Objectively intelligent.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

So early on in the movie Contagion they've isolated the virus and the computer spits out a DNA analysis- it includes a bat bit, a pig bit and then human parts.

I take it that sort of thing is fictional, as we don't know for certain it is from a bat? I heard it could have been anteater or snake?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangolin

[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?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

So early on in the movie Contagion they've isolated the virus and the computer spits out a DNA analysis- it includes a bat bit, a pig bit and then human parts.

I take it that sort of thing is fictional, as we don't know for certain it is from a bat? I heard it could have been anteater or snake?

If I understand correctly, it's not that the virus has bat (or other) DNA, it's that they thought it was a virus that circulating among bats and then jumped to humans.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

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 companies" create jobs. Google didn't start Google to reduce labor costs at Google. They could have just stayed in their garage smoking bud and had no labor cost. In the 80s and 90s, the companies building assembly robots created jobs, at their companies. None of that is arguable.

Robots did reduce jobs at the companies that bought the robots, but I'm not sure I see similar reductions from the e-industries?

[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.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

"Tech companies" create jobs. Google didn't start Google to reduce labor costs at Google. They could have just stayed in their garage smoking bud and had no labor cost. In the 80s and 90s, the companies building assembly robots created jobs, at their companies. None of that is arguable.

Robots did reduce jobs at the companies that bought the robots, but I'm not sure I see similar reductions from the e-industries?

Totally. But I think Sebby's argument is that they create a small number of good jobs, relatively, and possibly a large number of crappy jobs (maybe not Google, but Amazon warehouse workers and Uber drivers), and that they eliminate a lot more jobs that are better than the crappy jobs the bring.

To take Google, for example, Sebby is also missing that there are benefits to targeted advertising. If you run a B&B in a small town, Google ads are a much better way to reach people who might want your services than buying traditional broadcast or print ads. The reason why Google is so dominant is that its ads perform so well. If newspaper ads were nearly as good, newspapers wouldn't be going out of business left and right.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

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.

You are confusing consumer benefit in the broad sense with monetary profits. You get a lot of the former. You only pay taxes on the latter. You don't pay any taxes for all of the value you get from your iPhone, for example.

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.

I don't know what you mean by high and low, but I am talking proportionately. Tech companies tend to have very high fixed costs relatively to marginal costs for additional customers. It costs Facebook nothing to onboard an additional user, but they had to build a big infrastructure to offer that person its services.

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

Uber's app doesn't cost nothing to produce. It has to spend a ton to be able to offer its services.

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

They absolutely do. If United has a flight from Philadelphia to Houston, what's the marginal cost to it of filling another seat on the plane.

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.)

I agree -- it's hard for me to tell what you're talking about sometimes.

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.

Great example. The prior barrier to entry was regulatory. The only reason taxi medallions were worth so much is that they block entry. And driving a taxi is a shitty job! If the government wanted to, it could require a similar license to drive for Uber, and set minimum fares. Uber didn't directly destroy anything -- it just created a much more efficient way to connect taxis and rides, and then people realized how shitty the regulated taxi industry was in most places. Many more people are driving for Uber now than were driving taxis before. Isn't that a good thing? I can get an Uber from my house. Getting a taxi was no sure bet. Isn't that a good thing?

I can't believe it -- you're complaining about tech eliminating jobs, and your example is taxi drivers? Seriously?

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

So you're happy when government collects taxes on you indirectly through a private party, but not when it collects from you. OK. Doesn't make sense to me, but OK.

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.

Do you think technological innovation is, on balance, good for society? If so, why would you want less of it?

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.

A business that fails because it cannot compete is not an externality. And businesses replace employees with tech in order to be more efficient so they can stay in business. Do you think, boy, I wish we had more railroad porters, video-store employees and buggy-whip makers? We don't have those things because other technology came along and replaced them. You fly to Houston instead of taking an overnight train, you watch a movie on the way on a smart phone instead of carrying a VCR, and when you get to the airport you speed to your hotel in a car instead of a horse and buggy.

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 wouldn't have thought you'd be the person to have Old Left economic views about this, but OK. You want to go to the Google search bar and pay huge tax to run a search? Who thinks that's a good idea? Every using the service now would have to pay a tax to get what they get now for 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.

If you care, you can use a browser without the cookies. It's not rocket science. Most people accept the cookies because they enable a lot of value-creating stuff. Do you abstain from e-commerce?

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.

Many people talk big about how much they care about privacy, but don't actually act accordingly when presented with real-world choices.

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?

I'm in favor of rich people paying more taxes, just so we are clear.

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.

Let's change the law so that richer people pay more taxes than less rich people.

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

That farmer is almost certainly getting subsidized in a huge way by people who live in blue, urban states. Read Cadillac Desert about how we have paid huge amounts to supply Western agriculture with water. That farmer drives on a federally funded highway to his federally insured bank to cash his farm-subsidy checks for not using his federally-funded water. And the "subsidy" you care about is that he's not using a smart phone?

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.

So Wal-Mart is "tech" too, or are you inching closer to agreeing that the problems you are talking about aren't specific to today's tech industry?

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Totally. But I think Sebby's argument is that they create a small number of good jobs, relatively, and possibly a large number of crappy jobs (maybe not Google, but Amazon warehouse workers and Uber drivers), and that they eliminate a lot more jobs that are better than the crappy jobs the bring.

To take Google, for example, Sebby is also missing that there are benefits to targeted advertising. If you run a B&B in a small town, Google ads are a much better way to reach people who might want your services than buying traditional broadcast or print ads. The reason why Google is so dominant is that its ads perform so well. If newspaper ads were nearly as good, newspapers wouldn't be going out of business left and right.

I just would like to understand how the rise of e-information cost jobs. To say Amazon created jobs, but then brought in robots to eliminate them, that isn't so clear to me.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

I just would like to understand how the rise of e-information cost jobs. To say Amazon created jobs, but then brought in robots to eliminate them, that isn't so clear to me.

Netflix killed all the jobs at video stores. Craigslist killed all the newspaper jobs funded by classifieds. Apple is killing the camera industry. Microsoft killed typewriters.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Netflix killed all the jobs at video stores. Craigslist killed all the newspaper jobs funded by classifieds. Apple is killing the camera industry. Microsoft killed typewriters.

Foul truths.

See Quackser Fortune Has A Cousin In the Bronx.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Netflix killed all the jobs at video stores. Craigslist killed all the newspaper jobs funded by classifieds. Apple is killing the camera industry. Microsoft killed typewriters.

I don't normally reply to the same post twice, but when I started in, the guy who taught me commercial litigation told me: "If you are working with business people* you need to read 3 papers every day. A national paper, like NYT or WaPo, the WSJ and a local paper. They will have read all 3 and will expect you to have also."

I have never read 1 paper daily. I spend more time looking at Candy Crush hint pages than reading a paper. If people still read newspapers there would still be jobs at them, and ads. I do see though that tech killed those sweet sweet Blockbuster clerk positions.**

*He probably said "business men" but I update here.

**There is a video store hold out a mile from my house. It is not a specialty store, just a standard video store. Over the years it has struggled to get something going, adding CBD recently, looking for what it can to survive. I assumed the clients are really old people who can't sort out getting movies online. But it was deemed "non-essential," (or maybe no one considered that might still be a video store around so it wasn't listed as "essential?") and I now this lockdown will be its death. Even those old people must have sorted out Roku etc by now.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

I don't normally reply to the same post twice, but when I started in, the guy who taught me commercial litigation told me: "If you are working with business people* you need to read 3 papers every day. A national paper, like NYT or WaPo, the WSJ and a local paper. They will have read all 3 and will expect you to have also."

I have never read 1 paper daily. I spend more time looking at Candy Crush hint pages than reading a paper. If people still read newspapers there would still be jobs at them, and ads.

I disagree. People do read them. But as a means of advertising, they can't compete with other channels that are much better targeted. If you are a local business, do you spend on newspapers or Yelp? Probably Yelp first.

I do see though that tech killed those sweet sweet Blockbuster clerk positions.**

And those great, great jobs driving taxis. Those guys are driving Uber now.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

I disagree. People do read them. But as a means of advertising, they can't compete with other channels that are much better targeted. If you are a local business, do you spend on newspapers or Yelp? Probably Yelp first.

SOME people do read them, sure. But a lot fewer than used to. And that has brought ad numbers down. I remember when i had a Detroit News route. The hardest thing I ever had to do was convince my route manager that someone wanted to drop the paper. Or convince him to let me drop someone who wouldn't pay me. His attitude was non-payment was not a reason to drop a customer. Like fuck, I had to pay him for the paper to give to the guy who wouldn't pay me for it? But they did not like a circulation drop- because ad $$$.

My dad was a carpenter. He read two papers each night when he got home from work. I'm a high tech attorney. I was told I needed to read papers every day. I read none.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

SOME people do read them, sure. But a lot fewer than used to. And that has brought ad numbers down. I remember when i had a Detroit News route. The hardest thing I ever had to do was convince my route manager that someone wanted to drop the paper. Or convince him to let me drop someone who wouldn't pay me. His attitude was non-payment was not a reason to drop a customer. Like fuck, I had to pay him for the paper to give to the guy who wouldn't pay me for it? But they did not like a circulation drop- because ad $$$.

My dad was a carpenter. He read two papers each night when he got home from work. I'm a high tech attorney. I was told I needed to read papers every day. I read none.

The thing that drives most people to read newspapers is local news. The New York Times is an exception. Bezos has been trying to do the same for The Washington Post. If you're reading a paper for business news, there's the Wall Street Journal, and now a lot of more specialized outlets. People pay for those.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

The thing that drives most, but way fewer than used to, people to read newspapers is local news. The New York Times is an exception. Bezos has been trying to do the same for The Washington Post. If you're reading a paper for business news, there's the Wall Street Journal, and now a lot of more specialized outlets. People pay for those.

Fixed that for you.