321–330 of 355 posts
Minimum wage: if you can't produce $X/hr in value, you're prohibited from producing at all. I suspect raising that cutoff would increase suicides.
Real world data disagrees with your suspicion. Might want to rethink your reasoning.
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Seattle's raising of the minimum wage was arguably symbolic. Seattle--a world-class tech nexus point--raising its minimum wage affected a relatively small percent of businesses compared to a "normal" city, as businesses in Seattle would have long since needed to offer higher wages in order to keep employees. I'd be much more interested in seeing the effects of a $15 wage in Nowheresville, USA than in Seattle.
Symbolic for maybe people that are making above minimum wage but an increase in minimum wage to $15 made so many people lives easier.
"Normal" towns' leaders would recognize it as virtue-signaling rather than transformative change, because it would've affected proportionally few people.
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Having debt may not be a mental health illness, but mental health illnesses are significantly exacerbated by debt. I was discharged from a mental health ward 3 weeks ago after an unsuccessful suicide attempt. My brother was murdered a year ago and I've been struggling with depression since. I lose my job a few months ago and money has been tight in my household, to the point where I began to see myself as nothing but…
Did you know that army medics are 3x more likely to be diagnosed with PTSD than army infantrymen encountering combat? Likewise being a combat medic/doctor isn’t an illness. There is no discussion of eliminating those jobs to save people from mental health illnesses. Even if those jobs and/or debt were eliminated there is no reason to suggest the persons at potential risk of such illnesses would cured from the risk of…
This is not supported by anyone working within suicide prevention. Indeed, focussing on the medical model is rejected by any organisation working in suicide prevention, and they talk about the full range of bio-psycho-social factors involved in suicide.
It is simply incorrect to say that suicide is caused only by mental illness.
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When everybody raises prices at the same time, business survive.
Only if demand is entirely in elastic. You can be damn sure if the cost of mobile phones suddenly doubled, a lot fewer phones would be purchased and companies would go out of business.
But it is not obvious at all how demand responds to global increases in salary. It tends to increase more often than decrease.
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Re/ medicare for all ... Canada has universal health care yet a very similar suicide rate to the USA.[1] Canada doesn't have a livable minimum wage either. Each province sets its own. There is talk of UBI experiments. [1] https://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2011/02/us-vs-can...
That's 2011 data. Most recent data is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r... * Global rate: 10.5 per 100,000 people * Canada rate: 10.4 per 100,000 people * US rate: 13.7 per 100,000 people
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_Canada#Among_Indige...
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CDC chart does not show what you are saying it shows: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6630a6.htm
I don't understand. That chart shows very clearly that youth rates of death by suicide have gone up since 1999. It shows a climb from 10.x in 2007 to 14.x in 2015. That's not quite a third, but it's not far off. More importantly it shows that deaths from suicide are i: no longer declining and ii: increasing. This increase appears to happen around 2007 onwards -- this is when we had worldwide financial insecurity, wit…
On the linked graph I see the highest suicide rates in the late 90s. They dropped in the early 2000s and then at some point start climbing.
It’s like, one can pick any window from a graph like that to make a point.
Think if someone did that with the stock market. You could prove the market was going down, or up, merely by choosing the window that suits the claim.
Now, the graph only goes through 2015. I am receptive to the notion suicide rates have been climbing and are at all time highs. You may have a vital and valid point.
But the graph I linked doesn’t back it up, and you are including a whole bunch of causation in your comments that makes your argument start to sound ideologically shaped.
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Re/ medicare for all ... Canada has universal health care yet a very similar suicide rate to the USA.[1] Canada doesn't have a livable minimum wage either. Each province sets its own. There is talk of UBI experiments. [1] https://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2011/02/us-vs-can...
I really hope we do not get a UBI in any current forms. I know the second the stores realize that every person now has 'x' amount of dollars to spend, they will raise the prices to match the most they can extract. What I wish Canada would do instead is establish some sort of Universal Basic Rights like every man woman and child is entitled to 5lbs of potatoes a week, 1 gallon of milk, 1 pound of carrots, ect. I as a…
"Supply and demand" is an absolute economic law. Anyone trying to distort that (say, redistributing taxes so all get $1000/month) finds out the hard way. If S&D is not directly addressed in your pet socioeconomic proposal, implementation will fail.
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more likely to be religious That's not necessarily a contradiction, since churches double as social clubs and Christian charity means supporting your neighbour who is in trouble. So if you are active in a church you belong to a circle that is a little less dog-eat-dog. Same thing with immigrant communities.
> So if you are active in a church you belong to a circle that is a little less dog-eat-dog. That would imply that life in the US ~300 years ago, when pretty much everyone belonged to a church, was less dog-eat-dog. If anything, I would say it was the opposite. People would often shoot someone—someone who is just as likely as themselves to be a "good Christian"—just for being an interloper on their farmland, i.e. for…
Contrast that with the modern luxurious miracle of the $1 hamburger: with just 9 minutes of minimum-wage commodity labor, one can obtain a fresh complete meal (bread, meat, veggies, cheese) any time all year.
When you’re living the latter, the gravity of the former is hard to grasp.
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There is nearly a 2x difference in rate between white and native americans vs blacks, asians and hispanics. I'm wondering if there is a good understanding of that difference. I don't think it is just economic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States#/...
Because if you're told you're supposed to "make it" since birth, and you don't, you feel like a piece of shit. Marginalized communities have been told the other story, every little thing is a win. Difference in expectations is huge, and source of all sort of bad things (like racial resentment etc...). Solution: make this country slightly less "dog eat dog" and you'll solve a LOT of social issues almost overnight.
I call this the "loser" class (obviously, I don't personally see them as losers, just in terms of societal expectations). You're supposed to go make money or you're a loser. Hopefully, you're "in charge of people" too, because managers and executives are the only people that contribute to society. Do-ers just cost money. You buy a house and become a homeowner to be a "real American" and not be a loser. You better get a big car and attractive partner too. I think there's a talking heads song about this.
Worse, we think that all failures should be permanent. Once you become a member of this class, especially as you age, it becomes difficult to get out. What have you been doing all these years? Did you not want to sit in a cage for your entire adult life? No degree? Have you ever been fired? Have you had any issues with the law? Well, you're done. No longer a member of the "successful American" class, you're now a loser. A despised and ridiculed lesser class within society.
We'll let a few losers out, and rise to the level of good American, but generally, they stay there. Don't forget that you deserve this, and it's your fault because you're a bad person. I'm not surprised by the suicide rate at all.