Low interest rates mostly affect larger purchases and don't seem effective during slumps because it's these very products consumers tend to cut back on purchases of that low interest rates are targeting. Helicopter money will be spent on lots of things almost immediately. And QE-like devices mostly affect the wealthy, not middle and poor.
The problem is that the 1% already have plenty: giving them yet more spending money is like spoon feeding Chris Christy. Try the other 99% for once.
Everyday consumption is the bottleneck, not big ticket items and fat cat spending.
There's a rant somewhere on The Register about MS trying to shift to Enterprise and throwing small customers under the bus in the process. Bigger PHB's with bigger wallets.
You've still offered no evidence Japan tried anything close to helicopter money. They've had low inflation for a good while, with the one exception I already addressed.
Remember that Bing is a decision engine, not a search engine
Their product naming and slogans are so PHB, it's pitiful. "Power Point", "Excel", "Outlook", and applications are "solutions" in Visual Studio. I bet a product named "Microsoft Synergy" is on its way.
There are a class of people who need constant stimulation and changes of pace, and call centers do that because issues are constantly flying in from all different directions.
If an ad says nothing about the current condition of the reader's computer, I see no legitimate reason to block it.
MS risks getting into anti-trust legal problems again for blocking other IT co's. Perhaps they are willing to take that gamble in court now that they could argue mobile OS's are encroaching on Windows sales.
Inflation has been low in Japan also. I don't know where you are getting your alleged Japan evidence. There was a spike when they hiked their sales tax a couple of years ago, but that's a different animal.
The GOP was actually a useful party back when we had the fairness doctrine...they got shit done and cooperated with Democrats
Indeed. They now have a conspiratorial narrative whereby Democrats are plotting to take away their guns and Christmas trees, while Obamacare doctors turn their kids gay by vaccinating them with secret Sharia sauce.
The BSC* answer is, "We found no specific evidence of politically-biased re-ranking of stories. However, we did discover that the ranking process was not carefully managed and monitored enough, and are now putting in place procedures and cross-checks to prevent any future bias".
In short, it blames any problems later discovered on rogue underlings who were not watched well enough.
I don't claim to be an intentional expert on bullshit, I just witnessed too much over the years in Dilbertville, often as the underling scapegoat.
Much more likely is plumbers getting better tools, and becoming more efficient.
That too, meaning fewer plumbers are needed, or at least their efficiency offsets more need. It could be that the first use of remote technology is that newbie plumbers do all the work but experts guide them remotely. A given expert may be guiding a half dozen newbie plumbers, which means plumber pay on average goes down.
I've worked with people in other countries for almost 20 years now. Organizations have figured out all they're likely to.
The younger generation seems more comfortable with remote collaboration, and use it better.
If everyone had 2x as much spending money, but the same amount of factories and service workers, well, we'd all have the same amount of goods and services, wouldn't we?
No, because we are not using them to full capacity and not investing in more. The money supply is kind of like water pressure in a hydraulic system: too little, and the system is sluggish, too much, and leaks spring, requiring yet more pressure in the system. The economy's water pressure is below the ideal.
Robots still suck in spaces where legs and a flexible torso are needed to do anything.
They have the potential to be even better at that than humans. They could have snake-like appendages and/or little micro-probes to crawl into pipes. And sonograms, X-rays, specrographs, etc. If it takes the remote-bot 3x longer than a human, it may not matter if the controller in Timbuktu is paid 1/4 a local plumber.
And yet my employer pays me vast sums to do it here.
For highly customized stuff or stuff that takes a lot of domain knowledge, perhaps, but a lot of software is not like that. Plus, organizations don't know how to take advantage of offshored labor yet. There's a lot of grunt work that could be offshored in our IT teams, but (current) managers and accountants are unskilled at partitioning and analyzing work-loads that way.
If all our basic needs were nearly free, you don't think we could support 10-20% of our population in entertaining the other 80-90% (using "entertainment" very broadly here) or in customizing those nearly-free things to be fashionable?
Yes, but you seem to be saying that 80% not working is inevitable, which is generally my point.
And for right now, the middle class doesn't have enough spare cash to pay for sufficient fashion/customization to grow that field. The money is log-jammed at the top for some reason.
It may be possible to re-tune our economy for fashion/customization/localization jobs, but the current people in charge don't yet know how, and/or those at the top don't want them to find out and thus bribe those in charge to keep the status quo.
I'd like to see "helicopter money" tried. Inflation is currently too low. The risk of run-away inflation is low because there is a lot of under-capacity still.
I guess I missed the point also. If anyone says those things on the list are reasonable in the near future, I agree they are farfetched. But some are within the general realm of existing technology.
For example, we can scan a very small selected portion of a brain in detail to study the neurons and their state, but not on a large scale. Extrapolating to an entire brain is a scaling problem, not an ability problem.
On the other hand, faster-than-light travel may require a physics breakthrough to achieve rather than gradual improvements of existing abilities.
Maybe if we can tame the energy of star clusters, we could someday create worm-holes that allow us to send information and/or nano reconstruction machines so we could "beam" around the universe through worm-holes almost instantaneously. But that's a YUUUUUGE leap from what we know today. However, it's possibly within the realm of known physics. It would just take breakthroughs and vast improvements in boatloads of fields.
If we can build robots that can in turn build robots on their own, multiplying like mad, perhaps we could one day tame the resources of a star cluster to get the energy needed for worm-hole creation and management.
There's nearfetched, mediumfetched, farfetched, and unfetchable. Easter-bunny and Santa probably belong in the last category.
Plumber and electrician could be partly replaced by remote-controlled robots, operated out of 3rd-world countries. Plus, the demand for those has been relatively stagnant, and thus they are not going to absorb significant losses in other sectors from automation/offshoring (A/O). Same with truck drivers, who may eventually be replaced by self-driving vehicles, which already exist.
And there is no evidence that beautician and decorator jobs are increasing at a significant rate.
Plus of course anything creative and the guys who write the automation
Software and R&D can be done in Timbuktu.
Things dealing with the intersection of creativity and local culture may be semi-immune, but I truly doubt they will expand enough to absorb MOST the other jobs lost to A/O. It's peanuts compared to the quantity loss.
Plus, a lot of people lack social skills for sales and/or creative ability.
Even interior decorating could be A/O'd by having a remote-controlled robot come in your house*, take photos, which are then used for reconstructing a 3D model of your house mostly via automation (which already exists), and a "tuner" in Timbuktu working at $2/hr makes some human-needed adjustments to the computer-generated portfolio, which the customer reviews on their tablet. Most of the time-consuming work is done by A/O. A sales-rep may be briefly stop by to provide a human face to the process, but otherwise will be spending far fewer hours per house than now.
* Or just take the pictures with your mobile computer to send to the agency. No need for a physical visitor.
All those people WILL find something to do after a brief period of adjustment because that has happened since the beginning of civilization.
It's indeed been the past pattern, but it's still NOT guaranteed to continue indefinitely. It's not necessarily an inherent Law of the Universe, hard-wired into the stars.
Machines have been pretty dumb for most of history. There may be a tipping point whereby if machines get smart enough, prior patterns no longer apply. The warning signs seem to be indicating we are reaching that tipping point.
there are an awful lot of people who simply don't know what to do, don't want to learn how to do something new
Like what? I'd like examples of something that is not at risk of automation and/or offshoring. Programming and managing server farms can and is being offshored. As soon as you reach a certain age, corporations toss you in the trash like a 90's PC found in the closet anyhow. They don't value IT skills enough to keep you past Logan's Run age, so why should that be considered the safe haven from change?
I agree one has to be adaptable these days just to stay in the game, but it appears to be a race to the bottom, to borrow a popular phrase.
If everybody OD'd on caffeine and worked 70 hours a week to "keep up", that's just more intensity chasing a fixed number of positions. It don't see enough slots for each person even if everybody were super smart and super competitive and super-caffeinated.
3rd-world countries subsidize labor to keep their citizens from rioting and overthrowing the leaders. They are thus de-facto slaves. Do we have to turn our country into a 3rd-world dump to compete with 3rd-world dumps and slaves via deregulation and pollution? That's solving the wrong problem: our goal should be a better society, not a society where we compete with subsidized slaves wallowing in gunk by becoming slaves wallowing in gunk.
Slashdot Mirror
Low interest rates mostly affect larger purchases and don't seem effective during slumps because it's these very products consumers tend to cut back on purchases of that low interest rates are targeting. Helicopter money will be spent on lots of things almost immediately. And QE-like devices mostly affect the wealthy, not middle and poor.
The problem is that the 1% already have plenty: giving them yet more spending money is like spoon feeding Chris Christy. Try the other 99% for once.
Everyday consumption is the bottleneck, not big ticket items and fat cat spending.
There's a rant somewhere on The Register about MS trying to shift to Enterprise and throwing small customers under the bus in the process. Bigger PHB's with bigger wallets.
You've still offered no evidence Japan tried anything close to helicopter money. They've had low inflation for a good while, with the one exception I already addressed.
Their product naming and slogans are so PHB, it's pitiful. "Power Point", "Excel", "Outlook", and applications are "solutions" in Visual Studio. I bet a product named "Microsoft Synergy" is on its way.
So is MS. They are just a bit more gradual in their screwification.
But a lot of their Bing traffic is due to their near-monopoly on x86 desktops & laptops. It has potential anti-trust (anti-competitive) implications.
There are a class of people who need constant stimulation and changes of pace, and call centers do that because issues are constantly flying in from all different directions.
^ Grumpy McGrumpface
If an ad says nothing about the current condition of the reader's computer, I see no legitimate reason to block it.
MS risks getting into anti-trust legal problems again for blocking other IT co's. Perhaps they are willing to take that gamble in court now that they could argue mobile OS's are encroaching on Windows sales.
Inflation has been low in Japan also. I don't know where you are getting your alleged Japan evidence. There was a spike when they hiked their sales tax a couple of years ago, but that's a different animal.
Actually, the threat of dragging one's chubby pale stale-pizza-smelling body out into public is a potent threat.
It's best to imply you found something during your investigation. It gives the impression you've done something useful and did a real investigation.
Indeed. They now have a conspiratorial narrative whereby Democrats are plotting to take away their guns and Christmas trees, while Obamacare doctors turn their kids gay by vaccinating them with secret Sharia sauce.
Zuck doesn't quite know how to bullshit properly.
The BSC* answer is, "We found no specific evidence of politically-biased re-ranking of stories. However, we did discover that the ranking process was not carefully managed and monitored enough, and are now putting in place procedures and cross-checks to prevent any future bias".
In short, it blames any problems later discovered on rogue underlings who were not watched well enough.
I don't claim to be an intentional expert on bullshit, I just witnessed too much over the years in Dilbertville, often as the underling scapegoat.
* Bullshit-Correct
That too, meaning fewer plumbers are needed, or at least their efficiency offsets more need. It could be that the first use of remote technology is that newbie plumbers do all the work but experts guide them remotely. A given expert may be guiding a half dozen newbie plumbers, which means plumber pay on average goes down.
The younger generation seems more comfortable with remote collaboration, and use it better.
No, because we are not using them to full capacity and not investing in more. The money supply is kind of like water pressure in a hydraulic system: too little, and the system is sluggish, too much, and leaks spring, requiring yet more pressure in the system. The economy's water pressure is below the ideal.
They have the potential to be even better at that than humans. They could have snake-like appendages and/or little micro-probes to crawl into pipes. And sonograms, X-rays, specrographs, etc. If it takes the remote-bot 3x longer than a human, it may not matter if the controller in Timbuktu is paid 1/4 a local plumber.
For highly customized stuff or stuff that takes a lot of domain knowledge, perhaps, but a lot of software is not like that. Plus, organizations don't know how to take advantage of offshored labor yet. There's a lot of grunt work that could be offshored in our IT teams, but (current) managers and accountants are unskilled at partitioning and analyzing work-loads that way.
Yes, but you seem to be saying that 80% not working is inevitable, which is generally my point.
And for right now, the middle class doesn't have enough spare cash to pay for sufficient fashion/customization to grow that field. The money is log-jammed at the top for some reason.
It may be possible to re-tune our economy for fashion/customization/localization jobs, but the current people in charge don't yet know how, and/or those at the top don't want them to find out and thus bribe those in charge to keep the status quo.
I'd like to see "helicopter money" tried. Inflation is currently too low. The risk of run-away inflation is low because there is a lot of under-capacity still.
I guess I missed the point also. If anyone says those things on the list are reasonable in the near future, I agree they are farfetched. But some are within the general realm of existing technology.
For example, we can scan a very small selected portion of a brain in detail to study the neurons and their state, but not on a large scale. Extrapolating to an entire brain is a scaling problem, not an ability problem.
On the other hand, faster-than-light travel may require a physics breakthrough to achieve rather than gradual improvements of existing abilities.
Maybe if we can tame the energy of star clusters, we could someday create worm-holes that allow us to send information and/or nano reconstruction machines so we could "beam" around the universe through worm-holes almost instantaneously. But that's a YUUUUUGE leap from what we know today. However, it's possibly within the realm of known physics. It would just take breakthroughs and vast improvements in boatloads of fields.
If we can build robots that can in turn build robots on their own, multiplying like mad, perhaps we could one day tame the resources of a star cluster to get the energy needed for worm-hole creation and management.
There's nearfetched, mediumfetched, farfetched, and unfetchable. Easter-bunny and Santa probably belong in the last category.
Bullshitting may be the last skill perfected by A.I.
Plumber and electrician could be partly replaced by remote-controlled robots, operated out of 3rd-world countries. Plus, the demand for those has been relatively stagnant, and thus they are not going to absorb significant losses in other sectors from automation/offshoring (A/O). Same with truck drivers, who may eventually be replaced by self-driving vehicles, which already exist.
And there is no evidence that beautician and decorator jobs are increasing at a significant rate.
Software and R&D can be done in Timbuktu.
Things dealing with the intersection of creativity and local culture may be semi-immune, but I truly doubt they will expand enough to absorb MOST the other jobs lost to A/O. It's peanuts compared to the quantity loss.
Plus, a lot of people lack social skills for sales and/or creative ability.
Even interior decorating could be A/O'd by having a remote-controlled robot come in your house*, take photos, which are then used for reconstructing a 3D model of your house mostly via automation (which already exists), and a "tuner" in Timbuktu working at $2/hr makes some human-needed adjustments to the computer-generated portfolio, which the customer reviews on their tablet. Most of the time-consuming work is done by A/O. A sales-rep may be briefly stop by to provide a human face to the process, but otherwise will be spending far fewer hours per house than now.
* Or just take the pictures with your mobile computer to send to the agency. No need for a physical visitor.
Cubicle Politics 101: "Don't complain without supplying alternatives". The public-sector alternatives are not so great either.
It's indeed been the past pattern, but it's still NOT guaranteed to continue indefinitely. It's not necessarily an inherent Law of the Universe, hard-wired into the stars.
Machines have been pretty dumb for most of history. There may be a tipping point whereby if machines get smart enough, prior patterns no longer apply. The warning signs seem to be indicating we are reaching that tipping point.
Oh, a politician.
Like what? I'd like examples of something that is not at risk of automation and/or offshoring. Programming and managing server farms can and is being offshored. As soon as you reach a certain age, corporations toss you in the trash like a 90's PC found in the closet anyhow. They don't value IT skills enough to keep you past Logan's Run age, so why should that be considered the safe haven from change?
I agree one has to be adaptable these days just to stay in the game, but it appears to be a race to the bottom, to borrow a popular phrase.
If everybody OD'd on caffeine and worked 70 hours a week to "keep up", that's just more intensity chasing a fixed number of positions. It don't see enough slots for each person even if everybody were super smart and super competitive and super-caffeinated.
3rd-world countries subsidize labor to keep their citizens from rioting and overthrowing the leaders. They are thus de-facto slaves. Do we have to turn our country into a 3rd-world dump to compete with 3rd-world dumps and slaves via deregulation and pollution? That's solving the wrong problem: our goal should be a better society, not a society where we compete with subsidized slaves wallowing in gunk by becoming slaves wallowing in gunk.
outerspace.write("Goodbye Pluto, you're STILL not a fucking planet!");
Fitting: Microsoft makes sewers.
hope she books a cruise on Boaty McBoatface to generate stories that really fuck your clock