Not faulty. Inflation is a matter of how much money versus how much goods. The short of it is you have 3x as much money, but it buys 5x as much goods, even though those goods bear a price of 1.67x as much.
If that $500 of rice were made with as much labor in 2001, it would cost over $3,000. You couldn't sell it for $200 because you'd pay your agricultural workers over $3,000 to make it, and you'd take more than a $2,800 loss. You're trying to say that the rice was cheaper to produce--less human labor--so there wasn't inflation; but then how do you explain wages increasing? Do you assume that keeping wages the same would arrest inflation?
Your manner of thinking makes inflation and deflation spooky things which can't be identified because they just happen in a mass: prices go up and we don't understand why or how, just that it is what it is. This method of thinking makes it impossible to assess if the cost of a good has actually gone up or down.
Inflation is total income divided by total buying power. Total buying power is equivalent to total productive output. Produce more with the same labor-hours and provide no more pay? Deflation: the same money represents more goods purchased (their prices must come down, but that happens because you invest fewer labor-hours for those goods and thus pay less in wages, thus the cost comes down, thus you can reduce prices as other market factors create downward price pressures). Inflation: The same money represents fewer goods purchased.
Yes, this makes the implication that the price of a good can rise slower than the price of inflation--that a good in 1970 may cost $100, and that same good may cost $130 in 1990, and that the good is *cheaper* and costs *less* in 1990 even though 130 is greater than 100. That is actually how it goes: prices go up, but the price goes down.
Consider the Chevrolet Camaro in 1970, with its sale price of $6,800-$8,400. In 2012 dollars, that's $40,000-$50,000; yet the 2012 Camaro, with its newer technology, its air conditioner, MP3 CD system with 6 speakers, tilt steering wheel, TPMS, limited-slip differential, air bags, electronic stability control, anti-lock brakes, security systems, power seats, and 4-wheel independent suspension, cost $25,000. The more luxury model cost around $28,000; the super-high-end model did hit above $50,000.
This car had a lot more than your 1970 Camaro in it. It had so many things. Every single part in that 1970 car carries a higher price today than it did in 1970; and yet all of these new parts packed into the car command a price that isn't *six* times higher.
Inflation: there's six times as much money. Prices going down through inflation: the stuff doesn't cost six times as much.
Reduce the cost of labor instead of raising minimum wage.
High labor costs accelerate and, more importantly, compact the removal of jobs, while slowing the reuptake of jobs. Jobs always reduce: we've come from every single individual requiring 15-20 labor-hours per week to acquire food (that means a population of 1,000 people needs 20,000 working-hours per week to feed it) to a society where 2% of workers are ag and we expend 27 labor-hours per year producing food (so a population of 1,000 people needs 520 working-hours per week to feed itself). With the spare time, we've been able to build roads, cars, space ships.
The Industrial Revolution shows us an important model: machines suddenly became cheap, and the 479 labor-hours going into making clothes immediately dropped to 96 labor-hours--80% unemployment even 60 years later. What would today be a $4,000 shirt ($8.75/hr * 479) is now a $15 shirt, as we've improved the manufacture processes to use even less labor-time. Back then, that $4,000 shirt became an $800 shirt; most of the consumer base vanished--not for shirts, but for food and everything else--and much of the economy fell apart.
Contrast that to agriculture or car manufacture. In 1970, India was producing 2 tonnes of rice per hectare and selling for $500 per tonne; by 2001, they were making 6 tonnes per hectare at cost so low the sale price had dropped to below $200/tonne--note that inflation would have raised that $500 to over $3,000 in 2001, and so India was investing less than 6% labor per tonne of rice produced in 2001, compared to 1970. That transition occurred spread over 30 years.
During the spread transition, jobs were lost, and rice became cheaper. A few jobs lost--3% in one year is kind of rough, but that's only 3% of the agricultural sector and much less of the whole market--and a whole shitload of consumers (over 99% of the market) facing cheaper food meant they had almost a whole population with more money to spend. Find a way to make a product with little enough labor and you can sell it to those consumers, pay your workers, and come away with captured profits. Looking at the Industrial Revolution, we can conjecture this works less well when only a fifth of your population still has jobs.
What can we take away from this?
Alternate management--geoshifting jobs (H1-B or outsource to India), automation (outsource to machines), or rearrangement (cellular manufacture uses less labor than assembly lines, which are less labor-intensive than guilds and artisans)--transfers your labor needs to another form. That form often takes less or lower-priced (cost) direct labor, but may require more total labor (e.g. the machines are expensive, or QA to try and make standard measures work in 803BC is ridiculously labor-intensive thanks to undeveloped technological capabilities). If it takes more total labor, then you're paying someone more--the machines are expensive, you just hire real people.
By this, reducing the cost of labor at least delays the transition to geoshifting or automation (less outsourcing, fewer machines, for a while).
With the march of technology on a low-cost labor market, early adopters will get screwed. Your strategic adopters will recognize $10/hr labor vs $8/hr machines, but also notice the machines coming down in price: if they invest $25 million in a 30-year machine that will cost $8/hr to maintain now, they'll find themselves less-advantaged as if they wait up to 5 years for a cost range of $6/hr or lower, and so will decide how much risk they're willing to take and will jump into the automation game at that point. You get traditionalists who wait until their business nearly collapses, too.
By this, spiking labor costs *rapidly* moves labor to cheaper sources (including automation and H1-B): a $15/hr laborer versus a $10/hr machine is more encouraging to the entrepreneur considering a mechanized labor force. Lower labor costs *spread* the loss of jobs.
Not only is that a rhetorical and logical fallacy, it's a fucking insult to humanity and worse, to reason.
It demonstrates that scientifically-accepted human ideals are often wrong in spectacular ways. You seem to not understand that this isn't a new argument; people have had the same arguments in the past, with different beliefs, which we now hold as ridiculous and obviously stupid, while some speak up with new arguments we hold as ludicrous--a few of which will one day be the well-accepted scientific truth, while the common positions today are looked upon as ridiculous and obviously stupid.
I provided the definition of the money supply. It would be one thing if you were arguing that it didn't include something it should, or that it does include that which it should not; but instead, you are insisting that it doesn't include that which it explicitly does.
The definition used is ridiculous in the context it's used in, and garbles a scientific pursuit into an unrecognizable mess. There's a reason I use terms like "total income," "wealth," and "buying power," and dispense with terms like "value": the whole concept of "value" is as much a fantasy as the concept of the divine power of Ra, God of Sun, blessing your cropland with the rich gift of fertility. I occasionally provide "valuation" as a term, specifying that an individual, group, or market may hold a flawed ideal of how much buying power a thing translates to; "value" defines what buying power a thing *does* translate to, which is idiotic. Things don't have "value"; they have costs and prices.
It's as if I said, "Pi is the ratio of a circle's circumference to it's radius" and you responded with, "You moron, it's what you get by dividing the circumference by half the diameter! Mathematicians must not know what they're talking about!"
At one time, pi was defined as 22/7. While everyone agreed it was the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, and the value you get when you divide the circumference by the diameter (not half the diameter), we've since refined how to compute pi.
Similarly, your idea that money supply--that money laying fallow in banks, not operating within markets--somehow affects prices in those markets, leading to inflation, without ever being spent, is ridiculous. The idea that the circulation of money in relation to the production of goods determines the buying power of a unit of currency is sound; the idea that any money *not* being spent is "in circulation" is ludicrous. That money seems to have its influence because, necessarily, it is money that *has* been spent and *has* had an impact at one point; but it's since *removed* from circulation, and the new round of spending is discounted by the amount of money which was acquired by a party and then not spent over again by that party.
Yes, I know modern economists believe that sacking your millions into a mattress for 30 years still lets those millions cause inflation; this line of thinking suggests you can show up with several hundred billion dollars and start spending like crazy and *not* cause sudden inflation, since those dollars were in circulation under your bed for the past decades. That's a ridiculous conjecture.
As it stands, you are clearly far too ignorant to realize just how much you don't know.
Mirror, know thyself. You cling to your Holy Writ, which you have read, which you have accepted, and which you have taken to worship. I have read your Holy Writ and I have found it full of inconsistency, unable to account for the real world, and afraid to approach the difficult questions. It is a distraction.
Your entire line of argument has been "other people disagree with you, and they're right." My line of argument has been, "It doesn't work that way in real life; those assertions are ludicrous." I've even given an (extremely) simplified explanation of why; I've even reminded you that th
The definition of the money supply isn't some theory or belief.
It's part of economic theory. Your economists theorize that money not spent is money still reaching an invisible hand into the market to affect prices; I theorize that money not spent is money the market is naive to, and thus does not exist in the market, and cannot exert its pressures on prices.
just canonical economic theory restated and presented as if it were novel
I've got write-ups following Adam Smith's thinking to show where it broke down, such as where he identifies that division of labor increases output, and then simultaneously claims that the value of a thing is its labor costs to produce, the labor costs a consumer would incur to produce it himself, and the level of desire (perceived value) a consumer has for it.
Even Adam Smith comes quite close to some of the things I've said, and then veers off in another direction to reach incorrect conclusions. You think Ricardo, Marx, George, or any of our contemporaries have fared much better? For that matter, how would you imagine they'd fare much worse?
The thing about incorrect theory is it's never a matter of being devoid of understanding; it's a matter of having the pieces in the wrong order, and mixing in a few incorrect pieces. That's why programming, engineering, and management methodologies get sneered at by people who have a lot of experience doing things the wrong way: they know all the things those frameworks tell them; they don't apply all those things in the best manner, and they discount the value of a structured approach. These are people who hammer pieces of wood into the rough shape of a house because they already know how to nail things together and how a house looks (floors, walls, roof), and the whole explanation of doing all that stuff in a specific order is just telling them to do things they already know how to do.
You can't continue to insist that this or that isn't counted in the money supply when it is formally defined to do so!
Child, in the 1800s, negroes were formally defined to not be human beings. They were farm animals to be put to burden, bought and sold. We had formally accepted that the negro brain was not capable of the full intellect of human consciousness and was thus lesser. This is how they were defined.
Those definitions were wrong.
You can't just define reality. You can't just say, "Well, the money supply includes money that the market doesn't see, and the market reacts to money that doesn't interact with it at all." It doesn't. It doesn't matter how many times you get on your knees and pray to your idol statues of John Keynes and Paul Krugman to hold you steady in the darkness with the guiding light of your economics mantra; you pray to false gods, and the world will happily roll straight across your superstitious beliefs of magical money locked in boxes, ignoring what it does not see or touch, and acting as if such things do not exist.
Dollars unspent do not exert the push of their spiritual energy upon markets.
I don't care how many papers you say you have read as you cannot have understood their content.
I understand their content better than the writers of that content. The content of modern economics is incorrect.
Nor can you claim familiarity with the subject when you clearly don't understand even the most basic terminology.
Earth, fire, air, and water are elements, no? How can you say hydrogen, helium, and iron are elements? You clearly don't understand the most basic terminology of chemistry.
Again: their theory is wrong. The real world doesn't work that way.
I know what it says in economics papers. I know what Ph.D. holders and master's theses say. THEY. ARE. WRONG. Factually incorrect.
There was a time when we believed that iron was a mixture of the element Earth with the element Fire. Our loincloth-wearing contemporaries believe money sitting in reserve is factored in by the market, even though the market has no idea that money exists because it isn't getting spent.
Money is loaned into existence. Theoretically, infinite money exists. The government could have printed up an extra $785,000,000 trillion dollars LAST NIGHT and have it sitting in a vault, without telling anyone; by the Federal Reserve's reasoning above, that would cause inflation. In the real world, it won't, because THAT MONEY ISN'T AVAILABLE TO BE SPENT ON GOODS.
There's about $12 trillion of income in the US each year nowadays. If $0.2 trillion of that goes into bank accounts, never to be spent again, the economy will behave in the following years as if $11.8 trillion of income were acquired. That is to say: with our income being $12.1T, $12.7T, $13.4T, and so forth, we'd have an economy where $0.8T more money was PUT INTO CIRCULATION in the second year, but $0.2 was TAKEN OUT OF CIRCULATION by settling itself neatly in someone's mattress or in gold bullion.
All the markets care about is that the money isn't available to buy goods with. There's $1000, but $200 of it sits in bank accounts; they made 10 pounds of goods, and can only sell all of it if they sell it all for a total of $800, because that $200 is NOT coming out to play. This affects the buying power of money: labor and production-per-labor-hour stay the same, money being spent for that productive output changes.
You can wave around papers saying, "Yes, well very smart people are saying this," and the response is, "Well very smart people are frequently wrong. They thought fire was caused by the release of a gas called 'phlogiston' which saturated things like wood; eventually they realized this was stupid."
That shit the Federal Reserve says above? The same thing appearing in classical and contemporary economic papers? The SAME LINE OF THINKING being written RIGHT NOW in some kid's Master's Thesis? It's wrong. It doesn't matter that experts believe it; they're wrong.
My theories do not align completely with contemporary or classical economics. They follow the same general outline--a lot of the thinking is in the right direction--but make observations the field has missed because its mode of thinking is wildly different and cannot cope with reality. The bone has developed wrong, and must be broken and set correctly.
By the by, the people writing Ph.D. thesis are saying the same thing--with different theories at odds with mine, but still with the assertion that last decade's Nobel Prize in Economics winners were bluntly wrong about stuff.
For example, you divide by the money supply, not income. Income isn't a determinant for the value of currency, that's a function of GDP, money supply, and because currency is traded internationally, interest rates.
Actually, wrong.
This "money supply", does it include capital which is only sitting idle in bank accounts? Of course not. The rich have $39.6 trillion just sitting around; were they to attempt spending it all in one year, they would fail. They'd cause mass inflation and severe economic damage, but they'd never manage to purchase enough goods. It cannot be done; the goods aren't there, and the prices would have to ramp up fast enough to offset the money they're spending.
Income is money which is spent. When you buy from a business, that business discounts wages from its income; it gives those wages to workers, who count it as income. As such, the cycle of expenditure is that goods are made, services are provided, and money is spent for those goods and services. Unpurchased goods and services become an expense which increases the cost of goods, requiring those goods's prices to increase to cover the labor expended--for example, by low yield (not all semiconductors are functional) or by overproduction (a business must recover its losses in such sunk costs--we even regulate farms such as to prevent them from overproducing and causing an increase in the price of grain, a strange inversion of supply and demand).
Income includes all interest banks actually collect. It includes all money rendered for automobile service. It includes the ticket price of movies. It includes the price of food sold. It includes all worker's wages, all business profits, all taxes collected.
Income includes every last cent expended for every good and service rendered.
That means income *is* what people paid for goods and services. Even income sent to charity is income rendered for a service; if the charity then stocks that income instead of spending it, that income moves out of the money system, and so the income going forward is reduced by that much: your "money supply" appears to shrink.
This doesn't discount all of those complex factors you included; it factors them all in. It's like saying weight is a matter of calories absorbed by your body versus calories used by your body: this involves what you eat, how the microbes in your body process it, how your digestive system absorbs it, how much your basic metabolic rate changes day to day, how much water you have, how much muscle mass you're gaining, how much physical activity you engage in... none of which matters to the simple, direct fact that the amount of calories your body absorbs minus the amount of calories your body uses controls the change in your weight.
Economists have all these theories about GDP and inflation in order to explain the price of goods. They don't have theories explaining the wealth and capabilities of a society as a result of the per-capital buying-power income. I've provided such theories to economists, and they've told me it's patently ridiculous to think of things in that way because money is what drives economy; several have explained to me that productivity *is* money, and that you measure an increase in productivity by an increase in money. Nonsense like that makes you realize GDP is real GNP, and real GNP is GNP adjusted for inflation, and inflation is money growing faster than GDP, so... all these numbers are made up? (The truth is they measure prices on shelves and compute inflation by a sample of price fluctuation, which fails to account for increases in efficiency).
Part of it is an obsession with measuring and creating formulas. We have all kinds of models like the Drake Equation where we throw in a shitload of unknown and unknowable variables and say you can calculate some value (e.g. the number of inhabited planets in the universe, the extent of damage of a nuclear attack on the global climate, the timing of the stock market) from a bunch
Originally, I speculated that switching from broadcast to unicast would kill the Internet. Broadcast pipes use a single frequency range carrying a single stream of content through repeaters down to all viewers; whereas Internet carries the same content on-demand, again and again. A million users thus becomes the same data repeated a million times in parallel, rather than sent once. You'll notice the same cable carries that data when you're getting Comcast high-speed internet.
What actually happened was it killed the Internet by cost. Netflix et al have caching repeaters in Comcast data centers: the same strategy as broadcast helped avoid all those high peering costs, serving streaming media from the last mile. Unfortunately, it still sends a lot of data down that last mile to the customer, putting demands on their infrastructure--hence DOCSIS 2, DOCSIS 3, DOCSIS 4, raising the amount of data carried down by using 4 and 8 and 16 channel data transmission.
In theory, such mitigations help slow and spread the cost until the market catches up--in this case, by cheaper technology standards (DOCSIS 3 isn't more expensive; it's more efficient, in that providing 8 channels and so much bandwidth costs as much as it cost to supply 1 channel in 1998). In practice, this sadly doesn't always happen: you eventually need to change practice anyway.
That's also an inconvenient issue with my observation of our need to change from a minimum-wage-and-welfare system to a Citizen's Dividend: Minimum wage will eventually push employment costs rapidly above automation costs while slowing the creation of new employment and increasing the cost of living; while public aid increases in tax-dollar costs. A Citizen's Dividend arrests that movement: labor costs (wages) no longer need to increase to ensure a correctly-adjusted minimum standard of living (increases with the wealth of the economy); and so the cost of automation must come down to make labor reduction profitable; and so you have a wide spread between the early adopters, the strategic adopters (keep paying for expensive labor because cheap automation will be even cheaper, and a delay will make us even more money in the end), and the traditionalists; all while keeping labor prices low so labor is a more viable option for jobs in which automation costs more, thus encouraging more employment. Just as with the Netflix strategy, this assumes the improvement is *enough* of an improvement to offset the damage done by the changing economy; if not, then the system collapses anyway.
These things happen. Granted, a collapsing economy worries me more than a change in ISP business model, and the form and factors are much different; but the principle is the same: "Better" doesn't mean "Good enough to survive".
That may be; but nothing in the evidence confirms that. The evidence of it impacting Comcast's business model is more circumstantial than the average in this case, and does make a logical argument; it's just not supported by Comcast's direct acknowledgement that this isn't about bandwidth congestion. The more likely scenario is that consumer behavior models have changed--streaming video, as you say, dramatically changes the usage model--and the factors they planned their service around suddenly don't function that way anymore.
More likely doesn't mean it's a primary or solitary motivator; however, we can speculate that such a situation, such as it is and what there is of it, would preclude continued operation as-is anyway, regardless of other motivators. In that case, if it's shown that Comcast has to make these changes anyway, all other factors hold different relevance: Comcast is changing because they *need* to, and these other factors raise concern due to how they influence Comcast's new approach (will they try to use the forced changes as a predicate to apply other, less-consumer-friendly, less-necessary changes at the same time?).
As an economic theorist--that is, as someone who looked at modern economics and came away horrified that the state-of-the-art is so far out of alignment with any sane theory--it's not simply a matter of "technology needs to grow faster."
People frequently associate labor theory of value with Karl Marx, the Communist party icon; however, labor theories sit heavily in Capitalist-leaning philosophers such as Ricardo (the one responsible for free trade) and Adam Smith (the guy who recognized that the assembly line was more efficient than artisan labor--he believed economic efficiency rested on the division of labor). Still, labor theories of value, like all theories of value, have one goal: to determine the "correct" price of goods and services. In other words: what should things cost on store shelves?
I've been more interested in theories of wealth, and have been developing the Labor Theory of Wealth. I can give you the rough features in brief to help you form the same picture; as with all theories, you may conclude different, either by misunderstanding or by generating new knowledge, and should act accordingly to determine why your conclusions may be different and how to respond.
Theories of Wealth, in basic terms, explain how a society becomes wealthy. I define Wealth as "the productive output per capita", such that a society with 3,000 people making 6,000 tons of grain has more wealth than a society with 6,000 people making 11,000 tons of grain (2 tons per person rather than 1.8).
A society with more productive output per labor-hour can produce more goods per labor-hour. Assuming equivalent employment, that's the same as more per person; obviously, in a dysfunctional economy with high unemployment, there are more people and fewer labor-hours, thus less productive output per person, thus less Wealth. As well, adding more people requires adding more labor-hours at the same efficiency to maintain wealth; thus the only way to add more wealth is to produce more output per labor-hour, rather than to add more laborers (serfs, etc.).
A society with more productive output per labor-hour can support a number of things. Welfare is an obvious one: we can feed the hungry because we can make more food than we need, and some of us aren't making food. The other obvious one is just more goods: A society with more Wealth--more productive output per labor-hour--can focus labor-hours on luxuries like iPhones and Android tablets, or motorcycles and cars.
How does this come back to technology?
Before interchangeable parts, we didn't have the technology to make and follow standardized measures. Quality assurance would have consumed and *enormous* amount of labor; the cost of making non-interchangeable parts and repairing things that break was lower than the cost of making things easily-repaired and cheaply. To employ 10 labor-hours making a firearm rather than 100, you'd have to employ 3,000 hours of QA; thus it's cheaper to just employ more (direct) labor making firearms and avoid the (indirect) labor of QA.
Technological growth is predicated on new knowledge and techniques. "Technology" and "Technique" have the same root, and we can consider technology as the science of the application of improved technique. In order to grow technology, we must find ways to sink less labor cost into that technology; that is in part a matter of lower labor prices (wages)--which requires a lower cost per standard-of-living (if goods are cheaper and you can live as well as you live now on half your wage, we can cut your wage in half; this never works because you'd still end up richer)--but, on the whole, requires finding new methods to reduce the number of labor-hours invested in providing the goods and services in question (creating unemployment).
So technology doesn't "just grow faster"; technology grows as fast as capitalist businesses can figure out how to create huge rounds of layoffs without reducing the service they're supplying, thus removing the cost of labor (wage
They're distributed normals meant to be efficient, in the same way as virtual memory management, or the sizing of a municipal water system.
The water system in your city is sized such that it can supply the average use rate multiplied across all users. Some homes will use 1200gal/month; others will use 4800gal/month. You don't have usage caps on your water usage; the average home uses 2500gal/month and the system is sized to handle 2800gal/month.
They could size the system for 6,000gal/month and charge you $400/month for water. You probably pay around $150/month right now.
It's irritating that people can't understand this. Look at the article and the summary: Comcast says the new caps aren't about congestion management, and so people immediately conclude it's about "extracting more money". Nobody can imagine it's about cost management--that a more "Fair and equitable experience" could mean that some guy doing 24x7 max-rate streaming of 8 HD videos while torrenting all the pornography on the Internet might just make the difference between Comcast changing $50/month and Comcast charging $80/month for service.
On some level, this is about the bandwidth 0.1% taking all the resources, and other people paying for their usage.
Which writings am I to look upon, then? I'd quite like to have modern economists--people with Ph.D.s and master's degrees--stop telling me these things I say about labor and production are bat-shit crazy and completely contrary to "real economics".
Can you show documentation where the purchasing power of a unit of currency continuously approaches the total productive output (which is equivalent to the total buying power) over a period divided by the total income (in currency) over that period? That's where inflation and deflation come from: if money increases proportionally more than production, then you're paying more per unit good produced, thus inflation. It's not the other way around: inflation is not prices increasing, because prices can increase as goods become cheaper or don't become cheaper, and thus the increase in price may only reflect a fraction (a large fraction, typically) of inflation. That is to say: if it costs half as much to make something, but there's 3 times as much income relative to total production, that thing costs 1.5 times as much--but you have 200% inflation, not 50% inflation.
How about theories which show that cost of labor needs to be kept low, and that income inequality is not harmful when kept within bounds (and is beneficial depending on the overall wealth of a nation)?
There are a lot of things I have never seen and which economists keep telling me are not aligned with any theory modern or past.
Which is strange, since he invented something with no economic value.
BitCoin is only useful for trading to other currency--it's a currency at best--and thus for speculation. BitCoin has spawned speculation and BitCoin production, two operations which consume labor to produce nothing but the ability to transfer money from others to yourself. That's equivalent to a Government jobs bill which mandates you get taxpayer money for digging holes and filling them in again: you could get paid to stay home and do nothing and we'd have the same result (nothing useful produced).
It's not a great amount of labor, fortunately. A tiny, tiny fraction of available labor has sunk into waste production--essentially the building of trash nobody is going to use. It's still just waste, economically.
Economics is strange. Classical economic theory--what we operate on now--is all about determining "value", which has about a dozen different definitions all used interchangeably (making the entire theory of economics one enormous fallacy of equivocation). Basically, they try to determine the "correct" price of goods and services. Meanwhile I've rewritten macroeconomics from scratch based on "wealth theory", which has lead to a lot of understanding of how nations become wealthy, how this impacts day-to-day standard of living, where welfare systems come from, how income inequality happens, what advantages income inequality provides (progressive tax systems!), cost of labor considerations, and so forth.
This leads to interesting conclusions: expense of labor in non-productive ways is actively harmful, yet the effects of welfare are complex and useful--and the current optimal system really is just sending people money for nothing, without consuming their labor time for no economic benefit. (Of course, this is *extremely* unstable if not financed in such a way as to align with the well-understood basic economic behaviors discovered through wealth theories of economics; and it's only become the better system recently, since our current system will eventually collapse the economy in ways even modern economists recognize openly.)
Let's say there's a country with no proper land registry... How do you transfer, demarcate or make original claims for a piece of land?
You don't.
Without a central administration, there is no claim to land. The land isn't yours to sell, or yours to buy, or yours to own. No executive power can determine ownership, and so the enforcement of police and military does not protect your claim to land.
In such a situation, a decentralized cryptographic trust chain is as valid as a handshake over beer.
Imagine if they actually sold their capacity. Instead of everyone buying a 100Mbit/s plan on a median usage of, say, 10Mbit/s hour-to-hour average with occasional 25Mbit 5-minute peaks and 40GB usage, and the major users consuming 80Mbit/s hour-to-hour average with frequent 100Mbit/s peaks and 300GB usage, they could spec the network sized to assume everyone who buys the 30Mbit/s plan is using 30Mbit, and must cover the infrastructure and peering costs of 30Mbit, and so must pay in full.
You pay $70/month because most people pay $70/month and use less than median; you use what costs about $180/month, but there's like a dozen people using what costs $30/month to offset it, so you're well covered. As a trade-off, those people who only use what costs $30/month get ultra-high-speed downloads when they do use it.
We could charge $300/month for the $50 tier Internet or sell everyone $50 Internet with 1.5Mbit/s ADSL speeds. This happened with water utilities a few years ago when a company in Iowa or Illinoise (I forget where) bought the water utility from the city (this has become common practice lately) and reduced the minimum usage to restructure pricing. The result was single individuals using damn near nothing got a $20 drop in their bill, while families coming just under usage saw $300 hikes in their water bills. Everyone freaked out because poor people weren't paying for slightly-less-poor people's water anymore.
Actually, no. This kind of corporate policy isn't the kind of thing your front-line support *should* address. It's getting into regulatory issues, public relations, and on-going legal action. If your employees start talking about it, they represent the company position; if they're wrong, then your business is on record promising something it can't deliver, or stating something with legal implications.
I get market research and reporter calls all the time. People just dial random extensions or look up names of people working for a company and call the switchboard. Standard procedure is to direct them up the management chain, rather than hold a conversation with the press or Federal investigators.
Those liquid resins are harmless unless they're used in 3D printing, hence the headline. Also, non-liquid-resin 3D printing will cause birth defects in pregnant women.
If you're using the taylor series so much, why not memorize it? To multiply on an abacus, you memorize the multiplication table and do rapid addition; addition and subtraction use a memorized set of complements on 5 {(1,4),(2,3)} and 10 {(1,9),(2,8),(3,7),(4,6)}. That's why learning soroban math results in the ability to perform rapid mental computation without tools: the soroban itself eventually becomes obsolete because you can do it in your head faster.
Someone was trying to multiply 3 x 2 and got 5.5. Why would you do this on a slide rule? For that matter, why would you multiply 37.283 x 14.97 x sqrt(137) by slide rule when abacus or the derived mental mathematics perform such computations more quickly and to greater precision?
Doesn't seem to be happening. The 70s are often cited as the US starting point for influx of Chinese goods, but some sources claim it all started earlier; yet unemployment seems to not care, and simply cycle.
Rose-tinted glasses for the past; bleak, muddy shades for the present?
Slide rules are good for major, fast calculations; but the older tool, the abacus, is superior. Once you've learned it, you start computing simple arithmetic rapidly in your head as reflex.
The abacus is a digital device of infinite precision (you can make longer ones, or stick them side by side); the slide rule is an analog circuit.
Slashdot Mirror
Not faulty. Inflation is a matter of how much money versus how much goods. The short of it is you have 3x as much money, but it buys 5x as much goods, even though those goods bear a price of 1.67x as much.
If that $500 of rice were made with as much labor in 2001, it would cost over $3,000. You couldn't sell it for $200 because you'd pay your agricultural workers over $3,000 to make it, and you'd take more than a $2,800 loss. You're trying to say that the rice was cheaper to produce--less human labor--so there wasn't inflation; but then how do you explain wages increasing? Do you assume that keeping wages the same would arrest inflation?
Your manner of thinking makes inflation and deflation spooky things which can't be identified because they just happen in a mass: prices go up and we don't understand why or how, just that it is what it is. This method of thinking makes it impossible to assess if the cost of a good has actually gone up or down.
Inflation is total income divided by total buying power. Total buying power is equivalent to total productive output. Produce more with the same labor-hours and provide no more pay? Deflation: the same money represents more goods purchased (their prices must come down, but that happens because you invest fewer labor-hours for those goods and thus pay less in wages, thus the cost comes down, thus you can reduce prices as other market factors create downward price pressures). Inflation: The same money represents fewer goods purchased.
Yes, this makes the implication that the price of a good can rise slower than the price of inflation--that a good in 1970 may cost $100, and that same good may cost $130 in 1990, and that the good is *cheaper* and costs *less* in 1990 even though 130 is greater than 100. That is actually how it goes: prices go up, but the price goes down.
Consider the Chevrolet Camaro in 1970, with its sale price of $6,800-$8,400. In 2012 dollars, that's $40,000-$50,000; yet the 2012 Camaro, with its newer technology, its air conditioner, MP3 CD system with 6 speakers, tilt steering wheel, TPMS, limited-slip differential, air bags, electronic stability control, anti-lock brakes, security systems, power seats, and 4-wheel independent suspension, cost $25,000. The more luxury model cost around $28,000; the super-high-end model did hit above $50,000.
This car had a lot more than your 1970 Camaro in it. It had so many things. Every single part in that 1970 car carries a higher price today than it did in 1970; and yet all of these new parts packed into the car command a price that isn't *six* times higher.
Inflation: there's six times as much money. Prices going down through inflation: the stuff doesn't cost six times as much.
Reduce the cost of labor instead of raising minimum wage.
High labor costs accelerate and, more importantly, compact the removal of jobs, while slowing the reuptake of jobs. Jobs always reduce: we've come from every single individual requiring 15-20 labor-hours per week to acquire food (that means a population of 1,000 people needs 20,000 working-hours per week to feed it) to a society where 2% of workers are ag and we expend 27 labor-hours per year producing food (so a population of 1,000 people needs 520 working-hours per week to feed itself). With the spare time, we've been able to build roads, cars, space ships.
The Industrial Revolution shows us an important model: machines suddenly became cheap, and the 479 labor-hours going into making clothes immediately dropped to 96 labor-hours--80% unemployment even 60 years later. What would today be a $4,000 shirt ($8.75/hr * 479) is now a $15 shirt, as we've improved the manufacture processes to use even less labor-time. Back then, that $4,000 shirt became an $800 shirt; most of the consumer base vanished--not for shirts, but for food and everything else--and much of the economy fell apart.
Contrast that to agriculture or car manufacture. In 1970, India was producing 2 tonnes of rice per hectare and selling for $500 per tonne; by 2001, they were making 6 tonnes per hectare at cost so low the sale price had dropped to below $200/tonne--note that inflation would have raised that $500 to over $3,000 in 2001, and so India was investing less than 6% labor per tonne of rice produced in 2001, compared to 1970. That transition occurred spread over 30 years.
During the spread transition, jobs were lost, and rice became cheaper. A few jobs lost--3% in one year is kind of rough, but that's only 3% of the agricultural sector and much less of the whole market--and a whole shitload of consumers (over 99% of the market) facing cheaper food meant they had almost a whole population with more money to spend. Find a way to make a product with little enough labor and you can sell it to those consumers, pay your workers, and come away with captured profits. Looking at the Industrial Revolution, we can conjecture this works less well when only a fifth of your population still has jobs.
What can we take away from this?
Alternate management--geoshifting jobs (H1-B or outsource to India), automation (outsource to machines), or rearrangement (cellular manufacture uses less labor than assembly lines, which are less labor-intensive than guilds and artisans)--transfers your labor needs to another form. That form often takes less or lower-priced (cost) direct labor, but may require more total labor (e.g. the machines are expensive, or QA to try and make standard measures work in 803BC is ridiculously labor-intensive thanks to undeveloped technological capabilities). If it takes more total labor, then you're paying someone more--the machines are expensive, you just hire real people.
By this, reducing the cost of labor at least delays the transition to geoshifting or automation (less outsourcing, fewer machines, for a while).
With the march of technology on a low-cost labor market, early adopters will get screwed. Your strategic adopters will recognize $10/hr labor vs $8/hr machines, but also notice the machines coming down in price: if they invest $25 million in a 30-year machine that will cost $8/hr to maintain now, they'll find themselves less-advantaged as if they wait up to 5 years for a cost range of $6/hr or lower, and so will decide how much risk they're willing to take and will jump into the automation game at that point. You get traditionalists who wait until their business nearly collapses, too.
By this, spiking labor costs *rapidly* moves labor to cheaper sources (including automation and H1-B): a $15/hr laborer versus a $10/hr machine is more encouraging to the entrepreneur considering a mechanized labor force. Lower labor costs *spread* the loss of jobs.
Lower labor costs translate, eventually, into
Not only is that a rhetorical and logical fallacy, it's a fucking insult to humanity and worse, to reason.
It demonstrates that scientifically-accepted human ideals are often wrong in spectacular ways. You seem to not understand that this isn't a new argument; people have had the same arguments in the past, with different beliefs, which we now hold as ridiculous and obviously stupid, while some speak up with new arguments we hold as ludicrous--a few of which will one day be the well-accepted scientific truth, while the common positions today are looked upon as ridiculous and obviously stupid.
I provided the definition of the money supply. It would be one thing if you were arguing that it didn't include something it should, or that it does include that which it should not; but instead, you are insisting that it doesn't include that which it explicitly does.
The definition used is ridiculous in the context it's used in, and garbles a scientific pursuit into an unrecognizable mess. There's a reason I use terms like "total income," "wealth," and "buying power," and dispense with terms like "value": the whole concept of "value" is as much a fantasy as the concept of the divine power of Ra, God of Sun, blessing your cropland with the rich gift of fertility. I occasionally provide "valuation" as a term, specifying that an individual, group, or market may hold a flawed ideal of how much buying power a thing translates to; "value" defines what buying power a thing *does* translate to, which is idiotic. Things don't have "value"; they have costs and prices.
It's as if I said, "Pi is the ratio of a circle's circumference to it's radius" and you responded with, "You moron, it's what you get by dividing the circumference by half the diameter! Mathematicians must not know what they're talking about!"
At one time, pi was defined as 22/7. While everyone agreed it was the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, and the value you get when you divide the circumference by the diameter (not half the diameter), we've since refined how to compute pi.
Similarly, your idea that money supply--that money laying fallow in banks, not operating within markets--somehow affects prices in those markets, leading to inflation, without ever being spent, is ridiculous. The idea that the circulation of money in relation to the production of goods determines the buying power of a unit of currency is sound; the idea that any money *not* being spent is "in circulation" is ludicrous. That money seems to have its influence because, necessarily, it is money that *has* been spent and *has* had an impact at one point; but it's since *removed* from circulation, and the new round of spending is discounted by the amount of money which was acquired by a party and then not spent over again by that party.
Yes, I know modern economists believe that sacking your millions into a mattress for 30 years still lets those millions cause inflation; this line of thinking suggests you can show up with several hundred billion dollars and start spending like crazy and *not* cause sudden inflation, since those dollars were in circulation under your bed for the past decades. That's a ridiculous conjecture.
As it stands, you are clearly far too ignorant to realize just how much you don't know.
Mirror, know thyself. You cling to your Holy Writ, which you have read, which you have accepted, and which you have taken to worship. I have read your Holy Writ and I have found it full of inconsistency, unable to account for the real world, and afraid to approach the difficult questions. It is a distraction.
Your entire line of argument has been "other people disagree with you, and they're right." My line of argument has been, "It doesn't work that way in real life; those assertions are ludicrous." I've even given an (extremely) simplified explanation of why; I've even reminded you that th
The definition of the money supply isn't some theory or belief.
It's part of economic theory. Your economists theorize that money not spent is money still reaching an invisible hand into the market to affect prices; I theorize that money not spent is money the market is naive to, and thus does not exist in the market, and cannot exert its pressures on prices.
just canonical economic theory restated and presented as if it were novel
I've got write-ups following Adam Smith's thinking to show where it broke down, such as where he identifies that division of labor increases output, and then simultaneously claims that the value of a thing is its labor costs to produce, the labor costs a consumer would incur to produce it himself, and the level of desire (perceived value) a consumer has for it.
Even Adam Smith comes quite close to some of the things I've said, and then veers off in another direction to reach incorrect conclusions. You think Ricardo, Marx, George, or any of our contemporaries have fared much better? For that matter, how would you imagine they'd fare much worse?
The thing about incorrect theory is it's never a matter of being devoid of understanding; it's a matter of having the pieces in the wrong order, and mixing in a few incorrect pieces. That's why programming, engineering, and management methodologies get sneered at by people who have a lot of experience doing things the wrong way: they know all the things those frameworks tell them; they don't apply all those things in the best manner, and they discount the value of a structured approach. These are people who hammer pieces of wood into the rough shape of a house because they already know how to nail things together and how a house looks (floors, walls, roof), and the whole explanation of doing all that stuff in a specific order is just telling them to do things they already know how to do.
You can't continue to insist that this or that isn't counted in the money supply when it is formally defined to do so!
Child, in the 1800s, negroes were formally defined to not be human beings. They were farm animals to be put to burden, bought and sold. We had formally accepted that the negro brain was not capable of the full intellect of human consciousness and was thus lesser. This is how they were defined.
Those definitions were wrong.
You can't just define reality. You can't just say, "Well, the money supply includes money that the market doesn't see, and the market reacts to money that doesn't interact with it at all." It doesn't. It doesn't matter how many times you get on your knees and pray to your idol statues of John Keynes and Paul Krugman to hold you steady in the darkness with the guiding light of your economics mantra; you pray to false gods, and the world will happily roll straight across your superstitious beliefs of magical money locked in boxes, ignoring what it does not see or touch, and acting as if such things do not exist.
Dollars unspent do not exert the push of their spiritual energy upon markets.
I don't care how many papers you say you have read as you cannot have understood their content.
I understand their content better than the writers of that content. The content of modern economics is incorrect.
Nor can you claim familiarity with the subject when you clearly don't understand even the most basic terminology.
Earth, fire, air, and water are elements, no? How can you say hydrogen, helium, and iron are elements? You clearly don't understand the most basic terminology of chemistry.
Again: their theory is wrong. The real world doesn't work that way.
I know what it says in economics papers. I know what Ph.D. holders and master's theses say. THEY. ARE. WRONG. Factually incorrect.
There was a time when we believed that iron was a mixture of the element Earth with the element Fire. Our loincloth-wearing contemporaries believe money sitting in reserve is factored in by the market, even though the market has no idea that money exists because it isn't getting spent.
Money is loaned into existence. Theoretically, infinite money exists. The government could have printed up an extra $785,000,000 trillion dollars LAST NIGHT and have it sitting in a vault, without telling anyone; by the Federal Reserve's reasoning above, that would cause inflation. In the real world, it won't, because THAT MONEY ISN'T AVAILABLE TO BE SPENT ON GOODS.
There's about $12 trillion of income in the US each year nowadays. If $0.2 trillion of that goes into bank accounts, never to be spent again, the economy will behave in the following years as if $11.8 trillion of income were acquired. That is to say: with our income being $12.1T, $12.7T, $13.4T, and so forth, we'd have an economy where $0.8T more money was PUT INTO CIRCULATION in the second year, but $0.2 was TAKEN OUT OF CIRCULATION by settling itself neatly in someone's mattress or in gold bullion.
All the markets care about is that the money isn't available to buy goods with. There's $1000, but $200 of it sits in bank accounts; they made 10 pounds of goods, and can only sell all of it if they sell it all for a total of $800, because that $200 is NOT coming out to play. This affects the buying power of money: labor and production-per-labor-hour stay the same, money being spent for that productive output changes.
You can wave around papers saying, "Yes, well very smart people are saying this," and the response is, "Well very smart people are frequently wrong. They thought fire was caused by the release of a gas called 'phlogiston' which saturated things like wood; eventually they realized this was stupid."
That shit the Federal Reserve says above? The same thing appearing in classical and contemporary economic papers? The SAME LINE OF THINKING being written RIGHT NOW in some kid's Master's Thesis? It's wrong. It doesn't matter that experts believe it; they're wrong.
My theories do not align completely with contemporary or classical economics. They follow the same general outline--a lot of the thinking is in the right direction--but make observations the field has missed because its mode of thinking is wildly different and cannot cope with reality. The bone has developed wrong, and must be broken and set correctly.
By the by, the people writing Ph.D. thesis are saying the same thing--with different theories at odds with mine, but still with the assertion that last decade's Nobel Prize in Economics winners were bluntly wrong about stuff.
I don't until I've used over 6000 gallons.
For example, you divide by the money supply, not income. Income isn't a determinant for the value of currency, that's a function of GDP, money supply, and because currency is traded internationally, interest rates.
Actually, wrong.
This "money supply", does it include capital which is only sitting idle in bank accounts? Of course not. The rich have $39.6 trillion just sitting around; were they to attempt spending it all in one year, they would fail. They'd cause mass inflation and severe economic damage, but they'd never manage to purchase enough goods. It cannot be done; the goods aren't there, and the prices would have to ramp up fast enough to offset the money they're spending.
Income is money which is spent. When you buy from a business, that business discounts wages from its income; it gives those wages to workers, who count it as income. As such, the cycle of expenditure is that goods are made, services are provided, and money is spent for those goods and services. Unpurchased goods and services become an expense which increases the cost of goods, requiring those goods's prices to increase to cover the labor expended--for example, by low yield (not all semiconductors are functional) or by overproduction (a business must recover its losses in such sunk costs--we even regulate farms such as to prevent them from overproducing and causing an increase in the price of grain, a strange inversion of supply and demand).
Income includes all interest banks actually collect. It includes all money rendered for automobile service. It includes the ticket price of movies. It includes the price of food sold. It includes all worker's wages, all business profits, all taxes collected.
Income includes every last cent expended for every good and service rendered.
That means income *is* what people paid for goods and services. Even income sent to charity is income rendered for a service; if the charity then stocks that income instead of spending it, that income moves out of the money system, and so the income going forward is reduced by that much: your "money supply" appears to shrink.
This doesn't discount all of those complex factors you included; it factors them all in. It's like saying weight is a matter of calories absorbed by your body versus calories used by your body: this involves what you eat, how the microbes in your body process it, how your digestive system absorbs it, how much your basic metabolic rate changes day to day, how much water you have, how much muscle mass you're gaining, how much physical activity you engage in... none of which matters to the simple, direct fact that the amount of calories your body absorbs minus the amount of calories your body uses controls the change in your weight.
Economists have all these theories about GDP and inflation in order to explain the price of goods. They don't have theories explaining the wealth and capabilities of a society as a result of the per-capital buying-power income. I've provided such theories to economists, and they've told me it's patently ridiculous to think of things in that way because money is what drives economy; several have explained to me that productivity *is* money, and that you measure an increase in productivity by an increase in money. Nonsense like that makes you realize GDP is real GNP, and real GNP is GNP adjusted for inflation, and inflation is money growing faster than GDP, so... all these numbers are made up? (The truth is they measure prices on shelves and compute inflation by a sample of price fluctuation, which fails to account for increases in efficiency).
Part of it is an obsession with measuring and creating formulas. We have all kinds of models like the Drake Equation where we throw in a shitload of unknown and unknowable variables and say you can calculate some value (e.g. the number of inhabited planets in the universe, the extent of damage of a nuclear attack on the global climate, the timing of the stock market) from a bunch
Yeah, that can happen.
Originally, I speculated that switching from broadcast to unicast would kill the Internet. Broadcast pipes use a single frequency range carrying a single stream of content through repeaters down to all viewers; whereas Internet carries the same content on-demand, again and again. A million users thus becomes the same data repeated a million times in parallel, rather than sent once. You'll notice the same cable carries that data when you're getting Comcast high-speed internet.
What actually happened was it killed the Internet by cost. Netflix et al have caching repeaters in Comcast data centers: the same strategy as broadcast helped avoid all those high peering costs, serving streaming media from the last mile. Unfortunately, it still sends a lot of data down that last mile to the customer, putting demands on their infrastructure--hence DOCSIS 2, DOCSIS 3, DOCSIS 4, raising the amount of data carried down by using 4 and 8 and 16 channel data transmission.
In theory, such mitigations help slow and spread the cost until the market catches up--in this case, by cheaper technology standards (DOCSIS 3 isn't more expensive; it's more efficient, in that providing 8 channels and so much bandwidth costs as much as it cost to supply 1 channel in 1998). In practice, this sadly doesn't always happen: you eventually need to change practice anyway.
That's also an inconvenient issue with my observation of our need to change from a minimum-wage-and-welfare system to a Citizen's Dividend: Minimum wage will eventually push employment costs rapidly above automation costs while slowing the creation of new employment and increasing the cost of living; while public aid increases in tax-dollar costs. A Citizen's Dividend arrests that movement: labor costs (wages) no longer need to increase to ensure a correctly-adjusted minimum standard of living (increases with the wealth of the economy); and so the cost of automation must come down to make labor reduction profitable; and so you have a wide spread between the early adopters, the strategic adopters (keep paying for expensive labor because cheap automation will be even cheaper, and a delay will make us even more money in the end), and the traditionalists; all while keeping labor prices low so labor is a more viable option for jobs in which automation costs more, thus encouraging more employment. Just as with the Netflix strategy, this assumes the improvement is *enough* of an improvement to offset the damage done by the changing economy; if not, then the system collapses anyway.
These things happen. Granted, a collapsing economy worries me more than a change in ISP business model, and the form and factors are much different; but the principle is the same: "Better" doesn't mean "Good enough to survive".
That may be; but nothing in the evidence confirms that. The evidence of it impacting Comcast's business model is more circumstantial than the average in this case, and does make a logical argument; it's just not supported by Comcast's direct acknowledgement that this isn't about bandwidth congestion. The more likely scenario is that consumer behavior models have changed--streaming video, as you say, dramatically changes the usage model--and the factors they planned their service around suddenly don't function that way anymore.
More likely doesn't mean it's a primary or solitary motivator; however, we can speculate that such a situation, such as it is and what there is of it, would preclude continued operation as-is anyway, regardless of other motivators. In that case, if it's shown that Comcast has to make these changes anyway, all other factors hold different relevance: Comcast is changing because they *need* to, and these other factors raise concern due to how they influence Comcast's new approach (will they try to use the forced changes as a predicate to apply other, less-consumer-friendly, less-necessary changes at the same time?).
Shit like that happens, yeah. Baseline capacity changes; if you build a new housing development, you get brown-outs.
As an economic theorist--that is, as someone who looked at modern economics and came away horrified that the state-of-the-art is so far out of alignment with any sane theory--it's not simply a matter of "technology needs to grow faster."
People frequently associate labor theory of value with Karl Marx, the Communist party icon; however, labor theories sit heavily in Capitalist-leaning philosophers such as Ricardo (the one responsible for free trade) and Adam Smith (the guy who recognized that the assembly line was more efficient than artisan labor--he believed economic efficiency rested on the division of labor). Still, labor theories of value, like all theories of value, have one goal: to determine the "correct" price of goods and services. In other words: what should things cost on store shelves?
I've been more interested in theories of wealth, and have been developing the Labor Theory of Wealth. I can give you the rough features in brief to help you form the same picture; as with all theories, you may conclude different, either by misunderstanding or by generating new knowledge, and should act accordingly to determine why your conclusions may be different and how to respond.
Theories of Wealth, in basic terms, explain how a society becomes wealthy. I define Wealth as "the productive output per capita", such that a society with 3,000 people making 6,000 tons of grain has more wealth than a society with 6,000 people making 11,000 tons of grain (2 tons per person rather than 1.8).
A society with more productive output per labor-hour can produce more goods per labor-hour. Assuming equivalent employment, that's the same as more per person; obviously, in a dysfunctional economy with high unemployment, there are more people and fewer labor-hours, thus less productive output per person, thus less Wealth. As well, adding more people requires adding more labor-hours at the same efficiency to maintain wealth; thus the only way to add more wealth is to produce more output per labor-hour, rather than to add more laborers (serfs, etc.).
A society with more productive output per labor-hour can support a number of things. Welfare is an obvious one: we can feed the hungry because we can make more food than we need, and some of us aren't making food. The other obvious one is just more goods: A society with more Wealth--more productive output per labor-hour--can focus labor-hours on luxuries like iPhones and Android tablets, or motorcycles and cars.
How does this come back to technology?
Before interchangeable parts, we didn't have the technology to make and follow standardized measures. Quality assurance would have consumed and *enormous* amount of labor; the cost of making non-interchangeable parts and repairing things that break was lower than the cost of making things easily-repaired and cheaply. To employ 10 labor-hours making a firearm rather than 100, you'd have to employ 3,000 hours of QA; thus it's cheaper to just employ more (direct) labor making firearms and avoid the (indirect) labor of QA.
Technological growth is predicated on new knowledge and techniques. "Technology" and "Technique" have the same root, and we can consider technology as the science of the application of improved technique. In order to grow technology, we must find ways to sink less labor cost into that technology; that is in part a matter of lower labor prices (wages)--which requires a lower cost per standard-of-living (if goods are cheaper and you can live as well as you live now on half your wage, we can cut your wage in half; this never works because you'd still end up richer)--but, on the whole, requires finding new methods to reduce the number of labor-hours invested in providing the goods and services in question (creating unemployment).
So technology doesn't "just grow faster"; technology grows as fast as capitalist businesses can figure out how to create huge rounds of layoffs without reducing the service they're supplying, thus removing the cost of labor (wage
They're distributed normals meant to be efficient, in the same way as virtual memory management, or the sizing of a municipal water system.
The water system in your city is sized such that it can supply the average use rate multiplied across all users. Some homes will use 1200gal/month; others will use 4800gal/month. You don't have usage caps on your water usage; the average home uses 2500gal/month and the system is sized to handle 2800gal/month.
They could size the system for 6,000gal/month and charge you $400/month for water. You probably pay around $150/month right now.
It's irritating that people can't understand this. Look at the article and the summary: Comcast says the new caps aren't about congestion management, and so people immediately conclude it's about "extracting more money". Nobody can imagine it's about cost management--that a more "Fair and equitable experience" could mean that some guy doing 24x7 max-rate streaming of 8 HD videos while torrenting all the pornography on the Internet might just make the difference between Comcast changing $50/month and Comcast charging $80/month for service.
On some level, this is about the bandwidth 0.1% taking all the resources, and other people paying for their usage.
Which writings am I to look upon, then? I'd quite like to have modern economists--people with Ph.D.s and master's degrees--stop telling me these things I say about labor and production are bat-shit crazy and completely contrary to "real economics".
Can you show documentation where the purchasing power of a unit of currency continuously approaches the total productive output (which is equivalent to the total buying power) over a period divided by the total income (in currency) over that period? That's where inflation and deflation come from: if money increases proportionally more than production, then you're paying more per unit good produced, thus inflation. It's not the other way around: inflation is not prices increasing, because prices can increase as goods become cheaper or don't become cheaper, and thus the increase in price may only reflect a fraction (a large fraction, typically) of inflation. That is to say: if it costs half as much to make something, but there's 3 times as much income relative to total production, that thing costs 1.5 times as much--but you have 200% inflation, not 50% inflation.
How about theories which show that cost of labor needs to be kept low, and that income inequality is not harmful when kept within bounds (and is beneficial depending on the overall wealth of a nation)?
There are a lot of things I have never seen and which economists keep telling me are not aligned with any theory modern or past.
Which is strange, since he invented something with no economic value.
BitCoin is only useful for trading to other currency--it's a currency at best--and thus for speculation. BitCoin has spawned speculation and BitCoin production, two operations which consume labor to produce nothing but the ability to transfer money from others to yourself. That's equivalent to a Government jobs bill which mandates you get taxpayer money for digging holes and filling them in again: you could get paid to stay home and do nothing and we'd have the same result (nothing useful produced).
It's not a great amount of labor, fortunately. A tiny, tiny fraction of available labor has sunk into waste production--essentially the building of trash nobody is going to use. It's still just waste, economically.
Economics is strange. Classical economic theory--what we operate on now--is all about determining "value", which has about a dozen different definitions all used interchangeably (making the entire theory of economics one enormous fallacy of equivocation). Basically, they try to determine the "correct" price of goods and services. Meanwhile I've rewritten macroeconomics from scratch based on "wealth theory", which has lead to a lot of understanding of how nations become wealthy, how this impacts day-to-day standard of living, where welfare systems come from, how income inequality happens, what advantages income inequality provides (progressive tax systems!), cost of labor considerations, and so forth.
This leads to interesting conclusions: expense of labor in non-productive ways is actively harmful, yet the effects of welfare are complex and useful--and the current optimal system really is just sending people money for nothing, without consuming their labor time for no economic benefit. (Of course, this is *extremely* unstable if not financed in such a way as to align with the well-understood basic economic behaviors discovered through wealth theories of economics; and it's only become the better system recently, since our current system will eventually collapse the economy in ways even modern economists recognize openly.)
He's probably an anarchist and thinks you can have a society without government.
Let's say there's a country with no proper land registry... How do you transfer, demarcate or make original claims for a piece of land?
You don't.
Without a central administration, there is no claim to land. The land isn't yours to sell, or yours to buy, or yours to own. No executive power can determine ownership, and so the enforcement of police and military does not protect your claim to land.
In such a situation, a decentralized cryptographic trust chain is as valid as a handshake over beer.
"3D Printed Objects", obviously. Did you not read the headline?
Imagine if they actually sold their capacity. Instead of everyone buying a 100Mbit/s plan on a median usage of, say, 10Mbit/s hour-to-hour average with occasional 25Mbit 5-minute peaks and 40GB usage, and the major users consuming 80Mbit/s hour-to-hour average with frequent 100Mbit/s peaks and 300GB usage, they could spec the network sized to assume everyone who buys the 30Mbit/s plan is using 30Mbit, and must cover the infrastructure and peering costs of 30Mbit, and so must pay in full.
You pay $70/month because most people pay $70/month and use less than median; you use what costs about $180/month, but there's like a dozen people using what costs $30/month to offset it, so you're well covered. As a trade-off, those people who only use what costs $30/month get ultra-high-speed downloads when they do use it.
We could charge $300/month for the $50 tier Internet or sell everyone $50 Internet with 1.5Mbit/s ADSL speeds. This happened with water utilities a few years ago when a company in Iowa or Illinoise (I forget where) bought the water utility from the city (this has become common practice lately) and reduced the minimum usage to restructure pricing. The result was single individuals using damn near nothing got a $20 drop in their bill, while families coming just under usage saw $300 hikes in their water bills. Everyone freaked out because poor people weren't paying for slightly-less-poor people's water anymore.
Actually, no. This kind of corporate policy isn't the kind of thing your front-line support *should* address. It's getting into regulatory issues, public relations, and on-going legal action. If your employees start talking about it, they represent the company position; if they're wrong, then your business is on record promising something it can't deliver, or stating something with legal implications.
I get market research and reporter calls all the time. People just dial random extensions or look up names of people working for a company and call the switchboard. Standard procedure is to direct them up the management chain, rather than hold a conversation with the press or Federal investigators.
Those liquid resins are harmless unless they're used in 3D printing, hence the headline. Also, non-liquid-resin 3D printing will cause birth defects in pregnant women.
If you're using the taylor series so much, why not memorize it? To multiply on an abacus, you memorize the multiplication table and do rapid addition; addition and subtraction use a memorized set of complements on 5 {(1,4),(2,3)} and 10 {(1,9),(2,8),(3,7),(4,6)}. That's why learning soroban math results in the ability to perform rapid mental computation without tools: the soroban itself eventually becomes obsolete because you can do it in your head faster.
Someone was trying to multiply 3 x 2 and got 5.5. Why would you do this on a slide rule? For that matter, why would you multiply 37.283 x 14.97 x sqrt(137) by slide rule when abacus or the derived mental mathematics perform such computations more quickly and to greater precision?
Doesn't seem to be happening. The 70s are often cited as the US starting point for influx of Chinese goods, but some sources claim it all started earlier; yet unemployment seems to not care, and simply cycle.
Rose-tinted glasses for the past; bleak, muddy shades for the present?
Try ordering absolutely everything you buy with 2-day shipping if it's Prime ready and tell me you spend less than $80.
Slide rules are good for major, fast calculations; but the older tool, the abacus, is superior. Once you've learned it, you start computing simple arithmetic rapidly in your head as reflex.
The abacus is a digital device of infinite precision (you can make longer ones, or stick them side by side); the slide rule is an analog circuit.