Somebody just published (in 2010) a dissertation explaining capitalism, how markets work, and how this affects economic policy creation. Dissertations add new knowledge to the field.

I encourage you to reflect on why economists frequently publish dissertations citing all of their peers's contributions as things they've identified as wrong.

I meant it as a complete thought, not as an overly terse and flippant reply.

I only get that line from people who hold up the Holy Writ of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx. Too bad all modern economics is based on an equivocation fallacy in which the term "value" means several different things, yet is interchanged to justify things even when the definition of value is unfixed between two suggestions.

Real economics--economics that surpasses all currently published treatises--dispenses with the term "value", applying only "valuation" in market economics to indicate what the market or a particular transaction sees as the acceptable price of a good. In macroeconomics--in discussing the wealth of nations--the term "value" is inapplicable; the correct terms are cost, price, and wealth. All discussions on economic principles to date have come disturbingly close to correct, yet have always been a hair's breadth away, with enormous implications, due to the mistaken ideal of value.

It's not that. The standard argument is SELF-ACCESSIBLE college gives people the ability to get jobs by allowing them to, on their own, by their own assessment, using their own resources (time at least; money, if doing student loans instead of government-paid college), obtain a marketable job skill.

In a market where students can reasonably self-propel (that is, where anyone not sufficiently rich can send themselves to college), the absolute best course of action for the individual is to go to college and get a degree. Further, the best course of action is to get the degree in whatever field appears to provide the best immediate employment opportunity. These are both direct manifestations of the Prisonner's Dilemma; the latter involves a massive amount of market analysis, much of which is blind and long, meaning a lot of uncontrollable risk.

In such a market, students primarily face the risk of other students trying to enter the same market. Students cannot readily project how many jobs will be available in a field, how the field will grow, or how many other students will gain credentials for that field. Because *not* studying in that field provides even *worse* results, students must simply accept these risks. This creates floods of labor in the market, dynamically, driving down labor costs by creating high unemployment and a reduction of labor power, all through the simple mechanism of making skilled workers an over-supplied and readily-interchangeable commodity.

Besides the bargaining power problem, I believe this is plainly inefficient as an overall market strategy. It's an expensive way to produce an effective workforce.

In a non-intervention college market (where the government focuses on K-12, but not career education), the great majority of individuals cannot send themselves to college. Businesses, thus, suffer from a lack of required skilled labor. This sharply impacts each employer's ability to execute business strategies, placing them at sharp disadvantage to any other business which can effectively execute their own strategies. It's incredibly painful and destructive to business.

In such a market, the best action for any business is to hire entry-level employees and train them. Entrants can, almost immediately, take over low-skill, time-intensive work. Even shit programmers can hunt down and identify bugs, clean up code, and so forth; these things take the most skilled programmers some time, sometimes even hours or days, and so letting your $40k worker grind it for a week or so instead of having your $100k senior software engineer spend five days trying to track it down is at least breaking even. Carpenters who can't make intricate carvings can at least build rough furniture; those who can't can plane floors; those whose skills are so poor can at least lay joists; and those who are too inexperienced and terrible to lay joists can, at least, spend the hours of the day cutting wedges and shims, tasks which are too time-consuming for an expensive artisan to waste his day on.

Businesses in this context have stronger (still imperfect) insight into their individual needs, their market growth, their departmental expansion, and so forth. Often during times of expansion we approve budget 2-3 years in advance of hiring new accountants, programmers, sales people, digital artists, and master control engineers; during normal times, we approve budget 6-12 months in advance, when the need is recognized on the horizon. No student can so accurately and consistently project that there is a job somewhere out there waiting for him after college.

This arrangement is undesirable to businesses, as it makes workers valuable (this is a lay-term, not an economics one; the term "value" must be ejected from economic theory, while the term "valuation" must remain for market economics). Valuable workers are problematic: you can't just fire them and hire another interchangeable part. Workers, in an economic sense, have an up-front cost and a continuous cost, which become part of the cost of whatever product they produce; to fire a worker and hire a new entrant, you must now invest the up-front cost into the worker again, increasing the cost of whatever they produce. Such displaced workers save the up-front cost to the next employer, and may command an increased price if an employer needs a more senior developer and cannot wait to train a new laborer.

That means workers gain bargaining power and, ultimately, job security and stable salaries. On one hand, this raises their wage, which raises labor costs, which makes the economy less wealthy; on the other, this avoids a lot of poorly-invested expense in unnecessary college education, training laborers as needed rather than as a constant, freeing up a lot of capital (money) in the consumer's hands to spend on other things, creating new markets to obtain that residual wealth by selling the consumer new things, thus creating new jobs to produce those new goods and services, in all increasing total wealth.

As I said, our current strategy is inefficient. Considering 74% of STEM degree holders don't have STEM-related jobs and half of engineers don't work in engineering, there's a lot more waste than just liberal arts degrees.

I not only read it, I wrote it, along with new economic theory and large amounts of planning, market analysis, and risk considerations and management strategies.

Why is it people can understand this effect, but can't understand government-funded or government-backed (loans) college initiatives do this on a grand scale, deflating the value, power, and, ultimately, salaries of the individual? Even when I explain the whole of the mechanism fully in ways people can understand, they eventually go, "Well, yeah, that makes sense; but it's still empowering to be able to get an education!" when they just agreed it's the best and most effective way to strip employee power and make them tradable, low-cost commodities.

This is the most vacuous thing I have read today.

I raised the question because it's a point you seemed to ignore. There are costs inherent in there, which means the cost of battery swap is significantly higher than the cost of charging your own batteries.

Nope, you're using the fallacy of whole body analogy: X has aspect similar to Y, therefor X is similar to Y in all aspects. The problem is fuel and electricity are most similar, although bad fuel can damage a car and bad electricity can't. Swapping a battery for a defective battery can also damage a car (much worse, if it catches fire), but so can swapping in a bad radiator.

The battery is a car part. It isn't simply fuel, and it can't be fully analogized to fuel. You're swapping in a car part which may be bad and may damage the car or kill the driver.

A battery is a type of fuel tank. It's a storage container holding an electron charge (energy). This is substantially similar to a propane tank swap, which, yes, every single tank is individually inspected in the industry. Batteries, of course, don't fully analogize to propane tanks; they do tend to EXPLODE WHEN DAMAGED, and they explode or burn with the energy they contain: a Tesla 80kWh battery has as much energy as 64kg of TNT. A stick of dynamite is equivalent to .216kg of TNT, so that battery is potentially 300 sticks of dynamite.

Do you think inspection regulations for damaged and dangerous batteries won't appear overnight?

We don't routinely swap critical fuel management components in gasoline and diesel cars for other components which came out of other, random cars. We tend to install new or refurbished parts, and even then in vary rare cases (every few hundred thousand miles). Gasoline and diesel also don't massively explode, although Li+ batteries tend to burn--more rapidly than gasoline and diesel would, but they still tend to not detonate (they can). Both failure modes are more likely and more dangerous than liquid fuel failures, and harder to cease (dry chemical or CO2 onto gasoline will put it out; that won't work with a battery, because it's an oxidizer and reducer in one package--it has its own oxygen source).

You can live in a delusion where people (and, subsequently, governments) won't demand safety inspections on every single battery swap, but reality will happily ignore you.

Listen you fallacy-of-equivocation prick, I said it's a PREMIUM OFFERING. It's their premium offering. It doesn't matter if it doesn't cost as much as an expensive-ass HTC phone; a Chevrolet Cobalt SS doesn't cost as much as a Mustang Cobra, but the Cobalt SS is a premium car (which costs $25k). Why? There's a base model, and a premium model.

I said the 64GB model is their premium offering. You said it's "nuh-uh".

So your interest, minus about $12,000, is cut down by about 2/3, and given back to you. If you pay $25,000 in interest this year, you get $8,000 back from the Government. Cool.

Which are all lower than the costs of home ownership.

That's why I bought my house. Normally, rent costs less than a mortgage, slightly; it also saves you on maintenance and homeowner's insurance ($892/year HOI, $118/year RI), as well as taxes (although my house is reported as worth $3,000, so I only pay $72; if it were reported as the $50,000 I paid for it, it would cost about $1,200/year in taxes, or roughly 3 month's 15-year mortgage). In this case, house prices had dropped, and rents hadn't followed (a lot of realtors had new mortgages...); a lot of houses got abandoned, and I picked one up from an investor cheap.

I managed to plan to pay my mortgage off in 3 years, and then decided to divert that to updating the insulation (cut my heating needs by 80%), installing a split system (cut my $500 heating bills by 2/3, not counting insulation), and installing new windows--it'll be a 5 year pay-off instead.

I tend to take ~$10k loans to do work in blocks. I took $10k for a project to remove the trees from my back yard (before they eat the sewage line, and of course so I could kill the poison ivy by saturating the ground with triclopyr--90 days to non-kill levels, 420 days to complete decomposition, and any run-off immediately decomposes in water), and also to buy a piano. That leaves several thousand dollars in my bank account, instead of just draining my accounts (and then my car needed $1000 of work, so you can see why I took a loan instead of paying out of pocket). I'll pay that down in a few months, and then get another $10k loan to install a split heat pump system, insulate the rear wall (foam panel exterior), and rebuild the master bedroom (drafty, no insulation, gets hot and extremely humid during the summer).

Each cycle will end with more cash-on-hand, and the months I take to pay down those loans only holds me to a $250/mo obligation in case of financial trouble. I can take them down by $1000-$2000 each month otherwise. Same with my $450/mo mortgage that I dump $1200 on, when I'm not managing other loans. Flexibility.

That needs to go away. We need an Ethernet protocol extension with BCH or Hamming code support.

All true, and it stands with my point well; I'll point out that your argument distinctly is not a counter-point. There is no way you can buy yourself into a house to the point that you can't scrounge $20 more to make on the payment each month and expect to actually make your payment every month in the first place; it is almost guaranteed that your ability to easily afford your payment every month doesn't imply any ability to find an extra $600 every month to add to it. Buying into a slightly-cheaper house (location, size) would magnify the effects I describe in high-interest-rate markets; it is, in fact, the strategy I took even with 2.875% interest rates, hence my 3-year mortgage.

You claimed that you're unlikely to have more than a dud or two in a truck, dismissing the idea that failure rate *per* *battery* would be the same as anything else, when I pointed out that the operator would have to manage the cost of rotating out end-of-life batteries.

Your answer to "how will the operator handle disposal costs of bad batteries?" was "Oh, that's not a real consideration." Then you call me daft for pointing out that it *is* a real thing.

I said estimating capacity is easy, but estimating integrity is hard. Will the fucking battery EXPLODE UNDER YOUR TRUCK? A simple capacity measure won't tell you if it's dangerously damaged.

Unfortunately, the manufacturer doesn't have control of the batteries once they've been placed into a truck.

No you miserable fucking idiot, more like how Blue Rhino inspects and tests every tank for safety defects at every exchange. The gas station doesn't swap your god damned fuel tank, so they don't have to inspect it for dangerous leaks and rust spots.

You may as well have said "they'll inspect the electricity they charge it with to make sure it's clean power" if you wanted to make a show of being that stupid.

You still don't know how many 72-pound pieces of iron road debris have smashed into the battery, if the driver used a defective charger to charge the battery at extremely high voltages, if the battery's been damaged by *other*, less scrupulous stations mishandling it, if it's experienced flood damage somehow, and so forth. Determining the actual physical condition of the battery requires labor-intensive inspection, unless you want to just tell everyone those swapped-out batteries carry no warranty and may explode on them and it's not your fault if they do.

More like in the current world, where the crisis of a vehicle on fire either means the driver is getting roasted or his cargo is getting roasted. If it happens 1 in 10 million times, there's still about 150 million trucks on the road. 200 fatal hazmat incidents occur per year in the US, meaning fuel tanker trucks and (notably) oxygen tankers blowing up. Managing to keep defective, poorly-inspected, "Wull it dun held a chawj, Jeb" batteries from killing your driver is an important risk consideration.

Passenger cars have 482km range on batteries alone; do you honestly think a truck would have a 300km range?

I've ridden my bike on 25-35mph roads going 15mph. If I were going 25-35mph, I wouldn't get hit as much; fortunately, getting sideswiped by a car isn't the biggest deal in the world, aside from smashing up their passenger mirror.