The standard capitalist economic rhetoric is that while the rich are rich, they're not Scrooge McDuck swimming in gold coins. Their money is "hard at work", invested in equities. The implication is that they mostly live like you and I.
No, that is not the standard capitalist answer. The standard capitalist answer is when Scrooge McDuck trades $250 million for some luxury good, he has given $250 million to the people who produced or sold the luxury good, and Scrooge McDuck now is sitting on a useless, unproductive asset. That is how money gets recycled from the rich into the economy.
The only way Scrooge McDuck could remove $250 million from the economy is by stuffing it under his mattress. But that wouldnâ(TM)t hurt anybody either: because Scrooge McDuck isnâ(TM)t buying anything with that money, stuff will get proportionately cheaper in the rest of the economy; stuffing money under your mattress is like giving the entire country an interest free loan. (On another scale, thatâ(TM)s one of the reasons banks and governments still like cash, because large amounts of it do end up under sofa cushions.)
I doubt the executive class would downgrade their income merely to avoid taxation
You proposed punitive taxation on the corporation; that hurts the business. Executives very much will take a pay-cut if there is a threat to their business. In fact, many very wealthy CEOs just take home $1/year in pay; their wealth comes from the stock market. Thatâ(TM)s because if you can afford $250 million homes, you arenâ(TM)t in business to make money, youâ(TM)re in business to win, and youâ(TM)ll do whatever it takes.
But also donâ(TM)t underestimate how much bad government policy pisses people off and how much it distorts the market. Iâ(TM)ll probably stop working a few years early because of high taxes: it annoys me sending that much money to Uncle Sam, and on top of it, at my marginal tax rates, the take home pay isnâ(TM)t all that attractive compared to spending time with friends and family.
Yes, it is a burden. Big companies have thousands of people who conduct job interviews, many themselves not very skilled or educated. If any one of them accidentally asks an illegal question, they face multimillion dollar lawsuits and public outrage. In fact, with the latest âoeimplicit biasâ craze, companies are worried that they are accused of bias even if they subject their interviewers to extensive legal training.
To avoid that risk and to be able to document to any court or OCR bureaucrat that their selection process is unbiased, companies move to automated interview systems. Unintended consequences of well meaning but poorly thought out legislation.
No, you are the heartless bastard. Higher prices and redistribution hurt primarily low income groups, but you donâ(TM)t give a f*ck about that. What you care about is giving the superficial impression of being caring while you enjoy your upper middle class tech career.
Youâ(TM)re right that if you add 20-30 million low skill workers to an economy, the economy grows in absolute terms and they find jobs. But the per capita wealth and productivity goes down, and thatâ(TM)s what determines the overall wealth and well being of a society.
The definition of college is that of an institution of higher education or of higher learning. Itâ(TM)s trade schools that traditionally teach job skills.
Colleges tried to rebrand themselves as institutions that prepare people for the job market, but they are poor at that. Colleges these days are a simple way of credentialing that you have above average IQ and a reasonable ability to put up with boredom and tedium. Actual skills you need to learn on the job.
What are these horrible, scary regulations that you speak of? Name some.
Regulations that make it illegal to ask questions about children, marital status, gender, ethnic origin, etc. Legal practice that gets companies sued simply for not hiring enough minorities.
Oh, fuck you
Thanks for the offer, but I prefer my men a little smarter than you are.
Free college for all would solve the low skilled worker crisis for 1/3 the cost of a single petty war we carry out on nations who never attacked us or are guilty of anything but having natural resources.
Free college doesn't turn low skilled workers into high skilled workers.
There is also just straight up laziness. Retain management jobs that list a degree as a requirement because they can't be bothered to determine if you can do basic arithmetic or check your reading comprehension.
Yes, they can't be bothered, because hiring itself takes time and money, and hiring managers have better things to do than to look for people who are qualified despite having inferior credentials.
very few low-skilled immigrants work retail where English/Spanish language skills are fairly important
Hence I didn't claim that low skilled workers were directly taking this particular woman's job. But she is a low skilled worker in a glut of low skilled workers, and the fact that she speaks English doesn't give her much of an advantage.
Bottom line less than 30% of the population is working, the rest is on UBI, which is not called UBI but welfare or pension or unemployment insurrance, or as we say here HARTZ IV.
Pension and unemployment insurance are benefits in Germany that workers pay for (and quite substantially), so they are not a "UBI". Welfare in Germany is very small compared to welfare in the US and wouldn't be considered an acceptable UBI in the US.
These forms are often used to actively discriminate, because their operation is opaque and it is extremely difficult to prove anything when the computer says no.
You are probably right: these forms are probably used to avoid being accused of racial discrimination and to meet diversity quotas and affirmative action goals. That is, they actively discriminate, precisely in order to ensure that they are complying with the law.
For example, they often ask what your highest level of education is. Never mind if you have decades of experience and professional certifications, That can make it very hard for people who have the skills but didn't go the traditional university+debt mountain route.
If you have decades of experience, you have referrals; you don't need to answer computerized questions or forms. If you have neither a degree nor referrals, you are indeed not interesting to most companies.
My mother said that when she was looking for retail jobs in the 60s and 70s, it was easy as hell.
We have let in 20-30 million low skilled workers since then. That's why the supply of low skilled workers is high and exceeds demand.
Another reason for computerizing these hires is to remove the possibility of bias and to comply with regulations. Companies don't want to be accused of civil rights violations, illegal questions, or sexual harassment, and computerized interviews avoid that.
But holy shit have they totally fucked up other things.
This isn't the fault of computers, it's the fault of progressive government policies that backfired.
You want one-on-one interviews? Reduce the supply of low-skilled workers and reduce the stifling regulations and legal risks that surround hiring.
Companies are also having people do their first interview with an AI chatbot. "One popular AI that does this is called Mya, which promises a 70 percent decrease in hiring time," reports The Daily Beast. "Any number of questions these chatbots could ask could be proxies for race, gender or other factors."
A computer science Ph.D. is a "proxy for race, gender and other factors". Exceptionally test scores are a "proxy for race, gender, and other factors". Are you going to eliminate all objective measures of performance because it correlates with "race, gender, and other factors" in ways that you disapprove?
If you pay workers more, and Amazon pays workers less, Amazon will be able to price their wares lower than you can. Then you end up losing customers, because customers happily pay the lower rates at Amazon. This is called the race to the bottom.
That's called a free market. It's what keeps prices low and keeps people compensated at what they are worth to society and the company. You, of course want to end this system, a system exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance.
I, on the other hand, want to see this system continue, because it is far better than any of the alternatives, for everybody, rich or poor.
Amazon is doing a very good job winning that, as noted in this article.
Good! They are doing what they are supposed to do.
I support zoning. I don't support California's idiotic, progressive, self-serving zoning. But zoning is only a small part of California's housing crisis and fiscal problems.
The other factors you mentioned have a minimal effect on housing prices.
Apparently you believe that restating bullshit somehow makes it true.
But thank you for illustrating the kind of widespread economic illiteracy and stupidity that drives California's dysfunction.
I also think it helps to be somewhat philosophical about the long-term goal of UBI -- it isn't just paying cash to citizens,
Indeed, it is encouraging people not to work.
it's at least partly greatly reducing major income inequality which in turn leads to asset hoarding and sheltering. Reduce the income inequality and you start to long-term cut the amount of wealth hoarded/sheltered in economically non-productive assets.
Which "economically non-productive assets"? Investments are highly economically productive. If you want to get rid of "economically non-productive assets", that's easy: get rid of government debt and massively reduce government entitlements and spending.
One funding mechanism for UBI could be punitive taxation on companies whose executive compensation ratios exceed historical norms of about 25:1.
In which case corporations would reduce their executive pay and you'd get no revenue.
This creates an incentive for corporations to cut executive compensation and increase employee compensation, which contributes to part of the purpose of UBI -- that jobs just don't pay enough.
Redistributing executive pay to workers would not result in meaningful increases in take home pay. And, in any case, corporations wouldn't do that any way: they won't pay $15/h to a worker worth $9/h. If you try to force them to, they'll fire the $9/h worker and replace him with a more productive one.
Actually, headphone jacks cannot take a lot of mechanical forces. the Lightning port is bolted to the metal case and connects via flex cable to the motherboard
You can do the same for headphone jacks, and many devices do. Where they differ is that a Lightning/USB-C port has many parallel traces and is designed for easy insertion, which is a bad design for something that experiences a lot of lateral forces.
Most people don't have a need for more than one set of headphones, so sticking it on permanently is more than a solution.
Wired headlphones get lost, forgotten, or damaged all the time.
Thankfully you can buy lots of USB chargers these days.
You're missing the point here: you can't simultaneously charge your phone and use your headphones unless you use yet another dongle.
Neither is a result of either liberal or conservative politics (there is strict zoning everywhere in the US).
Bullshit. Restrictive zoning is a progressive favorite, as are rent control, environmental protection, housing subsidies, public transit subsidies, high taxes, low cost housing initiatives, and many other policies that massive increase the cost of housing and restrict the availability of housing. Similarly for traffic.
Policy matters, and Democrats and progressives support specific bad policies with specific bad outcomes.
That's why the biggest corporations and "conservative" politicians have conspired since the mid 1970s to destroy organized labor.
Organized labor has always been just a minority special interest group enriching itself at the cost of non-unionized labors. Unions were one of the main drivers behind racist laws in the US.
There are only two forces that can possibly counter corporate power: 1) unions and 2) government regulation. I would much rather see 1 than 2.
You're lying. Current unions are constructs of government, with their ability to impose their political and economic power on people who do not want to associate with them; it is taking away the government-granted special powers and privileges of unions that you so strongly oppose.
Big employers distort anything like a free market. What you end up with is more akin to a monopsony than a marketplace.
Really? How does Amazon offering jobs to people prevent you from offering higher paid jobs to the same people?
You wouldn't have to seize anything. One or two well-publicized billionaire trips to the guillotine and the rest would start behaving better.
Honey, you're a full, card carrying member of the bourgeoisie and a heterosexual cis-male shitlord and bigot to boot; if the revolution came, you'd be right there in line for the guillotine along with the people you pretend to hate.
"The average warehouse worker at Walmart makes just under $40,000 annually, while at Amazon would take home about $24,300 a year," CNN reported in 2013. "That's less than $1,000 above the official federal poverty line for a family of four."
In other words, even an Amazon warehouse worker with a family of four does not actually need SNAP, since they are not poor without it. SNAP should really not go to anybody above the poverty line.
And, of course, jobs like that tend to be for people just starting out in the job market, or taking on second jobs; if you marry and have two kids while employed as an Amazon warehouse worker, you are making bad life decisions.
I don't see any way that it's going to improve. I have no hope for either of those platforms.
We had nice, distributed, open source discussion platforms before companies like Reddit and Twitter swept in and tried to monetize everybody's discussions. So, good riddance to you. Hopefully, when your companies are history, we can return to more sane infrastructure. Unfortunately, you still will have your ill-gotten millions, Mr. McComas.
They actually are, and are known for widely supporting government-paid mandatory conversion therapy despite it being morally unethical.
That's utter nonsense. The majority of Christians in the US even support gay marriage. What the "conversion therapy" issue is about is whether conversion therapy for kids should be legal; a small minority of people wants to have the option of subjecting their underage children to conversion therapy, and some states are banning that. It's far from clear whether such bans are a good idea, since even legitimate counseling might fall under them.
Nor is conversion therapy a specifically Christian issue; medical treatments to cure homosexuality have been used by anybody who believes that homosexuality is a disease. Historically, the biggest offenders there were not Christians, it was socialists, communists, and progressives. Christians historically just viewed homosexuality as a sin, and sin isn't treated by doctors.
Slashdot Mirror
No, that is not the standard capitalist answer. The standard capitalist answer is when Scrooge McDuck trades $250 million for some luxury good, he has given $250 million to the people who produced or sold the luxury good, and Scrooge McDuck now is sitting on a useless, unproductive asset. That is how money gets recycled from the rich into the economy.
The only way Scrooge McDuck could remove $250 million from the economy is by stuffing it under his mattress. But that wouldnâ(TM)t hurt anybody either: because Scrooge McDuck isnâ(TM)t buying anything with that money, stuff will get proportionately cheaper in the rest of the economy; stuffing money under your mattress is like giving the entire country an interest free loan. (On another scale, thatâ(TM)s one of the reasons banks and governments still like cash, because large amounts of it do end up under sofa cushions.)
You proposed punitive taxation on the corporation; that hurts the business. Executives very much will take a pay-cut if there is a threat to their business. In fact, many very wealthy CEOs just take home $1/year in pay; their wealth comes from the stock market. Thatâ(TM)s because if you can afford $250 million homes, you arenâ(TM)t in business to make money, youâ(TM)re in business to win, and youâ(TM)ll do whatever it takes.
But also donâ(TM)t underestimate how much bad government policy pisses people off and how much it distorts the market. Iâ(TM)ll probably stop working a few years early because of high taxes: it annoys me sending that much money to Uncle Sam, and on top of it, at my marginal tax rates, the take home pay isnâ(TM)t all that attractive compared to spending time with friends and family.
Yes, it is a burden. Big companies have thousands of people who conduct job interviews, many themselves not very skilled or educated. If any one of them accidentally asks an illegal question, they face multimillion dollar lawsuits and public outrage. In fact, with the latest âoeimplicit biasâ craze, companies are worried that they are accused of bias even if they subject their interviewers to extensive legal training.
To avoid that risk and to be able to document to any court or OCR bureaucrat that their selection process is unbiased, companies move to automated interview systems. Unintended consequences of well meaning but poorly thought out legislation.
No, you are the heartless bastard. Higher prices and redistribution hurt primarily low income groups, but you donâ(TM)t give a f*ck about that. What you care about is giving the superficial impression of being caring while you enjoy your upper middle class tech career.
Youâ(TM)re right that if you add 20-30 million low skill workers to an economy, the economy grows in absolute terms and they find jobs. But the per capita wealth and productivity goes down, and thatâ(TM)s what determines the overall wealth and well being of a society.
The definition of college is that of an institution of higher education or of higher learning. Itâ(TM)s trade schools that traditionally teach job skills.
Colleges tried to rebrand themselves as institutions that prepare people for the job market, but they are poor at that. Colleges these days are a simple way of credentialing that you have above average IQ and a reasonable ability to put up with boredom and tedium. Actual skills you need to learn on the job.
Regulations that make it illegal to ask questions about children, marital status, gender, ethnic origin, etc. Legal practice that gets companies sued simply for not hiring enough minorities.
Thanks for the offer, but I prefer my men a little smarter than you are.
You should read up on the history of unions and be surprised, and read up on it other than from union propaganda materials.
Free college doesn't turn low skilled workers into high skilled workers.
Yes, they can't be bothered, because hiring itself takes time and money, and hiring managers have better things to do than to look for people who are qualified despite having inferior credentials.
Hence I didn't claim that low skilled workers were directly taking this particular woman's job. But she is a low skilled worker in a glut of low skilled workers, and the fact that she speaks English doesn't give her much of an advantage.
Pension and unemployment insurance are benefits in Germany that workers pay for (and quite substantially), so they are not a "UBI". Welfare in Germany is very small compared to welfare in the US and wouldn't be considered an acceptable UBI in the US.
You are probably right: these forms are probably used to avoid being accused of racial discrimination and to meet diversity quotas and affirmative action goals. That is, they actively discriminate, precisely in order to ensure that they are complying with the law.
If you have decades of experience, you have referrals; you don't need to answer computerized questions or forms. If you have neither a degree nor referrals, you are indeed not interesting to most companies.
We have let in 20-30 million low skilled workers since then. That's why the supply of low skilled workers is high and exceeds demand.
Another reason for computerizing these hires is to remove the possibility of bias and to comply with regulations. Companies don't want to be accused of civil rights violations, illegal questions, or sexual harassment, and computerized interviews avoid that.
This isn't the fault of computers, it's the fault of progressive government policies that backfired.
You want one-on-one interviews? Reduce the supply of low-skilled workers and reduce the stifling regulations and legal risks that surround hiring.
A computer science Ph.D. is a "proxy for race, gender and other factors". Exceptionally test scores are a "proxy for race, gender, and other factors". Are you going to eliminate all objective measures of performance because it correlates with "race, gender, and other factors" in ways that you disapprove?
That's called a free market. It's what keeps prices low and keeps people compensated at what they are worth to society and the company. You, of course want to end this system, a system exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance.
I, on the other hand, want to see this system continue, because it is far better than any of the alternatives, for everybody, rich or poor.
Good! They are doing what they are supposed to do.
I support zoning. I don't support California's idiotic, progressive, self-serving zoning. But zoning is only a small part of California's housing crisis and fiscal problems.
Apparently you believe that restating bullshit somehow makes it true.
But thank you for illustrating the kind of widespread economic illiteracy and stupidity that drives California's dysfunction.
Indeed, it is encouraging people not to work.
Which "economically non-productive assets"? Investments are highly economically productive. If you want to get rid of "economically non-productive assets", that's easy: get rid of government debt and massively reduce government entitlements and spending.
In which case corporations would reduce their executive pay and you'd get no revenue.
Redistributing executive pay to workers would not result in meaningful increases in take home pay. And, in any case, corporations wouldn't do that any way: they won't pay $15/h to a worker worth $9/h. If you try to force them to, they'll fire the $9/h worker and replace him with a more productive one.
You can do the same for headphone jacks, and many devices do. Where they differ is that a Lightning/USB-C port has many parallel traces and is designed for easy insertion, which is a bad design for something that experiences a lot of lateral forces.
Wired headlphones get lost, forgotten, or damaged all the time.
You're missing the point here: you can't simultaneously charge your phone and use your headphones unless you use yet another dongle.
Bullshit. Restrictive zoning is a progressive favorite, as are rent control, environmental protection, housing subsidies, public transit subsidies, high taxes, low cost housing initiatives, and many other policies that massive increase the cost of housing and restrict the availability of housing. Similarly for traffic.
Policy matters, and Democrats and progressives support specific bad policies with specific bad outcomes.
Organized labor has always been just a minority special interest group enriching itself at the cost of non-unionized labors. Unions were one of the main drivers behind racist laws in the US.
You're lying. Current unions are constructs of government, with their ability to impose their political and economic power on people who do not want to associate with them; it is taking away the government-granted special powers and privileges of unions that you so strongly oppose.
Really? How does Amazon offering jobs to people prevent you from offering higher paid jobs to the same people?
Honey, you're a full, card carrying member of the bourgeoisie and a heterosexual cis-male shitlord and bigot to boot; if the revolution came, you'd be right there in line for the guillotine along with the people you pretend to hate.
In other words, even an Amazon warehouse worker with a family of four does not actually need SNAP, since they are not poor without it. SNAP should really not go to anybody above the poverty line.
And, of course, jobs like that tend to be for people just starting out in the job market, or taking on second jobs; if you marry and have two kids while employed as an Amazon warehouse worker, you are making bad life decisions.
Science isn't about "belief", it is about evidence.
What we have done with NASA is create an institution that has held back space exploration by decades and wasted vast amounts of money.
We had nice, distributed, open source discussion platforms before companies like Reddit and Twitter swept in and tried to monetize everybody's discussions. So, good riddance to you. Hopefully, when your companies are history, we can return to more sane infrastructure. Unfortunately, you still will have your ill-gotten millions, Mr. McComas.
That's utter nonsense. The majority of Christians in the US even support gay marriage. What the "conversion therapy" issue is about is whether conversion therapy for kids should be legal; a small minority of people wants to have the option of subjecting their underage children to conversion therapy, and some states are banning that. It's far from clear whether such bans are a good idea, since even legitimate counseling might fall under them.
Nor is conversion therapy a specifically Christian issue; medical treatments to cure homosexuality have been used by anybody who believes that homosexuality is a disease. Historically, the biggest offenders there were not Christians, it was socialists, communists, and progressives. Christians historically just viewed homosexuality as a sin, and sin isn't treated by doctors.