Elsewhere, you've pointed out that it requires the labor of approximately 1% of the population to feed the rest
My argument has been incomplete: Farmers target a 20% profit margin, but often get 10%; at 2% of our working hours as farm labor, a 20% profit margin would mean food costs 2.4% of our income, yet it costs 11%. This is because land and capital are moderators and modulators of human labor; capital, in particular, is machines and knowledge, and that takes human labor time to produce (building, maintaining, fueling the machines; teaching the knowledge--much less labor involved).
Food gets to us by way of fuel, machines, fertilizer, pesticides, irrigation, logistics (planning, warehousing, and shipping), and retail. Technical progress reduces the direct labor (farmers) in favor of (less) indirect labor (oil drillers, machinists, steel miners, chemists), giving a reduction of total labor and, often, of land requirements (intensive farming: Grow more stuff closer together; use less fertile land, use less pesticides, lose less fertilizer to run-off, lose less irrigation to evaporation, cover less land planting and harvesting).
It takes considerably more than 2% of our population to feed us all; it takes considerably less than 50% or 90%.
We are rapidly approaching the point where it requires zero human labor to feed the entire population.
As rapidly as ever. We're approaching the point where a guy on a farm outsources his labor to people who never come within thousands of miles of his farm because the machines are all made in China, the steel is mined in Sweden, and the fuel oil is all refined in Alaska. At that point, I'm sure someone will point and say, "Look! Farms are 100% automated, and the growth of food involves zero human labor!" while it requires the equivalent of 9% of our population to grow food.
Your interlocutor has been trying to point out a new fact. Regardless of ongoing technological development, population is plateauing across the developed world. In Japan, the US, Canada, and most of Western Europe, native population growth is, in fact, a negative number. There is no growth.
There are a lot of graphs speculating a decline in population in the future. This is patently silly--why would it decline? Only due to failing resources--new scarcity leading to mass-starvation and poverty. As people declare we will soon be free of oil and moving onto renewable energy in abundance, they also declare that we will run out of the capacity to support ourselves--which can only be energy--and lose population.
Nobody is actually proposing we will move onto renewable energy, leave oil behind, find renewable energy just isn't enough, and sacrifice wealth and population to adjust; they *are* proposing we have an environmental responsibility to cull population regardless of our capacity for growth.
Measurements of the world population history are strange. 6.916 billion in 2010; 6.997Bn in 2011; 7.080Bn in 2012; 7.162 in 2013; 7.243 in 2014; 7.324Bn in 2015. This doesn't seem to project well with a plateau, although we are in a considerable dip. A technology paradigm has leveled off; the world population had a considerable drop in growth around 1905, as well, and we have thousands of times the number of people today.
It seems history is no longer an adequate guide to economic and population expectations.
Look at the context we're in. The explosive growth of the mid-1900s tapered off in the 70s. The height of technological growth in the 90s nudged us back up, then back down as the recessions came. The dot-com bust, the hybrid car failure (in 2002-2003 when oil became expensive, everyone made tons of hybrids, oil suddenly got cheap, and people bought SUVs in
I think that a UBI is our only hope to deal with a coming labor market unlike any in human history and that it represents our best hope to revitalize American civil society.
This makes me expect an "Automation is going to permanently eliminate jobs and we are entering an age of the end of work" argument. Automation is more of the same technical progress that's continued since man learned to sharpen spears to hunt more effectively; it has some attributes in common with the Industrial Revolution, which means we should look for and control the particular danger of sudden rapid transition--that is, sudden loss of lots of employment all at once; high-unemployment markets have difficulty recovering.
We are approaching a labor market in which entire trades and professions will be mere shadows of what they once were. I’m familiar with the retort: People have been worried about technology destroying jobs since the Luddites, and they have always been wrong. But the case for “this time is different” has a lot going for it.
And there it is.
Failure is here:
When cars and trucks started to displace horse-drawn vehicles, it didn’t take much imagination to see that jobs for drivers would replace jobs lost for teamsters, and that car mechanics would be in demand even as jobs for stable boys vanished. It takes a better imagination than mine to come up with new blue-collar occupations that will replace more than a fraction of the jobs (now numbering 4 million) that taxi drivers and truck drivers will lose when driverless vehicles take over.
Answer: Anything which requires any amount of human labor to produce--including the human labor required to produce and maintain the machines, to operate the machines, to manage the logistics, to supply fuel and electricity, to market, to maintain those self-driving cars, and to sell at retail outlets--will have a non-zero price. Our ability to buy those things will lead to buying more things and more-complex things, with the amount we spend increasing as more human labor is required in total to make those things. That means jobs.
Which jobs? What jobs? I don't know. All I know is if I'm buying something, somebody is involved in making it. Until we fully-automate the production of energy--including every activity involved in building, powering, and operating the factories, right down to mining, to painting the ships, all of it--electricity (and oil, solar panels, or whatever power source we're using) will have a cost. Everything that moves will have a cost. Everything that we use will have a cost. Those costs are jobs.
To envision that there won't be jobs, I have to envision that the average consumer has piled up more money than they can spend, ever.
Advances in 3-D printing and “contour craft” technology will put at risk the jobs of many of the 14 million people now employed in production and construction.
Buildings and 3D-printed objects will become cheaper than alternatives; we'll build more of these, and we'll build more-complex versions, invoking additional labor. Some of the labor displaced will go on to producing other products--some of those may even be 3D-printed products that didn't exist before, or which were rich-people luxuries and now are common goods (cell phones made by the technological processes used in 1983 would cost $9,000 today, for example, which should tell you why none of your friends had a cell phone in 1989).
The UBI is to be financed by getting rid of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Supplemental Security Income, housing subsidies, welfare for single women and every other kind of welfare and social-services program, as well as agricultural subsidies and corporate welfare.
Unnecessary risk. Medicare and medicaid are left alone in my plan because covering old people
Adjusted Gross Income (the amount of money on which businesses and individuals pay taxes--for businesses, we call it net profits). I did the math in 2013, and the cost of welfare was 17.2% of AGI while the Dividend was slightly-cheaper. I advocate a long-term fixed flat funding rate for the Dividend as a way to ensure the baseline standard-of-living grows at the exact same rate as the economy.
I did a lot of work identifying risks, costs, and transitional considerations, as well as generating a variety of long-term tax plans. The two major issues I'm still dealing with are a temporary top tax raise (I don't want the top tax bracket above 40%, but the blunt instant-transition is 43%; that actually puts $17,000 more income into the hands of consumers at an $80k income level, so a staged transition would reduce the shock as well as the peak) and a bootstrapping problem (if you start with $0, no friends, no charity, and no possessions, the first 3-4 months are financially-tight because utensils, pots, and pans cost a significant amount of money). It's viable, but not *perfect*.
The basic concept is on my blog. The only transitional consideration I've publicly addressed is Social Security retirement; I've put in some analysis of HUD in particular alongside this. Because the Dividend pays enough for food, clothing, and personal care, plus a remaining combined family (children) welfare system (1.4% cost) covers families with children, food stamps and related support are obviated; however, HUD recipients require continued assistance until the markets adjust to the availability of a stable income.
Notably, while I target the complete elimination of homelessness and hunger by creating a stable bottom-end consumer who can afford housing (224sqft per person), there are huge advantages to the working poor. HUD is a particular pain point, with 75% of Americans qualifying for HUD going directly and PERMANENTLY onto a waiting list and NEVER RECEIVING BENEFITS; and, despite food stamps, 50 million Americans live with food insecurity, not getting enough to eat every day. The lift for families on HUD would allow them to move into non-baseline housing (they have incomes, albeit low), and the transitional concerns are that such a move is natural *and* requires the market to locate, prepare, and market that housing.
There's also consumer market considerations outside the poorest of poor.
I did tax liability computations and found that, comparing to today's Federal taxes (including OASDI), my tax brackets leave the single-adult, minimum-wage household with $6,229 more take-home income; the two-adult, married-filing-jointly, one- or two-minimum-wage household with $14,600 +/- $50 additional take-home income; the two-adult, married-filing-jointly, median-income ($54,462) household with $12,892 additional take-home income; and some significant range of married-filing-jointly, two-adult households including the range of $80,000 to $144,000 (the top 10% Americans households make over $144,000) an additional $17,227.
Amusingly, a married-filing-jointly household with an $84,290 pre-tax income actually takes home exactly $84,290 (before state taxes). Below this, they take home more than their actual wage. Above this, they take home less.
At $1,000,000 anual income, your take-home is $9,126 higher; at $10,000,000, it's $116,874 lower (1.17% additional effective tax rate); and at $25,000,000, it's $326,874 lower (1.31% additional tax rate). Scaled to the median income ($54,462), an additional 1.31% tax would represent $713/year or $59/month in additional taxes; nevertheless, I consider such tax bumps unfortunate, and would want to move slowly into them and then reduce
Yet 25 years ago 2.4GHz and 5GHz was the standard of non-licensed devices. Are you saying new unlicensed frequency bands have or will appear with a high probability?
I would rather end homelessness and hunger because I already have the solution to that *and* I'm genetically immune to cancer. It helps my argument that ending homelessness and hunger saves more lives and improves quality-of-life for more Americans than finding a cancer cure, although I'm not sure it helps my argument enough to cover for the fact that I personally benefit a hell of a lot from the change, too.
You mean the labor force that stably holds around 58% of population, but has experienced a labor force bubble to 69%, and is now coming down as the population ages and retires?
Do you mean the labor force people complained about in the early-2000s because housewives started working to get a second income, claiming it was impossible to survive on a single income anymore?
Do you mean the labor force which continues to grow year after year, even as it shrinks as a proportion of the total population, and reduces itself by 2% marginal population while increasing its rate of employment 5%?
More new jobs have appeared than new Americans. America has become prosperous, and its population has expanded as the wage slave society has broken away, allowing desperate two-income families to become one-income families with more economic freedom. People have painted the change as the destruction of the American economy as the labor force participation rate grew ("We're getting poorer! Housewives must work alongside their husbands or their families starve!") and as it shrinks ("We're losing jobs! Well, not actual jobs, we've got more of those as a percentage of population... but less of the population is expressing a NEED to work! They must have just given up on living!").
I can't tell which of you are liars and which of you are fools.
The problem is politics *are* a form of technology, and we really are looking at the stupid stuff.
I disagree with Bernie Sanders because he has a political solution--raise minimum wage and institute a Basic Income, but no ideas on how to fund it or how it would affect the economy. He talks about creating jobs, but doesn't understand where jobs come from; he uses the same "Our infrastructure is falling apart and we'll create jobs by rebuilding it" argument as everyone else, and the basic premise is untrue, while the supposed outcome is also backwards (inefficient and ineffective spending decreases wealth and ends in a net reduction of jobs). Bernie's job creation and minimum wage policies are essentially trickle-down economics.
On my end, I've started working on economic theory exploring the *mechanisms* of economies, rather than *measurement*, as a basis for policy-making; as such, I have actual plans for a Basic Income in the form of a Citizen's Dividend, including transitions, risks, risk controls, and all the reasoning of why it works and how it impacts an economy. I also have reasoning *against* a minimum wage; the Citizen's Dividend is meant to accomplish what MW proponents envision a MW is for while sidestepping all the negative side effects MW opponents *and* economists recognize (including the ones that are wholly made-up).
That's the difference: people have political ideals--religion, morality, humanitarian, common-sense--and they ride on these as policy. You get "Businesses Must Pay" and then minimum wage increases, and then jobs vanish and people become poorer and you hope the nudge was small enough that population expansion and natural economic growth exceeds the loss, and then you can say, "See, there was no decrease" (i.e. sans-MW-increase, +2,000,000 jobs; MW-increase, +1,400,000 jobs, claim you created 1,400,000 jobs because there's no way to measure the other outcome since it never happened). Nobody says, "Wait, wages make the base wage," or, "Wealth is the per-capita productive output, and so the efficient application of labor is what makes wealth."
Nobody sits down and reasons out the cause-and-effect of policy on the economy, on education, on crime, on individual freedom and quality of life, or on anything else substantial; they reason out the cause-and-effect of policy on VOTES.
My data shows that populations expand more rapidly whenever there is a bump in prosperity.
The baby boomers of old America (1850s) appeared during the California Gold Rush; the baby boomers of modern time--the ones who keep getting old lately--came about during the 60s-70s, when our technology was expanding and the price of food and clothing was dropping rapidly. Economists frequently cite the development of agriculture--making food much more accessible--as creating a surge in human population growth; they cite the development of mathematics--allowing for better engineering and faster technical progress--as causing another sudden increase in human population growth.
All those points on that chart you didn't understand, all the spots where the slope suddenly increased and human population grew more rapidly, are points where technology advanced and created greater access to the means of living. Each inflection point where the population growth rate increased was a point when prosperity suddenly increased. It's why population grows as food prices fall.
That's the entirety of human history. Prosperity occurs and suddenly the human population starts growing faster to consume what's newly available. We see this pattern across thousands of years of history. It's the subject of many economic papers, and a basic tenant of economics that's stated as a known fact right at the beginning of papers which attempt to analyze this effect in more depth.
You may as well claim that pouring additional money into an economy faster than its growth doesn't cause inflation.
An 802.11a/b chipset will do 802.11a/b/g/n/ac with nothing more than a software update. IPv6 is software. WPA2 is software.
And you say...
So my router at home needs only a software change to magically be able to listen at 5Ghz?
You're talking about a fantasy where someone didn't put 5GHz in a newly-manufactured TV. Routers have had 5GHz for over 10 years now, 5GHz and 2.4GHz are the standard frequencies that were used for baby monitors and cordless phones back in the 70s and 80s; they're not new frequencies we just made up.
What if things change tomorrow? Maybe other frequencies open up,
The likelihood of adding non-scientific, licensed frequencies to the hardware are approximately zero. To do so, you would need major changes to the FCC spectrum to stop selling multi-hundred-billion-dollar licensed spectrum and just give it away for free to unlicensed base stations. This hasn't happened in THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF THE GIGAHERTZ SPECTRUM.
channel plans could change, modulations change, etc
A gold standard is patently the worst monetary system. Gold standards are deflationary: consumers become incapable of buying products like houses and cars because they can't access debt, due to debt growing over time (deflation). With the reduction in purchasing ability, the economy becomes more rigid, more risky, and less capable of creating jobs.
The best system is a fractional reserve system on fiat money. This allows controls on inflation: we can increase the money supply with both population and technology level to avoid prices going downward, and avoid infinite lending which would lead to money supply growing too much in excess with population-Union-technology and thus causing hyperinflation.
A zero-inflation economy is impossible because level of technology is not flat: we can improve food technology without improving medical technology, so food becomes cheaper relative to medicine; issuing more currency can get food back to its original price, and will make medicine's price increase. Inflation has to be positive or negative (deflation).
A money supply with reasonable inflation has... odd behaviors. Beneficial, but odd. Notably, it allows for debt.
With inflation, debts become smaller over time. When you take a debt amortized over a long term (e.g. 30-years--note: I want to eliminate the 30-year mortgage in favor of a 10-year mortgage by taking an opportunistic approach the next time interest prime rates are ~14%), you establish an unchanging payment. At the time of origination, that payment is affordable; as time passes, inflation reduces the buying power of that payment and, in general, your income should go up (I get a 1.5%-2.5% raise each year, at least; the theory behind minimum wage increases and certain types of basic income establishes this at the base). Because the payment stays the same, it represents a smaller impact on your income over time, and a smaller amount of buying power.
Essentially, this means the consumer is capable of buying large goods (cars, houses), creating purchasing demand in those markets, supporting jobs and providing the consumer access to luxuries outside his basic level of wealth (i.e. cars are rich-people luxuries, but I can spend half my salary for the next 5 years on one RIGHT NOW and so cars are a common good among the lower-middle-class). The consumer benefits from inflation by his obligated payment shrinking in relation to his income; this, as a general result of an increasing per-capita income, is simply a part of inflation: X dollars loses buying power over time.
The odd part is the banks actually calculate out inflation and take a risk-based approach to setting interest rates. Their goal--usually achieved--is for the interest to outpace inflation. While the consumer gains an advantage in purchasing ability, the bank gains an advantage in profit. On the face, this means you're best off eliminating your loans quickly; however, even with such means, it can be better to hold the debt. In my case, I expend money to insulate my house and upgrade my heating system now, which, over the course of 3 years, saves me the *total* 15-year interest cost of my loan (it really is several thousand dollars). Even though the banks are profiting from me, I am profiting from the deal, as well.
You do realize that layoffs remove people who aren't necessary to produce the product being sold, right? The cost of wages is the base cost of all prices; it is not business, but the consumer who pays wages.
The average family put 43% of their income to food in 1900, with 38% of the labor force working on farms. In 1950, it was 30% of our income with 12% of our labor force on the farms (and an additional chunk in the laboratories and factories making tractors, pesticides, fertilizers, and diesel fuel to support the farm worker). Today, we spend 11% of our income on food, with under 2% of our workers on the farm. How many poor families should be starving right now so that we could have avoided the elimination of 36% of our farm labor force, and should we give up healthcare or the Internet to support these excess and unnecessary farm workers?
This sort of thing is also part of economic growth. It's why we can all afford our nice cars, computers, and medical care, instead of living in brick or wood houses with zero insulation, no electricity, no running water, and wood heat fueled by logs we chop down ourselves.
The massive reduction of the agricultural workforce has lead us from a world where the average working-class family pays 43% of their income for food in 1900 (38% of workforce is farm workers) to 30% of their income in 1950 (12.2% of the workforce is farm workers) to 11% of their income today (under 2% of the workforce is farm workers). In 1790, 90% of the labor force was farm workers, and anyone who wasn't rich hunted and grew their own food to supplement what little they could buy; the *really* mega-rich could afford to charter a horse and carriage for a ride across town, while everyone else had to load up a donkey with panniers and walk.
In 1983, the first commercial cell phones were available for $4,000 (over $9,000 today), with service priced such that simple voice calling for 2 hours per week would cost $250/month ($550/month today). What workers do you think got excessed to bring us cheap cell phone service, and then allow for the growth of better, more widely-distributed services and, ultimately, higher-speed services as we found ways to implement newer technology without involving so many workers in producing it?
That's right: a combination of manufacture workers and IT workers. Manufacturing with a 10% yield means paying 10 times as many workers to get the same number of working units of a product as if you have a 100% yield; and tons of IT management means you have to pay all these IT workers to supply a service. Those costs make up the basic price you must charge to sell a product--hence why middle-class plebs can't have expensive rich-people luxuries, yet those luxuries become common, every-day commodities even the poorest of poor carry around with them just one generation later: we get rid of a lot of the wage workers in the production chain, and the minimum price comes down, and then market forces ranging from simple inflation to inter-market competition pull the prices toward that.
That kind of thing has lifted scarcity throughout human history, resulting in an increase in population (we'd run out of food with more than 3.5 billion humans on earth in 1920; hunter-gatherers would strip the planet bare at somewhere between 0.068 billion and 0.136 billion), a decrease in poverty (the poorest of poor have gained a higher standard-of-living, and welfare became possible), and changing employment sectors (IT services was not a huge sector in the 1790s).
At the end of the day, "Acting Presidential" is less important to the average person than not having their job outsourced overseas.
If we brought all the manufacture jobs from China back to America, Americans would be able to afford fewer products because those products would be more expensive. Seriously, we have 5.6% UE4 (that's UE3 plus discouraged workers--people who would and could take a job if offered, but gave up looking), so we don't have a major gap in the workforce to fill. Besides that, you can't fill the gap that way: the Chinese worker is $3.50/hr, and the American is $7.25/hr (Federal minimum); the goods are twice as expensive to manufacture, and still have to go through per-unit continental shipping (trucking industry), logistics (distribution), warehousing, marketing, and retail.
With the added expense, Americans can buy fewer units. The same amount of money is in the system: it's the same total income per year, because it's the same total consumer spending, which continues to grow by debt and Federal money issue at the same rate. That fact is usually missed in minimum wage arguments (people imagine taking money from the broad consumer base--the people already spending money--and concentrating it in fewer consumer hands by MAKING THINGS MORE EXPENSIVE is going to somehow create mo
Decoding at high data rates? Decoding what? Did you not get the memo that decoding 4k on a 1080p physical display is meaningless, and so you expend 0.01% CPU bitrate-peeling instead?
Improved networking options are mostly software. An 802.11a/b chipset will do 802.11a/b/g/n/ac with nothing more than a software update. IPv6 is software. WPA2 is software.
So, I have this data that shows that Japanese women who train intensively in martial arts are able to successfully defend themselves against men. Based on this demographics data, women are genetically stronger than men.
That's the argument you made.
Sociological and demographic data are not about population; they are about a BEHAVIOR of a SUBSET OF POPULATION.
Again: your data shows that CERTAIN FAMILIES in a CERTAIN POSITION IN THE HIERARCHY produce relatively more children than OTHER FAMILIES. My data shows that ALL FAMILIES, AS A WHOLE, PRODUCE MORE CHILDREN UNDER CERTAIN CONDITIONS.
In other words: poorer people breeding more than richer people doesn't grow population; the *total* amount of breeding accounting for *all people*--poor, rich, and middle-class--combined as a single, complete, 100% population unit determines population growth.
For example: there are MORE POOR FAMILIES when prosperity increases because there are MORE TOTAL FAMILIES.
So, basically what you just said is that I was ignoring your points, so in return, you will ignore mine.
Basically what I said is your points are wrong and invalid. You essentially said something akin to "more people with cancer die in this hospital, thus it is a bad hospital" without recognizing that the hospital has 100 times more beds and 300 times more cancer patients than the "better" hospital (getting into some Simpson's Paradox material).
Again: I'm talking about whole populations and their observable behaviors in response to environmental stimulus; you're talking about population demographics and their general average behavior across all environmental stimulus, and extrapolating that by analogizing their demographic to a certain type of stimulus and claiming that describes a population's reaction to the stimulus.
What I had said is that the rate of population growth decreases as prosperity increases.
Yet each reduction in scarcity across all of human history has caused a boom in population. Human population has been shown directly tied to prosperity in a causal manner: societies capable of producing more per population achieve higher populations, and developments of new technology which raises that ceiling causes an increase in population growth rate.
The greatest single factor in the history of human population growth has been developments in technology and the associated social changes arising from it. From the first development of tools to the development of agriculture and the later rise of industry, technology has expanded the resources available for the support of large populations.
The first important fact to consider is that technological growth helps drive population which itself helps drive technological progress. This is due to the ability of technological improvements to increase the agricultural productivity of both individuals and societies, and thus allowed for a boom in available resources which provided sustenance for a larger population.
This is the subject of a lot of economic study, forming the basis of many further arguments about what affects technical progress and, thus, further drives population growth.
So, again: you're talking about sociology and demographics; I'm talking about economy and populations.
I hardly think 2GB of RAM for an embedded system performing one task at one time is going obsolete in a decade or two. 16GB costs $60 new today (what!?); put $8 worth of RAM in there and back it by a zram-like swap system. If you use 50% of the RAM as a swap space, that's at least 4GB of accessible memory storage for program data; compression rates will be bad for buffered data, though. (Roku 3 has 512MB of RAM and streams full 1080p HD; 2GB should stream 4k easily enough, and the memory compression will swap out anything not as active as your video buffer.)
You don't even have to worry about newer, big-resolution standards: if your TV is a 1080p HDTV, streaming 4K doesn't help; if you can *only* get a 4k stream, you buffer it by pulling down compressed 4K and bit peeling. Many modern codecs store lossy-compressed data ordered like a progressive JPEG, such that throwing out the end part gets you the same output as encoding at a lower quality setting. This is highly attractive to streaming services because they can then keep one copy of high-quality encoded data and peel off the higher-resolution information or the higher-quality information without expending storage space or CPU power to transcode downward.
Wifi is just a radio chipset; push a new firmware blob to your 802.11-abg and it's now 802.11-a/b/g/n/ac (it needs the 5GHz band, so has to have 802.11a capability to begin with).
Which you've argued will lose 1.3 million jobs. Out of 1.6 million total jobs in said industry.
What if people buy exactly as many hamburgers, spending the additional few cents, which erodes their buying power to purchase some other commodity good? Then jobs at Amazon are lost.
Every good and service is in competition with every other good and service. You have the capability to buy 1,000 things and there are 10,000 things on the market; 9,000 things will lose out. There are millions of people, so the total pool of all consumer capability to buy is divided up among all of those things, which creates all jobs. If any one of these things becomes more expensive without the total money supply increasing (inflation), then someone else's job must go away, because less of something else is bought.
You continue to argue that a price increase in the fast food industry can ONLY reduce purchasing of fast food items. The argument is that the TOTAL AMOUNT OF PURCHASEABLE PRODUCTS decreases. The total IN THE ENTIRE POPULATION. That means something doesn't get bought, and somebody's job goes away.
I.e. Cost of life (i.e. cost of products and services) increases by less than 12% - while income jumps up by 81%.
This is an infinite money argument. You argue that somebody has more money, thus there is more capability to buy.
Your argument ignores that the TOTAL INCOME PER YEAR of all people working is *THE SAME*. It's not one penny more; just some specific person has more money because the cost of the products they're helping to produce are now higher. Some other people are incapable of buying as many products because THE SAME AMOUNT OF MONEY BUYS FEWER THINGS. This means someone else's job must go away, as something isn't bought, and whoever makes that something now can't be paid a wage.
The key flaw is all of these people are still getting and spending the same money in the same time. That is to say: someone is now getting $30,000 instead of $18,000; and they're getting that money over a year of work. They don't instantly have $12,000 additional to dump into the next guy's salary and create new jobs. If they did, then we would all be infinitely rich because we all have jobs and we put our money "back into the economy" and it comes back to us and, by the end of the week, the feedback loop makes us all billionaires.
This is a common flaw in thinking by people with narrow minds who can only observe individuals and not economies. Donald Trump is a huge example of this kind of horrendously-broken grasp on economics, although he's a good solid step up from most people I've seen argue about minimum wage.
When that same parent is paid ABOVE the poverty line for a family of five - he/she doesn't need that extra job.
That job then does not get lost - it becomes a job opening.
When I say jobs are being eliminated, I mean jobs. If there are 500 jobs being worked by 200 people because most of them have second jobs, some of those second jobs are going away--pack your shit, folks, we're going away!
You are, again, using some broken rationalization to imagine up where the jobs might go. I am saying the economy becomes poorer and less-capable of supporting jobs; you are saying CERTAIN people become richer and so no longer need their job, so the job becomes someone else's job--and ignoring the fact that some subset of such jobs actually vanish out of existence.
People have been on and off about it. There's even an Iron Browser that's Chrome with all that crap stripped out because typing in your URL bar should not invade your privacy by sending every keystroke to Google and immediately returning search results, recent history, and mathematical computations. Basically, if you use Chrome, Google knows *every* Web site you go to, because typing "www.myporno.com" sends that to Google along the way, in case you wanted URL completion.
Windows 10 does this if you type "Notepad" or "Photoshop" into the start menu search feature, as it'll suggest Web sites and programs to install. It's really bad at suggestions, too. This only happens if you use a specific search feature that searches on your computer and in the web, but it freaks people out.
I have no idea what that graph is trying to convey, but it does not address the demographic transition: that the more prosperous people are, the fewer children they have.
This doesn't support your argument. Your argument is, essentially, that certain demographics in a population exhibit a certain behavior; my argument is that a certain stimulus triggers a certain behavior.
Your argument completely ignores that a population with less scarcity can support more families. That means there can be more middle-class and rich families, or more poor families. There is physically more available to be distributed among each person without running out.
Notice here the relationship between GDP per capita in an area and the population (and population density) of that area.
Right. Hence, it makes sense that is desirable to increase their prosperity, so that they no longer are poor people who are, in your words, "breed like rats"
America has experienced huge prosperity increases. Take the past 100 years. Look at what the average family spent their money on.
1900: 43% of income spent on food; 14% on clothing. Housing (including shelter, maintenance, utilities) made up 23%. The average single-bedroom apartment was 400 square feet in this era.
1950: 30% food, 12% clothing, 28% on housing. I'll point out that the average new single-family home size in 1950 was 983sqft.
2003: 13% on food; 4% on clothing; 33% on housing, with an average new single-family home of 2,300 sqft. Your average American now spends more of his money on more and better healthcare, while also enjoying a much larger home and modern conveniences, and lots of non-essential discretionary spending. We eat out a lot more and cook in a lot less.
1900 United States population: 76,000,000. 1950: 152,000,000. 2003: 290,000,000.
Today, the average American family spends about 11% of our money on food and 3% on clothing. The United States population is 324 million.
The 1960 GDP per capita was $3,007. It was $39,677 in 2003, and is $53,041 today. These are inflation-adjusted numbers; GNP is unadjusted.
As America's prosperity has increased, so has its population. How do you explain this?
I have no idea what that graph is trying to convey, but it does not address the demographic transition: that the more prosperous people are, the fewer children they have.
I'm talking about whole populations, not demographics. I'm talking about the firm, real, total population of a nation based on its economics.
That graph is conveying that human population grows as technology grows into the capability to support human population. The planet Earth cannot support more than 130 MILLION humans as hunter-gatherers; with agriculture, we can support billions. Intensive agriculture allows that number to climb higher. New methods of steel-making. Textile machines. Communications. Information technology.
What, you think the population just grows and grows? It grows faster when technology uncaps scarcity. That's a fact. You're stating a fact that, if we close our eyes to the facts of population growth and focus down on the poor, ghetto-bound, welfare-supported families, they breed more; and you're IGNORING HOW THAT BREEDING INTERACTS WITH THE TOTAL POPULATION.
In other words: you're saying, "Poor people breed more, thus poorer people will breed even faster, and scarcity will not reduce population growth." In the real world, scarcity--the economic pressure of recessions--reduces population growth, and uncapping scarcity--developing technology which makes it easier for the poor and middle-class to live--leads to increased population growth. Why do you think all the boom generations are around times when riches and wealth and economic growth are going on?
The actual data, however, shows birth rate decreases with prosperity.
You keep saying this. You say, "Family Jones is poor, and has 5 kids; Family Maltese is rich and has 2. See? The total population grows more slowly when we have less scarcity!"
Too bad I'm not talking about one family or another, but about baby boom cycles and population slumps in national and global economies. Stop talking about families and demographics, because THE ACTUAL DATA, HOWEVER, SHOWS THAT TOTAL POPULATION EXPANDS WITH PROSPERITY.
You can't just say, "We'll discover magic in several decades." The progression doesn't do that. The sun hits an orbital solar station with 1,360 watts per square meter. A kilogram of glass requires 9.7kWh; factories sized to serve a city of 1-2 million will produce up to 3 million glass containers per day, 5.587 gigawatt-hours of consumption. That's a 233 megawatt plant using 100% of the solar energy (100% perfectly efficient solar utilization) of 171,000 square meters area or a 413 meter square (nearly a half a kilometer on each side).
The world demand for flat glass alone--window panes, not beverage containers or anything curvy--is over 50 million tonnes. That's well over 55 gigawatts just for that relatively small market, 55,000 megawatts, and the area of the sun shining on that is over 40,000,000 square meters or a 6.3 kilometer square. That's 428 million kilograms of glass, assuming 100% perfect efficiency in energy capture from the panel to the point of use, including absolutely-perfect heat utilization exceeding theoretical carnot efficiency by more than double.
An absolutely perfect solar system would have 1/116th of the weight of its glass output, or 0.86%. That's for 9.7kWh per kg to make. Iron requires 7kWh per kg, and feeds into new steel manufacture at 14kWh--new steel from iron ore requires 21kWh; recycled steel requires 4.1kWh per kg. Aluminum requires 95kWh from bauxite, 4.75kWh to recycle. Let's not forget: you have to lift all that shit up there.
Well, at least we can make semiconductors, right?
Electronics-grade silicon requires 2,155kWh per kg to manufacture. That's right: two fucking gigawatts for over an hour to make an amount of silicon weighing about the same as a third-grade math textbook. More exotic materials which we don't use include Silicon-on-Diamond; we currently use Silicon-on-Sapphire. SOS and SOD necessarily require more power than straight silicon, regardless of technology level: these materials are at a higher energy state and require additional input energy to manufacture; if you can get around that, you are literally creating energy in the same way as if you burned water to produce heat, then burned the H2 and O2 produced by burning water to produce water and heat. When we improve the technology to make silicon with less energy, diamond and sapphire substrate will benefit, as the processes are strongly related; there's a minimum amount of energy required to order and crystalize atoms, though.
Perspective:
While 98% elemental silicon, known as metallurgical-grade silicon (MGS), is readily produced on a large scale, the requirements of extreme purity for electronic device fabrication require additional purification steps in order to produce electronic-grade silicon (EGS). Electronic-grade silicon is also known as semiconductor-grade silicon (SGS). In order for the purity levels to be acceptable for subsequent crystal growth and device fabrication, EGS must have carbon and oxygen impurity levels less than a few parts per million (ppm), and metal impurities at the parts per billion (ppb) range or lower.
Amount?
Currently, approximately 500,000 metric tons of MGS are produced per year, worldwide. [...] only 1% or less of the total production of MGS is used in the manufacturing of high-purity EGS for the electronics industry. The current worldwide consumption of EGS is approximately 5 x 10^6 kg per year.
Five million kilogrammes. That's only 570kg/hr or a little over 1.2 gigawatts. MGS requires about 20kWh per kg, about 1% as much as SGS; at 57,000+ kg/hr, that's 1.1GW. That's 0.26 square kilometers of insolation, if you can make an energy-perfect collector--18 million kg of solar panels operating at 100% efficiency feeding a perfect machine.
So roll those panels up to 33% efficiency, then use them to feed machines with a Carnot efficiency of at best 40%. 13% at a conservative estimate. Divide all the numbers above by.1
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Elsewhere, you've pointed out that it requires the labor of approximately 1% of the population to feed the rest
My argument has been incomplete: Farmers target a 20% profit margin, but often get 10%; at 2% of our working hours as farm labor, a 20% profit margin would mean food costs 2.4% of our income, yet it costs 11%. This is because land and capital are moderators and modulators of human labor; capital, in particular, is machines and knowledge, and that takes human labor time to produce (building, maintaining, fueling the machines; teaching the knowledge--much less labor involved).
Food gets to us by way of fuel, machines, fertilizer, pesticides, irrigation, logistics (planning, warehousing, and shipping), and retail. Technical progress reduces the direct labor (farmers) in favor of (less) indirect labor (oil drillers, machinists, steel miners, chemists), giving a reduction of total labor and, often, of land requirements (intensive farming: Grow more stuff closer together; use less fertile land, use less pesticides, lose less fertilizer to run-off, lose less irrigation to evaporation, cover less land planting and harvesting).
It takes considerably more than 2% of our population to feed us all; it takes considerably less than 50% or 90%.
We are rapidly approaching the point where it requires zero human labor to feed the entire population.
As rapidly as ever. We're approaching the point where a guy on a farm outsources his labor to people who never come within thousands of miles of his farm because the machines are all made in China, the steel is mined in Sweden, and the fuel oil is all refined in Alaska. At that point, I'm sure someone will point and say, "Look! Farms are 100% automated, and the growth of food involves zero human labor!" while it requires the equivalent of 9% of our population to grow food.
Your interlocutor has been trying to point out a new fact. Regardless of ongoing technological development, population is plateauing across the developed world. In Japan, the US, Canada, and most of Western Europe, native population growth is, in fact, a negative number. There is no growth.
There are a lot of graphs speculating a decline in population in the future. This is patently silly--why would it decline? Only due to failing resources--new scarcity leading to mass-starvation and poverty. As people declare we will soon be free of oil and moving onto renewable energy in abundance, they also declare that we will run out of the capacity to support ourselves--which can only be energy--and lose population.
Nobody is actually proposing we will move onto renewable energy, leave oil behind, find renewable energy just isn't enough, and sacrifice wealth and population to adjust; they *are* proposing we have an environmental responsibility to cull population regardless of our capacity for growth.
Measurements of the world population history are strange. 6.916 billion in 2010; 6.997Bn in 2011; 7.080Bn in 2012; 7.162 in 2013; 7.243 in 2014; 7.324Bn in 2015. This doesn't seem to project well with a plateau, although we are in a considerable dip. A technology paradigm has leveled off; the world population had a considerable drop in growth around 1905, as well, and we have thousands of times the number of people today.
It seems history is no longer an adequate guide to economic and population expectations.
Look at the context we're in. The explosive growth of the mid-1900s tapered off in the 70s. The height of technological growth in the 90s nudged us back up, then back down as the recessions came. The dot-com bust, the hybrid car failure (in 2002-2003 when oil became expensive, everyone made tons of hybrids, oil suddenly got cheap, and people bought SUVs in
First red flag:
I think that a UBI is our only hope to deal with a coming labor market unlike any in human history and that it represents our best hope to revitalize American civil society.
This makes me expect an "Automation is going to permanently eliminate jobs and we are entering an age of the end of work" argument. Automation is more of the same technical progress that's continued since man learned to sharpen spears to hunt more effectively; it has some attributes in common with the Industrial Revolution, which means we should look for and control the particular danger of sudden rapid transition--that is, sudden loss of lots of employment all at once; high-unemployment markets have difficulty recovering.
We are approaching a labor market in which entire trades and professions will be mere shadows of what they once were. I’m familiar with the retort: People have been worried about technology destroying jobs since the Luddites, and they have always been wrong. But the case for “this time is different” has a lot going for it.
And there it is.
Failure is here:
When cars and trucks started to displace horse-drawn vehicles, it didn’t take much imagination to see that jobs for drivers would replace jobs lost for teamsters, and that car mechanics would be in demand even as jobs for stable boys vanished. It takes a better imagination than mine to come up with new blue-collar occupations that will replace more than a fraction of the jobs (now numbering 4 million) that taxi drivers and truck drivers will lose when driverless vehicles take over.
Answer: Anything which requires any amount of human labor to produce--including the human labor required to produce and maintain the machines, to operate the machines, to manage the logistics, to supply fuel and electricity, to market, to maintain those self-driving cars, and to sell at retail outlets--will have a non-zero price. Our ability to buy those things will lead to buying more things and more-complex things, with the amount we spend increasing as more human labor is required in total to make those things. That means jobs.
Which jobs? What jobs? I don't know. All I know is if I'm buying something, somebody is involved in making it. Until we fully-automate the production of energy--including every activity involved in building, powering, and operating the factories, right down to mining, to painting the ships, all of it--electricity (and oil, solar panels, or whatever power source we're using) will have a cost. Everything that moves will have a cost. Everything that we use will have a cost. Those costs are jobs.
To envision that there won't be jobs, I have to envision that the average consumer has piled up more money than they can spend, ever.
Advances in 3-D printing and “contour craft” technology will put at risk the jobs of many of the 14 million people now employed in production and construction.
Buildings and 3D-printed objects will become cheaper than alternatives; we'll build more of these, and we'll build more-complex versions, invoking additional labor. Some of the labor displaced will go on to producing other products--some of those may even be 3D-printed products that didn't exist before, or which were rich-people luxuries and now are common goods (cell phones made by the technological processes used in 1983 would cost $9,000 today, for example, which should tell you why none of your friends had a cell phone in 1989).
The UBI is to be financed by getting rid of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Supplemental Security Income, housing subsidies, welfare for single women and every other kind of welfare and social-services program, as well as agricultural subsidies and corporate welfare.
Unnecessary risk. Medicare and medicaid are left alone in my plan because covering old people
Adjusted Gross Income (the amount of money on which businesses and individuals pay taxes--for businesses, we call it net profits). I did the math in 2013, and the cost of welfare was 17.2% of AGI while the Dividend was slightly-cheaper. I advocate a long-term fixed flat funding rate for the Dividend as a way to ensure the baseline standard-of-living grows at the exact same rate as the economy.
I did a lot of work identifying risks, costs, and transitional considerations, as well as generating a variety of long-term tax plans. The two major issues I'm still dealing with are a temporary top tax raise (I don't want the top tax bracket above 40%, but the blunt instant-transition is 43%; that actually puts $17,000 more income into the hands of consumers at an $80k income level, so a staged transition would reduce the shock as well as the peak) and a bootstrapping problem (if you start with $0, no friends, no charity, and no possessions, the first 3-4 months are financially-tight because utensils, pots, and pans cost a significant amount of money). It's viable, but not *perfect*.
The basic concept is on my blog. The only transitional consideration I've publicly addressed is Social Security retirement; I've put in some analysis of HUD in particular alongside this. Because the Dividend pays enough for food, clothing, and personal care, plus a remaining combined family (children) welfare system (1.4% cost) covers families with children, food stamps and related support are obviated; however, HUD recipients require continued assistance until the markets adjust to the availability of a stable income.
Notably, while I target the complete elimination of homelessness and hunger by creating a stable bottom-end consumer who can afford housing (224sqft per person), there are huge advantages to the working poor. HUD is a particular pain point, with 75% of Americans qualifying for HUD going directly and PERMANENTLY onto a waiting list and NEVER RECEIVING BENEFITS; and, despite food stamps, 50 million Americans live with food insecurity, not getting enough to eat every day. The lift for families on HUD would allow them to move into non-baseline housing (they have incomes, albeit low), and the transitional concerns are that such a move is natural *and* requires the market to locate, prepare, and market that housing.
There's also consumer market considerations outside the poorest of poor.
I did tax liability computations and found that, comparing to today's Federal taxes (including OASDI), my tax brackets leave the single-adult, minimum-wage household with $6,229 more take-home income; the two-adult, married-filing-jointly, one- or two-minimum-wage household with $14,600 +/- $50 additional take-home income; the two-adult, married-filing-jointly, median-income ($54,462) household with $12,892 additional take-home income; and some significant range of married-filing-jointly, two-adult households including the range of $80,000 to $144,000 (the top 10% Americans households make over $144,000) an additional $17,227.
Amusingly, a married-filing-jointly household with an $84,290 pre-tax income actually takes home exactly $84,290 (before state taxes). Below this, they take home more than their actual wage. Above this, they take home less.
At $1,000,000 anual income, your take-home is $9,126 higher; at $10,000,000, it's $116,874 lower (1.17% additional effective tax rate); and at $25,000,000, it's $326,874 lower (1.31% additional tax rate). Scaled to the median income ($54,462), an additional 1.31% tax would represent $713/year or $59/month in additional taxes; nevertheless, I consider such tax bumps unfortunate, and would want to move slowly into them and then reduce
Yet 25 years ago 2.4GHz and 5GHz was the standard of non-licensed devices. Are you saying new unlicensed frequency bands have or will appear with a high probability?
I would rather end homelessness and hunger because I already have the solution to that *and* I'm genetically immune to cancer. It helps my argument that ending homelessness and hunger saves more lives and improves quality-of-life for more Americans than finding a cancer cure, although I'm not sure it helps my argument enough to cover for the fact that I personally benefit a hell of a lot from the change, too.
You mean the labor force that stably holds around 58% of population, but has experienced a labor force bubble to 69%, and is now coming down as the population ages and retires?
Do you mean the labor force people complained about in the early-2000s because housewives started working to get a second income, claiming it was impossible to survive on a single income anymore?
Do you mean the labor force which continues to grow year after year, even as it shrinks as a proportion of the total population, and reduces itself by 2% marginal population while increasing its rate of employment 5%?
More new jobs have appeared than new Americans. America has become prosperous, and its population has expanded as the wage slave society has broken away, allowing desperate two-income families to become one-income families with more economic freedom. People have painted the change as the destruction of the American economy as the labor force participation rate grew ("We're getting poorer! Housewives must work alongside their husbands or their families starve!") and as it shrinks ("We're losing jobs! Well, not actual jobs, we've got more of those as a percentage of population... but less of the population is expressing a NEED to work! They must have just given up on living!").
I can't tell which of you are liars and which of you are fools.
The problem is politics *are* a form of technology, and we really are looking at the stupid stuff.
I disagree with Bernie Sanders because he has a political solution--raise minimum wage and institute a Basic Income, but no ideas on how to fund it or how it would affect the economy. He talks about creating jobs, but doesn't understand where jobs come from; he uses the same "Our infrastructure is falling apart and we'll create jobs by rebuilding it" argument as everyone else, and the basic premise is untrue, while the supposed outcome is also backwards (inefficient and ineffective spending decreases wealth and ends in a net reduction of jobs). Bernie's job creation and minimum wage policies are essentially trickle-down economics.
On my end, I've started working on economic theory exploring the *mechanisms* of economies, rather than *measurement*, as a basis for policy-making; as such, I have actual plans for a Basic Income in the form of a Citizen's Dividend, including transitions, risks, risk controls, and all the reasoning of why it works and how it impacts an economy. I also have reasoning *against* a minimum wage; the Citizen's Dividend is meant to accomplish what MW proponents envision a MW is for while sidestepping all the negative side effects MW opponents *and* economists recognize (including the ones that are wholly made-up).
That's the difference: people have political ideals--religion, morality, humanitarian, common-sense--and they ride on these as policy. You get "Businesses Must Pay" and then minimum wage increases, and then jobs vanish and people become poorer and you hope the nudge was small enough that population expansion and natural economic growth exceeds the loss, and then you can say, "See, there was no decrease" (i.e. sans-MW-increase, +2,000,000 jobs; MW-increase, +1,400,000 jobs, claim you created 1,400,000 jobs because there's no way to measure the other outcome since it never happened). Nobody says, "Wait, wages make the base wage," or, "Wealth is the per-capita productive output, and so the efficient application of labor is what makes wealth."
Nobody sits down and reasons out the cause-and-effect of policy on the economy, on education, on crime, on individual freedom and quality of life, or on anything else substantial; they reason out the cause-and-effect of policy on VOTES.
My data shows that populations expand more rapidly whenever there is a bump in prosperity.
The baby boomers of old America (1850s) appeared during the California Gold Rush; the baby boomers of modern time--the ones who keep getting old lately--came about during the 60s-70s, when our technology was expanding and the price of food and clothing was dropping rapidly. Economists frequently cite the development of agriculture--making food much more accessible--as creating a surge in human population growth; they cite the development of mathematics--allowing for better engineering and faster technical progress--as causing another sudden increase in human population growth.
All those points on that chart you didn't understand, all the spots where the slope suddenly increased and human population grew more rapidly, are points where technology advanced and created greater access to the means of living. Each inflection point where the population growth rate increased was a point when prosperity suddenly increased. It's why population grows as food prices fall.
That's the entirety of human history. Prosperity occurs and suddenly the human population starts growing faster to consume what's newly available. We see this pattern across thousands of years of history. It's the subject of many economic papers, and a basic tenant of economics that's stated as a known fact right at the beginning of papers which attempt to analyze this effect in more depth.
You may as well claim that pouring additional money into an economy faster than its growth doesn't cause inflation.
An 802.11a/b chipset will do 802.11a/b/g/n/ac with nothing more than a software update. IPv6 is software. WPA2 is software.
And you say...
So my router at home needs only a software change to magically be able to listen at 5Ghz?
You're talking about a fantasy where someone didn't put 5GHz in a newly-manufactured TV. Routers have had 5GHz for over 10 years now, 5GHz and 2.4GHz are the standard frequencies that were used for baby monitors and cordless phones back in the 70s and 80s; they're not new frequencies we just made up.
What if things change tomorrow? Maybe other frequencies open up,
The likelihood of adding non-scientific, licensed frequencies to the hardware are approximately zero. To do so, you would need major changes to the FCC spectrum to stop selling multi-hundred-billion-dollar licensed spectrum and just give it away for free to unlicensed base stations. This hasn't happened in THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF THE GIGAHERTZ SPECTRUM.
channel plans could change, modulations change, etc
That's a software update.
A gold standard is patently the worst monetary system. Gold standards are deflationary: consumers become incapable of buying products like houses and cars because they can't access debt, due to debt growing over time (deflation). With the reduction in purchasing ability, the economy becomes more rigid, more risky, and less capable of creating jobs.
The best system is a fractional reserve system on fiat money. This allows controls on inflation: we can increase the money supply with both population and technology level to avoid prices going downward, and avoid infinite lending which would lead to money supply growing too much in excess with population-Union-technology and thus causing hyperinflation.
A zero-inflation economy is impossible because level of technology is not flat: we can improve food technology without improving medical technology, so food becomes cheaper relative to medicine; issuing more currency can get food back to its original price, and will make medicine's price increase. Inflation has to be positive or negative (deflation).
A money supply with reasonable inflation has ... odd behaviors. Beneficial, but odd. Notably, it allows for debt.
With inflation, debts become smaller over time. When you take a debt amortized over a long term (e.g. 30-years--note: I want to eliminate the 30-year mortgage in favor of a 10-year mortgage by taking an opportunistic approach the next time interest prime rates are ~14%), you establish an unchanging payment. At the time of origination, that payment is affordable; as time passes, inflation reduces the buying power of that payment and, in general, your income should go up (I get a 1.5%-2.5% raise each year, at least; the theory behind minimum wage increases and certain types of basic income establishes this at the base). Because the payment stays the same, it represents a smaller impact on your income over time, and a smaller amount of buying power.
Essentially, this means the consumer is capable of buying large goods (cars, houses), creating purchasing demand in those markets, supporting jobs and providing the consumer access to luxuries outside his basic level of wealth (i.e. cars are rich-people luxuries, but I can spend half my salary for the next 5 years on one RIGHT NOW and so cars are a common good among the lower-middle-class). The consumer benefits from inflation by his obligated payment shrinking in relation to his income; this, as a general result of an increasing per-capita income, is simply a part of inflation: X dollars loses buying power over time.
The odd part is the banks actually calculate out inflation and take a risk-based approach to setting interest rates. Their goal--usually achieved--is for the interest to outpace inflation. While the consumer gains an advantage in purchasing ability, the bank gains an advantage in profit. On the face, this means you're best off eliminating your loans quickly; however, even with such means, it can be better to hold the debt. In my case, I expend money to insulate my house and upgrade my heating system now, which, over the course of 3 years, saves me the *total* 15-year interest cost of my loan (it really is several thousand dollars). Even though the banks are profiting from me, I am profiting from the deal, as well.
Strange things most people don't understand.
You do realize that layoffs remove people who aren't necessary to produce the product being sold, right? The cost of wages is the base cost of all prices; it is not business, but the consumer who pays wages.
Labor reduction is a good thing. The labor force moves to other things. How do you think food keeps getting cheaper? From where do you think all the manufacture and services jobs came from? What money are Americans redirecting to the growing Healthcare sector to enjoy more and better healthcare?
The average family put 43% of their income to food in 1900, with 38% of the labor force working on farms. In 1950, it was 30% of our income with 12% of our labor force on the farms (and an additional chunk in the laboratories and factories making tractors, pesticides, fertilizers, and diesel fuel to support the farm worker). Today, we spend 11% of our income on food, with under 2% of our workers on the farm. How many poor families should be starving right now so that we could have avoided the elimination of 36% of our farm labor force, and should we give up healthcare or the Internet to support these excess and unnecessary farm workers?
If they do sell...
This sort of thing is also part of economic growth. It's why we can all afford our nice cars, computers, and medical care, instead of living in brick or wood houses with zero insulation, no electricity, no running water, and wood heat fueled by logs we chop down ourselves.
The massive reduction of the agricultural workforce has lead us from a world where the average working-class family pays 43% of their income for food in 1900 (38% of workforce is farm workers) to 30% of their income in 1950 (12.2% of the workforce is farm workers) to 11% of their income today (under 2% of the workforce is farm workers). In 1790, 90% of the labor force was farm workers, and anyone who wasn't rich hunted and grew their own food to supplement what little they could buy; the *really* mega-rich could afford to charter a horse and carriage for a ride across town, while everyone else had to load up a donkey with panniers and walk.
In 1983, the first commercial cell phones were available for $4,000 (over $9,000 today), with service priced such that simple voice calling for 2 hours per week would cost $250/month ($550/month today). What workers do you think got excessed to bring us cheap cell phone service, and then allow for the growth of better, more widely-distributed services and, ultimately, higher-speed services as we found ways to implement newer technology without involving so many workers in producing it?
That's right: a combination of manufacture workers and IT workers. Manufacturing with a 10% yield means paying 10 times as many workers to get the same number of working units of a product as if you have a 100% yield; and tons of IT management means you have to pay all these IT workers to supply a service. Those costs make up the basic price you must charge to sell a product--hence why middle-class plebs can't have expensive rich-people luxuries, yet those luxuries become common, every-day commodities even the poorest of poor carry around with them just one generation later: we get rid of a lot of the wage workers in the production chain, and the minimum price comes down, and then market forces ranging from simple inflation to inter-market competition pull the prices toward that.
That kind of thing has lifted scarcity throughout human history, resulting in an increase in population (we'd run out of food with more than 3.5 billion humans on earth in 1920; hunter-gatherers would strip the planet bare at somewhere between 0.068 billion and 0.136 billion), a decrease in poverty (the poorest of poor have gained a higher standard-of-living, and welfare became possible), and changing employment sectors (IT services was not a huge sector in the 1790s).
At the end of the day, "Acting Presidential" is less important to the average person than not having their job outsourced overseas.
If we brought all the manufacture jobs from China back to America, Americans would be able to afford fewer products because those products would be more expensive. Seriously, we have 5.6% UE4 (that's UE3 plus discouraged workers--people who would and could take a job if offered, but gave up looking), so we don't have a major gap in the workforce to fill. Besides that, you can't fill the gap that way: the Chinese worker is $3.50/hr, and the American is $7.25/hr (Federal minimum); the goods are twice as expensive to manufacture, and still have to go through per-unit continental shipping (trucking industry), logistics (distribution), warehousing, marketing, and retail.
With the added expense, Americans can buy fewer units. The same amount of money is in the system: it's the same total income per year, because it's the same total consumer spending, which continues to grow by debt and Federal money issue at the same rate. That fact is usually missed in minimum wage arguments (people imagine taking money from the broad consumer base--the people already spending money--and concentrating it in fewer consumer hands by MAKING THINGS MORE EXPENSIVE is going to somehow create mo
Decoding at high data rates? Decoding what? Did you not get the memo that decoding 4k on a 1080p physical display is meaningless, and so you expend 0.01% CPU bitrate-peeling instead?
Improved networking options are mostly software. An 802.11a/b chipset will do 802.11a/b/g/n/ac with nothing more than a software update. IPv6 is software. WPA2 is software.
Oh my god. *facepalm*
So, I have this data that shows that Japanese women who train intensively in martial arts are able to successfully defend themselves against men. Based on this demographics data, women are genetically stronger than men.
That's the argument you made.
Sociological and demographic data are not about population; they are about a BEHAVIOR of a SUBSET OF POPULATION.
Again: your data shows that CERTAIN FAMILIES in a CERTAIN POSITION IN THE HIERARCHY produce relatively more children than OTHER FAMILIES. My data shows that ALL FAMILIES, AS A WHOLE, PRODUCE MORE CHILDREN UNDER CERTAIN CONDITIONS.
In other words: poorer people breeding more than richer people doesn't grow population; the *total* amount of breeding accounting for *all people*--poor, rich, and middle-class--combined as a single, complete, 100% population unit determines population growth.
For example: there are MORE POOR FAMILIES when prosperity increases because there are MORE TOTAL FAMILIES.
Your point?
So, basically what you just said is that I was ignoring your points, so in return, you will ignore mine.
Basically what I said is your points are wrong and invalid. You essentially said something akin to "more people with cancer die in this hospital, thus it is a bad hospital" without recognizing that the hospital has 100 times more beds and 300 times more cancer patients than the "better" hospital (getting into some Simpson's Paradox material).
Again: I'm talking about whole populations and their observable behaviors in response to environmental stimulus; you're talking about population demographics and their general average behavior across all environmental stimulus, and extrapolating that by analogizing their demographic to a certain type of stimulus and claiming that describes a population's reaction to the stimulus.
What I had said is that the rate of population growth decreases as prosperity increases.
Yet each reduction in scarcity across all of human history has caused a boom in population. Human population has been shown directly tied to prosperity in a causal manner: societies capable of producing more per population achieve higher populations, and developments of new technology which raises that ceiling causes an increase in population growth rate.
Hell, quick google finds things
The greatest single factor in the history of human population growth has been developments in technology and the associated social changes arising from it. From the first development of tools to the development of agriculture and the later rise of industry, technology has expanded the resources available for the support of large populations.
The first important fact to consider is that technological growth helps drive population which itself helps drive technological progress. This is due to the ability of technological improvements to increase the agricultural productivity of both individuals and societies, and thus allowed for a boom in available resources which provided sustenance for a larger population.
This is the subject of a lot of economic study, forming the basis of many further arguments about what affects technical progress and, thus, further drives population growth.
So, again: you're talking about sociology and demographics; I'm talking about economy and populations.
I hardly think 2GB of RAM for an embedded system performing one task at one time is going obsolete in a decade or two. 16GB costs $60 new today (what!?); put $8 worth of RAM in there and back it by a zram-like swap system. If you use 50% of the RAM as a swap space, that's at least 4GB of accessible memory storage for program data; compression rates will be bad for buffered data, though. (Roku 3 has 512MB of RAM and streams full 1080p HD; 2GB should stream 4k easily enough, and the memory compression will swap out anything not as active as your video buffer.)
You don't even have to worry about newer, big-resolution standards: if your TV is a 1080p HDTV, streaming 4K doesn't help; if you can *only* get a 4k stream, you buffer it by pulling down compressed 4K and bit peeling. Many modern codecs store lossy-compressed data ordered like a progressive JPEG, such that throwing out the end part gets you the same output as encoding at a lower quality setting. This is highly attractive to streaming services because they can then keep one copy of high-quality encoded data and peel off the higher-resolution information or the higher-quality information without expending storage space or CPU power to transcode downward.
Wifi is just a radio chipset; push a new firmware blob to your 802.11-abg and it's now 802.11-a/b/g/n/ac (it needs the 5GHz band, so has to have 802.11a capability to begin with).
Which you've argued will lose 1.3 million jobs. Out of 1.6 million total jobs in said industry.
What if people buy exactly as many hamburgers, spending the additional few cents, which erodes their buying power to purchase some other commodity good? Then jobs at Amazon are lost.
Every good and service is in competition with every other good and service. You have the capability to buy 1,000 things and there are 10,000 things on the market; 9,000 things will lose out. There are millions of people, so the total pool of all consumer capability to buy is divided up among all of those things, which creates all jobs. If any one of these things becomes more expensive without the total money supply increasing (inflation), then someone else's job must go away, because less of something else is bought.
You continue to argue that a price increase in the fast food industry can ONLY reduce purchasing of fast food items. The argument is that the TOTAL AMOUNT OF PURCHASEABLE PRODUCTS decreases. The total IN THE ENTIRE POPULATION. That means something doesn't get bought, and somebody's job goes away.
I.e. Cost of life (i.e. cost of products and services) increases by less than 12% - while income jumps up by 81%.
This is an infinite money argument. You argue that somebody has more money, thus there is more capability to buy.
Your argument ignores that the TOTAL INCOME PER YEAR of all people working is *THE SAME*. It's not one penny more; just some specific person has more money because the cost of the products they're helping to produce are now higher. Some other people are incapable of buying as many products because THE SAME AMOUNT OF MONEY BUYS FEWER THINGS. This means someone else's job must go away, as something isn't bought, and whoever makes that something now can't be paid a wage.
The key flaw is all of these people are still getting and spending the same money in the same time. That is to say: someone is now getting $30,000 instead of $18,000; and they're getting that money over a year of work. They don't instantly have $12,000 additional to dump into the next guy's salary and create new jobs. If they did, then we would all be infinitely rich because we all have jobs and we put our money "back into the economy" and it comes back to us and, by the end of the week, the feedback loop makes us all billionaires.
This is a common flaw in thinking by people with narrow minds who can only observe individuals and not economies. Donald Trump is a huge example of this kind of horrendously-broken grasp on economics, although he's a good solid step up from most people I've seen argue about minimum wage.
When that same parent is paid ABOVE the poverty line for a family of five - he/she doesn't need that extra job. That job then does not get lost - it becomes a job opening.
When I say jobs are being eliminated, I mean jobs. If there are 500 jobs being worked by 200 people because most of them have second jobs, some of those second jobs are going away--pack your shit, folks, we're going away!
You are, again, using some broken rationalization to imagine up where the jobs might go. I am saying the economy becomes poorer and less-capable of supporting jobs; you are saying CERTAIN people become richer and so no longer need their job, so the job becomes someone else's job--and ignoring the fact that some subset of such jobs actually vanish out of existence.
People have been on and off about it. There's even an Iron Browser that's Chrome with all that crap stripped out because typing in your URL bar should not invade your privacy by sending every keystroke to Google and immediately returning search results, recent history, and mathematical computations. Basically, if you use Chrome, Google knows *every* Web site you go to, because typing "www.myporno.com" sends that to Google along the way, in case you wanted URL completion.
Windows 10 does this if you type "Notepad" or "Photoshop" into the start menu search feature, as it'll suggest Web sites and programs to install. It's really bad at suggestions, too. This only happens if you use a specific search feature that searches on your computer and in the web, but it freaks people out.
Okay, now that I've had time to think.
I have no idea what that graph is trying to convey, but it does not address the demographic transition: that the more prosperous people are, the fewer children they have.
This doesn't support your argument. Your argument is, essentially, that certain demographics in a population exhibit a certain behavior; my argument is that a certain stimulus triggers a certain behavior.
Your argument completely ignores that a population with less scarcity can support more families. That means there can be more middle-class and rich families, or more poor families. There is physically more available to be distributed among each person without running out.
Notice here the relationship between GDP per capita in an area and the population (and population density) of that area.
Right. Hence, it makes sense that is desirable to increase their prosperity, so that they no longer are poor people who are, in your words, "breed like rats"
America has experienced huge prosperity increases. Take the past 100 years. Look at what the average family spent their money on.
1900: 43% of income spent on food; 14% on clothing. Housing (including shelter, maintenance, utilities) made up 23%. The average single-bedroom apartment was 400 square feet in this era.
1950: 30% food, 12% clothing, 28% on housing. I'll point out that the average new single-family home size in 1950 was 983sqft.
2003: 13% on food; 4% on clothing; 33% on housing, with an average new single-family home of 2,300 sqft. Your average American now spends more of his money on more and better healthcare, while also enjoying a much larger home and modern conveniences, and lots of non-essential discretionary spending. We eat out a lot more and cook in a lot less.
1900 United States population: 76,000,000. 1950: 152,000,000. 2003: 290,000,000.
Today, the average American family spends about 11% of our money on food and 3% on clothing. The United States population is 324 million.
The 1960 GDP per capita was $3,007. It was $39,677 in 2003, and is $53,041 today. These are inflation-adjusted numbers; GNP is unadjusted.
As America's prosperity has increased, so has its population. How do you explain this?
I bought my router from Amazon.
I have no idea what that graph is trying to convey, but it does not address the demographic transition: that the more prosperous people are, the fewer children they have.
I'm talking about whole populations, not demographics. I'm talking about the firm, real, total population of a nation based on its economics.
That graph is conveying that human population grows as technology grows into the capability to support human population. The planet Earth cannot support more than 130 MILLION humans as hunter-gatherers; with agriculture, we can support billions. Intensive agriculture allows that number to climb higher. New methods of steel-making. Textile machines. Communications. Information technology.
What, you think the population just grows and grows? It grows faster when technology uncaps scarcity. That's a fact. You're stating a fact that, if we close our eyes to the facts of population growth and focus down on the poor, ghetto-bound, welfare-supported families, they breed more; and you're IGNORING HOW THAT BREEDING INTERACTS WITH THE TOTAL POPULATION.
In other words: you're saying, "Poor people breed more, thus poorer people will breed even faster, and scarcity will not reduce population growth." In the real world, scarcity--the economic pressure of recessions--reduces population growth, and uncapping scarcity--developing technology which makes it easier for the poor and middle-class to live--leads to increased population growth. Why do you think all the boom generations are around times when riches and wealth and economic growth are going on?
The actual data, however, shows birth rate decreases with prosperity.
You keep saying this. You say, "Family Jones is poor, and has 5 kids; Family Maltese is rich and has 2. See? The total population grows more slowly when we have less scarcity!"
Too bad I'm not talking about one family or another, but about baby boom cycles and population slumps in national and global economies. Stop talking about families and demographics, because THE ACTUAL DATA, HOWEVER, SHOWS THAT TOTAL POPULATION EXPANDS WITH PROSPERITY.
So you buy the new version and download it into your TV.
You can't just say, "We'll discover magic in several decades." The progression doesn't do that. The sun hits an orbital solar station with 1,360 watts per square meter. A kilogram of glass requires 9.7kWh; factories sized to serve a city of 1-2 million will produce up to 3 million glass containers per day, 5.587 gigawatt-hours of consumption. That's a 233 megawatt plant using 100% of the solar energy (100% perfectly efficient solar utilization) of 171,000 square meters area or a 413 meter square (nearly a half a kilometer on each side).
The world demand for flat glass alone--window panes, not beverage containers or anything curvy--is over 50 million tonnes. That's well over 55 gigawatts just for that relatively small market, 55,000 megawatts, and the area of the sun shining on that is over 40,000,000 square meters or a 6.3 kilometer square. That's 428 million kilograms of glass, assuming 100% perfect efficiency in energy capture from the panel to the point of use, including absolutely-perfect heat utilization exceeding theoretical carnot efficiency by more than double.
An absolutely perfect solar system would have 1/116th of the weight of its glass output, or 0.86%. That's for 9.7kWh per kg to make. Iron requires 7kWh per kg, and feeds into new steel manufacture at 14kWh--new steel from iron ore requires 21kWh; recycled steel requires 4.1kWh per kg. Aluminum requires 95kWh from bauxite, 4.75kWh to recycle. Let's not forget: you have to lift all that shit up there.
Well, at least we can make semiconductors, right?
Electronics-grade silicon requires 2,155kWh per kg to manufacture. That's right: two fucking gigawatts for over an hour to make an amount of silicon weighing about the same as a third-grade math textbook. More exotic materials which we don't use include Silicon-on-Diamond; we currently use Silicon-on-Sapphire. SOS and SOD necessarily require more power than straight silicon, regardless of technology level: these materials are at a higher energy state and require additional input energy to manufacture; if you can get around that, you are literally creating energy in the same way as if you burned water to produce heat, then burned the H2 and O2 produced by burning water to produce water and heat. When we improve the technology to make silicon with less energy, diamond and sapphire substrate will benefit, as the processes are strongly related; there's a minimum amount of energy required to order and crystalize atoms, though.
Perspective:
While 98% elemental silicon, known as metallurgical-grade silicon (MGS), is readily produced on a large scale, the requirements of extreme purity for electronic device fabrication require additional purification steps in order to produce electronic-grade silicon (EGS). Electronic-grade silicon is also known as semiconductor-grade silicon (SGS). In order for the purity levels to be acceptable for subsequent crystal growth and device fabrication, EGS must have carbon and oxygen impurity levels less than a few parts per million (ppm), and metal impurities at the parts per billion (ppb) range or lower.
Amount?
Currently, approximately 500,000 metric tons of MGS are produced per year, worldwide. [...] only 1% or less of the total production of MGS is used in the manufacturing of high-purity EGS for the electronics industry. The current worldwide consumption of EGS is approximately 5 x 10^6 kg per year.
Five million kilogrammes. That's only 570kg/hr or a little over 1.2 gigawatts. MGS requires about 20kWh per kg, about 1% as much as SGS; at 57,000+ kg/hr, that's 1.1GW. That's 0.26 square kilometers of insolation, if you can make an energy-perfect collector--18 million kg of solar panels operating at 100% efficiency feeding a perfect machine.
So roll those panels up to 33% efficiency, then use them to feed machines with a Carnot efficiency of at best 40%. 13% at a conservative estimate. Divide all the numbers above by .1