Last week tonight is great.

Why do we routinely vote for people and policies that actively promote programs which will hurt us?

Here John Oliver talks about the income gap in america.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfgSEwjAeno

johnson1010 wrote:Last week tonight is great.

Why do we routinely vote for people and policies that actively promote programs which will hurt us?

Here John Oliver talks about the income gap in america.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfgSEwjAeno

Those of us with grey hair will remember the '60s, and the common idea then of a future with endless free time, because automation and increases in productivity would mean a short week for workers. In a sense, this has happened. But instead of leisure time for workers, the massive productivity gains brought by the digital revolution, and hence the increased wealth, have migrated upwards to an investor class. Workers have been more or less dumped onto an increasingly small labour market. Productivity is good in itself, but how the gains achieved might be distributed is more of a problem, and inevitably a political one. A bank officer today, for example, may well be a thousand times more productive than his pen and ink and blotter predecessor of fifty years ago, but we can bet that he is not getting paid a thousand times as much, not at the mid to low levels anyway. Capital is ascendant, labour is on its knees.

Globalization has added to the wealth polarization by liberating business to seek the best deal anywhere it may exist, while keeping labour in its place, with a few exceptions. Again, capital is freed to make its best return, disproportionately for those that wheel and deal in large figures, while labour sees a downward pressure on the return for work.

This is a worldwide problem, but seems complicated by an additional factor in the US, which is a disturbing one. There is a palpable shift to the political right, among a certain segment of the population anyway, that tends to reinforce these trends. I've talked to some who see taxes and social programs as not only inefficient and poor policy, but actually immoral, even criminal. It is kind of hard to see this sort of detachment from community in our ever smaller and closely linked world. But it's there. At its most extreme, in amounts to a sort of corporate anarchy, in which those that do not find fair treatment from the business community are strictly on their own. This is significant when the real unemployment rate is perhaps 16-18%, as some noted economists have suggested. And that rate may look good a few years down the road, if projects like the Google car, and other aspects of automation start to consume the last of the major employment of the labour force.

It will be one heck of a crunch, when the absolute demand for a new paradigm of wealth distribution, and a new definition of meaningful work collides with a hard right and entrenched political sentiment.

I went leapblogging the other day across a series of articles on how the next world war will develop. I know I read about the primary factor in a book by Jarred Diamond - Collapse, but it's still eery to think how close we might be. Inequality is what will cause it, above most anything else. It's frustrating to see how there is so much half-truth for people to pull us in the wrong direction.

The next step to automation is automating caretaker tasks. What if a teacher drone can more effectively instruct school age children? All it would take is a pilot program at some private school to graduate a few classes with exceptional test results, and change would sweep the nation. There would be pockets of resistance, saying that the younger ages need human affection, but it would be hard more most parents to resist the allure of a better performing child due to being drone taught.

Or Siri-style service at checkout counters, integrated with the currently frustrating self-check counters? A few more changes, and that would be preferable to a good old fashioned disgruntled employee swiping your groceries. Or personal trainer, who instruct and modify body position by kinect-style sensor feedback.

How long until the armies of customer service reps are replaced by Siri-with-a-twist? A decade? Two?

Even if many people want human contact in service jobs, others will not. There will be advantages to getting rid of the person, both from the client side and from the business side.

I can see drones being better at doctor work as well. Obviously, we're not there yet, but it doesn't take much imagination to see how it would work. Engineers who create the drones would no longer be needed. Utilize a governance AI with a few evolutionary algorithms running at high speed, and prototypes could be printed and tested within hours by a crowd-sourced panel of NDA signing volunteers.

Unemployment will only increase I'm afraid. Wealth will migrate upward, and eventually people will start tearing the cities apart.

It will be one heck of a crunch, when the absolute demand for a new paradigm of wealth distribution, and a new definition of meaningful work collides with a hard right and entrenched political sentiment.

In a way, there is something inherently flawed with the idea of "property rights". I understand they are a saving grace in some ways, but they are also pandora's box. Imagine a corporation that is owned by a single person, yet everything is automated. He rakes in billions and does next to nothing, and his entire business is run by AI governance and drones, with a few hours a day for his strategic oversight.

In the current system, that is perfectly okay. The business is his "property". It doesn't matter that he employs no one if his products are innovative and cheap.

What's sad is that we're halfway to that point, like a frog in water that's been gradually heating up, and few people see it. We're scrambling to make new jobs and everyone has their two cents, but the real barrier to this is that efficiency within a business dictates eliminating human labor by leveraging technology. Laissez-faire America wouldn't create any more new jobs, because first we have to create new spending customers to justify the expense. The truth is that by cutting jobs, we're cutting customers who can afford to buy what's for sale.


I think we need to redefine property rights. Otherwise a few rich men will own the entire Earth, or there will be war. (I like the drama)

It grows, like a cancer...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-0 ... shows.html

An excellent example of inequality in America...a Whole Foods, a K Mart and a Dollar Store all lined up next to each other...the irony of that situation coupled with the fact that if you turn out of the parking lot to the left you enter a town where the first major business is a canine daycare center. If you exit from the right you enter a war zone and the first building you encounter has been burned and tagged. The haves and the have-nots.

Remember when the crash starting in 2007 was blamed on stupid people buying "too much house". Or even on requirements that banks loosen lending requirements? Remember NINJA loans voluntarily given to "no income no job applicants"? Why would banks do such a thing? Because Wall Street was buying up conglomerations of these loans that were fraudulently given high credit ratings. The banks writing the mortgages literally did not care if the first payment was ever made.

Now at last there are record fines for fraudulent banking practices. Yet BofA will even make money off this!

Bank of America’s projected $16 billion settlement for selling toxic mortgages is expected to be the largest in the history of corporate America, but it’s also likely to include some hidden, and significant, financial benefits for the giant bank.
http://www.newsweek.com/silver-lining-1 ... ica-263614

Until banks and Wall Street investment firms receive penalties that take their breath away and make them learn: "Holy crap, let's NEVER do THAT again!" things will never change. But obviously penalties like that will never occur as long as the procurement of congressmen and senators is considered free speech.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/08/opini ... .html?_r=0


How do we combat inequality? What's the first step? Eliminating patent and copyright protections? Eliminating rents, subsidies, tariffs? Fixing our tax code? Reformulating welfare into an incentive program?

Think of it, a guy buys a building, and some equipment and sets up an assembly line. All the people he hires which do the actual work get paid pennies, while he rakes in money.

yes, he provided the money for the building. Yes he took the risks associated with setting up the business, but at some point, after having made the first fifty million above and beyond what he invested... is it RIGHT for him to make more in a day than one of his skilled workers will make that whole year?

I don't know what the solution is, but getting rich because you had the money to start with seems like a bad system, and the income gap is the proof of it, in my eye.

It reminds me of really old city-states. They could hold the territory that they could actually personally hold. They might CLAIM to own land a thousand miles away, but if they couldn't actually control it themselves, then the people there had no need to imagine it was owned by that city state that claimed it. Now, protection of ownership is very stringent and extends way past anyone's actual ability to control that property.

My favorite example is to think of a tribe of cavemen who have all collectively killed a mammoth, but with our modern US income discrepencies. The guy who did the planning and organized everyone certainly needs to get credit for his vision that allowed them to pull down such a bounty. But then he being the 1 off the 100 who represents the wealthy 1 percent gets the vast majority of the meat for the animal that he could not have slain without the help of the rest of the tribe.

The mammath weighed 17,600 pounds, lets say. (8 tonnes)

The least prominent 40 people get 35.2 pounds of meat to share.
.88 pounds each.

The next most (wealthy) 20 people share 704 pounds.
They each get what the entire first 40 people got as a group. 35.2 pounds.

The next twenty get 1918.4 pounds to share.
95.92 pounds each. almost three times what the first 40 people had to share.
These are the "upper middle class" tribesmen.

The next 10 people get 2,112 pounds of meat.
Each individual walking away with 211.2 pounds.

Now we enter the top 10 percent of people.
The lowest 5 people of the top 10 get 1,971.2 pounds between them.
394.24 pounds each. Over ten times the amount of food than the first 40 people had to share amongst themselves.

The next 4 people get an incredible 4,804.8 pounds.
1,201.2 pounds of meat per person. These four people between them have more mammoth meat than the first 90 people mentioned. Four people with an enormous pallet of mammoth meat each, while there are some who get less than a pound.

The guy who planned it all gets 6,054.4 pounds of meat all to himself.
He very nearly has more than the first 90% of people all to himself.

Can you imagine this?

You cut the beast into thirds, roughly, and give one third to one guy, almost another third to 4 other people, then turn around and hand off a lump of meat the size of a watermellon to 40 people.

It's insane. it makes no sense.

The complex algorithm that describes capitalism is as elegant as the evolutionary algorithm that has created us. The problem with the capitalist algorithm is that, like nature, it's red in tooth and claw. We no longer let the evolutionary algorithm take our children when they are born prematurely or with a heart condition. Yet we let the capitalist algorithm put people with a sting of bad luck out onto the street.

The issue in both algorithms is that they are meant for optimization that does not include morality. The morals of consumers influences the capitalist algorithm in the sense of an input, but they do not produce the end result. Just as the morals of ancient tribes influenced the evolutionary algorithm, but did not produce the end result.

Consider the mammoth scenario, except that in a tribe of 100, a single person is responsible for the kill. He planned for a year, building a complex trap that lured and slew the animal in an isolated pool of near frozen water. It's preserved, to an extent. From both a capitalist and evolutionary perspective, he is the fittest. He need not share a thing. However, if that were the only source of meat in a hundred miles, and the only thing the tribe could potentially eat, his choice becomes one above and beyond an algorithm. It is a moral choice.

The problem with modern capitalism is that it's difficult to see moral deviations. If Bank of America charges 99 cents for something due entirely to leverage and not at all to consumer benefit, does that 99 cents get multiplied by the millions of people it's leveraged upon? No, we each forget the small slight. It's not as obvious as a single tribesman hoarding all the protein. This moral deviation due to leverage would exist even without rents or government tampering or any other negative influence. It exists as part of the algorithm.

Libertarianism and Laissez Faire capitalism would not solve this problem, because that would be the same as letting the algorithm run entirely free. The analogy to the evolutionary algorithm is that eugenics would be okay, we let the diseased and infirmed die, stop trying to feed those that can't grow their own food, and end vaccination. Neither capitalism nor evolution are moral, nor are they immoral. They are amoral algorithms, so we must correct the deviations from a neutral position.