Never mind that; Timothy has learned to not end a sentence in a preposition. Maybe he'll learn to correctly use the serial comma in lists of three or more items! Quick, set up a class so he can teach the other editors English!

You're ridiculous. "Oh, I can just walk into a major bank, an insurance company, or a credit card processor, and, with no foreknowledge of their systems, wave my hand and reconstruct their entire data center from back-ups, no planning required!" You'll get a non-working system.

You're one of those people who thinks he's a rockstar developer, a magic sysadmin with the Midas touch. I've watched hundreds of people like you destroy businesses and then walk off smiling to yourself about how you did a perfect job. I have been there, and I have done that; you are a child to me, an artifact from my past whose knowledge and experiences are a subset of mine.

You imagine a lot.

It doesn't by design. Such things are built on top the system. It's like saying that clay earth only bears 1500 pounds per square foot load: this is a fact, just as the stated facts I have given about economics. You add an argument similar to that engineers sometimes design shoddy buildings, or that builders sometimes cut corners; those are also true, and have nothing to do with how much load the earth will bear. The fact remains you can improve your structure to bear 1500 pounds per square foot load without collapsing, and it will still collapse if the earth below it only bears 1200 pounds per square inch; you must improve the earth before the structure.

A great economic leap forward would not bankrupt us; however, a massive switch to automation would cause something akin to the Industrial Revolution, which I've accounted for. The massive unemployment will go beyond the 47% of jobs which we can automate now: with those laborers displaced, the consumer base drops by a good 47%, which means you can sell all your inexpensive goods only to half as many consumers, which has nasty implications. The Information Age unbound struggling markets: businesses couldn't double capacity to manage contracts and invoices by doubling the number of workers; the mistakes went up exponentially, and the feasibility of managing all this information was non-existent until we brought in computers, hence allowing explosive economic growth and rapid creation of jobs to employ the displaced. Mechanization will replace linear labor scaling with machine work, so will simply create a large term of unemployment.

This won't bankrupt the country--far from it--but it will inconvenience many people. I provide a welfare system which doesn't increase in costs when more people are unemployed, and which is stable against all disruptions which don't destroy the economy outright, and which completely eliminates homelessness and hunger; people tell me this is immoral because those dirty poor people should just get a job. 55 million hungry in the United States of America, 600,000 homeless, and 4.8 million homed on HUD vouchers (5.4 million WOULD be homeless), and they tell me it's immoral to provide a welfare solution that costs 98% of what our current costs, but eliminates these problems.

Morality is an excuse to protect your ego from the suffering you inflict on others.

All these products and luxuries costing ever so much are reflective of when shirts used to cost 479 labor-hours (~$3500 today), and then factories and mechanization made them cost $25, and suddenly every beggar could buy himself two shirts.

How retarded are you?

I described economics in a way where you start with people spending $320/year on chairs, and wind up with them spending $320/year on chairs AND CUSHIONS. That's not zero-sum; are you fucking stupid? More shit is coming out of one side without more shit going in the other.

Nobody should bow to any science as a set of rules; sciences are tools. Engineers figure out how to abuse the rules to make interesting things happen.

Correct. You understand my point, I see: we rapidly move total wealth forward, so even the lowest and most abuse face an improving life situation. You argue that we shouldn't abuse the child of Omelas today so that he may be better off--but still abused--tomorrow; I only argue that it is more efficient, which you seem to understand. I find morality silly, but won't argue it in this case; I always attack morality where it leads to conclusions in which people would rather let millions suffer and die than condemn thousands, because you are responsible for that suffering and death by your refusal to stop it.

No, it doesn't. The problem isn't of how much, but how much per unit time; if the question becomes how much, implement complete and total communism, because you have entered a post-scarcity economy and everyone has so much money they can't find any way to spend it all.

We roll the dice you're stumbling over every once in a while. The last bad one was the Industrial Age, where we had 70% unemployment for 60 years; it sucked.

The last good one was the Information Age, where we replaced mostly clerks in offices managing paper document stores so large that an ever-expanding army of clerks couldn't do it--that is, you may hire 2000 clerks to handle 2000 times as many leases and contracts, but your workforce isn't going to handle the workload anyway, and your business is going to collapse under its own weight; the Information Age (computers) solved this by making it POSSIBLE to expand industries that desperately wanted to grow, not by throwing out massive numbers of jobs and then trying to make up new markets. New markets came rapidly because new jobs in existing markets showed up everywhere, and everyone got friggin' rich.

The next one is the automation age; it resembles the industrial revolution more than the information age, and will sharply create a 50%-ish drop in employment in industries which are not hitting walls trying to expand. Those industries are sized for the demand, and won't explosively grow; new jobs won't rapidly appear over night due to automation, and so the turn-over won't magic up so much wealth as to expand the middle class and create new markets out of nothing.

Automation won't do it. The core problem is energy scarcity; we can transmute any material into any other material through energy-expensive processes, so we are capable of using millions of times more energy than we currently produce or consume. A dyson sphere completely enclosing the sun and using modern parabolic reflector sterling engines at 39% efficiency would generate 13,000 TRILLION times as much energy as we use now, and would end us into an unknown post-scarcity economy as you suggest; however, I don't project the specifics being something I can simply describe, and don't attempt to do so. It may not instantly create a utopia; it will create the economic situation prerequisite for a utopia.

As for today, a capitalist solution works. For just a hair below the cost of our current welfare system in America, we can create a capitalist feedback loop that supplies everyone food, shelter, clothing, utilities, clean water, and so forth. Any business participating in the supply side will make billions in pure profit, so somebody will do so; as for the incentive to work, I specify everyone (even Warren Buffet) gets the Dividend payment each month, and so employment carries no risk of losing welfare benefits, nor reduction in benefits, and so a job is always an improvement in your financial situation. Incentive.

Solving poverty wasn't a difficult problem.

Debatable. Your environmental argument is stronger than your labor argument for technical reasons, rather than reasons of rhetoric; it is the technical reasons which concern me.

Realize every cost in every product or service you buy is human labor. Profit margins come on top of human labor. This works out in aggregate, which is important for many reasons: in major aggregate, bulk purchase agreements are bound by this human labor cost and nothing else.

Consider you make steel automobile frames, which use refined steel, which is processed from coal and steel ore. Humans mine coal and steel (it's complex enough, let's ignore the cost of machines, tools, and fuel at the mining level), which mining companies sell to the refinery; humans refine steel, which the refinery sells to you.

When you buy steel, you pay a mark-up on refined steel above its material and labor costs. The refinery buys coal and steel ore as material, which the mining companies mark up above their human labor costs. In aggregate, the price of your automobile frames includes your mark-up, the steel mill mark-up, and the mining company mark-up; while the cost includes the raw human labor and nothing else. Put the mark-up and human labor together and you get the price.

GM orders 100 million automobile frames from you. For this, you negotiate with your steel refinery for 100 million units of refined steel. For this, the refinery negotiates a massive ore and coal order from the ore and coal mining companies, respectively. These large orders provide a big profit opportunity: rather than mark up $100/ton, the mining companies mark up $1/ton, selling millions of tons of material they wouldn't have normally sold, profiting millions of dollars they would never have gained if you went elsewhere. You refine the ore into steel for frames, and charge a $1 mark-up on that instead of the usual $100 mark-up, which, with 100 million frames, nets you $100 million of profit.

That's just business. You know about bulk ordering; I will explain an important factor here.

Supply-and-demand suggests this high demand will drive the prices up, yet it drives prices down. That's because supply-and-demand doesn't account for market negotiation; we shoehorn competition here. Regardless, another mechanism is at play: labor cost.

Say coal costs $200/ton to extract, because you get a 10 tonne block of coal by an hour of effort from 200 miners making $10/hr. If you try to increase supply, the next best mines--the ones not being tapped right now--supply blocks of 75% rock and dirt mixed with 25% coal, meaning 200 miners still cost $2000 to pull that block out of the ground, but it only has 2.5 tonnes of coal--it costs you $800/tonne, plus cost to sift and refine the coal out. Existing coal companies can raise prices up to about $800/tonne without worrying about a new competitor showing up with a source of cheap coal (actually higher, because they can significantly undercut and bankrupt any new competitor immediately).

Invent new tools and new mining techniques.

In this new process, the labor involved in tool production, tool maintenance, mine planning, managing, and executing tallies up to about an hour of 100 laborers averaging $10/hr to pull one 10-tonne block of coal from the ground. That means it costs $100/ton for coal.

When someone comes along and says they want 10 million tonnes of coal, you can make them a deal for $200/tonne and not go bankrupt. Below that and you run red. Discover a new process, and suddenly your competitor breaks even at $200/tonne, while you make a 50% profit margin selling at $150/tonne--a price that would bankrupt your competitor in 6 months if they tried to fill that order at that price!

You'll notice here that I just UNEMPLOYED HALF THE COAL MINERS.

Although these miners are unemployed, cars are suddenly cheaper. We're talking about coal energy, so it's all suddenly cheaper (there's no environmental cost if we don't muse on consuming more coal; if we do use more coal, there's an environmental cost). Still, let's say the mark-down cuts $100 off the cost of a $15,000 car. That doesn't seem like a lot, but it's $100 more a consumer has in his pocket. The consumer can now buy that $100 leather seat upgrade.

That's how wealth works. If you can't find this theory anywhere, it's because it doesn't exist: comments on this cycle are scrawled throughout analysis of history, especially around the industrial revolution, but they're matured to the level of "moons appear to orbit planets, and planets orbit stars, and things fall when you drop them", and I've been putting those observations directly into "here is the theory of Gravitation". It's a very simple, basic theory that describes every basic and advanced economic theory, and highlights why some theories don't work, and why some should in theory work eventually but not now (e.g. I can show when communism works, and why it doesn't work now; we can project that the conditions I describe will never occur, but that's immaterial).

Essentially, wealth increases by repeatedly unemploying people to concentrate wealth. You apply fewer labor-hours to produce a common good or service; a significant but small number of laborers become unemployed; the large body of consumers are granted more wealth, by way of residual wealth after spending--they pay $50 instead of $500 for a thing, and have $450 left to spend on another thing; existing markets grow to target more consumers, and new markets appear to provide new goods and services, and the cost of these markets is bounded precisely by the cost to re-hire displaced labor.

This is a growth wealth transfer: it moves money from a few people to many people, but divides it by fewer people than the recipients. The monetary transfer is always one-to-one: if you unemploy 1,000 laborers each making $10,000, then 100,000 consumers are each $100 richer: $10,000,000 transfers from some poor people to some not-as-poor people. At the same time, non-monetary transfer occurs: those consumers were spending $200 on chairs, and now they spend $100 on chairs and keep $100, and so each has essentially received half their chairs FOR FREE. If they were to somehow sell half their chairs at old-market prices, they'd have $200 cash on hand, and yet still have $100 of chairs.

If you're trying to do the math and keep stumbling over "it works! ... no it doesn't," it's because value fluctuates, which is the point. The value of a chair--monetary value--drops, but its UTILITY VALUE does not. Your ability to possess and to benefit from possessing a chair does not reduce; you only trade less for it.

As I've shown labor is tied to cost, you can imagine the obvious: every product made will employ a portion of the displaced labor. If you fuck up the economy totally by unemploying half the workforce, this can take decades or generations to restore, with 60% unemployment running for 50 years or longer. The industrial revolution and the coming automation age will do that, while the information age created rapid returns and so grew a middle class. More moderate, dynamic, diverse economies tend to unemploy a few, then re-employ them, holding unemployment stable while this process slowly masticates upon the poor.

What all this means is displacing half the chair workers means you'll re-employ them next year and start selling cushions with the chairs; displacing half of ALL workers means you'll have an unemployed workforce, a drastically-smaller consumer base, and slow growth, leaving you waiting decades for new jobs. You want to concentrate wealth by transferring it from the bottom 1% to the top 99%, not by transferring it from the bottom 70% to the top 30%. Doing it the former way rapidly raises total economic wealth, overall raising the living quality even of those cycled employees at the bottom; while the latter way wrecks the economic machine, leaving it in a heap in the corner for curious tinkerers to untangle over the coming ages.

This implies that all forms of outsourcing are good by explaining what "trade advantage" ("Comparative Advantage") means (it's never been explained as an economic cycle, only as an immediate advantage: nobody has ever discussed how trade advantages raises wealth in a whole economic system, only that it allows neighbors to trade goods more cheaply than they could produce in isolation). Not really outsourcing per se, but reduction in labor costs--which means automation as well. My explanation of wealth also suggests a progressive tax system is far superior to a flat tax system, since taxing labor raises labor costs ($8 minimum wage when the government takes $6 of it!? You need to pay me $20 to work at McDonalds dude! It's not my fault the money you pay me doesn't actually get here!); I use flat taxes only where absolute stability in relation to the growth of the economy and the total income is strictly required, such as a source for a Citizen's Dividend.

Welcome to economics!

It's that long because there's oversupply of tech workers, so they get to wait for 100 applicants and then run through everyone to negotiate as low a salary as possible. This is the result of government-supported college education and a poor K-12 primary education system, instead of market-supported career education and a functional K-12 primary education system.

Which a McBurgerFlipper won't know how to do. Even as an experienced systems integration engineer, I would need a few hours at least to develop a plan on how to do that. I have tapes all over the place with multiple days's worth of differential backups, and I need to use dd and tar to get the data out, restore it to the appropriate systems, restore differentials and incrementals IN PROPER ORDER--meaning I have to verify I'm using the tapes in the correct order--get that data into the appropriate applications, configure the different servers on the new network so the applications can actually interact and function, and so forth.

There is no such thing as "put the tape in and tell Amanda to rebuild your data center". It's never been that way. In days of old, when servers had tape drives, you could bare-metal restore by taking the correct tape to the correct server and running restore software--requiring you to know which tape goes to which server and how to boot alternate media. When it came to banks of tapes in centralized backup, you had to configure each system to get on the network first, and to interact with your back-up system. Now we have complex PXE setups and all, which are fast, but require knowledge--even knowing how to work them, you have to know the overall engineering plan to set them up.

It's great that you take home back-ups onto an external hard drive, but we're talking about restoring data centers here.

Water bottles are PET or, if you're extremely lucky, Polypropylene. Polycarbonate uses bisphenol; PET and PP are both fully non-toxic according to all modern science, in the same way modern science finds glass fully non-toxic and copper considerably poisonous.

Switching from copper to CPVC and PEX was mostly driven by copper piping's tendency to corrode, weaken, and burst. CPVC and PEX fail far less frequently, with far longer lifetimes (50+ years for PEX), and with the most frequent failure mode being poorly-formed joints (which copper is susceptible to as well--your soldering sucks).

I have more efficient solutions that are less-expensive and more effective than putting people into homes not fit for human habitation. If you want to go that route, it would be easier to just execute all the poor people, since they're going to die of respiratory problems thanks to all the mold in those houses.

We can create a profitable market for providing small apartments, food, clothing, and clean water to homeless people, which would cost in total 98% of what our current main welfare programs cost, but be damn near 100% effective (the 600,000 homeless and 54 million hungry would no longer be homeless or hungry; the 4.8 million on HUD vouchers would self-support, or rather the HUD voucher would phase out as new people self-support and current beneficiaries recover and move out of the HUD program).

Yes, yes, and yes. Livable houses quickly become unlivable houses without maintenance. I live across the street from a house that went from livable and in good repair to molding, sagging, and damaged in 4 years of non-habitation. Within 10 years, a house can become unstable. Without humidity, temperature, insect, rodent, and plant control, everything attacks the structure: mold, fungus, and burrowing insects grow and weaken wood; rodents chew through electrical lines, drywall, carpet, insulation, wood, and so forth; tree roots can attack foundations, while creeping vines can attack siding and mortar, destroying wood, plastic, and brick; moisture seeping into concrete and masonry, along with temperature fluctuations, can reduce brick to quarter-sized fragments in less than two years (a clogged gutter did this to my house: it looked like you smashed up the bricks below the constant waterfall with a jackhammer).

Whoever said an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure is an idiot. The $3000 you spend just to run your air conditioning, $1000 on general maintenance, hours in the yard, and occasional large appliance repairs (furnace) save you hundreds of thousands of dollars in repair costs. Give it two years and you'll have to dump $50k-$100k into a 1300sqft town house to gut and restore it. A gram of prevention is worth several kilos of cure.

The context for their statement of a million dollars was America, where most cabbies carry a few hundred thousand. I recall numbers like $50,000 in countries where $30,000 was the norm, and suggestions of bigger numbers in some places that I never found specifics about and so never pursed much as argument.

Where my knowledge of Uber's insurance coverage has been concrete, they've always carried more than cabbies; where I've only had vague hints, I've always just ignored those such markets due to insufficient data. I have no comment on Uber's precise operations where I have no precise information.

Sale price. Home values don't really change--that is to say, clearly, the value of purchasing a home over a payment term doesn't change. A $1300/month 30-year term house is a $1300/month 30-year term house. If interest rates go up, the market will bear $1300/month for that house (plus the inflation, of course), so the price must come down. In the end, you pay the same.

Right.

People buy houses based on monthly payment, not transaction amount.

Right again.

WRONG!

This is a simplified explanation: it's functionally correct, but technically incorrect. Think like the "principle and interest" explanation: you don't really pay $SOMEDOLLARS on principle and $OTHERDOLLARS on interest; rather, you accrue interest every day, increasing your loan balance, and then pay down the balance, with the relative difference between payment dates being the imaginary "principle", and the interest accrued that month being the "interest". It describes the effective behavior of your payments, yes, but the whole process is completely divorced from reality.

Let's say you take a $320,000 loan at 3.5% for 30 years. Down payment made, sale price, none of that matters; the fact is, after all of it, you have to borrow $320,000, at 3.5%, for 30 years. Your monthly payment is $1,436.94.

The first month, your payment is $933.33 interest and $503.61 principle, by the strange definition above. You accrue $933.33 before your first payment, and then pay down your balance by the $1,400-ish. In fact, your first six months are $933.33, $931.86, $930.39, $928.91 $927.43, $925.95. Your principle payments are $503.61, $505.08, $506.55, $508.03, $509.51, and $511.

If, in that first month, you pay an extra $2,540.17, you skip the next five months's payments. Your balance moves down to where it would be when you made your sixth payment, and so you skip accruing that interest--$4,644.45. Instead of a $1,400 payment, you have to find a $4,000 payment, but that's the effect.

Let's change the interest rate to 14%.

Let's say you take a $120,000 loan at 14% for 30 years. Down payment made, sale price, none of that matters; the fact is, after all of it, you have to borrow $120,000, at 14%, for 30 years. Your monthly payment is $1,421.85.

That's almost exactly the same payment.

The first month, your payment is $1,400.00 interest and $21.85 principle, by the strange definition above. You accrue $1,400 before your first payment, and then pay down your balance by the $1,400-ish. In fact, your first six months are $1,400, $1,399.75, $1,399.49, $1,399.23, $1,398.96, $1,398.70. Your principle payments are $21.85, $22.10, $22.36, $22.62, $22.88, $23.15.

If, in that first month, you pay an extra $113.11, you skip the next five months's payments. Your balance moves down to where it would be when you made your sixth payment, and so you skip accruing that interest--$6,996.13. Instead of a $1,400 payment, you have to find a $1,550 payment, but that's the effect.

Do you see the difference here?

In your early payments, if you throw down an extra $20, you save yourself $1,400. In fact, two and a half years in, dropping an extra $30 would save you $1,391.62, if you had only paid the minimum until then. Obviously, if you're doubling principle payment, you'd have to pay $45 two and a half years in, and would only save about $1,380 for that single extra payment.

It means if you raise your first payment by $258, you skip nearly a year of interest ($15,382). If you pay your second payment plus $297, you save $15,343 and skip ahead a whole year. Even if you just throw an extra $50 on every payment, you save yourself 8 years and $120,000 off the loan.

A 15-year loan on this house at 14% is $1,598, with a $287k final totalcost; a 15-year loan at 3.5% is $2,288, with a $412k final cost. On a 30-year loan, the final costs are $512k and $517k--the monthly payments are off by about $5,000 over 30 years.

Can you squeeze an extra $20 out of your wallet? Can you squeeze out an extra $180? An extra $180 will cut the cost of your house down by $225k in a 14% interest market where house prices are suppressed. The big joke in Europe used to be that Americans are so stupid they'll take a 30-year mortgage to save $120/month, because they can't comprehend that they're paying $50,000 for the same fucking house; now the interest rates are low and we just pay $200,000 more for the same fucking house outright.

High interest rates. We need high interest rates as the market norm--a high Federal Reserve rate to the banks--before we can get 15-year mortgages to the poorest homeowners (the ones who aren't going to get foreclosed anyway due to severe lack of financial planning) and 10-year mortgages to savvy middle classers. You might imagine the banks will just raise the rates because people are willing to pay $1,800 instead of $1,300; but people are willing to pay $1,800 FOR TEN YEARS to avoid paying $1,300 FOR THIRTY YEARS. Even if everyone jumps on that train, it'd be like if banks started marketing 45 and 60 year mortgages now; who the hell is that dumb?

You're going to ask how we got here in the first place.

Roosevelt cultured 30-year mortgages when most people rented, and only rich people had mortgages. Mortgages were 5-10 years at the time, but basically only like 30% of the country owned homes. Roosevelt got those numbers up to some 70% or something, I can't remember the exact figures. Don't take this as numerical gospel; it's mechanism I'm trying to describe. The point is he got THE MIDDLE CLASS into homeownership by giving them 30-year mortgages; it was never in our public mind as middle-class citizens that a mortgage should be 10, at most 15, years.

Today, we're more wealthy, and can afford that; it hasn't been proven, but is certainly possible, that the banks could somehow convince us that home monthly payments should stagnate for 2 or 3 generations while they slowly lengthen the loan terms. Such a campaign would have to divert attention away from the ideal of not having a payment, in the same way that we'd have to divert your mind from the ideal of retirement: we'd have to make you not think about 20 years of having thousands of extra dollars just sitting in your pocket every month.

Ten-year mortgages giving everyone over 30 an extra $2000+ discretionary spending would expand existing consumer markets and open up new markets: every business that's not a bank would viciously attack any information campaign suggesting consumers should move away from 10-year mortgages to longer 30-year mortgages. It would start cutting into their profits, quickly; even the banks can't stand up to literally everyone else, and the oil companies aren't on their side.

That's assuming people don't just up and move, although they'd then sell their house with less loss into interest, buy the next house for dirt cheap in total, pay off the mortgage in a year or three, and overall come out rich anyway. You'd have to move every 3-5 years to keep yourself as poor as a modern one-house homeowner.

Pex can carry hot water up to several hundred degrees with no problem; it will, however, degrade rapidly, becoming useless with 15-20 minutes of sunlight exposure.

I'm a realist, not a cocaine-fueled Marxist who believes in a fantasy utopia. I know how to reach those utopias, and will inform you the moment it's possible to implement such things without destroying the world and inflicting widespread human suffering. My solutions are the best possible--I don't mean the best possible at cost, I mean the absolute best, considering human psychology, economic drivers, long-term planning on the order of thousands or millions of years (open-ended to beyond what can be projected recognizably), and so forth.

You can get houses where I live for $1000-$5000. Why don't you come buy a few of those?