Your response is essentially that you don't mind the blood of the innocent on your hands, as long as it's blood you can feel good about. Your moral superiority apparently is more important than human lives.
Nah, it's transient reporting. This happens a lot in politics: you'll see a news article pop up with a bunch of stuff about something a candidate said or did, and then later you'll find a lot of articles about other things they said in the same time frame. Hillary has them, Trump has them, Bernie has them. If the candidate is in media favor, it'll be negative reporting falling away; if he's in bad favor, it's positive reporting that vanishes.
I keep forgetting to save bookmarks to politics news, probably because there's too much of it already.
You're still going on about government conspiracy and providing no numbers. I've actually looked at the population numbers, labor force numbers, population growth, job growth, and determined what's actually happening. We're steadily escaping 50 years of wage slavery here.
I've *read* 127-page reports. I've pulled down BLS tables and databases and analyzed trends over a hundred years. I've looked at Census publications and pointed out flaws in their interpretations right along with new observations they missed. What have you done? Talked about a big, secret government conspiracy?
You don't present an evidence-based argument; you present fear, uncertainty, and doubt, in a world where the cost of food, shelter, and clothing have fallen year after year; a world where families spend 11% of their income to eat instead of 30% (1950) or even 15% (1990); a world where cell phones and Internet access are common, lower-end cars have a large number of built-in safety and luxury features, and more people have access to more and better healthcare than ever.
Are you afraid to make a concrete argument because it won't stand up to an examination of the facts?
Oh, and does anyone else thing it's funny that we're suppose to replace the drudgery of unending factory work with a never ending cycle of desperately retraining for new work?
The turn-over in the U.S. is huge. Our population expands such that tens of thousands of jobs are created each month (new people, new purchasing, new demand, new jobs); meanwhile around 24% of the entire labor force voluntarily turns over and 40% total turns over (firings). Our 5% unemployment base cycles in and out; and almost 1.5% of the population enters adulthood every year, while a similar number retire.
Eliminating a huge chunk of our skilled labor force is damaging. I've been developing a technical-renaissance-or-revolution theory lately to describe sharp technical progress based on a simple logical proposition: if you eliminate jobs more quickly than you create them, you get high unemployment and a damaged society.
Businesses will delay transition onto lower-cost alternatives if they believe the position is better later, and only to risk tolerances: a business has risk appetite (it wants to risk money for profit), and may keep a $7.25/hr worker in favor of a $7/hr machine if the machines of 3 years from now should cost $4.50/hr (because replacing your million-dollar machine each year is a losing proposition). These aren't fixed rules, and various businesses will actively seek various levels of risk, while others will tolerate more or less risk. Some businesses will control risk by rolling out changes in stages. This affects how quickly you lose jobs.
Most people cite minimum wage; there are also benefits, payroll taxes, and the impact of income taxes on employee wage (if you had to pay a lot less in income tax, I wouldn't have to pay you so much for you to take home the same amount of money...). Raising income taxes reduces employee's take-home pay and thus ability to buy; that causes a reduction in revenue and thus in ability to pay wages, and also a reduction in the need to produce as many units of a product, which both reduce the amount of jobs supportable. Payroll taxes are an additional proportion of wages paid, meaning those product costs go up, prices go up, and the same happens. SALES TAXES just jack up prices directly, taking more consumer money and reducing the amount of purchaseable products, thus jobs.
Increasing the cost of wages, benefits, and wage-derived (payroll) taxes makes employees more expensive, but not machines; in general, it widens the cost gap between many-labor-hour processes and few-labor-hour processes. That increases the risk (cost of risk) of delaying a transition, which causes all such transitions across all businesses to occur in a shorter time frame. In other words: jobs go away more quickly.
This means we have opposing strategies: we can avoid a sharp rise in unemployment by minimizing payroll taxes, avoiding sales taxes, and lowering the effective income taxes on consumers. We also need an alternative to minimum wage--the elephant in the room, both because of its function as a massive political topic and as the main force on the cost of employment.
The various ideas for a UBI are highly-flawed and outright dangerous, but the idea is sound. I designed a Citizen's Dividend--essentially universal Social Security--based on the above, with transitional considerations, financing plans, and risk controls. A UBI of any type provides a non-wage alternative to improving the financial position of low-income households, thus reduces the pressure to move to employment-reducing strategies, allowing the market time to replace lost employment during technical progress. My plan in particular also replaces OASDI with an income tax, cutting 6.2% of the payroll tax; and it greatly increases the take-home income of households in relation to their wages, enough that everyone above the lowest 5% gets bumped above the Federal poverty line, and the lowest-income HUD families are actually financially stable.
I've demonstrated a few times that you can easily get by on minimum wage in the modern market, as a single adult; it doesn't work for a family (one working adult, one non-working adult, plus any kids at all), and it doesn't work if you're underemployed (fewer than 40 working hours per week).
I've also demonstrated that the market *can* supply housing, food, clothing, utilities, and personal care at a profit to a single individual with around $580/month take-home. It doesn't because no stable basis at this income level exists: anyone making that little is severely financially unstable--they can lose their unemployment, their 18hr/week part-time job, or whatever. Tenants floating in and out of your apartment complex represent a lot of standing cost (the apartments still need maintenance) in empty units.
That means supplying every single individual with (currently) $580/month creates a profit opportunity to build 224sqft apartments in low-income areas (the median retail rent in 2013 was around $1/sqft including ~30% profit margin; I accounted for as high as $1.33/sqft and based it on $300/month rent, which gave the original monthly living expense as $546), which leaves enough for food, clothing, personal care, and utilities (heating that tiny space is cheap). We can mandate good insulation in these newly-built units because the cost of insulating with 5.5 inch, R-23 insulation at construction time is ~$150, and the units cost ~$25,000 to build (a standard 1br 700sqft renting at $725/month costs ~$53,000).
That should tell you something: what people can live on is partially dictated by how stable their income is at a given level. If minimum-wage income households aren't particularly stable (tend to lose their jobs on and off, or have their hours cut away during slow times, etc.), they're too risky to build your business on--most notably, landlords can't build units sized to rent to that income level without padding the rent with a huge risk margin, which only makes it more likely your tenants will move out.
Here's the best bit: the income plan I designed is based on a percentage of the total income and, because of technical progress and the way scarcity constricts population growth, represents not only a rise in total distributed buying power over time, but a rise in per-capita buying power over time. Essentially, it represents more purchasing power per person each year because the per-capita GDP increases per year. As-is, it provides a better financial position for all households qualified for welfare, immediately, meaning we can completely replace modern welfare with a 17% Dividend and make *everyone's* financial position better--and almost-immediately end all homelessness and hunger in the same swing.
Wait until the country recovers from its bubbles and recessions. The long-term, sustainable labor force participation rate has historically been 58%-60%. It's ridiculously high today.
When our transient wage-slavery returns to baseline, we'll have a lot more stay-at-home housewives, instead of couples who have to juggle two full-time adult jobs and then come home to spend their leisure time working in the home. Work time will come down from 60 hours (40 at work, 20 doing housework) again.
That's a ridiculous argument. I make hard economic arguments about technical progress and the growth of wealth in society all the time; I don't say ludicrous shit like "these people are now unemployed and uncertain, so their lives are better because they can find a new job!" The reduction in employment reduces wages paid out by reducing human labor time involved in each unit of product, and that leaves more money in consumer hands as prices fall; that money will buy new things, dictating what new jobs exist--many of which will be mindless, mundane tasks that are just hard to automate.
It sucks to be in the path of progress; that's why we have welfare. Unemployment is transitional, and it sucks to lose your job and wonder if you're going to spend 5 months or 5 years trying to find a new one; at the same time, unemployment tends to stay in the 4%-8% range, and 5% unemployment means either you or someone else is that guy wondering about where you're getting your next paycheck.
The difference is whether you stay in your comfortable seat and we all stay as poor as we are, or you get moved out of your comfortable seat and the other 95% of society enjoys growing wealth. The middle-class get to buy more toys (e.g. computers, cell phones, the things that made your programming job worth $144k/year in the first place); the poor get to eat more frequently, and maybe get access to medical care; you get to look for a new job, and a highly-wealthy society can supply better welfare to keep you from ending up as a beggar on the street with no job and no food while you do that. Probably less-good for you than not losing your job, but a lot better for everyone else at that moment, and better for *everyone* over time.
You would be wearing a loincloth and hunting in the wilderness right now, probably ill, with no healthcare and the constant uncertainty of where your next meal is coming from, if we didn't progress in this way. Your comfortable life today is built on the cycle of technical unemployment.
The consumer pays wages. If it takes 100 hours at $10/hr to make a product and that product has a 10% profit margin, then you pay $1,100 for that product; if it takes 50 hours at $10/hr and that product makes a 20% profit margin, then you pay $600. What do you do with the extra $500?
With prices coming down like that, you don't *need* as much income to live at the same standard-of-living. Part of this difference goes upwards, creating the growing income gap; the other part stays with the consumer. This is why we $4,000 cell phones in 1983 (over $9,000 in today's dollars) with $250/month service to make 2 hours of phone calls each week (over $550 today) have given way to $350 smart phones with $60/month service providing unlimited voice and text plus a few gigabytes of high-speed data. It's why food, housing, and clothing got cheaper in the past few decades--and continue to get cheaper, aside from a localized fluctuation in house prices due to falling mortgage rates and bad lending practices.
Cutting costs is called technical progress. It's why 30% of the median family's income went to food in 1950 (with 12.2% of America's labor force being farmers) and 11% goes to food today (with under 2% of America's labor force being farmers). The difference goes to suppliers (fertilizer, pesticides, machines, fuel, irrigation, seeds); farmers aim for a 20% profit margin, but typically make under 10%, as do their suppliers.
So we've gone from 12.2%+17.8% to 2%+9%, minus ~10% profits: the chemical industry and the machine industry have eliminated around half of their labor requirements per unit, while farmers have eliminated over 85%.
Up until the 1960s, the labor-force participation rate was between 58% and 60%; we're running in a labor-force bubble right now, with 4.9% (5.6%) unemployment, with 19% of the proportional jobs eliminated compared to an era where less of our population was working. How do you suppose we lost jobs but got more jobs?
Transitional unemployment is a real thing. The cost of producing goes down as you eliminate wages from the equation: 1/3 as many people means 1/3 the cost, and a bigger profit margin is made even as consumers only pay 1/3 the price. Prices don't rise as quickly as inflation (it's logically and mathematically impossible for prices to rise as quickly as inflation), and the remaining money can buy new goods. These new goods require new labor: even if everyone just bought twice as many Twinkies, we'd need *another* Twinkie factory, staffed with another 500 people, and supported by the energy, machine, steel, and transportation industry to keep those machines up and running; plus the logistics, transportation, and retail to decide which Wal-Mart to send those Twinkies to, move them there, and sell them to consumers. If you buy different goods (e.g. better healthcare, more video games, bigger TVs), the same applies.
This even works with globalization. As we've moved manufacture jobs and other such out to China and Mexico, costs have come down. Everything made in China is backed by logistics, shipping, and retail here, and those loads are fixed: each truck carries the same amount of goods, and more goods means more trucks; and retail centers close down when they don't sell product (Best Buy, Circuit City, CompUSA, K-Mart). If we shut down all our trade with China and brought manufacture back to America--all of it; the nuclear option--minimum-wage factory workers would nearly triple the actual manufacture cost of things like clothing, books, kitchen wares, the like. With the consumer base not actually having more money (because it comes from spending the money the consumers have; money does not trickle down and isn't created by employment), the number of goods bought shrinks. That means less to ship and less to sell, meaning literally more than 65% of truckers and retail workers lose their jobs; it'd be in the range of 15-40 million American jobs net lost.
Thanks to continuously creating transitional unemployment through technical progress, our population has expanded; it cannot sustain with earlier, less-efficient means. On the other hand, the reduction in cost has created new jobs through increased consumer buying power (demand-side economics); and the reduction in the costs of goods such as food, clothing, soap, and school supplies has made it easier for poorer families to afford basic needs goods.
Yes, it sucks to be the Child of Omelas; this is why we have welfare systems: for the lower- and middle-class to become more wealthy and for our nation to become stronger, for new technology to become affordable instead of costing $6,000 for a TV and $9,000 for a cell phone, and for us to increase access to health care and education and *food*, technical progress must occur, and that means somebody's job goes away. The new jobs can take months or years to come back around; we carry these people in the mean time, and the new jobs eventually come because the wealth of reduced cost is passed along to the consumer.
If this wasn't true, there would be no jobs anymore.
It sounds to me like you're working from either anecdote or a foregone conclusion that resists all logic. The less evidence there is for a position, the more that proves it's true, because o grand conspiracy?
I just pointed out that 40% of the United States labor force turns over every year (that's 1 in 2.5), moving from one job to the next while the number of floating unemployed individuals doesn't increase; and I've already dealt with the labor force participation rate argument several times (essentially an argument that people need to work whether they're well-off or not, ignoring that two-income households with better single-income finances will have less pressure to be two-income households and so may have one adult exit the labor force; it's a hilarious argument demanding wage slavery, often coming from people who complain about wage slavery), so that wouldn't be new. Surprise me.
That's true. We have things like income percentiles to tell us that; you have to compare that against the total income, and to the percentage shares of spending.
On average, families in the middling income percentiles (i.e. not the super-rich and not the poorer-than-poor) are spending 11% of their income on food now, versus 30% in 1950. Clothing, housing (per square foot), and utilities have also come down; although housing and utilities have gone up slightly in the past 10 years. These changes mean a smaller percentage of the total income goes to basic needs, and that means the poor are less-pressured trying to survive, even with a growing income gap.
As well, the percentage of income per capita must decrease with population expansion. That's pretty simple: if you have 2 million households, you're dividing up your total income by twice as many households as 1 million households. At the same time, twice the population means twice the labor force, and thus twice the productive output: all the money spent in one year represents twice as much, and so twice the buying power, assuming we didn't improve technology at the same time.
As you observe, the basic measure of an *economy* (such as the economic standing of a nation) doesn't tell you about distribution; it tells you how powerful that nation is in terms of its ability to produce. The GDP-per-capita increases with technical progress--fewer people working to make thing A, so they can make thing B as well, and now you make A and B, and the amount of buying power each person has is increased by B--and the impact on standard-of-living is unknown by that measure alone.
A stronger economy means that a certain tax levy can buy more, meaning taxes can be decreased, debt spending can decrease, or some combination thereof. The increase in GDP-per-capita, being a reflection that some goods cost a smaller percentage of the per-capita income, means a nation is *more* *capable* of implementing stronger welfare. The Citizen's Dividend I designed has been stably viable since 2013; prior to that it was questionable; and in 1950, anything like my plan would flatly destroy the economy of the United States.
To give you some perspective: I initially designed the Citizen's Dividend to eliminate all homelessness and hunger in America, without raising taxes (none in the long term; substantially small in the short term, and that's proven controllable by a variety of strategies). The actual likely impacts are a stronger, more stable job market (smaller peak unemployment and faster return to baseline during economic disturbances); a stabilization of the basic standard-of-living (that's that "elimination of homelessness and hunger" thing); and a dramatic improvement in the financial positions of all households qualifying for modern welfare, whether the welfare they currently receive is adequate or not (note that only 1/4 of households qualified for HUD in particular receive aid; 75% go on a waiting list FOREVER). There are a lot of other impacts, and a lot of risk and strain eliminated.
Even if that plan *fails*, it doesn't matter: barring a complete economic collapse that America cannot survive in any case, it's effectively guaranteed to improve the situation overall for almost all Americans immediately, and to improve over time without an increase in taxes. As the GDP-per-capita increases, the tax fund source for the Dividend represents more buying power per capita, and thus distributes more buying power to each recipient. That means if it's too small to accomplish the total effect (e.g. immediately eliminating all homelessness?), it'll correct itself in a few years.
I don't just quote numbers to play politics; I'm an engineer, and I build shit. Every fact in the world should make you ask: how can I use this to my advantage? What can I do with this? We have GOVERNMENTS; a stronger economy means something when you have a government. As I've shown here, it means the Government can take the same tithe (as a percentage of you
If those numbers were real, you'd see a rise in wages
Why? A rise in wages concentrates income into the hands of fewer people. There's the same amount of income per year because the consumer base has the same amount of money to spend, and higher wages means that spending directs to fewer hands. Fewer goods are bought, and the number of jobs goes down.
Supply and demand and all that...
This is a catch-all statement, like competition. While we can have a long and robust discussion about supply-and-demand or competition and the impact on markets in both a microeconomic and macroeconomic sense, you can't just handwave everything away by citing supply-and-demand.
Supply-and-demand is in large part a result of scarcity, which is based in labor. Food is a prime example.
Let's say there's a high demand for food and a low supply. If you have a lot of farm land, irrigation, and fertilizer available, you respond to a 10% increase in demand (which comes from a 10% increase in population) by hiring 10% more people into the massive infrastructure that produces food. Prices don't increase because costs don't increase. Competition factors into this because there are many food producers, and new food producers can appear with little barrier to entry.
So you run out of good farm land.
Now you have a 10% increase in population, thus demand; and you have to get 60% as much yield from the next block of land, all the while putting in the same field labor, twice as much fertilizer, and three times the irrigation. You have to farm over 67% more land, so the field labor increases; you use 3.33 times as much fertilizer; and you use 4.5 times as much water. All in all, to support the 10% demand increase, you must pay out 24% more wages--this particular food is 2.4 times as expensive.
Intensive farming has continuously developed new methods to grow more food in less land, reducing labor, fertilizer load, irrigation, pesticide use, and so forth. When you can produce the same amount of food on 1/3 the land area, you can triple your demand without increasing costs, and so prices don't go up. THAT'S THE SOURCE OF SUPPLY.
You don't see a rise in wages because labor is not in short supply. There are 9.6 million people in America available to the work force, and 8.5 million looking for jobs. Several million Americans LEAVE THE WORKFORCE every year (retirement!), and get replaced by newly-graduated college students and other fresh labor; jobs come at a rate of around 50,000 per month. Our workforce constantly gets refreshed with newer skills and younger workers.
On top of all that, jobs are created by consumer demand--spending power. We're not riding a technical renaissance and there aren't imaginative investors throwing down money to create a bubble in hopes they can divert our upcoming economic growth into their pockets (e.g. the dot-com boom--money trickling down is an anomalous event); there's not a whole hell of a lot of fresh spending power rolling into the consumer base to create an enormous demand for new jobs. That only happens during anomalous events where rich investors are buying heavily into a bubble or prices are rapidly falling due to new technology ("rapidly" as in fast enough that the unemployment which leads to these falling prices doesn't pile up before the prices fall and the consumers show up with unspent money looking for more shit to buy).
I still see a lot of people having trouble finding work and when I post a job listing I'm overrun with applications...
Yep. 1 in 20 working-class Americans, heavily concentrated in the lower income classes. It'll show up as huge swaths of people who just don't seem to be finding jobs, meanwhile the next suburban neighborhood is full of middle-class families with nice cars and green lawns.
From September, 2005 to August, 2006, 23.4% of all Americans VOLUNTARILY left their jobs. The rate in professiona
I'm referring to the ass-old senator from Vermont who gets up on the podium and whines about the system being rigged because the Superdelegates might side with Hillary after he takes the nation by storm, then whines that Hillary is crooked and has rigged the system and vows to go to the DNC and demand the Superdelegates overturn her nomination by all siding with him.
All of the candidates have serious flaws. Trump has no grasp of economics, no real grasp on reality (his statements about Muslim immigrants don't match the numbers, at all), and is politically-volatile (will cause wars). Hillary will push for 30-year-old liberal-progressive policies, ignoring the modern situation and the needs for *new* policies. Sanders will target some of the new types of policies without any grasp on *why* they're important (again: very poor grasp of economics), causing economic strain (not nearly as bad as Trump).
The problem today is we're facing a Technical Renaissance-Revolution fork: a minor increment in technology has opened up a massive opportunity for growth, which means transitional unemployment. If your economy can slow this transition naturally and can accelerate replacement employment, you get a Technical Renaissance: job growth keeps up with job loss, goods and services become *much* cheaper (lower labor means lower total wages paid per unit--less cost, lower prices), and our standards of living go up. If your economy facilitates the opposite, you get a Technical Revolution: jobs go away rapidly, and the consumer base collapses; recovery takes generations.
The latter front simplifies to a wage-labor-to-income ratio position: if, across the entire workforce, you increase the amount of income a laborer takes home relative to the cost his employer pays to employ him, the laborer's ability to buy goods and services increases. This is because employers still pay, say, $10/hr for the laborer, and the laborer's take-home pay moves up from $6/hr to $8/hr. The cost of the good doesn't increase, but the worker becomes capable of buying more goods, which means someone must make those goods, thus more labor, thus more jobs.
Supporting that is easy enough, in concept: lower payroll taxes, eliminate sales taxes, reduce taxes on the working class. I designed a type of universal basic income, essentially Universal Social Security, which functions as a dividend off the total income; these also reduce the wage-to-income ratio by supplying a non-wage income. UBIs are extremely complex: financing them without raising taxes is hard; adequately replacing with a UBI is the only viable approach, and is hard; and even given a perfect end state, transitioning from the current system onto a UBI plan without destroying the financial position of retirees and current welfare recipients is hard.
The other end--slowing transitional unemployment--just means "make the value of eliminating humans questionable." You do this by reducing employment costs. If the machines cost $6.50/hr and the workers cost $7.25/hr, your business has $1,500/year per employee to save by transitioning *today*; and it has to *not* upgrade its machines for some years (8? 15? 25?) to realize those gains. Businesses vary in risk appetite and tolerance, and will have different ideas of how long to wait for that $6.50/hr to become smaller; likewise, they will react to that $7.25/hr wage going up at different paces.
Again: lowering payroll taxes supports this, because the cost of an employee goes down; that's one reason my Citizen's Dividend replaces OASDI (6.2% off your paycheck PLUS 6.2% taxed from the business) with an income tax, which the business pays on profits. Reduced income taxes on the working class also controls costs, because businesses will raise salaries (and prices) more slowly.
Assemble those two things and you have fewer jobs lost and more jobs recovered in a given time span, which means the immediate unemployment rate at any given time is lower, and the economy recovers from growing pains m
Forever, or until the basic rules of economics changes.
Over time, we develop "technology" in a process called "technical progress". In simple terms, technology is learning new techniques to produce the same output with less human-labor input. This is why 90% of Americans were farmers in 1870 (when your average family bought food, grew food, and hunted for food, all at the same time); 28% were farm workers in 1900 (and the median family spent 43% of their income on food); 12% were farm workers in 1950 (food cost: 30%); and under 2% are farm workers today (food cost: 11%). The current labor costs of food include a small number of farmers, plus machinists, oil drilling and refining operations, chemists for pesticides and fertilizers, and infrastructure maintenance for irrigation and shipping; all of these involved people get paid wages, and each involved business entity seeks profit on top of labor costs, aggregating the final cost.
That means the cost to supply a certain square footage of living space, utilities for that space, clothing, personal care products, and food, in terms of human labor hours and associated wages, goes down over time. This is reflected in the continuous decrease of these costs as a percentage share of the spending of households in total and by income class.
As population expands, we reach the limits of technology. Adding 10% more food output to feed 10% more people today might mean finding 10% more labor-hours; but keep doing this and, eventually, you have trouble scaling production. We can grow food at higher yields than ever on the same land area, but we'll eventually get into less-fertile land and require more fertilizer, irrigation, and outright work to produce the same amount of additional food per year. That pushes costs up, which drives higher prices. This means population expansion eventually creates population-limiting scarcity, which causes a slowing of population growth (we see this in recessions).
Because of the first thing, the percentage of total income required to buy enough of a good (food, clothing, etc.) for each and every person in an economy constantly decreases. Because of the second, population expansion has zero impact on the per-person buying power associated with that percentage *until* it hits conditions which restrict population expansion. Together, this means that a certain percentage of the total income divided among the entire population will provide food, shelter, clothing, and so forth, and that the percentage required for such becomes smaller over time as technology progresses.
Such a plan provides its social safety net (welfare) and its minimum standard-of-living (minimum wage) as a non-wage income. This increases the jobs available by demand-side economics, where minimum wage increases, payroll taxes, income taxes, and sales taxes decrease the jobs available by reducing consumer buying power (minimum wage concentrates middle- and lower-class income into a smaller number of lower-class individuals, reducing the total buying power and making some individuals unemployed while leaving the remainder in a stronger financial position; most people have a fundamental misunderstanding in economics by which they assume these people have more, thus spend more, and thus can sustain the jobs of those displaced, and they ignore that income occurs over time and the amount of total income has not increased).
Thus a viable Dividend--in 2013, 17%--divided across all adults in the United States would, in fact, put an end to all homelessness and hunger, stabilize unemployment, and possibly require shorter working hours (to make the consumers poorer, as a counter against a labor shortage). This impact would endure forever, or until someone builds a dyson sphere (13,000 trillion times the energy generation than we currently consume) and technology to replace most possible human jobs, for example providing power cheaply enough that mining gold out of the ground is far more expensive (labor-intensive) than simply producing it from arbitrary matter (lead, dirt, dog shit) in a fusor, or making vertical farming cheap (pumps, lights, temperature management, etc.).
I've gone into road ralley race mode 4 or 5 times in the past few years alone just because traffic gets dense and the inattentive idiot next to me drifts into my lane, while the guy on the other side comes racing up at 40mph over the speed limit to pass between the 1.1 car lengths between me and the guy in his lane, and the dude behind me decides to tailgate at 18 inches. Have to find some way to move myself through this thick mess of people coming 2 feet out of their lane into an actual safe location on the road, and sometimes avoiding a 65mph collision requires extreme measures and driving like Mario Andretti for 6 seconds.
Once, I was riding a school bus, and another schoolbus drifted over the yellow line and hit ours. We had to stop and call the police, and there was glass everywhere.
So no, human beings cannot stay in their lane 100% of the time, because they are dumb.
If Google's car kept crashing while they report it's had zero crashes for 300 million miles driven, people would have cell phone pictures of hundreds of unreported crashes.
We have industrial accidents all the time. The question is will we have fewer and less-fatal vehicular collisions with such systems as autopilot than with straight manual driving?
I don't care about substitutions. If your 7-year-old daughter dies in a situation made possible because of a policy change that saved 357 working-class Americans, 20 retirees, and that one old lady in a wheelchair from such a horrible death, simultaneously preventing thousands of injuries and an enormous amount of property damage, well... your kid is the Child of Omelas. Sucks to be you. You might not mind the blood of thousands on your hands to save one kid, but everyone else in the world probably cares just a bit less about that.
It's not reported because it's NORMAL. Tesla's systems are special, and they crash under conditions that no normal vehicle deals with--special Tesla features no other vehicle has. If they crash much less frequently, those crashes are all the more notable and newsworthy.
Slashdot Mirror
Your response is essentially that you don't mind the blood of the innocent on your hands, as long as it's blood you can feel good about. Your moral superiority apparently is more important than human lives.
Nah, it's transient reporting. This happens a lot in politics: you'll see a news article pop up with a bunch of stuff about something a candidate said or did, and then later you'll find a lot of articles about other things they said in the same time frame. Hillary has them, Trump has them, Bernie has them. If the candidate is in media favor, it'll be negative reporting falling away; if he's in bad favor, it's positive reporting that vanishes.
I keep forgetting to save bookmarks to politics news, probably because there's too much of it already.
You're still going on about government conspiracy and providing no numbers. I've actually looked at the population numbers, labor force numbers, population growth, job growth, and determined what's actually happening. We're steadily escaping 50 years of wage slavery here.
I've *read* 127-page reports. I've pulled down BLS tables and databases and analyzed trends over a hundred years. I've looked at Census publications and pointed out flaws in their interpretations right along with new observations they missed. What have you done? Talked about a big, secret government conspiracy?
You don't present an evidence-based argument; you present fear, uncertainty, and doubt, in a world where the cost of food, shelter, and clothing have fallen year after year; a world where families spend 11% of their income to eat instead of 30% (1950) or even 15% (1990); a world where cell phones and Internet access are common, lower-end cars have a large number of built-in safety and luxury features, and more people have access to more and better healthcare than ever.
Are you afraid to make a concrete argument because it won't stand up to an examination of the facts?
Oh, and does anyone else thing it's funny that we're suppose to replace the drudgery of unending factory work with a never ending cycle of desperately retraining for new work?
The turn-over in the U.S. is huge. Our population expands such that tens of thousands of jobs are created each month (new people, new purchasing, new demand, new jobs); meanwhile around 24% of the entire labor force voluntarily turns over and 40% total turns over (firings). Our 5% unemployment base cycles in and out; and almost 1.5% of the population enters adulthood every year, while a similar number retire.
Eliminating a huge chunk of our skilled labor force is damaging. I've been developing a technical-renaissance-or-revolution theory lately to describe sharp technical progress based on a simple logical proposition: if you eliminate jobs more quickly than you create them, you get high unemployment and a damaged society.
Businesses will delay transition onto lower-cost alternatives if they believe the position is better later, and only to risk tolerances: a business has risk appetite (it wants to risk money for profit), and may keep a $7.25/hr worker in favor of a $7/hr machine if the machines of 3 years from now should cost $4.50/hr (because replacing your million-dollar machine each year is a losing proposition). These aren't fixed rules, and various businesses will actively seek various levels of risk, while others will tolerate more or less risk. Some businesses will control risk by rolling out changes in stages. This affects how quickly you lose jobs.
Most people cite minimum wage; there are also benefits, payroll taxes, and the impact of income taxes on employee wage (if you had to pay a lot less in income tax, I wouldn't have to pay you so much for you to take home the same amount of money...). Raising income taxes reduces employee's take-home pay and thus ability to buy; that causes a reduction in revenue and thus in ability to pay wages, and also a reduction in the need to produce as many units of a product, which both reduce the amount of jobs supportable. Payroll taxes are an additional proportion of wages paid, meaning those product costs go up, prices go up, and the same happens. SALES TAXES just jack up prices directly, taking more consumer money and reducing the amount of purchaseable products, thus jobs.
Increasing the cost of wages, benefits, and wage-derived (payroll) taxes makes employees more expensive, but not machines; in general, it widens the cost gap between many-labor-hour processes and few-labor-hour processes. That increases the risk (cost of risk) of delaying a transition, which causes all such transitions across all businesses to occur in a shorter time frame. In other words: jobs go away more quickly.
This means we have opposing strategies: we can avoid a sharp rise in unemployment by minimizing payroll taxes, avoiding sales taxes, and lowering the effective income taxes on consumers. We also need an alternative to minimum wage--the elephant in the room, both because of its function as a massive political topic and as the main force on the cost of employment.
The various ideas for a UBI are highly-flawed and outright dangerous, but the idea is sound. I designed a Citizen's Dividend--essentially universal Social Security--based on the above, with transitional considerations, financing plans, and risk controls. A UBI of any type provides a non-wage alternative to improving the financial position of low-income households, thus reduces the pressure to move to employment-reducing strategies, allowing the market time to replace lost employment during technical progress. My plan in particular also replaces OASDI with an income tax, cutting 6.2% of the payroll tax; and it greatly increases the take-home income of households in relation to their wages, enough that everyone above the lowest 5% gets bumped above the Federal poverty line, and the lowest-income HUD families are actually financially stable.
So, no, it's n
I've demonstrated a few times that you can easily get by on minimum wage in the modern market, as a single adult; it doesn't work for a family (one working adult, one non-working adult, plus any kids at all), and it doesn't work if you're underemployed (fewer than 40 working hours per week).
I've also demonstrated that the market *can* supply housing, food, clothing, utilities, and personal care at a profit to a single individual with around $580/month take-home. It doesn't because no stable basis at this income level exists: anyone making that little is severely financially unstable--they can lose their unemployment, their 18hr/week part-time job, or whatever. Tenants floating in and out of your apartment complex represent a lot of standing cost (the apartments still need maintenance) in empty units.
That means supplying every single individual with (currently) $580/month creates a profit opportunity to build 224sqft apartments in low-income areas (the median retail rent in 2013 was around $1/sqft including ~30% profit margin; I accounted for as high as $1.33/sqft and based it on $300/month rent, which gave the original monthly living expense as $546), which leaves enough for food, clothing, personal care, and utilities (heating that tiny space is cheap). We can mandate good insulation in these newly-built units because the cost of insulating with 5.5 inch, R-23 insulation at construction time is ~$150, and the units cost ~$25,000 to build (a standard 1br 700sqft renting at $725/month costs ~$53,000).
That should tell you something: what people can live on is partially dictated by how stable their income is at a given level. If minimum-wage income households aren't particularly stable (tend to lose their jobs on and off, or have their hours cut away during slow times, etc.), they're too risky to build your business on--most notably, landlords can't build units sized to rent to that income level without padding the rent with a huge risk margin, which only makes it more likely your tenants will move out.
Here's the best bit: the income plan I designed is based on a percentage of the total income and, because of technical progress and the way scarcity constricts population growth, represents not only a rise in total distributed buying power over time, but a rise in per-capita buying power over time. Essentially, it represents more purchasing power per person each year because the per-capita GDP increases per year. As-is, it provides a better financial position for all households qualified for welfare, immediately, meaning we can completely replace modern welfare with a 17% Dividend and make *everyone's* financial position better--and almost-immediately end all homelessness and hunger in the same swing.
I spent a lot of effort eliminating all the risk.
Wait until the country recovers from its bubbles and recessions. The long-term, sustainable labor force participation rate has historically been 58%-60%. It's ridiculously high today.
When our transient wage-slavery returns to baseline, we'll have a lot more stay-at-home housewives, instead of couples who have to juggle two full-time adult jobs and then come home to spend their leisure time working in the home. Work time will come down from 60 hours (40 at work, 20 doing housework) again.
So, Karl Marx?
That's a ridiculous argument. I make hard economic arguments about technical progress and the growth of wealth in society all the time; I don't say ludicrous shit like "these people are now unemployed and uncertain, so their lives are better because they can find a new job!" The reduction in employment reduces wages paid out by reducing human labor time involved in each unit of product, and that leaves more money in consumer hands as prices fall; that money will buy new things, dictating what new jobs exist--many of which will be mindless, mundane tasks that are just hard to automate.
It sucks to be in the path of progress; that's why we have welfare. Unemployment is transitional, and it sucks to lose your job and wonder if you're going to spend 5 months or 5 years trying to find a new one; at the same time, unemployment tends to stay in the 4%-8% range, and 5% unemployment means either you or someone else is that guy wondering about where you're getting your next paycheck.
The difference is whether you stay in your comfortable seat and we all stay as poor as we are, or you get moved out of your comfortable seat and the other 95% of society enjoys growing wealth. The middle-class get to buy more toys (e.g. computers, cell phones, the things that made your programming job worth $144k/year in the first place); the poor get to eat more frequently, and maybe get access to medical care; you get to look for a new job, and a highly-wealthy society can supply better welfare to keep you from ending up as a beggar on the street with no job and no food while you do that. Probably less-good for you than not losing your job, but a lot better for everyone else at that moment, and better for *everyone* over time.
You would be wearing a loincloth and hunting in the wilderness right now, probably ill, with no healthcare and the constant uncertainty of where your next meal is coming from, if we didn't progress in this way. Your comfortable life today is built on the cycle of technical unemployment.
The consumer pays wages. If it takes 100 hours at $10/hr to make a product and that product has a 10% profit margin, then you pay $1,100 for that product; if it takes 50 hours at $10/hr and that product makes a 20% profit margin, then you pay $600. What do you do with the extra $500?
With prices coming down like that, you don't *need* as much income to live at the same standard-of-living. Part of this difference goes upwards, creating the growing income gap; the other part stays with the consumer. This is why we $4,000 cell phones in 1983 (over $9,000 in today's dollars) with $250/month service to make 2 hours of phone calls each week (over $550 today) have given way to $350 smart phones with $60/month service providing unlimited voice and text plus a few gigabytes of high-speed data. It's why food, housing, and clothing got cheaper in the past few decades--and continue to get cheaper, aside from a localized fluctuation in house prices due to falling mortgage rates and bad lending practices.
Cutting costs is called technical progress. It's why 30% of the median family's income went to food in 1950 (with 12.2% of America's labor force being farmers) and 11% goes to food today (with under 2% of America's labor force being farmers). The difference goes to suppliers (fertilizer, pesticides, machines, fuel, irrigation, seeds); farmers aim for a 20% profit margin, but typically make under 10%, as do their suppliers.
So we've gone from 12.2%+17.8% to 2%+9%, minus ~10% profits: the chemical industry and the machine industry have eliminated around half of their labor requirements per unit, while farmers have eliminated over 85%.
Up until the 1960s, the labor-force participation rate was between 58% and 60%; we're running in a labor-force bubble right now, with 4.9% (5.6%) unemployment, with 19% of the proportional jobs eliminated compared to an era where less of our population was working. How do you suppose we lost jobs but got more jobs?
Transitional unemployment is a real thing. The cost of producing goes down as you eliminate wages from the equation: 1/3 as many people means 1/3 the cost, and a bigger profit margin is made even as consumers only pay 1/3 the price. Prices don't rise as quickly as inflation (it's logically and mathematically impossible for prices to rise as quickly as inflation), and the remaining money can buy new goods. These new goods require new labor: even if everyone just bought twice as many Twinkies, we'd need *another* Twinkie factory, staffed with another 500 people, and supported by the energy, machine, steel, and transportation industry to keep those machines up and running; plus the logistics, transportation, and retail to decide which Wal-Mart to send those Twinkies to, move them there, and sell them to consumers. If you buy different goods (e.g. better healthcare, more video games, bigger TVs), the same applies.
This even works with globalization. As we've moved manufacture jobs and other such out to China and Mexico, costs have come down. Everything made in China is backed by logistics, shipping, and retail here, and those loads are fixed: each truck carries the same amount of goods, and more goods means more trucks; and retail centers close down when they don't sell product (Best Buy, Circuit City, CompUSA, K-Mart). If we shut down all our trade with China and brought manufacture back to America--all of it; the nuclear option--minimum-wage factory workers would nearly triple the actual manufacture cost of things like clothing, books, kitchen wares, the like. With the consumer base not actually having more money (because it comes from spending the money the consumers have; money does not trickle down and isn't created by employment), the number of goods bought shrinks. That means less to ship and less to sell, meaning literally more than 65% of truckers and retail workers lose their jobs; it'd be in the range of 15-40 million American jobs net lost.
Thanks to continuously creating transitional unemployment through technical progress, our population has expanded; it cannot sustain with earlier, less-efficient means. On the other hand, the reduction in cost has created new jobs through increased consumer buying power (demand-side economics); and the reduction in the costs of goods such as food, clothing, soap, and school supplies has made it easier for poorer families to afford basic needs goods.
Yes, it sucks to be the Child of Omelas; this is why we have welfare systems: for the lower- and middle-class to become more wealthy and for our nation to become stronger, for new technology to become affordable instead of costing $6,000 for a TV and $9,000 for a cell phone, and for us to increase access to health care and education and *food*, technical progress must occur, and that means somebody's job goes away. The new jobs can take months or years to come back around; we carry these people in the mean time, and the new jobs eventually come because the wealth of reduced cost is passed along to the consumer.
If this wasn't true, there would be no jobs anymore.
It sounds to me like you're working from either anecdote or a foregone conclusion that resists all logic. The less evidence there is for a position, the more that proves it's true, because o grand conspiracy?
I just pointed out that 40% of the United States labor force turns over every year (that's 1 in 2.5), moving from one job to the next while the number of floating unemployed individuals doesn't increase; and I've already dealt with the labor force participation rate argument several times (essentially an argument that people need to work whether they're well-off or not, ignoring that two-income households with better single-income finances will have less pressure to be two-income households and so may have one adult exit the labor force; it's a hilarious argument demanding wage slavery, often coming from people who complain about wage slavery), so that wouldn't be new. Surprise me.
That's true. We have things like income percentiles to tell us that; you have to compare that against the total income, and to the percentage shares of spending.
On average, families in the middling income percentiles (i.e. not the super-rich and not the poorer-than-poor) are spending 11% of their income on food now, versus 30% in 1950. Clothing, housing (per square foot), and utilities have also come down; although housing and utilities have gone up slightly in the past 10 years. These changes mean a smaller percentage of the total income goes to basic needs, and that means the poor are less-pressured trying to survive, even with a growing income gap.
As well, the percentage of income per capita must decrease with population expansion. That's pretty simple: if you have 2 million households, you're dividing up your total income by twice as many households as 1 million households. At the same time, twice the population means twice the labor force, and thus twice the productive output: all the money spent in one year represents twice as much, and so twice the buying power, assuming we didn't improve technology at the same time.
As you observe, the basic measure of an *economy* (such as the economic standing of a nation) doesn't tell you about distribution; it tells you how powerful that nation is in terms of its ability to produce. The GDP-per-capita increases with technical progress--fewer people working to make thing A, so they can make thing B as well, and now you make A and B, and the amount of buying power each person has is increased by B--and the impact on standard-of-living is unknown by that measure alone.
A stronger economy means that a certain tax levy can buy more, meaning taxes can be decreased, debt spending can decrease, or some combination thereof. The increase in GDP-per-capita, being a reflection that some goods cost a smaller percentage of the per-capita income, means a nation is *more* *capable* of implementing stronger welfare. The Citizen's Dividend I designed has been stably viable since 2013; prior to that it was questionable; and in 1950, anything like my plan would flatly destroy the economy of the United States.
To give you some perspective: I initially designed the Citizen's Dividend to eliminate all homelessness and hunger in America, without raising taxes (none in the long term; substantially small in the short term, and that's proven controllable by a variety of strategies). The actual likely impacts are a stronger, more stable job market (smaller peak unemployment and faster return to baseline during economic disturbances); a stabilization of the basic standard-of-living (that's that "elimination of homelessness and hunger" thing); and a dramatic improvement in the financial positions of all households qualifying for modern welfare, whether the welfare they currently receive is adequate or not (note that only 1/4 of households qualified for HUD in particular receive aid; 75% go on a waiting list FOREVER). There are a lot of other impacts, and a lot of risk and strain eliminated.
Even if that plan *fails*, it doesn't matter: barring a complete economic collapse that America cannot survive in any case, it's effectively guaranteed to improve the situation overall for almost all Americans immediately, and to improve over time without an increase in taxes. As the GDP-per-capita increases, the tax fund source for the Dividend represents more buying power per capita, and thus distributes more buying power to each recipient. That means if it's too small to accomplish the total effect (e.g. immediately eliminating all homelessness?), it'll correct itself in a few years.
I don't just quote numbers to play politics; I'm an engineer, and I build shit. Every fact in the world should make you ask: how can I use this to my advantage? What can I do with this? We have GOVERNMENTS; a stronger economy means something when you have a government. As I've shown here, it means the Government can take the same tithe (as a percentage of you
If those numbers were real, you'd see a rise in wages
Why? A rise in wages concentrates income into the hands of fewer people. There's the same amount of income per year because the consumer base has the same amount of money to spend, and higher wages means that spending directs to fewer hands. Fewer goods are bought, and the number of jobs goes down.
Supply and demand and all that...
This is a catch-all statement, like competition. While we can have a long and robust discussion about supply-and-demand or competition and the impact on markets in both a microeconomic and macroeconomic sense, you can't just handwave everything away by citing supply-and-demand.
Supply-and-demand is in large part a result of scarcity, which is based in labor. Food is a prime example.
Let's say there's a high demand for food and a low supply. If you have a lot of farm land, irrigation, and fertilizer available, you respond to a 10% increase in demand (which comes from a 10% increase in population) by hiring 10% more people into the massive infrastructure that produces food. Prices don't increase because costs don't increase. Competition factors into this because there are many food producers, and new food producers can appear with little barrier to entry.
So you run out of good farm land.
Now you have a 10% increase in population, thus demand; and you have to get 60% as much yield from the next block of land, all the while putting in the same field labor, twice as much fertilizer, and three times the irrigation. You have to farm over 67% more land, so the field labor increases; you use 3.33 times as much fertilizer; and you use 4.5 times as much water. All in all, to support the 10% demand increase, you must pay out 24% more wages--this particular food is 2.4 times as expensive.
Intensive farming has continuously developed new methods to grow more food in less land, reducing labor, fertilizer load, irrigation, pesticide use, and so forth. When you can produce the same amount of food on 1/3 the land area, you can triple your demand without increasing costs, and so prices don't go up. THAT'S THE SOURCE OF SUPPLY.
You don't see a rise in wages because labor is not in short supply. There are 9.6 million people in America available to the work force, and 8.5 million looking for jobs. Several million Americans LEAVE THE WORKFORCE every year (retirement!), and get replaced by newly-graduated college students and other fresh labor; jobs come at a rate of around 50,000 per month. Our workforce constantly gets refreshed with newer skills and younger workers.
On top of all that, jobs are created by consumer demand--spending power. We're not riding a technical renaissance and there aren't imaginative investors throwing down money to create a bubble in hopes they can divert our upcoming economic growth into their pockets (e.g. the dot-com boom--money trickling down is an anomalous event); there's not a whole hell of a lot of fresh spending power rolling into the consumer base to create an enormous demand for new jobs. That only happens during anomalous events where rich investors are buying heavily into a bubble or prices are rapidly falling due to new technology ("rapidly" as in fast enough that the unemployment which leads to these falling prices doesn't pile up before the prices fall and the consumers show up with unspent money looking for more shit to buy).
I still see a lot of people having trouble finding work and when I post a job listing I'm overrun with applications...
Yep. 1 in 20 working-class Americans, heavily concentrated in the lower income classes. It'll show up as huge swaths of people who just don't seem to be finding jobs, meanwhile the next suburban neighborhood is full of middle-class families with nice cars and green lawns.
From September, 2005 to August, 2006, 23.4% of all Americans VOLUNTARILY left their jobs. The rate in professiona
I'm referring to the ass-old senator from Vermont who gets up on the podium and whines about the system being rigged because the Superdelegates might side with Hillary after he takes the nation by storm, then whines that Hillary is crooked and has rigged the system and vows to go to the DNC and demand the Superdelegates overturn her nomination by all siding with him.
All of the candidates have serious flaws. Trump has no grasp of economics, no real grasp on reality (his statements about Muslim immigrants don't match the numbers, at all), and is politically-volatile (will cause wars). Hillary will push for 30-year-old liberal-progressive policies, ignoring the modern situation and the needs for *new* policies. Sanders will target some of the new types of policies without any grasp on *why* they're important (again: very poor grasp of economics), causing economic strain (not nearly as bad as Trump).
The problem today is we're facing a Technical Renaissance-Revolution fork: a minor increment in technology has opened up a massive opportunity for growth, which means transitional unemployment. If your economy can slow this transition naturally and can accelerate replacement employment, you get a Technical Renaissance: job growth keeps up with job loss, goods and services become *much* cheaper (lower labor means lower total wages paid per unit--less cost, lower prices), and our standards of living go up. If your economy facilitates the opposite, you get a Technical Revolution: jobs go away rapidly, and the consumer base collapses; recovery takes generations.
The latter front simplifies to a wage-labor-to-income ratio position: if, across the entire workforce, you increase the amount of income a laborer takes home relative to the cost his employer pays to employ him, the laborer's ability to buy goods and services increases. This is because employers still pay, say, $10/hr for the laborer, and the laborer's take-home pay moves up from $6/hr to $8/hr. The cost of the good doesn't increase, but the worker becomes capable of buying more goods, which means someone must make those goods, thus more labor, thus more jobs.
Supporting that is easy enough, in concept: lower payroll taxes, eliminate sales taxes, reduce taxes on the working class. I designed a type of universal basic income, essentially Universal Social Security, which functions as a dividend off the total income; these also reduce the wage-to-income ratio by supplying a non-wage income. UBIs are extremely complex: financing them without raising taxes is hard; adequately replacing with a UBI is the only viable approach, and is hard; and even given a perfect end state, transitioning from the current system onto a UBI plan without destroying the financial position of retirees and current welfare recipients is hard.
The other end--slowing transitional unemployment--just means "make the value of eliminating humans questionable." You do this by reducing employment costs. If the machines cost $6.50/hr and the workers cost $7.25/hr, your business has $1,500/year per employee to save by transitioning *today*; and it has to *not* upgrade its machines for some years (8? 15? 25?) to realize those gains. Businesses vary in risk appetite and tolerance, and will have different ideas of how long to wait for that $6.50/hr to become smaller; likewise, they will react to that $7.25/hr wage going up at different paces.
Again: lowering payroll taxes supports this, because the cost of an employee goes down; that's one reason my Citizen's Dividend replaces OASDI (6.2% off your paycheck PLUS 6.2% taxed from the business) with an income tax, which the business pays on profits. Reduced income taxes on the working class also controls costs, because businesses will raise salaries (and prices) more slowly.
Assemble those two things and you have fewer jobs lost and more jobs recovered in a given time span, which means the immediate unemployment rate at any given time is lower, and the economy recovers from growing pains m
Does the human genome even fit in 1 cubic inch of DNA?
For how long?
Forever, or until the basic rules of economics changes.
Over time, we develop "technology" in a process called "technical progress". In simple terms, technology is learning new techniques to produce the same output with less human-labor input. This is why 90% of Americans were farmers in 1870 (when your average family bought food, grew food, and hunted for food, all at the same time); 28% were farm workers in 1900 (and the median family spent 43% of their income on food); 12% were farm workers in 1950 (food cost: 30%); and under 2% are farm workers today (food cost: 11%). The current labor costs of food include a small number of farmers, plus machinists, oil drilling and refining operations, chemists for pesticides and fertilizers, and infrastructure maintenance for irrigation and shipping; all of these involved people get paid wages, and each involved business entity seeks profit on top of labor costs, aggregating the final cost.
That means the cost to supply a certain square footage of living space, utilities for that space, clothing, personal care products, and food, in terms of human labor hours and associated wages, goes down over time. This is reflected in the continuous decrease of these costs as a percentage share of the spending of households in total and by income class.
As population expands, we reach the limits of technology. Adding 10% more food output to feed 10% more people today might mean finding 10% more labor-hours; but keep doing this and, eventually, you have trouble scaling production. We can grow food at higher yields than ever on the same land area, but we'll eventually get into less-fertile land and require more fertilizer, irrigation, and outright work to produce the same amount of additional food per year. That pushes costs up, which drives higher prices. This means population expansion eventually creates population-limiting scarcity, which causes a slowing of population growth (we see this in recessions).
Because of the first thing, the percentage of total income required to buy enough of a good (food, clothing, etc.) for each and every person in an economy constantly decreases. Because of the second, population expansion has zero impact on the per-person buying power associated with that percentage *until* it hits conditions which restrict population expansion. Together, this means that a certain percentage of the total income divided among the entire population will provide food, shelter, clothing, and so forth, and that the percentage required for such becomes smaller over time as technology progresses.
Such a plan provides its social safety net (welfare) and its minimum standard-of-living (minimum wage) as a non-wage income. This increases the jobs available by demand-side economics, where minimum wage increases, payroll taxes, income taxes, and sales taxes decrease the jobs available by reducing consumer buying power (minimum wage concentrates middle- and lower-class income into a smaller number of lower-class individuals, reducing the total buying power and making some individuals unemployed while leaving the remainder in a stronger financial position; most people have a fundamental misunderstanding in economics by which they assume these people have more, thus spend more, and thus can sustain the jobs of those displaced, and they ignore that income occurs over time and the amount of total income has not increased).
Thus a viable Dividend--in 2013, 17%--divided across all adults in the United States would, in fact, put an end to all homelessness and hunger, stabilize unemployment, and possibly require shorter working hours (to make the consumers poorer, as a counter against a labor shortage). This impact would endure forever, or until someone builds a dyson sphere (13,000 trillion times the energy generation than we currently consume) and technology to replace most possible human jobs, for example providing power cheaply enough that mining gold out of the ground is far more expensive (labor-intensive) than simply producing it from arbitrary matter (lead, dirt, dog shit) in a fusor, or making vertical farming cheap (pumps, lights, temperature management, etc.).
It's not a flaw in OpenSSL's implementation; it's a flaw in the order of encrypted operations selected by a client library.
I've gone into road ralley race mode 4 or 5 times in the past few years alone just because traffic gets dense and the inattentive idiot next to me drifts into my lane, while the guy on the other side comes racing up at 40mph over the speed limit to pass between the 1.1 car lengths between me and the guy in his lane, and the dude behind me decides to tailgate at 18 inches. Have to find some way to move myself through this thick mess of people coming 2 feet out of their lane into an actual safe location on the road, and sometimes avoiding a 65mph collision requires extreme measures and driving like Mario Andretti for 6 seconds.
Once, I was riding a school bus, and another schoolbus drifted over the yellow line and hit ours. We had to stop and call the police, and there was glass everywhere.
So no, human beings cannot stay in their lane 100% of the time, because they are dumb.
If Google's car kept crashing while they report it's had zero crashes for 300 million miles driven, people would have cell phone pictures of hundreds of unreported crashes.
We have industrial accidents all the time. The question is will we have fewer and less-fatal vehicular collisions with such systems as autopilot than with straight manual driving?
I don't care about substitutions. If your 7-year-old daughter dies in a situation made possible because of a policy change that saved 357 working-class Americans, 20 retirees, and that one old lady in a wheelchair from such a horrible death, simultaneously preventing thousands of injuries and an enormous amount of property damage, well... your kid is the Child of Omelas. Sucks to be you. You might not mind the blood of thousands on your hands to save one kid, but everyone else in the world probably cares just a bit less about that.
The Tesla has no transmission, so there is no gear shifting. (It's not even an automatic transmission).
I turn my wipers on and off all the time without removing my hands from the wheels. Is this different in the Tesla?
You can violate Tesla's enforcement by duct taping a soda can to each side of the steering wheel, allowing it to feel weight it interprets as hands.
You need to use rate analysis. How many per million miles, per 100,000, etc.
It's not reported because it's NORMAL. Tesla's systems are special, and they crash under conditions that no normal vehicle deals with--special Tesla features no other vehicle has. If they crash much less frequently, those crashes are all the more notable and newsworthy.
4.9% UE3 down from 10%; 5.6% UE4; GDP-per-capita recovered from its dip a couple years ago.