wildgift (u/wildgift)

wildgift commented on White House predicts all truck, taxi, and delivery drivers will be wiped out qz.com/868716/the-white-h... · Posted by u/electic

soared · 9 years ago

My answer is... no? Why would that be the case? Those people don't necesarrily have any right to that money. They /arguably/ have a right to a job/food/housing, but that is a whole other discussion.

Stopping technological progress because its unfair feels absurd.

wildgift · 9 years ago

I wouldn't say it's a "whole other discussion" when the changes are causing the unemployment.

When globalization was pushed, the government passed laws to help retrain workers. Maybe it was just a band-aid, but, it was something.

Perhaps the government should intervene to direct some of the automation toward producing free housing.

wildgift commented on White House predicts all truck, taxi, and delivery drivers will be wiped out qz.com/868716/the-white-h... · Posted by u/electic

blakesterz · 9 years ago

>> What those new jobs for truck or delivery drivers might be is “not currently foreseeable.”

I wonder if the same thing has been said about other professions that have been more or less wiped out in the past? I would guess the answer is "yes"

And then the next logical question is "So what did all those people end up doing?" Maybe that's how we being to answer the question of what all the truck, taxi and delivery drivers can be doing when those jobs are gone?

Or do those jobs just get phased out as people leave them? Like people who quit for whatever reason are just not replaced by other people, they get replaced with the bots (or whatever we call the things that are replacing people here).

[Added thought] Maybe the answer is found in how secretaries were replaced? They were recently the most popular jobs in many states, and now are not.

wildgift · 9 years ago

Secretaries still exist, but the job's divided into two broad categories. Receptionists, who don't make much, and executive secretaries who make middle class salaries. The latter do well because they assist people who are powerful. They generally need college-level writing skills, a diplomatic personality, and some management skills.

wildgift commented on Walmart Labs: Why we run an open source program todogroup.org/blog/why-we... · Posted by u/jamesgpearce

tvmalsv · 11 years ago

Just because you're price sensitive, that doesn't mean that you'll buy something you don't want, just because it's cheaper than what you do want.

There's been plenty of research that shows most people are more interested in lower prices than making some sort of social statement.

wildgift · 11 years ago

True. I think most people want the lowest price for a specific branded product. They start off by deciding, more or less, on getting a certain level of perceived quality, and then finding low prices. The price is secondary to making the decision to purchase a product.

As far as making a "social statement" - buying most recognizable or branded products is a kind of social statement. If it weren't, we wouldn't have such a diverse selection of cars, clothes and laptops.

wildgift commented on I Owe It All to Community College nytimes.com/2015/01/14/op... · Posted by u/MaxQuentero

Shivetya · 11 years ago

Libertarian here as well.

I am more of the opinion that the government should set rules on the cost of education for any school accepting government aid or any school who accepts students who pay with government loans.

Want to get the price of education back in line, drop the open checkbook.

The issue I take with taxing to pay for everyone's college is that apparently there is no determination what constitutes a good education or good student. As in, I do not want to see money thrown at majors that can never pay back the investment or require such skill and luck to achieve pay back relative to the cost. Then comes the student, if your just a fail student why should anyone foot your bill to stay in school? You get the same number of years as anyone else. If you don't achieve the diploma you pay back a percentage

wildgift · 11 years ago

Those are called "price controls."

wildgift commented on I Owe It All to Community College nytimes.com/2015/01/14/op... · Posted by u/MaxQuentero

refurb · 11 years ago

And when you can't afford the insurance for the fire department?

I would assume it would be the same if you couldn't afford your property taxes in today's system. You don't own a house?

wildgift · 11 years ago

I think the answer is "sell the house and move somewhere cheaper."

wildgift commented on I Owe It All to Community College nytimes.com/2015/01/14/op... · Posted by u/MaxQuentero

eropple · 11 years ago

> I don't see the appeal.

Disenfranchisement, as per most modes of radicality. I have observed as a near-universality among ancap types that they have identified at formative times of their lives as being "othered." They're not the in-crowd and they're not fundamentally of it. My suspicion is that they have a secret (or unsecret) opinion of themselves as misunderstood ubermenschen. (I recall that phase of my life, but then, I was fourteen.) With emotional and social development it became obvious to me, and to most recovering right-libertarian/ancap types I know of, that countless people helped me along the way because we decided, structurally and socially, that people should be helped. (We don't help everyone equally or sufficiently, and an expansion of it is decried by the you-got-mine, pulling-the-ladder-up-after-me types, but we try.)

I have made a pet interest of confronting the ancap types I occasionally run into--in tech, you sometimes stumble across enough of a True Believer to let their flag fly high--with questions of, what do you do when you're born into poverty? What is your recourse when you have nothing to sell? What do you do when somebody--but not the state, because the state doing it is Wrong, but Jim down the road with a real big gun and a couple muscley friends is just participating in economic activity--takes everything from you? The answers start evasively, but I've read as much von Mises and Rothbard as most of the vocal adherents and I can speak their language enough to fight on their own terms. Laughable handwaves of insurance companies and private security aside--and we called these "barons" in a prior age, but history and economics have already been laid aside to get into their weird twists of philosophy, so no it will not turn into feudalism, that's a silly notion--the answer is and will always be "and then you lose and you die". What chills me is that while most seem to have enough of an emotional intelligence to know that this argument doesn't win, I rarely hear even a shred of doubt when you finally get to that hard little core--because the idea of losing so totally as to be rendered economically incapable is not part of the equation. Other people lose, not them. This is also why there is so much overlap in this crowd of the worship of eat-your-dead meritocracy; that ancap nonsense devolves inevitably into feudalism is a feature, not a bug. Because they believe, as is their right, that they will be the knights, if not the barons and dukes and kings, of their new order.

I've run a few drafts of this post to leech out most of the pejorative nature I feel the ideas and the ideologues are due, and what remains should be taken more to be a mark of how truly alien (and I mean that in the sense of "inhuman") you have to get and how much reality you must pitch out the window at highway speeds to bend into a mode where the ancap arguments even make sense, let alone appeal. I am convinced that there is something rather fundamentally unwell about the whole thing. I have tried very hard to relate to it for years and my conclusion inevitably ends up being something around a predilection for cultish predations or never-outgrown teenage immaturity, and neither are satisfying but both fit the facts in evidence. I mean, I can have a discussion with a Communist. A Marxist and I are operating in a fundamentally relatable frame of reference. I don't agree with where they're going, but Marxists do not eject the entirety of human history to reach their conclusions--we can talk and actually agree what words mean. Every ancap I have ever met has washed their brains and adopted the weird sublanguage of the movement (Orwell was right...) and I can't do a thing with them except hope like hell they never stumble on a lever of power.

wildgift · 11 years ago

LOL, so true. I'm starting to get the same feeling about Georgists. They're in a bubble of their own making, in denial about their own reality, and prone to making up new definitions for common words, making it difficult to communicate. It makes me a little sad, because I'm sympathetic to their cause, and read a bunch of articles from their writers around fifteen years ago.

wildgift commented on I Owe It All to Community College nytimes.com/2015/01/14/op... · Posted by u/MaxQuentero

gajomi · 11 years ago

I want to second this point. The percentage of young adults (this is the demographic that represents most fo the current community college population) living below the poverty level is about 40% [1]. So even in the absolute worst case scenario where the Pell grant only applied to those below the poverty level and all those above that level started taking advantage of the free community college your efficiency could drop by a factor of two. In reality, there is a significant fraction of those below the poverty level who don't know about such Pell grant opportunities and the complexities of federal student aid and would never apply, but would jump at the opportunity for a free education. Also, a more realistic assessment of the efficiency question would require a better picture of how many people below the target of the Pell threshold would start taking advantage of the program. I would suspect that only a small fraction of people from the top 10% income bracket would pursue this, since they have other opportunities available. So lets say that we actually have something like a 50% reduction in efficiency to get the money to the target audience, and a side effect of a few tens of millions of people outside the target audience getting their education subsidized. There is obviously room for improvement, but I would support that scenario.

[1]http://www.ihep.org/sites/default/files/uploads/docs/pubs/br...

wildgift · 11 years ago

At LATTC everyone knew about financial aid. It was the default situation. I haven't been there, but I've been to CC in a low income community, and the assumption was that you'd get financial aid. Being middle class, middle aged, and not qualifying, I had to quietly explain that my personal income was past the limit, etc. I didn't want to stick out.

The problem these schools have is related to people lying to get financial aid, and then dropping out, never to be heard from again. If you get rid of the price, and school is free, all this fraud would end. (The fraud would happen elsewhere in the system.)

wildgift commented on I Owe It All to Community College nytimes.com/2015/01/14/op... · Posted by u/MaxQuentero

brohoolio · 11 years ago

Is it more efficient to have a whole complicated financial aid system or just provide discounted access to everyone.

Time is money.

wildgift · 11 years ago

At the school my partner went to, LA Trade Tech, it seemed like most students got financial aid. There were multiple offices involved in doing all the paperwork involved (in a multi-story building, too). The school was located in an area where the household income was around $25k per year, and many people worked at the minimum wage. It seemed absurd to me that they had to jump through so many hoops to get a few hundred dollars of aid.

wildgift commented on Software patents are crumbling, thanks to the Supreme Court vox.com/2014/9/12/6138483... · Posted by u/mcfunley

lotharbot · 11 years ago

From what I understand, speech restrictions are upheld in very narrow ways:

- "time, place, and manner" restrictions such as not yelling at 4 AM in a residential area (these must withstand what's called "immediate scrutiny", which basically says that the restrictions must be content neutral, narrowly tailored to serve a specific government interest, and leave ample opportunity to share outside of the specific circumstances)

- "content" restrictions, such as restrictions on direct threats or child porn. These must pass strict scrutiny (narrowly tailored, serve a specific government interest, and be the least restrictive means to serve that interest.)

The government's interest has never been in "remedying" the problem of people speaking about politics, regardless of money (it does have an interest in stopping bribery, but that's a different issue.) Indeed, Kennedy's majority opinion in Citizens United is quite direct about wanting to allow more people to speak about politics -- specifically, allowing associations of people (ie, corporations, unions, etc.) the same ability to speak that single wealthy individuals have. The alternative to CU is frightening -- the only people whose political messages could be heard would be the few with the money to own media companies, or the few with the social networking apparatus to create faux-viral content.

This parallels older supreme court decisions such as:

Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819)

Providence Bank v. Billings, 29 U.S. 514 (1830)

Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific Railroad Company, 118 U.S. 394 (1886)

United States v. United Auto Workers, 352 U.S. 567 (1957)

wildgift · 11 years ago

If a single wealthy person is, non-anonmously, going to be allowed to electioneer, that's actually the price that should be paid for restrictions on associations.

People can judge the message by the speaker. When billionaiare Meg Whitman ran for office, her ads were on every single commercial break. She still lost. People saw through her.

When you have a multitude of associations, you can't tell who is saying what, and it creates confusion.

wildgift commented on Software patents are crumbling, thanks to the Supreme Court vox.com/2014/9/12/6138483... · Posted by u/mcfunley

jessaustin · 11 years ago

There was nothing about that movie that was related to "Money" per se. This wasn't the Koch brothers conspiring with George Soros. This was a couple of goofballs editing together some news footage and dubbing over some scary narration. That is, shit that happens on youtube every day. You know, speech. After the FEC has silenced all the little guys who dare criticize a candidate, do you really think the Kochs will be reduced to normal private citizens?

wildgift · 11 years ago

The rules were limited to corporations, associations and unions. Individuals were not restricted in this type of speech. Citizens United was a nonprofit corporation.