Elemental boron, boron oxide, boric acid, borates, and many organoboron compounds are nontoxic to humans and animals (with toxicity similar to that of table salt)
Phosphorus I'll just claim is an essential mineral for life, which is why we put trisodium phosphate in cereal (although if you eat four boxes of it at once, you start nearing the toxicity threshold).
I developed a system to allow non-trackable cellular phones, in which you could receive a phone call without revealing your location (once answered, you revealed your location); nobody will go for it, though. It only requires like a few bytes of broadcast packet exchange (goes up to a theoretical maximum of 48KB if every single phone in the world is ringing all at once on a global scope), and has a 0.00002% chance of ringing your phone when you're not actually receiving a call. I mitigated this with geographical limits, although they don't help for a non-answer (if you don't answer, it tries a regional, then a global ring, meaning your initial chance of a false ring is like 0.000000000000000000000000013% for any phone call made).
Ionic compound. Sodium chloride also doesn't use shit like Arsenide in production. Indium Gallium Arsenide is an alloy, like pewter (92% tin, 8% lead).
Indium-Gallium-Arsenide: toxic heavy metals combined with toxic metalloids. Holy fuck. If ROHS doesn't lift their ban on lead after this, they've got their heads up their asses. Mercury is a little worse.
Assertion. Also would that mean that you favor a command economy (ala Soviet-style top-down economic control?) as long as we were good at identifying and promoting the right people?
You're missing it. His assertion was more along the lines that we should give more money to the rich so they can culture our economy. Trickle-down economics. It's a misguided ideal.
17% of total income isn't that far off from the total the federal government spends mailing checks to people today (Social Security, Medi*, federal pensions, welfare, etc)
In 2013, the Fed spent like $1.3 trillion on social security, unemployment, HUD assistance, and other welfares; Fed and State spent $1.62 trillion in total. Social Security was about $880 billion, with retirement benefits somewhat lower than that. I also leave medicare/medicaid alone, for stated reasons.
though the deficit is unsustainable.
Irrelevant. I pay out what I take in: the 17% tax takes trillions of dollars and hands out those exact trillions. I move the deficit out elsewhere in the government.
So you're really saying we need to pay the elderly less and pay everyone else more
Sort of, but not exactly.
If you save up your entire dividend and assume 20 years of retirement, you find you can pay yourself an annuity which, when added to the dividend, meets or exceeds Social Security. Further, Social Security pays more to the rich: a poverty-line individual making $12,000/year would get $757/mo; while someone like me, pulling a $75k salary, gets about $2100/mo (even starting at $12k and moving up over a decade).
My system still leaves the poor with less in retirement; however, it pays them the difference throughout their life: they have less because they spend their retirement money along the way, instead of stuffing it in a bank account or IRA. Since they can spend it throughout their lives, they can survive to retirement in the first place. If they just save it, they have the same or more.
For people with no savings, Social Security + Medicare barely makes ends meet
I did my computations based on what's profitable--on what would make me a billionaire if I started selling housing and food to people with no income. We're talking Warren Buffet under my heel. Our markets would change around some in response to a stable Citizen's Dividend, because all of the market risks become lower.
Further, people with no ability to save--those who are unemployed or underemployed, those on Welfare benefits because they only work 20 hours and make minimum wage (20*8.5*52 ~= $9000/year), those who have long swaths of unemployment because they're dirty and poor and nobody wants to hire a dirty, poor negro--get even less and less in retirement, as I pointed out above. They are least-able to save, and are least supported in retirement, even though their need is greatest.
Since the wealth of our economy increases over time, the buying power of 17% will increase as well. Over time, the benefit will increase; I don't predict a need to adjust the percentage down, but there is a risk that it will become a source of hyper-inflation as we enter a golden age of extreme wealth growth and 17% suddenly becomes equivalent to giving everyone a $40k salary today (so couples, families, are making $80k sitting at home watching cable all day).
Currently, 17% gets everyone about $7k/year, which is enough for us to make a damn good profit selling them apartments and food. To put this into perspective: even accounting only for the 600,000 unemployed and assuming a 1% profit margin, landlords alone would make $18 million per month, $216 million per year, of profit renting apartment space to the unemployed (currently homeless). I did my computations on 2013 numbers; yet the landlords made 3% profit margin even in the recession. Their profit margins were 3% in 2009, 4.5% in 2010, 5.33% in 2011, 7% in 2012, 10.5% in 2013, and 13% in 2014. My computations essentially assume about a 10.5% profit margin--$180 million per month, $2.16 billion per year, of profit. If we account for the 4.8 million HUD vouchers (these people can suddenly afford apartments?), we could project $1.62 billion per month and $19.44 billion per year of profit; but that's getting out of hand, and making a lot
I'd say 90% of the racism I've seen online has pretty obviously been kids
I've seen kids throw racism around as a joke, trolling, just being obnoxious. Some of them are pretty vicious attention whores, but they're approximately equivalent to Leopold.
Real, deep-seated racism? That comes from self-important assholes, the kinds of people who grew up already, have their own kids, and treat their children like the negro slaves they wish they owned. It comes from border conflict territories like Israel and Palestine, where everyone cheerfully acknowledges that they would definitely strangle those dirty arabs (the other arabs, not themselves) on the other side of the fence if they could just get a hand around one of their throats, even their children--especially their children. It comes from political opinions about rich white bankers or English-impaired Mexicans taking all our money and jobs.
Have you ever explained your utopian idea?
It somewhat requires a good grasp of economics; due to difficulty with this, I developed a unifying economic theory that's relatively simple to conceive of. For convenience's sake, I'll give a brief explanation of that first; it's enough for anyone determined enough to work out all the nuances, although I find the basic premises (like most truths) are offensive to most people.
My basic theory of wealth is simple: Economic growth requires a cycle of unemployment. Every cost is human labor. When you make huge bulk purchase agreements, your suppliers go to their suppliers, who go to their suppliers, all negotiating similar bulk agreements, all squeezing down their per-unit profit margins to gain a massive sale, bringing everything at every level closer to the human cost. In competition, your competitors can undercut your prices only if they can produce at lower cost, which means involving less labor in the entire production chain. In supply-side economics, the first units of a product--the so-called "low hanging fruit"--require less labor per unit than the later units, which eventually limits the supply (you can grow more oranges by using land in colder climates, but you need greenhouses and fuel and you produce less, thus more labor goes into every orange, and they become expensive, thus limiting supply of $2/lb oranges).
If you start with 1,000 laborers making a product with a one-year lifespan, each laborer making $10/hr, hand-making the product in 8 hours, you invest $80 in that product. Build an assembly line, and your efficiency doubles: 500 laborers make the same number of units per day; you invest 4 labor-hours per unit, and the product costs $40. That means you can make the same amount of profit selling it $40 cheaper; you can put $40 per unit per consumer per year back into every consumer's pocket, at the expense of firing 500 laborers--unemployment.
Now that every consumer has $40 per unit of residual wealth to spend (money is not wealth, but is a measure of wealth), you can sell them each any combination of products and services totaling 4 labor-hours for each unit they buy of the now-cheaper product. If they buy 4 of these widgets per year, for example, they all have $160 more in their pockets than they did before--you can sell them 16 more labor-hours of work.
Because of this, you can come up with new products and services to sell to consumers, who can now afford to buy them. Obviously, you will need labor. The amount of labor is, theoretically, exactly the amount you displaced: those 500 workers will eventually find jobs again. EVENTUALLY. Not immediately. Once they do, consumers will spend exactly what they did before--the same percentage of their income (or, really, of the total income in the economy)--and they will buy more and better goods. They'll have more, for the same amount of money; they'll have more wealth (like I said: money isn't wealth; suddenly, $160 has more buying power).
I initially read this as a "bastardization of free speech" and thought he was going to fix Reddit's oppression problem; instead, he's upping the ante on shaping the discussions.
I figured out a while ago why fiat currencies are superior. Interesting: if you find a new way to mine, say, copper, such that you require 1/10 the human labor? Copper value drops like a rock. Unstable inflation. The employees, however, then become 10 times as expensive, and so your society derives no wealth from improving efficiency in copper mining if it works on a copper-backed currency..
Uhhhhhh. Carl June has been working on treatments for all types of cancer in which he genetically modifies T-Cells by reading a genetic marker out of a biopted cancer cell, installing a new antigen into a T-cell's DNA code, and releasing it back into the patient.
Essentially, the cancer cells produce certain proteins differently: the protein on your cell surface for transporting a certain ion or signalling certain RNA messages may be structured in thousands of different variations and still carry out its function, and these proteins are constructed based entirely on the DNA sequence of the related gene (DNA is copied to RNA, which runs through cellular machinery to assemble proteins). Dr. June is working on a lot of standardized treatments, but has done plenty of work with a procedure to biopsy the current cancer and insert code to detect that specific genetic marker up-front.
This is the same way your body detects someone's kidney and attacks it--organ transplant rejection. All Dr. June does is specifically tune your immune system to recognize a precise variation in genetics, one which is normally close enough to pass (like a relative's organ) while remaining genetically distinct. It's like giving someone a perfect replica Rolex watch, where the magnifier in the date window of a Rolex is 1.5x with a tolerance between 1.49x and 1.51x, and then providing them a measuring device that can specifically detect a 1.487x-1.489x magnifier: the most expert appraiser might miss such a minute deviation in this counterfeit piece, but this specialized tool exposes it. Proteins on cancer (or close-genetic-match) cells may have such minute variation as to interface perfectly with all of your immune detection systems, so you tweak your immune detection systems to have an allergic reaction to one particular minor variation while still recognizing and allowing the correct version.
Also, the time scale involved from finding a new genetic marker to developing a treatment for that patient with the new genetic marker would likely be decades. The FDA requires about 8 to 10 years of testing before it approves a new treatment
It's a procedure, and would be approved as a procedure.
If it thousands of dollars, that means at least 2000USD.
"Thousands" could mean 1.2 thousands, or 0.3 thousands.
So what is the limit at which to which point I can steal?
The point at which you have legal standing. Below a certain threshold, the courts find that no sentencing is appropriate, and actually throw the case out as a waste of court time.
Electricity doesn't work that way. If it's a standard outlet at standard voltage, it has to operate within standard specifications or else there will be NEC problems. Further, the outlet will be useless if it doesn't--for all purposes, including the purpose for which it was installed.
Tinkering with my electricity involves coming onto my property and hooking up to my shit. My property is not for public use, so approaching and standing near the power socket is trespassing; I don't want people hanging around my yard, peeking into all my shit, tromping my gardens, etc.
Tinkering with the electricity in a public space involves little more than being somewhere you're expected to be. All these people will be in the mall, on a train, or whatnot; the only nitpick is that they plug in to the socket. We've now moved from "I don't want people using my electricity because I don't want them flocking like birds on my porch and in my back yard" to "I don't want people using my electricity because I don't like it." The cost to charge smart phones is almost zero; if one million people charged their smart phones every day, the cost would be $10,000*. The cost of labeling, monitoring, and enforcement is higher, so this is a risk you accept, avoiding all other risks (costs of enforcement, bad PR, etc.) or converting it to an opportunity (good PR).
* Charging an iPhone 6 costs 47 cents per year. You might get 10% charge from one particular casual source--the Starbucks or train outlet--and even then, 5 out of 7 days per year. That's about 3 cents per year per person.
does that mean i can walk into a government building and grab some paper or just start using the photocopiers?
The cost of photocopies and copy paper is, of course, higher. Likewise, the expectation of people crowding around the copiers is lower, and drawing crowds by providing public copying may impede regular business. You can, in fact, walk into a government building and drink from the public water fountain, use the toilet, and so forth; the cost for the water is, again, low, compared to the cost of people showing up to snag a $5 ream of printer paper (charging an iPhone 6 costs 47 cents per year on average; water costs $1.50 per 1000 gallons, or 0.225 cents per toilet flush).
This is why pens are, typically, only considered property to merchants selling pens: people will walk out of your business with one of your pens all the god damn time, and it's cheapest to just keep a hundred Bic pens on the desk and not worry about it. Many businesses have their business name and trade printed on their pens so the lost supply becomes free advertising (converting a risk--casual loss of pens--to an opportunity). Other businesses--particularly banks--chain the pen to their desk (if you haven't seen this, I'm being absolutely serious).
In hindsight, people often still don't understand what they did wrong. Hell, the best explanation people have for communism failing is "human nature doesn't work that way"; I have more advanced theories than state-of-the-art, and am fully aware of the conditions in which communism is correct (that is, better than everything else, and thus viable), and so can plainly see why it was premature, is still premature, and will possibly always be premature as an economic system.
Hilariously, I'm still trying to process the boundary condition; there's a potential for capitalism to fail spectacularly after reaching those conditions, possibly even before communism is a viable system, which suggests a null outcome (i.e. that it's not technically possible to reach the conditions of communism viability) is better. There's also an oscillation problem: communism can never be the perfect system, because resource scarcity can localize (e.g. you can build a dyson sphere and enter a post-scarcity period; you can colonize another star system and export parts to build a new dyson sphere; but, in transit, you will have resource scarcity and, thus, your post-scarcity, communist system fails), which causes interaction problems (as soon as you attach a post-scarcity system to a scarcity-driven system, you no longer have post-scarcity).
Maybe our successors will build a new, post-scarcity system, after scarcity is gone. I can't imagine it being anything but a perfect utopia: by definition, everyone has everything. That's it, really. You can only create that system when people have so much wealth that they run out of things they want or need before they run out of wealth to spend; thus, transferring that wealth to others who have less wealth is not harmful. The big problem? People will... want... more free time, and so if 25% of your wealth goes unspent, you'll cut your 40 hour work week to 30 hours (automatic wealth redistribution: spreads employment without decreasing actual wealth, since the top 25% of your money can't be spent and is thus valuleless). Then they will... want... more social status, more mates, more friends, more attention, more political power--a scarce resource, suddenly one money cannot buy because all these people have more money than they could ever want. Goods and services are now free (total, perfect communism); power, favors, and assassination are the currency of the day (dystopia).
Does this tell me capitalism collapses at the boundary, or that it smoothly slides into market-driven communism (by way of people just cutting back their hours, spreading work out until we all work 1 hour per week for more money than we could ever dream of spending)? If communism arises in that way, it is a natural process, needing no government intervention--and impossible to create; if it doesn't arise in that way, then the eventual pressure of infinite wealth growth will destroy civilization, as capitalism will stagger and sputter out before communism is viable; and, more likely, if people's greed is infinite, they will always find things to purchase with their money--things other than more free time.
Think about all that. Our best economic minds have a simple explanation: "Communism goes against human labor, depleting the labor pool, and so it collapses." They have no victory conditions, and do not conjecture that such conditions are either impossible or eventual; they give a wholly non-economic explanation. The ones who try, who talk about economic factors (primarily scarcity), don't have any explanation for how these things arise and how they change over time--things which are blatantly obvious, so much so that economists openly comment on them while not realizing what they're looking at.
Do you really think people are so brilliant in hindsight? A man cannot see what he stares straight at when his head is stuck up his ass. After all of this, they'll either dissolve the union and conclude such unions ar
That only makes sense if you have full employment and your economy is starving.
Among many arguments, people claim a Citizen's Dividend (or any basic income--or any WELFARE) will cause a disincentive to work. My primary argument is simple: that effect only occurs (bounds: conversion from pan-handling, theft, and prostitution to simply not working is considered "not occurring"; I'm asserting net effect), to any significant degree, at benefit levels which will consequentially cause hyperinflation and economic collapse anyway. My secondary argument is that any percentage of willful-unemployment below the general unemployment level is just shifting jobs to other people who want jobs, and so has no impact.
The full discussion is actually large and fascinating, but irrelevant here. Similar--out to the complexities of the further discussion--is the impact of retirement: if there are already unemployed, making retirees into unemployed (seeking employment) just increases your unemployment rate, putting strain on your economy.
The USA is a single political unit with central fiscal management authority, behaving almost as one giant state; the EU is an authority over a bunch of sovereign states, with little authority over state budgeting. Most government services in America come from the Federal Government (25% taxation, plus 6.2% social security; I pay 2% of my income to the State I live in); in EU, your taxes go to your country, with minimum outlay going to fund the EU as a central government itself, and minimal authority coming down from the EU.
Currencies like the US dollar work because, while there may be fifty states that use the USD, there is a single issuing central bank and a federal government that holds core constitutional fiscal powers.
I don't believe such unions are optimal; however, there are a lot of behavioral considerations involved. For example: the unification does prevent stupid shit like California's broken economy destroying Texas's flourishing economy (Texas produces $1.4 for every $1 it spends, or some such; Cali and Rhode Island, of course, are essentially failed economic states, like Greece). On the other, those of us who aren't living in economic shitholes would be better off on our own--if there were no North American Union, and each state were fully independent. In truth, neighbors would absorb states like Rhode Island; California and such would change economic behavior to survive, or fragment into smaller states and consolidate in the same way the United States has. The delineations would be smaller, naturally growing to the smallest viable size (the Union is an unnatural political agreement, not a natural survival behavior).
My Citizen's Dividend plan is more viable--completely viable--on the United States as a whole, whereas a non-Union political landscape (50 individual states) may have some states capable of implementing an independent policy, others incapable. Centralized fiscal policy--notably, taxation and citizenship--across a fairly-stable broad economy (as opposed to across the globe, taxing independent states by a central world bank) makes it possible to increase mobility: in my policy, I cannot give the Dividend to anyone but natural-born, resident, American citizens (a much-diminished legacy system would cover families and immigrants); you can move across the United States like that, but the same policy would be necessary if it were Maryland and Delaware, and thus you couldn't leave either state without relinquishing your monthly stipend.
Advantages and disadvantages to broad-union politics and economies. The balance is shifting; I believe the United States was a mistake, but in later years the Union is becoming the better alternative than a disassociated North American landscape. A single world-government would still be terribly wrong; as suggested in many scifi stories, any collection of civilizations spanning across planets with enough resources (wealth) to engage freely in interplanetary trade and tourism may find that the unit of "a planet", "a planet and its moons", or "a solar system" is the correct size of an economic unit. The management resources may, on the other hand, prove impossible: four separate 100-million-population entities may take far less each to manage than 1/4 of the same landscape as a single 400-million-population entity, as the amount of information moving within the unit grows faster than linearly (two people have one interaction; three have three; four have six; etc.).
Had Germany stayed with the Deutsche Mark, they would have priced themselves out.
Had Greece stayed out of the Euro, they would now export cheaply, becoming more attractive than other players. Trade advantage would make everyone more wealthy--Greece would be down and climbing back up, while everyone else would be spending less money and leaving residual wealth in consumer pockets, which new markets could target.
If that was true, then why are they not only refusing to pay what they owe, but they are demanding even more money?
You have a $100/mo surplus, but $150/mo in loans. You take an additional loan structured to cost you $25/mo, but to bankroll enough money that you can pay $175/mo. You use some of that money to invest in other things (analogy: dishwasher uses 1/7 of the water that handwashing uses, but costs $1000; could save you $50/mo, if you could actually save up any money...), reducing your costs, increasing your surpluses. You divert the additional surplus to paying off high-dollar loans.
Slashdot Mirror
A quick Wikipedia
Elemental boron, boron oxide, boric acid, borates, and many organoboron compounds are nontoxic to humans and animals (with toxicity similar to that of table salt)
Phosphorus I'll just claim is an essential mineral for life, which is why we put trisodium phosphate in cereal (although if you eat four boxes of it at once, you start nearing the toxicity threshold).
I developed a system to allow non-trackable cellular phones, in which you could receive a phone call without revealing your location (once answered, you revealed your location); nobody will go for it, though. It only requires like a few bytes of broadcast packet exchange (goes up to a theoretical maximum of 48KB if every single phone in the world is ringing all at once on a global scope), and has a 0.00002% chance of ringing your phone when you're not actually receiving a call. I mitigated this with geographical limits, although they don't help for a non-answer (if you don't answer, it tries a regional, then a global ring, meaning your initial chance of a false ring is like 0.000000000000000000000000013% for any phone call made).
Trivial shit.
Ionic compound. Sodium chloride also doesn't use shit like Arsenide in production. Indium Gallium Arsenide is an alloy, like pewter (92% tin, 8% lead).
Silicon-on-Silicon CMOS: non-toxic.
SOD-CMOS: non-toxic.
Indium-Gallium-Arsenide: toxic heavy metals combined with toxic metalloids. Holy fuck. If ROHS doesn't lift their ban on lead after this, they've got their heads up their asses. Mercury is a little worse.
Assertion. Also would that mean that you favor a command economy (ala Soviet-style top-down economic control?) as long as we were good at identifying and promoting the right people?
You're missing it. His assertion was more along the lines that we should give more money to the rich so they can culture our economy. Trickle-down economics. It's a misguided ideal.
17% of total income isn't that far off from the total the federal government spends mailing checks to people today (Social Security, Medi*, federal pensions, welfare, etc)
In 2013, the Fed spent like $1.3 trillion on social security, unemployment, HUD assistance, and other welfares; Fed and State spent $1.62 trillion in total. Social Security was about $880 billion, with retirement benefits somewhat lower than that. I also leave medicare/medicaid alone, for stated reasons.
though the deficit is unsustainable.
Irrelevant. I pay out what I take in: the 17% tax takes trillions of dollars and hands out those exact trillions. I move the deficit out elsewhere in the government.
So you're really saying we need to pay the elderly less and pay everyone else more
Sort of, but not exactly.
If you save up your entire dividend and assume 20 years of retirement, you find you can pay yourself an annuity which, when added to the dividend, meets or exceeds Social Security. Further, Social Security pays more to the rich: a poverty-line individual making $12,000/year would get $757/mo; while someone like me, pulling a $75k salary, gets about $2100/mo (even starting at $12k and moving up over a decade).
My system still leaves the poor with less in retirement; however, it pays them the difference throughout their life: they have less because they spend their retirement money along the way, instead of stuffing it in a bank account or IRA. Since they can spend it throughout their lives, they can survive to retirement in the first place. If they just save it, they have the same or more.
For people with no savings, Social Security + Medicare barely makes ends meet
I did my computations based on what's profitable--on what would make me a billionaire if I started selling housing and food to people with no income. We're talking Warren Buffet under my heel. Our markets would change around some in response to a stable Citizen's Dividend, because all of the market risks become lower.
Further, people with no ability to save--those who are unemployed or underemployed, those on Welfare benefits because they only work 20 hours and make minimum wage (20*8.5*52 ~= $9000/year), those who have long swaths of unemployment because they're dirty and poor and nobody wants to hire a dirty, poor negro--get even less and less in retirement, as I pointed out above. They are least-able to save, and are least supported in retirement, even though their need is greatest.
Since the wealth of our economy increases over time, the buying power of 17% will increase as well. Over time, the benefit will increase; I don't predict a need to adjust the percentage down, but there is a risk that it will become a source of hyper-inflation as we enter a golden age of extreme wealth growth and 17% suddenly becomes equivalent to giving everyone a $40k salary today (so couples, families, are making $80k sitting at home watching cable all day).
Currently, 17% gets everyone about $7k/year, which is enough for us to make a damn good profit selling them apartments and food. To put this into perspective: even accounting only for the 600,000 unemployed and assuming a 1% profit margin, landlords alone would make $18 million per month, $216 million per year, of profit renting apartment space to the unemployed (currently homeless). I did my computations on 2013 numbers; yet the landlords made 3% profit margin even in the recession. Their profit margins were 3% in 2009, 4.5% in 2010, 5.33% in 2011, 7% in 2012, 10.5% in 2013, and 13% in 2014. My computations essentially assume about a 10.5% profit margin--$180 million per month, $2.16 billion per year, of profit. If we account for the 4.8 million HUD vouchers (these people can suddenly afford apartments?), we could project $1.62 billion per month and $19.44 billion per year of profit; but that's getting out of hand, and making a lot
I'd say 90% of the racism I've seen online has pretty obviously been kids
I've seen kids throw racism around as a joke, trolling, just being obnoxious. Some of them are pretty vicious attention whores, but they're approximately equivalent to Leopold.
Real, deep-seated racism? That comes from self-important assholes, the kinds of people who grew up already, have their own kids, and treat their children like the negro slaves they wish they owned. It comes from border conflict territories like Israel and Palestine, where everyone cheerfully acknowledges that they would definitely strangle those dirty arabs (the other arabs, not themselves) on the other side of the fence if they could just get a hand around one of their throats, even their children--especially their children. It comes from political opinions about rich white bankers or English-impaired Mexicans taking all our money and jobs.
Have you ever explained your utopian idea?
It somewhat requires a good grasp of economics; due to difficulty with this, I developed a unifying economic theory that's relatively simple to conceive of. For convenience's sake, I'll give a brief explanation of that first; it's enough for anyone determined enough to work out all the nuances, although I find the basic premises (like most truths) are offensive to most people.
My basic theory of wealth is simple: Economic growth requires a cycle of unemployment. Every cost is human labor. When you make huge bulk purchase agreements, your suppliers go to their suppliers, who go to their suppliers, all negotiating similar bulk agreements, all squeezing down their per-unit profit margins to gain a massive sale, bringing everything at every level closer to the human cost. In competition, your competitors can undercut your prices only if they can produce at lower cost, which means involving less labor in the entire production chain. In supply-side economics, the first units of a product--the so-called "low hanging fruit"--require less labor per unit than the later units, which eventually limits the supply (you can grow more oranges by using land in colder climates, but you need greenhouses and fuel and you produce less, thus more labor goes into every orange, and they become expensive, thus limiting supply of $2/lb oranges).
If you start with 1,000 laborers making a product with a one-year lifespan, each laborer making $10/hr, hand-making the product in 8 hours, you invest $80 in that product. Build an assembly line, and your efficiency doubles: 500 laborers make the same number of units per day; you invest 4 labor-hours per unit, and the product costs $40. That means you can make the same amount of profit selling it $40 cheaper; you can put $40 per unit per consumer per year back into every consumer's pocket, at the expense of firing 500 laborers--unemployment.
Now that every consumer has $40 per unit of residual wealth to spend (money is not wealth, but is a measure of wealth), you can sell them each any combination of products and services totaling 4 labor-hours for each unit they buy of the now-cheaper product. If they buy 4 of these widgets per year, for example, they all have $160 more in their pockets than they did before--you can sell them 16 more labor-hours of work.
Because of this, you can come up with new products and services to sell to consumers, who can now afford to buy them. Obviously, you will need labor. The amount of labor is, theoretically, exactly the amount you displaced: those 500 workers will eventually find jobs again. EVENTUALLY. Not immediately. Once they do, consumers will spend exactly what they did before--the same percentage of their income (or, really, of the total income in the economy)--and they will buy more and better goods. They'll have more, for the same amount of money; they'll have more wealth (like I said: money isn't wealth; suddenly, $160 has more buying power).
This explains all kinds of shit. Competition, su
I initially read this as a "bastardization of free speech" and thought he was going to fix Reddit's oppression problem; instead, he's upping the ante on shaping the discussions.
You severely overestimate adults if you think racists aren't the grown-ups in the group.
What orders? No humans to give orders.
"Ideal Human Nature" would result in nobody having initiation impulse to do anything.
I figured out a while ago why fiat currencies are superior. Interesting: if you find a new way to mine, say, copper, such that you require 1/10 the human labor? Copper value drops like a rock. Unstable inflation. The employees, however, then become 10 times as expensive, and so your society derives no wealth from improving efficiency in copper mining if it works on a copper-backed currency..
Uhhhhhh. Carl June has been working on treatments for all types of cancer in which he genetically modifies T-Cells by reading a genetic marker out of a biopted cancer cell, installing a new antigen into a T-cell's DNA code, and releasing it back into the patient.
Essentially, the cancer cells produce certain proteins differently: the protein on your cell surface for transporting a certain ion or signalling certain RNA messages may be structured in thousands of different variations and still carry out its function, and these proteins are constructed based entirely on the DNA sequence of the related gene (DNA is copied to RNA, which runs through cellular machinery to assemble proteins). Dr. June is working on a lot of standardized treatments, but has done plenty of work with a procedure to biopsy the current cancer and insert code to detect that specific genetic marker up-front.
This is the same way your body detects someone's kidney and attacks it--organ transplant rejection. All Dr. June does is specifically tune your immune system to recognize a precise variation in genetics, one which is normally close enough to pass (like a relative's organ) while remaining genetically distinct. It's like giving someone a perfect replica Rolex watch, where the magnifier in the date window of a Rolex is 1.5x with a tolerance between 1.49x and 1.51x, and then providing them a measuring device that can specifically detect a 1.487x-1.489x magnifier: the most expert appraiser might miss such a minute deviation in this counterfeit piece, but this specialized tool exposes it. Proteins on cancer (or close-genetic-match) cells may have such minute variation as to interface perfectly with all of your immune detection systems, so you tweak your immune detection systems to have an allergic reaction to one particular minor variation while still recognizing and allowing the correct version.
Also, the time scale involved from finding a new genetic marker to developing a treatment for that patient with the new genetic marker would likely be decades. The FDA requires about 8 to 10 years of testing before it approves a new treatment
It's a procedure, and would be approved as a procedure.
If it thousands of dollars, that means at least 2000USD.
"Thousands" could mean 1.2 thousands, or 0.3 thousands.
So what is the limit at which to which point I can steal?
The point at which you have legal standing. Below a certain threshold, the courts find that no sentencing is appropriate, and actually throw the case out as a waste of court time.
Electricity doesn't work that way. If it's a standard outlet at standard voltage, it has to operate within standard specifications or else there will be NEC problems. Further, the outlet will be useless if it doesn't--for all purposes, including the purpose for which it was installed.
especially as the bloke was clearly being a wanker
Was he?
Tinkering with my electricity involves coming onto my property and hooking up to my shit. My property is not for public use, so approaching and standing near the power socket is trespassing; I don't want people hanging around my yard, peeking into all my shit, tromping my gardens, etc.
Tinkering with the electricity in a public space involves little more than being somewhere you're expected to be. All these people will be in the mall, on a train, or whatnot; the only nitpick is that they plug in to the socket. We've now moved from "I don't want people using my electricity because I don't want them flocking like birds on my porch and in my back yard" to "I don't want people using my electricity because I don't like it." The cost to charge smart phones is almost zero; if one million people charged their smart phones every day, the cost would be $10,000*. The cost of labeling, monitoring, and enforcement is higher, so this is a risk you accept, avoiding all other risks (costs of enforcement, bad PR, etc.) or converting it to an opportunity (good PR).
* Charging an iPhone 6 costs 47 cents per year. You might get 10% charge from one particular casual source--the Starbucks or train outlet--and even then, 5 out of 7 days per year. That's about 3 cents per year per person.
does that mean i can walk into a government building and grab some paper or just start using the photocopiers?
The cost of photocopies and copy paper is, of course, higher. Likewise, the expectation of people crowding around the copiers is lower, and drawing crowds by providing public copying may impede regular business. You can, in fact, walk into a government building and drink from the public water fountain, use the toilet, and so forth; the cost for the water is, again, low, compared to the cost of people showing up to snag a $5 ream of printer paper (charging an iPhone 6 costs 47 cents per year on average; water costs $1.50 per 1000 gallons, or 0.225 cents per toilet flush).
This is why pens are, typically, only considered property to merchants selling pens: people will walk out of your business with one of your pens all the god damn time, and it's cheapest to just keep a hundred Bic pens on the desk and not worry about it. Many businesses have their business name and trade printed on their pens so the lost supply becomes free advertising (converting a risk--casual loss of pens--to an opportunity). Other businesses--particularly banks--chain the pen to their desk (if you haven't seen this, I'm being absolutely serious).
It might be 3 pennies in the course of a year of keeping one phone charged.
In hindsight, people often still don't understand what they did wrong. Hell, the best explanation people have for communism failing is "human nature doesn't work that way"; I have more advanced theories than state-of-the-art, and am fully aware of the conditions in which communism is correct (that is, better than everything else, and thus viable), and so can plainly see why it was premature, is still premature, and will possibly always be premature as an economic system.
Hilariously, I'm still trying to process the boundary condition; there's a potential for capitalism to fail spectacularly after reaching those conditions, possibly even before communism is a viable system, which suggests a null outcome (i.e. that it's not technically possible to reach the conditions of communism viability) is better. There's also an oscillation problem: communism can never be the perfect system, because resource scarcity can localize (e.g. you can build a dyson sphere and enter a post-scarcity period; you can colonize another star system and export parts to build a new dyson sphere; but, in transit, you will have resource scarcity and, thus, your post-scarcity, communist system fails), which causes interaction problems (as soon as you attach a post-scarcity system to a scarcity-driven system, you no longer have post-scarcity).
Maybe our successors will build a new, post-scarcity system, after scarcity is gone. I can't imagine it being anything but a perfect utopia: by definition, everyone has everything. That's it, really. You can only create that system when people have so much wealth that they run out of things they want or need before they run out of wealth to spend; thus, transferring that wealth to others who have less wealth is not harmful. The big problem? People will ... want ... more free time, and so if 25% of your wealth goes unspent, you'll cut your 40 hour work week to 30 hours (automatic wealth redistribution: spreads employment without decreasing actual wealth, since the top 25% of your money can't be spent and is thus valuleless). Then they will ... want ... more social status, more mates, more friends, more attention, more political power--a scarce resource, suddenly one money cannot buy because all these people have more money than they could ever want. Goods and services are now free (total, perfect communism); power, favors, and assassination are the currency of the day (dystopia).
Does this tell me capitalism collapses at the boundary, or that it smoothly slides into market-driven communism (by way of people just cutting back their hours, spreading work out until we all work 1 hour per week for more money than we could ever dream of spending)? If communism arises in that way, it is a natural process, needing no government intervention--and impossible to create; if it doesn't arise in that way, then the eventual pressure of infinite wealth growth will destroy civilization, as capitalism will stagger and sputter out before communism is viable; and, more likely, if people's greed is infinite, they will always find things to purchase with their money--things other than more free time.
Think about all that. Our best economic minds have a simple explanation: "Communism goes against human labor, depleting the labor pool, and so it collapses." They have no victory conditions, and do not conjecture that such conditions are either impossible or eventual; they give a wholly non-economic explanation. The ones who try, who talk about economic factors (primarily scarcity), don't have any explanation for how these things arise and how they change over time--things which are blatantly obvious, so much so that economists openly comment on them while not realizing what they're looking at.
Do you really think people are so brilliant in hindsight? A man cannot see what he stares straight at when his head is stuck up his ass. After all of this, they'll either dissolve the union and conclude such unions ar
That only makes sense if you have full employment and your economy is starving.
Among many arguments, people claim a Citizen's Dividend (or any basic income--or any WELFARE) will cause a disincentive to work. My primary argument is simple: that effect only occurs (bounds: conversion from pan-handling, theft, and prostitution to simply not working is considered "not occurring"; I'm asserting net effect), to any significant degree, at benefit levels which will consequentially cause hyperinflation and economic collapse anyway. My secondary argument is that any percentage of willful-unemployment below the general unemployment level is just shifting jobs to other people who want jobs, and so has no impact.
The full discussion is actually large and fascinating, but irrelevant here. Similar--out to the complexities of the further discussion--is the impact of retirement: if there are already unemployed, making retirees into unemployed (seeking employment) just increases your unemployment rate, putting strain on your economy.
The USA is a single political unit with central fiscal management authority, behaving almost as one giant state; the EU is an authority over a bunch of sovereign states, with little authority over state budgeting. Most government services in America come from the Federal Government (25% taxation, plus 6.2% social security; I pay 2% of my income to the State I live in); in EU, your taxes go to your country, with minimum outlay going to fund the EU as a central government itself, and minimal authority coming down from the EU.
Currencies like the US dollar work because, while there may be fifty states that use the USD, there is a single issuing central bank and a federal government that holds core constitutional fiscal powers.
I don't believe such unions are optimal; however, there are a lot of behavioral considerations involved. For example: the unification does prevent stupid shit like California's broken economy destroying Texas's flourishing economy (Texas produces $1.4 for every $1 it spends, or some such; Cali and Rhode Island, of course, are essentially failed economic states, like Greece). On the other, those of us who aren't living in economic shitholes would be better off on our own--if there were no North American Union, and each state were fully independent. In truth, neighbors would absorb states like Rhode Island; California and such would change economic behavior to survive, or fragment into smaller states and consolidate in the same way the United States has. The delineations would be smaller, naturally growing to the smallest viable size (the Union is an unnatural political agreement, not a natural survival behavior).
My Citizen's Dividend plan is more viable--completely viable--on the United States as a whole, whereas a non-Union political landscape (50 individual states) may have some states capable of implementing an independent policy, others incapable. Centralized fiscal policy--notably, taxation and citizenship--across a fairly-stable broad economy (as opposed to across the globe, taxing independent states by a central world bank) makes it possible to increase mobility: in my policy, I cannot give the Dividend to anyone but natural-born, resident, American citizens (a much-diminished legacy system would cover families and immigrants); you can move across the United States like that, but the same policy would be necessary if it were Maryland and Delaware, and thus you couldn't leave either state without relinquishing your monthly stipend.
Advantages and disadvantages to broad-union politics and economies. The balance is shifting; I believe the United States was a mistake, but in later years the Union is becoming the better alternative than a disassociated North American landscape. A single world-government would still be terribly wrong; as suggested in many scifi stories, any collection of civilizations spanning across planets with enough resources (wealth) to engage freely in interplanetary trade and tourism may find that the unit of "a planet", "a planet and its moons", or "a solar system" is the correct size of an economic unit. The management resources may, on the other hand, prove impossible: four separate 100-million-population entities may take far less each to manage than 1/4 of the same landscape as a single 400-million-population entity, as the amount of information moving within the unit grows faster than linearly (two people have one interaction; three have three; four have six; etc.).
Had Germany stayed with the Deutsche Mark, they would have priced themselves out.
Had Greece stayed out of the Euro, they would now export cheaply, becoming more attractive than other players. Trade advantage would make everyone more wealthy--Greece would be down and climbing back up, while everyone else would be spending less money and leaving residual wealth in consumer pockets, which new markets could target.
If that was true, then why are they not only refusing to pay what they owe, but they are demanding even more money?
You have a $100/mo surplus, but $150/mo in loans. You take an additional loan structured to cost you $25/mo, but to bankroll enough money that you can pay $175/mo. You use some of that money to invest in other things (analogy: dishwasher uses 1/7 of the water that handwashing uses, but costs $1000; could save you $50/mo, if you could actually save up any money...), reducing your costs, increasing your surpluses. You divert the additional surplus to paying off high-dollar loans.
1. They haven't raised pension age: Would be positive for the economy.
[...]
1. Reduced benifits: Has a stong negative effect on the economy.
Raising pension age *is* a reduction in benefits.