It doesn't reach the poverty line; it does cover the cost of living. I've known plenty of people who lived below the minimum wage; there's even some giant dbag on the internet who retired on $7,000/year because what the fuck.
I don't believe the modern economic climate makes that technically feasible. $10,000/year for a single individual, sure; $7,000, you're getting into "the market must adjust" territory.
I frequently push for a Citizen's Dividend which pays, in 2013 dollars, about $7,000/year. It's tied to the total income, so it automatically follows inflation, but ignores wealth: over time, the buying power income increases, so the standard-of-living provided goes up. Still, at the rate I provide, I don't expect people to go buy an 800sqft single bedroom apartment; I expect the market to say, "Oh HOLY shit! If we rent to ALL these people, we'll be richer than Warren Buffet in 3 years! We need to build new housing units to capture this market!"
HUD currently supports 4.8 million households, many families who would have two Dividend incomes (and, really, many of whom have jobs, but make very little; they would also receive the full Dividend). I expect a roll-out of a Citizen's Dividend as I describe to involve funding HUD minus X units per year, where X is the number of units landlords are able to profitably convert to appropriately-sized non-assisted units. Families will have, in 2013, $600 of (additional) housing (budgeted) income per month, plus EBT to cover childcare expenses (a minimized public aid system targeting children and immigrants; since it's smaller--all general welfare is removed from that system--risk of abuse and associated costs are diminished sharply, and we can focus more on getting the money to people who need it and just accept the cost of missing more abuse).
It's the best I can do. 600,000 homeless, 18 million starving children, 48 million starving Americans; I can make all that go away, but I can't put everyone in a luxury apartment. The worst case is livable.
Now I live somewhere where that is less than my rent and that's just moving between two similar sized towns in the UK.
I think this system might adapt to the UK, as well. It only works for wealthy countries--that is, it works for countries whose per-capita buying power is above a certain threshold. You can't rubber-stamp my system in Canada, England, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and so forth; you'd have to use it as an example and try to fit your own system into the same transformation, carrying out the same assessment of the retail cost of each unit good and service, looking at transitional risks, at your social obligations (Social Security Retirement Benefits was a big one here), and so forth.
The difference in cost of living in the USA can be even larger.
When you're broke and unemployed, you tend to... okay, in the US, you tend to starve in the streets and sleep each night in your own piss with the rats to keep you warm.
When you have barely enough income to survive, you tend to move toward the ghettos. It kind of sucks. I know people who bicycled or bused to work 3 hours each way. At that level, I would have approximately zero criticism if they took the money and quit their jobs. Someone who lives a reasonable distance from my employer can mop the floor, or we can pay better money for that; if it's not worth SIX FUCKING HOURS of unpaid travel time to and from work every day for you to work for minimum wage, then you shouldn't do that. This isn't Uganda (where people walk 9 miles every day to fetch fresh water from the nearest river).
I want people to work; I don't want slaves. If they quit working because they can't work within 30 miles of where they can afford to live and they can't afford transportation, that's... you should expect that.
While that's not valueless, it's not really the major problem. Everyone has some ideals about what the problem in every large system (welfare, education, American government) is, and they're all largely symptoms or tangential disturbances.
I happen to agree with an EBT system for children, while many of my contemporaries have this ridiculous idea that we should give $4,000/year to parents for *every* child they have, flat out. That's stupid: to ensure that only 3 in 1,000 fail to thrive, you'd have to supply more than enough money for almost 99.7% of the population. If you did that, popping out babies and neglecting your kids (hand-me-downs, replacing clothing less often, cheaper food, no concern for entertainment and thus their mental well-being) would be profitable. An EBT system carries some risks, and they're the same risks we face now; using an EBT system for child welfare is guaranteed not to make the situation worse.
In general, a Citizen's Dividend is the correct modern welfare system. It encourages work and job creation--two distinct things operating on different mechanisms. It encourages work by eliminating all welfare traps, as you collect the Dividend (tax-free!) regardless of your working income; it creates jobs by reducing the cost of labor, thus reducing the cost of products, allowing the price of products to come down, increasing the buying power per consumer (rather than just concentrating it in the hands of fewer consumers, as most technological advancement does), thus demanding more production, thus more jobs.
Providing finances and other living skills in base education is a good plan. It's not strictly required (you'd be surprised how quickly poor people learn to sit on coal and make diamonds), but it gives a universal advantage and provides stability; very few activities do that (free public college is a red herring in that regard: it provides cheap labor for business and causes an increase in unemployment and a decrease in worker power and ability of the common man to obtain employment).
You will *never* "break" the poverty and welfare cycle. We create wealth by reducing employment, and then recover employment by creating wealth. That is to say: we expend 40 hours per person just to make enough food to feed everyone, and all run around naked living in caves; then we invent farming and expend 20 hours per person to feed everyone, and half of everyone finds themselves unemployed. Those unemployed then start making clothes. Then we invent bronze knives, cut skins faster, work fields more effectively, and spend 20 hours doing all that, and half of everyone becomes unemployed. Then we invent mud huts and people get jobs as straw carpenters. Wash, rinse, repeat, and we're up to a society where we frequently go through rounds of layoffs and then every single person in the world buys a smartphone that's ten thousand times more powerful than the $75,000 computer system SGI sold to your employer in 1987.
In other words: if 30 hours of labor at minimum wage goes into that new Keureg you want to buy, it's going to cost at least $247.50. If we build a better factory and only use 10 hours of labor per machine, it's going to cost $82.50, and we're going to fire 60% of the workers running the factory. You might still pay $100--and we make a good 20% profit--but that's in contrast to paying $300 and we make the same profit margin selling you that machine. That extra $200 means you can buy other crap, which somebody has to make; so we make new things, and we hire those people we just laid off.
There's a gap. People lose their jobs, then get new jobs months or years later. We hit an equilibrium where people are gaining jobs as quickly as they're losing them and unemployment becomes stable. That's what welfare is for.
There are two ways to fix schools. First, by putting a blunt end to all poverty, thus reducing one external factor. The second is to fix the education curriculum.
Sadly, in my son's district, a school failing due to poverty is told they're failing because of "bad teachers" and the school is put into receivership.
Education--we're talking about real education, not workforce development (college) mislabeled as "education"--involves complex interactions between parents, students, teachers, administrators, and politicians. If the parents don't raise their kids right, they're difficult to teach--hence poverty impacting academic performance--and the schools require corrective strategies; if the schools don't have a good foundation for a curriculum, students fail to perform unless they get that advantage elsewhere (parents, home life); if the teachers don't teach the curriculum effectively, the students don't learn well enough; if the administrators don't provide correct curriculum guidelines, the teachers don't teach the right stuff, regardless of how effective they are; and if the politicians establish improper educational rules, the correct curriculum doesn't appear, and the administrators can't supply the teachers with what they need.
Everyone wants to blame someone else.
The teachers want to blame your kids for being dumb, the parents for being crappy parents, and the administration for forcing a curriculum that doesn't teach what they believe they need to teach. The administration wants to blame the teachers for teaching poorly and the politicians for not funding and defining good educational options. Politicians want to blame the administration for mismanaging funds and not developing a proper educational environment. Standardized tests get involved to show that teachers aren't teaching--by showing that students aren't learning.
Educators talk a lot about intelligence. They talk about students who are more intelligent, and how to manage classrooms with students of varying intelligence. Administrators create programs to segregate gifted students from idiots.
It's bullshit.
The term "Intelligence" isn't simply politically-incorrect; it's factually wrong. The correct term is "Intellectual Development". Why do poor people perform worse than middle-class kids with a better home life? Because they've developed terrible mental habits and do not have the tools to succeed! They have poor intellectual development, not weak poor-people moron brains.
Hold that in your head and think on this. Think really hard about this. I'm serious, concentrate. If we taught students effective study and thinking skills as the very first thing crammed down their necks in their educational careers, they would all perform better, and all show more tightly-grouped academic performance.
That means a student's poor performance is always *our* *fault*. We'll never get 100%, because there will always be those corner cases of severely bad home life or other poor social development which we *can* fix, but only at the expense of immense amount of time, effort, energy, and disruption to the classroom; in many of the absolute worst cases, we simply won't know how to approach the problem. That's acceptable: we always risk a level of failure. Statisticians like to go for the 3-standard-deviation number of 99.7%, so let's say 3 in 1,000 students fail instead of 250 in 1,000 (apparently 25% of high school students fail to graduate on a normal timeline in the US; 0.3% would not be embarrassing, don't bitch).
Imagine being a teacher, a parent, or a school system administrator. Even politicians speak from the platform of having to reach in and make all these incompetent fools do their jobs properly, not from any admission of personal failure.
So what can we do?
I don't have a plan. I have pieces. Reading strategies; mnemonics a
I've bypassed fully-secured bootloaders by shorting the CLCM pin (deletes the bios password by removing power from NVRAM), going into bios, enabling USB boot, putting in a USB drive with grub, poking at the hard drive for 20 seconds, and then manually loading a kernel and initrd with init=/bin/bash. Added a secondary root account (uber, uid=0) and rebooted, got root. Failing that, I can boot a small Linux distribution and mount the root partition, then type a new entry into passwd and shadow using vi.
Actually, the Constitution requires 51 senators for quorum, or else the vote is not valid. Three senators voting unanimously to pass a bill in an empty Congressional meeting wouldn't meet requirements any more than dressing up in full court regalia and decreeing new US laws from your toilet seat would.
Why not a cryptocash system, wherein a particular smart chip requires a hardware register in a non-default state to write to it, and carries a complete signature of its contents? You could use small credit chips, each carrying a digitally-signed serial number and value--a 1024-bit identifier, a value (like $5), a system ID (serial number of the credit chip it's assigned to), a 7kB random padding block, and a private-key-encrypted hash.
You'd trade the chips as cash, readable by any dumb reader. You could use a connected system to send the contents of each chip to a central authority and then rewrite them into an account or into a new chip, combining a whole wallet of chips onto one. This allows you to make change by exchanging a $20 credit chip (verified by an unconnected machine) and getting back three $5 credit chips (also verified), or by accepting three $5 credit chips and rewriting one as a $1.23 credit chip (communication with central authority), or by accepting a $20 credit chip and rewriting it as a $3 credit chip (also by central authority).
Each of these chips would hold its own account--a full list of denominations, down to a dozen pennies--and a computer (such as a bank's database) could wipe the chip and reorganize its contents (convert 23 pennies to two dimes and three pennies). The credits would act like cash, in so much that you can't know who holds a particular credit chip, you can trade credit chips, and they can be deposited into banks; the physical chips would release their contents to accounts, so your bank account holds real dollars. Obviously, banks would account for how many dollars you have, and pool "your" dollars into their accounts, thus they'd still loan more than they had cash-on-hand.
All the advantages of cash--no personal identifying information, handling without networked electronics, physically tradeable, cheap to produce (bit of plastic with a printed circuit on it)--and of digital currency--can be loaded into accounts (and the accounts can just be a physical card rather than far away). A few of the disadvantages of digital currency, notably that you need some form of powered electronic device unless you put an eink screen to display the current denomination onto each credit chip, which would make it a hell of a lot less cheap to manufacture.
You have sources that come down to a single expert or small panel of editors, and sources that come down to anyone who can spot an error. Any idiot can post ridiculous bullshit masquerading as authority on the Internet without challenge by making his site a one-way push communication (no comments, no wiki). Any idiot can also post a volume of poorly-researched, outdated, self-contradictory rambling as an authoritative text printed over a dozen or so volumes of an encyclopedia.
For well-edited, complete articles, Wikipedia has a much lower error rate per subject than traditional encyclopedias. For lower-profile articles, Wikipedia lags the average. Nobody has done a comparison on less-emphasized Britannica articles versus more-central Britannica articles to see if Britannica has its low-error-rate and high-error-rate topics.
In medical school, professors and textbooks proclaim that epsom salts will draw toxins from the body. That's failed scientific rigor, and the literature hasn't caught up. Think about it. Who fucking cares? Are you going to die because your doctor--a competent doctor, not one who is going to prescribe epsom salts baths to detoxify the botulism from your body--doesn't know epsom salts baths are bullshit? Of course not; it's not important. Nobody has a real reason to challenge the literature.
The problem is we are reaching a tipping point where cheap machine labor will soon be able to replace all repetative labor which simply relies on having vision, manual dexterity, or even smart but not creative thinking work.
Maybe. We did this before, and got 80% unemployment and an economic disaster. That's just a matter of speed: we constantly unemploy and re-employ people; we just do it slowly, so we lose maybe 1% over the time it takes to create new jobs for those 1%. If we lose 30% over the time it takes to create jobs, we might create jobs faster--which doesn't help if we create jobs for 3% of them in that time, but end up with 27% standing unemployment.
The trend is accelerating so the next 20 years are going to be a period of rapid employment destruction.
A Dividend lets us eliminate a minimum wage and provides some income, which helps control labor costs by lowering effective taxes. That has a middling effect: for a large range, I suggest tax rates which actively reduce marginal income tax, thus allowing lower wages with the same paycheck take-home; and the income from the Dividend also reduces the worker's demand for wages, but not by the full measure of the Dividend itself. $4/hr may be a comfortable living if you're already getting a few extra dollars's worth of wages, but you might still decide you need at least $5.50 for it to be worth your time and effort--even though you'd normally demand at least $7 because of living expenses.
Fortunately, the income gap always grows, which lets us make clever use of progressive taxes to reduce taxes on the working class over time without raising taxes on businesses or high-income earners. That helps reduce wages: if you're getting taxed half as much and we reduce your paycheck by a bit more than the difference, you come out even, while your employer pays you much less. That means the machines have to cost less if they're going to compete with you, and all the stuff you buy costs less to make, and so can be sold cheaper, and so you actually come out richer.
All these effects stretch out the long-term schedule for automation deployment.
robots which cost close to the poverty line and by automated processes which are a little more expensive but which are tax deductible capital expenses to create.
The end goal isn't toxic, but the transition can be devastating if it happens too fast. The Industrial Revolution is essentially the same problem. As I showed above: we can slow the transition. That doesn't just kick the can down the road; it affects the entire dynamic of the economic change.
Adoption comes via three main archetypes: the early adopters; the strategic speculators; and the traditionalists.
Early adopters are the people you describe. They'll see the machines are more efficient and cost the same or less, in terms of TCO, compared to labor. That means a $1 million machine that operates for 25 years with fueling (electricity) and maintenance costs of $84,800/year costs as much as five full-time laborers making $12/hr wage. If it can do their job for that cost, the early adopters will buy it. New technology. Some will even jump in earlier, reasoning that $84,000 is less than the $125,000 in wa
More than that, engineers have generalized broad workloads into categories, and created standard hardware to handle those workloads. GPGPU allows hardware acceleration of anything similar to GPU processing; it's cost-effective, as designing hardware *and* software for a specialized task (bitcoin mining, protein folding, encryption cracking) is obviously more complex than designing only specialized software. PhysX specifically targets physics, a broad problem, and so reduces the amount of programming needed for custom physics engines without supplying a custom hardware dongle for each piece of software.
All this stuff reduces both the number of programmers and the number of hardware engineers for a task; so long as we're replacing legacy systems with more efficient systems, we'll shift away from paper accountants and spreadsheet payroll managers to programmers writing applications for small staffs. 10 new programmers, 1,000 payroll departments drop from 40 payroll managers to 38 payroll managers, save the labor of 1,990 employees. That creates unemployment in the short term; if we go slow enough, the cost savings passes on--in the case of business services, it means the business can buy other services and expand their capabilities; in the case of production line, it means consumer goods get cheaper and we can sell consumers more things.
Job creation at zero means there are no new jobs created. If someone replaces a worker in a job, that's still only one job, not a new job.
Technological innovation serves to reduce the labor required to produce a product. Jobs grow when we reduce scarcity: with 1,000,000 acres of land and hunter-gatherer society, you can only hunt so many deer and collect so many berries; go agrarian and you can get 10 times as much food; and bring it up to modern agricultural practices and genetically-modified crops and you can take that to 70 times as much. Don't believe me? The optimistic projection for hunter-gatherer society is a maximum of 135 million humans supported before exhausting all resources and incurring mass famine; our modern agricultural practice feeds over 7,000 million humans.
Reduce scarcity. If you have 1,000,000 acres of arable land, you'll expend the same amount of labor to farm each acre, the same amount of labor to feed each new person. When you run out of arable land, you have to expend extra labor to transport water for irrigation, to manufacture fertilizer, and to harvest smaller yields. That means instead of 10 hours to feed one person, you have to expend 20 hours. That's where scarcity comes from: we can continue to expand, but we'll have to pour in more human labor, meaning we have to pay these people, which means the cost of goods goes up, which means standard-of-living falls and some people just don't have anything to trade (notably, currency) to buy enough food to live.
In markets, reducing the labor that goes into a product reduces its cost, reducing its minimum price, enabling us to sell that product to more of the consumer market. As the price comes down, existing consumers end up with more money in their pockets, and can buy new goods. Producing more of a good and producing a new good both require labor, which creates new jobs for the ones we displace by lowering labor costs.
That only holds us at an equal number of jobs. When you become capable of scaling up further without incurring more than a proportional increase in labor, you create more jobs: you can make more units without increasing the cost-per-unit. That's often accompanied by an increase in population, which creates more jobs.
In politics, you look at unemployment rate when consumer markets recover from a rapid job depletion, pointing out the lowering of the marginal unemployment. You look at number of jobs created and pointedly avoid mentioning unemployment rate when scarcity decreases, creating more jobs but also creating more total unemployed, managing to not affect the unemployment rate in the process.
Given all that, a stagnation of job creation in EE doesn't necessarily mean we're not innovating; we may be innovating new analysis methods which require fewer EEs, thus shifting their labor away.
A lot of the privacy wargarble is unsubstantiated. Facebook and Google are mining your information, and we have tracking cookies to deal with; the vast majority of outcry is at Internet-connected services that don't bother with any of that. Even the cry about Amazon is overblown: Ubuntu goes and searches Amazon for products when you type into Unity search, and people lose their shit like Amazon is generating a profile on them somehow and filing it with their medical history.
You know if you actually crunch the numbers, you find that Corporate Income taxes shield people from individual taxes, we'd be better off not taxing corporations, so individuals would pay more individually and put a 25% tax on dividends to non-US taxpayers.
Taxing individuals more individually is a way to increase the cost of labor, thus raising the cost of products. Raising the cost of products reduces the amount of products that consumers can purchase with their income, thus reducing the amount of products you can profit by producing. Reducing the amount of production reduces the amount of required labor. Reducing the amount of labor means reducing jobs.
Socrates lived in a time when the sum total of human knowledge was a little fraction of what we know today, and this it was a lot easier to get up to the state of the art in several fields. Sure, we should question experts, but on average, the risk of rationalising our snap judgement with half-understood facts and simplified sound bites is not insignificant. The expert is not always right, but he usually comes closer to the truth than a non-expert.
That's no excuse for turning off the thinking part of your brain and being a twit. You can accomplish greatthings when you do a little thinking. In my case, I have economic theories that don't match with mainstream politics or contemporary economics, such as the observation that labor costs affect employment rates--one of the reasons I push for a Citizen's Dividend instead of a minimum wage and public-aid system, which lowers taxes and has positive impacts on retirement funding. This is also why I see the growing gap of income inequality as a good thing, since I can make use of it to cut back taxes on labor, thus incurring all those nice benefits like lowering the minimum price of all products, increasing employment, and possibly causing the full-time work week to shrink to 32 hours (figure that one out).
I don't have a fancy economics degree; I've cataloged a ton of information in my head, and at some point started organizing it. This is what happened. There are holes; I don't get how exchange rates work, among other things. I've come up with a few rough theories for those, and need more time to work them into something that fits in consistently with existing observations. It'll never be wholly correct, but it's not right until it appears to work under scrutiny.
It gets checked against contemporary theories, looking for observations I haven't made, looking for holes, looking for places where they were wrong; often I realize these people weren't wrong, but rather painfully close, like with Adam Smith asserting that the only way to work more efficiently is to divide tasks into smaller fractions spread among more people, rather than to invent new tools and techniques that may optimize processes (assembly line vs cellular manufacture: same tools, same laborers, different floor plan, less wandering back and forth carrying half-finished parts) or simply figure a way to get an end result in fewer major steps (technically, *consolidating* labor. Smith wasn't wrong; he just veered off at the end, observing the improvement of efficiency by doing more work with the same labor and then specifying it as division, instead of just the raw observation that more production per labor time creates wealth. He also was writing a theory of value, trying to explain the correct price of products instead of describing economic movement in general.
One thing I've learned in my life: math is a tool, not a framework. If people try to define non-mathematical things by math, reject that and look for a plain-words explanation. It probably won't be a simple one--simple explanations just gloss over complexities--but the mathematics behind quantum physics aren't as important as the basic concepts of how quantum mechanics works. If you know all the math, but not the mechanics, you're a Chinese Room: someone can hand you a paper with a lot of squiggles, you can pull out your dictionary and write down a correct response, but you don't really understand the conversation you're having. If you have the mechanics but not the math, then you can't be an engineer; you *can* be a theorist. Theorists are the ones who figure out where w
Ouch! No income tax! Income tax is the best type of tax ever invented--because all taxes are income tax. Sales taxes just take part of your income later. There are some interesting side-effects produced when implementing income taxes.
You're right: it's a market thing. The states tax these businesses, just not as much as they otherwise would; that means state revenue. If the state has a new facility producing some good or service, that's more production; that production represents the generation (and export) of local buying power.
Exporting local buying power is trade. You produce things using less labor than a neighboring economy; you send those products out to them, and they trade something they can produce for less than you. In currency economies, you sell your goods for currency, then spend your currency locally or you spend it to import. Because income requires jobs and local business, the same proportional spending equates to more money spent in each category, including locally: money coming in doesn't automatically mean wealth, because you can't have wealth without production; you need jobs, and more money spent even on retail (e.g. WalMart) mean more local jobs.
To the government, that means more income to tax without an increase in population. That's a good thing: the single most effective way to increase employment is to reduce the cost of labor. This is so effective that a reduction in taxes on the working class at the current point in time can not only spread and slow the implementation of automation (you want this, but you want it to happen over a long time period so we can find new jobs after the machines displace people), but potentially create *too* *much* employment. If unemployment is 8% and it suddenly drops by 15%, your economy grinds to a halt: too many people working--or rather, everyone working and employers experiencing a labor shortage. To compensate, you'd raise the cost of labor by lowering full-time working hours (32-hour work week). Possibility.
In the larger economy, something like tax breaks to attract business increases revenue without increasing productivity, and doesn't necessarily create more jobs. It only creates more jobs overall if the labor is the cheapest labor you can get; otherwise you're just leaching income from one location into another.
It's notable that my economic theory--yes, I developed my own--accounts for production (goods and services produced), productivity (proportional labor involved in production--including waste labor by overproducing goods which never get consumed), and wealth (buying power per capita) differently than other theories. I've intentionally tried to adjust the theory to synthesize other theories from it, but only if I can keep something actually accurate--no compromises, just better-engineered theory. That's why I have things like total buying power being the total production, the buying power of unit currency being (that is: constantly approaching) the total income (for a period, as a running average, etc.) divided by the total production, and inflation representing when the total income increases faster than the total production (i.e. buying power).
Defining the economics in this way accurately follows the generalized behavior of economies, and also explains the observations made by contemporary economists. The purpose isn't to write up formulas and numbers to try to predict economics, but rather to identify cause-and-effect relationships that says "doing X will lead towards Y". That lets me look at a lot of economic theories where people say, "In general, yes, but..." and say, "That theory is faulty. It tends to work out because X Y Z, and it tends to falter in completely predictable circumstances for exactly the same reasons."
Adam Smith's division-of-labor theory is a shining example of this; inflation is another, whereby we seem to keep getting a higher standard of living even when wages grow slower than inflation. A higher standard-of-living indicates we're buying more and better things, yet how does that happen when your wages are worth less? Answer: you're trying to compare modern objects which could, at one time, be produced at the expense of *enormous* amounts of labor with their less-advanced eq
Mostly because experts are people who have little slips of paper telling us their opinions are more valid than the opinions of others. It's the inversion of the American Cargo Cult ideal: while some people believe their opinion is as valid as any other opinion and that people who are well-researched just have an agenda, others believe that anything written by experts is Holy Writ and infallible.
Socrates had an issue with this.
Socrates figured people should ask questions about *everything*. We have a world where people get a glance at something, make up some stuff, and then stop asking questions about it and presume anyone who disagrees with them is a moron; on the other end, someone gets a certification telling us they know about something, so we stop asking questions and assume anyone who disagrees with *them* is a moron. Socrates wanted us to question ourselves *and* the experts, to find out why the experts disagree with us, and then to decide if the reason for disagreement was valid, or if we could even assess it with the information we had. Do that enough and you'll start realizing the experts are wrong--they're always wrong, just less-wrong than all of their predecessors.
There have been a few studies showing that speed traps are dangerous. People slow down suddenly when they become aware of police in the area, increasing the rate of collisions. Excessive enforcement, oddly enough, leads to more loss of life.
I like Google Drive, but OwnCloud is nice. I set it up in Docker in like 30 minutes with postgresql, redis, php-fpm, and nginx, living happily with other services (nginx connects to php5-fpm via socket and listens on a unix socket on another volume; the nginx unix socket volume is shared between all nginx containers, and the final container listens on HTTPS for a virtual host and just proxies back to the unix socket).
I've thought about hooking up OwnCloud to Google Drive (it does that) so I can use OwnCloud features without breaking up my storage. I wish there was something like the old EyeOS that got taken away from open source and left with a big "OPEN SOURCE" sign branded on it while they walled off all downloads and prevented anyone from using it unless they called for a sales person, negotiated a contract, and paid money. Not even a paypal link to buy and download; you had to contact for an Enterprise purchase. It was promising as hell.
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It doesn't reach the poverty line; it does cover the cost of living. I've known plenty of people who lived below the minimum wage; there's even some giant dbag on the internet who retired on $7,000/year because what the fuck.
I don't believe the modern economic climate makes that technically feasible. $10,000/year for a single individual, sure; $7,000, you're getting into "the market must adjust" territory.
I frequently push for a Citizen's Dividend which pays, in 2013 dollars, about $7,000/year. It's tied to the total income, so it automatically follows inflation, but ignores wealth: over time, the buying power income increases, so the standard-of-living provided goes up. Still, at the rate I provide, I don't expect people to go buy an 800sqft single bedroom apartment; I expect the market to say, "Oh HOLY shit! If we rent to ALL these people, we'll be richer than Warren Buffet in 3 years! We need to build new housing units to capture this market!"
HUD currently supports 4.8 million households, many families who would have two Dividend incomes (and, really, many of whom have jobs, but make very little; they would also receive the full Dividend). I expect a roll-out of a Citizen's Dividend as I describe to involve funding HUD minus X units per year, where X is the number of units landlords are able to profitably convert to appropriately-sized non-assisted units. Families will have, in 2013, $600 of (additional) housing (budgeted) income per month, plus EBT to cover childcare expenses (a minimized public aid system targeting children and immigrants; since it's smaller--all general welfare is removed from that system--risk of abuse and associated costs are diminished sharply, and we can focus more on getting the money to people who need it and just accept the cost of missing more abuse).
It's the best I can do. 600,000 homeless, 18 million starving children, 48 million starving Americans; I can make all that go away, but I can't put everyone in a luxury apartment. The worst case is livable.
Now I live somewhere where that is less than my rent and that's just moving between two similar sized towns in the UK.
I think this system might adapt to the UK, as well. It only works for wealthy countries--that is, it works for countries whose per-capita buying power is above a certain threshold. You can't rubber-stamp my system in Canada, England, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and so forth; you'd have to use it as an example and try to fit your own system into the same transformation, carrying out the same assessment of the retail cost of each unit good and service, looking at transitional risks, at your social obligations (Social Security Retirement Benefits was a big one here), and so forth.
The difference in cost of living in the USA can be even larger.
When you're broke and unemployed, you tend to... okay, in the US, you tend to starve in the streets and sleep each night in your own piss with the rats to keep you warm.
When you have barely enough income to survive, you tend to move toward the ghettos. It kind of sucks. I know people who bicycled or bused to work 3 hours each way. At that level, I would have approximately zero criticism if they took the money and quit their jobs. Someone who lives a reasonable distance from my employer can mop the floor, or we can pay better money for that; if it's not worth SIX FUCKING HOURS of unpaid travel time to and from work every day for you to work for minimum wage, then you shouldn't do that. This isn't Uganda (where people walk 9 miles every day to fetch fresh water from the nearest river).
I want people to work; I don't want slaves. If they quit working because they can't work within 30 miles of where they can afford to live and they can't afford transportation, that's ... you should expect that.
I fixed all that but nobody will listen.
While that's not valueless, it's not really the major problem. Everyone has some ideals about what the problem in every large system (welfare, education, American government) is, and they're all largely symptoms or tangential disturbances.
I happen to agree with an EBT system for children, while many of my contemporaries have this ridiculous idea that we should give $4,000/year to parents for *every* child they have, flat out. That's stupid: to ensure that only 3 in 1,000 fail to thrive, you'd have to supply more than enough money for almost 99.7% of the population. If you did that, popping out babies and neglecting your kids (hand-me-downs, replacing clothing less often, cheaper food, no concern for entertainment and thus their mental well-being) would be profitable. An EBT system carries some risks, and they're the same risks we face now; using an EBT system for child welfare is guaranteed not to make the situation worse.
In general, a Citizen's Dividend is the correct modern welfare system. It encourages work and job creation--two distinct things operating on different mechanisms. It encourages work by eliminating all welfare traps, as you collect the Dividend (tax-free!) regardless of your working income; it creates jobs by reducing the cost of labor, thus reducing the cost of products, allowing the price of products to come down, increasing the buying power per consumer (rather than just concentrating it in the hands of fewer consumers, as most technological advancement does), thus demanding more production, thus more jobs.
Providing finances and other living skills in base education is a good plan. It's not strictly required (you'd be surprised how quickly poor people learn to sit on coal and make diamonds), but it gives a universal advantage and provides stability; very few activities do that (free public college is a red herring in that regard: it provides cheap labor for business and causes an increase in unemployment and a decrease in worker power and ability of the common man to obtain employment).
You will *never* "break" the poverty and welfare cycle. We create wealth by reducing employment, and then recover employment by creating wealth. That is to say: we expend 40 hours per person just to make enough food to feed everyone, and all run around naked living in caves; then we invent farming and expend 20 hours per person to feed everyone, and half of everyone finds themselves unemployed. Those unemployed then start making clothes. Then we invent bronze knives, cut skins faster, work fields more effectively, and spend 20 hours doing all that, and half of everyone becomes unemployed. Then we invent mud huts and people get jobs as straw carpenters. Wash, rinse, repeat, and we're up to a society where we frequently go through rounds of layoffs and then every single person in the world buys a smartphone that's ten thousand times more powerful than the $75,000 computer system SGI sold to your employer in 1987.
In other words: if 30 hours of labor at minimum wage goes into that new Keureg you want to buy, it's going to cost at least $247.50. If we build a better factory and only use 10 hours of labor per machine, it's going to cost $82.50, and we're going to fire 60% of the workers running the factory. You might still pay $100--and we make a good 20% profit--but that's in contrast to paying $300 and we make the same profit margin selling you that machine. That extra $200 means you can buy other crap, which somebody has to make; so we make new things, and we hire those people we just laid off.
There's a gap. People lose their jobs, then get new jobs months or years later. We hit an equilibrium where people are gaining jobs as quickly as they're losing them and unemployment becomes stable. That's what welfare is for.
There are two ways to fix schools. First, by putting a blunt end to all poverty, thus reducing one external factor. The second is to fix the education curriculum.
Sadly, in my son's district, a school failing due to poverty is told they're failing because of "bad teachers" and the school is put into receivership.
Education--we're talking about real education, not workforce development (college) mislabeled as "education"--involves complex interactions between parents, students, teachers, administrators, and politicians. If the parents don't raise their kids right, they're difficult to teach--hence poverty impacting academic performance--and the schools require corrective strategies; if the schools don't have a good foundation for a curriculum, students fail to perform unless they get that advantage elsewhere (parents, home life); if the teachers don't teach the curriculum effectively, the students don't learn well enough; if the administrators don't provide correct curriculum guidelines, the teachers don't teach the right stuff, regardless of how effective they are; and if the politicians establish improper educational rules, the correct curriculum doesn't appear, and the administrators can't supply the teachers with what they need.
Everyone wants to blame someone else.
The teachers want to blame your kids for being dumb, the parents for being crappy parents, and the administration for forcing a curriculum that doesn't teach what they believe they need to teach. The administration wants to blame the teachers for teaching poorly and the politicians for not funding and defining good educational options. Politicians want to blame the administration for mismanaging funds and not developing a proper educational environment. Standardized tests get involved to show that teachers aren't teaching--by showing that students aren't learning.
Educators talk a lot about intelligence. They talk about students who are more intelligent, and how to manage classrooms with students of varying intelligence. Administrators create programs to segregate gifted students from idiots.
It's bullshit.
The term "Intelligence" isn't simply politically-incorrect; it's factually wrong. The correct term is "Intellectual Development". Why do poor people perform worse than middle-class kids with a better home life? Because they've developed terrible mental habits and do not have the tools to succeed! They have poor intellectual development, not weak poor-people moron brains.
Hold that in your head and think on this. Think really hard about this. I'm serious, concentrate. If we taught students effective study and thinking skills as the very first thing crammed down their necks in their educational careers, they would all perform better, and all show more tightly-grouped academic performance.
That means a student's poor performance is always *our* *fault*. We'll never get 100%, because there will always be those corner cases of severely bad home life or other poor social development which we *can* fix, but only at the expense of immense amount of time, effort, energy, and disruption to the classroom; in many of the absolute worst cases, we simply won't know how to approach the problem. That's acceptable: we always risk a level of failure. Statisticians like to go for the 3-standard-deviation number of 99.7%, so let's say 3 in 1,000 students fail instead of 250 in 1,000 (apparently 25% of high school students fail to graduate on a normal timeline in the US; 0.3% would not be embarrassing, don't bitch).
Imagine being a teacher, a parent, or a school system administrator. Even politicians speak from the platform of having to reach in and make all these incompetent fools do their jobs properly, not from any admission of personal failure.
So what can we do?
I don't have a plan. I have pieces. Reading strategies; mnemonics a
Why aren't you a Muslim and a Fiat driver?
I've bypassed fully-secured bootloaders by shorting the CLCM pin (deletes the bios password by removing power from NVRAM), going into bios, enabling USB boot, putting in a USB drive with grub, poking at the hard drive for 20 seconds, and then manually loading a kernel and initrd with init=/bin/bash. Added a secondary root account (uber, uid=0) and rebooted, got root. Failing that, I can boot a small Linux distribution and mount the root partition, then type a new entry into passwd and shadow using vi.
Actually, the Constitution requires 51 senators for quorum, or else the vote is not valid. Three senators voting unanimously to pass a bill in an empty Congressional meeting wouldn't meet requirements any more than dressing up in full court regalia and decreeing new US laws from your toilet seat would.
Why not a cryptocash system, wherein a particular smart chip requires a hardware register in a non-default state to write to it, and carries a complete signature of its contents? You could use small credit chips, each carrying a digitally-signed serial number and value--a 1024-bit identifier, a value (like $5), a system ID (serial number of the credit chip it's assigned to), a 7kB random padding block, and a private-key-encrypted hash.
You'd trade the chips as cash, readable by any dumb reader. You could use a connected system to send the contents of each chip to a central authority and then rewrite them into an account or into a new chip, combining a whole wallet of chips onto one. This allows you to make change by exchanging a $20 credit chip (verified by an unconnected machine) and getting back three $5 credit chips (also verified), or by accepting three $5 credit chips and rewriting one as a $1.23 credit chip (communication with central authority), or by accepting a $20 credit chip and rewriting it as a $3 credit chip (also by central authority).
Each of these chips would hold its own account--a full list of denominations, down to a dozen pennies--and a computer (such as a bank's database) could wipe the chip and reorganize its contents (convert 23 pennies to two dimes and three pennies). The credits would act like cash, in so much that you can't know who holds a particular credit chip, you can trade credit chips, and they can be deposited into banks; the physical chips would release their contents to accounts, so your bank account holds real dollars. Obviously, banks would account for how many dollars you have, and pool "your" dollars into their accounts, thus they'd still loan more than they had cash-on-hand.
All the advantages of cash--no personal identifying information, handling without networked electronics, physically tradeable, cheap to produce (bit of plastic with a printed circuit on it)--and of digital currency--can be loaded into accounts (and the accounts can just be a physical card rather than far away). A few of the disadvantages of digital currency, notably that you need some form of powered electronic device unless you put an eink screen to display the current denomination onto each credit chip, which would make it a hell of a lot less cheap to manufacture.
You have sources that come down to a single expert or small panel of editors, and sources that come down to anyone who can spot an error. Any idiot can post ridiculous bullshit masquerading as authority on the Internet without challenge by making his site a one-way push communication (no comments, no wiki). Any idiot can also post a volume of poorly-researched, outdated, self-contradictory rambling as an authoritative text printed over a dozen or so volumes of an encyclopedia.
For well-edited, complete articles, Wikipedia has a much lower error rate per subject than traditional encyclopedias. For lower-profile articles, Wikipedia lags the average. Nobody has done a comparison on less-emphasized Britannica articles versus more-central Britannica articles to see if Britannica has its low-error-rate and high-error-rate topics.
In medical school, professors and textbooks proclaim that epsom salts will draw toxins from the body. That's failed scientific rigor, and the literature hasn't caught up. Think about it. Who fucking cares? Are you going to die because your doctor--a competent doctor, not one who is going to prescribe epsom salts baths to detoxify the botulism from your body--doesn't know epsom salts baths are bullshit? Of course not; it's not important. Nobody has a real reason to challenge the literature.
The problem is we are reaching a tipping point where cheap machine labor will soon be able to replace all repetative labor which simply relies on having vision, manual dexterity, or even smart but not creative thinking work.
Maybe. We did this before, and got 80% unemployment and an economic disaster. That's just a matter of speed: we constantly unemploy and re-employ people; we just do it slowly, so we lose maybe 1% over the time it takes to create new jobs for those 1%. If we lose 30% over the time it takes to create jobs, we might create jobs faster--which doesn't help if we create jobs for 3% of them in that time, but end up with 27% standing unemployment.
The trend is accelerating so the next 20 years are going to be a period of rapid employment destruction.
We can slow it. That's one of the biggest goals of my Citizen's Dividend plan. The excessive cost of labor under a system reliant on minimum wage is why a minimum wage and public aid system is obsolete. If you look back, you'll quickly understand why the Dividend wasn't the right system in the past.
A Dividend lets us eliminate a minimum wage and provides some income, which helps control labor costs by lowering effective taxes. That has a middling effect: for a large range, I suggest tax rates which actively reduce marginal income tax, thus allowing lower wages with the same paycheck take-home; and the income from the Dividend also reduces the worker's demand for wages, but not by the full measure of the Dividend itself. $4/hr may be a comfortable living if you're already getting a few extra dollars's worth of wages, but you might still decide you need at least $5.50 for it to be worth your time and effort--even though you'd normally demand at least $7 because of living expenses.
Fortunately, the income gap always grows, which lets us make clever use of progressive taxes to reduce taxes on the working class over time without raising taxes on businesses or high-income earners. That helps reduce wages: if you're getting taxed half as much and we reduce your paycheck by a bit more than the difference, you come out even, while your employer pays you much less. That means the machines have to cost less if they're going to compete with you, and all the stuff you buy costs less to make, and so can be sold cheaper, and so you actually come out richer.
All these effects stretch out the long-term schedule for automation deployment.
robots which cost close to the poverty line and by automated processes which are a little more expensive but which are tax deductible capital expenses to create.
The end goal isn't toxic, but the transition can be devastating if it happens too fast. The Industrial Revolution is essentially the same problem. As I showed above: we can slow the transition. That doesn't just kick the can down the road; it affects the entire dynamic of the economic change.
Adoption comes via three main archetypes: the early adopters; the strategic speculators; and the traditionalists.
Early adopters are the people you describe. They'll see the machines are more efficient and cost the same or less, in terms of TCO, compared to labor. That means a $1 million machine that operates for 25 years with fueling (electricity) and maintenance costs of $84,800/year costs as much as five full-time laborers making $12/hr wage. If it can do their job for that cost, the early adopters will buy it. New technology. Some will even jump in earlier, reasoning that $84,000 is less than the $125,000 in wa
More than that, engineers have generalized broad workloads into categories, and created standard hardware to handle those workloads. GPGPU allows hardware acceleration of anything similar to GPU processing; it's cost-effective, as designing hardware *and* software for a specialized task (bitcoin mining, protein folding, encryption cracking) is obviously more complex than designing only specialized software. PhysX specifically targets physics, a broad problem, and so reduces the amount of programming needed for custom physics engines without supplying a custom hardware dongle for each piece of software.
All this stuff reduces both the number of programmers and the number of hardware engineers for a task; so long as we're replacing legacy systems with more efficient systems, we'll shift away from paper accountants and spreadsheet payroll managers to programmers writing applications for small staffs. 10 new programmers, 1,000 payroll departments drop from 40 payroll managers to 38 payroll managers, save the labor of 1,990 employees. That creates unemployment in the short term; if we go slow enough, the cost savings passes on--in the case of business services, it means the business can buy other services and expand their capabilities; in the case of production line, it means consumer goods get cheaper and we can sell consumers more things.
Job creation at zero means there are no new jobs created. If someone replaces a worker in a job, that's still only one job, not a new job.
Technological innovation serves to reduce the labor required to produce a product. Jobs grow when we reduce scarcity: with 1,000,000 acres of land and hunter-gatherer society, you can only hunt so many deer and collect so many berries; go agrarian and you can get 10 times as much food; and bring it up to modern agricultural practices and genetically-modified crops and you can take that to 70 times as much. Don't believe me? The optimistic projection for hunter-gatherer society is a maximum of 135 million humans supported before exhausting all resources and incurring mass famine; our modern agricultural practice feeds over 7,000 million humans.
Reduce scarcity. If you have 1,000,000 acres of arable land, you'll expend the same amount of labor to farm each acre, the same amount of labor to feed each new person. When you run out of arable land, you have to expend extra labor to transport water for irrigation, to manufacture fertilizer, and to harvest smaller yields. That means instead of 10 hours to feed one person, you have to expend 20 hours. That's where scarcity comes from: we can continue to expand, but we'll have to pour in more human labor, meaning we have to pay these people, which means the cost of goods goes up, which means standard-of-living falls and some people just don't have anything to trade (notably, currency) to buy enough food to live.
In markets, reducing the labor that goes into a product reduces its cost, reducing its minimum price, enabling us to sell that product to more of the consumer market. As the price comes down, existing consumers end up with more money in their pockets, and can buy new goods. Producing more of a good and producing a new good both require labor, which creates new jobs for the ones we displace by lowering labor costs.
That only holds us at an equal number of jobs. When you become capable of scaling up further without incurring more than a proportional increase in labor, you create more jobs: you can make more units without increasing the cost-per-unit. That's often accompanied by an increase in population, which creates more jobs.
In politics, you look at unemployment rate when consumer markets recover from a rapid job depletion, pointing out the lowering of the marginal unemployment. You look at number of jobs created and pointedly avoid mentioning unemployment rate when scarcity decreases, creating more jobs but also creating more total unemployed, managing to not affect the unemployment rate in the process.
Given all that, a stagnation of job creation in EE doesn't necessarily mean we're not innovating; we may be innovating new analysis methods which require fewer EEs, thus shifting their labor away.
A lot of the privacy wargarble is unsubstantiated. Facebook and Google are mining your information, and we have tracking cookies to deal with; the vast majority of outcry is at Internet-connected services that don't bother with any of that. Even the cry about Amazon is overblown: Ubuntu goes and searches Amazon for products when you type into Unity search, and people lose their shit like Amazon is generating a profile on them somehow and filing it with their medical history.
You know if you actually crunch the numbers, you find that Corporate Income taxes shield people from individual taxes, we'd be better off not taxing corporations, so individuals would pay more individually and put a 25% tax on dividends to non-US taxpayers.
Taxing individuals more individually is a way to increase the cost of labor, thus raising the cost of products. Raising the cost of products reduces the amount of products that consumers can purchase with their income, thus reducing the amount of products you can profit by producing. Reducing the amount of production reduces the amount of required labor. Reducing the amount of labor means reducing jobs.
That's a primary feature of my musings on public policy. It's one of the reasons I like progressive tax systems.
Socrates lived in a time when the sum total of human knowledge was a little fraction of what we know today, and this it was a lot easier to get up to the state of the art in several fields. Sure, we should question experts, but on average, the risk of rationalising our snap judgement with half-understood facts and simplified sound bites is not insignificant. The expert is not always right, but he usually comes closer to the truth than a non-expert.
That's no excuse for turning off the thinking part of your brain and being a twit. You can accomplish greatthings when you do a little thinking. In my case, I have economic theories that don't match with mainstream politics or contemporary economics, such as the observation that labor costs affect employment rates--one of the reasons I push for a Citizen's Dividend instead of a minimum wage and public-aid system, which lowers taxes and has positive impacts on retirement funding. This is also why I see the growing gap of income inequality as a good thing, since I can make use of it to cut back taxes on labor, thus incurring all those nice benefits like lowering the minimum price of all products, increasing employment, and possibly causing the full-time work week to shrink to 32 hours (figure that one out).
I don't have a fancy economics degree; I've cataloged a ton of information in my head, and at some point started organizing it. This is what happened. There are holes; I don't get how exchange rates work, among other things. I've come up with a few rough theories for those, and need more time to work them into something that fits in consistently with existing observations. It'll never be wholly correct, but it's not right until it appears to work under scrutiny.
It gets checked against contemporary theories, looking for observations I haven't made, looking for holes, looking for places where they were wrong; often I realize these people weren't wrong, but rather painfully close, like with Adam Smith asserting that the only way to work more efficiently is to divide tasks into smaller fractions spread among more people, rather than to invent new tools and techniques that may optimize processes (assembly line vs cellular manufacture: same tools, same laborers, different floor plan, less wandering back and forth carrying half-finished parts) or simply figure a way to get an end result in fewer major steps (technically, *consolidating* labor. Smith wasn't wrong; he just veered off at the end, observing the improvement of efficiency by doing more work with the same labor and then specifying it as division, instead of just the raw observation that more production per labor time creates wealth. He also was writing a theory of value, trying to explain the correct price of products instead of describing economic movement in general.
One thing I've learned in my life: math is a tool, not a framework. If people try to define non-mathematical things by math, reject that and look for a plain-words explanation. It probably won't be a simple one--simple explanations just gloss over complexities--but the mathematics behind quantum physics aren't as important as the basic concepts of how quantum mechanics works. If you know all the math, but not the mechanics, you're a Chinese Room: someone can hand you a paper with a lot of squiggles, you can pull out your dictionary and write down a correct response, but you don't really understand the conversation you're having. If you have the mechanics but not the math, then you can't be an engineer; you *can* be a theorist. Theorists are the ones who figure out where w
Ouch! No income tax! Income tax is the best type of tax ever invented--because all taxes are income tax. Sales taxes just take part of your income later. There are some interesting side-effects produced when implementing income taxes.
If they don't reduce the datacenter taxes to zero, they're going to have more tax revenue.
Producing things in-state does produce jobs, trickle-down economics or not.
You're right: it's a market thing. The states tax these businesses, just not as much as they otherwise would; that means state revenue. If the state has a new facility producing some good or service, that's more production; that production represents the generation (and export) of local buying power.
Exporting local buying power is trade. You produce things using less labor than a neighboring economy; you send those products out to them, and they trade something they can produce for less than you. In currency economies, you sell your goods for currency, then spend your currency locally or you spend it to import. Because income requires jobs and local business, the same proportional spending equates to more money spent in each category, including locally: money coming in doesn't automatically mean wealth, because you can't have wealth without production; you need jobs, and more money spent even on retail (e.g. WalMart) mean more local jobs.
To the government, that means more income to tax without an increase in population. That's a good thing: the single most effective way to increase employment is to reduce the cost of labor. This is so effective that a reduction in taxes on the working class at the current point in time can not only spread and slow the implementation of automation (you want this, but you want it to happen over a long time period so we can find new jobs after the machines displace people), but potentially create *too* *much* employment. If unemployment is 8% and it suddenly drops by 15%, your economy grinds to a halt: too many people working--or rather, everyone working and employers experiencing a labor shortage. To compensate, you'd raise the cost of labor by lowering full-time working hours (32-hour work week). Possibility.
In the larger economy, something like tax breaks to attract business increases revenue without increasing productivity, and doesn't necessarily create more jobs. It only creates more jobs overall if the labor is the cheapest labor you can get; otherwise you're just leaching income from one location into another.
It's notable that my economic theory--yes, I developed my own--accounts for production (goods and services produced), productivity (proportional labor involved in production--including waste labor by overproducing goods which never get consumed), and wealth (buying power per capita) differently than other theories. I've intentionally tried to adjust the theory to synthesize other theories from it, but only if I can keep something actually accurate--no compromises, just better-engineered theory. That's why I have things like total buying power being the total production, the buying power of unit currency being (that is: constantly approaching) the total income (for a period, as a running average, etc.) divided by the total production, and inflation representing when the total income increases faster than the total production (i.e. buying power).
Defining the economics in this way accurately follows the generalized behavior of economies, and also explains the observations made by contemporary economists. The purpose isn't to write up formulas and numbers to try to predict economics, but rather to identify cause-and-effect relationships that says "doing X will lead towards Y". That lets me look at a lot of economic theories where people say, "In general, yes, but..." and say, "That theory is faulty. It tends to work out because X Y Z, and it tends to falter in completely predictable circumstances for exactly the same reasons."
Adam Smith's division-of-labor theory is a shining example of this; inflation is another, whereby we seem to keep getting a higher standard of living even when wages grow slower than inflation. A higher standard-of-living indicates we're buying more and better things, yet how does that happen when your wages are worth less? Answer: you're trying to compare modern objects which could, at one time, be produced at the expense of *enormous* amounts of labor with their less-advanced eq
Mostly because experts are people who have little slips of paper telling us their opinions are more valid than the opinions of others. It's the inversion of the American Cargo Cult ideal: while some people believe their opinion is as valid as any other opinion and that people who are well-researched just have an agenda, others believe that anything written by experts is Holy Writ and infallible.
Socrates had an issue with this.
Socrates figured people should ask questions about *everything*. We have a world where people get a glance at something, make up some stuff, and then stop asking questions about it and presume anyone who disagrees with them is a moron; on the other end, someone gets a certification telling us they know about something, so we stop asking questions and assume anyone who disagrees with *them* is a moron. Socrates wanted us to question ourselves *and* the experts, to find out why the experts disagree with us, and then to decide if the reason for disagreement was valid, or if we could even assess it with the information we had. Do that enough and you'll start realizing the experts are wrong--they're always wrong, just less-wrong than all of their predecessors.
There have been a few studies showing that speed traps are dangerous. People slow down suddenly when they become aware of police in the area, increasing the rate of collisions. Excessive enforcement, oddly enough, leads to more loss of life.
They want you to install their EFF extension so they can monitor your privacy.
I like Google Drive, but OwnCloud is nice. I set it up in Docker in like 30 minutes with postgresql, redis, php-fpm, and nginx, living happily with other services (nginx connects to php5-fpm via socket and listens on a unix socket on another volume; the nginx unix socket volume is shared between all nginx containers, and the final container listens on HTTPS for a virtual host and just proxies back to the unix socket).
I've thought about hooking up OwnCloud to Google Drive (it does that) so I can use OwnCloud features without breaking up my storage. I wish there was something like the old EyeOS that got taken away from open source and left with a big "OPEN SOURCE" sign branded on it while they walled off all downloads and prevented anyone from using it unless they called for a sales person, negotiated a contract, and paid money. Not even a paypal link to buy and download; you had to contact for an Enterprise purchase. It was promising as hell.
People are paranoid that someone is watching their kitten pictures while rubbing their hands together and laughing evilly.