I look at net operating profits. Gross margins are always huge: a Wendy's franchise makes 50% on a hamburger, but keeps 8% of all of its revenue before taxes (net operating profit). Gross margins look at the cost of your sandwich maker, the marginal cost of your gas and your grill, the cost of the burger bun and patties, and so forth; net operating profits necessarily also lose the cost of the cashier, of marketing, of general utilities, of paying workers labor time to wipe down tables and take out trash, of taking care of the accounting and tax reporting, of legal services, of management, and so forth.
As you can imagine, anyone who makes arguments about cost of products and profits based around gross margins is deceptive at best, stupid at worst. We routinely see people arguing that Comcast makes something like an 80% profit margin on Internet service and thus is rolling in cash by overcharging immensely, so you may want to keep your eyes open for those sort.
Comcast is making 13% NOP now. Their running average used to be 11.8% over 5 years. 8% is about reasonable; above that starts going into the high-profit territory. Even many automakers and medical companies, swinging 40% profits and 25% losses from year to year, tend to average under 12%.
Microsoft and Apple sustain a constant 20%+ year-to-year profit margin.
It's ludicrous. Franklin D. Roosevelt said shareholders were entitled to a fair and reasonable profit from their enterprises. Does 20% sound fair and reasonable to you? WalMart makes under 3%.
I say we make the Corporate Income Tax Rate 25% and run a sigmoid based on NOP margin. WalMart can pay 13% for all I care; Apple and Microsoft can see a 48% tax rate on all their profits. It'll top at 50%, so feel free to try; but we all know you'd already be taking 2,000% net profit margins if you could get away with it. Comcast would be exposed to a 36% tax rate, as it was before the TCJA.
We'd have to adjust the rules about AMT and about carrying losses backwards and forwards. It's not impossible; it raises a bunch of questions which require answers, however, and only corporate tax experts will recognize those answers as trivial and obvious (and even then they'll contest that taxes are very complex and not trivial--forgetting that the exercise of taxes is different than the determination of tax policies).
It's not that. Everyone employs overseas labor to do that.
Apple is marketing to people with more money than brains, as they say in certain industries. You give them 20 cents on every dollar while the next company over sells an equivalent product but keeps 10 cents on every dollar. Why would you not buy the next company's product, which is a few hundred dollars cheaper?
Nailed it. The market cap is the market price per share times outstanding shares. Imagine a sell-off of all those shares, with everybody trying to cash out. The share price would plummet. It only holds when someone else tries to buy half the shares at once because they want to buy the business (someone trying to buy in, but people aren't rushing to cash out).
It's sitting. It's not only not assets, but it's meaningless. Meanwhile, the company is making and selling things--you know, production--which of course draws revenue, and we measure that production in revenue dollars, hence GDP. They could have a trillion-dollar market cap and a thirty-billion-dollar revenue stream.
Overtime is 150% of your total compensation, including benefits costs. If you're only paying 1.5x hourly wage, you're committing wage theft and are liable for back pay.
Cutting hours and keeping minimum wage set to an annual wage (raising the hourly wage as part-time hours fall) is a way to reduce job availability. It's one way to increase unemployment, and is useful if you manage to drive the economy into a hyperinflation state where you have a labor shortage.
I've been trying to push policy to effectively cause -12% unemployment, which would be economically destructive and require making consumers poorer: you ensure a strong consumer base can buy, they can buy way more than we can supply with our labor force, everyone is too wealthy, nobody can find workers, and you put a stop to that before employers start doubling wages and prices by inflicting a price increase relative to wages.
You stop that madness by dragging unemployment back up to 3% or 5%, while driving working hours to 28 per week (7 hour days, 4 day weeks). People are still about as wealthy as they started, with the poorest being a good bit better off (higher wages, more stable employment, better welfare services).
It's not the kind of thing you just do because you think we should work less. You have to figure out how you're going to siphon off the wealth gains from productivity into free time instead of additional consumption. I had to solve the problem backwards: I figured out how to improve our economic efficiency, but caused a huge productivity spike (on paper), and needed a countermeasure.
You're right to be skeptical, but you have the reasoning wrong: small businesses will be fine, in as much as our economy will be fine.
The premise behind the need for basic income is flawed.
It goes around the idea that efficiency improvements means taking away the jobs that are needed by people. We hear this every 40-50 years or so, When there are some major changes to the workforce.
That's the common argument, yes; and it's ludicrous.
I proposed a Universal Dividend--similar to a Basic Income, but not paying "enough to live", instead just a fair share by taking a percent of all income as a FICA tax and distributing it evenly. The American Citizen's Dividend is modeled on a 12.5% (1/8) FICA, redistributed flat among all adults, and manages to act as an effective tax cut at all levels.
That's difficult to explain, largely because it's a huge amount of math and quite counter-intuitive. The short version is we have an inefficient social insurance system, and I reworked it on an efficient model with the Dividend as a foundation. Social Security's Retirement and Disability benefits are paid in total with the Dividend (i.e. a recipient of OASDI gets the same from the three benefits in total, rather than additional on top of what OASDI pays now); while other means-tested welfare includes the Dividend as part of your income, thus reducing the amount of other welfare paid (because people are less-poor).
The slightly-longer version involves walking through the various income groups, their FICA burden, and the percent of the benefit which is represented by the FICA. If you get $6,000 and you pay $6,000 or more into FICA, we illustrate the "cost" of the benefit as $6k less; if you pay $4,000, then we illustrate the "cost" of the benefit as $4k less. That $2k that you receive in excess of your FICA paid essentially is represented by $2k somebody else paid in excess of the Dividend received, and that symmetrical number represents the "cost".
When you add it all up, I restructured $1.1 trillion of Federal spending into $2.0 trillion, with about $1.2 trillion going back to the same pockets from which it was taken--overall, $1.1 trillion becomes $0.8 trillion, or thereabouts. The Dividend itself only represent a $300 billion expense itself, in those terms, and somehow comes out with a more-efficient fiscal structure.
So... not a Basic Income; it's a social insurance against structural change: everybody pays an even share and receives an equal share.
This means if we become 10% wealthier (purchasing power income over time per adult) as a whole and you become 10% wealthier, you keep it; if you become 100% wealthier, you only become 87.5% wealthier due to the Dividend's FICA; if you become 5% wealthier, you end up paying 1/8 of that 5% and getting 1/8 of 10% (you come out with an extra 1/16); and if you lost your job, you are receiving 1/8 of everything. That FICA is an insurance premium against missing out or, worse, being the sacrifice to obtain progress.
That's the rationale between a Universal Dividend: it makes our social insurances efficient; it protects the losers from structural change without taking ever-more from the winners and forcing them to gain little to no benefit; and it has a huge pile of downstream effect that amount to bailing out collapsed local economies and rebuilding towns like Detroit, Blackwater, Flint, and Baltimore to middle-class, able to support a decent average local wage.
In other words: it's a zero-deficit-spending economic stimulus, perfectly targeted even to micro-recessions (single household losing income), with its greatest impact wherever poverty is most concentrated. It starts fixing recessions before they become recessions--or, worse, depressions, as we saw in the 2008 Depression (2008 was the first year since the Great Depression in which the United States per-capita income was not higher than the per-capita income of every preceding year in history--and you call that a
What happens when you don't have your wallet, social security card, or birth certificate? Do you just walk into the MVA and declare you're Joe Schmidt, address 777 Poppyseed Lane, and walk out with a photo ID?
Maybe you could go to several and get 25 different photo IDs under 25 different names.
Probably, yes. That's the microeconomics. The macroeconomics has seen this again and again for thousands of years, and we all know structural change brings shifts in employment yet we keep finding more jobs instead of fewer; it's not always the same people filling those jobs.
Can't change the database if you can validate the ballots from data collected by public observers under high-probability integrity guarantees. There are attacks against things like Military ballots et al (which arrive by mail and are processed through mail rooms and the Military post office), which we can handle probabilistically as well, although with higher risk of collusion even between parties; those ballots make up less of our total votes and, besides, I could design a similar voting process to document and disclose a secure election in military bases, ships, and deployments as well.
The last, of course, are general local absentee and mail-in ballots, and we're back to reducing the risk by requiring high collusion and isolating to a subset of ballots.
In the end, you want as many ballots independently verifiable as unchanged from those collected at the polls as possible. That's why security begins and ends at the ballot box: the rest is just making sure you can count your election.
The local human control is one of the first layers of security in elections. It's why we have designated polling places, and why we call names out loudly when you show up: other humans identify you, as you should live in the local neighborhood.
Registering for multiple voter IDs is actually relatively high risk and not generally coordinated due to being extremely high risk thanks to FBI tactics of leveraging one conspirator against others (informants). This is further discouraged by people in general leaking when they discover such a thing, so building your fraud network is hard. It's easier to build a coalition of thousands of voters to act as a bloc, or to manipulate the election rules by vote splitting and cloning (certain Condorcet methods and STV resist such manipulation).
Voter coercion and vote selling is the bigger concern, along with general disenfranchisement; we handle that by using secret ballots so you can't prove how you voted to anyone.
Yes, generally two hours with pay, although public transportation can make a one-way 20 minute trip into a 3-hour bus ride here (seriously). It's easy to end up in a situation where you simply can't vote on election day.
Employers generally don't follow national holidays. They're discretionary.
It's common in places where adults might end up unable to eat or pay rent if they lose $20 and IDs cost some $40 to get. Your parent aren't taking you to the MVA and they're sure as hell not getting you an ID for things they can't afford, like cars or college. 60% of the households in my neighborhood don't have cars.
You often see breakdowns that claim something like 13% of blacks, 10% of hispanics, and 5% of whites in America lack a government ID. Household incomes show no confirmed ID for 12% of those under $25k, 10% in the $30k-$35k range, 9% in the $40k-$50k range, and 2% in the $125k-$150k range. Given the statistics, it's kind of difficult to work out math that would suggest fewer than 1 in 20 American adults lack government ID.
It's also particularly high among the 17-20 and 21-24 age groups (by the by, 17-year-olds who will be 18 on the day of the corresponding general election can vote in a primary election), yet remains in the 5%-7% range for most older age groups.
The issue is largely a statistical one: specific demographics (age, race, income) are over-represented in the no-government-ID distribution, which gives uneven voting power to identifiable subgroups. Such an uneven distribution makes voting non-representative. We can't do much about voluntary voting behavior (lack of desire to vote), but we are responsible for involuntary voting behavior (coercion, disenfranchisement).
If you're thinking the real problem is whatever prohibits these people from obtaining an ID, you're right! This problem causes the others, and one solution is precluded by the other problem. Then comes another question: how do we pay for IDs that poor people get if the poor people don't pay the $85 at the MVA? What about the extra $75 or $150 for people who don't have proper identification papers and need their identities confirmed first? How do you identify a person who doesn't have ID, anyway? Are you sure you're giving that Photo ID to the person whom they claim they are?
This is why elections generally use local polling places, volunteer staff, and public attention: your neighbors should probably recognize you, or recognize that somebody else is using your name. We rely on the neighborhood to confirm your identity.
Yes, I've met several. In my city, around 5% of the population and 6% of the voting-age population haven't got ID and don't have the cash or time to get one. That's only the ones I can roughly count, and doesn't count things like adults who never got an ID in the first place because they didn't drive and their parents didn't keep records. The same thing happens with many elderly who no longer drive: they lose their social security cards, and have to pay $125 to get a copy of their birth certificates and have licenses printed up and all--often these people are on a fixed income.
You can get SNAP and other welfare by uh...using your voter registration card as an ID. Seriously. You can use just about anything--a school ID, an ID badge from a job, proof that you're receiving or have received some other form of welfare...
That third one is a huge sticking point. People have to invest time, money, and effort into getting an ID--especially when they don't have documentation (homeless people don't carry an archive of their birth certificates and whatnot, so it's hard to prove who you are). Issuing an ID is constrained by certain rules, and it can be kind of rough to get one even when you know who you are and you're supposed to have one.
Election holidays are meaningless. My employer gives us four days off each year. There are about two-dozen national holidays. What you do, you make people work holidays you think are bullshit--Columbus Day, MLK's Birthday, etc. aren't holidays at my employer because they only care about Veteran's Day, Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Independence Day. What makes you think they'd give anyone off for Voting Day?
That's because election security at the polls relies on locality to the community, loud announcement, and non-reuse of voter ID. We essentially presume that fewer people can repeatedly show up at the same polling place and claim to be someone else without anyone noticing it's the same person or, alternately, wander from polling place to polling place casting other people's votes without the real voter appearing or anyone recognizing them as not that person than there are voters who would be unable to produce a State ID for various reasons.
It's harder to defraud an election than one might think.
Security begins and ends at the ballot box. The voting machine has to be shown untampered; it has to be observed untampered throughout the day; and the counts have to be demonstrated with no chance of tampering before being shipped off to SBE. SBE publishes ballots and you regenerate the counts to show that they all come up with the right tally, thus integrity is maintained.
You can also attack the ballots from other directions. Voting methods which allow manipulation--such as plurality--are wide-open to such attacks. Clones can turn a narrow race into a sure victory (have a friend run against you, mimicking the campaign of your opponent). The election generally revolves around tipping a small amount of the swing vote and exciting the party voting base, so propaganda at the right time can directly select any candidate.
Resistance to attack requires strong procedural election security and a voting rule that resists manipulation (such as certain Condorcet methods and STV). An election system monoculture benefits from greater scrutiny and adherence to procedure; the most important procedure is the minimization of attack surface and the strict maintenance of integrity. Varied systems create more opportunities to discover weaknesses--which doesn't matter if you've got no attack surface, but then you're relying on a property which (again) suggests varied systems aren't a defense but rather a liability.
People malign unions for being politically active, often pointing to voluntary political contributions (your regular union dues can't be used for political purposes, and your political dues can't be compelled as a term of membership; the union must solicit from its members).
The AFL-CIO is pushing for everything from minimum wage laws and comp time rules to criminal justice reform and prisons that are actually humane environments. I told them they're not asking for enough, and we had a small debate over what is politically-viable today (they think the politicians won't allow full-scale reform of our prisons, parole, pre-trial, and reentry systems; I've gone door to door talking to people about these things and there is an extreme degree of immediate acceptance among the people, which has more impact than what a few fat politicos think).
Simple regulation requires mucking about with the iron triangle. Money buys you access, but won't get you legislation; you have to supply votes if you want politicians to actually do things for you. You let them speak with your community groups, you get them hundreds of constituent letters, you endorse them for their stance on a particular position. If you want to change the laws, you need to get the electorate behind a certain policy change and then demonstrate that desire of the electorate to the politicians so they know the votes are there.
As a politician, the easiest way to maintain power is to run on a platform of solving the problems of the electorate and educating them about the solutions. They like transparency; and even when they disagree with you, they see that you're trying to do the right thing, and that you have reason for the policies you provide, and that you are listening to their problems and their input. You have to avoid telling everyone to not worry about it and let you handle the complex things their feeble minds can't grasp--in other words: don't be Nancy Pelosi--and instead show them the solutions and explain yourself. Many are bad at this, and so it takes a large amount of pressure from issue groups to drive them to change--and even then, they like to not rock the boat.
They always think of the political implications first, instead of the technical implications. The political implications are you have to sell the damned thing to your constituents so you can stay in your seat and keep pushing; fair-weather politicians need to move over and let someone else drive.
Which part of this is "the free market", and how exactly would a different financial system have prevented it?
You don't need a different financial system; you only need protections against private abuse of the free market. That's what the NLRA is: groups of workers can operate together to become powerful, just as groups of administrators and managers operate together to become the balance of power in a corporation. Workers are more readily replaceable and have a difficult time organizing, hence why there are protections both for organizing and for the employer (against abuse by unfair labor practices by unions and workers).
There's also the freerider issue, wherein a labor contract can't hold a proper security contract. That is: the Union negotiates working conditions for all fitting a certain profile (job description, work responsibilities), and the security contract requires all fitting the bargaining unit to become dues-paying members (only for the basic union services; if you don't become a full member paying into things like the strike fund et al, you aren't able to vote in workplace decisions and aren't required to follow union rules). Many states now allow freeriders to benefit from the union contract without paying anything, and so the union must raise the union dues on all dues-paying members, resulting in more members bailing out of the union (avoiding payment). Rather than a deliberate vote, union membership falls so far the union withdraws.
Generally, you can't stop workers from unionizing by replacing them (this leads directly to lawsuits and fines), and you can't replace unionized workers unless they have done something meriting discharge.
It's clear that whoever set up these accounts went to much greater lengths to obscure their true identities than the Russian-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) has in the past. We believe this could be partly due to changes we've made over the last year to make this kind of abuse much harder.
Film industry revenue, 2017: $40.3 billion at the box office, globally. $20 billion home video consumption, globally. Yes, that's $60 billion for video--only $20 billion of which might be consumed at home.
If you needed a high end computer to play video games, that industry wouldn't even be the size of one large local television market.
You don't need today's high-end computer to play video games; you need last year's high-end computer. The CPU design process costs a lot of money, and CPUs are at best tweaked a bit as new low-end processors come out.
I bought a Chevy Volt. I paid $12,000. It was $40,000 new; they depreciate fast.
You bought a $300 CPU. It has the same specs as a $1,200 CPU did at the end of 2016.
So imagine that $300 CPU in 2020 is descended from a $1,000 CPU that has lower specs. Things that didn't matter to anyone except a few folks in 2019 suddenly matter to everyone in 2020, and aren't being delivered because the new 2020 basic CPU is 2019's crippled high-end CPU.
When they talk about video games being big money, most of that money is from things similar to Angry Birds
Global mobile game revenue was $40 billion of $108 billion total . That leaves $68 billion of non-mobile game revenue--more than the box office and home movie industry drew in total.
The CPU in mobile phones now contains a high-end GPU and 8-core asymmetric hybrid multi-processing. That means it runs 4 cores at high clock (2.1GHz) and 4 cores at low clock (500Mhz) and very low power consumption (like 1/100 as much), either being able to run 8 all at once or able to run any individual core as one or the other. Old mobile processors had to switch all cores to a high or low mode simultaneously.
To put this into perspective: the OnePlus One is four years old. OnePlus released the SIX in May. That's from 166GFLOPS to 737GFLOPS on the GPU, and from a quad-core 2.5GHz to an eight-core 2.8GHz and 1.8GHz asymmetric CPU architecture. Four years.
The cheap phones are going to have these chips next year.
One specific proposal: If members feel like H1Bs are basically indentured servitude, we can vote to make sure everyone makes the same money for the same job regardless of immigration status, which both protects our salaries and also benefits the engineers who do immigrate here.
Usually that's the first thing that happens. All employees performing certain tasks fit into job roles, which fit into a bargaining unit. The wages and benefits negotiated by the bargaining unit apply to those employees. You can't get around the bargaining unit--certainly not by hiring H1Bs.
I've both replaced and cleaned up after people like you. The last one kind of has trouble getting hired now, since his name became famous and everyone realized he can hack something out quick but is in no way capable of making anything well-engineered.
Good engineers produce maintainable things. Much of what I do seems to be voodoo magic to my employer; it's also self-documenting, easily-maintained, and forced on my coworkers so they can handle it when I'm not around. Periodically, I go away for a week and the place melts down a bit; then I grab other engineers and fill the gaps in their knowledge, and things don't break that way as often when I'm not around.
It would be extremely expensive and difficult to replace me, but I've outperformed my predecessors. You seem to be a liability.
Watching movies not only doesn't require high-end hardware, it doesn't even require hardware built within the past 10 years.
Reading comprehension: the gaming industry is bigger than the entire film industry--theater, DVD, everything. If watching movies is a significant use case for a PC, then gaming (which does benefit from huge processors with many cores and SMT) is an even more-significant use case.
wtf are you talking about? (Don't use acronyms you didn't introduce)
Simultaneous multi-threading. It's branded as "Hyperthreading" in Intel chips and as something else in AMD. It's the name of the technology, like SMP is symmetric multi-processing (multiple physical CPUs). It's the topic at hand.
Would you like a definition of CPU, too?
And yes, if games required a $1000 CPU, they would not be a mainstream market. They are a large mainstream market precisely because regular computers play games just fine;
This year's regular computer has a CPU similar to last year's $1,000 CPU. This year's neckbeards have next year's everyday hardware. Do you think Intel's going to spend hundreds of millions to design a new CPU without shoving it through the large-margin pipeline first?
They should, yes. Perhaps not time-and-a-half. Being salaried, you get paid even if you don't work 40 hours; the other side of that is you don't get overtime. Time-and-a-half wouldn't make sense for salaried workers; time does.
Note time-and-a-half include not only wage, but all benefits: if you make $10/hr and your employer covers benefits representing another $8/hr, they legally owe you 1.5 x $18 for every time-and-a-half hour of overtime.
If we instated the same time-and-a-half rule for salaried workers, unscrupulous employers would just employ people hourly, pressure them into getting their work done faster, then send them home early without pay.
At the same time, nothing will stop crunch-time. If an employer temporarily needs you to work 50 hours for 2-3 weeks to close out a project, they're not hiring another worker. It doesn't make fiscal sense, and it's logistically impossible anyway (the new worker won't be all that productive for a couple months). It's that dead baseline of 47 hour weeks that needs to go away.
Slashdot Mirror
I look at net operating profits. Gross margins are always huge: a Wendy's franchise makes 50% on a hamburger, but keeps 8% of all of its revenue before taxes (net operating profit). Gross margins look at the cost of your sandwich maker, the marginal cost of your gas and your grill, the cost of the burger bun and patties, and so forth; net operating profits necessarily also lose the cost of the cashier, of marketing, of general utilities, of paying workers labor time to wipe down tables and take out trash, of taking care of the accounting and tax reporting, of legal services, of management, and so forth.
As you can imagine, anyone who makes arguments about cost of products and profits based around gross margins is deceptive at best, stupid at worst. We routinely see people arguing that Comcast makes something like an 80% profit margin on Internet service and thus is rolling in cash by overcharging immensely, so you may want to keep your eyes open for those sort.
Comcast is making 13% NOP now. Their running average used to be 11.8% over 5 years. 8% is about reasonable; above that starts going into the high-profit territory. Even many automakers and medical companies, swinging 40% profits and 25% losses from year to year, tend to average under 12%.
Microsoft and Apple sustain a constant 20%+ year-to-year profit margin.
It's ludicrous. Franklin D. Roosevelt said shareholders were entitled to a fair and reasonable profit from their enterprises. Does 20% sound fair and reasonable to you? WalMart makes under 3%.
I say we make the Corporate Income Tax Rate 25% and run a sigmoid based on NOP margin. WalMart can pay 13% for all I care; Apple and Microsoft can see a 48% tax rate on all their profits. It'll top at 50%, so feel free to try; but we all know you'd already be taking 2,000% net profit margins if you could get away with it. Comcast would be exposed to a 36% tax rate, as it was before the TCJA.
We'd have to adjust the rules about AMT and about carrying losses backwards and forwards. It's not impossible; it raises a bunch of questions which require answers, however, and only corporate tax experts will recognize those answers as trivial and obvious (and even then they'll contest that taxes are very complex and not trivial--forgetting that the exercise of taxes is different than the determination of tax policies).
It's not that. Everyone employs overseas labor to do that.
Apple is marketing to people with more money than brains, as they say in certain industries. You give them 20 cents on every dollar while the next company over sells an equivalent product but keeps 10 cents on every dollar. Why would you not buy the next company's product, which is a few hundred dollars cheaper?
Nailed it. The market cap is the market price per share times outstanding shares. Imagine a sell-off of all those shares, with everybody trying to cash out. The share price would plummet. It only holds when someone else tries to buy half the shares at once because they want to buy the business (someone trying to buy in, but people aren't rushing to cash out).
It's sitting. It's not only not assets, but it's meaningless. Meanwhile, the company is making and selling things--you know, production--which of course draws revenue, and we measure that production in revenue dollars, hence GDP. They could have a trillion-dollar market cap and a thirty-billion-dollar revenue stream.
Overtime is 150% of your total compensation, including benefits costs. If you're only paying 1.5x hourly wage, you're committing wage theft and are liable for back pay.
Cutting hours and keeping minimum wage set to an annual wage (raising the hourly wage as part-time hours fall) is a way to reduce job availability. It's one way to increase unemployment, and is useful if you manage to drive the economy into a hyperinflation state where you have a labor shortage.
I've been trying to push policy to effectively cause -12% unemployment, which would be economically destructive and require making consumers poorer: you ensure a strong consumer base can buy, they can buy way more than we can supply with our labor force, everyone is too wealthy, nobody can find workers, and you put a stop to that before employers start doubling wages and prices by inflicting a price increase relative to wages.
You stop that madness by dragging unemployment back up to 3% or 5%, while driving working hours to 28 per week (7 hour days, 4 day weeks). People are still about as wealthy as they started, with the poorest being a good bit better off (higher wages, more stable employment, better welfare services).
It's not the kind of thing you just do because you think we should work less. You have to figure out how you're going to siphon off the wealth gains from productivity into free time instead of additional consumption. I had to solve the problem backwards: I figured out how to improve our economic efficiency, but caused a huge productivity spike (on paper), and needed a countermeasure.
You're right to be skeptical, but you have the reasoning wrong: small businesses will be fine, in as much as our economy will be fine.
The premise behind the need for basic income is flawed.
It goes around the idea that efficiency improvements means taking away the jobs that are needed by people. We hear this every 40-50 years or so, When there are some major changes to the workforce.
That's the common argument, yes; and it's ludicrous.
I proposed a Universal Dividend--similar to a Basic Income, but not paying "enough to live", instead just a fair share by taking a percent of all income as a FICA tax and distributing it evenly. The American Citizen's Dividend is modeled on a 12.5% (1/8) FICA, redistributed flat among all adults, and manages to act as an effective tax cut at all levels.
That's difficult to explain, largely because it's a huge amount of math and quite counter-intuitive. The short version is we have an inefficient social insurance system, and I reworked it on an efficient model with the Dividend as a foundation. Social Security's Retirement and Disability benefits are paid in total with the Dividend (i.e. a recipient of OASDI gets the same from the three benefits in total, rather than additional on top of what OASDI pays now); while other means-tested welfare includes the Dividend as part of your income, thus reducing the amount of other welfare paid (because people are less-poor).
The slightly-longer version involves walking through the various income groups, their FICA burden, and the percent of the benefit which is represented by the FICA. If you get $6,000 and you pay $6,000 or more into FICA, we illustrate the "cost" of the benefit as $6k less; if you pay $4,000, then we illustrate the "cost" of the benefit as $4k less. That $2k that you receive in excess of your FICA paid essentially is represented by $2k somebody else paid in excess of the Dividend received, and that symmetrical number represents the "cost".
When you add it all up, I restructured $1.1 trillion of Federal spending into $2.0 trillion, with about $1.2 trillion going back to the same pockets from which it was taken--overall, $1.1 trillion becomes $0.8 trillion, or thereabouts. The Dividend itself only represent a $300 billion expense itself, in those terms, and somehow comes out with a more-efficient fiscal structure.
So... not a Basic Income; it's a social insurance against structural change: everybody pays an even share and receives an equal share.
This means if we become 10% wealthier (purchasing power income over time per adult) as a whole and you become 10% wealthier, you keep it; if you become 100% wealthier, you only become 87.5% wealthier due to the Dividend's FICA; if you become 5% wealthier, you end up paying 1/8 of that 5% and getting 1/8 of 10% (you come out with an extra 1/16); and if you lost your job, you are receiving 1/8 of everything. That FICA is an insurance premium against missing out or, worse, being the sacrifice to obtain progress.
That's the rationale between a Universal Dividend: it makes our social insurances efficient; it protects the losers from structural change without taking ever-more from the winners and forcing them to gain little to no benefit; and it has a huge pile of downstream effect that amount to bailing out collapsed local economies and rebuilding towns like Detroit, Blackwater, Flint, and Baltimore to middle-class, able to support a decent average local wage.
In other words: it's a zero-deficit-spending economic stimulus, perfectly targeted even to micro-recessions (single household losing income), with its greatest impact wherever poverty is most concentrated. It starts fixing recessions before they become recessions--or, worse, depressions, as we saw in the 2008 Depression (2008 was the first year since the Great Depression in which the United States per-capita income was not higher than the per-capita income of every preceding year in history--and you call that a
What happens when you don't have your wallet, social security card, or birth certificate? Do you just walk into the MVA and declare you're Joe Schmidt, address 777 Poppyseed Lane, and walk out with a photo ID?
Maybe you could go to several and get 25 different photo IDs under 25 different names.
Probably, yes. That's the microeconomics. The macroeconomics has seen this again and again for thousands of years, and we all know structural change brings shifts in employment yet we keep finding more jobs instead of fewer; it's not always the same people filling those jobs.
Can't change the database if you can validate the ballots from data collected by public observers under high-probability integrity guarantees. There are attacks against things like Military ballots et al (which arrive by mail and are processed through mail rooms and the Military post office), which we can handle probabilistically as well, although with higher risk of collusion even between parties; those ballots make up less of our total votes and, besides, I could design a similar voting process to document and disclose a secure election in military bases, ships, and deployments as well.
The last, of course, are general local absentee and mail-in ballots, and we're back to reducing the risk by requiring high collusion and isolating to a subset of ballots.
In the end, you want as many ballots independently verifiable as unchanged from those collected at the polls as possible. That's why security begins and ends at the ballot box: the rest is just making sure you can count your election.
The local human control is one of the first layers of security in elections. It's why we have designated polling places, and why we call names out loudly when you show up: other humans identify you, as you should live in the local neighborhood.
Registering for multiple voter IDs is actually relatively high risk and not generally coordinated due to being extremely high risk thanks to FBI tactics of leveraging one conspirator against others (informants). This is further discouraged by people in general leaking when they discover such a thing, so building your fraud network is hard. It's easier to build a coalition of thousands of voters to act as a bloc, or to manipulate the election rules by vote splitting and cloning (certain Condorcet methods and STV resist such manipulation).
Voter coercion and vote selling is the bigger concern, along with general disenfranchisement; we handle that by using secret ballots so you can't prove how you voted to anyone.
Yes, generally two hours with pay, although public transportation can make a one-way 20 minute trip into a 3-hour bus ride here (seriously). It's easy to end up in a situation where you simply can't vote on election day.
Employers generally don't follow national holidays. They're discretionary.
It's common in places where adults might end up unable to eat or pay rent if they lose $20 and IDs cost some $40 to get. Your parent aren't taking you to the MVA and they're sure as hell not getting you an ID for things they can't afford, like cars or college. 60% of the households in my neighborhood don't have cars.
You often see breakdowns that claim something like 13% of blacks, 10% of hispanics, and 5% of whites in America lack a government ID. Household incomes show no confirmed ID for 12% of those under $25k, 10% in the $30k-$35k range, 9% in the $40k-$50k range, and 2% in the $125k-$150k range. Given the statistics, it's kind of difficult to work out math that would suggest fewer than 1 in 20 American adults lack government ID.
It's also particularly high among the 17-20 and 21-24 age groups (by the by, 17-year-olds who will be 18 on the day of the corresponding general election can vote in a primary election), yet remains in the 5%-7% range for most older age groups.
The issue is largely a statistical one: specific demographics (age, race, income) are over-represented in the no-government-ID distribution, which gives uneven voting power to identifiable subgroups. Such an uneven distribution makes voting non-representative. We can't do much about voluntary voting behavior (lack of desire to vote), but we are responsible for involuntary voting behavior (coercion, disenfranchisement).
If you're thinking the real problem is whatever prohibits these people from obtaining an ID, you're right! This problem causes the others, and one solution is precluded by the other problem. Then comes another question: how do we pay for IDs that poor people get if the poor people don't pay the $85 at the MVA? What about the extra $75 or $150 for people who don't have proper identification papers and need their identities confirmed first? How do you identify a person who doesn't have ID, anyway? Are you sure you're giving that Photo ID to the person whom they claim they are?
This is why elections generally use local polling places, volunteer staff, and public attention: your neighbors should probably recognize you, or recognize that somebody else is using your name. We rely on the neighborhood to confirm your identity.
Yes, I've met several. In my city, around 5% of the population and 6% of the voting-age population haven't got ID and don't have the cash or time to get one. That's only the ones I can roughly count, and doesn't count things like adults who never got an ID in the first place because they didn't drive and their parents didn't keep records. The same thing happens with many elderly who no longer drive: they lose their social security cards, and have to pay $125 to get a copy of their birth certificates and have licenses printed up and all--often these people are on a fixed income.
You can get SNAP and other welfare by uh...using your voter registration card as an ID. Seriously. You can use just about anything--a school ID, an ID badge from a job, proof that you're receiving or have received some other form of welfare...
That third one is a huge sticking point. People have to invest time, money, and effort into getting an ID--especially when they don't have documentation (homeless people don't carry an archive of their birth certificates and whatnot, so it's hard to prove who you are). Issuing an ID is constrained by certain rules, and it can be kind of rough to get one even when you know who you are and you're supposed to have one.
Election holidays are meaningless. My employer gives us four days off each year. There are about two-dozen national holidays. What you do, you make people work holidays you think are bullshit--Columbus Day, MLK's Birthday, etc. aren't holidays at my employer because they only care about Veteran's Day, Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Independence Day. What makes you think they'd give anyone off for Voting Day?
That's because election security at the polls relies on locality to the community, loud announcement, and non-reuse of voter ID. We essentially presume that fewer people can repeatedly show up at the same polling place and claim to be someone else without anyone noticing it's the same person or, alternately, wander from polling place to polling place casting other people's votes without the real voter appearing or anyone recognizing them as not that person than there are voters who would be unable to produce a State ID for various reasons.
It's harder to defraud an election than one might think.
That's not how election security works.
Security begins and ends at the ballot box. The voting machine has to be shown untampered; it has to be observed untampered throughout the day; and the counts have to be demonstrated with no chance of tampering before being shipped off to SBE. SBE publishes ballots and you regenerate the counts to show that they all come up with the right tally, thus integrity is maintained.
You can also attack the ballots from other directions. Voting methods which allow manipulation--such as plurality--are wide-open to such attacks. Clones can turn a narrow race into a sure victory (have a friend run against you, mimicking the campaign of your opponent). The election generally revolves around tipping a small amount of the swing vote and exciting the party voting base, so propaganda at the right time can directly select any candidate.
Resistance to attack requires strong procedural election security and a voting rule that resists manipulation (such as certain Condorcet methods and STV). An election system monoculture benefits from greater scrutiny and adherence to procedure; the most important procedure is the minimization of attack surface and the strict maintenance of integrity. Varied systems create more opportunities to discover weaknesses--which doesn't matter if you've got no attack surface, but then you're relying on a property which (again) suggests varied systems aren't a defense but rather a liability.
People malign unions for being politically active, often pointing to voluntary political contributions (your regular union dues can't be used for political purposes, and your political dues can't be compelled as a term of membership; the union must solicit from its members).
The AFL-CIO is pushing for everything from minimum wage laws and comp time rules to criminal justice reform and prisons that are actually humane environments. I told them they're not asking for enough, and we had a small debate over what is politically-viable today (they think the politicians won't allow full-scale reform of our prisons, parole, pre-trial, and reentry systems; I've gone door to door talking to people about these things and there is an extreme degree of immediate acceptance among the people, which has more impact than what a few fat politicos think).
Simple regulation requires mucking about with the iron triangle. Money buys you access, but won't get you legislation; you have to supply votes if you want politicians to actually do things for you. You let them speak with your community groups, you get them hundreds of constituent letters, you endorse them for their stance on a particular position. If you want to change the laws, you need to get the electorate behind a certain policy change and then demonstrate that desire of the electorate to the politicians so they know the votes are there.
As a politician, the easiest way to maintain power is to run on a platform of solving the problems of the electorate and educating them about the solutions. They like transparency; and even when they disagree with you, they see that you're trying to do the right thing, and that you have reason for the policies you provide, and that you are listening to their problems and their input. You have to avoid telling everyone to not worry about it and let you handle the complex things their feeble minds can't grasp--in other words: don't be Nancy Pelosi--and instead show them the solutions and explain yourself. Many are bad at this, and so it takes a large amount of pressure from issue groups to drive them to change--and even then, they like to not rock the boat.
They always think of the political implications first, instead of the technical implications. The political implications are you have to sell the damned thing to your constituents so you can stay in your seat and keep pushing; fair-weather politicians need to move over and let someone else drive.
Which part of this is "the free market", and how exactly would a different financial system have prevented it?
You don't need a different financial system; you only need protections against private abuse of the free market. That's what the NLRA is: groups of workers can operate together to become powerful, just as groups of administrators and managers operate together to become the balance of power in a corporation. Workers are more readily replaceable and have a difficult time organizing, hence why there are protections both for organizing and for the employer (against abuse by unfair labor practices by unions and workers).
There's also the freerider issue, wherein a labor contract can't hold a proper security contract. That is: the Union negotiates working conditions for all fitting a certain profile (job description, work responsibilities), and the security contract requires all fitting the bargaining unit to become dues-paying members (only for the basic union services; if you don't become a full member paying into things like the strike fund et al, you aren't able to vote in workplace decisions and aren't required to follow union rules). Many states now allow freeriders to benefit from the union contract without paying anything, and so the union must raise the union dues on all dues-paying members, resulting in more members bailing out of the union (avoiding payment). Rather than a deliberate vote, union membership falls so far the union withdraws.
Generally, you can't stop workers from unionizing by replacing them (this leads directly to lawsuits and fines), and you can't replace unionized workers unless they have done something meriting discharge.
This is the free market at work. It's ripe for unionization.
It's clear that whoever set up these accounts went to much greater lengths to obscure their true identities than the Russian-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) has in the past. We believe this could be partly due to changes we've made over the last year to make this kind of abuse much harder.
Also known as an arms race.
First of all, it isn't even close to true.
Gaming industry revenue, 2017: $108 billion.
Film industry revenue, 2017: $40.3 billion at the box office, globally. $20 billion home video consumption, globally. Yes, that's $60 billion for video--only $20 billion of which might be consumed at home.
If you needed a high end computer to play video games, that industry wouldn't even be the size of one large local television market.
You don't need today's high-end computer to play video games; you need last year's high-end computer. The CPU design process costs a lot of money, and CPUs are at best tweaked a bit as new low-end processors come out.
I bought a Chevy Volt. I paid $12,000. It was $40,000 new; they depreciate fast.
You bought a $300 CPU. It has the same specs as a $1,200 CPU did at the end of 2016.
So imagine that $300 CPU in 2020 is descended from a $1,000 CPU that has lower specs. Things that didn't matter to anyone except a few folks in 2019 suddenly matter to everyone in 2020, and aren't being delivered because the new 2020 basic CPU is 2019's crippled high-end CPU.
When they talk about video games being big money, most of that money is from things similar to Angry Birds
Global mobile game revenue was $40 billion of $108 billion total . That leaves $68 billion of non-mobile game revenue--more than the box office and home movie industry drew in total.
The CPU in mobile phones now contains a high-end GPU and 8-core asymmetric hybrid multi-processing. That means it runs 4 cores at high clock (2.1GHz) and 4 cores at low clock (500Mhz) and very low power consumption (like 1/100 as much), either being able to run 8 all at once or able to run any individual core as one or the other. Old mobile processors had to switch all cores to a high or low mode simultaneously.
To put this into perspective: the OnePlus One is four years old. OnePlus released the SIX in May. That's from 166GFLOPS to 737GFLOPS on the GPU, and from a quad-core 2.5GHz to an eight-core 2.8GHz and 1.8GHz asymmetric CPU architecture. Four years.
The cheap phones are going to have these chips next year.
One specific proposal: If members feel like H1Bs are basically indentured servitude, we can vote to make sure everyone makes the same money for the same job regardless of immigration status, which both protects our salaries and also benefits the engineers who do immigrate here.
Usually that's the first thing that happens. All employees performing certain tasks fit into job roles, which fit into a bargaining unit. The wages and benefits negotiated by the bargaining unit apply to those employees. You can't get around the bargaining unit--certainly not by hiring H1Bs.
I've both replaced and cleaned up after people like you. The last one kind of has trouble getting hired now, since his name became famous and everyone realized he can hack something out quick but is in no way capable of making anything well-engineered.
Good engineers produce maintainable things. Much of what I do seems to be voodoo magic to my employer; it's also self-documenting, easily-maintained, and forced on my coworkers so they can handle it when I'm not around. Periodically, I go away for a week and the place melts down a bit; then I grab other engineers and fill the gaps in their knowledge, and things don't break that way as often when I'm not around.
It would be extremely expensive and difficult to replace me, but I've outperformed my predecessors. You seem to be a liability.
Watching movies not only doesn't require high-end hardware, it doesn't even require hardware built within the past 10 years.
Reading comprehension: the gaming industry is bigger than the entire film industry--theater, DVD, everything. If watching movies is a significant use case for a PC, then gaming (which does benefit from huge processors with many cores and SMT) is an even more-significant use case.
wtf are you talking about? (Don't use acronyms you didn't introduce)
Simultaneous multi-threading. It's branded as "Hyperthreading" in Intel chips and as something else in AMD. It's the name of the technology, like SMP is symmetric multi-processing (multiple physical CPUs). It's the topic at hand.
Would you like a definition of CPU, too?
And yes, if games required a $1000 CPU, they would not be a mainstream market. They are a large mainstream market precisely because regular computers play games just fine;
This year's regular computer has a CPU similar to last year's $1,000 CPU. This year's neckbeards have next year's everyday hardware. Do you think Intel's going to spend hundreds of millions to design a new CPU without shoving it through the large-margin pipeline first?
They should, yes. Perhaps not time-and-a-half. Being salaried, you get paid even if you don't work 40 hours; the other side of that is you don't get overtime. Time-and-a-half wouldn't make sense for salaried workers; time does.
Note time-and-a-half include not only wage, but all benefits: if you make $10/hr and your employer covers benefits representing another $8/hr, they legally owe you 1.5 x $18 for every time-and-a-half hour of overtime.
If we instated the same time-and-a-half rule for salaried workers, unscrupulous employers would just employ people hourly, pressure them into getting their work done faster, then send them home early without pay.
At the same time, nothing will stop crunch-time. If an employer temporarily needs you to work 50 hours for 2-3 weeks to close out a project, they're not hiring another worker. It doesn't make fiscal sense, and it's logistically impossible anyway (the new worker won't be all that productive for a couple months). It's that dead baseline of 47 hour weeks that needs to go away.