not quite as well as they could have, but they made a serious go at it. The went from a third world hell hole to a first world nation in about 50 years. But when the price of oil tanked that was kind of that. The sanctions didn't help either (and I have no bloody idea why my country is sanctioning another country that has not attacked us or our allies... It honestly feels like we're attacking them for being socialistic... ).
John Oliver has a pretty good piece on it. I think if they'd had another 50 years to stabilize they could have weathered it (or if those aforementioned sanctions didn't exist and they could get some aid in).
See here. We're below population replacement rates. In fact it's one of the things that is freaking out a lot of (right wing) voters since it's immigrants that are replacing them. The actual (economically) right wing aren't so freaked out since the immigrants tend to be socially right wing because they hail from deeply religious countries.
but privacy violations like this are incredibly small potatoes compared to the tools of oppression employed by the ruling class. Yeah, Walmart & Target know what kind of cereal I like. If my kid gets pregnant they'll know about it before I do. Meanwhile the EPA and our education system are being systematically dismantled, we're in 7 or 8 wars (depending on how you want to count) none of which have congressional approval, our president lost the popular vote by 3 million votes and Congressional districts are so gerrymandered that the party in power lost the popular vote too, we've got dark money up the wazoo and I can count the number of (viable) politicians who refuse corporate PAC money on one hand (Bernie, Liz Warren, Orcasio-Cortez, that's about it really) and wedge issues like gun control and abortion have the working class completely at each other's throats.
The Gen Xers did alright and the boomers made out like bandits, but the Millennials are screwed. They're not getting pensions, their 401ks get eaten up by fees and the periodic stock market crashes brought on by weak regulation and risk free bail outs and their student loan debt means they can't start life until their 30s. Meanwhile outsourcing + H1-Bs means they're in intense competition for decent jobs so they worked much, much harder than their parents and grandparents for much, much less.
The right wing in America (who's defining feature is a pro-corporate bent that wants low wages, lax environmental regulations and lax worker protections) knows this. They're currently in control of all branches of Government (the Democratic party moved the Overton window to the left so Clinton could sail into the Whitehouse and got away with it when the.com and house bubbles masked the ill effects of supply side economics until 2008 when it all came crashing down). With control of the government came control of media (Sinclair media's been allowed to buy up all local stations).
The question is, Americans may be ready for Democratic Socialism but will they get it? The ruling class has so much wealth and power now they can bury the will of the people. It's been shown a 2-3 week ad blitz is enough to change the public's opinion on anything. Hell, we can't get more than 60% of the population to agree that healthcare is a right and thanks to our political system that gives extra voting power to rural states (a Montana voter has something like 42 times more voting power than a California thanks to our Senate) and the effect of "swing states" I'm not sure any of this matters.
It literally doesn't matter how much evidence you have that Democratic Socialism works. The people opposed to it have unlimited money (we gave it to them) and the last two generations are very much in the "I got mine, fuck you" school of thought. Maybe when those people start dying. Hell, we (mostly) got gay rights. Then again the new SCOTUS might shoot all that down...
That's always the argument against raising wages in the States. If we raise wages companies will just raise prices and you won't make any more money. Now, I know enough to know this is bunk. Inflation can be controlled so long as productivity is going up, and here in the States we've doubled in in 40 years while wages for low end employees have droped 20-30% in real dollars (seriously, I made $6/hr at a jack in the crack in 95 which was equal to $10 today. These days they start kids like I was off at $7.25-$8).
I guess what I'm really asking is, what do you say to people who tell you we should keep wages low because it'll mean lower prices and an overall better life. It needs to be pithy, because the folks you're arguing with have been told this repeatably by large Political Action Committees with a vested interest in keeping wages low.
our ruling class has paid close attention to how Norway's working class works together, doesn't fight among themselves and ensures everyone has food, shelter and healthcare and made sure we don't do the same. We've got an extensive network of social wedge issues that keep us divided and at each other throats so we don't ask too many questions. We've also got a constitution that limits the effects of democracy, or as many would put it, "It's a Republic!".
Oh, you meant the working class. Yeah, we haven't learned a God damned thing. We voted for a bitchy oligarch with a penchant for outsourcing instead of the guy that wanted to give us health care and then when we realized we didn't like her we voted for a guy who sits on a golden throne/toilet as our populist champion.... Does of us that did vote anyway. We're not paying a lot of attention really.
and the same level, but without the bit about "mansplaining" would she have lost her job? It's a bit hard to say because she's been a bit of an ass in the past. But I'm not entirely convinced that without the backlash from the opposition to the #metoo movement that she couldn't have just held out until everything blew over.
Also I can't help but wonder if this had been a bit of sexism from a man (so long as it didn't stray into sexual harassment) if we wouldn't see a lot of defenders arguing that so long as he did his job well it's fine; maybe suggesting he take a class or two in anger management...
I guess my point is, rudeness isn't what got her fired, angry men were. Now, feel free to continue arguing whether they have a right to be angry. Maybe they do, but OTOH there are probably better things to get angry about.
you never know what you're getting. To be fair, you've pretty much got to go with Asus or one of the boutique gaming laptop companies like iBuyPower to get that though, and you usually pay a $200 premium. But, well, the Apple premium blows that out of the water...
but the wealthy buy both parties off. The only solution is candidates who pledge to take no corporate PAC money. Right now these are the Democrat equivalent. If anyone knows any Republican equivalents let me know. I haven't found any but that doesn't mean they're not out there.
they're typically well known people at game studios. What's more, the ones in this story are being targeted for their gender. They're not just a collection of bytes. They're not anonymous/. posters. They're employees at a company expected to function in a customer service role. They can't "shut the fuck up". It's literally their job to engage with and talk with the community. The only way they can "shut the fuck up" is if they leave the industry, which, well, seems to be the goal here....
I'm assuming you're in your 40s. Maybe 50s or 60s. The reason why there was no gender was it was 99% white guys. The reason for that is, well, there weren't a lot of minorities in technology because especially 20-30 years ago (especially if you're old enough to remember BBS) minorities were in even worse shape than they were today and they didn't have a lot of access to tech, especially the expensive tech from the 90s (anyone remember building a 486 DX100 in 1995 for $400+ and being amazed at how "cheap" it was?). As for women, well, the places I hung out weren't exactly friendly to them. Lots of "Locker room" talk; which to be blunt was mostly thinly veiled misogyny from nerds (which I'm embarrassed to say my younger self took part in).
Tech got cheap. Really cheap. Like, I can get a laptop online for about $100. $250 if I want a nice new one. $50 if I'll settle for a desktop. Also, the internet became a global communication tool and software was written to get non-nerds online. Finally, the old nerd caves (like/.) are full of bitter old coots like me and, well, we're just not as much fun to be around.
On the plus side you've got a _lot_ more folks online. A lot of those folks are helpful and good folks. I've been able to do tons of projects thanks to them.
to address inequality? Racism and Sexism really are things. It's not like we've eliminated them completely from human thought and we can just go on our way. Just having laws against racial and sexual discrimination is technically 'identity politics'. Sure, you can take it too far (there's lots of whack jobs on the left and the right wing media spends an unhealthy amount of time reminding us of them) but when somebody's a racist or sexist you don't stop pointing out they're racist or sexist just because a few whack jobs want to cut everybody's dicks off.
in a money laundering sting op. This one comes to mind since the woman was fine until the undercover cop mentioned he was moving drugs with the money. There's several more.
I'm not saying coinbase will fall afoul immediately, but the price of bitcoin's dropped 70% in a few months (down from high of 20k to around 6k). I'm sure their cut's way down. Even if they don't take a percentage they're gonna be out money on volume as people scared off by that much volatility exit the market. It's going to get tempting to take on more dangerous trades...
that's part of the 40 years of productivity gains. Better software, faster CPUs, longer life cycles for existing hardware. It's not all just AI taking jobs. Not that AI doesn't cost jobs. I've got friends who used to do net ops monitoring who've been replaced by AIs (e.g. the kind that can learn which alerts need to be actioned after some training).
The government does just fine when two conditions are met:
a. The contract isn't just handed out to somebody's brother in law. Independent watchdog groups can, well, watch for this. And it's also a problem for private businesses too, btw.
b. One of the parties (who shall go nameless) isn't actively trying to sabotage things by either underfunding or by allowing the contract holder to skip out on doing the actual work. This is what happened with the Obamacare website launches. Eventually the contractors were called to task, some were fired, and the sites started working just fine.
tl;dr: If you put people in charge of gov't who don't think gov't works don't be surprised when gov't doesn't work. It's like putting a young earth creationist in charge of your fossil dating research. It ends badly.
Money is NOT a commodity. It's a convenient unit of measure used to track the exchange of goods and labor. We've been off the gold standard for a very long time. We had to, our economy was growing to fast for the amount of gold in this world. It was no longer a useful concept.
H1-Bs do hurt, but they're not the only factor. It's naive to assume that everybody at McDonald's is incapable of bettering themselves. Yes, few will make it to my level, but I know damn well some will because _I_ did. I was a pretty laid back guy working a cake walk call center job until I needed more money for my family and picked up some new skills and gunned for new jobs. I didn't do that because I'm overly ambitious, I did it because I needed the money to support my family. I took my hat out of the low end call center ring (where I wasn't making enough to live) and put it into the high end tech support ring (API development, project management and support). Sure, there's 1 less call center employee, but there's 1 more project manager. In that way I've effectively lowered their wages.
A much larger example of this is when women left the home and entered the workforce. They didn't do this for fun or equality. They did it so they could buy nicer houses in nicer neighborhoods where their kids could go to decent schools.
tl;dr. Supply and Demand goes both ways. More labor in a market means lower wages.
hadn't doubled in the last 40 years while wages stayed the same or declined. When productivity is skyrocketing and wages are declining something is broken. That is precisely why minimum wage exists.
Demand for wages is only going to fall as new automation kicks into high gear. Slave labor wages have kept that mostly at bay in China, but even there Foxconn is starting to replace workers paid with tea & biscuits with robots.
We know exactly what a healthy economy looks like. It looks like Sweden, Norway and Germany. Basically democratic socialism. We're rapidly heading for a post-capitalism economy, and we're already at the point where we need to start implementing solutions to distribute productivity gains because the market is not doing it. This is why economists keep going on about how unemployment is 3.8% and wages aren't going up. The honest ones admit that the economy just doesn't need everybody working anymore. The dishonest ones just scratch their heads...
for things that aren't inherently profitable (e.g. the "civic hacking" space) you need to have the government run it. Just like we do with the Post Office. A universal map system seems useful enough to me that we'd do that, but hey, what do I know?
few know and fewer care. I think they had to stop their shenanigans for a while (they're being watched right now) and it's costing them money. Being good is not as profitable as being evil. That's why we need laws to force companies to be good.
is these shenanigans. Another reason is that minimum wage is the floor. I don't make min wage, but I'm clever enough to realize that my wages are effected by the floor. If somebody can't make enough money to live they'll struggle to make more. Many will fail, but a few succeed. Those guys percolate up the economy, displacing workers at increasingly higher tiers until some of the workers they displaced are competing for my wages.
I'd say low minimum wage cost me at least $10k/yr, and I've got coworkers hired post 2008 who lost closer to $20k to it. I'm basing this off wages after economic crash vs wages pre-economic crash and during stronger economies (pre-H1-B Bonanza).
the economy sucks for workers right now. The unemployment rate is always bogus but the 'gig' economy means millions of people are being counted as working because they drive for Uber just enough to pay rent. They're on borrowed time when their cars break down, but this is considered 'employed'. We've doubled productivity in 40 years while simultaneously outsourcing and bringing in tons of H1-Bs for the high skill jobs we were promised when the factory work shipped overseas. Meanwhile automation is kicking up. I know IT workers who've lost net ops jobs to monitoring software. You can say their job wasn't much if they got replaced, but this is a recent thing that the software was good enough to replace them. Like last year or two. You can thank "AI" for that (I know, I know, it's not a "real" AI, doesn't get them their jobs back).
TL;DR: we need to start redistributing those productivity gains with taxes and social programs or we need to get used to being a second world hell hole ala Flint, Mi.
You're suggesting a strong social safety net with guarantees of healthcare, food and shelter would result in miserable and isolated people. As if people can only make friends if they're in a constant state of desperation.
No matter what you saw in a jug band once poverty does not bring people together. Money is the #1 cause of divorce you know? People can be economically secure and happy.
San Fransicso's problem is that it's stuffed with people who don't want to live there but do so because that's where the work is. They're unhappy because the city is a bad fit for them, but when you've got no social safety you can't take risks like moving to a smaller city with less job opportunities and worse schools for your kids. So you suck it down. For the people who _want_ to live in San Fransisco it's a paradise and they'd never leave.
Basic income's a great way to solve this. People could live where they want to instead of where they have to to find work. Also, it would be a nice way to distribute the productivity gains from the last 40 years (which have doubled).
Or we could do your way and keep giving all the gains to the rich plus a huge chunk of what the working class already has. That's what we've been doing for 40 years. How's that turning out for you, Mr takes time out of their day to post a bitter rant on/.?
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if European politicians would just take the bribe^XCampaign Contributions and look the other way.
not quite as well as they could have, but they made a serious go at it. The went from a third world hell hole to a first world nation in about 50 years. But when the price of oil tanked that was kind of that. The sanctions didn't help either (and I have no bloody idea why my country is sanctioning another country that has not attacked us or our allies... It honestly feels like we're attacking them for being socialistic... ).
John Oliver has a pretty good piece on it. I think if they'd had another 50 years to stabilize they could have weathered it (or if those aforementioned sanctions didn't exist and they could get some aid in).
See here. We're below population replacement rates. In fact it's one of the things that is freaking out a lot of (right wing) voters since it's immigrants that are replacing them. The actual (economically) right wing aren't so freaked out since the immigrants tend to be socially right wing because they hail from deeply religious countries.
but privacy violations like this are incredibly small potatoes compared to the tools of oppression employed by the ruling class. Yeah, Walmart & Target know what kind of cereal I like. If my kid gets pregnant they'll know about it before I do. Meanwhile the EPA and our education system are being systematically dismantled, we're in 7 or 8 wars (depending on how you want to count) none of which have congressional approval, our president lost the popular vote by 3 million votes and Congressional districts are so gerrymandered that the party in power lost the popular vote too, we've got dark money up the wazoo and I can count the number of (viable) politicians who refuse corporate PAC money on one hand (Bernie, Liz Warren, Orcasio-Cortez, that's about it really) and wedge issues like gun control and abortion have the working class completely at each other's throats.
Seriously, this crap is the least of my worries.
The Gen Xers did alright and the boomers made out like bandits, but the Millennials are screwed. They're not getting pensions, their 401ks get eaten up by fees and the periodic stock market crashes brought on by weak regulation and risk free bail outs and their student loan debt means they can't start life until their 30s. Meanwhile outsourcing + H1-Bs means they're in intense competition for decent jobs so they worked much, much harder than their parents and grandparents for much, much less.
.com and house bubbles masked the ill effects of supply side economics until 2008 when it all came crashing down). With control of the government came control of media (Sinclair media's been allowed to buy up all local stations).
The right wing in America (who's defining feature is a pro-corporate bent that wants low wages, lax environmental regulations and lax worker protections) knows this. They're currently in control of all branches of Government (the Democratic party moved the Overton window to the left so Clinton could sail into the Whitehouse and got away with it when the
The question is, Americans may be ready for Democratic Socialism but will they get it? The ruling class has so much wealth and power now they can bury the will of the people. It's been shown a 2-3 week ad blitz is enough to change the public's opinion on anything. Hell, we can't get more than 60% of the population to agree that healthcare is a right and thanks to our political system that gives extra voting power to rural states (a Montana voter has something like 42 times more voting power than a California thanks to our Senate) and the effect of "swing states" I'm not sure any of this matters.
It literally doesn't matter how much evidence you have that Democratic Socialism works. The people opposed to it have unlimited money (we gave it to them) and the last two generations are very much in the "I got mine, fuck you" school of thought. Maybe when those people start dying. Hell, we (mostly) got gay rights. Then again the new SCOTUS might shoot all that down...
That's always the argument against raising wages in the States. If we raise wages companies will just raise prices and you won't make any more money. Now, I know enough to know this is bunk. Inflation can be controlled so long as productivity is going up, and here in the States we've doubled in in 40 years while wages for low end employees have droped 20-30% in real dollars (seriously, I made $6/hr at a jack in the crack in 95 which was equal to $10 today. These days they start kids like I was off at $7.25-$8).
I guess what I'm really asking is, what do you say to people who tell you we should keep wages low because it'll mean lower prices and an overall better life. It needs to be pithy, because the folks you're arguing with have been told this repeatably by large Political Action Committees with a vested interest in keeping wages low.
our ruling class has paid close attention to how Norway's working class works together, doesn't fight among themselves and ensures everyone has food, shelter and healthcare and made sure we don't do the same. We've got an extensive network of social wedge issues that keep us divided and at each other throats so we don't ask too many questions. We've also got a constitution that limits the effects of democracy, or as many would put it, "It's a Republic!".
Oh, you meant the working class. Yeah, we haven't learned a God damned thing. We voted for a bitchy oligarch with a penchant for outsourcing instead of the guy that wanted to give us health care and then when we realized we didn't like her we voted for a guy who sits on a golden throne/toilet as our populist champion.... Does of us that did vote anyway. We're not paying a lot of attention really.
and the same level, but without the bit about "mansplaining" would she have lost her job? It's a bit hard to say because she's been a bit of an ass in the past. But I'm not entirely convinced that without the backlash from the opposition to the #metoo movement that she couldn't have just held out until everything blew over.
Also I can't help but wonder if this had been a bit of sexism from a man (so long as it didn't stray into sexual harassment) if we wouldn't see a lot of defenders arguing that so long as he did his job well it's fine; maybe suggesting he take a class or two in anger management...
I guess my point is, rudeness isn't what got her fired, angry men were. Now, feel free to continue arguing whether they have a right to be angry. Maybe they do, but OTOH there are probably better things to get angry about.
was a complete lack of tact.
it's not even close. Now get off my lawn.
you never know what you're getting. To be fair, you've pretty much got to go with Asus or one of the boutique gaming laptop companies like iBuyPower to get that though, and you usually pay a $200 premium. But, well, the Apple premium blows that out of the water...
but the wealthy buy both parties off. The only solution is candidates who pledge to take no corporate PAC money. Right now these are the Democrat equivalent. If anyone knows any Republican equivalents let me know. I haven't found any but that doesn't mean they're not out there.
they're typically well known people at game studios. What's more, the ones in this story are being targeted for their gender. They're not just a collection of bytes. They're not anonymous /. posters. They're employees at a company expected to function in a customer service role. They can't "shut the fuck up". It's literally their job to engage with and talk with the community. The only way they can "shut the fuck up" is if they leave the industry, which, well, seems to be the goal here....
I'm assuming you're in your 40s. Maybe 50s or 60s. The reason why there was no gender was it was 99% white guys. The reason for that is, well, there weren't a lot of minorities in technology because especially 20-30 years ago (especially if you're old enough to remember BBS) minorities were in even worse shape than they were today and they didn't have a lot of access to tech, especially the expensive tech from the 90s (anyone remember building a 486 DX100 in 1995 for $400+ and being amazed at how "cheap" it was?). As for women, well, the places I hung out weren't exactly friendly to them. Lots of "Locker room" talk; which to be blunt was mostly thinly veiled misogyny from nerds (which I'm embarrassed to say my younger self took part in).
/.) are full of bitter old coots like me and, well, we're just not as much fun to be around.
Tech got cheap. Really cheap. Like, I can get a laptop online for about $100. $250 if I want a nice new one. $50 if I'll settle for a desktop. Also, the internet became a global communication tool and software was written to get non-nerds online. Finally, the old nerd caves (like
On the plus side you've got a _lot_ more folks online. A lot of those folks are helpful and good folks. I've been able to do tons of projects thanks to them.
to address inequality? Racism and Sexism really are things. It's not like we've eliminated them completely from human thought and we can just go on our way. Just having laws against racial and sexual discrimination is technically 'identity politics'. Sure, you can take it too far (there's lots of whack jobs on the left and the right wing media spends an unhealthy amount of time reminding us of them) but when somebody's a racist or sexist you don't stop pointing out they're racist or sexist just because a few whack jobs want to cut everybody's dicks off.
in a money laundering sting op. This one comes to mind since the woman was fine until the undercover cop mentioned he was moving drugs with the money. There's several more.
I'm not saying coinbase will fall afoul immediately, but the price of bitcoin's dropped 70% in a few months (down from high of 20k to around 6k). I'm sure their cut's way down. Even if they don't take a percentage they're gonna be out money on volume as people scared off by that much volatility exit the market. It's going to get tempting to take on more dangerous trades...
that's part of the 40 years of productivity gains. Better software, faster CPUs, longer life cycles for existing hardware. It's not all just AI taking jobs. Not that AI doesn't cost jobs. I've got friends who used to do net ops monitoring who've been replaced by AIs (e.g. the kind that can learn which alerts need to be actioned after some training).
The government does just fine when two conditions are met:
a. The contract isn't just handed out to somebody's brother in law. Independent watchdog groups can, well, watch for this. And it's also a problem for private businesses too, btw.
b. One of the parties (who shall go nameless) isn't actively trying to sabotage things by either underfunding or by allowing the contract holder to skip out on doing the actual work. This is what happened with the Obamacare website launches. Eventually the contractors were called to task, some were fired, and the sites started working just fine.
tl;dr: If you put people in charge of gov't who don't think gov't works don't be surprised when gov't doesn't work. It's like putting a young earth creationist in charge of your fossil dating research. It ends badly.
Money is NOT a commodity. It's a convenient unit of measure used to track the exchange of goods and labor. We've been off the gold standard for a very long time. We had to, our economy was growing to fast for the amount of gold in this world. It was no longer a useful concept.
H1-Bs do hurt, but they're not the only factor. It's naive to assume that everybody at McDonald's is incapable of bettering themselves. Yes, few will make it to my level, but I know damn well some will because _I_ did. I was a pretty laid back guy working a cake walk call center job until I needed more money for my family and picked up some new skills and gunned for new jobs. I didn't do that because I'm overly ambitious, I did it because I needed the money to support my family. I took my hat out of the low end call center ring (where I wasn't making enough to live) and put it into the high end tech support ring (API development, project management and support). Sure, there's 1 less call center employee, but there's 1 more project manager. In that way I've effectively lowered their wages.
A much larger example of this is when women left the home and entered the workforce. They didn't do this for fun or equality. They did it so they could buy nicer houses in nicer neighborhoods where their kids could go to decent schools.
tl;dr. Supply and Demand goes both ways. More labor in a market means lower wages.
hadn't doubled in the last 40 years while wages stayed the same or declined. When productivity is skyrocketing and wages are declining something is broken. That is precisely why minimum wage exists.
Demand for wages is only going to fall as new automation kicks into high gear. Slave labor wages have kept that mostly at bay in China, but even there Foxconn is starting to replace workers paid with tea & biscuits with robots. We know exactly what a healthy economy looks like. It looks like Sweden, Norway and Germany. Basically democratic socialism. We're rapidly heading for a post-capitalism economy, and we're already at the point where we need to start implementing solutions to distribute productivity gains because the market is not doing it. This is why economists keep going on about how unemployment is 3.8% and wages aren't going up. The honest ones admit that the economy just doesn't need everybody working anymore. The dishonest ones just scratch their heads...
for things that aren't inherently profitable (e.g. the "civic hacking" space) you need to have the government run it. Just like we do with the Post Office. A universal map system seems useful enough to me that we'd do that, but hey, what do I know?
few know and fewer care. I think they had to stop their shenanigans for a while (they're being watched right now) and it's costing them money. Being good is not as profitable as being evil. That's why we need laws to force companies to be good.
is these shenanigans. Another reason is that minimum wage is the floor. I don't make min wage, but I'm clever enough to realize that my wages are effected by the floor. If somebody can't make enough money to live they'll struggle to make more. Many will fail, but a few succeed. Those guys percolate up the economy, displacing workers at increasingly higher tiers until some of the workers they displaced are competing for my wages.
I'd say low minimum wage cost me at least $10k/yr, and I've got coworkers hired post 2008 who lost closer to $20k to it. I'm basing this off wages after economic crash vs wages pre-economic crash and during stronger economies (pre-H1-B Bonanza).
the economy sucks for workers right now. The unemployment rate is always bogus but the 'gig' economy means millions of people are being counted as working because they drive for Uber just enough to pay rent. They're on borrowed time when their cars break down, but this is considered 'employed'. We've doubled productivity in 40 years while simultaneously outsourcing and bringing in tons of H1-Bs for the high skill jobs we were promised when the factory work shipped overseas. Meanwhile automation is kicking up. I know IT workers who've lost net ops jobs to monitoring software. You can say their job wasn't much if they got replaced, but this is a recent thing that the software was good enough to replace them. Like last year or two. You can thank "AI" for that (I know, I know, it's not a "real" AI, doesn't get them their jobs back).
TL;DR: we need to start redistributing those productivity gains with taxes and social programs or we need to get used to being a second world hell hole ala Flint, Mi.
You're suggesting a strong social safety net with guarantees of healthcare, food and shelter would result in miserable and isolated people. As if people can only make friends if they're in a constant state of desperation. No matter what you saw in a jug band once poverty does not bring people together. Money is the #1 cause of divorce you know? People can be economically secure and happy.
/.?
San Fransicso's problem is that it's stuffed with people who don't want to live there but do so because that's where the work is. They're unhappy because the city is a bad fit for them, but when you've got no social safety you can't take risks like moving to a smaller city with less job opportunities and worse schools for your kids. So you suck it down. For the people who _want_ to live in San Fransisco it's a paradise and they'd never leave.
Basic income's a great way to solve this. People could live where they want to instead of where they have to to find work. Also, it would be a nice way to distribute the productivity gains from the last 40 years (which have doubled).
Or we could do your way and keep giving all the gains to the rich plus a huge chunk of what the working class already has. That's what we've been doing for 40 years. How's that turning out for you, Mr takes time out of their day to post a bitter rant on