You just argued "it was done to X, therefor it was successful at X".
No I didn't.
But I was responding to your "it won't work", so I didn't see a need to put in much detail.
That's your history lesson: today we spend about 27 hours per person per year producing food (yes, that's PER YEAR, not PER WEEK), and we had time on our hands to stick two men on the moon for a photo shoot. We weren't all busy hunting and farming, so we managed to build space ships in our free time.
Indeed. I am well aware of how increased productivity produces wealth and real improvements in living standards.
Because it costs money to employ people like that. You need to remove that money in taxes to create non-useful jobs, leaving consumers with less buying power.
Your argument is fallacious.
False assumption #1: taxes fund ependiture (they don't). False assumption #1: jobs created as a job guarantee must or will be "non-useful" (the whole point is they shouldn't be). False assumption #2: increasing taxes must have a meaningful impact on consumer spending (it won't if you focus on taxing the richest who mostly hoard and only spend a fraction of their incomes and wealth on consumption, and only a tiny fraction of that on "useful" consumption rather than, say, drinking champagne with flakes of gold in it).
Your progressive tax example is misleading because it uses a divide between the bottom 90% and the top 10%, and uses this as a basis of comparing to the Romans to (seemingly) make an argument that "things aren't so bad today". (It also appears to be constructed along the lines of taxation's purpose being to collect revenue, when it is not.)
In reality the wealth and income difference between the top 1% and the next 9% down is as big as the difference between the the top 10% and the bottom 90%, as is the difference between the top 1% and top 0.1%.
Wealth and income distribution today is mind-bogglingly skewed towards the top fractions of a percent of the population, and is becoming increasingly more so over the last few decades thanks to deliberate policy choice (primarily around decreasing taxes and removal of worker bargaining power, though the massive selloff of public infrastructure and undermining of public services has also played a big part).
Now, why do you think a bunch of people sitting around doing nothing (a BIG) is less wasteful than the same bunch of people doing productive work (a jobs guarantee) ?
It means they can't really under-pay, because then they just won't get workers.
Why not ? Plenty of people when given the choice between being given, say, $50 and working to get $60 will work for that extra $10. There's a massive labour surplus, remember.
Either you need to re-look up what 'conflating' means or you're not understanding what I'm saying. "Conflating" means "combine two or more things into one". I'm NOT doing that. I'm proposing replacing nearly all forms of 'welfare' with a BIG.
Yes, I apologise, that sentence was poorly written.
You are conflating the outcome of poorly structured welfare and decades of wage suppression (amongst many other issues, eg: reduction in worker protections) with the outcome of not having a BIG.
Welfare cliffs exist because people who "shouldn't" be reliant on it - ie: in full-time jobs - are. Welfare is supposed to be for people incapable of supporting themselves - ie: unemployed/disabled/pensioner/etc. That is how most people think of it and that is how it is managed - hence the "cliff" as benefits are removed quickly.
In a scenario where you go from no income (+welfare), to a liveable income, the complete withdrawal of the welfare component should have no meaningful impact (other than having to go to work everyday).
In a scenario where you go from a very low income and are reliant on welfare, to a somewhat higher income where your welfare is removed at a greater rate than your pay is increased, then you have the "cliff".
The solution here is not more welfare, it is better paying jobs so that people who shouldn't be dependent on welfare - full time workers - are not.
(It's worth pointing out this is a problem across the entire western world as neoliberal Governments have done more and more to support wage suppression, subsidy of business by stealth, and upwards shifting of wealth. Here in Australia, child support is available to families earning 150% of the median income. Families on median incomes would suffer real reductions in quality of life if their child support payments were stopped. Madness. But it means wages can be kept lower.)
Except that's not the situation, and between differences in productivity and living costs(for example, number of dependents), it's not practical to set minimum employment standards high enough to cover 'all' situations.
It *should* be the situation, that's the point. You can certainly set "minimum employment standards high enough" to cover a reasonable situation (say, back to the good old days when a single typical full-time job could support a family of four (five at a stretch) and buy a house (consider the most unrealistic part of cartoons like the Simpsons and Family Guy today - the single-income family)).
You cannot sit there and argue "that's not the situation today" while proposing something as radical as a BIG.
6% is actually very good. Just look at Europe.
No it's not, it's terrible. That Europe is worse means nothing other than Europe is worse.
Post-WW2 America had unemployment numbers starting with a 3 or 4 - and that was *real* unemployment, not the comical "if you work an hour a week you're not unemployed" and "if you've given up looking for work you're not unemployed" stats they use today. Of course, that was also back when full unemployment was the goal, rather than today where maintaining a certain level of UN-employment is the goal.
*Real* unemployment today - ie: people without jobs who want them, or with jobs who want to work more - is almost certainly well into the %teens. I'm not intimately familiar with US statistics so I'm not entirely sure where to look for it.
While yes, theoretically it could be better(remember that the BIG idea is also intended to increase employment, and that's without getting into the other policies I'd put in place), I view it like eliminating fraud, waste, and abuse - it's impossible to get 100% of it.
Ah. Had to re-read this to catch what you meant. No, a BIG is not intended to 'facilitate' underpayment of workers.
I will agree a lot of people do not “intend” it for that, but that it what it does.
With full employment and liveable minimum wages, a BIG is unnecessary. All it does in this scenario is allow minimum wages to drop below the liveable level, with the difference going to businesses as profit.
Think about it this way as well: If the business doesn't offer enough pay, a BIG supported worker isn't going to work there. He or she doesn't NEED to work that badly.
Yes ?
And how is a policy of ensuring that workers aren't trapped in low paying jobs or facing welfare cliffs where earning extra money actually costs them income not a step towards your primary objective?
Because it doesn’t put people into jobs. It doesn’t even attempt to put people into jobs.
One example was a single mother with 2 kids - her effective income experienced a local maximum at a full time minimum wage job - any more and it would cost her roughly $11k in income. She had to earn more than $70k/year before she actually made more money.
You are conflating poorly structured welfare and the results of decades of wage suppression with a BIG. The real problem you are describing is that the woman’s wage was far too low, requiring a welfare supplement to be liveable (thus the dramatic impact of its removal).
The only people who should need welfare are the unemployed. Even the worst, lowest-paid minimum wage job should produce a liveable income at least equivalent to any BIG.
Actually, I'd argue that we're about as close to 'as many people as possible'.
No we aren’t. Not even close. Even the worthless official unemployment numbers for the US show 6%+ unemployment. Real un- and under-employment is probably well into the %teens, if not more.
All you have to do to see that we aren’t even close to ‘as many people as possible’ being employed is to look at the decades of wage stagnation (the result of neoliberalism’s despicably evil NAIRU).
So yeah, time to take care of people 'with welfare', but we need to do so in a way that's cheap and effective, without, like I said, putting cliffs in the benefits that block them from entering the workforce. My policy for that is a BIG.
Your policy will continue the upwards transfer of wealth, the reduction of social mobility, the ongoing destruction of the middle classes through wage suppression and not improve unemployment. It will produce a vast underclass reliant on the BIG to survive, a tiny sliver of middle-class professionals and a handful of unfathomably wealthy upper-class who own pretty much everything, including the political process.
No it's not and no it doesn't. Indeed, the whole point of it is to achieve the complete opposite result.
Why do you think a bunch of people sitting around doing nothing is less wasteful than that same group of people working on productive output ? How does that decrease wealth ? How does it lead to a poorer society ?
Unfortunately, whatever you believe Libertarianism is - or was? - it no longer is anymore. The public - and increasingly private - face of Libertarians are the far-right Ayn Rand corporate-fascism psychopath types (and there are plenty of them banging around Slashdot, and the tech world in general). It's not really fair to get annoyed at people criticising "Libertarians" because you consider yourself one, when your beliefs are so divergent from the beliefs of most people who call themselves Libertarians.
(Some people would argue, for example, that "feminism" is in a similar position. Unfortunate but inescapable.)
I appreciate your difficulty in finding any representation in the US, where "left" - progressive - politics has been basically dead for thirty-odd years as neoliberalism took over (Thatcher and Reagan have a lot to answer for). It's not quite so bad here in Australia, but - as in the the rest of the developed world - the Overton window has been moving steadily rightwards for decades and now the only place to find any sort of "left" representation is in the Greens, who at least have some political influence in our system. The mainstream supposed "left" party (Labor) now sit in a similar policy spectrum space as the mainstream "right" party (The Liberals) did a decade or two ago.
The point of social democracy (I believe) is not to have an "intrusive" Government as its own entity, it is for Government to be the _administrative_ representation of the People (ie: the "democracy" part). So it's not "the Government keeping you safe", it's "society keeping itself safe". Despite what many would argue, both genuinely and disingenuously, there is no reason that this idea need significantly impact on the rights and liberties of the individual. "Government" is thus no more intrusive than the people want it to be (which, it must be recognised, will be too intrusive for some, and not intrusive enough for others - such is the nature of compromise).
This does of course mean you need proper democracy. In particular the people must have the ability to circumvent the political classes - ostensibly their "representatives" - through processes like citizen-initiated-referendums and recall elections. I would also argue you need extremely restrictive rules around political donations and political advertising to prevent the undue influence of the wealthy, but in actuality this is of course something that the people would decide on themselves.
I was fortunate enough to live in Switzerland for a couple of years. Their system of direct democracy and representation is excellent.
Don't give out welfare and unemployment. Pay minimum wage to have somebody pick up trash along the highway. Pay $15/hour to have city employees fill in pot holes. Pay $15/hour to have teacher aids in classrooms. If you are handing out money anyway, have the people do something productive to earn it. The town will be cleaner, have fewer potholes, and better educated youth. Plus parents will have higher self-esteem that will transfer to their children. There will be better work ethic. Less idle time to find trouble. Less obesity-related health costs. The list goes on and on. If you are sceptical, try it on a small scale: divert 20% of social safety net spending into low paying jobs that improve the community. Prove which method is more effective.
You are talking about a jobs guarantee, which is a cornerstone of progressive economics and politics, and was one of the foundations of post-WW2 western democracies and the historic prosperity they created. I find it very odd you reach this conclusion after the previous paragraphs, especially the one arguing for income suppression through a lower minimum wage.
But a jobs guarantee means "big Government", comprehensive publicly-funded infrastructure and services, and workers with secure incomes and a strong bargaining position, things the neoliberals who have been running the western world since the '70s hate and will fight to their last breath.
Most of the developed world has chronic un- and under-employment problems thanks to the poisonous neoliberal ideology that has infected it, deeming full employment "bad". People want to work [more], but there is nothing for them to do (or employers won't pay enough to be worth it).
A UBI is basically a public(/Government) subsidy for business by proxy.
Better to have a jobs guarantee and let the public (/Government) soak up any idle labour by building stuff. But that means a Government that employs people and creates public goods, which horrifies the Ayn Rand types who think only their wealthy superheroes should/can do that.
Indeed. Because undermining workers rights and public services for the last thirty-odd years sure has produced great outcomes. What we need is more of that !
Vive la France! Vive la Republique! Vive la Liberte!
The few of us that work are getting crushed under the massive amount of money taken from us to give to lazy people that refuse to work.
No you're not.
"Lazy people that refuse to work" are a vanishingly small proportion of the un- and under-employed. The problem is a lack of jobs.
The real problem is a lack of demand, since the poor have no money, and the middle classes are either flat broke after decades of wage stagnation, or completely tapped out on debt and sacrificing most of the money they do have into it.
But, when there's absolutely no restrictions on who gets to take my money, and people say 'fuck it' and just give my money free to everyone else, it seems bizarre.
You may be familiar with this principle in its most common applications, the armed forces and the Police.
In a couple of generations, when probably upwards of 50% of the population is literally unable to work because there's nothing they can do a robot or AI can't do better/faster/cheaper, we will need the sort of societal rethink that starts with a universal basic income.
It's so strange because it's backwards compared to personal accounting. People usually want to pay off their cars or houses and live in them without a mortgage or car loan, for example. Businesses seem to want to go to software companies and say, "Please, let me pay you forever to use your software."
(In the general case...)
As an individual, you have to consider the last 10-20 years of your life where you will need to survive without an income.
As a business, you do not.
Specific to hosted vs local systems, generally speaking keeping people on staff to manage systems is expensive, with nearly no benefit vs paying for a functionally equivalent hosted system. This is simply a product of technological advancement that has made hardware incredibly cheap, internet connections cheap, fast and reliable, and people expensive.
That's a stupid thing to say, and you're a stupid person for saying it. The bar is not whether you're feeding many people or many many people, the bar is whether you're feeding many people. Try opening a soup kitchen and giving away food and see if you get inspected for health reasons. But nobody is going to inspect your kitchen at home unless you plan to feed the masses from it.
You don't need a commercial kitchen certification to have a party.
You do need one if your business is providing food as a service to others, even if it only serves a handful of people a day.
They key point - the "bar" - here is a business providing a service for others, not the number of attendees. To take an extreme example, a restaurant that only served one meal a day would still need appropriate commercial kitchen certification, but you could have fifty friends over for a barbecue without needing one.
Making a vehicle commercial does not increase its passenger capacity.
That's a stupid thing to say, and you're a stupid person for saying it.
A commercial vehicle for hire carries a far higher number of passengers, over a far higher number of kilometres, and a far greater area. It is driving around 24/7. To argue it presents the same risk profile as a personal vehicle carrying a handful of different people a relatively short distance, driving maybe 5 hours a day at most, over a limited area, is ridiculous on its face.
Driving a taxi is more dangerous for the driver than for the passengers, statistically; they are way more likely to have a crime committed against them by you (or another passenger) than you are by them.
Indeed. I drove taxis for years, remember ?
Doesn’t change the fact that drivers can also be dangerous to passengers.
Do you propose that we pre-screen all taxi passengers for the safety of taxi drivers?
That's a stupid thing to say, and you're a stupid person for saying it.
Again, the same rules should apply to all drivers whether commercial or not.
Right. So is your position is that someone with a criminal history in, say, violent theft, shouldn’t be allowed to have a driver’s license at all, or that someone with a criminal history in violent theft shouldn’t have any problems getting a job as a taxi or limo driver ?
But in this case, the taxi driver is at more risk of being killed or otherwise harmed by a passenger than the passenger is at risk of the opposite, so it's still a shitty argument here.
That's a stupid thing to say, and you're a stupid person for saying it.
Your core argument is that there is no difference - legally, ethically, or otherwise - between someone doing something (driving, cooking, watching children, whatever) in a social context, and someone doing the same thing as a business, providing a service to all and sundry. This is stupid. They haven't been considered equivalent since we lived in tribes of a few hundred people. Trying to abuse the word "sharing" to change this, does not.
Uh, because they've now got an implied responsibility to their customers ?
Wrong. Restaurants need to meet standards that your home kitchen does not because so many people eat there.
So a small corner cafe has lower hygiene requirements than a Sizzler ?
But whether you use your car for commercial purposes or not doesn't really change how many people you can kill with it.
Yes, it does.
We make drivers of heavy vehicles or people who want to tow heavy loads get fancier driver's licenses because they can kill more people.
No, we do it because it needs a more advanced skill set.
A taxi is just a regular automobile, so it doesn't require a special driver's license. It requires a taxi license because protectionism.
It requires a taxi license (by which I'm assuming you mean driver certification) because a taxi driver has additional standards around things like background checks and (depending on jurisdiction) driving offences. Because they're providing a paid service to others who may be impacted by those things.
You see a similar condition around people who need to work with children vs people who don't. For the same kinds of reasons.
Why ? Equipment standards for selling services to others vs personal use differ in lots of places.
If vehicles are a danger to others because they are being operated more, then vehicles should be inspected when they are operated more whether they are used for commercial purposes or not. It's wrong to place that burden on someone simply because they're engaging in economic activity.
Someone providing a commercial service has a greater responsibility than someone engaging in personal use. That's why restaurants need to meet standards that your kitchen at home does not.
Sure, but that's a separate problem from Uber, and one for which they should not be held responsible.
It's not a separate problem if vehicles for hire are subject to different standards, and Uber - more accurately, people driving for Uber - are providing a vehicle-for-hire service.
The separate problem is whether or not all vehicles should be subject to regular mechanical checks, not whether Uber vehicles should be - the law is already clear on vehicle-for-hire standards.
Slashdot Mirror
You just argued "it was done to X, therefor it was successful at X".
No I didn't.
But I was responding to your "it won't work", so I didn't see a need to put in much detail.
That's your history lesson: today we spend about 27 hours per person per year producing food (yes, that's PER YEAR, not PER WEEK), and we had time on our hands to stick two men on the moon for a photo shoot. We weren't all busy hunting and farming, so we managed to build space ships in our free time.
Indeed. I am well aware of how increased productivity produces wealth and real improvements in living standards.
Because it costs money to employ people like that. You need to remove that money in taxes to create non-useful jobs, leaving consumers with less buying power.
Your argument is fallacious.
False assumption #1: taxes fund ependiture (they don't).
False assumption #1: jobs created as a job guarantee must or will be "non-useful" (the whole point is they shouldn't be).
False assumption #2: increasing taxes must have a meaningful impact on consumer spending (it won't if you focus on taxing the richest who mostly hoard and only spend a fraction of their incomes and wealth on consumption, and only a tiny fraction of that on "useful" consumption rather than, say, drinking champagne with flakes of gold in it).
Your progressive tax example is misleading because it uses a divide between the bottom 90% and the top 10%, and uses this as a basis of comparing to the Romans to (seemingly) make an argument that "things aren't so bad today". (It also appears to be constructed along the lines of taxation's purpose being to collect revenue, when it is not.)
In reality the wealth and income difference between the top 1% and the next 9% down is as big as the difference between the the top 10% and the bottom 90%, as is the difference between the top 1% and top 0.1%.
Wealth and income distribution today is mind-bogglingly skewed towards the top fractions of a percent of the population, and is becoming increasingly more so over the last few decades thanks to deliberate policy choice (primarily around decreasing taxes and removal of worker bargaining power, though the massive selloff of public infrastructure and undermining of public services has also played a big part).
Now, why do you think a bunch of people sitting around doing nothing (a BIG) is less wasteful than the same bunch of people doing productive work (a jobs guarantee) ?
It means they can't really under-pay, because then they just won't get workers.
Why not ? Plenty of people when given the choice between being given, say, $50 and working to get $60 will work for that extra $10. There's a massive labour surplus, remember.
Either you need to re-look up what 'conflating' means or you're not understanding what I'm saying. "Conflating" means "combine two or more things into one". I'm NOT doing that. I'm proposing replacing nearly all forms of 'welfare' with a BIG.
Yes, I apologise, that sentence was poorly written.
You are conflating the outcome of poorly structured welfare and decades of wage suppression (amongst many other issues, eg: reduction in worker protections) with the outcome of not having a BIG.
Welfare cliffs exist because people who "shouldn't" be reliant on it - ie: in full-time jobs - are. Welfare is supposed to be for people incapable of supporting themselves - ie: unemployed/disabled/pensioner/etc. That is how most people think of it and that is how it is managed - hence the "cliff" as benefits are removed quickly.
In a scenario where you go from no income (+welfare), to a liveable income, the complete withdrawal of the welfare component should have no meaningful impact (other than having to go to work everyday).
In a scenario where you go from a very low income and are reliant on welfare, to a somewhat higher income where your welfare is removed at a greater rate than your pay is increased, then you have the "cliff".
The solution here is not more welfare, it is better paying jobs so that people who shouldn't be dependent on welfare - full time workers - are not.
(It's worth pointing out this is a problem across the entire western world as neoliberal Governments have done more and more to support wage suppression, subsidy of business by stealth, and upwards shifting of wealth. Here in Australia, child support is available to families earning 150% of the median income. Families on median incomes would suffer real reductions in quality of life if their child support payments were stopped. Madness. But it means wages can be kept lower.)
Except that's not the situation, and between differences in productivity and living costs(for example, number of dependents), it's not practical to set minimum employment standards high enough to cover 'all' situations.
It *should* be the situation, that's the point. You can certainly set "minimum employment standards high enough" to cover a reasonable situation (say, back to the good old days when a single typical full-time job could support a family of four (five at a stretch) and buy a house (consider the most unrealistic part of cartoons like the Simpsons and Family Guy today - the single-income family)).
You cannot sit there and argue "that's not the situation today" while proposing something as radical as a BIG.
6% is actually very good. Just look at Europe.
No it's not, it's terrible. That Europe is worse means nothing other than Europe is worse.
Post-WW2 America had unemployment numbers starting with a 3 or 4 - and that was *real* unemployment, not the comical "if you work an hour a week you're not unemployed" and "if you've given up looking for work you're not unemployed" stats they use today. Of course, that was also back when full unemployment was the goal, rather than today where maintaining a certain level of UN-employment is the goal.
*Real* unemployment today - ie: people without jobs who want them, or with jobs who want to work more - is almost certainly well into the %teens. I'm not intimately familiar with US statistics so I'm not entirely sure where to look for it.
While yes, theoretically it could be better(remember that the BIG idea is also intended to increase employment, and that's without getting into the other policies I'd put in place), I view it like eliminating fraud, waste, and abuse - it's impossible to get 100% of it.
I agree you never get "100%" because a ce
Ah. Had to re-read this to catch what you meant. No, a BIG is not intended to 'facilitate' underpayment of workers.
I will agree a lot of people do not “intend” it for that, but that it what it does.
With full employment and liveable minimum wages, a BIG is unnecessary. All it does in this scenario is allow minimum wages to drop below the liveable level, with the difference going to businesses as profit.
Think about it this way as well: If the business doesn't offer enough pay, a BIG supported worker isn't going to work there. He or she doesn't NEED to work that badly.
Yes ?
And how is a policy of ensuring that workers aren't trapped in low paying jobs or facing welfare cliffs where earning extra money actually costs them income not a step towards your primary objective?
Because it doesn’t put people into jobs. It doesn’t even attempt to put people into jobs.
One example was a single mother with 2 kids - her effective income experienced a local maximum at a full time minimum wage job - any more and it would cost her roughly $11k in income. She had to earn more than $70k/year before she actually made more money.
You are conflating poorly structured welfare and the results of decades of wage suppression with a BIG. The real problem you are describing is that the woman’s wage was far too low, requiring a welfare supplement to be liveable (thus the dramatic impact of its removal).
The only people who should need welfare are the unemployed. Even the worst, lowest-paid minimum wage job should produce a liveable income at least equivalent to any BIG.
Actually, I'd argue that we're about as close to 'as many people as possible'.
No we aren’t. Not even close. Even the worthless official unemployment numbers for the US show 6%+ unemployment. Real un- and under-employment is probably well into the %teens, if not more.
All you have to do to see that we aren’t even close to ‘as many people as possible’ being employed is to look at the decades of wage stagnation (the result of neoliberalism’s despicably evil NAIRU).
So yeah, time to take care of people 'with welfare', but we need to do so in a way that's cheap and effective, without, like I said, putting cliffs in the benefits that block them from entering the workforce. My policy for that is a BIG.
Your policy will continue the upwards transfer of wealth, the reduction of social mobility, the ongoing destruction of the middle classes through wage suppression and not improve unemployment. It will produce a vast underclass reliant on the BIG to survive, a tiny sliver of middle-class professionals and a handful of unfathomably wealthy upper-class who own pretty much everything, including the political process.
No it's not and no it doesn't. Indeed, the whole point of it is to achieve the complete opposite result.
Why do you think a bunch of people sitting around doing nothing is less wasteful than that same group of people working on productive output ? How does that decrease wealth ? How does it lead to a poorer society ?
Unfortunately, whatever you believe Libertarianism is - or was? - it no longer is anymore. The public - and increasingly private - face of Libertarians are the far-right Ayn Rand corporate-fascism psychopath types (and there are plenty of them banging around Slashdot, and the tech world in general). It's not really fair to get annoyed at people criticising "Libertarians" because you consider yourself one, when your beliefs are so divergent from the beliefs of most people who call themselves Libertarians.
(Some people would argue, for example, that "feminism" is in a similar position. Unfortunate but inescapable.)
I appreciate your difficulty in finding any representation in the US, where "left" - progressive - politics has been basically dead for thirty-odd years as neoliberalism took over (Thatcher and Reagan have a lot to answer for). It's not quite so bad here in Australia, but - as in the the rest of the developed world - the Overton window has been moving steadily rightwards for decades and now the only place to find any sort of "left" representation is in the Greens, who at least have some political influence in our system. The mainstream supposed "left" party (Labor) now sit in a similar policy spectrum space as the mainstream "right" party (The Liberals) did a decade or two ago.
The point of social democracy (I believe) is not to have an "intrusive" Government as its own entity, it is for Government to be the _administrative_ representation of the People (ie: the "democracy" part). So it's not "the Government keeping you safe", it's "society keeping itself safe". Despite what many would argue, both genuinely and disingenuously, there is no reason that this idea need significantly impact on the rights and liberties of the individual. "Government" is thus no more intrusive than the people want it to be (which, it must be recognised, will be too intrusive for some, and not intrusive enough for others - such is the nature of compromise).
This does of course mean you need proper democracy. In particular the people must have the ability to circumvent the political classes - ostensibly their "representatives" - through processes like citizen-initiated-referendums and recall elections. I would also argue you need extremely restrictive rules around political donations and political advertising to prevent the undue influence of the wealthy, but in actuality this is of course something that the people would decide on themselves.
I was fortunate enough to live in Switzerland for a couple of years. Their system of direct democracy and representation is excellent.
No it's not. In the post-war period incomes grew faster amongst the middle classes than they did amongst the wealthy.
Increasing income inequality is a policy choice.
Don't give out welfare and unemployment. Pay minimum wage to have somebody pick up trash along the highway. Pay $15/hour to have city employees fill in pot holes. Pay $15/hour to have teacher aids in classrooms. If you are handing out money anyway, have the people do something productive to earn it. The town will be cleaner, have fewer potholes, and better educated youth. Plus parents will have higher self-esteem that will transfer to their children. There will be better work ethic. Less idle time to find trouble. Less obesity-related health costs. The list goes on and on. If you are sceptical, try it on a small scale: divert 20% of social safety net spending into low paying jobs that improve the community. Prove which method is more effective.
You are talking about a jobs guarantee, which is a cornerstone of progressive economics and politics, and was one of the foundations of post-WW2 western democracies and the historic prosperity they created. I find it very odd you reach this conclusion after the previous paragraphs, especially the one arguing for income suppression through a lower minimum wage.
But a jobs guarantee means "big Government", comprehensive publicly-funded infrastructure and services, and workers with secure incomes and a strong bargaining position, things the neoliberals who have been running the western world since the '70s hate and will fight to their last breath.
Thatcher and Reagan have a lot to answer for.
You sound like a centre-left social democrat to me. Maybe you should vote for Bernie ?
(I'm not an American so I have no horse in that race.)
Eventually, I figured out [...]
"Figured out", or asked them ?
Most of the developed world has chronic un- and under-employment problems thanks to the poisonous neoliberal ideology that has infected it, deeming full employment "bad". People want to work [more], but there is nothing for them to do (or employers won't pay enough to be worth it).
That's a bit of a stretch, I think. By that standard anytime the government spends money it's a subsidy for business by proxy.
Not it's not, because that money isn't being spent for the sole purpose of facilitating the underpayment of workers.
If we're still running into a problem of 'not enough jobs', then we can do the job guarantee.
No, this is arse-about-face. The primary objective should be to have as many people as possible in real, productive, well-paid, work.
THEN the people who can't/won't work can be taken care of by welfare.
A UBI is basically a public(/Government) subsidy for business by proxy.
Better to have a jobs guarantee and let the public (/Government) soak up any idle labour by building stuff. But that means a Government that employs people and creates public goods, which horrifies the Ayn Rand types who think only their wealthy superheroes should/can do that.
A UBI is basically a subsidy for business by proxy.
A jobs guarantee is a better system. But that means Government has to build stuff and employ people, which spooks the "but teh freedumbz!" types.
Indeed. Because undermining workers rights and public services for the last thirty-odd years sure has produced great outcomes. What we need is more of that !
Vive la France! Vive la Republique! Vive la Liberte!
This must be some attempt at irony.
The few of us that work are getting crushed under the massive amount of money taken from us to give to lazy people that refuse to work.
No you're not.
"Lazy people that refuse to work" are a vanishingly small proportion of the un- and under-employed. The problem is a lack of jobs.
The real problem is a lack of demand, since the poor have no money, and the middle classes are either flat broke after decades of wage stagnation, or completely tapped out on debt and sacrificing most of the money they do have into it.
Why can't I travel anonymously?
You can. Walk.
How did we allow the Statists to play us so?
Because most people aren't extremists and understand that laws are always a compromise.
It is.
But the US taking over Britain's role in Middle Eastern Meddling for the last half century or so has sure made their task easier.
But, when there's absolutely no restrictions on who gets to take my money, and people say 'fuck it' and just give my money free to everyone else, it seems bizarre.
You may be familiar with this principle in its most common applications, the armed forces and the Police.
In a couple of generations, when probably upwards of 50% of the population is literally unable to work because there's nothing they can do a robot or AI can't do better/faster/cheaper, we will need the sort of societal rethink that starts with a universal basic income.
You can put 32GB into the Precision laptops - they have four slots.
Of course, they're a bit bigger and heavier than these.
Lets say in this post scarcity world of yours, one ton Iridium statues become a thing. Everybody wants one.
Justify your premise.
raw potatoes being merely "awful" while in reality they are quite poisonous.
No they're not, I eat them regularly and have for 30+ years.
It's so strange because it's backwards compared to personal accounting. People usually want to pay off their cars or houses and live in them without a mortgage or car loan, for example. Businesses seem to want to go to software companies and say, "Please, let me pay you forever to use your software."
(In the general case...)
As an individual, you have to consider the last 10-20 years of your life where you will need to survive without an income.
As a business, you do not.
Specific to hosted vs local systems, generally speaking keeping people on staff to manage systems is expensive, with nearly no benefit vs paying for a functionally equivalent hosted system. This is simply a product of technological advancement that has made hardware incredibly cheap, internet connections cheap, fast and reliable, and people expensive.
That's a stupid thing to say, and you're a stupid person for saying it. The bar is not whether you're feeding many people or many many people, the bar is whether you're feeding many people. Try opening a soup kitchen and giving away food and see if you get inspected for health reasons. But nobody is going to inspect your kitchen at home unless you plan to feed the masses from it.
You don't need a commercial kitchen certification to have a party.
You do need one if your business is providing food as a service to others, even if it only serves a handful of people a day.
They key point - the "bar" - here is a business providing a service for others, not the number of attendees. To take an extreme example, a restaurant that only served one meal a day would still need appropriate commercial kitchen certification, but you could have fifty friends over for a barbecue without needing one.
Making a vehicle commercial does not increase its passenger capacity.
That's a stupid thing to say, and you're a stupid person for saying it.
A commercial vehicle for hire carries a far higher number of passengers, over a far higher number of kilometres, and a far greater area. It is driving around 24/7. To argue it presents the same risk profile as a personal vehicle carrying a handful of different people a relatively short distance, driving maybe 5 hours a day at most, over a limited area, is ridiculous on its face.
Driving a taxi is more dangerous for the driver than for the passengers, statistically; they are way more likely to have a crime committed against them by you (or another passenger) than you are by them.
Indeed. I drove taxis for years, remember ?
Doesn’t change the fact that drivers can also be dangerous to passengers.
Do you propose that we pre-screen all taxi passengers for the safety of taxi drivers?
That's a stupid thing to say, and you're a stupid person for saying it.
Again, the same rules should apply to all drivers whether commercial or not.
Right. So is your position is that someone with a criminal history in, say, violent theft, shouldn’t be allowed to have a driver’s license at all, or that someone with a criminal history in violent theft shouldn’t have any problems getting a job as a taxi or limo driver ?
But in this case, the taxi driver is at more risk of being killed or otherwise harmed by a passenger than the passenger is at risk of the opposite, so it's still a shitty argument here.
That's a stupid thing to say, and you're a stupid person for saying it.
Your core argument is that there is no difference - legally, ethically, or otherwise - between someone doing something (driving, cooking, watching children, whatever) in a social context, and someone doing the same thing as a business, providing a service to all and sundry. This is stupid. They haven't been considered equivalent since we lived in tribes of a few hundred people. Trying to abuse the word "sharing" to change this, does not.
What? Why?
Uh, because they've now got an implied responsibility to their customers ?
Wrong. Restaurants need to meet standards that your home kitchen does not because so many people eat there.
So a small corner cafe has lower hygiene requirements than a Sizzler ?
But whether you use your car for commercial purposes or not doesn't really change how many people you can kill with it.
Yes, it does.
We make drivers of heavy vehicles or people who want to tow heavy loads get fancier driver's licenses because they can kill more people.
No, we do it because it needs a more advanced skill set.
A taxi is just a regular automobile, so it doesn't require a special driver's license. It requires a taxi license because protectionism.
It requires a taxi license (by which I'm assuming you mean driver certification) because a taxi driver has additional standards around things like background checks and (depending on jurisdiction) driving offences. Because they're providing a paid service to others who may be impacted by those things.
You see a similar condition around people who need to work with children vs people who don't. For the same kinds of reasons.
They shouldn't be.
Why ? Equipment standards for selling services to others vs personal use differ in lots of places.
If vehicles are a danger to others because they are being operated more, then vehicles should be inspected when they are operated more whether they are used for commercial purposes or not. It's wrong to place that burden on someone simply because they're engaging in economic activity.
Someone providing a commercial service has a greater responsibility than someone engaging in personal use. That's why restaurants need to meet standards that your kitchen at home does not.
Sure, but that's a separate problem from Uber, and one for which they should not be held responsible.
It's not a separate problem if vehicles for hire are subject to different standards, and Uber - more accurately, people driving for Uber - are providing a vehicle-for-hire service.
The separate problem is whether or not all vehicles should be subject to regular mechanical checks, not whether Uber vehicles should be - the law is already clear on vehicle-for-hire standards.