They are not backed by real world goods, so the value can easily go to zero
Fiat currency is backed by productivity: there's so much of it and it's standardized, so it represents everything produced and sold in a time frame. Digital currency... is hype. The strategy is literally "it becomes more-scarce as more is made, so it's worth more dollars because more people want it yet there's less of it!"
SystemD uses well-understood Linux kernel facilities such as the facility that sends notifications to an application when new hardware is plugged in, rather than having stuff constantly poll the USB/PCI bus and then run mknod scripts in/dev.
You may as well say nobody probably wants to dig into glibc to figure out how loading ELF executables works.
The other side of that is that, of $2,656 billion in income plus FICA taxes, corporate income taxes amount to $299.6 billion. It's actually a pretty damned ineffective revenue source, and mostly functions as a Republican talking point which leans certain swing voters away from Democrats.
Corporations also report two different numbers for profits. The one the IRS gets includes deductions like accelerated depreciation.
Let's say you spend $1.1M and make $1.2M, with $100,000 of your spending on equipment. The Government will make you pay taxes on $200,000 this year; however, because your equipment is Schedule F, it depreciates 50% each year to 10%. So next year, when you spend $1M and make $1.2M, you report a profit of $200,000! Great! You then tell the IRS you had a profit of $150,000: that $100,000 piece of equipment depreciated by 50%. In the following year, that equipment loses $40,000 of its value, and so you pay taxes on $40,000 less than what you report in profits.
This has the odd effect of showing taxes paid as less than 35% of SEC-reported profits.
This is all highly-relevant to me because I'm running to establish a sort of Universal Dividend that takes 15% of all income and redistributes it, resulting in a much better tax outcome than the published GOP plan. In 2016, this would have put the corporate tax rate at 34.6%: 15% feeding my Dividend, and $168 billion of further corporate taxes.
As a matter of strategic politics, I intend to just eliminate the remaining 19.6% over about a decade, keeping my 15% Dividend funding source as the only Corporate tax. Nobody is going to allow corporations to not pay their fair share--this is money that goes to everyone's pockets as important actors in the economy, because we need burger flippers and grocery baggers, because we have a reserve labor force full of frequently-unemployed, and because technical progress makes us all wealthy by laying off a small percentage of the population during a temporary transitional period. The Republican talking point about corporate income taxes becomes moot.
The Dividend also replaces a portion of Social Security's payouts, so makes Social Security solvent at a 5.15% FICA--all payroll. It grows faster than Social Security's COLA, so it forces an eventual reduction of FICA to keep the Trust from overflowing with excessive cash balance: the payroll tax comes down over time, too.
A powerful reduction in tax burden on the middle-class; a powerful aid package for the lower class; and even a 2.6% tax cut at the top bracket. I'm over here creating highly-progressive policies to build a better welfare state where nobody goes homeless or hungry in America (and helathcare is on my radar), and I'm beating the GOP at its own game.
How are they this bad at this?
... okay let's be fair: I didn't just turn the taxes up or down; I devised an entirely-new system that's never been proposed before. I'm not even playing the same game.
I've been waiting for someone to port Linux interfaces for SystemD (previously udev, kevents, and HAL) to Minix for a while, which would make it capable of replacing the Linux kernel.
Beyond that, you'd need to port in the file system and hardware drivers. Since they're separate services, you can make GPL versions out-of-tree and just load them into Minix. In-tree versions of adapted netbsd, freebsd, or dragonflybsd drivers are allowable.
The Malthusian theory of population has largely been abandoned for good reasons, although we've seen population growth rate booms as a direct result of things like the Green Revolution in the 1920s--a time when we were reaching the limits for, of all things, food production and then released a whole bunch of agricultural technology only to have population suddenly double.
Rather than play whack-a-mole, I simply point out a few things:
First, that production scales until it hits a limiting factor: at some point, adding 1 unit of production requires engaging more than 1 unit of additional labor.
Second, that labor is the basis of cost: somebody needs to pay all those wages, and the revenues per-unit from sales must meet or exceed the fractional cost of all labor invested in the course of producing, shipping, and retailing each unit in order to pay all the wages (payrolls, really: wages, benefits, and taxes). Modern economists understand technical progress as the driver of wealth because new technology reduces labor, thus cost, thus risk and barriers to entry, increasing competition and creating a profit motive for each individual competitor to bring down price (in collusion, keeping prices high is more-profitable, which is why we have anti-trust laws and bring heavy shit down on price fixers).
Thus, scaling beyond the reaches of current technology allocates labor to some things at the expense of reducing the amount of something else available per-capita. It also increases the price of those things. That means logically that we physically can't supply the same standard-of-living as we reach beyond our means; and financially that people are poorer by way of spending a larger proportion of their income on the over-scaled good (a more-refined definition of scarcity than current theory), so they can't buy the things for which we sacrifice production capacity anyway.
Poorer.
People feel the pain of a lower standard-of-living, greater costs, and a loss of capacity to buy. Jobs can't increase in this environment, yet population can--at the expense of greater unemployment. As the pain sets in--as people get the sense of being poorer--the biological response to scarcity (such as when an area has less food available to hunter-gatherers) kicks in.
As you press into this condition, the unemployment rate increases as the demand for jobs increases, so there's your corrected Malthusian growth measure: population growth--labor force growth--increases in abundance of jobs and decreases in scarcity of jobs.
This is, of course, completely-new theory. We know where the labor force goes, but not really why it goes. This is my answer to that.
It's economics, but you're using the wrong economics.
Back when the recession was at peak, we had news of more students going to grad school to avoid a job market with no jobs for them. Ride out the financial aid as long as possible and hope for the best. This is part of the labor force contraction effect.
When the job market recovered, people started exiting college early--even without degrees--to get into now-open jobs. Now there's no reason to stay in school.
This is part of the corrected model of Malthusian growth I use, with the job market being the proxy because hitting (and exceeding) carry capacity expands poverty and raises unemployment. Economists abandoned (but never debunked) Malthusian theory because every attempt to quantify the limiting factor failed: it's not food, it's not clothing, it's some basket we can't name. That basket is visible as just job--the means to support a given standard-of-living. When unemployment gets bigger and the standard-of-living among the lower classes starts to fall, the strain is visible to them, and the growth slows.
Other impacts include people staying later into retirement versus being lain off at age 70 and not going job hunting to make their retirement plans of bailing at age 72; and the immigrant labor market--fewer jobs, fewer H1-Bs brought in, since you can't replace 1,000 American workers when you've only got demand for the work of 500 of 'em.
During the day, they store sugar. At night, they burn it. When growing, they bind it up as cellulose (material) or starch (storage).
Leaves fall, rot, and release CO2 as bugs and bacteria burn them for oxygen. Fruit falls and rots, although new plants mean new growth. These things don't sequester carbon for very long. Non-fruiting trees sequester carbon for a day when they're not budding new leaves.
Basically, if it's not forming stable mass, it's not sequestering carbon.
Nails are better for framing because the fastener allows greater flexibility. Nails shift, twist, and flex; screws tend to take greater load from expansion and sway, and then shear.
At least we can make laws about... oh. Right. Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press.
We did make laws requiring political committees and activist groups to tag their political ads as paid for by their committee and authorized or not authorized by a candidate or candidate committee, so we have some disclosure.
We want voters to operate only under American influence. It's our democracy, and its flaws and terrible brokenness should be our fault; we shouldn't have to deal with the Russians creating a charged atmosphere of political divisiveness and shifting the balance toward a candidate in their favor.
It's self-interest, and it makes sense. We interfere with other countries's elections as well, for our own self-interests. There's no treaty not to; allowing this is considered an internal issue.
Still, look at the world. It's smaller than it was a hundred years ago. We get news from Europe. We talk to people in Moscow just because they're in our Team Fortress clan or whatever. We bullshit politics with folks in Sudameriko. We're having to give ground from "we don't want foreign influence" to "we don't want official, sanctioned foreign influence".
That assumes the goal was to learn the material, not simply to pass the class. We're operating in the scope of how to cheat effectively.
Besides, I've got a computer security background; discussing how to effectively penetrate a system without getting caught is in my scope of professional interest. (Imagine that: someone who's actually looked inside a computer trying to get a Congressional seat.)
Fair enough; however, most people also will want to work for economic reasons.
Take my program of Universal Social Security as a postulate. A strong welfare state: if you don't work, your two-adult household gets minimum wage (untaxed), plus WIC, SNAP, housing assistance, all this efficient welfare that's largely-diminished by the Universal Dividend. It's... livable.
If you do work, well, you keep getting the Universal Dividend. Minimum wage is pinned to twice the Dividend for a single adult--hence the two-adult minimum-wage-untaxed household. A single individual triples their standard of living with a job; a two-adult household doubles it. The welfare state cuts into this a little, but not so much as today: because of the Universal Dividend, your total earned-plus-unearned income is higher, diminishing your eligibility for welfare services. A single person gets just enough unearned income in the 2016 model to be ineligible for SSI, so I just repeal that program.
That doesn't count the Earned Income Tax Credit: minimum wage might be $8.75/hr, but EITC also pays you, say, $3/hr on top of that, phasing out above a certain household income. $11.75/hr on top of your $8.75/hr-equivalent (40 hours) two-adult Dividend.
Why would you not work? Is your life simply a matter of consuming food and hiding in your tiny hovel? Look at people today--people who work, who have luxurious middle-class lifestyles, and still curse the rich for being richer. You're going to see the middle-class living the high life, and you're going to want it. Well you can have it, easily.
If you have one truck driver doing the work of ten mechanics while what amounts to a fraction of a bunch of other people doing the work of the driver (the engineer who makes a design replicated millions of times; the factory workers who make millions of trucks per year; etc.), then you have, say, 1/5 of a person's working hours doing what 1 person did before.
For simplicity's sake, say it's one trucker doing the work of five.
You only have to pay one trucker.
Okay, there are a lot of independent shipping companies. A lot. There are a lot of local shippers pulling last mile, a lot of cross-country shippers, a lot of big names like WABASH and GOD and a lot of small names and even independent contractors. The independents will get folded into small shops with multi-truck fleets because we don't need drivers--eventually (this won't happen right away unless you fuck up royally and delay the movement onto self-driving trucks until everyone is ready to jump on that bandwagon right away, causing massive unemployment).
With so many elections, you're competing for business. It costs 20% as much to ship goods. If you're making twice as much profit margin, you can charge 22% as much!... well, that won't happen, because prices won't just hit the bottom; they'll have to push downward as trucking fleets fight over customers.
Every downwards tick means lower costs to get goods to retail stores. Wal-Mart is going to start talking about "price rollbacks" again. Target is actually bigger; K-Mart is gone, but was never a "lowest low prices" store so much as it was a "we're K-Mart and shopping here is good because our prices are low" store (i.e. not "lowest", but "low"). K-Mart was all about store loyalty; Wal-Mart and Target are both about a retail price war, although Wal-Mart advertises it more.
Most consumers aren't truck drivers, so most consumers are still working. They get wages. With the lower costs, the prices start coming down, and people buy and have money left. Aside from some really super-rich folks whose savings and investments grow and grow because they spend freely and don't run out, most folks are hitting the end of discretionary spending. That means they have more discretionary spending, where their remainder before was zero; this implies discretionary spending greater than spending capacity.
So, of course, with the increased spending capacity, they spend.
Well, someone needs to ship those new goods.
We're not putting the other 80% of truckers back in trucks. Someone needs to operate the registers, unload the trucks, track inventory, manage retail stores, and so forth as well. They'll eat into the consumer's new spending power.
There's a delay. It takes time--months. To avoid recession, you want these things to be legal before they're mature: early adopters, strategic adopters, late adopters, in that order. Spread the job loss over months or years so it occurs in tandem with the recovery, minimizing the peak unemployment. This, by the way, is why we need welfare.
So you're right: we start with 1 trucker who becomes a mechanic, 9 unemployed truckers, and a market that's highly-unstable and will race to the bottom, expand trucking, expand retail, employ a couple of those truckers as mechanics, and employ some other folks as retail. Some of those truckers are going to be old enough for retirement; and some won't be an "unemployed trucker" because the people starting their careers will say, "Welp that's a dying business; let's take another direction" and so will avoid entering the market in the first place.
It takes time, it's not magic, and it sends some people to high-skill jobs (mechanic) and some to low-skill jobs (retail monkey). The retail jobs will go away, too... eventually. We'll still need people for loss prevention for a while; and we'll have people for customer service. The store shelves will be stocked by humans for a while, because it's just
You know...if our society comes down to this and actually dependent upon this tech providing all....we're all pretty much fucked when something as natural and unpredictable as a solar flare knocks out the power grid for any good length of time.
In 1870, 90% of the US labor force were farmers.
Today it's less than 2%, and it seems like less than 5% in total of our labor goes into farming, chemicals, and so forth. We use GMO, pesticides, tractors, and the like. A single individual can feed themselves for about 3% of the median income, although it's closer to 9% because people eat out-of-home a lot more than they used to--McDonalds is food and servants to cook and clean for you, plus the rent of the building, all on a time share.
Do you realize how much technical progress has gone into farming? The planet can support about 150 million humans as hunter-gatherers; agriculture brought that up; and, in the early 1900s, we faced impending famine because we can't support 2 billion people--wait, no, a bunch of selective breeding, new farming technology, and so forth fixed that, and the global population nearly doubled in five years as a result.
It's a lot of investment for little return today, and nobody's going to come back in the future to play old VR games. You're looking at an industry where last year's GOTY is some retro garbage nerds play, and we have new titles to deal with.
The first to make a big hit on VR will be the loser. They'll be the company that makes it big, but not as big as the second big title, or the new one a year later when VR adoption ratchets up in response and the audience is bigger.
People have tried to claim that some of my statements on economic policies are opinions. That doesn't work. Either I'm right, factually, because my assessment of the facts is correct and my collection of facts is complete enough to reach a correct conclusion; or I'm wrong, factually, because my assessment of the facts is incorrect or my collection of facts is critically incomplete.
Minimum wage increases cause job loss. We increase minimum wage frequently because Malthusian growth (a corrected form--primarily using job availability as a proxy for means, such that changes in unemployment lead to reactive changes in the labor force size) suggests exactly what we see: low unemployment causes an increase in labor force size, by population and participation. Low wages increase employment while also increasing poverty at the bottom; then, when you true up minimum wage ten years later, you make a bunch of people poorer and other people less-poor.
This is why you see minimum wage plans with slow phase-in during growth periods: the loss reaction has a short delay, while the established growth counters the job loss. Thus the minimum wage bumps in quarters and half-dollars every several months only slow growth, rather than creating unemployment (that is: they reduce employment relative to no minimum wage increase, but employment is growing).
Facts. The kinds of facts economists use to suggest updating the minimum wage each year to follow inflation, and to phase in a general minimum wage increase over a few years instead of all at once.
There's another implication: a high minimum wage generally decreases employment, thus carry capacity (using the jobs model of Malthusian growth to which I briefly alluded). That means pinning a minimum wage to, say, GDP-per-capita rather than inflation causes a decrease in poverty at the lower end, as well as a decrease in economic growth (thus GDP grows more-slowly).
Whether or not slowing population growth is a generally-good or generally-bad cause is an opinion, from a philosophical standpoint. There are facts to argue; however, population control--the little cousin of eugenics--is a scary, authoritarian concept, the kind of thing for which we criticize China from a philosophical standpoint, and so we may argue over whether or not this is the sort of thing Government inherently should do, factual nature of any overpopulation notwithstanding.
You can reach the opinion that such population control efforts are distasteful but factually necessary, or that they're no cause for concern and people's moral imperatives are silly. You could conclude that the indirect, economic method is fine, while the direct method of limiting birth rates is government restriction of freedom and the type of terrifying dystopian authoritarianism against which we must fight as a free nation. You can say all kinds of airy, fluffy things about it--and it's only an opinion.
Claiming an analysis of facts as an opinion is a common informal fallacy. You'll see it come up when you discuss the scientific basis of addiction and willpower as an exhaustable resource, and people tell you they don't believe in all that and that drug addicts are making a choice--even though, scientifically, it's physically-impossible for drug addicts to take action to end their addiction if the parts of their brain required to override the natural impulse to escape discomfort is exhausted, as it has run low on ATP and cannot continue burning fuel to produce output without causing extreme brain damage (which, of course, your brain won't do). The science-deniers often claim differing opinion due to their poor basis of facts from which to argue.
I seriously use The Onion as a news source. It's practically my primary news source, so much so that I tried signing up for the print edition only to find they'd canceled it two months prior.
I always had a double filter: everything I said had to be understood-correct by me, and also complete and correctly represented to the expected concerns of the listening party. I never really learned to lie, and instead had explained people's behavior as a pseudo-mathematical equation balancing their wants and needs, and identified that folks are generally tended to blame themselves for bad outcomes if they understand the likelihood going into it.
That is to say: if you bullshit people and they don't like how things turn out, they stop liking you; if you're honest with people, they'll tend to do things even if it's understood it will probably turn out bad for them, and then blame themselves when it turns out bad for them and good for you. In the latter case, they're happy to work with you again.
People fight wars for the simple freedom of choice. I suppose they appreciate being given its full exercise.
What you really need to do is give people a sense that what they're doing is somehow interesting to them. People are happy to take on hardship for things like philosophical ideals--which is exactly what charity is.
It's that "complete and correctly represented to the expectations and concerns of the listening party" bit that's key, though.
You can omit facts. You can omit facts which would raise concern and objection. This is fine so long as you don't omit facts which actually have material effect on the outcome. That someone doesn't understand things well enough to accurately evaluate some omitted facts is immaterial; what matters is that the omitted facts aren't cause for their concern when correctly evaluated.
There are journalists out there who make a pretty good career out of presenting a lot of factual information, organizing it, and giving an interpretation, while omitting other facts. Their interpretation is incorrect or incomplete: they tell people what to think, and so they tell people the truth and paint a lie.
That's the real problem: you can lie to people without speaking any untruth.
Any selection of news will necessarily cultivate certain facts in a certain way, and omit other facts. Just the selection of subject matter creates political bias. The closest you can get to an unbiased news source is to intentionally create an extreme bias: ground everything out to neutral. Take the popular view, the emotion and perspective gaining the most momentum in the media, and pick it apart, factually. Drag it down to the least-concern; cut down all the outrage and the excitement; turn it from the sensational to the mundane.
The underwear bomber? He had PETN. It requires a bulky, compressive detonator to produce an explosion. I can't recall at the moment, but I believe it has low volume and high crack--it will destroy whatever you use it on, thus put a hole in a plane, but won't create a big explosion--although I may be confusing this with semtex. A block of PETN without an impossible-to-hide detonator will create a light show and a spectacular display of incompetence, nothing more.
Getting that thing on the plane was never a concern. It's not exactly dangerous.
In an atmosphere of media panic, these are the facts which strip the bias. This is an extremely-biased analysis; it only modifies the general tone with a counterweight, though. Instead of talking up some opposing point, it counterpoints everything exciting and frightening in the original. It turns the sensational into the mundane.
That is the injection you need to promote a more-rational media: bring people back down to the ground, where they can think. Put them in a place where they can work out whether to reject your conclusions. Cut away the distortion of emotion. Change the subject from what happened to what to do about it, or how very infrequently this happens.
Let the media set the stage by showing what people get excited about; then give them a reason to calm down and think.
Anything else is just putting your views against their views, leaving you free to select what facts to provide and which to leave out of the discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
They are not backed by real world goods, so the value can easily go to zero
Fiat currency is backed by productivity: there's so much of it and it's standardized, so it represents everything produced and sold in a time frame. Digital currency ... is hype. The strategy is literally "it becomes more-scarce as more is made, so it's worth more dollars because more people want it yet there's less of it!"
SystemD uses well-understood Linux kernel facilities such as the facility that sends notifications to an application when new hardware is plugged in, rather than having stuff constantly poll the USB/PCI bus and then run mknod scripts in /dev.
You may as well say nobody probably wants to dig into glibc to figure out how loading ELF executables works.
The other side of that is that, of $2,656 billion in income plus FICA taxes, corporate income taxes amount to $299.6 billion. It's actually a pretty damned ineffective revenue source, and mostly functions as a Republican talking point which leans certain swing voters away from Democrats.
Corporations also report two different numbers for profits. The one the IRS gets includes deductions like accelerated depreciation.
Let's say you spend $1.1M and make $1.2M, with $100,000 of your spending on equipment. The Government will make you pay taxes on $200,000 this year; however, because your equipment is Schedule F, it depreciates 50% each year to 10%. So next year, when you spend $1M and make $1.2M, you report a profit of $200,000! Great! You then tell the IRS you had a profit of $150,000: that $100,000 piece of equipment depreciated by 50%. In the following year, that equipment loses $40,000 of its value, and so you pay taxes on $40,000 less than what you report in profits.
This has the odd effect of showing taxes paid as less than 35% of SEC-reported profits.
This is all highly-relevant to me because I'm running to establish a sort of Universal Dividend that takes 15% of all income and redistributes it, resulting in a much better tax outcome than the published GOP plan. In 2016, this would have put the corporate tax rate at 34.6%: 15% feeding my Dividend, and $168 billion of further corporate taxes.
As a matter of strategic politics, I intend to just eliminate the remaining 19.6% over about a decade, keeping my 15% Dividend funding source as the only Corporate tax. Nobody is going to allow corporations to not pay their fair share--this is money that goes to everyone's pockets as important actors in the economy, because we need burger flippers and grocery baggers, because we have a reserve labor force full of frequently-unemployed, and because technical progress makes us all wealthy by laying off a small percentage of the population during a temporary transitional period. The Republican talking point about corporate income taxes becomes moot.
The Dividend also replaces a portion of Social Security's payouts, so makes Social Security solvent at a 5.15% FICA--all payroll. It grows faster than Social Security's COLA, so it forces an eventual reduction of FICA to keep the Trust from overflowing with excessive cash balance: the payroll tax comes down over time, too.
A powerful reduction in tax burden on the middle-class; a powerful aid package for the lower class; and even a 2.6% tax cut at the top bracket. I'm over here creating highly-progressive policies to build a better welfare state where nobody goes homeless or hungry in America (and helathcare is on my radar), and I'm beating the GOP at its own game.
How are they this bad at this?
I've been waiting for someone to port Linux interfaces for SystemD (previously udev, kevents, and HAL) to Minix for a while, which would make it capable of replacing the Linux kernel.
Beyond that, you'd need to port in the file system and hardware drivers. Since they're separate services, you can make GPL versions out-of-tree and just load them into Minix. In-tree versions of adapted netbsd, freebsd, or dragonflybsd drivers are allowable.
Yup, and it happened in 2012.
The Malthusian theory of population has largely been abandoned for good reasons, although we've seen population growth rate booms as a direct result of things like the Green Revolution in the 1920s--a time when we were reaching the limits for, of all things, food production and then released a whole bunch of agricultural technology only to have population suddenly double.
Rather than play whack-a-mole, I simply point out a few things:
First, that production scales until it hits a limiting factor: at some point, adding 1 unit of production requires engaging more than 1 unit of additional labor.
Second, that labor is the basis of cost: somebody needs to pay all those wages, and the revenues per-unit from sales must meet or exceed the fractional cost of all labor invested in the course of producing, shipping, and retailing each unit in order to pay all the wages (payrolls, really: wages, benefits, and taxes). Modern economists understand technical progress as the driver of wealth because new technology reduces labor, thus cost, thus risk and barriers to entry, increasing competition and creating a profit motive for each individual competitor to bring down price (in collusion, keeping prices high is more-profitable, which is why we have anti-trust laws and bring heavy shit down on price fixers).
Thus, scaling beyond the reaches of current technology allocates labor to some things at the expense of reducing the amount of something else available per-capita. It also increases the price of those things. That means logically that we physically can't supply the same standard-of-living as we reach beyond our means; and financially that people are poorer by way of spending a larger proportion of their income on the over-scaled good (a more-refined definition of scarcity than current theory), so they can't buy the things for which we sacrifice production capacity anyway.
Poorer.
People feel the pain of a lower standard-of-living, greater costs, and a loss of capacity to buy. Jobs can't increase in this environment, yet population can--at the expense of greater unemployment. As the pain sets in--as people get the sense of being poorer--the biological response to scarcity (such as when an area has less food available to hunter-gatherers) kicks in.
As you press into this condition, the unemployment rate increases as the demand for jobs increases, so there's your corrected Malthusian growth measure: population growth--labor force growth--increases in abundance of jobs and decreases in scarcity of jobs.
This is, of course, completely-new theory. We know where the labor force goes, but not really why it goes. This is my answer to that.
It's economics, but you're using the wrong economics.
Back when the recession was at peak, we had news of more students going to grad school to avoid a job market with no jobs for them. Ride out the financial aid as long as possible and hope for the best. This is part of the labor force contraction effect.
When the job market recovered, people started exiting college early--even without degrees--to get into now-open jobs. Now there's no reason to stay in school.
This is part of the corrected model of Malthusian growth I use, with the job market being the proxy because hitting (and exceeding) carry capacity expands poverty and raises unemployment. Economists abandoned (but never debunked) Malthusian theory because every attempt to quantify the limiting factor failed: it's not food, it's not clothing, it's some basket we can't name. That basket is visible as just job--the means to support a given standard-of-living. When unemployment gets bigger and the standard-of-living among the lower classes starts to fall, the strain is visible to them, and the growth slows.
Other impacts include people staying later into retirement versus being lain off at age 70 and not going job hunting to make their retirement plans of bailing at age 72; and the immigrant labor market--fewer jobs, fewer H1-Bs brought in, since you can't replace 1,000 American workers when you've only got demand for the work of 500 of 'em.
Twitter unconscionably restricts users's free speech to fewer than 255 characters. We demand the full 8-bit width of a one-byte length descriptor.
During the day, they store sugar. At night, they burn it. When growing, they bind it up as cellulose (material) or starch (storage).
Leaves fall, rot, and release CO2 as bugs and bacteria burn them for oxygen. Fruit falls and rots, although new plants mean new growth. These things don't sequester carbon for very long. Non-fruiting trees sequester carbon for a day when they're not budding new leaves.
Basically, if it's not forming stable mass, it's not sequestering carbon.
Nails are better for framing because the fastener allows greater flexibility. Nails shift, twist, and flex; screws tend to take greater load from expansion and sway, and then shear.
Trees don't net-produce oxygen. They only remove carbon from the air when growing.
People use hypodermic needles to shoot up heroin. Flu shots should be banned.
At least we can make laws about... oh. Right. Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press.
We did make laws requiring political committees and activist groups to tag their political ads as paid for by their committee and authorized or not authorized by a candidate or candidate committee, so we have some disclosure.
Shrug. That's not the problem that was posed. An alternate strategy may prove better but, hey, information warfare is a thing.
We want voters to operate only under American influence. It's our democracy, and its flaws and terrible brokenness should be our fault; we shouldn't have to deal with the Russians creating a charged atmosphere of political divisiveness and shifting the balance toward a candidate in their favor.
It's self-interest, and it makes sense. We interfere with other countries's elections as well, for our own self-interests. There's no treaty not to; allowing this is considered an internal issue.
Still, look at the world. It's smaller than it was a hundred years ago. We get news from Europe. We talk to people in Moscow just because they're in our Team Fortress clan or whatever. We bullshit politics with folks in Sudameriko. We're having to give ground from "we don't want foreign influence" to "we don't want official, sanctioned foreign influence".
That assumes the goal was to learn the material, not simply to pass the class. We're operating in the scope of how to cheat effectively.
Besides, I've got a computer security background; discussing how to effectively penetrate a system without getting caught is in my scope of professional interest. (Imagine that: someone who's actually looked inside a computer trying to get a Congressional seat.)
Smart would have been to subtly modify other peoples's grades just a tad before totals are tallied. Too much noise to identify the signal.
Rather than the marvelously ridiculous, I prefer a story about a magnificent bastard.
Fair enough; however, most people also will want to work for economic reasons.
Take my program of Universal Social Security as a postulate. A strong welfare state: if you don't work, your two-adult household gets minimum wage (untaxed), plus WIC, SNAP, housing assistance, all this efficient welfare that's largely-diminished by the Universal Dividend. It's ... livable.
If you do work, well, you keep getting the Universal Dividend. Minimum wage is pinned to twice the Dividend for a single adult--hence the two-adult minimum-wage-untaxed household. A single individual triples their standard of living with a job; a two-adult household doubles it. The welfare state cuts into this a little, but not so much as today: because of the Universal Dividend, your total earned-plus-unearned income is higher, diminishing your eligibility for welfare services. A single person gets just enough unearned income in the 2016 model to be ineligible for SSI, so I just repeal that program.
That doesn't count the Earned Income Tax Credit: minimum wage might be $8.75/hr, but EITC also pays you, say, $3/hr on top of that, phasing out above a certain household income. $11.75/hr on top of your $8.75/hr-equivalent (40 hours) two-adult Dividend.
Why would you not work? Is your life simply a matter of consuming food and hiding in your tiny hovel? Look at people today--people who work, who have luxurious middle-class lifestyles, and still curse the rich for being richer. You're going to see the middle-class living the high life, and you're going to want it. Well you can have it, easily.
If you have one truck driver doing the work of ten mechanics while what amounts to a fraction of a bunch of other people doing the work of the driver (the engineer who makes a design replicated millions of times; the factory workers who make millions of trucks per year; etc.), then you have, say, 1/5 of a person's working hours doing what 1 person did before.
For simplicity's sake, say it's one trucker doing the work of five.
You only have to pay one trucker.
Okay, there are a lot of independent shipping companies. A lot. There are a lot of local shippers pulling last mile, a lot of cross-country shippers, a lot of big names like WABASH and GOD and a lot of small names and even independent contractors. The independents will get folded into small shops with multi-truck fleets because we don't need drivers--eventually (this won't happen right away unless you fuck up royally and delay the movement onto self-driving trucks until everyone is ready to jump on that bandwagon right away, causing massive unemployment).
With so many elections, you're competing for business. It costs 20% as much to ship goods. If you're making twice as much profit margin, you can charge 22% as much! ... well, that won't happen, because prices won't just hit the bottom; they'll have to push downward as trucking fleets fight over customers.
Every downwards tick means lower costs to get goods to retail stores. Wal-Mart is going to start talking about "price rollbacks" again. Target is actually bigger; K-Mart is gone, but was never a "lowest low prices" store so much as it was a "we're K-Mart and shopping here is good because our prices are low" store (i.e. not "lowest", but "low"). K-Mart was all about store loyalty; Wal-Mart and Target are both about a retail price war, although Wal-Mart advertises it more.
Most consumers aren't truck drivers, so most consumers are still working. They get wages. With the lower costs, the prices start coming down, and people buy and have money left. Aside from some really super-rich folks whose savings and investments grow and grow because they spend freely and don't run out, most folks are hitting the end of discretionary spending. That means they have more discretionary spending, where their remainder before was zero; this implies discretionary spending greater than spending capacity.
So, of course, with the increased spending capacity, they spend.
Well, someone needs to ship those new goods.
We're not putting the other 80% of truckers back in trucks. Someone needs to operate the registers, unload the trucks, track inventory, manage retail stores, and so forth as well. They'll eat into the consumer's new spending power.
There's a delay. It takes time--months. To avoid recession, you want these things to be legal before they're mature: early adopters, strategic adopters, late adopters, in that order. Spread the job loss over months or years so it occurs in tandem with the recovery, minimizing the peak unemployment. This, by the way, is why we need welfare.
So you're right: we start with 1 trucker who becomes a mechanic, 9 unemployed truckers, and a market that's highly-unstable and will race to the bottom, expand trucking, expand retail, employ a couple of those truckers as mechanics, and employ some other folks as retail. Some of those truckers are going to be old enough for retirement; and some won't be an "unemployed trucker" because the people starting their careers will say, "Welp that's a dying business; let's take another direction" and so will avoid entering the market in the first place.
It takes time, it's not magic, and it sends some people to high-skill jobs (mechanic) and some to low-skill jobs (retail monkey). The retail jobs will go away, too... eventually. We'll still need people for loss prevention for a while; and we'll have people for customer service. The store shelves will be stocked by humans for a while, because it's just
You know...if our society comes down to this and actually dependent upon this tech providing all....we're all pretty much fucked when something as natural and unpredictable as a solar flare knocks out the power grid for any good length of time.
In 1870, 90% of the US labor force were farmers.
Today it's less than 2%, and it seems like less than 5% in total of our labor goes into farming, chemicals, and so forth. We use GMO, pesticides, tractors, and the like. A single individual can feed themselves for about 3% of the median income, although it's closer to 9% because people eat out-of-home a lot more than they used to--McDonalds is food and servants to cook and clean for you, plus the rent of the building, all on a time share.
Do you realize how much technical progress has gone into farming? The planet can support about 150 million humans as hunter-gatherers; agriculture brought that up; and, in the early 1900s, we faced impending famine because we can't support 2 billion people--wait, no, a bunch of selective breeding, new farming technology, and so forth fixed that, and the global population nearly doubled in five years as a result.
It's a lot of investment for little return today, and nobody's going to come back in the future to play old VR games. You're looking at an industry where last year's GOTY is some retro garbage nerds play, and we have new titles to deal with.
The first to make a big hit on VR will be the loser. They'll be the company that makes it big, but not as big as the second big title, or the new one a year later when VR adoption ratchets up in response and the audience is bigger.
Fair enough; although it's irrelevant history today, isn't it?
It was just a setup for something ridiculous anyway.
You can't have an opinion on most of the news.
People have tried to claim that some of my statements on economic policies are opinions. That doesn't work. Either I'm right, factually, because my assessment of the facts is correct and my collection of facts is complete enough to reach a correct conclusion; or I'm wrong, factually, because my assessment of the facts is incorrect or my collection of facts is critically incomplete.
Minimum wage increases cause job loss. We increase minimum wage frequently because Malthusian growth (a corrected form--primarily using job availability as a proxy for means, such that changes in unemployment lead to reactive changes in the labor force size) suggests exactly what we see: low unemployment causes an increase in labor force size, by population and participation. Low wages increase employment while also increasing poverty at the bottom; then, when you true up minimum wage ten years later, you make a bunch of people poorer and other people less-poor.
This is why you see minimum wage plans with slow phase-in during growth periods: the loss reaction has a short delay, while the established growth counters the job loss. Thus the minimum wage bumps in quarters and half-dollars every several months only slow growth, rather than creating unemployment (that is: they reduce employment relative to no minimum wage increase, but employment is growing).
Facts. The kinds of facts economists use to suggest updating the minimum wage each year to follow inflation, and to phase in a general minimum wage increase over a few years instead of all at once.
There's another implication: a high minimum wage generally decreases employment, thus carry capacity (using the jobs model of Malthusian growth to which I briefly alluded). That means pinning a minimum wage to, say, GDP-per-capita rather than inflation causes a decrease in poverty at the lower end, as well as a decrease in economic growth (thus GDP grows more-slowly).
Whether or not slowing population growth is a generally-good or generally-bad cause is an opinion, from a philosophical standpoint. There are facts to argue; however, population control--the little cousin of eugenics--is a scary, authoritarian concept, the kind of thing for which we criticize China from a philosophical standpoint, and so we may argue over whether or not this is the sort of thing Government inherently should do, factual nature of any overpopulation notwithstanding.
You can reach the opinion that such population control efforts are distasteful but factually necessary, or that they're no cause for concern and people's moral imperatives are silly. You could conclude that the indirect, economic method is fine, while the direct method of limiting birth rates is government restriction of freedom and the type of terrifying dystopian authoritarianism against which we must fight as a free nation. You can say all kinds of airy, fluffy things about it--and it's only an opinion.
Claiming an analysis of facts as an opinion is a common informal fallacy. You'll see it come up when you discuss the scientific basis of addiction and willpower as an exhaustable resource, and people tell you they don't believe in all that and that drug addicts are making a choice--even though, scientifically, it's physically-impossible for drug addicts to take action to end their addiction if the parts of their brain required to override the natural impulse to escape discomfort is exhausted, as it has run low on ATP and cannot continue burning fuel to produce output without causing extreme brain damage (which, of course, your brain won't do). The science-deniers often claim differing opinion due to their poor basis of facts from which to argue.
I seriously use The Onion as a news source. It's practically my primary news source, so much so that I tried signing up for the print edition only to find they'd canceled it two months prior.
I always had a double filter: everything I said had to be understood-correct by me, and also complete and correctly represented to the expected concerns of the listening party. I never really learned to lie, and instead had explained people's behavior as a pseudo-mathematical equation balancing their wants and needs, and identified that folks are generally tended to blame themselves for bad outcomes if they understand the likelihood going into it.
That is to say: if you bullshit people and they don't like how things turn out, they stop liking you; if you're honest with people, they'll tend to do things even if it's understood it will probably turn out bad for them, and then blame themselves when it turns out bad for them and good for you. In the latter case, they're happy to work with you again.
People fight wars for the simple freedom of choice. I suppose they appreciate being given its full exercise.
What you really need to do is give people a sense that what they're doing is somehow interesting to them. People are happy to take on hardship for things like philosophical ideals--which is exactly what charity is.
It's that "complete and correctly represented to the expectations and concerns of the listening party" bit that's key, though.
You can omit facts. You can omit facts which would raise concern and objection. This is fine so long as you don't omit facts which actually have material effect on the outcome. That someone doesn't understand things well enough to accurately evaluate some omitted facts is immaterial; what matters is that the omitted facts aren't cause for their concern when correctly evaluated.
There are journalists out there who make a pretty good career out of presenting a lot of factual information, organizing it, and giving an interpretation, while omitting other facts. Their interpretation is incorrect or incomplete: they tell people what to think, and so they tell people the truth and paint a lie.
That's the real problem: you can lie to people without speaking any untruth.
Any selection of news will necessarily cultivate certain facts in a certain way, and omit other facts. Just the selection of subject matter creates political bias. The closest you can get to an unbiased news source is to intentionally create an extreme bias: ground everything out to neutral. Take the popular view, the emotion and perspective gaining the most momentum in the media, and pick it apart, factually. Drag it down to the least-concern; cut down all the outrage and the excitement; turn it from the sensational to the mundane.
The underwear bomber? He had PETN. It requires a bulky, compressive detonator to produce an explosion. I can't recall at the moment, but I believe it has low volume and high crack--it will destroy whatever you use it on, thus put a hole in a plane, but won't create a big explosion--although I may be confusing this with semtex. A block of PETN without an impossible-to-hide detonator will create a light show and a spectacular display of incompetence, nothing more.
Getting that thing on the plane was never a concern. It's not exactly dangerous.
In an atmosphere of media panic, these are the facts which strip the bias. This is an extremely-biased analysis; it only modifies the general tone with a counterweight, though. Instead of talking up some opposing point, it counterpoints everything exciting and frightening in the original. It turns the sensational into the mundane.
That is the injection you need to promote a more-rational media: bring people back down to the ground, where they can think. Put them in a place where they can work out whether to reject your conclusions. Cut away the distortion of emotion. Change the subject from what happened to what to do about it, or how very infrequently this happens.
Let the media set the stage by showing what people get excited about; then give them a reason to calm down and think.
Anything else is just putting your views against their views, leaving you free to select what facts to provide and which to leave out of the discussion.