On Sun, 2016-09-11 at 17:24 +0200, Ralf Mardorf wrote: > On Sun, 11 Sep 2016 15:58:44 +0300, Thierry Andriamirado wrote: > > > > Le 10 septembre 2016 20:13:47 UTC+03:00, Ralf Mardorf > > <ralf.mard...@alice-dsl.net> a écrit : > > > > > > > > It's not the task of the poor to help the poor. > > Of course IT IS! ;) > > I'm not so poor compared to many malagasy people, but being in a > > poor > > country, I should be one of the first to raise their hands to speak > > for these "poors" who still use old hardwares. With the help of > > those > > in rich countries. ;) > You are quoting me out of context. The context is that the poor can't > donate new computers and they can't pay for infrastructure, such as > internet access for everyone. _BUT_ rich people could, they are just > not interested in doing it, they are greedy.
Stop that. Everybody loves to say "X has less and Y has more, Y is greedy!" This has lead to enormous political problems preventing any effective aid to the economically disadvantaged. To illustrate in a somewhat off-topic direction: the United States can implement the modern concept of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a Universal Social Security (USS) for $1 trillion lower burden on the taxpayer, without raising taxes on the rich. This can easily end homelessness and hunger across the nation; create an enormous demand for jobs (which eventually requires shorter working hours to counterbalance); and remediate an incredibly faulty welfare system that would take too long to discuss here. And yes, it really is a trillion dollars: https://bluecollarlunch.word press.com/2016/07/22/a-basic-income-is-a-trillion-dollars-cheaper/ Most UBI proponents oppose this because IT DOESN'T TAX THE RICH MORE. Many people also get angry because the income bump "doesn't make businesses pay"--your effective "minimum wage" goes up, but the evil, greedy business doesn't have to pay it, so this is wrong. In other words: people are less-interested in helping the poor and more interested in attacking people or classes of people whom they dislike. People attacked the American Red Cross WHILE THEY WERE STOPPING A CHOLERA EPIDEMIC IN HAITI, going so far as to complain that ARC hired contractors who then made a profit--never mind that they actually got food, water, sanitization, vaccination, government disaster response programs for future crises, and temporary shelter distributed to people who would be dead by now; there's evil rich people to burn, and nobody really cares about dirty poor people on some barely-developed island somewhere. Do you have any concept of how many people suffer and die every year because everyone is focused on how to pry money away from businesses and high-income individuals instead of how to effectively address societal problems by organized effort or public policy? That doesn't even go into the economic considerations. People still think money is wealth; but money is backed by the productive output of a population. Want to see how it really works? In America, we outsource a lot. We import labor and goods (ultimately labor). Even when we bring things from China, someone has to ship it, someone has to stock it, someone has to retail it. There's a huge amount of labor just in moving and selling goods. Americans have income, from jobs. When goods and services are purchased, that money is business revenue. Revenue goes to individuals (wages), other businesses (overhead), and profits. Put the wages and profits together, and you have income. All of the income in America is equivalent to all of the business productive output; import goods are bought and thus the money goes out of the country, while those goods are sold locally and the price then divided between wages and business profits, thus reflecting the production of retail and shipping services. IT services and made-in-America things (e.g. food?) are of course tangibly made here. The ability to keep importing goods, of course, predicates on our ability to produce more goods. America does trade away a lot of grain, IT services, and electronics goods (iPhones made in China by the specifications of Apple; China gets its cut, but so does the US). Take a step back and look at all the money moving around. Every dollar spent represents somethings that was made, shipped, and sold. If we produce half as much but still employed as many people for the same yearly wage, everything would cost twice as much--suddenly we're making 5,000 instead of 10,000, but we're still paying Charlie $40,000/year, and have to divvy his salary up into the price of each of these. That means Charlie ultimately can only buy half as much. So you look at these poor countries and tell me what they're missing. The answer isn't money, computers, or a modern welfare system to make their rich people pay for their poor people. The answer is technology. Man learned to sharpen a pointy stick and spend less time hunting. He learned to plant seeds and get food without gathering. He kept sheep, then learned to make them breed more effectively and get more meat with less work, and developed animal husbandry. Today we've replaced our highly-toxic pesticides with low-impact, narrow-spectrum insecticides, and replaced huge fields and massive irrigation with high-yield GMO crops. We use tractors and combines instead of shovels and mules. The difference between a poor, backwater African country that can hardly feed its own people and has just barely evolved fashion past the loin cloth and a stable, modern nation with roads, electricity, running water, and easy access to food isn't the warlords hoarding their gold. The difference is a country that needs 90% of its people working 60 hours per week to produce enough food not to starve only has enough time to cut a loincloth; a country using 10% of its population to manufacture food has a *lot* of free time, and can use that to provide medicine and sanitary conditions, as well as clothing that fits the culture rather than savage economic need. Without the technological basis to maintain and stabilize their society's production, they can't afford modern policy solutions like welfare systems. > We make progress regarding computers. The computer you buy today is > already old next week. We don't need this kind of progress. What we > need is social progress. We need both. I guess I will go into America's troubles in brief bullet point. Here's a rundown of America's welfare system at current: * Unemployment insurance pays for 6 months. Unemployment is a required consequence of economics, both because technical progress reduces labor to make things (e.g. MAKES FOOD CHEAPER AND MORE ACCESSIBLE) and because a society actually can't function stably with a labor shortage. Our unemployment insurance relies on people repeatedly losing their jobs to other people who have and will soon again lose their jobs. * Housing assistance for low-income households puts 75% of qualified households on a waiting list FOREVER. 1 in every 4 families who our Welfare system decides are legally supposed to receive aid actually gets it; 3 of every 4 RECEIVE NOTHING, EVER. * Food security programs suffer similar problems, requiring several months delay before entering the program, or restricting what can be bought on the program (18oz peanut butter ok, 16oz denied), or denying applicants who actually need it, or not paying enough. * Social Security retirement aid pays poor people the least--down as low as NOTHING AT ALL--specifically because they are the least-able to save money during their lives. * Minimum wage generates political arguments even among economists, some of whom have given numbers in the millions for how much the 2007 minimum wage increases increased unemployment, while others claim such increases decrease unemployment. While they're arguing over that, unemployed and underemployed individuals are getting nothing because they have no jobs. Technological progress has changed the world. In 1900, 43% of the median household's income went to food, and 14% went to clothing; in 1950, it was 33% and 12%; today it's about 11% to food, 3% to clothing. We generally spend slightly more on housing now, but buy 2.5 times as much living space. We spend more of our money on healthcare, and have access to more and better healthcare. In other words: the cost, as a percentage of the income of each and every American, to provide food for any given person is much lower. It's about 1/4 as big a proportion as it was 115 years ago. You can blame the tractor, the computer, and biogenic research into pesticides and GMO for cutting the cost so much; globalization also takes some credit for this, but the U.S. is a big food producer and the food we do import is often more-expensive than our major staples produced right here. As a result, the United States can suddenly remediate all of the welfare problems above. Technical progress carries threat and opportunity risk. If we progress too quickly, the jobs displaced are not then replaced fast enough, and we get high unemployment. On the other hand, if we can mediate that growth, we move into a golden age of prosperity--examine America, 1950- 1990, in terms of expense shares on food, housing, clothing, and medical care, as the cost of these things sharply fell during that time. The long and short of it is that what people now call "automation" will destroy our economy if it happens overnight, and will make us all *extremely* wealthy if it happens over a decade or so. Projecting that backwards for America, the Universal Social Security I described would have destroyed America in 1950. It wasn't possible to fund it. By measure of the amount of money being examined, it actually hit parity in 2013 with our current system; by measure of income displaced from one person's hands to another's, it's $1 trillion cheaper than the current system. That's enough money to effectively remediate the problems listed above, and it does so. Project that to the third world. YES THEY NEED TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS! They need to be able to make food without working themselves to death in the process! Better agricultural technology will allow them to make their own food more efficiently and without destroying their natural resources in the process, like America. Better construction technology will allow them to dig up the ground and lay water piping, roads, and other infrastructure. This is a major boon for public health. Better infrastructure technology means access to energy--electricity generation--and communications, allowing organization of people into governments and businesses. These increases in production make the society more wealthy. Less human effort is invested to produce more; the remainder can then go toward public efforts including education, welfare, healthcare, and the like. That means they can finally stop cutting the heads off used syringes by hand, and doctors in Africa won't end up sticking themselves with diseased needles so damned often. Of course societal progress is important. Social progress is a response to technical progress: poor societies necessarily must be without strong welfare systems, education systems, and public health systems; they're too busy trying to hold up their other needs for anyone to build those nice, modern societal support systems we all like. A more-wealthy society naturally grows some of those, and needs to re-engineer itself to move onto others. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
