Uh, yeah, people who place their boot on the necks of the poor and working class...
Most people that died in the Soviet Gulags were poor and working class. The biggest determinant of who died was not class, but ethnicity, with Ukrainian peasants getting the worst of it.
The Luddites weren't just overly conservative, they were losing their livelihoods.
But overall employment in the spinning/weaving business was going UP. It was only their particular skills that were declining in value.
When there are new jobs they're low paying service sector jobs.
That is a big problem.
But the trouble there is there's less money in the economy
Rising productivity means more goods and services produced per unit of labor. That does not lead to "less money".
... an overall slowdown in the economy.
The economy is currently booming, but the "slow" period from 2007 to 2014 coincided with a DECLINE in productivity growth. This is the opposite of what you are claiming.
You're saying that being poor is more a result of societal factors than personal ones, also that upward mobility is extremely poor in the US.
Yes, that is what I am saying. Are you disagreeing?
Isn't that a horrible indictment on our society and our nation?
Yes. Absolutely.
Shouldn't the realization of that unfairness increase rather than decrease your compassion and understanding of the plight of the poor?
What??? How does saying "We shouldn't punish companies for hiring poor people" indicate a lack of compassion?
Bernie's proposed tax on poverty will disincentivize companies from hiring poor people, incentivize them to locate jobs in areas with fewer poor households, and raise the barriers to upward mobility. It is an idiotic proposal. But I don't think Bernie's supporters lack compassion, I just think they lack basic economic literacy.
So basic income it is. Easier to administer and actually closes the gap.
There is no plausible proposal for basic income that "closes the gap" and provides a living income to everyone. They only proposals that come close do so by eliminating social security, which is politically infeasible and deeply unfair to the people that paid into the system for a lifetime, and by raiding medicare, which ignores the fact that medical expenses are not evenly spread.
Or were you thinking of lowering the minimum wage to a penny
Markets don't work that way. Nobody would accept a job for a penny, because someone else would offer more. Employers can't just arbitrarily set wages.
Only 2% of full time workers earn the minimum wage. For the other 98%, even the current minimum wage isn't enough.
Denmark, Sweden, and Norway have no legal minimum wage. Number of Scandinavians earning a penny per hour: 0.
The US produces about 4000 billion kwhrs annually. So 70/4000 = 1.8%, which matches what TFA says. So, yes, it is fairly obvious that correct figure is 70 billion kilowatt-HOURS.
What of people who were doing everything "right" who got derailed by circumstances beyond their control?
An obvious way to help these people is to make it EASIER for employers to hire them and give them a chance to turn their lives around. For instance, the EITC is an effective program that has helped millions of people earn enough to support their families.
But Bernie's poverty tax does the exact opposite. It penalizes companies for hiring the people most in need of a job. It is an insanely stupid proposal, and I can't believe that anyone takes it seriously.
If Amazon hires a poor single mother, it is idiotic to say that somehow Amazon "caused" her to be poor. The truth is, that by giving her a job, they are helping her take the first step out of poverty. Punishing them for doing so makes no sense.
Poverty is a difficult societal problem, and we should all bear the cost of alleviating it. Dumping the cost onto the companies that are providing much needed entry level jobs, and thus disincentivizing them from doing so, is counter-productive.
The median house in America today is more than twice the size it was in 1914. If you calculate by square foot of housing, wages today are about the same.
But housing prices have climbed faster than general inflation for most of the last century, so it is not a good benchmark for comparing wages.
If anything we need shorter work weeks and higher pay to absorb job losses due to increased productivity.
There is little historical evidence that increased productivity causes job losses. There is much more evidence for the opposite, and productivity improvements are more often than not correlated with rising labor force participation rates.
As workers become more productive, it is more profitable to employ them, so demand for labor goes UP, not down.
Countries with low productivity growth tend to have higher unemployment.
Predictions of job losses from productivity improvements are usually based on the zero-sum Lump of Labor Fallacy.
I know right? They should just choose to stop being poor
Poverty is strongly correlated with the life choices that you make. For instance, having a child when you are an unmarried teenager is a choice.
But making it more expensive to hire that unmarried single mother is just going to make her predicament worse. It isn't hard to look at a person and see if they are likely to be on public assistance. Even their zipcode and phone prefix are good indicators. How they dress and the vocabulary they use are also good indicators.
An even easier solution for employers is to just stay away from any area with a concentration of poverty, and to oppose any construction of "affordable housing" near their place of business, that could draw in the "wrong type" of worker.
Taxing employers for hiring people receiving public assistance will just make the "poverty trap" even deeper.
How much money you need also depends on how many kids you have, and if you are a sole breadwinner for your household.
Should employers be required to pay more to people with more kids?
What if an employee breaks up with his girlfriend, and she moves out, taking her income with her? Now he needs more money to pay rent. Should he get an automatic raise?
This does raise a question, how often does a 911 call actually justify a response by SWAT?
If a police department wants to keep their SWAT team, and keep getting all the cool mil-spec equipment, then they need to use it as often as possible. Otherwise, their budget will get cut.
It means under represented in tech compared to their presence in the general population.
So anything except a white or Asian male.
Black, Hispanic, Native American, or female of any race is under represented.
I spent several years working in after school programs for robots, coding, and GATE (Gifted And Talented Education). I can see some sense in "girl-only" instruction, since boys can get overly enthusiastic about tech, so the girls often pull back and just sit and watch. But this can be addressed by allowing girls to self-segregate into girl-only workgroups.
For race it make NO SENSE. Black kids do better when intermixed, and kids learn a lot from their peers.
Adiabatic CAES. Batteries are for portable things; compressed air is for grid.
CAES has a round trip efficiency of about 70%. Lithium batteries have a RTE of about 90%. So if the batteries are cheap enough, they win.
If peak power sells for 10 cents per kwh, and trough power costs 5 cents, then a 20% difference in efficiency is going to save you one cent per kwh per cycle. If the battery has a ten year life, then it is more cost effective when the capital cost difference between Lithium batteries and CAES falls below $36.50/kwh.
What are the dangerous files Customs needs to stop people bringing in on their phones?
They mostly want to look at your contacts. Who were the last few people you called or messaged? A recent call to "Bombs R Us" or "Joe's Exotic Reptiles" may indicate tat you are not entering the country for the reasons stated on your customs form.
Wouldn't "falling up" mean that the anti-matter somehow breaks out of the curvature of the space and lays waste of Newton and Einstein?
Yes. If anti-matter "falls up", then that blows a major hole in General Relativity. It is extremely unlikely that "falls up" will be the outcome of these experiments.
Look at it this way: Matter falls down, so if anti-matter falls up, and matter and anti-matter annihilate to form a photon (which is its own anti-particle), then the photon should be neutral in a gravitational field. But it isn't. Photons "fall down", which was measured during a solar eclipse in 1919, as the first experimental confirmation of General Relativity.
No we don't. Hawking Radiation is conjecture at this point. The closest known black hole is 2800 LY away, has 11 solar masses, and emits about one particle of hawking radiation every 10 Billion years. That is roughly a googoleth of a watt.
What you are missing is that the calls thru the wired handsets are only a very small part of what these do. They are also free WiFi hotspots, so if you live close by, you don't need to pay for Internet.
But most of the cost is to pay for weather and vandal resistant advertising displays.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, yeah, people who place their boot on the necks of the poor and working class ...
Most people that died in the Soviet Gulags were poor and working class. The biggest determinant of who died was not class, but ethnicity, with Ukrainian peasants getting the worst of it.
$20k is below the poverty threshold for a family of one.
Not every job should be required to pay enough to let you afford your own place. Find a roommate while you work on your skillset.
Most Uber drivers have another job that is their main income. 80% are part time drivers. 20% drive less than 10 hours per week.
the service economy makes it hard to measure
Productivity is easy to measure.
Productivity = GDP / (hours worked)
The Luddites weren't just overly conservative, they were losing their livelihoods.
But overall employment in the spinning/weaving business was going UP. It was only their particular skills that were declining in value.
When there are new jobs they're low paying service sector jobs.
That is a big problem.
But the trouble there is there's less money in the economy
Rising productivity means more goods and services produced per unit of labor. That does not lead to "less money".
... an overall slowdown in the economy.
The economy is currently booming, but the "slow" period from 2007 to 2014 coincided with a DECLINE in productivity growth. This is the opposite of what you are claiming.
This. I work in medical and we DO ship real manuals.
That is stupid and irresponsible.
In addition to adding to medical cost inflation, what if there is an error in the manual that could cause misuse of the device?
If there is no printed manual, people will use the UP-TO-DATE on-line manual, and get the correct info.
Which no one reads.
Nor should they. The proper thing to do with a printed manual is throw it in the trash so no one accidentally reads it.
You're saying that being poor is more a result of societal factors than personal ones, also that upward mobility is extremely poor in the US.
Yes, that is what I am saying. Are you disagreeing?
Isn't that a horrible indictment on our society and our nation?
Yes. Absolutely.
Shouldn't the realization of that unfairness increase rather than decrease your compassion and understanding of the plight of the poor?
What??? How does saying "We shouldn't punish companies for hiring poor people" indicate a lack of compassion?
Bernie's proposed tax on poverty will disincentivize companies from hiring poor people, incentivize them to locate jobs in areas with fewer poor households, and raise the barriers to upward mobility. It is an idiotic proposal. But I don't think Bernie's supporters lack compassion, I just think they lack basic economic literacy.
So basic income it is. Easier to administer and actually closes the gap.
There is no plausible proposal for basic income that "closes the gap" and provides a living income to everyone. They only proposals that come close do so by eliminating social security, which is politically infeasible and deeply unfair to the people that paid into the system for a lifetime, and by raiding medicare, which ignores the fact that medical expenses are not evenly spread.
Or were you thinking of lowering the minimum wage to a penny
Markets don't work that way. Nobody would accept a job for a penny, because someone else would offer more. Employers can't just arbitrarily set wages.
Only 2% of full time workers earn the minimum wage. For the other 98%, even the current minimum wage isn't enough.
Denmark, Sweden, and Norway have no legal minimum wage. Number of Scandinavians earning a penny per hour: 0.
Minimum wages by country
Did you mean 70 billion kilowatt hours?
The US produces about 4000 billion kwhrs annually. So 70/4000 = 1.8%, which matches what TFA says. So, yes, it is fairly obvious that correct figure is 70 billion kilowatt-HOURS.
List of countries by electricity consumption
claims CAES is only 50% efficient (adiabatic systems are above 75% and predicted to mature to above 90%, even though theoretical limit is 100%).
A home-brew CAES rig is not going to be adiabatic. Adiabatic compression over a daily cycle requires scale (and insulation).
50% is about the best that Bubba is going to get. He should stick with batteries.
What of people who were doing everything "right" who got derailed by circumstances beyond their control?
An obvious way to help these people is to make it EASIER for employers to hire them and give them a chance to turn their lives around. For instance, the EITC is an effective program that has helped millions of people earn enough to support their families.
But Bernie's poverty tax does the exact opposite. It penalizes companies for hiring the people most in need of a job. It is an insanely stupid proposal, and I can't believe that anyone takes it seriously.
It is a myth that "low pay" is a significant cause of poverty. The real problem is NO PAY. Only 9 percent of adults living below the poverty line work full time.
If Amazon hires a poor single mother, it is idiotic to say that somehow Amazon "caused" her to be poor. The truth is, that by giving her a job, they are helping her take the first step out of poverty. Punishing them for doing so makes no sense.
Poverty is a difficult societal problem, and we should all bear the cost of alleviating it. Dumping the cost onto the companies that are providing much needed entry level jobs, and thus disincentivizing them from doing so, is counter-productive.
The median house in America today is more than twice the size it was in 1914. If you calculate by square foot of housing, wages today are about the same.
But housing prices have climbed faster than general inflation for most of the last century, so it is not a good benchmark for comparing wages.
And productivity has doubled in the last 20 years
In America, productivity has gone up about 30% in the last 20 years.
... and continues to climb
In America, productivity growth has been mostly stagnant since 2004.
If anything we need shorter work weeks and higher pay to absorb job losses due to increased productivity.
There is little historical evidence that increased productivity causes job losses. There is much more evidence for the opposite, and productivity improvements are more often than not correlated with rising labor force participation rates.
As workers become more productive, it is more profitable to employ them, so demand for labor goes UP, not down.
Countries with low productivity growth tend to have higher unemployment.
Predictions of job losses from productivity improvements are usually based on the zero-sum Lump of Labor Fallacy.
I know right? They should just choose to stop being poor
Poverty is strongly correlated with the life choices that you make. For instance, having a child when you are an unmarried teenager is a choice.
But making it more expensive to hire that unmarried single mother is just going to make her predicament worse. It isn't hard to look at a person and see if they are likely to be on public assistance. Even their zipcode and phone prefix are good indicators. How they dress and the vocabulary they use are also good indicators.
An even easier solution for employers is to just stay away from any area with a concentration of poverty, and to oppose any construction of "affordable housing" near their place of business, that could draw in the "wrong type" of worker.
Taxing employers for hiring people receiving public assistance will just make the "poverty trap" even deeper.
How much money you need also depends on how many kids you have, and if you are a sole breadwinner for your household.
Should employers be required to pay more to people with more kids?
What if an employee breaks up with his girlfriend, and she moves out, taking her income with her? Now he needs more money to pay rent. Should he get an automatic raise?
No, its the threat of government intervention like the tax mentioned
There is little chance of government intervention, and ZERO chance of Bernie's idiotic tax on hiring poor people.
This does raise a question, how often does a 911 call actually justify a response by SWAT?
If a police department wants to keep their SWAT team, and keep getting all the cool mil-spec equipment, then they need to use it as often as possible. Otherwise, their budget will get cut.
Also, what does underrepresented actually mean?
It means under represented in tech compared to their presence in the general population.
So anything except a white or Asian male.
Black, Hispanic, Native American, or female of any race is under represented.
I spent several years working in after school programs for robots, coding, and GATE (Gifted And Talented Education). I can see some sense in "girl-only" instruction, since boys can get overly enthusiastic about tech, so the girls often pull back and just sit and watch. But this can be addressed by allowing girls to self-segregate into girl-only workgroups.
For race it make NO SENSE. Black kids do better when intermixed, and kids learn a lot from their peers.
But it would emit more if antimatter fell up.
If antimatter fell up, black holes would not exist.
Adiabatic CAES. Batteries are for portable things; compressed air is for grid.
CAES has a round trip efficiency of about 70%. Lithium batteries have a RTE of about 90%. So if the batteries are cheap enough, they win.
If peak power sells for 10 cents per kwh, and trough power costs 5 cents, then a 20% difference in efficiency is going to save you one cent per kwh per cycle. If the battery has a ten year life, then it is more cost effective when the capital cost difference between Lithium batteries and CAES falls below $36.50/kwh.
I'm not sure I like Facebook having ANY presence in the classroom even if it's trying to help.
Sure, but it is unfair to blame Facebook for this. They are being pressured to "do something" about diversity, and this is "something".
From my lay perspective medical advances in the last 30 years have been weak, AF.
Over the last 30 years, average live expectancy has gone up by 5 years.
The only thing they seem to have become really really good at is billing.
That is an American problem. It doesn't much affect the other 95% of the world.
What are the dangerous files Customs needs to stop people bringing in on their phones?
They mostly want to look at your contacts. Who were the last few people you called or messaged? A recent call to "Bombs R Us" or "Joe's Exotic Reptiles" may indicate tat you are not entering the country for the reasons stated on your customs form.
Wouldn't "falling up" mean that the anti-matter somehow breaks out of the curvature of the space and lays waste of Newton and Einstein?
Yes. If anti-matter "falls up", then that blows a major hole in General Relativity. It is extremely unlikely that "falls up" will be the outcome of these experiments.
Look at it this way: Matter falls down, so if anti-matter falls up, and matter and anti-matter annihilate to form a photon (which is its own anti-particle), then the photon should be neutral in a gravitational field. But it isn't. Photons "fall down", which was measured during a solar eclipse in 1919, as the first experimental confirmation of General Relativity.
We observe hawking radiation
No we don't. Hawking Radiation is conjecture at this point. The closest known black hole is 2800 LY away, has 11 solar masses, and emits about one particle of hawking radiation every 10 Billion years. That is roughly a googoleth of a watt.
Very, very carefully.
If all the antimatter ever made by humans were annihilated at once, the energy produced would be just about enough to make a cup of tea.
What you are missing is that the calls thru the wired handsets are only a very small part of what these do. They are also free WiFi hotspots, so if you live close by, you don't need to pay for Internet.
But most of the cost is to pay for weather and vandal resistant advertising displays.