Carbon taxes could help, but end-of-life taxes on the producer would be more effective at actually driving change. The consumer doesn't have the decision making power to choose lower-impact materials in products or packaging they buy, but the producer does. If we tax them on the disposal cost and other negative externalities resulting from the use and EOL of their products those producers will likely choose different materials.
This is a really good point actually, insurance firms are already licensed and regulated. You could effectively implement a wealth tax simply through added taxes on insurance policies.
This only applies if it’s anti-competitive, meaning if the intent is to undercut and harm a competing business. Funded startups routinely operate at losses, the point is that for many business models it isn’t possible to operate profitably from the start-making alternative ownership structures challenging.
Open source projects at large need to move to decentralized, censor-resistant Git hosting. Some interesting projects in this area to watch are Ellcrys and Gitchain.
I take real issue with the unemployment rate claim. The federal U-3 rate is a politicized number that has over time been reduced to an incredibly narrow definition. U-6 is much better because it includes discouraged workers who have given up on seeking employment and part-time workers who want full-time (an increasingly large population). In 1994 the BLS changed the U-6 to exclude long-term discouraged workers which had the effect of lowering the rate. As John William's Shadowstats shows, when you adjust long-term discouraged workers back into the U-6 rate unemployment is actually well over 20%.
I'm not a Yang supporter but this article is total garbage. Slate has been very disappointing lately.
The key takeaway seems to be while Yang says automation has displaced jobs there's a lack of academic consensus on the weight placed between trade policy and technology improvements; but everyone agrees both have had a significant effect.
Ok... so we shouldn't be coming up with a plan for how to address economic changes due to technology based on "it's historic effect has possibly been outweighed by other factors" even though we all agree it will continue to have an effect in the future?
Also just want to point out that anyone using the reported federal unemployment rate as a measure of overall employment health has already lost all credibility to write on the topic.
I’ll go a bit further. The article was just rambling.
The article title is super click baity and the substance of the article doesn’t support it. They cited a bunch of studies to try to show that the job losses can be attributed to many things.
Why not compile the various studies and make an infographic showing the different ideas out there? It might be much easier to understand.
I think Yang has been overstating automation’s impact, in part because that’s necessary for political messaging. Sounds like the Ball State study has some issues.
If you're going to make the energy-usage argument you'll need to position it against a comparable alternative, not how far you can drive a Tesla. How much energy does the current financial industry use on a per transaction basis? If you were to sum up all the retail banking locations, corporate offices, their data centers, contractors, POS systems, etc. would you realistically expect energy usage per transaction to be lower than a Bitcoin transaction?
> If you were to sum up all the retail banking locations, corporate offices, their data centers, contractors, POS systems, etc. would you realistically expect energy usage per transaction to be lower than a Bitcoin transaction?
Yes, on a per transaction basis. You can only have 7tx/sec which means only a tiny tiny number of people could ever use it, and yet it uses as much power as Denmark. Currently nobody uses it and it uses as much power as Denmark. I would rather another Denmark or Austria than an incredibly inefficient payments system. To underscore just how little bitcoin matters ask yourself, if it just disappeared one day would anyone outside the industry even notice? And on that you want to spend an entire nations energy budget?
Visa processes 600,000 transactions in the same energy budget as a single bitcoin payment. Six hundred thousand times more efficient.
I can’t understand why you’d compare it to the entire global financial system when it can’t possibly ever replace even a sliver of it. I could outperform it with a single AWS instance and one table in RDS or DynamoDB.
Upcoding is extremely common and almost never comes with any consequences. It's routine for staff at the hospital to add line items for things that never actually happened. I've personally seen procedure codes for neuropsychological testing in the ER when the staff never completed those exams, as an example. The billing codes require very specific actions to have taken place in order for the insurance companies to reimburse. It's not often done out of malice, the codes added are likely what should have taken place but the hospital staff are overworked and end up cutting corners.
This is outright fraud.. I wish I could wear a bodycam into the hospital and have the footage confirm everything I'm billed for is actually administered and necessary for the diagnosis I'm provided by the physician.
