Wind turbine generation is such shit. If you have a lot of constant, unending wind, it seems like a good idea; typically, solar outclasses it by far.
My analysis of solar has changed in the past month. I last looked half a decade or so ago, when the ROI for solar was 19 years; it's now 2.5 years. Seriously. What the fuck? The arrays are more efficient, and they're down from like $3.84/W for shit-efficiency panels that degrade rapidly to $1.81/W for high-efficiency panels that degrade by less than 0.7% per year and are guaranteed to have above 80.7% efficiency 25 years into their lifespan--with god damn microinverters and advanced monitoring systems. When did this shit happen? I can generate 9,800kWh/year with optimal placement, 9,200kWh/year with simple placement, and thus about $1500 of electricity and $1700 of SRECs.
I thought Amazon was having trouble keeping up with rush 2-day shipping, so was trying to back it off. They tried building a new warehouse in Seattle, but they couldn't because they ran out of cranes--as in, there are no more cranes in the United States with which Amazon could build a warehouse. They have to wait before they can build new warehouses to satisfy all of this demand for 2-day shipping. Their current warehouses are at maximum efficient staff, and won't be able to deliver any additional volume of 2-day shipping orders simply by hiring more employees.
These NASA programs are expensive, bloated drains on the economy. They attempt to accelerate technological development by brute force, slowing down wealth creation and making the nation as a whole poorer.
I've suggested a Citizen's Dividend which, as a secondary effect, causes the wealth cycle to speed up: the expansion of niche markets and the creation of new markets occurs more rapidly, speeding up the creation of new jobs. It also has secondary effects such as freeing up the application of wealth to more quickly reduce labor employment in a particular production line, which sits at odds with its effect of reducing labor costs and thus delaying the implementation of new management tools and techniques (such as automation) until they become less expensive.
The whole thing is complex, but it should have a tendency to actually speed up movement through the wealth cycle, particularly in the area of creating jobs to replace those lost each time we find a way to more efficiently provide a good or service.
The growth of wealth in our nation reduces the proportional cost of things like NASA. As we become more efficient, the total buying power increases: the full income (not GDP) of every business and individual, in total, can buy more shit. Since NASA is funded by a portion of the total income, it becomes able to buy more and better components and crew for the same taxes: if NASA is 1% of our income, doubling our wealth doubles NASA's effective funding, even if inflation doesn't keep up (i.e. even if there are only 1.2 times as many dollars) (although inflation lagging behind tends to be bad for those with debt; conversely, it would encourage lower-interest loans, which... could also be bad, particularly for persons seeking mortgages, although those actually selling those houses are quite happy with a low-interest market).
It's not precisely a prerequisite; but deploying a Citizen's Dividend first would provide greater opportunities to run a program like NASA in the long run, that long run being a very short projection--less than ten years. The budgetary requirements of NASA would shrink, which would make the required budget easier to justify.
Aaaah, the "My buddies did it, and I'm not aware of anything bad happening" defense. How many of those 10th graders got pregnant? I'm sure there weren't any, none that you and your buddies are aware of anyway.
Considering my buddies were the cute young girls going after guys 5 years older than we were instead of having sex with me, yeah, I'm pretty sure they're unaware of any of them getting pregnant.
The fact of the matter is it happens, it's not tearing society apart from the seams, and we're pretty sure we'd have about 40% of everyone on the sex offender registry if we managed to enforce any but the most egregious cases (which are, typically, the abusive ones--and no, simply participating in someone's teenage adventure isn't abuse, just the same as them initiating it doesn't automatically make it not abuse; for that matter, doing the same with an adult doesn't automatically make it not abuse). Your moral compass may be spinning off its axis, but empirical evidence suggests it doesn't really matter.
That doesn't change the fact that you're a selfish prick.
I'm a pragmatist. I'm more interested in what is and is not harmful and what minimizes total human suffering than what makes me, personally, feel good about my moral standpoint. Unlike, say, the selfish prick who wants to unleash the Book of Schuler on anyone who disagrees with his ideals of what's in the Holy Writ.
your implication that 20 year olds having sex with teenagers isn't harmful to society strictly because it hasn't been discovered yet is a little more than slightly disturbing.
It happens, and I have plenty of friends who have stories of doing it when they were growing up. Lots of girls who were hooking up with college guys when they were in 10th grade. Doesn't seem to have caused the world to collapse.
Thump your bible harder. Maybe someone who actually cares will hear.
The entire passage written before that explained that a lot of people's criminal activities are harmless.
Did you know a guy in Virgina was shot in the heart by the SWAT team that invaded his house? They got a tip that he was having a poker game with his friends. Illegal gambling. $40 pot; not exactly high rollers here. The swat team kicked his door in, and one of them shot him due to an error in judgment in which they mis-evaluated him as a threat; he didn't even make a threatening gesture.
Your neighbor's drinking buddies playing poker for peanuts isn't harming your society. The busybody who called in that tip got that guy killed. Even putting that aside, he wasted police time chasing after a crime that doesn't harm society and would have gone undetected while the police notice things like smashed windows and brutalized women.
Now imagine you've got everyone's cars showing up at your house on the weekend, after they just hit the ATM. Same 6 people. Hmm. Looks like illegal gambling to me. We should issue a warrant and go investigate this...
Does that sound like something we actually need the police cracking down on? It's just a statistic to get their numbers up while doing nothing to ensure the peace or improve our society. It's a way to strike fear into the hearts of upstanding, productive citizens while not extending any actual protection to keep them from becoming the victims of crimes. While they're busy with that, what's happening with all the other crime they should be attending?
The real problem isn't the public nature of your data; it's the private nature of aggregate data.
Because you carry out your activities in public, any individual who legitimately wants information about you can, without violating any laws, personally keep track of your public activities. Without publication or any direct action, the person is not harassing you or whatnot. The things you do are completely public and not subject to privacy protections.
That, of course, implies someone is interested in you, personally, in the first place.
With aggregate data, we can put together lists of all people whose public functions follow a certain pattern. This, then, draws our attention to those people.
Most people don't realize the very criminal nature of human existence. A lot of folks have... mischief in their histories. Hanging in parks at night, casual adultery, illegal gambling between friends... hell, there's estimates that some 40%-70% of 20-year-olds have hooked up with underaged teens. These are all things that can put you in jail, and may or may not distress people in your community--some more than others, some not at all (nobody cares about your poker games in your basement with your drinking buddies). As it stands, these activities aren't actually harmful to society, or distressing at large.
That's why we have strict, constitutional controls for searches and seizure: if your criminal activities aren't drawing any attention, your criminal activities aren't harmful to society. The police rifling through your belongings and arresting you on bureaucratic technicalities *would* harm society at large, creating a constant state of paranoia and resentment among the population, along with costly economic and social disruption.
Aggregate public data collection and profiling similarly draws attention to people's behaviors, focusing legal scrutiny where it does not necessarily do the most good. As this scrutiny broadens, it necessarily dilutes the attention of legal enforcement from the important criminal activities which actually harm society. Persons whose activities are of no consequence are more frequently investigated and arrested, while persons whose quiet activities invoke a greater injury to their peers enjoy reduced law enforcement attention and a consequential lower risk for expanding their operations even further. Such aggregation could, as consequence, allow petty criminals to build and operate more substantial criminal networks with even less likelihood of police detection.
Many forget the police are not law enforcement officers, but peace officers. Their job is to keep the peace; they are not lawyers and not expected to know the law. This is because police detect crime by detecting its effects: injury, death, property loss, and, above all, distress among the population. This fits well with the explicit prohibition on police actively looking for crimes without first having a crime brought to their attention by the public nature of its activities.
Broad data collection and aggregation changes the public nature of people's activities. It distorts this function, leading to false positives and arrests of harmless members of society.
Most hiring managers prefer a less-qualified lower laborer to an overqualified one. The professional barista's next job is K-Mart; the engineer barista is quitting in 2 weeks when Ford offers him a job designing truck engines.
Displacing workers lowers costs, which creates markets. It has to happen slow enough to not kill the economy; ideally, it happens at such a rate that other markets are covering gaps of prior displacements at that time, so jobs get shuffled around. Karl Marx liked the ideal of not doing this--he wanted to keep the same amount of labor vested in every product, maximizing the value of each product--which would have us in an age where 1% of the population can afford shirts because they cost $4000 each, and we'd all be wearing rich peoples's cast-offs and hand-me-downs and thanking God that the fashionable style at court changes as often as it does.
But in the apprenticeship system, at least in union-strong states, companies don't hire trade labor directly; they go through the union and pay union rates.
Which would be bad because it pushes up labor costs, slowing economic growth. All growth of wealth--that's the wealth of nations, the wealth of the poor, the middle, and the rich--stems from reduction of labor costs. In the long run, this is the reduction of labor *time* invested; changing the price of labor has important effects in a narrow reach.
Reducing labor costs allows market effects (some fast, some decades-slow) to draw product prices downward. This places residual wealth in the pockets of consumers (typically, those who were not recently unemployed by reducing the amount of labor invested as a method to reduce labor costs), allowing more consumers to buy niche goods, or to buy new goods we just made up. This allows markets to expand to sell new goods and services, which requires invested labor, creating jobs. Cutting labor costs by reducing wages makes the overall turn-over faster; raising wages makes it slower; and we ultimately rely on cutting number of laborers. As such, we want lower labor costs which are high enough to support the labor market, since that will get displaced laborers re-hired quickly, and you do *NOT* want unemployed laborers piling up.
Raising labor costs encourages the displacement of laborers and discourages the creation of new jobs. Imagine the sandwich making machine costs $14/hr, the burger flipping machine costs $10/hr, and the fry-making machine costs $7/hr. If minimum wage is $15/hr (ignore the complexities of payroll taxes on wages), we replace all these laborers at once; if it's $8.25, the fry-runners go first, and the burger machine and sandwich machine have to come down in price before we start firing more people. That lets us take a 10% unemployment hit and have some time to find those people new jobs, rather than taking 50% unemployment all at once and having expensive laborers nobody wants to hire without good reason.
Businesses would benefit overall by increasing OJT, but they don't presently.
You can make the argument; and you'd have to consider how that compares to the benefit of exercising a high degree of power over their workers, cutting salaries and benefits, and reducing the individual business value of any specific employee.
I argue that training employees is much less risky for a business, and invests value in that employee. Retaining that employee is important. Because that employee has value to the employer, the employee has power; the employer faces expenses when trying to replace the employee, losing his value and needing to put that same value as outlay into creating a new employee (unless they stumble across an unemployed, well-trained professional wandering about). Businesses, thus, will prefer a market of labor saturation; and, in such a market, will save the outlay of expense in training non-skilled professionals to be skilled professionals.
That says nothing about taking bulk, off-the-shelf skilled labor and adding new skills by OJT. There is, at present, simply no way to avoid that if you want to maximize the value derived from a skilled laborer. You don't need to take a high school kid who's into computers and turn him into a skilled programmer, though; you tell that kid to come back when he's spent 4 years not making any sort of income and going through rigorous job training at a local college or technical trade school, if you still have a job for him then, and if there isn't a better candidate in the other 500 people filing their CV for a single position at that time.
That said, unless things change dramatically, I think support for college -- for those who would benefit from it -- needs to be maintained. You don't just learn random facts in college or a narrow trade -- if you do it right, you learn a lot about how to approach problems and grow up at the same time. Unless y
H1-B takes your job? You're an unemployed engineer and show up on the BLS stats. Take a job flipping burgers so you can make ends meet? You're now an employed fast food worker and do not show up on the BLS stats.
This is true in the general sense; however, to say H1-Bs push people to McDonalds is... fraudulent. I tried, really, but it's not a deception or a manipulation of facts; it's a blunt lie.
We have unemployment. We have burger flipper jobs. Creating more unemployment won't create more demand for burger flippers. You're not expanding the number of burger flipper jobs.
Basic labor expands linearly. That means making more wooden tables requires investing the same machines, fuel, materials, and laborers proportional to the production of existing tables. This is an overstatement, of course: machines, fuel, and materials are ultimately produced by labor at the most fundamental level; an industry which produces 100,000,000 tables and wishes to produce 200,000,000 tables must employ twice as much labor, or find a new way to make tables. That goes for supplying fast food, retail, and so forth.
There are non-linear tasks. One is information: tracking 10,000 documents is not 1/1000 of the effort of tracking 10,000,000 documents; expanding payroll, legal contracts, and invoicing by 1000 times will require more than 1000 times the effort to get right. At a point, it can't be done in less time: employ 10,000 times as many employees and you still have millions of times the communications needs to line everything up--a nigh-on-impossible task.
This is a specific case of the more general scarcity problem: if you can pull 100 cubic foot blocks out of the ground, you'll find the ability to scale mineral production is limited by access to mines. You can scale linearly as long as you have mines that all produce 100% anthracite blocks; but when demand increases such that you must supply 10,000,000 tons more coal per year than your mines provide, you open another mine which surrenders blocks of 50% anthracite and 50% rocks and dirt--for the same effort, making anthracite coal twice as expensive, since getting the same 100 cubic feet of anthracite requires twice as much effort. Since we can't work the existing mines any faster, you're going to have to pay us twice as much if you want that much coal that quickly.
The difference between linear and non-linear tasks becomes plain when you account for the Industrial Revolution (Mechanization) versus the Information Age (Computerization).
In Mechanization, linear-scaling labor jobs met demand by blunt labor, scaling because demand did not exceed linear supply and because the labor of spinning, dying, weaving, cutting, and sewing is the same for garment #1 as for garment #1,000,000,000,000 (farming the cotton will eventually run out of good land, and scale non-linearly). Massive reduction in labor caused a sharp collapse of employment, with nothing waiting in the wings.
Computerization cut off the bottleneck of information management. That opened up businesses to expand to meet demands well beyond what human information management could accomplish, tracking all the invoices and legal requirements and payroll concerns more easily. Costs to supply a broad array of services dropped; and demand for those services, already existing in the consumer base (everyone wanted a $5000 computer; nobody could afford it), drove consumers to buy all these new, cheap goods and services, creating an ever-expanding job market to absorb all the displaced clerks.
Just as Automation will be more like Mechanization--it will cut back on burger flipper jobs, but not create an equal number of machinist jobs--the replacement of higher-level jobs with H1-B visa jobs won't suddenly create a great and endless demand for burger flippers and cashiers.
It means the money, hardly from "sitting-around", is being invested into the market -- helping fund startup companies, investing in real-estate, providing capital for companies to invest in innovation, and whatever else may give a return.
It's traded in securities, providing no real economic benefit; instead, it's used to pull money of idiot players to money of smart players.
Hoarded money doesn't contribute to inflation, anyway; it's out of the buying power exercised in the market. A money hoard may be a good thing, when your economy is healthy--something nobody knows anything about, which is why I'm rewriting modern economic theory.
College level should be 100% free to citizens in the USA,
That's a great idea! As a business owner, this will help to move the responsibility of workforce creation off the business owner to the individual, allowing me to abuse my employees, reduce salaries, and strip benefits! The fact that there are so many unemployed programmers will make them easy minimum-wage workers!
Seriously, though, the belief that college loans or free college empowers the individual is one of the most successful lies ever sold to the world at large.
This organization would do what the AMA does -- limit the number of new entrants, lobby for laws to be passed that favor its members, and ensure professional standards. Low level tech work would be on an apprenticeship basis, which would allow people to learn from experienced folks rather than the hodgepodge of self-teaching, vendor certification, etc. High level engineers/architects would be professionals, with responsibilities similar to actual, real PEs.
That, and the immense boost of worker value and thus power, is the natural consequence of eliminating all government support for college education, leaving the individual to find a job. Without this, most individuals won't afford workforce development education--college--and so employers will experience severe pain and profit losses due to a dearth of skilled labor. They would, thus, gain a competitive advantage by hiring entrants (high school graduates) for cheap, paying for their training and education, transferring low-skill and time-consuming work from high-skill and expensive laborers to the new guy (low-skill work, by its nature, either can't cause any damage if mishandled or can be reviewed quickly by a high-skilled laborer before going into production), thus cutting costs while the laborer developed. The new high-skilled laborer would be hard to replace, and thus valuable.
The obvious implication is any business should, as a matter of eliminating worker power and driving down salaries and benefits, demand public support for college, either by free college or by loan programs. Loan programs put the employee under more desperate pressure, but also help drive up required salaries; free college relieves the employee from the constant beating stick of crushing, growing interest costs on deferred loans, but leaves you with a labor oversupply that still lets you toss out any employee who gets snippy, and reduces the pressure that makes them demand higher salaries even against their own desperate need for an employment of any sort. Which policy you want to implement to abuse the individual and prop up the power and profits of the business is a matter of strategic taste.
My understanding of economics actually makes this obvious.
The submitter says this is aggregate, not specific individual. That's the crux of the issue: if you evict a small enough percentage of laborers out of a job at once, and you keep production even, you only cut costs and thus eventually reduce prices as consequence (complex market dynamics drive prices down; some are fast, some are very slow). As prices come down, the remaining consumer base ends up with more residual wealth (money), which allows them to buy more stuff. This expands niche goods or creates demand for new goods, which require labor to manufacture. That labor demand brings in new jobs.
In total, due to Ricardo's explanation of comparative advantage, this effect eventually spreads all over: if we constantly outsource, the consumer base elsewhere expands, and the market for products and services increases e.g. in China; it being cheaper to manufacture certain goods or provide certain services in the American economic climate, China will outsource such things to America. In this way, each side expends less of its resource base to produce the same amount of shit, and thus becomes more wealthy.
The turn-over isn't instant, which is why shit like the Industrial Revolution and the upcoming automation crisis kill economies: you unemploy 50% of your population in under a year and you see what happens. Time is a big factor.
In hierarchy: We need a good number (4%-10%) of routinely-displaced workers (generally, underemployed poor people who frequently have too few working hours or spend swaths of time unemployed) to act as our moving workforce; we need a large number (80%+) of lower- to middle-class workers to act as our consumer base, creating demand; and we need a few (2%-10%) upper- to wealthy-class individuals who have high capital to divert to profitable business filling new demands and creating jobs to re-employ displaced workers.
You'll notice this hierarchy demands a stable consumer force, and also recognizes the wealthy who step in to create efficient production means to reclaim residual wealth in the consumer force's pockets as job creators. Coasting businesses need most to reduce employment; they are not so much job creators, although their natural expansion as their products become cheaper does reclaim or repurpose some of the labor they displace off production in the process. In saturated demand markets, these businesses don't expand; they only make their products cheaper, employing less labor to do so.
Yet psychology is a valuable field that underscores medicine, economics, business, stock prediction, poker, and so forth.
Reproducible results in psychology show that 4 months of cognitive therapy for the severely depressed produce results of 0 relapses in 24 months in 47% of cases, while continuous drug therapy for 24 months produces 0 relapses in 23% of patients, and a placebo for 24 months produces 8% success rate. The targeting of specific distorted thinking and the guided improvement of executive functions actually works twice as well as Xanax or Zoloft, which themselves only work about 3 times as well as simply suggesting to a patient that he has undergone treatment.
That indicates the psychological strategies have a large (5x) impact beyond the placebo effect--a conclusion we can reproduce simply enough by putting an experiment group on sugar pills and putting another on therapy, while keeping an untreated control group to monitor.
I'm sure you would argue that seeing the effect repeatedly, but not understanding the cause invoked by the specific experimental action, means no reproducible experimental results exist, since we can't say that each experimental action invokes the same physical responses and thus produces the same effect by the same cause. We can say that about chemistry by invoking quantum mechanics, too.
I’ve now spoken with three vouched sources who all have reported finding their information and last four digits of their credit card numbers in the leaked database. Also, it occurs to me that it’s been almost exactly 30 days since the original hack. Finally, all of the accounts created at Bugmenot.com for Ashleymadison.com prior to the original breach appear to be in the leaked data set as well. I’m sure there are millions of AshleyMadison users who wish it weren’t so, but there is every indication this dump is the real deal.
"Called out as fake! Here's a link showing it's real!"
So the authoritative text of a field is not legitimate? Are you next going to tell me the Oxford English Dictionary is not a legitimate source of definitions of words in the English language?
No legitimate climate scientist believes in climate change.
1820 hours are per year but not per person. A hunter would catch a prey which would feed many tribe members (depending on the animal's weight).
First off, they hunted in groups. One person didn't go out with a spear to fetch the tribe dinner.
Second, the 4.8 hours per person per day statistic is the current scientific conjecture. That's not "some people, when they worked, worked 4.8 hours per day"; that's "we believe each person put forth an effort of 4.8 hours of working time per day."
749K farmers don't work solo, they have other people working with/for them.
Try agricultural workers. 749,400 agricultural workers in the United States in 2012.
Let's take your numbers. Produces 9-22 hours per person per YEAR.
I'm not sure about your other numbers (citation needed)
Population of the US: 318.9 million (2014).
Exports seem to vary (31% of soy versus 62% of soy, depending on who you ask?).
There's production numbers. Looks like cotton and vegetables don't outweigh corn; the USDA estimates the US exports over 20% of its corn production, but Wikipedia estimates about 15%. USDA suggests 30% of wheat exported, while FAO suggests average grain export (wheat export) fluctuates between 52% and 63% per year. I just took the chart Google gave me on the first search.
Taking the low numbers, we can raise my estimates by a further 50%. Somewhere between 15 and 33 hours per person per year of working time invested in the production of food per year.
So we're not talking about each individual human working 1,815 fewer hours each year to feed itself; we're talking about each individual human working 1,800 fewer hours per each year to feed itself. I was off a little, I guess. Across 320 million humans in the US, that's only 576 billion hours per year saved; across the 1.2 billion in developed countries, it's 2.16 trillion working hours not spent on producing food.
The sheer power of my shrug at a rounding error can move the sun.
Yep. I did my own calculations and got 850kWh/month or about 10,000 kWh/year. I used satellite data and got 951kWh/month or 11,400kWh/year. I used the State's PVWatts program (which for an array less than 10kW, the state uses to confer solar energy credits without measuring generation) and got 9280kWh at an azimuth of 165 and a fixed angle of 54 from vertical, 9820kWh at an ideal azimuth of 180. The PVWatts calculation assumes 9% loss in system; the default is 14%, but I target a micro-inverter system and have absolutely no rooftop shading, so was able to eliminate or partly reduce various sources of loss.
Overall, my ROI is 2.5 years for a 7kW system at an initial price of $12,500. That includes the 30% unlimited Federal discount and the $1,000 MD grant, cutting the cost down below $8000. Installation will likely cost $250-$500 (8-16 hours of work for a $30/hr roofer). I can wire the panel up myself; however, I really want to rewire my main electrical panel, since the certified electrician who built and signed off on it... needs to be dumped into a well. I had 14 gauge wire hooked up to a major appliance on a 30 amp breaker (14ga is rated for 15A, 12ga for 30A--fire hazard), and all kinds of crap was just wired up wrong (electrical sockets and other major appliances wired to the dryer 220 breaker pair!). Hazards everywhere. I've seriously considered pulling the mains out, inserting it into a main electrical disconnect, and rewiring the panel from scratch. I'm no electrician, but this isn't much more complex than wiring a light socket up (a hell of a lot more safety issues, though, hence why you want a main power disconnect before you fuck around with it).
We recommend an installation that covers less than 100% of your electrical usage because, in most areas, there is little financial benefit to producing more power than you can consume.
Distribution fees, taxes, etc. I pay 11 cents per kWh; my total bill is 18.2 cents per kWh. For many people, electricity is 5 cents per kWh, and distribution is 3-8 cents. My power is 100% solar-wind; if it were cheap baseline power, I'd pay 8.9 cents per kWh, meaning over 40% of my electricity cost is distribution, taxes, and fees.
I'm replacing my gas furnace with an $800 air handler if I need air circulation. I'm installing a $4000 split system for actual heating--100% load capacity down to 15F, 80% down to -5F. That's cheaper to run, and runs on electricity; that will ensure I never cut below my electricity consumption, meaning I'll never send power back to the grid, so I'll never have to worry about if they're going to pay me distribution fees and taxes (they won't) for my surrendered electricity. ROI stays at 100% instead of dropping to 60%.
I'm still sealing drafts and installing insulation.
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Wind turbine generation is such shit. If you have a lot of constant, unending wind, it seems like a good idea; typically, solar outclasses it by far.
My analysis of solar has changed in the past month. I last looked half a decade or so ago, when the ROI for solar was 19 years; it's now 2.5 years. Seriously. What the fuck? The arrays are more efficient, and they're down from like $3.84/W for shit-efficiency panels that degrade rapidly to $1.81/W for high-efficiency panels that degrade by less than 0.7% per year and are guaranteed to have above 80.7% efficiency 25 years into their lifespan--with god damn microinverters and advanced monitoring systems. When did this shit happen? I can generate 9,800kWh/year with optimal placement, 9,200kWh/year with simple placement, and thus about $1500 of electricity and $1700 of SRECs.
The product has flaws and limitations, so he's taking it as a personal attack.
The whole corporate shareholder myth is bullshit, too.
I thought Amazon was having trouble keeping up with rush 2-day shipping, so was trying to back it off. They tried building a new warehouse in Seattle, but they couldn't because they ran out of cranes--as in, there are no more cranes in the United States with which Amazon could build a warehouse. They have to wait before they can build new warehouses to satisfy all of this demand for 2-day shipping. Their current warehouses are at maximum efficient staff, and won't be able to deliver any additional volume of 2-day shipping orders simply by hiring more employees.
These NASA programs are expensive, bloated drains on the economy. They attempt to accelerate technological development by brute force, slowing down wealth creation and making the nation as a whole poorer.
I've suggested a Citizen's Dividend which, as a secondary effect, causes the wealth cycle to speed up: the expansion of niche markets and the creation of new markets occurs more rapidly, speeding up the creation of new jobs. It also has secondary effects such as freeing up the application of wealth to more quickly reduce labor employment in a particular production line, which sits at odds with its effect of reducing labor costs and thus delaying the implementation of new management tools and techniques (such as automation) until they become less expensive.
The whole thing is complex, but it should have a tendency to actually speed up movement through the wealth cycle, particularly in the area of creating jobs to replace those lost each time we find a way to more efficiently provide a good or service.
The growth of wealth in our nation reduces the proportional cost of things like NASA. As we become more efficient, the total buying power increases: the full income (not GDP) of every business and individual, in total, can buy more shit. Since NASA is funded by a portion of the total income, it becomes able to buy more and better components and crew for the same taxes: if NASA is 1% of our income, doubling our wealth doubles NASA's effective funding, even if inflation doesn't keep up (i.e. even if there are only 1.2 times as many dollars) (although inflation lagging behind tends to be bad for those with debt; conversely, it would encourage lower-interest loans, which ... could also be bad, particularly for persons seeking mortgages, although those actually selling those houses are quite happy with a low-interest market).
It's not precisely a prerequisite; but deploying a Citizen's Dividend first would provide greater opportunities to run a program like NASA in the long run, that long run being a very short projection--less than ten years. The budgetary requirements of NASA would shrink, which would make the required budget easier to justify.
Aaaah, the "My buddies did it, and I'm not aware of anything bad happening" defense. How many of those 10th graders got pregnant? I'm sure there weren't any, none that you and your buddies are aware of anyway.
Considering my buddies were the cute young girls going after guys 5 years older than we were instead of having sex with me, yeah, I'm pretty sure they're unaware of any of them getting pregnant.
The fact of the matter is it happens, it's not tearing society apart from the seams, and we're pretty sure we'd have about 40% of everyone on the sex offender registry if we managed to enforce any but the most egregious cases (which are, typically, the abusive ones--and no, simply participating in someone's teenage adventure isn't abuse, just the same as them initiating it doesn't automatically make it not abuse; for that matter, doing the same with an adult doesn't automatically make it not abuse). Your moral compass may be spinning off its axis, but empirical evidence suggests it doesn't really matter.
That doesn't change the fact that you're a selfish prick.
I'm a pragmatist. I'm more interested in what is and is not harmful and what minimizes total human suffering than what makes me, personally, feel good about my moral standpoint. Unlike, say, the selfish prick who wants to unleash the Book of Schuler on anyone who disagrees with his ideals of what's in the Holy Writ.
How many people have no job and nobody who knows they exist? That shit gets missing persons reports.
I'm not sure how necrophilia does anything. Let's ask Alice Cooper.
Cannibalization seems like one of those things that draws attention, since you then have dead people with missing organs.
your implication that 20 year olds having sex with teenagers isn't harmful to society strictly because it hasn't been discovered yet is a little more than slightly disturbing.
It happens, and I have plenty of friends who have stories of doing it when they were growing up. Lots of girls who were hooking up with college guys when they were in 10th grade. Doesn't seem to have caused the world to collapse.
Thump your bible harder. Maybe someone who actually cares will hear.
The entire passage written before that explained that a lot of people's criminal activities are harmless.
Did you know a guy in Virgina was shot in the heart by the SWAT team that invaded his house? They got a tip that he was having a poker game with his friends. Illegal gambling. $40 pot; not exactly high rollers here. The swat team kicked his door in, and one of them shot him due to an error in judgment in which they mis-evaluated him as a threat; he didn't even make a threatening gesture.
Your neighbor's drinking buddies playing poker for peanuts isn't harming your society. The busybody who called in that tip got that guy killed. Even putting that aside, he wasted police time chasing after a crime that doesn't harm society and would have gone undetected while the police notice things like smashed windows and brutalized women.
Now imagine you've got everyone's cars showing up at your house on the weekend, after they just hit the ATM. Same 6 people. Hmm. Looks like illegal gambling to me. We should issue a warrant and go investigate this...
Does that sound like something we actually need the police cracking down on? It's just a statistic to get their numbers up while doing nothing to ensure the peace or improve our society. It's a way to strike fear into the hearts of upstanding, productive citizens while not extending any actual protection to keep them from becoming the victims of crimes. While they're busy with that, what's happening with all the other crime they should be attending?
The real problem isn't the public nature of your data; it's the private nature of aggregate data.
Because you carry out your activities in public, any individual who legitimately wants information about you can, without violating any laws, personally keep track of your public activities. Without publication or any direct action, the person is not harassing you or whatnot. The things you do are completely public and not subject to privacy protections.
That, of course, implies someone is interested in you, personally, in the first place.
With aggregate data, we can put together lists of all people whose public functions follow a certain pattern. This, then, draws our attention to those people.
Most people don't realize the very criminal nature of human existence. A lot of folks have... mischief in their histories. Hanging in parks at night, casual adultery, illegal gambling between friends... hell, there's estimates that some 40%-70% of 20-year-olds have hooked up with underaged teens. These are all things that can put you in jail, and may or may not distress people in your community--some more than others, some not at all (nobody cares about your poker games in your basement with your drinking buddies). As it stands, these activities aren't actually harmful to society, or distressing at large.
That's why we have strict, constitutional controls for searches and seizure: if your criminal activities aren't drawing any attention, your criminal activities aren't harmful to society. The police rifling through your belongings and arresting you on bureaucratic technicalities *would* harm society at large, creating a constant state of paranoia and resentment among the population, along with costly economic and social disruption.
Aggregate public data collection and profiling similarly draws attention to people's behaviors, focusing legal scrutiny where it does not necessarily do the most good. As this scrutiny broadens, it necessarily dilutes the attention of legal enforcement from the important criminal activities which actually harm society. Persons whose activities are of no consequence are more frequently investigated and arrested, while persons whose quiet activities invoke a greater injury to their peers enjoy reduced law enforcement attention and a consequential lower risk for expanding their operations even further. Such aggregation could, as consequence, allow petty criminals to build and operate more substantial criminal networks with even less likelihood of police detection.
Many forget the police are not law enforcement officers, but peace officers. Their job is to keep the peace; they are not lawyers and not expected to know the law. This is because police detect crime by detecting its effects: injury, death, property loss, and, above all, distress among the population. This fits well with the explicit prohibition on police actively looking for crimes without first having a crime brought to their attention by the public nature of its activities.
Broad data collection and aggregation changes the public nature of people's activities. It distorts this function, leading to false positives and arrests of harmless members of society.
What happens if that's actually vastly more expensive than the alternative?
Most hiring managers prefer a less-qualified lower laborer to an overqualified one. The professional barista's next job is K-Mart; the engineer barista is quitting in 2 weeks when Ford offers him a job designing truck engines.
Displacing workers lowers costs, which creates markets. It has to happen slow enough to not kill the economy; ideally, it happens at such a rate that other markets are covering gaps of prior displacements at that time, so jobs get shuffled around. Karl Marx liked the ideal of not doing this--he wanted to keep the same amount of labor vested in every product, maximizing the value of each product--which would have us in an age where 1% of the population can afford shirts because they cost $4000 each, and we'd all be wearing rich peoples's cast-offs and hand-me-downs and thanking God that the fashionable style at court changes as often as it does.
I was more indicating the misconception that other jobs are just out there waiting for you to step down into.
But in the apprenticeship system, at least in union-strong states, companies don't hire trade labor directly; they go through the union and pay union rates.
Which would be bad because it pushes up labor costs, slowing economic growth. All growth of wealth--that's the wealth of nations, the wealth of the poor, the middle, and the rich--stems from reduction of labor costs. In the long run, this is the reduction of labor *time* invested; changing the price of labor has important effects in a narrow reach.
Reducing labor costs allows market effects (some fast, some decades-slow) to draw product prices downward. This places residual wealth in the pockets of consumers (typically, those who were not recently unemployed by reducing the amount of labor invested as a method to reduce labor costs), allowing more consumers to buy niche goods, or to buy new goods we just made up. This allows markets to expand to sell new goods and services, which requires invested labor, creating jobs. Cutting labor costs by reducing wages makes the overall turn-over faster; raising wages makes it slower; and we ultimately rely on cutting number of laborers. As such, we want lower labor costs which are high enough to support the labor market, since that will get displaced laborers re-hired quickly, and you do *NOT* want unemployed laborers piling up.
Raising labor costs encourages the displacement of laborers and discourages the creation of new jobs. Imagine the sandwich making machine costs $14/hr, the burger flipping machine costs $10/hr, and the fry-making machine costs $7/hr. If minimum wage is $15/hr (ignore the complexities of payroll taxes on wages), we replace all these laborers at once; if it's $8.25, the fry-runners go first, and the burger machine and sandwich machine have to come down in price before we start firing more people. That lets us take a 10% unemployment hit and have some time to find those people new jobs, rather than taking 50% unemployment all at once and having expensive laborers nobody wants to hire without good reason.
Businesses would benefit overall by increasing OJT, but they don't presently.
You can make the argument; and you'd have to consider how that compares to the benefit of exercising a high degree of power over their workers, cutting salaries and benefits, and reducing the individual business value of any specific employee.
I argue that training employees is much less risky for a business, and invests value in that employee. Retaining that employee is important. Because that employee has value to the employer, the employee has power; the employer faces expenses when trying to replace the employee, losing his value and needing to put that same value as outlay into creating a new employee (unless they stumble across an unemployed, well-trained professional wandering about). Businesses, thus, will prefer a market of labor saturation; and, in such a market, will save the outlay of expense in training non-skilled professionals to be skilled professionals.
That says nothing about taking bulk, off-the-shelf skilled labor and adding new skills by OJT. There is, at present, simply no way to avoid that if you want to maximize the value derived from a skilled laborer. You don't need to take a high school kid who's into computers and turn him into a skilled programmer, though; you tell that kid to come back when he's spent 4 years not making any sort of income and going through rigorous job training at a local college or technical trade school, if you still have a job for him then, and if there isn't a better candidate in the other 500 people filing their CV for a single position at that time.
That said, unless things change dramatically, I think support for college -- for those who would benefit from it -- needs to be maintained. You don't just learn random facts in college or a narrow trade -- if you do it right, you learn a lot about how to approach problems and grow up at the same time. Unless y
H1-B takes your job? You're an unemployed engineer and show up on the BLS stats. Take a job flipping burgers so you can make ends meet? You're now an employed fast food worker and do not show up on the BLS stats.
This is true in the general sense; however, to say H1-Bs push people to McDonalds is ... fraudulent. I tried, really, but it's not a deception or a manipulation of facts; it's a blunt lie.
We have unemployment. We have burger flipper jobs. Creating more unemployment won't create more demand for burger flippers. You're not expanding the number of burger flipper jobs.
Basic labor expands linearly. That means making more wooden tables requires investing the same machines, fuel, materials, and laborers proportional to the production of existing tables. This is an overstatement, of course: machines, fuel, and materials are ultimately produced by labor at the most fundamental level; an industry which produces 100,000,000 tables and wishes to produce 200,000,000 tables must employ twice as much labor, or find a new way to make tables. That goes for supplying fast food, retail, and so forth.
There are non-linear tasks. One is information: tracking 10,000 documents is not 1/1000 of the effort of tracking 10,000,000 documents; expanding payroll, legal contracts, and invoicing by 1000 times will require more than 1000 times the effort to get right. At a point, it can't be done in less time: employ 10,000 times as many employees and you still have millions of times the communications needs to line everything up--a nigh-on-impossible task.
This is a specific case of the more general scarcity problem: if you can pull 100 cubic foot blocks out of the ground, you'll find the ability to scale mineral production is limited by access to mines. You can scale linearly as long as you have mines that all produce 100% anthracite blocks; but when demand increases such that you must supply 10,000,000 tons more coal per year than your mines provide, you open another mine which surrenders blocks of 50% anthracite and 50% rocks and dirt--for the same effort, making anthracite coal twice as expensive, since getting the same 100 cubic feet of anthracite requires twice as much effort. Since we can't work the existing mines any faster, you're going to have to pay us twice as much if you want that much coal that quickly.
The difference between linear and non-linear tasks becomes plain when you account for the Industrial Revolution (Mechanization) versus the Information Age (Computerization).
In Mechanization, linear-scaling labor jobs met demand by blunt labor, scaling because demand did not exceed linear supply and because the labor of spinning, dying, weaving, cutting, and sewing is the same for garment #1 as for garment #1,000,000,000,000 (farming the cotton will eventually run out of good land, and scale non-linearly). Massive reduction in labor caused a sharp collapse of employment, with nothing waiting in the wings.
Computerization cut off the bottleneck of information management. That opened up businesses to expand to meet demands well beyond what human information management could accomplish, tracking all the invoices and legal requirements and payroll concerns more easily. Costs to supply a broad array of services dropped; and demand for those services, already existing in the consumer base (everyone wanted a $5000 computer; nobody could afford it), drove consumers to buy all these new, cheap goods and services, creating an ever-expanding job market to absorb all the displaced clerks.
Just as Automation will be more like Mechanization--it will cut back on burger flipper jobs, but not create an equal number of machinist jobs--the replacement of higher-level jobs with H1-B visa jobs won't suddenly create a great and endless demand for burger flippers and cashiers.
It means the money, hardly from "sitting-around", is being invested into the market -- helping fund startup companies, investing in real-estate, providing capital for companies to invest in innovation, and whatever else may give a return.
It's traded in securities, providing no real economic benefit; instead, it's used to pull money of idiot players to money of smart players.
Hoarded money doesn't contribute to inflation, anyway; it's out of the buying power exercised in the market. A money hoard may be a good thing, when your economy is healthy--something nobody knows anything about, which is why I'm rewriting modern economic theory.
College level should be 100% free to citizens in the USA,
That's a great idea! As a business owner, this will help to move the responsibility of workforce creation off the business owner to the individual, allowing me to abuse my employees, reduce salaries, and strip benefits! The fact that there are so many unemployed programmers will make them easy minimum-wage workers!
Seriously, though, the belief that college loans or free college empowers the individual is one of the most successful lies ever sold to the world at large.
This organization would do what the AMA does -- limit the number of new entrants, lobby for laws to be passed that favor its members, and ensure professional standards. Low level tech work would be on an apprenticeship basis, which would allow people to learn from experienced folks rather than the hodgepodge of self-teaching, vendor certification, etc. High level engineers/architects would be professionals, with responsibilities similar to actual, real PEs.
That, and the immense boost of worker value and thus power, is the natural consequence of eliminating all government support for college education, leaving the individual to find a job. Without this, most individuals won't afford workforce development education--college--and so employers will experience severe pain and profit losses due to a dearth of skilled labor. They would, thus, gain a competitive advantage by hiring entrants (high school graduates) for cheap, paying for their training and education, transferring low-skill and time-consuming work from high-skill and expensive laborers to the new guy (low-skill work, by its nature, either can't cause any damage if mishandled or can be reviewed quickly by a high-skilled laborer before going into production), thus cutting costs while the laborer developed. The new high-skilled laborer would be hard to replace, and thus valuable.
The obvious implication is any business should, as a matter of eliminating worker power and driving down salaries and benefits, demand public support for college, either by free college or by loan programs. Loan programs put the employee under more desperate pressure, but also help drive up required salaries; free college relieves the employee from the constant beating stick of crushing, growing interest costs on deferred loans, but leaves you with a labor oversupply that still lets you toss out any employee who gets snippy, and reduces the pressure that makes them demand higher salaries even against their own desperate need for an employment of any sort. Which policy you want to implement to abuse the individual and prop up the power and profits of the business is a matter of strategic taste.
My understanding of economics actually makes this obvious.
The submitter says this is aggregate, not specific individual. That's the crux of the issue: if you evict a small enough percentage of laborers out of a job at once, and you keep production even, you only cut costs and thus eventually reduce prices as consequence (complex market dynamics drive prices down; some are fast, some are very slow). As prices come down, the remaining consumer base ends up with more residual wealth (money), which allows them to buy more stuff. This expands niche goods or creates demand for new goods, which require labor to manufacture. That labor demand brings in new jobs.
In total, due to Ricardo's explanation of comparative advantage, this effect eventually spreads all over: if we constantly outsource, the consumer base elsewhere expands, and the market for products and services increases e.g. in China; it being cheaper to manufacture certain goods or provide certain services in the American economic climate, China will outsource such things to America. In this way, each side expends less of its resource base to produce the same amount of shit, and thus becomes more wealthy.
The turn-over isn't instant, which is why shit like the Industrial Revolution and the upcoming automation crisis kill economies: you unemploy 50% of your population in under a year and you see what happens. Time is a big factor.
In hierarchy: We need a good number (4%-10%) of routinely-displaced workers (generally, underemployed poor people who frequently have too few working hours or spend swaths of time unemployed) to act as our moving workforce; we need a large number (80%+) of lower- to middle-class workers to act as our consumer base, creating demand; and we need a few (2%-10%) upper- to wealthy-class individuals who have high capital to divert to profitable business filling new demands and creating jobs to re-employ displaced workers.
You'll notice this hierarchy demands a stable consumer force, and also recognizes the wealthy who step in to create efficient production means to reclaim residual wealth in the consumer force's pockets as job creators. Coasting businesses need most to reduce employment; they are not so much job creators, although their natural expansion as their products become cheaper does reclaim or repurpose some of the labor they displace off production in the process. In saturated demand markets, these businesses don't expand; they only make their products cheaper, employing less labor to do so.
Yet psychology is a valuable field that underscores medicine, economics, business, stock prediction, poker, and so forth.
Reproducible results in psychology show that 4 months of cognitive therapy for the severely depressed produce results of 0 relapses in 24 months in 47% of cases, while continuous drug therapy for 24 months produces 0 relapses in 23% of patients, and a placebo for 24 months produces 8% success rate. The targeting of specific distorted thinking and the guided improvement of executive functions actually works twice as well as Xanax or Zoloft, which themselves only work about 3 times as well as simply suggesting to a patient that he has undergone treatment.
That indicates the psychological strategies have a large (5x) impact beyond the placebo effect--a conclusion we can reproduce simply enough by putting an experiment group on sugar pills and putting another on therapy, while keeping an untreated control group to monitor.
I'm sure you would argue that seeing the effect repeatedly, but not understanding the cause invoked by the specific experimental action, means no reproducible experimental results exist, since we can't say that each experimental action invokes the same physical responses and thus produces the same effect by the same cause. We can say that about chemistry by invoking quantum mechanics, too.
You can say that about physics, medicine, or climate science as well.
I’ve now spoken with three vouched sources who all have reported finding their information and last four digits of their credit card numbers in the leaked database. Also, it occurs to me that it’s been almost exactly 30 days since the original hack. Finally, all of the accounts created at Bugmenot.com for Ashleymadison.com prior to the original breach appear to be in the leaked data set as well. I’m sure there are millions of AshleyMadison users who wish it weren’t so, but there is every indication this dump is the real deal.
"Called out as fake! Here's a link showing it's real!"
Well I freethink you should keep your damn mouth shut, so I'm going to freethink cut your throat.
You're all deluded.
So the authoritative text of a field is not legitimate? Are you next going to tell me the Oxford English Dictionary is not a legitimate source of definitions of words in the English language?
No legitimate climate scientist believes in climate change.
1820 hours are per year but not per person. A hunter would catch a prey which would feed many tribe members (depending on the animal's weight).
First off, they hunted in groups. One person didn't go out with a spear to fetch the tribe dinner.
Second, the 4.8 hours per person per day statistic is the current scientific conjecture. That's not "some people, when they worked, worked 4.8 hours per day"; that's "we believe each person put forth an effort of 4.8 hours of working time per day."
749K farmers don't work solo, they have other people working with/for them.
Try agricultural workers. 749,400 agricultural workers in the United States in 2012.
You raise a point, and I've done more digging. Farmers, ranchers, and other agricultural managers...
Let's take your numbers. Produces 9-22 hours per person per YEAR.
I'm not sure about your other numbers (citation needed)
Population of the US: 318.9 million (2014).
Exports seem to vary (31% of soy versus 62% of soy, depending on who you ask?).
There's production numbers. Looks like cotton and vegetables don't outweigh corn; the USDA estimates the US exports over 20% of its corn production, but Wikipedia estimates about 15%. USDA suggests 30% of wheat exported, while FAO suggests average grain export (wheat export) fluctuates between 52% and 63% per year. I just took the chart Google gave me on the first search.
Taking the low numbers, we can raise my estimates by a further 50%. Somewhere between 15 and 33 hours per person per year of working time invested in the production of food per year.
So we're not talking about each individual human working 1,815 fewer hours each year to feed itself; we're talking about each individual human working 1,800 fewer hours per each year to feed itself. I was off a little, I guess. Across 320 million humans in the US, that's only 576 billion hours per year saved; across the 1.2 billion in developed countries, it's 2.16 trillion working hours not spent on producing food.
The sheer power of my shrug at a rounding error can move the sun.
Yep. I did my own calculations and got 850kWh/month or about 10,000 kWh/year. I used satellite data and got 951kWh/month or 11,400kWh/year. I used the State's PVWatts program (which for an array less than 10kW, the state uses to confer solar energy credits without measuring generation) and got 9280kWh at an azimuth of 165 and a fixed angle of 54 from vertical, 9820kWh at an ideal azimuth of 180. The PVWatts calculation assumes 9% loss in system; the default is 14%, but I target a micro-inverter system and have absolutely no rooftop shading, so was able to eliminate or partly reduce various sources of loss.
Overall, my ROI is 2.5 years for a 7kW system at an initial price of $12,500. That includes the 30% unlimited Federal discount and the $1,000 MD grant, cutting the cost down below $8000. Installation will likely cost $250-$500 (8-16 hours of work for a $30/hr roofer). I can wire the panel up myself; however, I really want to rewire my main electrical panel, since the certified electrician who built and signed off on it ... needs to be dumped into a well. I had 14 gauge wire hooked up to a major appliance on a 30 amp breaker (14ga is rated for 15A, 12ga for 30A--fire hazard), and all kinds of crap was just wired up wrong (electrical sockets and other major appliances wired to the dryer 220 breaker pair!). Hazards everywhere. I've seriously considered pulling the mains out, inserting it into a main electrical disconnect, and rewiring the panel from scratch. I'm no electrician, but this isn't much more complex than wiring a light socket up (a hell of a lot more safety issues, though, hence why you want a main power disconnect before you fuck around with it).
We recommend an installation that covers less than 100% of your electrical usage because, in most areas, there is little financial benefit to producing more power than you can consume.
Distribution fees, taxes, etc. I pay 11 cents per kWh; my total bill is 18.2 cents per kWh. For many people, electricity is 5 cents per kWh, and distribution is 3-8 cents. My power is 100% solar-wind; if it were cheap baseline power, I'd pay 8.9 cents per kWh, meaning over 40% of my electricity cost is distribution, taxes, and fees.
I'm replacing my gas furnace with an $800 air handler if I need air circulation. I'm installing a $4000 split system for actual heating--100% load capacity down to 15F, 80% down to -5F. That's cheaper to run, and runs on electricity; that will ensure I never cut below my electricity consumption, meaning I'll never send power back to the grid, so I'll never have to worry about if they're going to pay me distribution fees and taxes (they won't) for my surrendered electricity. ROI stays at 100% instead of dropping to 60%.
I'm still sealing drafts and installing insulation.