My point is literacy isn't necessarily about who speaks English or whatnot; Kerala has 20 languages, which kind of emphasizes the problem with "someone might speak some other language and not speak mine well."
United States citizens who have a poor grasp on basic English literacy are considered literate in counts because they're fully fluent in Spanish and live in a part of the US where that's considered literate.
Being familiar with what native language? Puerto Rico has a 93% literacy rate; more than half of Puerto Ricans are English-illiterate.
English-illiterate doesn't necessarily mean illiterate.
There are newspapers in 20 different languages in Kerala. Literacy rate is like 94%.
As for your study, prose literacy has gone from 9% to 7% for whites. It's overall 14% below basic for Prose literacy, 12% below basic for Document literacy, and 22% below basic for Quantitative literacy. That means 78% quantitative literacy, but 88% document literacy. That means people can follow basic instructions and scrape facts from Google, but they're HUGELY deficient in the capacity to get figures out of text and use that to compare and compute (i.e. they think word problems are some special kind of hell designed to frustrate third-grade math students and hopefully no longer relevant by college).
Eggs cost $3/dozen and milk costs $4/gallon. You want two dozen eggs and a gallon of milk; and your neighbor asked you to also pick up a dozen eggs and two gallons of milk. How much money does your neighbor owe you?
A lot of people can't figure out that what you're buying for yourself isn't useful information; and they have trouble distilling the dozen eggs and two gallons milk to 1 x $3 + 2 x $4. They can understand the language, but not extract out the salient facts; this is a huge barrier to reasoning.
Notably, a large portion of India has higher literacy rates than the United States. Check out Kerala. They're apparently above 80% now.
The United States doesn't report literacy rates. Various analysis has suggested the US is somewhere between 65% and 85%, depending on what you call "illiterate"; in general, 14% of American adults last decade were considered "below a basic level of literacy".
Eh, I often point out that WalMart could pay 16% CIT for all I care and Apple can pay 48%. The difference is WalMart keeps under 3 cents on every dollar as profit, while Apple keeps over 20 cents.
WalMart is equivalent to lots and lots of mom-and-pop shops all over the place, except with bigger stores, less operational overhead, and smaller CEO salaries (the WalMart CEO earns $4 per employee per year, while a corner store owner with two employees and a $60k salary earns $30,000 per employee per year). You look at the "retail sector" and you see huge numbers; WalMart is just a portion of that and has profits in proportion.
Apple has profits way the hell out of proportion with anything sane. So does Microsoft.
In 1950, the minimum wage was 45% of the median household income. In 2016, it was 25%.
You know every wage between 25% and 45% would be between 45% and 100% of the median income if the minimum wage were equivalent to the 1950 rate? Businesses aren't charities, and they generally don't pay above-minimum wage if they reasonably believe they can easily replace workers. This also means people who were making 70% of median can make less and still be distinguished from their poorer compatriots.
That's not to say we should use the median income. If we increase the minimum wage whenever it stands below 1/4 of the per-adult GNI, it would be 36% of the median household income--and permanently coupled to productivity per working-age adult. Growth then means wage growth as well, and middle-income wages don't stretch over time to below-minimum-wage levels (i.e. a lower-middle-income wage in 2016, such as $14/hr, may be less than the equivalent 1950 minimum wage).
You're right. The trade will allow them to save a lot of expense and increase their production possibilities frontier, making a wealthier country with more jobs.
They could use solar desalinization. Pump sea water (via teflon- and titanium-coated piping bodies) into a tank for a reflux stil. Insolation heats the tank (it sucks in solar energy), which boils the sea water. The reflux component cools the steam and allows extremely-hot water to fall back into the reservoir, while cooled water flows out.
While this conserves energy, you can do more. This distillation process concentrates sea water, which you must flush; and it will be extremely hot. A reverse-flow chiller allows you to run the inflow of seawater past the outflow of both warm freshwater and hot effluence (you split the seawater into two lines).
Result? The beginning of the hot outflow merges with the end of the cold inflow, which is now hot; and as it travels down the line, the cold inflow becomes colder as the hot outflow cools. Rather than equalizing to a middle temperature, you nearly exchange the two temperatures: cold water and effluent out, hot sea water in.
When your tank is below a certain level, you increase the flow volume of seawater in; when it's above a certain level, you decrease the flow volume.
There are other ways to do this. Hot water out can first drive a steam turbine, then go through this cooling system. The steam turbine, having high thermal mass, would sort of act as a reflux return itself. Now you have a solar rankine boiler with fresh water output.
Most modern research on solar desalination focuses on reducing tank pressure to lower temperatures. We don't focus on energy recapture. When folks turn their eyes toward power recirculation, they'll figure out they can get 30%-50% range extension for electric vehicles.
Then: someone decides your password must have 1 upper and lower case letter, 1 number, and 1 odd-looking thing, with 8 characters, and change every 30 days.
It's not black and red, you know. A pinprick and a little blood aren't going to hurt anyone; killing another human being causes serious psychological trauma.
That everyone can verify their votes are un-tampered, actually does tell us exactly that.
No, it only tells you that your vote is untampered and that nobody has complained. If a bloc of people complain, they may be trying to throw credibility concerns rather than reporting honestly.
we only allow you to prove you voted to others. Their are several proposals that have been discussed to do this. Where you can leave with your vote encrypted on paper, and you can provide any number of false keys to prove whatever you want anyone else to see, only if they were in the both with you could they get the real key.
A zero-knowledge proof. They're hard to set up. I've proposed a similar scheme for Internet voting; problem being that Internet voting is not observable and is thus incapable of providing any integrity at all, thus is not a viable method for public elections. (There are other concerns; most are coverable.)
You can't keep your real key if you're avoiding coercion or vote buying. Coercion would require you to show up with only one key, as they can't identify how many valid keys you created. You'd have to discard your real key and keep your false key; the possibility of doing so then makes it impossible to prove you haven't, so you can show up with any number of false keys and cannot prove which is real or if any is real.
The other option is to allow multiple votes, such that only the last one is counted
You'd have to identify who voted what, or identify single-person vote batches. This mimics a risk with ranked ballots: a specific pattern of voting can identify a voter. If you're only counting the last vote and identifying a person's batch, you have to identify which was actually counted, which gets you back where you started.
Exactly, that is why you allow everyone to validate their true ballot is cast. You also allow as many servers collecting results
I've suggested that--of course, with the results being after polling center counting. We don't plug voting machines into networks. That's a thing VVSG 1.1 allows; it's ludicrous.
with the same open source software.
Working on it, but this is really just a mess. I'm looking at architecture to get a feel for how to run this; in truth, I can't build this software. I'll have to hire programmers, and I only know a few who are actually cognizant of things like good architecture and design.
Prototyping helps me think.
You can verify and validate they all get the same results, if any official servers differ, or sufficient private servers differ to raise concern of a mass fraud, then you can re run all the ballots and find the difference. The states would have the keys for every machine in the state, and verify all machines reported in their results, and no extra machines reported extra results.
You've already failed.
I have suggested we can propagate results to anyone and everyone, and "recount" by all interested third-parties in real-time. In truth, even for ranked ballot elections, your public observers will be posting photos and results at each polling station to Twitter or New York Times or whatever. You can likely reverse a set of pairwise results to a set of ranked ballots (these are 1:1) in something like O(m*n^2*log(n)), although I haven't figured out the right algorithm yet. It's linear to combined sets, which means decoding two sets of 100 ballots takes twice as long as one set of 100 ballots, while one set of 200 ballots takes longer; because you can graph a necessarily-existing ballot or reduce the number of candidates in a subset of ballots, you're continuously shrinking the coefficients and so you get weird logarithmic stuff.
In any case, this all means we can not only validate the per-polling-place r
Do you know that it has happened, or do you know it has happened only these times?
With black box voting machine elections, you don't know what's happened at any step of the way, and anyone who tells you that they do is simply lying.
Yes, exactly. That's the part you need to fix.
The thing that makes paper ballots more secure than any and all electronic methods
I've designed an elections integrity model. It's more-secure with electronic voting machines than with paper ballots--to the point that if you have a paper audit trail and the paper audit trail is in conflict, it's the paper ballots that are tampered.
I did this by eliminating the black box. You have to prove, at poll open, that the machines run non-tampered software. That means they start blank and you start with read-only install media. Everybody has to be able to inspect what's happening. If the people watching election open--that is: regular folks who walked in off the street--copy, verify, and upload that software image, then every person in the world is physically-capable of inspecting that software forever.
Physical ballots in the real world are open to stuffing, losing, and altering.
I can give you $10,000 in hundred dollar bills in a briefcase right now, or I can show you a video monitor that shows I just deposited $10,000 in a bank account that I might or might not give you access to at a later date. Which do you take?
Actually, it's more-complicated than that.
You and I can disagree on whether a bunch of arbitrary people instructed to deposit a single $1 or $5 into a briefcase will deposit more $1 bills or $5 bills, and whomever is right gets the money. We then open several collection stations and invite people to come do this. The money is then counted, put back in the briefcases, shipped under watch of a few definitely-trustworthy people, taken to a central location, and counted together.
Instead, we can have those people come and fill out an electronic deposit form on a non-network-connected machine which has had its running software image published and was imaged under public watch as each station opened. At close, the machine displays the totals of how many 1's and 5's were deposited; we then pull its data and copy it to a central location where all electronic deposits are made (and all deposits are somehow guaranteed to be valid: once they've put in the deposit, it WILL come out of their account). The total deposits should be the sum of all observed totals at individual locations or else something has tampered with the numbers.
Now, under this first method, some of your agents can slip people extra 1's or 5's to sneak into the briefcases. Some of your agents can manipulate the errors in counting the money--a common sleight-of-hand trick. Agents can integrate additional 1's and 5's into the stack as they open the briefcases and remove the moneys. Once they've gotten away with it, it's not discoverable.
Under the second method, any software to commit tampering is discoverable. We can't go inside the neural network embedded in each human agent, but we can examine computer code; and the computer code was released to the whole public. The counts are guaranteed correct or discoverably manipulated, and can't be manipulated later.
The electronic method also doesn't fall to simple sleight-of-hand in counting or in slipping in extra bills: alteration while running the polls takes several minutes of invasive physical effort, and can't be instantly-aborted. It generates anomalous audit trails as well.
That's the reality of paper ballots: you only need someone to turn their heads and cough. You can mess with them while people watch and not get caught. With electronic voting, you have more integrity threats, and must reduce the attack surface to avoid those threats; what's left requires people to just up and leave for half an hour or so and not ask questions.
At low speeds, your reflexes can reasonably protect you. 20mph is about that; some of these things can hit 40mph, which is kind of ridiculous.
The helmet doesn't protect against concussion; it breaks where impact would deform the skull. I've seen people break their necks and wake up in the hospital, neck brace for 10-12 weeks, then back on the motorcycle; and I've seen their helmets. Usually, you have to tell people their helmet is no longer safe; in this case, that's not often a problem.
We don't require adult bicyclists to wear helmets here (even though a head impact can kill you easily); we require children to wear helmets. A scooter under 20mph would fall under the same reasoning: if a cyclist wears a helmet, so should you.
Just because it is a wise precautionary stance to be extremely skeptical of computer algorithmic voting security (or application security in general), and just because it is wise to demand transparency of the system so that it can be continually reviewed and critiqued (by both the competent and the incompetent), DOES NOT mean that no secure voting system (or application of whatever kind that should be secure, like banking) is possible.
In fact, the system I designed fails the same way paper fails: if nobody's watching, you can do whatever you want. I just narrowed the window to between poll open and poll close, and made it extremely difficult to bypass public observation via sleight-of-hand.
It still needs refinement. This will work, but I need to define some of the specific throughout-the-day handling procedures and protective measures to prevent physical intervention. It's not good enough to just say "we need public observers"; we need alarms and impediments to ensure any attempt to tamper is highly-visible, leaves evidence, and takes a large amount of real time. I've made mention of such things, but haven't written down a detailed implementation.
The reasoning that all computerized voting is flawed is the same is the following reasoning:
Many software programs have bugs (either in design or implementation),
Therefore all software programs have bugs.
Computerized voting is invisible. Computers can have tampering paths which are invisible. You must prove a computer contains only specific, known software, which can then be inspected by everyone forever so that any invisible tampering can be discovered at any time by any person.
It's not about computers mistakenly doing the wrong thing; it's about computers intentionally doing the wrong thing and actively hiding it. We have to make it impossible to hide.
Printing that much additional ballot can be found , having the whole LOT of people to distribute them in ballot box and remove true votes can be found out much easier.
You know we've had this conversation before?
As the 1940s came to an end, the public demanded mechanical voting machines. Paper ballots were rife with fraud, with ballot boxes 'lost' and 'found' all the time, and politicians frantically calling their loyal precinct bosses to manufacture votes.
Today, we still hear about electoral fraud in the form of messing with how judges count votes and spoiled ballots. We hear about thousands of ballots cast mysteriously not being present in counting, but the election officials are sure it's fine and has no effect. We hear about the scandal of some election staffer being discovered with no counterfeit ballots or anything, just a few hundred blank ballot sheets--an enormous concern to the integrity of our elections.
Verifying that your vote is counted doesn't tell you the election is untampered; and verifying that your vote has been counted opens up the election to tampering via vote-buying.
We must verify that the ballots as a whole are counted, collected, and summed.
and those can bypass lobbyist and pork barrel politics.
I like pork. Four years ago, we had won a new transit system in our State. $2.2 billion dollars expected cost; the Federal Government gave us a $900 million grant.
That's pork barrel spending.
Every time the Federal Government pays for a State project--notably infrastructure--that's pork barrel spending.
Government waste is a real problem; Conservatives have pushed the idea that any spending on local projects is government waste. The culmination of this has been last year's proposal by the President for massive infrastructure projects while calling for the states to pay for them and stop asking the Federal government for money.
I think I'd have the log collector hooked up to the big display in that, too. Easier to show many statistics. We could show the public observers that X voters have cast ballots, that the two ballot machines are running in-sync, and so forth. Any important log notices would appear.
It's kind of annoying doing this with one-wire serial, but I don't want to put the EVM and two ballot boxes on an Ethernet network together. I want one-way communications, and nothing able to signal anything to the active EBB.
that's the system we had in place before the advent of voting machines and election software. You had a room full of election judges from both sides, and they sat side-by-side checking in voters as they approached the voting booth and physically watched them put the ballot in the box. When the votes were counted, there was a whole bunch of people from both parties standing around keeping a close eye. When the ballots were sent for storage, one person from each party rode in the truck to drop them off after sealing the container - together - and signing off.
Today, we have issues like 3,700 votes not being counted and ballots being apparently cast but somehow missing; or a ballot box being "found"; or all kinds of mucking with the error rate to intentionally miscount; or people invalidating ballots because they have a stray mark that could be a signal to a third party that the vote they purchased was cast faithfully.
Paper ballots aren't magically secure.
Was it possible to jigger with an election like that? Of course. But you had a list of names of people you could hold accountable at every step in the process.
Not really. In paper voting, it's possible to tamper at multiple stages. An unscrupulous election staffer can shuffle blank ballots to an individual who comes in and votes, casting multiple ballots into the box at once. A little sleight of hand. That's why ballots have anti-counterfeit properties, and why we freak out when we discover someone has a pile of blank ballots.
If you have a list of registered voters who never vote, you can tamper with the voting rolls by casting ballots at their polling places. Write their names in throughout the day and use one of the ballot numbers attached to the pile of stolen ballots.
Nobody can quite identify if or who. Totally-invisible, except for the record turn-out in your precinct (up 10%!).
Electronic voting will never, ever be trusted. That is the effect of transparency.
Paper voting is trusted too much, and people even let you take ballots out of public view "because the ballot boxes are kept in a secure location."
Current electronic voting is horrendous. You bring in a pre-programmed machine, "certified" by a trusted third party. Trusted? You fail. Load malware the night before; have the malware tamper with votes; delete the malware at poll close (self-removing!). Wipe forensic evidence by simply eliminating the deleted file pointer and clearing out the file contents for the malware's binary. Nobody will ever know.
You can secure elections with high integrity by using a non-repudiated elections integrity model, which practically requires electronic counts (we can't tamper with the counting that way). Ensuring non-tampering of the ballots in transit from the polling location is doable without electronic voting; this doesn't ensure the ballots weren't miscounted to arrive at the output values.
Electronic voting machines can't be network-connected, so you can't use blockchain. Blockchain is invisible, anyway, until you put something on the public blockchain, so you can tamper until then.
EVMs need to start non-tampered; and you need to prove that they are untampered at poll open in a manner which people can inspect at any point in the future. That means any person in the world can identify any tampering functions and any alteration in the software--and they can identify these things at any time in the future. If you haven't achieved that, you're using a black box with no assurance it's properly recording votes.
On the other hand, once you achieve that, paper ballots are invalid: if the paper audit trail disagrees with the electronic audit trail, the paper audit trail has been compromised.
You're describing an ideal. That's fine; I'm pointing out a flaw in your mechanism.
Your mechanism is that automation will make a $2 loaf of bread cost only $0.30 cents to make instead of $1.90, so we're going to tax the business enough to extract $1.60 per loaf of bread. The next breadmaker over won't go from a 5% profit at $2 to a 330% profit at $1 and take all your business, compelling you to sell at $0.80, etc., until you both maximize your profits at around $0.35.
You suggest we'll just pay the now-unemployed bread factory workers their prior salary, and progress will continue without work.
If you did that, then those now-unemployed bread factory workers would be able to buy the same things they could, and no more. Prices would not fall compared to wages. There would be no way to introduce new products to the market because nobody would be able to buy them; and any improvement to a product would raise its price because you tax any capacity to make the product at a lower cost.
So you say innovation will continue. I say nobody will be able to buy any newly-innovated thing because they'll be paying for expensive existing things that never become a smaller portion of their income.
In other words: a 1995 Chevrolet costing 56% of the median income came with some stuff, while a 2016 Chevrolet costing 56% of the income came with all the stuff that you'd get in a 1995 Chevrolet costing 200% of the median income. Thing is you want to tax the productivity gains, so that particular 2016 Chevrolet costs 200% of the median income, and 56% of the median income in 2016 buys a Chevrolet identical to what the 56%-of-median 1995 Chevrolet had.
Consumers can't afford power windows, anti-lock brakes, and airbags because those things used to cost way more than consumers could afford, and then you decided to tax the living shit out of them when we found a way to make those things affordable to the consumer--ensuring the consumer still can't afford those things and never will.
Back in 1914, someone invented a thing called a "wooden shipping pallet". They found that palletized canned goods could be loaded and unloaded in 4 hours, while the same crew usually needed three 16-hour days to do so. That's a 92% reduction in labor to load and unload shipped goods.
That's automation: you don't get zero human labor work, but rather a reduction in total invested human labor. That wooden pallet still takes human labor to make, so you get around an 85%-90% reduction in shipping labor overall.
Think about all the things people had in 1914--the things the working family could buy. It's a lot less stuff than today, right? Even if we go back to 1989, when you could have a cell phone--a $4,000 device with $50/month service and 40 cent per minute voice calls, amounting to over $9,000 for the phone and $500/month to talk for two hours per week today. Those price reductions came by reducing cost--by reducing labor.
Now imagine if we had made a post-employment world in 1914.
You're asking for something specific: there will never be any increase in standard-of-living again. We're going to make sure what costs 10% of the income today still costs 10% of the income after new technology rolls in, and simply reduce the level of employment by the difference. 100 years from now, few people will work, and they'll work little; they'll live as we do today, with no advances in standard-of-living except free time.
I want shorter working hours, accomplished by becoming 5% richer when we could become 10% richer. I don't want to call this the end of technological development and ensure our society never gains a higher standard-of-living than it has today.
Social Democracy uses tax-and-spend government to provide services to fill the gaps in capitalism (you can't make money providing disability insurance, healthcare, and housing to people who are poor and can't pay the cost of these things). The general free market stays around (although there are regulations), rather than being annihilated by socialist policies.
Productivity gains--wealth, as the amount of production and consumption possible per person--increase by structural change. If we can make 100% as much with 80% as much labor, guess what? We only need to employ 80% as many people. We only need to pay 80% as much to make the same things. The price can come down and we can still have even bigger profits because the same profit margin is more purchasing power.
So if you move a factory to another town, you stop bringing money into the town from all the places to which the factory sells products. The vehicle of factory worker wages vanishes; jobs beyond just factory jobs can no longer exist because the revenue from sales dries up; and you get mass unemployment and poverty.
Because people are poor in your area and you've lost a cash inflow source, you can't just start a business selling to your neighbors, or have jobs selling expensive things--it doesn't work. Your first jobs are service jobs; and those are supported by welfare. People get jobs at grocery stores and WalMarts, and then their welfare gets cut off. The cash flow reverses: welfare supports jobs; cutting welfare means part of the spend from your neighbors goes to your wage and part leaves out the supply chain. Unemployment again increases.
Your collapsed city goes into poverty stasis.
Now as you can imagine, a city of workers is producing more than a city of non-workers. We can't pay them, they can't work. If they worked, they would produce, and our nation would have wealth.
So in 2016 (before this new tax law), it was possible to restructure our social insurances such that we didn't cut any services and we built Social Security on a new, firm foundation--without raising taxes or increasing deficits. The model I used restructured $1.1 trillion of Federal spending into $2.0 trillion, paying a benefit equally to all adults; $1.2 trillion of those benefits payments covered the taxes the recipients would pay into the system.
In case you missed that: total money moving in and out went up by $0.9 trillion; and $1.2 trillion of the tax taken was being placed directly back into the same hands from which it was taken. That means it's a $300 billion tax cut.
Cute, right? Mathematical paradoxes have their limits.
So how is this useful?
$6,000 per adult per year. The poorest get the biggest benefit; it tapers off among the middle-class: their total tax rate is a touch higher to reclaim the benefit. Basically, they make $60,000, they get $6,000, but they pay a little more in taxes--between $0 and $6,000 more--which ultimately transfers some of that money from the new Dividend program to the General fund through tax games.
That's done to make the program a hands-off, self-stabilizing program--one the government doesn't need to "rescue", one that doesn't need to be "made stronger" with higher taxes and benefits, one that doesn't need "reform". It's set, it has strict rules, and the tax rate attached never changes. Don't touch it.
Where you have concentrated poverty, you have concentrated stimulus. People are a little less poor, so they don't qualify for as much welfare; and when they get jobs and lose welfare, they retain this basis to help lift their local economy steadily toward middle-class anyway. They don't collapse back into poverty again.
People working. People producing. People paying taxes. A small share of that distributes, so the benefit is bigger--it grows faster than inflation because it grows with productivity.
Lower unemployment and a quick fix wherever there is any seed of recession remediates recession
Thought by many who have no idea what they're talking about.
There are excellent, valid economic arguments for a demogrant. The 200-year-old argument that "in 5 years everybody will be unemployed!" isn't one of them.
The modern direct attempts to tax automation (technology) as some sort of fix would actually cause unemployment: reductions in costs increase purchasing power at the expense of structural change (people become unemployed, while other people eventually become employed--not necessarily the same people). A tax directed at the cost reduction prohibits a price reduction, leaving prices high as employment falls away, preventing the creation of jobs.
The argument for taxing automation is a Haynes argument--the one used by Republicans for trickle-down and such. The argument for not taxing automation is a Keynes argument--an argument that says jobs are created by consumer buying power. Keynesian economics tend to highlight problems with things like payroll taxes (artificial raising of prices) and support taxes on corporate profits instead (profits happen AFTER cost-price exchange, rather than as PART of the cost driving price).
In other words: a tax on employees would do as you say, destroying employment; a tax on "automation-driven productivity" is the same kind of tax, and has the same kind of impact on employment.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the kind of argument the loon who runs Ethereum would make. Granted he's less of a lunatic than the Bitcoin folks.
My point is literacy isn't necessarily about who speaks English or whatnot; Kerala has 20 languages, which kind of emphasizes the problem with "someone might speak some other language and not speak mine well."
United States citizens who have a poor grasp on basic English literacy are considered literate in counts because they're fully fluent in Spanish and live in a part of the US where that's considered literate.
Being familiar with what native language? Puerto Rico has a 93% literacy rate; more than half of Puerto Ricans are English-illiterate.
English-illiterate doesn't necessarily mean illiterate.
There are newspapers in 20 different languages in Kerala. Literacy rate is like 94%.
As for your study, prose literacy has gone from 9% to 7% for whites. It's overall 14% below basic for Prose literacy, 12% below basic for Document literacy, and 22% below basic for Quantitative literacy. That means 78% quantitative literacy, but 88% document literacy. That means people can follow basic instructions and scrape facts from Google, but they're HUGELY deficient in the capacity to get figures out of text and use that to compare and compute (i.e. they think word problems are some special kind of hell designed to frustrate third-grade math students and hopefully no longer relevant by college).
Eggs cost $3/dozen and milk costs $4/gallon. You want two dozen eggs and a gallon of milk; and your neighbor asked you to also pick up a dozen eggs and two gallons of milk. How much money does your neighbor owe you?
A lot of people can't figure out that what you're buying for yourself isn't useful information; and they have trouble distilling the dozen eggs and two gallons milk to 1 x $3 + 2 x $4. They can understand the language, but not extract out the salient facts; this is a huge barrier to reasoning.
Notably, a large portion of India has higher literacy rates than the United States. Check out Kerala. They're apparently above 80% now.
The United States doesn't report literacy rates. Various analysis has suggested the US is somewhere between 65% and 85%, depending on what you call "illiterate"; in general, 14% of American adults last decade were considered "below a basic level of literacy".
Eh, I often point out that WalMart could pay 16% CIT for all I care and Apple can pay 48%. The difference is WalMart keeps under 3 cents on every dollar as profit, while Apple keeps over 20 cents.
WalMart is equivalent to lots and lots of mom-and-pop shops all over the place, except with bigger stores, less operational overhead, and smaller CEO salaries (the WalMart CEO earns $4 per employee per year, while a corner store owner with two employees and a $60k salary earns $30,000 per employee per year). You look at the "retail sector" and you see huge numbers; WalMart is just a portion of that and has profits in proportion.
Apple has profits way the hell out of proportion with anything sane. So does Microsoft.
How would they move and locate a job? Will they hire homeless people, or are you too dirty and smelly without a place to live and wash clothes?
In 1950, the minimum wage was 45% of the median household income. In 2016, it was 25%.
You know every wage between 25% and 45% would be between 45% and 100% of the median income if the minimum wage were equivalent to the 1950 rate? Businesses aren't charities, and they generally don't pay above-minimum wage if they reasonably believe they can easily replace workers. This also means people who were making 70% of median can make less and still be distinguished from their poorer compatriots.
That's not to say we should use the median income. If we increase the minimum wage whenever it stands below 1/4 of the per-adult GNI, it would be 36% of the median household income--and permanently coupled to productivity per working-age adult. Growth then means wage growth as well, and middle-income wages don't stretch over time to below-minimum-wage levels (i.e. a lower-middle-income wage in 2016, such as $14/hr, may be less than the equivalent 1950 minimum wage).
Structure.
You're right. The trade will allow them to save a lot of expense and increase their production possibilities frontier, making a wealthier country with more jobs.
They could use solar desalinization. Pump sea water (via teflon- and titanium-coated piping bodies) into a tank for a reflux stil. Insolation heats the tank (it sucks in solar energy), which boils the sea water. The reflux component cools the steam and allows extremely-hot water to fall back into the reservoir, while cooled water flows out.
While this conserves energy, you can do more. This distillation process concentrates sea water, which you must flush; and it will be extremely hot. A reverse-flow chiller allows you to run the inflow of seawater past the outflow of both warm freshwater and hot effluence (you split the seawater into two lines).
Result? The beginning of the hot outflow merges with the end of the cold inflow, which is now hot; and as it travels down the line, the cold inflow becomes colder as the hot outflow cools. Rather than equalizing to a middle temperature, you nearly exchange the two temperatures: cold water and effluent out, hot sea water in.
When your tank is below a certain level, you increase the flow volume of seawater in; when it's above a certain level, you decrease the flow volume.
There are other ways to do this. Hot water out can first drive a steam turbine, then go through this cooling system. The steam turbine, having high thermal mass, would sort of act as a reflux return itself. Now you have a solar rankine boiler with fresh water output.
Most modern research on solar desalination focuses on reducing tank pressure to lower temperatures. We don't focus on energy recapture. When folks turn their eyes toward power recirculation, they'll figure out they can get 30%-50% range extension for electric vehicles.
Then: someone decides your password must have 1 upper and lower case letter, 1 number, and 1 odd-looking thing, with 8 characters, and change every 30 days.
Yeah, don't do that. Build infrastructure to attract business; don't give business money to build a private building for themselves.
Infrastructure spending is for public projects.
It's not black and red, you know. A pinprick and a little blood aren't going to hurt anyone; killing another human being causes serious psychological trauma.
We also do ban speech to incite violence.
That everyone can verify their votes are un-tampered, actually does tell us exactly that.
No, it only tells you that your vote is untampered and that nobody has complained. If a bloc of people complain, they may be trying to throw credibility concerns rather than reporting honestly.
we only allow you to prove you voted to others. Their are several proposals that have been discussed to do this. Where you can leave with your vote encrypted on paper, and you can provide any number of false keys to prove whatever you want anyone else to see, only if they were in the both with you could they get the real key.
A zero-knowledge proof. They're hard to set up. I've proposed a similar scheme for Internet voting; problem being that Internet voting is not observable and is thus incapable of providing any integrity at all, thus is not a viable method for public elections. (There are other concerns; most are coverable.)
You can't keep your real key if you're avoiding coercion or vote buying. Coercion would require you to show up with only one key, as they can't identify how many valid keys you created. You'd have to discard your real key and keep your false key; the possibility of doing so then makes it impossible to prove you haven't, so you can show up with any number of false keys and cannot prove which is real or if any is real.
The other option is to allow multiple votes, such that only the last one is counted
You'd have to identify who voted what, or identify single-person vote batches. This mimics a risk with ranked ballots: a specific pattern of voting can identify a voter. If you're only counting the last vote and identifying a person's batch, you have to identify which was actually counted, which gets you back where you started.
Exactly, that is why you allow everyone to validate their true ballot is cast. You also allow as many servers collecting results
I've suggested that--of course, with the results being after polling center counting. We don't plug voting machines into networks. That's a thing VVSG 1.1 allows; it's ludicrous.
with the same open source software.
Working on it, but this is really just a mess. I'm looking at architecture to get a feel for how to run this; in truth, I can't build this software. I'll have to hire programmers, and I only know a few who are actually cognizant of things like good architecture and design.
Prototyping helps me think.
You can verify and validate they all get the same results, if any official servers differ, or sufficient private servers differ to raise concern of a mass fraud, then you can re run all the ballots and find the difference. The states would have the keys for every machine in the state, and verify all machines reported in their results, and no extra machines reported extra results.
You've already failed.
I have suggested we can propagate results to anyone and everyone, and "recount" by all interested third-parties in real-time. In truth, even for ranked ballot elections, your public observers will be posting photos and results at each polling station to Twitter or New York Times or whatever. You can likely reverse a set of pairwise results to a set of ranked ballots (these are 1:1) in something like O(m*n^2*log(n)), although I haven't figured out the right algorithm yet. It's linear to combined sets, which means decoding two sets of 100 ballots takes twice as long as one set of 100 ballots, while one set of 200 ballots takes longer; because you can graph a necessarily-existing ballot or reduce the number of candidates in a subset of ballots, you're continuously shrinking the coefficients and so you get weird logarithmic stuff.
In any case, this all means we can not only validate the per-polling-place r
because we know this has happened.
Do you know that it has happened, or do you know it has happened only these times?
With black box voting machine elections, you don't know what's happened at any step of the way, and anyone who tells you that they do is simply lying.
Yes, exactly. That's the part you need to fix.
The thing that makes paper ballots more secure than any and all electronic methods
I've designed an elections integrity model. It's more-secure with electronic voting machines than with paper ballots--to the point that if you have a paper audit trail and the paper audit trail is in conflict, it's the paper ballots that are tampered.
I did this by eliminating the black box. You have to prove, at poll open, that the machines run non-tampered software. That means they start blank and you start with read-only install media. Everybody has to be able to inspect what's happening. If the people watching election open--that is: regular folks who walked in off the street--copy, verify, and upload that software image, then every person in the world is physically-capable of inspecting that software forever.
Physical ballots in the real world are open to stuffing, losing, and altering.
I can give you $10,000 in hundred dollar bills in a briefcase right now, or I can show you a video monitor that shows I just deposited $10,000 in a bank account that I might or might not give you access to at a later date. Which do you take?
Actually, it's more-complicated than that.
You and I can disagree on whether a bunch of arbitrary people instructed to deposit a single $1 or $5 into a briefcase will deposit more $1 bills or $5 bills, and whomever is right gets the money. We then open several collection stations and invite people to come do this. The money is then counted, put back in the briefcases, shipped under watch of a few definitely-trustworthy people, taken to a central location, and counted together.
Instead, we can have those people come and fill out an electronic deposit form on a non-network-connected machine which has had its running software image published and was imaged under public watch as each station opened. At close, the machine displays the totals of how many 1's and 5's were deposited; we then pull its data and copy it to a central location where all electronic deposits are made (and all deposits are somehow guaranteed to be valid: once they've put in the deposit, it WILL come out of their account). The total deposits should be the sum of all observed totals at individual locations or else something has tampered with the numbers.
Now, under this first method, some of your agents can slip people extra 1's or 5's to sneak into the briefcases. Some of your agents can manipulate the errors in counting the money--a common sleight-of-hand trick. Agents can integrate additional 1's and 5's into the stack as they open the briefcases and remove the moneys. Once they've gotten away with it, it's not discoverable.
Under the second method, any software to commit tampering is discoverable. We can't go inside the neural network embedded in each human agent, but we can examine computer code; and the computer code was released to the whole public. The counts are guaranteed correct or discoverably manipulated, and can't be manipulated later.
The electronic method also doesn't fall to simple sleight-of-hand in counting or in slipping in extra bills: alteration while running the polls takes several minutes of invasive physical effort, and can't be instantly-aborted. It generates anomalous audit trails as well.
That's the reality of paper ballots: you only need someone to turn their heads and cough. You can mess with them while people watch and not get caught. With electronic voting, you have more integrity threats, and must reduce the attack surface to avoid those threats; what's left requires people to just up and leave for half an hour or so and not ask questions.
Paper ballot fetishism is magical thinking.
It also places others at risk of severe psychiatric trauma, bloodborne disease, and funerary costs.
At low speeds, your reflexes can reasonably protect you. 20mph is about that; some of these things can hit 40mph, which is kind of ridiculous.
The helmet doesn't protect against concussion; it breaks where impact would deform the skull. I've seen people break their necks and wake up in the hospital, neck brace for 10-12 weeks, then back on the motorcycle; and I've seen their helmets. Usually, you have to tell people their helmet is no longer safe; in this case, that's not often a problem.
We don't require adult bicyclists to wear helmets here (even though a head impact can kill you easily); we require children to wear helmets. A scooter under 20mph would fall under the same reasoning: if a cyclist wears a helmet, so should you.
Just because it is a wise precautionary stance to be extremely skeptical of computer algorithmic voting security (or application security in general), and just because it is wise to demand transparency of the system so that it can be continually reviewed and critiqued (by both the competent and the incompetent), DOES NOT mean that no secure voting system (or application of whatever kind that should be secure, like banking) is possible.
In fact, the system I designed fails the same way paper fails: if nobody's watching, you can do whatever you want. I just narrowed the window to between poll open and poll close, and made it extremely difficult to bypass public observation via sleight-of-hand.
It still needs refinement. This will work, but I need to define some of the specific throughout-the-day handling procedures and protective measures to prevent physical intervention. It's not good enough to just say "we need public observers"; we need alarms and impediments to ensure any attempt to tamper is highly-visible, leaves evidence, and takes a large amount of real time. I've made mention of such things, but haven't written down a detailed implementation.
The reasoning that all computerized voting is flawed is the same is the following reasoning: Many software programs have bugs (either in design or implementation), Therefore all software programs have bugs.
Computerized voting is invisible. Computers can have tampering paths which are invisible. You must prove a computer contains only specific, known software, which can then be inspected by everyone forever so that any invisible tampering can be discovered at any time by any person.
It's not about computers mistakenly doing the wrong thing; it's about computers intentionally doing the wrong thing and actively hiding it. We have to make it impossible to hide.
Printing that much additional ballot can be found , having the whole LOT of people to distribute them in ballot box and remove true votes can be found out much easier.
You know we've had this conversation before?
As the 1940s came to an end, the public demanded mechanical voting machines. Paper ballots were rife with fraud, with ballot boxes 'lost' and 'found' all the time, and politicians frantically calling their loyal precinct bosses to manufacture votes.
Today, we still hear about electoral fraud in the form of messing with how judges count votes and spoiled ballots. We hear about thousands of ballots cast mysteriously not being present in counting, but the election officials are sure it's fine and has no effect. We hear about the scandal of some election staffer being discovered with no counterfeit ballots or anything, just a few hundred blank ballot sheets--an enormous concern to the integrity of our elections.
They're doing it wrong. Electronic voting machines are handled horrendously. The standards for using these systems do not provide any degree of integrity. That doesn't mean you can't; in fact, you can provide greater integrity with electronic voting than with paper. Nobody does.
Don't call for a solution that's worse than the problem.
Verifying that your vote is counted doesn't tell you the election is untampered; and verifying that your vote has been counted opens up the election to tampering via vote-buying.
We must verify that the ballots as a whole are counted, collected, and summed.
and those can bypass lobbyist and pork barrel politics.
I like pork. Four years ago, we had won a new transit system in our State. $2.2 billion dollars expected cost; the Federal Government gave us a $900 million grant.
That's pork barrel spending.
Every time the Federal Government pays for a State project--notably infrastructure--that's pork barrel spending.
Government waste is a real problem; Conservatives have pushed the idea that any spending on local projects is government waste. The culmination of this has been last year's proposal by the President for massive infrastructure projects while calling for the states to pay for them and stop asking the Federal government for money.
We moved away from paper ballots because of the rampant fraud associated with paper ballots. That's how we got punch card machines.
of course, let's not forget magical disappearing and appearing boxes of ballots.
See?
the electronic one is harder to track hacking than the good ol' traditional methods with paper ballots.
Oh I can do better than that
I think I'd have the log collector hooked up to the big display in that, too. Easier to show many statistics. We could show the public observers that X voters have cast ballots, that the two ballot machines are running in-sync, and so forth. Any important log notices would appear.
It's kind of annoying doing this with one-wire serial, but I don't want to put the EVM and two ballot boxes on an Ethernet network together. I want one-way communications, and nothing able to signal anything to the active EBB.
Close, but not quite.
that's the system we had in place before the advent of voting machines and election software. You had a room full of election judges from both sides, and they sat side-by-side checking in voters as they approached the voting booth and physically watched them put the ballot in the box. When the votes were counted, there was a whole bunch of people from both parties standing around keeping a close eye. When the ballots were sent for storage, one person from each party rode in the truck to drop them off after sealing the container - together - and signing off.
Today, we have issues like 3,700 votes not being counted and ballots being apparently cast but somehow missing; or a ballot box being "found"; or all kinds of mucking with the error rate to intentionally miscount; or people invalidating ballots because they have a stray mark that could be a signal to a third party that the vote they purchased was cast faithfully.
Paper ballots aren't magically secure.
Was it possible to jigger with an election like that? Of course. But you had a list of names of people you could hold accountable at every step in the process.
Not really. In paper voting, it's possible to tamper at multiple stages. An unscrupulous election staffer can shuffle blank ballots to an individual who comes in and votes, casting multiple ballots into the box at once. A little sleight of hand. That's why ballots have anti-counterfeit properties, and why we freak out when we discover someone has a pile of blank ballots.
If you have a list of registered voters who never vote, you can tamper with the voting rolls by casting ballots at their polling places. Write their names in throughout the day and use one of the ballot numbers attached to the pile of stolen ballots.
Nobody can quite identify if or who. Totally-invisible, except for the record turn-out in your precinct (up 10%!).
Electronic voting will never, ever be trusted. That is the effect of transparency.
Paper voting is trusted too much, and people even let you take ballots out of public view "because the ballot boxes are kept in a secure location."
Current electronic voting is horrendous. You bring in a pre-programmed machine, "certified" by a trusted third party. Trusted? You fail. Load malware the night before; have the malware tamper with votes; delete the malware at poll close (self-removing!). Wipe forensic evidence by simply eliminating the deleted file pointer and clearing out the file contents for the malware's binary. Nobody will ever know.
You can secure elections with high integrity by using a non-repudiated elections integrity model, which practically requires electronic counts (we can't tamper with the counting that way). Ensuring non-tampering of the ballots in transit from the polling location is doable without electronic voting; this doesn't ensure the ballots weren't miscounted to arrive at the output values.
Electronic voting machines can't be network-connected, so you can't use blockchain. Blockchain is invisible, anyway, until you put something on the public blockchain, so you can tamper until then.
EVMs need to start non-tampered; and you need to prove that they are untampered at poll open in a manner which people can inspect at any point in the future. That means any person in the world can identify any tampering functions and any alteration in the software--and they can identify these things at any time in the future. If you haven't achieved that, you're using a black box with no assurance it's properly recording votes.
On the other hand, once you achieve that, paper ballots are invalid: if the paper audit trail disagrees with the electronic audit trail, the paper audit trail has been compromised.
You're describing an ideal. That's fine; I'm pointing out a flaw in your mechanism.
Your mechanism is that automation will make a $2 loaf of bread cost only $0.30 cents to make instead of $1.90, so we're going to tax the business enough to extract $1.60 per loaf of bread. The next breadmaker over won't go from a 5% profit at $2 to a 330% profit at $1 and take all your business, compelling you to sell at $0.80, etc., until you both maximize your profits at around $0.35.
You suggest we'll just pay the now-unemployed bread factory workers their prior salary, and progress will continue without work.
If you did that, then those now-unemployed bread factory workers would be able to buy the same things they could, and no more. Prices would not fall compared to wages. There would be no way to introduce new products to the market because nobody would be able to buy them; and any improvement to a product would raise its price because you tax any capacity to make the product at a lower cost.
So you say innovation will continue. I say nobody will be able to buy any newly-innovated thing because they'll be paying for expensive existing things that never become a smaller portion of their income.
In other words: a 1995 Chevrolet costing 56% of the median income came with some stuff, while a 2016 Chevrolet costing 56% of the income came with all the stuff that you'd get in a 1995 Chevrolet costing 200% of the median income. Thing is you want to tax the productivity gains, so that particular 2016 Chevrolet costs 200% of the median income, and 56% of the median income in 2016 buys a Chevrolet identical to what the 56%-of-median 1995 Chevrolet had.
Consumers can't afford power windows, anti-lock brakes, and airbags because those things used to cost way more than consumers could afford, and then you decided to tax the living shit out of them when we found a way to make those things affordable to the consumer--ensuring the consumer still can't afford those things and never will.
Let me try to explain this.
Back in 1914, someone invented a thing called a "wooden shipping pallet". They found that palletized canned goods could be loaded and unloaded in 4 hours, while the same crew usually needed three 16-hour days to do so. That's a 92% reduction in labor to load and unload shipped goods.
That's automation: you don't get zero human labor work, but rather a reduction in total invested human labor. That wooden pallet still takes human labor to make, so you get around an 85%-90% reduction in shipping labor overall.
Think about all the things people had in 1914--the things the working family could buy. It's a lot less stuff than today, right? Even if we go back to 1989, when you could have a cell phone--a $4,000 device with $50/month service and 40 cent per minute voice calls, amounting to over $9,000 for the phone and $500/month to talk for two hours per week today. Those price reductions came by reducing cost--by reducing labor.
Now imagine if we had made a post-employment world in 1914.
You're asking for something specific: there will never be any increase in standard-of-living again. We're going to make sure what costs 10% of the income today still costs 10% of the income after new technology rolls in, and simply reduce the level of employment by the difference. 100 years from now, few people will work, and they'll work little; they'll live as we do today, with no advances in standard-of-living except free time.
I want shorter working hours, accomplished by becoming 5% richer when we could become 10% richer. I don't want to call this the end of technological development and ensure our society never gains a higher standard-of-living than it has today.
Social Democracy uses tax-and-spend government to provide services to fill the gaps in capitalism (you can't make money providing disability insurance, healthcare, and housing to people who are poor and can't pay the cost of these things). The general free market stays around (although there are regulations), rather than being annihilated by socialist policies.
Productivity gains--wealth, as the amount of production and consumption possible per person--increase by structural change. If we can make 100% as much with 80% as much labor, guess what? We only need to employ 80% as many people. We only need to pay 80% as much to make the same things. The price can come down and we can still have even bigger profits because the same profit margin is more purchasing power.
So if you move a factory to another town, you stop bringing money into the town from all the places to which the factory sells products. The vehicle of factory worker wages vanishes; jobs beyond just factory jobs can no longer exist because the revenue from sales dries up; and you get mass unemployment and poverty.
Because people are poor in your area and you've lost a cash inflow source, you can't just start a business selling to your neighbors, or have jobs selling expensive things--it doesn't work. Your first jobs are service jobs; and those are supported by welfare. People get jobs at grocery stores and WalMarts, and then their welfare gets cut off. The cash flow reverses: welfare supports jobs; cutting welfare means part of the spend from your neighbors goes to your wage and part leaves out the supply chain. Unemployment again increases.
Your collapsed city goes into poverty stasis.
Now as you can imagine, a city of workers is producing more than a city of non-workers. We can't pay them, they can't work. If they worked, they would produce, and our nation would have wealth.
So in 2016 (before this new tax law), it was possible to restructure our social insurances such that we didn't cut any services and we built Social Security on a new, firm foundation--without raising taxes or increasing deficits. The model I used restructured $1.1 trillion of Federal spending into $2.0 trillion, paying a benefit equally to all adults; $1.2 trillion of those benefits payments covered the taxes the recipients would pay into the system.
In case you missed that: total money moving in and out went up by $0.9 trillion; and $1.2 trillion of the tax taken was being placed directly back into the same hands from which it was taken. That means it's a $300 billion tax cut.
Cute, right? Mathematical paradoxes have their limits.
So how is this useful?
$6,000 per adult per year. The poorest get the biggest benefit; it tapers off among the middle-class: their total tax rate is a touch higher to reclaim the benefit. Basically, they make $60,000, they get $6,000, but they pay a little more in taxes--between $0 and $6,000 more--which ultimately transfers some of that money from the new Dividend program to the General fund through tax games.
That's done to make the program a hands-off, self-stabilizing program--one the government doesn't need to "rescue", one that doesn't need to be "made stronger" with higher taxes and benefits, one that doesn't need "reform". It's set, it has strict rules, and the tax rate attached never changes. Don't touch it.
Where you have concentrated poverty, you have concentrated stimulus. People are a little less poor, so they don't qualify for as much welfare; and when they get jobs and lose welfare, they retain this basis to help lift their local economy steadily toward middle-class anyway. They don't collapse back into poverty again.
People working. People producing. People paying taxes. A small share of that distributes, so the benefit is bigger--it grows faster than inflation because it grows with productivity.
Lower unemployment and a quick fix wherever there is any seed of recession remediates recession
Thought by many who have no idea what they're talking about.
There are excellent, valid economic arguments for a demogrant. The 200-year-old argument that "in 5 years everybody will be unemployed!" isn't one of them.
The modern direct attempts to tax automation (technology) as some sort of fix would actually cause unemployment: reductions in costs increase purchasing power at the expense of structural change (people become unemployed, while other people eventually become employed--not necessarily the same people). A tax directed at the cost reduction prohibits a price reduction, leaving prices high as employment falls away, preventing the creation of jobs.
The argument for taxing automation is a Haynes argument--the one used by Republicans for trickle-down and such. The argument for not taxing automation is a Keynes argument--an argument that says jobs are created by consumer buying power. Keynesian economics tend to highlight problems with things like payroll taxes (artificial raising of prices) and support taxes on corporate profits instead (profits happen AFTER cost-price exchange, rather than as PART of the cost driving price).
In other words: a tax on employees would do as you say, destroying employment; a tax on "automation-driven productivity" is the same kind of tax, and has the same kind of impact on employment.
Everyone brilliant is underfunded.