> The costs of too many unemployed and underemployed is far too high on multiple levels including to those who are not in either group than any social or welfare net and it's absence leads to higly unstable and fractured societies.
Excellent comment.
Some points to consider:
* Poverty is not the problem. Westerners make a big deal out of poverty. They need to believe that poverty is the worst thing in the world and that buying things is the key to happiness. This is obviously not true and a stroll through the many slums of the world will reveal that some of the happiest people in the world are very, very poor. Marx was right about this.
* Unemployment is the problem. Unemployment really is the worst thing in the world. It's something that's difficult to really understand: unemployment is like an invading army of Mongols. Unemployment doesn't just destroy one life -- it destroys families and, on a large enough scale, it can destroy whole cities. It was unemployment that burned Detroit to the ground. It is unemployment that will destroy Baltimore [1]. I say again unemployment is a national security threat far more serious than anything else out there. Marx was right about this too.
* Welfare is the natural state of humanity. Again Western propaganda warps the truth. If you believe the propaganda America is full of self-made men who forged brilliant fortunes despite government interference. This is obviously a lie to even the most casual observers. Westerners benefit tremendously not just from parental welfare (seriously, look at college tuition prices) but they are the beneficiaries of an extraordinary historic investment. (Which, many would say, was itself the result of historic theft and literal slavery.) Marx was right again.
* The key point: feudalism is exactly what we have today. It's difficult to see this because there's so much propaganda in the way but I think people are starting to pick up on it. Certain people enjoy tremendous aid and support and all types of valuable welfare while others are thrown to the wolves. And it's not clear who is doing the choosing or how or even why. The numbers are breaking through though: the falling life expectancy, the total loss of socio-economic mobility [2] and the rapid decline of historical social norms. A historically unprecedented binge of private debt in the early 2000s managed to delay this but now the debt binge is over and what we're seeing is the emergence of an American serf class. (Or rather the normalization of serfdom -- arguably this is nothing new for minorities in many parts of the country.) Eventually the serfs may get angry but what's the worst that could happen? (Marx was probably right here too.)
I'm not a fan of basic income. Basic income can lessen the worst symptoms of the real disease -- mass un-and-under-employment -- but it isn't a cure. And I suspect in the end private producers will capture much of the basic income surplus either in the form of depressed wages or exporting the true costs somewhere else (probably the environment). People don't appreciate (1) the extraordinary lengths private producers will go to in order to avoid taxes and (2) how accommodating politicians are to help private producers and so (3) in the long run, in any conflict between private producers and private labor, private producers always win unless the government steps in to help labor.
(Remember the only reason governments exist at all is to protect against private predation. All of this comes back to the fact that feudalism works! For much of history, for thousands of years, most of the surplus was wholly captured by a few families.)
The right solution is probably something like a Job Guarantee [3]. There's a lot of details that need to be worked out but the basic principles are sound: (1) (involuntary) unemployment must be avoided and causes tremendous harm (2) the government is never going to run out of money and (3) there's always some productive work to be done even if that work is mispriced/underpriced/non-priced by the market. Let the government step in as the employer of last resort and at the least we could slow the bleeding.
It's too bad to see all this work being done on basic income. It's a very seductive idea and it has an element of the underpants gnome logic to it which is very hard to resist. (Step 1: Give people money Step 2: ???? Step 3: Profit!). Giving every citizen a job is a much harder problem and if you buy into the strong AI thesis that problem might not even seem worthwhile.
>But even if we assume that all who are directly forced out of employment by machinery, as well as all of the rising generation who were waiting for a chance of employment in the same branch of industry, do actually find some new employment – are we to believe that this new employment will pay as high wages as did the one they have lost? If it did, it would be in contradiction to the laws of political economy. We have seen how modern industry always tends to the substitution of the simpler and more subordinate employments for the higher and more complex ones. How, then, could a mass of workers thrown out of one branch of industry by machinery find refuge in another branch, unless they were to be paid more poorly?
and
>To sum up: the more productive capital grows, the more it extends the division of labour and the application of machinery; the more the division of labour and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.
Yet by the 1860s, real wages and standard of living had already risen substantially from the level they were at when Marx penned the above.
He was a totally irresponsible and self-absorbed demagogue whose lies wreaked terrible damage upon society.
To see you elevating him in such a manner is disappointing to say the least.
Happiness is correlated not so much with one's absolute wealth but rather with one's relative wealth compared to others in the local community. Even within those slums there is a wide range of incomes, and I think you'll find that the very poorest of the poor in a particular area are usually rather unhappy.
A trivial google search will weed out these papers. They wouldn't make it past even the least skilled graders at any institution I'm familiar with... and if they did I think it would be the student who was really harmed, not the field.
Except it's not generated. A simple google search [1] reveals there's at least one paper out there that contains a structurally identical phrase [2]. The "Dada Engine" just takes real papers and substitutes nouns and pronouns. A similar strategy could probably be used on most any academic paper. But it does appeal to those who would never attempt to read these papers in the first place.
> The "Dada Engine" just takes real papers and substitutes nouns and pronouns. A similar strategy could probably be used on most any academic paper.
I dare you to do this on e.g. a Physics paper. This doesn't mean badly written Physics papers don't exist, but unless it's an awful paper or you aren't familiar with that field, the statistics and data analysis should stand on it's own. So you always have this fallback. Of course they aren't infallible either, but it's one extra BS detection layer.
For social science, extra BS detection could be had via reference checking. Unfortunately, this is effort and tedious, in part because almost all papers are long-winded and hard to read. So instead, form/style/reputation of cited authors/buzz-words is used. All of these are easy to fake.
I don't know what the solution is. I've seen in Philosophy, students would mark text with logic symbols. Then, you can see a bit more easily if "therefore" really means something follows. Maybe that kind of rigorousness is needed, in an explicit form?
But you're right in that it's mostly laziness, and the random generators don't hold up to too much scrutiny. It's more that it's a mirror, a way of pointing out the shortcomings of the field. Which is why it's funny.
The rest of the world is perfectly happy with universal healthcare, strong social safety nets, and "handouts" to children.
How do you think Brexit was sold to the British? Do you realize that the Brexiters (and all the European nativists) have been selling their agenda primarily on the basis that it would mean more handouts?
America is different. And we all know what that difference is. Americans are very much unique in rejecting basic social guarantees out of the fear that the "wrong people" will benefit.
I don't think that this is due to "fear that the 'wrong people' will benefit". I think the fear is that such programs will sap our will to improve. We fear becoming European. We fear becoming docile wards of the state. Keep in mind that everyone in the US descends from people that decided that the risk of exposure, wolves and bears was more tolerable than staying with their peers.
We now stand at a crossroads unseen by past humanity: unnecessary man. How do we deal with the fact that a portion of our population, perhaps even half, is quickly becoming a millstone about society's neck? Ideas like UBI are our first attempt to deal humanly. Soon we'll probably add to UBI voluntary sterilization or other population controls. How will we collectively in the West solve this? Burdening our State coffers by maintaining useless populations might not be the best thing.
Taxation doesn't distort the economy. This is such a nonsense statement that it's difficult to say it's even "wrong" -- it's simply meaningless. Taxation and the fundamental ability of the sovereign to create demand for its money tokens is the very basis of any modern, capitalized economy. There is a strong argument to be made that taxes drive money and make economic exchange possible [1].
(BTW, Hacker News is simply terrible at discussing economics. This comment is hardly unique.)
> Broken Window Fallacy
The entire thread and discussion is a bit off-putting but it's worth noting that the question is, as always, what to do about unproductive assets. Nobody is advocating that healthy, able-bodied people should all receive free money from the government. That's why the Broken Window Fallacy is stupid. It's a fallacy against a straw man.
And yes, when it comes to unproductive assets there's good reason to believe that the government should step in and act as the "producer of last of resort." There's always work to be done. The government is never going to run out of money. And, in reality, you're going to end up giving these people money anyways (unless you want to see women and children starving the streets) so you might as well try to see some returns. I've never been a fan of basic income but a Job Guarantee[2] makes perfect sense. Finland would be far better off putting these people to work for the government. Basic income in this form (giving people free money while encouraging them to go to work for private producers) can, ironically, depress wages, unfairly subsidize badly managed firms, and ultimately hurt the economy. Unfortunately westerners are terrified by the spectre of communism so you don't get this sort of large scale public production any more.
>the question is, as always, what to do about unproductive assets.
If we consider the goal of society to be increasing overall utility, then someone enjoying their free time is not unproductive because they are producing utility (for themselves). There may be more productive things they could be doing, but we shouldn't ignore that baseline. If the work offered by a Job Guarantee scheme is not producing as much utility for society, then it would be more efficient to just give them the money.
This entire article is bullshit clickbait designed to appeal to select baseless biases.
It offers no meaningful content except for this single sentence:
"The Register has learned of one customer in retail with 80,000 PCs which was informed by Oracle it was in breach on Java."
There are no further details about why this customer was "targeted" or the nature of their licensing deal with Oracle.
I would think after all these years people would know that (a) the Register is a well-known source of fake news/clickbait/misleading headlines (b) Java is open-source (full-stop) and wholly free software and (c) products like "Java SE Advanced Suite" have nothing to do with the Java language or the JDK. (Though I can see why (c) would be confusing, though Sun started this product of calling everything Java XXX (tm).)
It's a shame that such an article gets written to feed advertisers useless clicks but it's really disappointing to see it on the hacker news front page.
Yeah I'm not in love with Java, but let's also not forget that Google has successfully extracted Java from Oracle's hands at this point, to a billion-or-so installation extent.
One could argue that the Java ecosystem was already pretty fragmented and weird anyway: Java Card, Java in the browser, all the many versions of the JVM on every platform, and open source JVM "forks"... right?
Sure, but then Google went and added another billion plus installations of a new fork that only shares very superficial ties with normal Java (in reference to Dalvik, which has been replaced but still defines the intentions Google had as far as staying compatible).
And to add insult to injury, they've gone and fragmented Java on that platform too.
Right now on Android you can have:
Java "6.5" hybrid, Java 6 with some Java 7 features
(Overwhelming majority of developers are stuck with this, and this is where an Android project defaults to.)
Java 6 with some Java 7 and 8 features but no Java 8 APIs
(Retrolambda)
Java 8 without the proper Java 8 APIs, but breaking several popular tools for Android development
(Jack + Devices not on Android N)
Java 8 with proper Java 8 APIs, but breaking several popular tools for Android development
(Jack + Devices on Android N)
I've always felt that Oracle should have some legal recourse for what Google did. It honestly doesn't feel that different than what Microsoft did with Visual J++ and we saw how that went down. It's a shame it's come down to the case for copyrighting APIs instead of the case for punishing Google for subtly breaking Java's maturity on their platform while benefiting from calling it "Java".
