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from the building-a-more-robotic-tomorrow dept.
Hadrian is not the first large-scale industrial robot that can complete a whole build from start to finish. It's not even the first outdoor construction robot.
What's remarkable is it's both. As Mike told me, "Anything you can build inside a factory ... we're getting really, really good at. Trouble is, nothing's happening outdoors."
That's because environmental factors like wind and temperature variations can make life difficult for robots outdoors.
Most robots can't adjust to small, quick changes in wind or temperature fast enough to keep up.
That's fine if little wobbles won't make a big difference. But when you're working on something as large-scale as building a house and a light breeze could lead to bricks being laid way out of position, it can get very dangerous.
So up till now, any robot building on such large scales had to be indoors in minutely controlled environments.
Hadrian has overcome this problem using the precision technology Dynamic Stabilisation Technology (DST). DST was developed in Perth by Mike's cousin, Mark Pivac, back in the early 2000s. The computer program measures environmental factors an astounding 2000 times per second, then accounts for them in real time.
If robots replace the construction workers, who then will wolf whistle?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 23 2018, @02:49PM (116 children)
Automate as much as possible, and then reduce the population, preferably by attrition.
That is the only way to improve Quality of Life.
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Tuesday January 23 2018, @03:19PM (7 children)
Because nothing solves a problem faster than creating a bigger one. How about this alternate solution. We keep doing the status quo (minus the interference in employment) - which is already solving overpopulation in at least a sixth of the world by population - and have all those people work? Automate only where it makes economic sense, and allow automation to continue to create new, higher quality jobs as it has for the past few centuries.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 23 2018, @03:32PM (6 children)
If you can automate something, then said automation always makes economic sense; hence, automate as much as possible.
The fear is what to do with a bunch of people whose existence no longer makes economic sense; the major problem with those people is that they reproduce. I'd suggest paying people not to have children.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 23 2018, @03:55PM (5 children)
Patently false. For example, automation doesn't make sense when the equipment costs more than the value you'd get from using the equipment. Why buy a $40 electrical stapler for the occasional bits of paper in your home when a $10 manual stapler does the job without the need for batteries?
Well, don't be an idiot and make the problem worse by going out of your way to automate their usefulness out of existence. I see the people who claim that is a problem on the forefront of making it a problem. When you advocate policies like higher minimum wages, mandatory reduced work weeks, etc, you're part of the problem not part of the solution.
(Score: 1) by Sulla on Tuesday January 23 2018, @04:15PM (1 child)
I am more concerned about the ability to find an automatic stapler that actually works..\
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 23 2018, @04:39PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 23 2018, @08:12PM (2 children)
Obviously, the assumption is that a certain task is repetitive and without end.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 23 2018, @08:20PM
Like my stapler example? The problem is not that there is a definite end to the number of papers I'll ever need to staple, but rather than this need doesn't happen frequently enough to justify the expense of the more expensive automated solution.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 23 2018, @09:08PM
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Tuesday January 23 2018, @04:12PM (106 children)
A reduced population leads to reduced innovation. Most people aren't very innovative or brilliant, so you need a big population to get a decent number of those.
High automation should lead to a lack of need for regular work; people eventually should be able to live very comfortably without having to work at all if they choose (and those that do, get rewarded for it of course; this is how UBI works: make some money doing nothing, make more money doing something, make lots more money doing something lucrative). And with automation, society should be able to support these people just fine, and more really by having more efficient use of space: denser housing mainly. By removing the economic stimuli for crime, "ghettos" and other such wastes of land should be eliminated, making it more feasible to have denser cities. Imagine how much population could be supported in all the existing cities in the US, if all the single-family homes were bulldozed and replaced with high-rise condos.
Of course, people tend to have fewer kids when they become richer, but that's in a society where they have to work to have that income level. Remove the need for regular work, and people might start having more kids than now. Add to this the coming advances in anti-aging medicine, and possible life extension, and we may reduce the death rate drastically, so that even with the same birthrate we'll have a much larger population. But if we have high automation and UBI, it should work out. Of course, this is a very optimistic viewpoint; usually people seem to find a way of screwing things up with corruption etc.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 23 2018, @06:34PM (105 children)
There are a surprising number of innovative and brilliant people in the world, a disappointing portion of them are not in a socio-economic position for their innovative/brilliant ideas to be developed and implemented, and an even larger portion of them are not even exposed to the problems they could offer innovative/brilliant (or at least better than the status-quo) solutions to.
Giving people more leisure time and resources should improve the number of productive innovators, without a need to increase the population.
The "great minds" of history were only able to advance science and engineering because they had the opportunity to do so. A much larger number of "great minds" have been forgotten because life didn't permit them to develop their ideas or record them for posterity.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Tuesday January 23 2018, @07:01PM (2 children)
Quite possibly. But it's also very debatable how the population size is going to change once people are given more leisure time and resources, so we don't really know if this will be a problem or not. These days, we find that giving people reliable contraception, access to education, and a middle-class life tends to make them reproduce less. However that middle-class life usually comes with a full-time job, and for married couples, two jobs, so while they have resources, they don't have that much leisure time, and having kids really puts a cramp in that, coupled with the modern reality where extended family isn't around to help out as was the case in centuries past. So if automation and UBI succeeds in giving people tons of leisure time to pursue their passions instead of mindlessly toiling in bullshit jobs or trying to make the next big app, will they have more kids? Who knows.
But ultimately, if we don't screw things up too badly, and figure out how to live more efficiently (no 6000sf houses in the suburbs and monster SUVs for everyone), I don't think a larger population is necessarily a problem. It's only a problem now because we're *so* inefficient. House people more densely (modern luxury high-rise condos show how nice this can be), improve transit systems, remove the need for much work (which would lessen the load on transit systems and eliminate "rush hour"), improve food production technology (e.g. vertical farming, artificial meat), and adopt more efficient energy production (solar, plus more efficient buildings and eliminating fossil fuel cars so we don't need so much energy in the first place), and we can handle a much larger population than we currently have, if it comes to that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 23 2018, @09:39PM
many aspects of the consumption economy is just that. consumption. we have consumption of food, obviously. but now we have consumption of durable goods. consumption as in: use it for a short time, until it breaks (and can't be repaired) or is no longer in fashion.
Sure, short time frame this is "good". people perhaps can have more things, sooner, and perhaps for less money.
Long term? all that stuff ends up in landfills or incinerators much sooner than it used to. Which then requires more resources to make the next batch of stuff.
So we also see the progression towards dystopian food supply too. It's just a matter of progression. the Soylent people, faux-mayonnaise etc people are at the front of the wave. Right now that wave is cool. But that wave will progress. At some point most of us will just opt for our daily rations of Purina (Nestle) People Chow, if only for our own shear laziness, or itll be the only thing we can buy on our UBI checks. There just won't be the resources available to get basic raw foods to most people, or for them to grow their own, unless they happen to live outside the urban areas, where they can sneak a few items out of the bins from the corporate harvesters, sneak water to raise it, and avoid the corporate surveilance, er, "productivity management" systems on those corporate farms.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @12:44AM
Roll back global human population to ~1B and I don't think the above would be a problem at all, hydro and solar powered (and nuclear where other clean sources aren't practical), plenty of wild caught fish and even free range beef, hardwoods to build the houses from - the Earth has a pretty bitchin' set of resources, for a certain number of people.
If that's what you're into, sure. Myself, with my nuclear family of 4, I'd like about 2500 square feet of living space, plus another 1000 of weather protected workshop, plus covered parking for the vehicles, too many vehicles to be considered efficient (small cars, big car, truck, boat, bicycles), but why does life have to be about efficiency? Maybe when I'm older, and even more physically broken, a high density low maintenance living arrangement might be attractive.
To me: human population has historically NEVER stopped growing, and I don't need another khallow-math lecture about how it's not really growing anymore, I don't believe anybody's crystal ball... it's still growing, 1 child in China still saw significant growth, maybe some really f-ed up economies like 1990s Russia actually reversed for a short while - do we want to all be like that? If we continue to have biological bodies, at some point whether 10B, 20B, or 200B - the Earth's population is going to have to stop growing, there just won't be enough solar power intersecting the planet to form the chemical bonds necessary to feed us all. So, to me the question is: what population number do you want to stop at? Personally, 2B seems nice to me, but that's just a swag, and can vary a lot depending on how those 2B people live. Incase somebody hasn't seen it yet, here's a plug for some other people who also think we need to conserve more of the Earth's resources than we currently are, a LOT more: The Half-Earth Project [half-earthproject.org]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 23 2018, @07:54PM (99 children)
Unless it has the opposite effect, of course. Let us note in history most inventions are due to people getting paid to invent things (or merely having the leeway to do so) at their jobs. Jobs are also one of the most important places for learning new skills.
For example, I found that my experience with teaching, tutoring, and computer administration during my graduate student years was more of a selling point to employers than the degrees I obtained as a result. For another example, on several occasions I've had to guide coworkers through a complex PC configuration issue over the phone while having no computer access myself - guiding them solely through my mental model of what steps to take and what things to look at. You don't learn those skills proficiently by watching TV or surfing porn.
So here that the things that get missed in the quest for a UBI. First, if people have a good paying job, then they don't need a UBI. Meanwhile, more jobs worked means more jobs created - there's a modest feedback here towards job creation when jobs are already being created. UBI is a notable disincentive for that and routinely intended as such. Second, we are creating a class of incompetent people who don't have a variety of important skills because they've never been in a situation where they needed them. That's the concern I outline above.
This leads to my third concern - a huge reduction in power of the members of society. Our work is one of the ways we can control our own lives. This is a large piece of cognitive dissonance on the part of would-be UBI proponents who often spin [soylentnews.org] elaborate [soylentnews.org] yarns [soylentnews.org] about how businesses and the wealthy rule our lives. So instead, they propose giving this alleged power over our lives to the most powerful organization of all, the national government. Good luck with that.
At least, with work, you have the lightweight choice to leave your job - and many, many people choose every year to leave for greener pastures.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 23 2018, @10:52PM (98 children)
Well, if you're referring to the recent patent and product explosion, then, sure - brassieres with simulated nipples [google.com], glow in the dark flashlights [wikia.com], homemade ice-cream candy mixing machines [youtube.com], and their like are all fruits of the great free market invention machine where paid employees invent, develop and refine ever-better money making products for their employers. Lest you think I'm putting such things down, in 2003 Applica - the design house for the Black and Decker Arctic twister and many other fine consumer products, was advertising to hire a product designer/inventor - not only was I out of work at the time, but they were within a reasonable commute from the house I just bought less than a year earlier, you bet your ass I applied and wanted that job, badly.
However, if you're talking about the giants which Sir Issac Newton credited with giving him shoulders to stand on, then, no. Those figures in history didn't research, discover, or develop for a mere paycheck - the primary thing they have in common was rare opportunity to do the work while so many of their contemporaries toiled in a field just to get enough food to eat.
Imagine no employers, I wonder if you can [youtu.be]. What makes people valuable to a wage payer isn't 1:1 correlated with what makes people valuable to society as a whole. Just because some people watch TV and surf porn while decompressing from their paycheck-coerced daily labor doesn't mean that all people would choose to do that all the time if they didn't have jobs.
To wit: in the zero-sum economy we're living in, taxes on good paying jobs will indeed be the source of UBI. Those at the bottom of the wage scale would get UBI and their low income tax free, then some point above the diet of ramen noodles and public transportation only level of income, a percentage of additional income would be paid in tax - hell, make it a flat 25% if you like, whatever it takes to balance the books, but at some point, that tax will be greater than the UBI, people at that level of income would be net-tax-free, and those above would be paying 25% or whatever it takes on income above that level to finance the rest. Anybody who thinks that "everyone pays tax" in our present system is just deluded - there are great swaths of the population who are taking more from the government than they are giving already - what I object to is the byzantine convolution of rules administering the benefits along with the intrusive "determination of need" BS auditing that goes with it all. Give a, spartan, livable benefit to EVERYBODY, an equal tax structure for all, and fire every government worker who has anything at all to do with "determination of need" - let them live on UBI.
You say that like it's a good thing. Step back and ask yourself why you think that's a good thing? Is it, really? If I were young, and unemployed, and not needing work, I would be inclined to pick up trash from the side of the road, it bothers me, it's easy enough to fix, but "my time is too valuable," I'm too tired after a day of work to both do that and all the other things I want to do with my family. When I have been unemployed, the quest for the almighty replacement job has been of such paramount importance that I have even less free time and energy to do things like that. Bottom line, the roadsides around my home have a hell of a lot more trash on them than they would if I didn't have a job. A society developed around "doing what you can to make things better" - volunteering with children, education, the elderly, the sick... all of those things should see a clear uptick if people aren't spending their whole life chasing a paycheck, and volunteers in education, elder-care and hospitals effectively reduce the cost of those services / improve them in ways that pay-for-service models miss. But, where's the motivation for education, you might ask? Well - those who are fired up and determined to own the world before they're 20 can certainly pursue fast-track education and career launching, but others who are less certain of their destiny (the majority, in my experience), would have more freedom to do some volunteer, intern, and exploration, and find something they can really enjoy contributing to and excel at, rather than having to climb the ladder of progress at the prescribed rate for fear of becoming destitute and homeless should they fall behind.
There's an implicit assumption that people working = productivity, and I have never seen that to be a 1:1 situation. Every place I have ever worked, you could always identify employees who contribute more to productivity by their absence than their presence, and many more who could clearly contribute more/better in a different role than the one which they are serving.
I know plenty of employed, incompetents who lack a variety of skills important to their positions. Perhaps if they were more free to choose activities based on the skills and interests they _do_ have, rather than attempting to stick with their current paying post because they "need the money" we might have better fit between people, their skills, and the functions they are performing in society.
Our work is the primary way in which others control our lives. Don't believe me? Try doing just what you want to do, when you want to do it, with no regard to your employer's needs or desires, for a month and tell me how employed you are after that.
Talk about cognitive dissonance: the U in UBI is Universal, meaning equally to all people, without judgement or conditions. Where's the national government's power in that policy?
Maybe your skillset is different, with mine, every single career level job change has been traumatic. Sure, when I temped for a data entry company, walking off wasn't just easy, it was also fun. Ditto for fast food, dishwashing, and similar gigs. Quitting academia was an easy enough decision, but not without the angst of having no idea how long it would take to land an actual, paying job (2 months). That first job ran just over 12 years, then on a Friday we were told "thanks a lot, starting 5pm today you're not getting paid anymore," at which point I walked back to my office and phoned Applica about the inventor's job (because the writing had been on the wall for awhile), but, bird flu in China was partly blamed as to why they never hired anyone for that advertised spot. The next 4 months were similarly discouraging, looking within a 300 mile radius of home, with maybe one seemingly serious potential job interview every 2-3 weeks, all of which turned out to be non-starters. That prompted the cross-country move to Houston - hardly lightweight, and moving back from Houston, while initiated by me, was hardly lightweight either - another 4 months of job searching, 3 plane trips to go on interviews while trying not to tip-off work that I'm looking because another round of layoffs is looming, 12 months with a home on-the-market over 1000 miles away paying 2 mortgages, none of this seems lightweight to me. But, it is part of the price of specialization in a higher paying industry - an industry that more chose me than I chose, based on the first opportunity that I took up after leaving school. The greener pastures available to me involve more travel... colleagues who have been "airport warriors" for the last 20 years are rolling in more money than they will ever need, and those opportunities are theoretically available to me, if I simply abandon my family for days, weeks, occasionally months on end to go answer whatever burning questions need expensive attention ASAP.
..........................
The funny thing, to circle back to the article topic, is that a good bit of what I am doing lately is building and tuning a "code robot" - something that takes my colleagues' interface specifications and turns them into interface code for them. I can remember a time when the code that my robot writes would have been a full time job for 3 or 4 people, just to keep up with inevitable changes, and, more importantly, the robot can re-write all the code to accommodate a change in under a minute, whereas the people would have taken a week or more to recode and test, so... we make changes much more easily and often, basically at will and on whims of experimentation. While I haven't put anybody out of a job with this robot, it has influenced our style of working, design choices, and may be accelerating time to market without requiring as much additional hiring. Which leaves more people free to pick up trash off the side of the road, if that's their thing. I just wish we didn't de-value that choice to such a point as making people do something else just to survive.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 24 2018, @02:09AM (78 children)
Those guys wouldn't have stood out so much in today's crowded field.
I indeed can. That's the usual state of affairs before the Industrial Age after all. I notice that so far, you've exhibited a great of nostalgia for the past. But sorry, we've moved past that.
You sound like you're trying to claim that more employment is a bad thing. Let's start with the saying "my time is too valuable". How does making your time less valuable become a good thing?
So what? Let us keep in mind that road-side trash is a low value problem. It's unsightly, but not as important as improving your life. Yet here you are hearkening to the possibility that we are so useless and unambitious that we're ambling along the roadsides and picking up trash. Let's keep in mind the subject of the story, construction automation. Something similar could clean up roadsides without the need to waste a lot of peoples' time.
In other words, they can sit on a couch for a few years and watch cat videos. Or they can work, learn valuable life skills (as well as what they would like in life!), and not be a burden to the rest of society. It's not that hard a choice.
So making human society even more inefficient will help. Somehow? This is the fallacy of imperfection. Because the current world is imperfect, then my ideas will make it better.
Expression is existence. The more effect you have on the world, via work and other means (expression), the more control you have over that world.
So no, I don't believe you and never have. Incidentally, I'm doing just that - trying what I want when I want to do it, with no regard for my employer's needs or desires for a six month stretch (I return to work in April). Guess I got that part figured out. And a big part of that time out? Ranting on the internets. But I'm sure I'll cure cancer in the remaining time somewhere.
Conditions like citizenship, criminality, or just deciding not to issue your checks.
Without exception, every time has been exciting. Guess you need a different attitude to life.
I don't have a problem with your choices, but I don't think society should compensate you for them.
The question isn't who you're putting out of a low value job, it's what jobs are you creating?
We didn't. We made human time valuable.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @04:26AM (77 children)
And you think that Industrial Age 1.0 settled down to the optimal state of affairs with those who control the wealth telling those who have none what to do, how to do it, and how much liberty they are allowed?
Make-work, employing people for the sake of having them employed, is a very bad thing. Government, large corporations, regulatory compliance efforts - all have big merits, and also have significant waste in the form of many (not all) people "reporting to work" to do nothing of real value.
There's a deep conservative fear of "idle hands" and "the Devil's workshop" which seems part of this driver to try to make sure that people have to be busy doing something, otherwise they'll be making trouble. A) Trouble for who? B) If there are so many troublemaking unemployed, let's ramp up employment in the police and community services fields until the troublemakers are reduced to an acceptable level.
to you. As you say:
Many of us are quite happy with the level of improvement of our own private lives, and would derive great satisfaction from the removal of unsightly and ecologically damaging trash from the common spaces of the world. I believe Pixar made a science fiction movie extrapolating the potential future outcome of a world that shares your unsightly trash is a low value problem [imdb.com] attitude.
Vacation doesn't count, you're not actually employed during that time, even if it's earned-paid vacation, which I doubt would ever happen for 6 months at a stretch in the US.
Absolutely, and you don't think that equally arbitrary and capricious "adjustments" to immigration rules, tax codes and pork allocations aren't happening in every session of Congress and Presidential dick wave? In a utopia, there are no problems with other countries because we're all equal and free to move about... not holding my breath for utopia, but it is worth striving for.
I'll take my excitement without the threat of foreclosure, or dilemmas between losing 6 months' pay with one choice, or 9 months' pay with the other.
At what point did you ever get the impression that I think I would be receiving UBI benefit without paying it back multiple times over in income tax?
That's your agenda, not mine.
No, people who control the wealth have assigned relative values to various tasks, and they have decided by consensus that some worthwhile tasks are not worth compensation even at a level that can provide a livable existence. The primary assignment of value to a task today isn't how many people it benefits or how much it benefits them, the primary assignment of value is based on how much money the employer can derive from the employee doing the task. Sometimes that works out to a good result, other times it leads to greed fueled bubbles, from my perspective it looks like Ouroboros has already swallowed more than half of itself and the consequence to people without wealth is no longer a consideration.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 24 2018, @06:14AM (76 children)
No, I don't think it "settled" that way. After all, I don't even agree that those who control wealth have that sort of power.
Large corporations don't belong on that list. They pay people to work and unlike government and more government, they don't have a reason to just pay people. Waste is not make work.
Further, just because things aren't absolutely perfect doesn't mean that it's a good idea to pay people to waste their time.
For me, an enormous part of the problem is simply that there's a lot of work left. We haven't brought everyone up to developed world status, we don't live as long as we would like, and I'm still looking for space colonization. I'm pretty sure, I could come up with a ton of other stuff that we would need or like, both on the large and small scales. So why should we tell everyone to go home, when there's so much left to do?
Proof by movie. Very professional.
What an enormous moving of the goalposts there! Of course, it's vacation. Of course, I'm not paid. And nobody gave me a unicorn either, the cheapskates!
You claimed it couldn't happen and I happened to be doing that very thing right now. Now, you're throwing ridiculous conditions on it. That was a silly argument and you should be ashamed for making it.
I think it's the incessant whining. Doesn't strike me as a thing that someone who is productive by choice would say.
Which if you think about it, is far healthier an attitude than both the living wage crap or the make work busybodies. If work isn't worth paying what people are willing to work for, then it doesn't get done. I'm fine with that.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @01:54PM (7 children)
See, I think this is the basis of our fundamental difference. I do think that those who control the wealth have inappropriately disproportionate control of the earth, and people's lives thereon. I'm not of the position "one person one vote" for everything, but when wealth focuses on building wealth, concentrating >99% of the wealth into 99% of the human wealth, you couldn't buy and exploit all the natural resources even if you controlled all the human wealth in the world. We've passed the tipping point, and while our wise and serene leader of the free world doesn't feel the need to drill for oil off the coast of Mar-a-Lago, the next one might not be so level headed.
Balance - sure there should be differences based on wealth, but this game of asymptotes with a huge number of people with wealth approaching zero, and a tiny number of people with wealth approaching infinity, needs to flatten out a bit, maybe even bulge the curve the other way.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 24 2018, @05:02PM (6 children)
So what? Why should I care what you think?
Trivially true. More than 99% of the wealth is concentrated in the wealthiest 99%. Check that box.
But perhaps you meant the other way around? The poorest 99% can never have greater than 99% of the wealth, else they wouldn't be the poorest 99%. It's a genuine mathematical impossibility.
And of course, there is this unwarranted assumption that the inequality matters.
Ok, so what? Not even seeing a reason to care here.
While I can see the obvious nuisance (in the legal sense here, a nuisance can be a crippling problem on a large scale to neighbors) problems with drilling right off the coast of a hot tourist spot, the actual prohibition is for the entire Eastern coast not just the touristy spots. And should climate change prove to be a greater problem than our other problems, then that too would be a large negative to drilling. But OTOH, we do a lot with oil. It's foolish to dismiss oil drilling just because it's the current thoughtcrime.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @05:08PM (4 children)
Sorry, my editor is taking the day off. Though I thought you'd recognize the old saw: greater than 99% of the wealth into less than 1% of the people.... I suspect the HTML interpreter made a mess of that.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 24 2018, @05:19PM (3 children)
Not true. Let us keep in mind that these measures of wealth don't count earning potential as wealth. That's why the poorest people are in developed world countries and someone without a penny to their name owns more than the bottom 30% of the world's population.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @06:04PM (2 children)
Switching focus global vs domestic will certainly confuse the issues.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Wednesday January 24 2018, @06:27PM (1 child)
Point is that current measures of wealth lead to ignoring a huge source of wealth and treating people with high debt as if they were just as poor as someone who is too poor to borrow any money at all.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @07:16PM
Very good point. Nevertheless, regardless of what you think of government statistics, there is still the observable phenomenon in my part of the world: hundreds of thousands of people living in the city, working full-time and exhibiting relatively modest means, thousands more in apparent poverty, and then, in smaller numbers than the visible poor, but still in their thousands: empty mansions on the waterfront - part-time (often less than 5%) occupied by people who own many similarly extravagant houses spread around the world - and their houses don't even represent the bulk of their wealth. They're great for the local property tax base, but I think they are representative of a problem that needs addressing.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @05:38PM
Inequality of outcome is a good thing. Inequality of opportunity to the extent that it reduces the chances for equal outcome to less than one in millions? That's grounds for readjustment, or eventually revolution.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @02:01PM (3 children)
Have you worked for a large corporation, lately? I did exaggerate slightly about being fired within a month, we had a colleague who went AWOL, no explanation, for 6 weeks - came back for a bit over a year and nobody bothered her - very low stress choose your assignment kind of work, then she left to visit her sick father for another six weeks, then came back and complained about the her working conditions, was offered a promotion and quit. And it's not just minority sex and color that gets away with that kind of behavior. I don't know why management doesn't do anything about the non-performers, but they don't. Probably because, even with probably 20% deadweight on the crew, we're still turning in profit and growth above the corporate average, so they don't want to mess with the magic money making machine.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 24 2018, @05:04PM (2 children)
I currently work for one. Next.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @05:40PM (1 child)
No, you're currently on vacation.
Maybe your corner of your corporation doesn't tolerate deadwood. The handful that I have seen the inner workings of all do.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 24 2018, @06:05PM
That's not incompatible with working. And it indicates further the bad faith with which you have approached this particular argument.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @02:10PM (5 children)
But, when the primary focus of the wealthy is on creating more wealth for themselves, how is that addressing the goals of people? Giving people more control over their own lives isn't telling them to go home and do nothing, it's giving them more options to pursue the things in life that they think are worth doing.
Trust in today's free market is trust in the wealthy to set and pursue the important goals. Putting more power into people's hands means that the goals that are pursued will be decided by a wider audience. Bread and circuses? For some, and if that's what they want, with their minimal share of power and control, then that's fine for them. People who get together with common goals and desires should be able to get together and pursue them, without requiring approval from a trust fund baby.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 24 2018, @05:07PM (4 children)
First, that already is addressing goals of people. The wealthy count as people despite what you may have heard. Second, in today's economy most of those wealthy got that way because they or an ancestor were giving people what they wanted and thus, addressing goals.
It's worked pretty well. It'd work better without clueless interference from people who don't understand how markets work or what is a market.
And they do. So no issue here.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @05:48PM (3 children)
Maybe in your perception of reality. In my industry, first, it's a rare (less than 5%) startup that succeeds, as in staying solvent, more than 5 years. Of those successful ones, well over 99% are capitalized with more than $10M investment. The goal of basically all of them is to get bought by a big player with an exit price of 20x or better than their investment capital, because of the high failure rate investors aren't interested without the high multiple, short horizon buyout potential. In this environment, without $10M investment, smaller players can't hope to pass the regulatory hurdles.
So, no, it's not only trust fund babies who have $10M+ to invest in high risk endeavors, it's VCs and other consortia... none of them apparently interested in anything other than growing their outsized net-worth as quickly as possible.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 24 2018, @06:08PM (2 children)
Quite irrelevant to the quote you replied to.
Oh look, the same players who are going to rescue us with UBI are causing this major problem in your industry.
Their motives don't have to be pure. Again this is quite irrelevant to the topic of discussion.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @06:30PM (1 child)
You think these assholes pay significant amounts of income tax? These are gamblers, and they lose as much as they win. The losers pay zero, the winners defer their capital gains and end up paying greatly reduced rates by all sorts of methods, most of which they wrote into the tax code themselves and handed to their pet legislators to enact.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 24 2018, @06:38PM
Yes.
Then you don't understand that sort of investment.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @02:13PM (30 children)
Minor point, not intended as proof, just an example that there are other people, people with significant resources, who also think that untended waste is more than just unsightly.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 24 2018, @05:08PM (29 children)
And having significant resources makes you an expert on things that you don't know much about?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @05:50PM (28 children)
No, but since you seem content to labor at the will of those with vast multiples of your wealth, it would seem to be a token of worth to you.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 24 2018, @06:16PM (27 children)
That's because you're not thinking. It's hard enough speaking with you with you inventing cartoonish straw men of me. I'm content to labor because I'm happy enough with the work (particularly since it is in Yellowstone National Park) and it is a mutually beneficial relationship. I simply don't care how much wealth they have because that is irrelevant to me.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @06:50PM (26 children)
I don't particularly care how much wealth my employers have... it really doesn't bother me at all.
I do particularly care that the economic landscape is dominated by giants.
If you ever get done ranting on the internet and try your hand at curing cancer, good luck getting your solution marketed without approval from very deep pockets. At that point you might start caring about the wealthy, their control of the world, and their pervasive lack of caring about much besides making themselves even more wealthy.
I worked with docs researching and developing a cure for meconium aspiration [healthline.com], which could save thousands of babies which die every year from this bit: "Your doctor may need to place a tube in your newborn’s windpipe to help them breathe if the infant is very ill or not breathing on their own." When a newborn gets to that point, their survival rate is ~50%. In animal models, we demonstrated a 5/10 survival rate in the control group and 10/10 not only survival but rapid recovery in the new treatment group. It's a little device, fits on a desktop, and it's not commercially viable, meaning that the investment required to put it into the marketplace isn't going to net a 20x ROI for investors within 5 years after investment. So, it's been academically published and forgotten for 15+ years now.
Tell me how you feel when you know you've cured a form of cancer and you have to stand next to parents whose young child is dying of your cancer, and you can't even tell them about the cure (without crushing their souls) because it's not commercially viable, therefore not approved for use, and their doctor isn't willing to risk his license or job at the hospital by stirring up a big pot of (expensive and time consuming) "humanitarian exemption, experimental treatment" paperwork.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 24 2018, @09:17PM (25 children)
What is particularly bizarre about your complaints is how small-minded and irrelevant they are. This situation is far better than having only a few governments able to muster the resources needed. The pool of private-side deep pockets is at least a couple orders of magnitude larger in number. And the morality is misplaced. The whole point of a capitalist system is that you no longer have to care about the motivations of those with deep pockets. They get wealthier by finding things that others are willing to pay for.
Not commercially viable? Sounds like there's some bullshit in your story somewhere. If you can save the lives of thousands of infants each year, that's quite a bit of money. Would cover your human testing costs for sure.
Hate to say it, but sounds like one of those 300 MPG carburetors of 1970s mythology that the oil companies supposedly hunted down.
Note how you fail to mention even a single problem that is associated with deep pockets. It's regulation and liability strangling this scenario.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @10:16PM (3 children)
Nope, the bullshit is in the system. The barriers to entry are real, and the money required to surmount those barriers either comes from (rare) humanitarian donors who have thousands of "worthy" causes to pick from, or most often from greed-driven investors looking to maximize ROI.
Here's one of the papers, this one showed 6 controls vs 6 test subjects, we did many more but not with as much experimental rigor: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11090601 [nih.gov]
Here's a more modern paper that is actually picking up some of the bits [hindawi.com] from the method we developed and using them to good effect, but not as dramatically as we saw in the piglets with the pGz method. Note that release of endogenous nitric oxide (via pGz) is inherently safe, inhaled nitric oxide (iNO) is tricky stuff - yes, the very same that turns the fingernails cherry red shortly before death by asphyxiation when running a car in an enclosed garage. We suspected an endogenous surfactant effect with pGz, but I don't think we generated conclusive proof of it like we did with the pulmonary artery pressure.
Their analysis of rates of occurrence is this: MSAF is present in 8–20% of all deliveries [1–4], increasing to 23–52% after 42 weeks of gestation [5, 6]. Meconium aspiration may occur before birth, or during the birth process. About 2–9% of infants born through MSAF develop MAS [7–9]. About one-third of infants with MAS require intubation and mechanical ventilation [9].
Taking the low end of their numbers, 2% of 8% is 0.16%, and a third of that is ~0.05%. So, of ~4 million live births in the US in 2017, >2000 of these newbies went on a ventilator for MAS. Thousands requiring treatment, even at the low end of mortality estimates, over 600 deaths in the US in 2017, thereby many thousands worldwide. But... only somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.05%, or one per ~2000 live births needs ventilator intervention. Your average big maternity ward might see one or two cases a year, so: the mighty dollar wins again, more compelling things to spend their time, attention and money on. With infant mortality hovering around 0.5%, MAS only accounts for ~5-10% of infant death - it's not exactly "the shit" when it comes to attracting funding.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @11:37PM
BTW, sorry about crossing wires on CO and NO, NO is nearly as nasty and does come out of most car exhaust in significant quantities, but CO is the one generally credited with killing the suiciders in enclosed garages.
https://academic.oup.com/toxsci/article/59/1/5/1658774 [oup.com]
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 25 2018, @12:43AM (1 child)
What you neglected to mention here is that this is whole body periodic acceleration (along the head-foot or "spinal axis" direction). So not only do we need the alleged, cheap piece of gear, we need all supporting gear that attaches to the patient (particularly things like IV needles, face masks, tracheal tubes, and electrodes) to be able to handle those acceleration conditions. There is this huge testing cost over numerous items that have to be engineered for this environment. It's quite unfair to blame this on the profit motive when it is a problem for any sort of research.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 25 2018, @01:28AM
Valid criticism, and more to the point: it just plain looks weird and so will have a difficult adoption curve. However:
Newborns with meconium aspiration do not typically have indwelling IV needles.
A tight fitting face-mask OR trache tube is indeed a necessity for this therapy, but... the primary difference between pGz therapy and conventional ventilation is that pGz uses low pressure continuous airway pressure to keep the airways open, but lacking the high pressure swings of conventional ventilation which push the meconium deeper into the lungs, worsening the injury and prolonging recovery.
Adhesive electrodes are a non-concern in pGz, peak therapeutic acceleration is on the order of +/- 0.5g or less. In adults we found the sweet spot to be around 0.2g, we never did human trials on small children.
As for the "cheap" piece of gear, nothing produced as a regulated medical device is ever cheap, but it would come in at retail easily below the cost of similar capital equipment (~$30K back then). The money saved in reduced ICU stay time for the first 2 or 3 patients alone would pay that back to the insurers (though it would be hurting hospital per-case profit), and the one life saved out of 3 would certainly seem worth the price, especially since meconium aspirators are generally otherwise healthy.
The primary problem perceived by the pediatrician was that 3 cases need to wait for 6000 live births to go by, and that's a long time even in a busy hospital.
And where's your expertise in this field coming from? Everything used was, and could be certified with off-the shelf designs, safety testing would be required, but it's not like going into an MRI environment where anything conductive, or especially magnetic, has to be re-designed with new materials.
Back to concentration of wealth - this is a rare problem, 1/2000 live births. Things like this typically get funded by some investor who has personal experience with the human side of the problem, either their own child or the child of someone close to them. As rare as this problem is, you're not going to find that investor easily, not until you've pitched to literally hundreds of them will you find that personal experience angle, and the first investor who wants to help is rarely the one who ends up funding a project, it usually takes several motivated partners before a deal comes together.
Could all these problems be overcome by a dedicated crusader for the cause? Absolutely. Who has the time, resources, and interest? Not me, I've got a mortgage to pay - and did I mention that I hate begging? Procuring investment capital is more than a little like begging.
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @10:18PM (20 children)
How about their small numbers and hyper-focus on making their own pockets deeper, hm?
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 25 2018, @12:09AM (19 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 25 2018, @01:12AM (18 children)
Well, the smallest, most focused medical device I ever developed was in-fact funded by government grants. They're not the best source of funding available, but they can work in places where venture capital fails. Also: refocusing money in the hands of more humanitarian-merit minded committees and less in the number crunching profit maximizers does yield different decisions and outcomes.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 25 2018, @03:16AM (17 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 25 2018, @03:45AM (16 children)
Which is: maximizing profits. Not every valuable aspect of human endeavor yields maximal profits.
I'm not saying "nuke Wall Street and give all the money to the hippies," but I am saying that Wall Street controls more money than they do good with.
Also: just because a project doesn't provide maximal ROI doesn't mean it should always be passed over in favor of one that does.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 25 2018, @05:39AM (15 children)
But it does yield more than one puts into the endeavor. One of the things forgotten about profit is that it is a clear signal of positive return on investment.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 25 2018, @01:10PM (14 children)
More what? Again, not everything of value is measured with money.
When I see the market truly driven by reduction of human suffering, breathable air, maintenance of streams such that the fish therein are edible, etc. then we can talk about letting the market decide everything. Until then, the imperfect system we have is a mix of market and regulatory / government forces, and the market has been on a tear lately (35+ years) left unchecked it will not end well for the next generation.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 25 2018, @02:46PM (13 children)
So has US regulation [gwu.edu]. In fact, the past 35 years is most of US regulation in history (the number of pages of the Code of Federal Regulations goes down a lot once one looks at before the Second World War). And unlike the market which has plenty of recent constraints on it (such as Sarbanes-Oxley [wikipedia.org], PATRIOT Act [wikipedia.org], and financial industry changes [npr.org] since 2008), no one has been similarly constraining regulation.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 25 2018, @03:56PM (12 children)
O.K. - hit a nerve there, Sarbanes-Oxley, the regulatory knee jerk reaction to the options backdating "scandal", is a f-ing farce in terms of what it really accomplished, and IMO another example of wealth controlling government regulation such that it doesn't impact the wealthy. The options-backdaters (C-levels) continued to get their options (just without the illegal backdating perks), while the rank and file employee IOPs (or whatever-the-f TLA) incentive options plans were suspended or canceled because the accountants couldn't figure out how to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley at that level, but they damn sure didn't miss a beat for the CEO, or his buddies.
And, of course, the PATRIOT act is just a fear based power grab, while 2008 would seem to be self-explanatory as to why the financial industry needed not only a spanking, but to be sat facing the corner until they can start acting more mature.
Yes, government regulation has been on a tear too, playing catchup IMO - when rivers are catching fire, previously prime game fish are poisonous to eat, cities are issuing summer smog alerts that you can literally feel your chest tightening from (the air, not the alert), mortgages are being granted without credit checks and sold into the most trusted of low-risk securities bundles, yeah, the "free" market clearly needed a shorter leash.
Circle this back around to the unprecedented population explosion of the last 50 years, combined with the technological plummet toward the singularity, and it's not surprising that business as usual isn't working for today's society.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 25 2018, @04:40PM (11 children)
Too bad. It's still heavy regulation no matter what you think of it.
No, they just needed to go bankrupt.
You're speaking of 1970s issues that were fixed back in the 1980s. Funny how that still gets used as an excuse three decades later. And yes, I'm aware of the Houston story [soylentnews.org].
It's working well actually. We have a global move towards developed world status for everyone. That's what business as usual means. Funny how you keep claiming things like unprecedented population explosions. I've already shown the population rate has been declining for the past 50 years. Sure, it's an unprecedented number of people, but at birth rates that are much lower than historical levels.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 25 2018, @05:00PM (10 children)
You keep showing projections, extrapolations, as if crystal balls accurately predict the future. If I had to bet, I'd go with the predictions you're stating. If I had to guarantee a range - there's a WIDE margin of uncertainty.
World population tripled in the last 50 years and reached record high levels, that's unprecedented and fact. Any statements about the future decrease in reliability the farther in the future they project, to the point of meaninglessness at +50 years from today.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 25 2018, @05:46PM (9 children)
So what? You do too. Mine just are based on what's really going on.
Demographics is more reliable than the usual technology stuff that's traditionally predicted. After all, Malthus didn't really get proven wrong until the global emancipation of women and post-Second World War economy. That's over a century after his death.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 25 2018, @06:00PM (8 children)
Your attitude is that they are accurate and reliable, which is an impossible assumption.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 25 2018, @06:30PM (7 children)
That is not my attitude. That's merely your straw man characterization. And what is the point of your lecture? You ignored the past 50 years except for the pieces that have confirmed your biases. For example, noting that population has tripled in the past 50 years while ignoring that the rate of population growth has greatly shrunk and that the vast majority of population growth (as well as other social ills like pollution) occurs in the poorest parts of the world. The places that have relatively free markets also have made significant progress on the very things you claim to care about.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 25 2018, @07:45PM (6 children)
All I stated about the past 50 years is fact, what happened.
All anybody can state about the future is projection, assumption, prediction. Here's some Pulitzer prize winning projection for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sixth_Extinction:_An_Unnatural_History [wikipedia.org]
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 26 2018, @02:12AM (5 children)
And I didn't disagree, except where noted otherwise (such as your erroneous characterizations of current pollution in the US and regulatory environment of markets in the US). But it's a very incomplete picture even in the areas you got right.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 26 2018, @02:51AM (4 children)
If you want to deconstruct the dialogue, you mentioned something about regulations increasing during the past several decades faster than ever before, which is what got me rolling back to a few obvious reasons why regulations started increasing so much, starting at the beginning of the period.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 26 2018, @04:22AM (3 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 26 2018, @01:08PM (2 children)
While I agree that the volume of text in legislation, documentation requirements for regulatory compliance, and high school term papers have all ballooned in response to the ease of production starting roughly in 1985 with the rise of the word processor (and really getting rolling by ~1995)... I still say that regulations against things like burning rivers would have happened even if we had to chisel the commandment on a stone tablet.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 26 2018, @03:20PM (1 child)
And did by oh, 1980 or so. But the regulation tarbaby doesn't go away just because the problems it solved did.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 26 2018, @03:39PM
Tangential note: I work with an electronic documentation system that traces its roots back to military projects like nuclear submarine development. In the 1970s, the paperwork required to specify and build a nuclear submarine outweighed the submarine itself. I suspect that now, thanks to the ease of creation, storage and retrieval, and the general decline of editorial review to reduce volume (and even ensure correctness or self-consistency) there's well over 10x as much "documentation" for similar products when it's all printed out on paper, meaning that the relative value of each page of text you obtain and read about such a product is declining - taking more human effort to comprehend the material presented, even if it is orders of magnitude easier to obtain - much like this rambling post.
In the multiverse where I was promoted to king of the Earth after roughly age 25 or so when I developed a fuller appreciation for such things, my first and really only agenda for change was the simplification of laws, rules, procedures, etc. Putting the bulk of accountants, lawyers, and other interpreters of the great tomes of rules out of work by reducing their complexity to a level that any reasonably educated person could come up to speed on in a reasonable period of time. Not only is it more efficient, it also appeals to that infantile concept of "fair" that is so abused in this world. Alas, this version of me does not live in that reality.
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @02:17PM (18 children)
Not at all. Congratulations for reaching that point in your life when you can do such a thing. Double congratulations if you're not eating government cheese or planning on drawing social security in the future because you've been lucky enough to amass self-sustaining wealth - that puts you in a lucky minority. Point remains, you're not employed.
Unpaid vacation / furlough is not the same thing as employment.
Not ashamed, perhaps I should have laid out the conditions in the initial statement, I thought it obvious that employment = getting paid.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 24 2018, @03:39PM (17 children)
Do you not take pride in well-made and well-founded arguments? Let's review what you wrote:
I showed not only that one could do it for a month, but one could do it for a whole six months! Now it supposedly doesn't count because I'm not currently getting paid to not work (even though I go back to the same employer, with a promotion no less, yay me). That ignores that I got paid earlier and thus don't need to get paid now. That's the power of saving money.
But that leads us to the second problem, namely, you turned a reasonable question into an argument that has no point to it. We were speaking of freedom of action, not a fixed captive stream of money. Even with a UBI, I wouldn't be getting paid as much as if I had a job too. So not working would still be less money and thus, by your earlier reckoning, still not count.
Control is relative. Merely paying someone doesn't give business ultimate command of them.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @03:50PM (1 child)
You were neither employed when you started, nor employed when the month finished, from my perspective no execution of the exercise was even attempted, much less demonstrated.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 24 2018, @05:13PM
Both which are entirely irrelevant both to the subject of control by an employer and your earliest statement which didn't have that as a condition. Again, you moved the goalposts to a silly argument.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @03:58PM (14 children)
Absolutely, control is relative.
For people who start out life with nothing, they do need to work for some kind of business to survive. No single business controls a person's life, but the collection of potential employers do, and when that system traces its control back to a tiny group of people who have nothing in common with the people who start out life with nothing... tales of the self-made billionaires are widely heralded, but the self-made are in a small minority, and they didn't get where they are without a very rare string of lucky events, usually combined with some skill, but the luck is much rarer than the skill.
I'd like to see the tables slanted more toward tales of the self-made comfortable / reasonably well off being more common than the tales of the abject poor.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 24 2018, @05:14PM (13 children)
A collection is not an entity capable of control.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @05:54PM (12 children)
Oh, how they love your kind of thinking.
Note the first statement: "producer (or group of producers)"
http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/monopoly.html [businessdictionary.com]
Illegal, yes, enforcement is difficult, at best.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation [wikipedia.org]
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 24 2018, @06:20PM (11 children)
You just made "monopoly" a meaningless distinction since any producer now belongs. Thus, you are part of the group of producers. Enjoy your monopoly hiring privileges!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @07:10PM (2 children)
Only when a group colludes to be anti-competitive (like OPEC) does it fall afoul of monopoly definitions.
I think we had the idiot trucker discussion where that particular group can't help but race itself to the bottom, creating a stream of bankruptcies because there's always another idiot willing to do the job for a loss.
And this [youtube.com] is always a problem.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 24 2018, @09:18PM
The term you're looking for is "oligopoly".
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 26 2018, @03:25PM
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @07:19PM (7 children)
Oh, look! collusion exposed for once: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-24/qualcomm-gets-1-2-billion-eu-fine-for-apple-chip-payments [bloomberg.com]
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 24 2018, @09:19PM (6 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @10:21PM (5 children)
Monopoly (mono - singular) is the extreme form of anti-competitive, counter-free-market business practice, and doesn't exist in pure form in the real world. Even when AT&T "owned" telecoms in the U.S. they did not have a full unqualified monopoly.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 25 2018, @12:09AM (4 children)
Except that they did. They were the sole provider of local phone networks throughout most of the US. That makes them a monopoly in truth.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 25 2018, @01:05AM (3 children)
For most definitions of most.
OPEC was a cartel, they only controlled a large fraction of the market, but by (legal in their countries) collusion they manipulated the market price - when they could manage to not undercut one another.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 25 2018, @01:09AM (2 children)
By population. You're not going anywhere with the AT&T meander.
And no one here disagrees with that. A cartel is not a monopoly because it consists of multiple competing members.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 25 2018, @01:32AM (1 child)
A cartel with enough market share to manipulate market prices, acting together to manipulate the market does run afoul of US anti-trust laws - when anybody steps up to enforce them.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 25 2018, @03:17AM
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @02:31PM
What I would wish for, if I were back in 1988 with a magic wand to change the world, would be the chance to branch out and do my own thing in the marketplace, work hard to find something that people feel is worthwhile enough to compensate. Instead, I worked for guys in the upper 1% who had their ideas of what they wanted to do. I think, by choice, I would have started there anyway - for experience, but there never has been a choice for me, or any of the other sub-CEO employees of these companies, to chart our own course. In school I knew lots of people who wanted nothing more than for people to tell them what to do - I suppose they fit better in today's world than I do. There's the argument that I could have saved money and taken a risk, branched out and done my own thing, but the business starting world I learned involves securing investment, which basically amounts to begging for money while spinning a story about how the investor of money has the potential to make great returns on their investment - not so much in human terms of benefit of the endeavor, just in raw number of dollars.
If you haven't gotten this by now: I hate begging. One of the big draws for me to UBI is the aspect that: anyone eligible for UBI has no reason to beg.
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @02:35PM (6 children)
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 24 2018, @03:42PM (5 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @04:04PM (4 children)
With what? My boomer parents with dual incomes and responsibly managed retirement accounts at 70+ years of age barely afford to pay a cleaning lady a couple of days a week.
What percentage of the population can afford to pay other people to do anything? The Brady Bunches don't have live-in maids anymore, you've got to move into the upper 5% to start to think about that level of service. In a way, this is a good thing, in another - it's really not, because instead of half the world being able to afford to pay a person or two to help them out, we've got 1% of the world who can afford to hire 50 or more people, and 95% of the world who can't afford to hire even 1.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 24 2018, @05:16PM (3 children)
100%. For example, they do so by pooling their resources via government. A private organization doing the same thing is not that hard.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @05:57PM (2 children)
And here I thought you thought government was ineffective.
When 99% of the population pools their resources via government, and the other 1% out-resources the remaining 99 and mostly takes over government as well, where does that take us? Right where we're headed.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 24 2018, @06:18PM (1 child)
The smart person would ask what did I do wrong? The first step was in giving your government a marketable amount of power with which to distribute wealth to the "1%".
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @07:05PM
First, I was barely out of high-school when Ronnie Ray-Gun's goon squad rolled out trickle-down theory into the economic policies, so I guess I'll have to blame my forefathers for letting that particular pendulum swing on my generation.
Second, I believe if you look back, more deeply historically, government has been an instrument limiting the power of the wealthy - anti-trust legislation, labor protections, etc. It has been the wealthy's successful overtaking of government policies in the last 40 years that needs to reach apogee and start the pendulum swinging back.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 24 2018, @02:46AM (18 children)
Why are you speaking of that rather than big stuff like smart phones, GMO food, self-driving cars, or germ-line genetic modification of humans? It's not hard to see that there's bigger inventions out there than simulated nipples.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @04:39AM (17 children)
Those are all in the mix, but, relatively speaking, there are far more inventors and designers employed and working on smaller market products like fashion, quirky gadgets, toys, and niche household products than there are "doing the big stuff" like cell-phones, GMO for the handful of corporations that are actually pursuing it commercially (academia is a different animal, and not quite free-market employment, yet), or cars. As for germ-line modification of any organism freely reproducing in the wild, that's more of an ethical discussion.
Case in point: we did a deal with a reasonably profitable medical devices company that made a wide variety of cardio-pulmonary measuring devices, they had dozens of engineers designing, developing and maintaining dozens of product lines. They got bought out by a laser-hair removal company, who had employed fewer engineers to design and develop essentially one product line that they sold as a service across the country - the single "big" laser-hair removal company was roughly 50x larger, in market cap, than the clever med device company they bought, but didn't employ any "inventive" people long term, unless you count their marketing.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 24 2018, @06:18AM (16 children)
And of course, the cell phone market is just as big and significant as the fake nipple market? Some inventions are just more important and profound that a thousand niche ones.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @12:52PM (15 children)
I think we're back to Wall-E again, here. The cell-phone market is "big and significant" just like Buy-N-Large created a big and significant market for breakfast in cup, everybody drinks it, and "blue is the new red," a virtual product that sweeps the population. If you extend the fake nipple market just out to general bust-appearance devices, I'm sure you'll find more designers, inventors and developers working that market around the world than you do designers, inventors and engineers for the cell phone market - at least cell phone hardware, apps are a slightly different animal.
It doesn't take seven billion people to design, develop, implement and maintain a global wireless communication system. A very small number are actually involved in the inventive part, especially if you take satellite work out of the mix. Space work is a nice employment sink for inventive types, too bad we employ more people (spend more money) on weapons.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 24 2018, @02:48PM (13 children)
I guess if communication doesn't matter to you, and your sequence of posts do bear that supposition out, then sure, a really important invention can look like another breakfast in a cup.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @03:32PM (12 children)
Not saying it doesn't matter. I am saying that the "free market drivers" of people's time, ingenuity, knowledge and skills, push more people into the development of the next way to make breasts more distracting than pushing people into your "important" endeavors like communication, space development, etc.
For every person doing meaningful work on a space development project, there are many others who would like to be doing that work, but are instead working on something more like false nipples because that's where the work is.
UBI wouldn't black to white change this, but it would un-tilt the playing field a bit.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 24 2018, @03:43PM (11 children)
Foxconn is employing something like a million people, most of whom make iPhones. I don't buy that argument.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @04:11PM (10 children)
The market is more diverse and larger, if you're counting factory workers too, let's just start tallying up the industry: 88,000 employees here: http://investors.lb.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=94854&p=irol-irHome [lb.com]
886 separate manufacturers there: http://www.globalsources.com/manufacturers/Lingerie.html [globalsources.com]
Walk into a retail store like Target - there's good square footage devoted to cell-phones, but more to underwear.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 25 2018, @01:21AM (9 children)
Walk into a hardware store like Home Depot. There's good square footage devoted to rechargeable tools, but not underwear.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 25 2018, @01:30AM (8 children)
Nor cell phones.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 25 2018, @03:18AM (7 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 25 2018, @03:47AM (6 children)
I don't think this started as a discussion of importance, but rather of how many creative, inventive people are employed by the respective industries.
Something along the lines of: employment is not a maximization of individuals' potential to help the world.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 25 2018, @05:38AM (5 children)
Umm, you were claiming something much worse than employment being slightly imperfect. That somehow engineers were being diverted from space development projects to work on fake nipples for women's underwear. The skill sets don't overlap much so, sorry, I'm just not buying it.
Even worse you claimed it was a bad thing. But I can't help but note, for example, that fake nipples need more attention than NASA's Space Launch System does, the latter being a hindrance than progress on space development. Of course, the SLS happens to be politically driven rather than market-driven. But who knew that greed and self-interest didn't go away just because the market wasn't involved?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 25 2018, @01:05PM (4 children)
The political system is large enough to be considered a market in and of itself - one with different drivers, but still executed by humans, so greed and self-interest are still factors - even if they aren't the explicit aim.
Two ends of a spectrum - market driven employment is like a pool, deep where the profits are, pour in your talented people and they will swim toward their areas of interest/expertise, but only so many fit in the "noble" (a.k.a. shallow) end of the pool, the rest end up where the profits are.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 26 2018, @03:52PM (3 children)
Ok, fine. Political systems do have market aspects. But these problems don't come from the market aspects. Greed and self-interest would exist anyway because society and the government consist of distinct sentient entities. And in the absence of a well-functioning market to divert those interests into productive directions, they tend to manifest in uglier ways (for example, bloody coups and power struggles).
And it would be even better if less people fit in the "negative RoI" end of the pool. Fake nipples may be low value, but they're cheap to research and don't require that we take public funding in order to succeed. Meanwhile something like the SLS actually harms the interests it's supposed to help. I don't think we need to pay our best and brightest to make our society worse.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 26 2018, @04:43PM (2 children)
I think this is missing the point: the market is devouring resources (especially human capital) based on ROI. So many intelligent, talented engineering graduates who have aptitude and desire to work in design, development, making better things to make a better world, end up washed into the sales and support end of the pool, because that's what it takes to make a company successful in the competitive marketplace.
I've worked for a number of commercial failures, and a few commercial successes. They all had similar engineering staff to product being developed ratios: it really does take about the same number of engineers to screw in a lightbulb wherever you go. The difference in success is strongly correlated to investment in sales, marketing, people attempting to influence other people to buy a product, whether in preference to a competitor's similar product, or to buy a unique, innovative product as opposed to basically doing nothing. The ratios are dumbfounding: implantable medical device, cost to design, manufacture and support all the regulatory BS overhead: $600 per copy, cost to market the device, get it sold: >$14,000 per copy. (additional cost to the patient to have the hospital implant it: ~$15K, net cost to the patient's insurance provider: ~$30K, profit to the company ~$400 per device - typically absorbed in general overhead.) Over 2/3 of the $600 manufacturing cost is people's salaries and benefits, but 100% of the sales cost is salary, commission, benefits. The companies I worked for that "built the better mousetrap" "best in world performance and efficiency" for a given problem, without a huge - much larger than the investment in actually making the widget - investment in sales and marketing, they fizzled. When you've got that better mousetrap, the first order of business is to sell investors on the idea that people will buy it if you push them hard enough, so the investors open their wallets, give you a pile of cash, and see if you really can sell the widget - if you can sell them efficiently enough to make a profit that the investors find appealing, then they open their wallets wider and you ramp up production and sales. Personally, I find the ratios appalling, it feels like >80% of the effort involved in doing anything for anyone in the world is just make-work.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 26 2018, @04:48PM (1 child)
So many intelligent, talented engineering graduates yadda yadda end up doing useful stuff. That's terrible!
"Feels like" != "is". They wouldn't be paying you, if it were genuine make-work.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 26 2018, @09:01PM
I find that jobs are offered and retained as much on ability of the employer to pay as they are on employee merit. If the employer isn't able to pay, BOOM! you're out of work. When they are able to pay, there's a lot of deadwood that seems to float merrily along with the productive workforce.
It's not useful, it's competitive. If the world could occasionally make up it's mind instead of being open to influence: Coke vs. Pepsi for example, billions of dollars in competitive advertising and marketing could be used for something else.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 24 2018, @02:50PM
Forgot this one. This is a classic composition fallacy. It doesn't take seven billion people to mow my lawn either.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday January 24 2018, @12:33AM (1 child)
While true, it's also important to remember that Charles Dickens would have devoted his life to not-really-good poetry if he hadn't needed to earn a living writing short stories (and later novels), which his disliked doing (at least initially).
*Some* economic incentive is quite valuable. Too much is bad, and so is too little.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @12:56AM
Fair point, and I imagine the desire to have a bigger living space, in a nicer place, maybe with your own personal transportation to use, and more costly food and clothing, and even some shiny consumer gadgets, all should be good incentives to not just lay about only "doing the things you love."
We know some long-term "stay at home moms" and after a few years they all get the itch to get back out in the world and do things, be with people - which, in today's world mostly means: working some kind of job, even if it's just part-time. We've connected with some disabilities groups where they struggle with the welfare lifestyle, nobody wants it, but some don't have a physical choice... and, again, the answer for them is to get out and do something with their life, get a job that pays some kind of money - that feeling of appreciation that comes with a paycheck is a very effective anti-depressant. The biggest struggle in the disabled group is the messed up system that yanks back their benefits that they need to live at the first sign of them maybe starting to make a little money on their own - this is a free-market society and that money earned from the world isn't reliable at all, so rather than risk their "sure thing" poverty check that they need to live, they often opt-out of the paying work because re-instatement of benefits can take months, sometimes years.
In the U.S. we do have a social safety net, but it's (intentionally) quite difficult to use, and that difficulty often traps those who do end up using it.
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(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday January 24 2018, @01:58AM
> Automate as much as possible, and then reduce the population, preferably by attrition.
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