Legal barratry. If dismissed with prejudice, it means they're no longer allowed to do this. Dismissal with prejudice means this case is over and can no longer come to court.
We have a lot of meaningless political words. Corruption and Bribery are somewhere in the gray wastes: these are real things, but the words aren't exactly fixed. Patriotism, freedom, liberty, and rights are actually wholly meaningless, pretty much name-dropped when someone wants to label something as good or bad (usually when they have no concrete argument other than that it's something they want).
Meaningless dialogue comes up regardless of any real merit of argument: even privacy rights arguments, which have solid and definite importance behind them, sort of wargarble about rights and handwave a bunch of smoke and mirrors in most discussions. That's why you get people screaming that a service which reports back what applications they install is invading their privacy in a Microsoft OS (which supplies patches for those softwares!), yet completely ignoring that `apt-get upgrade` generates piles of httpd logs telling the server admins your IP address and what software you installed. Then they go send all their e-mail through gmail. You'd think it'd be easy for someone to hide major abuses in all the noise....
There's a lot of talk about Microsoft spyware, but no substantiation. People pull out EULAs and talk about what Cortana does when you ask it to search the 'net for you, and they pull up things saying Windows hit 6,000 DNS requests in one day, and have no explanation of what or how there's end-user monitoring.
Linux has an awful lot of network activity when idle; I think Debian and Slackware are spying on end users...
Fewer support calls from development shops trying to make stuff work with 6 versions of Windows. Faster deprecation path for Windows 7 and 8. Broader access to the App Store. The ability to just make IE12 work with Windows 10 and tell everyone else Windows 8.1 doesn't support the new Web standards and may fuck up with your Web application.
Ubuntu has two active LTS and a third lagging behind every other year; they have a 9 month support cycle for the 6 month release. That means you get 5 years to update an LTS, and 3 months to update anything else. They only ever have a maximum of three LTS and two non-LTS to support, and a minimum of two and one; there's always a three-month span of time where any and all resources devoted to supporting an old release are reassigned to working on a new release, and there's a one-year span of time where any and all resources devoted to supporting a new LTS are directed toward the next *two* releases (a lead-up and an LTS).
Do you think Microsoft wants to support Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Windows 2008r2 server, Windows 2012, and Windows 2015 for the next 15 years? Do you think they want to backport the app store and Windows Container Services, or get called out for heavily advertising these features while 80% of their OS products don't actually support them?
If I were Microsoft, I'd be pushing for a consolidated platform with a Windows core (2015, 2018, etc.) running a Windows desktop (Windows 10) or a Windows server (Windows Server 2015) application suite. There would be one system with one set of core services and libraries; and there would be applications available on each type of installation. If you write it for Windows 10 Desktop, it runs on Windows 10 Server; if you want to use local AD or HyperV and that's a Server feature, maybe it doesn't run on Windows 10 Desktop. Either way, what you're talking about is software, and not potential compatibility issues between operating systems.
I'd also have a campaign to compact my profile to two core releases. I don't want to support 2009, 2011, 2012, 2015, and 2018 software while I'm releasing 2020 software.
If that means getting my users to upgrade to the latest and greatest for free, then so be it. The cost savings for getting all these people moved up will offset the lost profits, especially when you consider none of these people were ever going to get Windows 10 until they got new machines--which they're going to do at likely the same pace anyway. The actual lost income from giving the damn OS away is going to be fractional, possibly too small to measure, and the total cost is only going to amount to the bandwidth.
Did you think it would cost MS anything? Sometimes a free gift really is free: the person giving it to you has absolutely nothing to gain by withholding it, and nothing to lose by giving it. It may or may not have actually cost them anything; it might have cost them a lot and turned out both useless and impossible to resell. We like to think of things in terms of us getting stuff, and not in terms of what the other guy is losing or gaining from it; so of course one man's garbage becomes another man's treasure.
Nope, that's toys. They can watch a movie and you can't. That's like rich people being able to go to a play and you can't because it costs money to maintain the theater and pay the actors and support the orchestra and filling those seats with moneyless poor people won't keep the stagehands fed.
Data comes across data networks; you're paying for access to a system and for content production, at a minimum. If you can't afford it but someone else can, fine; and it keeps being fine as long as their ability to access said data doesn't reduce your ability to access some other good (by raising costs to you).
Nearly every analogy fails. As far as I know, every analogy fails.
Analogical thinking is the foundation of human intelligence. The major human fault is false analogy by whole body: most things behave like parts of other things assembled in different ways.
The Internet does, in fact, behave like a water or gas pipeline; both data and electricity flow like water; and there are details that don't match up with those systems, but do match up with other systems. For example: water and electricity both flow in volume (current) by pressure (voltage) and resistance; data flows at a basically constant rate, and only by usage, and so won't flow faster if you pump up the system. Data networks do behave like water and gas pipeline networks: If too many people try to draw on the resource, they saturate its capacity (which is limited by flow rate; this happens to be adjustable in water pipelines by raising the pressure at source, but you need fundamentally different hardware at source and receiver to adjust this in data networks).
You're holding data access luxuries up as a special kind of magical thing. It's not.
What's happening is IFTTT says, "We made a site that lets users do things with other sites. You didn't rewrite shim code for us, and the module for our site is ONE OF THE MOST POPULAR AMONG OUR USERS; rewrite it for us or we remove you."
Pinboard guy is saying, "... what? Really? You capitalize heavily off integration with my site, and you want me to maintain your service?"
The code will be relocatable. Just replace the relocation table entry pointing to the function in the static-linked library with the address of a new piece of code, and append that new code to the.text segment. A decent static linker will do this automatically if you link in a new library with the same functions.
The reality is you don't get a job because you have the skills, the drive, and the product to sell; you get a job because the consumer can pay you. Let me say that again: You get a job because the consumer can pay you.
You go to McDonalds, and you get a hamburger sold to you by a cash register monkey who gets paid minimum wage. He gets the burger from a sandwich maker who gets minimum wage. He gets the patty from the spatula technician flipping them, also paid minimum wage. He got the uncooked patty from stock that came in on a truck driven by a guy paid per mile. That trucker got his fuel from a gas station fueled by another driver. The fuel itself came from oil refineries staffed by technicians making well more than minimum wage, who got their raw fuel from oil drilling companies staffed by more people; electricity comes from power plants run by people who buy stuff from other people, most of whom are getting middle-class or higher salaries.
When you put everything--every input required to get some product to your hands--all together, you aggregate a bunch of wages, fractioned down to the time invested per unit. If every business has zero profit, the price is the combined wages.
Those wages are the lowest price you'll ever pay. Sometimes you get razor-and-blade models where you pay less than cost for the machine and more than cost for the supplies; in aggregate, the two parts are, at a minimum in the life of the loss-leader, the cost of wages.
Good businesses can do well in any market? Hardly. Who's buying all this crap? Who's paying the salaries for these people? Once the consumer base has bought their food, their clothes, their shelter, and their fancy toys, and once they've run out of money buying all that crap, nobody's there to pay your workers.
If the consumers can't afford it, you can't profit from it. The best idea in the world can't profit in a market where a minimum viable market isn't willing to pass on some other product to buy yours at above the cost of wages involved.
Think about that when someone tells you a good idea is a guaranteed success. Think about that when someone tells you an education creates a job. Think about that when someone tells you the unemployed should just go out and get work. Who's paying for all this success?
True Caller is the dialer app on some phones. On other phones, you can replace the default dialer with True Caller. Good luck getting rid of default True Caller; the dialer app isn't in the Android store. You could install another third-party dialer app that sniffs all your dialed numbers.
If the solution is only a few people can have it, thus nobody should have it, and nobody should be better off because of other people being hurt, then you're just harming society.
It's okay for rich people to have toys the rest of us couldn't afford anyway *even if we took those toys away*.
It's also possible to recognize that popular service X eats a lot of peered bandwidth and raises huge costs, and so you partner with service provider X to provision a service point inside your network in a way which minimizes the costs. Then Netflix and Spotify pay less for outgoing bandwidth through their ISPs, Comcast and Verizon pay less for peering said data (because it's not coming across a peered connection), and both the ISP and service X experience a cost savings.
This net cost savings would translate to lower minimum feasible bills for all, instead of a price decrease in one place requiring a price increase in another. That is: it would enable the ISP to reduce the charge to some or all customers, rather than force the ISP to increase the charge on some customers. In practice, the ISP is reducing the charge on some customers by simply not charging for streaming down data from services which previously incurred high peering costs.
In 1950, only one parent was working versus two parents, so right there your numbers don't take that into account.
Categorically false. With a labor participation rate of 59% in 1950 and 63% in 2014, only 4% more of the population could possibly be working. The increase peaked in 2000 at 67%, an increase of 8%. That means 1 in 12 American families could account as two-income families.
That analysis ignores the rate of marriage. In 2004, 67% of Americans aged 30-39 were married; in 2014, only 56% were married. 7% were unmarried and living with their partner in 2004, and 13% in 2014. That means 9% fewer married, 6% more living together unmarried, and a decline of 3% in cohabitation of couples.
However, all of that is unimportant, because my numbers center around median income levels; and the median is a single-salary $54,400/year. Dual-income households are largely poor people. (I actually work from the mean, which is slightly lower--around $53,000--but close enough).
If a person has a job for $50k and they get laid off and spend a month looking for another job and then make $50K again, the stats will show $50k a year but they are only making $45k a year.
Nope, they use IRS-reported income. You're just making up bullshit now.
When calculating quality of life, I don't really care about 'stuff'. The only stuff that people really need is a house to give them shelter, food, and possibly a vehicle.
If your ability to buy 'stuff' is low, you spend 60% of your income on food, shelter, clothing, and so forth; meanwhile a lot of people who are poorer than you scratch and claw their way to survival.
If your ability to buy 'stuff' is high, you spend 30% of your income on food, shelter, clothing, and so forth; meanwhile a lot of people who are poorer than you feel the pressure, but manage.
Already housing has gone up by your numbers.
People spent 15.8% on shelter in 1950 and 17.7% in 2003, on average, sure. The average house was 983sqft in 1950, and 2,300sqft in 2003. In other words: They spent 16% on 1,000sqft of housing in 1950, and 8.6% per 1,000sqft in 2003. Housing has nudged up to as high as 9.41% per 1,000sqft in 2010, and come down to 9.13% per 1,000sqft in 2011; it continues to fall as we exit the 2004-2007 housing bubble originally created by falling mortgage rates an an excitement to buy.
The other things that matter to me in determining quality of life are: proximity to home, proximity to family
You have more disposable income, so you can buy a house in a nicer area closer to where you want to live. In practice, people spend that extra money buying a house 3 times as big.
available health care
People spend more on health care today than they did in 1950; this is because they are buying more and better care. We've lost a lot of manufacture jobs to China, and have created a *lot* of service jobs to replace them--thanks to the low cost of goods from China and the high amount of remaining consumer buying power after those prices fell. We've taken the money we've saved by buying from China and used it to create a labor shortage in medical care: we have ten times the medical care jobs today compared to 1939. That means instead of 1 doctor per 100,000 people, we have 1 doctor per 10,000 people.
salary
There is only one meaningful measure of income: buying power. How much stuff can your money buy? It doesn't help to have a $90,000/year income if it costs you $6,000/week to feed your family poor-quality grain rice.
job security
Never going to happen. We eliminate jobs when we find a cheaper way to do things.
Most of those jobs are for lower pay and/or are less secure than they were in the previous generation.
Not precisely. It depends on your definition of pay, and on time scales. The jobs consistently pay a lower percentage of total income (otherwise population couldn't grow); however, they also consistently pay a higher amount of absolute buying power. That is to say: Our ability to produce doubles, our income doubles, and the amount of money you get for the same job is less than twice as much. Your money still buys more than before, but not proportionally more; if it did, then we wouldn't have money left to pay new workers as population expands. (Rich people are also getting richer faster than the poor are getting richer, hence the growing income gap.)
If you think one job from 1950 provides the same quality of life as one job from 2016 then you're dreaming
It didn't. In 1950, the median American spent more than twice as much of their income (proportionally) on food and three times as much on clothing. Today, the median American spends more on healthcare than in 1950, and buys more healthcare; he spends slightly more on housing, but buys three times as much housing: 28% of income bought 984sqft in 1950, and 33% bought 2,300sqft.
In other words: Americans spend less than half as much of their paycheck on food, less than a third as much of their paycheck on clothing, and a bit more than a third as much of their paycheck per square foot of housing in 2013 as they did in 1950. They spent more on medical care because they now have the money to get medical services a 1950s family was unable to afford.
you keep thinking the Netflixes, Teslas, Ubers, and Air BnBs of the world are the answer to America's quality of life problems
These things are only available because Americans are able to spend less on food, shelter, clothing, utilities, and so forth. In case you haven't caught on: there's a giant hole in consumer spending from all those things people *need* getting cheaper.
That means a man in 1950 may have brought home $6,000/year and spent $3,600 on food, shelter, clothing, and utilities; a man in 2010 brought home $50,000 and spent $17,000 on food, shelter, clothing, and utilities. That leaves some $13,000 a 2010 household would have spent... not being spent. That's what's buying Netflix, Uber, and all kinds of other shit--including better health care.
That number is also deceptive: our population is bigger, and that means that $50,000 is a smaller share of the total income than the $6,000 represents. In other words: if we divided all the money today by all the working Americans in 1950, they'd all get $100,000; instead, we have twice as many people, and we each get $50,000. We *still* spent a smaller portion of that $50,000 on living, and more on having a higher quality of life.
America currently has 4.9% unemployment and 9 million more jobs than in 2010. The labor force participation rate has dropped by a small percentage, enough to account for 1.2 to 1.6 million of the current population; and, in the same time, population has risen by 9 million: for every single person born between 2010 and now, there has been 1 new job.
The thing you're missing is where jobs come from. If you set up a lemonade stand in your living room selling lemonade for $1,000,000/cup, you would have no income. Nobody would come to pay for your lemonade, both because you're not visible and because nobody can afford that much. That's hyper-illustrative: you having the physical ability to perform some work doesn't mean you get paid, and you need to get paid to buy things (e.g. food).
American jobs come from Americans doing work that draws wages. Wages come from consumer spending. When you buy something, the basis of that price is the wage-labor cost of everyone working to get that product to you, from the factories to the retail cashier.
That, in turn, means the purchase of more things translates directly to the creation of more jobs. Our ability to buy more is what allows us to have a bigger population: America has 170 million more Americans now because we can produce and purchase more stuff per person. More to the point, we can do it without starting to inflate the amount of total wages per good produced: things scale up until they don't, then it gets more expensive per unit to produce further units. Think like running out of good land, so you have to employ not only farmers, but chemists (fertilizers) and engineers (irrigation), and so you have to pay more people more time.
So you end up with comparative advantage: if some other population can produce good X cheaper than we can (i.e. less labor, lower wages, whatnot), including moving it here, then we can all obtain a good X and have purchasing power left over. When we do so, we keep all the logistics, retail, shipping, marketing, advertising, and other localized support infrastructure (because driving a truck and operating a shop in America requires using people physically present here); and we increase the demand on that infrastructure, creating new jobs within. So long as that infrastructure scales, we end up with a pile of money left over.
That pile of money goes into buying other stuff, like Spotify or new goods. Tesla cars?
So think about this: Cheaper clothing. Cheaper building materials. Cheaper machines. Cheaper support infrastructure maintenance supplies. All the things American jobs are founded around are cheaper, and so the cost to buy the things we *need* lowers.
In other words: it takes 1/2 as much of the total income to buy a decent living.
Now all these people can afford to buy more stuff, creating more jobs, and expanding the population.
Then you bring it all back to the US, and everything is suddenly expensive. All these people can't afford food, clothing, and shelter. Because they can't afford it (or the other cheap things we bought), the infrastructure movers lose their jobs. Demand for goods we're now producing right here in America drops, further eroding jobs. It settles around 10%-25% loss.
How does that resolve?
Well, America's population is unsustainable in a local production model. You just need to exterminate most of the poor people--about 10%-25% of the American population.
That's what globalization did: it made America wealthy enough for the poor to live better, and made America wealthy enough to have a bigger population. The American worker stopped making clothes and started making Netflix and Tesla cars. Close that off to bring jobs back and you bring *those* jobs back at the expense of other jobs, making all Americans poorer and shoving millions of Americans into unemployment and absolute poverty.
True. I forgot about Marx's backwardization because it's never really caught on.
The crux of Marx's theory as such is that we don't want to improve technology because we'll all get poor. If 10,000,000 people can make more stuff by investing less time in each unit good, then the goods are worth less, and we are poor.
Wealth theory--my own macroeconomic theory--suggests that this reduction of labor time is the defining feature of technology: we study (-ology) new techniques (techn-) to produce goods with less labor. Often we find a process requiring more labor to set up and operate, yet reducing labor applied to another problem; in those cases, we stay on high-labor strategies because they're cheaper (it takes 1,000 more people to maintain the machines, but 500 fewer people to operate those machines; therefor it takes 500 fewer people to use the current, low-tech method). Once we find a labor-reducing technology for implementing the new technology, we switch (we can now make the machine with 100 laborers, replacing 1,000 laborers with 500 operators, thus a net savings of 400 laborers when you include the labor to make the machines).
Reducing labor as such means each unit of population can produce proportionally more quantity goods as technology increases. Because laborers have basic needs (food, shelter) and societal basic needs (a minimum standard of living above the theoretical minimal subsistence), the minimum cost of a laborer (in terms of labor-hours to support) reduces as technology to make things like food, clothing, and shelter improves. In other words: if you need 50% of your population making food to feed everyone, then you'll be spending 50% of your income on food; if you need 5% of your population making food to feed everyone, then you can spend as low as 5% of your income on food.
This leads to things like income inequality (labor becomes cheaper, even if the labor's buying power increases; rich people's buying power increases more), increasing standards of living, and an increase in general access to luxuries (we have cars and running water now; 500 years ago, steel was too expensive for railroads, much less personal vehicles). In other words: technology creates wealth.
I explain scarcity as the limits of production. If you run out of arable land, you suddenly need to bring fertilizer and irrigation to grow more food to support a larger population; that means more labor invested in making the same amount of food. Food becomes more expensive per unit, and the availability of labor decreases: people who might have made cars now are making food, and we have fewer cars to go around. Somebody must go with less; and more people must be paid for the goods we're trying to buy which have become scarce, so our buying power is redirected that way. The demand for luxuries decreases because the affordability of basic needs or other luxuries decreases, and buying power is diverted away from buying things we don't have the labor to make anyway. Recessions set in and population growth slows.
Then we inject a gene from Barley into Wheat, and now Wheat grows 50% more yield per land area, and so we can both feed more people without hitting production limits *and* feed them at 2/3 the base cost. Food becomes cheaper, more cheap food becomes available, and population is able to expand further.
This explanation actually suggests a secondary effect approximately identical to modern supply-and-demand economics. I've just explained where supply comes from and, in part (incomplete), where demand comes from. I have some other complex market economics e.g. when you have low-demand goods (high risk for new market competitors) and thus the markets don't behave as optimized, competitive markets; the classic way to handle that is to default to Subjective Theory of Value ("people pay a lot for things like diamonds because they perceive them as valuable", with no thought as to why we can't just raise the supply and how that would affect the price of diamonds).
No, you're trying to explain Americans don't need to *consume* as many products--which is a good position. The ideal of less consumer waste is a wealth-creating one: overconsumption means employing more labor to make things we could avoid a need for. If we could avoid those needs, we would CREATE UNEMPLOYMENT IN THE PRODUCTION OF THOSE THINGS; and we would retain the unspent consumer buying power, allowing us to CREATE EMPLOYMENT IN THE PRODUCTION OF OTHER THINGS, thus making ourselves wealthier.
I've explained that Americans need to create jobs as consumers. An optimal consumer purchasing strategy, as above, would still produce more jobs when outsourcing manufacture to a lower-labor-cost locale (China) than when using local labor.
There is no way to escape the loss of American jobs when bringing manufacture jobs back to America. YOU WOULD PAY FEWER PEOPLE THE SAME AMOUNT OF MONEY TO PRODUCE THE SAME NUMBER OF THINGS.
The problem is Marx generated a premise by which 1,000 worker-hours went into a truck, and so a truck has the value of 1,000 worker-hours. If you make a new truck with 500 worker-hours, then the first truck is still worth 1,000 worker-hours, even though it's the same kind of truck made a different way.
That's patently stupid.
What you have is a competing method for making a truck in which the amount of wage-labor required is reduced. You have the ability to produce trucks for a broader consumer market with lower remaining unspent income, as they don't have to pay as many wages to have the truck made; and you have laborers free to do other jobs.
In practice, the market will adjust by trying to recapture the cost of making those already-built trucks; heavy competition will mean companies take losses, while not-so-heavy competition will mean companies slowly lower the prices. The newly-unemployed truck makers will wander around without jobs until prices come down and consumer spending moves into a new area (most probably an existing luxury they couldn't previously afford--possibly trucks, which would actually reduce the number of people made unemployed by this new development), and so you get unemployment and need welfare.
Notice these are mechanics. The truck doesn't have value; it has a cost, and it has a price that's necessarily higher than that cost. Even razor-and-blade models have a combined model: the razor and the blade cost less to make than the price they sell for, and we sell the razor below-cost and the blade at a high margin. If competitors undercut your blades, you have to raise the price on your razor to match costs; the long-term razor-and-blade combined running sales price must exceed the combined running wage-labor cost.
We know markets behave in certain ways. People see a $1,000 truck and see the same truck for $500, they buy the $500 one. So much for value; people decide if the truck is worth the price based on their need, their want, the amount of free income they have (yeah, if you have thousands of unspent dollars, you might be willing to pay more for the same goods), and how easily they can get the same thing cheaper. Valuation? Yes, there's an attribute of the interaction between a consumer and a product by which a consumer values (verb) a product. Value? No, there's not a property of a product by which it contains, within itself, a correct sale price.
It comes down to making some sacrifices now so that our kids can have food and shelter and not starve on the streets later.
Making Jeans in China means more American kids have food and shelter because more American workers have jobs.
Making Jeans in America means fewer American workers have jobs.
We will have a reduced ability to pay American wages. Consumers pay wages: the people making the jeans make $36 per pair of jeans and the jeans sell for $38. The jeans can't sell for $14 or the workers don't get paid. With the products being more expensive, YOU CAN'T BUY AS MANY PRODUCTS, meaning fewer workers.
You aren't going to make more American jobs by bringing factory work from China to America; you're going to ELIMINATE A BUNCH OF AMERICAN JOBS, then CREATE A SMALLER NUMBER OF AMERICAN FACTORY JOBS.
Bringing work back from China will first put 57,000,000 Americans out of a job.
It will then put 39,000,000 Americans into new factory jobs.
That leaves 18,000,000 Americans newly and permanently unemployed.
You will DESTROY AMERICAN JOBS if you move factory work to the United States.
You will DESTROY AMERICAN JOBS if you move factory work to the United States.
156,000,000 Americans with jobs and Chinese making jeans.
123,000,000 Americans with jobs and Americans making jeans.
IF AMERICANS ARE MAKING THE JEANS
THEN THERE WILL BE FEWER AMERICAN JOBS.
The problem is Americans will spend additional money on jeans, which means there will be less money to spend on other things. That translates to fewer jobs created here in America, and thus fewer Americans with jobs.
Bringing the manufacture jobs to America WILL PUT AMERICANS OUT OF WORK.
It takes the same amount of American labor as Chinese labor to make that one pair of jeans. That means Americans don't pay someone to have a job: an American loses his job because Americans are buying one less pair of jeans.
What most people miss is 300M Americans buying $65M blue jeans represent $14.1 billion less money in the consumer market. That's 850,000 minimum-wage jobs; it's 260,000 median-income jobs.
What happens when that's a large swath of products? What happens when we have to pay twice as much for all that stuff we have made in China now? Then, on top of it, you have to find the labor in a market with 4.9% unemployment and so much prosperity that the labor force is shrinking while the proportion of income spent on basic-needs goods continues to go down. That means we don't have the labor to make both Netflix and American-made manufactured goods.
By cost and by manpower, we can't provide the same goods to everyone. If you increase the population, you have to supply at least the same proportion of workers in that population to provide them (scarcity happens when a good requires a *larger* proportion to scale, becoming more expensive and reducing the amount of labor available to produce some luxury for the new population, making people poorer).
People don't understand economics. I whine about this a lot; but my own economic theories DON'T DISCUSS VALUE, so I shouldn't be surprised. A lot of modern theories are strikingly close, and they'll be dead on when they stop turning down blind alleys because they're still operating on the childish logic that goods are actually worth something. Goods are produced and sold--mechanical--and cost, price, and labor factor into that process; the supposed value of a good is an imaginary property that no economist in history has ever clearly defined. They recognize a perception (valuation: what someone believes something is worth) and assume it's tied to a physical property (value: what something *is* worth, even if nobody will or can pay it), and then decide that property is the single main driver of an economy.
The problem with cutting off labor trade is the market will adjust by reducing the total number of American jobs. Unemployment will go up, but a certain poster child will appear protected.
Slashdot Mirror
Legal barratry. If dismissed with prejudice, it means they're no longer allowed to do this. Dismissal with prejudice means this case is over and can no longer come to court.
We have a lot of meaningless political words. Corruption and Bribery are somewhere in the gray wastes: these are real things, but the words aren't exactly fixed. Patriotism, freedom, liberty, and rights are actually wholly meaningless, pretty much name-dropped when someone wants to label something as good or bad (usually when they have no concrete argument other than that it's something they want).
Meaningless dialogue comes up regardless of any real merit of argument: even privacy rights arguments, which have solid and definite importance behind them, sort of wargarble about rights and handwave a bunch of smoke and mirrors in most discussions. That's why you get people screaming that a service which reports back what applications they install is invading their privacy in a Microsoft OS (which supplies patches for those softwares!), yet completely ignoring that `apt-get upgrade` generates piles of httpd logs telling the server admins your IP address and what software you installed. Then they go send all their e-mail through gmail. You'd think it'd be easy for someone to hide major abuses in all the noise....
There's a lot of talk about Microsoft spyware, but no substantiation. People pull out EULAs and talk about what Cortana does when you ask it to search the 'net for you, and they pull up things saying Windows hit 6,000 DNS requests in one day, and have no explanation of what or how there's end-user monitoring.
Linux has an awful lot of network activity when idle; I think Debian and Slackware are spying on end users...
Fewer support calls from development shops trying to make stuff work with 6 versions of Windows. Faster deprecation path for Windows 7 and 8. Broader access to the App Store. The ability to just make IE12 work with Windows 10 and tell everyone else Windows 8.1 doesn't support the new Web standards and may fuck up with your Web application.
Ubuntu has two active LTS and a third lagging behind every other year; they have a 9 month support cycle for the 6 month release. That means you get 5 years to update an LTS, and 3 months to update anything else. They only ever have a maximum of three LTS and two non-LTS to support, and a minimum of two and one; there's always a three-month span of time where any and all resources devoted to supporting an old release are reassigned to working on a new release, and there's a one-year span of time where any and all resources devoted to supporting a new LTS are directed toward the next *two* releases (a lead-up and an LTS).
Do you think Microsoft wants to support Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Windows 2008r2 server, Windows 2012, and Windows 2015 for the next 15 years? Do you think they want to backport the app store and Windows Container Services, or get called out for heavily advertising these features while 80% of their OS products don't actually support them?
If I were Microsoft, I'd be pushing for a consolidated platform with a Windows core (2015, 2018, etc.) running a Windows desktop (Windows 10) or a Windows server (Windows Server 2015) application suite. There would be one system with one set of core services and libraries; and there would be applications available on each type of installation. If you write it for Windows 10 Desktop, it runs on Windows 10 Server; if you want to use local AD or HyperV and that's a Server feature, maybe it doesn't run on Windows 10 Desktop. Either way, what you're talking about is software, and not potential compatibility issues between operating systems.
I'd also have a campaign to compact my profile to two core releases. I don't want to support 2009, 2011, 2012, 2015, and 2018 software while I'm releasing 2020 software.
If that means getting my users to upgrade to the latest and greatest for free, then so be it. The cost savings for getting all these people moved up will offset the lost profits, especially when you consider none of these people were ever going to get Windows 10 until they got new machines--which they're going to do at likely the same pace anyway. The actual lost income from giving the damn OS away is going to be fractional, possibly too small to measure, and the total cost is only going to amount to the bandwidth.
Did you think it would cost MS anything? Sometimes a free gift really is free: the person giving it to you has absolutely nothing to gain by withholding it, and nothing to lose by giving it. It may or may not have actually cost them anything; it might have cost them a lot and turned out both useless and impossible to resell. We like to think of things in terms of us getting stuff, and not in terms of what the other guy is losing or gaining from it; so of course one man's garbage becomes another man's treasure.
Nope, that's toys. They can watch a movie and you can't. That's like rich people being able to go to a play and you can't because it costs money to maintain the theater and pay the actors and support the orchestra and filling those seats with moneyless poor people won't keep the stagehands fed.
Data comes across data networks; you're paying for access to a system and for content production, at a minimum. If you can't afford it but someone else can, fine; and it keeps being fine as long as their ability to access said data doesn't reduce your ability to access some other good (by raising costs to you).
Nearly every analogy fails. As far as I know, every analogy fails.
Analogical thinking is the foundation of human intelligence. The major human fault is false analogy by whole body: most things behave like parts of other things assembled in different ways.
The Internet does, in fact, behave like a water or gas pipeline; both data and electricity flow like water; and there are details that don't match up with those systems, but do match up with other systems. For example: water and electricity both flow in volume (current) by pressure (voltage) and resistance; data flows at a basically constant rate, and only by usage, and so won't flow faster if you pump up the system. Data networks do behave like water and gas pipeline networks: If too many people try to draw on the resource, they saturate its capacity (which is limited by flow rate; this happens to be adjustable in water pipelines by raising the pressure at source, but you need fundamentally different hardware at source and receiver to adjust this in data networks).
You're holding data access luxuries up as a special kind of magical thing. It's not.
Notice the waaaa tag.
What's happening is IFTTT says, "We made a site that lets users do things with other sites. You didn't rewrite shim code for us, and the module for our site is ONE OF THE MOST POPULAR AMONG OUR USERS; rewrite it for us or we remove you."
Pinboard guy is saying, "... what? Really? You capitalize heavily off integration with my site, and you want me to maintain your service?"
They could have used the CIL.
The code will be relocatable. Just replace the relocation table entry pointing to the function in the static-linked library with the address of a new piece of code, and append that new code to the .text segment. A decent static linker will do this automatically if you link in a new library with the same functions.
Not even.
The reality is you don't get a job because you have the skills, the drive, and the product to sell; you get a job because the consumer can pay you. Let me say that again: You get a job because the consumer can pay you.
You go to McDonalds, and you get a hamburger sold to you by a cash register monkey who gets paid minimum wage. He gets the burger from a sandwich maker who gets minimum wage. He gets the patty from the spatula technician flipping them, also paid minimum wage. He got the uncooked patty from stock that came in on a truck driven by a guy paid per mile. That trucker got his fuel from a gas station fueled by another driver. The fuel itself came from oil refineries staffed by technicians making well more than minimum wage, who got their raw fuel from oil drilling companies staffed by more people; electricity comes from power plants run by people who buy stuff from other people, most of whom are getting middle-class or higher salaries.
When you put everything--every input required to get some product to your hands--all together, you aggregate a bunch of wages, fractioned down to the time invested per unit. If every business has zero profit, the price is the combined wages.
Those wages are the lowest price you'll ever pay. Sometimes you get razor-and-blade models where you pay less than cost for the machine and more than cost for the supplies; in aggregate, the two parts are, at a minimum in the life of the loss-leader, the cost of wages.
Good businesses can do well in any market? Hardly. Who's buying all this crap? Who's paying the salaries for these people? Once the consumer base has bought their food, their clothes, their shelter, and their fancy toys, and once they've run out of money buying all that crap, nobody's there to pay your workers.
If the consumers can't afford it, you can't profit from it. The best idea in the world can't profit in a market where a minimum viable market isn't willing to pass on some other product to buy yours at above the cost of wages involved.
Think about that when someone tells you a good idea is a guaranteed success. Think about that when someone tells you an education creates a job. Think about that when someone tells you the unemployed should just go out and get work. Who's paying for all this success?
True Caller is the dialer app on some phones. On other phones, you can replace the default dialer with True Caller. Good luck getting rid of default True Caller; the dialer app isn't in the Android store. You could install another third-party dialer app that sniffs all your dialed numbers.
If the solution is only a few people can have it, thus nobody should have it, and nobody should be better off because of other people being hurt, then you're just harming society.
It's okay for rich people to have toys the rest of us couldn't afford anyway *even if we took those toys away*.
It's also possible to recognize that popular service X eats a lot of peered bandwidth and raises huge costs, and so you partner with service provider X to provision a service point inside your network in a way which minimizes the costs. Then Netflix and Spotify pay less for outgoing bandwidth through their ISPs, Comcast and Verizon pay less for peering said data (because it's not coming across a peered connection), and both the ISP and service X experience a cost savings.
This net cost savings would translate to lower minimum feasible bills for all, instead of a price decrease in one place requiring a price increase in another. That is: it would enable the ISP to reduce the charge to some or all customers, rather than force the ISP to increase the charge on some customers. In practice, the ISP is reducing the charge on some customers by simply not charging for streaming down data from services which previously incurred high peering costs.
In 1950, only one parent was working versus two parents, so right there your numbers don't take that into account.
Categorically false. With a labor participation rate of 59% in 1950 and 63% in 2014, only 4% more of the population could possibly be working. The increase peaked in 2000 at 67%, an increase of 8%. That means 1 in 12 American families could account as two-income families.
That analysis ignores the rate of marriage. In 2004, 67% of Americans aged 30-39 were married; in 2014, only 56% were married. 7% were unmarried and living with their partner in 2004, and 13% in 2014. That means 9% fewer married, 6% more living together unmarried, and a decline of 3% in cohabitation of couples.
However, all of that is unimportant, because my numbers center around median income levels; and the median is a single-salary $54,400/year. Dual-income households are largely poor people. (I actually work from the mean, which is slightly lower--around $53,000--but close enough).
If a person has a job for $50k and they get laid off and spend a month looking for another job and then make $50K again, the stats will show $50k a year but they are only making $45k a year.
Nope, they use IRS-reported income. You're just making up bullshit now.
When calculating quality of life, I don't really care about 'stuff'. The only stuff that people really need is a house to give them shelter, food, and possibly a vehicle.
If your ability to buy 'stuff' is low, you spend 60% of your income on food, shelter, clothing, and so forth; meanwhile a lot of people who are poorer than you scratch and claw their way to survival.
If your ability to buy 'stuff' is high, you spend 30% of your income on food, shelter, clothing, and so forth; meanwhile a lot of people who are poorer than you feel the pressure, but manage.
Already housing has gone up by your numbers.
People spent 15.8% on shelter in 1950 and 17.7% in 2003, on average, sure. The average house was 983sqft in 1950, and 2,300sqft in 2003. In other words: They spent 16% on 1,000sqft of housing in 1950, and 8.6% per 1,000sqft in 2003. Housing has nudged up to as high as 9.41% per 1,000sqft in 2010, and come down to 9.13% per 1,000sqft in 2011; it continues to fall as we exit the 2004-2007 housing bubble originally created by falling mortgage rates an an excitement to buy.
The other things that matter to me in determining quality of life are: proximity to home, proximity to family
You have more disposable income, so you can buy a house in a nicer area closer to where you want to live. In practice, people spend that extra money buying a house 3 times as big.
available health care
People spend more on health care today than they did in 1950; this is because they are buying more and better care. We've lost a lot of manufacture jobs to China, and have created a *lot* of service jobs to replace them--thanks to the low cost of goods from China and the high amount of remaining consumer buying power after those prices fell. We've taken the money we've saved by buying from China and used it to create a labor shortage in medical care: we have ten times the medical care jobs today compared to 1939. That means instead of 1 doctor per 100,000 people, we have 1 doctor per 10,000 people.
salary
There is only one meaningful measure of income: buying power. How much stuff can your money buy? It doesn't help to have a $90,000/year income if it costs you $6,000/week to feed your family poor-quality grain rice.
job security
Never going to happen. We eliminate jobs when we find a cheaper way to do things.
Karl Marx proposed that the valu
Most of those jobs are for lower pay and/or are less secure than they were in the previous generation.
Not precisely. It depends on your definition of pay, and on time scales. The jobs consistently pay a lower percentage of total income (otherwise population couldn't grow); however, they also consistently pay a higher amount of absolute buying power. That is to say: Our ability to produce doubles, our income doubles, and the amount of money you get for the same job is less than twice as much. Your money still buys more than before, but not proportionally more; if it did, then we wouldn't have money left to pay new workers as population expands. (Rich people are also getting richer faster than the poor are getting richer, hence the growing income gap.)
If you think one job from 1950 provides the same quality of life as one job from 2016 then you're dreaming
It didn't. In 1950, the median American spent more than twice as much of their income (proportionally) on food and three times as much on clothing. Today, the median American spends more on healthcare than in 1950, and buys more healthcare; he spends slightly more on housing, but buys three times as much housing: 28% of income bought 984sqft in 1950, and 33% bought 2,300sqft.
In other words: Americans spend less than half as much of their paycheck on food, less than a third as much of their paycheck on clothing, and a bit more than a third as much of their paycheck per square foot of housing in 2013 as they did in 1950. They spent more on medical care because they now have the money to get medical services a 1950s family was unable to afford.
you keep thinking the Netflixes, Teslas, Ubers, and Air BnBs of the world are the answer to America's quality of life problems
These things are only available because Americans are able to spend less on food, shelter, clothing, utilities, and so forth. In case you haven't caught on: there's a giant hole in consumer spending from all those things people *need* getting cheaper.
That means a man in 1950 may have brought home $6,000/year and spent $3,600 on food, shelter, clothing, and utilities; a man in 2010 brought home $50,000 and spent $17,000 on food, shelter, clothing, and utilities. That leaves some $13,000 a 2010 household would have spent ... not being spent. That's what's buying Netflix, Uber, and all kinds of other shit--including better health care.
That number is also deceptive: our population is bigger, and that means that $50,000 is a smaller share of the total income than the $6,000 represents. In other words: if we divided all the money today by all the working Americans in 1950, they'd all get $100,000; instead, we have twice as many people, and we each get $50,000. We *still* spent a smaller portion of that $50,000 on living, and more on having a higher quality of life.
Not really.
America currently has 4.9% unemployment and 9 million more jobs than in 2010. The labor force participation rate has dropped by a small percentage, enough to account for 1.2 to 1.6 million of the current population; and, in the same time, population has risen by 9 million: for every single person born between 2010 and now, there has been 1 new job.
The thing you're missing is where jobs come from. If you set up a lemonade stand in your living room selling lemonade for $1,000,000/cup, you would have no income. Nobody would come to pay for your lemonade, both because you're not visible and because nobody can afford that much. That's hyper-illustrative: you having the physical ability to perform some work doesn't mean you get paid, and you need to get paid to buy things (e.g. food).
American jobs come from Americans doing work that draws wages. Wages come from consumer spending. When you buy something, the basis of that price is the wage-labor cost of everyone working to get that product to you, from the factories to the retail cashier.
That, in turn, means the purchase of more things translates directly to the creation of more jobs. Our ability to buy more is what allows us to have a bigger population: America has 170 million more Americans now because we can produce and purchase more stuff per person. More to the point, we can do it without starting to inflate the amount of total wages per good produced: things scale up until they don't, then it gets more expensive per unit to produce further units. Think like running out of good land, so you have to employ not only farmers, but chemists (fertilizers) and engineers (irrigation), and so you have to pay more people more time.
So you end up with comparative advantage: if some other population can produce good X cheaper than we can (i.e. less labor, lower wages, whatnot), including moving it here, then we can all obtain a good X and have purchasing power left over. When we do so, we keep all the logistics, retail, shipping, marketing, advertising, and other localized support infrastructure (because driving a truck and operating a shop in America requires using people physically present here); and we increase the demand on that infrastructure, creating new jobs within. So long as that infrastructure scales, we end up with a pile of money left over.
That pile of money goes into buying other stuff, like Spotify or new goods. Tesla cars?
So think about this: Cheaper clothing. Cheaper building materials. Cheaper machines. Cheaper support infrastructure maintenance supplies. All the things American jobs are founded around are cheaper, and so the cost to buy the things we *need* lowers.
In other words: it takes 1/2 as much of the total income to buy a decent living.
Now all these people can afford to buy more stuff, creating more jobs, and expanding the population.
Then you bring it all back to the US, and everything is suddenly expensive. All these people can't afford food, clothing, and shelter. Because they can't afford it (or the other cheap things we bought), the infrastructure movers lose their jobs. Demand for goods we're now producing right here in America drops, further eroding jobs. It settles around 10%-25% loss.
How does that resolve?
Well, America's population is unsustainable in a local production model. You just need to exterminate most of the poor people--about 10%-25% of the American population.
That's what globalization did: it made America wealthy enough for the poor to live better, and made America wealthy enough to have a bigger population. The American worker stopped making clothes and started making Netflix and Tesla cars. Close that off to bring jobs back and you bring *those* jobs back at the expense of other jobs, making all Americans poorer and shoving millions of Americans into unemployment and absolute poverty.
The solution is more free trade.
True. I forgot about Marx's backwardization because it's never really caught on.
The crux of Marx's theory as such is that we don't want to improve technology because we'll all get poor. If 10,000,000 people can make more stuff by investing less time in each unit good, then the goods are worth less, and we are poor.
Wealth theory--my own macroeconomic theory--suggests that this reduction of labor time is the defining feature of technology: we study (-ology) new techniques (techn-) to produce goods with less labor. Often we find a process requiring more labor to set up and operate, yet reducing labor applied to another problem; in those cases, we stay on high-labor strategies because they're cheaper (it takes 1,000 more people to maintain the machines, but 500 fewer people to operate those machines; therefor it takes 500 fewer people to use the current, low-tech method). Once we find a labor-reducing technology for implementing the new technology, we switch (we can now make the machine with 100 laborers, replacing 1,000 laborers with 500 operators, thus a net savings of 400 laborers when you include the labor to make the machines).
Reducing labor as such means each unit of population can produce proportionally more quantity goods as technology increases. Because laborers have basic needs (food, shelter) and societal basic needs (a minimum standard of living above the theoretical minimal subsistence), the minimum cost of a laborer (in terms of labor-hours to support) reduces as technology to make things like food, clothing, and shelter improves. In other words: if you need 50% of your population making food to feed everyone, then you'll be spending 50% of your income on food; if you need 5% of your population making food to feed everyone, then you can spend as low as 5% of your income on food.
This leads to things like income inequality (labor becomes cheaper, even if the labor's buying power increases; rich people's buying power increases more), increasing standards of living, and an increase in general access to luxuries (we have cars and running water now; 500 years ago, steel was too expensive for railroads, much less personal vehicles). In other words: technology creates wealth.
I explain scarcity as the limits of production. If you run out of arable land, you suddenly need to bring fertilizer and irrigation to grow more food to support a larger population; that means more labor invested in making the same amount of food. Food becomes more expensive per unit, and the availability of labor decreases: people who might have made cars now are making food, and we have fewer cars to go around. Somebody must go with less; and more people must be paid for the goods we're trying to buy which have become scarce, so our buying power is redirected that way. The demand for luxuries decreases because the affordability of basic needs or other luxuries decreases, and buying power is diverted away from buying things we don't have the labor to make anyway. Recessions set in and population growth slows.
Then we inject a gene from Barley into Wheat, and now Wheat grows 50% more yield per land area, and so we can both feed more people without hitting production limits *and* feed them at 2/3 the base cost. Food becomes cheaper, more cheap food becomes available, and population is able to expand further.
This explanation actually suggests a secondary effect approximately identical to modern supply-and-demand economics. I've just explained where supply comes from and, in part (incomplete), where demand comes from. I have some other complex market economics e.g. when you have low-demand goods (high risk for new market competitors) and thus the markets don't behave as optimized, competitive markets; the classic way to handle that is to default to Subjective Theory of Value ("people pay a lot for things like diamonds because they perceive them as valuable", with no thought as to why we can't just raise the supply and how that would affect the price of diamonds).
No, you're trying to explain Americans don't need to *consume* as many products--which is a good position. The ideal of less consumer waste is a wealth-creating one: overconsumption means employing more labor to make things we could avoid a need for. If we could avoid those needs, we would CREATE UNEMPLOYMENT IN THE PRODUCTION OF THOSE THINGS; and we would retain the unspent consumer buying power, allowing us to CREATE EMPLOYMENT IN THE PRODUCTION OF OTHER THINGS, thus making ourselves wealthier.
I've explained that Americans need to create jobs as consumers. An optimal consumer purchasing strategy, as above, would still produce more jobs when outsourcing manufacture to a lower-labor-cost locale (China) than when using local labor.
There is no way to escape the loss of American jobs when bringing manufacture jobs back to America. YOU WOULD PAY FEWER PEOPLE THE SAME AMOUNT OF MONEY TO PRODUCE THE SAME NUMBER OF THINGS.
This is important. We need to teach society to put a female on the Basketball team so we can get our gangbang on after the game.
The problem is Marx generated a premise by which 1,000 worker-hours went into a truck, and so a truck has the value of 1,000 worker-hours. If you make a new truck with 500 worker-hours, then the first truck is still worth 1,000 worker-hours, even though it's the same kind of truck made a different way.
That's patently stupid.
What you have is a competing method for making a truck in which the amount of wage-labor required is reduced. You have the ability to produce trucks for a broader consumer market with lower remaining unspent income, as they don't have to pay as many wages to have the truck made; and you have laborers free to do other jobs.
In practice, the market will adjust by trying to recapture the cost of making those already-built trucks; heavy competition will mean companies take losses, while not-so-heavy competition will mean companies slowly lower the prices. The newly-unemployed truck makers will wander around without jobs until prices come down and consumer spending moves into a new area (most probably an existing luxury they couldn't previously afford--possibly trucks, which would actually reduce the number of people made unemployed by this new development), and so you get unemployment and need welfare.
Notice these are mechanics. The truck doesn't have value; it has a cost, and it has a price that's necessarily higher than that cost. Even razor-and-blade models have a combined model: the razor and the blade cost less to make than the price they sell for, and we sell the razor below-cost and the blade at a high margin. If competitors undercut your blades, you have to raise the price on your razor to match costs; the long-term razor-and-blade combined running sales price must exceed the combined running wage-labor cost.
We know markets behave in certain ways. People see a $1,000 truck and see the same truck for $500, they buy the $500 one. So much for value; people decide if the truck is worth the price based on their need, their want, the amount of free income they have (yeah, if you have thousands of unspent dollars, you might be willing to pay more for the same goods), and how easily they can get the same thing cheaper. Valuation? Yes, there's an attribute of the interaction between a consumer and a product by which a consumer values (verb) a product. Value? No, there's not a property of a product by which it contains, within itself, a correct sale price.
It comes down to making some sacrifices now so that our kids can have food and shelter and not starve on the streets later.
Making Jeans in China means more American kids have food and shelter because more American workers have jobs.
Making Jeans in America means fewer American workers have jobs.
We will have a reduced ability to pay American wages. Consumers pay wages: the people making the jeans make $36 per pair of jeans and the jeans sell for $38. The jeans can't sell for $14 or the workers don't get paid. With the products being more expensive, YOU CAN'T BUY AS MANY PRODUCTS, meaning fewer workers.
You aren't going to make more American jobs by bringing factory work from China to America; you're going to ELIMINATE A BUNCH OF AMERICAN JOBS, then CREATE A SMALLER NUMBER OF AMERICAN FACTORY JOBS.
Bringing work back from China will first put 57,000,000 Americans out of a job.
It will then put 39,000,000 Americans into new factory jobs.
That leaves 18,000,000 Americans newly and permanently unemployed.
You will DESTROY AMERICAN JOBS if you move factory work to the United States.
You will DESTROY AMERICAN JOBS if you move factory work to the United States.
Making jeans in China CREATES MORE AMERICAN JOBS.
156,000,000 Americans with jobs and Chinese making jeans.
123,000,000 Americans with jobs and Americans making jeans.
IF AMERICANS ARE MAKING THE JEANS
THEN THERE WILL BE FEWER AMERICAN JOBS.
The problem is Americans will spend additional money on jeans, which means there will be less money to spend on other things. That translates to fewer jobs created here in America, and thus fewer Americans with jobs.
Bringing the manufacture jobs to America WILL PUT AMERICANS OUT OF WORK.
It takes the same amount of American labor as Chinese labor to make that one pair of jeans. That means Americans don't pay someone to have a job: an American loses his job because Americans are buying one less pair of jeans.
The U.S. having a ton of military power has been good for the U.S., in the short term. It's been very bad for the world. Now you whine about China?
Standard xenophobia. Common behavior in all human societies.
What most people miss is 300M Americans buying $65M blue jeans represent $14.1 billion less money in the consumer market. That's 850,000 minimum-wage jobs; it's 260,000 median-income jobs.
What happens when that's a large swath of products? What happens when we have to pay twice as much for all that stuff we have made in China now? Then, on top of it, you have to find the labor in a market with 4.9% unemployment and so much prosperity that the labor force is shrinking while the proportion of income spent on basic-needs goods continues to go down. That means we don't have the labor to make both Netflix and American-made manufactured goods.
By cost and by manpower, we can't provide the same goods to everyone. If you increase the population, you have to supply at least the same proportion of workers in that population to provide them (scarcity happens when a good requires a *larger* proportion to scale, becoming more expensive and reducing the amount of labor available to produce some luxury for the new population, making people poorer).
People don't understand economics. I whine about this a lot; but my own economic theories DON'T DISCUSS VALUE, so I shouldn't be surprised. A lot of modern theories are strikingly close, and they'll be dead on when they stop turning down blind alleys because they're still operating on the childish logic that goods are actually worth something. Goods are produced and sold--mechanical--and cost, price, and labor factor into that process; the supposed value of a good is an imaginary property that no economist in history has ever clearly defined. They recognize a perception (valuation: what someone believes something is worth) and assume it's tied to a physical property (value: what something *is* worth, even if nobody will or can pay it), and then decide that property is the single main driver of an economy.
The problem with cutting off labor trade is the market will adjust by reducing the total number of American jobs. Unemployment will go up, but a certain poster child will appear protected.