Roads get water in cracks, which freezes and expands, damaging the road surface by prying it open. Cracks form by hot and cold expansion during day/night cycles from the sun shining on them and from patterns in driving. Enough small cracks without a freeze-thaw cycle will leave bits of road unsupported, meaning your road is made up of protruding pencil-eraser-sized platforms instead of one flat sheet, and the stress of a moving or braking vehicle wiggles these until they break apart (and the edges chip etc.).
Old road material gets crushed up and mixed with substrate.
Should we also have mandatory checks for eyebrow width and the space between their eyes? Endomorphic theory says short, chubby people with beady eyes are more likely to be thieves and rapists, after all.
Decisions are tricky things. Just by reordering the same words with the same semantic meaning, I can change your perception; the simplest of these is to put the most important, point at the end of the discussion. Start with what you want to de-emphasize, and end with what you want to emphasize. I can also peel away your reluctance by starting with support ("you know cigarettes are bad for you"), then avoiding the negating conjunction "but" ("and you just can't quit!"), and filling the pitch with agreeable terms, challenges, and sympathy ("Wouldn't it be nice to protect your health while you work to cut down on your intake of dangerous nicotine, tar, and hundreds of pesticides and chemicals? Our low-nicotine, low-tar cigarettes...").
About 100 years ago, a guy started a business selling cheap white salmon. Because pink salmon was more popular, he didn't get much business; then he created a new slogan: "Guaranteed not to turn pink in the can." Consumers gained the perception that pink salmon was somehow inferior, expiring, unhealthy, old... and sales of pink salmon immediately plummeted. His competitors responded shortly after by printing "Never bleached" on their cans, which had a similar effect. These aren't lies.
What choice do you have? You can spend your time playing video games and arguing on Slashdot, or you can spend every waking hour of your life studying everything in an attempt to defend yourself against misleading claims, such as the claim that certain drivers are fingerprinted--implying that fingerprinting improves passenger safety.
By the way: "BPA-Free" polycarbonate uses Bisphenol-S (BPS). BPS has 19 times the leeching rate of BPA and metabolizes the exact same way: "BPA-Free" PC plastics are a real hazard to consumers, while BPA polycarbonate in unheated applications (i.e. not baby bottles) don't provide enough of a dose to have a biological impact. Many hard plastic consumer goods (e.g. Ninja food processors) are advertised BPA-Free polycarbonate plastic: you can either buy a good blender *or* you can buy a really shitty $20 basic blender. Consumers with more high-end, heavier-duty needs for their kitchen appliances don't have a choice: it's toxic BPS polycarbonate or don't get the features and performance of high-power food processors, reducing the quality of complex home-cooked meals. They should obviously stop cooking and just order pizza or microwave TV dinners.
I have two tracts with this: money isn't wealth (finance is significant) and the whole concept is ridiculous.
Cupertino is my favored example for the moment. Apple makes $42.25 billion in revenues and $32.25 in operating expenses, employing 13,000 people at their Cupertino HQ with a combined salary of around $2 billion. Cupertino mayor claims Apple is "abusing them" by avoiding taxes; never mind that Apple pumps 6% of its operating expenses into Cupertino, money which it collects from business all over the world, which California and the Cupertino government taxes the shit out of (8.25% sales tax and 8% income tax, plus municipal property taxes and some other shit). Money gets poured into the local economy off the back of productive output in another country (China), and Cupertino wants to be the recipient of wealth produced in China.
Business profits are tiny compared to operating costs; Apple is an outlier, with its operating costs 75% of its total revenue. They're also not *exactly* unreasonable to claim they've created shitloads of US jobs beyond their 47,000 total--that's 47,000 jobs fueled by global sales, with Apple getting 37% of its revenue from the Americas (including Canada and South America!). Apple's business requires shipping companies, retail stores, marketers, logistics, warehouses, and all kinds of other labor in other companies--effectively impacting employment in all of these job areas.
Counter-point: if Apple didn't sell iPhones, the available consumer dollars would buy other things to create the same number of jobs, assuming the same price per unit goods. That's why I said it's not *exactly* unreasonable: their understanding of economics is flawed, but not egregiously so.
That counter-point is important if you consider all the Chinese labor. American-made iPhones would cost a *lot* more and, if consumers actually bought them, would result in consumers buying fewer products. That would shift Americans off existing jobs onto factory work; and the dearth in shipped goods would reduce logistics, marketing, retail, and shipping, leading to a corresponding reduction in jobs. The additional cost moved onto Americans would prevent the purchase of other goods including things like Spotify and more modern healthcare (we spend more today for more and better healthcare because we can). I've projected the total impact of rejecting 100% of Chinese manufacture as a rough 15 million to 40 million lost American jobs and corresponding wide-spread poverty, a total failure of our welfare system, and a culling by mass starvation; Apple is only a small part of that.
Put that into perspective with Microsoft. Microsoft sells software all over the world. Microsoft's software is made right here in America; even with lower-cost H1B workers moved to Redmond, those operating costs disperse into spending in the United States, income taxes in the United States, and money flowing *from* India to the United States instead of *to* India *from* the United States. Microsoft has $108 billion offshored, which represents $42 billion in corporate income taxes evaded *over* *its* *lifetime*; the United States Federal income in 2013 was some $2,775 billion, with $2,304 billion from income tax. That means Microsoft has, in its lifetime, kept 1.5% of a year's income from the Federal government; since April 4, 1975, that's about $1 billion/year, or 0.037%,or $2.94 per current American.
Microsoft has 40,000 employees at Redmond, plus more in Belleview and Issaquah down the road, totaling 42,000 at $100k-$120k salaries, or *FIVE* *BILLION* *DOLLARS* of global revenue coming to Washington State for dispersal into the economy, getting taxed by the United States Federal Government and the state and local authorities, every fucking year.
Those numbers--for Microsoft and Apple--count only their direct employees; we're not counting their business services. Do they pay for electricity
Trying to find the reports I was looking at. Slashdot carried an article several months ago about Uber getting hit up in California because, across the whole state, they've had 25 assaults on passengers in their entire operating history; I did a bunch of research on the topic then, and concluded that Uber isn't specially safer, just not specially more dangerous. A lot of comments had horror stories about how taxis are so constantly dangerous to passengers, but that's the same kind of wargarble on the other side.
This one isn't strong enough. It makes a lot of logical arguments and carries some data (passenger assaults on drivers), but not the data I want (driver assaults on passengers). Still, the argument that fingerprinting might possibly carry more than 7 years of non-conviction arrests while Uber's background checks get all of that data *except* the non-conviction arrests is... telling (what, not guilty, but not *really* innocent because you *did* get arrested some 20 years ago, even if the judge decided you didn't commit any crime? They're going to ban you from driving Uber for that? That's a lot of grasping for straws).
A Chicago study says taxi crimes went down when Uber entered the market; I think they just shifted taxi service to Uber and didn't count Uber crime. New York reports a rise in taxi cab sexual assault reporting, I think because people are chattering about how possibly dangerous Uber/Lyft might be and now are primed to be more vocal about getting groped in a taxicab. I also found a newspaper with the 2016 headline, "New York taxi drivers banned from flirting with or ejaculating on passengers"...... wtf?
This is impossible today. If you put "taxi assault statistics" into Google, you get 16 pages of highly-political, heavily-biased pages about Uber/Lyft, and how taxis *must* be safer because of insurance or background checks, or how Uber *must* be safer because it has *better* insurance or background checks (and tons of technology tracking everything that happens). Most studies are localized, not nationalized, and so you come across Chicago and Detroit and New York and "our city police don't specially-track who was committing a crime, so we can't know how many taxi drivers actually assault passengers". News outlets aren't particularly invested in settling the dispute, either, because it creates fear and draws eyeballs.
Great. Now I have to wait for both some institute to publish statistics *and* the news to latch onto it and make it popular so it doesn't vanish into the black hole of shit-you-can't-find-on-the-Internet.
Partly because consumers are dumb and will buy useless shit.
One popular marketing technique is to make a three-tier product with the intention of never selling the top-tier. You make a $100 toaster oven, and a $160 toaster oven with all the bells and whistles. Then you make a $250 toaster oven that also has a nice finish and an additional, practically-useless, almost-zero-cost feature. The consumer reasons that the $160 toaster oven is an incredible deal; if you're extremely lucky, a few will reason that the uselessly-decorated $250 model is top-of-the-line and carries features they'll miss if they settle for less.
Fingerprints aren't ID; fingerprints are associated with ID. If someone's fingerprints are on file and you give their ID (driver's license, etc.) to the place with them on file (e.g. police), they'll be able to look up the fingerprints. This is all well-and-good and very logical, but it doesn't mean fingerprints don't increase safety; the statistical data in areas with lots of taxis and lots of Uber drivers showing no difference in passenger safety between background-checked taxis and non-background-checked Ubers means fingerprints don't increase safety.
However, you've now got a message that a higher tier of background check (with fingerprints!) is available, suggesting to the customer that this is more-safe. You not only have a false sense of security for the passenger, but also you have drivers who lose a big chunk of the market unless they pay for and submit to fingerprint registration.
Extra costs, all for nothing. Extra costs like that destroy jobs and create poverty, but that's a whole different discussion.
"It's not 100% foolproof" is a true but misleading statement. Between standard taxis (with fingerprinting) and Uber in the same market (without fingerprinting) in markets with significant numbers of Uber drivers (statistics don't work when you have a sample size of 4, dude), the amount of driver-on-passenger assault is essentially equivalent.
In other words: the data suggests fingerprinting is approximately as effective for the purpose of improving passenger safety as measuring the driver's penis size and keeping that on file. Not really better than doing nothing.
Politician's soliloquy: Something must be done; this is something; therefor, this must be done.
Wow. Deceptive tactics versus poor understanding of reality.
Rather than lying, the canvasser should have politely asked why their audience was in favor of fingerprinting. Then he should have provided a competent and considerate coverage of concerns. For example: most people are afraid the person in the car might be dangerous (why else would you want fingerprinting?). The cost of fingerprinting can be spent on other, more-effective methods of risk reduction to ensure a safer ride; this is especially important because, across millions of drivers per year in both fingerprinted and non-printed services, fingerprinting has been demonstrated to produce no measurable increase in safety. For the safest ride, the resources spent to collect and file fingerprints must be spent on better methods of maximizing driver and passenger safety; to do otherwise is to give taxi and ride share companies a pass, allowing them to go through the motions and smile and comfort you with empty promises while taking no real action to support your safety.
That needs some rework and polishing, but it's a start. It's also all essentially true, which carries a hell of a lot more weight than streams of lies.
I can buy that - you're getting the difference by stealing government pensions, BTW (not that I oppose that).
Not quite. I targeted Social Security Old-Age pensions, not government-supplied pension benefits. Even that has a transitional plan (retiring within 15 years of activation of the Dividend gets you grandfathered; however, you get OASDI minus the Dividend, and the Dividend tops it up to the original promised benefit).
What about that legally-mandated health care plan that costs $200/month then?
The ACA specifies tax subsidies for low-income and no-income individuals and families to cover those plans. People making under a certain amount of income paid $0 the day the exchanges came online; I don't specify anything about that, and simply mandate that the Dividend is not income (not taxable, not counted as income, not garnered, not Alimony) because it's logically your basic right to life (if you can survive on the Dividend, then we can take whatever other money you have; if you have no other money, then taking the Dividend is essentially a death sentence).
Remember, economic cycles are caused not by actual unemployment, but by the much larger reduction in spending due to future fear of unemployment
My entire argument was that employing people costs less under my plan, thus the amount of consumer spending required to create a job is lower. That "reduction in spending" thing doesn't have as much of an impact: it can't create as much unemployment, and the unemployment it does create is relieved more rapidly.
Do you think the economy will recover jobs faster if the new goods we try to sell to consumers cost the consumer $200 per month, or if they cost $20 per month, assuming that either good requires as much labor time to provide?
We spend $306 B on "income security", basically all the "welfare" style programs.
In 2013: $721 billion Retirement (Social Security Old-Age pensions), $150 billion Sickness and Disability (Social Security Supplemental Disability Insurance), $110 billion Food Security, $170 billion Income Security, $71 billion Federal Unemployment, and $46.7 billion HUD Housing Assistance. $1,268.70 billion at the Federal level, $1,618.90 billion including State and Local.
At the Federal level, those services made up 36.7% of total Federal spending, 45.7% of total Federal tax revenue, and 55.1% of total Federal collected Income tax. This was with a Personal Income measured at $14,301 billion, including $2,417 billion of income from welfare, for a base Personal Income of $11,884 trillion. The taxable income after all deductions (Adjusted Gross Income) was $9,329.10.
That makes our public aid system amount to 17.35% of AGI, including state services for retirement, unemployment, food stamps, and housing assistance. I essentially roll the 6.2% OASDI into income taxes (the payroll tax gets rolled into business income) and cut 55% off Federal spending, then level off the bottom (which is 16.2% by default) and apply a 17.0% tax as a funding source. Because of how the progressive taxes work, it actually comes out roughly even; the nearly 3% tax bump at the top is an artifact. Several state services become obsolete in addition to these reductions in Federal tax.
In 2013, that supplied $549/month or $6,558/year *per* *individual* *adult*. Monthly, for one person, that's $300 rent, $100 food, $30 utilities, $35 clothing, and $35 personal care in 2013; in 2015 those numbers are 6.24% higher ($584/month), although the costs don't keep up (the actual increase in food cost, for example, was 4.2% instead of 6.24%; the income-per-capita increased by 6.24%).
I've actually run trials on this in practice, and found that it's not so nice-and-neat; you get *way* ahead if you combine the food, clothing, and personal care into a single budget, because you can do food in substantially less ($42/month per 2000 kcal) on running average, and the other two are just ridiculously high. To put this into perspective: starting with zero utensils and only the assumption of a stove with which to cook, buying pots and pans, a $45 Sam's Club membership, and all food, I had enough food continuously, plus money saved up for a $200 bread machine 4 months in. I did, in practice, live in a 750sqft apartment with a utility bill below $60/month for 4 years, ending in 2012; I placed the utility bill at half that for less than a third the space.
BTW, it won't smooth out the economic cycles very much (I'm sure it will help a little)
Yes, it will.
Currently, we try to create subsistence by raising the minimum wage. This increases the cost of a subset of low-end goods, slightly reducing the amount of spending power of the enormous consumer base. That is to say: the middle class might pay 15 cents more at McDonalds. Propagate that across the entire country and you get a tiny loss of jobs: you're making some of the poor poorer as well (jobless) and concentrating wealth from the rich middle class (who pay more) and the poorest of poor (who lose their income because it's transferred to a smaller set of poor people).
Notice the loss of jobs: wages get more expensive, the products created by those wages increase in price, and the consumer's ability to buy as many products decreases. Re-hiring these displaced workers is hard because of both the decrease in consumer buying power and the increase in cost of hiring human labor. That creates higher unemployment baselines via faster loss of employment and longer unemployment cycles.
My Dividend provides the baseline income by an income tax. This doesn't raise the direct cost of hiring employees, and it moves the OASDI payroll tax (6.2%) off the attempt (the cost of attempting to make a good--direct
Flying a battery with that kind of energy density is one of the stupidest conceivable things you could do. At 30x density, a cell phone battery holds the energy of 0.28 pounds of TNT or 0.54 sticks of dynamite. They blow up now when smacked with a hammer; imagine the tiny, tiny fault required to cause a chain reaction and the size and sheer reaction time of the explosion: it would detonate immediately. Now you want a plane loaded with that shit?
Just use solar power or some other source to convert atmospheric CO2 and H2O into manufactured hydrocarbon, then push that through a fuel cell or diesel generator with an electric engine. Even then, you might be best off with just jet turbines: the atmosphere gets thin up there, and you need *something* to push off--driving the plane off the dense mass of burning fuel exhaust is better than simply venting said exhaust into the atmosphere.
This will happen when the labor cost of manufacturing such a hydrocarbon from a non-hydrocarbon energy source no longer exceeds the labor cost of pumping oil out of the ground and refining it into jet fuel.
The problem is, you can only fund a "subsidence dividend" at the expense of medicare
Patently false. The till is OASDI, unemployment insurance, food stamps, and HUD housing assistance (17.2% of the total taxed income in 2013) converting into a 17.0% base, plus 1.4% of AGI covering a public aid system (food stamps, UI, OASDI, HUD) only applicable to children and naturalized citizens. That's 100% Federal initiative.
That's all without touching any healthcare services, at all. It's enough for 225 square foot of apartment space in most low-income areas, even in California and New York, although such small spaces are usually marketed as luxury apartments instead; plus food, personal care, clothing, and utilities.
That means a single individual actually gets enough to survive. I've got a lot of risk reserve built into that--I used a $1/sqft model for apartment rent (real world is between 60 cents and $1.20 for 1br), but allocated $1.33/sqft, and did similar for the other categories--and the proportional costs drop as technology expands and lowers cost-per-income-per-capita of the various goods. Over time, the poorest of poor get richer by exactly the per-capita marginal technological growth.
There's also an intentional fault in my particular plan: it's aimed to cause a labor shortage crisis. The target is ~118% employment (negative 18% unemployment), at which point we have to make everyone 20% poorer by amending the Fair Labor Standards Act to define full time as 28-32 hours per week. That cuts back working hours per person and the attached income, settling us at 5.6% unemployment--right back where we started, working 1 day less, with the same buying power, although everyone making under ~$625k is a bit better off in it.
The buying power guarantees also smooth out the market a bit (economic downturns aren't so sharp), so you have a more stable economy which can afford more risks--more effort toward technological growth, creating more wealth in shorter time spans while protecting the economy from rising unemployment (humans are slower to replace and faster to re-employ because we pay them an income-tax-sourced Dividend rather than a minimum wage, and because certain payroll taxes are lifted off the cost of employing a human; technological unemployment thus has a blunter edge and a shorter recovery time).
So... yeah. Slow the loss of jobs from every source, speed the eventual creation of replacement jobs, and eliminate all homelessness and hunger by replacing our hardly-functional welfare system. 50 million Americans living without continuous access to enough food; 75% of families qualified for HUD assistance go on a waiting list and NEVER receive it; and Unemployment Insurance relies on continuously cycling people out of jobs and then back into them at fixed intervals (jobs are created by consumer buying power, and the dynamics of technological growth guarantee continuous creation of transitional unemployment, while scarcity and population growth guarantee an unemployment baseline).
We can fund America's welfare system, today, now, as it stands, with a 20% increase in *everyone's* taxes; or we can cut out payroll taxes, reduce business income taxes slightly, and replace all our welfare taxes with an earmarked 17% Dividend tax that accomplishes the same purpose and *much* more, redu
It depends. If you pay enough, you change the perception of scarcity such that people don't work certain types of jobs, and then the labor availability drops, and your society becomes unsustainable. All the money in the world can't buy food that's not made.
If you don't pay enough, people simply can't get by--we see that already, since they get paid by wages and they have no jobs.
If you pay someone, you need a source. That source has to have enough *labor* to safely move it down into the economy. Every dollar I take from you is something you can't buy, which decreases employment because whoever is making, moving, and selling that has less to do, and eventually we get rid of a few of those guys. Moving that money down gives our poor population the ability to buy something else, which creates employment. If the amount moved down is too big, our society spends too much time maintaining and not enough time growing, and it destabilizes from the shock of the change and creates too many people with no jobs, thus eliminates the income source for this downward movement of money, thus collapses.
In 2013, we hit parity with public aid in America: a subsistence dividend costs just a hair less than modern welfare. In 1950, a subsistence dividend would have bankrupt the country and caused mass starvation and an economic collapse to put the Great Depression to shame. Even so, implementing such a Dividend today is a carefully-instrumented and highly-complex process; the end result is simple, but the path there without hurling a bunch of current welfare-dependent families out into the gutter to die is difficult and kind of expensive.
Technology in itself is neutral. Why is it a problem? Who are the people who abuse it, what are their incentives, how is it that they are in a position to create problems out of technology?
Technology uncaps scarcity, allowing population increase. It also reduces the cost of goods by reducing labor involved in making the good, leaving buying power in consumer hands when the prices come down, which creates new jobs as consumers buy new things which require (a reduced amount of) labor to produce. For example: cell phones were priced at $4,000 in 1983 (~$9,000 in 2010 dollars) and service came at $50/month and 42 cents per minute ($250/mo to talk for 2 hours/week); thanks to improvements in process, many fewer labor hours (and fewer people) are involved in making a cell phone and operating the network, while the cell phone labor itself is shipped to a low-wage-price market ($3.50/hr Chinese workers), giving us a $350 high-end smart phone (much more stuff packed in a little box) and $60/month unlimited everything (voice-data-text, and that's on local-labor infrastructure).
The march of technology has reduced the cost and price of food, clothing, medical care, and housing. In 1950, the average-income household spent 28% of their income on housing, with the average new single-family home being 983sqft; by 2003, the average-income household spent 33% of their income on housing, with the average new single-family home being 2,300sqft--they spent roughly half as much per square foot. Food also cost about half as much (12% of income instead of 30%+); clothing fell to 4% of income; and so forth. The average new car purchased still has a purchase price of 56% of the average income; and that average new car has standard air conditioning (available in 1/3 of new cars in 1950), standard MP3-6CD-USB-satellite-bluetooth radio media center, 4 wheel independent suspension, disc brakes, anti-lock brakes, traction control, precrash systems, airbags, better-designed engines with lower emissions and higher power, better-engineered tires, and all kinds of other safety and comfort systems not purchased in the 1950 reference.
Because of this march of technology, Americans spend upwards of 40% of their income on nonessential goods, and they spend 50% more of their income to purchase more and better-quality healthcare. The lower- and middle-class workers have gotten incredibly rich thanks to technological growth raising the total wealth and the basic standard-of-living.
Globalisation in moderation is quite nice. I mean you like foreign food, goods, people, culture. How has globalisation then evolved into a situation where it craps on everything it touches?
It hasn't; people are simply short-sighted.
People see manufacturing jobs have gone to China. They see a job which they could do being done by a little yellow prick 14,000 miles away for half a cup of rice or whatever it is they imagine the slant-eyed demon gets paid. (Hint: It's about $3.50/hr.) They then complain the little China man has taken their job--*their* job!
Goods produced and shipped from China command a lower price here. They get moved by local shippers to retail centers run by managers, inventory specialists, and cash register operators, all handled by district managers and distribution centers governed by logistics engineers. The goods and the retail centers get marketed by marketers and advertisers. A lot of jobs support getting any physical commodity into an American's hands.
If you cut out China and bring the manufacture back to America, you get $8.25/hr Americans making goods. Everything costs 2.5 times as much to make, and it still has to go through local shippers, distributors, retailers, and so forth; and those entities move things en masse, so the millions of such jobs actually move hundreds of billions of unit goods, and their actual cost impact is fractional.
Result: goods cost twice as much, and Americans end up with half as much b
They seem to forget that corporate taxes are tiny.
Apple's money winds up funneled to Chinese workers, support reps, Apple Store retail employees, shipping companies, advertisers, and the like. All of the things involved in Apple's product sales are costs representing human labor time; each individual business supplying said product or service has its own price, higher than the cost. You aggregate them and you get a gap between cost and price, with an aggregate cost paid out as wages on labor and an aggregate price equal to the price of the thing sold.
Apple's Cupertino HQ shuttles some of that cost to its 12,000 staff (the new campus will house over 13,000) each making around $120,000-$150,000 (median in all of Cupertino is $127,000 per household; Apple INTERNS make $80,000, HW engineers make $130,000, SR HW $160,000, etc.). Cupertino is an economic shithole with an 8.75% sales tax rate and a 6% income tax rate (sales taxes are inefficient and have the same impact as raising cost by a percentage of the *price*, which reduces consumer buying power and thus the available jobs).
That means Apple brings $2 billion to the Cupertino economy through WAGES, minus Federal taxes (~30%), leaving $120 million of income tax income via wages and some slightly smaller amount (sales tax is spotty) through sales tax, plus Apple's corporate taxes. That's out of Apple's $33.25 billion operating expenses: Apple expends 6% of its operating expenses in Cupertino.
Cupertino wants a chunk of Apple's sales from all over the world. They want to come up behind Apple and claim rights to a chunk of everything that's left over. This isn't an unreasonable proposition or a bad policy (taxes on business income are far less damaging to the economy than taxes on business activity: payroll taxes raise the cost of trying and thus the *cost* and corresponding risk of failure, while income taxes on business raise the cost of *success* by a portion of that success). It's also not explicitly reasonable or good; it's mostly a policy of opportunity: finance by association.
You can have any number of moral arguments for or against, and most of the moral arguments are essentially the same argument as the desired output. To put it another way: Cupertino essentially complains that Apple does all this business all over the world and *Denmark* profits because Apple files its profits in Denmark; instead, Cupertino wants to relocate Apple's tax burden to Cupertino, drawing profit to Cupertino. How is this different than relocating its tax HQ to Baltimore, India, or some other locale? If Apple is making all this profit on income taken from residents of other cities and countries, should it not pay its income taxes there instead?
Economically, those arguments get into protectionism, which actively harms your economy (taxing the export is a disadvantage); and you can also argue that local products pay said taxes, and so taxation at fair rates is not penalization (your local suppliers already pay a tax, and the importers are only paying the *same* tax and not an *import* tax). This is one of the only sensible arguments of sales tax proponents (see my earlier comments about sales tax; the extent of flaws is not limited there).
With a net income of $10 billion, an operating expense of $33.25 billion, and $2 billion paid to operate in Cupertino (wages), it seems only 6% of Apple's operations occur in Cupertino. Maybe they owe taxes on $600,000,000--about $90 million? If we account for Apple's global sales versus their Cupertino sales (income generated from the Cupertino market), maybe they owe Cupertino a shitload less than that. Maybe Cupertino should consider the ~$200,000,000 in tax revenue and $2 billion of wage spending flowing to them from *the entire world* as Apple's contribution, instead of trying to position themselves as a parasite on every other city in the entire iPhone-using world.
This is bullshit. Dogs climb in my lap and beg for attention all the time and they're all treated for worms and fleas and weird diseases, and they never shed anything but hair on my pants. Dogs are excellent!
hint hint, nudge nudge. but there's no h1b problem here. no sir!
At 4.9% UE3 and 5.6% UE4 (UE4 includes *all* people who would get jobs if there were unlimited jobs; it excludes people who would want jobs but can't get jobs because they have other demands on their time, such as single mothers who would not be able to afford daycare if they got a job), we're not hurting for jobs.
Trickle-down economics doesn't work: jobs don't come from corporate initiatives, small-business owners, hard-working individuals, and a college education. Jobs come from consumer buying power: consumers buy and buy and buy until their buying power is 100% allocated--to necessities, to discretionary purchases, and to savings. When they are no longer willing and able to buy, there is no source to support the wage of an employee.
Wealth, thus, comes from technology: as we find ways to expend less labor time to produce the same goods, we run rounds of lay-offs and reduce the wage-labor cost of said goods. Remaining consumers end with more money in their pockets, and buy more of the same good or buy other goods; the additional production requires additional labor, thus replacing the lost jobs. So long as you don't create unemployment too quickly and you have sufficiently fast re-employment, the amount of stuff produced per-capita and purchased per-income goes up.
Standard-of-living raises as the proportion of income allocated to each individual increases. This includes infrastructure income (running water, etc.), although that's hard to measure (so are a lot of things). That means wages fall as a percentage of total income, population expands, and everyone lives better.
This leads to the consideration of income concentration: you create fewer jobs if you concentrate income. In a given economic state, you can increase consumer buying power by reducing the wage-labor cost of a product through the direct action of reducing the wages associated with the laborers. This controls prices against inflation (they rise more slowly than inflation). The additional money in remaining consumer pockets, again, leads to more purchasing and more jobs.
At a point, you wind up with the ability to create more jobs than you can sustain. In America, for example, a little less than half (48%) of the income goes to the upper 10% of earners, and they take home around 1/3 of the total take-home pay after taxes. If you were to adjust and level out the other 90% (the incomes under $141,000) and move down some of the high-income money, costs would fall; and employment would increase dramatically. You'd experience labor shortages: people would necessarily have enough money to purchase more than 100% of the labor force can provide.
In fact, it's possible to create such a system that hits 118% employment with 4.5% lower corporate income taxes, 6% lower corporate payroll taxes, and less than a 43% top tax bracket. At that level, a married-filing-jointly household with $80,000 of income actually takes home more than $80,000. To compensate for the labor shortage, you'd have to make everyone ~20% poorer by amending the Fair Labor Standard Act to define Full Time Employment as 26-32 hours per week--a 4-day work week. Because this is blanket across the whole labor force, no raising of wages or other mechanism would compensate for the wage income loss (you'd only get inflation by raising wages). People would work 4 days per week, they'd have 20% less income, and our unemployment would rise to 5.6%.
Similarly, you could make people poorer and increase total unemployment in the American non-H1B workforce by replacing H1B laborers with more-expensive American laborers, thus increasing the cost of products, reducing consumer buying power, reducing the number of direct workers required, reducing the amount of logistics labor required, reducing retail labor required, reducing marketing labor required, reducing shipping labor required, reducing labor required at oil refineries and ene
Declining wages? Man, people spend a larger percentage of their income on junk and *healthcare* now than they did in 1970; they spend less of their money on food, clothing, and housing (per square foot; they buy much bigger houses and rent larger apartments). The middle- and lower-class are overall richer today, with a greater amount of buying-power income than people of 40 years ago; don't sit there and bullshit that wages are going down.
Slashdot Mirror
Roads get water in cracks, which freezes and expands, damaging the road surface by prying it open. Cracks form by hot and cold expansion during day/night cycles from the sun shining on them and from patterns in driving. Enough small cracks without a freeze-thaw cycle will leave bits of road unsupported, meaning your road is made up of protruding pencil-eraser-sized platforms instead of one flat sheet, and the stress of a moving or braking vehicle wiggles these until they break apart (and the edges chip etc.).
Old road material gets crushed up and mixed with substrate.
Should we also have mandatory checks for eyebrow width and the space between their eyes? Endomorphic theory says short, chubby people with beady eyes are more likely to be thieves and rapists, after all.
Decisions are tricky things. Just by reordering the same words with the same semantic meaning, I can change your perception; the simplest of these is to put the most important, point at the end of the discussion. Start with what you want to de-emphasize, and end with what you want to emphasize. I can also peel away your reluctance by starting with support ("you know cigarettes are bad for you"), then avoiding the negating conjunction "but" ("and you just can't quit!"), and filling the pitch with agreeable terms, challenges, and sympathy ("Wouldn't it be nice to protect your health while you work to cut down on your intake of dangerous nicotine, tar, and hundreds of pesticides and chemicals? Our low-nicotine, low-tar cigarettes...").
About 100 years ago, a guy started a business selling cheap white salmon. Because pink salmon was more popular, he didn't get much business; then he created a new slogan: "Guaranteed not to turn pink in the can." Consumers gained the perception that pink salmon was somehow inferior, expiring, unhealthy, old... and sales of pink salmon immediately plummeted. His competitors responded shortly after by printing "Never bleached" on their cans, which had a similar effect. These aren't lies.
What choice do you have? You can spend your time playing video games and arguing on Slashdot, or you can spend every waking hour of your life studying everything in an attempt to defend yourself against misleading claims, such as the claim that certain drivers are fingerprinted--implying that fingerprinting improves passenger safety.
By the way: "BPA-Free" polycarbonate uses Bisphenol-S (BPS). BPS has 19 times the leeching rate of BPA and metabolizes the exact same way: "BPA-Free" PC plastics are a real hazard to consumers, while BPA polycarbonate in unheated applications (i.e. not baby bottles) don't provide enough of a dose to have a biological impact. Many hard plastic consumer goods (e.g. Ninja food processors) are advertised BPA-Free polycarbonate plastic: you can either buy a good blender *or* you can buy a really shitty $20 basic blender. Consumers with more high-end, heavier-duty needs for their kitchen appliances don't have a choice: it's toxic BPS polycarbonate or don't get the features and performance of high-power food processors, reducing the quality of complex home-cooked meals. They should obviously stop cooking and just order pizza or microwave TV dinners.
I have two tracts with this: money isn't wealth (finance is significant) and the whole concept is ridiculous.
Cupertino is my favored example for the moment. Apple makes $42.25 billion in revenues and $32.25 in operating expenses, employing 13,000 people at their Cupertino HQ with a combined salary of around $2 billion. Cupertino mayor claims Apple is "abusing them" by avoiding taxes; never mind that Apple pumps 6% of its operating expenses into Cupertino, money which it collects from business all over the world, which California and the Cupertino government taxes the shit out of (8.25% sales tax and 8% income tax, plus municipal property taxes and some other shit). Money gets poured into the local economy off the back of productive output in another country (China), and Cupertino wants to be the recipient of wealth produced in China.
Business profits are tiny compared to operating costs; Apple is an outlier, with its operating costs 75% of its total revenue. They're also not *exactly* unreasonable to claim they've created shitloads of US jobs beyond their 47,000 total--that's 47,000 jobs fueled by global sales, with Apple getting 37% of its revenue from the Americas (including Canada and South America!). Apple's business requires shipping companies, retail stores, marketers, logistics, warehouses, and all kinds of other labor in other companies--effectively impacting employment in all of these job areas.
Counter-point: if Apple didn't sell iPhones, the available consumer dollars would buy other things to create the same number of jobs, assuming the same price per unit goods. That's why I said it's not *exactly* unreasonable: their understanding of economics is flawed, but not egregiously so.
That counter-point is important if you consider all the Chinese labor. American-made iPhones would cost a *lot* more and, if consumers actually bought them, would result in consumers buying fewer products. That would shift Americans off existing jobs onto factory work; and the dearth in shipped goods would reduce logistics, marketing, retail, and shipping, leading to a corresponding reduction in jobs. The additional cost moved onto Americans would prevent the purchase of other goods including things like Spotify and more modern healthcare (we spend more today for more and better healthcare because we can). I've projected the total impact of rejecting 100% of Chinese manufacture as a rough 15 million to 40 million lost American jobs and corresponding wide-spread poverty, a total failure of our welfare system, and a culling by mass starvation; Apple is only a small part of that.
Put that into perspective with Microsoft. Microsoft sells software all over the world. Microsoft's software is made right here in America; even with lower-cost H1B workers moved to Redmond, those operating costs disperse into spending in the United States, income taxes in the United States, and money flowing *from* India to the United States instead of *to* India *from* the United States. Microsoft has $108 billion offshored, which represents $42 billion in corporate income taxes evaded *over* *its* *lifetime*; the United States Federal income in 2013 was some $2,775 billion, with $2,304 billion from income tax. That means Microsoft has, in its lifetime, kept 1.5% of a year's income from the Federal government; since April 4, 1975, that's about $1 billion/year, or 0.037%,or $2.94 per current American.
Microsoft has 40,000 employees at Redmond, plus more in Belleview and Issaquah down the road, totaling 42,000 at $100k-$120k salaries, or *FIVE* *BILLION* *DOLLARS* of global revenue coming to Washington State for dispersal into the economy, getting taxed by the United States Federal Government and the state and local authorities, every fucking year.
Those numbers--for Microsoft and Apple--count only their direct employees; we're not counting their business services. Do they pay for electricity
Trying to find the reports I was looking at. Slashdot carried an article several months ago about Uber getting hit up in California because, across the whole state, they've had 25 assaults on passengers in their entire operating history; I did a bunch of research on the topic then, and concluded that Uber isn't specially safer, just not specially more dangerous. A lot of comments had horror stories about how taxis are so constantly dangerous to passengers, but that's the same kind of wargarble on the other side.
This one isn't strong enough. It makes a lot of logical arguments and carries some data (passenger assaults on drivers), but not the data I want (driver assaults on passengers). Still, the argument that fingerprinting might possibly carry more than 7 years of non-conviction arrests while Uber's background checks get all of that data *except* the non-conviction arrests is ... telling (what, not guilty, but not *really* innocent because you *did* get arrested some 20 years ago, even if the judge decided you didn't commit any crime? They're going to ban you from driving Uber for that? That's a lot of grasping for straws).
A Chicago study says taxi crimes went down when Uber entered the market; I think they just shifted taxi service to Uber and didn't count Uber crime. New York reports a rise in taxi cab sexual assault reporting, I think because people are chattering about how possibly dangerous Uber/Lyft might be and now are primed to be more vocal about getting groped in a taxicab. I also found a newspaper with the 2016 headline, "New York taxi drivers banned from flirting with or ejaculating on passengers" ... ... wtf?
This is impossible today. If you put "taxi assault statistics" into Google, you get 16 pages of highly-political, heavily-biased pages about Uber/Lyft, and how taxis *must* be safer because of insurance or background checks, or how Uber *must* be safer because it has *better* insurance or background checks (and tons of technology tracking everything that happens). Most studies are localized, not nationalized, and so you come across Chicago and Detroit and New York and "our city police don't specially-track who was committing a crime, so we can't know how many taxi drivers actually assault passengers". News outlets aren't particularly invested in settling the dispute, either, because it creates fear and draws eyeballs.
Great. Now I have to wait for both some institute to publish statistics *and* the news to latch onto it and make it popular so it doesn't vanish into the black hole of shit-you-can't-find-on-the-Internet.
We have laws against selling snake-oil as panacea to cure shit it doesn't cure.
Partly because consumers are dumb and will buy useless shit.
One popular marketing technique is to make a three-tier product with the intention of never selling the top-tier. You make a $100 toaster oven, and a $160 toaster oven with all the bells and whistles. Then you make a $250 toaster oven that also has a nice finish and an additional, practically-useless, almost-zero-cost feature. The consumer reasons that the $160 toaster oven is an incredible deal; if you're extremely lucky, a few will reason that the uselessly-decorated $250 model is top-of-the-line and carries features they'll miss if they settle for less.
Fingerprints aren't ID; fingerprints are associated with ID. If someone's fingerprints are on file and you give their ID (driver's license, etc.) to the place with them on file (e.g. police), they'll be able to look up the fingerprints. This is all well-and-good and very logical, but it doesn't mean fingerprints don't increase safety; the statistical data in areas with lots of taxis and lots of Uber drivers showing no difference in passenger safety between background-checked taxis and non-background-checked Ubers means fingerprints don't increase safety.
Fingerprint background checks don't improve safety.
However, you've now got a message that a higher tier of background check (with fingerprints!) is available, suggesting to the customer that this is more-safe. You not only have a false sense of security for the passenger, but also you have drivers who lose a big chunk of the market unless they pay for and submit to fingerprint registration.
Extra costs, all for nothing. Extra costs like that destroy jobs and create poverty, but that's a whole different discussion.
You mean a cost to the consumer, as costs trickle down and profits trickle up.
Is it still a safety regulation if it's 100% ineffective at providing any additional safety?
"It's not 100% foolproof" is a true but misleading statement. Between standard taxis (with fingerprinting) and Uber in the same market (without fingerprinting) in markets with significant numbers of Uber drivers (statistics don't work when you have a sample size of 4, dude), the amount of driver-on-passenger assault is essentially equivalent.
In other words: the data suggests fingerprinting is approximately as effective for the purpose of improving passenger safety as measuring the driver's penis size and keeping that on file. Not really better than doing nothing.
Politician's soliloquy: Something must be done; this is something; therefor, this must be done.
Wow. Deceptive tactics versus poor understanding of reality.
Rather than lying, the canvasser should have politely asked why their audience was in favor of fingerprinting. Then he should have provided a competent and considerate coverage of concerns. For example: most people are afraid the person in the car might be dangerous (why else would you want fingerprinting?). The cost of fingerprinting can be spent on other, more-effective methods of risk reduction to ensure a safer ride; this is especially important because, across millions of drivers per year in both fingerprinted and non-printed services, fingerprinting has been demonstrated to produce no measurable increase in safety. For the safest ride, the resources spent to collect and file fingerprints must be spent on better methods of maximizing driver and passenger safety; to do otherwise is to give taxi and ride share companies a pass, allowing them to go through the motions and smile and comfort you with empty promises while taking no real action to support your safety.
That needs some rework and polishing, but it's a start. It's also all essentially true, which carries a hell of a lot more weight than streams of lies.
No. It's decreasing because it's becoming a smaller fraction. Editor is dufus.
I can buy that - you're getting the difference by stealing government pensions, BTW (not that I oppose that).
Not quite. I targeted Social Security Old-Age pensions, not government-supplied pension benefits. Even that has a transitional plan (retiring within 15 years of activation of the Dividend gets you grandfathered; however, you get OASDI minus the Dividend, and the Dividend tops it up to the original promised benefit).
What about that legally-mandated health care plan that costs $200/month then?
The ACA specifies tax subsidies for low-income and no-income individuals and families to cover those plans. People making under a certain amount of income paid $0 the day the exchanges came online; I don't specify anything about that, and simply mandate that the Dividend is not income (not taxable, not counted as income, not garnered, not Alimony) because it's logically your basic right to life (if you can survive on the Dividend, then we can take whatever other money you have; if you have no other money, then taking the Dividend is essentially a death sentence).
Remember, economic cycles are caused not by actual unemployment, but by the much larger reduction in spending due to future fear of unemployment
My entire argument was that employing people costs less under my plan, thus the amount of consumer spending required to create a job is lower. That "reduction in spending" thing doesn't have as much of an impact: it can't create as much unemployment, and the unemployment it does create is relieved more rapidly.
Do you think the economy will recover jobs faster if the new goods we try to sell to consumers cost the consumer $200 per month, or if they cost $20 per month, assuming that either good requires as much labor time to provide?
We spend $306 B on "income security", basically all the "welfare" style programs.
In 2013: $721 billion Retirement (Social Security Old-Age pensions), $150 billion Sickness and Disability (Social Security Supplemental Disability Insurance), $110 billion Food Security, $170 billion Income Security, $71 billion Federal Unemployment, and $46.7 billion HUD Housing Assistance. $1,268.70 billion at the Federal level, $1,618.90 billion including State and Local.
At the Federal level, those services made up 36.7% of total Federal spending, 45.7% of total Federal tax revenue, and 55.1% of total Federal collected Income tax. This was with a Personal Income measured at $14,301 billion, including $2,417 billion of income from welfare, for a base Personal Income of $11,884 trillion. The taxable income after all deductions (Adjusted Gross Income) was $9,329.10.
That makes our public aid system amount to 17.35% of AGI, including state services for retirement, unemployment, food stamps, and housing assistance. I essentially roll the 6.2% OASDI into income taxes (the payroll tax gets rolled into business income) and cut 55% off Federal spending, then level off the bottom (which is 16.2% by default) and apply a 17.0% tax as a funding source. Because of how the progressive taxes work, it actually comes out roughly even; the nearly 3% tax bump at the top is an artifact. Several state services become obsolete in addition to these reductions in Federal tax.
In 2013, that supplied $549/month or $6,558/year *per* *individual* *adult*. Monthly, for one person, that's $300 rent, $100 food, $30 utilities, $35 clothing, and $35 personal care in 2013; in 2015 those numbers are 6.24% higher ($584/month), although the costs don't keep up (the actual increase in food cost, for example, was 4.2% instead of 6.24%; the income-per-capita increased by 6.24%).
I've actually run trials on this in practice, and found that it's not so nice-and-neat; you get *way* ahead if you combine the food, clothing, and personal care into a single budget, because you can do food in substantially less ($42/month per 2000 kcal) on running average, and the other two are just ridiculously high. To put this into perspective: starting with zero utensils and only the assumption of a stove with which to cook, buying pots and pans, a $45 Sam's Club membership, and all food, I had enough food continuously, plus money saved up for a $200 bread machine 4 months in. I did, in practice, live in a 750sqft apartment with a utility bill below $60/month for 4 years, ending in 2012; I placed the utility bill at half that for less than a third the space.
BTW, it won't smooth out the economic cycles very much (I'm sure it will help a little)
Yes, it will.
Currently, we try to create subsistence by raising the minimum wage. This increases the cost of a subset of low-end goods, slightly reducing the amount of spending power of the enormous consumer base. That is to say: the middle class might pay 15 cents more at McDonalds. Propagate that across the entire country and you get a tiny loss of jobs: you're making some of the poor poorer as well (jobless) and concentrating wealth from the rich middle class (who pay more) and the poorest of poor (who lose their income because it's transferred to a smaller set of poor people).
Notice the loss of jobs: wages get more expensive, the products created by those wages increase in price, and the consumer's ability to buy as many products decreases. Re-hiring these displaced workers is hard because of both the decrease in consumer buying power and the increase in cost of hiring human labor. That creates higher unemployment baselines via faster loss of employment and longer unemployment cycles.
My Dividend provides the baseline income by an income tax. This doesn't raise the direct cost of hiring employees, and it moves the OASDI payroll tax (6.2%) off the attempt (the cost of attempting to make a good--direct
Flying a battery with that kind of energy density is one of the stupidest conceivable things you could do. At 30x density, a cell phone battery holds the energy of 0.28 pounds of TNT or 0.54 sticks of dynamite. They blow up now when smacked with a hammer; imagine the tiny, tiny fault required to cause a chain reaction and the size and sheer reaction time of the explosion: it would detonate immediately. Now you want a plane loaded with that shit?
Just use solar power or some other source to convert atmospheric CO2 and H2O into manufactured hydrocarbon, then push that through a fuel cell or diesel generator with an electric engine. Even then, you might be best off with just jet turbines: the atmosphere gets thin up there, and you need *something* to push off--driving the plane off the dense mass of burning fuel exhaust is better than simply venting said exhaust into the atmosphere.
This will happen when the labor cost of manufacturing such a hydrocarbon from a non-hydrocarbon energy source no longer exceeds the labor cost of pumping oil out of the ground and refining it into jet fuel.
The problem is, you can only fund a "subsidence dividend" at the expense of medicare
Patently false. The till is OASDI, unemployment insurance, food stamps, and HUD housing assistance (17.2% of the total taxed income in 2013) converting into a 17.0% base, plus 1.4% of AGI covering a public aid system (food stamps, UI, OASDI, HUD) only applicable to children and naturalized citizens. That's 100% Federal initiative.
The total from 18 to 82 amortizes over 20 years to just a little less than OASDI (i.e. it pays the same as OASDI from 62 to 82, if you save 100% of it), without adding additional taxes. The plan in total I've designed actually lowers taxes further at most income levels; and besides, even reliable interest-based accounts exceed the performance of OASDI.
That's all without touching any healthcare services, at all. It's enough for 225 square foot of apartment space in most low-income areas, even in California and New York, although such small spaces are usually marketed as luxury apartments instead; plus food, personal care, clothing, and utilities.
That means a single individual actually gets enough to survive. I've got a lot of risk reserve built into that--I used a $1/sqft model for apartment rent (real world is between 60 cents and $1.20 for 1br), but allocated $1.33/sqft, and did similar for the other categories--and the proportional costs drop as technology expands and lowers cost-per-income-per-capita of the various goods. Over time, the poorest of poor get richer by exactly the per-capita marginal technological growth.
There's also an intentional fault in my particular plan: it's aimed to cause a labor shortage crisis. The target is ~118% employment (negative 18% unemployment), at which point we have to make everyone 20% poorer by amending the Fair Labor Standards Act to define full time as 28-32 hours per week. That cuts back working hours per person and the attached income, settling us at 5.6% unemployment--right back where we started, working 1 day less, with the same buying power, although everyone making under ~$625k is a bit better off in it.
The buying power guarantees also smooth out the market a bit (economic downturns aren't so sharp), so you have a more stable economy which can afford more risks--more effort toward technological growth, creating more wealth in shorter time spans while protecting the economy from rising unemployment (humans are slower to replace and faster to re-employ because we pay them an income-tax-sourced Dividend rather than a minimum wage, and because certain payroll taxes are lifted off the cost of employing a human; technological unemployment thus has a blunter edge and a shorter recovery time).
So... yeah. Slow the loss of jobs from every source, speed the eventual creation of replacement jobs, and eliminate all homelessness and hunger by replacing our hardly-functional welfare system. 50 million Americans living without continuous access to enough food; 75% of families qualified for HUD assistance go on a waiting list and NEVER receive it; and Unemployment Insurance relies on continuously cycling people out of jobs and then back into them at fixed intervals (jobs are created by consumer buying power, and the dynamics of technological growth guarantee continuous creation of transitional unemployment, while scarcity and population growth guarantee an unemployment baseline).
We can fund America's welfare system, today, now, as it stands, with a 20% increase in *everyone's* taxes; or we can cut out payroll taxes, reduce business income taxes slightly, and replace all our welfare taxes with an earmarked 17% Dividend tax that accomplishes the same purpose and *much* more, redu
I've already addressed this.
It depends. If you pay enough, you change the perception of scarcity such that people don't work certain types of jobs, and then the labor availability drops, and your society becomes unsustainable. All the money in the world can't buy food that's not made.
If you don't pay enough, people simply can't get by--we see that already, since they get paid by wages and they have no jobs.
If you pay someone, you need a source. That source has to have enough *labor* to safely move it down into the economy. Every dollar I take from you is something you can't buy, which decreases employment because whoever is making, moving, and selling that has less to do, and eventually we get rid of a few of those guys. Moving that money down gives our poor population the ability to buy something else, which creates employment. If the amount moved down is too big, our society spends too much time maintaining and not enough time growing, and it destabilizes from the shock of the change and creates too many people with no jobs, thus eliminates the income source for this downward movement of money, thus collapses.
In 2013, we hit parity with public aid in America: a subsistence dividend costs just a hair less than modern welfare. In 1950, a subsistence dividend would have bankrupt the country and caused mass starvation and an economic collapse to put the Great Depression to shame. Even so, implementing such a Dividend today is a carefully-instrumented and highly-complex process; the end result is simple, but the path there without hurling a bunch of current welfare-dependent families out into the gutter to die is difficult and kind of expensive.
It's a great reason to find a more effective solution for the whole of the problem, though.
Technology in itself is neutral. Why is it a problem? Who are the people who abuse it, what are their incentives, how is it that they are in a position to create problems out of technology?
Technology uncaps scarcity, allowing population increase. It also reduces the cost of goods by reducing labor involved in making the good, leaving buying power in consumer hands when the prices come down, which creates new jobs as consumers buy new things which require (a reduced amount of) labor to produce. For example: cell phones were priced at $4,000 in 1983 (~$9,000 in 2010 dollars) and service came at $50/month and 42 cents per minute ($250/mo to talk for 2 hours/week); thanks to improvements in process, many fewer labor hours (and fewer people) are involved in making a cell phone and operating the network, while the cell phone labor itself is shipped to a low-wage-price market ($3.50/hr Chinese workers), giving us a $350 high-end smart phone (much more stuff packed in a little box) and $60/month unlimited everything (voice-data-text, and that's on local-labor infrastructure).
The march of technology has reduced the cost and price of food, clothing, medical care, and housing. In 1950, the average-income household spent 28% of their income on housing, with the average new single-family home being 983sqft; by 2003, the average-income household spent 33% of their income on housing, with the average new single-family home being 2,300sqft--they spent roughly half as much per square foot. Food also cost about half as much (12% of income instead of 30%+); clothing fell to 4% of income; and so forth. The average new car purchased still has a purchase price of 56% of the average income; and that average new car has standard air conditioning (available in 1/3 of new cars in 1950), standard MP3-6CD-USB-satellite-bluetooth radio media center, 4 wheel independent suspension, disc brakes, anti-lock brakes, traction control, precrash systems, airbags, better-designed engines with lower emissions and higher power, better-engineered tires, and all kinds of other safety and comfort systems not purchased in the 1950 reference.
Because of this march of technology, Americans spend upwards of 40% of their income on nonessential goods, and they spend 50% more of their income to purchase more and better-quality healthcare. The lower- and middle-class workers have gotten incredibly rich thanks to technological growth raising the total wealth and the basic standard-of-living.
Globalisation in moderation is quite nice. I mean you like foreign food, goods, people, culture. How has globalisation then evolved into a situation where it craps on everything it touches?
It hasn't; people are simply short-sighted.
People see manufacturing jobs have gone to China. They see a job which they could do being done by a little yellow prick 14,000 miles away for half a cup of rice or whatever it is they imagine the slant-eyed demon gets paid. (Hint: It's about $3.50/hr.) They then complain the little China man has taken their job--*their* job!
Goods produced and shipped from China command a lower price here. They get moved by local shippers to retail centers run by managers, inventory specialists, and cash register operators, all handled by district managers and distribution centers governed by logistics engineers. The goods and the retail centers get marketed by marketers and advertisers. A lot of jobs support getting any physical commodity into an American's hands.
If you cut out China and bring the manufacture back to America, you get $8.25/hr Americans making goods. Everything costs 2.5 times as much to make, and it still has to go through local shippers, distributors, retailers, and so forth; and those entities move things en masse, so the millions of such jobs actually move hundreds of billions of unit goods, and their actual cost impact is fractional.
Result: goods cost twice as much, and Americans end up with half as much b
Audio worked out of the box in 2004. MP3 support wasn't included in the base install of Ubuntu in 2004, but it was there in 2005.
They seem to forget that corporate taxes are tiny.
Apple's money winds up funneled to Chinese workers, support reps, Apple Store retail employees, shipping companies, advertisers, and the like. All of the things involved in Apple's product sales are costs representing human labor time; each individual business supplying said product or service has its own price, higher than the cost. You aggregate them and you get a gap between cost and price, with an aggregate cost paid out as wages on labor and an aggregate price equal to the price of the thing sold.
Apple's Cupertino HQ shuttles some of that cost to its 12,000 staff (the new campus will house over 13,000) each making around $120,000-$150,000 (median in all of Cupertino is $127,000 per household; Apple INTERNS make $80,000, HW engineers make $130,000, SR HW $160,000, etc.). Cupertino is an economic shithole with an 8.75% sales tax rate and a 6% income tax rate (sales taxes are inefficient and have the same impact as raising cost by a percentage of the *price*, which reduces consumer buying power and thus the available jobs).
That means Apple brings $2 billion to the Cupertino economy through WAGES, minus Federal taxes (~30%), leaving $120 million of income tax income via wages and some slightly smaller amount (sales tax is spotty) through sales tax, plus Apple's corporate taxes. That's out of Apple's $33.25 billion operating expenses: Apple expends 6% of its operating expenses in Cupertino.
Cupertino wants a chunk of Apple's sales from all over the world. They want to come up behind Apple and claim rights to a chunk of everything that's left over. This isn't an unreasonable proposition or a bad policy (taxes on business income are far less damaging to the economy than taxes on business activity: payroll taxes raise the cost of trying and thus the *cost* and corresponding risk of failure, while income taxes on business raise the cost of *success* by a portion of that success). It's also not explicitly reasonable or good; it's mostly a policy of opportunity: finance by association.
You can have any number of moral arguments for or against, and most of the moral arguments are essentially the same argument as the desired output. To put it another way: Cupertino essentially complains that Apple does all this business all over the world and *Denmark* profits because Apple files its profits in Denmark; instead, Cupertino wants to relocate Apple's tax burden to Cupertino, drawing profit to Cupertino. How is this different than relocating its tax HQ to Baltimore, India, or some other locale? If Apple is making all this profit on income taken from residents of other cities and countries, should it not pay its income taxes there instead?
Economically, those arguments get into protectionism, which actively harms your economy (taxing the export is a disadvantage); and you can also argue that local products pay said taxes, and so taxation at fair rates is not penalization (your local suppliers already pay a tax, and the importers are only paying the *same* tax and not an *import* tax). This is one of the only sensible arguments of sales tax proponents (see my earlier comments about sales tax; the extent of flaws is not limited there).
With a net income of $10 billion, an operating expense of $33.25 billion, and $2 billion paid to operate in Cupertino (wages), it seems only 6% of Apple's operations occur in Cupertino. Maybe they owe taxes on $600,000,000--about $90 million? If we account for Apple's global sales versus their Cupertino sales (income generated from the Cupertino market), maybe they owe Cupertino a shitload less than that. Maybe Cupertino should consider the ~$200,000,000 in tax revenue and $2 billion of wage spending flowing to them from *the entire world* as Apple's contribution, instead of trying to position themselves as a parasite on every other city in the entire iPhone-using world.
This is bullshit. Dogs climb in my lap and beg for attention all the time and they're all treated for worms and fleas and weird diseases, and they never shed anything but hair on my pants. Dogs are excellent!
hint hint, nudge nudge. but there's no h1b problem here. no sir!
At 4.9% UE3 and 5.6% UE4 (UE4 includes *all* people who would get jobs if there were unlimited jobs; it excludes people who would want jobs but can't get jobs because they have other demands on their time, such as single mothers who would not be able to afford daycare if they got a job), we're not hurting for jobs.
Trickle-down economics doesn't work: jobs don't come from corporate initiatives, small-business owners, hard-working individuals, and a college education. Jobs come from consumer buying power: consumers buy and buy and buy until their buying power is 100% allocated--to necessities, to discretionary purchases, and to savings. When they are no longer willing and able to buy, there is no source to support the wage of an employee.
Wealth, thus, comes from technology: as we find ways to expend less labor time to produce the same goods, we run rounds of lay-offs and reduce the wage-labor cost of said goods. Remaining consumers end with more money in their pockets, and buy more of the same good or buy other goods; the additional production requires additional labor, thus replacing the lost jobs. So long as you don't create unemployment too quickly and you have sufficiently fast re-employment, the amount of stuff produced per-capita and purchased per-income goes up.
Standard-of-living raises as the proportion of income allocated to each individual increases. This includes infrastructure income (running water, etc.), although that's hard to measure (so are a lot of things). That means wages fall as a percentage of total income, population expands, and everyone lives better.
This leads to the consideration of income concentration: you create fewer jobs if you concentrate income. In a given economic state, you can increase consumer buying power by reducing the wage-labor cost of a product through the direct action of reducing the wages associated with the laborers. This controls prices against inflation (they rise more slowly than inflation). The additional money in remaining consumer pockets, again, leads to more purchasing and more jobs.
At a point, you wind up with the ability to create more jobs than you can sustain. In America, for example, a little less than half (48%) of the income goes to the upper 10% of earners, and they take home around 1/3 of the total take-home pay after taxes. If you were to adjust and level out the other 90% (the incomes under $141,000) and move down some of the high-income money, costs would fall; and employment would increase dramatically. You'd experience labor shortages: people would necessarily have enough money to purchase more than 100% of the labor force can provide.
In fact, it's possible to create such a system that hits 118% employment with 4.5% lower corporate income taxes, 6% lower corporate payroll taxes, and less than a 43% top tax bracket. At that level, a married-filing-jointly household with $80,000 of income actually takes home more than $80,000. To compensate for the labor shortage, you'd have to make everyone ~20% poorer by amending the Fair Labor Standard Act to define Full Time Employment as 26-32 hours per week--a 4-day work week. Because this is blanket across the whole labor force, no raising of wages or other mechanism would compensate for the wage income loss (you'd only get inflation by raising wages). People would work 4 days per week, they'd have 20% less income, and our unemployment would rise to 5.6%.
Similarly, you could make people poorer and increase total unemployment in the American non-H1B workforce by replacing H1B laborers with more-expensive American laborers, thus increasing the cost of products, reducing consumer buying power, reducing the number of direct workers required, reducing the amount of logistics labor required, reducing retail labor required, reducing marketing labor required, reducing shipping labor required, reducing labor required at oil refineries and ene
Declining wages? Man, people spend a larger percentage of their income on junk and *healthcare* now than they did in 1970; they spend less of their money on food, clothing, and housing (per square foot; they buy much bigger houses and rent larger apartments). The middle- and lower-class are overall richer today, with a greater amount of buying-power income than people of 40 years ago; don't sit there and bullshit that wages are going down.