Not likely. My system is highly sensitive to wealth: once you've reached a certain level of wealth (which is predicate entirely on technological development--how much stuff can you actually produce per person?), you have enough to go around that tapping it for a basic-needs-level income is cheaper than most simple alternatives. You can compare the cost of welfare versus a competing Dividend against spending in 1950 and spending in 2003. The difference is more staggering when you realize the average 1950 house had 983sqft, and the average 2003 house had 2,300sqft: houses cost less than half as much per square foot in 2003, in terms of percentage of household income. You can see the Dividend I propose would have been a *huge* mistake in 1950: excessive cost and lowered effectiveness would bring economic ruin to the United States.
I'm actually starting to suspect that chart is wrong: food and clothing costs fell versus the average income, and inflation of food and clothing came slower than per-capita GDP growth, meaning that red bar should have started a lot higher than just 24% instead of humming along levelly. I only adjusted my Dividend for inflation, so the red bar assumes food and housing have gotten no cheaper. If I go back and find the appropriate numbers, that chart would look more like a Dividend requires 44% of our AGI in 1950 and 17% in 2013, while Welfare requires 2% in 1950 and 17.2% in 2013.
(If you're wondering: I did some quick math comparing the proportions of spending and used that to adjust the Dividend, then adjusted it proportionally. So food is 30% in 1950 and 13% in 2003? I adjusted the food budget in 2013 by multiplying it by 30/13. Did this for food, clothing, housing (per square foot); divided the result by the 2013 Dividend; and multiplied that proportion by the percentage in 1950. About 2.3 times as much is needed to live in 1950 than 2003; the ratio is probably bigger for 2013, but I'm not going to haggle over a percentage point.)
That means it might work fantastically in Texas, fail in California or Rhode Island, and operate in an unrelated manner on the Federal level. Further, it's an expansion of Social Security, and would require revoking OASDI taxes in that state while still paying half the OASDI benefit--which would break OASDI. Even if the Federal government let you do it, OASDI would become less-solvent if you piloted on a more-affluent state likely to succeed at a state-level Dividend, and more-solvent if you piloted on a less-affluent state likely to fail. If you don't revoke OASDI, you wind up with a tax system that applies some 6% more taxes to the working class while also holding products an additional 6% more costly thanks to payroll taxes; and OASDI stays everywhere else in the country, anyway, so all kinds of shipping, logistics, and other interstate commerce becomes expensive, lowering the buying power of individuals in the state piloting the Dividend.
In other words: it's approximately a guaranteed success at the Federal level, with a graceful failure mode (if it's not a success, it's a flesh wound that makes the country wince a little); it's approximately a guaranteed failure at the State level, with a disastrous failure mode that would probably not only leave everyone in that state much poorer and create a lot more homelessness and hunger, but also take down Social Security's retirement benefits by sheer force of insolvency. The more likely it is to succeed at the State level, the more likely the attempt is to break the rest of the United States.
That doesn't even begin to address logistics like residency: what happens when someone moves into or out of state? I managed to work that out on the National level; it's different on the State level, especially when
So, wherever you're wrong, you can't see it because you tricked yourself into believing that your thoughts are magical and so you can prove negatives.
I was particularly referring to the postulate that technology, throughout history, has reduced labor time required to produce goods, thus reducing the cost, leading to an eventual reduction to price, leading to an increase in consumer buying power (the consumer spends less on something he was already buying). Someone loses their job for a while, and then later a new job becomes available.
I've had people explain that this *never* happens, and businesses have *always* just taken profit. Jobs lost to technology are lost *forever*. The problem with that is it's mathematically impossible to produce more things without creating new jobs; and it's mathematically impossible for a consumer base already spending all their income to spend more income to buy new products, creating new jobs. The mechanism I describe must happen if new products or new consumption ever come into the market.
There are too many logical problems with that to count, even as short as it is. It is factually wrong, even in Adam Smith he points out specific products and services where price isn't responsive to competition.
Mostly small-market products with low demand, because entering that market is risky. Thing is the *entire* *economic* *system* isn't one little product; what I describe is the whole economic system.
You're basically saying, "Well, shit, diamonds don't get any cheaper, therefor nothing ever gets cheaper."
Again: It takes a certain amount of labor to supply a certain product. If you increase the population and supply the same amount of that product per person, then you must increase labor by the same proportion that you increased population. If you then find a way to supply that product with less per-unit labor, then you have unemployed people. To employ them, you must pay them wages; and to pay them wages, consumers must buy product and pay the wage cost. Where do the consumers get the extra buying power to create these new jobs and buy these new products if they products they're buying don't represent a smaller proportion of the total income?
That's mathematical. It's similar to double-entry accounting: all buying-power income (thus spending) must come from somewhere, and it all adds up to 100%, so where is the reduction when we buy new things?
Supply-and-demand is a simplistic theory that generally describes economics in the same way that air pressure dynamics generally describe airplane lift.
Your theory has merit--it's a known market cycle in unsaturated markets--but it tends to fall apart in saturated markets. Competition tends to bring prices down in the long run. In the initial market, a bunch of SSD manufacturers have kept prices high without collusion in an effort to capture early adopters, with notable price differences between them; but as the early adopters started to saturate, the prices started more closely following actual costs. You start getting things like Samsung EVO 850 drives competing on price with friggin' OCZ budget drives. After that point, market destratification starts setting in pretty hard.
Binning parts that don't hold up to test is different. A 1GB flash chip with 10% defect rate can be a 9GB flash chip. A CPU process's variable nature can produce processors that run at 4.5GHz and others that run at 3.9GHz. You trash the broken ones, you repurpose the sub-par ones. That's not artificial; it's a form of quality control. Intel *has* binned high-performance parts as low-performance to balance for market demand, which *is* what you describe.
I don't think an artificially-lowered capacity with a lowered price is sustainable. A competitor will be able to provide something twice as big for the same price. Likewise, competition on 1TB drives will drive them down toward cost, and no amount of of supply-and-demand handwaving will make drives cheaper than cost in the long run--market saturation tends to cause this.
Only for initial spin-up. Once it's spun up, it's going to idle with the same power consumption. You lose friction in the spindle, but you store energy in the platters; as long as the spindle has the same surface contact, friction, and velocity, you don't lose any more power holding the drive idle.
I'm interested in your Citizen's Dividend idea. Is there a place I can go to learn the details?
I still need to write a formal description; but I've blogged about chunks and abstract ideas. The sheer amount of detail I've got scribbled down in notes is... it's not like you can fix a problem by throwing money at it. I mostly talk about financing plans--cut off the cost of welfare (55% of the marginal income taxes) and replace it with a Dividend funding source (17% of AGI income tax); distribute that to every natural-born, adult, resident, American citizen; pay it as a non-refundable tax credit to all other American citizens--but there are transitional considerations, tax details, job creation details, opportunities to reduce the working week (actually, a risk of destroying the economy by creating more jobs than people, and a 4-day work week is my contingency), and all kinds of other stuff. It's not just about what, but about how to get there without destroying the economy along the way--it might be a good idea to excavate a gold mine, but it's no good if you bring the mountain down on your head in the process.
I've got a latex document here that includes analysis of how many immigrants we have on welfare, tax costs of providing public aid for families (children) and naturalized citizens (immigrants who aren't making it, but who we don't want to hand free money because of the gold rush economy of coming to America and NOT working and getting paid to be American); transitional considerations about how to handle things like HUD (different sized families, income profiles, need for aid; along with the rate at which the market can respond by creating or locating available housing units for people who are homeless or leaving HUD) and Social Security OASDI; and even some political highlights depending on audience. It's very rough and not even complete.
This is most likely the one I would have responded with if I we were having a conversation and I hadn't thought about what I was going to say. I still dislike the notion of paying societal parasites. Wouldn't your plan still work if we didn't hand out money to people who don't contribute to the system? Why is it necessary that the parasites be given a free ride?
No, because then you're back to determining who is worth what, which creates new risks. One of those risks is a financing risk: the fluctuations of outlay tend to be stable when aligned with scarcity (population grows until scarcity sets in, then slows down), but are less-predictable when made more arbitrary and bureaucratic. You're basically adding complexity and increasing probability of failure, which leads not only to poverty, but also to a poorer middle- and upper-class, and to lower economic stability (unemployment tends to go up higher and stay high longer when it does go up).
There are reasons it's not important:
* In practice, things like welfare drug tests determine almost nobody (like 0.01%) is actually on welfare and on drugs, without drops in welfare enrollment. Most states implementing welfare drug tests repeal them due to the cost being in massive excess of the savings.
* Employment is a function of the consumer's ability to buy products. If the consumer can buy more products, we must make more products to sell to the consumer, thus we need more jobs (manufacture, freight, logistics, marketing, retail). When that's exhausted, we have unemployment. In practice, *most* unemployed aren't parasites, and those who are just get out of the way of the rest of us. In other words: the parasites aren't subtracting from wealth by being parasites until they're drawing UE3 (which excludes non-job-seekers) down to an incredibly low value.
* Modern welfare goes away when you get a job, making the $7.25/hr minimum wage roughly equivalent to a $2/hr minimum wage. A Citizen's Divide
Money is not wealth. The buying power of money constantly converges on a measure by which all money spent in a reasonable recent period (e.g. 1 year) equates to all products produced and sold in that period. That means one year of total income equates to one year of production-consumption.
All the stuff made divided by the whole population tells you how much there is to go around. If there's 1,000 people and 1,000 pounds of rice made per year, everyone can have 1 pound of rice per year; if you make 2,000 pounds of rice as the population expands to 2,000 people, everyone can still have 1 pound of rice per year; and if you make 4,000 pounds of rice without growing the population past 2,000, everyone can now have 2 pounds of rice per year.
Likewise, we could have half the population make other things besides rice.
Either way, half the wage time is going into making rice; if we don't increase or decrease wages, the guy making rice can now buy his own rice plus other stuff. He has access to more. This is how wealth at all levels increases: more stuff made per person, more buying power per income unit.
It's not just "how much shit you can buy"; it's what you said:
lack of wealth in our society reduces your options and that makes most people feel unhappy. At the bottom of that rung, you basically are begging for survival (be it from the govt, or a church, or the street corner).
Physical stability and access to luxuries for less labor time exchange means you can more likely pursue whatever it is you want to pursue. All the fuzzy ideals about quality-of-life being some intangible ignore than reaching most intangibles is predicated on physical wealth or a lack of mental health (insanity is a good way to live in the street and wait for death while being quite happy with how your life turned out).
Will money solve these people's problems?
The ideal in the Citizen's Dividend is to improve economic efficiency, not to simply throw money at the problem. I don't want to rob the rich and give to the poor, and I don't think just pumping more money in will magically mean people buy more stuff. There's a limit to what they can buy due to what they can make (4.9% unemployment? Maybe we can make 4% more stuff...).
Essentially, I'm trying to change the tax structure to reduce the amount of non-wage labor-wage cost. If a business pays you $10/hr and then has to pay 10% payroll tax, then the business must pay you $11/hr, meaning the *consumer* must pay at least $11/hr times the fraction of labor hours you put into the product you made (if you're running an assembly line where 5 people turn out 5,000 widgets per hour, that wage fraction can be quite low). At the same time, the laborer is taxed 10% on his $10/hr, so receives $9/hr. Now you have a product which must go on store shelves for 22% greater than its fractional wage cost: the consumers have lost 22% of their buying power.
As this money flows through the hands of administrators, it pays some people for the task of handling logistics and bureaucratic tasks which produce nothing. Such tasks are important support for the functions which require them; however, if we replace those functions with something requiring less support, those tasks become irrelevant. That labor becomes free to use elsewhere--and, like all progress, that means someone becomes unemployed for an extended span of time, which is why we have welfare systems in the first place (you don't magic up new jobs; it takes time for the economy to shift around).
Basically, money moving around more actively by the enforcement of buying and selling (e.g. instead of ending up directly in consumer hands, it first goes through taxation, or some other intermediate cycle, which requires it to be paid to administrators first) is less efficient than consumer buying power. The movements that don't go through production cycles waste labor and d
I seriously doubt it costs less to manufacture this thing than a 1TB drive. WD has 1TB 2.5" drives with two 500GB platters; they'd lower the density and use the same parts to get a 314GB drive, or raise the density and use 1 platter to get 314GB. You're either dealing with one platter short (a piece of glass, coating, and a magnetic head) and a higher-density RW head (more expensive) or the same amount of hardware and a lower-density RW head (more tooling to bother making the damn thing). You might break even.
For all points on a line to be equidistant from the center of a circle, an infinite number of line segments of equal length must extend from the circle's center to the circle's edge. If the circle *is* a circle, then any three line segments of equal length extending from one point to three distinct points on the circle's edge are extended from the circle's center.
The problem is nobody listens to you unless they agree; they're more likely to listen if you're famous or have some kind of credential.
I've found these problems where I'll explain how markets or how macro-economics work and people will go, "... okay, yeah. I get that. I still think you're wrong, even though everything you said is obviously correct."
Favorite example: I want to replace our welfare system with a Citizen's Dividend, a particular form of basic income (I have a complete tax plan, including transitions, financing considerations, risks, mitigation, and contingency plans in case certain outcomes occur that need a response). I've shown the math for how I came up with the amount of the Citizen's Dividend; I've shown how much it costs in taxes; I've shown how it combines with even below-minimum-wage incomes to make a sharp increase in quality-of-life; and I've demonstrated how simply changing around *how* taxes are taken (not necessarily who ultimately pays) changes the dynamics of employment, reducing the cost of products and increasing employment. I've backed this up with both direct inspection of history and with airtight logical models that show certain conclusions are likely correct because all other conclusions are mathematically impossible (for example: reducing cost of a general market good always *eventually* reduces price as a proportion of both per-capita and median buying power, else we'd have eliminated all employment thousands of years ago--any other conclusion prohibits the creation of new products).
After long explanations of the technical details, people frequently tell me one of several things:
* It makes sense that lower cost of wage-labor means lower product cost and consumer buying power *but* we should raise minimum wage a lot to make the businesses pay. (Logical flaw: acknowledging that the base cost of wage-labor creates the base cost of goods implicitly acknowledges that consumers pay wages.)
* Wage-labor increases like taxes on the working class, payroll taxes, wages, and sales taxes reduce consumer buying power, eliminating jobs; *but* increasing minimum wage will make more people richer, even if it does eliminate a few jobs. (Logical flaw: acknowledging that raising the cost of labor destroys jobs is acknowledging that products are more expensive in such a way that consumers can, in total, afford less; you've just suggested that you're making the poor poorer *and* richer at the same time.)
* Same as above with wage-labor increases eliminating jobs; *but* a national sales tax should be the only tax because reasons. (All kinds of holy hell here; this is just blunt politics from people who think a national sales tax will somehow make businesses "pay their fair share," while they simultaneously argue that businesses are offshoring all their profits in such a way that would dodge the national sales tax anyway, and that the rich are avoiding all taxes by making capital gains.)
* Such a plan does reduce taxes on consumer take-home pay, increasing take-home pay per dollar wage-labor paid by the employer (including taxes), thus making *everyone* richer; *but* it's an expensive waste of money to give "our hard-earned taxpayer dollars" to drug dealers and lazy bums. (X causes Y; I like Y, but I don't like X. More politics.)
* More take-home pay does create jobs by creating the consumer buying power to buy products, thus increasing production demand and necessitating more people working to make things we're buying; thus jobs are not there because you worked hard, but because someone else wants to buy what you're making; *but* all poor people are lazy and should just get jobs, and welfare should be removed wholesale. (This seems reasonable on the face--welfare is expensive--until you realize population expands to scarcity, and full employment destroys an economy, and all kinds of other reasons that there will always be unemployment.)
Mostly, people agree with what they agree with. If you can put on a good
There is simply no way that a one-size-fits all bureaucracy can educate as well as a system with tools that allow teachers to tailor activities to individual children.
This is true; and you are left with a public school strategy which must maximize effectiveness in the group space, rather than the individual space. That's not necessarily a bad strategy: it's effective and has the high points of bringing socialization to education.
In most simple terms, all people learn the same way. Individuals discover strategies to access information in various forms, and these become habits which reduce the mental energy required to learn by these strategies. Mental energy is limited--parts of your brain (notably, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) run out of ATP and must rest--and the application of effort really does drain a scarce resource. Our classroom education strategies don't account for this, and so some students thrive while others fall behind; we interpret this as students having differing needs.
We can maximize group classroom learning by founding our education system on the development of learning strategies. Rather than allowing students to discover ways to chunk, reflect, associate, and mnemonize things on their own, we must teach them about memory, about analytical strategies, and about study strategies. Learning is based on memory, and a competent study of mnemonics covers not only simple mnemonic devices such as the mnemonic major system or the method of loci, but basic mnemonic concepts like association, visualization, and organization. Students need to learn to approach an opaque source of information; dissect it; interpret it; transform it; and ultimately store, file, and retrieve it. Rather than leaving them to find competing strategies, we should teach them a broad span of strategies to maximize their visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning, enabling them to learn from lectures, books, activities, observations, and personal reflection.
Individualized learning comes down to subject matter and deliberate practice.
People learn best what they are most interested in, as this requires the least mental effort; a personalized education program is feasible in primary schools, and can provide a broad basis while also allowing the student to focus on their own selection of topics in history, math, literature, the arts, and whatever else we want to teach them.
Deliberate practice essentially comes down to focusing on weakness--practice provides maximum effectiveness for the least time invested when it is goal-oriented and technically focused, with constant and immediate feedback--and so providing only a baseline of revisionary learning on most areas of a subject and a more intense focus on those areas the student struggles in will make the student improve faster. The student's technical academic performance may lower--he may perform worse--but he'll perform worse on a more complex set of challenges, meaning his grasp of the baseline material will be solid. What does it matter that a student is essentially performing at a barely-passing level on complex algebra when the subject of study is *introductory elementary algebra*? The student has apparently mastered all we intended to teach him, and has moved on to things we never expected; that he's struggling with the material is less important than the level of material he's moved up to.
These individualized strategies place stress on a classroom environment, and have limited application as such; we can try, and we can make some improvements, and maybe have a competent education system without the enormous cost of a blanket personal education system.
It's one thing to trace a $10 million withdrawal to you; it's something completely different to trace that $10 million back to a Mexican in Palo Alto acting as a known drop point for large cocaine shipments. How *did* that $10 million get into your bank account? It looks like money went into the exchange, and money came out; but we don't know whose hands it passed through, or what investments it went through, in its context as transactions.
You're a fad libertarian if you didn't know governments frequently ban things like carrying large amounts of money, traveling with large amounts of money, or making large bank account deposits and withdrawals without disclosure to the authorities. In Alabama, a routine traffic stop will end in the police confiscating your drug money if they notice you have more than $100 in cash. No drug charges, just "that's a lot of cash to be carrying. Don't you use credit cards, boy? That must be for drugs. Now we can't arrest you for drugs, but we can take your money on suspicion of involvement in illegal activities."
Amazon still stores them somewhere. Risk transfer is a good strategy; but somewhere down the line, someone faces these problems. People who claim things like encryption as a strategy for every data breach are under some weird belief that an automated computer system can both prevent a hacker compromising authentication from compromising authorization (i.e. it lets you access the data because it believes you're an authorized user, but the data is magically unreadable) and internally allow the authenticated user with correct authorization to access the data. They're the same kinds of people who think DRM should work because encrypting the data prevents the user from copying it.
Using the same last 4 digits would add a lot of work, considering computers can just look up a token (a number) against a table indexed by token that labels the relationship {Token,FK=CCN}.
The system I described was more robust--using a Contract ID with a merchant, rather than an abstract "token"--and includes authentication of the merchant, authorization of the merchant's billing activities, and exclusion of all personally-identifiable information in the billing action.
That's the whole point! Untraceable, unaccountable, easily-hidden money. The cops can't find it on you by checking your pockets; the FBI can't find it by checking your bank account; and the individual block chains tend to flow in and out of exchanges with no association to who is putting them in or taking them out. Bitcoin exchanges are money laundering operations as a feature: bitcoins go into a consolidated fund, and the same number of bitcoins come back out of that consolidated fund; they're different block chains, so their block history is not traceable to any particular original owner.
It's like they just wrote the mission statement of Bitcoin and said "ILLEGAL!"
It's hard to not store credit card details in plain text. Even the fabled encryption relies on an automated system accessing it by decryption, meaning somewhere the key is accessible. You can hit the database application and say, "Please give me credit cards," and it decrypts them; or it at least can access the key and use that, so you get that too; or it's whole-disk encryption, so it's useless.
You store CCNs so you can re-bill people when you get hacked. We haven't advanced to the point of billing contracts in the financial system yet, so we won't send a vendor-signed billing contract up to the bank saying "I can bill with this frequency and this maximum charge per period". If we did, we could hit the bank and say "Contract #3876492 Bill=$42.79" and the bank would determine if the message was signed by the correct vendor, valid for the contract, and within correct billing limits, as well as what account it affects. No need to store CCNs.
No, he did this a bunch of times before. Now he gets fines and jail time for repeated dickery. This is how we deal with rich people who go "oh a fine lol ok yeah sure go away."
You could also look at how consumers spend their money and see trends of less and less on food and clothing; slightly more on housing, but houses are more than twice as big; and more on healthcare and luxuries.
It stands to reason spending less of the average income on the same good means that good has gotten cheaper.
You haven't suggested any reason I might be wrong; you've only suggested that you've known some loons and that you don't understand anything.
I work from the reality I see on the ground, too; the difference is I don't see homeless people and hard times, but the mechanism behind them. You see the bullet and the gun; I see the gunpowder, the firing mechanism, the conflict, the political machine that brought the war, the economic machine that fuels it, and the evolution of warfare from rocks to pikes to swords to bows and arrows and finally to explosives and firearms.
Put up or shut up time: predict the next major recession. Right now. Can't? Hmmm
Oh, hmm. You know about computers, right? Predict the next time your hard disk is going to fill up. Can't? Hmmmm! I guess you're too stupid to understand hard drives have infinite space and don't fill up just because you put a lot of files on them!
Do you really think knowing the mechanics of something tells you its future history? Engines wear; I can't tell you the next time an engine in a car is going to fail.
Absolutely not. Corporate income tax should be replaced by a flat consumption (sales) tax. Why? It removes an entire layer of tax evasion and ensures that corporations pay their fair share.
Sales taxes target the consumer, reducing purchasing powers and eliminating jobs. When you levy a 10% sales tax, you're levying a 10% reduction in consumer purchasing power, and a corresponding 10% reduction in jobs. It's inefficient, and it leads to lower tax revenue thanks to lower productivity.
People describe coffee mugs with eyes and mouths as creative, intelligent, and emotional. AlphaGo knows how to execute a particularly advanced search algorithm; it doesn't combine old knowledge to create novel knowledge. A creative human will say, "Hmm, this class of tesuji are useful in these situations; but here's a different situation I can't find a good answer for. I see a few shapes and patterns that look vaguely like some familiar pattern I've used these tesuji in; perhaps I could alter the tesuji and create a new class of tesuji that are more brisk and light, and harass my opponent in this particular situation to create a situation he must respond to in a way that will give me an advantage or at least a stand-off."
Humans tend to use the wrong tool for the wrong job simply because it looks vaguely like it will fit, and not because any form of logical analysis says that will work. Really intelligent humans run through some reverse analysis to determine if this is a bad idea before they get started.
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Not likely. My system is highly sensitive to wealth: once you've reached a certain level of wealth (which is predicate entirely on technological development--how much stuff can you actually produce per person?), you have enough to go around that tapping it for a basic-needs-level income is cheaper than most simple alternatives. You can compare the cost of welfare versus a competing Dividend against spending in 1950 and spending in 2003. The difference is more staggering when you realize the average 1950 house had 983sqft, and the average 2003 house had 2,300sqft: houses cost less than half as much per square foot in 2003, in terms of percentage of household income. You can see the Dividend I propose would have been a *huge* mistake in 1950: excessive cost and lowered effectiveness would bring economic ruin to the United States.
I'm actually starting to suspect that chart is wrong: food and clothing costs fell versus the average income, and inflation of food and clothing came slower than per-capita GDP growth, meaning that red bar should have started a lot higher than just 24% instead of humming along levelly. I only adjusted my Dividend for inflation, so the red bar assumes food and housing have gotten no cheaper. If I go back and find the appropriate numbers, that chart would look more like a Dividend requires 44% of our AGI in 1950 and 17% in 2013, while Welfare requires 2% in 1950 and 17.2% in 2013.
(If you're wondering: I did some quick math comparing the proportions of spending and used that to adjust the Dividend, then adjusted it proportionally. So food is 30% in 1950 and 13% in 2003? I adjusted the food budget in 2013 by multiplying it by 30/13. Did this for food, clothing, housing (per square foot); divided the result by the 2013 Dividend; and multiplied that proportion by the percentage in 1950. About 2.3 times as much is needed to live in 1950 than 2003; the ratio is probably bigger for 2013, but I'm not going to haggle over a percentage point.)
That means it might work fantastically in Texas, fail in California or Rhode Island, and operate in an unrelated manner on the Federal level. Further, it's an expansion of Social Security, and would require revoking OASDI taxes in that state while still paying half the OASDI benefit--which would break OASDI. Even if the Federal government let you do it, OASDI would become less-solvent if you piloted on a more-affluent state likely to succeed at a state-level Dividend, and more-solvent if you piloted on a less-affluent state likely to fail. If you don't revoke OASDI, you wind up with a tax system that applies some 6% more taxes to the working class while also holding products an additional 6% more costly thanks to payroll taxes; and OASDI stays everywhere else in the country, anyway, so all kinds of shipping, logistics, and other interstate commerce becomes expensive, lowering the buying power of individuals in the state piloting the Dividend.
In other words: it's approximately a guaranteed success at the Federal level, with a graceful failure mode (if it's not a success, it's a flesh wound that makes the country wince a little); it's approximately a guaranteed failure at the State level, with a disastrous failure mode that would probably not only leave everyone in that state much poorer and create a lot more homelessness and hunger, but also take down Social Security's retirement benefits by sheer force of insolvency. The more likely it is to succeed at the State level, the more likely the attempt is to break the rest of the United States.
That doesn't even begin to address logistics like residency: what happens when someone moves into or out of state? I managed to work that out on the National level; it's different on the State level, especially when
It depends on if they're starting with a 4 platter 1TB drive or a 2 platter 1TB drive.
So, wherever you're wrong, you can't see it because you tricked yourself into believing that your thoughts are magical and so you can prove negatives.
I was particularly referring to the postulate that technology, throughout history, has reduced labor time required to produce goods, thus reducing the cost, leading to an eventual reduction to price, leading to an increase in consumer buying power (the consumer spends less on something he was already buying). Someone loses their job for a while, and then later a new job becomes available.
I've had people explain that this *never* happens, and businesses have *always* just taken profit. Jobs lost to technology are lost *forever*. The problem with that is it's mathematically impossible to produce more things without creating new jobs; and it's mathematically impossible for a consumer base already spending all their income to spend more income to buy new products, creating new jobs. The mechanism I describe must happen if new products or new consumption ever come into the market.
There are too many logical problems with that to count, even as short as it is. It is factually wrong, even in Adam Smith he points out specific products and services where price isn't responsive to competition.
Mostly small-market products with low demand, because entering that market is risky. Thing is the *entire* *economic* *system* isn't one little product; what I describe is the whole economic system.
You're basically saying, "Well, shit, diamonds don't get any cheaper, therefor nothing ever gets cheaper."
Again: It takes a certain amount of labor to supply a certain product. If you increase the population and supply the same amount of that product per person, then you must increase labor by the same proportion that you increased population. If you then find a way to supply that product with less per-unit labor, then you have unemployed people. To employ them, you must pay them wages; and to pay them wages, consumers must buy product and pay the wage cost. Where do the consumers get the extra buying power to create these new jobs and buy these new products if they products they're buying don't represent a smaller proportion of the total income?
That's mathematical. It's similar to double-entry accounting: all buying-power income (thus spending) must come from somewhere, and it all adds up to 100%, so where is the reduction when we buy new things?
Supply-and-demand is a simplistic theory that generally describes economics in the same way that air pressure dynamics generally describe airplane lift.
Your theory has merit--it's a known market cycle in unsaturated markets--but it tends to fall apart in saturated markets. Competition tends to bring prices down in the long run. In the initial market, a bunch of SSD manufacturers have kept prices high without collusion in an effort to capture early adopters, with notable price differences between them; but as the early adopters started to saturate, the prices started more closely following actual costs. You start getting things like Samsung EVO 850 drives competing on price with friggin' OCZ budget drives. After that point, market destratification starts setting in pretty hard.
Binning parts that don't hold up to test is different. A 1GB flash chip with 10% defect rate can be a 9GB flash chip. A CPU process's variable nature can produce processors that run at 4.5GHz and others that run at 3.9GHz. You trash the broken ones, you repurpose the sub-par ones. That's not artificial; it's a form of quality control. Intel *has* binned high-performance parts as low-performance to balance for market demand, which *is* what you describe.
I don't think an artificially-lowered capacity with a lowered price is sustainable. A competitor will be able to provide something twice as big for the same price. Likewise, competition on 1TB drives will drive them down toward cost, and no amount of of supply-and-demand handwaving will make drives cheaper than cost in the long run--market saturation tends to cause this.
Only for initial spin-up. Once it's spun up, it's going to idle with the same power consumption. You lose friction in the spindle, but you store energy in the platters; as long as the spindle has the same surface contact, friction, and velocity, you don't lose any more power holding the drive idle.
I'm interested in your Citizen's Dividend idea. Is there a place I can go to learn the details?
I still need to write a formal description; but I've blogged about chunks and abstract ideas. The sheer amount of detail I've got scribbled down in notes is ... it's not like you can fix a problem by throwing money at it. I mostly talk about financing plans--cut off the cost of welfare (55% of the marginal income taxes) and replace it with a Dividend funding source (17% of AGI income tax); distribute that to every natural-born, adult, resident, American citizen; pay it as a non-refundable tax credit to all other American citizens--but there are transitional considerations, tax details, job creation details, opportunities to reduce the working week (actually, a risk of destroying the economy by creating more jobs than people, and a 4-day work week is my contingency), and all kinds of other stuff. It's not just about what, but about how to get there without destroying the economy along the way--it might be a good idea to excavate a gold mine, but it's no good if you bring the mountain down on your head in the process.
I've got a latex document here that includes analysis of how many immigrants we have on welfare, tax costs of providing public aid for families (children) and naturalized citizens (immigrants who aren't making it, but who we don't want to hand free money because of the gold rush economy of coming to America and NOT working and getting paid to be American); transitional considerations about how to handle things like HUD (different sized families, income profiles, need for aid; along with the rate at which the market can respond by creating or locating available housing units for people who are homeless or leaving HUD) and Social Security OASDI; and even some political highlights depending on audience. It's very rough and not even complete.
This is most likely the one I would have responded with if I we were having a conversation and I hadn't thought about what I was going to say. I still dislike the notion of paying societal parasites. Wouldn't your plan still work if we didn't hand out money to people who don't contribute to the system? Why is it necessary that the parasites be given a free ride?
No, because then you're back to determining who is worth what, which creates new risks. One of those risks is a financing risk: the fluctuations of outlay tend to be stable when aligned with scarcity (population grows until scarcity sets in, then slows down), but are less-predictable when made more arbitrary and bureaucratic. You're basically adding complexity and increasing probability of failure, which leads not only to poverty, but also to a poorer middle- and upper-class, and to lower economic stability (unemployment tends to go up higher and stay high longer when it does go up).
There are reasons it's not important:
Actually, you missed it; but only barely.
Money is not wealth. The buying power of money constantly converges on a measure by which all money spent in a reasonable recent period (e.g. 1 year) equates to all products produced and sold in that period. That means one year of total income equates to one year of production-consumption.
All the stuff made divided by the whole population tells you how much there is to go around. If there's 1,000 people and 1,000 pounds of rice made per year, everyone can have 1 pound of rice per year; if you make 2,000 pounds of rice as the population expands to 2,000 people, everyone can still have 1 pound of rice per year; and if you make 4,000 pounds of rice without growing the population past 2,000, everyone can now have 2 pounds of rice per year.
Likewise, we could have half the population make other things besides rice.
Either way, half the wage time is going into making rice; if we don't increase or decrease wages, the guy making rice can now buy his own rice plus other stuff. He has access to more. This is how wealth at all levels increases: more stuff made per person, more buying power per income unit.
It's not just "how much shit you can buy"; it's what you said:
lack of wealth in our society reduces your options and that makes most people feel unhappy. At the bottom of that rung, you basically are begging for survival (be it from the govt, or a church, or the street corner).
Physical stability and access to luxuries for less labor time exchange means you can more likely pursue whatever it is you want to pursue. All the fuzzy ideals about quality-of-life being some intangible ignore than reaching most intangibles is predicated on physical wealth or a lack of mental health (insanity is a good way to live in the street and wait for death while being quite happy with how your life turned out).
Will money solve these people's problems?
The ideal in the Citizen's Dividend is to improve economic efficiency, not to simply throw money at the problem. I don't want to rob the rich and give to the poor, and I don't think just pumping more money in will magically mean people buy more stuff. There's a limit to what they can buy due to what they can make (4.9% unemployment? Maybe we can make 4% more stuff...).
Essentially, I'm trying to change the tax structure to reduce the amount of non-wage labor-wage cost. If a business pays you $10/hr and then has to pay 10% payroll tax, then the business must pay you $11/hr, meaning the *consumer* must pay at least $11/hr times the fraction of labor hours you put into the product you made (if you're running an assembly line where 5 people turn out 5,000 widgets per hour, that wage fraction can be quite low). At the same time, the laborer is taxed 10% on his $10/hr, so receives $9/hr. Now you have a product which must go on store shelves for 22% greater than its fractional wage cost: the consumers have lost 22% of their buying power.
As this money flows through the hands of administrators, it pays some people for the task of handling logistics and bureaucratic tasks which produce nothing. Such tasks are important support for the functions which require them; however, if we replace those functions with something requiring less support, those tasks become irrelevant. That labor becomes free to use elsewhere--and, like all progress, that means someone becomes unemployed for an extended span of time, which is why we have welfare systems in the first place (you don't magic up new jobs; it takes time for the economy to shift around).
Basically, money moving around more actively by the enforcement of buying and selling (e.g. instead of ending up directly in consumer hands, it first goes through taxation, or some other intermediate cycle, which requires it to be paid to administrators first) is less efficient than consumer buying power. The movements that don't go through production cycles waste labor and d
I seriously doubt it costs less to manufacture this thing than a 1TB drive. WD has 1TB 2.5" drives with two 500GB platters; they'd lower the density and use the same parts to get a 314GB drive, or raise the density and use 1 platter to get 314GB. You're either dealing with one platter short (a piece of glass, coating, and a magnetic head) and a higher-density RW head (more expensive) or the same amount of hardware and a lower-density RW head (more tooling to bother making the damn thing). You might break even.
For all points on a line to be equidistant from the center of a circle, an infinite number of line segments of equal length must extend from the circle's center to the circle's edge. If the circle *is* a circle, then any three line segments of equal length extending from one point to three distinct points on the circle's edge are extended from the circle's center.
The problem is nobody listens to you unless they agree; they're more likely to listen if you're famous or have some kind of credential.
I've found these problems where I'll explain how markets or how macro-economics work and people will go, "... okay, yeah. I get that. I still think you're wrong, even though everything you said is obviously correct."
Favorite example: I want to replace our welfare system with a Citizen's Dividend, a particular form of basic income (I have a complete tax plan, including transitions, financing considerations, risks, mitigation, and contingency plans in case certain outcomes occur that need a response). I've shown the math for how I came up with the amount of the Citizen's Dividend; I've shown how much it costs in taxes; I've shown how it combines with even below-minimum-wage incomes to make a sharp increase in quality-of-life; and I've demonstrated how simply changing around *how* taxes are taken (not necessarily who ultimately pays) changes the dynamics of employment, reducing the cost of products and increasing employment. I've backed this up with both direct inspection of history and with airtight logical models that show certain conclusions are likely correct because all other conclusions are mathematically impossible (for example: reducing cost of a general market good always *eventually* reduces price as a proportion of both per-capita and median buying power, else we'd have eliminated all employment thousands of years ago--any other conclusion prohibits the creation of new products).
After long explanations of the technical details, people frequently tell me one of several things:
Mostly, people agree with what they agree with. If you can put on a good
There is simply no way that a one-size-fits all bureaucracy can educate as well as a system with tools that allow teachers to tailor activities to individual children.
This is true; and you are left with a public school strategy which must maximize effectiveness in the group space, rather than the individual space. That's not necessarily a bad strategy: it's effective and has the high points of bringing socialization to education.
In most simple terms, all people learn the same way. Individuals discover strategies to access information in various forms, and these become habits which reduce the mental energy required to learn by these strategies. Mental energy is limited--parts of your brain (notably, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) run out of ATP and must rest--and the application of effort really does drain a scarce resource. Our classroom education strategies don't account for this, and so some students thrive while others fall behind; we interpret this as students having differing needs.
We can maximize group classroom learning by founding our education system on the development of learning strategies. Rather than allowing students to discover ways to chunk, reflect, associate, and mnemonize things on their own, we must teach them about memory, about analytical strategies, and about study strategies. Learning is based on memory, and a competent study of mnemonics covers not only simple mnemonic devices such as the mnemonic major system or the method of loci, but basic mnemonic concepts like association, visualization, and organization. Students need to learn to approach an opaque source of information; dissect it; interpret it; transform it; and ultimately store, file, and retrieve it. Rather than leaving them to find competing strategies, we should teach them a broad span of strategies to maximize their visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning, enabling them to learn from lectures, books, activities, observations, and personal reflection.
Individualized learning comes down to subject matter and deliberate practice.
People learn best what they are most interested in, as this requires the least mental effort; a personalized education program is feasible in primary schools, and can provide a broad basis while also allowing the student to focus on their own selection of topics in history, math, literature, the arts, and whatever else we want to teach them.
Deliberate practice essentially comes down to focusing on weakness--practice provides maximum effectiveness for the least time invested when it is goal-oriented and technically focused, with constant and immediate feedback--and so providing only a baseline of revisionary learning on most areas of a subject and a more intense focus on those areas the student struggles in will make the student improve faster. The student's technical academic performance may lower--he may perform worse--but he'll perform worse on a more complex set of challenges, meaning his grasp of the baseline material will be solid. What does it matter that a student is essentially performing at a barely-passing level on complex algebra when the subject of study is *introductory elementary algebra*? The student has apparently mastered all we intended to teach him, and has moved on to things we never expected; that he's struggling with the material is less important than the level of material he's moved up to.
These individualized strategies place stress on a classroom environment, and have limited application as such; we can try, and we can make some improvements, and maybe have a competent education system without the enormous cost of a blanket personal education system.
I've thrown an 80 pound server at someone's head; does that count?
Avoiding card charges isn't what bitcoin was originally marketed for. "Privacy" was its main thrust.
It's one thing to trace a $10 million withdrawal to you; it's something completely different to trace that $10 million back to a Mexican in Palo Alto acting as a known drop point for large cocaine shipments. How *did* that $10 million get into your bank account? It looks like money went into the exchange, and money came out; but we don't know whose hands it passed through, or what investments it went through, in its context as transactions.
You're a fad libertarian if you didn't know governments frequently ban things like carrying large amounts of money, traveling with large amounts of money, or making large bank account deposits and withdrawals without disclosure to the authorities. In Alabama, a routine traffic stop will end in the police confiscating your drug money if they notice you have more than $100 in cash. No drug charges, just "that's a lot of cash to be carrying. Don't you use credit cards, boy? That must be for drugs. Now we can't arrest you for drugs, but we can take your money on suspicion of involvement in illegal activities."
Amazon still stores them somewhere. Risk transfer is a good strategy; but somewhere down the line, someone faces these problems. People who claim things like encryption as a strategy for every data breach are under some weird belief that an automated computer system can both prevent a hacker compromising authentication from compromising authorization (i.e. it lets you access the data because it believes you're an authorized user, but the data is magically unreadable) and internally allow the authenticated user with correct authorization to access the data. They're the same kinds of people who think DRM should work because encrypting the data prevents the user from copying it.
Using the same last 4 digits would add a lot of work, considering computers can just look up a token (a number) against a table indexed by token that labels the relationship {Token,FK=CCN}.
The system I described was more robust--using a Contract ID with a merchant, rather than an abstract "token"--and includes authentication of the merchant, authorization of the merchant's billing activities, and exclusion of all personally-identifiable information in the billing action.
That's the whole point! Untraceable, unaccountable, easily-hidden money. The cops can't find it on you by checking your pockets; the FBI can't find it by checking your bank account; and the individual block chains tend to flow in and out of exchanges with no association to who is putting them in or taking them out. Bitcoin exchanges are money laundering operations as a feature: bitcoins go into a consolidated fund, and the same number of bitcoins come back out of that consolidated fund; they're different block chains, so their block history is not traceable to any particular original owner.
It's like they just wrote the mission statement of Bitcoin and said "ILLEGAL!"
Well yeah. If you get into the security business, you need to go big or go home; you're automatically an enormous target.
It's hard to not store credit card details in plain text. Even the fabled encryption relies on an automated system accessing it by decryption, meaning somewhere the key is accessible. You can hit the database application and say, "Please give me credit cards," and it decrypts them; or it at least can access the key and use that, so you get that too; or it's whole-disk encryption, so it's useless.
You store CCNs so you can re-bill people when you get hacked. We haven't advanced to the point of billing contracts in the financial system yet, so we won't send a vendor-signed billing contract up to the bank saying "I can bill with this frequency and this maximum charge per period". If we did, we could hit the bank and say "Contract #3876492 Bill=$42.79" and the bank would determine if the message was signed by the correct vendor, valid for the contract, and within correct billing limits, as well as what account it affects. No need to store CCNs.
No, he did this a bunch of times before. Now he gets fines and jail time for repeated dickery. This is how we deal with rich people who go "oh a fine lol ok yeah sure go away."
You could also look at how consumers spend their money and see trends of less and less on food and clothing; slightly more on housing, but houses are more than twice as big; and more on healthcare and luxuries.
It stands to reason spending less of the average income on the same good means that good has gotten cheaper.
You haven't suggested any reason I might be wrong; you've only suggested that you've known some loons and that you don't understand anything.
I work from the reality I see on the ground, too; the difference is I don't see homeless people and hard times, but the mechanism behind them. You see the bullet and the gun; I see the gunpowder, the firing mechanism, the conflict, the political machine that brought the war, the economic machine that fuels it, and the evolution of warfare from rocks to pikes to swords to bows and arrows and finally to explosives and firearms.
Put up or shut up time: predict the next major recession. Right now. Can't? Hmmm
Oh, hmm. You know about computers, right? Predict the next time your hard disk is going to fill up. Can't? Hmmmm! I guess you're too stupid to understand hard drives have infinite space and don't fill up just because you put a lot of files on them!
Do you really think knowing the mechanics of something tells you its future history? Engines wear; I can't tell you the next time an engine in a car is going to fail.
Absolutely not. Corporate income tax should be replaced by a flat consumption (sales) tax. Why? It removes an entire layer of tax evasion and ensures that corporations pay their fair share.
Sales taxes target the consumer, reducing purchasing powers and eliminating jobs. When you levy a 10% sales tax, you're levying a 10% reduction in consumer purchasing power, and a corresponding 10% reduction in jobs. It's inefficient, and it leads to lower tax revenue thanks to lower productivity.
People describe coffee mugs with eyes and mouths as creative, intelligent, and emotional. AlphaGo knows how to execute a particularly advanced search algorithm; it doesn't combine old knowledge to create novel knowledge. A creative human will say, "Hmm, this class of tesuji are useful in these situations; but here's a different situation I can't find a good answer for. I see a few shapes and patterns that look vaguely like some familiar pattern I've used these tesuji in; perhaps I could alter the tesuji and create a new class of tesuji that are more brisk and light, and harass my opponent in this particular situation to create a situation he must respond to in a way that will give me an advantage or at least a stand-off."
Humans tend to use the wrong tool for the wrong job simply because it looks vaguely like it will fit, and not because any form of logical analysis says that will work. Really intelligent humans run through some reverse analysis to determine if this is a bad idea before they get started.