"IT" is burger-flipper jobs. IT people rack servers, run cables, configure routers, and handle support tickets. They are your low-end, easily-replaced cogs.
You're looking at computer science and engineering people. Programmers, data analysts, computer engineers, the like. These people are highly-skilled, heavily-educated, and difficult to replace.
Someone on here once told me I should look into an online college instead of traditional Computer Science, because he has this really nice online college that was started by some governor. I took a look. They had Business Management and Information Technology, but no Computer Science. The guy couldn't understand the difference between CS and IT, and tried to explain that CS doesn't require math and that math is just fluff.
Technical progress. We can do X with fewer people now. A few things can happen.
In one case, we can do more X. People buy more services that require X. This means we still need those people, and they output more. Car manufacturers move car features down through their models as they become cheaper, and the various income levels buy a model that fits their desire to spend. We're still using the labor, just for other things. This is a complex example of consumer buying power creating demand for a new product, with the new product being added to a package that consumers are already buying.
We can do the same amount of X. That means we lay off a bunch of now-excess people. We can also do more X, but not quite so much more. This is one of many intermediaries, and it means we lay off fewer people.
We can do the same amount of X per-capita, and expand our population. As we erode the labor required to do X, we increase the population. The percentage of laborers invested in X decreases; at a certain equilibrium between technical progress and population growth, the number of laborers doesn't decrease. We can even increase the number of laborers doing X this way, but more-slowly than population expansion.
Cloud services centralize knowledge. Instead of 20 engineers at 20 companies learning lessons about VM and SAN management, you have 10 engineers servicing 20 companies all working in the same data center doing VM and SAN management. Every lesson learned in the context of one client is now available to apply to all clients. If they find a way to manage with less overhead, they don't need to repeat the whole process of developing a lower-effort management strategy; and they can apply this savings to all clients. At a point, each engineer can service multiple clients, and so the total jobs invested here go down.
People aren't much economists, so they just decide something must be obvious. They examine everything in a bubble, so much so that they assume a business can somehow create jobs and not simply allocate available job-creating demand to itself at the expense of jobs elsewhere. You get weird disconnects from that, like business X outcompeting business Y and creating 2,000 jobs, while business Y needed 3,000 jobs to do the same--and then business Y lays off 3,000 people and folks claim that the economy lost 3,000 jobs, and start attributing it to H1-B work or something.
The best part is when people claim H1-B labor is causing a reduction of employment. Not an increase in unemployment, but a reduction in total employment in the sector. H1-B labor would tend to increase total employment; any actual reduction in total employment means something else is happening.
That's what AMP is supposed to fix. "Responsive Design" means "Load the whole god damned thing, all 4 gigabytes, all the massive JavaScript, everything; then apply CSS to show it friendly-like on a Mobile Phone so it doesn't look like shit." AMP provides an alternate location, so your cell phone downloads only half a megabyte of crap, and starts downloading the 15MB of images as you scroll the page. It can also supply cut-back JavaScript and skip loading scripting blocks for high-intensity features that get cut from mobile.
I've seen cut-down designs provide feature subsets before. Sometimes I have to use the desktop site. Ideally, you frequently wouldn't, and so you'd get to skip all that garbage; it'd be great if you could do that on the desktop, too.
Anticapitalists and anarchocapitalists are both insane. People want either rampant socialism (the government owns all means of production) or they want the evil socialism to go away and the government to stop doing anything. In that latter case--the anarchocapitalism case--you have no regulations, and end up with big businesses buying each other, buying all small competitors, and then leveraging their position to make it very expensive to switch to their competitors. Then the megacorporation effectively controls the law of the land--rampant socialism with a figurehead government.
This is why many modern countries, including the United States, are social democracies with free enterprise markets. We have regulations to ensure that the free market keeps running as a free market by limiting the abuse possible under unconstrained free-market capitalism.
MongoDB would be great for building a PMIS; this is a financial exchange and will need synchronous, guaranteed, multi-step transactions with rollback capability. You want an RDBMS for that.
They want to pretend these are somehow a type of hard currency (commodity) and not a security.
This is similar to how people misrepresent the stock market as actual ownership of something or investment in a company. Many modern common stocks convey neither dividends nor voting rights(!), and so they're essentially worth nothing in their own right; buying stocks also doesn't give the company money, except at IPO. Stocks just represent trying to time it so that you buy something and then sell it to the next guy for more money, who in turn thinks he's going to do the same; somebody eventually winds up holding the bag when the price dips. Long-term stock market growth is pretty much just inflation.
You may as well buy and sell stock in Facebook profiles based on how popular they are with their friends.
True, the paragraph-level writing structure needs some work. I'm thinking more in terms of the strategic structure. A 250,000-page essay is going to be failure no matter how well-organized.
That's been debated quite a lot. At one time, the law actually suggested that a married woman had automatically consented forever; now we have spousal rape. At this point in time, we're apparently suggesting that a woman who has drunk alcohol in a place where she doesn't have full control over who else is there at any point in time means anyone who shows up can have sex with her, so long as she seems able to respond to external stimuli, even if her ability to reason about the situation around her is totally-compromised.
Essentially, you suggest that showing up to a party late enough that the chicks are drunk means you can automatically take advantage of their incapacity to make reasoned decisions in order to have sex with them. Technically, the law might allow that; how is this different from rape, when the law also explicitly claims administrative power over someone so compromises their ability to make independent decisions that they're likely to consent to sex even when largely reluctant and that such a situation is legally rape?
That's the thing: we've essentially determined the actual harm caused by VW's actions is... nothing. All modern gasoline and diesel vehicles pass the emissions tests designed to approve a vehicle for sale, and then produce shitloads more pollutants when on the road. They're all about on-par with VW, except VW apparently games the system directly when you stick their TDi on the rack for testing. Had VW played by the rules, the outcome would have been exactly the same--demonstrated by every other car company technically keeping to the rules of the game.
We either have nothing important happening here or we have a dire, industry-wide crisis. GP is arguing that it doesn't matter, because it's only vitally-important that VW get there by proper procedure, and that everything being equivalent in the end isn't a problem. If it's not a problem, then the rules VW violated are a waste of time and should be abolished.
Maybe. I'm not sure. You have to realize most of the readership in a political campaign have short attention spans and existing bias. What you describe works for people who are looking to educate themselves; for people who need their emotional basis or their beliefs changed, you need something different.
Persuasion when you need to spread an idea generally requires short, powerful arguments. You can't just sit down and start describing something in a technical sense, or explaining all the reasons why something is good; it will take forever, and you can't open up with why a thing is good for a particular person. You need to open up with something that generates interest, and you need to close concerns in ways which have already shoved this new information down someone's throat before they can open their mouth and protest that they think it won't work for $reasons.
The welfare troll problem is one I'm trying to work out ATM. I could write a small dissertation about poverty families and the aid they receive. Welfare trolls will like to point out that welfare households receive like $35,000 or $58,000 in aid and you propose some ~$8k (i.e. not enough); and then you get to spend 40 minutes making a long, boring argument nobody cares about, describing how much of that aid is State-level services, how the majority of that aid is for education and medical care that you don't touch, how the childcare component is provided for low-income families separate from the proposed Social Security plan, how the replaced Federal aid is almost exactly the same size as the proposed Social Security, and how approximately nobody actually receives all that aid anyway. You need facts and figures to back this up. Drawing the tables out, explaining it, and reasoning through it... you're dealing with an opponent who wants to be right, not someone who wants to self-educate.
You need to open that argument yourself, and you need to do it with a single statement that slams all of that information straight into their faces. This is why graphical representations are so powerful, and why they come first.
When you're giving a speech, you use less information, frequently. You use more words, you reiterate (tell them what you're going to tell them; tell them; tell them what you told them), and you try to control it to meet the attention span of your listeners. They only need to passively listen, so it's easier, and more-tolerable; active reading of some pages and pages of text is a nightmare. Besides being a different venue, speeches generally don't have pictures. When they do, we call them "presentations", and load up more technical data.
The interesting thing about this universal social security is it benefits everyone due to a reduction in effective tax rate everywhere. It solves many problems in our welfare system. It provides a stabilizing force that holds up people of all classes through recessions (one coming up around the beginning of 2018!) and other adverse financial events (losing your job would be bad, mmkay?). Everyone is somehow conditioned to think it's got to cost someone something; nobody wants to sit down and think about the entire frigging government budget, tax systems, and the like. People don't leave high school with economics and finance degrees.
So for an informative piece for people who have already become interested, the outline you provide might be useful. For people who aren't willing to devote significant time to reading, thinking, and responding to long and complicated explanations, you answer these questions by displaying the system in ways that make such things self-evident. Notice the graphics all display a reduction in effective taxes, answering #1 and #3. The graphics on individual, payroll, and corporate profit taxes answer #4. #2 is more-difficult, and also less-relevant: by the time you've gotten through the other things, the reader is now interested, and has the attention span to read about why--about all the benefits of such a plan, be
Uh... dimensional lumber is sized to standards published in 1961, agreed upon by one of the many American societies of engineers. In other news, oil is manufactured based on standards set by the Society of Automotive Engineers, and cat food has to meet published standards for cat food nutritional content.
but also cheats the customer out of the full width, breadth and length since they charge the same price.
How did you come to that conclusion? What comparison base do you have? Are you telling me that wood has a specific, universally-defined price as an inherent property, and that the only market force that affects the price of a piece of wood is the size at which it is advertised?
It's not that so much as the dialogue. "Look at how much poverty we have! The rich need to pay their fair share!" "How will that help?" "They have too much money!".... what?
Elongated bowls don't bang male-parts when you scoot forward a bit. They're seen as a luxury option for this purpose, but only by men, and not necessarily by all men. It's also easier to pee standing up.
Good point on the round toilet fluid dynamics.
The limits of our fluid dynamics technology (and fluid dynamics in general--there's only so much energy in a gallon of water that's not elevated 6 feet above the bowl) remain close to 20 years ago; the general understanding of and ability to manufacture to tolerances required for good fluid dynamics has spread, so cheaper toilets have improved faster than upper-end toilets. Until they start coating them with low-friction ceramics, this will remain true.
There are $50 toilets at Home Depot sometimes, when they're woefully overstocked. Typically, you can get a good (but not top-end) Toto around $200-$250 off Amazon; their MSRP is like $450. You can get the $600-$800 models for like $450. I like the highest-end models because they have smooth sides instead of the ridiculous crevices and pipe designs: a trapezoidal monolyth is a flat surface to wipe down, rather than a bunch of nooks and crannies to dig at with a pick brush for 40 minutes. Being able to not have my toilet covered in dust and yellow film without spending an hour every weekend cleaning it is worth the $450. Meanwhile, your generic toilet does typically cost over $100 if you don't catch some extreme overstock clearance bullshit, so yeah... the $200 thing is actually priced competitively.
So here's a $989 toilet at $600 on Amazon. If you're buying a $1,000 toilet, you should expect that I guess. You can see what I mean about the sides, though. Flat sides like that have become somewhat popular, versus this kind of shit that's impossible to clean. You're getting a vanilla top-down flush if you're not paying a few hundred, though; that Toto "Tornado Flush" has a steep price tag. As I said: I'm willing to pay in the upper end for something that's going to outlast the bathroom itself.
VW did their cheating not by merely choosing settings that performed well on the test but not as well in the real world. VW actually cheated: they detected the test, and turned off their emissions controls.
This is like how millions of guys across America don't beat women in alleyways and force their penises up their ass, but instead get them drunk so they'll consent to sex. See, it's not really rape if you drug them until they say yes, so long as you don't use certain illegal drugs like rhoypnol. Alcohol is generally recognized as an acceptable way to make a girl spread her legs so technically....
I've been trying to make a difference for 4 years and all I've found is I'm drowned out by children. People talk about the plight of the poor and start attacking the rich instead of proposing solutions--as if they don't care about the poor at all, but rather about attacking someone they hate.
It's surprisingly-hard to sell a 0.9% marginal reduction of payroll taxes, a 2.5% marginal reduction of corporate income taxes, and a fat boost in individual and household discretionary spending. People find all kinds of ridiculous arguments and generally take you down by volume; I've started to change tack in an attempt to get past this.
There are plenty of crazy people ranting at pigeons, and nobody pays attention to them. The guy standing in the park telling you how to solve world hunger? It doesn't matter if he's right; nobody's likely to pay attention to him, either. People make bigger promises--FDR, Barack Obama--and they get a cult of personality, along with the reins to go ahead and actually change the world.
It isn't easy. I think it has a lot to do with luck. You have to be an opportunistic predator, ready to jump at the first chance to make a difference, and equipped with the fangs to take it down before it passes.
Oddly enough, taking a power meter to things like window ACs has typically shown me they eat less than the advertised wattage. I don't get a read on performance, though.
Get a Toto. Even their 1-gallon super-eco model is an outperformer, although the slightly-larger models have more flushing power.
Toilets are engineered with complex fluid dynamics to get flow and pressure just right, and to make the flush swirl properly. This means a 3-gallon tank might flush just about anything, but a 1-gallon tank in a well-designed bowl can flush what a 1.5-gallon tank in a naive design can't. Even if the 3-gallon tank does flush, the flow and swirl characteristics will determine how well it cleans the bowl.
Toto toilets are over-engineered and expensive, and they're designed to flush a lot with little water. They're also designed to scrub the sides of the bowl with every flush, so they're more self-cleaning. That means you don't have as many stuck-on turd spots between actual cleanings, and the bowl doesn't build up quite as much grime--although the thin film of grime and slime is pretty durable and generally builds up no matter what kind of bowl you have.
You can get a good Toto elongated for $250-$450, or a cheap Kohler for $50 at Home Depot. Unless you frequently drop sledgehammers on your toilet, I'd buy an upper-end model; the damned things last basically until you somehow smash them. All the innards are trivially rebuildable--a $5 flapper valve and a 15 cent rubber gasket, seriously.
They didn't do it on a larger scale, aside from being plain bigger. We found many car manufacturers whose cars were tuned in some specific way to beat the regulatory tests, and performed horribly in any real-world scenario--typically on-par with the VW offerings. VW happens to be a bigger manufacturer; when you and the big guys are all-in, you can't claim half the culpability just because you sell half as many cars per year.
Instead of "Durr durr VW evulz!" maybe we should be asking tough questions like "what do we do about emissions tests and ratings being pretty much divorced from real-world emissions for practically all vehicles manufactured by anyone?" Otherwise there's obviously not a real problem and VW obviously did nothing wrong, aside from attracting attention from bored idiots.
You seem to misunderstand "free speech" completely,
Not really, no. We've actually had "freedom of speech" cases ruled against private enterprise for their effective ability to infringe on the rights of others. That's generally only happened when you could reasonably prove that private enterprises can do such a thing, which is exceedingly-rare.
I think perhaps you also misunderstand what a "monopoly" is. Even by your own admission, WalMart only accounted for just over 10% of music sales in the past, and probably far less these days. Since when is 10% of a market a monopoly?
Majority players with less than half of the market have been ruled against in monopoly-abuse cases. It's typically only doable when they're the only big player or one of very few (e.g. a duopoly two-plus market and you have 34% of the market), or when they have large exclusive markets.
WalMart isn't the only retail store; it's a major source of sales of some classes of goods to some demographics, and frequently considered to be in a duopoly with Target. Target has better profits, WalMart has a bigger general market. The capacity to damage and thus control not one competitor, but an entire market, is generally enough to get you some unwanted attention.
We have, in fact, taken steps of varying degrees of severity against these sorts of things, and not just with government lawsuits and monopoly hearings. There have been rulings against for-profit private colleges dictating that they must allow students to speak on any and all political topics because the college was violating the free speech of certain groups by banning them from assembling and speaking based on their topic. We create an enormous span of regulatory policies forcing businesses away from the violation of some consumers's rights. Contract law doesn't even allow you to waive your rights through private contracts--so much so that a contract which does so can be wholly-invalid if it has no provision nor reasonable method for invalidating those specific clauses.
The government can't go into every corner deli and tell them people can't be sent out for discussing gay marriage while eating there. They have determined that some companies are in such a position that the rules actually do apply to them. That's why most of us aren't lawyers: the things that happen in law don't always fit with what you'd understand after reading the damned thing. An encyclopedic knowledge of case law is a strong requirement.
From that position, I still say it would have been amusing to see certain lawsuits brought up against WalMart. They might not win, but they did, at one time, have a reasonable argument here and there.
Yep. It came into fruition sixty years after it came into the political mind; that's still actually pretty recent--a century ago.
Every technological advancement reduces the labor required to produce things. This can only do one of three things: increase unemployment; increase individual wealth; or decrease working hours. It can blend those things--go half in on one and another--but it can't do other things in regard to wealth.
So on the unemployment front, we went into a labor force participation rate bubble after about 1950. That stable ~59% participation rate got as high as what, 68.9%? We're still up there. Meanwhile, our unemployment keeps cycling through recessions, and returns to a stable base of around 5%. That means, per-capita and per-adult-capita, we have a greater proportion of employed than we did before, and more working hours per capita, given the same working hours per employed person.
We've seen cars get all kinds of extra shit flowing from luxury cars down into the cars people at lower income levels buy. The technology gets easier and cheaper to produce (technical progress), so they pack more shit into a car. You can buy a Tesla Model S 85kW car for $25,000 of today's dollars? You bet your ass the people who buy $25,000 passenger cars today are going to be buying $25,000 Tesla Model S 85kW sports cars in that world of the future; they'll have the equivalent of the $12,000 Ford Focus (which will be better than today's), but they're not buying that today. See the same with computers, cell phones, information services, all that stuff that was nifty and rare in the 90s and is just everywhere today.
That leaves a decrease in working hours.
Technological progress has allowed us to produce stuff cheaper today. The Chinese couldn't make cell phones this cheap in 1985; the Americans certainly couldn't provide a cellular network with unlimited voice and SMS plus 2G of high-speed LTE data and unlimited low speed each month for $160/year. Thing is, we're buying a lot more stuff, in terms of the output of labor that can produce more stuff. We may buy the same number of packages (e.g. a cell phone), but we put tons more shit in that package (e.g. the old calls-only cell phone has evolved into the modern smart phone). We need jobs to handle all this consumption.
If you want people to be as wealthy as they are now but work 80% as much, you have to get a 20% increase in productivity through technical progress and not consume 20% more stuff. Control the unemployment by reducing working hours.
You can't really have it for free. On the other hand, there's a lot of slack in office jobs today, so reducing the time in the office by 20% doesn't necessarily reduce all of the work done by 20%. People's brains process things while not at the office, and people spend a lot of downtime doing nothing useful at the office; there are also projects that involve constant, non-stop effort, notably programming and design work, so you can't just assume 20% of all office work is slack.
The economy will essentially adjust for actual output, which will do weird things to wealth. Let's say you don't adjust wages per annum. An office which continues its productivity just about the same with 20% less time at the office wouldn't necessarily run if you had just cut off 20% of the people, but it won't need those people sitting at a desk, and so products become no more expensive. Meanwhile a fast food place will have to cut hours by 20% and hire more people, making those products more-expensive. If you do adjust wages-per-annum, prices of the office-supported services drop, prices at the fast food joint don't, and everyone has less income. Same deal either way.
It's all weird and headache-inducing. The long and short of it is there won't be a 20% decrease in wealth without a 20% decrease in productive output per capita.
This is hilarious. It's anti-competitive and abuse of monopoly position.
WalMart could potentially be taken to task for a lot of shit, but it never is. They don't allow CDs with explicit content, so their selection of music is all censored. This accounts for 2% of WalMart sales, but not 2% of WalMart revenue or profits; it accounts for over 10% of music industry CD sales, or at least it did back before digital streaming became big. That's basically WalMart leveraging its enormous monopoly power to constrict free speech--it's still a tough case due to WalMart being a private enterprise, but it'd be an interesting Supreme Court case.
Consider: we have a lot of consumer protections that amount to, "You're infringing on consumers's rights because they have no alternative and they're not free to choose." Cell phones need to be unlockable or unlocked because everybody locks them. Net Neutrality is there basically because consumers will never be able to get the benefits of a neutral network otherwise. "You're too damned big and you behave like a de-facto part of government" is the unspoken argument. WalMart is that.
Do you know when the 40-hour work week began? Railroad workers finally got it in 1916; it became a general part of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1937. Most people were working 10-16 hour days.
Only on the bottom end. On the top end it's constrained by what the market will bear. If the industry has a large margin then moving the labour won't make any difference to the price
That's not quite true.
Look at Cell phones. When cell phones came out in 1983, they cost $4,000 (that's over $9,000 with inflation today). The same is true of flat-panel TVs (LCD vs Plasma at first) to replace CRTs. At that level, even with healthy demand, the market looks like... well, the market for electric vehicles: people who can afford an $80,000 Tesla are not your average American, and there are fewer of them.
So maybe you can get a 30% profit margin on a luxury good with a market of 100,000 consumers. It's a luxury good because it's expensive and everyone else can't afford it. That means the next guy to come compete with you has got to put down shitloads of money and take enormous risks trying to capture your market away from you. A 1% capture is only 1,000 customers, and isn't going to sustain his business. Likewise, your competitors--or, maybe, competitor, single, at this level--can't very well undercut your prices much and expect to profit for what of your market they capture.
Now look what happens when electric cars cost $15,000 to make.
Suddenly, your market is 300,000,000 American and 50,000,000 new vehicles sold per year. You can sell those cars for about $20k off the lot at a 12% net operating profit margin. You're competing with 23 other manufacturers, and a small manufacturer capturing 1% of the market gets 3,000,000 sales--which is why GM bought so many competitors over the years and had over a dozen brands.
Cell phones gave way to smart phones in the same way, with narrowing margins. These are things people just buy, and they're cheap enough that you have competitors all over the place. They're not like supermarkets, where you're taking a 2% operating profit because every moron who can file for a $20 LLC license and get a $100k bank loan can open a corner grocer. You're looking at a 7% net operating profit five-year average for some of the specialized companies; the gross profit margins are always bigger, and between products those gross margins are bigger on the luxury phones (iPhone, Galaxy S8) than on the commodity phones.
The market has to bear competition. This is kind of the result. Historically, yes, when costs go down, prices go down. Margins don't necessarily go down; they tend not to increase, because lower costs means lower barriers to entry and thus more robust competition. Sometimes, that robustness is in the form of just squeezing the prices down a bit more; sometimes, it's damned easy for anyone to jump into your market, and now you have 5,000 small businesses. If you want to see how ridiculous it gets, look at the MVNOs--like Ultra/MintSim, Ting, and Cricket.
Overall, though, moving the workforce to the US is going to be better than *not* moving the workforce to the US.
Moving the workforce to do X to the U.S. can cause the cost of product X to increase, while the wealth of the U.S. consumer base doesn't increase. Then you end up concentrating more income into fewer hands, but also making everyone poorer because they buy less stuff. That "buying less stuff" means fewer retail scans, thus fewer cashiers, fewer things stocked on shelves, fewer shelf stockers, fewer truck drivers because of less stuff shipped, and so on.
Now you have a new workforce of 40,000 U.S. factory workers making pants, and you lost 80,000 U.S. truck drivers, retail workers, and so forth. The average American goes from working 0.55 hours to buy a pair of pants to instead having to expend 2 hours of his labor to buy pants.
Overall, throwing 10% of your virgin teenage girls into a volcano to appease the Volcano God is going to be better than *not* throwing 10% of your virgin teenage girls into the volcano to appease the Volcano God, right?
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"IT" is burger-flipper jobs. IT people rack servers, run cables, configure routers, and handle support tickets. They are your low-end, easily-replaced cogs.
You're looking at computer science and engineering people. Programmers, data analysts, computer engineers, the like. These people are highly-skilled, heavily-educated, and difficult to replace.
Someone on here once told me I should look into an online college instead of traditional Computer Science, because he has this really nice online college that was started by some governor. I took a look. They had Business Management and Information Technology, but no Computer Science. The guy couldn't understand the difference between CS and IT, and tried to explain that CS doesn't require math and that math is just fluff.
Technical progress. We can do X with fewer people now. A few things can happen.
In one case, we can do more X. People buy more services that require X. This means we still need those people, and they output more. Car manufacturers move car features down through their models as they become cheaper, and the various income levels buy a model that fits their desire to spend. We're still using the labor, just for other things. This is a complex example of consumer buying power creating demand for a new product, with the new product being added to a package that consumers are already buying.
We can do the same amount of X. That means we lay off a bunch of now-excess people. We can also do more X, but not quite so much more. This is one of many intermediaries, and it means we lay off fewer people.
We can do the same amount of X per-capita, and expand our population. As we erode the labor required to do X, we increase the population. The percentage of laborers invested in X decreases; at a certain equilibrium between technical progress and population growth, the number of laborers doesn't decrease. We can even increase the number of laborers doing X this way, but more-slowly than population expansion.
Cloud services centralize knowledge. Instead of 20 engineers at 20 companies learning lessons about VM and SAN management, you have 10 engineers servicing 20 companies all working in the same data center doing VM and SAN management. Every lesson learned in the context of one client is now available to apply to all clients. If they find a way to manage with less overhead, they don't need to repeat the whole process of developing a lower-effort management strategy; and they can apply this savings to all clients. At a point, each engineer can service multiple clients, and so the total jobs invested here go down.
People aren't much economists, so they just decide something must be obvious. They examine everything in a bubble, so much so that they assume a business can somehow create jobs and not simply allocate available job-creating demand to itself at the expense of jobs elsewhere. You get weird disconnects from that, like business X outcompeting business Y and creating 2,000 jobs, while business Y needed 3,000 jobs to do the same--and then business Y lays off 3,000 people and folks claim that the economy lost 3,000 jobs, and start attributing it to H1-B work or something.
The best part is when people claim H1-B labor is causing a reduction of employment. Not an increase in unemployment, but a reduction in total employment in the sector. H1-B labor would tend to increase total employment; any actual reduction in total employment means something else is happening.
People complain a lot about GUIs and command lines, too. That should tell you all you need to know about everything.
That's what AMP is supposed to fix. "Responsive Design" means "Load the whole god damned thing, all 4 gigabytes, all the massive JavaScript, everything; then apply CSS to show it friendly-like on a Mobile Phone so it doesn't look like shit." AMP provides an alternate location, so your cell phone downloads only half a megabyte of crap, and starts downloading the 15MB of images as you scroll the page. It can also supply cut-back JavaScript and skip loading scripting blocks for high-intensity features that get cut from mobile.
I've seen cut-down designs provide feature subsets before. Sometimes I have to use the desktop site. Ideally, you frequently wouldn't, and so you'd get to skip all that garbage; it'd be great if you could do that on the desktop, too.
Anticapitalists and anarchocapitalists are both insane. People want either rampant socialism (the government owns all means of production) or they want the evil socialism to go away and the government to stop doing anything. In that latter case--the anarchocapitalism case--you have no regulations, and end up with big businesses buying each other, buying all small competitors, and then leveraging their position to make it very expensive to switch to their competitors. Then the megacorporation effectively controls the law of the land--rampant socialism with a figurehead government.
This is why many modern countries, including the United States, are social democracies with free enterprise markets. We have regulations to ensure that the free market keeps running as a free market by limiting the abuse possible under unconstrained free-market capitalism.
MongoDB would be great for building a PMIS; this is a financial exchange and will need synchronous, guaranteed, multi-step transactions with rollback capability. You want an RDBMS for that.
They want to pretend these are somehow a type of hard currency (commodity) and not a security.
This is similar to how people misrepresent the stock market as actual ownership of something or investment in a company. Many modern common stocks convey neither dividends nor voting rights(!), and so they're essentially worth nothing in their own right; buying stocks also doesn't give the company money, except at IPO. Stocks just represent trying to time it so that you buy something and then sell it to the next guy for more money, who in turn thinks he's going to do the same; somebody eventually winds up holding the bag when the price dips. Long-term stock market growth is pretty much just inflation.
You may as well buy and sell stock in Facebook profiles based on how popular they are with their friends.
True, the paragraph-level writing structure needs some work. I'm thinking more in terms of the strategic structure. A 250,000-page essay is going to be failure no matter how well-organized.
That's been debated quite a lot. At one time, the law actually suggested that a married woman had automatically consented forever; now we have spousal rape. At this point in time, we're apparently suggesting that a woman who has drunk alcohol in a place where she doesn't have full control over who else is there at any point in time means anyone who shows up can have sex with her, so long as she seems able to respond to external stimuli, even if her ability to reason about the situation around her is totally-compromised.
Essentially, you suggest that showing up to a party late enough that the chicks are drunk means you can automatically take advantage of their incapacity to make reasoned decisions in order to have sex with them. Technically, the law might allow that; how is this different from rape, when the law also explicitly claims administrative power over someone so compromises their ability to make independent decisions that they're likely to consent to sex even when largely reluctant and that such a situation is legally rape?
That's the thing: we've essentially determined the actual harm caused by VW's actions is... nothing. All modern gasoline and diesel vehicles pass the emissions tests designed to approve a vehicle for sale, and then produce shitloads more pollutants when on the road. They're all about on-par with VW, except VW apparently games the system directly when you stick their TDi on the rack for testing. Had VW played by the rules, the outcome would have been exactly the same--demonstrated by every other car company technically keeping to the rules of the game.
We either have nothing important happening here or we have a dire, industry-wide crisis. GP is arguing that it doesn't matter, because it's only vitally-important that VW get there by proper procedure, and that everything being equivalent in the end isn't a problem. If it's not a problem, then the rules VW violated are a waste of time and should be abolished.
Maybe. I'm not sure. You have to realize most of the readership in a political campaign have short attention spans and existing bias. What you describe works for people who are looking to educate themselves; for people who need their emotional basis or their beliefs changed, you need something different.
Persuasion when you need to spread an idea generally requires short, powerful arguments. You can't just sit down and start describing something in a technical sense, or explaining all the reasons why something is good; it will take forever, and you can't open up with why a thing is good for a particular person. You need to open up with something that generates interest, and you need to close concerns in ways which have already shoved this new information down someone's throat before they can open their mouth and protest that they think it won't work for $reasons.
The welfare troll problem is one I'm trying to work out ATM. I could write a small dissertation about poverty families and the aid they receive. Welfare trolls will like to point out that welfare households receive like $35,000 or $58,000 in aid and you propose some ~$8k (i.e. not enough); and then you get to spend 40 minutes making a long, boring argument nobody cares about, describing how much of that aid is State-level services, how the majority of that aid is for education and medical care that you don't touch, how the childcare component is provided for low-income families separate from the proposed Social Security plan, how the replaced Federal aid is almost exactly the same size as the proposed Social Security, and how approximately nobody actually receives all that aid anyway. You need facts and figures to back this up. Drawing the tables out, explaining it, and reasoning through it... you're dealing with an opponent who wants to be right, not someone who wants to self-educate.
You need to open that argument yourself, and you need to do it with a single statement that slams all of that information straight into their faces. This is why graphical representations are so powerful, and why they come first.
When you're giving a speech, you use less information, frequently. You use more words, you reiterate (tell them what you're going to tell them; tell them; tell them what you told them), and you try to control it to meet the attention span of your listeners. They only need to passively listen, so it's easier, and more-tolerable; active reading of some pages and pages of text is a nightmare. Besides being a different venue, speeches generally don't have pictures. When they do, we call them "presentations", and load up more technical data.
The interesting thing about this universal social security is it benefits everyone due to a reduction in effective tax rate everywhere. It solves many problems in our welfare system. It provides a stabilizing force that holds up people of all classes through recessions (one coming up around the beginning of 2018!) and other adverse financial events (losing your job would be bad, mmkay?). Everyone is somehow conditioned to think it's got to cost someone something; nobody wants to sit down and think about the entire frigging government budget, tax systems, and the like. People don't leave high school with economics and finance degrees.
So for an informative piece for people who have already become interested, the outline you provide might be useful. For people who aren't willing to devote significant time to reading, thinking, and responding to long and complicated explanations, you answer these questions by displaying the system in ways that make such things self-evident. Notice the graphics all display a reduction in effective taxes, answering #1 and #3. The graphics on individual, payroll, and corporate profit taxes answer #4. #2 is more-difficult, and also less-relevant: by the time you've gotten through the other things, the reader is now interested, and has the attention span to read about why--about all the benefits of such a plan, be
Uh... dimensional lumber is sized to standards published in 1961, agreed upon by one of the many American societies of engineers. In other news, oil is manufactured based on standards set by the Society of Automotive Engineers, and cat food has to meet published standards for cat food nutritional content.
but also cheats the customer out of the full width, breadth and length since they charge the same price.
How did you come to that conclusion? What comparison base do you have? Are you telling me that wood has a specific, universally-defined price as an inherent property, and that the only market force that affects the price of a piece of wood is the size at which it is advertised?
It's not that so much as the dialogue. "Look at how much poverty we have! The rich need to pay their fair share!" "How will that help?" "They have too much money!" .... what?
I'm looking hard at the politics now as I seriously consider addressing the problem.
Elongated bowls don't bang male-parts when you scoot forward a bit. They're seen as a luxury option for this purpose, but only by men, and not necessarily by all men. It's also easier to pee standing up.
Good point on the round toilet fluid dynamics.
The limits of our fluid dynamics technology (and fluid dynamics in general--there's only so much energy in a gallon of water that's not elevated 6 feet above the bowl) remain close to 20 years ago; the general understanding of and ability to manufacture to tolerances required for good fluid dynamics has spread, so cheaper toilets have improved faster than upper-end toilets. Until they start coating them with low-friction ceramics, this will remain true.
There are $50 toilets at Home Depot sometimes, when they're woefully overstocked. Typically, you can get a good (but not top-end) Toto around $200-$250 off Amazon; their MSRP is like $450. You can get the $600-$800 models for like $450. I like the highest-end models because they have smooth sides instead of the ridiculous crevices and pipe designs: a trapezoidal monolyth is a flat surface to wipe down, rather than a bunch of nooks and crannies to dig at with a pick brush for 40 minutes. Being able to not have my toilet covered in dust and yellow film without spending an hour every weekend cleaning it is worth the $450. Meanwhile, your generic toilet does typically cost over $100 if you don't catch some extreme overstock clearance bullshit, so yeah... the $200 thing is actually priced competitively.
So here's a $989 toilet at $600 on Amazon. If you're buying a $1,000 toilet, you should expect that I guess. You can see what I mean about the sides, though. Flat sides like that have become somewhat popular, versus this kind of shit that's impossible to clean. You're getting a vanilla top-down flush if you're not paying a few hundred, though; that Toto "Tornado Flush" has a steep price tag. As I said: I'm willing to pay in the upper end for something that's going to outlast the bathroom itself.
Good points, though.
If the answer is no, then the tests need to be updated to better reflect real-world usage.
I'm having an awful damned hard time getting this through peoples's heads.
VW did their cheating not by merely choosing settings that performed well on the test but not as well in the real world. VW actually cheated: they detected the test, and turned off their emissions controls.
This is like how millions of guys across America don't beat women in alleyways and force their penises up their ass, but instead get them drunk so they'll consent to sex. See, it's not really rape if you drug them until they say yes, so long as you don't use certain illegal drugs like rhoypnol. Alcohol is generally recognized as an acceptable way to make a girl spread her legs so technically....
I've been trying to make a difference for 4 years and all I've found is I'm drowned out by children. People talk about the plight of the poor and start attacking the rich instead of proposing solutions--as if they don't care about the poor at all, but rather about attacking someone they hate.
It's surprisingly-hard to sell a 0.9% marginal reduction of payroll taxes, a 2.5% marginal reduction of corporate income taxes, and a fat boost in individual and household discretionary spending. People find all kinds of ridiculous arguments and generally take you down by volume; I've started to change tack in an attempt to get past this.
There are plenty of crazy people ranting at pigeons, and nobody pays attention to them. The guy standing in the park telling you how to solve world hunger? It doesn't matter if he's right; nobody's likely to pay attention to him, either. People make bigger promises--FDR, Barack Obama--and they get a cult of personality, along with the reins to go ahead and actually change the world.
It isn't easy. I think it has a lot to do with luck. You have to be an opportunistic predator, ready to jump at the first chance to make a difference, and equipped with the fangs to take it down before it passes.
Oddly enough, taking a power meter to things like window ACs has typically shown me they eat less than the advertised wattage. I don't get a read on performance, though.
Get a Toto. Even their 1-gallon super-eco model is an outperformer, although the slightly-larger models have more flushing power.
Toilets are engineered with complex fluid dynamics to get flow and pressure just right, and to make the flush swirl properly. This means a 3-gallon tank might flush just about anything, but a 1-gallon tank in a well-designed bowl can flush what a 1.5-gallon tank in a naive design can't. Even if the 3-gallon tank does flush, the flow and swirl characteristics will determine how well it cleans the bowl.
Toto toilets are over-engineered and expensive, and they're designed to flush a lot with little water. They're also designed to scrub the sides of the bowl with every flush, so they're more self-cleaning. That means you don't have as many stuck-on turd spots between actual cleanings, and the bowl doesn't build up quite as much grime--although the thin film of grime and slime is pretty durable and generally builds up no matter what kind of bowl you have.
You can get a good Toto elongated for $250-$450, or a cheap Kohler for $50 at Home Depot. Unless you frequently drop sledgehammers on your toilet, I'd buy an upper-end model; the damned things last basically until you somehow smash them. All the innards are trivially rebuildable--a $5 flapper valve and a 15 cent rubber gasket, seriously.
They didn't do it on a larger scale, aside from being plain bigger. We found many car manufacturers whose cars were tuned in some specific way to beat the regulatory tests, and performed horribly in any real-world scenario--typically on-par with the VW offerings. VW happens to be a bigger manufacturer; when you and the big guys are all-in, you can't claim half the culpability just because you sell half as many cars per year.
Instead of "Durr durr VW evulz!" maybe we should be asking tough questions like "what do we do about emissions tests and ratings being pretty much divorced from real-world emissions for practically all vehicles manufactured by anyone?" Otherwise there's obviously not a real problem and VW obviously did nothing wrong, aside from attracting attention from bored idiots.
You seem to misunderstand "free speech" completely,
Not really, no. We've actually had "freedom of speech" cases ruled against private enterprise for their effective ability to infringe on the rights of others. That's generally only happened when you could reasonably prove that private enterprises can do such a thing, which is exceedingly-rare.
I think perhaps you also misunderstand what a "monopoly" is. Even by your own admission, WalMart only accounted for just over 10% of music sales in the past, and probably far less these days. Since when is 10% of a market a monopoly?
Majority players with less than half of the market have been ruled against in monopoly-abuse cases. It's typically only doable when they're the only big player or one of very few (e.g. a duopoly two-plus market and you have 34% of the market), or when they have large exclusive markets.
WalMart isn't the only retail store; it's a major source of sales of some classes of goods to some demographics, and frequently considered to be in a duopoly with Target. Target has better profits, WalMart has a bigger general market. The capacity to damage and thus control not one competitor, but an entire market, is generally enough to get you some unwanted attention.
We have, in fact, taken steps of varying degrees of severity against these sorts of things, and not just with government lawsuits and monopoly hearings. There have been rulings against for-profit private colleges dictating that they must allow students to speak on any and all political topics because the college was violating the free speech of certain groups by banning them from assembling and speaking based on their topic. We create an enormous span of regulatory policies forcing businesses away from the violation of some consumers's rights. Contract law doesn't even allow you to waive your rights through private contracts--so much so that a contract which does so can be wholly-invalid if it has no provision nor reasonable method for invalidating those specific clauses.
The government can't go into every corner deli and tell them people can't be sent out for discussing gay marriage while eating there. They have determined that some companies are in such a position that the rules actually do apply to them. That's why most of us aren't lawyers: the things that happen in law don't always fit with what you'd understand after reading the damned thing. An encyclopedic knowledge of case law is a strong requirement.
From that position, I still say it would have been amusing to see certain lawsuits brought up against WalMart. They might not win, but they did, at one time, have a reasonable argument here and there.
Yep. It came into fruition sixty years after it came into the political mind; that's still actually pretty recent--a century ago.
Every technological advancement reduces the labor required to produce things. This can only do one of three things: increase unemployment; increase individual wealth; or decrease working hours. It can blend those things--go half in on one and another--but it can't do other things in regard to wealth.
So on the unemployment front, we went into a labor force participation rate bubble after about 1950. That stable ~59% participation rate got as high as what, 68.9%? We're still up there. Meanwhile, our unemployment keeps cycling through recessions, and returns to a stable base of around 5%. That means, per-capita and per-adult-capita, we have a greater proportion of employed than we did before, and more working hours per capita, given the same working hours per employed person.
We've seen cars get all kinds of extra shit flowing from luxury cars down into the cars people at lower income levels buy. The technology gets easier and cheaper to produce (technical progress), so they pack more shit into a car. You can buy a Tesla Model S 85kW car for $25,000 of today's dollars? You bet your ass the people who buy $25,000 passenger cars today are going to be buying $25,000 Tesla Model S 85kW sports cars in that world of the future; they'll have the equivalent of the $12,000 Ford Focus (which will be better than today's), but they're not buying that today. See the same with computers, cell phones, information services, all that stuff that was nifty and rare in the 90s and is just everywhere today.
That leaves a decrease in working hours.
Technological progress has allowed us to produce stuff cheaper today. The Chinese couldn't make cell phones this cheap in 1985; the Americans certainly couldn't provide a cellular network with unlimited voice and SMS plus 2G of high-speed LTE data and unlimited low speed each month for $160/year. Thing is, we're buying a lot more stuff, in terms of the output of labor that can produce more stuff. We may buy the same number of packages (e.g. a cell phone), but we put tons more shit in that package (e.g. the old calls-only cell phone has evolved into the modern smart phone). We need jobs to handle all this consumption.
If you want people to be as wealthy as they are now but work 80% as much, you have to get a 20% increase in productivity through technical progress and not consume 20% more stuff. Control the unemployment by reducing working hours.
You can't really have it for free. On the other hand, there's a lot of slack in office jobs today, so reducing the time in the office by 20% doesn't necessarily reduce all of the work done by 20%. People's brains process things while not at the office, and people spend a lot of downtime doing nothing useful at the office; there are also projects that involve constant, non-stop effort, notably programming and design work, so you can't just assume 20% of all office work is slack.
The economy will essentially adjust for actual output, which will do weird things to wealth. Let's say you don't adjust wages per annum. An office which continues its productivity just about the same with 20% less time at the office wouldn't necessarily run if you had just cut off 20% of the people, but it won't need those people sitting at a desk, and so products become no more expensive. Meanwhile a fast food place will have to cut hours by 20% and hire more people, making those products more-expensive. If you do adjust wages-per-annum, prices of the office-supported services drop, prices at the fast food joint don't, and everyone has less income. Same deal either way.
It's all weird and headache-inducing. The long and short of it is there won't be a 20% decrease in wealth without a 20% decrease in productive output per capita.
This is hilarious. It's anti-competitive and abuse of monopoly position.
WalMart could potentially be taken to task for a lot of shit, but it never is. They don't allow CDs with explicit content, so their selection of music is all censored. This accounts for 2% of WalMart sales, but not 2% of WalMart revenue or profits; it accounts for over 10% of music industry CD sales, or at least it did back before digital streaming became big. That's basically WalMart leveraging its enormous monopoly power to constrict free speech--it's still a tough case due to WalMart being a private enterprise, but it'd be an interesting Supreme Court case.
Consider: we have a lot of consumer protections that amount to, "You're infringing on consumers's rights because they have no alternative and they're not free to choose." Cell phones need to be unlockable or unlocked because everybody locks them. Net Neutrality is there basically because consumers will never be able to get the benefits of a neutral network otherwise. "You're too damned big and you behave like a de-facto part of government" is the unspoken argument. WalMart is that.
Do you know when the 40-hour work week began? Railroad workers finally got it in 1916; it became a general part of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1937. Most people were working 10-16 hour days.
Only on the bottom end. On the top end it's constrained by what the market will bear. If the industry has a large margin then moving the labour won't make any difference to the price
That's not quite true.
Look at Cell phones. When cell phones came out in 1983, they cost $4,000 (that's over $9,000 with inflation today). The same is true of flat-panel TVs (LCD vs Plasma at first) to replace CRTs. At that level, even with healthy demand, the market looks like ... well, the market for electric vehicles: people who can afford an $80,000 Tesla are not your average American, and there are fewer of them.
So maybe you can get a 30% profit margin on a luxury good with a market of 100,000 consumers. It's a luxury good because it's expensive and everyone else can't afford it. That means the next guy to come compete with you has got to put down shitloads of money and take enormous risks trying to capture your market away from you. A 1% capture is only 1,000 customers, and isn't going to sustain his business. Likewise, your competitors--or, maybe, competitor, single, at this level--can't very well undercut your prices much and expect to profit for what of your market they capture.
Now look what happens when electric cars cost $15,000 to make.
Suddenly, your market is 300,000,000 American and 50,000,000 new vehicles sold per year. You can sell those cars for about $20k off the lot at a 12% net operating profit margin. You're competing with 23 other manufacturers, and a small manufacturer capturing 1% of the market gets 3,000,000 sales--which is why GM bought so many competitors over the years and had over a dozen brands.
Cell phones gave way to smart phones in the same way, with narrowing margins. These are things people just buy, and they're cheap enough that you have competitors all over the place. They're not like supermarkets, where you're taking a 2% operating profit because every moron who can file for a $20 LLC license and get a $100k bank loan can open a corner grocer. You're looking at a 7% net operating profit five-year average for some of the specialized companies; the gross profit margins are always bigger, and between products those gross margins are bigger on the luxury phones (iPhone, Galaxy S8) than on the commodity phones.
The market has to bear competition. This is kind of the result. Historically, yes, when costs go down, prices go down. Margins don't necessarily go down; they tend not to increase, because lower costs means lower barriers to entry and thus more robust competition. Sometimes, that robustness is in the form of just squeezing the prices down a bit more; sometimes, it's damned easy for anyone to jump into your market, and now you have 5,000 small businesses. If you want to see how ridiculous it gets, look at the MVNOs--like Ultra/MintSim, Ting, and Cricket.
Overall, though, moving the workforce to the US is going to be better than *not* moving the workforce to the US.
Moving the workforce to do X to the U.S. can cause the cost of product X to increase, while the wealth of the U.S. consumer base doesn't increase. Then you end up concentrating more income into fewer hands, but also making everyone poorer because they buy less stuff. That "buying less stuff" means fewer retail scans, thus fewer cashiers, fewer things stocked on shelves, fewer shelf stockers, fewer truck drivers because of less stuff shipped, and so on.
Now you have a new workforce of 40,000 U.S. factory workers making pants, and you lost 80,000 U.S. truck drivers, retail workers, and so forth. The average American goes from working 0.55 hours to buy a pair of pants to instead having to expend 2 hours of his labor to buy pants.
Overall, throwing 10% of your virgin teenage girls into a volcano to appease the Volcano God is going to be better than *not* throwing 10% of your virgin teenage girls into the volcano to appease the Volcano God, right?