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On November 10 2017 14:47 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On November 10 2017 14:40 Introvert wrote:On November 10 2017 13:54 Mohdoo wrote:
Let's take a moment to compare and contrast how Democrats defended Weiner vs how Republicans are defending Moore. One ignored an embarrassing politician until he ran himself out of relevancy and the other is being told to quit if the stories are true? This isn't really a trail any Democrat would want to go down, and after Trump, no Republican either. Did any major left wing networks defend Weiner like fox is Moore?
I don't know, I don't watch them. All we have here is a few quotes from Hannity, a consistent shill, one of which seems to have been better when you hear it than read it. It seems like most media and actual politicians are saying he should be leave the race if need be. I think Democrats simply don't have a leg to stand on when it comes to morality in this sphere.
It seems like the majority of conservative media is not only evaluating the story, but being quite harsh on those who defend the alleged behavior on its face.
And third, Wiener was running for NYC mayor in a primary, a safe Democrat spot, against a more favored candidate. The media loved Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton, etc. I just don't think there's a high ground here to claim.
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There wasn't much about that Hannity clip that was better if you heard it than if you read it.
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On November 10 2017 13:52 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On November 10 2017 13:50 mozoku wrote:On November 10 2017 03:34 KwarK wrote:On November 10 2017 03:01 mozoku wrote:On November 10 2017 00:04 KwarK wrote:On November 09 2017 23:35 Danglars wrote:On November 09 2017 23:11 Liquid`Drone wrote:
When the cutoff is at $11 million for a household, clearly you can still accumulate generational wealth. It's not like they take 100% beyond that either. (Tbh, I'd personally be kinda fine with that. :D Or it should probably also depend on how many beneficiaries there are, but I don't see the fairness or benefit from any individual being given more than $5 million for 'being in the same family as someone'. So maybe rather than calculating it based on the value of the estate, have the cutoff be decided by how much each recipient gets. )
I don't see the societal benefit from individuals being billionaires. I get 'they invest and create jobs', but I've never seen any compelling evidence that one individual holding 1 billion creates more, better jobs than 200 individuals holding $5 million does. (Or that there being one company valued at $1 billion is better for the economy than 200 companies worth $5 million). All the bipartisan talk about 'small business being the backbone of american economy' really doesn't seem to match up with policy geared towards benefiting small businesses (which must, naturally, come at the expense of big business). The way I see it, it's impossible to accumulate $1 billion without having massively underpaid workers helping your company thrive, and while I prefer methods like increased worker ownership or limiting CEO pay to X amounts of entry level pay over taxation as a means of redistribution, if you do allow CEOs to make 600 times entry level pay then the redistribution must be done through other means. And if people aren't taxed sufficiently during their life times, then it has to happen at death.
Everybody idealizes the meritocracy. But a meritocracy is incompatible with an aristocracy, the US can't pretend to be the former while enacting policies that benefit the latter. The wealth you've earned and has been taxed that the government allows you to give to your children and grandchildren ... Examining how much property individuals attain in terms of net societal benefit as compared to pay cap ... catching up on presumed inadequate taxation over their lives ... allowing CEOs to make X redistribution must be done. I shudder to think you're probably talking in good faith here. No individuals but only servants of societal benefit, no unjust policies but only the ends justify the means, and so transparently the politics of envy but without attendant shame. I really hate to think this may be what we're headed towards. It's the social contract that binds us together. If a man lived on an island by himself and all his possessions were crafted by his own hand I wouldn't see any reason to tax him. But within a capitalist society every rich man has become rich through the redistribution of labour from others to them. We allow capitalism to redistribute wealth because it's functionally effective for allocating resources within society but there is nothing natural about, say, land ownership. If a field in Texas is discovered to have oil underneath it it does not rationally follow that all Americans should have to collectively make the owner of the field a billionaire in order to make their commute to work. You need to recognize that the wealth capitalism awards you is simply the product of an artificial system that was created by men to help decide whether ipods or zunes were better. The fact that an employer is willing to pay you $100,000 for your labour does not mean that the intrinsic value of your labour is $100,000, it's just a bullshit number that the system produced. If you get rid of society none of this labour has any intrinsic value, it's simply a product of a set of rules we created. You're trying to combine two completely separate concepts, the individual and capitalist society and it doesn't work. You can't have capitalism on an island with one occupant. Taxation is part of the same book of rules that capitalism comes from, and neither makes any sense from an individualist perspective. I don't know how you're defining "intrinsic" value, but if an employer is willing to pay me $100,000, the market value of my labor is $100,000 (assuming efficient/competitive markets). If the market values my labor more than someone else's, it follows that (again, assuming efficient/competitive markets) society's best estimate of my labor's value is more than that other person's. Should not the fruits of society's labor be distributed, in principle, proportionally to those who created it? Especially given that, for most people, the market value of the labor is--to a pretty large degree--under their control during their lifetime? You can argue that heirs to large fortunes didn't really create the value that their fortune's create (their parents did) and I think that's fair (though there are counterarguments in favor of the estate tax as well), or that economic mobility isn't possible (I disagree), but to act like the only basis for how society's wealth should be distributed is the tyranny of the masses (who are writing the "book of rules" you're referencing--at least in a democracy) doesn't have any moral or ethical basis in favor of it. The share of the wealth you get and the share of the wealth you created aren't well correlated. That's pretty much the point of capitalism, the underlying mechanism that makes capitalism work is people attempting to do arbitrage to take advantage of that discrepancy. If you break it down to its very simplest village level bartering, the objective is to find something that you can produce in an hour that you can trade for firewood that took two hours to chop. You perform one hour of labour, and yet you get two hours of stuff. The mechanism relies upon disproportionate rewards to redistribute labour and direct economic activity. Clearly whatever the guy in the village was doing with his hour was the right thing to do, and other villagers may follow him until an equilibrium where 1 hour = 1 hour is restored. Arbitrage to exploit disproportionate rewards between what you contribute and what you get is the engine that drives capitalism. By the time we apply it on a modern global perspective the difference is staggering, a ratio of thousands of manhours to one in many cases. These differences are reinforced by artificial impositions upon the ability of many people to engage in arbitrage, such as denying Mexicans the ability to sell their labour in America, and by exploitation grandfathered in by the capital class. However, the basic engine remains the same, the economic systems offers participants in the economy disproportionate rewards for directing their labour in certain ways. The disproportionate outcome needs to exist for our society to work. We need doctors to get more than grocers to keep kids in school. But it doesn't follow that what the system outputs is what you deserve, or what you earned. It's certainly not what you created, any American can tell that the manhours of labour they consume on any given day greatly exceed the manhours of labour they performed. Deserve and earned are subjective moral concepts that aren't relevant to the mechanism, what you get is what you get. This is literally nonsense. I barely know where to begin. Suppose an hour's worth of labor chopping firewood produces $1 of firewood. The new guy creates $2/hr with whatever he's doing. He's twice as productive. If chooses to work the same amount of time, he gets twice as much stuff. That's literally the definition of proportional. How that's supposed to be disproportionate, I have no idea. The share of the wealth you get and the share of the wealth you created aren't well correlated. ??? I'm pretty sure fast-food workers are creating much less wealth than software engineers, successful investors, etc. I literally can't even imagine how society would exist if this statement were true. Why would capitalism even be efficient if this statement were true? What is your definition of "well correlated"? 0.99999999999999999?? It's certainly not what you created, any American can tell that the manhours of labour they consume on any given day greatly exceed the manhours of labour they performed. I'm not sure this is true at all. In fact, I'd lean towards not true if anything. Ever heard of an economy of scale? I work at a mega-scale tech company. I work 40-50 hrs/week, but my work influences thousands of people directly, and affects millions indirectly. Hell, the marginal cost of someone consuming my work is practically zero. Likewise, the marginal cost (in terms of other's time) of most of the stuff I consume is practically zero. That's how automation works, and is why we're fabulously wealthy compared to several hundred years ago. Why is the bartering village using dollars? Remove the dollars, try again. What objective system of valuation are you using to show that you're producing more value than the fast food worker from your day? Remembering of course that you're already justifying the getting more money than them by the fact that you create more value so you cannot complete the circle and use the more money to prove the greater value.
Does it matter if they're bartering in gold, wood, virgins, or dollars? It's a trade they both agree to and the principles are the same.
But I see the point that you're trying to make is that the efficient man's hour should, in principle, be worth no more than the inefficient man's hour if you don't care about productivity, and that productivity is independent of morality. However, the former statement is inherently incorrect because productivity and time are, by definition, linked, and a person's time has value in excess of that which can be determined monetarily.
To simplify, let's assume they're both chopping lumber. The efficient man can simply choose to work 1/2 hour, have the same productivity, and keep the other 1/2 hour to himself. By nature of being more efficient (and his own efficiency is surely not intrinsically amoral), he's advantaged no matter what. Suppose, regardless of compensation, he only wanted to work 1/2 hour, and wanted to spend the other 1/2 hour with his kids. Are you going to argue that society is justified in forcing him to work the full hour? Or that they should discriminate against his good fortune by paying less for his lumber in the name of "equality"?
That's certainly not a society I'd want to be a part of.
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Here is how bad the Hannity clip was, the man who kept talking about a murder conspiracy story that his own network retracted has decided THIS is the thing he needs to apologize for. Now of course his apology involved pretending that his comments were taking out of context by "Soros-funded, radical, left-wing group(s) that has (have) purposely taken me out of context for years." By the way how is this poorly spoken?
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Hannity REALLY bores me, but what was posted in this thread seems now to be clearly unfair so we should prob drop this example.
BTW this is the type of thing that gets taken out of context all the time, as the tweeter points out.
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On November 10 2017 15:45 Introvert wrote:Hannity REALLY bores me, but what was posted in this thread seems now to be clearly unfair so we should prob drop this example. https://twitter.com/yashar/status/928839833090514944BTW this is the type of thing that gets taken out of context all the time, as the tweeter points out.
So Hannity didn't say that having sex with a 14 year old is okay, but he did just happen to say, on the same day as the Roy Moore story, that a lot of women make these accusations for money. And he just happened to have a guest whose purpose was to say just that.
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"But Hannity was referring to the 17 year old, so the liberals are wrong" is a great line. I hope the rightosphere runs with that for a whole news cycle.
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On November 10 2017 14:55 JonnyBNoHo wrote:Show nested quote +On November 09 2017 23:11 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I don't see the societal benefit from individuals being billionaires. I get 'they invest and create jobs', but I've never seen any compelling evidence that one individual holding 1 billion creates more, better jobs than 200 individuals holding $5 million does. No difference. I'd err on the side of figuring the 200 would do better. Kind of the point of corps and professional managers / finance.
This actually isn't correct. Real world investors are risk-averse (i.e. require an expected return premium for an equally risky investment). I'm using the the financial definition of risk btw, which is the same as statistical variance. Assuming efficient markets, this means that riskier investments generate higher returns, and thus result in faster economic growth. Obviously, risk appetite generally grows with the size of one's fortune so concentrated wealth leads to faster economic growth (again, in an efficient market).
In layman's terms, if you want to stay above $10M and you own $1B, you can invest $990M. If 5 investors with $200M want to stay above $10M, they can invest 5 x $190M = $950M. So concentrating wealth results in $40M more in active capital in this example.
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On November 09 2017 19:11 Toadesstern wrote:
you usually don't inherit stuff the moment you're born though. So I don't really see the point in inheritance being such a great start into your life.
Your parents are rich. You maybe do get a lot of benefits out of that but you're probably not going to get their money until you're in your 50's or older
Right, so not only you want money to arbitrarily stacks in some increasingly rich families hands, but you think the fact that all that cash will be owned by old people way past their productive age is a good idea.
We want money to be linked, related and earned by productive activity. Which is one more reason, on top of the moral aspect, why progressive inheritance tax is the obvious way to go. Inheriting millions at age 60 and putting them in the bank to be invested in some financial products so that your old children will inherit even more when they reach 60 brings next to nothing to society.
I mean, what is your vision? An old people gilded age?
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On November 10 2017 06:49 IgnE wrote:Show nested quote +On November 10 2017 06:42 kollin wrote:On November 10 2017 06:41 IgnE wrote:
asking permission is what i meant by "explicit permission". coincidentally in almost all of the stories in that NYT article louis ck did ask for explicit permission. so thats a case where asking for explicit permission didnt solve the problem, although im sure you meant to include something like waiting for an affirmative answer that you are sure was uncoerced
generally though a lot of flirting doesnt proceed by asking for explicit permission to flirt. Does masturbarion fall under flirting? i suppose the anawer is "it depends" but ill short circuit this digression and just say "no" to avoid this pointless line of questioning. obviously what louis ck apparently has a history of doing is not a good thing to go back to my original post on this topic though, i was thinking aloud about whether the #metoo movement, which has brought to light numerous instances of horrific and bad behavior, might have a chilling effect on flirting generally. im not even necessarily opposed to explicit permission to flirt, although a lot of women seem to enjoy flirting themselves, and a lot of them think that explicitly asking for permission is anathema to flirting itself anathema -- from the greek ana + tithemi . . .
I agree that this can have a chilling effect of flirtation.
I don't think that this is going to be a permanent detriment though and consider this quite a healthy thing to do to accustom oneself to the new status quo where certain previously overlooked things suddenly are not acceptable anymore.
Being a little more cautious and considerate when thinking of what is acceptable and what not with regard to whom you are trying to flirt with. Accepting the fact that there is no single framework for flirting that draws the lines for you and instead you have to feel out the situation (no pun intended) and in case of insecurity maybe take a step back instead of forward.
Of course due to statistical effects you'll eventually hit on someone that appreciates your approach but in the meantime you treat an unknown number of people indecently (in an extreme example).
In case the systemic mistreatment of different parts of the populace - be it women, black women, LGBTQ, poor people - subsides and there is less of a power dynamic active in the background, I'm rather certain that the cooling effect on flirtation did its job and people can go back to business being all the smarter and feel less insecure about the acceptable moral framework.
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After spending nine months indulging President Donald Trump’s desire to renegotiate NAFTA, agricultural groups representing farmers in Trump-supporting states across the heartland are now moving aggressively to save an agreement they consider crucial to their industry.
The once-powerful agricultural lobby was somewhat muted in its warnings about losing a significant portion of the $17.9 billion worth of agricultural products exported last year to Mexico, the U.S.’ third-largest trading partner, believing that the Trump administration would reach a settlement on other aspects of NAFTA while leaving agricultural trade alone.
Now, with Trump threatening to issue a formal intent to withdraw from the deal, farming groups say it’s clearer than ever that their pleas to save the pact are barely registering with a president intent on its destruction.
“I’ve come to believe this administration is determined to end NAFTA,” said Gordon Stoner, a fourth-generation Montana wheat farmer who leads the National Association of Wheat Growers.
The fearful tone now coming from many of the nation’s farm groups has only amplified as America’s agriculture sector confronts the loss of its main profit driver — foreign exports. Many are now mobilizing behind the scenes to stave off what most believe would be a disaster for American farmers.
A reversal on NAFTA would be a clear measure of the industry’s lack of influence over Trump and his administration. There’s also a growing recognition that the agriculture industry, while united on the importance of NAFTA, may have failed to coordinate an effective strategy to counter the threat that Trump posed to the trade pact since his first day in office.
“The importance of trade to economic growth in the food and ag sector is so fundamental that there tends to be an assumption that everyone understands that,” one association leader told POLITICO. “We can get lazy about our meeting our educational challenge in explaining that part of our industry to others.”
But the newly energized, growing frustration of the agriculture industry has hit what some are calling a milestone after it recently released a letter directly challenging Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross after he publicly disputed the idea that a NAFTA withdrawal would lead to a serious drop in exports.
“Unless countries are going to be prepared to have their people go hungry or change their diets, I think it’s more of a threat to try to frighten the agricultural community,” Ross said during an public event on Oct. 11.
The letter also responded to a threat Trump has been amplifying both publicly and privately to lawmakers in recent weeks: He would send notice that the United States would withdraw from the pact in order to pressure Canada and Mexico to agree to U.S. demands.
But agriculture groups say even that action would be cataclysmic and render meaningless the administration’s continuing promise to “do no harm” to agriculture through the NAFTA talks. Mexico has also said with no uncertainty that it would walk away from the talks if Trump resorted to that tactic.
“Contracts would be canceled, sales would be lost, able competitors would rush to seize our export markets, and litigation would abound even before withdrawal would take effect,” more than 80 associations wrote in their letter to Ross, which they made public soon afterward.
The six-page missive was meant to be an unequivocal recognition there was little expectation that the Trump administration would be helpful in trying to preserve NAFTA’s benefits for U.S. agricultural producers, according to sources who helped organize the effort.
“It was a huge departure,” said one strategist involved in the effort. “I see this as a major sea change of people saying the administration is not going to be helpful on this.”
The letter was in fact a culmination of what many agriculture groups had sensed for months: The Trump administration viewed agriculture’s benefits from the deal more as a bargaining chip rather than something that needed to be defended at all costs.
Ross "told aggies straight up that they’ve just got to get used to the fact that they’re a minor part of the economy and that trade policy isn’t going to be constructed around their interests,” said one industry consultant.
In numerous meetings between Ross and industry groups starting last spring, he said he believed the United States held all the leverage based on the volume of food and agriculture products it sold to Mexico. He argued that if the United States wanted to press Mexico into making concessions on issues such as auto-part imports, Mexico would agree rather than risk losing inexpensive access to U.S. farm products, according to people briefed on those meetings.
“All the ag groups looked at him and their mouths dropped open and said, ‘Don’t you get it? The leverage is in their hands. We are completely dependent on them as this major export market,’” said one person who received the briefing.
“If you try to twist Mexico’s arm to give in on rules of origin [on autos], they’ll just stop buying,” the person added. “That’s just an inconvenience to them because there are so many other places they can go. Sure, consumers might pay a little more, but it’s not as if they can’t get it.”
Trump’s threats to withdraw from NAFTA and the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement have “generated a response that I don’t think that he fully expected,” said Kent Bacus, the international trade director at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.
“It’s been difficult, to be honest with you, because even though we have a lot of support from people within the Trump administration, President Trump has made statements that obviously have caused us a lot of concern,” he said.
Bacus said his group’s lobbying effort had “evolved" from simply reminding the administration of the positive benefits of trade to strongly opposing the administration’s positions.
“People are just shocked and kind of angry that the [ag] sector is not being taken very seriously or that these administration officials who prided themselves on understanding business and being business-friendly are dismissing the massive costs [of NAFTA withdrawal] at a time of low commodity prices and a really hurting ag sector,” said another agriculture industry consultant.
Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue — one of the industry's few allies in the administration — recently acknowledged Trump’s “bombastic” statements on trade during a meeting with farmers in California, but he still predicts a positive outcome from the NAFTA talks.
“The president is determined to get a better deal for American agricultural producers. At the end of the day I think he will achieve that,” Perdue said in a statement to POLITICO.
Still, the Agriculture Department is actively engaged in developing contingency plans if a NAFTA withdrawal actually happened.
Source
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Let's be honest here, I don't know why any party/campaign whose main defining image is that they're the "patriotic" party would want anything to do with Flynn but no one could imagine he'd be so darn brazen to actually plot a kidnapping on American soil.
I sort of don't blame the GOP in this situation since that's pretty wild, even if we knew Flynn was a compromised foreign agent for quite a long time.
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Norway28674 Posts
On November 10 2017 15:25 mozoku wrote:Show nested quote +On November 10 2017 13:52 KwarK wrote:On November 10 2017 13:50 mozoku wrote:On November 10 2017 03:34 KwarK wrote:On November 10 2017 03:01 mozoku wrote:On November 10 2017 00:04 KwarK wrote:On November 09 2017 23:35 Danglars wrote:On November 09 2017 23:11 Liquid`Drone wrote:
When the cutoff is at $11 million for a household, clearly you can still accumulate generational wealth. It's not like they take 100% beyond that either. (Tbh, I'd personally be kinda fine with that. :D Or it should probably also depend on how many beneficiaries there are, but I don't see the fairness or benefit from any individual being given more than $5 million for 'being in the same family as someone'. So maybe rather than calculating it based on the value of the estate, have the cutoff be decided by how much each recipient gets. )
I don't see the societal benefit from individuals being billionaires. I get 'they invest and create jobs', but I've never seen any compelling evidence that one individual holding 1 billion creates more, better jobs than 200 individuals holding $5 million does. (Or that there being one company valued at $1 billion is better for the economy than 200 companies worth $5 million). All the bipartisan talk about 'small business being the backbone of american economy' really doesn't seem to match up with policy geared towards benefiting small businesses (which must, naturally, come at the expense of big business). The way I see it, it's impossible to accumulate $1 billion without having massively underpaid workers helping your company thrive, and while I prefer methods like increased worker ownership or limiting CEO pay to X amounts of entry level pay over taxation as a means of redistribution, if you do allow CEOs to make 600 times entry level pay then the redistribution must be done through other means. And if people aren't taxed sufficiently during their life times, then it has to happen at death.
Everybody idealizes the meritocracy. But a meritocracy is incompatible with an aristocracy, the US can't pretend to be the former while enacting policies that benefit the latter. The wealth you've earned and has been taxed that the government allows you to give to your children and grandchildren ... Examining how much property individuals attain in terms of net societal benefit as compared to pay cap ... catching up on presumed inadequate taxation over their lives ... allowing CEOs to make X redistribution must be done. I shudder to think you're probably talking in good faith here. No individuals but only servants of societal benefit, no unjust policies but only the ends justify the means, and so transparently the politics of envy but without attendant shame. I really hate to think this may be what we're headed towards. It's the social contract that binds us together. If a man lived on an island by himself and all his possessions were crafted by his own hand I wouldn't see any reason to tax him. But within a capitalist society every rich man has become rich through the redistribution of labour from others to them. We allow capitalism to redistribute wealth because it's functionally effective for allocating resources within society but there is nothing natural about, say, land ownership. If a field in Texas is discovered to have oil underneath it it does not rationally follow that all Americans should have to collectively make the owner of the field a billionaire in order to make their commute to work. You need to recognize that the wealth capitalism awards you is simply the product of an artificial system that was created by men to help decide whether ipods or zunes were better. The fact that an employer is willing to pay you $100,000 for your labour does not mean that the intrinsic value of your labour is $100,000, it's just a bullshit number that the system produced. If you get rid of society none of this labour has any intrinsic value, it's simply a product of a set of rules we created. You're trying to combine two completely separate concepts, the individual and capitalist society and it doesn't work. You can't have capitalism on an island with one occupant. Taxation is part of the same book of rules that capitalism comes from, and neither makes any sense from an individualist perspective. I don't know how you're defining "intrinsic" value, but if an employer is willing to pay me $100,000, the market value of my labor is $100,000 (assuming efficient/competitive markets). If the market values my labor more than someone else's, it follows that (again, assuming efficient/competitive markets) society's best estimate of my labor's value is more than that other person's. Should not the fruits of society's labor be distributed, in principle, proportionally to those who created it? Especially given that, for most people, the market value of the labor is--to a pretty large degree--under their control during their lifetime? You can argue that heirs to large fortunes didn't really create the value that their fortune's create (their parents did) and I think that's fair (though there are counterarguments in favor of the estate tax as well), or that economic mobility isn't possible (I disagree), but to act like the only basis for how society's wealth should be distributed is the tyranny of the masses (who are writing the "book of rules" you're referencing--at least in a democracy) doesn't have any moral or ethical basis in favor of it. The share of the wealth you get and the share of the wealth you created aren't well correlated. That's pretty much the point of capitalism, the underlying mechanism that makes capitalism work is people attempting to do arbitrage to take advantage of that discrepancy. If you break it down to its very simplest village level bartering, the objective is to find something that you can produce in an hour that you can trade for firewood that took two hours to chop. You perform one hour of labour, and yet you get two hours of stuff. The mechanism relies upon disproportionate rewards to redistribute labour and direct economic activity. Clearly whatever the guy in the village was doing with his hour was the right thing to do, and other villagers may follow him until an equilibrium where 1 hour = 1 hour is restored. Arbitrage to exploit disproportionate rewards between what you contribute and what you get is the engine that drives capitalism. By the time we apply it on a modern global perspective the difference is staggering, a ratio of thousands of manhours to one in many cases. These differences are reinforced by artificial impositions upon the ability of many people to engage in arbitrage, such as denying Mexicans the ability to sell their labour in America, and by exploitation grandfathered in by the capital class. However, the basic engine remains the same, the economic systems offers participants in the economy disproportionate rewards for directing their labour in certain ways. The disproportionate outcome needs to exist for our society to work. We need doctors to get more than grocers to keep kids in school. But it doesn't follow that what the system outputs is what you deserve, or what you earned. It's certainly not what you created, any American can tell that the manhours of labour they consume on any given day greatly exceed the manhours of labour they performed. Deserve and earned are subjective moral concepts that aren't relevant to the mechanism, what you get is what you get. This is literally nonsense. I barely know where to begin. Suppose an hour's worth of labor chopping firewood produces $1 of firewood. The new guy creates $2/hr with whatever he's doing. He's twice as productive. If chooses to work the same amount of time, he gets twice as much stuff. That's literally the definition of proportional. How that's supposed to be disproportionate, I have no idea. The share of the wealth you get and the share of the wealth you created aren't well correlated. ??? I'm pretty sure fast-food workers are creating much less wealth than software engineers, successful investors, etc. I literally can't even imagine how society would exist if this statement were true. Why would capitalism even be efficient if this statement were true? What is your definition of "well correlated"? 0.99999999999999999?? It's certainly not what you created, any American can tell that the manhours of labour they consume on any given day greatly exceed the manhours of labour they performed. I'm not sure this is true at all. In fact, I'd lean towards not true if anything. Ever heard of an economy of scale? I work at a mega-scale tech company. I work 40-50 hrs/week, but my work influences thousands of people directly, and affects millions indirectly. Hell, the marginal cost of someone consuming my work is practically zero. Likewise, the marginal cost (in terms of other's time) of most of the stuff I consume is practically zero. That's how automation works, and is why we're fabulously wealthy compared to several hundred years ago. Why is the bartering village using dollars? Remove the dollars, try again. What objective system of valuation are you using to show that you're producing more value than the fast food worker from your day? Remembering of course that you're already justifying the getting more money than them by the fact that you create more value so you cannot complete the circle and use the more money to prove the greater value. Does it matter if they're bartering in gold, wood, virgins, or dollars? It's a trade they both agree to and the principles are the same. But I see the point that you're trying to make is that the efficient man's hour should, in principle, be worth no more than the inefficient man's hour if you don't care about productivity, and that productivity is independent of morality. However, the former statement is inherently incorrect because productivity and time are, by definition, linked, and a person's time has value in excess of that which can be determined monetarily. To simplify, let's assume they're both chopping lumber. The efficient man can simply choose to work 1/2 hour, have the same productivity, and keep the other 1/2 hour to himself. By nature of being more efficient (and his own efficiency is surely not intrinsically amoral), he's advantaged no matter what. Suppose, regardless of compensation, he only wanted to work 1/2 hour, and wanted to spend the other 1/2 hour with his kids. Are you going to argue that society is justified in forcing him to work the full hour? Or that they should discriminate against his good fortune by paying less for his lumber in the name of "equality"? That's certainly not a society I'd want to be a part of.
What me and other 'real world' leftists want isn't that 1 hour = 1 hour. But we think the concept of 1 hour = 600 hours is not grounded in what their real productivity entails and that it is harmful for society. I don't have any issues with people in important jobs making 3-4x regional median wage (I used to have a warehouse job and my boss was making about double what I was making and his boss was making about 3x what I was making - they were managing like 40 and 120 people respectively - I thought that was totally fair), I might even be on board with 10x, or at least I don't find that a really big deal. But I think that's sufficient motivation to 'work harder'. The important thing from my perspective is that as many people as possible are above the threshold of 'economic comfortability'. Like studies show that having more money entails more happiness until you get to a certain level, but after that, it gives really diminishing returns. It seems really wasteful to have one person have 600 times that while 5500 people are 10% short, a system where the guy who has 600 times that instead had 50x and those other 5500 had 10% more, would be way better.
Also when I was working the warehouse job, I was amazingly productive. Like, mid 20s, good shape, math-brain, high motivation, those allowed me to literally be 4x as productive as some of the 50 year old ladies who had been there for 20 years. I was paid the same, and I think that is a really good thing. Being able to work hard and being appreciated for the hard work I do is reward on its own, it's way more important that those ladies were also able to have enough money to get by than for me to receive 'accurate monetary compensation to reflect how much more productive I was'.
Finally, my english economic vocabulary isn't perfect, but in Norway there's this concept we basically call 'working capital' - funds that are actively invested. I'm totally on board with not taxing funds while they are tied up in investments, I'm also on board with corporate tax cuts. But I want to end the private jet type of personal wealth, and I see pretty much no 'justness' in great wealth being transferred between generations. If our system started everyone off at a truly equal footing at birth, I could see unfettered capitalism be fairly just, as your success would really depend on your own labor. But now there's such a strong correlation between how well you do and how well your parents did (social mobility isn't high anywhere) that it seems on point to argue that individual success by large doesn't really hinge on individual effort or greatness.
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On November 10 2017 12:39 Ryzel wrote:
Holy shit what happened to the US Politics thread I used to know and love
are you talking about the last day of discussion, or the last long while?
and what is it that you would like to see instead?
it seems on the whole not all that different than it's been for a long while now.
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Sweden33719 Posts
On November 10 2017 09:05 Nevuk wrote:
Why do scammers even bother with this whole I'm a prince from X country", just pretend to be a despicable/extremist candidate and give them a link to send you money.
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On November 10 2017 22:53 zlefin wrote:Show nested quote +On November 10 2017 12:39 Ryzel wrote:
Holy shit what happened to the US Politics thread I used to know and love are you talking about the last day of discussion, or the last long while? and what is it that you would like to see instead? it seems on the whole not all that different than it's been for a long while now.
1) Last day of discussion
2) Less deep analysis of Shades of Grey lol
Although that being said, respecting this thread as a forum for debate and arguing appropriately when discussing an important topic and not settling for "well you know what I mean" would be nice. But there's no in-depth moderating of this thread, so what can you do.
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EPT
