The rattlesnake producing in the economic sense its own venom is instructive for several reasons. First, it demonstrates that human labor is not needed.
The rattlesnake isn't producing anything for human society.
There are aliens on Alpha Centauri Prime building space ships, and you're arguing that labor isn't a function of production because they're aliens and they build things without the application of human labor. You're making a stupid argument.
Like said aliens, the rattlesnake is investing its time and effort in the production of venom. The rattlesnake must eat to acquire food energy required for its body to produce the venom. That venom takes time to produce. If humans want the snake's venom, they have to apply human labor to acquire it: NO HUMAN BEING WILL EVER COME INTO POSSESSION OF RATTLESNAKE VENOM WITHOUT THE APPLICATION OF HUMAN LABOR IN THE VENOM PRODUCTION PROCESS.
The benefit here is more efficient use of other things than human labor.
The benefit is more efficient use of human labor. If you use a power tool, you have to invest the fractional human labor of mining fuel, refining fuel, TCO building and maintaining a power plant, TCO distributing electricity, mining materials, producing materials, battery manufacture, and operating the power tool. The fractional cost of all that shit, when looking at the whole of woodworking, is a great deal lower than the fractional cost of doing the same woodworking by hand.
That means, in aggregate, the total human time spent producing chairs and all the things used to build chairs using factories and power tools is *less* than the total human time spent producing the same number of chairs and all the tools used to build those chairs using hand tools.
Capitalism is an economic system based on the creation of goods and services for profit. In an abstract sense, that defines the basis of all pursuits engaged in to increase productivity.
Your niggling about is what's kept economics in the stone age. It's no wonder I can explain, with a consistent and unshifting unified theory, all accepted theories of economics, and explain why they fail when they're observed to fail, and why they work when they do work, and predict when they fail and when they work, consistently, without error: correct theories are easy to come up with when you're not a mindless git.
Seriously. I describe movements of economics, and you whine about words. Someone defines a system in which people work to acquire a higher standard-of-living by acquiring control of assets, and you obsess over whether having effective control of an asset implies possession--as if that matters. Humans decrease the labor they apply to produce a good, and you see that a machine now does a task and go, "Oh, look, NO HUMAN LABOR!" without recognizing the labor in producing and operating the machine. Humans produce NOTHING, and you go, "Look, something was produced without human labor!" You see things and say, "Look! Capital! Capital value!" instead of recognizing a (limited) resource that allows production of some good with less labor (e.g. energy by mining oil, until the oil runs out and you have to use solar energy to produce oil from the air--which takes more human labor than just digging it out of the ground).
That last one should be particularly obvious, but nobody notices that somehow "capital" doesn't have so much value if you move it over a few feet--you know, into solid rock or a muck pile where you have to expend ten times as much labor digging it out and filtering it, ultimately increasing the cost and decreasing the supposed "value" of the "capital".
In a communist society with state ownership of all capital, people will seek to get themselves into power positions which provide them greater rights over more of the state's capital. They won't "own" it, yet they'll somehow behave exactly as if they do: they'll be able to eat caviar while others eat bread, and fl
I'm talking about economics in general. Whether the US can or can't implement public healthcare isn't obvious; it requires an analysis of the economic situation of the United States, an analysis of the economic situation of other countries who implemented public healthcare, their successes, their failures, the costs, the benefits, and then a rough explanation of how each factor influenced each outcome. Then you have to project the range of possible outcomes for various public healthcare approaches to determine which, if any, are suitable; which are the *most* suitable; and to what degree those suitable provide a benefit.
You can't just say, "Well we're a developed nation, so obviously..." because it doesn't work that way. Your guess might be correct, but not because your grasp of the facts was enough to accurately assess the system--same as how you can guess a dice roll.
Nope. The rattlesnake doesn't need its venom harvested by human labor in order to have and use it.
The rattlesnake employs rattlesnake labor to produce and use its venom. It takes time and energy of the rattlesnake.
all this ignores that presence of human labor is not a definition of capital.
The absence of human labor 100% absolutely will prevent humans from accessing any form of capital.
Automation works to an increasing degree and there's no reason to assume it couldn't eliminate the need for human labor in a variety of tasks.
So nobody needs to build, maintain, fuel, or operate these machines? The machines run themselves, they build themselves, they maintain themselves, they mine their own power? They run for all eternity, never breaking down, never using an outside resource?
You say, "Ah, look, a woman got herself pregnant!" as if a man wasn't involved.
I don't need video games either. I still like them.
The usefulness to society as a whole for certain people having certain things is not a given, even if those things are useful to those people. It's useful to *me* to have access to Dice to get jobs making $135k; when I was 19, I could have gotten a job at McDonalds. While it's perfectly possible for me to end up poor and unemployed for a while--and guaranteed that some people with my or other high-dollar skills are currently living as such--it's less likely that I'd be walled-off from such employment with no car and no phone; even less likely that I wouldn't be able to dig my way out by getting a job at McDonalds for a while and buying a phone; and pretty much guaranteed--thanks to public college--that society as a whole has wasted its wealth making more people capable of doing my job than we can employ, thus ensuring that someone else (who is currently poor and hopeless) will only get their chance at a good job if I (or someone else) fall out of my job and get stuck as a poor kid.
That doesn't mean municipal broadband is definitely useless; it just means that such an argument of its virtues by way of giving people opportunities and thus strengthening our society is *trivially* dismissed. You need to show some other reason it's beneficial, rather than just a cost lumbered onto the backs of everyone for no real benefit at the expense of making us all slightly poorer.
Do note that making us *all* slightly poorer has the immediate primary effect of making it harder for the least-well-off to get jobs, and those of them who have base-level jobs get a lower standard of living. They're the first ones to feel the pressure.
Economics isn't a zero-sum game. Some actions cost us a pile of wealth and return a bigger pile; others return a smaller pile. Those actions don't operate by their own virtue, but rather by their relationship to the system. Change the system--it changes all the time--and you get a different outcome.
I'll give you a good example: I want to replace our welfare system with a Citizen's Dividend, which will directly end all homelessness and hunger in the United States while creating jobs, lowering the cost of goods, reducing taxes, and raising the standard of living. This would be a very bad idea in the 1950s. Here's why.
We can also go into the philosophy of choices: every choice involves giving something up. Do you want a chocolate bar or a peanut butter cup? Whichever one you choose, you lose the other. Even if you can choose both, you get excess calories; do you want to be fat, or do you want to eat candy? Maybe you can exchange your time spent leisurely arguing with idiots on Twitter with time spent gagging and coughing as you run yourself ragged doing high-speed laps around the gym in a desperate attempt to burn off the candy bar so you don't get fat, which would lower your body fat enough to do a couple sit-ups and develop chick-attracting abs--a state you'll get to faster if you eat less chocolate and more chicken.
In economics, the choices are analyzed further: how do you give up one thing in exchange for something bigger? Put your time in doing something upfront that allows you to do *more* of what you sacrificed in the long term, thus not actually making a material choice in long terms, but rather taking both.
In this case, economics tells us we are in one of two conditions: either municipal broadband provides an economic benefit which increases or at least does not decrease standard-of-living, or municipal broadband provides a single benefit to standard-of-living at the expense of the general standard-of-living. In the first situation, we enact that choice because it provides a total benefit; in the second, we can give you an XBox, but we have to take away your bicycle and your gameboy batteries. A single action doesn't define the outcome; the action in the surrounding condi
No, there are studies showing that state-provided healthcare in current practice--that is, in the nations which successfully implement it--provides a specific set of outcomes. State-provided healthcare in 1490 Feudal Japan likely would have provided little more than an economic drain.
Go back to hunter-gatherer society and you find people spent *most* of their time working. There weren't really "rich people", because it took almost all human labor to feed everyone; nobody had 308 times the income of the poorest-surviving individual. Take this up through ancient agrarian societies, through the bronze age, and so forth and you have a similar problem: the amount of excess income the aristocracy and nobility owned, all pooled together, was insufficient to provide services like healthcare to everyone.
It's notable that we call transportation of goods "shipping" and, in fact, we call moving shit around "transportation" because we *transfer* it between *ports* on *ships*. At one point, no government could produce and maintain rail or road with any viable amount of tax money: the production of steel and the movement of earth cost so much in human labor that implementing rails, good roads, and other such forms of overland transportation would cost an unreasonable and crippling amount of the total income. Think like the rich have 15% of all income and you need 73% of all income, so you have to take more than half of the income of the poorest of poor if you're going to do this.
Surprise: in America, the top 10%--which is around 34 million people--collectively have 48% of the income. We invented power tools, electricity, new methods of forging steel, and all kinds of other shit; we expend the same amount of labor and we produce a *lot* more. There's a lot more stuff per person; the amount of money each person has buys a *lot* more. Even our poor live at a level above the nobility of medieval times, with insulated homes and running water and electric lights.
That means we've got a better chance of buying into a good public healthcare system than medieval Europe did.
Canada and Norway are primary oil exporters. Norway is like the ninth largest exporter of oil in the world; Canada is the tenth, and exports more than a fifth of what Saudi Arabia exports. Norway also has 5 million people, versus 35 million in Canada and 28 million in Saudi Arabia; Norway is fucking rich. Norway, in fact, exports 30% more oil per capita than Saudi, meaning the amount of wealth in Norway's oil economy is 30% larger than Saudi's.
We always talk about Norway's and Canada's healthcare systems, not to mention the *insane* standard of living in Norway.
How well do you think a public option would fair in Uganda?
This is part economics, part finances, part history. Most people don't realize that experts are all hobbled by their narrow scope of domain knowledge: an economist without a strong grasp of economic history is going to have a hard time inventing new ideas; most economists who *do* invent new ideas have either a strong grasp of history or a strong grasp of classical economics coupled directly with a wide base of observation of modern business. They need multiple fields of study to manufacture new information; if you knew anything about learning and creativity, you'd be rolling your eyes at me for stating the bluntly obvious.
The point is everything is like that. You can't look at an action and an outcome and say X leads to Y; you need to look at the conditions within which the action occurred. Even the Star Trek utopian no-work society has an economic condition; socialists and marxists thought they could snap their fingers and make that by force of will, which is why they failed. Never guess; always know.
So how much human labor does a rattlesnake need to manufacture venom?
Oh, you want rattlesnake venom? Hmm. Well, humans will have to collect or farm the snakes. They'll need to produce the vessels and extraction mechanisms--really just a cellophane barrier stretched over a glass--and handle the snakes to extract the sample. They'll have to collect these samples together in a central, sterile form of storage. They'll have to account for it, track it, and ship it to wherever it's needed.
You're trying to use the example of "Gold is free because there's gold in the ground", which involves ignoring all the labor required to collect that gold. The raw earth is not a product because it cannot be used until it is obtained.
Political idealism aside, I actually can't think of any "obvious benefits". I mean, there aren't even any obvious benefits to government healthcare: it takes a good bit of analysis to figure out if state healthcare is more or less expensive, and then you have to figure out if it's *affordable* or if it inflicts crippling poverty on more individuals than it protects; that's not even considering the various *forms* of state healthcare (single-payer; state hospitals; hybrid systems like Canada; laws mandating how employers, insurers, and providers will operate...).
People *need* healthcare. They get sick. They don't *need* Internet access; they may need transportation--there aren't enough McDonalds peppering your neighborhood for everyone in the ghetto to walk to their shitty, underpaid job. Even then, you're dealing with class status: most jobs above the minimum provide this stuff, or provide enough money to just buy it outright; it's mainly the unemployed who need public service.
Even my Citizen's Dividend doesn't have *obvious* benefits. It took a lot of market analysis just to show it would end homelessness and hunger--retail prices compared to profitability, risk considerations, and even some architecture to plan out miniature apartments that are livable even if way smaller than the luxury 1 bedroom I lived in--and all kinds of secondary effects require advanced economic theory to explain. Remember, people think if we raise minimum wage we'll somehow increase employment by giving consumers more money to spend; they haven't worked out that an increase in the cost of labor raises the minimum cost of products, thus counteracting *every* economic pressure that draws prices down. They haven't even worked out that higher labor costs concentrate wealth into fewer hands.
We actually passed a law giving businesses and rich people tax breaks to stimulate growth and create employment.
The problem, of course, is that the products are being sold to consumers. Consumers have a certain amount of money, and they're spending what they're willing to spend. You can't sell more by making more; if you could, you'd hire more consumers. Profitability scales, and unprofitable expansion doesn't happen just because you have money to spend. You need to make products cheaper so you can sell more of them, which means making labor cheaper... for example, by reducing taxes on the working class so as to allow employers to pay them less while leaving them with the same amount of money flowing into their bank account, thus reducing the cost of products, allowing prices to fall, giving consumers additional buying power which then allows us to hire new laborers to make new products to sell to these consumers, creating more jobs.
These aren't obvious things. Handing out healthcare isn't obviously helpful. There are no obvious benefits to public broadband; all you can say about it is everyone pays a tax, and some broadband system exists for everyone. Whether it's cheaper or better-maintained depends on the economic system; and its impact on the economy itself is highly questionable. If you're going to pitch something like that, you have to answer those questions instead of just declaring that they've been answered.
Don't even start with the backwards ideals people have about workforce development--notably calling it "education" instead of "workforce development", and then demanding to be sold into serfdom. Again: impact not obvious.
The essence of capitalism is people working for a profit. We try to claim people don't have money or ownership, yet people still barter, they still do work in expectation of individual reward, and they still seek to increase their standard-of-living by reducing the labor they perform while increasing the assets they control.
Think about it this way: You can be a maid making $500/week keeping a rich person's mansion going; you might make about as much as a cashier at Sears, but you still live in a mansion and eat filet mingon. Sure you don't own any of that stuff, but your job provides you with lodging (in the servant wing of the mansion) and food (from the same damn kitchen).
Products always require human labor for production; and humans always seek to reduce their labor while increasing their access to products. It's biology: we want to expend as little energy as possible, increasing survival prospects if food becomes scarce. Rattle snakes shake their rattles to warn away dangerous animals because manufacturing venom takes too much energy--they really don't want to bite you.
Actually, there's no such thing as a non-capitalist system.
The whole point of inventing new things--such as AI--is to create a new way to produce with less human labor. Less labor means less cost; we simply represent that cost with a universal commodity, like money. Essentially, everything requires human labor: if you have 60 labor-hours to work, you need 20 labor-hours to produce food for your family, and you spend 45 labor-hours building shelter, your family is going to starve (eventually) because they're only getting 75% as much food as they need.
As you cut back the human labor requirements to produce food, shelter, clothing, and whatever else you're currently consuming, you become capable of producing new things, as well as producing existing things in great quantity with little resource investment. Humans often take shortcuts by digging things like coal or gold out of the ground until they run out of that resource, and then do something more labor-intensive to get that resource (or preemptively invent a less-intensive method to obtain the same resource, thus saving themselves the labor involved in fetching it from a giant hole).
Everything useful you invent provides a profit. Everything you want to invent in some way is expected to provide a profit. Humans don't want money; they want to invest less labor to achieve the same things. Humans want to be rich so they don't have to work hard to pay for their houses, food, cars, and lame-ass XBox 360 video games; other humans invent the Wii U because the non-rich humans are happy to pay $200 to get a video game console and bypass the $600 beast begging for their cash, as obtaining $600 requires doing three times as much work (at least) than obtaining $200.
Essentially, some dim-witted scientist opened his mouth and said, "I want to get away from capitalism so I can invent this new thing that will make stuff cost less."
Well a lot of electricians know the International Electric Code. We should stop following that and just wire things however the hell we feel like, based on our skill.
Try reading that article. It mentions you need to get some higher-grade coolant (read: a bigger heat sink and fan), validate the airflow in your case, raise the voltage, etc.
Today, you put in the stock heatsink and fan that came in the same Intel Core I7 3.8GHz box as your processor, you go into the stock BIOS, and you say "make me 4.2GHz." Done. Works in a cheap case.
"Guarantee" is a funny word. No processor has a 100% probability of running at the rated speed--or even powering on at all. A guarantee only means someone is willing to make good on the defect.
The problem here is that they used to build processors to run at the rated speed, test them to make sure they run at the rated speed, de-rate them to a stable speed if they can only run at a lower speed, and sell them at a speed rated to design and, possibly, to testing. Today, they build processors to run at a high speed and rate them to run at a lower speed, then sell them as "overclockable". They don't build a 3.8GHz processor that can run at 4.2GHz if you're lucky; they build a 4.2GHz processor to high tolerances on a design meant to run at 4.2GHz reliably, and rate it as a 3.8GHz processor.
Modern processors are intentionally overbuilt. They're not built to run a service life at a rated level of performance; they're built to run a service life significantly above the rated level of service. It's like installing 120PSI cold water pipe in your house and rating your home's plumbing for 60PSI residential pressure: if you crank that pressure regulator up to 100PSI, your pipes won't burst, and you're not doing anything particularly special except running the system at a pressure it was purpose-built to handle.
As a general rule, X processor model runs at Y speed these days. The processes are stable at high power outputs, but marketed as 80W CPUs. Most modern processors even run by default at a low clock and add 400-600MHz in "Turbo Mode" automatically when the CPU is running under sufficient load--meaning they just do regular old CPU scaling, but save the higher clock rate for when you're trying to use it. If you run SETI@HOME, they run in turbo mode 100% of the time.
Old days: the processor should run at 200MHz. You can push 215MHz, but you need to modify the vcore. The processor might be unstable. You might need additional cooling. The gates might just not switch correctly at that speed (miller capacitance...) without a vcore high enough to blow the chip. It's stamped 200MHz for a reason.
Modern times: that's a 4.7GHz processor clocked at 3.8GHz. You buy it, you turn it up to 4.7GHz, don't mess with anything else, it runs 60C at full load under stock configuration. That processor came underclocked out of the box.
I'm not saying they should; I'm saying there's no economic pressure on them not to. There isn't a noose around their necks; if they have 1000 kids, it's some minimum-wage worker who starves. What stops them?
If I put a gun to some starving Etheopean's head without telling you, will you still post stupid shit, even though he'll get his head blown off? Or will that stop you from posting idiocy, not knowing that some anonymous African will die when you hit submit?
You're trying to say nothing. Knowing modern design patterns *is* good skill. Trying to just say, "I take Computer Science III, know what I'm talking about," and then "dividing your code up" in some arbitrary way produces a shambling hulk.
Although, if you have a particular set of design patterns that somehow make it easy to organize 9-million lines of code, I'd love to see it:) Maybe it's something I haven't seen before.
The modern design patterns like factories and builders and decorators *are* how people organize the code in large applications. They came about because people found better ways to do it, and other people organized that information into modern doctrine. In 10 years, we'll have a new set of design patterns, and a new set of doctrine in which someone organizes and codifies those patterns. Wash, rinse, repeat.
We do this with building codes, cars, rocket engines, brain surgery, the scientific method, education, mnemonics, and mathematics; of course we do it with programming, too. We develop new techniques over time to handle new and larger problems with less labor--that's technology.
It's simpler than that. Quantum computing in this scale is in the area of heavy research, with a huge blanket of unknown unknowns; security is about mapping out your known and unknown unknowns and turning them into known resolvable state. You can't discuss security in this field yet because you have to discuss how the system *does* behave and how to ensure it *reliably* follows that behavior in the face of any and all unknown input states.
Multi-millionaires may be able to afford that. Middle-class (and upper middle class) people can't. This isn't India where servants are dirt-cheap.
The point is most multi-millionaires don't actually have 40 kids. They have 2 or 3. It's not a huge hardship for a multi-millionaire to have 40 kids, which is what you claimed about the middle class. Even most middle-class families can handle more kids than they have without an appreciable reduction in their individual standard-of-living; the additional population strain would reduce total standard-of-living, which would feed back and probably make those same families poor, but that's not rationally considered by the people not breeding.
That means there's no obvious mechanism, in this small view of the model, which accounts for the population limit. I don't know what sentiment causes population growth to slow at the appropriate time; I know why it's the appropriate time, and why population grows when scarcity is lifted, but not how everyone gets the message and adjusts the population appropriately.
You're not accounting for changes in culture and values. People are much less religious now, and even mega-rich people have to spend some time with their kids, or else why bother having them? You're also missing what a pain it is to carry a child to term, and what a health risk it is.
Except these booms and dips have cycled based wholly on economic conditions, rather than steadily sliding with the cultural condition. We're not looking at a cycle of atheism, religious revival, atheism, religious revival.
In other words: what you cite here doesn't correlate *at* *all* with the long-term behavior. That's no surprise: you're using the same sort of post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc logic coupled with a short view and cherry picking that everyone uses; the argument is obvious, as is its high probability of invalidity.
What's the difference? The people building iPhones and such still have to toil away at work all day long.
The difference is they ride a bus home instead of walking, they have a stove in their home that costs pennies (or seconds of labor wage) to operate, they have refrigeration and the benefits thereof, they have climate-controlled living space, they have 8 changes of clothes, they have mechanical washing machines or access to $1.50 laundromats (instead of spending 14 hours on Saturday washing clothes), they have running water, they have glass windows instead of paper soaked in animal fat, they have OTC cold medication, they have supermarkets, they have television, they have Internet access, and the greatest proportion of them (the middle class) have their own cars and smart phones and FitBit dongles attached to their arms.
They don't spend any more time making things; they just magically make more things. Instead of spending 8 hours per person making food for one person, they spend 8 hours making food, clothing, soap, hospitals, television, recorded music,electric lighting, running water, cars, jet planes, and space ships.
With all the additional, non-necessary productivity, we can afford to siphon some. That means instead of having enough to feed 100 people and if 98 find food and the other 2 come up empty, well, those 2 can starve... we have 100 people capable of producing enough to feed 1,000 people, so we produce enough to feed 100 people and everyone eats. Those few people who can't support themselves? We can carry them. As we improve productivity, we can carry them more trivially--the cost to us falls, and we hardly even notice what little we divert to the unfortunate. Suddenly, welfare is possible.
Historically, work days ranged 10-16 hours for up to 6 days per week--a maximum of almost 100-hour work weeks. French workers got a 12-hour work day around 1850; at the same time, England passed laws limiting the working hours of women and children to 10 hours. Before that, in 1933, England had passed a law l
I thought I already answered this down-thread. We've come a long way from assembly. We got FORTRAN and BASIC and C, and started doing imperative programming. We went from instruction code listings to callable functions. We started building code as modules with abstraction, and then moved into an object oriented programming model where we abstracted objects inside the code modules and exposed objects as an abstraction interface to other modules.
Today, we have the Gang of Four design patterns for object oriented programming. We have large architecture design patterns like MVC, MVP, MVVM, and so forth. We don't just abstract code modules; we have specific strategies for abstracting components.
We've come from a time when you might write functions and set up initialization calls to carefully build a mass of structures with pointers to each other. We've arrived here in a time when you set up interfaces and factories and class inheritance, and then you say, "I need a widget with X and Y characteristics," and the factory builder goes, "Oh, then I need to use these classes and initialize them with these parameters, and assemble them this way," and it hands you something that just does what you need. In the end, even all that whining about C++ memory management being hard is reduced to "so just delete the thing you got and it will do the right thing and mop up memory correctly" because we've found better ways to structure our code and turn every large, complex interaction into a trivial exercise in Lego.
We use a completely different approach to write large programs today. A program written in C++ by a skilled programmer today will look completely different than a program written in C++ by an identically-skilled programmer in 1995 because the techniques we use today didn't exist back then. If we gave modern C# to the guy in 1995, he'd write something that looks ridiculous and backwards.
Thing about structured knowledge is it brings you... well, structure. A lot of people look at decision-making systems, problem-solving systems, or fields like project management and say, "Oh, I know all that stuff already; what a waste of time." Frequently, you know all that stuff, but have no context for how to use it in an effective, structured model.
I'm pretty sure the GoF brought together a lot of design patterns already in use in code here and there and wrote a basic handbook; they didn't invent anything new, aside from the codification of modern programming paradigm. That means, at the time, people had all these tools; they didn't have any form of repeatable, well-known doctrine about what all the tools do and how to use them effectively. That's a valuable thing. Sticking names on things is also immensely valuable.
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The rattlesnake producing in the economic sense its own venom is instructive for several reasons. First, it demonstrates that human labor is not needed.
The rattlesnake isn't producing anything for human society.
There are aliens on Alpha Centauri Prime building space ships, and you're arguing that labor isn't a function of production because they're aliens and they build things without the application of human labor. You're making a stupid argument.
Like said aliens, the rattlesnake is investing its time and effort in the production of venom. The rattlesnake must eat to acquire food energy required for its body to produce the venom. That venom takes time to produce. If humans want the snake's venom, they have to apply human labor to acquire it: NO HUMAN BEING WILL EVER COME INTO POSSESSION OF RATTLESNAKE VENOM WITHOUT THE APPLICATION OF HUMAN LABOR IN THE VENOM PRODUCTION PROCESS.
The benefit here is more efficient use of other things than human labor.
The benefit is more efficient use of human labor. If you use a power tool, you have to invest the fractional human labor of mining fuel, refining fuel, TCO building and maintaining a power plant, TCO distributing electricity, mining materials, producing materials, battery manufacture, and operating the power tool. The fractional cost of all that shit, when looking at the whole of woodworking, is a great deal lower than the fractional cost of doing the same woodworking by hand.
That means, in aggregate, the total human time spent producing chairs and all the things used to build chairs using factories and power tools is *less* than the total human time spent producing the same number of chairs and all the tools used to build those chairs using hand tools.
Capitalism is an economic system based on the creation of goods and services for profit. In an abstract sense, that defines the basis of all pursuits engaged in to increase productivity.
Your niggling about is what's kept economics in the stone age. It's no wonder I can explain, with a consistent and unshifting unified theory, all accepted theories of economics, and explain why they fail when they're observed to fail, and why they work when they do work, and predict when they fail and when they work, consistently, without error: correct theories are easy to come up with when you're not a mindless git.
Seriously. I describe movements of economics, and you whine about words. Someone defines a system in which people work to acquire a higher standard-of-living by acquiring control of assets, and you obsess over whether having effective control of an asset implies possession--as if that matters. Humans decrease the labor they apply to produce a good, and you see that a machine now does a task and go, "Oh, look, NO HUMAN LABOR!" without recognizing the labor in producing and operating the machine. Humans produce NOTHING, and you go, "Look, something was produced without human labor!" You see things and say, "Look! Capital! Capital value!" instead of recognizing a (limited) resource that allows production of some good with less labor (e.g. energy by mining oil, until the oil runs out and you have to use solar energy to produce oil from the air--which takes more human labor than just digging it out of the ground).
That last one should be particularly obvious, but nobody notices that somehow "capital" doesn't have so much value if you move it over a few feet--you know, into solid rock or a muck pile where you have to expend ten times as much labor digging it out and filtering it, ultimately increasing the cost and decreasing the supposed "value" of the "capital".
In a communist society with state ownership of all capital, people will seek to get themselves into power positions which provide them greater rights over more of the state's capital. They won't "own" it, yet they'll somehow behave exactly as if they do: they'll be able to eat caviar while others eat bread, and fl
I'm talking about economics in general. Whether the US can or can't implement public healthcare isn't obvious; it requires an analysis of the economic situation of the United States, an analysis of the economic situation of other countries who implemented public healthcare, their successes, their failures, the costs, the benefits, and then a rough explanation of how each factor influenced each outcome. Then you have to project the range of possible outcomes for various public healthcare approaches to determine which, if any, are suitable; which are the *most* suitable; and to what degree those suitable provide a benefit.
You can't just say, "Well we're a developed nation, so obviously..." because it doesn't work that way. Your guess might be correct, but not because your grasp of the facts was enough to accurately assess the system--same as how you can guess a dice roll.
Nope. The rattlesnake doesn't need its venom harvested by human labor in order to have and use it.
The rattlesnake employs rattlesnake labor to produce and use its venom. It takes time and energy of the rattlesnake.
all this ignores that presence of human labor is not a definition of capital.
The absence of human labor 100% absolutely will prevent humans from accessing any form of capital.
Automation works to an increasing degree and there's no reason to assume it couldn't eliminate the need for human labor in a variety of tasks.
So nobody needs to build, maintain, fuel, or operate these machines? The machines run themselves, they build themselves, they maintain themselves, they mine their own power? They run for all eternity, never breaking down, never using an outside resource?
You say, "Ah, look, a woman got herself pregnant!" as if a man wasn't involved.
It's Geohot. He's a known uncontrolled dumbass with little forethought and lots of hyperfocus.
I don't need video games either. I still like them.
The usefulness to society as a whole for certain people having certain things is not a given, even if those things are useful to those people. It's useful to *me* to have access to Dice to get jobs making $135k; when I was 19, I could have gotten a job at McDonalds. While it's perfectly possible for me to end up poor and unemployed for a while--and guaranteed that some people with my or other high-dollar skills are currently living as such--it's less likely that I'd be walled-off from such employment with no car and no phone; even less likely that I wouldn't be able to dig my way out by getting a job at McDonalds for a while and buying a phone; and pretty much guaranteed--thanks to public college--that society as a whole has wasted its wealth making more people capable of doing my job than we can employ, thus ensuring that someone else (who is currently poor and hopeless) will only get their chance at a good job if I (or someone else) fall out of my job and get stuck as a poor kid.
That doesn't mean municipal broadband is definitely useless; it just means that such an argument of its virtues by way of giving people opportunities and thus strengthening our society is *trivially* dismissed. You need to show some other reason it's beneficial, rather than just a cost lumbered onto the backs of everyone for no real benefit at the expense of making us all slightly poorer.
Do note that making us *all* slightly poorer has the immediate primary effect of making it harder for the least-well-off to get jobs, and those of them who have base-level jobs get a lower standard of living. They're the first ones to feel the pressure.
Economics isn't a zero-sum game. Some actions cost us a pile of wealth and return a bigger pile; others return a smaller pile. Those actions don't operate by their own virtue, but rather by their relationship to the system. Change the system--it changes all the time--and you get a different outcome.
I'll give you a good example: I want to replace our welfare system with a Citizen's Dividend, which will directly end all homelessness and hunger in the United States while creating jobs, lowering the cost of goods, reducing taxes, and raising the standard of living. This would be a very bad idea in the 1950s. Here's why.
We can also go into the philosophy of choices: every choice involves giving something up. Do you want a chocolate bar or a peanut butter cup? Whichever one you choose, you lose the other. Even if you can choose both, you get excess calories; do you want to be fat, or do you want to eat candy? Maybe you can exchange your time spent leisurely arguing with idiots on Twitter with time spent gagging and coughing as you run yourself ragged doing high-speed laps around the gym in a desperate attempt to burn off the candy bar so you don't get fat, which would lower your body fat enough to do a couple sit-ups and develop chick-attracting abs--a state you'll get to faster if you eat less chocolate and more chicken.
In economics, the choices are analyzed further: how do you give up one thing in exchange for something bigger? Put your time in doing something upfront that allows you to do *more* of what you sacrificed in the long term, thus not actually making a material choice in long terms, but rather taking both.
In this case, economics tells us we are in one of two conditions: either municipal broadband provides an economic benefit which increases or at least does not decrease standard-of-living, or municipal broadband provides a single benefit to standard-of-living at the expense of the general standard-of-living. In the first situation, we enact that choice because it provides a total benefit; in the second, we can give you an XBox, but we have to take away your bicycle and your gameboy batteries. A single action doesn't define the outcome; the action in the surrounding condi
No, there are studies showing that state-provided healthcare in current practice--that is, in the nations which successfully implement it--provides a specific set of outcomes. State-provided healthcare in 1490 Feudal Japan likely would have provided little more than an economic drain.
Go back to hunter-gatherer society and you find people spent *most* of their time working. There weren't really "rich people", because it took almost all human labor to feed everyone; nobody had 308 times the income of the poorest-surviving individual. Take this up through ancient agrarian societies, through the bronze age, and so forth and you have a similar problem: the amount of excess income the aristocracy and nobility owned, all pooled together, was insufficient to provide services like healthcare to everyone.
It's notable that we call transportation of goods "shipping" and, in fact, we call moving shit around "transportation" because we *transfer* it between *ports* on *ships*. At one point, no government could produce and maintain rail or road with any viable amount of tax money: the production of steel and the movement of earth cost so much in human labor that implementing rails, good roads, and other such forms of overland transportation would cost an unreasonable and crippling amount of the total income. Think like the rich have 15% of all income and you need 73% of all income, so you have to take more than half of the income of the poorest of poor if you're going to do this.
Surprise: in America, the top 10%--which is around 34 million people--collectively have 48% of the income. We invented power tools, electricity, new methods of forging steel, and all kinds of other shit; we expend the same amount of labor and we produce a *lot* more. There's a lot more stuff per person; the amount of money each person has buys a *lot* more. Even our poor live at a level above the nobility of medieval times, with insulated homes and running water and electric lights.
That means we've got a better chance of buying into a good public healthcare system than medieval Europe did.
Canada and Norway are primary oil exporters. Norway is like the ninth largest exporter of oil in the world; Canada is the tenth, and exports more than a fifth of what Saudi Arabia exports. Norway also has 5 million people, versus 35 million in Canada and 28 million in Saudi Arabia; Norway is fucking rich. Norway, in fact, exports 30% more oil per capita than Saudi, meaning the amount of wealth in Norway's oil economy is 30% larger than Saudi's.
We always talk about Norway's and Canada's healthcare systems, not to mention the *insane* standard of living in Norway.
How well do you think a public option would fair in Uganda?
This is part economics, part finances, part history. Most people don't realize that experts are all hobbled by their narrow scope of domain knowledge: an economist without a strong grasp of economic history is going to have a hard time inventing new ideas; most economists who *do* invent new ideas have either a strong grasp of history or a strong grasp of classical economics coupled directly with a wide base of observation of modern business. They need multiple fields of study to manufacture new information; if you knew anything about learning and creativity, you'd be rolling your eyes at me for stating the bluntly obvious.
The point is everything is like that. You can't look at an action and an outcome and say X leads to Y; you need to look at the conditions within which the action occurred. Even the Star Trek utopian no-work society has an economic condition; socialists and marxists thought they could snap their fingers and make that by force of will, which is why they failed. Never guess; always know.
Except when they don't.
Which is never.
So how much human labor does a rattlesnake need to manufacture venom?
Oh, you want rattlesnake venom? Hmm. Well, humans will have to collect or farm the snakes. They'll need to produce the vessels and extraction mechanisms--really just a cellophane barrier stretched over a glass--and handle the snakes to extract the sample. They'll have to collect these samples together in a central, sterile form of storage. They'll have to account for it, track it, and ship it to wherever it's needed.
You're trying to use the example of "Gold is free because there's gold in the ground", which involves ignoring all the labor required to collect that gold. The raw earth is not a product because it cannot be used until it is obtained.
Political idealism aside, I actually can't think of any "obvious benefits". I mean, there aren't even any obvious benefits to government healthcare: it takes a good bit of analysis to figure out if state healthcare is more or less expensive, and then you have to figure out if it's *affordable* or if it inflicts crippling poverty on more individuals than it protects; that's not even considering the various *forms* of state healthcare (single-payer; state hospitals; hybrid systems like Canada; laws mandating how employers, insurers, and providers will operate...).
People *need* healthcare. They get sick. They don't *need* Internet access; they may need transportation--there aren't enough McDonalds peppering your neighborhood for everyone in the ghetto to walk to their shitty, underpaid job. Even then, you're dealing with class status: most jobs above the minimum provide this stuff, or provide enough money to just buy it outright; it's mainly the unemployed who need public service.
Even my Citizen's Dividend doesn't have *obvious* benefits. It took a lot of market analysis just to show it would end homelessness and hunger--retail prices compared to profitability, risk considerations, and even some architecture to plan out miniature apartments that are livable even if way smaller than the luxury 1 bedroom I lived in--and all kinds of secondary effects require advanced economic theory to explain. Remember, people think if we raise minimum wage we'll somehow increase employment by giving consumers more money to spend; they haven't worked out that an increase in the cost of labor raises the minimum cost of products, thus counteracting *every* economic pressure that draws prices down. They haven't even worked out that higher labor costs concentrate wealth into fewer hands.
We actually passed a law giving businesses and rich people tax breaks to stimulate growth and create employment.
The problem, of course, is that the products are being sold to consumers. Consumers have a certain amount of money, and they're spending what they're willing to spend. You can't sell more by making more; if you could, you'd hire more consumers. Profitability scales, and unprofitable expansion doesn't happen just because you have money to spend. You need to make products cheaper so you can sell more of them, which means making labor cheaper... for example, by reducing taxes on the working class so as to allow employers to pay them less while leaving them with the same amount of money flowing into their bank account, thus reducing the cost of products, allowing prices to fall, giving consumers additional buying power which then allows us to hire new laborers to make new products to sell to these consumers, creating more jobs.
These aren't obvious things. Handing out healthcare isn't obviously helpful. There are no obvious benefits to public broadband; all you can say about it is everyone pays a tax, and some broadband system exists for everyone. Whether it's cheaper or better-maintained depends on the economic system; and its impact on the economy itself is highly questionable. If you're going to pitch something like that, you have to answer those questions instead of just declaring that they've been answered.
Don't even start with the backwards ideals people have about workforce development--notably calling it "education" instead of "workforce development", and then demanding to be sold into serfdom. Again: impact not obvious.
What's scary is banning child pornography somehow has become a slippery slope to Librarian control of the United States.
There's no hope for the world.
The essence of capitalism is people working for a profit. We try to claim people don't have money or ownership, yet people still barter, they still do work in expectation of individual reward, and they still seek to increase their standard-of-living by reducing the labor they perform while increasing the assets they control.
Think about it this way: You can be a maid making $500/week keeping a rich person's mansion going; you might make about as much as a cashier at Sears, but you still live in a mansion and eat filet mingon. Sure you don't own any of that stuff, but your job provides you with lodging (in the servant wing of the mansion) and food (from the same damn kitchen).
Products always require human labor for production; and humans always seek to reduce their labor while increasing their access to products. It's biology: we want to expend as little energy as possible, increasing survival prospects if food becomes scarce. Rattle snakes shake their rattles to warn away dangerous animals because manufacturing venom takes too much energy--they really don't want to bite you.
Actually, there's no such thing as a non-capitalist system.
The whole point of inventing new things--such as AI--is to create a new way to produce with less human labor. Less labor means less cost; we simply represent that cost with a universal commodity, like money. Essentially, everything requires human labor: if you have 60 labor-hours to work, you need 20 labor-hours to produce food for your family, and you spend 45 labor-hours building shelter, your family is going to starve (eventually) because they're only getting 75% as much food as they need.
As you cut back the human labor requirements to produce food, shelter, clothing, and whatever else you're currently consuming, you become capable of producing new things, as well as producing existing things in great quantity with little resource investment. Humans often take shortcuts by digging things like coal or gold out of the ground until they run out of that resource, and then do something more labor-intensive to get that resource (or preemptively invent a less-intensive method to obtain the same resource, thus saving themselves the labor involved in fetching it from a giant hole).
Everything useful you invent provides a profit. Everything you want to invent in some way is expected to provide a profit. Humans don't want money; they want to invest less labor to achieve the same things. Humans want to be rich so they don't have to work hard to pay for their houses, food, cars, and lame-ass XBox 360 video games; other humans invent the Wii U because the non-rich humans are happy to pay $200 to get a video game console and bypass the $600 beast begging for their cash, as obtaining $600 requires doing three times as much work (at least) than obtaining $200.
Essentially, some dim-witted scientist opened his mouth and said, "I want to get away from capitalism so I can invent this new thing that will make stuff cost less."
Well a lot of electricians know the International Electric Code. We should stop following that and just wire things however the hell we feel like, based on our skill.
Try reading that article. It mentions you need to get some higher-grade coolant (read: a bigger heat sink and fan), validate the airflow in your case, raise the voltage, etc.
Today, you put in the stock heatsink and fan that came in the same Intel Core I7 3.8GHz box as your processor, you go into the stock BIOS, and you say "make me 4.2GHz." Done. Works in a cheap case.
Pretty much, yes. Facebook supports SHA1 certificates, same situation as yesterday.
"Guarantee" is a funny word. No processor has a 100% probability of running at the rated speed--or even powering on at all. A guarantee only means someone is willing to make good on the defect.
The problem here is that they used to build processors to run at the rated speed, test them to make sure they run at the rated speed, de-rate them to a stable speed if they can only run at a lower speed, and sell them at a speed rated to design and, possibly, to testing. Today, they build processors to run at a high speed and rate them to run at a lower speed, then sell them as "overclockable". They don't build a 3.8GHz processor that can run at 4.2GHz if you're lucky; they build a 4.2GHz processor to high tolerances on a design meant to run at 4.2GHz reliably, and rate it as a 3.8GHz processor.
Modern processors are intentionally overbuilt. They're not built to run a service life at a rated level of performance; they're built to run a service life significantly above the rated level of service. It's like installing 120PSI cold water pipe in your house and rating your home's plumbing for 60PSI residential pressure: if you crank that pressure regulator up to 100PSI, your pipes won't burst, and you're not doing anything particularly special except running the system at a pressure it was purpose-built to handle.
As a general rule, X processor model runs at Y speed these days. The processes are stable at high power outputs, but marketed as 80W CPUs. Most modern processors even run by default at a low clock and add 400-600MHz in "Turbo Mode" automatically when the CPU is running under sufficient load--meaning they just do regular old CPU scaling, but save the higher clock rate for when you're trying to use it. If you run SETI@HOME, they run in turbo mode 100% of the time.
Old days: the processor should run at 200MHz. You can push 215MHz, but you need to modify the vcore. The processor might be unstable. You might need additional cooling. The gates might just not switch correctly at that speed (miller capacitance...) without a vcore high enough to blow the chip. It's stamped 200MHz for a reason.
Modern times: that's a 4.7GHz processor clocked at 3.8GHz. You buy it, you turn it up to 4.7GHz, don't mess with anything else, it runs 60C at full load under stock configuration. That processor came underclocked out of the box.
I'm not saying they should; I'm saying there's no economic pressure on them not to. There isn't a noose around their necks; if they have 1000 kids, it's some minimum-wage worker who starves. What stops them?
If I put a gun to some starving Etheopean's head without telling you, will you still post stupid shit, even though he'll get his head blown off? Or will that stop you from posting idiocy, not knowing that some anonymous African will die when you hit submit?
You're trying to say nothing. Knowing modern design patterns *is* good skill. Trying to just say, "I take Computer Science III, know what I'm talking about," and then "dividing your code up" in some arbitrary way produces a shambling hulk.
Although, if you have a particular set of design patterns that somehow make it easy to organize 9-million lines of code, I'd love to see it :) Maybe it's something I haven't seen before.
The modern design patterns like factories and builders and decorators *are* how people organize the code in large applications. They came about because people found better ways to do it, and other people organized that information into modern doctrine. In 10 years, we'll have a new set of design patterns, and a new set of doctrine in which someone organizes and codifies those patterns. Wash, rinse, repeat.
We do this with building codes, cars, rocket engines, brain surgery, the scientific method, education, mnemonics, and mathematics; of course we do it with programming, too. We develop new techniques over time to handle new and larger problems with less labor--that's technology.
It's simpler than that. Quantum computing in this scale is in the area of heavy research, with a huge blanket of unknown unknowns; security is about mapping out your known and unknown unknowns and turning them into known resolvable state. You can't discuss security in this field yet because you have to discuss how the system *does* behave and how to ensure it *reliably* follows that behavior in the face of any and all unknown input states.
Then you're not looking; you're only searching for a reason to disagree.
The world isn't a simple place as you want it.
That's what modern design patterns do: they make giant, 9-million-line code bases readable and flexible.
Multi-millionaires may be able to afford that. Middle-class (and upper middle class) people can't. This isn't India where servants are dirt-cheap.
The point is most multi-millionaires don't actually have 40 kids. They have 2 or 3. It's not a huge hardship for a multi-millionaire to have 40 kids, which is what you claimed about the middle class. Even most middle-class families can handle more kids than they have without an appreciable reduction in their individual standard-of-living; the additional population strain would reduce total standard-of-living, which would feed back and probably make those same families poor, but that's not rationally considered by the people not breeding.
That means there's no obvious mechanism, in this small view of the model, which accounts for the population limit. I don't know what sentiment causes population growth to slow at the appropriate time; I know why it's the appropriate time, and why population grows when scarcity is lifted, but not how everyone gets the message and adjusts the population appropriately.
You're not accounting for changes in culture and values. People are much less religious now, and even mega-rich people have to spend some time with their kids, or else why bother having them? You're also missing what a pain it is to carry a child to term, and what a health risk it is.
Except these booms and dips have cycled based wholly on economic conditions, rather than steadily sliding with the cultural condition. We're not looking at a cycle of atheism, religious revival, atheism, religious revival.
In other words: what you cite here doesn't correlate *at* *all* with the long-term behavior. That's no surprise: you're using the same sort of post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc logic coupled with a short view and cherry picking that everyone uses; the argument is obvious, as is its high probability of invalidity.
What's the difference? The people building iPhones and such still have to toil away at work all day long.
The difference is they ride a bus home instead of walking, they have a stove in their home that costs pennies (or seconds of labor wage) to operate, they have refrigeration and the benefits thereof, they have climate-controlled living space, they have 8 changes of clothes, they have mechanical washing machines or access to $1.50 laundromats (instead of spending 14 hours on Saturday washing clothes), they have running water, they have glass windows instead of paper soaked in animal fat, they have OTC cold medication, they have supermarkets, they have television, they have Internet access, and the greatest proportion of them (the middle class) have their own cars and smart phones and FitBit dongles attached to their arms.
They don't spend any more time making things; they just magically make more things. Instead of spending 8 hours per person making food for one person, they spend 8 hours making food, clothing, soap, hospitals, television, recorded music,electric lighting, running water, cars, jet planes, and space ships.
With all the additional, non-necessary productivity, we can afford to siphon some. That means instead of having enough to feed 100 people and if 98 find food and the other 2 come up empty, well, those 2 can starve... we have 100 people capable of producing enough to feed 1,000 people, so we produce enough to feed 100 people and everyone eats. Those few people who can't support themselves? We can carry them. As we improve productivity, we can carry them more trivially--the cost to us falls, and we hardly even notice what little we divert to the unfortunate. Suddenly, welfare is possible.
Historically, work days ranged 10-16 hours for up to 6 days per week--a maximum of almost 100-hour work weeks. French workers got a 12-hour work day around 1850; at the same time, England passed laws limiting the working hours of women and children to 10 hours. Before that, in 1933, England had passed a law l
I thought I already answered this down-thread. We've come a long way from assembly. We got FORTRAN and BASIC and C, and started doing imperative programming. We went from instruction code listings to callable functions. We started building code as modules with abstraction, and then moved into an object oriented programming model where we abstracted objects inside the code modules and exposed objects as an abstraction interface to other modules.
Today, we have the Gang of Four design patterns for object oriented programming. We have large architecture design patterns like MVC, MVP, MVVM, and so forth. We don't just abstract code modules; we have specific strategies for abstracting components.
We've come from a time when you might write functions and set up initialization calls to carefully build a mass of structures with pointers to each other. We've arrived here in a time when you set up interfaces and factories and class inheritance, and then you say, "I need a widget with X and Y characteristics," and the factory builder goes, "Oh, then I need to use these classes and initialize them with these parameters, and assemble them this way," and it hands you something that just does what you need. In the end, even all that whining about C++ memory management being hard is reduced to "so just delete the thing you got and it will do the right thing and mop up memory correctly" because we've found better ways to structure our code and turn every large, complex interaction into a trivial exercise in Lego.
We use a completely different approach to write large programs today. A program written in C++ by a skilled programmer today will look completely different than a program written in C++ by an identically-skilled programmer in 1995 because the techniques we use today didn't exist back then. If we gave modern C# to the guy in 1995, he'd write something that looks ridiculous and backwards.
Thing about structured knowledge is it brings you... well, structure. A lot of people look at decision-making systems, problem-solving systems, or fields like project management and say, "Oh, I know all that stuff already; what a waste of time." Frequently, you know all that stuff, but have no context for how to use it in an effective, structured model.
I'm pretty sure the GoF brought together a lot of design patterns already in use in code here and there and wrote a basic handbook; they didn't invent anything new, aside from the codification of modern programming paradigm. That means, at the time, people had all these tools; they didn't have any form of repeatable, well-known doctrine about what all the tools do and how to use them effectively. That's a valuable thing. Sticking names on things is also immensely valuable.