Do you honestly think that companies would just build goods and offer services without estimating the demand for such goods and services? Some businesses do and they go out of business. And the magic of the price system lets even very small businesses, who might not have the resources to conduct extensive market research, build the right product for the right price.
the problem is models are imperfect, and changing production based on demand demonstrated (and quantifiable) by rising prices or inventory changes is much more accurate than trying to predict demand based on projected consumer spending. There is no reliable uniform model for household budgets, spending, and how severe the effect of anti-labor policy will be on their spending.
Startups and new divisions usually start their operations based on predicted demand, but this practice is incredibly uncertain, and there are as many hits as misses. Take the nintendo wii for example. They vastly underestimated initial demand, resulting in massive shortages. The zune is another example in which they vastly overestimated initial demand. After initial launch though, there is quantifiable sales data from which to gage actual demand, and adjust production accordingly.
Pushing subsidies consumer side rather than producer side provides producers with much more certainty in this regard.
As for the seed example, obviously production is necessary for wealth because nobody can consume what is not there, but pushing a production first model is not the way to increase prosperity, because the demand side always moves first, with the supply side reacting to it. Trying to subsidize the supply side without demonstrated demand will simply result in the subsidy being considered profits and treated as such.
I want to add something to this, because I don't think I was particularly clear on the most underlying principle here.
In the supply and demand function, demand will always move before supply. Firms have no logical reason to simply provide something without demonstrated demand. 99.999% of those who do go out of business (the other 0.001% is apple's IPOD/Iphone divison : P)
Because of this, subsidizing producers (who don't need money, and can easily gain credit to expand) results in any extra money being calculated as profits, specifically as profits via cost reduction rather than employee contribution, and therefore distributed as bonuses among senior management.
Subsidizing consumers, however, will provide money they actually need, result in increased spending, and drive demand higher, which will prompt increases in supply. The rich get taxed, the poor get a better standard of living, the sales go up, and the rich get their money back through sales.
If everyone is saving, then someone is willing to pay interest/returns for that saving.
This is not true. Savings does not have to equate to high returns, or even private companies snatching up the deposited money. Financial markets work the same way consumer markets do. When people save more money than is demanded, the interest rates plummet.
Otherwise, "everyone" would have no place to invest their savings.
Who says you have to invest your savings? Some paranoid depression-minded people still use a good old mattress, but there are also government bonds if no private enterprise will take your money.
It is funny that you accuse me of being a republican, but you are the one making the assumption that bush made after 9/11 when he urged everyone to go spend.
The assumption he made was that everyone would take his "suggestion" to go spend when it was obvious the market would be volatile and many industries would suffer in the citizens' paranoia, and therefore anyone who had money to spend on non-essentials decided to tighten up.
Spending or consumption does not create wealth. Increasing productivity does.
This is not true. Increasing productivity without insuring people have a disposable income with which to buy the goods results in inventory which cannot be moved. This means that businesses will not be keen on simply building more infrastructure just because the government says so. The extra subsidies/tax breaks will be treated like profits and distributed as bonuses to the upper ranks in a manner commensurate with profits.
Assuming they do decide to increase productivity, though, The potential lower prices from this situation simply will not compensate for the fact that consumers, faced with anti-labor policies (stemming from deregulation under the same philosophy as the subsidies to producers), will slowly lose real purchasing power, see this coming, and not feel as comfortable parting with their money.
Finally, in the long term, producers will slow down any expansion, or stop all together. As people reproduce, their kids face a rougher job market, and real wages go down further.
The farmer who consumes all his seed corn may increase consumption, but he does not increase his wealth.
The farmer who consumes all his seed is actually increasing his production. It's true, he doesn't increase his wealth because he now has a field full of crops which are worth less, and may not be bought at all. (this is one of the reasons why the government pays farmers NOT to plant every few years, and buys up surpluses.. planting all seeds results in greater taxes on everyone) And you've just contradicted your earlier statement about productivity creating wealth.
The farmer who starves and saves to buy a new tractor is the one who increases wealth. And he does so by saving, not by consuming.
No, he has not increased wealth, he's shifted wealth into another good with an entirely different set of expenses.
Here is my analysis: Bottom up is preferable to top down in terms of economic and fiscal policy.
Subsidies given to the bottom are far more likely to be passed up the chain through spending than those given to people and companies who already have plenty of disposable income and available credit. The bottom actually NEED that money, and they will be compelled by their situation to utilize more of it constructively.
Additionally, subsidizing the bottom produces a better overall quality of life, and provides every potential entrepreneur with a hedge against risk, freeing them from some uncertainty and blessing their efforts with the promise they will at least retain their own shirts if things don't go well.
The increase in available income for discretionary spending will result in higher demand and higher sales for "the greedy rich", giving them a conside
Disclaimer: this is coming from an ardent mac user....
what about directx?
I've expressed continuous vexation at the lack of video game portability because people keep building them off the dx9 api.
I'm told by/.'s resident graphics devs that, essentially, Dx9 is to them what MacOS X is to power users, and that opengl was clunky, and falling behind.
Assuming that was not fud, I'd say MS made one good api.
We don't have Rovian tactics in India, but we are good at spotting charlatans who speak about things they have no business talking about.
I was taught economics by the combined faculty of a top 20 undergrad institution and a business school ranked 6th in the world.
You are merely screaming repeatedly that I'm a charlatan with no rational counter-argument to my case.
Please provide a rational counter-argument. I don't reach my conclusions lightly, but when presented with more feasible arguments or evidence to the contrary, I do adjust my beliefs rather than cling to ignorance.
Personally, I think you're just a republican who is pissed at what I say.
If I were to get a job, walk off as soon as customer requests started flooding in, then put it on a resume and go looking for another more important job, their HR would spew their coffee through their nose laughing at a reference to it as "experience".
I'm not sure how bad this is in canada, but the dingbat-right think tanks maintain vast rings of fake blogs, which are populated with deliberate fabrications and distortions, linking to one another in a circular fashion to create the illusion of credibility.
This extension of the echo chamber has produced things like the obama=muslim crap, and i've seen morons posting absurdities about how rome was a welfare state.
This ruling makes it much harder to combat things like this.
I could have used anything. The non-existent issue of Transexual Leprechaun Succession Rights would have worked just as well. Here, let's try it out:
Reporter: Mr. Obama, I would like to know what you think of Transexual Leprechaun Succession Rights. Obama: Well, reporter, seeing as you are not a Leprechaun undergoing a severe identity crisis who could be considered a possible probate heir of your companion's belongings, I do not have to answer your question.
And you would still be dead wrong.
Issues of fiscal policy and economics, unlike moral or social issues, are quantifiable (and issues of regulation have several hundred years of records which can also be statistically analyzed). This means there is an objective truth.
It also means people who don't know a damn thing about the demographic they claim to be advocating have no standing, and are polluting the public discourse by spouting off some cock and bull story trying to spread unfounded, dogmatic ideology.
Do keep waffling on inanely though, and not reading a word or thinking critically about it.
with a full 2% of the population in prison at any one time, and a vast majority of them being convictions related to drug abuse, and obviously many more people who have already served their time...
I wonder how quickly marijuana and many other drugs (and filesharing while we're at it) would be legalized if every one of them were given their right to vote again.
The classification of even minor drug use/possession as a felony was designed by the fascist nixon administration to assure anyone who opposed their extremist stance on drugs would never be allowed to push congress to restore their rights.
I honestly never got the point of barring felons from voting. What if they rehabilitate while serving their sentence? Besides which, how are they any less human, or any less a citizen, simply because they've committed a crime?
What if the law they violated is fundamentally unjust, and the felony label is being used in the same way SLAPP suits and poll taxes were.
We already have election law and it allows us to choose to replace our criminal legislators, or, if we feel that they are still able to competently serve us, choose to return them to office.
Unless we are felons, in which case we can't vote. (i'm pretty sure this is a huge breach of the constitution, but the authoritarian USSC doesn't give a damn.)
So your a Senator of one of the largest oil producing states, an you hire an oil services company to renovate your house, instead of say, a home builder.
Yea that doesn't look odd at all.
It wouldnt if they used only oil as materials. : )
I have to agree here. Congresspeople are already 'set for life' on the government's dime when they leave office.
Government pays for staff, office space, homes, cars, etc.
Supplying these people with this kind of lifestyle is the government equivalent of supply-side voodoo economics.
Just as massive corporate tax cuts don't guarantee jobs instead of corporate bonuses, massive payoffs to government officials don't guarantee public representation instead of further bribery.
I don't know how else to explain the terrible campaigns being run by all republicans this year.
well, you can only lie about your disastrous policies and hide the horrible smell for so long before the weight of the dung in the closet causes the door to burst, flooding the room.
Reaganomics doesn't work. Deregulation of the financial industries led to the meltdown, and republican policies of rewarding the rich while ignoring or even disenfranchising the middle class and working poor were not very conducive to successful mortgage payments.
If you are participating in public discourse, you should be required to have a minimal understanding of what you are talking about.
Should we require the same of reporters? "I'm sorry, it looks like you, a male reporter, asked a question about abortion. I refuse to answer on the grounds that you lack standing as you are not a female. Come back to me after the sex change or whatever."
Don't spuriously compare moral issues to technical ones. One can be quantified and analyzed by industry structure, policy structure, and how one will affect the other. "joe" not knowing jack about plumbing definitely does affect his standing.
"that's a fascinating question about my healthcare plan, but it looks like you're an able-bodied person. So don't ask me any questions on this because you lack standing."
Once again an issue with a moral rather than technical core. The current debate over healthcare is whether people have the right to a healthy quality of life, not how we will implement universal healthcare (which, I might add, does not require socialization).
And that's where the firearms question comes from above. It appears to have flown over your head - and boy, was that a shocker. Even a person who does not own firearms retains the right to question Obama about his firearms policies.
WTF are you rattling on about now. I told you moral issues don't require more than a point of view. Technical ones, like economics, spending, and tax policy, do.
We don't teach intelligent design in classrooms for a reason, and we shouldn't be misrepresenting fiscal and economic issues, especially when the republican party prefers dogma rather than quantitative data and analysis in this regard (because they know digging into the real numbers will show their obvious sellouts to the rich).
UI design, while it CAN and SHOULD take into account the amount of system resources it is using, cannot accurately predict the power of the machines that will be running it.
Given that this UI is running on custom hardware designed specifically for this use, isn't your argument moot? They not only could accurately predict the hardware, they also designed the hardware and tested both together.
However, I for one am in favor of a tricky ballot system, something that requires a bit of thought. After all, what benefit does anybody anyplace get from running our society based on the opinions of people who are too dumb-stupid to solve even a simple concrete problem like "where shall I place an X if I want to vote for candidate Y?"
except those dumb people still have a right to go to the polls, and will do so.
Increasing the chance they screw up will not help the electoral process, and may very well be counterproductive.
Let's also remember that Obama's 'generation' also skips email. The 'myspace generation' has no idea what a MUA is. They think that sending messages on Myspace *IS* email.
Slashdot Mirror
I also would like to add that consumer side subsidies do not necessarily discourage savings.
most families have a savings to spending ratio, and increasing the money going in increases both.
Do you honestly think that companies would just build goods and offer services without estimating the demand for such goods and services? Some businesses do and they go out of business. And the magic of the price system lets even very small businesses, who might not have the resources to conduct extensive market research, build the right product for the right price.
the problem is models are imperfect, and changing production based on demand demonstrated (and quantifiable) by rising prices or inventory changes is much more accurate than trying to predict demand based on projected consumer spending. There is no reliable uniform model for household budgets, spending, and how severe the effect of anti-labor policy will be on their spending.
Startups and new divisions usually start their operations based on predicted demand, but this practice is incredibly uncertain, and there are as many hits as misses. Take the nintendo wii for example. They vastly underestimated initial demand, resulting in massive shortages. The zune is another example in which they vastly overestimated initial demand.
After initial launch though, there is quantifiable sales data from which to gage actual demand, and adjust production accordingly.
Pushing subsidies consumer side rather than producer side provides producers with much more certainty in this regard.
As for the seed example, obviously production is necessary for wealth because nobody can consume what is not there, but pushing a production first model is not the way to increase prosperity, because the demand side always moves first, with the supply side reacting to it. Trying to subsidize the supply side without demonstrated demand will simply result in the subsidy being considered profits and treated as such.
I want to add something to this, because I don't think I was particularly clear on the most underlying principle here.
In the supply and demand function, demand will always move before supply. Firms have no logical reason to simply provide something without demonstrated demand. 99.999% of those who do go out of business (the other 0.001% is apple's IPOD/Iphone divison : P)
Because of this, subsidizing producers (who don't need money, and can easily gain credit to expand) results in any extra money being calculated as profits, specifically as profits via cost reduction rather than employee contribution, and therefore distributed as bonuses among senior management.
Subsidizing consumers, however, will provide money they actually need, result in increased spending, and drive demand higher, which will prompt increases in supply. The rich get taxed, the poor get a better standard of living, the sales go up, and the rich get their money back through sales.
Trickle up > trickle down.
If everyone is saving, then someone is willing to pay interest/returns for that saving.
This is not true. Savings does not have to equate to high returns, or even private companies snatching up the deposited money. Financial markets work the same way consumer markets do. When people save more money than is demanded, the interest rates plummet.
Otherwise, "everyone" would have no place to invest their savings.
Who says you have to invest your savings? Some paranoid depression-minded people still use a good old mattress, but there are also government bonds if no private enterprise will take your money.
It is funny that you accuse me of being a republican, but you are the one making the assumption that bush made after 9/11 when he urged everyone to go spend.
The assumption he made was that everyone would take his "suggestion" to go spend when it was obvious the market would be volatile and many industries would suffer in the citizens' paranoia, and therefore anyone who had money to spend on non-essentials decided to tighten up.
Spending or consumption does not create wealth. Increasing productivity does.
This is not true. Increasing productivity without insuring people have a disposable income with which to buy the goods results in inventory which cannot be moved. This means that businesses will not be keen on simply building more infrastructure just because the government says so. The extra subsidies/tax breaks will be treated like profits and distributed as bonuses to the upper ranks in a manner commensurate with profits.
Assuming they do decide to increase productivity, though, The potential lower prices from this situation simply will not compensate for the fact that consumers, faced with anti-labor policies (stemming from deregulation under the same philosophy as the subsidies to producers), will slowly lose real purchasing power, see this coming, and not feel as comfortable parting with their money.
Finally, in the long term, producers will slow down any expansion, or stop all together. As people reproduce, their kids face a rougher job market, and real wages go down further.
The farmer who consumes all his seed corn may increase consumption, but he does not increase his wealth.
The farmer who consumes all his seed is actually increasing his production. It's true, he doesn't increase his wealth because he now has a field full of crops which are worth less, and may not be bought at all. (this is one of the reasons why the government pays farmers NOT to plant every few years, and buys up surpluses.. planting all seeds results in greater taxes on everyone) And you've just contradicted your earlier statement about productivity creating wealth.
The farmer who starves and saves to buy a new tractor is the one who increases wealth. And he does so by saving, not by consuming.
No, he has not increased wealth, he's shifted wealth into another good with an entirely different set of expenses.
Here is my analysis:
Bottom up is preferable to top down in terms of economic and fiscal policy.
Subsidies given to the bottom are far more likely to be passed up the chain through spending than those given to people and companies who already have plenty of disposable income and available credit. The bottom actually NEED that money, and they will be compelled by their situation to utilize more of it constructively.
Additionally, subsidizing the bottom produces a better overall quality of life, and provides every potential entrepreneur with a hedge against risk, freeing them from some uncertainty and blessing their efforts with the promise they will at least retain their own shirts if things don't go well.
The increase in available income for discretionary spending will result in higher demand and higher sales for "the greedy rich", giving them a conside
Disclaimer: this is coming from an ardent mac user....
what about directx?
I've expressed continuous vexation at the lack of video game portability because people keep building them off the dx9 api.
I'm told by /.'s resident graphics devs that, essentially, Dx9 is to them what MacOS X is to power users, and that opengl was clunky, and falling behind.
Assuming that was not fud, I'd say MS made one good api.
We don't have Rovian tactics in India, but we are good at spotting charlatans who speak about things they have no business talking about.
I was taught economics by the combined faculty of a top 20 undergrad institution and a business school ranked 6th in the world.
You are merely screaming repeatedly that I'm a charlatan with no rational counter-argument to my case.
Please provide a rational counter-argument. I don't reach my conclusions lightly, but when presented with more feasible arguments or evidence to the contrary, I do adjust my beliefs rather than cling to ignorance.
Personally, I think you're just a republican who is pissed at what I say.
The trouble with reaganomics is, if everyone is saving, nobody is consuming, and consumption is a far greater factor in our GDP.
You fail Economics 101.
Typical Rovian tactic, accuse me of what you've already done.
Let me know when GDP, the primary metric of economic well being, stops being a measure of the value of all final goods and services sold.
If I were to get a job, walk off as soon as customer requests started flooding in, then put it on a resume and go looking for another more important job, their HR would spew their coffee through their nose laughing at a reference to it as "experience".
Still, I have mixed feelings about this.
I'm not sure how bad this is in canada, but the dingbat-right think tanks maintain vast rings of fake blogs, which are populated with deliberate fabrications and distortions, linking to one another in a circular fashion to create the illusion of credibility.
This extension of the echo chamber has produced things like the obama=muslim crap, and i've seen morons posting absurdities about how rome was a welfare state.
This ruling makes it much harder to combat things like this.
I could have used anything. The non-existent issue of Transexual Leprechaun Succession Rights would have worked just as well. Here, let's try it out:
Reporter: Mr. Obama, I would like to know what you think of Transexual Leprechaun Succession Rights.
Obama: Well, reporter, seeing as you are not a Leprechaun undergoing a severe identity crisis who could be considered a possible probate heir of your companion's belongings, I do not have to answer your question.
And you would still be dead wrong.
Issues of fiscal policy and economics, unlike moral or social issues, are quantifiable (and issues of regulation have several hundred years of records which can also be statistically analyzed). This means there is an objective truth.
It also means people who don't know a damn thing about the demographic they claim to be advocating have no standing, and are polluting the public discourse by spouting off some cock and bull story trying to spread unfounded, dogmatic ideology.
Do keep waffling on inanely though, and not reading a word or thinking critically about it.
with a full 2% of the population in prison at any one time, and a vast majority of them being convictions related to drug abuse, and obviously many more people who have already served their time...
I wonder how quickly marijuana and many other drugs (and filesharing while we're at it) would be legalized if every one of them were given their right to vote again.
The classification of even minor drug use/possession as a felony was designed by the fascist nixon administration to assure anyone who opposed their extremist stance on drugs would never be allowed to push congress to restore their rights.
+100, Insightful.
I honestly never got the point of barring felons from voting. What if they rehabilitate while serving their sentence? Besides which, how are they any less human, or any less a citizen, simply because they've committed a crime?
What if the law they violated is fundamentally unjust, and the felony label is being used in the same way SLAPP suits and poll taxes were.
We already have election law and it allows us to choose to replace our criminal legislators, or, if we feel that they are still able to competently serve us, choose to return them to office.
Unless we are felons, in which case we can't vote. (i'm pretty sure this is a huge breach of the constitution, but the authoritarian USSC doesn't give a damn.)
So your a Senator of one of the largest oil producing states, an you hire an oil services company to renovate your house, instead of say, a home builder.
Yea that doesn't look odd at all.
It wouldnt if they used only oil as materials. : )
I have to agree here. Congresspeople are already 'set for life' on the government's dime when they leave office.
Government pays for staff, office space, homes, cars, etc.
Supplying these people with this kind of lifestyle is the government equivalent of supply-side voodoo economics.
Just as massive corporate tax cuts don't guarantee jobs instead of corporate bonuses, massive payoffs to government officials don't guarantee public representation instead of further bribery.
I don't know how else to explain the terrible campaigns being run by all republicans this year.
well, you can only lie about your disastrous policies and hide the horrible smell for so long before the weight of the dung in the closet causes the door to burst, flooding the room.
Reaganomics doesn't work. Deregulation of the financial industries led to the meltdown, and republican policies of rewarding the rich while ignoring or even disenfranchising the middle class and working poor were not very conducive to successful mortgage payments.
If you're happy ted stevens was prosecuted, you are not a republican, you're a moderate.
Sorry, no.
If you are participating in public discourse, you should be required to have a minimal understanding of what you are talking about.
Should we require the same of reporters? "I'm sorry, it looks like you, a male reporter, asked a question about abortion. I refuse to answer on the grounds that you lack standing as you are not a female. Come back to me after the sex change or whatever."
Don't spuriously compare moral issues to technical ones. One can be quantified and analyzed by industry structure, policy structure, and how one will affect the other. "joe" not knowing jack about plumbing definitely does affect his standing.
"that's a fascinating question about my healthcare plan, but it looks like you're an able-bodied person. So don't ask me any questions on this because you lack standing."
Once again an issue with a moral rather than technical core. The current debate over healthcare is whether people have the right to a healthy quality of life, not how we will implement universal healthcare (which, I might add, does not require socialization).
And that's where the firearms question comes from above. It appears to have flown over your head - and boy, was that a shocker. Even a person who does not own firearms retains the right to question Obama about his firearms policies.
WTF are you rattling on about now. I told you moral issues don't require more than a point of view. Technical ones, like economics, spending, and tax policy, do.
We don't teach intelligent design in classrooms for a reason, and we shouldn't be misrepresenting fiscal and economic issues, especially when the republican party prefers dogma rather than quantitative data and analysis in this regard (because they know digging into the real numbers will show their obvious sellouts to the rich).
UI design, while it CAN and SHOULD take into account the amount of system resources it is using, cannot accurately predict the power of the machines that will be running it.
Given that this UI is running on custom hardware designed specifically for this use, isn't your argument moot? They not only could accurately predict the hardware, they also designed the hardware and tested both together.
They use windows on the machines.
On the way to work, I pass a couple of dozen houses with "McCain/Palin" signs out front whose owners would apparently also like to chime in.
U R Doing it Rong..
the correct illustration is the sap griping as he empties a second mortgage into the gas tank of his SUV, with Bush '04 and McCain/Palin '08 stickers.
no, both of you are wrong. It wasn't the user, it wasn't the ballot maker, chad hung himself... hundreds of thousands of times.
The supreme court gave the election to bush so floridian officials would finally burn the corpses.
Even idiots have a right to choose their representatives and president. Fortunately your civil rights are not limited by your mental capacity.
I disagree on this regard.
I see plenty of morons voting for candidates who stand diametrically opposed to their interests.
Best example, trailer trash with mccain posters on their grass. (there is no "lawn" in a trailer park)
However, I for one am in favor of a tricky ballot system, something that requires a bit of thought. After all, what benefit does anybody anyplace get from running our society based on the opinions of people who are too dumb-stupid to solve even a simple concrete problem like "where shall I place an X if I want to vote for candidate Y?"
except those dumb people still have a right to go to the polls, and will do so.
Increasing the chance they screw up will not help the electoral process, and may very well be counterproductive.
Parent is Insightful? How about 'uninformed'?
George Bush was an officer and pilot in the Armed Services of the United States.
Who never saw action and went awol.
Let's also remember that Obama's 'generation' also skips email. The 'myspace generation' has no idea what a MUA is. They think that sending messages on Myspace *IS* email.
Kids say email is dead.
In other news, kids are still stupid.
I would never, EVER use social networking sites for communication beyond arranging to communicate through some other, more private means.
I wonder how dead email will be when these kids find out their potential employers wrote them off after looking at their myspace columns.