It can be, but then you take your dollars elsewhere.
It doesn't matter from the consumer point of view. If the product doesn't meet acceptance criteria, the manufacturer doesn't get paid. To the consumer, this means Paul Reed Smith's Korean-made guitars are of Paul Reed Smith quality, and Cordoba's Chinese guitars are of Cordoba quality. If Cordoba lets China send them shitty guitars, and actually sells them, then that's not a China problem; that's Cordoba accepting shitty work and passing it off as their brand.
If your product is crap, and the company seems to not think that's a problem, then the Chinese shit work is acceptable. It's not acceptable to you, and you should find another brand; Brand X obviously sells cheap crap, China or not.
You can disagree about as much as you can disagree that screws are wound such as to screw in clockwise, except in specialist applications.
The definition of quality and the explanations given are what quality means in English, in manufacture, and in management. They are correct. Your re-definition is like saying, "I'm straight, but I like to suck guys' dicks." Not quite the definition of heterosexual.
Swapping the engine makes working on cars ridiculous. I've done it, and you better know exactly what you need going into the store.
I always run my cars out pretty far. I had one dump oil and throw a rod at 220k; it was very poorly maintained by the prior owner, and had its first timing chain service at 210k, and only one transmission fluid change in its lifetime. The owner insisted that transmission fluid only got changed if the transmission gets rebuilt.
That's not an economic theory. That's a specific implementation of an economic policy. I wasn't including the infininte number of "fund this, not that" choices. Theory is how to tax, how to own.
You said theory and policy. Policy is very specific. It includes what services are government-provided, how they're provided, what their extent is, how they're funded, and so on. It includes tax brackets, plans to adjust things like minimum wage, if you should even have a minimum wage, and so on. It includes regulations, rebates, and subsidies.
I would have a trivial minimum wage, but only to prevent worker abuse if there's a new class of $0.50 workers. Perhaps no initial minimum, and instituting one if there looks to be a problem.
It works like this: if you don't work, at all, you collect UBI. The UBI I've set gets you something livable; you probably won't spend much time at home, and you can't afford fancy toys. You can buy a $2 Frisbee, so maybe you spend a lot of time playing Ultimate Frisbee with your friends, since you have no job. Your life kind of sucks, and your primary source of relief is that you can LEAVE YOUR HOUSE.
If you get a job, you lose time to work, at great effort. You may lose 40 hours each week, or part time it at 20. You may work at K-Mart as a cashier, or at Panera Bread making bread overnight, or at Rocks and Gravel Quarry shoveling heavy stone gravel in the hot sun for 12 hours a day. This takes time away from your nature hikes, your volunteer work, your Ultimate Frisbee games, and so on.
Now, any retard can shovel gravel, but let's be honest: nobody is going to do that shit for the same wage as sticking cash in a drawer. For that matter, why do I want to work 40 hours for 50 cents an hour, get myself $20 at the end of the week, and... what, exactly? Buy a 12 pack of beer? Yeah, hell no, they need to pay me better.
The first consideration is the major time sacrifice. You'll have people looking for more enjoyable work to minimize this. Some people might shovel stone for $5/hr, because it's a challenge between me, the rocks, and the sun; some people might take up baking for $5/hr, because I get to learn how to make bread. For the most part, people will look for a job that's enriching, and that pays well enough to compensate: the stone and bread challenge is great and all, but I don't want to do this every fucking day, and I would like a bigger apartment or an X-Box. After a week, the exciting new job in the world of cake decoration has become a chore, and it's decreasing my quality of life, and I need appropriate compensation or I'm going to find someone who pays better.
To me, trying to compute the optimal minimum wage is silly. It's going to vary by area, it's going to vary by job, and it serves no real purpose. UBI intends to supply a basic standard of living so that nobody is so desperate as to take any job for slave wage; if you offer slave wage, your applicants are able to offer a finger and still find food and shelter.
That's freedom.
I'm a fan of the ideal free market. Where barriers are low, and information is free. People can't make "free" decisions in our free market, because the companies are lying to them, and lobbying for market barriers.
The ideal free market is a fantasy. In this ideal, everyone makes fully-rational decisions based on full competence. The problem is people aren't competent, we can manipulate competence, and we do so to gain advantage. It comes right down to making boxes of laundry detergent red because people will associate the color red with a better product even if all empirical evidence proves the product is shit (this is actually why Coca-Cola is the top cola: over 80% of people who took the Pepsi Challenge in the 80s preferred the taste of Pepsi when they didn't know which was which, but everyone loves the familiar shiny red can of Coke).
Yes. That's sometimes abuse, and sometimes our own fault for not setting quality standards correctly. The US isn't always innocent: Apple stomps all over FoxConn's factory floor making sure the employees producing Apple products are mentally healthy, while Dell doesn't give a shit if you use slave labor working 80 hours a week for nearly zero pay.
Resale value is part of the quality assessment. To some people, resale value is not an issue. Notably, if you are specifically looking for a car to replace in 5 years, chances are you expect to get all the value out of that car. Fleet cars, for example, are run through a heavy duty cycle and have their resale value drastically discounted.
My conclusions are fully rational, operate from a technical perspective, and reject irrelevant considerations that people get all emotional over. "OH but the car lasts longer, so it's better because it has lower carbon!" Not relevant. "Oh but the 5 year car MIGHT last 3 years!" Not relevant. "Oh but you can sell the 50 year car for more!" Yeah, and you paid a lot more for it, and now have to dump it back into a market where it's apparently a much better value proposition to ditch that particular car and get a brand new one. "But the second hand market is so cool!"
Why would you intend to replace a car in 5 years? Why would you actually plan turn-over? What are the tax implications of resale? Do you know how much it costs to replace a car that's retained its resale value, versus one that's fully depreciated? The normal way that's handled is by junking the car, rather than reselling, because it's easier on taxes and allows you to take he full depreciation deduction.
Recently, yes. It's still a good comparison: you know what I mean, and history supports the above statements. Times change, and maybe times are changing for the worse for Germany; or maybe they've stumbled, and will get back to high-end German engineering soon. Time will tell.
Incorrect thinking. The 5 year car is built to last 5 years. It's designed to a tolerance where it should last 5 years, and with cost-cutting measures so that it doesn't reliably exceed 5 years. Most (95%, 97%, 99.5%, depending on quality guidelines) units should last 5 years.
You're making odd, nebulous, non-realistic arguments about quality. If you want a high-end car that can last 50 years for your use cases, and it has a significant chance of dying after 30 years, that's a fucking low quality car. It does not meet acceptance criteria, is not suitable for your purpose, and should be passed over. Similarly, if you expect to cycle your fleet out every 5 years, your cars should last 5 years: if they very occasionally last 3, or if they often fall short or run over some 6 months either way, that might be acceptable; if they often last only 3 years, then they don't meet quality acceptance criteria and are not of high quality. If those fuckers are not pre-programmed to die, but they wear out uniformly right on the 5 year mark, they're of almost perfect quality.
Not faulty thinking. Quality only applies to the original buyer; the second-hand buyer will look for quality as well, on different terms. The second-hand buyer then becomes the original buyer of second-hand goods, and his acceptance criteria doesn't include being in the beginning of its duty cycle or having consistent risk prospects (i.e. there may be things wrong with the car, or it may be at a point in its life where it's twice as likely to experience certain failures, and you're half as sure if it'll make it the next 20,000 miles or only 5,000 miles before hitting them).
Think of it this way: After 5 years, the car is obsolete. It gets 20mpg; the new cars have more torque, more horsepower, are hybrids, and get 45mpg. The new cars have better safety features that didn't exist when this car was built. This car will last 50 years, but nobody will buy it; it's going to the scrap yard.
It follows that we mandate a long-lived car if we want to save money, too, unless building a long-lived car costs 5 times as much as building a short-lived car that has 1/3 the life span. Most people will go for a car that lasts 6 years and costs $20k over a car that lasts 20 years and costs $120k--which is why we have economy cars all over the US, with a duty cycle of about 100k, at an average of 12k/year driving miles.
That's kind of irrelevant, anyway. The Chinese can build high quality; they often build frail things because we ask for frail duty cycles. That set of cheap Chinese knives you got for $10? It was commissioned as a set of sharp, non-rusting knives for cheap as possible, with high aluminum content being acceptable to quality standards. They took it right to the bare bottom of acceptance criteria, driving the production cost down low. They can also forge you a $150 chef's knife out of the finest steel, if you want.
Actually, the Chinese will build to any spec. If they can build it on the same quality requirements for cheaper, you tell them you want it to your quality spec and you pay less.
This is unlike Germany, where the only quality level is "high", and you pay for German manufacture. German manufacturers won't provide you with a lower cost-tier and a lesser-duty-cycle product.
By the by, quality is the degree to which a deliverable satisfies requirements. A car that falls apart after 5 years isn't any higher quality than a car that runs for 50 years, if you're going to replace either in 5 years anyway. If the former is much cheaper to own and maintain for the first 5 years than the latter, then the former is of higher quality; if the latter is cheaper to own and maintain, then the latter is over-engineered and can be stripped back to last 5 years and cost much less, better satisfying quality requirements.
Many of us want cars which will satisfy a low total cost for acceptable function. The car should last longer to avoid a new expensive purchase, and require minimal maintenance to retain its important functions (reliability, safety, comforts, emissions, and so on). Our quality standards are the cheapest thing we can get for the presumed function and comfort level, which is why economy cars are so popular in the US: they don't save very much on gas, they don't drive as well as something with a V6 or V8 and a sports suspension, but they're cheap and they tend to have a good duty cycle (even GM's ecotec engines are built to last, never mind the newer non-Ford engines Mazda has been putting in the 3).
A lot of newer ideas are hard to implement. This is a fact.
Even UBI is hard to implement: if we weren't in so much debt, the transition off Social Security would be a lot easier, and the change-over would be faster, because we could just leverage debt. As we stand, I've worked out numerous complex transitions, some that require 20 years of turn-over, to not interrupt anyone's social security or government pensions while switching over to UBI, with only a marginal (1%-2%) tax increase, which continuously decreases as people get older and as natural inflation continues. We could do the whole turn-over in about 5 years if we could leverage debt; it wouldn't be a lot of debt, but it's like having 15 maxed out $25k credit cards and then saying you could get shit under control if you took out two more $50k cards.
Electric cars have always predicated on batteries, which were patent-encumbered (NiMH), poor technology for the purpose (lead-acid, NiCD, NiMH), or heavy and expensive (Li+, NiMH). NiMH batteries were a good contender for a while, but have lifespan issues and were very expensive. Li+ were much better, but heavy and expensive. Newer Li+ are cheaper, but are still heavy--there's only 300 mile range in the Tesla for a reason--yet can almost compete with gasoline.
Plasma displays were invented in 1960. They were huge and expensive. Remember having $50 32 inch CRTs when you could get a perfectly good 30 inch LCD for $5000? Remember when nanometer chips rolled out, but were expensive because 60% were misconstructed? The price dropped as they got better... now we have 16nm scale, and building 100nm scale would be damn near 100% reliable output.
You don't seem to understand just how economics works, either. "Nearly every economic policy/theory" would envelop thousands, if not millions, of policies. For example: Throw out NASA, institute a National Medical Research Agency under the NIH instead. Why? Because fuck Pfeizer, and the whoring of overpriced drugs, and the killing of low-cost, life-saving treatments in favor of research into high-cost maintenance drugs. NASA got us satellites; most of their other achievements are overrated (better rubber in tires? Goodyear. Better shoe cushioning? Puma. Better mattresses? Etc.).
In UBI, there are many variations. Some folks want everyone to have a comfortable middle-class salary on UBI. I've repeatedly shown this is not possible, and also not an issue. It's not possible because, if you took away 100% of everyone's income and divided it up between everyone over age 18, you'd get a $55k/year salary minus taxes--the implication is nobody would be able to profit, so the incentive to work would be eliminated. It's not an issue because UBI doesn't decrease the incentive to work (it actually increases it by eliminating welfare traps) until it's set high enough to cause hyper-inflation, which destroys the economy anyway.
I suggest no minimum wage under UBI, because minimum wage gives employers more negotiating power to pin unskilled labor to a fixed number that you have to lobby congress to increase. Removing minimum wage means the individual has to decide if the job at the given wage increases their quality of life: your employer must negotiate with every single individual job seeker, who will decide if they like life more with more money (to buy a larger apartment, better food, Wii U) or if they're making too little money (working 40 hours shoveling gravel for a case of beer). Other people propose UBI with minimum wage, citing that you somehow need minimum wage to provide a standard of living (which is what UBI is supposed to do--what do you do when 50% of the country isn't working?).
This is why I tout my full economic plan: you can really fuck up a country with UBI. You can really fuck up a country with Capitalism, which is why we got the Sherman Anti-Trust Act after Carnegie Steel and Rockerfeller Oil.
For that matter, you can really fuck up a country with Democracy--our representative de
The expansion of the middle class is irrelevant to UBI. If you had 90% poor and 10% rich, then set up a progressive tax to provide for the UBI, the UBI and tax would be exactly the same with a distrivution of 10% poor, 80% middle class, and 10% rich.
You have 10 making $10,000 (poor), 80 making $50,000 (middle class), and 10 making $1,000,000 (rich), with a tax of 10% below $50,000 and 20% above $50,000. For (10% * (10*1000 + 80*50000 + 10*50,000) + 20% * (10*1000000)), you get $10,000 + $400,000 + $50,000 + $1,900,000, a total of $2,360,000. $1,950,000 comes from the coffers of the rich.
Make that 90% poor, 10% rich. That $14,100,000 becomes 90 people making $10,000 and 10 people making $1,401,000. For (10% * (90 * 10,000 + 10 * 50,000) + 20% * 10 * 1,351,000), you get $90,000 + $50,000 + $1,351,000, a total of $1,491,000.
Notice that, for example, sudden automation and a loss of jobs removes money from the poor and middle class, shifting it up to the rich. In the above example, with a sudden divide at $50,000, the result of our ridiculous scenario is a drop of 37%. That means UBI drops by 37%.
The big recession of the mid-2000s was a drop of 6% of personal income, which, with a 15% UBI, would have translated to UBI decreasing by 0.9%. Part of the common complaint (accurate or not) is the rich getting richer: people make fancy charts to complain about this. A flat tax on all income ensures that UBI does not self-defeat by correcting this problem: UBI isn't attempting to solve this problem, but rather to avoid it entirely.
Everyone I've seen propose a UBI (including Fair Tax people) couldn't explain what would happen if the UBI was doubled. "It'd be bad" is the most detail I got from anyone.
At low levels, UBI is not resilient: an economic downturn could leave the unemployed with not enough income to pay the cost of low-end housing. As I said, the mid-2000s economic downturn represented a 6% decrease in total income, equating to a small drop in UBI. UBI requires 1% padding above the bare minimum to survive this; the more padding, the more economic damage UBI can survive.
At extremely high levels, UBI fails in the same way as Marxism and similar systems. This is irrelevant, because UBI has a failure mode at a lower level. I mention it to illustrate another point: the majority-mean income in 2012, that being all personal income divided by all Americans aged 18 and over, was roughly $55,000. If we set UBI at 100% less taxes, every single American would receive the equivalent of a $55,000 salary as UBI. There simply isn't any more income.
UBI's upper bound isn't the proven one, or the implied disincentive to work. An increase in UBI increases economic activity and cash availability. This both encourages people to spend more freely and taxes the producers and distributors. UBI thus encourages inflation. Inflation is not a bad thing; but hyperinflation is economically destructive, and would damage the economy.
It's difficult to pinpoint where UBI is theoretically safe. Our current welfare system costs 25% of total personal income if you count retirement security (Social Security, Government Pensions), housing assistance, food security (WIC, food stamps), and unemployment. UBI costs considerably less, but is tied directly to economic activity rather than government outlay: instead of the government taxing to cover a need for so many trillions of welfare, they collect so many trillions of tax and divide that up as welfare.
As economic activity increases, so does UBI; and as UBI increases, so does the availability of money in the lower class. UBI works because the poor are now a harvestable cash crop: if they get too much cash, the cost of services and basic goods increases. If the cost of services and basic goods increases, more money flows through the economy without creating more wealth. If more money flows through the e
Look, I've already explained how to make the economy durable against these sorts of things. People just won't take it.
The current systems rely on work for income to establish a basic standard of living (minimum wage), and then supply welfare if you can't find work (unemployment, HUD, food stamps). It takes an act of congress to raise minimum wage, which has all kinds of economic implications (make fewer people work harder, reduce quality of service, move to automation); and it takes more money--thus more taxes, thus more economic stress and damage--to pay for rising unemployment when the economy starts to dip.
The main problems are, as a whole body and not a set of individual factors of various importance, the moral demand of an enforced fair minimum wage; the moral demand of compensation by work or need (i.e. welfare only if we think you need and deserve it); the sub-saturation of the welfare system (i.e. not everyone collects welfare, so more people will collect welfare during hard economic times); and the progressive tax structure supporting the welfare system (it should be flat--and social security is actually regressive, which is even worse).
Our welfare system currently includes retirement benefits (social security and government pensions--usually you're ineligible for social security if you collect government pensions), totaling $1,800 billion ($886 billion SS, $920 billion pensions); food and family support (HUD housing assistance, WIC, food stamps); and unemployment insurance. Medicaid and Medicare I specifically exclude due to complexity. Altogether, this is over $3,500 billion of federal outlay and a cost of, roughly, 25% of the total personal income in the united states.
Eliminating these services (with a controlled drop--social security and government pensions require particular care) and replacing them with a 15% separate flat tax on all income (including capital gains) would provide enough money to feed and house every American over the age of 18. This would require new housing of roughly 224sqft apartments for the unemployed (profitable at $300/mo); but the poor, having a guaranteed income, would be a cash crop for landlords who provided that service, and so there would be a rush to provide basic housing and other basic needs.
With a flat tax supporting it, the system ignores income distribution: if the rich get richer and the middle class shrinks, the UBI stays the same. The UBI itself isn't taxed (it's a tax credit), and isn't counted as income from a tax perspective. Because 100% of adults are collecting it, sudden mass unemployment doesn't add strain to the economy. It fills the function of social security and government pensions (i.e. it prevents you from losing your retirement benefits due to market crash or banks folding--the original intent). It tracks real inflation, because it functions as a percentage of the total economic activity: UBI is a tax levied by the people for the people, not a tax levied by the government for its services to the people.
By eliminating these welfare services--which you must be qualified for--and eliminating minimum wage, we leave everyone in control of their own lives. Nobody goes homeless, nobody goes hungry. Nobody is forced to take a job for inadequate pay; for that matter, nobody is forced to accept that a job is a "minimum wage job", because there's no such thing as minimum wage: if anyone can do that job, but this shit is hard and unpleasant and generally demeaning, then people will appropriately seek other employment unless offered better pay. If they don't get appropriate inflation-following wage increases, the job eventually becomes more trouble than it's worth--it decreases quality of life, and adds too little income to offset this--and so they quit and look for better employment.
Many people find this offensive. The idea that the government will give you money, just because you're an adult? The idea that you could live in an apartment with a 6x9 bedroom--half of which is taken up by a
Just raising the price is price gouging, or "exploitative opportunism" as you say.
Raising the price because you see a person is in great need for a good you are selling and is under duress by that need is extortion. This specific individual's need makes them highly reliant on your immediate service, allowing for coercion. The typical terms of your service are not extortion; but modifying those terms in response to an individual's sudden reliance on you is.
You don't have a cell phone and your wife is in labor? And the car's out of gas? Wow, sure would be a shame if you couldn't use my 25 cent payphone to call the hospital. Actually, it's a $25 payphone today. There's not another station for five miles down the road. Sure is a shame.
For the same way journalists write headlines that speak to people ideas such as "Republican Conservative Equivalent in Japan Blowing its Bible Thumper Over Stem Cells, Goes on Assault Against Science" for stories that read more "Severe misconduct and fraud rife within corrupt institution; major restructuring proposed."
Seriously. "Stem Cell Debacle Could Bring Down Entire Research Lab." That's a screaming political headline. Then you read the article, and no such thing is happening.
Good faith is a legal concept often addressed in court. Some opposite concepts are bad faith and negligence. All of these center around the beliefs of a rational person: if a rational person with appropriate qualifications (i.e. your engineers did X, would an engineer know the implications of X?) would understand the consequences of an action, then you are held to that understanding. If you act such that you should know the outcome is harmful and contrary to what would be considered good faith, you are acting in bad faith.
An example of bad faith would be production of sub-quality components with a staff of engineers who understand the limits of such components. If you built chargers with 14ga wire to carry 20A currant, using aluminum core wire with extremely thin electroplating, those chargers would degrade quickly. If you are doing so and then marketing heavily in areas trafficked heavily by Tesla cars, we can reasonably assume you are committing sabotage: these chargers will quickly degrade, causing charging issues and damaging Tesla's image. If you release your own charger architecture of better quality, the evidence reinforces this: Why would you use 12ga full copper wire for 20A chargers of your design, but 14ga aluminum core for 20A of Tesla's design?
Evidence of ulterior motives and willful negligence constitute bad faith.
No. Extortion is the use of coercion to make you pay.
Let's say you need to get to a job interview, and your car runs out of fuel. You have AAA, and can call for a tow or fuel, enough to get to the next gas station 5 miles away, free; it'll take over an hour, and you don't have time. If the gas station right across the street charges $3.50/gal, but the owner sees you require fuel RIGHT NOW for the security of your livelihood and so jacks up the price, that's extortion: he sees your situation allows him to coerce you into paying above his normal fare, so demands additional money using that leverage.
If the price is raised generically--if the gas station owner raises his fixed price to $15/gal because he's the only station within reasonable distance and so expects people will pay it to avoid a long detour--that's price gouging. Any situation where a good is unreasonably priced in its general sale is price gouging.
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It can be, but then you take your dollars elsewhere.
It doesn't matter from the consumer point of view. If the product doesn't meet acceptance criteria, the manufacturer doesn't get paid. To the consumer, this means Paul Reed Smith's Korean-made guitars are of Paul Reed Smith quality, and Cordoba's Chinese guitars are of Cordoba quality. If Cordoba lets China send them shitty guitars, and actually sells them, then that's not a China problem; that's Cordoba accepting shitty work and passing it off as their brand.
If your product is crap, and the company seems to not think that's a problem, then the Chinese shit work is acceptable. It's not acceptable to you, and you should find another brand; Brand X obviously sells cheap crap, China or not.
That could work. The problem is the maker wants to sell a new car; you're dealing with rent-seekers here.
You can disagree about as much as you can disagree that screws are wound such as to screw in clockwise, except in specialist applications.
The definition of quality and the explanations given are what quality means in English, in manufacture, and in management. They are correct. Your re-definition is like saying, "I'm straight, but I like to suck guys' dicks." Not quite the definition of heterosexual.
Swapping the engine makes working on cars ridiculous. I've done it, and you better know exactly what you need going into the store.
I always run my cars out pretty far. I had one dump oil and throw a rod at 220k; it was very poorly maintained by the prior owner, and had its first timing chain service at 210k, and only one transmission fluid change in its lifetime. The owner insisted that transmission fluid only got changed if the transmission gets rebuilt.
That's not an economic theory. That's a specific implementation of an economic policy. I wasn't including the infininte number of "fund this, not that" choices. Theory is how to tax, how to own.
You said theory and policy. Policy is very specific. It includes what services are government-provided, how they're provided, what their extent is, how they're funded, and so on. It includes tax brackets, plans to adjust things like minimum wage, if you should even have a minimum wage, and so on. It includes regulations, rebates, and subsidies.
I would have a trivial minimum wage, but only to prevent worker abuse if there's a new class of $0.50 workers. Perhaps no initial minimum, and instituting one if there looks to be a problem.
It works like this: if you don't work, at all, you collect UBI. The UBI I've set gets you something livable; you probably won't spend much time at home, and you can't afford fancy toys. You can buy a $2 Frisbee, so maybe you spend a lot of time playing Ultimate Frisbee with your friends, since you have no job. Your life kind of sucks, and your primary source of relief is that you can LEAVE YOUR HOUSE.
If you get a job, you lose time to work, at great effort. You may lose 40 hours each week, or part time it at 20. You may work at K-Mart as a cashier, or at Panera Bread making bread overnight, or at Rocks and Gravel Quarry shoveling heavy stone gravel in the hot sun for 12 hours a day. This takes time away from your nature hikes, your volunteer work, your Ultimate Frisbee games, and so on.
Now, any retard can shovel gravel, but let's be honest: nobody is going to do that shit for the same wage as sticking cash in a drawer. For that matter, why do I want to work 40 hours for 50 cents an hour, get myself $20 at the end of the week, and... what, exactly? Buy a 12 pack of beer? Yeah, hell no, they need to pay me better.
The first consideration is the major time sacrifice. You'll have people looking for more enjoyable work to minimize this. Some people might shovel stone for $5/hr, because it's a challenge between me, the rocks, and the sun; some people might take up baking for $5/hr, because I get to learn how to make bread. For the most part, people will look for a job that's enriching, and that pays well enough to compensate: the stone and bread challenge is great and all, but I don't want to do this every fucking day, and I would like a bigger apartment or an X-Box. After a week, the exciting new job in the world of cake decoration has become a chore, and it's decreasing my quality of life, and I need appropriate compensation or I'm going to find someone who pays better.
To me, trying to compute the optimal minimum wage is silly. It's going to vary by area, it's going to vary by job, and it serves no real purpose. UBI intends to supply a basic standard of living so that nobody is so desperate as to take any job for slave wage; if you offer slave wage, your applicants are able to offer a finger and still find food and shelter.
That's freedom.
I'm a fan of the ideal free market. Where barriers are low, and information is free. People can't make "free" decisions in our free market, because the companies are lying to them, and lobbying for market barriers.
The ideal free market is a fantasy. In this ideal, everyone makes fully-rational decisions based on full competence. The problem is people aren't competent, we can manipulate competence, and we do so to gain advantage. It comes right down to making boxes of laundry detergent red because people will associate the color red with a better product even if all empirical evidence proves the product is shit (this is actually why Coca-Cola is the top cola: over 80% of people who took the Pepsi Challenge in the 80s preferred the taste of Pepsi when they didn't know which was which, but everyone loves the familiar shiny red can of Coke).
My economic policy tries to address t
Yes. That's sometimes abuse, and sometimes our own fault for not setting quality standards correctly. The US isn't always innocent: Apple stomps all over FoxConn's factory floor making sure the employees producing Apple products are mentally healthy, while Dell doesn't give a shit if you use slave labor working 80 hours a week for nearly zero pay.
Resale value is part of the quality assessment. To some people, resale value is not an issue. Notably, if you are specifically looking for a car to replace in 5 years, chances are you expect to get all the value out of that car. Fleet cars, for example, are run through a heavy duty cycle and have their resale value drastically discounted.
My conclusions are fully rational, operate from a technical perspective, and reject irrelevant considerations that people get all emotional over. "OH but the car lasts longer, so it's better because it has lower carbon!" Not relevant. "Oh but the 5 year car MIGHT last 3 years!" Not relevant. "Oh but you can sell the 50 year car for more!" Yeah, and you paid a lot more for it, and now have to dump it back into a market where it's apparently a much better value proposition to ditch that particular car and get a brand new one. "But the second hand market is so cool!"
Why would you intend to replace a car in 5 years? Why would you actually plan turn-over? What are the tax implications of resale? Do you know how much it costs to replace a car that's retained its resale value, versus one that's fully depreciated? The normal way that's handled is by junking the car, rather than reselling, because it's easier on taxes and allows you to take he full depreciation deduction.
The best part is Google isn't paying them shit, and so Google comes along and says, "We'll give you money," and they're like, "It's not enough money!"
Recently, yes. It's still a good comparison: you know what I mean, and history supports the above statements. Times change, and maybe times are changing for the worse for Germany; or maybe they've stumbled, and will get back to high-end German engineering soon. Time will tell.
The Chinese will still produce garbage on demand.
Incorrect thinking. The 5 year car is built to last 5 years. It's designed to a tolerance where it should last 5 years, and with cost-cutting measures so that it doesn't reliably exceed 5 years. Most (95%, 97%, 99.5%, depending on quality guidelines) units should last 5 years.
You're making odd, nebulous, non-realistic arguments about quality. If you want a high-end car that can last 50 years for your use cases, and it has a significant chance of dying after 30 years, that's a fucking low quality car. It does not meet acceptance criteria, is not suitable for your purpose, and should be passed over. Similarly, if you expect to cycle your fleet out every 5 years, your cars should last 5 years: if they very occasionally last 3, or if they often fall short or run over some 6 months either way, that might be acceptable; if they often last only 3 years, then they don't meet quality acceptance criteria and are not of high quality. If those fuckers are not pre-programmed to die, but they wear out uniformly right on the 5 year mark, they're of almost perfect quality.
Not faulty thinking. Quality only applies to the original buyer; the second-hand buyer will look for quality as well, on different terms. The second-hand buyer then becomes the original buyer of second-hand goods, and his acceptance criteria doesn't include being in the beginning of its duty cycle or having consistent risk prospects (i.e. there may be things wrong with the car, or it may be at a point in its life where it's twice as likely to experience certain failures, and you're half as sure if it'll make it the next 20,000 miles or only 5,000 miles before hitting them).
Think of it this way: After 5 years, the car is obsolete. It gets 20mpg; the new cars have more torque, more horsepower, are hybrids, and get 45mpg. The new cars have better safety features that didn't exist when this car was built. This car will last 50 years, but nobody will buy it; it's going to the scrap yard.
It follows that we mandate a long-lived car if we want to save money, too, unless building a long-lived car costs 5 times as much as building a short-lived car that has 1/3 the life span. Most people will go for a car that lasts 6 years and costs $20k over a car that lasts 20 years and costs $120k--which is why we have economy cars all over the US, with a duty cycle of about 100k, at an average of 12k/year driving miles.
That's kind of irrelevant, anyway. The Chinese can build high quality; they often build frail things because we ask for frail duty cycles. That set of cheap Chinese knives you got for $10? It was commissioned as a set of sharp, non-rusting knives for cheap as possible, with high aluminum content being acceptable to quality standards. They took it right to the bare bottom of acceptance criteria, driving the production cost down low. They can also forge you a $150 chef's knife out of the finest steel, if you want.
Actually, the Chinese will build to any spec. If they can build it on the same quality requirements for cheaper, you tell them you want it to your quality spec and you pay less.
This is unlike Germany, where the only quality level is "high", and you pay for German manufacture. German manufacturers won't provide you with a lower cost-tier and a lesser-duty-cycle product.
By the by, quality is the degree to which a deliverable satisfies requirements. A car that falls apart after 5 years isn't any higher quality than a car that runs for 50 years, if you're going to replace either in 5 years anyway. If the former is much cheaper to own and maintain for the first 5 years than the latter, then the former is of higher quality; if the latter is cheaper to own and maintain, then the latter is over-engineered and can be stripped back to last 5 years and cost much less, better satisfying quality requirements.
Many of us want cars which will satisfy a low total cost for acceptable function. The car should last longer to avoid a new expensive purchase, and require minimal maintenance to retain its important functions (reliability, safety, comforts, emissions, and so on). Our quality standards are the cheapest thing we can get for the presumed function and comfort level, which is why economy cars are so popular in the US: they don't save very much on gas, they don't drive as well as something with a V6 or V8 and a sports suspension, but they're cheap and they tend to have a good duty cycle (even GM's ecotec engines are built to last, never mind the newer non-Ford engines Mazda has been putting in the 3).
Trying to decrease China's rise to power?
A lot of newer ideas are hard to implement. This is a fact.
Even UBI is hard to implement: if we weren't in so much debt, the transition off Social Security would be a lot easier, and the change-over would be faster, because we could just leverage debt. As we stand, I've worked out numerous complex transitions, some that require 20 years of turn-over, to not interrupt anyone's social security or government pensions while switching over to UBI, with only a marginal (1%-2%) tax increase, which continuously decreases as people get older and as natural inflation continues. We could do the whole turn-over in about 5 years if we could leverage debt; it wouldn't be a lot of debt, but it's like having 15 maxed out $25k credit cards and then saying you could get shit under control if you took out two more $50k cards.
Electric cars have always predicated on batteries, which were patent-encumbered (NiMH), poor technology for the purpose (lead-acid, NiCD, NiMH), or heavy and expensive (Li+, NiMH). NiMH batteries were a good contender for a while, but have lifespan issues and were very expensive. Li+ were much better, but heavy and expensive. Newer Li+ are cheaper, but are still heavy--there's only 300 mile range in the Tesla for a reason--yet can almost compete with gasoline.
Plasma displays were invented in 1960. They were huge and expensive. Remember having $50 32 inch CRTs when you could get a perfectly good 30 inch LCD for $5000? Remember when nanometer chips rolled out, but were expensive because 60% were misconstructed? The price dropped as they got better... now we have 16nm scale, and building 100nm scale would be damn near 100% reliable output.
You don't seem to understand just how economics works, either. "Nearly every economic policy/theory" would envelop thousands, if not millions, of policies. For example: Throw out NASA, institute a National Medical Research Agency under the NIH instead. Why? Because fuck Pfeizer, and the whoring of overpriced drugs, and the killing of low-cost, life-saving treatments in favor of research into high-cost maintenance drugs. NASA got us satellites; most of their other achievements are overrated (better rubber in tires? Goodyear. Better shoe cushioning? Puma. Better mattresses? Etc.).
In UBI, there are many variations. Some folks want everyone to have a comfortable middle-class salary on UBI. I've repeatedly shown this is not possible, and also not an issue. It's not possible because, if you took away 100% of everyone's income and divided it up between everyone over age 18, you'd get a $55k/year salary minus taxes--the implication is nobody would be able to profit, so the incentive to work would be eliminated. It's not an issue because UBI doesn't decrease the incentive to work (it actually increases it by eliminating welfare traps) until it's set high enough to cause hyper-inflation, which destroys the economy anyway.
I suggest no minimum wage under UBI, because minimum wage gives employers more negotiating power to pin unskilled labor to a fixed number that you have to lobby congress to increase. Removing minimum wage means the individual has to decide if the job at the given wage increases their quality of life: your employer must negotiate with every single individual job seeker, who will decide if they like life more with more money (to buy a larger apartment, better food, Wii U) or if they're making too little money (working 40 hours shoveling gravel for a case of beer). Other people propose UBI with minimum wage, citing that you somehow need minimum wage to provide a standard of living (which is what UBI is supposed to do--what do you do when 50% of the country isn't working?).
This is why I tout my full economic plan: you can really fuck up a country with UBI. You can really fuck up a country with Capitalism, which is why we got the Sherman Anti-Trust Act after Carnegie Steel and Rockerfeller Oil.
For that matter, you can really fuck up a country with Democracy--our representative de
Yes, and then Slashdot can send you to http://lp.getfree-soft.net/mpc... every 3 seconds instead of 5 seconds.
The expansion of the middle class is irrelevant to UBI. If you had 90% poor and 10% rich, then set up a progressive tax to provide for the UBI, the UBI and tax would be exactly the same with a distrivution of 10% poor, 80% middle class, and 10% rich.
You have 10 making $10,000 (poor), 80 making $50,000 (middle class), and 10 making $1,000,000 (rich), with a tax of 10% below $50,000 and 20% above $50,000. For (10% * (10*1000 + 80*50000 + 10*50,000) + 20% * (10*1000000)), you get $10,000 + $400,000 + $50,000 + $1,900,000, a total of $2,360,000. $1,950,000 comes from the coffers of the rich.
Make that 90% poor, 10% rich. That $14,100,000 becomes 90 people making $10,000 and 10 people making $1,401,000. For (10% * (90 * 10,000 + 10 * 50,000) + 20% * 10 * 1,351,000), you get $90,000 + $50,000 + $1,351,000, a total of $1,491,000.
Notice that, for example, sudden automation and a loss of jobs removes money from the poor and middle class, shifting it up to the rich. In the above example, with a sudden divide at $50,000, the result of our ridiculous scenario is a drop of 37%. That means UBI drops by 37%.
The big recession of the mid-2000s was a drop of 6% of personal income, which, with a 15% UBI, would have translated to UBI decreasing by 0.9%. Part of the common complaint (accurate or not) is the rich getting richer: people make fancy charts to complain about this. A flat tax on all income ensures that UBI does not self-defeat by correcting this problem: UBI isn't attempting to solve this problem, but rather to avoid it entirely.
Everyone I've seen propose a UBI (including Fair Tax people) couldn't explain what would happen if the UBI was doubled. "It'd be bad" is the most detail I got from anyone.
At low levels, UBI is not resilient: an economic downturn could leave the unemployed with not enough income to pay the cost of low-end housing. As I said, the mid-2000s economic downturn represented a 6% decrease in total income, equating to a small drop in UBI. UBI requires 1% padding above the bare minimum to survive this; the more padding, the more economic damage UBI can survive.
At extremely high levels, UBI fails in the same way as Marxism and similar systems. This is irrelevant, because UBI has a failure mode at a lower level. I mention it to illustrate another point: the majority-mean income in 2012, that being all personal income divided by all Americans aged 18 and over, was roughly $55,000. If we set UBI at 100% less taxes, every single American would receive the equivalent of a $55,000 salary as UBI. There simply isn't any more income.
UBI's upper bound isn't the proven one, or the implied disincentive to work. An increase in UBI increases economic activity and cash availability. This both encourages people to spend more freely and taxes the producers and distributors. UBI thus encourages inflation. Inflation is not a bad thing; but hyperinflation is economically destructive, and would damage the economy.
It's difficult to pinpoint where UBI is theoretically safe. Our current welfare system costs 25% of total personal income if you count retirement security (Social Security, Government Pensions), housing assistance, food security (WIC, food stamps), and unemployment. UBI costs considerably less, but is tied directly to economic activity rather than government outlay: instead of the government taxing to cover a need for so many trillions of welfare, they collect so many trillions of tax and divide that up as welfare.
As economic activity increases, so does UBI; and as UBI increases, so does the availability of money in the lower class. UBI works because the poor are now a harvestable cash crop: if they get too much cash, the cost of services and basic goods increases. If the cost of services and basic goods increases, more money flows through the economy without creating more wealth. If more money flows through the e
Look, I've already explained how to make the economy durable against these sorts of things. People just won't take it.
The current systems rely on work for income to establish a basic standard of living (minimum wage), and then supply welfare if you can't find work (unemployment, HUD, food stamps). It takes an act of congress to raise minimum wage, which has all kinds of economic implications (make fewer people work harder, reduce quality of service, move to automation); and it takes more money--thus more taxes, thus more economic stress and damage--to pay for rising unemployment when the economy starts to dip.
The main problems are, as a whole body and not a set of individual factors of various importance, the moral demand of an enforced fair minimum wage; the moral demand of compensation by work or need (i.e. welfare only if we think you need and deserve it); the sub-saturation of the welfare system (i.e. not everyone collects welfare, so more people will collect welfare during hard economic times); and the progressive tax structure supporting the welfare system (it should be flat--and social security is actually regressive, which is even worse).
Our welfare system currently includes retirement benefits (social security and government pensions--usually you're ineligible for social security if you collect government pensions), totaling $1,800 billion ($886 billion SS, $920 billion pensions); food and family support (HUD housing assistance, WIC, food stamps); and unemployment insurance. Medicaid and Medicare I specifically exclude due to complexity. Altogether, this is over $3,500 billion of federal outlay and a cost of, roughly, 25% of the total personal income in the united states.
Eliminating these services (with a controlled drop--social security and government pensions require particular care) and replacing them with a 15% separate flat tax on all income (including capital gains) would provide enough money to feed and house every American over the age of 18. This would require new housing of roughly 224sqft apartments for the unemployed (profitable at $300/mo); but the poor, having a guaranteed income, would be a cash crop for landlords who provided that service, and so there would be a rush to provide basic housing and other basic needs.
With a flat tax supporting it, the system ignores income distribution: if the rich get richer and the middle class shrinks, the UBI stays the same. The UBI itself isn't taxed (it's a tax credit), and isn't counted as income from a tax perspective. Because 100% of adults are collecting it, sudden mass unemployment doesn't add strain to the economy. It fills the function of social security and government pensions (i.e. it prevents you from losing your retirement benefits due to market crash or banks folding--the original intent). It tracks real inflation, because it functions as a percentage of the total economic activity: UBI is a tax levied by the people for the people, not a tax levied by the government for its services to the people.
By eliminating these welfare services--which you must be qualified for--and eliminating minimum wage, we leave everyone in control of their own lives. Nobody goes homeless, nobody goes hungry. Nobody is forced to take a job for inadequate pay; for that matter, nobody is forced to accept that a job is a "minimum wage job", because there's no such thing as minimum wage: if anyone can do that job, but this shit is hard and unpleasant and generally demeaning, then people will appropriately seek other employment unless offered better pay. If they don't get appropriate inflation-following wage increases, the job eventually becomes more trouble than it's worth--it decreases quality of life, and adds too little income to offset this--and so they quit and look for better employment.
Many people find this offensive. The idea that the government will give you money, just because you're an adult? The idea that you could live in an apartment with a 6x9 bedroom--half of which is taken up by a
Just raising the price is price gouging, or "exploitative opportunism" as you say.
Raising the price because you see a person is in great need for a good you are selling and is under duress by that need is extortion. This specific individual's need makes them highly reliant on your immediate service, allowing for coercion. The typical terms of your service are not extortion; but modifying those terms in response to an individual's sudden reliance on you is.
You don't have a cell phone and your wife is in labor? And the car's out of gas? Wow, sure would be a shame if you couldn't use my 25 cent payphone to call the hospital. Actually, it's a $25 payphone today. There's not another station for five miles down the road. Sure is a shame.
For the same way journalists write headlines that speak to people ideas such as "Republican Conservative Equivalent in Japan Blowing its Bible Thumper Over Stem Cells, Goes on Assault Against Science" for stories that read more "Severe misconduct and fraud rife within corrupt institution; major restructuring proposed."
Seriously. "Stem Cell Debacle Could Bring Down Entire Research Lab." That's a screaming political headline. Then you read the article, and no such thing is happening.
Good faith is a legal concept often addressed in court. Some opposite concepts are bad faith and negligence. All of these center around the beliefs of a rational person: if a rational person with appropriate qualifications (i.e. your engineers did X, would an engineer know the implications of X?) would understand the consequences of an action, then you are held to that understanding. If you act such that you should know the outcome is harmful and contrary to what would be considered good faith, you are acting in bad faith.
An example of bad faith would be production of sub-quality components with a staff of engineers who understand the limits of such components. If you built chargers with 14ga wire to carry 20A currant, using aluminum core wire with extremely thin electroplating, those chargers would degrade quickly. If you are doing so and then marketing heavily in areas trafficked heavily by Tesla cars, we can reasonably assume you are committing sabotage: these chargers will quickly degrade, causing charging issues and damaging Tesla's image. If you release your own charger architecture of better quality, the evidence reinforces this: Why would you use 12ga full copper wire for 20A chargers of your design, but 14ga aluminum core for 20A of Tesla's design?
Evidence of ulterior motives and willful negligence constitute bad faith.
The directors are the shareholders. Common stock owners are irrelevant.
No. Extortion is the use of coercion to make you pay.
Let's say you need to get to a job interview, and your car runs out of fuel. You have AAA, and can call for a tow or fuel, enough to get to the next gas station 5 miles away, free; it'll take over an hour, and you don't have time. If the gas station right across the street charges $3.50/gal, but the owner sees you require fuel RIGHT NOW for the security of your livelihood and so jacks up the price, that's extortion: he sees your situation allows him to coerce you into paying above his normal fare, so demands additional money using that leverage.
If the price is raised generically--if the gas station owner raises his fixed price to $15/gal because he's the only station within reasonable distance and so expects people will pay it to avoid a long detour--that's price gouging. Any situation where a good is unreasonably priced in its general sale is price gouging.
That wouldn't make any sense.
Python with web.dom?