It's not built on inequality; it's built on productivity and wealth.
If 60% of your society spends its time making food for 100% of society, and the other 40% spends its time making clothing for 100% of society, then we can all live in caves with no medical care. When we invent new technology reducing agricultural labor to 2% and clothing to 4%, we can build space ships and cars and have a health care system.
The poorer societies don't produce anything we can't produce cheaper here. It's cheaper because... well... the slaves have to eat, and the cost of food for a slave who hand-makes a set of plates is the same as for a person who makes 1,000 of them using a machine. Their problem is they're behind in technology ("technical progress" is the standard economic term), which is why we take the culture-destroying path of forcing our modern technology on poor, third-world countries: it gives them health care, reduces the percentage of their population in poverty, and increases their access to luxuries; although it does completely stamp out their culture and superimpose our own, rather than letting theirs grow to something different.
I can end poverty in developed countries at or above a certain wealth level; I can't end poverty in the world. To end poverty in your country, you must reach a level of technical progress which produces an amount of per-capita wealth at which siphoning off the amount necessary for each person to live at subsistence level doesn't damage your economy compared to the next-most-optimal welfare system. As a pre-requisite, you have to hit a level of growth at which providing welfare doesn't outright collapse your economy and spread even worse poverty for the attempt.
Yeah, I don't have any monetary policy theory about that. Inflationary fiat currency is the best type of currency, and we need some kind of strategy to replace $4 million gasoline with $$4 gasoline eventually.
Can't handle the truth? Need to live in a fantasy where the middle-class is shrinking, the poor are getting poorer, jobs are drying up, and all the growth that's made our country and our world *extremely* wealthy never happened?
More people have jobs now than in 2010, and the unemployment rate is low... really low. Labor participation is still freakishly high and needs to come down, though.
The problem is that society (an umbrella term encompassing individuals and their attitudes; government lawmakers and executives; and corporations' leadership) collectively has few ideas (and even fewer plans to actually implement those ideas) about what to do to take care of the laborers whose jobs are being taken away by this efficiency.
It's time. If you do it too quickly, your unemployment rate spikes. Unemployment is a constant because of technical progress; unemployment from technical progress leads to new jobs as costs cause reductions in price (people keep arguing this is false while the proportion of income that buys any given good keeps dropping...), giving consumers the power to buy new things, requiring labor for production (which creates the basis of their price--their cost); and technical unemployment coming *faster* than new job creation leads to rising unemployment. Too much at once means Industrial Revolution: 85% unemployment for 70-100 years because a tiny consumer market only recovers fractionally.
More in a bit.
We continue to see global population growth; there are more people than ever, but fewer jobs are needed as automation increases.
This is a contradiction; it's inobvious due to economic complexity.
Technical growth tends to reduce scarcity.
In a nutshell, scarcity occurs when costs grow faster than scale. For example: You have fertile land enough to feed 1,000,000 people, and have 500,000 people; 10% of your population (50,000) is needed to produce food. Add 20% more people (+100,000) and you need 10% of those to make food (10,000): 600,000 people, 60,000 people involved in food, food takes the same labor time, invokes the same cost per unit food.
Once you have 1,000,000 people, it changes. Growing your population by 20% (200,000) means you have to use less-fertile land. You normally need 20,000 people to produce food for the extra 200,000 people; but now, with this poor-quality land, you have to bring in irrigation and fertilizer. Even so, the land produces 80% of the yield, so you need 1.25 times the raw land and thus the labor, fertilizer, and irrigation all scale. So per unit land, you now need 14%; and you need 1.25 times that, so 17.5%. That means making food for those next 200,000 people requires not 20,000 laborers, but 35,000--*that* food is 75% more expensive.
In 1970, India produced 2 tonnes of rice per hectare, selling for $550/tonne (~$3,000/tonne in 2000); by 2000, India produced over 6 tonnes of rice per hectare, selling for under $200/tonne. That's three times the rice per unit of land, and a total reduction to under 7% as much labor per tonne of rice. The straight reduction just means rice costs less; it's the producing more rice per unit land we're looking at here: your scarcity cap is now three times as high. Where you could produce food to scale up to 1,000,000 people without the price per unit food increasing, you can now scale up to 3,000,000 people.
That's where your population growth comes from, and it's where it stops: scarcity pressure always triggers a population arrest. I have no idea why. It works that way on animals, too: they just stop breeding as much when there's not enough food. It's especially weird with humans, since there's no reason rich and middle-class--who can financially handle more and more children--would decide to scale back their breeding. In theory, all rich people are Angelina Julie.
You can't expect the current societal structures and economic theories to continue to work when you're making such a drastic change.
They do. My economic theories are prototypical to modern economic theories; I aim at mechanism (hence why all things are labor: capital--machines, etc.--is produced and maintained via labor; land--mines, ore, etc.--is a mediator replaceable by other means, and we select based on technical progress) while others aim at measurement (hence why supply-and
I know, those horrible lower costs should have never come along. We were better off when 43% of our income went to food (circa 1900), instead of 11.5% (circa 2015). We should have never improved technology; we were best off when cell phones cost $4,000 (1983, $9,000 in 2015 money) and 2 hours per week of voice would cost you $250/month ($550/month in 2015).
All we ever got for lowering costs were a bunch of whiny middle-class talking about how poor they are spending 40% of their income on junk, buying more and better health care, and buying larger houses than ever. Not only that, but poor people can more easily afford things like food, so they don't die and shut up as fast as when 90% of the labor force was farmers.
We were best off when Americans were poor because everything was high-cost. Anyone making less than ten million dollars per year doesn't deserve rich-people luxuries like cars, home ownership, pools, medical care, and cellular telephones. Only the elite should have internet access.
FitBit has always claimed their ChargeHR is not as accurate during intensive exercise. They're pretty accurate at resting heart rate and when casually walking, but not when you're driving close to MHR. The lawyers found the same thing, and concluded that consumers are being defrauded because FitBit advertises having a heart rate monitor.
What worked in 1790 doesn't work in 2016. Companies need to restructure as markets change; and markets change as technology changes.
Millions of people working to produce and manage servers... and then we moved to cloud technology and virtualization, and now one person provides that server management for 20 companies who are all dangling off 1 VM host with 5 times the hardware as a single of the (20) servers it replaces. It suddenly takes 8% as many employees to do the same job, and people start leaving old-hat in-house service and paying 10% as much for outsourced "cloud data centers". Your company is standing around, overfed and fat as hell with 12 times as many employees as it needs to provide the same services as ever. what do you do?
Answer: You restructure. You change your business model. You change your internal processes to match modern technology, eliminating the need for thousands of your employees, whom you lay off. You cut prices on those services they provided to match competitors who are providing the same for half the price--after all, you're not paying nearly as many employees to make that thing now, so it doesn't cost you all that much anymore. You transition off high-labor services onto cheaper, low-labor services that give your customers the same outcome at lower costs, pricing those even lower than your legacy services in a bid to get out of the clunky, old, unprofitable market and into the new, efficient one.
Before you know it, $250/month ISDN 128k internet service becomes $70/month 2,000,000k cable-delivered internet service.
What's funny is HP slowly dying while people scream "OMG LAYOFFS!", complaining HP is an unprofitable behemoth and then freaking out when they fire people who aren't useful for anything because HP has employees to provide 1 billion hours of service but has customers to buy 200 million hours of service.
I live in a port town. My Mazda has rust forming at the corners; I'm pretty confident it'll last another 10 years or 100,000 miles. That is: it's going to last long enough that it's not worth trading it in. I'll find a way to get rid of it--maybe take it straight to the salvager, who will pay me good money for steel (I've brought in aluminum and gotten a *lot* of cash).
At 100,000 miles, my car seems like it'll be fine as long as I get some work done on the engine head, fix that rattle, and have a gear rebuilt (third gear had a weak synchro when I got it; my driving isn't sufficiently good to not finish it off, so now the car doesn't do third gear at all). The cost for the engine losing performance isn't entirely borne: if you discount it by whatever missed maintenance must have initially caused the problem, it's not that much more expensive. Preventing the problem would, thus, be cheaper, but not like thousands of dollars cheaper (considering the repair is under $1,000 itself). We can ignore the transmission (bad driver(s)).
Comparing that maintenance to Tesla maintenance actually gets us on-par in terms of maintenance volume. The Tesla obviously costs a lot more than my car; if we put it next to a gasoline luxury car (because, honestly, what do you think a Model S is?), it comes in on par at least. Which means...
Any modern car engine can easily go 250k miles with proper maintenance.
The cost of all that maintenance will meet or exceed the cost of battery replacement. Those batteries only cost $10,000, dude. $10,000 over 100,000 miles? My 2004 is at 100,000 miles in 2016, and Tesla's batteries are at 85% in practice 10 years out ($800-$1,000/year maintenance). That means they're *still* getting full range on the standard 80% capacity charge (Tesla allows you to override this if you're about to take a long trip, and by default charges to 80%). Swapping the battery is elective: if you only need half the range, go ahead and drive another 20 years before swapping; if your gasoline engine is tapping and has a gasket leak, you better get that shit fixed.
That compares well with the maintenance on the power train, engine cooling system, fuel management system, and so forth over the years (Teslas have no transmissions, and automatic transmission annual fluid change is $250 itself--$125 if you're doing bi-annual changes at 24,000 miles). I suspect the tolerance for range loss among commuters (or even in a society with a high availability of 20-minute chargers--stopping every 3 hours to top back up to 150-mile range during a 10-minute charge while you eat on a long road trip) will stretch that, as people realize there's no need to replace their battery until they're having range issues. For now, let's not speculate and just say the cost is "comparable"; if we start speculating on 40-year battery lives in practice, we have to conclude the maintenance on the Tesla is simply a hell of a lot cheaper, on the order of thousands of dollars per decade, which requires some substantiation.
I can't think of many. In Baltimore, with 660,000 people and roughly 380,000 tax payers, that's a little over 5 cents per person. While I can think of many things I need more than a stick of gum, I can't think of anything better to spend 5 cents on--that is, I can't think of anything that I should buy, am capable of buying, and won't be capable of buying if I spend 5 cents. As long as I don't stockpile gumballs and bic pens, this is utterly irrelevant.
Even a small town of 20,000 people is talking about $1 per person.
Actually, this tech is usable as-is. E-Ink displays are transparent/black, and so you could layer a modern Kindle e-ink display on top of a new, half-resolution color display. Refresh would first immediately draw the black lines, then slowly fill in low-resolution color. The result is a sharp image immediately, with color that gets there eventually. While the color fill-in period would be unconventional, it's far-superior to a pure-color screen with low-resolution and a two-second draw time, and only *adds* color to a snappy black-and-white display.
Technology advances. Older technology is flaky, unreliable, labor-intensive, and so forth; newer technology is cheap. For example: farmers have been growing wheat in the US since as far back as the 1790s, but they've since obsoleted 97% of the direct farming workforce and, since as recently as 1900, have removed 75% of the workers from the front-to-back production chain (that includes all workers--right down to the oil prospectors finding crude feed stock to make fuel to power tractors). No doubt the combine was a break-through even though we've been harvesting soy beans for thousands of years.
Currently, we can manufacture a 60-inch OLED panel with scattered defects, and salvage most of it for cell phone screens. That's about labor-equivalent to LCD screens, so AMOLED cell phones are cheap. We can use a different process which requires roughly 8 times the total invested labor to carefully produce a perfect 60-inch OLED panel, hence why an LCD 60-inch TV costs $500 and an OLED 60-inch TV costs $4,000. One day we'll announce a new breakthrough manufacturing... the same fucking panels made of the same OLED we were making back in 2002.
We've got a new type of E-Ink now on a new manufacture process. It's cheap and efficient compared to old color E-Ink.
The whole idea of mining businesses for tax money as some kind of economic fix is ludicrous anyway.
I've been facepalming At Cupertino--that is, Cupertino "Apple is abusing us" California, where $2 billion of world-wide money gets funneled to 13,000 Apple HQ employees, taxed as local income (8% fuck) and sales tax (just as high), and spent in the local economy (local job creation). Cupertino is abusing the world and complaining Apple might owe them $90 million or so from global sales they're not reporting as in-Cupertino sales.
Compared to Apple's $10 billion net, Google is pulling a $16 billion net *globally*. Google France is claiming Google owes France over 11% of its entire worldwide net operating profits from all markets in all countries everywhere. I doubt Google France has the same draw as Cupertino--France is a country, Cupertino is a city, and Google has 19,000 non-US employees whereas Apple has 13,000 *just* in Cupertino; it's not like Google's salaries are drawing a lopsided amount of money into the French economy. That means France is less ridiculous than Cupertino--but still ridiculous.
This thing where you mine the businesses for income is stupid. I've dropped business income taxes in my plan (39.6% to 35.1%, computed before the raise to 40% in the US), and shuffled around the income taxes such that the top bracket is 43% (that's some $116,000 additional taxes if you make $10,000,000/year--I want to phase that in *slowly*, and then phase it back out; more a paragraph down), minimum wage households at $8.25/hr (MD rate) are taking home $6k (1 adult) or $14.6k (2 adult, 1 earner) more, and the after-tax take-home of a married-filing-joint at $84,290 is $84,290.
That means the after-tax take-home of a $15,047 married-filing-jointly, 1-adult household is $21k; the after-tax take-home of a married-filing-jointly, 2 adult household is $30k; and the middle class is steadily more-advantaged until becoming steadily less-advantaged at $84,290. That 43% bump at the top we can phase in by *not* advantaging the middle-class so much at first; over time, the tax increase becomes unnecessary, so we likely won't even hit 43% before rolling back down to below 40%. I like 40% as a stable number (our effective flat income tax rate is 30%; 40% is 10% more): as wealth grows, the income gap spreads, and we can leave that 40% rate as-is while lowering the taxes on the lower and middle classes.
That kind of tax restructuring gives consumers a higher dollar take-home per wage-labor dollar paid by businesses. My plan moves the payroll tax for OASDI onto an income tax to increase this; and I strongly suggest eliminating sales taxes in favor of progressive income tax. All of these things mean the take-home wage is a smaller proportion of the cost of producing anything, and so consumers can buy more things, thus creating a need for more jobs to produce said things. This usually goes over peoples's heads because they're convinced inflation means products getting more expensive, rather than realizing product X getting more expensive in the absence of more income-per-capita means some other product must sell less (thus reducing the number of jobs)--inflation is more *income* per *consumer*. I've left the income alone but reduced costs, creating more *buying power* per consumer.
That's all accomplished by reducing the public aid system to provide aid to children and low-income naturalized American families, replacing the general-fund tax (the portion of income tax) funding welfare with an earmarked 17% flat tax diverted to Social Security as a Dividend fund. It provides enough to create a profitable opportunity providing low-income housing and a food market for the unemployed (I accounted for huge risk reserves--e.g. rental prices in low-income areas were at or below $1/sqft in 2013, but I used $1.33 as my budget model); and I worked around the bootstrapping problem (you have no friends, no money, and no credit; how do you buy pots, pans, and dishes in your first month?) by lumpi
It's better than that: plural means non-1. 0.78 million is "millions", 1.2 trillion is "trillions", etc. For purposes of reasonable discussion, it's occasionally useful to raise large fractions to plural, such as to talk about 85,000 people as "Thousands" and then reference 850,000 people as "millions". There is even a standard convention that being within a certain deviation (as wide as half) of an order-of-magnitude is in that magnitude (e.g. >0.5 million is "millions"), mainly to support the usefulness of qualification of magnitude (i.e. 0.999 millions is more "millions" than "thousands", you git).
In political debate, you often get an integrity check on that, either because you specified "millions" where the difference between 10 million and 0.8 million matters (you're a dick) or because your opponent has no useful argument and wants to poison the well by accusing you of overstating 0.8 million (he's a dick). This is a *huge* opportunity when there's a reasonable response that doubles as an emotional appeal, such as citing 0.8 million homeless Americans in a stream of magnitudes (parallel construction: don't say "thousands of... billions of... hundreds of thousands of... nearly a million..."; keep to the same form) and having your opponent claim it's *only* 800,000.
We made hybrid embryos decades ago. We're making new ones; for decades, we've been all weird about human embryos and have been restricted to a set of old embryonic lines and hybrids we made back then.
The problem is you can conceal a radio in that little pink piece of shit, and then when you plug it into USB it powers up the radio and listens for your bluetooth and RF keyboards, logs keys, and then connects to whatever wifi it can find and e-mails all your passwords to some asshole in Beijing.
It's a complex topic (I keep saying that about things...).
There's a fairly-curvy model out there who did a bunch of ads pushing back on fat shaming, claiming she's proud to be fat. SHE'S HAWT. Seriously. She has firm abs. She's got larger, padded, but firm thighs. She has a narrow waist, broad hips, and an overall-feminine form. She is the depiction of beauty in old Greek art. This is not a fat chick.
That should tell you something about this whole political wargarble.
People are going out with 600-pound land whales shaped like miniature cattle and claiming they're healthy and proud and there's nothing wrong with them. Bullshit. They're morbidly obese. "Morbidly" does not mean "I disagree with this because it hurts my little feelings"; it means "you are exposed to severe health problems."
Fat people are unhealthy. The additional belly fat causes more heart burn, leading to esophageal cancer and bad teeth (and halitosis). They're more at-risk for diabeetus. Their hearts have to work harder, but aren't equipped to work harder--larger, more buff people have made more work for their hearts while making their hearts stronger--and so are more prone to failure. Their metabolism isn't burning all the crap away, so their blood cholesterol is more likely to clot and get stuck in odd places (coronary arteries, cranial arteries, etc., heart attacks and strokes are bad). They also smell bad--we can put smokers on that list, too.
That's what "morbidly obese" is: you're fat to the point of serious damage to yourself.
On top of all that, what makes a good body image is not what you think about your body; it's what society thinks about it. What *we* find attractive is what *is* attractive. There's fat-chick dudes who go riding the hog, and that's their business, and you and them can get along just fine; but when 98% of all dudes are telling you you're way too fat and not attractive, that means you're way too fat and not attractive. It's the same as if I started insisting all girls are supposed to want to have sex with me because I'm pantie-melting hot--I can keep saying it, but it's not gonna get any more true unless I start doing some serious push-ups. Stick with your fat fetish man and stop telling us all what we're supposed to think about it.
Making e-diesel requires several steps, which are powered by renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. High-temperature electrolysis splits water, heated to form steam, into hydrogen and oxygen. The oxygen is released into the atmosphere while the hydrogen is fed into a reactor, where it reacts with CO2 to form a liquid long-form hydrocarbon known as "blue crude." Audi says the efficiency of the overall process is "very high"—about 70 percent.
A barrel (55gal) of diesel has 2240.52834kWh of energy (you might, ideally, get 56% of that from a diesel generator), and we can bind up 70% of input energy into diesel. Barrel /.7 = 3200.75477kWh per barrel. Nuclear power plants go all the way up to 8GW, which means Kashiwazaki-Kariwa can produce 2,488 barrels of diesel per hour or almost 60,000 barrels per day. One gigawatt gives almost 7,500 barrels per day of oil.
The United States generated 1,068 gigawatts of electricity in 2014. At 10.472 cents per kWh (this is the USA national average), 1GW is $92 billion per year--this is not very much. In a world where renewable overtakes fossil, the cost would be less (e.g. one day solar will be 9 cents adjusted for inflation to that point in time versus 10.5 cents for oil); this will happen as solar manufacture technology improves (less labor per panel, thus lower cost) and nuclear generator management and waste disposal technology improves (lower cost to operate nuclear). Part of the economic savings would fund $92Bn/year easily.
That gives us 21 million barrels of oil per year, which we can pump directly back into the most-accessible oil wells we sucked the stuff out of in the first place and call it a strategic reserve. That's about a day's worth of United States oil consumption per year; we can scale this up as technology gets cheaper: when solar/nuclear/whatever are twice as efficient, we can expend the same cost to pull twice as much out of the air. Likewise, as population and productivity expand (growth of *other*, unrelated technology), the *PROPORTIONAL* *COST* of that electricity is lower *even* *if* the electricity-generation technology gets no cheaper: you can actually use more of it without making people any poorer (you take away their wealth growth--the growth in GDP--and funnel it toward this effort). That means the speed of fossil fuel reclamation *accelerates*.
Notice what I've outlined is based on what's possible today, and that technical progress means that what's possible for a given proportional cost constantly accelerates. We'll get our biggest reduction of atmospheric CO2 by displacing oil and coal with nuclear and solar; once we've done that, we'll be at a level of technology where we might very well be able to divert the EPA's budget (which was controlling all that coal pollution) to sucking 5 day's worth of American fossil fuel consumption back out of the atmosphere each year. Imagine Canada and the European Union getting in on that. We've had 200 years to mass-produce atmospheric CO2; accounting for technical growth, it won't take 200 years to undo all of that.
I didn't skip that; I selected America's economy and the decline of farm jobs. During the Industrial Revolution, America grew as a manufacture base; England was already a manufacture base and took the hit of high unemployment. I was trying to avoid the discussion on time scales in job economics because it's long and complex.
As you say, there was mass-unemployment after the Industrial Revolution; and that is not a required outcome of technical advancement. The type of technical advancement which caused that *is* the type we're discussing, and it's the most common and constant type; that, logically, suggests there is a complex component. That component is time.
Let's first look at the two types of technical progress. All technical progress is labor-reducing, in that the labor required to produce a product is reduced.
In the Industrial Revolution, you have a sudden surge of technical progress in a short time. This technical progress is in a linear-growth (pre-scarcity) production process and does not provide scarcity uncapping. If you want to make twice as many shirts per unit time, you build twice as many factories, hire twice as many people, and overall expend twice as much labor. Factories and factory labor are not scarce, and don't provide a bottle-neck for other growth. The Industrial Revolution brought the Power Loom, which simply cut back how many labor units we needed to produce a given product; this brought on massive unemployment.
In the Information Revolution, you also have a surge of technical progress. This technical progress provided scarcity uncapping. Information management requires super-linear labor growth: managing 1,000 accounts requires more than 100 times as much work as managing 10, as you have to start cross-referencing your various obligations against each other, thus you get communications channel growth (1 way between 2 people, 3 ways between 3 people, 6 ways between 4 people...). American Express also shows us an example of geometric growth: AmEx was hiring 1 clerk per 10,000 accounts, then 1 per 100, then 1 per 3, before they made their expert system; more customers, more transactions per customer, and more data per transaction to analyze to detect fraud meant the load per transaction and the load per customer were increasing faster than linear. Computers made all of these "it gets more expensive per unit as we supply more units" problems go away, immediately making all kinds of new goods and services available and allowing existing ones to grow suddenly instead of making mass lay-offs.
Both of these happened quickly. The first rapidly destroyed jobs; the second also destroyed jobs *and* created new jobs at a faster rate. We know it's a faster rate because population growth increased during this period, while unemployment went down.
It doesn't take 75 years to recreate jobs lost by technology on that scale; it takes 75 years for a devastated market to recover. That is to say: if you make sure your unemployment rates don't go that high, you can actually advance faster than the 100 years surrounding the Industrial revolution *without* having high unemployment rates.
I often argue for replacing the minimum wage and our public aid system with a Citizen's Dividend, a tax I designed which replaces public aid (except for that covering children and naturalized Americans) with an income derived from 17% of the total taxable income (a flat tax on all taxable income--business and individual). This increases the amount of money each consumer receives (through both lower total taxes and an alternate, non-wage income) while reducing both payroll taxes and the necessary minimum wage (the necessary minimum wage to eliminate homelessness and hunger in America is 0). Among the *many* justifications I've given for such a plan, this strategy reduces the likelihood and impact of an industrial-revolution-style economic collapse.
By reducing payroll taxes, we reduce the amount of dollars an employer pays per dollar employee wage; a
Given the right market conditions flying to the moon would be free.
Wrong. Flying to the moon still requires human labor, and those humans must be paid. The cost is in (small, possibly now fractional) billions of man-hours. You try making flying to the moon free--even by enforcing some sort of authoritarian dictatorship economy--what you'll get is zero production of anything else and a collapse of the global food system.
So no, the Prius is NOT a cheap car. The Toyota Yaris is under 15k
I was going by total cost of ownership. You know, gas, maintenance, etc?
Which is right before it needs a battery replacement at a cost of $6000.
Actually, those calculations specifically included depreciation accounting for the battery component's wear and tear.
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Iskra Lawrence.
It's not built on inequality; it's built on productivity and wealth.
If 60% of your society spends its time making food for 100% of society, and the other 40% spends its time making clothing for 100% of society, then we can all live in caves with no medical care. When we invent new technology reducing agricultural labor to 2% and clothing to 4%, we can build space ships and cars and have a health care system.
The poorer societies don't produce anything we can't produce cheaper here. It's cheaper because... well... the slaves have to eat, and the cost of food for a slave who hand-makes a set of plates is the same as for a person who makes 1,000 of them using a machine. Their problem is they're behind in technology ("technical progress" is the standard economic term), which is why we take the culture-destroying path of forcing our modern technology on poor, third-world countries: it gives them health care, reduces the percentage of their population in poverty, and increases their access to luxuries; although it does completely stamp out their culture and superimpose our own, rather than letting theirs grow to something different.
I can end poverty in developed countries at or above a certain wealth level; I can't end poverty in the world. To end poverty in your country, you must reach a level of technical progress which produces an amount of per-capita wealth at which siphoning off the amount necessary for each person to live at subsistence level doesn't damage your economy compared to the next-most-optimal welfare system. As a pre-requisite, you have to hit a level of growth at which providing welfare doesn't outright collapse your economy and spread even worse poverty for the attempt.
Yeah, I don't have any monetary policy theory about that. Inflationary fiat currency is the best type of currency, and we need some kind of strategy to replace $4 million gasoline with $$4 gasoline eventually.
Can't handle the truth? Need to live in a fantasy where the middle-class is shrinking, the poor are getting poorer, jobs are drying up, and all the growth that's made our country and our world *extremely* wealthy never happened?
More people have jobs now than in 2010, and the unemployment rate is low... really low. Labor participation is still freakishly high and needs to come down, though.
The problem is that society (an umbrella term encompassing individuals and their attitudes; government lawmakers and executives; and corporations' leadership) collectively has few ideas (and even fewer plans to actually implement those ideas) about what to do to take care of the laborers whose jobs are being taken away by this efficiency.
It's time. If you do it too quickly, your unemployment rate spikes. Unemployment is a constant because of technical progress; unemployment from technical progress leads to new jobs as costs cause reductions in price (people keep arguing this is false while the proportion of income that buys any given good keeps dropping...), giving consumers the power to buy new things, requiring labor for production (which creates the basis of their price--their cost); and technical unemployment coming *faster* than new job creation leads to rising unemployment. Too much at once means Industrial Revolution: 85% unemployment for 70-100 years because a tiny consumer market only recovers fractionally.
More in a bit.
We continue to see global population growth; there are more people than ever, but fewer jobs are needed as automation increases.
This is a contradiction; it's inobvious due to economic complexity.
Technical growth tends to reduce scarcity.
In a nutshell, scarcity occurs when costs grow faster than scale. For example: You have fertile land enough to feed 1,000,000 people, and have 500,000 people; 10% of your population (50,000) is needed to produce food. Add 20% more people (+100,000) and you need 10% of those to make food (10,000): 600,000 people, 60,000 people involved in food, food takes the same labor time, invokes the same cost per unit food.
Once you have 1,000,000 people, it changes. Growing your population by 20% (200,000) means you have to use less-fertile land. You normally need 20,000 people to produce food for the extra 200,000 people; but now, with this poor-quality land, you have to bring in irrigation and fertilizer. Even so, the land produces 80% of the yield, so you need 1.25 times the raw land and thus the labor, fertilizer, and irrigation all scale. So per unit land, you now need 14%; and you need 1.25 times that, so 17.5%. That means making food for those next 200,000 people requires not 20,000 laborers, but 35,000--*that* food is 75% more expensive.
In 1970, India produced 2 tonnes of rice per hectare, selling for $550/tonne (~$3,000/tonne in 2000); by 2000, India produced over 6 tonnes of rice per hectare, selling for under $200/tonne. That's three times the rice per unit of land, and a total reduction to under 7% as much labor per tonne of rice. The straight reduction just means rice costs less; it's the producing more rice per unit land we're looking at here: your scarcity cap is now three times as high. Where you could produce food to scale up to 1,000,000 people without the price per unit food increasing, you can now scale up to 3,000,000 people.
That's where your population growth comes from, and it's where it stops: scarcity pressure always triggers a population arrest. I have no idea why. It works that way on animals, too: they just stop breeding as much when there's not enough food. It's especially weird with humans, since there's no reason rich and middle-class--who can financially handle more and more children--would decide to scale back their breeding. In theory, all rich people are Angelina Julie.
You can't expect the current societal structures and economic theories to continue to work when you're making such a drastic change.
They do. My economic theories are prototypical to modern economic theories; I aim at mechanism (hence why all things are labor: capital--machines, etc.--is produced and maintained via labor; land--mines, ore, etc.--is a mediator replaceable by other means, and we select based on technical progress) while others aim at measurement (hence why supply-and
I know, those horrible lower costs should have never come along. We were better off when 43% of our income went to food (circa 1900), instead of 11.5% (circa 2015). We should have never improved technology; we were best off when cell phones cost $4,000 (1983, $9,000 in 2015 money) and 2 hours per week of voice would cost you $250/month ($550/month in 2015).
All we ever got for lowering costs were a bunch of whiny middle-class talking about how poor they are spending 40% of their income on junk, buying more and better health care, and buying larger houses than ever. Not only that, but poor people can more easily afford things like food, so they don't die and shut up as fast as when 90% of the labor force was farmers.
We were best off when Americans were poor because everything was high-cost. Anyone making less than ten million dollars per year doesn't deserve rich-people luxuries like cars, home ownership, pools, medical care, and cellular telephones. Only the elite should have internet access.
But you could save up to 15% or more...
FitBit has always claimed their ChargeHR is not as accurate during intensive exercise. They're pretty accurate at resting heart rate and when casually walking, but not when you're driving close to MHR. The lawyers found the same thing, and concluded that consumers are being defrauded because FitBit advertises having a heart rate monitor.
What worked in 1790 doesn't work in 2016. Companies need to restructure as markets change; and markets change as technology changes.
Millions of people working to produce and manage servers... and then we moved to cloud technology and virtualization, and now one person provides that server management for 20 companies who are all dangling off 1 VM host with 5 times the hardware as a single of the (20) servers it replaces. It suddenly takes 8% as many employees to do the same job, and people start leaving old-hat in-house service and paying 10% as much for outsourced "cloud data centers". Your company is standing around, overfed and fat as hell with 12 times as many employees as it needs to provide the same services as ever. what do you do?
Answer: You restructure. You change your business model. You change your internal processes to match modern technology, eliminating the need for thousands of your employees, whom you lay off. You cut prices on those services they provided to match competitors who are providing the same for half the price--after all, you're not paying nearly as many employees to make that thing now, so it doesn't cost you all that much anymore. You transition off high-labor services onto cheaper, low-labor services that give your customers the same outcome at lower costs, pricing those even lower than your legacy services in a bid to get out of the clunky, old, unprofitable market and into the new, efficient one.
Before you know it, $250/month ISDN 128k internet service becomes $70/month 2,000,000k cable-delivered internet service.
What's funny is HP slowly dying while people scream "OMG LAYOFFS!", complaining HP is an unprofitable behemoth and then freaking out when they fire people who aren't useful for anything because HP has employees to provide 1 billion hours of service but has customers to buy 200 million hours of service.
I live in a port town. My Mazda has rust forming at the corners; I'm pretty confident it'll last another 10 years or 100,000 miles. That is: it's going to last long enough that it's not worth trading it in. I'll find a way to get rid of it--maybe take it straight to the salvager, who will pay me good money for steel (I've brought in aluminum and gotten a *lot* of cash).
At 100,000 miles, my car seems like it'll be fine as long as I get some work done on the engine head, fix that rattle, and have a gear rebuilt (third gear had a weak synchro when I got it; my driving isn't sufficiently good to not finish it off, so now the car doesn't do third gear at all). The cost for the engine losing performance isn't entirely borne: if you discount it by whatever missed maintenance must have initially caused the problem, it's not that much more expensive. Preventing the problem would, thus, be cheaper, but not like thousands of dollars cheaper (considering the repair is under $1,000 itself). We can ignore the transmission (bad driver(s)).
Comparing that maintenance to Tesla maintenance actually gets us on-par in terms of maintenance volume. The Tesla obviously costs a lot more than my car; if we put it next to a gasoline luxury car (because, honestly, what do you think a Model S is?), it comes in on par at least. Which means...
Any modern car engine can easily go 250k miles with proper maintenance.
The cost of all that maintenance will meet or exceed the cost of battery replacement. Those batteries only cost $10,000, dude. $10,000 over 100,000 miles? My 2004 is at 100,000 miles in 2016, and Tesla's batteries are at 85% in practice 10 years out ($800-$1,000/year maintenance). That means they're *still* getting full range on the standard 80% capacity charge (Tesla allows you to override this if you're about to take a long trip, and by default charges to 80%). Swapping the battery is elective: if you only need half the range, go ahead and drive another 20 years before swapping; if your gasoline engine is tapping and has a gasket leak, you better get that shit fixed.
That compares well with the maintenance on the power train, engine cooling system, fuel management system, and so forth over the years (Teslas have no transmissions, and automatic transmission annual fluid change is $250 itself--$125 if you're doing bi-annual changes at 24,000 miles). I suspect the tolerance for range loss among commuters (or even in a society with a high availability of 20-minute chargers--stopping every 3 hours to top back up to 150-mile range during a 10-minute charge while you eat on a long road trip) will stretch that, as people realize there's no need to replace their battery until they're having range issues. For now, let's not speculate and just say the cost is "comparable"; if we start speculating on 40-year battery lives in practice, we have to conclude the maintenance on the Tesla is simply a hell of a lot cheaper, on the order of thousands of dollars per decade, which requires some substantiation.
I can't think of many. In Baltimore, with 660,000 people and roughly 380,000 tax payers, that's a little over 5 cents per person. While I can think of many things I need more than a stick of gum, I can't think of anything better to spend 5 cents on--that is, I can't think of anything that I should buy, am capable of buying, and won't be capable of buying if I spend 5 cents. As long as I don't stockpile gumballs and bic pens, this is utterly irrelevant.
Even a small town of 20,000 people is talking about $1 per person.
Actually, this tech is usable as-is. E-Ink displays are transparent/black, and so you could layer a modern Kindle e-ink display on top of a new, half-resolution color display. Refresh would first immediately draw the black lines, then slowly fill in low-resolution color. The result is a sharp image immediately, with color that gets there eventually. While the color fill-in period would be unconventional, it's far-superior to a pure-color screen with low-resolution and a two-second draw time, and only *adds* color to a snappy black-and-white display.
Technology advances. Older technology is flaky, unreliable, labor-intensive, and so forth; newer technology is cheap. For example: farmers have been growing wheat in the US since as far back as the 1790s, but they've since obsoleted 97% of the direct farming workforce and, since as recently as 1900, have removed 75% of the workers from the front-to-back production chain (that includes all workers--right down to the oil prospectors finding crude feed stock to make fuel to power tractors). No doubt the combine was a break-through even though we've been harvesting soy beans for thousands of years.
Currently, we can manufacture a 60-inch OLED panel with scattered defects, and salvage most of it for cell phone screens. That's about labor-equivalent to LCD screens, so AMOLED cell phones are cheap. We can use a different process which requires roughly 8 times the total invested labor to carefully produce a perfect 60-inch OLED panel, hence why an LCD 60-inch TV costs $500 and an OLED 60-inch TV costs $4,000. One day we'll announce a new breakthrough manufacturing ... the same fucking panels made of the same OLED we were making back in 2002.
We've got a new type of E-Ink now on a new manufacture process. It's cheap and efficient compared to old color E-Ink.
The whole idea of mining businesses for tax money as some kind of economic fix is ludicrous anyway.
I've been facepalming At Cupertino--that is, Cupertino "Apple is abusing us" California, where $2 billion of world-wide money gets funneled to 13,000 Apple HQ employees, taxed as local income (8% fuck) and sales tax (just as high), and spent in the local economy (local job creation). Cupertino is abusing the world and complaining Apple might owe them $90 million or so from global sales they're not reporting as in-Cupertino sales.
Compared to Apple's $10 billion net, Google is pulling a $16 billion net *globally*. Google France is claiming Google owes France over 11% of its entire worldwide net operating profits from all markets in all countries everywhere. I doubt Google France has the same draw as Cupertino--France is a country, Cupertino is a city, and Google has 19,000 non-US employees whereas Apple has 13,000 *just* in Cupertino; it's not like Google's salaries are drawing a lopsided amount of money into the French economy. That means France is less ridiculous than Cupertino--but still ridiculous.
This thing where you mine the businesses for income is stupid. I've dropped business income taxes in my plan (39.6% to 35.1%, computed before the raise to 40% in the US), and shuffled around the income taxes such that the top bracket is 43% (that's some $116,000 additional taxes if you make $10,000,000/year--I want to phase that in *slowly*, and then phase it back out; more a paragraph down), minimum wage households at $8.25/hr (MD rate) are taking home $6k (1 adult) or $14.6k (2 adult, 1 earner) more, and the after-tax take-home of a married-filing-joint at $84,290 is $84,290.
That means the after-tax take-home of a $15,047 married-filing-jointly, 1-adult household is $21k; the after-tax take-home of a married-filing-jointly, 2 adult household is $30k; and the middle class is steadily more-advantaged until becoming steadily less-advantaged at $84,290. That 43% bump at the top we can phase in by *not* advantaging the middle-class so much at first; over time, the tax increase becomes unnecessary, so we likely won't even hit 43% before rolling back down to below 40%. I like 40% as a stable number (our effective flat income tax rate is 30%; 40% is 10% more): as wealth grows, the income gap spreads, and we can leave that 40% rate as-is while lowering the taxes on the lower and middle classes.
That kind of tax restructuring gives consumers a higher dollar take-home per wage-labor dollar paid by businesses. My plan moves the payroll tax for OASDI onto an income tax to increase this; and I strongly suggest eliminating sales taxes in favor of progressive income tax. All of these things mean the take-home wage is a smaller proportion of the cost of producing anything, and so consumers can buy more things, thus creating a need for more jobs to produce said things. This usually goes over peoples's heads because they're convinced inflation means products getting more expensive, rather than realizing product X getting more expensive in the absence of more income-per-capita means some other product must sell less (thus reducing the number of jobs)--inflation is more *income* per *consumer*. I've left the income alone but reduced costs, creating more *buying power* per consumer.
That's all accomplished by reducing the public aid system to provide aid to children and low-income naturalized American families, replacing the general-fund tax (the portion of income tax) funding welfare with an earmarked 17% flat tax diverted to Social Security as a Dividend fund. It provides enough to create a profitable opportunity providing low-income housing and a food market for the unemployed (I accounted for huge risk reserves--e.g. rental prices in low-income areas were at or below $1/sqft in 2013, but I used $1.33 as my budget model); and I worked around the bootstrapping problem (you have no friends, no money, and no credit; how do you buy pots, pans, and dishes in your first month?) by lumpi
It's better than that: plural means non-1. 0.78 million is "millions", 1.2 trillion is "trillions", etc. For purposes of reasonable discussion, it's occasionally useful to raise large fractions to plural, such as to talk about 85,000 people as "Thousands" and then reference 850,000 people as "millions". There is even a standard convention that being within a certain deviation (as wide as half) of an order-of-magnitude is in that magnitude (e.g. >0.5 million is "millions"), mainly to support the usefulness of qualification of magnitude (i.e. 0.999 millions is more "millions" than "thousands", you git).
In political debate, you often get an integrity check on that, either because you specified "millions" where the difference between 10 million and 0.8 million matters (you're a dick) or because your opponent has no useful argument and wants to poison the well by accusing you of overstating 0.8 million (he's a dick). This is a *huge* opportunity when there's a reasonable response that doubles as an emotional appeal, such as citing 0.8 million homeless Americans in a stream of magnitudes (parallel construction: don't say "thousands of ... billions of ... hundreds of thousands of ... nearly a million ..."; keep to the same form) and having your opponent claim it's *only* 800,000.
In marketing, it lets you handwave vagaries.
I read that as "Apple won't become a wireless cancer" and that seemed legit.
We made hybrid embryos decades ago. We're making new ones; for decades, we've been all weird about human embryos and have been restricted to a set of old embryonic lines and hybrids we made back then.
The problem is you can conceal a radio in that little pink piece of shit, and then when you plug it into USB it powers up the radio and listens for your bluetooth and RF keyboards, logs keys, and then connects to whatever wifi it can find and e-mails all your passwords to some asshole in Beijing.
It's a complex topic (I keep saying that about things...).
There's a fairly-curvy model out there who did a bunch of ads pushing back on fat shaming, claiming she's proud to be fat. SHE'S HAWT. Seriously. She has firm abs. She's got larger, padded, but firm thighs. She has a narrow waist, broad hips, and an overall-feminine form. She is the depiction of beauty in old Greek art. This is not a fat chick.
That should tell you something about this whole political wargarble.
People are going out with 600-pound land whales shaped like miniature cattle and claiming they're healthy and proud and there's nothing wrong with them. Bullshit. They're morbidly obese. "Morbidly" does not mean "I disagree with this because it hurts my little feelings"; it means "you are exposed to severe health problems."
Fat people are unhealthy. The additional belly fat causes more heart burn, leading to esophageal cancer and bad teeth (and halitosis). They're more at-risk for diabeetus. Their hearts have to work harder, but aren't equipped to work harder--larger, more buff people have made more work for their hearts while making their hearts stronger--and so are more prone to failure. Their metabolism isn't burning all the crap away, so their blood cholesterol is more likely to clot and get stuck in odd places (coronary arteries, cranial arteries, etc., heart attacks and strokes are bad). They also smell bad--we can put smokers on that list, too.
That's what "morbidly obese" is: you're fat to the point of serious damage to yourself.
On top of all that, what makes a good body image is not what you think about your body; it's what society thinks about it. What *we* find attractive is what *is* attractive. There's fat-chick dudes who go riding the hog, and that's their business, and you and them can get along just fine; but when 98% of all dudes are telling you you're way too fat and not attractive, that means you're way too fat and not attractive. It's the same as if I started insisting all girls are supposed to want to have sex with me because I'm pantie-melting hot--I can keep saying it, but it's not gonna get any more true unless I start doing some serious push-ups. Stick with your fat fetish man and stop telling us all what we're supposed to think about it.
Actually it's not that far-fetched.
Making e-diesel requires several steps, which are powered by renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. High-temperature electrolysis splits water, heated to form steam, into hydrogen and oxygen. The oxygen is released into the atmosphere while the hydrogen is fed into a reactor, where it reacts with CO2 to form a liquid long-form hydrocarbon known as "blue crude." Audi says the efficiency of the overall process is "very high"—about 70 percent.
A barrel (55gal) of diesel has 2240.52834kWh of energy (you might, ideally, get 56% of that from a diesel generator), and we can bind up 70% of input energy into diesel. Barrel / .7 = 3200.75477kWh per barrel. Nuclear power plants go all the way up to 8GW, which means Kashiwazaki-Kariwa can produce 2,488 barrels of diesel per hour or almost 60,000 barrels per day. One gigawatt gives almost 7,500 barrels per day of oil.
The United States generated 1,068 gigawatts of electricity in 2014. At 10.472 cents per kWh (this is the USA national average), 1GW is $92 billion per year--this is not very much. In a world where renewable overtakes fossil, the cost would be less (e.g. one day solar will be 9 cents adjusted for inflation to that point in time versus 10.5 cents for oil); this will happen as solar manufacture technology improves (less labor per panel, thus lower cost) and nuclear generator management and waste disposal technology improves (lower cost to operate nuclear). Part of the economic savings would fund $92Bn/year easily.
That gives us 21 million barrels of oil per year, which we can pump directly back into the most-accessible oil wells we sucked the stuff out of in the first place and call it a strategic reserve. That's about a day's worth of United States oil consumption per year; we can scale this up as technology gets cheaper: when solar/nuclear/whatever are twice as efficient, we can expend the same cost to pull twice as much out of the air. Likewise, as population and productivity expand (growth of *other*, unrelated technology), the *PROPORTIONAL* *COST* of that electricity is lower *even* *if* the electricity-generation technology gets no cheaper: you can actually use more of it without making people any poorer (you take away their wealth growth--the growth in GDP--and funnel it toward this effort). That means the speed of fossil fuel reclamation *accelerates*.
Notice what I've outlined is based on what's possible today, and that technical progress means that what's possible for a given proportional cost constantly accelerates. We'll get our biggest reduction of atmospheric CO2 by displacing oil and coal with nuclear and solar; once we've done that, we'll be at a level of technology where we might very well be able to divert the EPA's budget (which was controlling all that coal pollution) to sucking 5 day's worth of American fossil fuel consumption back out of the atmosphere each year. Imagine Canada and the European Union getting in on that. We've had 200 years to mass-produce atmospheric CO2; accounting for technical growth, it won't take 200 years to undo all of that.
Let's just hope they don't spend it all. If they started spending that, it would collapse the economy.
I didn't skip that; I selected America's economy and the decline of farm jobs. During the Industrial Revolution, America grew as a manufacture base; England was already a manufacture base and took the hit of high unemployment. I was trying to avoid the discussion on time scales in job economics because it's long and complex.
As you say, there was mass-unemployment after the Industrial Revolution; and that is not a required outcome of technical advancement. The type of technical advancement which caused that *is* the type we're discussing, and it's the most common and constant type; that, logically, suggests there is a complex component. That component is time.
Let's first look at the two types of technical progress. All technical progress is labor-reducing, in that the labor required to produce a product is reduced.
In the Industrial Revolution, you have a sudden surge of technical progress in a short time. This technical progress is in a linear-growth (pre-scarcity) production process and does not provide scarcity uncapping. If you want to make twice as many shirts per unit time, you build twice as many factories, hire twice as many people, and overall expend twice as much labor. Factories and factory labor are not scarce, and don't provide a bottle-neck for other growth. The Industrial Revolution brought the Power Loom, which simply cut back how many labor units we needed to produce a given product; this brought on massive unemployment.
In the Information Revolution, you also have a surge of technical progress. This technical progress provided scarcity uncapping. Information management requires super-linear labor growth: managing 1,000 accounts requires more than 100 times as much work as managing 10, as you have to start cross-referencing your various obligations against each other, thus you get communications channel growth (1 way between 2 people, 3 ways between 3 people, 6 ways between 4 people...). American Express also shows us an example of geometric growth: AmEx was hiring 1 clerk per 10,000 accounts, then 1 per 100, then 1 per 3, before they made their expert system; more customers, more transactions per customer, and more data per transaction to analyze to detect fraud meant the load per transaction and the load per customer were increasing faster than linear. Computers made all of these "it gets more expensive per unit as we supply more units" problems go away, immediately making all kinds of new goods and services available and allowing existing ones to grow suddenly instead of making mass lay-offs.
Both of these happened quickly. The first rapidly destroyed jobs; the second also destroyed jobs *and* created new jobs at a faster rate. We know it's a faster rate because population growth increased during this period, while unemployment went down.
It doesn't take 75 years to recreate jobs lost by technology on that scale; it takes 75 years for a devastated market to recover. That is to say: if you make sure your unemployment rates don't go that high, you can actually advance faster than the 100 years surrounding the Industrial revolution *without* having high unemployment rates.
I often argue for replacing the minimum wage and our public aid system with a Citizen's Dividend, a tax I designed which replaces public aid (except for that covering children and naturalized Americans) with an income derived from 17% of the total taxable income (a flat tax on all taxable income--business and individual). This increases the amount of money each consumer receives (through both lower total taxes and an alternate, non-wage income) while reducing both payroll taxes and the necessary minimum wage (the necessary minimum wage to eliminate homelessness and hunger in America is 0). Among the *many* justifications I've given for such a plan, this strategy reduces the likelihood and impact of an industrial-revolution-style economic collapse.
By reducing payroll taxes, we reduce the amount of dollars an employer pays per dollar employee wage; a
Given the right market conditions flying to the moon would be free.
Wrong. Flying to the moon still requires human labor, and those humans must be paid. The cost is in (small, possibly now fractional) billions of man-hours. You try making flying to the moon free--even by enforcing some sort of authoritarian dictatorship economy--what you'll get is zero production of anything else and a collapse of the global food system.
So no, the Prius is NOT a cheap car. The Toyota Yaris is under 15k
I was going by total cost of ownership. You know, gas, maintenance, etc?
Which is right before it needs a battery replacement at a cost of $6000.
Actually, those calculations specifically included depreciation accounting for the battery component's wear and tear.