You have stated as fact that nobody ever successfully uses a firearm to prevent a violent attack, and that a knife is more likely to work for this purpose.
Incorrect. I have stated as fact that the fear of individuals possibly carrying firearms and defending themselves is not a significant factor in the criminal mind. The object intent of a criminal is to overcome a victim, not to have a Mexican stand-off; they don't announce themselves. If you're not waliking around holding a large firearm leveled at whoever approaches you, you're a target; you'll have to draw your firearm, and a good grappler can control your arm so you can't safely point it away from yourself and at them.
Knives happen to have sharp edges, so trying to take one away is less of a winning proposition.
You seem to be arguing that the average person is a sociopath who is willing to just watch others be hurt.
One mechanism is called the Bystander Effect; there are several others. We actively discourage vigilantism.
There is solid research estimating that firearms are used in the USA about two million times each year to prevent a violent crime. Most of these "defensive gun uses" do not involve anyone being killed or even anyone firing the gun; the defender deterred the assailant just by having a gun.
At which point you bring up a whole lot of inconsistent research that manage to conclude something with a 312.5% margin of error and with extremely poor experimental design, and from a biased source to boot.
Did you know global warming is bunk, too? Exxon-Mobil published a study. There is no pollution from coal at all.
I don't blame the victims the way you seem to
You're a retard.
I explained the role of society in deterrence, and you claim victim-blaming. I specifically said the victim has NO POWER over the situation, and it's the fault of everyone else in the world.
Sally got raped. Tim, Bob, George, Amanda, Mark, Joseph, and Bill all stood by and did nothing. You claim I'm blaming Sally for getting raped by complaining that Tim, Bob, George, Amanda, Mark, Joseph, and Bill all stood by and did nothing. Are Tim, Bob, George, Amanda, Mark, Joseph, and Bill the victim?
You extended too far with your bullshit art. You got burned.
Nobody fears a swift death at the hands of a victim. That's a stupid argument. Victims are harmless, armed or not; you take them by surprise and you take them down. If they have weapons, you take them away before they can use them--this is hilariously easy when you attack someone and they turn out to have a firearm. A knife is actually more of a difficult proposition.
*Society* has the power to reduce crime. The United States society tolerates crime: if you attack someone else, it's not my business; I'll keep my head down and stay safe. This is why witnesses just vanish, deciding not to testify; this is why the Virginia Tech shootings had a dude walk into a class full of people, shoot them one by one while they all sat compliant or cowered behind chairs, and then move to the next class. Nobody stands up to put a stop to it, because they might get shot a few seconds earlier.
The threat level of a society which will collectively hunt you down is enormous. Watch someone murder a gypsy once. The police have about 8 minutes to find that guy; after that, they're just looking for the body. People are afraid of the mafia because messing with the mafia means the mob hunts you down. Murder is one thing; murdering a cop is wholly different, and you will die before your trial. Nobody messes with these people, because you immediately become the hunted.
A society of armed loners who only care about themselves is a society of targets.
In other words, US workers should be happy to get screwed.
More distorted thinking.
Worker productivity has gone up since 2000, but not the median family income in constant dollars, and you appear to be saying it should go down.
More distorted thinking.
And incorrect facts. How does the median family have more shiny toys now, yet less purchasing power?
When everyone is getting more, people tend not to care too much about what other people are getting.
You've obviously never seen someone quite content encounter someone who had more than them. Folks think they're getting a good deal or they're well-cared-for, they're happy; they see that someone else has 10x as much, suddenly they're pissed off. Even old people pull that shit, if they haven't learned not to care yet. I've seen a 60-year-old woman light up when she got two scoops of ice cream, so happy and excited; then the woman 2 seats down was given a bowl with 3 and the old bitch freaked out and started screaming. "Why does she get three and I only get two?!" Two was enough before... isn't this how a four-year-old reacts? Grow up, grandma.
It's why we don't discuss salaries at work, though that's been debated: people tend to not care about what other coworkers are making; they bitch more that the guy at the top is making $25M and they only get $0.74M.
It was a simile. My mistake; I should have dropped the part up to "like" and just made it a metaphor; better imagery, more powerful argument, persuades people more effectively.
Farm-raised salmon are in open cages in ocean. They're dense and interact with the open ocean water, acting as a collection bed for parasites and disease.
Glyphosate is less-toxic than table salt and less-toxic than many alternatives. A lot of organic farming pesticides are highly toxic, broad target, and long halflife. That means organic produce has a lot more toxic chemical content than regular produce with synthetic pesticides; the pesticides kill a wide array of insects and small animals, including earth worms and bees; and they wash into the ground or the rivers and stay there for years, instead of weeks or days. People still whine about pesticides in regular food and go with the highly-toxic organic food.
It's mixed salmon. The salmon has a protein present in another type of salmon. In practical terms, it's like you squeezed and filtered the juices of one salmon, and poured it over another.
You're looking at a buy-in problem, which is two-part: getting and keeping. You first need buy-in, and second need to maintain buy-in.
Getting buy-in is not difficult. Find the people with the most stake, the most interest. You need to figure out who's important and who's aligned.
First, you build a stakeholder engagement assessment matrix. List the people involved (your boss, the VP, coworkers), their Current (C) state, and their Desired (D) state, ranging from Unaware to Resistant (opposition), through Neutral (doesn't care), up into Supportive (is interested) and Leading (is actively advocating, pushing back against opposition).
Take the ones in a less-than-desired state and work on them, picking out who's important first. Figure out what drives them, what do they want. Someone who says, "It's a lot of work," has given you a way in: it would be a good idea, right? It'd be nice if we could do it, wouldn't it? Take responsibility. You'll find a way to make it workable; you'll figure out what it will take; you'll make sure we know going in if this is doable or if it's an unending behemoth we simply can't tackle. Now you've got them to agree that this is a good idea, and allow you to go find out just how hard it'd be.
Get those executive stakeholders on the line first, if possible. Especially hit the command chain: if your boss is concerned with his boss and you typically have that communication line, bring it casually up to his boss. Remember to manage all of your stakeholders: if you're going to go over your boss's head, point out that it's a lot of effort; shift responsibility off your boss for getting it done right, underscore that it may be impossible even if it's worth a look. If your boss is okay on the idea and it's generally a very structured organization where you don't have that rapport with his boss, bring it to him first, then let him take it upwards; don't circumvent where circumvention isn't just called "small-office politics".
Your boss being good with the idea means your team has to go along with it, in theory. Don't lay that weight on them if you don't have to; it's your idea, it was your proposal, and he sent you to find out what it's going to take. It's not their responsibility, not yet anyway. They'll hand you enough rope to hang yourself, especially if you seem to think they've got what it takes to actually do it--remember, the team's doing the work, not just you.
So now you've got people to listen in, to say, "Hmm, yes, it's a good idea in theory..." and to let you find out just how bad "...but it's a lot of work" really is.
Now you need to keep it.
The simple way there is to produce results. Ask questions, find the people who know and get their input. Get together and determine what pieces need to change and how, conceptually; then determine, roughly, what it would take. Build a work breakdown structure, every element down to the work package being a deliverable--an adjective-noun--and not a task; no verbs on WBS. Work packages are the largest manageable deliverable, the piece that you fully understand and can estimate time and complexity and completion; break it down further if it's a nebulous piece, don't break it down further if you already understand it.
Project managers break those work packages into activities and tasks; these can be verbs. You don't have to do that right away; we do that during scheduling.
Once you have your Work Breakdown Structure, you can look at it and say, "This is everything it will take." Just having that scaffold in front of you will show you something important: big or small, you can do it.
You can do it.
It's not a phantom under your bed, not a giant behemoth you can't conquer; it's a mountain, y
Not if their budget included $400 of free spending and they suddenly became infatuated with tablets which cost $340.
Besides, "Fewer" implies "less labor required," which implies unemployment. Combine that with consumers not having the dollars to spend on new products, and you have no way to create new jobs to use these unemployed--not until we find a way to use less labor to make tablets, unemploying some of those people, in which case now you have the two groups competing for what meager employment remains.
You might think (I did, for about 2.7 seconds; apparently it took that long to copy the data into classical memory) that the more efficient processes mean we can make more things more cheaply, and so we can re-employ more people. That's only sort-of true. If we find a way to use less labor to make electronics and thus unemploy them along with the now-unemployed half-the-people-who-used-to-make-Crocs, we can make *more* electronics by re-employing the same number of people who just lost their tablet-making jobs. That's because we can only pay that many people's wages. At the same time, electronics cost less: if we pay them less, they can still buy as much crap; that, in turn, means we can employ more of them, as long as their wages are lower.
It's sort-of true in the sense that it's true in a specific sort of sense: it's true we can employ more people when productivity increases, if we pay them less in buying-power terms. If we give them a wage that follows inflation--one that follows the total income divided by the total productivity, and multiplies their previous wage by the ratio of that value now to that value before--then we can only employ exactly as many as we unemployed.
The higher price per labor-hour reduces employment. High wages reduce employment. The negative effects of low wages are the reasoning behind minimum wage; and the systems which obsolete the system of minimum wage were not viable until recently. It's time to move on, time to get away from a system that raises labor costs and expands unemployment.
Bulk labor is trying to get $15/hr; machines cost $12. We tax the middle-class worker a third of his paycheck.
What if we resolved the taxes in such a way that we didn't need to raise taxes on anyone (least not by more than, say, 3%, worst case, maybe less), and the $45k worker effectively brought home about $40k? We could stop paying people $60k and start paying them $15k less, and they'd come home with $500/year more. For every 4 employees at that income level, you could hire 5 and still spend the same on wages.
What if we got rid of that OASDI payroll tax, instead covering it with a level income tax? Instead of hiring a $60k worker and paying $3,750 in taxes, you'd just pay the $60k worker. Put that above and those $45k workers are $2,800 cheaper than they'd normally be, closer to an actual $45k, and still taking home the same money at the end of the day.
Those aren't arbitrary numbers. I've done the math a dozen different ways.
Productivity moving forward is a constant; it just has to happen at an unfortunately slow rate.
Every time you increase productivity, you decrease labor time required to do something, and thus create unemployment. That's fine: we stop paying those people--*we*, as in consumers, since the very basic component of price is the cost of all labor (labor price times labor hours makes labor cost), and no economic factor will push prices down below that level--and have more money to spend on new things; thus someone can hire labor to make new things to sell us.
There's a gap, of course. Unemploy someone today, hire them next year. With a complex, dynamic market, this fluctuation is constant: jobs appear even as they're lost, and we sort of stabilize on a certain unemployment rate, moved up and down by the general economic tone. We don't sit at 9% unemployment and then slide back down to 4% because we figured out how to make new products; we do it because the freedom of spending and the consumer movement has changed enough to encourage that slide, or because prices have trended to convergence high and then low in the ranges. Maybe a new product moved into the market, and now people want shiny tablet PCs instead of Croc shoes, and so Crocs have to sell at a 20% margin instead of a 160% margin, taking less profit to stay in business: the unnecessary good is just abandoned in favor of a niche market, and that niche expands, and the unnecessary good must lower its prices to take what's left if it wants to compete. The employees making tablet PCs are new; the employees making Crocs were a small part of its sale price, and have now become a large part, and no employment was changed in that part of the market, and so total unemployment shrinks.
Still, what if people want to pay $60 for Crocs, but they cost $85 to make? Sure, we'd all be more fashionable not wearing ugly, retarded footwear; but those people making said ugly, retarded footwear would cease being employed. A new product could fill the gap then; it'd have to consume less labor time--fewer labor hours to get the price under $60, the threshold of consumer interest.
By the same reasoning, if labor cost half as much, then the cost would be $42, and $60 would represent a profit. Employment stays; or maybe people realize their shiny Galaxy or Surface makes them look intelligent, and their rubber clown shoes make them look stupid, and so they stop buying them. Well, those people lose their jobs, but they only cost half as much to employ: the new product we sell is cheap, and we hire them back more readily.
This model doesn't work when you unemploy 50% of the active labor force at once. Oh, it follows the model; the problem is the outcome is a complete and total economic collapse with decades or even centuries of recovery time.
Spread that productivity increase over time. Don't throw people to the streets so fast, not unless you're growing even faster. Finding ways to slash labor isn't growth; you have to find a market to sell your products to as well, or else you only make small amounts of goods with even smaller amounts of labor while the rest of the population goes jobless with no hope of a bootstrap.
The larger problem is distorted thinking. People are angry, claiming they don't get paid enough, that corporations and rich people have too much, and that we need to "make them pay" somehow--you'll notice no solutions, just vengeance. They ignore real solutions because they don't tickle their genetalia the right way.
The minimum wage push is a big one right now. That was a decent strategy in the 1900s, with good return for its costs; but now it's crap. What we need, today, is *cheap* labor. We need to reduce labor costs, which means new strategies for managing standard-of-living. We can't just hand out high wages and public aid and expect the economy to function; it'll just throw out the laborers in favor of machines, H1-B cheap import labor, and new management structures which cost 30% more in overhead but eliminate 40% of the labor cost--which is significant when labor in total costs 3/4 as much as management.
We need new ways of doing things. We need to cut back on labor pricing. Nobody wants to do that because it doesn't feel good to them if they don't stab the knife into the purse of their corporate overlords; they don't care about a better standard-of-living for themselves, but rather for a worse one for those they've focused their anger upon.
That's true; but the point was more toward the extreme views people hold: they know something is bad, so it must be as bad as they can possibly imagine. Rational decisions work best when you hold a realistic world view.
Slashdot Mirror
They had their time, and we've moved on.
They're 6 feet above sea level and apparently the sea has risen by 2 meters suddenly and driven them off the island.
You have stated as fact that nobody ever successfully uses a firearm to prevent a violent attack, and that a knife is more likely to work for this purpose.
Incorrect. I have stated as fact that the fear of individuals possibly carrying firearms and defending themselves is not a significant factor in the criminal mind. The object intent of a criminal is to overcome a victim, not to have a Mexican stand-off; they don't announce themselves. If you're not waliking around holding a large firearm leveled at whoever approaches you, you're a target; you'll have to draw your firearm, and a good grappler can control your arm so you can't safely point it away from yourself and at them.
Knives happen to have sharp edges, so trying to take one away is less of a winning proposition.
You seem to be arguing that the average person is a sociopath who is willing to just watch others be hurt.
One mechanism is called the Bystander Effect; there are several others. We actively discourage vigilantism.
There is solid research estimating that firearms are used in the USA about two million times each year to prevent a violent crime. Most of these "defensive gun uses" do not involve anyone being killed or even anyone firing the gun; the defender deterred the assailant just by having a gun.
At which point you bring up a whole lot of inconsistent research that manage to conclude something with a 312.5% margin of error and with extremely poor experimental design, and from a biased source to boot.
Did you know global warming is bunk, too? Exxon-Mobil published a study. There is no pollution from coal at all.
I don't blame the victims the way you seem to
You're a retard.
I explained the role of society in deterrence, and you claim victim-blaming. I specifically said the victim has NO POWER over the situation, and it's the fault of everyone else in the world.
Sally got raped. Tim, Bob, George, Amanda, Mark, Joseph, and Bill all stood by and did nothing. You claim I'm blaming Sally for getting raped by complaining that Tim, Bob, George, Amanda, Mark, Joseph, and Bill all stood by and did nothing. Are Tim, Bob, George, Amanda, Mark, Joseph, and Bill the victim?
You extended too far with your bullshit art. You got burned.
UK people tell me UK doesn't have racism.
Easy to solve poverty. Side effect: business taxes drop 4.5%. Wasn't my intention; it just happened that way.
Nobody fears a swift death at the hands of a victim. That's a stupid argument. Victims are harmless, armed or not; you take them by surprise and you take them down. If they have weapons, you take them away before they can use them--this is hilariously easy when you attack someone and they turn out to have a firearm. A knife is actually more of a difficult proposition.
*Society* has the power to reduce crime. The United States society tolerates crime: if you attack someone else, it's not my business; I'll keep my head down and stay safe. This is why witnesses just vanish, deciding not to testify; this is why the Virginia Tech shootings had a dude walk into a class full of people, shoot them one by one while they all sat compliant or cowered behind chairs, and then move to the next class. Nobody stands up to put a stop to it, because they might get shot a few seconds earlier.
The threat level of a society which will collectively hunt you down is enormous. Watch someone murder a gypsy once. The police have about 8 minutes to find that guy; after that, they're just looking for the body. People are afraid of the mafia because messing with the mafia means the mob hunts you down. Murder is one thing; murdering a cop is wholly different, and you will die before your trial. Nobody messes with these people, because you immediately become the hunted.
A society of armed loners who only care about themselves is a society of targets.
Ay, mate, gotta watch for the tail 'cause it's reeeeeallly pointy!
In other words, US workers should be happy to get screwed.
More distorted thinking.
Worker productivity has gone up since 2000, but not the median family income in constant dollars, and you appear to be saying it should go down. More distorted thinking.
And incorrect facts. How does the median family have more shiny toys now, yet less purchasing power?
When everyone is getting more, people tend not to care too much about what other people are getting.
You've obviously never seen someone quite content encounter someone who had more than them. Folks think they're getting a good deal or they're well-cared-for, they're happy; they see that someone else has 10x as much, suddenly they're pissed off. Even old people pull that shit, if they haven't learned not to care yet. I've seen a 60-year-old woman light up when she got two scoops of ice cream, so happy and excited; then the woman 2 seats down was given a bowl with 3 and the old bitch freaked out and started screaming. "Why does she get three and I only get two?!" Two was enough before... isn't this how a four-year-old reacts? Grow up, grandma.
It's why we don't discuss salaries at work, though that's been debated: people tend to not care about what other coworkers are making; they bitch more that the guy at the top is making $25M and they only get $0.74M.
It was a simile. My mistake; I should have dropped the part up to "like" and just made it a metaphor; better imagery, more powerful argument, persuades people more effectively.
People whine about refined sucrose from GMO sugar beets.
That's a lot of words to say "Negligible difference".
"Guaranteed not to turn pink in the can!" "Never bleached!"
Farm-raised salmon are in open cages in ocean. They're dense and interact with the open ocean water, acting as a collection bed for parasites and disease.
Earth can sustain theoretical 134 million hunter-gatherers, and that assumes ideal conditions at all forageable land area.
I've heard legit horror stories about wifi and smart meters, better ban those.
Glyphosate is less-toxic than table salt and less-toxic than many alternatives. A lot of organic farming pesticides are highly toxic, broad target, and long halflife. That means organic produce has a lot more toxic chemical content than regular produce with synthetic pesticides; the pesticides kill a wide array of insects and small animals, including earth worms and bees; and they wash into the ground or the rivers and stay there for years, instead of weeks or days. People still whine about pesticides in regular food and go with the highly-toxic organic food.
It's mixed salmon. The salmon has a protein present in another type of salmon. In practical terms, it's like you squeezed and filtered the juices of one salmon, and poured it over another.
This is an easy one.
You're looking at a buy-in problem, which is two-part: getting and keeping. You first need buy-in, and second need to maintain buy-in.
Getting buy-in is not difficult. Find the people with the most stake, the most interest. You need to figure out who's important and who's aligned.
First, you build a stakeholder engagement assessment matrix. List the people involved (your boss, the VP, coworkers), their Current (C) state, and their Desired (D) state, ranging from Unaware to Resistant (opposition), through Neutral (doesn't care), up into Supportive (is interested) and Leading (is actively advocating, pushing back against opposition).
Take the ones in a less-than-desired state and work on them, picking out who's important first. Figure out what drives them, what do they want. Someone who says, "It's a lot of work," has given you a way in: it would be a good idea, right? It'd be nice if we could do it, wouldn't it? Take responsibility. You'll find a way to make it workable; you'll figure out what it will take; you'll make sure we know going in if this is doable or if it's an unending behemoth we simply can't tackle. Now you've got them to agree that this is a good idea, and allow you to go find out just how hard it'd be.
Get those executive stakeholders on the line first, if possible. Especially hit the command chain: if your boss is concerned with his boss and you typically have that communication line, bring it casually up to his boss. Remember to manage all of your stakeholders: if you're going to go over your boss's head, point out that it's a lot of effort; shift responsibility off your boss for getting it done right, underscore that it may be impossible even if it's worth a look. If your boss is okay on the idea and it's generally a very structured organization where you don't have that rapport with his boss, bring it to him first, then let him take it upwards; don't circumvent where circumvention isn't just called "small-office politics".
Your boss being good with the idea means your team has to go along with it, in theory. Don't lay that weight on them if you don't have to; it's your idea, it was your proposal, and he sent you to find out what it's going to take. It's not their responsibility, not yet anyway. They'll hand you enough rope to hang yourself, especially if you seem to think they've got what it takes to actually do it--remember, the team's doing the work, not just you.
So now you've got people to listen in, to say, "Hmm, yes, it's a good idea in theory..." and to let you find out just how bad "...but it's a lot of work" really is.
Now you need to keep it.
The simple way there is to produce results. Ask questions, find the people who know and get their input. Get together and determine what pieces need to change and how, conceptually; then determine, roughly, what it would take. Build a work breakdown structure, every element down to the work package being a deliverable--an adjective-noun--and not a task; no verbs on WBS. Work packages are the largest manageable deliverable, the piece that you fully understand and can estimate time and complexity and completion; break it down further if it's a nebulous piece, don't break it down further if you already understand it.
Project managers break those work packages into activities and tasks; these can be verbs. You don't have to do that right away; we do that during scheduling.
Once you have your Work Breakdown Structure, you can look at it and say, "This is everything it will take." Just having that scaffold in front of you will show you something important: big or small, you can do it.
You can do it.
It's not a phantom under your bed, not a giant behemoth you can't conquer; it's a mountain, y
Not if their budget included $400 of free spending and they suddenly became infatuated with tablets which cost $340.
Besides, "Fewer" implies "less labor required," which implies unemployment. Combine that with consumers not having the dollars to spend on new products, and you have no way to create new jobs to use these unemployed--not until we find a way to use less labor to make tablets, unemploying some of those people, in which case now you have the two groups competing for what meager employment remains.
You might think (I did, for about 2.7 seconds; apparently it took that long to copy the data into classical memory) that the more efficient processes mean we can make more things more cheaply, and so we can re-employ more people. That's only sort-of true. If we find a way to use less labor to make electronics and thus unemploy them along with the now-unemployed half-the-people-who-used-to-make-Crocs, we can make *more* electronics by re-employing the same number of people who just lost their tablet-making jobs. That's because we can only pay that many people's wages. At the same time, electronics cost less: if we pay them less, they can still buy as much crap; that, in turn, means we can employ more of them, as long as their wages are lower.
It's sort-of true in the sense that it's true in a specific sort of sense: it's true we can employ more people when productivity increases, if we pay them less in buying-power terms. If we give them a wage that follows inflation--one that follows the total income divided by the total productivity, and multiplies their previous wage by the ratio of that value now to that value before--then we can only employ exactly as many as we unemployed.
The higher price per labor-hour reduces employment. High wages reduce employment. The negative effects of low wages are the reasoning behind minimum wage; and the systems which obsolete the system of minimum wage were not viable until recently. It's time to move on, time to get away from a system that raises labor costs and expands unemployment.
Bulk labor is trying to get $15/hr; machines cost $12. We tax the middle-class worker a third of his paycheck.
What if we resolved the taxes in such a way that we didn't need to raise taxes on anyone (least not by more than, say, 3%, worst case, maybe less), and the $45k worker effectively brought home about $40k? We could stop paying people $60k and start paying them $15k less, and they'd come home with $500/year more. For every 4 employees at that income level, you could hire 5 and still spend the same on wages.
What if we got rid of that OASDI payroll tax, instead covering it with a level income tax? Instead of hiring a $60k worker and paying $3,750 in taxes, you'd just pay the $60k worker. Put that above and those $45k workers are $2,800 cheaper than they'd normally be, closer to an actual $45k, and still taking home the same money at the end of the day.
Those aren't arbitrary numbers. I've done the math a dozen different ways.
Productivity moving forward is a constant; it just has to happen at an unfortunately slow rate.
Every time you increase productivity, you decrease labor time required to do something, and thus create unemployment. That's fine: we stop paying those people--*we*, as in consumers, since the very basic component of price is the cost of all labor (labor price times labor hours makes labor cost), and no economic factor will push prices down below that level--and have more money to spend on new things; thus someone can hire labor to make new things to sell us.
There's a gap, of course. Unemploy someone today, hire them next year. With a complex, dynamic market, this fluctuation is constant: jobs appear even as they're lost, and we sort of stabilize on a certain unemployment rate, moved up and down by the general economic tone. We don't sit at 9% unemployment and then slide back down to 4% because we figured out how to make new products; we do it because the freedom of spending and the consumer movement has changed enough to encourage that slide, or because prices have trended to convergence high and then low in the ranges. Maybe a new product moved into the market, and now people want shiny tablet PCs instead of Croc shoes, and so Crocs have to sell at a 20% margin instead of a 160% margin, taking less profit to stay in business: the unnecessary good is just abandoned in favor of a niche market, and that niche expands, and the unnecessary good must lower its prices to take what's left if it wants to compete. The employees making tablet PCs are new; the employees making Crocs were a small part of its sale price, and have now become a large part, and no employment was changed in that part of the market, and so total unemployment shrinks.
Still, what if people want to pay $60 for Crocs, but they cost $85 to make? Sure, we'd all be more fashionable not wearing ugly, retarded footwear; but those people making said ugly, retarded footwear would cease being employed. A new product could fill the gap then; it'd have to consume less labor time--fewer labor hours to get the price under $60, the threshold of consumer interest.
By the same reasoning, if labor cost half as much, then the cost would be $42, and $60 would represent a profit. Employment stays; or maybe people realize their shiny Galaxy or Surface makes them look intelligent, and their rubber clown shoes make them look stupid, and so they stop buying them. Well, those people lose their jobs, but they only cost half as much to employ: the new product we sell is cheap, and we hire them back more readily.
This model doesn't work when you unemploy 50% of the active labor force at once. Oh, it follows the model; the problem is the outcome is a complete and total economic collapse with decades or even centuries of recovery time.
Spread that productivity increase over time. Don't throw people to the streets so fast, not unless you're growing even faster. Finding ways to slash labor isn't growth; you have to find a market to sell your products to as well, or else you only make small amounts of goods with even smaller amounts of labor while the rest of the population goes jobless with no hope of a bootstrap.
The larger problem is distorted thinking. People are angry, claiming they don't get paid enough, that corporations and rich people have too much, and that we need to "make them pay" somehow--you'll notice no solutions, just vengeance. They ignore real solutions because they don't tickle their genetalia the right way.
The minimum wage push is a big one right now. That was a decent strategy in the 1900s, with good return for its costs; but now it's crap. What we need, today, is *cheap* labor. We need to reduce labor costs, which means new strategies for managing standard-of-living. We can't just hand out high wages and public aid and expect the economy to function; it'll just throw out the laborers in favor of machines, H1-B cheap import labor, and new management structures which cost 30% more in overhead but eliminate 40% of the labor cost--which is significant when labor in total costs 3/4 as much as management.
We need new ways of doing things. We need to cut back on labor pricing. Nobody wants to do that because it doesn't feel good to them if they don't stab the knife into the purse of their corporate overlords; they don't care about a better standard-of-living for themselves, but rather for a worse one for those they've focused their anger upon.
All you need to complete the concoction of stupidity is Bernie Sanders.
That's true; but the point was more toward the extreme views people hold: they know something is bad, so it must be as bad as they can possibly imagine. Rational decisions work best when you hold a realistic world view.
There's having your teeth pulled, and there's having your mouth shit in and then having your teeth pulled without painkiller.