Sometimes, they are. We know this because sometimes someone takes the software apart with reverse-engineering tools, then tells everyone.
That kind of universal verifiability is the basis of integrity. I've been pushing it for voting. Current electronic voting machines use secret software reviewed by some people under NDA and loaded on the machines before the election, so you can't verify any of it. For an electronic voting machine to be usable during an election, you need to publish the software image, and then prove that image is the image loaded at the beginning of polling--achievable, but brutally-stringent on exact procedures for opening and closing the polling day.
I've suggested the same about things like Single Transferable Vote and other voting rules: the state must publish the full ballot sets (which must be traceable to polling centers or marked as non-traceable mail-in absentee ballots) and the algorithm used to compute the results.
It's not that everyone has the tools and knowledge to verify the election; it's that we've made it impossible to get rid of the kid pointing out that the Emperor has no clothes. He won't stop telling everyone.
How long do you think we could hide code in WhatsApp to parallel-encrypt with another public key and send to another server?
How long could we hide code that downloads additional code and adds it to the application?
How would we keep people from dumping the memory space to find out what exactly that additional code does?
How quickly will Google start screaming that Facebook is doing something shady? What about RMS? Peter Gutmann?
Here's a principle for you: some people can't eat.
I mean if one guy got a million, but 1000 people lost $100, it is a net gain on average, but the 1000 people would rather the one guy lost a million and they all got $100
In practice, that guy can get 90% of a million and everyone else can get another $100, while those who lost out get a large support package. Rich is still getting richer, and everyone else is also doing well.
Which is probably something like 200 times the salary of the average employee
So, if the $6M Walmart CEO gives his salaries to their employees, they get $4 more per year.
I make $80k. If I give my salary to my employees, they get $40,000 more per year.
"200 times the salary of the average employee" is a red herring: it's completely-meaningless for any practical purpose. You can claim a type of superfood has 200x the calories needed for the average person to eat...ignoring that it takes 5,000x the labor to produce, so it's unsustainable and can't feed the hungry.
"the times are bad, I have to let some of you go and the rest will get reduced salary, we have to tighten our belts to survive the recession. Oh and look at my shiny new Tesla" makes people hate the CEO and company owners in general, developing into an "us vs them" mentality that the government gladly exploits.
It does. It's a dialogue we must correct by educating people, as we can't solve problems if we invest our time in things that don't matter.
When there's a recession, people buy less. We need 1,000 of you to make the 50,000-unit demand; but now people are only buying 40,000 units and 200 of these workers are doing nothing. We can either charge 25% more per unit (further driving down purchasing, and making the customers more-poor) or we can eliminate 20% of the workforce. Downsizing the workforce impacts 200 workers (and, by extension, those from whom they buy things), while raising prices impacts 10,000 customers (and, by extension, those from whom they purchase using the money the new price claws away).
Meanwhile the CEO's new Tesla is still a few pennies per worker spread across the year.
The correct solution is social insurances and economic development programs.
Depends on how you count it, in some cases people give up hope on ever finding a job and become alcoholics. Since they are not registered as looking for a job, the government does not count them as "unemployed".
As robots (and workers in foreign countries) are replacing less skilled local workers, those workers have nowhere to go. So, a factory with robots may need more engineers to program and maintain those robots, but the people who assembled the product by hand previously may not e able to do it.
Actually, robots tend to reduce the number of skilled workers as well. You turn 1,000 workers into 10 engineers and 190 robot operators, with 800 workers shaved off the top. As the economy shifts and grows, you'll create 800 more jobs.
While many people envision burger-flippers being replaced by burger-flipping robots, that's actually hard: a machine to flip burgers and make fries still needs an employee loading the hopper. Modern grease fryers have timers, and an employee incidentally dumps a bag of fries into the basket when appropriate, then responds to the alarm and dumps the basket. The investment is about 20 seconds of time per batch, and the employee is basically free to do other things. A grill requires a person tending it continuously, so does a bit better; but burgers get sold so fast that you'd invest most of the employee's time feeding the burger hopper, cleaning it (it's harder to clean than just a grill surface), and so forth. Bad deal.
Meanwhile we've replaced skilled network technicians with IT monkeys. We need a few engineers; configuring our networking hardware merely requires using the simple, easy interfaces which some engineers have developed.
In other words: many classes of jobs--such as in IT--have replaced 1,000 skilled engineers with 200 skilled engineers and 800 unskilled workers who spent a week training under other unskilled workers. There is no way to gain com
Let's say I work at a fast food place and sell food. Someone orders a burrito ($2.89), milk shake ($1.93), and nachos ($1.28). I add them up and get $6.10.
You assert that I have learned that a burrito, milk shake, and nachos cost $6.10.
You're wrong.
Three customers later, someone orders a burrito, milk shake, and nachos. I remember this just happened a few minutes ago, but I don't remember how much they cost, together. I must re-compute these things using arithmetic skills I learned long ago through repetition because I haven't learned that burrito + milk shake + nachos = $6.10.
Now say this happens over and over and over. It's a common order.
In a few days, I stop computing that. As soon as you say burrito, milk shake, and nachos, I say $6.10. I've seen that combination two hundred times; it's always $6.10. Now I've learned.
So in conclusion: idiot, you keep describing something that isn't learning, and calling it learning.
It seems that open trade may work for some countries and especially be beneficial to the poor countries.
It's beneficial to rich countries, as well. The point of trade is that it makes both sides wealthier. That's not about dollars; it's about relative efficiencies.
Even if you have an absolute advantage making a good yourself--if it's cheaper for you to make your own clothes, for example--the comparative advantage controls trade.
If you can make 10 tonnes food or 5,000 pants with the same labor (cost) invested and the trading partner can make 6 tonnes food or 4,000 pants, then every pair of pants you make costs you 2 tonnes of food, while every pair of pants they make costs them 1.5 tonnes food. It still makes both of you wealthier to make food and trade food for pants, even though it appears to cost 1.25x as much for them to make pants as it does for you to make pants and thus, without food in the equation, would be cheaper for you to make your own pants.
the way stuff works now, AFAIK, is that factories in, say, the USA get moved to China, workers are now jobless, but the profits go only to the company and its shareholders
That's structural change. It happens whenever you increase wealth.
A factory making all the pants the US consumes would require around 175,000 workers. There are about 175,000,000 workers in the US. That means the pants factory represents 0.1% of the workforce.
Making pants in the US would increase the basis cost of pants at retail by 65%. That means where you work 1 hour to buy pants, you'd work 1.65 hours. A minimum-wage worker who works 1.8 hours to buy pants now works 3 hours.
That means less purchasing--either fewer pants or fewer other things--which means less shipping and retail, and so jobs are lost. Last time I did the calculations, the estimate was about 50,000 jobs created (assuming we just buy fewer pants), 90,000 lost, net loss 40,000 jobs.
More to the point, again, the theoretical jobs are 0.1% of the workforce. That means the opposite reasoning--that we move pants production to China--would negatively affect 0.1% of the workers. The 99.9% get richer; a bigger portion of the new wealth goes to the top 1%, but most of it spreads among the 99.9%.
Look at the 1990s. Do you live like you did in the 1990s? Are you able to access more luxury at a middle-class job than you could in the 1990s? Even spending on clothes represents less of the median income. Food costs have remained around the same level, while people eat more out-of-home: instead of just food, they pay for food, preparation, and waitstaff, and it costs the same. That's wealth: the same % of your income goes to buying more.
Norway is a different case, as the mentality there differs from the USA and my country, from what I have read. There is is considered "shameful" if a CEO of a company earns 10 times more than the workers
That's actually a red herring. Walmart has 1,500,000 employees, and the CEO makes $6 million. That's $4 per employee per year. Home Depot it's $20 per employee-year. As you get into smaller businesses, the CEO takes a bigger share per-employee.
while in my country, in the last recession, it was relatively common for the salaries of the workers be reduced and some workers fired (with the remaining ones having to do more) on account of the recession, while the boss buys a brand new car.
In a recession, people are purchasing less. Your company pays wages out of revenues--businesses don't print money--and so when there is less purchasing, there are layoffs. The business doesn't need you if your job is to make 1,000 cars each year and people are purchasing 50,000 fewer cars: 50 workers are suddenly unnecessary. The business can't afford to pay you if they're not drawing revenue by selling profit: 50 workers need to be let go.
You are obviously not listening or even think out of the box as many others do.
I'm listening; you're just wrong.
You keep using the same reasoning which is the base part of learning
Reasoning is spelled with letters, like "R". Learning starts with an "L".
You keep telling me I can't fly, but I put one foot in front of the other. Isn't that flying?
No, it's walking, just like reasoning is reasoning and learning is learning.
Learning is specifically the encoding of new knowledge so that it is retained and doesn't have to be reasoned out or observed again. It has to be recallable as its own thing or it isn't learned. Reasoning something out isn't knowing it, and reasoning it out repeatedly because you haven't learned the new fact isn't having learned it--although the repetition does lead to learning.
yes, we can learn from logical conclusion without going through a scenario or repetitions.
You're not learning; you're applying previous knowledge.
If I say: 3x^2 + 2x = 164, solve for x, what do you do? You apply your knowledge of algebra to obtain the value of x.
What if you don't know algebra?
How did you get to know algebra?
You got to know algebra by repetition learning. You can't just read a book on algebra and have it memorized; you need to perform repetitive tasks.
Logic is a part of second-hand experience because we could use knowledge proven by others to make a conclusion; thus it is another type of learning.
That's not learning. Obtaining a result by following a process is doing. You haven't learned until you can follow that process without using the outside instruction sheet.
Intuiting the process yourself also isn't learning. You're using a tool (prior knowledge--you've learned to analyze problems and apply other knowledge in the analysis so as to structure a solution). Learning occurs when you no longer need to re-derive that process from logical analysis, but instead can simply recall this new information without the reasoning which explains why it works as such.
You're trying to call things learning when they're not learning. It's like saying a cat has fur, thus is a type of dog.
Let's demonstrate.
Houses are built by assembling pieces of material. This requires material and tools.
You're suggesting that a person doesn't need to actually assemble the material: people already have a house when they have a hammer, nails, and wood. If your house burns down, you still have a place to stay, because you can assemble wood into a house.
That obviously doesn't work: the house doesn't shield you from rain or retain heat until you've assembled it.
So how does this apply to learning?
We all know that things move when struck with sufficient force. We've seen baseball players play baseball, so we're aware of that. We have a lot of experience with the general idea of kicking or throwing things, so it makes sense.
If I were to throw you a baseball, your first time holding a bat, you might hit it. You might miss.
By repeatedly swinging the bat at balls, you cause the neurons in your arm, spine, and brain to adjust. Certain impulses, when summed together, suggest that certain actions will create a certain outcome. You assess that outcome, feed back the data, and your brain adjusts how it weights those impulses. Your nerves physically change their structure to improve on the outcome of swinging a bat.
That's learning.
So how did you know to swing the bat?
Well, when you were first born, your brain didn't know anything about how striking an object with a force made it move. As a small child, you saw people do things. You eventually threw things across the room. You kicked and smacked blocks, and they tumbled and fell.
From that repetition, you learned about momentum, force, gravity, the movement of objects through space when struck or thrown.
When propositioned with two rigid objects and an interaction between them, you used that already learned knowledge to drive the ball away. You didn't learn something new by looking at it; you already had that knowledge. You used a tool: prior knowledge.
As you repeated the action, your brain learned to do it better, more consistently, with greater and more-controllable outcomes.
That is, by definition, learning. Learning is not assembling what you already know into a new form--that's called "creativity" or "engineering". Learning is the retention of new knowledge.
Retention only comes with repetition. Even what little you can remember from a single experience is stored by referencing a lot of similar things you've experienced in the past and stringing them together to roughly describe what this new thing is.
Humans don't learn using logic; they apply logic to assess. Logic is a tool learned by repetition.
Logic also does not apply to the unknown: if I explain to you the R-Star target and the movement of equities, you can't tell me what should or shouldn't happen to the economy. It's completely-logical, but you don't have prior knowledge to assess it.
Even then, when you get down to it, you're applying an array of tools that you built through repetition of experience. You're quite slow at getting a result someone else can achieve in seconds because they have learned the immediate skill through repetition and you are trying to synthesize advanced knowledge through more-fundamental tools. You also won't likely remember much of anything complex without a lot of repetition.
Again: most "new" scenarios are actually combinations of old scenarios, which you've probably learned to deal with through repetition. You also learned the skill of analyzing by analogical thinking, taking those scenarios apart and assembling them into the current scenario--quickly--to respond as if the current scenario is familiar instead of novel.
When you say humans can learn by using logic, you're stating something such as that humans can learn to read a Chess board by having played Go for years. The human has learned to visualize and project moves through repetition of strategies to abstract and simplify those projections; they're applying that learning to a new topic (Chess).
It's not learning; it's application of already-learned knowledge. That already-learned knowledge was learned by repetition.
You're talking about brand. I'm talking about features. How do you compare computers where once has a better processor, another more RAM, a third a better GPU, etc. While a well informed consumer, with a well defined use case, may be able to force-rank them, it's hard.
This is true; and it tends to depend on marginal utility.
Let's say a high-power PC isn't worth much to you. You want to brows the Internet and get on Facebook. What you want is a $200 Chromebook--or a $150 refurbished one. Find the cheapest thing you can get. That's why they're out there. It's why eMachines existed for a while.
If you're building a high-end gaming PC, you're going to research components and build your own. Your marginal utility is higher for those things--you're willing to shell out money to buy a luxury item--so you'll be less-sensitive to price. Me, I game on a machine with 32GB DDR4, an ASUS Tuf AM4 motherboard, and a Ryzen 5 2400G with Vega11 graphics on the chip. All in all I spent about $450.
If you're quite rich or some sort of enthusiast, you'll get that massively-expensive Threadripper.
This is why we had OnePlus vs. Samsung vs. LG, with OnePlus making $350 mid-high-end phones (the OnePlus One). Now the big phones are $800 and the OnePlus is $550; the iPhone is $1,000! Much of the lower-end market is actually in second-hand phones (and cars), too, even if competition does hold the prices down.
Even then, the NOPs of these companies...Apple is 20%. Microsoft is 20%. It's high, but it's not like they could sell you that phone for $400 and remain profitable.
I would argue CITs are overhead, not COGS
CIT is on net profits. If your goods and services cost $500 per each and your business costs a million dollars to run, well, so what? If you business delivers 50,000 units per year, then your overhead cost is $20 per unit, making your total operating cost per unit goods and services $520. If you charge $550, your net profit is $30 per each, and your gross profit is $50 per each.
That's a net operating profit of 5.8%. My argument was essentially that if you raise the CIT by 10%, you're taking away another $3 for each unit goods and services that company produces. The company sees what you might call a 0.58% increase in the overall cost, and would have to raise the price to about $553.25 to retain the same NOP.
A 10% tax increase does not mean a $550 product is now a $605 product.
I think the idea of scaling CIT on NOP margins is new (and find it pretty interesting).
Yeah, that one's new.
It seems to heavily incentivize C-suite cash bonuses at Apple as compared to giving them options, and incentivize Walmart C-suite people to stock options. It seems like it would heavily reward Apple playing games with their structure, like have Apple stores spin off and have both Apple and (the new) Apple Stores LLC make ~9.5% NOP (very close to your target).
Executive cash compensation, under current law, ceases to be deductible above some amount.
People are obsessed with absolute numbers, so the cap is like $1M; and other people are obsessed with comparing an employee (poorest or median) to the CEO, so want the cap to be 35x or 150x.
Want to know a secret?
Walmart has 1,500,000 employees, and their CEO gets $6,000,000 of cash comp. That's $4 per employee per year.
Yeah, Walmart's CEO doesn't really get paid much. Some rich CEOs of smaller businesses--Sinclair, for example--get $120 per employee per year. Home Depot is like $20. For many small businesses, the CEO is compensated about 1-1.5x as much as employees, but gets thousands of dollars per employee, if not tens of thousands.
I've basically encoded into my Articles of Organization for my business that my own salary cap is 2x GNI/C or 1/300 GNI/C per employee--whichever is bigger. The 1/300 figure kicks in at 600 employe
Yes. You said a human doesn't have to run through a scenario repeatedly to learn it; you seem to think each scenario is unique, and not comparable to different scenarios already experienced repeatably--i.e. that most "new" scenarios are actually old scenarios.
Do you know why you can't retain fluency in language just by a study of grammar and vocabulary?
You can't just memorize words. I remember words--even English words--because every concept I want to convey links to thousands of phrases I've heard, said, or otherwise processed in my life. When I speak or write, I'm recalling events, songs, simple quotes, or even people via theory of mind (copies of other people's behavior that simulates them inside your head).
Everything anyone says is an experience I've had millions of times already, even if the phrase and context are completely novel.
The same is true of pretty much everything. Hit something totally-foreign and you stop hard: no prior experience. Learn a new programming language and you're just identifying how different parts are like other programming languages.
A human doesn't need to play through the scenario 10,000,000 times, humans learn in ways besides just reinforced repetition
Humans learn about things by experience. You have a lot of information you've learned through repetition--like gravity and pain. I stepped on a bee once because I'd gotten stung earlier and wanted to confirm that stepping on a bee caused pain; I now know that some animals can sting and don't need to mess with them to figure out they'll inflict pain. I learned that hornets and scorpions sting by repeatedly being stung by bees.
I can work out how things work without doing them because I can simulate them inside my mind. I don't need to physically attempt something to engage in repetition learning because I've already learned parts of the machine through repetition, and can reassemble a new machine internally and examine the outcome.
That was actually their second point, to which I simply didn't respond. Notice they made an economic statement and an environmental one.
To the environmental point, our trade treaties to establish free and open trade often contain some standards. Right now, when we send batteries to Mexico for recycling, they handle them horribly and flood lead into the environment. An updated trade treaty should place no tariffs while requiring environmental controls around stuff like that.
Many low-development economies can't actually implement the industrial controls necessary. China and Mexico can--as a result of becoming wealthy through trade. Meanwhile some non-industrial nations with low economic development are razing old-growth forests, planting crops, exhausting the land, and cutting down more forests--extreme damage highly-industrialized societies don't inflict because our agricultural practices are well-advanced.
Overfertilization actually slows plant growth, by the way, because the fertilizer salts draw water out of the roots. Organic fertilizers such as mulch and manure improve the soil structure when folded in, and can run off when top-dressed heavily; although all that cow shit has to go somewhere, but maybe not right next to a river.
So they've figured out that getting X to happen is rewarding, but hard because X happens if you do something after W happens, which occurs if you do something after V happens, etc..
First, most products are not priced based on cost, but on the market power of the sellers. Most goods compete on non-price attributes.
Products are priced based on cost. Market power allows for higher profit margins.
A commodity product will have an extremely-low barrier to entry. If you have $1M of sales per year in the whole market and you need $0.5M to be viable, a new competitor needs to capture 50% of the market. If there are $1,000M of sales per year in the whole market, that new competitor only needs to capture 0.05% of the market.
A product becomes commodity as its cost falls. It costs so much that, with a 0% profit margin, only 1% of your population can afford it? Luxury, small market. Someone figures out how to make it cheap enough for 40% of your population to afford it? They can price it for 40% to afford it, take your customers, and also make enormous profits at slimmer margins that you were getting.
When I talk abstractly about the price of goods, I talk about the lowest-priced equivalent good. That means I'm ignoring the inferior good (the $5 shirts that fall apart in three washes) and the boutique good (the $15 shirts priced at $55 because the tag says "Old Navy"). You want a quality good (like a $55 Old Navy shirt), you only have to pay for that low-cost equivalent good (the $15 lower-prestige brand shirt, but not the $5 budget brand).
Most goods compete on non-price attributes.
Most brands compete on non-price attributes. This is why I talk about the lowest-price equivalent good: stop buying Sony Vaio when you can pay 70% as much for an identical Dell or HP.
Tariffs raise the costs of goods sold, which means that they increase the costs to sell products. Taxes on profits don't.
Correct. If a good costs $50 to produce--including all of your business costs--and you sell it for $60, you pay taxes on $10. that's a 20% net operating profit margin. Raising taxes by 10% marginal only raises them on that 20%, so you've perhaps raised the price of the good by a mere 2%.
There are other reasons high corporate income taxes are bad; that, of course, requires a definition of what "high" is. Is it 50%? 80%? 10%? People miss this part of the argument.
I actually favored a 25% CIT, of a sort. More-specifically, I favored a net operating profit of 8% being considered "fair", and a sigmoid selecting a CIT based on your corporate net operating profit. Walmart has a 3% NOP, and landed on something like 16% CIT; Apple has a 20% NOP, and would be paying 48% CIT in my original proposal. Walmart's keeping 3 cent on every dollar, the rest going into investment and wages and the like; Apple is keeping TWENTY cents on every consumer dollar, what the hell?
I invented an entirely-new branch of policy economics. Some economists have reviewed them; they're now getting funding and assembling a panel to do some serious modeling and research. Apparently I did something.
only the rich win from open trade and being able to screw the local workers.
That's not true. Open trade increases the production possibilities frontier.
Let's say you can produce 5 tonnes of potato or 3 tonnes of grain with the same labor-hours. Another country can produce 3 tonnes of potato or 5 tonnes of grain with the same labor-hours. Your labor-hours might be 40 and theirs 50, but that doesn't matter.
If you produce 10 tonnes of potato and they produce 10 tonnes of grain, you can trade, and each of you can have 5 tonnes of potato and 5 tonnes of grain while investing the same amount as you would have to get 8 tonnes in total of both. That's an extra 2 tonnes of food for the same labor.
Exchange rates are sort of an arbitration between these things: those people over there actually put in more labor-hours to make grain than we do, but they sacrifice even more of their labor if they make potato. Their ability to produce and buy is lower, so their full-time working hours have less purchasing power. If we work 40 hours and they work 50 hours in this example, it's like we make $25/hr and they make $20/hr, hence the exchange rate.
So how does this impact the average buyer?
Let's say we opened a factory making pants at the same quality level as Chinese import pants (men and boys's cotton pants and trousers). To achieve a higher quality costs additional labor investment; people try to argue the American-made pants would be higher-quality, and pretend that it wouldn't be more-expensive than making them at the same quality as the displaced Chinese import, so I've learned to short-circuit that argument.
Running through about 4 pages of math, you eventually come up with pants increasing in price by 1.6x. That factors in the cost of shipping--importing a 40-foot container from China with 20,000 pairs of pants costs $1,300, or 6.5 cents per pair--as well as labor.
The capacity to purchase falls. The poorest experience the greatest new burdens, unable to buy more; the middle-class also face these higher prices, of course, and can handle it better than the poor. Middle-classers sacrifice luxuries, while the poor sacrifice necessities.
You create around 50,000 factory jobs to keep up with the demand for American-made pants. You lose shipping and retail jobs--around 90,000 of them, giving a net loss of 40,000 American jobs.
So Americans are now poor and unemployed.
The part most people stumble over is structural change: every increase in wealth requires new technology or new trade. These wealth increases mean there's more per person; yet it also means we can get more of something with fewer workers making that thing. That means layoffs, it mean changes in where money is flowing, and it often means an entire town's economy collapses and never recovers.
In other words: the 99.9% are richer. The 99.9% include the top 1% and much of the bottom 1%. The 0.1% are displaced workers who were sacrificed so the rest of us can be richer.
Circle back, though: didn't I say we're all richer?
There's more available per person. More purchasing power per person. That means, including the displaced workers, you might divide our total purchasing power and find that there's $1,000 more per person. Let's call it 10% richer: we went from $100,000 per person to $101,000 (yes, it's actually about $60,000 GNI/C; work with me here).
Well, why can't we all be 9% richer?
The whole of the country can chip in 10% of what we have, and then pay out a flat benefit derived by dividing that among all adults. That's a type of Citizen's Dividend, a demogrant like a Universal Basic Income but not trying to pay e.g. enough to cover basic needs. It's opportunistic.
More income? 10% is more money. Less income? 10% is less. 10% of $101k is $10,100, so if $101k is your GNI/C and 100% of that is exposed to the tax (it's not--it'd be corporate profits and per
No, the voting machine industry. They're all terrible. It's so bad people are calling for paper ballots--computer science people, not infosec people, because infosec people would look at paper ballots and cringe...oh, wait, no, Bruce Schneier has also fallen for that noise.
Let's be honest here: paper ballots are data packets. You have a distributed network in which a few trusted individuals are in possession of the packets at any time. Start from the sender (polling center), put the data packet on a truck (router) operated by a few trusted individuals (ISP employees) who promise not to clone seals (checksum) and tamper with the data (ballots). It looks like the Internet, but slow.
We need authentication before the packets leave the polling center. With voting, we need universal verification: the ballots must be counted while in view, accounted for, and then signed by a mathematically-derived number we can regenerate by counting exactly-identical ballots. The number must be observed by anyone present--if you want to just wander into the polling center and watch, you are the security control.
For electronic voting machines in particular, we need universal verification that the software image is unchanged from a published image at the moment polling begins. That only lets you know the state of ballots until they're removed from the machine, so the machines need to produce proof of the ballot set before tampering is possible.
A lot of people focus on usability issues, counting time, and miscounting paper ballots. These are all technical; the long view only really involves two issues.
First, direct-recording electronic voting machines are the future. Surprisingly-few people really care about paper ballots, and paper audit trails have been shown manipulable (paper isn't an audit trail anyway: you can print a false audit trail). We're going to have DRE voting machines in the next generation, and it's never going back.
Second, paper ranked ballots are complex and difficult to resolve to real, stable proof. I've been able to alter votes and produce similar statistics for number of times each candidate appeared in each position, pairwise race results (they'll be the same if you rotate vote order, allowing selection of a winning candidate), and a few other outcomes. I haven't been able to make them match simultaneously, and haven't proven you can't. Mathematically, the amount of information increases exponentially with the candidate pool.
In other words: certain ballots are going to need ballot data format and sorting rules plus a strong hash algorithm (SHA-512) and statistics. While modifying the statistics involves tweaking the ballots in valid ways, finding a hash collision involves tweaking data: any collisions could, conceivably, involve inaccurate data. For a given number of ballots and candidates, the number of variations is limited; it's further limited when generating the same statistics.
To carry this out, you need to enter the ballots into a computer.
To validate the ballots, you need to re-enter exactly the same ballots.
There's no hope of integrity guarantees and certified ballots leaving the polling center--not in any way verifiable by anyone but the election judges themselves--without a way to maintain integrity of a computer system unless we use voting rules like First Past The Post Plurality or Instant Runoff Voting, in which case we can hijack the election by nominating or retiring candidates or by gerrymandering the district.
Diebold made ATMs. Then they made voting machines. A future of Diebold-descended voting machines is a nightmare.
No, I'm saying that the SAME fab plant to produce the SAME thing will be cheaper at a point further in the future. The same fab plant and process in 2010 is cheaper than it was in 2000.
We're finding that repeating the 2000 to 2010 step takes until 2025, but we're trying to do it in 2020. The 2010 process had similar costs in 2010 to the 2000 process in 2000--and would have cost a whole hell of a lot more to do in 2000. Well, the 2025 process has similar costs in 2025 to the process we used in 2010--and we're doing it in 2020, which means it's not as technologically-mature and so is more-expensive than you would predict.
You know how flat-panel displays get cheaper to make over time--better yields and such? Imagine you start buying the bigger TVs while they're still only making 50% yield, so they cost $1,000. When they're making 90% yield, they cost $560. The last time you upgraded to the bigger TVs after 5 years, it only cost you $560, and now you're complaining these new-generation TVs cost $1,000. In 2 more years, those same TVs will only cost $400 due to having like 98% manufacturing yield.
Technology ("science of craft", from Greek , techne, "art, skill, cunning of hand"; and -, -logia) is the collection of techniques, skills, methods, and processes used in the production of goods or services or in the accomplishment of objectives, such as scientific investigation.
In economics, we call the advancement of technology (and its measurable effects on productivity) "technical progress".
An assembly line is technology. So is cellular manufacture. These are techniques, not tools--although a tool is a type of technique.
Even better: "You're still getting more density but it costs more and takes longer."
That's a nonsense statement. With new technology, you learn to do things cheaper--with less human labor involved in total. They're saying the technology isn't improving as quickly.
This technology that "costs more and takes longer" will be cheaper, faster, and better than last-generation's new technology when next-generation's new technology is standard. "costs more and takes longer" means we're being impatient and greedy--we're making opportunity cost trade-offs, and that's okay, but let's be honest about what we're doing.
I've wanted a generic coprocessor architecture for a few months now. Imagine if you could stick a chip on your board and it could access the on-board video port (DVI, HDMI), a range of RAM exposed as RAM (it requests address and data), and so forth. Instead of on-CPU graphics, you have a chip that provides that. The same chip can provide things like encryption, encoding, and artificial neural networks.
These things aren't extended CPU instructions as with an FPU. They're actual separate microcomputers. An ANN chip has a completely-different architecture with memory local to the neuron's logic unit instead of in a memory bank. A GPU runs its own program against a memory space.
You don't need a huge riser and ports exposed on the card's edge. You can just plug into the board, get power and an addressing bus, and get appropriate output ports like display and DMA. You can provide multiple functions on one chip. Just make it a chip socket and make it standard.
This works for things that have to run a process on input and output, or on large bulk data. It doesn't work for things that are just extended CPU instructions, like SIMD. Transfer back and forth between processing units and the hop through the memory controller creates too much latency.
You can use a four-wire (RX,TX) LVDS memory bus, too: instead of 64 data lines and 32 addressing lines (1TB physical addressing), you can use two TX and two RX and use a packet protocol. Modern GPUs use 128-byte cache lines (seriously!). You can specify a protocol that sets memory unit size, offset, and then issues READ requests. If you want, your memory controller (on the expansion chip) could send an instruction packet {SET SIZE 512}, {READ 390625}, {READ 390626},.... The return packet on RX would be the data. CPU's memory controller would carry out the memory read and stream the data to the RX pins.
The memory unit size is just a number of bytes. No trading off number of pins for maximum addressable RAM. There are odd reasons we use parallel buses for RAM, and it's not because parallel is faster; it's because building all of that stuff into DRAM is expensive and power-hungry. Since a coprocessor goes through a memory controller on a CPU, it's cheap there. Latency isn't as much of an issue as sheer bandwidth in this application.
Imagine it. Just pop a graphics chip on your motherboard. 12V supply that can feed 100W. If you need bigger than that, then you buy a 16-lane PCI-Express card.
You use a rock to crush up bits of sticks so they're easier to ignite as tinder. One day, you realize that striking in a different manner better separates the fibers, allowing you to produce 50% more tinder in the same time with the same tools.
That's technology. You've just invented a new, more-efficient method of manufacturing tinder from sticks using the same tools. You can make the same tinder with less labor and apply other labor to do other things like hunt more meat. Your society can now enjoy more meat. Arbitrate between these two activities and you can have more tinder and more meat, and so you can have more cooked meat per person, all at the same cost.
A Citizen's Dividend fixes the economy where there's high unemployment pretty damned quick. Don't know about SF itself; I know at the Federal level it's huge, and at the State level even an incredibly-weak policy would work for Maryland.
SF passing a gross receipts tax is bad juju, though. That is the worst kind of economics failure.
Imagine a gross receipts tax without the target on "you have too much revenue"--or just imagine that your back-end businesses are big. Your supply chain is affected.
With a 1% gross receipts tax going through a supply chain 14 firms deep, you're looking at 14.9%. That is: a $100 product becomes a $114.90 product. This is because the same productive action is taxed again and again: you pay a worker $20 to do something, then that product hops through 14 steps of supply and is taxed at 1% again and again each time. The revenue collected to cover the tax is also taxed. Eventually it's $23.
Now what if you consolidate? Bring together your vertical. You're a big market player, so you have control of several levels of the supply chain. Get it down to 8.
Now you're only facing an 8.29% tax. While those small business suckers over there have got themselves a $114.90 product, you make the same thing at exactly the same efficiency and it only costs you $108.29. You can undercut their price by 5.75% and still have a larger profit margin than they do--even though you're no more efficient at it and it costs you exactly the same labor and other costs.
That's what a gross tax does: it ensures Andrew Carnegie has a massive tax advantage and nobody can compete with the big businesses.
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Wouldn't even be a Snowden moment. If it's not encrypted on your end, it's not E2E. That means you have universal verifiability: anyone can look into it, and nobody can stop them from telling the world what they find.
Sometimes, they are. We know this because sometimes someone takes the software apart with reverse-engineering tools, then tells everyone.
That kind of universal verifiability is the basis of integrity. I've been pushing it for voting. Current electronic voting machines use secret software reviewed by some people under NDA and loaded on the machines before the election, so you can't verify any of it. For an electronic voting machine to be usable during an election, you need to publish the software image, and then prove that image is the image loaded at the beginning of polling--achievable, but brutally-stringent on exact procedures for opening and closing the polling day.
I've suggested the same about things like Single Transferable Vote and other voting rules: the state must publish the full ballot sets (which must be traceable to polling centers or marked as non-traceable mail-in absentee ballots) and the algorithm used to compute the results.
It's not that everyone has the tools and knowledge to verify the election; it's that we've made it impossible to get rid of the kid pointing out that the Emperor has no clothes. He won't stop telling everyone.
How long do you think we could hide code in WhatsApp to parallel-encrypt with another public key and send to another server?
How long could we hide code that downloads additional code and adds it to the application?
How would we keep people from dumping the memory space to find out what exactly that additional code does?
How quickly will Google start screaming that Facebook is doing something shady? What about RMS? Peter Gutmann?
It's the principle of the thing and how it looks
Here's a principle for you: some people can't eat.
I mean if one guy got a million, but 1000 people lost $100, it is a net gain on average, but the 1000 people would rather the one guy lost a million and they all got $100
In practice, that guy can get 90% of a million and everyone else can get another $100, while those who lost out get a large support package. Rich is still getting richer, and everyone else is also doing well.
Which is probably something like 200 times the salary of the average employee
So, if the $6M Walmart CEO gives his salaries to their employees, they get $4 more per year.
I make $80k. If I give my salary to my employees, they get $40,000 more per year.
"200 times the salary of the average employee" is a red herring: it's completely-meaningless for any practical purpose. You can claim a type of superfood has 200x the calories needed for the average person to eat...ignoring that it takes 5,000x the labor to produce, so it's unsustainable and can't feed the hungry.
"the times are bad, I have to let some of you go and the rest will get reduced salary, we have to tighten our belts to survive the recession. Oh and look at my shiny new Tesla" makes people hate the CEO and company owners in general, developing into an "us vs them" mentality that the government gladly exploits.
It does. It's a dialogue we must correct by educating people, as we can't solve problems if we invest our time in things that don't matter.
When there's a recession, people buy less. We need 1,000 of you to make the 50,000-unit demand; but now people are only buying 40,000 units and 200 of these workers are doing nothing. We can either charge 25% more per unit (further driving down purchasing, and making the customers more-poor) or we can eliminate 20% of the workforce. Downsizing the workforce impacts 200 workers (and, by extension, those from whom they buy things), while raising prices impacts 10,000 customers (and, by extension, those from whom they purchase using the money the new price claws away).
Meanwhile the CEO's new Tesla is still a few pennies per worker spread across the year.
The correct solution is social insurances and economic development programs.
Depends on how you count it, in some cases people give up hope on ever finding a job and become alcoholics. Since they are not registered as looking for a job, the government does not count them as "unemployed".
Those people move from U3 to U4. U4 is strongly-correlated with U3.
As robots (and workers in foreign countries) are replacing less skilled local workers, those workers have nowhere to go. So, a factory with robots may need more engineers to program and maintain those robots, but the people who assembled the product by hand previously may not e able to do it.
Actually, robots tend to reduce the number of skilled workers as well. You turn 1,000 workers into 10 engineers and 190 robot operators, with 800 workers shaved off the top. As the economy shifts and grows, you'll create 800 more jobs.
While many people envision burger-flippers being replaced by burger-flipping robots, that's actually hard: a machine to flip burgers and make fries still needs an employee loading the hopper. Modern grease fryers have timers, and an employee incidentally dumps a bag of fries into the basket when appropriate, then responds to the alarm and dumps the basket. The investment is about 20 seconds of time per batch, and the employee is basically free to do other things. A grill requires a person tending it continuously, so does a bit better; but burgers get sold so fast that you'd invest most of the employee's time feeding the burger hopper, cleaning it (it's harder to clean than just a grill surface), and so forth. Bad deal.
Meanwhile we've replaced skilled network technicians with IT monkeys. We need a few engineers; configuring our networking hardware merely requires using the simple, easy interfaces which some engineers have developed.
In other words: many classes of jobs--such as in IT--have replaced 1,000 skilled engineers with 200 skilled engineers and 800 unskilled workers who spent a week training under other unskilled workers. There is no way to gain com
Have you considered that maybe you're wrong?
Let's say I work at a fast food place and sell food. Someone orders a burrito ($2.89), milk shake ($1.93), and nachos ($1.28). I add them up and get $6.10.
You assert that I have learned that a burrito, milk shake, and nachos cost $6.10.
You're wrong.
Three customers later, someone orders a burrito, milk shake, and nachos. I remember this just happened a few minutes ago, but I don't remember how much they cost, together. I must re-compute these things using arithmetic skills I learned long ago through repetition because I haven't learned that burrito + milk shake + nachos = $6.10.
Now say this happens over and over and over. It's a common order.
In a few days, I stop computing that. As soon as you say burrito, milk shake, and nachos, I say $6.10. I've seen that combination two hundred times; it's always $6.10. Now I've learned.
So in conclusion: idiot, you keep describing something that isn't learning, and calling it learning.
Give me an example and I'll tell you what previously-learned implement you're actually using.
It seems that open trade may work for some countries and especially be beneficial to the poor countries.
It's beneficial to rich countries, as well. The point of trade is that it makes both sides wealthier. That's not about dollars; it's about relative efficiencies.
Even if you have an absolute advantage making a good yourself--if it's cheaper for you to make your own clothes, for example--the comparative advantage controls trade.
If you can make 10 tonnes food or 5,000 pants with the same labor (cost) invested and the trading partner can make 6 tonnes food or 4,000 pants, then every pair of pants you make costs you 2 tonnes of food, while every pair of pants they make costs them 1.5 tonnes food. It still makes both of you wealthier to make food and trade food for pants, even though it appears to cost 1.25x as much for them to make pants as it does for you to make pants and thus, without food in the equation, would be cheaper for you to make your own pants.
the way stuff works now, AFAIK, is that factories in, say, the USA get moved to China, workers are now jobless, but the profits go only to the company and its shareholders
That's structural change. It happens whenever you increase wealth.
A factory making all the pants the US consumes would require around 175,000 workers. There are about 175,000,000 workers in the US. That means the pants factory represents 0.1% of the workforce.
Making pants in the US would increase the basis cost of pants at retail by 65%. That means where you work 1 hour to buy pants, you'd work 1.65 hours. A minimum-wage worker who works 1.8 hours to buy pants now works 3 hours.
That means less purchasing--either fewer pants or fewer other things--which means less shipping and retail, and so jobs are lost. Last time I did the calculations, the estimate was about 50,000 jobs created (assuming we just buy fewer pants), 90,000 lost, net loss 40,000 jobs.
More to the point, again, the theoretical jobs are 0.1% of the workforce. That means the opposite reasoning--that we move pants production to China--would negatively affect 0.1% of the workers. The 99.9% get richer; a bigger portion of the new wealth goes to the top 1%, but most of it spreads among the 99.9%.
Look at the 1990s. Do you live like you did in the 1990s? Are you able to access more luxury at a middle-class job than you could in the 1990s? Even spending on clothes represents less of the median income. Food costs have remained around the same level, while people eat more out-of-home: instead of just food, they pay for food, preparation, and waitstaff, and it costs the same. That's wealth: the same % of your income goes to buying more.
Norway is a different case, as the mentality there differs from the USA and my country, from what I have read. There is is considered "shameful" if a CEO of a company earns 10 times more than the workers
That's actually a red herring. Walmart has 1,500,000 employees, and the CEO makes $6 million. That's $4 per employee per year. Home Depot it's $20 per employee-year. As you get into smaller businesses, the CEO takes a bigger share per-employee.
while in my country, in the last recession, it was relatively common for the salaries of the workers be reduced and some workers fired (with the remaining ones having to do more) on account of the recession, while the boss buys a brand new car.
In a recession, people are purchasing less. Your company pays wages out of revenues--businesses don't print money--and so when there is less purchasing, there are layoffs. The business doesn't need you if your job is to make 1,000 cars each year and people are purchasing 50,000 fewer cars: 50 workers are suddenly unnecessary. The business can't afford to pay you if they're not drawing revenue by selling profit: 50 workers need to be let go.
Meanwhile,
You are obviously not listening or even think out of the box as many others do.
I'm listening; you're just wrong.
You keep using the same reasoning which is the base part of learning
Reasoning is spelled with letters, like "R". Learning starts with an "L".
You keep telling me I can't fly, but I put one foot in front of the other. Isn't that flying?
No, it's walking, just like reasoning is reasoning and learning is learning.
Learning is specifically the encoding of new knowledge so that it is retained and doesn't have to be reasoned out or observed again. It has to be recallable as its own thing or it isn't learned. Reasoning something out isn't knowing it, and reasoning it out repeatedly because you haven't learned the new fact isn't having learned it--although the repetition does lead to learning.
It is my fault to attempt to show you a way.
It's your fault for calling a dog a cat.
yes, we can learn from logical conclusion without going through a scenario or repetitions.
You're not learning; you're applying previous knowledge.
If I say: 3x^2 + 2x = 164, solve for x, what do you do? You apply your knowledge of algebra to obtain the value of x.
What if you don't know algebra?
How did you get to know algebra?
You got to know algebra by repetition learning. You can't just read a book on algebra and have it memorized; you need to perform repetitive tasks.
Logic is a part of second-hand experience because we could use knowledge proven by others to make a conclusion; thus it is another type of learning.
That's not learning. Obtaining a result by following a process is doing. You haven't learned until you can follow that process without using the outside instruction sheet.
Intuiting the process yourself also isn't learning. You're using a tool (prior knowledge--you've learned to analyze problems and apply other knowledge in the analysis so as to structure a solution). Learning occurs when you no longer need to re-derive that process from logical analysis, but instead can simply recall this new information without the reasoning which explains why it works as such.
You're trying to call things learning when they're not learning. It's like saying a cat has fur, thus is a type of dog.
Let's demonstrate.
Houses are built by assembling pieces of material. This requires material and tools.
You're suggesting that a person doesn't need to actually assemble the material: people already have a house when they have a hammer, nails, and wood. If your house burns down, you still have a place to stay, because you can assemble wood into a house.
That obviously doesn't work: the house doesn't shield you from rain or retain heat until you've assembled it.
So how does this apply to learning?
We all know that things move when struck with sufficient force. We've seen baseball players play baseball, so we're aware of that. We have a lot of experience with the general idea of kicking or throwing things, so it makes sense.
If I were to throw you a baseball, your first time holding a bat, you might hit it. You might miss.
By repeatedly swinging the bat at balls, you cause the neurons in your arm, spine, and brain to adjust. Certain impulses, when summed together, suggest that certain actions will create a certain outcome. You assess that outcome, feed back the data, and your brain adjusts how it weights those impulses. Your nerves physically change their structure to improve on the outcome of swinging a bat.
That's learning.
So how did you know to swing the bat?
Well, when you were first born, your brain didn't know anything about how striking an object with a force made it move. As a small child, you saw people do things. You eventually threw things across the room. You kicked and smacked blocks, and they tumbled and fell.
From that repetition, you learned about momentum, force, gravity, the movement of objects through space when struck or thrown.
When propositioned with two rigid objects and an interaction between them, you used that already learned knowledge to drive the ball away. You didn't learn something new by looking at it; you already had that knowledge. You used a tool: prior knowledge.
As you repeated the action, your brain learned to do it better, more consistently, with greater and more-controllable outcomes.
That is, by definition, learning. Learning is not assembling what you already know into a new form--that's called "creativity" or "engineering". Learning is the retention of new knowledge.
Retention only comes with repetition. Even what little you can remember from a single experience is stored by referencing a lot of similar things you've experienced in the past and stringing them together to roughly describe what this new thing is.
Humans don't learn using logic; they apply logic to assess. Logic is a tool learned by repetition.
Logic also does not apply to the unknown: if I explain to you the R-Star target and the movement of equities, you can't tell me what should or shouldn't happen to the economy. It's completely-logical, but you don't have prior knowledge to assess it.
Even then, when you get down to it, you're applying an array of tools that you built through repetition of experience. You're quite slow at getting a result someone else can achieve in seconds because they have learned the immediate skill through repetition and you are trying to synthesize advanced knowledge through more-fundamental tools. You also won't likely remember much of anything complex without a lot of repetition.
Again: most "new" scenarios are actually combinations of old scenarios, which you've probably learned to deal with through repetition. You also learned the skill of analyzing by analogical thinking, taking those scenarios apart and assembling them into the current scenario--quickly--to respond as if the current scenario is familiar instead of novel.
When you say humans can learn by using logic, you're stating something such as that humans can learn to read a Chess board by having played Go for years. The human has learned to visualize and project moves through repetition of strategies to abstract and simplify those projections; they're applying that learning to a new topic (Chess).
It's not learning; it's application of already-learned knowledge. That already-learned knowledge was learned by repetition.
You're talking about brand. I'm talking about features. How do you compare computers where once has a better processor, another more RAM, a third a better GPU, etc. While a well informed consumer, with a well defined use case, may be able to force-rank them, it's hard.
This is true; and it tends to depend on marginal utility.
Let's say a high-power PC isn't worth much to you. You want to brows the Internet and get on Facebook. What you want is a $200 Chromebook--or a $150 refurbished one. Find the cheapest thing you can get. That's why they're out there. It's why eMachines existed for a while.
If you're building a high-end gaming PC, you're going to research components and build your own. Your marginal utility is higher for those things--you're willing to shell out money to buy a luxury item--so you'll be less-sensitive to price. Me, I game on a machine with 32GB DDR4, an ASUS Tuf AM4 motherboard, and a Ryzen 5 2400G with Vega11 graphics on the chip. All in all I spent about $450.
If you're quite rich or some sort of enthusiast, you'll get that massively-expensive Threadripper.
This is why we had OnePlus vs. Samsung vs. LG, with OnePlus making $350 mid-high-end phones (the OnePlus One). Now the big phones are $800 and the OnePlus is $550; the iPhone is $1,000! Much of the lower-end market is actually in second-hand phones (and cars), too, even if competition does hold the prices down.
Even then, the NOPs of these companies...Apple is 20%. Microsoft is 20%. It's high, but it's not like they could sell you that phone for $400 and remain profitable.
I would argue CITs are overhead, not COGS
CIT is on net profits. If your goods and services cost $500 per each and your business costs a million dollars to run, well, so what? If you business delivers 50,000 units per year, then your overhead cost is $20 per unit, making your total operating cost per unit goods and services $520. If you charge $550, your net profit is $30 per each, and your gross profit is $50 per each.
That's a net operating profit of 5.8%. My argument was essentially that if you raise the CIT by 10%, you're taking away another $3 for each unit goods and services that company produces. The company sees what you might call a 0.58% increase in the overall cost, and would have to raise the price to about $553.25 to retain the same NOP.
A 10% tax increase does not mean a $550 product is now a $605 product.
I think the idea of scaling CIT on NOP margins is new (and find it pretty interesting).
Yeah, that one's new.
It seems to heavily incentivize C-suite cash bonuses at Apple as compared to giving them options, and incentivize Walmart C-suite people to stock options. It seems like it would heavily reward Apple playing games with their structure, like have Apple stores spin off and have both Apple and (the new) Apple Stores LLC make ~9.5% NOP (very close to your target).
Executive cash compensation, under current law, ceases to be deductible above some amount.
People are obsessed with absolute numbers, so the cap is like $1M; and other people are obsessed with comparing an employee (poorest or median) to the CEO, so want the cap to be 35x or 150x.
Want to know a secret?
Walmart has 1,500,000 employees, and their CEO gets $6,000,000 of cash comp. That's $4 per employee per year.
Yeah, Walmart's CEO doesn't really get paid much. Some rich CEOs of smaller businesses--Sinclair, for example--get $120 per employee per year. Home Depot is like $20. For many small businesses, the CEO is compensated about 1-1.5x as much as employees, but gets thousands of dollars per employee, if not tens of thousands.
I've basically encoded into my Articles of Organization for my business that my own salary cap is 2x GNI/C or 1/300 GNI/C per employee--whichever is bigger. The 1/300 figure kicks in at 600 employe
Yes. You said a human doesn't have to run through a scenario repeatedly to learn it; you seem to think each scenario is unique, and not comparable to different scenarios already experienced repeatably--i.e. that most "new" scenarios are actually old scenarios.
Do you know why you can't retain fluency in language just by a study of grammar and vocabulary?
You can't just memorize words. I remember words--even English words--because every concept I want to convey links to thousands of phrases I've heard, said, or otherwise processed in my life. When I speak or write, I'm recalling events, songs, simple quotes, or even people via theory of mind (copies of other people's behavior that simulates them inside your head).
Everything anyone says is an experience I've had millions of times already, even if the phrase and context are completely novel.
The same is true of pretty much everything. Hit something totally-foreign and you stop hard: no prior experience. Learn a new programming language and you're just identifying how different parts are like other programming languages.
A human doesn't need to play through the scenario 10,000,000 times, humans learn in ways besides just reinforced repetition
Humans learn about things by experience. You have a lot of information you've learned through repetition--like gravity and pain. I stepped on a bee once because I'd gotten stung earlier and wanted to confirm that stepping on a bee caused pain; I now know that some animals can sting and don't need to mess with them to figure out they'll inflict pain. I learned that hornets and scorpions sting by repeatedly being stung by bees.
I can work out how things work without doing them because I can simulate them inside my mind. I don't need to physically attempt something to engage in repetition learning because I've already learned parts of the machine through repetition, and can reassemble a new machine internally and examine the outcome.
That was actually their second point, to which I simply didn't respond. Notice they made an economic statement and an environmental one.
To the environmental point, our trade treaties to establish free and open trade often contain some standards. Right now, when we send batteries to Mexico for recycling, they handle them horribly and flood lead into the environment. An updated trade treaty should place no tariffs while requiring environmental controls around stuff like that.
Many low-development economies can't actually implement the industrial controls necessary. China and Mexico can--as a result of becoming wealthy through trade. Meanwhile some non-industrial nations with low economic development are razing old-growth forests, planting crops, exhausting the land, and cutting down more forests--extreme damage highly-industrialized societies don't inflict because our agricultural practices are well-advanced.
Overfertilization actually slows plant growth, by the way, because the fertilizer salts draw water out of the roots. Organic fertilizers such as mulch and manure improve the soil structure when folded in, and can run off when top-dressed heavily; although all that cow shit has to go somewhere, but maybe not right next to a river.
So they've figured out that getting X to happen is rewarding, but hard because X happens if you do something after W happens, which occurs if you do something after V happens, etc..
First, most products are not priced based on cost, but on the market power of the sellers. Most goods compete on non-price attributes.
Products are priced based on cost. Market power allows for higher profit margins.
A commodity product will have an extremely-low barrier to entry. If you have $1M of sales per year in the whole market and you need $0.5M to be viable, a new competitor needs to capture 50% of the market. If there are $1,000M of sales per year in the whole market, that new competitor only needs to capture 0.05% of the market.
A product becomes commodity as its cost falls. It costs so much that, with a 0% profit margin, only 1% of your population can afford it? Luxury, small market. Someone figures out how to make it cheap enough for 40% of your population to afford it? They can price it for 40% to afford it, take your customers, and also make enormous profits at slimmer margins that you were getting.
When I talk abstractly about the price of goods, I talk about the lowest-priced equivalent good. That means I'm ignoring the inferior good (the $5 shirts that fall apart in three washes) and the boutique good (the $15 shirts priced at $55 because the tag says "Old Navy"). You want a quality good (like a $55 Old Navy shirt), you only have to pay for that low-cost equivalent good (the $15 lower-prestige brand shirt, but not the $5 budget brand).
Most goods compete on non-price attributes.
Most brands compete on non-price attributes. This is why I talk about the lowest-price equivalent good: stop buying Sony Vaio when you can pay 70% as much for an identical Dell or HP.
Tariffs raise the costs of goods sold, which means that they increase the costs to sell products. Taxes on profits don't.
Correct. If a good costs $50 to produce--including all of your business costs--and you sell it for $60, you pay taxes on $10. that's a 20% net operating profit margin. Raising taxes by 10% marginal only raises them on that 20%, so you've perhaps raised the price of the good by a mere 2%.
There are other reasons high corporate income taxes are bad; that, of course, requires a definition of what "high" is. Is it 50%? 80%? 10%? People miss this part of the argument.
I actually favored a 25% CIT, of a sort. More-specifically, I favored a net operating profit of 8% being considered "fair", and a sigmoid selecting a CIT based on your corporate net operating profit. Walmart has a 3% NOP, and landed on something like 16% CIT; Apple has a 20% NOP, and would be paying 48% CIT in my original proposal. Walmart's keeping 3 cent on every dollar, the rest going into investment and wages and the like; Apple is keeping TWENTY cents on every consumer dollar, what the hell?
I invented an entirely-new branch of policy economics. Some economists have reviewed them; they're now getting funding and assembling a panel to do some serious modeling and research. Apparently I did something.
only the rich win from open trade and being able to screw the local workers.
That's not true. Open trade increases the production possibilities frontier.
Let's say you can produce 5 tonnes of potato or 3 tonnes of grain with the same labor-hours. Another country can produce 3 tonnes of potato or 5 tonnes of grain with the same labor-hours. Your labor-hours might be 40 and theirs 50, but that doesn't matter.
If you produce 10 tonnes of potato and they produce 10 tonnes of grain, you can trade, and each of you can have 5 tonnes of potato and 5 tonnes of grain while investing the same amount as you would have to get 8 tonnes in total of both. That's an extra 2 tonnes of food for the same labor.
Exchange rates are sort of an arbitration between these things: those people over there actually put in more labor-hours to make grain than we do, but they sacrifice even more of their labor if they make potato. Their ability to produce and buy is lower, so their full-time working hours have less purchasing power. If we work 40 hours and they work 50 hours in this example, it's like we make $25/hr and they make $20/hr, hence the exchange rate.
So how does this impact the average buyer?
Let's say we opened a factory making pants at the same quality level as Chinese import pants (men and boys's cotton pants and trousers). To achieve a higher quality costs additional labor investment; people try to argue the American-made pants would be higher-quality, and pretend that it wouldn't be more-expensive than making them at the same quality as the displaced Chinese import, so I've learned to short-circuit that argument.
Running through about 4 pages of math, you eventually come up with pants increasing in price by 1.6x. That factors in the cost of shipping--importing a 40-foot container from China with 20,000 pairs of pants costs $1,300, or 6.5 cents per pair--as well as labor.
The capacity to purchase falls. The poorest experience the greatest new burdens, unable to buy more; the middle-class also face these higher prices, of course, and can handle it better than the poor. Middle-classers sacrifice luxuries, while the poor sacrifice necessities.
You create around 50,000 factory jobs to keep up with the demand for American-made pants. You lose shipping and retail jobs--around 90,000 of them, giving a net loss of 40,000 American jobs.
So Americans are now poor and unemployed.
The part most people stumble over is structural change: every increase in wealth requires new technology or new trade. These wealth increases mean there's more per person; yet it also means we can get more of something with fewer workers making that thing. That means layoffs, it mean changes in where money is flowing, and it often means an entire town's economy collapses and never recovers.
In other words: the 99.9% are richer. The 99.9% include the top 1% and much of the bottom 1%. The 0.1% are displaced workers who were sacrificed so the rest of us can be richer.
Circle back, though: didn't I say we're all richer?
There's more available per person. More purchasing power per person. That means, including the displaced workers, you might divide our total purchasing power and find that there's $1,000 more per person. Let's call it 10% richer: we went from $100,000 per person to $101,000 (yes, it's actually about $60,000 GNI/C; work with me here).
Well, why can't we all be 9% richer?
The whole of the country can chip in 10% of what we have, and then pay out a flat benefit derived by dividing that among all adults. That's a type of Citizen's Dividend, a demogrant like a Universal Basic Income but not trying to pay e.g. enough to cover basic needs. It's opportunistic.
More income? 10% is more money. Less income? 10% is less. 10% of $101k is $10,100, so if $101k is your GNI/C and 100% of that is exposed to the tax (it's not--it'd be corporate profits and per
No, the voting machine industry. They're all terrible. It's so bad people are calling for paper ballots--computer science people, not infosec people, because infosec people would look at paper ballots and cringe...oh, wait, no, Bruce Schneier has also fallen for that noise.
Let's be honest here: paper ballots are data packets. You have a distributed network in which a few trusted individuals are in possession of the packets at any time. Start from the sender (polling center), put the data packet on a truck (router) operated by a few trusted individuals (ISP employees) who promise not to clone seals (checksum) and tamper with the data (ballots). It looks like the Internet, but slow.
We need authentication before the packets leave the polling center. With voting, we need universal verification: the ballots must be counted while in view, accounted for, and then signed by a mathematically-derived number we can regenerate by counting exactly-identical ballots. The number must be observed by anyone present--if you want to just wander into the polling center and watch, you are the security control.
For electronic voting machines in particular, we need universal verification that the software image is unchanged from a published image at the moment polling begins. That only lets you know the state of ballots until they're removed from the machine, so the machines need to produce proof of the ballot set before tampering is possible.
A lot of people focus on usability issues, counting time, and miscounting paper ballots. These are all technical; the long view only really involves two issues.
First, direct-recording electronic voting machines are the future. Surprisingly-few people really care about paper ballots, and paper audit trails have been shown manipulable (paper isn't an audit trail anyway: you can print a false audit trail). We're going to have DRE voting machines in the next generation, and it's never going back.
Second, paper ranked ballots are complex and difficult to resolve to real, stable proof. I've been able to alter votes and produce similar statistics for number of times each candidate appeared in each position, pairwise race results (they'll be the same if you rotate vote order, allowing selection of a winning candidate), and a few other outcomes. I haven't been able to make them match simultaneously, and haven't proven you can't. Mathematically, the amount of information increases exponentially with the candidate pool.
In other words: certain ballots are going to need ballot data format and sorting rules plus a strong hash algorithm (SHA-512) and statistics. While modifying the statistics involves tweaking the ballots in valid ways, finding a hash collision involves tweaking data: any collisions could, conceivably, involve inaccurate data. For a given number of ballots and candidates, the number of variations is limited; it's further limited when generating the same statistics.
To carry this out, you need to enter the ballots into a computer.
To validate the ballots, you need to re-enter exactly the same ballots.
There's no hope of integrity guarantees and certified ballots leaving the polling center--not in any way verifiable by anyone but the election judges themselves--without a way to maintain integrity of a computer system unless we use voting rules like First Past The Post Plurality or Instant Runoff Voting, in which case we can hijack the election by nominating or retiring candidates or by gerrymandering the district.
Diebold made ATMs. Then they made voting machines. A future of Diebold-descended voting machines is a nightmare.
Diebold made voting machines.
Everyone else in that industry is just as bad. No threat models, at all. That's why I'm getting into the industry.
No, I'm saying that the SAME fab plant to produce the SAME thing will be cheaper at a point further in the future. The same fab plant and process in 2010 is cheaper than it was in 2000.
We're finding that repeating the 2000 to 2010 step takes until 2025, but we're trying to do it in 2020. The 2010 process had similar costs in 2010 to the 2000 process in 2000--and would have cost a whole hell of a lot more to do in 2000. Well, the 2025 process has similar costs in 2025 to the process we used in 2010--and we're doing it in 2020, which means it's not as technologically-mature and so is more-expensive than you would predict.
You know how flat-panel displays get cheaper to make over time--better yields and such? Imagine you start buying the bigger TVs while they're still only making 50% yield, so they cost $1,000. When they're making 90% yield, they cost $560. The last time you upgraded to the bigger TVs after 5 years, it only cost you $560, and now you're complaining these new-generation TVs cost $1,000. In 2 more years, those same TVs will only cost $400 due to having like 98% manufacturing yield.
That's what they're doing with processors.
Technology ("science of craft", from Greek , techne, "art, skill, cunning of hand"; and -, -logia) is the collection of techniques, skills, methods, and processes used in the production of goods or services or in the accomplishment of objectives, such as scientific investigation.
In economics, we call the advancement of technology (and its measurable effects on productivity) "technical progress".
An assembly line is technology. So is cellular manufacture. These are techniques, not tools--although a tool is a type of technique.
Even better: "You're still getting more density but it costs more and takes longer."
That's a nonsense statement. With new technology, you learn to do things cheaper--with less human labor involved in total. They're saying the technology isn't improving as quickly.
This technology that "costs more and takes longer" will be cheaper, faster, and better than last-generation's new technology when next-generation's new technology is standard. "costs more and takes longer" means we're being impatient and greedy--we're making opportunity cost trade-offs, and that's okay, but let's be honest about what we're doing.
I've wanted a generic coprocessor architecture for a few months now. Imagine if you could stick a chip on your board and it could access the on-board video port (DVI, HDMI), a range of RAM exposed as RAM (it requests address and data), and so forth. Instead of on-CPU graphics, you have a chip that provides that. The same chip can provide things like encryption, encoding, and artificial neural networks.
These things aren't extended CPU instructions as with an FPU. They're actual separate microcomputers. An ANN chip has a completely-different architecture with memory local to the neuron's logic unit instead of in a memory bank. A GPU runs its own program against a memory space.
You don't need a huge riser and ports exposed on the card's edge. You can just plug into the board, get power and an addressing bus, and get appropriate output ports like display and DMA. You can provide multiple functions on one chip. Just make it a chip socket and make it standard.
This works for things that have to run a process on input and output, or on large bulk data. It doesn't work for things that are just extended CPU instructions, like SIMD. Transfer back and forth between processing units and the hop through the memory controller creates too much latency.
You can use a four-wire (RX,TX) LVDS memory bus, too: instead of 64 data lines and 32 addressing lines (1TB physical addressing), you can use two TX and two RX and use a packet protocol. Modern GPUs use 128-byte cache lines (seriously!). You can specify a protocol that sets memory unit size, offset, and then issues READ requests. If you want, your memory controller (on the expansion chip) could send an instruction packet {SET SIZE 512}, {READ 390625}, {READ 390626}, .... The return packet on RX would be the data. CPU's memory controller would carry out the memory read and stream the data to the RX pins.
The memory unit size is just a number of bytes. No trading off number of pins for maximum addressable RAM. There are odd reasons we use parallel buses for RAM, and it's not because parallel is faster; it's because building all of that stuff into DRAM is expensive and power-hungry. Since a coprocessor goes through a memory controller on a CPU, it's cheap there. Latency isn't as much of an issue as sheer bandwidth in this application.
Imagine it. Just pop a graphics chip on your motherboard. 12V supply that can feed 100W. If you need bigger than that, then you buy a 16-lane PCI-Express card.
It's a fundamental understanding of technology.
You use a rock to crush up bits of sticks so they're easier to ignite as tinder. One day, you realize that striking in a different manner better separates the fibers, allowing you to produce 50% more tinder in the same time with the same tools.
That's technology. You've just invented a new, more-efficient method of manufacturing tinder from sticks using the same tools. You can make the same tinder with less labor and apply other labor to do other things like hunt more meat. Your society can now enjoy more meat. Arbitrate between these two activities and you can have more tinder and more meat, and so you can have more cooked meat per person, all at the same cost.
They need a completely different strategy.
A Citizen's Dividend fixes the economy where there's high unemployment pretty damned quick. Don't know about SF itself; I know at the Federal level it's huge, and at the State level even an incredibly-weak policy would work for Maryland.
SF passing a gross receipts tax is bad juju, though. That is the worst kind of economics failure.
Imagine a gross receipts tax without the target on "you have too much revenue"--or just imagine that your back-end businesses are big. Your supply chain is affected.
With a 1% gross receipts tax going through a supply chain 14 firms deep, you're looking at 14.9%. That is: a $100 product becomes a $114.90 product. This is because the same productive action is taxed again and again: you pay a worker $20 to do something, then that product hops through 14 steps of supply and is taxed at 1% again and again each time. The revenue collected to cover the tax is also taxed. Eventually it's $23.
Now what if you consolidate? Bring together your vertical. You're a big market player, so you have control of several levels of the supply chain. Get it down to 8.
Now you're only facing an 8.29% tax. While those small business suckers over there have got themselves a $114.90 product, you make the same thing at exactly the same efficiency and it only costs you $108.29. You can undercut their price by 5.75% and still have a larger profit margin than they do--even though you're no more efficient at it and it costs you exactly the same labor and other costs.
That's what a gross tax does: it ensures Andrew Carnegie has a massive tax advantage and nobody can compete with the big businesses.