Bill Gates: Robots Should Pay Taxes

IdiotInCharge said:
This is your prediction, the point is to find a way for this to not be necessary.
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No its an obvious outcome of tech advancements. Plenty of other people reached the same conclusions and have written high quality research papers on this subject which is why you're hearing more about now.

And there is no "finding a way for this not to be necessary" short of Luddism which isn't going to happen since that would mean that manufacturing in this country would lose out to other countries' manufacturing that would invest heavily in robotics. They'd out compete any human production lines and the factory owners would lose their money. But those people are ALL about their money so they're not going to let that happen and will lobby accordingly against any pro worker protection laws.
 
SmokeRngs said:
You know, I might get behind this. However, I will first require punitive taxes on stoves, microwaves, furnaces, a/c units, plumbing, TVs, phones, computers, radios, clocks, automobiles, trains, planes, farm equipment, roads, electricity,......That right there is the absurdity of the "tax robots" argument.
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No it doesn't. Those are things which either improve human production or help humans work better. The sort of automation Gates is talking about is semi-autonomous and will directly eliminate jobs.

Taxing robots sounds dumb but it makes sense if you look at it from the perspective of each robot eliminating x amount of jobs. It makes it easier to correlate job loss with a possible tax rate that would scale up and down accordingly to how many jobs are being eliminated by the robotics in a given company.

There are other ways to do it of course, some are possibly better (I'd focus on taxing profits more since some sort of method would have to be introduced into the legal/tax code to accommodate taxing robots which opens the door for more loopholes), but its not a terrible or dumb idea.
 
mesyn191 said:
No its an obvious outcome of tech advancements. Plenty of other people reached the same conclusions and have written high quality research papers on this subject which is why you're hearing more about now.
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I'm not saying anything to the contrary, though it may have come off that way: I'm just pointing out your opinion here as supporting the idea.

mesyn191 said:
And there is no "finding a way for this not to be necessary" short of Luddism which isn't going to happen since that would mean that manufacturing in this country would lose out to other countries' manufacturing that would invest heavily in robotics. They'd out compete any human production lines and the factory owners would lose their money. But those people are ALL about their money so they're not going to let that happen and will lobby accordingly against any pro worker protection laws.
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Ludism/Ludditism isn't what I'm going for; throughout the centuries, including the one where the term 'Luddite' came into use, labor-saving technology didn't result in mass-unemployment, but rather more efficient alternative uses of human capital. That's what I'm going for, and I see this idea more as a warning than a path forward.

We need to find something for people to work on, or we'll wind up just paying people to be alive. I vote for mining the asteroid belt and building generational starships.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
I'm just pointing out your opinion here as supporting the idea.
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By calling it a opinion or prediction you're effectively downplaying the issue whether you mean to or not though. The only thing people aren't sure about is the exact time line and number jobs that will be eliminated at this point by modern automation but they all agree its going to happen over the next few decades and be a large number of jobs. Enough to be catastrophic to the economy as well as a humanitarian disaster if nothing is done to try to address the issue.

IdiotInCharge said:
including the one where the term 'Luddite' came into use, labor-saving technology didn't result in mass-unemployment, but rather more efficient alternative uses of human capital.
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Depends on how you look at it. If you were a factory owner at the time the machine looms and spinners were awesome profit drivers for you. If you were a farmer who also had a hand loom that the family ran for much needed income on the side to make up for crop failures or pay debts the factories were a economic disaster which was why they rioted and tried to bust up the machines.

That effort failed of course but you're doing them and history a disservice by putting it down to a disagreement over efficient use of "human capital".

IdiotInCharge said:
We need to find something for people to work on, or we'll wind up just paying people to be alive.
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We already do that to some extent. Its called retirement and Social Security. They're also both programs that are funded in part by progressive taxation and both have been a very thorough success at reducing poverty for those unable to work.

IdiotInCharge said:
vote for mining the asteroid belt and building generational starships.
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The heavy lift tech isn't there to make the necessary hundreds of millions of people emigrating to the stars financially feasible much less possible.

Also robots will do space mining much cheaper and more efficiently than any human piloted ship or space based equipment could. The habitat + radiation shielding + food requirements are inherently prohibitively expensive for even a handful of people in space. Doing it for hundreds of millions of people is purely in the realm of sci fi for now and the next few decades if not centuries short of Star Trek-esque tech suddenly popping up.

FWIW I'm not trying to piss on your dreams here, I'd like to see practical space travel and mining happen in my life time, the fundamental issues are so huge though its just not realistic to talk about as a solution.
 
This is a fairly stupid idea. Robots by definition are not people. They don't earn an income.
 
mesyn191 said:
If robots and software keep improving (they will) then a UBI/mincome is necessary eventually no matter what.

Either that or you just let most of the country degrade into extreme poverty.
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Seems like a country with robots working 24/7 would improve the quality of life not degrade it.
 
CSI_PC said:
Gates does have a point though.
It is not about when robots get paid but about robotics changing the dynamics of the labour force and little incentive for employees to keep human workers.
As robotics become more advanced, this trend will become a problem from a social-economics perspective.
TBH similar 'stick' incentive should had been done when western companies started to outsource work to 3rd world or substandard work-health manufacturing and employment practice countries and if they still want to work in those countries without such a 'stick' then bring those factories-practices-employment up to the state of western world in all aspects, but that is another thread debate.
Cheers
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What about dump trucks and bulldozers? Should dump trucks and bulldozers pay taxes ? How many guys lost jobs when machinery replaced pick and shovel crews for road building? Technology has been replacing humans with machines for a long, long time now. Robots aren't the first and certainly won't be the last invention that forces people to look for other employment.
 
257Tony said:
What about dump trucks and bulldozers? Should dump trucks and bulldozers pay taxes ? How many guys lost jobs when machinery replaced pick and shovel crews for road building? Technology has been replacing humans with machines for a long, long time now. Robots aren't the first and certainly won't be the last invention that forces people to look for other employment.
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Good point.
Advanced robotics has the chance to radically change the social-economic landscape through all ways of life and closer mimic human tasks, where dump trucks and bulldozers do not.
Cheers
 
Domingow said:
Hi,
You do realize that the bill and melinda gates foundation give away BILLIONS of dollars around the world....right? At one point they were the 2nd most generous foundation on the planet.

People also ask

How much did Bill Gates donate in total?
Gates has put his money where his mouth is. He and his wife Melinda have so far given away $28 billion via their charitable foundation, more than $8 billion of it to improve global health.Jan 18, 2013


​
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Yet he is still the richest man in the world. It's easy to be charitable when you stole an idea from someone else and your life is now paid for.

Taxing robots = a tax on companies, which gets passed down to US! Without robots, our cost of living would be higher. If your job can be replaced by a robot, then the job shouldn't exist anyway. It frees humanity up to do more productive things. There will always be more jobs to do.
 
sleepeeg3 said:
Yet he is still the richest man in the world. It's easy to be charitable when you stole an idea from someone else and your life is now paid for.

Taxing robots = a tax on companies, which gets passed down to US! Without robots, our cost of living would be higher. If your job can be replaced by a robot, then the job shouldn't exist anyway. It frees humanity up to do more productive things. There will always be more jobs to do.
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Whether he "stole an idea" or not is irrelevant - there is no single billionaire that got that way through their originality. You could say the same of Steve Jobs, or many others out there. There's always someone "stealing" something, making it their own, and become successful. What matters here is that Gates could have easily chosen to keep all his money for himself, or build an empire. Instead, he is using his money for the betterment of humanity. Also, I have to disagree - being as charitable as he is I imagine is not anywhere near as easy as you think. Amassing such a fortune and then deciding you will give back to people that need it? I know I'd have a much harder time letting go of it.

As for your idea of taxing companies and it being passed to us - so what? With or without robots, our cost of living will be higher no matter what. Please show me where automation has actually made a company lower their prices or somehow being a direct benefit to us as consumers.

I'll wait. In the meantime, I'll offer this to you:

http://www.mybudget360.com/cost-of-living-compare-1975-2015-inflation-price-changes-history/
 
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thelazydog said:
Seems like a country with robots working 24/7 would improve the quality of life not degrade it.
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Ideally yes. In the US however currently regulatory capture and lobbying allow the wealthy to get their way nearly all the time.

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs...ns-and-businesses-control-politics-and-policy

“The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”
,,,,,,
Main Street alone does not matter. Nor do interest groups that purport to support the general welfare. The data show that politicians cater to rich people and groups organized to advance their own narrow interests. Worse still, those interest groups tend to lobby for positions that are “negatively related to the preferences of average citizens.”
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http://www.businessinsider.com/major-study-finds-that-the-us-is-an-oligarchy-2014-4

The U.S. government does not represent the interests of the majority of the country's citizens, but is instead ruled by those of the rich and powerful, a new study from Princeton and Northwestern universities has concluded.
,,,,,,
The peer-reviewed study, which will be taught at these universities in September, says: "The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence."
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The owner of the robots are going to get taxed no matter what the real issue is how are we going to keep people employed and not simply allowing for rich people to get richer while the rest of us are prepositionally screwed by the select relative few with the money and power to do so? Granted that's a issue even w/o automation. That's also part of the worlds problem perception is a tough thing to break.
 
Why so many not understand that businesses don't pay taxes, because they just pass the cost their customers by including them in the cost of their products? Tax businesses for every robot they "employ", and the price you pay for goods will simply increase to cover the added cost of doing business.
 
mynamehere said:
Why so many not understand that businesses don't pay taxes, because they just pass the cost their customers by including them in the cost of their products? Tax businesses for every robot they "employ", and the price you pay for goods will simply increase to cover the added cost of doing business.
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Yes but it then creates a more level playing field on a product price where other companies will not replace a lot of their workers with advanced robotics, importantly this also applies to services when considering advanced robotics, heck maybe should even be applied to AIs used for human tasks-roles in the future.
Not every company moved their manufacturing to China but consumers had to appreciate it had a cost burden keeping this in the Western world, those who went to China usually had cheaper product prices (yeah not always such as Apple) in comparison.
However advanced robotics/AI (albeit still limited in what 'AI' really is) roles is an even bigger future issue.
Cheers
 
mynamehere said:
Why so many not understand that businesses don't pay taxes, because they just pass the cost their customers by including them in the cost of their products? Tax businesses for every robot they "employ", and the price you pay for goods will simply increase to cover the added cost of doing business.
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Actually, they're already getting taxed by the workers the company currently has. If you employ 500 people but replace 400 of them with 100 robos, that's a reduction of 300 people's worth of taxes. In this case, the cost of production will go down. It's not like it will be a 1:1 ratio or anything.

And guess what? Even if cost of doing business goes down, the price that you pay for the product in the end does not.
 
Yeah, because the price of this computer, and the computing/processing power it has, is the same as the first computer I bought back in the 80's. ;)

You guys have got to put down that Karl Marx pamphlet and get out into the real world. Productivity increases, in a market open to competition, will lead to lower prices for equivalent performance.

Taxing a new form of production in an effort to stop/regulate it because it "threatens" current production processes is a technique as old as the cotton gin...
 
Draax said:
Leftist? I find it humorous when Americans use these leftists, alt-right, main-stream media, etc. terms. American needs to understand that the kind of bat-shit crazy politics, which is currently going on in the US, doesn't fit the left / right spectrums the rest of the world is familiar with.
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Haha, you beat me to it. I always have this crazy thought that any discussion involving "tax" in a U.S. based community is more silly than watching some soap opera where everyone has sex with everyone, you know a girl's mother has secret sex with her BF and the like.
 
c3k said:
Yeah, because the price of this computer, and the computing/processing power it has, is the same as the first computer I bought back in the 80's. ;)

You guys have got to put down that Karl Marx pamphlet and get out into the real world. Productivity increases, in a market open to competition, will lead to lower prices for equivalent performance.

Taxing a new form of production in an effort to stop/regulate it because it "threatens" current production processes is a technique as old as the cotton gin...
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You can only have so much unemployment before it becomes a seriously big issue for a large economy and also the impact it has on a social scale as well, this is further compounded by the population size.
Cheers
 
IdiotInCharge said:
Lower cost of business is what allows the price to go down so that there *can be* competition.
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I think that certainly, lower cost of business can lead to competition. But if we were to have two items that cost the same to make, the two brands will sell the item at the same price. If one finds the cost of making said item is reduced, they will continue with that same price for as long as they can get away with it, until one of the two wants to invade the other's market share, so they will reduce the price, but not before that.

Now let's take Apple as an example, where there is no competition. According to http://www.zdnet.com/article/heres-how-much-the-iphone-7-costs-to-make/ at the time of writing a 32GB iPhone 7 that retails for $649 costs Apple only $219.80 in components, with manufacturing adding another $5 to the price. Just because the cost of the phone goes down year to year, it doesn't mean us consumers see a benefit - in fact, price for the iPhone goes up. If they eliminated all labor from China and went to robots, the price will likely go up again due to maintenance cost of said robots. Companies are never, ever going to lower a price a consumer is willing to pay simply because their costs went down; quite the contrary. They will want to squeeze every penny out of you that they can.

Ultimately, a company will charge what a customer is willing to pay for an item. If taxing robots increases the price of the product, as long as consumers are willing to put up the cash, they will pay for it. If not, robot tax or not, you bet those prices will come down.
 
You really can't use the iPhone as a good example. There is significant engineering put into that whether you want to accept that fact or not.

It's not like the latest flavor of MacBook that is just them cramming some latest flavor of Intel chipset into an aluminum shell. At least the iPhone has a custom SoC and they generally had to invest quite a bit of money to R&D the product. They are still making a healthy margin for sure, but it's really dishonest to just use the cost of the parts used during manufacturing as that doesn't include R&D costs, and the extensive costs Apple incurs to setup their assembly line that Foxconn staffs.
 
Jehuty said:
Actually, they're already getting taxed by the workers the company currently has. If you employ 500 people but replace 400 of them with 100 robos, that's a reduction of 300 people's worth of taxes. In this case, the cost of production will go down. It's not like it will be a 1:1 ratio or anything.

And guess what? Even if cost of doing business goes down, the price that you pay for the product in the end does not.
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Dude, you just make no sense. First off, if you replace 400 of something then it's a reduction of 400. ...and second the business doesn't really pay tax on employees - payroll and income taxes are effectively part of the employees' pay. ...and if the cost of doing business goes down, the price goes down. Google "invisible hand" or take an economics class.

Also, your points on Bill Gates, yes there are billionaires who did not steal ideas. He makes enough money on interest and investments alone, the amount he gives allows him to still maintain his richest man in the world title. That doesn't make his ideas hold more value. I put less value in the ideas of thieves like he and Zuckerberg.
 
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sleepeeg3 said:
Dude, you just make no sense. First off, if you replace 400 of something then it's a reduction of 400. ...and second the business doesn't really pay tax on employees - payroll and income taxes are effectively part of the employees' pay. ...and if the cost of doing business goes down, the price goes down. Google "invisible hand" or take an economics class.

Also, your points on Bill Gates, yes there are billionaires who did not steal ideas. He makes enough money on interest and investments alone, the amount he gives allows him to still maintain his richest man in the world title. The amount of money does not automatically qualify someone as a saint.
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It's a reduction of 400 employees, but strictly following the idea of taxing, then the amount taxed goes down by 300. That's what I meant, sorry if it wasn't clear. I'm ignoring everything else though, since we're just talking about "what ifs" with taxing robots that directly replace humans. Also, as for prices going down as a direct result of cost of doing business going down - can you cite some sources?

As for your opinion on Gates, I don't disagree. It doesn't qualify him as a saint. However, we have people here classifying Gates as a "typical leftist, wants to use other people's money before their own...." when he has been doing the opposite of that.
 
Makes sense to me. Companies are trying to replace humans with robots to make as much profit as possible at the expense of society. There should to be a "penalty" if you want to do that.
 
haste. said:
But you aren't the owner of these and you don't understand his point. It's ok, sometimes people wear blinders associated with their party affiliation. It's not that I even agree with him, it's the outright he is an idiot leftist that makes me chuckle. You do understand that capital investments get favorable tax treatment, robotics eliminates "good jobs" as your president would say (such as Carriers plan to use that little bump they were given) and therefore reduces overall taxes. Yes it should make the company more profitable, but with the breaks there is no making up the difference. Plus we'll have a bunch of unskilled workers suddenly looking for hand outs (which need tax revenue), confused why all the "good jobs" went away when they had been preached it for so long...
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It is not worth arguing with morons like YeuEmMaiMai.

When robots start taking over jobs and tax revenue plummets, fools like him would complain "Unemployment is on the rise and tax revenue falling.. wawa liberals and illegals taking over jobs & not paying taxes and THOSE SOCIAL PROGRAMS!" When an idea is considered where the companies would have to pay same taxes with much more efficient robots as with a human worker, they go "wawa liberals and government raising taxes and taking OUR money." If companies were to replace human workers with robots and reap all the benefits, that fool would still complain "wawa liberals and government are destroying jobs!" With fools like YeuEmMaiMai, it is a lose-lose argument.

And to respond to his argument that savings would pass to the consumer if robots could do the jobs for cheap.. Yup, that is top-down economics, which sounds good in idea but NEVER has worked in practice. Initially it may work, but it always reverts back to pocketing more money for those at the top in offshore accounts somewhere or massive bonuses for the executives. Some of the savings pass to the consumers but most stays at the very top of the company. Remember, the mission of all companies at the end of the day is to maximize profits. Top-down economics does not work in the real world. Period.
 
Jehuty said:
New pursuits that will eventually also be automated? Where is the line drawn with what a person does vs what a robot will do for / instead of you?
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Not everything can be automated. For now anyways! Much of STEM cannot be automated. Programming, quantum physics research, human biological research, high-level mathematics, etc.. You would need powerful artificial intelligence that can not only process information but literally think on it's own. We are not there yet.

For now, this would concern basic jobs/tasks like manufacturing and putting together foods, tools, durable products, etc. Basic stuff that requires very low level concepts, and you can automate that. No independent thinking artificial intelligence.
 
haste. said:
more than you will ever see in 5,000 of your lifetimes.
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You're missing one more zero.

dgz said:
Love these threads. Is this type of crazy common in the soapbox?
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Oh yeah, I got drawn into another one where it was being implied that Mark Zuckerberg is a Marxist.

Draax said:
Leftist? I find it humorous when Americans use these leftists, alt-right, main-stream media, etc. terms. American needs to understand that the kind of bat-shit crazy politics, which is currently going on in the US, doesn't fit the left / right spectrums the rest of the world is familiar with.
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Couldn't be more true, it makes communication worse than it already is. For example, Hillary Clinton and Jill Stein are both "left", but are diametrically opposed on maybe 70-80% of the same issues? When one person wants to do one thing, and another wants to do the EXACT OPPOSITE and they're both referred to as the same side of the spectrum, it sure makes conversations interesting

Ultima99 said:
We have to be smart.
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I've seen no evidence of how society is currently running to support that conclusion.

Ducman69 said:
If he didn't give money to charity, there is a good chance the government likely would have just implemented a "Bill Gates Tax" of 95%, and taken it from him, or he would have been assassinated.
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I'd say you have a point... if this was 1960. Nowadays government works FOR the billionaires, not against them.

sleepeeg3 said:
Dude, you just make no sense. First off, if you replace 400 of something then it's a reduction of 400. ...and second the business doesn't really pay tax on employees - payroll and income taxes are effectively part of the employees' pay. ...and if the cost of doing business goes down, the price goes down. Google "invisible hand" or take an economics class.
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Yeah, that's fine and well for Economics 101 classes, but once you get into global empires, more dynamics start emerging. Specifically oligopolies. Many companies have figured out it's more profitable to cooperate and not compete against other so they can ALL raise prices. Ever wonder why things like printer cartridges and glasses lenses are still so expensive despite costing pennies to produce?
 
The cheap Chinese labor that is supposedly stealing all of the jobs in the US is already expensive enough that even those jobs are getting automated. Yet you think that somehow it's actually possible to bring those jobs to the US for humans to do them? It's simple economic illiteracy.

Unskilled labor is going to be automated; people tell those displaced to move upmarket. Yet already jobs such as the legal profession and even medicine are actually being displaced, with more disruption predicted for the near future. Most of the population already don't have the mental capacity to become lawyers and doctors, and now we're telling everyone to be, in essence, even smarter? Not going to happen.

The fact of the matter is that doing nothing is either an implicit or explicit endorsement of writing off the lives of millions if not billions of people over the coming generations. Somehow we have to find a new economic/social model that still prioritizes competition and incentive to be productive, but does not write off the lives of a significant part of the global population as worthless simply because they were born during a major technological epoch.
 
M76 said:
When you look at it in proportion to his wealth he's not giving more money to charities than the average person. So I don't see why he gets a get out of jail free card based on that for every stupid idea he comes up with.

And this is a stupid idea. Because it suggests "hey let's make robots artificially less attractive to industry, so Joe Unfortunate can continue scrubbing the sewers with his hands" Instead of giving Joe a basic income and letting a robot do it which has no soul and can't feel miserable.
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Personally, I am thinking that some form of minimum income system is going to have to be a part of the long-term solution.

At some point in the future humanity may have to revisit these conversations because I fully expect that someone will attempt to develop a robot that does have emotions, which may change the narrative if robots indeed can be miserable. The good news is that we probably don't have to worry about it within our lifetimes...
 
M76 said:
He was specifically talking about taxing automation to make it less attractive compared to wage slavers. So it is a stupid idea in that context. Taxing automation with a reasonable amount is debatable.
Automation increases productivity and decreases costs, so it increases the profit margin by a great deal. So in theory income/profit taxes should be enough to support the basic income of the displaced workers. Of course this requires that companies that use tax loopholes and tax havens should be utterly and decisively punished.
And don't get me started on sports personalities who go to monte carlo to pay less tax. The 50 million you make a year is not enough, you want to cheat your home that raised and supported you and gave you the opportunity to become successful from taxes too? OK this is not a great amount in the greater scheme, it's just disgusting selfish behaviour IMO.

More taxes that is more types of taxes creates more bureaucracy, which increases the cost of taxation, therefore reducing the amount of actual money left to spend on other things. That's why I don't think taxing automation specifically is a good idea.
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Yeah I can definitly agree with some of those points. Im not sure if the increase in tax from increased profits would be enough to support basic income of displaced workers though. But I don't know enough on that topic to make an argument either way.
 
blade12 said:
Not everything can be automated. For now anyways! Much of STEM cannot be automated. Programming, quantum physics research, human biological research, high-level mathematics, etc.. You would need powerful artificial intelligence that can not only process information but literally think on it's own. We are not there yet.

For now, this would concern basic jobs/tasks like manufacturing and putting together foods, tools, durable products, etc. Basic stuff that requires very low level concepts, and you can automate that. No independent thinking artificial intelligence.
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I'm sure Bob the janitor will be awesome at quantum physics research once his job gets replaced by a giant multifunction roomba.
 
Lizard Testes said:
I'm sure Bob the janitor will be awesome at quantum physics research once his job gets replaced by a giant multifunction roomba.
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Hey, you never know what those currently at the lowest level, such as janitors, are capable of with some education and proper training. Besides, there are plenty of tasks that researchers need assistance with.. Filling out paperwork, data entry, wiring, installing/upgrading computer hardware, mixing chemicals to exact proportions, machine maintenance, carting things around, assisting the researcher, etc that anyone can do. Even someone with 70 IQ (they would be bit limited but they can surely do machine cleaning, carting fragile things around, etc). Not everyone has to be the head researcher or even junior/senior researcher!
 
blade12 said:
Hey, you never know what those currently at the lowest level, such as janitors, are capable of with some education and proper training. Besides, there are plenty of tasks that researchers need assistance with.. Filling out paperwork, data entry, wiring, installing/upgrading computer hardware, mixing chemicals to exact proportions, machine maintenance, carting things around, assisting the researcher, etc that anyone can do. Even someone with 70 IQ (they would be bit limited but they can surely do machine cleaning, carting fragile things around, etc). Not everyone has to be the head researcher or even junior/senior researcher!
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Don't necessarily disagree, but the same people yelling about pulling oneself up by bootstraps also don't want to fund education. Hell, they want to defund what we have and teach young earth creationism instead.
 
Lizard Testes said:
What's going to happen over the next 20/50/100 years as more and more jobs are automated is EVERYONE'S BUSINESS.
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so what you are saying is people are incapable of adapting to the work environment so those of us that can should get taxed more, got it.... may I suggest that you just give me your entire paycheck since you are obviously incapable of deciding how to "properly" spend your money?
 
Simply responding to any proposal about taxation that people should simply give you all their money isn't novel, thoughtful, or helpful.

I would say that the definition of a reasonable person is one that recognizes some level of taxation is required for a modern society. With that being said, now the discussion is what that level is and what methods to collect it.
 
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