71–80 of 100 posts
I was reading about how the US now considers McDonalds hamburgers to be part of US manufacturing output, whereas in the past that was credited as service since it was a restaurant. So we must ask. Does the claim made by boston.com include hamburgers?
A lot of people don't understand this. I'm an English grad student, and one of my more, uh, politically-minded professors said in a seminar that the U.S. doesn't manufacture anything anymore. I sent him this e-mail: When I mentioned the bit about the U.S. continuing to manufacture a lot of stuff, I wasn't just trying to be a pain, as it's actually true; see Dept. of Labor Data on the subject here: http://research.stl…
http://yelnick.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c563953ef01310fc3f3ee...
You'll notice that the output, as a percentage of the overall economy, has remained relatively flat. Jobs, on the other hand, have taken an absolute nose-dive.
What's really happened is that factories in the U.S. have become crazily efficient. Through both technology and significant process improvements.
So we have quite a problem. It's not enough to just make stuff, we need to make it way less efficiently if we're going to solve the blue-collar unemployment problem. I have no idea how we're going to do it.
A lot of people don't understand this. I'm an English grad student, and one of my more, uh, politically-minded professors said in a seminar that the U.S. doesn't manufacture anything anymore. I sent him this e-mail: When I mentioned the bit about the U.S. continuing to manufacture a lot of stuff, I wasn't just trying to be a pain, as it's actually true; see Dept. of Labor Data on the subject here: http://research.stl…
That's not really correct tho. Here's a handy graph showing the United States manufacturing output as percentage of overall GDP versus percentage of workforce employed in manufacturing: http://yelnick.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c563953ef01310fc3f3ee... You'll notice that the output, as a percentage of the overall economy, has remained relatively flat. Jobs, on the other hand, have taken an absolute nose-dive. What's rea…
Producing less for the sack of jobs = Socialism
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wages by industry: ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/suppl/empsit.ceseeb2.txt Historical CPI: ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/cpi/cpiai.txt From 1964-2010, weekly manufacturing wages rose from $102.59 to $765.08/week. "Private service-providing" jobs (which includes retail) went from $98.10 to $606.14. Over that same time period, the CPI rose from an index of 30.9 to to 216.687, an increase of 7x. In real terms, retail wa…
Does the CPI take into account that cars have improved in fuel economy, that TVS are now in color and with a remote control, not to mention a lot bigger? Does the CPI take into account that a wristwatch today has more power than all IBMs computers in the mid sixties? Does the CPI take into account that $X that either didn't exist then, or has been so improved that it wouldn't be recognized? Try to compare it with the…
A lot of people don't understand this. I'm an English grad student, and one of my more, uh, politically-minded professors said in a seminar that the U.S. doesn't manufacture anything anymore. I sent him this e-mail: When I mentioned the bit about the U.S. continuing to manufacture a lot of stuff, I wasn't just trying to be a pain, as it's actually true; see Dept. of Labor Data on the subject here: http://research.stl…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is health insurance which only pays for 1970's era medical care really that expensive today? Or did you mean to say that a financial product which pays for an MRI/viagra/chemotherapy today is more expensive than a financial product which paid for X-Rays/dying of cancer at home in the past? Incidentally, I can only find data going back to 1987, but it suggests little change the number of uninsured since then. http://w…
I made the exact same argument as you elsewhere on this thread :-) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2187130 The problem is that health insurance isn't continuously divisible. You typically can't buy a policy that will cover only 1970s-era medical treatments. Even if you could, it brings up a host of ethical issues that many doctors wouldn't be comfortable with. Say a kid gets strep throat. Okay, give him penicilli…
Anything that requires technology/manufacturing has a sort of cliff, where you can use the current technology (or perhaps one generation back), or you can use very primitive treatments, but not much in between. You could dig through the history of technological advances for some particular device, and make the rational decision that Generation 3 of the device is the optimal one for you on the price/benefit curve. But if we're on Generation 9 currently, you simply can't use Generation 3 machines, sorry, because nobody makes them and no hospital/doctor still uses them, and the FDA might not even allow their use anymore; you use a recent one, or none at all.
Some drugs have a not-really-available effect as well. I might actually be happy with penicillin as my antibiotic of choice... if it had 1970s levels of efficacy. Unfortunately, resistance to penicillin has greatly increased, so "1970s penicillin that works like it was the 1970s" just isn't a product you can buy anymore.
Somewhat of interest to me, because if it were possible to buy 1970s-era health insurance that worked like it was the 1970s, I might actually do it, with a few a-la-carte exceptions. I've read some of the literature that tries to quantify the effect of new medical technology on health outcomes, and the single biggest one for adults appears to be better vaccinations, so I'd definitely still get a modern vaccination schedule. A second worthwhile one is improved surgery techniques, especially arthroscopic surgeries that reduce the need for traditional open-wound surgeries, and thus also reduce many infection/etc. complications.
But a lot of the increase in expense is stuff I would be willing to opt out of if it were an option: 1) huge increase in heroic last-6-months care; and 2) chronic-condition drugs like Viagra, SSRIs, Ritalin, statins, beta blockers, etc. Not that those have no arguable benefits, but if I had the choice to purchase a health-insurance plan that excluded those categories, that would fit my cost/benefit analysis.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does the CPI take into account that cars have improved in fuel economy, that TVS are now in color and with a remote control, not to mention a lot bigger? Does the CPI take into account that a wristwatch today has more power than all IBMs computers in the mid sixties? Does the CPI take into account that $X that either didn't exist then, or has been so improved that it wouldn't be recognized? Try to compare it with the…
Not to derail, but the thing about wristwatches/pocket calculators being more powerful than the best sixties computer is a frequently-quoted and entirely wrong bit of BS. That is all.
While it is true that North America still manufactures great quantities of luxury and high tech stuff, that isn't what is pissing off the populists. They couldn't care less if our manufacturing doubled in terms of dollars of output. What they really want is a return to the highly paid, unionized, tradesperson. To them robots making Chevy trucks matters just as much to their lives as nerds writing software. As product…
Maybe this sounds slightly kooky, but... I believe there is no 'solution' to their plight. The timeline until singularity is too short for a complete retooling of the economy. However the pace of development at the higher end is fast enough and explosive enough that we can afford to keep on subsidizing the lower classes with bread and circuses until we reach sentient AI, at which point we will be able to provide ever…
As Ken MacLeod put it "the Rapture for nerds".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to derail, but the thing about wristwatches/pocket calculators being more powerful than the best sixties computer is a frequently-quoted and entirely wrong bit of BS. That is all.
Unless your wristwatch is an iPod Nano, which it easily could be. Or your pocket calculator is a recent-model TI or HP graphing calculator.