Fantastic_T

>1) Vote for politicians who are going to create real structural change in society, e.g. Bernie

Bernie Sanders 2011: American dream more apt to be realized in Venezuela where incomes are more equal https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/must-read/close-the-...

Six years later, Venezuelans are facing malnutrition from severe shortages in basic goods. 75 percent of Venezuelan lost 19 pounds in 2016:

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2017/02/19/Venezuela-...

I don't think any other oil economy has seen 75 percent of the population lose 19 lb in a year from malnutrition. The total ignorance of Venezuelan economic officials is what is behind the severity of the shortages. This quote from 2011 is emblematic of that:

“The law of supply and demand is a lie,” Karlin Granadillo, the head of a price control agency set up to enforce the new regulations, said on state television. “These are not arbitrary measures. They are necessary.”

http://www.pressherald.com/2011/11/26/venezuelas-price-contr...

For reasons like this, I find the promotion of socialism to be morally reprehensible.

Ostler was a human job. The parent comment implied that horses had jobs.

The cost of automated processes approaches zero over time, because automation can be scaled up so easily, so the cost of human labour, and scarce natural resources, will always trend toward 100% of the cost of production inputs.

>There is no fundamental relationship between taxing profit and investment.

The sole motivation for investment is profit. As profit declines, fewer investments are justified by the projected ROI.

>If a company makes 20 million a year after tax it is not going to drop everything and stop making a profit at all if it starts making 15 million a year after tax.

There's no way a party can know beforehand how much profit, if any, there will be. The estimated possibility of profit is adjusted for the estimated risk of loss, to get the projected ROI. Higher taxes reduce the projected ROI, because they reduce the size of the possible profit.

>Horse jobs (horses are a special and strange kind of human) are nil.

There is no such thing as a horse job. Horses are not people with legal rights. They are property, that was replaced as soon as a better machine came around.

Humans aren't horses. Horses can't buy an automobile or a computer. The number of registered automobiles has gone from 126 million in 1960 to over 1.2 billion in 2012, which is a 4X increase per capita. The number of people owning smartphones (a type of personal computer) has gone from 122 million in 2007 to 2.5 billion in 2017.

Could you explain a little more explicitly what you are referring to, and what you think the solution will be?

>Average wage can go up while national income goes down.

Only sustained increase in national income can support sustained wage growth. Wage growth that comes out of increasing labour's share of national income is capped, at whatever capital's share of national income is. Once labour's gone from 60% to 100% of national income, no more growth can come from this source. Wage growth that comes out of growth in national income has no natural limit, since national income has no inherent cap.

What this means in practice is that wages will grow far more from growth in national income than from labour growing its share of national income.

In other words, growing the pie is a far more effective strategy for fostering wage growth than trying to increase labour's share of the pie.

A real world demonstration of this principle is the last 200 years of wage growth history: wages have grown something on the order of 20X since the early 1800s. That is something like 10X more than the maximum growth that would have been possible through only increasing labour's share of the pie.

If growing labour's of the pie comes at the expense of even a slight bit of long term average economic growth, then on a long enough time scale, workers will be worse off, as they lose out on a recurring exponential boost for a one-time boost. The former is guaranteed to exceed the latter over the long run.

>If you pay your robot maintenance team of 10 each $100k a year to be able to fire 30 workers who used to make $30k a year, total wages go up, average wage goes up, but the group of workers feels worse.

It's important to understand that automation does not only help highly skilled workers. Mechanisation/automation make complex work more simple to do, and makes expensive equipment cheaper to buy. This means things like starting an advanced business become far easier and more accessible to the masses.

Historically, we've seen increases in productivity, which is mostly a result of increasing automation, be associated with increases in not just average wages, but median wages as well. The typical person, meaning the masses, are better off from automation, and any policy that slows the rate of automation, like taxing those who invest in automation, harms the masses.

Right, but who knows how property is best configured to serve society. Given the market's profit loss system aligns the interests of private investors with the interests of society, private investors do. Not only do they have the right incentives, they have the local knowledge about a particular segment of the economy, that big picture politicians have no hope of acquiring when creating their clumsy plans.

A spending plan that's imposed with a stroke of a pen, and that recklessly interferes with hundreds of millions of people, and forces them into economic relationships with people based on crude categorisations, like income levels, and simplistic formulas, like those that determine eligibility for government assistance programs, is no substitute for the intelligently formed personal relationships and market transactions that spontaneously emerge when property and contracting rights are respected and protected. The latter is based on the unique knowledge of hundreds of millions of people, that is aware of local conditions and opportunities for optimisation.

As for slaveowners, what they have in common with socialists is a belief that they have a right to forcibly confine those who refuse to surrender their rights to them.

>If a company invests their excess cash then that money is spent and is no longer profit and no longer taxed.

I was using a simplified example that ignores deductions. You're right of course.

But that doesn't change the fundamental relationship between taxing profit and investment.

Even if all reinvestment is made tax deductible, a tax on profits still reduces the incentive for individuals to invest in corporations, since all investment decisions are based on ROI projections, and with higher taxes on profits, ROI declines.

Moreover, sometimes it is more effective to sit on profits, and wait for a good opportunity to appear, and taxing all accumulated profits creates an incentive to not do that.

>Industrial machines such as the Jacquard Loom could only affect one industry at a time. And in doing so we brought about the service economy.

The power loom was but one variation of a more fundamental technology: the steam engine, and more generally, the combustion engine.

Beyond engines, the Industrial Revolution saw a rapid shift to all kinds of mechanisation, almost all of which were made possible by combustion engines. This affected countless occupations. The occupation of the Luddites is but one example. It was not limited to them.

I am not at all concerned about the speed and breadth of soon-to-occur automation. Automation reduces costs, leading to people having more money to spend on new types of products/services. The cost of a product/service being roughly equal to the human labor needed to make it, we will always consume the same amount of human labor (subject to changes in the supply of labour, as people voluntarily drop out of the work force as their prosperity increases), because a reduction in the consumption of labour in one field (as a result of automation), leads to consumer savings, which are spent on consuming labour in another field.

Please do dig it up, because I find it highly unlikely that in an environment where the average wage increases by 20% over a generation, that the children of those who had been in one of the many occupations that had been made obsolete by automation were not better off than their fathers were at the best of times.

If it was a general rule that the children of those who lose their job to automation are worse off than their parents, the majority of the population would have seen its quality of life degrade over the last two hundred years given most occupations that existed at the beginning of the period have been made obsolete or mostly obsolete since that time.

Yep I assumed they believed in tech unemployment but I checked my assumption and couldn't find any evidence for it.

However I will say that in the long run it is very unlikely that the majority of Luddites were not far better off after the power loom than before. The quality of jobs available for the average person dramatically improved over the course industrialization, because automation increases human prosperity.

The Luddites were wrong in the sense that they and their children for the most part had far better jobs than they did before the power loom. Automation has always caused improvements in the occupations that exist.

I can't find anything to suggest that you are wrong. I can't find any evidence that the Luddites themselves believed in technological unemployment.

Corporations also have record high corporate debt levels right now. Cash reserves are vitally important as cushions to provide stability in a volatile economy that crashes every few years. Companies correctly became more conservative post-financial-crisis and built up their financial reserves, and that makes the economy as a whole less fragile and likely to suffer a cascading debt default crisis.

The attitude of wanting to violate other parties' property rights invariably comes down to a sort of arrogance in believing that the way the market works and the way people manage our own property is incorrect and that you have a better idea on how they should be using their property.

If you take a dollar for every four dollars of corporate profits, corporations (meaning the compacts created between shareholders) will have less money to invest with. The shareholders will also have less incentive to reinvest their dividends. Capital stock (e.g. factories, restaurants, vending machines) is the basis of all productivity, and capital stock only increases through investment.

So taxing profits reduces the growth in productivity. Productivity growth is the main source of wage growth and indeed that slowdown in productivity growth is the source of most of the slowdown in wage growth that has been seen in the US over the last 40 years.

So basically you believe in the Luddite fallacy that automation hurts workers.

http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6717/economics/the-luddite...

Welfare hurts incentives and misallocates capital from those who invest it most effectively to those who reproduce most quickly.

You're deflecting with a change of subject. This is the kind of attitude that is typical of the pro-censorship crowd.

It's not finite but inflation is paid out to ETH holders in proportion to the amount of ETH they stake for validation, so on the balance, ETH holdings experience no dilution. Rather, there is constant (and gradual, at a rate of about 1-2% per year) transference of ETH value from inactive holders, who don't stake their ETH, to active holders, who do.

So I think ETH can be both digital oil (or digital solar, if you want to be PC) and digital gold.

Not with the block size limit serving the market for payments to the first competing cryptocurrency (like Ethereum) that develops a decent wallet and gets critical traction.

If there's a shift, it can quickly turn into a flood, since much of the value of bitcoin is based on speculation, rather than more robust demand from use as a payment vehicle.

I was one of the first people to join /r/bitcoin, and was banned years later, after the block size debate started, for being on the large block side.

Hearn is right. The wider world simply doesn't know how dysfunctional Bitcoin is, mostly because of the censorship taking place on the main communication channels. You will literally be banned from /r/bitcoin if you post a comment notifying other users that comments are being deleted.

The blacklist article is pure FUD, seemingly written with the sole intent of smearing Hearn.