What if there's a demand for 1 billion chips one year, and a demand for 1.5 billion chips the next year; but, in the second year, you've retooled on a new process you invented which requires 50% as many labor-hours to produce each processor, so you can make 1.5 billion chips with the same number of employees who made 0.75 billion chips last year?
Answer: Your sales go up, and you lay off 25% of your workforce.
12,000 jobs isn't a lot in a 350,000,000 American population with 170,000,000 labor force in a 7,000,000,000 population world.
The reduction of labor force per product made has important and highly-desirable impacts, unless you would rather spend twice as much of your money on the basic food and clothes you eat now, and buy half as much cool stuff while reducing your access to health care.
What if it means the cost is 30% lower, and Intel can charge 30% less and have more consumers and make the same profit margin? That stabilizes Intel's business and opens up for consumers to buy more products. This is why cars still cost an average 56% of the annual income, yet they come with anti-lock brakes, satellite radio, independent suspension, EFI, and all kinds of other shit that wasn't on a similarly-expensive car in 1950: the cost came down, the price came down, and they sold you more things in the package.
That's basically how consumers ever afford new things.
Uh, I just stay away from women because I won't go down, and they're all freaky and demanding and get angry and pissy and abusive if you don't do exactly the right thing exactly when they want exactly 100% of the time. I've had a woman throw something at me at a bar once because she decided to hit on me and went straight that route, and I just flatly responded that I don't do that, and she suddenly went from smiling and flirty to dark and evil and angry.
Sex isn't that big of a deal anyway. Everyone wargarbles about it. Your parents don't want you to have sex. Politicians don't want anyone seeing pornography. The church is all about not having sex. High school boys talk about all the sex they imagine they're having. College frat clubs are built around picking up girls and having sex. Sororities haze new members by making them have sex with the frat boys. People got arrested for gay sex. People are nuts.
I have the right to not be forced to breathe cancer inducing air from someone who chooses to pollute their own body with such things
No study has ever produced strong evidence that second-hand smoke carries health effects; all which have suggested such have been refuted. That's why second-hand smoke campaigns went away after the 90s, along with the campaigns about the dangers of watching TV in the dark.
Second-hand smoke smells like ass and makes your clothes smell like ass. It's also an irritant and is painful to breathe. It's not a health hazard, which is about all you can say for it.
Then you could say typing is a form of playing an instrument. Shitting is a form of drawing because it leaves marks in the toilet. Eating is also a form of drawing.
You're using a huge false analogy in which you equate the creation of a few marks in juxtaposition with the construction of an image. Drawing is a highly-developed skill and writing is not; writing is simplistic, serial, and minor. Writing is even easier than using a mouse to click on menu items on a PC--which, apparently, is a form of drawing, too, if you think about things in the broken manner in which you do.
Analogical thinking is a powerful thing; unfortunately, idiots like to do whole-body analogies and say, "Ah, X is a type of Y" because X has a minor characteristic of Y. For example: Soda is a form of milk, as both are adulterated water and both contain sugar (sucrose or lactose); or writing is a form of drawing, as both create marks on a medium.
Looks like they made a software to put the engine into test mode to test a low-emissions operating mode, then later said, "Hey, here's a firmware version that runs lower emissions!" Hilarity ensues when nobody asks what "Test Mode" means and someone just decides the API label must mean it's designed for emissions tests.
Practical impact is still just a bunch of whining. "He chewed gum in class!" and what happened? "He's not allowed to!"
Written words have meta-information like underlining or simple positioning. Simulating the same information when typed takes a little more time; while typing lets you quickly amend the notes (insert, delete, rearrange).
Cursive writing can break 100wpm; and abbreviated longhand (abbr, +, v., etc.) breaks my Dvorak speed. Breaking my 72wpm QWERTY record wasn't hard. Teeline can break 350wpm, but that's getting into shorthand.
To really hit those high shorthand rates, you have to stream text efficiently. There's no way to write 350wpm when you're thinking and organizing new data; it just isn't possible. This is also why programmers don't type at 60wpm ever.
When it comes down to it, cursive longhand isn't exactly "drawing"; it's a fluid and repetitive motor skill, whereas drawing relies on high accuracy. This is why men's signatures tend to trail off: we write a few letters and then scribble. Women tend more toward the calligraphic, drawing slow and even curves to make an artistic rendition.
Typing on a keyboard is also a fluid and repetitive motor skill of lowered accuracy.
We're told through school to study and take notes, and nobody tells us how. Sounds like your teacher, like most teachers, doesn't actually know how to do any of that "studying" or "note-taking" stuff.
This is where mnemonics education would come in handy. Human memory is associative and heavily benefits from organization; this means things like reflection (associating new information with current-known and with itself) and note-taking (organizing information into a clearer, concise, more ordered form) significantly enhance human learning.
Your teacher doesn't know about memory. The associative memory allows you to represent new information in a compact, directly-associated form. The descriptive form (the huge pile of worthless garbage that explains the new information to you in a way that enters your head relatively easily) gives you piles of abstract associations and minor information; concise notes discard much of those minor details, connect the major points more directly (better association), and provide the associative keys for those discarded details. The result is a *much* tighter mnemonic network, improving retention and accelerating learning speed.
That's why the most powerful general note taking structure is Cornell Notes; and we also have three-column, four-column, chapter map, venn diagram, and dozens of other note-taking structures to represent information. Hierarchical breakdowns like Work Breakdown Structures, Risk Breakdowns, and Organizational Charts help us understand business problems like projects and processes. We add diagrams and pictures to flat notes. This isn't done just to spice things up a little.
I type at 125wpm and I still write notes because it's faster to write.
The other side of that is I've started learning Teeline, and can write notes at ~350wpm. I also use a Cornell notebook, so my notes are easier to organize.
The problem with saying something is "a solution just crying out for automation" is it quickly proclaims "there is not a simpler way to do this that we have yet invented" and then proclaims "there must of course be a simply way to make a robot to do this complex task, which we already know how to put into practice." In other words: We'll use magical imaginary technology because magical imaginary technology doesn't exist.
There is no reason to believe that electric vehicles will always cost more than internal combustion vehicles
There is also no reason to believe they will either A) be cheaper than combustion vehicles in 2025 (see: Hard drives getting cheaper as SSDs get cheaper); or B) become cheaper and not naturally displace the more-expensive ICE. The only reason to pass such a law as this is to force a change in a market where a new product is more expensive than an old; and in the case that the new product is in fact cheaper, you eliminate the old product as competition, which means a rent-seeking market might simply add profit margin (this always drains away slowly; you would only stretch out the process).
There's no economic advantage to passing a law like this.
Fun fact: If we brought back all the jobs from China, somewhere around 40 million Americans would need to become unemployed due to the consumer market not having enough money to support them; and our Welfare system wouldn't handle the load, so they'd just have to go be poor and die somewhere. The rest of us would live with less stuff--if we simply reverse the trend of the last 50 years, that "stuff" would be non-essentials and *healthcare*.
This is how we went from living in mud huts to living in sky scrapers with running water and medical care, kid. It's how we'll get to a life where all the poorest people live like the median income families ($54,000 currently), while the median income families live like today's upper class ($150,000-ish), and the rich people own their own moons and shit and we all whine about them.
Oh, and it's how it became financially possible (circa 2013, actually) to eliminate all homelessness and hunger in America *without* large tax raises (I'm still under 45% on the top even with the high cost of transitioning; and the small 1%-3% I project can be diffused by slowly rolling out my middle-class tax plan, which is so fucking strong that a person with an $80,000 salary takes home more than $80,000 in total).
I only want these types of layoffs to come slowly--0.1% or 0.5% or such of the population losing their jobs per year. Imagine if we switched onto automation all over the place in 3-5 years, and laid off 50% of all American workers. Imagine. Do you know what kind of damage that would do? If we transitioned slowly, over 2-3 DECADES, we'd all wake up to find we're spending 70% of our income on bullshit like Xbox, and 30% on food, clothing, healthcare, our homes, etc, after a period of unemployment somehow rising by 1%-2%, then falling again.
Free market doesn't always work the *best*; it supplies a specific set of advantages in each situation, some of which are *extremely* common. Much of the time, a regulated free market operates the best--in which case we can read "regulated" as "facilitated", a fact many lawmakers ignore. Radio spectrum bandwidth licenses are a strong example: without these, broadcast television and radio would be a chaos of noise and interference, and thus constantly exposed to expenses and risks, driving the price up or just making the business unviable. Contrast that with the early-1900s behavior of the U.S. Congress breaking up big telecom and railroad companies for no other reason than "they're big and we want to *create* competition" (the lessons learned here are why Congress hasn't divided up Comcast and Verizon for the simple crime of being too large).
I've frequently proposed that a combination of cheap energy and cheap methods to convert atmosphere to hydrocarbon (this is a thing today, but it's expensive) will eliminate the market for ground oil. Our current cheapest atmosphere-to-hydrocarbon method is biofuel; industrial methods will replace that when a non-hydrocarbon energy (nuclear, solar, orbital) becomes cheaper than oil *and* the efficiency of atmosphere-to-hydrocarbon conversion combined with such energy no longer exceeds the cost of ground-sourced oil.
Adjunct to this eventuality, I have proposed that the Government will divert a small amount of EPA funding to operate their own production system for atmosphere-to-hydrocarbon. They'll stockpile this hydrocarbon as an energy source; much of it will go straight back into oilfields as a storage source, essentially putting it back in the bottle. That's a non-profitable atmospheric cleanup operation. The government can then sell that same stockpile back to liquid hydrocarbon producers in bad economic times, basically using a cost they've accepted as a funding source for Keynesian economics (in other words: instead of outlaying money to stimulate a depressed economy, taking debt and taxes, the government would *constantly* exercise an environmental program to recover lingering hydrocarbon emissions from the atmosphere, selling back part of the liquid hydrocarbon at a market-rate discount to source suppliers in lieu of cash outlay when an economic stimulus is needed).
So we have a long-term market solution to atmospheric CO2 emissions from hydrocarbon, as well as a long-term government solution to reverse the damage in a way which a market solution cannot (it's more effective at this process, although the market will produce a significant amount of plastics and oils along with burnable hydrocarbon). The government solution also interacts with the market when the market is strained, reducing market costs and supporting the market behavior in bad times.
If your goal is to reverse CO2 emissions at a given rate, a market solution can only do that with a sufficiently low rate. If your rate target is sufficiently high, a government solution is also non-viable, and you may need to select for a lower target. There's a point where a policy decision is viable (i.e. doesn't require significant taxes) and beyond market capacity (i.e. not profitable).
There are also examples such as healthcare, where at a given level of technology broad healthcare is non-viable; at a higher level of technology it is cheap as a market service and non-viable as a centralized service; and at a sufficiently high level of technology it is cheaper as a centralized service (e.g. single payer) than as a market service. Most political debates over government healthcare ignore these things, and only claim that someone, somewhere does it, and that it's either good (cheaper for Canada) or bad (waiting lists, real or imagined, whether or not the existing system has them or not). That is to say: the question of whether a Public Option would supply *better* healthcare *and* lower costs in America is never asked; the debates only point at Canada or the Netherlands
The OP's argument is basically, "They're making cars not pollute by getting energy from another polluting source, moving the can up the road," which is dumb because it assumes all sources of energy are equal. Large engines are more efficient that small ones: if your transmission loss doesn't exceed your efficiency gain by using a central power plant, electric cars pollute less. The problem of battery manufacture adds onto that, creating more complexity in determining which model is more polluting per mile. Deciding this is a foregone conclusion because the pollution output of each model is non-zero is foolish.
My big question is economics. If the cars cost more than other cars, it's because they take more total human labor to make. You're going to have to stop having something else, but keep having cars: you pay $30,000 instead of $20,000 for a car, that's $10,000 over the lifetime of the car (plus the maintenance and fuel differential) not spent on other things, which means we can't pay the people making those other things, which means they lose their jobs. The other side of this is using less fuel (even oil--the power plant uses less oil to make 300 miles of electricity than 300 miles of gasoline?) means you move consumer demand (money) off oil (causing layoffs at BP) and onto some other good (possibly electric car manufacture).
On the social end, you'll have people who can barely afford a car in their budget now; they must decide between a car, rent, and food.
This is why market people have such a hard-on for free markets (which isn't always a good thing): all of these particular problems vanish when electric cars actually cost less than gasoline cars. At that point, less human labor is involved, a smaller proportion of buying power is moving to pay for that human labor (i.e. the car itself--the output), and the difference moves to some other good (creating jobs in another sector). There's a period of time when the displaced labor is just flat out unemployed, which is why we have (need) welfare. Sometimes, this is also routed around by increasing the product package (e.g. cars today have a *lot* more tech in them than cars of the 50s, and cost about the same proportion of income--cars haven't gotten cheaper, but just better, containing *more* high-tech stuff requiring roughly the same total labor).
You said there's plenty of good music that's made, but it's not what sells; and then claimed their stuff-that-sells isn't selling and that not selling will destroy them. You actually made a market argument where they're providing the most-profitable product and that's going to destroy their profits.
The amount of double-think is astounding. They're selling precisely what brings in the most money, continuously, in a constant and reliable model, and you're criticizing the model and saying it's going to destroy them.
Cooke's analysis was published in 2013, and most of its peer-review has been criticism on Peer's methodology. You don't get published by passing peer review; you pass peer review in the years after you get published.
There are several surveys showing that salt and fat cause heart disease and vaccines cause autism. There are also a lot showing those studies are bullshit. It doesn't take a planet-wide conspiracy to do things wrong; it only takes a few hellbent individulas and a lot of group think.
No, the jobs aren't going away permanently; they might go away more quickly than they come back--which would *destroy* our economy, just like the Industrial Revolution did. We can prevent that by slowing the uptake through economic factors, to the same end result of a mass increase in wealth but with the omission of the intermediate mass economic collapse.
One of the bigger problems today is everyone has backwards ideals about economy. They think money is wealth, they think technology destroys wealth, they think globalization makes us poor, they think jobs are going away forever, etc... they demand action that will only lead to a poorer working class, wide-spread poverty, slower growth, and more pain and suffering and death. People only care about what they see, because thinking is hard.
Think about a dog for a minute. You put a shock collar on your dog because the dog always chases bigger dogs. When your dog sees and starts to chase a bigger dog, you hit the button and the dog gets a horribly-painful shock. The dog doesn't understand the source of the shock--you didn't run up and beat it with a stick--but it knows that shocks have started coming when a big dog appears. What's your dog going to do? It's going to see big dog, realize it's bringing a shock with it, and attack the big dog *more* viciously to get rid of it.
That's what's going on with most people talking about our economic problems today: they see the rich, or they see welfare, or they see outsourcing, and they say, "Man, if I had that rich guy's money, if that poor fucker didn't have *my* money, and if that chinese kid didn't steal my job, I'd be rich! All our troubles would go away if we fixed all this!" That's the same kind of thinking that got us long-ass threads on Slashdot when someone posts about Uber passengers getting assaulted, and literally 2/3 of the comments are quoting statistics on how many blacks commit crimes versus how many whites, and people are trying to build a case that black people are inherently and genetically predisposed to be criminals and that America would be a model, crime-free country if we got rid of all the blacks. For some reason, economics and sociology draw shoddy analysis from laypeople who think they know everything.
Bigger houses, cars with anti-lock brakes and radios, ipods, cheaper clothes, cheaper food, fast (and cheap) internet, more of our income spent on more and better healthcare, and a *lot* more of our income spent on non-essential toys.
The average American is a lot better off now than 20 or 30 years ago; and it's hilarious when you look back as far as 1950, where 1/3 of your income went to food (it's 11% today, 15% 1990, over 20% in 1970, and 30% in 1950), 16% went per 1,000sqft of housing (it's 8%-9% today), 14% went to clothing (it's 4% today and was 6% in 1990), and so forth. Families of the 50s spent 60% of their income just to live in smaller houses (984sqft average new home) than families of today (2,300sqft average circa 2003); and they had worse healthcare-per-dollar while spending only 4% of their income on healthcare (it's 6% today). Today, we spend over 40% of our income on non-essential goods.
By the by, if we cut off China and brought manufacture back to America, we'd be unable to support our population (even with better welfare). Between 15 million and 40 million Americans would need to die off right away; and the remainder would spend more for food, clothing, and other essential goods. The poor would be hit the hardest, but many of them would die anyway. The increase in cost of goods would reduce the amount of money each consumer has, resulting in less ability to buy as many goods; this would eliminate some of the jobs producing goods, as well as shipping, logistics, marketing, and retail.
This is because Americans are currently buying those products, but will have to pay more for (and buy less of) those products if produced domestically. That means not as many jobs to make, market, and distribute; and it means the income from said jobs buys fewer goods. We'd essentially convert Americans off existing production (destroying jobs) onto new production (creating jobs) making goods which are more expensive than their existing equivalents (destroying buying power, hence how those earlier jobs got destroyed in the first place), resulting in less purchasing in total.
Technology is the source of wealth. Hard wealth, not money; money is not wealth.
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1) our workers aren't as good as they used to be, or maybe it's better to say they aren't as effective
The exact opposite is true, and is the definition of technology.
What if there's a demand for 1 billion chips one year, and a demand for 1.5 billion chips the next year; but, in the second year, you've retooled on a new process you invented which requires 50% as many labor-hours to produce each processor, so you can make 1.5 billion chips with the same number of employees who made 0.75 billion chips last year?
Answer: Your sales go up, and you lay off 25% of your workforce.
12,000 jobs isn't a lot in a 350,000,000 American population with 170,000,000 labor force in a 7,000,000,000 population world.
The reduction of labor force per product made has important and highly-desirable impacts, unless you would rather spend twice as much of your money on the basic food and clothes you eat now, and buy half as much cool stuff while reducing your access to health care.
What if it means the cost is 30% lower, and Intel can charge 30% less and have more consumers and make the same profit margin? That stabilizes Intel's business and opens up for consumers to buy more products. This is why cars still cost an average 56% of the annual income, yet they come with anti-lock brakes, satellite radio, independent suspension, EFI, and all kinds of other shit that wasn't on a similarly-expensive car in 1950: the cost came down, the price came down, and they sold you more things in the package.
That's basically how consumers ever afford new things.
Uh, I just stay away from women because I won't go down, and they're all freaky and demanding and get angry and pissy and abusive if you don't do exactly the right thing exactly when they want exactly 100% of the time. I've had a woman throw something at me at a bar once because she decided to hit on me and went straight that route, and I just flatly responded that I don't do that, and she suddenly went from smiling and flirty to dark and evil and angry.
Sex isn't that big of a deal anyway. Everyone wargarbles about it. Your parents don't want you to have sex. Politicians don't want anyone seeing pornography. The church is all about not having sex. High school boys talk about all the sex they imagine they're having. College frat clubs are built around picking up girls and having sex. Sororities haze new members by making them have sex with the frat boys. People got arrested for gay sex. People are nuts.
I have the right to not be forced to breathe cancer inducing air from someone who chooses to pollute their own body with such things
No study has ever produced strong evidence that second-hand smoke carries health effects; all which have suggested such have been refuted. That's why second-hand smoke campaigns went away after the 90s, along with the campaigns about the dangers of watching TV in the dark.
Second-hand smoke smells like ass and makes your clothes smell like ass. It's also an irritant and is painful to breathe. It's not a health hazard, which is about all you can say for it.
Then you could say typing is a form of playing an instrument. Shitting is a form of drawing because it leaves marks in the toilet. Eating is also a form of drawing.
You're using a huge false analogy in which you equate the creation of a few marks in juxtaposition with the construction of an image. Drawing is a highly-developed skill and writing is not; writing is simplistic, serial, and minor. Writing is even easier than using a mouse to click on menu items on a PC--which, apparently, is a form of drawing, too, if you think about things in the broken manner in which you do.
Analogical thinking is a powerful thing; unfortunately, idiots like to do whole-body analogies and say, "Ah, X is a type of Y" because X has a minor characteristic of Y. For example: Soda is a form of milk, as both are adulterated water and both contain sugar (sucrose or lactose); or writing is a form of drawing, as both create marks on a medium.
Looks like they made a software to put the engine into test mode to test a low-emissions operating mode, then later said, "Hey, here's a firmware version that runs lower emissions!" Hilarity ensues when nobody asks what "Test Mode" means and someone just decides the API label must mean it's designed for emissions tests.
Practical impact is still just a bunch of whining. "He chewed gum in class!" and what happened? "He's not allowed to!"
Written words have meta-information like underlining or simple positioning. Simulating the same information when typed takes a little more time; while typing lets you quickly amend the notes (insert, delete, rearrange).
Cursive writing can break 100wpm; and abbreviated longhand (abbr, +, v., etc.) breaks my Dvorak speed. Breaking my 72wpm QWERTY record wasn't hard. Teeline can break 350wpm, but that's getting into shorthand.
To really hit those high shorthand rates, you have to stream text efficiently. There's no way to write 350wpm when you're thinking and organizing new data; it just isn't possible. This is also why programmers don't type at 60wpm ever.
When it comes down to it, cursive longhand isn't exactly "drawing"; it's a fluid and repetitive motor skill, whereas drawing relies on high accuracy. This is why men's signatures tend to trail off: we write a few letters and then scribble. Women tend more toward the calligraphic, drawing slow and even curves to make an artistic rendition.
Typing on a keyboard is also a fluid and repetitive motor skill of lowered accuracy.
We're told through school to study and take notes, and nobody tells us how. Sounds like your teacher, like most teachers, doesn't actually know how to do any of that "studying" or "note-taking" stuff.
This is where mnemonics education would come in handy. Human memory is associative and heavily benefits from organization; this means things like reflection (associating new information with current-known and with itself) and note-taking (organizing information into a clearer, concise, more ordered form) significantly enhance human learning.
Your teacher doesn't know about memory. The associative memory allows you to represent new information in a compact, directly-associated form. The descriptive form (the huge pile of worthless garbage that explains the new information to you in a way that enters your head relatively easily) gives you piles of abstract associations and minor information; concise notes discard much of those minor details, connect the major points more directly (better association), and provide the associative keys for those discarded details. The result is a *much* tighter mnemonic network, improving retention and accelerating learning speed.
That's why the most powerful general note taking structure is Cornell Notes; and we also have three-column, four-column, chapter map, venn diagram, and dozens of other note-taking structures to represent information. Hierarchical breakdowns like Work Breakdown Structures, Risk Breakdowns, and Organizational Charts help us understand business problems like projects and processes. We add diagrams and pictures to flat notes. This isn't done just to spice things up a little.
Look up SQW4R, OK4R, etc. and read into "Reflection".
I type at 125wpm and I still write notes because it's faster to write.
The other side of that is I've started learning Teeline, and can write notes at ~350wpm. I also use a Cornell notebook, so my notes are easier to organize.
That was literally the next sentence in the paragraph you quoted.
The problem with saying something is "a solution just crying out for automation" is it quickly proclaims "there is not a simpler way to do this that we have yet invented" and then proclaims "there must of course be a simply way to make a robot to do this complex task, which we already know how to put into practice." In other words: We'll use magical imaginary technology because magical imaginary technology doesn't exist.
There is no reason to believe that electric vehicles will always cost more than internal combustion vehicles
There is also no reason to believe they will either A) be cheaper than combustion vehicles in 2025 (see: Hard drives getting cheaper as SSDs get cheaper); or B) become cheaper and not naturally displace the more-expensive ICE. The only reason to pass such a law as this is to force a change in a market where a new product is more expensive than an old; and in the case that the new product is in fact cheaper, you eliminate the old product as competition, which means a rent-seeking market might simply add profit margin (this always drains away slowly; you would only stretch out the process).
There's no economic advantage to passing a law like this.
Fun fact: If we brought back all the jobs from China, somewhere around 40 million Americans would need to become unemployed due to the consumer market not having enough money to support them; and our Welfare system wouldn't handle the load, so they'd just have to go be poor and die somewhere. The rest of us would live with less stuff--if we simply reverse the trend of the last 50 years, that "stuff" would be non-essentials and *healthcare*.
This is how we went from living in mud huts to living in sky scrapers with running water and medical care, kid. It's how we'll get to a life where all the poorest people live like the median income families ($54,000 currently), while the median income families live like today's upper class ($150,000-ish), and the rich people own their own moons and shit and we all whine about them.
Oh, and it's how it became financially possible (circa 2013, actually) to eliminate all homelessness and hunger in America *without* large tax raises (I'm still under 45% on the top even with the high cost of transitioning; and the small 1%-3% I project can be diffused by slowly rolling out my middle-class tax plan, which is so fucking strong that a person with an $80,000 salary takes home more than $80,000 in total).
I only want these types of layoffs to come slowly--0.1% or 0.5% or such of the population losing their jobs per year. Imagine if we switched onto automation all over the place in 3-5 years, and laid off 50% of all American workers. Imagine. Do you know what kind of damage that would do? If we transitioned slowly, over 2-3 DECADES, we'd all wake up to find we're spending 70% of our income on bullshit like Xbox, and 30% on food, clothing, healthcare, our homes, etc, after a period of unemployment somehow rising by 1%-2%, then falling again.
People have such small minds.
Free market doesn't always work the *best*; it supplies a specific set of advantages in each situation, some of which are *extremely* common. Much of the time, a regulated free market operates the best--in which case we can read "regulated" as "facilitated", a fact many lawmakers ignore. Radio spectrum bandwidth licenses are a strong example: without these, broadcast television and radio would be a chaos of noise and interference, and thus constantly exposed to expenses and risks, driving the price up or just making the business unviable. Contrast that with the early-1900s behavior of the U.S. Congress breaking up big telecom and railroad companies for no other reason than "they're big and we want to *create* competition" (the lessons learned here are why Congress hasn't divided up Comcast and Verizon for the simple crime of being too large).
I've frequently proposed that a combination of cheap energy and cheap methods to convert atmosphere to hydrocarbon (this is a thing today, but it's expensive) will eliminate the market for ground oil. Our current cheapest atmosphere-to-hydrocarbon method is biofuel; industrial methods will replace that when a non-hydrocarbon energy (nuclear, solar, orbital) becomes cheaper than oil *and* the efficiency of atmosphere-to-hydrocarbon conversion combined with such energy no longer exceeds the cost of ground-sourced oil.
Adjunct to this eventuality, I have proposed that the Government will divert a small amount of EPA funding to operate their own production system for atmosphere-to-hydrocarbon. They'll stockpile this hydrocarbon as an energy source; much of it will go straight back into oilfields as a storage source, essentially putting it back in the bottle. That's a non-profitable atmospheric cleanup operation. The government can then sell that same stockpile back to liquid hydrocarbon producers in bad economic times, basically using a cost they've accepted as a funding source for Keynesian economics (in other words: instead of outlaying money to stimulate a depressed economy, taking debt and taxes, the government would *constantly* exercise an environmental program to recover lingering hydrocarbon emissions from the atmosphere, selling back part of the liquid hydrocarbon at a market-rate discount to source suppliers in lieu of cash outlay when an economic stimulus is needed).
So we have a long-term market solution to atmospheric CO2 emissions from hydrocarbon, as well as a long-term government solution to reverse the damage in a way which a market solution cannot (it's more effective at this process, although the market will produce a significant amount of plastics and oils along with burnable hydrocarbon). The government solution also interacts with the market when the market is strained, reducing market costs and supporting the market behavior in bad times.
If your goal is to reverse CO2 emissions at a given rate, a market solution can only do that with a sufficiently low rate. If your rate target is sufficiently high, a government solution is also non-viable, and you may need to select for a lower target. There's a point where a policy decision is viable (i.e. doesn't require significant taxes) and beyond market capacity (i.e. not profitable).
There are also examples such as healthcare, where at a given level of technology broad healthcare is non-viable; at a higher level of technology it is cheap as a market service and non-viable as a centralized service; and at a sufficiently high level of technology it is cheaper as a centralized service (e.g. single payer) than as a market service. Most political debates over government healthcare ignore these things, and only claim that someone, somewhere does it, and that it's either good (cheaper for Canada) or bad (waiting lists, real or imagined, whether or not the existing system has them or not). That is to say: the question of whether a Public Option would supply *better* healthcare *and* lower costs in America is never asked; the debates only point at Canada or the Netherlands
The OP's argument is basically, "They're making cars not pollute by getting energy from another polluting source, moving the can up the road," which is dumb because it assumes all sources of energy are equal. Large engines are more efficient that small ones: if your transmission loss doesn't exceed your efficiency gain by using a central power plant, electric cars pollute less. The problem of battery manufacture adds onto that, creating more complexity in determining which model is more polluting per mile. Deciding this is a foregone conclusion because the pollution output of each model is non-zero is foolish.
My big question is economics. If the cars cost more than other cars, it's because they take more total human labor to make. You're going to have to stop having something else, but keep having cars: you pay $30,000 instead of $20,000 for a car, that's $10,000 over the lifetime of the car (plus the maintenance and fuel differential) not spent on other things, which means we can't pay the people making those other things, which means they lose their jobs. The other side of this is using less fuel (even oil--the power plant uses less oil to make 300 miles of electricity than 300 miles of gasoline?) means you move consumer demand (money) off oil (causing layoffs at BP) and onto some other good (possibly electric car manufacture).
On the social end, you'll have people who can barely afford a car in their budget now; they must decide between a car, rent, and food.
This is why market people have such a hard-on for free markets (which isn't always a good thing): all of these particular problems vanish when electric cars actually cost less than gasoline cars. At that point, less human labor is involved, a smaller proportion of buying power is moving to pay for that human labor (i.e. the car itself--the output), and the difference moves to some other good (creating jobs in another sector). There's a period of time when the displaced labor is just flat out unemployed, which is why we have (need) welfare. Sometimes, this is also routed around by increasing the product package (e.g. cars today have a *lot* more tech in them than cars of the 50s, and cost about the same proportion of income--cars haven't gotten cheaper, but just better, containing *more* high-tech stuff requiring roughly the same total labor).
You said there's plenty of good music that's made, but it's not what sells; and then claimed their stuff-that-sells isn't selling and that not selling will destroy them. You actually made a market argument where they're providing the most-profitable product and that's going to destroy their profits.
This needs to go on the list.
The amount of double-think is astounding. They're selling precisely what brings in the most money, continuously, in a constant and reliable model, and you're criticizing the model and saying it's going to destroy them.
Cooke's analysis was published in 2013, and most of its peer-review has been criticism on Peer's methodology. You don't get published by passing peer review; you pass peer review in the years after you get published.
There are several surveys showing that salt and fat cause heart disease and vaccines cause autism. There are also a lot showing those studies are bullshit. It doesn't take a planet-wide conspiracy to do things wrong; it only takes a few hellbent individulas and a lot of group think.
It's not a course any more than "flying cars and a cure for HIV" is a course.
I've already done all that
. It was enlightening.
No, the jobs aren't going away permanently; they might go away more quickly than they come back--which would *destroy* our economy, just like the Industrial Revolution did. We can prevent that by slowing the uptake through economic factors, to the same end result of a mass increase in wealth but with the omission of the intermediate mass economic collapse.
One of the bigger problems today is everyone has backwards ideals about economy. They think money is wealth, they think technology destroys wealth, they think globalization makes us poor, they think jobs are going away forever, etc... they demand action that will only lead to a poorer working class, wide-spread poverty, slower growth, and more pain and suffering and death. People only care about what they see, because thinking is hard.
Think about a dog for a minute. You put a shock collar on your dog because the dog always chases bigger dogs. When your dog sees and starts to chase a bigger dog, you hit the button and the dog gets a horribly-painful shock. The dog doesn't understand the source of the shock--you didn't run up and beat it with a stick--but it knows that shocks have started coming when a big dog appears. What's your dog going to do? It's going to see big dog, realize it's bringing a shock with it, and attack the big dog *more* viciously to get rid of it.
That's what's going on with most people talking about our economic problems today: they see the rich, or they see welfare, or they see outsourcing, and they say, "Man, if I had that rich guy's money, if that poor fucker didn't have *my* money, and if that chinese kid didn't steal my job, I'd be rich! All our troubles would go away if we fixed all this!" That's the same kind of thinking that got us long-ass threads on Slashdot when someone posts about Uber passengers getting assaulted, and literally 2/3 of the comments are quoting statistics on how many blacks commit crimes versus how many whites, and people are trying to build a case that black people are inherently and genetically predisposed to be criminals and that America would be a model, crime-free country if we got rid of all the blacks. For some reason, economics and sociology draw shoddy analysis from laypeople who think they know everything.
Bigger houses, cars with anti-lock brakes and radios, ipods, cheaper clothes, cheaper food, fast (and cheap) internet, more of our income spent on more and better healthcare, and a *lot* more of our income spent on non-essential toys.
The average American is a lot better off now than 20 or 30 years ago; and it's hilarious when you look back as far as 1950, where 1/3 of your income went to food (it's 11% today, 15% 1990, over 20% in 1970, and 30% in 1950), 16% went per 1,000sqft of housing (it's 8%-9% today), 14% went to clothing (it's 4% today and was 6% in 1990), and so forth. Families of the 50s spent 60% of their income just to live in smaller houses (984sqft average new home) than families of today (2,300sqft average circa 2003); and they had worse healthcare-per-dollar while spending only 4% of their income on healthcare (it's 6% today). Today, we spend over 40% of our income on non-essential goods.
By the by, if we cut off China and brought manufacture back to America, we'd be unable to support our population (even with better welfare). Between 15 million and 40 million Americans would need to die off right away; and the remainder would spend more for food, clothing, and other essential goods. The poor would be hit the hardest, but many of them would die anyway. The increase in cost of goods would reduce the amount of money each consumer has, resulting in less ability to buy as many goods; this would eliminate some of the jobs producing goods, as well as shipping, logistics, marketing, and retail.
This is because Americans are currently buying those products, but will have to pay more for (and buy less of) those products if produced domestically. That means not as many jobs to make, market, and distribute; and it means the income from said jobs buys fewer goods. We'd essentially convert Americans off existing production (destroying jobs) onto new production (creating jobs) making goods which are more expensive than their existing equivalents (destroying buying power, hence how those earlier jobs got destroyed in the first place), resulting in less purchasing in total.
Technology is the source of wealth. Hard wealth, not money; money is not wealth.
Reducing costs *is* innovation. It's the only innovation.