It was kind of a crude joke. It works that way, but there's a long cycle involved. Essentially, you lose jobs today, and recreate them in 3-5 years; our unemployment rate reflects this happening across a huge number of markets, creating jobs as we lose other jobs. That's why we have welfare: Unemployment is a necessity if you want to increase the standard-of-living.
There would be. We've been eliminating jobs since hunter-gatherers stopped working 20 hours per week just to acquire food (much less prepare it) for each one person, instead letting agrarians farm it so they had time to make tools. (Now less than 2% of our society is agricultural workers, and the other 98% build roads and put rocket ships on the moon.)
People become unable to find work when there aren't enough consumer dollars to pay them.
Think about it for a minute. Create a level, communist utopia, the sort of idealized state where every person works, every person gets, everyone has exactly the same. Every need covered, every luxury in every individual's hands. Exactly as much labor time as everyone can apply (say the 40hr/wk standard, or a 24hr/wk 3-day week, or whatever you want) is used to make all this stuff.
Now give some people more, but don't make anyone work more.
Since the same work is done (and we haven't created new, efficient technology), there's the same amount of stuff. Someone has more, but no more is made, so someone else has less. Now you have rich and poor. If your society is sufficiently wealthy, the rich have yachts and the poor have hovels; if your society isn't sufficiently wealthy, the rich have horses and carriages, and the poor starve in the streets.
In a money-based system, this translates to consumer buying power. Some people get paid $5/hr, others get paid $50/hr. There's a cycle in which you eliminate jobs by reducing labor to make a thing, which makes it cheaper--say food costs $200/month, and you figure out how to make it for $100/month simply by cutting total labor in half, great. 2% of our population is agricultural workers, so suddenly 1% of our population is agricultural workers (actually, less than 1%, plus oil workers, power plant workers, transporters, miners, machinists, and everyone else involved in creating the tools of the new process, totaling 1%). 1% of our population becomes unemployed.
In trade for this unemployment, the remaining consumer population (approximately 98% of the original consumer population) all have about $100/month more unspent income per person in their household. 60% of our labor for products is foreign (Chinese factory) and 40% is domestic (local business logistics, shipping, advertising, retail). We boost up our production by about the same proportion, creating a bunch of low-cost jobs outside America, and supporting them with high-cost jobs inside America. This reciprocates, and we end up ticking up our local employment by 1%, maybe a little more, maybe a little less. Now we have our jobs back.
Unemployment settles on a certain nominal rate depending on how fast you eliminate and create jobs and how much pressure you put on the economy by raising the cost of goods. Minimum wage, payroll taxes, and income tax on labor directly raise labor costs; sales and VAT taxes add to the price, at the very minimum acting as a rise in labor cost by the percentage tax, but the proportion increases when the price increases (i.e. more mark-up means more cost). Broad consumer goods affect more of the purchasing power, and so you have loss: consumers can't buy as many things, thus we don't need to produce as many things, thus we don't need jobs, thus some people go unemployed.
The Citizen's Dividend I designed actually has a potential flaw in that it creates too much employment. Crude projections of one-cycle reciprocation indicate that rewriting the Fair Labor Standards Act to define full-time as 26-32 hours (4 day work week) would create enough unemployment to counter this, reducing total unemployment from 8% to 7% in the end. (Essentially, cutting back the work week but retaining the same standard of living demands a rise in the cost of goods, which counteracts the excess employment caused by my economic meddling.) I've got contingencies for everything.
Full employment, by the way, would destroy the economy. It would become unable to produce what is demanded, and the income supply would suddenly stutter. Most likely, it would hobble along with wildly fluctuating prices and unemployment rates.
$795 (a one-time license, max price) * 12,000 jurisdictions in the US (100% of all jurisdictions) / 224,000,000 adults = 4.2 cents.
I see no evidence that the US Government paid for it to be produced; I see that it was developed by an independent business with the aid (labor) of two state highway administrations and the oversight of a government administration. That sounds like the U.S. Government provided oversight as a customer seeking to license a product, not that it paid to have a product produced under contract. Not sure if the states provided actual up-front funding or if they just provided the logistics of pilot testing and review by installing signs with experimental font on highways.
The only reference to the U.S. Government actually paying for the development of Clearview seems to be this slashdot thread.
This is how Amazon will end all our jobs! They're able to sell products 40% cheaper than anyone else, which is leaving us with damn near twice as much money in our pockets, which we spend on other stuff, meaning people have to make other stuff, so we have to create all these job-ending jobs where people who aren't plodding around warehouses are doing something else useful!
The people I'm usually arguing with are stating absolutes. They're using non-backed cherry-picking arguments, like "lower wages won't lower product prices because businesses will just take the profits" juxtaposed with "giving people more money won't cause prices to increase because competition pushes prices down." This is especially jarring when the topic is the *housing* market, where the same person will argue that reducing risk (and the cost of risk) will just lead to landlords taking more profit, but giving people more money with which to pay rent won't raise rent prices because the landlords are in competition and that keeps prices down--not because of the defunct logic, but because entering the housing rental market is a high-risk business proposition, and so there is a natural barrier to competition, which allows landlords to generally raise prices in areas with a lot of income (gentrification exemplifies this) but does still prevent one landlord from holding his prices well above the others in his area.
but businesses who place orders of 10,000 units, a $5 difference turns into a $50,000 savings by purchasing from WnS.
I usually make that example with steel, coal (coke), and iron ore to show that the ultimate cost of all production is the labor cost (price of labor). People usually dismiss this by claiming something about value coming from capital (e.g. coal mines); I usually argue that by pointing out that it takes *less* labor to fetch stock reserves (e.g. mine minerals) than to manufacture them (e.g. atmosphere-to-liquid fuel generation), and that those stock reserves will become worthless when we devise a cheaper way to produce energy--especially if we devise a way to produce *excessive* energy and liquefy atmospheric CO2 and water into gasoline and diesel reserves (unlikely--this would lead directly to the end of scarcity in society).
So yes, pocketing savings is, generally, the best option to take by businesses without meaningful competition. Passing along savings to a customer who has more market choice is generally a better business move.
They can; but people typically just dismiss one concept and amplify another to create an absolute. See the discussion about rent prices. People take opposing positions as absolutes in the same line of thought when it helps avoid thinking about facts which undermine their position.
My interest in economics is largely about mechanisms: classical economics focuses on trying to predict the stock market and establish the correct price of goods, while I chiefly concern myself with what factors increase or decrease the rate at which wealth grows, and how this influences a society's standard-of-living, its welfare systems, its population growth, its income distribution, its tax systems, its employment rates, and so forth. That's why I never use the term "value": it's not a valid economic term; it's a defect in modern economic theory, like phlogiston. This is also why I have conceptual definitions of things like inflation which describe the same effect, but explain it slightly differently than modern economics.
In that, classical economics (theories of value) had moved from land (feudalism) to labor (Smithism) to the objective theory of value. The objective theory of value tries to explain why low-demand things like diamonds carry a high price, while labor theories would suggest their price is low; it claims that value is just what people perceive. This ignores that labor time is required to produce a good or service, and the laborer must at *least* be fed, and so the cost of this minimal standard-of-living proportioned to the time of labor is the very *least* cost you might incur, and that the price must be above the cost or the product is not marketable.
I approached the problem by simply observing that low-demand goods are difficult and risky markets to get into, and that entering them is likely to achieve business failure, and so competition is weaker when
Sounds like an argument about who everyone on the forum thinks is useless, meanwhile obviously we're getting rid of jobs we don't need filled. It's like everyone wants to halt economic progresss and go back to a wealthless shithole like the USSR, where there's barely enough productivity to get everyone food.
We make progress by reducing the amount of labor per good made. That means every person's time produces more stuff, meaning there's more stuff per person. That's why hunter-gatherers had loincloths and spent all damn day trying to find food while agrarian societies built rocket ships and put people on the moon. Steel used to be expensive--mining, refining, forming--and then we invented industrial mining machines, puddling process, blast furnace, steel rolling (this made rail production 1/10 as labor-intensive), and mechanical drop forging, and all kinds of metal stuff like cars became things the common man could afford since, amazingly, we don't have to pay 10,000 other common men's wages to buy one of these things.
They're in competition with Android and with tablets, phablets, and laptops. They're winning the competition against tablets and laptops. It's not just based on what people will pay, but on what people want to buy and how much they have. You have $100; do you by Crocs or an iPhone? iPhone drops their price to $100, but... Crocs are still a huge fad, and 70% of the population pays $100 for Crocs. What if everyone has $350 and the iPhone drops from $600 to $250? 70% of the population buys Crocs *and* an iPhone; 30% just buys the iPhone and some other product.
These nuances are so familiar to me because I've been digging at them for years. People keep saying businesses just take profit and making things cheaper never brings prices down (look at gas stations and oil), but then they immediately claim competition will lower prices in the next sentence. I had to figure out how it really works, since people simultaneously arguing opposite behaviors as absolutes are obviously wrong.
Imagine you have 1,000,000 customers with over $250 to spend on your product and 10,000,000 customers with over $150 to spend on your product.
If your product has a manufacture cost of $220, you can sell it for $250 and get 1,000,000 customers. That's $250,000,000 of revenue and $30,000,000 of profit.
If your product's manufacturing cost falls to $140, you can sell it for $150 and get $10,000,000 customers. That's $1,500,000,000 of revenue and $100,000,000 of profit.
Weakening the dollar essentially does this, but in reverse: instead of 250 euros, the product costs 150 euros. More people can afford it. You might have a slimmer margin (or it might not matter at all) and yet still come out with massive exports and three times as much profit.
It's possible for it to go either way, really. It can *easily* be an advantage, or it can be a disadvantage.
People are largely xenophobic, which leads to things like a hatred of all foreign species (a few invasive species are not classified as such because they're seen as native due to traditions involving them, while a *lot* of benign species are labeled invasive for being foreign). One of the more subtle xenophobias is a hatred of a weak local currency in the global market: they want us to be *strong*, stronger than foreigners, and thus have a dollar that commands *many* foreign dollars.
This has a number of impacts.
First off, a strong US dollar pushes jobs overseas where they are roughly as cost-effective as local; while a weak US dollar retains jobs at home. If jobs overseas are *much* more cost-effective, a strong US dollar reduces costs, while a weak one raises costs without increasing jobs at home. In both cases, a weak dollar can supply a push for reduction: when the costs of these goods increases (by moving jobs to expensive domestic or by paying more for outsourcing), their prices also increase, which reduces consumer buying power, reducing the demand for goods, reducing the amount of production required, reducing the labor in total required, thus reducing the number of jobs required. (That whole chain does suggest outsourcing increases jobs; it can, in fact, increase or decrease domestic jobs.)
Second, a strong US dollar makes goods more expensive overseas. That reduces our trade advantage: while a weak dollar may do as above, it only does so for 330 million Americans; the billions in Europe, Canada, South America, and Asia are suddenly faced with cheap American import services and goods when our dollar is weaker. We're the world's largest exporter of food, so we have a strong position overall; however, we can easily *lose* that position if food becomes easy enough to produce in other countries. Likewise, the trade advantage gained by other countries in buying cheap American wheat leaves them more wealthy, capable of improving their economies, making more goods, finding cheaper ways to make goods, and *reducing* *the* *cost* *of* *living*, which eventually mediates in a reduction of fractional working wages (it has to for population to grow), which still leaves the worker with more--just only with collectively 6% more after 10% growth, or such.
The fluctuation of currencies interacts with a huge array of economic factors and carries many subtle nuances. A stronger dollar is good if you're already a primary importer and your economy doesn't rely on its exports at all; it's *bad* if you're a primary exporter or your economy *greatly* relies on its exports. Even that is an extreme simplification.
You should appreciate my ideals about teaching kids about memory, and then about studying and practicing. Memory is immediately recognizable and can produce immediate benefit: every mnemonist is a sort of charlatan who performs a routine, giving his audience a bunch of shit to remember and watching them utterly fail, then telling them to use one tiny little trick--usually the mnemonic linking system or the method of loci--and providing them a new list, which they promptly remember near-perfectly (typically about 1/3 of the audience gets it perfect). They never tell you how physically exhausting it is to train yourself to use these systems effectively... at first, anyway; it gets ridiculously easy with practice.
Imagine a child's reaction to a technical explanation which he can understand, and which immediately makes him *smart*. Then imagine explaining that the brain adapts: new things are hard and tiring, and then become easy and effortless after you force yourself through them for a while. This "force" can be as little as a good 10, 15, or 30 minutes each day practicing. Conclude this by pointing at his amazing, genius memory, and associating it with systems of study and systems of practice which leverage the human memory efficiently, allowing him to learn much more easily. What regard do you think you'll get for the long-term goal?
You'll get a classroom full of kids who want their minds filled, and who suddenly love math. Well, they'll probably still hate math; they'll just enjoy the feeling of dominating it with their elite mind powers. A half-hour lesson and they'll be able to imagine it; they'll crave it; they'll want you to teach them everything.
Were you ever told to study or take notes in school? Do you know how to do either of those? Think before you answer.
Did you know organization aids in memorization? Did your teachers tell you rhythm and rhyme increase the ease with which you can learn something, or only leverage that fact, most likely thinking they were adding entertainment to keep a class full of distracted kids attentive?
Surely someone tried to feed you acrostics. Even engineers know this one.
What about mathematics? Are you still counting on your fingers and carrying the two? If you memorize your multiplication tables (by brute force) and practice using a Japanese 4/1 abacus, you can immediately compute arithmetic operations in your head. Memorize a simple system of numerical storage (Dominick's, Mnemonic Major, number shape, PAO) and use a digital computation algorithm and you can keep three registers straight while you compute infinite digits in any square root in your head faster than you can write or voice the numbers.
People think too much about goals and not about foundations. They also think children too stupid to understand anything complex, instead of thinking about how people think. You would think folks would say, "Hey, we can describe memory to children in great technical detail, because a child will stare at you blankly, think for about four seconds, and immediately recognize the mechanism you've described!" Instead they say, "Associative? You want to tell children memory is visual and associative? They're not going to understand that! It's too complex!" It's ludicrous; it's like claiming you can't tell a child teeth grind up food and wet it with saliva so it can safely transport down the esophagus to the stomach. They bite a chicken nugget, chew, swallow, and feel it move, and immediately understand what you're babbling about.
As a result, we don't teach children to learn. We force them to learn by whatever means necessary, but give them no tool to drive information into their minds. We don't teach them study methods, note-taking methods, or deliberate practice; we don't teach them any concepts of executive function or mnemonics; and we even avoid showing them highly-structured, systematic approaches to basic mathematics, under the assumption that children cannot handle structure and require a sort of free-play type of classroom learning.
Children need to start with a basic study of the mind. First a brief overview of memory in function, including a high-level overview of the neurology involved and an introduction to mnemonic devices, but excluding mnemonic systems. Then an explanation of leveraging human memory through systems of study and note-taking, like SQ3R and the Affinity Diagram device. These provide the easy foundation to ingesting new information.
Once you've transferred these, you can teach and apply deliberate practice and executive function. Deliberate practice is a method of technical, goal-oriented practice producing constant and immediate results: you recognize your weaknesses and focus on those, while trying to judge if you're improving. Executive function includes a broad array of loosely-related behaviors, notably in eliminating distraction, managing time, and orga
Programming to a limited extent is a practical skill; beyond that, it's about people getting their pet ideals out to the masses.
Programming to teach logic and reasoning is bullshit. Programming doesn't teach logic and reasoning; logic and reasoning are exercised in programming. If you're not that interested or simply don't know how to plan and reason, you'll be a shit programmer; we can fix this by teaching you to plan and reason.
I taught myself basic, C, C++, awk, bash scripting, and even assembly; I am not a programmer because I never learned to plan out large software projects. I don't know how to do it. I mash together bits of logic code and create a shambling, horrible beast summoned from the darkest depths of Hell. It works, but it's a *disaster*.
I've been learning about programming convention, design patterns, architecture, problem solving, and project management lately. These things have helped me improve my programming. Each is only a tool; even architecture and programming convention only lead to horribly-designed Python modules created to interface with database backends for custom Web applications, the code for which is more readable but still *terrible*. Planning skills from Project Management improved my programming; I am now seeking planning skills related to the large architecture of programming, rather than simply having an abstract idea of planning in general and programming architecture in general.
It's my ability to turn general problems into structured problems which is now transforming my 25 years of being able to make machines do things into a new skill of *programming*. All that Basic, C, Python, and the like I've done since I was 6 years old didn't give me any ability to think, plan, or solve problems; I've used programming languages to look directly at a thing I want and violently rip it from its seat into my greedy hands, and nothing else.
It is for this reason I've started a style guide to clear English. This guide includes communicative, informative, and persuasive styles, with a subsection on expletives for persuasive writing and speaking.
Essentially, it's just Strunk and White, Dale Carnegie, and a few other pieces of broad research brought together. Informative style will provide the greatest difficulty, as I'll need to cobble it together from experience and abstract concepts, rather than other research. For example: SQ3R and its derivatives describe methods of study of informative texts (textbooks, essays, articles, etc.), and various books and papers on human memory have cited questioning and organization as ways to improve memorization; many writers incorporate these observations by asking and then answering questions--similar to the rhetorical question.
My target audience encompasses copywriters of books, pamphlets, blogs, and news sites. The book *does* target general consumption, but I particularly want an improvement in mass media. We've reached an era where every person constantly faces the words of an educated man; yet the educated man now talks as the common man, instead of speaking in a way which the common man can easily understand. When the common man's speech deteriorates, the media deteriorates as well.
It is perfectly well for the media to use the language of the common man, but the common man is served best by structuring that language to a higher standard, taking a form best suited to convey information clearly rather than to socialize. The common man is a man of intelligence, even if he is not a man of intellect: he can understand and learn, and he will imitate those behaviors which produce the greatest effect upon him and others. Expose him to clear, concise, vibrant writing and he will begin to speak in clear, concise, vibrant language, even if he is disinclined to study the use of language in such a way.
I'm outside the system because I don't have any social biases. I have my own internal responses and subsequent avoidance behavior; but avoidance just means keeping myself out of meaningful contact with things I avoid. I don't smoke (anything), but I don't lobby for banning cigarettes and marijuana because it's not particularly my problem if someone else is smoking.
I also don't fuck animals, but it's not particularly my problem if some dude 5 miles away is keeping horses because his wife likes sucking them off. That's their business, as long as the horse isn't being emotionally tormented by the activity.
I don't form social attachments. I don't have an impulse to cling to a group view of how the world needs to operate and then attack others for offending my morality. Things are disgusting, but not inherently wrong; other things are harmful to others, create unwilling victims, and thus are inherently wrong. If someone dragged me into their obscene farm sex orgy, that would be a problem.
You're inside the system. You try to associate with others, think from their perspective, and protect them from ideals which distress them. To do this, you take those ideals into yourself, and become distressed by them. Other ideals are meaningless to you. You look at polygamy in Utah and claim there's something wrong with *those* people, and they shouldn't be allowed to do that, or at least that it's not important and there's no civil rights crisis because marrying 6 people is against the law and they should know better. They're not *your* social group, and nobody in your social group really has any emotional investment in the cause for polygamy.
Who is the victim, but the man arrested for doing what only affects him and his willing participants?
It's not a sane approach because advertising is a bubble.
The only sane approach is direct monetization of services. Could you imagine Facebook with a $1/year subscription?
I have actually considered this a lot. I've been working, conceptually, on something like Craigslist, but more modernized. A system to categorize and find things. Meetings, landmarks, objects for sale; it's more abstract in design. I started sketching out a basic reputation system so people can mark and comment on listings, then filter away things like new accounts (younger than so many days) or accounts with significant consensus on positions (spam, illegal activity, etc.). Basically thinking on how to anti-spam without an army of spam hunters. There'd also be an upvote system, so we're looking at a post-and-user karma system (reddit).
I've considered a cash gate model as well, with a $1 yearly subscription. I noticed spam accounts on Facebook go away quickly; probably the same for MySpace. Craigslist has a flagging system, but I think that gets abused. The most egregious cases--the ones who send links to alternate sites or porn sites, or claim you've won the lottery--die quickly. Those accounts last minutes in most popular services. In something like Craigslist, people tend to roll by listings that say things like "s%ale get b1ggr p3n!s" without opening the listing and flagging as spam, so that doesn't work so much; it's the more subtle ones who can lure you in, but not actually catch you, where people flag the post away.
The point is spammers would spend money. If they last 1 hour and only operate in a 4 hour peak period, every *one* account-year costs $1500. Registering 100 accounts and flooding the place would cost a spammer $150,000/year; and 100 spammers in the same area are competing for the limited resource of attention. I want something that's hard to monetize effectively as a gateway for spam and scams, and that carries the risk of constant capital investment. It probably helps that I could ban credit cards (or cardholder-zipcode pairs) and paypal accounts if they misbehave.
Within that whole model is an assumption that people would not mind sending money via a considerably safe method (ShopSafe card, Paypal) to get an account; and that people don't care about a dollar per year. Give me one million users and that's a million dollars per year; consider Spotify's 10 million paying subscribers and 40 million total users, and you realize this could become *quite* lucrative.
Even Google has roughly 2.2 billion users. If the ad model imploded, Google would have $2.2 billion of revenue from a $1/year subscription model giving everyone access to Youtube, Gmail, and so forth. That's more operating revenue than Sinclair Broadcast Group. Google's income is $71.5 billion, with $16.4 billion of profits: they'd need $51.5 billion, or $23.50 per user per year, to break even--about $2/month.
Think about that: Google provides YouTube, Gmail, Google Apps, Google Maps, Google Drive, Google+, Google Talk, Google Voice, and a few other minor applications. They provide business services. They research things like self-driving cars. All this for $2/user each month.
Now tell me how much a New York Times subscription should cost.
Hint: $1.9 million income per year. 1 million digital-only subscribers, plus 1.1 million print-and-digital subscribers. 2.1 million users. 90 cents per user per year.
The best part? If this became the standard model for big, broad-audience sites, advertising would face scarcity. Instead of ads plastered over every inch of the Internet, you'd have TV broadcast, radio broadcast, and small sites. Ads would be a thing you have on your personal blog; and those outlets would be *the* major source of advertisement impressions. They'd be premium placement, because ads do not exist
Hitler tried to exterminate an entire people, citing the dangers of the International Jewish Conspiracy and siding with Italian Fascism for its success in defeating International Jewery.
Slave owners restricted people from education. They also supported a legal system allowing the murder of an entire race of people, so long as another race of people did the murdering. They disenfranchised this group, restricting their civil rights as a whole not just by eliminating the burden of due process, but also by allowing atrocities against them ranging from cruel and unusual punishment to simply rendering judgment (with or without due process) for free speech if that speech offended another race of people.
Rapists physically brutalize people and force them into sexual submission.
Eich funded a campaign seeking to prevent State legal recognition of a social union.
Have you fought for legal polygamy? Have you demanded the IRS allow men to marry multiple women, and women to marry multiple men, and each to marry each other? Have you lobbied Congress to make marriage to animals legal, or are the Welsh beneath your morals?
Society makes two types of delineations: the concrete and the arbitrary. Our concrete delineations show a real victim, real harm, and real reasoning: we stop threats such as murder, assault, and theft, because a person carrying these actions out brings harm to others. We make other, arbitrary delineations, like age-of-consent (why does it range from 14-18 depending on state?), legal drinking age, drug laws, and alcohol laws.
If you think Eich is a terrible person for not supporting the state recognition of a legal union between two people, then you are a terrible person for not supporting the rights of parents to give their teenagers liquor, or for people with weird sexual deviant behavior to own horses.
Slashdot Mirror
Same. Didn't hear about these people until someone started complaining about them.
It was kind of a crude joke. It works that way, but there's a long cycle involved. Essentially, you lose jobs today, and recreate them in 3-5 years; our unemployment rate reflects this happening across a huge number of markets, creating jobs as we lose other jobs. That's why we have welfare: Unemployment is a necessity if you want to increase the standard-of-living.
There would be. We've been eliminating jobs since hunter-gatherers stopped working 20 hours per week just to acquire food (much less prepare it) for each one person, instead letting agrarians farm it so they had time to make tools. (Now less than 2% of our society is agricultural workers, and the other 98% build roads and put rocket ships on the moon.)
People become unable to find work when there aren't enough consumer dollars to pay them.
Think about it for a minute. Create a level, communist utopia, the sort of idealized state where every person works, every person gets, everyone has exactly the same. Every need covered, every luxury in every individual's hands. Exactly as much labor time as everyone can apply (say the 40hr/wk standard, or a 24hr/wk 3-day week, or whatever you want) is used to make all this stuff.
Now give some people more, but don't make anyone work more.
Since the same work is done (and we haven't created new, efficient technology), there's the same amount of stuff. Someone has more, but no more is made, so someone else has less. Now you have rich and poor. If your society is sufficiently wealthy, the rich have yachts and the poor have hovels; if your society isn't sufficiently wealthy, the rich have horses and carriages, and the poor starve in the streets.
In a money-based system, this translates to consumer buying power. Some people get paid $5/hr, others get paid $50/hr. There's a cycle in which you eliminate jobs by reducing labor to make a thing, which makes it cheaper--say food costs $200/month, and you figure out how to make it for $100/month simply by cutting total labor in half, great. 2% of our population is agricultural workers, so suddenly 1% of our population is agricultural workers (actually, less than 1%, plus oil workers, power plant workers, transporters, miners, machinists, and everyone else involved in creating the tools of the new process, totaling 1%). 1% of our population becomes unemployed.
In trade for this unemployment, the remaining consumer population (approximately 98% of the original consumer population) all have about $100/month more unspent income per person in their household. 60% of our labor for products is foreign (Chinese factory) and 40% is domestic (local business logistics, shipping, advertising, retail). We boost up our production by about the same proportion, creating a bunch of low-cost jobs outside America, and supporting them with high-cost jobs inside America. This reciprocates, and we end up ticking up our local employment by 1%, maybe a little more, maybe a little less. Now we have our jobs back.
Unemployment settles on a certain nominal rate depending on how fast you eliminate and create jobs and how much pressure you put on the economy by raising the cost of goods. Minimum wage, payroll taxes, and income tax on labor directly raise labor costs; sales and VAT taxes add to the price, at the very minimum acting as a rise in labor cost by the percentage tax, but the proportion increases when the price increases (i.e. more mark-up means more cost). Broad consumer goods affect more of the purchasing power, and so you have loss: consumers can't buy as many things, thus we don't need to produce as many things, thus we don't need jobs, thus some people go unemployed.
The Citizen's Dividend I designed actually has a potential flaw in that it creates too much employment. Crude projections of one-cycle reciprocation indicate that rewriting the Fair Labor Standards Act to define full-time as 26-32 hours (4 day work week) would create enough unemployment to counter this, reducing total unemployment from 8% to 7% in the end. (Essentially, cutting back the work week but retaining the same standard of living demands a rise in the cost of goods, which counteracts the excess employment caused by my economic meddling.) I've got contingencies for everything.
Full employment, by the way, would destroy the economy. It would become unable to produce what is demanded, and the income supply would suddenly stutter. Most likely, it would hobble along with wildly fluctuating prices and unemployment rates.
$795 (a one-time license, max price) * 12,000 jurisdictions in the US (100% of all jurisdictions) / 224,000,000 adults = 4.2 cents.
I see no evidence that the US Government paid for it to be produced; I see that it was developed by an independent business with the aid (labor) of two state highway administrations and the oversight of a government administration. That sounds like the U.S. Government provided oversight as a customer seeking to license a product, not that it paid to have a product produced under contract. Not sure if the states provided actual up-front funding or if they just provided the logistics of pilot testing and review by installing signs with experimental font on highways.
The only reference to the U.S. Government actually paying for the development of Clearview seems to be this slashdot thread.
For a one-time license, at $795 per license, for 100% of all jurisdictions in the entire United states, this is 4.2 cents per American adult.
That is to say: you paid substantially less than 0.35 pennies per year for each of the previous 12 years for the privilege of having these signs.
The retard rage. It's real.
This is how Amazon will end all our jobs! They're able to sell products 40% cheaper than anyone else, which is leaving us with damn near twice as much money in our pockets, which we spend on other stuff, meaning people have to make other stuff, so we have to create all these job-ending jobs where people who aren't plodding around warehouses are doing something else useful!
It's a lawnmower with a computer in it.
The report was that SystemD needs this, but other tools need it too.
The people I'm usually arguing with are stating absolutes. They're using non-backed cherry-picking arguments, like "lower wages won't lower product prices because businesses will just take the profits" juxtaposed with "giving people more money won't cause prices to increase because competition pushes prices down." This is especially jarring when the topic is the *housing* market, where the same person will argue that reducing risk (and the cost of risk) will just lead to landlords taking more profit, but giving people more money with which to pay rent won't raise rent prices because the landlords are in competition and that keeps prices down--not because of the defunct logic, but because entering the housing rental market is a high-risk business proposition, and so there is a natural barrier to competition, which allows landlords to generally raise prices in areas with a lot of income (gentrification exemplifies this) but does still prevent one landlord from holding his prices well above the others in his area.
but businesses who place orders of 10,000 units, a $5 difference turns into a $50,000 savings by purchasing from WnS.
I usually make that example with steel, coal (coke), and iron ore to show that the ultimate cost of all production is the labor cost (price of labor). People usually dismiss this by claiming something about value coming from capital (e.g. coal mines); I usually argue that by pointing out that it takes *less* labor to fetch stock reserves (e.g. mine minerals) than to manufacture them (e.g. atmosphere-to-liquid fuel generation), and that those stock reserves will become worthless when we devise a cheaper way to produce energy--especially if we devise a way to produce *excessive* energy and liquefy atmospheric CO2 and water into gasoline and diesel reserves (unlikely--this would lead directly to the end of scarcity in society).
So yes, pocketing savings is, generally, the best option to take by businesses without meaningful competition. Passing along savings to a customer who has more market choice is generally a better business move.
They can; but people typically just dismiss one concept and amplify another to create an absolute. See the discussion about rent prices. People take opposing positions as absolutes in the same line of thought when it helps avoid thinking about facts which undermine their position.
My interest in economics is largely about mechanisms: classical economics focuses on trying to predict the stock market and establish the correct price of goods, while I chiefly concern myself with what factors increase or decrease the rate at which wealth grows, and how this influences a society's standard-of-living, its welfare systems, its population growth, its income distribution, its tax systems, its employment rates, and so forth. That's why I never use the term "value": it's not a valid economic term; it's a defect in modern economic theory, like phlogiston. This is also why I have conceptual definitions of things like inflation which describe the same effect, but explain it slightly differently than modern economics.
In that, classical economics (theories of value) had moved from land (feudalism) to labor (Smithism) to the objective theory of value. The objective theory of value tries to explain why low-demand things like diamonds carry a high price, while labor theories would suggest their price is low; it claims that value is just what people perceive. This ignores that labor time is required to produce a good or service, and the laborer must at *least* be fed, and so the cost of this minimal standard-of-living proportioned to the time of labor is the very *least* cost you might incur, and that the price must be above the cost or the product is not marketable.
I approached the problem by simply observing that low-demand goods are difficult and risky markets to get into, and that entering them is likely to achieve business failure, and so competition is weaker when
That's not a problem if we invented new machines that take 5 minutes to set up instead of 5 hours.
Sounds like an argument about who everyone on the forum thinks is useless, meanwhile obviously we're getting rid of jobs we don't need filled. It's like everyone wants to halt economic progresss and go back to a wealthless shithole like the USSR, where there's barely enough productivity to get everyone food.
We make progress by reducing the amount of labor per good made. That means every person's time produces more stuff, meaning there's more stuff per person. That's why hunter-gatherers had loincloths and spent all damn day trying to find food while agrarian societies built rocket ships and put people on the moon. Steel used to be expensive--mining, refining, forming--and then we invented industrial mining machines, puddling process, blast furnace, steel rolling (this made rail production 1/10 as labor-intensive), and mechanical drop forging, and all kinds of metal stuff like cars became things the common man could afford since, amazingly, we don't have to pay 10,000 other common men's wages to buy one of these things.
It's already fat people rage. That last comment says, "I'm fat and you skinny dicks don't know what it's like!"
They're in competition with Android and with tablets, phablets, and laptops. They're winning the competition against tablets and laptops. It's not just based on what people will pay, but on what people want to buy and how much they have. You have $100; do you by Crocs or an iPhone? iPhone drops their price to $100, but... Crocs are still a huge fad, and 70% of the population pays $100 for Crocs. What if everyone has $350 and the iPhone drops from $600 to $250? 70% of the population buys Crocs *and* an iPhone; 30% just buys the iPhone and some other product.
These nuances are so familiar to me because I've been digging at them for years. People keep saying businesses just take profit and making things cheaper never brings prices down (look at gas stations and oil), but then they immediately claim competition will lower prices in the next sentence. I had to figure out how it really works, since people simultaneously arguing opposite behaviors as absolutes are obviously wrong.
Imagine you have 1,000,000 customers with over $250 to spend on your product and 10,000,000 customers with over $150 to spend on your product.
If your product has a manufacture cost of $220, you can sell it for $250 and get 1,000,000 customers. That's $250,000,000 of revenue and $30,000,000 of profit.
If your product's manufacturing cost falls to $140, you can sell it for $150 and get $10,000,000 customers. That's $1,500,000,000 of revenue and $100,000,000 of profit.
Weakening the dollar essentially does this, but in reverse: instead of 250 euros, the product costs 150 euros. More people can afford it. You might have a slimmer margin (or it might not matter at all) and yet still come out with massive exports and three times as much profit.
It's possible for it to go either way, really. It can *easily* be an advantage, or it can be a disadvantage.
Sort of.
People are largely xenophobic, which leads to things like a hatred of all foreign species (a few invasive species are not classified as such because they're seen as native due to traditions involving them, while a *lot* of benign species are labeled invasive for being foreign). One of the more subtle xenophobias is a hatred of a weak local currency in the global market: they want us to be *strong*, stronger than foreigners, and thus have a dollar that commands *many* foreign dollars.
This has a number of impacts.
First off, a strong US dollar pushes jobs overseas where they are roughly as cost-effective as local; while a weak US dollar retains jobs at home. If jobs overseas are *much* more cost-effective, a strong US dollar reduces costs, while a weak one raises costs without increasing jobs at home. In both cases, a weak dollar can supply a push for reduction: when the costs of these goods increases (by moving jobs to expensive domestic or by paying more for outsourcing), their prices also increase, which reduces consumer buying power, reducing the demand for goods, reducing the amount of production required, reducing the labor in total required, thus reducing the number of jobs required. (That whole chain does suggest outsourcing increases jobs; it can, in fact, increase or decrease domestic jobs.)
Second, a strong US dollar makes goods more expensive overseas. That reduces our trade advantage: while a weak dollar may do as above, it only does so for 330 million Americans; the billions in Europe, Canada, South America, and Asia are suddenly faced with cheap American import services and goods when our dollar is weaker. We're the world's largest exporter of food, so we have a strong position overall; however, we can easily *lose* that position if food becomes easy enough to produce in other countries. Likewise, the trade advantage gained by other countries in buying cheap American wheat leaves them more wealthy, capable of improving their economies, making more goods, finding cheaper ways to make goods, and *reducing* *the* *cost* *of* *living*, which eventually mediates in a reduction of fractional working wages (it has to for population to grow), which still leaves the worker with more--just only with collectively 6% more after 10% growth, or such.
The fluctuation of currencies interacts with a huge array of economic factors and carries many subtle nuances. A stronger dollar is good if you're already a primary importer and your economy doesn't rely on its exports at all; it's *bad* if you're a primary exporter or your economy *greatly* relies on its exports. Even that is an extreme simplification.
You should appreciate my ideals about teaching kids about memory, and then about studying and practicing. Memory is immediately recognizable and can produce immediate benefit: every mnemonist is a sort of charlatan who performs a routine, giving his audience a bunch of shit to remember and watching them utterly fail, then telling them to use one tiny little trick--usually the mnemonic linking system or the method of loci--and providing them a new list, which they promptly remember near-perfectly (typically about 1/3 of the audience gets it perfect). They never tell you how physically exhausting it is to train yourself to use these systems effectively... at first, anyway; it gets ridiculously easy with practice.
Imagine a child's reaction to a technical explanation which he can understand, and which immediately makes him *smart*. Then imagine explaining that the brain adapts: new things are hard and tiring, and then become easy and effortless after you force yourself through them for a while. This "force" can be as little as a good 10, 15, or 30 minutes each day practicing. Conclude this by pointing at his amazing, genius memory, and associating it with systems of study and systems of practice which leverage the human memory efficiently, allowing him to learn much more easily. What regard do you think you'll get for the long-term goal?
You'll get a classroom full of kids who want their minds filled, and who suddenly love math. Well, they'll probably still hate math; they'll just enjoy the feeling of dominating it with their elite mind powers. A half-hour lesson and they'll be able to imagine it; they'll crave it; they'll want you to teach them everything.
Programming is not a building block.
Were you ever told to study or take notes in school? Do you know how to do either of those? Think before you answer.
Did you know organization aids in memorization? Did your teachers tell you rhythm and rhyme increase the ease with which you can learn something, or only leverage that fact, most likely thinking they were adding entertainment to keep a class full of distracted kids attentive?
Surely someone tried to feed you acrostics. Even engineers know this one.
What about mathematics? Are you still counting on your fingers and carrying the two? If you memorize your multiplication tables (by brute force) and practice using a Japanese 4/1 abacus, you can immediately compute arithmetic operations in your head. Memorize a simple system of numerical storage (Dominick's, Mnemonic Major, number shape, PAO) and use a digital computation algorithm and you can keep three registers straight while you compute infinite digits in any square root in your head faster than you can write or voice the numbers.
People think too much about goals and not about foundations. They also think children too stupid to understand anything complex, instead of thinking about how people think. You would think folks would say, "Hey, we can describe memory to children in great technical detail, because a child will stare at you blankly, think for about four seconds, and immediately recognize the mechanism you've described!" Instead they say, "Associative? You want to tell children memory is visual and associative? They're not going to understand that! It's too complex!" It's ludicrous; it's like claiming you can't tell a child teeth grind up food and wet it with saliva so it can safely transport down the esophagus to the stomach. They bite a chicken nugget, chew, swallow, and feel it move, and immediately understand what you're babbling about.
As a result, we don't teach children to learn. We force them to learn by whatever means necessary, but give them no tool to drive information into their minds. We don't teach them study methods, note-taking methods, or deliberate practice; we don't teach them any concepts of executive function or mnemonics; and we even avoid showing them highly-structured, systematic approaches to basic mathematics, under the assumption that children cannot handle structure and require a sort of free-play type of classroom learning.
Children need to start with a basic study of the mind. First a brief overview of memory in function, including a high-level overview of the neurology involved and an introduction to mnemonic devices, but excluding mnemonic systems. Then an explanation of leveraging human memory through systems of study and note-taking, like SQ3R and the Affinity Diagram device. These provide the easy foundation to ingesting new information.
Once you've transferred these, you can teach and apply deliberate practice and executive function. Deliberate practice is a method of technical, goal-oriented practice producing constant and immediate results: you recognize your weaknesses and focus on those, while trying to judge if you're improving. Executive function includes a broad array of loosely-related behaviors, notably in eliminating distraction, managing time, and orga
Math up to geometry is a practical skill.
Programming to a limited extent is a practical skill; beyond that, it's about people getting their pet ideals out to the masses.
Programming to teach logic and reasoning is bullshit. Programming doesn't teach logic and reasoning; logic and reasoning are exercised in programming. If you're not that interested or simply don't know how to plan and reason, you'll be a shit programmer; we can fix this by teaching you to plan and reason.
I taught myself basic, C, C++, awk, bash scripting, and even assembly; I am not a programmer because I never learned to plan out large software projects. I don't know how to do it. I mash together bits of logic code and create a shambling, horrible beast summoned from the darkest depths of Hell. It works, but it's a *disaster*.
I've been learning about programming convention, design patterns, architecture, problem solving, and project management lately. These things have helped me improve my programming. Each is only a tool; even architecture and programming convention only lead to horribly-designed Python modules created to interface with database backends for custom Web applications, the code for which is more readable but still *terrible*. Planning skills from Project Management improved my programming; I am now seeking planning skills related to the large architecture of programming, rather than simply having an abstract idea of planning in general and programming architecture in general.
It's my ability to turn general problems into structured problems which is now transforming my 25 years of being able to make machines do things into a new skill of *programming*. All that Basic, C, Python, and the like I've done since I was 6 years old didn't give me any ability to think, plan, or solve problems; I've used programming languages to look directly at a thing I want and violently rip it from its seat into my greedy hands, and nothing else.
It is for this reason I've started a style guide to clear English. This guide includes communicative, informative, and persuasive styles, with a subsection on expletives for persuasive writing and speaking.
Essentially, it's just Strunk and White, Dale Carnegie, and a few other pieces of broad research brought together. Informative style will provide the greatest difficulty, as I'll need to cobble it together from experience and abstract concepts, rather than other research. For example: SQ3R and its derivatives describe methods of study of informative texts (textbooks, essays, articles, etc.), and various books and papers on human memory have cited questioning and organization as ways to improve memorization; many writers incorporate these observations by asking and then answering questions--similar to the rhetorical question.
My target audience encompasses copywriters of books, pamphlets, blogs, and news sites. The book *does* target general consumption, but I particularly want an improvement in mass media. We've reached an era where every person constantly faces the words of an educated man; yet the educated man now talks as the common man, instead of speaking in a way which the common man can easily understand. When the common man's speech deteriorates, the media deteriorates as well.
It is perfectly well for the media to use the language of the common man, but the common man is served best by structuring that language to a higher standard, taking a form best suited to convey information clearly rather than to socialize. The common man is a man of intelligence, even if he is not a man of intellect: he can understand and learn, and he will imitate those behaviors which produce the greatest effect upon him and others. Expose him to clear, concise, vibrant writing and he will begin to speak in clear, concise, vibrant language, even if he is disinclined to study the use of language in such a way.
I'm outside the system because I don't have any social biases. I have my own internal responses and subsequent avoidance behavior; but avoidance just means keeping myself out of meaningful contact with things I avoid. I don't smoke (anything), but I don't lobby for banning cigarettes and marijuana because it's not particularly my problem if someone else is smoking.
I also don't fuck animals, but it's not particularly my problem if some dude 5 miles away is keeping horses because his wife likes sucking them off. That's their business, as long as the horse isn't being emotionally tormented by the activity.
I don't form social attachments. I don't have an impulse to cling to a group view of how the world needs to operate and then attack others for offending my morality. Things are disgusting, but not inherently wrong; other things are harmful to others, create unwilling victims, and thus are inherently wrong. If someone dragged me into their obscene farm sex orgy, that would be a problem.
You're inside the system. You try to associate with others, think from their perspective, and protect them from ideals which distress them. To do this, you take those ideals into yourself, and become distressed by them. Other ideals are meaningless to you. You look at polygamy in Utah and claim there's something wrong with *those* people, and they shouldn't be allowed to do that, or at least that it's not important and there's no civil rights crisis because marrying 6 people is against the law and they should know better. They're not *your* social group, and nobody in your social group really has any emotional investment in the cause for polygamy.
Who is the victim, but the man arrested for doing what only affects him and his willing participants?
This is the ass gecko.
This sounds like the 1990s "make money while you buy" applications that showed ads and gave you 10 cents per hour.
It's not a sane approach because advertising is a bubble.
The only sane approach is direct monetization of services. Could you imagine Facebook with a $1/year subscription?
I have actually considered this a lot. I've been working, conceptually, on something like Craigslist, but more modernized. A system to categorize and find things. Meetings, landmarks, objects for sale; it's more abstract in design. I started sketching out a basic reputation system so people can mark and comment on listings, then filter away things like new accounts (younger than so many days) or accounts with significant consensus on positions (spam, illegal activity, etc.). Basically thinking on how to anti-spam without an army of spam hunters. There'd also be an upvote system, so we're looking at a post-and-user karma system (reddit).
I've considered a cash gate model as well, with a $1 yearly subscription. I noticed spam accounts on Facebook go away quickly; probably the same for MySpace. Craigslist has a flagging system, but I think that gets abused. The most egregious cases--the ones who send links to alternate sites or porn sites, or claim you've won the lottery--die quickly. Those accounts last minutes in most popular services. In something like Craigslist, people tend to roll by listings that say things like "s%ale get b1ggr p3n!s" without opening the listing and flagging as spam, so that doesn't work so much; it's the more subtle ones who can lure you in, but not actually catch you, where people flag the post away.
The point is spammers would spend money. If they last 1 hour and only operate in a 4 hour peak period, every *one* account-year costs $1500. Registering 100 accounts and flooding the place would cost a spammer $150,000/year; and 100 spammers in the same area are competing for the limited resource of attention. I want something that's hard to monetize effectively as a gateway for spam and scams, and that carries the risk of constant capital investment. It probably helps that I could ban credit cards (or cardholder-zipcode pairs) and paypal accounts if they misbehave.
Within that whole model is an assumption that people would not mind sending money via a considerably safe method (ShopSafe card, Paypal) to get an account; and that people don't care about a dollar per year. Give me one million users and that's a million dollars per year; consider Spotify's 10 million paying subscribers and 40 million total users, and you realize this could become *quite* lucrative.
Even Google has roughly 2.2 billion users. If the ad model imploded, Google would have $2.2 billion of revenue from a $1/year subscription model giving everyone access to Youtube, Gmail, and so forth. That's more operating revenue than Sinclair Broadcast Group. Google's income is $71.5 billion, with $16.4 billion of profits: they'd need $51.5 billion, or $23.50 per user per year, to break even--about $2/month.
Think about that: Google provides YouTube, Gmail, Google Apps, Google Maps, Google Drive, Google+, Google Talk, Google Voice, and a few other minor applications. They provide business services. They research things like self-driving cars. All this for $2/user each month.
Now tell me how much a New York Times subscription should cost.
Hint: $1.9 million income per year. 1 million digital-only subscribers, plus 1.1 million print-and-digital subscribers. 2.1 million users. 90 cents per user per year.
The best part? If this became the standard model for big, broad-audience sites, advertising would face scarcity. Instead of ads plastered over every inch of the Internet, you'd have TV broadcast, radio broadcast, and small sites. Ads would be a thing you have on your personal blog; and those outlets would be *the* major source of advertisement impressions. They'd be premium placement, because ads do not exist
Hitler tried to exterminate an entire people, citing the dangers of the International Jewish Conspiracy and siding with Italian Fascism for its success in defeating International Jewery.
Slave owners restricted people from education. They also supported a legal system allowing the murder of an entire race of people, so long as another race of people did the murdering. They disenfranchised this group, restricting their civil rights as a whole not just by eliminating the burden of due process, but also by allowing atrocities against them ranging from cruel and unusual punishment to simply rendering judgment (with or without due process) for free speech if that speech offended another race of people.
Rapists physically brutalize people and force them into sexual submission.
Eich funded a campaign seeking to prevent State legal recognition of a social union.
Have you fought for legal polygamy? Have you demanded the IRS allow men to marry multiple women, and women to marry multiple men, and each to marry each other? Have you lobbied Congress to make marriage to animals legal, or are the Welsh beneath your morals?
Society makes two types of delineations: the concrete and the arbitrary. Our concrete delineations show a real victim, real harm, and real reasoning: we stop threats such as murder, assault, and theft, because a person carrying these actions out brings harm to others. We make other, arbitrary delineations, like age-of-consent (why does it range from 14-18 depending on state?), legal drinking age, drug laws, and alcohol laws.
If you think Eich is a terrible person for not supporting the state recognition of a legal union between two people, then you are a terrible person for not supporting the rights of parents to give their teenagers liquor, or for people with weird sexual deviant behavior to own horses.
I read Trump as a noun and thought the title was nonsense.