2,232 karma · joined July 19, 2011
Also entire train lines frequently run in parallel a few blocks from each other.
Thus, it is Democrats who are most responsible for making Trump far, far wealthier than he would be without their assistance. This while adding to inequality and making rents for even small apartments very expensive.
Incidentally, in Japan in 2001 or so they passed a federal law which overruled local zoning density restrictions. The result is that in 2014 140,000 housing units were built in Tokyo compared with less than 90,000 for all of California and 20,000 for NYC.
1. Wages are just part of the overall benefit package per worker. Healthcare costs to firms have been rising dramatically and these higher healthcare costs (even as employers are having workers pay more out-of-pocket) have resulted in a flat overall wage payout.
2. What should be focused on is overall standard of living and not wages. In cities such as my own, NYC, but also SF, LA, SD, Boston, DC, the price of housing and commercial real estate (an increasing cost to businesses which can result in lower wages paid out) is caused because of "rent-seeking" that causes an artificial scarcity of land through politics that limit zoning density with the resultant higher proportion of income going towards housing costs. The rent-seeking benefits special interests which in this case are wealthy landlords such as Donald Trump.
3. Importing illegal immigrants holds down wage costs among the working class. Except for Trump, almost all Democratic and Republican Presidential candidates wanted to import illegal immigrants.
4. Exporting factory jobs to China and Mexico have also kept wage rates low.
5. The abuse of H1-B Visas have helped to keep wages lower among STEM workers. H1-B Visas are supposed to be used only in the case where there is no American with the skill set to fill the job. Many Democrats and some Republicans actually want to increase the number of H1-B Visas to further depress STEM wages. Trump campaigned against H1-B Visa abuse and spoke against Disney replacing 250 American IT workers with H1-B from India, a clear abuse of H1-B. Clinton did not speak out against H1-B Visa abuse.
6. Raising minimum wage by law to $15 per hour as the author suggested demonstrates to me that he wants to take this simplistic solution which ends up with higher costs to poor people who have to buy goods and services.
In summary, instead of focusing on wages alone, focus on standard of living much of which is poor because of rent-seeking which benefits wealthy landlords to the cost of everyone else. When focusing on wages, deal with the structural issues which are 1) increasing costs of healthcare and other benefits 2) increasing real-estate costs to businesses, 3) eliminating illegal immigrants 4) eliminating H1-B Visa abuse and decreasing the number of H1-B Visas.
Raising the minimum wage through law simply lowers the standard of living to the poor such as retirees on fixed incomes as the grocery store costs and other costs increase.
Various forms of farm machinery such as combines automated farm jobs for the better. So true with robots in factories and artificial intelligence that replaces lawyers for standard contracts.
I respectfully disagree. These are direct quotes from the Wikipedia article mentioned above. The Pentium M (Banias) was an innovation of increasing the (maximum) speed vs. power ratio. Intel chose not to extend to x64 because they wanted to market an entirely different 64-bit architecture, the Itanium processors.
I am very pleased that AMD came out with it and forced Intel to do the same, but the Pentium M was (for microprocessors) a true innovation.
"The Pentium M coupled the execution core of the Pentium III with a Pentium 4 compatible bus interface, an improved instruction decoding/issuing front end, improved branch prediction, SSE2 support, and a much larger cache. The usually power-hungry secondary cache uses an access method which only switches on the portion being accessed..."
"Other power saving methods include dynamically variable clock frequency and core voltage, allowing the Pentium M to throttle clock speed when the system is idle in order to conserve energy, using the SpeedStep 3 technology (which has more sleep stages than previous versions of SpeedStep)..."
"...Pentium M varies from 5 watts when idle to 27 watts at full load..."
My first job was VLSI designer (GPUs) and I follow the industry. Intel is the innovator when it comes to fab. IBM has a fab (or just sold it) in Upstate NY, but they could not keep up with Intel.
The Pentium M (Banias was the first processor) was developed in the Haifa, Israel design center and it is the first example (in microprocessors) of slowing the clock rate and performing more computation per clock cycle. This was released in March, 2003. Could you please cite examples of competitors releasing low TDP models before this?
The local city councils respond to lobbying on the part of wealthy landlords by 1) zoning density restrictions, 2) overregulation and amount of red tape needed for approvals, and 3) overuse of historic landmark status.
Harvard Economist Edward Glaeser has written extensively about these problems. For example: Build Big Bill http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/build-big-bill-article-1....
See also: 40 Percent of the Buildings in Manhattan Could Not Be Built Today https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-...
The solution is to use the one in used by Japan which is to have the federal government override the "rent-seeking" local city councils. The honest truth is that these city councils make renters and younger people pay far, far more for housing while giving Donald Trump and his fellow wealthy landlords far, far more money than their costs.
Also, they were the first to move away from the "higher frequency is better" to running lower power CPUs with more computation per clock cycle for mobile.
IMHO, Apple should have moved to Intel when the IBM PC came out. The IBM PC used the Intel 8088 which ran Intel 8086 16-bit processor while using a cheaper 8-bit bus which could use the more mature and less expensive 8085 interface chips. The Apple II had only an 8-bit processor.
I've stopped using it because of all of this junk.
They took something that worked well and made it not work well. Brilliant.
GM's high revenue/profit vehicles require a lot of gas compared with the lower revenue/profit vehicles and thus the projected cost of gasoline probably is part of the GM valuation. For now, and for the future, thanks to fracking and (relatively) low demand from China, it appears as if GM should be having increased profits.
Regarding, Tesla's valuation, there must be some metric for customer acquisition.
In the US, many people have the iPhones and iPads. For professionals worldwide at least in developed countries, it makes sense to use iPhones which are far, far more secure than Android platforms, especially when taking into account total cost of ownership, the monthly fee for cell service on a high quality network.
In professional settings, the Mac is becoming a more popular platform, IBM is converting many Thinkpads over to Macs.
Many in Europe, even the young, smoke cigarettes which are very costly with the taxes. I'd suggest for both health reasons and using money for better purposes to quit smoking cigarettes and use the money for iPhones (and Macs).
A pack of Marlboros in Germany is about $8 per pack according to Wikipedia.
My daily cost for being on the Verizon (top cell provider, esp in NYC) network and having Verizon yearly upgrade for latest iPhone is $5 per day. Upgrading to latest MacBook 15" Pro from recent model is about $2 to $3 per day.
The Macs, iPhones, and iPads play much better together as an ecosystem.
Well, at least thanks to BrExit, you can still have public health in England.
I also prefer the PDF versions which I can print out a chapter when I need to read hard-copy Instead of carrying with me an entire book (live/work in Manhattan, we don't use cars much and value light-weight equipment).
In my view, this was a brilliant design choice and a pity that Apple didn't do the same.
The 8088 was designed in the Haifa Israeli Design Center.
"After several months, he had recovered enough to be discharged. But, out in the world, his life was simply another hospitalization waiting to happen."
Hospitalizations can cost thousands of dollar per day. So this stay cost in the several hundred thousand dollar range.
[skipping some paragraphs]. He is given a stable housing environment:
"I spoke to Hendricks recently. He has gone without alcohol for a year, cocaine for two years, and smoking for three years. He lives with his girlfriend in a safer neighborhood, goes to church, and weathers family crises. He cooks his own meals now. His diabetes and congestive heart failure are under much better control. He’s lost two hundred and twenty pounds, which means, among other things, that if he falls he can pick himself up, rather than having to call for an ambulance."
The entire article is about this sort of thing and about many cases.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/01/24/the-hot-spotter...
These four items are deemed by society as wrong or bad and therefore it "wrong" as you say.
There are import tariffs on sugar that benefits sugar producers while "harming" society (and other countries that want to import sugar).
Pick up a microeconomics book and it will explain. In microeconomics market inefficiencies or market failures have 3 causes: 1) rent-seeking, 2) negative externalities, 3) information asymmetry.
As I explained somewhere else in this post, Economist David Ricardo first discussed this problem of rent-seeking about 200 years ago. In this case, the wealthy landlords work to pass laws that give them wealth paid for by society or in this case renters.
David Ricardo first discussed rent-seeking with the Corn Laws of Britain which had a tariff on all grains which increased the wealth of landowners at the cost of other members of society.
Another example is limits on taxicab medallions (which we have in NYC) so that medallions in NYC were valued at $1.2 million each and higher fares for passengers but that scarcity was fixed by competition from Uber/Lyft so that now medallions are only worth $700,000 or less and fares are less expensive than they were.
Another example is labor unions. Various forms of tariffs also create scarcity benefiting the special interests over the needs of the general population. Many jobs have extraordinary educational or licensing requirements to create scarcity and limit competition.
When it comes to housing wealthy landlords want their land to appreciate so they lobby politicians to pass these regressive laws. Without spending a cent, simply reversing the artificial scarcity in housing means that renters pay less for rent and more for goods and services, the construction trades have jobs, etc.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1839578/
Eagle Eye movie:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1059786/