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#127 Mar 23 2016 at 4:50 PM Rating: Excellent
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I stopped reading at "that's not what happens". I figured if you were wrong out of the gate, there was no reason to read the rest of your nonsense.
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#128 Mar 23 2016 at 5:52 PM Rating: Decent
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Jophiel wrote:
Medieval serfs lived better lives than cavemen in terms of housing and amenities. Absolutely meaningless but true.


If someone's actually seriously making an argument about the state of the economy by using the decline in purchasing power of a sharp pointy stick in the medieval age versus the stone age, then it's not meaningless at all. I'm just following the argument here.
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#129 Mar 23 2016 at 5:55 PM Rating: Decent
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Jophiel wrote:
I stopped reading at "that's not what happens". I figured if you were wrong out of the gate, there was no reason to read the rest of your nonsense.


Well, ignorance is bliss then. I guess when you don't have a response, the easiest course is to just ignore the argument. Not a bad course of action for one with such an utterly unsupportable position.
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#130 Mar 23 2016 at 6:14 PM Rating: Excellent
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gbaji wrote:
Jophiel wrote:
I stopped reading at "that's not what happens". I figured if you were wrong out of the gate, there was no reason to read the rest of your nonsense.
Well, ignorance is bliss then. I guess when you don't have a response, the easiest course is to just ignore the argument.

It's also easy to ignore the argument when the opening statement is laughably false and so you realize you don't really need to read the next five paragraphs Smiley: thumbsup
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#131 Mar 23 2016 at 6:17 PM Rating: Excellent
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gbaji wrote:
Jophiel wrote:
Medieval serfs lived better lives than cavemen in terms of housing and amenities. Absolutely meaningless but true.
If someone's actually seriously making an argument about the state of the economy by using the decline in purchasing power of a sharp pointy stick in the medieval age versus the stone age, then it's not meaningless at all. I'm just following the argument here.

"Farmer John is upset that his wife died in birthing because he could not afford the herb-fee to gather in the baron's wood but last winter I saw him quaff two flagons of ale while at St. Bartholomew's Feast! Surely that was coin he could have set aside! Furthermore, did you know that he sits upon a stool of hewn wood where cavemen had only rocks upon which to sit! He was even seen to fold a woolen cloth as to make a crude cushion! The luxury Farmer John does not appreciate boggles the righteous mind."
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#132 Mar 23 2016 at 6:34 PM Rating: Good
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gbaji wrote:
Jophiel wrote:
Medieval serfs lived better lives than cavemen in terms of housing and amenities. Absolutely meaningless but true.
If someone's actually seriously making an argument about the state of the economy by using the decline in purchasing power of a sharp pointy stick in the medieval age versus the stone age, then it's not meaningless at all. I'm just following the argument here.
Well, then...try making the start point of your purchasing power/poverty comparisons 1970 instead of 1900.

If I want to compare you, gbaji, today, compared to your behavioUr in the past, I compare it to when you show up in Alla's forum search...not to when you were in diapers.

Get it yet?
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#133 Mar 23 2016 at 6:47 PM Rating: Decent
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Jophiel wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Jophiel wrote:
I stopped reading at "that's not what happens". I figured if you were wrong out of the gate, there was no reason to read the rest of your nonsense.
Well, ignorance is bliss then. I guess when you don't have a response, the easiest course is to just ignore the argument.

It's also easy to ignore the argument when the opening statement is laughably false and so you realize you don't really need to read the next five paragraphs Smiley: thumbsup


Dismissing something as "laughably false", without bothering to read the explanation and support written for that thing, is a meaningless test. You could do that to anything that someone says that you disagree with. Like say, someone making the absurd claim that the earth revolves around the sun instead of the other way around. It's easy to dismiss such things. But it clearly does not make them false.

The evidence over the last century and a half resoundingly supports the model I'm using.
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#134 Mar 23 2016 at 7:07 PM Rating: Excellent
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Look, sorry you're butthurt and stuff but "meaningful" in this context only applies to what I want to spend my time on. If you want to believe that everyone gets richer when job positions are consolidated or that everyone in the silver mine gets a raise when you replace half the workers with children or whatever, knock yourself out.

Edited, Mar 23rd 2016 8:08pm by Jophiel
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#135 Mar 23 2016 at 7:18 PM Rating: Decent
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Friar Bijou wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Jophiel wrote:
Medieval serfs lived better lives than cavemen in terms of housing and amenities. Absolutely meaningless but true.
If someone's actually seriously making an argument about the state of the economy by using the decline in purchasing power of a sharp pointy stick in the medieval age versus the stone age, then it's not meaningless at all. I'm just following the argument here.
Well, then...try making the start point of your purchasing power/poverty comparisons 1970 instead of 1900.


Sorry. I used that as a starting point because that was the claim being debunked in the article I linked to about the fallacy of pointing to declining purchasing power as a problem (the Ron Paul argument). To be fair, you did say "since the 50s".

Here's the thing though. It does not matter. When you talk about the purchasing power of a dollar, you're talking about what a single dollar buys. Obviously, over time, inflation will reduce the value of a single dollar. But that's tells us nothing about our economic condition unless the total supply of dollars is unchanged. If I have 10 times as many dollars, but each can only purchase what used to cost 10 cents, the purchasing power of a dollar is 1/10th what it was. But I'm not affected at all.

Just saying that the purchasing power has "nosedived" doesn't tell us anything. You'd need to say that the average person is less able to purchase things today than he used to (I mentioned using purchasing power per hour of labor for this). The problem is that this is a much more difficult number to determine, since you have to decide which "things" to use as your metric. For example, we could use houses (in fact, someone did). But, as I pointed out, when adjusted for inflation, housing prices are only up about 20% over the last century. They're up even less over the last half a century. I think they might even be *down* relative to 1950s, since that was a boom time. I'd have to dig up the link again.

But even looking at the relative cost increase (let's just pretend it's like 10% increase in adjusted price for a house compared to the 1950s to split the difference), this doesn't tell us the whole picture. Is a house purchased today the same as a house purchased in the 1950s? Probably not. The average American house has doubled in size since the 1950s. There are more bathrooms. Bigger and more bedrooms. Bigger kitchens. More appliances. More plumbing and wiring to go with that. Phone and cable outlets. Probably better insulation. Probably more heat and cool efficiency. More likely to have heating (and more efficient heating). And I'm not even sure if AC existed then. So for 10% more of your average earnings, you're getting a far far better house.

I would assume rentals have followed the same pattern as well. The point being that you can't just look at the dollars spent, or even the dollars relative to some inflation adjusted standard. You also have to look at what you are buying. We could make the same calculations with cars. But is a car today the same as a car from the 1950s? Not even close. Even the old staple, food, has changed. Some (myself included) might argue for the worst, but the reality is that if you can avoid processed foods (and lets not forget that the foil wrapped food craze started in the 50s), I would argue that there are a lot more choices with regard to fresh and healthy foods today than you could get in your average market back in the 50s. Blame it on GMOs if you want. Dunno. And I don't think adjusted food prices are much higher (or higher at all) compared to 1950s prices. Lots fewer people die of salmonella and ecoli today than did back then though. So there is that.


I get what you're saying, I just don't agree that the facts support it. Aside from just comparing prices directly while ignoring inflation effects, can you actually make an argument that the average working class person was better off in the 1950s than today? I don't think you can. Not without ignoring a whole slew of things that directly affect quality of life. And no, I'm not just talking about 50 inch flat screen TVs. I'm talking about quality and variety of food, clothing, housing, transportation, leisure, etc. Heck. Even health care, as messed up as it is, is still far far "better" than it was back then. That's a whole topic by itself, but my point is (again) that you can't just compare the costs straight across. You have to look at what you are getting in return.

Edited, Mar 23rd 2016 6:46pm by gbaji
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#136 Mar 23 2016 at 7:25 PM Rating: Good
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gbaji wrote:
Dismissing something as "laughably false", without bothering to read the explanation and support written for that thing, is a meaningless test.
One plus one isn't three, there isn't any point reading anything beyond someone's claim that it is.
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#137 Mar 23 2016 at 7:41 PM Rating: Decent
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Jophiel wrote:
If you want to believe that everyone gets richer when job positions are consolidated or that everyone in the silver mine gets a raise when you replace half the workers with children or whatever, knock yourself out.


That's one hell of a strawman you've laid out there Joph. Nothing in my argument comes remotely close to claiming either of those things.

All I've been arguing is that workplace process improvements do not result in eternally lost jobs that can never be recovered or replaced. Implementing a new computer system that allows one office worker to do the work that used to take 3 does not actually result in the other two workers losing their jobs and never finding a new one. Again, the proof is all around us. If what you are claiming is actually true, we should have massively high unemployment. But what has actually happened is that over time labor has shifted to becoming operators/users of the new processes, making them more efficient, and thus allowing the job market to find use for them at wages similar to what they were earning before whilst doing everything by hand.

Heck. Just looking at computers in the office, what has actually happened is that businesses have discovered more need for office work as it's become easier and faster to do. There are whole portions of the company I work in that do nothing but generate reports on various metrics that probably would not have even been tracked before the days of computers (who could afford the rooms full of number crunchers to do this?). And other whole groups that do nothing but maintain the software that generate them. And other whole groups that do nothing but maintain the servers that the software runs on.

Did the introduction of CAD software eliminate the positions in your field? Or did it happen that by improving the tools themselves, it actually put people able to use them in greater demand than before? For a lot of projects there's a hard cost to benefit ratio involved. When the overhead is "hire a team of guys to design this" and the cost for that is too high for the projected value of the project, the result is that the project is dropped (or never picked up in the first place), and no one is hired at all. By making it less expensive, you can now hire people to do jobs that would not otherwise have been considered. This effect tends to more than make up for the jobs lost in the simplistic "but now 1 guy can do the work of 3" equation. More work becomes available because the market entry cost is lower.

This is the trend we've seen all along. I'm not sure how one can deny this. And even when a field is phased out, it's replaced with a similar one, often more vibrant and just as rewarding to those who enter into it.

Edited, Mar 23rd 2016 6:50pm by gbaji
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#138 Mar 23 2016 at 7:45 PM Rating: Decent
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lolgaxe wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Dismissing something as "laughably false", without bothering to read the explanation and support written for that thing, is a meaningless test.
One plus one isn't three, there isn't any point reading anything beyond someone's claim that it is.


It's a good thing that I'm not claiming that then. What I'm claiming is something that is completely consistent with the world we see around us. What Joph and Bijou are claiming is something that is completely inconsistent with the world we see around us. If they were right, we should have massive unemployment right now. We don't. Ergo, they are wrong. We can argue endlessly about why they are wrong, and what factors they're failing to take into account that cause them to be wrong, but that does not change the absolute fact that they are wrong.
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#139 Mar 23 2016 at 8:22 PM Rating: Excellent
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I like how gbaji conflates business "WILL" create more jobs with their profits with business "CAN" create new jobs.



It's cute.
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#140 Mar 23 2016 at 9:44 PM Rating: Excellent
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gbaji wrote:
Did the introduction of CAD software eliminate the positions in your field?

Of course it did. What a stupid question. When one person on a computer can do the work of three people with paper and ink, two of those people aren't needed any longer. And they don't magically just increase productivity by three times because the need for their labor is capped and if there was three times the demand for the design work than we would have had nine drafters instead of three. Back in the day when we ran numbers by hand on sheets, you'd have two or three people in the department because of the time involved. With estimating software, you only need one person (and for some companies not even that -- they just train the project managers on the software and fire the estimating department). Again, there wasn't some magical flourishing of productivity because the market is still limited by how many projects are happening at one time. You just get rid of the people you don't need.

Seriously, it's like you live in a land of unicorns and faeries or something. You, as usual, assume that if something isn't immediately happening to you it must not exist. The world's bigger than that.

Edited, Mar 23rd 2016 10:49pm by Jophiel
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#141 Mar 23 2016 at 11:44 PM Rating: Good
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Jophiel wrote:
Medieval serfs lived better lives than cavemen in terms of housing and amenities. Absolutely meaningless but true.

In fact, I bet that's what the feudal merchant class used to tell themselves. "Oh, sure, Farmer John lost his arm to an errant scythe while trying to meet the baron's tax deadline for wheat and then caught fever for six weeks while shivering in his sod hut but at least he wasn't in a CAVE. I simply can't understand why he doesn't appreciate how grand his life really is. Did you know he owns three lead-crafted spoons? Cavemen didn't own spoons. Lazy entitled lie-about is the problem here, really..."

Edited, Mar 23rd 2016 5:29pm by Jophiel


Kind of off topic a bit here, but I would love to live in a cave.
#142 Mar 24 2016 at 12:05 AM Rating: Good
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someproteinguy wrote:
The One and Only Poldaran wrote:
Americans have a surprisingly high amount to spend on developing our own **** robots. Definitely NSFW.
Smiley: eek

Smiley: um

Yeah, we might want to leave this to the Japanese. It's a solid attempt though, good to see we're making up some ground at least...

Edited, Mar 22nd 2016 12:50pm by someproteinguy


Looks like a missile turret role playing as Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs.

For anyone who hasn't seen this already... it's quite a lot better.





Edited, Mar 24th 2016 6:06am by Kuwoobie
#143 Mar 24 2016 at 7:38 AM Rating: Good
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Jophiel wrote:
You just get rid of the people you don't need.
Not to worry, they can just go down the street and get a similar or better job immediately. You know, something that is completely consistent with the world we see around us?
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#144 Mar 24 2016 at 7:58 AM Rating: Good
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Kuwoobie wrote:
someproteinguy wrote:
The One and Only Poldaran wrote:
Americans have a surprisingly high amount to spend on developing our own **** robots. Definitely NSFW.
Smiley: eek

Smiley: um

Yeah, we might want to leave this to the Japanese. It's a solid attempt though, good to see we're making up some ground at least...

Edited, Mar 22nd 2016 12:50pm by someproteinguy


Looks like a missile turret role playing as Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs.

For anyone who hasn't seen this already... it's quite a lot better.


Since we're talking about robots, Microsoft's language learning "AI" got hijacked yesterday in a completely predictable fashion. I'm almost surprised they didn't see that coming.

Edit: This selection from this article made me laugh.

Edit Again: This was too funny not to share.

Edited, Mar 24th 2016 11:00am by Poldaran
#145 Mar 24 2016 at 7:59 AM Rating: Excellent
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Yeah, "How cumzit there's not million percent unemployment??" is up there with "If we evolved from monkeys how come there's still monkeys".

Wage stagnation, underemployment, increased foreclosures, massive expansions of personal debt, increased numbers of dual-income households out of necessity, collapsing middle class, declining economic mobility and increased stratification of economic classes -- but until we have literal rampaging mobs with torches, we can insist that the system works! I mean, at that point it'll kind of be too late but that doesn't mean we can't enjoy some fiddle music until then.
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#146 Mar 24 2016 at 10:12 AM Rating: Excellent
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Kuwoobie wrote:
Jophiel wrote:
Medieval serfs lived better lives than cavemen in terms of housing and amenities. Absolutely meaningless but true.

In fact, I bet that's what the feudal merchant class used to tell themselves. "Oh, sure, Farmer John lost his arm to an errant scythe while trying to meet the baron's tax deadline for wheat and then caught fever for six weeks while shivering in his sod hut but at least he wasn't in a CAVE. I simply can't understand why he doesn't appreciate how grand his life really is. Did you know he owns three lead-crafted spoons? Cavemen didn't own spoons. Lazy entitled lie-about is the problem here, really..."

Edited, Mar 23rd 2016 5:29pm by Jophiel


Kind of off topic a bit here, but I would love to live in a cave.
There are some pretty awesome looking cave homes out there. Not sure I could get past the fear of being trapped underground in a landslide or something of that nature. Imagine that fear is probably misplaced with all the various technology and safety kind of stuff that's out there. Could probably survey the area and find some place where you weren't at risk and all, but yeah...
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#147 Mar 25 2016 at 7:50 AM Rating: Good
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someproteinguy wrote:
Not sure I could get past the fear of being trapped underground in a landslide or something of that nature.
And bears.
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#148 Mar 25 2016 at 6:20 PM Rating: Good
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someproteinguy wrote:
There are some pretty awesome looking cave homes out there.
Do you want ants?

Because that's how you get ants.
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#149 Mar 25 2016 at 6:57 PM Rating: Default
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Jophiel wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Did the introduction of CAD software eliminate the positions in your field?

Of course it did. What a stupid question. When one person on a computer can do the work of three people with paper and ink, two of those people aren't needed any longer. And they don't magically just increase productivity by three times because the need for their labor is capped and if there was three times the demand for the design work than we would have had nine drafters instead of three.


Except that 9 women can't make a baby in 1 month. Increasing the productive efficiency of each individual worker has a very different effect on the market than simply adding more workers.

Quote:
Again, there wasn't some magical flourishing of productivity because the market is still limited by how many projects are happening at one time. You just get rid of the people you don't need.


Are you seriously trying to argue that since the introduction of CAD software, the total number of draft/design projects nationwide over a year's time has not increased? That would fly in the face of everything I've seen or heard about in every other industry that has had technological labor improvements applied. The general rule is that when labor in a field becomes more efficient, the demand for that more efficient labor increases. Now, this isn't always going to result in more total workers, but overall, the effect tends to wash out, leaving us with similar employment rates over time.

Again, this is why, despite massively more efficient productivity per labor hour values today than say 50 years ago, we don't have anywhere close to a correspondingly lower percentage of our workforce employed. By your argument, every single time we make it so that one person can do the work that used to take two people, we should lose half our workers to unemployment. But that simply has not happened.

Quote:
Seriously, it's like you live in a land of unicorns and faeries or something.


Which is funny given that I'm actually pointing at the real world around us and observing that your predicted/assumed outcome hasn't happened, while you're the one putting economic theory ahead of reality.

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You, as usual, assume that if something isn't immediately happening to you it must not exist. The world's bigger than that.


Yes, it is. And that bigger world has an amazingly consistent ability to ensure that when labor becomes available, it finds a use for it. There is zero evidence of process improvements via technological advancement having any significant impact on long term unemployment in the US. Our employment rates are far more impacted by other economic factors and government policies than by the dreaded march of technology that's going to take all our jobs.
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#150 Mar 25 2016 at 7:07 PM Rating: Decent
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Friar Bijou wrote:
I like how gbaji conflates business "WILL" create more jobs with their profits with business "CAN" create new jobs.


Statistically, they are the same though. In a free market environment, any resource that can be used to make money will be used to make money. Labor is a resource. It's not going to be left idle, unless there are other conditions (like too heavy regulations) that affect the profit calculation.

Quote:
It's cute.


What's cute is selectively cherry picking just examples of jobs lost, or outsourced, or offshored, while ignoring all the jobs that are created, often as a result of the very workplace innovations that you blame for the first set. I'm looking at the entire employment picture, not just at one job or set of jobs at one company. Part of my argument is that it's a bad idea to try to protect jobs in that manner since as the jobs become less efficient, the workers lose their negotiating power in the job market while at the same time, employers will look for less expensive methods of achieving the same business end.

If you allow the natural changes and improvements to occur, and allow for people to have to change with those things, you get a much more gradual shift that both employers and employees can manage, without the kinds of massive layoffs we see in industries that try for too long to cling to old and inefficient methods in the name of "protecting jobs".
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#151 Mar 25 2016 at 7:25 PM Rating: Excellent
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gbaji wrote:
Except that 9 women can't make a baby in 1 month.
No combination and quantity of words beyond this point can save your argument.
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