That's wild. Does any other company have this problem?
The root cause is global competition, especially from countries with very low wages - Ukraine, a country in Europe, for example, was a top food supplier for Africa -, and widespread income disparity in many Western countries - 67% of Americans self-report to live from paycheck to paycheck [1], for example. First it's "luxuries" that get the cut - travel, eating out, entertainment - and once everything has been cut, people go for savings in food because that's the last large expenses block that they can meaningfully control.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/living-paycheck-to-paycheck-you...
[2] https://www.boeckler.de/de/boeckler-impuls-vermoegen-nur-jed...
This sentence is rather self contradictory...
Kale in US is about as expensive as the cheapest cut of beef. Despite one taking 2-3 years of labor and the other is 60 days.
https://am.gs.com/en-us/advisors/insights/report-survey/reti...
The only reasonable conclusion is "are you living paycheck to paycheck" is a useless survey question.
I don't know how often this actually happens, but it certainly not an unreasonable conclusion.
Hmm... What do I wanna do more? Keep up with the Joneses, or flip the bird to my boss? Hmm...
One of the central evils of consumer advertising is that it implants the idea in everyone's heads that buying more material things = happiness.
And the ideal consumer is one which only stops buying when they've reached their income...
Which they suggest will make you happier.
The most toxic high-income advertising is all based around creating a need and then fulfilling it... because it turns out wealthy people tend to already have enough things to make themselves happy, if they looked at them differently.
All advertising is based around creating a need and fulfilling it, but not all of those needs are toxic. Imagine getting an advertisement for a concert for some musicians you've never even heard of. You hear their music, and maybe they even have some showmanship. You like what you see and hear, and now you have a need you didn't have before, whether that's going to a KISS concert or whatever kinda music floats your boat.
Toxic ads encouraging you to indulge in toxic behavior, like an Instagram ad making you think you don't matter if you don't publicize every hour of your life, are a different animal.
That's all I'm trying to say, I'm not trying to be pedantic or anything. I just don't think putting out a Disney World ad of a happy family eating breakfast with Mickey Mouse is promoting or exploiting toxic values even though it convinces you that you need something you weren't aware of yesterday.
So in order for FIRE to kill off McMansions and luxury cars most people would have to become resistant to advertising (or advertising would need to be limited).
"If you treat people as they are, they will become worse. If you treat them as they could be, they will become better.
If we treat people as if they were what they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship
I'm convinced that treating most people as if they have free will is more likely to get them to at least consider my ways.
Mostly because there are infinite ways to misunderstand an individual's motivations and thus arrive at a 'should' prediction that conflicts with observed reality.
Versus reasoning in from 'a lot of people ____, do they still after we ____?'
As time goes on you have to start importing people from further afield.
-Bill Watterson (via Calvin & Hobbes)
At least where I grew up if you drop out and don't file all the necessary homeschooling paperwork the police will visit you.
Miss too many days of government school because your family are poor and you had to help your parents put bread on the table? The truancy officer may show up to arrest you.
Announce you are homeschooling your kids to avoid liberal indoctrination? Sending your kids to work in a factory? A-ok in a number of states.
The US spends more per pupil than every other OECD country except for Luxembourg, and exceeds the average by over 50%. If US schools aren't funded well enough, essentially no one is.
Not accurate in the context you're saying it.
You're probably conflating US K-12 spending (low) with post-secondary spending (high)?
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...
https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...
Your source there still puts US K-12 spending in the top-5 worldwide.
The allocation of said spending clearly isn't optimal, but there is plenty of money at a high-level
I'd love to see your citations on that.
Because my impression is that, precisely because of the lack of regulation in many states, homeschooling has bimodal outcomes.
Some children turn out better (read: those of wealthy, educated parents with extra time to spend on educating) while some children turn out much worse than even the worst public schools (read: kids of religious/political-indoctrination parents and/or ones of limited socioeconomic means/time).
At minimum, it seems pretty reasonable to have homeschooled kids take the same milestone tests as public school kids, in order to objectively measure if their teachers are doing the job well.
You know, considering (a) it's a decision children aren't empowered to make for themselves, (b) there are a lot of crazy-as-fuck parents out there, and (c) it's something that will define the rest of kids' lives.
"Oops, my bad" in the event of poor outcomes won't put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
Ref to start: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lzsZP9o7SlI
The guy you're replying to only posts simple takes to derail conversations. He doesn't have citations.
Comparisons like his don't make sense. There's no dividing line between government-schooled and home-schooled in real life, there's a range of connections and dependencies. There is no friction or animosity between Government Education as an institution and people who homeschool. Their goals align.
I'm not sure what I said that made you think I'm arguing against this point. Government Education is absolutely necessary and a common good. It's a bare minimum that keeps a lot of children from a life of total ignorance and squalor.
I do think that government education has some pretty major flaws, but I didn't say anything to setup some zero-sum competition between the two approaches. I was replying to the statement "In most states, homeschooling is almost meaningless because there are no required assessments to demonstrate student proficiency in any subject", which is a bit ridiculous and, in context, is trying to paint home-schooling as some backdoor approach to child labor.
Yeah, sure. Here are the popular studies on the subject: https://nheri.org/academic-achievement-and-demographic-trait...
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15582159.2015.99...
https://nheri.org/a-systematic-review-of-the-empirical-resea...
If you look into these you'll see people arguing against Ray's studies saying "the population is overly white, overly married parents, and overly Christian, it doesn't represent potential results for the wider population". That's definitely true, but it's also a fact of the home-schooled population that those groups are wildly over represented, and the results of that actual population being called "meaningless" is what I was responding to.
It is fair to argue that home-schooling isn't a panacea, and wouldn't work for everyone. I never intended to say it would. I did include the second study which is specifically about black American home-schooled students and their results.
As for the rest of your post, I understand your opinion, but don't share it.
The point is that the average result appears to be better.
Consumerism rewards this process, because the glut of mediocre goods remains cheap.
None of it is about talent, it's about giving companies the ability to abuse employees, with a nice side of wage suppression.
It ran into the problem that workers are in fact a finite resource. And of course that at some point the juice ain't worth the squeeze. People aren't going to do part time work being ground to death and still not be able to pay rent. At least ridesharing and delivery is done on and around your own schedule
The depletion of tech workers for Amazon is similar. The part that isn't said is: at the salaries Amazon is willing to pay. Amazon has a different market to worry about, the stock market. They can't just increase their HR spend 25% without taking a hit in the stock market. And I guess they aren't willing to change the work environment to be more attractive. Maybe they can't at their size, as it can be hard to avoid dead weight.
Google doesn't hire in the US for some PAs, for similar reason. Salaries are capped (artificially) by stock market demands. But Google doesn't call it worker depletion.
Same goes for labor: if you pay shit, demand for that job is going to be shit.
Of course on the labor side, part of the "price" is job satisfaction, working conditions, etc. Many more people would rather be receptionists at $17/hr than working in a warehouse or factory for the same rate.
let say you ran a trucking company and decided that you'd pay more to ensure you cornered the market on 'good' drivers. but... it turns out that your customers don't care if you have good drivers or mediocre drivers, so you can't justify charging a higher rate.
How are they going to undercut them without drivers available to actually do the work?
This narrative is absurd. Per mile domestic truck shipping rates have gone up dramatically in recent years, and are generally quite variable. Trucking profit margins were until quite recently way up, the fall driven by high fuel prices and interest rates (which increase the costs of equipment financing and insurance) and reduced demand.
The truth is trucking is currently going through a recession with freight demand down and empty miles up. Trucking companies most certainly could raise rates and pay pay to attract more drivers; right now they don't want more drivers.