CapitalistImperialistPig

Daron Acemoglu of MIT and Pascual Restrepo of Boston U did a regression analysis attempting to isolate the effects of robots on wages and employment in a variety of work environments between 1990 and 2007.   The bottom line: " According to our estimates, one more robot per thousand workers reduces the employment to population ratio by about 0.18-0.34 percentage points and wages by 0.25-0.5 percent." That's ten years ago and you ain't seen nothin' yet. My guess is that we won't see huge effects until the next recession, and then I expect catastrophe. These phenomena suggest that Democrats may be barking up an inappropriate tree with plans to increase the minimum wage.  WB said that Warren Buffett prefers an increase in the earned income credit.  That and related ideas are probably preferable.

Me, I mean.  I just spent wasted an hour arguing with some other idiot - one of the right-wing nutjob variety - on facebook.  I ignored facebook for a couple of years because I was tired of the idiots, and now I am one. Oh well.

While the Secretary of State was off on vacation and the President was conducting a twitter war against his Attorney General and suggesting to the Boy Scouts that he deserved a place on Mount Rushmore, North Korea tested a missile which can reach the US West Coast and perhaps even the US Northeast. That's a very depressing thought, as is the thought that the Trump Clown Car is extremely unlikely to have any intelligent answers to that fact - if, in fact, it comes to its attention at all. Faced with this grim reality, I retreated to art, specifically, monumental sculpture, a fitting tribute to our Pres. The concept I have in mind would be a bit less grand than Mount Rushmore, to wit, on the scale of the kind of boulder some of my neighbors like to decorate their front yards with. Granite would be nice, but ceramic or plastic might do in a pinch. I am picturing a life scale sit down toilet, perhaps covered in goldish colored paint, containing a disembodied sculptured head of the...

The central question in biology today is how life originated. It's not only the biggest unanswered question in biology, but it's also central to our understanding of the place of life in the universe. We now know that planets are extremely common in the universe, and it's at least plausible, that a lot of them have or had Earth like conditions. If we understood how life originated on Earth, we would be much more able to understand the probability of it existing elsewhere. Conversely, if we found life elsewhere, it would almost certainly provide potent clues to how life originated on Earth. The past decades have seen considerable progress in understanding some possibilities for early life, but we are far from concrete answers. Natalie Wolchover, writing in Quanta , has some news on one approach, dissipation driven organization. The idea is that some physical systems evolve to maximize their dissipation of energy and entropy increase. The biophysicist Jeremy England ...

The Democrats have awakened to the fact that they lost the last two elections and want to do something about it by proposing a plan for the economy that would appeal to voters. From what I've heard so far I'm not terribly impressed. There are some good ideas (infrastructure spending), some not quite terrible ideas (raising the minimum wage), but I've yet to see any really good ideas. I think that the idea that workers should make at least $15/hr is not a bad one, but the minimum wage proposal also has a major disadvantage - it increases the cost of employment. That's unlikely to be a good deal in the age of robotics. Here is an alternative - have the government directly subsidize low wages. For example: If an employer pays $10/hr, the subsidy would be $5/hr. For 8$/hr, the subsidy only $3/hr, to discourage lowballing. Another idea. Replace employment taxes with a VAT or income tax. Not only do they increase the costs of hiring people but they are regressive...

I live in a small city that is growing fairly fast. Like many sun belt cities, it attracts a lot of retirees as well as others fleeing winter or California. From time to time I like to cruise the new neighborhoods, just to see what's going on. I did this, a couple of weeks ago, on a long new street. For mile after mile it was lined with brand new gated communities. Gated communities piss me off. One very small component of this irritation is that occasionally I need to attend social events in one of them which involves hassle at the gate. Even though I have been given the gate code, I usually need to punch it in about five times to get the gate to open. Mostly, though, I hate the anti-communitarian ethos of it. There is also a racist element to it, since we are a predominantly Hispanic city and those behind the gates are mostly wealthy Anglos and Asians. If it were up to me I would install a toll gate at each exit and make the residents pay to enter, or, at least, to leav...

I've been looking for a new car, and my main criteria are legroom, headroom, and all the safety features. So I was test driving a Cadillac CT-6 yesterday, and decided to test the lane keeping and auto-brake features. I was not impressed. I deliberately let the car wander across the lane line (other cars were too far away to be endangered by these maneuvers, but probably close enough to conclude that I was drunk or an idiot). The lane keeping was supposed to keep me in my lane while vibrating the seat on the side where I wandered off. Well, it did sort of keep me in my lane, meaning that it wandered drunkenly from left lane mrker to right, but it never vibrated. The emergency auto-braking feature didn't work either, unless it planned to switch on after I got close enough to panic brake and scare the heck out of my wife. So far, not impressed with this implementation.