[mikeh]

Kaitlyn S, on 2016-December-14, 21:33, said:

How do you fix this? If you tax companies with more employees higher, you give incentives for having robots rather than employees, causing higher unemployment.

If you have a progressive corporate tax rate, you ģive incentive to split companies, making them less efficient and less competitive vs foreign companies, as well as making it easier to dodge quotas. Making them less competitive will have the net effect of higher unemployment.

Tax is a trivial issue compared to other reasons for automating work, i.e. Having robots. Tax isn't why Amazon warehouses are full of robots and virtually empty of humans or why automobile production lines are highly roboticized.

At a simplistic level, consider basic arithmetic. A skilled worker might get paid 50,000 a year, plus the cost of benefits. This would make the direct cost at least 60,000 and usually more. This ignores absenteeism, productivity issues and quality control for when the worker is sick but still comes to work, or is hungover or depressed, etc.

Now take a robot that costs 250,000 to buy. You need a service technician, but that cost is spread over multiple robots. Interest at 5%, and that's high in today's climate for a large company, means interest costs of 12,500 a year. Add 10,000 for the technician. Add 25,000 a year to pay down capital cost, assuming replacement every 10 years.

Already the business is saving over 10,000 a year. Now realize that this robot can easily work two shifts! 7 days a week. It doesn't take coffe breaks or time for lunch. It doesn't get paid overtime. It will never unionize and go on strike. While it will need monitoring and occasional maintenance or repair, it will usually be far more precise than any human, it will not get distracted or pissed off or hungover. You could double the cost per robot and still be making a huge gain.

My numbers are arbitrary and intended for illustrative purposes. However, considerations like this are what drive roboticization. Tax issues, such as writing off the interest on the robot and/or depreciating the capital asset also play a role, but in most cases the economic/productivity/quality control gains from automation are such as to dwarve the impact of variations in tax rates.

A more obvious and plausible effect of creating different and higher tax brackets for companies with lots of employees is to cause businesses to create multiple companies. Say the tax hike kicked in at over 1,000 employees. Then a business might set up separate companies, each having no more than 1,000 employees, with each company being a wholly-owned subsidiary of the 'real' company. This idea of having multiple corporate entities for financial reasons, including tax, is already widespread

[kenberg]

At the risk of sounding like Johnny One Note, I want to expand a little on mikeh's last paragraph. The effect would be that corporations would be making structural decisions based not on efficiency but on tax law. They would be looking for a way to be one corporation for business reasons, but multiple corporations for tax reasons. Maybe whoever writes the law would try to prevent that, but lobbyists would try to prevent them from preventing it. And then tax lawyers would find ways to twist whatever was written in the law so that the law could be seen as saying what they wished it said. This does not require that we think of anyone as evil, it is just the natural flow.

My earliest encounter with such things was as a graduate student in the early 1960s. I was sometimes supported by fellowship money (no work required) and sometimes supported as a graduate assistant (some work required). Fellowship money was not taxable, the graduate assistantship was. Then someone got the bright idea that an assistantship could be partly seen as payment for work, taxable, and partly as fellowship money, not taxable. Oh my. I would call the IRS and someone would tell me what the rules were. Then I would talk to someone else who had called the IRS and got a different explanation. So I would call again, and get a third explanation, different from what I was told before, different from what my friend had been told. Then it was said that the taxable status depended on the wording of the job offer. Well, the original job offer had been something like "We offer you an assistantship for $xxxx a year, do you accept?". So now the University wrote up more extensive letters of job offers. They wanted to slant the letter to be as helpful as possible to the grad student, they also wanted to stay on the right side of the law. So the job offers started to look like your usual incomprehensible legal document. And here is a key point: Going to a tax consultant was out of the question. My TA salary was something like $3500 for the academic year. Sure, in 1960 thiswas more money than it is today, but there was no way getting paid tax help would have been worth the price of it.

Lawmakers often get too clever. Part of the consideration when writing tax law should be whether or not anyone will be able to understand what the law is, and part should be on how it will stimulate maneuvers that do nothing good. I do not object to paying taxes. I do object to tax laws that I cannot understand or tax laws that favor people with incomes high enough so that they can have tax lawyers manipulate the outcome for them.

Incidentally, the argument that an assistanship was partly a fellowship was not crazy. I started at one salary, and after i did well in a course taught by the chair of the separtment my salary was increased. He explained that he would add a research assisstantship onto my teaching assisstantship, but no research work would be required. So there was perhaps some logic in treating that money as a not taxable fellowship. But trying to sort out what was taxable and what was not taxable for every graduate student in the country? Pretty near impossible, I think. Most of us just want to pay our taxes and stay out of jail.

[Winstonm]

mikeh, on 2016-December-15, 05:48, said:

Tax is a trivial issue compared to other reasons for automating work, i.e. Having robots. Tax isn't why Amazon warehouses are full of robots and virtually empty of humans or why automobile production lines are highly roboticized.

At a simplistic level, consider basic arithmetic. A skilled worker might get paid 50,000 a year, plus the cost of benefits. This would make the direct cost at least 60,000 and usually more. This ignores absenteeism, productivity issues and quality control for when the worker is sick but still comes to work, or is hungover or depressed, etc.

Now take a robot that costs 250,000 to buy. You need a service technician, but that cost is spread over multiple robots. Interest at 5%, and that's high in today's climate for a large company, means interest costs of 12,500 a year. Add 10,000 for the technician. Add 25,000 a year to pay down capital cost, assuming replacement every 10 years.

Already the business is saving over 10,000 a year. Now realize that this robot can easily work two shifts! 7 days a week. It doesn't take coffe breaks or time for lunch. It doesn't get paid overtime. It will never unionize and go on strike. While it will need monitoring and occasional maintenance or repair, it will usually be far more precise than any human, it will not get distracted or pissed off or hungover. You could double the cost per robot and still be making a huge gain.

My numbers are arbitrary and intended for illustrative purposes. However, considerations like this are what drive roboticization. Tax issues, such as writing off the interest on the robot and/or depreciating the capital asset also play a role, but in most cases the economic/productivity/quality control gains from automation are such as to dwarve the impact of variations in tax rates.

A more obvious and plausible effect of creating different and higher tax brackets for companies with lots of employees is to cause businesses to create multiple companies. Say the tax hike kicked in at over 1,000 employees. Then a business might set up separate companies, each having no more than 1,000 employees, with each company being a wholly-owned subsidiary of the 'real' company. This idea of having multiple corporate entities for financial reasons, including tax, is already widespread

Although not a tax lawyer, I would also guess the business could depreciate the cost of the robots over many years, further reducing costs.

[y66]

The accelerating effects of technology on everything, esp for winners and losers in the new economy, are fascinating. Good to hear our president elect say yesterday "I'm here to help". This is the right message even if it does call to mind (for some) Gene Hackman's blind hermit scene in Young Frankenstein.

From David Streitfeld's story about Trump's meeting with tech executives yesterday:

Quote

The meeting between President-elect Donald J. Trump and the nation’s tech elite was hyped as something out of “The Apprentice”: The new boss tells his minions to shape up. It turned out to be a charm offensive, a kind of “Dancing With the Silicon Valley Stars.”

“This is a truly amazing group of people,” the president-elect said on Wednesday in a 25th-floor conference room at Trump Tower in Manhattan. The gathering included Jeff Bezos of Amazon; Elon Musk of Tesla; Timothy D. Cook of Apple; Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook; Larry Page and Eric Schmidt of Alphabet, Google’s parent company; and Satya Nadella of Microsoft, among others. “I’m here to help you folks do well,” Mr. Trump said.

He kept going in that vein. “There’s nobody like you in the world,” he enthused. “In the world! There’s nobody like the people in this room.” Anything that the government “can do to help this go along,” he made clear, “we’re going to be there for you.”

And that was just in the first few minutes. The candidate who warned during the presidential campaign that Amazon was going to have antitrust problems, that Apple needed to build its iPhones in the United States instead of China, was nowhere to be seen.

Even after the press was ushered out, the meeting continued its genial way. Among the topics discussed, according to several corporate executives and a transition official briefed on the meeting, who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, were vocational education and the need for more of it, the promise and peril of trade with China and immigration (Mr. Trump wants “smart and talented people here”). The president-elect also asked the executives to see if they could not apply data analysis technology to detect and help get rid of government waste.

There are plans for quarterly meetings of a smaller group of tech executives, to be organized by Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, said one of the executives briefed on the meeting. They will focus mainly on immigration and education issues.

The meeting lasted more than 90 minutes, longer than expected. Mr. Trump was seated next to Peter Thiel, the tech investor who is a member of the president-elect’s transition team. In another sign of Mr. Trump mixing family, business and government hats, three of his adult children — Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric — also attended.

... Mr. Bezos later issued a statement that said he found the meeting “very productive. I shared the view that the administration should make innovation one of its key pillars, which would create a huge number of jobs across the whole country, in all sectors, not just tech — agriculture, infrastructure, manufacturing — everywhere,” he said.

The technology world had been in turmoil as the meeting drew near. Some argued the chief executives should boycott the event to show their disdain for Mr. Trump’s values. Others maintained they should go and forthrightly make their values clear. And still others thought they should attend and make their accommodations with the new reality.

“There is a wide spectrum of feeling in the Valley,” said Aaron Levie, the chief executive of the cloud storage company Box.

Complicating the debate was the fact that the most fervently anti-Trump elements in Silicon Valley seem to be the start-ups and venture capitalists, few of which were invited to the meeting. (Alex Karp, the chief executive of Palantir Technologies, was the only head of a privately held tech company at the meeting.)

Some tech companies were also notable for their absence. Twitter, the president-elect’s medium of choice for communication, was not invited.

Twitter declined to comment on why it was not included. A campaign official complained last month in a Medium post that Twitter had killed a #CrookedHillary emoji. On Wednesday, Sean Spicer, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said that Twitter had been left out of the meeting because of space considerations in a gathering that many other technology executives were “dying to get into.”

In the days and hours before the meeting, various factions made their positions clear.

A group of engineers and other tech workers issued a statement asserting that they would refuse to participate in the creation of databases that could be used by the government to target people based on their race, religion or national origin.

The proclamation immediately drew more than 500 signatories, including employees at Google, Apple and Microsoft. During the campaign, Mr. Trump did not rule out the idea of a database of Muslims.

Another group of entrepreneurs assembled virtually this week with the same goal of preventing any erosion of civil liberties.

They also accepted “a responsibility to partner with communities where the effects of rapidly changing technologies have hurt our fellow Americans.” Among those signing were Aileen Lee, a venture capitalist; Dave McClure, of the 500 Start-Ups incubator; and Lenny Mendonca, an angel investor.

Mr. Levie, of Box, was a Hillary Clinton supporter but believes in engagement with the new administration.

“We have to face reality that this is the next four years, and the best way to make sure our values are upheld is actually push on them,” he said.

Other tech chief executives also took the same route. Hours before Mr. Trump’s meeting with tech leaders, the president-elect announced that Mr. Musk and Travis Kalanick, Uber’s chief executive, would be among those joining his Strategic and Policy Forum, which is already stacked with businesspeople from finance and other industries. Ginni Rometty, the chief executive of IBM, had previously joined the forum.

More than values and policy are at stake in the relationship between the administration and the Valley. Money is, too.

In the wake of Mr. Trump’s victory, Forrester Research is cutting back its growth estimate for the United States tech market in 2017 to 4.3 percent from 5.1 percent.

One reason is simple caution, as large multinational manufacturers navigate a new and unpredictable administration.

Another reason: less tech spending by the government. “There are so many cabinet secretaries who are explicitly hostile to the mission of their agencies,” said Andrew Bartels, a Forrester principal analyst.

As for 2018, there are so many ways things could go that a forecast is impossible. “It’s up for grabs,” the analyst said.

So, too, is the relationship of Mr. Trump and the tech industry. For the moment, though, Silicon Valley seems to have dodged a bullet.

[jogs]

rmnka447, on 2016-December-15, 02:13, said:

The problem with Obamacare was that the pre-existing condition folks had to be offset by a group that is only a fraction of the whole healthcare pool.

What was happening to those with pre-existing conditions before Obamacare? Why should others be responsible for their care at inflated prices?
Repeal Obamacare and they are no worst than before 2009. Obama claims 20 million would lose health insurance. With a $5,000 deductible, how many of those people actually had access to healthcare?
Solve the problem of healthcare for vets before tackling healthcare for the general population.

[jogs]

Winstonm, on 2016-November-09, 23:33, said:

Bigots who truly think themselves fair-minded are the most insidious challenge to a just society.

Quote

big·ot·ed
ˈbiɡədəd/
adjective
having or revealing an obstinate belief in the superiority of one's own opinions and a prejudiced intolerance of the opinions of others.

That describes the left.

[Winstonm]

jogs, on 2016-December-15, 21:01, said:

That describes the left.

It is not a right vs left fault. It is a human fault.

[PassedOut]

Quite a number of voters say that they voted for Trump, a man they knew to be completely unqualified to be president, because they considered Clinton to be even worse. On any objective basis, that's nonsense, so how did that opinion come to be formed? That's becoming clearer now: How a Putin Fan Overseas Pushed Pro-Trump Propaganda to Americans

Quote

The Patriot News Agency website popped up in July, soon after it became clear that Donald J. Trump would win the Republican presidential nomination, bearing a logo of a red, white and blue eagle and the motto “Built by patriots, for patriots.”

Tucked away on a corner of the site, next to links for Twitter and YouTube, is a link to another social media platform that most Americans have never heard of: VKontakte, the Russian equivalent of Facebook. It is a clue that Patriot News, like many sites that appeared out of nowhere and pumped out pro-Trump hoaxes tying his opponent Hillary Clinton to Satanism, pedophilia and other conspiracies, is actually run by foreigners based overseas.

But while most of those others seem be the work of young, apolitical opportunists cashing in on a conservative appetite for viral nonsense, operators of Patriot News had an explicitly partisan motivation: getting Mr. Trump elected.

Patriot News — whose postings were viewed and shared tens of thousands of times in the United States — is among a constellation of websites run out of the United Kingdom that are linked to James Dowson, a far-right political activist who advocated Britain’s exit from the European Union and is a fan of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. A vocal proponent of Christian nationalist, anti-immigrant movements in Europe, Mr. Dowson, 52, has spoken at a conference of far-right leaders in Russia and makes no secret of his hope that Mr. Trump will usher in an era of rapprochement with Mr. Putin.

His dabbling in the American presidential election adds an ideological element that has been largely missing from the still-emerging landscape of websites and Facebook pages that bombarded American voters with misinformation and propaganda. Far from the much-reported Macedonian teenagers running fake news factories solely for profit, Mr. Dowson made it his mission, according to messages posted on one of his sites, to “spread devastating anti-Clinton, pro-Trump memes and sound bites into sections of the population too disillusioned with politics to have taken any notice of conventional campaigning.”

The combination of the highly-skilled use of social media for propaganda purposes and enough gullible voters to elect Trump resulted in the calamity that the US faces now.

We'll always have a percentage of gullible voters and a group people aiming to make use of that gullibility. But we need to work on reducing the numbers of those hoodwinked by fake news and propaganda, doing so by presenting facts in dramatic and interesting ways. Articles like this, while interesting to many, don't reach a lot of the voters who were conned. We've got to do better.

[kenberg]

PassedOut, on 2016-December-17, 09:55, said:

Quite a number of voters say that they voted for Trump, a man they knew to be completely unqualified to be president, because they considered Clinton to be even worse. On any objective basis, that's nonsense, so how did that opinion come to be formed? That's becoming clearer now: How a Putin Fan Overseas Pushed Pro-Trump Propaganda to Americans


The combination of the highly-skilled use of social media for propaganda purposes and enough gullible voters to elect Trump resulted in the calamity that the US faces now.

We'll always have a percentage of gullible voters and a group people aiming to make use of that gullibility. But we need to work on reducing the numbers of those hoodwinked by fake news and propaganda, doing so by presenting facts in dramatic and interesting ways. Articles like this, while interesting to many, don't reach a lot of the voters who were conned. We've got to do better.

I completely agree, we must do better.

I was reading something about fake news and viral postings and such. I had never even heard of a fair number of the things that they were referring to. I look at Facebook when Becky tells me there is something up about the grandkids. One of them recently went to Houston for a high school hockey event, he is a goalie. And the youngest is struggling, sometimes successfully, to stand up without help. But otherwise I ignore FB. I keep meaning to hook up Skype but I haven't yet. And, as I say, a lot of the social media sites I had never even heard of. Becky reads it more and from time to time she will mention that so and so has posted another ridiculous rant.

I think the anonymity of modern life is a big feature in all of this. Here is an event from the other ay: We got our mail out of the mailbox by the curb and Becky handed me an envelope addressed to our neighbors two houses down. I don't know them I walked down and stuffed it in their already empty box. But then Becky found three more envelopes to the same address. I guess the postman was having a bad day. Ok, I went down and got the first one out and took all four up and knocked on the door. The guy opened the door and had a stance that led me to think maybe I should throw the envelopes at him and run. He managed a brief thank you when I explained what i was doing there.

This has all gotten a bit nuts.

I don't know how to make the gullible less gullible, and I don't know how to monitor fake news. But I think a more neighborly approach to life might help.

Whatever one thinks of Clinton, she isn't running a child sex ring. Really, she isn't. What's wrong with these people?

[Al_U_Card]

Must be more Russian agitprop or perhaps inaccurate explanations for why so many people were so deluded as to their own status as well as that of their politicians?

[rmnka447]

jogs, on 2016-December-15, 18:49, said:

What was happening to those with pre-existing conditions before Obamacare? Why should others be responsible for their care at inflated prices?
Repeal Obamacare and they are no worst than before 2009. Obama claims 20 million would lose health insurance. With a $5,000 deductible, how many of those people actually had access to healthcare?
Solve the problem of healthcare for vets before tackling healthcare for the general population.

A $5000 deductible makes that "affordable care" effectively a very costly catastrophic healthcare insurance. Another example, after the election, a Trump voter in Wisconsin -- a small business owner -- said he was paying $1000 a month for family healthcare coverage with a $12,000 deductible -- more essentially catastrophic healthcare insurance.

The mantra has been "repeal and replace" but it's standard for Obamacare proponents to just focus on the "repeal" part as a scare tactic. The thing I find funny is that I thought I saw there was only something like 11 million signed up for Obamacare which was causing the death spiral. In any case, there'll have to be a several year transition period even if it is repealed. Maybe both parties can work together to get it right this time.

[kenberg]

Al_U_Card, on 2016-December-17, 12:03, said:

Must be more Russian agitprop or perhaps inaccurate explanations for why so many people were so deluded as to their own status as well as that of their politicians?

I responded to this, but now I have thought better of it. It suffices to say I will not be listening to the next video of his. Nor did I finish listening to the first.

[Kaitlyn S]

kenberg, on 2016-December-17, 11:33, said:

Whatever one thinks of Clinton, she isn't running a child sex ring. Really, she isn't. What's wrong with these people?

Despite all the hoots and howls to the contrary, I still think there is a reasonable chance that she is hiding something bad (although the odds seem to be decreasing all the time with all the crap coming out about foreign entities putting out fake news to help Trump.) However, it would be extremely difficult to convince me that the reason she scrubbed emails was anything to do with child sex.

[nige1]

kenberg, on 2016-December-17, 18:27, said:

I responded to this, but now I have thought better of it. It suffices to say I will not be listening to the next video of his. Nor did I finish listening to the first.

I enjoy listening to political pundits like Noam Chomsky and John Pilger. I agree with most of their views.

It would be amazing if Russia hadn't consistently tried to influence Western politics (including US elections), given the West's policy of fomenting unrest in other countries.

[kenberg]

nige1, on 2016-December-18, 07:21, said:

I enjoy listening to political pundits like Noam Chomsky and John Pilger. I agree with most of their views.

It would be amazing if Russia hadn't consistently tried to influence Western politics (including US elections), given the West's policy of fomenting rebellion against the regimes of other countries.

I found that his style overwhelmed his message. He spoke with such constant and utter contempt for anyone who had views different from his that it was just impossible for me to listen all the way through. Generally. I like hearing from people who see things differently than I do, but not him.

[Al_U_Card]

kenberg, on 2016-December-17, 18:27, said:

I responded to this, but now I have thought better of it. It suffices to say I will not be listening to the next video of his. Nor did I finish listening to the first.

Hi Ken.
They were that off-the-mark? We are talking about the opinions of well-respected individuals with much more information than you (I expect) or I (definitely) at their disposal.
Since this thread began, I have even started to check out the Fox News site, because before I only read CNN. The divergence on seemingly indentical subjects is most edifying.
Different peoples opinions differ because they have different viewpoints. The facts must be identical so the margin must be located in the perspective as well as the quantity available. We are both old enough to have seen lots of "surprising" things. They were always different from what we expected or even preferred, right?

[Al_U_Card]

nige1, on 2016-December-18, 07:21, said:

I enjoy listening to political pundits like Noam Chomsky and John Pilger. I agree with most of their views.

It would be amazing if Russia hadn't consistently tried to influence Western politics (including US elections), given the West's policy of fomenting rebellion against the regimes of other countries.

The video above of the Canadian journalist that put US policy in Syria in another light is a perfect example. Independent and daring journalism is a hallmark of functional democracy. Press release pap regurgitation is a sign of totalitarian regimes. As much as the internet allows for "fake" news to circulate, it is up to us to wade through the morass and figure out what's what.

[Al_U_Card]

Kaitlyn S, on 2016-December-17, 22:49, said:

Despite all the hoots and howls to the contrary, I still think there is a reasonable chance that she is hiding something bad (although the odds seem to be decreasing all the time with all the crap coming out about foreign entities putting out fake news to help Trump.) However, it would be extremely difficult to convince me that the reason she scrubbed emails was anything to do with child sex.

Based on the verifiable information, it appears that she is just playing the game by rules that are well-established if abhorent. Pay-for-play, influence-peddling and straight out graft are all part of the political establishment. Getting it under control is preferable to keeping it under wraps so the more we know...

[Al_U_Card]

kenberg, on 2016-December-18, 07:29, said:

I found that his style overwhelmed his message. He spoke with such constant and utter contempt for anyone who had views different from his that it was just impossible for me to listen all the way through. Generally. I like hearing from people who see things differently than I do, but not him.

More disgust than contempt, I would expect. Pilger has seen a lot of crap, up close, so his disposition can be allowed for. The reality of his descriptions is what I find most interesting.

[kenberg]

Al_U_Card, on 2016-December-18, 09:05, said:

More disgust than contempt, I would expect. Pilger has seen a lot of crap, up close, so his disposition can be allowed for. The reality of his descriptions is what I find most interesting.

I am not sure I distinguish all that much between contempt and disgust. My point is that as I tried listening to him I thought that I might possibly agree with some of what he said, but I found it so overloaded with contempt or disgust or whatever the right word is that I could not wade through it to get to whatever argument it was that he was making. He clearly sees himself as morally superior to me, probably to you, really to just about everyone. Since (a.) he does seem to be considered serious and (b.) I find his speaking style repugnant, I looked up a bit of his written stuff on the internet. So far nothing to get me going much one way or the other. I may read some more of it.