What the NAA published is ludicrous and disconnected from reality; but they're not wrong: if Brave actually did what they claim, it would be roughly akin to stealing their content just as if they'd copied it to their own server and republished it. It's like tying a string to a door and hooking up a shotgun, then trying to claim you didn't shoot them.
This is called a strawman argument: the NAA made up something easy to attack and used it to attack something defensible. Since what Brave actually does is actually a sort of partnership between publishers and the browser manufacturer, it's really fucking hard to trample down.
If you want to attack Brave, attack it on grounds of being an unsustainable business model.
It's argument behavior. Whenever I have economics discussions, I cite particular things I've studied and analyzed. I don't just state that other people believe me and so that's good enough. Sometimes I deal with annoying people who want that by pointing out Robert Solow's theories are close to mine (Solow won a Nobel Prize of Economic Sciences for his work, and modern economics uses his models to separate labor force growth from technological growth), and then go back to explaining *why* the things I'm claiming are correct, backed up by economic history.
Nobody points out broadly-studied theories and models and historical behaviors when arguing climate change; they just claim arbitrary consensus. They bring nothing to the table but "I have met with the Council and they have rendered their decision!"
It's no good to just tell people they can believe you or go look for themselves. That's not a strong argument point; it's a position that suggests you don't actually understand why you're taking a position, other than that it seemed like the one everyone else was taking.
I'm more irked by the claim that it's right because of consensus. It's *probably* right because of consensus; the current understanding seems to suggest correctness; and we've got an open dialogue about the scientific community's consensus about fat, salt, and heart disease being totally backwards.
Massive, highly-publicized scientific consensus has been shown wrong plenty of times--probably because it's such an important political dialogue as to only be right by chance. The harmfulness of saturated fat and salt are the basis of many school lunch campaigns, USDA campaigns, CDC campaigns, and AHA campaigns, right up to the freaking President of the United States and his wife making and publicly speaking on the gravity of such policies. Not simply the fact, but the *extent* of human-induced climate change is a matter of international politics. We're to believe the scientific consensus on one of these was wrong, and the other can't be wrong?
Correctness of consensus about fat and salt failed *because* of its political importance; and correctness and consensus of climate change seems to have succeeded *in spite of* this political dialogue. Even then, an objective observer can't deny that the *extent* claimed seems to be all over the place, and--perhaps to the credit of the climate-change consensus in general--hasn't exactly reached stable scientific consensus. It's not hard to see how someone could be skeptical of the consensus argument; and it's *easy* to see how someone might be skeptical when, in 2007, the IPCC claimed global warming was occurring at 1/4 the speed they previously claimed, and then in 2010 claimed it was happening 10 times faster than they previously claimed--noting they intentionally shaved down the numbers because "nobody would believe the truth"--and then claimed it was just happening 10 times faster than previously predicted.
I want to hear about evidence and models, not "people are dumb for not believing this because me and my nerd friends believe it and you should trust us because we went to school for this stuff and rich people believe us." You and your nerd friends have been wrong *many* times; I believe a lot of the things you say because you insist on explaining *why* you're right in more robust terms than "I take computer science 3; I know what I'm talking about!"
Actually, this *is* a private matter. That's a technical term: the firm is a private-sector business, and he's said he's interested in the Government--the public sector. We use these terms when discussing government.
People have taken to a fallacy of equivocation here: the PM says he's not interested in private-sector tax avoidance, but rather public-sector corruption; and everyone has taken "private" (non-government) and read it as "private" (personal).
I've used KDE, Gnome2, Gnome 1.8, Gnome 3, XFCE, XPde, Unity, Enlightenment, and IceWM as primary DEs for extended periods. The best one I've ever used was Gnome 3. I interact with it the least: when I need to do something, it happens quickly and efficiently, and I'm on a new desktop with whatever window I need doing whatever it was I was trying to do instead of playing with the DE.
The difference is if we say, "Google is continuously making outlays of cash to hold up a service which consumes power and IT resources and generates zero revenue, and now they want to turn it off," it sounds like we're making unreasonable demands asking for free service forever. If we say, "Google is destroying shit we paid $200 for!", it sounds like Google is evil.
You're focusing on microeconomics. Consider: If 70% of our population still worked to make food, how much would you be able to purchase in our economy?
Every iteration of technology reduces the number of people required to produce some product. We reduce how many people we need in a job area and either we slow job growth there (minor reduction or simple scarcity uncapping), we remove some people from their jobs (retooling), or we remove a *lot* of people from their jobs (technological revolution). Technological revolutions can either replace direct 1:1 labor (technological revolution sans scarcity uncapping) or can move a limiting factor (scarcity uncapping).
The Industrial Revolution was a TR-sans-SU: if you wanted 10% more shirts, you hired 10% more workers; then we made it possible to produce shirts with 20% as many workers and fired damn near everyone. In that time period, shirts were a luxury: the middle-class and poor got hand-me-down shirts from rich people as the fashions trended (this is how charity works today, too, except it's not as critical for our society today--there are still VERY GOOD REASONS for such charity), and old shirts became rags because spending $900 on a dish towel is retarded. That means 80% of everyone lost their jobs, and the only consumer market feedback was in basic needs areas e.g. farmers.
The Information Age was a TR-SU: if you added more legal contracts, more complex transactions, or more of any information-driven service, you started creating more complexity in providing those services. American Express, for example, started out with some 10,000 accounts supported per 1 agent; eventually they were hiring 1 new agent per 3 accounts. As more people used credit cards and the fraud market developed, the amount of credit behavioral data available and *required* to pick out fraudulent transactions increased; agents even had to use large market trends to detect broad, hidden schemes across dozens or hundreds of accounts by recognizing a seemingly-benign but common new trend among them. That, plus the fact that people were using the cards more frequently, limited the growth of the credit card market.
Then, AmEx developed the Authorizer's Assistant.
The Authorizer's Assistant is a computerized expert system which presents the AmEx Agent with a listing of all information the AA examined, annotated with how it influenced the AA's decision, along with a final decision on whether the transaction is legitimate or fraudulent. It even includes information examined but not understood, with the annotation that the AA didn't factor said information in. Agents performed their jobs 78% faster and with an 80% lower incidence of failure (approving fraudulent transactions) the day it was released; and the AA scaled far better, allowing AmEx to continue flying along with only a few authorizers per thousands of accounts even as the complexity and scale of information relationships increased. AmEx basically got to eventually hire 30 programmers and 10,000 authorizers instead of 500,000,000 authorizers (which was never going to happen: the product would eventually become unviable).
The trend of a technical revolution such as the computer age is to eliminate some class of existing jobs and uncork a growth bottleneck. This creates an explosive growth in the job market, meaning you lose millions of jobs, create hundreds of some other kind of job to replace them, and as a result become immediately capable of creating millions of new jobs supplying thousands of new products and services. This is the ideal situation of "people will just get new jobs"; however, the usual ideal that we'll all just become higher-paid machine engineers is blatantly dysfunctional. We'll see lots of jobs for low-paid machine operators; the wealth of society will balance out into the same trending class structure as ever, and that class structure is highly variable. Scarcity uncapping tends to create a growing middle-class, which then shrinks as population growth catches
You seem to be under the impression that the number of jobs is essentially fixed, and having as many jobs as possible is good
Where would you ever get that idea?
All I've described is the demand source of jobs: jobs come from being able to buy what the employee is making. If I can't sell the stuff you're making, I can't employ you. If the United States Public can buy 75% as much physical stuff, then 25% of us (by income) must stop working.
Jobs "freed up" in that manner don't come back. When you make a product cheaper by new technology or by trade advantage, you eliminate jobs; and in doing so, you leave money in the consumer's pocket. That money can buy new things, which *someone* has to make (and ship, and sell), which means new jobs. By increasing the cost of a product, you *reduce* the amount of money in the consumer's hands after buying that product; the remaining money can't buy as many other products; and somebody else must *lose* their job.
Population expands when you break scarcity. 10% growth in population means 10% more farm labor, right? What happens when you run out of arable farm land and move onto rocks and dirt? You have to bring fertilizer and irrigation, meaning 10% more population, 10% more farmers, PLUS 4% more chemists and engineers to make the fertilizer and irrigation, so 14%. Expanding the production of a good to match the growth of population demands more wage hours, thus more cost; and it leaves fewer hands to make other things, which the growing population can no longer afford anyway. This creates wider-spread poverty, which constricts the growth of population. Invent a new technology to grow more food on the same arable land and suddenly that problem goes away, and your population grows again (and less of it goes to farming, to boot, so you can make cell phones instead).
I independently developed my own economic theory; TIL Robert Solow was almost exactly in line with my own theories, and he got a fucking Nobel Prize for it. I'm a bit more abstract: I don't believe in economic inputs other than labor (and I've rejected "value" as an economic term). So give me at least enough credit not to try to pin ludicrous bullshit on me kthx.
Yes, except no... because I can afford to just lower my price and take a capital write off...
Actually, you can't. If you lower your price below your cost, you only get to reduce your taxes on your loss. People have this idea that "write-off" means "the government gives the money back", as if you lose $20,000 and the Government sends you a $20,000 check. Doesn't work that way; you lose $20,000 and the government doesn't tax you on it.
If you run negative, you still have to fork over personal money (owner equity) to make up the difference, or file bankruptcy.
The cost is all front loaded for robots, they cost very little to actually use, but a whole lot to buy. My day-to-day running costs are not likely to be much, if any, higher than yours, I just paid more up front.
Most likely, the robot lasts ~30 years, costs $300,000 to buy, and costs $1.50/hr in maintenance and fuel (electricity) costs to operate, assuming negligible labor costs (i.e. your existing crew just stuffs a row of patties in the feed and pulls out cooked patties as-needed). You take a loan to buy these $300,000 machines, and now you have to pay that loan back; but loan + maintenance is less than worker.
In your case, you're assuming the machine might cost 50 cents more than a $7.25/hr worker, so a $375,000 machine that costs $1.50/hr to run.
If the machine costs a grand total of $1 less than a wage worker TCO, then replacing that wage worker will save you his labor in 7.25 years. If you think that machine is going to drop in price by $75,000, you're talking about roughly a 37.5 year return by waiting. That means if you think the machine is going to cost $1.25/year less in TCO in 5 years, you're securing yourself a better position for a good 30+ years by letting your competitor adopt now and waiting 5 years to catch up--even if the machine costs $1 less than a worker today. 10 years down the line, your hamburgers will be a dollar cheaper than your competitor's, and he'll have this expensive-ass machine he can't reasonably and profitably replace--and most of the TCO was the purchase anyway, so he made 30 years of mistakes up front.
A write off of capital is a non-cash balance sheet transaction, it doesn't cost me money today, that money was already spent.
Assuming you had the money to spend, and haven't leveraged. Microsoft, Shell, and Wal-Mart are highly leveraged; Apple and Google have billions of cash on hand.
It is also worth noting that this all only works if wages rise to $15/hr nationally
It works if machines require less wage-labor than their operating lifespan replaces. That is to say: we have to pay a few hundred people some total of ~15,000 hours of work to build one of these machines today; in the future, new technology will allow us to build the same machine with ~5,000 hours of work. Instead of paying $20/hr, 15,000 hours, $300,000 machine, we pay $20/hr, 5,000 hours, $100,000 machine. Even with inflation, your worker's wages are going up just like those machine maker's wages; but the number of hours of wages invested in making that machine has gone down, and so that machine costs less.
The difference you're looking for, and the one I describe, is time: do we wake up one day to find machines cost half as much as workers and we are all stupid for employing anyone; or do we go through a long cycle of technological growth, making strategic decisions as different machines become cheap enough to effectively replace workers, and making those replacements based on differing predictions of when is the most profitable time to do so?
As you observe: if wages jump to $15/hr, we fire everyone and get machines. Nothing gets cheaper--everything gets a bit more expensive--and unemployment goes up by 40%. We can't create new jobs very easily because while the average consumer isn't a whole hell of a lot poorer (an effective minimum wage doubling might
Those are all risks. Have you forgotten that fast food workers are underemployed? I have an army of 20-hr workers who are begging for more time. It gives me a lot of power over my employees to keep this overprovisioned, underutilized workforce around; it lets me call in more workers at busy times and dismiss workers early when labor costs go above 14%.
Your risk appetite and risk tolerance may be different than others. You sound like an early adopter: the technology is shiny, and you want it. Five years down the line, you'll take a net loss if you sell a hamburger for less than $4.58; while your competitors are able to sell the same burger for $3.25 and make a small profit. You're "that expensive burger place", and you go out of business because nobody buys from you.
All of the things you discuss are measurable risks. Risk thresholds might actually kick in if someone does sue for discrimination or something, because that's expensive and the cost has just exceeded what the business is willing to pay; or the business might operate under the same average costs it projected (because it does that always anyway--when you have 3 million employees, your overall operating costs and risk events are *highly* predictable), and just continue flying smoothly until it reaches a point where it believes the risks don't pan out anymore.
The problem with a non-inflation currency is wealth increases by technology. Technology is simply the discovery of new techniques to produce the same goods in less labor time: we now expend about 1/2.5 as much total aggregate human labor making food as we did in 1950, and Americans spend 12% of their income on food instead of 30%. Essentially, there are fewer people making food per person, and fewer people making food per unit food produced.
That means a currency can only remain non-deflationary if we keep producing new money at the same rate we improve productivity.
So what about inflation? Why is it important?
There are four tiers of technology.
In the first tier, doing something costs so much in terms of human labor time that the world can't afford it. There was a point in time we shipped everything by... ship... because overland transportation cost a lot more. During the earlier part of that time, the cost of laying and maintaining steel rails and building steel rail cars (even if you had the technology to build such a thing as a steam locomotive--which they didn't) would have cost so much human labor no Government could afford it. The taxes would collapse human society; and the labor investment would preclude the production of food, clothing, and shelter--everyone would be working to build railroads, and nobody would be making food, and everyone would die. There's a long slide of time where this would just cause wide-spread poverty.
In the second tier, governments can afford it. A large body of people can pay a reasonable tax to pay all the wages of the human laborers involved in building something large. This labor isn't strictly necessary for other things, although this activity does draw from the labor pool and thus precludes other actions which may need said labor. Frequently (but not always), this tier provides some independent economic benefit, but can't itself profit directly. For example: a rail system may require less human labor (and thus less cost) than other shipping methods, but no rail company can profit from it because it's too much risk or too expensive to implement in the first place. Implementation saves more labor than it uses, and the taxes take less out of the consumer pockets than they save by the reduced cost of cheap goods shipped from all around; but the market simply can't build and operate the damn thing.
In the third tier, big businesses can afford it. A business can leverage a technology to reduce its dependence on human labor, thus reducing the cost of its goods. This one's pretty straight-forward: there was a time when only the Government could launch a satellite; now businesses are starting to put their own up there.
In the fourth tier, it becomes a consumer good. We've reduced the labor needs (and laid off enough people) so much that you only have to pay a week's salary for one guy to buy Gameboy, so there's that.
So what about inflation?
There's a consumer good category where the consumer good is large and complex, and becomes desirable well before consumers can buy it. Cars and houses are prime examples: consumers cannot buy cars because they can only spend $300/month on a car. When the car costs $20,000, you have to spend years saving for that car.
That's where debt comes in. Debt allows consumers to buy a good for money now, and pay that money back later.
In a deflationary economy, savings can happen faster, and saving for a $300,000 house might take 10-15 years instead of 30. Debt can't happen, because debt is crippling: the loan payments just get bigger every month, like a 1/1 ARM that keeps increasing the interest rate by 1% every year. Sure, it still says $1,000/month on your bill; but that $1,000 buys a hell of a lot more than it did when you bought the house, and necessarily represents a larger fraction of the per-capita income. For you to stay ahead, someone else must fall rapidly behind as you become incredibly rich.
If us buying 2/3 less pants equals a 2/3 cut in employment down the board then that makes the pants cheaper in logistics on the American side and the only cost increase is the person who spent a couple hours making the pants in the first place.
No, you don't get to do that.
The people who lose their jobs are the people involved in moving the pants WE ARE NO LONGER SELLING. They're sitting around with their thumbs up their asses because we're selling fewer pants.
In other words: if we have 1/3 as many pants, we fire 2/3 of the people helping with the logistics. That means you start with 99 pants and 9 logistics people; you end selling 33 pants and dealing with 3 people handling logistics; and so you start with 1 logistics per 11 pants and end with 1 logistics per 11 pants. That means the marginal cost of logistics per pants unit doesn't change. Same goes for truck drivers, who are now sidelined because there's nothing for them to ship.
You just tried to sell a fantasy where the cost of a thing scales with the breadth of service, but the price doesn't divide by the number serviced. It's like you said if we feed half as many people, we'd have half as many farmers, and so food would cost half as much.
It's the same pants. You think they magically will last longer?
This is a stupid argument, I'm not going down that line. That's the wrong line of argument.
Or pants cost three times as much and we must use them three times as long.
We buy 1/3 as many pants, and 1/3 as many pants move. That means we need 1/3 as many retail monkeys involved in selling pants; 1/3 as many logistics people involved in directing the movement of pants; 1/3 as many truck drivers driving pants around; and Levis Strauss, Ralph Lauren, Polo, and Dock Marten all need to lay off 1/3 of their existing work force.
In other words: We get to throw a bunch of Americans out of jobs because we can only buy 1/3 of what they were providing us before. They don't get new jobs because we can't buy what they're selling. That means even if they get an education, start a small business, and do whatever heroic American Dream thing people do in American fantasies, they at best get to force some other guy out of a job and take his employment.
More to the point: I illustrated that a house isn't a screw or a plank, but a collection of things with varied behaviors; and so is a ship. You refuse to believe that the timbers in a ship flex like the timbers in a house.
This is where the basic human intelligence thing would have happened for you, but didn't. Humans, again, are good at analogical thinking, with their main mistakes being applying the analogy in a whole-body extent instead of finding the correct limits; you've shown an inability to find the limits of an analogy, so you can't understand a new thing by the ways it behaves like an old thing.
Life must be very, very hard for you. Everything must be so complicated and difficult to understand.
We make and have our food and shelter right here; we buy our clothing from China, and some of our food.
We *can* make those things here--at a higher cost. That means we have less buying power: instead of buying pants *and* bread, we buy pants *or* bread. Either the guy making the pants or the guy making the bread must now become unemployed.
Facts actually fit on my side. You can argue globalization is bad for Americans and that we would lower unemployment by bringing Manufacture back to America, but you'd be out there with the Vaccines-Cause-Autism and faith healing groups.
If I expect the machine's TCO over its life to be much lower if I wait 5 years, I'll do some risk analysis and determine if my risk tolerance and risk appetite are compatible with waiting. I might pay you $10/hr when a machine costs $9.50/hr because I think the machine I can get in 7 years will cost $6.50/hr and save me an extra $210,000 dollars in its lifetime.
If we have lower wages, these various risk tolerances and appetites fail to line up. People lose their jobs, yes; but they lose them over a broad span of time. People become unemployed, some goods get cheaper, consumer buying power shifts over a few years, people buy more stuff, we need someone to make that stuff (even if it's just to man the machines), and the displaced workers get jobs.
If you push unemployment to 8%, that's fine; if you push it to 58%, your economy collapses.
Same deal here. I don't understand the TPP or the objections being raised, so can't comment.
I know globalization and free trade are economic positives. If we blockaded China and brought those manufacture jobs here to the US, somewhere between 15 million and 40 million Americans would simply need to die, because we wouldn't have jobs for them. The increase in cost to make those products manufactured in China would decrease the American consumer buying power, while the labor requirements would remove our ability to produce other services (most recently, healthcare)--which doesn't matter anyway, since we wouldn't be able to buy those services anymore. With the lower buying power, we'd buy *fewer* goods, leaving fewer Americans with jobs. There'd be less America-side shipping, logistics, marketing, retail, and other secondary employment required to move all this Chinese crap into American hands. We'd lose tons of jobs and tons of wealth in the process of securing a moral victory.
In short: transferring manufacture to China has provided the trade benefit of allowing Americans to do other things, and simultaneously left more buying power in the hands of consumer-class Americans so that we can buy the products those other jobs produce. As a result, our population has expanded; conversely, if we undid that change, our population would be millions beyond sustainable, and many people would go jobless. Both our current welfare system (which is faltering heavily) and a Citizen's Dividend (a form of UBI) would fail under those stresses: millions of Americans would need to simply die off to stabilize our system.
I don't know details about the TPP, so I can't say if or how it supports free trade economics as such. I can't say if it aligns with the economic behaviors responsible for the above or if it's a pile of ridiculous garbage meant to seal in profits for special interests and control for the politically powerful. I don't know if the TPP is a good trade deal or if it's a good elitist deal. I know enough about economics; I don't know enough about TPP.
The network activity you see with Linux is normal network protocol stuff.
What you won't see is packets going outside your network unlike MS that sends data to dozens of MS owned IP addresses
The biggest alarm blog post about 5,000 network packets going out in one day from Windows 10 was mostly DNS resolution, which is normal network protocol stuff.
I was specifically talking about my machine constantly phoning home to places like us.debian.org and sending http requests for specific.deb files related to the programs I have installed. Most distributions now also use things like apport to report bugs in your software as soon as something goes wrong with your system. There's always chatter going back to a distribution Web server or an automated bug report collecting system when you're using Linux.
Windows pings Microsoft asking about updates all the fucking time, too. That's why you get updates immediately when they're out: Windows just downloads new lists of software from the Windows store and from Windows Update. In Windows 10, it installs them and then pops up dialogues saying it's going to reboot at 3am.
Slashdot Mirror
What the NAA published is ludicrous and disconnected from reality; but they're not wrong: if Brave actually did what they claim, it would be roughly akin to stealing their content just as if they'd copied it to their own server and republished it. It's like tying a string to a door and hooking up a shotgun, then trying to claim you didn't shoot them.
This is called a strawman argument: the NAA made up something easy to attack and used it to attack something defensible. Since what Brave actually does is actually a sort of partnership between publishers and the browser manufacturer, it's really fucking hard to trample down.
If you want to attack Brave, attack it on grounds of being an unsustainable business model.
It's argument behavior. Whenever I have economics discussions, I cite particular things I've studied and analyzed. I don't just state that other people believe me and so that's good enough. Sometimes I deal with annoying people who want that by pointing out Robert Solow's theories are close to mine (Solow won a Nobel Prize of Economic Sciences for his work, and modern economics uses his models to separate labor force growth from technological growth), and then go back to explaining *why* the things I'm claiming are correct, backed up by economic history.
Nobody points out broadly-studied theories and models and historical behaviors when arguing climate change; they just claim arbitrary consensus. They bring nothing to the table but "I have met with the Council and they have rendered their decision!"
It's no good to just tell people they can believe you or go look for themselves. That's not a strong argument point; it's a position that suggests you don't actually understand why you're taking a position, other than that it seemed like the one everyone else was taking.
I'm more irked by the claim that it's right because of consensus. It's *probably* right because of consensus; the current understanding seems to suggest correctness; and we've got an open dialogue about the scientific community's consensus about fat, salt, and heart disease being totally backwards.
Massive, highly-publicized scientific consensus has been shown wrong plenty of times--probably because it's such an important political dialogue as to only be right by chance. The harmfulness of saturated fat and salt are the basis of many school lunch campaigns, USDA campaigns, CDC campaigns, and AHA campaigns, right up to the freaking President of the United States and his wife making and publicly speaking on the gravity of such policies. Not simply the fact, but the *extent* of human-induced climate change is a matter of international politics. We're to believe the scientific consensus on one of these was wrong, and the other can't be wrong?
Correctness of consensus about fat and salt failed *because* of its political importance; and correctness and consensus of climate change seems to have succeeded *in spite of* this political dialogue. Even then, an objective observer can't deny that the *extent* claimed seems to be all over the place, and--perhaps to the credit of the climate-change consensus in general--hasn't exactly reached stable scientific consensus. It's not hard to see how someone could be skeptical of the consensus argument; and it's *easy* to see how someone might be skeptical when, in 2007, the IPCC claimed global warming was occurring at 1/4 the speed they previously claimed, and then in 2010 claimed it was happening 10 times faster than they previously claimed--noting they intentionally shaved down the numbers because "nobody would believe the truth"--and then claimed it was just happening 10 times faster than previously predicted.
I want to hear about evidence and models, not "people are dumb for not believing this because me and my nerd friends believe it and you should trust us because we went to school for this stuff and rich people believe us." You and your nerd friends have been wrong *many* times; I believe a lot of the things you say because you insist on explaining *why* you're right in more robust terms than "I take computer science 3; I know what I'm talking about!"
Actually, this *is* a private matter. That's a technical term: the firm is a private-sector business, and he's said he's interested in the Government--the public sector. We use these terms when discussing government.
People have taken to a fallacy of equivocation here: the PM says he's not interested in private-sector tax avoidance, but rather public-sector corruption; and everyone has taken "private" (non-government) and read it as "private" (personal).
My first thought is less "they might be lying to us" and more "do they need some sort of penis-shaped sound wave"?
I've used KDE, Gnome2, Gnome 1.8, Gnome 3, XFCE, XPde, Unity, Enlightenment, and IceWM as primary DEs for extended periods. The best one I've ever used was Gnome 3. I interact with it the least: when I need to do something, it happens quickly and efficiently, and I'm on a new desktop with whatever window I need doing whatever it was I was trying to do instead of playing with the DE.
I only have a Windows PC because I wanted a Unity 3D dev box. Windows 10 is much nicer than 7 and 8.1.
The difference is if we say, "Google is continuously making outlays of cash to hold up a service which consumes power and IT resources and generates zero revenue, and now they want to turn it off," it sounds like we're making unreasonable demands asking for free service forever. If we say, "Google is destroying shit we paid $200 for!", it sounds like Google is evil.
Explain to me how shutting down that service is "bricking the device".
Where were the headlines when Nintendo bricked the Wii?
Software is getting bigger and more complex; it's not getting more defects-per-line or defects-per-task, just more shit-it-has-to-do.
You're focusing on microeconomics. Consider: If 70% of our population still worked to make food, how much would you be able to purchase in our economy?
Every iteration of technology reduces the number of people required to produce some product. We reduce how many people we need in a job area and either we slow job growth there (minor reduction or simple scarcity uncapping), we remove some people from their jobs (retooling), or we remove a *lot* of people from their jobs (technological revolution). Technological revolutions can either replace direct 1:1 labor (technological revolution sans scarcity uncapping) or can move a limiting factor (scarcity uncapping).
The Industrial Revolution was a TR-sans-SU: if you wanted 10% more shirts, you hired 10% more workers; then we made it possible to produce shirts with 20% as many workers and fired damn near everyone. In that time period, shirts were a luxury: the middle-class and poor got hand-me-down shirts from rich people as the fashions trended (this is how charity works today, too, except it's not as critical for our society today--there are still VERY GOOD REASONS for such charity), and old shirts became rags because spending $900 on a dish towel is retarded. That means 80% of everyone lost their jobs, and the only consumer market feedback was in basic needs areas e.g. farmers.
The Information Age was a TR-SU: if you added more legal contracts, more complex transactions, or more of any information-driven service, you started creating more complexity in providing those services. American Express, for example, started out with some 10,000 accounts supported per 1 agent; eventually they were hiring 1 new agent per 3 accounts. As more people used credit cards and the fraud market developed, the amount of credit behavioral data available and *required* to pick out fraudulent transactions increased; agents even had to use large market trends to detect broad, hidden schemes across dozens or hundreds of accounts by recognizing a seemingly-benign but common new trend among them. That, plus the fact that people were using the cards more frequently, limited the growth of the credit card market.
Then, AmEx developed the Authorizer's Assistant.
The Authorizer's Assistant is a computerized expert system which presents the AmEx Agent with a listing of all information the AA examined, annotated with how it influenced the AA's decision, along with a final decision on whether the transaction is legitimate or fraudulent. It even includes information examined but not understood, with the annotation that the AA didn't factor said information in. Agents performed their jobs 78% faster and with an 80% lower incidence of failure (approving fraudulent transactions) the day it was released; and the AA scaled far better, allowing AmEx to continue flying along with only a few authorizers per thousands of accounts even as the complexity and scale of information relationships increased. AmEx basically got to eventually hire 30 programmers and 10,000 authorizers instead of 500,000,000 authorizers (which was never going to happen: the product would eventually become unviable).
The trend of a technical revolution such as the computer age is to eliminate some class of existing jobs and uncork a growth bottleneck. This creates an explosive growth in the job market, meaning you lose millions of jobs, create hundreds of some other kind of job to replace them, and as a result become immediately capable of creating millions of new jobs supplying thousands of new products and services. This is the ideal situation of "people will just get new jobs"; however, the usual ideal that we'll all just become higher-paid machine engineers is blatantly dysfunctional. We'll see lots of jobs for low-paid machine operators; the wealth of society will balance out into the same trending class structure as ever, and that class structure is highly variable. Scarcity uncapping tends to create a growing middle-class, which then shrinks as population growth catches
You seem to be under the impression that the number of jobs is essentially fixed, and having as many jobs as possible is good
Where would you ever get that idea?
All I've described is the demand source of jobs: jobs come from being able to buy what the employee is making. If I can't sell the stuff you're making, I can't employ you. If the United States Public can buy 75% as much physical stuff, then 25% of us (by income) must stop working.
Jobs "freed up" in that manner don't come back. When you make a product cheaper by new technology or by trade advantage, you eliminate jobs; and in doing so, you leave money in the consumer's pocket. That money can buy new things, which *someone* has to make (and ship, and sell), which means new jobs. By increasing the cost of a product, you *reduce* the amount of money in the consumer's hands after buying that product; the remaining money can't buy as many other products; and somebody else must *lose* their job.
Population expands when you break scarcity. 10% growth in population means 10% more farm labor, right? What happens when you run out of arable farm land and move onto rocks and dirt? You have to bring fertilizer and irrigation, meaning 10% more population, 10% more farmers, PLUS 4% more chemists and engineers to make the fertilizer and irrigation, so 14%. Expanding the production of a good to match the growth of population demands more wage hours, thus more cost; and it leaves fewer hands to make other things, which the growing population can no longer afford anyway. This creates wider-spread poverty, which constricts the growth of population. Invent a new technology to grow more food on the same arable land and suddenly that problem goes away, and your population grows again (and less of it goes to farming, to boot, so you can make cell phones instead).
I independently developed my own economic theory; TIL Robert Solow was almost exactly in line with my own theories, and he got a fucking Nobel Prize for it. I'm a bit more abstract: I don't believe in economic inputs other than labor (and I've rejected "value" as an economic term). So give me at least enough credit not to try to pin ludicrous bullshit on me kthx.
Yes, except no... because I can afford to just lower my price and take a capital write off...
Actually, you can't. If you lower your price below your cost, you only get to reduce your taxes on your loss. People have this idea that "write-off" means "the government gives the money back", as if you lose $20,000 and the Government sends you a $20,000 check. Doesn't work that way; you lose $20,000 and the government doesn't tax you on it.
If you run negative, you still have to fork over personal money (owner equity) to make up the difference, or file bankruptcy.
The cost is all front loaded for robots, they cost very little to actually use, but a whole lot to buy. My day-to-day running costs are not likely to be much, if any, higher than yours, I just paid more up front.
Most likely, the robot lasts ~30 years, costs $300,000 to buy, and costs $1.50/hr in maintenance and fuel (electricity) costs to operate, assuming negligible labor costs (i.e. your existing crew just stuffs a row of patties in the feed and pulls out cooked patties as-needed). You take a loan to buy these $300,000 machines, and now you have to pay that loan back; but loan + maintenance is less than worker.
In your case, you're assuming the machine might cost 50 cents more than a $7.25/hr worker, so a $375,000 machine that costs $1.50/hr to run.
If the machine costs a grand total of $1 less than a wage worker TCO, then replacing that wage worker will save you his labor in 7.25 years. If you think that machine is going to drop in price by $75,000, you're talking about roughly a 37.5 year return by waiting. That means if you think the machine is going to cost $1.25/year less in TCO in 5 years, you're securing yourself a better position for a good 30+ years by letting your competitor adopt now and waiting 5 years to catch up--even if the machine costs $1 less than a worker today. 10 years down the line, your hamburgers will be a dollar cheaper than your competitor's, and he'll have this expensive-ass machine he can't reasonably and profitably replace--and most of the TCO was the purchase anyway, so he made 30 years of mistakes up front.
A write off of capital is a non-cash balance sheet transaction, it doesn't cost me money today, that money was already spent.
Assuming you had the money to spend, and haven't leveraged. Microsoft, Shell, and Wal-Mart are highly leveraged; Apple and Google have billions of cash on hand.
It is also worth noting that this all only works if wages rise to $15/hr nationally
It works if machines require less wage-labor than their operating lifespan replaces. That is to say: we have to pay a few hundred people some total of ~15,000 hours of work to build one of these machines today; in the future, new technology will allow us to build the same machine with ~5,000 hours of work. Instead of paying $20/hr, 15,000 hours, $300,000 machine, we pay $20/hr, 5,000 hours, $100,000 machine. Even with inflation, your worker's wages are going up just like those machine maker's wages; but the number of hours of wages invested in making that machine has gone down, and so that machine costs less.
The difference you're looking for, and the one I describe, is time: do we wake up one day to find machines cost half as much as workers and we are all stupid for employing anyone; or do we go through a long cycle of technological growth, making strategic decisions as different machines become cheap enough to effectively replace workers, and making those replacements based on differing predictions of when is the most profitable time to do so?
As you observe: if wages jump to $15/hr, we fire everyone and get machines. Nothing gets cheaper--everything gets a bit more expensive--and unemployment goes up by 40%. We can't create new jobs very easily because while the average consumer isn't a whole hell of a lot poorer (an effective minimum wage doubling might
I just use SSL. My browser loses its shit if my bank or Amazon uses a non-verisigned SSL certificate, and I don't put my credit card number in crazy.
Those are all risks. Have you forgotten that fast food workers are underemployed? I have an army of 20-hr workers who are begging for more time. It gives me a lot of power over my employees to keep this overprovisioned, underutilized workforce around; it lets me call in more workers at busy times and dismiss workers early when labor costs go above 14%.
Your risk appetite and risk tolerance may be different than others. You sound like an early adopter: the technology is shiny, and you want it. Five years down the line, you'll take a net loss if you sell a hamburger for less than $4.58; while your competitors are able to sell the same burger for $3.25 and make a small profit. You're "that expensive burger place", and you go out of business because nobody buys from you.
All of the things you discuss are measurable risks. Risk thresholds might actually kick in if someone does sue for discrimination or something, because that's expensive and the cost has just exceeded what the business is willing to pay; or the business might operate under the same average costs it projected (because it does that always anyway--when you have 3 million employees, your overall operating costs and risk events are *highly* predictable), and just continue flying smoothly until it reaches a point where it believes the risks don't pan out anymore.
The problem with a non-inflation currency is wealth increases by technology. Technology is simply the discovery of new techniques to produce the same goods in less labor time: we now expend about 1/2.5 as much total aggregate human labor making food as we did in 1950, and Americans spend 12% of their income on food instead of 30%. Essentially, there are fewer people making food per person, and fewer people making food per unit food produced.
That means a currency can only remain non-deflationary if we keep producing new money at the same rate we improve productivity.
So what about inflation? Why is it important?
There are four tiers of technology.
In the first tier, doing something costs so much in terms of human labor time that the world can't afford it. There was a point in time we shipped everything by ... ship ... because overland transportation cost a lot more. During the earlier part of that time, the cost of laying and maintaining steel rails and building steel rail cars (even if you had the technology to build such a thing as a steam locomotive--which they didn't) would have cost so much human labor no Government could afford it. The taxes would collapse human society; and the labor investment would preclude the production of food, clothing, and shelter--everyone would be working to build railroads, and nobody would be making food, and everyone would die. There's a long slide of time where this would just cause wide-spread poverty.
In the second tier, governments can afford it. A large body of people can pay a reasonable tax to pay all the wages of the human laborers involved in building something large. This labor isn't strictly necessary for other things, although this activity does draw from the labor pool and thus precludes other actions which may need said labor. Frequently (but not always), this tier provides some independent economic benefit, but can't itself profit directly. For example: a rail system may require less human labor (and thus less cost) than other shipping methods, but no rail company can profit from it because it's too much risk or too expensive to implement in the first place. Implementation saves more labor than it uses, and the taxes take less out of the consumer pockets than they save by the reduced cost of cheap goods shipped from all around; but the market simply can't build and operate the damn thing.
In the third tier, big businesses can afford it. A business can leverage a technology to reduce its dependence on human labor, thus reducing the cost of its goods. This one's pretty straight-forward: there was a time when only the Government could launch a satellite; now businesses are starting to put their own up there.
In the fourth tier, it becomes a consumer good. We've reduced the labor needs (and laid off enough people) so much that you only have to pay a week's salary for one guy to buy Gameboy, so there's that.
So what about inflation?
There's a consumer good category where the consumer good is large and complex, and becomes desirable well before consumers can buy it. Cars and houses are prime examples: consumers cannot buy cars because they can only spend $300/month on a car. When the car costs $20,000, you have to spend years saving for that car.
That's where debt comes in. Debt allows consumers to buy a good for money now, and pay that money back later.
In a deflationary economy, savings can happen faster, and saving for a $300,000 house might take 10-15 years instead of 30. Debt can't happen, because debt is crippling: the loan payments just get bigger every month, like a 1/1 ARM that keeps increasing the interest rate by 1% every year. Sure, it still says $1,000/month on your bill; but that $1,000 buys a hell of a lot more than it did when you bought the house, and necessarily represents a larger fraction of the per-capita income. For you to stay ahead, someone else must fall rapidly behind as you become incredibly rich.
If us buying 2/3 less pants equals a 2/3 cut in employment down the board then that makes the pants cheaper in logistics on the American side and the only cost increase is the person who spent a couple hours making the pants in the first place.
No, you don't get to do that.
The people who lose their jobs are the people involved in moving the pants WE ARE NO LONGER SELLING. They're sitting around with their thumbs up their asses because we're selling fewer pants.
In other words: if we have 1/3 as many pants, we fire 2/3 of the people helping with the logistics. That means you start with 99 pants and 9 logistics people; you end selling 33 pants and dealing with 3 people handling logistics; and so you start with 1 logistics per 11 pants and end with 1 logistics per 11 pants. That means the marginal cost of logistics per pants unit doesn't change. Same goes for truck drivers, who are now sidelined because there's nothing for them to ship.
You just tried to sell a fantasy where the cost of a thing scales with the breadth of service, but the price doesn't divide by the number serviced. It's like you said if we feed half as many people, we'd have half as many farmers, and so food would cost half as much.
It's the same pants. You think they magically will last longer?
This is a stupid argument, I'm not going down that line. That's the wrong line of argument.
Or pants cost three times as much and we must use them three times as long.
We buy 1/3 as many pants, and 1/3 as many pants move. That means we need 1/3 as many retail monkeys involved in selling pants; 1/3 as many logistics people involved in directing the movement of pants; 1/3 as many truck drivers driving pants around; and Levis Strauss, Ralph Lauren, Polo, and Dock Marten all need to lay off 1/3 of their existing work force.
In other words: We get to throw a bunch of Americans out of jobs because we can only buy 1/3 of what they were providing us before. They don't get new jobs because we can't buy what they're selling. That means even if they get an education, start a small business, and do whatever heroic American Dream thing people do in American fantasies, they at best get to force some other guy out of a job and take his employment.
THE BEHAVIORS ARE ANALOGOUS.
The substance isn't.
More to the point: I illustrated that a house isn't a screw or a plank, but a collection of things with varied behaviors; and so is a ship. You refuse to believe that the timbers in a ship flex like the timbers in a house.
This is where the basic human intelligence thing would have happened for you, but didn't. Humans, again, are good at analogical thinking, with their main mistakes being applying the analogy in a whole-body extent instead of finding the correct limits; you've shown an inability to find the limits of an analogy, so you can't understand a new thing by the ways it behaves like an old thing.
Life must be very, very hard for you. Everything must be so complicated and difficult to understand.
We make and have our food and shelter right here; we buy our clothing from China, and some of our food.
We *can* make those things here--at a higher cost. That means we have less buying power: instead of buying pants *and* bread, we buy pants *or* bread. Either the guy making the pants or the guy making the bread must now become unemployed.
Facts actually fit on my side. You can argue globalization is bad for Americans and that we would lower unemployment by bringing Manufacture back to America, but you'd be out there with the Vaccines-Cause-Autism and faith healing groups.
Still wrong.
If I expect the machine's TCO over its life to be much lower if I wait 5 years, I'll do some risk analysis and determine if my risk tolerance and risk appetite are compatible with waiting. I might pay you $10/hr when a machine costs $9.50/hr because I think the machine I can get in 7 years will cost $6.50/hr and save me an extra $210,000 dollars in its lifetime.
If we have lower wages, these various risk tolerances and appetites fail to line up. People lose their jobs, yes; but they lose them over a broad span of time. People become unemployed, some goods get cheaper, consumer buying power shifts over a few years, people buy more stuff, we need someone to make that stuff (even if it's just to man the machines), and the displaced workers get jobs.
If you push unemployment to 8%, that's fine; if you push it to 58%, your economy collapses.
So Canada's economy is defunct and was completely stagnate, not growing at all while the minimum wage raise went into effect?
Does the Canadian economy control the US economy?
Same deal here. I don't understand the TPP or the objections being raised, so can't comment.
I know globalization and free trade are economic positives. If we blockaded China and brought those manufacture jobs here to the US, somewhere between 15 million and 40 million Americans would simply need to die, because we wouldn't have jobs for them. The increase in cost to make those products manufactured in China would decrease the American consumer buying power, while the labor requirements would remove our ability to produce other services (most recently, healthcare)--which doesn't matter anyway, since we wouldn't be able to buy those services anymore. With the lower buying power, we'd buy *fewer* goods, leaving fewer Americans with jobs. There'd be less America-side shipping, logistics, marketing, retail, and other secondary employment required to move all this Chinese crap into American hands. We'd lose tons of jobs and tons of wealth in the process of securing a moral victory.
In short: transferring manufacture to China has provided the trade benefit of allowing Americans to do other things, and simultaneously left more buying power in the hands of consumer-class Americans so that we can buy the products those other jobs produce. As a result, our population has expanded; conversely, if we undid that change, our population would be millions beyond sustainable, and many people would go jobless. Both our current welfare system (which is faltering heavily) and a Citizen's Dividend (a form of UBI) would fail under those stresses: millions of Americans would need to simply die off to stabilize our system.
I don't know details about the TPP, so I can't say if or how it supports free trade economics as such. I can't say if it aligns with the economic behaviors responsible for the above or if it's a pile of ridiculous garbage meant to seal in profits for special interests and control for the politically powerful. I don't know if the TPP is a good trade deal or if it's a good elitist deal. I know enough about economics; I don't know enough about TPP.
The network activity you see with Linux is normal network protocol stuff.
What you won't see is packets going outside your network unlike MS that sends data to dozens of MS owned IP addresses
The biggest alarm blog post about 5,000 network packets going out in one day from Windows 10 was mostly DNS resolution, which is normal network protocol stuff.
I was specifically talking about my machine constantly phoning home to places like us.debian.org and sending http requests for specific .deb files related to the programs I have installed. Most distributions now also use things like apport to report bugs in your software as soon as something goes wrong with your system. There's always chatter going back to a distribution Web server or an automated bug report collecting system when you're using Linux.
Windows pings Microsoft asking about updates all the fucking time, too. That's why you get updates immediately when they're out: Windows just downloads new lists of software from the Windows store and from Windows Update. In Windows 10, it installs them and then pops up dialogues saying it's going to reboot at 3am.
These are ... the same behaviors.