A brief history of nobody wants to work anymore
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Healthcare for all that has 0 to do with employers and is near "free".. guaranteed time off, sick leave, maternity leave, and real assistance on early childcare (as in nearly free nurserys etc) would fix like 90% of the US's problems when we talk about things like "people don't want to work".
But this will never happen so where we are.
The improvements you list are all good things, but they’ve got zilch to do with wanting to work
Good wages after a bit are not going to help you if the work sucks, but it is a good initial motivator.
1) Acquiring status / proving yourself (qualifying for a better romantic partner, etc). More applicable for men.
2) Servicing existing debt (student loans, mortgage, etc)
3) Providing for a family (somewhat similar to 1 - but for future goals)
4) Securing a legacy/reputation
Although the most important drive in work is seeing a path towards upwards mobility (i.e. if I work hard then my lot in life can improve - not in an absolute sense, but in a relative sense. Meaning that I will be better off than my neighbor. This ties in to status games and mate competition from (1)).
So currently I am at stage 'Providing for a family', while I do a little bit of self-actualisation whenever I can find some free time.
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I ᴍᴇᴛ a Traveller from an antique land, Who said, “ Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desart.[17] Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read, Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: “ My name is Oᴢʏᴍᴀɴᴅɪᴀs, King of Kings.” Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair! No thing beside remains. Round the decay Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Maybe in 100.000 years even he will be forgotten as well, but he did get his 15 minutes of fame (relatively speaking), I'll give you that :)
Plenty of public works projects we could start and pay people $50/hr.
Consumers who spend a majority of their income on food, energy and housing are paying more in than they get back because the income they receive from assets is smaller than their living expenses aka the income share of labor is less than 100%.
Imagine being so rich that you can live off dividends, there is no reason for your wealth accumulation to ever stop. The amount you pay into the economy is much lower than the income you derive from your assets.
This is the reason why there is a constant flow of money toward the top. When you think about how a market economy worksy the above is completely illogical. The entire point of markets is to trade which means those who have too much give to those who have too little in exchange for monetary compensation.
Why doesn't the same happen with money? Why isn't money flowing from those who have too much to those who have too little in exchange for their labor?
Instead, those who have too much get more and those who have too little get less, this is highly inefficient.
You can't really tax "increase in net worth", because net worth can - and does fluctuate both positively and negatively, As opposed to income which just accumulate more or less linearly.
Imagine Jeff Bezos stock has a perfect seasonal effect: on odds years, he gains $1 billion and on even years, he loses that amount. We can all agree here that Jeff sin't getting any richer, on average and thus should not be taxed since he is not getting any stable income. Yet you would want to tax him, every odd year, on the $1 billion - which is unfair, unless you also give him back that tax money every even year. This means firing those workers and asking them to give back their undue wage - which you can't do of course.
The way we solve this is by not taxing the increase in net worth, until he does actually sell the stock and converts this increase in stock value into what is called realized gains. At that point, his net worth won't fluctuate anymore since he sold the stock for cold hard cash. And we tax him on that cash amount. You might argue that we should tax him more on those realized gains - which is fair discussion point.
But trying to impose a tax on virtual net worth increase is a quite risky path because you would also need to pay billionaires when their stock portfolio decreases. And although everyone wants to tax billionaire when you hear about them having a fantastic month on the stock market (even tho these gains haven't been realized yet), but no one want to send them money when a headline says "$25 billion wiped out in a single day" (and rightfully so).
Personally, I wish the income tax for high earners could be deferred for the first year or two. It’s like, right when you are first building wealth, it goes away so fast… but then, once you got wealth, why not plan to pay a percent or two a year in tax?
To get to $50/hr I imagine the middle class will need their federal tax doubled, at least.
But do you want to live in a civilized society or not?
It's also not at all obvious that this is better than someone just investing a bunch of money. After all, the way investments ultimately make money is by supplying people with what they want at low prices, which means that investment money floating around can lead to innovation which supplies people with more stuff using less resources, increasing the amount available for everyone can buy with their wages.
By that I mean universal healthcare, guaranteed sick leave and childbirth leave as well as minimum 3-4 weeks vacation a year and a good unemployment system.
This would in effect force employers to pay better.
However, due to the hedonic treadmill, after people get accustomed to it and take things for granted, people will find reasons to be unhappy and frustrated and claim that they live in the worst possible times etc.
EDIT: just to be clear: I'm not saying that since people will complain there is no point in improving, nor I'm saying that you don't have to listen people's complaints since they just don't know how lucky they are. It's important to keep improving more and more, since there is still room for improvement. What I'm saying is that it's hard to compare the quality of life in different places just by measuring how many people are complaining here or there.
With $50/hr you will have your pick of providers.
Besides if 50 dollars an hour becomes minimum wage for everyone you can bet your years salary that healthcare providers are going to raise their prices accordingly.
Unreal that schools have active shooter training and no one seems to even care. The fact that there is a non-zero chance your kid might be shot at school is completely absurd.
Being confronted with an armed robber in a home invasion is more of a problem in the US (but France has its own fair share of violent crime). Outside of that I think the bulk of gun violence is suicides and gang on gang violence.
I've read that more children have died of gunshot wounds this year than police officers have died in the line of duty.[1]
Granted, there are probably more school children at school than there are police at work on any given day, so ... of course children are more likely to be shot at a school?
But then again, here in Australia we have reasonable gun control after that mass schooling in Tasmania all those years ago ... and the country still turned to shit ... so?
While were here, anyone else got any arguments no one would intentionally make?
1. https://en.as.com/latest_news/more-children-have-died-in-sch...
The outrage always happens on politically charged subjects, but worse outcomes happen on the roads, and nobody talks about it as though it was normal.
Kids should fear crossing the street more than an active shooter. While i don't disagree that gun control is a good outcome, the difficulty of achieving it in the US is real. Effort is better spent addressing the root cause of gun violence, rather than attempting to take the guns away and just hope that the violence doesn't occur.
There's enough concern to go around to work at improving both.
And in most countries, they do.
For the people who live outside the US and consume our "news", it must seem our country is falling apart. From gun violence, to wildfires, to racism, to homelessness, we truly must be living in a 3rd world country. However, my experience does not reflect any of this. Yes, these issues exist, but everyday I can go to the grocery store, put gas in my wife's car, walk downtown, take a trip to the lake, visit a neighboring town, etc - all without fear. People of differing backgrounds/colors talk pleasantly with each other, neighbors help neighbors, etc. Totally different from what the "media" is pushing these days.
My advice - walk/run away from the media and don't attach yourself to any political party. Your emotional state will thank you later.
One way is examining the dimensions of analysis. A simple counting exercise and declaring “well it’s just not relevant,” despite contradictory qualitative evidence is really simple-minded and an abuse of statistical reasoning.
But this is typical of non-research thinking, in non-academic contexts so forgive me if I come off harshly.
The principles we use for relevance, and other techniques we’ve built upon them are axiomatic: there’s no real reason they persist except as a form of historical convention and necessary standardization.
What makes statistics useful is when it’s able to capture quantitatively something that exists practically, i.e. material phenomena. When the stats don’t square with reality, it’s not exactly reality’s fault, so to speak. It’s the statistician’s job to understand and explain why the statistics, or the techniques thereof, failed. This is the red meat of “hard” statistics, how the field refines itself, and it’s also the most fun and challenging thing about it.
When eye-to-eye with a provoked bear in real life, I’d be curious to see if any statisticians would dismiss it on statistical grounds. My bet is zero because they know the limits of their discipline.
Statistically: that time I lived in the US.
The aviation sector is one of the most regulated on earth and has extreme safety standards for exactly this reason: we don't want to crash.
Societies also implemented security measures after terrorist attacks. Especially after Bataclan in France.
These are extremely rare events because we take measures to prevent them.
i would argue that those measures are costing more than the attacks themselves. It's security theater - high cost (in terms of time and resources), high visibility (politically). But doesn't really prevent any terrorist attacks, because terrorist attacks are fairly rare all things considered.
So you can say that those terrorists' attack succeeded in making the lives of those they attacked worse, and it's because we let them dictate due to "fear", rather than rationally ignore them.
When you use the TSA and Patriot Act as an example of meaningful, useful legislation, you're probably not on strong footing. One is considered an expensive boondoggle jobs program, the other is tasked with illegal mass spying of US citizens and deprivation of rights. Neither shows any strong evidence of preventing terrorist acts. Its legislation like these that give gun owners pause of any "common sense" gun control solutions implemented based on emotion.
This isn't a very compelling argument, and it's kinda intellectually dishonest because you wouldn't accept any answer I gave you. You are now acting as "dear leader," who decides what individuals do or don't need.
Why does anyone NEED to go over 10 miles per hour, why does anyone NEED more than one pair of shoes? Why does anyone NEED coffee, tea, beer, lots of things, why does anyone NEED a fast computer? Why does anyone NEED cologne or perfume? Why does anyone NEED dessert? Why does anyone NEED fashionable clothes? Why does anyone NEED art? How do you even justify that outside of a profit motive in a way you will accept? See it's a trick you are playing.
Of course to answer your question, a gun would be the preferred tool. If you ever go camping in the woods, they are certainly handy. If someone tries to rape or murder you, it would certainly come in handy. If you were a woman (or a man even) and attracted a crazy stalker, invaluable. If you have a massive plague where the police stop working and society stops functioning correctly, it would certainly come in handy. Remember covid?
>These things will now be put under weapons regulation, and will be basically unavailable to the general public.
Of course, someone will kill someone with a bow and arrow, then it will be banned, then someone will kill someone with a knife, and they will ban the "scary looking" ones. Then someone will use a slingshot and those will get banned. You know it's all just a theatrical overreaction at that point to placate the hysterical masses.
Yes, but why do you NEED them, isn't that the argument you made?
Rare events that only happen in America.
I don't know what kind of parent looks at a rare event where their kid might die and says "yeah, I'm okay with that".
Good job those gang bullets aren't allowed to hit anything other than gang members!
Do you seriously think the traveling public would accept a plane crashing every week?
I think active shooter training time would be better spent on counseling, therapy, PE, recess, or just literally letting kids fuck off and hang out with their friends for an hour.
This doesn't happen anywhere else on the planet outside of war-torn countries. Saying that "actually kids are more likely to kill themselves" is just about peak cope.
You're being disingenuous if you're trying to claim that, say, the Beslan School Siege is the same as the Columbine school shooting. One was committed by a terrorist organization with a political goal. The other was just a couple of fellow students.
We have enough food and housing for everyone right now, except in some popular places, why exactly have we become so desperate? Why can't we give up some economic growth and use the resources we have on general human well-being?
Firearm related injuries are the #2 killer of children after automotive accidents[1]. The rate of firearm related deaths for young people went up nearly 14% between 2019 and 2020 alone.
I do agree with the importance of socio-economic solutions, though, even before gun regulations.
A binary analysis would lead us to conclude that gun regulations are completely bereft of any benefit whatsoever, given that gun violence, even mass shootings/spree killings, happen in countries with quite strict gun control - I mean, the former PM of Japan was killed via firearm just this month! But that is not the case. There is a clear gradient of occurrence and effectiveness of regulation. So, we need to move into the realm of statistics.
And the statistics are that over the course of the decade from 2010 to 2019 ~350 kids were killed in school shootings, and ~26000 took their own lives.
My assertion is that given these numbers, an inordinate amount of resources, political capital, and conversational bandwidth is being spent on what is actually a rather rare occurrence and that this is largely a waste compared to what we could be spending said resources, political capital, and conversational bandwidth on - namely, solving the problems that affect broad swathes of the populace and that I, and others, believe actually drive people to commit such violence in the first place.
Or, we can spend the next century fretting about a statistically vanishingly rare occurrence, keeping the blue and red tribes divided, making little to no progress on the existential problems that we as a country, culture, society, and species face, as the world becomes increasingly uninhabitable.
Statistics deals in degrees; violence against children is something that is sufficiently cognized in absolutes.
To do otherwise is to be biased one way or another.
This is the only moral choice when dealing with absolutes.
A cute rhetorical parlor trick.
Principle 1: Children should not be victims of arbitrary violence
Principle 2: Children should be educated
These are compatible principles. Your proposal (one of many potential proposals) is to undermine principle two rather than addressing the source of the issue which is violent third parties.
And to forestall any further swiss-cheese a priori logic: this is not something fantastical. There are other societies with have honored both principles one and two, and have experienced zero, as in ABSOLUTELY zero acts of mass violence in educational settings.
They absolutely do not, not even remotely close to the scale and frequency in the United States. At least not in countries with equivalent socio-economic metrics as the US (El Salvador does not count).
I thought we weren't analyzing gun violence statistically?
But since you walked down the statistical path anyway, the least you can do is not be completely wrong about it.
I compared the rate of school shooting deaths to suicide deaths for the purpose of pointing out the outsized amount of resources the issue takes up.
You claimed that it is wrong to analyze gun violence statistically.
I, for the purpose of demonstrating the absurdity of such an assertion, analyzed gun violence using a non-statistical and binary approach.
You then took exception to me conceding your point for the purpose of argument and using said non-statistical approach by then bringing statistics back into the mix and arguing that the frequency of gun violence is much higher in the US than other places.
So, which is it? Can we, or can we not use statistics to analyze gun violence? If we can, then we can compare the statistics across regulatory regimes and social, economic, and cultural contexts and show that gun violence can be affected in degree by those factors. If we cannot, then we cannot show that regulation is effective, since gun violence still happens in highly varied regulatory regimes and social, economic, and cultural contexts.
I would argue that statistics is an appropriate approach since, in my opinion, it allows us to come to a better reckoning of reality. Ultimately, your view is up to you. But you can't have your cake and eat it too here - you have to either admit that the use of statistics is appropriate, or that aforementioned factors are irrelevant to gun violence occurring. They are simply mutually incompatible views.
Classic. They're not having trouble following your argument. They just disagree.
This reads as appalling smug. Whether spaceman_2020 made a good argument or not, you are quibbling over ultimately unimportant figures when the situation remains that mass shootings of children in their schools are orders of magnitude more common in the US than other developed countries.
You should also be appalled by the adolescent suicide rate involving firearms - that's also not normal.
I just think that, given the status quo, the best approach to reducing all forms of gun violence is to just generally make life better for everyone, and that the resources spent on trying to wrench guns from the hands of the citizenry are much better spent on just about anything else.
Can't really hear your argument, if any, over the smug.
In this one sentence you betray yourself as uninterested in debate, and instead just like to hear yourself talk. The person you are responding to offered an interesting comparison, that of stats from the US versus other countries (and, I might add, they gamely came to your turf, which you subsequently tried to dismiss). Instead of doing the hard work of revising your views in the face of a potentially fruitful comparison, you dismiss it out of hand and assert your self-righteousness.
They did the exact opposite of this. They asserted that it is wrong to examine this issue statistically.
Spaceman posted > rbj challenged that stats should be used > spaceman answered, alluding to stats widely searchable > rbj dismissed the use of stats.
Edit: Re-reading through all posts, I see I am incorrect in this summary.
This is not an argument against gun control, but against spending so much time and effort fighting for that gun control at the cost of letting slip the lower hanging fruit that could prevent more deaths.
Um, I don’t know maybe morally? As in, it is morally abhorrent and unconscionable for children to be preyed upon in school, one of the places they should safe by definition.
I agree that kids should not be preyed upon in schools.
Now what?
This is ultimately my point - we have a lot of other avenues to address the problem rather than this, IMO, fruitless attempt to deal with the guns.
And just because it's difficult doesn't mean it's impossible. If one side can stack the Supreme Court with people who suddenly realize there's no constitutional right to privacy, the other side can find some judges to suddenly notice the "well-regulated militia" part of the second amendment, and act accordingly.
Gun-control opponents... generally choose to ignore the first clause altogether, hoping that no one notices that there was never an unabridged right to gun ownership.[1]
The solution to the gun-control issue and, perhaps, to some of the lawlessness in our communities is for the states to invoke the Second Amendment and require gun owners to join a militia.[1)
The 2nd Amendment says well-regulated militia shall not be infringed, it's the right of the people. Gun owners should be drafted into militia and whipped into shape. Whether regulation works or not is incidental because the 2nd requires it.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1987/08/22/t...
There hasn’t been an “assault rifle” used in a school shooting for decades. “Assault rifles” are highly regulated— it’s nearly impossible to own one. There have been a fair number of sporting semi-auto rifles used in mass shootings.
Can we please stop describing these weapons as something they are not? The “AR” in AR-15 means “ArmaLite Rifle”. ArmaLite being the company that originally developed the weapon.
...
Around _400_[1]. That's ALL rifles. Hunting rifles, bolt action, "assault weapons", whatever, in a country with ~300M-1B guns and a population of 330M. While we should look at why these deaths happening, banning the tool used to commit such an incredibly low number of crimes is just silly. I'd compare it to trying to ban swimming pools because 390 people drown in them per year [2]. "No one NEEDS a swimming pool, ban them all!"
People like you that want to go off and "ban everything" while being completely uninformed and refusing to do any kind of simple research are the worst kind of voters / citizens.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/195325/murder-victims-in...
[2] https://www.edgarsnyder.com/statistics/swimming-pool-statist...
Not saying I agree with this line of thinking, but that is a common retort.
My understanding is that it is up to the courts (ultimately the US Supreme Court) to interpret the Constitution, and define things like "Arms", "security", etc..
> I can’t own a nuclear weapon
Careful what you wish for. If personal nuclear weapons ever become a thing, they too may be "Arms" "necessary to the security of a free State". It is hard to understand some rulings of the Supreme Court.
At the time of writing the 2nd Amendment (December 15, 1791), the accepted "Arm" was a musket, with a muzzle velocity between 1425 fps (434 m/s) and 1700 fps (518 m/s) with a ¾” (19.05 mm) diameter ball (. 640 caliber), and an approximate weight of .9 oz (25.5 g) [1]. Today the court accepts that an ArmaLite AR-15 is an "Arm", with a muzzle velocity of 3,300 ft/s (1,006 m/s) using a .223 Remington cartridge with a 55 g FMJ bullet [2].
The momentum of the AR-15 round is therefore approx 55,330 gm/s compared to 13,209 gm/s for the musket ball (ie more than 4 times greater). Too many American shooters make the mistake of thinking these modern "lightweight" weapons translate into less lethality, but it is the increased momentum from higher muzzle velocities that does the devastating damage to soft tissue and bone.
Take a look at the X-ray of a leg showing a bullet wound delivered by an assault rifle used in combat compared to an X-ray of a leg that sustained a bullet wound from a low-energy bullet, inflicted by a weapon like a handgun in Philadelphia. [3]. The trauma surgeons of the 19 children killed in the Robb Elementary massacre reported "They were so pulverized, he said, that they could be identified only by their clothing." [4]
[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-2/
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15740773.2019.16...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.223_Remington
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/04/health/parkland-shooting-...
[4] https://khn.org/news/article/trauma-surgeons-uvalde-mass-sho...
Can you stop with the nonsense? You produce it faster than I can correct you.
Example: The US military just replaced the .223 with .277 Fury for exactly the reason that the .223 is _too fast_ and doesn't shed enough energy when hitting a target.
Furthermore, you're mixing grains (gr) and grams (g). A 55gr (grain) bullet is 3.56 grams. A 0.9oz musket ball is 25.5 grams. So your momentum calculations are (11'067-13'209) grams * m/s for a musket and 3'581 grams * m/s. So the musket actually has 3+ times more momentum than the .223 round.
Musket balls are absolutely huge, there are effectively zero modern rifles which shoot a .640 caliber round. The .223 is a very small rifle round.
https://www.quora.com/Would-it-be-worse-to-be-shot-with-a-mu...
Why is it that political philosophy that hates constitutional originalism in every other case wants to try and selectively apply some weird quasi-originalist argument not to the amendment itself but to two individual words within it?
If the amendment was written before muskets were common would you argue in only applied to swords, bows, slings, and catapults? The amendment is about providing the populace with a mechanism to keep tyranny in check, its not about caliber and projectile ft/s.
Respectfully, aren't these definitions just semantics about firing capability?
My understanding is the mass-shooter weapon of choice, the AR-15 is semi-automatic-only (ie not an assault rifle [0]) as they do not have select-fire capability, meaning the capability of a weapon to be adjusted to fire in semi-automatic, multi-short burst, and/or automatic firing mode. Semi-automatic fire means that one shot is fired upon each depression of the trigger. [1]
Regardless of firing capability, there is "overwhelming evidence that the AR-15 could bring more firepower to bear than the M14" [2] battle rifle [3].
This evidence is borne out in our schools [4]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_rifle
[1] http://www.weaponslaw.org/glossary/selective-fire
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_rifle#M16
Statements like "ban all assault rifles" require semantics, and the entire discussion around "which weapons to ban" is entirely semantics. If this person genuinely means "assault rifle", then you already can't own these as a civilian (generally, unless it was made before 1986 and you pay a ton of money for it). If this person means "assault weapon", then we're talking about a poorly defined class of weapons, which are largely based on cosmetic features.
> My understanding is the mass-shooter weapon of choice, the AR-15
The AR-15 is the most common rifle in the country. It's a popular rifle because it can do everything. It's cheap, you can hunt with it if you want (larger magazines are popular for hunting feral hogs, which are infesting the south), you can shoot sporting competitions with it. If you want to shoot a different caliber, for example to change to .22 for cheap target shooting, you can pop two pins, swap to a second upper, and go ahead and plink away at your soda cans. With it being the most popular platform of rifle in the US, of course it pops up in mass shootings. Wanting to ban the AR-15 is like wanting to ban RAM 2500s because they're the "truck of choice for drunk drivers" [1].
> "overwhelming evidence that the AR-15 could bring more firepower to bear than the M14" [2]
A potential, but never materialized, military AR-15 that they're talking about here, would have been select-fire. Then that military AR-15 would be an assault rifle. This has no bearing on semi-automatic AR-15s not being an assault rifle.
This is the third uninformed comment from you that I've needed to respond to today, loaded with more sources but lacking comprehension.
[1] https://insurify.com/insights/car-models-most-duis-2020/
I don't believe any of the points you make are drivers of violence at all. You perhaps failed to analyze the typical issues.
I do agree that a society might want to ban guns. Policing is much safer and there are a lot of other advantages. Fewer deaths too of course. But I heavily doubt the presence of guns is reason for an increase in violence among younger people. On the contrary, I think some people are well underway to create self-fulfilling prophecies. Security at schools is part of that.
There is a recent increase in crime but certainly to none of the factors you mentioned. I live happily in a country without access to assault rifles. But we probably disagree on what constitutes drivers of violence.
I understand your perspective, and I believe I understand how you arrived at it. I even largely share your concern - but I don’t think you fully realize just how repugnant it is to many people.
Have you considered how many lives your proposal would cost, or how likely it would be to succeed in any measurable way?
This is not a rhetorical question. I would definitely consider myself part of “American gun culture.” I would resist disarmament with lethal force if necessary. That statement may be somewhat shocking in this context it wouldn’t so much as raise an eyebrow amongst gun owners.
… and this is about banning one kind of weapon. One kind. An ill-defined class of firearms that are used in a tiny fraction of crimes. How many deaths would be worthwhile to make that happen?
> But when the patient is bleeding out, you first STOP THE BLEEDING.
Attempting to disarm the US may or may not “stop the bleeding” - but I’m extremely confident that it would create many times more patients.
You could just limit sales of these guns to folks over 25 and make everyone much safer.
In fact, every single school shooter was white...
It seems like you want to say that broader mental health problems are more important than gun violence, but that's only more reason to restrict access to guns. Most other places in the world are able to recognise that mental illness and guns are a bad mix, and act accordingly. The US has had nearly one third of the mass shootings in the world since the 60s yet people like you continue to defend access to guns as though it's not a contributing factor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shootings_in_the_United_S...). That alone seems to point to one of those broad problems affecting the populace. It doesn't have to be the only cause, to merit a treatment.
The rest of the world doesn't view gun access as a given, or even a good. It's earned and revered, or prevented, but never normalised. It's why Abe's assassin had to make his own gun, because Japanese laws didn't make things easier for him. It's why here in Australia, even gangsters don't even have guns, for the most part https://youtu.be/BYsXCnxbnj0?t=461
But we don't judge the effectiveness of these restrictions by some bogus standard of absolute zero gun violence. We judge them by assessing our rare incidents of gun violence, and whether we think we think we could or should have done more to prevent them from obtaining and using a firearm.
And when we look at the numbers of mass shootings in the US, particularly in sensitive places like schools, we wonder how in the world you can think you're doing enough.
Both are horrific, but the latter seems even more horrific because it includes not only death, but psychological torture before the death.
your 80:1 stat seems pretty dubious -- do you have a source for it?
People need to quit embarrassing themselves trying to somehow reason away why the USA is an outlier via some kind of cope metric. It's the guns.
You have to. For effective policy you need to distance yourself from the deed no matter how terrible they are. All other venues for grief are better than policies motivated by retribution, which will very likely not lead to constructive outcomes and resulting in repeats. Otherwise you end up invading random countries because someone attacked you.
Unclear the portion that is suicides but homicides are the fastest growing segment beyond unintentional poisonings
> Although the new data are consistent with other evidence that firearm violence has increased during the Covid-19 pandemic,5 the reasons for the increase are unclear,
Seems like there is a pretty obvious candidate for that, lockdowns.
Still, only time will tell, as they go on to say with the rest of that quote:
> and it cannot be assumed that firearm-related mortality will later revert to prepandemic levels.
When most people say "gun violence" they do not mean gun-as-tool-used-in-suicide, they mean nonconsensual use of a firearm against someone.
Suicides are way up. Gun murders are up too, but they're still pretty low in the scheme of things. They're "safe to completely ignore" low if you're not in one of a few specific counties in the US where gang violence causes 70-90% of the gun murders.
The movie plot/evening news gun violence stuff that you hear about is so rare as to be safely ignored in all parts of the US.
> The consensus among public health experts is that there is strong evidence that reducing firearm suicides in contexts where more-lethal means of attempting suicide are unavailable will result in reductions in the total suicide rate (see, for example, Office of the Surgeon General and National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention, 2012; World Health Organization, 2014; for review, see Azrael and Miller, 2016).
[1] https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/suicide.ht...
It shows there is zero correlation.
For example, imagine we find that higher speed limits increase the rate of automobile accidents in a given area. That finding doesn't preclude that poorly maintained roads might also increase the rate of accidents. So just the existence of an area with a high level of car accidents and very low speed limits doesn't necessarily mean that there is no correlation or causal link between speed limits and automobile accidents. It may just mean that the area suffers greatly from other causes (like poorly maintained roads).
Similarly, I think it is fairly intuitive to assume that there are probably a host of causal factors in suicide rates. For sure, means isn't the only factor but it is an important one.
There's been research into means reduction, and it does seem to have an effect on reducing suicide. The hypothesis is fairly intuitive: many suicides are a response to a crisis, and a human in crisis-mode is not always a great problem solver; lack of an obvious means sometimes gives people some extra time to reconsider.
You can read a high level summary of some of the research here: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/risk/
The cost, such as politically and time & energy to lobby, would be better spent making the social net better, or add more mental health services that target more people, and to prevent people from getting to a state of destitution (and fall into crime).
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”
But what's the comparison with the rest of the world here? Are you trying to counter the claim that gun violence is a uniquely American issue? Or are you saying that even higher rates of youth suicide are an even more American issue? Because suicide happens everywhere, but unless the US is doing remarkably well on this, that 80x figure is still far far lower than any other developed country. Where, you know, a non-non-zero chance of shootings means infinite more chance of suicide, most other places in the world.
You're dismissing an acute problem with common sense solutions behind issues that are common enough to almost be normal, in order to justify doing nothing. It's like someone's pointed at your bleeding foot and you've said it's fine, because you've also got high cholesterol.
But TL;DR: I think that the juice is not worth the squeeze and that it is just another issue for the two tribes to fight about while the ruling class continues to destroy the human habitat and loot our country's wealth.
I don't know. I certainly don't think anyone should be shooting kids.
>US is the only country in the whole universe that has an active shooter problem in schools.
Because we have guns that are relatively available and a handful of wingnuts that want to hurt kids.
That said, it is not the only place that has a violence against children problem. Not even the only place with a violence against children in schools problem.
They do have active shooter drills as routine part of education. And schools have cops in them routinely and Americans talk about it as normal. You cant those wish away, those are very really affecting the country.
Sure, if you limit the numbers to just school shootings. Why not count all kid deaths by firearms? A kid is twice as likely to die by bullet than by suicide.
School shootings are just the currently most visible form of kid death by bullet.
US Teen suicide looks like around 8-11 per 100k, age 15-19, depending on year (source: https://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/health-of-wom...), with 9 states over 20.
Compare to Germany, 184 between age 15-20 (https://www.aerzteblatt.de/int/archive/article/213427) from a population of 5.41 million (https://www.statista.com/statistics/454349/population-by-age...), or 3.4 per 100k.
Good way to word it. Suicides alone are an NP hard problem. Homelessness is an NP Hard problem, etc. Mass shooting could be a sort of NP Complete problem. If you can come up with solutions that prevent mass shootings, those same solutions will probably greatly reduce the others.
Just to name, a probably short, list of sources.
- We have a poor gun culture. Guns used to be viewed as tools, now they are some cool gadget that is apart of someone's identity.
- We often ignore and stigmatized mental health issues. If you want mental health, you are seen as weak or pathetic. When in reality, we probably all could use some sort of neutral third party counseling at the very least to talk about issues we individually face out loud.
- Insurance coverage is pretty shitty for mental health. My last employer had good benefits, good medical benefits, but it only covered 3 or 4 mental health appointments. Other than that, it was a decent plan.
- We probably should honestly evaluate the process of purchasing a firearm. You can be placed on a no-fly list for suspected involvement in terrorist activities, but can still purchase a gun? Doesn't seem to make sense to me at all.
The fact that schools have active shooter drills says more about the disclaim-all-liability culture of schools here than it does about gun violence. The more pervasive gun violence problem is outside of schools, and is more a result of a systemic collapse of order in inner cities. The lone-wolf school shooters just make better headlines.
From a European point of view it's incomprehensible how that is even a thing.
This is an ironic demonstration of why larger problems in the US are not addressed. Someone always starts off talking about an issue then "think of the children" rears it's head. Do you believe there's a benefit from the whataboutism when "think of the population" is far more important? The larger societal issues are more likely issues on which there is plenty of low hanging fruit, versus this hand-wringing about children which will not promote any short-term improvements.
To quote Daryl Zero: Now, a few words on looking for things. When you go looking for something specific, your chances of finding it are very bad. Because of all the things in the world, you're only looking for one of them. When you go looking for anything at all, your chances of finding it are very good. Because of all the things in the world, you're sure to find some of them.
Yes, it’s worse than France, which is part of Western Europe, the most developed and best-run part of the entire world.
If the US ever gets near the median on these global lists, it would be the result of a collapse worse than the Soviet Union’s.
Where did I claim it should be seen as a great accomplishment?
The facts are as exhaustive as they are exhausting. There’s one simple conclusion from all of this. We’ve been tricked. We’ve been told that America, like most other majority-white countries, deserves the title “developed economy”. It does not.
A bit polemic but an interesting perspective. Maybe it's just the case that the us IS a "third world' aka >developing county<
People love talking about how the US is the worst developed country across so many categories, without grasping the point that if something is clearly an outlier from everything else in a category, the definition of the category itself is flawed.
The US isn't that bad of a country in that sense that if you knew you were going to be born into the US, and you got one optional re-roll, you shouldn't take it. But for some reason that isn't totally clear to me people (though I have some hypotheses), people seem to think that we should be doing dramatically better than we are, and the fact that we're not in an even higher percentile of best countries to live in is some sort of unconscionable moral failing.
My hypotheses for the source of this idea:
* Pure racism -- people think "the US is a Western country with a European-influenced culture; why shouldn't it be doing as well as all the other countries that fit that description?"
* People confuse wealth with development. They think "of course [country X] is fucked up, because it's poor, but the US doesn't have that excuse". However, they are actually two independent axes (despite being correlated, of course).
* The existence of so much "America #1" propaganda makes people want to hold the US to a higher standard -- if country X has problems, well, at least they're not going around claiming to be the best country in the world.
* The ironclad pop-cultural dominance of the US in the Western world means it's on people's minds way more than random median-quality countries.
I can relate to that... in the 80s USA was the dream for us kids. But now... I'm so glad I don't live there. France is indeed extremely generous. I wish more french people would realize this.
For most people, especially any French person who'd move to the US, all of those indicators are fine, and, income is considerably higher than in France, if not 'free time' and guaranteed access to healthcare.
Yes, the food in many ways is not good, but it's fine. There is no 'security' problem - Manhattan is generally safer than Paris, and US has great educational institutions unless you live in a ghetto.
It hasn't changed that much over 20 years other than what you see on TV.
Attitudes towards work have changed, our material standard of living is considerably higher than it was 2 generations ago, and people are considerably less willing to do manual labour for example. Ironically, wages in semi skilled and skilled labour are actually not that bad.
What we have now is a 'new white collar working class' - large swaths of people who went to college and have expectations they wouldn't be managing restaurants.
This being said, a lot of IT professionals here don't take all of their paid leave. It's not uncommon for me to see people forced into a vacation by their company so they don't get into legal trouble. I don't think they would mind working for a US company (I wouldn't). Working in the US is another thing, and very much an acquired taste.
Time off is more valuable to labor where the average unit of time to complete a desired amount of work is fairly small. For work that takes a lot of time to contribute too, you get no realized break, just a granted "delay" in deadlines.
Also, almost 2/3 Americans are on free or subsidized health insurance through Medicaid, Medicare, Tricare/VA etc. which have nothing to do with employment.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
Work in France is importantly a vector for socialization. This seemed to be a foreign consideration to a lot of Americans from what I've witnessed. It's so easy to get fired in the US that considering coworkers are more than acquaintances -- trying to make friends -- is a "bad investment."
Most French people would also rather say that work is "chiant" (boring) rather than bad.
Importantly, socialist and communist societies are different, and there is no successful nation that is purely one or the other. Successful nations with high standards of living and overall higher than average levels of life satisfaction have socialised elements, such as healthcare.
When hearing French people using the word chiant (comes from chier=to shit) it shows to me the sequel of decades of education destruction in the country, as they are hundred better or more diverse words to express the emotion behind "chiant".
Something like pénible for example doesn't feel quite equal, more something I'd use to describe someone. Bassinant would not quite feel as heavy as well. Barber/barbe may be.
Overall chiant/faire chier is just much more common and conveys the meaning quite well and accurately when it comes to work.
The company I used to work for had the HQ in France, and there, all the devs doing the stressful mediocre pay grunt work, were all Mohamed and Ahmed immigrants from North Africa, while all the suit & tie managers with expensive haircuts doing nothing but have coffee and joke around for 4 hours/day, were native white French dudes.
I wish this was a meme though, but this is my anecdote from my time there.
Owning a house? Check
Starting a business? Check
Starting a family? Check
Getting an advanced education? Check
The US is full of opportunity and "chances". Just because you feel nobody has a chance does not make it so. Nothing is for free - you need to be willing to put the effort into making it happen.
It does happen…
Who cares? France gives everybody mobility, a computer and network, plus free training in case they cannot go self-taught. Most of French new jobs are deliviery and remote work by African immigrants (extensively represented due to France having half Africa as a former trading point, faith territory and colony).
What are you talking about? Basic education in France is free, the university is open to everybody and is not expensive at all; and if you are a good student you can even go to a "grande école", which is not only free but you receive a good monthly salary just to study there. The entrance exams are open to everybody, and they are anonymous. Please tell me how can it be any less elitist than that!
Of course, there is a lot of social inertia whereby children of parents with higher education are more likely to pursue a higher education. But this is an acknowledged problem and one of the main goals of the system is precisely to solve it.
Source: I am part of the French higher education system to which I entered as a total outsider.
(you are right, however, that the private employment system is awfully elitist: if you didn't go to the right schools it's much harder to get a good job)
Also, the 60k are probably before income tax, which as far as I understand, is higher than in the US.
Of course if you live somewhere else than Paris it's even better, and in every case you also count in universal healthcare.
Easily does a lot of heavy lifting. I'd doubt you'd find a 30m2 in a nice neighborhood. Source: I looked last year. I was also specifically talking about buying.
> Of course if you live somewhere else than Paris it's even better
You'll probably be making less than 60k in that case, if you can even find a job…
> and in every case you also count in universal healthcare.
It depends. If you break your leg or something else critical, sure. If you need any other kind of care (hospital stay, glasses, or even some dental work) you better have a "mutuelle", which seems similar to the US model of employer provided health insurance, in that not everyone has it. Also, this comes out of your 60K, and part of it is included in the tax base, so it isn't completely "free".
Paris has the largest job market but there still a lot of jobs around the country. In my area, which couldn't be further away from Paris, senior profiles take 65-80k gross/year.
meh. I make less than 3200 net/month and iI live inside a 33m2 2 pieces in a completely normal part of the 20eme, if I'd go to other still nice but cheaper parts of Paris/banlieue prochaine on the metro I could probably do even better.
About buying, I've lived in places with an higher buying cost/rent price. But still, the market is mental and buying an house in the 2nd most expensive city in the world is completely different to live a decent life off a salary like 60k/year (which is medium-high compared to the average one in Paris, which is 48k/y).
Of course more aristocratic arrondissements are much more expensive and the Paris house market is completely mental, but that's another issue.
> You'll probably be making less than 60k in that case, if you can even find a job…
Mah! Other sibling comment already addressed that
> It depends. If you break your leg or something else critical, sure. If you need any other kind of care (hospital stay, glasses, or even some dental work) you better have a "mutuelle", which seems similar to the US model of employer provided health insurance, in that not everyone has it. Also, this comes out of your 60K, and part of it is included in the tax base, so it isn't completely "free".
It's mandatory and for the bigger part payed by the employer. Anyway, that's the concept of "taxes" in Europe. One could argue that the US model of health insurance is better, but that's easily proven false.
I should hope they can 'kinda easily' rent that.
Remember that in the US most decent jobs (certainly any which would pay €60k in France) include health insurance so then universal healthcare isn't such a big benefit either.
Ask the Germans, where you basically have to wait for someone to die, so that an apartment comes on the market for renting.
Maybe it's better in France.
So you work full time in a highly skilled career and you can afford to... rent a flat, as long as you keep working full time forever.
That's.... nice, I guess?
fixed that for you. welcome to modern society :)
(also, you kinda forget to realize that 60k is much higher than most of what skilled job positions currently offer, except for the tech bubble, where senior profiles in Europe - especially in Paris - make way more than 60k)
"Congrats, you're not homeless!"
60,000 USD is 58,000 Euros at current exchange rates, which equates to a post-tax annual income of 37500 Euros in France.
If you were only supporting yourself, that would place you in the top 1.6% of earners in the world. It would be an effective income 17x the global median.[1]
Now, these are estimates, and some of the underlying data is outdated, but the basic point is clear. It would provide you with, relatively speaking, a historically and globally unprecedented level of affluence. After that point more money is going to do almost nothing to improve your well-being - doing creative and meaningful work, having good relationships, having a well balanced mind, etc., is going to be far more important.
[1] https://howrichami.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i?income=...
So ... yes, technically, if you earn 37500 Euros post-tax, you are the 2%. And if you live in Laos, you're living the good life. In Paris, however, things will be hard.
[1] https://kagi.com/proxy/5653f337-ac74-470a-8651-231e5f3fee60....
Paris is a collection of shoebox apartments, if you want to have a larger house, don't go live in Paris.
Where the 60k€ comes from is... complicated, but has to do with the distinction between taxes, employee social contributions and employer social contributions. That's three layer of "taxes" or tax-like stuff, giving 4 different ways to express the salary: "total cost", "gross", "net", and "net after taxes". [1] Usually companies advertise the "gross" salary.
Yes, taxes are really high, but that includes a generous retirement pension, a generous employment insurance if you lose your job, you won't get bankrupt if you get sick, universities and Grandes Écoles are free [2] so your kids won't need to get into debt to study.
That said, overall you are probably better off at a FAANG in SV...
[1] Calculator: https://mon-entreprise.urssaf.fr/simulateurs/salaire-brut-ne...
[2] Except fancy private business schools that can be very expensive. Most STEM Grandes Écoles are free.
EDIT: seems I'm wrong, and actually it is similar in the US. My bad!
Are the France state pensions that much higher than in the US? Average US social security pension is around $1700 per month IIRC.
France: €1,714 ($1,714 USD) per month in 2022 [1]
US: $3,345 per month for someone who files at full retirement age [2]
[1] https://www.cleiss.fr/docs/regimes/regime_france/an_3.html
[2] https://www.aarp.org/retirement/social-security/questions-an...
Someone at 60k€ should expect a total retirement of roughly 3,200€/month (back of the envelope calculation). Someone making 150k€ would expect a retirement of about 7,000€/month (again, back of the envelope calculation). Making 300k€, you would expect close to 14k€/month (again, back of the envelope calculation). I think that's pretty much the maximum you can get, it doesn't scale much further than that.
Financial concerns didn’t weight at all on my mind when deciding to move here, so I can’t tell you if it’s better or worse.
I strongly doubt it’s better, especially for retirement, but I could be wrong.
So I’m not even sure why I’m arguing about cross border salaries or retirement benefits…
The US social security is not a pension system. It's a welfare system designed to pay for basic necessities for those with no other substantial income. Its nominal target is replacing 40% of income, though that decreases with income. Mid-income people already receive less than 40% of their former wages.
Mandatory pensions typically replace 60-80% of income. Their purpose is to support retirement without a substantial decrease in quality of life. The French system, as far as I understand, is rather generous, aiming to replace 70-80% of income.
Lol, probably? At FAANG, you can retire with a house at 35-40. In France, you retire with a small flat at 70.
while working at a FAANG? hardly. sure, you'll be paid 150kE instead of 300k$, but it's still more than enough to be in the top 5% of the country
I'm one of the few that left to the US and followed the money, but I was the only person in my class going abroad every time I've done it. That being said, I'd be nice to go back to Europe just for the quality of life.
France is a two-system country. In "real France" (Switzerland and Luxembourg), SWE average salary is CHF 1,06,713 per year. (1 CHF ~= 1 EUR)
I recently interviewed around (in France), the low ball offers were 90k euro base.
any 40-hour/week job should provide that and there are a very large number that do not.
people want to work, they just don't want to be crapped on while they do it.
I guarantee that any employer who pays fairly is not seeing any shortage of applicants.
1. A shitty job at $15 an hour is equally unappealing at $16 an hour. Someone who doesn't want the crap hours, crap boss, and crap customer interactions isn't going to change their mind over an extra buck an hour. The money isn't the problem, it's that companies make it _not rewarding_ to work.
2. Raising pay ratchets up inflation, and isn't a response. Cause and effect are reversed. Unlike food, gas, houses, movie tickets, and restaurants, the amount of money transacted in wages/salary cannot go down. McDonald's can't tell their employees that due to supply and demand, they are only going to make $14.83 an hour this week. Imagine if your company lowered wages due to the "expected recession". You would start looking for a new role. This means pay increases can never go down again after a temporary bump. I won't say it's the cause, but it artificially limits deflation from ever pulling things back. Like an elevator that can only go up.
I did not grow up poor neither did I grow up rich.. but I would love for people in my neighborhood, my state, my country and rest of the world (somewhat in that order) to have a better life with less uncertainties than what the previous generation had. The attitude of "I struggled, so everyone should also struggle" makes very little sense to me.
The upsides of struggle don't make as much sense to people who didn't need to struggle. But there are upsides nonetheless, and I would contend that a society without struggle for the individual becomes decadent amd lazy.
That wasn't the reason for this comment, however. It was that when I hear the attitude 'why would anyone want to work for $16/hr', I know I'm talking to someone who doesn't need to work.
What are you even talking about? Of course money is the problem.
That's exactly what they do. Most of my family falls in that category, and a desk job doing customer service at AT&T with reasonable health insurance is a big fucking deal. Getting that higher paying job in that market isn't as easy as you think it is.
Do you really think people work at Walmart because they love the job? Check out /r/target for some insane stories. If forced to choose between insane working conditions or take their chances, some are willing to take their chances.
And bad employers found their labour pool was more selective. They thought the root cause was Unemployment Insurance and people sitting home, but even after those programs expired they still faced difficulty hiring.
So, I don't think people are siting home watching Netflix; but they are unwilling to work for a crap boss serving crap customer during crap hours for crap money, because there are options.
Imagine the average software developer earns $140,000 but due to some historical oddity, a company needs to hire people who'll develop software while people occasionally spit on them. They actually had a team of people doing that, and getting paid an average of $130,000, but they laid them off during the pandemic. Now they're finding it impossible to hire.
In a sense this is a money issue, in that I'm certain they could hire software developers who'll let you spit on them for, say, $1,000,000 a year.
In a sense it's not a money issue, in that if they could just remove the requirement to be spat on they could probably rehire for only a modest increase in salary.
And when, exactly, looking at 5-years windows has the amount of money transacted for movie tickets, food, gas, etc. gone down instead of up? Not prices from one week to the next or to the next month, when did prices consistently trended downwards for a period of 5 years or longer for a given product?
If inflation is driven purely by rising wages (hint: it isn't), why are corporate profits through this roof this quarter?
If you are making say $380 a week, you might have fixed costs of $200-$250 a week. Other costs, maybe $60-100, which are difficult to cut without making your life much worse. And the constant chance of an unlucky break which will cost you $300-1000 and need to be paid straight away.
A small payrise can mean the difference between having $20 left over for everything nonessential, and having $50 - 2.5 times as much. Or the difference between having $30 and having nothing at all. Or the difference between ending the week with slightly more than you started, or with slightly less.
Studies on local minimum wages (such as Seattle's aggressive ratcheting) suggest that low-end wage increases have negligible effects on inflation.
This has a pretty obvious basis when you consider that the 1% and especially the 0.1% have an overwhelming majority all the money in the economy.
Lots of people are fine making sacrifices for money, but it sounds like you think that "crap bosses, crap customer interactions, crap hours" are things not in the employers control. Be nicer, have sane schedules, make customers (generally) happy goes a long way.
> Raising pay ratchets up inflation, and isn't a response.
While pay raises have a slight inflationary affect, worker pay over the last few decades FAR lags modest inflation. IF you have to work TWO jobs just to cover rent, then your pay is too low.
> lowered wages due to the "expected recession". You would start looking for a new role
Unless this "expected" recession is fictional, employers do exactly this, but just not in the way you frame it. It's true they generally don't ask for pay cuts, but cutting hours and shifts, drop bonuses and even lay people off. And since it's a recession and many businesses are similarly affected, you just can't "look for a new role".
> pay increases can never go down
In absolute terms, sure. But if future pay raises are below inflation, you actually do lose ground in real terms.
This line made me realize that, yes, lots of people are fine making sacrifices for money, but that no one is fine making sacrifices for survival. Sure, you can deal with it for a while, years even, but if every day requires a fresh sacrifice then you will wear out and ultimately break.
Maybe less likely if everyone has to sacrifice like this, say in war or famine, we are remarkably good at adapting to our situations.
But, when your friends are buying houses and getting married and having children and going on vacations and you're stuck flipping burgers and paying all of your money on rent and ramen? No, there's a point where anyone would break.
See a contrary opinion here:
https://www.residentcontrarian.com/p/what-does-shitty-job-me...
(Look for the “Wages, Non-Work Survival Stress, and You” section)
If you are payed better than most jobs you could otherwise do, you may find that it motivates you.
Think of a world that worked that way. The only way to make a country work is to have a slave-labor class that struggles for a pittance while simultaneously bidding up the prices on things? I guess Karl Marx would agree, but I don't think he had any more evidence than "It's obvious to me" which is the bar here.
1. Nobody is talking about $16, but living wage payment that are not paid to workers. 2. It's millionaires and billionaires who increases the inflation, not workers.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/07/19/ceos-not-workin...
And that's a lazy ass response because you only talked about wages and ignored EVERYTHING else. Wages alone, fine I don't disagree terribly with what you said. But it's everything else that is the major issue!
The complete lack of basic benefits- which translate to "I don't give a shit about you as an employee, just do as much work as you can and I'll give you as little as I can, and no one can stop me because there's little to no regulations on what I have to give you".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b...
>European Union legislation mandates that all 27 member states must by law grant all employees a minimum of 4 weeks of paid vacation
How many people doing the jobs that pay under even say 40k get 4 weeks vacation? Get sick leave? Get maternity benefits? Get any descent healthcare? Those are the REAL problems.
CEO pay in 2021 went up 18.2% in 2021 and inflation is through the roof. Rich people wealth has exploded and inflation is through the roof as a result. That whole talking point is a scare tactic but inflation is through the roof and normal wages are in the toilet.
Typical humans would save the money to live on through daily expenses.
CEOs spend on big projects with inflating costs, circularly inflating costs.
It’s simple arithmetic and a whole lot of propaganda the rich are the best. Really the masses are just poorly educated (<13% have advanced degrees).
The Fed was just saying they’re trying to get wages to stop going up; aka CEOs tossing more money at people, and trying to get people to save.
It’s gaslighting while ignoring the obvious trend; decades of CEO pay/growing wage inequality have lead normies into high inflation despite being told paying workers more would be the cause.
The powers that be are not dumb; they intentionally peddle narratives contrary to their intentions all the time; Roe v Wade for example. They’ll conveniently ignore the status quo of paying them more deflating our buying power because barely 90% of country is college educated and won’t question the hierarchy defined for them their entire lives, and the educated are outnumbered so they just play along.
I don’t know how it can be anymore clear; decades of doing what we were resulted in the situation we find ourselves; JIT logistics only the elite can thrive in.
I have no sympathy for myself that I've so far failed to have a big hit among the 7 or 8 startup apps and sites I've built in my spare time while working corporate jobs. How am I supposed to have sympathy for someone who isn't even trying, just because wages are shit and they don't get a lot of vacation? Who cares? I've worked some of the shittiest jobs in America. I can bitch as much as anyone else.
People like me not losing hope in my own ability to one day launch something that will make us fuck-you rich from our garage - even if most of us never will - is an essential driver of innovation and overall economic well being. And people who say it's impossible disgust me, because they're essentially just lazy
This doesn't scale.
The comment you replied to stated facts about structural issues in society. Starting your own company isn't going to fix any of that.
Others are honorable and work (at least intermittently) to support their addiction. One guy is an oceanic ship captain, who work fixed-term contracts, and is 100% sober during them (one infraction would end his career). But, once he's back from the contract, he stops on the first gas station on route from the port to his home, buys a bottle of vodka and drinks it on the spot. This shows that controlling alcoholism is partially a matter of willpower and motivation.
Let's be real here. Plenty of people have all those things and are still lazy as shit, especially in tech. I work hard enough so that I'm at least somewhat of an asset to my company, but I doubt I'm anywhere near as dedicated to my work as the average Chinese factory worker. If you watch American Factory, you'd notice that the Chinese workers just seem to care more about their work than the American ones. I do think that Americans deserve things like free healthcare, but I also think it's important to maintain a realistic perspective.
In the west, work is a job, and we work it for (usually) 40hrs a week. The Chinese workers were often hundreds or thousands of miles from their families, living in cramped company-provided housing and seeing their families a few times a year. It showed me that work is a lifestyle.
My impression was that while the company wanted it's workers nominally "happy", productivity was of supreme importance. Safety, legality, and all of that was red tape to be handled in some way, but productivity was most important. My impression was that the workers were all seen as cogs by the management, and all were replaceable.
I'm sure it's true that there are lazy people out there. But I think the point here is that there are people who will do the work in the right conditions for decent money.
we never have had as much means to raise kids as we have now. Right after the war families had tons of kids and comparatively were working much harder and with less disposable income that we do. Please don't used that tired argument, it's ludicrous.
And what in the heck does that even mean?
>Please don't used that tired argument, it's ludicrous.
Yeah, it's really ludicrous. The average cost of child care alone is $10k / year. The median income is like 31k in the US. You do the math.
My hypothesis is that it's not fun/interesting to work on becoming a PRO carpenter (in general), when all the hype (that's hard to disconnect from) is about "You're missing out on crypto bro, that's the future".
I don't have anything against crypto, but you get the example.
I think this cause is highly underrepresented. Many countries get at least a month of paid vacation a year don't they? In the US, it's a slog, year in and year out for most people. Even white collar workers who get 3-4 weeks off are often manipulated into not taking it.
I'd be a lot less burned out every year if I got to take an actual month off.
“[Young people] are high-minded because they have not yet been humbled by life, nor have they experienced the force of circumstances. ... They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it.” -Aristotle
There's definitely a crisis in America of people who've never worked not wanting to work. And it's the ultimate first world problem. If you want to tackle privilege instead of getting a relatively shitty job in your 20s... you're probably privileged as hell.
Citation needed. Do you have one single shred of evidence that this is the case, to the extent of being a "crisis"?
Oh wow. Just talk to any of the beatniks, or the hobos and vagabonds in the greatest generation or...
You can't take a sample from people who have dropped out of society and become drug addicts or to live in a van and make a conclusion about society!
If I took the same sample from of 25 yos from a Harvard lecture theater you can bet most of them are expecting to work 60 hours weeks.
I live in Portland by PSU. I used to live in inner SE off Belmont. You’re 100% talking out your ass. I would put money you don’t talk to anyone OR as others have said are only talking to those living on the street. You’re manipulating things to fit your narrative it’s gross. Please stop.
The subset of people you’re attempting to identify are by and large suffering from mental illness and/or abuse. They don’t need you to misrepresent them and portray them as lazy, bourgeois, and/or unwilling to work. It’s completely disgusting behavior to do so and you should feel shame.
Also, Roadside tends to be a slightly older crowd and generate better than average conversations. I love that place.
FWIW I also live in inner SE and it has changed drastically for the worse in the last few years. But I can assure you, one thing hasn't changed, I still talk to tons of people from all walks of life. I can walk a few blocks in any direction and run into a dozen people I know and who know me by name.
> just talk to anyone under 25 here who's living in a van or shooting heroin on the street and they'll explain to you in collegiate level prose why there's no point getting a job.
It's always strange to me when critics look at this highly productive country, where many people work hard with fewer benefits & protections than other nations, and then call those people lazy.
lol c’mon. The ol’ “$CURRENT_GENERATION is uniquely weak/lazy/bad, unlike $SPEAKER_OWN_GENERATION” chestnut is a nice touch, I’ll give you that.
So would you consider your comment "tackling privilege"?
Ie : I wish I could grow some beans in this field VS I wish my wealthy neighbor would use me.
In the present, there is plenty of cheap land if you want to live off the grid and grow beans. That's not what people want anymore. They want cars and modern appliances. You can't get those without an advanced manufacturing society, and thus, people work for other people.
But you don't extract your living from wealthy neighbors. You provide a service that you get paid for. What you get paid depends on what you can provide.
One part of the equation that I think is addressable though is unsophisticated employers, for lack of a better term. If you work for a small business, the owner's personality is a bigger factor in your experience - in negotiating, being paid, handling leave (an owner rarely gets formal leave, so some will resent people asking). Being underpaid is one thing, but being underpaid and dealing with a difficult personality who controls everything about your employment is another thing on top.
No, it could mean that the market is booming and pay rates haven't caught up. IE, what happened during the Covid-era of 0% interest rates.
It could also mean that handouts are making people not work as hard or not wanting to work for less in general.
Also, those "handouts" have long since expired and the labor issues remain.
A great victory for labor huh.
To be less cryptic, there's a relentless chorus of people advocating for inflationary policies that achieve the exact opposite of their intended effect.
And we really should be expecting real wages to drop at the moment, that's a sign our economy is doing a good job at reflecting what's going on in the world. I'd be more concerned if they were all going up despite all these issues because it would mean we are at disconnected from reality and that normally comes with a crash after a couple of years
There are a few graphs from the US Fed that show it pretty well. Wages got very static after 2008 and started heading back up once we left the Great recession stagnation era.
Then we have the drop from recent events such as the war with Russia, covid in China causing lockdowns, supply chain issues.
More than likely as things recover it'll start taking up again
But politicians fighting inflation with higher wages and stimulus checks, as well as the chorus of idiots cheering them on, repeating the same mistakes as the 70s, is quite mindblowing.
How far do consumer sentiment and approval ratings have to drop for people to wake up to basic economic realities?
They didn't have the internet in the 70s, by the way.
People have been going on and on as though $600 was too much inflationary pressure.
You get that that is less then 1 months rent, right?
Which doesn't even include forbearances that add a few T more in consumer spending power, or artificially low interest rates driven by the Fed
Here's your inflation: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSXFS
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PI
Maybe you can clue some of the others into it. Not like we have the internet and easily observable datapoints that makes it quite obvious huh.
Instead have to hear the inane idiocy of economically illiterate people promoting policy that does the opposite of what they want to achieve
The stimulus bumps are quite visible, but subsequent data is right in line.
So apparently taking about personal income was just happenstance, since you pretty obviously were trying to say "it's rising wages that are doing it" and then have been backpedaling everytime I press you to explain why.
So we face successfully established there's inflation, and you've made no argument as to why we should think it's fiscal policy related rather than supply chain - you know, that big thing which has been stressed and suffering shortages repeatedly the last 2.5 years.
Supply of effectively every good is higher than prepandemic. Demand is even higher. Retail sales have exploded vastly above trend due to fiscal injections. This is NOT a supply side issue, this is consumers mass buying which leads to shortages. If it were a supply side issue, you'd see big hits to corporate earnings, instead they became massively inflated due to excess consumer spending.
Personal income is rising much faster than sustainable for 2% inflation. Are you aware that money is nominal? People getting paid more means nothing if prices rise faster than they're getting paid. There's zero inherent value to a dollar.
Inflation is a product of supply and demand, not just one or the other. When there's an imbalance, prices rise to a new equilibrium point.
Go on, cheer for higher nominal wages as consumer sentiment sits at all time lows and real wages are deteriorating faster than any time in history
How can you possibly claim this? Where have you been for the last year? Energy embargos, dramatic slow downs in trade with China, excruciating shortages of basic/fundamental electrical components.
I have to assume that you have ignored all evidence that doesn't support your narrative. The trouble is this inflation would have happened with or without individual stimulus moneys.
It’s just bread and circuses.
$1,200 per adult in April 2020, $500 per child.
$600 per adult in December 2020/January 2021, same per child
$1,400 per adult in March 2021, same per child.
A fully qualified two adult, two child household received $11,400. For a median income of 2x $31k, that’s 9% of the household’s per annum income. If you both had a job during covid, as most people did, it’s pure inflation.
Inflation is measured via a basket of goods measure, and corporations have freely taken all those basics and gone "welp must be circumstance" while posting those profits.
Prices surged before any stimulus was handed out.
No matter how much you take away from those 0.01% of people, it’s not going to do much to fight the inflation of the goods that people are worried about the inflation of.
Let’s take food for example. Perhaps the 0.01% might consume 10x more food than regular people at most (factoring in waste). Even if the 0.01% were to be taxed to the point where they can eat nothing, it’s not going to create very much more supply of food for everyone else.
Then there is fuel. The ultra rich probably do consume a lot more of it when you factor in things like jet flights and such. But even if it’s 100x more, it’s not really freeing up so much to actually affect the market for it.
Now what taxing those guys might do is reduce the price of the goods that they do in fact consume more of. Things like housing where the rich will own a lot in order to generate revenue.
And indeed these productive assets were inflated significantly due to the loose monetary policy regime that we have been living in for some time.
But these are not the resources that most are concerned about with regard to cost of living at the moment. That’s food, fuel, etc.
Because of supply chain issues, it's more money chasing fewer resources. I think people focus too much on the money supply and not enough on supply chain shortages. IMO, the bump in stimulus money given would not have caused this level of inflation without also the decline in supply to go along with it.
600 a week for people on unemployment on top of normal unemployment.
1400 of stimulus checks to a large percentage of Americans.
PPP loans given to business that large weren't paid back
Lots of little stuff that funded stresses institutions.
Stimulus isn't too blame at all for the inflation we are facing, supply chain limits and war are also responsible.
However, to say stimulus was "just 600 dollars" is crazy misrepresentative and totally ignores that the American stimulus package was literally the most robust and impactful examples of stimulus in the world.
You can say the same thing for $250/hour developer jobs. Some might do it for $5 an hour (well or not can be debated), and some wouldn't touch it for $250/hour. Free market. There are many companies out there to choose from. If the person is qualified, they will find it. If they are not, they will need to get qualified to ask for more money.
I'm not sure you understand how a labor market works. There may be (and often are) local/temporary inefficiencies, but if "hoarders" are taking most of it, then why are there so many unfilled jobs across the country – including high-paying jobs?
Similarly, if employers aren't compensating employees fairly (which may be the case while the market adjusts to inflation + recession), they can only do that for so long before the market effectively forces them to pay/treat employees more favorably (no government intervention necessary).
At the same time, there can be an overall deficit of meaningful work for decent enough wages at the societal level.
The hoarders can selectively employ people who will make them richer, all while the rest of society continues to crumble around them. That's what's been happening in America for decades. Either you're in the upper class or things or actively getting worse.
The magical device on which you're reading this comment would not have been possible without companies employing people they thought would help make the company richer. It's not a zero-sum game; we all benefit as a consequence of capitalism – from the richest of the rich to the poorest of the poor.
Have you ever owned a business or hired someone? If so, did you deliberately select employees who would not help the company be successful, and if so, did that somehow help prevent societal collapse?
I hear so many lies about the "evils" of capitalism (from all sources, not just here); I fear people are starting to believe them, as we're slowly being brainwashed into joining the next reboot of "let's see – again – how badly we can screw up the world with communism".
People complain about central banks and low interest rates or about the decline of the west not because of a lack of prosperity, no the problem is that there is too much prosperity in the hands of the wrong people.
During times of actual scarcity, people are busily and happily working to get rid of the scarcity which is why we constantly try to create more jobs and why we constantly induce artificial demand increases, to maintain the scarcity that capitalism demands.
> fear people are starting to believe them, as we're slowly being brainwashed into joining the next reboot of "let's see – again – how badly we can screw up the world with communism".
You can abolish capitalism by introducing an actual free market, not one in name.
This is one of those "myths" of capitalism -- "everyone" benefits. While I'm a recipient of the benefits, I also realize that it's a system with flaws that drives inequity and preys on the poor.
I'm not sure that the impoverished really benefit from the constant stress of working 3 precarious part-time jobs to pay for rent and food, with little to no time for family or leisure. But, hey, latest tech gadget is cheap, so that's a universal benefit, right?
I always thought the American Dream was to own a house through hard work. Now working at multiple places barely covers your monthly expenses, forget buying something. Decent housing shouldn't be an intractable problem, but looking through the capitalistic lens it sure seems to be. But pretending that places where it fails are "lies" and that we have to become the Soviet Union is just fearmongering. Perhaps there are social interventions that could help?
Prices can be sticky in more than one way it seems, and that might make for some interesting economics.
The market isn't particularly free when people need to eat
It'd be much freer with guarantees for basic necessities
> It'd be much freer with guarantees for basic necessities
You do know that would literally just make the problem worse, right? I mean, it sounds good to someone who can't work for legitimate reasons (small percentage of the population), but it also sounds good to everyone who has the capacity to earn their necessities, but would rather have it handed to them instead. It also sounds really good to politicians who seek (re)election by promising everything for free, knowing perfectly well that nothing is truly free. That kind of reasoning is what got us into this inflation mess.
Also, the "free" in "free market" doesn't mean what you seem to think it does.
Nope. You'd be wrong. It's the trillions of dollars unnecessarily printed by the fed. A large part of that went to business owners who didn't actually need it, but took advantage of all the "free money" (and who could blame them when the gov't practically gave it away). That money was quickly invested into real estate and equities markets, leading the way for inflation in the rest of the market, albeit with some delay.
And we're not even at the worst yet.
Depends what you think "the problem" is. To my mind the biggest problem is the hours of human life wasted on performative make-work while most citizens in a supposedly rich country barely spend any time on things that are actually fulfilling for them.
> Also, the "free" in "free market" doesn't mean what you seem to think it does.
On the contrary, this looks to be one of the minority of cases where the term is used correctly (which makes it a bad term, but I fear we're stuck with it).
The idea that citizens of a rich nation has some natural right to live a fulfilling life just because the country happens to be rich, is hubris on the one hand, and also entitle on the other.
People work to obtain the resources to live off. Some can produce _more_ (due to luck, or skill), and those are the ones who would be able to give up productive work and focus on "what's fulfilling" (aka, climb up the maslow pyramid).
Some people don't get to do that climb - that's just reality of scarcity of resources today. Until the day the world becomes like star-trek, where people's basic needs a completely covered without any labour input from any humans (in which case, they spend time exploring the galaxy!), it cannot be that all people fulfill their higher needs in the maslow pyramid.
> People work to obtain the resources to live off. Some can produce _more_ (due to luck, or skill), and those are the ones who would be able to give up productive work and focus on "what's fulfilling" (aka, climb up the maslow pyramid).
But the biggest factor that enables them to produce more is the society around them. So the idea that the surplus should go to the individual rather than the society seems pretty entitled. If we're a rich country, we should be able to allocate those riches in a way that produces the most benefit.
> Some people don't get to do that climb - that's just reality of scarcity of resources today. Until the day the world becomes like star-trek, where people's basic needs a completely covered without any labour input from any humans (in which case, they spend time exploring the galaxy!), it cannot be that all people fulfill their higher needs in the maslow pyramid.
But the patterns for how we'll live when resources are virtually unlimited will be set today. And by most objective metrics, we're already far past the level of having enough for everyone to live on - even the very poorest have food and shelter (and most rich countries manage to provide them with healthcare and education). Conversely an increasing fraction of increasingly many jobs is, as I said, performative make-work rather than something that actually increases societal resource output; those jobs are a dead-weight loss.
We need to start being ok with people working less and retiring earlier. Otherwise our lives won't get better no matter how much more productive we get.
If living in such conditions is better than working some of the jobs that sustain large parts of society, I'd say it's about time to reevaluate some things. Are we ok with a society designed to sacrifice some percentage of its people's lives?
Instead, we should tax incomes that have very little to do with human work like CO2 taxes or land value taxes to fund UBI. In essence, the UBI grants people a basic CO2 exemption and a small share in the land of the planet. I would argue that is fair.
A mix of market and command is necessary. But this whole thing isn't really relevant because both markets and command systems have very wide variety in implementation.
My hunch when some these places say they can't get talent or etc. they have a particular idea of what they want: young & low pay & desperate. and all the complaining about labour shortage means: a shortage of low pay workers. Esp here in Canada as there was a couple years where the temporary foreign worker program wasn't fully operational due to COVID.
My wife is trying to get back into the job market after 10+ years out. There's supposedly been a labour shortage here in Canada. She has -- in addition to being a mature functional adult who has raised a family and managed a home -- almost a decade of work experience (in the past) in marketing and some design at Apple, an honors degree in Anthropology with a boatload of academic awards under her belt, an a two year programme in UX research & design from a local university. She has been applying for junior positions and doesn't even get nibbles. Even local retail jobs etc. she's gone for have not responded.
Today still, in some parts of the world, lower echelons of society are called "the working class", because needing to work is very effective at discriminating between haves and have nots. If work was somehow desirable in and of itself, it would be the other way around: the working class would describe those lucky enough to have a job.
People complaining that "nobody wants to work anymore" are usually people not working themselves, who fail to understand that in order to find someone willing to do your own laundry, you have to pay them a fair wage.
Pay the locals a fair wage and they'd quit after only a few hours, having made cash sufficient for their needs. The landowners weren't getting enough work out of them.
The solution : pay the locals less. Thus they need to work more.
Is that how it goes in USA?
C'mon....We are more sophisticated now.
We constrain housing supply and ensure high inflation.
>Pay the locals a fair wage and they'd quit after only a few hours, having made cash sufficient for their needs. The landowners weren't getting enough work out of them.
>The solution : pay the locals less. Thus they need to work more.
It's a nice allegory, but it doesn't make any sense. You're basically claiming that the colonial landowners were so dumb that they were paying the natives well in excess of the market clearing wage? Seems unlikely to me. It's almost as unbelievable as saying that jeff bezos used to pay people $50k/day to clean his house, but the cleaners would stop coming in after the second day, so he paid the workers $100/day instead.
Not even remotely true. I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say things like "retire? but then what would I do?", or how many people work like their job is the only thing in their lives that means anything. I'm talking about here, on HN, the site you are currently reading.
And what happens when they do retire? Do they keep going to work? Or maybe they can't retire because they don't have retirement benefits.
But when people live in a country with proper retirement benefits, they actually do retire, and somehow they manage to find meaning elsewhere.
Very few people work in something they truly enjoy. And so logically they try to do as little as possible.
The rational thing to do, which goes against the xenophobic tendencies of the general public (they are taking our jobs), is to do what every growing economy has to do: grow the labor market by providing access to willing labor from outside that market. Whether it's slaves, illegal immigrants, or simply making it easier for migrants to enter legally really does not matter as long as people are able to get to the jobs that need doing.
There's work to be done and there are people willing to do the work. Bring them together and the work gets done. Cut off the labor supply and you get issues with businesses struggling to get things done. Unless of course they can afford to pay market rates. And with inflation being a thing, those market rates are going up, not down.
The US has imported lots of cheap labor from abroad pretty much throughout it's history and especially during its boom periods. Sometimes as slaves, sometimes as refugees, and sometimes just by providing visas to those who wanted them. It wasn't always pretty of course but there are now large communities of people in the US with roots pretty much all over the world.
There's no shortage of people looking to get visas to work in the US. Just an artificial shortage of visas. How many million people do you need? They are there. At any skill level. All you need to do is let them in.
No sane US citizen wants to work their ass off for minimum wage and minimum benefits. And why would they? Why give away your precious limited time for free, so some corp. can benefit from it?
Employment is supposed to be a situation with mutual benefit for employer and employee.
Flooding the labor market with cheap work force that doesn't complain when you break their backs is exactly what will worsen the situation. What we need is LESS people that are happy to have their backs broken for peanuts. And unions might help achieving that.
Employers need to come up with better compensation. THAT is the only rational thing that should happen right now. And the tighter the labor market, the earlier that will happen.
This will mean that wealth of the wealthier country hiring migrant workers will slowly osmose. This is what seems to be happening in china (where labour is slowly becoming more expensive overtime - not to the point where outsourcing is not worth it, but many companies are looking at south eastern asian countries as a new source of cheap labour).
The only scenario in which this breaks down is when the migrant is defrauded like those in Quatar and Dubai, where they are indeed treated as slaves by having their passport confiscated etc.
That's some very technical/amoral understanding of exploitation (I guess this kind of thinking helps many people in the West sleep at night. Whilst the reality is that our standard of living is only made possible via other people's suffering). Consider a scenario: a guy goes for a stroll into a forest, has a heart attack there and needs immediate help. I see him and propose "I will call for help only if you will work for me for free for the next 10 years.". Of course, he willingly obliges. In your book, is that exploitation or not?
> The immigrant worker receives a higher pay doing what you call "humiliating labour"
It's what most people would call "humiliating labour". The old people these pseudo-nurses have to take care of curse at them, treat them as their slaves, make sexual advances towards them etc. All the while they're required to be in their house 24/7, sometimes with a Sunday afternoon off. It's arguably worse than prison, all for the privilege of earning 1600 euros per month (while being locked up in somebody's house in a foreign country, 1000 km from your family).
the law has something to say about that - a person under duress can void the contract they sign as they are not of sound mind (and dying due to a heart attack could be easily construed as under duress).
But a migrant who considered their options, not under duress (except the "duress" of unemployment in their own country), and chose to work overseas to earn more than they could at home, is not really exploitation.
> The old people these pseudo-nurses have to take care of curse at them ... It's arguably worse than prison
they could leave the job, and probably should if they feel mistreated. I don't doubt that there's bad apples and there are migrants who feel they are "stuck" with not much other choice but to "take it". I really don't believe that they are stuck - and if it was due to lack of education and knowledge of possible choices they can take (for example, dobbing on employers who mistreat them), they would - and this is a lack of regulatory safeguards etc.
The summary is:
- People are working more and reaping less and less from their labor
- Social security is getting both worse and less accessible for people in the working age
- Working people in general have a much harder time entering the house market and when they do the bang for the buck is way worse than in the past
- Retirement plans are getting worse and worse
- Millennials and younger people will likely have to drastically reduce their carbon footprint by as much as a factor of 8 compared to the previous generations if we want to hit climate goals for the century
Apart for the carbon one, the others are things I am also witnessing both in Switzerland and Italy. And with these premises I don't find surprising that people consider "working hard" or even working not worth it.
I imagine that a large part of the issue is that productivity increases seem to benefit the top and not the bottom. I haven't thoroughly reviewed all the snippets, but my casual view is that people are complaining that younger people aren't willing to do the work that the complainer used to do without complaining, ignoring the fact that the nature of work has changed significantly over the decades, with significant mechanisation/automation. IIRC one of the examples is that youngsters don't want to break rocks any more (I exagerate perhaps a little there).
It's interesting that in places like China, where conditions and pay are basically unimaginably worse, people still don't have as much problem getting motivated for entering the workforce.
I live in UK, and current inflation of ~10-15% will quickly eat all your savings, house/flat prices almost doubled. Just in 2 years what was 200K now is 350K, what was 400K is 700K. Meaning all you worked for years will be diminished in just couple.
Wages are not following inflation since 1970, while profits of shareholders have skyrocketed.
So, when I read "No one wants to work", I read it as:
- "No, one wants to work, for the money I would like to pay them",
> What is the level of skills and amount of money you are willing to pay?
- Highest level of skill, and if possible I would like to pay nothing.
I've caught myself thinking this a few times. This twitter thread is a great antidote.
Been in the industry for more than a decade and am suffering from CRUD / new tech churn fatigue. Also have had a taste of having my own product business and schedule but can’t make that financially work yet, so slogging through…
There are fine days though, eg when investigating a tricky bug or being deep into a problem, but I’d cap it at “like” my job, rather than “love”
That said, words are squishy. Maybe "like" would be a better descriptor. But either way, I feel pretty happy where I am!
(I still don't want to work though lol)
"...do what they love doing"
"...build their dream"
"...help people in a way that is truly needed"
"...create shareholder value in a mind-numbing hellhole for minimum wage with a boss who constantly complains about your lack of motivation."
Anyone who says, "nobody wants to work anymore" is outing themselves as a lizard-person who lacks awareness, people skills, and even the most basic level of empathy for their employees. Never work for somebody who says this.
Oh, and they require for the candidates to learn the companies business end to end before or during interview process, otherwise you're less passionate with our company.
You've said, "the main problem". Are you talking about something that affects most of the working population?
However I think the specified hierarchy is not required for most workplaces. There is a lot more variety in where the sociopaths reside, and I consider both the clueless and sociopaths to be delusional. Deluded might be a better term for both.
0. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
1. American ethos really instills the notion of 'Follow your passion' as a dogma.
Life is complicated, and shit happens, but for americans that genuinely means you failed. (I see this a lot when I try to discuss homelessness and social protection in the US).
2. Follow up from that, 'everyone is special' or 'destined for great things' is a constant movie theme
3. Americans _really_ peg a lot of their self-worth to work.
Without fail all the americans I have met open the conversation with 'So, what do you do?' as if how I will be judged is wholy pegged on where I am on the totem pole and how much they can infer income from my occupation. You have made the person as an individual undissociable from the worker as a contributor to someone else's wealth or the gold standard of the self-made man.
It kinda seems like they are lamenting that THEY THEMSELVES "do not want to work anymore" on some kind of work, try to hire someone to do the work THEY THEMSELVES don't want to do, and then they go around slandering other people that never wanted to work on it in the first place.
It isn't that others don't want to work ANYMORE it is that others never wanted to work on it AT ALL.
That's a different problem. Maybe people saying this just need to be honest about it?
Try saying "I DON'T WANT TO WORK ANYMORE on this shitty work, but how about you give it a try?" See what happens?
When everyone gets it, it becomes baked into rents or mortgage payments, and I've never heard a convincing argument about how the money just doesn't go to rent seekers over time
If so how?
If not, how are they cheaper than somebody who only wants to work for fun?
True, unless there’s a land value tax. But a man can dream.
The ubi receiver still loses and needs other support
Alternatively, the recipient can run a homestead on his share of land.
Another solution is to invest more in our public housing stock. Private apartments could march up sure, but they'd be competing with the government building with subsidized rents designed to be affordable under the UBI plan, which would put downwards pressure on prices.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/09/24/economi...
I stopped wanting to push my business forward when my govt has forced me to get computers and internet access in my grocery store for sending info about each transaction. That equipment slows down a number of people which I can serve per minute. The software I have bought is ugly as hell and prints 5cm of advertisement on each paper check I use to give to a client. Excuse me trees, I do not know how to fix that.
In a perfect world, RMS' advice about tax rate based on the fraction of any given market that the company controls seems a good start.
1. If you take the video at its word, then it is still the case that the richest are paying more taxes. In the final graph the richest decile is paying over 30% while the poorest is in the mid 20's. The curve is slightly crescent shaped, with the poor 20-30% paying less than the poorest, but beyond that the trend holds that richer pay more. The video summarizes this slope as "mostly flat".
2. The video adds 15% for payroll taxes to the poorer deciles even though the video says that 7.5% is paid by the employee and 7.5% is paid by the company. The video explains that "economists have found that in practice companies pay their part of the payroll tax by just paying workers less." The video doesn't offer any source for this claim. If you Google the claim you see it is, not surprisingly, disputed by economists. It's not a plausible claim in the first place, and if you are allowed to support a claim because some economist somewhere might have said something kind of like it then you could really claim anything. Once you adjust the 15% the video incorrectly added to every lower decile back to 7.5% then the trend of the rich paying more, which was always present, becomes even more prominent.
3. The chart shows the richest 400 Americans as a column on par with the other deciles. This is visually deceptive because it causes you to think of this category as being a similar kind of thing - but it is not, it's a much smaller and extreme group. These people made massive amounts of money from stock in huge companies, gains which are often unrealized, and so taking this small group and graphing it next to deciles distorts what is being shown. How would the graph look if we added on the 400 poorest Americans? And why would we do that except as some rhetorical trick?
4. The video is uninterested in net taxation. That is, poor Americans get significant transfers of money back from the government. For some groups this is substantially more than they pay in taxes which would make their net interaction with government profitable. I can't really agree that a group "pays" X% in taxes if they receive from government transfers more than they paid.
5. The video description says that "All of their data, which we used to produce this video, is available on their website." But it's not. At least, I hope it's not all the data they used to produce this video. There are a few unexplained Excel sheets with some unsourced and unexplained data on the "Tax for Justice" website, but nothing like what I would expect to underlie the claims made in these figures. For example, I wanted to look at how they calculated the sales tax rates, since those varied by state and I thought that the poorest people might be spending more in categories that have no sales taxes (e.g. food) - but... maybe I didn't look hard enough, but I couldn't find anything like this. Just some random tables with numbers.
6. The top decile earns about half the income for the country. They also pay the highest tax rate. So, it's pretty obvious that, in objective terms, most of the taxes are paid by the rich. Even if, pre-benefits, the poor paid tax rates that were only ~10% lower than the richest decile, the richest decile would still be paying substantially more objective dollars in taxes.
7. It's also a bit weird to me that Vox, nominally a news organization, would just uncritically repeat the work of left wing activists out of Berkeley. Is regurgitating advocacy what a news organization is supposed to do?
Employers pay taxes + net wages and employees only receive net wages no matter who the government says is paying a tax; it should mostly be shared based on price elasticity
Although most people don't understand that well, which likely affects behavior irrationally:
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2017/11/15/economists...
Another consideration is that wages are sticky, so while tax burden might be shared more based on price elasticity for new offers, new taxes probably would actually fall upon the side the government says (since employers are unlikely to adjust pay up/down for existing employees just because one side has to pay more taxes)
Average sallaries are obscenously taxed. In my country having a cheap rental/airbnb grants you a better income than an average full time job..
Who cares how you came by the money? It is fungible.
[0] https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments...
Also, while some of those benefits are less fungible, others have phase-outs that are functionally identical to taxes at the margin. For example, if you get subsidized health insurance through healthcare.gov, every additional dollar that you earn directly reduces your tax refund by up to ten cents, on top of your marginal tax rate.
In this case, taxes and how much anyone pays are irrelevant because you're not those people and because the real consideration with work is to ignore the immutable circumstantial limitations and decide if the exchange of time and toil is worth the post tax currency you'll be compensated with and what you can do with that money.
If I'm living at home and soon going backpacking in Southeast Asia with my $4/hr(post taxes assuming minimum wage of $7) for 6mos, it'll give me a ton of utility. Meanwhile the guy who smokes 3 packs a day at NY state rates and pays $2000/mo for a studio apartment, much less so.
You don't work because of this than you don't gain new skills than the chance you are getting hired is even less.
Then you are imprisoned with the little money you get and be more and more dependent while it gets harder and harder for you to get out of.
And why? Because you think it's not fair that you work for your own part of the taxes everyone needs to pay.
If we did that, GP might be willing to work since the effective pay rate would be higher.
And I'm not even against your idea.
Not working costs you money indirectly and keeps you were you are.
If you are poor and provide less than 20k€ to the state, you’re making others work for you.
Income = Rough approximation of your contribution to society.
Income Taxes = Penalty for contributing, but also another contribution to society.
Not only are poor people not contributing (by definition of being poor), they're also convinced their tax contribution is too high.
Poor person: "My taxes are too high, I contributed a whole $20 to society through a 20% tax on my $100 income. That's not fair, the guy who contributed $100k through tax only gave 10%."
If I'm being radical, I'd propose a flat tax amount (not flat rate). Everyone pays $20k/year. Don't have $20k? Take out a loan and get another job.
Poor person: "I don't buy from McDonalds because it's unfair their prices as a percentage of income are higher for me than for rich people."
That's how retarded it sounds to me hearing people talk about taxes as percent of income. Yet that's somehow the dominate narrative.
Tax enabled the infrastructure and social structure that made your income possible in the first place.
Tax is a fee that the government uses to invest in its country to stimulate economical ans social development. Paying tax will in the long term benefit your net. income.
Effectively, the 'poor person' is netting $80,- for their time. The 'other guy' nets $90.000,- for their time. Those are the only figures that count, and they look very bad for the 'poor guy'.
Some people think they are 'better' persons because they pay more taxes. I argue, they are persons who took home way more income: the tax is just a fee that they pay for being allowed to live and work in their country. The price for the opportunity that they received to earn $100k.
If you feel "better than others" because you pay more taxes, you are a very sad individualistic person.
Yes, contributers are better than freeloaders.
By your logic, a dog walker is equivalent to a doctor, and given only enough resources to save one of their lives, we should toss a coin.
hahahah oh my god hahahaha. Nah I can't even argue with this, it's so backwards.
Poor people work 1 day/week (or so inefficiently that it should be considered 1 day/week), and therefore should be paying a 100 tax. Exactly what I was saying.
By this logic sending a job overseas to lower paid workers makes the exact same job contribute less to society. It also means all unpaid work contributes nothing to society. This is particularly absurd with opensource software that generates millions or billions for big corporations.
I did mention income being a rough approximation, implicitly acknowledging unpaid work. Yes, I agree that open-source contributions should be counted as charity donations in regards to taxes.
I have always been fascinated by stories about explorers making first contact with a previously unknown tribe in the Amazon rainforest and discovering that they work maybe 2 hours a day and take the rest off for sleeping and social things.
In my experience most "full time" work is performative at best anyway. You pretend to work while wasting time in meetings or on Facebook, and then, maybe one or two hours a day, if you are lucky, you get to do actual work that is actually needed by someone else.
It's not just about the salary.
Our lifetime is our only truly irreplaceable resource. We shouldn't be wasting it like this.
Your lifestyle is supported by people working pretty damn hard. The people picking your amazon order and making your food at a meat plant are not playing grab ass on facebook for 80% of their shift.
8 billion people can't enjoy a hunter/forager lifestyle on this planet.
It seems to just be how the world works...
See https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/63219-the-children-now-love... for Socrates.
Nobody wants to work that job, because that job doesn't pay enough to live off, and having your hours randomly moved around (i.e. the well known phenomenon of employer retaliation by not giving someone any hours in a week but not firing them) screws with your ability to pick up any other work, or look after children or anything else.
This is before we even get to the disparity between rent, cost of living and minimum wage in most (possibly by now all?) areas in the US.
Agile/JIT labour, the kinda stuff techies have been arguing for for decades
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=nobody+wants+t...
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration
Think I'm going to go carve some more bits for the computer. Kids these day, get off my lawn.
When I was a boy our Nintendo Was carved from an old Apple tree And we used garden hose to connect it To our steam-powered color tv. But it still beat that ancient Atari 'Cuz I almost went blind, don'tcha know, Playing Breakout and Pong on a video game Hooked up to our radio.
And we walked twenty miles to the schoolhouse Barefoot, uphill both ways, Through blizzards in summer and winter Back in the good old days. Back when Fortran was not even Three-tran And the PC was only a toy And we did our computing by gaslight When I was a boy.
When I was a boy all our networks Were for hauling in fish from the sea-- Our bawd rate was eight bits an hour (and she was worth it!), And our IP address was just 3. And you kids who complain that the World Wide Web Is too slow oughtta cut out your bitchin', 'Cuz when I was a boy every packet Was delivered by carrier pigeon
And we walked twenty miles to the schoolhouse Barefoot, uphill both ways, Through blizzards in summer and winter Back in the good old days. Back when Fortran was not even Two-tran And the mainframe was only a toy And we did our computing by torchlight When I was a boy.
When I was a boy our IS shop Built relational tables from wood, And we wrappered our data in oilcloth To preserve it the best that we could. And we carried our bits in a bucket, And our mainframe weighed 900 tons, And we programmed in ones and in zeros And sometimes we ran out of ones.
And we walked twenty miles to the schoolhouse Barefoot, uphill both ways, Through blizzards in summer and winter Back in the good old days. Back when Fortran was not even One-tran And the abacus? Only a toy! And we did our computing in primordial darkness When I was a boy.
Copyright 1997 by Frank Hayes, Firebird Arts & Music (BMI) @nostalgia filename[ WHENABOY
After reading the rest of your comment I’m surprised you didn’t lead with “our stand ups are at 5am…”
I'm wondering how much signal there is in the years in his excerpts. For example, he shows an excerpt from 1981, then jumps to 1999. Is this simply because he just found a few examples across the years and used those, or were there actually less reports during those 18 years?
The first except is written today, in the UK, whilst the unemployment rate is at the lowest level in recorded history. There's literally a quote in there from 1916, The middle of World War 1, are you honestly going to say there was a major crisis of Brits being lazy and unwilling to work hard in World War 1?
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/searchresults?st=Labor+Force+Par...
The participation rate declining is primarily due to retirement.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/06/why-did-labor...
Isn't it strange that the opportunity cost of giving away unneeded capital financial or physical never disappears?
Well yes, you fired all the foreign temporary workers during covid, you offer shit wage and then you complain as if it's their fault for not wanting to wageslave for you lmao.
It's not just the people at the bottom ;-)
Which is true for any age, to the lament of cheap employers in any age.
https://twitter.com/JStein_WaPo/status/1549859727978516481 (link to Washington Post story)
There is a target unemployment rate that is considered "healthy"; we're currently below that. Attempts will be made through various levers to get it back up there. Likewise, flexibilities and "perks" around home work, etc. that emerged during COVID will be pushed back: not because they impede productivity but because a disciplined and vulnerable work force is a cheaper work force.
All the talk about "nobody wants to work anymore" is the blunt ideological end of the hammer that will be used to restore workforce discipline. The sharper edge will come in the form of modifications to labour laws, reduction of benefits and welfare programs, and the return of the austerity politics of the 90s. We've been through it before...
A large part of the battle against "inflation" will be done in board rooms of major companies.
Would be a super accurate title :)
At the end of the days there are people willing to match their skills with a job and some who are not it s just a market equilibrium thing / demand never match the offer perfectly and innovations tend to displace work towards higher productivity…
source: https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-etymology-for-work-in-some-...
E.g: I can't hire developers! Nobody wants to work! (Actuality: Nobody wants to spend £7k/pa to commute into your central London office for no good reason)
So yeah, people not working has always been a problem or endemic to society, but an argument can be made that it has gotten worse.
Yes, a demographic bulge of a generation during whose prime working years men were even more overrepresented than they are today in heavy physical labor fields that burn out bodies quickly has been reaching the end of their careers, and the denominator for the LFPR is the the population over a certain age with no cap.
https://www.statista.com/graphic/1/191725/us-male-civilian-l...
I go to a coffee shop in middle of day on a weekday and tons of men in there of working age.
COVID was simply the catalyst of getting a large lump of folks out of the labor force because they could retire (or died of any number of causes during the pandemic).
I'm willing to bet you can find the sentence "People never had it better" in print all the way back to 1894. What would that prove?
Again, I would agree that days are getting hotter and wages are very depressed. But I dont like twitter threads or hearsay
So every example in that Twitter threat could be true.
On a related note, this kind of content is guaranteed be very popular on Twitter since Twitter is leans pretty far left. It justifies that it's ok to be lazy and that you don't have success because of the system rather than your intellectual ability or hard work. It justifies entitlement.
It's not really any better or more well-intentioned than attributing unemployment to laziness.
You or I are equally credible in making up theories to explain these phenomena. He just has a very attractive manner of speaking that sounds very intellectually rigorous to people who have no intellectual rigour of their own. He seems intelligent because he's willing to consider every possibility from it's first principles, whether that possibility is IQ rates in the labour force, or whether women are being sexually promiscuous by wearing makeup to the office.
The specific argument in question is ludicrous. We've always had people excluded from the labour force due to intelligence. While surely IQ 85 individuals aren't able to take advantage of a booming tech market, the specific instances of complaints and criticisms today of "nobody wanting to work anymore" are for menial labour jobs that can easily be done by someone with an IQ of 85.
I have several family members that would love to be able to maintain employment but can't because they get pushed out by managers who think they can do better for the wage. And they probably can.
If my brother could keep a job for $4/hr it would give him the honor of work (which he wants/needs), and it would do society good to have more of these people around for us to interact with.
> There is no argument worth addressing. Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist, he has no credibility, research, or study in this domain.
Credentials don't make an argument correct. Lack of credentials doesn't make an argument wrong. It's an intellectually dishonest argument to declare something unworthy because you don't like it. If you don't want to participate, then don't, pooping in the thread isn't helpful.
Jordan Peterson is treated by his fans as someone with explicit credibility on the domain of human society and its problems and solutions. In my analogy they treat his ideas on string theory as somewhere between a Physics Professor and a Nobel Prize winner.
When in point of fact, his ideas and credentials lie closer to a 1st year English major talking about how the "Universe vibrates" right before they tell you about the healing crystals they bought on eBay. If you squint enough that may sound like String Theory, but it's not the same.
Jordan Peterson builds his entire philosophy on a foundation of Judeo-Christian values. Note, I didn't say he basis his personal ethics on these values - which would be perfectly valid, but rather he believes that this is the only possible way for society to function. That means he is fundamentally, militantly, faithfully against gay marraige, against women in the workplace (he doesn't say he's AGAINST it, but he asks questions that inherently suggest he does not believe in gender equality), and is pro societal hierarchies - within the family, and across it.
All of his other "arguments" - about wages, employment, IQ, etc, are all built on top of this foundation, that I believe is fundamentally broken.
So yes, I will absolutely challenge any idea from Jordan Peterson by default based on his lack of credibility, just as I will challenge any idea about the origins of the universe from a hippie suggesting I rub some quartz crystals on my temples to get in touch with Gaia.
In the past, the stock market has gone up in huge part due to government intervention. It's entirely possible that real returns in the stock market and real estate market will flatten, but expenses will continue to rise at a faster rate. Notably in healthcare. There also the possibility we'll see changes in taxation.
So yes, we'll get the boomer "wealth", but it won't be what people assume it will be. I hope I'm wrong.
At present, there are more living Millenials than Boomers.[0]
[0]https://www.statista.com/statistics/296974/us-population-sha...
without any hope of social mobility in their lifetime.
this sounds like a you problem (managers,govt), not a me problem.
And there is also a valid anti work movement. The boomers who mistake that for 'nobody wants to work anymore' just can't see it, but that reveals more about their shitty priorities than the generation(s) they are critizing.
As always, stereotypes of a generation are more telling of the flaws of the previous generations than anything else.
In 1979 someone apparently wrote:
> nts to work
> - disgusted
Thanks tweet thread!!
I lost 2 jobs in biotech due to vaccine mandates. I'm consulting presently, but may need to completely change careers if the situation stays this way. That or find a startup where the founders care more about talent than optics.
I'm improving my python skills and studying machine learning, but I world rather be doing wet lab experiments.
Nope. You (we) would love to follow a passion. There’s a ton of under-staffed and under-payed restaurants and factories. Do you still want to work?
Be honest and reflect for a minute on how many people you know who have gotten covid recently. Do you think they all got it from unvaccinated people? Why are the majority of the mutations in spike protein then? Could it be selective pressure applied by a vaccine that was leaky from the start?
I'm sorry but mandating an experimental new drug is unethical, so yes I chose to adhere to my principles and I accept the consequences. My point was some people are out of the work force due to these unethical mandates.
ETA I have taken all other vaccines courses, participated in a different experimental vaccine clinical trial (where I felt comfortable making informed consent) and sat on the safety committees of at least 4 different biotech companies for some perspective.
Good.
I'm sorry, but biotech is likely one of the last places I would want someone to not be vaccinated.
Pay me as a contractor to deliver results on a project. I don't need your salary and management structure blocking me.
Give me money in exchange for working software.