https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessemer,_Alabama#Economy
"Crime increased following the rise in unemployment and social disruption from the decline of manufacturing industries in the area. As of 2019 Bessemer ranks first in terms of violent crimes for US cities with 25,000 or more people."
Population has fallen from its peak in 1970 of 33k to 26k today.
Thanks for the reference.
EDIT: Also home to the world's oldest chicken, who lived 16 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matilda_(chicken)
frowns in Colorado
Funny enough, I have no heavenly idea how, I had actually run into the article on poor Mike before.-
Further edit: Come to think, poor Mike the "headless" would be a great mascot for -at least- AWS, for obvious, ssh-related reasons :) VP of ... "Customer Engagement"? Prime? ...
... I got it! "Incubator"!
I'll show myself out ...Random internet serendipity, shift in topic and mood. We live in such an interesting and strange universe.
I never committed any violent crimes, but I know throughout most of 2016 I was really really broke (about $15,000 credit card debt, 3 months of unpaid rent, a lawsuit from my landlord for the back rent). In the process I debated reaching out to one of those payday loan places, despite the fact that I knew they were scams. My desperate brain was overriding my logical brain.
I can only assume I'm not unique in this fact; if it comes down to mugging someone or not eating for a week, I'm not 100% sure which option I would choose. I would like to think that I would never hurt someone, but since 2017 or so, I've had a pretty privileged life.
I see the HN crowd as rather monotonic, and thanks to stories like yours, it shows me wrong, and that’s for the best.
No: being really broke can cause a lot of anxiety that can lead to irrational behavior.
But often a person has to choose between homelessness and crime and picks the latter as a rational choice, given the alternative.
So please don't assume poor = "crazy" = criminal, it's a bit unkind.
A lot of comments here seem to think that it has something to do with morals, but from living in poor places, what I gather is that people have no other options when they’re backed into a corner.
If you’re unemployed and you need money for rent and food, what the he’ll are you going to do? Survival mode kicks in, and you’ll do anything to make the next day/week. This could include steeling (to consume or sell) and mugging people (actual money, but probably less of a problem in the near future with everyone using digital payments). Now throw into the mix drugs to numb to pain of living an abysmal life... which are astronomically expensive, so most of the time your only option is to steel and mug more.
They aren't scams, but they are only useful for a very narrow band of people in a very narrow band of circumstances. For the vast majority of people that want one of those loans, they are better off not getting it. It's entirely possible to get the loan and use it as intended, it's just the most the people that need it aren't in a position to do so, and the lenders go out of their way to make it real easy to just roll the loan over into a new ones that kicks the problem down the road to the next payday after this one.[1]
1: It's a dark pattern. "You borrowed $400 the other week and you owe use $500 today? How about we fund a new loan for $400 before your payment, roll that into your current payment, and all you have to do is pay the $100 difference this payday, and you can just pay it all next payday when it's more convenient?" Now, the lender has an installment plan for 700-1500% APR as long as they can get the client to keep doing that (but the client does have to choose to do it every time).
At least, that's how it was a decade or so ago. I think it got even more regulated since then, and they can't charge 25% interest per payday anymore (you can likely thank the NY AG if so).
If I recall, the military had a heavy hand in that. When the payday loan industry has cut into military readiness to the point the generals are talking to Congress about it, it's gone a bit too far.
edit (add ref): https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-109shrg50303/html/C...
You mean that it's possible for some people to use it in a personally beneficial way.
That is true without any need to get into intent. I think it's unambiguous that the predatory application is the actual intended usage-- since their business model doesn't make sense without it, they have a massive default rate that only gets paid for with the windfall customers that stay on the treadmill for a long time.
It's very rational to choose crime over starvation or exposure, especially when our legal framework (US) is morally bankrupt. Why not turn to crime when crime really isn't such a bad thing compared to the other shit going on.
It is easier to think long term while feeling secure but not thinking long term can lead to becoming insecure. Not trying to make any moral or blame judgements here - just pondering origins of problems and solutions.
I think my lack of impulse control came as a direct cause of me being broke. I had previously never seriously considered any kind of payday loan because I knew they were multi-thousand-percent levels of interest, but that part of my brain wasn't the one thinking. When faced with a really tough situation, I think it's common for your "survivalist" side to kick in.
I never actually did get the payday loan because I was able to (begrudgingly) get a loan from my stepfather-in-law for the back rent, and I very luckily landed a decent-paying job shortly afterwards.
I was absolutely one of the lucky ones. It's not hard at all for me to envision a universe where I was stuck in an endless cycle of debt, and honestly I still have nightmares about that time occasionally. Not fun.
For all the criticisms of UBI, I think it would be a net win simply because it eliminates the significant time wasted in maintaining welfare entitlement.
Because they're not, the idea that they are is paternalistic bullshit from the kind of people who get their news from John Oliver.
Debt can be dangerous, and payday loans are commensurately more so due to their high rates. But debt is a _tool_, and just like middle- and upper-income folks can use it to prevent disaster or rationally extend themselves, lower-income people can too. Not having access to credit isn't a _good_ thing per se.
Whenever people have actually bothered to look into the use of payday loans instead of pearl-clutching about how the poor don't know what's good for them, they've found that much of the clientele is making rational decisions. As bad as a high-interest loan sounds to privileged sensibilities, the alternative is often worse. It's just more diffuse and thus easier to ignore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Tucker_(businessman)
Likewise, just because I post one extreme example of payday loan businesses being a fraud doesn't invalidate the entire industry. As a whole though, I feel the industry is quite scummy and often scammy.
That's not using debt as a 'tool', that is weaponizing it against those can't fend for themselves.
Reminds me of an anecdote from poor African countries. Farmers would buy fertilizer months before they needed it, even though it is logically better for them to save that money and only buy the fertilizer when they needed it (assuming the price of the fertilizer was constant). But they knew if they had the money the would be tempted to spend it in the meantime, so they bought it early to avoid the temptation.
Payday loans can encourage people to take out a loan and spend money even in cases where it would be better for them to find an alternative.
Maybe I was being a bit hyperbolic when I said "scam" since they usually do what they advertise. Let me rephrase: they have ridiculously high interest rates that can lead to difficult-to-escape debt, and they are predatory towards desperate people, hence why you usually see them in poorer neighborhoods.
Debt is absolutely a tool and I wasn't claiming otherwise, so when I said "scam", what I really meant was "the worst possible way to leverage debt".
Not sure where you get your news/experience from ;), but I don't see how any of those arguments apply to payday loan places - in every country, city, society I've lived in, they a) were shut down for fraud and exploitation anytime anybody bothered to look & investigate b) are universally demonstrated and proven to prey upon those who can least afford it. These are not benevolent capitalists trying to help those who nobody else would help - the owners are shameless sharks exploiting and manipulating people into a vicious cycle.
(FWIW I'm not going to downvote, I actually upvoted - your perspective is interesting and must as I may disagree I'd like to hear more and maybe be educated, rather than shut the debate down; but I'd like to see some "counter-John-Oliver" studies and stats to go against the ones I think most of us have seen)
Edit: I mean heck, like with smoking, government here will try their best to talk you out of it; you can still do it, as an adult human being... but it's just a bad, bad idea
https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-agency/services/...
You are correct, not having access to credit is a bad thing. But having access to predatory credit is a WORSE thing. There's a reason we outlawed indentured slavery and "company scrip", and payday loans are a half a step up from that situation.
Unemployment is a cause of or certainly concomitant with having very high stress and a very poor outlook on the future. In a town like Bessemer the thought process is something like “I don’t have a job, I’m not going to get one, I have no money, and this situation is not going to change.” And it’s not just you thinking this, you see your friends and family having the same problems. You reach out for help but after a while the good graces of others run out. So do unemployment checks.
After a few months you get evicted, so no one else will rent to you, and you are either homeless or at least not in control of your living situation. A slum lord may be involved. The food bank (which was already not a great source of food) is now useless since you need a kitchen to make most of the raw supplies they hand out.
The stress and pressure to take care of ones self and ones family under these conditions often leads so serious mental health issues, drug use, and domestic violence. For some it leads to other crimes like stealing, mostly stealing food or stealing things to buy food and drugs. You see your friends falling victim to these issues, getting arrested, dying of exposure, or losing themselves to mental illness. Prospects don’t look good.
One of the most infamous is/was New York City's SOTA program [1], which attempted to relocate and provide one year's rent for people from NYC's shelters. They basically shipped families and individuals out of state to other cities, hoping they'd find a job and affordable housing there. NYC is an economic powerhouse if you're credentialed and high enough on the treadmill to make it work, but not an area you want to start out with nothing; you can imagine that someone had the bright idea that there are cheap houses and entry-level manufacturing jobs in other growing cities, someone homeless and jobless might have a better chance of integrating into society than panhandling on Wall St.
The program met with outrage from the destination cities whenever anyone (utterly broke, with a history of homelessness, with no local family or connections...the program worked for some but did not for others) ended up in trouble and the locals found out they'd come from NYC. Turns out a lot of people would rather have their bright and bustling new-money "innovation hubs" and "tech corridors" unsullied by undesirables from dying cities.
It's one thing to turn a saloon and general store into a quaint Old West ghost town when the gold mine runs out. It's another to turn dying cities that once had populations of millions working in bustling industries of rail, coal, steel, or automotive manufacturing (like Bessemer, named after the inventor of the Bessemer steel converter, or other cities like St Louis, Detroit, Cleveland, Gary, Flint, Dayton, etc.) into not just the current Rust Belt cities but an enormous ghost metropolis.
Subsidize 2 luggages and a 1-way bus ticket per household member, to anyone that wants to move to a new location. No questions asked. You can do it X amount of times in your life, and anyone with income below (a multiple of poverty rate here) qualifies. That's it.
I don't follow how you made that assumption about OP of the comment
(noting there's a difference between "I'm a student living with parents, I'd like a job but can't get one so I'm unemployed" and "I have 3 kids and a sickly partner and I'm overdue on rent and I'm unemployed and I have no social/family safety net")
I wouldn't call it "not having a real actual problem" - again, it's relative and so on; but a charitable read as "never been on brink of famine/poverty" may be a good interpretation?
But in the US, unemployment, desperation, and easy access to firearms can be a big problem.
BTW, I'm still shocked by the casualness of people who threaten to shoot me. Or like to show they are armed in an attempt to intimidate me.
I have a few questions, sorry if this sounds like a lot I’m just really curious.
What city are you in where this happens? What are you doing to provoke this kind of behavior? Why haven’t you moved away to somewhere safer?
> What are you doing to provoke this kind of behavior?
Standing on the sidewalk, hanging out with friends.
> Why haven’t you moved away to somewhere safer?
I left when I was 18.
I'd be happy to entertain any additional questions you or others might have.
Driving, riding my bike, walking. When I was a kid simply walking to school was enough. But people will threaten to shoot you for turning, not driving fast enough, merging, stopping, not stopping. Riding a bike in the right lane.
Growing up down here you get used to it. Far too many Americans have access to guns. Hopefully, they only use it on themselves. But even if only 1% of gun owners were certifiable crazy, that's still over a 1 million unhinged individuals.
I moved to Europe for a time. But career and family brought me back here. And I like money :-)
And also obviously it happens frequently in SF from the homeless people. That is probably more worrying as they potentially have "nothing to lose"
What? Where in the US do you live? I've lived in the US my entire life and never, not once has anyone ever threatened to shoot me. Thats a felony in itself and I am really surprised by that.
The US is a big, diverse place with a lot of history.
Two is that America’s high crime rates well preceded the advent of the modern welfare state. New York had much higher crime than London even in the 19th century at the height of Victorian social Darwinism and Dickensian work houses. If anything the disparity has actually decreased in the post war period.
The short answer is America, and in fact the Western Hemisphere in general, is just a much more violent society at its roots than the Old World.
I think there is a clear reason: nihilism and depression. If you have resigned yourself to being unemployed and impoverished forever, what difference does it make whether you're in jail or not? It's the same reason we argue that jailing the homeless is pointless. They don't care; life in prison might even be better in terms of quality of life. Sure, there's less freedom, but the poorer you are, the less the delta in freedom is. You don't have access to a lot of the freedom that financially healthy people have to begin with. Jailing them is like trying to drown a fish. We don't have any functional punishments for people who don't care about their life (I'm not advocating that we try to invent some).
You mentioned rape specifically. The prevailing theory afaik is that rape is about control over someone else rather than sexual gratification. There are plenty of ways to have sex; the floor on sex worker prices is shockingly low. Doubly so in extremely poor areas. It's not shocking to me that people with almost no control over their lives would lash out in ways that grant them control, or at least a feeling of control. If you're poor and have no safety net, you have little control over your housing (can't afford to move), your job (don't have a rainy day fund to tell your boss to fuck off), your food (you eat what's cheap, or what the food bank will give you), your money (you're lucky if you even have enough to pay bills, much less have money left over that you can pick what to do with), etc. Your life becomes a constant chain of being shunted around and manipulated by people who do have money.
Crimes of opportunity are an attempt to lift yourself out of poverty. Crimes of passion are an attempt to cope with the struggles of living a life that you have almost no control over.
I'm not attempting to absolve anyone of responsibility for their actions, but I can see how someone would make that choice.
Also, suicide is an act of passion, and it's highly correlated with unemployment.
I am originally from Russia, but live in US. I actually feel safer in US than in Russia.
It is far easier to get assaulted as result of road rage or because somebody don't like how you dress in Russia. Hopefully Russia have stricter gun laws, so it's less lethal.
Also when people believe that they can't, by legal and socially acceptable means, thrive, their belief in the current social order is undermined. A lot of society operates on trust in fundamental fairness; for people who find that life is fundamentally unfair, that trust is eroded, sometimes permanently.
Crime often puts people in stressful situations.
People in stressful situations sometimes act violently, even if that's not their default mode of conduct.
As a simple example, imagine someone shoplifting some food from a market, where an employee confronts them and bars their way, saying they are calling the police. The shoplifter tries to leave, and a scuffles ensues while the employee tries to restrain the accused. It's very easy for the crime to become assault while someone is fleeing, and nobody needed to intend for any violence at any point.
Law enforcement can probably withstand some budget cuts before public safety suffers, and leaders probably cut other things first, but at some point it might have an effect.
Yes, 10,000 years ago our monkey brains were just fine at navigating the world as it existed. They're not just fine at it today. Today, even some of the simplest jobs require advanced skills in disparate areas, and frankly about 16% of the entire world population is not up to the task. Sixteen percent is the amount of the world population with an IQ at or under 85. These are people who struggle with tasks as simple as folding a sheet of paper into thirds, more or less perfectly, and then placing it into an envelope.
The world we live in, and almost certainly the world we're creating, has no place for these people. Even something as simple as receiving merchandise on a dock in a warehouse requires some basic computer skills, from either operating a Windows or Linux machine and interfacing with SAP, Oracle's JD Edwards, or IBM's AS/400, to figuring out the proper layout of boxes on a wooden pallet to maximize storage space of the warehouse. Something your grandfather or great grandfather did with a 6th grade education, now requires a minimum of a high school education by necessity, if not by design.
That brings me to actual answer to your question... because they don't have the decency to lay down and die. Because inside every human is an irrational desire to live, even when you're no longer useful. I know, know... a long argument can, and likely will, be made that "every life is valuable", etc., so forth. I understand and even accept those arguments on an emotional level, because I am not a machine - I am a man, and because I find it morally repugnant to allow people to die because they have no economic value.
That said... clearly there are plenty of others who do not feel the same way. If you work on AI to streamline a process or aid in manufacturing, you feel this way. The people who employ you, feel this way. You cannot design an algorithm that replaces 7,800 jobs and then throw your hands up and say, "I'm just doing my job." We either have to decide that everyone is worthy of life, regardless of their intellectual abilities and their economic contribution, or we have to decide that's not the case. Right now, because no one is taking Universal Basic Income seriously, we're clearly deciding that your value is mostly - one could argue almost entirely - economically based. We have a few exceptions to this that I can think of off the top of my head - the clergy seem to provide some kind of non-productive "good" that enough people, in America at least, feel is worth the cost of supporting them. But the factory worker who makes widgets for your ConsumerGoodX that you bought, she apparently does not.
I would like to be wrong about this, but our actions as a society say otherwise. We reward companies that reduce their "human capital" and return the money that would be spent on those salaries to either expanding their operations or in dividends to their shareholders. We reward them with higher stock prices and increased demand to purchase those stocks. We reward them by purchasing their goods. We tell ourselves another story, because if you really thought long and hard enough about it, you'd likely have to do some serious soul searching. Most of us don't want to do that.
But in countries going through late stage capitalism, if you don't have a job, you have to rob your neighbour to eat.
Any country with a strong social safety net will be far better off when unemployment spikes than one without such a net.
When humans care about their fellow man, society flourishes. When it's every man for himself, spiralling unemployment means crime, anarchy, and chaos.
https://247wallst.com/special-report/2019/07/22/worst-cities...
I suspect manufacturing is somewhat less casual about their employees’ health because much of it is unionized, and training is more difficult. Warehouse workers are considered disposable.
And the service industry is light years easier than warehouse work, at least based on my time in both.
People being carried out of a factory missing a limb are more noticeable than people who stop coming to work because their backs simply can’t sustain the work any longer.
But why does this work need to be for decades? Why isn't the worker in amazon also educate themselves or upskill, so that they can move to a different career with higher paying prospects?
The days of working the same job for your entire life is gone - and that it's every person's own responsibility to keep improving their own skills and career prospects, continuously throughout their life.
Secondly, are we really sure that if everyone suddenly educated themselves into a better job that there would be enough better jobs to go around? It seems unlikely. Particularly with increased automation.
My point is that the “get a better job” argument isn’t a strong solution to providing for everyone’s needs. We’re pretty clearly getting worse in this area as a society, with stagnating wages and fewer opportunities for entry-level work which can make ends meet.
At a point, if this trend continues, you get riots and revolution when people feel they don’t have another choice. We aren’t necessarily close to that, but if these trends continue, that’s more people making less money with higher prices. At some point that leads to desperation for enough people that violence happens. Just look at Russia or France in the past couple hundred years.
My meaning with that is that it’s not just someone’s own responsibility, but that there is some level of social responsibility for maintaining a baseline.
If they were valuable, they would be valuable enough to pay a high price.
And i don't believe that it is possible to run out of high skilled jobs. It may be that in the further future, these higher skilled jobs paid just as much as low-skilled jobs of today, and the lowskilled job of today disappears due to automation. But that's a good future - it means that production and output must be very high for it to occur. And who's to say there won't be even higher skilled jobs? Or brand-new job types that's not envisioned yet? After all, human have unlimited desires which is the impetus for all economic progress.
> if this trend continues, you get riots and revolution
only if society don't invest in up-skilling. I'm a big fan of society helping those of lower skill to increase their skill. Education is one of the most efficient forms of investment a gov't can undertake.
Edit: Added the bit about all the world governments
- Health care
- Worker protections
- Required time off
- Sick time
- Maternity leave
etc.
Here its $15. And you're on your fucking own.
If you compare it to completely underdeveloped or dictatorial economies... Sure I guess its way better. But the US shouldn't be comparing comparing itself to that. Its like saying "This engineer is horrible, but he's not as bad as this drug addict that is yelling all day outside our front door!"
The US as a whole is awful at providing healthcare, but healthcare is a particular area where Amazon actually is going way above what is normal and is provided astonishingly well for its workers.
You've been mislead by propaganda. They have healthcare, protections, etc.
Europe is not one country. I hope you realize it's hard to generalize.
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me, 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store"
That's ignoring the whole healthcare situation... which I think you're leaving out of the equation.
30 seconds of searching indicates the average grocery store clerk in the UK makes 8.80GPB/hr. Add on healthcare and they're coming out far ahead of an amazon warehouse worker.
https://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Industry=Grocery_Store_...
Of course the US healthcare system is broken so I know what you're getting at but I don't know that I want Amazon to pay their workers > $15 to subsidize a broken healthcare system for their workers I just want a functional healthcare system and for them to continue to make $15/hr.
Is it fair to compare the average wage of a warehouse worker across the entirety of the U.K. with the starting wage of a warehouse worker in a single deeply impoverished town?
And if it's just plane fare, there are probably a lot of places you can make it with a bus ticket that have better prospects without needing to go to Europe.
Healthcare in the UK is not as good as you may think it is. Unless you love waiting lines for life-threatening conditions.
And even if they didn't, through the Affordable Care Act, someone at that income level can buy a "Gold" plan with low deductibles for $75/month. Obviously for Amazon workers, that's irrelevant.
K-12 education is free, and once you factor in-state tuition and FAFSA, university is also basically free for anyone that continues to make minimum wage throughout their career.
The estimated cost of attendance at one of the closest public universities, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, has a yearly estimated cost of attendance of $28,695 for in-state students.
University isn't 'basically free' for low income students. My parents lived below the poverty line their entire lives. I graduated with my bachelor's degree and $80k worth of loan debt.
Sure low-income students might be eligible for needs-based grants and scholarships offered at their college. But federal support for low-income students is pitiful and college for those students is a far cry from free.
Talking about Germany here by the way.
I need more information about that health care plan. Last time I looked at the market I was looking at worse premiums, coverage, and limits and making garbage pay.
My plan is $500/mo from me and $1500 from my employer with, iirc, 8000 max oop
Edit: I reviewed the plans they offer. Mine is significantly better, excluding the max oop. Anyone know what the costs are for for the plans?
Furthermore, it is a bad historical precedent to rely on employers for healthcare. This was a poor side-effect of the wage-hike stoppages during WWII that was later tax-exempted through federal law. It was never well thought out.
Finally, how many people in this town feel they have equal opportunity for social mobility? Decades of economic stagnation and degradation have thrown any plausible arguments towards a "meritocracy/American dream/everyone has an equal chance at success" out the window.
That said: prereq is you’re bonkers smart.
Not everywhere in Europe, and "free healthcare" is largely a myth. It's free until it's not. You need glasses? Out of your pocket, and it's super expensive. You need to stay in hospital? It's not going to be anywhere free. And they will kick you out as soon as they can as they are starving for beds and resources. Good luck with that.
Sure, you can always go to the emergencies to get free treatment, and wait 10 hours to see someone who is overworked to diagnose your issues.
Nobody is ever going to kick you out of hospital. It's covered and the stay is usually longer than in the US where they kick you out right after you wake up.
The wait times are not worse than in the US, never had to wait more than 2-3 hrs in the hospital.
Neither you would ever receive a surprise bill from the hospital.
I live in the US (originally from EU) and I don't like people arguing the EU healthcare sucks without experiencing it themselves.
No matter what your job/status is, you don't have to be scared to see any doctor - dentist, specialist, eye doctor...
Germany and Netherlands for example the payment is in the order of 100 euros a month for health insurance.
Single payer health care is not necessary 'free'. Here in Czechia one pays mandatory 'health tax/insurance' in addition to regular income tax. But still (IMHO) better than US system.
Why do we keep using this term? There is no such thing as free healthcare. There is taxpayer paid healthcare. I'm not being critical of taxpayer paid healthcare. Those countries made that choice as to how they would pay for healthcare. Cool. Sounds like a good choice. But can we stop calling it "free" please.
Education is also not free... Rant off. Sorry for the interruption.
But yes, it comes with affordable healthcare, free education, longer vacation, and maternity leave.
I don't think most of my colleagues in academia could physically complete a shift in an Amazon warehouse. Is that a skill?
The labels unskilled and entry level are used to depress wage expectations not accurately represent the requirements of the work performed because the work is deemed to be of low economic value.
It doesn’t mean, and has never meant it was easy work or anyone could survive doing it for long - rather that the necessary skills (for the majority of the population who doesn’t already have them by dint of existing) can be taught in about 5 minutes by someone not trained in teaching it to you.
Ditch digging is ‘unskilled’ because anyone who can figure out a shovel can do it, and theoretically any random passerby could do it (for a time) to a competent degree. This is unlike a ‘skilled’ trade, or craft such as electrical work, surveying, etc.
It’s something very few people could actually sustain for very long - I spent a week ditch digging before when I was younger - but part of why the pay is terrible and the work is hard is because any rando who needs some cash this week can do it. There is a ton of competition keeping prices low and conditions hard.
I live in the middle of The Netherlands; the average house price is 360k and the average wage is 36k, that's around 10x salary to house cost.
One important point: in almost all cases in NL both partners work, the general rule is that women work part time and increasingly couples under 40 both work full time. That's how the insane house market is propped up.
Healthcare costs are around 200 EUR / person / month at the limit (you pay ~110 and the deductible is about 900 EUR a year).
Why ... what did you think that the subject was, dear ?
https://jobs.lidl.de/lidl-als-arbeitgeber/mindesteinstiegslo...
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2414-6th-Ave-N-Bessemer-A...
https://revealnews.org/article/how-amazon-hid-its-safety-cri...
So yeah, you can have your own opinion. That doesn't mean that the opinion is beyond criticism, nor does it mean it's a rational thought out opinion from all points of view, considering all the facts.
Or are we talking about the hicks that vote against government healthcare and social safety nets despite the fact that they would themselves benefit?
"Voting against their interest" is just how the ivory tower crowd derides the poor for sticking to their ideological guns even when it doesn't benefit them. The poor have opinions and beliefs and making sacrifices in the name of their beliefs does not make them stupid.
In fact, the people who were the first "rednecks" would most likely reject all of the fascist bootlicking that goes on for most conservatives (not that neoliberal bootlicking is better, just less prevalent; I don't see hordes of foaming-at-the-mouth Biden supporters screaming adoration about Biden with some goofy flags and apparel on the street corners, while I still see the Trump folks doing the same cult worship of their new "god"). The original rednecks were miners who violently opposed capitalist exploitation [1]. This culminated in the battle of Blair Mountain [2], in which miners living in exploitative conditions violently rebelled against the authoritarian private police (the "Pinkertons") in their attempt to form a union. This is also the first time that aerial bombardment is used on American soil (preceding Pearl Harbor).
Needless to say, I think the original "rednecks" have nothing in common with those who pretend to espouse some sort of "rural identity"; the original rednecks would not have looked to the state to force their own restrictive ideas of living on other people.
It's fine for people to have their own opinions about these things, but when these people who stick to their ideological guns do so in the face of facts (e.g. all of the cult-of-trump people who intellectually contort themselves to see him as some skilled businessman when he has a history littered with business failures, including losing money on a casino!), it's a little difficult to respect their opinions; this is especially true when their opinions are incoherent (e.g. the GOP celebrating Goya and that my pillow guy for "getting involved in politics" when it benefits them, while deriding companies looking to boycott states that plan to impose Draconian voter suppressing laws to "stay out of politics") and involve restricting the liberties of other people to comport with their own strict world view (e.g. restricting the right of other people to get same-sex married, as though that is somehow an "attack" on hetero marriage).
Ultimately it's about being able to accept new evidence and change one's mind, which I think these people who vote against their own interest (hicks or not) are not wont to do. Just as not all people in the GOP are fascists, but all fascists vote for GOP candidates, not all people towards the liberal end of the political spectrum are open to new ideas and changing their mind, but all people who are open to learning and change are on the liberal side of the political spectrum.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy [1] https://www.appalachianhistory.net/2009/08/original-redneck-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
Most of them are not aware that they are making sacrifices, though. They were convinced that the only alternative is communism.
Contrary to what folks seem to think, unionization is not always a “no brainer”. Been through two orgs that went through the process, considered joining one because they presented a good case, rejected one because there was no value to the $50 the wanted to pull from my paycheck.
Often when I hear that people need to be educated about some issue, what I understand the speaker to be implying is that the reason a person disagrees with them is due to ignorance, when that's often not the case. We may think we arrive at our opinions based on cold logic and inarguable facts, but in reality there are many more factors that influence all of us.
Fraud to get disability payments is very high. People who are unable to rejoin the job market sometimes make the difficult decision to connive with sympathetic doctors to get this. But once you do this, you can never go back to work in any official capacity. This is the one case where people who are chronically unemployed give up and become wards of the state. So the 'desperately poor' are actually taken care of in some fashion in the US.
The problem is that the people who are the 'working poor' often get shafted. These are the janitors who are working all hours of the day, the baggers at the grocery store, the short order cooks, the security people who patrol industrial and residential facilities, etc. Even though their children are eligible for all the benefits above in many cases, it's still difficult to raise a family if there is one breadwinner who makes minimum wage. These people are not eligible for many benefits programs and also do not generally get healthcare from their employers (employers deliberately keep hours/week down to avoid this expense). The problem is, 'taking care' of these people is very hard: they are the majority of the workforce, and I suspect that there is not enough money to fund programs for these people because of the sheer size of this workforce. Also remember that this group oftentimes does not have powerful unions (many subgroups do), which means politicians do not have to listen to them.
The utopia would be having low income housing running on solar with affordable EV's for people under a certain income level as well. Combined with a basic income, it would certainly make a huge decrease in poverty and allow these people to bootstrap themselves into the middle class.
EDIT: for poor math skills. lol
That'd be $329 trillion[1], which is on the order of 100x what we spent.
1: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%241+million%2Fperson+...
damn, didn't know covid killed 99% of the US population. rough.
I come from a shit city in France, a former textile powerhouse that lost everthing after the war when it became automated abroad and we couldnt compete. And I moved to Hong Kong years ago.
Well... between this city and my new one, there's such an imbalance, I think I wish a few companies were trying to enslave people back home to teach them something else than shooting heroin and cheating on social insurance... And the French gov cant fix it, they can't make people clever and useful just with money and will...
It's completely sustainable and is effectively just a simplification and improvement of the status quo of having unemployment insurance and a bunch of means-tested benefits for low income people, but without the poverty traps, perverse incentives and excessive bureaucracy.
b) Observe the real world, see what happens when you "just increase tax rate". You'll find that very often when you increase taxes you actually end up collecting less, as more people decide to illegally dodge taxes or simply close up shop.
Given a country's economic output, laws, culture and a thousand other factors, there's a hidden function that determines the maximum tax rate you can employ where anything more than that is counter-productive with both short-term and long-term results, the latter often including reputational damage that can be nigh impossible to repair, soft-capping your economy far below what it could've been. See: Laffer Curve, and the shining example that is Argentina.
I believe The USA spends most on social welfare than any other country.
What does that have to do with health system
I see USA at 10 in per capita section in your wiki link.
The lesson of the GINI coefficient and the psychology of relative wealth, is that absolute, material well being isn't the issue. The issue is whether people think the cards are so stacked against them, that they will never win.
So the answer is no. We know that condemning those at the bottom will result in civil unrest. Everyone needs to live in dignity, or there will be violence. Psychology has pretty much determined this to be a fact of human nature.
However, this doesn't mean we should have equity. People should be rewarded, and people should also have something to strive for. It's the dignity of the common person which has been eroded over time.
This is both right and wrong. Asian immigrants are notorious for arriving on foreign shores, penniless, then winding up owning businesses and sending their kids to top tier schools. The problem isn't being born into not having money and things. The problem is being born into an environment that sets children up for future failure.
The good news, is that such cultural practices aren't attached to race or ethnicity and so can be learned and adopted. There are historical precedents for this.
The bad news, is that other cultural practices can do the opposite, and insulate groups of people against things like valuing education and a work ethic.
As someone who lived in the US for a long time and now lives in Europe, I can tell you that all of the Americans I've met over here (who are not vacationing) are incredibly driven and entrepreneurial. They do not at all reflect the average American back in the US (e.g. I don't know a single Trump supporter over here; the Democrats Abroad caucus typically goes far more liberal than any state, supporting Bernie Sanders in 2016 by a very wide margin).
I don't follow. What are some examples of this?
If healthcare is free, people who are healthy have to pay healthcare for those who aren't.
I'm not taking a stance one way or the other on these issues, just trying to illustrate the argument.
No, they should do so, just not be so exploitative about it (e.g. deliberately going into areas full of desperate people, for the reason of using that desperation to exert maximum control with minimum accountability).
Isn't that what taxes are for?
I wouldn't search for evil intent in those moves.
[1] https://ugapress.org/book/9780820356273/americas-johannesbur...
I was a union member back in the last 1980s through 1990s early. I was in a low skilled job where we paid our dues and got exactly nothing for it. Oh we had a wonderful contract that specified it all. It was great for basically keeping anyone new boxed in. Each quarter if we were lucky we got a visit by our local union rep in her Mercedes which cost more than many of us made a year. So I am so not a big union supporter and lean against them.
On another personal note, they spent decades harassing my uncles, now cousins industrial roofing business calling OSHA and other inspectors out to where even the OSHA representatives joked about it. It became a coffee break for them. All this over a company with less than thirty people at max.
So while they may have some application on higher paid jobs when you are low wage there isn't much they do for you other than suck two hours of wages or more from you each month.
People here glorify unions have no experience with them at the level that would have been seen in Amazon. They have these grandiose ideas how everyone benefits. Oh don't get me wrong, you are likely to get some changes that are beneficial, but in the end you are still exactly where you are before but now its all in nice pretty print writing which spells out exactly how you aren't going anywhere fast. Oh, don't forget the monthly payout (could be weekly in some places) and don't expect much if you ever actually reach strike stage.
Had a friend who was a pilot. Personal situation - moved, wanted to live in base rather than deadhead yadda yadda - you start off at ground zero at the new airline - literally next to guys with no time on type (and you could have thousands of hours on type - which is years of work).
I might recommend to watch Waiting For Lefty to understand the distinction.
Are "dying cities/slums" a purely American phenomenon, in terms of rich first-world countries?
Is there similarly a "rust belt" in Germany, of cities that had an economic collapse after manufacturing died out? Are there rich European countries with flailing cities that devolve into crime and poverty? Does Europe have its own Bessemers, Detroits? (though I do hear Detroit isn't as bad as it's made out to be)
The UK definitely has declining factory towns (often called mill towns there) similar to the US. Northern England is like that for the most part. Less of a rust belt and more of a rust hat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Migration_(African_Ameri...
Not anti union, but these also had high union activity, which some explain as a cause of their 'rustification' as companies moved production elsewhere (like Alabama) to avoid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Negro_Labor_Council
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Negro_Labor_Congress
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Revolutionary_Black_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_Revolutionary_Union_Move...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_Black_Trade_Union...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Brotherhood_of_Worker...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brotherhood_of_Sleeping_Car_Po... (See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_Commission_v._Pullman.... )
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Association_of_R...
One of the few things I think Trump got right is when he brought tariffs back. If you want companies to keep jobs in the US you have to make the labor cost just as much no matter where you find it. Otherwise it is just a race to the bottom.
Well, that guy would do a really bad job, especially after he dies. You can compete with him by staying healthy and being much more productive.
That's not an accurate description of overseas labor though, those people are skilled at what they do and their PPP-adjusted pay is better than that. (Sometimes overseas developers aren't skilled at enterprise development, in that case their skill is scamming the outsourcing manager.)
> One of the few things I think Trump got right is when he brought tariffs back. If you want companies to keep jobs in the US you have to make the labor cost just as much no matter where you find it.
That's not what a tariff does, a tariff makes foreign companies' products more expensive for domestic customers. It's just a pointless tax increase. And when the other country fights back it makes your products more expensive for foreign customers, hurting you.
Keeping jobs domestically means doing the opposite, increasing foreign customers for your stuff. This falls under industrial policy and it's what the overseas countries taking your jobs did better than us.
(Also German carmakers have - at least until now - done much better than Detroit for a variety of reasons).
Inside immigration is also big. Small towns/cities are losing population while big cities/capitals are rapidly growing. We have hundreds of towns that once had thousands inhabitants and now they barely have a couple hundred and haven't seen a kid in more than a decade.
But as far as I know, there's no Detroits in Europe. The cities with most crimes are also the ones that are attracting more people and immigrants. The abandoned places are quiet and peaceful.
There's also growing trend of trying to revive those places by people that just can't take big cities anymore or people who work for home, etc. Why would they pay a huge chunk of their salary for a crappy shared flat on the city when they can live on a nice house with garden only 5 hours away?
As for crime, it's some economic and some that Detroit was the center of the car industry which means everyone was huffing leaded gasoline fumes for decades. In Europe everyone is still breathing in diesel, which just kills you rather than makes you a rage monster.
Most of Japan is dying as nearly its entire population moves to Tokyo.
And that's only a slight sprinkle of hyperbole. Other regions are sustained only by tourism or by other industries where the average worker age is past 60.
Charleroi Belgium comes to mind. Once a prosperous industrious town, now the glory is gone. Recently read somewhere there is a bit of revival, culturally at least. Economically I’m not sure. A bit like Detroit maybe.
I don't know more details, I am only speaking observationally. Someone else might tell you why this happened.
I would assume it has to do with globalization and other nations being more competitive than local business.
Not yet, but we are doing out best to deliver that in the near future \s
What we do have is sort of a coal belt. The Ruhr Area, where coal mining used to be big but has died out. Some regions did not recover from the closing of mines, Gelsenkirchen for example.
It's not that any city is altogether full of crime and poverty, personally I'd say they're just less desirable with full-on "crime and poverty" being noticeable only in some hotspots (but then again, I don't live there and only ever visit for short periods of time, so really all I can say is "it doesn't seem that bad").
Observe for yourself the recordings by CharlieBo313
And if it was such a hell hole, why did Amazon choose to open a warehouse there? Out of the goodness of their hearts? We need to ask questions as to why Amazon had to become a "savior" for the City of Bessemer. Not just focusing on effects but looking into causes too!
My comment isn't about Amazon specifically as much as the fact that there are so many cities all over this country (supposedly the wealthiest in human history) that have fallen into so much disrepair and so much distress that they need companies like Amazon to come "save" them.
We need to ask why is all I'm saying.
As I've grown older I've tried to resist the urge to marry myself to these stark beliefs. Following this thread there's a lot of good information on what those competing perspectives actually entail. In my current area, which is mostly liberals of varying degrees, unions are almost universally championed. If you ask about the downsides or present an example of how they can be bad you can face people who think you're some kind of oppressor, or that you must be conservative. Where I'm from, which is mostly various flavors of conservativism the mention of unions causes similar outrage but in the other direction. If you mention how a union could be useful or various implementations that are non-stock (such as unions that don't try to practice authoritarian control over pay and just maintain representation for working conditions) then you'll be demonized for being a socialist. I used to think, "these are bad people of varying variety" but I've come to understand they're just people without experience in each other's geography and problem set, so it becomes easier to speak dogmatically.
Sometimes a union can be good, sometimes it can be bad, sometimes it's a bit of both pending nuance and implementation details, but at the end of the day this is a truth: the only people whose opinion matters is the people whose lives it will directly affect.
How did we as a nation go from the land of the free, a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage, to "beg for scraps or you will starve."
All of this has always been propaganda, nothing more. The average unskilled worker has never had a good life in America.
They'll be able to put a roof over their head, and not worry about their kids' next meal or maybe even their kid breaking their arm. But they're not going to advance to the next rung of the socioeconomic ladder.
You’re painting way too bleak of a picture based on zero data.
This was basically the norm from 40s to late 80s after reganomics started widdling away workers' rights.
This is the way it should be - 1 parent at home, 1 bringing home $$.
Else, the government should cover child care, or pay stay-at-home parents a salary for providing their own child care.
If a company can sell its products two towns over for 2x the price Bessemer can afford, it's not going to slash prices in Bessemer just because everyone there is poor.
1 - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/05/amazon-wo...
Find a dying city with huge unemployment. No problem finding workers for a factory where most employees don't require anything more than ability to walk and read.
This why we need national and international coordination on minimum wage and minimum work environment laws.
Normally having a huge employer would be a boon to the city, but most of these people are going to be working for close to minimum wage and Amazon most likely negotiated with the city so they don't have to pay a dime.
I think a retail/warehouse workers' union only really works if it's a national sort with local chapters so that a company can't hire except through a union.
I'm not saying such a situation isn't rife with its own problems, but as long as these unions are essentially on a per-location basis, a company with the resources can always close one location and open up down the street to avoid the union.
If you don't have the first it is easy to replace anyone striking, and the union doesn't have power. If you don't have the second the better employees will want more money and so they won't work with the lesser ones
In retail it is generally easy to replace people. It only takes a few minutes of training and the new person will figure it out.
In retail there are a lot of different jobs. People who can do more (and have been around longer) are worth more. Many of the jobs do have metrics that can be measured to say who is better. While the pay this results in isn't much more, it is enough.
That isn't to say you need the above to have a union. There are counter examples that work, but they are less powerful than unions that have those factors because they find it harder to get everyone to stand together.
As such retail unions have trouble working. It is too easy to hire someone else if they go on strike.
This is also why the UAW started dying once containerized shipping made it practical to move factories overseas.
They voted to allow the “hand” to maximize exploitation without restraint.
America is utterly rotten.
Until they get hurt on the job and Amazon fires them for failure to show up to work:
https://revealnews.org/article/how-amazon-hid-its-safety-cri...