301–310 of 632 posts
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Nothing, unless you force a dog which hunted its bone to share it with one who slept the whole day, and call it "equality".
Or you can share 5% of your hunt to keep the lazy dog from attacking you while you sleep. Is it 'fair'? No. Is it a wise move? Maybe.
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If you only look at numbers and not individual stories, you miss the blind-spots of your data.
This means the numbers are meaningless and don't provide a good representation. Needs better data. Call me inhumane, but a single story doesn't mean anything . It's just some random point in the set. Drawing any conclusions from such a single point is dangerous (the larger the set, the more), as we humans just love to extrapolate single points and even tend have quite strong emotional defenses about their importance.…
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Would I be incorrect in saying you don’t feel empathy very often?
No, you'd be correct.
It seems simple enough to raise minimum wages: => tap into corporate profits that are through the roof & reduce the working poor problem. Organizing in unions would work too. 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…
A problem with raising minimum wages is then marginal businesses will lay off employees. It may be better for the government to subsidise low wages by chipping in a bit on top. eg this kind of thing https://www.moneyadviceservice.org.uk/en/articles/working-ta...
Higher minimal wages and tax credits for small businesses seems healthier.
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…
> Why hasn't the market solved this problem? The market did solve the problem and then we blew it by undermining the family unit so we have people dependent on the state with no significant family support. > Believe it or not, its not impossible to manufacture a living space in a factory and assemble it on site in a day, to provide extremely well made and affordable housing structures. The soviets tried this approach…
This entire statement just blows my mind.
Getting people to build enough expensive homes for rich people seems to be an already solved problems. People already build homes as expensive as the market will bear and and the rich buy not one but 2 of them or even more and rent them out to others less rich than themselves. The only way to get people to build a glut such as to devalue their own product would be to provide tax incentives or kickbacks effectively funding rich peoples houses with tax money from the middle class.
Supposing you decided to do this building a glut of "top end" housing enough to move the needle as far as price would be an insanely expensive endeavor. Millions of dollars per unit.
There are 74 million single family homes in the US building out 10% more all at the top end at 2 million per would cost 148 trillion dollars. This is actually more than the 25 trillion it would cost just to give every household their own free 200k house.
Building 1% of the present housing supply would only cost a laughable 14.8 trillion and would barely move anyone up much beyond making it easier for the upper middle class to move from nice house to awesome.
The truly funny thing is that no matter how much top end housing we build the poor would never live in the houses the wealthy used to live in because we would literally let it rot to the ground before the rich would sell it to them for anything like they could afford not because they have a several hundred dollar a day drug addition but because they don't have enough wealth to pay for what it actually costs to build and maintain a nice large rich persons house.
Ultimately if we want there to be a bigger supply of affordable housing then we will build more for 100-200k not mansions for 2-5million because poor people can afford the first and you can build 10-50 of one for the cost of the other. It's simple math.
As a final note if we charitably say several hundred is 3-400 a several hundred dollar a day drug habit is between 109k and 146k per year.
The only people that have several hundred dollar a day drug habits for very long are drug lords and CEOs that are fueled by cocaine.
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This means the numbers are meaningless and don't provide a good representation. Needs better data. Call me inhumane, but a single story doesn't mean anything . It's just some random point in the set. Drawing any conclusions from such a single point is dangerous (the larger the set, the more), as we humans just love to extrapolate single points and even tend have quite strong emotional defenses about their importance.…
I'll call you inhumane then. Despite record employment levels and rising average net worth in the USA, millions of people are still starving and struggling with drug addictions and so on. Averages and generalizations only tell a portion of the story. Anecdotes can shed light on "noise".
That's also a single aggregated number. Until the data doesn't cover those millions dire situation, it's a bad data. Emotionless analogy: like a green status page when some percentile of requests is failing.
See, you've mentioned "millions" rather than some "that person.". That's exactly what I mean.
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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…
I'm not trying to make a point or rallying against anything. I'm simply saying that I work hard to acquire resources for myself and will never give them away. We can all make moral/ethical/humane arguments about equality and fairness but I simply don't care. If that makes me unintelligent, then I suppose that's just something I'll have to accept.
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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 only "civilization" I care about is me. Is it really that difficult for you to understand and accept that there are people like me out there who only care about themselves and the resources they can acquire for themselves? The dog can die. It isn't my problem.
Once there are only 19 dogs left, the number of bones will simply be reduced to (slightly more than) 18, because the prevailing ideology is that there must be 5% unemployment. (This is greatly simplified, of course, but that's the gist of it.)
Eventually you'll stop being lucky. And in any case, it's not always the same dog who gets unlucky. So yes, it is your problem, or at least it will be.
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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 only "civilization" I care about is me. Is it really that difficult for you to understand and accept that there are people like me out there who only care about themselves and the resources they can acquire for themselves? The dog can die. It isn't my problem.