I guess a self-driving taxi and freight truck would go without driver airbags, driver steering wheel, and driver pedal, since the idea is to not pay a driver--you still have to pay a driver for lounging around in your car all day when he could be at home lounging around in front of the TV or digging in the garden.
As for "speed deployment", that's not quite it.
If we lose a few thousand or tens of thousands of jobs a month to new technologies, that's just business as usual: the.01% nudge in unemployment is felt by the unemployed (hence why we need stronger protections for people's economic security), and the rest of the economy goes on to shift around buying power and draw new labor elsewhere. All in all, this is what causes progress, increased standards of living, and wealth, and is just what happens constantly and continuously.
If we hold that back, mature the technology, then have a breakthrough with low-cost, highly-effective, well-tested technology coming to replace 3 million jobs at once, we get a sudden 2% bump in unemployment. We also get a loss in the jobs supporting those employed, and supporting the parts of their function that replace the robots. That kind of hammer coming over the span of a couple months--everyone rushing at once to fire all of you and replace you with a small shell script--doesn't speak of unemployment insurance and negligible economic effects; it looks like the dot-com bust.
You don't want technical revolutions. You want to bleed slowly over a long period of time, giving each wound a chance to heal. A quick stab through the heart and you just die as half your blood pumps out onto the floor. Get the regulations out of the way before the businesses are all begging to go live; give them the green light when none of them are ready to move yet, when nothing's ready for them yet, and when the whole process is going to drag out as slowly as it possibly can.
Physical activity increases brain-derived neural factor, leading to higher neuroplasticity and increased rate of learning. It also increases blood flow, toxin clearing (like, actual toxins, the stuff your Cytochrome P450 enzymes and renal system cleans up, not whatever bullshit soaking in salt water is supposed to remove), dopamine levels, and reliability of your circadian system.
Motivation increases attention span, and so an interest in a particular subject drives your capacity to study and learn that subject. Memory is visual and associative, and so more information, analogous thinking, and a grasp of how to use human memory on a basic level (not just mnemonics systems) increases learning capacity. Motivation relies on the proper functioning of your dopaminergic system; memory in general relies on the proper function of your serotonergic system.
So yes, physical activity makes you smarter. In other news, mushrooms make you bigger.
Even Paul Ryan has spoken out against this. He's not Jeff Sessions, but he's also not the poster-boy for human compassion and tolerance toward anyone and anything he disagrees with. Ryan speaks of human compassion, of understanding, of the circumstances of a teenager being brought with parents to this country and growing up as an American. These are weighty things we must consider.
These people are here, they're working in our economy, and ejecting them is disruptive and costly. They've been around long enough to no longer have an impact on job availability--our labor force adjusts rapidly--and removing them will create temporary job openings, followed by a labor force adjustment to increase the proportion of job-seekers and return us to this current baseline. There's no economic benefit to ending DACA.
On the other hand, DACA provides us documentation as to the existence and location of a subset of illegal immigrants. We keep them renewing work permits. They pay taxes. They get an SSN now instead of an ITIN; if they become citizens, their work counts toward Social Security credit; and, as non-citizen residents, they are ineligible for Social Security benefits unless and until they receive said citizenship.
We have established a trust relationship between these people and ourselves. If we violate that trust--and we have already violated it by suggesting we might--then why would any undocumented immigrant ever present themselves to any government identification system ever again?
The Republicans are willing to speak out; they hardly need to even vote to pass this into law.
Privacy is one thing, and most businesses--even Federal agencies--confer a limited personal use policy, allowing you to browse the 'net and do things with their equipment as long as you do your job. This was actually directly described on the MOTD at log-in at the Social Security Administration. There's a reasonable expectation of privacy; it's also their system, and what you do is subject to inspection.
So yeah, they won't suck up your cookies, hack your gmail, and snoop your bank accounts; they will read your e-mail and inspect the files on your computer if they so choose.
Maybe don't e-mail naked pictures of yourself using the corporate email account. It also really irritates your mail admin when the FBI shows up and requires access to search your company e-mail the morning after they pick you up for child pornography.
For example, when a communications device detects a body movement that signifies the occurrence of a potentially dangerous event (e.g., a fall), the communication device can immediately send an alarm to call for assistance.
The patent is actually about detecting and evaluating movement relative to environment, instead of detecting it. They open by describing systems which detect static acceleration (tilt), dynamic acceleration (movement), or even reason about those (fall detection), and lead into suggesting:
It would be very useful to have a communications device that is capable of evaluating movement of a body relative to an environment.
That's a Wiimote.
So the patent is about what they say it's about; whether it's valid is another matter. We're at least not saying we've described a way to detect when something has suddenly fallen (suddenly accelerated, then suddenly decelerated) and extrapolating that to a system to detect complex changes in spatial position or orientation so as to describe relative movement in space.
people sacked for taking undeclared pharmaceuticals (prescription or not) to work with them
Presumably "they" who would "give" would be of an official capacity for the site. In highly-critical situations with unusual amounts of stress, a vigilance agent provides important advantages. The USAF has gone as far as to remove amphetamine from its list of field-approved drugs, switching to non-abusable and non-harmful vigilance agents such as Modafinil or Armodafinil; these are provided notably to jet pilots who must do long runs wherein they fly a plane continuously for 40 hours, without stopping, without taking a break, and without sleep. Four pills, one every twelve hours. They seem fine and well-rested when they get back; let the last dose run down, they sleep for 8 hours, wake up with no residual effects.
I don't know if you know this, but flying a plane is hard. Not like "it takes a lot of skill and you need to train for months to learn to do it", but like even highly-experienced pilots get fatigued if they have to do it for a long time all at once. Hell, even driving a car for too many hours straight will eventually tire your brain out.
I like risk. Risk is controllable. You can mitigate risk. You can create contingencies for risk. I don't like leaving risks uncontrolled and unmitigated. When I see a risk, I propose a means of reducing that risk. Somebody has to.
You do have your bags and pockets searched every time you go to work, no? Because that's what you get used to.
Been there, and complained a lot because our security provider was too lax.
Going to get a "Tylenol" (wossat? Ibuprofen, heroi, paracetamol?) is going to take several hours.
Tylenol is paracetamol.
You sound like you live in England. We're cowboys over here and like to ride into fire without plan and without consideration for just how much shit can go wrong. It's a behavior that needs to change. Hell, people in this country still discharge firearms into the air during national holidays to celebrate--despite it being illegal.
also having well adjusted ground control crew who can function well without pharmaceuticals is a good option.
The ground control crew aren't super-humans. They may be better-adjusted to functioning under stress, but they will degrade from their own baseline under stress. My impression is that these people are getting less sleep and being put under more-critical conditions than usual, thus will be under high stress. Just staying on a task for that long causes a loss of vigilance--you start to pay less attention if it's uneventful, and you start to break down from strain if it's highly-engaging.
This is more-applicable to a surgeon who has to remain on-shift for 30+ hours, I suppose. For truck drivers, we tell them to take a 30-minute break after 8 hours; only drive 11 hours in any 14 hours; and, after 14 hours of driving in one day, stop driving. That's an excellent strategy when you have the election to relieve people.
The point was that the assertion of "Stop X or you're addicted" is ludicrous. We're rational beings and can decide not only to override a low-effort behavior, but also to continue to engage for whatever benefit we perceive. Alcohol breaks a stress cycle and comes in things that taste good (cider). Video games are fun. Amphetamine is kind of nasty but if you have ADHD a low dose can make you functional (I went with Atomoxetine—apparently idiosyncratic individuals can hit amphetamine toxicity at 2mg, and I pissed brown immediately on a 20mg XR dose).
Behaviors are only self-destructive if engaged in in a manner which is self-destructive. Addiction breaks the regulation systems and enables self-destructive behaviors, such as injecting oral preparations of heroin through non-sterile syringes, or consumption of alcohol to excess. Some addicts are stronger than that and can manage an addiction; they're always fully-aware they have an addiction, else they can't manage it. Even then, when you stop a behavior and then have an irresistible compulsion to start it again, it's an addiction: you might be able to decide when to do it, to delay it, to choose when to engage to minimize the risk, but you have no choice about actually engaging. That's a broken regulation system.
That's different than using THC once or twice a month, drinking a beer in the evening, or even using the occasional low dose of amphetamine to dismiss fatigue. In those situations, you typically have no compulsion due to a lack of sufficient use to develop dependence or a lack of dependence potential of the drug (THC will generate physical addiction, but it's weak), and can decide simply to not do it. Habit is a smaller hill to climb than addiction.
These are important things to understand.
A lot of factors go into drug abuse, ranging from a physical need (heroin withdrawal: half a year of sweating, shaking, and horribleness, seriously) to environmental factors consuming the balance of willpower. Some people are simply elective abusers: they take drugs, they slow down when they're starting to become self-destructive, they re-center themselves, then they start abusing again because they like it. Other people are flatly addicted: they can't stop without an immense effort of willpower; and the availability of that willpower is limited physiologically, and consumed by all stressors. Addicts in poor emotional or strained financial states have little energy remaining to fight their addictions--which might very well be the only good thing in their lives, because the whole point of getting high is to feel great for a little while and that's a striking experience when your entire life is shit.
Up to now, we've treated all drug abusers as elective lawbreakers. We have mandatory minimum sentencing, and so we have prisons filled with THC users who never did anything particularly wrong--no violent crimes, no stealing to feed their habits. The marijuana dealers running around with guns and organizing gang territory are also selling harder shit than marijuana and, besides, dealers and users shouldn't be treated the same, even if the users are casually trafficking to their friends. You want to be a high-rolling drug kingpin? You get the whole package: we're putting you in prison forever when we catch you; you're not some small-time college kid who grows a plant in his basement to smoke with a girl you met now and then. Two different things, man.
Our focus should be on intoxication (don't smoke weed and drive); on major, deliberate trafficking (casual trafficking is generally called "sharing" and is a social behavior, not a behavior of criminal intent); on the better understanding, education, and control of drugs based on their potential for harm; on harm-reduction; and on the mitigation of the conditions which lead to and support addiction. Blunt enforcement--"drugs r bad and if you go near drugs we arrest you forever"--is not a strategy; it's mindless bureaucracy.
He's using the dubious line that anyone who is able-bodied is seeking work. You turned 18? You're unemployed unless you're working. Doesn't matter if you're a housewife putting in 90 hours at home running house and raising children; you should be a secretary somewhere or whatever it is women do, not freeloading off a man who paid to buy a dishwasher and microwave.
It's the kind of line you get from small-minded pundits who need a crisis to support their argument of someone's incompetence.
There is great danger it seems to me to arise from the constant habit which prevails where anything is opposed or objected to, of referring without rhyme or reason to the Constitution as a means of preventing its accomplishment, thus creating the general impression that the Constitution is but a barrier to progress instead of being the broad highway through which alone true progress may be enjoyed.
(A) implies something like that going into a hospital puts you in an environment where there are sick people, and so you might get sick. It's just what happens because you're breathing in air that they're trying to keep sterile because people are filling it with virulent pathogens.
(B) implies something like that the hospital despots are twirling their moustaches as they watch you sit in the waiting room, slowly leaning closer to the monitor. The smell of insurance money. They push the big red button, and the vent above you starts to cough out a combination of tuberculosis and influenza.
You use tone and specific words to manipulate emotional context. Use negative tones to convey that someone is being malicious, and positive tones to convey that someone has provided a helpful tool. (A) in this case impresses: "The baseline is X, and adding a Google+ share button raises you above baseline." (B) in this case impresses: "The baseline is X, and not adding a Google+ button pushes you below baseline." What the journalist wrote says Google penalizes you for not doing a thing, rather than that doing a thing allows Google to provide better results with better data gathering.
The other interesting part is the article being in Google's search until it was taken down. Then, suspiciously, it disappeared from Google's cache very quickly.
... wait, can't Google just remove the listing from search results? Why did they need you to take the article down first? Why couldn't they just bury it on page 53?
It bugs me mainly because commodities make bad currencies--they're unstable and deflationary--and, in the case of virtual currencies, because Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are produced by the expenditure of labor to no useful end.
When a person works, he expends time. For that time, we pay a wage. That wage (really, the total payroll cost--wage, benefits, taxes) is the cost of the good: if it takes 10 hours of labor at an average $10/hr to make a good, you have to charge $100 for that good to pay the workers. The price is labor plus profit; and there's cost of risk, which means your profit margins fluctuate even given the same activities, and so there's additional labor being paid some of the time to respond to changes in those variables (that's also what insurance covers).
So we get paid, we buy goods, we pay for them, and our spending holds up the next paycheck. For our labor, we produce goods and receive money; then we trade that money for other goods, produced by labor. Money is just a representation of the time spent and the goods produced. Money is also at exchange rate: I might make $20/hr, you make $10/hr, so I work 1 hour and use my 1 hour to buy 2 of your hours--or the product thereof. You have to expend 2 of your hours to buy one of mine. Thus overall 3 hours of work are done, and I trade 2*(1hr) for your 1*(2hr), which gives a net-zero exchange of labor (I'm compensated with credit for 2 times my actual hours worked, if we're basing hours on your hours).
So what happens if we have a war?
A bunch of people work and get paid. The stuff they make doesn't go to other folks to get bought; rather it gets sent to another country to be blown up. War machines, weapons, ammunition, battle armor, boots, all of it wears down or is expended. The big machine of working men back here don't get a physical return--the tools of war are removed from our GDP, essentially. So for our traded labor hours, we end up with less stuff. This is exactly the same situation as living at a lower level of technology, wherein you work more hours to produce the same things.
What about cryptocurrency?
Build computers, generate electricity, and expend the output of that labor to generate a cryptocurrency. It's a number that says you can buy a thing--you can trade it for dollars--yet the work which you've done has produced nothing of any use. You've dug holes, filled them back in again, and been given a written declaration that you have done so.
The Wireless Power Consortium says that current wired chargers are 60% efficient to the battery and wireless chargers are inefficient, but that "next-gen" chargers will be like 70%+ efficient to the battery, when we invent the tech to do it. They have diagrams. They show... pretty much that they excite a coil and build a transformer using DC power in, after using a transformer to convert AC to DC in.
Begging the question: wouldn't you be able to just use the DC power off the transformer and run it straight to the wire, avoiding all those other losses along the way?
Generally, we've found closely-coupled systems (transformers) lose a lot less energy than loosely-coupled systems. Inverse square law. Basically, wireless charging is okay if you're right on top of the charger, and you don't have charging surface all over the place sending power out into the sky and space; it's wildly-inefficient if your smart phone or car is smaller than the charge transmitter, or a few inches away.
I hope they gave those folks a couple doses of Modafinil to keep them going. Early, right after waking up. The drug puts you into a mode like when you've got work due soon, and you're not panicked, but you're dead-focused on it--it's the mode your brain goes into when there might be tigers around, but you haven't found a tiger hunting you yet, so you're on high alert so you don't die. You get a headache and you forget about it in 4 seconds, and notice it every hour or so and don't bother getting a Tylenol because you have other shit to do.
Not only does it make the long shift tolerable, but it makes the exhaustion from that kind of overwork go away. Stuff lasts 14 hours, so you take it early because it's not so nice to sleep on (you can, but it's nice to have it out of your system).
I got some for ADHD, but it caused the most severe depression that can exist after a few weeks of daily use. That's not even a listed side-effect, and I had slept... pretty much not at all for a year prior. Amphetamine also causes depression while it's active: I don't sleep for 26 hours and I feel kind of lethargic and dysphoric until the drug wears off--but not fatigued. My psychiatrist finally gave me Strattera instead and it caused serotonin mania at full dose; it's working at the current dose, and I want to try trimming it back a bit to see if I can get more energy and less emotional suppression without a relapse of never-ending insomnia and uncontrollable impulsiveness.
Modafinil, by the way, is prescribed for shift work syndrome. If they're interrupting their circadian rhythm, that's what the drug is for, so says the FDA. A real doctor who can actually give medical advice would have to have a look to make sure they're not taking any drugs with bad interactions; it's a good ask before you put people under this kind of strain.
In my opinion, we should be investigating the viability of statutory availability for certain temporary, high-strain, high-risk situations--disaster response, long-hour surgery, and so forth--because those situations are miserable and mistakes mean people die. If this is a proper and safe tool for these critical situations, then it's ludicrous for us not to use it.
It's a bunch of people who don't grasp anything about economics or complex monetary systems being completely-fascinated with the strange thing they just discovered in their pants.
It's a commodity. Go onto ETrade, short gold, and buy cotton with the proceeds. Congratulations: you just bought cotton with gold. You're expecting the relative value of cotton to increase over the relative value of gold. Welcome to arbitrage!
Here's the fun bit: if both go down, but cotton falls less proportionally than gold (e.g. 1% cotton drop, 1.5% gold drop), you can sell cotton and buy back your short, and now you have more gold than you started with--except you started with no gold, so you just bought back all the gold you borrowed and sold, and have money left over after surrendering the gold to its original owner.
You can also buy oil with frozen concentrated orange juice.
Yes and when you suddenly need that cash in savings, you won't have it. You'll run up against a wall and need to somehow capitalize.
I've kept loans because I wanted cash on hand. I cleared a loan (at 6% APR) at the end of last year, and then had a sudden expense that drained my remaining savings and required $3,500 in cash run as a cash advance at 20% APR off a credit card. It wasn't a good financial situation.
I've been paying about $70/month in interest because I rebuilt my savings account to only $3,000 and then started cutting into the cash advance and another high-balance card. Originally I was at $120/month. I've also had savings up as far as $4,000, but knocked it down to $2,000 recently, and am now sitting at $3,000.
I have extra money diverted toward my mortgage which, at 2.785%, is drawing around $130/month in interest. I had a car blow an engine in March and elected for a $12,000 Chevy Volt instead of a $6,000 engine for an old Mazda 3--for which I needed cash on hand, and again took a cash advance. I had squeezed my finances as-is because I spent $2,000 plus another $1,000 in driving courses and armor getting a motorcycle the prior month as an alternate form of transportation so I could avoid driving that car as much, in an attempt to delay a large replacement expense; too late there. If it hadn't blown for another month, I'd actually have been in a good financial position.
I have half a dozen layers of contingencies. One year I put $18,000 into my 401(k) so that I have a loan source with no risk to my credit and a scaling tax risk (you pay taxes plus 10% penalty on the remaining loan balance if you default; the total loss is the 10%). it's sitting at $32,000 now, and I can get $16k out of that in a week. My first line of defense is my emergency fund (cash), followed by credit cards that I keep empty.
I'd have kept the cards and the pile of cash, too. I'm more-flexible and more-agile that way. Cremier is kind of a raging liberal with a poor grasp of economics, but his grasp of personal finances is superior to yours.
I have a Pentagon Federal Access America checking account and a 1.2% cash-back Power Cash Rewards VISA. Because I have Pentagon Federal Credit Union's high-dividend (relatively-speaking) Access America checking product, their Power Cash Rewards VISA pays me 2% cash-back instead of the standard 1.2% rate.
Pentagon Federal Credit Union is definitely not PayPal.
*Overly-verbose statements of products I personally use are not endorsements.
Actually, we need to go with a universal Social Security first, before we can shorten the work week. Otherwise the struggling full-time minimum-wagers will find themselves with a devastating cut in income. Both are on my main agenda.
As for your main, point, however, we aren't facing an elimination of all labor involved in the production of any good. That means we're still on the normal, historical cycle: reduce the labor to make a good; transitional unemployment; the same market pressures that set current prices make it more-profitable to set lower prices (mainly because if your competitors do it and you don't, they take all your business); people are still working at a given wage and for a given time, but spending less of their income on products, and so have more purchase capacity; more purchasing means necessary labor to support that purchasing; and thus new jobs are created. QED.
There are a lot of odd interactions along the way, notably in monetary policy driving inflation such that wages in dollars increase and prices increase more-slowly (we don't like it when prices go down). It's easier to ignore all that by thinking of prices in terms of labor-hour exchange and profits, except labor-hours are exchanged at an exchange rate which we call "wage inequality". If that sounds odd, it's because I'm pretty sure nobody's described wages that way yet, and I'm not shy of producing advanced economic theory instead of waiting for the economists to catch up.
The big risk is rate.
Typically, we replace jobs slowly. You lay off 100,000 people in America, it's an extra 0.063% unemployment. Basically, approximately nobody cares, aside from those who got unemployed--and for them, we need a strong safety net (welfare, social security, etc.). Even with that kind of lay-off rate per month, your consumer base faces the slowed growth of prices and steadily drives the recovery as their buying power increases, thus avoiding unemployment growth.
When you accelerate the lay-off rate--the growth of technology--without accelerating the recovery rate as much, unemployment increases. A sudden turn-over of technology pushing millions into unemployment gives you several percentage points increase in the unemployment rate. The dot-com bust was something like a 3% growth in unemployment; the 2008 Great Recession was something like 5%, but kicked off at 4% and then climbed the rest of the way to its peak.
The Universal Social Security I designed flatly-redistributes 15% of all income--corporate and individual--so as to redistribute 15% of all productivity gains. This starts everyone off on a strong financial base ($8,751/adult in 2016, not counted as income for tax purposes), and so it costs less to supply welfare services such as housing assistance or childcare aid, and thus we can apply those welfare services more-effectively. As well, to get the promised total benefit (Universal + Retirement + Disability) to any individual, the Social Security Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance pensions program only needs to close the gap between the Universal benefit and the promised benefit.
As a result, income taxes at every level--corporate profits, payroll, and individual at every income level--decrease in total. The top tax bracket falls to 35.8% from 36.9%; corporate income taxes fall to 33.2%; and I replaced the 6.2% OASDI tax in payrolls and on paychecks (or the 12.4% FICA you pay if self-employed) with only a 5.3% payroll tax (or FICA total). FICA needs to be 5.13% for for Social Security to continue to pay its full retirement benefits as-is under this system; 5.3% starts rebuilding the Trust, ensuring Social Security stays solvent.
The reduction in payrolls significantly reduces the cost of products, which will have a shocking market effect on price, so that's nice. I actually want to see that, because it's going to be kind of disruptive, and the Fed might need to drive a major effort of inflation to compensate--that is: they might have t
Shipping from China to the US accounts for a fraction of the price. For trousers or jackets, a 40-foot container carries 40,000 pants or 40,000 jackets. It costs under $1,300 to import from China to the US, at around 6 cents per article.
Domestic shipping once the product lands in the US is about half the retail price.
Surely with the production costs going down the shirts will be sold at lower prices, right?
Well, it won't reduce the cost by 94%. It'll reduce the human labor cost of performing the sewing; you still have the shipping (about 6 cents to get the shirt from China to the US; about half the retail price is driving overland to get the shirt to the intermediate distribution points once it's in the country), the production of the material (cotton, polyester), electricity to operate the robot, maintenance costs, the cost of the robot itself amortized over its lifetime output, and the cost of operating the entire facility around the robot.
As well, with China making so damned much being a world manufacturing giant, they'll be able to implement this new technology and then raise the wage of their workers again without the cost of their manufactured goods increasing. If the payroll costs are cut by 40% and they raise the wage of the worker by half that, then they're still producing for 20% cheaper, and they have a greater standard-of-living. IIRC, Chinese wages doubled between 2000 and 2006; this has been a continuous strategy as they attempt to become on-par with most developed nations.
Beside that, yes, the price of shirts will be lower, in a sense. Their price will continue to rise, most likely, as we analyze our inflation basket and take monetary policy action to maintain a 2% annual inflation rate across that basket. The price might actually go down a touch, or it might just rise more-slowly than wages.
Shirts are too much of a competitive monopoly to just take wider margins once a new technology becomes widespread. The factories pushing the product for a lower price will be able to capture more of the global demand for those goods. The price will only go down until none of the producers think they're going to lose too much by all of their competitors cutting prices, nor that they'll gain enough business to profit by cutting prices to undercut the competition. Obviously if you cut the price in half you get phenomenal market capture and new profits, but cutting the price by that last 2% not so much.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess a self-driving taxi and freight truck would go without driver airbags, driver steering wheel, and driver pedal, since the idea is to not pay a driver--you still have to pay a driver for lounging around in your car all day when he could be at home lounging around in front of the TV or digging in the garden.
As for "speed deployment", that's not quite it.
If we lose a few thousand or tens of thousands of jobs a month to new technologies, that's just business as usual: the .01% nudge in unemployment is felt by the unemployed (hence why we need stronger protections for people's economic security), and the rest of the economy goes on to shift around buying power and draw new labor elsewhere. All in all, this is what causes progress, increased standards of living, and wealth, and is just what happens constantly and continuously.
If we hold that back, mature the technology, then have a breakthrough with low-cost, highly-effective, well-tested technology coming to replace 3 million jobs at once, we get a sudden 2% bump in unemployment. We also get a loss in the jobs supporting those employed, and supporting the parts of their function that replace the robots. That kind of hammer coming over the span of a couple months--everyone rushing at once to fire all of you and replace you with a small shell script--doesn't speak of unemployment insurance and negligible economic effects; it looks like the dot-com bust.
You don't want technical revolutions. You want to bleed slowly over a long period of time, giving each wound a chance to heal. A quick stab through the heart and you just die as half your blood pumps out onto the floor. Get the regulations out of the way before the businesses are all begging to go live; give them the green light when none of them are ready to move yet, when nothing's ready for them yet, and when the whole process is going to drag out as slowly as it possibly can.
Physical activity increases brain-derived neural factor, leading to higher neuroplasticity and increased rate of learning. It also increases blood flow, toxin clearing (like, actual toxins, the stuff your Cytochrome P450 enzymes and renal system cleans up, not whatever bullshit soaking in salt water is supposed to remove), dopamine levels, and reliability of your circadian system.
Motivation increases attention span, and so an interest in a particular subject drives your capacity to study and learn that subject. Memory is visual and associative, and so more information, analogous thinking, and a grasp of how to use human memory on a basic level (not just mnemonics systems) increases learning capacity. Motivation relies on the proper functioning of your dopaminergic system; memory in general relies on the proper function of your serotonergic system.
So yes, physical activity makes you smarter. In other news, mushrooms make you bigger.
Hell, if someone steals one of my signs, I assume he's just a fan of my campaign and is a secure vote.
Even Paul Ryan has spoken out against this. He's not Jeff Sessions, but he's also not the poster-boy for human compassion and tolerance toward anyone and anything he disagrees with. Ryan speaks of human compassion, of understanding, of the circumstances of a teenager being brought with parents to this country and growing up as an American. These are weighty things we must consider.
These people are here, they're working in our economy, and ejecting them is disruptive and costly. They've been around long enough to no longer have an impact on job availability--our labor force adjusts rapidly--and removing them will create temporary job openings, followed by a labor force adjustment to increase the proportion of job-seekers and return us to this current baseline. There's no economic benefit to ending DACA.
On the other hand, DACA provides us documentation as to the existence and location of a subset of illegal immigrants. We keep them renewing work permits. They pay taxes. They get an SSN now instead of an ITIN; if they become citizens, their work counts toward Social Security credit; and, as non-citizen residents, they are ineligible for Social Security benefits unless and until they receive said citizenship.
We have established a trust relationship between these people and ourselves. If we violate that trust--and we have already violated it by suggesting we might--then why would any undocumented immigrant ever present themselves to any government identification system ever again?
The Republicans are willing to speak out; they hardly need to even vote to pass this into law.
Privacy is one thing, and most businesses--even Federal agencies--confer a limited personal use policy, allowing you to browse the 'net and do things with their equipment as long as you do your job. This was actually directly described on the MOTD at log-in at the Social Security Administration. There's a reasonable expectation of privacy; it's also their system, and what you do is subject to inspection.
So yeah, they won't suck up your cookies, hack your gmail, and snoop your bank accounts; they will read your e-mail and inspect the files on your computer if they so choose.
Maybe don't e-mail naked pictures of yourself using the corporate email account. It also really irritates your mail admin when the FBI shows up and requires access to search your company e-mail the morning after they pick you up for child pornography.
Actually, that's just an example:
For example, when a communications device detects a body movement that signifies the occurrence of a potentially dangerous event (e.g., a fall), the communication device can immediately send an alarm to call for assistance.
The patent is actually about detecting and evaluating movement relative to environment, instead of detecting it. They open by describing systems which detect static acceleration (tilt), dynamic acceleration (movement), or even reason about those (fall detection), and lead into suggesting:
It would be very useful to have a communications device that is capable of evaluating movement of a body relative to an environment.
That's a Wiimote.
So the patent is about what they say it's about; whether it's valid is another matter. We're at least not saying we've described a way to detect when something has suddenly fallen (suddenly accelerated, then suddenly decelerated) and extrapolating that to a system to detect complex changes in spatial position or orientation so as to describe relative movement in space.
people sacked for taking undeclared pharmaceuticals (prescription or not) to work with them
Presumably "they" who would "give" would be of an official capacity for the site. In highly-critical situations with unusual amounts of stress, a vigilance agent provides important advantages. The USAF has gone as far as to remove amphetamine from its list of field-approved drugs, switching to non-abusable and non-harmful vigilance agents such as Modafinil or Armodafinil; these are provided notably to jet pilots who must do long runs wherein they fly a plane continuously for 40 hours, without stopping, without taking a break, and without sleep. Four pills, one every twelve hours. They seem fine and well-rested when they get back; let the last dose run down, they sleep for 8 hours, wake up with no residual effects.
I don't know if you know this, but flying a plane is hard. Not like "it takes a lot of skill and you need to train for months to learn to do it", but like even highly-experienced pilots get fatigued if they have to do it for a long time all at once. Hell, even driving a car for too many hours straight will eventually tire your brain out.
I like risk. Risk is controllable. You can mitigate risk. You can create contingencies for risk. I don't like leaving risks uncontrolled and unmitigated. When I see a risk, I propose a means of reducing that risk. Somebody has to.
You do have your bags and pockets searched every time you go to work, no? Because that's what you get used to.
Been there, and complained a lot because our security provider was too lax.
Going to get a "Tylenol" (wossat? Ibuprofen, heroi, paracetamol?) is going to take several hours.
Tylenol is paracetamol.
You sound like you live in England. We're cowboys over here and like to ride into fire without plan and without consideration for just how much shit can go wrong. It's a behavior that needs to change. Hell, people in this country still discharge firearms into the air during national holidays to celebrate--despite it being illegal.
also having well adjusted ground control crew who can function well without pharmaceuticals is a good option.
The ground control crew aren't super-humans. They may be better-adjusted to functioning under stress, but they will degrade from their own baseline under stress. My impression is that these people are getting less sleep and being put under more-critical conditions than usual, thus will be under high stress. Just staying on a task for that long causes a loss of vigilance--you start to pay less attention if it's uneventful, and you start to break down from strain if it's highly-engaging.
This is more-applicable to a surgeon who has to remain on-shift for 30+ hours, I suppose. For truck drivers, we tell them to take a 30-minute break after 8 hours; only drive 11 hours in any 14 hours; and, after 14 hours of driving in one day, stop driving. That's an excellent strategy when you have the election to relieve people.
The point was that the assertion of "Stop X or you're addicted" is ludicrous. We're rational beings and can decide not only to override a low-effort behavior, but also to continue to engage for whatever benefit we perceive. Alcohol breaks a stress cycle and comes in things that taste good (cider). Video games are fun. Amphetamine is kind of nasty but if you have ADHD a low dose can make you functional (I went with Atomoxetine—apparently idiosyncratic individuals can hit amphetamine toxicity at 2mg, and I pissed brown immediately on a 20mg XR dose).
Behaviors are only self-destructive if engaged in in a manner which is self-destructive. Addiction breaks the regulation systems and enables self-destructive behaviors, such as injecting oral preparations of heroin through non-sterile syringes, or consumption of alcohol to excess. Some addicts are stronger than that and can manage an addiction; they're always fully-aware they have an addiction, else they can't manage it. Even then, when you stop a behavior and then have an irresistible compulsion to start it again, it's an addiction: you might be able to decide when to do it, to delay it, to choose when to engage to minimize the risk, but you have no choice about actually engaging. That's a broken regulation system.
That's different than using THC once or twice a month, drinking a beer in the evening, or even using the occasional low dose of amphetamine to dismiss fatigue. In those situations, you typically have no compulsion due to a lack of sufficient use to develop dependence or a lack of dependence potential of the drug (THC will generate physical addiction, but it's weak), and can decide simply to not do it. Habit is a smaller hill to climb than addiction.
These are important things to understand.
A lot of factors go into drug abuse, ranging from a physical need (heroin withdrawal: half a year of sweating, shaking, and horribleness, seriously) to environmental factors consuming the balance of willpower. Some people are simply elective abusers: they take drugs, they slow down when they're starting to become self-destructive, they re-center themselves, then they start abusing again because they like it. Other people are flatly addicted: they can't stop without an immense effort of willpower; and the availability of that willpower is limited physiologically, and consumed by all stressors. Addicts in poor emotional or strained financial states have little energy remaining to fight their addictions--which might very well be the only good thing in their lives, because the whole point of getting high is to feel great for a little while and that's a striking experience when your entire life is shit.
Up to now, we've treated all drug abusers as elective lawbreakers. We have mandatory minimum sentencing, and so we have prisons filled with THC users who never did anything particularly wrong--no violent crimes, no stealing to feed their habits. The marijuana dealers running around with guns and organizing gang territory are also selling harder shit than marijuana and, besides, dealers and users shouldn't be treated the same, even if the users are casually trafficking to their friends. You want to be a high-rolling drug kingpin? You get the whole package: we're putting you in prison forever when we catch you; you're not some small-time college kid who grows a plant in his basement to smoke with a girl you met now and then. Two different things, man.
Our focus should be on intoxication (don't smoke weed and drive); on major, deliberate trafficking (casual trafficking is generally called "sharing" and is a social behavior, not a behavior of criminal intent); on the better understanding, education, and control of drugs based on their potential for harm; on harm-reduction; and on the mitigation of the conditions which lead to and support addiction. Blunt enforcement--"drugs r bad and if you go near drugs we arrest you forever"--is not a strategy; it's mindless bureaucracy.
A new deal?
It's not a recession until it's receeded. It has to go backwards, not forwards slowly.
I've been drinking soda on and off my whole life.
Why don't you stop using the Internet and never start again to prove that you're not addicted?
He's using the dubious line that anyone who is able-bodied is seeking work. You turned 18? You're unemployed unless you're working. Doesn't matter if you're a housewife putting in 90 hours at home running house and raising children; you should be a secretary somewhere or whatever it is women do, not freeloading off a man who paid to buy a dishwasher and microwave.
It's the kind of line you get from small-minded pundits who need a crisis to support their argument of someone's incompetence.
There is great danger it seems to me to arise from the constant habit which prevails where anything is opposed or objected to, of referring without rhyme or reason to the Constitution as a means of preventing its accomplishment, thus creating the general impression that the Constitution is but a barrier to progress instead of being the broad highway through which alone true progress may be enjoyed.
(A) implies something like that going into a hospital puts you in an environment where there are sick people, and so you might get sick. It's just what happens because you're breathing in air that they're trying to keep sterile because people are filling it with virulent pathogens.
(B) implies something like that the hospital despots are twirling their moustaches as they watch you sit in the waiting room, slowly leaning closer to the monitor. The smell of insurance money. They push the big red button, and the vent above you starts to cough out a combination of tuberculosis and influenza.
You use tone and specific words to manipulate emotional context. Use negative tones to convey that someone is being malicious, and positive tones to convey that someone has provided a helpful tool. (A) in this case impresses: "The baseline is X, and adding a Google+ share button raises you above baseline." (B) in this case impresses: "The baseline is X, and not adding a Google+ button pushes you below baseline." What the journalist wrote says Google penalizes you for not doing a thing, rather than that doing a thing allows Google to provide better results with better data gathering.
The other interesting part is the article being in Google's search until it was taken down. Then, suspiciously, it disappeared from Google's cache very quickly.
It bugs me mainly because commodities make bad currencies--they're unstable and deflationary--and, in the case of virtual currencies, because Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are produced by the expenditure of labor to no useful end.
When a person works, he expends time. For that time, we pay a wage. That wage (really, the total payroll cost--wage, benefits, taxes) is the cost of the good: if it takes 10 hours of labor at an average $10/hr to make a good, you have to charge $100 for that good to pay the workers. The price is labor plus profit; and there's cost of risk, which means your profit margins fluctuate even given the same activities, and so there's additional labor being paid some of the time to respond to changes in those variables (that's also what insurance covers).
So we get paid, we buy goods, we pay for them, and our spending holds up the next paycheck. For our labor, we produce goods and receive money; then we trade that money for other goods, produced by labor. Money is just a representation of the time spent and the goods produced. Money is also at exchange rate: I might make $20/hr, you make $10/hr, so I work 1 hour and use my 1 hour to buy 2 of your hours--or the product thereof. You have to expend 2 of your hours to buy one of mine. Thus overall 3 hours of work are done, and I trade 2*(1hr) for your 1*(2hr), which gives a net-zero exchange of labor (I'm compensated with credit for 2 times my actual hours worked, if we're basing hours on your hours).
So what happens if we have a war?
A bunch of people work and get paid. The stuff they make doesn't go to other folks to get bought; rather it gets sent to another country to be blown up. War machines, weapons, ammunition, battle armor, boots, all of it wears down or is expended. The big machine of working men back here don't get a physical return--the tools of war are removed from our GDP, essentially. So for our traded labor hours, we end up with less stuff. This is exactly the same situation as living at a lower level of technology, wherein you work more hours to produce the same things.
What about cryptocurrency?
Build computers, generate electricity, and expend the output of that labor to generate a cryptocurrency. It's a number that says you can buy a thing--you can trade it for dollars--yet the work which you've done has produced nothing of any use. You've dug holes, filled them back in again, and been given a written declaration that you have done so.
The Wireless Power Consortium says that current wired chargers are 60% efficient to the battery and wireless chargers are inefficient, but that "next-gen" chargers will be like 70%+ efficient to the battery, when we invent the tech to do it. They have diagrams. They show ... pretty much that they excite a coil and build a transformer using DC power in, after using a transformer to convert AC to DC in.
Begging the question: wouldn't you be able to just use the DC power off the transformer and run it straight to the wire, avoiding all those other losses along the way?
Generally, we've found closely-coupled systems (transformers) lose a lot less energy than loosely-coupled systems. Inverse square law. Basically, wireless charging is okay if you're right on top of the charger, and you don't have charging surface all over the place sending power out into the sky and space; it's wildly-inefficient if your smart phone or car is smaller than the charge transmitter, or a few inches away.
I hope they gave those folks a couple doses of Modafinil to keep them going. Early, right after waking up. The drug puts you into a mode like when you've got work due soon, and you're not panicked, but you're dead-focused on it--it's the mode your brain goes into when there might be tigers around, but you haven't found a tiger hunting you yet, so you're on high alert so you don't die. You get a headache and you forget about it in 4 seconds, and notice it every hour or so and don't bother getting a Tylenol because you have other shit to do.
Not only does it make the long shift tolerable, but it makes the exhaustion from that kind of overwork go away. Stuff lasts 14 hours, so you take it early because it's not so nice to sleep on (you can, but it's nice to have it out of your system).
I got some for ADHD, but it caused the most severe depression that can exist after a few weeks of daily use. That's not even a listed side-effect, and I had slept... pretty much not at all for a year prior. Amphetamine also causes depression while it's active: I don't sleep for 26 hours and I feel kind of lethargic and dysphoric until the drug wears off--but not fatigued. My psychiatrist finally gave me Strattera instead and it caused serotonin mania at full dose; it's working at the current dose, and I want to try trimming it back a bit to see if I can get more energy and less emotional suppression without a relapse of never-ending insomnia and uncontrollable impulsiveness.
Modafinil, by the way, is prescribed for shift work syndrome. If they're interrupting their circadian rhythm, that's what the drug is for, so says the FDA. A real doctor who can actually give medical advice would have to have a look to make sure they're not taking any drugs with bad interactions; it's a good ask before you put people under this kind of strain.
In my opinion, we should be investigating the viability of statutory availability for certain temporary, high-strain, high-risk situations--disaster response, long-hour surgery, and so forth--because those situations are miserable and mistakes mean people die. If this is a proper and safe tool for these critical situations, then it's ludicrous for us not to use it.
It's a bunch of people who don't grasp anything about economics or complex monetary systems being completely-fascinated with the strange thing they just discovered in their pants.
It's a commodity. Go onto ETrade, short gold, and buy cotton with the proceeds. Congratulations: you just bought cotton with gold. You're expecting the relative value of cotton to increase over the relative value of gold. Welcome to arbitrage!
Here's the fun bit: if both go down, but cotton falls less proportionally than gold (e.g. 1% cotton drop, 1.5% gold drop), you can sell cotton and buy back your short, and now you have more gold than you started with--except you started with no gold, so you just bought back all the gold you borrowed and sold, and have money left over after surrendering the gold to its original owner.
You can also buy oil with frozen concentrated orange juice.
Yes and when you suddenly need that cash in savings, you won't have it. You'll run up against a wall and need to somehow capitalize.
I've kept loans because I wanted cash on hand. I cleared a loan (at 6% APR) at the end of last year, and then had a sudden expense that drained my remaining savings and required $3,500 in cash run as a cash advance at 20% APR off a credit card. It wasn't a good financial situation.
I've been paying about $70/month in interest because I rebuilt my savings account to only $3,000 and then started cutting into the cash advance and another high-balance card. Originally I was at $120/month. I've also had savings up as far as $4,000, but knocked it down to $2,000 recently, and am now sitting at $3,000.
I have extra money diverted toward my mortgage which, at 2.785%, is drawing around $130/month in interest. I had a car blow an engine in March and elected for a $12,000 Chevy Volt instead of a $6,000 engine for an old Mazda 3--for which I needed cash on hand, and again took a cash advance. I had squeezed my finances as-is because I spent $2,000 plus another $1,000 in driving courses and armor getting a motorcycle the prior month as an alternate form of transportation so I could avoid driving that car as much, in an attempt to delay a large replacement expense; too late there. If it hadn't blown for another month, I'd actually have been in a good financial position.
I have half a dozen layers of contingencies. One year I put $18,000 into my 401(k) so that I have a loan source with no risk to my credit and a scaling tax risk (you pay taxes plus 10% penalty on the remaining loan balance if you default; the total loss is the 10%). it's sitting at $32,000 now, and I can get $16k out of that in a week. My first line of defense is my emergency fund (cash), followed by credit cards that I keep empty.
I'd have kept the cards and the pile of cash, too. I'm more-flexible and more-agile that way. Cremier is kind of a raging liberal with a poor grasp of economics, but his grasp of personal finances is superior to yours.
I have a Pentagon Federal Access America checking account and a 1.2% cash-back Power Cash Rewards VISA. Because I have Pentagon Federal Credit Union's high-dividend (relatively-speaking) Access America checking product, their Power Cash Rewards VISA pays me 2% cash-back instead of the standard 1.2% rate.
Pentagon Federal Credit Union is definitely not PayPal.
*Overly-verbose statements of products I personally use are not endorsements.
Actually, we need to go with a universal Social Security first, before we can shorten the work week. Otherwise the struggling full-time minimum-wagers will find themselves with a devastating cut in income. Both are on my main agenda.
As for your main, point, however, we aren't facing an elimination of all labor involved in the production of any good. That means we're still on the normal, historical cycle: reduce the labor to make a good; transitional unemployment; the same market pressures that set current prices make it more-profitable to set lower prices (mainly because if your competitors do it and you don't, they take all your business); people are still working at a given wage and for a given time, but spending less of their income on products, and so have more purchase capacity; more purchasing means necessary labor to support that purchasing; and thus new jobs are created. QED.
There are a lot of odd interactions along the way, notably in monetary policy driving inflation such that wages in dollars increase and prices increase more-slowly (we don't like it when prices go down). It's easier to ignore all that by thinking of prices in terms of labor-hour exchange and profits, except labor-hours are exchanged at an exchange rate which we call "wage inequality". If that sounds odd, it's because I'm pretty sure nobody's described wages that way yet, and I'm not shy of producing advanced economic theory instead of waiting for the economists to catch up.
The big risk is rate.
Typically, we replace jobs slowly. You lay off 100,000 people in America, it's an extra 0.063% unemployment. Basically, approximately nobody cares, aside from those who got unemployed--and for them, we need a strong safety net (welfare, social security, etc.). Even with that kind of lay-off rate per month, your consumer base faces the slowed growth of prices and steadily drives the recovery as their buying power increases, thus avoiding unemployment growth.
When you accelerate the lay-off rate--the growth of technology--without accelerating the recovery rate as much, unemployment increases. A sudden turn-over of technology pushing millions into unemployment gives you several percentage points increase in the unemployment rate. The dot-com bust was something like a 3% growth in unemployment; the 2008 Great Recession was something like 5%, but kicked off at 4% and then climbed the rest of the way to its peak.
The Universal Social Security I designed flatly-redistributes 15% of all income--corporate and individual--so as to redistribute 15% of all productivity gains. This starts everyone off on a strong financial base ($8,751/adult in 2016, not counted as income for tax purposes), and so it costs less to supply welfare services such as housing assistance or childcare aid, and thus we can apply those welfare services more-effectively. As well, to get the promised total benefit (Universal + Retirement + Disability) to any individual, the Social Security Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance pensions program only needs to close the gap between the Universal benefit and the promised benefit.
As a result, income taxes at every level--corporate profits, payroll, and individual at every income level--decrease in total. The top tax bracket falls to 35.8% from 36.9%; corporate income taxes fall to 33.2%; and I replaced the 6.2% OASDI tax in payrolls and on paychecks (or the 12.4% FICA you pay if self-employed) with only a 5.3% payroll tax (or FICA total). FICA needs to be 5.13% for for Social Security to continue to pay its full retirement benefits as-is under this system; 5.3% starts rebuilding the Trust, ensuring Social Security stays solvent.
The reduction in payrolls significantly reduces the cost of products, which will have a shocking market effect on price, so that's nice. I actually want to see that, because it's going to be kind of disruptive, and the Fed might need to drive a major effort of inflation to compensate--that is: they might have t
Shipping from China to the US accounts for a fraction of the price. For trousers or jackets, a 40-foot container carries 40,000 pants or 40,000 jackets. It costs under $1,300 to import from China to the US, at around 6 cents per article.
Domestic shipping once the product lands in the US is about half the retail price.
Surely with the production costs going down the shirts will be sold at lower prices, right?
Well, it won't reduce the cost by 94%. It'll reduce the human labor cost of performing the sewing; you still have the shipping (about 6 cents to get the shirt from China to the US; about half the retail price is driving overland to get the shirt to the intermediate distribution points once it's in the country), the production of the material (cotton, polyester), electricity to operate the robot, maintenance costs, the cost of the robot itself amortized over its lifetime output, and the cost of operating the entire facility around the robot.
As well, with China making so damned much being a world manufacturing giant, they'll be able to implement this new technology and then raise the wage of their workers again without the cost of their manufactured goods increasing. If the payroll costs are cut by 40% and they raise the wage of the worker by half that, then they're still producing for 20% cheaper, and they have a greater standard-of-living. IIRC, Chinese wages doubled between 2000 and 2006; this has been a continuous strategy as they attempt to become on-par with most developed nations.
Beside that, yes, the price of shirts will be lower, in a sense. Their price will continue to rise, most likely, as we analyze our inflation basket and take monetary policy action to maintain a 2% annual inflation rate across that basket. The price might actually go down a touch, or it might just rise more-slowly than wages.
Shirts are too much of a competitive monopoly to just take wider margins once a new technology becomes widespread. The factories pushing the product for a lower price will be able to capture more of the global demand for those goods. The price will only go down until none of the producers think they're going to lose too much by all of their competitors cutting prices, nor that they'll gain enough business to profit by cutting prices to undercut the competition. Obviously if you cut the price in half you get phenomenal market capture and new profits, but cutting the price by that last 2% not so much.