Objectively intelligent.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

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.

I already am. As my profit goes up because tech decreases my costs of operation, the taxes I pay increase. You seem to want me to pay again on top of that.

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 costs.

It does not as a rule have high fixed costs. That only occurs as it ramps up initially. FB has very low operating costs relative to its revenue. GM could never approach that in 1000 years.

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

I was focusing on Uber, which is an app. (That stupidly decided to create a backbone of physical operations for some bizarre reason.)

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

I know oil has been low for a while, but airplane flights do not fit in the low marginal cost bucket.

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.

It's difficult to define "tech" as it includes myriad companies and in some cases old staid companies employing tech fixes. (By way of example, IBM was a stodgy, failing computer company that now sells shitty predictive software and would be considered a tech company.)

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.

Taxi drivers who drive for Uber do not make more money as a result of Uber. Uber utterly destroys their barrier to entry, allowing for hundreds if not thousands of more competitors on the street each day.

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.)

Did I not say, "Charge Me More for Tech"? I kinda think that's the point I made three posts ago? Just so explicitly.

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.

Not if you simply charge me more for the tech. This would cause a smoothing of the disruption, as adopters wouldn't be so quick to eliminate labor.

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.

The person laid off is the externality. And you're cherry picking business closures. The bigger set of layoffs are not accruing from businesses closing, but from businesses replacing employees with tech.

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.

I think generally the govt should tax tech more robustly, which would then compel tech to charge me more. At the same time, govt should place a huge tax on the sale of people's personal information by firms like FB and Google. That's a staggering cash pile for the safety net enhancement.

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.

I specifically never joined FB. Yet my wife advises that to the extent I've been tagged somewhere, they have a folder on me.

I don't find anything about FB valuable. But they've placed a value on what they've learned about me by placing cookies in websites I've visited without my knowledge or consent.

FB can build whatever data base it likes, but to me and those like me, it's basically a peeping tom. I rather see Zuckerberg dead than give him any info or any consent, and yet he's made money off me nonetheless.

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

I need to read up on the collapse of Big Horsing.

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 it's govt or nothing, then the question becomes, which taxpayer bears the burden? That's where this interesting: The Tech titan who makes XXXXXXXX off the sale of labor-reducing products? Or the average person who realizes XX benefit from the products?

When we decide to figure out who pays the freight for the safety net expansion here, the opthamologist feels the pinch a whole lot more than the tech titan. Progressive taxation doesn't even the score given the massive income disparities there.

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.

I'd prefer to see Lanier's idea of making tech pay for private information come to fruition. But it's way too out of the box to happen.

I'd go with UBI. But not as an add-on -- as a replacement for the administrative agencies that currently run the programs that comprise the welfare state.

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

I never said I didn't. And that farmer is probably not getting his money's worth versus the increased taxes he's paying.

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

The previous analysis.

Wal Mart buys inventory at obscenely low prices. (I represented one company Wal Mart put out of business by simply demanding to pay less for product, after having become 75% of its business). Wal Mart is a bully, nothing more or less, just like Amazon. There's nothing innovative or defensible about it at all.

And Wal Mart's labor force is subsidized by our social safety nets.