I'll accept that. I think personal ownership of trucks makes that untenable; however, commercial interests may lease truck transit time, such as how city goers lease car time from ZipCar. Wabash may in fact not own any trucks, having ZipTruck, and so being able to charter a truck and return their truck for charging, exchange trailers, and continue to deliver Wabash goods on a Wabash-branded freight trailer pulled by some random ZipTruck. ZipTruck won't handle logistics; you pay Wabash to get your freight from one end of the country to the next, and Wabash pays ZipTruck to provide an engine. These are separate tasks.

You, sir, are a man of vision; at least you needed less a nudge than I. This is why I would surround myself with smart people if I ever ran a business: I may be able to envision great things with broad-reaching implications, but I need prompting or I may as well just stare directly into the sun.

For that matter, I think I'd want a quality cabinet if I ever became a member of Congress.

No, but the brief of it is as obvious as gravity was in Newton's time (when everyone knew things fell down and planets orbited other large things, but nobody had described gravity).

All costs are human labor. Oil and coal require manpower to mine; the machines and fuel used require manpower to build, operate, and maintain, as well as to mine, refine, and ship. At the root of all of it is wages paid to workers.

Considering this briefly, imagine two mines producing coal, both by the same method. They each need the same manpower to mine a 100 cubic meter block of coal; however, one mine produces a solid anthracite block, while the other produces anthracite mixed with 50% rocks and dirt. The second mine spends twice as much labor per 100 cubic meters of coal (not counting refinement--removing those rocks and dirt), so that coal costs twice as much. Think about that when someone says a restriction of supply causes prices to rise: if your next best competitor needs to spend $100 more per unit than you, he can't undercut your prices unless you raise your profit margin to more than $100 per unit, which is how supply gets restricted.

My theory, in simple explanation, is as follows.

Each improvement in efficiency is a reduction of human labor time invested in each unit of production. Where it takes 8 hours to make a chair by hand, hand-tool making of chairs on an assembly line produces twice as many units in the same time investment--essentially 4 hours to make that same chair--and so the chair costs half as much.

By this manner, each improvement in efficiency CREATES UNEMPLOYMENT, concentrating the wealth of the unemployed into the hands of the employed consumer: by competitive market forces (a great many more than just as my coal competition example), consumer demand arises for lower prices (either by another supplier charging less, or by consumers seeing a different good they find more important than yours). Since your prices come down, consumers, as an immediate effect, have more wealth (represented by money, but, more directly, buying power).

This residual wealth creates an opportunity: these consumers--a great many consumers, often--now make up a demographic owning more buying power than they currently exercise. That means you can sell them things which they previously could not afford.

The cost of producing your new goods is the cost of labor you consume, directly or indirectly. That CREATES EMPLOYMENT, which recovers the displaced labor--this may happen months, years, or decades down the line (industrial revolution created multiple generations of high unemployment)--and, of course, means the consumer must pay for that labor per unit new good created.

That is a basic outline of my theory of wealth. This theory implies many things, and lends itself to understanding many things.

For example: progressive taxes are good, as they reduce labor costs, which for obvious reasons I agree with; however, creating the production capacity to employ displaced labor does cost money, and so taxing the living fuck out of "The Rich" has a negative economic impact. When you roll in Social Security, a flat tax would be around 39.2%, whereas our progressive system is 39.6% above $400k and 16.2% at the lowest income bracket (if you don't flatten social security, the flat tax is about 26%, and everyone making under $117k pays 32.2% in taxes). An extra 0.4% taxes on the fabulously wealthy is absolutely acceptable in exchange for cutting taxes by 23.4% on labor.

My reasoning for a Citizen's Dividend at the ruthlessly bare levels is along the same lines: it *works*--it's amazingly profitable for any enterprising business choosing to sell needed goods and services to the poor--and it's, in total, just slightly cheaper than our existing welfare system. At the same time, it puts several thousand dollars into the hands of consumers; and I'm sure you can recognize the implication of keeping the tax percentage flat, thus following the growth of wealth and increasing the standard of living of the poor as the general total wealth increases. You can probably also imagine why I want to take advantage of an *absolute* *guaranteed* minimum standard of living (even for the broke and unemployed) to repeal minimum wage; if not, I suggest you research the Industrial Revolution and reflect on what exactly is involved in the upcoming wave of automation, and the particular value of spreading out the loss of 47% of jobs over time.

That last point is huge.

The Industrial Revolution was just business as usual, yet it cost us more than 60 years of horrifying unemployment, levels around 80%. That's because mechanization did exactly what I describe, but rapidly: instead of losing 0.01% of the jobs in the economy, 80% of the skilled labor jobs vanished overnight. Those 80% were still largely underemployed or unemployed three full generations later. By my theories, stretching out such an extreme upheaval will allow for more rapid backfilling of employment, which may make it an easier pill to swallow--and perhaps we ourselves will come out of it riding the enormous waves of wealth it produces, instead of waiting for our great-great-great-grandchildren to finally gain a glimpse of that wealth in the distant future.

I've already explained how these theories affect supply-and demand. You can imagine how that impacts the economy of scale as well, since arguing for discounts on enormous orders can only cut prices back as far as costs--your supplier will make those arguments with his supplier, all the way up, and compound these cuts; but things must actually cost less to make, or else you won't get so much of a discount.

I can even take this out far enough to explain communism, which has of course lead me to define in *very* *clear* *economic* *terms* why you shouldn't attempt to implement communism. Communism becomes the best system when wealth is such that every individual has more buying power than he cares for, after which you can just take it away and give it to others. In such a system, a person would most likely buy the last commodity: time. You only spend 75% of your income? Looks like you're working 30 hour weeks instead of 40 hour; but your employer has to now hire more part-time workers to fill the slack, meaning more jobs, although only a 30-hour week is needed to make a fully satisfying income. Take this out until nearly nobody is working more than a few hours a week, or when only a few bored workers are spreading their income around to everyone else, and you have communism; I'm sure you can see why it's impossible to force this system--as well as why it may never actually come upon its own--into existence. It's not a matter of idealism; it's a matter of wealth, and you can't magically supply all things to all men without the wealth to produce those things within the labor capabilities of all men.

One day, I'll actually sit down and properly pick apart each basic economic theory--and the various market theories--with this theory. I'll use that to pick apart the greater, more complex theories which settle themselves on top the ECON101 theories. I'll use those to pick apart Marx and Keynes. I'll demonstrate why things have worked in the past, and why people were wrong in the past, and what theories are actually correct, and why they're correct. I've done much of that on cursory examination. The result will undoubtedly be a tome of all modern economic knowledge; it won't be a prescription, because what economic system is appropriate depends entirely on what level of wealth your society can supply (our welfare system used to cost 1.5% of our total income, when my dividend would have cost 120%-135%; now they both cost about 17%, so why would I think a particular system is correct?).

For now, I've taken the constant economic comments that "X could be accomplished with less labor" and explained, once and for all, what exactly that phrase means. It's as if people kept commenting that moons orbited planets and planets orbited the sun, and I pointed out that massive objects in fact attract one another--which is exactly what Isaac Newton did after several hundred years of that nonsense. It's not as big and wordy a statement as one might want to make to impress people, but it's a statement with important implications.

When I say finance isn't the same thing as economics, I mean it. When Trump opens his mouth and says you need to be a rich guy to be President because only rich people have that method of thinking, he's a fucking idiot. The method of thinking required to attend to the needs of an economy is vastly different than the method of thinking required to attend to the needs of a business.

Yap yap yap.

Low beams

High beams

Any questions?

You're not getting this.

That $300,000 house was a $100,000 house before the interest rates dropped. Its price skyrocketed during that "housing bubble" thing, you know, the minor issue that tore down our economy.

Do you imagine that $300,000 house, at 14%, will simply command a $3550 monthly payment? When interest rates recover and return to 1980-level rates, do you imagine middle-class families will beat a path to the banks's doors to put their entire monthly paycheck plus whatever they can beg off welfare into their mortgage payments?

In 1990, the average middle-class family spent 47% of their income on housing--mortgage or rent. When the interest rates dropped from 10%-ish to around 3%-ish, do you know how much the average middle-class family spent on their new homes that they just bought, those same homes that other families sold at an immense profit? 47% of their income. A lot of people make arguments like "you're getting more equity now!" to explain this away.

When the interest rates go up again and people try to sell their overpriced houses, how much do you think people will pay for that $300,000 house?

Changing batteries carries other engineering problems. How old are the batteries? Do you own your battery? What is a battery worth? Do you load your truck with aging, unreliable batteries to swap-off with other aging, unreliable batteries? As a service station manager, how do you test each of these batteries to ensure its safety and reliability (its level of aging), and swap them out? As a service station manager, how do you offset the cost of rotating out old batteries traded in by truckers?

Changing batteries in something like a truck is a labor-intensive process. Mounting the batteries affects balance, thus handling, thus safety; mounting may preclude a fast removal operation. Batteries are heavy, and large machinery is required to remove the batteries. Running a 200A cable to a truck is one thing; but if you want to swap batteries, you're going to have to get in line. The operation may take 40 minutes overall--so may an 80% charge. Even in an EV like the Leaf or Tesla Model S, swapping out those enormous batteries--they're the size of the whole god damn car--is akin to swapping engines, or at least oil pans or transaxles; expect to be there an hour or two.

Think about it as if you were going to swap an entire, pre-filled gas tank, rather than just fill the tank. Sure, it sounds good in theory; but that kind of mechanic work takes space, labor, and time. Filling a tank is faster. Filling a battery is slower than filling a tank, but not that damn slow.

A driverless truck would use the rail system as freight transport, and drive last-mile. Labor costs would be cheap enough to justify the longer driver-miles of such crude distribution. Driverless trucks can spend a lot more time just driving all the fuck around with no cargo, since it costs 1/5 as much for fuel, and the driver's wage is eliminated.

The point was it's not possible to "pay as much on your principle as you can" (or it's not very beneficial, at least) if your interest rate is low.

A low interest rate leads to saving, at most, 8% by paying extra principle--if you can pay the whole damn loan off in full on day one, meaning never getting a loan in the first place. At higher interest rates--that is, in a market where interest rates are high, and your lowest obtainable rate is a comparatively high rate--you can save 63% by paying extra principle.

Likewise, in the high-interest-rate market, your early payments can save you 65 times as much total cost as the initial payment (you pay $18 and save $1166). In the low-interest-rate market, you get a 111% return (you pay an extra $560, and save $625). It is a fool's errand to try and save money by paying extra into your mortgage in a low-interest-rate market; you'd have to be fucking rich, in which case you've probably taken steps such as buying points or lunking down a big down-payment.

The Model S has a 320 mile range; my Mazda 3 ranges 260-315 miles on a full 12-gallon tank.

Not necessarily. I imagine additional engineering may come into play, but you can realistically charge trucks fairly quickly. Rather than a battery, you'd use a bank of batteries with a high-flow fan for thermal protection; you'd use a high amount of voltage to charge them the first 80%, which can pull that off in as little as half an hour.

With that kind of power draw, you may need kinetic storage. Roller coasters can't fire off from a standing start because they'd blow the power grid; some roller coasters spend a full minute or so accelerating a flywheel, and then connect it to a generator or direct mechanical drive to launch. A truck stop may provide high-speed charging likewise, driving a dynamo from a flywheel. From that standpoint, you'd recharge your truck while waiting for food, since a 20-30 minute rest stop to eat twice per day is all but unavoidable.

I look forward to a more wealthy economy in which people own a car and an alternate means--a motorcycle, for example, if not a bicycle or skilled use of public transit--so as to defray those costs. A low-end motorcycle, such as a Honda or Kawasaki 250cc (actually 249cc, to avoid regulations on 250cc+ bikes), provides excellent fuel economy for single-person transit.

Most people counter-argue with me here by pointing out that the average passenger carry of a motorcycle is 1.2, while a car can carry 5 people; I find this dishonest, since a great many cars carry one person driving to work alone. With carry capacity for light shopping--I've carried groceries on a bicycle, and have seen motorcycle panniers frequently--and 78% of commuters driving solo, the doubling of mpg and great reduction of maintenance costs (two wheels, bike itself costs $4000) is an excellent way to defray financial costs and extend the life of your expensive passenger vehicle.

Bicycles and public transit require more effort, carry more risk (bicycles particularly--at least a motorcycle can travel with traffic, and not simply in the same direction), and demand more time investment than a motorcycle. While I personally leverage these mode of transportation fine, I don't imagine most people could more smoothly transition to a motorcycle; an ebike sits somewhere between, with its 20-25mph limit.

I own a home, but don't own it as an investment. When I inevitably dispose of it, I won't make any sort of return on that home; in fact, homeownership will be a financial loss--possibly even a loss compared to renting, although it'll likely be some small gain. Homeownership gives me more temporal control over my finances, however: I've invested quite a lot of money into small returns, such that the amount of money I must spend month-to-month is lower.

If we could get an interest rate market around the 14% mark, homeownership would easily be an attractive option, since you could spend very little to clear your debt. At 2.5%, a home with a payment of $1180 requires an extra $500+/month to skip a payment in the very early months, and more as you get deeper into payments, with the total interest paid at around $26,000; at 14%, a home with a payment of $1180 comes to the same projected total cost at the end of a 30-year loan period, but allows you to skip early payments with as little as $18 additional payment. If you raise your payments by $150, that 30-year loan at 14% interest becomes a 15-year loan, saving you $162,000 in interest--more than six times the total interest cost of the same home in a 2.5% interest rate market where buyers can afford (and do pay) much higher sale prices.

In the end, a house's investment return is a gamble at best, and one that doesn't really work out unless general market interest rates are high when you buy and suddenly drop just before you sell, ratcheting the sale price of your house up extremely high. What we need most is financial education in the next high-interest-rate market, creating a cultural habit of 15- or, better, 10-year mortgages, where people reject the idea of banker fiefdom for 20-30 years. Even if your home is a complete write-off, hitting an age of 30 and realizing you suddenly have $1500-$2500 more to spend every month creates quite a different economic climate--both in your personal finances and in the wider market.

I'd make one hell of a banker, but I decided to go economist on that front. Bankers obviously want people to go for long, high-balanced loans; as an economist--as *the* economist, since I've developed a formal economic theory which unifies and correctly explains all current theory--I see the great value in accelerating and strengthening the wealth cycle. The mortgage market behaviors I've described don't really make banks (much) poorer--in fact, taking the full function of banks into account, they probably only reduce the proportion of bank income from consumer mortgages, and increase its income in business loans and other consumer loans--but they leave more residual wealth in the consumer's hand, creating market opportunities for businesses to sell more goods and services, thus creating demand for new labor.

Even automation would only cut production costs, having the same effect--unfortunately, at an excessively high rate, leading to a serious economic disruption that would require several decades to heal in exactly the same way--with an interesting difference in that you'd need much less new labor to produce new products, and so would produce a much greater volume of new products and services to capture that residual wealth, so long as dynamics of competition come into play (fortunately, competition can be outside market: does the consumer want your overpriced diamonds, or my overpriced cakes? Perhaps one of us--or both of us--must reduce our prices to come closer in line to our actual costs, slimming our profit margins while still retaining a healthy profit... no guarantees there, though).

I'm sure you can imagine why, while I want to protect the income of businesses and high-earners (meaning I'd like to minimize any new taxes), I'm also chiefly concerned with maximizing the wealth of consumers. Many of my economics policies proposals focus on reducing labor costs, increasing income security, and doing so with little expansion or, interestingly, a reduction of total taxes necessary to fund these new systems by replacing more-expensive but less-effective legacy systems. Such legacy systems were good for their time--our current welfare system, including social security old-age pensions, cost 1.5% of our country's total income in 1950, while my proposed system would have cost 120%-135% of the total income--but have slowly become ungainly, while new systems have become viable--that old welfare system now consumes 17.2% of our income, and my proposed system consumes only 17%. The greater reach of economics systems, however, don't preclude the personal benefits of a good head for finance.