I argue that if you are not paying your employees enough to survive on - so they need social security benefits - then you are probably undercutting your competitors who pay decent wages, which are taxed to provide said benefits to your workers.
That's actually a thing, although I want to start on a Universal Dividend (a type of social security benefit) that pays to everyone. The difference between wage and something like EITC is wage is paid by people who buy products (i.e. the consumers, the 90%), while something like EITC is paid from the progressive tax system (i.e. it moves rich-folk money downwards). The Dividend is funded by a flat FICA tax on all income (personal and corporate), and so it pays back to the middle-class (mainly neutral-ish) and moves down more money from the top: you get $7,500 per adult, but pay 14% of your income regardless, and 14% of a million is a lot more than $7,500.
People with jobs shouldn't be getting food stamps and housing vouchers, but they're often that poor. I built a growth-based Dividend, and I want minimum wage to rise whenever a full-time job pays less than twice the Dividend. That means minimum wage rises with productivity, and workers get a fair share. That minimum wage is still (for quite a long time) lower than the COLA-adjusted $15/hr at 2023, but the take-home total of one full-time minimum wage plus the Dividend should have parity with a $15/hr wage in 2023. The immediate next year, the take-home should actually be higher than the COLA-adjusted minimum wage.
Over time, those welfare services will become unloaded due to people being much less poor, even at the bottom.
If your employees cannot live on their wages - then it should be illegal to distribute profits to your shareholders, as this is stealing from your competitors as well as mistreatment of your employees.
That's more of an emotional argument than an economic argument, and doesn't really solve anything. Blunt raising of the minimum wage (and wages in general) reduces jobs. That's why economists currently favor EITC when we talk numbers above $10.10/hr, and why you see $15/hr wage plans that talk about a $1/hr increase each year, as well as the recent laddering in Maryland's wage increases: the policymakers all know that a shock adjustment upwards will create that unemployment all-at-once, before the labor market can adjust.
It doesn't adjust by those wage recipients having more to spend, either. It adjusts by reducing the labor market. Fewer people working into late retirement, fewer people leaving college early to start careers, fewer work visa authorizations, and the like. The labor market is actually quite agile and can cut out a bunch of workers in a few months if there's too much unemployment pressure. It is, however, quite discriminatory: old people (retirement at 70 instead of 72) and young people (more full college degrees or grad school attendees) go first, along with immigrant workers. That's kind-of okay, because it's an economic process involving resource (job) scarcity and individual decisions, rather than hiring discrimination by employers--i.e. people react this way to hard times.
I like correlating minimum wage to productivity growth because it grows with growth, and so reduces how many new jobs are available rather than reducing how many total jobs are available. The risk of creating unemployment by wage raise in that model is lower.
It's weird, isn't it? Either you have things like EITC and other assistance paid for by the rich because businesses pay low wages to get a competitive advantage (and profit), or you have higher wages paid for by the middle-class. At the same time, while it may sound good to have the rich pay for everything, wages definitely need to be something resembling fair, and so need to come up.
I'm going to undo the damage this congress has done. I'd like to say the delay actually makes implementation easier (it does), but the delay has also resulted in thousands of people dying (in ONE DAY here in Baltimore, five homeless froze to death in one encampment. About 700 in the US each year).
Today, top-down is fashionable: you see outcries for CEO pay ratio limits, while people ignore that big-earner CEOs work for big companies and make a few dollars per employee. Get down to the small businesses with CEOs making barely 6 figures if you want to see thousands in cash comp per employee. People somehow argue that there's a huge win here if we take all their money and redistribute it as wage raises for their employees, making everyone 2.5 cents per hour richer.
That won't pay for healthcare.
Bottom-up approaches are things like the ACA (which is a mess) and my own Universal Dividend. If we tighten up the ACA employer mandate, more people get healthcare--which is important in a world where the $12/hr employees can pay half their paychecks for insurance with copays they can't afford. A public option covers those who can't get affordable care for cheap but, like the proposed Medicare-for-All, would inevitably get its funding from the middle-class (that's okay). It's the Universal Dividend that ties it all together.
A Universal Dividend, implemented in 2016 (before Trump and his tax bullshit), doesn't increase tax burdens. It cuts taxes at the top a little (1.9% on the top bracket in an unadjusted rough model), and pays enough throughout the year to leave everyone in the middle-class with something extra. When you get to the very bottom, they get the whole dividend--and it's $7,500 per adult in 2016.
The Dividend grows faster than inflation without raising taxes, and so offsets more and more of the middle-class tax burden. It grows with productivity gains. Because it raises bottom income, it cuts back on welfare eligibility. That means welfare reaches more people and, in total, ends up spending less money--and even less year after year. The Federal spending on welfare goes down. Refounding retirement and disability on top of the Dividend makes them immediately and permanently solvent.
Immediately, you have no homeless and no hunger in the United States. You have more consumer spending, thus more effective demand, thus more jobs. Wages, raised when the Dividend goes up past half of full-time wage, grow. Recessions become weaker and shorter (if they don't stop happening altogether--this might cause full employment, not sure yet).
What you have is, essentially, a tax cut. A tax cut everywhere, with all its consequences except an increased deficit and decreased services. A tax cut so big the poor get back thousands more than they pay in.
In fact, it's over $500 billion. That public option? It costs $200 billion. Healthcare and an end to homelessness and hunger, and less taken in taxes.
I want to cut working hours (which reduces wealth generation and makes the pie smaller). That's going to take time, maybe a decade to get to 35 or 32 hours. With this new economic policy... it should be doable rather easily. We'll grow faster like this, and the shortening of working hours is an offset: we take some of the growth as pie, and the rest as time to enjoy eating the pie.
It's not equality we need; it's equity. Everyone needs a fair share.
We can make a strong society with a good social safety net and also have capitalism, you know.
Capitalism drives innovation and new wealth, but has some problems of focus; regulation tames those. Welfare is the third leg, and some have argued that the welfare state is responsible for modern wealth; this is incomplete: the welfare state has stabilized markets and enabled capitalism to bring more growth.
Socialism has been discredited for many reasons, such as the advent of global communication and trade eliminating the primarily-self-contained nation-state economy, and the rise of a new type of individualism which changes the moral basis on which socialism is founded. One of the most-powerful factors, however, was the realization that socialists severely underestimated the power of capitalism in driving innovation and using the market as a massive information processing system. Central planning doesn't work because it sacrifices these properties of free markets.
We're at a point where something simple as a Universal Dividend reshapes our economies in significant ways. In the United States, implementing such a policy in 2016 (pre-TCJA) ends poverty and cuts welfare costs, acts as a half-trillion-dollar tax cut, and does all this without increasing government deficit spending. Tax burdens actually fall--lower tax rates on the rich, a rolling tax refund to the middle-class, and a cash aid package to the poor. Welfare services continue, yet there are fewer claims and a greater span of effectiveness. The Social Security retirement and disability benefits, when refounded on this system, become permanently-stable.
Such a policy achieves this while ending all homelessness and hunger in the nation practically immediately (we have to wait for landlords to build apartments; effective demand outstrips supply). The Dividend grows with productivity increases--fueled by capitalism. The consumer market drives business and protects against recessions (demand-side economics, increased effective demand), creating jobs. Because of the continuous growth with productivity, the Dividend offsets the taxes taken--it grows faster than inflation, lowering the effective tax rate over time.
Socialists wanted central planning and collectivism. They didn't consider simply giving people a fair and equitable share--not an equal share, but enough to give them the opportunity to succeed and become the wealthy and powerful in our capitalist system. Our society's hierarchy remains; mobility in that hierarchy increases; and yet there's actually a bottom.
The socialists I know are quite nasty people, oddly enough. They hate my solutions. They keep trying to explain to me that capitalism is outdated and we won't survive if we don't end it and move to a superior system of equal public ownership of all things, and largely end the concept of "private property". Perhaps they know my example will permanently end the remnants of any real socialist movement in the world.
Actually, changes in gene expression can inherit as well, even if you move the infant offspring out of the environment. So, for example, an animal which is exercised a lot and develops high strength and endurance may pass on this trait without a DNA sequencing basis by changes to DNA expression in the sperm or egg cells. The cell cytoplasm may carry RNA or the DNA may have things bound to its structure altering expression to increase the rate and propensity to develop muscle as such.
Such a thing increases fitness: an adaptive organism--one which can make biological trade-offs by modifications to gene expression based on its environment--can bias its offspring to the environment it experienced, which is likely to continue. A thicker fur coat to protect against the colder environment, and thinner in warmer areas, means the milding of winter won't send your cat into full summer coat because its parents lived in a tundra. The cat thus is less-likely to thin its coat so much and freeze in the tundra. Spreading territory into other climates is easier because no genetic mutation is required to adapt: offspring are just pre-programmed to be fit for what their parents experienced.
That has the limits of genetics. You're not going to evolve something by simply exercising its parent to instill an ever-strengthening trait down the line. You're going to have to wait for genetic mutations, and cull the unfit.
American businesses have good reason to be extremely diligent in monitoring supply lines.
That's true in any case, but point taken. I'm a social democrat: I like capitalism; I don't trust it.
Again, with the problem of income inequality [pewresearch.org], only being able to afford chinese 'goods' even as majority of families are dual income [bls.gov] makes a declaration of higher standard of living questionable.
Income inequality is unrelated, and isn't helped by moving manufacture here. Income inequality isn't really a problem, anyway; inequity is the problem.
I designed the Universal Dividend and its growth-based minimum wage policy in such a way that an unemployed, single individual can only have as little as 10% of the mean (not median) income; two-adult household is 20%; one-adult with a full-time, minimum wage job is 30%; and two-adult with a full-time, minimum-wage job is 40%.
That means a two-adult household in 2016 with one full-time worker would theoretically have $21,600 (half of which doesn't count as taxable income), but I started the Dividend at 14% with a plan to lower it to 10% later. In 2016, that household has $30,000, half of which is not taxable income: they pay 10% Federal income taxes on $3,000, plus 14% FICA on $15,000, total $2,400. $27,600 or $2,300 monthly take-home.
By 2023, a single adult with a full-time job is making the equivalent take-home of $15/hr minimum wage, although the wage is only really around $9.25/hr.
It grows faster than cost-of-living from there (even in the phase where I start moving toward 10%). I might consider changing my target to 12.5% to ensure a two-adult, one-worker household ends up halfway to what might be called "middle-class"; I'm uncertain.
This is brand-new tech, and the post-keynesians are going to need a while to get a grasp of all the impacts. Nice, round numbers are also not necessarily optimal, but eh.
If you want to talk bare economic policy, that's a different beast than trade.
as it is close enough to impossible to implement in a way that is secure and understandable to the average voter.
Challenge accepted!
You can implement Internet voting by using cryptographic identity tokens to verify that a hard credential was once presented for in-person verification. This is stronger than current voter verification, so we still need our existing polling places: requirements for a hard credential verification (such as by driver's ID or passport) would disenfranchise voters in our current system. Mind you, we need to fix the underlying problems preventing people who have become homeless or otherwise lost their identity papers from obtaining a photo ID, because that does other things: it keeps them out of homeless shelters, denies them government benefits, and otherwise disenfranchises them of many government and private services to which they are entitled.
So Internet voting is only allowable for the subset of voters who can get a Photo ID. The remainder must go to their designated polling place as usual.
To assign a cryptographic token, a voter would take their hard credential to a government building such as a motor vehicle authority (where you get your driver's license and voter registration), Social Security benefits office, or their designated polling place. They would bring, buy, or (if facing the hardship of poverty) be provided with a standards-compliant FIDO device, such as one by Yubikey (we really need another manufacturer making good ones). This device costs $18 and can hold 1,000 identity credentials. It uses 4096-bit RSA or strong elliptical curve cryptography (although it doesn't use curve 22519).
So far, so good: show your ID, get a USB device.
When you identify with your ID, you plug the device into a USB port, and press a button on its back. That's it. The government verifies your ID and has you present the device. In the background, this thing generates a random key pair and sends the public key to the requestor—no user intervention.
These FIDO devices plug into a USB port, then blink a light when challenge. You click it and it signs the challenge using the requested key. To vote on the Internet, you'd go through the online system, check all your boxes, then insert the device when prompted and click the button. That's it.
For added security, you can use two-part independent verification. When you submit your vote, it goes up to the server, which stores it and sends back a QR code signed by the voting system's own private key. That code contains your vote data. You can point your smart phone at it and verify its contents. If satisfied, click "Cast" to finally cast your vote, then use the FIDO device again (one more click) to send it.
Security: it takes two physical button presses to actually cast a vote. The first is required to create your vote data in an unmodifiable form; you receive that back in a form not modifiable after being received, interpreted, and signed by the voting system itself. Your vote isn't actually accepted until you send THAT back as final verification that you have seen it through the eyes of the voting system--which requires the second press. The data can't be modified in between, and new data can't be sent that second time without requiring a THIRD press to cast the update instead.
Interface: Check the boxes, hit submit, plug in the USB key. Click. Point your phone at the screen if you want to verify that your browser hasn't been hijacked to cast fake votes (no guarantee your browser and phone aren't both hijacked and colluding). Click. Your vote is cast.
Compare this to today's voting system: we fill out a bunch of paper ballots or use electronic voting systems. The votes get cast. Somebody else counts them, tells them how many there are. If the election officials are lying, they can get away with it. They can discard votes from the pile--no one will know. We don't recount votes by name;
That's the problem, yeah; although we have some hard numbers here (about $16 billion for the part I can fix, $172 billion for all of it).
On the other hand, never having to worry about someone 3,000 miles away with a fake ID opening a new credit card or mortgage in your name is a definite plus.
Eh five bucks helps. Five hundred helps more, but hey, if a thousand people gave me five bucks a month, that's five thousand dollars every month. I need $100k to win this; it's winnable by hope and luck at $36k.
Send your friends my way;)
And yeah, it's possible to reduce the problem by solving or reducing other social problems. I have a background in computer information security, and an appreciation of layered approaches comes with the territory.
Not really. You've already identified a human target. You can monitor them, yet not come across decoded messages. It's comparatively-easy to discover they're never without access to (or keep referencing in public libraries) a certain book or periodical. If it's not on your common list, it goes to the front of the line for potential book cipher cryptanalysis.
You can always contribute to my campaign. The average congressional challenger spends $3M, but I'm using more modern digital marketing and think I can do it in $100k. We also think my opponent is retiring, so the bar is lower without an incumbent in the game.
My core platform is anti-poverty, healthcare, and fiscal responsibility. Criminal justice reform and ending identity theft are things that turned out to be easy, and so got drawn in shortly after I started. Criminal justice reform is going to be big, though—almost as big as healthcare and the Dividend, in terms of changing the landscape of America. Our rate of incarceration is legendary, and recidivism is unbelievable; and I'm going to use every incentive possible to turn that around to match the nation with the lowest rate of either: Norway.
The guns will still be a problem, but not nearly as much without so many people running around trying to shoot other people.
If we use the common set, it's easy to run through a list of common books and do a fast brute force. That was literally my immediate-following statement.
Basically, using a common book is like using a password picked off the published list of the top million passwords.
or the most popular ever: a Gideon Bible.
That is likely the first thing someone will attempt--especially if your operatives seem reasonably prone to hotel stays.
For added security, you can have an agreed algorithm for choosing the start location eg the first five digits on the front page of today's newspaper + your cat's birthday,
This is known to not increase security, and can even reduce security.
The football results.
Data set too small, chosen ciphertext attack possible.
I just don't like the statement that laws make reality happen. It's a fallacy of equivocation: you have legislative rules (law) and statements of relations or sequences of phenomena invariable under the same conditions (scientific principles). I'm kind of a pedant; to be fair, I'm kind of serious about solving problems, so I need to have a proper understanding of those problems. Pedantry helps.
I'm a politician. That means I've become aware of stupid shit politicians have said throughout history. Watch out for this one:
But the law of supply and demand is an economic law, and every economic law is man-made, and what is made by man can be altered by man.
Economic law, like mathematical law, is the observation of outcomes in a given state. People economize: they seek to achieve the most-ends for the expense of least-means. They make decisions based on their knowledge and understanding of what will achieve this (rational behavior), and are affected by placing value (valuation) on short- versus long-term gains. You can change the state, but not the laws of economics; you can only change your understanding of such laws.
Politicians in various nations have argued, at various points, that the laws of economics are mutable: that we don't need to learn a new thing about economic behaviors, but rather that economic behaviors are inconvenient and so we can and should dictate that they change. It's absurd.
Your gun control argument is actually an economic argument (behavioral economics), and a rational argument around such involves the limits of changing behaviors. We have good gun control laws in this country, and we fail to implement them properly. Background checks don't always work because states don't propagate background check information, and don't always enforce waiting periods and background checks (gun show loophole, etc.). Nobody really believes anyone should be able to walk into a super market, grab a gun, drop some cash, and leave; although some people do believe the police should raid every home and take every gun, because they don't understand the economic behaviors of crime, and so they think they can just legislate that people won't get guns. People debate around the fuzzy bit in the middle a lot.
They debate too much, in fact.
Gun control does its job, and what we see is only a deficiency, not a failure: correcting the system or "getting better gun control" won't remediate the vast majority of the remaining problem. We also need criminal justice reform to cut back the recidivism rate and, thus, the crime rate by refactoring criminals into well-adjusted citizens through humane treatment and integration into the community during their entire incarceration. We need sensible drug laws to reduce the number of criminal black markets created around harmless intoxicants that shouldn't even be illegal, to treat people for addiction from beginning to end, and to ensure people struck by such addiction or brought to abuse by mental health issues get the treatment they need and can integrate into the workforce instead of becoming the hopeless outcast who must turn to crime.
A single solution will never work. Gun control merely makes it more-difficult to obtain a firearm in short order (raises cost), requiring a higher value on firearms. Defuse the criminal element and you lower that value, which means you can move most criminal gun acquisition motive below the cost of criminal gun acquisition. You cannot move the cost of criminal gun acquisition high enough to diminish the motive very much, because criminal behavior quickly builds up severe consequences on par with that cost, while the gun is still valuable in that criminal context. You have to devalue criminal gun acquisition.
It also acts as a barrier to crimes of passion and suicide attempts. That's pretty much the only big win of gun control on its own.
I'm a pretty radical center-left candidate myself. I'm pushing policy to end homelessness and hunger, without raising the tax burden, and trying to change how our economic policies fundamentally work. Too much Bernie Sanders socialism for me, but I still want universal healthcare and a strong social safety net. I found a way.
I have a project management background and an enormous amount of focus on risk. I take steps to control risks and protect against unintended consequences, ensuring anything that goes wrong is sufficiently-minor and easy to respond to quickly and effectively. Most people don't take such rigor with anything.
One of the aspects of a free society, is the general concept of innocent until proven guilty
I keep telling people that if you can get away with a criminal behavior--if you can do it without getting caught, reliably--that behavior probably shouldn't be criminal. We have laws that prevent illegal search and seizure, which makes it kind of hard for the police to discover you've been fermenting apple juice into cider and enforce any law making the personal consumption of alcohol illegal if you're not getting drunk and becoming a rowdy nuisance (or worse). On the other hand, people know when they've been robbed, and it's hard to make a career as a thief without ever getting caught (or having to craft enormous master plans to keep your identity a secret--which usually only works in cheap romance novels targeted at a certain breed of reader).
We accept certain risks so we have protections against government overreach.
Slashdot Mirror
I argue that if you are not paying your employees enough to survive on - so they need social security benefits - then you are probably undercutting your competitors who pay decent wages, which are taxed to provide said benefits to your workers.
That's actually a thing, although I want to start on a Universal Dividend (a type of social security benefit) that pays to everyone. The difference between wage and something like EITC is wage is paid by people who buy products (i.e. the consumers, the 90%), while something like EITC is paid from the progressive tax system (i.e. it moves rich-folk money downwards). The Dividend is funded by a flat FICA tax on all income (personal and corporate), and so it pays back to the middle-class (mainly neutral-ish) and moves down more money from the top: you get $7,500 per adult, but pay 14% of your income regardless, and 14% of a million is a lot more than $7,500.
People with jobs shouldn't be getting food stamps and housing vouchers, but they're often that poor. I built a growth-based Dividend, and I want minimum wage to rise whenever a full-time job pays less than twice the Dividend. That means minimum wage rises with productivity, and workers get a fair share. That minimum wage is still (for quite a long time) lower than the COLA-adjusted $15/hr at 2023, but the take-home total of one full-time minimum wage plus the Dividend should have parity with a $15/hr wage in 2023. The immediate next year, the take-home should actually be higher than the COLA-adjusted minimum wage.
Over time, those welfare services will become unloaded due to people being much less poor, even at the bottom.
If your employees cannot live on their wages - then it should be illegal to distribute profits to your shareholders, as this is stealing from your competitors as well as mistreatment of your employees.
That's more of an emotional argument than an economic argument, and doesn't really solve anything. Blunt raising of the minimum wage (and wages in general) reduces jobs. That's why economists currently favor EITC when we talk numbers above $10.10/hr, and why you see $15/hr wage plans that talk about a $1/hr increase each year, as well as the recent laddering in Maryland's wage increases: the policymakers all know that a shock adjustment upwards will create that unemployment all-at-once, before the labor market can adjust.
It doesn't adjust by those wage recipients having more to spend, either. It adjusts by reducing the labor market. Fewer people working into late retirement, fewer people leaving college early to start careers, fewer work visa authorizations, and the like. The labor market is actually quite agile and can cut out a bunch of workers in a few months if there's too much unemployment pressure. It is, however, quite discriminatory: old people (retirement at 70 instead of 72) and young people (more full college degrees or grad school attendees) go first, along with immigrant workers. That's kind-of okay, because it's an economic process involving resource (job) scarcity and individual decisions, rather than hiring discrimination by employers--i.e. people react this way to hard times.
I like correlating minimum wage to productivity growth because it grows with growth, and so reduces how many new jobs are available rather than reducing how many total jobs are available. The risk of creating unemployment by wage raise in that model is lower.
It's weird, isn't it? Either you have things like EITC and other assistance paid for by the rich because businesses pay low wages to get a competitive advantage (and profit), or you have higher wages paid for by the middle-class. At the same time, while it may sound good to have the rich pay for everything, wages definitely need to be something resembling fair, and so need to come up.
I'm going to undo the damage this congress has done. I'd like to say the delay actually makes implementation easier (it does), but the delay has also resulted in thousands of people dying (in ONE DAY here in Baltimore, five homeless froze to death in one encampment. About 700 in the US each year).
One day.
Trump supporters?
That depends if you start top-down or bottom-up.
Today, top-down is fashionable: you see outcries for CEO pay ratio limits, while people ignore that big-earner CEOs work for big companies and make a few dollars per employee. Get down to the small businesses with CEOs making barely 6 figures if you want to see thousands in cash comp per employee. People somehow argue that there's a huge win here if we take all their money and redistribute it as wage raises for their employees, making everyone 2.5 cents per hour richer.
That won't pay for healthcare.
Bottom-up approaches are things like the ACA (which is a mess) and my own Universal Dividend. If we tighten up the ACA employer mandate, more people get healthcare--which is important in a world where the $12/hr employees can pay half their paychecks for insurance with copays they can't afford. A public option covers those who can't get affordable care for cheap but, like the proposed Medicare-for-All, would inevitably get its funding from the middle-class (that's okay). It's the Universal Dividend that ties it all together.
A Universal Dividend, implemented in 2016 (before Trump and his tax bullshit), doesn't increase tax burdens. It cuts taxes at the top a little (1.9% on the top bracket in an unadjusted rough model), and pays enough throughout the year to leave everyone in the middle-class with something extra. When you get to the very bottom, they get the whole dividend--and it's $7,500 per adult in 2016.
The Dividend grows faster than inflation without raising taxes, and so offsets more and more of the middle-class tax burden. It grows with productivity gains. Because it raises bottom income, it cuts back on welfare eligibility. That means welfare reaches more people and, in total, ends up spending less money--and even less year after year. The Federal spending on welfare goes down. Refounding retirement and disability on top of the Dividend makes them immediately and permanently solvent.
Immediately, you have no homeless and no hunger in the United States. You have more consumer spending, thus more effective demand, thus more jobs. Wages, raised when the Dividend goes up past half of full-time wage, grow. Recessions become weaker and shorter (if they don't stop happening altogether--this might cause full employment, not sure yet).
What you have is, essentially, a tax cut. A tax cut everywhere, with all its consequences except an increased deficit and decreased services. A tax cut so big the poor get back thousands more than they pay in.
In fact, it's over $500 billion. That public option? It costs $200 billion. Healthcare and an end to homelessness and hunger, and less taken in taxes.
I want to cut working hours (which reduces wealth generation and makes the pie smaller). That's going to take time, maybe a decade to get to 35 or 32 hours. With this new economic policy... it should be doable rather easily. We'll grow faster like this, and the shortening of working hours is an offset: we take some of the growth as pie, and the rest as time to enjoy eating the pie.
It's not equality we need; it's equity. Everyone needs a fair share.
We can make a strong society with a good social safety net and also have capitalism, you know.
Capitalism drives innovation and new wealth, but has some problems of focus; regulation tames those. Welfare is the third leg, and some have argued that the welfare state is responsible for modern wealth; this is incomplete: the welfare state has stabilized markets and enabled capitalism to bring more growth.
Socialism has been discredited for many reasons, such as the advent of global communication and trade eliminating the primarily-self-contained nation-state economy, and the rise of a new type of individualism which changes the moral basis on which socialism is founded. One of the most-powerful factors, however, was the realization that socialists severely underestimated the power of capitalism in driving innovation and using the market as a massive information processing system. Central planning doesn't work because it sacrifices these properties of free markets.
We're at a point where something simple as a Universal Dividend reshapes our economies in significant ways. In the United States, implementing such a policy in 2016 (pre-TCJA) ends poverty and cuts welfare costs, acts as a half-trillion-dollar tax cut, and does all this without increasing government deficit spending. Tax burdens actually fall--lower tax rates on the rich, a rolling tax refund to the middle-class, and a cash aid package to the poor. Welfare services continue, yet there are fewer claims and a greater span of effectiveness. The Social Security retirement and disability benefits, when refounded on this system, become permanently-stable.
Such a policy achieves this while ending all homelessness and hunger in the nation practically immediately (we have to wait for landlords to build apartments; effective demand outstrips supply). The Dividend grows with productivity increases--fueled by capitalism. The consumer market drives business and protects against recessions (demand-side economics, increased effective demand), creating jobs. Because of the continuous growth with productivity, the Dividend offsets the taxes taken--it grows faster than inflation, lowering the effective tax rate over time.
Socialists wanted central planning and collectivism. They didn't consider simply giving people a fair and equitable share--not an equal share, but enough to give them the opportunity to succeed and become the wealthy and powerful in our capitalist system. Our society's hierarchy remains; mobility in that hierarchy increases; and yet there's actually a bottom.
The socialists I know are quite nasty people, oddly enough. They hate my solutions. They keep trying to explain to me that capitalism is outdated and we won't survive if we don't end it and move to a superior system of equal public ownership of all things, and largely end the concept of "private property". Perhaps they know my example will permanently end the remnants of any real socialist movement in the world.
Actually, changes in gene expression can inherit as well, even if you move the infant offspring out of the environment. So, for example, an animal which is exercised a lot and develops high strength and endurance may pass on this trait without a DNA sequencing basis by changes to DNA expression in the sperm or egg cells. The cell cytoplasm may carry RNA or the DNA may have things bound to its structure altering expression to increase the rate and propensity to develop muscle as such.
Such a thing increases fitness: an adaptive organism--one which can make biological trade-offs by modifications to gene expression based on its environment--can bias its offspring to the environment it experienced, which is likely to continue. A thicker fur coat to protect against the colder environment, and thinner in warmer areas, means the milding of winter won't send your cat into full summer coat because its parents lived in a tundra. The cat thus is less-likely to thin its coat so much and freeze in the tundra. Spreading territory into other climates is easier because no genetic mutation is required to adapt: offspring are just pre-programmed to be fit for what their parents experienced.
That has the limits of genetics. You're not going to evolve something by simply exercising its parent to instill an ever-strengthening trait down the line. You're going to have to wait for genetic mutations, and cull the unfit.
I actually spend a lot more time on Facebook and wandering around knocking doors or talking to people at clubs. I've been on Twitch too.
Reused key allows for analysis.
American businesses have good reason to be extremely diligent in monitoring supply lines.
That's true in any case, but point taken. I'm a social democrat: I like capitalism; I don't trust it.
Again, with the problem of income inequality [pewresearch.org], only being able to afford chinese 'goods' even as majority of families are dual income [bls.gov] makes a declaration of higher standard of living questionable.
Income inequality is unrelated, and isn't helped by moving manufacture here. Income inequality isn't really a problem, anyway; inequity is the problem.
I designed the Universal Dividend and its growth-based minimum wage policy in such a way that an unemployed, single individual can only have as little as 10% of the mean (not median) income; two-adult household is 20%; one-adult with a full-time, minimum wage job is 30%; and two-adult with a full-time, minimum-wage job is 40%.
That means a two-adult household in 2016 with one full-time worker would theoretically have $21,600 (half of which doesn't count as taxable income), but I started the Dividend at 14% with a plan to lower it to 10% later. In 2016, that household has $30,000, half of which is not taxable income: they pay 10% Federal income taxes on $3,000, plus 14% FICA on $15,000, total $2,400. $27,600 or $2,300 monthly take-home.
By 2023, a single adult with a full-time job is making the equivalent take-home of $15/hr minimum wage, although the wage is only really around $9.25/hr.
It grows faster than cost-of-living from there (even in the phase where I start moving toward 10%). I might consider changing my target to 12.5% to ensure a two-adult, one-worker household ends up halfway to what might be called "middle-class"; I'm uncertain. This is brand-new tech, and the post-keynesians are going to need a while to get a grasp of all the impacts. Nice, round numbers are also not necessarily optimal, but eh.
If you want to talk bare economic policy, that's a different beast than trade.
as it is close enough to impossible to implement in a way that is secure and understandable to the average voter.
Challenge accepted!
You can implement Internet voting by using cryptographic identity tokens to verify that a hard credential was once presented for in-person verification. This is stronger than current voter verification, so we still need our existing polling places: requirements for a hard credential verification (such as by driver's ID or passport) would disenfranchise voters in our current system. Mind you, we need to fix the underlying problems preventing people who have become homeless or otherwise lost their identity papers from obtaining a photo ID, because that does other things: it keeps them out of homeless shelters, denies them government benefits, and otherwise disenfranchises them of many government and private services to which they are entitled.
So Internet voting is only allowable for the subset of voters who can get a Photo ID. The remainder must go to their designated polling place as usual.
To assign a cryptographic token, a voter would take their hard credential to a government building such as a motor vehicle authority (where you get your driver's license and voter registration), Social Security benefits office, or their designated polling place. They would bring, buy, or (if facing the hardship of poverty) be provided with a standards-compliant FIDO device, such as one by Yubikey (we really need another manufacturer making good ones). This device costs $18 and can hold 1,000 identity credentials. It uses 4096-bit RSA or strong elliptical curve cryptography (although it doesn't use curve 22519).
So far, so good: show your ID, get a USB device.
When you identify with your ID, you plug the device into a USB port, and press a button on its back. That's it. The government verifies your ID and has you present the device. In the background, this thing generates a random key pair and sends the public key to the requestor—no user intervention.
These FIDO devices plug into a USB port, then blink a light when challenge. You click it and it signs the challenge using the requested key. To vote on the Internet, you'd go through the online system, check all your boxes, then insert the device when prompted and click the button. That's it.
For added security, you can use two-part independent verification. When you submit your vote, it goes up to the server, which stores it and sends back a QR code signed by the voting system's own private key. That code contains your vote data. You can point your smart phone at it and verify its contents. If satisfied, click "Cast" to finally cast your vote, then use the FIDO device again (one more click) to send it.
Security: it takes two physical button presses to actually cast a vote. The first is required to create your vote data in an unmodifiable form; you receive that back in a form not modifiable after being received, interpreted, and signed by the voting system itself. Your vote isn't actually accepted until you send THAT back as final verification that you have seen it through the eyes of the voting system--which requires the second press. The data can't be modified in between, and new data can't be sent that second time without requiring a THIRD press to cast the update instead.
Interface: Check the boxes, hit submit, plug in the USB key. Click. Point your phone at the screen if you want to verify that your browser hasn't been hijacked to cast fake votes (no guarantee your browser and phone aren't both hijacked and colluding). Click. Your vote is cast.
Compare this to today's voting system: we fill out a bunch of paper ballots or use electronic voting systems. The votes get cast. Somebody else counts them, tells them how many there are. If the election officials are lying, they can get away with it. They can discard votes from the pile--no one will know. We don't recount votes by name;
That's the problem, yeah; although we have some hard numbers here (about $16 billion for the part I can fix, $172 billion for all of it).
On the other hand, never having to worry about someone 3,000 miles away with a fake ID opening a new credit card or mortgage in your name is a definite plus.
Eh five bucks helps. Five hundred helps more, but hey, if a thousand people gave me five bucks a month, that's five thousand dollars every month. I need $100k to win this; it's winnable by hope and luck at $36k.
Send your friends my way ;)
And yeah, it's possible to reduce the problem by solving or reducing other social problems. I have a background in computer information security, and an appreciation of layered approaches comes with the territory.
Not really. You've already identified a human target. You can monitor them, yet not come across decoded messages. It's comparatively-easy to discover they're never without access to (or keep referencing in public libraries) a certain book or periodical. If it's not on your common list, it goes to the front of the line for potential book cipher cryptanalysis.
Ha, and here I thought I was talking too much. ;)
You can always contribute to my campaign. The average congressional challenger spends $3M, but I'm using more modern digital marketing and think I can do it in $100k. We also think my opponent is retiring, so the bar is lower without an incumbent in the game.
My core platform is anti-poverty, healthcare, and fiscal responsibility. Criminal justice reform and ending identity theft are things that turned out to be easy, and so got drawn in shortly after I started. Criminal justice reform is going to be big, though—almost as big as healthcare and the Dividend, in terms of changing the landscape of America. Our rate of incarceration is legendary, and recidivism is unbelievable; and I'm going to use every incentive possible to turn that around to match the nation with the lowest rate of either: Norway.
The guns will still be a problem, but not nearly as much without so many people running around trying to shoot other people.
Sounds like the same value to me. You got a hundred-dollar sword for cheap, or you got a box full of valuable life lessons.
Well, yeah. I was more interested in the fact that the keys were never secret in the first place: they're visible inside the lock itself.
there is no need to use an obscure book
If we use the common set, it's easy to run through a list of common books and do a fast brute force. That was literally my immediate-following statement.
Basically, using a common book is like using a password picked off the published list of the top million passwords.
or the most popular ever: a Gideon Bible.
That is likely the first thing someone will attempt--especially if your operatives seem reasonably prone to hotel stays.
For added security, you can have an agreed algorithm for choosing the start location eg the first five digits on the front page of today's newspaper + your cat's birthday,
This is known to not increase security, and can even reduce security.
The football results.
Data set too small, chosen ciphertext attack possible.
I just don't like the statement that laws make reality happen. It's a fallacy of equivocation: you have legislative rules (law) and statements of relations or sequences of phenomena invariable under the same conditions (scientific principles). I'm kind of a pedant; to be fair, I'm kind of serious about solving problems, so I need to have a proper understanding of those problems. Pedantry helps.
I'm a politician. That means I've become aware of stupid shit politicians have said throughout history. Watch out for this one:
But the law of supply and demand is an economic law, and every economic law is man-made, and what is made by man can be altered by man.
Economic law, like mathematical law, is the observation of outcomes in a given state. People economize: they seek to achieve the most-ends for the expense of least-means. They make decisions based on their knowledge and understanding of what will achieve this (rational behavior), and are affected by placing value (valuation) on short- versus long-term gains. You can change the state, but not the laws of economics; you can only change your understanding of such laws.
Politicians in various nations have argued, at various points, that the laws of economics are mutable: that we don't need to learn a new thing about economic behaviors, but rather that economic behaviors are inconvenient and so we can and should dictate that they change. It's absurd.
Your gun control argument is actually an economic argument (behavioral economics), and a rational argument around such involves the limits of changing behaviors. We have good gun control laws in this country, and we fail to implement them properly. Background checks don't always work because states don't propagate background check information, and don't always enforce waiting periods and background checks (gun show loophole, etc.). Nobody really believes anyone should be able to walk into a super market, grab a gun, drop some cash, and leave; although some people do believe the police should raid every home and take every gun, because they don't understand the economic behaviors of crime, and so they think they can just legislate that people won't get guns. People debate around the fuzzy bit in the middle a lot.
They debate too much, in fact.
Gun control does its job, and what we see is only a deficiency, not a failure: correcting the system or "getting better gun control" won't remediate the vast majority of the remaining problem. We also need criminal justice reform to cut back the recidivism rate and, thus, the crime rate by refactoring criminals into well-adjusted citizens through humane treatment and integration into the community during their entire incarceration. We need sensible drug laws to reduce the number of criminal black markets created around harmless intoxicants that shouldn't even be illegal, to treat people for addiction from beginning to end, and to ensure people struck by such addiction or brought to abuse by mental health issues get the treatment they need and can integrate into the workforce instead of becoming the hopeless outcast who must turn to crime.
A single solution will never work. Gun control merely makes it more-difficult to obtain a firearm in short order (raises cost), requiring a higher value on firearms. Defuse the criminal element and you lower that value, which means you can move most criminal gun acquisition motive below the cost of criminal gun acquisition. You cannot move the cost of criminal gun acquisition high enough to diminish the motive very much, because criminal behavior quickly builds up severe consequences on par with that cost, while the gun is still valuable in that criminal context. You have to devalue criminal gun acquisition.
It also acts as a barrier to crimes of passion and suicide attempts. That's pretty much the only big win of gun control on its own.
This kind of thing happens when you have big
Have a read.
I'm a pretty radical center-left candidate myself. I'm pushing policy to end homelessness and hunger, without raising the tax burden, and trying to change how our economic policies fundamentally work. Too much Bernie Sanders socialism for me, but I still want universal healthcare and a strong social safety net. I found a way.
This is why I talk a lot about clean air and water, and avoid talking about climate change. Everybody loves clean air and water.
I have a project management background and an enormous amount of focus on risk. I take steps to control risks and protect against unintended consequences, ensuring anything that goes wrong is sufficiently-minor and easy to respond to quickly and effectively. Most people don't take such rigor with anything.
Running for MD07, Elijah Cummings's seat.
Nixon wiretapped his own conversations, not the other way around.
One of the aspects of a free society, is the general concept of innocent until proven guilty
I keep telling people that if you can get away with a criminal behavior--if you can do it without getting caught, reliably--that behavior probably shouldn't be criminal. We have laws that prevent illegal search and seizure, which makes it kind of hard for the police to discover you've been fermenting apple juice into cider and enforce any law making the personal consumption of alcohol illegal if you're not getting drunk and becoming a rowdy nuisance (or worse). On the other hand, people know when they've been robbed, and it's hard to make a career as a thief without ever getting caught (or having to craft enormous master plans to keep your identity a secret--which usually only works in cheap romance novels targeted at a certain breed of reader).
We accept certain risks so we have protections against government overreach.
Mathematical law is just observational documentation. You have no authority over reality.
Why are they making a big deal about people publishing a picture of the TSA master keys?
Just cut the locks open, examine the pin tumbler mechanism, and identify the master keying. Then you can derive the key from the lock.