Hear hear. I would suggest not being shy of technology; I've been interested in Microsoft Project 365 integration with Sharepoint for a while, and you should definitely look at your options for project management whether they come from Microsoft, Oracle, or some no-name company that provides a fantastic and little-known product as an open-source support-contracted service. What you have there is a long program, and I suggest you get RMCProject's CAPM Exam Prep and the PMBOK if you haven't got project management skills, and spend the 3 months getting a basic grasp of all that right out of the gate.
The primary tools you're going to want are risk management and hierarchical decomposition; however, on the scale you're talking about, full project management knowledge is going to be an outright requirement if you want to do anything resembling a competent job. You *won't* want to use the full suite of project management practices--you never want to use the full set of tools outright, but rather the ones you want, for any purpose in any field--but if that place is as big a rat hole as you say, you're going to need some accounting of what's going on.
As the parent poster here says, you definitely need to start here:
Make a matrix of things that need to be addressed easy to hard, least significant to most, and start chipping away at it.
Get a list of discrete, finite, deliverable projects. Things you can put into boxes and say, "This is one thing I want to produce; it's of a nature that I can tell you what work is required, how much time it will take, and what it will cost." You'll start by examining the array of systems, breaking them down into departments and components (what do they support? What do they do for each department?), and deciding what you're replacing. Are you upgrading Windows XP with stitched-together software to Windows Server 2008, or are you transitioning to a new set of systems to solve the same problem in a different way? Get that list down.
Each thing you want to address will be something small, finite, limited, and understood. You're replacing the groupware services--Exchange, for example; the thing that provides e-mail, calendar, and such--with an upgraded, better-implemented, or new product (exchange to Zimbra, Zimbra to Exchange, migration to a SaaS such as Google for Business or Office 365, etc.). Some things break out into phases or multiple projects, e.g.: migrating Exchange to Office 365 may involve a phase 1 of upgrading Exchange to the latest version, a phase 2 of enabling some kind of synchronization and backup that you don't have now, and a phase 3 of migrating to service; while you may find that your Zimbra installation has no back-ups because you need an enterprise backup solution, and so you can't get back-ups in until you get Bacula set up.
Once you have your list, you can start breaking them out by hierarchical decomposition. You'll want to decompose the work: each deliverable (e.g. your project, Bacula backup infrastructure, delivers a working Bacula backup infrastructure as its product) breaks out into a complete set of deliverables (e.g. project management, support services, back-up strategy design, servers, client deployment with Puppet or SCCM or Ansible, etc.), which themselves each break down further. Once your work is broken down, you hit the bottom with sets of work packages--each a deliverable--that you can understand completely; you can turn those into lists of activities and tasks to produce the deliverable.
The same goes for risks. You want to identify everything your experience says can go wrong, and use your experience to do qualitative risk analysis--what risks are important? Then you use a procedure of assessing probability vs severity to do quantitative risk analysis. You work out how to avoid (100%), mitigate (any%), accept (0%), or transfer (buy insurance) the negative risks (threats), and how to exploit (100%), en
People--laymen, folks like you and I, with no technical education on EPA pollution measurements or their reasoning--envision pollution as toxic, poisonous, choking smoke and sludge pumped into the atmosphere. Exhaust fumes that eat away your lungs by the fouling of burning ash and poisonous esters and hydrocarbons. Carcinogenic compounds that shred tissue, blacken water, kill birds, and rain down the sulfuric fury of acid rain.
NOx emissions are relatively harmless. NO emissions rapidly oxidize to NO2: at 1ppm, it takes roughly 3500 minutes for half of the particles to oxidize; at 20,000 ppm, it takes ten seconds. That means NO concentration in areas of excessively high vehicle activity are sharply less than linear: 100x as much emissions means far less than 100x as much NO in the air.
NO2 tends to form a weak type of acid rain, which acts as fertilizer when it reaches soil. This can be problematic if excessive plant growth is a problem, to a limited degree. NO2 doesn't lead to global warming; it has such an impact on atmospheric methane that high-emission diesel engine output leads to a net global cooling effect, in practice. NO2 can react with ammonia and water vapours to produce said acid compounds, which can damage lungs; ammonia has a half-life of about 1 day in atmosphere, so is relatively rare.
The EPA's NOx output limits are pretty low; they're a lot higher than US limits, and the EU has a lot more diesel traffic. At the same time, larger vehicles are emitting much higher output as well; however, truck freight shipping accounts for 150 billion miles, while passenger vehicle traffic accounts for 3,000 billion miles, so passenger vehicles are significant. Fluctuations in NO2 output in passenger vehicles are thus important and of high impact.
Considering Europe already has a lot higher output in total, we can use them as a model. The impacts are all local--wind, rain, etc. decay and precipitate NOx emissions out of the air--and so this isn't a global climate issue. In the end, what we're talking about is a non-issue that we're seeing as a real issue because we've defined things bureaucratically that we don't want to change based on competent risk analysis--which is the name of the game when you're playing bureaucracy.
In short: the effects of NOx output is negligible, even in total fleet consideration (if *all* US cars did this, what would happen?). The impact of NOx pollution is minimal, compared to the impact of the type of idealized pollution people think of when you use the term "pollution". Substituting the term "pollution" for "nitrous oxide emissions" when making press releases is a way to manipulate the minds of the reader, suggesting to them a situation far different than the one you're describing, while being completely correct in what you're describing, relying in a difference in understanding of a term ("pollution") to send a dishonest message to the listener.
This is a technical concept in political rhetoric. It's one of those things you study when you want to learn how to lie and manipulate and mislead *without* actually lying. It lets you say things that would get you ripped apart by any investigative journalism or random idiot who's paying attention by not saying those things, instead saying something *truthful* that you know your audience will *interpret* as those untrue things you want to say.
That kind of rhetoric is the driving motivation for a certain breed of pedantry. I'm trying to develop the skilled use of pedantry as a technical countermeasure against misleading rhetoric. Pedantry is itself another form of rhetoric, useful for this purpose; and, as you can obviously surmise, it draws the discussion more toward a need for technical correctness: the above argument only works if nobody can show I'm technically wrong, and demonstrate actual harm. Of course, my purpose is just to raise attention to what's being said and what risks exist; I'm not really interested in pushing a conclusion, so I'm not really invested in anything more than pointing out the rhetoric.
Not to mention if someone along the chain is outside the expert engineering field, doesn't know about all code compliance, and is assured it's all above-board.
They produce more NOx, which isn't exactly dirty; it's just above emissions standards for the US. Further, apparently our standards are per-gallon burned, and we prefer to burn more fuel per mile instead of reduce fuel usage. If you made a 200mpg car that produced 10% more NOx in 200 miles than a 20mpg car produced in 20 miles, you'd fail US regulations and be forced to retune the engine to get 20mpg and produce less NOx per gallon fuel burned, even though you're now producing like 9.7 times as much NOx per mile traveled, and more CO2, and more hydrocarbon exhaust, etc.
They were probably exposed to more nitrous oxides than usual, which isn't harmful. EU regulations allow hire NOx, but US regulations prefer to burn more fuel and produce more CO2 and hydrocarbon output--actually toxic shit.
Still, giving away resources to folks who can otherwise support themselves is a bad idea for a government.
Begging the question.
Right now 60+% of the money spent by the Federal government goes to entitlements which is totally out of line with reality and unsustainable.
I know; I've done the government's finances for them. The current welfare system also cost 1.5% of AGI in 1950, and costs 17.2% as of 2015; it gets more expensive over time. My system would have cost 120%-135%, but now is as low as 17%.
Adding some other entitlement won't help that for sure, won't really help anybody out of poverty and will likely cause more folks to fall into poverty as welfare becomes more comfortable.
You have to replace the existing system with the new system. The effect you describe isn't a problem, because having a job is way better than poverty; it's a long discussion.
there is literally no way to keep what I call "Scope Creep" from happening.... "Well, if you provide this service, we should provide this additional service too because it makes sense..." The problem is, we end up having to provide a long list of services to people who could otherwise support themselves just fine and blowing though more money than the Bureau of Engraving can print.
We have that now.
The system I propose eliminates welfare traps--you no longer have to decide if you're going to lose enough money that your extra 50 cents wage isn't worth working that $11/hr job over collecting $10.50/hr in unemployment, or find yourself as a single mother with $58,000/year of support only able to find $32,000/year jobs--and so people are not discouraged from employment. On top of that, you can keep talking about new systems to add.
My system has a complex economic effect of getting stronger over time. I fix a 17% tax on all income; but the total buying power of an economy is the total productive output, and the value of a dollar is the total income divided by that buying power, and the essential wealth of a nation is the total buying power divided by population. Every economic change which allows us to expand population also reduces the per-unit cost of the bottleneck good (this requires a complex discussion of scarcity to explain), so that 17% never spreads thin; wealth *always* increases.
The end result is you can always argue that the system *is* constantly paying everyone more. It not only scales to inflation, but it provides more buying power over time. At the same time, it supplies a limited amount of buying power, to so much of a degree that any fair wage for any job doubles your income: you'll never be middle-class or upper-poor-class without a working income, and the difference in lifestyle and social status is phenomenal. All this without ever actually raising the tax associated, so the expense doesn't grow out of control like modern welfare systems.
Now, there is the slight problem that politicians like to pander, raising welfare benefits and creating new systems to get votes; but that's a problem in our current system--and easier to hide and argue for, to boot, since our system is consistently inadequate--and not really new. My system is easier to examine financially, and provides many good arguments for not fucking touching it.
Now, if you want to start a program to produce jobs for people, retrain people with marketable skills, provide employer tax credits for hiring the chronically unemployed and stuff like that, we can talk.
Jobs don't just come out of nowhere. Jobs come from markets, and must produce, lest they make the nation less wealthy. Each time we find a new, efficient way to do something, we become capable of producing more of that good or service with less invested labor time. That means we can rid ourselves of some employment, and reduce the cost of that good or service. Over time, competition, consu
That's a sorely-neglected work in progress I need to get back to when I'm not trying to learn programming, more project management, whatever the hell's going on in the fantasy novels I'm reading, and playing with my bees.
So far I've only organized and written in the source of wealth through labor, with commentary on how close and how far Adam Smith came to the same conclusions. I haven't gotten into the formal declaration of how wealth is defined, how scarcity comes about, what inflation is, or how to describe these things in strict terms of cost, price, buying power, wealth, and the like without using nebulous and abstract terms such as value.
I also haven't written anything on the impacts of time--the movements of consumer markets and the displacement of employment, and how the amount of unemployment created in a short time impacts the time required to converge once more onto maximum sustainable employment--and the analysis between linear and superlinear production expansion that describes scarcity, in terms of the immediate effects on employment (i.e. Industrial Revolution destroying employment vs. Information Age creating employment).
Whenever somebody tells you they've got it all in their head, you should recognize immediately the simple problem of them not writing that shit down. If nothing else, I should have an outline and some rough notes by now.
A Basic Income implies, by its nature, providing individuals with an amount of money which creates a profit opportunity for businesses which provide minimum services.
providing a comfortable living for those who could otherwise support themselves by working
I usually specify, for a single individual, a 224 square foot apartment, and food stapled on beans and rice with 2-3 days per week allowing a small meat portion, as well as a vegetable portion, at 2000kcal per day. The amount required, given market rates including the profit margins, plus risk margins on top (33% additional above the cost of rent, 200% additional above the cost of food), plus an additional risk control to handle economic fluctuations (in 2013, that's 8%), is $546--untaxed--per single individual person per month, 2013 numbers. That allocates $300 for rent--at a base rate of $1/sqft, plus 33% on top just to make sure it's enough--and $100 for food--with a base cost computed at $35 per month to feed one person, mostly dry beans or dry rice, plus a lot more to handle the *severe* fluctuations of over-expenditure. It also covers clothing, utilities, and personal care. I've also considered encouraging capsule apartments, 100 square foot models targeting single individuals. The opportunities of the combined income of a couple are left as an exercise for the reader, but couples are more space-efficient and will have more slack in their combined budget.
Much of your rambling is platitudes based in dogma. It comes into play when people talk about giving a "middle-class income" and trying to hand everyone $12,000/year or $20,000/year or whatever ridiculously high number; so does mass inflation. It doesn't come into play below a certain threshold; and it's tempered quite nicely by the fact that any wage tends to dramatically increase cost of living, raising the social standing. At high numbers like $20,000/year--that's a full $40,000/year for a couple--that effect is sharply diminished; however, at sustainable, livable, survivable levels at the levels I provide, the effect is approximately equal to full-time employment at $3.41/hr take-home pay, and so a wage of, say, $5/hr more than doubles a person's prospective standard of living.
Those numbers and their effective buying power actually increase over time, but they decrease as a percentage of the total buying power: while the standard of living does increase as the wealth of society increases, the impact of having a low-class wage remains enormous, and the impact of a middle-class income dwarfs the benefit. At the same time, no increase in earned income ever decreases the individual's Dividend, and so the modern welfare traps which make it rationally better to *not* have a job when you have welfare benefits--the reduction of total income because benefits are higher, or the diminishing of wage benefits because the net difference between working and not-working is some 50 cents per hour when your unemployment check is $10.75/hr and the job is $11.25/hr--suddenly evaporates. Nobody would ever hesitate to get a job on the basis of not wanting to lose their Dividend, as they do on the basis of not wanting to lose their welfare income.
Capitalism works by encouragement of action by profit motive. A Basic Income works directly on this. The Citizen's Dividend I designed supplies this in a stable, sustainable manner, encouraging greater employment, eliminating all poverty, and commanding less expense than our current welfare system both currently and in the future in total. In total, it will likely not increase employment--the limiting factor for employment isn't workforce willingness, but job availability, which comes down to productivity and wealth--but it will increase wealth at all levels by increasing the rapidity of the wealth cycle while lessening and shortening the periods of economic drag caused by that cycle.
It's not so much that as it is getting attention. What I need is the House of Representatives, the President, and the major news media pushing the important points; from an academic perspective, I need colleges and economic journals taking the stance that my newer theories are valid.
That's not a simple matter of being well-spoken. Much of it is forum: people in a social group (political parties, schools of thought, etc.) have to exclude themselves from the safety of a social group and put themselves in individual mortal danger if they're to change their stance on an issue. Individual human survival doesn't work; humans only survive for any reasonable period of time in social groups. Even I get money from a job, and spend that money on food. Self-preservation demands protecting your standing in your social group.
Imagine the damage any politician would take by taking up any radical viewpoint. It's easy to label someone as a loonie, even if he's coherent and correct while you're just spitting out the same five words and frothing at the mouth like a delirious animal. Exciting people's emotions with meaningless platitudes and targeting those emotions at an idea or a person isn't difficult. There's an advantage to distinguishing yourself, but a sharp disadvantage to distinguishing yourself so much that you seem strange.
There are a number of things to consider in any case, whenever someone shows up with new knowledge.
First, is the new knowledge valid--or even partially valid? Wrong-headed people often get something right and go the wrong way with it--everyone from Aristotle noticing something makes parchment and feathers fall slower than iron ball right down to Hitler recognizing the Jewish-run media as the source of Germany's major socioeconomic problems went that way, drawing incorrect conclusions from correct observations typically by focusing on the wrong aspects (weight, ethnicity). Analyzing a wholly-wrong position for flaws often produces new thoughts as well, generating new knowledge in correction.
Second, anyone bringing new knowledge to the table is correcting some incorrect or missing fact which has stood up to this point. It stands to reason that someone in the future will correct these new facts with more correct ones, and that the new theory isn't perfect or complete. Typically, such correction and improvement comes from analyzing existing facts against new ones, finding conflicts, and correcting what part of the theory--old or new--is in error to make an even better, newer theory.
Most importantly, the pragmatic application isn't guaranteed.
My understanding of specific history--notably, the difference between the Industrial Revolution and the Information Age--leads me to read further on the upcoming automation crisis than most: while economists are predicting 47% of jobs can be immediately automated, I've already determined why the IR was different from the IA, recognized that automation is essentially similar to the IR in all technical aspects, and used the wealth and labor theories I've come up with to support the rough prediction of the long-term effects. I keep claiming over a century of 80% unemployment if the situation isn't addressed because I can only claim a rough analysis, not a step-by-step prediction; I'm not an oracle and I don't have concrete, refined, mathematical theory to tell you the exact movement of an economy.
Even so, and even though I can show why it happens, why it takes so long to recover, and how to avoid it, *nobody* *actually* *cares*. Nobody is going to recognize the threat on my word, much less start taking up policy to diminish that threat; as such, whether I'm wholly correct or not, and whether or not a bunch of people on Internet forums or in my home town get the idea in their heads that I am, all that information isn't actually useful. Unless I'm not only correct, but also positioned to capture the ear of someone who can understand the threat and apply political clout to maneuver society as a whole around it--and, of course, in possession of a viable plan that actually works to do just that (I have the best one, but I can't guarantee it's sufficient in total; I can think of more drastic actions, but they're more dangerous themselves and start to lean away from capitalism and free markets into more authoritarian command economies)--it doesn't mean a damned thing at the end of the day. I may as well stand around pointing into the sky at the giant burning fireball about to transform the Earth into an enormous space canoe.
In history, you'll find plenty of people who were right in hindsight, who somebody should have damn well listened to. You'll typically find identifying them at the time is hard--both finding them if you happen to be looking for court advisers and identifying that they're brilliantly intelligent and not just loonies. It's not a new problem.
I think you'll find it more easy to work with if you think in terms of supply/demand. Almost everything fits in supply/demand
My economic theories produce a theory of supply and demand when analyzed in a vacuum: supply and demand economics describe the economics of scarcity, and scarcity stems from the requirement of more labor-per-unit to produce further units of a product.
Again: farmland. You use one hectare of farmland to feed 1,000 people, requiring the yearly labor of 50 people working 50 hours per week (105 labor hours per person per year to produce food for every person). The next best two hectares are rocky soil, which produces half as much food and requires twice as much total labor per hectare between irrigation (labor to pump water, frequency of irrigation), fertilizing (labor to acquire fertilizer, transport, and apply), to dig and lay seed (digging in hard earth is harder), etc. To expand to 2,000 people, you must feed 1,000 more people. To feed those 1,000 people, you must employ 100 people per hectare over two such hectares--200 people, meaning 420 labor-hours per person to produce that food. Keep stretching this out and the production of food eventually requires multi-layer greenhouses, artificial lighting, excess of chemically-synthesized fertilizer, and so forth--eventually breaching the 2080 hours per person per year (40 hour work week) or 2600 hours (50 hour), making it impossible to produce enough to satisfy demand even in distant theory.
The same works with coal. One mine produces solid blocks of raw, high-quality anthracite; the next mine over produces blocks comprised 50% of rocks and dirt. The same labor gives half the output in the second mine (and even in the first, once you've mined out the richer veins).
It works with everything, really. The information age is a great example: when you get more clerks handling more information, coordination requires more communication channels. Two people, one channel; three people, three channels; four people, six channels; five people, nine channels; and so forth. Mistakes and time requirements grow exponentially, until you implement information management systems--computers--which then frees up all kinds of information-intensive business operations to grow and expand rapidly (which is exactly what happened). Contrast that to the Industrial Revolution, where you can double your cloth output by doubling the number of weavers (well, the amount of labor-hours spent weaving), and then we invented machines, and caused an economic collapse as most everyone became unemployed for the better part of a century.
Essentially I'm discussing Von Neumann architecture, operating system design, CPU design, and compiler design; and you're saying I should just use good algorithmic libraries and code in C#.NET. I'm talking about something much more fundamental.
Everything fits into my theories on the origins and development of wealth by the efficiency of the application of labor. Even supply and demand is a *consequence* of those theories. The very fact that we can feed over 100 million humans on this planet at all is a consequence of those theories; those theories explain why we were able to put two men on the moon.
So it is. My facts were wrong in this case, apparently. Updating. I've been repeating the Da Vinci thing so often lately and everyone's just nodded and agreed with me!
In 1950, our welfare system--unemployment, food stamps, social security, housing assistance, etc.--cost 1.5% of the total adjusted gross income (AGI) filed to the IRS as taxable. I've devised a system which pays out enough for housing, food, clothing, utilities, and personal care; it would cost 120%-135% in 1950, meaning more money than existed.
In 2013, the cost of our welfare system supplying the same was 17.2%. My system cost 17%.
I can even explain why it all works, although I don't have time for that shit and really need to write a massive paper explaining how economies actually work.
It's not dependent on your political opinion; it's a matter of economic fact. Redistribution of wealth is constant, because that's how taxes work; the question is the effect of a particular program, which is either positive, negative, or neutral.
Actually, my Citizen's Dividend is essentially an expansion of Social Security.
The Basic Income movement is inherently political, which I've had the unfortunate pleasure of learning about since I worked out how to make a *correct* Citizen's Dividend.
Basic Incomes are extremely expensive and have enormous economic impacts; to implement one without damaging the economy, you need to replace existing welfare. To gain a benefit, you need a stable finance source--stable relative to the distribution per person and the required amount for each recipient, in particular. Without proper transitional plans and proper financing considerations, the cost of a Basic Income crushes an economy, while the benefit fails to provide for a standard of living.
The fact of the matter is *nobody* cares.
Most Basic Income advocates want some--any--amount of money by any means; some want a very specific amount ($1000/month, $10,000/year), without examining the actual economic situation or considering inflation or wealth growth; a good deal are constantly trying to claim we should fund it by Land Value Tax or Carbon Credits; a few are just interested in taxing the rich a lot more; and plenty enough want to even give an income for children, typically in a number of $4,000 USD per child. You'll notice these aren't well-thought-out positions; they're philosophical ("Here is my idea! We must have something which fits this label!", "Land Value!"), rounded ($1000/mo, $10,000/year, etc.), socially activist ("tax the rich!", "tax pollution!"), and idealist ("save the children!").
It's become an obvious fact that most people advocating tax policies and social policies don't know how economies work; that became more obvious when I realized nobody knows how economies work--having developed economic theory several steps ahead of modern theory--and they imagine jobs come out of nowhere, money has value, and taxing rich people has an impact entirely in discouraging being rich or simply taking away otherwise locked-up wealth.
All of these things, when explained, are shocking to most people.
Jobs, for example, come from... well, as far as I can tell, they come from population support. Let's use an example. India used to produce 2 tonnes of rice per hectare; now, with better agricultural methods, they can produce 6 tonnes of rice per hectare. Consider that some land is fertile, and other land is rocky. Now, say you need 100 people to tend an area of fertile land which feeds 1,000 people; and then you're out of fertile land, and the next best area of the same size has a quarter the yield--to feed 1,000 people, you need 4 times as much land, so apparently 400 people. To get even that yield, you need to put in twice the labor hours--more fertilizer, irrigation, and intensive farming--and so you actually need 800 people's full working time to feed 1,000 people off that land.
As you can imagine, this is the root of scarcity: you need additional labor-per-unit to produce additional output, thus per-unit cost is high, more labor is diverted to production, and support of population drops. People become poor; eventually, you reach a point where every 1 person's labor can support LESS than 1 person, and population growth stops--if nothing else, because people die of starvation, dehydration, or exposure, unless we stop making smart phones and employ those people in the business of making food.
Hunter-gatherers could have supported, in theory, 136 million people; in fact, the whole earth isn't all great forage, so it's less. On the other hand, India's increased production per land unit not only made rice cheaper--1 unit of labor tending the land produced 3 units of rice, as they went from 2 tonnes output to 6 tonnes output--but also easier to scale: rice production scaled linearly for three times higher output, and so making the population 300% bigger would require 300% as many rice farmers versus feeding the existing population. Because the population can scale, you can c
That's impossible. It's Java! Java can't have security holes! Everyone knows you don't write C because C has buffer overflows and can cause security problems when you paste in very long strings, and that NEVER happens with Java! Java is perfect! Everything you write in Java is perfectly secure! Ask any Java programmer!
Used to be you needed a $90,000 DBA, an $85,000 networking engineer, a $60,000 sysadmin, and a $115,000 storage engineer to run the data center, if not multiple, all working full tilt. They worked a lot, and it was expensive.
Nowadays, these guys all work like 100 hours per year; yet you can't cram all that knowledge into one person. To get around this, we fire all of them, hiring a few into services companies. Now the $90,000 DBA, $85,000 network engineer, $60,000 sysadmin, and $115,000 storage engineer work for an IT services firm which supplies their 2000 hours per man per year labor to 20 companies, each paying 2-3 times their total package--until some direct competition slims the margin to 20% or so--and so you're spending $17,500 in total for all that, plus maybe $60,000 for a broad-skill infrastructure guy who doesn't know much about these things, but can identify what you need and plug the pieces together if someone else assembles the parts for them. Hell, we can send you that guy, too.
That means 95% of those IT workers get booted out of their jobs.
This is actually a good thing. Karl Marx wrote that each product's value is the labor invested, and so we should not reduce the labor required to make new things, lest we reduce working hours and create unemployed man. Karl Marx failed to realize reduced labor hours to produce a product reduces costs, which eventually becomes a price reduction; such a price reduction concentrates wealth in the broad consumer market, creating wide demographics which have buying power ready to buy niche products. Producing niche products in higher quantity requires labor, which creates jobs--the statistic of lost jobs is what we can afford to buy into for creating new products.
It's actually more complex than that.
The reduction of labor in food and other basic living production reduces the minimum wage required--India produced rice for $550/ton in 1970, but for under $200/ton in 2001, whereas the inflation on $550 from 1970 to 2001 would have come to $3000/ton--which allows you to employ a higher percentage of the population, since you can sustain those employees with a smaller cut of the total income, and thus can afford to buy more labor hours to produce more goods. This is why middle class standard of living has increased over the years, yet middle class salaries have stagnated (that's a whole other can of worms involving the information age and a middle class bubble, though).
Further, just reducing the cost of current production doesn't allow for population expansion. Let's say India makes new machines to harvest rice, dropping the cost by 95%; but they still need the same amount of land to grow it. Well, if you double the population, the old supply of rice still costs $200/tonne; the new supply of rice grows on rocky soil, since you have no available good farmland left, and produces yields of 20% the size of the rest of production, with more fertilizer, more irrigation, and overall twice as much labor invested (due to using more seed, more water, more fertilizer, more pumping power, etc., all produced by labor). That means the new supply of rice costs 10 times as much, so you can't expand a population of middle-class or lower-class and manage to feed them all--their labor contribution (as farmers, mostly) can't sustain an income to afford their living and, eventually, can't even produce enough food to feed them all.
India also stepped up from production of 2 tonnes per hectare to 6 tonnes per hectare. With the same arable land, they'd be able to produce food for three times the population at a third the cost; but the inflation-adjusted numbers suggest they're producing at around 5% of the original cost. That's because they also implemented new farming methods, fertilization methods, and farming equipment (harvesters, planters, etc.) to dramatically reduce labor. They still can't more than triple the population without access to more arable land (else the yields go down and
Slashdot Mirror
Hear hear. I would suggest not being shy of technology; I've been interested in Microsoft Project 365 integration with Sharepoint for a while, and you should definitely look at your options for project management whether they come from Microsoft, Oracle, or some no-name company that provides a fantastic and little-known product as an open-source support-contracted service. What you have there is a long program, and I suggest you get RMCProject's CAPM Exam Prep and the PMBOK if you haven't got project management skills, and spend the 3 months getting a basic grasp of all that right out of the gate.
The primary tools you're going to want are risk management and hierarchical decomposition; however, on the scale you're talking about, full project management knowledge is going to be an outright requirement if you want to do anything resembling a competent job. You *won't* want to use the full suite of project management practices--you never want to use the full set of tools outright, but rather the ones you want, for any purpose in any field--but if that place is as big a rat hole as you say, you're going to need some accounting of what's going on.
As the parent poster here says, you definitely need to start here:
Make a matrix of things that need to be addressed easy to hard, least significant to most, and start chipping away at it.
Get a list of discrete, finite, deliverable projects. Things you can put into boxes and say, "This is one thing I want to produce; it's of a nature that I can tell you what work is required, how much time it will take, and what it will cost." You'll start by examining the array of systems, breaking them down into departments and components (what do they support? What do they do for each department?), and deciding what you're replacing. Are you upgrading Windows XP with stitched-together software to Windows Server 2008, or are you transitioning to a new set of systems to solve the same problem in a different way? Get that list down.
Each thing you want to address will be something small, finite, limited, and understood. You're replacing the groupware services--Exchange, for example; the thing that provides e-mail, calendar, and such--with an upgraded, better-implemented, or new product (exchange to Zimbra, Zimbra to Exchange, migration to a SaaS such as Google for Business or Office 365, etc.). Some things break out into phases or multiple projects, e.g.: migrating Exchange to Office 365 may involve a phase 1 of upgrading Exchange to the latest version, a phase 2 of enabling some kind of synchronization and backup that you don't have now, and a phase 3 of migrating to service; while you may find that your Zimbra installation has no back-ups because you need an enterprise backup solution, and so you can't get back-ups in until you get Bacula set up.
Once you have your list, you can start breaking them out by hierarchical decomposition. You'll want to decompose the work: each deliverable (e.g. your project, Bacula backup infrastructure, delivers a working Bacula backup infrastructure as its product) breaks out into a complete set of deliverables (e.g. project management, support services, back-up strategy design, servers, client deployment with Puppet or SCCM or Ansible, etc.), which themselves each break down further. Once your work is broken down, you hit the bottom with sets of work packages--each a deliverable--that you can understand completely; you can turn those into lists of activities and tasks to produce the deliverable.
The same goes for risks. You want to identify everything your experience says can go wrong, and use your experience to do qualitative risk analysis--what risks are important? Then you use a procedure of assessing probability vs severity to do quantitative risk analysis. You work out how to avoid (100%), mitigate (any%), accept (0%), or transfer (buy insurance) the negative risks (threats), and how to exploit (100%), en
People--laymen, folks like you and I, with no technical education on EPA pollution measurements or their reasoning--envision pollution as toxic, poisonous, choking smoke and sludge pumped into the atmosphere. Exhaust fumes that eat away your lungs by the fouling of burning ash and poisonous esters and hydrocarbons. Carcinogenic compounds that shred tissue, blacken water, kill birds, and rain down the sulfuric fury of acid rain.
NOx emissions are relatively harmless. NO emissions rapidly oxidize to NO2: at 1ppm, it takes roughly 3500 minutes for half of the particles to oxidize; at 20,000 ppm, it takes ten seconds. That means NO concentration in areas of excessively high vehicle activity are sharply less than linear: 100x as much emissions means far less than 100x as much NO in the air.
NO2 tends to form a weak type of acid rain, which acts as fertilizer when it reaches soil. This can be problematic if excessive plant growth is a problem, to a limited degree. NO2 doesn't lead to global warming; it has such an impact on atmospheric methane that high-emission diesel engine output leads to a net global cooling effect, in practice. NO2 can react with ammonia and water vapours to produce said acid compounds, which can damage lungs; ammonia has a half-life of about 1 day in atmosphere, so is relatively rare.
The EPA's NOx output limits are pretty low; they're a lot higher than US limits, and the EU has a lot more diesel traffic. At the same time, larger vehicles are emitting much higher output as well; however, truck freight shipping accounts for 150 billion miles, while passenger vehicle traffic accounts for 3,000 billion miles, so passenger vehicles are significant. Fluctuations in NO2 output in passenger vehicles are thus important and of high impact.
Considering Europe already has a lot higher output in total, we can use them as a model. The impacts are all local--wind, rain, etc. decay and precipitate NOx emissions out of the air--and so this isn't a global climate issue. In the end, what we're talking about is a non-issue that we're seeing as a real issue because we've defined things bureaucratically that we don't want to change based on competent risk analysis--which is the name of the game when you're playing bureaucracy.
In short: the effects of NOx output is negligible, even in total fleet consideration (if *all* US cars did this, what would happen?). The impact of NOx pollution is minimal, compared to the impact of the type of idealized pollution people think of when you use the term "pollution". Substituting the term "pollution" for "nitrous oxide emissions" when making press releases is a way to manipulate the minds of the reader, suggesting to them a situation far different than the one you're describing, while being completely correct in what you're describing, relying in a difference in understanding of a term ("pollution") to send a dishonest message to the listener.
This is a technical concept in political rhetoric. It's one of those things you study when you want to learn how to lie and manipulate and mislead *without* actually lying. It lets you say things that would get you ripped apart by any investigative journalism or random idiot who's paying attention by not saying those things, instead saying something *truthful* that you know your audience will *interpret* as those untrue things you want to say.
That kind of rhetoric is the driving motivation for a certain breed of pedantry. I'm trying to develop the skilled use of pedantry as a technical countermeasure against misleading rhetoric. Pedantry is itself another form of rhetoric, useful for this purpose; and, as you can obviously surmise, it draws the discussion more toward a need for technical correctness: the above argument only works if nobody can show I'm technically wrong, and demonstrate actual harm. Of course, my purpose is just to raise attention to what's being said and what risks exist; I'm not really interested in pushing a conclusion, so I'm not really invested in anything more than pointing out the rhetoric.
Not to mention if someone along the chain is outside the expert engineering field, doesn't know about all code compliance, and is assured it's all above-board.
They don't belch soot and choking ash into the air. Americans associate diesel with black, smoking coal towers.
"Pollution" is also a meaningless word. They count NOx as pollution, as well as CO2 and water vapour.
They produce more NOx, which isn't exactly dirty; it's just above emissions standards for the US. Further, apparently our standards are per-gallon burned, and we prefer to burn more fuel per mile instead of reduce fuel usage. If you made a 200mpg car that produced 10% more NOx in 200 miles than a 20mpg car produced in 20 miles, you'd fail US regulations and be forced to retune the engine to get 20mpg and produce less NOx per gallon fuel burned, even though you're now producing like 9.7 times as much NOx per mile traveled, and more CO2, and more hydrocarbon exhaust, etc.
They were probably exposed to more nitrous oxides than usual, which isn't harmful. EU regulations allow hire NOx, but US regulations prefer to burn more fuel and produce more CO2 and hydrocarbon output--actually toxic shit.
Still, giving away resources to folks who can otherwise support themselves is a bad idea for a government.
Begging the question.
Right now 60+% of the money spent by the Federal government goes to entitlements which is totally out of line with reality and unsustainable.
I know; I've done the government's finances for them. The current welfare system also cost 1.5% of AGI in 1950, and costs 17.2% as of 2015; it gets more expensive over time. My system would have cost 120%-135%, but now is as low as 17%.
Adding some other entitlement won't help that for sure, won't really help anybody out of poverty and will likely cause more folks to fall into poverty as welfare becomes more comfortable.
You have to replace the existing system with the new system. The effect you describe isn't a problem, because having a job is way better than poverty; it's a long discussion.
there is literally no way to keep what I call "Scope Creep" from happening.... "Well, if you provide this service, we should provide this additional service too because it makes sense..." The problem is, we end up having to provide a long list of services to people who could otherwise support themselves just fine and blowing though more money than the Bureau of Engraving can print.
We have that now.
The system I propose eliminates welfare traps--you no longer have to decide if you're going to lose enough money that your extra 50 cents wage isn't worth working that $11/hr job over collecting $10.50/hr in unemployment, or find yourself as a single mother with $58,000/year of support only able to find $32,000/year jobs--and so people are not discouraged from employment. On top of that, you can keep talking about new systems to add.
My system has a complex economic effect of getting stronger over time. I fix a 17% tax on all income; but the total buying power of an economy is the total productive output, and the value of a dollar is the total income divided by that buying power, and the essential wealth of a nation is the total buying power divided by population. Every economic change which allows us to expand population also reduces the per-unit cost of the bottleneck good (this requires a complex discussion of scarcity to explain), so that 17% never spreads thin; wealth *always* increases.
The end result is you can always argue that the system *is* constantly paying everyone more. It not only scales to inflation, but it provides more buying power over time. At the same time, it supplies a limited amount of buying power, to so much of a degree that any fair wage for any job doubles your income: you'll never be middle-class or upper-poor-class without a working income, and the difference in lifestyle and social status is phenomenal. All this without ever actually raising the tax associated, so the expense doesn't grow out of control like modern welfare systems.
Now, there is the slight problem that politicians like to pander, raising welfare benefits and creating new systems to get votes; but that's a problem in our current system--and easier to hide and argue for, to boot, since our system is consistently inadequate--and not really new. My system is easier to examine financially, and provides many good arguments for not fucking touching it.
Now, if you want to start a program to produce jobs for people, retrain people with marketable skills, provide employer tax credits for hiring the chronically unemployed and stuff like that, we can talk.
Jobs don't just come out of nowhere. Jobs come from markets, and must produce, lest they make the nation less wealthy. Each time we find a new, efficient way to do something, we become capable of producing more of that good or service with less invested labor time. That means we can rid ourselves of some employment, and reduce the cost of that good or service. Over time, competition, consu
That's a sorely-neglected work in progress I need to get back to when I'm not trying to learn programming, more project management, whatever the hell's going on in the fantasy novels I'm reading, and playing with my bees.
So far I've only organized and written in the source of wealth through labor, with commentary on how close and how far Adam Smith came to the same conclusions. I haven't gotten into the formal declaration of how wealth is defined, how scarcity comes about, what inflation is, or how to describe these things in strict terms of cost, price, buying power, wealth, and the like without using nebulous and abstract terms such as value.
I also haven't written anything on the impacts of time--the movements of consumer markets and the displacement of employment, and how the amount of unemployment created in a short time impacts the time required to converge once more onto maximum sustainable employment--and the analysis between linear and superlinear production expansion that describes scarcity, in terms of the immediate effects on employment (i.e. Industrial Revolution destroying employment vs. Information Age creating employment).
Whenever somebody tells you they've got it all in their head, you should recognize immediately the simple problem of them not writing that shit down. If nothing else, I should have an outline and some rough notes by now.
Under who's definition?
A Basic Income implies, by its nature, providing individuals with an amount of money which creates a profit opportunity for businesses which provide minimum services.
providing a comfortable living for those who could otherwise support themselves by working
I usually specify, for a single individual, a 224 square foot apartment, and food stapled on beans and rice with 2-3 days per week allowing a small meat portion, as well as a vegetable portion, at 2000kcal per day. The amount required, given market rates including the profit margins, plus risk margins on top (33% additional above the cost of rent, 200% additional above the cost of food), plus an additional risk control to handle economic fluctuations (in 2013, that's 8%), is $546--untaxed--per single individual person per month, 2013 numbers. That allocates $300 for rent--at a base rate of $1/sqft, plus 33% on top just to make sure it's enough--and $100 for food--with a base cost computed at $35 per month to feed one person, mostly dry beans or dry rice, plus a lot more to handle the *severe* fluctuations of over-expenditure. It also covers clothing, utilities, and personal care. I've also considered encouraging capsule apartments, 100 square foot models targeting single individuals. The opportunities of the combined income of a couple are left as an exercise for the reader, but couples are more space-efficient and will have more slack in their combined budget.
Much of your rambling is platitudes based in dogma. It comes into play when people talk about giving a "middle-class income" and trying to hand everyone $12,000/year or $20,000/year or whatever ridiculously high number; so does mass inflation. It doesn't come into play below a certain threshold; and it's tempered quite nicely by the fact that any wage tends to dramatically increase cost of living, raising the social standing. At high numbers like $20,000/year--that's a full $40,000/year for a couple--that effect is sharply diminished; however, at sustainable, livable, survivable levels at the levels I provide, the effect is approximately equal to full-time employment at $3.41/hr take-home pay, and so a wage of, say, $5/hr more than doubles a person's prospective standard of living.
Those numbers and their effective buying power actually increase over time, but they decrease as a percentage of the total buying power: while the standard of living does increase as the wealth of society increases, the impact of having a low-class wage remains enormous, and the impact of a middle-class income dwarfs the benefit. At the same time, no increase in earned income ever decreases the individual's Dividend, and so the modern welfare traps which make it rationally better to *not* have a job when you have welfare benefits--the reduction of total income because benefits are higher, or the diminishing of wage benefits because the net difference between working and not-working is some 50 cents per hour when your unemployment check is $10.75/hr and the job is $11.25/hr--suddenly evaporates. Nobody would ever hesitate to get a job on the basis of not wanting to lose their Dividend, as they do on the basis of not wanting to lose their welfare income.
Capitalism works by encouragement of action by profit motive. A Basic Income works directly on this. The Citizen's Dividend I designed supplies this in a stable, sustainable manner, encouraging greater employment, eliminating all poverty, and commanding less expense than our current welfare system both currently and in the future in total. In total, it will likely not increase employment--the limiting factor for employment isn't workforce willingness, but job availability, which comes down to productivity and wealth--but it will increase wealth at all levels by increasing the rapidity of the wealth cycle while lessening and shortening the periods of economic drag caused by that cycle.
It's not so much that as it is getting attention. What I need is the House of Representatives, the President, and the major news media pushing the important points; from an academic perspective, I need colleges and economic journals taking the stance that my newer theories are valid.
That's not a simple matter of being well-spoken. Much of it is forum: people in a social group (political parties, schools of thought, etc.) have to exclude themselves from the safety of a social group and put themselves in individual mortal danger if they're to change their stance on an issue. Individual human survival doesn't work; humans only survive for any reasonable period of time in social groups. Even I get money from a job, and spend that money on food. Self-preservation demands protecting your standing in your social group.
Imagine the damage any politician would take by taking up any radical viewpoint. It's easy to label someone as a loonie, even if he's coherent and correct while you're just spitting out the same five words and frothing at the mouth like a delirious animal. Exciting people's emotions with meaningless platitudes and targeting those emotions at an idea or a person isn't difficult. There's an advantage to distinguishing yourself, but a sharp disadvantage to distinguishing yourself so much that you seem strange.
It doesn't much matter if nobody listens.
There are a number of things to consider in any case, whenever someone shows up with new knowledge.
First, is the new knowledge valid--or even partially valid? Wrong-headed people often get something right and go the wrong way with it--everyone from Aristotle noticing something makes parchment and feathers fall slower than iron ball right down to Hitler recognizing the Jewish-run media as the source of Germany's major socioeconomic problems went that way, drawing incorrect conclusions from correct observations typically by focusing on the wrong aspects (weight, ethnicity). Analyzing a wholly-wrong position for flaws often produces new thoughts as well, generating new knowledge in correction.
Second, anyone bringing new knowledge to the table is correcting some incorrect or missing fact which has stood up to this point. It stands to reason that someone in the future will correct these new facts with more correct ones, and that the new theory isn't perfect or complete. Typically, such correction and improvement comes from analyzing existing facts against new ones, finding conflicts, and correcting what part of the theory--old or new--is in error to make an even better, newer theory.
Most importantly, the pragmatic application isn't guaranteed.
My understanding of specific history--notably, the difference between the Industrial Revolution and the Information Age--leads me to read further on the upcoming automation crisis than most: while economists are predicting 47% of jobs can be immediately automated, I've already determined why the IR was different from the IA, recognized that automation is essentially similar to the IR in all technical aspects, and used the wealth and labor theories I've come up with to support the rough prediction of the long-term effects. I keep claiming over a century of 80% unemployment if the situation isn't addressed because I can only claim a rough analysis, not a step-by-step prediction; I'm not an oracle and I don't have concrete, refined, mathematical theory to tell you the exact movement of an economy.
Even so, and even though I can show why it happens, why it takes so long to recover, and how to avoid it, *nobody* *actually* *cares*. Nobody is going to recognize the threat on my word, much less start taking up policy to diminish that threat; as such, whether I'm wholly correct or not, and whether or not a bunch of people on Internet forums or in my home town get the idea in their heads that I am, all that information isn't actually useful. Unless I'm not only correct, but also positioned to capture the ear of someone who can understand the threat and apply political clout to maneuver society as a whole around it--and, of course, in possession of a viable plan that actually works to do just that (I have the best one, but I can't guarantee it's sufficient in total; I can think of more drastic actions, but they're more dangerous themselves and start to lean away from capitalism and free markets into more authoritarian command economies)--it doesn't mean a damned thing at the end of the day. I may as well stand around pointing into the sky at the giant burning fireball about to transform the Earth into an enormous space canoe.
In history, you'll find plenty of people who were right in hindsight, who somebody should have damn well listened to. You'll typically find identifying them at the time is hard--both finding them if you happen to be looking for court advisers and identifying that they're brilliantly intelligent and not just loonies. It's not a new problem.
Somebody has to.
Yes, it was van gogh.
I think you'll find it more easy to work with if you think in terms of supply/demand. Almost everything fits in supply/demand
My economic theories produce a theory of supply and demand when analyzed in a vacuum: supply and demand economics describe the economics of scarcity, and scarcity stems from the requirement of more labor-per-unit to produce further units of a product.
Again: farmland. You use one hectare of farmland to feed 1,000 people, requiring the yearly labor of 50 people working 50 hours per week (105 labor hours per person per year to produce food for every person). The next best two hectares are rocky soil, which produces half as much food and requires twice as much total labor per hectare between irrigation (labor to pump water, frequency of irrigation), fertilizing (labor to acquire fertilizer, transport, and apply), to dig and lay seed (digging in hard earth is harder), etc. To expand to 2,000 people, you must feed 1,000 more people. To feed those 1,000 people, you must employ 100 people per hectare over two such hectares--200 people, meaning 420 labor-hours per person to produce that food. Keep stretching this out and the production of food eventually requires multi-layer greenhouses, artificial lighting, excess of chemically-synthesized fertilizer, and so forth--eventually breaching the 2080 hours per person per year (40 hour work week) or 2600 hours (50 hour), making it impossible to produce enough to satisfy demand even in distant theory.
The same works with coal. One mine produces solid blocks of raw, high-quality anthracite; the next mine over produces blocks comprised 50% of rocks and dirt. The same labor gives half the output in the second mine (and even in the first, once you've mined out the richer veins).
It works with everything, really. The information age is a great example: when you get more clerks handling more information, coordination requires more communication channels. Two people, one channel; three people, three channels; four people, six channels; five people, nine channels; and so forth. Mistakes and time requirements grow exponentially, until you implement information management systems--computers--which then frees up all kinds of information-intensive business operations to grow and expand rapidly (which is exactly what happened). Contrast that to the Industrial Revolution, where you can double your cloth output by doubling the number of weavers (well, the amount of labor-hours spent weaving), and then we invented machines, and caused an economic collapse as most everyone became unemployed for the better part of a century.
Essentially I'm discussing Von Neumann architecture, operating system design, CPU design, and compiler design; and you're saying I should just use good algorithmic libraries and code in C#.NET. I'm talking about something much more fundamental.
Everything fits into my theories on the origins and development of wealth by the efficiency of the application of labor. Even supply and demand is a *consequence* of those theories. The very fact that we can feed over 100 million humans on this planet at all is a consequence of those theories; those theories explain why we were able to put two men on the moon.
So it is. My facts were wrong in this case, apparently. Updating. I've been repeating the Da Vinci thing so often lately and everyone's just nodded and agreed with me!
Medicare and medicaid need to stay.
Fortunately, the cost of all the other crap is more than the cost of a viable Citizen's Dividend.
$869 BILLION of social security; and we're not touching medicare.
I actually already figured all of that out.
In 1950, our welfare system--unemployment, food stamps, social security, housing assistance, etc.--cost 1.5% of the total adjusted gross income (AGI) filed to the IRS as taxable. I've devised a system which pays out enough for housing, food, clothing, utilities, and personal care; it would cost 120%-135% in 1950, meaning more money than existed.
In 2013, the cost of our welfare system supplying the same was 17.2%. My system cost 17%.
I can even explain why it all works, although I don't have time for that shit and really need to write a massive paper explaining how economies actually work.
A Basic Income is an inherently capitalist solution.
In other news: everything that could ever be invented had already been invented in 1902. Ask the US Patent Office.
It's not dependent on your political opinion; it's a matter of economic fact. Redistribution of wealth is constant, because that's how taxes work; the question is the effect of a particular program, which is either positive, negative, or neutral.
Actually, my Citizen's Dividend is essentially an expansion of Social Security.
The Basic Income movement is inherently political, which I've had the unfortunate pleasure of learning about since I worked out how to make a *correct* Citizen's Dividend.
Basic Incomes are extremely expensive and have enormous economic impacts; to implement one without damaging the economy, you need to replace existing welfare. To gain a benefit, you need a stable finance source--stable relative to the distribution per person and the required amount for each recipient, in particular. Without proper transitional plans and proper financing considerations, the cost of a Basic Income crushes an economy, while the benefit fails to provide for a standard of living.
The fact of the matter is *nobody* cares.
Most Basic Income advocates want some--any--amount of money by any means; some want a very specific amount ($1000/month, $10,000/year), without examining the actual economic situation or considering inflation or wealth growth; a good deal are constantly trying to claim we should fund it by Land Value Tax or Carbon Credits; a few are just interested in taxing the rich a lot more; and plenty enough want to even give an income for children, typically in a number of $4,000 USD per child. You'll notice these aren't well-thought-out positions; they're philosophical ("Here is my idea! We must have something which fits this label!", "Land Value!"), rounded ($1000/mo, $10,000/year, etc.), socially activist ("tax the rich!", "tax pollution!"), and idealist ("save the children!").
It's become an obvious fact that most people advocating tax policies and social policies don't know how economies work; that became more obvious when I realized nobody knows how economies work--having developed economic theory several steps ahead of modern theory--and they imagine jobs come out of nowhere, money has value, and taxing rich people has an impact entirely in discouraging being rich or simply taking away otherwise locked-up wealth.
All of these things, when explained, are shocking to most people.
Jobs, for example, come from ... well, as far as I can tell, they come from population support. Let's use an example. India used to produce 2 tonnes of rice per hectare; now, with better agricultural methods, they can produce 6 tonnes of rice per hectare. Consider that some land is fertile, and other land is rocky. Now, say you need 100 people to tend an area of fertile land which feeds 1,000 people; and then you're out of fertile land, and the next best area of the same size has a quarter the yield--to feed 1,000 people, you need 4 times as much land, so apparently 400 people. To get even that yield, you need to put in twice the labor hours--more fertilizer, irrigation, and intensive farming--and so you actually need 800 people's full working time to feed 1,000 people off that land.
As you can imagine, this is the root of scarcity: you need additional labor-per-unit to produce additional output, thus per-unit cost is high, more labor is diverted to production, and support of population drops. People become poor; eventually, you reach a point where every 1 person's labor can support LESS than 1 person, and population growth stops--if nothing else, because people die of starvation, dehydration, or exposure, unless we stop making smart phones and employ those people in the business of making food.
Hunter-gatherers could have supported, in theory, 136 million people; in fact, the whole earth isn't all great forage, so it's less. On the other hand, India's increased production per land unit not only made rice cheaper--1 unit of labor tending the land produced 3 units of rice, as they went from 2 tonnes output to 6 tonnes output--but also easier to scale: rice production scaled linearly for three times higher output, and so making the population 300% bigger would require 300% as many rice farmers versus feeding the existing population. Because the population can scale, you can c
That's impossible. It's Java! Java can't have security holes! Everyone knows you don't write C because C has buffer overflows and can cause security problems when you paste in very long strings, and that NEVER happens with Java! Java is perfect! Everything you write in Java is perfectly secure! Ask any Java programmer!
We do this internally, too.
Used to be you needed a $90,000 DBA, an $85,000 networking engineer, a $60,000 sysadmin, and a $115,000 storage engineer to run the data center, if not multiple, all working full tilt. They worked a lot, and it was expensive.
Nowadays, these guys all work like 100 hours per year; yet you can't cram all that knowledge into one person. To get around this, we fire all of them, hiring a few into services companies. Now the $90,000 DBA, $85,000 network engineer, $60,000 sysadmin, and $115,000 storage engineer work for an IT services firm which supplies their 2000 hours per man per year labor to 20 companies, each paying 2-3 times their total package--until some direct competition slims the margin to 20% or so--and so you're spending $17,500 in total for all that, plus maybe $60,000 for a broad-skill infrastructure guy who doesn't know much about these things, but can identify what you need and plug the pieces together if someone else assembles the parts for them. Hell, we can send you that guy, too.
That means 95% of those IT workers get booted out of their jobs.
This is actually a good thing. Karl Marx wrote that each product's value is the labor invested, and so we should not reduce the labor required to make new things, lest we reduce working hours and create unemployed man. Karl Marx failed to realize reduced labor hours to produce a product reduces costs, which eventually becomes a price reduction; such a price reduction concentrates wealth in the broad consumer market, creating wide demographics which have buying power ready to buy niche products. Producing niche products in higher quantity requires labor, which creates jobs--the statistic of lost jobs is what we can afford to buy into for creating new products.
It's actually more complex than that.
The reduction of labor in food and other basic living production reduces the minimum wage required--India produced rice for $550/ton in 1970, but for under $200/ton in 2001, whereas the inflation on $550 from 1970 to 2001 would have come to $3000/ton--which allows you to employ a higher percentage of the population, since you can sustain those employees with a smaller cut of the total income, and thus can afford to buy more labor hours to produce more goods. This is why middle class standard of living has increased over the years, yet middle class salaries have stagnated (that's a whole other can of worms involving the information age and a middle class bubble, though).
Further, just reducing the cost of current production doesn't allow for population expansion. Let's say India makes new machines to harvest rice, dropping the cost by 95%; but they still need the same amount of land to grow it. Well, if you double the population, the old supply of rice still costs $200/tonne; the new supply of rice grows on rocky soil, since you have no available good farmland left, and produces yields of 20% the size of the rest of production, with more fertilizer, more irrigation, and overall twice as much labor invested (due to using more seed, more water, more fertilizer, more pumping power, etc., all produced by labor). That means the new supply of rice costs 10 times as much, so you can't expand a population of middle-class or lower-class and manage to feed them all--their labor contribution (as farmers, mostly) can't sustain an income to afford their living and, eventually, can't even produce enough food to feed them all.
India also stepped up from production of 2 tonnes per hectare to 6 tonnes per hectare. With the same arable land, they'd be able to produce food for three times the population at a third the cost; but the inflation-adjusted numbers suggest they're producing at around 5% of the original cost. That's because they also implemented new farming methods, fertilization methods, and farming equipment (harvesters, planters, etc.) to dramatically reduce labor. They still can't more than triple the population without access to more arable land (else the yields go down and
You've never seen cartoons, have you?