It's skill alright, but it's not IT skill. I never get burned because I interview well. I'm the guy who can pass a multiple-choice knowledge test on any subject, even if it's one I've never even heard of. When you get into subjects I actually understand, I have an answer for everything.
I flubbed one interview, hard. Phone interview. Two senior techs basically told me to start talking, with no direction. I was like, "...about what?" I have an answer for everything; I don't have a prepared speech for an open-ended interview where the interviewer isn't participating.
Fortunately for me, I can keep things running, and I develop new knowledge quickly. There are a lot of people who interview well, and plenty of them get to the job and turn out to be useless. There are also great candidates who can't articulate well and so sound like they don't know much about their job regardless of how they can actually perform--and can't get hired.
It's always been like that, although it used to be worse. We expand our population to carry capacity, which means our population grows rapidly when we feel like we live in a comfortable world of vast abundance and more-slowly when we feel like jobs are hard to come by and money's tight.
Remember the baby boomers from the tech growth in the 1970s? What about the boomer generation during the California Gold Rush? What about every single economic growth event in history that resulted in lots of work, lots of cheap goods, and population exploding?
I made $75k, put $18k into my 401(k) in one year, bought a house, bought a (2013) car (a Chevy Volt!), bought a motorcycle.
I could manage it in $45k, but it'd be hard. I'm paying double mortgage payments, shuffling $1,200/month to knock down credit card debt (took a cash advance to insulate a room in my house, cut 20% off my heating bill), and spent a few thousand in psychiatric care over the last year. I'm spending this year poor focusing on debt management--credit card, mortgage, car loan--and next year I want a $3,000 bed, an electrical upgrade, and a central heat pump (comfort is rather important: I have serious insomnia problems and drugs don't fix it).
At $45k, I'd be able to pay my mortgage and my car loan; I'd only be able to buy junk and home improvement at half the rate I do now. The last five years would have taken ten years. I have cash holdings and three layers of financial contingencies, and don't live paycheck-to-paycheck.
Fun fact: buying a car is hard when you're spending all your money on rent and food.
Competition isn't "Nike and Puma both sell shoes." Competition is universal. You have $50,000 every year to spend, and there are $140,000 worth of goods you'd like to buy. With everyone buying a $400 tablet and a $400 phone, a $100 pair of Crocs or Uggs might not fit the budget anymore.
10 years ago. 5 years ago. This has been a continuous phenomena which some firms have occasionally tried to portray as edgy. I've had three firms hire me because I seemed to know about stuff, and one because a recruiter told them I seemed to know enough to fit the job.
We need people well-versed in economics to run our public policy machine. Not just people who took economics in college, but people who have pushed the boundaries.
Business isn't economics. What's good for business is good for a business, but not necessarily good for the economy as a whole. That isn't to say we can't accomplish things directly-beneficial to businesses and the economy, rather than things which have an indirect benefit to businesses by strengthening our economy. In reverse reasoning: taxing by revenue or jacking up payroll taxes would be bad for our economy and directly bad for businesses; thus there may be existing situations which, if remediated, are good for businesses and good for the economy.
So here's an economics perspective on one small piece.
Business payroll taxes are essentially an increase in wages without that increase going to the hands of the worker. That is: A business pays $60k to employ you, but you only get $45k, upon which you pay taxes. If you're not involved in making something which generates revenue beyond the cost of that $60k diffused through the time you put into each unit of that something (that includes any involvement in any activity the business requires to continue to function and produce that thing), then you're not drawing in enough money for the business to pay you. That means prices must cover your wages, and it means that prices are adjusted to a $60k wage while you receive a $45k wage.
A payroll tax cut bringing that down to $55k means that any pressure on prices can yield roughly 8% further. If you have sufficient competition, your competitors may then gain an advantage (and profits) undercutting you a further 8%, increasing that pressure. The lower costs reduce risk, because a market dip is not as costly and thus doesn't have as strong a financial impact (it's 8% less severe), which stabilizes the business as well.
Such price reduction means that consumers can purchase more (the difference). This kind of price reduction doesn't involve reducing wage-labor hours, but rather wages, without reducing wages received by the employee. That means no job loss, yet greater demand--jobs gained. Technically, that's active labor force growth (the same kind of economic growth as population growth), although I would argue that finding a way to reduce the payroll tax as such without reducing the effectiveness of government services rendered is a form of technical progress.
So that would be good for business (lower costs) and good for the economy.
That's a particular example. It's relevant to me because I worked out how to improve our social security structure and remediate many of the problems with modern welfare with a sharp reduction in individual retained taxes, a 0.9% marginal reduction in payroll taxes, and a 2.5% marginal reduction in business income (profits) taxes. Tax cuts across the board, while providing broad coverage for the welfare and security of the American people in the lowest and middle classes.
Economics, finance, and business, all at once. Being a polymath kind of helps, I guess.
Maybe I'm crediting them too much with an understanding of economics, but the fact of the matter is you don't want the technology to move faster than the legal framework allowing said technology.
When tech is new, it's risky and expensive. Adopting new technology is a strategic shift, and that means businesses do it at different paces. Early adopters, late adopters, slower roll-outs, faster roll-outs. You get in early, you get ahead of the competition; you get in later, you get more-mature technology at a lower cost, a better total ROI, and a better long-term position against your competition.
If you drop a new, mature, cheap technology on the economy, you get a giant, rapid movement forward. Think Industrial Revolution: "New Technology" always means "reduction in total labor required to produce an output" (technical progress), which means jobs go away, and you made all the jobs go away at once. Mass-unemployment is the only outcome.
So normally, you'd get self-driving taxis, self-driving lorries, and self-driving delivery vehicles. Every taxi company, shipping firm, and Pizza Hut isn't going to jump on all at once. Uber is going to be an early adopter in the taxi sphere (which is game-changing: it's not a "taxi" if there's no certified, background checked cab driver at all; it's more like ZipCar). Even they'll need venture capital; other, established firms might add a few to their fleet, eventually, at different paces. The same goes for shipping firms; and delivery places aren't all going to spent $50,000 on a new self-driving car and a portable vending machine to hand out pizza right now.
That means your outflow of taxi drivers, truckers, and delivery drivers is buffered by a reduction of late retirement and a reduction of new entrants to the market, mainly. There's an adjustment in labor targeting. With the reduced costs, price competition brings down shipping prices and self-driving taxi prices, allowing consumers to buy more, which requires more shipping, and so will help retain some of the shipping labor. This accelerates as the technology matures, as does the market's response, thus minimizing the spot unemployment impact at any time.
So, what if you don't get legislation in to allow the technology to grow as such?
Technology fully matures. You pass legislation late. Suddenly: 3.8 million unemployed truckers, 1.2 million unemployed taxi drivers, and who knows how many unemployed pizza delivery dudes? Unemployment's going to jump up to 8%-11% over the span of 6 months.
Do you want a 0.2%-0.4% temporary increase in unemployment, or a six-year recession with a 5%-8% increase in unemployment?
Why does it seem instead of this happening (as predicted by Keynes a century ago), what we really get are fewer people, holding more wealth and clamoring for even more wealth?
Because you have mangled second-hand information.
Look back at 1998. 128k ISDN, $35/month. Today, I spend $87/month and get 200MBit. I can get $56,000/month worth of Internet for $87.
Those home telephone lines for $30/month became cell phone lines when those $4,000 cell phones got down to like $500. Now I pay $160 for a year of unlimited voice and mms, plus 2GB/month of high-speed data and unlimited throttled data; I have a $350 smartphone, essentially a quad-core computer with a couple gigs of RAM in my pocket. Cars, computers, and phones are pretty much just moving advances in technology downward, packing in the luxury options as lower-end options and standard features on the models fitting lower incomes.
The percentage of a median income spent on food, clothing, and other goods shrinks as well; and yet people continue this narrative that the median income wage has not grown, or has shrunk, over the past 40 years. The last time I won that argument (yesterday), the other guy tried moving the goalposts: after posting the infamous chart about median income wages stagnating, he said nobody on a minimum-wage is getting richer. A lot of people just tell me that the ability to buy things isn't wealth--which begs the question, what the hell is an increase in wages? Frequently, people simply cop out and say that "real wages" haven't changed, with real wages being adjusted for inflation, and with no explanation for how these wages still buy more and more stuff every year.
There are a lot of narratives like that. The CEO narrative is the other big one. People talk about how CEOs should give their money to their employees so everyone gets raises; yet a comprehensive examination of any executive compensation package generally turns this statement into "CEOs should buy their employees a latte from Starbucks once a month. One latte per employee." Cash compensation--dividends, bonuses, and salaries--comes from revenue; stocks and options are just commanded into existence at the expense of other investors, and compensating all employees in stock as a universal strategy would have the same effect on stock prices as printing money has on inflation. You end up working out that executives get roughly 0.7-2.1 cents per employee per hour of cash compensation--the limits of wage increases they could give to their employees if they sacrificed their incomes are effectively nothing.
There's also the tax argument about rich people, but rich individuals can't escape taxes. Businesses have a limited but real capacity to play with the tax system. Executives pay full income taxes on stocks at issue based on their valuation at issue, stocks when options are exercised, all dividends even when reinvested, cash bonuses, and cash salary. When executives sell those stocks, they pay taxes on the difference between the stock's current market value and its market value at issue. For stocks sold within one year, that's regular income; for stocks sold later, it's 15% capital gains. Overall, executives generally pay around 38.5% in taxes, rather than the 39.6% tax bracket. Most people claim that rich people only pay 15% in taxes--which doesn't make sense at all, unless they're only quoting capital gains, which of course only applies to a fraction of the income provided by stock issuance.
All of these broken narratives about how the rich are getting richer at an incredible rate and everyone else is getting poorer. The rich are getting a bigger share of the income, slowly; that income gap is precisely what makes progressive tax systems effective. Currently the upper 10% have just under 50% of the income, and the lower 90% have just under 50% in total. A 1% income tax raise on the upper tenth and a 1% reduction on everyone else gets the same tax revenue. If
Efficiency is the difference between 2016 and 1600 BCE. Also the difference between wealthy European states and shitholes like North Korea where people live in universal poverty.
We do get a few minor bruises getting there. There's a reason we need universal Social Security--which the United States in particular can implement trivially. Each step of progress reduces costs in the only real way costs come down: reducing wage-labor hours paid. That means people get stuck in transitional unemployment, and underemployment is rampant and a constant blight on our society. For the great and ever-increasing wealth we as a society experience, we all participate in what is effectively an unemployment lottery, with an extreme minority facing the destruction of their lives and livelihoods so the rest of us may benefit.
A universal Social Security in the United States would reduce taxes retained in total across the semi-monthly period at all income levels. Such a system, implemented in the crudest, unadjusted manner, would provide at the minimum an increase in take-home pay per year at $90,000, for which an individual filer takes home over $4,000 more, and a married household retains nearly $11,000 additional income. The highest-earner tax bracket falls from 39.6% to 35%. Payroll taxes fall by 0.9% immediately, and the corporate income tax falls from 35% to 32.5%. We gain, in large part, a discretion for the future, a mote of breathing room for the levy of taxes in our times of need to come, by relieving only so little of the pressure on our taxpayers from the very poorest to the very richest.
Such a system, funded by a 15% flat income tax replacing half of the sum of current tax brackets plus the 12.5% OASDI bracket, would pay, as of 2017, $729.25/month to every American adult. Simultaneously, we would continue full OASDI benefits to retirees and the disabled, and increase our focus on childcare benefits for programs like TANF and WIC (since the parents get a flat cash benefit and the children...don't).
Because of the funding structure, this program's benefit increases in buying power over time and, notably, increases as a proportion of Social Security retirement benefits. In 2010, the Universal Social Security would have represented 50.8% of the average OASDI Retirement benefit; in 2016, it would represent 54.4%. By 2090, this program would overtake OASDI benefits entirely, requiring a continuous lowering of the OASDI payroll tax, the eventual extension of the minimum age of recipients to 16 years, and the slow reduction of the tax funding source such that we keep people reasonably-well above the poverty line, but not so much as to make a wage unjustifiable. Because this overlaps with and thus partially-replaces OASDI, it immediately solves all of Social Security's long-term solvency concerns, although Social Security is not currently at risk of becoming insolvent.
All of this is readily accomplished without reducing state benefits, education benefits, medical benefits, retirement benefits, or childcare benefits. The stability of the American worker is assured even in the worst recessions, in which America will be supported by the continuing stimulus effect and thus will suffer less economic harm and hurl toward a more-expedient recovery.
I am confident Amazon will replace their cashiers eventually. So will McDonalds. We'll replace everyone eventually--not with the robot apocalypse, but with other jobs which leverage more automation to produce more with fewer labor-hours. We will see a day soon when we can enjoy an even-greater standard-of-living with as little as 32 or even 28 working-hours per week declared as full-time employment in an amended Fair Labor Standards Act, a trade-off of an even greater capacity to purchase goods and services for instead the simple time to enjoy our ever-amassing wealth. We will see a day soon when the world of the early 21st century looks as the world of the late 20th century appears now. People will lose their jobs, and they wi
You search for map sites like mapquest.com, bing maps, yahoo maps, and Google maps? I'm pretty sure any of those four belongs on the 9,874th page of a google search for "maps".
Google doesn't appear to bury me in ads. I don't have an adblocker installed.
That's probably because Google users use Google maps. In the US, Google just shows you a map if you search for something mappable, like a hotel, a particular store, or an address. Clicking it takes you to the Google Maps result.
Imagine if you searched for a nearby pharmacy, then had to look up their hours, then go to Google Maps to search for such pharmacies near you. Instead, if I type "CVS Pharmacy Hours" into Google, it gives me that immediately, as well as a map showing the nearest one--which takes me to Google maps. I can make decisions about new information while gathering information, and those decisions are largely supported by the next steps being right in front of me.
I'm not sure how this one works. Google can find information, in this case about products. Searching for a product would normally just bring up Amazon, and skip the price comparison altogether. Is Google just not allowed to supply this service?
Companies don't choose to do anything of the sort. If you're building hard drives, you can sell 4TB drives when they're as cheap to produce as 2TB drives used to be--because people want to buy them. If you put out $100 4TB drives and people buy 2TB drives for $50 instead, well... then you're making 2TB drives.
This isn't a trickle-down economy. You don't go out, start a business, and push your success out to the masses by creating jobs and shoving products down peoples's throats. We have a demand economy: you start a business and you capture part of the available buying power, and now that's unavailable to any other vendor. If more customers come than to whom you can supply, then you hire more workers and increase your capacity.
Also, the "very bad for the American worker" thing is begging the question.
Ah, I can't always tell. I know some things that make me prone to identify things differently from other people--most notably economics (which nobody is happy about), but also some armchair psychiatry stuff. I'm still waiting for them to figure out Atomoxetine is a mild antipsychotic (norepinephrine in the prefrontal cortex agonizes D2 in the prefrontal region, which downregulates D1) and that schizoids don't become dangerously-psychotic when exposed to dopaminergics because of a cognitive resistance.
That last one is an interesting hypothesis, by the way. We know schizoids tend to not trust their senses--things like having a person enter their house for five minutes, then going to take a shower after they leave and constantly checking around corners because they're not 100% sure they're not imagining an empty house (despite a lack of actual hallucinations ever). Drugs to treat the negative symptoms of schizophrenia are dopaminergic, and tend to exacerbate the positive symptoms (hallucinations, delusions, manias); schizoids tend to be resistant to the psychotic effect of such drugs for unknown reasons.... which is exactly what would happen if you constantly second-guessed your own thoughts, as if you worried everything you perceived might be a psychotic delusion.
So here's the fun part: Schizoids don't volunteer information like this, and nobody asks. Treatment guidelines for SPD say don't. Seriously. If you're a psychiatrist or a therapist and a schizoid shows up in your office, figure out what specific problem they're having today and treat the symptom. Don't attempt to treat the cause; it won't work.
Prefrontal issues are within my sphere of interests because of attention-system problems. It turns out all this shit is really interesting. I'm kind of annoyed that Texas is so frigging far behind that they're just discovering the concept of distraction.
Actually this is viable. For most people, "I'll buy it when I have more money" becomes "it's not worth it to me now" later. When you've had a turn of good-faith and you're not a sociopath, it becomes more of a dutiful obligation.
In other words: this cost nothing and some people are more-likely to purchase the game later. An arms race against piracy costs a lot of money and largely stops a few people temporarily, while the ones who don't get the hammer brought down on them largely don't care and find another way, all the while inducing nobody to actually pay you.
Basic negotiation. His legal obligations are limited because he can stop big-time distributors, but not the individual clients of those distributors. He wants those clients to purchase legitimately from him. Thus he needs to negotiate with those clients for best results, and an extension of good-faith and fraternity will bring them to identify more with him and, in some subset of cases, to become amenable to supporting his particular brand. You have just broadened your basis of brand loyalty.
Here's the thing: when you get an IT degree, you don't get this knowledge. You get a 4 year Bachelor's of Applied Science in Information Technology from a $140,000 university, and you've learned something about routers, cables, servers, and some data center management. Those IT degrees are super-fluffed-up, and they don't include a whole hell of a lot of useful information. Most of it is "intro to...". For example, the local university here supplies a Bachelor's of Applied Science that includes intro to database design, intro to data communications and networks, software and hardware concepts, some math, some statistics (math), economics, and structured systems design. So you're looking at two database courses, two networking courses, a basic explanation of what a computer does, one course about complex system architecture, and then math and economics and technical writing. Or, in short, "I know what a computer is."
You can go to college for Network Engineering, and learn about how networks operate at every level, with a deep exploration of routing protocols, of switching technology, of networking architecture, the whole lot. You can get a four-year BAS in Database Design and Administration. You can get an IT or IS degree that makes sure you've taken a long look at the glossary of terms.
You can't pick up a Network Engineer, DBA, or Programmer by grabbing some high school kid who "liked computers" and training him for a couple months. For what's described as just "IT" and not an engineering-level job, you can pick a guy off the street and teach him how to plug the little wires in correctly.
We're constantly working toward that, more and more. You want comprehensive network security? Plan out your programmable switches, your IDS sensors, malware trackers and detonators, and so forth. Then, send your boots-on-the-ground to go plug all that shit in and give it the right IP address. One of these is a massive exercise in understanding complex architecture, identifying major trunks in your network, capacity planning for how you're getting all this information together and how much your new IDS can handle, and simple risk trade-offs on what you can and can't see within the limits of your budgets. The other is plugging things in.
Sure, you can outsource programming, or network design, or what have you; and you can outsource it to a highly-trained and experienced professional. You can hire a frigging Wendy's cashier to handle a temporary data entry clerk position, or to help rack some of these servers. More and more, we're seeing the ability to plug-and-play certain devices without heavy engineering, too; and some devices let the engineers design it once and then send it out to groups of devices, so you don't need 8 people configuring your 400 firewalls anymore because you have CISCO's management center or FortiManager or whatnot. Soon, the intermediary "I designed complex architecture and this Networking dude is configuring the switch" jobs are going to be cut down to "I designed complex architecture and configurations, and that intern racked the server; it's in my management center now, and I hit Apply."
You're talking about Systems Engineers. People who say, "Your business needs what? A customer relations management system that integrates with your Active Directory domain and your PMIS?" and then sit down and solve out how to do it. They may not be able to put it all into practice; they might be able to describe software architecture, networking architecture, and other stuff that other highly-skilled and less-skilled components of your business can assemble together.
You can replace most lower-level IT with someone who's been trained for a few weeks. In smaller shops (and yes, I've seen $2Bn businesses with smaller shops), you don't even have lower-level IT; you have your highly-skilled network engineers, and they have so little to do that you make them run cable and rack servers. In big shops, you have infrastructure engineers and network engineers designing the data center and making up all the routing and VLAN and firewall rules, and you have a bunch of IT monkeys running around pulling cables and sticking servers into racks because real engineers have no time for that.
Kind of. Some sites have a lot of images to load and can either have image tags or can use JavaScript to do fancy things to set the images. Much JS is poorly-coded, so yes, it eats your desktop as well as your mobile device. Likewise, a lot of JS that shouldn't load on mobile... does, and doesn't end its timers and such, so it keeps running.
AMP mainly tries to restrict what you can do. It says, "On a mobile device, you can't do certain resource-heavy things anymore," so you're forced to at least fall into a reasonable standard. Whether this is a viable approach or not remains to be seen.
It's not, not yet. It can, and it has--the Great Depression and the Industrial Revolution had pretty bad immediate effects--but for now, it's just economy.
Technical progress always means reducing labor required to accomplish an output. That means lay-offs, transitional unemployment, and so forth. People can get quite vocal about little things.
Think about it this way: 2-3 sports players die every year from a minor flaw in the human cardiovascular system. A college hockey player or a high school baseball player will take a puck or ball to the chest, and his heart will stop--permanently. Every heartbeat requires an ion channel reset; it takes 30mS, and a low-energy impact to the heart during this window puts the heart into permanent fibrillation. A heart rate of 120 means you're vulnerable to this for 60mS of every second.
Imagine if that made CNN and Fox News.
There would be a 10-year holy war about how we need to abolish all high school sports involving any sort of possible impact. Every few months, we'd re-kindle it by bringing a new face into the death-by-hockey-puck dialogue.
We do this with businesses. We lay off people constantly. The economy is growing, the number of jobs is increasing, and we point at the constant stream of thousands of lay-offs in the midst of millions of new jobs and loudly proclaim that our economy is dying. A lack of apoptosis is called cancer.
Mind you, we've got another recession coming up in a few months. We really will get a new unemployment spike then; that's going to happen. Different problem.
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That requires an understanding of economics. He even claimed it's zero-sum, which is a direct claim that technical progress doesn't exist.
It's skill alright, but it's not IT skill. I never get burned because I interview well. I'm the guy who can pass a multiple-choice knowledge test on any subject, even if it's one I've never even heard of. When you get into subjects I actually understand, I have an answer for everything.
I flubbed one interview, hard. Phone interview. Two senior techs basically told me to start talking, with no direction. I was like, "...about what?" I have an answer for everything; I don't have a prepared speech for an open-ended interview where the interviewer isn't participating.
Fortunately for me, I can keep things running, and I develop new knowledge quickly. There are a lot of people who interview well, and plenty of them get to the job and turn out to be useless. There are also great candidates who can't articulate well and so sound like they don't know much about their job regardless of how they can actually perform--and can't get hired.
It's always been like that, although it used to be worse. We expand our population to carry capacity, which means our population grows rapidly when we feel like we live in a comfortable world of vast abundance and more-slowly when we feel like jobs are hard to come by and money's tight.
Remember the baby boomers from the tech growth in the 1970s? What about the boomer generation during the California Gold Rush? What about every single economic growth event in history that resulted in lots of work, lots of cheap goods, and population exploding?
You're stealing my material man. I got a shitstorm yesterday for pointing this out.
I made $75k, put $18k into my 401(k) in one year, bought a house, bought a (2013) car (a Chevy Volt!), bought a motorcycle.
I could manage it in $45k, but it'd be hard. I'm paying double mortgage payments, shuffling $1,200/month to knock down credit card debt (took a cash advance to insulate a room in my house, cut 20% off my heating bill), and spent a few thousand in psychiatric care over the last year. I'm spending this year poor focusing on debt management--credit card, mortgage, car loan--and next year I want a $3,000 bed, an electrical upgrade, and a central heat pump (comfort is rather important: I have serious insomnia problems and drugs don't fix it).
At $45k, I'd be able to pay my mortgage and my car loan; I'd only be able to buy junk and home improvement at half the rate I do now. The last five years would have taken ten years. I have cash holdings and three layers of financial contingencies, and don't live paycheck-to-paycheck.
Fun fact: buying a car is hard when you're spending all your money on rent and food.
Competition isn't "Nike and Puma both sell shoes." Competition is universal. You have $50,000 every year to spend, and there are $140,000 worth of goods you'd like to buy. With everyone buying a $400 tablet and a $400 phone, a $100 pair of Crocs or Uggs might not fit the budget anymore.
You should read the book, "Godless Bullshit What My Kid Don't Need Learnin'."
10 years ago. 5 years ago. This has been a continuous phenomena which some firms have occasionally tried to portray as edgy. I've had three firms hire me because I seemed to know about stuff, and one because a recruiter told them I seemed to know enough to fit the job.
VAT is regressive and non-representative.
We need people well-versed in economics to run our public policy machine. Not just people who took economics in college, but people who have pushed the boundaries.
Business isn't economics. What's good for business is good for a business, but not necessarily good for the economy as a whole. That isn't to say we can't accomplish things directly-beneficial to businesses and the economy, rather than things which have an indirect benefit to businesses by strengthening our economy. In reverse reasoning: taxing by revenue or jacking up payroll taxes would be bad for our economy and directly bad for businesses; thus there may be existing situations which, if remediated, are good for businesses and good for the economy.
So here's an economics perspective on one small piece.
Business payroll taxes are essentially an increase in wages without that increase going to the hands of the worker. That is: A business pays $60k to employ you, but you only get $45k, upon which you pay taxes. If you're not involved in making something which generates revenue beyond the cost of that $60k diffused through the time you put into each unit of that something (that includes any involvement in any activity the business requires to continue to function and produce that thing), then you're not drawing in enough money for the business to pay you. That means prices must cover your wages, and it means that prices are adjusted to a $60k wage while you receive a $45k wage.
A payroll tax cut bringing that down to $55k means that any pressure on prices can yield roughly 8% further. If you have sufficient competition, your competitors may then gain an advantage (and profits) undercutting you a further 8%, increasing that pressure. The lower costs reduce risk, because a market dip is not as costly and thus doesn't have as strong a financial impact (it's 8% less severe), which stabilizes the business as well.
Such price reduction means that consumers can purchase more (the difference). This kind of price reduction doesn't involve reducing wage-labor hours, but rather wages, without reducing wages received by the employee. That means no job loss, yet greater demand--jobs gained. Technically, that's active labor force growth (the same kind of economic growth as population growth), although I would argue that finding a way to reduce the payroll tax as such without reducing the effectiveness of government services rendered is a form of technical progress.
So that would be good for business (lower costs) and good for the economy.
That's a particular example. It's relevant to me because I worked out how to improve our social security structure and remediate many of the problems with modern welfare with a sharp reduction in individual retained taxes, a 0.9% marginal reduction in payroll taxes, and a 2.5% marginal reduction in business income (profits) taxes. Tax cuts across the board, while providing broad coverage for the welfare and security of the American people in the lowest and middle classes.
Economics, finance, and business, all at once. Being a polymath kind of helps, I guess.
Maybe I'm crediting them too much with an understanding of economics, but the fact of the matter is you don't want the technology to move faster than the legal framework allowing said technology.
When tech is new, it's risky and expensive. Adopting new technology is a strategic shift, and that means businesses do it at different paces. Early adopters, late adopters, slower roll-outs, faster roll-outs. You get in early, you get ahead of the competition; you get in later, you get more-mature technology at a lower cost, a better total ROI, and a better long-term position against your competition.
If you drop a new, mature, cheap technology on the economy, you get a giant, rapid movement forward. Think Industrial Revolution: "New Technology" always means "reduction in total labor required to produce an output" (technical progress), which means jobs go away, and you made all the jobs go away at once. Mass-unemployment is the only outcome.
So normally, you'd get self-driving taxis, self-driving lorries, and self-driving delivery vehicles. Every taxi company, shipping firm, and Pizza Hut isn't going to jump on all at once. Uber is going to be an early adopter in the taxi sphere (which is game-changing: it's not a "taxi" if there's no certified, background checked cab driver at all; it's more like ZipCar). Even they'll need venture capital; other, established firms might add a few to their fleet, eventually, at different paces. The same goes for shipping firms; and delivery places aren't all going to spent $50,000 on a new self-driving car and a portable vending machine to hand out pizza right now.
That means your outflow of taxi drivers, truckers, and delivery drivers is buffered by a reduction of late retirement and a reduction of new entrants to the market, mainly. There's an adjustment in labor targeting. With the reduced costs, price competition brings down shipping prices and self-driving taxi prices, allowing consumers to buy more, which requires more shipping, and so will help retain some of the shipping labor. This accelerates as the technology matures, as does the market's response, thus minimizing the spot unemployment impact at any time.
So, what if you don't get legislation in to allow the technology to grow as such?
Technology fully matures. You pass legislation late. Suddenly: 3.8 million unemployed truckers, 1.2 million unemployed taxi drivers, and who knows how many unemployed pizza delivery dudes? Unemployment's going to jump up to 8%-11% over the span of 6 months.
Do you want a 0.2%-0.4% temporary increase in unemployment, or a six-year recession with a 5%-8% increase in unemployment?
Why does it seem instead of this happening (as predicted by Keynes a century ago), what we really get are fewer people, holding more wealth and clamoring for even more wealth?
Because you have mangled second-hand information.
Look back at 1998. 128k ISDN, $35/month. Today, I spend $87/month and get 200MBit. I can get $56,000/month worth of Internet for $87.
Those home telephone lines for $30/month became cell phone lines when those $4,000 cell phones got down to like $500. Now I pay $160 for a year of unlimited voice and mms, plus 2GB/month of high-speed data and unlimited throttled data; I have a $350 smartphone, essentially a quad-core computer with a couple gigs of RAM in my pocket. Cars, computers, and phones are pretty much just moving advances in technology downward, packing in the luxury options as lower-end options and standard features on the models fitting lower incomes.
The percentage of a median income spent on food, clothing, and other goods shrinks as well; and yet people continue this narrative that the median income wage has not grown, or has shrunk, over the past 40 years. The last time I won that argument (yesterday), the other guy tried moving the goalposts: after posting the infamous chart about median income wages stagnating, he said nobody on a minimum-wage is getting richer. A lot of people just tell me that the ability to buy things isn't wealth--which begs the question, what the hell is an increase in wages? Frequently, people simply cop out and say that "real wages" haven't changed, with real wages being adjusted for inflation, and with no explanation for how these wages still buy more and more stuff every year.
There are a lot of narratives like that. The CEO narrative is the other big one. People talk about how CEOs should give their money to their employees so everyone gets raises; yet a comprehensive examination of any executive compensation package generally turns this statement into "CEOs should buy their employees a latte from Starbucks once a month. One latte per employee." Cash compensation--dividends, bonuses, and salaries--comes from revenue; stocks and options are just commanded into existence at the expense of other investors, and compensating all employees in stock as a universal strategy would have the same effect on stock prices as printing money has on inflation. You end up working out that executives get roughly 0.7-2.1 cents per employee per hour of cash compensation--the limits of wage increases they could give to their employees if they sacrificed their incomes are effectively nothing.
There's also the tax argument about rich people, but rich individuals can't escape taxes. Businesses have a limited but real capacity to play with the tax system. Executives pay full income taxes on stocks at issue based on their valuation at issue, stocks when options are exercised, all dividends even when reinvested, cash bonuses, and cash salary. When executives sell those stocks, they pay taxes on the difference between the stock's current market value and its market value at issue. For stocks sold within one year, that's regular income; for stocks sold later, it's 15% capital gains. Overall, executives generally pay around 38.5% in taxes, rather than the 39.6% tax bracket. Most people claim that rich people only pay 15% in taxes--which doesn't make sense at all, unless they're only quoting capital gains, which of course only applies to a fraction of the income provided by stock issuance.
All of these broken narratives about how the rich are getting richer at an incredible rate and everyone else is getting poorer. The rich are getting a bigger share of the income, slowly; that income gap is precisely what makes progressive tax systems effective. Currently the upper 10% have just under 50% of the income, and the lower 90% have just under 50% in total. A 1% income tax raise on the upper tenth and a 1% reduction on everyone else gets the same tax revenue. If
Efficiency is the difference between 2016 and 1600 BCE. Also the difference between wealthy European states and shitholes like North Korea where people live in universal poverty.
We do get a few minor bruises getting there. There's a reason we need universal Social Security--which the United States in particular can implement trivially. Each step of progress reduces costs in the only real way costs come down: reducing wage-labor hours paid. That means people get stuck in transitional unemployment, and underemployment is rampant and a constant blight on our society. For the great and ever-increasing wealth we as a society experience, we all participate in what is effectively an unemployment lottery, with an extreme minority facing the destruction of their lives and livelihoods so the rest of us may benefit.
A universal Social Security in the United States would reduce taxes retained in total across the semi-monthly period at all income levels. Such a system, implemented in the crudest, unadjusted manner, would provide at the minimum an increase in take-home pay per year at $90,000, for which an individual filer takes home over $4,000 more, and a married household retains nearly $11,000 additional income. The highest-earner tax bracket falls from 39.6% to 35%. Payroll taxes fall by 0.9% immediately, and the corporate income tax falls from 35% to 32.5%. We gain, in large part, a discretion for the future, a mote of breathing room for the levy of taxes in our times of need to come, by relieving only so little of the pressure on our taxpayers from the very poorest to the very richest.
Such a system, funded by a 15% flat income tax replacing half of the sum of current tax brackets plus the 12.5% OASDI bracket, would pay, as of 2017, $729.25/month to every American adult. Simultaneously, we would continue full OASDI benefits to retirees and the disabled, and increase our focus on childcare benefits for programs like TANF and WIC (since the parents get a flat cash benefit and the children...don't).
Because of the funding structure, this program's benefit increases in buying power over time and, notably, increases as a proportion of Social Security retirement benefits. In 2010, the Universal Social Security would have represented 50.8% of the average OASDI Retirement benefit; in 2016, it would represent 54.4%. By 2090, this program would overtake OASDI benefits entirely, requiring a continuous lowering of the OASDI payroll tax, the eventual extension of the minimum age of recipients to 16 years, and the slow reduction of the tax funding source such that we keep people reasonably-well above the poverty line, but not so much as to make a wage unjustifiable. Because this overlaps with and thus partially-replaces OASDI, it immediately solves all of Social Security's long-term solvency concerns, although Social Security is not currently at risk of becoming insolvent.
All of this is readily accomplished without reducing state benefits, education benefits, medical benefits, retirement benefits, or childcare benefits. The stability of the American worker is assured even in the worst recessions, in which America will be supported by the continuing stimulus effect and thus will suffer less economic harm and hurl toward a more-expedient recovery.
I am confident Amazon will replace their cashiers eventually. So will McDonalds. We'll replace everyone eventually--not with the robot apocalypse, but with other jobs which leverage more automation to produce more with fewer labor-hours. We will see a day soon when we can enjoy an even-greater standard-of-living with as little as 32 or even 28 working-hours per week declared as full-time employment in an amended Fair Labor Standards Act, a trade-off of an even greater capacity to purchase goods and services for instead the simple time to enjoy our ever-amassing wealth. We will see a day soon when the world of the early 21st century looks as the world of the late 20th century appears now. People will lose their jobs, and they wi
You search for map sites like mapquest.com, bing maps, yahoo maps, and Google maps? I'm pretty sure any of those four belongs on the 9,874th page of a google search for "maps".
Google doesn't appear to bury me in ads. I don't have an adblocker installed.
That's probably because Google users use Google maps. In the US, Google just shows you a map if you search for something mappable, like a hotel, a particular store, or an address. Clicking it takes you to the Google Maps result.
Imagine if you searched for a nearby pharmacy, then had to look up their hours, then go to Google Maps to search for such pharmacies near you. Instead, if I type "CVS Pharmacy Hours" into Google, it gives me that immediately, as well as a map showing the nearest one--which takes me to Google maps. I can make decisions about new information while gathering information, and those decisions are largely supported by the next steps being right in front of me.
If I wanted to use Bing, I'd go to Bing.
I'm not sure how this one works. Google can find information, in this case about products. Searching for a product would normally just bring up Amazon, and skip the price comparison altogether. Is Google just not allowed to supply this service?
Companies don't choose to do anything of the sort. If you're building hard drives, you can sell 4TB drives when they're as cheap to produce as 2TB drives used to be--because people want to buy them. If you put out $100 4TB drives and people buy 2TB drives for $50 instead, well... then you're making 2TB drives.
This isn't a trickle-down economy. You don't go out, start a business, and push your success out to the masses by creating jobs and shoving products down peoples's throats. We have a demand economy: you start a business and you capture part of the available buying power, and now that's unavailable to any other vendor. If more customers come than to whom you can supply, then you hire more workers and increase your capacity.
Also, the "very bad for the American worker" thing is begging the question.
Ah, I can't always tell. I know some things that make me prone to identify things differently from other people--most notably economics (which nobody is happy about), but also some armchair psychiatry stuff. I'm still waiting for them to figure out Atomoxetine is a mild antipsychotic (norepinephrine in the prefrontal cortex agonizes D2 in the prefrontal region, which downregulates D1) and that schizoids don't become dangerously-psychotic when exposed to dopaminergics because of a cognitive resistance.
That last one is an interesting hypothesis, by the way. We know schizoids tend to not trust their senses--things like having a person enter their house for five minutes, then going to take a shower after they leave and constantly checking around corners because they're not 100% sure they're not imagining an empty house (despite a lack of actual hallucinations ever). Drugs to treat the negative symptoms of schizophrenia are dopaminergic, and tend to exacerbate the positive symptoms (hallucinations, delusions, manias); schizoids tend to be resistant to the psychotic effect of such drugs for unknown reasons. ... which is exactly what would happen if you constantly second-guessed your own thoughts, as if you worried everything you perceived might be a psychotic delusion.
So here's the fun part: Schizoids don't volunteer information like this, and nobody asks. Treatment guidelines for SPD say don't. Seriously. If you're a psychiatrist or a therapist and a schizoid shows up in your office, figure out what specific problem they're having today and treat the symptom. Don't attempt to treat the cause; it won't work.
Prefrontal issues are within my sphere of interests because of attention-system problems. It turns out all this shit is really interesting. I'm kind of annoyed that Texas is so frigging far behind that they're just discovering the concept of distraction.
No, it's just distraction. Your brain has to use extra power to compensate.
Actually this is viable. For most people, "I'll buy it when I have more money" becomes "it's not worth it to me now" later. When you've had a turn of good-faith and you're not a sociopath, it becomes more of a dutiful obligation.
In other words: this cost nothing and some people are more-likely to purchase the game later. An arms race against piracy costs a lot of money and largely stops a few people temporarily, while the ones who don't get the hammer brought down on them largely don't care and find another way, all the while inducing nobody to actually pay you.
Basic negotiation. His legal obligations are limited because he can stop big-time distributors, but not the individual clients of those distributors. He wants those clients to purchase legitimately from him. Thus he needs to negotiate with those clients for best results, and an extension of good-faith and fraternity will bring them to identify more with him and, in some subset of cases, to become amenable to supporting his particular brand. You have just broadened your basis of brand loyalty.
there are higher level jobs such as network/wifi
Network engineers.
systems/storage architects
Infrastructure engineers.
Here's the thing: when you get an IT degree, you don't get this knowledge. You get a 4 year Bachelor's of Applied Science in Information Technology from a $140,000 university, and you've learned something about routers, cables, servers, and some data center management. Those IT degrees are super-fluffed-up, and they don't include a whole hell of a lot of useful information. Most of it is "intro to...". For example, the local university here supplies a Bachelor's of Applied Science that includes intro to database design, intro to data communications and networks, software and hardware concepts, some math, some statistics (math), economics, and structured systems design. So you're looking at two database courses, two networking courses, a basic explanation of what a computer does, one course about complex system architecture, and then math and economics and technical writing. Or, in short, "I know what a computer is."
You can go to college for Network Engineering, and learn about how networks operate at every level, with a deep exploration of routing protocols, of switching technology, of networking architecture, the whole lot. You can get a four-year BAS in Database Design and Administration. You can get an IT or IS degree that makes sure you've taken a long look at the glossary of terms.
You can't pick up a Network Engineer, DBA, or Programmer by grabbing some high school kid who "liked computers" and training him for a couple months. For what's described as just "IT" and not an engineering-level job, you can pick a guy off the street and teach him how to plug the little wires in correctly.
We're constantly working toward that, more and more. You want comprehensive network security? Plan out your programmable switches, your IDS sensors, malware trackers and detonators, and so forth. Then, send your boots-on-the-ground to go plug all that shit in and give it the right IP address. One of these is a massive exercise in understanding complex architecture, identifying major trunks in your network, capacity planning for how you're getting all this information together and how much your new IDS can handle, and simple risk trade-offs on what you can and can't see within the limits of your budgets. The other is plugging things in.
Sure, you can outsource programming, or network design, or what have you; and you can outsource it to a highly-trained and experienced professional. You can hire a frigging Wendy's cashier to handle a temporary data entry clerk position, or to help rack some of these servers. More and more, we're seeing the ability to plug-and-play certain devices without heavy engineering, too; and some devices let the engineers design it once and then send it out to groups of devices, so you don't need 8 people configuring your 400 firewalls anymore because you have CISCO's management center or FortiManager or whatnot. Soon, the intermediary "I designed complex architecture and this Networking dude is configuring the switch" jobs are going to be cut down to "I designed complex architecture and configurations, and that intern racked the server; it's in my management center now, and I hit Apply."
"Soon" being "half a decade ago".
You're talking about Systems Engineers. People who say, "Your business needs what? A customer relations management system that integrates with your Active Directory domain and your PMIS?" and then sit down and solve out how to do it. They may not be able to put it all into practice; they might be able to describe software architecture, networking architecture, and other stuff that other highly-skilled and less-skilled components of your business can assemble together.
You can replace most lower-level IT with someone who's been trained for a few weeks. In smaller shops (and yes, I've seen $2Bn businesses with smaller shops), you don't even have lower-level IT; you have your highly-skilled network engineers, and they have so little to do that you make them run cable and rack servers. In big shops, you have infrastructure engineers and network engineers designing the data center and making up all the routing and VLAN and firewall rules, and you have a bunch of IT monkeys running around pulling cables and sticking servers into racks because real engineers have no time for that.
Kind of. Some sites have a lot of images to load and can either have image tags or can use JavaScript to do fancy things to set the images. Much JS is poorly-coded, so yes, it eats your desktop as well as your mobile device. Likewise, a lot of JS that shouldn't load on mobile ... does, and doesn't end its timers and such, so it keeps running.
AMP mainly tries to restrict what you can do. It says, "On a mobile device, you can't do certain resource-heavy things anymore," so you're forced to at least fall into a reasonable standard. Whether this is a viable approach or not remains to be seen.
Images aren't all specified in CSS. There's this <img/> tag ...
It's not, not yet. It can, and it has--the Great Depression and the Industrial Revolution had pretty bad immediate effects--but for now, it's just economy.
Technical progress always means reducing labor required to accomplish an output. That means lay-offs, transitional unemployment, and so forth. People can get quite vocal about little things.
Think about it this way: 2-3 sports players die every year from a minor flaw in the human cardiovascular system. A college hockey player or a high school baseball player will take a puck or ball to the chest, and his heart will stop--permanently. Every heartbeat requires an ion channel reset; it takes 30mS, and a low-energy impact to the heart during this window puts the heart into permanent fibrillation. A heart rate of 120 means you're vulnerable to this for 60mS of every second.
Imagine if that made CNN and Fox News.
There would be a 10-year holy war about how we need to abolish all high school sports involving any sort of possible impact. Every few months, we'd re-kindle it by bringing a new face into the death-by-hockey-puck dialogue.
We do this with businesses. We lay off people constantly. The economy is growing, the number of jobs is increasing, and we point at the constant stream of thousands of lay-offs in the midst of millions of new jobs and loudly proclaim that our economy is dying. A lack of apoptosis is called cancer.
Mind you, we've got another recession coming up in a few months. We really will get a new unemployment spike then; that's going to happen. Different problem.