There is a Constitutional law which says Congress shall make no law establishing a State religion or infringing upon the free exercise of religion. That means Congress cannot make laws declaring a religion of the United States, or banning a religion, or whatnot. Congress also can't give any regulatory body the power to enforce any such thing.
Congress also cannot produce a legal basis for removing bibles, torah, qu'ran, or the Tao from the curriculum of public schools. Congress can neither prevent nor produce a legal basis to order a Federal courthouse to adorn itself with religious displays. Congress cannot produce any sort of law allowing a legal gag of the practice of religion by state or Federal legislatures, either, meaning that the Senate can vote for its proceedings to open with prayer, and any Senator may abstain from said prayer without legal repercussion.
The "Separation of Church and State" doesn't exist. The uneducated make an argument that, somewhere, there's a line in the Constitution declaring that the Government must be 100% secular, agnostic of all religion, and neutral in all aspects of its behavior. This has been used to found arguments against police departments which place crosses at sites of roadside deaths, even though you can't make any such legal argument against the practice even via the Incorporation Clause of the 14th Amendment (applying the 14th would make it illegal for the State to stop the police department from doing any such thing).
Not true at all as long as you hold your savings in a financial institution. Put your money in a savings account or similar and that money will get lent out to do other useful things in the economy.
Uh, hold on. My money in my bank accounts is spent by sending it to other bank accounts. Billionaires don't carry billions of dollars in cash; it sits in bank accounts, then gets transferred to other bank accounts. If that money is spent, it stays in the banking system, doing exactly the things you said; if it's unspent, it may well still stay in the bank account and provide a basis for fractional reserve lending, and it itself goes unspent.
It seems that the difference between spending $40 million and saving $40 million is that $40 million is whether that $40 million becomes part of some business's revenue stream. In either case, that $40 million remains in financial institutions. So, again, savings that goes unspent is essentially removed from circulation.
This is a direct contradiction to your assertion that savings = removal of money from the economy
It's not. When you leave money unspent, it stops acting as revenue stream, thus stops supporting wages, thus stops affecting prices. The Fed adjusts the money supply to maintain 2% inflation. How does that affect the money supply?
If you're spending your money, then it's being moved between accounts at financial institutions. It contributes to the loan basis for fractional banking. It also itself is a revenue stream for businesses, and acts as... well, money. It feeds into revenue and supports wages.
If you're not spending your money, it's sitting in an account at a financial institution. It contributes to the loan basis for fractional banking. It is not itself a revenue stream and doesn't support wages. Over time, the Fed issues more currency in order to keep inflation at 2% per year, and in the process compensates for the reduction in spending caused by your money idling in a bank account.
In that second situation, the Fed has issued more money; then, ten years later, you take your money out and spend it. It's as if your money (and not all of the loans based on it) was removed from the economy, new money was printed up to replace it, and then you magically poofed your money back into existence.
Your argument has one huge, glaring flaw: spending your money doesn't take it out of the banking system. Money spent is still in the banks to act as a basis from which to issue loans.
It's a complex economical issue that demonstrates that common sense is a logical fallacy, especially when dealing with large and complex systems. As such, it gets stupid people screaming for protection from something they think will hurt them.
Slashdot, like everywhere else, is full of self-indulgent idiots. Even rednecks have complex skills and knowledge other people don't; those of us with more-refined careers, better education, and all kinds of justifications about how smart we are like to forget that anyone without our particular technical skill has some other difficult skill (accounting, etc.). All sides think the others are full of morons and that their own ideals are perfect; we all then proceed to mindlessly throw out baseless and damaged opinions about things we don't understand.
I like economics because it's complex. Economics isn't about having read a book on economic systems; it's about thinking, analyzing, and conjecturing. Generally, in all non-economist circles, economics becomes a political topic where people grab a few choice axioms to demonstrate their position--or just shoot from the hip.
Look at the two opposing arguments. If you replace a man with a machine, then you've eliminated the man's job (forever). Alternately, if you replace a man with a machine, then you've created jobs for people to make machines. Neither is correct.
If you replace a man with a machine, then you've replaced a set of labor-hours to produce a thing with a set of fewer labor-hours to produce the same things. You get fewer machinists and machine operators than people replaced by the machines. The jobs lost to this re-distribute, typically such that you get some machinists, more machines producing more of the things for a lower cost (and price) than before, and jobs doing other things entirely.
That's also complex, takes time to fully render (there aren't and can't be replacement jobs the day jobs are eliminated by new technology because the full of downstream economic effects have to cut through all pressures holding them back), and can happen in a bunch of different ways. Slow technological replacement causes negligible unemployment increases before job replacement kicks in and puts us back on stable footing; rapid replacement causes rapid unemployment build-up and recessions.
Nobody cares. What they care about is the group of people on their side--the luddites and the technophiles. They care that a bunch of people agree with whichever wrong-headed, overly-simplistic ideal they're clinging to.
As a media outlet, if you can scare people, you can get them to come back to you for more news. The ability to see threats is the ability to avoid threats. News outlets that frighten you with terrifying news are perceived as protecting you from harm. They're your look-outs. Bad analysis and sloppy reporting to imply a threat gets you more viewers and more ad revenue.
I know nobody likes to read 90-paragraph essays and would rather do knee-jerk reactions either forwards or (as you did) in satire, but I still prefer to do a full accounting to justify the current position.
The tl;dr is that a rapid technological deployment will cause a terrible recession due to unemploying several percentage points of the workforce and driving the remainder to tighten their wallets, creating further unemployment; while a slow technological deployment will cause hardly a whimper, and just drive up consumer wealth.
25,000 jobs exchanged per month is a slow, gradual, easy deployment. We probably won't even notice. We'll notice so little that we'll get a few percentage points richer and still complain that we're poorer and the rich are taking all the money, even as we buy more junk, buy bigger houses, get better healthcare, and generally push up the living conditions of the middle- and lower-classes.
(Seriously, nobody cares about the explosive growth of middle- and lower-class wealth in the past 30 years; whenever I've backed someone into a corner pointing out all the things we buy now and the sheer quantity of consumption on which we live, they defect to an argument that material purchasing power isn't wealth in a conversation about the rich supposedly taking all the material purchasing power. I'm too stubborn to accept that complex, abstract concepts are hard to argue because people can't be forced to look directly at broad effects; if you can't hold up a rock and a grape and drop both to show the rock doesn't fall faster than the grape, they'll just ignore what you're saying and substitute their own imaginative fantasy for facts.)
It's harder to fly a plane or helicopter. There are a lot of things to hit on the ground, a lot of information feeds, and a lot of decisions to make; the air is nice and clear, except for invisible turbulence, stalls, and other situations requiring massive processing of information in ways not well-documented.
To get planes to self-fly reliably, you have to make them not drop out of the sky in a stall. Pilots do that by experience, which is just knowledge and an interpretation of feedback. Since we don't have a way to explain the generalized algorithm and information set pilots use, we could, at best, use complex flight recorders and bayesian analysis to generate statistical models which attempt to use only the specific situations encountered plus a limited degree of extrapolation on variables we've identified as relevant. None of the indicators are visual; we can only pull values from temperature sensors (which are slow to react to temperature changes), accelerometers, gyroscopes, pressure sensors, and stress sensors (i.e. power meters) attached to the movable parts of the plane to work out the situation. That means we have to either hope for a simple correlation between these variables or find a transformation algorithm to match them to what the pilot senses.
Cars can sense wheel rotation speed and identify when individual wheels are slipping. Accelerometers, gyroscopes, cameras, LiDAR, and prescriptive data feeds (e.g. maps, GPS) give you a pretty good sense of how the car is moving. You can tack on things like stress sensors on suspension components to model vehicular forces, and current models don't even do that--it might not even be necessary. Vehicle dynamics are pretty easy to work out from the way the car is moving now and the amount of wheel slippage; aerodynamics are negligible, so invisible forces aren't going to send your car spinning out of control or cause it to slide along the road due to a loss of traction.
As for the replacement rate, 25,000 per month isn't a lot. There are 192,000 freight trucks sold per year, or 16,000 per month. That leaves 9,000 taxi cabs or other such things.
It's not a big deal at that rate, anyway. The job turn-over is actually pretty high, and this gives a lot of recovery time. It's only 0.0166% of the workforce per month, and the adjustment rate for new contracts to push down shipping costs should pick up as soon as someone can scratch into a market--which means a freight company could even start expanding to weaken a competitor by deploying more trucks than the drivers it's eliminating and cutting its shipping pricing to attract more business. The added volume, even with the margins the same, will grow that company's cash flows and make them more capable of taking actions to gain market traction--while the competitors will have to lay off workers who they don't replace with self-driving cars.
In other words: we should see some job replacement in 2-3 months due to a slight reduction in shipping costs putting a control on consumer prices (i.e. prices rise slower than consumer wages; they'll slow their rise just a tiny bit more), but it's not going to stop the growth of unemployment at that level. It could be 6-12 months before the competition in the market really starts driving prices down, and those input costs start leading downstream businesses to price competition. We may see a full swing of 0.1%-0.2% unemployment at peak with a transition rate of 25,000.
Once that replacement rate kicks in, the rate of transition onto autonomous cars will pick up as a market imperative. It's two-fold: slightly-lower costs mean consumers can buy slightly-more, and part of that goes into increased shipping demand, which means labor on operational support, mechanics, fuel (electricity), and so forth. In total, it's still less labor in shipping, and less labor per unit shipped. Anything shipped must be sold (retail), as well, so some of the labor goes there. Even then, you've got slac
"Savings" in the long-term is the removal of money from the economy. Money that goes unspent is the same as money that's been burned. If you put your money in the bank and then come back 10 years later and take it out to spend it, it's functionally the same as printing new money.
Consumables are the productive economy. What do you think production is? Computers are consumable. Cars are consumable. Houses are consumable. None of those things continues to exist in working order without a steady flow of maintenance, which means productive labor.
I've been on road trips with my parents. We stopped for half-hour breaks between here and the next state. Staying locked up in the car for 9 hours is not the kind of thing most people want to do.
Likewise, it's still a thing nobody does every other weekend unless there's something psychiatrically wrong with them.
When central banks manage a fiat currency, their supposed goal is to avoid flation of either kind by continually adjusting the money supply to match the aggregate value of everything that is exchangeable for it.
The explicit goal of the Federal Treasury is a 2% inflation rate in the U.S.. They estimate inflation based on a core set of goods, and ignore everything else, which is why inflation seems so off. Inflation the way most people think about it isn't really a thing: money doesn't have blanket buying power in terms of goods.
Think of it like this: we have a range of wages, with a median income. Those wages are dollars per labor hour. If we double them all, immediately, and just print up twice the money, we get 100% inflation and no change in the relative cost of goods; all the prices must go up to match (get to that next). That's what people think of when you talk about inflation: everything is priced higher, we adjust the number of dollars upward.
The thing is that's not how it works. Money isn't that kind of magic. You've seen hard drives get cheaper (from thousands of dollars for any unit--at a few megabytes--to today's pennies-per-gigabyte and $80 full units), displays get cheaper (again: thousands of dollars to $100 or so, and the screens are bigger), phones get cheaper ($4,000 for a cell phone in 1983; $350 for a OnePlus 3t in 2016), and so forth. Food, clothing, housing, medical care, these things rise in price or even in proportion of spending; yet people eat out more (food + servants), spend a smaller percentage of their income on these things (food and clothing), or spend a bigger percentage of their income while buying more than the difference (e.g. 4% of median income spending today would buy more and better healthcare than 4% of the median income bought in 1950, and instead people spend 6% of their income and buy even more).
It's not just that some things price up and others price down anyway; it's that they price up and down at different rates. Food and clothing prices both grow more-slowly than wages, and so the inflation rate of food is different than the inflation rate of clothing. Even then, different foods and different clothes change differently.
So what actually happens?
Well, the minimum viable cost of a product has a hard-bound at the wages to supply it. Imagine all wages involved in making a shirt are $10/hr, including the cotton farming, the dying, the shipping, the retail, business management to get all this organized, and everything else. If it takes a total of 14 labor hours to get that shirt into your hands, then either that shirt costs no less than $140 or somebody doesn't get paid. Get that cut down to 3 labor-hours per shirt and the shirt has to cost more than $30--at a 40% profit, it would cost $42!
That's why prices come down: the costs come down. Each business in the supply chain has some profit, which bumps those prices above the wage-labor cost; lower the wage-labor costs and the price coming out of that business is still lower with the same profit margins. The profit margins are as high as the market will bear, and reducing the minimum price possible allows another manufacturer to target consumers who can't afford your product at its current price; because existing buyers would rather spend $50 than $100, you lose business to the new guy unless you cut your prices, so the broader market forces a narrowing of profit margins by increasing the pressure from competition (either actual competitors or potential competitors by way of making it less-risky for someone to try to break into your market). Without that particular beating stick, prices would just stay high.
Importantly, people still have the same labor to trade.
Recall above I said that prices must go up if you double the amount of wages and money? Here's why.
Population can expand until it reaches carry capacity. Carry capacity happens when you hit scarcity. Th
Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
I didn't learn this shit from history. I didn't even learn this shit from an economics class. I just modeled a bunch of different monetary policies in my head and identified that fiat with fractional reserve provides massive advantages and gives the greatest long-term stability, while commodity currency (e.g. gold) suffers from deflationary problems and commodity instability (new, productive gold mine means sudden inflation).
That would be no different than saying you want to be paid a fixed number of dollars per hour
Bitcoins are deflationary and somewhat unstable in the short-term.
The Mythical Man-Month was an essay collection written by a person whose understanding of scope management, resource leveling, and scheduling amounted to, "Throw more workers on the project and they'll be able to do more work at once." He learned that "oh, no, they won't."
Those of us who aren't uneducated fools understand how to use decomposition to render anything from a from-scratch implementation of a novel operating system to a morning coffee bar down into a hierarchical tree of deliverables, going down as far as the quantifiable and manageable components which build into the larger whole, including the complete set of management, assembly, and delivery associated with the thing. That decomposition may require a rolling approach, whereby the later parts are decomposed further as the earlier parts are finished so that we can understand those later parts sufficiently to decompose them.
You might recognize that parts we can't yet necessarily understand are also parts we can't implement: if I can't break down the idea of a thing into the idea of the things that go into it, I can't do it. That's important. It's why you can break those things down later.
Know why that's important?
Once you have understandable, definable work packages, you can identify the activities and tasks required to produce those work packages. You can relate those activities and tasks to each other to show how they relate in scheduling terms: which tasks can start independent of which other tasks? Your tasks will relate in ways including Finish-To-Start (you must complete A before you can begin B), Start-To-Start (you must begin A before you can begin B), Start-To-Finish (B cannot complete until A has started), and Finish-To-Finish (B cannot complete until A is complete--e.g. if a change in how A is implemented affects how B is implemented).
Given this, it is now possible to create a graph of work. You can identify your longest chain of dependent work, which tells you that completing all other parallel work first will not finish the project faster than that: the maximum effective resource allocation is, in the simplest sense, an amount of resources which can finish all other work at the same time as the critical path; throwing more workers at the problem won't make it finish faster, although it might finish some pieces faster.
It's also possible to identify when you can speed things up by adding more resources. If you're making decisions between allocating to critical and non-critical paths, you can get more people working on the project and do both at the same time. You'll finish faster.
The last possibility is a schedule crash: take the pieces that need to happen in sequence, make some guesses, and have more people work on them. This increases the risk of rework--things will be predicted incorrectly and you'll need additional work to true it all up. That can cost more, and it can even cause things to take even longer.
Brooks wrote a good bit of stuff about things that happen with programming projects, and a good resource for project managers who need to manage a programming team. Unfortunately, he used management of a programming project's schedule as his key hook, right up to defining Brooks's Law as a blunt cudgel with no apology. Much of the reasoning I've seen carried out around and in explanation of Brooks's law is generalized in project management practices, and has been well-understood since the 70s.
To be fair, the field of project management was also pretty fucking unrefined back then, so maybe I'm being uncharitable by pointing out that Brooks was patently uneducated in a field scarcely a decade older than his own observations. It may be better to say that the central scheduling focus of the Mythical Man Month and Brooks's Law are anachronistic and frequently-cited by the uneducated, while Brooks was simply not riding on the forefr
Yes but marathon trips with two drivers are the same kind of ludicrous nonsense as hypermiling: an edge case nobody cares about, except for some 1 in 100,000 people who lead such a sad and pathetic life that that's a thing they do.
That's a great idea! Also you should use my free app! It's great and lets you create an account and a profile; and if you send me a $19.99 tip (through the app), you can even use a bunch of special content features as a thank-you!
You know there was a time when cars ran on anything--alcohol or peanut oil--because gas stations weren't a thing? They got shit for mileage and horsepower, but they could burn anything you could dump in the tank.
In reality, there will be bathroom breaks, at least one meal, so add another 2 hours. Now, add two hours for recharge stops, assuming you can find one in the wasteland of west Texas.
Why aren't there 80kW chargers at your highway rest stops? You should be charging while you're peeing!
The 1000km round trip means you reach your destination just outside the 482km range of the Chevy Bolt. You need about a 2.67 minute charge on an 80kW DC circuit to get that last bit in. At the end of your drive, you can plug in and have a full charge in 1.25 hours.
ChargePoint currently sells charge circuits capable of delivering 130kW DC charging and up (as high as nearly 700kW). A future electric car with a 120kW charging circuit or support for off-board charging circuits (as in the Zero Motorcycle, which has a 1.65kW onboard circuit and accepts up to 6.6kW through a tree of offboard chargers) could get that 300 miles in 50 minutes. The J1772 standard communicates with the BMS, so the BMS can operate the TMS and work with the charger to maintain battery temperature range if the power can get to the battery; this may involve the cooling system working to almost-keep-up, then the BMS dialing the charge rate back so the cooling system can run the temperature back down to the bottom of the optimal range.
On current hardware, a 500km trip at average 90km/h should take you 5.56 hours. You should eat and rest every 4 hours. Plug into an 80kW charge circuit and you can put another 96km back onto your car, giving you a total 578km of range for the trip, allowing you to limp that last bit in. You'll then need about an hour at your destination to fully-recharge your car.
If you're making an 11-hour round trip, an hour at the destination doesn't seem excessive. If you're just going to pick up a package, pay Fedex to do it.
The charge circuits in modern cars (80kW at 3 miles per kW; my Volt gets 3.5-4.2 miles per kW) can put 240 miles of range on in an hour. At 4 miles per kW, it's 320 miles. Modern chargers can push 130kW or higher, and a 120kW charge circuit in a car could put 300 miles on in 50 minutes.
Charge times of half an hour per 200 miles are viable because it's about 3 hours of driving at 66mph average.
You tend to have more cases of exhaustion and fatigue when people actually work instead of sitting benched doing the least amount of work their contract allows them to get away with.
The Mythical Man Month was an essay written by an uneducated observer with no concept of how to account for bad management practices. He drew a hell of a lot of bad conclusions from observations of complex systems he couldn't understand, sort of like a person putting grain into a shirt and finding a mouse and thus concluding that mice are spontaneously created out of the ether by a mixture of grain and shirts.
Improving production means cutting back the labor required to produce results. This goes all the way down to organization: assembly lines and cellular manufacture just move the same machines around so that there's less running back and forth, and can cut out a huge chunk of labor.
In expansion, that means hiring fewer people. In level demand, that means layoffs. In either case, it means price tags grow more-slowly than inflation.
Cross-training allows you to hire fewer employees when your employees have a light load or your job function demands are variable. Specialization allows your employees to operate more-efficiently, and is more-appropriate when you have constant demand for a particular job function. Both of these increase the output per employee hour, decreasing the number of wage-hours paid. QED.
Holy shit, their average quarterly margin for 5 years is 19.28%.
Generally margins are slim, around 7%-12% (e.g. GM average is 4.53% ranging 0.6%-15.8% quarterly; Ford is 4.19% ranging -5.31%-20.86%; Restaurant Brands International owns Burger King, at 12.68% ranged -8.43%-28.75%). 20% average operating profits is sizable. CISCO can cut their margins and reduce their prices by at best 10% to try to compete; with the increased competition, they may very well need to.
Still, that won't help, because...
they demand growth, but cut back. Of *course* you can't sustain or grow your business if you are defeatist and ditch your people. A good business will accept lower profitability for the sake of investing in some way that delivers growth next go around.
The only sustainable model of growth is technical progress. Trade is a form of technical progress, and wage trade (e.g. outsourcing to low-wage countries like China) is only the most-limited form.
Technical progress reduces the labor invested in producing things. This allows the same invested time to produce more stuff--that means you work for 40 hours and can trade that 40 hours for more things, meanwhile you produce more things and so 40 hours of labor can trade to you for more stuff. We represent this with money, thus wages paid as money per time. Three big examples are the production of the hot-blast furnace, which allowed the same labor which previously produced 200 tonnes of iron to instead produce 86,400 tonnes (eliminated 99.8% of the labor involved); the wooden shipping pallet, which turned three days of 16-hour dock work into a 4-hour job (eliminated 91.7% of the labor at each transfer point); and computers, which have provided too much labor savings in too many fields to count.
Trade on technical progress moves labor to a better climate. America has the largest fertile basin in the world and can produce food more-cheaply than anywhere else given the same technology. Canada has vast wood and oil resources. Even China has developed manufacture facilities and expertise, meaning an even-wage basis between America and China would still give you cheaper Chinese imports because they're just better at manufacturing things. There is a great advantage to letting them do what they can do with less labor and giving them our easy-to-make stuff in trade.
Wage trade is advantageous to both economies: the importer reduces consumer costs, while the exporter gains a market to grow their economy. That growth allows the implementation of more-developed technologies, which further grows the economy. Over time, this means that relative wages increase (e.g. China suddenly doubling its wages in 5 years) while technical progress keeps cost down by reducing labor: that $5 thing is still a $5 thing because people make $3.20/hr instead of $1.60/hr and the massive export market has allowed them to fund the integration of technology that cuts the labor used for that $5 thing in half and sell two $5 things instead. Eventually, technology catches up, and wage growth drives prices up to near-even footing.
Once the economy is developed and wages come even, the advantage of importing from a low-wage labor force is lost.
That means your only advantage is whether they're running on better technology: are they capable of producing the thing with less labor than you'd invest, whether that be because of being right next to a resource, or having more experience, or a better installed basis of infrastructure, or just a greater amount of experience and thus the ability to handle those jobs better than you can? If so, it's cheaper to import.
That eventuality is the development of technology. If your technology is better than theirs but your experience is not as good, you can still do it cheaper; if they're so good at this and have such a huge market, they'll upgrade their technology and pass you again.
So do you know how a $30,000 CISCO router at 20% operating prof
Amid FortiNet and friends taking Cisco's business, nobody is flaming about jobs being lost in the industry while ignoring the growth in other competing businesses? Nobody's going to claim unemployment increases while unemployment continues to fall, even in the tech sector? Nobody's going to demand Cisco "just cut back profits" as they lose business and somehow keep paying their existing staff even as their customer base shrinks?
What happened, Slashdot? All I see is Obama and Trump talk (both bullshit).
Slashdot Mirror
There is a Constitutional law which says Congress shall make no law establishing a State religion or infringing upon the free exercise of religion. That means Congress cannot make laws declaring a religion of the United States, or banning a religion, or whatnot. Congress also can't give any regulatory body the power to enforce any such thing.
Congress also cannot produce a legal basis for removing bibles, torah, qu'ran, or the Tao from the curriculum of public schools. Congress can neither prevent nor produce a legal basis to order a Federal courthouse to adorn itself with religious displays. Congress cannot produce any sort of law allowing a legal gag of the practice of religion by state or Federal legislatures, either, meaning that the Senate can vote for its proceedings to open with prayer, and any Senator may abstain from said prayer without legal repercussion.
The "Separation of Church and State" doesn't exist. The uneducated make an argument that, somewhere, there's a line in the Constitution declaring that the Government must be 100% secular, agnostic of all religion, and neutral in all aspects of its behavior. This has been used to found arguments against police departments which place crosses at sites of roadside deaths, even though you can't make any such legal argument against the practice even via the Incorporation Clause of the 14th Amendment (applying the 14th would make it illegal for the State to stop the police department from doing any such thing).
Not true at all as long as you hold your savings in a financial institution. Put your money in a savings account or similar and that money will get lent out to do other useful things in the economy.
Uh, hold on. My money in my bank accounts is spent by sending it to other bank accounts. Billionaires don't carry billions of dollars in cash; it sits in bank accounts, then gets transferred to other bank accounts. If that money is spent, it stays in the banking system, doing exactly the things you said; if it's unspent, it may well still stay in the bank account and provide a basis for fractional reserve lending, and it itself goes unspent.
It seems that the difference between spending $40 million and saving $40 million is that $40 million is whether that $40 million becomes part of some business's revenue stream. In either case, that $40 million remains in financial institutions. So, again, savings that goes unspent is essentially removed from circulation.
This is a direct contradiction to your assertion that savings = removal of money from the economy
It's not. When you leave money unspent, it stops acting as revenue stream, thus stops supporting wages, thus stops affecting prices. The Fed adjusts the money supply to maintain 2% inflation. How does that affect the money supply?
If you're spending your money, then it's being moved between accounts at financial institutions. It contributes to the loan basis for fractional banking. It also itself is a revenue stream for businesses, and acts as... well, money. It feeds into revenue and supports wages.
If you're not spending your money, it's sitting in an account at a financial institution. It contributes to the loan basis for fractional banking. It is not itself a revenue stream and doesn't support wages. Over time, the Fed issues more currency in order to keep inflation at 2% per year, and in the process compensates for the reduction in spending caused by your money idling in a bank account.
In that second situation, the Fed has issued more money; then, ten years later, you take your money out and spend it. It's as if your money (and not all of the loans based on it) was removed from the economy, new money was printed up to replace it, and then you magically poofed your money back into existence.
Your argument has one huge, glaring flaw: spending your money doesn't take it out of the banking system. Money spent is still in the banks to act as a basis from which to issue loans.
A toy drone doesn't have a 196-foot wingspan and isn't traveling at 700mph at 10,000-30,000 foot atmosphere.
Stalls aren't part of air; stalls are an event experienced due to interaction with air. Use your fucking brain.
Orbit is not atmosphere; and a UAV with a 14-foot wingspan isn't a passenger jet with a 196-foot wingspan.
Next would you like to claim that a goose is pretty fat and can fly, so an ostrich should obviously have no trouble getting airborne?
It's a complex economical issue that demonstrates that common sense is a logical fallacy, especially when dealing with large and complex systems. As such, it gets stupid people screaming for protection from something they think will hurt them.
Slashdot, like everywhere else, is full of self-indulgent idiots. Even rednecks have complex skills and knowledge other people don't; those of us with more-refined careers, better education, and all kinds of justifications about how smart we are like to forget that anyone without our particular technical skill has some other difficult skill (accounting, etc.). All sides think the others are full of morons and that their own ideals are perfect; we all then proceed to mindlessly throw out baseless and damaged opinions about things we don't understand.
I like economics because it's complex. Economics isn't about having read a book on economic systems; it's about thinking, analyzing, and conjecturing. Generally, in all non-economist circles, economics becomes a political topic where people grab a few choice axioms to demonstrate their position--or just shoot from the hip.
Look at the two opposing arguments. If you replace a man with a machine, then you've eliminated the man's job (forever). Alternately, if you replace a man with a machine, then you've created jobs for people to make machines. Neither is correct.
If you replace a man with a machine, then you've replaced a set of labor-hours to produce a thing with a set of fewer labor-hours to produce the same things. You get fewer machinists and machine operators than people replaced by the machines. The jobs lost to this re-distribute, typically such that you get some machinists, more machines producing more of the things for a lower cost (and price) than before, and jobs doing other things entirely.
That's also complex, takes time to fully render (there aren't and can't be replacement jobs the day jobs are eliminated by new technology because the full of downstream economic effects have to cut through all pressures holding them back), and can happen in a bunch of different ways. Slow technological replacement causes negligible unemployment increases before job replacement kicks in and puts us back on stable footing; rapid replacement causes rapid unemployment build-up and recessions.
Nobody cares. What they care about is the group of people on their side--the luddites and the technophiles. They care that a bunch of people agree with whichever wrong-headed, overly-simplistic ideal they're clinging to.
As a media outlet, if you can scare people, you can get them to come back to you for more news. The ability to see threats is the ability to avoid threats. News outlets that frighten you with terrifying news are perceived as protecting you from harm. They're your look-outs. Bad analysis and sloppy reporting to imply a threat gets you more viewers and more ad revenue.
I know nobody likes to read 90-paragraph essays and would rather do knee-jerk reactions either forwards or (as you did) in satire, but I still prefer to do a full accounting to justify the current position.
The tl;dr is that a rapid technological deployment will cause a terrible recession due to unemploying several percentage points of the workforce and driving the remainder to tighten their wallets, creating further unemployment; while a slow technological deployment will cause hardly a whimper, and just drive up consumer wealth.
25,000 jobs exchanged per month is a slow, gradual, easy deployment. We probably won't even notice. We'll notice so little that we'll get a few percentage points richer and still complain that we're poorer and the rich are taking all the money, even as we buy more junk, buy bigger houses, get better healthcare, and generally push up the living conditions of the middle- and lower-classes.
(Seriously, nobody cares about the explosive growth of middle- and lower-class wealth in the past 30 years; whenever I've backed someone into a corner pointing out all the things we buy now and the sheer quantity of consumption on which we live, they defect to an argument that material purchasing power isn't wealth in a conversation about the rich supposedly taking all the material purchasing power. I'm too stubborn to accept that complex, abstract concepts are hard to argue because people can't be forced to look directly at broad effects; if you can't hold up a rock and a grape and drop both to show the rock doesn't fall faster than the grape, they'll just ignore what you're saying and substitute their own imaginative fantasy for facts.)
It's harder to fly a plane or helicopter. There are a lot of things to hit on the ground, a lot of information feeds, and a lot of decisions to make; the air is nice and clear, except for invisible turbulence, stalls, and other situations requiring massive processing of information in ways not well-documented.
To get planes to self-fly reliably, you have to make them not drop out of the sky in a stall. Pilots do that by experience, which is just knowledge and an interpretation of feedback. Since we don't have a way to explain the generalized algorithm and information set pilots use, we could, at best, use complex flight recorders and bayesian analysis to generate statistical models which attempt to use only the specific situations encountered plus a limited degree of extrapolation on variables we've identified as relevant. None of the indicators are visual; we can only pull values from temperature sensors (which are slow to react to temperature changes), accelerometers, gyroscopes, pressure sensors, and stress sensors (i.e. power meters) attached to the movable parts of the plane to work out the situation. That means we have to either hope for a simple correlation between these variables or find a transformation algorithm to match them to what the pilot senses.
Cars can sense wheel rotation speed and identify when individual wheels are slipping. Accelerometers, gyroscopes, cameras, LiDAR, and prescriptive data feeds (e.g. maps, GPS) give you a pretty good sense of how the car is moving. You can tack on things like stress sensors on suspension components to model vehicular forces, and current models don't even do that--it might not even be necessary. Vehicle dynamics are pretty easy to work out from the way the car is moving now and the amount of wheel slippage; aerodynamics are negligible, so invisible forces aren't going to send your car spinning out of control or cause it to slide along the road due to a loss of traction.
As for the replacement rate, 25,000 per month isn't a lot. There are 192,000 freight trucks sold per year, or 16,000 per month. That leaves 9,000 taxi cabs or other such things.
It's not a big deal at that rate, anyway. The job turn-over is actually pretty high, and this gives a lot of recovery time. It's only 0.0166% of the workforce per month, and the adjustment rate for new contracts to push down shipping costs should pick up as soon as someone can scratch into a market--which means a freight company could even start expanding to weaken a competitor by deploying more trucks than the drivers it's eliminating and cutting its shipping pricing to attract more business. The added volume, even with the margins the same, will grow that company's cash flows and make them more capable of taking actions to gain market traction--while the competitors will have to lay off workers who they don't replace with self-driving cars.
In other words: we should see some job replacement in 2-3 months due to a slight reduction in shipping costs putting a control on consumer prices (i.e. prices rise slower than consumer wages; they'll slow their rise just a tiny bit more), but it's not going to stop the growth of unemployment at that level. It could be 6-12 months before the competition in the market really starts driving prices down, and those input costs start leading downstream businesses to price competition. We may see a full swing of 0.1%-0.2% unemployment at peak with a transition rate of 25,000.
Once that replacement rate kicks in, the rate of transition onto autonomous cars will pick up as a market imperative. It's two-fold: slightly-lower costs mean consumers can buy slightly-more, and part of that goes into increased shipping demand, which means labor on operational support, mechanics, fuel (electricity), and so forth. In total, it's still less labor in shipping, and less labor per unit shipped. Anything shipped must be sold (retail), as well, so some of the labor goes there. Even then, you've got slac
"Savings" in the long-term is the removal of money from the economy. Money that goes unspent is the same as money that's been burned. If you put your money in the bank and then come back 10 years later and take it out to spend it, it's functionally the same as printing new money.
Consumables are the productive economy. What do you think production is? Computers are consumable. Cars are consumable. Houses are consumable. None of those things continues to exist in working order without a steady flow of maintenance, which means productive labor.
I've been on road trips with my parents. We stopped for half-hour breaks between here and the next state. Staying locked up in the car for 9 hours is not the kind of thing most people want to do.
Likewise, it's still a thing nobody does every other weekend unless there's something psychiatrically wrong with them.
When central banks manage a fiat currency, their supposed goal is to avoid flation of either kind by continually adjusting the money supply to match the aggregate value of everything that is exchangeable for it.
The explicit goal of the Federal Treasury is a 2% inflation rate in the U.S.. They estimate inflation based on a core set of goods, and ignore everything else, which is why inflation seems so off. Inflation the way most people think about it isn't really a thing: money doesn't have blanket buying power in terms of goods.
Think of it like this: we have a range of wages, with a median income. Those wages are dollars per labor hour. If we double them all, immediately, and just print up twice the money, we get 100% inflation and no change in the relative cost of goods; all the prices must go up to match (get to that next). That's what people think of when you talk about inflation: everything is priced higher, we adjust the number of dollars upward.
The thing is that's not how it works. Money isn't that kind of magic. You've seen hard drives get cheaper (from thousands of dollars for any unit--at a few megabytes--to today's pennies-per-gigabyte and $80 full units), displays get cheaper (again: thousands of dollars to $100 or so, and the screens are bigger), phones get cheaper ($4,000 for a cell phone in 1983; $350 for a OnePlus 3t in 2016), and so forth. Food, clothing, housing, medical care, these things rise in price or even in proportion of spending; yet people eat out more (food + servants), spend a smaller percentage of their income on these things (food and clothing), or spend a bigger percentage of their income while buying more than the difference (e.g. 4% of median income spending today would buy more and better healthcare than 4% of the median income bought in 1950, and instead people spend 6% of their income and buy even more).
It's not just that some things price up and others price down anyway; it's that they price up and down at different rates. Food and clothing prices both grow more-slowly than wages, and so the inflation rate of food is different than the inflation rate of clothing. Even then, different foods and different clothes change differently.
So what actually happens?
Well, the minimum viable cost of a product has a hard-bound at the wages to supply it. Imagine all wages involved in making a shirt are $10/hr, including the cotton farming, the dying, the shipping, the retail, business management to get all this organized, and everything else. If it takes a total of 14 labor hours to get that shirt into your hands, then either that shirt costs no less than $140 or somebody doesn't get paid. Get that cut down to 3 labor-hours per shirt and the shirt has to cost more than $30--at a 40% profit, it would cost $42!
That's why prices come down: the costs come down. Each business in the supply chain has some profit, which bumps those prices above the wage-labor cost; lower the wage-labor costs and the price coming out of that business is still lower with the same profit margins. The profit margins are as high as the market will bear, and reducing the minimum price possible allows another manufacturer to target consumers who can't afford your product at its current price; because existing buyers would rather spend $50 than $100, you lose business to the new guy unless you cut your prices, so the broader market forces a narrowing of profit margins by increasing the pressure from competition (either actual competitors or potential competitors by way of making it less-risky for someone to try to break into your market). Without that particular beating stick, prices would just stay high.
Importantly, people still have the same labor to trade.
Recall above I said that prices must go up if you double the amount of wages and money? Here's why.
Population can expand until it reaches carry capacity. Carry capacity happens when you hit scarcity. Th
Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
I didn't learn this shit from history. I didn't even learn this shit from an economics class. I just modeled a bunch of different monetary policies in my head and identified that fiat with fractional reserve provides massive advantages and gives the greatest long-term stability, while commodity currency (e.g. gold) suffers from deflationary problems and commodity instability (new, productive gold mine means sudden inflation).
That would be no different than saying you want to be paid a fixed number of dollars per hour
Bitcoins are deflationary and somewhat unstable in the short-term.
The Mythical Man-Month was an essay collection written by a person whose understanding of scope management, resource leveling, and scheduling amounted to, "Throw more workers on the project and they'll be able to do more work at once." He learned that "oh, no, they won't."
Those of us who aren't uneducated fools understand how to use decomposition to render anything from a from-scratch implementation of a novel operating system to a morning coffee bar down into a hierarchical tree of deliverables, going down as far as the quantifiable and manageable components which build into the larger whole, including the complete set of management, assembly, and delivery associated with the thing. That decomposition may require a rolling approach, whereby the later parts are decomposed further as the earlier parts are finished so that we can understand those later parts sufficiently to decompose them.
You might recognize that parts we can't yet necessarily understand are also parts we can't implement: if I can't break down the idea of a thing into the idea of the things that go into it, I can't do it. That's important. It's why you can break those things down later.
Know why that's important?
Once you have understandable, definable work packages, you can identify the activities and tasks required to produce those work packages. You can relate those activities and tasks to each other to show how they relate in scheduling terms: which tasks can start independent of which other tasks? Your tasks will relate in ways including Finish-To-Start (you must complete A before you can begin B), Start-To-Start (you must begin A before you can begin B), Start-To-Finish (B cannot complete until A has started), and Finish-To-Finish (B cannot complete until A is complete--e.g. if a change in how A is implemented affects how B is implemented).
Given this, it is now possible to create a graph of work. You can identify your longest chain of dependent work, which tells you that completing all other parallel work first will not finish the project faster than that: the maximum effective resource allocation is, in the simplest sense, an amount of resources which can finish all other work at the same time as the critical path; throwing more workers at the problem won't make it finish faster, although it might finish some pieces faster.
It's also possible to identify when you can speed things up by adding more resources. If you're making decisions between allocating to critical and non-critical paths, you can get more people working on the project and do both at the same time. You'll finish faster.
The last possibility is a schedule crash: take the pieces that need to happen in sequence, make some guesses, and have more people work on them. This increases the risk of rework--things will be predicted incorrectly and you'll need additional work to true it all up. That can cost more, and it can even cause things to take even longer.
Brooks wrote a good bit of stuff about things that happen with programming projects, and a good resource for project managers who need to manage a programming team. Unfortunately, he used management of a programming project's schedule as his key hook, right up to defining Brooks's Law as a blunt cudgel with no apology. Much of the reasoning I've seen carried out around and in explanation of Brooks's law is generalized in project management practices, and has been well-understood since the 70s.
To be fair, the field of project management was also pretty fucking unrefined back then, so maybe I'm being uncharitable by pointing out that Brooks was patently uneducated in a field scarcely a decade older than his own observations. It may be better to say that the central scheduling focus of the Mythical Man Month and Brooks's Law are anachronistic and frequently-cited by the uneducated, while Brooks was simply not riding on the forefr
Yes but marathon trips with two drivers are the same kind of ludicrous nonsense as hypermiling: an edge case nobody cares about, except for some 1 in 100,000 people who lead such a sad and pathetic life that that's a thing they do.
That's a great idea! Also you should use my free app! It's great and lets you create an account and a profile; and if you send me a $19.99 tip (through the app), you can even use a bunch of special content features as a thank-you!
You know there was a time when cars ran on anything--alcohol or peanut oil--because gas stations weren't a thing? They got shit for mileage and horsepower, but they could burn anything you could dump in the tank.
In reality, there will be bathroom breaks, at least one meal, so add another 2 hours. Now, add two hours for recharge stops, assuming you can find one in the wasteland of west Texas.
Why aren't there 80kW chargers at your highway rest stops? You should be charging while you're peeing!
The 1000km round trip means you reach your destination just outside the 482km range of the Chevy Bolt. You need about a 2.67 minute charge on an 80kW DC circuit to get that last bit in. At the end of your drive, you can plug in and have a full charge in 1.25 hours.
ChargePoint currently sells charge circuits capable of delivering 130kW DC charging and up (as high as nearly 700kW). A future electric car with a 120kW charging circuit or support for off-board charging circuits (as in the Zero Motorcycle, which has a 1.65kW onboard circuit and accepts up to 6.6kW through a tree of offboard chargers) could get that 300 miles in 50 minutes. The J1772 standard communicates with the BMS, so the BMS can operate the TMS and work with the charger to maintain battery temperature range if the power can get to the battery; this may involve the cooling system working to almost-keep-up, then the BMS dialing the charge rate back so the cooling system can run the temperature back down to the bottom of the optimal range.
On current hardware, a 500km trip at average 90km/h should take you 5.56 hours. You should eat and rest every 4 hours. Plug into an 80kW charge circuit and you can put another 96km back onto your car, giving you a total 578km of range for the trip, allowing you to limp that last bit in. You'll then need about an hour at your destination to fully-recharge your car.
If you're making an 11-hour round trip, an hour at the destination doesn't seem excessive. If you're just going to pick up a package, pay Fedex to do it.
The charge circuits in modern cars (80kW at 3 miles per kW; my Volt gets 3.5-4.2 miles per kW) can put 240 miles of range on in an hour. At 4 miles per kW, it's 320 miles. Modern chargers can push 130kW or higher, and a 120kW charge circuit in a car could put 300 miles on in 50 minutes.
Charge times of half an hour per 200 miles are viable because it's about 3 hours of driving at 66mph average.
You tend to have more cases of exhaustion and fatigue when people actually work instead of sitting benched doing the least amount of work their contract allows them to get away with.
The Mythical Man Month was an essay written by an uneducated observer with no concept of how to account for bad management practices. He drew a hell of a lot of bad conclusions from observations of complex systems he couldn't understand, sort of like a person putting grain into a shirt and finding a mouse and thus concluding that mice are spontaneously created out of the ether by a mixture of grain and shirts.
Improving production means cutting back the labor required to produce results. This goes all the way down to organization: assembly lines and cellular manufacture just move the same machines around so that there's less running back and forth, and can cut out a huge chunk of labor.
In expansion, that means hiring fewer people. In level demand, that means layoffs. In either case, it means price tags grow more-slowly than inflation.
Cross-training allows you to hire fewer employees when your employees have a light load or your job function demands are variable. Specialization allows your employees to operate more-efficiently, and is more-appropriate when you have constant demand for a particular job function. Both of these increase the output per employee hour, decreasing the number of wage-hours paid. QED.
Communication is even older than the human species. This Internet fad will go away soon enough.
Holy shit, their average quarterly margin for 5 years is 19.28%.
Generally margins are slim, around 7%-12% (e.g. GM average is 4.53% ranging 0.6%-15.8% quarterly; Ford is 4.19% ranging -5.31%-20.86%; Restaurant Brands International owns Burger King, at 12.68% ranged -8.43%-28.75%). 20% average operating profits is sizable. CISCO can cut their margins and reduce their prices by at best 10% to try to compete; with the increased competition, they may very well need to.
Still, that won't help, because...
they demand growth, but cut back. Of *course* you can't sustain or grow your business if you are defeatist and ditch your people. A good business will accept lower profitability for the sake of investing in some way that delivers growth next go around.
The only sustainable model of growth is technical progress. Trade is a form of technical progress, and wage trade (e.g. outsourcing to low-wage countries like China) is only the most-limited form.
Technical progress reduces the labor invested in producing things. This allows the same invested time to produce more stuff--that means you work for 40 hours and can trade that 40 hours for more things, meanwhile you produce more things and so 40 hours of labor can trade to you for more stuff. We represent this with money, thus wages paid as money per time. Three big examples are the production of the hot-blast furnace, which allowed the same labor which previously produced 200 tonnes of iron to instead produce 86,400 tonnes (eliminated 99.8% of the labor involved); the wooden shipping pallet, which turned three days of 16-hour dock work into a 4-hour job (eliminated 91.7% of the labor at each transfer point); and computers, which have provided too much labor savings in too many fields to count.
Trade on technical progress moves labor to a better climate. America has the largest fertile basin in the world and can produce food more-cheaply than anywhere else given the same technology. Canada has vast wood and oil resources. Even China has developed manufacture facilities and expertise, meaning an even-wage basis between America and China would still give you cheaper Chinese imports because they're just better at manufacturing things. There is a great advantage to letting them do what they can do with less labor and giving them our easy-to-make stuff in trade.
Wage trade is advantageous to both economies: the importer reduces consumer costs, while the exporter gains a market to grow their economy. That growth allows the implementation of more-developed technologies, which further grows the economy. Over time, this means that relative wages increase (e.g. China suddenly doubling its wages in 5 years) while technical progress keeps cost down by reducing labor: that $5 thing is still a $5 thing because people make $3.20/hr instead of $1.60/hr and the massive export market has allowed them to fund the integration of technology that cuts the labor used for that $5 thing in half and sell two $5 things instead. Eventually, technology catches up, and wage growth drives prices up to near-even footing.
Once the economy is developed and wages come even, the advantage of importing from a low-wage labor force is lost.
That means your only advantage is whether they're running on better technology: are they capable of producing the thing with less labor than you'd invest, whether that be because of being right next to a resource, or having more experience, or a better installed basis of infrastructure, or just a greater amount of experience and thus the ability to handle those jobs better than you can? If so, it's cheaper to import.
That eventuality is the development of technology. If your technology is better than theirs but your experience is not as good, you can still do it cheaper; if they're so good at this and have such a huge market, they'll upgrade their technology and pass you again.
So do you know how a $30,000 CISCO router at 20% operating prof
Amid FortiNet and friends taking Cisco's business, nobody is flaming about jobs being lost in the industry while ignoring the growth in other competing businesses? Nobody's going to claim unemployment increases while unemployment continues to fall, even in the tech sector? Nobody's going to demand Cisco "just cut back profits" as they lose business and somehow keep paying their existing staff even as their customer base shrinks?
What happened, Slashdot? All I see is Obama and Trump talk (both bullshit).