The implication is that there are some women who would like to have followed the same path, but were dissuaded along the way. Not by the universities, but by the lower schools, the other students, and the women's parents.
I see. And here I thought that talking to your parents, other students, and teachers was a way in which free people reached an informed decision.
Who should those poor, oppressed women have talked to instead? You? A cadre of feminists?
Because if the market decides, you just get the biggest player, not the best system.
That's not how markets work.
Besides, don't you people keep saying that the biggest player will pay off politicians anyway in order to win? So in what way does government making this decision help anybody?
This was worked out long ago for money, it's not called "legal tender" for nothing; companies aren't free to come up with their own coins and bills.
You're not helping your case. In fact, you're hurting it.
The generalizations coming from the GP are only useful for mapping trends over an entire group and should not be used as a blanket way to treat all individuals.
And guess what? Companies and universities go out of their way to accommodate women, and women generally are as happy with their jobs as men.
Instantly saying it's "natural" is a lazy way out. How much is nature and how much is nurture?
What difference does it make whether women choose career X because of the bed time stories their mothers told them or because their brains are genetically different? What gives you or anybody else the right to mess with their nurture and education just so they meet your arbitrary criteria of equality?
Ah, so you are saying that credit card companies should continue to be able to dominate the market, with all the security problems, exploitation of, and discrimination against, vulnerable customers, and excessive charges that entails, because you, a whiny middle class guy doesn't want to be inconvenienced by having two separate smartphone apps on your phone.
Yeah, I think that kind of attitude just about sums up why people like you keep voting crony capitalists into office.
This isn't the sort of thing that "the market" can decide. I expect that it'll end up in court.
Why can't the market decide this? Why should this end up in court? We currently have deeply entrenched market dominance by credit card companies. Alternative payment schemes are coming out and attacking that dominance, and that only works if a critical mass of retailers actually stand up to the currently dominant players. If courts intervene, it will lock in the dominance and monopoly profits the credit card companies are extracting. Why do you think that would be a good thing?
The reason they are doing this is that they don't want to keep paying inflated fees to credit card companies because they are tired of getting screwed. They may also not be serious about it; it may simply be a pressure tactic to get credit card companies to lower fees "or else".
Getting payment options other than the big credit card companies and their inflated fees necessarily involves inconvenience. Obviously, consumers are too lazy to do it by themselves, but retailers may have enough power to make this happen.
So you agree, the US has problems. How many of those constraints have you experienced in Australia?
No, I chose the US over Australia because of the socio-economic constraints in Australia.
The ability to read. Your claim that Australia is more socio-economically constrained than the US is plainly false as plenty of OECD reports will show. This [epi.org] says it's nearly twice as constrained. Your claim is bunk.
Given the low levels of inequality in Australia, that means that you can move easily from being slightly lower middle class to slightly upper middle class (and back down)! Ain't it great! And that's just one of the many problems with your interpretation of that statistic. They teach you to read, but not to think.
I've never once seen the right wing give me a good answer that didn't boil down to "let 'em die for my profit and glory" or some form of back door socialism. If you've got the balls (and they psychopathy) to let 99% of the world starve while 1% live like Gods fine.
Well, the irony of course is that it is socialism that leads to "letting the 99% of the world starve while 1% live like Gods". How do I know? I experienced socialism first hand, the real kind, behind iron curtain and everything. That's why I find the positions of US liberals and progressives on socialism and welfare states so disturbing: you simply have no idea what you are advocating and how miserably it fails in practice, time and again.
This idea that free markets lead to starvation, poverty, or exploitation is simply a lie. It has been free markets and free trade that have brought unprecedented wealth, health, peace, and freedom from privation to the world.
Free markets do lead to more inequality than socialism, but inequality doesn't matter if everybody is still better off.
The problem isn't "how do we train people for new jobs" it's "what do we do with people when there _are_ no jobs?". What do we do when only 20% of us have any useful work to do? What about 10%? 1%?
From the point of view of the 19th century, less than 10% of us have useful work to do these days: less than 10% of the workforce are engaged in producing the entirety of the stuff that people 200 years ago needed for work, and those 10% are producing stuff that would have been fit for kings back then. Does that mean 90% of people are out of work? Not at all: the labor participation rate is higher than it has ever been (well, except for a modest dip due to Obama's screwy policies).
Human labor is always scarce. The real problems with welfare and unemployment we have are the consequence of increasing government policies that encourage people not to work, in particular at the low end. It is demeaning and hurtful for the people involved, and it is destructive for our society.
Socio-economic constraints - do you even know what those words mean?
Yes, I have experienced them first hand, under socialism, under the European welfare state, and finally coming as an immigrant to the US and working my way up.
So tell me: what's your experience of "socio-economic constraints" based on?
There are lots of things they can do, however: they can upgrade to an empty package, upgrade to a package that requires positive confirmation from the user upon upgrade, or upgrade to a package with a non-existent dependency.
If McDonalds is operating in an environment where their food can be replaced with many different supplementary goods below their menu price, they actually, in the limit, cannot raise
Well, yes, you are stating the obvious. But the possibility that they can't raise prices is even worse if you think it through. None of these possibilities will result in people getting paid substantially above what they are worth because that simply is not sustainable.
You can go a little further, and we can argue that McDonalds was paying their employees below the equilibrium wage for the work
Yes, when you pull facts like that out of your ass, you can "prove" just about anything. But probably the opposite is true: they are an anachronism and already paid a bit more than they are worth. Companies are simply holding on to them because automation is risky and capital intensive, but the higher you raise the cost of employing them, the faster their jobs will be eliminated.
Let's disregard how utterly stupid those studies are, how gullible you are in your interpretation, or the fact that the links you point to contradict you; let's assume the effect was actually real: increasing minimum wage this year correlated with increased job growth. Does that mean it's a good thing?
Increasing minimum wage may well cause short term job growth: changing your business to use less labor requires lots of short term investments: high tech self-checkout stations, remodeling, new business processes, new computers, assembly robots, cleaning robots, etc.
But the long term effect of raising the cost of labor is that businesses hire less and less inexperienced workers. The result is higher job requirements, higher youth unemployment, more student loan debt, exactly what we are seeing.
Of course, the next step is for people like you to call for more public funding for tertiary education. The net effect? You have freed companies from their need to train their entry-level workers and instead make the tax payer pay for it. Aren't you a good little crony capitalist.
Yes. The thing that's different about the business climate now is that business owners are just pocketing the extra profits that removing employees from the workforce gives them
In different words, my 401(k) plan increases in value by an extra percent per year. You better hope that's happening, because otherwise all of our retirments are in the toilet.
Any small business owner can funnel nearly 100% of his personal expenses through his business and pay lower tax rates as a result.
The IRS frowns on that sort of thing, and when the IRS frowns on things, people get heavily penalized.
So I'm not exactly sympathetic when a small business owner complains about how much it costs to employ someone who is helping him make money.
So to summarize your argument: because wage earners get taxed too much and because some small business owners cheat on their taxes, you think all small business owners should be taxed more highly. Never mind that the effect will be people losing their jobs, at least it makes you feel good!
Small business owners complain way too much about things like taxes, when in reality, they have the best deal in the world going.
If they are getting such a great deal, why don't you become one?
WSJ - Don't Worry Old Money: Automation will undercut the minimum wage hikes and keep your portfolio's growth going strong
McDonald's is franchises, i.e., small businesses.
That doesn't necessarily make them evil, but it certainly speaks about how unethical a lot of employers are--their code of conduct is about selfishness and not a more fundamental moral failing.
An employer's ethics are irrelevant in a free market as long as they honor their contracts and don't commit fraud, theft, or murder; the whole point of a free market is that unethical behavior is self-punishing.
Furthermore, you think that you're sticking it to the employer if you force them to pay higher wages, but they are simply going to raise their prices and pass the costs on to the rest of us. The increased wages don't come out of their pockets. However, they oppose higher wages because the higher prices they charge lower demand for their products.
And this is why the there's such a heckling against minimum wage laws and unions.
Unions are a good idea in principle. The problem with the actual unions we have is the same as the problem with banks: they have managed to get laws passed that give them a monopoly on some market. Minimum wage laws are just stupid.
The U.S. is always 20 to 30 years behind the times for technology that appears first in Europe since it didn't appear here first. We are finally getting credit/debit cards with microchips that is commonplace in Europe. Whee!
We have been behind on self-service technology because our labor costs are lower; that's why we still have baggers, busboys cashiers, hotel check-in clerks, parking gate operators, etc. where in Europe, they have none. In many cases, in Europe, jobs are only partially automated, forcing the customer do to extra work for the business.
Banking security in the US has been less strong than in Europe because we have (relatively speaking) less fraud and because we have a large legacy of credit card usage; Europe moved to cashless systems much later and largely went for debit cards instead of credit cards.
(Incidentally, just because a technology gets deployed widely in Europe first doesn't mean that it was invented there either.)
Companies would automate jobs if they were being paid $2/hour.
Companies automate when automation is cheaper than hiring someone. That can happen because automation gets cheaper or because labor costs rise. Labor costs rise for many reasons, minimum wage just being one.
A higher minimum wage never explained ATMs and online banking.
Just because A causes B doesn't mean B can't be caused by other factors as well.
Automation Coming To Restaurants, But Not Because of Minimum Wage Hikes
Hiring permanent staff has gotten very expensive in other ways too, and McDonald's is seeing the writing on the wall: there will be more mandates, more wage hikes, etc. It makes sense for them to reduce the workforce now already.
I think it would be truer to say that both the USA and Australia are being run by the same plutocrats. They're aggressively expanding their oligarchy worldwide, with collusion from most of the governments they interact with, including our own exceptionally sycophantic pack.
You obviously have no idea what's going on in either the US or Australia or anywhere else. You don't even know where the nonsense you spout comes from.
So for an Australian (like me or Assange), or a Chinese (like Taco), the American socio-political constraints are clearer, and the flaws more glaring, not because we're better, but because we've grown up outside them.
Well, you may see the mote in America's eye (and there are plenty), but you are obviously blind to the beam in your own.
So for an Australian (like me or Assange), or a Chinese (like Taco), the American socio-political constraints are clearer, and the flaws more glaring, not because we're better, but because we've grown up outside them.
I've grown up in Europe and spent time in the US, Australia, China, and a bunch of other places, thinking about where I wanted to settle down. You're right, sometimes it's easier to see things from the outside, and while there are lots of nice things about Australia, socio-economic constraints are worse than in the US, as is the support for civil liberties and individual rights.
Well, basically, yes. English is the lingua franca of the world, and if you don't speak it, you're cut off from global culture. Mandarin is neither culturally nor commercially very important; having traveled to China many times, I can't think of anything I'd have missed out not speaking Chinese. In part that's because of a long history of self-imposed isolation, stagnancy, and xenophobia in China, in part because China destroyed much of its remaining culture and fell into poverty when it adopted communism.
But Mandarin Chinese also not that hard to learn. Anybody of average intelligence can learn to speak most languages decently in half a year with moderately good tutoring and intensive training. Zuckerberg is learning Chinese because of personal connections and to cater to Chinese nationalist impulses in order to help his business. Good for him. Irrelevant to the rest of us.
This isn't about sexual harassment, but controlling the internet, and implicitly people in general. A lot of the powers that be have decided that, like other forms of media, they need to sanitize it in the name of control.
Talking about "control" makes it sound like some regime with some well thought out master plan. It's much simpler, though: media companies and journalists are scared shitless by the Internet because it means they are losing their well-paying positions and ability to manipulate public opinion. These people look at how the uncool tech nerds from high school and college now have solid, well-paid jobs and are changing the world while they only have their useless social science degrees (plus tattoos), and they are green with envy. It's about money and political power (which is, in the end, all about money too).
GamerGate actually illustrates this nicely: of the self-proclaimed "women in tech", Wu and Sarkeesian were both social science and journalism majors, and Quinn is an artist.
Slashdot Mirror
I see. And here I thought that talking to your parents, other students, and teachers was a way in which free people reached an informed decision.
Who should those poor, oppressed women have talked to instead? You? A cadre of feminists?
That's not how markets work.
Besides, don't you people keep saying that the biggest player will pay off politicians anyway in order to win? So in what way does government making this decision help anybody?
You're not helping your case. In fact, you're hurting it.
If by "people from other races" you mean "international students".
And guess what? Companies and universities go out of their way to accommodate women, and women generally are as happy with their jobs as men.
What difference does it make whether women choose career X because of the bed time stories their mothers told them or because their brains are genetically different? What gives you or anybody else the right to mess with their nurture and education just so they meet your arbitrary criteria of equality?
Ah, so you are saying that credit card companies should continue to be able to dominate the market, with all the security problems, exploitation of, and discrimination against, vulnerable customers, and excessive charges that entails, because you, a whiny middle class guy doesn't want to be inconvenienced by having two separate smartphone apps on your phone.
Yeah, I think that kind of attitude just about sums up why people like you keep voting crony capitalists into office.
Why can't the market decide this? Why should this end up in court? We currently have deeply entrenched market dominance by credit card companies. Alternative payment schemes are coming out and attacking that dominance, and that only works if a critical mass of retailers actually stand up to the currently dominant players. If courts intervene, it will lock in the dominance and monopoly profits the credit card companies are extracting. Why do you think that would be a good thing?
The reason they are doing this is that they don't want to keep paying inflated fees to credit card companies because they are tired of getting screwed. They may also not be serious about it; it may simply be a pressure tactic to get credit card companies to lower fees "or else".
Getting payment options other than the big credit card companies and their inflated fees necessarily involves inconvenience. Obviously, consumers are too lazy to do it by themselves, but retailers may have enough power to make this happen.
No, I chose the US over Australia because of the socio-economic constraints in Australia.
Given the low levels of inequality in Australia, that means that you can move easily from being slightly lower middle class to slightly upper middle class (and back down)! Ain't it great! And that's just one of the many problems with your interpretation of that statistic. They teach you to read, but not to think.
Well, the irony of course is that it is socialism that leads to "letting the 99% of the world starve while 1% live like Gods". How do I know? I experienced socialism first hand, the real kind, behind iron curtain and everything. That's why I find the positions of US liberals and progressives on socialism and welfare states so disturbing: you simply have no idea what you are advocating and how miserably it fails in practice, time and again.
This idea that free markets lead to starvation, poverty, or exploitation is simply a lie. It has been free markets and free trade that have brought unprecedented wealth, health, peace, and freedom from privation to the world.
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_...
Free markets do lead to more inequality than socialism, but inequality doesn't matter if everybody is still better off.
From the point of view of the 19th century, less than 10% of us have useful work to do these days: less than 10% of the workforce are engaged in producing the entirety of the stuff that people 200 years ago needed for work, and those 10% are producing stuff that would have been fit for kings back then. Does that mean 90% of people are out of work? Not at all: the labor participation rate is higher than it has ever been (well, except for a modest dip due to Obama's screwy policies).
Human labor is always scarce. The real problems with welfare and unemployment we have are the consequence of increasing government policies that encourage people not to work, in particular at the low end. It is demeaning and hurtful for the people involved, and it is destructive for our society.
Yes, I have experienced them first hand, under socialism, under the European welfare state, and finally coming as an immigrant to the US and working my way up.
So tell me: what's your experience of "socio-economic constraints" based on?
There are lots of things they can do, however: they can upgrade to an empty package, upgrade to a package that requires positive confirmation from the user upon upgrade, or upgrade to a package with a non-existent dependency.
Well, yes, you are stating the obvious. But the possibility that they can't raise prices is even worse if you think it through. None of these possibilities will result in people getting paid substantially above what they are worth because that simply is not sustainable.
Yes, when you pull facts like that out of your ass, you can "prove" just about anything. But probably the opposite is true: they are an anachronism and already paid a bit more than they are worth. Companies are simply holding on to them because automation is risky and capital intensive, but the higher you raise the cost of employing them, the faster their jobs will be eliminated.
Let's disregard how utterly stupid those studies are, how gullible you are in your interpretation, or the fact that the links you point to contradict you; let's assume the effect was actually real: increasing minimum wage this year correlated with increased job growth. Does that mean it's a good thing?
Increasing minimum wage may well cause short term job growth: changing your business to use less labor requires lots of short term investments: high tech self-checkout stations, remodeling, new business processes, new computers, assembly robots, cleaning robots, etc.
But the long term effect of raising the cost of labor is that businesses hire less and less inexperienced workers. The result is higher job requirements, higher youth unemployment, more student loan debt, exactly what we are seeing.
Of course, the next step is for people like you to call for more public funding for tertiary education. The net effect? You have freed companies from their need to train their entry-level workers and instead make the tax payer pay for it. Aren't you a good little crony capitalist.
In different words, my 401(k) plan increases in value by an extra percent per year. You better hope that's happening, because otherwise all of our retirments are in the toilet.
The IRS frowns on that sort of thing, and when the IRS frowns on things, people get heavily penalized.
So to summarize your argument: because wage earners get taxed too much and because some small business owners cheat on their taxes, you think all small business owners should be taxed more highly. Never mind that the effect will be people losing their jobs, at least it makes you feel good!
If they are getting such a great deal, why don't you become one?
And people who drive Teslas have a higher average wage than people who don't. We should force everybody to buy a Tesla!
You got your cause and effect backwards.
McDonald's is franchises, i.e., small businesses.
An employer's ethics are irrelevant in a free market as long as they honor their contracts and don't commit fraud, theft, or murder; the whole point of a free market is that unethical behavior is self-punishing.
Furthermore, you think that you're sticking it to the employer if you force them to pay higher wages, but they are simply going to raise their prices and pass the costs on to the rest of us. The increased wages don't come out of their pockets. However, they oppose higher wages because the higher prices they charge lower demand for their products.
Unions are a good idea in principle. The problem with the actual unions we have is the same as the problem with banks: they have managed to get laws passed that give them a monopoly on some market. Minimum wage laws are just stupid.
We have been behind on self-service technology because our labor costs are lower; that's why we still have baggers, busboys cashiers, hotel check-in clerks, parking gate operators, etc. where in Europe, they have none. In many cases, in Europe, jobs are only partially automated, forcing the customer do to extra work for the business.
Banking security in the US has been less strong than in Europe because we have (relatively speaking) less fraud and because we have a large legacy of credit card usage; Europe moved to cashless systems much later and largely went for debit cards instead of credit cards.
(Incidentally, just because a technology gets deployed widely in Europe first doesn't mean that it was invented there either.)
Companies automate when automation is cheaper than hiring someone. That can happen because automation gets cheaper or because labor costs rise. Labor costs rise for many reasons, minimum wage just being one.
Just because A causes B doesn't mean B can't be caused by other factors as well.
Hiring permanent staff has gotten very expensive in other ways too, and McDonald's is seeing the writing on the wall: there will be more mandates, more wage hikes, etc. It makes sense for them to reduce the workforce now already.
You mean mindless drivel like this?
You obviously have no idea what's going on in either the US or Australia or anywhere else. You don't even know where the nonsense you spout comes from.
Well, you may see the mote in America's eye (and there are plenty), but you are obviously blind to the beam in your own.
I've grown up in Europe and spent time in the US, Australia, China, and a bunch of other places, thinking about where I wanted to settle down. You're right, sometimes it's easier to see things from the outside, and while there are lots of nice things about Australia, socio-economic constraints are worse than in the US, as is the support for civil liberties and individual rights.
Well, basically, yes. English is the lingua franca of the world, and if you don't speak it, you're cut off from global culture. Mandarin is neither culturally nor commercially very important; having traveled to China many times, I can't think of anything I'd have missed out not speaking Chinese. In part that's because of a long history of self-imposed isolation, stagnancy, and xenophobia in China, in part because China destroyed much of its remaining culture and fell into poverty when it adopted communism.
But Mandarin Chinese also not that hard to learn. Anybody of average intelligence can learn to speak most languages decently in half a year with moderately good tutoring and intensive training. Zuckerberg is learning Chinese because of personal connections and to cater to Chinese nationalist impulses in order to help his business. Good for him. Irrelevant to the rest of us.
Talking about "control" makes it sound like some regime with some well thought out master plan. It's much simpler, though: media companies and journalists are scared shitless by the Internet because it means they are losing their well-paying positions and ability to manipulate public opinion. These people look at how the uncool tech nerds from high school and college now have solid, well-paid jobs and are changing the world while they only have their useless social science degrees (plus tattoos), and they are green with envy. It's about money and political power (which is, in the end, all about money too).
GamerGate actually illustrates this nicely: of the self-proclaimed "women in tech", Wu and Sarkeesian were both social science and journalism majors, and Quinn is an artist.