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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

The tech is worth far, far more than the amount for which it is sold. This is its biggest selling point.

If you pay XXXX in wages, and I sell you tech that eliminates those wages, that tech is worth more than X. I have simply chosen to sell you the tech at basement prices to grab all of the market.

In other words, you say tech companies are creating massive benefits for the rest of society far exceeding their profits. If that's true, people like you who benefit can afford to pay something in taxes to help with the problems created by all those people using that tech.

(Later, I will raise that price.)

Tech *is* different in ways you are struggling to articulate, and one of them is that we are talking about businesses with high fixed costs and low marginal costs. Since the rational thing to do is price to marginal cost, that leads to low prices. Google has owned search for a long time, and has never started charging for it.

Tech, and most notably apps, which cost nothing to produce, are unlike previous innovations.

What tech company that you know of has gotten big selling "apps"?

Also, there are other industries with high fixed costs and low marginal costs. Pharma. Airlines. Telecoms.

It's difficult to have this conversation with you about "tech" since you can't even seem to describe a single company that fits what you're saying.

Capitalism is arguably too antiquated to address the disruptions caused by them because the extreme deltas between the cost of labor they eliminate and the cost to produce them, and the cost at which they can be sold, are so extreme. There's no smoothing in the adjustment from prior labor to tech replacing that labor. In the case of things like Uber, it's near immediate, and severe.

Thing like Uber? You're talking about taxi drivers who now drive for Uber? Is that really a change? The people who got killed were the people who invested in medallions, but that's a story about bad capital investment, not about labor.

I'm not going to argue with what can occur. I am arguing with whether I should be compelled to subsidize a safety net for the externalities.

You can always be counted on to be selfish. (But you're going to pay either way, because there is no world in which a monopolist (by your description) incurs an additional cost and does not pass it on to its users.)

All of the work in your sentence is done by the word "subsidize." You are comparing where we are to some but-for world in which we all get all of the advantages of technological growth but someone else somehow makes the disruption to existing enterprises go away. Yes, if that's the alternative then any other world where you don't get ponies all the time is worse.

True. That's pulling in some stuff beyond this discussion.

Except that monopoly is the only market failure you've stumbled on in this conversation. Competition between business that causes less efficient businesses to fail is not an externality.

I have not read all of Lanier's books simply for fun (although they are entertaining). I have read them because I think he advocates for a tax scheme and form of income to consumers (being paid for use of their info) which would avoid some of the suffering of labor rendered redundant by tech.

Your view - simply make all of us pay more in taxes for a bigger safety net - is neither creative nor realistic. It's an old D platform plank mixed with a European welfare state policy. I think forcing tech to pay people for collection of their data, and forcing consumers of that data from tech companies to pay a special add-on tax, can pump more than adequate dollars to the people rendered redundant. It'd also force the very worst tech companies (google and FB), which live on gobbling up info (often sleazily) and selling it, to shoulder the majority of the costs.

I asked, which side are you on? If you are committed to using the government's powers to make things better for people, great. If you are committed to that only if it doesn't cost you anything, whatever.

Not exactly. I loathe FB and have never participated in it. However, it has a dossier on me, and every other non-FBer in existence. Much of the really useful data is not provided freely, but researched and compiled by companies like FB. Raw, it's nearly impossible to understand (years of playing with Google Analytics taught me that). You can only take away broad meta points. But drilled down to individual profiles using various cookies in various websites it places all over the internet, FB and Google can, as we saw in 2016, target exactly who a candidate needs to go out and vote.

And FB has done this by forcing every website selling anything to put one of those dumb "Like" buttons on their site or use FB as a login.

I don't like FB either, but they haven't "forced" anyone to do anything. They've created something that lots of people find valuable, and it's free.

Henry Ford didn't put 1/1000th of the people out of work that tech does every year.

Sure he did. It has been happening for hundreds of years.

And when you're saying "govt," what you really mean is "taxpayers." Why should a farmer in Idaho who still uses a flip phone and files his taxes on paper have to subsidize via increased taxation a safety net that would not need to be expanded exponentially but for tech? Let tech do that.

Setting aside the question of ethics -- I'd be happy to address it, but since you're fundamentally selfish I'm not sure what the point is -- the answer is, it's government or nothing. No one else -- not the Boy Scouts, not Rotary, not the Methodist Church -- has the ability to create some kind of social safety net.

If you concede that it would be better to have a better safety net to help people who are victims of social change, great. When push comes to shove, you seem to be saying that it needs to done, so long as someone else (not you!) pays for it.

The farmer in Idaho benefits indirectly in all sorts of ways from technological innovation, as do you.

(This also applies to Wal Mart and Amazon, for some similar and some different reasons.)

What applies to Wal-Mart? Are you pointing out that their innovations put countless Main St. stores across the country out of business?