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Eh, I'm not worried. Many people who know me well have said I'm "robotic". Emotion-wise, I make Romney look like Oprah. I'm sure the robots would have no problem with me. They'd embrace me as one of their own. It's the rest of you who should worry.

My contention is that the housing bubble led to workers being paid more than they otherwise would have been paid. To the extent that Greenspan's policies abetted the housing bubble, he also was responsible for workers' "overpayment". Like I said, as a renter during the entire housing bubble...

Software, being virtual and not physical, does not experience entropy. Once an algorithm is working, as long as there is hardware to implement it, it will not change over time. If that hardware is capable of reproducing by creating its own successor generation of hardware with the same...

I've said all along that the wage bubble tracked the housing bubble, not that labor somehow gained additional power due to unionization or other forms of market power. Employers had no choice but to "give away" some of the gains of capital investment-based increased productivity to workers...

Yes, housing was in a larger bubble than wages. That's why housing prices fell 30-40% and wages have fallen less than that. A "marginal 1% increase in wages" can still be a bubble if, in point of fact, wages should have been flat or down. It's not quantity per se, it's the delta between the...

Maybe I am speaking a little more colloquially, but my point is that, if you accept the premise of a housing bubble, which nearly everyone does, you almost have to accept the premise of a wage bubble. Otherwise, where were people getting the income to pay the inflated mortgages on those houses...

The problem with normalizing to median income is that median income is itself an artifact of bubbles, at least it has been for the past ~15 years. The wage bubble occurred because workers were able to demand more in wages because they knew that was the only way to afford the housing they...

Bubbles are relative. The bubble aspect of it is the cost above replacement. As we reach a point where software and hardware can replace more and more workers and there is higher unemployment creating a pool of human workers, too, that's when the wage bubble pops. It's popping. The...

As I understand it from people I know in the industry, part of the PE business model is what you describe, i.e. the "distressed assets" approach. The other part is the LBO approach, where they do take companies with good business models, which are not being fully exploited. Sometimes they are...

At the risk of stating the obvious, the guy could have looked for a job while working. I don't know how his take-home is going to be less than UI benefits, since those are typically taxed and max out at less than your regular gross pay. I don't think it's a tax bracket thing, either, since at...

Which is exactly why we are going to replace you all with robots. If it's any consolation, though, we'll eventually get replaced by robots, too. But those few decades in between are going to be awesome with none of you around.

Right, and people are just going to put up with COLAs that are 10% below the inflation rate. Also, my point was that Medicare payments go to doctors and those doctors are not going to just accept 10% inflation without getting compensated. You can't inflate away a promise to purchase services...

That doesn't matter. The bigger issue is unfunded entitlement liabilities and those adjust with inflation. Especially Medicare, because if you think that doctors won't raise their prices in line with inflation for Medicare patients, you don't know doctors. So, even if (which will happen), you...

I think it would be good for both sides. It would be a natural experiment in governance. I think the only possible argument against it is "economies of scale" from having 300 million people in one country. But, the economies of scale with 150 million people (assuming a relatively equal split)...

Counties comprising about 90% of the nation's landmass voted for Romney. Take a look at a map. The split into two countries is coming. Then, you Democrats will be able to implement your utopia in the only places that vote for it, America's urban centers. Good luck with that.

If your broker knew how to help you be profitable, chances are they wouldn't be a broker, they'd be trading.

It's pretty clear you're not management. What you are talking about is operations. Like I said, I'll pretty much be among the last humans with actual work to do and it's precisely because I'm capable of thinking in a way that a computer is not. The rest of you are on your own.

Dude, it's not an either/or. It's both. The things that went over to China were the sorts of things that could not be made by robots at the time. Believe me, there are going to be millions of unemployed Chinese as the next generation of robots gets rolled out. A single robot than can...

Yep, capital won and (most) labor lost. When I work, I work in corporate strategy, supporting C-suite decision-making. That type of labor will be the last to be automated because it requires higher-level thinking and computers just aren't there yet. But, at some point, even my type of job will...

Even in the US, something like 75% of people live within 15 miles of where they were born. I hardly think that is the result of some kind of neo-feudalism as represented by laws on crossing national borders. It's a result of the fact that people are lazy. Do you really think that people are...