[OT] Re: My opinion on Ubuntu cancelling Intel 80386/80386-clone processor support

[John Moser]

On Sun, 2016-09-11 at 17:24 +0200, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> On Sun, 11 Sep 2016 15:58:44 +0300, Thierry Andriamirado wrote:
> > 
> > Le 10 septembre 2016 20:13:47 UTC+03:00, Ralf Mardorf
> > <ralf.mardorf at alice-dsl.net> a écrit :
> >  
> > > 
> > > It's not the task of the poor to help the poor.    
> > Of course IT IS! ;)
> > I'm not so poor compared to many malagasy people, but being in a
> > poor
> > country, I should be one of the first to raise their hands to speak
> > for these "poors" who still use old hardwares. With the help of
> > those
> > in rich countries. ;)  
> You are quoting me out of context. The context is that the poor can't
> donate new computers and they can't pay for infrastructure, such as
> internet access for everyone. _BUT_ rich people could, they are just
> not interested in doing it, they are greedy.

Stop that.

Everybody loves to say "X has less and Y has more, Y is greedy!"  This
has lead to enormous political problems preventing any effective aid to
the economically disadvantaged.

To illustrate in a somewhat off-topic direction:  the United States can
implement the modern concept of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a
Universal Social Security (USS) for $1 trillion lower burden on the
taxpayer, without raising taxes on the rich.  This can easily end
homelessness and hunger across the nation; create an enormous demand
for jobs (which eventually requires shorter working hours to
counterbalance); and remediate an incredibly faulty welfare system that
would take too long to discuss here.

And yes, it really is a trillion dollars:  https://bluecollarlunch.word
press.com/2016/07/22/a-basic-income-is-a-trillion-dollars-cheaper/

Most UBI proponents oppose this because IT DOESN'T TAX THE RICH MORE.
 Many people also get angry because the income bump "doesn't make
businesses pay"--your effective "minimum wage" goes up, but the evil,
greedy business doesn't have to pay it, so this is wrong.

In other words:  people are less-interested in helping the poor and
more interested in attacking people or classes of people whom they
dislike.

People attacked the American Red Cross WHILE THEY WERE STOPPING A
CHOLERA EPIDEMIC IN HAITI, going so far as to complain that ARC hired
contractors who then made a profit--never mind that they actually got
food, water, sanitization, vaccination, government disaster response
programs for future crises, and temporary shelter distributed to people
who would be dead by now; there's evil rich people to burn, and nobody
really cares about dirty poor people on some barely-developed island
somewhere.

Do you have any concept of how many people suffer and die every year
because everyone is focused on how to pry money away from businesses
and high-income individuals instead of how to effectively address
societal problems by organized effort or public policy?



That doesn't even go into the economic considerations.  People still
think money is wealth; but money is backed by the productive output of
a population.  Want to see how it really works?

In America, we outsource a lot.  We import labor and goods (ultimately
labor).  Even when we bring things from China, someone has to ship it,
someone has to stock it, someone has to retail it.  There's a huge
amount of labor just in moving and selling goods.

Americans have income, from jobs.  When goods and services are
purchased, that money is business revenue.  Revenue goes to individuals
(wages), other businesses (overhead), and profits.  Put the wages and
profits together, and you have income.  All of the income in America is
equivalent to all of the business productive output; import goods are
bought and thus the money goes out of the country, while those goods
are sold locally and the price then divided between wages and business
profits, thus reflecting the production of retail and shipping
services.  IT services and made-in-America things (e.g. food?) are of
course tangibly made here.

The ability to keep importing goods, of course, predicates on our
ability to produce more goods.  America does trade away a lot of grain,
IT services, and electronics goods (iPhones made in China by the
specifications of Apple; China gets its cut, but so does the US).

Take a step back and look at all the money moving around.

Every dollar spent represents somethings that was made, shipped, and
sold.  If we produce half as much but still employed as many people for
the same yearly wage, everything would cost twice as much--suddenly
we're making 5,000 instead of 10,000, but we're still paying Charlie
$40,000/year, and have to divvy his salary up into the price of each of
these.  That means Charlie ultimately can only buy half as much.

So you look at these poor countries and tell me what they're missing.

The answer isn't money, computers, or a modern welfare system to make
their rich people pay for their poor people.

The answer is technology.

Man learned to sharpen a pointy stick and spend less time hunting.  He
learned to plant seeds and get food without gathering.  He kept sheep,
then learned to make them breed more effectively and get more meat with
less work, and developed animal husbandry.  Today we've replaced our
highly-toxic pesticides with low-impact, narrow-spectrum insecticides,
and replaced huge fields and massive irrigation with high-yield GMO
crops.  We use tractors and combines instead of shovels and mules.

The difference between a poor, backwater African country that can
hardly feed its own people and has just barely evolved fashion past the
loin cloth and a stable, modern nation with roads, electricity, running
water, and easy access to food isn't the warlords hoarding their gold.
 The difference is a country that needs 90% of its people working 60
hours per week to produce enough food not to starve only has enough
time to cut a loincloth; a country using 10% of its population to
manufacture food has a *lot* of free time, and can use that to provide
medicine and sanitary conditions, as well as clothing that fits the
culture rather than savage economic need.

Without the technological basis to maintain and stabilize their
society's production, they can't afford modern policy solutions like
welfare systems.


> We make progress regarding computers. The computer you buy today is
> already old next week. We don't need this kind of progress. What we
> need is social progress.

We need both.  I guess I will go into America's troubles in brief
bullet point.  Here's a rundown of America's welfare system at current:


  * Unemployment insurance pays for 6 months.  Unemployment is a
    required consequence of economics, both because technical progress
    reduces labor to make things (e.g. MAKES FOOD CHEAPER AND MORE
    ACCESSIBLE) and because a society actually can't function stably
    with a labor shortage.  Our unemployment insurance relies on
    people repeatedly losing their jobs to other people who have and
    will soon again lose their jobs.

  * Housing assistance for low-income households puts 75% of qualified
    households on a waiting list FOREVER.  1 in every 4 families who
    our Welfare system decides are legally supposed to receive aid
    actually gets it; 3 of every 4 RECEIVE NOTHING, EVER.

  * Food security programs suffer similar problems, requiring several
    months delay before entering the program, or restricting what can
    be bought on the program (18oz peanut butter ok, 16oz denied), or
    denying applicants who actually need it, or not paying enough.

  * Social Security retirement aid pays poor people the least--down as
    low as NOTHING AT ALL--specifically because they are the least-able
    to save money during their lives.

  * Minimum wage generates political arguments even among economists,
    some of whom have given numbers in the millions for how much the
    2007 minimum wage increases increased unemployment, while others
    claim such increases decrease unemployment.  While they're arguing
    over that, unemployed and underemployed individuals are getting
    nothing because they have no jobs.

Technological progress has changed the world.  In 1900, 43% of the
median household's income went to food, and 14% went to clothing; in
1950, it was 33% and 12%; today it's about 11% to food, 3% to clothing.
 We generally spend slightly more on housing now, but buy 2.5 times as
much living space.  We spend more of our money on healthcare, and have
access to more and better healthcare.

In other words:  the cost, as a percentage of the income of each and
every American, to provide food for any given person is much lower.
 It's about 1/4 as big a proportion as it was 115 years ago.  You can
blame the tractor, the computer, and biogenic research into pesticides
and GMO for cutting the cost so much; globalization also takes some
credit for this, but the U.S. is a big food producer and the food we do
import is often more-expensive than our major staples produced right
here.

As a result, the United States can suddenly remediate all of the
welfare problems above.

Technical progress carries threat and opportunity risk.  If we progress
too quickly, the jobs displaced are not then replaced fast enough, and
we get high unemployment.  On the other hand, if we can mediate that
growth, we move into a golden age of prosperity--examine America, 1950-
1990, in terms of expense shares on food, housing, clothing, and
medical care, as the cost of these things sharply fell during that
time.

The long and short of it is that what people now call "automation" will
destroy our economy if it happens overnight, and will make us all
*extremely* wealthy if it happens over a decade or so.

Projecting that backwards for America, the Universal Social Security I
described would have destroyed America in 1950.  It wasn't possible to
fund it.  By measure of the amount of money being examined, it actually
hit parity in 2013 with our current system; by measure of income
displaced from one person's hands to another's, it's $1 trillion
cheaper than the current system.  That's enough money to effectively
remediate the problems listed above, and it does so.

Project that to the third world.

YES THEY NEED TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS!  They need to be able to make
food without working themselves to death in the process!

Better agricultural technology will allow them to make their own food
more efficiently and without destroying their natural resources in the
process, like America.

Better construction technology will allow them to dig up the ground and
lay water piping, roads, and other infrastructure.  This is a major
boon for public health.

Better infrastructure technology means access to energy--electricity
generation--and communications, allowing organization of people into
governments and businesses.

These increases in production make the society more wealthy.  Less
human effort is invested to produce more; the remainder can then go
toward public efforts including education, welfare, healthcare, and the
like.  That means they can finally stop cutting the heads off used
syringes by hand, and doctors in Africa won't end up sticking
themselves with diseased needles so damned often.

Of course societal progress is important.  Social progress is a
response to technical progress:  poor societies necessarily must be
without strong welfare systems, education systems, and public health
systems; they're too busy trying to hold up their other needs for
anyone to build those nice, modern societal support systems we all
like.  A more-wealthy society naturally grows some of those, and needs
to re-engineer itself to move onto others.