Things are going to be bad until people can go back to work, that much is certain. Whether there is a speedy bounce back after things are back to normal, or if we experience economic stagnation, is anyones guess. The metric to watch is m2, the federal reserve's measure of the velocity of money. Basically, a healthy economy in our system is one where money changes hands quickly. Saving money is bad for the economy, which is why the federal reserve has the mandate of maintaining steady positive inflation. Unfortunately, this availability of this measure is lagged a month or two. It could be that when people go back to work, they go on a spending spree after being cooped up for months, or it could be that pandemic scares people into being more fiscally conservative.
M2 is a measure of money supply. To get velocity you also need nominal GDP. M2 says nothing about velocity without taking into account the inevitable GDP changes. If you're looking for a googlable metric to look for, M2V is the Fed's calculated velocity of M2.
There was a gym chain in Australia call Fitness First that was kind of famous for this BS. You had to go to 'head office' to cancel, then head office would bounce you to your local gym etc etc.
It so severely damaged the brand that the company publicly apologized and fixed it. But there's a glut of gyms so competition may have played it's part - I'm a lot more likely to sign up for something if I know I can pull out easily.
To anyone with a detailed understanding of the current limits of machine learning, this should be no surprise; unsupervised learning is far from solved and ML in its current state will always be plagued by the cat and mouse game of edge cases. The reality is the industry has decided to go this way anyways because it has a good profit outlook if you can get it to work, which is the only thing funding the endeavor. Consider two ways of going about automated transportation:
1) AI. The car independently makes decisions and drives itself.
2) Networks. The car communicates with a grid to make decisions.
Why did we go for #1? Well, thats easy, capitalism. Consider:
AI:
- Company gets to own the intellectual property to form a temporary monopoly.
- Easier to sidestep governments involvement.
- No need to build large infrastructure
Networks:
- Shared, less opportunity for monopoly formation.
- Will need the government to cooperate. Governments are slows.
If I had to guess, we will eventually go the network route. The research used for AI will drive safety features and failsafes, but not the meet of it. Anyways, why accelerate a line of stopped cars one at a time with autonomous vehicles when you could accelerate the entire line of cars simultaneously with a networked setup?
This article makes me think of the engineer at one of my past jobs that not only subsided on the free office poptarts, but also would butter them. I like to think I am a very open minded person but I had a hard time taking that guy seriously with anything.
I had a friend show me this when I was a kid and I did it for a while. That engineer was probably raised that way and thought it was as normal as buttering toast.
While I agree with the author's sentiment that it hasn't really panned out for professional work, the title is not right. When the iPad came out, I dumped my Apple stock before the quarter where they would report on sales. The stock at the time was heavily forward valued on lots of iPad sales happening. Apple had failed to gain traction with all it's previous ultra-mobile computing products in the past, all of them marketed for productivity. Why would this one be different? Tablets were available in the stores, but they weren't selling. I figured it would be another case of the early adopters getting overly jazzed about a product nobody wanted.
I was wrong. The iPad saw adoption by the everyday consumer. Give it to the kids so they could play games, watch videos and stop bothering mom. Mom liked how simple it was to check her email. Etc. They created an entire new market. THAT, is not a failure.
Oh come on now, really? I have a piece of farmland in the middle of nowhere and let me tell you, even digging a hole out there is harder now than it was 100 years ago because of the things you find buried. Subways in 200+ year old cities? I can't even imagine. What do you do when your borer, designed for medium size rock and dirt runs into a 4ft wide brick and cement wall the city forgot about 40 years ago? This happens! Also, back 100 years ago we were talking brick, cement, some steel, and thats it. Today there is a vast array of engineered materials and machinery that didn't exist back then. It's not 1,000s of unskilled workers with shovels anymore, its hundreds with technology and mostly engineers.
Unskilled workers can dig through rock and concrete just fine, you just give them power tools. We don’t use them anymore not because they aren’t suitable tool for the job, but rather because they got more expensive per hour worked in the meantime, by a factor of 10-20x.
Kind of a textbook description of queue theory if you were taking a stochastic processes class. If the author really is suggesting this for use in retail line situations, he is out of touch because... retail managers have no idea what queue theory is. If they did, they would be making much more money, and not working in retail. Staffing is more of a function of how many people you can get on the clock without getting yelled at by regional managers (who also do not know queue theory) for overstaffing.
That’s not true at all! A good GM understands throughput and may get bonuses based on that.
The retailer I worked at in the 90s also tracked the ring rate and time per customer for cashiers, and made scheduling and hour decisions based on performance.
I would write this author off, this is a rant and nothing more. "We now live in a different economic universe than we did before the crash. Falling unemployment no longer drives up wages..." Wages are certainly going up in places with low unemployment, its just not distributed as evenly as it was in prior history.
Graeber is also the person who wrote this sentence:
"Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages..."
For context: this idea is basically a fetish amongst those around Corbyn.
Danny Blanchflower was, at one point, influential amongst the Corbyn crowd. Around 2013-15, he made a prediction that wage growth wouldn't rise as unemployment fell. This was true for a while...until 2015, and wage growth was nearly 4% a few quarters ago.
The idea that high employment won't cause wage growth is something that you will, however, hear repeatedly from Corbynites.
Btw, economists, unlike the author, tend to be quite sensible on the Phillips curve and understand that the relationship varies.
What I don't get about these scams is what is preventing them from working with the bank to reverse the fraudulent transfers? Sure I get that in these instances money is usually moving between the banking systems of two different countries, but just like we have extradition treaties, how is this not a thing?
Well, the issue is I think specifically wire transfers are designed to NOT be reversible? I'm not saying they can't reverse in case of fraud (like this). But it's probably way more difficult because the money would have been IMMEDIATELY available in the fraudsters account, in which case they probably knew to move the money somewhere else immediately / withdraw it (in some regards, I'm not sure how you withdraw $200k cash).
Anyway- that's my guess why this is difficult to reverse.. if it was easy to reverse, both sides would be very suspicious of each other during a large transfer.
