In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up!
NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action.
On November 14 2017 03:43 Buckyman wrote: ...or Alabama collectively considers the pedophilia allegations to be Fake News™. ...or Alabama holds strongly the view that the accused is innocent until proven guilty. ...or they think Doug Jones has done something even worse. ...or after Bill Clinton's shining example they no longer think sexual misconduct should disqualify someone from holding office.
I think there's a bit of a difference between what he allegedly did and getting a blowjob from a (I presume?) consenting adult
monica lewinsky isn't the big bill clinton scandal anymore. He is fully established as a predator-rapist in right wing circles, and I think there actually seems to be quite some meat on the bone of that accusation. The issue is more the idea that Bill's past transgressions in any way justify electing a sexual predator today than the claim that Bill is a sexual predator. He left office 17 years ago.
Democrats voted the woman that threatened and covered up the rape accusers to the 2016 Democratic party nominee.
Pretty fucked up if you ask me. I wouldn't vote Moore, but damn if they know the political double standard present.
Hillary's actions towards Broderick, even if fully accepting them, cannot in be equated with that of Moore, Bill Clinton, or even the self admitted ones from Donald Trump. Completely unfair comparison.
If you can vote for a woman that will cover up, threaten into silence, and destroy the credibility of rape victims so her husband can offend again, you're nine tenths of the way there as far as I'm concerned.
Hey look you repeated a false claim for which you have not and cannot provide support.
Do you think Joe Biden acts inappropriately around young female children and/or women in general?
I had never heard of this before but I looked up the Sessions video and I’m not totally clear on it. I remember a video of Biden putting his hands on someone’s wife’s shoulders. So it could be just some type of shoulder and arm contact that he does. But if he’s a pedophile he should be tarred and feathered and then locked in jail.
Assuming this is really the first you've heard of Biden being creepy af around all women here's a compilation focused on children.
Some I wouldn't say are creepy on their own but as part of a pattern they definitely are, and some would seem completely innocent if he wasn't so overwhelmingly creepy. There's one with a red haired girl where the picture went pretty viral that's shown in the compilation (1:40) that while I couldn't say I am definitely hearing what the comment section suggests he says, everything about their body language supports it.
While I can't dispute whether this was something you previously knew, I have to say that it takes a bit of willful ignorance to have been unaware of any of this (though understandably not all).
On November 13 2017 14:07 Slaughter wrote: Yea well the glorification of the US and Capitalism has taught people to be selfish because everyone should be/are selfish. So people really don't give a fuck about things like that and just say "them's the breaks I was lucky that time"
This appears to be based on a fundamental misunderstanding of capitalism. Capitalism is how we entice selfish people to contribute to the rest of society.
Capitalism is how selfish people provide moral justification for the accumulation of wealth at the expense of society.
Why is wealth accumulation by default at the expense of society? Theoretically we are freely exchanging goods (or labour in order to get goods) that we have a surplus and couldn't use anyways. If we are generating wealth and I get what I want and you get what you want in an exchange that we are reasonably happy why would that be at the expense of each other?
What planet is this happening on?
Right here, right now. It's called job specialization. I work at a particular job, but I can't be bothered to fix my own car, so I pay someone else to do so. I gain because I don't have time to learn to fix my car (not have I invested in all the tools needed), and so I benefit from his labour. I'm salaried, so my potential earnings is limited unless I hustle on the side. But if that mechanic does well and is able to hire a bunch of journeymen mechanics and/or apprentices and double the income that I make, hell if he makes ten times what I make, I still haven't lost anything. I still get my car fixed, freeing up my time to do something else. And he gets my money, plus a bunch of other customer's money. And the journeymen mechanics are gainfully employed and may well strike out on their own if they are sufficiently enterprising. There's no loss to me, if I get what I want for a reasonable price, and they got rich. I got what I wanted, and I can focus my labour elsewhere.
It's all very nice looking at the relationship between two laborers, but how about the relationship between you and your employer? If your employer starts giving you 10 more hours of work a week with no compensation, that's fine because value is still being created? I'd call that your employer generating value at your expense.
Well, I teach, so it's not so much that I'm given more hours, so much as I take on more hours. But the public will never want to pay sufficient money to compensate my out of class hours, even if I am (as I am currently) coaching two volleyball teams and am the athletic director on top of full time teaching.
But teaching is weird in that it relies upon tax money, in full or in part, so it isn't exactly free market (even our private schools have 50% government funding for the students, though nothing for capital expenses). Salaried work is weird in general, as I suppose it is more open to abuse from an employer. On the other hand, if I didn't like working those extra hours without pay, I could find some other job that paid hourly. I certainly wouldn't have double coached (in the same season) any other sport other than volleyball. But I enjoy it, so I do it- no one else was going to.
That was more of a generic "you." I believe technically I should have written "one and one's employer," but that just sounds strange. But yeah, my problem with capitalism isn't the relationship between workers, or between workers and government. It's the relationship between workers and capital, the latter of which is largely represented by large corporations these days. With all the overtime exemptions, salaried work is open to abuse from employers. Of course, hourly work can result in stuff like McDonald's budget advice for its employees that made the rounds a while back. http://www.nasdaq.com/article/mcdonalds-sample-budget-sheet-is-laughable-but-its-implications-are-not-cm261920
Basically, the reality is that most people can't change jobs easily, and employers leverage this into things such as squeezing more work out of salaried employees or squeezing hourly wages down. When people are working at minimum wage, wealth is generated, and both the employees and employers get some of it, but the employees are getting so little that they can't actually live on it. My original comment is that capitalism is how the employers (the large corporations and the people who benefit the most from their behavior) morally justify the situation where a significant portion of Americans don't have the option of exchanging their labor for what it's really worth, much less the option of gaining some share of the value their labor creates when they're part of a larger organization.
The alternative, that human labor is not actually worth enough for a human to live on, has implications that I'm pretty sure this thread has discussed already in the form of discussing UBI.
If your labor is actually worth more than you're being paid for, you really shouldn't have much trouble switching employers or roles... managers hate losing hard-to-replace employees as much as employees hate managers treating them poorly--remember, in most workplace scenarios your manager has their manager is who is expecting them to deliver results. Pushing out underpaid employees means you're probably going to have to hire a properly paid one to replace him (i.e. is not in your manager's interest), and the new hire search plus ramp-up process makes it harder for the manager to meet their own goals.
The places that consistently "mistreat" employees (rather than merely have poor managers) usually make up for it with higher pay, and that's true all along the salary scale. At the low end, Amazon works its warehouse employees notoriously hard, but they also pay better than the competition for similarly credentialed employees. My wife went to a very competitive business school for her MBA, and the same dynamic is true there too--even though the pay is much higher for employees in that pool. Investment banks and big name consulting firms pay the best, but make you work/travel for 70+ hours/wk. Corporate management positions generally pay less, but give better work/life balance. I'm simplifying things a bit, but the rule is generally true. You should generally know what you're getting yourself into when you're hired.
In cases where a manager suddenly changes hours (or other) expectations without an accompanying pay bump, it's more likely to be a symptom of incompetent management (or unfortunate market conditions maybe) trying to save its ass than something fundamentally wrong with capitalism, and it's not like switching to a communist society fixes either of those problems. In China for example, the non-market sectors are often run by production targets set by the government. When the targets aren't being met, what do you think happens? Often, the managers grind their employees to work more hours. It's really not any different than what happens here. Management errors (e.g. unrealistic targets in this case but there's a million ways to be a poor manager) are more often than not going to get pushed down the hierarchy. It's just human nature unfortunately.
At least a market system has a mechanism to punish bad managers (i.e. failure) instead subsidizing it until the government reforms or collapses (which takes much longer and is much less desirable for a government than it is for a private company).
On November 13 2017 14:07 Slaughter wrote: Yea well the glorification of the US and Capitalism has taught people to be selfish because everyone should be/are selfish. So people really don't give a fuck about things like that and just say "them's the breaks I was lucky that time"
This appears to be based on a fundamental misunderstanding of capitalism. Capitalism is how we entice selfish people to contribute to the rest of society.
Capitalism is how selfish people provide moral justification for the accumulation of wealth at the expense of society.
Why is wealth accumulation by default at the expense of society? Theoretically we are freely exchanging goods (or labour in order to get goods) that we have a surplus and couldn't use anyways. If we are generating wealth and I get what I want and you get what you want in an exchange that we are reasonably happy why would that be at the expense of each other?
What planet is this happening on?
Right here, right now. It's called job specialization. I work at a particular job, but I can't be bothered to fix my own car, so I pay someone else to do so. I gain because I don't have time to learn to fix my car (not have I invested in all the tools needed), and so I benefit from his labour. I'm salaried, so my potential earnings is limited unless I hustle on the side. But if that mechanic does well and is able to hire a bunch of journeymen mechanics and/or apprentices and double the income that I make, hell if he makes ten times what I make, I still haven't lost anything. I still get my car fixed, freeing up my time to do something else. And he gets my money, plus a bunch of other customer's money. And the journeymen mechanics are gainfully employed and may well strike out on their own if they are sufficiently enterprising. There's no loss to me, if I get what I want for a reasonable price, and they got rich. I got what I wanted, and I can focus my labour elsewhere.
It's all very nice looking at the relationship between two laborers, but how about the relationship between you and your employer? If your employer starts giving you 10 more hours of work a week with no compensation, that's fine because value is still being created? I'd call that your employer generating value at your expense.
Well, I teach, so it's not so much that I'm given more hours, so much as I take on more hours. But the public will never want to pay sufficient money to compensate my out of class hours, even if I am (as I am currently) coaching two volleyball teams and am the athletic director on top of full time teaching.
But teaching is weird in that it relies upon tax money, in full or in part, so it isn't exactly free market (even our private schools have 50% government funding for the students, though nothing for capital expenses). Salaried work is weird in general, as I suppose it is more open to abuse from an employer. On the other hand, if I didn't like working those extra hours without pay, I could find some other job that paid hourly. I certainly wouldn't have double coached (in the same season) any other sport other than volleyball. But I enjoy it, so I do it- no one else was going to.
That was more of a generic "you." I believe technically I should have written "one and one's employer," but that just sounds strange. But yeah, my problem with capitalism isn't the relationship between workers, or between workers and government. It's the relationship between workers and capital, the latter of which is largely represented by large corporations these days. With all the overtime exemptions, salaried work is open to abuse from employers. Of course, hourly work can result in stuff like McDonald's budget advice for its employees that made the rounds a while back. http://www.nasdaq.com/article/mcdonalds-sample-budget-sheet-is-laughable-but-its-implications-are-not-cm261920
Basically, the reality is that most people can't change jobs easily, and employers leverage this into things such as squeezing more work out of salaried employees or squeezing hourly wages down. When people are working at minimum wage, wealth is generated, and both the employees and employers get some of it, but the employees are getting so little that they can't actually live on it. My original comment is that capitalism is how the employers (the large corporations and the people who benefit the most from their behavior) morally justify the situation where a significant portion of Americans don't have the option of exchanging their labor for what it's really worth, much less the option of gaining some share of the value their labor creates when they're part of a larger organization.
The alternative, that human labor is not actually worth enough for a human to live on, has implications that I'm pretty sure this thread has discussed already in the form of discussing UBI.
If your labor is actually worth more than you're being paid for, you really shouldn't have much trouble switching employers or roles... managers hate losing hard-to-replace employees as much as employees hate managers treating them poorly--remember, in most workplace scenarios your manager has their manager is who is expecting them to deliver results. Pushing out underpaid employees means you're probably going to have to hire a properly paid one to replace him (i.e. is not in your manager's interest), and the new hire search plus ramp-up process makes it harder for the manager to meet their own goals.
The places that consistently "mistreat" employees (rather than merely have poor managers) usually make up for it with higher pay, and that's true all along the salary scale. At the low end, Amazon works its warehouse employees notoriously hard, but they also pay better than the competition for similarly credentialed employees. My wife went to a very competitive business school for her MBA, and the same dynamic is true there too--even though the pay is much higher for employees in that pool. Investment banks and big name consulting firms pay the best, but make you work/travel for 70+ hours/wk. Corporate management positions generally pay less, but give better work/life balance. I'm simplifying things a bit, but the rule is generally true. You should generally know what you're getting yourself into when you're hired.
In cases where a manager suddenly changes hours (or other) expectations without an accompanying pay bump, it's more likely to be a symptom of incompetent management (or unfortunate market conditions maybe) trying to save its ass than something fundamentally wrong with capitalism, and it's not like switching to a communist society fixes either of those problems. In China for example, the non-market sectors are often run by production targets set by the government. When the targets aren't being met, what do you think happens? Often, the managers grind their employees to work more hours. It's really not any different than what happens here. Management errors (e.g. unrealistic targets in this case but there's a million ways to be a poor manager) are more often than not going to get pushed down the hierarchy. It's just human nature unfortunately.
At least a market system has a mechanism to punish bad managers (i.e. failure) instead subsidizing it until the government reforms or collapses (which takes much longer and is much less desirable for a government than it is for a private company).
I guess I wasn't clear enough. I am stating that either all minimum wage employees are paid less per hour than their labor is actually worth, or the value of basic human labor has fallen below the cost of living. As for places that mistreat their employees, there's a sliding scale from how EA used to treat its software developers to how Google treats its software developers.
For salaried positions, basically, if it's easier for the employer to replace the worker than it is for the worker to find a new job, the employer can in some fashion abuse the worker. Someone discussed this a while back (probably thousands of pages now), but in the pressure between what the employer wants and what the employee wants, what is at stake for companies over 100 employees is in no way comparable to what is at stake for the employee. Many companies can afford to have an employee quit and not replace them for six months. Most workers can't afford to spend six months out of work without unemployment insurance, which they usually don't get for quitting. This gives the employer a lot of advantages when it comes to failing to give an employee a raise or dumping some extra work on an employee and basically saying "suck it up, you can't afford to quit right now."
This isn't even getting into companies like Uber, which are basically doing an end run around all sorts of employee protections by pushing all of the operating costs and risks on the workers.
Income inequality is at Gilded Age levels. Last time this happened, workers literally ended up fighting a small scale war against employers to gain the rights that have since been slowly eroded as large corporations have lobbied for things like the overtime exemptions or found ways to avoid having to treat employees properly. Capitalism these days is used as a moral justification for the way in which worker rights have been eroded and worker pay has been ground down.
The tl;dr here is that people are using the idea that unfettered capitalism and the results thereof is a good unto itself to provide moral standing for levels of inequality and the naturally following ill treatment of the lower class which people gave their lives fighting against a hundred and forty years ago. Given that capitalism has now led us to this point in our history for the second time in under 150 years, I'm arguing that capitalism as a concept is how the successful selfish convince the rest of society to accept exploitation.
He was also recently accused of doing this in his wheelchair, to which his wife gave an eyeroll to him.
Roslyn Corrigan was sixteen years old when she got a chance to meet George H.W. Bush, excited to be introduced to a former president having grown up dreaming of going into politics.
But Corrigan was crushed by her encounter: Bush, then 79 years old, groped her buttocks at a November 2003 event in The Woodlands, Texas, office of the Central Intelligence Agency where Corrigan’s father gathered with fellow intelligence officers and family members to meet Bush, Corrigan said. Corrigan is the sixth woman since Oct. 24 to accuse Bush publicly of grabbing her buttocks without consent.
I wasn't, just a bit of light humor on a day of fairly depressing new stories.
Out of curiousity, what's your opinion GW Bush's presidency these days? Iirc you still liked him a lot during Obama's term.
He presaged Obama's misuse of executive authority by misusing TARP. He was too obsessed with nation building in Iraq. He was a walking example of selling out his conservative base on immigration reform. He couldn't articulate conservative policy positions in a clear and understandable way, so the collection of values and ideas just took on what the opposition wanted to call it. I see a lot of what Trump was elected to try to correct about the GOP in him, but not as much as say Senator McCain, Flake, Collins, or Cochran. He's a really mixed bag, though I still think he made a better president than his successor.
EDIT: As an afterthought, his recent participation in politics has been pretty dumb.
On November 14 2017 03:43 Buckyman wrote: ...or Alabama collectively considers the pedophilia allegations to be Fake News™. ...or Alabama holds strongly the view that the accused is innocent until proven guilty. ...or they think Doug Jones has done something even worse. ...or after Bill Clinton's shining example they no longer think sexual misconduct should disqualify someone from holding office.
I think there's a bit of a difference between what he allegedly did and getting a blowjob from a (I presume?) consenting adult
monica lewinsky isn't the big bill clinton scandal anymore. He is fully established as a predator-rapist in right wing circles, and I think there actually seems to be quite some meat on the bone of that accusation. The issue is more the idea that Bill's past transgressions in any way justify electing a sexual predator today than the claim that Bill is a sexual predator. He left office 17 years ago.
Democrats voted the woman that threatened and covered up the rape accusers to the 2016 Democratic party nominee.
Pretty fucked up if you ask me. I wouldn't vote Moore, but damn if they know the political double standard present.
Hillary's actions towards Broderick, even if fully accepting them, cannot in be equated with that of Moore, Bill Clinton, or even the self admitted ones from Donald Trump. Completely unfair comparison.
If you can vote for a woman that will cover up, threaten into silence, and destroy the credibility of rape victims so her husband can offend again, you're nine tenths of the way there as far as I'm concerned.
Hey look you repeated a false claim for which you have not and cannot provide support.
Do you think Joe Biden acts inappropriately around young female children and/or women in general?
I had never heard of this before but I looked up the Sessions video and I’m not totally clear on it. I remember a video of Biden putting his hands on someone’s wife’s shoulders. So it could be just some type of shoulder and arm contact that he does. But if he’s a pedophile he should be tarred and feathered and then locked in jail.
Assuming this is really the first you've heard of Biden being creepy af around all women here's a compilation focused on children.
Some I wouldn't say are creepy on their own but as part of a pattern they definitely are, and some would seem completely innocent if he wasn't so overwhelmingly creepy. There's one with a red haired girl where the picture went pretty viral that's shown in the compilation (1:40) that while I couldn't say I am definitely hearing what the comment section suggests he says, everything about their body language supports it.
While I can't dispute whether this was something you previously knew, I have to say that it takes a bit of willful ignorance to have been unaware of any of this (though understandably not all).
/twitter thread
He's creepy as fuck. I wouldn't go so far as to say sexual predator like the collector here, but watch for yourself.
This appears to be based on a fundamental misunderstanding of capitalism. Capitalism is how we entice selfish people to contribute to the rest of society.
Capitalism is how selfish people provide moral justification for the accumulation of wealth at the expense of society.
Why is wealth accumulation by default at the expense of society? Theoretically we are freely exchanging goods (or labour in order to get goods) that we have a surplus and couldn't use anyways. If we are generating wealth and I get what I want and you get what you want in an exchange that we are reasonably happy why would that be at the expense of each other?
What planet is this happening on?
Right here, right now. It's called job specialization. I work at a particular job, but I can't be bothered to fix my own car, so I pay someone else to do so. I gain because I don't have time to learn to fix my car (not have I invested in all the tools needed), and so I benefit from his labour. I'm salaried, so my potential earnings is limited unless I hustle on the side. But if that mechanic does well and is able to hire a bunch of journeymen mechanics and/or apprentices and double the income that I make, hell if he makes ten times what I make, I still haven't lost anything. I still get my car fixed, freeing up my time to do something else. And he gets my money, plus a bunch of other customer's money. And the journeymen mechanics are gainfully employed and may well strike out on their own if they are sufficiently enterprising. There's no loss to me, if I get what I want for a reasonable price, and they got rich. I got what I wanted, and I can focus my labour elsewhere.
It's all very nice looking at the relationship between two laborers, but how about the relationship between you and your employer? If your employer starts giving you 10 more hours of work a week with no compensation, that's fine because value is still being created? I'd call that your employer generating value at your expense.
Well, I teach, so it's not so much that I'm given more hours, so much as I take on more hours. But the public will never want to pay sufficient money to compensate my out of class hours, even if I am (as I am currently) coaching two volleyball teams and am the athletic director on top of full time teaching.
But teaching is weird in that it relies upon tax money, in full or in part, so it isn't exactly free market (even our private schools have 50% government funding for the students, though nothing for capital expenses). Salaried work is weird in general, as I suppose it is more open to abuse from an employer. On the other hand, if I didn't like working those extra hours without pay, I could find some other job that paid hourly. I certainly wouldn't have double coached (in the same season) any other sport other than volleyball. But I enjoy it, so I do it- no one else was going to.
That was more of a generic "you." I believe technically I should have written "one and one's employer," but that just sounds strange. But yeah, my problem with capitalism isn't the relationship between workers, or between workers and government. It's the relationship between workers and capital, the latter of which is largely represented by large corporations these days. With all the overtime exemptions, salaried work is open to abuse from employers. Of course, hourly work can result in stuff like McDonald's budget advice for its employees that made the rounds a while back. http://www.nasdaq.com/article/mcdonalds-sample-budget-sheet-is-laughable-but-its-implications-are-not-cm261920
Basically, the reality is that most people can't change jobs easily, and employers leverage this into things such as squeezing more work out of salaried employees or squeezing hourly wages down. When people are working at minimum wage, wealth is generated, and both the employees and employers get some of it, but the employees are getting so little that they can't actually live on it. My original comment is that capitalism is how the employers (the large corporations and the people who benefit the most from their behavior) morally justify the situation where a significant portion of Americans don't have the option of exchanging their labor for what it's really worth, much less the option of gaining some share of the value their labor creates when they're part of a larger organization.
The alternative, that human labor is not actually worth enough for a human to live on, has implications that I'm pretty sure this thread has discussed already in the form of discussing UBI.
If your labor is actually worth more than you're being paid for, you really shouldn't have much trouble switching employers or roles... managers hate losing hard-to-replace employees as much as employees hate managers treating them poorly--remember, in most workplace scenarios your manager has their manager is who is expecting them to deliver results. Pushing out underpaid employees means you're probably going to have to hire a properly paid one to replace him (i.e. is not in your manager's interest), and the new hire search plus ramp-up process makes it harder for the manager to meet their own goals.
The places that consistently "mistreat" employees (rather than merely have poor managers) usually make up for it with higher pay, and that's true all along the salary scale. At the low end, Amazon works its warehouse employees notoriously hard, but they also pay better than the competition for similarly credentialed employees. My wife went to a very competitive business school for her MBA, and the same dynamic is true there too--even though the pay is much higher for employees in that pool. Investment banks and big name consulting firms pay the best, but make you work/travel for 70+ hours/wk. Corporate management positions generally pay less, but give better work/life balance. I'm simplifying things a bit, but the rule is generally true. You should generally know what you're getting yourself into when you're hired.
In cases where a manager suddenly changes hours (or other) expectations without an accompanying pay bump, it's more likely to be a symptom of incompetent management (or unfortunate market conditions maybe) trying to save its ass than something fundamentally wrong with capitalism, and it's not like switching to a communist society fixes either of those problems. In China for example, the non-market sectors are often run by production targets set by the government. When the targets aren't being met, what do you think happens? Often, the managers grind their employees to work more hours. It's really not any different than what happens here. Management errors (e.g. unrealistic targets in this case but there's a million ways to be a poor manager) are more often than not going to get pushed down the hierarchy. It's just human nature unfortunately.
At least a market system has a mechanism to punish bad managers (i.e. failure) instead subsidizing it until the government reforms or collapses (which takes much longer and is much less desirable for a government than it is for a private company).
I guess I wasn't clear enough. I am stating that either all minimum wage employees are paid less per hour than their labor is actually worth, or the value of basic human labor has fallen below the cost of living. As for places that mistreat their employees, there's a sliding scale from how EA used to treat its software developers to how Google treats its software developers.
For salaried positions, basically, if it's easier for the employer to replace the worker than it is for the worker to find a new job, the employer can in some fashion abuse the worker. Someone discussed this a while back (probably thousands of pages now), but in the pressure between what the employer wants and what the employee wants, what is at stake for companies over 100 employees is in no way comparable to what is at stake for the employee. Many companies can afford to have an employee quit and not replace them for six months. Most workers can't afford to spend six months out of work without unemployment insurance, which they usually don't get for quitting. This gives the employer a lot of advantages when it comes to failing to give an employee a raise or dumping some extra work on an employee and basically saying "suck it up, you can't afford to quit right now."
This isn't even getting into companies like Uber, which are basically doing an end run around all sorts of employee protections by pushing all of the operating costs and risks on the workers.
Income inequality is at Gilded Age levels. Last time this happened, workers literally ended up fighting a small scale war against employers to gain the rights that have since been slowly eroded as large corporations have lobbied for things like the overtime exemptions or found ways to avoid having to treat employees properly. Capitalism these days is used as a moral justification for the way in which worker rights have been eroded and worker pay has been ground down.
The tl;dr here is that people are using the idea that unfettered capitalism and the results thereof is a good unto itself to provide moral standing for levels of inequality and the naturally following ill treatment of the lower class which people gave their lives fighting against a hundred and forty years ago. Given that capitalism has now led us to this point in our history for the second time in under 150 years, I'm arguing that capitalism as a concept is how the successful selfish convince the rest of society to accept exploitation.
There is absolutely no point in talking to people like mozoku. They will always repeat the same nonsense in response to what you're saying. Market this, market that, etc. They refuse to acknowledge any and all imbalances and the reality that many people live in.
On November 13 2017 15:40 Kyadytim wrote: [quote] Capitalism is how selfish people provide moral justification for the accumulation of wealth at the expense of society.
Why is wealth accumulation by default at the expense of society? Theoretically we are freely exchanging goods (or labour in order to get goods) that we have a surplus and couldn't use anyways. If we are generating wealth and I get what I want and you get what you want in an exchange that we are reasonably happy why would that be at the expense of each other?
What planet is this happening on?
Right here, right now. It's called job specialization. I work at a particular job, but I can't be bothered to fix my own car, so I pay someone else to do so. I gain because I don't have time to learn to fix my car (not have I invested in all the tools needed), and so I benefit from his labour. I'm salaried, so my potential earnings is limited unless I hustle on the side. But if that mechanic does well and is able to hire a bunch of journeymen mechanics and/or apprentices and double the income that I make, hell if he makes ten times what I make, I still haven't lost anything. I still get my car fixed, freeing up my time to do something else. And he gets my money, plus a bunch of other customer's money. And the journeymen mechanics are gainfully employed and may well strike out on their own if they are sufficiently enterprising. There's no loss to me, if I get what I want for a reasonable price, and they got rich. I got what I wanted, and I can focus my labour elsewhere.
It's all very nice looking at the relationship between two laborers, but how about the relationship between you and your employer? If your employer starts giving you 10 more hours of work a week with no compensation, that's fine because value is still being created? I'd call that your employer generating value at your expense.
Well, I teach, so it's not so much that I'm given more hours, so much as I take on more hours. But the public will never want to pay sufficient money to compensate my out of class hours, even if I am (as I am currently) coaching two volleyball teams and am the athletic director on top of full time teaching.
But teaching is weird in that it relies upon tax money, in full or in part, so it isn't exactly free market (even our private schools have 50% government funding for the students, though nothing for capital expenses). Salaried work is weird in general, as I suppose it is more open to abuse from an employer. On the other hand, if I didn't like working those extra hours without pay, I could find some other job that paid hourly. I certainly wouldn't have double coached (in the same season) any other sport other than volleyball. But I enjoy it, so I do it- no one else was going to.
That was more of a generic "you." I believe technically I should have written "one and one's employer," but that just sounds strange. But yeah, my problem with capitalism isn't the relationship between workers, or between workers and government. It's the relationship between workers and capital, the latter of which is largely represented by large corporations these days. With all the overtime exemptions, salaried work is open to abuse from employers. Of course, hourly work can result in stuff like McDonald's budget advice for its employees that made the rounds a while back. http://www.nasdaq.com/article/mcdonalds-sample-budget-sheet-is-laughable-but-its-implications-are-not-cm261920
Basically, the reality is that most people can't change jobs easily, and employers leverage this into things such as squeezing more work out of salaried employees or squeezing hourly wages down. When people are working at minimum wage, wealth is generated, and both the employees and employers get some of it, but the employees are getting so little that they can't actually live on it. My original comment is that capitalism is how the employers (the large corporations and the people who benefit the most from their behavior) morally justify the situation where a significant portion of Americans don't have the option of exchanging their labor for what it's really worth, much less the option of gaining some share of the value their labor creates when they're part of a larger organization.
The alternative, that human labor is not actually worth enough for a human to live on, has implications that I'm pretty sure this thread has discussed already in the form of discussing UBI.
If your labor is actually worth more than you're being paid for, you really shouldn't have much trouble switching employers or roles... managers hate losing hard-to-replace employees as much as employees hate managers treating them poorly--remember, in most workplace scenarios your manager has their manager is who is expecting them to deliver results. Pushing out underpaid employees means you're probably going to have to hire a properly paid one to replace him (i.e. is not in your manager's interest), and the new hire search plus ramp-up process makes it harder for the manager to meet their own goals.
The places that consistently "mistreat" employees (rather than merely have poor managers) usually make up for it with higher pay, and that's true all along the salary scale. At the low end, Amazon works its warehouse employees notoriously hard, but they also pay better than the competition for similarly credentialed employees. My wife went to a very competitive business school for her MBA, and the same dynamic is true there too--even though the pay is much higher for employees in that pool. Investment banks and big name consulting firms pay the best, but make you work/travel for 70+ hours/wk. Corporate management positions generally pay less, but give better work/life balance. I'm simplifying things a bit, but the rule is generally true. You should generally know what you're getting yourself into when you're hired.
In cases where a manager suddenly changes hours (or other) expectations without an accompanying pay bump, it's more likely to be a symptom of incompetent management (or unfortunate market conditions maybe) trying to save its ass than something fundamentally wrong with capitalism, and it's not like switching to a communist society fixes either of those problems. In China for example, the non-market sectors are often run by production targets set by the government. When the targets aren't being met, what do you think happens? Often, the managers grind their employees to work more hours. It's really not any different than what happens here. Management errors (e.g. unrealistic targets in this case but there's a million ways to be a poor manager) are more often than not going to get pushed down the hierarchy. It's just human nature unfortunately.
At least a market system has a mechanism to punish bad managers (i.e. failure) instead subsidizing it until the government reforms or collapses (which takes much longer and is much less desirable for a government than it is for a private company).
I guess I wasn't clear enough. I am stating that either all minimum wage employees are paid less per hour than their labor is actually worth, or the value of basic human labor has fallen below the cost of living. As for places that mistreat their employees, there's a sliding scale from how EA used to treat its software developers to how Google treats its software developers.
For salaried positions, basically, if it's easier for the employer to replace the worker than it is for the worker to find a new job, the employer can in some fashion abuse the worker. Someone discussed this a while back (probably thousands of pages now), but in the pressure between what the employer wants and what the employee wants, what is at stake for companies over 100 employees is in no way comparable to what is at stake for the employee. Many companies can afford to have an employee quit and not replace them for six months. Most workers can't afford to spend six months out of work without unemployment insurance, which they usually don't get for quitting. This gives the employer a lot of advantages when it comes to failing to give an employee a raise or dumping some extra work on an employee and basically saying "suck it up, you can't afford to quit right now."
This isn't even getting into companies like Uber, which are basically doing an end run around all sorts of employee protections by pushing all of the operating costs and risks on the workers.
Income inequality is at Gilded Age levels. Last time this happened, workers literally ended up fighting a small scale war against employers to gain the rights that have since been slowly eroded as large corporations have lobbied for things like the overtime exemptions or found ways to avoid having to treat employees properly. Capitalism these days is used as a moral justification for the way in which worker rights have been eroded and worker pay has been ground down.
The tl;dr here is that people are using the idea that unfettered capitalism and the results thereof is a good unto itself to provide moral standing for levels of inequality and the naturally following ill treatment of the lower class which people gave their lives fighting against a hundred and forty years ago. Given that capitalism has now led us to this point in our history for the second time in under 150 years, I'm arguing that capitalism as a concept is how the successful selfish convince the rest of society to accept exploitation.
There is absolutely no point in talking to people like mozoku. They will always repeat the same nonsense in response to what you're saying. Market this, market that, etc. They refuse to acknowledge the imbalances and the reality that many people live in.
I'd probably have a conversation in person with mozoku. It just takes too much effort in a forum context because he's basically uneducated.
On November 13 2017 15:40 Kyadytim wrote: [quote] Capitalism is how selfish people provide moral justification for the accumulation of wealth at the expense of society.
Why is wealth accumulation by default at the expense of society? Theoretically we are freely exchanging goods (or labour in order to get goods) that we have a surplus and couldn't use anyways. If we are generating wealth and I get what I want and you get what you want in an exchange that we are reasonably happy why would that be at the expense of each other?
What planet is this happening on?
Right here, right now. It's called job specialization. I work at a particular job, but I can't be bothered to fix my own car, so I pay someone else to do so. I gain because I don't have time to learn to fix my car (not have I invested in all the tools needed), and so I benefit from his labour. I'm salaried, so my potential earnings is limited unless I hustle on the side. But if that mechanic does well and is able to hire a bunch of journeymen mechanics and/or apprentices and double the income that I make, hell if he makes ten times what I make, I still haven't lost anything. I still get my car fixed, freeing up my time to do something else. And he gets my money, plus a bunch of other customer's money. And the journeymen mechanics are gainfully employed and may well strike out on their own if they are sufficiently enterprising. There's no loss to me, if I get what I want for a reasonable price, and they got rich. I got what I wanted, and I can focus my labour elsewhere.
It's all very nice looking at the relationship between two laborers, but how about the relationship between you and your employer? If your employer starts giving you 10 more hours of work a week with no compensation, that's fine because value is still being created? I'd call that your employer generating value at your expense.
Well, I teach, so it's not so much that I'm given more hours, so much as I take on more hours. But the public will never want to pay sufficient money to compensate my out of class hours, even if I am (as I am currently) coaching two volleyball teams and am the athletic director on top of full time teaching.
But teaching is weird in that it relies upon tax money, in full or in part, so it isn't exactly free market (even our private schools have 50% government funding for the students, though nothing for capital expenses). Salaried work is weird in general, as I suppose it is more open to abuse from an employer. On the other hand, if I didn't like working those extra hours without pay, I could find some other job that paid hourly. I certainly wouldn't have double coached (in the same season) any other sport other than volleyball. But I enjoy it, so I do it- no one else was going to.
That was more of a generic "you." I believe technically I should have written "one and one's employer," but that just sounds strange. But yeah, my problem with capitalism isn't the relationship between workers, or between workers and government. It's the relationship between workers and capital, the latter of which is largely represented by large corporations these days. With all the overtime exemptions, salaried work is open to abuse from employers. Of course, hourly work can result in stuff like McDonald's budget advice for its employees that made the rounds a while back. http://www.nasdaq.com/article/mcdonalds-sample-budget-sheet-is-laughable-but-its-implications-are-not-cm261920
Basically, the reality is that most people can't change jobs easily, and employers leverage this into things such as squeezing more work out of salaried employees or squeezing hourly wages down. When people are working at minimum wage, wealth is generated, and both the employees and employers get some of it, but the employees are getting so little that they can't actually live on it. My original comment is that capitalism is how the employers (the large corporations and the people who benefit the most from their behavior) morally justify the situation where a significant portion of Americans don't have the option of exchanging their labor for what it's really worth, much less the option of gaining some share of the value their labor creates when they're part of a larger organization.
The alternative, that human labor is not actually worth enough for a human to live on, has implications that I'm pretty sure this thread has discussed already in the form of discussing UBI.
If your labor is actually worth more than you're being paid for, you really shouldn't have much trouble switching employers or roles... managers hate losing hard-to-replace employees as much as employees hate managers treating them poorly--remember, in most workplace scenarios your manager has their manager is who is expecting them to deliver results. Pushing out underpaid employees means you're probably going to have to hire a properly paid one to replace him (i.e. is not in your manager's interest), and the new hire search plus ramp-up process makes it harder for the manager to meet their own goals.
The places that consistently "mistreat" employees (rather than merely have poor managers) usually make up for it with higher pay, and that's true all along the salary scale. At the low end, Amazon works its warehouse employees notoriously hard, but they also pay better than the competition for similarly credentialed employees. My wife went to a very competitive business school for her MBA, and the same dynamic is true there too--even though the pay is much higher for employees in that pool. Investment banks and big name consulting firms pay the best, but make you work/travel for 70+ hours/wk. Corporate management positions generally pay less, but give better work/life balance. I'm simplifying things a bit, but the rule is generally true. You should generally know what you're getting yourself into when you're hired.
In cases where a manager suddenly changes hours (or other) expectations without an accompanying pay bump, it's more likely to be a symptom of incompetent management (or unfortunate market conditions maybe) trying to save its ass than something fundamentally wrong with capitalism, and it's not like switching to a communist society fixes either of those problems. In China for example, the non-market sectors are often run by production targets set by the government. When the targets aren't being met, what do you think happens? Often, the managers grind their employees to work more hours. It's really not any different than what happens here. Management errors (e.g. unrealistic targets in this case but there's a million ways to be a poor manager) are more often than not going to get pushed down the hierarchy. It's just human nature unfortunately.
At least a market system has a mechanism to punish bad managers (i.e. failure) instead subsidizing it until the government reforms or collapses (which takes much longer and is much less desirable for a government than it is for a private company).
I guess I wasn't clear enough. I am stating that either all minimum wage employees are paid less per hour than their labor is actually worth, or the value of basic human labor has fallen below the cost of living. As for places that mistreat their employees, there's a sliding scale from how EA used to treat its software developers to how Google treats its software developers.
For salaried positions, basically, if it's easier for the employer to replace the worker than it is for the worker to find a new job, the employer can in some fashion abuse the worker. Someone discussed this a while back (probably thousands of pages now), but in the pressure between what the employer wants and what the employee wants, what is at stake for companies over 100 employees is in no way comparable to what is at stake for the employee. Many companies can afford to have an employee quit and not replace them for six months. Most workers can't afford to spend six months out of work without unemployment insurance, which they usually don't get for quitting. This gives the employer a lot of advantages when it comes to failing to give an employee a raise or dumping some extra work on an employee and basically saying "suck it up, you can't afford to quit right now."
This isn't even getting into companies like Uber, which are basically doing an end run around all sorts of employee protections by pushing all of the operating costs and risks on the workers.
Income inequality is at Gilded Age levels. Last time this happened, workers literally ended up fighting a small scale war against employers to gain the rights that have since been slowly eroded as large corporations have lobbied for things like the overtime exemptions or found ways to avoid having to treat employees properly. Capitalism these days is used as a moral justification for the way in which worker rights have been eroded and worker pay has been ground down.
The tl;dr here is that people are using the idea that unfettered capitalism and the results thereof is a good unto itself to provide moral standing for levels of inequality and the naturally following ill treatment of the lower class which people gave their lives fighting against a hundred and forty years ago. Given that capitalism has now led us to this point in our history for the second time in under 150 years, I'm arguing that capitalism as a concept is how the successful selfish convince the rest of society to accept exploitation.
There is absolutely no point in talking to people like mozoku. They will always repeat the same nonsense in response to what you're saying. Market this, market that, etc. They refuse to acknowledge any and all imbalances and the reality that many people live in.
I saw a response to my post and just assumed that it was Falling replying to me without actually checking who had posted.
This appears to be based on a fundamental misunderstanding of capitalism. Capitalism is how we entice selfish people to contribute to the rest of society.
Capitalism is how selfish people provide moral justification for the accumulation of wealth at the expense of society.
Why is wealth accumulation by default at the expense of society? Theoretically we are freely exchanging goods (or labour in order to get goods) that we have a surplus and couldn't use anyways. If we are generating wealth and I get what I want and you get what you want in an exchange that we are reasonably happy why would that be at the expense of each other?
What planet is this happening on?
Right here, right now. It's called job specialization. I work at a particular job, but I can't be bothered to fix my own car, so I pay someone else to do so. I gain because I don't have time to learn to fix my car (not have I invested in all the tools needed), and so I benefit from his labour. I'm salaried, so my potential earnings is limited unless I hustle on the side. But if that mechanic does well and is able to hire a bunch of journeymen mechanics and/or apprentices and double the income that I make, hell if he makes ten times what I make, I still haven't lost anything. I still get my car fixed, freeing up my time to do something else. And he gets my money, plus a bunch of other customer's money. And the journeymen mechanics are gainfully employed and may well strike out on their own if they are sufficiently enterprising. There's no loss to me, if I get what I want for a reasonable price, and they got rich. I got what I wanted, and I can focus my labour elsewhere.
It's all very nice looking at the relationship between two laborers, but how about the relationship between you and your employer? If your employer starts giving you 10 more hours of work a week with no compensation, that's fine because value is still being created? I'd call that your employer generating value at your expense.
Well, I teach, so it's not so much that I'm given more hours, so much as I take on more hours. But the public will never want to pay sufficient money to compensate my out of class hours, even if I am (as I am currently) coaching two volleyball teams and am the athletic director on top of full time teaching.
But teaching is weird in that it relies upon tax money, in full or in part, so it isn't exactly free market (even our private schools have 50% government funding for the students, though nothing for capital expenses). Salaried work is weird in general, as I suppose it is more open to abuse from an employer. On the other hand, if I didn't like working those extra hours without pay, I could find some other job that paid hourly. I certainly wouldn't have double coached (in the same season) any other sport other than volleyball. But I enjoy it, so I do it- no one else was going to.
That was more of a generic "you." I believe technically I should have written "one and one's employer," but that just sounds strange. But yeah, my problem with capitalism isn't the relationship between workers, or between workers and government. It's the relationship between workers and capital, the latter of which is largely represented by large corporations these days. With all the overtime exemptions, salaried work is open to abuse from employers. Of course, hourly work can result in stuff like McDonald's budget advice for its employees that made the rounds a while back. http://www.nasdaq.com/article/mcdonalds-sample-budget-sheet-is-laughable-but-its-implications-are-not-cm261920
Basically, the reality is that most people can't change jobs easily, and employers leverage this into things such as squeezing more work out of salaried employees or squeezing hourly wages down. When people are working at minimum wage, wealth is generated, and both the employees and employers get some of it, but the employees are getting so little that they can't actually live on it. My original comment is that capitalism is how the employers (the large corporations and the people who benefit the most from their behavior) morally justify the situation where a significant portion of Americans don't have the option of exchanging their labor for what it's really worth, much less the option of gaining some share of the value their labor creates when they're part of a larger organization.
The alternative, that human labor is not actually worth enough for a human to live on, has implications that I'm pretty sure this thread has discussed already in the form of discussing UBI.
If your labor is actually worth more than you're being paid for, you really shouldn't have much trouble switching employers or roles... managers hate losing hard-to-replace employees as much as employees hate managers treating them poorly--remember, in most workplace scenarios your manager has their manager is who is expecting them to deliver results. Pushing out underpaid employees means you're probably going to have to hire a properly paid one to replace him (i.e. is not in your manager's interest), and the new hire search plus ramp-up process makes it harder for the manager to meet their own goals.
The places that consistently "mistreat" employees (rather than merely have poor managers) usually make up for it with higher pay, and that's true all along the salary scale. At the low end, Amazon works its warehouse employees notoriously hard, but they also pay better than the competition for similarly credentialed employees. My wife went to a very competitive business school for her MBA, and the same dynamic is true there too--even though the pay is much higher for employees in that pool. Investment banks and big name consulting firms pay the best, but make you work/travel for 70+ hours/wk. Corporate management positions generally pay less, but give better work/life balance. I'm simplifying things a bit, but the rule is generally true. You should generally know what you're getting yourself into when you're hired.
In cases where a manager suddenly changes hours (or other) expectations without an accompanying pay bump, it's more likely to be a symptom of incompetent management (or unfortunate market conditions maybe) trying to save its ass than something fundamentally wrong with capitalism, and it's not like switching to a communist society fixes either of those problems. In China for example, the non-market sectors are often run by production targets set by the government. When the targets aren't being met, what do you think happens? Often, the managers grind their employees to work more hours. It's really not any different than what happens here. Management errors (e.g. unrealistic targets in this case but there's a million ways to be a poor manager) are more often than not going to get pushed down the hierarchy. It's just human nature unfortunately.
At least a market system has a mechanism to punish bad managers (i.e. failure) instead subsidizing it until the government reforms or collapses (which takes much longer and is much less desirable for a government than it is for a private company).
I guess I wasn't clear enough. I am stating that either all minimum wage employees are paid less per hour than their labor is actually worth, or the value of basic human labor has fallen below the cost of living.
What you are actually seeing is a localized phenomenon (being localized in advanced countries). Because of trade & immigration, many minimum wage positions (and even higher level ones) in these economies are experiencing pressures that cause their value to converge with those in 3rd world countries. However, because there are soo many more 3rd world people than low-skill people in developed nations, cost of living in developed countries has not converged with that of undeveloped countries at nearly the same rate. This has actually happened in the US at times. The best example I can recall off the top of my head is the California gold rush. Far more people than were needed to pan gold came, and once the easy to get gold stopped existing, it was impossible for the average laborer to earn enough to justify living in the Sierra foothills because it was still expensive to get food & supplies there compared to the east coast/midwest.
On November 14 2017 03:43 Buckyman wrote: ...or Alabama collectively considers the pedophilia allegations to be Fake News™. ...or Alabama holds strongly the view that the accused is innocent until proven guilty. ...or they think Doug Jones has done something even worse. ...or after Bill Clinton's shining example they no longer think sexual misconduct should disqualify someone from holding office.
I think there's a bit of a difference between what he allegedly did and getting a blowjob from a (I presume?) consenting adult
monica lewinsky isn't the big bill clinton scandal anymore. He is fully established as a predator-rapist in right wing circles, and I think there actually seems to be quite some meat on the bone of that accusation. The issue is more the idea that Bill's past transgressions in any way justify electing a sexual predator today than the claim that Bill is a sexual predator. He left office 17 years ago.
Democrats voted the woman that threatened and covered up the rape accusers to the 2016 Democratic party nominee.
Pretty fucked up if you ask me. I wouldn't vote Moore, but damn if they know the political double standard present.
Hillary's actions towards Broderick, even if fully accepting them, cannot in be equated with that of Moore, Bill Clinton, or even the self admitted ones from Donald Trump. Completely unfair comparison.
If you can vote for a woman that will cover up, threaten into silence, and destroy the credibility of rape victims so her husband can offend again, you're nine tenths of the way there as far as I'm concerned.
Hey look you repeated a false claim for which you have not and cannot provide support.
Do you think Joe Biden acts inappropriately around young female children and/or women in general?
I had never heard of this before but I looked up the Sessions video and I’m not totally clear on it. I remember a video of Biden putting his hands on someone’s wife’s shoulders. So it could be just some type of shoulder and arm contact that he does. But if he’s a pedophile he should be tarred and feathered and then locked in jail.
Assuming this is really the first you've heard of Biden being creepy af around all women here's a compilation focused on children.
Some I wouldn't say are creepy on their own but as part of a pattern they definitely are, and some would seem completely innocent if he wasn't so overwhelmingly creepy. There's one with a red haired girl where the picture went pretty viral that's shown in the compilation (1:40) that while I couldn't say I am definitely hearing what the comment section suggests he says, everything about their body language supports it.
While I can't dispute whether this was something you previously knew, I have to say that it takes a bit of willful ignorance to have been unaware of any of this (though understandably not all).
It's actually really easy to be ignorant of this sort of thing. Viral doesn't mean "everyone's heard about it", it just means a lot of people have. Know Your Meme exists because people often encounter references to old memes they're unfamiliar with. Case in point, I'm in the "wait, when did creepy Biden become a thing?" crowd.
If Biden's done anything beyond creepy, or if anyone feels that their interactions with him were sufficiently disturbing to want an apology, that should totally come out. The only issue I have is with people pointing to Biden as a counterargument to Moore.
On November 13 2017 15:40 Kyadytim wrote: [quote] Capitalism is how selfish people provide moral justification for the accumulation of wealth at the expense of society.
Why is wealth accumulation by default at the expense of society? Theoretically we are freely exchanging goods (or labour in order to get goods) that we have a surplus and couldn't use anyways. If we are generating wealth and I get what I want and you get what you want in an exchange that we are reasonably happy why would that be at the expense of each other?
What planet is this happening on?
Right here, right now. It's called job specialization. I work at a particular job, but I can't be bothered to fix my own car, so I pay someone else to do so. I gain because I don't have time to learn to fix my car (not have I invested in all the tools needed), and so I benefit from his labour. I'm salaried, so my potential earnings is limited unless I hustle on the side. But if that mechanic does well and is able to hire a bunch of journeymen mechanics and/or apprentices and double the income that I make, hell if he makes ten times what I make, I still haven't lost anything. I still get my car fixed, freeing up my time to do something else. And he gets my money, plus a bunch of other customer's money. And the journeymen mechanics are gainfully employed and may well strike out on their own if they are sufficiently enterprising. There's no loss to me, if I get what I want for a reasonable price, and they got rich. I got what I wanted, and I can focus my labour elsewhere.
It's all very nice looking at the relationship between two laborers, but how about the relationship between you and your employer? If your employer starts giving you 10 more hours of work a week with no compensation, that's fine because value is still being created? I'd call that your employer generating value at your expense.
Well, I teach, so it's not so much that I'm given more hours, so much as I take on more hours. But the public will never want to pay sufficient money to compensate my out of class hours, even if I am (as I am currently) coaching two volleyball teams and am the athletic director on top of full time teaching.
But teaching is weird in that it relies upon tax money, in full or in part, so it isn't exactly free market (even our private schools have 50% government funding for the students, though nothing for capital expenses). Salaried work is weird in general, as I suppose it is more open to abuse from an employer. On the other hand, if I didn't like working those extra hours without pay, I could find some other job that paid hourly. I certainly wouldn't have double coached (in the same season) any other sport other than volleyball. But I enjoy it, so I do it- no one else was going to.
That was more of a generic "you." I believe technically I should have written "one and one's employer," but that just sounds strange. But yeah, my problem with capitalism isn't the relationship between workers, or between workers and government. It's the relationship between workers and capital, the latter of which is largely represented by large corporations these days. With all the overtime exemptions, salaried work is open to abuse from employers. Of course, hourly work can result in stuff like McDonald's budget advice for its employees that made the rounds a while back. http://www.nasdaq.com/article/mcdonalds-sample-budget-sheet-is-laughable-but-its-implications-are-not-cm261920
Basically, the reality is that most people can't change jobs easily, and employers leverage this into things such as squeezing more work out of salaried employees or squeezing hourly wages down. When people are working at minimum wage, wealth is generated, and both the employees and employers get some of it, but the employees are getting so little that they can't actually live on it. My original comment is that capitalism is how the employers (the large corporations and the people who benefit the most from their behavior) morally justify the situation where a significant portion of Americans don't have the option of exchanging their labor for what it's really worth, much less the option of gaining some share of the value their labor creates when they're part of a larger organization.
The alternative, that human labor is not actually worth enough for a human to live on, has implications that I'm pretty sure this thread has discussed already in the form of discussing UBI.
If your labor is actually worth more than you're being paid for, you really shouldn't have much trouble switching employers or roles... managers hate losing hard-to-replace employees as much as employees hate managers treating them poorly--remember, in most workplace scenarios your manager has their manager is who is expecting them to deliver results. Pushing out underpaid employees means you're probably going to have to hire a properly paid one to replace him (i.e. is not in your manager's interest), and the new hire search plus ramp-up process makes it harder for the manager to meet their own goals.
The places that consistently "mistreat" employees (rather than merely have poor managers) usually make up for it with higher pay, and that's true all along the salary scale. At the low end, Amazon works its warehouse employees notoriously hard, but they also pay better than the competition for similarly credentialed employees. My wife went to a very competitive business school for her MBA, and the same dynamic is true there too--even though the pay is much higher for employees in that pool. Investment banks and big name consulting firms pay the best, but make you work/travel for 70+ hours/wk. Corporate management positions generally pay less, but give better work/life balance. I'm simplifying things a bit, but the rule is generally true. You should generally know what you're getting yourself into when you're hired.
In cases where a manager suddenly changes hours (or other) expectations without an accompanying pay bump, it's more likely to be a symptom of incompetent management (or unfortunate market conditions maybe) trying to save its ass than something fundamentally wrong with capitalism, and it's not like switching to a communist society fixes either of those problems. In China for example, the non-market sectors are often run by production targets set by the government. When the targets aren't being met, what do you think happens? Often, the managers grind their employees to work more hours. It's really not any different than what happens here. Management errors (e.g. unrealistic targets in this case but there's a million ways to be a poor manager) are more often than not going to get pushed down the hierarchy. It's just human nature unfortunately.
At least a market system has a mechanism to punish bad managers (i.e. failure) instead subsidizing it until the government reforms or collapses (which takes much longer and is much less desirable for a government than it is for a private company).
I guess I wasn't clear enough. I am stating that either all minimum wage employees are paid less per hour than their labor is actually worth, or the value of basic human labor has fallen below the cost of living.
What you are actually seeing is a localized phenomenon (being localized in advanced countries). Because of trade & immigration, many minimum wage positions (and even higher level ones) in these economies are experiencing pressures that cause their value to converge with those in 3rd world countries. However, because there are soo many more 3rd world people than low-skill people in developed nations, cost of living in developed countries has not converged with that of undeveloped countries at nearly the same rate. This has actually happened in the US at times. The best example I can recall off the top of my head is the California gold rush. Far more people than were needed to pan gold came, and once the easy to get gold stopped existing, it was impossible for the average laborer to earn enough to justify living in the Sierra foothills because it was still expensive to get food & supplies there compared to the east coast/midwest.
I definitely disagree that service industry employees are competing with people in other nations. People working jobs such as stocking shelves are only competing with people in their immediate area.
On November 13 2017 18:38 Falling wrote: [quote] Why is wealth accumulation by default at the expense of society? Theoretically we are freely exchanging goods (or labour in order to get goods) that we have a surplus and couldn't use anyways. If we are generating wealth and I get what I want and you get what you want in an exchange that we are reasonably happy why would that be at the expense of each other?
What planet is this happening on?
Right here, right now. It's called job specialization. I work at a particular job, but I can't be bothered to fix my own car, so I pay someone else to do so. I gain because I don't have time to learn to fix my car (not have I invested in all the tools needed), and so I benefit from his labour. I'm salaried, so my potential earnings is limited unless I hustle on the side. But if that mechanic does well and is able to hire a bunch of journeymen mechanics and/or apprentices and double the income that I make, hell if he makes ten times what I make, I still haven't lost anything. I still get my car fixed, freeing up my time to do something else. And he gets my money, plus a bunch of other customer's money. And the journeymen mechanics are gainfully employed and may well strike out on their own if they are sufficiently enterprising. There's no loss to me, if I get what I want for a reasonable price, and they got rich. I got what I wanted, and I can focus my labour elsewhere.
It's all very nice looking at the relationship between two laborers, but how about the relationship between you and your employer? If your employer starts giving you 10 more hours of work a week with no compensation, that's fine because value is still being created? I'd call that your employer generating value at your expense.
Well, I teach, so it's not so much that I'm given more hours, so much as I take on more hours. But the public will never want to pay sufficient money to compensate my out of class hours, even if I am (as I am currently) coaching two volleyball teams and am the athletic director on top of full time teaching.
But teaching is weird in that it relies upon tax money, in full or in part, so it isn't exactly free market (even our private schools have 50% government funding for the students, though nothing for capital expenses). Salaried work is weird in general, as I suppose it is more open to abuse from an employer. On the other hand, if I didn't like working those extra hours without pay, I could find some other job that paid hourly. I certainly wouldn't have double coached (in the same season) any other sport other than volleyball. But I enjoy it, so I do it- no one else was going to.
That was more of a generic "you." I believe technically I should have written "one and one's employer," but that just sounds strange. But yeah, my problem with capitalism isn't the relationship between workers, or between workers and government. It's the relationship between workers and capital, the latter of which is largely represented by large corporations these days. With all the overtime exemptions, salaried work is open to abuse from employers. Of course, hourly work can result in stuff like McDonald's budget advice for its employees that made the rounds a while back. http://www.nasdaq.com/article/mcdonalds-sample-budget-sheet-is-laughable-but-its-implications-are-not-cm261920
Basically, the reality is that most people can't change jobs easily, and employers leverage this into things such as squeezing more work out of salaried employees or squeezing hourly wages down. When people are working at minimum wage, wealth is generated, and both the employees and employers get some of it, but the employees are getting so little that they can't actually live on it. My original comment is that capitalism is how the employers (the large corporations and the people who benefit the most from their behavior) morally justify the situation where a significant portion of Americans don't have the option of exchanging their labor for what it's really worth, much less the option of gaining some share of the value their labor creates when they're part of a larger organization.
The alternative, that human labor is not actually worth enough for a human to live on, has implications that I'm pretty sure this thread has discussed already in the form of discussing UBI.
If your labor is actually worth more than you're being paid for, you really shouldn't have much trouble switching employers or roles... managers hate losing hard-to-replace employees as much as employees hate managers treating them poorly--remember, in most workplace scenarios your manager has their manager is who is expecting them to deliver results. Pushing out underpaid employees means you're probably going to have to hire a properly paid one to replace him (i.e. is not in your manager's interest), and the new hire search plus ramp-up process makes it harder for the manager to meet their own goals.
The places that consistently "mistreat" employees (rather than merely have poor managers) usually make up for it with higher pay, and that's true all along the salary scale. At the low end, Amazon works its warehouse employees notoriously hard, but they also pay better than the competition for similarly credentialed employees. My wife went to a very competitive business school for her MBA, and the same dynamic is true there too--even though the pay is much higher for employees in that pool. Investment banks and big name consulting firms pay the best, but make you work/travel for 70+ hours/wk. Corporate management positions generally pay less, but give better work/life balance. I'm simplifying things a bit, but the rule is generally true. You should generally know what you're getting yourself into when you're hired.
In cases where a manager suddenly changes hours (or other) expectations without an accompanying pay bump, it's more likely to be a symptom of incompetent management (or unfortunate market conditions maybe) trying to save its ass than something fundamentally wrong with capitalism, and it's not like switching to a communist society fixes either of those problems. In China for example, the non-market sectors are often run by production targets set by the government. When the targets aren't being met, what do you think happens? Often, the managers grind their employees to work more hours. It's really not any different than what happens here. Management errors (e.g. unrealistic targets in this case but there's a million ways to be a poor manager) are more often than not going to get pushed down the hierarchy. It's just human nature unfortunately.
At least a market system has a mechanism to punish bad managers (i.e. failure) instead subsidizing it until the government reforms or collapses (which takes much longer and is much less desirable for a government than it is for a private company).
I guess I wasn't clear enough. I am stating that either all minimum wage employees are paid less per hour than their labor is actually worth, or the value of basic human labor has fallen below the cost of living.
What you are actually seeing is a localized phenomenon (being localized in advanced countries). Because of trade & immigration, many minimum wage positions (and even higher level ones) in these economies are experiencing pressures that cause their value to converge with those in 3rd world countries. However, because there are soo many more 3rd world people than low-skill people in developed nations, cost of living in developed countries has not converged with that of undeveloped countries at nearly the same rate. This has actually happened in the US at times. The best example I can recall off the top of my head is the California gold rush. Far more people than were needed to pan gold came, and once the easy to get gold stopped existing, it was impossible for the average laborer to earn enough to justify living in the Sierra foothills because it was still expensive to get food & supplies there compared to the east coast/midwest.
I definitely disagree that service industry employees are competing with people in other nations. People working jobs such as stocking shelves are only competing with people in their immediate area.
Maybe importing slaves people who are willing to take on jobs like that for the little pay it offers and are used to living in poverty in 3rd world countries has something to do with it.
![[image loading]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/6IL5u5U39Qo/maxresdefault.jpg)
I saw a response to my post and just assumed that it was Falling replying to me without actually checking who had posted. 
EPT
