They don't produce better code. LibreSSL is not vulnerable because LibreSSL is OpenSSL with SSLv2 turned off; they just deleted a feature. You can't compile it in, whereas on OpenSSL you have the option to run without SSLv2.
OpenBSD LibreSSL is largely OpenSSL, and the part that has the vulnerability was *removed* rather than fixed. You might as well say a fork of Firefox has better code because it has no JavaScript engine and thus isn't vulnerable to Spidermonkey bugs.
Agreed. I have major issues with CPI and GDP; I consider them rough calculations with *serious* flaws. For this purpose, they're close enough. I don't make a habit of making large economic decisions from precise computations; the numbers generally fall in line, and I assume that line isn't exactly straight but is going in the same direction most of the time.
They're useful when debating economic behaviors, since nobody wants to rely on the backing behaviors. Nobody wants to say, "Gee, we invented all these techniques for producing more with less, and laid off all these people... maybe it costs less to make the same stuff!" Nobody wants to accept that businesses are always looking to cut costs and increase net revenue; they'll accept competition, but only when it works for them--I've had people argue in one statement that businesses will just take profits and not lower prices, and then argue in the next that businesses would *never* raise prices if you gave consumers *tons* of money because a competitor would undercut their prices. I like mechanics, but people want numbers.
You're operating on a vacuum assumption in your own head without looking at the world around you. You go, "Oh, that doesn't make sense to me, so I'll make up bullshit and claim everything based on solid analysis and understanding is made-up bullshit." It's familiar to me: it's called a cargo-cult. Basically, anything that's not simple is obviously suspect, and anyone who knows wtf they're talking about must have an agenda and is thus lying.
You are reveling in your ignorance and wielding stupidity as a weapon.
You'll note that dishwashers, washing machines, dryers, and those other nice tools all arrived *prior* to the dual income family becoming standard
Yes. They removed the strain on household labor, thus freeing up that labor resource and making way for a labor bubble. I *just* explained that.
Where we are going is an economy where productivity keeps increasing compared to labor hours spent.
Are going? That's where wealth comes from. I've been writing about this for a while. The toxic component is time: if you eliminate 2% of labor in a year and create 2% more jobs, you have stable unemployment; if you eliminate 20% of labor in a year and create 7% more jobs, you have growing unemployment (you just moved from 4% to 16.5% unemployment).
In the Industrial Revolution, they moved from manual weaving to the power loom, immediately cutting that 479 labor-hours of shirt-making back to near 100 labor-hours; they got 80% unemployment for nearly 100 years. Since then, we've steadily progressed to an economy where it takes not even 7 labor-hours per single shirt to grow the cotton, harvest the cotton, dye the cotton, spin the thread, weave the thread, construct the shirt, package the shirt, ship the shirt, and retail the shirt on store shelves.
What do you think GMO crops, advanced fertilizers, pesticides, harvesting machines, planting machines, and refrigeration did to the farming economy? In 1970, India was growing 2 tonnes of rice per hectare of land, and selling it for a price of $550/tonne; by 2000, inflation raises that $550/tonne to over $3,000. By the year 2000, India was growing 6 tonnes of rice per hectare of land area, and selling it for under $200/tonne. In 30 years, they decreased the costs of manufacturing rice by around 93%, which means a sum total reduction of labor in aggregate when accounting for all levels of the supply chain in the business of producing rice. 93% of the humans involved in making 1 tonne of rice are no longer employed in making that tonne of rice; they might produce a larger population in response and thus make more rice to feed said population, and so not actually unemploy 93% of their farmers, but the proportion did drop.
the income from a single job has been degraded since the 70s as more and more of those middle class jobs exited via outsourcing, to be replaced by lower wage jobs, if at all
So back in the 70s we had cars with 6 CD changers, satellite radio, air conditioning standard, anti-lock brakes, electronic stability control, airbags, 4 wheel independent suspension, On-Star, and a $2,000 satellite navigation system option? Air conditioning in cars did become standard in 1968; by 1969, about half of all cars had air conditioning units. 2/3 had car radios in 1970--it was still common to see cars with no radio in the 70s. Never mind satellite systems, multi-CD changers, and the like.
What about cell phones? We had the color TFT in 1998, and the Compaq iPaq had a wireless radio option to operate as a cellular phone; yet people barely got on with a $600 Motorola V3 Razr. The cellular phones of 1973 weighed 5 pounds; in 1983, they became commercially available at a cost of $4,000 (over $9,000 2014), with a service cost of $50/month plus 40 cents per minute. For $60/month on a $350 phone, I have data service and can stream Spotify to and f
Schizoid personality disorder. My emotions hardly work at all; when they do it's not really great anyway. On a good day, I might have anger management issues and rage at idiots on the Internet; usually I'm just bored. I'm aromantic and asexual as part of the deal, as romance requires some sort of interest in emotional attachment (which makes zero sense to me) and sexual activity is a complex social interaction which creates a large amount of stress (and also is messy and kind of unpleasant). I become more analytical when drunk, and recognize the experience largely as flu-like symptoms, with my teeth trying to crawl out of my head.
Seriously. Very broken. People always figure me for a genius when observing long enough, but they don't get the mechanism. On the bright side, I figured out geniuses are made, not born, and know roughly how to rewire anyone's brain to put them into the intellectual elite. One day, I want to fold that into education; I don't have a good plan for that yet.
A lot of people will raise their hands and claim they're different and that somehow they're... different. Not that they've got a different habitual response trained by their basic interests and corresponding activities, but that they were born with a superior brain. My personality defects and general interests lead to the method of thinking that separates me from the dull herds; it's the same with the rest of them. What makes us attentive and smart is the same mechanism that makes the sheep mindless: our brains become overtaxed and fall back on the standard, least-effort behavior; some of us are so used to overanalyzing that we go straight there because anything else would require forethought and effort.
Optimistically those 10 high paying american jobs become a combination of 10 mid to low-paying jobs. They're still employed! Yay!
Actually, it's not that simple.
When you outsource those 10 jobs to China, the products they make become cheaper. For example: manufacturing a shirt used to require 479 labor-hours pre-industrial-revolution, a cost of about $4,000 at $8.25/hr (my state minimum); today, such a shirt costs $15, or 6.67 hours at $2.25/hr Chinese labor.
Take it in reverse: a cheap t-shirt would cost $55 at local minimum wage. Clothing currently equates to 2.8% of annual household budgets; if, instead, it equated to 10.3%, what would happen to the 7.5% of products each household could no longer afford? What would happen to those jobs?
The answer is not that people would work more. We're not going back to an economy where we used a different technique; we're going to an economy where we've cut back working hours by a high-tech technique, but didn't cut back costs. This prevents consumers from purchasing new products, and that means labor to produce those products doesn't get paid because those products aren't bought, so we just don't hire those people.
This is well-understood economics. I wasn't the first to come up with it; I found out this was called Ricardo's Theory of Comparative Advantage after I designed my models, although my own models are more complete and more reliable than modern economic theory. I focus on macroeconomic form: most economists are bean counters trying to predict the stock market and commodities market, explaining what the so-called value of a particular good should be and what its correct price is; I focus on the broad movement of economics throughout history and the repeating patterns, identifying how wealth grows and what impacts the long-term changes in that respect. I don't care to say how rich we're going to be by doing X; just that X will occur and it will cause some effect to increase or decrease total wealth, employment, individual buying power, or the like.
That is no longer the case, with the total labor force shrinking every year since 2006 [bls.gov]. It's actually worse than that, if you go further back.
We've been in a labor force bubble since 1970. Housewives gave way to working couples and middle-class families living at an extended standard-of-living (two people work, draw more income, and buy more stuff, living like rich people--we've normalized this, so they're just middle-class). We didn't replace those housewives with maids and servants in every household; on the other hand, we *did* get nice dishwashers, washing machines, and other tools to dramatically reduce the domestic working hour load. Housewives don't have to slave over the kitchen sink for eight hours each week and then spend 12 more hours handling laundry; they spend an hour on these tasks combined and still take care of our domestic affairs. I won't paint a picture where women are now enslaved to two careers, because they're not.
It's the only way it's worked. Initially we shipped labor intensive work like textiles out. Then more expensive jobs that included things like EPA restrictions. As the manufacturing base overseas ramped up, it wasn't long before more and more of those higher paying middle class jobs all left, if they could. There were some initial jobs created to build up the infrastructure to support the imports, but once done that number shrank again and now there are fewer total jobs.
Yet a labor participation rate of about 60% is normal across all of human history, and unemployment rates of 4%-8% in healthy economies span back as far as the Roman Empire. Labor participation rates are higher in poorer societies, yet even serfs had women keeping house and raising children in
The best part is steel melts around 2400 degrees, but it loses over 80% of its strength around 800 degrees. If you heat up steel beams with a diesel fire, they'll get a little hot, but they won't melt; if you put several hundred tonnes of concrete on those steel beams and heat them up, they'll buckle, and the building will collapse.
This leads to idiots skimping on insulation for main columns, since any fire that could melt steel beams would compromise the structure anyway. It also leads to engineers designing steel beams with integrated piping systems and running the fire suppression system's water feed through the main column as a built-in cooling system: when there's a fire, the columns get constant cooling via water flowing through them.
Nothing is stronger than steel, but you have to decide what you want out of it. You want heat resistance and excessively high tensile strength? Go inconel. You want corrosion resistance and high hardness? VG-10, with vanadium carbide to change the electrical affinity of the lattice structure such that it won't accept negative ions--it won't oxidize and it will somewhat resist acid. You want cheap and serviceable? 440 stainless. Light-weight? Go with a titanium alloy, but you're sacrificing some strength. Steel bicycles cycle infinitely, as almost any grade of steel can flex over and over again forever as long as it doesn't bend to the point of permanent deformation; aluminum weakens with each vibration, eventually cracking wholesale.
Price, performance, trade-offs. Buildings shift and flex--high-rise buildings wobble in the wind--so you want something that can cycle and that's flexible. You want something hard, with high compressive and tensile strength, but also low cost. If you want fire resistance, you'd better integrate thermal controls--insulation or a water coolant loop--because you can't build steel columns out of inconel.
It's not more likely to fail; it's given more samples. A Web server doesn't fail in testing; then you put it up to the scrutiny of millions of requests per hour, and it cracks under the load. The CPU heats up in a way it wouldn't under testing because it was only ever driven at 50% for 2 hours straight. The software is exposed to requests you didn't test for. 1 in 100 million goes quick when you're doing 10 million attempts per hour.
Your brain restructures itself based on common tasks, including modes of thinking. To override this, you need to first make a decision in your prefrontal cortex (PFX), the analytical part of your brain. Then you need to enforce it by energizing your dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFX), overriding your midbrain's decision-making process. In other words: your brain is on rails, and you use a specific part of your brain to decide when to switch rails, and a specific part of *that* part of your brain to force the rest of your brain to jump track.
All of this takes energy.
Go do push-ups until your arms hurt. Then take a 1 minute break and do it again. Keep doing this. In about 5 minutes, you'll be laying on the ground unable to use your arms. You will be physically incapable of doing another push-up--not just strained, not just sore, but physically incapable of lifting your body. Your muscles won't be able to do it.
The mitochondria in your cells manufacture and store adenosine triphosphate (ATP). They burn this--literally burn, for a small spark of heat--to power chemical reactions. When your brain exhausts its primary neurotransmitter reserves and burns off its ATP reserves, it shuts down just like your muscles. The brain isn't a muscle, but it's a biological tissue made up of cells powered by chemical reactions requiring activation energy; if it runs out of fuel, it stops working.
Your brain is under a lot of stress in an emergency situation.
How quickly do you think you'll run out of fuel reserves with which to make complex decisions?
Under stress, people fall into old habits. They bite their nails. They become bitchy. They start tying and untying their ties. They shuffle papers. They do little fidgety things they do all the time, or that they used to do but trained out of themselves. Their brains go right back on the rails and they stop thinking, because they've diverted too much energy to contemplating the emergency and don't have the reserves to manage their thoughts.
It's not about being lazy, offloading responsibility, or being too stupid to recognize that your glorious leader is an idiot; you simply don't have the capability to do that many things at once. I'm different because my brain is wired to go analytic when I'm under stress: my emotions don't fucking work (hi, I have a severe personality disorder!) and my most familiar pattern is the one that assesses. That's just like everyone else: I stop thinking and start reacting blindly, whatever it may look like from the outside, because that's how I've always reacted to everything. People who flake out under stress are doing the same thing.
That has some interesting implications for depression and anxiety: there's a reason cognitive therapy is more than *twice* as effective long-term compared to anti-depression medication when controlling severe depression, and why ADM is only three times as effective as a placebo ADM. Installing habitual responses that trigger on collapsing emotional states takes a *lot* of effort and is exhausting, especially when you're severely depressed; and it takes several months to fit it out so as to reliably counteract the depressive episodes. You rewire your brain to ride down a particular rail when it encounters a particular condition, and it handles the rest itself, and you never have a relapse again in your life because that would take effort.
It's the same with intelligence: we can train people to have better memories (mnemonics techniques, among other things), to compute numbers rapidly, to learn quickly, and to organize their lives by instilling good time-management practices. We can train them to react to stress and emergency situations the same way I do--without the severe social disorders that came with my base package--and they'll stop following the idiot robot into a burning building, or driving off a bridge because their GPS says so. You change what takes *little* energy by investing a *lot* of energy in twisting your brain into a new shape, and you fix that shit forever.
It has nothing to do with what makes sense; it's just what's easy for your brain.
I assume only long-term economic behaviors which have operated as such since hunter-gatherer man.
the reduction in unemployment you refer to are people settling for (two or three) jobs as unskilled labor
The reduction in unemployment is per-capita, and you don't get -3 unemployment for 1 person getting 3 jobs. Employment is a function of job availability, not a function of how job-ready the populous is; and job availability is a function of what the populous can buy.
My logic successfully and correctly predicts all gross economic behaviors throughout human history. Your arguments are idealistic platitudes. Particularly of note:
you assume all profits are fed back into the local economy
That's not what happens. Various economic factors drive prices down. Let's explore some.
Competition is the biggest one: either direct (food producers are *common*, so you can't overcharge on food without losing customers) or indirect (smartphones are more popular than Crocs, so you can't have that huge mark-up on Crocs and expect people to buy your product when they won't have money left over after buying a smartphone). Goods with bigger markets--more demand--are more ripe for competition; low-demand and low-flexibility goods and services (rental housing is a notable one; diamonds are another) aren't, and tend to hold bigger margins and drive off price competition more readily.
A special case of competition is supply-chain competition. When GM wants to build cars, they find a contract for, say, 100 million tonnes of steel per year for 5 years. There are a dozen steel mills with that kind of output. Say they each charge $500/tonne for steel. A steel mill makes that steel at a cost of $430/tonne. When approached, the steel mill goes back to the steel ore mine and the coal mine (you need coal to make steel) and negotiates for a contract for massive amounts of ore and coal to ensure it won't breach contract. The same process occurs: the costs of these things drop from $200 of coal per steel-tonne and $150 of ore per steel-tonne to something closer to the *labor cost* of those products. In the end, the steel producer gets his costs down to $230/tonne, and sells steel to GM for $232/tonne, netting a $200 million per-year profit (thanks to the coal miners and steel ore miners also cutting their margins razor-thin to capture a $200 million per-year contract for 5 years--a billion dollar sale they'd otherwise miss out on).
That kind of supply-chain contracting drives prices for things like cars and buildings down toward labor costs.
Market saturation is another factor. 1TB SSDs cost about $200 to make last year, but had a price of $700; now they carry a price of $330. All the early adopters have thrown in their money, buying up drives with huge margins; it's no longer **profitable** to charge those big margins, so Samsung et al have backed down pricing to capture the next rung of the market. The prices will eventually settle closer to labor cost.
Consumer resistance to inflation is another factor. Each year, the amount of income per production increases, causing a rise in prices; consumers dislike rising prices, and so will slow their purchasing. This causes downward price pressure. Manufacturers have attempted downsizing on goods they can't adequately cut prices on.
Let's take some real data.
The Consumer Price Index shows a general increase in prices per unit good of 0.8% across 2014 and 0.7% across 2015; the CPI for food shows food has inflated much faster than general inflation, at 2.4% and 1.9%, with home-cooked meals experiencing a 2.4% and 1.2% price increase (eating out became a lot more expensive in 2014--2.9% over the year).
Wait, it wasn't approaching from the opposite direction? In my state, if you signal to change lanes while moving with traffic, the driver behind you must yield; failure to do so is a $250 fine. Assholes around here like to speed up into your blind spot to keep you from changing lanes in front of them, hence the fine.
In practice, right-of-way alternates in this situation. If the lane is clear and you proceed, you have right-of-way. If the traffic coming the opposite way plows through, they are violating your right-of-way. Whether it's actually safe to proceed in such a fashion is another matter; it's *reasonable*, it's *legal*, and it's really the only way to handle the situation besides just parking and waiting for the police to send an officer to direct traffic, but it's not necessarily safe.
A hydrogen economy would be useless for exactly that reason. To store hydrogen, you need exotic materials and high-energy cooling systems. Hydrogen leaks through sealed steel; you'd need to use a lot of energy to keep a hydrogen storage unit idle. This is okay when you're making, shipping, burning; but it's not okay when you fill up your gas tank once a month.
If they could combine the hydrogen with CO2 and make O2+C4H, they could use methane to drive fuel cells or internal combustion. You can actually store methane.
Protectionism isn't good for the economy and won't create more jobs; this is simple radicalized middle-class politics. The ideal is to deceive people via their lack of knowledge, making them poorer and convincing them to worship you for it.
People don't realize *consumers* pay wages, not businesses. If it takes a sum total, through all levels of production, of $350 of paid wages to make a product, then that product costs no less than $350. That's why a cell phone in 1985 cost over $1,000, but in 2015 you can get a smart phone with a quad core processor and 64GB of storage for $300: there were over a thousand dollars of wages funneled into those old, enormous bricks, between mining raw materials and manufacturing silicone wafers and assembling the cases and all. Even if they slapped no profit margin on top at all, the phone would have been over a thousand dollars.
When you reduce the amount of per-unit labor costs to make a product, you eliminate some employment. Eliminate too much in a short time and you get the Industrial Revolution: 80% unemployment and a collapsed economy. Otherwise, you just get a few thousand unemployed and several hundred million (or, globally, several billion) consumers with a few unspent dollars left in their pockets that they didn't have before. Those unspent dollars are a market opportunity to sell a new product or bring a niche product (rich people toys) to the masses; but expanding that production capacity requires labor, so you create new jobs.
In domestic economics, you actually create more local jobs by aggressively outsourcing, so long as your labor balance slides more slowly than your wealth. That is: If 50% of your employment is domestic and you save enough money outsourcing to create 10% more jobs, you have the *same* number of domestic employees if you end with 45.45% of your employment domestic and the rest outsourced. You start with 50 Chinese and 50 American workers, you eliminate 10 American jobs in favor of 10 Chinese jobs, and you get 40 and 60; along the way you find you can sell 10% more stuff, so you employ 10% more workers, and end up with 50 and 60--10 new Chinese jobs overall, more stuff being made for the same amount of money, and the 50 American workers are living a higher standard-of-living because they can buy more stuff since it's all cheaper.
Obviously, if you start shoveling jobs out to China like crazy without creating new American jobs, this doesn't work. Historically, that's not how it's worked; it's not even how it works today. People cry because they say "that person's job was lost to that foreigner!", but they don't ask what happened next. They conveniently ignore that our GDP per capita has gone up by 6.3% in the past two years while expenses have gone up by 4.2%, and ignore that all this mass outsourcing has resulted in unemployment dropping to 5.5% from 8.5% (from a 4 year peak of 10%, even). They ignore that there are more jobs and more *income per person*, and engage in the trade of platitudes about someone losing their job once.
You may as well say that a doctor lost a patient in OR, so we should ban all surgery.
To my understanding--which is generated by a severe abuse of my visual and spatial systems associating abstract concepts to group the various behaviors and impacts--there's a difference between the acquisition of specific skills and the acquisition of general skills. I've generalized this distinction by focusing on the reusability of skills: if acquiring skill X makes you good at task X, then you have a low-resuability skill; if acquiring skill X makes you good at *many* tasks T, you have a high-reusability skill; and if acquiring skill X compounds to improve your ability to acquire further skills S of a broad spread of technical basis, you have an *extremely* high-reusability skill.
People used to call Education "reading, writing, and arithmetic." Generalizing this, education provides the basic skills a person needs. There's a reason you can be "educated" without being a mechanical engineer or a doctor: education is not being a particular thing with a particular set of knowledge. Likewise, we see these highly-skilled mechanics who are all uneducated rednecks living in trailer parks, and so education is not having *a* particular distinct skill. We can intuit that education is the common ground, at least.
Basic skills, common ground. Education is both the knowledge that allows you to function in general and the common social ground that knowledge provides.
That's a crystalized explanation. It's not as fluid as what's going on in my head, but it suffices. You are welcome to take it apart and draw all kinds of generalized conclusions from it, since I can't transfer such conclusions due to a lack of mental telepathy with which to directly commune with your mind. Language was invented because telepathy isn't a thing (although I can fix that, too, to a crude degree...).
That's why I recognize education as things like study skills, mental arithmetic, executive function training, and mnemonics. I don't restrict mnemonics to things like the mind palace and the person-action-object system; a generalized understanding of memory tells us that organization and association are constants, and so even changing our methods of thinking and examining study material in the smallest ways provide large gains in academic performance. You start with how to use the brain, and then you move down through the more direct mathematics skills, the engineering skills, language skills, artistic skills, and piles of abstract data such as history and literature to provide a basis to draw from (creativity and invention stem from an analysis of your memory's existing contents and a rearrangement of those contents to provide a new function). Math is more direct than studying, but less direct than chemistry.
Education might span an introduction to skills like computer usage, simple engineering, and various forms of writing. Those broad skills cross domains. I'm not a computer programmer, but I chew through any pile of data like mad with a few bash and awk scripts because I have the basic skills to rearrange a few tools into a pipeline of useful actions; a computer programmer has a much harder job, and I've been trying to force those particular skills into my own brain, with limited success. Basic functionality with the tools I'll see every day, or the ones that will let me tear any job into tiny pieces and then shuffle them together into a working form? That's more education than a deep study into computer science.
Deep study into computer programming, OS architecture, processor architecture, and the like gives me skills of limited use. Sure, I can now get a job as a computer engineer; the full depth of these skills aren't useful for any other career, and giving these skills to everyone makes computer engineers tomorrow's burger flippers. Burger flippers are important, but they're also worthless: you fire them for looking at you the wrong way and replace them with one of the millions of others waiting outside your door begging for a job. You don't fire computer engineers for combing the
I've had arguments with this guy. He has definitely said things to that effect. A less-direct statement to that effect is written into the preamble of the GPLv2; I've only ever gotten the full potato out of RMS by arguing with him directly about the MIT and BSD licenses. The man could feed the Irish.
Basically, Richard Stallman's line is that the MIT license restricts your freedom as a software developer and a software user, and the GPL protects it. It's backwards double-think.
This is an example of protectionist politics: the SFC is afraid of the precedent by which a work of non-GPL status constructed in such a way would somehow not be forced to release under GPL. Then someone might find a way around gettext by linking against a stub library with the same ABI and then distributing with the actual gettext in a repo (the weak argument for GPL provisions about dynamic linking is ridiculous, and only survives by continuing to play on the ignorance of judges; when the judges realize you're laughing at their stupidity, they will be *very* unhappy with you).
Michael Crichton once gave a long talk on global warming being caused by aliens. He had... difficulties with the scientific community. Mostly this comes from stuff like the Drake Equation having dozens of different, unknown, unknowable, unpredictable, and barely-definable variables to say, "If we make a bunch of shit up to fill in here, we get infinite or zero aliens coming to visit us ever!" The same kinds of mathematical models are used for global warming and nuclear winters--claiming that so much volcanic output, so many nukes, such yield of nukes, some positioning, the anger of the Yellowstone Caldera, and so forth would lead to so much ash in the air, which, given some arbitrary behaviors of air currents, would lead to a reduction of insolation, leading to some years of freezing.
We're looking at more of these models here. The scientists are saying, "Based on unknown, unknowable, unmeasured variables which we jammed into a very sound equation and then filled with made-up data, there are some number of life-sustaining planets out there!" They're putting in "reasonable guesses" and declaring results.
If a thousand letters flood in this month about a particular campaign point, it's likely that a large chunk of the population has been angered into action. That large chunk is probably 0.0000001%; and we know they're only the tiniest fraction of a population who find the point meaningful. If they're so up in arms as to start sending letters, it means there's a *lot* of people out there who are going to perk up if you start speaking about the issue, and raise pitch forks if you start pushing back against their will.
A handful of letters on one topic when there's no such noise coming your way about another topic means a sizable number of voters are thinking about that topic, even though only a few have decided to do something about it. You should probably pay attention if you don't want to lose the next election despite the six billion dollars of campaign contributions Exxon-Mobil sent you this year.
Actually... the reduction in cost from buying and re-buying the same media again and again *is* a path to job creation. The "you paid $20 for the DVD, and now you'll pay $20 for a DVD that plays on your iPod, and $20 for a license to play your $20 DVD on your Mac, and $20 again for a license to watch the DVD on your phone via Amazon" thing just prices a single good at $100 when the cost isn't actually higher. Instead of paying $300 for a device to play a copy of a DVD you dumped to an SD card, you have to pay $300 and then an extra $20 per DVD you dump to that SD card, and the device maker has to have its own infrastructure and legal agreements to sell you an additional copy of that DVD so they can make sure it's locked to your device.
This all sounds like a good way to make up bullshit jobs (which don't really exist--obviously, the jobs in question would be there to get around regulatory hurdles and make the company a profit), except that consumers don't magically have an extra $2,000 to spend on all these duplicate DVDs. Those jobs vanish away, and anything the consumer *does* buy tends to funnel mostly into licensing fees going up to the content creator--they have to make their money, and target per-unit rather than an amortization, since eliminating the lossy side of a loss-gain net positive average gets you bigger profits--which means the money is going to inefficient corporate profits instead of jobs.
As much as corporate profits aren't evil, pouring additional profits into a corporation's bottom line at the expense of wage jobs is a good way to increase unemployment. It's just slow and inefficient: it doesn't erase the money, but it does slow down the creation of buying power demand, making sure new jobs don't pop up quite as quickly, while not slowing down the elimination of old jobs as we find ways to do more with less labor time. When you eliminate 200,000 jobs per year and only create 120,000 jobs per year, unemployment starts growing; when you eliminate 200,000 jobs per year and create 200,000 jobs per year, you hold to a nice, stable unemployment rate. It's a factor of time.
This is one of the very few cases where someone says "job creation" and isn't completely fucking wrong about jobs actually being created by the mechanism they're focusing on.
Education isn't a universally good idea; it depends on how you define education. Currently, we're trying to define education as "job skills" and not as "general knowledge," and so we call College "education" and ignore K-12. With eyes back on K-12, we're placating the masses by folding job skills into K-12 curriculum and calling it education.
That's all abstract. It's great politics.
More directly: we should teach students how to use their fucking brains. The brain is such an intuitive tool that people don't realize they have no idea how to operate it. You can extend human memory through trivial mnemonics techniques; you can greatly increase learning through strategic study routines; and you can optimize damn near everything by the simple mechanism of reflection. We turn little kids into human calculators by forcing them to memorize a 9x9 multiplication table and six pairs of numbers. We're so focused on passing tests and having some nameable skill that we don't give people the unnamable quality of intelligence.
Without job skill education, you have a labor shortage: you want programmers, but there aren't enough programmers to go around; you have to hire entrants based on your long-term strategy, and train them into programmers. The time-intensive, low-skill jobs get moved off your high-dollar senior programmers and onto the new guy, and your senior programmers take the much faster task of checking the work; more skill-intensive work moves down to the junior programmer as he learns, giving an immediate and incremental return-on-investment. That's the world you have when only the extremely wealthy can get to college on their own--and the extremely wealthy usually want to get MBAs or law degrees.
Without the labor shortage pressure, you just go out and grab someone at random--essentially whoever's easiest to control. You have a million programmer jobs and twenty million programmers, and you sift through the two hundred applicants and find the guy who will go for low pay and poor benefits. If you lose the employee, you're down a couple weeks of productivity, and it's not really that important anyway; it's not like you're working in a market that's only got the pool of people who've been trained because someone couldn't afford to wait for their competitors to get ahead of them by training someone first, where you'll have to either offer high salaries or take the strategic route of bringing in a new guy--a decision based on whether your team can function well enough by moving grunt work down or whether they really need another high-level software engineer to help tackle the intensive architectural planning. You're hiring a $5 wrench off a peg at Sears.
We gave up on educating students long ago, and went to building a low-power workforce. We give people skills and tell them it will help them compete, and it's only half true: it helps them compete in a world where everyone else has that skill; and the blanket action creates a world where everyone has that skill, putting them all at a disadvantage. We'd all be better off if we all got educated and then got dumped onto the streets with no job skills and no college education that we couldn't pay for ourselves or convince an employer that we needed; and we'd be *especially* better off if we had an education system that taught us to be smart and learn 4 years of college in 18 months without having a fucking psychotic episode.
The problem is nobody cares. They don't care if you can get them a better life; they only care about what's in front of them. If you take someone's poisoned food away in favor of creating a system in which they all have the opportunity to get food and live healthier lives, they'll all scream that you should just give them that system but *also* give them the food they were already getting. They'll demand you poison them until their livers rot out and their eyes turn yellow with jaundice because they don't want you to take something away from them.
Well you can claim to have bitcoins and sound pompous. You can display your bitcoin holdings on your phone. Isn't that what women do with useless rocks?
A commodity is a tradeable object--it's a good. Wheat, dirt, rocks, liquid nitrogen, bull semen. Bitcoin doesn't represent ownership of a company, so it's not a stock; and it's not issued by a central bank (even gold bullion was stamped by an official mint), so it's not a currency. It's manufactured by individuals using their own resources, and then traded for money or other commodities.
No, gold was used as a currency for most of recorded history. It was used as a currency in poor societies where the majority of trade was barter, and where actual money was restricted to a rich elite class who traded in a symbol to remind them that their glorious empire favored them and could make them poor.
Gold isn't just deflationary, as the naive analysis would suggest--as we find ways to produce a thing with less labor, its representative buying power falls, as it now represents 1/10,000,000 of the people working in the fields rather than 1/10,000. Gold is also relative: maybe today we have a new way to mine or smelt gold with less labor, and so gold ingots are worth a lot less; and next week we realize the mines are running dry, so gold is worth a lot more because we can get the *same* number of tonnes of gold out only by employing *three times as much* labor-hours; and then we find a new mine and gold is suddenly worth very little.
That means commodity currency is unstable. The amount of buying power per unit currency fluctuates greatly because it's tied directly to labor. Fiat currencies approach a unit value approximated by the amount of income divided by the amount of production: all the money paid for all things made and sold is what represents all things made and sold. It's a definition by tautology. (Income / Production) just says "the amount of money we pay for things is equal to the amount of money we pay for those things". This means fiat currencies gain buying power (deflation) as we create new technology to reduce labor used to make things; and, unlike commodity currency (gold, silver, sheep), we can counteract this (neutral) or exceed this (inflation) by printing and introducing more money. We can also print up more money as population expands, leaving production scarcity to control population growth.
Gold only made a good currency when we had a very small set of extremely rich people and a large population of serfs. The Roman Empire's Equestrian class was 25,000 strong in a population of over 50,000,000 (.05%), whereas our top 10% have a similar proportion of the wealth spread among them (they also have *more* total wealth, and only our poorest are actually less-wealthy than rich Roman senators). The Romans only had to keep their serfs alive and clothed with last year's fashion, which they tossed out of their wardrobes when a new fashion came out, handing down rich people's old clothes as poor people's new clothes. Of course gold was a workable currency for the tiniest sliver of overly-rich assholes running everything; nobody else had to use it!
Slashdot Mirror
They don't produce better code. LibreSSL is not vulnerable because LibreSSL is OpenSSL with SSLv2 turned off; they just deleted a feature. You can't compile it in, whereas on OpenSSL you have the option to run without SSLv2.
OpenBSD LibreSSL is largely OpenSSL, and the part that has the vulnerability was *removed* rather than fixed. You might as well say a fork of Firefox has better code because it has no JavaScript engine and thus isn't vulnerable to Spidermonkey bugs.
Agreed. I have major issues with CPI and GDP; I consider them rough calculations with *serious* flaws. For this purpose, they're close enough. I don't make a habit of making large economic decisions from precise computations; the numbers generally fall in line, and I assume that line isn't exactly straight but is going in the same direction most of the time.
They're useful when debating economic behaviors, since nobody wants to rely on the backing behaviors. Nobody wants to say, "Gee, we invented all these techniques for producing more with less, and laid off all these people ... maybe it costs less to make the same stuff!" Nobody wants to accept that businesses are always looking to cut costs and increase net revenue; they'll accept competition, but only when it works for them--I've had people argue in one statement that businesses will just take profits and not lower prices, and then argue in the next that businesses would *never* raise prices if you gave consumers *tons* of money because a competitor would undercut their prices. I like mechanics, but people want numbers.
You're operating on a vacuum assumption in your own head without looking at the world around you. You go, "Oh, that doesn't make sense to me, so I'll make up bullshit and claim everything based on solid analysis and understanding is made-up bullshit." It's familiar to me: it's called a cargo-cult. Basically, anything that's not simple is obviously suspect, and anyone who knows wtf they're talking about must have an agenda and is thus lying.
You are reveling in your ignorance and wielding stupidity as a weapon.
You'll note that dishwashers, washing machines, dryers, and those other nice tools all arrived *prior* to the dual income family becoming standard
Yes. They removed the strain on household labor, thus freeing up that labor resource and making way for a labor bubble. I *just* explained that.
Where we are going is an economy where productivity keeps increasing compared to labor hours spent.
Are going? That's where wealth comes from. I've been writing about this for a while. The toxic component is time: if you eliminate 2% of labor in a year and create 2% more jobs, you have stable unemployment; if you eliminate 20% of labor in a year and create 7% more jobs, you have growing unemployment (you just moved from 4% to 16.5% unemployment).
In the Industrial Revolution, they moved from manual weaving to the power loom, immediately cutting that 479 labor-hours of shirt-making back to near 100 labor-hours; they got 80% unemployment for nearly 100 years. Since then, we've steadily progressed to an economy where it takes not even 7 labor-hours per single shirt to grow the cotton, harvest the cotton, dye the cotton, spin the thread, weave the thread, construct the shirt, package the shirt, ship the shirt, and retail the shirt on store shelves.
What do you think GMO crops, advanced fertilizers, pesticides, harvesting machines, planting machines, and refrigeration did to the farming economy? In 1970, India was growing 2 tonnes of rice per hectare of land, and selling it for a price of $550/tonne; by 2000, inflation raises that $550/tonne to over $3,000. By the year 2000, India was growing 6 tonnes of rice per hectare of land area, and selling it for under $200/tonne. In 30 years, they decreased the costs of manufacturing rice by around 93%, which means a sum total reduction of labor in aggregate when accounting for all levels of the supply chain in the business of producing rice. 93% of the humans involved in making 1 tonne of rice are no longer employed in making that tonne of rice; they might produce a larger population in response and thus make more rice to feed said population, and so not actually unemploy 93% of their farmers, but the proportion did drop.
the income from a single job has been degraded since the 70s as more and more of those middle class jobs exited via outsourcing, to be replaced by lower wage jobs, if at all
So back in the 70s we had cars with 6 CD changers, satellite radio, air conditioning standard, anti-lock brakes, electronic stability control, airbags, 4 wheel independent suspension, On-Star, and a $2,000 satellite navigation system option? Air conditioning in cars did become standard in 1968; by 1969, about half of all cars had air conditioning units. 2/3 had car radios in 1970--it was still common to see cars with no radio in the 70s. Never mind satellite systems, multi-CD changers, and the like.
What about cell phones? We had the color TFT in 1998, and the Compaq iPaq had a wireless radio option to operate as a cellular phone; yet people barely got on with a $600 Motorola V3 Razr. The cellular phones of 1973 weighed 5 pounds; in 1983, they became commercially available at a cost of $4,000 (over $9,000 2014), with a service cost of $50/month plus 40 cents per minute. For $60/month on a $350 phone, I have data service and can stream Spotify to and f
Schizoid personality disorder. My emotions hardly work at all; when they do it's not really great anyway. On a good day, I might have anger management issues and rage at idiots on the Internet; usually I'm just bored. I'm aromantic and asexual as part of the deal, as romance requires some sort of interest in emotional attachment (which makes zero sense to me) and sexual activity is a complex social interaction which creates a large amount of stress (and also is messy and kind of unpleasant). I become more analytical when drunk, and recognize the experience largely as flu-like symptoms, with my teeth trying to crawl out of my head.
Seriously. Very broken. People always figure me for a genius when observing long enough, but they don't get the mechanism. On the bright side, I figured out geniuses are made, not born, and know roughly how to rewire anyone's brain to put them into the intellectual elite. One day, I want to fold that into education; I don't have a good plan for that yet.
A lot of people will raise their hands and claim they're different and that somehow they're ... different. Not that they've got a different habitual response trained by their basic interests and corresponding activities, but that they were born with a superior brain. My personality defects and general interests lead to the method of thinking that separates me from the dull herds; it's the same with the rest of them. What makes us attentive and smart is the same mechanism that makes the sheep mindless: our brains become overtaxed and fall back on the standard, least-effort behavior; some of us are so used to overanalyzing that we go straight there because anything else would require forethought and effort.
Optimistically those 10 high paying american jobs become a combination of 10 mid to low-paying jobs. They're still employed! Yay!
Actually, it's not that simple.
When you outsource those 10 jobs to China, the products they make become cheaper. For example: manufacturing a shirt used to require 479 labor-hours pre-industrial-revolution, a cost of about $4,000 at $8.25/hr (my state minimum); today, such a shirt costs $15, or 6.67 hours at $2.25/hr Chinese labor.
Take it in reverse: a cheap t-shirt would cost $55 at local minimum wage. Clothing currently equates to 2.8% of annual household budgets; if, instead, it equated to 10.3%, what would happen to the 7.5% of products each household could no longer afford? What would happen to those jobs?
The answer is not that people would work more. We're not going back to an economy where we used a different technique; we're going to an economy where we've cut back working hours by a high-tech technique, but didn't cut back costs. This prevents consumers from purchasing new products, and that means labor to produce those products doesn't get paid because those products aren't bought, so we just don't hire those people.
This is well-understood economics. I wasn't the first to come up with it; I found out this was called Ricardo's Theory of Comparative Advantage after I designed my models, although my own models are more complete and more reliable than modern economic theory. I focus on macroeconomic form: most economists are bean counters trying to predict the stock market and commodities market, explaining what the so-called value of a particular good should be and what its correct price is; I focus on the broad movement of economics throughout history and the repeating patterns, identifying how wealth grows and what impacts the long-term changes in that respect. I don't care to say how rich we're going to be by doing X; just that X will occur and it will cause some effect to increase or decrease total wealth, employment, individual buying power, or the like.
That is no longer the case, with the total labor force shrinking every year since 2006 [bls.gov]. It's actually worse than that, if you go further back.
We've been in a labor force bubble since 1970. Housewives gave way to working couples and middle-class families living at an extended standard-of-living (two people work, draw more income, and buy more stuff, living like rich people--we've normalized this, so they're just middle-class). We didn't replace those housewives with maids and servants in every household; on the other hand, we *did* get nice dishwashers, washing machines, and other tools to dramatically reduce the domestic working hour load. Housewives don't have to slave over the kitchen sink for eight hours each week and then spend 12 more hours handling laundry; they spend an hour on these tasks combined and still take care of our domestic affairs. I won't paint a picture where women are now enslaved to two careers, because they're not.
It's the only way it's worked. Initially we shipped labor intensive work like textiles out. Then more expensive jobs that included things like EPA restrictions. As the manufacturing base overseas ramped up, it wasn't long before more and more of those higher paying middle class jobs all left, if they could. There were some initial jobs created to build up the infrastructure to support the imports, but once done that number shrank again and now there are fewer total jobs.
Yet a labor participation rate of about 60% is normal across all of human history, and unemployment rates of 4%-8% in healthy economies span back as far as the Roman Empire. Labor participation rates are higher in poorer societies, yet even serfs had women keeping house and raising children in
The best part is steel melts around 2400 degrees, but it loses over 80% of its strength around 800 degrees. If you heat up steel beams with a diesel fire, they'll get a little hot, but they won't melt; if you put several hundred tonnes of concrete on those steel beams and heat them up, they'll buckle, and the building will collapse.
This leads to idiots skimping on insulation for main columns, since any fire that could melt steel beams would compromise the structure anyway. It also leads to engineers designing steel beams with integrated piping systems and running the fire suppression system's water feed through the main column as a built-in cooling system: when there's a fire, the columns get constant cooling via water flowing through them.
Nothing is stronger than steel, but you have to decide what you want out of it. You want heat resistance and excessively high tensile strength? Go inconel. You want corrosion resistance and high hardness? VG-10, with vanadium carbide to change the electrical affinity of the lattice structure such that it won't accept negative ions--it won't oxidize and it will somewhat resist acid. You want cheap and serviceable? 440 stainless. Light-weight? Go with a titanium alloy, but you're sacrificing some strength. Steel bicycles cycle infinitely, as almost any grade of steel can flex over and over again forever as long as it doesn't bend to the point of permanent deformation; aluminum weakens with each vibration, eventually cracking wholesale.
Price, performance, trade-offs. Buildings shift and flex--high-rise buildings wobble in the wind--so you want something that can cycle and that's flexible. You want something hard, with high compressive and tensile strength, but also low cost. If you want fire resistance, you'd better integrate thermal controls--insulation or a water coolant loop--because you can't build steel columns out of inconel.
It's not more likely to fail; it's given more samples. A Web server doesn't fail in testing; then you put it up to the scrutiny of millions of requests per hour, and it cracks under the load. The CPU heats up in a way it wouldn't under testing because it was only ever driven at 50% for 2 hours straight. The software is exposed to requests you didn't test for. 1 in 100 million goes quick when you're doing 10 million attempts per hour.
It's simpler than that.
Your brain restructures itself based on common tasks, including modes of thinking. To override this, you need to first make a decision in your prefrontal cortex (PFX), the analytical part of your brain. Then you need to enforce it by energizing your dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFX), overriding your midbrain's decision-making process. In other words: your brain is on rails, and you use a specific part of your brain to decide when to switch rails, and a specific part of *that* part of your brain to force the rest of your brain to jump track.
All of this takes energy.
Go do push-ups until your arms hurt. Then take a 1 minute break and do it again. Keep doing this. In about 5 minutes, you'll be laying on the ground unable to use your arms. You will be physically incapable of doing another push-up--not just strained, not just sore, but physically incapable of lifting your body. Your muscles won't be able to do it.
The mitochondria in your cells manufacture and store adenosine triphosphate (ATP). They burn this--literally burn, for a small spark of heat--to power chemical reactions. When your brain exhausts its primary neurotransmitter reserves and burns off its ATP reserves, it shuts down just like your muscles. The brain isn't a muscle, but it's a biological tissue made up of cells powered by chemical reactions requiring activation energy; if it runs out of fuel, it stops working.
Your brain is under a lot of stress in an emergency situation.
How quickly do you think you'll run out of fuel reserves with which to make complex decisions?
Under stress, people fall into old habits. They bite their nails. They become bitchy. They start tying and untying their ties. They shuffle papers. They do little fidgety things they do all the time, or that they used to do but trained out of themselves. Their brains go right back on the rails and they stop thinking, because they've diverted too much energy to contemplating the emergency and don't have the reserves to manage their thoughts.
It's not about being lazy, offloading responsibility, or being too stupid to recognize that your glorious leader is an idiot; you simply don't have the capability to do that many things at once. I'm different because my brain is wired to go analytic when I'm under stress: my emotions don't fucking work (hi, I have a severe personality disorder!) and my most familiar pattern is the one that assesses. That's just like everyone else: I stop thinking and start reacting blindly, whatever it may look like from the outside, because that's how I've always reacted to everything. People who flake out under stress are doing the same thing.
That has some interesting implications for depression and anxiety: there's a reason cognitive therapy is more than *twice* as effective long-term compared to anti-depression medication when controlling severe depression, and why ADM is only three times as effective as a placebo ADM. Installing habitual responses that trigger on collapsing emotional states takes a *lot* of effort and is exhausting, especially when you're severely depressed; and it takes several months to fit it out so as to reliably counteract the depressive episodes. You rewire your brain to ride down a particular rail when it encounters a particular condition, and it handles the rest itself, and you never have a relapse again in your life because that would take effort.
It's the same with intelligence: we can train people to have better memories (mnemonics techniques, among other things), to compute numbers rapidly, to learn quickly, and to organize their lives by instilling good time-management practices. We can train them to react to stress and emergency situations the same way I do--without the severe social disorders that came with my base package--and they'll stop following the idiot robot into a burning building, or driving off a bridge because their GPS says so. You change what takes *little* energy by investing a *lot* of energy in twisting your brain into a new shape, and you fix that shit forever.
It has nothing to do with what makes sense; it's just what's easy for your brain.
Ahhhh, that's a problem. It should have signaled to the *left* to indicate its lane change, even for a partial lane change.
I assume only long-term economic behaviors which have operated as such since hunter-gatherer man.
the reduction in unemployment you refer to are people settling for (two or three) jobs as unskilled labor
The reduction in unemployment is per-capita, and you don't get -3 unemployment for 1 person getting 3 jobs. Employment is a function of job availability, not a function of how job-ready the populous is; and job availability is a function of what the populous can buy.
My logic successfully and correctly predicts all gross economic behaviors throughout human history. Your arguments are idealistic platitudes. Particularly of note:
you assume all profits are fed back into the local economy
That's not what happens. Various economic factors drive prices down. Let's explore some.
Competition is the biggest one: either direct (food producers are *common*, so you can't overcharge on food without losing customers) or indirect (smartphones are more popular than Crocs, so you can't have that huge mark-up on Crocs and expect people to buy your product when they won't have money left over after buying a smartphone). Goods with bigger markets--more demand--are more ripe for competition; low-demand and low-flexibility goods and services (rental housing is a notable one; diamonds are another) aren't, and tend to hold bigger margins and drive off price competition more readily.
A special case of competition is supply-chain competition. When GM wants to build cars, they find a contract for, say, 100 million tonnes of steel per year for 5 years. There are a dozen steel mills with that kind of output. Say they each charge $500/tonne for steel. A steel mill makes that steel at a cost of $430/tonne. When approached, the steel mill goes back to the steel ore mine and the coal mine (you need coal to make steel) and negotiates for a contract for massive amounts of ore and coal to ensure it won't breach contract. The same process occurs: the costs of these things drop from $200 of coal per steel-tonne and $150 of ore per steel-tonne to something closer to the *labor cost* of those products. In the end, the steel producer gets his costs down to $230/tonne, and sells steel to GM for $232/tonne, netting a $200 million per-year profit (thanks to the coal miners and steel ore miners also cutting their margins razor-thin to capture a $200 million per-year contract for 5 years--a billion dollar sale they'd otherwise miss out on).
That kind of supply-chain contracting drives prices for things like cars and buildings down toward labor costs.
Market saturation is another factor. 1TB SSDs cost about $200 to make last year, but had a price of $700; now they carry a price of $330. All the early adopters have thrown in their money, buying up drives with huge margins; it's no longer **profitable** to charge those big margins, so Samsung et al have backed down pricing to capture the next rung of the market. The prices will eventually settle closer to labor cost.
Consumer resistance to inflation is another factor. Each year, the amount of income per production increases, causing a rise in prices; consumers dislike rising prices, and so will slow their purchasing. This causes downward price pressure. Manufacturers have attempted downsizing on goods they can't adequately cut prices on.
Let's take some real data.
The Consumer Price Index shows a general increase in prices per unit good of 0.8% across 2014 and 0.7% across 2015; the CPI for food shows food has inflated much faster than general inflation, at 2.4% and 1.9%, with home-cooked meals experiencing a 2.4% and 1.2% price increase (eating out became a lot more expensive in 2014--2.9% over the year).
The GDP per capita in 2013 was $52,607.9
Technically, sideswiping another vehicle at 2mph isn't unsafe; it's just inconvenient.
Wait, it wasn't approaching from the opposite direction? In my state, if you signal to change lanes while moving with traffic, the driver behind you must yield; failure to do so is a $250 fine. Assholes around here like to speed up into your blind spot to keep you from changing lanes in front of them, hence the fine.
In practice, right-of-way alternates in this situation. If the lane is clear and you proceed, you have right-of-way. If the traffic coming the opposite way plows through, they are violating your right-of-way. Whether it's actually safe to proceed in such a fashion is another matter; it's *reasonable*, it's *legal*, and it's really the only way to handle the situation besides just parking and waiting for the police to send an officer to direct traffic, but it's not necessarily safe.
A hydrogen economy would be useless for exactly that reason. To store hydrogen, you need exotic materials and high-energy cooling systems. Hydrogen leaks through sealed steel; you'd need to use a lot of energy to keep a hydrogen storage unit idle. This is okay when you're making, shipping, burning; but it's not okay when you fill up your gas tank once a month.
If they could combine the hydrogen with CO2 and make O2+C4H, they could use methane to drive fuel cells or internal combustion. You can actually store methane.
Protectionism isn't good for the economy and won't create more jobs; this is simple radicalized middle-class politics. The ideal is to deceive people via their lack of knowledge, making them poorer and convincing them to worship you for it.
People don't realize *consumers* pay wages, not businesses. If it takes a sum total, through all levels of production, of $350 of paid wages to make a product, then that product costs no less than $350. That's why a cell phone in 1985 cost over $1,000, but in 2015 you can get a smart phone with a quad core processor and 64GB of storage for $300: there were over a thousand dollars of wages funneled into those old, enormous bricks, between mining raw materials and manufacturing silicone wafers and assembling the cases and all. Even if they slapped no profit margin on top at all, the phone would have been over a thousand dollars.
When you reduce the amount of per-unit labor costs to make a product, you eliminate some employment. Eliminate too much in a short time and you get the Industrial Revolution: 80% unemployment and a collapsed economy. Otherwise, you just get a few thousand unemployed and several hundred million (or, globally, several billion) consumers with a few unspent dollars left in their pockets that they didn't have before. Those unspent dollars are a market opportunity to sell a new product or bring a niche product (rich people toys) to the masses; but expanding that production capacity requires labor, so you create new jobs.
In domestic economics, you actually create more local jobs by aggressively outsourcing, so long as your labor balance slides more slowly than your wealth. That is: If 50% of your employment is domestic and you save enough money outsourcing to create 10% more jobs, you have the *same* number of domestic employees if you end with 45.45% of your employment domestic and the rest outsourced. You start with 50 Chinese and 50 American workers, you eliminate 10 American jobs in favor of 10 Chinese jobs, and you get 40 and 60; along the way you find you can sell 10% more stuff, so you employ 10% more workers, and end up with 50 and 60--10 new Chinese jobs overall, more stuff being made for the same amount of money, and the 50 American workers are living a higher standard-of-living because they can buy more stuff since it's all cheaper.
Obviously, if you start shoveling jobs out to China like crazy without creating new American jobs, this doesn't work. Historically, that's not how it's worked; it's not even how it works today. People cry because they say "that person's job was lost to that foreigner!", but they don't ask what happened next. They conveniently ignore that our GDP per capita has gone up by 6.3% in the past two years while expenses have gone up by 4.2%, and ignore that all this mass outsourcing has resulted in unemployment dropping to 5.5% from 8.5% (from a 4 year peak of 10%, even). They ignore that there are more jobs and more *income per person*, and engage in the trade of platitudes about someone losing their job once.
You may as well say that a doctor lost a patient in OR, so we should ban all surgery.
To my understanding--which is generated by a severe abuse of my visual and spatial systems associating abstract concepts to group the various behaviors and impacts--there's a difference between the acquisition of specific skills and the acquisition of general skills. I've generalized this distinction by focusing on the reusability of skills: if acquiring skill X makes you good at task X, then you have a low-resuability skill; if acquiring skill X makes you good at *many* tasks T, you have a high-reusability skill; and if acquiring skill X compounds to improve your ability to acquire further skills S of a broad spread of technical basis, you have an *extremely* high-reusability skill.
People used to call Education "reading, writing, and arithmetic." Generalizing this, education provides the basic skills a person needs. There's a reason you can be "educated" without being a mechanical engineer or a doctor: education is not being a particular thing with a particular set of knowledge. Likewise, we see these highly-skilled mechanics who are all uneducated rednecks living in trailer parks, and so education is not having *a* particular distinct skill. We can intuit that education is the common ground, at least.
Basic skills, common ground. Education is both the knowledge that allows you to function in general and the common social ground that knowledge provides.
That's a crystalized explanation. It's not as fluid as what's going on in my head, but it suffices. You are welcome to take it apart and draw all kinds of generalized conclusions from it, since I can't transfer such conclusions due to a lack of mental telepathy with which to directly commune with your mind. Language was invented because telepathy isn't a thing (although I can fix that, too, to a crude degree...).
That's why I recognize education as things like study skills, mental arithmetic, executive function training, and mnemonics. I don't restrict mnemonics to things like the mind palace and the person-action-object system; a generalized understanding of memory tells us that organization and association are constants, and so even changing our methods of thinking and examining study material in the smallest ways provide large gains in academic performance. You start with how to use the brain, and then you move down through the more direct mathematics skills, the engineering skills, language skills, artistic skills, and piles of abstract data such as history and literature to provide a basis to draw from (creativity and invention stem from an analysis of your memory's existing contents and a rearrangement of those contents to provide a new function). Math is more direct than studying, but less direct than chemistry.
Education might span an introduction to skills like computer usage, simple engineering, and various forms of writing. Those broad skills cross domains. I'm not a computer programmer, but I chew through any pile of data like mad with a few bash and awk scripts because I have the basic skills to rearrange a few tools into a pipeline of useful actions; a computer programmer has a much harder job, and I've been trying to force those particular skills into my own brain, with limited success. Basic functionality with the tools I'll see every day, or the ones that will let me tear any job into tiny pieces and then shuffle them together into a working form? That's more education than a deep study into computer science.
Deep study into computer programming, OS architecture, processor architecture, and the like gives me skills of limited use. Sure, I can now get a job as a computer engineer; the full depth of these skills aren't useful for any other career, and giving these skills to everyone makes computer engineers tomorrow's burger flippers. Burger flippers are important, but they're also worthless: you fire them for looking at you the wrong way and replace them with one of the millions of others waiting outside your door begging for a job. You don't fire computer engineers for combing the
I've had arguments with this guy. He has definitely said things to that effect. A less-direct statement to that effect is written into the preamble of the GPLv2; I've only ever gotten the full potato out of RMS by arguing with him directly about the MIT and BSD licenses. The man could feed the Irish.
Basically, Richard Stallman's line is that the MIT license restricts your freedom as a software developer and a software user, and the GPL protects it. It's backwards double-think.
This is an example of protectionist politics: the SFC is afraid of the precedent by which a work of non-GPL status constructed in such a way would somehow not be forced to release under GPL. Then someone might find a way around gettext by linking against a stub library with the same ABI and then distributing with the actual gettext in a repo (the weak argument for GPL provisions about dynamic linking is ridiculous, and only survives by continuing to play on the ignorance of judges; when the judges realize you're laughing at their stupidity, they will be *very* unhappy with you).
Michael Crichton once gave a long talk on global warming being caused by aliens. He had ... difficulties with the scientific community. Mostly this comes from stuff like the Drake Equation having dozens of different, unknown, unknowable, unpredictable, and barely-definable variables to say, "If we make a bunch of shit up to fill in here, we get infinite or zero aliens coming to visit us ever!" The same kinds of mathematical models are used for global warming and nuclear winters--claiming that so much volcanic output, so many nukes, such yield of nukes, some positioning, the anger of the Yellowstone Caldera, and so forth would lead to so much ash in the air, which, given some arbitrary behaviors of air currents, would lead to a reduction of insolation, leading to some years of freezing.
We're looking at more of these models here. The scientists are saying, "Based on unknown, unknowable, unmeasured variables which we jammed into a very sound equation and then filled with made-up data, there are some number of life-sustaining planets out there!" They're putting in "reasonable guesses" and declaring results.
If a thousand letters flood in this month about a particular campaign point, it's likely that a large chunk of the population has been angered into action. That large chunk is probably 0.0000001%; and we know they're only the tiniest fraction of a population who find the point meaningful. If they're so up in arms as to start sending letters, it means there's a *lot* of people out there who are going to perk up if you start speaking about the issue, and raise pitch forks if you start pushing back against their will.
A handful of letters on one topic when there's no such noise coming your way about another topic means a sizable number of voters are thinking about that topic, even though only a few have decided to do something about it. You should probably pay attention if you don't want to lose the next election despite the six billion dollars of campaign contributions Exxon-Mobil sent you this year.
Actually... the reduction in cost from buying and re-buying the same media again and again *is* a path to job creation. The "you paid $20 for the DVD, and now you'll pay $20 for a DVD that plays on your iPod, and $20 for a license to play your $20 DVD on your Mac, and $20 again for a license to watch the DVD on your phone via Amazon" thing just prices a single good at $100 when the cost isn't actually higher. Instead of paying $300 for a device to play a copy of a DVD you dumped to an SD card, you have to pay $300 and then an extra $20 per DVD you dump to that SD card, and the device maker has to have its own infrastructure and legal agreements to sell you an additional copy of that DVD so they can make sure it's locked to your device.
This all sounds like a good way to make up bullshit jobs (which don't really exist--obviously, the jobs in question would be there to get around regulatory hurdles and make the company a profit), except that consumers don't magically have an extra $2,000 to spend on all these duplicate DVDs. Those jobs vanish away, and anything the consumer *does* buy tends to funnel mostly into licensing fees going up to the content creator--they have to make their money, and target per-unit rather than an amortization, since eliminating the lossy side of a loss-gain net positive average gets you bigger profits--which means the money is going to inefficient corporate profits instead of jobs.
As much as corporate profits aren't evil, pouring additional profits into a corporation's bottom line at the expense of wage jobs is a good way to increase unemployment. It's just slow and inefficient: it doesn't erase the money, but it does slow down the creation of buying power demand, making sure new jobs don't pop up quite as quickly, while not slowing down the elimination of old jobs as we find ways to do more with less labor time. When you eliminate 200,000 jobs per year and only create 120,000 jobs per year, unemployment starts growing; when you eliminate 200,000 jobs per year and create 200,000 jobs per year, you hold to a nice, stable unemployment rate. It's a factor of time.
This is one of the very few cases where someone says "job creation" and isn't completely fucking wrong about jobs actually being created by the mechanism they're focusing on.
The big problem is it's a normalizing strategy.
Education isn't a universally good idea; it depends on how you define education. Currently, we're trying to define education as "job skills" and not as "general knowledge," and so we call College "education" and ignore K-12. With eyes back on K-12, we're placating the masses by folding job skills into K-12 curriculum and calling it education.
That's all abstract. It's great politics.
More directly: we should teach students how to use their fucking brains. The brain is such an intuitive tool that people don't realize they have no idea how to operate it. You can extend human memory through trivial mnemonics techniques; you can greatly increase learning through strategic study routines; and you can optimize damn near everything by the simple mechanism of reflection. We turn little kids into human calculators by forcing them to memorize a 9x9 multiplication table and six pairs of numbers. We're so focused on passing tests and having some nameable skill that we don't give people the unnamable quality of intelligence.
Without job skill education, you have a labor shortage: you want programmers, but there aren't enough programmers to go around; you have to hire entrants based on your long-term strategy, and train them into programmers. The time-intensive, low-skill jobs get moved off your high-dollar senior programmers and onto the new guy, and your senior programmers take the much faster task of checking the work; more skill-intensive work moves down to the junior programmer as he learns, giving an immediate and incremental return-on-investment. That's the world you have when only the extremely wealthy can get to college on their own--and the extremely wealthy usually want to get MBAs or law degrees.
Without the labor shortage pressure, you just go out and grab someone at random--essentially whoever's easiest to control. You have a million programmer jobs and twenty million programmers, and you sift through the two hundred applicants and find the guy who will go for low pay and poor benefits. If you lose the employee, you're down a couple weeks of productivity, and it's not really that important anyway; it's not like you're working in a market that's only got the pool of people who've been trained because someone couldn't afford to wait for their competitors to get ahead of them by training someone first, where you'll have to either offer high salaries or take the strategic route of bringing in a new guy--a decision based on whether your team can function well enough by moving grunt work down or whether they really need another high-level software engineer to help tackle the intensive architectural planning. You're hiring a $5 wrench off a peg at Sears.
We gave up on educating students long ago, and went to building a low-power workforce. We give people skills and tell them it will help them compete, and it's only half true: it helps them compete in a world where everyone else has that skill; and the blanket action creates a world where everyone has that skill, putting them all at a disadvantage. We'd all be better off if we all got educated and then got dumped onto the streets with no job skills and no college education that we couldn't pay for ourselves or convince an employer that we needed; and we'd be *especially* better off if we had an education system that taught us to be smart and learn 4 years of college in 18 months without having a fucking psychotic episode.
The problem is nobody cares. They don't care if you can get them a better life; they only care about what's in front of them. If you take someone's poisoned food away in favor of creating a system in which they all have the opportunity to get food and live healthier lives, they'll all scream that you should just give them that system but *also* give them the food they were already getting. They'll demand you poison them until their livers rot out and their eyes turn yellow with jaundice because they don't want you to take something away from them.
The slaves fight to keep their chains.
Well you can claim to have bitcoins and sound pompous. You can display your bitcoin holdings on your phone. Isn't that what women do with useless rocks?
A commodity is a tradeable object--it's a good. Wheat, dirt, rocks, liquid nitrogen, bull semen. Bitcoin doesn't represent ownership of a company, so it's not a stock; and it's not issued by a central bank (even gold bullion was stamped by an official mint), so it's not a currency. It's manufactured by individuals using their own resources, and then traded for money or other commodities.
Money is a synonym for currency.
No, gold was used as a currency for most of recorded history. It was used as a currency in poor societies where the majority of trade was barter, and where actual money was restricted to a rich elite class who traded in a symbol to remind them that their glorious empire favored them and could make them poor.
Gold isn't just deflationary, as the naive analysis would suggest--as we find ways to produce a thing with less labor, its representative buying power falls, as it now represents 1/10,000,000 of the people working in the fields rather than 1/10,000. Gold is also relative: maybe today we have a new way to mine or smelt gold with less labor, and so gold ingots are worth a lot less; and next week we realize the mines are running dry, so gold is worth a lot more because we can get the *same* number of tonnes of gold out only by employing *three times as much* labor-hours; and then we find a new mine and gold is suddenly worth very little.
That means commodity currency is unstable. The amount of buying power per unit currency fluctuates greatly because it's tied directly to labor. Fiat currencies approach a unit value approximated by the amount of income divided by the amount of production: all the money paid for all things made and sold is what represents all things made and sold. It's a definition by tautology. (Income / Production) just says "the amount of money we pay for things is equal to the amount of money we pay for those things". This means fiat currencies gain buying power (deflation) as we create new technology to reduce labor used to make things; and, unlike commodity currency (gold, silver, sheep), we can counteract this (neutral) or exceed this (inflation) by printing and introducing more money. We can also print up more money as population expands, leaving production scarcity to control population growth.
Gold only made a good currency when we had a very small set of extremely rich people and a large population of serfs. The Roman Empire's Equestrian class was 25,000 strong in a population of over 50,000,000 (.05%), whereas our top 10% have a similar proportion of the wealth spread among them (they also have *more* total wealth, and only our poorest are actually less-wealthy than rich Roman senators). The Romans only had to keep their serfs alive and clothed with last year's fashion, which they tossed out of their wardrobes when a new fashion came out, handing down rich people's old clothes as poor people's new clothes. Of course gold was a workable currency for the tiniest sliver of overly-rich assholes running everything; nobody else had to use it!