"The problem is that most people calling themselves "capitalists" are not capitalists at all. They are greedy evil scum that tries to exploit the loopholes in capitalism."
And that's not the intended way for capitalism to work exactly how?
" The truth of the matter is that Amazon is doing exactly what people want it to do. Because most people aim squarely for a smaller price on the items they buy."
Absolutly wrong.
At least for the moment, what Amazon really brings is catalogue. While a reasonable price, that's not the main of it, but the fact that I gain access to products all over the world I otherwise wouldn't even know they exist.
And Amazon is not going for low prices if at all possible. An anecdotal example: I just bought a (quite expensive) fry pan. First, I couldn't find it in any local retailer, so that's what I most valued from Amazon, not the price. Second, I, just out of curiosity, looked for the same item at Amazon Italy instead on Spain, where I live in. Surprise! in Italy was like 40% cheaper. A second item was much cheaper in USA, even taking taxes into account: surprise! that item "couldn't" be sent to my country -but I was able to buy it at Amazon Spain at a much higher price.
Oh! and the fact that there are already web sites tracking prices on different subsidiaries of Amazon, as I discovered later, probes my anecdote is not just an anecdote but ongoing business.
"There are no better jobs for people with their education level, you say? So if Amazon didn't exist they would be unemployed and even worse off, because they sure as hell wouldn't be able to find a job at those bookstores as the knowledgeable salespeople?"
No, they would be having a decent pay doing basically the same for a local retailer, one of the very many there would be instead of Amazon as the one single behemoth.
"While there are a lot of people who are actually competing for those crappy temp jobs because they're not qualified for anything, the environment and pay is going to suck"
There was a time when companies did train their own people and then, these people would get qualified for something. Now, they prefer for others to cover for the costs of a perfect fit, or to scream, "we need more H1B visas!" or in other, lower markets, to hire illegal aliens while at the same time crying "illegal aliens are killing America!"
"Last I checked I could buy things online from thousands and thousands of different online retailers."
Last I checked, and I checked very recently, very many of retailers were in fact reselling Amazon products at a price locked to that of Amazon. This means that in the mid to long term that either Amazon, or an Amazon-like, most probably from China, will take all the cake.
When globalization works, long tail be damned, the winner takes all.
The article forgets *why* Bezos is doing this: it is out of sheer panic of Chinese giants the likes of Alibaba to eat his cake overnight.
"in cafes and parks here in the US. What is disappearing are paper books."
On one hand, losing the ability to read without a hugh tad of supporting technology may be a problem on itself.
On the other, the problem exposed here is not paper versus electronic books but the risk of Amazon trying to become a de facto monopoly as the dumping practice, if it's true, would suggest.
Do you remember that one of the short list of things a government should do, even on the most liberalist wet dreams, is to put an eye on monopolies, right?
But then again, is he still doing "engineer stuff" when he only designs a run-of-the-mill bridge, or is it indeed required for him to create new technology to be considered an engineer, as the parent poster said?
"Architects use the knowledge about physics and material science created by scientist to engineer a bride."
False.
Most architects most of the time use the knowledge of other architects to engineer their buildings. That's the basis of engineering and that's what allows it to be regulated.
Do you imagine engineering being regulated the way it is today in the days of Eiffel?
And, by the way, of course Eiffel innovated. But not all engineers are Eiffel and not because of that they are any less engineers.
"Well, certainly the part where you take what materials science researchers have discovered in concrete technology and design structural members of a bridge certainly seems to fit that statement of what an engineer does quite nicely"
Of course it does: a bridge engineer is an engineer.
But he certainly doesn't create the technology and that's my point. The parent poster above implies that the only engineer is the one that innovates when most engineers don't innovate nor we need them to: the basis of the modern engineering is its repeatability and "looking up the right sizes in a table" *is* an engineer's job.
"A person of American culture. But of Irish ethnicity."
And, where that "Irish ethnicity" comes from? Sharing DNA with Molly Malone?
See: the point is that you want to impose *your* definition of "ethnicity" to just mean "of a geographical or biological ascend" and, of course, you point out that being of a given geographical or biological ascend can't be a criminal trait on itself (nor impose any kind of ethic), which is obviously true.
Problem is that, no matter how many times you try to call a true Scotsman to your side, ethnicity, as you yourself point out, "tends to be associated with and ideologies of shared cultural heritage", therefore, as long as you can find *any* cultural heritage that by its own definition can be considered criminal, it forcibly will make criminal the ethnicity it belongs to or it is identified with.
"I don't really see the "dense" argument. If it were less dense, it wouldn't take the volume of a house to represent a day's worth of effort. It would take the same volume, which would have less mass"
Exactly. And then, try to use a half a gram coin for anything. It just doesn't look proper... well, it doesn't matter *now* because we have a deep understandment that money means wealth just because we agree on that, but it has taken milennia to fully grasp that -and it isn't fully understood even now, if you look at this thread.
"I don't think understandment or cognitate are words."
Well, I'm sorry I'm not native English... I'm Spanish, so I tend to use Latin-based words if only because I'm accustomed to then. Cognitate seems not to exist but cognition and cognitive certainly do, hence my mistake.
Understandment, on the other hand, renders more than 43000 entries on google and its meaning looks, well, quite understandable, so I think its use is proper but, certainly, I'm open to suggestion on alternate words for that.
Wrong. Bullion has a single value: make coins out of it.
You are right in that it's used for... but that's not what brings value to it: gold nuggets cover all those uses exactly the same.
What bullion brings to the table is control of market and regulation of origin, exactly what you need to control coin minting.
And about the ability of noble metals to be a store of wealth, points 3 and half four are right (do not tarnish, which means your wealth doesn't dissipate just with time, and it's highly dense, which means a little coin weights quite enough to seem worthy for quite a lot) but point one (other uses) and two (demand is high) are not, because the alternate and not directly linked to survival uses brings nothing and demand is high because of its use a wealth storage itself.
"I'm sorry but gold has had multiple uses throughout history, from sutures (first used by the Romans IIRC) to computer chips."
Yeah, and it was used to store and represent wealth because, you know, it's good to have some ounces of it in case you have to practice a suture. C'mon, man, C'mon.
I'll tell you exactly why it was chosen: * First and foremost because humans are capable of abstraction and so, we can cognitate in terms of "look, this is gold, but let's pretend it is not gold but wealth". In other words, it has value because there is a common understandment that we'll give value to it. * It's scarce enough that it takes considerable work to take it out of land, so it's no danger of a repent market flood, you want some stability on its meaning. * It's soft and malleable, so you can fractionalize it with ease. * It's dense, so you can agree to represent a good piece of wealth in low volume: you don't want to trade a day's worth of effort for the volume of a house. * It's stable, so you can use it to store wealth. You don't want your wealth to vanish in short term all by itself. * Hurr... looks purty so, why not?
You see, all its properties comes from an abstractions and its ability to sustain the meaning of that abstraction. And that's why, in the end, fiat money works exactly the same, because from the begining, it was a matter of puting value onto something, not that this something had a value on itself.
"There's a fallacy here: where do the owner's profits come from if not from the workers buying the goods manufactured by the owner's company?"
From other owners. Have you read even a single History book? If you did you'd know that's exactly how Humanity has worked for most of its time.
It's been not much more than a century that we've had a really massive middle class (and that, only on first world) and it's a good thing.
The 0.1% want to return to the old statu quo of a decanted society with a ruling minority and a massive amount of serfs. The really annoying thing is the really big chunks of almost serfs that gladly support such distopy.
"This is the same fallacy that is used by Marxist economists, but economic growth is NOT a zero-sum game"
The very point of this article being that high technology may be approaching us to the point where it either asymptotically approaches a zero sum game or the capital gains so greatly displaces labour gains that for the laborers doesn't mind one way or the other.
"(Gains from Trade)"
Gains from Trade forcibly requires both arbitrage and value added by the middle men. Globalization and technology are both eradicating market differences and middle men value, so go figure.
Whenever you base a rationale in some premises is good to review your premises from time to time in case they are no longer valid.
"It has had value since humans placed value on things."
Correction: it has been GIVEN value since humans placed value on things. You can't eat gold, right? you can't shelter with gold, right?
Now, think of it. Gold has value because people gave it value. This means that other things can have value as long as people gives value to them. Pretty papers with a portrait of a famous dead guy, for instance.
Slashdot Mirror
"The problem is that most people calling themselves "capitalists" are not capitalists at all. They are greedy evil scum that tries to exploit the loopholes in capitalism."
And that's not the intended way for capitalism to work exactly how?
" The truth of the matter is that Amazon is doing exactly what people want it to do. Because most people aim squarely for a smaller price on the items they buy."
Absolutly wrong.
At least for the moment, what Amazon really brings is catalogue. While a reasonable price, that's not the main of it, but the fact that I gain access to products all over the world I otherwise wouldn't even know they exist.
And Amazon is not going for low prices if at all possible. An anecdotal example: I just bought a (quite expensive) fry pan. First, I couldn't find it in any local retailer, so that's what I most valued from Amazon, not the price. Second, I, just out of curiosity, looked for the same item at Amazon Italy instead on Spain, where I live in. Surprise! in Italy was like 40% cheaper. A second item was much cheaper in USA, even taking taxes into account: surprise! that item "couldn't" be sent to my country -but I was able to buy it at Amazon Spain at a much higher price.
Oh! and the fact that there are already web sites tracking prices on different subsidiaries of Amazon, as I discovered later, probes my anecdote is not just an anecdote but ongoing business.
Amazon is mangling prices as much as anyone else.
"There are no better jobs for people with their education level, you say? So if Amazon didn't exist they would be unemployed and even worse off, because they sure as hell wouldn't be able to find a job at those bookstores as the knowledgeable salespeople?"
No, they would be having a decent pay doing basically the same for a local retailer, one of the very many there would be instead of Amazon as the one single behemoth.
"While there are a lot of people who are actually competing for those crappy temp jobs because they're not qualified for anything, the environment and pay is going to suck"
There was a time when companies did train their own people and then, these people would get qualified for something. Now, they prefer for others to cover for the costs of a perfect fit, or to scream, "we need more H1B visas!" or in other, lower markets, to hire illegal aliens while at the same time crying "illegal aliens are killing America!"
"Last I checked I could buy things online from thousands and thousands of different online retailers."
Last I checked, and I checked very recently, very many of retailers were in fact reselling Amazon products at a price locked to that of Amazon. This means that in the mid to long term that either Amazon, or an Amazon-like, most probably from China, will take all the cake.
When globalization works, long tail be damned, the winner takes all.
The article forgets *why* Bezos is doing this: it is out of sheer panic of Chinese giants the likes of Alibaba to eat his cake overnight.
"Amazon isn't dumping"
That's why I added an "if". But then, selling at a loss, as the article indicates, *is* dumping.
"in cafes and parks here in the US. What is disappearing are paper books."
On one hand, losing the ability to read without a hugh tad of supporting technology may be a problem on itself.
On the other, the problem exposed here is not paper versus electronic books but the risk of Amazon trying to become a de facto monopoly as the dumping practice, if it's true, would suggest.
Do you remember that one of the short list of things a government should do, even on the most liberalist wet dreams, is to put an eye on monopolies, right?
"Most folks who want to use a framework have no interest in forking or taking over the project."
Unless really needed.
There.
"If they can pay someone in-house to fork/maintain, they can probably afford someone to write a customized framework"
Bullshit on itself and bullshit-plus once you consider the hidden costs and hindrances of such a decision.
"I can't even remember the last time I saw a site with an applet."
Do you have a better idea for, say, a software-based KVM or something that needs to deal with local hardware, like an authentication token?
"Engineers don't build bridges. Engineers design bridges. Construction workers build bridges."
Quite true.
But then again, is he still doing "engineer stuff" when he only designs a run-of-the-mill bridge, or is it indeed required for him to create new technology to be considered an engineer, as the parent poster said?
"The engineer picks the materials"
out of a table.
"their thickness"
out of a table
"the load they can handle"
out of a table.
When does he exactly create any technology?
Look again. Now read exactly what I wrote, not what you think I wrote.
Engineers != Engineering
"Architects use the knowledge about physics and material science created by scientist to engineer a bride."
False.
Most architects most of the time use the knowledge of other architects to engineer their buildings. That's the basis of engineering and that's what allows it to be regulated.
Do you imagine engineering being regulated the way it is today in the days of Eiffel?
And, by the way, of course Eiffel innovated. But not all engineers are Eiffel and not because of that they are any less engineers.
"Well, certainly the part where you take what materials science researchers have discovered in concrete technology and design structural members of a bridge certainly seems to fit that statement of what an engineer does quite nicely"
Of course it does: a bridge engineer is an engineer.
But he certainly doesn't create the technology and that's my point. The parent poster above implies that the only engineer is the one that innovates when most engineers don't innovate nor we need them to: the basis of the modern engineering is its repeatability and "looking up the right sizes in a table" *is* an engineer's job.
"...whatever you learned in school is already out of date, when you consider what they teach in University is 5 years old when they teach it."
Yes, you are right. I also felt that I lost my time in University when all of a sudden O(n!) algorithms started becoming faster than O(n).
O tempora, o mores, I said.
"Engineers take what the researchers have discovered and create the technology"
So what part of building a bridge is taking what researches have discovered and create a technology?
Or bridge engineers are engineers no more?
A True Scotsman...
"Cool as hell, but I'm curious as to, well... why? And has anyone thought this through?"
They used to call it "genetic engineering". Up to know it's been genetic bricolage at most. It's time the discipline is up to its name.
"If you had one three billion long you could have Turing himself."
Not as interesting. We already know that Turing halts.
In 1954.
"A person of American culture. But of Irish ethnicity."
And, where that "Irish ethnicity" comes from? Sharing DNA with Molly Malone?
See: the point is that you want to impose *your* definition of "ethnicity" to just mean "of a geographical or biological ascend" and, of course, you point out that being of a given geographical or biological ascend can't be a criminal trait on itself (nor impose any kind of ethic), which is obviously true.
Problem is that, no matter how many times you try to call a true Scotsman to your side, ethnicity, as you yourself point out, "tends to be associated with and ideologies of shared cultural heritage", therefore, as long as you can find *any* cultural heritage that by its own definition can be considered criminal, it forcibly will make criminal the ethnicity it belongs to or it is identified with.
"I don't really see the "dense" argument. If it were less dense, it wouldn't take the volume of a house to represent a day's worth of effort. It would take the same volume, which would have less mass"
Exactly. And then, try to use a half a gram coin for anything. It just doesn't look proper... well, it doesn't matter *now* because we have a deep understandment that money means wealth just because we agree on that, but it has taken milennia to fully grasp that -and it isn't fully understood even now, if you look at this thread.
"I don't think understandment or cognitate are words."
Well, I'm sorry I'm not native English... I'm Spanish, so I tend to use Latin-based words if only because I'm accustomed to then. Cognitate seems not to exist but cognition and cognitive certainly do, hence my mistake.
Understandment, on the other hand, renders more than 43000 entries on google and its meaning looks, well, quite understandable, so I think its use is proper but, certainly, I'm open to suggestion on alternate words for that.
"Bullion has value for many reasons."
Wrong. Bullion has a single value: make coins out of it.
You are right in that it's used for... but that's not what brings value to it: gold nuggets cover all those uses exactly the same.
What bullion brings to the table is control of market and regulation of origin, exactly what you need to control coin minting.
And about the ability of noble metals to be a store of wealth, points 3 and half four are right (do not tarnish, which means your wealth doesn't dissipate just with time, and it's highly dense, which means a little coin weights quite enough to seem worthy for quite a lot) but point one (other uses) and two (demand is high) are not, because the alternate and not directly linked to survival uses brings nothing and demand is high because of its use a wealth storage itself.
"Not to mention one other important factor. Ease of detecting counterfeits."
You are right. I failed to mention that.
"I'm sorry but gold has had multiple uses throughout history, from sutures (first used by the Romans IIRC) to computer chips."
Yeah, and it was used to store and represent wealth because, you know, it's good to have some ounces of it in case you have to practice a suture. C'mon, man, C'mon.
I'll tell you exactly why it was chosen:
* First and foremost because humans are capable of abstraction and so, we can cognitate in terms of "look, this is gold, but let's pretend it is not gold but wealth". In other words, it has value because there is a common understandment that we'll give value to it.
* It's scarce enough that it takes considerable work to take it out of land, so it's no danger of a repent market flood, you want some stability on its meaning.
* It's soft and malleable, so you can fractionalize it with ease.
* It's dense, so you can agree to represent a good piece of wealth in low volume: you don't want to trade a day's worth of effort for the volume of a house.
* It's stable, so you can use it to store wealth. You don't want your wealth to vanish in short term all by itself.
* Hurr... looks purty so, why not?
You see, all its properties comes from an abstractions and its ability to sustain the meaning of that abstraction. And that's why, in the end, fiat money works exactly the same, because from the begining, it was a matter of puting value onto something, not that this something had a value on itself.
"Add a third person and it gets even better. Pool resources. What you can't afford on your own, share with others. It works."
Congratulations, you just invented socialism.
Bad news is that right now federals are approaching your home to send you to Gitmo, you know, communism being antiamerican and all that.
"There's a fallacy here: where do the owner's profits come from if not from the workers buying the goods manufactured by the owner's company?"
From other owners. Have you read even a single History book? If you did you'd know that's exactly how Humanity has worked for most of its time.
It's been not much more than a century that we've had a really massive middle class (and that, only on first world) and it's a good thing.
The 0.1% want to return to the old statu quo of a decanted society with a ruling minority and a massive amount of serfs. The really annoying thing is the really big chunks of almost serfs that gladly support such distopy.
"This is the same fallacy that is used by Marxist economists, but economic growth is NOT a zero-sum game"
The very point of this article being that high technology may be approaching us to the point where it either asymptotically approaches a zero sum game or the capital gains so greatly displaces labour gains that for the laborers doesn't mind one way or the other.
"(Gains from Trade)"
Gains from Trade forcibly requires both arbitrage and value added by the middle men. Globalization and technology are both eradicating market differences and middle men value, so go figure.
Whenever you base a rationale in some premises is good to review your premises from time to time in case they are no longer valid.
"I see no reason any early teen that is willing to apply themselves could not do the same thing"
Sorry to bang your bubble but you are making over 60K/year because you worked hard AND you were lucky.
"It has had value since humans placed value on things."
Correction: it has been GIVEN value since humans placed value on things. You can't eat gold, right? you can't shelter with gold, right?
Now, think of it. Gold has value because people gave it value. This means that other things can have value as long as people gives value to them. Pretty papers with a portrait of a famous dead guy, for instance.