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#77 Mar 22 2016 at 1:59 PM Rating: Good
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You could always get the VirtuaDolls controller for VR. Don't look that up.
#78 Mar 22 2016 at 2:00 PM Rating: Excellent
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#79 Mar 22 2016 at 2:07 PM Rating: Excellent
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The One and Only Poldaran wrote:
You could always get the VirtuaDolls controller for VR. Don't look that up.
We'll save that for after the kids go to bed. Smiley: wink
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#80 Mar 22 2016 at 4:49 PM Rating: Decent
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Jophiel wrote:
Kavekkk wrote:
If you own your house, sure. Food and appliances are both very cheap, rent is the main expense for low income people by far.

I was thinking the same and it's shades of the whole "poor people don't know how good they have it with their color televisions and microwave ovens" argument while they struggle to pay rent and keep the utilities connected (much less acquire a doctor's bill).


And that's not really true either though. Here's a chart showing housing prices adjusted for inflation. It's risen a bit, but not that much, over the last century (maybe 20% higher today relatively speaking). Nominally, rents should be a function of housing costs (it's trickier getting adjusted rent figures), so differences in real relative costs have less to do with actual increases in costs, but in other factors.

One of the factors for overall relative housing costs is something like larger rental spaces. People don't rent the equivalent of a room with shared facilities anymore. That's going to affect any "average rent cost" calculation. Today, people expect rental units to come standard with things like electrical outlets, heat and often AC, a complete functioning kitchen, indoor plumbing, bathroom, etc. Call us victims of our own rising standard of living, but you can't ignore that as a factor.

Another huge factor is family makeup. I ran across some calculations that were looking at things like average incomes back in <insert old timey year here> and costs for various things (including housing) and comparing them to prices today (using the relative income levels to establish what relative costs of things should be if we were as well off today as back then). Of course, the problem with that is "back then" most families consisted of a married couple with one income providing for the household, including the non-working mom. Today, there are many more single income single person "households", and many more single parent households, and many families consisting of two different people each earning a salary, and each supporting a separate household (with kids shared between them in some manner). And that's not counting people who are on public assistance and therefore count on the "housing cost" side of the equation, but not very much on the "average income" side. You obviously can't just peg income levels across the board from then to now. A single income back then was expected to support an entire family. Today? More like part of a family.

Obviously, we could debate whether rising costs of living relative to income drove more workers into the market, or other social factors first drove more workers into the market (like, you know, women), which drove down average income relative to living cost. And I'm not even saying that this isn't something we have to account for today. I'm just saying that it's overly simplistic to conclude that the solution to rising rents relative to average hourly wages is to just increase the wages, much less that a minimum wage increase would cause a significant change in that relative increase at all anyway.

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The issue is that the cost of voluntary (mainly electronic) consumer goods goes down as new stuff comes on the market but housing, energy costs, transportation, food, medical and other necessities tends to go up. Being able to acquire one isn't necessarily indicative of the ability to acquire the other.


Again though, we do tend to judge standard of living not just on whether one has a home, but the quality of that home. And we judge standard of living by what we can do in our leisure time as well. I mean, I suppose if we were living in some kind of Soviet style workers paradise, where all that matters is the cost to provide a standard issue dwelling, standard issue clothes, and standard issue food, and only in the precise amounts necessary for subsistence existence for all workers, we could make direct calculations of the average "wage" you'd need to pay (really cost to maintain your labor force at that point), and look at relative changes in those things.

But we (thankfully) don't live in that kind of society. And while I don't think the issue of housing costs is irrelevant, I also do think we need to take into other factors than just relative wages when looking at those costs. A group of 3 or 4 friends in their 20s sharing housing and living expenses are no less able to do so even while earning near minimum wage pay today than they were when we were that age (or when our parents were our age). Most of the scary stats are derived based on the false assumption that every single income earner must be a sole head of household. But that has *never* been the case, and is even less the case today.

Edited, Mar 22nd 2016 3:53pm by gbaji
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#81 Mar 22 2016 at 4:59 PM Rating: Excellent
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The One and Only Poldaran wrote:
lolgaxe wrote:
The One and Only Poldaran wrote:
lolgaxe wrote:
who doesn't like burgers?
Vegans.
Oh, there'll be vegan burgers.
Vegan burgers don't agree with my stomach.
You have to feed the vegans lots of grain right before slaughter them to get the flavoUr you want.Smiley: schooled
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#82 Mar 22 2016 at 5:37 PM Rating: Excellent
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gbaji wrote:
Of course, the problem with that is "back then" most families consisted of a married couple with one income providing for the household, including the non-working mom.

Very often in a manufacturing capacity as it turns out. Luckily, they all became robot scientists.
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A group of 3 or 4 friends in their 20s sharing housing and living expenses are no less able to do so even while earning near minimum wage pay today than they were when we were that age (or when our parents were our age).

When my parents were in their 20s, they had a single family home in the suburbs and a stay-at-home mom.

Edited, Mar 22nd 2016 6:42pm by Jophiel
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#83 Mar 22 2016 at 6:53 PM Rating: Good
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Friar Bijou wrote:
The One and Only Poldaran wrote:
lolgaxe wrote:
The One and Only Poldaran wrote:
lolgaxe wrote:
who doesn't like burgers?
Vegans.
Oh, there'll be vegan burgers.
Vegan burgers don't agree with my stomach.
You have to feed the vegans lots of grain right before slaughter them to get the flavoUr you want.Smiley: schooled


I'm kinda liking that Soylent Green is Green thing. We can run with this IMO!
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#84 Mar 22 2016 at 7:00 PM Rating: Good
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gbaji wrote:
Friar Bijou wrote:
The One and Only Poldaran wrote:
lolgaxe wrote:
The One and Only Poldaran wrote:
lolgaxe wrote:
who doesn't like burgers?
Vegans.
Oh, there'll be vegan burgers.
Vegan burgers don't agree with my stomach.
You have to feed the vegans lots of grain right before slaughter them to get the flavoUr you want.Smiley: schooled
I'm kinda liking that Soylent Green is Green thing. We can run with this IMO!
Soylent Green?

NO! Soylent Red!!!

We wants it RAW!! And WRIGGLING!!
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#85 Mar 22 2016 at 7:04 PM Rating: Decent
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Jophiel wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Of course, the problem with that is "back then" most families consisted of a married couple with one income providing for the household, including the non-working mom.

Very often in a manufacturing capacity as it turns out. Luckily, they all became robot scientists.


So there's no middle ground between manufacturing and scientists? Who's operating the equipment that manufactures the robots? Who builds the tools that those use? Who manages those things? Who designs them? Your assumption is that once we eliminate the previous generations labor intensive jobs with automation and industrial processes, this somehow magically results in no jobs for the next generation. Yet, despite your claims that this is the only outcome in the future, you seem to ignore that the last generation thought this too. And they were wrong.

You're wrong too.

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A group of 3 or 4 friends in their 20s sharing housing and living expenses are no less able to do so even while earning near minimum wage pay today than they were when we were that age (or when our parents were our age).

When my parents were in their 20s, they had a single family home in the suburbs and a stay-at-home mom.


That's nice. And there are tons of young kids in this generation growing up in single family homes in the suburbs with a stay at home mom too. What's your point?

We were talking about people who aren't married with good jobs and thus able to raise their kids in the suburbs while mom stays home and bakes pies or something. And my point, which seems to have flown right by you, is that people in this generation in that condition are no worse off, and in fact arguably better off, than those in our generation, or our parents generations. The single unmarried folks earning near minimum wage pay today are just as capable of getting by in shared living quarters with their friends as those same folks were a generation or two before.

The problem represented in the stats is not that our pay has dropped so much and housing costs risen so much that this is so much harder today than it used to be, but that each generation has had more people in the less successful "single parent" category than the previous one. That's far less an economic issue as it is a social issue. My argument is that "higher pay" doesn't solve this problem.
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#86 Mar 22 2016 at 7:09 PM Rating: Decent
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Friar Bijou wrote:
Soylent Green?

NO! Soylent Red!!!

We wants it RAW!! And WRIGGLING!!


But Green is better! I'm sure we can get all the hip vegan, soy latte drinking, gluten-free-for-no-apparent reason people to support this.

I have a vision of a world where we become so dependent on our smart phones telling us how to get everywhere (either via navigation in our cars, or maybe augmented reality) that Skynet wont need to nuke us. It'll just use us for cheap labor, while providing us with free food and comfort, and when it's time, just direct us to the closest Soylent factory for recycling.

I didn't say it was a good vision.
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#87 Mar 22 2016 at 7:09 PM Rating: Good
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gbaji wrote:
The problem represented in the stats is not that our pay has dropped so much and housing costs risen so much that this is so much harder today than it used to be, but that each generation has had more people in the less successful "single parent" category than the previous one. That's far less an economic issue as it is a social issue. My argument is that "higher pay" doesn't solve this problem.
Or it could be that the actual purchasing power of a dollar has nosedived since the 50's.

Excluded middle and all that.
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#88 Mar 22 2016 at 7:30 PM Rating: Decent
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Friar Bijou wrote:
gbaji wrote:
The problem represented in the stats is not that our pay has dropped so much and housing costs risen so much that this is so much harder today than it used to be, but that each generation has had more people in the less successful "single parent" category than the previous one. That's far less an economic issue as it is a social issue. My argument is that "higher pay" doesn't solve this problem.
Or it could be that the actual purchasing power of a dollar has nosedived since the 50's.


It hasn't though. Ironically, you're quoting a source (Ron Paul) that is incredibly faulty in it's claims As this article clearly points out. Just talking about the purchasing power of a single dollar is meaningless, unless wages haven't increased at all during the period of time in question. We don't earn the same number of dollars, so it's a meaningless statistic.

A better measurement is the purchasing power of an average hours labor. And if there's one rare thing that economists on all sides of the spectrum can agree on, it's that this power increases as the efficiency of labor increases. A laborer operating a widget making machine will generate far more productive output than one making widget by hand. Assuming his wages raise by some function of that increased efficiency (which it will, for reasons that are actually required for economies to work, and if you stop and think about supply and demand concepts should be quite obvious), then the total number/utility of the goods he can in turn purchase with the wages from that hour of work will increase.

Not a little bit. But dramatically over time. It's how kids working part time at a fast food restaurant can afford a car, cell phone, and more trips to the mall than they probably really need.

Quote:
Excluded middle and all that.


No. I'm including that middle. Other people are pretending that the only case that exists is the extreme case of the poor single parent struggling to make ends meet on a near minimum wage job. I'm just not sure we should chuck out the otherwise successful baby to get rid of that bathwater. Maybe try dealing with the cause of the massive rise in single parenthood instead? Just a crazy thought.

You know who else isn't doing well? Really lazy people. And drug addicts. And frankly, all the same sets of people who have historically never been successful within a society. This is not anything new.
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#89 Mar 22 2016 at 7:35 PM Rating: Excellent
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gbaji wrote:
Who's operating the equipment that manufactures the robots? Who builds the tools that those use? Who manages those things? Who designs them?

Progressively fewer people than before.
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That's nice. And there are tons of young kids in this generation growing up in single family homes in the suburbs with a stay at home mom too.

A lot fewer than before.
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We were talking about people who aren't married with good jobs...

Now, of those there's a lot more than before.
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Yet, despite your claims that this is the only outcome in the future, you seem to ignore that the last generation thought this too. And they were wrong.

Less economic stability, more double-income households by sheer economic necessity, more people working multiple jobs themselves, lower home ownership, fewer opportunities for higher education without incurring a massive debt burden, etc.

But, hey! Four poor 23 year olds in an apartment can have a color television! The system works!
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#90 Mar 22 2016 at 7:37 PM Rating: Good
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Look, gbaji; if you want to pretend that the purchasing power in America of the value of the dollar hasn't taken a severe beating over the years....well, I don't know what to say, actually.

It's a fact. I know you hate actual facts and all...but it's a fact.
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#91 Mar 22 2016 at 7:37 PM Rating: Excellent
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gbaji wrote:
You know who else isn't doing well? Really lazy people. And drug addicts. And frankly, all the same sets of people who have historically never been successful within a society. This is not anything new.

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what; who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims. These are people who pay no income tax. And so my job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.
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#92 Mar 22 2016 at 7:41 PM Rating: Good
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gbaji wrote:
A better measurement is the purchasing power of an average hours labor.
Yep. Too bad all that "labor" went outside the country to assuage the stockholders.

All the worker's fault, though, right?
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#93 Mar 22 2016 at 7:51 PM Rating: Good
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gbaji's awesome link wrote:
A household making $15,000/yr today is well below the poverty line, but yet, they are highly likely to have a refrigerator, indoor plumbing, electricity, tv, cell phone and maybe even heating and cooling. They are highly likely to have government help in making ends meet - food stamps, subsidized housing, Medicaid etc:.
I don't know how things work in San Diego, but, 15k a year as a single white (non-disabled) guy in South Dakota gets you exactly ZERO of those things.

gbaji's awesome link wrote:
Their analogue in 1913, making $740/yr had none of these "luxuries". And that was the average income... Can you imagine what the poverty line looked like then?
Squalor.
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#94 Mar 22 2016 at 9:00 PM Rating: Excellent
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Seriously? We're calling "indoor plumbing" a win now?
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#95 Mar 22 2016 at 9:13 PM Rating: Good
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Jophiel wrote:
Seriously? We're calling "indoor plumbing" a win now?
If you ignore 2000 years of sewage technolgy; why, yes!
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#96 Mar 23 2016 at 7:04 AM Rating: Excellent
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Back to my initial comment, we've gotten bogged down in manufacturing but once upon a time the idea was for technology in general to lighten our burden. For a white collar example, your office may have one person doing accounts receivable, one person doing payroll and another answering phones, each a 40hr task. Then you bring in a computer and AR and payroll now take 15 hours each. Under the old dream, the idea was that your payroll person would now work a 15 hour week, completing their task and being able to enjoy the other 25 hours while still receiving a full wage for their job.

Instead, of course, what happens is that the payroll person and the receptionist get fired and the Accounts Receivable person is told that they need to do AR, payroll and answer the phones while only receiving a nominal, if any, increase in pay. They are not being paid for their task but rather for the week and their week must be filled with productivity to warrant a check. Certainly there is an increase in productivity -- you now have one person doing the work of three for the wages of one -- but the remaining employees barely benefit if at all and the discarded employees of course are out of a job. Twenty years later and the company has outsourced its payroll and AR needs to a company in India for 50% of the wages of the remaining worker.

In the blue collar arena, the issue with the farm to factory analogy is that human labor was still needed. "Labor" may be a resource but labor doesn't have to come from people. Manufacturing took the initial hit but the OP is about eliminating workers in fast food restaurants. Other recent stories have been about robots making pizzas or delivering packages or taking over warehouse jobs -- service positions once thought of as safe ("hey, they'll always need a guy to drive the truck"... haha, no we won't). Anyone saying that we've been coping just fine so far hasn't actually paid any attention to the economic situation in this country for the past several decades and the declining middle class.

Again, that's just pointing out the issue. Solutions are something else. I don't think it's realistic to assume that we'll stop progressing technologically but then history isn't as kind to the "It'll all just work out" Pollyannaism as some would hope. If you think the disaffected populism driving Trump now is something, give it another decade or two of replacing workers and see what kind of person we can sweep into office.
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#97 Mar 23 2016 at 7:26 AM Rating: Good
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Jophiel wrote:
Seriously? We're calling "indoor plumbing" a win now?
I guess when you live in a place where water becomes an extremely rare commodity.
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#98 Mar 23 2016 at 8:40 AM Rating: Good
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Jophiel wrote:
Back to my initial comment, we've gotten bogged down in manufacturing but once upon a time the idea was for technology in general to lighten our burden. For a white collar example, your office may have one person doing accounts receivable, one person doing payroll and another answering phones, each a 40hr task. Then you bring in a computer and AR and payroll now take 15 hours each. Under the old dream, the idea was that your payroll person would now work a 15 hour week, completing their task and being able to enjoy the other 25 hours while still receiving a full wage for their job.

Instead, of course, what happens is that the payroll person and the receptionist get fired and the Accounts Receivable person is told that they need to do AR, payroll and answer the phones while only receiving a nominal, if any, increase in pay. They are not being paid for their task but rather for the week and their week must be filled with productivity to warrant a check. Certainly there is an increase in productivity -- you now have one person doing the work of three for the wages of one -- but the remaining employees barely benefit if at all and the discarded employees of course are out of a job. Twenty years later and the company has outsourced its payroll and AR needs to a company in India for 50% of the wages of the remaining worker.

In the blue collar arena, the issue with the farm to factory analogy is that human labor was still needed. "Labor" may be a resource but labor doesn't have to come from people. Manufacturing took the initial hit but the OP is about eliminating workers in fast food restaurants. Other recent stories have been about robots making pizzas or delivering packages or taking over warehouse jobs -- service positions once thought of as safe ("hey, they'll always need a guy to drive the truck"... haha, no we won't). Anyone saying that we've been coping just fine so far hasn't actually paid any attention to the economic situation in this country for the past several decades and the declining middle class.

Again, that's just pointing out the issue. Solutions are something else. I don't think it's realistic to assume that we'll stop progressing technologically but then history isn't as kind to the "It'll all just work out" Pollyannaism as some would hope. If you think the disaffected populism driving Trump now is something, give it another decade or two of replacing workers and see what kind of person we can sweep into office.



I don't think anyone can say that higher productivity & efficiency is a bad thing. What we will need, however, is a way for the bulk of the population to benefit from these advances. That's of course, a political question, not a question about tech.
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#99 Mar 23 2016 at 8:55 AM Rating: Good
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I think one of the better solutions to the problem is via setting up sovereign wealth funds which invest in industry/indexes as a minority shareholder, and then pays out a dividend/basic income. Then you can eliminate Medicare, social security, welfare & various other redundant bureaucracies.
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#100 Mar 23 2016 at 9:07 AM Rating: Excellent
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Timelordwho wrote:
I don't think anyone can say that higher productivity & efficiency is a bad thing. What we will need, however, is a way for the bulk of the population to benefit from these advances. That's of course, a political question, not a question about tech.

Agreed (well, Allegory seemed to think I was saying that hence my re-statement). But what I don't think will work is putting our heads in the sand and saying "There's no buggy whip companies!" and calling it done. In fact, I'd say the ramifications of that attitude are already rearing their head.

And I'd strongly argue that "benefit from these advances" needs to be in the form of secure lifestyles not just cheap televisions and tablets.
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#101 Mar 23 2016 at 10:35 AM Rating: Excellent
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Jophiel wrote:
And I'd strongly argue that "benefit from these advances" needs to be in the form of secure lifestyles not just cheap televisions and tablets.
Well aren't the vast majority of us employed in the service sector? Basically just doing things that really aren't required for society to function, but nonetheless give benefits to people? I mean, at least it keeps us quasi-useful and what not. Idle hands being the devil's workshop and whatnot.
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