Have you not read up on labor theories of value, intrinsic theories of value, and subjective theories of value? Economics is essentially about determining why goods and services hold the price they hold, how they come to have those prices, and how to calculate the correct price.
My wealth theories are about the *capacity* of human society for production of goods, support of population, and provision of services. I explain things like changes in labor application (technology) providing ways to produce more with less labor, thus allowing government to distribute large amounts of product and services without damaging and destroying the economic function of its population.
For example: if it takes 60% of available labor time to feed your people and 80% of available labor time to build and maintain road and rail systems, you can't do both; your society isn't at a level of technology where it can sustain overland transit infrastructure. Invent a new steel production process which produces higher-grade steel with less fuel and less labor time, and now you only need 40% of your labor time to build road and rail infrastructure--you can, theoretically, do that. Further, you can build farm tractors (steel is now cheap to produce and form), and so a good tractor design cuts back your labor time required to feed your population to 20%--now you're sinking 60% of your labor time into food and rail infrastructure, and have 40% to apply to other things. Whatever you were doing before that ate 40% of your labor time fits into that.
It's obviously more complicated than that: with 60% labor producing food, the other 40% is making other stuff. You have to slim these down in total to find time to make new things. Slimming down the cost (labor time) to make steel makes basic farm implements cheaper and better, which may cut a little time off making food and *anything* better made with cheap steel. Eventually, you get enough steel production capacity and cheap enough steel to roll out railroads in your spare labor time. With unemployment fluctuating between 4% and 10%, you've actually got a reserve labor force that can pick up things like that (look at all the jobs Keystone XL will "create"--most of them are temporary construction jobs).
Look at what makes up macroeconomics. It's all about effects of production capability--money, government policy, unemployment, employment, financial markets, supply and demand, scarcity--and how they affect the effects. In other words: they write about how market conditions affect market conditions, instead of how basic production capability gives rise to market conditions and produces supply-demand behaviors, unemployment and underemployment, welfare systems, the median and basic standards of living, income inequality, viability and impacts of progressive tax systems, trade advantages, and so forth. All of these things are just obvious effects stemming from a basic economic system of labor efficiency, not founding theories of economics or policy.
I'm writing Economics in assembly, and they're all working in PHP.
I've actually been working on a lengthy explanation of economics based in the generation of wealthy economic systems--wealthy nations. The problem is all existing economics are basically merchant and accountant shit: they try to predict prices, and call that economics. Nobody really has theories about the cost of labor, the market impact of cyclical improvement, what inflation actually is, why we can have welfare and what determines what kind of welfare system we have, or even what causes scarcity and supply-and-demand.
Economists say things like "goods become scarce" without figuring out things like "at a point, it's technically possible to produce more of a good to meet demand; however, each additional unit of that good requires a larger investment of total human labor time than previous unit good, thus holding a higher cost, and requiring a higher price, increasing the cost of living until the consumer is priced out of the market, thus producing the range of supply-and-demand economics called 'scarcity'." They also fail to realize that "supply" is unlimited up to the point where that changes in some way, including up to a point where an entity controlling the means to production at current costs decides to restrict supply (if similar means to production are claimed by competitors, you get competition; if DeBeers owns all the good diamond mines, you get monopoly price inflation), and so get confused about demand not increasing price sometimes and price increasing with reduced demand other times.
Nobody knows that stuff because economics is based on the idea of value, rather than wealth. They even measure productivity in dollars; economics theories are all targeted at predicting the shelf price of goods and services, not the state of an economy.
The economics textbooks are based in incorrect theory.
Productivity forms the basis of wealth economics. Everything requires human labor to produce; we can mitigate this by many factors, ranging from advanced techniques (technology: the science of improved techniques) to simply finding an available limited supply.
For example: humans can produce gold by producing electricity and using that to run a fusor to convert vaporized lead base metal ions to gold by fusion with hydrogen; this requires so much labor investment (to produce electricity, mostly) that simply mining gold out of the ground is cheaper (less human labor involved in total). When the mines run dry, this will invert: we currently use fusors to make cesium because producing it from pollucite mining takes more human labor time (rather, more time times labor unit cost; eventually it just becomes time, but the markets turn over on cost).
Similarly, transitioning from blacksmiths to assembly lines changes from many, many hours of expensive, skilled labor to very few hours of cheap, unskilled labor. The transition comes because the labor time multiplied by labor price (wage) is lower per unit produced; that doesn't make a nation wealthy, though. What makes the nation wealthy is transition from 800 hours invested in making a particular good (say, a kitchen knife) to 4 hours invested in making that same good (the cost of all the oil, the machinery, maintenance, machine operators, mining of ore, refining of ore...). We now have 796 hours of unused labor time--that means unemployment--and can apply that labor to producing new goods.
That's the first point, and you must understand how it fits into the overall movement of an economy. First, however, you must understand the point itself: if you have 1,000 hours in which to do work, you can only perform 1,000 hours of work (tautology). Therefor, if you reduce the work required to produce your current set of goods by 500 hours, you have time enough to make twice as many of the same goods *or* make the same goods plus new goods. Wealth is developed by increasing the production of goods per person available, which only happens by increasing the production of goods per labor hour; the growth of a large amount of wealth allows a nation to skim some of that per-person productivity to provide things like welfare services and public roadways without destroying the lives and livelihoods of anyone (i.e. without shoving the poor into starvation or the rich down into the middle class).
On to the second point: Markets.
I mentioned unemployment. Look back up, you'll see it.
Each time you find a way to produce the same with less labor, you reduce your need for employment. This is fine, so long as you don't remove too much of the labor force all at once; that's a long conversation I'd like to pass over for now, but perhaps we can leave off the finer points for now and simply agree that 0.5% of the jobs moving around year to year is fine, while 50% of the jobs vanishing in one year is very bad.
With the reduction of labor, the cost to make a good goes down; profits made by charging a higher price than labor costs can stay the same with a lower price. Factors ranging from direct and indirect competition to the simple consumer pressure of inflation (people hate seeing prices rise) helps push these prices down toward costs, rather than just offering permanent higher profit margins. (Inflation works this way because the buying power of money moves constantly toward the total income divided by the total productive output for a reasonable period of time: goods cost about what they're traded for. In other words: If people have 20% more money *and* there are 20% more goods being sold, you have no inflation; if people have 20% more money *and* there are no more goods being sold, you have 20% inflation; and if people have 20% more money *and* there are 10% more goods being sold, you have 10% inflation, but goods aren't 10% more expensive.)
Protectionism is a good way to make an economy poor. People have this ideal that they'll make twice as much salary and have a bigger piece of the pie, except they don't realize the pie just gets smaller.
NOx is pretty nasty; but so is table salt. Eat a pound of table salt and you'll die. For that matter, you inhale chlorine in the shower.
It's a matter of dosage. Even botulism is harmless in low doses; though a high dose of botulinum exotoxin 1 is something like 0.010mg. The concentration of NOx produced by hot-burning engines simply isn't harmful.
Unions make spinning up and slowing down production a hell. You have to keep paying for benched workers; it makes sense to consolidate factory needs across the industry to smooth out the ups and downs and avoid those costs, rather than spin up independent factories.
Catalytic converter burns off unburnt hydrocarbons. SOx is handled by not putting sulfur in the fuel. Burning the fuel colder reduces NOx, but increases CO; burning it hotter reduces CO and unburnt hydrocarbons, but increases NOx. NOx has a really short half-life and a high toxic dose (it's like 12ppb in the air right now and the NIH gets iffy if it hits 1200ppb; health problems start around 1500ppb), but we're panicing more over NOx right now.
People call NOx "pollution", which is a hot button word. NOx is an emission, but not polluting at the elevated levels VW's cars put out. On the other hand, your standard school bus emits lung-irritating particulate and *high* amounts of extremely-toxic CO because it would emit unacceptable (but not harmful) levels of NOx if it burned the fuel hotter, like a VW. I've seen poorly-tuned diesel cars spit out black smoke clouds, and I've been behind a gasoline car that was tuned properly and had a fouled cat--inhaling vaporized hydrocarbons in that concentration made me nauseated; it was like huffing off a jar of high-octane fuel.
That's pollution. That stuff clogs the air and, if every car burned that way, would start wrecking the environment and destroying people's health; NOx emissions like VW as a standard would not fit the government's numbers, but also would not damage the environment. We've been higher before, in the 70s, after catalytic converters became EPA requirements. NOx has a shorter half-life at higher atmospheric concentrations, so doubling the NOx output doesn't really double the amount of NOx in the atmosphere. We'd have less unburnt gasoline and less carbon monoxide in the atmosphere as a trade-off.
The increased attention has drawn increased scrutiny and attention to a normal deviation. VW says they've noticed a small subset of cars with inconsistencies--if you're 3 standards away from mean, you're going to find 99.7% fall within your bounds and the other 0.3% stand out, of which 0.15% are on the top end. For all appearances, it looks like VW has noticed that quality control isn't 100% perfect--surprise--and some of their gasoline cars are deviating.
Yeah, but by that much? 75TB? A Debian mirror of all packages on all architectures, including source, is 1.3TB. I don't have that much data on my hard drive; I don't even access that much data combined from hosted storage. XBox 360 uses DVDs, single or dual layer, at 4-9GB; with their full game library, that's at the most 10TB. Playstation 3 uses 50-100GB Blu-ray, and has enough games to hit around 100TB--that's around 1100 games for each system.
It's reasonable to assume a reasonable space usage average, spec your system for that, and let the big users use much and the small users leave slack space to compensate. Really, they'd otherwise have to underspec: they'd have to say, "Well you get a 5GB limit, and we have 5GB x $USERS space, and will have to add 5GB for each user, and will always have about half our space unused." There's a sufficiently small size where everyone fills it up, but it's not adequate for most people; there's a sufficiently large size where you're above 99.7% of users's usage and thus only have to account for 0.3% of the average storage per user to expand. They tried to do that and people came back and showed them their expectations of user behavior was wrong.
Storage needs don't grow that rapidly. I can't even find that much recorded data passing my hands in my life.
Figure a reasonable person has maybe 1-5TB of hard drive space. At the extreme, they might average half a terabyte. You'll have a few power users who hold up like 3-4TB of shit, but they're not all too common.
You could put a cap somewhere, but it's nonsense. Someone might actually hit it; on the off chance that they do, you don't really care. The average doesn't shift too much, so you're figuring on middle-ground numbers around where you expected. It's fine.
Then: Every single person in the world somehow finds 150 times their hard drive space's worth of shit and uploads *all* of it to your storage servers.
Any message of the given length s is possible. That mean if you encrypt a 60MB file, it could be 60MB of child pornography MP4 H.264 or 60MB of Rhianna in Ogg Vorbis format an any bitrate. If you pad the file before encrypting, you don't even know the length of the message. Knowing the key lets you get the original data out; not knowing the key means you may be looking at 15MB of classified text documents and 45MB of gibberish.
Is the organization making only a 14 cent profit per each student? Would an 11 cent raise be an enormous increase in pay for any individual faculty member?
Movies usually do the "she's my wife" or "we're in love" thing. Human history legitimately had a long, long age of "anyone could secretly be your sister and everyone marries their cousin" going on. The whole gamut of original justification included bigamy, as well as incest, underaged marriages, forced marriage, marrying a priest or nun(!), and even being infertile (apparently, not being able to knock up your wife is illegal in this time period).
The point was people are under the impression that modern problems are new, and complain about the moral erosion of society. Drugs, sex, and disturbing imagery are seen as new things--never mind that Peyote, diviner's sage, and other hallucinogens were used in most of the spiritual vision quests through history (Salvia was used by people claiming to see the Virgin Mary; mistresses, brothels, teen pregnancy, and sex with your teachers has been common right up until the Internet turned it into a sensation; and classical art included rape, torture, lots of nudity, demons, sex with animals, and anything else you can imagine.
It seems like the Village Idiot has become today's primary occupation.
You could send them black spots and pay people in their area to harass them. This was uncommon; but so is harassing people on Facebook from another state.
Slashdot Mirror
From economists.
Have you not read up on labor theories of value, intrinsic theories of value, and subjective theories of value? Economics is essentially about determining why goods and services hold the price they hold, how they come to have those prices, and how to calculate the correct price.
My wealth theories are about the *capacity* of human society for production of goods, support of population, and provision of services. I explain things like changes in labor application (technology) providing ways to produce more with less labor, thus allowing government to distribute large amounts of product and services without damaging and destroying the economic function of its population.
For example: if it takes 60% of available labor time to feed your people and 80% of available labor time to build and maintain road and rail systems, you can't do both; your society isn't at a level of technology where it can sustain overland transit infrastructure. Invent a new steel production process which produces higher-grade steel with less fuel and less labor time, and now you only need 40% of your labor time to build road and rail infrastructure--you can, theoretically, do that. Further, you can build farm tractors (steel is now cheap to produce and form), and so a good tractor design cuts back your labor time required to feed your population to 20%--now you're sinking 60% of your labor time into food and rail infrastructure, and have 40% to apply to other things. Whatever you were doing before that ate 40% of your labor time fits into that.
It's obviously more complicated than that: with 60% labor producing food, the other 40% is making other stuff. You have to slim these down in total to find time to make new things. Slimming down the cost (labor time) to make steel makes basic farm implements cheaper and better, which may cut a little time off making food and *anything* better made with cheap steel. Eventually, you get enough steel production capacity and cheap enough steel to roll out railroads in your spare labor time. With unemployment fluctuating between 4% and 10%, you've actually got a reserve labor force that can pick up things like that (look at all the jobs Keystone XL will "create"--most of them are temporary construction jobs).
Look at what makes up macroeconomics. It's all about effects of production capability--money, government policy, unemployment, employment, financial markets, supply and demand, scarcity--and how they affect the effects. In other words: they write about how market conditions affect market conditions, instead of how basic production capability gives rise to market conditions and produces supply-demand behaviors, unemployment and underemployment, welfare systems, the median and basic standards of living, income inequality, viability and impacts of progressive tax systems, trade advantages, and so forth. All of these things are just obvious effects stemming from a basic economic system of labor efficiency, not founding theories of economics or policy.
I'm writing Economics in assembly, and they're all working in PHP.
I've actually been working on a lengthy explanation of economics based in the generation of wealthy economic systems--wealthy nations. The problem is all existing economics are basically merchant and accountant shit: they try to predict prices, and call that economics. Nobody really has theories about the cost of labor, the market impact of cyclical improvement, what inflation actually is, why we can have welfare and what determines what kind of welfare system we have, or even what causes scarcity and supply-and-demand.
Economists say things like "goods become scarce" without figuring out things like "at a point, it's technically possible to produce more of a good to meet demand; however, each additional unit of that good requires a larger investment of total human labor time than previous unit good, thus holding a higher cost, and requiring a higher price, increasing the cost of living until the consumer is priced out of the market, thus producing the range of supply-and-demand economics called 'scarcity'." They also fail to realize that "supply" is unlimited up to the point where that changes in some way, including up to a point where an entity controlling the means to production at current costs decides to restrict supply (if similar means to production are claimed by competitors, you get competition; if DeBeers owns all the good diamond mines, you get monopoly price inflation), and so get confused about demand not increasing price sometimes and price increasing with reduced demand other times.
Mind you, I'm the guy who ran through the government's finances since 1950, drew up tax theories and market theories, and explained why we need to change our economic policies at this point, but not e.g. in 2010. I'm a bit obsessive.
Money is not wealth; and intellectual property *is* protectionism.
Nobody knows that stuff because economics is based on the idea of value, rather than wealth. They even measure productivity in dollars; economics theories are all targeted at predicting the shelf price of goods and services, not the state of an economy.
The economics textbooks are based in incorrect theory.
Productivity forms the basis of wealth economics. Everything requires human labor to produce; we can mitigate this by many factors, ranging from advanced techniques (technology: the science of improved techniques) to simply finding an available limited supply.
For example: humans can produce gold by producing electricity and using that to run a fusor to convert vaporized lead base metal ions to gold by fusion with hydrogen; this requires so much labor investment (to produce electricity, mostly) that simply mining gold out of the ground is cheaper (less human labor involved in total). When the mines run dry, this will invert: we currently use fusors to make cesium because producing it from pollucite mining takes more human labor time (rather, more time times labor unit cost; eventually it just becomes time, but the markets turn over on cost).
Similarly, transitioning from blacksmiths to assembly lines changes from many, many hours of expensive, skilled labor to very few hours of cheap, unskilled labor. The transition comes because the labor time multiplied by labor price (wage) is lower per unit produced; that doesn't make a nation wealthy, though. What makes the nation wealthy is transition from 800 hours invested in making a particular good (say, a kitchen knife) to 4 hours invested in making that same good (the cost of all the oil, the machinery, maintenance, machine operators, mining of ore, refining of ore...). We now have 796 hours of unused labor time--that means unemployment--and can apply that labor to producing new goods.
That's the first point, and you must understand how it fits into the overall movement of an economy. First, however, you must understand the point itself: if you have 1,000 hours in which to do work, you can only perform 1,000 hours of work (tautology). Therefor, if you reduce the work required to produce your current set of goods by 500 hours, you have time enough to make twice as many of the same goods *or* make the same goods plus new goods. Wealth is developed by increasing the production of goods per person available, which only happens by increasing the production of goods per labor hour; the growth of a large amount of wealth allows a nation to skim some of that per-person productivity to provide things like welfare services and public roadways without destroying the lives and livelihoods of anyone (i.e. without shoving the poor into starvation or the rich down into the middle class).
On to the second point: Markets.
I mentioned unemployment. Look back up, you'll see it.
Each time you find a way to produce the same with less labor, you reduce your need for employment. This is fine, so long as you don't remove too much of the labor force all at once; that's a long conversation I'd like to pass over for now, but perhaps we can leave off the finer points for now and simply agree that 0.5% of the jobs moving around year to year is fine, while 50% of the jobs vanishing in one year is very bad.
With the reduction of labor, the cost to make a good goes down; profits made by charging a higher price than labor costs can stay the same with a lower price. Factors ranging from direct and indirect competition to the simple consumer pressure of inflation (people hate seeing prices rise) helps push these prices down toward costs, rather than just offering permanent higher profit margins. (Inflation works this way because the buying power of money moves constantly toward the total income divided by the total productive output for a reasonable period of time: goods cost about what they're traded for. In other words: If people have 20% more money *and* there are 20% more goods being sold, you have no inflation; if people have 20% more money *and* there are no more goods being sold, you have 20% inflation; and if people have 20% more money *and* there are 10% more goods being sold, you have 10% inflation, but goods aren't 10% more expensive.)
With this reduction
Protectionism is a good way to make an economy poor. People have this ideal that they'll make twice as much salary and have a bigger piece of the pie, except they don't realize the pie just gets smaller.
1500 ppb is 1.5 ppm.
We can only hope.
Modern reports Americans are less free than Canadians, and have more fear of terrorist attacks than Egyptians, Sudanese, and Bangladeshians.
Yeah. Removing it from the fuel is not exactly the same thing as not adding; sulfur in diesel is not the same thing as lead in gasoline.
NOx is pretty nasty; but so is table salt. Eat a pound of table salt and you'll die. For that matter, you inhale chlorine in the shower.
It's a matter of dosage. Even botulism is harmless in low doses; though a high dose of botulinum exotoxin 1 is something like 0.010mg. The concentration of NOx produced by hot-burning engines simply isn't harmful.
Unions make spinning up and slowing down production a hell. You have to keep paying for benched workers; it makes sense to consolidate factory needs across the industry to smooth out the ups and downs and avoid those costs, rather than spin up independent factories.
It is if the merchants make you take the candy bar out of the store and refuse to let you pay for it.
Catalytic converter burns off unburnt hydrocarbons. SOx is handled by not putting sulfur in the fuel. Burning the fuel colder reduces NOx, but increases CO; burning it hotter reduces CO and unburnt hydrocarbons, but increases NOx. NOx has a really short half-life and a high toxic dose (it's like 12ppb in the air right now and the NIH gets iffy if it hits 1200ppb; health problems start around 1500ppb), but we're panicing more over NOx right now.
People call NOx "pollution", which is a hot button word. NOx is an emission, but not polluting at the elevated levels VW's cars put out. On the other hand, your standard school bus emits lung-irritating particulate and *high* amounts of extremely-toxic CO because it would emit unacceptable (but not harmful) levels of NOx if it burned the fuel hotter, like a VW. I've seen poorly-tuned diesel cars spit out black smoke clouds, and I've been behind a gasoline car that was tuned properly and had a fouled cat--inhaling vaporized hydrocarbons in that concentration made me nauseated; it was like huffing off a jar of high-octane fuel.
That's pollution. That stuff clogs the air and, if every car burned that way, would start wrecking the environment and destroying people's health; NOx emissions like VW as a standard would not fit the government's numbers, but also would not damage the environment. We've been higher before, in the 70s, after catalytic converters became EPA requirements. NOx has a shorter half-life at higher atmospheric concentrations, so doubling the NOx output doesn't really double the amount of NOx in the atmosphere. We'd have less unburnt gasoline and less carbon monoxide in the atmosphere as a trade-off.
The increased attention has drawn increased scrutiny and attention to a normal deviation. VW says they've noticed a small subset of cars with inconsistencies--if you're 3 standards away from mean, you're going to find 99.7% fall within your bounds and the other 0.3% stand out, of which 0.15% are on the top end. For all appearances, it looks like VW has noticed that quality control isn't 100% perfect--surprise--and some of their gasoline cars are deviating.
Different problem, and not a problem.
Yeah, but by that much? 75TB? A Debian mirror of all packages on all architectures, including source, is 1.3TB. I don't have that much data on my hard drive; I don't even access that much data combined from hosted storage. XBox 360 uses DVDs, single or dual layer, at 4-9GB; with their full game library, that's at the most 10TB. Playstation 3 uses 50-100GB Blu-ray, and has enough games to hit around 100TB--that's around 1100 games for each system.
It's reasonable to assume a reasonable space usage average, spec your system for that, and let the big users use much and the small users leave slack space to compensate. Really, they'd otherwise have to underspec: they'd have to say, "Well you get a 5GB limit, and we have 5GB x $USERS space, and will have to add 5GB for each user, and will always have about half our space unused." There's a sufficiently small size where everyone fills it up, but it's not adequate for most people; there's a sufficiently large size where you're above 99.7% of users's usage and thus only have to account for 0.3% of the average storage per user to expand. They tried to do that and people came back and showed them their expectations of user behavior was wrong.
Storage needs don't grow that rapidly. I can't even find that much recorded data passing my hands in my life.
Figure a reasonable person has maybe 1-5TB of hard drive space. At the extreme, they might average half a terabyte. You'll have a few power users who hold up like 3-4TB of shit, but they're not all too common.
You could put a cap somewhere, but it's nonsense. Someone might actually hit it; on the off chance that they do, you don't really care. The average doesn't shift too much, so you're figuring on middle-ground numbers around where you expected. It's fine.
Then: Every single person in the world somehow finds 150 times their hard drive space's worth of shit and uploads *all* of it to your storage servers.
Won't the terrorists and pedophiles just bring their own encryption?
Any message of the given length s is possible. That mean if you encrypt a 60MB file, it could be 60MB of child pornography MP4 H.264 or 60MB of Rhianna in Ogg Vorbis format an any bitrate. If you pad the file before encrypting, you don't even know the length of the message. Knowing the key lets you get the original data out; not knowing the key means you may be looking at 15MB of classified text documents and 45MB of gibberish.
Yes, like Nature Magazine and Scientific American. Most university libraries bulk-subscribe to many journals at a steep discount.
Sure, we could make it a government service and tax you to pay for the expense.
Is the organization making only a 14 cent profit per each student? Would an 11 cent raise be an enormous increase in pay for any individual faculty member?
A whole 22 cents per person per year for a subscription. Very expensive.
Movies usually do the "she's my wife" or "we're in love" thing. Human history legitimately had a long, long age of "anyone could secretly be your sister and everyone marries their cousin" going on. The whole gamut of original justification included bigamy, as well as incest, underaged marriages, forced marriage, marrying a priest or nun(!), and even being infertile (apparently, not being able to knock up your wife is illegal in this time period).
The point was people are under the impression that modern problems are new, and complain about the moral erosion of society. Drugs, sex, and disturbing imagery are seen as new things--never mind that Peyote, diviner's sage, and other hallucinogens were used in most of the spiritual vision quests through history (Salvia was used by people claiming to see the Virgin Mary; mistresses, brothels, teen pregnancy, and sex with your teachers has been common right up until the Internet turned it into a sensation; and classical art included rape, torture, lots of nudity, demons, sex with animals, and anything else you can imagine.
It seems like the Village Idiot has become today's primary occupation.
You could send them black spots and pay people in their area to harass them. This was uncommon; but so is harassing people on Facebook from another state.