My point is that the money in the bank account isn't itself changing hands. There's a difference between money being spent (moved between bank accounts) and not being spent (sitting in a bank account).
To claim that the money in the bank account is still doing something because it is the foundation of existence for some other money is a terrible argument. It's complete nonsense. The economic effect of spending dollar X is independent of the economic effect of spending some other dollars; the money in the bank is not circulating, even if it is theoretically the basis for some other loans.
Again: this matters because the total amount of money spent on all production is the total wages earned, the total purchasing, and thus the basis for how much buying power the currency has. Whether a pile of money is circulating or not circulation is what determines inflation; and because central banks (not just the one in the U.S.) intentionally keep a steady inflation rate (it's 2% in the US), money just sitting in a bank account is replaced by a smaller amount of newly-minted money such that the fractional reserve system replaces the unspent cash holdings in total.
Whether or not your central bank actually responds that way, your economy will respond in such a way that all the money being spent is all the goods and services being sold, because of course it is. That means unspent billions sitting in a bank do impact the economy as if that money is taken out of circulation (because it is), and spending it years later will have the same effect as putting so much more money into circulation (because it does).
The argument that $1Bn of banked money is different from $1Bn of newly-minted Federal cash is distorted: $1Bn of banked money is the same amount of potential money in circulation as $0.05Bn of minted Federal cash. Pointing out the conversion and then handwaving it away is a fallacy of equivocation (and likely a few more I don't care to pick apart).
Everybody thinks "That's great, I could finally code up that game I've always wanted to write!"
That's one of those fantasies UBI people have. UBI isn't about freeing people from work to do some other kind of work; it's about Malthusian growth and economic stability.
Improve technology enough to raise the carry capacity. Make the economy efficient enough to get everyone a job. Drop unemployment to 0.2%. Block immigration. Do you know what will happen? More babies, fewer college students going to grad school (to delay entry into the job market), more late retirement, less early retirement. Short- and long-term increase of the labor force will occur until we push unemployment back up around 5% (UE3/UE4).
There's always going to be unemployment. We respond to abundance by growing. We grow until the scarcity pressure makes us uncomfortable. It's just that way. We have an administrative tap we can use to adjust this artificially--the flow of immigrant labor is something we can actually control--and otherwise it just runs on its own to raise or lower the unemployment rate toward 5%. That's only a secondary effect; the primary effect is growth in abundance and less growth in scarcity.
We saw this slowing of population and labor force growth with the Great Recession and the Great Depression, in both cases with more early retirement and more students staying in college for grad school to avoid the weak job market. We saw the growth of population in the California Gold Rush and in the technological growth era that gave us the Baby Boomers. It's the same mechanism as the predator-prey relationship whereby the population of a predator adjusts with the population of its prey, just with a good deal more underlying variables.
UBI is about supplying a welfare system to cover the transitions. Anyone who tells you people will be free to pursue their artistic careers, become volunteer workers, and otherwise supply things they can't right now for some reason is simply delusional.
Any social system that doesn't take human nature into account is doomed to failure.
I designed my Universal Social Security around an economic basis. People try to economize: they try to maximize their ends (what they get) from their means (what they can expend--essentially time, thus work). That means every action is a greedy action seeking to do the least work and bring the most gain. The more people adhere to this behavior, the better the system works.
Unix systems fundamentally do not function without services. As well, I can easily argue that the paradigm of systemd is a better reflection of the Unix philosophy than classical init: systemd actually supplies small, sharp tools for things like process communication and logging, while we have a pile of blunt hacks to cobble shit together with sysvinit.
sysvinit is your services manager. It brings up your syslog daemon; it initializes your graphical display; it changes your system context to determine if you've got networking up or down. The sysvinit system is tasked with managing the whole process of getting system services running, and it does a terrible job of it.
Code quality aside, systemd is a collection of tools, daemons, and libraries. It's not a giant, monolithic clusterfuck that loads itself to start with; the init system brings up a bunch of other services of which it is aware. Each service makes use of other services. Various services use libraries to make use of systemd-supplied facilities such as interprocess communication and device management.
The real, fundamental difference between systemd and sysvinit is systemd is more-aware of all the little components of an init system. Classical sysvinit relies on some sort of hardware management service to ensure network devices are in place, drivers are loaded, and device files are created; systemd relies on such a service as well, and is aware of a particular interface to communicate with such a service. The service manager in systemd can bring up a service, and also is aware of the logging daemon and can send console output to the daemon, in the context of the service; the daemon itself can also send log messages directly to the logging daemon.
It's a collection of tools replacing older, blunter tools. That collection is called "systemd".
Money in the bank supports a 19:1 fractional reserve loan system. That's it.
When you spend your money, you move it from one bank account (yours) to another (someone else's). That means you spend your money ($1), and your money continues to support loans ($19). That's a total $20 of money represented in the economy. If you don't spend your money, it's a total of $19.
Here's the rub: if you don't spend your money, then it only represents 95% as much active, moving money in the monetary system. The Fed tries to maintain 2% inflation per year. More money circulating per labor-hour worked means inflation (it can only circulate if prices are higher; and you can only sustain higher prices with higher wages).
So if you have $1Bn of cash flow and spend it and the banks are maxed on their loans, that money represents $20Bn of issued, active currency. The Fed can inflate all of this by 2% by issuing $0.02Bn (FRB turns this into $0.4Bn additional circulating currency via new debt). If you just bank that $1Bn and don't spend it, then the Fed is targeting $20.4Bn, but that $20Bn has turned into $19Bn of spending; thus the Fed must issue $0.07Bn of currency (which becomes $1.4Bn via FRB).
Now the Fed has put your $1Bn back into circulation without moving it out of your bank account. Essentially, instead of you spending $1Bn, the Fed has issued $0.05Bn and enabled the Banks to loan an additional $0.95Bn. Now other entities--people, businesses, etc.--can spend the $1Bn you're not.
Then, when you wake up one day years later and start spending your money, you're issuing $1Bn of active currency back into circulation.
Yes, that's really how it works. Mattress money takes 20x as much currency out of circulation; bank account money only eliminates your spending, taking your money out of circulation only and leaving the fractional-reserve-banking loaned money in circulation.
It helps if you know a little about how banking and monetary systems work, instead of just that banks loan money. What gets me, though, is that people talk as if money that's spent somehow isn't in the banks, and money that's unspent is. Big money doesn't leave the banking system; only petty cash is temporarily out of bank accounts. Your assertion suggests there is no difference between spending and not spending.
Wouldn't work. Savings is idle money and is out of the economy. Spending it all at once like that creates a bubble and is basically just inflation. It's the same as printing new money.
The only sustainable UBI policy I've been able to derive feeds from a flat income tax appended to a progressive general fund income tax. It's sustainable because its funding source represents a portion of production: it pays out enough to buy 17% of everything made every year, continuously, on two-week intervals. It does this by taking that 17% on two-week intervals, so basically it takes 17% of everything being produced and distributes it evenly.
You can't eat cash; cash has to represent something you can eat.
It can be done without raising taxes on anyone. Zuck is still full of hot air.
GDP measures total production, and grows with population and technical progress. GDP-per-capita measures production per person in population, and measures wealth. GDP-per-labor-hour would be a viable measure of actual productivity, if it were measurable.
If productivity increases, then there's more stuff per person. If there's more stuff per person, then we can take a smaller percentage of stuff from everyone and give everyone things.
Imagine if the average hourly income (the mean) across all hours worked could pay the rent for two apartments, food for two households, and clothing for two households. To give apartments, food, and clothing to everyone, we'd have to tax everyone at 50% of their income.
Imagine if the average hourly income (the mean) across all hours worked could pay the rent for ten apartments, food for ten households, and clothing for ten households. To give apartments, food, and clothing to everyone, we'd have to tax everyone at 10% of their income.
In the United States, we can just about do it without raising taxes on the rich as of 2013. The total is actually a $1 trillion lower tax burden. I count it as a "tax burden" if you get more than you pay in--that is: if you pay $5k in and get $10k back, that's a $5k tax burden because somebody has to pay that extra $5k. By the same logic, if you pay $19k in taxes now, and under my system pay $21k in taxes but get $7k back, your tax burden is $5k lower.
It would be a great but deceptive political argument to just claim that all of the money goes back to Americans somewhere, therefor there is no cost involved, and the entire amount is a reduction of tax burden. By such logic, you could claim welfare of any kind carries no cost; it's an idiotic argument.
The whole system I worked out moves about $1.8 trillion around. Nearly half of that pays out to low-income taxpayers who don't pay enough taxes to cover it; the rest goes back to the people who paid into the pool to start with. Again: because the people receiving more than they pay in are the cost, the savings to the tax payer versus the current system are only about $1 trillion.
That works in the United States. It's not a global system and can't directly translate to any other country. I don't believe a global system is viable today, and I don't believe all countries are at a level of wealth in which a UBI of any sort is viable. I've also seen a hell of a lot of non-viable UBI plans and really fucking bad arguments from UBI proponents who haven't got a damned clue how economics works.
Most of the UBI proponents don't make sense. Zuckerberg's announcement here is a feel-good thing, and terrible.
You've got a few bad arguments, too, though. Stop using this go-to:
without opportunity the money will just be used for drugs far too often.
Drug abuse and other mental health issues come with stress. Poverty and insecurity produce stress. Stability reduces these problems. Individual economic stability is much-more-likely to reduce drug abuse than it is to increase it--along with reducing things like prostitution and gang crimes.
Blank checks require more personal responsibility than you can expect out of the population at large.
To a degree, yes. I prefer child welfare by providing public aid for children of low-income households because providing a cash benefit for children just creates profit motive for child neglect. It's the same problem: a UBI provides a limited amount of stability; if you provide child care in a way which can be leveraged, people will leverage it for more stability. Giving everyone a set pile of cash for each child means the poorer who are operating narrowly within the lines are encouraged to produce children, minimize childcare expenses, and rake the rest off the top to try and shore up their finances elsewhere. It's less of a problem with middle-class because of the obvious increase in financial stability.
Providing public aid for children of low-income families doesn't take on any new risks relative to our current system. That means each adult in the household gets $MONEY to support themselves; each child gets EBT for food, clothing, and the like. In the current system, you can shift food money onto EBT and use the money elsewhere; this isn't a new risk in a UBI system.
As for why a UBI? You have to understand welfare first.
All welfare leverages our level of technology to supply social safety nets. Technology reduces labor required to make things, which means you pay less in wages--fewer labor hours at the same labor-hour rate means less currency in total spent on labor--which reduces the minimum price for which a thing can sell. Our current spotty welfare system was feasible in 1950, whereas a UBI would have raised taxes on everyone by some 38% or more--and some were already paying a 90% bracket.
This technical progress means people will lose jobs. Those jobs get replaced; however, our labor force naturally grows to a target unemployment rate. In the United States, that has gravitated toward 5% (UE3 and UE4) for over a century, regardless of the labor force participation rate. It's so strong that the labor force participation rate increased when technological progress sharply drove growth after 1950, rather than unemployment simply falling to a stable 2% or so.
Jobs are created by demand. Consumers have income unspent; they seek to purchase additional things; those things must be supplied, shipped, warehoused, retailed, the like. Those activities scale; technical progress reduces the number of humans required for a certain amount of any of those, and so you can increase how much of that you're doing per-person while keeping the same rate of employment. If trucks can ship twice as much and people can buy twice as much, then you have the same number of truck drivers.
In other words: you can't pre-plan an economy and create new jobs to move people into as they lose their existing ones to technology (e.g. Marxism). Those new jobs can only exist to support what people are buying; and people can only buy once prices fail to increase as rapidly as wages. To find out what jobs you need to move people into, you need to unemploy them and let prices lag wages first. Worse, if you did move people directly, you'd disenfranchise all the existing unemployed from ever finding employment: all of the new jobs would be reserved for the currently-employed.
That's why we need welfare, and how we get welfare. What abo
So, wait, we can give people the legal privilege ("rights" are a philosophical mysticism, not a real thing) of speech without repercussion from government, and then revoke that privilege from corporations (which are not people)? That's great! All we have to do is avoid public spaces! Put most places under the incorporated care of businesses on behalf of the government, and then fine the business for allowing politically-unfavorable displays in those areas!
A helicopter is a different machine with different aerodynamics due to its sheer size, mass, and altitude, too.
Your argument implies that being able to fly an RC quadcopter drone implies capability to fly a helicopter. Do you know what flying a helicopter entails?
Grow a tomato plant. When you have large, hard, green tomatoes, pick a few and put them in a brown paper bag.
Eat those tomatoes when they ripen. Compare them to tomatoes which ripen on the vine. As well, hold onto a tomato picked at optimal ripeness, and a tomato picked when green; time how long before each begins to soften, wrinkle, and rot.
Tomatoes are harvested green and shipped. They don't develop the sugars that make them sweet because they're not ripened on the vine. Were they vine-ripened, shipping them to remote states would land you with rotting tomatoes.
In practice, tomato flavor is related to the distance shipped from the harvesting operation. The logistics to get tomatoes to your table with less time between picking and purchasing are responsible for providing better flavor.
Says the guy who rants about how he doesn't like the facts put in front of him but doesn't offer any explanation. Your entire counter-argument has been "you're an idiot"; to the audience, I've explained things, and you've thrown a tantrum.
So, why going back to a physician once you have the best diagnostic possible?
Because humans are able to access and interpret a wider array of information. We see patterns in how people walk, how they breathe, and how the scientific analysis of data provides a particular diagnosis in detectable situations where a different diagnosis is correct.
Sometimes it's 0.01% likely that other diagnosis is correct, given the data you understand; and some available data you can't yet name or quantify identifies when it's almost-guaranteed the alternate option is the correct one. We call that "intuition" until we can identify the variables, quantify them, and feed them into a machine or training course to include them in the documented diagnostic criteria.
Doctors and nurses will begin to notice patterns of the AI giving a certain list of likely diagnoses when specific symptoms are present when some different diagnoses is correct. They'll notice that if the diagnosis list or the symptoms are different, then the alternate diagnosis is not correct. In other words: they'll start recognizing error conditions and failure modes, and identifying not just when not to trust the machine, but what the machine should have selected for.
Working rigidly from a procedure means ignoring failure modes no matter how consistently you can spot them. Humans do the equivalent of modifying the deep-learning algorithm on the fly.
is sufficiently difficult that mere error isn't generally considered a matter of culpability unless it's accompanied by negligence or recklessness
In other words: medicine is based on imperfect information, it's impossible to correctly diagnose and treat anything, and people should stop expecting doctors to get everything right and focus more on getting things less-wrong.
I'm a fan of exploratory pharmacology, although I don't know if that's considered ethical. I don't particularly care, so long as it's safe.
I went in for psychiatric care due to ADHD, and eventually discovered my insomnia was severe (I thought I was getting 6.5 hours; I was getting ~2 hours for over a year). I don't have attention issues when well-rested; I'm fidgety and have impulse-control problems. That means my ADHD is inattentive-type when sleep-deprived and hyperactive-type when well-rested. I've also determined the original issue (starting things, working for a few days or weeks, then never finding the motivation to continue) is rooted in anhedonia, and is textbook major depressive disorder even though I don't feel depressed.
So here's the fun part.
My first try was Modafinil, because I did not want amphetamine, because I knew I had sleeping issues. Modafinil worked great, and then messed me up bad (extreme depression) after two weeks. I went back and checked out how I was really sleeping for the prior several months and determined my FitBit was reading me as asleep when lying in bed for hours awake; switched to the Sensitive tracker those days and it read my sleep time accurately--at damned near nothing. Yeah, don't use Modafinil to stay up for 2 weeks straight; and don't use Modafinil if you otherwise don't sleep for 2 weeks straight.
I had tried Phenylpiracetam (not scheduled, not approved; NDRI) to no success prior to getting a psychiatrist, but only did that for a week because it made me really high. A talk with my psychiatrist determined that "really high" was pretty much "there are these feelings when good things happen and I've never felt this before and it's a euphoriant and I'm high as shit!" I told him I needed to get some counseling and figure out if that's anhedonia or just me being high, and he asked a bunch of questions and determined... it's anhedonia. Put me on Amphetamine.
Did not like Amphetamine.
Amphetamine hits me really hard. At 10mg XR it makes me anxious and depressed; at 20mg XR it causes severe overdose symptoms (I pissed brown and lost 6 pounds in one day, including muscle mass); at 15mg XR the anxiety goes away and I feel mildly depressed. If I take one, I don't sleep for at least 26 hours. I stopped taking them while taking Belsomra (Suvorexant), which allowed me to sleep but didn't make me tired.
Belsomra is hard to get covered by insurance, so I tried Eszopiclone. I was high as shit 24/7 and nearly drove my car into another car 20 hours after the last dose, but it didn't help me sleep. 12 days in I stopped taking it, went through really bad withdrawal for one day, and decided GABA drugs are not for me. To hell with that.
It goes on and on. I've determined serotonin drugs are not a thing for me--that means all those SSRI anti-depressants are a no-go. SAM-e (at 800mg) and Atomoxetine (at 80mg) both cause serotonin mania; Atomoxetine at 60mg causes serotonin-related problems (tachycardia, fatigue) that go away at a split 25mg dose. Atomoxetine is an SNRI that primarily occupies NET; once NET is 98% occupied, an increase in dose rapidly occupies SERT and jacks up the level of Serotonin in your brain. I like Atomoxetine at lower doses, as it eliminates the excessive poor behavioral impulses and leaves me with something I can control; it also allows me to sleep, so I don't need any sleep drugs.
I've been pushed into suicide-grade depression, driven insane, and outright poisoned. As a patient, I can handle it: I'm extremely psychologically-resilient
Yeah, this is another elevation of someone's personal hobby to a personal fantasy. The opener got me:
For starters, the profile of a programmer's mind is pretty uncommon. As well as being highly analytical and creative, software developers need almost superhuman focus to manage the complexity of their tasks.
Becoming a programmer requires putting in effort. You have to put in the effort to study, learn, and understand the field of computer science and the application of programming processes. It's not just "I read a book on C# and now I can code!" It's not just knowing design patterns and other trivia. It's knowing why those things are there.
I got a project management certification. I break down deliverables into hierarchies of deliverables. In programming, we have all these design patterns and concepts like encapsulation so you can break down large, complex bodies of code into isolated blocks. The whole microkernel thing separates processes physically and forces the use of a common communication protocol; modern OOP methods attempt the same with code living in the same source file right next to each other. These are all the same concept: you're localizing each piece to a small scope so you don't make a change internal to one part and have something far, far away break as a result unless you broke the part you changed.
Planning takes a lot of time. Most programmers don't seem to appreciate architecture or management; they all just want to sit down, write a bunch of stuff, get a result that pushes their joy buttons, and keep making changes as they organically grow a complex system. It only works as long as they can keep the relevant parts in their heads and manage to not break the other parts they've already forgotten.
Good project management sharply reduces the complexity of execution (getting all the work done) by breaking down and structuring the work, making it easy to track. In the same way, good program architecture sharply reduces the complexity of implementation by reducing the number of connections between different parts of the code. If your code is tightly-coupled, then a change in how you perform a certain operation can affect the way other parts of the code flow due to changing states besides the output state. If your code is encapsulated, then all client code uses an interface and receives a result without being affected by everything that happens along the way: any change that could affect other parts of your program is a bug fix or a refactor.
Engineers don't build cars such that the rear differential is affected by changes to how the piston rod connects to the crank shaft or the steering pinion is affected by how the power steering module transfers power in response to the driver's input. Engineers build engines, transmissions, power steering modules, and differentials, and plug them together like legos. You replace the vacuum-driven, hydraulic power steering module with an electrically-driven, drive-by-wire power steering module and your rack-and-pinion steering system still works because the electric motor's drive shaft plugs into the same spot the other thing hooked up to.
We build programs the same way now, or else we complain that programming is super-complex beyond the limits of rocket science and automotive engineering.
No, it's a stupid point. If it's advantageous for all the big players to take the same kinds of throttling action, then what? A small player enters the market and... what? The market won't just turn over and give them influence; they still have to go through someone else's fabric, and can face rate controls and the like by proxy. Building their own infrastructure is expensive.
Why hasn't MintSim caused everyone to abandon Ting and T-Mobile?
PayPal argues that Pandora wants people to accidentally go to Pandora instead of PayPal.
Their argument is ridiculous, since people with the Pandora app are already Pandora customers, and confusion doesn't help Pandora in that case. The remaining claims are reasonable.
Slashdot Mirror
My point is that the money in the bank account isn't itself changing hands. There's a difference between money being spent (moved between bank accounts) and not being spent (sitting in a bank account).
To claim that the money in the bank account is still doing something because it is the foundation of existence for some other money is a terrible argument. It's complete nonsense. The economic effect of spending dollar X is independent of the economic effect of spending some other dollars; the money in the bank is not circulating, even if it is theoretically the basis for some other loans.
Again: this matters because the total amount of money spent on all production is the total wages earned, the total purchasing, and thus the basis for how much buying power the currency has. Whether a pile of money is circulating or not circulation is what determines inflation; and because central banks (not just the one in the U.S.) intentionally keep a steady inflation rate (it's 2% in the US), money just sitting in a bank account is replaced by a smaller amount of newly-minted money such that the fractional reserve system replaces the unspent cash holdings in total.
Whether or not your central bank actually responds that way, your economy will respond in such a way that all the money being spent is all the goods and services being sold, because of course it is. That means unspent billions sitting in a bank do impact the economy as if that money is taken out of circulation (because it is), and spending it years later will have the same effect as putting so much more money into circulation (because it does).
The argument that $1Bn of banked money is different from $1Bn of newly-minted Federal cash is distorted: $1Bn of banked money is the same amount of potential money in circulation as $0.05Bn of minted Federal cash. Pointing out the conversion and then handwaving it away is a fallacy of equivocation (and likely a few more I don't care to pick apart).
Everybody thinks "That's great, I could finally code up that game I've always wanted to write!"
That's one of those fantasies UBI people have. UBI isn't about freeing people from work to do some other kind of work; it's about Malthusian growth and economic stability.
Improve technology enough to raise the carry capacity. Make the economy efficient enough to get everyone a job. Drop unemployment to 0.2%. Block immigration. Do you know what will happen? More babies, fewer college students going to grad school (to delay entry into the job market), more late retirement, less early retirement. Short- and long-term increase of the labor force will occur until we push unemployment back up around 5% (UE3/UE4).
There's always going to be unemployment. We respond to abundance by growing. We grow until the scarcity pressure makes us uncomfortable. It's just that way. We have an administrative tap we can use to adjust this artificially--the flow of immigrant labor is something we can actually control--and otherwise it just runs on its own to raise or lower the unemployment rate toward 5%. That's only a secondary effect; the primary effect is growth in abundance and less growth in scarcity.
We saw this slowing of population and labor force growth with the Great Recession and the Great Depression, in both cases with more early retirement and more students staying in college for grad school to avoid the weak job market. We saw the growth of population in the California Gold Rush and in the technological growth era that gave us the Baby Boomers. It's the same mechanism as the predator-prey relationship whereby the population of a predator adjusts with the population of its prey, just with a good deal more underlying variables.
UBI is about supplying a welfare system to cover the transitions. Anyone who tells you people will be free to pursue their artistic careers, become volunteer workers, and otherwise supply things they can't right now for some reason is simply delusional.
Any social system that doesn't take human nature into account is doomed to failure.
I designed my Universal Social Security around an economic basis. People try to economize: they try to maximize their ends (what they get) from their means (what they can expend--essentially time, thus work). That means every action is a greedy action seeking to do the least work and bring the most gain. The more people adhere to this behavior, the better the system works.
Unix systems fundamentally do not function without services. As well, I can easily argue that the paradigm of systemd is a better reflection of the Unix philosophy than classical init: systemd actually supplies small, sharp tools for things like process communication and logging, while we have a pile of blunt hacks to cobble shit together with sysvinit.
sysvinit is your services manager. It brings up your syslog daemon; it initializes your graphical display; it changes your system context to determine if you've got networking up or down. The sysvinit system is tasked with managing the whole process of getting system services running, and it does a terrible job of it.
Code quality aside, systemd is a collection of tools, daemons, and libraries. It's not a giant, monolithic clusterfuck that loads itself to start with; the init system brings up a bunch of other services of which it is aware. Each service makes use of other services. Various services use libraries to make use of systemd-supplied facilities such as interprocess communication and device management.
The real, fundamental difference between systemd and sysvinit is systemd is more-aware of all the little components of an init system. Classical sysvinit relies on some sort of hardware management service to ensure network devices are in place, drivers are loaded, and device files are created; systemd relies on such a service as well, and is aware of a particular interface to communicate with such a service. The service manager in systemd can bring up a service, and also is aware of the logging daemon and can send console output to the daemon, in the context of the service; the daemon itself can also send log messages directly to the logging daemon.
It's a collection of tools replacing older, blunter tools. That collection is called "systemd".
Money in the bank supports a 19:1 fractional reserve loan system. That's it.
When you spend your money, you move it from one bank account (yours) to another (someone else's). That means you spend your money ($1), and your money continues to support loans ($19). That's a total $20 of money represented in the economy. If you don't spend your money, it's a total of $19.
Here's the rub: if you don't spend your money, then it only represents 95% as much active, moving money in the monetary system. The Fed tries to maintain 2% inflation per year. More money circulating per labor-hour worked means inflation (it can only circulate if prices are higher; and you can only sustain higher prices with higher wages).
So if you have $1Bn of cash flow and spend it and the banks are maxed on their loans, that money represents $20Bn of issued, active currency. The Fed can inflate all of this by 2% by issuing $0.02Bn (FRB turns this into $0.4Bn additional circulating currency via new debt). If you just bank that $1Bn and don't spend it, then the Fed is targeting $20.4Bn, but that $20Bn has turned into $19Bn of spending; thus the Fed must issue $0.07Bn of currency (which becomes $1.4Bn via FRB).
Now the Fed has put your $1Bn back into circulation without moving it out of your bank account. Essentially, instead of you spending $1Bn, the Fed has issued $0.05Bn and enabled the Banks to loan an additional $0.95Bn. Now other entities--people, businesses, etc.--can spend the $1Bn you're not.
Then, when you wake up one day years later and start spending your money, you're issuing $1Bn of active currency back into circulation.
Yes, that's really how it works. Mattress money takes 20x as much currency out of circulation; bank account money only eliminates your spending, taking your money out of circulation only and leaving the fractional-reserve-banking loaned money in circulation.
It helps if you know a little about how banking and monetary systems work, instead of just that banks loan money. What gets me, though, is that people talk as if money that's spent somehow isn't in the banks, and money that's unspent is. Big money doesn't leave the banking system; only petty cash is temporarily out of bank accounts. Your assertion suggests there is no difference between spending and not spending.
A replacement for systemd that doesn't end up just reverting back to SysV will have to end up looking a lot like systemd as a result.
In other words, nobody can think of anything better, and would just rewrite SystemD?
Wouldn't work. Savings is idle money and is out of the economy. Spending it all at once like that creates a bubble and is basically just inflation. It's the same as printing new money.
The only sustainable UBI policy I've been able to derive feeds from a flat income tax appended to a progressive general fund income tax. It's sustainable because its funding source represents a portion of production: it pays out enough to buy 17% of everything made every year, continuously, on two-week intervals. It does this by taking that 17% on two-week intervals, so basically it takes 17% of everything being produced and distributes it evenly.
You can't eat cash; cash has to represent something you can eat.
It can be done without raising taxes on anyone. Zuck is still full of hot air.
GDP measures total production, and grows with population and technical progress. GDP-per-capita measures production per person in population, and measures wealth. GDP-per-labor-hour would be a viable measure of actual productivity, if it were measurable.
If productivity increases, then there's more stuff per person. If there's more stuff per person, then we can take a smaller percentage of stuff from everyone and give everyone things.
Imagine if the average hourly income (the mean) across all hours worked could pay the rent for two apartments, food for two households, and clothing for two households. To give apartments, food, and clothing to everyone, we'd have to tax everyone at 50% of their income.
Imagine if the average hourly income (the mean) across all hours worked could pay the rent for ten apartments, food for ten households, and clothing for ten households. To give apartments, food, and clothing to everyone, we'd have to tax everyone at 10% of their income.
In the United States, we can just about do it without raising taxes on the rich as of 2013. The total is actually a $1 trillion lower tax burden. I count it as a "tax burden" if you get more than you pay in--that is: if you pay $5k in and get $10k back, that's a $5k tax burden because somebody has to pay that extra $5k. By the same logic, if you pay $19k in taxes now, and under my system pay $21k in taxes but get $7k back, your tax burden is $5k lower.
It would be a great but deceptive political argument to just claim that all of the money goes back to Americans somewhere, therefor there is no cost involved, and the entire amount is a reduction of tax burden. By such logic, you could claim welfare of any kind carries no cost; it's an idiotic argument.
The whole system I worked out moves about $1.8 trillion around. Nearly half of that pays out to low-income taxpayers who don't pay enough taxes to cover it; the rest goes back to the people who paid into the pool to start with. Again: because the people receiving more than they pay in are the cost, the savings to the tax payer versus the current system are only about $1 trillion.
That works in the United States. It's not a global system and can't directly translate to any other country. I don't believe a global system is viable today, and I don't believe all countries are at a level of wealth in which a UBI of any sort is viable. I've also seen a hell of a lot of non-viable UBI plans and really fucking bad arguments from UBI proponents who haven't got a damned clue how economics works.
Most of the UBI proponents don't make sense. Zuckerberg's announcement here is a feel-good thing, and terrible.
You've got a few bad arguments, too, though. Stop using this go-to:
without opportunity the money will just be used for drugs far too often.
Drug abuse and other mental health issues come with stress. Poverty and insecurity produce stress. Stability reduces these problems. Individual economic stability is much-more-likely to reduce drug abuse than it is to increase it--along with reducing things like prostitution and gang crimes.
Blank checks require more personal responsibility than you can expect out of the population at large.
To a degree, yes. I prefer child welfare by providing public aid for children of low-income households because providing a cash benefit for children just creates profit motive for child neglect. It's the same problem: a UBI provides a limited amount of stability; if you provide child care in a way which can be leveraged, people will leverage it for more stability. Giving everyone a set pile of cash for each child means the poorer who are operating narrowly within the lines are encouraged to produce children, minimize childcare expenses, and rake the rest off the top to try and shore up their finances elsewhere. It's less of a problem with middle-class because of the obvious increase in financial stability.
Providing public aid for children of low-income families doesn't take on any new risks relative to our current system. That means each adult in the household gets $MONEY to support themselves; each child gets EBT for food, clothing, and the like. In the current system, you can shift food money onto EBT and use the money elsewhere; this isn't a new risk in a UBI system.
As for why a UBI? You have to understand welfare first.
All welfare leverages our level of technology to supply social safety nets. Technology reduces labor required to make things, which means you pay less in wages--fewer labor hours at the same labor-hour rate means less currency in total spent on labor--which reduces the minimum price for which a thing can sell. Our current spotty welfare system was feasible in 1950, whereas a UBI would have raised taxes on everyone by some 38% or more--and some were already paying a 90% bracket.
This technical progress means people will lose jobs. Those jobs get replaced; however, our labor force naturally grows to a target unemployment rate. In the United States, that has gravitated toward 5% (UE3 and UE4) for over a century, regardless of the labor force participation rate. It's so strong that the labor force participation rate increased when technological progress sharply drove growth after 1950, rather than unemployment simply falling to a stable 2% or so.
Jobs are created by demand. Consumers have income unspent; they seek to purchase additional things; those things must be supplied, shipped, warehoused, retailed, the like. Those activities scale; technical progress reduces the number of humans required for a certain amount of any of those, and so you can increase how much of that you're doing per-person while keeping the same rate of employment. If trucks can ship twice as much and people can buy twice as much, then you have the same number of truck drivers.
In other words: you can't pre-plan an economy and create new jobs to move people into as they lose their existing ones to technology (e.g. Marxism). Those new jobs can only exist to support what people are buying; and people can only buy once prices fail to increase as rapidly as wages. To find out what jobs you need to move people into, you need to unemploy them and let prices lag wages first. Worse, if you did move people directly, you'd disenfranchise all the existing unemployed from ever finding employment: all of the new jobs would be reserved for the currently-employed.
That's why we need welfare, and how we get welfare. What abo
Read the fucking manual.
Systemd is a modular architecture with many small pieces plugged together.
Ian committed suicide.
So, wait, we can give people the legal privilege ("rights" are a philosophical mysticism, not a real thing) of speech without repercussion from government, and then revoke that privilege from corporations (which are not people)? That's great! All we have to do is avoid public spaces! Put most places under the incorporated care of businesses on behalf of the government, and then fine the business for allowing politically-unfavorable displays in those areas!
My local Safeway has them.
Does "slightly" equate to "roughly 3 weeks"?
Nobody really asks why bitcoin is $2,700. The answer is simple: Because people think it will be worth more than $2,700 later. They're all speculators.
The difference between "investment" and "speculation" is how people feel about it.
Gandhi picked up salt off the beach. This was illegal. He did it because it was illegal.
A helicopter is a different machine with different aerodynamics due to its sheer size, mass, and altitude, too.
Your argument implies that being able to fly an RC quadcopter drone implies capability to fly a helicopter. Do you know what flying a helicopter entails?
Here's an exercise for you.
Grow a tomato plant. When you have large, hard, green tomatoes, pick a few and put them in a brown paper bag.
Eat those tomatoes when they ripen. Compare them to tomatoes which ripen on the vine. As well, hold onto a tomato picked at optimal ripeness, and a tomato picked when green; time how long before each begins to soften, wrinkle, and rot.
You want tasty tomatoes? Live closer to the farm.
Tomatoes are harvested green and shipped. They don't develop the sugars that make them sweet because they're not ripened on the vine. Were they vine-ripened, shipping them to remote states would land you with rotting tomatoes.
In practice, tomato flavor is related to the distance shipped from the harvesting operation. The logistics to get tomatoes to your table with less time between picking and purchasing are responsible for providing better flavor.
Says the guy who rants about how he doesn't like the facts put in front of him but doesn't offer any explanation. Your entire counter-argument has been "you're an idiot"; to the audience, I've explained things, and you've thrown a tantrum.
So, why going back to a physician once you have the best diagnostic possible?
Because humans are able to access and interpret a wider array of information. We see patterns in how people walk, how they breathe, and how the scientific analysis of data provides a particular diagnosis in detectable situations where a different diagnosis is correct.
Sometimes it's 0.01% likely that other diagnosis is correct, given the data you understand; and some available data you can't yet name or quantify identifies when it's almost-guaranteed the alternate option is the correct one. We call that "intuition" until we can identify the variables, quantify them, and feed them into a machine or training course to include them in the documented diagnostic criteria.
Doctors and nurses will begin to notice patterns of the AI giving a certain list of likely diagnoses when specific symptoms are present when some different diagnoses is correct. They'll notice that if the diagnosis list or the symptoms are different, then the alternate diagnosis is not correct. In other words: they'll start recognizing error conditions and failure modes, and identifying not just when not to trust the machine, but what the machine should have selected for.
Working rigidly from a procedure means ignoring failure modes no matter how consistently you can spot them. Humans do the equivalent of modifying the deep-learning algorithm on the fly.
is sufficiently difficult that mere error isn't generally considered a matter of culpability unless it's accompanied by negligence or recklessness
In other words: medicine is based on imperfect information, it's impossible to correctly diagnose and treat anything, and people should stop expecting doctors to get everything right and focus more on getting things less-wrong.
I'm a fan of exploratory pharmacology, although I don't know if that's considered ethical. I don't particularly care, so long as it's safe.
I went in for psychiatric care due to ADHD, and eventually discovered my insomnia was severe (I thought I was getting 6.5 hours; I was getting ~2 hours for over a year). I don't have attention issues when well-rested; I'm fidgety and have impulse-control problems. That means my ADHD is inattentive-type when sleep-deprived and hyperactive-type when well-rested. I've also determined the original issue (starting things, working for a few days or weeks, then never finding the motivation to continue) is rooted in anhedonia, and is textbook major depressive disorder even though I don't feel depressed.
So here's the fun part.
My first try was Modafinil, because I did not want amphetamine, because I knew I had sleeping issues. Modafinil worked great, and then messed me up bad (extreme depression) after two weeks. I went back and checked out how I was really sleeping for the prior several months and determined my FitBit was reading me as asleep when lying in bed for hours awake; switched to the Sensitive tracker those days and it read my sleep time accurately--at damned near nothing. Yeah, don't use Modafinil to stay up for 2 weeks straight; and don't use Modafinil if you otherwise don't sleep for 2 weeks straight.
I had tried Phenylpiracetam (not scheduled, not approved; NDRI) to no success prior to getting a psychiatrist, but only did that for a week because it made me really high. A talk with my psychiatrist determined that "really high" was pretty much "there are these feelings when good things happen and I've never felt this before and it's a euphoriant and I'm high as shit!" I told him I needed to get some counseling and figure out if that's anhedonia or just me being high, and he asked a bunch of questions and determined ... it's anhedonia. Put me on Amphetamine.
Did not like Amphetamine.
Amphetamine hits me really hard. At 10mg XR it makes me anxious and depressed; at 20mg XR it causes severe overdose symptoms (I pissed brown and lost 6 pounds in one day, including muscle mass); at 15mg XR the anxiety goes away and I feel mildly depressed. If I take one, I don't sleep for at least 26 hours. I stopped taking them while taking Belsomra (Suvorexant), which allowed me to sleep but didn't make me tired.
Belsomra is hard to get covered by insurance, so I tried Eszopiclone. I was high as shit 24/7 and nearly drove my car into another car 20 hours after the last dose, but it didn't help me sleep. 12 days in I stopped taking it, went through really bad withdrawal for one day, and decided GABA drugs are not for me. To hell with that.
It goes on and on. I've determined serotonin drugs are not a thing for me--that means all those SSRI anti-depressants are a no-go. SAM-e (at 800mg) and Atomoxetine (at 80mg) both cause serotonin mania; Atomoxetine at 60mg causes serotonin-related problems (tachycardia, fatigue) that go away at a split 25mg dose. Atomoxetine is an SNRI that primarily occupies NET; once NET is 98% occupied, an increase in dose rapidly occupies SERT and jacks up the level of Serotonin in your brain. I like Atomoxetine at lower doses, as it eliminates the excessive poor behavioral impulses and leaves me with something I can control; it also allows me to sleep, so I don't need any sleep drugs.
I've been pushed into suicide-grade depression, driven insane, and outright poisoned. As a patient, I can handle it: I'm extremely psychologically-resilient
Yeah, this is another elevation of someone's personal hobby to a personal fantasy. The opener got me:
For starters, the profile of a programmer's mind is pretty uncommon. As well as being highly analytical and creative, software developers need almost superhuman focus to manage the complexity of their tasks.
Becoming a programmer requires putting in effort. You have to put in the effort to study, learn, and understand the field of computer science and the application of programming processes. It's not just "I read a book on C# and now I can code!" It's not just knowing design patterns and other trivia. It's knowing why those things are there.
I got a project management certification. I break down deliverables into hierarchies of deliverables. In programming, we have all these design patterns and concepts like encapsulation so you can break down large, complex bodies of code into isolated blocks. The whole microkernel thing separates processes physically and forces the use of a common communication protocol; modern OOP methods attempt the same with code living in the same source file right next to each other. These are all the same concept: you're localizing each piece to a small scope so you don't make a change internal to one part and have something far, far away break as a result unless you broke the part you changed.
Planning takes a lot of time. Most programmers don't seem to appreciate architecture or management; they all just want to sit down, write a bunch of stuff, get a result that pushes their joy buttons, and keep making changes as they organically grow a complex system. It only works as long as they can keep the relevant parts in their heads and manage to not break the other parts they've already forgotten.
Good project management sharply reduces the complexity of execution (getting all the work done) by breaking down and structuring the work, making it easy to track. In the same way, good program architecture sharply reduces the complexity of implementation by reducing the number of connections between different parts of the code. If your code is tightly-coupled, then a change in how you perform a certain operation can affect the way other parts of the code flow due to changing states besides the output state. If your code is encapsulated, then all client code uses an interface and receives a result without being affected by everything that happens along the way: any change that could affect other parts of your program is a bug fix or a refactor.
Engineers don't build cars such that the rear differential is affected by changes to how the piston rod connects to the crank shaft or the steering pinion is affected by how the power steering module transfers power in response to the driver's input. Engineers build engines, transmissions, power steering modules, and differentials, and plug them together like legos. You replace the vacuum-driven, hydraulic power steering module with an electrically-driven, drive-by-wire power steering module and your rack-and-pinion steering system still works because the electric motor's drive shaft plugs into the same spot the other thing hooked up to.
We build programs the same way now, or else we complain that programming is super-complex beyond the limits of rocket science and automotive engineering.
No, it's a stupid point. If it's advantageous for all the big players to take the same kinds of throttling action, then what? A small player enters the market and... what? The market won't just turn over and give them influence; they still have to go through someone else's fabric, and can face rate controls and the like by proxy. Building their own infrastructure is expensive.
Why hasn't MintSim caused everyone to abandon Ting and T-Mobile?
PayPal argues that Pandora wants people to accidentally go to Pandora instead of PayPal.
Their argument is ridiculous, since people with the Pandora app are already Pandora customers, and confusion doesn't help Pandora in that case. The remaining claims are reasonable.