hours in part-time jobs, loss of part-time work, and loss of unemployment. That means more evictions and empty units, increasing the cost per square foot charged for apartments marketed to these levels. Below a certain income level, the costs are more than the tenant can pay, so certain sized apartments marketed to certain levels of income just don't exist.
This is loss: evictions and empty units are worthless; they produce nothing, they do nothing to enrich society, yet they carry a cost. Evictions require labor for legal action, for moving action (removing all your stuff), and so forth; they also frequently destroy a person's possessions, as the evicted has nowhere to go, and thus said possessions can only be reclaimed by expending new labor to make more. An empty unit requires upkeep and consumes heat and electricity, yet provides no one a home; and it cannot be rented out for free, lest other tenants pay to cover the costs--the wealth represented by housing is the support of labor which produces other things.
As for wages, your employer pays your wage, your benefits, and payroll taxes. You might make $50,000/year, but your employer is paying $56,000/year; likewise, you only take home $42,000/year. For every dollar your employer pays to have you, you as a consumer receive 75 cents; yet, as a consumer, you must pay the wages incurred by the time invested in making any product you purchase. Narrow this gap and the consumer can purchase more.
These are mechanism. If you just handed out money, or just took more money from one place and sent it to be spent in another, you wouldn't increase labor time and, thus, produced output; you would only either exhaust the economy (make everyone spend until they're in deep, deep debt) or create inflation.
My main fear is the same as that of many others -- that too many people would simply choose not to work. This one problem could be the doom of the whole idea.
Modern welfare sharply reduces your wealth and devalues employment if you seek employment.
When I was on unemployment, I took in the equivalent of $10.25/hr. Would that Fedex offered me $10.50/hr, I'd have laughed them off; 40 hours a week for only $0.25/hr? I can stay home and get checks from the Government for near as much.
Any form of UBI has the advantage of continuing to provide income as you move into employment. The decision between $X and not working vs $Y and working has to compare ($Y-$X) to the effort of working; whereas the decision between $X and not working vs. $X+$Y and working only has to consider the value proposition of $Y in comparison to the effort of working.
This is bolstered by security: if you take a job when receiving welfare benefits and then lose it, you risk being denied further benefits. If you take a job under a UBI system, your benefits never stop. The individual doesn
To be fair, a hell of a lot of poor people live on budgets that middle-class "they'll spend all their money on drugs!" people can't understand. Ghettos are full of people living on $20,000/year or less with 2 adults and multiple children in the household--SOMEHOW. Bear in mind that only 1/4 of all HUD-qualified families get assistance; the other 75% go on a waiting list forever. Many of these households receive food stamp benefits; most receive only the benefit of a $6,000 standard deduction giving them $14,000 or less of taxable income, meaning they only pay about $130/month in Federal taxes plus $100/month in OASDI.
A study of those making the various arguments has shown that the people arguing individual poor choice are making objectively-worse financial decisions than those individuals they're criticizing.
No, what the hell would that do? It would annoy rich people and do nothing more than spread money into the economy--unbacked money. There isn't enough demand for employment to supply even a 6% increase in employment; and only income is sustainable, just like raiding grain silos to try to feed your population isn't sustainable (eventually you have to produce enough food to refill those silos).
Want to do the numbers? I'll even put a tl;dr summary at the end.
In 2013, the cost was $1.678 trillion, with $1.276 trillion spent on Federal programs.
In 2013, retail for apartment rent in low-income areas spanned from $0.62 cents per square foot to $1.10, with a general median around $1/sqft. This included samples spanning from California and Washington to New York state (mostly Western New York, but also some of the ghettos of Manhattan, near the big city centers) and Baltimore.
Renting an apartment to someone with a low income poses business risk: empty units and tenant evictions are expensive, and low-income individuals are prone to lose their unemployment income or face reductions in working hours at their part-time jobs; these risks are offset by raising the rental pricing, which makes renting unaffordable to these income levels, and thus excludes the market. A stable, guaranteed income eliminates this risk and the associated cost-of-risk, allowing lower rental prices with the same profit margin (about 33%, typically, although I didn't account for anything but retail).
To that end, I estimate the housing cost in 2013 at $1.33/sqft, being $1/sqft plus a 33% risk reserve (i.e. I might be wrong about $1/sqft; I'm less likely to be wrong about $1.10/sqft; I'm approximately 100% guaranteed to be above the threshold at $1.33/sqft). Budget: $300/month, single-person, 244sqft. That gives a 6x9 bedroom, 6x10 main room, a bathroom (shower stall with corner sink integrated, plus a toilet outside the stall), and a small kitchen (I've lived in an apartment where the kitchen was ~6 feet wide, with only a 3 foot wide floor space). That can be shaved a bit at the edges (it's 255sqft), or fit as-is, or widened, to fit to budget.
Utilities for a space of that size range around $30. I know because I've heated a 700sqft apartment for $56/month utilities (gas and electric), and it had poor insulation. We may need to mandate better insulation standards for micro-units; the cost to insulate well when you're already doing demolition and construction (to subdivide for the new market) is cheap. Good R-23 stone wool insulation only costs like $50 for the whole apartment's 16 foot back wall; $100 if you have to do one of the side walls, and $200 if you have to do the side walls and ceiling. In-wall foam sealing would cost about $50 per apartment. A normal 1 bedroom costs around $58,000 to build; these smaller ones would cost around $25,000, including the replicated cost of stove, sink, and bathroom, so this additional cost is not onerous if implemented during already-planned remodeling. Such insulation stabilizes utility costs, thus decreasing risk of tenants coming up short.
Moving on.
I've run estimates on food as recently as April, 2016, and gotten as low as $25/month for 2000kcal/day 30day spans, including lots of beans, rice, frozen mixed vegetables, the occasional rotisserie chicken, bread, eggs, and so forth. This actually spans a fair variety of food (pancake vs bread, rice dishes, and so forth combine a surprisingly-consistent set of ingredients), although nothing luxurious.
My original estimate was $100/month per person in 2016, because of extreme risk if the food budget deviates (which can happen *easily*). While that remains valid, I also overestimated personal care ($35 in my original budget) and clothing (another $35). It turns out tooth paste and soap are pretty cheap, less than $5/month per person. To that end, I used a combined Food-Clothing-Personal Care budget of $170/month in my models: personal care is cheap and clothing is elastic; food is inelastic and volatile.
That all left about $56/month in the 17% figure of the time--another risk reserve. That gave a total of $546/month per single adult. Total inflation in the following two years was 4.24%, and per-capita GDP increase was 6.24%; that means the inflation-adjusted equivalent would be $569 in 2015, and the *actual* income per adult would be $580/month. That makes sense bec
Eh it's a LW interview, of course he's going to talk up Perl 6 and should get props based on that assumption; no use bashing--wait, what?
Somehow PHP has managed to convince a horde of programmers that if their programs are flakey or hard to maintain, it must somehow be the programmer's fault.
Followed by "Perl is objectively a broken language"...
"Doctor, it hurts when I do this!"
"Well then, don't do that."
PHP sucks because PHP is broken, and PHP has conned programmers into thinking it's their fault and not the fault of their shitty language. If you found certain language features lead to really shitty perl, it must be your fault and not the language's fault.