Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure I can. Feudalism. Oh, you meant a higher standard of living for everyone? Well then, are you sure market economies are really the end all solution for that? Listen, you seem to think I'm arguing against market economies or trying to promote some kind of communism. I'm not. I'm just pointing out capitalism and communism are not the only choices. There have been other systems and some of them lasted a long time an…
What economies can you point to that have provided their citizens a higher standard of living than the market economies have? Be specific.
Will minimum wage hikes lead to a huge boost in automation? Only if we're lucky
351–360 of 376 posts
Re: Will minimum wage hikes lead to a huge boost in automation? Only if we're lucky
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then it seems like the minimum wage is not the underlying issue. If there are too many people and not enough jobs, fiddling with the minimum wage won't have any real effect because regardless of what it is, there are always going to be people who are jobless (and therefore without income). So how do we reconcile the fact that currently, most people must work in order to live and yet there isn't enough work to go arou…
What if we stop trying to control everything and let people make their own choices. In nature, if an animal doesn't hunt for food, it dies. We should take care of those who can't "hunt" because they're handicapped, but we can't afford to because we spend all of that energy on handing things to the ones who don't want to "hunt". Stop trying to control nature.
If serious, I believe that it would be categorized under the "appeal to nature" group of fallacies. Secondly, who is "we" in this situation? People are making their own choices. We live in a representative democracy and people vote to decide things. Not everybody gets their way all the time. And then, is it worth the time and energy spent on differentiating between those who can't hunt and those who won't? I would think it's much more efficient to assume that everyone who asks for help needs it and simply help them.
Re: Will minimum wage hikes lead to a huge boost in automation? Only if we're lucky
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
> how do we reconcile the fact that currently, most people must work in order to live and yet there isn't enough work to go around? If you are a big powerful government, you have many tools to reconcile sweeping social problems like this. Foreign wars and civil wars are effective at wiping out lots of people here and abroad. So are infectious diseases. You can also round up and intern undesirable people indefinitely…
And yet nothing I said was untrue nor out of the realm of possibility.
The implication in my original post was that there is enough "wealth" to go around but the current system prevents it from being shared with everyone. When I say shared wealth I don't mean equally, I mean enough so that people can survive without having to fight for subsistence wages to work part time at their local mega mart.
Re: Will minimum wage hikes lead to a huge boost in automation? Only if we're lucky
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet nothing I said was untrue nor out of the realm of possibility.
I didn't down vote you but I assume the people that did have some kind of value system that doesn't involve culling the underperforming subsection of humanity during their annual review. The implication in my original post was that there is enough "wealth" to go around but the current system prevents it from being shared with everyone. When I say shared wealth I don't mean equally, I mean enough so that people can su…
This is a rad comment, I laughed. Well, I'm not sorry if I jarred them, that was my intention.
> The implication in my original post was that there is enough "wealth" to go around but the current system prevents it from being shared with everyone. When I say shared wealth I don't mean equally, I mean enough so that people can survive without having to fight for subsistence wages to work part time at their local mega mart.
When I think about the great social upheaval that will come about from job sector-eliminating automation, I shudder to think about what the hundreds of thousands of newly unemployed masses will do. And, I shudder to think about what governments will do with them in response, (which I why I wrote what I did.) In my opinion a living wage just puts the class war pressure cooker on medium instead of high heat.
I wish I had a great idea or plan to keep things running smoothly, but I don't. I have seen homelessness explode in my city ever since the Occupy Wall Street protests, and I see a lot of young people among the homeless who should/could be off the streets making a living. It's absolutely criminal simply from a public health standpoint for the city to let homelessness proliferate like this, and that comes from someone who thinks of himself as a libertarian.
Here's a recent interesting interview on RuneSoup about work and money. It gives me hope when smarter people than me can present a positive vision of the future. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ci24y4wOHY
Re: Will minimum wage hikes lead to a huge boost in automation? Only if we're lucky
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
Up until now, the possibility of having a group of people who lead a leisure life without an undercaste of slaves hasn't existed. Automation is a new thing under the sun.
No, no it is not, for fuck's sake. Automation is not new. The spinning Jenny was invented in 1764. Robot labor has been here since industrialization started and there is NOTHING new in the last twenty years. Automation is only the replacement of manual labor with machine labor, a.k.a productivity growth. If you've noticed, economies have been growing for centuries. In fact, growth is slower now than in the past. Auto…
Re: Will minimum wage hikes lead to a huge boost in automation? Only if we're lucky
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
Marxists and communists have tried this without also sticking to democracy... The well known failings could just as well be due to the massize amount of corruption that came from the strong bases of power. We also had "real" market economies (no trust busting or the like) in the early 20th and it was shitty for a huge part of the population History is the biggest argument against all economic systems
Not to mention capitalist countries working very hard to undermine marxists and communists by pretty much any means possible.
Re: Will minimum wage hikes lead to a huge boost in automation? Only if we're lucky
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
*Socialists like Sanders
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wl-BV8vrLDU I'm actually from Poland, a country that had actual communism created by another rich jew that wanted to help "the opressed masses". You think at the beginning any of the commies said straight what they plan to do how it will look like after they're done? And what they will do with the evil burgois (or "the 1%" as Sanders and his cultists name it). You're playing with fire,…
Re: Will minimum wage hikes lead to a huge boost in automation? Only if we're lucky
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Soviet Union depended on an enormous laboring class to meet its production needs; the whole point is that we no longer do.
Oh, we still do, they're just in second and third world countries. The author of this article focused on service industries that require a physical presence in the local area ... and did not address outsourcing. I think that one likely outcome of this law will be that people will find creative new ways to move work to lower cost locales.
Re: Will minimum wage hikes lead to a huge boost in automation? Only if we're lucky
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "good argument" for having a minimum wage is that without it, wages will be pressured down , because every business on the planet wants wages as low as possible, and they generally have the means to achieve this. It has nothing to do with job creation: it's about having jobs that are not basically slavery. It's for job quality, not quantity. Besides, you're just assuming people should be employed at "fair market…
True, every business on the planet wants wages as low as possible. This is, of course, correct. On the other hand, every employee on the planet wants her wage to be as high as possible. This is also obviously true. This creates law of supply and demand. Google can't hire a decent software engineer for, say, $30000/year, because other companies will immediately offer more, and supply of talented software engineers is…
Did you somehow miss the massive wage fixing lawsuit google just recently lost? Your hypothetical wouldn't happen because google has deals with its competitors to artificially deflate wages.
I think you mightve picked the absolute worst example to defend your point
Re: Will minimum wage hikes lead to a huge boost in automation? Only if we're lucky
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah admittedly that judgement largely depends on where you live and the cost base. In my opinion, that wouldn't buy you much in SF or NY. For somebody located outside of a city, it could have a much bigger impact.
3% of the country live in SF or NYC.