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WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)

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Re: WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)

#401

Post by kjs3 »

DickingAround wrote: post #119
backtoyoujim wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm OK with the "Move Fast & Break Shit" crowd staying far from my medical history thankyouverymuch.

If you don't mind, why exactly? You're worried the care will get screwed up? Or you worry that someone will steal that data and charge more for insurance? I'm just wondering about why exactly the paradigm doesn't totally work here. I get that we don't want medical devices failing, but that's different than charting. And I get it that we don't want everyone to have your data. But risking that someone does a data copy…

Oops...last patch inaccurately reported test results, so we did the wrong treatment.

Oops...last patch didn't include all the drugs the patient was on, so we prescribed one with bad interactions.

Oops...last patch mixed up MRI images, so Patient A is being treated for patient Bs cancer.

etc., etc., etc...

Our bad...we'll get to it in the next sprint.

Re: WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)

#402

Post by EricE »

allemagne wrote: post #264
erikpukinskis wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point I kind of wish a supermajority was required for every vote. Then neither party could control legislating over the objections of the other. This trading back and forth every so often thing doesn’t seem to be working great.

I'm surprised that you think that too much legislating is the problem. No legislation can even happen without bipartisan support unless one party has control of the House of Representatives, the Senate, AND the Presidency. Oh, and unless there's a supermajority in the Senate, the minority party can filibuster most legislation anyway. Sounds like a great way to ensure that compromise has to happen, except that the par…

"I'm surprised that you think that too much legislating is the problem."

Too much "legislating" is indeed _the_ problem. At least with gridlock they can't screw things up worse than they are.

Just look at AB 5 in CA - tailored by labor unions with all sorts of collateral damage and unintended consequences that are still reverberating through CA economy. What's hilarious is that many independent tech writers who were in favor of it initially suddenly got to find out the wisdom of our legislators first hand when AB 5 proceeded to destroy their current business model as an independent, for higher worker.

Ha! Delicious irony indeed.

Making new laws _should_ be hard. It also would be good if congress started to do their job instead of delegating it to the executive branch. And for every new hair brained law it would be awesome if they were required to at least remove one other one - removing five would be better still.

If you think complexity favors you vs. big businesses or special interests....

Re: WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)

#403

Post by [deleted] »

yellowapple wrote: post #396
lutorm wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the fact that we don't use railguns to launch things into space is because of energy cost. It's just not technologically feasible.

From what I understand, the main technological blocker (as opposed to various political and economic blockers) is the need for superconductors to achieve reasonable energy efficiency. With cheap energy, that's less of a pressing need (and further, cheap energy = more energy to throw at cryogenic cooling systems to induce superconductivity in less-exotic materials).

[deleted]

Re: WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)

#404

Post by noch »

crazygringo wrote: post #320
bryanlarsen wrote: post #25

The author obviously wants you to believe that it was the abandonment of the gold standard, but there are several other theories that have more credence with mainstream economists. The early 70's was the start of a horrible period of stagflation: stagnation coupled with inflation. Some do blame the loss of the gold standard, but the leading theory is the OPEC oil crisis. Others blame market regulations, the EPA was p…

According to Thomas Piketty [1], it's mainly a result of a bifurcation in education, and dramatically rising managerial compensation helped with tax cuts. I personally also think this is the main answer. In other words, all our massive productivity increases have come from people with a ton of education, and they reap all the rewards, helped with lower taxes. The median worker isn't any more educated and hasn't reape…

> For instance, I point out in my book (Piketty 2014a, ch. 8–9) that the rise of top income shares in the United States over the 1980–2010 period is due for the most part to rising inequality of labor earnings,

Rognlie(2014) points out fatal errors in Piketty's primary analysis of wealth inequality. In summary:

“ Recent trends in both capital wealth and income are driven almost entirely by housing, with underlying mechanisms quite different from those emphasized in Capital. ” http://mattrognlie.com/piketty_diminishing_returns.pdf

Re: WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)

#405

Post by webmaven »

brundolf wrote: post #262
mirkules wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As weird as it sounds, inefficiency can be a feature of regulation, especially for big companies because it creates a slow and expensive hurdle for smaller competitors. Sometimes, even as a consumer, this is desired, for ex when new drugs are coming to market. Sometimes, as you point out, it’s stifling. Government is also inefficient by design. Imagine the gov’t pivoting to different laws every week - it would be com…

> Sometimes, even as a consumer, this is desired I don't understand this argument. The goal is not to be intrinsically "slow", but to be suitably "careful". If you can be as careful as needed, but execute that careful process in such a way that no time is wasted, that's a win. The two are separate questions. To put it differently: high-security systems programmers don't move their fingers more slowly on the keyboards…

> To put it differently: high-security systems programmers don't move their fingers more slowly on the keyboards because "going slow is better". They put checks in place, and they take as much time as is needed to do things right, but padding that time just for the sake of "slowness" helps nobody.

"Being careful" doesn't necessarily lead to slowness directly, but making the carefulness verifiable (and making that verification, by an external stakeholder, mandatory) usually does.

This approach (regulation and inspection by a government agency) is generally how society makes actors internalize otherwise external costs, but there are other variations such as government codes and standards.

Fine-grained mandatory process specification is usually the least desirable route to safety, but that's often what companies end up asking for in return for giving them a pass when the process inevitably fails to prevent a bad outcome with a large blast-radius.

However, in some specific circumstances where you don't have another means, directly enforcing slowness in some way may be your best option for at least limiting the damage caused by a failure, even if it doesn't reduce the chances of an error (though sometimes it does that too). Vehicle speed limits are one example, rate-limits on transactions (or comments) are another. In other circumstances, requiring speed (eg. monitoring with a fast response time, quick deployment of a fix) may be the right choice for limiting the damage a failure can cause.

Re: WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)

#406

Post by simonblack »

What happened was that purchasing value separated from currency numbers. That was enabled by the moving away from the gold standard, but was not the abandonment of the gold standard per se.

It allowed the wage numbers to increase, but not sufficiently to keep up with inflation. In other words, where before there was one rate of change, there were now two different rates of change.

A concrete example: before 1970 a blue-collar worker had a big enough wage that enabled him to buy a house, car, and good standard of living while his wife was able to stay home and look after the house. Today his wage needs to be supplemented by his wife's wage, and they do not have sufficient to have a house, car and good standard of living. In fact they struggle to make ends meet.

If wages had kept in line with cost of living rises, that blue-collar worker would be making over $2000 per week.

Re: WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)

#407

Post by gruez »

proverbialbunny wrote: post #291
aazaa wrote: post #107

Plenty of events to choose from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971 Highlights: - "A new stock market index called the Nasdaq Composite debuts." - "Starbucks, a major coffeehouse and outlet in worldwide, is founded in the U.S. State of Washington." - "The U.S. ends its trade embargo of China." - "President Richard Nixon declares the U.S. War on Drugs." - "Southwest Airlines, a low-cost carrier, begins its first…

It's interesting that the middle class started losing wealth and income stagnated in relation to the larger economy starting in 1971-1972, but most of the events from 1971 are lagging indicators. Eg, the CIA was actively keeping China from being able to obtain chips in the mid '70s. China was barely able to export anything until the late '80s - early '90s. The birth of the digital age is another good example, but tec…

>Also, we have regulated food prices in the US

Can you expand on this?

Re: WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)

#408

Post by thehappypm »

Zviedris wrote: post #374
thehappypm wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, lots of ways cheap gas would help me afford a flat! First of all it takes a ton of energy to build a home, so housing would be fundamentally cheaper. Then, every month, I'd be spending less money on heating or air conditioning. I'd also be spending less of my own money on transportation (either through less gas costs, or buses/trains being cheaper). Then since goods are cheaper at the store, I have more money to…

If shipping is cheap why does goods go from Chine to US not from US to China? Would cheap energy lower land costs for a house or flat? Cheap energy would improve situation. But a lot of competition comes from productivity and wages. Low wages in Asia made possible to import goods cheaper from Asia rather than produce locally.

Goods absolutely do flow from the US to China -- $100B worth in 2019.

Re: WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)

#409

Post by lotsofpulp »

mordymoop wrote: post #349
lotsofpulp wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The supply of labor would have changed. See below where you wrote: >because otherwise people would stop becoming musicians It's about as cleanly supply and demand as you can get. The supply of musicians willing to work for $x decreases, since they now have the option to do other work that is more preferred than being a musician for $x. Therefore, you now have to pay more than $x to continue incentivizing a musician t…

All I can say is that it seems more like a second-order consequence of supply and demand, and an unintuitive one for many people. The counter factual/subjunctive “the musicians are paid more because otherwise they would have chosen other jobs” is not the way in which people usually talk about supply and demand. You could also say that the rules that govern the supply and demand of labor are not quite the same as the…

> You could also say that the rules that govern the supply and demand of labor are not quite the same as the rules that govern supply and demand of goods, and people’s general failure to realize this results in the Bamoult effect being surprising.

I wouldn’t say that because I disagree there is any difference in the application of supply and demand curves between labor and goods. If anything, Baumol’s effect clearly demonstrates that price (wages) is set by supply and demand just like goods, and it’s entirely unsurprising.

As you reduce the supply of laborers for labor type A because those laborers have better options, then the price for labor type A rises. That’s what Baumol says. That’s what supply and demand says. I fail to see the significance.

Re: WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)

#410

Post by elihu »

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock

In 1971, the US abruptly stopped backstopping Europe's Bretton Woods system that kept Europe's currencies stable, making them convertible with US dollars and gold.

(I'm not an expect in this area, I just sort-of-recently read "And the Weak Suffer What They Must?" by Yannis Varoufakis, and hopefully I'm remembering it more-or-less correctly.)

https://www.amazon.com/Weak-Suffer-What-They-Must/dp/1568585...

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