261–270 of 632 posts
Why do these articles always start with a story about a person? I see this in nearly all articles from american news papers. It's strange. Seems like a paper from a young student who needs to get his 3000 wordcount. It just bloats the article and makes it difficult to get the information out of it.
America is a country of huge wealth. Wealthy in natural resources, capital equipment, labor ... fucking everything. And yet we have such terrible poverty. When I read stories about poor people in America, always there is lurking just below the surface the key element of scarcity. Not food. Not transportation. Not clothing. Not even, surprisingly, health care. The missing factor in all these broken lives is the simple…
Poverty is the inability to know how or be able to survive at a minimum comfortable level in our society.
The causes are many, such as lack of education, addiction, early parenthood, good role models, lack of good health and many more I can't even begin to imagine.
So giving people stuff and housing is only a temporary solution. The solution is so much more and it takes years to get ahead of it.
Look at Venezuela, they tried to solve their poverty problem very simply by basically giving people food and shelter without fixing the fundamental problem of lack of knowledge and the other problems that cause poverty and now they are in worst trouble than ever and yet in theory they had the financial resources to fix the problem.
What you mention is just a start and poverty will always be unless the more fundamental problems are fixed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This ignores the Soviet Union and all of it's allies, which did trade amongst themselves but failed regardless.
I had mostly cuba in mind with this comment
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That wouldn't make them intelligent at all. This idea that there should always be fairness and equality in existence is very naive.
Okay, you are conflating fairness and equality, which are totally separate concepts. Let's assume you are talking about sharing, as that's what the original point was about. Specifically the sharing of 19 bones among 20 dogs, by dividing up the bones. Assumign by 'naive' you mean wrong, are you saying that it is simply a more optimal situation for one dog to go hungry? Does the one dog always go hungry, or does one d…
The dog can die. It isn't my problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We develop drugs and medical practices to artificially extend our lives. We build gigantic civilizations and trade goods around the globe. We take the coffee beans from a farmer in a poor nation undergoing drought, pay that farmer between $0.07-$0.50 per kilo of coffee, and then sell that kilo in a coffee shop (after roasting and brewing) for about $70. We aren't natural. We don't need natural evolutionary states. We…
None of that is my responsibility. I'm not obligated to help anyone but myself. Nobody asked me for consent before flinging me into existence, and now I have to follow all these rules that people make up? I don't need "unnatural, human-oriented, ethical states". I'm perfectly happy with a state where I can acquire as many resources as possible, even if that incurs a significant cost to others.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And, of course you need a way to prevent employers from using various alternatives available to them. * You need very high import taxes, so goods have to be produced with local labour * If truly automation were to become pervasive, that needs taxing * You probably need restrictions to prevent money from crossing borders too easily * You can't have open borders (or) * You have to strongly respond to illegals working (…
Alternatively, we could ditch the neo-feudalism, embrace automation, and give people a more meaningful live than having to slave 60 hour weeks to be allowed to survive, at meaningless jobs that could easily be done by machines.
(On a more serious note, I fully expect automation to simply lead to automated armies defending the rich from the poor, rather than relieving any suffering anywhere. Productivity increases have not lead to (proportional) wage increases, have not lead to (proportional) reductions in working hours. The internet has not lead to information-driven utopia, but instead ad-serving dystopia. Automation will also fall to the deathly grip of capitalism, as does everything else.)
These articles are quite disingenuous as they constantly focus on hourly pay without giving a any context whatsoever to compensation : bonuses, matched retirement/investment plans, insurance, profit-sharing/equity plans, paid time off, paid sick leave days, etc. This really seems just disingenuous to me since this is a major part of compensation as the figures show. And the worst part is that this measurement of comp…
1. increase in healthcare costs and how health insurance is bound to employment
2. increase in wealth concentration and a shift from cash compensation to asset compensation (Bezos is only absurdly rich if he liquidates his Amazon holding instantly)
So, I would say your portrayal of hourly compensation is disingenuous as well. All of these statistics probably need to be calculated as medians instead of means ("compensation per hour" sounds suspiciously like "total compensation / total hours", which is a mean) in order for it to come close to accurately describing the situation of the median American, because wealth concentration has skewed the mean American into something a lot more optimistic than one would think.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sharing resources with other people has absolutely nothing to do with being intelligent.
And not sharing them doesn't either. You still haven't made a point. Is the intelligent action the action that is most likely to benefit the group? Is a group of 20 fed dogs stronger than a group of 20 dogs where one goes hungry and becomes a weak or unstable element? Seems like you're just trying to somehow rally against equality and/or sharing, by associating them with naivité, like you have some knowledge others d…
Minimum wages exist for a reason: the job market does not satisfy the conditions for making it an "equilibrium" market. As long as unions are weak, corporations can and will strong-arm the labor force into cheaper and cheaper work.
The fact that it has become a better choice to live on welfare than working with minimum wage is ridiculous.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s wrong with the idea of sharing?
Nothing, unless you force a dog which hunted its bone to share it with one who slept the whole day, and call it "equality".