That's the thing. If your kid gets shot, you are going to hate guns forever; never mind that more people die if we try (and fail--or even succeed!) to ban them. Moreover, most people--even if they won't admit it--will knowingly opt for an outcome that would save their own child even at the expense of hundreds of others. Like if you could institute a gun ban, and you knew that in 1 year your daughter would be dead, and if you banned guns she'd never be shot to death, but on average 17 MORE kids would be murdered a year, you'd probably opt to ban guns. You might say you won't, but then there's all those Christians who immediately become Atheists when bad things happen to them--your child is in the arms of God, and fuck God, there is no God, God wouldn't have taken your child.
In Sweden, electric heating is illegal because it's inefficient. "Even with a 100% efficient electric heater, the amount of fuel needed for a given amount of heat is more than if the fuel was burned in a furnace or boiler at the building being heated. If the same fuel could be used for space heating by a consumer, it would be more efficient overall to burn the fuel at the end user's building."
Norway's coastline is listed as about 3000km, about 25000km, and about 58000km depending on who you ask. The CIA, USGS, and US Coast Guard give similar fluctuations (by orders of magnitude) for the length of the coast of Florida.
How big a set of parameters do you think it would take to define MERELY THE OUTLINE of a squirrel?
All estimates of the length of any coastline are wrong. They vary widely depending on how many curves are taken into account. Without adequate smoothing, the length of the coast of Norway is infinite. With adequate smoothing, it's a few miles.
All very pretty, but "pragmatism" is what got us all our broken systems. Windows is a load of doing what's "pragmatic" because it works, and the end result is when they need to change something it really doesn't work anymore. Have you finished a Windows port of Samba yet?
It's short-term because you lose 5 jobs, then a new business opens and hires people again. It'd be long-term if that closed down Wal-Mart was replaced with a derelict parking lot and a crumbling old Wal-Mart building 80 years in the future.
Retail is always hiring. We have like 70% labor participation here and people are wandering the streets complaining they have no job, but the retail and fast food places are hiring like crazy, complaining they can't find employees. I know chronic poor folks that are in and out of jobs all the time. "Oh the state fair is here, I'm goin' back tomorrow at 8am I'mma work until they kick me out!" "Yeah I have three jobs I'm working at Burger King AND at the 7-11!" etc. I also know unemployed middle classers that are like, "...what do you mean, work at UPS or Panera Bread? I need a JOB, you know, MONEY. Those places don't pay anything." Well cry me a river while Steve Martin plays sad songs on the world's tiniest banjo.
Here's an idea: All technology is property of the Government.
If you do something and decide to keep it trade-secret, the Government might decide it looks nice and they'll tear it down to figure out how it works, then publish it. If you submit it to the Government, they'll keep it secret. For like, 20 years. Worst of all, if the Government likes something and can't functionally figure it out, they might just show up and ask.
Patent submission is free. There is no patent court.
No, it's the other way around. Closing a local business is a loss for the community on a short term. The building is eventually filled with a new business performing a different function. Alternate scenarios include existing businesses changing around (adding/altering services), or being pre-emptively replaced (a similar business with different services becomes more popular, or a new business appears and people are more interested in spending their extra dollars there--indirect competition).
Claiming an effect of permanent job loss is identical to claiming detrimental effects of permanent unemployment increases from an expanding population. While population expansion has significant downsides, that's not one of the acute negative impacts. (Some have even suggested that unemployment is a myth--that people won't take jobs that don't pay enough, so they sit around and complain about being unemployed while we pay some Mexican $10/hr instead of paying an American $22/hr; my issue with that is that some outsourced jobs are below minimum wage, but then if you factor in shipping costs perhaps not...)
Potassium and other vitamins are in potato skin. You cited boiled potato without skin--and the link you gave didn't list potassium or B6. Most people eat baked potato out of the skin and throw the skin away, or they eat mashed potatoes.
Changing the function of a bookstore is also an indication of a failing business model. If the bookstore can survive on its own, it's just a valuable evolution... unless another bookstore with a coffee shop opens, becomes vastly more popular, and the first bookstore dies out. On the other hand, if the first bookstore was going to die out anyway, they could still try to attract customers by altering the atmosphere. Of course, if the bookstore was going to die out, it means people are going to stop buying books (and you're better off with a coffee shop) or they found a better way to buy books (and we're back to folding because of a rival bookshop, this time Amazon, although another local bookstore with a coffee shop could do the same).
It's a broken window when you're trying to hold onto something that's useless. If folks in the community have no interest in a bookstore, but they go there and spend extra money because "it's good for the community," that's basically useless: it has an associated cost and is wasteful, and could be replaced with something better; at the very least, not doing this would raise the amount of money in peoples' pockets without taking anything away from them--the only reason they want the bookstore is because they think a bookstore is good for the community. Similarly, if people donate money to keep a library open, and yet the only thing the library does is staff 3 or 4 people to wander around and dust, that's terribly wasteful; libraries aren't of any value if nobody goes in to use the facilities (and in this era, people are into e-books and likely to buy the book they want rather than read it free at the library).
Things should exist because they have purpose. A healthy community with 2 or 3 glaziers is healthy because windows break, and glaziers have to fix them, and there is enough business for 2 or 3 glaziers. If we have kids once in a while break windows, or we design windows specifically to break frequently, such that the community supports 8 or 10 glaziers (or makes those 2 or 3 very rich), then what we have is a destruction of wealth. The community does not need glaziers; rather it needs functional windows, and glaziers fix broken windows. The community doesn't need any particular business; it needs jobs, roads, and generally wealth--and part of wealth is having businesses available locally that people want, which isn't served by teaching people to mindlessly buy into "supporting local businesses" by buying into things they really don't care about as a charity. Business welfare isn't profit, and I find the big chain H-Mart here (Asian food market) much more valuable than a small local grocer that carries the same shit as Giant Foods because it expands the range of available foods I have (not to mention I can get produce cheaper there). If you want to run a local market here, open a market that carries things people want--otherwise fold and get out.
Mechanization and an increase in product lifespan are much larger, very much different effects. Essentially the same but on a whole different scale--closing a bookstore occurs because the bookstore doesn't supply anything the customers want in one specific location from one outlet. Mechanization eliminates employees because they don't supply anything employers want--same thing, really. Mechanization is, however, not restricted to circumstance; if you can mechanize the production and distribution of books, you can do it FOR ALL BOOKS EVER MADE. A local bookstore closes, but another community keeps theirs open because it's a good bookstore and caters to their tastes better and so on; we can't rubber-stamp close all our local bookstores. A local printer fires 80% of its staff after opening up a new factory that's 80% automated and only needs machinists to run, and every other printer in the country does the exact same thing.
They are essentially the same; but the impact is different in the same way that a camp fire is essentially fire yet not a California wild fire.
Finally, I'd like to reiterate that the whole 'shop local' thing by itself is economically wasteful. That doesn't imply that any given example is automatically wrong. Sometimes the local bookstore is better--or the community just likes it for something other than books. If nobody really cares, why should they essentially pay a tax to keep open a historic but basically worthless landmark? The bookstore needs to add some kind of value--a better selection of books is a good start in most cases I've seen.
Nah, the answer of artificially funding a business because it's "better for the local economy" is as far off the mark as you can be. It simply doesn't correlate. What do you have then? A local business that's propped up by debt dollars injected into the economy by all the student loans and mortgages. Held for historical reasons, but not practically useful, and essentially acting as a broken window.
The debt economy came from FDR trying to get out of a depression by mandating that mortgages should be 30 years, more people should own houses, and there should be no gold standard backing the US Dollar. Instead, the dollar was just that: the US Dollar. After that, we started lending a hell of a lot more money, and the Fed issued money by debt rather than by note of claim to gold.
America was poor, so he got everyone a credit card.
As for the meaning of "wealth": ever since the currency was floated, the "absolute wealth" is relative: the society no longer values it, but values "wealth increase rate". Doesn't strike you as peculiar that the finance people never judge an economy by the absolute value of the GDP, but only by the "grow rate"?
To put the problem in your term: as big would it be your current output, after so many businesses being shot down (and relocated in China), what are the chances that you'll still be able to stay relevant in the "growing race"? And if you are not able, how long until your "bigger output" will mean exactly nothing?
Well the vast majority of the "poor" in this country--those who the US Census has established are living in abject poverty--own their home (46%), have air conditioning (76%, compared to 36% of all households in the US 30 years ago), are not overcrowded (94%, with over 67% having more than 2 rooms per person in their house), has more living space than the average person (modal average of all--i.e. the middle class) living in European big cities like Paris or London, owns a car (over 70%, with nearly 70% owning two or more cars), has a color TV (97%, more than half have multiple), has a VCR or DVD player (67%) and cable or satellite (over 50%), owns a microwave (73%), a stereo (over 50%), and an automatic dishwasher (over 30%). 89% assess that they have "enough" to eat at all times; 2% assess that they "often" do not have enough to eat; the remainder occasionally have less food than they consider ideal.
These are circa 2005. A poor person in 2005 on average has a house, car, food, TV, some kind of subscription TV service, air conditioning, a refrigerator, and even access to medical care. They have cell phones and telephone answering machines (damn, people still have land lines?), Internet access, and a luxury condo compared to a Parisian or Athenian.
If America weren't a debt society living on the edge of credit and facing imminent foreclosure, I'd say we were pretty wealthy here. As it is, we as a nation have run up our credit cards to the max and can't afford to pay them much longer, and we're just running them up further. All money is loaned into existence, loaned to the banks who loan to the people (businesses, mortgages, credit cards...) who buy stuff and pass those dollars to pay salaries supported ultimately by debt. The Federal Government borrows money from other countries, collecting debt money in taxes, with no asset base to work from. How dysfunctional.
See the Mann Act. Also if you ever go to a theater in some third world country (Romania? Cambodia? Where is 12 year old porn legal?) to watch child pornography, and it's known--prosecutable--then you will be arrested upon re-entering the country, since that kind of thing is illegal in the US. There was even an article on Slashdot about a guy who got arrested a few years ago for sex with a minor while out of the country (he bragged about it to the border police, thinking he was immune because it wasn't in the US). Technically, if you're under 21 and in Europe, you're not legally allowed to consume or possess alcohol at any time.
RAM is incredibly fast. L1 cache is SRAM and faster; RAM access requires a whole lot of shit with slow clocking. There's a lot of latency because there's a memory controller between everything that works out how to send commands across and get data and put it in the CPU, mostly because just accessing RAM outright by attaching it to CPU pins doesn't work anymore (and partly because the memory controller adds features, but that's become less of an effect). Seriously the CPU can clock a few times by the time access requests actually reaches the RAM.
The problem is that the local bookstore doesn't have to be crap to go out of business, and why does someone who decides to save $10 by buying from amazon decide to shop at a farmer's market (less convenient, can be more expensive) instead of a grocery store?
The point was to show wealth creation. In any case the community is less interested in a local bookstore than in having $10; having $10 instead of not having $10 (you have the book either way) is having more. In all cases, something else will replace a failed business--it always does. Usually many somethings--where I live, dozens of businesses start and fail every day; I've been down to town hall to start a business, I've seen how many people come in and out every day, most of them will fail. Something will take hold, be that a Farmer's market or a new fish store or a brand new strip club.
No, you're wrong. Government grants are grants--you get money. Private equity funding is loans (you owe money) or significantly smaller. Big ass grants, when managed properly, are the hand and the will of God for just about any business.
Yes in this case it looks like the Solindra $500M and the A123 $250M could have gone to paying down a fraction of our national debt at least. Small fraction, but it's a start.
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That's the thing. If your kid gets shot, you are going to hate guns forever; never mind that more people die if we try (and fail--or even succeed!) to ban them. Moreover, most people--even if they won't admit it--will knowingly opt for an outcome that would save their own child even at the expense of hundreds of others. Like if you could institute a gun ban, and you knew that in 1 year your daughter would be dead, and if you banned guns she'd never be shot to death, but on average 17 MORE kids would be murdered a year, you'd probably opt to ban guns. You might say you won't, but then there's all those Christians who immediately become Atheists when bad things happen to them--your child is in the arms of God, and fuck God, there is no God, God wouldn't have taken your child.
The worst part was reading a Tolkien novel.
In Sweden, electric heating is illegal because it's inefficient. "Even with a 100% efficient electric heater, the amount of fuel needed for a given amount of heat is more than if the fuel was burned in a furnace or boiler at the building being heated. If the same fuel could be used for space heating by a consumer, it would be more efficient overall to burn the fuel at the end user's building."
You can run a hydronic furnace off your hot water tank, with a coil in the blower to pump heat through HVAC.
You would need a memory controller, or your e-mail app could stomp all over your web server's memory space.
Norway's coastline is listed as about 3000km, about 25000km, and about 58000km depending on who you ask. The CIA, USGS, and US Coast Guard give similar fluctuations (by orders of magnitude) for the length of the coast of Florida.
How big a set of parameters do you think it would take to define MERELY THE OUTLINE of a squirrel?
All estimates of the length of any coastline are wrong. They vary widely depending on how many curves are taken into account. Without adequate smoothing, the length of the coast of Norway is infinite. With adequate smoothing, it's a few miles.
All very pretty, but "pragmatism" is what got us all our broken systems. Windows is a load of doing what's "pragmatic" because it works, and the end result is when they need to change something it really doesn't work anymore. Have you finished a Windows port of Samba yet?
It's short-term because you lose 5 jobs, then a new business opens and hires people again. It'd be long-term if that closed down Wal-Mart was replaced with a derelict parking lot and a crumbling old Wal-Mart building 80 years in the future.
Retail is always hiring. We have like 70% labor participation here and people are wandering the streets complaining they have no job, but the retail and fast food places are hiring like crazy, complaining they can't find employees. I know chronic poor folks that are in and out of jobs all the time. "Oh the state fair is here, I'm goin' back tomorrow at 8am I'mma work until they kick me out!" "Yeah I have three jobs I'm working at Burger King AND at the 7-11!" etc. I also know unemployed middle classers that are like, "...what do you mean, work at UPS or Panera Bread? I need a JOB, you know, MONEY. Those places don't pay anything." Well cry me a river while Steve Martin plays sad songs on the world's tiniest banjo.
The domain is run by Samba straight on Linux, not by an Active Directory Domain Controller on Windows 2008 Server.
We got a giant monolith instead of a bunch of core libraries and services.
Here's an idea: All technology is property of the Government.
If you do something and decide to keep it trade-secret, the Government might decide it looks nice and they'll tear it down to figure out how it works, then publish it. If you submit it to the Government, they'll keep it secret. For like, 20 years. Worst of all, if the Government likes something and can't functionally figure it out, they might just show up and ask.
Patent submission is free. There is no patent court.
I never really got an education, seeing as I was born an orphan and went to art college...
No, it's the other way around. Closing a local business is a loss for the community on a short term. The building is eventually filled with a new business performing a different function. Alternate scenarios include existing businesses changing around (adding/altering services), or being pre-emptively replaced (a similar business with different services becomes more popular, or a new business appears and people are more interested in spending their extra dollars there--indirect competition).
Claiming an effect of permanent job loss is identical to claiming detrimental effects of permanent unemployment increases from an expanding population. While population expansion has significant downsides, that's not one of the acute negative impacts. (Some have even suggested that unemployment is a myth--that people won't take jobs that don't pay enough, so they sit around and complain about being unemployed while we pay some Mexican $10/hr instead of paying an American $22/hr; my issue with that is that some outsourced jobs are below minimum wage, but then if you factor in shipping costs perhaps not...)
Potassium and other vitamins are in potato skin. You cited boiled potato without skin--and the link you gave didn't list potassium or B6. Most people eat baked potato out of the skin and throw the skin away, or they eat mashed potatoes.
Stop floating your arguments around.
Changing the function of a bookstore is also an indication of a failing business model. If the bookstore can survive on its own, it's just a valuable evolution... unless another bookstore with a coffee shop opens, becomes vastly more popular, and the first bookstore dies out. On the other hand, if the first bookstore was going to die out anyway, they could still try to attract customers by altering the atmosphere. Of course, if the bookstore was going to die out, it means people are going to stop buying books (and you're better off with a coffee shop) or they found a better way to buy books (and we're back to folding because of a rival bookshop, this time Amazon, although another local bookstore with a coffee shop could do the same).
It's a broken window when you're trying to hold onto something that's useless. If folks in the community have no interest in a bookstore, but they go there and spend extra money because "it's good for the community," that's basically useless: it has an associated cost and is wasteful, and could be replaced with something better; at the very least, not doing this would raise the amount of money in peoples' pockets without taking anything away from them--the only reason they want the bookstore is because they think a bookstore is good for the community. Similarly, if people donate money to keep a library open, and yet the only thing the library does is staff 3 or 4 people to wander around and dust, that's terribly wasteful; libraries aren't of any value if nobody goes in to use the facilities (and in this era, people are into e-books and likely to buy the book they want rather than read it free at the library).
Things should exist because they have purpose. A healthy community with 2 or 3 glaziers is healthy because windows break, and glaziers have to fix them, and there is enough business for 2 or 3 glaziers. If we have kids once in a while break windows, or we design windows specifically to break frequently, such that the community supports 8 or 10 glaziers (or makes those 2 or 3 very rich), then what we have is a destruction of wealth. The community does not need glaziers; rather it needs functional windows, and glaziers fix broken windows. The community doesn't need any particular business; it needs jobs, roads, and generally wealth--and part of wealth is having businesses available locally that people want, which isn't served by teaching people to mindlessly buy into "supporting local businesses" by buying into things they really don't care about as a charity. Business welfare isn't profit, and I find the big chain H-Mart here (Asian food market) much more valuable than a small local grocer that carries the same shit as Giant Foods because it expands the range of available foods I have (not to mention I can get produce cheaper there). If you want to run a local market here, open a market that carries things people want--otherwise fold and get out.
Mechanization and an increase in product lifespan are much larger, very much different effects. Essentially the same but on a whole different scale--closing a bookstore occurs because the bookstore doesn't supply anything the customers want in one specific location from one outlet. Mechanization eliminates employees because they don't supply anything employers want--same thing, really. Mechanization is, however, not restricted to circumstance; if you can mechanize the production and distribution of books, you can do it FOR ALL BOOKS EVER MADE. A local bookstore closes, but another community keeps theirs open because it's a good bookstore and caters to their tastes better and so on; we can't rubber-stamp close all our local bookstores. A local printer fires 80% of its staff after opening up a new factory that's 80% automated and only needs machinists to run, and every other printer in the country does the exact same thing.
They are essentially the same; but the impact is different in the same way that a camp fire is essentially fire yet not a California wild fire.
Finally, I'd like to reiterate that the whole 'shop local' thing by itself is economically wasteful. That doesn't imply that any given example is automatically wrong. Sometimes the local bookstore is better--or the community just likes it for something other than books. If nobody really cares, why should they essentially pay a tax to keep open a historic but basically worthless landmark? The bookstore needs to add some kind of value--a better selection of books is a good start in most cases I've seen.
Nah, the answer of artificially funding a business because it's "better for the local economy" is as far off the mark as you can be. It simply doesn't correlate. What do you have then? A local business that's propped up by debt dollars injected into the economy by all the student loans and mortgages. Held for historical reasons, but not practically useful, and essentially acting as a broken window.
The debt economy came from FDR trying to get out of a depression by mandating that mortgages should be 30 years, more people should own houses, and there should be no gold standard backing the US Dollar. Instead, the dollar was just that: the US Dollar. After that, we started lending a hell of a lot more money, and the Fed issued money by debt rather than by note of claim to gold.
America was poor, so he got everyone a credit card.
As for the meaning of "wealth": ever since the currency was floated, the "absolute wealth" is relative: the society no longer values it, but values "wealth increase rate". Doesn't strike you as peculiar that the finance people never judge an economy by the absolute value of the GDP, but only by the "grow rate"? To put the problem in your term: as big would it be your current output, after so many businesses being shot down (and relocated in China), what are the chances that you'll still be able to stay relevant in the "growing race"? And if you are not able, how long until your "bigger output" will mean exactly nothing?
Well the vast majority of the "poor" in this country--those who the US Census has established are living in abject poverty--own their home (46%), have air conditioning (76%, compared to 36% of all households in the US 30 years ago), are not overcrowded (94%, with over 67% having more than 2 rooms per person in their house), has more living space than the average person (modal average of all--i.e. the middle class) living in European big cities like Paris or London, owns a car (over 70%, with nearly 70% owning two or more cars), has a color TV (97%, more than half have multiple), has a VCR or DVD player (67%) and cable or satellite (over 50%), owns a microwave (73%), a stereo (over 50%), and an automatic dishwasher (over 30%). 89% assess that they have "enough" to eat at all times; 2% assess that they "often" do not have enough to eat; the remainder occasionally have less food than they consider ideal.
These are circa 2005. A poor person in 2005 on average has a house, car, food, TV, some kind of subscription TV service, air conditioning, a refrigerator, and even access to medical care. They have cell phones and telephone answering machines (damn, people still have land lines?), Internet access, and a luxury condo compared to a Parisian or Athenian.
If America weren't a debt society living on the edge of credit and facing imminent foreclosure, I'd say we were pretty wealthy here. As it is, we as a nation have run up our credit cards to the max and can't afford to pay them much longer, and we're just running them up further. All money is loaned into existence, loaned to the banks who loan to the people (businesses, mortgages, credit cards...) who buy stuff and pass those dollars to pay salaries supported ultimately by debt. The Federal Government borrows money from other countries, collecting debt money in taxes, with no asset base to work from. How dysfunctional.
See the Mann Act. Also if you ever go to a theater in some third world country (Romania? Cambodia? Where is 12 year old porn legal?) to watch child pornography, and it's known--prosecutable--then you will be arrested upon re-entering the country, since that kind of thing is illegal in the US. There was even an article on Slashdot about a guy who got arrested a few years ago for sex with a minor while out of the country (he bragged about it to the border police, thinking he was immune because it wasn't in the US). Technically, if you're under 21 and in Europe, you're not legally allowed to consume or possess alcohol at any time.
Well apparently the local bookstore isn't supplying them a service that's outright worth their god damn $10 or they'd be there spending $10.
RAM is incredibly fast. L1 cache is SRAM and faster; RAM access requires a whole lot of shit with slow clocking. There's a lot of latency because there's a memory controller between everything that works out how to send commands across and get data and put it in the CPU, mostly because just accessing RAM outright by attaching it to CPU pins doesn't work anymore (and partly because the memory controller adds features, but that's become less of an effect). Seriously the CPU can clock a few times by the time access requests actually reaches the RAM.
The problem is that the local bookstore doesn't have to be crap to go out of business, and why does someone who decides to save $10 by buying from amazon decide to shop at a farmer's market (less convenient, can be more expensive) instead of a grocery store?
The point was to show wealth creation. In any case the community is less interested in a local bookstore than in having $10; having $10 instead of not having $10 (you have the book either way) is having more. In all cases, something else will replace a failed business--it always does. Usually many somethings--where I live, dozens of businesses start and fail every day; I've been down to town hall to start a business, I've seen how many people come in and out every day, most of them will fail. Something will take hold, be that a Farmer's market or a new fish store or a brand new strip club.
No, you're wrong. Government grants are grants--you get money. Private equity funding is loans (you owe money) or significantly smaller. Big ass grants, when managed properly, are the hand and the will of God for just about any business.
Yes in this case it looks like the Solindra $500M and the A123 $250M could have gone to paying down a fraction of our national debt at least. Small fraction, but it's a start.