The big bogeyman is cancer, heart attacks, and all the other effects of cigarette poisoning. Irritation of the bronchial tubes in sensitive individuals can, in fact, cause asthma attacks; so can asbestos dust, but that's really not what anyone cares about with asbestos. If asbestos were bullshit, the same form statement ("asbestos has been shown to have zero health effects, aside from irritating the bronchial tubes") would apply, with the same implications.
To put it simply: second-hand smoke is sold as a toxic environmental factor poisoning healthy people and shortening their lives; it doesn't.
I don't much care if a president is having orgies and playing online as a cam girl, so long as she has good policies. It's kind of like drug testing: weed isn't my thing and we don't smoke up at work, but I'd hire a guy who smokes weed in a place where smoking weed is legal, so long as I have reason not to project any performance issues. If he has a good work history, seems well-adjusted, and interviews well, I have reason to believe his personal life isn't my business; and let's be honest: you can put in all the screens and filters and 6-day interview processes you want and still hire a crap candidate--or worse, you can get me.
The United States flat-income-tax rate would be 30% (29.97%, 2013). I picked an arbitrary rule about not having the top tax bracket more than 4/3 the ETR, because that's basically a low-risk proposition for any changes. There are financial arguments about attracting rich people to settle their taxable income here so we can leverage the financial position this provides, and a few other things; I'm most interested in macroeconomics and, while I can competently discuss the financial considerations relevant for an individual, a government, or an economy, I find long-term economic policy is best tuned to the macroeconomic concepts revolving around scarcity and technical progress--the things that actually make your nation richer.
So about that.
There's this philosophical war going on whereby one side takes a position and another side must take the exact opposite position; tangentially, there's also a deceptive political practice of picking an arbitrary middle position and claiming extremes are broken and thus any centrist stance is vastly-superior and optimal. All this means you have a bunch of people who want to tax 65% or 85% of the rich people's money (with no plan on how that's going to help, or what to do about everyone else); you have a bunch of people who want to give *enormous* tax cuts to the rich (talking about how their money will then magically trickle down); and you have a few opportunists whose main thrust is that each side is wrong because they're wrong.
I set my arbitrary bound the way I did because it gives me a good guide to make policy. I've got a policy on hand (this is unfinished and requires a *hell* of a lot of explanation) that greatly improves the financial position of low- and middle-class families while minimally impacting the high-income earners, reducing business income taxes, and sharply reducing payroll taxes. The two big impacts here are the reduced effective income taxes on the consumer class (more take-home, more buying power) and the reduced payroll taxes (your $20/hr wage costs your employer less, but doesn't pay you any less), both of which increase the consumer's ability to buy, thus stabilizing the job market and outright creating more jobs. I managed this without pulling big tax numbers up top.
Around median, there's a blunt $8,000-per-household increase in take-home pay. That represents some $400 billion per year, while the negative income impact on the top 0.1% is around $23 billion. The tax increase in the upper end comes from me trying to fix our currently-broken tax brackets: at $75k, a married couple is paying 31%, at $151k 34%, and at $230k they're paying 39.25%; then, suddenly, they drop to 33%. For a single individual, this is $37k/31%, $91k/34%, and then at $118k it drop to 28%. Those American adults who are 25-30 years old and not married? If they're not making minimum wage, their marginal tax rate is jacked up higher than what people making $7,200 paychecks every other Friday are paying!
So here's the point: I can actually control the excessive top-end taxes by knocking $23 billion out of the huge tax advantage, which would knock about $38 out of the middle-class American household's hands each month, coming off an $8,000 boost. That still means computer programmers making $85k salaries have around $17k more coming into their pockets; it just avoids suddenly grabbing $130,000 more taxes out of the hands of someone making $10,000,000 (which is just bad politics).
Where does that get us?
This policy's delta imposes no penalty on the rich; businesses end up paying lower taxes; payroll taxes decrease, meaning the cost of employing a human being is lower; the income taxes employees pay decreases, which means a lot of things (you can pay the same and they can buy more
Usually propylene glycol, if you've got the good stuff. Frequently acetylamides that break down into diacetylamides, which causes popcorn lung over long-term, extreme exposure. Aldehydes can also form into formaldehyde if you gunk up the mechanism and cause localized hot spots.
The stuff dissolves in air to a less-than-toxic (LC0) dose, and is known-harmless. The ingredients are often published, and almost always well-known. The amount of douchebaggery is readily measurable by how big and gaudy the vaping rod is, ranging from a discrete cigarette-like device to a fat, ornate miniature hookah; you can pick out the inverse by identifying who is smoking motherfucking dragons, since they're usually well-balanced individuals with improved judgment over the baseline population.
There is plenty of evidence to support negative-association reparative therapy to turn gays back into normal people, too; it just happens that the full body of scientific information suggests said evidence is faulty, insignificant, or anomalous.
Smoking does raise your risk factors for fatal disease dramatically, thus can be said to "kill". Science has consistently shown second-hand smoke has zero impact on anyone, aside from annoying people and irritating the bronchial passages. CO2 is a natural phenomena; the amount of CO2 we're pumping out in the given time frame is *not* a natural phenomena (in so much as human activity can be said to be not natural); and whether you believe the AGW line or the anti-AGW line, that distinction remains a cold, scientific fact, indisputable because it is a comparative mathematical relationship and not a whimsical conclusion drawn from data.
The premise was that jobs come from consumer buying power, not rich people sitting up on high throwing out wages to prop up an endless stream of failing businesses. The money floats to the top; it doesn't trickle down.
From that, you should recognize that there are a limited number of jobs at any given time. No amount of "retraining" will fix that; you're attempting a form of fairness in which we try to hurry up and fit the people who just lost their jobs into the now-available jobs (that only pop up when prices fall and consumers end up with more spending money) before someone who previously lost their job (or just graduated college) manages to steal that spot.
The rest was a discussion about how society's wealth grows by technical progress. I've been told this is Malthusian theory; I'm planning to read Malthus one day. Essentially, the reduction in costs means a reduction in cost-of-living (for a given standard-of-living), meaning there's a new set point of wages (N) that's *lower* than the prior set point of wages (P) such that any wage (w) where P >= w > N represents an increase in standard-of-living. In the real world, you must adjust those values for inflation (an increase in money greater than the increase in production). Thus you're able to hire more people, pay them less, and actually have them all living better-off.
In theory, this means you can raise the minimum wage more slowly than inflation, allowing more of the poorer people to have jobs while simultaneously increasing (and not decreasing) their standard-of-living more slowly than productivity gains. In practice, while that actually holds true, population expands, and continues to expand until it starts creating scarcity (that is, until 10% more population means >10% more labor needed to provide for them, thus the poor start getting poorer). A little of both actually happens, but it's far from the ideal; the optimal situation is also non-ideal.
Everyone wants to satisfy that little pain in their gut that makes them feel sorry for someone. There are millions of invisible someone-else's who we ignore in the process, because they haven't been named, we can't identify with them as anything more than an abstract concept, and so we don't honestly care. The result is we try to establish fairness by harming those someone-else's with impunity in order to stamp out our sad, sorry feelings, hurling unnamed children and hard-working family men into the street because they're not in the group of children and family men we've been made directly aware of.
In some tangential way, allowing the market to fix this particular problem--which only works because the turn-over of skilled workers and, especially, retirees and new college graduates is a hell of a lot bigger than the unemployed labor force--actually harms fewer people in total, because the cost that goes into retraining when you have other people ready to take up those new jobs first is removed from the economy's capability to support total jobs, meaning instead of some amount of food you're producing some amount of retraining, and somebody has to go hungry because they can't afford to eat. We're getting into complex interactions at this point--the kind of things you can identify as harmful (e.g. creating unnecessary things = waste production; training people for jobs we already have people trained for = expending labor to produce training which is not needed = waste), but don't trust anyone to give you a 1:1 graph of X causes Y because that's not happening.
The big, complex problems of the world aren't answered in a half a line of text.
You instead want everyone to be wage-slaves. You want women to go to work, work 40 hours, come home to a house which hasn't been cleaned, and do what? Spend their income on going out to dinner, hiring a maid, and daycare; or give up leisure time for their whole lives, spending married life slaving at the office only to come home and slave in the kitchen?
She who doth not work, nor shall she eat. Women have oppressed men for too long with their stay-at-home-and-be-provided-for behavior!
You're thinking one person, money comes out of nowhere, the world is a mystery. I'm thinking what keeps the world running such that a roof over your head, power, and food exist; for that matter, what makes food affordable?
There was a time when 90% of America's labor force worked on a farm. It was called 1870, and you bought food, hunted, and grew your own, because no normal, middle-class family could actually afford to feed their family. My mind boggles to imagine how this economy even functioned, considering the other 10% would have to provide clothes, build houses, and repair stage coaches; of course the woman stayed home and mended clothes so you rarely had to buy them, and hunters would sell furs and eat the damned raccoon to boot.
In 1950, the average, median-income household spent 30% of its income on food; 12% of our labor force was on the farm, supported by machine workers making tractors and diesel fuel. In 2013, that was 13% of our income and 2% of our labor force, supported by chemists making fertilizers and pesticides; and today it's as low as 11%. How many poor families do you think would be struggling if, today, they had to spend three times as much of their money on food?
And that's the rub: the upper-class IT worker has his IT job because he doesn't need to be a farmer for us to survive as a species; and he spends an obscenely-small amount of his income on food to boot. He decrees that it's so horrible he may one day lose his job and need to find a new one; and this dynamic is exactly how food, clothing, soap, running water, medical care, and computers all became things a middle-class family can afford, and how he got to be an IT worker.
Our descendants will have luxurious lifestyles we dream about, the kind of things a VP with a $10,000 direct deposit every other Friday gets to live up to today, on mediocre common jobs because somewhere, between now and then, a lot of people will lose their jobs, and they'll have to somehow make it to the end of the month or year or however long for the rest of us to take the money we're no longer spending on what they used to do and spend it on a new thing that requires a new job to produce it.
So if you want to back-project your concerns about labor and layoffs a few hundred years, we can live in an era where basic medical care isn't something you can expect to see, or even hear about in myths, because actual doctors are literally impossible. As for food on your table, the squirrels in your back yard will do.
It's a matter of people not understanding economics, at all. They want to keep paying huge amounts of money for $9,000 cell phones and $600/month service with no data and hardly an hour of talk so they don't have to fear being removed from their job to get those prices down. It's how Karl Marx wanted an economy run.
Seagate has its own manufactories too, doesn't it? They produce their own hard drives. Maybe they retooled and have better equipment that doesn't need as much babysitting.
I suppose a better statement would be: the middle 1/3 of society is not experiencing an increase of disposable income nearly on-par with that of the upper 1/3 of society.
It's more like the upper 10% (which is people over $142,000/year).
if all you want is clothing - absolutely you can shop at Wal-Mart and buy Hanes brand socks that last 25% as long as the same Hanes brand socks used to 20 years ago
Uh, those are spending shares. It's the amount people are actually spending. That means if they buy 10 times as many socks and spend 1/3 the money, those socks MUST COST 1/30 AS MUCH PER EACH.
housing costs per 1000sf have indeed declined, while sf of housing occupied per person has skyrocketed...
Yeah, people are living in big luxury homes now, pretty much.
to buy the same food you would buy from an ordinary grocery store in 1960, today you have to buy organic
I actively avoid organic food because of its unsustainable environmental practices and its higher level of toxicity. Modern farming is intensive, targeting high yield per land area, which reduces water lost to evaporation, fertilizer lost to run-off (pollutes streams and bays), and sheer volume of pesticide used; the pesticides and herbicides used are highly-targeted synthetic compounds, affecting a relatively narrow range of species, and breaking down in the environment rapidly. Organic farming takes more space, loses more water to evaporation, runs off more fertilizer (notably manure, which must be applied at the beginning of planting, in major excess due to continuous run-off), and uses high amounts of tank mixed pesticides like copper sulfate and pyrethrins--compounds with varying (often high) toxicity to humans and pets, long soil life, broad toxicity to a variety of insects and soil organisms, and heavier bioaccumulation. It's a fucking toxic waste nightmare.
Once the outer envelope is breached, water damage is much more devastating to modern construction than older styles. Kids can stick toys through the walls today much easier than they used to
Wood and drywall can last as long or longer than brick; brick is harder to repair. I had a gutter issue that ran water down my wall for a year, and the brick at the base was completely and utterly destroyed (it crumbled into thin plates of chipped stone); the vinyl siding and tyvek-covered wooden sheathing took no damage, except in an area below a window which leaked, where I simply cut out and replaced that wooden sheathing--and honestly, an epoxy reinforcement would have been sufficient.
The window needed a bead of silicone, which the builder forgot.
If we blockade China to bring manufacture jobs back to America, we'll lose critical infrastructure jobs. Logistics, retail, shipping... all the $3.50/hr labor we use in China becomes $7.25/hr labor in America, and we can't buy as much stuff. Half of those support jobs go away, because they scale directly to number of units moved and sold. It'd be 15-40 million jobs lost if we completely eliminated outsourced manufacture.
People talk about getting all these new jobs, but they don't think about where consumers are going to get the new money to pay the new wages.
The problem is jobs come from consumer buying power, which is increased by consumers having more left over after buying things. If, for example, half the people making food go away but half the food does *not* go away, two things happen: half the money you were spending on food can be spent elsewhere; and the amount of money someone needs to live in the same standard-of-living as the food workers (before they were unemployed) is decreased.
100% of the cost displaced by bumping those workers out of their jobs is enough to cover their wages, because that *is* their wages (including payroll taxes, benefits, and such). The story's bigger than that: when the market adjusts--which takes months or years, and involves things like inflation and universal competition--the theoretical settling on the same profit margin means there's actually more. If something costs $100 and has a 10% profit margin, that's a $110 of price; if you eliminate 50% of that cost and keep the same margin, that's $55. If you bumped out $50 worth of workers, you somehow reduced the end-target price by $55.
I should explain universal competition. Each consumer has a set amount of income as a TIME FUNCTION: you have so much income per year. There's a total amount of income every year, meaning paying some people more means paying other people less (as a proportion of the total income). All income represents all labor time and, ultimately, all productive output, so a proportion of income represents a concrete thing, and thus flatly more dollars doesn't create more buying power (more output per time does, and more laborers do). Put these together and you realize the money you spend on food can't be spent on Pokemon games, and thus Pokemon is in some way in competition with food.
So a number of things happens here. First, the costs go down, and workers end up unemployed. Prices can, but often don't, reflect this immediately; direct-competition on even terms (everyone having similar technology) tends to drive prices downward as businesses attempt to capture market share, while indirect-competition tends to just lag price inflation behind monetary inflation (i.e. the amount of money in total increases faster than the amount of productive output; the prices increase slightly slower than that). This, eventually, means the profit margins go back to where they were, and consumers have more money to spend.
With the prices lower, a consumer can buy into the same standard-of-living with lower wages. Because of this, that theoretical $55 freed up when eliminating workforce costs might not translate into new $50 jobs; their new wages might be slightly lower (wages not keeping up with inflation), while part of the productivity gains float upward (widening income gap). This makes progressive tax systems useful: as that income gap spreads, you can leave tax rates at the top income brackets alone, and reduce the tax rates at the bottom income brackets, thus improving the buying power of the consumer base (creating jobs). This has the great political advantage of not raising taxes (notably, this works well if you can attract rich people to tax shelter in your country).
The new jobs come from consumers spending that $55 on new goods, creating demand and a need for labor. If we assume the new jobs also drive a business at a 10% profit margin, $55 can only create $50 of jobs. Again, as above, the wage might be slightly less.
On a large scale, a slightly-lower wage slides between "improved standard of living by the productivity gain" and "no standard of living increase". In any data point between these, you *create* new jobs out of the proportion not lost to rich people getting richer. That is: there is now consumer buying power to support $50 of product costs; we only need to pay workers $48 for those new products for them to buy all the stuff they used to buy when we were paying them $50; that extra $2 can pile up to pay for slightly *more* jobs.
So yes, it sucks a little when you lose your job; and th
Well I, for one, don't want 50% of the hard drive cost to be covering the wage of idlers sitting around the office doing nothing. If you don't need them, why are you paying them? Scratch that; I'm the one buying the hard disk, so why am *I* paying them?
Wow your facebook page is entirely filled with attacks on other people for being stupid. Not constructive discussion of political issues; not analysis and planning; not compassion for anyone who is hurt by anything. Everything you post, literally, is an accusation that someone is stupid, someone deserved to die, someone deserved to have their guts ripped out by an angry animal, and so forth.
You *are* a vindictive bitch! Your life revolves around attacking other people! Ho-ly shit!
"From the the-internet-makes-stupid dept. Like we needed more proof?"
"From the not-going-to-cry-over-this-thug dept. Sterling was a registered sex offender with a long and violent criminal history. Lived like a thug - died like a thug. It was only a question of time."
"You were joking around, but the punch line did harm the world over. Suck it up, because nobody is going to trust you if you can't even respect your own referendum."
"And let that be a lesson to Quebec's separatist supporters. Be careful what you wish for... you might get it, and there's no take-backs."
"Posting images of text that is too small for the visually impaired is mean."
So much anger directed at everyone. Do you have a hormonal problem or something? The discussion here clearly shows you'll grasp at straws to enforce your superiority, not just to hold to an opinion, but to wield it as a tool to attack and, hopefully, injure other people. Your vicious, vitriolic behavior is pathological; seek mental health counseling.
Wow, you're really out of touch. In case you haven't noticed, the divorce rate is higher than ever, and more and more people are simply staying single. Sorry, but we can't return to the 50s ideal of a nuclear family with 2.3 kids and a stay-at-home housewife.
Actually, more people are eschewing marriage altogether, and staying single. The increase in this behavior--in single-adult households--is significantly larger than the decrease in the labor force participation rate. That would tend to drive the labor force participation rate upwards, as a single-adult household does not carry a non-working adult; and all the while, the remaining nuclear families of the United States have managed to reduce the number of working adults per household enough to not only offset, but exceed the sharp growth in single-adult households.
Divorce rate isn't representative because divorcees tend to want to be married, and will frequently remarry. Many *do* stay unmarried. The number of adults who are getting married later or not at all is increasing more quickly.
And do you really expect modern women to completely give up on going to college and having a career, especially now that women comprise 60% of the college population?
So rather than taking advantage of the dishwasher, the automatic vacuum cleaner, and the washing machine to increase the amount of leisure time, you expect modern women to take up a second household-career entirely as a hedge for a marriage exit plan? Are you sure your wench just doesn't do any real work and needs to pull her weight around here? I mean housework was a pretty hefty duty in the 50s, but now most of it does itself.
For that matter, families *with* children have the option of paying for daycare or having the woman be the nanny. Daycare is costly, but not as costly as a dedicated nanny. You expect modern women to work so they can pay other people to work and come home to nothing to show for all their work? A salary exceeds daycare, and is deducted by daycare: If you make $20/hr and half your salary goes to daycare costs, you're making $10/hr for that work compared to just staying home. Would you take that job for $10/hr, to come home to a house which still require what little housework remains in this era?
The average single-family house in 1950 was 983sqft, and the average household spent 28% of their income on it; in 2003, it was 2,300sqft, and the average household spent 33% of their income on it. Roughly half of that expense is the actual rent or mortgage.
Housing prices do not equate to housing cost. The same $120,000 house in a 14% interest rate market is a $350,000 house in a 4.25% market. That is to say: it's a $1,085/month 30-year mortgage. I'm working off what people actually spent per square foot of living space.
Even so, house prices did increase marginally in the past decade and a half. Falling interest rates don't just adjust the price of housing; people were conned into this idea that low interest rates mean a buyer's market, and the willingness to spend a greater proportion of the household income on the same amount of housing increased.
In case you're wondering, here is a chart for the United States median household spending shares. These represent the proportion of income spent on each good, with housing and utilities represented per 1,000 square feet of living space.
Rent-seeking behavior in an area doesn't reflect the national trend, and also isn't sustainable. We also have concepts such as gentrification (we throw all the poor people over there, and bring all the rich people over here, and then jack up all our prices for the same shit).
You're forgetting that it's the cost of running hot and cold lines to the washing machine, and the cost of running 220 and an exhaust vent to the dryer.
Uh, no I'm not. You think these are major, multi-thousand-dollar expenses? It costs about $50.
And now your 224 square foot apartment has appliances taking up almost 10% of the space - more than 10% if you include room to open the doors - which isn't optional
I hate to break it to you, but making this a few machines bigger is going to raise the cost of electrical run by ~$50, raise the cost of plumbing by ~$30, and add another $250 per machine. Yes, I said $250; typically a 12-apartment-block will have 3 of each washer and dryer, so $125 per apartment per ~10 years. I also included the $1.25 landlords charge to use those machines in the personal care budget, which, for weekly use by 12 apartments doing 2 loads per week, is $31,200 over 10 years, or $260 per apartment per year (two machines used per load, since there's a washer and a dryer).
And let's not forget a toilet and bathtub, and the bathroom sink so you can brush your teeth, shave, whatever, and enough room to get around in the bathroom so you can actually sit to do your business in private. And the hot water tank. That's another 50 square feet.
In my 244sqft, I included a 6x9 bedroom, a 10x9 main room, a kitchen, and a bathroom. The bathroom design I used includes a shower stall with a corner-mounted sink, as well as a toilet (outside the shower stall). That actually fits in a 6x6 area, meaning the wall between the bedroom and shower can be 6 inches thick. This leaves a 6x10 kitchen--my first apartment had a kitchen that size. The entire length of counter space will be between the kitchen and the main room, acting as a dining surface as well. I've planned several such spaces, and such microunits are actually in use today, albeit more targeted at luxury tenants (the 245sqft apartment model typically targets tenants who want to live in the same building as a shopping mall, and has a market place on the lower floors so you can go shopping without leaving your building; it oddly enough targets people who aren't home a hell of a lot, yet don't want to go out shopping a hell of a lot).
And the hot water tank. That's another 50 square feet
I can't help feeling you're trying to describe a house. My apartment had neither a hot water tank nor a furnace, yet it had hot water and a thermostat to control forced-air heating. We had building hot water with meters on each feed line to each apartment, and were charged for our individual gas and electric use. The building utility space was in an unfinished basement area not suitable for human habitation as a living space.
Lets not forget the space to open the front door - another 6 square feet.
There won't be furniture in front of the door. This isn't hard.
And the second door as a fire escape.
Every apartment I lived in used a window as the egress to a fire escape. Regardless, such a door would open outward.
And there are some people who, by law, you cannot exclude from having a dog. Where's the guide dog going to go? His food and water bowls? Say goodbye to more free space.
What HOMELESS PERSON WITH NO JOB AND NO INCOME can afford to keep and feed a guide dog?
Taking an existing building and fixing it up runs into problems with what's allowed to be modified on existing buildings. One stupid ass renovated more than 50% of the property without checking, and was forced to tear his house down to the ground, as anything over 50% had to both get a permit to build a new home, and to conform to the latest building codes.
The Citizen's Dividend is a capitalist solution and relies on facilitating a profit motive for markets to provide service while reducing state services and decision-making processes. I've analyzed the markets, determined that they are capable of providing an excess of modern welfare goals for less than the cost of welfare, and thus produced a plan which ensures the profit motive is there; the market will figure out how to make it affordable--I've checked, and it already has.
The upcoming automation thing will either occur over a stretched time span (humans stay competitive with machines) and create a technical renaissance (1950-1980 on that chart), or they'll occur compacted (rapid wage increases, increases in payroll taxes, sales and middle-class income tax increases, etc.) and cause a technical revolution (Industrial Revolution: 80% unemployment for 100 years, massive economic destruction).
A lot of people want a sort of Universal Basic Income in the mistaken belief that it will allow an 80%-unemployed society to continue functioning; that won't happen, because the sharp loss of employment stems in large part from a compounding loss of jobs (loss of jobs leads to loss of consumer demand, which leads to further loss of jobs), which means lost production and, ultimately, a loss of a tax base from which to direct production toward welfare.
A viable UBI can preempt a Technical Revolution by supplying a sort of Universal Social Security, migrating payroll taxes to income taxes, and providing a basic standard benefit by a non-wage income rather than minimum wage increases. This decreases the cost (thus risk) for businesses to wait for even-cheaper machines, ultimately staggering the replacement of workers over a wider span of time, giving the market time to adjust to the lowered production costs and the consumer time to use the increased buying power to buy more goods and create replacement jobs.
That process of production costs filtering to the consumer is guaranteed for mathematical reasons (goods can't universally keep even with inflation), and is demonstrated continuously--not just leading up to the 1980s, but even so much as in food falling from 13% of the middle-class income in 2000 to 11% today, and by computers and cell phones becoming ever-less-expensive, while jobs continue to normalize to the 4%-8% band and consumers spend larger and larger fractions of their income on an increase in luxury goods and healthcare. Jobs are lost by progress, and *eventually* replaced by the same number of jobs (proportional to the population) making more things in total.
That "eventually" is important: if jobs are lost in too-rapid succession, the unemployment rate piles up, and the consumer base shrinks. Recovery from this takes a lot longer, and a lot of people become very poor.
So, provided we can avoid the economic collapse of a technical revolution, we should see something similar to the sharp increase in purchasing power of the middle- and lower-classes over the long years of conversion onto a more automated service base. If we *don't* avoid that kind of economic collapse, we'll see severe damage that doesn't care about uneven income distribution among workers because the collapse came when most of the jobs went away.
Notice this isn't an argument to sit back and see who's right: I've described factors which influence whether we move into an era of great wealth or a failed state. As you must readily understand, we *need* to minimize the risk of an economic collapse in a period of accelerated technical progress.
You forgot that as the square footage goes down, the cost of installing washrooms and 220v wiring for the store, heating, etc., doesn't scale down evenly.
I didn't forget this; it was brought up in another discussion, notably focused around stoves and bathrooms. Average cost for a stove in a small apartment is ~$400; bathrooms are under $3,000. Installing washrooms and 220V wiring isn't appreciably more expensive, and *does* scale per unit, notably when you're dealing with people who are unemployed or underemployed and can do their laundry any time of any day of the week instead of flooding the washroom to capacity on Saturday.
and your cost per unit derived from scaling down a 700 ft apartment are also stupid because it costs more than $53,000 to build
The average cost of mid-range apartments is $64,500 to $86,000 per unit, currently, to build. To repurpose existing, underutilized space in slum areas, it's cheaper (not always by a lot--erecting a new building doesn't cost that much more than renovating an existing property). Even at $64,500, the scale-down is to $22,500; plus ~$5,000 of finishing because of the kitchen and bathroom, meaning $59,500 scaling to $20,750 plus $5,000, or $25,750.
Unless you want to build in some unincorporated area with no roads, no running water, no police or fire, and no insurance, your land is going to cost real money, and real annual taxes, and real expenses.
The above numbers are for mid-range areas; the actual retail rent costs I used were lower-income areas. That means I computed per-unit scale-down costs based on more expensive units.
Nobody is going to build apartments to rent out for $300.00, not even in slums.
I explained that there is a lot of risk renting to people who would live in such a unit, because they'd have transient income: they could easily lose their income. I suggested ELIMINATING THAT RISK.
To put this into perspective: the sum total of all rent profits, assuming they rented for $245/month instead of $300/month and using the 30% average profit margin, is $1,370,000,000. That's 1.37 billion dollars of profit in a $4.57 trillion market. That's only counting America's 1.56 million homeless.
If you assume the landlords charge $300/month for this shit, it's $2.4 billion of profits *per* *year* in a $5.6 billion revenue market. If you assume zero profit at the retail numbers and a $300/month rent, it's still a billion dollars of profits per year.
In Baltimore City alone, we have 2,756 census-counted homeless people. At $245/month and the industry-standard 30% margin, that's $3 million annual profits. Worst-case, it's $1.8 million annual profits. Note that in Baltimore, 30,000 people have unstable housing--they end up homeless on-and-off throughout the year. That's ten times the potential target market between the scale I mentioned (244sqft) and the scale available today (700sqft).
So there is a 100% guarantee that your tenants will not lose their income stream. There are neither stronger nor weaker guarantees about your tenants deciding to spend their money elsewhere.
There is a potential profit of millions of dollars per year just in one city; billions in the U.S.. That's demonstrated by the number of homeless people who would probably like to no longer be homeless, and would have the means to afford rent.
The cost of building an apartment does directly scale; builders costs are measured as cost per square foot in market computations, banking applications, and insurance adjustment. I've demonstrated adjusting these based on a conservative (read: overly-large) estimate of the fixed costs of bathrooms and kitchens, even though the kitchen and bathroom in the units described are both small compared to full-sized units.
You've made an argument from a good logical standpoint--that costs don't directly scale for a number of reasons--and simpl
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The big bogeyman is cancer, heart attacks, and all the other effects of cigarette poisoning. Irritation of the bronchial tubes in sensitive individuals can, in fact, cause asthma attacks; so can asbestos dust, but that's really not what anyone cares about with asbestos. If asbestos were bullshit, the same form statement ("asbestos has been shown to have zero health effects, aside from irritating the bronchial tubes") would apply, with the same implications.
To put it simply: second-hand smoke is sold as a toxic environmental factor poisoning healthy people and shortening their lives; it doesn't.
I don't much care if a president is having orgies and playing online as a cam girl, so long as she has good policies. It's kind of like drug testing: weed isn't my thing and we don't smoke up at work, but I'd hire a guy who smokes weed in a place where smoking weed is legal, so long as I have reason not to project any performance issues. If he has a good work history, seems well-adjusted, and interviews well, I have reason to believe his personal life isn't my business; and let's be honest: you can put in all the screens and filters and 6-day interview processes you want and still hire a crap candidate--or worse, you can get me.
what the fuck? Did you pass the citizenship test or something?
reduce taxes on the rich
The United States flat-income-tax rate would be 30% (29.97%, 2013). I picked an arbitrary rule about not having the top tax bracket more than 4/3 the ETR, because that's basically a low-risk proposition for any changes. There are financial arguments about attracting rich people to settle their taxable income here so we can leverage the financial position this provides, and a few other things; I'm most interested in macroeconomics and, while I can competently discuss the financial considerations relevant for an individual, a government, or an economy, I find long-term economic policy is best tuned to the macroeconomic concepts revolving around scarcity and technical progress--the things that actually make your nation richer.
So about that.
There's this philosophical war going on whereby one side takes a position and another side must take the exact opposite position; tangentially, there's also a deceptive political practice of picking an arbitrary middle position and claiming extremes are broken and thus any centrist stance is vastly-superior and optimal. All this means you have a bunch of people who want to tax 65% or 85% of the rich people's money (with no plan on how that's going to help, or what to do about everyone else); you have a bunch of people who want to give *enormous* tax cuts to the rich (talking about how their money will then magically trickle down); and you have a few opportunists whose main thrust is that each side is wrong because they're wrong.
I set my arbitrary bound the way I did because it gives me a good guide to make policy. I've got a policy on hand (this is unfinished and requires a *hell* of a lot of explanation) that greatly improves the financial position of low- and middle-class families while minimally impacting the high-income earners, reducing business income taxes, and sharply reducing payroll taxes. The two big impacts here are the reduced effective income taxes on the consumer class (more take-home, more buying power) and the reduced payroll taxes (your $20/hr wage costs your employer less, but doesn't pay you any less), both of which increase the consumer's ability to buy, thus stabilizing the job market and outright creating more jobs. I managed this without pulling big tax numbers up top.
Around median, there's a blunt $8,000-per-household increase in take-home pay. That represents some $400 billion per year, while the negative income impact on the top 0.1% is around $23 billion. The tax increase in the upper end comes from me trying to fix our currently-broken tax brackets: at $75k, a married couple is paying 31%, at $151k 34%, and at $230k they're paying 39.25%; then, suddenly, they drop to 33%. For a single individual, this is $37k/31%, $91k/34%, and then at $118k it drop to 28%. Those American adults who are 25-30 years old and not married? If they're not making minimum wage, their marginal tax rate is jacked up higher than what people making $7,200 paychecks every other Friday are paying!
So here's the point: I can actually control the excessive top-end taxes by knocking $23 billion out of the huge tax advantage, which would knock about $38 out of the middle-class American household's hands each month, coming off an $8,000 boost. That still means computer programmers making $85k salaries have around $17k more coming into their pockets; it just avoids suddenly grabbing $130,000 more taxes out of the hands of someone making $10,000,000 (which is just bad politics).
Where does that get us?
This policy's delta imposes no penalty on the rich; businesses end up paying lower taxes; payroll taxes decrease, meaning the cost of employing a human being is lower; the income taxes employees pay decreases, which means a lot of things (you can pay the same and they can buy more
Usually propylene glycol, if you've got the good stuff. Frequently acetylamides that break down into diacetylamides, which causes popcorn lung over long-term, extreme exposure. Aldehydes can also form into formaldehyde if you gunk up the mechanism and cause localized hot spots.
The stuff dissolves in air to a less-than-toxic (LC0) dose, and is known-harmless. The ingredients are often published, and almost always well-known. The amount of douchebaggery is readily measurable by how big and gaudy the vaping rod is, ranging from a discrete cigarette-like device to a fat, ornate miniature hookah; you can pick out the inverse by identifying who is smoking motherfucking dragons, since they're usually well-balanced individuals with improved judgment over the baseline population.
There is plenty of evidence to support negative-association reparative therapy to turn gays back into normal people, too; it just happens that the full body of scientific information suggests said evidence is faulty, insignificant, or anomalous.
Smoking does raise your risk factors for fatal disease dramatically, thus can be said to "kill". Science has consistently shown second-hand smoke has zero impact on anyone, aside from annoying people and irritating the bronchial passages. CO2 is a natural phenomena; the amount of CO2 we're pumping out in the given time frame is *not* a natural phenomena (in so much as human activity can be said to be not natural); and whether you believe the AGW line or the anti-AGW line, that distinction remains a cold, scientific fact, indisputable because it is a comparative mathematical relationship and not a whimsical conclusion drawn from data.
People are persistent in being imprecise.
The premise was that jobs come from consumer buying power, not rich people sitting up on high throwing out wages to prop up an endless stream of failing businesses. The money floats to the top; it doesn't trickle down.
From that, you should recognize that there are a limited number of jobs at any given time. No amount of "retraining" will fix that; you're attempting a form of fairness in which we try to hurry up and fit the people who just lost their jobs into the now-available jobs (that only pop up when prices fall and consumers end up with more spending money) before someone who previously lost their job (or just graduated college) manages to steal that spot.
The rest was a discussion about how society's wealth grows by technical progress. I've been told this is Malthusian theory; I'm planning to read Malthus one day. Essentially, the reduction in costs means a reduction in cost-of-living (for a given standard-of-living), meaning there's a new set point of wages (N) that's *lower* than the prior set point of wages (P) such that any wage (w) where P >= w > N represents an increase in standard-of-living. In the real world, you must adjust those values for inflation (an increase in money greater than the increase in production). Thus you're able to hire more people, pay them less, and actually have them all living better-off.
In theory, this means you can raise the minimum wage more slowly than inflation, allowing more of the poorer people to have jobs while simultaneously increasing (and not decreasing) their standard-of-living more slowly than productivity gains. In practice, while that actually holds true, population expands, and continues to expand until it starts creating scarcity (that is, until 10% more population means >10% more labor needed to provide for them, thus the poor start getting poorer). A little of both actually happens, but it's far from the ideal; the optimal situation is also non-ideal.
Everyone wants to satisfy that little pain in their gut that makes them feel sorry for someone. There are millions of invisible someone-else's who we ignore in the process, because they haven't been named, we can't identify with them as anything more than an abstract concept, and so we don't honestly care. The result is we try to establish fairness by harming those someone-else's with impunity in order to stamp out our sad, sorry feelings, hurling unnamed children and hard-working family men into the street because they're not in the group of children and family men we've been made directly aware of.
In some tangential way, allowing the market to fix this particular problem--which only works because the turn-over of skilled workers and, especially, retirees and new college graduates is a hell of a lot bigger than the unemployed labor force--actually harms fewer people in total, because the cost that goes into retraining when you have other people ready to take up those new jobs first is removed from the economy's capability to support total jobs, meaning instead of some amount of food you're producing some amount of retraining, and somebody has to go hungry because they can't afford to eat. We're getting into complex interactions at this point--the kind of things you can identify as harmful (e.g. creating unnecessary things = waste production; training people for jobs we already have people trained for = expending labor to produce training which is not needed = waste), but don't trust anyone to give you a 1:1 graph of X causes Y because that's not happening.
The big, complex problems of the world aren't answered in a half a line of text.
You instead want everyone to be wage-slaves. You want women to go to work, work 40 hours, come home to a house which hasn't been cleaned, and do what? Spend their income on going out to dinner, hiring a maid, and daycare; or give up leisure time for their whole lives, spending married life slaving at the office only to come home and slave in the kitchen?
She who doth not work, nor shall she eat. Women have oppressed men for too long with their stay-at-home-and-be-provided-for behavior!
You're thinking one person, money comes out of nowhere, the world is a mystery. I'm thinking what keeps the world running such that a roof over your head, power, and food exist; for that matter, what makes food affordable?
There was a time when 90% of America's labor force worked on a farm. It was called 1870, and you bought food, hunted, and grew your own, because no normal, middle-class family could actually afford to feed their family. My mind boggles to imagine how this economy even functioned, considering the other 10% would have to provide clothes, build houses, and repair stage coaches; of course the woman stayed home and mended clothes so you rarely had to buy them, and hunters would sell furs and eat the damned raccoon to boot.
In 1950, the average, median-income household spent 30% of its income on food; 12% of our labor force was on the farm, supported by machine workers making tractors and diesel fuel. In 2013, that was 13% of our income and 2% of our labor force, supported by chemists making fertilizers and pesticides; and today it's as low as 11%. How many poor families do you think would be struggling if, today, they had to spend three times as much of their money on food?
And that's the rub: the upper-class IT worker has his IT job because he doesn't need to be a farmer for us to survive as a species; and he spends an obscenely-small amount of his income on food to boot. He decrees that it's so horrible he may one day lose his job and need to find a new one; and this dynamic is exactly how food, clothing, soap, running water, medical care, and computers all became things a middle-class family can afford, and how he got to be an IT worker.
Our descendants will have luxurious lifestyles we dream about, the kind of things a VP with a $10,000 direct deposit every other Friday gets to live up to today, on mediocre common jobs because somewhere, between now and then, a lot of people will lose their jobs, and they'll have to somehow make it to the end of the month or year or however long for the rest of us to take the money we're no longer spending on what they used to do and spend it on a new thing that requires a new job to produce it.
So if you want to back-project your concerns about labor and layoffs a few hundred years, we can live in an era where basic medical care isn't something you can expect to see, or even hear about in myths, because actual doctors are literally impossible. As for food on your table, the squirrels in your back yard will do.
It's a matter of people not understanding economics, at all. They want to keep paying huge amounts of money for $9,000 cell phones and $600/month service with no data and hardly an hour of talk so they don't have to fear being removed from their job to get those prices down. It's how Karl Marx wanted an economy run.
Seagate has its own manufactories too, doesn't it? They produce their own hard drives. Maybe they retooled and have better equipment that doesn't need as much babysitting.
I suppose a better statement would be: the middle 1/3 of society is not experiencing an increase of disposable income nearly on-par with that of the upper 1/3 of society.
It's more like the upper 10% (which is people over $142,000/year).
if all you want is clothing - absolutely you can shop at Wal-Mart and buy Hanes brand socks that last 25% as long as the same Hanes brand socks used to 20 years ago
Uh, those are spending shares. It's the amount people are actually spending. That means if they buy 10 times as many socks and spend 1/3 the money, those socks MUST COST 1/30 AS MUCH PER EACH.
housing costs per 1000sf have indeed declined, while sf of housing occupied per person has skyrocketed...
Yeah, people are living in big luxury homes now, pretty much.
to buy the same food you would buy from an ordinary grocery store in 1960, today you have to buy organic
I actively avoid organic food because of its unsustainable environmental practices and its higher level of toxicity. Modern farming is intensive, targeting high yield per land area, which reduces water lost to evaporation, fertilizer lost to run-off (pollutes streams and bays), and sheer volume of pesticide used; the pesticides and herbicides used are highly-targeted synthetic compounds, affecting a relatively narrow range of species, and breaking down in the environment rapidly. Organic farming takes more space, loses more water to evaporation, runs off more fertilizer (notably manure, which must be applied at the beginning of planting, in major excess due to continuous run-off), and uses high amounts of tank mixed pesticides like copper sulfate and pyrethrins--compounds with varying (often high) toxicity to humans and pets, long soil life, broad toxicity to a variety of insects and soil organisms, and heavier bioaccumulation. It's a fucking toxic waste nightmare.
Once the outer envelope is breached, water damage is much more devastating to modern construction than older styles. Kids can stick toys through the walls today much easier than they used to
Wood and drywall can last as long or longer than brick; brick is harder to repair. I had a gutter issue that ran water down my wall for a year, and the brick at the base was completely and utterly destroyed (it crumbled into thin plates of chipped stone); the vinyl siding and tyvek-covered wooden sheathing took no damage, except in an area below a window which leaked, where I simply cut out and replaced that wooden sheathing--and honestly, an epoxy reinforcement would have been sufficient.
The window needed a bead of silicone, which the builder forgot.
Not enough wench-slaves then, need to pull their wench-weight and get real wench-jobs. Got it.
If we blockade China to bring manufacture jobs back to America, we'll lose critical infrastructure jobs. Logistics, retail, shipping... all the $3.50/hr labor we use in China becomes $7.25/hr labor in America, and we can't buy as much stuff. Half of those support jobs go away, because they scale directly to number of units moved and sold. It'd be 15-40 million jobs lost if we completely eliminated outsourced manufacture.
People talk about getting all these new jobs, but they don't think about where consumers are going to get the new money to pay the new wages.
The problem is jobs come from consumer buying power, which is increased by consumers having more left over after buying things. If, for example, half the people making food go away but half the food does *not* go away, two things happen: half the money you were spending on food can be spent elsewhere; and the amount of money someone needs to live in the same standard-of-living as the food workers (before they were unemployed) is decreased.
100% of the cost displaced by bumping those workers out of their jobs is enough to cover their wages, because that *is* their wages (including payroll taxes, benefits, and such). The story's bigger than that: when the market adjusts--which takes months or years, and involves things like inflation and universal competition--the theoretical settling on the same profit margin means there's actually more. If something costs $100 and has a 10% profit margin, that's a $110 of price; if you eliminate 50% of that cost and keep the same margin, that's $55. If you bumped out $50 worth of workers, you somehow reduced the end-target price by $55.
I should explain universal competition. Each consumer has a set amount of income as a TIME FUNCTION: you have so much income per year. There's a total amount of income every year, meaning paying some people more means paying other people less (as a proportion of the total income). All income represents all labor time and, ultimately, all productive output, so a proportion of income represents a concrete thing, and thus flatly more dollars doesn't create more buying power (more output per time does, and more laborers do). Put these together and you realize the money you spend on food can't be spent on Pokemon games, and thus Pokemon is in some way in competition with food.
So a number of things happens here. First, the costs go down, and workers end up unemployed. Prices can, but often don't, reflect this immediately; direct-competition on even terms (everyone having similar technology) tends to drive prices downward as businesses attempt to capture market share, while indirect-competition tends to just lag price inflation behind monetary inflation (i.e. the amount of money in total increases faster than the amount of productive output; the prices increase slightly slower than that). This, eventually, means the profit margins go back to where they were, and consumers have more money to spend.
With the prices lower, a consumer can buy into the same standard-of-living with lower wages. Because of this, that theoretical $55 freed up when eliminating workforce costs might not translate into new $50 jobs; their new wages might be slightly lower (wages not keeping up with inflation), while part of the productivity gains float upward (widening income gap). This makes progressive tax systems useful: as that income gap spreads, you can leave tax rates at the top income brackets alone, and reduce the tax rates at the bottom income brackets, thus improving the buying power of the consumer base (creating jobs). This has the great political advantage of not raising taxes (notably, this works well if you can attract rich people to tax shelter in your country).
The new jobs come from consumers spending that $55 on new goods, creating demand and a need for labor. If we assume the new jobs also drive a business at a 10% profit margin, $55 can only create $50 of jobs. Again, as above, the wage might be slightly less.
On a large scale, a slightly-lower wage slides between "improved standard of living by the productivity gain" and "no standard of living increase". In any data point between these, you *create* new jobs out of the proportion not lost to rich people getting richer. That is: there is now consumer buying power to support $50 of product costs; we only need to pay workers $48 for those new products for them to buy all the stuff they used to buy when we were paying them $50; that extra $2 can pile up to pay for slightly *more* jobs.
So yes, it sucks a little when you lose your job; and th
Well I, for one, don't want 50% of the hard drive cost to be covering the wage of idlers sitting around the office doing nothing. If you don't need them, why are you paying them? Scratch that; I'm the one buying the hard disk, so why am *I* paying them?
Wow your facebook page is entirely filled with attacks on other people for being stupid. Not constructive discussion of political issues; not analysis and planning; not compassion for anyone who is hurt by anything. Everything you post, literally, is an accusation that someone is stupid, someone deserved to die, someone deserved to have their guts ripped out by an angry animal, and so forth.
You *are* a vindictive bitch! Your life revolves around attacking other people! Ho-ly shit!
"From the the-internet-makes-stupid dept. Like we needed more proof?"
"From the not-going-to-cry-over-this-thug dept. Sterling was a registered sex offender with a long and violent criminal history. Lived like a thug - died like a thug. It was only a question of time."
"You were joking around, but the punch line did harm the world over. Suck it up, because nobody is going to trust you if you can't even respect your own referendum." "And let that be a lesson to Quebec's separatist supporters. Be careful what you wish for ... you might get it, and there's no take-backs."
"Posting images of text that is too small for the visually impaired is mean."
So much anger directed at everyone. Do you have a hormonal problem or something? The discussion here clearly shows you'll grasp at straws to enforce your superiority, not just to hold to an opinion, but to wield it as a tool to attack and, hopefully, injure other people. Your vicious, vitriolic behavior is pathological; seek mental health counseling.
Wow, you're really out of touch. In case you haven't noticed, the divorce rate is higher than ever, and more and more people are simply staying single. Sorry, but we can't return to the 50s ideal of a nuclear family with 2.3 kids and a stay-at-home housewife.
Actually, more people are eschewing marriage altogether, and staying single. The increase in this behavior--in single-adult households--is significantly larger than the decrease in the labor force participation rate. That would tend to drive the labor force participation rate upwards, as a single-adult household does not carry a non-working adult; and all the while, the remaining nuclear families of the United States have managed to reduce the number of working adults per household enough to not only offset, but exceed the sharp growth in single-adult households.
Divorce rate isn't representative because divorcees tend to want to be married, and will frequently remarry. Many *do* stay unmarried. The number of adults who are getting married later or not at all is increasing more quickly.
And do you really expect modern women to completely give up on going to college and having a career, especially now that women comprise 60% of the college population?
So rather than taking advantage of the dishwasher, the automatic vacuum cleaner, and the washing machine to increase the amount of leisure time, you expect modern women to take up a second household-career entirely as a hedge for a marriage exit plan? Are you sure your wench just doesn't do any real work and needs to pull her weight around here? I mean housework was a pretty hefty duty in the 50s, but now most of it does itself.
For that matter, families *with* children have the option of paying for daycare or having the woman be the nanny. Daycare is costly, but not as costly as a dedicated nanny. You expect modern women to work so they can pay other people to work and come home to nothing to show for all their work? A salary exceeds daycare, and is deducted by daycare: If you make $20/hr and half your salary goes to daycare costs, you're making $10/hr for that work compared to just staying home. Would you take that job for $10/hr, to come home to a house which still require what little housework remains in this era?
The average single-family house in 1950 was 983sqft, and the average household spent 28% of their income on it; in 2003, it was 2,300sqft, and the average household spent 33% of their income on it. Roughly half of that expense is the actual rent or mortgage.
Housing prices do not equate to housing cost. The same $120,000 house in a 14% interest rate market is a $350,000 house in a 4.25% market. That is to say: it's a $1,085/month 30-year mortgage. I'm working off what people actually spent per square foot of living space.
Even so, house prices did increase marginally in the past decade and a half. Falling interest rates don't just adjust the price of housing; people were conned into this idea that low interest rates mean a buyer's market, and the willingness to spend a greater proportion of the household income on the same amount of housing increased.
In case you're wondering, here is a chart for the United States median household spending shares. These represent the proportion of income spent on each good, with housing and utilities represented per 1,000 square feet of living space.
Rent-seeking behavior in an area doesn't reflect the national trend, and also isn't sustainable. We also have concepts such as gentrification (we throw all the poor people over there, and bring all the rich people over here, and then jack up all our prices for the same shit).
You're forgetting that it's the cost of running hot and cold lines to the washing machine, and the cost of running 220 and an exhaust vent to the dryer.
Uh, no I'm not. You think these are major, multi-thousand-dollar expenses? It costs about $50.
And now your 224 square foot apartment has appliances taking up almost 10% of the space - more than 10% if you include room to open the doors - which isn't optional
I hate to break it to you, but making this a few machines bigger is going to raise the cost of electrical run by ~$50, raise the cost of plumbing by ~$30, and add another $250 per machine. Yes, I said $250; typically a 12-apartment-block will have 3 of each washer and dryer, so $125 per apartment per ~10 years. I also included the $1.25 landlords charge to use those machines in the personal care budget, which, for weekly use by 12 apartments doing 2 loads per week, is $31,200 over 10 years, or $260 per apartment per year (two machines used per load, since there's a washer and a dryer).
And let's not forget a toilet and bathtub, and the bathroom sink so you can brush your teeth, shave, whatever, and enough room to get around in the bathroom so you can actually sit to do your business in private. And the hot water tank. That's another 50 square feet.
In my 244sqft, I included a 6x9 bedroom, a 10x9 main room, a kitchen, and a bathroom. The bathroom design I used includes a shower stall with a corner-mounted sink, as well as a toilet (outside the shower stall). That actually fits in a 6x6 area, meaning the wall between the bedroom and shower can be 6 inches thick. This leaves a 6x10 kitchen--my first apartment had a kitchen that size. The entire length of counter space will be between the kitchen and the main room, acting as a dining surface as well. I've planned several such spaces, and such microunits are actually in use today, albeit more targeted at luxury tenants (the 245sqft apartment model typically targets tenants who want to live in the same building as a shopping mall, and has a market place on the lower floors so you can go shopping without leaving your building; it oddly enough targets people who aren't home a hell of a lot, yet don't want to go out shopping a hell of a lot).
And the hot water tank. That's another 50 square feet
I can't help feeling you're trying to describe a house. My apartment had neither a hot water tank nor a furnace, yet it had hot water and a thermostat to control forced-air heating. We had building hot water with meters on each feed line to each apartment, and were charged for our individual gas and electric use. The building utility space was in an unfinished basement area not suitable for human habitation as a living space.
Lets not forget the space to open the front door - another 6 square feet.
There won't be furniture in front of the door. This isn't hard.
And the second door as a fire escape.
Every apartment I lived in used a window as the egress to a fire escape. Regardless, such a door would open outward.
And there are some people who, by law, you cannot exclude from having a dog. Where's the guide dog going to go? His food and water bowls? Say goodbye to more free space.
What HOMELESS PERSON WITH NO JOB AND NO INCOME can afford to keep and feed a guide dog?
Taking an existing building and fixing it up runs into problems with what's allowed to be modified on existing buildings. One stupid ass renovated more than 50% of the property without checking, and was forced to tear his house down to the ground, as anything over 50% had to both get a permit to build a new home, and to conform to the latest building codes.
Plus either way y
The Citizen's Dividend is a capitalist solution and relies on facilitating a profit motive for markets to provide service while reducing state services and decision-making processes. I've analyzed the markets, determined that they are capable of providing an excess of modern welfare goals for less than the cost of welfare, and thus produced a plan which ensures the profit motive is there; the market will figure out how to make it affordable--I've checked, and it already has.
If you are implying that 2/3 of the middle 1/3 of society is experiencing an increase in disposable income, sadly that is not the case.
It's slowed down since 1980, and still marches forward.
The upcoming automation thing will either occur over a stretched time span (humans stay competitive with machines) and create a technical renaissance (1950-1980 on that chart), or they'll occur compacted (rapid wage increases, increases in payroll taxes, sales and middle-class income tax increases, etc.) and cause a technical revolution (Industrial Revolution: 80% unemployment for 100 years, massive economic destruction).
A lot of people want a sort of Universal Basic Income in the mistaken belief that it will allow an 80%-unemployed society to continue functioning; that won't happen, because the sharp loss of employment stems in large part from a compounding loss of jobs (loss of jobs leads to loss of consumer demand, which leads to further loss of jobs), which means lost production and, ultimately, a loss of a tax base from which to direct production toward welfare.
A viable UBI can preempt a Technical Revolution by supplying a sort of Universal Social Security, migrating payroll taxes to income taxes, and providing a basic standard benefit by a non-wage income rather than minimum wage increases. This decreases the cost (thus risk) for businesses to wait for even-cheaper machines, ultimately staggering the replacement of workers over a wider span of time, giving the market time to adjust to the lowered production costs and the consumer time to use the increased buying power to buy more goods and create replacement jobs.
That process of production costs filtering to the consumer is guaranteed for mathematical reasons (goods can't universally keep even with inflation), and is demonstrated continuously--not just leading up to the 1980s, but even so much as in food falling from 13% of the middle-class income in 2000 to 11% today, and by computers and cell phones becoming ever-less-expensive, while jobs continue to normalize to the 4%-8% band and consumers spend larger and larger fractions of their income on an increase in luxury goods and healthcare. Jobs are lost by progress, and *eventually* replaced by the same number of jobs (proportional to the population) making more things in total.
That "eventually" is important: if jobs are lost in too-rapid succession, the unemployment rate piles up, and the consumer base shrinks. Recovery from this takes a lot longer, and a lot of people become very poor.
So, provided we can avoid the economic collapse of a technical revolution, we should see something similar to the sharp increase in purchasing power of the middle- and lower-classes over the long years of conversion onto a more automated service base. If we *don't* avoid that kind of economic collapse, we'll see severe damage that doesn't care about uneven income distribution among workers because the collapse came when most of the jobs went away.
Notice this isn't an argument to sit back and see who's right: I've described factors which influence whether we move into an era of great wealth or a failed state. As you must readily understand, we *need* to minimize the risk of an economic collapse in a period of accelerated technical progress.
Average broadway ticket price passed $100 in 2014. In 1996, the average was $36 and the highest price was $55.
With inflation, modern tickets are 83% more expensive... if one is affordable, two should be half as affordable, ne?
You forgot that as the square footage goes down, the cost of installing washrooms and 220v wiring for the store, heating, etc., doesn't scale down evenly.
I didn't forget this; it was brought up in another discussion, notably focused around stoves and bathrooms. Average cost for a stove in a small apartment is ~$400; bathrooms are under $3,000. Installing washrooms and 220V wiring isn't appreciably more expensive, and *does* scale per unit, notably when you're dealing with people who are unemployed or underemployed and can do their laundry any time of any day of the week instead of flooding the washroom to capacity on Saturday.
and your cost per unit derived from scaling down a 700 ft apartment are also stupid because it costs more than $53,000 to build
The average cost of mid-range apartments is $64,500 to $86,000 per unit, currently, to build. To repurpose existing, underutilized space in slum areas, it's cheaper (not always by a lot--erecting a new building doesn't cost that much more than renovating an existing property). Even at $64,500, the scale-down is to $22,500; plus ~$5,000 of finishing because of the kitchen and bathroom, meaning $59,500 scaling to $20,750 plus $5,000, or $25,750.
Unless you want to build in some unincorporated area with no roads, no running water, no police or fire, and no insurance, your land is going to cost real money, and real annual taxes, and real expenses.
The above numbers are for mid-range areas; the actual retail rent costs I used were lower-income areas. That means I computed per-unit scale-down costs based on more expensive units.
Nobody is going to build apartments to rent out for $300.00, not even in slums.
I explained that there is a lot of risk renting to people who would live in such a unit, because they'd have transient income: they could easily lose their income. I suggested ELIMINATING THAT RISK.
To put this into perspective: the sum total of all rent profits, assuming they rented for $245/month instead of $300/month and using the 30% average profit margin, is $1,370,000,000. That's 1.37 billion dollars of profit in a $4.57 trillion market. That's only counting America's 1.56 million homeless.
If you assume the landlords charge $300/month for this shit, it's $2.4 billion of profits *per* *year* in a $5.6 billion revenue market. If you assume zero profit at the retail numbers and a $300/month rent, it's still a billion dollars of profits per year.
In Baltimore City alone, we have 2,756 census-counted homeless people. At $245/month and the industry-standard 30% margin, that's $3 million annual profits. Worst-case, it's $1.8 million annual profits. Note that in Baltimore, 30,000 people have unstable housing--they end up homeless on-and-off throughout the year. That's ten times the potential target market between the scale I mentioned (244sqft) and the scale available today (700sqft).
So there is a 100% guarantee that your tenants will not lose their income stream. There are neither stronger nor weaker guarantees about your tenants deciding to spend their money elsewhere.
There is a potential profit of millions of dollars per year just in one city; billions in the U.S.. That's demonstrated by the number of homeless people who would probably like to no longer be homeless, and would have the means to afford rent.
The cost of building an apartment does directly scale; builders costs are measured as cost per square foot in market computations, banking applications, and insurance adjustment. I've demonstrated adjusting these based on a conservative (read: overly-large) estimate of the fixed costs of bathrooms and kitchens, even though the kitchen and bathroom in the units described are both small compared to full-sized units.
You've made an argument from a good logical standpoint--that costs don't directly scale for a number of reasons--and simpl