What if I told you that, contrary to the alarming headlines and eye-catching infographics you may have seen ricocheting around social media, new technologies aren't shaking up the labor market very much by historical standards? You might think I was as loopy as a climate-change denier and suggest that I open my eyes to all the taxi drivers being displaced by Uber, the robots taking over factories, and artificial intelligence doing some of the work lawyers and doctors used to do. Surely, we are in uncharted territory, right?
Right, but not in the way you think. If you study the US labor market from the Civil War era to present, you discover that we are in a period of unprecedented calm – with comparatively few jobs shifting between occupations – and that is a bad sign. In fact, this low level of "churn" is a reflection of too little, not too much technological innovation: Lack of disruption is a marker of our historically low productivity growth, which is slowing improvement in people's living standards.
A new report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) examines this trend in detail using large sets of US Census data that researchers at the Minnesota Population Center have curated to harmonize occupational classifications over long periods. ITIF's analysis quantifies the growth or contraction of individual occupations, decade by decade, relative to overall job growth, and it assesses how much of that job churn – whether growth or contraction – is attributable to technological advances. The report concludes that, rather than increasing, the rate of occupational churn in recent years has been the lowest in American history – and only about one-third or one-quarter of the rate we saw in the 1960s, depending on how you measure contracting occupations.
[...] Aside from being methodologically suspect and, as ITIF shows, ahistorical, this false alarmism is politically dangerous, because it feeds the notion that we should pump the breaks on technological progress, avoid risk, and maintain the status quo – a foolish formula that would lock in economic stagnation and ossify living standards. Policymakers certainly can and should do more to improve labor-market transitions for workers who lose their jobs. But if there is any risk for the near future, it is that technological change and productivity growth will be too slow, not too fast.
So, let's all take a deep breath and calm down. Labor market disruption is not abnormally high; it's at an all-time low, and predictions that human labor is just a few more tech "unicorns" away from redundancy are vastly overstated, as they always have been.
IOW, it's all in your imagination.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Justin Case on Saturday May 27 2017, @09:39PM (58 children)
For example, I do not yet have my own spaceship. Until somebody invents and manufactures one, there is work to be done.
"But I don't know how to make a spaceship."
Yeah, so there's more work to be done in teaching and research.
"But nobody is hiring spaceship designers right now."
So start your own company and hire all those talented unemployed people we keep hearing about.
"But I can't afford to start my own spaceship making company."
Yeah, so there's work to be done in teaching and learning how to start companies and acquire the resources to develop a new invention.
"There wouldn't be enough fuel to power spaceships for everyone."
So there's work to be done in harvesting energy directly from the sun.
In short, any problem you cite that stands between our present reality and affordable spaceships for everyone is an acknowledgment that there is work out there waiting for someone to do it.
Anyone who says there is no work, or not enough work, is suffering from a severe lack of imagination.
"OK, there's work. But who is going to pay me to do it?"
Now you've identified the actual problem. You don't want work, you want pay. So think up something you can do that is of value to someone else. It doesn't have to be spaceships. Anything at all, that anybody in the world might want.
"But I'm not good at thinking up stuff. I want someone else to give me a job and tell me what to do."
Ahhh. Well you may be right. You can't get by on your own in this case. You need those thinkers and company-founders and job-makers. Maybe there aren't enough of those people in the world to meet the demand for jobs. Maybe there's a shortage of job-makers. In that case the best thing for everyone would be to increase the reward for successful job-makers. Stop spouting off about how they are evil and their job-making assets should be confiscated.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Gaaark on Saturday May 27 2017, @09:53PM
Just so long as the government doesn't allow them to fuck their employees.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2, Interesting) by tftp on Saturday May 27 2017, @09:55PM (15 children)
One catch here is that the reward to the exceptional people has to compete with the reward (the basic income) paid to entirely common people who cannot tie their own shoelaces without a YouTube video. As the prospect of the basic income is becoming more and more real, the reward for being inventive has to become truly impressive, or else why bother? There won't be sufficient social pressure (or the need to survive) to advance, outside of a few geeks. In a fully robotized society, where all the basic needs are fulfilled for free, humans either have to invent new, universally acceptable metric for comparing themselves to other, instead of wealth and property, or to become equally inactive and equally disinterested in life (see Diaspar [wikipedia.org].)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Saturday May 27 2017, @10:12PM (10 children)
Let basic income just provide exactly those basic needs like food, shelter, care etc and nothing else. Then make it possible to increase the income by educating yourself in STEM or other useful subjects. The fine print is while you don't need to work. It will be tempting to increase pay by at least 10 times or more by working so the majority of people will end up doing so anyway.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Saturday May 27 2017, @11:46PM (9 children)
And how would you make the people NOT demand houses, cars, clothes if all that is just as abundant in a robotized society as food, shelter and care? Note, though, that care is, actually, hard to make free - it requires human labor. (3D-printed houses and cars and furniture are nothing, compared to a daily job of a professional nurse.) The government would be hard pressed to explain why robots can pick strawberries but cannot put bricks and concrete blocks together. Cars are already assembled mostly by robots, and assembly of iPhones is being migrated by Foxconn from humans to robots. We are getting there. Little status items may become even easier available than the food - they are easier to make.
I predict that a populist will rise who promises all that and more - and become happily elected, because the people love free stuff. You can't run against a populist who promises the wealth from the people's treasury. Unless the democracy is abandoned, of course, and replaced with a benevolent dictator.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday May 28 2017, @12:37AM
You can demand a lot of things right now but you will only get it if you have something to trade with. And well if someone wants to give away stuff, then that's their choice.
If a populist or some moron gets elected. Insightful people can move away, even in anticipation before the shit hits the fan.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @02:47AM (6 children)
I predict
That's interesting when you consider that it ALREADY happened.
that a populist will rise
You don't often hear the guy called by that term but he did get himself elected to a 4-year term 4 times.
who promises [houses, cars, clothes to the people]
...and the guy I'm referencing not only promised, he delivered.
...and he did this without discarding Capitalism (to my disappointment).
His method was to CREATE JOBS.
He put 15 million USAians on the payroll of USA.gov when the Capitalists hadn't been hiring for 4 years (though they had continued to lay off workers as the economy continued to shrink without ordinary folks buying ordinary stuff).
He had those folks build/rebuild infrastructure.
It's the only way that an economy in a deep slump has EVER recovered quickly.
The way he financed this thing which he called The New Deal was to tax the billionaire class of his day at 94 percent.
(That billionaires' tax stayed over 90 percent until the 1960s.)
The guy's name is Franklin Roosevelt.
His reforms to gov't, which were instituted so that another giant failure of Capitalism wouldn't occur in the USA, have been chipped away at by Reactionaries (Republicans) and Neoliberals (Democrats) in the decades since.
We are currently in another giant slump (enough of The New Deal remains that the failure wasn't total) but we don't have a single personality in gov't with the wisdom to repeat what already worked before.
There was a presidential candidate in 2012 and again in 2016 who had a Green New Deal as part of her platform.
Her name is Jill Stein and she ran on the Green Party ticket.
She was ignored[1] by Lamestream Media while they gave $6B of free coverage to the guy who had nothing but empty slogans to offer.
[1] I would have said "She couldn't get arrested" but that's not true; she's been arrested multiple times while joining in protests against injustice.
I would have preferred a Socialist of the Eugene Debs style, but Jill, while only a baby step in the right direction, was better than what the 2 parties who are beholden to the corporations had to offer.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 28 2017, @12:38PM (2 children)
You are suffering from the politician's syllogism [wikipedia.org] fallacy. Just because FDR did something doesn't mean that he made the situation better. Let us note that even completely inaction on FDR's part would have resulted in considerable job growth just because the US would grow naturally from this employment minimum, just like it has before and since.
I believe FDR lost more jobs than he created. Let us remember that the US did veer back into recession a few years in FDR's regime (1936-1937). And it was only when the Second World War required the dismantling of his oligopoly schemes, that the economy made a sharp improvement.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @04:10PM (1 child)
Khallow, you're an idiot.
In order for the economy to grow there need to be people with money spending money. The situation prior to the start of the WPA was that there wasn't any hiring going on as there was little spending going on. The companies that were going out of business were spending as little money as possible hoping to make it through the depression and many didn't make it.
The whole argument that the oligopoly schemes had anything to do with it is ridiculous. Companies do not hire unless they need to hire because the people they're currently employing can't keep up with demand. Whether it's a olligopoly, monopoly or functioning free market doesn't really matter. Hiring is always in response to demand or offering new products/services that are expected to be in demand. Without potential customers, companies don't hire and they sometimes even fire the ones they've got.
WWII got us completely out of the depression because the massive amount of production necessary to supply our troops. What people weren't employed in those factories were mostly sent overseas to fight. It was the same basic deal as the WPA but on a massive and largely unimaginable scale.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 29 2017, @03:09AM
That massive production required the ending of a bunch of FDR schemes such as the oligopolies and the WPA.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 28 2017, @12:45PM (2 children)
Let us note that the billionaire class wasn't actually taxed at this rate due to readily available loopholes that reduced the tax burden to proportions similar to what they pay today. But the idea of high marginal tax rates sold well to the US public.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @04:14PM (1 child)
Sigh, another post from the resident cock-holster for the wealthiest. Do you get hard thinking of all those people refusing to pay their fair share?
And yes, there were loopholes, but you're completely full of shit if you think they weren't paying more tax than they are now. Nobody is saying we have to go back to a time when we're taxing them at 90%+ of their income, but we are saying that we need to raise the taxes high enough that they stop behaving like greedy cunts and actually let the people keep some of what they earned. One of the reasons why high marginal tax rates are so good for the economy is that it keeps the money with the people that are likely to use it productively. Invested funds are only productive when people are actually buying things from those companies.
It's not particularly counter-intuitive or confusing, you just have to get the rich whiteman dick out of your mouth long enough to see what's going on.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 29 2017, @03:23AM
I'm not saying the tax rate was exactly constant. But it was pretty damn close. For example, the last seven decades [mises.org] in the US have seen near constant federal taxes collected as a fraction of GDP and federal income tax as a fraction of income - no matter what the highest tax brackets were. This same article notes that the highest income earners pay more as a fraction of tax revenue now than they did in 1980:
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 28 2017, @12:48PM
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Sunday May 28 2017, @09:22AM (3 children)
I find it interesting that, in California, they are decrying the lack of workers to pick farm produce [nytimes.com]. While, at the same time, there are roughly 40 million Californians on welfare.
In other news, as Georgia imposes a work requirement for welfare, around half the welfare recipients decide that they aren't so poor after all. [breitbart.com] The work requirements are not particularly onerous, for example, you can volunteer at a listed charity. If you can't even be bothered to help out at a charity, you must not be very hungry after all...
There's not so much a need for a basic income, as for a work ethic.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @10:13AM
Georgia, Out Migrant Workers, Turns to Prison Labor
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2012/04/20/georgia-out-migrant-workers-turns-prison-labor [commondreams.org]
As Georgia's agricultural fields are finding themselves without its usual mirgrant workforce due to harsh immigration laws, the state is turning towards another cheap source of labor: prisoners. With increased privatization of prisons and inmates providing a "pliable" work source, Georgia's situation may present a harbinger of the kind of labor to come.
Describing if the program that has some of Georgia's "transitional prison inmates" picking onions is likely to spread, a WXIA Atlanta reporter says, "as long as labor shortage continues... this is going to be pretty appealing."
Steve Fraser and Joshua Freeman write on the ubiquity of prison labor: "Prisoners, whose ranks increasingly consist of those for whom the legitimate economy has found no use, now make up a virtual brigade within the reserve army of the unemployed whose ranks have ballooned along with the U.S. incarceration rate."
"All told, nearly a million prisoners are now making office furniture, working in call centers, fabricating body armor, taking hotel reservations, working in slaughterhouses, or manufacturing textiles, shoes, and clothing, while getting paid somewhere between 93 cents and $4.73 per day," write Fraser and Freeman.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @04:19PM
There are degrees of welfare, my brother gets la bit each month to help feed my nephew and that's welfare, but there's no way on earth that he could afford to quit his job to take one of those farming jobs. He'd require even more social assistance after doing that.
As for Georgia, the point of those requirements is to make it hard or impossible to get the help that people need. A lot of those people have disabilities that aren't being allowed by law. It's rather common for people to have to fight tooth and nail for disability money that they're entitled to because of the perception that people are cheating the system. There's also a large number of people that get dropped from the rolls over paperwork problems and just having it be a real pain in the ass to do. What's more, most charities won't accept volunteers unless you can commit to working there for many months or even a year, which rules out anybody that's on unemployment and actually looking for work as they'd have to miss a lot of volunteer time if they're actively looking for work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @04:35PM
Welcome to the concept of the welfare trap. If you work full time at a crappy job you lose your benefits. So, lots of people can't afford to work the crappy job because then they literally can't pay for their rent / bills / food. Also, there is motivation to hire illegals or recent immigrants who don't know their rights and can more easily be screwed over, made to work overtime without OT pay, etc. etc. etc. Also, convincing people to move to the middle of nowhere to work a low paying farm job is pretty difficult.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by arcz on Saturday May 27 2017, @09:56PM (24 children)
I wanted to make my own soda and sell it. But I didn't, because it requires too much capital (thousands upon thousands of dollars) in order to comply with the regulations. I need to have a "food service establishment", which cannot be my home. So I would have to buy a plot, build a place, and pass ridiculous inspections and pay huge fees in order to become licensed to produce and sell the product. Regulatory startup costs: $20,000+. Actual startup cost if I ignored all the regulations: $300. Notice a problem?
I'm not saying food safety restrictions are a bad idea, but some of them (like making you have a separate location) are VERY expensive and do little to nothing to protect food safety.
Wonder why there is so little competition? Because most people do not have $20,000 to drop on something that might not make it back. Do you know how much soda I would need to sell to make back $20,000? A LOT.
So why is there little work? Because there are few companies around, due to how stupidly expensive it is to start a new business.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 27 2017, @10:08PM (3 children)
~40000 liters? even in small batches that's only a few days production at most if you had the distribution contracts in place it would be pretty easy
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @04:39PM (2 children)
There is another problem, in order to actually compete you have to operate on the same economy of scale. Massive producers have their production so streamlined that their costs are very very low. To compete is next to impossible unless you can build a similar production system, so from hundreds or thousands to multi-millions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @05:48PM (1 child)
while i agree with your general point, it's only true if you are trying to sell the same poison the whores at big cola are producing. if you wanted to sell something that was full of buzzwords(organic, heirloom, non-gmo, etc) you could charge more.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @05:51PM
but that's why the sacks of shit in government run a protection racket for big cola. if you will be paying a certain level of tax then you will be allowed to compete. otherwise go get a job from the big boys or operate on the margins of society and be victimized by slave catchers working for big prison.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Justin Case on Saturday May 27 2017, @10:11PM
I don't think you'll find me disagreeing with your remarks. Among the work to be done is streamlining the political and economic system to make it easier to start a new business. Those useless rules you mention are there specifically to keep competition out so the big boys can keep milking their government granted monopolies.
"Public-Private Partnership" == big government colluding with big corporations to screw everyone else. Downsize. Decentralize. Depoliticize.
Remember that governments give corporations permission to exist, immunity from liability for their crimes, and bailouts for their one-sided gambles. The government is not our ally in this fight.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Whoever on Saturday May 27 2017, @10:12PM (16 children)
Hey, I should be allowed to have 120dB concerts playing in my house next to yours, right?
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Saturday May 27 2017, @11:09PM (11 children)
If you're truly concerned about that, likely your neighbors would agree to form a homeowners' association with rules about such things and whatever else troubles you.
Small, local, voluntary, decentralized, self-government.
And don't go all radical on me and paint me as arguing for no government. It is possible for there to be numbers between 100% (dictatorship) and 0% (anarchy) you know. If your neighbor violates the HOA agreement, take him to court.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Whoever on Saturday May 27 2017, @11:49PM (6 children)
And when I don't volunteer to follow rules that you want to impose? Or my house is not in a HOA area?
You want to be able to disrupt others with your food business, but don't want disruption from others. Life doesn't work like that.
But back to your specific example, you have arbitrarily raised the cost of your food business by deciding that you have to buy the premises. Most businesses rent their premises. As for "ridiculous inspections": do you think that you should be exempt from food hygiene regulations just because you are preparing the food in your own home?
Summary: you have constructed an unrealistic example, making your point invalid.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 28 2017, @02:42AM (5 children)
Then disruption happens. If it's illegal, it'll probably get settled in court. If it'll legal, then oh well, disruption happens.
Well, how disruptive is this food business? I think there's a error here in deciding that small businesses are automatically disruptive.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Whoever on Sunday May 28 2017, @03:25AM (4 children)
Well, considering that there is a risk of killing people with a food business, I would say that that is quite disruptive.
More locally, he is talking about a soda business, which would involve large trucks to pick up the product, possible smells, the waste product might affect the sewage system, etc.. Really, it doesn't take much imagination to realize that you don't want someone running a bulk food business in a dense residential area.
You talk about settling the issue in court. That requires regulations. If you accept that regulations are necessary, then surely a regulation that keeps food businesses out of residential properties is a reasonable regulation, because the business will involve some disruption for the neighbors, as I described above.
Unless you start with the presumption that some types of businesses are disruptive, you will always be suffering from some disruption while trying to play whack-a-mole.
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Sunday May 28 2017, @11:38AM (2 children)
Unless that sort of disruption doesn't happen. Just because disruption could happen, doesn't mean it does. This sort of argument also applies to the consumption of alcohol and other recreational drugs for another glaring example. The end result is to shift power to those who can afford the rules or afford to break the rules.
Let us note the mole gets whacked hard here. And businesses unlike other sorts of disruptions build up assets and capital that can be seized. There is more to lose.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @04:43PM (1 child)
OMG GOVERNMENT MIGHT HAVE LEGITIMATE REASONS FOR REGULATION!!! **BRAIN IMPLODES**
What you seem to be going for here is FLEXIBLE regulation, but that involves human judgment so it is likely a bit of a problem.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 29 2017, @03:25AM
(Score: 1) by arcz on Tuesday June 06 2017, @05:25AM
Since when does a small time soda business take large amounts of shipping? A low volume business would not need to be shipping a large amount of material around. Maybe you should do some research about what is involved in making a soda business. By the time you have large trucks coming to your home, you can afford to buy or rent a regular businessplace. The problem is that until you have that much business, you are stuck.
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Saturday May 27 2017, @11:52PM (3 children)
Sorry, GP post constructed an unrealistic example. You just went along with the weak-minded thinking.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @01:09AM (1 child)
Preteen girls can run lemonade stands with no food inspection, set their prices as high as they want, and they don't pay taxes either. If I try to sell food on the street, I would be arrested. That's all kinds of ageist sexist prejudice right there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @04:22PM
Legally they shouldn't, but people tend to turn a blind eye to that sort of thing. Food poisoning from that is rather rare, but if it does happen, then their parents had better have insurance as that's where the money would be coming from.
In practice though, those lemonade stands tend not to be up for very long. I don't think I've ever seen one that was up for more than a few days. And as long as the lemons they're using are OK, there's very little risk of food poisoning from lemons, sugar or water.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 28 2017, @01:01PM
Perhaps you shouldn't have posted that then? Or were you speaking of something other than your 120 dB straw man?.0
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @02:24AM (3 children)
Right, because if we allow people to run a small business from their home the next thing that will happen is people will be having rock concerts in their backyards. Like, noise ordinances don't exist, I guess?
Oh, wait. The real reason we can't have sensible regulation is assholes like you constantly derail any attempt at improvement by your shrieks of, "Oh, so you want to repeal regulation [X]?!?! Then I guess people will just do [most extreme conceivable example which is tangentially related to regulation X at best]!"
Check this out: Some regulations are good, some are bad. Wanting to repeal a bad one does not equate to wanting to repeal all regulations whatsoever. If you aren't able to debate the merits of a specific regulation, how it could be improved to achieve results, or if it should be repealed without resulting to stupid hyperbole, then go sit at the kiddie debate table. You'll have a lot of conversations relevant to you there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @04:28PM (2 children)
And this is why the GOP keeps winning, people who have no idea what they're talking about and are too lazy to find out.
In this case, you probably can have a home based business where the previous poster is living, just not that kind of business. Anything that requires that much shipping in and out is going to create traffic problems. There's also the monitoring and safety requirements for producing food. In the case of businesses that have customers, there's a ton of safety requirements that apply to commercial buildings that don't apply to residential buildings due to the increased number of people. Not to mention parking considerations.
In short, those rules exist with good reason. For businesses that don't have things shipped and don't have customers showing up, it's highly likely that you can do that even if you aren't zoned for it. I have a small business that I work out of my home and neither the city, county nor state cares that I'm not zoned for it, because it's internet only. I just have to an address for them to send me my tax forms and what not.
BTW, I am licensed to operate here, it's not like one of those cases where the operator doesn't get a license or operates from a place differently than licensed for.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @06:07PM
if you get a license to do honest business with your fellow man, you're a pitiful slave.
(Score: 1) by arcz on Tuesday June 06 2017, @05:22AM
Actually selling soda does not require much shipping. I have a single bottle of phosphoric acid. There is enough of it to make thousands upon thousands of soda bottles. Flavorings are pretty concentrated too, you don't need much. "Shipping" would not be much of a problem, one can simply sell bottles to friends who might pick them up every once in a while.
No business should start off as mass production, but as a low-volume pilot business. All innovation has to start small. Unfortunately, we don't allow small businesses, thus, small businesses cannot become large businesses and we cannot grow our economy.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday May 27 2017, @10:15PM
The way out is to either find another business opportunity with a lower barrier to entry, find another country or simple take some short cuts on what is allowed. If it were illegal to eat and you were hungry, would you stop eating? ;-)
And observe that many business people are prepared to do the things you are not supposed to at every opportunity.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday May 28 2017, @09:13PM
It's called protectionism. The "players" in a market are all of a certain size, they might be vulnerable to upstarts with fresh ideas and good growth in the market, but that vulnerability can be heavily mitigated by placing these barriers to entry in laws, regulations, trade secrets, and every other mechanism you can imagine.
$20K is pretty low as barriers to market entry goes. I looked at making my own Palm Pilot to OBDII code reader dongle+software (back during the 18 months when "Palm Pilots were cool") - at that time, there were $50K barriers to entry on that market. Want our specs? Join our consortium - entry fee: $50K. And that wasn't guaranteed to make life easy by telling you things like: who supplies the connector, and can I buy them from stock or will I have to pay to make my own starting with paying for the injection molds?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday May 27 2017, @10:04PM
Intelligent posting!
I would say the primary interest is to increase the reward for successful value creators. You could buy food in the year 1600. And you can buy food in 2010. But you could not buy a computer, rocket, TB vaccine in 1600. And the real price has gone down and reliability of food has gone up. This won't happen just because people work harder per se. They have to re-think what they are doing continuously.
And the spaceship analogy is excellent. But when I test that on other people in IRL most people will fail. They will make you a nice drawing of a rocket engine exhaust. But they will not figure out that is necessary or what chain of problems to solve to get to the target. Elon Musk is likely a complete anti-thesis of this. Perhaps why he was bullied to.
Few people will imagine things that don't exist and fewer how to make them happen.
Your train of thought seems to end up in that people want someone to pay them and tell them what to do. Which will then be what employers expect of their workforce. Anyone content with bread with water and their own ideas better break free. The last step to provide with the pay and instruction is pay up front, so the whole operation will require: pay, instructions and up front cash (loan?).
Society at large will probably not act rationally so to get things done. Get independent and do it yourself.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 27 2017, @11:01PM (10 children)
Hey you, libertarian cum stain! You know we had those Bush Tax Cuts and what happened? The job creators piled up shit tons of money and didn't use it to create jobs. The job creators got their fucking incentive and they're still not doing their fucking job of creating jobs. Lowering taxes on the greedy doesn't fucking work, you moron. But you already know that. You're just another greedy piece of shit who wants lower taxes because you want to get rich quick and taxes will only slow down your meteoric rise to the billionaires club. FUCK YOU.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Justin Case on Saturday May 27 2017, @11:13PM (4 children)
You are aware Bush wasn't a libertarian, right?
Also, I'm sorry you failed your basic economics class. Pay attention next time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 27 2017, @11:39PM (3 children)
Shit, I got an A in economics, and it shows. My economics teacher was the most foul mouthed motherfucker who ever taught.
You are aware that high taxes incentivize job creation right? Because the job creators have two choices. They either give their surplus money to the government in tax, or they get rid of their surplus money by paying people to do jobs. The one thing they don't get to do is remove money from the economy by stockpiling tons of money. If the job creators choose to pay tax, then the government receives a surplus of money, and the government can afford to pay people to do jobs.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 28 2017, @02:57AM (2 children)
The unicorns make it go right? Looks like your economics class was shit. A key problem is that the same tax savings can be achieved by either paying foreign workers instead or investing in automation. Anyone who has been awake at some point during the past half century would have noticed this.
Let us note that job creation was one of the many "modest" benefits rationalized by Jonathan Swift when he discussed the considerable utility of Irish children as a nutritious food source.
You can rationalize anything from anything, especially if you outright ignore what happens in reality. It doesn't make it a good idea.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @04:38PM (1 child)
You're an idiot Khallow.
The reason why high taxes on the wealthy create more jobs is not even difficult to understand. You're showing Aristarchusian levels of incompetence with your posts here.
Higher taxes on the wealthiest discourage them from just building the largest possible estate. Knowing that after that first million dollars that you're going to be seeing less and less of the money you make beyond that is a great incentive to allow the workers to keep more of that. The workers keeping more of that means that they have more money to spend on the goods and services that they need and want. Which increases the economic activity.
Investing doesn't generate wealth in most cases. It only generates more wealth if there's sufficient demand for the things that the investments are being placed in. It doesn't matter how many pork belly futures you invest in if you're expecting to sell them in a majority Muslim country you're not generating wealth. However, if you're expecting to sell them in China you might well make a ton of money on it.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 29 2017, @03:36AM
I quite agree on the understandability of the argument. It's a typical free luncher argument. It's good for me, therefore I'll pull a bunch of reasons out of my ass to rationalize in my mind why it's good for everyone else. But maybe it's time to come up with a better understanding divorced from what benefits you personally.
Building the largest estate would a) create jobs, b) reduce the wealth of the wealthiest in a direct transfer of wealth to everyone else, and c) look pretty. It's pretty much the same effect as government wealth transfers except that we get some gaudy buildings and jobs.
Yet another reason to note that your economics training or whatever is crap. I'll note here that every job I ever had was due to investment on someone's part.
If instead, you're planning to sell them in Canada, a notorious bacon sink, you just made an investment. Yes, there's some rudimentary due diligence that you should do with an investment in order for it to actually be an investment. But you do realize that people do that, right?
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday May 28 2017, @12:46AM (4 children)
Those tax cuts were for the top rich right? not for small business or the inventor type?
Tax cut for HP makes the top richer and produces more entertaining cat-fiona-fights. Tax cuts for Joe's fuel monitor production gives more employees because that enables expansion and thus more profit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @01:12AM (3 children)
The problem is Apple and Amazon and Alphabet don't use tax cuts for expansion. They just hoard money.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @04:07PM (2 children)
You realize that the ludicrous tax laws in the US aren't helping? Things like a high base rate, and taxing money earned outside the country? Most of them are sitting on a lot of cash, but they're sitting on a lot of cash _outside the US_, because if they brought it back in to use it they'd take a huge tax hit. Last time there was a tax holiday on that particular rule they brought a huge amount back to invest. Try it again and see if the same thing happens. It's called experimentation. If it works, reform the tax law.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @04:40PM (1 child)
The problem isn't them having the money overseas and not bringing it into the US. The problem is that they're allowed to book the losses from those overseas ventures without repatriating profits. It allows them to get out of paying the taxes that they're supposed to be paying.
This isn't an issue of the taxes being too high, this is an issue of the tax code allowing them to evade taxes and there being no penalties in place to prevent this sort of thing from happening.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 29 2017, @03:44AM
And we could fix that problem by not caring about what Apple's "fair share" is supposed to be. That tax revenue is going to be flushed down some drain just like it currently is. I'd rather have serious business than serious cronyism and government corruption.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 27 2017, @11:27PM (1 child)
I'm great at thinking up stuff. I don't want someone else to give me a job or tell me what to do. Trouble is, all of my great ideas will get me in trouble with corporations. Everything I've been working on violates some patent or some copyright or some corporate terms of service. Think "tools that facilitate copyright infringement" or "tools that facilitate theft of service" and that's the kind of stuff I'm working on. Stuff that can only ever be non-commercial hobby projects. Even if I can find customers who might want to pay me, if I try to make any money by turning my ideas into profitable business, I will get sued, and I can't afford to get sued. So maybe you'd like to limit the awesome powers of corporate overlords to use intangible intellectual property rights to crush the little guy?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @01:22AM
Lol it's the bootleg cable guy. Your services are valuable to me. Shut up and take my money!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @02:42AM (1 child)
There's definitely a shortage of job makers because the people who own the companies that produce the things that people buy are too selfish to pay a decent wage.
Companies don't create jobs out of thin air, they do it in response to demand. Insufficient pay for most people stifles demand and ultimately kills jobs. Just look at Europe where they've been trying to fight recession with austerity for years and look at the progress they haven't made.
People don't generally call for privatization of companies when they're doing well themselves. It's when you've got a build up of people that aren't being given their fair share for creating wealth that you get those calls. And in situations where you've got massive unemployment.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @04:27AM
No no no; we need to abolish all tax on the rich. Don't you understand?? The job creators can't create enough jobs fast enough because they're too busy evading taxes to do any productive work!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by kaszz on Saturday May 27 2017, @10:22PM (3 children)
Previous drivers of accelerated development were WWII, space race, and the cold war. Something similar is needed to make the necessary push to drive people. The "blue sky" projects are gone, that is a problem. During WWII researchers and inventors were almost given labs and equipment to get going instantly. Bureaucrats were in many cases left out.
My suggestion: Push for Mars. Alternatively, asteroid mining.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @04:38AM (2 children)
Here's a crazy idea: Make America Great Again.
Note that my notion differs from Trump's plan to make America WHITE again.
We could repeat what worked 8 decades ago by rebuilding USA's crumbling infrastructure:
fix the roads that are full of potholes;
fix the bridges that are falling into rivers;
fix the railways that are so awful that trains can't go fast on them;
fix the water systems that leak as much as they deliver and/or that poison the populace they serve.
We could even enter the 21st Century and have 10Gb internet for everyone.
We could get serious about cybersecurity and have an internet that isn't constantly being pwned.
I'm sure that others can think of things where unemployed/underemployed people could improve USA--rather than watching USA continue its path to becoming a Third World country with a tiny number of very rich people.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 28 2017, @11:53AM (1 child)
They never stopped doing what worked 8 decades ago. They're still building new infrastructure. The problem is that building politically sexy new infrastructure doesn't maintain politically unsexy existing infrastructure.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday May 29 2017, @01:56AM
Obviously the problem is political....
There should be a priority list such that the core of the railways, roads, electrical, fiber connections are maintained at a set level. Otherwise the country could face the scenario of actually not getting around, when it matters.
A volcano eruption combined with heavy snow weather would make it really difficult to get anywhere since airplanes would suffocate in the dust and rail and road would be blocked snow etc.
Hmm.. Let's make Mars great again! ;-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 27 2017, @10:37PM (6 children)
You guys suck so I'm keeping all my disruptive ideas in my garage.
(Score: 4, Informative) by looorg on Saturday May 27 2017, @10:46PM (2 children)
Isn't he the dude getting blowjobs from Ayn Rand?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 27 2017, @11:47PM (1 child)
Dude, Ayn Rand was like totally hot.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by looorg on Sunday May 28 2017, @12:06AM
Perhaps, but you should try to refrain from sticking your dick into crazy.
(Score: 4, Informative) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday May 28 2017, @01:30AM (2 children)
Bob the Angry Flower [angryflower.com]
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @01:39AM
The tech valley billionaires have the solution: more H1B.
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Sunday May 28 2017, @12:11PM
For example, Rearden knew how to make his alloy from start to finish, not merely "I only know how to pay people to create new alloys!" Probably not good enough for the making of lunch, but he wasn't the helpless flower as portrayed in the cartoon. Meanwhile the "looters" (the various antagonists of the Atlas Shrugged story) didn't even know how to do that.
And does the "Bob the Angry Flower" comic creator know how to pay people to create new alloys? Perhaps that knowledge isn't as trivial as it is made out to be.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @02:31AM (1 child)
Rapid change in task done may still be required for economic growth under capitalism -- but that does not mean the new tasks have to be mostly doable profitably by humans (as opposed to machines).
No one would employ a trained chimpanzee to work in a modern factory or modern service provide. In the future, why would anyone want to employ robots who get sick, take vacation, sue for harassment, talk back, have highly variable output, and go on strike? Such robots will be removed from the production floor even if they cost nothing to hire. Sure, you may need to reconfigure production lines now and then to keep up with changing demands, but modern robotics makes that easier and easier.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 28 2017, @12:12PM
Unless of course, they're more profitable than the alternative. Then you'd see them all over the place.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday May 28 2017, @09:27PM
I'm sorry, do we really need to increase our standard of living?
Most everyone in the US lives in well heated and/or air conditioned buildings.
Food is readily available, clothing is practically free if you don't need to wear the latest fashion.
Flat panel screens are piling up so fast that anyone who can deal with a slightly smaller/older one can get it for free or close to it. A computer to drive that screen is less than 6 hours minimum wage, unlimited internet access is less than 4 hours minimum wage, so for 10 hours "work" asking if you want fries with that, from zero you've got access to the world's libraries, free university courses, and instant global communication.
Rent is a bit high, if you're picky where you live, but, see above about instant global communication for next to free.
I do wish that higher quality (clean, free of pesticides, growth hormones, etc.) foods were more readily available, that feels like some backsliding we've done lately. And I suppose it would be _nice_ to be able to hop a jet to anywhere in the world anytime you want - but do we "need" this? Is it even good for us?
Take a look back to 1967, when only "the elite" flew on jets more than once every few years, communication was expensive (like: 6 hours minimum wage just to talk 1:1 on the phone for an hour), food was more, many houses even in hot climates lacked cooling systems, very few childhood diseases had vaccines. Progress is good, and we've made a hell of a lot of progress in 50 years, at what point do we need to check and see if our progress is actually digging a hole for future generations to climb out of instead of just reaching for more progress?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 30 2017, @08:35AM
Really, CSM?