aabeshou

the models of market fairness work perfectly in a world where people could simply choose not to work, and where everyone has the ability to work to qualify for any job.

however in the real world people are forced to work by a need to survive, which puts disempowered people in a position to be exploited. and there is unequal access to education, to the leisure time to participate in education, and to the material security required to have a brain that is able to focus on education, so not everyone will be able to even make an attempt to qualify for every job. not to mention the fact that there is unequal access to the networking and connections, and to the non-merit-based "qualifications" that bring certain people to power (e.g. race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. all the isms).

so exploitation and injustice abounds in an unregulated system which tends to entrench and concentrate power within the hands of those who already have it

freedom in America usually means freedom of the elite to do whatever they want, and freedom of the workers from being protected

"if the world is going to be dominated by big tech, it'd better be by an AMERICAN company, not some CHINESE!!"

I'm sorry, I misunderstood your tone as challenging, like "who is anyone to say what is fair or not?"

technically in the U.S. there is a federal (nation-wide) minimum wage, then there are minimum wages for each state. I am not sure how they are defined, e.g. the federal one is certainly not automatically pegged to inflation. there is a movement to raise the federal minimum wage to $15/hour but even that is hard or impossible to live on in many areas.

I sort of agree with this on the condition that "tampering with supply to keep wages in check" includes union-busting. If unions and other forms of labor power were not suppressed by a government owned by Capital, then we would have a chance to see the "free market" potentially arrive at some of the same outcomes that socialists seek, such as worker co-ownership of firms and fair profit distribution. However, it's a bit paradoxical because one of the mechanisms by which these changes would occur is by labor power overturning a lot of the rules of capitalism. A system which did not allow this to happen would still be unjust, supporting the status quo through its so-called laissez-faire neutrality.

I agree that government is not automatically = good, it is corruptible. and I do think it sucks that computers are built in places with unethical labor laws.

come on, it's really not that complicated. just pay people a fair wage.

not sure, but maybe they mean apologetic in the sense of being an apologist?

maybe the conditions vary from one warehouse to another, but the fact remains that Amazon smeared and retaliated against whistleblowers at warehouses with terrible conditions

Best Buy is actually pretty amazing. Their protection plan is a great deal too because it basically lets you pay a premium to return your item for a full refund in store credit for 2 years.

can you give a citation for this or is it just sinophobia

voters of the US overwhelmingly support universal healthcare and a majority supports medicare for all. it's not the voters. it's the politicians who are bought and who deceive voters into thinking they are on their side, who tell lies about what things are possible because it hurts their donors.

Clyburn, the congressman from South Carolina whose endorsement arguably delivered Joe Biden a landslide victory, has received millions of dollars from big pharma [0]

[0] https://khn.org/news/democrats-taking-key-leadership-jobs-ha...

> we have just enough regulation to prevent healthy market dynamics, but not enough to have a single payer type system

this seems like a very concise summary of the problem. and insurance companies see the profits of this no-mans land

that seems plausible. but I consider that a reason why we need taxpayer-funded healthcare, just like so many other countries have had for years. not a reason why insurance is a necessary/lesser evil. I don't see how it's better for insurance to be fleecing people rather than medical providers

weird that you're getting downvoted. probably for the use of the word "parasitical" which I assume some of the HN crowd deems combative or divisive. but it's just true. there's a whole pointless middleman industry whose entire purpose is to derive profit from healthcare by denying coverage and increasing premiums, which of course have real world consequences of people dying or going bankrupt.

> I've also read the "conspiracy theory" that racial division is pushed in an attempt to disrupt solidarity based on economic class.

Hardly a conspiracy theory when it is on record during the Civil War and the Southern Strategy.

do you understand the difference between a government definition and a human experience? I'm talking about making it so everyone has the basic needs of their life met - food, shelter, water, medicine, clean environment, leisure time, sleep time.

your argument is so pedantic that it is insulting. it reminds me of Ben Shapiro's classic tweet [0] "Renewable energy: dumbest phrase since climate change. See the first law of thermodynamics, dumbass." You're like Ben Shapiro saying "eradicating poverty?? that's literally impossible... since poverty is defined as the lowest 5% of income and there will always be someone there. Learn percentiles, dumbass"

[0] https://twitter.com/benshapiro/status/30089090699366400

> Poverty is relative, not absolute

That's.... just not true, and I feel like you don't really know what poverty is if you say that. Poverty is not just definitionally being in some lower percentile. Poverty is misery because you don't have financial power to meet your basic needs, or have to sacrifice all your time and comfort to do so. There's nothing relative about going hungry, living in bad housing with heat that doesn't work, working 2 jobs and sleeping 4 hours a night, etc.

I think that "disease" is a misleading term, because it makes it sound like an act of god or nature. I'd say it's more like a moral evil. Because there are people in power who have the ability to eradicate this, simply by paying their workers more, or allocating government money to public services rather than to tax cuts for the rich, but they don't. They push austerity, they exploit greedily, and those are deliberate human acts of selfish evil.

I'd say that the global implicit and explicit ideology of "greed is good" and "might makes right", as well as the tendency of our systems towards nearly boundless concentration of resources and power in the hands of few, is the real disease.

got it, I misinterpreted your tone, my apologies

as long as they are factual*

* make sure to use corporate-approved facts

have you ever done shrooms/lsd?

just so people don't get the wrong idea -- there are a LOT of leftists, such as myself, on twitter who have a problem with zuckerberg donating .0001% of his wealth, who ARE impressed by this. Giving away 28% of your wealth is nothing to sneeze at, even if in a just economy he shouldn't have that much wealth to control in the first place. On an individual level, I still think this is very commendable in a way that zuck's pathetic donation is not.

- I think Trump is the one who sensationalized it, not pharma surrogates, but I may be wrong

- I'm not committed to this particular conspiracy theory but I jumped in here because I don't like when people try to dismiss conspiracies out of hand as if it's crazy to think that pharma does things like this constantly. There's this free market ideology that exonerates companies and argues that self-interested behavior leads to positive outcomes, so I was reacting to what I sensed of that

dont move the goalposts.

(1) OP said big pharma wants to downplay HCQ because it doesnt make them as much money.

(2) reply says that the fact that pharma donated millions of doses contradicts that

(3) OP counters that pharma is donating millions of doses because it gives them an epic tax write-off

it has nothing to do with donations being bad. it has to do with the fact that pharma is always doing whats best for them, and if its also best for patients that's a happy coincidence, but they frequently act in opposite of whats best for patients (e.g. price gouging on insulin, in this case possibly downplaying the efficacy of a cheap drug HCQ), and that's something we should notice and call out

absolutely agree. I think this explains a large narcissistic segment of society (and the narcissistic parts that everyone has, to an extent). But to say that's "all" there is is, for lack of a better word, insane

let's be clear - it's a 1.8% percentage point increase, relative to the entire US population. but data from the U.S. Dept of Labor (graphed in The Guardian [0]) shows weekly unemployment claims just shot up from around 250k to around 3.25 million, which is a 1300% increase

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/mar/26/us-unemploy...

no, what's tiring and lazy (and yes, evil) is the idea that the peons at the bottom should be grateful for what the people at the top, who hoard 99% of the world's wealth, can get away with paying them. $15/hour is hardly living large, and a $2 bump is insulting

one option is to bail them out but with strings attached. Demand concessions that are good for labor and for the consumer public in exchange for the bailout. Don't just let them put all savings into pockets of executives and shareholders (while promoting "ration and save/pull yourself by bootstraps" ideology to the poor, of course) then run crying to the taxpayers because they're too big to fail.

okay but they're only raising wages by $2. It's disgusting. Jeff Bezos makes millions of dollars an hour.

no bootlicking responses please