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Author Topic: It's the economy, stupid!  (Read 69097 times)

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Mongrel

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Re: It's the economy, stupid!
« Reply #960 on: May 15, 2013, 03:49:33 AM »

Oh, don't get me wrong. Anything with this much money in it will and should attract regulator attention.

The issue is that Bitcoins are most attractive to fringe speculators and criminals. Giving them attention like this is only going to help "legitimize" them in the eyes of people who might otherwise have stood on the fence.

Of course regulator attention will also scare some folks off too, so who knows. 
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Brentai

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Re: It's the economy, stupid!
« Reply #961 on: May 15, 2013, 05:47:50 AM »

I was just thinking the other day that BitCoins are probably the official currency of child pornographers.  Guess I wasn't alone on that one.
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TA

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Re: It's the economy, stupid!
« Reply #962 on: May 15, 2013, 06:18:34 AM »

I was just thinking the other day that BitCoins are probably the official currency of child pornographers.  Guess I wasn't alone on that one.

They are, yes.  Silk Road stuff, too.
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Mongrel

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Re: It's the economy, stupid!
« Reply #963 on: May 15, 2013, 07:22:53 AM »

Oh hell yeah.

The funny thing is that I'd bet a bitcoin that Organized Crime has (for the most part) been smart enough to stay away from the things for now.
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Büge

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Re: It's the economy, stupid!
« Reply #964 on: May 15, 2013, 07:57:30 AM »

Well, there are people who want them to become the currency of the US, and are shocked, SHOCKED, that this suddenly means the US Government would like them to conform to the standards of regular currency.

Didn't they go through this same song and dance five years ago for Second Life's currency? What's it called, yiffbux or something?
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Thad

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Re: It's the economy, stupid!
« Reply #965 on: May 15, 2013, 12:47:41 PM »

There's a perfectly legitimate appeal to the principle of Bitcoin, if not its actual use in practice.

First of all, there's the pure fucking math of it.  The problem of creating a secure, finite, anonymous, uncounterfeitable form of currency is fascinating as hell, and the cryptographic underpinnings are not only elegant, they've also got implications far broader than just currency.  (For example, I think secure, anonymous, unfalsifiable online voting is an insoluble problem -- but I'd love to be proven wrong.)

And second, there are the privacy implications.  I think it's troubling that we start talking about privacy and the conversation goes straight to pedophiles -- even if yes in fact pedophiles ARE often on the bleeding edge of privacy technologies.

Some people would like to be able to buy things without being tracked on principle.  I can certainly see the appeal -- though there are a slew of problems with Bitcoin, not the least its lack of regulation and its wildly fluctuating value.

Dan Kaminsky wrote a pretty great article about it a couple weeks ago -- I admit I only skimmed it; I really do need to get around to reading the whole thing.
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Büge

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Re: It's the economy, stupid!
« Reply #966 on: June 02, 2013, 06:39:55 AM »

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Brentai

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Re: It's the economy, stupid!
« Reply #967 on: July 18, 2013, 09:13:45 AM »

Detroit has filed for bankruptcy.

That's one more step toward Delta City.
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Mongrel

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Re: It's the economy, stupid!
« Reply #968 on: July 18, 2013, 09:28:03 AM »

That's been coming for a loooooonnnnnnng time.
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Smiler

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Re: It's the economy, stupid!
« Reply #969 on: July 18, 2013, 10:08:11 AM »

One step closer to Robocop eating dinner at a nice restaurant.
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Mongrel

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Re: It's the economy, stupid!
« Reply #970 on: August 09, 2013, 04:26:28 PM »

The Phony Fear Factor

A shout-out from Krugman to a very old essay with some very current relevance.
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Mongrel

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Mongrel

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Re: It's the economy, stupid!
« Reply #972 on: August 23, 2013, 08:22:44 AM »

I guess class-war stuff can go here?

Stay classy Columbia, SC

(Columbia institutes something not far off concentration camps for the homeless)
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Smiler

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Re: It's the economy, stupid!
« Reply #973 on: August 23, 2013, 08:29:17 AM »

Oh hey I'm glad that DS9 episode is relevant again.
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Mongrel

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Re: It's the economy, stupid!
« Reply #974 on: October 08, 2013, 12:49:11 PM »

This video will not come as a surprise to any of us, but it's a very clean, well done, infographic if you need something shareable.

Wealth Inequality in America
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Mongrel

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Mongrel

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Re: It's the economy, stupid!
« Reply #976 on: October 14, 2013, 02:39:04 AM »

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Mongrel

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Re: It's the economy, stupid!
« Reply #977 on: November 19, 2013, 01:45:46 PM »

http://www.epi.org/publication/technology-inequality-dont-blame-the-robots/

Okay, so this is really interesting. It's basically a comprehensive rebuttal to about 30 years of economic papers which have posited that increasing automation directly correlates with a rise in wage inequality. More robots, fewer monotonous middle-class jobs.

It's long and heavily academic (though still perfectly readable) with many references, so I figured I'd offer a tl;dr version.

First off, here's their section titles, which actually serve as a good summary of the points:

Quote
1. Technological and skill deficiency explanations of wage inequality have failed to explain key wage
patterns over the last three decades, including the 2000s.
2. History shows that middle-wage occupations have shrunk and higher-wage occupations have expanded
since the 1950s. This has not driven any changed pattern of wage trends.
3. Evidence for job polarization is weak.
4. There was no occupational job polarization in the 2000s.
5. Occupational employment trends do not drive wage patterns or wage inequality.
6. Occupations have become less, not more, important determinants of wage patterns.
7. An expanded demand for low-wage service occupations is not a key driver of wage trends.
8. Occupational employment trends provide only limited insights into the main dynamics of the labor
market, particularly wage trends.

The key point they're making is that apparently there's little link between JOB polarization (demands for higher-skilled and lower skilled work at the expense of middling skill but easily automated work) and WAGE polarization (income inequality).

Job polarization is apparently a longstanding issue, going back as far as they have data and is something that makes sense in terms of technology gradually changing the nature work over time, but it's a slow phenomenon and has actually been dropping - there was little job polarization in the 2000's. Interestingly, they also posit that yes, educational requirements for the workforce as a whole have risen, but that increased education has largely kept pace with technological demands for higher skilled workers.

For instance, they quoted figures that the service industry is only 13% of the current workforce and this is growth of only 2% since the mid-late 70's. The growth in skilled high-tech demand is also less than expected. An example is given of retail publishing moving to e-books and internet sales. You might add a few techs, but mostly you just go from low-skill bookstore workers to low-skill warehouse workers and truck drivers (I think that IRL, you would still lose some overall employement in that scenario but it was something of a throwaway example).

They also talk about "occupational" job polarization. This is job polarization that specifically relates to people being in the "wrong field" (due to industries becoming obsolete or highly automated) and claim that this has much less correlation and impact than is supposed.

Wage polarization on the other hand, has only been seriously happening in the past three decades. Even when both types of polarization have been happening, the measureable trend curves of the two phenomenon do not synch well at all, which seriously undermines any claims of direct correlation.

Essentially, correlation is not causation.

The one thing I found partially lacking was an overall picture of automation on the labour market as a whole. Going back to the idea of the bookstore being automated, in that scenario you may lose a small number of jobs. A small erosion across ALL sectors may result in an overall surplus of labour, which exerts downward pressure on most, if not all wages.

They even reference "High unemployment" as one cause of wage polarization without going into alternative explanations for why there's an ever-growing surfeit of labour in all fields. All you need is a few super-rich guys to get big bonuses for layoffs and then it looks like you have U-shaped polarization, when in fact the link is indirect rather than direct and deals with a very small sample size (and high-end wage growth is certainly heavily affected by other factors, such as globalization).

They do sort of address that when they show that the kind of occupation you're in has had a declining relevance to wages over time, albeit that's in a roundabout way. So maybe it's a non-issue after all. But I would have liked a bit more clarity there, I think.

Some other numbers on inequality would have also been good. It has after all been commented on that even even most of the supposed 1% aren't actually SUPER CRAZY rich. It's that .01% or even that .001% that are really off the chart. Could it be that wages for just about everyone are falling and that the super-rich are accruing such disproportionate wealth as to make the income distribution curve look U-shaped when really it's more like a backwards L?

Other than that, their criticisms of previous studies DO seem valid and are quite well-researched, but what I can't say is whether their opponents are right but just did sloppy, superficial research to prove their argument, or are significantly wrong. Or we may be dealing with a messay array of hybrid reasons. I.E. That increasing automation IS still responsible for income inequality, but only in an indirect way, and only in combination with several other large factors.

They don't really suggest an alternative explanation for the rise in inequality, but I think that's normal for this sort of pure academic study - they're focusing exclusively on debunking a long-held correlation and no more than that.

They don't try to advance a competing claim and are only "fact-checking" actually makes me trust their findings more (if perhaps leaving me a bit unsatisfied). They do state that in future they're going to look at trade gaps and globalization and their effect on wages as a possible alternate explanation. I'd really like to see that when it's published.
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Mongrel

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Re: It's the economy, stupid!
« Reply #978 on: December 05, 2013, 04:05:23 AM »

Quote from: Grakthis
http://www.foreffectivegov.org/corp-tax-rate-debate

In case there is a single human being alive who didn't obviously and completely understand this already.

Quote
Our examination of the evidence found no relationship between cutting tax rates on corporate profits and job growth.

We examined the job creation track record of 60 large, profitable U.S. corporations (from a list of 280 Fortune 500 companies) with the highest and lowest effective tax rates between 2008 and 2010 and found:

22 of the 30 corporations that paid the highest tax rates (30 percent or more) on their reported profits created almost 200,000 jobs between 2008 and 2012. Only eight of the 30 firms paying high tax rates reported reducing the number of employees between 2008 and 2012.

The 30 profitable corporations that paid little or no taxes over three years collectively shed 51,289 jobs; half of these low-tax firms created some jobs, and half shed jobs between 2008 and 2012.

Lowe’s, the nation’s second-largest home improvement store, paid over 36 percent in taxes on reported profits of $9 billion between 2008 and 2010, and hired an additional 28,820 employees between 2008 and 2012.

Verizon, the nation’s largest wireless provider, reported $32 billion in U.S. profits between 2008 and 2010, yet received tax refunds totaling $951 million and reduced the number of employees by almost 56,000 between 2008 and 2012.

IT'S AMAZING.  IT'S ALMOST LIKE GIVING MONEY TO THE ALREADY RICH DOESN'T DO ANYTHING TO HELP THE MIDDLE CLASS AND POOR?!?!? WHO WOULD HAVE EVER THOUGHT OF SUCH A THING?!?!?
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Royal☭

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Re: It's the economy, stupid!
« Reply #979 on: December 05, 2013, 04:11:56 AM »

Was reading the first chapter on a comic about economics history, and it was discussing Adam Smith. Specifically, the parts of Adam Smith where he talks about things other than the markets. Interestingly, Smith comes to the conclusions that having high profits (for individuals or corporations) is incompatible with high wages for workers. He actually recommended government intervention to keep profits low and wages high. He also recommended that we not trust capitalists, since they'd probably recommend government policies and laws that only benefited wealthy capitalists.

This part of the Wealth of Nations seems to go ignored whenever people invoke Smith to talk about the free market and regulations.
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