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On June 25 2020 00:20 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On June 24 2020 23:32 Sr18 wrote:On June 24 2020 23:16 Acrofales wrote:On June 24 2020 21:49 Sr18 wrote:On June 24 2020 21:22 Sbrubbles wrote:On June 24 2020 21:05 Sr18 wrote:On June 24 2020 20:49 Sbrubbles wrote:On June 24 2020 20:47 Sr18 wrote:On June 24 2020 20:18 Zambrah wrote:
How do you make the average person wealthier without reducing wealth inequality though? By creating more wealth. No, that is insufficient. If you want constant relative wealth inequality you have to create wealth for everyone in proportion to their current wealth. Constant relative wealth inequality isn't the goal. Maximum wealth increase for the vast majority of the population is. Whether this increases or decreases wealth equality is irrelevant. To put it bluntly, my happiness is much more influenced by my own wealth than it is by someone elses. I don't care much about how much money Bill Gates has. Wealth is not a zero sum game. Gates winning doesn't equate me losing. I propose we focus more on everyone winning and less on preventing some people from winning more than others. My goal was answering the question "How do you make the average person wealthier without reducing wealth inequality though?". Your answer to said question was insufficient and I pointed out how. If you want to answer a different question, maybe one that wasn't asked, like "how do you maximize welfare?", you should make that clearer. I think there is a misunderstanding. I'm not saying that we must preserve wealth inequality. I'm just saying that we should focus on making the average person wealthier. Zambrah's question implies that you can only achieve this goal by reducing wealth inequality. Which is wrong. If you increase the overall wealth, you can increase the wealth of the average person without neccessarily decreasing wealth inequality. My point is that wealth inequality is only very loosely related to the wealth of the average person. Reducing wealth inequality should never be more than a means to increase the wealth of the average person. And if that goal can be better achieved without reducing (or maybe even increasing) wealth inequality, than that has my preference. So the focus should be on the goal (increasing wealth of the average person) and not on one loosely related means to get it (wealth redistribution). On June 24 2020 21:09 farvacola wrote:On June 24 2020 21:05 Sr18 wrote:On June 24 2020 20:49 Sbrubbles wrote:On June 24 2020 20:47 Sr18 wrote:On June 24 2020 20:18 Zambrah wrote:
How do you make the average person wealthier without reducing wealth inequality though? By creating more wealth. No, that is insufficient. If you want constant relative wealth inequality you have to create wealth for everyone in proportion to their current wealth. Constant relative wealth inequality isn't the goal. Maximum wealth increase for the vast majority of the population is. Whether this increases or decreases wealth equality is irrelevant. To put it bluntly, my happiness is much more influenced by my own wealth than it is by someone elses. I don't care much about how much money Bill Gates has. Wealth is not a zero sum game. Gates winning doesn't equate me losing. I propose we focus more on everyone winning and less on preventing some people from winning more than others. Your own wealth is irreducibly tied to the wealth of other people, so you've created a sort of tautology here that is strikingly lacking in use aside from attacking one dimensional notions of wealth redistribution. You're going to have to account for the impact of other's people's wealth on the value of your wealth and what we do with wealth in society in order to actually say something substantive about whether inequality is or is not a problem. I don't agree with this. Let's distribute 10 marbles. You get 7, I get 3. If I can improve my situation to having 5 marbles, I'd be happy. Because 5 is more than 3. How many marbles you have in the new situation is irrelevant to me. You can have 5 as well, or 30. Either way, I'd have 2 more marbles than I had before. And I'm not talking about money by the way, in which case my wealth is obviously tied to yours. I'm talking actual wealth: goods, services etc. You having many nice houses in no way devalues the worth of my house to me. On June 24 2020 21:23 Zambrah wrote:On June 24 2020 21:05 Sr18 wrote:On June 24 2020 20:49 Sbrubbles wrote:On June 24 2020 20:47 Sr18 wrote:On June 24 2020 20:18 Zambrah wrote:
How do you make the average person wealthier without reducing wealth inequality though? By creating more wealth. No, that is insufficient. If you want constant relative wealth inequality you have to create wealth for everyone in proportion to their current wealth. Constant relative wealth inequality isn't the goal. Maximum wealth increase for the vast majority of the population is. Whether this increases or decreases wealth equality is irrelevant. To put it bluntly, my happiness is much more influenced by my own wealth than it is by someone elses. I don't care much about how much money Bill Gates has. Wealth is not a zero sum game. Gates winning doesn't equate me losing. I propose we focus more on everyone winning and less on preventing some people from winning more than others. Would you care how much Bill Gates had if he was withdrawing money from your checking account once in a while? No? I would care about him withdrawing my money, not about how much money he already has. How are these things related? Okay, but if everybody has 5 marbles on average all of a sudden, rather than 3, then initially they can use that to buy some nice stuff, which creates a scarcity, and the price of the nice stuff goes up accordingly. And suddenly they can all buy with their 5 marbles what they could before buy with 3 marbles. Meanwhile the rich guy has gone from 7 to 15 marbles... he used to be able to buy 2 1/3 times the nice stuff you could, but now he can buy 3x that, which further increases scarcity of that nice stuff, so the price actually goes up even further. Moreover, the people selling you food and other basic necessities also want nice stuff, and to pay for that, they now need to sell the food at a higher price, so you actually have *less* marbles left over to buy nice stuff as compared to when you had 3 marbles. GG. You just got wrecked by inflation. Like I said, the marbles do not represent money, they represent actual wealth. So it's not using the marbles to buy some nice stuff, the marbles are the nice stuff. There is simply more nice stuff to go around. It might not be distributed evenly, but everyone has more nice stuff than they had before. That's what increasing wealth is all about. On June 24 2020 22:20 farvacola wrote:
Money and assets aren't sterilized variables qua marbles, so that's a poor comparison, and wealth does not exist in this world in a vacuum divorced from the means with which we account for it, so you're basically talking about a thing that doesn't exist in the real world, which is fine so long as you're only making a point about this imaginary world you've constructed. Assets don't have magically separable intrinsic properties of owner-adjudged value that can be used to attack indictments of wealth inequality. In other words, "value to me" is irreducibly connected with the societal and transactional notions of what value means as a general concept, and pretending otherwise doesn't change anything. It's not a point about an imaginary world. It's a point about our world. This increase in wealth has happened throughout human history. We are wealthier than our cavemen ancesters, eventhough the wealth inequality is much larger than it was then. It's also a point about our more recent history. The average westerner is wealthier than his equivalent was in the 1950s, while at the same time the wealth inequality has increased. So I'm not sure what exactly you are disagreeing with. (...) In the middle ages, that would have been food on the table, a roof over your head, protection from highway men and a lord who doesn't rape your wife and daughters and take your sons off to fight in a pointless war against his neighbours (or worse yet, on a crusade). Getting sick was just part of the deal, and education was not something anybody really thought of at all. Nowadays a "bare minimum" is all of the above (except that instead of gruel and vegetables, we want strawberries in the winter, mangos and avocados, and a good cut of meat every day), 6 years of primary school, a decent healthcare system, a car, broadband internet, and the capability to travel to a nice holiday destination once or twice a year. Oh, and instead of darning socks and having a washing day, we buy new socks and have a washing machine. So yes, wealth has quite obviously increased, but so has what we expect as the bare minimum for a life with dignity. Now the smaller the margin is between "average wealth" and that minimum expectation is a far more valuable measure of where we are as a society than whether we are wealthier than 50, 100 or 5000 years ago.
I don't think this is a right way to look at it. Having more than what we expect to have is much less relevant than objectively having more. Would you swap with a 1500 nobleman? I wouldn't. He would be rich for his time, but much poorer than we are now. Objective wealth is what counts, not relative wealth.
On June 24 2020 23:36 Salazarz wrote:Show nested quote +On June 24 2020 23:33 Salazarz wrote:On June 24 2020 21:05 Sr18 wrote:On June 24 2020 20:49 Sbrubbles wrote:On June 24 2020 20:47 Sr18 wrote:On June 24 2020 20:18 Zambrah wrote:
How do you make the average person wealthier without reducing wealth inequality though? By creating more wealth. No, that is insufficient. If you want constant relative wealth inequality you have to create wealth for everyone in proportion to their current wealth. Constant relative wealth inequality isn't the goal. Maximum wealth increase for the vast majority of the population is. Whether this increases or decreases wealth equality is irrelevant. To put it bluntly, my happiness is much more influenced by my own wealth than it is by someone elses. I don't care much about how much money Bill Gates has. Wealth is not a zero sum game. Gates winning doesn't equate me losing. I propose we focus more on everyone winning and less on preventing some people from winning more than others. You have a very poor understanding of economics if you think that's how it works. Wealth is a zero sum game, because resources aren't infinite and inflation is a thing. Show nested quote +It's not a point about an imaginary world. It's a point about our world. This increase in wealth has happened throughout human history. We are wealthier than our cavemen ancesters, eventhough the wealth inequality is much larger than it was then. It's also a point about our more recent history. The average westerner is wealthier than his equivalent was in the 1950s, while at the same time the wealth inequality has increased. So I'm not sure what exactly you are disagreeing with. See, this is a nice sentiment, except that the average westerner's productivity has increased significantly more than the average westerner's standard of living. In fact, over the last few decades income adjusted for inflation & cost of living has been stagnant or declining in most of the developed world.
I understand. The distribution is not fair. Yet life is still undeniably better than it was. And here is where the essence of this discussion lies. If you had to choose how your descendents had to live, what would you value higher: having better lives than we have now, or living in a society where the wealth is more fairly distributed. I choose the former.
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On June 25 2020 00:48 Sr18 wrote:
I understand. The distribution is not fair. Yet life is still undeniably better than it was. And here is where the essence of this discussion lies. If you had to choose how your descendents had to live, what would you value higher: having better lives than we have now, or living in a society where the wealth is more fairly distributed. I choose the former.
Why does it have to be one or the other? What makes you think that increase in productivity isn't possible without increase in inequality? Not to mention that your claim about life today being better is not nearly as undeniable as you think. More stuff doesn't usually lead to quantifiable increase in life satisfaction / happiness, while increases in stress and anxiety of the modern world are directly correlated with reduction of those. It's not inconceivable to imagine that the average peasants in at least the more peaceful / prosperous periods of middle ages were indeed happier than the average wage drones of today are. And today, countries with relatively lower levels of inequality tend to score much better on surveys related to happiness, life satisfaction, hope for the future etc than the ones with high inequality.
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In other news. The appeals court has ordered Judge Sullivan to let Flynn go, despite the law saying a dismissal is 'by leave of court'.
With the House hearing testimonies about political influence in the sentencing of Roger Stone I wonder if this will be the end of the case against Flynn or if this will drag on further.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/24/politics/michael-flynn-dismiss/index.html
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They’ll file for en banc review before the entire circuit, which has about a 50/50 shot at being accepted I’d guess.
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On June 24 2020 23:27 Wombat_NI wrote:
I must say I’m a little confused with the support here for aspects
of this visa restriction when weighing it with the positions of others.
Is this particular type of visa ripe with abuse or something I’m not getting or is it supplanting qualified graduates and rendering degrees less valuable or what?
Not being from the States I feel I’m missing some angle on this one.
Yes, that's pretty accurate. The entire program is heavily abused to create a race to the bottom for educated professionals across a wide range of fields. Many businesses claim the program is necessary because the US doesn't have sufficient talent to fill up the workforce with US nationals; said claims are controversial and often believed to be made in bad faith (with "can't find qualified employees" really meaning "using H1-B's is cheaper").
H1-B in particular is a working visa for non-nationals. Related are visas such as F1 which are student visas for university education by non-nationals. A
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On June 25 2020 02:19 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On June 24 2020 23:27 Wombat_NI wrote:
I must say I’m a little confused with the support here for aspects
of this visa restriction when weighing it with the positions of others.
Is this particular type of visa ripe with abuse or something I’m not getting or is it supplanting qualified graduates and rendering degrees less valuable or what?
Not being from the States I feel I’m missing some angle on this one. Yes, that's pretty accurate. The entire program is heavily abused to create a race to the bottom for educated professionals across a wide range of fields. Many businesses claim the program is necessary because the US doesn't have sufficient talent to fill up the workforce with US nationals; said claims are controversial and often believed to be made in bad faith (with "can't find qualified employees" really meaning "using H1-B's is cheaper"). H1-B in particular is a working visa for non-nationals. Related are visas such as F1 which are student visas for university education by non-nationals. A
Is the entire program created to have an excuse to race to the bottom or is whatever system created just going to be abused that way because capitalism. There are certain employers who create positions that you have to fax resumes to so they can fill it with H1B labor for cheaper, but do you really think they'd not find another way to pay less money if given the opportunity.
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On June 24 2020 15:58 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On June 24 2020 15:40 Mohdoo wrote:On June 24 2020 15:19 GreenHorizons wrote:
I don't really see a significant difference between most opposition to H1-B's and right wing opposition to dreamers or immigration generally. Other than the class aspect dragging in more college educated 'people of the left'.
The exploitation they facilitate is another story , denying immigrants opportunity because they are exploited to drive down working conditions isn't the solution imo. What I have seen is a plentiful pool of candidates who can't get jobs because someone with an h1b appears to be better. Let's say a job requires a 6/10 candidate. I have seen 8/10 candidates turned down because a 9/10 candidate with h1b is available. H1b creates an excessively competitive market that makes extremely qualified candidates unable to get jobs. Show nested quote +On June 24 2020 15:54 LegalLord wrote:On June 24 2020 15:45 Zambrah wrote:
I don't think it's that bad to sponsor to get the 9/10, seems like more of an issue to get a 6/10 you can pay less than a local 6/10. Often done in the form of advertising a need for a 9/10, offering 3/10 conditions, and finding no qualified takers in the domestic market - “proving” that an H1-B is necessary. The criteria are relaxed for the H1-B hire and a 5/10 or 6/10 are now fully acceptable. The situation Mohdoo describes seems to be by far the rarer use case of H1-B. These both fit squarely in the right wing opposition to immigration generally imo. Left wing opposition is to the exploitative worker conditions whether the workers are immigrants or not.
I suppose my point is that when businesses have infinite possibilities to hire from, it basically takes all the good talent and puts it in the place where the best talent would prefer to be. When companies have access to the entire world when hiring for a local job, people who already live in the area are cut out of jobs they could totally do. The job may only barely require a BS, but they can just look for PhDs if they have over 50 PhDs applying because they want to leave their current country. It means education requirements get higher and higher without any real purpose.
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On June 25 2020 00:48 Sr18 wrote:Show nested quote +On June 25 2020 00:20 Acrofales wrote:On June 24 2020 23:32 Sr18 wrote:On June 24 2020 23:16 Acrofales wrote:On June 24 2020 21:49 Sr18 wrote:On June 24 2020 21:22 Sbrubbles wrote:On June 24 2020 21:05 Sr18 wrote:On June 24 2020 20:49 Sbrubbles wrote:On June 24 2020 20:47 Sr18 wrote:On June 24 2020 20:18 Zambrah wrote:
How do you make the average person wealthier without reducing wealth inequality though? By creating more wealth. No, that is insufficient. If you want constant relative wealth inequality you have to create wealth for everyone in proportion to their current wealth. Constant relative wealth inequality isn't the goal. Maximum wealth increase for the vast majority of the population is. Whether this increases or decreases wealth equality is irrelevant. To put it bluntly, my happiness is much more influenced by my own wealth than it is by someone elses. I don't care much about how much money Bill Gates has. Wealth is not a zero sum game. Gates winning doesn't equate me losing. I propose we focus more on everyone winning and less on preventing some people from winning more than others. My goal was answering the question "How do you make the average person wealthier without reducing wealth inequality though?". Your answer to said question was insufficient and I pointed out how. If you want to answer a different question, maybe one that wasn't asked, like "how do you maximize welfare?", you should make that clearer. I think there is a misunderstanding. I'm not saying that we must preserve wealth inequality. I'm just saying that we should focus on making the average person wealthier. Zambrah's question implies that you can only achieve this goal by reducing wealth inequality. Which is wrong. If you increase the overall wealth, you can increase the wealth of the average person without neccessarily decreasing wealth inequality. My point is that wealth inequality is only very loosely related to the wealth of the average person. Reducing wealth inequality should never be more than a means to increase the wealth of the average person. And if that goal can be better achieved without reducing (or maybe even increasing) wealth inequality, than that has my preference. So the focus should be on the goal (increasing wealth of the average person) and not on one loosely related means to get it (wealth redistribution). On June 24 2020 21:09 farvacola wrote:On June 24 2020 21:05 Sr18 wrote:On June 24 2020 20:49 Sbrubbles wrote:On June 24 2020 20:47 Sr18 wrote:On June 24 2020 20:18 Zambrah wrote:
How do you make the average person wealthier without reducing wealth inequality though? By creating more wealth. No, that is insufficient. If you want constant relative wealth inequality you have to create wealth for everyone in proportion to their current wealth. Constant relative wealth inequality isn't the goal. Maximum wealth increase for the vast majority of the population is. Whether this increases or decreases wealth equality is irrelevant. To put it bluntly, my happiness is much more influenced by my own wealth than it is by someone elses. I don't care much about how much money Bill Gates has. Wealth is not a zero sum game. Gates winning doesn't equate me losing. I propose we focus more on everyone winning and less on preventing some people from winning more than others. Your own wealth is irreducibly tied to the wealth of other people, so you've created a sort of tautology here that is strikingly lacking in use aside from attacking one dimensional notions of wealth redistribution. You're going to have to account for the impact of other's people's wealth on the value of your wealth and what we do with wealth in society in order to actually say something substantive about whether inequality is or is not a problem. I don't agree with this. Let's distribute 10 marbles. You get 7, I get 3. If I can improve my situation to having 5 marbles, I'd be happy. Because 5 is more than 3. How many marbles you have in the new situation is irrelevant to me. You can have 5 as well, or 30. Either way, I'd have 2 more marbles than I had before. And I'm not talking about money by the way, in which case my wealth is obviously tied to yours. I'm talking actual wealth: goods, services etc. You having many nice houses in no way devalues the worth of my house to me. On June 24 2020 21:23 Zambrah wrote:On June 24 2020 21:05 Sr18 wrote:On June 24 2020 20:49 Sbrubbles wrote:On June 24 2020 20:47 Sr18 wrote:On June 24 2020 20:18 Zambrah wrote:
How do you make the average person wealthier without reducing wealth inequality though? By creating more wealth. No, that is insufficient. If you want constant relative wealth inequality you have to create wealth for everyone in proportion to their current wealth. Constant relative wealth inequality isn't the goal. Maximum wealth increase for the vast majority of the population is. Whether this increases or decreases wealth equality is irrelevant. To put it bluntly, my happiness is much more influenced by my own wealth than it is by someone elses. I don't care much about how much money Bill Gates has. Wealth is not a zero sum game. Gates winning doesn't equate me losing. I propose we focus more on everyone winning and less on preventing some people from winning more than others. Would you care how much Bill Gates had if he was withdrawing money from your checking account once in a while? No? I would care about him withdrawing my money, not about how much money he already has. How are these things related? Okay, but if everybody has 5 marbles on average all of a sudden, rather than 3, then initially they can use that to buy some nice stuff, which creates a scarcity, and the price of the nice stuff goes up accordingly. And suddenly they can all buy with their 5 marbles what they could before buy with 3 marbles. Meanwhile the rich guy has gone from 7 to 15 marbles... he used to be able to buy 2 1/3 times the nice stuff you could, but now he can buy 3x that, which further increases scarcity of that nice stuff, so the price actually goes up even further. Moreover, the people selling you food and other basic necessities also want nice stuff, and to pay for that, they now need to sell the food at a higher price, so you actually have *less* marbles left over to buy nice stuff as compared to when you had 3 marbles. GG. You just got wrecked by inflation. Like I said, the marbles do not represent money, they represent actual wealth. So it's not using the marbles to buy some nice stuff, the marbles are the nice stuff. There is simply more nice stuff to go around. It might not be distributed evenly, but everyone has more nice stuff than they had before. That's what increasing wealth is all about. On June 24 2020 22:20 farvacola wrote:
Money and assets aren't sterilized variables qua marbles, so that's a poor comparison, and wealth does not exist in this world in a vacuum divorced from the means with which we account for it, so you're basically talking about a thing that doesn't exist in the real world, which is fine so long as you're only making a point about this imaginary world you've constructed. Assets don't have magically separable intrinsic properties of owner-adjudged value that can be used to attack indictments of wealth inequality. In other words, "value to me" is irreducibly connected with the societal and transactional notions of what value means as a general concept, and pretending otherwise doesn't change anything. It's not a point about an imaginary world. It's a point about our world. This increase in wealth has happened throughout human history. We are wealthier than our cavemen ancesters, eventhough the wealth inequality is much larger than it was then. It's also a point about our more recent history. The average westerner is wealthier than his equivalent was in the 1950s, while at the same time the wealth inequality has increased. So I'm not sure what exactly you are disagreeing with. (...) In the middle ages, that would have been food on the table, a roof over your head, protection from highway men and a lord who doesn't rape your wife and daughters and take your sons off to fight in a pointless war against his neighbours (or worse yet, on a crusade). Getting sick was just part of the deal, and education was not something anybody really thought of at all. Nowadays a "bare minimum" is all of the above (except that instead of gruel and vegetables, we want strawberries in the winter, mangos and avocados, and a good cut of meat every day), 6 years of primary school, a decent healthcare system, a car, broadband internet, and the capability to travel to a nice holiday destination once or twice a year. Oh, and instead of darning socks and having a washing day, we buy new socks and have a washing machine. So yes, wealth has quite obviously increased, but so has what we expect as the bare minimum for a life with dignity. Now the smaller the margin is between "average wealth" and that minimum expectation is a far more valuable measure of where we are as a society than whether we are wealthier than 50, 100 or 5000 years ago. I don't think this is a right way to look at it. Having more than what we expect to have is much less relevant than objectively having more. Would you swap with a 1500 nobleman? I wouldn't. He would be rich for his time, but much poorer than we are now. Objective wealth is what counts, not relative wealth. Show nested quote +On June 24 2020 23:36 Salazarz wrote:On June 24 2020 23:33 Salazarz wrote:On June 24 2020 21:05 Sr18 wrote:On June 24 2020 20:49 Sbrubbles wrote:On June 24 2020 20:47 Sr18 wrote:On June 24 2020 20:18 Zambrah wrote:
How do you make the average person wealthier without reducing wealth inequality though? By creating more wealth. No, that is insufficient. If you want constant relative wealth inequality you have to create wealth for everyone in proportion to their current wealth. Constant relative wealth inequality isn't the goal. Maximum wealth increase for the vast majority of the population is. Whether this increases or decreases wealth equality is irrelevant. To put it bluntly, my happiness is much more influenced by my own wealth than it is by someone elses. I don't care much about how much money Bill Gates has. Wealth is not a zero sum game. Gates winning doesn't equate me losing. I propose we focus more on everyone winning and less on preventing some people from winning more than others. You have a very poor understanding of economics if you think that's how it works. Wealth is a zero sum game, because resources aren't infinite and inflation is a thing. It's not a point about an imaginary world. It's a point about our world. This increase in wealth has happened throughout human history. We are wealthier than our cavemen ancesters, eventhough the wealth inequality is much larger than it was then. It's also a point about our more recent history. The average westerner is wealthier than his equivalent was in the 1950s, while at the same time the wealth inequality has increased. So I'm not sure what exactly you are disagreeing with. See, this is a nice sentiment, except that the average westerner's productivity has increased significantly more than the average westerner's standard of living. In fact, over the last few decades income adjusted for inflation & cost of living has been stagnant or declining in most of the developed world. I understand. The distribution is not fair. Yet life is still undeniably better than it was. And here is where the essence of this discussion lies. If you had to choose how your descendents had to live, what would you value higher: having better lives than we have now, or living in a society where the wealth is more fairly distributed. I choose the former.
You missed the point. I wouldn't want to trade with a 15th century nobleman, because my "bare minimum for a comfortable life" includes holidays to exotic locations (without risking a hazardous sailing trip, although the sailing trip itself could be a fun adventure) and broadband internet, as well as modern healthcare.
The fact that even the working poor are better off now than a rich nobleman in the 15th century doesn't mean that we should just say "that's okay then, because noblemen in the 15th century were perfectly happy, so being better off than them is good enough". It means your benchmark is wrong.
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On June 25 2020 02:50 Blitzkrieg0 wrote:Show nested quote +On June 25 2020 02:19 LegalLord wrote:On June 24 2020 23:27 Wombat_NI wrote:
I must say I’m a little confused with the support here for aspects
of this visa restriction when weighing it with the positions of others.
Is this particular type of visa ripe with abuse or something I’m not getting or is it supplanting qualified graduates and rendering degrees less valuable or what?
Not being from the States I feel I’m missing some angle on this one. Yes, that's pretty accurate. The entire program is heavily abused to create a race to the bottom for educated professionals across a wide range of fields. Many businesses claim the program is necessary because the US doesn't have sufficient talent to fill up the workforce with US nationals; said claims are controversial and often believed to be made in bad faith (with "can't find qualified employees" really meaning "using H1-B's is cheaper"). H1-B in particular is a working visa for non-nationals. Related are visas such as F1 which are student visas for university education by non-nationals. A Is the entire program created to have an excuse to race to the bottom or is whatever system created just going to be abused that way because capitalism. There are certain employers who create positions that you have to fax resumes to so they can fill it with H1B labor for cheaper, but do you really think they'd not find another way to pay less money if given the opportunity.
I'm sure the program was originally created with good intentions. Looks like 1952 was its original inception, 1990 in its current form.
I'm also certain that bad faith employers will always seek out new ways to game the system to drive down wages. Good to try to remove tools from their arsenal when possible, though.
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On June 25 2020 03:12 Acrofales wrote:
You missed the point. I wouldn't want to trade with a 15th century nobleman, because my "bare minimum for a comfortable life" includes holidays to exotic locations (without risking a hazardous sailing trip, although the sailing trip itself could be a fun adventure) and broadband internet, as well as modern healthcare.
The fact that even the working poor are better off now than a rich nobleman in the 15th century doesn't mean that we should just say "that's okay then, because noblemen in the 15th century were perfectly happy, so being better off than them is good enough". It means your benchmark is wrong.
I'm pretty sure you don't understand how the working poor of today live, either that or we have a vastly different definition of the term. I'm also rather confident that no nobleman would trade their medieval comforts for a lifetime washing dishes or stacking boxes somewhere 10 hours a day just so they could have the pinnacle of human entertainment, netflix and beer, in the evenings.
What exactly is your definition of 'better off', anyway? If being satisfied with your life isn't it, what is? Having more crap you've ordered off Amazon?
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There’s some good historical scholarship being done on how classic understandings of feudalism and the working lives of medieval peasants do not square with the actual historical record, I’ll have to see if I can find my PDF. Regardless, the notion that people generally worked harder or for longer periods of time back then, while attractively convenient, is very much an item in controversy.
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The two primaries yesterday in New York and Kentucky have some interesting results to parse through.
-Progressives did well in New York. Bowman likely ousted Engel for one and AOC dominated her challenger as examples.
-Trump-backed candidates were a mixed bag, like with the replacement for Mark Meadows who lost to a 24-year-old who didn't have that support.
-McGrath and Booker are in a decently close race for the Democratic nomination in Kentucky. Absentee ballots and mail-in ballots in major districts yet to be counted are said to favour Booker apparently.
I expect turnout to be noticeably boosted compared to 2016 on the Democratic side, even with some headaches like mail-in ballots or shrinking the amount of voting locations.
[1] [2]
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On June 25 2020 03:12 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On June 25 2020 00:48 Sr18 wrote:On June 25 2020 00:20 Acrofales wrote:On June 24 2020 23:32 Sr18 wrote:On June 24 2020 23:16 Acrofales wrote:On June 24 2020 21:49 Sr18 wrote:On June 24 2020 21:22 Sbrubbles wrote:On June 24 2020 21:05 Sr18 wrote:On June 24 2020 20:49 Sbrubbles wrote:On June 24 2020 20:47 Sr18 wrote:
[quote]
By creating more wealth. No, that is insufficient. If you want constant relative wealth inequality you have to create wealth for everyone in proportion to their current wealth. Constant relative wealth inequality isn't the goal. Maximum wealth increase for the vast majority of the population is. Whether this increases or decreases wealth equality is irrelevant. To put it bluntly, my happiness is much more influenced by my own wealth than it is by someone elses. I don't care much about how much money Bill Gates has. Wealth is not a zero sum game. Gates winning doesn't equate me losing. I propose we focus more on everyone winning and less on preventing some people from winning more than others. My goal was answering the question "How do you make the average person wealthier without reducing wealth inequality though?". Your answer to said question was insufficient and I pointed out how. If you want to answer a different question, maybe one that wasn't asked, like "how do you maximize welfare?", you should make that clearer. I think there is a misunderstanding. I'm not saying that we must preserve wealth inequality. I'm just saying that we should focus on making the average person wealthier. Zambrah's question implies that you can only achieve this goal by reducing wealth inequality. Which is wrong. If you increase the overall wealth, you can increase the wealth of the average person without neccessarily decreasing wealth inequality. My point is that wealth inequality is only very loosely related to the wealth of the average person. Reducing wealth inequality should never be more than a means to increase the wealth of the average person. And if that goal can be better achieved without reducing (or maybe even increasing) wealth inequality, than that has my preference. So the focus should be on the goal (increasing wealth of the average person) and not on one loosely related means to get it (wealth redistribution). On June 24 2020 21:09 farvacola wrote:On June 24 2020 21:05 Sr18 wrote:On June 24 2020 20:49 Sbrubbles wrote:On June 24 2020 20:47 Sr18 wrote:
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By creating more wealth. No, that is insufficient. If you want constant relative wealth inequality you have to create wealth for everyone in proportion to their current wealth. Constant relative wealth inequality isn't the goal. Maximum wealth increase for the vast majority of the population is. Whether this increases or decreases wealth equality is irrelevant. To put it bluntly, my happiness is much more influenced by my own wealth than it is by someone elses. I don't care much about how much money Bill Gates has. Wealth is not a zero sum game. Gates winning doesn't equate me losing. I propose we focus more on everyone winning and less on preventing some people from winning more than others. Your own wealth is irreducibly tied to the wealth of other people, so you've created a sort of tautology here that is strikingly lacking in use aside from attacking one dimensional notions of wealth redistribution. You're going to have to account for the impact of other's people's wealth on the value of your wealth and what we do with wealth in society in order to actually say something substantive about whether inequality is or is not a problem. I don't agree with this. Let's distribute 10 marbles. You get 7, I get 3. If I can improve my situation to having 5 marbles, I'd be happy. Because 5 is more than 3. How many marbles you have in the new situation is irrelevant to me. You can have 5 as well, or 30. Either way, I'd have 2 more marbles than I had before. And I'm not talking about money by the way, in which case my wealth is obviously tied to yours. I'm talking actual wealth: goods, services etc. You having many nice houses in no way devalues the worth of my house to me. On June 24 2020 21:23 Zambrah wrote:On June 24 2020 21:05 Sr18 wrote:On June 24 2020 20:49 Sbrubbles wrote:On June 24 2020 20:47 Sr18 wrote:
[quote]
By creating more wealth. No, that is insufficient. If you want constant relative wealth inequality you have to create wealth for everyone in proportion to their current wealth. Constant relative wealth inequality isn't the goal. Maximum wealth increase for the vast majority of the population is. Whether this increases or decreases wealth equality is irrelevant. To put it bluntly, my happiness is much more influenced by my own wealth than it is by someone elses. I don't care much about how much money Bill Gates has. Wealth is not a zero sum game. Gates winning doesn't equate me losing. I propose we focus more on everyone winning and less on preventing some people from winning more than others. Would you care how much Bill Gates had if he was withdrawing money from your checking account once in a while? No? I would care about him withdrawing my money, not about how much money he already has. How are these things related? Okay, but if everybody has 5 marbles on average all of a sudden, rather than 3, then initially they can use that to buy some nice stuff, which creates a scarcity, and the price of the nice stuff goes up accordingly. And suddenly they can all buy with their 5 marbles what they could before buy with 3 marbles. Meanwhile the rich guy has gone from 7 to 15 marbles... he used to be able to buy 2 1/3 times the nice stuff you could, but now he can buy 3x that, which further increases scarcity of that nice stuff, so the price actually goes up even further. Moreover, the people selling you food and other basic necessities also want nice stuff, and to pay for that, they now need to sell the food at a higher price, so you actually have *less* marbles left over to buy nice stuff as compared to when you had 3 marbles. GG. You just got wrecked by inflation. Like I said, the marbles do not represent money, they represent actual wealth. So it's not using the marbles to buy some nice stuff, the marbles are the nice stuff. There is simply more nice stuff to go around. It might not be distributed evenly, but everyone has more nice stuff than they had before. That's what increasing wealth is all about. On June 24 2020 22:20 farvacola wrote:
Money and assets aren't sterilized variables qua marbles, so that's a poor comparison, and wealth does not exist in this world in a vacuum divorced from the means with which we account for it, so you're basically talking about a thing that doesn't exist in the real world, which is fine so long as you're only making a point about this imaginary world you've constructed. Assets don't have magically separable intrinsic properties of owner-adjudged value that can be used to attack indictments of wealth inequality. In other words, "value to me" is irreducibly connected with the societal and transactional notions of what value means as a general concept, and pretending otherwise doesn't change anything. It's not a point about an imaginary world. It's a point about our world. This increase in wealth has happened throughout human history. We are wealthier than our cavemen ancesters, eventhough the wealth inequality is much larger than it was then. It's also a point about our more recent history. The average westerner is wealthier than his equivalent was in the 1950s, while at the same time the wealth inequality has increased. So I'm not sure what exactly you are disagreeing with. (...) In the middle ages, that would have been food on the table, a roof over your head, protection from highway men and a lord who doesn't rape your wife and daughters and take your sons off to fight in a pointless war against his neighbours (or worse yet, on a crusade). Getting sick was just part of the deal, and education was not something anybody really thought of at all. Nowadays a "bare minimum" is all of the above (except that instead of gruel and vegetables, we want strawberries in the winter, mangos and avocados, and a good cut of meat every day), 6 years of primary school, a decent healthcare system, a car, broadband internet, and the capability to travel to a nice holiday destination once or twice a year. Oh, and instead of darning socks and having a washing day, we buy new socks and have a washing machine. So yes, wealth has quite obviously increased, but so has what we expect as the bare minimum for a life with dignity. Now the smaller the margin is between "average wealth" and that minimum expectation is a far more valuable measure of where we are as a society than whether we are wealthier than 50, 100 or 5000 years ago. I don't think this is a right way to look at it. Having more than what we expect to have is much less relevant than objectively having more. Would you swap with a 1500 nobleman? I wouldn't. He would be rich for his time, but much poorer than we are now. Objective wealth is what counts, not relative wealth. On June 24 2020 23:36 Salazarz wrote:On June 24 2020 23:33 Salazarz wrote:On June 24 2020 21:05 Sr18 wrote:On June 24 2020 20:49 Sbrubbles wrote:On June 24 2020 20:47 Sr18 wrote:On June 24 2020 20:18 Zambrah wrote:
How do you make the average person wealthier without reducing wealth inequality though? By creating more wealth. No, that is insufficient. If you want constant relative wealth inequality you have to create wealth for everyone in proportion to their current wealth. Constant relative wealth inequality isn't the goal. Maximum wealth increase for the vast majority of the population is. Whether this increases or decreases wealth equality is irrelevant. To put it bluntly, my happiness is much more influenced by my own wealth than it is by someone elses. I don't care much about how much money Bill Gates has. Wealth is not a zero sum game. Gates winning doesn't equate me losing. I propose we focus more on everyone winning and less on preventing some people from winning more than others. You have a very poor understanding of economics if you think that's how it works. Wealth is a zero sum game, because resources aren't infinite and inflation is a thing. It's not a point about an imaginary world. It's a point about our world. This increase in wealth has happened throughout human history. We are wealthier than our cavemen ancesters, eventhough the wealth inequality is much larger than it was then. It's also a point about our more recent history. The average westerner is wealthier than his equivalent was in the 1950s, while at the same time the wealth inequality has increased. So I'm not sure what exactly you are disagreeing with. See, this is a nice sentiment, except that the average westerner's productivity has increased significantly more than the average westerner's standard of living. In fact, over the last few decades income adjusted for inflation & cost of living has been stagnant or declining in most of the developed world. I understand. The distribution is not fair. Yet life is still undeniably better than it was. And here is where the essence of this discussion lies. If you had to choose how your descendents had to live, what would you value higher: having better lives than we have now, or living in a society where the wealth is more fairly distributed. I choose the former. You missed the point. I wouldn't want to trade with a 15th century nobleman, because my "bare minimum for a comfortable life" includes holidays to exotic locations (without risking a hazardous sailing trip, although the sailing trip itself could be a fun adventure) and broadband internet, as well as modern healthcare. The fact that even the working poor are better off now than a rich nobleman in the 15th century doesn't mean that we should just say "that's okay then, because noblemen in the 15th century were perfectly happy, so being better off than them is good enough". It means your benchmark is wrong.
But it does mean that increasing wealth is more important than decreasing inequaltiy. And that was my point. People may have read more into my posts, but that's on them.
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On June 25 2020 03:23 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On June 25 2020 02:50 Blitzkrieg0 wrote:On June 25 2020 02:19 LegalLord wrote:On June 24 2020 23:27 Wombat_NI wrote:
I must say I’m a little confused with the support here for aspects
of this visa restriction when weighing it with the positions of others.
Is this particular type of visa ripe with abuse or something I’m not getting or is it supplanting qualified graduates and rendering degrees less valuable or what?
Not being from the States I feel I’m missing some angle on this one. Yes, that's pretty accurate. The entire program is heavily abused to create a race to the bottom for educated professionals across a wide range of fields. Many businesses claim the program is necessary because the US doesn't have sufficient talent to fill up the workforce with US nationals; said claims are controversial and often believed to be made in bad faith (with "can't find qualified employees" really meaning "using H1-B's is cheaper"). H1-B in particular is a working visa for non-nationals. Related are visas such as F1 which are student visas for university education by non-nationals. A Is the entire program created to have an excuse to race to the bottom or is whatever system created just going to be abused that way because capitalism. There are certain employers who create positions that you have to fax resumes to so they can fill it with H1B labor for cheaper, but do you really think they'd not find another way to pay less money if given the opportunity. I'm sure the program was originally created with good intentions. Looks like 1952 was its original inception, 1990 in its current form. I'm also certain that bad faith employers will always seek out new ways to game the system to drive down wages. Good to try to remove tools from their arsenal when possible, though.
The people who do migrate with basis on an H1-B also benefit from this by higher wages and opportunities than in their home countries. Employers aren't the only ones winning from the arrangement. Incidentally, american workers aren't the only losers in this either, as the brain-drain is a significant factor in many underdeveloped countries.
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Northern Ireland26764 Posts
On June 25 2020 02:19 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On June 24 2020 23:27 Wombat_NI wrote:
I must say I’m a little confused with the support here for aspects
of this visa restriction when weighing it with the positions of others.
Is this particular type of visa ripe with abuse or something I’m not getting or is it supplanting qualified graduates and rendering degrees less valuable or what?
Not being from the States I feel I’m missing some angle on this one. Yes, that's pretty accurate. The entire program is heavily abused to create a race to the bottom for educated professionals across a wide range of fields. Many businesses claim the program is necessary because the US doesn't have sufficient talent to fill up the workforce with US nationals; said claims are controversial and often believed to be made in bad faith (with "can't find qualified employees" really meaning "using H1-B's is cheaper"). H1-B in particular is a working visa for non-nationals. Related are visas such as F1 which are student visas for university education by non-nationals. A
How is that fundamentally different from the claims of unskilled workers vs unskilled migrants and what they’re worried about?
It just strikes me as the same phenomenon only affecting a different strata of society? And that kind of anti-migrant sentiment seems very frowned upon here.
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On June 25 2020 03:45 farvacola wrote:
There’s some good historical scholarship being done on how classic understandings of feudalism and the working lives of medieval peasants do not square with the actual historical record, I’ll have to see if I can find my PDF. Regardless, the notion that people generally worked harder or for longer periods of time back then, while attractively convenient, is very much an item in controversy.
Yeah, I used to use the expression "serf brain" but serfs wouldn't put up with the shit US workers do.
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On June 25 2020 03:23 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On June 25 2020 02:50 Blitzkrieg0 wrote:On June 25 2020 02:19 LegalLord wrote:On June 24 2020 23:27 Wombat_NI wrote:
I must say I’m a little confused with the support here for aspects
of this visa restriction when weighing it with the positions of others.
Is this particular type of visa ripe with abuse or something I’m not getting or is it supplanting qualified graduates and rendering degrees less valuable or what?
Not being from the States I feel I’m missing some angle on this one. Yes, that's pretty accurate. The entire program is heavily abused to create a race to the bottom for educated professionals across a wide range of fields. Many businesses claim the program is necessary because the US doesn't have sufficient talent to fill up the workforce with US nationals; said claims are controversial and often believed to be made in bad faith (with "can't find qualified employees" really meaning "using H1-B's is cheaper"). H1-B in particular is a working visa for non-nationals. Related are visas such as F1 which are student visas for university education by non-nationals. A Is the entire program created to have an excuse to race to the bottom or is whatever system created just going to be abused that way because capitalism. There are certain employers who create positions that you have to fax resumes to so they can fill it with H1B labor for cheaper, but do you really think they'd not find another way to pay less money if given the opportunity. I'm sure the program was originally created with good intentions. Looks like 1952 was its original inception, 1990 in its current form. I'm also certain that bad faith employers will always seek out new ways to game the system to drive down wages. Good to try to remove tools from their arsenal when possible, though.
I just don't see H1Bs being a net bad. I'd rather the government crack down on the abusers than get rid of the program.
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Well Japan and Korea have some modern reasons as to their current work conditions that should be quite obvious. The issue with the euros coming to america is that they had a lot more work to do to establish a society. That way of thinking never left and people think that working at or more than 40 hours is how it should always be.
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On June 25 2020 03:50 PhoenixVoid wrote:The two primaries yesterday in New York and Kentucky have some interesting results to parse through. -Progressives did well in New York. Bowman likely ousted Engel for one and AOC dominated her challenger as examples. -Trump-backed candidates were a mixed bag, like with the replacement for Mark Meadows who lost to a 24-year-old who didn't have that support. -McGrath and Booker are in a decently close race for the Democratic nomination in Kentucky. Absentee ballots and mail-in ballots in major districts yet to be counted are said to favour Booker apparently. I expect turnout to be noticeably boosted compared to 2016 on the Democratic side, even with some headaches like mail-in ballots or shrinking the amount of voting locations. [ 1] [ 2]
Bowman ousting Engel is probably the biggest win electoral politics will get this cycle. Ridiculous the level of voter suppression they had to deal with in New York and Kentucky though.
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EPT
