BTW, my comment about productivity (the orange line) and quality is just my hypothesis, but I don't have data to back it up. I'm not saying that I can prove that quality is correlated to productivity, or that productivity is tied to purchasing power.
My point is that the chart fails to show that the gap exists, as it claims. The gap may very well exist, but this chart doesn't show it.
I see that chart brought up every time worker productivity is mentioned.
It is misleading. People ignore the fact that the U.S. moved off the gold standard in 1971, which is when the red line starts deviating from the orange line. That's not just coincidence; switching off the gold standard caused the deviation you see.
The red line is real wages, or wages after adjusting for inflation. Since 1971, that line is essentially flat because wages increased at around the rate of inflation (because the value of the dollar has been tied to the cost of goods and services). But that wasn't true before 1971. When the U.S. was on the gold standard, the value of the dollar--and thus the rate of inflation--was tied to the value of gold, and gold held its value better than average goods. Thus the inflation-adjusted value of wages appears to increase before 1971.
It's pretty much just an accounting trick. It doesn't say much about purchasing power; it says everything about how inflation was accounted.
But the biggest thing to consider is that inflation doesn't account for how the quality of products and services will change over time. The average cost of a nice TV has increased by around 3 or 4 times since 1970, but the quality (including resolution, thickness, sound, number of supported channels, capabilities, etc.) has increased by a much, much larger amount. Housing, vehicles, and a ton of other things are much better than they were in the 70s. If you put that on a chart, I would imagine it would look something like the orange line. In other words, the same real wage today buys you a better life than it did in the 70s, and that is where all that extra productivity goes.
I would prefer the backwards-facing seats due to safety:
Yet they also cite a 1958 accident involving an airliner in Munich, Germany, which crashed on takeoff with the Manchester United soccer team on board. Those in forward-facing seats were killed, and those in aft-facing seats were saved.
Because:
Passengers in Navy transport planes have ten-fold better chances of coming out of crashes alive, thanks to backward-facing seats which are being installed in all new planes.The Navy has decided to install the seats after five years of development and testing showed they gave passengers much more protection for the entire back, neck, head and parts of the arms and legs in sudden stoppages. The human body can absorb more shock by the back than by the chest and abdomen, flight surgeons say.
For that reason, I'd actually prefer backwards-facing seats in all forms of transportation. This is one reason I want self-driving cars; it would mean every person in the vehicle could be rear-facing, so that even in the (rare) event of a crash, the survival rate should be much higher.
That's not the only obvious thing. People are college age at the same time in life that they tend to form more serious relationships, for the purpose of finding a spouse. People in the same college major spend more time with each other than with people in any other particular major. Combine these together, voilá, you get a nice happy statistic.
I'm just curious, why do you think their machine learning algorithms are "shoddy"? Based on the input data (including the corpus of users across the globe and their ad clicking behaviors), it seems they have done a pretty intelligent job in getting people the ads they are most likely to care about.
Insurance reduces immediate risk by spreading out the costs, for the price of a bit of overhead.
But it's hard to spread out the cost of space launches. There aren't that many. And if you have enough money in the bank to pay for the crash, you shouldn't get insurance. In total you would be paying more for insurance (via overhead) than if you were uninsured.
So someone making $10 an hour who gets a 50% raise will not be paid any more? Congrats, you flunked basic math, in addition to basic economics.
My example (which you directly quoted) was $15/hour who gets 0% raise. I don't know where you got your numbers. You seem to be the one flunking a core subject.
Reality tells us that the price increase is less than the 50% increase of the pay rise, and so the benefits overall are for the minimum wage workers. But you don't let reality interfere with your theories.
So, in reality, if we raise the minimum wage to say $1 Billion/hour, everybody wins right?
So, the value in land is unrelated to market forces.
I didn't say that. I said costs are based on labor, not that labor is 100% of costs. In other words, labor is the only intrinsic cost. Market forces start there and build on top of it.
Market forces can create the appearance of absorbing labor cost increases. If supply and demand (and competition) are at a level that provides more income than the bare minimum necessary to stay in business, then labor costs can be forced higher without much of an immediate affect on market rates. Profits will go down.
But that only works up to the point that profit margins can absorb the increase. After that point, the company will have to adjust prices. Companies in a particular market are generally going to be affected the same, so prices will go up across the market.
Most companies that rely heavily on low-skill labor do not have enough profit margin to absorb the cost. They will have to raise prices. If doing so would kill the business, they may have to restructure (i.e. fire employees) until they can work out how to balance price increases with labor costs.
And those people who already make $15/hour? They see no more money, but get to pay more for everything. Congrats, the minimum wage increase just put a huge burden on our lower-middle class.
You pay a person "rent" for land, that's unrelated to any labor.
Someone originally originally cleared the land, built any structures on it, provided all the supplies for doing so. And before all of that, the government claimed the land, fought wars to defend that claim, and went through the work of subdividing it into states, counties, cities/towns, plats, etc. All of that is labor.
You pay for materials that's related to "value", which may, or may not be based on labor.
Market forces can increase value based on things like supply and demand, but the base costs all go back to labor. When you have enough competition (increased supply), prices go down. But they never go down beyond a certain point, which is the combined cost of inputs into the product. Those input costs are directly or indirectly based on labor.
The reason China is cheaper to manufacture in isn't the labor cost, but the environmental regulations.
The government isn't saying "you must charge $3 more". It says "you must do XYZ to reduce your environmental footprint". XYZ is performed by labor. It might cost $3 this month, but perhaps it costs $2 next month because new efficient processes were found.
Oh, I thought you were saying that prices would increase because of the minimum wage increase.
Which they would, and MUCH more dramatically than the simple inflation-based increase you are talking about. Prices would increase substantially nearly overnight. There may be a bit of relief from the new wage, but not much or for long. Oh and don't forget that people already making $15/hour (lower middle class) wouldn't get a penny extra out of the deal, so now their purchasing power just dropped dramatically. Essentially this plan makes poor people a bit less poor, rich people stay filthy rich, and the working class gets screwed.
A better alternative is a safety net funded from the current progressive income tax structure. At least then it wouldn't hurt the middle class so damn much.
False Cause: the base assumption that because Google's systems produce a particular result, Google must be actively discriminating both against black people and against women
Appeal to Emotion: instead of an actual argument, you are attempting to instill fear that bad things are going to happen unless we act
Slippery Slope: assumption that algorithmic discrimination in advertising will lead to Skynet
Without these, you really didn't say anything. So yeah, I'd say those links are relevant.
Also consider how we are talking about artificial price inflation via regulation (price of labor going up due to minimum wage laws). That's basically the opposite of allowing supply and demand to work.
But S&D will kick in... employers will have much less demand for the more costly labor, unless they can raise their prices. Customers will have less demand for more pricy goods and services, unless they can raise their wages. And this cycle continues until the market hits equilibrium again, effectively washing out most of the benefits from the original regulation.
Thanks for putting words in my mouth that I never said.
I never said raise the minimum wage. I wrote pretty much the opposite of that. I specifically pointed out that raising the minimum wage in such a way would be bad.
The points you two are making are good, but don't act like you're arguing against me.
All costs are directly, or indirectly, based on labor.
Nobody pays the ground for food, or the mines for gold and jewels. Nobody pays the rivers for electricity.
All goods are made of raw materials, and the costs of those goods incorporate the various forms of labor involved in extracting those raw materials, assembling them into useful products, packaging them for distribution, and delivering to the customer. So when labor costs go up, the costs of raw materials and all processes that create the final product also rise.
Many of my friends call me a liberal, so thanks for that information. I'll throw it back in their faces.
Tell me, how many times have we raised the federal minimum wage by as much as $7.75? How can you be so certain that businesses can so easily absorb that cost?
My problem with minimum wage isn't that I disagree with giving people a safety net or some form of minimum standard of living. It's because it disruptively targets markets that are built on low-skilled, low-wage jobs. I'd rather have a progressive tax-based solution, rather than such a regressive solution as killing the labor segment of low-income markets.
The issue is applying the stereotypes to individuals, rather than how well they fit a population.
The study only specified gender in the original profiles. How can we expect Google to take individuality into account when the input data didn't?
If Google's algorithms ignored gender and other such demographic data, then it would be ignoring the individual even more than if it takes that information into account. The fact that it doesn't ignore that data leads us to conclude that it is attempting to factor in individual preferences where possible.
It could be better, no doubt, but to be perfect it would need to list every distinct ad Google has available and allow the user to choose. Is that the solution?
There is a jump from the admitted lack of causal evidence to building a case based on causal evidence.
"We found absolutely no reason to believe that eating salad causes people to die. Nevertheless, we believe salads are bad so we should begin deeper investigation into regulating salad."
I'm perfectly OK with this to continue because if I have ads, I at least want them to be relevant to me. Anything else is a waste of my time and bandwidth.
Slashdot Mirror
BTW, my comment about productivity (the orange line) and quality is just my hypothesis, but I don't have data to back it up. I'm not saying that I can prove that quality is correlated to productivity, or that productivity is tied to purchasing power.
My point is that the chart fails to show that the gap exists, as it claims. The gap may very well exist, but this chart doesn't show it.
worker productivity has basically quadrupled in the U.S. since 1950
I see that chart brought up every time worker productivity is mentioned.
It is misleading. People ignore the fact that the U.S. moved off the gold standard in 1971, which is when the red line starts deviating from the orange line. That's not just coincidence; switching off the gold standard caused the deviation you see.
The red line is real wages, or wages after adjusting for inflation. Since 1971, that line is essentially flat because wages increased at around the rate of inflation (because the value of the dollar has been tied to the cost of goods and services). But that wasn't true before 1971. When the U.S. was on the gold standard, the value of the dollar--and thus the rate of inflation--was tied to the value of gold, and gold held its value better than average goods. Thus the inflation-adjusted value of wages appears to increase before 1971.
It's pretty much just an accounting trick. It doesn't say much about purchasing power; it says everything about how inflation was accounted.
But the biggest thing to consider is that inflation doesn't account for how the quality of products and services will change over time. The average cost of a nice TV has increased by around 3 or 4 times since 1970, but the quality (including resolution, thickness, sound, number of supported channels, capabilities, etc.) has increased by a much, much larger amount. Housing, vehicles, and a ton of other things are much better than they were in the 70s. If you put that on a chart, I would imagine it would look something like the orange line. In other words, the same real wage today buys you a better life than it did in the 70s, and that is where all that extra productivity goes.
Every acceleration would "pull" you away from the seat. That would quickly get annoying.
The same happens every time you decelerate.
And if a driver has to slam on the brakes, that pull is several times harder than typical acceleration in traffic.
In a car at least you're wearing a three-point belt. In the plane they were wearing simple lap belts.
Good point, it would make sense that rear-facing seats in planes should use three-point belts.
I would prefer the backwards-facing seats due to safety:
Yet they also cite a 1958 accident involving an airliner in Munich, Germany, which crashed on takeoff with the Manchester United soccer team on board. Those in forward-facing seats were killed, and those in aft-facing seats were saved.
Because:
Passengers in Navy transport planes have ten-fold better chances of coming out of crashes alive, thanks to backward-facing seats which are being installed in all new planes.The Navy has decided to install the seats after five years of development and testing showed they gave passengers much more protection for the entire back, neck, head and parts of the arms and legs in sudden stoppages. The human body can absorb more shock by the back than by the chest and abdomen, flight surgeons say.
For that reason, I'd actually prefer backwards-facing seats in all forms of transportation. This is one reason I want self-driving cars; it would mean every person in the vehicle could be rear-facing, so that even in the (rare) event of a crash, the survival rate should be much higher.
That's not the only obvious thing. People are college age at the same time in life that they tend to form more serious relationships, for the purpose of finding a spouse. People in the same college major spend more time with each other than with people in any other particular major. Combine these together, voilá, you get a nice happy statistic.
I'm just curious, why do you think their machine learning algorithms are "shoddy"? Based on the input data (including the corpus of users across the globe and their ad clicking behaviors), it seems they have done a pretty intelligent job in getting people the ads they are most likely to care about.
But isn't the point to try to match the level of panic with the level of practical danger?
Insurance reduces immediate risk by spreading out the costs, for the price of a bit of overhead.
But it's hard to spread out the cost of space launches. There aren't that many. And if you have enough money in the bank to pay for the crash, you shouldn't get insurance. In total you would be paying more for insurance (via overhead) than if you were uninsured.
So someone making $10 an hour who gets a 50% raise will not be paid any more? Congrats, you flunked basic math, in addition to basic economics.
My example (which you directly quoted) was $15/hour who gets 0% raise. I don't know where you got your numbers. You seem to be the one flunking a core subject.
Reality tells us that the price increase is less than the 50% increase of the pay rise, and so the benefits overall are for the minimum wage workers. But you don't let reality interfere with your theories.
So, in reality, if we raise the minimum wage to say $1 Billion/hour, everybody wins right?
the confederacy really fucked that up by citing state's rights as a justification to sustain slavery
The other thing that really fucked up state's rights was the change to the senate.
Oh, I'm not disagreeing with you. I agree with both of those points.
So, the value in land is unrelated to market forces.
I didn't say that. I said costs are based on labor, not that labor is 100% of costs. In other words, labor is the only intrinsic cost. Market forces start there and build on top of it.
Market forces can create the appearance of absorbing labor cost increases. If supply and demand (and competition) are at a level that provides more income than the bare minimum necessary to stay in business, then labor costs can be forced higher without much of an immediate affect on market rates. Profits will go down.
But that only works up to the point that profit margins can absorb the increase. After that point, the company will have to adjust prices. Companies in a particular market are generally going to be affected the same, so prices will go up across the market.
Most companies that rely heavily on low-skill labor do not have enough profit margin to absorb the cost. They will have to raise prices. If doing so would kill the business, they may have to restructure (i.e. fire employees) until they can work out how to balance price increases with labor costs.
And those people who already make $15/hour? They see no more money, but get to pay more for everything. Congrats, the minimum wage increase just put a huge burden on our lower-middle class.
Slavery != states' rights
The federal government evidently believes the 15th Amendment repealed the 10th. That's completely untrue, but it's how they behave.
I hope that one day the states will hold an Article V convention and use it to get some of those rights back.
You pay a person "rent" for land, that's unrelated to any labor.
Someone originally originally cleared the land, built any structures on it, provided all the supplies for doing so. And before all of that, the government claimed the land, fought wars to defend that claim, and went through the work of subdividing it into states, counties, cities/towns, plats, etc. All of that is labor.
You pay for materials that's related to "value", which may, or may not be based on labor.
Market forces can increase value based on things like supply and demand, but the base costs all go back to labor. When you have enough competition (increased supply), prices go down. But they never go down beyond a certain point, which is the combined cost of inputs into the product. Those input costs are directly or indirectly based on labor.
The reason China is cheaper to manufacture in isn't the labor cost, but the environmental regulations.
The government isn't saying "you must charge $3 more". It says "you must do XYZ to reduce your environmental footprint". XYZ is performed by labor. It might cost $3 this month, but perhaps it costs $2 next month because new efficient processes were found.
Regardless, it is all based on labor.
Oh, I thought you were saying that prices would increase because of the minimum wage increase.
Which they would, and MUCH more dramatically than the simple inflation-based increase you are talking about. Prices would increase substantially nearly overnight. There may be a bit of relief from the new wage, but not much or for long. Oh and don't forget that people already making $15/hour (lower middle class) wouldn't get a penny extra out of the deal, so now their purchasing power just dropped dramatically. Essentially this plan makes poor people a bit less poor, rich people stay filthy rich, and the working class gets screwed.
A better alternative is a safety net funded from the current progressive income tax structure. At least then it wouldn't hurt the middle class so damn much.
Actually they are very relevant.
False Cause: the base assumption that because Google's systems produce a particular result, Google must be actively discriminating both against black people and against women
Appeal to Emotion: instead of an actual argument, you are attempting to instill fear that bad things are going to happen unless we act
Slippery Slope: assumption that algorithmic discrimination in advertising will lead to Skynet
Without these, you really didn't say anything. So yeah, I'd say those links are relevant.
I hope you didn't miss the words "based on".
Also consider how we are talking about artificial price inflation via regulation (price of labor going up due to minimum wage laws). That's basically the opposite of allowing supply and demand to work.
But S&D will kick in... employers will have much less demand for the more costly labor, unless they can raise their prices. Customers will have less demand for more pricy goods and services, unless they can raise their wages. And this cycle continues until the market hits equilibrium again, effectively washing out most of the benefits from the original regulation.
So, my career potential should be limited because people of my gender weren't sufficiently interested in high-paying jobs?
No, your career potential is limited because you are relying on Google to advertise a job to you instead of searching for it yourself.
I fail to see how ads are locking anyone out.
It's a bit like not eating until you see an ad for food. That's ridiculous, obviously if you want food, you look for food.
If you want a job, search for the job.
Thanks for putting words in my mouth that I never said.
I never said raise the minimum wage. I wrote pretty much the opposite of that. I specifically pointed out that raising the minimum wage in such a way would be bad.
The points you two are making are good, but don't act like you're arguing against me.
All costs are directly, or indirectly, based on labor.
Nobody pays the ground for food, or the mines for gold and jewels. Nobody pays the rivers for electricity.
All goods are made of raw materials, and the costs of those goods incorporate the various forms of labor involved in extracting those raw materials, assembling them into useful products, packaging them for distribution, and delivering to the customer. So when labor costs go up, the costs of raw materials and all processes that create the final product also rise.
Many of my friends call me a liberal, so thanks for that information. I'll throw it back in their faces.
Tell me, how many times have we raised the federal minimum wage by as much as $7.75? How can you be so certain that businesses can so easily absorb that cost?
My problem with minimum wage isn't that I disagree with giving people a safety net or some form of minimum standard of living. It's because it disruptively targets markets that are built on low-skilled, low-wage jobs. I'd rather have a progressive tax-based solution, rather than such a regressive solution as killing the labor segment of low-income markets.
The issue is applying the stereotypes to individuals, rather than how well they fit a population.
The study only specified gender in the original profiles. How can we expect Google to take individuality into account when the input data didn't?
If Google's algorithms ignored gender and other such demographic data, then it would be ignoring the individual even more than if it takes that information into account. The fact that it doesn't ignore that data leads us to conclude that it is attempting to factor in individual preferences where possible.
It could be better, no doubt, but to be perfect it would need to list every distinct ad Google has available and allow the user to choose. Is that the solution?
What do you mean "certain narrative"?
There is a jump from the admitted lack of causal evidence to building a case based on causal evidence.
"We found absolutely no reason to believe that eating salad causes people to die. Nevertheless, we believe salads are bad so we should begin deeper investigation into regulating salad."
I'm perfectly OK with this to continue because if I have ads, I at least want them to be relevant to me. Anything else is a waste of my time and bandwidth.
Congratulations, your logical fallacies are:
False Cause
Appeal to Emotion
Slippery Slope