Well, again that seems simplistic to me. Keynes said you could just bury money in the ground and let people dig it up, and it'd have a stimulative effect, and I'm sure that's true. But I do think it makes a difference what you spend money on. The government should spend money on things like infrastructure that improve private sector productivity when the economy turns around.

That is pretty much Keynes' point. Digging up money in jars (an analogy to mining gold for money - a similarly pointless exercise) would be better than nothing because it would create a stimulatory result, but a much smarter use of that same labour would be to do something useful like, say, building houses.

What's bizzare is watching all these economists try to come up with theories about why wages aren't going up during full employment. A few are finally saying "Unions are dead so workers have no bargaining power" but _very_ few.

Well, if there really was full employment, the lack of unions wouldn't be particularly important.

The real reason is because the economy isn't anywhere close to full employment.

LOL.

Boring propaganda is boring.

âoeInvestmentsâ come out of revenue before it is taxed. You donâ(TM)t get taxed âoeinvestingâ in your business.

The problem is, most every country other than the US recognizes that receiving tax revenue is a good thing, and having people invest in factories, fabs, etc is good for your country. As Barak Obama said "if you want people to do less of something, tax it". The US taxes investment. They have high taxes on factories, fabs, development centers - companies - because apparently they want people to do less building of companies in the US. Other countries aren't so stupid. They WANT companies like Dell, Google, and Apple to put their operations in their countries, so they don't tax the hell of that like the US does.

Aren't taxes on profits ?

Not to mention that the volume "shortfall" wasn't caused by poor sales or high prices. It was cause by the previous financial year's quarter being one week longer than this year's quarter. The weekly average actually increased.

And there will be no corrections, clarifications, or retractions because the tech press is completely beyond accountability.

There's a massive oversupply of labour and not enough jobs.

So employers use degrees (or lack thereof) as a quick way to cull the applicant list for the few jobs they do advertise.

Nobody disagrees the Earth will make it through this.

It's modern human society we're less confident of.

Wage transparency is bad for everyone.

Wage transparency is good for employees and bad for employers (because it means they are dealing with employees more as a group than individuals).

Your definition of "left" and "right" seem diametrically opposed to reality. Are you a Libertarian ?

I need to dig into the Twitter app, at 121.1 MB on my iPhone 6 Plus, to see how it ended up that much larger than Twitterrific at 11.4 MB. I'm guessing it's because The Iconfactory, as Mac development veterans, wrote Twitterrific in straight Objective-C code, while Twitter is using something like React. (I think Tweetbot is even smaller than Twitterrific, but that's probably because Tweetbot doesn't come with any iMessage stickers.)

We have a massive labor surplus and have for _decades_.

Hence the explosion in bullshit jobs in areas like HR, marketing and middle management, the massive worldwide bubble in education as people desperately try to make themselves more "employable" and the collapse in job security.

That's like calling the chestbursters from Alien "self defense".

All USB protocols and connectors are royalty-free to members of the USB Implementers Forum, and Microsoft is on their board of directors. And even if they weren't, I'm pretty sure they could find the US$4,000/year membership dues in the cushions of Satya Nadella's couch.

The exact same thing was said when Apple introduced Gatekeeper in mac OS Mountain Lion four years ago. The default when Mountain Lion* shipped was to allow apps from the App Store or signed apps from other sources, and it's still the default today. The blanket option to allow all apps and go unprotected is now hidden, but it can be re-enabled from the command line. And you can still override Gatekeeper for individual apps from at least three different interfaces (attempt to launch the app, then open the App Store prefpane; right-click the app in Finder; use spctl from the command line). As far as I'm concerned, that's all as it should be. It's still possible for a user to selectively bypass Gatekeeper, but it's harder to do so accidentally or globally.

(*: The back-port to Lion allowed all apps by default as a concession to users of old hardware that were left behind when Mountain Lion dropped support for 32-bit EFI.)

That's no guarantee that Microsoft will be as wise as Apple has been. Instead of code signing, Microsoft is encouraging developers to wrap Win32 apps in UWP containers so they can be published from the Windows Store, so probably not as wise. Closed-source OS developers aren't idiots, though. Apple and Microsoft both know that the "default walled garden on desktop" button is wired to the self-destruct system.

How so? Take someone that's being paid, let's say, $5000/month at the moment, and let's take a UBI of $1000/month to have a neat number to work with. With the UBI they'll be getting $6000/mo, but paying back $1000/mo for a net of $5000/mo. That's exactly what they were already getting, so where's the subsidy for the employer?

The $1000 less they have to pay the person to do that job because that component of their worth in the market is being met by the UBI not the employer.

The minimum wage is not the same thing. It is a required minimum amount the employer must pay, not a minimum amount paid by the public.

It's a good point. I quite like the general idea. None of this is going to be viable long term though, because we can automate all of these things too.

Yes. But there needs to be a transitionary step so the people who can't handle the idea of "getting something for nothing" can get their head around it (or die).