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 04:01 Toadesstern wrote: [quote] 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.
There's enough in the video I posted where I wouldn't let him near a small child in my presence. You can see the kid's face in several clips show clear discomfort or even pulling away before he pulls him back in.
He's not a counter argument to Moore other than he answers how people somehow don't know about something that's happening right in front of them or rationalize/defend/make silly disclaimers.
None of those children need to put their whole lives on blast for the media and worry about whatever else pull a former VP, leading Democratic presidential candidate for 2020, and long time senator might have (to wreck you for trying to make a deal out of it) for me to see there was clearly something wrong with the way Biden behaved in those interactions.
That Democrats can watch that and think "But did anyone complain?" is exactly how this stuff is allowed to fester and much worse things go on when they aren't surrounded by media cameras.
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.
Actually, we know service employees are competing with those abroad, telemarketers, customer service, etc are all well known to have been outsourced. Plus, the service-manufacturing dichotomy is illusory, particularly for low skilled workers. You may not think a stocker in Boise competes with a seamstress in Cambodia, but he is. If that factory is in Boise, the factory would also be competing with the grocer to employ that stocker. This would drive the stocker's wage up significantly, but only marginally increase his cost of living.
On November 13 2017 18:56 GreenHorizons wrote: [quote]
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.
Nevermind, I'm just being a xenophobic racist.
Nah. Companies definitely import workers on work visas to pay less. The HB-1 program was discussed in this thread a while back. If I really had to attribute the problem somewhere, it's that Americans from generations after the baby boomers calibrated their expectations on what they saw growing up, and when corporations started to squeeze more value out of their workforce, pay fell below what Americans wanted for certain jobs. To phrase it another way, employers don't want to pay people the amount it takes to support the standard of living American's expect if they can find a way to avoid it.
It's a complex issue. Wages for a lot of jobs are unsustainably low, and Americans can tell at a glance that they're not going to be able to afford the quality of life they had growing up working at that wage, but at the same time they are used to the prices that come from companies forcing their labor costs down. As someone who puts the fault with the wealth disparity, I'd say that the problem's root is that the super wealthy have, by accident or design, shaped our economy into one that runs with the bare minimum of wealth circulating while extracting as much of it as possible into their own possession. There is enough wealth in this country to support higher prices for many goods and services, which in turn would support higher wages, but that wealth isn't circulating. It's stashed in airplane funds, complex financial products, offshore bank accounts, and such. Going back to my initial point again, capitalism is how those people with this wealth stashed in their coffers of choice justify this problem as the natural and good state of things.
EDIT: To give this some context, the Forbes 400 are worth a staggering 14.5% of the US GDP.
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. 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 14 2017 04:21 Liquid`Drone wrote: [quote]
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.
There's enough in the video I posted where I wouldn't let him near a small child in my presence. You can see the kid's face in several clips show clear discomfort or even pulling away before he pulls him back in.
He's not a counter argument to Moore other than he answers how people somehow don't know about something that's happening right in front of them or rationalize/defend/make silly disclaimers.
None of those children need to put their whole lives on blast for the media and worry about whatever else pull a former VP, leading Democratic presidential candidate for 2020, and long time senator might have (to wreck you for trying to make a deal out of it) for me to see there was clearly something wrong with the way Biden behaved in those interactions.
That Democrats can watch that and think "But did anyone complain?" is exactly how this stuff is allowed to fester and much worse things go on when they aren't surrounded by media cameras.
My point isn't "did anyone complain?" but "now's a good time to do something about this along with all the other creepy and/or predatory politicians". There's always reasons why people hold back (trauma, regret, self-loathing, fear etc.), and sometimes they didn't hold back but were never given the attention they deserved. Now just happens to be a fairly decent moment where people are listening and supporting victims of this sort of behavior.
The flipside of my point is I've seen people (not necessarily here) defending Moore by saying [insert some other sexual predator, preferably not a Republican] did bad things too. Hence why, "Sure, let's take care of them as well" is my response. I'm totally fine with bringing up other problematic or predatory individuals in addition to Moore (as opposed to in lieu).
On November 13 2017 18:56 GreenHorizons wrote: [quote]
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.
Funny, I think the same thing about all of you 😛
The difference is, most of us recognize and are willing to acknowledge the positive aspects of capitalism and the market-based economy but still see the problems. Like, your shit regarding workers quitting and finding better income elsewhere works in theory but the reality of the situation simply doesn't allow for that in many cases.
But now I'm making the same stupid mistake of trying to converse with you.
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.
There's enough in the video I posted where I wouldn't let him near a small child in my presence. You can see the kid's face in several clips show clear discomfort or even pulling away before he pulls him back in.
He's not a counter argument to Moore other than he answers how people somehow don't know about something that's happening right in front of them or rationalize/defend/make silly disclaimers.
None of those children need to put their whole lives on blast for the media and worry about whatever else pull a former VP, leading Democratic presidential candidate for 2020, and long time senator might have (to wreck you for trying to make a deal out of it) for me to see there was clearly something wrong with the way Biden behaved in those interactions.
That Democrats can watch that and think "But did anyone complain?" is exactly how this stuff is allowed to fester and much worse things go on when they aren't surrounded by media cameras.
My point isn't "did anyone complain?" but "now's a good time to do something about this along with all the other creepy and/or predatory politicians". There's always reasons why people hold back (trauma, regret, self-loathing, fear etc.), and sometimes they didn't hold back but were never given the attention they deserved. Now just happens to be a fairly decent moment where people are listening and supporting victims of this sort of behavior.
The flipside of my point is I've seen people (not necessarily here) defending Moore by saying [insert some other sexual predator, preferably not a Republican] did bad things too. Hence why, "Sure, let's take care of them as well" is my response. I'm totally fine with bringing up other problematic or predatory individuals in addition to Moore (as opposed to in lieu).
Sure looked like you were trying to minimize and excuse what's on that video and how Democrats have handled it, but okay.
I agree that Democrats being crap doesn't excuse Republicans on Moore (who was a trash candidate before this came out) and vice versa.
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.
“My initial reaction was absolute horror. I was really, really confused,” Corrigan told TIME, speaking publicly for the first time about the encounter. “The first thing I did was look at my mom and, while he was still standing there, I didn’t say anything. What does a teenager say to the ex-president of the United States? Like, ‘Hey dude, you shouldn’t have touched me like that?’”
On November 14 2017 04:21 Liquid`Drone wrote: [quote]
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.
There's enough in the video I posted where I wouldn't let him near a small child in my presence. You can see the kid's face in several clips show clear discomfort or even pulling away before he pulls him back in.
He's not a counter argument to Moore other than he answers how people somehow don't know about something that's happening right in front of them or rationalize/defend/make silly disclaimers.
None of those children need to put their whole lives on blast for the media and worry about whatever else pull a former VP, leading Democratic presidential candidate for 2020, and long time senator might have (to wreck you for trying to make a deal out of it) for me to see there was clearly something wrong with the way Biden behaved in those interactions.
That Democrats can watch that and think "But did anyone complain?" is exactly how this stuff is allowed to fester and much worse things go on when they aren't surrounded by media cameras.
Looking into it, Biden seems to be overly affectionate with all women, it's just particularly weird around kids. He gets the same way around old, unattractive women as well, so I wouldn't single him out as some child predator. It's definitely a problem though and not socially acceptable to initiate contact the way he does. The Alex Jones pedophile hunters would have a field day smearing him if he ever ran again, even if there is nothing malicious in his social awkwardness.
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.
There's enough in the video I posted where I wouldn't let him near a small child in my presence. You can see the kid's face in several clips show clear discomfort or even pulling away before he pulls him back in.
He's not a counter argument to Moore other than he answers how people somehow don't know about something that's happening right in front of them or rationalize/defend/make silly disclaimers.
None of those children need to put their whole lives on blast for the media and worry about whatever else pull a former VP, leading Democratic presidential candidate for 2020, and long time senator might have (to wreck you for trying to make a deal out of it) for me to see there was clearly something wrong with the way Biden behaved in those interactions.
That Democrats can watch that and think "But did anyone complain?" is exactly how this stuff is allowed to fester and much worse things go on when they aren't surrounded by media cameras.
Looking into it, Biden seems to be overly affectionate with all women, it's just particularly weird around kids. He gets the same way around old, unattractive women as well, so I wouldn't single him out as some child predator. It's definitely a problem though and not socially acceptable to initiate contact the way he does. The Alex Jones pedophile hunters would have a field day smearing him if he ever ran again, even if there is nothing malicious in his social awkwardness.
This is what I was talking about.
He's not a counter argument to Moore other than he answers how people somehow don't know about something that's happening right in front of them or rationalize/defend/make silly disclaimers.
"I see he's inappropriately touching children, but it's nothing malicious because he does it to all women, even the unattractive ones. Those Alex Jones nuts will love to smear him for being awkward though!"... no...just no.
What does a teenager say to the ex-president of the United States? Like, ‘Hey dude, you shouldn’t have touched me like that?’”
Yes. That's exactly what you should do. His title _should_ be meaningless in this context.
When my boss kept grabbing my body parts, I told him to back off the second time he did it (shoulders and arms, so nothing too bad, but I just didn't like it).
When my landlord put his fingers through my hair (I'm still grossed out by that like 8 years later) I told him to back off immediately.
We need to start teaching people from like age 12 and onwards that's how you respond to things like that. If you're in an open setting like that girl was and there's no risk of bodily harm to yourself by speaking up, you need to speak up immediately and with an appropriate level of forcefulness. Don't let this kind of thing slide AT ALL or these sort of people will not change their ways. You essentially need to shock them into realizing that they are crossing a line.
Both abuse and standing up to abuse is essentially taught behavior. Society needs to solve this by going at it from all possible angles: go after the abusers (both in a preventive and punitive way) and also teach the abused to stand up for themselves. And people's titles, celebrity status, or whatever need to be made irrelevant in this context.
On November 14 2017 05:17 Falling wrote: [quote] 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.
Nevermind, I'm just being a xenophobic racist.
Nah. Companies definitely import workers on work visas to pay less. The HB-1 program was discussed in this thread a while back. If I really had to attribute the problem somewhere, it's that Americans from generations after the baby boomers calibrated their expectations on what they saw growing up, and when corporations started to squeeze more value out of their workforce, pay fell below what Americans wanted for certain jobs. To phrase it another way, employers don't want to pay people the amount it takes to support the standard of living American's expect if they can find a way to avoid it.
It's a complex issue. Wages for a lot of jobs are unsustainably low, and Americans can tell at a glance that they're not going to be able to afford the quality of life they had growing up working at that wage, but at the same time they are used to the prices that come from companies forcing their labor costs down. As someone who puts the fault with the wealth disparity, I'd say that the problem's root is that the super wealthy have, by accident or design, shaped our economy into one that runs with the bare minimum of wealth circulating while extracting as much of it as possible into their own possession. There is enough wealth in this country to support higher prices for many goods and services, which in turn would support higher wages, but that wealth isn't circulating. It's stashed in airplane funds, complex financial products, offshore bank accounts, and such. Going back to my initial point again, capitalism is how those people with this wealth stashed in their coffers of choice justify this problem as the natural and good state of things.
EDIT: To give this some context, the Forbes 400 are worth a staggering 14.5% of the US GDP.
Wealth is a stock and income is a flow. Income from wealth could be spent (still want positive savings) but selling assets to fund a higher standard of living would be unsustainable very quick.
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. 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.
The biggest problem that I have with traditional stock conservatives and economic libertarians is their inability to articulate a solution for growing income inequality and uneven wealth distribution. When you push them, their answer is typically that these things aren't problems at all. Such a position is patently untenable due to the obvious social and political implications.
On November 13 2017 18:56 GreenHorizons wrote: [quote]
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.
The biggest problem that I have with traditional stock conservatives and economic libertarians is their inability to articulate a solution for growing income inequality and uneven wealth distribution. When you push them, their answer is typically that these things aren't problems at all. Such a position is patently untenable due to the obvious social and political implications.
Feel like you're the only one that's even identified it as a problem here (unless you count Kwark). You support some form of socialized healthcare iirc, what other solutions are you partial to?
On November 14 2017 05:55 Liquid`Drone wrote: [quote]
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.
There's enough in the video I posted where I wouldn't let him near a small child in my presence. You can see the kid's face in several clips show clear discomfort or even pulling away before he pulls him back in.
He's not a counter argument to Moore other than he answers how people somehow don't know about something that's happening right in front of them or rationalize/defend/make silly disclaimers.
None of those children need to put their whole lives on blast for the media and worry about whatever else pull a former VP, leading Democratic presidential candidate for 2020, and long time senator might have (to wreck you for trying to make a deal out of it) for me to see there was clearly something wrong with the way Biden behaved in those interactions.
That Democrats can watch that and think "But did anyone complain?" is exactly how this stuff is allowed to fester and much worse things go on when they aren't surrounded by media cameras.
Looking into it, Biden seems to be overly affectionate with all women, it's just particularly weird around kids. He gets the same way around old, unattractive women as well, so I wouldn't single him out as some child predator. It's definitely a problem though and not socially acceptable to initiate contact the way he does. The Alex Jones pedophile hunters would have a field day smearing him if he ever ran again, even if there is nothing malicious in his social awkwardness.
He's not a counter argument to Moore other than he answers how people somehow don't know about something that's happening right in front of them or rationalize/defend/make silly disclaimers.
"I see he's inappropriately touching children, but it's nothing malicious because he does it to all women, even the unattractive ones. Those Alex Jones nuts will love to smear him for being awkward though!"... no...just no.
It sounds like you are assuming that there is something sinister in his behavior beyond his public appearances. Particularly with children?
On November 14 2017 10:31 Danglars wrote: [quote] 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.
There's enough in the video I posted where I wouldn't let him near a small child in my presence. You can see the kid's face in several clips show clear discomfort or even pulling away before he pulls him back in.
He's not a counter argument to Moore other than he answers how people somehow don't know about something that's happening right in front of them or rationalize/defend/make silly disclaimers.
None of those children need to put their whole lives on blast for the media and worry about whatever else pull a former VP, leading Democratic presidential candidate for 2020, and long time senator might have (to wreck you for trying to make a deal out of it) for me to see there was clearly something wrong with the way Biden behaved in those interactions.
That Democrats can watch that and think "But did anyone complain?" is exactly how this stuff is allowed to fester and much worse things go on when they aren't surrounded by media cameras.
Looking into it, Biden seems to be overly affectionate with all women, it's just particularly weird around kids. He gets the same way around old, unattractive women as well, so I wouldn't single him out as some child predator. It's definitely a problem though and not socially acceptable to initiate contact the way he does. The Alex Jones pedophile hunters would have a field day smearing him if he ever ran again, even if there is nothing malicious in his social awkwardness.
This is what I was talking about.
He's not a counter argument to Moore other than he answers how people somehow don't know about something that's happening right in front of them or rationalize/defend/make silly disclaimers.
"I see he's inappropriately touching children, but it's nothing malicious because he does it to all women, even the unattractive ones. Those Alex Jones nuts will love to smear him for being awkward though!"... no...just no.
It sounds like you are assuming that there is something sinister in his behavior beyond his public appearances. Particularly with children?
From a personal observation perspective. Absofuckinglutely in my personal opinion you'd have to be an idiot to think he's not more inappropriate when there isn't a room full of sober people with cameras and mics pointed at him.
From the point of what's wrong with what you're doing, no, what we don't see is a tertiary point.
On November 13 2017 18:56 GreenHorizons wrote: [quote]
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.
Nevermind, I'm just being a xenophobic racist.
You know, the notion that it’s immigration that is driving wages down has been debunked a million times. Wages of low skill jobs have gone down because workers have lost all bargaining power with the loss of their unions in the late 80’s. From the moment you don’t have bargaining power and there is no shortage of people to do your job, you can expect your wage to go down in spiral.
EPT![[image loading]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/6IL5u5U39Qo/maxresdefault.jpg)
