Topic: Technological unemployment is (almost) here - page 38. (Read 88257 times)

Just FYI, the Standard financial.economic terms for the first one is "cost" (as in cost of production). So cost is what the company spends to make something, and price is what it sells it for.

Thank you for that. I never thought of it that way, but it makes perfect sense, and fits nicely with the point that wealthy people, who aren't thieves, are only wealthy because they gave something that the people of the world wanted or needed.

Tractors replaced a group of farmers with one tractor driver. Computers will replace a group of tractor drivers with one computer operator. It's not THAT different. Really, the biggest difference is that we can now have "tractors" that have way more dexterity and skill to be able to perform more complex tasks, and we call them "robots." This new mainstream thing has been happening for decades now.


This is your claim. I don't have to have faith in, or believe, in anything, since it's on you to prove that new jobs will not come out, despite them doing so for centuries to date.

Decrease production price, not necessarily retail price.

But even if they did decrease retail price, they would often only do it to drive competition out of the market, the competition too will be forced to either stop their business or fire most of their employees.

A lot of people become unemployed and poor, so there is less money in the hands of the common people, because there are less jobs.

But ironically there are more goods.

Less money, more goods, so even though the economy would imply (goods wise) that everyone can have a good live (there's more than enough goods to share with the whole world), the world at large is still poor, because most people can not afford those products because robots stole their jobs.

The mayor industries prefer to throw away 90% of their production to keep the price of the other 10% high! than to give away their goods.

This is the problem.

Also it's completely insane that some companies like shell ask high prices for oil, while oil does not belong to them, they actually bribed politicians in Africa and hired armies to drive farmers of their land forcefully to get the oil, and than sell that oil to you. Same goes for metals and diamonds.

World leaders are elected to SERVE the country yet they act like they are elected to GET SERVED by the country. The whole idea of countries needing protection in the form of armies against other countries is ridiculous. The fact that we have to buy land from someone is ridiculous, who decided that that land belongs to that person in the first place?

Why should we pay for bottles of water that are extracted from large spas that naturally occur?

Seriously, the economy and social politic structure of the world is very messed up and has been for hundreds if not thousand of years.

I've seen an endless series of weeds on farms if you would like to start pulling .... ?

You missed the big one.  And it actually explains a lot about AnnoyMint's delusions.

Capital does not grow while sitting in a hole.  It rots, it rusts, it fades away.

Now money, on the other hand...  Money is an abstraction, a placeholder.  Without money, we barter, my goods or services for yours.  With money, we still barter, but we do it in half transactions.  I give you my goods or services, but I don't want what you have to sell, so you give me an IOU, money.  Later, I complete that trade by redeeming my IOU for something that I do want.  Because money is an abstraction, in the aggregate, holding money is akin to having provided goods or services, to the world.  The money that you hold represents capital that the world owes you, but can use until you call for it.

We naturally expect that the world will put our capital to good use, and earn steady returns with it.  If we didn't feel this way, we would call that capital in and put it to use ourselves.

Failure to understand this basic principle poisons the mind.  It is impossible to understand economics while you think that to save is to deprive the world of capital.  It is, however, perfectly possible to write a whole bunch of incoherent gibberish while holding that belief, as AnnoyMint is all too willing to demonstrate.

Very strange that Google started pushing job-eliminating technologies so aggressively. Even if the profit is only one motivation for Google shareholders, they must think about consequences on the society and probability for their capitals to be expropriated/destroyed during revolution!

1. Just because something was happening since now it doest automatically mean it will continue forever.
2. Automation is done through computers , which is relatively new mainstream invention, you can't compare algorithms with tractor that was used to mechanize agriculture .....

The new jobs will not magically come out via almighty market hands. It is really pathetic and faith based to think that.

It is amazing how such an obvious things can be missed.

1. Price decreases due to lower cost of labor. It doesn't mean automatically you sell more.
2. You can sell more but to the same population that can actually afford. It is done through planned and perceived obsolescence.

How do you get rich decreasing prices, except if that then expands your market so you can sell more, hence closing in on the goal of supplying "the whole world with the goods they need"?

I don't mind robots doing our jobs, in fact, it's great. but the sad thing is that the technological improvements are mainly for personal gain and not for the benefit of mankind.

If they would use the decreased prices of labor and increased production rate to supply the whole world with the goods they need, instead of decreasing prices and increasing production to enrich a few individuals, the world would already look so much better.

Ever since the industrial revolution, planned obsolescence has become more and more common.

Are you a blacksmith, a barber, a merchant, or a farmer? No? Then which woodwork your new job came out of?

47% of US jobs under threat from computerization according to Oxford study
http://www.gizmag.com/half-of-us-jobs-computerized/29142/

Of course in libertarian paradise new jobs will come out of woodwork to save the day.

Awesome. Maybe people will finally stop complaining about people in China working in sweatshops.

Just read in the news that Google have joined into job-killing race!

Rassah I responded to you.

Fact: moving to the next stage, i.e. announcing to the world that they do have 51% power, will be tantamount to them shooting themselves in the foot. Bitcoin will crash, as will their investments, OR they will be seen as hostile, and punished. IP or not, you can tell who has how much hashing power by how much each bitcoin address gets paid. The reason you can tell that BTCGuild, Ghash.io, Eligius, etc have so much hashing power is not from their IP addresses, but from the bitcoin addresses from the blocks they publish.
Let's say BTCGuild and GHash both owned 33% of the hashing power, and were actually owned by the same person, so you couldn't tell that someone owned 51% of the hashing power. What could this person do with these two pools that would not immediately expose them as having majority hashing/decision control, send bitcoin into a panick, and have miners leave those two pools en-masse?



You are assuming that bitcoin wallets must wait for a solved block (~10 minutes) to see whether someone sent them money. That's not how it works. If your case was ever encountered, where you tried to use your Amazon wallet app to send me coins, and your app only send the transaction to Amazon's miners, I would claim that you have not sent me any money, since it hasn't shown up on the network (not within the first 10 minutes), and walk away, OR notice that your software is hiding transactions, and consider you suspect. Besides, with version 0.9 that's coming out, you would be sending me money from your Amazon app in the form of a signed transaction, and I would be the one to broadcast it. As a recepient of the coins, I have incentive to broadcast it to everyone I can, not just to your Amazon. So...


Fact: the cartel's customers will be VERY unhappy when their currency crashes 90% in value, as large holders and investors dump the now broken currency for something else. That is what you, and those guys who wrote the Selfish Mining paper, are ignoring, or refusing to connsider.



This:

"Worse we will be on a public ledger with no privacy nor anonymity."

does not work, because of this:

"How would cartel miners know which address belongs to whom, if no IP's are tied to it"

There is no identifiable information that miners, even 100% miners, can get on people's bitcoin addresses. IP's are not tied to them, and neither is anything else.

As for this:
"And don't forget, if a 51%+ cartel implements nonstandard changes, their blocks will not be accepted by any of the clients, and won't even propagate. Their 51% will instantly become 0%, because, again, bitcoin rules are enforced first by the clients, and second by the miners."

if that does not make any sense to you, then you need to figure out how bitcoin and its distributed consensus system works, before telling others they don't understand how bitcoin works. I would explain it to you, but I don't want to waste my time on someone as full of shit as you. And that doesn't happen often.

Fact:

The cartel can hide how much hashrate it has, by using many IP addresses and sharing transactions until it has 50+% or more and is ready to move to the next stage.


Fact:

You are conflating the publication of block solutions with the propagation of transactions before the fact.

You don't understand well the way Bitcoin works.


Fact:

If the cartel waits until they have 80 or 90% of the hashrate and transactions before attacking, then you will not get most of the commerce on your new fork. You lose.

The cartel's customers are not going to change which websites they send their transactions on. They will be happy with the service they are getting.

This is known as installed base networking effects, or inertia.


None of that makes any sense.

I agree with what most of what is said in the OP but the opinions given in regards to the outcomes of technological unemployment and options  or paths we had I got a little confused so I'll read threw this thread to get more depth on the matter before I give my own opinion.

I don't think people will care if the 51% is owned by an organization that calls itself "cartel" or "government," either one will be considered a threat, and likely either one coming close to getting 51% will cause concern and threat of price collapse. Remember when BTCGuild got close to having 51% hashing power? Instead of continuing to increase their share, they increased their fees to get miners to leave their pool, because they know they will earn more by keeping Bitcoin secure and distributed, than by getting 51% power. Before that happened, everyone including the developers believed as you did. Now wee have evidence that that may not be the case.



So, if you are using an Amazon wallet app, and I am using some other wallet app, and you try to send me coins, how will I know whether you sent them if you only send them to Amazon's servers? It would essentially cut everyone using Amazon clients off from the rest of the bitcoin network. Why would anyone want to use such an app? Bitcoin transactions primarily work because they are propagated P2P through the network from person to person. Miners just sit on the perifere catching these transactions as they pass by and adding them to blocks.


Once they get beyond 51%, the bitcoins they are working so hard to mine and get control of will start rapidly losing value, as people abandon it and move to a more distributed system. Even getting close will be considered a threat. Just knowing this is likely to keep anyone from trying.


How would miners know which address belongs to whom, if no IP's are tied to it, and their miners may only hear about a transaction after it has passed through multiple clients? And don't forget, if a 51%+ cartel implements nonstandard changes, their blocks will not be accepted by any of the clients, and won't even propagate. Their 51% will instantly become 0%, because, again, bitcoin rules are enforced first by the clients, and second by the miners.