Actually at 140kWh using a 600V 300A charger (I've seen 676A chargers), it would take 45 minutes to recharge.
For distribution centers, the truck is about 150 miles from the DC. Generally, at a Best Buy or WalMart, there's a full bay or two with empty trailers. It takes us 1-2 hours to unload a truck; the trucks grab the other trailer and leave. Given a L3 charger on a ChargePoint cube with 2 outlets at 676A, we could have two trailers charging simultaneously and have a full 140kWh battery in 45 minutes.
If the truck itself has a smaller battery (say, 20kWh), we could selectively divert resources to charging the power plant when one is plugged in: stop charging the trailers (all of them) and throw the full 676A, 600V at the truck. Its battery will charge in 3 minutes, and it can drive off without a trailer. The MP100KWh it gets without the load is considerably-high. The driver has to wait 10-15 minutes to settle everything before he can leave, anyway.
On the other hand, because it takes about an hour to unload a truck, even at 300V or at 600V with only 240A, the trailer's recharged in about an hour. That means a 600V circuit (3-phase power supply required for any of this anyway) can recharge two trailers with a 500A charger while they unload.
Truck shows up, drops trailer, moves to an empty trailer, takes it, leaves. If you can get out of the truck, walk into the door, find the store manager, sign off that the seal has the same number as the invoice the manager received (indicating the truck has not been opened since it left the DC), and get back to the truck in 3 minutes, you have a fully-charged 20kWh battery under your cab, and a fully-charged 120kWh+ battery under the trailer you just snagged.
The best part is the DC doesn't need nearly as much power: trucks are showing up empty, so they should have trailers with a near-full charge.
It's not just that. People think an apocalypse is coming. Not a technical revolution the likes of which would drive high unemployment and long recovery periods, a collapse of our economy in a new Great Depression or Industrial Revolution which will destroy today's nations and leave our peoples to pick up the pieces and form new works of them; but a complete, unrecoverable end to all employment as humans are no longer needed by their technology.
Deploying new technology across months or years--early adopters, staged roll-outs, strategic business plans to move early or to wait for a greater ROI, and increases in wealth and demand driving the need for new positions such that rolling out expands some fleets and more-slowly eliminates human positions--gives little bits of unemployment. It bleeds in over time, and the costs amortize and average, and the transitionally-unemployed don't pile up because new jobs become available. The same people who become unemployed don't necessarily get those jobs--we have an unemployed labor pool, and you get tossed in to go play the employment lottery--but the jobs do come back. With these long time spans, that occurs while things change, and so our economy doesn't collapse under the weight.
Call it "Technical Renaissance", if you will. That's appropriate: I'm not working off the same economic theory as modern economics anyway, as it's a little... primitive... for my tastes. Close, but with a few rough spots.
Technical Revolution, on the other hand, looks like the Industrial Revolution: you throw out half your workers and deal with a broken economy. Because it's so damaged and yet the carry capacity is so high, it stays broken and sickly for decades. This happens when your recovery is slower than the loss of jobs in oncoming technical progress; and a new, faster rate of progress should result in a faster rate of recovery as well, so you need a major economic event to bring this on. As such, even deploying high technology rapidly won't tear down your economy if it explodes with new business vision and with venture capitalists seizing those opportunities, as well as high competition quickly driving prices down to the new (lower) costs, thus stepping up the cycle of new consumer buying power to keep with the explosive growth. If that explosive growth doesn't happen, the very earth collapses from beneath your feet.
That's why it's important for the DOT and Congress and whoever else needs to be involved to get regulations out for things like self-driving cars before the technology is ready: if they become mature, cheap, and roadworthy before they're legal, businesses will stack cash and prepare for a massive fleet replacement. Rather than a hundred paper cuts over several months or a few years, we get a pike stabbed into the leg the moment new regulations open the floodgates.
One target effect of my universal Social Security plan is to improve the pace of recovery. It takes a chunk (15%) of all income, so it moves that proportion of new productivity down into the consumer base before the market readjusts prices. It also acts as a continuous economic stimulus, and so encourages continuous recovery. As well, it stabilizes American households which have lost jobs, and supports the poorest households with a basis of aid.
This basis reduces the cost of means-tested aid and social insurances by raising the financial starting position of low-income households, making HUD housing assistance and TANF aid cheaper and more-effective services, and providing Social Security permanent solvency in its OASDI program. Because of how the taxes are taken and distributed, it's effectively negative-cost in nature at the bottom and in the middle, and so low in cost at the top that the top effective tax bracket falls from 39.6% to 35.8% in total. Business income tax falls to 33.2% or thereabouts (I haven't memorized this number and don't care to go look), increasing the agility of businesses to respond to change; an
Not just the degree of monopolization, but the end-to-end impact. Even if you have 1,000 ISPs in a city and only one excludes your Web site, the customers of that one must face whatever special impact their ISP has on you. If you have one giant monopoly ISP today and exactly two equivalent Web hosts, one Web host excluding you just means you go to the next (who we assume doesn't exclude you), and the people using the monopoly ISP experience exactly the same end-user experience.
The ISP connection is not flexible; it's a fixed resource at the consumer end. With Net Neutrality, all Web hosts are equally-accessible from all ISPs as per the ISP's capability, and they're at the other end. Without Net Neutrality, all Web services (not necessarily hosts) are not equally-accessible from all ISPs as per the ISP's capability, and even changing your hosting provider will leave you blocked or degraded by an ISP.
ISP monopolization causes the false choice, and is the practical situation today, and so prevents certain businesses from existing. ISP competition would lessen, but not eliminate the problem. Web hosting competition generally-eliminates the problem of some Web hosts not supplying adequately-unencumbered service from which to host.
People also imagine inconceivably-complex technology when they think not just about machines that can automatically flip burgers, but machines that can automatically do all the mining, run the refineries, handle the orders, run the farms, slaughter the cows, manufacture the fry cartons and burger wrappers, maintain itself, and maintain all the infrastructure to run the entire economy without a shred of human input. They imagine this is just five years away--they've imagined it was feasible already and just not taken up yet since the 1800s--and so conclude that jobs are going away forever.
That's not a blind extension of peoples's ignorance, either.
I've repeatedly brought up that the cost of products is the wage-labor cost, and technology reduces the amount of time (labor) and thus the cost. Market forces set the price as cost plus profit, and those same forces will push it down toward the new cost insofar that further reduction in prices won't increase profits even if all your competitors do it because they won't draw enough of your customers away. Thus people end up working the same hours, getting paid wages, with prices set by those wages (payrolls, really--wage, benefits, tax), and necessarily get an increase in purchasing power. They buy more stuff, which requires more labor to produce, ship, and retail, thus jobs to replace those lost.
The usual answer?
People just claim that won't happen anymore because no human labor will be involved at any stage in the entire production process of anything. Very soon. Like, as soon as self-driving cars hit the streets.
Magical machines of inconceivable design, but they must exist because we can fantasize about them.
ISPs control whether you can access a resource. Hosters provide a place to host a resource.
If your host won't host you, you can find another host. There are lots of them.
If ISPs won't allow access, then you have the big one or two in an area who can actually carry something (e.g. Netflix) but refuse, and the small ISPs who are willing to carry something but don't have the capacity. Changing hosts doesn't work at the supplier end: you have to get your customers to change to an ISP who supports you. It's even worse if some ISPs decide to block different things, so now customers need 3 different ISPs to have free and unrestricted access to all the hosted Internet content they want.
Fundamentally different consequences. It's like allowing car dealers to ban you from buying cars there, versus allowing states to ban you from driving on their roads (or from driving above 15mph).
"A Better Deal" is just the same Democrat talking points rehashed with a hash tag: $15 minimum wage, tax businesses, healthcare, blahblahblah. There's a plan, and it's everything they've been saying with new paint.
I'm going to be the black sheep of the party if I somehow manage to get elected (hoping Elijah goes to senate; would hate to see him bail out this round due to his health issues, even if I can't beat him in the primaries). My core platform is a Universal Social Security plan, which hits every end goal, but not in ways the other party members like.
Universal Social Security completely-restructures our welfare system to get more aid to more households. I built models to show how the money moves around and what services get adjusted. It cuts out some expenses equivalent to 48% of the taxes taken by income (including all FICA taxes), drops a 15% tax on the new tax brackets, and then redistributes that 15% take to all adults. I built Social Security's current OASDI benefits, HUD housing assistance, WIC, and parts of TANF (childcare aid, basic aid, and administrative costs) back up on top of that.
So let's talk about this a bit.
The benefit pays out twice monthly (close to your paycheck cycle) to come as close to just not taking some of your taxes as possible. I thought about deducting it right from payroll owe, but that involves a hell of a lot of reporting and synchronization between every single payroll operation and the IRS and Social Security Administration, so not doing that.
Across the top 20% of earners, it should take in about $750 million and pay out something like $500 million? I'm not entirely sure: I need the total adult householders and adult dependent household members in that bracket (not just households) and a report on the total FICA tax paid by that group to get a precise number. When you get to the bottom bracket, it's pretty much $64 million in, $500 million out. Until you get to the top 40% or so, you're still dealing with people paying in less for that 15% tax than they're getting back; with joint-filing 2-adult households, you have to get up to the top 15%.
In other words: the middle-class gets more out of it than they pay in; and it's an enormous aid package on the poor, so much so that a single individual in 2016 gets $8,751/year and a 2-adult household gets $17,502/year--and it's not counted as income for tax purposes (we taxed it before we took it from everyone; we're not double-taxing it). That can pretty much replace the Federal proportion of unemployment insurance; and, from that basis, things like housing assistance, WIC, and TANF are cheaper to provide, simply because the financial position of households is improved (they're not as poor, so they don't need as much aid--same means-testing we do today).
As well, Social Security's OASDI program promises to pay $X dollars in retirement, disability, and so forth. I put the payroll/FICA tax back at 5.3% (only needs to be 5.15%) instead of 6.2%, with nothing coming out of your paycheck. If you were going to get, say, $1,200/month, you now get e.g. $800/month Universal plus $400/month retirement, meeting the $1,200/month as promised. Social Security reported at the end of 2017 that the Trust would be insolvent in 2034; well it's now solvent forever.
The Universal benefit grew by 8% in my model since 2013, by the way. OASDI grew by 6.72% in the same period; the retirement benefit grew by 5.1%. That 5.3% FICA can actually shrink over time, because I'll eventually overtake OASDI--without tax increases.
What's not to like?
The burden on the upper incomes is cut back. The top tax bracket is 35.8% instead of 39.6%. It's just an artifact of the raw number manipulation. The business income taxes are cut to 33.2% from 35%. Democrats generally don't like this.
Minimum wage doesn't pay a minimum monthly wage for the underemployed. I'm guaranteeing a mo
We don't have enough time in any case. The next election cycle is next year.
I need more information on Net Neutrality. All I've been able to come up with is a jumbled mess about false choice: in theory, you just vote with your dollars and go to an ISP who doesn't throttle Netflix or whatever; in practice, Verizon and Comcast do it, and the other small players are either not carrying big enough pipes to make Netflix useful or not carrying enough customers to make Netflix profitable. Net Neutrality prevents the tyranny of false choice between capable suppliers who won't and willing suppliers who can't.
So far, I haven't been able to build a strong, defensible argument, though, so the best I've got is "Vote YES for Net Neutrality!" It's no good saying anything if I can't argue on it at-length.
It's not a bandaid; it's saying I got a paper cut, so let me take a blowtorch to the wound to cauterize it.
Technology is the development of new ways to do things with less labor. The frigging wooden shipping pallet eliminated around 90% of all loading dock labor: a crew could unload canned goods in three 16-hour days, and could unload the same goods palletized in 4 hours; and we move those pallets on and off trucks (and train cars) at multiple demarcation points along the way, each of which now requires less than 17% as much labor. Conveying the goods into a warehouse and organizing them there is also a lot faster--not just stacking, but finding a place for them.
From this development, you end up with people working the same hours--fewer people, in terms of goods made. If you de-employ 100,000 people in the US, that's 0.063% additional unemployment: 99.93% of your employment base (at 5% unemployment) is still working. Not a huge deal.
Thing is, you now have a lower cost to produce a good. If that's a luxury good, then you can meet wider markets at lower prices. The current producers can keep the prices high, but someone will see a profit opportunity in a totally-untapped market (Blue Ocean strategy) and start selling the same good at a lower margin. They get the lower-income consumers and the higher-income consumers who now have a choice between a $3,000 TV and an equivalent TV for $1,800.
If it's a commodity good (food, clothing, etc.--everyone already buys it), there's generally lots of competition. Barriers to entry are low in commodity goods: with a larger market, you need a smaller fraction of that market to stay in business, and everybody is your market. The same factors that set the price before--the cost, the competitors, and the degree to which a lowering of price will affect whether the consumer selects brand X over brand Y--determine if and by how much prices fall. If Tide costs $5 but Gain costs only $3, are you going to stick with Tide because hell it's cheap?
The Fed keeps a basket of goods it uses to benchmark inflation, and then tries to keep that basket at 2% per-year inflation by issuing new money. Instead of something going from $5 to $4.95, it should raise from $5 to $5.05, whereas by inflation it would cost $5.10. "Slower than inflation" means prices are going down, kind of--it's really "consumes a smaller proportion of the median income" but this is getting into complex monetary theory.
The long and short of it is consumers (after a few months to years, depending on where on the luxury-commodity scale the good is, among other things) end up with some headroom in their discretionary spending. They buy the same stuff, put the same percent of their income in savings, and have some unspent left over that they didn't before.
Then: they buy more stuff.
To get more stuff, you need jobs. Those robots don't design, build, organize, deploy, maintain, and fuel themselves; there are infrastructure costs and supply chain costs, and all of those costs come from human labor. Costs are only human labor: you pay wages (actually payroll--wages, taxes, and benefits) for the fractional time people put into making a thing. Prices are costs plus profits. You want more stuff made? You need more people.
So technology allows the same labor-hours--the same jobs at a given full-time standard--to produce more. Great.
So what happens if you tax away the productivity gains, keeping prices from falling as jobs are replaced by technology?
If a person keeps at it, they can start 5 business ventures. The businesses each fail if they go bankrupt; they don't fail if they find some marketable product.
It's like going out to hunt deer and getting a moose.... close enough; hunt successful. If you come back with nothing (or a rabbit) YOU FAIL.
It's also apparently only affecting Linux, so they can shelve and test the RMA units and then roll them back out as refurbished units if this proves to not affect other users. They could announce that, or they could do it quietly before announcing the issue has been resolved completely and just rely on 98% of their consumer base being Windows users building ridiculous gaming boxes and deal with "my Linux won't work" exactly as they're doing it today, although someone is going to notice the pattern in refurbished units.
If it's a build tolerance issue, it's likely more-expensive to just build the machine to better tolerance, so this is the best option for consumers (do you want to pay $3,000, or pay $1,000 and have a small chance of waiting another week to swap the CPU off in the mail? $2,000 expedited shipping is serious shit).
Getting people a CPU that works is a fix. If it doesn't impact your workload, you don't need to worry about it.
Cost-of-risk factors into business overhead, and requires reserve cash. That means a business's profitability fluctuates--maybe 12% this year, 4% that year, average of 9% profit, once in a while you have to dump your cash coffers to take massive growth (opportunity risk) or deal with 6 straight years of billion-dollar losses (threat risk)--and they need the revenue and thus the pricing to cover that.
Do you want to pay to cover "we replaced hundreds of thousands of latest-generation processors", or "we got processors that worked for most of our users to them, and put in some expensive-per-unit testing to pick out processor that work for the small fraction of users who experience a particular problem not impacting all of our units"?
Sounds like they're a successful company if one of their products didn't pan out but a different venture of theirs did. Did they still pivot and not fail if they just went bankrupt?
Okay, so, I usually do a 15-20 page write-up to explain the financial models behind the Universal Social Security framework. This involves a whole lot of numbers, tangential references to the effectiveness of our public aid systems, and so forth. For example: 3/4 of families qualified by the Government for HUD Housing Assistance go on a waiting list and never receive benefits (they never graduate from the waiting list).
While it takes about 2-3 minutes to map out which services I'm restructuring, the cost of those services, how the money gets distributed, how our aid services would build on top of this new foundation, how this new structure immediately improves the financial position of all American households, and how that change in financial position changes (reduces) the amount of aid necessary to provide stability to low-income households, it's possible to display all of this in a 20-30 second animated infographic.
That doesn't even begin to cover the tax impacts (it's lower taxes on individuals, businesses, and payrolls); the explanation for why the system is permanently solvent or why the benefit grows faster than inflation (this requires a crash course in the economics of technical progress); or the quick-check model of comparing the total money moved to Social Security OASDI taxes adjusted to all income and the funding source tax rate used. For the most part, that's all stuff you can display visually in a few seconds with minimal explanation.
A 2-minute video can cover pretty much all the mechanical details, whereas it takes a dozen pages with spreadsheets full of numbers and verbose descriptions of the logical process of manipulating those numbers to get it out in text. By the time you've gotten through it, you've exceeded most people's attention spans. If you've thoroughly read this, the way you'd have to read that sort of dense text to extract any useful information, you've already spent more time than it takes to describe the process thoroughly in video.
There's not a video because I don't have the skill to make one, nor the capitalization to pay someone for one.
Actually, videos are showing the most successful steps forward in marketing we've seen in recent history. Explainer videos, in particular, have become prime marketing tools, effectively communicating both complex information and a sense of emotion to excite an audience over a subject such as a product or political call to action.
Thing is you can't pour steak sauce on donuts. Steak sauce is a wonderful thing, just not here.
How does private insurance drive prices up when it's in the interest of the insurer's maximized profits to get the prices down as low as possible?
How does private insurance drive prices up when the insurer's rate after remittance is often (well) below half the list price?
How is it Medicare will never pay above the listed usual and customary price an individual practice charges even if the medicare rate for the area is higher, yet doesn't push prices upwards? A practice charging below that rate won't get as much Medicare money; a practice charging above that rate gets more Medicare money and, as well, can negotiate a higher rate from insurers--because of course the insurer isn't going to pay more than the patient would pay out-of-pocket, either.
Medicare does a lot of great things. Driving prices downward is not one of them.
The surprise here is that the data left the app unencrypted.
And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn't for those pesky kids I hired for $5/hr to code my app not using a TLS certificate and strong trust validation!
No, they're putting a false choice down: You can get an upper-end MacBook with a touch bar or you can get a MacBook without a touch bar.
Imagine if every pick-up truck with more hauling capacity than a low-end SUV had double rear wheels, even though only super-high-capacity trucks can carry a load exceeding a four-wheel vehicle's rear two wheels. Then, they tell you you can get the truck with six wheels, or you can get a four-wheel truck.
The key to that analogy is that mid-tier trucks can't carry enough to overload two rear wheels: the double wheels are useless and expensive. At upper tiers, you need double rear wheels. Upper-end MacBook Pros also function just fine without a touch bar, but you can't buy one without it.
This is also what happens when an oligopoly controls a market and all parties with capability to do a thing don't allow that thing: you can choose a small competitor, and you can give up the capacity to do that thing; or you can go with the oligopoly and simply not be able to do that thing because they won't. Folks often say markets will supply the feature, and that's generally true if the feature is a highly-demanded feature and will significantly change the balance of power. As a result, we sometimes have the government intervene when such exclusions in practice mean one or the majority of large market players are using their dominance to crush a competitor in another type of market.
That's also the argument about net neutrality: the big providers will all throttle $SERVICE (e.g. netflix) to cut costs, thus $SERVICE will die, and the minor players are too small in the market or too low in capability to enable $SERVICE to survive. There's a likelihood that consumers won't be allowed to have Netflix or Spotify or some such because Verizon and Comcast won't carry them equally.
MD's drivers aren't known for being great either, probably something to do with the wrecks half of them drive around in as the last time I was there vehicles only needed to be inspected on new owner registrations. The entire East coast from DC on north to Boston is one hugely congested mess of traffic with subpar highways for most of it.
Now there's some sense. It has mostly to do with really terrible driver's education.
No, medicare is the reason the usual and customary price tag is $2,000, and thus a person without insurance pays $2,000, while a person paying 100% out-of-pocket is getting $2,000 minus the insurer-negotiated discount. That $2,000 sets the price, and medicare is legally below that.
That price, by the way, isn't the "usual and customary" market price; it's the "usual and customary" price your provider charges. We also have non-discrimination laws about pricing, so the practice must charge the same price to all customers--meaning that "usual and customary" price is the price, and what Medicare pays is below the price. This is, again, why the insurer is billed $2,000, but has a negotiated discount: it's not legal to bill the insurer a straight $800, but it is legal to bill them $2,000 and discount a contract-negotiated $1,200.
Which produces the terrible consequence that the uninsured and those with weak group insurance face high medical prices.
A public option isn't likely to resolve this, although I've designed policies that probably would--those policies might also have a negative consequence somewhere about non-discriminatory pricing, but I don't think repealing that rule is actually necessary. We can just benchmark the public option price to the actual market discount rates negotiated by insurers. Without pulling the non-discriminatory pricing law, however, medicare is still driving the base price up (not sure how much it matters with a public option that's using the insurer-negotiated rates, and with no outright-uninsured; people with less-prestigious insurers and HDHPs might not get a great discount off that really-high base price, but the public option should cover that gap or why would you buy into a catastrophic plan?). I think it'd at least be better.
A single-payer means that "usual and customary" rate is the rate they'd benchmark to--as evidenced by it being the rate they benchmark to now--and it's a lot higher than what insurance pays now. That's a lot of economic rent and a huge amount of tax costs to the consumer to have government healthcare.
LLY's profit margin seems to be about 14% 5-year average, which is a touch high, but par for the course in the healthcare industry (10-15%). Consumer-level automobiles are generally 12% NOP long-term average; Wendy's has an 8% NOP long-term average; and New Balance shoe company was maintaining just over 5% over 5 years last time I looked. Comcast is usually in the 8%-11% range.
Strattera was, what, $1100 for a 3-month supply, one pill dose? The insurance-negotiated price was $382, or $4.25/pill. Using that as a benchmark, LLY could have 0% profit average at $3.72/pill or a price of $335/6mo.
LLY spent $824.5 million on advertising in 2016; they spent $5,243.9 million on research in the same year. As your master's degree in mathematics surely will attest, 825 / 5,244 = 4.
Here's a tip: don't play emotional appeals and fake facts at me, because I have real facts and I can do first-grade math on a pocket calculator.
Cars don't just "easily merge into the gaps between trucks". They notice, 40 meters before an exit on the right, that they're about to miss their exit, and recklessly cut at a 35-degree angle across 4 lanes of traffic to try to catch the exit without dying as their car is split in half on the guard rail. They come up and merge onto the highway going 20mph slower than traffic.
I routinely ride my motorcycle in the right lane because I haven't gotten the hang of using my mirrors and otherwise being aware of traffic around me, thus lane shifting is... hazardous. So I'll be going 60mph in the right lane, come to a merge lane, and hit my front brake hard to come down to 30-40mph. I still sometimes negotiate with the last car getting on the highway, passing at the end of the merge lane because he's still going slower.
That's just the right lane for you. Assholes to the left of me, assholes to the right, traveling at massive speed differentials. They're not going about 50mph; they're going way too slow or way too fast. When someone does merge in front of the truck, the truck has to brake because they merge about 5 meters ahead of them--on south 295, in the left lane, you'll go 85mph in a car and people will go around you because you're too slow, and you'll have less than 5 meters between you and the next vehicle at all times until you get out of that lane; they do the same damned thing when traffic gets denser in every lane on 95, 695, and 83, and it's even worse on 495.
I don't know what boring-ass driving game you're playing on your Sega Genesis over there, but you need to take a look at the real world.
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Actually at 140kWh using a 600V 300A charger (I've seen 676A chargers), it would take 45 minutes to recharge.
For distribution centers, the truck is about 150 miles from the DC. Generally, at a Best Buy or WalMart, there's a full bay or two with empty trailers. It takes us 1-2 hours to unload a truck; the trucks grab the other trailer and leave. Given a L3 charger on a ChargePoint cube with 2 outlets at 676A, we could have two trailers charging simultaneously and have a full 140kWh battery in 45 minutes.
If the truck itself has a smaller battery (say, 20kWh), we could selectively divert resources to charging the power plant when one is plugged in: stop charging the trailers (all of them) and throw the full 676A, 600V at the truck. Its battery will charge in 3 minutes, and it can drive off without a trailer. The MP100KWh it gets without the load is considerably-high. The driver has to wait 10-15 minutes to settle everything before he can leave, anyway.
On the other hand, because it takes about an hour to unload a truck, even at 300V or at 600V with only 240A, the trailer's recharged in about an hour. That means a 600V circuit (3-phase power supply required for any of this anyway) can recharge two trailers with a 500A charger while they unload.
Truck shows up, drops trailer, moves to an empty trailer, takes it, leaves. If you can get out of the truck, walk into the door, find the store manager, sign off that the seal has the same number as the invoice the manager received (indicating the truck has not been opened since it left the DC), and get back to the truck in 3 minutes, you have a fully-charged 20kWh battery under your cab, and a fully-charged 120kWh+ battery under the trailer you just snagged.
The best part is the DC doesn't need nearly as much power: trucks are showing up empty, so they should have trailers with a near-full charge.
It's not just that. People think an apocalypse is coming. Not a technical revolution the likes of which would drive high unemployment and long recovery periods, a collapse of our economy in a new Great Depression or Industrial Revolution which will destroy today's nations and leave our peoples to pick up the pieces and form new works of them; but a complete, unrecoverable end to all employment as humans are no longer needed by their technology.
Deploying new technology across months or years--early adopters, staged roll-outs, strategic business plans to move early or to wait for a greater ROI, and increases in wealth and demand driving the need for new positions such that rolling out expands some fleets and more-slowly eliminates human positions--gives little bits of unemployment. It bleeds in over time, and the costs amortize and average, and the transitionally-unemployed don't pile up because new jobs become available. The same people who become unemployed don't necessarily get those jobs--we have an unemployed labor pool, and you get tossed in to go play the employment lottery--but the jobs do come back. With these long time spans, that occurs while things change, and so our economy doesn't collapse under the weight.
Call it "Technical Renaissance", if you will. That's appropriate: I'm not working off the same economic theory as modern economics anyway, as it's a little... primitive... for my tastes. Close, but with a few rough spots.
Technical Revolution, on the other hand, looks like the Industrial Revolution: you throw out half your workers and deal with a broken economy. Because it's so damaged and yet the carry capacity is so high, it stays broken and sickly for decades. This happens when your recovery is slower than the loss of jobs in oncoming technical progress; and a new, faster rate of progress should result in a faster rate of recovery as well, so you need a major economic event to bring this on. As such, even deploying high technology rapidly won't tear down your economy if it explodes with new business vision and with venture capitalists seizing those opportunities, as well as high competition quickly driving prices down to the new (lower) costs, thus stepping up the cycle of new consumer buying power to keep with the explosive growth. If that explosive growth doesn't happen, the very earth collapses from beneath your feet.
That's why it's important for the DOT and Congress and whoever else needs to be involved to get regulations out for things like self-driving cars before the technology is ready: if they become mature, cheap, and roadworthy before they're legal, businesses will stack cash and prepare for a massive fleet replacement. Rather than a hundred paper cuts over several months or a few years, we get a pike stabbed into the leg the moment new regulations open the floodgates.
One target effect of my universal Social Security plan is to improve the pace of recovery. It takes a chunk (15%) of all income, so it moves that proportion of new productivity down into the consumer base before the market readjusts prices. It also acts as a continuous economic stimulus, and so encourages continuous recovery. As well, it stabilizes American households which have lost jobs, and supports the poorest households with a basis of aid.
This basis reduces the cost of means-tested aid and social insurances by raising the financial starting position of low-income households, making HUD housing assistance and TANF aid cheaper and more-effective services, and providing Social Security permanent solvency in its OASDI program. Because of how the taxes are taken and distributed, it's effectively negative-cost in nature at the bottom and in the middle, and so low in cost at the top that the top effective tax bracket falls from 39.6% to 35.8% in total. Business income tax falls to 33.2% or thereabouts (I haven't memorized this number and don't care to go look), increasing the agility of businesses to respond to change; an
Not just the degree of monopolization, but the end-to-end impact. Even if you have 1,000 ISPs in a city and only one excludes your Web site, the customers of that one must face whatever special impact their ISP has on you. If you have one giant monopoly ISP today and exactly two equivalent Web hosts, one Web host excluding you just means you go to the next (who we assume doesn't exclude you), and the people using the monopoly ISP experience exactly the same end-user experience.
The ISP connection is not flexible; it's a fixed resource at the consumer end. With Net Neutrality, all Web hosts are equally-accessible from all ISPs as per the ISP's capability, and they're at the other end. Without Net Neutrality, all Web services (not necessarily hosts) are not equally-accessible from all ISPs as per the ISP's capability, and even changing your hosting provider will leave you blocked or degraded by an ISP.
ISP monopolization causes the false choice, and is the practical situation today, and so prevents certain businesses from existing. ISP competition would lessen, but not eliminate the problem. Web hosting competition generally-eliminates the problem of some Web hosts not supplying adequately-unencumbered service from which to host.
People also imagine inconceivably-complex technology when they think not just about machines that can automatically flip burgers, but machines that can automatically do all the mining, run the refineries, handle the orders, run the farms, slaughter the cows, manufacture the fry cartons and burger wrappers, maintain itself, and maintain all the infrastructure to run the entire economy without a shred of human input. They imagine this is just five years away--they've imagined it was feasible already and just not taken up yet since the 1800s--and so conclude that jobs are going away forever.
That's not a blind extension of peoples's ignorance, either.
I've repeatedly brought up that the cost of products is the wage-labor cost, and technology reduces the amount of time (labor) and thus the cost. Market forces set the price as cost plus profit, and those same forces will push it down toward the new cost insofar that further reduction in prices won't increase profits even if all your competitors do it because they won't draw enough of your customers away. Thus people end up working the same hours, getting paid wages, with prices set by those wages (payrolls, really--wage, benefits, tax), and necessarily get an increase in purchasing power. They buy more stuff, which requires more labor to produce, ship, and retail, thus jobs to replace those lost.
The usual answer?
People just claim that won't happen anymore because no human labor will be involved at any stage in the entire production process of anything. Very soon. Like, as soon as self-driving cars hit the streets.
Magical machines of inconceivable design, but they must exist because we can fantasize about them.
Shrug. It wasn't a campaign statement and I haven't gotten the idea that it's always a campaign statement yet.
Either way, it's not funny if I have to explain it.
ISPs control whether you can access a resource. Hosters provide a place to host a resource.
If your host won't host you, you can find another host. There are lots of them.
If ISPs won't allow access, then you have the big one or two in an area who can actually carry something (e.g. Netflix) but refuse, and the small ISPs who are willing to carry something but don't have the capacity. Changing hosts doesn't work at the supplier end: you have to get your customers to change to an ISP who supports you. It's even worse if some ISPs decide to block different things, so now customers need 3 different ISPs to have free and unrestricted access to all the hosted Internet content they want.
Fundamentally different consequences. It's like allowing car dealers to ban you from buying cars there, versus allowing states to ban you from driving on their roads (or from driving above 15mph).
Tenebrousedge, James P.: "Assholes Are Not a Protected Class", Harvard Ph.D. Programme Library, 2017.
"A Better Deal" is just the same Democrat talking points rehashed with a hash tag: $15 minimum wage, tax businesses, healthcare, blahblahblah. There's a plan, and it's everything they've been saying with new paint.
I'm going to be the black sheep of the party if I somehow manage to get elected (hoping Elijah goes to senate; would hate to see him bail out this round due to his health issues, even if I can't beat him in the primaries). My core platform is a Universal Social Security plan, which hits every end goal, but not in ways the other party members like.
Universal Social Security completely-restructures our welfare system to get more aid to more households. I built models to show how the money moves around and what services get adjusted. It cuts out some expenses equivalent to 48% of the taxes taken by income (including all FICA taxes), drops a 15% tax on the new tax brackets, and then redistributes that 15% take to all adults. I built Social Security's current OASDI benefits, HUD housing assistance, WIC, and parts of TANF (childcare aid, basic aid, and administrative costs) back up on top of that.
So let's talk about this a bit.
The benefit pays out twice monthly (close to your paycheck cycle) to come as close to just not taking some of your taxes as possible. I thought about deducting it right from payroll owe, but that involves a hell of a lot of reporting and synchronization between every single payroll operation and the IRS and Social Security Administration, so not doing that.
Across the top 20% of earners, it should take in about $750 million and pay out something like $500 million? I'm not entirely sure: I need the total adult householders and adult dependent household members in that bracket (not just households) and a report on the total FICA tax paid by that group to get a precise number. When you get to the bottom bracket, it's pretty much $64 million in, $500 million out. Until you get to the top 40% or so, you're still dealing with people paying in less for that 15% tax than they're getting back; with joint-filing 2-adult households, you have to get up to the top 15%.
In other words: the middle-class gets more out of it than they pay in; and it's an enormous aid package on the poor, so much so that a single individual in 2016 gets $8,751/year and a 2-adult household gets $17,502/year--and it's not counted as income for tax purposes (we taxed it before we took it from everyone; we're not double-taxing it). That can pretty much replace the Federal proportion of unemployment insurance; and, from that basis, things like housing assistance, WIC, and TANF are cheaper to provide, simply because the financial position of households is improved (they're not as poor, so they don't need as much aid--same means-testing we do today).
As well, Social Security's OASDI program promises to pay $X dollars in retirement, disability, and so forth. I put the payroll/FICA tax back at 5.3% (only needs to be 5.15%) instead of 6.2%, with nothing coming out of your paycheck. If you were going to get, say, $1,200/month, you now get e.g. $800/month Universal plus $400/month retirement, meeting the $1,200/month as promised. Social Security reported at the end of 2017 that the Trust would be insolvent in 2034; well it's now solvent forever.
The Universal benefit grew by 8% in my model since 2013, by the way. OASDI grew by 6.72% in the same period; the retirement benefit grew by 5.1%. That 5.3% FICA can actually shrink over time, because I'll eventually overtake OASDI--without tax increases.
What's not to like?
The burden on the upper incomes is cut back. The top tax bracket is 35.8% instead of 39.6%. It's just an artifact of the raw number manipulation. The business income taxes are cut to 33.2% from 35%. Democrats generally don't like this.
Minimum wage doesn't pay a minimum monthly wage for the underemployed. I'm guaranteeing a mo
We don't have enough time in any case. The next election cycle is next year.
I need more information on Net Neutrality. All I've been able to come up with is a jumbled mess about false choice: in theory, you just vote with your dollars and go to an ISP who doesn't throttle Netflix or whatever; in practice, Verizon and Comcast do it, and the other small players are either not carrying big enough pipes to make Netflix useful or not carrying enough customers to make Netflix profitable. Net Neutrality prevents the tyranny of false choice between capable suppliers who won't and willing suppliers who can't.
So far, I haven't been able to build a strong, defensible argument, though, so the best I've got is "Vote YES for Net Neutrality!" It's no good saying anything if I can't argue on it at-length.
Just remember that this is the same society that thinks you will die if you run a fan in a closed room
Appeal to irrelevant ignorance. They're wrong, but not because they're wrong about fans.
It's not a bandaid; it's saying I got a paper cut, so let me take a blowtorch to the wound to cauterize it.
Technology is the development of new ways to do things with less labor. The frigging wooden shipping pallet eliminated around 90% of all loading dock labor: a crew could unload canned goods in three 16-hour days, and could unload the same goods palletized in 4 hours; and we move those pallets on and off trucks (and train cars) at multiple demarcation points along the way, each of which now requires less than 17% as much labor. Conveying the goods into a warehouse and organizing them there is also a lot faster--not just stacking, but finding a place for them.
From this development, you end up with people working the same hours--fewer people, in terms of goods made. If you de-employ 100,000 people in the US, that's 0.063% additional unemployment: 99.93% of your employment base (at 5% unemployment) is still working. Not a huge deal.
Thing is, you now have a lower cost to produce a good. If that's a luxury good, then you can meet wider markets at lower prices. The current producers can keep the prices high, but someone will see a profit opportunity in a totally-untapped market (Blue Ocean strategy) and start selling the same good at a lower margin. They get the lower-income consumers and the higher-income consumers who now have a choice between a $3,000 TV and an equivalent TV for $1,800.
If it's a commodity good (food, clothing, etc.--everyone already buys it), there's generally lots of competition. Barriers to entry are low in commodity goods: with a larger market, you need a smaller fraction of that market to stay in business, and everybody is your market. The same factors that set the price before--the cost, the competitors, and the degree to which a lowering of price will affect whether the consumer selects brand X over brand Y--determine if and by how much prices fall. If Tide costs $5 but Gain costs only $3, are you going to stick with Tide because hell it's cheap?
The Fed keeps a basket of goods it uses to benchmark inflation, and then tries to keep that basket at 2% per-year inflation by issuing new money. Instead of something going from $5 to $4.95, it should raise from $5 to $5.05, whereas by inflation it would cost $5.10. "Slower than inflation" means prices are going down, kind of--it's really "consumes a smaller proportion of the median income" but this is getting into complex monetary theory.
The long and short of it is consumers (after a few months to years, depending on where on the luxury-commodity scale the good is, among other things) end up with some headroom in their discretionary spending. They buy the same stuff, put the same percent of their income in savings, and have some unspent left over that they didn't before.
Then: they buy more stuff.
To get more stuff, you need jobs. Those robots don't design, build, organize, deploy, maintain, and fuel themselves; there are infrastructure costs and supply chain costs, and all of those costs come from human labor. Costs are only human labor: you pay wages (actually payroll--wages, taxes, and benefits) for the fractional time people put into making a thing. Prices are costs plus profits. You want more stuff made? You need more people.
So technology allows the same labor-hours--the same jobs at a given full-time standard--to produce more. Great.
So what happens if you tax away the productivity gains, keeping prices from falling as jobs are replaced by technology?
If a person keeps at it, they can start 5 business ventures. The businesses each fail if they go bankrupt; they don't fail if they find some marketable product.
It's like going out to hunt deer and getting a moose. ... close enough; hunt successful. If you come back with nothing (or a rabbit) YOU FAIL.
It's also apparently only affecting Linux, so they can shelve and test the RMA units and then roll them back out as refurbished units if this proves to not affect other users. They could announce that, or they could do it quietly before announcing the issue has been resolved completely and just rely on 98% of their consumer base being Windows users building ridiculous gaming boxes and deal with "my Linux won't work" exactly as they're doing it today, although someone is going to notice the pattern in refurbished units.
If it's a build tolerance issue, it's likely more-expensive to just build the machine to better tolerance, so this is the best option for consumers (do you want to pay $3,000, or pay $1,000 and have a small chance of waiting another week to swap the CPU off in the mail? $2,000 expedited shipping is serious shit).
Getting people a CPU that works is a fix. If it doesn't impact your workload, you don't need to worry about it.
Cost-of-risk factors into business overhead, and requires reserve cash. That means a business's profitability fluctuates--maybe 12% this year, 4% that year, average of 9% profit, once in a while you have to dump your cash coffers to take massive growth (opportunity risk) or deal with 6 straight years of billion-dollar losses (threat risk)--and they need the revenue and thus the pricing to cover that.
Do you want to pay to cover "we replaced hundreds of thousands of latest-generation processors", or "we got processors that worked for most of our users to them, and put in some expensive-per-unit testing to pick out processor that work for the small fraction of users who experience a particular problem not impacting all of our units"?
Sounds like they're a successful company if one of their products didn't pan out but a different venture of theirs did. Did they still pivot and not fail if they just went bankrupt?
Okay, so, I usually do a 15-20 page write-up to explain the financial models behind the Universal Social Security framework. This involves a whole lot of numbers, tangential references to the effectiveness of our public aid systems, and so forth. For example: 3/4 of families qualified by the Government for HUD Housing Assistance go on a waiting list and never receive benefits (they never graduate from the waiting list).
While it takes about 2-3 minutes to map out which services I'm restructuring, the cost of those services, how the money gets distributed, how our aid services would build on top of this new foundation, how this new structure immediately improves the financial position of all American households, and how that change in financial position changes (reduces) the amount of aid necessary to provide stability to low-income households, it's possible to display all of this in a 20-30 second animated infographic.
That doesn't even begin to cover the tax impacts (it's lower taxes on individuals, businesses, and payrolls); the explanation for why the system is permanently solvent or why the benefit grows faster than inflation (this requires a crash course in the economics of technical progress); or the quick-check model of comparing the total money moved to Social Security OASDI taxes adjusted to all income and the funding source tax rate used. For the most part, that's all stuff you can display visually in a few seconds with minimal explanation.
A 2-minute video can cover pretty much all the mechanical details, whereas it takes a dozen pages with spreadsheets full of numbers and verbose descriptions of the logical process of manipulating those numbers to get it out in text. By the time you've gotten through it, you've exceeded most people's attention spans. If you've thoroughly read this, the way you'd have to read that sort of dense text to extract any useful information, you've already spent more time than it takes to describe the process thoroughly in video.
There's not a video because I don't have the skill to make one, nor the capitalization to pay someone for one.
Actually, videos are showing the most successful steps forward in marketing we've seen in recent history. Explainer videos, in particular, have become prime marketing tools, effectively communicating both complex information and a sense of emotion to excite an audience over a subject such as a product or political call to action.
Thing is you can't pour steak sauce on donuts. Steak sauce is a wonderful thing, just not here.
Videos are useful where you want to pack a lot of complex technical information into a communication.
Videos aren't useful for gossip.
How does private insurance drive prices up when it's in the interest of the insurer's maximized profits to get the prices down as low as possible?
How does private insurance drive prices up when the insurer's rate after remittance is often (well) below half the list price?
How is it Medicare will never pay above the listed usual and customary price an individual practice charges even if the medicare rate for the area is higher, yet doesn't push prices upwards? A practice charging below that rate won't get as much Medicare money; a practice charging above that rate gets more Medicare money and, as well, can negotiate a higher rate from insurers--because of course the insurer isn't going to pay more than the patient would pay out-of-pocket, either.
Medicare does a lot of great things. Driving prices downward is not one of them.
The surprise here is that the data left the app unencrypted.
And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn't for those pesky kids I hired for $5/hr to code my app not using a TLS certificate and strong trust validation!
This is Apple? I thought Touch Bar was an attempt by an overly-enthusiastic Gentleman's Club to attract new patronage.
No, they're putting a false choice down: You can get an upper-end MacBook with a touch bar or you can get a MacBook without a touch bar.
Imagine if every pick-up truck with more hauling capacity than a low-end SUV had double rear wheels, even though only super-high-capacity trucks can carry a load exceeding a four-wheel vehicle's rear two wheels. Then, they tell you you can get the truck with six wheels, or you can get a four-wheel truck.
The key to that analogy is that mid-tier trucks can't carry enough to overload two rear wheels: the double wheels are useless and expensive. At upper tiers, you need double rear wheels. Upper-end MacBook Pros also function just fine without a touch bar, but you can't buy one without it.
This is also what happens when an oligopoly controls a market and all parties with capability to do a thing don't allow that thing: you can choose a small competitor, and you can give up the capacity to do that thing; or you can go with the oligopoly and simply not be able to do that thing because they won't. Folks often say markets will supply the feature, and that's generally true if the feature is a highly-demanded feature and will significantly change the balance of power. As a result, we sometimes have the government intervene when such exclusions in practice mean one or the majority of large market players are using their dominance to crush a competitor in another type of market.
That's also the argument about net neutrality: the big providers will all throttle $SERVICE (e.g. netflix) to cut costs, thus $SERVICE will die, and the minor players are too small in the market or too low in capability to enable $SERVICE to survive. There's a likelihood that consumers won't be allowed to have Netflix or Spotify or some such because Verizon and Comcast won't carry them equally.
MD's drivers aren't known for being great either, probably something to do with the wrecks half of them drive around in as the last time I was there vehicles only needed to be inspected on new owner registrations. The entire East coast from DC on north to Boston is one hugely congested mess of traffic with subpar highways for most of it.
Now there's some sense. It has mostly to do with really terrible driver's education.
No, medicare is the reason the usual and customary price tag is $2,000, and thus a person without insurance pays $2,000, while a person paying 100% out-of-pocket is getting $2,000 minus the insurer-negotiated discount. That $2,000 sets the price, and medicare is legally below that.
That price, by the way, isn't the "usual and customary" market price; it's the "usual and customary" price your provider charges. We also have non-discrimination laws about pricing, so the practice must charge the same price to all customers--meaning that "usual and customary" price is the price, and what Medicare pays is below the price. This is, again, why the insurer is billed $2,000, but has a negotiated discount: it's not legal to bill the insurer a straight $800, but it is legal to bill them $2,000 and discount a contract-negotiated $1,200.
Which produces the terrible consequence that the uninsured and those with weak group insurance face high medical prices.
A public option isn't likely to resolve this, although I've designed policies that probably would--those policies might also have a negative consequence somewhere about non-discriminatory pricing, but I don't think repealing that rule is actually necessary. We can just benchmark the public option price to the actual market discount rates negotiated by insurers. Without pulling the non-discriminatory pricing law, however, medicare is still driving the base price up (not sure how much it matters with a public option that's using the insurer-negotiated rates, and with no outright-uninsured; people with less-prestigious insurers and HDHPs might not get a great discount off that really-high base price, but the public option should cover that gap or why would you buy into a catastrophic plan?). I think it'd at least be better.
A single-payer means that "usual and customary" rate is the rate they'd benchmark to--as evidenced by it being the rate they benchmark to now--and it's a lot higher than what insurance pays now. That's a lot of economic rent and a huge amount of tax costs to the consumer to have government healthcare.
LLY's profit margin seems to be about 14% 5-year average, which is a touch high, but par for the course in the healthcare industry (10-15%). Consumer-level automobiles are generally 12% NOP long-term average; Wendy's has an 8% NOP long-term average; and New Balance shoe company was maintaining just over 5% over 5 years last time I looked. Comcast is usually in the 8%-11% range.
Strattera was, what, $1100 for a 3-month supply, one pill dose? The insurance-negotiated price was $382, or $4.25/pill. Using that as a benchmark, LLY could have 0% profit average at $3.72/pill or a price of $335/6mo.
LLY spent $824.5 million on advertising in 2016; they spent $5,243.9 million on research in the same year. As your master's degree in mathematics surely will attest, 825 / 5,244 = 4.
Here's a tip: don't play emotional appeals and fake facts at me, because I have real facts and I can do first-grade math on a pocket calculator.
Cars don't just "easily merge into the gaps between trucks". They notice, 40 meters before an exit on the right, that they're about to miss their exit, and recklessly cut at a 35-degree angle across 4 lanes of traffic to try to catch the exit without dying as their car is split in half on the guard rail. They come up and merge onto the highway going 20mph slower than traffic.
I routinely ride my motorcycle in the right lane because I haven't gotten the hang of using my mirrors and otherwise being aware of traffic around me, thus lane shifting is ... hazardous. So I'll be going 60mph in the right lane, come to a merge lane, and hit my front brake hard to come down to 30-40mph. I still sometimes negotiate with the last car getting on the highway, passing at the end of the merge lane because he's still going slower.
That's just the right lane for you. Assholes to the left of me, assholes to the right, traveling at massive speed differentials. They're not going about 50mph; they're going way too slow or way too fast. When someone does merge in front of the truck, the truck has to brake because they merge about 5 meters ahead of them--on south 295, in the left lane, you'll go 85mph in a car and people will go around you because you're too slow, and you'll have less than 5 meters between you and the next vehicle at all times until you get out of that lane; they do the same damned thing when traffic gets denser in every lane on 95, 695, and 83, and it's even worse on 495.
I don't know what boring-ass driving game you're playing on your Sega Genesis over there, but you need to take a look at the real world.