Many would rather have respectable jobs over prettier GUI's.
Dignity and an empty sack are worth the sack.
Especially young adult males: if you don't find them a job and respect, they'll riot, rape, rob, and war. It's how they are wired.
You mean if they don't have an income to support themselves and their families, and thus feel threatened because of scarcity--food is hard to come by, medical care is expensive, etc. You know, the things globalization and the growth of wealth among the middle- and lower-classes have provided.
You will have riots in the streets when your people are poor, starving, and desperate; they'll *always* wax romantic about how they're somehow better than their lot in life.
So who pays for a worker who becomes unemployed to go back to college to retrain for a new job?
We don't.
There's 5.6% UE4 unemployment--UE3 (competitive job market) plus people who are discouraged (have given up competing). Creating a 5% increase in unemployment *seriously* injures your economy (see: the Great Recession of 2008). If you knock 0.1% of people out of their jobs, there's 50 other long-standing unemployed people for every 1 who has been made unemployed.
In other words: we're training new steel workers as our demand for ships slows and our demand for rail transit grows. 10,000,000 people are unemployed; 100,000 are becoming unemployed dock workers; 100,000 are becoming seniors; and 100,000 are becoming adults and training to join the workforce. The unemployed dock workers don't get first dibs--if they did, then the other ten million unemployed people would have been ahead of them in line to get jobs, and they would have never been employed in the first place.
Note that, in practice, 26% of the United States population is under 18, and 5.6% UE4 represents 9 million people in a 161 million person labor force. If we make the assumption of a steady population growth rate (this is generally valid without sharp, disruptive technical progress, such as across the past 50 years or so), then 1/18 of the minors (1/18 of 88 million, or 1 million) become adults, and 1/44 of the labor force become retirees, each year. Today, in the US, that's 4.9 million new adults of which 62% or 3 million become workforce, and 3.7 million leaving the workforce as retirees, as a general estimate.
In other words: a large (~1/3) chunk of the unemployed work force is represented by workforce turn-over. If 9 million people are unemployed, 3 million retire, and 3 million come into the work force, then you have 12 million people competing for 3 million jobs.
All of this is fascinating, I'm sure; the point is that we're paying for the initial training of 3 million people here. What do you think we're going to train them for?
The former is being automated. Amazon has displaced Best Buy and many other sellers of durable goods, and some grocery stores, such as the Kroger store on West State Blvd in Fort Wayne, Indiana, close all non-self-checkout lanes after some hour.
Back in the 1700s, you could take your uneducated self to a farm and do some work. Carry hay bales. Then we got diesel combines; much of that farm work has been automated.
Back in the 1800s, you could take your uneducated self to the textile mills and operate machines. We had 8-year-old kids doing it. Then the power loom came.
In the 1900s, you could take your uneducated self to the factories in America and operate the machines. You could go to the rail yards and dock yards and load freight. We now have cranes and more industrial machinery.
My point is "Burger Flippers" was a metaphor. We'll have some other job that a burger-flipper can do soon. You don't even need a high-school degree to twiddle the levers and refill the machine with hamburger meat. Try to not think on such a narrow track; we're entering the age of self-driving flying cars, and we no longer need roads.
Some time during some night in the next 10 days, not "that night". When it's within 2 days, it asks me again.
Oh I'm glad you mentioned this, especially since every update seems to set Edge back to the default browser, and regardless of what you set your default browser too if you search via Cortana it'll open up in Edge.
I've been running Windows 10 since May, 2014 and that hasn't happened to me.
First, the benefits of free trade seem to go to the wealthy, not workers, for as of yet unknown reasons.
It's more that the benefits are weighted upward. That is to say: when the nation becomes 10% richer, the working class gets 8% of that, and the upper class gets 2%; but the upper class is the top 10%, so they, as a collective, get twice the proportion. Every one of us gets the ability to buy a car, they each get the ability to buy two cars.
Second, comparative advantage removes diversification: you become a few- or one-product country, creating risk.
And it gives you access to things you otherwise wouldn't have at all, as well as higher degrees of wealth. This makes new risk mitigation possible. The expansion of wealth via technical progress is what has made labor-protecting tax plans like welfare systems and, ultimately, Basic Incomes possible, and the labor required for that expansion is more rapidly obtained by diverting the production of goods to the population which expends the least labor on such production.
The theory cannot handle inequality and bubbles properly. The cash bubbles, inequality, and de-diversification (C.A.) create more instability and domino effects of crashes, due to increased linkage of country economies.
False. These are unrelated.
Inequality is a natural consequence of the growth of wealth: rich people can be only so much richer than the average man that the cash they don't siphon off the basic needs of the working population and cause a labor force collapse. In poor societies, the rich can have slightly more than the poor--the poorest hunter-gatherer societies have an equal share access to all goods, and the wealth of authority concentrated in whoever can scream the loudest. In more wealthy societies, the economy can necessarily handle the rich taking more; and the population can grow larger, meaning the rich siphoning the same proportion from each of the poor leads to the rich having *much* more than the average poor person, creating enormous inequality gaps.
None of this relates to comparative advantage.
Protectionism may create some duplication (inefficiency), but that duplication is also a buffer from risk.
It creates cost risks by which you have fewer and less-effective contingencies when something bad happens because the amount of wealth is low and the amount of damage is high.
In the modern globalized system, we've gained enough wealth to institute a system under which a disturbance such as the 2008-2010 Great Recession would have been minor and short-lived; and we *did* experience the dot-com bust, the automaker's collapse, and the housing market collapse without triggering similar recessions (the housing market collapse came before the general financial market collapse, and was buffered by months; the 2008 Great Recession was a much larger general recession).
Because of the amount of wealth, the cost of a basic income system such as a Citizen's Dividend has fallen below the cost of public aid. Such a system allows for tax plans which do not require the raising of business or personal income taxes, and which drive the employee's take-home pay closer to the employee's per-hour wage-labor cost. Simultaneously, expending labor in the most-efficient way distributes wage-labor hours over a larger amount of production: you get paid $10/hr, but in that hour you make 1.5 times as much stuff, thus all that stuff costs 2/3 as much and you are no poorer--really, richer, because things are cheaper yet you have as m
Uninstall WHAT programs? You said it uninstalls programs so I'll use the microsoft alternatives.
I have not seen Windows just update at a time other than at which I have specified it to update.
apt-get update gets a list of packages. apt-get upgrade tells the server all the packages I have installed which need upgrades. apt-get install tells Ubuntu what packages I'm installing. They have a long-running history of what packages I installed, when I install them, how frequently I update, and what packages get what updates--meaning they know if I've uninstalled a particular package, as it stops getting updates.
I'm pretty sure Microsoft sends connections to Bing when you open the start menu's search feature. That's what it does: it asks Bing for things. So when you click that little box and type "Notepad", yes, it talks to an Internet search engine; how do you think it's delivering suggestions "on the web"?
We're known for +5 Insightful that agrees with the majority political opinion of Slashdot as filtered by who has mod points at the time, often to the hilarious effect that the highly-rated comments are stupid and defective. I'm pretty sure *many* of the people who are nodding and agreeing with me on economics comments are just happy I touched their feel-good liberal or feel-good conservative standpoint in some aspect, so I get modded up for saying "minimum wage is bad" or "we need a better welfare system" with big words, instead of for actually being right.
"Hey, I have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about, but floating USB drives sound like a great idea because I'm a self-proclaimed nerd surrounded by old ISA cards" is a political opinion, too.
the 107 domains that the OS sends your personal information to
Every report I've seen about that has had methodology I've used to show Ubuntu, Fedora, et al sends your personal information all over the god damned world, what with Apport/Whoopsie constantly uploading error reports to Launchpad, apt and yum constantly telling all kinds of servers what applications you have installed (HTTP GET pornview-2.1.3.deb WUT? It tells them my IP address too!), and so forth. There are also complaints about Microsoft's live Web search tool sending whatever you type in the Start menu search to Bing, meanwhile people are using Siri and Android to ask about Microsoft's snooping--which is sending everything they say to Apple and Google.
In other words, Vlad is doing what Sam is doing, but Vlad is a big, scary Russian and we can't trust Russians. Sam is the every-day man and obviously can do those things Vlad does, 'cause he's cool.
he uncontrollable auto-updates that reboot while you're in the middle of your work,
Mine warns me like 2 days before it does it, and tells me it's scheduled for like 3am 2 days later. It lets me delay that stuff to a date and time of my choosing, and will put the updates in when I reboot if I finish up early and decide I can restart at that time.
deletes programs installed on your computer so you'll use the Microsoft equivalent instead
You sent me a link to Windows 10 installing itself as a new operating system and moving the previous OS to a C:\windows.old directory. That happened when I upgraded from Windows 8, and happens when you upgrade between tech previews; I've never seen Windows 10 do that from a production, non-beta build.
Thus far, Windows 10 hasn't removed Xamarin Studio Monodevelop, Chrome, Google Drive, Spotify, Kindle, LibreOffice, LyX, Unity 3D, Steam, or anything else I had installed. I did notice Microsoft *bought* Xamarin, and now installing Xamarin Studio instead installs Visual Studio instead of MonoDevelop.
So what, does it only remove Firefox and install Edge? Is Google Chrome immune from Microsoft setting its home page to Bing? I don't see any of this happening on my end. Maybe it removes some useless utility that collides with a Windows service or makes assumptions no longer true about the registry (and thus might break Windows), and everybody panicked; maybe you're the FUD master. So far as I can tell, you've described nothing that affects the vast majority of users--and in some cases nothing that differs from popular mainstream Linux distributions.
This is plain bad marketing strategy. Microsoft Windows 10 is actually a decent operating system, unlike that shit slab Windows 8.1 and the status-quo Windows 7. I tried Windows XP and went *back* to Linux, and that was freaking Mandrake 8; Windows 7 wasn't much of any kind of improvement, and Windows 8.1 was just "has the right APIs to run Unity 3D". Windows 10 surprised me enough that I sometimes stay on it as a casual OS rather than flipping back and forth if I'm doing a bunch of things *and* Unity 3D; so why aren't they playing up all the incredible improvements in Windows 10 as a migration strategy, rather than annoying the user into submission?
Correct. This is why the steady growth of technology across the past 200 years in America has supplied vast wealth with 4%-10% unemployment rates, while sharp steps forward in technology without uncorking any form of scarcity (e.g. the Industrial Revolution; automating every task at all McDonalds; self-driving cars) have caused history's greatest economic collapses.
To be short and imprecise: technical progress causes transitional unemployment, and an economy is kept healthy by maximizing the rate of re-employment and stretching out the rate of transition to labor-reducing methods; this is optimally performed by keeping workers competitive with the technology which replaces them and highly-employable. The most effective way to keep workers highly-employable is to minimize their proportional wage-labor cost; technical progress tends to do that, as one employee's time handles the task of several employees thanks to new technology, thus that employee's wages are divided more finely across more units of product. Basic income schemes such as a Citizen's Dividend, tax plans which reduce payroll and sales taxes, and progressive taxes which reduce working-class taxes as the income gap widens address both ends of the equation.
These are also more highly skilled professions, for which most of "the labor freed up from the farm" is likely unqualified. Who covers the cost of retraining?
This is not entirely true for two reasons.
First, we're exchanging numbers. A healthy economy has 4%-8% unemployment in the labor force; low unemployment leads to labor shortages (which staggers the economy), and high unemployment reduces the consumer base. If you unemploy 0.2% of your labor force during one year, then the new jobs may very well go to some of the other 4% or so who are already unemployed. In the United States, unemployment insurance only pays for 6 months, which means our social safety net relies on continuously exchanging out workers onto the unemployment line and bringing in other workers who were previously receiving unemployment aid (my Citizen's Dividend addresses this directly, because it's a reasonable policy, but a sub-optimal one; unemployment limits are negative punishment for not getting a job, while a Citizen's Dividend converts this to positive reinforcement by eliminating the negative punishment associated with *losing* your unemployment payment when you do get hired, thus any employment *only* makes you more wealthy).
This, plus the nature of changing markets and a constantly-developing workforce, means the workforce training occurring among new labor market entrants (college students) changes to follow the changing technology trends, and so the retraining you cite is somewhat integrated. Again: you probably don't want to eliminate 5% of jobs in 2-3 years; that's a pretty high turn-over rate, and the economy won't often create new jobs that quickly (the Information Age was a highly-complex example).
Second, much of the labor isn't highly-skilled labor. We've created a lot of blunt customer service jobs, truck loading/unloading jobs, cashier operators, and the like. Part of our growth is more grocery baggers and burger flippers; and we will necessarily want to replace our highly-skilled industrial machine operators with whatever moron can babysit a nearly-self-operating machine designed to be operated by whatever moron you can pull off the street. Look at most network software and hardware now: I could teach a completely computer-illiterate idiot to install Ubuntu and load arbitrary Web applications (OwnCloud, Gitlab, Wordpress, etc.) in maybe an hour; and the curious and persistent could figure it out on their own in half a day. My job as a skilled computer systems technician and engineer has become roughly equivalent to burger flipping.
So we get a major growth in retail, shipping, and other low-skilled labor, while our skilled professional
So get 40 million people together and start screaming very loudly. Seriously the amount of stupidity I deal with every day; do people not realize "X is hard and nobody will want to do it" implies NOTHING IS WORTH DOING?
You might want to adopt early to immediately assess the risk, to understand the nature of operations.
We call those pilots, and they're done on a small scale and considered a sub-optimal cost paid to gain organizational knowledge so as to improve the strategic decisions made later.
You might to add the additional cost of an early transition because the transition can give you an edge (in terms of quality or quantity) against competitors.
Adopting a young technology early in its viability lifetime tends to put you in a position where you have to absorb a lot of cost and hold out for a long-term ROI; and then, when your competitor invests in the same technology 2-3 years later, their absolute minimum prices to break even are lower than yours, and you can't drop you prices to meet theirs without filing Chapter 11 (you don't have to Chapter 7 if you can continue business operations if you can restructure your debt well enough to keep operating). You are now behind, and you are doomed to be behind for the next decade or so.
A not-so-perfect analogy of swallowing upfront costs as a strategic move is Amazon selling its Kindle Fire line of products at a lost.
That's a *FALSE* analogy. Razor-and-blade or loss-leader model sells two separate goods as a combined good: the razor is sold at a loss, and the consumer will *necessarily* buy the blades continuously as a consumable, thus the amortized profit on the blades makes up for the loss on the razor. That's different from making an up-front investment which should provide lower operating costs: loss-leaders are a revenue strategy, while business process management focuses on production cost strategies.
It is at this point that we need to stop looking at this purely from a private business or economics point of view, and look at this as a matter of social/national policy.
I'm actually functioning on my own economic theories because I needed a theory specifically designed for policy development. It's what I do.
the possibility of adopting some form of basic income
Citizen's Dividend is the most optimum model. We can represent public-aid welfare costs as 55% of the total Federal income taxes collected; merge OASDI with the tax brackets, cut each tax bracket by that proportion, lay down a 17% flat tax along side, and then adjust them to smooth the total curve. That essentially locks the Dividend to a proportion of the GDP per capita, which necessarilygrows continuously and doesn't fluctuate down too badly even in the worst recessions. That means as we get wealthier, the poorest of poor become wealthier in exactly the same proportion; and so long as the fluctuation doesn't take that Dividend payment down below the viability point (which becomes less likely over time), it can't fail as a safety net. At a point, a recession which breaks the Dividend would necessarily break the economy as a whole--no welfare system survives that.
have a national policy for the continuing education of our workforce - including moving focus away from 4-year college education and into vocational/adult training.
I do not agree with the state-supported workforce development model. It is a handout to businesses at the expense of individuals; it removes small risks from businesses and converts them to *enormous* risks on individuals; and it wastes a lot of labor time providing worthless job training (because we over-supply job markets and wind up with unemployed people who instead could have been trained in something else, thus the
came to the conclusion you're saying we shouldn't give a shit about people who don't have money to spend on bling.
I direct you to the uncontrollable certainty that your planned effort will fail to produce the intended results, and you conclude we should simply stop trying instead of selecting a different strategy that might actually fucking work?
Oh, I see. You're trying to argue by poisoning the well now, creating a fantasy image of your opponent that you can attack via emotional arguments.
So, you want to respond to the elimination of jobs by enforcing the permanent removal of those jobs, thus sliding the American economy into the depths of poverty? Are you trying to collapse the country?
Because if there are multiple copies of industries in each nation (something globalists hate), then individuals within those nations can chose the occupation that maximizes their potential
This is mysticism. It relies on a spiritual superstition in which people are gifted by their deity to have certain special abilities over others.
The usual answer is a blunt "comparative advantage" or "economists have shown protectionism is bad", which, such as it is, basically implies you or the person arguing with you is too dumb to understand, thus fall back to buzzwords. Let's go with a more complete explanation.
Let's say a producer in Maine can produce 8 tonnes of potato per acre, and 2 tonnes of melon per acre. A producer in Mexico can produce 8 tonnes of melon per acre, and 2 tonnes of potato per acre. The farm management techniques are similar, and so the costs are basically the same per acreage; thus melon costs 4 times as much to produce in Maine, and potato costs 4 times as much to produce in Mexico.
So the guys in Maine normally produce potato for $100/tonne and melon for $400/tonne using 5 acres of land for 8 tonnes of each; while the guys in Mexico produce melon for $100/tonne and potato for $400/tonne using 5 acres of land for 8 tonnes of each. That's a lot of wasted money (read: human labor time) and land.
So the guys in Maine instead produce 16 tonnes of potato on 2 acres of land at a price of $100/tonne; the guys in Mexico produce 16 tonnes of melon on 2 acres of land at a price of $100/tonne. It costs about $1,000 to ship 30 tonnes of freight, so these people trade and Mexico ends up with potato at $133/tonne, while Maine ends up with Melon at $133/tonne.
Each side now has 60% of the land involved in producing 8 tonnes each potato and melon, and has reclaimed 60% of the labor (unemployment). As well, there is $66 per tonne or approximately 75% of the money unspent by the consumer base purchasing these products.
Most people miss this next part.
With that additional money, the consumers can now buy more products--including foreign imports, recycling the above process. Those products must be moved (shipping), accounted for (logistics), distributed (warehousing), and sold (retail), meaning the supply chain of melons, jeans, or cheap mechanical pencils creates a *lot* of local jobs (your local WalMart has a district manager under a regional manager; it has regional warehouses to stage goods for distribution across the district; and of course all those stores and the inventory, security, management, and service employees), paid for by the money saved via importing.
In short: the labor freed up from the farm is repurposed. Maybe we start a manufacturing base (this happened after America's labor force started using intensive farming techniques and machines, cutting from 90% of the work force to today's ~2%). Maybe that gets shipped to China and we make more doctors and stuff like Netflix and cell phone networks. Maybe we just make more food. In any case, for the same labor and the same number of jobs, we end up with MORE STUFF.
You might also notice: food is suddenly cheaper, since we're making 2.5 times as much for the same cost investment. Imagine it takes half the labor to produce all the goods you currently consumer--that means half the wages paid down the whole stack (right down to the coal miners), thus the same profit margins at half the PRICE. Your money can buy twice as much, so long as your wages aren't slashed, right? In this case, we haven't slashed hourly wages; we've slashed number of hours required to make a thing: one guy working for $10/hr still works 40 hours, and the other guy goes to do some other job; the things they both make cost half as much, and you can buy both of them, and support both their salaries.
So you ask:
How is "thinking globally" going to help me, Joe Random Small Person?
Globalization increases wealth and creates jobs. I've done some *weak* analysis on a scenario in which the United States blockades China and brings all manufacture back to the U.S., and the result is people become *much* poorer on an individual basis (the people making Comcast High Speed Internet, T-Mobile's 4G network, and Netflix need to stop doing that and go work in these factories--we don't have the labor for
Is e-coli really that dangerous? Last time I got it, it gave me a stomach ache.. I cried for like five hours, then it went away; then I shit my ass the next morning.
Salmonella gives me a headache and the shits (even like the fifth time in three months), and I generally ignore it. People panic over that, too.
Pro tip: if the beef smells rotten or you managed to make some wicked pink chicken by accidentally undercooking it, maybe you should do something besides eat that.
"Allow nature to create new antibiotics"? That is the dumbest shit I have heard. You take the bacteria, you examine its genetic code and locate proteins which are critical to its function but unknown to humans, you find proteins on its cell membrane which are unique markers and don't match with humans or livestock, and you engineer chemicals and counter-proteins to interfere with that. Resistance requires fundamental structural changes for which we can then adjust overnight; and highly-engineered antibiotics are less-likely to have random, unpredicted effects on the human and animal and the gut flora.
That's an absolute-fucking-lutly horrible place for a fire to happen, you know how fire travels... Right?
In every Tesla crash which has breached the battery and caused a fire, two things have happened. First, the passenger compartment was more-than-adequately protected--to the point that passengers actually came back WHILE THE CAR WAS ON FIRE, got back in the car, retrieved personal effects and left. I recommend against this, as lithium smoke is bad. Second, firefighters tried putting out metal fires with water--never do this.
And the car actually carries FAR MORE energy in the passenger cabin during frontal impacts. In normal front engine ICE cars, the engine and all its mass is the first thing to stop, adding no stress to the cabin.
The engine carries more momentum and can act as a ram to possibly break down an object that's distinctly not a tree (if you hit a tree, it will stop you). Otherwise, the engine is a huge brick that doesn't do much to protect the passenger, and gets in the way of crumple zones--meaning the car disperses less of the energy of stopping, and SLAMS the passenger to a stop where a Tesla more gently slows the passenger to a stop ("slows" is a relative term here, as is "gently").
On the other hand, the tesla battery is directly attached, very strongly to the cabin... Effectively driving it forward with all the battery mass/energy. Are you still so silly to think that's better cause if so you need some basic physics lessons.
I think it's better because, in all tests and all real-life collisions, it has proven to be better.
Hate to break it too you, but those two things are examples of tesla getting it wrong
What's wrong is your basic theoretical understanding of the practical engineering of the Telsa car versus an ICE in the context of a high-speed collision. You can scream about how you *think* high-energy impacts are going to work in each platform all you want; and, in the real world, they'll work out HOW THEY ACTUALLY HAPPEN.
This is the same thing as when you look at a sheet of aluminate glass and say, "oh, that's a glass, it can't possibly hold up to an impact," and then somebody smashes a 25 pound sledgehammer into it and it bounces off. Aluminate glass, at 1cm, holds up to impact pressures of well-over 1,000 kg per meter even when heated to hundreds of degrees celsius. Whether you perceive it as being a frail material matters as much as whether you perceive a Tesla to be dangerous: when the hammer comes down, those perceptions won't hold up.
You just changed tack: your initial argument was that these people don't have jobs, but "something to do for 8 hours a day", implying that their work is not important.
As for your new argument, the bare-minimum, non-market cost of food and shelter for a human is something like $270/month, if you were keeping slaves. That doesn't count healthcare, which is now subsidized among the poor, although I'd assume slave healthcare wouldn't be.
Because of the inefficiency of markets in that particular aspect, the suggested (by me) risk-adjusted cost of food, shelter, clothing, utilities, and personal care for a single human in the United States with a different market is $580/month ($546 in 2013; the two years of growth 2014 and 2015 are 6.24%, and inflation is 4.24% over that period, so the modern suggestion targets a higher standard-of-living and broader risk reserves). The market adjustment is a 100% guarantee that every individual adult has that income as an absolute minimum; all current-market retail prices for the basic needs goods and services can profit off that consumer market.
Our current producer market doesn't target that consumer market because it doesn't currently exist. That is to say: the reason a single individual bringing home $15,000/year (or even half that) can't find food and shelter is he's such an insignificant, unimportant, and *unreliable* demographic that it's not profitable to target him as a consumer from which to derive income through the business pursuit of providing food and shelter to individuals of that income level.
Let that sink in for a minute.
Now think about how the market responds, long-term, to a minimum wage.
That's right: the set of minimum-wage jobs is unstable. Those people are risky, and must therefor pay higher prices to cover their risks. They don't have the money to pay higher prices, and so the cost of risk makes them less-profitable than simply targeting a higher-income market. The Government then steps in with HUD housing vouchers to bridge the cost-of-risk gap... for 1 of every 4 families who actually qualifies for such assistance; the rest go on a waiting list forever.
which have huge impacts on the poor. Non-wage solutions stabilize the job market by narrowing the gap between job elimination to technical progress and job creation from consumer buying power increases (which come as prices lag behind inflation). Fixed solutions respond to technical growth by continuously making the poorest-of-poor more wealthy and, since around 2013, can reliably eliminate all homelessness and hunger in the United States.
We can raise the ratio of consumer take-home pay to employer wage-labor cost *without* raising business income taxes and without excessive taxes on the wealthy (I've pushed the top bracket from 39.6% to 43%, and have transitional mitigation plans to roll that out slowly and then back it out back to sub-40%, trying to avoid actually hitting that 43% top end). This can have secondary effects, such as a necessary reduction of the working week to 32 hours (I structured an example plan that causes ~118% employment demand, requiring everyone to become 20% poorer from that frame of reference... easy enough: cut their hours by 20%, unemployment rises to 5.6%).
There's something important here.
Continuing to pay workers less than a living wage
Compare to:
raise the ratio of consumer take-home pay to employer wage-labor cost
If you raise minimum wage, you *necessarily* *reduce* *employment*. I explain this frequently. For the employment to recover, the buying power lost to consumers must return, which means inflation must suppress those wages again (wages rise more slowly than inflation), spreading the jobs out again.
Without any alternative, this is a simple proposition: The many suffer, or the few become the Child of Omelas. You throw those people out of their jobs, let them starve, and let the many who remain live better, because 10,000 people jobless and starving quickly is better than 3,000,000 people working themselves to death and starving slowly. Through the 1900s, minimum wage increases have been a good solution.
We now have an alternative, and it's damned cheap. Transitioning from a minimum wage and public aid system to a dividend is readily facilitated by deducting the dividend from public aid: welfare costs are less dividend costs, which means, until the market has adjusted to the stable income source, grandfathered old-age pensions get split between a supplemental, phasing-out OA pension and the Dividend as a top-off; unemployment almost entirely goes away *immediately*; HUD costs get cut back dramatically; and food stamps become practically unnecessary. To eliminate the risk of abuse, children (and naturalized American adults) are still covered by a full public aid system (food stamps, etc. via EBT), which costs 1.4% of AGI (compared to more than 17% in 2013 for the full public aid system).
Immediately, for minimum wage workers, that bumps a 1-adult, single-filer household from $15,047 to $21,276 take-home, roughly equivalent to a minimum wage increase from $8.25/hr to $11.67/hr. For a two-adult household, single or married, the bump is to $29,689 take-home or roughly a current wage of $16.28/hr. Regardless of any other argument about my financial considerations and my grasp of economics, you can't deny that impact. All of that without raising labor costs (actually
but teaching of arithmetic tricks is kinda pointless without concurrent teaching of what properties of numbers and/or algebra make these tricks work
Anzan arithmetic isn't a trick; it's arithmetic generalized to single-digit iterative process. The method we learned in school was *counting*: 6 + 7 is 6... 7... 8... 9... 10... 11.. 12... 13! It's 13. I counted. On my fingers. Carry the 1. Anzan bases on Soroban math, where you memorize an addition table {(1,4),(2,3)}{(1,9),(2,8),(3,7),(4,6)} and apply that: 7 gives you 3, 6 - 3 = 3, 13. Two direct additions (subtraction is addition). Similar algorithms are used for multiplication and division using look-up tables.
This is different than scanning your numbers, trying to combine them to create friendly numbers, blocking off where you can, and generally trying to fit the task into one of several strategies. Friendly-numbers strategy, for example, will take 6 + 7 + 5 + 3 + 9 and say 6 + 3 = 9, so you have 9*2 + 7 + 5, and 7 + 5 is 6 + 6, and you have 9*2 + 6*2, or 15*2, or 30 (using the doubles strategy a lot here). Maybe you noticed 7 + 3 = 10, and then you had 6 + 5 + 9, and things got awkward (unless you caught 6 - 1 = 5 and 9 + 1 = 10 and got 10 + 5 + 5). Maybe you got confused along the way and forgot what numbers you were adding, since you keep wasting time adjusting the numbers and switching strategies instead of just straight adding them.
Wasting time on doing mental arithmetic is just that at some point in life. Sure I do it if I have to, but only then, and it's usually faster to do it on the phone anyway.
Once you get out of third grade, you have this shit for life. By the time you can pull out your phone, you already know to-the-penny how much the whopper jr, onion rings, and medium coke you're about to order will cost, because you passively glanced at the numbers up on the big screen with the menu.
Of course I can teach myself this stuff now, on my own. Waste of my time teaching me bad math in school when they could have used the mandatory fun time to teach good math in much less time. I and all of my classmates would have spent much less time on homework and more time learning to socialize, and we would all have the benefit of being able to prepare a meal without spending 2 minutes punching numbers into a calculator or writing and re-checking our math on paper.
Slashdot Mirror
Many would rather have respectable jobs over prettier GUI's.
Dignity and an empty sack are worth the sack.
Especially young adult males: if you don't find them a job and respect, they'll riot, rape, rob, and war. It's how they are wired.
You mean if they don't have an income to support themselves and their families, and thus feel threatened because of scarcity--food is hard to come by, medical care is expensive, etc. You know, the things globalization and the growth of wealth among the middle- and lower-classes have provided.
You will have riots in the streets when your people are poor, starving, and desperate; they'll *always* wax romantic about how they're somehow better than their lot in life.
So who pays for a worker who becomes unemployed to go back to college to retrain for a new job?
We don't.
There's 5.6% UE4 unemployment--UE3 (competitive job market) plus people who are discouraged (have given up competing). Creating a 5% increase in unemployment *seriously* injures your economy (see: the Great Recession of 2008). If you knock 0.1% of people out of their jobs, there's 50 other long-standing unemployed people for every 1 who has been made unemployed.
In other words: we're training new steel workers as our demand for ships slows and our demand for rail transit grows. 10,000,000 people are unemployed; 100,000 are becoming unemployed dock workers; 100,000 are becoming seniors; and 100,000 are becoming adults and training to join the workforce. The unemployed dock workers don't get first dibs--if they did, then the other ten million unemployed people would have been ahead of them in line to get jobs, and they would have never been employed in the first place.
Note that, in practice, 26% of the United States population is under 18, and 5.6% UE4 represents 9 million people in a 161 million person labor force. If we make the assumption of a steady population growth rate (this is generally valid without sharp, disruptive technical progress, such as across the past 50 years or so), then 1/18 of the minors (1/18 of 88 million, or 1 million) become adults, and 1/44 of the labor force become retirees, each year. Today, in the US, that's 4.9 million new adults of which 62% or 3 million become workforce, and 3.7 million leaving the workforce as retirees, as a general estimate.
In other words: a large (~1/3) chunk of the unemployed work force is represented by workforce turn-over. If 9 million people are unemployed, 3 million retire, and 3 million come into the work force, then you have 12 million people competing for 3 million jobs.
All of this is fascinating, I'm sure; the point is that we're paying for the initial training of 3 million people here. What do you think we're going to train them for?
The former is being automated. Amazon has displaced Best Buy and many other sellers of durable goods, and some grocery stores, such as the Kroger store on West State Blvd in Fort Wayne, Indiana, close all non-self-checkout lanes after some hour.
Back in the 1700s, you could take your uneducated self to a farm and do some work. Carry hay bales. Then we got diesel combines; much of that farm work has been automated.
Back in the 1800s, you could take your uneducated self to the textile mills and operate machines. We had 8-year-old kids doing it. Then the power loom came.
In the 1900s, you could take your uneducated self to the factories in America and operate the machines. You could go to the rail yards and dock yards and load freight. We now have cranes and more industrial machinery.
My point is "Burger Flippers" was a metaphor. We'll have some other job that a burger-flipper can do soon. You don't even need a high-school degree to twiddle the levers and refill the machine with hamburger meat. Try to not think on such a narrow track; we're entering the age of self-driving flying cars, and we no longer need roads.
Some time during some night in the next 10 days, not "that night". When it's within 2 days, it asks me again.
Oh I'm glad you mentioned this, especially since every update seems to set Edge back to the default browser, and regardless of what you set your default browser too if you search via Cortana it'll open up in Edge.
I've been running Windows 10 since May, 2014 and that hasn't happened to me.
First, the benefits of free trade seem to go to the wealthy, not workers, for as of yet unknown reasons.
It's more that the benefits are weighted upward. That is to say: when the nation becomes 10% richer, the working class gets 8% of that, and the upper class gets 2%; but the upper class is the top 10%, so they, as a collective, get twice the proportion. Every one of us gets the ability to buy a car, they each get the ability to buy two cars.
This behavior makes progressive taxes possible and useful.
Second, comparative advantage removes diversification: you become a few- or one-product country, creating risk.
And it gives you access to things you otherwise wouldn't have at all, as well as higher degrees of wealth. This makes new risk mitigation possible. The expansion of wealth via technical progress is what has made labor-protecting tax plans like welfare systems and, ultimately, Basic Incomes possible, and the labor required for that expansion is more rapidly obtained by diverting the production of goods to the population which expends the least labor on such production.
The theory cannot handle inequality and bubbles properly. The cash bubbles, inequality, and de-diversification (C.A.) create more instability and domino effects of crashes, due to increased linkage of country economies.
False. These are unrelated.
Inequality is a natural consequence of the growth of wealth: rich people can be only so much richer than the average man that the cash they don't siphon off the basic needs of the working population and cause a labor force collapse. In poor societies, the rich can have slightly more than the poor--the poorest hunter-gatherer societies have an equal share access to all goods, and the wealth of authority concentrated in whoever can scream the loudest. In more wealthy societies, the economy can necessarily handle the rich taking more; and the population can grow larger, meaning the rich siphoning the same proportion from each of the poor leads to the rich having *much* more than the average poor person, creating enormous inequality gaps.
None of this relates to comparative advantage.
Protectionism may create some duplication (inefficiency), but that duplication is also a buffer from risk.
It creates cost risks by which you have fewer and less-effective contingencies when something bad happens because the amount of wealth is low and the amount of damage is high.
In the modern globalized system, we've gained enough wealth to institute a system under which a disturbance such as the 2008-2010 Great Recession would have been minor and short-lived; and we *did* experience the dot-com bust, the automaker's collapse, and the housing market collapse without triggering similar recessions (the housing market collapse came before the general financial market collapse, and was buffered by months; the 2008 Great Recession was a much larger general recession).
Because of the amount of wealth, the cost of a basic income system such as a Citizen's Dividend has fallen below the cost of public aid. Such a system allows for tax plans which do not require the raising of business or personal income taxes, and which drive the employee's take-home pay closer to the employee's per-hour wage-labor cost. Simultaneously, expending labor in the most-efficient way distributes wage-labor hours over a larger amount of production: you get paid $10/hr, but in that hour you make 1.5 times as much stuff, thus all that stuff costs 2/3 as much and you are no poorer--really, richer, because things are cheaper yet you have as m
Uninstall WHAT programs? You said it uninstalls programs so I'll use the microsoft alternatives.
I have not seen Windows just update at a time other than at which I have specified it to update.
apt-get update gets a list of packages. apt-get upgrade tells the server all the packages I have installed which need upgrades. apt-get install tells Ubuntu what packages I'm installing. They have a long-running history of what packages I installed, when I install them, how frequently I update, and what packages get what updates--meaning they know if I've uninstalled a particular package, as it stops getting updates.
I'm pretty sure Microsoft sends connections to Bing when you open the start menu's search feature. That's what it does: it asks Bing for things. So when you click that little box and type "Notepad", yes, it talks to an Internet search engine; how do you think it's delivering suggestions "on the web"?
If it were Bennette, it would be 3-4 times the size of most of my economics comments.
We're known for +5 Insightful that agrees with the majority political opinion of Slashdot as filtered by who has mod points at the time, often to the hilarious effect that the highly-rated comments are stupid and defective. I'm pretty sure *many* of the people who are nodding and agreeing with me on economics comments are just happy I touched their feel-good liberal or feel-good conservative standpoint in some aspect, so I get modded up for saying "minimum wage is bad" or "we need a better welfare system" with big words, instead of for actually being right.
"Hey, I have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about, but floating USB drives sound like a great idea because I'm a self-proclaimed nerd surrounded by old ISA cards" is a political opinion, too.
the 107 domains that the OS sends your personal information to
Every report I've seen about that has had methodology I've used to show Ubuntu, Fedora, et al sends your personal information all over the god damned world, what with Apport/Whoopsie constantly uploading error reports to Launchpad, apt and yum constantly telling all kinds of servers what applications you have installed (HTTP GET pornview-2.1.3.deb WUT? It tells them my IP address too!), and so forth. There are also complaints about Microsoft's live Web search tool sending whatever you type in the Start menu search to Bing, meanwhile people are using Siri and Android to ask about Microsoft's snooping--which is sending everything they say to Apple and Google.
In other words, Vlad is doing what Sam is doing, but Vlad is a big, scary Russian and we can't trust Russians. Sam is the every-day man and obviously can do those things Vlad does, 'cause he's cool.
he uncontrollable auto-updates that reboot while you're in the middle of your work,
Mine warns me like 2 days before it does it, and tells me it's scheduled for like 3am 2 days later. It lets me delay that stuff to a date and time of my choosing, and will put the updates in when I reboot if I finish up early and decide I can restart at that time.
deletes programs installed on your computer so you'll use the Microsoft equivalent instead
You sent me a link to Windows 10 installing itself as a new operating system and moving the previous OS to a C:\windows.old directory. That happened when I upgraded from Windows 8, and happens when you upgrade between tech previews; I've never seen Windows 10 do that from a production, non-beta build.
Thus far, Windows 10 hasn't removed Xamarin Studio Monodevelop, Chrome, Google Drive, Spotify, Kindle, LibreOffice, LyX, Unity 3D, Steam, or anything else I had installed. I did notice Microsoft *bought* Xamarin, and now installing Xamarin Studio instead installs Visual Studio instead of MonoDevelop.
So what, does it only remove Firefox and install Edge? Is Google Chrome immune from Microsoft setting its home page to Bing? I don't see any of this happening on my end. Maybe it removes some useless utility that collides with a Windows service or makes assumptions no longer true about the registry (and thus might break Windows), and everybody panicked; maybe you're the FUD master. So far as I can tell, you've described nothing that affects the vast majority of users--and in some cases nothing that differs from popular mainstream Linux distributions.
This is plain bad marketing strategy. Microsoft Windows 10 is actually a decent operating system, unlike that shit slab Windows 8.1 and the status-quo Windows 7. I tried Windows XP and went *back* to Linux, and that was freaking Mandrake 8; Windows 7 wasn't much of any kind of improvement, and Windows 8.1 was just "has the right APIs to run Unity 3D". Windows 10 surprised me enough that I sometimes stay on it as a casual OS rather than flipping back and forth if I'm doing a bunch of things *and* Unity 3D; so why aren't they playing up all the incredible improvements in Windows 10 as a migration strategy, rather than annoying the user into submission?
If you're unemployed, you can buy zero products.
Correct. This is why the steady growth of technology across the past 200 years in America has supplied vast wealth with 4%-10% unemployment rates, while sharp steps forward in technology without uncorking any form of scarcity (e.g. the Industrial Revolution; automating every task at all McDonalds; self-driving cars) have caused history's greatest economic collapses.
To be short and imprecise: technical progress causes transitional unemployment, and an economy is kept healthy by maximizing the rate of re-employment and stretching out the rate of transition to labor-reducing methods; this is optimally performed by keeping workers competitive with the technology which replaces them and highly-employable. The most effective way to keep workers highly-employable is to minimize their proportional wage-labor cost; technical progress tends to do that, as one employee's time handles the task of several employees thanks to new technology, thus that employee's wages are divided more finely across more units of product. Basic income schemes such as a Citizen's Dividend, tax plans which reduce payroll and sales taxes, and progressive taxes which reduce working-class taxes as the income gap widens address both ends of the equation.
These are also more highly skilled professions, for which most of "the labor freed up from the farm" is likely unqualified. Who covers the cost of retraining?
This is not entirely true for two reasons.
First, we're exchanging numbers. A healthy economy has 4%-8% unemployment in the labor force; low unemployment leads to labor shortages (which staggers the economy), and high unemployment reduces the consumer base. If you unemploy 0.2% of your labor force during one year, then the new jobs may very well go to some of the other 4% or so who are already unemployed. In the United States, unemployment insurance only pays for 6 months, which means our social safety net relies on continuously exchanging out workers onto the unemployment line and bringing in other workers who were previously receiving unemployment aid (my Citizen's Dividend addresses this directly, because it's a reasonable policy, but a sub-optimal one; unemployment limits are negative punishment for not getting a job, while a Citizen's Dividend converts this to positive reinforcement by eliminating the negative punishment associated with *losing* your unemployment payment when you do get hired, thus any employment *only* makes you more wealthy).
This, plus the nature of changing markets and a constantly-developing workforce, means the workforce training occurring among new labor market entrants (college students) changes to follow the changing technology trends, and so the retraining you cite is somewhat integrated. Again: you probably don't want to eliminate 5% of jobs in 2-3 years; that's a pretty high turn-over rate, and the economy won't often create new jobs that quickly (the Information Age was a highly-complex example).
Second, much of the labor isn't highly-skilled labor. We've created a lot of blunt customer service jobs, truck loading/unloading jobs, cashier operators, and the like. Part of our growth is more grocery baggers and burger flippers; and we will necessarily want to replace our highly-skilled industrial machine operators with whatever moron can babysit a nearly-self-operating machine designed to be operated by whatever moron you can pull off the street. Look at most network software and hardware now: I could teach a completely computer-illiterate idiot to install Ubuntu and load arbitrary Web applications (OwnCloud, Gitlab, Wordpress, etc.) in maybe an hour; and the curious and persistent could figure it out on their own in half a day. My job as a skilled computer systems technician and engineer has become roughly equivalent to burger flipping.
So we get a major growth in retail, shipping, and other low-skilled labor, while our skilled professional
Ah. I'm perpetually an adolescent and my immune system is awesome, so I guess that makes sense.
So get 40 million people together and start screaming very loudly. Seriously the amount of stupidity I deal with every day; do people not realize "X is hard and nobody will want to do it" implies NOTHING IS WORTH DOING?
You might want to adopt early to immediately assess the risk, to understand the nature of operations.
We call those pilots, and they're done on a small scale and considered a sub-optimal cost paid to gain organizational knowledge so as to improve the strategic decisions made later.
You might to add the additional cost of an early transition because the transition can give you an edge (in terms of quality or quantity) against competitors.
Adopting a young technology early in its viability lifetime tends to put you in a position where you have to absorb a lot of cost and hold out for a long-term ROI; and then, when your competitor invests in the same technology 2-3 years later, their absolute minimum prices to break even are lower than yours, and you can't drop you prices to meet theirs without filing Chapter 11 (you don't have to Chapter 7 if you can continue business operations if you can restructure your debt well enough to keep operating). You are now behind, and you are doomed to be behind for the next decade or so.
A not-so-perfect analogy of swallowing upfront costs as a strategic move is Amazon selling its Kindle Fire line of products at a lost.
That's a *FALSE* analogy. Razor-and-blade or loss-leader model sells two separate goods as a combined good: the razor is sold at a loss, and the consumer will *necessarily* buy the blades continuously as a consumable, thus the amortized profit on the blades makes up for the loss on the razor. That's different from making an up-front investment which should provide lower operating costs: loss-leaders are a revenue strategy, while business process management focuses on production cost strategies.
It is at this point that we need to stop looking at this purely from a private business or economics point of view, and look at this as a matter of social/national policy.
I'm actually functioning on my own economic theories because I needed a theory specifically designed for policy development. It's what I do.
the possibility of adopting some form of basic income
Citizen's Dividend is the most optimum model. We can represent public-aid welfare costs as 55% of the total Federal income taxes collected; merge OASDI with the tax brackets, cut each tax bracket by that proportion, lay down a 17% flat tax along side, and then adjust them to smooth the total curve. That essentially locks the Dividend to a proportion of the GDP per capita, which necessarily grows continuously and doesn't fluctuate down too badly even in the worst recessions. That means as we get wealthier, the poorest of poor become wealthier in exactly the same proportion; and so long as the fluctuation doesn't take that Dividend payment down below the viability point (which becomes less likely over time), it can't fail as a safety net. At a point, a recession which breaks the Dividend would necessarily break the economy as a whole--no welfare system survives that.
have a national policy for the continuing education of our workforce - including moving focus away from 4-year college education and into vocational/adult training.
I do not agree with the state-supported workforce development model. It is a handout to businesses at the expense of individuals; it removes small risks from businesses and converts them to *enormous* risks on individuals; and it wastes a lot of labor time providing worthless job training (because we over-supply job markets and wind up with unemployed people who instead could have been trained in something else, thus the
came to the conclusion you're saying we shouldn't give a shit about people who don't have money to spend on bling.
I direct you to the uncontrollable certainty that your planned effort will fail to produce the intended results, and you conclude we should simply stop trying instead of selecting a different strategy that might actually fucking work?
Oh, I see. You're trying to argue by poisoning the well now, creating a fantasy image of your opponent that you can attack via emotional arguments.
So, you want to respond to the elimination of jobs by enforcing the permanent removal of those jobs, thus sliding the American economy into the depths of poverty? Are you trying to collapse the country?
Because if there are multiple copies of industries in each nation (something globalists hate), then individuals within those nations can chose the occupation that maximizes their potential
This is mysticism. It relies on a spiritual superstition in which people are gifted by their deity to have certain special abilities over others.
The usual answer is a blunt "comparative advantage" or "economists have shown protectionism is bad", which, such as it is, basically implies you or the person arguing with you is too dumb to understand, thus fall back to buzzwords. Let's go with a more complete explanation.
Let's say a producer in Maine can produce 8 tonnes of potato per acre, and 2 tonnes of melon per acre. A producer in Mexico can produce 8 tonnes of melon per acre, and 2 tonnes of potato per acre. The farm management techniques are similar, and so the costs are basically the same per acreage; thus melon costs 4 times as much to produce in Maine, and potato costs 4 times as much to produce in Mexico.
So the guys in Maine normally produce potato for $100/tonne and melon for $400/tonne using 5 acres of land for 8 tonnes of each; while the guys in Mexico produce melon for $100/tonne and potato for $400/tonne using 5 acres of land for 8 tonnes of each. That's a lot of wasted money (read: human labor time) and land.
So the guys in Maine instead produce 16 tonnes of potato on 2 acres of land at a price of $100/tonne; the guys in Mexico produce 16 tonnes of melon on 2 acres of land at a price of $100/tonne. It costs about $1,000 to ship 30 tonnes of freight, so these people trade and Mexico ends up with potato at $133/tonne, while Maine ends up with Melon at $133/tonne.
Each side now has 60% of the land involved in producing 8 tonnes each potato and melon, and has reclaimed 60% of the labor (unemployment). As well, there is $66 per tonne or approximately 75% of the money unspent by the consumer base purchasing these products.
Most people miss this next part.
With that additional money, the consumers can now buy more products--including foreign imports, recycling the above process. Those products must be moved (shipping), accounted for (logistics), distributed (warehousing), and sold (retail), meaning the supply chain of melons, jeans, or cheap mechanical pencils creates a *lot* of local jobs (your local WalMart has a district manager under a regional manager; it has regional warehouses to stage goods for distribution across the district; and of course all those stores and the inventory, security, management, and service employees), paid for by the money saved via importing.
In short: the labor freed up from the farm is repurposed. Maybe we start a manufacturing base (this happened after America's labor force started using intensive farming techniques and machines, cutting from 90% of the work force to today's ~2%). Maybe that gets shipped to China and we make more doctors and stuff like Netflix and cell phone networks. Maybe we just make more food. In any case, for the same labor and the same number of jobs, we end up with MORE STUFF.
You might also notice: food is suddenly cheaper, since we're making 2.5 times as much for the same cost investment. Imagine it takes half the labor to produce all the goods you currently consumer--that means half the wages paid down the whole stack (right down to the coal miners), thus the same profit margins at half the PRICE. Your money can buy twice as much, so long as your wages aren't slashed, right? In this case, we haven't slashed hourly wages; we've slashed number of hours required to make a thing: one guy working for $10/hr still works 40 hours, and the other guy goes to do some other job; the things they both make cost half as much, and you can buy both of them, and support both their salaries.
So you ask:
How is "thinking globally" going to help me, Joe Random Small Person?
Globalization increases wealth and creates jobs. I've done some *weak* analysis on a scenario in which the United States blockades China and brings all manufacture back to the U.S., and the result is people become *much* poorer on an individual basis (the people making Comcast High Speed Internet, T-Mobile's 4G network, and Netflix need to stop doing that and go work in these factories--we don't have the labor for
Is e-coli really that dangerous? Last time I got it, it gave me a stomach ache.. I cried for like five hours, then it went away; then I shit my ass the next morning.
Salmonella gives me a headache and the shits (even like the fifth time in three months), and I generally ignore it. People panic over that, too.
Pro tip: if the beef smells rotten or you managed to make some wicked pink chicken by accidentally undercooking it, maybe you should do something besides eat that.
DumbFace
"Allow nature to create new antibiotics"? That is the dumbest shit I have heard. You take the bacteria, you examine its genetic code and locate proteins which are critical to its function but unknown to humans, you find proteins on its cell membrane which are unique markers and don't match with humans or livestock, and you engineer chemicals and counter-proteins to interfere with that. Resistance requires fundamental structural changes for which we can then adjust overnight; and highly-engineered antibiotics are less-likely to have random, unpredicted effects on the human and animal and the gut flora.
That's an absolute-fucking-lutly horrible place for a fire to happen, you know how fire travels ... Right?
In every Tesla crash which has breached the battery and caused a fire, two things have happened. First, the passenger compartment was more-than-adequately protected--to the point that passengers actually came back WHILE THE CAR WAS ON FIRE, got back in the car, retrieved personal effects and left. I recommend against this, as lithium smoke is bad. Second, firefighters tried putting out metal fires with water--never do this.
And the car actually carries FAR MORE energy in the passenger cabin during frontal impacts. In normal front engine ICE cars, the engine and all its mass is the first thing to stop, adding no stress to the cabin.
The engine carries more momentum and can act as a ram to possibly break down an object that's distinctly not a tree (if you hit a tree, it will stop you). Otherwise, the engine is a huge brick that doesn't do much to protect the passenger, and gets in the way of crumple zones--meaning the car disperses less of the energy of stopping, and SLAMS the passenger to a stop where a Tesla more gently slows the passenger to a stop ("slows" is a relative term here, as is "gently").
On the other hand, the tesla battery is directly attached, very strongly to the cabin... Effectively driving it forward with all the battery mass/energy. Are you still so silly to think that's better cause if so you need some basic physics lessons.
I think it's better because, in all tests and all real-life collisions, it has proven to be better.
Hate to break it too you, but those two things are examples of tesla getting it wrong
What's wrong is your basic theoretical understanding of the practical engineering of the Telsa car versus an ICE in the context of a high-speed collision. You can scream about how you *think* high-energy impacts are going to work in each platform all you want; and, in the real world, they'll work out HOW THEY ACTUALLY HAPPEN.
This is the same thing as when you look at a sheet of aluminate glass and say, "oh, that's a glass, it can't possibly hold up to an impact," and then somebody smashes a 25 pound sledgehammer into it and it bounces off. Aluminate glass, at 1cm, holds up to impact pressures of well-over 1,000 kg per meter even when heated to hundreds of degrees celsius. Whether you perceive it as being a frail material matters as much as whether you perceive a Tesla to be dangerous: when the hammer comes down, those perceptions won't hold up.
You just changed tack: your initial argument was that these people don't have jobs, but "something to do for 8 hours a day", implying that their work is not important.
As for your new argument, the bare-minimum, non-market cost of food and shelter for a human is something like $270/month, if you were keeping slaves. That doesn't count healthcare, which is now subsidized among the poor, although I'd assume slave healthcare wouldn't be.
Because of the inefficiency of markets in that particular aspect, the suggested (by me) risk-adjusted cost of food, shelter, clothing, utilities, and personal care for a single human in the United States with a different market is $580/month ($546 in 2013; the two years of growth 2014 and 2015 are 6.24%, and inflation is 4.24% over that period, so the modern suggestion targets a higher standard-of-living and broader risk reserves). The market adjustment is a 100% guarantee that every individual adult has that income as an absolute minimum; all current-market retail prices for the basic needs goods and services can profit off that consumer market.
Our current producer market doesn't target that consumer market because it doesn't currently exist. That is to say: the reason a single individual bringing home $15,000/year (or even half that) can't find food and shelter is he's such an insignificant, unimportant, and *unreliable* demographic that it's not profitable to target him as a consumer from which to derive income through the business pursuit of providing food and shelter to individuals of that income level.
Let that sink in for a minute.
Now think about how the market responds, long-term, to a minimum wage.
That's right: the set of minimum-wage jobs is unstable. Those people are risky, and must therefor pay higher prices to cover their risks. They don't have the money to pay higher prices, and so the cost of risk makes them less-profitable than simply targeting a higher-income market. The Government then steps in with HUD housing vouchers to bridge the cost-of-risk gap... for 1 of every 4 families who actually qualifies for such assistance; the rest go on a waiting list forever.
I don't smoke; I habitually bite my nails.
Continuing to pay workers less than a living wage is already damaging society
False premise.
There are better ways to handle this
which have huge impacts on the poor. Non-wage solutions stabilize the job market by narrowing the gap between job elimination to technical progress and job creation from consumer buying power increases (which come as prices lag behind inflation). Fixed solutions respond to technical growth by continuously making the poorest-of-poor more wealthy and, since around 2013, can reliably eliminate all homelessness and hunger in the United States.
We can raise the ratio of consumer take-home pay to employer wage-labor cost *without* raising business income taxes and without excessive taxes on the wealthy (I've pushed the top bracket from 39.6% to 43%, and have transitional mitigation plans to roll that out slowly and then back it out back to sub-40%, trying to avoid actually hitting that 43% top end). This can have secondary effects, such as a necessary reduction of the working week to 32 hours (I structured an example plan that causes ~118% employment demand, requiring everyone to become 20% poorer from that frame of reference... easy enough: cut their hours by 20%, unemployment rises to 5.6%).
There's something important here.
Continuing to pay workers less than a living wage
Compare to:
raise the ratio of consumer take-home pay to employer wage-labor cost
If you raise minimum wage, you *necessarily* *reduce* *employment*. I explain this frequently. For the employment to recover, the buying power lost to consumers must return, which means inflation must suppress those wages again (wages rise more slowly than inflation), spreading the jobs out again.
Without any alternative, this is a simple proposition: The many suffer, or the few become the Child of Omelas. You throw those people out of their jobs, let them starve, and let the many who remain live better, because 10,000 people jobless and starving quickly is better than 3,000,000 people working themselves to death and starving slowly. Through the 1900s, minimum wage increases have been a good solution.
We now have an alternative, and it's damned cheap. Transitioning from a minimum wage and public aid system to a dividend is readily facilitated by deducting the dividend from public aid: welfare costs are less dividend costs, which means, until the market has adjusted to the stable income source, grandfathered old-age pensions get split between a supplemental, phasing-out OA pension and the Dividend as a top-off; unemployment almost entirely goes away *immediately*; HUD costs get cut back dramatically; and food stamps become practically unnecessary. To eliminate the risk of abuse, children (and naturalized American adults) are still covered by a full public aid system (food stamps, etc. via EBT), which costs 1.4% of AGI (compared to more than 17% in 2013 for the full public aid system).
Immediately, for minimum wage workers, that bumps a 1-adult, single-filer household from $15,047 to $21,276 take-home, roughly equivalent to a minimum wage increase from $8.25/hr to $11.67/hr. For a two-adult household, single or married, the bump is to $29,689 take-home or roughly a current wage of $16.28/hr. Regardless of any other argument about my financial considerations and my grasp of economics, you can't deny that impact. All of that without raising labor costs (actually
but teaching of arithmetic tricks is kinda pointless without concurrent teaching of what properties of numbers and/or algebra make these tricks work
Anzan arithmetic isn't a trick; it's arithmetic generalized to single-digit iterative process. The method we learned in school was *counting*: 6 + 7 is 6... 7... 8... 9... 10... 11.. 12... 13! It's 13. I counted. On my fingers. Carry the 1. Anzan bases on Soroban math, where you memorize an addition table {(1,4),(2,3)}{(1,9),(2,8),(3,7),(4,6)} and apply that: 7 gives you 3, 6 - 3 = 3, 13. Two direct additions (subtraction is addition). Similar algorithms are used for multiplication and division using look-up tables.
This is different than scanning your numbers, trying to combine them to create friendly numbers, blocking off where you can, and generally trying to fit the task into one of several strategies. Friendly-numbers strategy, for example, will take 6 + 7 + 5 + 3 + 9 and say 6 + 3 = 9, so you have 9*2 + 7 + 5, and 7 + 5 is 6 + 6, and you have 9*2 + 6*2, or 15*2, or 30 (using the doubles strategy a lot here). Maybe you noticed 7 + 3 = 10, and then you had 6 + 5 + 9, and things got awkward (unless you caught 6 - 1 = 5 and 9 + 1 = 10 and got 10 + 5 + 5). Maybe you got confused along the way and forgot what numbers you were adding, since you keep wasting time adjusting the numbers and switching strategies instead of just straight adding them.
Wasting time on doing mental arithmetic is just that at some point in life. Sure I do it if I have to, but only then, and it's usually faster to do it on the phone anyway.
Once you get out of third grade, you have this shit for life. By the time you can pull out your phone, you already know to-the-penny how much the whopper jr, onion rings, and medium coke you're about to order will cost, because you passively glanced at the numbers up on the big screen with the menu.
Of course I can teach myself this stuff now, on my own. Waste of my time teaching me bad math in school when they could have used the mandatory fun time to teach good math in much less time. I and all of my classmates would have spent much less time on homework and more time learning to socialize, and we would all have the benefit of being able to prepare a meal without spending 2 minutes punching numbers into a calculator or writing and re-checking our math on paper.