>>> This is Helen wife of @joeerl It’s fantastic to read all these comments. Joe died from an infection which his lungs couldn’t cope with due to a quite recent diagnosis of pulmonary fibrosis. Incurable and rather unusual. Donate to lung research!
I believe plenty of people do it for a leisure activity rather than to make a living. Sort of like putting puzzles together or surfing the web. Some workers may even be at a dull job (such as a tollbooth operator at night) and their boss doesn't mind.
All forward looking statements are guesses but... I see a strong movement toward Elixir from Ruby devs (and others, I'm not a Rubyist) and I expect Phoenix to be one of the main frameworks in the next few years. It's due to a combination of simplicity, history (erlang is old), and a change in the types of apps some of us are building. There will always be simple CRUD apps too but the demand for constant connectivity seems to be rising. IoT, desktop replacement apps, etc.
Edit: fixed typo referring to Elixir as a framework
There seem to be plenty that lean toward non-mainstream practices. However the one I go to was fully planning to have a career as an MD but converted to chiropractic after it helped him with his own health. He tells me that building core muscle strength is the long term solution, not constant adjustments.
I added a function to my bash that forces me to do pushups every 30 minutes (by turning off my monitor and keyboard). https://gist.github.com/jerel/1fc7686263c9427522f945f755e0a7... An hour after I start work in the morning a cron job reminds me to start a terminal and run `work 8` (or however many pushups I want to do that day). I do the pushups on my knuckles to avoid aggravating my wrists.
I also have a Kinesis Advantage keyboard, go to a good chiropractor, and do cycling. All of which seems to contribute to a (nearly) pain free existence.
I live in a rural area and have fiber to the home from our electric co-op. It's amazing: $99 symmetric gigabit and rock solid service.
On the other hand AT&T is the phone provider here and selling DSL is the least of their worries. One of my clients (a block from the phone switch office) needed DSL as a backup to their fiber connection and AT&T can't provide it because their "equipment is already full". As I see it that's the damage of a monopoly; luckily for us we have proactive co-ops that can compete on projects of that size or we'd have no wired internet.
A monopoly must necessarily limit supply to increase profit. That means that turning away potential customers--even customers that spontaneously appear without advertising or recruitment--is an essential part of the business model.
Refusing to install another DSLAM means they can sell space on the existing ones at a higher price.
I don't get this argument. Why would a monopoly turn away customers? More customers mean more fat margins.
I do get why a monopoly would not want to invest more in capacity (for example DSLAMs). A dollar may have higher returns for the monopoly somewhere else, especially if the monopoly can't (immediately) sell all ports on the new DSLAM.
However, if there is free capacity (for example DSLAM ports), why would a monopoly turn away paying customers?
A perfectly competitive business operates such that price equals marginal cost.
A monopoly operates such that marginal revenue equals marginal cost.
This usually works out such that the quantity supplied is lower and price is higher than the market-clearing quantity and price under perfect competition.
This is an unstable point, because a competitor could enter, and capture some of the unrealized benefit of trade in the triangular area between the monopoly quantity and the competitive equilibrium quantity. If the business is a natural monopoly, and the incumbent does not act quickly to drive the competitor out, they could flip the market and drive out the incumbent instead. A natural monopoly under normal circumstances should occasionally see brief bouts of competition that are essentially deathmatches between businesses. Customers get greater supply and lower prices during these bouts.
So many businesses that are the incumbent in a natural monopoly market try to solidify their position with an enforced monopoly, making competition illegal. This is usually sold as protecting consumers from market disruptions, but that is always a lie. It only protects the incumbent and their guaranteed economic profits from an intentionally underserved market.
I get the economic theory, but I don't get how it would result in the actions prescribed in your example.
> Refusing to install another DSLAM means they can sell space on the existing ones at a higher price.
As customers as either on fixed term contracts or grandfathered in on existing plans, I don't quite get how ports on the DSLAM could be sold for a higher price.
I suppose prices could be raised as contracts run out and old plans are sunset, or when an existing user cancels and a new one seeks service. Is this what you mean?
> A monopoly must necessarily limit supply to increase profit. That means that turning away potential customers--even customers that spontaneously appear without advertising or recruitment--is an essential part of the business model
I get that the monopoly would limit supply by not installing new DSLAMs, but turning away customers? Why would a monopoly do that if there were free ports on the DSLAM?
Another Django -> Phoenix dev here. Currently I miss Django's model field types (UrlField, EmailField, etc) and will probably write them if no one else does soon. I sometimes miss South style migrations when I'm prototyping but doubt there's a good reason to implement them in Phoenix. For building JSON APIs JA Serializer is a quite capable alternative to DRF-JA.
For the Django Admin there's ex_admin which I haven't used yet but it appears to take a bit more work than the Django Admin does.
I haven't felt like virtualenv + pip was too bad for deps and deployment but exrm is already comparable/easier with an even better `mix release` planned for this summer/fall. No uwsgi or gunicorn to configure and even nginx can be skipped.
For the last part of your question: the biggest thing missing from Django was a good way to do websockets. Django has channels now but I doubt they'll work like Phoenix/OTP/Erlang (especially in the concurrency and fault tolerance categories).
Is it common to skip nginx or insert-your-reverse-proxy-of-choice-here?
I'm working on a Phoenix app, getting close to being ready for a beta deployment, and I was just looking for best practices as far as putting it in production.
From what I've read (I'm not an expert either) nginx is completely optional. Cowboy (used by Phoenix) supports https termination and I understand that it's the router for Heroku so it sees plenty of traffic.
As a dev that used Python for the majority of projects I skipped over Elixir when I first saw it based on just a quick scan of the home page. "What? A dynamic, functional, compiled language that looks a little like Ruby? Why would I spend time learning this?". And I'm happy to say that I now love Elixir. Off the top of my head the 5 best features are: pattern matching[1], fault tolerance (a single isolated VM process can crash and then retry quickly), concurrency, Phoenix, and now Nerves[2].
The best alternative that I've used for end user support is Remote Utilities: https://www.remoteutilities.com/ They have an executable that non-technical users can easily download + run in addition to a version for unattended access.
Let's say that currently rent is $1,000 per month, food is $500, and Alice is earning $2,500.
Now UBI is implemented and Alice and all fellow citizens receive $1,000 per month. What will keep the market from easing the entry level rent up to $1,500 and food to $1,000 since the money is available? At first glance it seems like we'd just be choosing a different number representing "broke".
Consider a society with 2 members, Mr Rich (net worth $10M) and Mr. Poor (net worth $100). Mr. Rich is 100,000 X richer than Mr. Poor right now.
Institute a ridiculous UBI of $1M/year for everyone. At the end of the year, Mr. Poor has $1,000,100 and Mr Rich has $11M but Mr Rich is now only ~ 11 X richer than Mr Poor.
Now sure cheeseburgers at Micky-D's are now $700 but the fact has changed that before, Mr Rich could buy a hundred thousand burgers for every one Mr Poor could buy. Now he can only buy 11.
UBI works like gravity. Continually pulling the unequal towards a center. The rich will still stay rich, but unlike today where rich automatically makes richer, the force will be reversed. It will take "energy" to stay rich.
Mr Rich will have $9M because his taxes would have gone up by $2M/year to pay for the program.
And the cheeseburgers are still the same price. Mr. Poor was buying cheeseburgers before he got BI and he's still buying cheeseburgers; neither supply nor demand has changed. Mr. Rich bought caviar before and after.
If McDonald's gets greedy and raises its prices because it thinks it can, Burger King is still making money selling at $5.
Except McDonald's can't find any workers that are willing to work for $8.15/hr any more. I think prices of most things will go up, not because of inflation, but because you have to pay more for the people to serve them. On the other hand, customer service will probably go up, because nobody is there any more because they have to.
> unlike today where rich automatically makes richer
This aspect of Piketty has been pretty well refuted. To begin with, he failed to properly account for depreciation. That server software system that you built and is making you money today, isn't going to be worth squat in 10 years.
Because markets still exist. The change in the distribution of income will necessarily incur a change in the distribution of production of goods and services. You would probably expect the price of some necessities to increase a little, especially in the short term, but it's not like we're anywhere near our capacity to produce food and housing.
You would have to restructure taxation, such that incomes from rent-seeking behaviors and business activities are taxed at a higher (possibly punitive) rate than incomes from voluntary, equivalent-value trades between economic equals.
Otherwise, as has been seen countless times before, the value of the government benefit will be mostly captured by those best positioned to monetize it.
The alternative is to provide the housing and food benefit directly, rather than distributing dollars and employing a middleman. If UBI provided 3000 kcal of food per person per day directly, as pantry staples, rather than with a $500 check, it is much more difficult to skim rents out of that. Even restricted use food stamps fuel scams that convert them into cash. There may be people who rent out their government-provided housing as storage units, storefronts, or offices as they live in a non-gratis premium residence, but assigned tenement space is not quite as liquid as cash in the wallet, and therefore less able to be sucked out of the local economy.
Twice as much of the same apartment you already have is simply less valuable to you than twice what one apartment is worth to you, so anyone trying to rent it out cannot demand the same price as it might otherwise cost for the first apartment you live in. Imagine where you live now. Now make an exact copy of it. Would you pay twice as much as you currently pay to live in both places at once? Would you cook twice as much or twice as often if you had two identical kitchens? Would you sleep twice as long or twice as restfully if you had two identical bedrooms? If housing is a benefit guaranteed by UBI, rental prices for the non-gratis residences crash, because the only people willing to pay are now only those looking for a better place to live, rather than those looking for any place to live.
Whereas if the benefit is up to $500 in cash to the person who rents you an apartment, that's just fueling an economic bidding war where everyone in the auction has another $500 to spend.
BI shouldn't be more inflationary in the aggregate than any other government scheme that redistributes income in a comparable way. The only difference would be which goods have more money chasing them. That choice would be made by the market (of net BI recipients after any tax clawback) instead of by politicians & bureaucrats, which has a certain appeal.
Currently, if you want access to much redistributed income, you can only use it to eat what USDA allows you to, or live where HUD tells you to. I find that a rather degrading way to treat our fellow citizens.
> The only difference would be which goods have more money chasing them. That choice would be made by the market
... for what people must spend on, and where it's hard to create new competition. So, rent - exactly where most middle-class surplus is going today (and I think a large part of what makes people yearn for BI).
The obvious answer here is that basic income won't be evenly distributed to all citizens. A household earning the average national income will get $1,000/month from the government, and see their taxes go up by about $1,000/month. So it's difficult to raise rent on everyone when only a fraction of your customers have true extra income.
Imagine you're a landlord who runs a property for those of normal income. How much do you raise rent because people who currently earn below the poverty line suddenly have $1,000 extra per month? You can raise rent on everyone, but then most of your middle class tenants will move out to seek better prices. The same is true for the price of groceries and other staples.
A smart business will maintain their prices and benefit from a larger customer base. Since everyone doesn't experience an increase in income, raising rents of all forms will only open those businesses up to price competition.
You ignore marginal utility. As you amass more of something, the value you place on each individual unit of it decreases. So $1 is worth more to me than to Bill Gates.
In any mutually-agreed upon transaction, both parties to the transaction will gain some amount of value ("utility" in economics jargon) relative to the amount they're giving up. Because $X is now worth (slightly) less (say, by $Y) to each BI recipient, the seller (or landlord in this case) can demand $X+$Y in exchange for his product. That is, he's demanding that the buyer continue to sacrifice the same amount of value, because the value of his own asset hasn't decreased. So you'll see prices increase.
There are other forces in play, too. One of them is price elasticity of demand. This tells us that things that people are less willing to go without (housing, fuel...) put more bargaining power in the hands of the seller than those that we're more willing to flex on (say, going out to movies). In this context, goods like housing and fuel will have a larger degree of price rise than will those where the consumer has greater bargaining power.
Let's assume a free market, run by supply and demand. Will BI change the supply of food? No. Will it change the demand? Well, there are some people who can't get enough food, but they are the exception. Demand might rise, but it won't double.
What will change is an increasing demand for quality. If I've got more money, I might want healthier food, or tastier food, or food that I perceive as being more "upper class" than I have been eating so far. I might move to wine from beer, or to steak from hamburger, or to organic from factory food.
The argument is that BI is non-inflationary because the total money supply is not being increased. BI simply re-allocates money from one person to another.
While that addresses inflation on an economy-wide scale, there are also arguments that apply to specific items. Take milk for example. Currently, if you are poor, you buy milk using SNAP vouchers or some other form of welfare. Under a BI system, the demand for milk doesn't change - we simply replace SNAP vouchers with cash from the BI.
That would be the Marxian claim: wages trend for most workers towards subsistence. Caveat: subsistence is a relative term.
I think it's a reasonable question because UBI doesn't change much about the structure of capitalism. And also just like every other welfare program, it will be rolled back inch by inch every time there's a systemic shock and the poors are held to blame.
Sure about that? Some fraction of the population will buy a new iphone, some will experience the rare luxury of health insurance, some will repair the car they use to get to work or buy a better car to get to work, some will spend money on higher education, some can finally afford dental work, some will pay up whatever had garnished their wages (child support,taxes?), catch up on bills. Most of that money is not going to be available for basic food or rent.
The experience will vary greatly depending on the socioeconomic class and the size of the UBI. It'll also vary based on institutionalization status. College students will likely be expected to pay 100% of it toward tuition. Prisoners will likely either not get it or the state will keep it for restitution and court fees. On the other extreme the average slumlord likely will not see an additional penny.
>>> This is Helen wife of @joeerl It’s fantastic to read all these comments. Joe died from an infection which his lungs couldn’t cope with due to a quite recent diagnosis of pulmonary fibrosis. Incurable and rather unusual. Donate to lung research!
[1] https://twitter.com/mrsjoeerl/status/1119941783381774338