I still say that was a mistake. Google could have gone with Mono and.NET, making C#, F#, VB.NET, and even Java and Python languages on the Android platform. They had no way to know Microsoft would drop Core CLR under an MIT license, or that Mono would fold code for poorly-implemented or poorly-performing functions from Core CLR into Mono, giving a.NET-based Android a boost; they *did* have enough programmers to write their own JVM and convert bytecode from Java to Dalvik, and so could have instead improved Mono as per their needs.
Google does have the option of migrating all Java/Dalvik functions to Java/Mono. They could, with quite a *lot* of work, have the entire Android ecosystem running on Java using native Java classes interpreted on Mono. The Java code would run as native CLR, with run-time JIT and profiling, just like C# applications--in other words, native, not "Java shoehorned onto.NET".
If they had gone that direction in the first place, likely C# would be a top language, possibly *the* top language. More importantly, Android would have had Java and C# developers--both fairly large camps outside their overlap--both contributing to its ecosystem.
In other words: it would have reduced risk and hedged a lot of bets for almost zero cost.
Actually, I understand the whole system. That's why I frequently explain to people that automation is not the end of all jobs; it's a potential increase in the rate of reduction of labor, which can lead to mass unemployment, causing an economic collapse that takes decades to dig out of--just like the Industrial Revolution.
The fact is we have always gained wealth by reducing the amount of labor used to produce goods. Less labor, more unemployment; this transfers buying power from the unemployed sector to the consumer, making all consumers a bit richer. The consumers still have the same income, but the products cost less to produce, and so prices come down; that leaves buying power in the consumer's pocket. With more buying power per consumer, the market demographic for any given good (notably, niche goods which a large portion of the consumer base could not afford) rapidly expands. This demands an increase in production, which recreates the jobs lost.
That fluctuation takes time to move: you lose 1% of jobs, you gain 1% of jobs later. Because we have a broad market with many different types of goods and different movements, it reaches an equilibrium: we're losing 1% of jobs per year over here, but gaining 1% per year over there. That equilibrium causes stabilization at an unemployment rate--4%, 8%, whatnot--even as the economy grows.
As a result, we become capable of producing more goods per unit of working hours, which practically means more goods per population since working hours are proportional to population size.
That's where wealth comes from.
Wealth, in practical terms, is the amount of stuff available to consumers per-capita. In economic wealth theory terms, it's the amount of buying-power (which is the amount of production) per-capita. (There are a lot of ways to say the same thing, with various labels attached to help indicate context.)
Now, in a war--notably, in World War 2--you divert production of consumer goods to production of weapons of war and consumables. Those goods get consumed by war.
For example: Your highly-efficient society capable of producing enough bread slicers to give everyone ready access to sliced bread suddenly can't produce enough steel to both support the war *and* make slicing blades for bread slicers, so suddenly the per-capita availability of sliced bread falls away.
Another example: Your highly-efficient society capable of producing gasoline cheaply enough that every single consumer had money in their pockets to fuel their cars (which they could also buy) to drive all over the god damn place suddenly has its oil resources diverted to fueling weapons of war. You don't have the available labor-hours to produce even more gasoline--you can't put more people to work in oil and fuel production without taking them off other jobs--so the consumer must go without gasoline.
In each of these situations, there is less of a good available per-capita. The consumer no longer has access to a resource; we effectively expend labor to produce a resource only to destroy it, removing that labor from our economic system, and removing the goods it can produce from the reach of the consumer. Sure, consumers are still working (as producers) and getting paid; they just can't buy anything with that money.
Now end the war.
You have all these production facilities for steel and gasoline. You have all this capability to produce steel and oil. You have all this labor that suddenly isn't working to provide for a war effort. What happens?
What happens now that you have all this capacity to make goods, and the big consumer of the goods--WAR--has gone away?
All these people working, all these people drawing income, all these people who can afford goods that were just plain unavailable because we didn't have the labor to make enough goods to supply both WAR and consumers?
All kinds of shit becomes available to the consumer.
Where is the wealth in a bunch of consumers working to build cars that they then drop into a giant hydraulic compactor to make blocks of steel?
Oh my god. You're Franklin! Let's just print more and more money and devalue existing money, instead of taking money from the economy!
A print-money policy is functionally equivalent to a flat tax levied on both income *and* standing monetary assets, which is kind of a nightmare. The last 4 times we used the printing presses as our revenue source, we caused major economic recessions; we stopped doing that because it was stupid and extremely regressive.
Some apartments (the ones in my area) used shared metering, so there were 6 units in the building and one customer charge--a $3 charge by your measure. Cut those apartments down to small 400sqft studios and you've got 18, at $1 for the hookup.
It's not unreasonable the utility would cut a landlord a deal to meter individual bills at a reduced service charge; or that the landlord would use a $2,000 commercial TED installed at the main distribution panel to automatically partition the bill based on actual tenant usage. Remember, we're talking about a ginormous opportunity to make a ton of profit; that means innovation and large business deals for anyone who can get rich by playing along.
A good 90% of my bill was heating and AC. A good 90% of my bill is still heating and AC, which is pretty hilarious. 100kWh for the lights, refrigerator, and computer each month; 693kWh total used this month, mostly to power a one-room space heater at night plus, an extra 90 therms ($50) of gas for the water heater and furnace. My lowest this year was 493kWh with a 6000BTU window AC consuming a bit over 400kWh for that month--that was July.
So yes, just my lights, ceiling fan, refrigerator, and computer cost me about $10. I'm working on an assumption of good insulation. R-32 would cost about $45 if added to the apartment during interior wall construction using mold- and fire-resistant stone wool insulation in long-wall configuration; $30 in short-wall configuration; and $90 in worst-case corner apartment configuration. Long-wall configuration gives more windows, which cost way more than insulation. That, ceiling fan, CFL or LED lighting (about 18 watts to make one room REALLY bright), and a small space heater or central forced air (my apartment had individually-metered central forced air heating) would actually get the cost down pretty low. You'd spend under $5 on lighting, refrigerator, and fan; the rest goes to heating and AC.
All of this uses existing off-the-shelf products. A savvy landlord might provide central heating and AC with a capstone turbine to generate electricity and reduce the total monthly meter, but that's probably not cost-effective in practice at that scale; I'd like to stick to realistic, sensible alternatives.
Don't forget that you'll have to address zoning and building codes. For example, Manhattan [datalounge.com] has a requirement that the smallest legal apartment is 400 sqft. Bloomberg wanted to reduce it to 300, you'd need to reduce it even more. Chicago stipulates that in any given development must average at least 500.
People always bring this up when we talk about massive overhauls of the Federal Government's tax code, Social Security, and state welfare. Like we can move mountains, but not a bucket of gravel.
What you have there is not a technical problem; you have politics. Those politics aren't "zoning laws and building codes must be changed"; they're "put those dirty fucking poor people somewhere else, not in our city!" It's the same reason some municipalities in Florida give poor people bus passes or arrest them and escort them to city borders: the objective is to herd them away from your clean, respectable, middle-class incorporated municipality, not develop ghettos for economic refugees.
Good luck with that in any context.
For a 900 sqft apartment, you still only need to supply 1 each of: refridgerator, stove, sink, bathroom sink, toilet, bathtub or shower, etc
These are surprisingly small expenses. A stove costs less than 1 month's rent, but stays in the apartment for over 10 years. Same with sinks, toilets, and showers. This is called cost amortization: divide the cost of X by its lifespan to get its per-time cost.
Construction for an apartment ranges from $85 to $200 per square foot. That means just building one of those more-expensive $750 1br apartments cramped down to 680sqft costs around $58,000. The stove in that apartment costs $400; t
Good job, Mallory. Keep it rolling. We have to convince the slaves that responsibility for workforce development is not on our backs, else there won't be a flood of college-trained workers for us to pick from. If people stop getting self-directed college education, we'll get a labor shortage, and you know what that means: we have to take up entrants, train them, send them to college, pay for it, and then give them fair salaries and good benefits so they don't leave for a better employer. That would be horrifying; they're supposed to be serfs, not human beings!
Let's consider utilities. ~$25, including your 'risk buffer'? Not in a single person household! My electric bill's connection fee is higher.
I pay $160-$320 in my house. In my apartment, I paid $52-$68. My apartment was 3 times the size of the living space I propose, had 4-inch walls, and did not have any insulation; one entire long wall and one short wall (50% of my wall space), as well as the entire ceiling, was uninsulated and facing directly outside.
the poverty line is an eminently livable income in most of the country
The poverty line is a relative poverty measure. It's a delineation at which we say people are poor because they look poor. It's distinct from absolute poverty, which is the delineation at which a person cannot afford the basic needs for living. The term "decent life", as you put it, is distinct from "subsistence".
We go from $1.16/sqft to $0.88/sqft. Bigger apartments are cheaper by area. Another argument for roommates.
That's actually a function of risk control, and not cost. A larger apartment holds a higher-income tenant with less of a flight risk; a smaller apartment holds someone with lower, more-distressed income, statistically more likely to face eviction and cause major landlord costs. The Dividend doesn't run out: your tenant won't lose his unemployment or his job; much of that risk is controlled, and I have proposed secondary systems to further control risk in order to help draw prices down.
I've seen as low as $0.62/sqft for a 900sqft area; I've seen some apartments as low as $330, but don't like the amount of risk in treating that as the norm.
The 244sqft area includes bathroom and kitchen, although I've had interesting ideas about a shower stall with corner sink basin and a separate toilet. Let's face it: you don't live in your bathroom.
This all looks fuzzy largely because it's market creation. I don't believe these people are going to go rent what's out there; we're going to have a multi-year transition period where we've still got people on HUD because the landlords are figuring out what units to build *and* trying to manage finances and logistics in hiring construction to build them. It's going to be a slow process moving from one system to another; fortunately HUD only costs about $50 billion, and most HUD families have some other form of income (low-income families suddenly having $1,100/mo more means maybe they can rent that $1,100 4-bedroom apartment instead of getting a HUD voucher), so some of my projection is just ignoring things that will take care of themselves trivially. Either way, you can't look outside today and say, "Oh, I see those things... yes this will work;" you have to plan and project, which is why there are pretty big error bars.
I'll note that I didn't address kids, but a family of two would be $1k/month under what I proposed, so I don't understand what got you hot and bothered. That's only a 10% difference.
I thought you were commenting on my numbers, not supplying your own. Misread. A lot of people freak out if we don't give everyone $1,000/month and $4,000/year for each child.
I'd structure the amount as a non-refundable credit for legal immigrants(IE they're untaxed until they're at the point that a citizen would be paying taxes).
That is...a surprisingly good solution. I don't know what *economic* merits it carries, but it avoids the no-work-free-money issue that would draw a lot of jobless immigrants to come squat for free housing. Off the top of my head, it would reduce their direct labor costs, which would prevent the system from disadvantaging immigrants at low-income postings.
I need to examine this, run some projections in my head, and maybe do a small write-up. This is good. How did I miss this?
Income inequality has not always grown. It did not grow in the postwar period (low- and middle-class incomes grew faster than high incomes). It's worth noting that this period covers the most rapid increase in overall wealth, prosperity and living standards in human history, precisely because of that.
Post-hoc, ergo propter hoc?
You're thinking in the short run, first of all. I could say that GDP has always grown (it has), and show you a chart. You could tell me it fell several times, notably in the 1930s (great depression) and in the 1945 post-war period. Look at the graph, though: GDP has always grown. In the long run, productivity grows.
Second, rapid increases in overall wealth, prosperity, and living standards did not occur *because* of middle-class recovery; they are a *symptom* of middle-class recovery. The war consumed resources, devoting production to destructive war efforts. Nylon and steel became scare because all labor available to produce steel was usurped to produce weapons of war. The common man could not get sliced bread because the steel for slicing machine blades wasn't available. Gasoline became scarce because there wasn't enough physical labor available to refine fuel for the war *and* for our domestic use.
During the war, a lot of women got man-jobs. There was still a labor shortage. A lot of workers were sent off to war, and our ability to produce shrank.
You think somehow, magically, the post-war period became about giving to the middle-class and not the rich, and that this simple shifting of income distribution drove our economy to new heights? The post-war period was about ending the anal rape of our economy and putting workers back to work. We got rich because we started building things again.
You have an incredibly distorted view of history *and* economics.
You said: "No it's not and no it doesn't. Indeed, the whole point of it is to achieve the complete opposite result." That statement is semantically identical to: "It doesn't do that because we do it intending for it to not do that." Your *intent* doesn't mean your understanding is correct; I pour kerosene into my car engine intending to improve its longevity by cleaning the gunk out of it, and there are a lot of mechanics suggesting this as a method to clean your engine, but it could be a really good way to just destroy your engine (and some mechanics have suggested that it does exactly that).
Your progressive tax example is misleading because it uses a divide between the bottom 90% and the top 10%,
I believe the term you're looking for is "Illustrative," which means "Shows the mechanism in a more complex system by a simplified example." "Misleading" means "draws an incorrect conclusion."
and uses this as a basis of comparing to the Romans to (seemingly) make an argument that "things aren't so bad today".
It argues that things are different in some ways and similar in other ways. The Romans had a healthy society with an income gap; we have a bigger income gap and a healthier society. These aren't correlates; the wider income gap is not harmful because our wealth is higher, and a much wider income gap *today* (say, 70% of the money going to the top 10%, right now, without us being any more wealthy) would precipitate an economic collapse. An income gap such as we have today might have precipitated an economic collapse in Rome; I don't care to do the analysis, as I'd have to examine the finances of Rome and the standard-of-living at various class levels, which is hard since I don't have year-by-year Roman census data. IF the vulgar Roman class were poor enough, THEN moving more of their income to the rich would push them into a level of absolute poverty triggering a collapse of the workforce and consumer base.
Wealth and income distribution today is mind-bogglingly skewed towards the top fractions of a percent of the population, and is becoming increasingly more so over the last few decades
THIS IS A FALLACIOUS ARGUMENT. It's begging the question. Why is it mind-boggling? What is "skewed"? How is the increasing income gap different than the increasing income gap that occurred all throughout history?
Let's ask a bit more on that last one. The income gap across history has widened as GDP per capita has increased; does it seem significant that the income gap appears to have widened more quickly during a massive spike in productivity starting just after 1960? Is *everything* happening faster; and is every argument that the rich are suddenly taking more each year than they did before just ignoring that we are *making* more each year than before? Are we getting richer twice as fast, and the rich padding themselves with the lion's share they've always taken twice as fast in turn?
Your argument assumes a widening income gap is bad, and that a flatter income gap is good.
Now, why do you think a bunch of people sitting around doing nothing (a BIG) is less wasteful than the same bunch of people doing productive work (a jobs guarantee) ?
People doing productive work draw a cost. You have argued that "NUH UH IT'S FREE!" and "WELL WE JUST MAKE THE RICH PAY FOR IT LULZOR!" The rich are not a natural resource.
You're even stupid enough to argue that taxes are not for revenue. Let's just shut off all taxes, and see how the government pays for anything. You have no concept of economics and would pay $1,000 to save yourself $500, then claim being $500 poorer is better than missing out on such great saving!
You're still making an argument about something that wasn't said. I did not say home-schooled kids are not well-adjusted or that they are unsocialized.
If you want to argue against me, you have to pull up an example of someone who is successful and a social retard who should be shot in the face for the good of society.
I did my calculations using the retail price of goods, plus risk reserves. A surprising amount of that is just extra cash thrown in because my calculations may be off, there may be a recession, prices may spike now and then (look at eggs), or people may occasionally spend irresponsibly (a monthly payment instead of lump-sum per year *really* provides a huge control for that particular risk, since you can only screw up one month; I do expect people to learn, readily, if they're not already fiscally-responsible accountants. They're poor, not retarded).
The Federal poverty line for a single individual is around $12k, and the numbers I give are well below that.
If you're on the bottom economic rung, an apartment/house of your own should not be expected.
224sqft. Enough for a 6'x9' bedroom (I actually spend much of my time in a room that size, with a futon, a computer desk, a 32 inch TV, video games...) and a 10'x9' common room, plus a bathroom and small kitchen tacked on. Low-income apartments have a median cost per square foot of roughly $1, although I've seen as low as 60 cents; with the risk reserve, I accounted $1.33/sqft.
That's for one individual, no room mates, no kids. If you've got a room mate (married?), you're getting twice the income. I pegged immigrants and families to a legacy public aid system, which doesn't support the adult population at all (except non-natural-born citizens) and so is much smaller--consequentially, less risk of abuse, so we can accept proportionally more fraud and focus on getting aid to families who need it. That means $1,100/month (in 2013) plus aid to feed and clothe your kids.
This is tied to the total income, and essentially to the per capita income, which alwaysgrows (GDP is the same number). You'll notice it's not a straight line; while there's a constant growth trend, the fluctuations are risk. That risk reserve thing I talked about? It's for that, too. In theory, as long as we don't dip below, say, 2013 (my established baseline), it continues to work without activating risk reserves; the minimum viable is a 2009 baseline.
By the by, being in the military counts as "Resident". On top of your military pay, you'd have the dividend going home to your spouse, or whatever you want to do with it. I advocate against paying citizens who don't live here; if a Chinawoman comes to Hawaii to birth a baby and then goes back to China, we shouldn't pay that kid money when he turns 18, having lived his life in China, living in China, working in China, having American citizenship. If he lives in America, well... he's a natural-born American and entitled to that money. Yes, I have thought of every possible risk--even the risks I can't name (most of which would just tank the economy anyway, so my answer is "nothing works then, so I haven't bothered").
Finances, economics, taxes... I've juggled too much money looking at this. I even wrote my own economic theories because the state-of-the-art was inadequate and couldn't explain a lot of economic behaviors. Can you believe nobody could explain why we have welfare systems, why welfare systems are possible *now* but not in 1750, or what causes Supply and Demand and scarcity? Like they could tell you prices increase when demand outpaces supply, but they couldn't tell you why supply wouldn't just increase to keep up with demand. (Hint: it's labor. Supply lasts as long as linear scaling; scarcity occurs when labor requirements scale superlinearly. That's part of why the per-capita incom
To "control" inequality of wealth doesn't mean to pay everyone the same.
I didn't say that, and I don't know where your autistic hyperfocus got that.
the current inequality is dangerous, and has reduced social mobility in the country.
False. The current income inequality is a normal consequence of growing wealth.
Unemployment was higher in the 1890s, the 1920s, and the 1980s; there was also the Great Depression, but that was a time of extreme economic illness, and does not exemplify a healthy economic state. The point is we're facing nothing more than the recurring cycle of wealth and employment.
The income gap has grown over time. It was larger in 1910 than it was in 1890; it was larger in 1950 than it was in 1920; it was larger in 1980 than it was in 1960; and it's larger now than it was in 1990. It has continued to grow steadily since the inception of man.
The rich upper class of the Romans were the Equestrians. At peak, the top 1% of Rome controlled 16% of the income; today, the top 1% control 20%. The top 10% control 48%, which shows a large disparity.
At its peak, Rome had about 25,000 Equestrians. Their elite represented 0.04% of Rome. Notice our Elite 1% control 20% of our income, and the top 10% control 48%; Scheidel and Friesen claim the top 10% of Roman society had 37% of income. So what's happened here?
Firstly, our top 10% represent people with $141,000 salaries.
Second, our society is a *lot* richer. The income distribution isn't that far off from Rome (I mean, top 10% have an extra 11% of the whole, and top 1% have 4% more of the whole), yet we have so much stuff they don't. Smart phones, supermarkets, powered automobiles, the Internet, global communications satellites, that sort of thing.
We've hardly lost social mobility. You can blame public efforts to get everyone an independent college education for much of that, but that's a wholly different argument requiring a completely different set of knowledge domains (it's also not as unintuitive). The real problems are at the bottom: jobs.
Addressing jobs is relatively easy. The growing income inequality makes progressive tax systems effective--and more effective over time. Even the fucking Romans knew this, which is why the Roman Republic implemented a progressive tax system. As the gap increases, the same percentage tax on the high earners draws in more of their dollars per dollar of income among the low earners. Essentially, you go to their door first, don't charge them any *extra*, but charge the next guy a bit less depending on how close to full your bucket-o-money is. I've written about this, even modeling the effect of a Citizen's Dividend (taken as a 17% flat tax on all AGI) against class-level take-home totals.
Reduce the cost of labor in this way and you create jobs. Why?
You make $60k, but you pay 33% in taxes and take home $40k. To pay you, we have to take a portion of the price paid for everything you produce (for your job) and use it to pay for the amount of time you spent making that 1 unit good. In short: the smallest cost of that good is the total pre-tax wages invested into producing the good.
Your tax rate drops to 11%. Well, now we start paying you $45k. Because your tax rate is 11%, you still take home $40k. That means you're not even one cent poorer, yet we pay you 25% less. Propagate this across the entire workforce involved in making that product and the thing you're making costs 25% less.
We can cut back the cost of that good to reach market demographics who don't have as much money. We'll make the same profit margin (e.g. 10%) or better, but move more units, thus making a larger profit. To make more units, we must hire more people. That creates jobs.
You might notice the odd effect that you're still bringing home $40k, but all the sh
So driving a car to a location without an anonymous passenger is different than driving a car to a location without an anonymous passenger?
Or are you arguing that driving a car to a location *with* an anonymous passenger in your car is *the* *same* *as* driving that car to a location *without* an anonymous passenger in your car?
No it's not and no it doesn't. Indeed, the whole point of it is to achieve the complete opposite result.
You just argued "it was done to X, therefor it was successful at X".
Why do you think a bunch of people sitting around doing nothing is less wasteful than that same group of people working on productive output ? How does that decrease wealth ? How does it lead to a poorer society ?
Trading food for cars with square wheels.... you'll see.
Let's talk history first.
Hunter-gatherers are believed to have worked 15-20 hours per person per week collecting food; some researchers argue they spent a total of 40-45 hours per week working (men and women) when you include preparing food. That's our total work week spent just on food.
In such a society, you don't have the labor time to produce anything else. Given a functional method to do so, you still can't build roads because the sum total of all available human labor isn't capable of building a working roadway. It takes too much time, and roadways need maintenance. There's also a large amount of time in which you *could* do it, but it'd be so costly as to easily displace other efforts which would cost less and return more to society.
This extends to any method of production: it takes labor, and it provides something; it may not be worth doing.
So these hunter-gatherers eventually invented agriculture. Agriculture is great. It let them spend less time finding food, so they could cut loincloths and figure out what to do with fire. Eventually they made bronze and invented bronze tools, cutting the time spent on agriculture down; animal power, iron and then steel tools, and other advancements further reduced this time. "Shipping" and "Transportation" are named after putting goods on ships and moving (trans) them from port to port; this happened because steel was hard to make (lots of labor involved) and rolling out railroads was too costly, thus overland transport would have cost far more per good shipped than just putting the goods on big boats and sailing around. New methods of steelmaking changed that.
That's your history lesson: today we spend about 27 hours per person per year producing food (yes, that's PER YEAR, not PER WEEK), and we had time on our hands to stick two men on the moon for a photo shoot. We weren't all busy hunting and farming, so we managed to build space ships in our free time.
So you asked...
Why do you think a bunch of people sitting around doing nothing is less wasteful than that same group of people working on productive output ? How does that decrease wealth ? How does it lead to a poorer society ?
The answer involves economics.
The above history lesson should make it clear that wealth (production per capita, also buying power per capita) grows by reducing unit labor invested in unit production, not by reducing things like costs or increasing the amount of labor put into force. How does that... work?
Each time we come up with a new, lower-labor method, we unemploy some people. "Lower-labor" is a total sense and hypothetical object. The inputs (any required overhead) require labor, and so interchangeable parts and assembly lines are not "lower labor" unless QA (notably, standardized measurements) and assembly line management require less labor in total than the labor saved in total by these new methods. Likewise, while this is true in the nominally long run, there's frequently a short period where professionals of X command high salaries, and so a lower-labor method is more expensive; refining the method or spreading its popularity will either reduce the labor time further or reduce the labor shortage (and thus salaries involved), dropping the cost to where the market will do the efficient thing. This is one of the downsides of free markets, and it's understood insignificant in the long run.
Well, to begin with, can you please advise what "optimization" is taking place?
Video streamed to your cell phone is encoded to a bitrate for cell phone screens, which is usually around 700-1200kbit/s. T-Mobile throttles to 1500kbit/s, preventing excessive buffering (i.e. keeping your phone from downloading 8 minutes of a 10 minute video in the first few seconds), reducing total transfer (when people stop watching a video halfway through, they're only buffered up to maybe 30 seconds past that) and instantaneous bandwidth usage (100 people jumping onto Youtube all at once aren't suddenly using 9 gigs/sec).
In other words: You only need ~1.5Mbit/s to stream video to your cell phone, so they decrease network congestion and total transfer costs by throttling the bandwidth for video streams to 1.5Mbit/s. This allows the quality of the streaming service to remain as expected (bandwidth is higher than streaming video bitrate) and enforces predictable network utilization by this particular application, thus allowing more reliable cost projections and decreasing the risk of cost overages, which allows T-Mobile to provide the service at a lower price (in this case, bluntly unlimited video streaming, because the cost of the average number of streaming users times 1.5Mbit/s is less than the service cost of providing unlimited video streaming, and there will be zero overages from this group of users).
They could provide full-speed, unlimited video streaming. They'd have to A) charge more; or B) wait for infrastructure build-outs, then not increase their network speed (just throttle *everything*). In other words: they'd have to match the price of the service to the cost of the service.
People work. You find a way to get people to produce 12 items with 10 hours of work, so you do that. Now people work the same amount, but produce 20% more crap--that means we're all a little richer.
Businesses provide organization. The great majority of production costs are wages spent on actual work (that is, costs in aggregate, including the input costs of every input product in the production chain); the "overhead" of management accounts for efforts getting those workers organized to make efficient use of their time, thus minimizing total wage cost.
With each improvement in efficiency, *somehow* we move more of that improvement up to the top.
Let's say you have the top 10% ("the rich") and the bottom 90% ("the working class"). You figure out how to make 10% more products in the same labor time. GREAT! We're all 10% richer, because we work exactly as much as before but have 10% more stuff! We only have to pay the same wages in total for the products and, if profit margins stay the same, the average actual price of products comes down by 10%, so we have the same amount of money and buy 10% more crap.
In practice, we have inflation. 10% more production, 20% more total income, and things carry a slightly higher price tag while we all carry a bit more money than that. Say everything cost $5 before now costs $5.50, but for every $50k of income we had we now make $60k.
Now here's where we get income inequality.
Instead of giving you a raise to $60k, you get a "cost of living" adjustment. That is: salaries don't go up to $60k from $50k; they go up to $55k, maybe $56k.
Where's that other $4k go? Well, it goes to spread employment; but that just reduces unemployment, doesn't it? With broader employment, you're also selling more products (more work means more production, and you don't produce if you can't sell--when that happens, you make rounds of layoffs because nobody's buying your crap). So we're all a little richer, but that's just pushing more profit upwards.
That's where it goes: Upwards.
Instead of us all getting 10% richer, we all got 6% richer, and the rich got 14% richer. Wash, rinse, repeat.
So how does this look historically?
In poor societies, you can't have much of an income gap. If the production is, in total, 10% more per-capita than everyone needs to survive, then the rich taking more than that 10% would starve the production line and collapse the economy. With that "Top 10%" statistic, it'd be as if the top 10% had TWICE as much as the working-class in total--which would come out to each rich man having about 18 times as much as each working-class laborer, if the rich each had the same amount of income.
In America, CEOs frequently have over 300 times as much income ($15 million) as a middle-class worker. In a society with the amount of wealth I describe above, the top 10% having 300 times as much as the bottom 90% would be "the laborers have exactly nothing". You can approach, but not reach, a 300:1 income ratio in a society where there's 10% more than subsistence production.
The income gap was actually smaller in medieval Europe, in Colonial America, and in 1950. It's hard to see because we have inflation *and* wealth growth, causing prices and salary to rise at the same time, making it hard to register purchasing power; further, measuring production is *impossible*, and economists handle it by measuring the total income from selling products and services--which is muddled about by factoring in CPI inflation measurements (which don't follow actual inflation because prices rise more slowly than inflation). People see that a car's price times inflation comes out to be roughly the same car's price today, but they ignore that the car today has four-wheel independent suspension, antilock brakes, traction control, precrash systems, heated leather seats, an MP3 CD changer, bluetooth media player control to stream Pandora from their phone, and a built-in satellite navigation system *and still cost
You're not carrying passenger, but on the way, so you're covered by neither your insurer nor Uber. Okay, that's a new one on me.
It seems to me (reasonable person test) driving on your way to pick up someone for an Uber call is the same operation as driving to a job interview, or driving to meet your (existing) friends at a new night club. Hell, I have to drive down to an unfamiliar part of town in an hour to pick up a guitar I had shipped from another Guitar Center. That's the same scenario.
Carrying an unknown passenger carries unknown risk. The passenger may be crazy, distracting, or otherwise disruptive to the driving operation in an unknown way. Carting around your friends means you deal with known risks of their asshole behavior (known known); picking up a stranger means you deal with unknown risks of their asshole behavior (a known unknown).
Legally, a contract has no force until an exchange occurs. If you haven't picked up a passenger, they have no obligation to enter your car or to pay you. Legally, this strongly suggests an exchange hasn't occurred; in that case, until you pick up the passenger, you are not performing a contracted service.
I'm going to say this is on your insurer for behaving in an illegal manner and categorizing non-commercial driving as commercial driving. This is akin to delivering pizza for Dominos (all pizza companies make you use your own car) and not having insurance when driving from your house to work because you are en route to start your shift as a commercial pizza driver: Until you enter that car with a pizza, you are not operating that car in a commercial context.
This illegal behavior is a risk. You always risk your insurer behaving illegally and disenfranchising you of a valid claim. This is a specific known risk of such behavior, rather than the generic known unknown (which is also less likely).
The difference is Uber provides the service of locating small business X providing ridesharing; TaxiCo provides the service of taxi, and hires employees as operators.
If anything, Uber connects you to thousands of independently-operated taxi businesses.
Quorum is technically the capability to make a decision. Without quorum, a decision cannot be made. The House can operate without a quorum by forming a Committee of the Whole, in which the entire body of the House becomes a Committee and can discuss and vote on a particular issue (e.g. bill) without a quorum present; at that point, the entire house is in on it. Such a Committee can make amendments to a bill; the House must then ratify the bill as normal, requiring quorum to actually pass it to the Senate.
Income inequality is always growing. It's not a real problem, and people are just looking to whine. Income inequality makes progressive tax systems possible and useful.
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I still say that was a mistake. Google could have gone with Mono and .NET, making C#, F#, VB.NET, and even Java and Python languages on the Android platform. They had no way to know Microsoft would drop Core CLR under an MIT license, or that Mono would fold code for poorly-implemented or poorly-performing functions from Core CLR into Mono, giving a .NET-based Android a boost; they *did* have enough programmers to write their own JVM and convert bytecode from Java to Dalvik, and so could have instead improved Mono as per their needs.
Google does have the option of migrating all Java/Dalvik functions to Java/Mono. They could, with quite a *lot* of work, have the entire Android ecosystem running on Java using native Java classes interpreted on Mono. The Java code would run as native CLR, with run-time JIT and profiling, just like C# applications--in other words, native, not "Java shoehorned onto .NET".
If they had gone that direction in the first place, likely C# would be a top language, possibly *the* top language. More importantly, Android would have had Java and C# developers--both fairly large camps outside their overlap--both contributing to its ecosystem.
In other words: it would have reduced risk and hedged a lot of bets for almost zero cost.
Actually, I understand the whole system. That's why I frequently explain to people that automation is not the end of all jobs; it's a potential increase in the rate of reduction of labor, which can lead to mass unemployment, causing an economic collapse that takes decades to dig out of--just like the Industrial Revolution.
The fact is we have always gained wealth by reducing the amount of labor used to produce goods. Less labor, more unemployment; this transfers buying power from the unemployed sector to the consumer, making all consumers a bit richer. The consumers still have the same income, but the products cost less to produce, and so prices come down; that leaves buying power in the consumer's pocket. With more buying power per consumer, the market demographic for any given good (notably, niche goods which a large portion of the consumer base could not afford) rapidly expands. This demands an increase in production, which recreates the jobs lost.
That fluctuation takes time to move: you lose 1% of jobs, you gain 1% of jobs later. Because we have a broad market with many different types of goods and different movements, it reaches an equilibrium: we're losing 1% of jobs per year over here, but gaining 1% per year over there. That equilibrium causes stabilization at an unemployment rate--4%, 8%, whatnot--even as the economy grows.
As a result, we become capable of producing more goods per unit of working hours, which practically means more goods per population since working hours are proportional to population size.
That's where wealth comes from.
Wealth, in practical terms, is the amount of stuff available to consumers per-capita. In economic wealth theory terms, it's the amount of buying-power (which is the amount of production) per-capita. (There are a lot of ways to say the same thing, with various labels attached to help indicate context.)
Now, in a war--notably, in World War 2--you divert production of consumer goods to production of weapons of war and consumables. Those goods get consumed by war.
For example: Your highly-efficient society capable of producing enough bread slicers to give everyone ready access to sliced bread suddenly can't produce enough steel to both support the war *and* make slicing blades for bread slicers, so suddenly the per-capita availability of sliced bread falls away.
Another example: Your highly-efficient society capable of producing gasoline cheaply enough that every single consumer had money in their pockets to fuel their cars (which they could also buy) to drive all over the god damn place suddenly has its oil resources diverted to fueling weapons of war. You don't have the available labor-hours to produce even more gasoline--you can't put more people to work in oil and fuel production without taking them off other jobs--so the consumer must go without gasoline.
In each of these situations, there is less of a good available per-capita. The consumer no longer has access to a resource; we effectively expend labor to produce a resource only to destroy it, removing that labor from our economic system, and removing the goods it can produce from the reach of the consumer. Sure, consumers are still working (as producers) and getting paid; they just can't buy anything with that money.
Now end the war.
You have all these production facilities for steel and gasoline. You have all this capability to produce steel and oil. You have all this labor that suddenly isn't working to provide for a war effort. What happens?
What happens now that you have all this capacity to make goods, and the big consumer of the goods--WAR--has gone away?
All these people working, all these people drawing income, all these people who can afford goods that were just plain unavailable because we didn't have the labor to make enough goods to supply both WAR and consumers?
All kinds of shit becomes available to the consumer.
Where is the wealth in a bunch of consumers working to build cars that they then drop into a giant hydraulic compactor to make blocks of steel?
Oh my god. You're Franklin! Let's just print more and more money and devalue existing money, instead of taking money from the economy!
A print-money policy is functionally equivalent to a flat tax levied on both income *and* standing monetary assets, which is kind of a nightmare. The last 4 times we used the printing presses as our revenue source, we caused major economic recessions; we stopped doing that because it was stupid and extremely regressive.
Some apartments (the ones in my area) used shared metering, so there were 6 units in the building and one customer charge--a $3 charge by your measure. Cut those apartments down to small 400sqft studios and you've got 18, at $1 for the hookup.
It's not unreasonable the utility would cut a landlord a deal to meter individual bills at a reduced service charge; or that the landlord would use a $2,000 commercial TED installed at the main distribution panel to automatically partition the bill based on actual tenant usage. Remember, we're talking about a ginormous opportunity to make a ton of profit; that means innovation and large business deals for anyone who can get rich by playing along.
A good 90% of my bill was heating and AC. A good 90% of my bill is still heating and AC, which is pretty hilarious. 100kWh for the lights, refrigerator, and computer each month; 693kWh total used this month, mostly to power a one-room space heater at night plus, an extra 90 therms ($50) of gas for the water heater and furnace. My lowest this year was 493kWh with a 6000BTU window AC consuming a bit over 400kWh for that month--that was July.
So yes, just my lights, ceiling fan, refrigerator, and computer cost me about $10. I'm working on an assumption of good insulation. R-32 would cost about $45 if added to the apartment during interior wall construction using mold- and fire-resistant stone wool insulation in long-wall configuration; $30 in short-wall configuration; and $90 in worst-case corner apartment configuration. Long-wall configuration gives more windows, which cost way more than insulation. That, ceiling fan, CFL or LED lighting (about 18 watts to make one room REALLY bright), and a small space heater or central forced air (my apartment had individually-metered central forced air heating) would actually get the cost down pretty low. You'd spend under $5 on lighting, refrigerator, and fan; the rest goes to heating and AC.
All of this uses existing off-the-shelf products. A savvy landlord might provide central heating and AC with a capstone turbine to generate electricity and reduce the total monthly meter, but that's probably not cost-effective in practice at that scale; I'd like to stick to realistic, sensible alternatives.
Don't forget that you'll have to address zoning and building codes. For example, Manhattan [datalounge.com] has a requirement that the smallest legal apartment is 400 sqft. Bloomberg wanted to reduce it to 300, you'd need to reduce it even more. Chicago stipulates that in any given development must average at least 500.
People always bring this up when we talk about massive overhauls of the Federal Government's tax code, Social Security, and state welfare. Like we can move mountains, but not a bucket of gravel.
What you have there is not a technical problem; you have politics. Those politics aren't "zoning laws and building codes must be changed"; they're "put those dirty fucking poor people somewhere else, not in our city!" It's the same reason some municipalities in Florida give poor people bus passes or arrest them and escort them to city borders: the objective is to herd them away from your clean, respectable, middle-class incorporated municipality, not develop ghettos for economic refugees.
Good luck with that in any context.
For a 900 sqft apartment, you still only need to supply 1 each of: refridgerator, stove, sink, bathroom sink, toilet, bathtub or shower, etc
These are surprisingly small expenses. A stove costs less than 1 month's rent, but stays in the apartment for over 10 years. Same with sinks, toilets, and showers. This is called cost amortization: divide the cost of X by its lifespan to get its per-time cost.
Construction for an apartment ranges from $85 to $200 per square foot. That means just building one of those more-expensive $750 1br apartments cramped down to 680sqft costs around $58,000. The stove in that apartment costs $400; t
Good job, Mallory. Keep it rolling. We have to convince the slaves that responsibility for workforce development is not on our backs, else there won't be a flood of college-trained workers for us to pick from. If people stop getting self-directed college education, we'll get a labor shortage, and you know what that means: we have to take up entrants, train them, send them to college, pay for it, and then give them fair salaries and good benefits so they don't leave for a better employer. That would be horrifying; they're supposed to be serfs, not human beings!
640 characters should be enough for everyone.
Let's consider utilities. ~$25, including your 'risk buffer'? Not in a single person household! My electric bill's connection fee is higher.
I pay $160-$320 in my house. In my apartment, I paid $52-$68. My apartment was 3 times the size of the living space I propose, had 4-inch walls, and did not have any insulation; one entire long wall and one short wall (50% of my wall space), as well as the entire ceiling, was uninsulated and facing directly outside.
the poverty line is an eminently livable income in most of the country
The poverty line is a relative poverty measure. It's a delineation at which we say people are poor because they look poor. It's distinct from absolute poverty, which is the delineation at which a person cannot afford the basic needs for living. The term "decent life", as you put it, is distinct from "subsistence".
We go from $1.16/sqft to $0.88/sqft. Bigger apartments are cheaper by area. Another argument for roommates.
That's actually a function of risk control, and not cost. A larger apartment holds a higher-income tenant with less of a flight risk; a smaller apartment holds someone with lower, more-distressed income, statistically more likely to face eviction and cause major landlord costs. The Dividend doesn't run out: your tenant won't lose his unemployment or his job; much of that risk is controlled, and I have proposed secondary systems to further control risk in order to help draw prices down.
I've seen as low as $0.62/sqft for a 900sqft area; I've seen some apartments as low as $330, but don't like the amount of risk in treating that as the norm.
The 244sqft area includes bathroom and kitchen, although I've had interesting ideas about a shower stall with corner sink basin and a separate toilet. Let's face it: you don't live in your bathroom.
This all looks fuzzy largely because it's market creation. I don't believe these people are going to go rent what's out there; we're going to have a multi-year transition period where we've still got people on HUD because the landlords are figuring out what units to build *and* trying to manage finances and logistics in hiring construction to build them. It's going to be a slow process moving from one system to another; fortunately HUD only costs about $50 billion, and most HUD families have some other form of income (low-income families suddenly having $1,100/mo more means maybe they can rent that $1,100 4-bedroom apartment instead of getting a HUD voucher), so some of my projection is just ignoring things that will take care of themselves trivially. Either way, you can't look outside today and say, "Oh, I see those things... yes this will work;" you have to plan and project, which is why there are pretty big error bars.
I'll note that I didn't address kids, but a family of two would be $1k/month under what I proposed, so I don't understand what got you hot and bothered. That's only a 10% difference.
I thought you were commenting on my numbers, not supplying your own. Misread. A lot of people freak out if we don't give everyone $1,000/month and $4,000/year for each child.
I'd structure the amount as a non-refundable credit for legal immigrants(IE they're untaxed until they're at the point that a citizen would be paying taxes).
That is...a surprisingly good solution. I don't know what *economic* merits it carries, but it avoids the no-work-free-money issue that would draw a lot of jobless immigrants to come squat for free housing. Off the top of my head, it would reduce their direct labor costs, which would prevent the system from disadvantaging immigrants at low-income postings.
I need to examine this, run some projections in my head, and maybe do a small write-up. This is good. How did I miss this?
Income inequality has not always grown. It did not grow in the postwar period (low- and middle-class incomes grew faster than high incomes). It's worth noting that this period covers the most rapid increase in overall wealth, prosperity and living standards in human history, precisely because of that.
Post-hoc, ergo propter hoc?
You're thinking in the short run, first of all. I could say that GDP has always grown (it has), and show you a chart. You could tell me it fell several times, notably in the 1930s (great depression) and in the 1945 post-war period. Look at the graph, though: GDP has always grown. In the long run, productivity grows.
Second, rapid increases in overall wealth, prosperity, and living standards did not occur *because* of middle-class recovery; they are a *symptom* of middle-class recovery. The war consumed resources, devoting production to destructive war efforts. Nylon and steel became scare because all labor available to produce steel was usurped to produce weapons of war. The common man could not get sliced bread because the steel for slicing machine blades wasn't available. Gasoline became scarce because there wasn't enough physical labor available to refine fuel for the war *and* for our domestic use.
During the war, a lot of women got man-jobs. There was still a labor shortage. A lot of workers were sent off to war, and our ability to produce shrank.
You think somehow, magically, the post-war period became about giving to the middle-class and not the rich, and that this simple shifting of income distribution drove our economy to new heights? The post-war period was about ending the anal rape of our economy and putting workers back to work. We got rich because we started building things again.
You have an incredibly distorted view of history *and* economics.
No I didn't.
You said: "No it's not and no it doesn't. Indeed, the whole point of it is to achieve the complete opposite result." That statement is semantically identical to: "It doesn't do that because we do it intending for it to not do that." Your *intent* doesn't mean your understanding is correct; I pour kerosene into my car engine intending to improve its longevity by cleaning the gunk out of it, and there are a lot of mechanics suggesting this as a method to clean your engine, but it could be a really good way to just destroy your engine (and some mechanics have suggested that it does exactly that).
Your progressive tax example is misleading because it uses a divide between the bottom 90% and the top 10%,
I believe the term you're looking for is "Illustrative," which means "Shows the mechanism in a more complex system by a simplified example." "Misleading" means "draws an incorrect conclusion."
and uses this as a basis of comparing to the Romans to (seemingly) make an argument that "things aren't so bad today".
It argues that things are different in some ways and similar in other ways. The Romans had a healthy society with an income gap; we have a bigger income gap and a healthier society. These aren't correlates; the wider income gap is not harmful because our wealth is higher, and a much wider income gap *today* (say, 70% of the money going to the top 10%, right now, without us being any more wealthy) would precipitate an economic collapse. An income gap such as we have today might have precipitated an economic collapse in Rome; I don't care to do the analysis, as I'd have to examine the finances of Rome and the standard-of-living at various class levels, which is hard since I don't have year-by-year Roman census data. IF the vulgar Roman class were poor enough, THEN moving more of their income to the rich would push them into a level of absolute poverty triggering a collapse of the workforce and consumer base.
Wealth and income distribution today is mind-bogglingly skewed towards the top fractions of a percent of the population, and is becoming increasingly more so over the last few decades
THIS IS A FALLACIOUS ARGUMENT. It's begging the question. Why is it mind-boggling? What is "skewed"? How is the increasing income gap different than the increasing income gap that occurred all throughout history?
Let's ask a bit more on that last one. The income gap across history has widened as GDP per capita has increased; does it seem significant that the income gap appears to have widened more quickly during a massive spike in productivity starting just after 1960? Is *everything* happening faster; and is every argument that the rich are suddenly taking more each year than they did before just ignoring that we are *making* more each year than before? Are we getting richer twice as fast, and the rich padding themselves with the lion's share they've always taken twice as fast in turn?
Your argument assumes a widening income gap is bad, and that a flatter income gap is good.
Now, why do you think a bunch of people sitting around doing nothing (a BIG) is less wasteful than the same bunch of people doing productive work (a jobs guarantee) ?
People doing productive work draw a cost. You have argued that "NUH UH IT'S FREE!" and "WELL WE JUST MAKE THE RICH PAY FOR IT LULZOR!" The rich are not a natural resource.
You're even stupid enough to argue that taxes are not for revenue. Let's just shut off all taxes, and see how the government pays for anything. You have no concept of economics and would pay $1,000 to save yourself $500, then claim being $500 poorer is better than missing out on such great saving!
You're still making an argument about something that wasn't said. I did not say home-schooled kids are not well-adjusted or that they are unsocialized.
If you want to argue against me, you have to pull up an example of someone who is successful and a social retard who should be shot in the face for the good of society.
Federal poverty line is a bullshit number.
I did my calculations using the retail price of goods, plus risk reserves. A surprising amount of that is just extra cash thrown in because my calculations may be off, there may be a recession, prices may spike now and then (look at eggs), or people may occasionally spend irresponsibly (a monthly payment instead of lump-sum per year *really* provides a huge control for that particular risk, since you can only screw up one month; I do expect people to learn, readily, if they're not already fiscally-responsible accountants. They're poor, not retarded).
The Federal poverty line for a single individual is around $12k, and the numbers I give are well below that.
If you're on the bottom economic rung, an apartment/house of your own should not be expected.
224sqft. Enough for a 6'x9' bedroom (I actually spend much of my time in a room that size, with a futon, a computer desk, a 32 inch TV, video games...) and a 10'x9' common room, plus a bathroom and small kitchen tacked on. Low-income apartments have a median cost per square foot of roughly $1, although I've seen as low as 60 cents; with the risk reserve, I accounted $1.33/sqft.
That's for one individual, no room mates, no kids. If you've got a room mate (married?), you're getting twice the income. I pegged immigrants and families to a legacy public aid system, which doesn't support the adult population at all (except non-natural-born citizens) and so is much smaller--consequentially, less risk of abuse, so we can accept proportionally more fraud and focus on getting aid to families who need it. That means $1,100/month (in 2013) plus aid to feed and clothe your kids.
This is tied to the total income, and essentially to the per capita income, which always grows (GDP is the same number). You'll notice it's not a straight line; while there's a constant growth trend, the fluctuations are risk. That risk reserve thing I talked about? It's for that, too. In theory, as long as we don't dip below, say, 2013 (my established baseline), it continues to work without activating risk reserves; the minimum viable is a 2009 baseline.
By the by, being in the military counts as "Resident". On top of your military pay, you'd have the dividend going home to your spouse, or whatever you want to do with it. I advocate against paying citizens who don't live here; if a Chinawoman comes to Hawaii to birth a baby and then goes back to China, we shouldn't pay that kid money when he turns 18, having lived his life in China, living in China, working in China, having American citizenship. If he lives in America, well... he's a natural-born American and entitled to that money. Yes, I have thought of every possible risk--even the risks I can't name (most of which would just tank the economy anyway, so my answer is "nothing works then, so I haven't bothered").
Finances, economics, taxes... I've juggled too much money looking at this. I even wrote my own economic theories because the state-of-the-art was inadequate and couldn't explain a lot of economic behaviors. Can you believe nobody could explain why we have welfare systems, why welfare systems are possible *now* but not in 1750, or what causes Supply and Demand and scarcity? Like they could tell you prices increase when demand outpaces supply, but they couldn't tell you why supply wouldn't just increase to keep up with demand. (Hint: it's labor. Supply lasts as long as linear scaling; scarcity occurs when labor requirements scale superlinearly. That's part of why the per-capita incom
To "control" inequality of wealth doesn't mean to pay everyone the same.
I didn't say that, and I don't know where your autistic hyperfocus got that.
the current inequality is dangerous, and has reduced social mobility in the country.
False. The current income inequality is a normal consequence of growing wealth.
Unemployment was higher in the 1890s, the 1920s, and the 1980s; there was also the Great Depression, but that was a time of extreme economic illness, and does not exemplify a healthy economic state. The point is we're facing nothing more than the recurring cycle of wealth and employment.
The income gap has grown over time. It was larger in 1910 than it was in 1890; it was larger in 1950 than it was in 1920; it was larger in 1980 than it was in 1960; and it's larger now than it was in 1990. It has continued to grow steadily since the inception of man.
The rich upper class of the Romans were the Equestrians. At peak, the top 1% of Rome controlled 16% of the income; today, the top 1% control 20%. The top 10% control 48%, which shows a large disparity.
At its peak, Rome had about 25,000 Equestrians. Their elite represented 0.04% of Rome. Notice our Elite 1% control 20% of our income, and the top 10% control 48%; Scheidel and Friesen claim the top 10% of Roman society had 37% of income. So what's happened here?
Firstly, our top 10% represent people with $141,000 salaries.
Second, our society is a *lot* richer. The income distribution isn't that far off from Rome (I mean, top 10% have an extra 11% of the whole, and top 1% have 4% more of the whole), yet we have so much stuff they don't. Smart phones, supermarkets, powered automobiles, the Internet, global communications satellites, that sort of thing.
We've hardly lost social mobility. You can blame public efforts to get everyone an independent college education for much of that, but that's a wholly different argument requiring a completely different set of knowledge domains (it's also not as unintuitive). The real problems are at the bottom: jobs.
Addressing jobs is relatively easy. The growing income inequality makes progressive tax systems effective--and more effective over time. Even the fucking Romans knew this, which is why the Roman Republic implemented a progressive tax system. As the gap increases, the same percentage tax on the high earners draws in more of their dollars per dollar of income among the low earners. Essentially, you go to their door first, don't charge them any *extra*, but charge the next guy a bit less depending on how close to full your bucket-o-money is. I've written about this, even modeling the effect of a Citizen's Dividend (taken as a 17% flat tax on all AGI) against class-level take-home totals.
Reduce the cost of labor in this way and you create jobs. Why?
You make $60k, but you pay 33% in taxes and take home $40k. To pay you, we have to take a portion of the price paid for everything you produce (for your job) and use it to pay for the amount of time you spent making that 1 unit good. In short: the smallest cost of that good is the total pre-tax wages invested into producing the good.
Your tax rate drops to 11%. Well, now we start paying you $45k. Because your tax rate is 11%, you still take home $40k. That means you're not even one cent poorer, yet we pay you 25% less. Propagate this across the entire workforce involved in making that product and the thing you're making costs 25% less.
We can cut back the cost of that good to reach market demographics who don't have as much money. We'll make the same profit margin (e.g. 10%) or better, but move more units, thus making a larger profit. To make more units, we must hire more people. That creates jobs.
You might notice the odd effect that you're still bringing home $40k, but all the sh
So driving a car to a location without an anonymous passenger is different than driving a car to a location without an anonymous passenger?
Or are you arguing that driving a car to a location *with* an anonymous passenger in your car is *the* *same* *as* driving that car to a location *without* an anonymous passenger in your car?
No it's not and no it doesn't. Indeed, the whole point of it is to achieve the complete opposite result.
You just argued "it was done to X, therefor it was successful at X".
Why do you think a bunch of people sitting around doing nothing is less wasteful than that same group of people working on productive output ? How does that decrease wealth ? How does it lead to a poorer society ?
Trading food for cars with square wheels. ... you'll see.
Let's talk history first.
Hunter-gatherers are believed to have worked 15-20 hours per person per week collecting food; some researchers argue they spent a total of 40-45 hours per week working (men and women) when you include preparing food. That's our total work week spent just on food.
In such a society, you don't have the labor time to produce anything else. Given a functional method to do so, you still can't build roads because the sum total of all available human labor isn't capable of building a working roadway. It takes too much time, and roadways need maintenance. There's also a large amount of time in which you *could* do it, but it'd be so costly as to easily displace other efforts which would cost less and return more to society.
This extends to any method of production: it takes labor, and it provides something; it may not be worth doing.
So these hunter-gatherers eventually invented agriculture. Agriculture is great. It let them spend less time finding food, so they could cut loincloths and figure out what to do with fire. Eventually they made bronze and invented bronze tools, cutting the time spent on agriculture down; animal power, iron and then steel tools, and other advancements further reduced this time. "Shipping" and "Transportation" are named after putting goods on ships and moving (trans) them from port to port; this happened because steel was hard to make (lots of labor involved) and rolling out railroads was too costly, thus overland transport would have cost far more per good shipped than just putting the goods on big boats and sailing around. New methods of steelmaking changed that.
That's your history lesson: today we spend about 27 hours per person per year producing food (yes, that's PER YEAR, not PER WEEK), and we had time on our hands to stick two men on the moon for a photo shoot. We weren't all busy hunting and farming, so we managed to build space ships in our free time.
So you asked...
Why do you think a bunch of people sitting around doing nothing is less wasteful than that same group of people working on productive output ? How does that decrease wealth ? How does it lead to a poorer society ?
The answer involves economics.
The above history lesson should make it clear that wealth (production per capita, also buying power per capita) grows by reducing unit labor invested in unit production, not by reducing things like costs or increasing the amount of labor put into force. How does that ... work?
Each time we come up with a new, lower-labor method, we unemploy some people. "Lower-labor" is a total sense and hypothetical object. The inputs (any required overhead) require labor, and so interchangeable parts and assembly lines are not "lower labor" unless QA (notably, standardized measurements) and assembly line management require less labor in total than the labor saved in total by these new methods. Likewise, while this is true in the nominally long run, there's frequently a short period where professionals of X command high salaries, and so a lower-labor method is more expensive; refining the method or spreading its popularity will either reduce the labor time further or reduce the labor shortage (and thus salaries involved), dropping the cost to where the market will do the efficient thing. This is one of the downsides of free markets, and it's understood insignificant in the long run.
That unemploymen
Well, to begin with, can you please advise what "optimization" is taking place?
Video streamed to your cell phone is encoded to a bitrate for cell phone screens, which is usually around 700-1200kbit/s. T-Mobile throttles to 1500kbit/s, preventing excessive buffering (i.e. keeping your phone from downloading 8 minutes of a 10 minute video in the first few seconds), reducing total transfer (when people stop watching a video halfway through, they're only buffered up to maybe 30 seconds past that) and instantaneous bandwidth usage (100 people jumping onto Youtube all at once aren't suddenly using 9 gigs/sec).
In other words: You only need ~1.5Mbit/s to stream video to your cell phone, so they decrease network congestion and total transfer costs by throttling the bandwidth for video streams to 1.5Mbit/s. This allows the quality of the streaming service to remain as expected (bandwidth is higher than streaming video bitrate) and enforces predictable network utilization by this particular application, thus allowing more reliable cost projections and decreasing the risk of cost overages, which allows T-Mobile to provide the service at a lower price (in this case, bluntly unlimited video streaming, because the cost of the average number of streaming users times 1.5Mbit/s is less than the service cost of providing unlimited video streaming, and there will be zero overages from this group of users).
They could provide full-speed, unlimited video streaming. They'd have to A) charge more; or B) wait for infrastructure build-outs, then not increase their network speed (just throttle *everything*). In other words: they'd have to match the price of the service to the cost of the service.
Better to have a jobs guarantee and let the public (/Government) soak up any idle labour by building stuff
That's wasteful and decreases wealth, leading to a poorer society with more poverty.
I did not say home-schooled kids were unsocialized, and that article doesn't say home-schooled kids are fine *despite* being unsocialized.
People work. You find a way to get people to produce 12 items with 10 hours of work, so you do that. Now people work the same amount, but produce 20% more crap--that means we're all a little richer.
Businesses provide organization. The great majority of production costs are wages spent on actual work (that is, costs in aggregate, including the input costs of every input product in the production chain); the "overhead" of management accounts for efforts getting those workers organized to make efficient use of their time, thus minimizing total wage cost.
With each improvement in efficiency, *somehow* we move more of that improvement up to the top.
Let's say you have the top 10% ("the rich") and the bottom 90% ("the working class"). You figure out how to make 10% more products in the same labor time. GREAT! We're all 10% richer, because we work exactly as much as before but have 10% more stuff! We only have to pay the same wages in total for the products and, if profit margins stay the same, the average actual price of products comes down by 10%, so we have the same amount of money and buy 10% more crap.
In practice, we have inflation. 10% more production, 20% more total income, and things carry a slightly higher price tag while we all carry a bit more money than that. Say everything cost $5 before now costs $5.50, but for every $50k of income we had we now make $60k.
Now here's where we get income inequality.
Instead of giving you a raise to $60k, you get a "cost of living" adjustment. That is: salaries don't go up to $60k from $50k; they go up to $55k, maybe $56k.
Where's that other $4k go? Well, it goes to spread employment; but that just reduces unemployment, doesn't it? With broader employment, you're also selling more products (more work means more production, and you don't produce if you can't sell--when that happens, you make rounds of layoffs because nobody's buying your crap). So we're all a little richer, but that's just pushing more profit upwards.
That's where it goes: Upwards.
Instead of us all getting 10% richer, we all got 6% richer, and the rich got 14% richer. Wash, rinse, repeat.
So how does this look historically?
In poor societies, you can't have much of an income gap. If the production is, in total, 10% more per-capita than everyone needs to survive, then the rich taking more than that 10% would starve the production line and collapse the economy. With that "Top 10%" statistic, it'd be as if the top 10% had TWICE as much as the working-class in total--which would come out to each rich man having about 18 times as much as each working-class laborer, if the rich each had the same amount of income.
In America, CEOs frequently have over 300 times as much income ($15 million) as a middle-class worker. In a society with the amount of wealth I describe above, the top 10% having 300 times as much as the bottom 90% would be "the laborers have exactly nothing". You can approach, but not reach, a 300:1 income ratio in a society where there's 10% more than subsistence production.
The income gap was actually smaller in medieval Europe, in Colonial America, and in 1950. It's hard to see because we have inflation *and* wealth growth, causing prices and salary to rise at the same time, making it hard to register purchasing power; further, measuring production is *impossible*, and economists handle it by measuring the total income from selling products and services--which is muddled about by factoring in CPI inflation measurements (which don't follow actual inflation because prices rise more slowly than inflation). People see that a car's price times inflation comes out to be roughly the same car's price today, but they ignore that the car today has four-wheel independent suspension, antilock brakes, traction control, precrash systems, heated leather seats, an MP3 CD changer, bluetooth media player control to stream Pandora from their phone, and a built-in satellite navigation system *and still cost
You're not carrying passenger, but on the way, so you're covered by neither your insurer nor Uber. Okay, that's a new one on me.
It seems to me (reasonable person test) driving on your way to pick up someone for an Uber call is the same operation as driving to a job interview, or driving to meet your (existing) friends at a new night club. Hell, I have to drive down to an unfamiliar part of town in an hour to pick up a guitar I had shipped from another Guitar Center. That's the same scenario.
Carrying an unknown passenger carries unknown risk. The passenger may be crazy, distracting, or otherwise disruptive to the driving operation in an unknown way. Carting around your friends means you deal with known risks of their asshole behavior (known known); picking up a stranger means you deal with unknown risks of their asshole behavior (a known unknown).
Legally, a contract has no force until an exchange occurs. If you haven't picked up a passenger, they have no obligation to enter your car or to pay you. Legally, this strongly suggests an exchange hasn't occurred; in that case, until you pick up the passenger, you are not performing a contracted service.
I'm going to say this is on your insurer for behaving in an illegal manner and categorizing non-commercial driving as commercial driving. This is akin to delivering pizza for Dominos (all pizza companies make you use your own car) and not having insurance when driving from your house to work because you are en route to start your shift as a commercial pizza driver: Until you enter that car with a pizza, you are not operating that car in a commercial context.
This illegal behavior is a risk. You always risk your insurer behaving illegally and disenfranchising you of a valid claim. This is a specific known risk of such behavior, rather than the generic known unknown (which is also less likely).
Can put an end to all homelessness and hunger in the US pretty much right now. Nobody cares.
That's probably only valid if your claim is for an incident occurring while you're ridesharing.
Uber provides insurance covering you while providing ridesharing.
Uber provides $1M of insurance. It's more than taxi companies provide.
The difference is Uber provides the service of locating small business X providing ridesharing; TaxiCo provides the service of taxi, and hires employees as operators.
If anything, Uber connects you to thousands of independently-operated taxi businesses.
Quorum is technically the capability to make a decision. Without quorum, a decision cannot be made. The House can operate without a quorum by forming a Committee of the Whole, in which the entire body of the House becomes a Committee and can discuss and vote on a particular issue (e.g. bill) without a quorum present; at that point, the entire house is in on it. Such a Committee can make amendments to a bill; the House must then ratify the bill as normal, requiring quorum to actually pass it to the Senate.
The Senate doesn't do this anymore. They used to.
Income inequality is always growing. It's not a real problem, and people are just looking to whine. Income inequality makes progressive tax systems possible and useful.