39,454 karma · joined March 30, 2012
If you get rid of BS jobs then you're not paying people to do them. Someone then gets the money you're not paying them, e.g. the company can now charge lower prices to customers who then have more money to spend. They then want to buy something else with the money and the people who need jobs then get jobs doing that.
In most cases this will actually increase consumption, because people buy more when things cost less and therefore provide more value for money. If the cost of a year of college goes down by $10,000 by eliminating some bloated administrative bureaucracy then more people can afford it, positions that couldn't previously find qualified applicants get filled and unemployment goes down, those positions pay better and people have more money to spend, etc.
> I suggest that instead of cutting “bullshit jobs”, we instead reduce working hours across the board (and penalize overtime)
Isn't this the exact same thing only distributing the hours differently?
You could be proposing one of two things. One is to have everyone work fewer hours doing the same thing they do now, but that one obviously doesn't work. Jobs like carpenter or trauma surgeon aren't BS jobs and if people spent fewer hours doing them then we'd have fewer of those things done, which would be bad.
The other is that instead of getting rid of BS jobs, we get rid of BS work. So we have fewer middle managers and have the people who used to do that instead do something productive, allowing the people currently doing the productive thing to work fewer hours.
The result of that would then be that everyone works fewer hours. But then they would have less money to spend. If you work for 32 hours instead of 40 at the same hourly rate then you take home less money. Getting rid of 20% of hours rather than 20% of employees would reduce total income by the same amount.
If the same thing happens and the company e.g. uses the money saved to lower prices then it's a similar scenario to getting rid of the jobs, except that now instead of production/consumption increasing because we got rid of inefficiency, people work fewer hours to get the same stuff because now they get paid for fewer hours but things also cost less. But that tends to be trouble because the prices change non-uniformly, e.g. the cost of financial services comes down because you eliminate some useless bureaucracy but you haven't done zoning reform so housing is still expensive. When jobs still pay the same amount that's fine, because a bunch of small businesses pay lower costs for payment processing or employee health insurance, lower prices by that much and then have to hire the people who lost their jobs to produce the extra stuff people buy with the surplus money. But if jobs suddenly pay 20% less, your mortgage payment hasn't changed.
Whereas if you take the original premise that people making less money would reduce consumption, e.g. that the savings would go into Evil Corp's money bin and never be spent, then you're in even more trouble in your case. Because you're deterring people from going back to the original number of hours in order to be able to afford the original level of consumption.
BS jobs are the anti-UBI. With a UBI you get to avoid starvation even if you refuse to take a job which is excessively dangerous or degrading or low-paying, which in turn exerts pressure on those jobs to improve conditions or pay. You get more runway to start a business instead of being forced to work for someone else because you need to make rent today rather than a year from now when your new venture is off the ground. It allows you to be actually productive by your own metrics rather than getting taken advantage of for lack of alternatives.
Whereas BS jobs create the illusion of productivity. You get to avoid starvation by digging holes and filling them back in, but now you're wasting all day doing something useless instead of spending that time starting your business or going to school, so you end up stuck in the BS job forever. Which helps neither society nor you compared to you still getting the money and then letting you choose what to do with your time.
The fun part about this is that it shows what people actually care about.
What happens if petroleum prices go up? People use less. It's the entire premise of a carbon tax. Fuel costs more so people buy a hybrid or electric vehicle, power utilities find renewables or nuclear more attractive relative to natural gas, etc. In a market economy this is the primary way to get people to switch from something to alternatives -- which is pretty important if you think climate change is a problem.
This is obviously not why Trump is doing it, but it's the consequence of it anyway. So now we get to see what people care about. Do you like higher oil prices because it speeds up the transition away from fossil fuels, or dislike them because of who it is that caused it this time?
Exactly. Which in turn requires you to have some way of tying those accounts to that ID, which was supposed to be the thing to be prevented.
But it would also be completely reasonable to authenticate the customer exclusively using mechanisms other than government ID. You can already make a withdrawal using your bank card and PIN. If you lose your card you could sign into their website using your password and request a new one etc.
Consider what happens if you lose your government ID. Your bank has much better ways to authenticate you at that point than the government does. Government ID has a major bootstrap problem, whereas patronizing a service doesn't because a new account with no money in it belongs to whoever is signing up for it regardless of who they are, and you can at that point give them a bank card and have them provide a password and email address etc. that allows you to identify them in subsequent transactions without ever needing their name.
And those laws are extremely invasive and should be repealed. It's offensive to have a law that de facto requires you to identify yourself in order to pay for a newspaper subscription or buy contraceptives over the internet.
But that's not the issue in this case. It's that the bank knows your name and what you buy -- already very bad -- but now you want to create a path to tying that information to everything you do on the internet.
How has the anti-competitive lock-in scam of "device integrity protection" entered the discussion? Using ZK proofs without it has exactly the same effect.
There are far too many attestation-passing insecure devices to expect attestation to have any security value against attackers who can choose any of those devices on purpose.
Which is why the people trying to do it always pull out the misdirect about ZK proofs. Those don't fix anything because a system that actually preserved privacy wouldn't be able to prove that the user is over 18, only that someone is over 18, not necessarily them. And that in turn means you're setting up a rug pull. You roll out a system which is indistinguishable from the perspective of ordinary people from the one that screws them, and then that system can't actually exclude minors so what follows is calls to change it to stop protecting privacy, at which point the people trying to collect everyone's ID will be arguing that you already have to show ID.
It also presumes you would even get a privacy-preserving implementation to begin with, which a pretty credulous assumption given how these things usually go.
Battery storage has a levelized cost of ~$0.20/kWh. Solar is ~$0.04/kWh. If you're using the batteries for 50% of kWh you end up at an average of ~$0.14/kWh, which is in the same range as coal.
> it requires impractical overcapacity to compensate for seasonal variation.
Only if you're trying to do 100% of generation from one source. Solar generates more power in the summer, wind generates more power in the winter. Meanwhile you don't have to use overcapacity at all when your target isn't fully 100%. You have enough solar to not need fossil fuels in the warmer months at all, enough wind to only need them 20% of the time in cooler months, and then only 10% of your kWh come from fossil fuels.
> China does about 30% of the world's industrial production and 40% of metal production, while having around 50% of world's coal power plants.
Those are unwelcome numbers even proportional to the amount of manufacturing.
> Many of their new coal plants are peaker plants.
"New coal plants" is rather the problem in itself. The number we need to be going down is instead going up.
No it doesn't. You install 12 hours worth of batteries at the factory and "there is no solar at night" is solved, and doing that is already cost competitive with coal on the majority of days.
The problem comes when generation is low not because it's night but because it's cloudy for an extended period of time. But that only happens a small minority of the time, and doesn't require you to burn fossil fuels the other 90% of the time.
You also don't need things like synchronous condensers when you're using a non-trivial amount of nuclear or hydro, neither of which is coal.
> Yeah, it's because of the above points.
Then how do so many other industrialized countries do it without that amount of coal?
Canada and Spain are each only ~22% fossil fuels. France is <5%. The UK is 31% and only 0.1% of that is coal.
The premise of "excess" already has the problem baked into it.
Suppose an efficient company could provide service for $100 with a $10 profit, but regulators have no practical way of establishing this. The incumbent is instead providing service for $200 with a $10 profit, but then receiving $30 in kickbacks under the table or something of equivalent value not being accounted for in the official books from whoever is now getting $190 instead of $90.
Whereas getting them to invest in a particular type of generation was never hard because you can just give them a financial incentive to do it. If they have to pay a carbon tax out of their profits, which generation types are they going to add?
The trouble with this is that people frequently don't like the consequences of that.
For example, a lot of the costs of a grid connection are non-linear if not totally independent of the amount of power you use. When a tree falls on a power line and a crew has to show up and install a new pole, the cost of that has nothing to do with the average percent utilization of those wires. Likewise, a line that can deliver 100MW to a single customer costs more than one that can handle 100kW, but it doesn't cost anywhere near 1000 times as much or consume 1000 times more land etc.
The result of this is that the "works under any set of conditions" pricing for a grid connection would be a flat monthly fee for the capacity of the line totally independent of how much you use, and a line with 1000 times the capacity would only cost e.g. 10 times as much. But then a typical household electric bill would have a fixed charge of ~$100/mo for a grid connection regardless of how little electricity you use.
Likewise, if you have a high proportion of renewable generation in the grid then the price per kWh during daylight hours when there are clear skies would be essentially zero, but the price on a cold still night in winter would be oppressively high and anyone who failed to turn off their electric heat on that specific day would end up with a $5000 electric bill.
So in most places what happens instead is that the power company charges a fee per kWh which is used to pay line crews and other expenses that don't actually depend on usage and then have a much lower fixed connection charge. And charge a certain amount per kWh during days when supply is sufficient and then use the money to subsidize consumption during shortfalls, even though that actually raises total costs, because otherwise people would scream about prices hitting $500/kWh for a few hours every year or two.
But once you're doing those things, a customer that wants megawatts of power is reasonably going to object to that rate structure, because the few percent inefficiency those things induce is millions of dollars in their case. At which point people start complaining about subsidies, even though not doing those things would be the absence of subsidies.
Not only that, it's a misdirect to try to blame countries that have more stringent emissions rules for the results in a country that doesn't.
Suppose that every country banned coal. Obviously then the location of the factories or customers wouldn't affect the amount of coal being burned because the number would be zero either way.
Suppose no country regulated emissions at all. Again the amount of coal being burned doesn't depend on the location of the factories because companies would be able to burn as much as they like regardless of where they are.
But suppose that some countries have emissions rules and others don't. As a result, the companies that want to burn coal move to the countries where they're allowed to do it. Now the amount of emissions does depend on where the factories are. But if the country where they are had the same emissions rules then they would be less competitive -- and so they choose to attract a disproportionate share of the manufacturing to a place that uses dirty power. That's definitely a choice -- compare it to the outcome where every country stops burning coal.
Intermittent energy sources are predictable in aggregate. A fairly modest amount of storage to smooth things out and you can pretty reasonably get above 50% solar and wind. Make up a large chunk of the balance with nuclear and hydro and you're pretty close to 100%.
The last 10% is obviously the hardest, but what's the excuse for countries still doing majority fossil fuels?
> China is building tens of nuclear power plants though.
Trouble being they're still operating ~1200 coal power plants.
Because then the utility company's expenses go up, which they would normally not want because it reduces their profit, except that then they can say that their profit isn't over the threshold and use that to increase revenue (i.e. raise prices) and still make the same profit but now also get the kickbacks under the table or help out their cronies by overpaying them.
It also in general deprives them of the incentive to improve efficiency, because reducing waste lowers expenses, which in a normal system you have the incentive to do because it means you make more money, but not if profit is a fixed amount defined by the law regardless of what you do.
Which is to say, it's much better to find a way to narrow the utility monopoly as much as possible and subject them to competitive pressure as much as possible, than to try to pretend that you can limit the profit of an entire monopoly supply chain by declaring that a single entity in it can only have a specific amount.
The definition of a market is the set of goods or services which are fungible substitutes for one another.
The only thing that's hard about this at all is determining how fungible they have to be in order to be considered substitutes, e.g. two restaurants that are 3000 miles apart are obviously not substitutes for each other, but what if they're 30 miles apart? That one could go either way depending on how aggressive you want to be.
But it doesn't really matter how the coin flips like that turn out because the things that are close to the line aren't the markets where consolidation is causing major trouble, and conversely causing some local shops to not merge with each other so it stays unambiguous that the local market isn't consolidating is likewise not a big issue.
> Do non-profit organizations count for this rule?
Yes. If a non-profit has more than 15% market share then it has to be broken into multiple non-profits that each have less than 15% market share, the same as anyone else.
> Imagine a serious condition getting its first drug treatment approved and the company saying "Only every seventh patient is eligible."
You're assuming that there are still patents. If there are then that obviously doesn't count during the patent term because that's what patents are, but then you count only the patented invention and any sort of tying is entirely prohibited. You shouldn't be able to patent a connector and use that to monopolize the market for replacement razor blades.
Whereas if there aren't patents then you don't have this problem to begin with because you get a dozen different companies all producing the new medicine right away.
> operating systems
Operating systems are easy. Microsoft would be atomized because they have too much market share and then a dozen different companies would have the full rights to make derivatives of Windows. None of them would ever be allowed to have majority market share again, so now it's in everyone's interests to standardize APIs so that the same software will run on each company's Windows distribution, and the same APIs would end up being supported by (or consolidated with) non-Windows operating systems as well.
The OS then becomes fungible as intended and most likely ends up being open source since there's not a lot of margin in fungible commodities. And software licensed to allow the entire public to modify and redistribute it has an unlimited number of suppliers and would never exceed the market share threshold.
> utilities to a specific house or even city
If you're a utility company and you know you're going to get broken up if you have more than 15% market share, what do you do?
The sensible thing to do is to build your infrastructure differently. You're digging up the road once, but instead of installing one big pipe, you install a conduit with 10 smaller ones inside it. Then you sell off nine out of ten to nine other companies so that you each have ~10% market share and if one of you ends up with 14% and another 6% you're still not over the threshold.
Then if a natural disaster damages the infrastructure, in theory they could each employ their own repair crews and each send one to each damaged location, but that seems pretty inefficient when there is another option. You have multiple independent repair companies and the utility companies pay whichever one gives them the best rate for a given job, which will tend to be the one already sending someone to that site, i.e. the same repair crew usually repairs all 10 damaged pipes and gets paid by all 10 utility companies. Meanwhile a different repair company puts in the best bid for a different site.
The status quo takes the assumption that everything has to be vertically integrated, but it doesn't, and it's a lot easier to have competition when each new entrant doesn't have to reproduce the entire supply chain themselves.
> spy satellites, combat aircraft, armored fighting vehicles
You're listing things that are concentrated markets because the government is the only one that buys them and then there is only one seller because there is only one buyer. And even then the way the government does that is stupid. If they're the only one who wants armored fighting vehicles then they should take competing bids to design one and then take the design they paid for and take competing bids to manufacture it. The contracts to make these things should be going to the same companies that make trucks and locomotives.
Likewise they should break Boeing up and then have the various pieces of it put in bids to design, manufacture or assemble combat aircraft.
> EUV lithography
Nothing about this should be a monopoly. It should be something that dozens of companies know how to do. It consolidated because the government has been allowing companies to merge with competitors and suppliers for decades.
> chemicals that are difficult or dangerous to synthesize
These are the sort of things that should have 50 suppliers rather than 50,000. Nothing about it requires a monopoly. Indeed, allowing the market to concentrate is dangerous, because what happens if that one company's facilities are damaged or they're the only ones who know how to do it and the bus to the company retreat goes over a cliff?
> literally any new product category
So someone invents e.g. 3D printers. How does the time it takes to litigate a case in court compare to the time it takes for multiple companies to be making the new category of product?
There is no need or incentive to file a case if it would be dismissed as moot by the time a decision would be rendered. And if a "new" product category is still a consolidated market multiple years later then that's actually a consolidated market and it's time to break them up.
It's not about the amount of physical force they can assert.
Suppose you have a constrained set of things the government is allowed to do. They prohibit fraud, non-consensual physical harm (e.g. violence, pollution) and market consolidation. Market consolidation is given a rigid definition in the nature of any organization having more than 15% market share in any market, a rigid consequence in the nature of that organization being fully atomized, and a right for customers and suppliers to bring a private case against them with the same consequence if they're over the threshold and the government prosecutor won't do it. Every citizen has the constitutional right to smash corporations in consolidated markets into smithereens.
Meanwhile the government is prohibited from enacting more specific economic rules. They lack the authority to enact things like certificate of need laws, zoning density restrictions, price controls, anything that acts as a constraint on adversarial interoperability, etc. Micromanaging the population is not allowed.
How do these constraints benefit large incumbents? What benefit is there in giving the government the authority to do things that history has consistently shown to be anti-competitive and inefficient?
Suppose you live in South America, register a domain from a registry in Canada and then have users accessing it from Ukraine. Are we going to give every local government a global root certificate? Have a single one in California or Texas that every other country is somehow forced to use? Or make it so people in Europe can't access sites in Asia and vice versa?
The existing system is more than the usual amount of messed up but that seems like one of the things that could actually make it worse.
If they were the root of all evil then shouldn't you want to donate even more, to increase the amount of money they donate to the non-profit and reduce the amount they have left for their evil doings?
> And if there's any meaningful shortfall it's literally impossible to get there with infrastructure cuts. Nobody sane would try it, since the target would be negative one thousand percent costs.
You can't make up a $35M shortfall exclusively from cutting infrastructure when you're only spending $3.5M on infrastructure, but you also can't make up a $35M shortfall by not cutting anything. And you can make up some of it from cutting infrastructure, so where does the money come from that didn't come from reducing headcount?
> If they were paying each employee 10x as much
They're presumably paying the market rate either way. The issue is, what happens if they need to reduce the number of employees? Or they have too many front end developers and not enough back end administrators or vice versa, and then need to let some people go and hire others with a different skill set?
That's the problem, isn't it? Suppose that e.g. Wikipedia traffic is down year over year because of AI summaries and then they get fewer donations. Now something needs to be cut. It's a non-profit so "investor profit" can't be that thing.
If you then also make it so that it can't be workers, what's left? It's mostly either spending down savings (which isn't long-term sustainable) or sacrificing things that ought not to be, like infrastructure or servicing technical debt. So now you've put off a given percentage of layoffs for a few years until that catches up to you and sinks the whole foundation.
We currently have an army defeatists who show up to tell you that if you think companies would get more customers by selling products that screw them less, nobody cares about that and people just want to live in a convenient cage with an unlimited supply of artificially sweetened penitentiary gruel. These people (to the extent that any can be found who are not robots) should obviously be burned alive in the town square to serve as an example to the others, but the most important thing if you intend to solve the problem in that way is to ignore them and build the product that screws customers less anyway. And then shame the services not doing that into irrelevance, once the alternative actually exists. Put it in your advertising so people know there is a difference.
Likewise, there are better ways to do anti-gatekeeping rules than what the EU is doing. For example, require two things. First, that source code be published as a requirement to receive copyright protection -- not that the customer can make unlimited copies, but that they can read it to know what it's doing or make changes to their own copy. And second, require that if the manufacturer/seller can modify any code running on the device, so can the customer. Now Apple can do malicious compliance all they like, but any vendor locks they put in will have someone distributing a patch to remove them the next day, and inhibiting that is the thing which is prohibited.
The history of these things is that something changes to allow them or everyone discovers that they're advantageous, e.g. the industrial revolution happens and for a few years employers try having workers put in 80 hour weeks but then discover that burn out increases errors and turnover and it's better to hire more people for fewer hours. Then politicians rush to take credit for the thing everyone was by then starting to do anyway by passing a law mandating it.
Also notice that the way these things are implemented in the law are asinine, e.g. if you work for more than 40 hours for one employer then you have to be paid overtime, but if you work 40 hours each for two employers then neither of them does. So then employers cap your hours even if you're willing or otherwise have a need to work more to make more money and those people still end up working 80 hours with no overtime, but now they have two jobs with two commutes and two bosses they have to convince to take vacation at the same time etc.
But the alternative mandates (e.g. individuals are effectively or entirely banned from working over 40 hours) are pretty obviously unreasonable to people who are trying to save up for something or start a side business or get out of debt. So instead you have a law which is essentially useless when it isn't actively counterproductive, but that sounds good and therefore allows politicians to pretend they're helping you.
See also employer-provided healthcare incentives, social security forcing everyone to de facto invest their retirement savings in low-yielding government bonds rather than diversified investments, healthcare corporations capturing regulators to limit competition through the law, etc.