You know there weren't service jobs at one point because that was rich-people thing? Tipping is a sort of European custom that came to America because European barons and lords were used to tossing some spare change to well-behaved servants. It was, at the time, novel for the less-wealthy to have access to maids and cooks.
Ever wonder why the labor force doesn't exceed job availability? Unemployment keeps going down to about 5% in the US, 2% in Japan. We keep importing labor--300,000 foreign worker per year. Why aren't we just importing millions and millions of workers, having loads of Irish twins, and otherwise building our population?
For that matter, why does population explode suddenly around the Green Revolutions (when food costs dropped by half), computer revolutions, and other technological growth spurts where productivity goes up and the capacity to supply for a larger population increases?
Jobs. Population grows in abundance; and the means to access abundance is jobs. The availability of jobs mediates the moderators of population growth.
The obvious solution would be for jobs to work fewer hours.
This actually increases unemployment.
Imagine you require 40 human labor hours to produce a certain good. On the same technology, cut working hours to 32 (four day work week, 8 hours). Whether weekly wages adapt to the hours or hourly wages adapt to the week, you're going to have 32 hours of income each week instead of 40, and you're going to need 40 hours of income to buy a good.
You see the obvious: we'll need to hire an additional person to fill the last 8 hours--or, rather, we need to employ 25% more people to make the same goods.
You miss the blatant: you only have 80% capacity to buy goods. The same working hours distribute among more workers alright; yet each worker can afford to purchase less. More to the point: our economy has grown to its labor limits under current conditions, and does not have the labor force to fill those working hours; we would need an expansion of the labor force, and thus an expansion of consumption needs, which we could not meet (population would become higher).
Instead, consumption would reduce. Each person would be poorer, unable to buy as much. With reduced consumption comes a reduction in necessary labor: with each need to make five (5) fewer units of that good per week (due to fewer purchases of said good, due to lower purchasing power, due to shorter working hours), we don't replace 5 workers with 6; rather we eliminate 4 workers, with the fifth making up the 8-hour weekly shortfall.
Labor force thus contracts, unemployment goes up, and we wait for the surplus population to die off.
We can achieve shorter working hours by shortening working hours as productivity increases so that we simply create less labor force expansion instead of more poverty. Cutting working hours won't create jobs; it will destroy them.
(We can also shrink the labor force by raising minimum wages.)
So what? What does that straw man have to do with anything?
Nothing. It's a "the technology isn't really ready yet" argument: it won't happen today, so it won't happen.
The real argument is that technology doesn't ever replace labor; it augments it. The counterpoint to this will be when technology becomes labor, at which point it won't matter. A generic technology able to do anything without human tuning and improvement would be able to think and reason: it would be human.
The magical thinking surrounding a world where work is no longer a thing has been around for hundreds of years. There's a reason we call these people Luddites.
Microeconomics. I prefer macroeconomics, which is about how that fair-market price comes about.
They did teach selling a product at a fare market value, and not to short sell your product and putting yourself in a race to the bottom.
Today's electronic voting machines run about $3,500 per each. I've been looking at designing my own and selling it at-cost, a little under $200 per each, 10-year minimum lifespan. The software would cost something fierce, and diffuses through many units; plus its development costs are largely upfront, and it's only likely half a year of actual programming (planning and architecture are big and it will probably cost a labor-year in total). Consulting and non-government services are my planned revenue stream.
I got into it because our election integrity sucks and I want to fix it--and I actually know how, whereas these people are transmitting votes over the Internet during voting (many don't do this; it's allowed in the voluntary voting system guidelines because wtf?). ES&S says they'll add more security to the machines; you don't make voting secure by upping your audit logs and antivirus software. Fundamentally-flawed approach.
When I saw the costs, I balked, and it quickly became a matter of kicking the industry in the head for being horribly-inefficient and costing our government way too much.
That race to the bottom is how society benefits from the advances of technology. You make your product cheaper by employing fewer people in the whole process of producing it; when prices fall, those still employed can purchase more, and thus can live better and create replacement employment. Government takes its money in taxes and supplies society with benefits; it's not a magical source of ethics-free revenue.
If you ever read The Wealth of Nations, you'll have no idea what you just read. His writing is worse than mine. I have considered rewriting The Wealth of Nations to state the same things in meticulously-edited language, with the Dictionary of Concise Writing, The Elements of Style, and STFU: You Talk Too Much at hand for each proofread pass.
Correct: it's an ethical problem, not a moral problem.
This is why I like B-Corporations: the bylaws establish an institutional requirement for managers to act in the best interest of the company, considering the impacts on the members, the employees and workforce, the customers, the community, the environment, the interests of the business, and the long-term capability of the company to create a material positive impact on the environment and society as a whole. There's even a provision wherein selling the business to someone other than the highest bidder does not breach duty so long as they are acting in the best interests of the company.
Unnecessarily raising pharmaceutical prices is bad for customers and negatively impacts the long-term capability of the company to make a material positive impact on society as a whole. Your prices are as necessary to keep the company operating and to fund continued research sufficient to maximize accessibility of highly-effective medicine to those in need, not simply to pour out money to shareholders. Excessively-high prices are against the best interests of the company.
Not really. The exchange rates will reflect a weakened US Dollar if we pay people the same weekly, and a stronger US dollar if we pay them the same hourly.
True. The argument that wages have been flat is somewhat damaged (wages are inflation indexed instead of productivity indexed, and inflation is a reflection of a subset of goods rather than a reflection of everything); yet while workers have enjoyed ever-increasing buying power, they have not enjoyed buying power increasing at the rate of productivity.
This is because of an expanding labor force: the minimum wages grow more-slowly than per-capita incomes, and median wages slump with them. That allows us to employ more labor, which results in labor force expansion to fill the supportable labor force capacity, which means you have a huge pile of low-paid workers. A structural wage fixes this: raise minimum wage when it is less than a fixed portion of the per-adult GNI.
People keep looking at CEO pay and rich people; that's a distraction: the top 1% earn sufficient income to pay every one of the lower 99% about $132/year. Conglomeration and larger employee bases have moved millionaires to the point of having a few dollars per employee per year flowing to their pockets--not much at all. It turns out all the money is going to the poor: we created a bunch more mouths to feed and made them spread the same amount of bread among themselves, so they all go hungry.
Doesn't matter so long as you're not running negative productivity. You're thinking microeconomics, and I'm thinking macroeconomics: the average productivity for a producer with a labor force is a function of technical progress.
If shorter working hours improve worker productivity, then that's technical progress; although if you can produce more in 8 hours in total than 7--and yes you can--your economy as a whole has more productivity per person even with the sub-optimal per-labor-hour output. You suggest that in some cases there will be sufficient damage that you expend 10 hours causing 12 hours of rework; that would, as you say, actually reduce per-person productivity, although that's uncommon (but destruction is easier than creation and so yes you absolutely can make a 3,000-hour clean-up job in 30 seconds of stupidity).
If added technology means the thing now takes 20 hours to make, then profits are doubled, but the worker sees none of it.
You know Apple's profit margin is 20%?
Apple, Microsoft, and a few others have egregiously-high profits. Most businesses operate around 8%-10%; 5% and 3% are common (Walmart has below 3% profit margin).
In practice, profits haven't simply shot up because of a logical problem with the proposition: businesses set prices at a particular level either because they're charitable (low profit margins), uncharitable (high profit margins), or facing external pressure (lowering margins). If businesses are charitable, they'll lower prices with costs; if they're uncharitable, their prices should be even higher. Competition creates external pressure, which tends to lower profit margins--again: Apple and Microsoft have pretty damned high profit margins, largely because they face little competition (Apple isn't competing with Microsoft; it caters to a base of fanatics and loyalists who will pay a lot of money for things they can get cheaper elsewhere).
As technology improves, the long-running operating costs to compete fall. This reduces minimum viable prices and increases market reach, enlarging the market. High prices shut out people who can't purchase, and a new competitor has low risk by targeting those consumers; with sufficiently-low costs, a competitor in a commodity market only needs to capture a fraction of the market to make ROI, as the market becomes quite large and the number of units the competitor must sell to stay in business stays fixed.
That means technical progress almost naturally forces prices down. Price fixing and other anti-competitive practices are also natural, hence government and regulation: anti-trust laws protect us from that bullshit.
In either case, when considering the whole economy shifting its labor hours, it is mathematically-equivalent to pay workers a higher hourly wage (same weekly) or the same hourly wage (lower weekly). You make a nonsense proposition.
In any case, you're bringing up a discussion that isn't sensible and hasn't been for a long time. I'll try to make this brief, but it's frigging hard to get your head around on the best days.
The first question is what does "real wages" mean? Wages adjusted to inflation are usually counted as "real wages"; and inflation doesn't follow productivity gains, but rather the price gains on a subset of goods. "Inflation" isn't a real thing: the concept is an abstract one correlated to an actual behavior in reality, and the number is an arbitrary basket of goods based on how much people buy. That means "inflation" generally follows some basic needs basket (CPI-U) while other things increase in price more-slowly than inflation: raising wages with inflation doesn't raise wages as fast as productivity, but also doesn't necessarily raise them at zero.
In short: inflation indexing of wages gives you flat real wage growth.
The second question: are people wealthier?
In 1995, a new car costing 56% of the middle income had some basic features, which didn't include 6-CD-changer radio, anti-lock brakes, traction control, power windows, telescoping steering wheel, high-complexity suspensions, and the like. Today, all of that stuff is available in your base-model $20,000 economy car (yeah wtf?); your fancy $32,000 car looks like a mid-90s luxury car that used to cost $80k when people made $34k on average.
In short: each decade, we can look back to simpler times when we could have bonded ISDN lines to get today's $50/month Internet service--if we wanted to pay $50,000/month. The middle income does, in fact, buy more, and we're getting productivity gains.
Third: who is getting the money if we're falling behind productivity?
This one's actually a fun question because the answer is...the poor. That sounds great until you realize how it's being delivered--and it's not by welfare.
Everyone wants to talk about the rich first, so let's go there. The CEO of Walmart makes an enormous amount of money...and has 1.5 million employees, for which he earns $0.002 per hour or $4 per year per each employee. Jeff Bezos? It's $3/year per employee. Compare this to an entrepreneur earning $60k and employing two workers to run the shop: $30,000 per employee. Who's the robber baron here?
We've had a lot of mergers and acquisitions in recent decades, placing a few elite at the top of massive corporate conglomerates. Shave a little off a much, much bigger edge and you get a huge pile of gold flakes. You should worry particularly about Amazon: they're using AWS to cover for losses in every other business unit, selling below the total operating cost of each business and destroying competition (predatory pricing). I'd worry about Amazon employees (underpaid, overworked), too; just not about Jeff Bezos's compensation, which is paltry.
So it's going to the poor? How?
Minimum wage, as a percentage of the average income (per-capita GNI), has fallen steadily. So has median wage: minimum-to-median has actually been fairly flat, meaning middle wages scale with minimum wages in practice.
Labor forces don't just grow out of control. There's a carry capacity, and your labor force expands until it hits it: jobs become less-abundant, expansion becomes difficult, and poverty increases. We expand our labor force rapidly by bringing in 300,000 immigrant workers to the US every year through the Visa programs, and can adjust that freely; were we to somehow slow the creation of jobs, we could also slow the labor inflow immediately.
If you raise wages, you concentrate more money into fewer hands. Higher minimum wages means we can't buy as many goods because they're somewhat more expensive, as workers are getting paid more. The size of the labor force shrinks--or, at least, the growth of the labor force slows. Our GDP and GNI growth slo
It doesn't actually make a difference: money is an arbitration for time.
If 40 hours of human labor produce a thing, then a 28-hour work week requires 1.43 worker-weeks of labor to produce the thing. Let's examine.
If we pay the workers the same 40-hour rate, then the $1,000 object now costs $1,430. You must work for 1.43 weeks to earn income to buy the thing.
If we pay the workers the same hourly rate for 28 hours, then the $1,000 object now costs $1,000; however, you only have $700 after a week's work. You must work 1.43 weeks's worth of hours to earn income to buy the thing.
We work and we make new technology. The wooden shipping pallet reduced shipping labor by 85%. We have all this computer tech. We have a lot more per-capita today, and we consume a great deal more than we did 20 years ago for each person.
We could trade some of that.
Technical progress lets us work the same and make 10% more. Why work the same 40 hours? Why not work 38 hours and have 5% more?
That's the direction. I want a 28-hour work week: 7 hours, 4 days. The unions seem to be looking toward that, finally.
In ACLU's own terms, it is a "slippery slope" without the "clear bright line" separating the reasonable and egregious applications.
So are a lot of things. There are noise restrictions: you can't blare music at 120dB at night or the police show up. I can hear my neighbors talking and hear people outside driving cars sometimes; they're not loud but they're audible. At what point do we fine you for making "noise"?
I can shine a flashlight at an airplane. Laser diodes require a lens to form collimated light, and they do scatter over distance: a spot at 2 kilometers is larger than a spot at 2 meters. At what point is shining a bright light with its focal point on the windscreen of an airplane illegal?
You can wave a sword or firearm at someone without actually attacking them with it. At what point are you assaulting them with a deadly weapon? When it's visible? When you look angry? If it's waved in your general direction, is that assault?
Harassment is just annoyance and is only illegal because it causes a sense of insecurity and psychological trauma. Maybe you shouldn't have any recourse just because you "feel unsafe", and if you assault me for constantly hanging around your house and badgering your wife you can be put in prison for a very long time. Sound good?
Not only can't it be done incrementally, but it can't be done at all. We have no materials which can withstand the stresses involved.
Then...
There are many lesser things we could do in between here and there, like solar power satellites.
...Which would likely use laser or microwave (really, laser microwave--microwave is photonic, after all) to beam energy to Earth, or to each other.
Which could independently encircle the Sun and relay power around its horizon as such.
Which could link together into a ring, although that's problematic: orbits must be eccentric, and a spinning ring becomes unstable. You're going to get a giant ellipse. Material stresses aren't a problem; the matter of keeping a spinning ring or sphere from flying off is.
There's another caveat: all space craft experience solar radiation pressure. That means the Sun's emissions are pushing all satellites outward away from the Sun itself. Satellites might initially require ion engines to stabilize themselves; eventually, as they link, they'll require more stabilization. With sufficient surface, they require less. That expansive tension is shared by all structural tension members, so the stresses are pretty small.
Achieving this, you can then link together a biaxial ring, and then a triaxial ring.
Filling the eight facets by superstructure would produce more outward pressure. Engineers would need to balance as they go over its massive construction based on data from the triaxial ring system's continuous compensation to reduce said compensation and achieve gravitational balance.
What? Did you think they'd just wake up one day and proclaim a 5-year project to build a massive sphere around the Sun? It's going to take a thousand years, or maybe a hundred.
You're still not asking the right questions: if we eventually run out of energy and expand further, won't we eventually use all the energy provided by a dyson sphere?
The problem is the engineer said, "The phone has a GPS and Wifi and figures out where it is all the time; so we'll store that, unless you stop tracking location!" Then, when you open maps, the engineer said, "Ah, you've actually asked us to get your location, so we'll store that."
Everyone else said, "When you turn location history off, the phone stops recording location history." They don't imagine that the phone just doesn't tell Google their location anymore, or that asking their phone to tell Google their location (by opening Google maps) would involve telling Google their location and Google subsequently storing it.
Imagine if disabling location tracking actually left it on, and kept sending your location to Google every 5 seconds, except Google's servers didn't store it anywhere. This is the opposite: disabling location tracking stops telling Google where you are--and when you do tell Google where you are, they store that.
It's obviously-broken to us, but seems reasonable to the engineers who came up with it.
It's not science fiction without the science, and so far, there is only handwaving. Nothing we understood about physics precluded making a hotter furnace.
You're trying to dispute solar power.
A dyson sphere is a superstructure with solar collectors driving heat engines. We can make metal structures, solar collectors, and the like. Nothing in the laws of physics precludes us from building a dyson sphere in the same way that nothing in the laws of physics precludes you from generating nuclear power in your basement: if you only had a piece of uranium (there's plenty and people are using it to generate nuclear power), you could.
Our understanding of physics itself does not permit it.
Economics doesn't permit it: it would be an enormous resource expenditure. It would pay itself back, but it's hard to start up.
It can be done incrementally, but it's still damned expensive.
it's like a space elevator in that we don't know of any materials which could actually be used to build one.
Steel, PTFE, and some mundane refrigerants.
None of this is even the point.
We know, for a fact, that the currency of resources is energy. Today, we make some cesium and molybdenum by transmuting other elements via nuclear fusion. It's expensive as all hell because it consumes tons of energy; but it works when mining and refining are more expensive than that. Need more uranium? Iron? Hydrogen? Nuclear fission and fusion can do that; we know how; it's just going to take a ton of energy.
Human labor is energy--food. Machine work is energy--fuel.
We know for a fact that expanding our productivity and our production will eventually mean expanding beyond the terrestrial windfall of the sun's energy.
Where do you get more energy?
A dyson sphere. The sun is leaking tons of energy: it's not making it to Earth. Capture it.
That you don't know how to get the material up there is immaterial; you don't know how to get the material up there because you have no clue where you'd find the energy. It's sort of a chicken-and-egg paradox. The physics of building it, operating it, making it work, all easy; the economics are pretty much dead at this moment.
I'm arguing that we will eventually reach the limits of terrestrial energy availability, and then we'll need a Dyson sphere. You're arguing that we can't know that because you can't imagine how to build a dyson sphere. The fact that you can't figure out how doesn't mean you won't need to; and, really, the fact that you can't figure out how is a matter of not understanding that we've actually built things in space that do everything a dyson sphere does--they're just smaller.
It looks like a bunch of weird nomenclature stuff.
If you turn Location History on, your phone tracks your every movement. Everywhere you go, they tell Google.
If you turn Location History off, your phone tracks nothing. Put it in your pocket, wander around, nothing gets logged.
If you turn Location History off and open Google Maps at some point, Google Maps gets your location and stores it in your Location History or something akin to that. They're not tracking your every movement, but they do make note whenever you volunteer your location in some manner.
It seems reasonable until somebody who never thought about it much uses it; then it seems unexpected and confusing. This is why we have user testing.
We not only have no idea how you would build a Dyson sphere, but we have no idea what you would build one out of even if you could magically summon up anything you wanted.
Of course not. When we invented the blast furnace, we could suddenly produce a quantity of iron requiring 84,000 hours of labor in a mere 200 hours; nobody had any earthly idea how to do such a thing until suddenly someone did. If memory serves, the same person invented an iron rolling technique immediately, which made rail travel possible--at the time, the equivalent of traveling from here to Mars Colony as a lower-middle-class family weekend trip.
We do know that a dyson sphere with 32%-efficient collection (the efficiency of concentrating parabolic sterling engine solar collectors) would collect 13,000 trillion times the amount of electricity used on Earth today.
All energy on earth comes from the sun: photosynthesis feeds plants, animals (which eat animals or other plants), and microbes (which photosynthesize or eat other things). The heat, magnetic dynamo (orbiting the sun and its magnetic field causes the Earth's nickel-iron core to turn like a giant dynamo, generating a ton of heat), and so forth all bring energy to the Earth. This is the source of decomposition of arbitrary matter into coal, oil, and flammable gases (today's fossil fuels), as well as the water cycle (hydroelectric power) and wind. Tidal power apparently comes from the moon, which is the odd one out.
That means eventually you are going to expand beyond our exposure to the sun's output if you keep growing. To grow further, you need to collect space fuels (methane from Titan) or more solar energy. Logically, growth eventually demands a dyson sphere.
When you exceed the dyson sphere's capacity, you need one more thing--the most dangerous thing: a black hole generator.
There's an intermediate area between normal space and the event horizon in which the laws of physics are...weird. You can enter and leave this space; you can't leave the event horizon. A black hole is a collapsed spinning star and is itself spinning; dropping more stuff into it makes it spin faster. By throwing something past the black hole, you can enter orbit; and at a close distance, you can drop part of the mass into the black hole to escape. The black hole spins faster, transferring part of its momentum to the mass still in orbit, which exits with more velocity than it entered.
There is one form of self-propagating mass.
If you put a bunch of mirrors around a black hole and shine light past it, part of the light beam peels off and falls into the black hole. The remainder is affected by the gravity and spin, and comes out with more energy than went in: the black hole actually loses a bit of momentum overall, and the photons gain energy. When they reflect, they interact with matter, which means electrons absorb a high-energy photon and emit multiple lower-energy photons.
Put a hole in the mirror array and you get this massively-powerful blast of radiation flooding out; fail to put a hole in it and the mirror vaporizes, but can't move away at the speed of light, and so before it fails to contain the reflecting photons the black hole releases so much energy as to emit the most powerful supernova in recorded history.
Please don't build this until the universe suffers heat death.
It doesn't matter that you don't know how to build it; it's mundane technology. The logistics of assembling it are not mundane. The logistics of needing it at some point in the future are obvious: where else are you going to get more energy than the sun projects onto the earth?
That's sort of the goal; people generalize too much (yes, this coming from me).
You can't mine more and more oil, gold, or whatever forever. You run out eventually.
Your business can't grow forever. You run out of customers eventually, and become flat relative to consumer base.
Your economy, however...
Productivity is a matter of finding new ways to accomplish the same things by reducing the resources required. Human labor is the final resource: we don't pay iron deposits for their ore; we do pay humans for their time producing the tools, extracting the ore, transporting it, refining it, and so forth. Sometimes we also pay governments or landowners for access rights, but that's a matter of artificial cost and not productivity.
When productivity increases, wealth per person increases. Higher wages for a particular engineer may mean you get a 10% productivity increase but less than a 9% cost decrease (a 10% increase in output, ceteris parabus, is 90.9% cost per output); that's fine: you're concentrating wealth, slowing the growth of the labor force instead of exploding your population. You can still produce and sell more per person, which is why time is the currency.
It turns out you can effectively increase productivity forever, or at least beyond limits we can identify. Productivity increases eventually necessitate the use of fewer expendable resources (less coal, more solar--you need a dyson sphere!), and even causes resource use reduction (GMO wheat grows twice as fast and yields 50% more per plant, so you use 1/3 as much land, labor, water, pesticide, and fertilizer per tonne of wheat). Mechanization front-loads resources: with more energy availability, it's cheap to run machines, and it's already damned-inexpensive to build and maintain them, so you put up human labor with a huge multiplier.
Keynes predicted we'd work 15-hour weeks by now; it's more like 5 or 1. Thing is we kept working 40 hours so we can have the fruits of 40x more labor--or rather, the fruits of the same labor producing 40x as much. I'd like to push for 7-hour work days 4 days per week: as we pick up new productivity, redefine "full time" to force overtime pay and benefits at shorter working hours. We'll be a little less wealthy (we'll be 10% wealthier instead of 15%), and in exchange have more time to enjoy our massive wealth.
Bitcoin is a complex, fancy mechanism that wastes a lot of resources. Instead of producing something consumable, it uses "proof of work": you make a pair of boots, and then we burn those boots because we don't actually need them and just wanted to make sure you're not getting a hand-out. Ethereum seems inefficient as well, although the guy who came up with that did at least put some thought into how to make something productive, whether or not he succeeded. Efficiency of resource utilization matters.
All of the income earned in the United States--all those US Dollars--comes from selling services to consumers buying services. That means the annual GNI is equal to the amount of stuff produced and sold: it's backed by actual productivity.
People have some magical fantasy about a paper currency being backed by a fickle commodity which can explosively inflate or deflate as people corner the market or find a new gold mine. One day, your half-gram of gold is worth what last year's tenth-gram was worth, and your bank account just collapsed; another, the Hunt Brothers start hoarding all the gold, and you have to take a steep pay cut.
With fiat money, we manipulate monetary policy to hold a 2% inflation rate. This works because all the money spent is logistically and mathematically tied to all the stuff sold: the purchasing power of the currency is the purchasing power of the currency, a reflexive mathematical tautology.
That we all agree to use it helps, but doesn't set its buying power.
Slashdot Mirror
You know there weren't service jobs at one point because that was rich-people thing? Tipping is a sort of European custom that came to America because European barons and lords were used to tossing some spare change to well-behaved servants. It was, at the time, novel for the less-wealthy to have access to maids and cooks.
How fast can you breed humans?
Ever wonder why the labor force doesn't exceed job availability? Unemployment keeps going down to about 5% in the US, 2% in Japan. We keep importing labor--300,000 foreign worker per year. Why aren't we just importing millions and millions of workers, having loads of Irish twins, and otherwise building our population?
For that matter, why does population explode suddenly around the Green Revolutions (when food costs dropped by half), computer revolutions, and other technological growth spurts where productivity goes up and the capacity to supply for a larger population increases?
Jobs. Population grows in abundance; and the means to access abundance is jobs. The availability of jobs mediates the moderators of population growth.
The obvious solution would be for jobs to work fewer hours.
This actually increases unemployment.
Imagine you require 40 human labor hours to produce a certain good. On the same technology, cut working hours to 32 (four day work week, 8 hours). Whether weekly wages adapt to the hours or hourly wages adapt to the week, you're going to have 32 hours of income each week instead of 40, and you're going to need 40 hours of income to buy a good.
You see the obvious: we'll need to hire an additional person to fill the last 8 hours--or, rather, we need to employ 25% more people to make the same goods.
You miss the blatant: you only have 80% capacity to buy goods. The same working hours distribute among more workers alright; yet each worker can afford to purchase less. More to the point: our economy has grown to its labor limits under current conditions, and does not have the labor force to fill those working hours; we would need an expansion of the labor force, and thus an expansion of consumption needs, which we could not meet (population would become higher).
Instead, consumption would reduce. Each person would be poorer, unable to buy as much. With reduced consumption comes a reduction in necessary labor: with each need to make five (5) fewer units of that good per week (due to fewer purchases of said good, due to lower purchasing power, due to shorter working hours), we don't replace 5 workers with 6; rather we eliminate 4 workers, with the fifth making up the 8-hour weekly shortfall.
Labor force thus contracts, unemployment goes up, and we wait for the surplus population to die off.
We can achieve shorter working hours by shortening working hours as productivity increases so that we simply create less labor force expansion instead of more poverty. Cutting working hours won't create jobs; it will destroy them.
(We can also shrink the labor force by raising minimum wages.)
So what? What does that straw man have to do with anything?
Nothing. It's a "the technology isn't really ready yet" argument: it won't happen today, so it won't happen.
The real argument is that technology doesn't ever replace labor; it augments it. The counterpoint to this will be when technology becomes labor, at which point it won't matter. A generic technology able to do anything without human tuning and improvement would be able to think and reason: it would be human.
The magical thinking surrounding a world where work is no longer a thing has been around for hundreds of years. There's a reason we call these people Luddites.
Software rounded corners would be the killer app. Give the physical screen sharp corners and configure the roundness through the settings app.
It's not a "headphone jack," it's an analog audio jack.
You mean the 3.5mm 4-wire headset jack?
Microeconomics. I prefer macroeconomics, which is about how that fair-market price comes about.
They did teach selling a product at a fare market value, and not to short sell your product and putting yourself in a race to the bottom.
Today's electronic voting machines run about $3,500 per each. I've been looking at designing my own and selling it at-cost, a little under $200 per each, 10-year minimum lifespan. The software would cost something fierce, and diffuses through many units; plus its development costs are largely upfront, and it's only likely half a year of actual programming (planning and architecture are big and it will probably cost a labor-year in total). Consulting and non-government services are my planned revenue stream.
I got into it because our election integrity sucks and I want to fix it--and I actually know how, whereas these people are transmitting votes over the Internet during voting (many don't do this; it's allowed in the voluntary voting system guidelines because wtf?). ES&S says they'll add more security to the machines; you don't make voting secure by upping your audit logs and antivirus software. Fundamentally-flawed approach.
When I saw the costs, I balked, and it quickly became a matter of kicking the industry in the head for being horribly-inefficient and costing our government way too much.
That race to the bottom is how society benefits from the advances of technology. You make your product cheaper by employing fewer people in the whole process of producing it; when prices fall, those still employed can purchase more, and thus can live better and create replacement employment. Government takes its money in taxes and supplies society with benefits; it's not a magical source of ethics-free revenue.
If you ever read The Wealth of Nations, you'll have no idea what you just read. His writing is worse than mine. I have considered rewriting The Wealth of Nations to state the same things in meticulously-edited language, with the Dictionary of Concise Writing, The Elements of Style, and STFU: You Talk Too Much at hand for each proofread pass.
Correct: it's an ethical problem, not a moral problem.
This is why I like B-Corporations: the bylaws establish an institutional requirement for managers to act in the best interest of the company, considering the impacts on the members, the employees and workforce, the customers, the community, the environment, the interests of the business, and the long-term capability of the company to create a material positive impact on the environment and society as a whole. There's even a provision wherein selling the business to someone other than the highest bidder does not breach duty so long as they are acting in the best interests of the company.
Unnecessarily raising pharmaceutical prices is bad for customers and negatively impacts the long-term capability of the company to make a material positive impact on society as a whole. Your prices are as necessary to keep the company operating and to fund continued research sufficient to maximize accessibility of highly-effective medicine to those in need, not simply to pour out money to shareholders. Excessively-high prices are against the best interests of the company.
Not really. The exchange rates will reflect a weakened US Dollar if we pay people the same weekly, and a stronger US dollar if we pay them the same hourly.
True. The argument that wages have been flat is somewhat damaged (wages are inflation indexed instead of productivity indexed, and inflation is a reflection of a subset of goods rather than a reflection of everything); yet while workers have enjoyed ever-increasing buying power, they have not enjoyed buying power increasing at the rate of productivity.
This is because of an expanding labor force: the minimum wages grow more-slowly than per-capita incomes, and median wages slump with them. That allows us to employ more labor, which results in labor force expansion to fill the supportable labor force capacity, which means you have a huge pile of low-paid workers. A structural wage fixes this: raise minimum wage when it is less than a fixed portion of the per-adult GNI.
People keep looking at CEO pay and rich people; that's a distraction: the top 1% earn sufficient income to pay every one of the lower 99% about $132/year. Conglomeration and larger employee bases have moved millionaires to the point of having a few dollars per employee per year flowing to their pockets--not much at all. It turns out all the money is going to the poor: we created a bunch more mouths to feed and made them spread the same amount of bread among themselves, so they all go hungry.
I wrote a bigger ramble about this.
Doesn't matter so long as you're not running negative productivity. You're thinking microeconomics, and I'm thinking macroeconomics: the average productivity for a producer with a labor force is a function of technical progress.
If shorter working hours improve worker productivity, then that's technical progress; although if you can produce more in 8 hours in total than 7--and yes you can--your economy as a whole has more productivity per person even with the sub-optimal per-labor-hour output. You suggest that in some cases there will be sufficient damage that you expend 10 hours causing 12 hours of rework; that would, as you say, actually reduce per-person productivity, although that's uncommon (but destruction is easier than creation and so yes you absolutely can make a 3,000-hour clean-up job in 30 seconds of stupidity).
If added technology means the thing now takes 20 hours to make, then profits are doubled, but the worker sees none of it.
You know Apple's profit margin is 20%?
Apple, Microsoft, and a few others have egregiously-high profits. Most businesses operate around 8%-10%; 5% and 3% are common (Walmart has below 3% profit margin).
In practice, profits haven't simply shot up because of a logical problem with the proposition: businesses set prices at a particular level either because they're charitable (low profit margins), uncharitable (high profit margins), or facing external pressure (lowering margins). If businesses are charitable, they'll lower prices with costs; if they're uncharitable, their prices should be even higher. Competition creates external pressure, which tends to lower profit margins--again: Apple and Microsoft have pretty damned high profit margins, largely because they face little competition (Apple isn't competing with Microsoft; it caters to a base of fanatics and loyalists who will pay a lot of money for things they can get cheaper elsewhere).
As technology improves, the long-running operating costs to compete fall. This reduces minimum viable prices and increases market reach, enlarging the market. High prices shut out people who can't purchase, and a new competitor has low risk by targeting those consumers; with sufficiently-low costs, a competitor in a commodity market only needs to capture a fraction of the market to make ROI, as the market becomes quite large and the number of units the competitor must sell to stay in business stays fixed.
That means technical progress almost naturally forces prices down. Price fixing and other anti-competitive practices are also natural, hence government and regulation: anti-trust laws protect us from that bullshit.
In either case, when considering the whole economy shifting its labor hours, it is mathematically-equivalent to pay workers a higher hourly wage (same weekly) or the same hourly wage (lower weekly). You make a nonsense proposition.
CEO pay is wages. So is administrative overhead.
In any case, you're bringing up a discussion that isn't sensible and hasn't been for a long time. I'll try to make this brief, but it's frigging hard to get your head around on the best days.
The first question is what does "real wages" mean? Wages adjusted to inflation are usually counted as "real wages"; and inflation doesn't follow productivity gains, but rather the price gains on a subset of goods. "Inflation" isn't a real thing: the concept is an abstract one correlated to an actual behavior in reality, and the number is an arbitrary basket of goods based on how much people buy. That means "inflation" generally follows some basic needs basket (CPI-U) while other things increase in price more-slowly than inflation: raising wages with inflation doesn't raise wages as fast as productivity, but also doesn't necessarily raise them at zero.
In short: inflation indexing of wages gives you flat real wage growth.
The second question: are people wealthier?
In 1995, a new car costing 56% of the middle income had some basic features, which didn't include 6-CD-changer radio, anti-lock brakes, traction control, power windows, telescoping steering wheel, high-complexity suspensions, and the like. Today, all of that stuff is available in your base-model $20,000 economy car (yeah wtf?); your fancy $32,000 car looks like a mid-90s luxury car that used to cost $80k when people made $34k on average.
In short: each decade, we can look back to simpler times when we could have bonded ISDN lines to get today's $50/month Internet service--if we wanted to pay $50,000/month. The middle income does, in fact, buy more, and we're getting productivity gains.
Third: who is getting the money if we're falling behind productivity?
This one's actually a fun question because the answer is...the poor. That sounds great until you realize how it's being delivered--and it's not by welfare.
Everyone wants to talk about the rich first, so let's go there. The CEO of Walmart makes an enormous amount of money...and has 1.5 million employees, for which he earns $0.002 per hour or $4 per year per each employee. Jeff Bezos? It's $3/year per employee. Compare this to an entrepreneur earning $60k and employing two workers to run the shop: $30,000 per employee. Who's the robber baron here?
We've had a lot of mergers and acquisitions in recent decades, placing a few elite at the top of massive corporate conglomerates. Shave a little off a much, much bigger edge and you get a huge pile of gold flakes. You should worry particularly about Amazon: they're using AWS to cover for losses in every other business unit, selling below the total operating cost of each business and destroying competition (predatory pricing). I'd worry about Amazon employees (underpaid, overworked), too; just not about Jeff Bezos's compensation, which is paltry.
So it's going to the poor? How?
Minimum wage, as a percentage of the average income (per-capita GNI), has fallen steadily. So has median wage: minimum-to-median has actually been fairly flat, meaning middle wages scale with minimum wages in practice.
Labor forces don't just grow out of control. There's a carry capacity, and your labor force expands until it hits it: jobs become less-abundant, expansion becomes difficult, and poverty increases. We expand our labor force rapidly by bringing in 300,000 immigrant workers to the US every year through the Visa programs, and can adjust that freely; were we to somehow slow the creation of jobs, we could also slow the labor inflow immediately.
If you raise wages, you concentrate more money into fewer hands. Higher minimum wages means we can't buy as many goods because they're somewhat more expensive, as workers are getting paid more. The size of the labor force shrinks--or, at least, the growth of the labor force slows. Our GDP and GNI growth slo
It doesn't actually make a difference: money is an arbitration for time.
If 40 hours of human labor produce a thing, then a 28-hour work week requires 1.43 worker-weeks of labor to produce the thing. Let's examine.
If we pay the workers the same 40-hour rate, then the $1,000 object now costs $1,430. You must work for 1.43 weeks to earn income to buy the thing.
If we pay the workers the same hourly rate for 28 hours, then the $1,000 object now costs $1,000; however, you only have $700 after a week's work. You must work 1.43 weeks's worth of hours to earn income to buy the thing.
See it?
We didn't really win the 40-hour week until mid-century, so it was still familiar to the generation who made the Jetsons.
We work and we make new technology. The wooden shipping pallet reduced shipping labor by 85%. We have all this computer tech. We have a lot more per-capita today, and we consume a great deal more than we did 20 years ago for each person.
We could trade some of that.
Technical progress lets us work the same and make 10% more. Why work the same 40 hours? Why not work 38 hours and have 5% more?
That's the direction. I want a 28-hour work week: 7 hours, 4 days. The unions seem to be looking toward that, finally.
In ACLU's own terms, it is a "slippery slope" without the "clear bright line" separating the reasonable and egregious applications.
So are a lot of things. There are noise restrictions: you can't blare music at 120dB at night or the police show up. I can hear my neighbors talking and hear people outside driving cars sometimes; they're not loud but they're audible. At what point do we fine you for making "noise"?
I can shine a flashlight at an airplane. Laser diodes require a lens to form collimated light, and they do scatter over distance: a spot at 2 kilometers is larger than a spot at 2 meters. At what point is shining a bright light with its focal point on the windscreen of an airplane illegal?
You can wave a sword or firearm at someone without actually attacking them with it. At what point are you assaulting them with a deadly weapon? When it's visible? When you look angry? If it's waved in your general direction, is that assault?
Harassment is just annoyance and is only illegal because it causes a sense of insecurity and psychological trauma. Maybe you shouldn't have any recourse just because you "feel unsafe", and if you assault me for constantly hanging around your house and badgering your wife you can be put in prison for a very long time. Sound good?
Not only can't it be done incrementally, but it can't be done at all. We have no materials which can withstand the stresses involved.
Then...
There are many lesser things we could do in between here and there, like solar power satellites.
Which could independently encircle the Sun and relay power around its horizon as such.
Which could link together into a ring, although that's problematic: orbits must be eccentric, and a spinning ring becomes unstable. You're going to get a giant ellipse. Material stresses aren't a problem; the matter of keeping a spinning ring or sphere from flying off is.
There's another caveat: all space craft experience solar radiation pressure. That means the Sun's emissions are pushing all satellites outward away from the Sun itself. Satellites might initially require ion engines to stabilize themselves; eventually, as they link, they'll require more stabilization. With sufficient surface, they require less. That expansive tension is shared by all structural tension members, so the stresses are pretty small.
Achieving this, you can then link together a biaxial ring, and then a triaxial ring.
Filling the eight facets by superstructure would produce more outward pressure. Engineers would need to balance as they go over its massive construction based on data from the triaxial ring system's continuous compensation to reduce said compensation and achieve gravitational balance.
What? Did you think they'd just wake up one day and proclaim a 5-year project to build a massive sphere around the Sun? It's going to take a thousand years, or maybe a hundred.
You're still not asking the right questions: if we eventually run out of energy and expand further, won't we eventually use all the energy provided by a dyson sphere?
Yes.
The problem is the engineer said, "The phone has a GPS and Wifi and figures out where it is all the time; so we'll store that, unless you stop tracking location!" Then, when you open maps, the engineer said, "Ah, you've actually asked us to get your location, so we'll store that."
Everyone else said, "When you turn location history off, the phone stops recording location history." They don't imagine that the phone just doesn't tell Google their location anymore, or that asking their phone to tell Google their location (by opening Google maps) would involve telling Google their location and Google subsequently storing it.
Imagine if disabling location tracking actually left it on, and kept sending your location to Google every 5 seconds, except Google's servers didn't store it anywhere. This is the opposite: disabling location tracking stops telling Google where you are--and when you do tell Google where you are, they store that.
It's obviously-broken to us, but seems reasonable to the engineers who came up with it.
It's not science fiction without the science, and so far, there is only handwaving. Nothing we understood about physics precluded making a hotter furnace.
You're trying to dispute solar power.
A dyson sphere is a superstructure with solar collectors driving heat engines. We can make metal structures, solar collectors, and the like. Nothing in the laws of physics precludes us from building a dyson sphere in the same way that nothing in the laws of physics precludes you from generating nuclear power in your basement: if you only had a piece of uranium (there's plenty and people are using it to generate nuclear power), you could.
Our understanding of physics itself does not permit it.
Economics doesn't permit it: it would be an enormous resource expenditure. It would pay itself back, but it's hard to start up.
It can be done incrementally, but it's still damned expensive.
it's like a space elevator in that we don't know of any materials which could actually be used to build one.
Steel, PTFE, and some mundane refrigerants.
None of this is even the point.
We know, for a fact, that the currency of resources is energy. Today, we make some cesium and molybdenum by transmuting other elements via nuclear fusion. It's expensive as all hell because it consumes tons of energy; but it works when mining and refining are more expensive than that. Need more uranium? Iron? Hydrogen? Nuclear fission and fusion can do that; we know how; it's just going to take a ton of energy.
Human labor is energy--food. Machine work is energy--fuel.
We know for a fact that expanding our productivity and our production will eventually mean expanding beyond the terrestrial windfall of the sun's energy.
Where do you get more energy?
A dyson sphere. The sun is leaking tons of energy: it's not making it to Earth. Capture it.
That you don't know how to get the material up there is immaterial; you don't know how to get the material up there because you have no clue where you'd find the energy. It's sort of a chicken-and-egg paradox. The physics of building it, operating it, making it work, all easy; the economics are pretty much dead at this moment.
I'm arguing that we will eventually reach the limits of terrestrial energy availability, and then we'll need a Dyson sphere. You're arguing that we can't know that because you can't imagine how to build a dyson sphere. The fact that you can't figure out how doesn't mean you won't need to; and, really, the fact that you can't figure out how is a matter of not understanding that we've actually built things in space that do everything a dyson sphere does--they're just smaller.
It looks like a bunch of weird nomenclature stuff.
If you turn Location History on, your phone tracks your every movement. Everywhere you go, they tell Google.
If you turn Location History off, your phone tracks nothing. Put it in your pocket, wander around, nothing gets logged.
If you turn Location History off and open Google Maps at some point, Google Maps gets your location and stores it in your Location History or something akin to that. They're not tracking your every movement, but they do make note whenever you volunteer your location in some manner.
It seems reasonable until somebody who never thought about it much uses it; then it seems unexpected and confusing. This is why we have user testing.
We not only have no idea how you would build a Dyson sphere, but we have no idea what you would build one out of even if you could magically summon up anything you wanted.
Of course not. When we invented the blast furnace, we could suddenly produce a quantity of iron requiring 84,000 hours of labor in a mere 200 hours; nobody had any earthly idea how to do such a thing until suddenly someone did. If memory serves, the same person invented an iron rolling technique immediately, which made rail travel possible--at the time, the equivalent of traveling from here to Mars Colony as a lower-middle-class family weekend trip.
We do know that a dyson sphere with 32%-efficient collection (the efficiency of concentrating parabolic sterling engine solar collectors) would collect 13,000 trillion times the amount of electricity used on Earth today.
All energy on earth comes from the sun: photosynthesis feeds plants, animals (which eat animals or other plants), and microbes (which photosynthesize or eat other things). The heat, magnetic dynamo (orbiting the sun and its magnetic field causes the Earth's nickel-iron core to turn like a giant dynamo, generating a ton of heat), and so forth all bring energy to the Earth. This is the source of decomposition of arbitrary matter into coal, oil, and flammable gases (today's fossil fuels), as well as the water cycle (hydroelectric power) and wind. Tidal power apparently comes from the moon, which is the odd one out.
That means eventually you are going to expand beyond our exposure to the sun's output if you keep growing. To grow further, you need to collect space fuels (methane from Titan) or more solar energy. Logically, growth eventually demands a dyson sphere.
When you exceed the dyson sphere's capacity, you need one more thing--the most dangerous thing: a black hole generator.
There's an intermediate area between normal space and the event horizon in which the laws of physics are...weird. You can enter and leave this space; you can't leave the event horizon. A black hole is a collapsed spinning star and is itself spinning; dropping more stuff into it makes it spin faster. By throwing something past the black hole, you can enter orbit; and at a close distance, you can drop part of the mass into the black hole to escape. The black hole spins faster, transferring part of its momentum to the mass still in orbit, which exits with more velocity than it entered.
There is one form of self-propagating mass.
If you put a bunch of mirrors around a black hole and shine light past it, part of the light beam peels off and falls into the black hole. The remainder is affected by the gravity and spin, and comes out with more energy than went in: the black hole actually loses a bit of momentum overall, and the photons gain energy. When they reflect, they interact with matter, which means electrons absorb a high-energy photon and emit multiple lower-energy photons.
Put a hole in the mirror array and you get this massively-powerful blast of radiation flooding out; fail to put a hole in it and the mirror vaporizes, but can't move away at the speed of light, and so before it fails to contain the reflecting photons the black hole releases so much energy as to emit the most powerful supernova in recorded history.
Please don't build this until the universe suffers heat death.
It doesn't matter that you don't know how to build it; it's mundane technology. The logistics of assembling it are not mundane. The logistics of needing it at some point in the future are obvious: where else are you going to get more energy than the sun projects onto the earth?
That's sort of the goal; people generalize too much (yes, this coming from me).
You can't mine more and more oil, gold, or whatever forever. You run out eventually.
Your business can't grow forever. You run out of customers eventually, and become flat relative to consumer base.
Your economy, however...
Productivity is a matter of finding new ways to accomplish the same things by reducing the resources required. Human labor is the final resource: we don't pay iron deposits for their ore; we do pay humans for their time producing the tools, extracting the ore, transporting it, refining it, and so forth. Sometimes we also pay governments or landowners for access rights, but that's a matter of artificial cost and not productivity.
When productivity increases, wealth per person increases. Higher wages for a particular engineer may mean you get a 10% productivity increase but less than a 9% cost decrease (a 10% increase in output, ceteris parabus, is 90.9% cost per output); that's fine: you're concentrating wealth, slowing the growth of the labor force instead of exploding your population. You can still produce and sell more per person, which is why time is the currency.
It turns out you can effectively increase productivity forever, or at least beyond limits we can identify. Productivity increases eventually necessitate the use of fewer expendable resources (less coal, more solar--you need a dyson sphere!), and even causes resource use reduction (GMO wheat grows twice as fast and yields 50% more per plant, so you use 1/3 as much land, labor, water, pesticide, and fertilizer per tonne of wheat). Mechanization front-loads resources: with more energy availability, it's cheap to run machines, and it's already damned-inexpensive to build and maintain them, so you put up human labor with a huge multiplier.
Keynes predicted we'd work 15-hour weeks by now; it's more like 5 or 1. Thing is we kept working 40 hours so we can have the fruits of 40x more labor--or rather, the fruits of the same labor producing 40x as much. I'd like to push for 7-hour work days 4 days per week: as we pick up new productivity, redefine "full time" to force overtime pay and benefits at shorter working hours. We'll be a little less wealthy (we'll be 10% wealthier instead of 15%), and in exchange have more time to enjoy our massive wealth.
Bitcoin is a complex, fancy mechanism that wastes a lot of resources. Instead of producing something consumable, it uses "proof of work": you make a pair of boots, and then we burn those boots because we don't actually need them and just wanted to make sure you're not getting a hand-out. Ethereum seems inefficient as well, although the guy who came up with that did at least put some thought into how to make something productive, whether or not he succeeded. Efficiency of resource utilization matters.
The fact it went to $20k is a once in a generation fluke.
lol no, there's a sucker born every minute.
All of the income earned in the United States--all those US Dollars--comes from selling services to consumers buying services. That means the annual GNI is equal to the amount of stuff produced and sold: it's backed by actual productivity.
People have some magical fantasy about a paper currency being backed by a fickle commodity which can explosively inflate or deflate as people corner the market or find a new gold mine. One day, your half-gram of gold is worth what last year's tenth-gram was worth, and your bank account just collapsed; another, the Hunt Brothers start hoarding all the gold, and you have to take a steep pay cut.
With fiat money, we manipulate monetary policy to hold a 2% inflation rate. This works because all the money spent is logistically and mathematically tied to all the stuff sold: the purchasing power of the currency is the purchasing power of the currency, a reflexive mathematical tautology.
That we all agree to use it helps, but doesn't set its buying power.