Is it fraud if your less-popular series with ten half-hour episodes and a rating of 73 airs 2 hours before U.S. election footage, and your more-popular prime-time series with 5 one-hour episodes airs one during the U.S. election and gets a rating of 68??
Hey, look, I can sell $LESS_VALUABLE show on fake higher ratings than $MORE_VALUABLE show because an outlier condition has damaged their ratings. They have one big dip on one episode out of four years, but their ratings this year tanked and so next year they won't be able to report it as so valuable and I can get people to pay me more money for my shit that nobody cares about!
In medical literature, pharma companies have had their drug banned from the market and been fined billions of dollars for not doing the equivalent of removing the data of those patients who had another conflicting variable or even a major deviation from their computations. Including outliers is fraudulent.
Absent better data tools which perform statistical analysis based on temporal locality, letting an episode of a TV show average its ratings out with ratings during major events like sports or 9/11 would distort the data with outliers. In statistics, we actually identify anything more than 1.5 times further away from the median than the first and third quartiles and discard it before performing any computations.
Think about it. You air a 13-episode season of a show. All of these have a rating of 80/100, except the one that aired on Election Night--which had a 15/100 rating. Your rating is 75. Now you've got data telling you another popular program with an average 78 rating is more-popular, and it's not.
Blunt statistics would have done exactly what they're doing: Remove the outliers. Today, we would use enormous data systems to identify if specific time slots had more viewers, if specific channels had more viewers, if airing after another show affected the show's popularity, if an event affected it, etc., and then forward-predict the rating of any given airing--even in any given market. That's part of what ATSC 3.0 aims to achieve: robust understanding of program viewership, based on everything that's happening during the airing of a show, and where.
But that's just it. The *lifespan* of you machine goes up when you put high-quality parts in it.
No. If you take a machine with shit parts and make one part last 5,000 times longer, one of the other shit parts breaks first and the machine doesn't last longer. You just spend extra for that high-end part in a pile of shit. That's what the immediate next thing in my post said.
You pretty much seem to have read what I wrote; said, "No, you're wrong, because..."; and then regurgitated what I just said.
Me: "Doobies: they're like little insurance salesmen with wings."
You: "No, see, you had a thing there, but you're wrong. It's more like, Doobies are little insurance salesmen... WITH WINGS!!!"
If you fund it as a percentage of all income (i.e. a flat income tax earmarked for a social security benefit, next to the progressive general fund tax), it increases in purchasing power year after year.
This is because gdp-per-capita increases year after year, and so a percentage of that also increases at the same rate.
How do you know the credibility of every person on such an issue? I can lay out and competently defend a detailed framework for providing a stable social security benefit in America with a tax cut everywhere, immediately remediating the problems with our welfare system, ending hunger in the United States, and making homelessness a thing that happens to people in other countries and Aesop fables.
I can't seem to get the politics quite right, though. I'm starting to think people are right about that stick thing: the upcoming recession is the next opportunity for change, because people need to be in great pain before they're motivated to listen and act.
From a policy perspective, I can easily put an end to all homelessness and hunger in the United States, and get an enormous cut in taxes across the board doing so. It's a trivial problem.
This ends in personal income tax brackets falling from 39.6% at the top end, and corporate income taxes falling from 35% to 32.5%.
So people like you look at a state in which the poor are able to eat, retain living quarters, afford utilities, clothe themselves, and care for their hygiene, and......... immediately complain about the rich not being taxed more.
Fuck the poor; nobody cares about them. Solving poverty isn't the point; we need to beat the people who have more than the rest of us. They have more money, but we have more sticks.
That's what we're up against. That's what's impeding social progress: people wave their hands in the direction of the dirty, homeless, starving poor while looking up at the mansions of the rich and complaining that we need to tear those down for whatever reason.
Actually, the state enforces laws to prevent people from driving dangerously. In countries without such laws, you see a lot of insanity on the road (and lots of vehicular incidents resulting in death and dismemberment).
Likewise, fire protection is important for stopping the spread of fires, which can destroy your property and quickly make it impossible for you to retain your employment and financial position. In my case, the house in which I live has a firewall; yet the roof over each porch is connected by a single span of continuous wooden framework. Fires spread from house to house easily, just with a small delay since they have to go around. A few years ago, a house here caught fire from an errant cigarette, and seven houses burned down before the fire department got the fire under control.
Problem: you can't just hand people money. Nobody is working; who is building these houses, maintaining these roads, and making the food?
For like 400 years, people have been saying that, just next decade, these new machines will end all human labor, and we'll all live with our mechanical servants caring for us. It hasn't happened yet, for important reasons: any machine which can do that has to be a sentient, creative intellect, which is essentially human, will want rights, will want pay, will want free time, and thus won't be free. Anything less just paves the way for us to apply our labor to make even more shit.
More to the point, though, every industry has a break in it. The major break is the logistics of marketing: every business wants to exceed its peers, or at least keep its position, and so we have competition; and robots can't compete. Humans can utilize robots as they compete.
That doesn't get down to the recursion problem: robots aren't self-maintaining, and we need machinists and QA and such to keep the robots running. There are little things for which we'd use more labor to build and maintain robots than to do on our own. Instead of 3,500 people running a candy factory, we use fewer than 300; and we use those 300 people because the robots can't do some stuff cheaply enough.
In a decade, it'll be 30.
So you have two considerable situations: The rich have nothing because nothing is made, because they can't sell to anyone, and so can't remain rich; or everyone is rich because the means to make things are cheap and easy. Neither of these actually works out.
Thus you have the only remaining option: we have the same kind of working population as we have now. Oh, we might cut our working hours in half, because suddenly we can produce 3x as much and nobody wants that as much as they want 1.5x as much stuff and half the time spent working to get it. We'll still be a working society.
With a universal social security, the bottom of society--the poorest--have a minimal standard. What's just above that, though?
A universal Social Security, sufficient to better achieve the mission of our welfare services, without dismantling our welfare system, causes a reduction in taxes at all levels. In payroll, it's 0.9% marginal lowered taxes; in corporate profits, we fall from 35% to 32.5%; and the individual has greater retained take-home income when you include the benefits check that comes twice a month.
Currently, our personal income tax brackets range from 10%+6.2%(OASDI) to 28%+6.2%, then fall to 28% and climb back up to 39.6%. I've cut my proposal back to only tackle the naive implementation and leave straightening it out to the CBO, which means I inherit that flaw: the blunt proposal has the highest tax bracket on the middle class, like our 34.2% tax bracket on $91k (single)/$153k (married, 2 incomes under $118k).
Under that proposal, the impacts on taxable wages hit a low point around $200k, with only $2,800 more income (single earner). In other words: the total Federal taxes paid on $200k as a single earner falls from 27.53% to 26.15%.
At $50,000, it's about $5k more spendable income single, $13k more spendable income married.
Let's look at minimum wage, though.
The poorest of poor end up with $8,751/year, or $17,502 for a two-adult household. That's in untaxed income (benefits disbursement). If you have no job and no income, that's where you stand.
At minimum wage ($8.25/hr), one full-time income gets a single earner $7,204 more income than today, $21,579/year, or $12,828 more
I challenge you to name anything a CEO does fundamentally more insightfully than a McDonald's crew manager, or taking ideas gleanable from reading Slashdot or any other technically competent publication, putting the ideas on a dartboard, and throwing darts. Don't let me give the impression that I'm saying the CEO's ideas are of equal number or quality to random Slashdot readers, though. The CEO is inferior on both counts.
You remind me of a guy. His name was Adolf Hitler.
Hitler was an enlisted man in the army. He fought on the front lines. He knew how to fight a war, and what it was to face the enemy. Hitler knew, better than any general, how to face a complex tactical situation. He had seen their incompetence time and again, and thought to himself how much better it would have been if someone would have listened to his objections.
Hitler never went to officer school.
Then, Hitler became the leader of a country. That country went to war and, in a few short years, demonstrated the height of human incompetence in tactical and strategic warfare.
You think, with no concept of business risks, with no concept of marketing, with your blindingly-superior hindsight on how much better you could do, that you know better than Google and Microsoft on how to run a business?
IBM nearly failed thrice. Each time, IBM had looked at new products, new markets. They watched people get into those markets and fail, repeatedly, each trying to scrape out a position for themselves. They scoffed, and said that the market as-is was never going to change, and that these new toys were stupid.
IBM stayed out of the PC market after major players like Xerox failed. The VIC-20, the Sinclair, the Apple, the little things that scraped for market, hung around for a half a decade, maybe got a revision, and failed utterly? IBM said, "Those PCs will never amount to anything; computers are for businesses, and businesses want mainframes."
IBM almost lost that battle, as businesses started trying to escape the mainframe, even on the garbage that was clogging the pipes.
Finally, when their CEO came under fire, he passed his job to his kid of all people, who immediately directed the company to standardize, license, and produce its own PCs. Commodore was contracted to write the PCOS; they dicked around, and IBM passed the contract to Bill Gates, who bought QDOS and gave them MS-DOS. The PC market started to fill with players like RadioShack (Tandy) and HP, licensing IBM designs.
That's what happens when your CEO knows better than to bother with those obvious failures: your company collapses as we leave your old ass behind.
Microsoft lost the Zune battle because they thought they could go up against Apple's iPod. They lost the console battle because they thought they could wedge a place in with Sega, Sony, and Nintendo--oh, wait!
That's right: Apple jumped in on the music service thing where Rhapsody et al failed, where tons of MP3 players like the Creative Zen went nowhere, and they made a shitload. Microsoft got the gaming console market. Google has business services. Amazon got into online hosting, for some fucking reason--Microsoft didn't learn from their bout with Apple and... is also a major player in online hosting.
ffs, Google took on the iPhone and has 7x the market share, and with it a chunk of the revenue from app purchases and IAPs. Microsoft tried the same, and I bet you think they were stupid for trying to bring out the Windows phone, just like Google was for trying to bring out Android phones when they didn't even have a phone to sell.
I see you're a fantastic business strategist, though, because you can plug in a cable modem and read Yahoo Business to learn what product failed today.
Some of us are familiar with business and economics, and can construct things called budgets, business plans, and profitability projections.
As such, I based my initial attempt at universal social security strictly on what would make landlords and business owners richer than Warren Buffet in a year. Later I started using other peoples's budgets--only after I'd realized I didn't quite understand the income balance sheets and had essentially excluded the self-employed by only counting wages as personal income. That's fine: I'm tended to make mistakes in ways which disadvantage my position.
In practice, I went from a 17% tax and $564/month of income to a 15% tax and $729/month of income.
My own framework suggests giving naturalized American citizens a social security rendered as an end-of-the-year non-refundable tax credit. If it's supposed to pay out $8,000 and you owe $5,000 in taxes, you get $5,000. The other side of this is that you are now an aid-dependent member of the household: if the household income falls below the aid threshold, you get welfare services (childcare welfare stays around because you don't want to give people cash for children).
I've been looking harder at social security, though. There's a transition path out.
Currently, OASDI allows the accrual of "credits" for income earned. These credits determine your retirement benefit under OASDI. Under my system, OASDI only funds the difference between its benefit and the Universal benefit, so the credit system still stays around.
It would make sense to pay out to naturalized Americans based on their Social Security credits.
Let's say that the (average) $1,300 OASDI is replaced by a $729 universal benefit that pays when you hit age 18, and those in retirement age receive an additional (on average) $571 from OASDI. An American with freshly-granted citizen obviously has no credit, and gets none of this; instead, he receives that $8,750 as a non-refundable tax credit each year, and is eligible for welfare.
Now consider: five years later, this citizen has earned enough credits to be eligible for $250/month. Today, OASDI just says you're not eligible for retirement benefits. Under a universal Social Security, this new citizen receives $250/month, plus the remainder of the benefit as a non-refundable credit.
This inherits from OASDI the problem of not providing benefits to late-life immigrants; that's fine essentially because it's fine now. At the same time, an immigrant who comes to this country, gets citizenship, and then doesn't work is in exactly the same position as today. We've now controlled for the immigrant risk in a graceful manner.
While our own citizens are born here and learn to want for the luxuries of their working-class parents, immigrants come here from whatever lives they lived in whatever countries from which they come. They must learn to desire that higher standard-of-living that comes from gainful employment so as to become equivalent to the young adults just entering our workforce. We can care for them, and even afford them the benefit we grant to citizens; and we can do so without simply assuming all responsibility when we let them into this country. They will first learn what it is to be a working-class American, and then can decide if they'd rather to live on the scraps which we throw away--and I believe nobody wants to take that large step down.
So no, we don't need tighter immigration controls at all. We only need people who can figure out how to write legislation which controls for risks.
The idea is that since there will be less jobs available to get employed
Stop saying this, because it's absolutely untrue, and is a line of argument which demonstrates to reasonable people who actually make policy and cry out for policy changes that your idea is stupid.
Most humans are basically lazy, and will do minimal work for maximum pay. That is called "Capitalism",
It's called "economization". You want to expend the least means (time, effort) for the most gains. The opposite of economization would be for you to expend maximum means (work yourself to death) for the least gains (give me all your money).
Can you explain what happens when nobody is working because they all expect "a living wage" for not doing anything?
Well, that depends on a number of factors. Notably, the size of the income. Other things are at play, as well, primarily risk and that whole economization thing.
Take unemployment insurance.
If you work more than three jobs in three years, you don't get unemployment insurance. That means if Lockheed lays you off in early 2017 due to Legg Mason expanding and taking their contracts, and then Legg Mason lays you off in late 2017 due to the contract you were on expiring, and then T. Rowe Price lays you off in mid 2018 due to outsourcing their payroll to ADP, you're kind of stuck. When OmniTI lays you off in 2019, you'll be denied unemployment benefits.
Likewise, unemployment doesn't pay out if you're terminated with-cause. That means you should probably avoid taking a job if you can't keep your shit together; and the risk of an abrasive management chain has large consequences outside your own control, unless you're a useless, pandering asshole who will take getting a paycheck over doing anything useful.
On top of that, unemployment pays a certain amount of income. For me, this was equivalent to $10.25/hr. When FedEx offered me a job at $10.50/hr, I didn't even look; that's $10/week for 40 hours of work. By not working, I made $10.25/hr; by working, I would lose $10.25/hr and gain $10.50/hr, a net quarter per hour's work. No thanks.
As a result, unemployment has a certain kind of discouraging effect on work. To minimize your financial risk, you need to avoid getting a job for the full six months, and try to get employment as close to the end of that period as possible. On top of that, any job offer is devalued by the lost unemployment benefit. If they would continue to pay unemployment for the full six month term even if you got fired, then getting a job would make more sense.
Welfare is basically built around that.
There's also the problem that humans are tended toward self-preservation. If a human can't get sufficient means to live, he will find those means. No job, no welfare? Rob people. Steal stuff. Prostitute. Sell drugs. Do something to survive, to feed your family if you have that sort of thing. People won't just lay down and die.
So what happens when you give people some minimal benefit that allows them subsistence, but doesn't provide any real luxury in life?
Well, for one, there's no risk. If they get a job, lose the job, get the job, and so forth, nothing changes with their benefits. They don't lose benefits for working, they don't risk failing out of the welfare system.
Likewise, a job which pays close to their benefit amount is economical. What happens if you give a man $8,700/year, regardless of his situation? He sees a minimum-wage job paying $16,500/year, and it triples his income. Were you to remove the benefit when he gets employment, that job is worth $7,800/year and doesn't even double his income. The incentive to work is maximized.
Welfare systems have controls to prevent people from getting to the end of unemployment, getting a job, pissing everyone off, getting fired, and getting six more months of unemployment. Likewise, a person who receives welfare close to his working income will have little to gain from employment. A constant, irrevocable income supplement doesn't have those problems because such antisocial behavior doesn't incite a change in situation and working provides income in addition to the benefit.
Actually, 0.9% lower payroll taxes, 2.5% lower marginal corporate profits taxes, top tax bracket falls from 39.6% to 35%, and the least-advantaged are single-earners making $200k/year with only about $2,700 more spendable income.
Essentially a tax cut on everyone, and stronger support than modern welfare benefits. It's not a hard problem.
Technically they're threatening assault, of a kind.
It appears to me that CNN has determined taking action X will cause specific harm to John Doe #1. John Doe #1 thus must kowtow to CNN's wishes to avoid CNN activating specific harm against his person. In this case, said harm could include loss of employment, loss of social support, or violence against his person by third parties, all of which have a high likelihood of physical harm.
Thus it seems CNN, failing a legal remedy, has resorted to the threat of harm against the specific user. This seems unlawful. Also, childish.
Here's the thing: the Chinese factory making a good exactly to spec of an American product would cost less. The American factory making shitty Chinese goods would cost 5x more.
We didn't move from America to China; we moved to lower-durability goods at lower prices. The Chinese are some of the most-skillful, most-dependable manufacturers in the world, if not the best. American manufacturers generally produce overpriced goods at low quality; some try to deal with this by overbuilding, so you get a boat anchor that's not hardly any better than what's coming out of China. Often they'll try to sell you stupid shit like "all-metal gears" in a blender transmission where metal gears will grind out of tolerance in a few short years while the Chinese thing with ABS gears lasts 15 years.
We have a dichotomy in which one side only cares about the label and not the quality, and the other only cares about the price and not the quality. Neither side is going to get good quality today.
They're not a finely-tuned clock; they can be wrong sometimes.
For one thing, overbuilding is generally-bad. If you put a 7-cent part in a machine where a 3-cent part typically falls within the lifespan of the machine, you waste money (and labor). Likewise, you may find that the expensive part can go in a more-durable machine, and that said machine often replaces 6-cent parts with 35-cent parts, and so costs 4-5 times as much.
You can take this out farther. You can build a machine that lasts thrice as long as a cheaper machine, but costs four times as much; or you can build the cheaper machine and replace it four times, and get 33% more lifetime out of the same expense.
Likewise, in engineering, if you find that a certain part is below specification and is the main failure, you can replace it with a better-engineered part, often for cheap. This is great for hard-to-replace components. For easily-replaced components, such as lids or sacrificial clips (built to break under strain so other parts don't), you just issue replacement supply.
Then you get into the innards.
Something strange happens when you have to diagnose a problem, disassemble a machine, remove the problem part, replace it, and reassemble the machine: costs go up.
Imagine if a small component, such as a capacitor, broke in your TV. It may require a TV repair man 6-7 hours to identify the damaged component by electronics troubleshooting. It can then take half an hour to desolder it, solder a new one, and test the joints properly. You pay $50/hr, you end up paying $400, for which you can simply purchase a new 42-inch LED-backed IPS LCD television.
It can take just as long for a small appliance like a $30 iron or a $25 blender. The cost of human time to look inside the damned thing and ferret out the problem can be hundreds of dollars.
Why repair? Electronics recycling is faster, consuming less labor time even if it produces nothing.
Well maybe they should! The whole idea of putting batteries everywhere makes as much sense as making a hundred hamburgers an hour and just throwing the ones people don't buy into the trash!
I don't have to know who an entity is to know what they're saying is stupid. If someone said Microsoft claimed that teenagers are huffing nuclear radon by collecting their farts in a bottle and using it to breathe Hadoukens with their minds, it would still be valid to observe that Microsoft is retarded, even if you have no idea who Microsoft is and decide it sounds like some dude's name.
You can buy AC/heat pump units with ice-based cold storage, designed for night time cooling using solar.
Which is hilariously far from 100% efficiency. Even batteries are more-efficient.
In winter, thermal mass can store excess heat very easily
Which requires installation of large thermal masses. It's an engineering problem I've approached frequently. $144,000 worth of beeswax is interesting for the purpose, if it doesn't autoignite.
And a commuter who works or shops near the grid (almost everyone) can use their EV to sell seasonal excess energy onto the grid.
Which is inefficient both in the cost of charging/discharging batteries (lossy, sends much of the energy to heat) and in the time restriction (there's a lower probability of energy being in-demand when you jack up a battery to dump it versus when you overproduce it). You'll also wear down your EV battery using it as... well, a battery.
Grids *must* adapt to renewables or else.
Grids handle renewables just fine. They need giant, centralized, advanced compressed air energy storage, not little distributed batteries in everyone's houses.
we've been having these energy debates for generations now, so the obstructionism has become part and parcel of their identity as profligate consumers
It has more to do with coal and oil costing less than solar and wind until the recent decade. The costs are falling faster now than ever, too. Switching today is objectively-worse than switching in 5 years if it costs half as much in 5 years; eventually the delay is not cost-effective (technology tends to spike, plateau, and then idle until the next new breakthrough causes rapid growth as we explore its boundaries and refine our new knowledge).
If you implement a $50 billion solar infrastructure today, you produce a lot of toxic waste and consume loads of energy. Then, in 5 years, when the next guy can implement a $25 billion solar infrastructure, he can sell his power for half as much, undercut your prices, and put you out of business--all that toxic waste spewed for nothing, and then even more. 10 years from then, when the next guy can roll out his solar infrastructure for $23 billion... it's not going to get him the same conversion. That tech will come as the grid grows and as we service parts that break; we're not putting people out of business until we can undercut them enough to cause a mass exodus of their customer base.
Face it: Given 15 cent solar or 8 cent coal electricity, Americans will pay 8 cents for coal. We spend $175/month on electricity and nobody wants to spend $350/month just to say there's a solar plant somewhere producing power equivalent to what they draw. It's hard enough to get them to switch when the prices are the same, or even when it's just 0.1 cent cheaper to go with solar. I switched when it was costing me about $4/month more for solar, because the conversion rate on $175 of electricity from coal to solar for a cost of $4 is a relatively-large impact for very small investment--at scale, anyway.
Our political games are annoying and impede progress; but there has to be progress to impede first. You cannot violate the laws of economics because economics is a trade of time, and you can't magic time out of nowhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it fraud if your less-popular series with ten half-hour episodes and a rating of 73 airs 2 hours before U.S. election footage, and your more-popular prime-time series with 5 one-hour episodes airs one during the U.S. election and gets a rating of 68??
Hey, look, I can sell $LESS_VALUABLE show on fake higher ratings than $MORE_VALUABLE show because an outlier condition has damaged their ratings. They have one big dip on one episode out of four years, but their ratings this year tanked and so next year they won't be able to report it as so valuable and I can get people to pay me more money for my shit that nobody cares about!
In medical literature, pharma companies have had their drug banned from the market and been fined billions of dollars for not doing the equivalent of removing the data of those patients who had another conflicting variable or even a major deviation from their computations. Including outliers is fraudulent.
It's probably considered a feature.
Absent better data tools which perform statistical analysis based on temporal locality, letting an episode of a TV show average its ratings out with ratings during major events like sports or 9/11 would distort the data with outliers. In statistics, we actually identify anything more than 1.5 times further away from the median than the first and third quartiles and discard it before performing any computations.
Think about it. You air a 13-episode season of a show. All of these have a rating of 80/100, except the one that aired on Election Night--which had a 15/100 rating. Your rating is 75. Now you've got data telling you another popular program with an average 78 rating is more-popular, and it's not.
Blunt statistics would have done exactly what they're doing: Remove the outliers. Today, we would use enormous data systems to identify if specific time slots had more viewers, if specific channels had more viewers, if airing after another show affected the show's popularity, if an event affected it, etc., and then forward-predict the rating of any given airing--even in any given market. That's part of what ATSC 3.0 aims to achieve: robust understanding of program viewership, based on everything that's happening during the airing of a show, and where.
But that's just it. The *lifespan* of you machine goes up when you put high-quality parts in it.
No. If you take a machine with shit parts and make one part last 5,000 times longer, one of the other shit parts breaks first and the machine doesn't last longer. You just spend extra for that high-end part in a pile of shit. That's what the immediate next thing in my post said.
You pretty much seem to have read what I wrote; said, "No, you're wrong, because..."; and then regurgitated what I just said.
Me: "Doobies: they're like little insurance salesmen with wings."
You: "No, see, you had a thing there, but you're wrong. It's more like, Doobies are little insurance salesmen... WITH WINGS!!!"
Me: "You're a complete idiot."
If you fund it as a percentage of all income (i.e. a flat income tax earmarked for a social security benefit, next to the progressive general fund tax), it increases in purchasing power year after year.
This is because gdp-per-capita increases year after year, and so a percentage of that also increases at the same rate.
Actually, the end result is a decrease in taxes on people, corporations, and payrolls, and no increase in taxes anywhere.
The United States is, historically, a social democracy as well.
How do you know the credibility of every person on such an issue? I can lay out and competently defend a detailed framework for providing a stable social security benefit in America with a tax cut everywhere, immediately remediating the problems with our welfare system, ending hunger in the United States, and making homelessness a thing that happens to people in other countries and Aesop fables.
I can't seem to get the politics quite right, though. I'm starting to think people are right about that stick thing: the upcoming recession is the next opportunity for change, because people need to be in great pain before they're motivated to listen and act.
I actually blame people like you.
From a policy perspective, I can easily put an end to all homelessness and hunger in the United States, and get an enormous cut in taxes across the board doing so. It's a trivial problem.
This ends in personal income tax brackets falling from 39.6% at the top end, and corporate income taxes falling from 35% to 32.5%.
So people like you look at a state in which the poor are able to eat, retain living quarters, afford utilities, clothe themselves, and care for their hygiene, and ... ... ... immediately complain about the rich not being taxed more.
Fuck the poor; nobody cares about them. Solving poverty isn't the point; we need to beat the people who have more than the rest of us. They have more money, but we have more sticks.
That's what we're up against. That's what's impeding social progress: people wave their hands in the direction of the dirty, homeless, starving poor while looking up at the mansions of the rich and complaining that we need to tear those down for whatever reason.
Actually, the state enforces laws to prevent people from driving dangerously. In countries without such laws, you see a lot of insanity on the road (and lots of vehicular incidents resulting in death and dismemberment).
Likewise, fire protection is important for stopping the spread of fires, which can destroy your property and quickly make it impossible for you to retain your employment and financial position. In my case, the house in which I live has a firewall; yet the roof over each porch is connected by a single span of continuous wooden framework. Fires spread from house to house easily, just with a small delay since they have to go around. A few years ago, a house here caught fire from an errant cigarette, and seven houses burned down before the fire department got the fire under control.
Problem: you can't just hand people money. Nobody is working; who is building these houses, maintaining these roads, and making the food?
For like 400 years, people have been saying that, just next decade, these new machines will end all human labor, and we'll all live with our mechanical servants caring for us. It hasn't happened yet, for important reasons: any machine which can do that has to be a sentient, creative intellect, which is essentially human, will want rights, will want pay, will want free time, and thus won't be free. Anything less just paves the way for us to apply our labor to make even more shit.
More to the point, though, every industry has a break in it. The major break is the logistics of marketing: every business wants to exceed its peers, or at least keep its position, and so we have competition; and robots can't compete. Humans can utilize robots as they compete.
That doesn't get down to the recursion problem: robots aren't self-maintaining, and we need machinists and QA and such to keep the robots running. There are little things for which we'd use more labor to build and maintain robots than to do on our own. Instead of 3,500 people running a candy factory, we use fewer than 300; and we use those 300 people because the robots can't do some stuff cheaply enough.
In a decade, it'll be 30.
So you have two considerable situations: The rich have nothing because nothing is made, because they can't sell to anyone, and so can't remain rich; or everyone is rich because the means to make things are cheap and easy. Neither of these actually works out.
Thus you have the only remaining option: we have the same kind of working population as we have now. Oh, we might cut our working hours in half, because suddenly we can produce 3x as much and nobody wants that as much as they want 1.5x as much stuff and half the time spent working to get it. We'll still be a working society.
With a universal social security, the bottom of society--the poorest--have a minimal standard. What's just above that, though?
I've been trying to get a good visual down for this, but I'm not the world's best Web designer (I can't, at all). The policy is easy to work out, while the politics are... hard. Bear with me for a minute.
A universal Social Security, sufficient to better achieve the mission of our welfare services, without dismantling our welfare system, causes a reduction in taxes at all levels. In payroll, it's 0.9% marginal lowered taxes; in corporate profits, we fall from 35% to 32.5%; and the individual has greater retained take-home income when you include the benefits check that comes twice a month.
Currently, our personal income tax brackets range from 10%+6.2%(OASDI) to 28%+6.2%, then fall to 28% and climb back up to 39.6%. I've cut my proposal back to only tackle the naive implementation and leave straightening it out to the CBO, which means I inherit that flaw: the blunt proposal has the highest tax bracket on the middle class, like our 34.2% tax bracket on $91k (single)/$153k (married, 2 incomes under $118k).
Under that proposal, the impacts on taxable wages hit a low point around $200k, with only $2,800 more income (single earner). In other words: the total Federal taxes paid on $200k as a single earner falls from 27.53% to 26.15%.
At $50,000, it's about $5k more spendable income single, $13k more spendable income married.
Let's look at minimum wage, though.
The poorest of poor end up with $8,751/year, or $17,502 for a two-adult household. That's in untaxed income (benefits disbursement). If you have no job and no income, that's where you stand.
At minimum wage ($8.25/hr), one full-time income gets a single earner $7,204 more income than today, $21,579/year, or $12,828 more
I challenge you to name anything a CEO does fundamentally more insightfully than a McDonald's crew manager, or taking ideas gleanable from reading Slashdot or any other technically competent publication, putting the ideas on a dartboard, and throwing darts. Don't let me give the impression that I'm saying the CEO's ideas are of equal number or quality to random Slashdot readers, though. The CEO is inferior on both counts.
You remind me of a guy. His name was Adolf Hitler.
Hitler was an enlisted man in the army. He fought on the front lines. He knew how to fight a war, and what it was to face the enemy. Hitler knew, better than any general, how to face a complex tactical situation. He had seen their incompetence time and again, and thought to himself how much better it would have been if someone would have listened to his objections.
Hitler never went to officer school.
Then, Hitler became the leader of a country. That country went to war and, in a few short years, demonstrated the height of human incompetence in tactical and strategic warfare.
You think, with no concept of business risks, with no concept of marketing, with your blindingly-superior hindsight on how much better you could do, that you know better than Google and Microsoft on how to run a business?
IBM nearly failed thrice. Each time, IBM had looked at new products, new markets. They watched people get into those markets and fail, repeatedly, each trying to scrape out a position for themselves. They scoffed, and said that the market as-is was never going to change, and that these new toys were stupid.
IBM stayed out of the PC market after major players like Xerox failed. The VIC-20, the Sinclair, the Apple, the little things that scraped for market, hung around for a half a decade, maybe got a revision, and failed utterly? IBM said, "Those PCs will never amount to anything; computers are for businesses, and businesses want mainframes."
IBM almost lost that battle, as businesses started trying to escape the mainframe, even on the garbage that was clogging the pipes.
Finally, when their CEO came under fire, he passed his job to his kid of all people, who immediately directed the company to standardize, license, and produce its own PCs. Commodore was contracted to write the PCOS; they dicked around, and IBM passed the contract to Bill Gates, who bought QDOS and gave them MS-DOS. The PC market started to fill with players like RadioShack (Tandy) and HP, licensing IBM designs.
That's what happens when your CEO knows better than to bother with those obvious failures: your company collapses as we leave your old ass behind.
Microsoft lost the Zune battle because they thought they could go up against Apple's iPod. They lost the console battle because they thought they could wedge a place in with Sega, Sony, and Nintendo--oh, wait!
That's right: Apple jumped in on the music service thing where Rhapsody et al failed, where tons of MP3 players like the Creative Zen went nowhere, and they made a shitload. Microsoft got the gaming console market. Google has business services. Amazon got into online hosting, for some fucking reason--Microsoft didn't learn from their bout with Apple and... is also a major player in online hosting.
ffs, Google took on the iPhone and has 7x the market share, and with it a chunk of the revenue from app purchases and IAPs. Microsoft tried the same, and I bet you think they were stupid for trying to bring out the Windows phone, just like Google was for trying to bring out Android phones when they didn't even have a phone to sell.
I see you're a fantastic business strategist, though, because you can plug in a cable modem and read Yahoo Business to learn what product failed today.
Some of us are familiar with business and economics, and can construct things called budgets, business plans, and profitability projections.
As such, I based my initial attempt at universal social security strictly on what would make landlords and business owners richer than Warren Buffet in a year. Later I started using other peoples's budgets--only after I'd realized I didn't quite understand the income balance sheets and had essentially excluded the self-employed by only counting wages as personal income. That's fine: I'm tended to make mistakes in ways which disadvantage my position.
In practice, I went from a 17% tax and $564/month of income to a 15% tax and $729/month of income.
Not necessarily.
My own framework suggests giving naturalized American citizens a social security rendered as an end-of-the-year non-refundable tax credit. If it's supposed to pay out $8,000 and you owe $5,000 in taxes, you get $5,000. The other side of this is that you are now an aid-dependent member of the household: if the household income falls below the aid threshold, you get welfare services (childcare welfare stays around because you don't want to give people cash for children).
I've been looking harder at social security, though. There's a transition path out.
Currently, OASDI allows the accrual of "credits" for income earned. These credits determine your retirement benefit under OASDI. Under my system, OASDI only funds the difference between its benefit and the Universal benefit, so the credit system still stays around.
It would make sense to pay out to naturalized Americans based on their Social Security credits.
Let's say that the (average) $1,300 OASDI is replaced by a $729 universal benefit that pays when you hit age 18, and those in retirement age receive an additional (on average) $571 from OASDI. An American with freshly-granted citizen obviously has no credit, and gets none of this; instead, he receives that $8,750 as a non-refundable tax credit each year, and is eligible for welfare.
Now consider: five years later, this citizen has earned enough credits to be eligible for $250/month. Today, OASDI just says you're not eligible for retirement benefits. Under a universal Social Security, this new citizen receives $250/month, plus the remainder of the benefit as a non-refundable credit.
This inherits from OASDI the problem of not providing benefits to late-life immigrants; that's fine essentially because it's fine now. At the same time, an immigrant who comes to this country, gets citizenship, and then doesn't work is in exactly the same position as today. We've now controlled for the immigrant risk in a graceful manner.
While our own citizens are born here and learn to want for the luxuries of their working-class parents, immigrants come here from whatever lives they lived in whatever countries from which they come. They must learn to desire that higher standard-of-living that comes from gainful employment so as to become equivalent to the young adults just entering our workforce. We can care for them, and even afford them the benefit we grant to citizens; and we can do so without simply assuming all responsibility when we let them into this country. They will first learn what it is to be a working-class American, and then can decide if they'd rather to live on the scraps which we throw away--and I believe nobody wants to take that large step down.
So no, we don't need tighter immigration controls at all. We only need people who can figure out how to write legislation which controls for risks.
The idea is that since there will be less jobs available to get employed
Stop saying this, because it's absolutely untrue, and is a line of argument which demonstrates to reasonable people who actually make policy and cry out for policy changes that your idea is stupid.
Most humans are basically lazy, and will do minimal work for maximum pay. That is called "Capitalism",
It's called "economization". You want to expend the least means (time, effort) for the most gains. The opposite of economization would be for you to expend maximum means (work yourself to death) for the least gains (give me all your money).
Can you explain what happens when nobody is working because they all expect "a living wage" for not doing anything?
Well, that depends on a number of factors. Notably, the size of the income. Other things are at play, as well, primarily risk and that whole economization thing.
Take unemployment insurance.
If you work more than three jobs in three years, you don't get unemployment insurance. That means if Lockheed lays you off in early 2017 due to Legg Mason expanding and taking their contracts, and then Legg Mason lays you off in late 2017 due to the contract you were on expiring, and then T. Rowe Price lays you off in mid 2018 due to outsourcing their payroll to ADP, you're kind of stuck. When OmniTI lays you off in 2019, you'll be denied unemployment benefits.
Likewise, unemployment doesn't pay out if you're terminated with-cause. That means you should probably avoid taking a job if you can't keep your shit together; and the risk of an abrasive management chain has large consequences outside your own control, unless you're a useless, pandering asshole who will take getting a paycheck over doing anything useful.
On top of that, unemployment pays a certain amount of income. For me, this was equivalent to $10.25/hr. When FedEx offered me a job at $10.50/hr, I didn't even look; that's $10/week for 40 hours of work. By not working, I made $10.25/hr; by working, I would lose $10.25/hr and gain $10.50/hr, a net quarter per hour's work. No thanks.
As a result, unemployment has a certain kind of discouraging effect on work. To minimize your financial risk, you need to avoid getting a job for the full six months, and try to get employment as close to the end of that period as possible. On top of that, any job offer is devalued by the lost unemployment benefit. If they would continue to pay unemployment for the full six month term even if you got fired, then getting a job would make more sense.
Welfare is basically built around that.
There's also the problem that humans are tended toward self-preservation. If a human can't get sufficient means to live, he will find those means. No job, no welfare? Rob people. Steal stuff. Prostitute. Sell drugs. Do something to survive, to feed your family if you have that sort of thing. People won't just lay down and die.
So what happens when you give people some minimal benefit that allows them subsistence, but doesn't provide any real luxury in life?
Well, for one, there's no risk. If they get a job, lose the job, get the job, and so forth, nothing changes with their benefits. They don't lose benefits for working, they don't risk failing out of the welfare system.
Likewise, a job which pays close to their benefit amount is economical. What happens if you give a man $8,700/year, regardless of his situation? He sees a minimum-wage job paying $16,500/year, and it triples his income. Were you to remove the benefit when he gets employment, that job is worth $7,800/year and doesn't even double his income. The incentive to work is maximized.
Welfare systems have controls to prevent people from getting to the end of unemployment, getting a job, pissing everyone off, getting fired, and getting six more months of unemployment. Likewise, a person who receives welfare close to his working income will have little to gain from employment. A constant, irrevocable income supplement doesn't have those problems because such antisocial behavior doesn't incite a change in situation and working provides income in addition to the benefit.
So what will ha
Actually, 0.9% lower payroll taxes, 2.5% lower marginal corporate profits taxes, top tax bracket falls from 39.6% to 35%, and the least-advantaged are single-earners making $200k/year with only about $2,700 more spendable income.
Essentially a tax cut on everyone, and stronger support than modern welfare benefits. It's not a hard problem.
Technically they're threatening assault, of a kind.
It appears to me that CNN has determined taking action X will cause specific harm to John Doe #1. John Doe #1 thus must kowtow to CNN's wishes to avoid CNN activating specific harm against his person. In this case, said harm could include loss of employment, loss of social support, or violence against his person by third parties, all of which have a high likelihood of physical harm.
Thus it seems CNN, failing a legal remedy, has resorted to the threat of harm against the specific user. This seems unlawful. Also, childish.
Here's the thing: the Chinese factory making a good exactly to spec of an American product would cost less. The American factory making shitty Chinese goods would cost 5x more.
We didn't move from America to China; we moved to lower-durability goods at lower prices. The Chinese are some of the most-skillful, most-dependable manufacturers in the world, if not the best. American manufacturers generally produce overpriced goods at low quality; some try to deal with this by overbuilding, so you get a boat anchor that's not hardly any better than what's coming out of China. Often they'll try to sell you stupid shit like "all-metal gears" in a blender transmission where metal gears will grind out of tolerance in a few short years while the Chinese thing with ABS gears lasts 15 years.
We have a dichotomy in which one side only cares about the label and not the quality, and the other only cares about the price and not the quality. Neither side is going to get good quality today.
They're not a finely-tuned clock; they can be wrong sometimes.
For one thing, overbuilding is generally-bad. If you put a 7-cent part in a machine where a 3-cent part typically falls within the lifespan of the machine, you waste money (and labor). Likewise, you may find that the expensive part can go in a more-durable machine, and that said machine often replaces 6-cent parts with 35-cent parts, and so costs 4-5 times as much.
You can take this out farther. You can build a machine that lasts thrice as long as a cheaper machine, but costs four times as much; or you can build the cheaper machine and replace it four times, and get 33% more lifetime out of the same expense.
Likewise, in engineering, if you find that a certain part is below specification and is the main failure, you can replace it with a better-engineered part, often for cheap. This is great for hard-to-replace components. For easily-replaced components, such as lids or sacrificial clips (built to break under strain so other parts don't), you just issue replacement supply.
Then you get into the innards.
Something strange happens when you have to diagnose a problem, disassemble a machine, remove the problem part, replace it, and reassemble the machine: costs go up.
Imagine if a small component, such as a capacitor, broke in your TV. It may require a TV repair man 6-7 hours to identify the damaged component by electronics troubleshooting. It can then take half an hour to desolder it, solder a new one, and test the joints properly. You pay $50/hr, you end up paying $400, for which you can simply purchase a new 42-inch LED-backed IPS LCD television.
It can take just as long for a small appliance like a $30 iron or a $25 blender. The cost of human time to look inside the damned thing and ferret out the problem can be hundreds of dollars.
Why repair? Electronics recycling is faster, consuming less labor time even if it produces nothing.
Hey, the numbers are real and the logic is sound; when you get a shot that clear you load up a solid right-hook.
4-stroke engines are kind of the norm now. No catalytic converter, though.
No way, we need to ban all the weird shit I personally don't like.
Well maybe they should! The whole idea of putting batteries everywhere makes as much sense as making a hundred hamburgers an hour and just throwing the ones people don't buy into the trash!
I don't have to know who an entity is to know what they're saying is stupid. If someone said Microsoft claimed that teenagers are huffing nuclear radon by collecting their farts in a bottle and using it to breathe Hadoukens with their minds, it would still be valid to observe that Microsoft is retarded, even if you have no idea who Microsoft is and decide it sounds like some dude's name.
You can buy AC/heat pump units with ice-based cold storage, designed for night time cooling using solar.
Which is hilariously far from 100% efficiency. Even batteries are more-efficient.
In winter, thermal mass can store excess heat very easily
Which requires installation of large thermal masses. It's an engineering problem I've approached frequently. $144,000 worth of beeswax is interesting for the purpose, if it doesn't autoignite.
And a commuter who works or shops near the grid (almost everyone) can use their EV to sell seasonal excess energy onto the grid.
Which is inefficient both in the cost of charging/discharging batteries (lossy, sends much of the energy to heat) and in the time restriction (there's a lower probability of energy being in-demand when you jack up a battery to dump it versus when you overproduce it). You'll also wear down your EV battery using it as ... well, a battery.
Grids *must* adapt to renewables or else.
Grids handle renewables just fine. They need giant, centralized, advanced compressed air energy storage, not little distributed batteries in everyone's houses.
we've been having these energy debates for generations now, so the obstructionism has become part and parcel of their identity as profligate consumers
It has more to do with coal and oil costing less than solar and wind until the recent decade. The costs are falling faster now than ever, too. Switching today is objectively-worse than switching in 5 years if it costs half as much in 5 years; eventually the delay is not cost-effective (technology tends to spike, plateau, and then idle until the next new breakthrough causes rapid growth as we explore its boundaries and refine our new knowledge).
If you implement a $50 billion solar infrastructure today, you produce a lot of toxic waste and consume loads of energy. Then, in 5 years, when the next guy can implement a $25 billion solar infrastructure, he can sell his power for half as much, undercut your prices, and put you out of business--all that toxic waste spewed for nothing, and then even more. 10 years from then, when the next guy can roll out his solar infrastructure for $23 billion... it's not going to get him the same conversion. That tech will come as the grid grows and as we service parts that break; we're not putting people out of business until we can undercut them enough to cause a mass exodus of their customer base.
Face it: Given 15 cent solar or 8 cent coal electricity, Americans will pay 8 cents for coal. We spend $175/month on electricity and nobody wants to spend $350/month just to say there's a solar plant somewhere producing power equivalent to what they draw. It's hard enough to get them to switch when the prices are the same, or even when it's just 0.1 cent cheaper to go with solar. I switched when it was costing me about $4/month more for solar, because the conversion rate on $175 of electricity from coal to solar for a cost of $4 is a relatively-large impact for very small investment--at scale, anyway.
Our political games are annoying and impede progress; but there has to be progress to impede first. You cannot violate the laws of economics because economics is a trade of time, and you can't magic time out of nowhere.