>Imagine a machine that creates gourmet meals out of thin air. It is solar powered, cheap to use, can be manufactured for less than a plasma screen TV. ... Every restaurant in the world goes out of business.
Chefs, waitresses, and dishwashers lose their jobs. The marginal cost of manufacturing goods falls to nearly zero, but if the technology for such a machine remains proprietary, then the replicator’s food is only as free as its designer decides. Our Silicon Valley whizkid, free of competition, charges as much for the food we now make in our kitchens as we might’ve once paid in a five star restaurant.
If the machine costs as much as a five star restaurant per meal then why the fuck did the all the restaurants in the world go out of business‽
Furthermore why are we assuming that no other company on Earth will think the food market might be profitable? Even if a design is propriety that doesn't prevent independent invention.
That bit also caught my eye, yet I think the point stills hold true given the following constraints.
Even though this food synthesiser is incredibly cheap to produce it needs some sort of source of molecules to produce its goods, think of it as a cartridge.
In the beginning to attain a sizeable market share the cartridge cost can be amortised. Once the goal is achieved the company can sell it for whatever it wants.
It's true that other companies could see an opportunity there, and develop competing synthesisers. But, they could be easily driven out of the market by legal costs when the original company uses its enormous corpus of meaningless patents to sue them.
These constraints can be seen today at play with devastating results for innovators and consumers.
TFA's scary scenario assumes a number of things that just aren't, and empirically won't be, true.
In no industry, ever, has an inventor with however many patents succeeded in permanently keeping substitutions away for more than a very short period of time. You mention cartridges with brings to mind famously uncompetitive coffee and printer toner parallels.
Yet, there is a rich market for third party toner cartridges that the incumbents has totally failed to shut down, and there's a rich market for different brands of printers, which even in the face of uncompetitive cartridges caps the price any one manufacturer can charge. Despite the popularity of printers, HP is NOT a healthy company.
Pretty much the same thing is true for the capsule-coffee-market. There are a ton of different kinds of cartridge/pad/pod/foo systems, and again, it's trivial to find third-party capsules. On top of that, the capsule-coffee-market is under pressure from the non-capsule coffee market: If you feel ripped off by capsules, you have a good number of options to brew beans direct.
The same thing will happen with the magic food machine - people will just cook regular meals. Sure, the 5 star restaurant experience might be hurt , and that's a real shame, but it's not like a silicon valley whizkid can just charge $INF because otherwise humanity starves.
>Subsistence farmers worked far longer hours than their ancestors. They died younger and lived more miserable lives. The sole upside was that farming allowed the same plot of land to feed many more people.
The author misses the upside of not worrying about getting eaten by a lion or trampled by a wildebeest.
As far as I am aware, by every measure hunter-gatherers had better lives than the vast majority of farmers until very recently. They had better nutrition, as evidenced by being taller. They had more equal societies. They worked very little. Contemporary hunter-gatherers generally live only on very marginal land, as more organised societies have taken over the rest, and their lifestyle is not a good reflection of what life was like before civilisation.
If you believe Steven Pinker (and IIRC Jared Diamond) then hunter gatherers had a much higher chance of being brutally murdered. That'd probably be a down-side.
> If the machine costs as much as a five star restaurant per meal then why the fuck did the all the restaurants in the world go out of business‽
It's a two-step phase: first acquire a user-base by making the machine extremely cheap and drive all competition out of business, then ramp up prices (relatively slowly ideally).
And of course, if competitors appear you can just locally give away machines.
> Even if a design is propriety that doesn't prevent independent invention.
It doesn't prevent independent invention, but the reinventor would most likely need investors (who'd get no ROI as the current monopoly can drive down profits to 0 or close for everybody) and intact kneecaps. So the reinventor has two choices really:
* ask for a payout to not disclose their reinvention (and pray the monopoly holder won't take the "kneecaps" option instead)
* open up the reinvented design and spread it far and wide, completely destroying the market in the process
The author doesn't even seem to agree with himself.
This line:
> "We have never yet failed to become richer; as a species, our lives have always gotten better. You wouldn’t know it from the headlines, but Greece today is more affluent than the Germany of 1974. Even the least among us own technology that would have been science fiction just a dozen years ago. Our ancestors would be amazed at the splendor of our lives, and by this I mean our grandparents, not cavemen."
is directly at odds with this:
> "What if the benefits of productivity gains are monopolized by the top one percent, as they largely have been for most of the past 30 years?"
If the benefits had been large monopolised by the 1%, Germany in 1974 would be substantially the same (for the 99%, that is) as today, and there would be little splendor for our grandparents to be amazed at.
Sure, some amount of wealth seems to have accumulated at the top, and that's generally undesirable, but the fact that there has been huge leaps in quality of life for all is so blatantly obvious that the author, despite trying to drive the opposite point, (accidentally?) uses it as a throwaway rhetorical device.
Quote from the article : "There is a third option. It is likely and it is ugly.
Even a technological wonderland can create a pernicious society. Technological progress can create dystopia even if ecological disaster is avoided. What if the benefits of productivity gains are monopolized by the top one percent, as they largely have been for most of the past 30 years? This is the world of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, a terrifying, but familiar world of gated communities and genetic engineering, with generalized poverty for everyone outside the corporate elite."
That is an interesting idea but not likely to happen in the long run, but maybe during an intermediate state. Taking historic events as an indicator, the "upper 1%" see little incentive to try to prevent a coming collapse. It is not their children not getting jobs, only the children of the other 99% are not getting jobs and not getting opportunities. So the disaster will grow slowly through all ranks. The "top 1%" will fall last, but fall they will.
From the article I quoted:
"In scenario 5.3.2, with a larger depletion rate, the decline of the Commoners occurs faster, while the Elites are still thriving, but eventually the Commoners collapse completely, followed by the Elites. It is important
to note that in both of these scenarios, the Elites – due to their wealth – do not suffer the detrimental effects of the environmental collapse untilmuch later than the Commoners. This buffer of wealth allows
Elites to continue “business as usual” despite the impending catastrophe.
It is likely that this is an important mechanism that would help explain howhistorical collapseswere allowed to occur by eliteswho appear to be oblivious to the catastrophic trajectory (most clearly apparent in the Roman and Mayan cases). This buffer effect is further reinforced by the long, apparently sustainable trajectory prior to the beginning of the collapse. While somemembers of societymight raise the alarm that the system is moving towards an impending collapse and therefore advocate structural changes to society in order to avoid it,
Elites and their supporters, who opposed making these changes, could point to the long sustainable trajectory “so far” in support of doing nothing.
Did you watch the latest movie? It is heavily implied that the rivers had all dried up or were poisoned. The people lived near an under ground aquifer controlled by the local warlord Immortal Joe.
I did not see the movie. But without rivers the mountains would still be a better option then ground level land: cooler and rainy because of the height.
well, movie (heck, all MM movies took place in Australia, which is anything but mountainous land.
and it goes on - if rivers are poisoned, rain is some sort of hardcore acid pouring down. you actually want to avoid that as much as possible. so no, even for people that would be able to travel far, mountains might be a worse choice. plus, they are so deep into apocalypse, that they don't know geography beyond what they can reach by cars
I think this is a poorly written essay that has all sorts of interesting things to say. I say that because I feel about half the comments here seem to miss the point and are focusing on nitpicks.
I wish he had looked at the hamburger making machine that was being developed rather than "a machine that makes gourmet meals". When talking of that concept to friends and family, I realized for many people that caused them to think of the plight of minimum wage workers, and I literally found out who of my friends and family had Luddite reactions to that and argued they shouldn't be built and shouldn't be legal if they were to be, just for the sake of preserving jobs.
I also wish he spoke to the current state of music and/or video. We literally are in the Star Trek universe with music and video. I can open my computer and find enough music and movies that I couldn't watch or listen to them all in my lifetime. We can imagine a button on our stove that you could press (or voice activate) and it would duplicate an apple for you. Meanwhile we literally have a machine that will duplicate music for you, at near zero cost, and we've had many people do all sorts of things to restrict usage of them. The head of the MPAA compared the video cassette recorder to the Boston Strangler in terms of how much it would destroy society.
There have been many economists who have argued that people will find always find new jobs. After all, there is always something more to do, or at least at jobs I've worked at, although not always money or will to hire more people to do more stuff.
It might be worth exploring the ideas if those economists are wrong and we do end up in a world where you can have a computer make you a hot earl grey tea from nothingness, but few people can afford it, when the hardware is completely locked up under patent laws and the inventors insist on being compensated for creating such an impressive thing.
It's so strange. First the article explains in Star Trek land most people don't need to work and don't need to buy things because production is essentially free. But in the end he argues that making production more and more free people won't be able to afford to buy them. What about the not buying part?
Because we have the wrong social structure. Humanity is sufficiently advanced that our problems are basically solved problems. But our methods of organization keep us from applying the solutions, except under heavy constraints.
For example, we could have access to every book and video ever published. The history of human thought. And creators could be compensated. But our systems do not allow this.
Underneath it all is violence; attempt to act as if it weren’t the case. Openly share books and movies you’ve experienced. An armed bureaucrat will come after you.
If/when production is free you don't even need to compensate the creators. They can get whatever they want, like any other guy, and they'll create only when they feel like it and not (say) once per year to pay bills and buy stuff.
However there are goods that are scarce by definition. Example: that house on the beach you've been dreaming of. Even if you don't mind getting a different one (maybe in a different place) there will be only a finite number of houses on the beach all over the world. So, even in that kind of society we'll need something similar to money to get access to scarce goods. Hopefully that will be linked to the value or the social stand of a person. We almost always measured that as price times the number of sold items but there are zillions of other possible metrics, especially if the price is zero. It could be who has the biggest free gun but that's undesirable, so probably some form of police will be necessary.
"If/when production is free you don't even need to compensate the creators. They can get whatever they want, like any other guy, and they'll create only when they feel like it and not (say) once per year to pay bills and buy stuff."
If history is a guide, I'll say that the inventors themselves won't want to share with you or I. They want to be compensated in some fashion for their inventions. Be it money or power, they'll demand control of our use of their creations. So, I can see how an inventor in our current social structure would become like Immorten(sp?) Joe but without the nuclear wasteland.
The real answer is we wait and see but my belief is that with prices falling to zero the greedy kind of person is going to be at a disadvantage. Probably there is a threshold. If there is need of very little money then enough good content will be made available for free because authors will keep creating no matter what and there will be little money to pay them anyway. Then the ones who insist getting more than claps or a legion of followers (that's power) will get less and less.
Imagine a machine that gives you whatever you want that can reasonably be produced. Imagine a world with infinite resources. Economics exists due to scarcity. If there is no scarcity, then everyone can have whatever they want, whenever and wherever they want. Robots will extract the raw resources, build it, and deliver it to you wherever you want them to. There will be no sales. There will be no excess. Just what is needed whenever it is needed.
Yes, that's the Star Trek vision he explains in the beginning. This doesn't answer the question of why the author in the end of his argument suddenly says that "Robots [...] [delivering] it to you wherever you want" would result in job/money problems. Logic would say that with the need for trade there is no need for money and with robots producing everything for you there is no need for you to work.
Well if you don't work you can't get money. So if there are still other economic activities for which you need money, not supplied by the machine then you are out of luck.
> What ecological pessimists forget is that so far scientists have always been able to stay ahead of resource scarcity. They have always found better, less toxic replacements for what we’ve lost.
Wrong. Very wrong. Humanity has been living over carrying capacity since the beginning of time. We always produce more offspring than what the environment/society can sustain. It is only recently (last 50 years?) and in a very limited area (first-world) that we are living below carrying capacity (of that region). The world as a whole is very much living above carrying capacity.
And no, it does not matter that we are "wasting food" in the first world. For all intent and purposes, that food is not available to the rest of the world.
Until we are able to first feed and then procreate, keeping the demographic curve well behind the food production curve, we are doomed. But that will never happen: as soon as scarcity is not an issue, we tend to reproduce like rabbits.
This makes no sense. The evidence (we still survive and population keeps growing) suggests that we a living well within the carrying capacity of the earth. Technology, invention, social adaptation all help to increase that carrying capacity, making more efficient use of available resources. That may not continue indefinitely, but also population growth may not continue indefinitely. We are not a virus.
There have been occurences mass starvation throughout history, so human ingenuity does not always find a way out. I think many Irish people live in the US today because of one of those starvation events not that long ago.
Jared Diamond's book "Collapse" lists several civilizations that only went down after hundreds of years, sometimes thousands.
Our current practices are in effect for less than 100 years, so we really have no idea yet how it will all play out.
Currently we reap the rewards of the "green revolution", but that is not a sustainable way of farming - it depends on extra energy sources. So we don't know how that will play out in the long run, either.
Meanwhile, as you know, world population has exploded. So if our current way of producing food might turn out to be unsustainable, even more people could die.
> Currently we reap the rewards of the "green revolution", but that is not a sustainable way of farming - it depends on extra energy sources. [...]
If we were ever to hurt for cheap energy really badly, we could just opt for nuclear. At the moment politics prevents nuclear, but that's not an immutable fact of physics.
The balancing act that we have to pull whenever free energy (in the form of petrol) starts to show signs of depletion will have to be played not at the pre-industrial 1000 million people level, but at the current 8000 million. That is a very difficult act to pull - specially without the jackpot that petrol has meant for humankind.
Can you make the transition to nuclear or to another energy source? Maybe, but that's far from sure. We do not even know if nuclear (or any other energy source) is a good enough substitute for petrol at the global level, not even clear that it is an energy source (it has a much lower eroei than petrol, maybe even negative if you account for disposal costs).
Maybe everything plays out well and in some decades we are flying our tesla-jets with rechargeable batteries powered by clean australian uranium, but that seems far-fetched. And even then we might have not yet solved the demographics problem, meaning it has just been kicked down the road for another while.
Nuclear has ridiculously high eroei, if you ignore one-time capital costs to build the reactor. The capital costs to build the reactor are high at the moment, but they don't have to be. (Mostly political reasons.)
> Maybe everything plays out well and in some decades we are flying our tesla-jets with rechargeable batteries powered by clean australian uranium, but that seems far-fetched.
We can invest (nuclear) energy to make artificial petroleum, if that turns out to be the most energy-dense battery.
> And even then we might have not yet solved the demographics problem, meaning it has just been kicked down the road for another while.
You mean the problem that lots of rich countries are aging rapidly? Population growth has pretty much ceased to be a problem.
We have been losing population to starvation since forever. We keep losing population to starvation. We are not able to feed the population of the Earth. We are living above carrying capacity.
Worse: we can not change this. It is part of our human nature, probably a defining characteristic of life, at least as evolved here on Earth. A species prefers to produce more offspring and lose some, guaranteeing that at least some of that offspring is going to be passing genes down the genealogical tree.
What makes this specially worrisome in the case of the human species is that we have gotten so efficient at extracting resources, that we have been able to fuel an exponential growth without precedent in the history of life on the planet - with the exception of some micro-organisms, which actually are what we are most similar to.
Having become so good at extracting resources, and having grown so much in numbers, means that whenever a resource problem arises, the population collapse is going to be fast and furious. I doubt we will be able to keep our technology running in such a catastrophic scenario.
We have been losing population to starvation since forever. We keep losing population to starvation.
But that is purely down to distribution problems, not capacity problems. There exists enough food on planet, we're just not very good at getting to the people who need it.
That is the point: we do not care, we just reproduce. We have been doing that (reproducing over the real carrying capacity, which is what the local environment can sustain) forever.
You can argue that we'll get soon better at distributing food, but that is just wishful thinking. And, human nature being what it is, improving food distribution will just lead us to a bigger population increase, keeping us above carrying capacity.
There is no period of human history when humanity has managed to sustainable restrain its growth. We go wherever technology can bring us, but always a little bit farther. It is simply not how life works: life overproduces to guarantee delivery.
For that scenario that you are proposing to become reality we need to reign on very strong instincts acquired during millions of years of evolution. I am not saying that it can not be done, just that we are not there, that we are not getting anywhere near, and that I think the chances of bringing about that utopia are really slim. Mad Max is way more probable.
Please have a look at eg the UN's population growth forecasts. Fertility rates are falling in nearly all countries (or already at sub-replacement levels).
If population drecreases, and you still lose people to starvation, you are living above carrying capacity. Even if that only happens in certain regions.
The world is losing lots of people to starvation. We are not able to reign on our instintcs.
you still lose people to starvation, you are living above carrying capacity.
By that definition the carrying capacity of earth is zero. No matter how few people there are on earth there will always be some scenario where some guy starves to death because he couldn't get to the other side of the valley where the food was.
We are losing about 10 million people per year to starvation, and there are close to 800 million undernourished people in the world. I am not talking about a random guy not finding his way to an opulent dinner, but about a systemic proplem.
Yes, and that systemic problem is completely unrelated to global food production. We could double production or half the population and people would still starve to death and be undernourished because we are incapable of distributing the food we have to all the people who need it.
"But that is purely down to distribution problems, not capacity problems."
Are you sure? There may be or have been superproductive farming areas in the world, but do they last forever? In the US there seems to be a water shortage. The Ural sea is all but dried up. Can you point me to one location where farming is going on in a sustainable way?
The water shortage in the US is caused by a combination of 'wasting' too much water on things not related to farming and insisting on farming unsuitable crops on unsuitable land. On the other hand countries like Argentina and India will likely have above average crops this year. And that's kind of the point. Sure at any given time you can find areas doing way below their average when it comes to agriculture, and there may very well be areas that are farmed today that won't be farmed in the future, but at the same time you'll find completely different areas doing above average, and new technology will let us grow crops in places where it wasn't profitable to do so before. As I said it's a distribution problem.
As to water, it essentially reduces to an electricity production problem. As soon as electricity gets cheap enough relative to the price of water, you can start firing up the desalination plants and get as much water as you want.
Except, as I said, some previously productive regions were eventually destroyed for good.
As I also said, we have only been doing this (modern way of farming) for a miniscule time span. We have no indication whatsoever that it can go on indefinitely. Starvation has happened in the past, so you are simply fooled by your even more miniscule life span in which you didn't experience war or starvation into an unwarranted optimism.
It's also not a given that we will have unlimited energy - that science fiction novels exist with that scenario is not proof. Even desalination might have issues, apparently atm they also cause environmental issues. And water is not the only resource needed for farming.
Obviously with unlimited energy you could produce lots of food (for example underground or where ever). But we don't have that.
The "overpopulation until the end" myth is completely debunked by the demographic curves of many different developed countries (Germany, Italy, Russia, Japan to name some). I think the common assumption is that the population of nations as they develop taper off eventually.
The "population is controlled whenever technology is able to lead the way" is a myth which is based on the false assumption that "technology is able to lead the way". Humanity has not followed that pattern in the last 200 thousand years, and nothing suggests we will be able to get to that utopia.
1) That will never be a priority. We have so many things which are more important to us, and it is just such a difficult problem to solve because of:
2) Whenever (by some magic coincidence?) we are able to feed the whole world population by better distributing the available food, we will do what we have always done: increase population above carrying capacity.
As said, we are fighting against a very basic mechanism of life: overproduction of offspring. It is an uphill battle.
That is the anomaly, as I have stated above. It is an open question if we are able to extend that behaviour to the rest of humankind. Even China's one-child policy has not managed to control population growth. For that to happen, it would seem that we need to increase the world standard of living to the american/european level. Given the consumption footprint that would mean, it is highly questionable if we will ever achieve that.
Not impossible, just questionable. I still think Mad Max is more likely.
Yes, China's one-child policy didn't seem to make too much of a difference, but that's because Chinese fertility rates fell even in areas that didn't enforce the one-child policy.
The consumption footprint is easily achievable---the limiting factor is energy burned per day. Nuclear (or cheap solar) can change that.
> The economics of Mad Max echo those that followed the fall of the Roman Empire. During the Dark Ages, precious resources became scarce, and men from regions devastated by famine swarmed more prosperous lands.
No it isn't. I can't stand citation culture. My wife does courses as part of her Nursing practice and has to write papers full of citations in the modern style. You can't even say it was a sunny day without referencing an official weather report. The thing is, most of the references you see in books and articles are to sources no more authoritative than the one citing them. If you're dealing with research then yes, sources and standards of evidence are important, but in many cases it creates an illusion of authority.
This is an article on the Internet, not a historical thesis. If you doubt something it says, say so and say why you doubt it. If you think it's worth challenging, it should be worth some time checking for yourself or at least explaining why you doubt it. Just tossing two word over the fence is lazy and provocative without making any actual contribution to the conversation.
Sometimes I think it's worse even than that. As you say, providing a supporting citation gives a gloss of authority and acceptance, whether in an academic paper or on a chat forum. The reader should ideally appraise the cited source and decide if they agree. I doubt this happens in even 1% of cases.
Ideally I'd like to see citations that both support and disagree with the point being made. Then I could take a more balanced overview and decide my level of trust in the evidence.
However this would lead to a systematic review for every sentence written/read.
To my mind this is a major problem in the peer-review scientific process, and I don't know of a decent solution. This is where I'd like to see a really potent AI: systematic reviews.
I'm somewhat skeptical of the quoted assertion as well as I think it's overly generalised, but e.g from the source you give, from part 5:
"When the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the Fifth Century the effect on material culture and technology in Europe was devastating. Without the Empire to fund major engineering projects and large scale infrastructure, many of the skills and techniques involved in monumental buildings and complex technologies were forgotten and lost. The break down of long distance trade meant people became increasingly self-sufficient and produced what they needed locally."
I know this had positive side effects, I did read the article (thanks, great read) but the collapse of the western empire was no picnic. But now we're having a reasoned discussion, whereas 'citation required' is a conversational brick wall.
A less meme-y way would be to say: I'm sceptical (and even seem to recall having read just the opposite), please provide more than a simple assertion to convince me.
the guy has some interesting points (hard to say valid ones since we are all just guessing how future will shape up), but constant mentioning of minimal guaranteed income as cure-it-all-for-our-bright-future is a bit too much to swallow (mentality of quite a few nations i know is, hand out anything, and you remove the only motivation for them do do anything positive or even neutral to society)
The last line of article says it all - Tom Streithorst has been a union member... - in my own personal experience, unions are plague, nothing to be proud of, but that's another topic altogether. This makes it automatically a left-wing-orientated article, which is OK by principle, but not in sync with my inner beliefs and all experiences in my whole life so far (and I've seen the world a bit here & there)
Unions are why we have the forty hour/five day work week.
Guaranteed income is probably the only sane way to move forward. Your description of "mentality of nations" make very little sense, and doesn't actually mesh with the many studies on what happens when you invest in people.
I don't have problem with concept of minimal income, likewise i don't have so many issues with theory of communism. It's this harsh reality we call life when these utopias fail so spectacularly, because of... so many things. World is fragmented, people have so vastly different mentalities and goals in life (if at all), and I cannot imagine one realistic way to enforce this globally. I am more interested into iterations striving for improvement of our lives, rather than massively under-planned revolutions which might look appealing at first glance.
And as for unions, another poster expressed it perfectly. The current political reality of them is pure shame, nothing I would ever, anywhere put into my signature as something to be proud of. So that tells you/me soemthign about author.
Btw, why unions left for example doctors out of that 40-hour work week? Or you think that having over-exhausted expert, who hadn't slept for a day or two, decide on your best treatment for some acute life threatening state, when you take your own medications, have your own allergies and set of other important conditions to consider?
Unions didn't "leave out" anyone. Doctors have a professional association, which as you point out isn't quite sane in what it allows in terms of overtime. But as a result becoming a doctor is a far more exclusive endeavor.
Doctors are also paid quite well, in large part because of that exclusivity.
Not trying to defend the worst of current union behavior, but even now unions are useful; thinking particularly about teachers' unions, which fight to get teachers decent pay. It doesn't work, unfortunately -- teachers are paid less than babysitters -- but they'd be paid even less without unions.
That said, teacher tenure is too well protected by unions; a teacher who is no longer trying should be able to be fired.
Not sure what a better alternative to union organization is. Probably workers earning equity in companies they join, as much as possible. And I'm not talking communism; there are companies today that practice this. But it could be that unions are like democracy: A terrible way to run things, but all the other options are worse.
teachers are paid less than babysitters -- but they'd be paid even less without unions.
Maybe in the median, but certainly not in the right tail. Lots of schools and their 'customers' are well aware of the value of great teachers, and freed from the 'fear' of being stuck with a bad tenured teachers combined with the competition to hire the best possible teachers will no doubt push their salary up.
The real down side I see is that once the salary gap between the best and worst teachers starts to widen, then the schools in poorer areas and with lower budgets won't have a chance to afford employing good teachers and will be stuck with the 'leftovers' to an even bigger degree than now.
Private schools that entirely lack unions (or protected tenure) actually have significantly lower teacher salaries than public schools, so your theory is incorrect. Add to that the fact that public schools in most states are terribly underfunded, and teacher salaries are pathetic across the board.
Administrator salaries, on the other hand, are often way too high. A law (covering government-run public schools) that limited administrator salaries to 120% of the median teacher salary at that school would likely to more to raise teacher salaries than a union could, I think.
> Unions are why we have the forty hour/five day work week.
Just for the record, these two statements don't contradict each other in any way. What unions did 80 years ago and what they're became now are two completely different things.
My comment didn't imply any judgement; I was just pointing out the semantics of the thread, that althoigh two statements can appear contradictory, they aren't necessarily. Personally, I don't have enough information abou unions to offer any opinion.
If the machine costs as much as a five star restaurant per meal then why the fuck did the all the restaurants in the world go out of business‽
Furthermore why are we assuming that no other company on Earth will think the food market might be profitable? Even if a design is propriety that doesn't prevent independent invention.