“at least those people working in the sweatshops aren’t homeless”
Bizarrely enough there are many people who have jobs, yet cannot afford housing. Something about rising real estate prices.
Strange7
Karma: 2,130
A union makes sense when the workers have specialized interests, but for unskilled labor isn’t it simpler just to work through the overarching government?
Personally I would expect large corporations and the very rich to be capable of defending their position against any reasonably predictable shift in the economic environment, since they have resources and motivation to lay out more comprehensive contingency plans than anyone else. That extra productivity from “Job 2” doesn’t just vanish into the aether. Higher minimum wage means the poorest people have more money, then they turn around and spend that money at Walmart.
The ones who lose out from a higher minimum wage would be the middle managers, who are then less free to treat bottom-tier workers as interchangeable, disposable, safe targets for petty abuse. With higher wages, those workers will have more of the financial security that makes them willing to risk standing up for themselves, and specialized skills that make them more expensive to replace. That’s what wage compression, reductions in turnover, and improvements in organizational efficiency look like from the trenches.
This is an adequately accurate summary, though you may have missed the pun.
“Let’s help everyone equally, or in proportion to their needs or something” is easier to agree on than “let’s devote the entire GDP of Russia to my personal enjoyment, and maybe my friends and allies in proportion to their loyalty.” With the former, people quibble over definitions and in-groups and details of implementation; the latter, even Putin dares not propose openly.
I’m not claiming that propensity to charity or altruism causes, or even particularly correlates with, economic development. I’m just saying that economic development is good, and that it’s marginally better for the world economy when some excess food goes to a human who’ll eat it, rather than sitting in some warehouse until it rots, even (perhaps especially) if the human in question can’t afford to buy food at the going market rate. When rational people see something being squandered, they prefer to throw that resource into charity, where it will do some good, rather than preserve the wasteful status quo.
Or you are so unfocused you solve none of them?
You start with the especially vast, horrific problems which can be sorted out cheaply, like scurvy and polio and malaria, then proceed to more complicated, less severe stuff as returns begin to diminish. That’s the whole idea of evaluating medical interventions in terms of dollars-per-QALY, isn’t it?
Some combination of Social Security Disability payments, caring friends and family, private-sector charities, and hospital emergency rooms that aren’t allowed to check for ability to pay before providing treatment. It’s a bad system with a lot of cracks to fall through, and a distressing number of poor people suffer miserable pointless deaths.
Colonizing the galaxy is a political problem, not a question of engineering possibility. A sufficiently zealous world government could jump-start asteroid mining with an Orion Heavy Lifter, construct mirror arrays near the sun, and start lobbing around interstellar VNMs, all with relatively simple refinement and application of existing technologies. Problem is, the best way of putting a complete industrial base into orbit runs afoul of certain atmospheric nuclear test ban treaties.
Without a reactionless drive there’s no point sending a colony ship faster than about 60% of the speed of light. Gotta save some remass to decelerate.
It’s an investment.
When you have some asset that you don’t immediately need, and somebody else would be able to make better use of it, renting it out or giving it away enriches the whole system. Then you get to live in that richer system and enjoy the benefits. Your quality of life is better when you live somewhere with reliable electricity, uncensored internet, and trivial access to potable water, right? A fancy car isn’t much fun without fuel or decent roads.
Helping somebody on an altruistic basis is just another transfer of resources toward where they’ll be used more efficiently. It’s less directly profitable to the donor than sale or rent, but reduced transaction costs and targeting explicitly based on need means the net societal benefit can be greater.
Maximizing overall QALYs may be, in itself, a less efficient way to improve the society you live in than slanting toward helping your immediate social circle, municipality, or nation, but it’s easier for everyone to agree on, and every dollar or man-hour spent on arguments is one less to spend on getting the actual work done. Besides, we live in a world where more of the mercury contaminating fish in Lake Michigan comes from industry in China than from local sources. You never know whose problems might land in your back yard, so just go ahead and solve all of them.
All that social stuff, instinctive empathy and cultural expectations alike, is secondary. It developed so people can do the right thing without needing to understand why it’s the right thing.
Antidote to Pascal’s Wager
Pretend to be a radical environmentalist or something.
An explicit argument that lack of regulation would produce better results than the current regulatory system is not the same thing as disliking and actively opposing the current system yet having no idea what to replace it with.
I’m fully aware that there’s more to nautical charts than the water’s surface, and I used the term ‘satellite photography’ somewhat broadly. More of the deep ocean has been mapped by sensors in polar orbits, which can stay on-station indefinitely and cover the entire globe without regard for local obstacles, than ever was (or likely would have been) by surface craft and submarines.
Henry George was looking at the labor market, and pointing out that you can’t really understand the causes of large-scale unemployment, “the paralysis which produces dullness in all trades,” without looking all the way back up the supply chain, if necessary to natural resources and how they’re being used or prevented from use, until you find something necessary that’s not being supplied. Can you find a counterexample to THAT claim, a cause for general unemployment which can’t be traced back to a lack of supply?
As far as literal charts of literal bodies of water on the surface of the earth, satelite photography actually has pretty much solved that problem.
As far as metaphorical waters, human civilization is larger than most people really think, and consists disproportionately of people finding and publishing answers to interesting questions. “Don’t assume the waters are uncharted until you’ve done at least a cursory search for the charts” is sound advice.
A poorly put together gun is perfectly capable of crippling the wielder, and most bombs light enough to throw won’t reliably kill everyone in a room, especially a large room. Also, guns are harder to get right than bombs. That’s why, in military history, hand grenades and land mines came first, then muskets, then rifles, instead of just better and better grenades. That’s why the saying is “every Marine is a rifleman” and not “every Marine is a grenadier.”
A well-made Friendly AI would translate human knowledge and intent into precise, mechanical solutions to problems. You just look through the scope and decide when to pull the trigger, then it handles the details of implementation.
Also, you seem to have lost track of the positional aspect of the metaphor. The room outside represents the future; are you planning to stay behind in the garbage compactor?
Just to make completely sure I understand you here… you went looking for something that’s not a natural resource underlying major economic issues, but could still affect those issues, and the best answer you could come up with was the sun ? The local star, that gigantic nuclear furnace whose radiant energy is the source of power for all photosynthetic life on earth, excepting maybe some geothermal-powered grow-lights in Greenland or something. That sun, that’s the one you’re referring to?
If solar energy flux abruptly changed by even one percent, up or down, or was widely anticipated to do so, i don’t think unemployed ice cream manufacturers and salespeople would be the main economic consequence, or even noticeable among all the other chaos.
There might be an ‘extinct in the wild, building up a viable breeding population in captivity’ situation, though.
So start with a quick sweep for functional-looking knives, followed by pieces of armor that look like they’d cover your skull or torso without falling off. No point to armor if it fails to protect you, or hampers your movements enough that you’ll be taking more hits from lost capacity to dodge than the armor can soak up.
If the walls don’t seem to have closed in much by the time you’ve got all that located and equipped, think about the junk you’ve already searched through. Optimistically, you may by this time have located several instances of the same model of gun with only one core problem each, in which case grab all of them and swap parts around (being careful not to drop otherwise good parts into the mud) until you’ve got at least one functional gun. Or, you may not have found anything that looks remotely like it could be converted into a useful approximation of a gun in the time available, in which case forget it and gather up whatever else you think could justify the effort of carrying it on your back.
Extending the metaphor, load-bearing gear is anything that lets you carry more of everything else with less discomfort. By it’s very nature, that kind of thing needs to be fitted individually for best results, so don’t just settle for a backpack or ‘supportive community’ that looks nice at arm’s length but aggravates your spine when you actually try it on, especially if it isn’t adjustable. If you’ve only found one or two useful items anyway, don’t even bother.
Medical supplies would be investments in maintaining your literal health as well as non-crisis-averting skills and resources, so you’re less likely to burn yourself out if one of those problems gets a grazing hit in. You should be especially careful to make sure that medical supplies you’re picking out of the garbage aren’t contaminated somehow.
Finally, a grenade would be any sort of clever political stratagem which could avert a range of related bad ends without much further work on your part, or else blow up in your face.
Alright, so you bring this alleged time traveler with you to visit two or three different psychologists, all of whom are appropriately surprised by the whole ‘time travel’ thing but agree that you seem to be perceiving and processing the facts of the situation accurately.
Furthermore you have a lot of expensive tests run on the health and functionality of your brain, and all of the results turn out within normal limits. Camera-phone videos of the initial arrival are posted to the internet and after millions of views nobody can credibly figure out how it could have been faked. To the extent that introspection provides any meaningful data, you feel fine. In short, by every available test, your sanity is either far beyond retrieval down an indistinguishably perfect fantasy hole, or completely unmarred apart from perhaps a circumstantially-normal level of existential anxiety.
Now what?
We’re all empiricists here, so let’s run an experiment. You’ve got this theory that gjm won’t understand if you try to explain. How ’bout you stop rehashing that, actually try to explain some of those technical terms you mentioned earlier, and see how your theory holds up?