>if you count employer contributions to employee heath insurance You shouldn't. >and employers probably shouldn't even be involved in sponsoring group health plans in the first place. They are free to lobby for socialized medicine, but they don't because they like how the current system helps lock employees into bad jobs for any amount of healthcare.
> You shouldn't. The correct number to use is called "total employee compensation". This includes: 1. salary 2. paid days off 3. health care benefits 4. retirement benefits 5. employer 401k contributions 6. incentive stock plans 7. taxes paid on behalf of the employee (such as the so-called employer's contribution to social security) 8. free food in the company cafeteria 9. any other benefits that cost money The cost…
Having an office for them to work at is also important and costs money.
Rent/mortgage would be dirt cheap if you didn't have to live near a job.
It's never been easier to live far from your job, yet rent/mortgage prices are higher than ever.
Sure but price to income has never been lower if you're willing to move and work remotely (or retire on investment income) somewhere cheaper.
If you want to live in the best real estate in the world and expect to continue doing so when you have no job, that's not going to happen. If you're willing to adapt and spread out you can live better and freer than ever in a hypothetical world where AI has taken most jobs.
Can we have a grown up discussion that uses numbers instead of hyperbole? Certainly you can argue income inequality is too high and capital holders and high earners need to pay much more. But you cannot seriously argue that capital owners "avoid contributing to the financing of our states and social systems". They pay a lot in capital gains and income taxes, even if they don't contribute as much as they should.
Ultra-wealthy individuals legally minimise their tax liability by: Receiving a relatively low official salary (Bezos's Amazon salary was $81,840 for many years). Not receiving dividends, so the wealth remains in stock that is not taxed annually. Borrowing money against their stock holdings to fund their lifestyle. Loans are not considered income and are therefore not taxable, and the interest on the loans can sometim…
> Ultra-wealthy individuals legally minimise their tax liability by ...
You pay taxes when you are paying off your loan...
Really? What taxes?
Rather, you pay taxes on the income you use to repay the loan. Plus you pay the interest on the loan.
This basically defers the taxes to a later date and charges you interest for 'em. Which might be worthwhile, depending on how quickly and reliably your capital is growing.
"Inadequate hardware" is a truly ridiculous myth. The universal robot problem was, and is, and always will be an AI problem . Just take one long look at the kind of utter garbage human mind has to work with. It's a frame that, without a hideous amount of wetware doing data processing, can't even keep its own limbs tracked - because proprioreception is made of wet meat noise and integration error. Smartphones in 2010…
Read Brooks' argument in detail, if you haven't. He has spent decades getting robots to play nicely in human environments, and he gets invited to an enormous number of modern robotics demonstrations. His hardware argument is primarily sensory. Specifically, current generation robots, no matter how clever they might be, have a physical sensorium that's incredibly impoverished, about on par with a human with severe fro…
I did read it, and I found it so lacking that it baffles me to see people actually believe it to be a well-crafted argument.
Again: we can't even make a universal robot work in a sim with perfect sensor streams! If the issue was "universal robots work fine in sims, suffer in real world", then his argument would have had a leg to stand on. As is? It's a "robot AI caught lacking" problem - and ignoring the elephant in the room in favor of nitpicking at hardware isn't doing anyone a favor.
It's not like we don't know how to make sensors. Wrist-mounted cameras cover a multitude of sins, if your AI knows how to leverage them - they give you a data stream about as rich as anything a human gets from the skin - and every single motor in a robot is a force feedback sensor, giving it a rudimentary sense of touch.
Nothing stops you from getting more of that with dedicated piezos, if you want better "touchy-feely" capabilities. But do you want to? We are nowhere near being limited by "robot skin isn't good enough". We are at "if we made a perfect replica of a human hand for a robot to work with, it wouldn't allow us to do anything we can't already do". The bottleneck lies elsewhere.
> The dark factory does not make much capital gains, even as it produces 1,000 gizmo per second. But that's good, right? It means that the difference between what workers get paid when they do work and what they pay when they buy things is small. > Sure the 4,995 unemployed might be able to afford the gizmo, but the state does not receive the same taxes. So what happens to those 4,995 unemployed people ? who is payin…
My problem is when you automate, the benefits are not passed on to the entire chain of people involved even though we start the discussion with that. So what do we do?
In a competitive market, efficiency gains are generally going to end up as lower prices to the customer, which is the main way that ordinary people benefit from them. That doesn't happen when the market is consolidated and the oligopoly keeps the gains themselves.
So, ensure competitive markets by thwarting regulatory capture and enforcing antitrust laws.
Ultra-wealthy individuals legally minimise their tax liability by: Receiving a relatively low official salary (Bezos's Amazon salary was $81,840 for many years). Not receiving dividends, so the wealth remains in stock that is not taxed annually. Borrowing money against their stock holdings to fund their lifestyle. Loans are not considered income and are therefore not taxable, and the interest on the loans can sometim…
If you don’t receive income then it obviously shouldn’t be taxed. Otherwise you’d be taxed on owning a car or a house, despite not selling it.
It is not so obvious, some countries have a wealth tax in addition to the income tax.
What if I build and manage a dark factory ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_out_(manufacturing) ) and it produces gizmos. Since all my competitors are also running dark factories, we compete essentially on source materials + energy (assuming we have similar design/quality). Margin would be eventually razor thin. The dark factory does not make much capital gains, even as it produces 1,000 gizmo per second. The ca…
> The dark factory does not make much capital gains, even as it produces 1,000 gizmo per second. But that's good, right? It means that the difference between what workers get paid when they do work and what they pay when they buy things is small. > Sure the 4,995 unemployed might be able to afford the gizmo, but the state does not receive the same taxes. So what happens to those 4,995 unemployed people ? who is payin…
The problem with that is that it operates from a wrong idea of how to set prices for a product. From first principles, you make a widget, figure out how much it costs to make it, including your time, then add some amount of margin on top, and you have a business. That is incorrect. No, you have product, and then you just make up a number based on circumstances. If you're lucky, the price you manage to sell your widget for is above what it costs to make it. If you're not lucky, it isn't, and you have a sale, and lose less money than if you didn't sell anything. However, if you're lucky, you sell your widget for way more than it costs to make it, because of branding, aka luxury fashion brands. The numbers though, are just made up. That's the trick of capitalism. You just... make up a number! Once you understand that, the world starts to make even less sense than it did before. If pricing were cost-plus, branding and timing wouldn’t matter, and empirically they matter a lot.