My favorite is when the routes are changed, with poor communication about the changing (signs on stops are wrong, info from the "telephone for help" line is wrong... etc.) Waiting for an unexpected extra 2 hours after sunset in the cold goes a long way toward making people forget about the bus as an option.
Depends - does the public transport system suck less than driving a car?
Yes, driving 45 minutes through rush hour traffic sucks, but when the alternative is to drive 20 minutes, then spend an additional 40 minutes riding on public transport, waiting for a transfer, and finally walking exposed to the weather for 10 minutes at each end of the trip (40 minutes total exposure, just long enough to get totally rain-soaked at both the beginning and end of the day)... well, then, it doesn't really matter if you give that away for free, does it?
What would their rate of metabolism be? Even if they were "technologically advanced" a billion years ago, would they be moving fast enough to notice what's been happening in the last 100 years on Earth?
Active epilepsy is rare, but not as rare as people think: about 1:100 people. Roughly 1:25 people will have more than one seizure in their lifetime.
Photosensitive epilepsy is even more rare: about 1:100 among people with epilepsy. So, this means that a stadium filled with 50,000 people (from a completely unbiased cross-section) would have 5 photosensitive epileptics present. But selection is always at work, and photosensitive epileptics tend to shy away from things that might trigger their condition.
While you probably don't have epilepsy, and you probably don't have epileptics in your immediate family (genetic bias also at work...), you probably know several - even if you are not aware of it. Due to the social stigmas, most epileptics hide their condition as best they can. If we, as a society, actually believe in equal access for the handicapped, epileptics are a grossly under-served slice of the population. Being considerate of the photo-sensitives is a nice gesture, but it isn't helping the other 99%.
China is an interesting case - they have slowed population growth, but are in the process of rapidly "tapping into" the existing population as members of the economy. Simple head counts don't tell the economic story, it's how much those people participate in the system - are they isolated farmers, basically growing their own food, building and maintaining their own houses, roads, wells, etc.? In that case they contribute essentially zero to the economy beyond what little "tax" the government might be able to levy off of their farm production. Now, if the farmers buy equipment, increase efficiency in the fields, send their children to the factories to work, and start buying other things from the factories, that's going to be a similar effect as an increase in headcount in an "economically engaged" country.
Tune-in, turn-on, drop-out can have an opposite effect, turning active members of an economy into commune-dwelling non-members. I don't think we've ever had a significant example of this kind of economic exodus that out-paced immigration and birth rates.
On the issue of profits and the "free market," one of my bigger concerns is how volatility is being used to stifle competition. It looks like a wildly competitive market when commodity prices swing up by 80% then down by 40% the following year, but, in reality, I think it damages competition and increases profits because consumers aren't in control, they don't have time to find the best price when the prices are changing by 10 and 20% on a weekly basis. Of course, gasoline is a huge poster child for this, but I have also seen it in the grocery store - weekly "BOGO" specials cutting prices by 50%, seemingly to desensitize consumers to the fact that "normal" prices are now at 100% markup, and if you want to bargain shop, you'll have to build your own warehouse to take advantage of the pricing scheme.
But, nowhere in Marx does it say "cut yourself off from the world, abuse and destroy your natural resources, establish a corrupt political power system." You can do that under capitalism just as well, and with similarly bad results.
The numbers say the birth rate is below replacement, but in my lifetime I have seen the population rise by approximately 30%. The economy doesn't really care if you're growing population by births or immigration, in-fact older immigrants are already "full consumers" who don't have to be educated or go through those 15 years of "sub-consumer" status.
When the population stagnates, fewer companies will be able to point to continuous growth as justification for higher share prices...
Birthrate is also quite low in Russia - where they aren't quite calling themselves wealthy yet.
This "high-wealth = low birthrate" correlation seems to be a favorite mantra of those who are optimistic about our planet's future - all we have to do is make everyone wealthy and the birthrate thing will happen voluntarily.
Thing is, these "wealthy" countries have a lot of poor people, and a majority of the population that is full-time employed just to keep roofs over their heads. These people are heavily incentivized by their lifestyle to not have children. It's not a lifestyle of abundance or non-scarcity.
I agree that _most_ advanced civilizations slow their birth rates.
Unfortunately, the USA seems addicted to growth and is continuing population growth incentive programs and policies from 100 years ago. A lot of people are afraid of what will happen to the economy (and, more immediately, the value of their portfolios) if our population stops growing.
That Husqvarna mower bot isn't exactly a post-scarcity poster child - it's priced more like a Maserati than a Roomba (and, for that matter, what happened to the $99 Roombas, they seem to start at 3x that, now).
The 'bots are so expensive because of the labor involved in their design, construction, and a hidden cost of maintenance (the $299 Roomba does seem to require less end-user attention than the $99 ones used to...)
I could install a "bot" to open my garage door for me, but since I only use that door about 200 times a year, I prefer to open and close it manually, as compared to the effort required to get a professional installer out to do the work, plus the periodic maintenance required to keep it working. The $400 isn't the problem, it's the choice of spending a predictable minute per use opening/closing the door vs an unpredictable hour or two dealing with a broken opener when the opener breaks down.
Ever try Business Class? It's a whole different experience. Too bad the corporate beaners won't spring for it at my pay grade, but if you really like to travel, just do it 1/3 as often, pay 3x as much, and be treated like a human being again.
There's a whole lot of space under the floor where they currently carry cargo. We could go full Japanese cube hotel on the design and lay people in bunk-beds stacked 6 high in the middle and 4 high on the outside.
Not never, ever. Just not with kerosene fueled turbine engines - fuel is too costly to make it work.
What he describes isn't too far off how train cars are handled, and that would be an interesting thing to extend to air-travel. Passenger pods that load up at local terminals, get transported by truck to a rail center, then by rail to an air (or sea) terminal if necessary/desired.
All we need is cheaper energy and it would work fine.
Some of this is the "jetway" method of loading / unloading.
When jumbos land in places like Tel-Aviv, they bring up ladders on ALL the exits and the people dump out onto the tarmac rather quickly, with minimal fuss.
It's harder to accomplish this in a "air conditioned" air terminal where you bring multiple sizes of aircraft up to a single covered entrance gate.
Lived in Manhattan for a month, three up in a one bedroom apartment. Actually, the overnight sleeping population of the apartment varied wildly throughout the month, some nights I was sleeping there alone, other nights we had 3 in the bedroom and 3 more on the sleeper sofa + chair in the living room. And, yeah, early 20s there's some appeal to the "social melting pot" that is a mega-city. Wouldn't want to raise a family in those conditions. What I would consider "minimal" accommodation for a family of 4 in Manhattan in those days cost 4x what a "decent" house cost in Miami. Miami has gone a little crazy on the real-estate front lately, those "decent" houses are getting close to the cost of a 3 bedroom apartment in Manhattan, but I'd still rather have cockroaches and a yard, instead of cockroaches and living in a tower with upstairs neighbors, minimal if any terrace, etc.
It's a speculative market - the people with money have snapped up the real-estate and they rent it back to the tech workers at whatever the market will bear for rents / cramped living conditions.
There's also the problem of land. In total, there's only 36,652,096,000 acres of land on the Earth. Sounds like a lot for 7 billion people (5 acres each), but most of it sucks for people, and people need to stay the hell off of a lot of it if we want anything approaching a naturally bio-diverse planet to live on. There's also a small problem of population growth. Sure, some people don't care if they have children or not, but in an economy without scarcity, with nothing much to do but lay about and make babies, the population tends to grow rather quickly. In a short time, we'll be down to 1 acre per person, then 1/4, etc. until there's just not enough solar radiation impacting on the surface to sustain our metabolism. If everybody has 1.5 children apiece (3 children per couple), we can achieve this solar snuff point in a few thousand years.
My point is that Mike was working in Miami for $90K/yr, living in a modest house worth $125K at the time.
Mike considered taking a job in Los Angeles (not even SV), but the job in LA might have offered $95K or 100K at the time - but similar houses out in a god forsaken fire trap of a canyon were $250K and up, and other neighborhoods would have extended Mike's workday by 2 hours or more with commute hour traffic, while charging similar ($250K+ ish) prices for the houses. Silicon Valley might have been paying $125K for the same position at the time, but the modest houses there were $500K and up, or a 3+ hour extension of the workday.
I have never seen Silicon Valley offering double salaries, often times they offer the same salaries that you can get in places like Dallas, Chicago, Minneapolis, Atlanta, etc.
Now, when there's a go-go bubble, the stupid money does flow in greater abundance in Silicon Valley, but if you're going to get stupid salaries from go-go bubble companies, you can get those anywhere you can find the go-go bubble companies, and they can pop up anywhere. _Some_ people get quite wealthy off of these deals, some make a nice little chunk of change off of a stock option / buyout deal, _most_ end up out of work and looking within a very short time.
This is ignoring the cost of public services which are still delivered to and along the abandoned road - were there no road, there would be precious few people trespassing across a private field. But, since there is this abandoned road clearly marking the public right of way, all manner of people go out there, get hurt, need medical evac, get drunk, need police to restrain them, etc.
In Florida, it can be a pissing contest between neighboring counties for who pays to maintain the road. One county benefits from the road (and has coastal property taxes with which to pay maintenance), the other mostly doesn't, but both have 30+ miles of asphalt to maintain. Rather than footing the bill for their side of the road, the contrarian county will often close it as a bargaining chip to get the other county to pay for the maintenance.
Also true, however, in addition to technical know-how, most jobs require a certain amount of B.S. hoop jumping, patience, and general just getting along with the crowd. That's why the degree says "B.S." - it means you can put up with 4 years of it without telling the whole place to F- themselves.
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My favorite is when the routes are changed, with poor communication about the changing (signs on stops are wrong, info from the "telephone for help" line is wrong... etc.) Waiting for an unexpected extra 2 hours after sunset in the cold goes a long way toward making people forget about the bus as an option.
Depends - does the public transport system suck less than driving a car?
Yes, driving 45 minutes through rush hour traffic sucks, but when the alternative is to drive 20 minutes, then spend an additional 40 minutes riding on public transport, waiting for a transfer, and finally walking exposed to the weather for 10 minutes at each end of the trip (40 minutes total exposure, just long enough to get totally rain-soaked at both the beginning and end of the day)... well, then, it doesn't really matter if you give that away for free, does it?
What would their rate of metabolism be? Even if they were "technologically advanced" a billion years ago, would they be moving fast enough to notice what's been happening in the last 100 years on Earth?
Active epilepsy is rare, but not as rare as people think: about 1:100 people. Roughly 1:25 people will have more than one seizure in their lifetime.
Photosensitive epilepsy is even more rare: about 1:100 among people with epilepsy. So, this means that a stadium filled with 50,000 people (from a completely unbiased cross-section) would have 5 photosensitive epileptics present. But selection is always at work, and photosensitive epileptics tend to shy away from things that might trigger their condition.
While you probably don't have epilepsy, and you probably don't have epileptics in your immediate family (genetic bias also at work...), you probably know several - even if you are not aware of it. Due to the social stigmas, most epileptics hide their condition as best they can. If we, as a society, actually believe in equal access for the handicapped, epileptics are a grossly under-served slice of the population. Being considerate of the photo-sensitives is a nice gesture, but it isn't helping the other 99%.
China is an interesting case - they have slowed population growth, but are in the process of rapidly "tapping into" the existing population as members of the economy. Simple head counts don't tell the economic story, it's how much those people participate in the system - are they isolated farmers, basically growing their own food, building and maintaining their own houses, roads, wells, etc.? In that case they contribute essentially zero to the economy beyond what little "tax" the government might be able to levy off of their farm production. Now, if the farmers buy equipment, increase efficiency in the fields, send their children to the factories to work, and start buying other things from the factories, that's going to be a similar effect as an increase in headcount in an "economically engaged" country.
Tune-in, turn-on, drop-out can have an opposite effect, turning active members of an economy into commune-dwelling non-members. I don't think we've ever had a significant example of this kind of economic exodus that out-paced immigration and birth rates.
On the issue of profits and the "free market," one of my bigger concerns is how volatility is being used to stifle competition. It looks like a wildly competitive market when commodity prices swing up by 80% then down by 40% the following year, but, in reality, I think it damages competition and increases profits because consumers aren't in control, they don't have time to find the best price when the prices are changing by 10 and 20% on a weekly basis. Of course, gasoline is a huge poster child for this, but I have also seen it in the grocery store - weekly "BOGO" specials cutting prices by 50%, seemingly to desensitize consumers to the fact that "normal" prices are now at 100% markup, and if you want to bargain shop, you'll have to build your own warehouse to take advantage of the pricing scheme.
But, nowhere in Marx does it say "cut yourself off from the world, abuse and destroy your natural resources, establish a corrupt political power system." You can do that under capitalism just as well, and with similarly bad results.
The numbers say the birth rate is below replacement, but in my lifetime I have seen the population rise by approximately 30%. The economy doesn't really care if you're growing population by births or immigration, in-fact older immigrants are already "full consumers" who don't have to be educated or go through those 15 years of "sub-consumer" status.
When the population stagnates, fewer companies will be able to point to continuous growth as justification for higher share prices...
Birthrate is also quite low in Russia - where they aren't quite calling themselves wealthy yet.
This "high-wealth = low birthrate" correlation seems to be a favorite mantra of those who are optimistic about our planet's future - all we have to do is make everyone wealthy and the birthrate thing will happen voluntarily.
Thing is, these "wealthy" countries have a lot of poor people, and a majority of the population that is full-time employed just to keep roofs over their heads. These people are heavily incentivized by their lifestyle to not have children. It's not a lifestyle of abundance or non-scarcity.
Power structures also figure largely in hunter-gatherer societies, they just don't leave as many historical artifacts.
Yeah, give teenage boys technical power - that worked so well for the phone company....
http://www.gutenberg.org/files...
I agree that _most_ advanced civilizations slow their birth rates.
Unfortunately, the USA seems addicted to growth and is continuing population growth incentive programs and policies from 100 years ago. A lot of people are afraid of what will happen to the economy (and, more immediately, the value of their portfolios) if our population stops growing.
> That battle was fought and Communism lost during the 20th century.
If the US had gone Communist and the USSR had embraced Capitalism, it would not have guaranteed that the USSR would have "won" the cold war.
The US had better access to resources, and, importantly, the US did not cut itself off from world markets the way that the USSR did.
That Husqvarna mower bot isn't exactly a post-scarcity poster child - it's priced more like a Maserati than a Roomba (and, for that matter, what happened to the $99 Roombas, they seem to start at 3x that, now).
The 'bots are so expensive because of the labor involved in their design, construction, and a hidden cost of maintenance (the $299 Roomba does seem to require less end-user attention than the $99 ones used to...)
I could install a "bot" to open my garage door for me, but since I only use that door about 200 times a year, I prefer to open and close it manually, as compared to the effort required to get a professional installer out to do the work, plus the periodic maintenance required to keep it working. The $400 isn't the problem, it's the choice of spending a predictable minute per use opening/closing the door vs an unpredictable hour or two dealing with a broken opener when the opener breaks down.
Ever try Business Class? It's a whole different experience. Too bad the corporate beaners won't spring for it at my pay grade, but if you really like to travel, just do it 1/3 as often, pay 3x as much, and be treated like a human being again.
There's a whole lot of space under the floor where they currently carry cargo. We could go full Japanese cube hotel on the design and lay people in bunk-beds stacked 6 high in the middle and 4 high on the outside.
This assumes that people are wider at the shoulder than they are at the thighs.
They need to take a walk in a Wal-Mart and reassess their anthropological models.
Not never, ever. Just not with kerosene fueled turbine engines - fuel is too costly to make it work.
What he describes isn't too far off how train cars are handled, and that would be an interesting thing to extend to air-travel. Passenger pods that load up at local terminals, get transported by truck to a rail center, then by rail to an air (or sea) terminal if necessary/desired.
All we need is cheaper energy and it would work fine.
Yeah, today, not so much.
Some of this is the "jetway" method of loading / unloading.
When jumbos land in places like Tel-Aviv, they bring up ladders on ALL the exits and the people dump out onto the tarmac rather quickly, with minimal fuss.
It's harder to accomplish this in a "air conditioned" air terminal where you bring multiple sizes of aircraft up to a single covered entrance gate.
Lived in Manhattan for a month, three up in a one bedroom apartment. Actually, the overnight sleeping population of the apartment varied wildly throughout the month, some nights I was sleeping there alone, other nights we had 3 in the bedroom and 3 more on the sleeper sofa + chair in the living room. And, yeah, early 20s there's some appeal to the "social melting pot" that is a mega-city. Wouldn't want to raise a family in those conditions. What I would consider "minimal" accommodation for a family of 4 in Manhattan in those days cost 4x what a "decent" house cost in Miami. Miami has gone a little crazy on the real-estate front lately, those "decent" houses are getting close to the cost of a 3 bedroom apartment in Manhattan, but I'd still rather have cockroaches and a yard, instead of cockroaches and living in a tower with upstairs neighbors, minimal if any terrace, etc.
It's a speculative market - the people with money have snapped up the real-estate and they rent it back to the tech workers at whatever the market will bear for rents / cramped living conditions.
There's also the problem of land. In total, there's only 36,652,096,000 acres of land on the Earth. Sounds like a lot for 7 billion people (5 acres each), but most of it sucks for people, and people need to stay the hell off of a lot of it if we want anything approaching a naturally bio-diverse planet to live on. There's also a small problem of population growth. Sure, some people don't care if they have children or not, but in an economy without scarcity, with nothing much to do but lay about and make babies, the population tends to grow rather quickly. In a short time, we'll be down to 1 acre per person, then 1/4, etc. until there's just not enough solar radiation impacting on the surface to sustain our metabolism. If everybody has 1.5 children apiece (3 children per couple), we can achieve this solar snuff point in a few thousand years.
My point is that Mike was working in Miami for $90K/yr, living in a modest house worth $125K at the time.
Mike considered taking a job in Los Angeles (not even SV), but the job in LA might have offered $95K or 100K at the time - but similar houses out in a god forsaken fire trap of a canyon were $250K and up, and other neighborhoods would have extended Mike's workday by 2 hours or more with commute hour traffic, while charging similar ($250K+ ish) prices for the houses. Silicon Valley might have been paying $125K for the same position at the time, but the modest houses there were $500K and up, or a 3+ hour extension of the workday.
I have never seen Silicon Valley offering double salaries, often times they offer the same salaries that you can get in places like Dallas, Chicago, Minneapolis, Atlanta, etc.
Now, when there's a go-go bubble, the stupid money does flow in greater abundance in Silicon Valley, but if you're going to get stupid salaries from go-go bubble companies, you can get those anywhere you can find the go-go bubble companies, and they can pop up anywhere. _Some_ people get quite wealthy off of these deals, some make a nice little chunk of change off of a stock option / buyout deal, _most_ end up out of work and looking within a very short time.
This is ignoring the cost of public services which are still delivered to and along the abandoned road - were there no road, there would be precious few people trespassing across a private field. But, since there is this abandoned road clearly marking the public right of way, all manner of people go out there, get hurt, need medical evac, get drunk, need police to restrain them, etc.
In Florida, it can be a pissing contest between neighboring counties for who pays to maintain the road. One county benefits from the road (and has coastal property taxes with which to pay maintenance), the other mostly doesn't, but both have 30+ miles of asphalt to maintain. Rather than footing the bill for their side of the road, the contrarian county will often close it as a bargaining chip to get the other county to pay for the maintenance.
Also true, however, in addition to technical know-how, most jobs require a certain amount of B.S. hoop jumping, patience, and general just getting along with the crowd. That's why the degree says "B.S." - it means you can put up with 4 years of it without telling the whole place to F- themselves.