Production will probably never be free cost, there will always be raw resources, and opportunity cost, and land, and ownership rules. No labor cost does not mean no cost.
You don't need poor people for an economy, only people WITH money. If systems get fully automated, money goes to the people who own the systems and natural resources that feed into them, producing products of interest to other people who own the machines and natural resources. Money can be traded between owners just as easily as workers, they just have demand for different products. You don't actually NEED low income people.
I've been watching software development teams shrink for decades now. People tend to forget that automation doesn't completely remove jobs, it just means fewer people doing the same work, with higher pay but less than the larger team would have made.
*nod* other disruptive shifts have depended on only impacting a small part of the economy at a time, and thus other industries that were not benefiting from new technology absorbing the displaced workforce... and even then, well... as much as we mock the luddites for 'being wrong', the majority of them died in poverty so we could 'win'.
But the big danger in these upcoming shifts, if they hit large industries, large percentages of the population, you no longer have the unaffected segments of the economy to absorb the excess population. All that awaits is death, and future people talking about how wonderful things were after all those useless people died.
If you kept reading, you would see that the ocean currents are only a part of the problem, and mostly how the blooms start further out. Agricultural runoff is believed to be sustaining the near-shore bloom, but funding was cut for things like measuring and monitoring so as to not potentially threaten upstream industries.
Years back I worked on (non-mobile, 15"+) touch screen based devices. The larger the screen, the more likely it is to run into issues with calibration and more sensitive it is to things like minor pressure changes in its mounting frame. A good rule of thumb is to never use them in anything important.
Ahm.. you do realize that their preferences lay in joining the rest of the industrialized world in its economic structure, right?
I am always amazed at how people fetishize and seem so proud of their own ignorance, clinging to rose tinted versions of some imaginary past and ignoring the lessons every other 1st world country has learned from and incorporated.
Which can really be summed up as 'doing what the other people in your age group value is all that matters'. People do not really become more or less liberal or conservative, what is liberal or conservative changes as generations rise to power and become the new norm.
Yeah, but Norway and Sweden have too many happy poor people, and the pro-capitalist crowd really wants people to suffer in order to boost their self worth.
The people who came before them got a massive economic boost through heavy government spending, but now the older generation, having gotten their reward, want the younger one to pay all the bills.
Given that a BA/BS is now the minimum requirement for the vast majority of entry level positions, that might not be a 'gun to the head', but it pretty much is an economic reality now.
The problem with that problem is that it was by design. One of the big things early proponents of BTC loved was that it was deflationary, so it would increase in value the longer you held onto. The thing was basically BUILT for investment and speculation, with a built in mechanism to eventually doom small transactions by drowning them in fees that encourage moving large amounts around private exchanges.
Thing is, the banks are not going to start with $1000 fees, they are going to be able to undercut everyone through sheer resources, then wait till small time players can not survive. Then poof, they are the only ones left.
Yeah, but it is just this kind of investment in infrastructure that help break the cycle. One of the big reasons that middle class people in suburban areas are not living in poverty is the massive amount of infrastructure they take for granted.
It would indeed have to be proof of work, but since institutions could see how much work each one is putting in and who is doing what, they could at least watch out for it. If nothing else, blockchains tend to be a good technology for implementing audit trails
And yeah, when two companies do not trust each other, mutual approval works well. But if you are dealing with, say, 1000 entities then things like quorums make more sense, which blockchain as a technology can be used to implement.
It is pretty much still the 'trusted 3rd party in disguise', but with one exception : the workload could be spread out between multiple institutions/exchanges that do not trust each other. So it would not change anything for the end trader, but could remove the need for a 'everyone trusts' arbitrator between banks.
Encrypting a volume is useful for cases like, say, your laptop is lost or stolen so that people can not access your data without logon in formation. Cloud storage has about the same level of protection, even if someone finds out what your account is called they can not access your stuff without a password.
hrm. One use case I could see is the work of updating the blockchain being split between multiple companies/institutions that need to work together but do not trust each other.
This was only true when conquest was cheaper than trade. This pretty much ended with the late industrial revolution, which is why today you only really see war of conquest in the most impoverished regions.
Slashdot Mirror
Production will probably never be free cost, there will always be raw resources, and opportunity cost, and land, and ownership rules. No labor cost does not mean no cost.
You don't need poor people for an economy, only people WITH money. If systems get fully automated, money goes to the people who own the systems and natural resources that feed into them, producing products of interest to other people who own the machines and natural resources. Money can be traded between owners just as easily as workers, they just have demand for different products. You don't actually NEED low income people.
I've been watching software development teams shrink for decades now. People tend to forget that automation doesn't completely remove jobs, it just means fewer people doing the same work, with higher pay but less than the larger team would have made.
*nod* other disruptive shifts have depended on only impacting a small part of the economy at a time, and thus other industries that were not benefiting from new technology absorbing the displaced workforce... and even then, well... as much as we mock the luddites for 'being wrong', the majority of them died in poverty so we could 'win'.
But the big danger in these upcoming shifts, if they hit large industries, large percentages of the population, you no longer have the unaffected segments of the economy to absorb the excess population. All that awaits is death, and future people talking about how wonderful things were after all those useless people died.
Scary thing is, pre-industrial this actually was a way to get rid of your surplus population during economic shifts...
*nod* and in law enforcement contracts, the biggest determining factor comes down to 'is the company run by an ex-cop?'.
If you kept reading, you would see that the ocean currents are only a part of the problem, and mostly how the blooms start further out. Agricultural runoff is believed to be sustaining the near-shore bloom, but funding was cut for things like measuring and monitoring so as to not potentially threaten upstream industries.
Years back I worked on (non-mobile, 15"+) touch screen based devices. The larger the screen, the more likely it is to run into issues with calibration and more sensitive it is to things like minor pressure changes in its mounting frame. A good rule of thumb is to never use them in anything important.
Ahm.. you do realize that their preferences lay in joining the rest of the industrialized world in its economic structure, right?
I am always amazed at how people fetishize and seem so proud of their own ignorance, clinging to rose tinted versions of some imaginary past and ignoring the lessons every other 1st world country has learned from and incorporated.
Which can really be summed up as 'doing what the other people in your age group value is all that matters'. People do not really become more or less liberal or conservative, what is liberal or conservative changes as generations rise to power and become the new norm.
Yeah, but Norway and Sweden have too many happy poor people, and the pro-capitalist crowd really wants people to suffer in order to boost their self worth.
The people who came before them got a massive economic boost through heavy government spending, but now the older generation, having gotten their reward, want the younger one to pay all the bills.
Given that a BA/BS is now the minimum requirement for the vast majority of entry level positions, that might not be a 'gun to the head', but it pretty much is an economic reality now.
Ahm.. the only difference between a debt and an asset is which side of the contract you are on.
The problem with that problem is that it was by design. One of the big things early proponents of BTC loved was that it was deflationary, so it would increase in value the longer you held onto. The thing was basically BUILT for investment and speculation, with a built in mechanism to eventually doom small transactions by drowning them in fees that encourage moving large amounts around private exchanges.
Thing is, the banks are not going to start with $1000 fees, they are going to be able to undercut everyone through sheer resources, then wait till small time players can not survive. Then poof, they are the only ones left.
Yeah, but it is just this kind of investment in infrastructure that help break the cycle. One of the big reasons that middle class people in suburban areas are not living in poverty is the massive amount of infrastructure they take for granted.
California.. the 5th largest economy in the world... is business unfriendly?
It would indeed have to be proof of work, but since institutions could see how much work each one is putting in and who is doing what, they could at least watch out for it. If nothing else, blockchains tend to be a good technology for implementing audit trails And yeah, when two companies do not trust each other, mutual approval works well. But if you are dealing with, say, 1000 entities then things like quorums make more sense, which blockchain as a technology can be used to implement.
It is pretty much still the 'trusted 3rd party in disguise', but with one exception : the workload could be spread out between multiple institutions/exchanges that do not trust each other. So it would not change anything for the end trader, but could remove the need for a 'everyone trusts' arbitrator between banks.
Encrypting a volume is useful for cases like, say, your laptop is lost or stolen so that people can not access your data without logon in formation. Cloud storage has about the same level of protection, even if someone finds out what your account is called they can not access your stuff without a password.
I suspect they are not offloading it onto random miners, but instead it is being done by serveres controlled by the exchanges or banks.
hrm. One use case I could see is the work of updating the blockchain being split between multiple companies/institutions that need to work together but do not trust each other.
It is the same basic problem though. Blockchain is only a secure as it is shared.
This was only true when conquest was cheaper than trade. This pretty much ended with the late industrial revolution, which is why today you only really see war of conquest in the most impoverished regions.