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Ted Cruz

7 (6.5%)

Rick Santorum

16 (14.8%)

Michelle Bachmann

13 (12%)

Chris Christie

23 (21.3%)

Rand Paul

49 (45.4%)

Total Members Voted: 107

[Bauglir]

I strongly suspect they didn't care because it made things simpler for them and made accounting predictable. To be fair, our supervisors are buried under so many levels of additional supervisors that cheating us out of pay does nothing meaningful for them, but not every workplace is like that. And I'm sure there are people who prefer it to work this way, because exploitation surely was happening somewhere (always is). It's just that it's notably impacted work performance in a negative way and I haven't met anyone who thinks that was worth it (hospital, remember; a lot of us genuinely care about patient care). But, really, I'd have preferred some dialogue with the people the change is allegedly protecting. As it is, it's just as irritating as if the administration unilaterally imposed it to cut costs somehow.

[wierd]

Mainiac:

I don't particularly "like" economics. (Since unlike most other humans, I have a FIRM grasp on what the exponential function represents. As a STEM background, I also comprehend the nature of finite limits. It is painful to me to see a system predicated on the necessity for purpetual growth using exponential curve functions. Torturous in fact. It may explain part of my bias against accellerating the rate of growth, and toward putting on the brakes with religious predjudice. I instead feel that in the modern world, at least a functional grasp of the subject is essential. It basically dominates our lives. Not paying it the proper attention is a recipe for disaster. It being complicated is not an excuse to fail to try to comprehend it, given the consequences of that failure. I consider it in the same scope as refusing to learn to read. You don't need to become shakespeare, but being literate is an absolute necessity in the modern world. Understanding economics is the same way. I don't need to chart the course of nations. I do need to be able to see through the likes of bernie madoff. I'm sure you'll agree.

I much perfer colder, less dangerous logic and the comforts of understanding material reality.
There is a need for that in the world too.

Bauglir:

The problem is that preventing a market from relaxing creates a false equilibrium in the market that cannot be sustained in the face of a market that is unregulated. Global free trade will destroy any such regulated market unless the interaction with that market is sharply controlled. You ca see this problem historically with many communist command-economy based markets. You will have to either be a dictatorial regime with an iron fist, or you will have to form a massive global collusion to maintain the pressure.  (In the end, is there really a difference?)

You really have to think about a LOT of things to fix something like the raging oligopoly problem we currently have. (As maniac really did rightly chastise me over.) The market looks stable and calm in many ways, but poking it in a way you think is gently, can result in the market violently reconforming in ways you didn't intend.

Fixing prices in any sense is not a gentle poke, no matter how subtle the fixing is.  They need to relax and settle with the market, or serious, serious problems will start happening.

We are currently seeing serious serious problems now because of the other side of the problem, where money is being actively taken out of effective circulation and hoarded by corporations, where it then cannot move within the economy-- this coupled with an equally nasty alteration in the effective profit to total wages paid ratio in the US market.

Things do not look good this way at all. 

That may seem counter-intuitive to my position against unions demanding wages above median; if the problem is that there is not enough currency circulating, because there is a major inequality at play, then adding liquidity is a good thing right?

Partially, as long as the rate of increase is not excessive or violent.

This is the policy that the Fed has been undertaking since the banking disaster that has been demonised by the GOP and the MSM, who don't know what they are talking about-- with the fed printing money and putting it into circulation through domestic services and wages for government employment.

The wages being paid by the government in this way are softer, and will produce a less violent reaction from the market than 100% hard nosed insistances that wages always exceed inflation will.  There is time for the market to assimilate the infusion, and to allow smaller agencies to make use of that liquidity. This is because the wages paid to government workers are considered "low" by most standards. That is good in my estimation. It won't cause a spike in demanded wages.

The mere presense of the directly created liquidity also directly devalues to relative value of the profits that the corporations have ratholed away as well.

I don't know if this strategy is viable in the long term though.

The real solution is to find some soft manner of preventing the oligopoly disaster, and dismantling the problem we already have without bankrupting the planet.

Hard. Very, unbelievably hard.

I would have much less ..ire?... with union enforced payrates if the enforced rate was only just a teensy bit above inflation, and not "head in the sand, I want mine damnit!" Above inflation.

[Helgoland]

Okay, just about the exponential function bit, as that seems to pop up quite often:

Logistic growth (which seems like the most likely candidate for a good model of economic growth without productivity oncreases) looks like exponential growth in its early phase. Just because our economic model looks like it's geared towards exponential growth, doesn't make it so - capitalism works just fine if we assume logistic growth. That's the beauty of the whole thing: It will adapt to literally anything; even to hard limits of its own growth.

[wierd]

A sensible economist would not use a truely exponential growth model, no.

The problem is that a great many corporations, in fact, DO.

Case in point, my new corporate overlords have directly asserted, without qualification, that they expect a 2% reduction in costs or time every month from our company. No term for time to limit the curve as given.

That is a straight up exponential function. A fixed rate (2%) over infinite time.

Eventually, the energy and resources expended to attempt to attain that 2% will exceed any gains. It CANNOT be sustained. The curve will self limit, but not before crushing hundreds of people in the cogs of finance.

[wierd]

Stupid phone....



Anyway, I am sure my employer is not the only fortune 500 that incorrectly states policy that directly runs face first into genuine exponential functions.

[mainiac]

wierd, you are taking an idea and extrapolating it way outside the frame of reference.  No economist in the world supposes infinite compounding ever.  But economists deal with very, very complicated situations where we have imperfect information.  As a result you have to chose what imperfect models to use in what circumstances and that often includes exponential growth within a certain frame of reference.  In fact no one is more interested in the failure of compounding to continue forever then economists.  The very first econometrician was Thomas Malthus, who dealt with precisely this issue as it relates to populations.  Possibly the hottest topic in economics right now is whether or not the exponential model of productivity growth is going to stop applying in the upcoming decades in certain parts of the developed world.  I assure you that nobody takes this concern more seriously then the economics profession.

Also... whatever your feeling of economic predictions you do need to understand that economic history has a huge volume of data pointing in the direction of there being productivity growth between the 60s and the present day.  It's about as uncontroversial as the notion that the ocean contains a large amount of water.  If you have a model of national income that doesn't account for this you are going to have a very, very skewed impression.

[wierd]

Mainiac:

A corporate accountant looking at projected expense to income reports is not exactly a talented economist.  I am extrapolating the compound reaction of giving excel to to masses. I understand exponential functions are unworkable, and that past performance is not a perfect predictor of future gains.

The question, is do the accounting departments of corporations, who have more total asset valuations than many nations, understand this?

Also, I was not making any such claim that there was no improvement inproductivity between the 50s and the 60s. That would be absurd. What I was pointing out is that as productivity increases, the effective cost of product must come down accordingly in proportion to what the new costs of production and available currency can accommodate. You can view human labor as a product, and currency in the market as a product. As you increase supply of one, you MUST change the exchange rate between the two.  The ultimate effect of doubling the workforce's pool of labor in the 40s and 50s, resulted in the compensational value of that labor dropping 50%, as the market stabilized. (It actually dropped to less than that, precisely because improvements in productivity reduced the necessity of human labor to begin with. This is NOT lost to me. I am not "forgetting" it.)

Recently, there is a problem within many industries failing to accept that the needed prices for products have diminished radically because of improvements in techology, which has radically reduced the profitabilty of many industries.

The music industry especially is in this situation.

As is the software industry in many ways. (But that's complicated. Not all forms of software are equally applicable. Don't presume I make this assertion please. I am simply saying the software is implicated.)

The costs of a music album, for instance, has dropped from a significant double digit sum per unit, down to perhaps 12$, at the most- due to digital distribution. Often times even less.

However, this reduction in cost due to improvements in production runs face first into consumption patterns; old patterns won't apply, and new saturation of digital files that can't really wear out will take hold.

Similar things will eventually happen with material goods as we transition to true post scarcity.

At some point, it won't be possible to make a business that sells anything, except perhaps a personal service, because the cost of manufacture and distribution will be cheaper than dirt-- literally.

In addition to this, (production improvement improves, comsumption saturates) there is a side effect with labor.  Because it is now not only very easy to produce the product, with very little effort-- and also with a stagnating population of consumers (population is expected to become static at around 9 to 15bn, depending on the estimate and model) with a finite consumption capacity, economies of scale to maintain a workforce at the lower rates dries up.

Eventually, everyone will be unemployed, and unemployable in manufacturing.
(At some point, the entire work of the entire planet could be undertaken by the single one-time action of a single person. After that point, any need for human labor at all will cease to be, dur to 100% factory and maintenance automaton. Post scarcity.


One could I suppose, argue that this can be offset with new products, however that runs into issues with raw combinational possibilities.

Using the existing types of musical scales, for instance, there are only a finite number of unique progressions that can be classified as "music".

In the face of indestructable goods, and the other prevailing features listed above, eventually it will simply not be possible to create new music.

There are finite limits to the material nature of the universe, as such, there finite possible combinations of those rules and materials.

Total saturation is the ultimate conclusion. -- assuming we don't destroy ourselves some other way first.


Economics itself will long become unworkable by then in the general sense however. Once it becomes impossible to produce any product for a supposed profit, due to increases in efficiency, the concept of compensation will not have value.

[Willfor]

Using the existing types of musical scales, for instance, there are only a finite number of unique progressions that can be classified as "music".

In the face of indestructable goods, and the other prevailing features listed above, eventually it will simply not be possible to create new music.

You say "eventually" here as if it will occur before the sun swallows the Earth. As someone who understands both how vast the combinations of music that can be put together is, and how the music industry works, you're talking way outside of your game here. You're both underestimating just how far down the costs of distribution have become in the industry -- it costs between $5,000 and $100,000 to record an album in the studio, and the rest of an album's cost is in advertising, middle management, intellectual property fees such as royalties, etc. -- and underestimating just how easily the mainstream audience can appease itself using just barely 1% of all possible combinations of music. Over, and over, and over again. Forever.

Total saturation has already occurred, we just didn't care when it happened. There are enough combinations of music that you could not fit it all into a human lifespan, and therefore, it doesn't matter how much music is actually created. But because you cannot copyright chord patterns -- otherwise, music would have collapsed a long time ago -- the same patterns have been used over and over again for decades now. Just with new words strapped over them. And people who can't stand this go off into the alternatives such as metal, or other routes according to taste.

Music will never stop being experienced or created until there is no one left to create or enjoy it.

[wierd]

You are correct-- I used a time term of "near infinite".

Your assertion makes some faulted presumptions; namely that the current lifespan of humans will remain static, and at the current length.  When we perfect stemcell technology, theoretical biological immortality could well become possible. Who knows what future medical technologies are possible?

As mainiac put it, don't underestimate the improvements in production and efficiency.


The really real point, was that at some point it will cease being PROFITABLE to make music.

The costs to produce that music may currently cost that much, but how much did it cost 10 years ago? When you continue to factor cost reductions in production, with reductions in unit price, in the face of peak saturation, you end up selling iceboxes to eskimos.

It can be a really nice icebox, but the eskimos have all the ice they could ever need.


When you can no longer profit from making and selling music, no-one will make and sell music.

(But they may make and sell performances.)

[Willfor]

If we're expanding the scope from what we consider now, please do consider that the human ability to register aural input as music is extremely flexible, and we're not even taking full advantage of it even in the most experimental genres of music we have today. This ability of ours is unlikely to restrict itself as we move into longer lifespans, or move out of bodily form. In fact, it may expand even further into the infinite than it already has.

The really real point, was that at some point it will cease being PROFITABLE to make music.

The costs to produce that music may currently cost that much, but how much did it cost 10 years ago? When you continue to factor cost reductions in production, with reductions in unit price, in the face of peak saturation, you end up selling iceboxes to eskimos.

It can be a really nice icebox, but the eskimos have all the ice they could ever need.

It's not profitable. The massive label structure is dying already in favour of the musicians taking it straight to customers. You're criticizing a beast that's already on its last legs. Nonetheless, musicians are still making money because they're being paid for a service and an idea and not a product.

[Mictlantecuhtli]

So, how about those Murrican Politics? Chris Christie bridge shenanigans, Robert Gate's book and included sub-"controversies"?

[wierd]

Willfor:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The intended context for "no longer profitable", was exactly why I pointed to the music industry. They are a poster child for "large sums of money invested in an unsustainable model, conceived by not being a sound economist, making decisions incorrectly-- and that money now being used in deleterious ways that can damage the future market spectacularly

The "do the accountants in the fortune 500 companies with hundreds of billions of dollars of liquid assets involved know that exponential growth can't be sustained?" Question.

The death of the music industry shows the answer to be "NO".

Currently, a dissolution of many such behemoths, without small enterprise to take up market activity, would destroy the global economy horribly.

It was in resonse to hego's and mainiac's comments that economists know this.
I was trying to point out that wheels of industry clearly do not.

Sorry, we derailed over attempting to evaluate each other's grasp of economic theory, after a hot button issue about unions came up.

(I presented a seemingly irrational view, which I tried to elaborate on, which created the derail.)

Maybe we can re-rail with this:

Even if I am wrong, at least I approached my opinion on the matter in a more rational and sensible fashion than most people would have given themselves to.

Maybe we can leave it at that. (I fully admit I can be wrong in my view. I just wanted to explain why I held it, BECAUSE it was different from the expected one, and that explanation has value, even when it is wrong.)

Now-- US politics....

Hard to say much more really.. i'd have to wait for somebody to ask a question I think.

[GlyphGryph]

Chris Christie might end up going to jail. When your close advisors are pleading the fifth and you pre-emptively state you also aren't aware of all the other stuff the investigators are going to turn up... things arent looking good for you.

[darkrider2]

Thanks Onion. 

When there's no one else, I can always rely on you.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/voters-shocked-christie-botched-such-an-easy-polit,34909/

[FearfulJesuit]

I should have stepped in and told people to branch off the union discussion, but I've been absent. Anyways, Chris Christie.

Edit: Also, for the bored, here's an armchair statistician's attempt at a 2016 Electoral College map.