Wealth and Income Inequality
There are some recent, disturbing trends appearing with wealth concentration, The UK has become one of the most unequal countries in the world, The US is even worse, the top 0.1 percent are now worth more than the entire bottom 90 percent of the U.S. population, the top 1 percent of households in the United States received 8.9 percent of all pre-tax income in 1976. In 2012, the top 1 percent share had more than doubled to 22.46 percent. The overall bounty is not being distributed equally, it is quickly accumulating at the top, leaving everyone else with less.
Income Inequality -
- Since 2009 executive pay has soared and the number of billionaires in the UK has doubled, while food bank use has increased from 29,000 users to nearly 1 million and the average worker has experience a 9% real terms pay cut.
- The richest fifth of the UK population saw their incomes increase by £940 in 2013. But incomes were down by £250 for the other 80% of the population and by £381 for the poorest fifth
- Since the mid 1990s the incomes of the top 0.1 per cent have grown almost four times faster than the incomes of the bottom Income - In real terms, that means the richest 0.1 per cent have seen their income grow by more than £461 a week, the equivalent of over £24,000 a year. By contrast the bottom 90 per cent have experienced a real-terms increase of £2.82 a week, equivalent to just £147 a year. 90 per cent of the population.
- Since 2003 the majority of the British public (95%) have seen a 12 percent real terms drop in their disposable income (after housing costs), whilst the richest 5 percent of the population have seen their disposable income increase.
- Andy Haldane, chief economist at the Bank of England, reported real wages (wages adjusted for inflation) have fallen by around 10% from their pre-recession peak. This represents a fall in living standards that is unprecedented since the middle of the 19th century.
- The new national minimum wage of £6.70 is still worth around £2,182 a year less than a living wage
- If the minimum wage had grown at the same rate as CEO pay over the past 15 years, it would be £9 per hour higher
- The richest 1% of the UK population have as much wealth as the poorest 55% combined
- The richest 10% of UK households hold 44% of all wealth. The poorest 50% own just 9.5%.
- Almost one third of wealth in the UK is inherited, not earned. Only 13% of people receive any real inheritance(over £2000).
- The five richest families in the UK are now wealthier than the bottom 20 per cent of the entire population. That means just five households have more money than 12.6 million people put together Richest Family - The most affluent family in the UK (Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor and family), have more wealth than the poorest 10 per cent of the entire population, or 6.3 million people (£7.9 and £7 billion respectively). – almost the same as the number of people living below the poverty line.
- The 100 richest people in the UK are worth around £257 billion - that's about the same as the poorest 19 million, roughly 30% of the population, combined
- The collective wealth of Britain’s richest people has more than doubled in the last 10 years, Last year they saw their wealth increase by a staggering £28.151 billion, the equivalent of £77 million a day, or £893 a second.
- The UK has more billionaires Billionaires - There are now 104 billionaires based in the UK with a combined wealth of more than £301bn. London has more billionaires than any other city in the world with 72 - far ahead of nearest rival Moscow with 48. per head of population than any other country.
Countries which are more equal have many economical and societal benefits. Fairer society - “This compelling evidence proves that addressing high and growing inequality is critical to promote strong and sustained growth and needs to be at the centre of the policy debate. Countries that promote equal opportunity for all from an early age are those that will grow and prosper.” The west’s leading economic think-tank dismissed the concept of trickle-down economics as it found that the UK economy would have been more than 20% bigger had the gap between rich and poor not widened since the 1980s.
Very large income differences within countries are damaging, linking greater inequality to worse population health; hundreds of studies show us that life expectancy is longer, and mortality lower, in more equal societies, rates of infant mortality and mental illness are two to four times higher. Inequality wastes Equality - The UNICEF Index of Child Well Being is significantly higher in more equal societies, educational attainment is higher, fewer young people drop out of education, employment and training, and fewer teenage girls become mothers. Notably, social mobility is restricted in very unequal societies – equality of opportunity is shaped by equality of outcomes. human capital and human potential. There is also substantial evidence linking greater equality to better social relationships within societies Better for society - levels of social cohesion, including trust and social capital, are higher in more equal countries. Indicators of women’s status and equality are generally better and rates of both property, crime and violence, especially homicides, increase as income differences widen.
The concentration of wealth is accelerating and incomes are only rising for the rich. Steps to end this trend and redistribute the overall wealth need to be taken, so we as a society can all experience the benefits of the productivity gains and wealth bounty created by technology, instead of just an elite few.
Technological Unemployment
Some economic experts see the new robotic and automation capabilities and are not worried, they say nothing is new and use history to show how technology has always replaced the jobs it destroys with more and better jobs. They have valid arguments, no one can predict what new jobs will be created, just like how 50 years ago no one predicted the internet and the amount of jobs that it would create.
Some technology experts believe that this time new jobs will not be created
quickly enough to replace the destroyed jobs. They believe job creation
will no longer be able to keep up with the
exponential
Exponential -
Ask someone how long a million seconds is - the answer is 12 days.
Ask them to think how long a billion seconds is and they may well
answer in days. The answer is 32 years.
People struggle with large numbers so it’s no surprise exponential
is hard to grasp for some.
After 30 linear steps I’d end up 30 paces or 30 meters away.
But if I said to you take 30 exponential steps, one, two, four,
eight, sixteen, thirty-two... you would end up a billion meters away,
which is twenty-six times around the planet.
trend of Morse Law
which is allowing automation technologies to advance at a rate never seen before,
this is why some experts argue that this time, it’s different.
What is certain that humans have a limited skill set and each year robots and software are gaining them and improving upon them and with reasonable certainty we can predict in the very near future, which humans skills will be replaced by machines, and the resulting jobs and employment disruption.
Self Driving CarsThe biggest visual example to job disruption will be Self Driving Cars, Peter Diamandis - “You’ll never own a car again. I have two two and a half year old boys. They’re not going to drive when they turn 18. They’re going to have an autonomous car driving them around. Every single car company has announced autonomous cars in their future.” every day these systems go through 3 million miles of simulation testing, they are already being physically tested by many car firms and are completing feats like driving 99% of the distance across America autonomously.
Using the most conservative estimate, expert members of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) have estimated that up to 75% of all vehicles will be autonomous Autonomous Vehicles - They will also make car sharing programs more prevalent. They will arrive, take you to your destination and then be ready for the next user. Since cars today are parked for more than 90 percent of their lifetime, shared car services will promote more continuous movement, garner more efficient operation and use less gas. by 2040. We can now be fairly certain that these occupations will experience job losses in the next 25 years.
- Taxi and Bus Drivers Cheaper than owning a car - One study found, for example, that an average 2-mile taxi trip in New York City costs $8 to $13, depending on traffic conditions. It estimated that a fleet of 9,000 driverless cars could replace the city’s fleet of Yellow Cabs and operate for an average of 80 cents for a 2-mile trip. A more than 10-fold difference.
-
Truck and Delivery Drivers
Cheaper Delivery -
Trucks can travel continuously, no breaks, holidays or sick days,
less logistic route or shift planning required, more time on the road.
Most people would like items delivered when they are home, companies won’t have to worry about getting staff to work evenings, could have a custom delivery van wait outside which sends an alert to you to collect package, could also combine with Amazon Air. -
Car Manufacturers and Car Salesmen
Car Manufacturers -
A car is often a person’s second largest capital expenditure, after a home,
yet a car sits unused some 90% of the time.
Optimising use of cars will mean less need to be made Columbia University's The Earth Institute forecasts the reduction of United States' fleet of vehicles by a factor of 10. Car usage being optimised will mean less cars will need to be manufactured or sold. - Mechanics Mechanics - following on there being less cars being made then less maintenance work would be needed. Less car repairs are required due to reduced number of crashes and less vehicle modifications due to majority not owning cars.
- Doctors/Surgeons/Lawyers/Insurers Safer Cars - autonomous cars would be much safer, professions would have less work to do as less injuries to drivers and pedestrians, less insurance claims or injury lawsuits
- Traffic Cops, Driving Instructors and Parking Wardens Follow road rules - people are not driving so don’t need to learn, cars will follow the road rules and will not need to park.
-
Train and Plane Industry
Faster On Demand Travel -
may lose some customers as self driving cars can travel faster,
Broggi believes that, “speed limits of up to 100 miles/hour (160 km/hour) are
absolutely possible by 2040.
Think of custom cars with TV's, game consoles or beds in, people will prefer not having to share journeys with other people(crying babies). Would allow people more comfort, ability to recline chair back or more space for leg room. Allows you to leave for your destination whenever you want, no more set times, schedule your self driving car to pick you up at any time or day, more convenience.
Driverless car research may also enable train drivers, pilots and boat operators to be replaced.
We can be fairly certain that automation will be capable of performing many of the jobs in retail in a generation's time. We have already seen the rise of automation in retail via the installation of self checkout in shops and its set to increase Self Checkout- The total shipments of self-checkout terminals to 27,000 for 2012 — and they forecast that figure to continually increase. The number of self-checkout terminal shipments will soar to 60,000 by 2018. Many new projects will be in the general merchandise sector, notably in mass merchandisers and certain speciality retail subsegments. even more, Self Checkout tills reduces the number of workers operating tills substantially, workers are still needed to stack the shelves and help customers but each of these look like they could be done by robots well within 25 years time. In fact shelf stacking can already be automated and robots can already help humans in shops
Amazon is working on getting items from
shelves
using robots pickers for their fuffilment centers, Fetch Robotics have released
robots
Fetch Robots-
Fetch Robotics’ system uses a relatively large and capable mobile manipulator (Fetch)
to pick items off of warehouse shelves, while Freight, a mobile base, acts as an
autonomous cargo delivery cart. Fetch can pick items continuously, while a
succession of Freights can switch in and out to move different selections of
goods to different parts of the fulfilment center.
Fetch has a grasping range all the way from the floor up to just under two meters and
is expected to be able to work 16 hours a day, 365 days a year, for four years before
something breaks on it.
which can grab items from shelves and place into baskets. How long until the
reverse is possible and all the shelf stacking jobs people perform
are no longer needed?
Robot hand technology which can be used
to interact with human tools is advancing,
NASA
has been making great
strides in development of robotic limbs, they are about 15 years from
creating robotic hands that perform as well as humans,
many others are competing in this endeavour including a startup which plans
to release a robot with human like hands in 2017 for
cooking
Robots Cooks-
Creator Moley Robotics says that when the commercial version launches in 2017
users will be able to select one of 2,000 dishes from their phone and the
robotic hands in the automated kitchen will make it.
The hands to be able to pick up and put down utensils, stir food a pan,
and then safely turn a hob to the correct temperature.The robotic chef, complete
with a purpose-built kitchen, including an oven,
hob, dishwasher and sink
If the robot is successful, it could mean we can simply tap a button on
our phone to have a meal prepared in time for us coming home from work.
meals.
How many peoples job require this skill that
could soon be replaced for the above mentioned "chef" robot which
costs
just £10,000 (around $15,000)?
For the upcoming Darpa Robotics challenge, DARPA - Technologies resulting from the DRC will transform the field of robotics and catapult forward development of robots featuring task-level autonomy that can operate in the hazardous, degraded conditions common in disaster zones. robots will have to demonstrate roughly the competence of a two-year-old child, giving them the ability to autonomously carry out simple commands such as “Clear the debris in front of you” or “Close the valve.” Once this is achieved, how long until these 1st generation of Agile Robots Agile Robots - Much of the world is inaccessible to wheeled machines but not legged ones. Computer scientists have created machines that have the balance and agility to walk and run across rough and uneven terrain, making them far more useful in navigating human environments. are improved and applied to other tasks and zones. Construction - A team of architects and engineers at the University at Buffalo are designing and programming robots to help on construction sites. The four-legged robot would be able to grab a stack of bricks, carry them across a construction site, climb a ladder and deliver materials to the mason.
New
compliant
Compliant Robots -
If Baxter drops a screw while assembling something,
it won’t continue on with the task. It will realize it’s dropped a screw,
and pick up another before carrying on.
If YuMi picks up a screw, but is holding
it in the wrong direction it’s 3D sensing and 3D cameras in its hands will
realize and reorient the screw. For simple assembly tasks, an unskilled person
can train YuMi to do a task in 20 minutes.
robots like Baxter,
Sawyer
,
KUKA
,
YuMi
,
UR3
or
Justin
, which are safe to work along humans and that even
children
can program, have just entered
the marker targeting low and medium end manufacturing.
Baxter has a base-price of $25,000 (£19,000),
the equivalent of an average US production worker's annual salary.
Baxter and Sawyer together can
address many of the estimated 90 percent of manufacturing tasks that
cannot be feasibly automated with traditional solutions today.
These are the first generation, they will get
better
Baxter -
It's performance keeps improving through regular software releases.
In 2014 it completed the same task almost 3 times faster versus the
2013 version of the software.
Intera 3 is the latest and by far the most impressive version of our revolutionary
software platform for manufacturing and production applications -
with twice the speed, precision, and motion quality.
software and hardware and lower in price.
As they are refined they will be able to
be applied to many other future applications and combined with more features such
as wheels so they are mobile, robotic hands so they are dexterous and powerful AI
so they can understand their surroundings and work out how to complete various tasks
autonomously.
Autonomous Robot -
Robobarista can figure out your new coffee machine,
A new deep-learning algorithm enables a robot to operate a machine it has never seen before.
In the near future we may have household robots to handle cooking,
cleaning and other menial tasks. They will be teachable:
Show the robot how to operate your coffee machine, and it will take over from there.
They will work 24/7, with no breaks, holidays, sick days, lateness, distractions, strikes or wage rises.
Advances in AI are allowing more people to be replaced with software e.g. Customer Service Workers Customer Service Workers - "Automated intelligent assistants are already hard at work doing customer support, sales, marketing, retail, healthcare, utilities, education, and hospitality, they are designed to recognize real-world implementations that are the pinnacle of real-time natural language understanding, knowledge management, machine learning, and conversational technologies." or Call centre staff. Call centre staff - Apple’s Siri and Google Now rely on natural user interfaces to recognise spoken words, interpret their meanings, and act on them accordingly. Moreover, a company called SmartAction now provides call computerisation solutions that use ML technology and advanced speech recognition to improve upon conventional interactive voice response systems, realising cost savings of 60 to 80 percent over an outsourced call center consisting of human labour A recent study by 2 researchers at Oxford found nearly half of U.S. jobs, and 70% of low-skill jobs, could be susceptible to computerization over the next two decades. The study found that occupations within the service industry are highly susceptible, 92% for retail salespeople, 97% for cashiers, 96% for general office clerks, 81% for fast food cooks, 96% for restaurant cooks, 87% for food preparation workers and 94% for wait staff. The study also found that there is a 94% probability of accountants, auditors, paralegals and legal assistants all being replaced by software within 20 years.
McKinsey Global Institute
found
that there were 230+ million Knowledge workers
in 2012 which accounts for 9% of the global workforce and 27% of global employment costs.
They predict a $5–7 trillion potential economic impact
by 2025 of automation of knowledge work.
The report which was on disruptive
technologies
Technologies -
Twelve potentially economically disruptive technologies -
Renewable energy
- Advanced oil and gas exploration and recovery
-
Advanced materials
- 3D printing
- Energy storage
- Autonomous and near-autonomous vehicles
-
Next-generation genomics
- Advanced robotics
- Cloud technology
- The Internet of Things.
Other technologies on the radar, Automation of knowledge work Mobile Internet.
Fusion power Carbon sequestration Advanced water purification and Quantum computing.
also estimated that advanced robotics could generate a potential
economic impact of between $1.9tn and $6.4tn per year by 2025.
There is nothing unique or special that prevents the the service industry following
the same fate as the manufacturing or agriculture
industries.
Computers keep getting exponentially better due to
following
Morse Law which allows Machine Learning algorithms such as
Deep Learning
to be more successful in tools such as
Computer Vision
Computer Vision -
We're teaching computers to understand pictures,
computer vision expert Fei-Fei Li describes the state of the art
— including the database of 15 million photos her team built to
"teach" a computer to understand pictures — and the key insights yet to come
or
Natural Language Processing.
Natural Language Processing -
The Robot can be programmed by casually talking to it teaching robots
to understand instructions in natural language from various speakers,
account for missing information, and adapt to the environment at hand.
This will allow robots to understand their surrounding and even be
programmed to perform tasks verbally eventually.
Computers also get cheaper and smaller at a rapid pace due to
Morse Law.
Morse Law -
Scientists and engineers seem to be able to get around the limitations that threaten Moore's law
by developing new technologies. There may come a wall, when 2-D silicon chips as we
know them today can become no faster in terms of their clock speed, and transistors
can get no smaller.
At that point it is likely that 3-dimensional chip stacking will take off,
or chips will change their substrate from silicon to graphene, or quantum computing will mature,
or completely new silicon architectures will emerge.
What robots
learn
DARPA -
DARPA robot can learn tasks from Youtube video and a neural
net can understand video 20 times faster than a human.
“This system allows robots to continuously build on previous learning—such
as types of objects and grasps associated with them—which could have a huge
impact on teaching and training,”
can be added to a cloud and be used by other robots,
creating a huge collective brain that continually improves
and accumulates robotics
knowledge.
Robot Brain -
Hey there! I'm a robot brain. I learn concepts by searching the Internet.
I can interpret natural language text, images, and videos.
I watch humans with my sensors and learn things from interacting with them.
Here are a few things I've learned recently…
The
price
of robots is dropping while their capabilities increase,
this is why
spending
Robot Spending -
At some factories, robots are even building other robots,
producing about 50 robots per 24-hour shift and operating
unsupervised for as long as 30 days at a time.
on robots worldwide is expected to jump from
just over $15 billion in 2010 to about $67 billion by 2025.
All this including better sensor technology and more data to use will
advance the potential of robots in the future to perform even
more
complex tasks
Jeremy Howard -
"In the Industrial Revolution, we saw a step change in capability thanks to engines.
The thing is, though, that after a while, things flattened out.
There was social disruption, but once engines were used to generate power
in all the situations, things really settled down.
The Machine Learning
Revolution is going to be very different, it never settles down. The better
computers get at intellectual activities, the more they can build better
computers to be better at intellectual capabilities, so this is going to
be a kind of change that the world has actually never experienced before,
so your previous understanding of what's possible is different."
we
never thought they could, tasks which make even self driving cars
look elementary in comparison.
A recent survey conducted by Pew which asked technology experts,
will networked, automated, artificial intelligence (AI) applications
and robotic devices have displaced more jobs than they have created by 2025?
52% expected that technology will
not
Pew Report -
To be sure, this group anticipates that many jobs currently performed
by humans will be substantially taken over by robots or digital agents by 2025.
But they have faith that human ingenuity will create new jobs, industries,
and ways to make a living, just as it has been doing since the dawn of the
Industrial Revolution.
displace more jobs than it creates by 2025 while 48% thought it would.
The inventor of the first web browser Marc Andreessen believes
that we will create enough
new
Marc Andreessen -
"We have no idea what the fields, industries, businesses, and jobs of the future will be.
We just know we will create an enormous number of them.
Because if robots and AI replace people for many of the things we do today,
the new fields we create will be built on the huge number of people those
robots and AI systems made available.
To argue that huge numbers of people
will be available but we will find nothing for them (us) to do is to dramatically
short human creativity. And I am way long human creativity."
jobs in time.
I, like
Bill Gates
Bill Gates, -
"Software substitution, whether it's for drivers or waiters or nurses …
it's progressing, Technology over time will reduce demand for jobs,
particularly at the lower end of skill set. 20 years from now,
labor demand for lots of skill sets will be substantially lower.
I don’t think people have that in their mental model."
am not so optimistic about new jobs being created to replace the
destroyed jobs
in enough time. The reason for low confidence is because of recent trends in the job market,
the UK economy shows a shift to
low-skilled
Low-skilled job trend -
Every 10 middle-skilled jobs that disappeared in the UK between 1996 and 2008,
about 4.5 of the replacement jobs were high-skilled and 5.5 were low-skilled.
jobs which are generally low paid, and again
research
New Jobs -
Home health care workers, food service workers, retail salespeople
and custodians will account for nearly 1 million of the 2.4 million new,
low-skill jobs expected to be added in the U.S. by 2017,
according to a USA TODAY analysis of jobs data.
Driverless vehicles could dramatically affect
transportation jobs, the fourth-largest occupation sector and 7% of the workforce.
indicates that 70% of low-skill positions have a high risk of being automated in 10 to 20 years,
compared to 46% of mid-skill jobs and 8% of high-skill jobs.
One of their rebuttals is that better, higher skilled jobs will be created
and people will train to get these higher skilled jobs.
Do we expect the 50 year old unemployed truck driver to go back
to college and become a
data scientist
Jeremy Howard -
"For example, there will be more jobs for data scientists. Well, not really.
It doesn't take data scientists very long to build these things. For example,
these four algorithms were all built by the same guy.
Human performance grows at
his gradual rate, but we now have a system, deep learning, that we know actually
grows in capability exponentially. And we're here. So currently, we see the
things around us and we say, "Oh, computers are still pretty dumb." Right?
But in five years' time, computers will be off this chart"
or electrical engineer?
Some skills are difficult to learn, almost half of US bachelor’s degree students
who entered STEM fields between 2003 and 2009 had
left
STEM -
A total of 48 percent of bachelor’s degree students and 69 percent of
associate’s degree students who entered STEM fields between 2003 and 2009
had left these fields by spring 2009.
Roughly one-half of these leavers
switched their major to a non-STEM field, and the rest of them left STEM
fields by exiting college before earning a degree or certificate
these fields by spring 2009.
The current trend is that women don’t want to study STEM subjects,
only about a quarter of workers in STEM fields were
women
in 2011. Some people just simply can't or don't want to gain certain higher skills.
With many more middle skilled workers being displaced, then young people with just high school qualifications Entry Level Jobs - The entry-level wages for high school-educated men and women in 2011 were far below their 1979 or 1973 levels. For instance, the entry-level hourly wage of a young high school-educated man in 2011 was 25.3 percent less than that for the equivalent worker in 1979, a drop of nearly $4.00 per hour (in 2011 dollars). may find it even harder to compete for jobs. Not everyone will be capable of gaining the skills to perform these higher skilled jobs, or would want to get into huge amounts of debt acquiring them. There may not enough time to completely overhaul the education system and society in time to address this. Marshall Brian, the founder of HowStuffWorks describes the issue we are facing in his free to read wbook The Second Intelligent Species. He questions what happens to the millions of unemployed trucker drivers who enter a job market that already has millions of unemployed workers.
The Pew Report found these reasons to be concerned Pew Report - Half of these experts (48%) envision a future in which robots and digital agents have displaced significant numbers of both blue- and white-collar workers—with many expressing concern that this will lead to vast increases in income inequality, masses of people who are effectively unemployable, and breakdowns in the social order.
- Impacts from automation have thus far impacted mostly blue-collar employment; the coming wave of innovation threatens to upend white-collar work as well.
- Certain highly-skilled workers will succeed wildly in this new environment—but far more may be displaced into lower paying service industry jobs at best, or permanent unemployment at worst.
- Our educational system is not adequately preparing us for work of the future, and our political and economic institutions are poorly equipped to handle these hard choices.
In the the next 25 years we can be fairly certain that low skill jobs that many people perform are the most likely to be replaced by software, robots, machinery and other automation technologies. We also know that the rate of jobs that get outsourced to countries where wages are lower is increasing each year, 2,637,239 US jobs were outsourced Outsourcing - Outsourcing has grown in the last decade, and recent statistics show that more than two million jobs were outsourced in 2013, with many of those opportunities going to workers in China and India. 43% of the IT sector was outsourced, 26% of distribution is now taken care of offshore, 12% of call center jobs are found overseas, and 38% of research and development (R&D) is taken care of by workers outside of the country. in 2013. It might increase even more now that instant translation tools like Skype have become available. This is a very small time frame for low skilled people to adapt.
Conclusion
People will still call it luddism and carry on repeating
"new jobs will always be created to replace the destroyed ones",
this claim is too uncertain this time round, how certain are you of a
brand new
industry
that will appear in the next 2 decades,
which robots can’t already do and
won't be able
Mark Walker -
"Historically, humans have contributed muscle and brains to production
but we are now being outcompeted by machinery, in both areas,
in many jobs.
Machines are encroaching in the last area that we have
a competitive edge. So, unlike the displacement of labor during the
First Great Transformation, there is no untapped category for surplus
human labor to migrate to.
Even supposing new sectors of the economy open up,
their demand for human labor is likely to be very weak since these new sectors
too will be faced with the question of whether to employ robots or humans.
The cost advantage will lie with robots for the most part, and so there will
be weak demand for human mental labor in the future just as the demand for
human muscle dropped precipitously in the past."
to do?
Even if it was true, the societal disruption of everyone training
to new jobs may be too great while faced with problems of low wages,
unemployment and inequality.
Erik Brynjolfsson
says.
Erik Brynjolfsson -
“Recently, we’ve been seeing more of the replacement, more of the automation,
and less of the complementing and creating of new jobs.”
Unlike the transition that occurred in the post-War boom, automation is
hollowing out the workforce rather than fattening it.
Middle-class jobs are being replaced by robots and computers.
As workers are forced out of good-paying factory and clerical positions,
many take what they can find, maybe working as a janitor or preparing food
at McDonalds.
“It’s not a matter of slowing down the technology, it’s a matter of speeding up our response to it.”
Is a 100% employment rate really humanity's end goal?
Humans skills are finite, once the robots eventually achieve them should we still
make it necessary for people to work,
just so they have a
job?
I believe what we truly want as a society is less work, more leisure and more wealth for all. This is what all this new technology is offering, the whole purpose of this website is showing how in the future we can be free from work, have our needs met and allow us to spend more of our life doing the things we enjoy, like a cat lives. The next section describes how we can turn this "problem" into the greatest achievement of our civilization.
Solutions to Rising Inequality and Technological Unemployment
CIO President Walter Reuther was being shown through the Ford Motor plant in Cleveland recently.
A company official proudly pointed to some new automatically controlled machines and asked Reuther: “How are you going to collect union dues from these guys?”
Reuther replied: “How are you going to get them to buy Fords?”
In the book The Second Machine Age
the two US authors show how a different
trend
has started to appear between GDP and Wages.
"They used to follow each other but since the end of the 2001
recession real GDP has increased by just about 20%. The number of hours worked, however, has increased
by only 2.8% over that same time, and the total number of jobs by 1.9%.
Those latter two
numbers are pretty close to zero. Is it so hard to believe that
a realistic future
combination of fast automation and relatively slow
GDP growth could cause them to turn negative?"
The US labour
participation
rate fell to 62.7% in September 2014,
the lowest since the late 1970s. Productivity is still rising while
less people are working, yet not everyone is sharing the benifits from increased productivity.
The economy in the
UK
has grown by 50% over
the last 20 years yet pay for those in the middle has only gone up by 20%.
Technological unemployment could accelerate wealth and income inequality. The rich will be able to afford capital such as the robots and this will increase their wealth, because they are now able to achieve a rising output(the robots can work faster and 24/7), and save on labour costs by hiring less people. Their rising wealth will make it able for them to generate more wealth and buy more robots/capital, perpetuating the cycle. This process of destroying jobs will hollow out of the middle class and create a polarisation between the poor and the rich. Luckily there are solutions to address these issues and share out the gains of productivity to everyone.
Maximum Wage
It takes a FTSE 100 CEO just
three days
to earn the average UK workers' annual salary of £27,000,
the average FTSE 100 chief executive was paid the equivalent of nearly £1,200 an hour.
Most people would have to
work
until the year 2172 to earn what they makes in a year.
In 1998, the average FTSE 100 CEO was paid 47 times their average employee,
this has
risen
to 143 times in 2013.
This article written by MP Iain McKenzie explains how rising income
disparities
Iain McKenzie -
"In these difficult times, we see many struggling, including hard-working families,
with the cost of living crisis across the UK today.
That is why I want to focus on
one of the obstacles to fairness: the pay gap between the bosses of Britain’s
biggest companies and their average employees, which has become even greater
over the past couple of years."
are one of the key drivers of inequality and how to address
this issue with a Maximum wage solution.
“At Associated British Foods, the gap between the pay of the chief
executive and the average worker’s salary was 361 times. In the hospitality conglomerate
Whitbread, the gap was 415 times. Worst of all was the pay gap at the media company WPP,
where the CEO took home a pay package nearly 800 times bigger
than his employees.
Perhaps we should raise the idea of a maximum pay ratio, so that the highest paid
employee of an organisation would not be allowed to earn more than a fixed multiple
of the amount earned by lowest paid.
Would a democratically enacted maximum pay ratio of, for example, 75:1 really be that extreme in a society that uses zero-hours contracts and relies on food banks? Some forward-looking organisations already operate such a policy unilaterally; for example, John Lewis has capped the ratio at 75:1 and the TSB at 65:1”
A maximum pay ratio would recognise the important principle that all workers should share in a company’s success, this would also reduce the gaps between those at the top and low/middle earners. The High Pay centre have released a manifesto High Pay Centre - Typical annual pay for a FTSE 100 CEO has risen from around £100- £200,000 in the early 1980s to £4.3 million in 2012. This represented a leap from around 20 times the pay of the average UK worker in the 1980s to 160 times in 2012 on how to make top pay fairer, the report found that 78% of the public would support a maximum limit on the amount the highest-paid employee of a company can be paid in relation to the lowest-paid. The government needs to enforce these policies to reduce income and wealth inequality.
There is already a successful business model which adopts a fair wage ratio between workers called Worker Cooperatives that the government should encourage more. Worker Cooperatives have company-wide profit-sharing so that all employees benefit proportionally from a company’s success, they have a maximum pay ratio meaning that executives cannot earn more than a certain multiple of their lowest-paid employee. Worker Cooperatives are a democratic organisation, each employee own the company so employees each have a democratic voice in how the company is run.
Worker CooperativesThe Mondragon Corporation is a corporation and federation of worker cooperatives based in the Basque region of Spain, It is the world's biggest workers co-operative with annual sales over £13 billion ($19.44 billion). At the end of 2013, it employed 74,061 people in 257 companies and organizations in four areas of activity: finance, industry, retail and knowledge. At Mondragon, there are agreed-upon wage ratios between executive work and field or factory work which earns a minimum wage. These ratios range from 3:1 to 9:1 in different cooperatives and average 5:1. That is, the general manager of an average Mondragon cooperative earns no more than 5 times as much as the theoretical minimum wage paid in his/her cooperative.
They are a Democratic organisation, Its worker members own MCC(Mondragon Cooperative Corporation)
collectively and make all its basic decisions, no private or individual ownership of
MCC exists. In the MCC, the worker-members exercise the final power over capital
(machines, technology, cash, investments).
The greatest responsibility of the worker-owner is participation in
decision making.
Decision Making. -
The MCC mandate of ‘one worker, one vote’ applies to decision-making
in each individual cooperative enterprise and at the corporate level of MCC.
Worker-members vote on their individual cooperative’s direct management and internal affairs.
They do the same for the MCC as a corporation by means of (1) democratically
electing representatives to the Co-operative Congress and (2) voting on
referenda that the Congress submits for worker-members’ approval.
They are not just, as in capitalism,
“the workers.” The managers each have one share, like the workers; because the
workers outnumber the managers and democratic votes settle all matter,
the workers can fire the managers, not the other way around.
The Mondragon Worker Cooperative Corporation has showed remarkable resistance to abandoning its basic commitments through six decades of challenges and adjustments to economic changes. It demonstrates – indeed, proves - the possibility, the durability, the relative efficiency and competitive success of cooperative enterprises that should be recognized, commended, and replicated on a global scale. Economist Richard D Wolff gives a fantastic lecture to help people understand how the Mondragon Worker Cooperative Corporation works.
The United Kingdom is home to a widespread and diverse co-operative movement,
with over 3 million individual members. Modern co-operation started with a
shop
Rochdale Principals -
They created 10 Basic Co-operative Principles to run the business by.
- Open Admission
- Democratic Organisation
- the Sovereignty of Labour
-
Instrumental and Subordinate Nature of Capital
- Participatory Management
-
Payment Solidarity
- Inter-cooperation
- Social Transformation
- Universality
- Education
in the northern English town of Rochdale in 1844. The largest examples of a British
worker cooperatives include, Suma Wholefoods, Bristol-based Essential Trading Co-operative,
Brighton-based Infinity Foods Cooperative Ltd and the retail giant John Lewis Partnership.
The
Worker Cooperative Code of Governance
explains how to use the
co-operative principles to create a good co-operative businesses.
The Co-operative group claims the prevalence of profit-sharing schemes, along with other mandatory John Lewis-style approaches in France, contributes to higher levels of productivity than the UK. In 2012 France had the second highest level of productivity per hour worked in the G7, more than 30% higher than the UK, which is languishing in sixth. A poll found 76% of the British public are in favour of employees having a bigger say in how a company is run and introducing compulsory profit sharing in the UK. The Co-operative Party’s plans for compulsory profit sharing would affect 53% of the people currently employed in the UK. Office for National Statistics figures on company size suggest there are 36,000 companies with 50 or more employees in the UK, employing a total of 12.9 million people. At one FTSE 100 company, the profit share for the average worker could be almost £4,000 per year.
The government needs to encourage more companies and entrepreneurs to follow the worker cooperative model and to give workers the statutory right to request employee ownership. These steps will reduce income and wealth inequality and allow democracy in the work place. Politicians like Bernie Sanders pushes Bernie Sanders - “By expanding employee ownership and participation, we can create stronger companies, simply put, when employees have an ownership stake in their company, they will not ship their own jobs to China to increase their profits, they will be more productive, have better working conditions and they will earn a better living.” for worker co-ops for these reasons.
Basic Income
Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime.
Build a
robot
to fish, do all men starve, or do all men eat?"
Basic Income works by giving everyone enough money to be able to sustain themselves.
Everyone receives the
same amount,
Everyone receives it -
‘Why giving basic income to even the richest makes sense’
Scott Santens blog post helps to understand the reason
behind giving everyone a basic income.
regardless of income.
Right now there are not enough jobs for each person who wants to work.
In early 2015 in the UK, about 1.3 million people were in part-time jobs when they
wanted
full-time work, the number of people classed as economically inactive
or unemployed was 10.8 million.
In 2015 there were 743,000 job vacancies across the UK,
there isn't currently enough full jobs in the UK for the people who works part time to get,
nevermind everyone else.
The US stats are
similar.
Jobs -
In March 2015, the U.S. underemployment rate was at 15.5 percent.
"The rate is created by adding unemployed workers, who are looking for work,
to the amount of workers employed part time but seeking full-time work"
The working age population is just over 200 million, if 15.5% are looking for full time work
that means approximately 30m people are looking for work, lets be generous and say 2/3's of these
people are disabled or in college, that leaves at the very least 10 million people available to work.
There were only 5.1 million job openings on the last business day of February 2015.
The
theory
Guaranteed Income-
This cracked podcast segment explains the reasoning
behind a basic income perfectly.
behind basic income is that even if you can't find work,
even if you don't want to work, at least you can still function as
a human being and have an income, it means every citizen has a right
to a minimum level of subsistence.
People hear this and its met with cries of outrage at the suggestion
of giving people money for no reason.
Yet as demonstrated above, we don't have enough jobs now, so if someone doesn't want a job and
just sits at home they have just
freed up a job
Mark Walker -
“When the number of unemployed greatly exceeds the number of jobs available,
as clearly happened during the Great Recession, it makes no sense to say that
everyone ought to get a job. There is a composition fallacy at work.
It may be true that each runner might win the race but it does not follow
that every runner can win the race. Similarly, even if each unemployed person
could get a job, it does not follow that every unemployed person can get a job.
If the economy is not producing enough jobs, then those who give up are making
it possible for others to find work.“
for someone who wants one.
The people who can't work can still keep buying things,
the money is going to be spent, not saved, it gets injected right back into the economy.
People will say society will grind to a halt yet
currently
22.1% of people aged 16 to 64 are not in the labour force and productivity still keeps going up,
the stuff we want is still getting done but with less labour being put in,
In the 1960s, only one in 20 American men between 25 and 54 was not working.
According to Mr Summers’s
extrapolations,
in ten years the number could be one in seven. Currently 13 people can
produce
enough cotton for 9.4 million T-shirts.
If less people are required to make the things we need then surely thats a good for society?
The government is set up in this grossly inefficient administration system of monitoring, assessing and controlling so assistance is only allowed under certain requirements, Requirements - Approximately 100,000,000 of these working-age adults in the United States receive varying degrees of welfare benefits from many different programs, there are more working-age people in the United States receiving some form of welfare than there are working-age people who do not. which costs a huge amount of money to measure and determine. We have a system to give money to people but we have to disguise it as payments in a series of ways to make them socially acceptable, we don't have a flat rate that says this is least you can get and if you want anymore you have to work. What we do instead is invent a hundred different politically correct ways to send people money, you can get it if you are sick, a child, a veteran, old, disabled, jobless - and you can't just get money, the government has to specify its for certain things like buying food with food stamps, because thats more palatable to the general public as they see food as a necessity. Any time someone gets money you have to invent some cover for why they get it, can it not just be because they are a human being?
If Republican governor Sam Brownback signs a new social services
bill,
Kansas will have some of the US’s most severe measures to block welfare
recipients from spending the state funds at swimming pools, nail salons
and movie theaters and limit how much they can withdraw each day.
Last month, two bills passed in the Missouri house that would similarly
limit how people can spend food stamps. The legislation seeks to prevent
people from using food stamps to buy soda, cookies, chips, seafood,
steak and porn.
There are more working-age people in the United States
receiving some form of welfare than there are working-age people who do not.
I feel this point really needs to be emphasised in response to
the above plans for welfare recipients.
The general public have been trained well, certain media has gone to great
lengths to demonise the poor so
when draconian laws like
this, which punish people who receive welfare, the public are more acceptable to them.
 They need to be punished more until they finally
take one of the good paying jobs that are so common in every state...
“It’s as if middle-class and wealthy Americans think poor people live under the poverty line by choice, as if a sensible person would choose to subsist on so little.”- Jeanine Lister. This trend and hypocrisy of the goverment treating the poor like second class citizens and monitoring and controlling what they can buy and do sounds worryingly Orwellian and a type of society I want absolutely no part in. We as a society need to get out of the monstrous mentality that the unemployed are ”lazy scroungers”, “social parasites”, “not looking hard enough for jobs” and other demonising views which describe them as terrible, selfish people who should be looked down upon. It is victim blaming. The system we have does not provide enough jobs for everyone who wants one, it does not even provide enough full time jobs for the people who have part time jobs, the system should get the abuse and criticism, not the victims of a failing system.
This is the biggest hurdle that a basic income faces, media and culture
has successfully made people warped, brainwashed and convinced
of the impossible ideology that
everyone has to
work for a living.
Buckminster Fuller -
"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has
to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can
make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest.
The youth of today are absolutely right in recognising this nonsense of
earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that
everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according
to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, they must justify their right to exist.
So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for
inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be
to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking
about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."
A basic income preserves incentive, opportunity and responsibility,
it removes the fear of unemployment, poverty and saving traps.
A humane society would take care of everyone, especially the most vulnerable
people who can’t find work in a system that does not provide enough jobs.
A
basic income
Marshall Brain -
If you would like a different way of thinking about a basic income
solution then this
thought experiment and discussion by Marshall Brain describes a simplified society
and why a basic income would be beneficial.
ensures adequate safety-nets for the poorest.
A Basic Income or its other name,
Citizens/Guaranteed
Income,
would give some reward to those whose voluntary caring
contribution
Contribution -
By helping to break down the barriers between employment and unemployment,
a Citizen's Income would enable workers to develop more flexible patterns of work
that would be more consistent with their own needs
to society is so important, but currently unrecognised.
It would ensure that those seeking higher education, training or re-training
would be able to take advantage of a small secure income.
The Citizen's Income would
redistribute
Redistribute -
People in the lower earnings deciles are generally more likely to
consume goods and services than those in higher deciles, and the well
recognised multiplier effect would increase Gross Domestic Product.
net income slightly
from higher earners to lower earners and because the poor are more
likely to spend money on basic goods and services, the producers
of these would benefit.
Expenditure savings would arise because the CI payments would
replace
Replace -
The Exchequer would get more revenue,
a) because the Income Tax base would be wider,
b) because employees' and self-employed people's National Insurance contributions
could be integrated into the new style Income Tax
c) because fewer people
would be caught in the poverty and unemployment traps and more people would be
able to contribute through their earnings.
most existing benefits, and they would be a far less costly
system to administer than the existing tax and benefits system.
Recently, three unconditional basic income schemes were tested in India, funded by Unicef. Altogether, more than 6,000 men, women and children received it, with the children’s money paid to the mother. It had four main effects
- First, it had strong welfare, or “capability”, effects. Positive Effects - There were improvements in child nutrition, child and adult health, schooling attendance and performance, sanitation, economic activity and earned incomes, and the socio-economic status of women, the elderly and the disabled.
- Second, it had strong equity Equity Effects - It resulted in bigger improvements for scheduled caste and tribal households, and for all vulnerable groups, notably those with disabilities and frailties. This was partly because the basic income was paid to each individual, strengthening their bargaining position in the household and community. effects.
- Third, it had growth Growth Effects - Conventional labour statistics would have picked that up inadequately. There was a big increase in secondary economic activities, as well as a shift from casual wage labour to own-account farming and small-scale business. Growth in village economies is often ignored. It should not be. effects. Contrary to what sceptics predicted, the basic incomes resulted in more economic activity and work.
-
Fourth, it had
emancipatory
Emancipatory Effects -
These are unappreciated by orthodox development thinkers.
For many, it provided liquidity with which to respond to shocks and hazards.
In effect, the basic income responded to the fact that in such villages money
is a scarce commodity, and as such that has driven up its price,
locking most in a perpetual cycle of debt and deprivation.
The poor’s liberty has no value. But the basic income resulted in some families buying themselves out of debt bondage, others paying down exorbitant debts incurring horrendous interest rates. effects.
The citizen's income trust worked out how to pay for a partial basic income in the UK. It is intended to be revenue and cost neutral. People aged 0 to 24 would get £51.85, 25 to 64 would get £65.45 and people aged 65 and over would receive £132.60 a week at a cost of £232.9bn a year. The estimated total cost of benefits and tax reliefs and allowances that would be replaced is £239bn.
This would be the first step to implementing a full basic income.
It does not need to start at a huge amount on day one.
It can be introduced incrementally, small payments initially
which eventually grow to the final Citizen's Income system or
segmented where one age cohort is tackled at a time.
Once the inefficiency in the system has been removed,
including the social stigma surrounding
welfare,
Martin Ford -
"The very conventional solution that we're always offered which was give people
more training, give them more education so they can do a higher level job, that
simply may not work because those jobs are also quite likely to be automated.
So I think we need to do something different and what I have proposed is that
eventually we're going to have to move toward a Guaranteed Income where
everybody is guaranteed at least some livable income in our society."
the next step would be to find ways to increase it to a full basic income.
Getting started is
key.
Need for a BI-
Martin Ford cites a recent jobs summit he attended with about fifty tech-company CEOs.
"Here in Silicon Valley, there's a remarkable consensus about this.
Every single person agreed we're on the leading edge of a disruption,
and we're going to have to move to a guaranteed basic income.
There was overwhelming support for that."
Some ways to increase the Basic Income amount in the UK;
- Tackle unfair tax rules to combat inequality and ensure those who can afford it are paying their fair share: The group with the highest Tax Rates - A new report by the Equality Trust think tank found that the bottom 10% pays 43% of its income in tax, with the top 10% paying 35%. Furthermore, the bottom 10% pay a much larger proportion of their income on indirect taxes such as VAT and on council tax. tax rates as a percentage in the UK are the poorest – paying more of their income overall than the most well off.
- Need to cut down on tax breaks and benefits for the rich, between 2007 and 2013, cash benefits Tax System - The result is a very clear social injustice being perpetuated by the UK’s tax system that the attack on social security benefits only exacerbates. The poor are getting hit the poorest hardest paid to the richest fifth of the population increased by 42%. For the poorest fifth, benefits fell by 5%.
- Clampdown on tax dodgers Tax dodgers - The PCS-commissioned research estimates that over 2013 and 14 the UK lost £73.4bn to tax evasion ("tax lost when a person or company deliberately and unlawfully fails to declare income that they know is taxable or claims expenses that are not allowed") over the course of the studied period by improving transparency and accountability standards in global and UK tax rules and increasing government capacity to tackle tax evasion.
- Raise top income tax rate back to original levels, it is currently at 50%, Thatcher, who favoured indirect taxation, which hurts the poor the most, reduced personal income tax rates during the 1980s from 83% to 40%. A higher top-rate of income tax would discourage executives from demanding disproportionate pay increases.
-
Look at ways of raising revenue through progressive taxation and balancing
the books on the shoulders of those who can afford it:
In particular, the Government should implement a financial
transactions tax
( Robin Hood Tax).
Robin Hood Tax -
Also known as a Financial Transactions Tax (FTT), a Robin Hood Tax is a
tiny tax of about 0.05% on transactions like stocks, bonds, foreign currency
and derivatives, which could raise £250 billion a year globally.
FTTs are well-tested, cheap to implement and hard to avoid. A tiny tax on the financial sector could generate £20 billion annually in the UK alone. - Ensure the financial sector contributes its fair share, and focus on the greater taxation of wealth, by exploring things like a land value tax. Land Value Tax - 160,000 families, 0.3% of the population, own 37 million acres, two thirds of Britain, 230 acres each. Just 1,252 of them own 57% of Scotland. They pay no land tax.
- Create a social dividend reward Sovereign Wealth Fund- In Alaska every citizen receives an annual income from the profits of oil produced. In the UK we might look at the idea of a 'social dividend' financed out of the profits of industry as it adopts new technologies, e.g. UK should drive to be a world leader in robotics, some of the profits from this would be given back to society.
- Establish Green taxes as a tax on carbon, Carbon Tax - Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the main greenhouse gas, accounting for 82 percent of total UK greenhouse gas emissions in 2013. In 2013, UK net emissions of carbon dioxide were estimated to be 467.5 million tonnes (Mt). do this regardless to prevent climate change
- Legalise and Tax Marijuana Marijuana Tax - Uk economy to gain £6.7 billion from cannabis tax & regulation, evidence from the US and Europe shows that a regulated system would also reduce all health and social harms, better protect children as well as permitting enormous gain from the medicinal and therapeutic benefits of cannabis.
It’s quite ironic when the “Everyone must work for a living” crowd demand the unemployed to get jobs that don’t even pay a living wage and it's even more absurd when the people most against raising the minimum wage are CEO's who earn millions a year + bonuses.
The Living Wage is calculated according to the basic cost of living in the UK, the minimum wage is getting further away from the living wage, In 2011 the difference between the minimum wage and living wage in England was £1.12. By 2014 the difference had increased to 1.35, the minimum wage is getting harder and harder to live on. A living wage is good for business, Work Improvement - An independent study examining the business benefits of implementing a Living Wage policy in London found that more than 80% of employers believe that the Living Wage had enhanced the quality of the work of their staff, while absenteeism had fallen by approximately 25%. 75% of employees reported increases in work quality as a result of receiving the Living Wage. families and society. Society Improvement - It has been estimated that by increasing the National Minimum Wage to a Living Wage some 4.8 million workers would see an extra £4bn in take home pay. To ensure that work really pays for the poorest the government needs to raise the minimum wage to a living wage.
Equal PayIn 2012, comparing all work, women earned 18.6% less per hour than men. Overall, women constitute the majority of those in low paid work: almost two-thirds (63%) of those earning £7 per hour or less are women. Female graduates earn thousands of pounds less than their male counterparts - even if they studied the same subject at university. One in five men are paid more than £30,000 after their degree, compared with just 8% of women who earn the same. Women and parents need to be supported with universal affordable childcare. Gender inequality needs to be addressed, equal pay legislation and more economic policies are needed to give women a fair deal.
Reduce Work Week
In 1930, Keynes predicted that living standards in "progressive countries"
would be eight times higher and this would allow the working week to be
drastically cut to 15 hours a week. Living standards in developed
western economies have seen rapid growth; by 2030 it is likely
that they will have risen at least eightfold.
Keynes prediction
in productivity looks to be coming true but his prediction in
reduced work hours is spectacularly wrong. Rising living standards
have not led to people working less.
We need to copy France and reduce the work week to 35 hours,
in 2012, France had the second highest level
of productivity per hour worked in the G7, more than 30% higher than the UK,
which is languishing in sixth.
Reducing hours will create more jobs for the
hours
Job Creation -
Very simplistic calculation, not accounting for any logistics -
Lets say 20 million people currently in work have hours reduced,
If the work week was cut by 5 hours too 35 like in France,
that would leave 100 million hours of work still to do each week,
to fill this gap up you would need almost 3 million extra
people working 35 hours a week.
that need to be filled, help alleviate
technological unemployment.
Vivek Wadhwa -
"The only solution that I see is a shrinking work week. We may perhaps be working
for 10 to 20 hours a week instead of the 40 for which we do today.
And with
the prices of necessities and of what we today consider luxury goods dropping
exponentially, we may not need the entire population to be working.
There is surely a possibility for social unrest because of this; but we
could also create the utopian future we have long dreamed of,
with a large part of humanity focused on creativity and enlightenment."
This is a step towards more leisure which we should rightly be
experiencing thanks to technology and increased production, like Keynes predicted.
Conclusion
This section is the longest on this website because I believe this is the most important in determining a future which is good for all. The hope of abundance is obstructed by this problem, as well as housing. Every other necessity looks solvable thanks to technology.
What may be required eventually is a completely different system to
capitalism
Michio Kaku -
“If you read the newspaper there's this roaring debate, tax the rich, tax the poor,
who’s to blame? What I’m saying is the economy is changing, this is the sign of the
decline of an empire, of an empire that doesn't even know it, thats talking about inequality
without understanding why?
The economy is changing, it is becoming more technologically, It’s making the transformation
from commodity capitalism to intellectual capitalism.
As Tony Blair likes to say, “England rises more revenue from rock n roll than
it does the coal mining industry” because coal mining is a commodity industry
its time has come and gone in many place but rock n roll, people will spend money
on intellectual capital. Movies, books, science, technology, that's the shift we are
seeing in the world economy, so the nations of the future will be richer nations if
they understand this link between commodity capital and intellectual capital.”
in the future,
maybe a socialist or marxist approach may be necessary to distribute the means of productions(the robots)
to the people to prevent only a few from owning them.
Just like how the people revolted to get rid of feudalism,
the same might happen to capitalism if current trends continue.
An Economist Thomas Piketty, released a best selling book last year called
Capital
in the 21st Century.
Piketty's argument is that, in an economy where the rate of return on capital
outstrips the rate of growth, inherited wealth will always grow faster
than earned wealth.
“If you get slow growth alongside better financial returns, then inherited
wealth will, on average, dominate wealth amassed from a lifetime's labour
by a wide margin", says Piketty. “Wealth will concentrate to levels
incompatible with democracy, let alone social justice.
Capitalism, in short, automatically creates levels of inequality
that are unsustainable. The rising wealth of the 1% is neither a blip,
nor rhetoric.”
The future is not set in stone; it depends on the social and political choices
that we make. This is a turning point in humanity and it could very much lead
to Star Trek type utopia but the current trend is all the technological gains
and wealth that is generated is not being shared equally.
There are solutions but implementing them will not be easy but it will cause much greater
difficulty in the long run if nothing is done.
If we do not adjust the current system quickly to cope with the job loses
and uneven distribution of wealth and income then this
fantastic opportunity,
Jeremy Rifkin -
"The emerging new economy offers greater potential opportunity for
self-development and promises more intense rewards than traditional
employment.
And since intelligent technology will do most of the heavy
lifting in an economy centred on sustainable abundance rather than scarcity,
in a half-century from now our grandchildren may look back at mass-market
employment with the same disbelief with which we look upon slavery and serfdom.
The idea that a human being's worth was measured almost exclusively by his or
her productive output of goods, services and material wealth will seem primitive,
even barbaric."
will turn into a monumental disaster.
To progress as a society and achieve a better life for the next generation;
- We need to get out of this mindset of victim blaming the poor Poverty - More than half of US public school students live in poverty, report finds In 2012, out of 35 economically developed countries, only Romania had a higher child poverty rate than the US. and jobless.
- We need to be more critical of a system Federico Pistono - “Maybe the problem isn't that jobs are going away. Maybe the problem is that the economic system requires jobs in the first place for people to live.” that is failing many of us.
-
We have to make the system work for
all of us,
Marshall Brain -
"We should redesign the way the economy works so that we all get the
benefits of all this automation.
So, how might you do that?
-Spread the benefit of productivity increases to everyone.
-Break the concentration of wealth
-Increase pay for everybody
-Reduce the work week, you would say ‘hey, this 40 hour work week, we’ve had it forever. Let’s make it 35, then 30, then 20 til we’re all on perpetual vacation’.” not just an elite few.
We can already imagine a utopian society without jobs or work, we are now beginning to see technology and robots which may make this possible one day. Our own goal, as a human species, could be to create a heaven on earth. I think a Resource Based Economy may be a good ideal to try to achieve for humanity in the long run. If we are successful in using all of this wonderful technology to our advantage and spread the overall bounty evenly then these goals may one day, step by step, be possible.
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Class: Wraith.Base
| Defined in: | src/base.coffee |
Overview
The base class for all Wraith objects. Includes binding to events, and emitting events.
Direct Known Subclasses
Wraith.BaseView, Wraith.Collection, Wraith.Model
Instance Method Summary
- - (void) constructor() Constructor Constructor
- - (void) bind(ev, cb) Bound Binds the given function (cb) to the given event (ev)
- - (void) unbind(ev, cb) Bound Unbinds the given function (cb) from the given event (ev)
- - (void) emit(event, args...) Bound Emits the given event to listneers
- - (void) proxy(fn) Used to proxy a function call through this object.
Constructor Details
- (void) constructor()
Constructor
Instance Method Details
- (void) bind(ev, cb) (bound)
Binds the given function (cb) to the given event (ev)
- (void) unbind(ev, cb) (bound)
Unbinds the given function (cb) from the given event (ev)
- (void) emit(event, args...) (bound)
Emits the given event to listneers
- (void) proxy(fn)
Used to proxy a function call through this object.
Borrowed from Spine


conheça mais sobre a bikcraft
Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text.
Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lorem Ipsum passage, and going through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source.
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry.
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry.
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry.
"o verdadeiro segredo da felicidade está em ter um genúino interesse por todos os detalhes da vida cotidiana"
William Morris


Level 4
The Barbarian
The Barbarian is a kilt-clad Scottish warrior with an angry, battle-ready expression, hungry for
destruction. He has Killer yellow horseshoe mustache.
20S
Training
16
Speed
150
Cost


All of the Client side code resides in the /public directory.
public --- articles --- auth --- system ---- assets ---- controllers ---- lib ---- routes ---- services ---- views


Making the access to the Free Brazilian Repository for Open Soil Data <http://www.ufsm.br/febr/> as easy as possible.
| Version: | 1.0.1 |
| Imports: | dplyr, glue, googlesheets, knitr, pedometrics, readr, sp, stringr, xlsx |
| Suggests: | bookdown, DT, lattice, latticeExtra, magrittr, pander, rgdal |
| Published: | 2018-11-12 |
| Author: | Alessandro Samuel-Rosa [aut, cre], Universidade Federal de Santa Maria [fnd], Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná [fnd] |
| Maintainer: | Alessandro Samuel-Rosa <alessandrosamuelrosa at gmail.com> |
| BugReports: | https://github.com/febr-team/febr-package/issues/ |
| License: | GPL-2 | GPL-3 [expanded from: GPL (≥ 2)] |
| URL: | https://github.com/febr-team/febr-package/ |
| NeedsCompilation: | no |
| SystemRequirements: | pandoc |
| Materials: | NEWS |
| CRAN checks: | febr results |
| Reference manual: | febr.pdf |
| Vignettes: |
Repositório Brasileiro Livre para Dados Abertos do Solo – Guia Básico |
| Package source: | febr_1.0.1.tar.gz |
| Windows binaries: | r-devel: febr_1.0.1.zip, r-release: febr_1.0.1.zip, r-oldrel: febr_1.0.1.zip |
| OS X binaries: | r-release: febr_1.0.1.tgz, r-oldrel: febr_1.0.1.tgz |
| Old sources: | febr archive |
Please use the canonical form https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=febr to link to this page.


Release Date: August 16, 1994
For immediate release
The Federal Reserve announced today the following monetary policy actions:
- The Board of Governors approved an increase in the discount rate from 3 1/2 percent to 4 percent, effective immediately.
- The Federal Open Market Committee agreed that this increase would be allowed to show through completely into interest rates in reserve markets.
These measures were taken against the background of evidence of continuing strength in the economic expansion and high levels of resource utilization. The actions are intended to keep inflationary pressures contained, and thereby foster sustainable economic growth.
The Federal Reserve will continue to monitor economic and financial developments to gauge the appropriate stance of policy. But these actions are expected to be sufficient, at least for a time, to meet the objective of sustained, noninflationary growth.
In taking the discount rate action, the Board approved requests submitted by the Boards of Directors of the Federal Reserve Banks of Boston, New York, Richmond, Kansas City, and Dallas. The discount rate is the interest rate that is charged depository institutions when they borrow from their district Federal Reserve Banks.


Our sprint nears an end which means we have released a new version of packit - 0.2.0! You can expect a new release after every sprint (i.e. every 2 weeks).
The 0.2.0 version has a bunch of new features and improvements: you can find a complete list in the changelog. We also have a detailed documentation for all the workflows packit covers.
Let’s get through what’s new:
- We have decided to rename two keys in our config file so they are more
descriptive. Old names still work but they are deprecated:
package_name
→downstream_package_name
upstream_name
→upstream_project_name
- You don’t need to touch dist-git at all when getting your new upstream
release into Fedora, you can stay in your upstream repository and just fire
off a bunch of packit calls:
packit propose-update
to create a pull request in Fedora dist-git with the selected upstream releasepackit build
to build the new upstream release once the pull request is merged- and finally,
packit create-update
creates a new bodhi update (if you chose a stable Fedora release)
- Packit now has a
srpm
command which creates an SRPM out of the local content of your upstream repository. - You can now use packit to sync files from your dist-git repo back into
upstream (mainly to keep spec files in sync).
sync-from-downstream
is the command. - Command
propose-update
received numerous improvements:- You can pick upstream version to use.
- Packit will NOT check out the git ref with the upstream release if you
specify
--local-content
- It’s possible to force packit to execute
fedpkg new-sources
using--force-new-sources
and bypass the caching mechanism.
Installation
Please make sure you are installing 0.2.0
:
$ dnf install --enablerepo=updates-testing packit
Or
$ pip3 install --user packitos
You can also install packit from master branch, if you are brave enough:
$ pip3 install --user git+https://github.com/packit-service/packit
How are we using packit?
I’d like to show you how we used packit to bring a new upstream release of ogr into Fedora, a library which packit is using.
Once we have performed an upstream release of ogr, we can propose an update in dist-git:
$ git clone https://github.com/packit-service/ogr && cd ogr/
$ packit propose-update
INFO: Running 'anitya' versioneer
Version in upstream registries is '0.0.3'.
Version in spec file is '0.0.3'.
Picking version of the latest release from the upstream registry over spec file.
Checking out upstream version 0.0.3
Using 'master' dist-git branch
Cloning repo: https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/python-ogr.git -> /tmp/tmpb9xlvdhj
Syncing /home/tt/g/user-cont/ogr/python-ogr.spec
Archive ogr-0.0.3.tar.gz found in lookaside cache (skipping upload).
ERROR Cmd('git') failed due to: exit code(1)
cmdline: git commit -s -m [packit] 0.0.3 upstream release -m Upstream tag: 0.0.3
Upstream commit: 059d21080a7849acff4626b6e0ec61830d537ac4
stdout: 'On branch 0.0.3-master-update
nothing to commit, working tree clean'
Whoops, it seems that I have messed up, I forgot to bump the spec file in the
upstream repo when doing the release. I will bump it locally and utilize
--local-content
argument:
$ rpmdev-bumpspec -n 0.1.0 -c 'New upstream release: 0.1.0' *.spec
$ packit propose-update --local-content
INFO: Running 'anitya' versioneer
Version in upstream registries is '0.0.3'.
Version in spec file is '0.1.0'.
Picking version of the latest release from the upstream registry over spec file.
Using 'master' dist-git branch
Cloning repo: https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/python-ogr.git -> /tmp/tmpd9j4se27
Syncing /home/tt/g/user-cont/ogr/python-ogr.spec
Archive ogr-0.1.0.tar.gz found in lookaside cache (skipping upload).
INFO: Downloading file from URL https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/source/o/ogr/ogr-0.1.0.tar.gz
100%[=============================>] 20.25K eta 00:00:00
Downloaded archive: '/tmp/tmpd9j4se27/ogr-0.1.0.tar.gz'
About to upload to lookaside cache
won't be doing kinit, no credentials provided
PR created: https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/python-ogr/pull-request/6
Once the scratch build is done and tests passed we merged and built it:
$ packit build
Using 'master' dist-git branch
Cloning repo: https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/python-ogr.git -> /tmp/tmprp3cmdjy
Building python-ogr-0.1.0-1.fc31 for rawhide
Created task: 33616980
Task info: https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=33616980
We have done the same for F30 and F29.
The previous commands were ran in the directory of the upstream repository. Packit also accepts path to your upstream clone, or even URL. So let’s create a bodhi update for python-ogr by specifying the upstream repo URL:
$ cd $HOME
$ packit create-update --dist-git-branch f29 https://github.com/packit-service/ogr
Cloning repo: https://github.com/packit-service/ogr -> /tmp/tmpdkdadmn_
Koji builds for package python-ogr and koji tag f29-updates-candidate:
- python-ogr-0.1.0-1.fc29
Cloning repo: https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/python-ogr.git -> /tmp/tmpn1809ec9
Bodhi update FEDORA-2019-78948e62d2:
- https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2019-78948e62d2
- stable_karma: 3
- unstable_karma: -3
- notes:
New upstream release: 0.1.0
And that’s it, no need to access dist-git any more.
Please give packit a try and let us know what you think.


@use super::statics::style_css; @use crate::{footer, Session}; @(session: &Session, title: &str, content: Content)


HTTP stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. It is the data transfer protocol used by the World Wide Web, or the language that one computer uses to ask another for a document. So, in a web browser, you would type in the URL and hit enter.  Your computer requests your desired website from the server, and the server answers the computer using HTTP.
This diagram depicts how HTTP requests are sent.
HTTP is mainly made up of "GET" requests. To get to the Tumbler Login page, your computer would say GET/, followed by the Tumblr login page information. Essentially the computer is asking for all of the HTML code for the login page. You can learn about HTML here. One thing to note is that images and videos for a site are not included in the HTML code. They are separate files with their own URLs and need to be requested. The browser sends separate requests for the images and videos and they populate as they arrive. Each image or video causes its own HTTP request, which causes the page to load slower.
Sometimes when you browse the web you actually send information, like when filling out a form or typing a search query. Your browser transfers this information via a POST request. Based on the information sent, the server will send back the corresponding webpage. For example, if John logs into Tumblr, he would receive his Tumblr Account Homepage back. There is also cookie data sent that your browser sees and knows how to save. Cookie data is like an ID card that lets the web browser remember who you are.
HTTPS stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure. It is an extension of HTTP used for secure communication over the internet.
The internet is open, and information is sent in plain text. This makes information sent through the web able to be exposed to hackers! Safe websites prevent snooping by communicating on a secure channel using Secure Sockets Layer(SSL) and Transport Layer Security(TLS). SSL and TLS are a layer of security wrapped around your communications and are represented by the lock next to the HTTPS. HTTPs uses public key encryption to exchange data with the website you are using. Public key cryptography is the foundation of all secure messaging on open internet. Computers use asymmetric keys; a public key that can be exchanged with anybody and a private key that is not shared. The public key is used to encrypt data and anybody can use it to create a secret message. The secret can only be decrypted by a computer with access to the private key. Public key cryptography includes SSL and TLS protocols to protect us when browsing the web.
This diagram decribes HTTPS.
When a website asks your browser to engage securely, it provides a digital certificate, which is like an official ID card proving it is the website that it claims to be. Certificates are given by certificate authorities which are trusted entities that verify the identities of websites and issue certificates for them. If a website starts to send a transmission without a verified certificate your browser will warn you. It is important to pay attention to this to prevent information from getting into the wrong hands!
HTTP Representation
HTTPS representation


Latest Covid19 data on the web!
LiveCovid19.World
World Totals
Confirmed
0
+
0
Recovered
0
Critical
211 769 048
Deaths
0
+
0
ALL Coutries Data
Country
Confirmed
Recovered
Critical
Deaths
US
123456
123
1243
0


Members
CHAR_MAX
MOREPUNC_REGEX
PUNC_REGEX
TIMEOUT
WORD_MAX
Methods
countWords(text) → {number}
Returns number of words in a string.
Parameters:
| Name | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
text |
string | text inputtted by user for later parsing. |
Returns:
Number of words in text.
- Type
- number
disableInputs()
Ensures user can't proceed with entering data on form if exception thrown.
displayError(err)
Displays error message on console and form.html page.
Parameters:
| Name | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
err |
string | The error message to display. |
enableSubmit()
Enables or disables the 'Count' button depending on the state of the
form. The submit button is only enabled if the user has entered text
whose word and character counts are equal to or below their respective
maxima. Also, the number-of-words-per-sentence text field must contain a
value. If any of these conditions are not met, the submit button is
disabled.
refreshForm()
Updates form elements as the user types. Word and character counts
are refreshed in real-time, as well as the 'Count' button's state, which
which clearly depends on these counts.
To avoid typing-lag on old or busy machines, the function does not refresh
the counts with every keystroke. While refreshForm is executed on every
keystroke, the function upCounts is not: it is only executed after
a specified delay (e.g. 500 milliseconds), and no sooner than that.
resetAll()
Resets all form elements to initial states: empty text area; disabled
submit button.
updateCounts()
Refreshes output that indicates number of words and characters currently in
text area. If text is over either max, the function prevents the user from
submitting the form.


This is another mailto link: Send mail!
Note: Spaces between words should be replaced by %20 to ensure that the browser will display the text properly.


| DOSE: |
500 mg |
oral |
DMAE |
(daily) |
I have been taking this drug to see what it's mind-enhancing effects are. I found that one pill was not having any noticeable effects at the beginning, so I increased it to two per day. It took probably 3 to 4 days in order for me to notice any effects. The first thing I noticed was that I was able to wake up instantly. I am not a morning person, so it greatly surprised me when I would wake up and feel like getting out of bed instead of rolling over and hitting snooze. My mind was focused as if I had been awake for a few hours already.
I also noticed an ability to focus better in class, although for the most part I have never had trouble paying attention. I would notice that when I was on it I could stay in line with the professor's line of thought and focus on the lecture instead of drifting off into daydreams once in a while.
Another thing is that it seemed to have slight effects on mood swings. Some days I might feel upset for no reason, or very happy for no reason at all. It was very subtle, though, and didn't happen very often.
Last, I would have to say this drug greatly increased my sex drive. It was like an itch that needed constant scratching, so to speak, and I felt like I was more easily aroused.
I would like to keep taking this drug, but it is kind of expensive, and I fear that I might become addicted to it because the effects are so good, other than sometimes the mood swings have made me want to stop taking it.
Thank you for reading and I hope this helped if you are interested in DMAE.
Experience Reports are the writings and opinions of the individual authors who submit them.
Some of the activities described are dangerous and/or illegal and none are recommended by Erowid.


Rule Overview
Matrix
Node-link
Dynamic Rules
by support
by confidence
by lift
by support
by confidence
by lift
by support
by confidence
by lift
by support
by confidence
by lift
by support
by confidence
by lift
by support
by confidence
by lift
by support
by confidence
by lift
Rules of Interest
New Rule List
clear all
Itemsets
Support
Rule Data Distribution
Monday Starts
Recalculation
Reselect
Hour


The element 'actionScript' is the base for the action's script. All actions have an attribute 'name', used as a callback identifier to store and retrieve information returned from the action. It is always a good idea to keep these names unique throughout a script. The next attribute is 'type' which indicates the action type to run. Although the use of a type 'blank' might seem odd at first, it is useful to set up variables or to define actions that need to be called multiple times--like functions. In this case only some local tasks need to be performed.


Variables hold simple strings. They are global and come in two types: temporary and permanent. Permanent variables persist over multiple invocations of the chat script, while temporary variables are forgotten each time the script completes.
Variables are specified with a dollar sign, then a letter, followed by letters, digits, and underscores. If the first letter is upper case the variable is permanent; otherwise it is temporary. The variable name may be optionally enclosed in curly braces.
Examples:
$initString
$My_variable_234
${i_am_safely_followed_by_a_letter}


--- layout: post title: 'Hi-Lo counter tool' categories: [blackjack] tags: [strategy, calculator] excerpt_separator: ---


{% extends '_layouts/layout.html' %} {% block page_title %}{% endblock %} {% block body_css_classes %}nhsuk-frontend{% endblock %} {% block content %}
Enter your age
We don't need to know who they are. It will change the advice we give to you if you live with other people.


An Update on Integrating Zcash on Ethereum (ZoE)
Members of the Ethereum R&D team and the Zcash Company are collaborating on a research project addressing the combination of programmability and privacy in blockchains. This joint post is being concurrently posted on the Zcash blog, and is coauthored by Ariel Gabizon (Zcash) and Christian Reitwiessner (Ethereum).
Ethereum’s flexible smart contract interface enables a large variety of applications, many of which have probably not yet been conceived. The possibilities grow considerably when adding the capacity for privacy. Imagine, for example, an election or auction conducted on the blockchain via a smart contract such that the results can be verified by any observer of the blockchain, but the individual votes or bids are not revealed. Another possible scenario may involve selective disclosure where users would have the ability to prove they are in a certain city without disclosing their exact location. The key to adding such capabilities to Ethereum is zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge (zk-SNARKs) – precisely the cryptographic engine underlying Zcash.
One of the goals of the Zcash company, codenamed Project Alchemy, is to enable a direct decentralized exchange between Ethereum and Zcash. Connecting these two blockchains and technologies, one focusing on programmability and the other on privacy, is a natural way to facilitate the development of applications requiring both.
As part of the Zcash/Ethereum technical collaboration, Ariel Gabizon from Zcash visited Christian Reitwiessner from the Ethereum hub at Berlin a few weeks ago. The highlight of the visit is a proof of concept implementation of a zk-SNARK verifier written in Solidity, based on pre-compiled Ethereum contracts implemented for the Ethereum C++ client. This work complements Baby ZoE , where a zk-SNARK precompiled contract was written for Parity (the Ethereum Rust client). The updates we’ve made involved adding tiny cryptographic primitives (elliptic curve multiplication, addition and pairing) and implementing the rest in Solidity, all of which allows for a greater flexibility and enables using a variety of zk-SNARK constructions without requiring a hard fork. Details will be shared as they are available later. We tested the new code by successfully verifying a real privacy-preserving Zcash transaction on a testnet of the Ethereum blockchain.
The verification took only 42 milliseconds, which shows that such precompiled contracts can be added, and the gas costs for using them can be made to be quite affordable.
What can be done with such a system
The Zcash system can be reused on Ethereum to create shielded custom tokens. Such tokens already allow many applications like voting, (see below) or simple blind auctions where participants make bids without the knowledge of the amounts bid by others.
If you want to try compiling the proof of concept, you can use the following commands. If you need help, see https://gitter.im/ethereum/privacy-tech
git clone https://github.com/scipr-lab/libsnark.git cd libsnark sudo PREFIX=/usr/local make NO_PROCPS=1 NO_GTEST=1 NO_DOCS=1 \ CURVE=ALT_BN128 \ FEATUREFLAGS="-DBINARY_OUTPUT=1 -DMONTGOMERY_OUTPUT=1 \ -DNO_PT_COMPRESSION=1" \ lib install cd .. git clone --recursive -b snark https://github.com/ethereum/cpp-ethereum.git cd cpp-ethereum ./scripts/install_deps.sh && cmake . -DEVMJIT=0 -DETHASHCL=0 && make eth cd .. git clone --recursive -b snarks https://github.com/ethereum/solidity.git cd solidity ./scripts/install_deps.sh && cmake . && make soltest cd .. ./cpp-ethereum/eth/eth --test -d /tmp/test # And on a second terminal: ./solidity/test/soltest -t "*/snark" -- --ipcpath /tmp/test/geth.ipc --show-messages
We also discussed various aspects of integrating zk-SNARKs into the Ethereum blockchain, upon which we now expand.
Deciding what precompiled contracts to define
Recall that a SNARK is a short proof of some property, and what is needed for adding the privacy features to the Ethereum blockchain are clients that have the ability to verify such a proof.
In all recent constructions, the verification procedure consisted solely of operations on elliptic curves. Specifically, the verifier requires scalar multiplication and addition on an elliptic curve group, and would also require a heavier operation called a bilinear pairing.
As mentioned here, implementing these operations directly in the EVM is too costly. Thus, we would want to implement pre-compiled contracts that perform these operations. Now, the question debated is: what level of generality should these pre-compiled contracts aim for.
The security level of the SNARK corresponds to the parameters of the curve. Roughly, the larger the curve order is, and the larger something called the embedding degree is, and the more secure the SNARK based on this curve is. On the other hand, the larger these quantities are, naturally the more costly the operations on the corresponding curve are. Thus, a contract designer using SNARKs may wish to choose these parameters according to their own desired efficiency/security tradeoff. This tradeoff is one reason for implementing a pre-compiled contract with a high level of generality, where the contract designer can choose from a large family of curves. We indeed began by aiming for a high level of generality, where the description of the curve is given as part of the input to the contract. In such a case, a smart contract would be able to perform addition in any elliptic curve group.
A complication with this approach is assigning gas cost to the operation. You must assess, merely from the description of the curve, and with no access to a specific implementation, how expensive a group operation on that curve would be in the worst case. A somewhat less general approach is to allow all curves from a given family. We noticed that when working with the Barreto-Naehrig (BN) family of curves, one can assess roughly how expensive the pairing operation will be, given the curve parameters, as all such curves support a specific kind of optimal Ate pairing. Here’s a sketch of how such a precompile would work and how the gas cost would be computed.
We learned a lot from this debate, but ultimately, decided to “keep it simple” for this proof of concept: we chose to implement contracts for the specific curve currently used by Zcash. We did this by using wrappers of the corresponding functions in the libsnark library, which is also used by Zcash.
Note that we could have simply used a wrapper for the entire SNARK verification function currently used by Zcash, as was done in the above mentioned Baby ZoE project. However, the advantage of explicitly defining elliptic curve operations is enabling using a wide variety of SNARK constructions which, again, all have a verifier working by some combination of the three previously mentioned elliptic curve operations.
Reusing the Zcash setup for new anonymous tokens and other applications
As you may have heard, using SNARKs requires a complex setup phase in which the so-called public parameters of the system are constructed. The fact that these public parameters need to be generated in a secure way every time we want to use a SNARK for a particular circuit significantly, hinders the usability of SNARKs. Simplifying this setup phase is an important goal that we have given thought to, but haven’t had any success in so far.
The good news is that someone desiring to issue a token supporting privacy-preserving transactions can simply reuse the public parameters that have already been securely generated by Zcash. It can be reused because the circuit used to verify privacy-preserving transactions is not inherently tied to one currency or blockchain. Rather, one of its explicit inputs is the root of a Merkle tree that contains all the valid notes of the currency. Thus, this input can be changed according to the currency one wishes to work with. Moreover, if it is easy to start a new anonymous token. You can already accomplish many tasks that do not look like tokens at first glance. For example, suppose we wish to conduct an anonymous election to choose a preferred option amongst two. We can issue an anonymous custom token for the vote, and send one coin to each voting party. Since there is no “mining”, it will not be possible to generate tokens any other way. Now each party sends their coin to one of two addresses according to their vote. The address with a larger final balance corresponds to the election result.
Other applications
A non-token-based system that is fairly simple to build and allows for “selective disclosure” follows. You can, for example, post an encrypted message in regular intervals, containing your physical location to the blockchain (perhaps with other people’s signatures to prevent spoofing). If you use a different key for each message, you can reveal your location only at a certain time by publishing the key. However, with zk-SNARKs you can additionally prove that you were in a certain area without revealing exactly where you were. Inside the zk-SNARK, you decrypt your location and check that it is inside the area. Because of the zero-knowledge property, everyone can verify that check, but nobody will be able to retrieve your actual location.
The work ahead
Achieving the mentioned functionalities – creating anonymous tokens and verifying Zcash transactions on the Ethereum blockchain, will require implementing other elements used by Zcash in Solidity.
For the first functionality, we must have an implementation of tasks performed by nodes on the Zcash network such as updating the note commitment tree.
For the second functionality, we need an implementation of the equihash proof of work algorithm used by Zcash in Solidity. Otherwise, transactions can be verified as valid in themselves, but we do not know whether the transaction was actually integrated into the Zcash blockchain.
Fortunately, such an implementation was written; however, its efficiency needs to be improved in order to be used in practical applications.
Acknowledgement: We thank Sean Bowe for technical assistance. We also thank Sean and Vitalik Buterin for helpful comments, and Ming Chan for editing.
Source: https://blog.ethereum.org/2017/01/19/update-integrating-zcash-ethereum/


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