741–750 of 776 posts
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I went looking for a new phone recently, there were brands I hadn't seen before on the shelves. Why you would need your own chips is beyond me, when you can buy them for a pretty small price.
Not wanting to get Huawei-ed?
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There's still darkness without people. Sickness, suffering, etc, exist without humans. Hell, even torture exists. Orcas play with their food as they're killing it. I believe cats do as well. If you can zoom out from that at see it as some grand, beautiful, process, then you have to apply the same filter to all of the evil stuff humans do as well, IMO.
Fair point. Animals eat each other, and that process is pretty cruel at times. Do animals have a mental concept of cruelty though? Of guilt? I suspect most don't. That does not make their actions less cruel, but it reduces the blame perhaps. We humans know exactly what's going on. Wr do it anyway. We keep animals in horrible conditions. And we know it. Yet we keep doing it. We treat each other horribly. We have reall…
What if a human, or groups of humans, don't feel any guilt or don't believe what they're doing is cruel? I don't think that would help you sleep better...
Also, at least some animals are, in fact, capable of complex emotions. Pigs, apparently, can feel empathy: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animal-emotions/2015...
It shouldn't be surprising. We are animals, after all.
> We humans know exactly what's going on. Wr[sic] do it anyway.
Perhaps that makes it worse, but I don't know that it means that animals being cruel doesn't count as "darkness" as in the grandparent comment. (It certainly doesn't refute the point that cancer is still a thing from nature and it's pretty damn dark)
But I'm pretty sure that animals would do the same stuff we do if they ever developed the capacity to do so. I see no reason to assume they wouldn't. Again- we are animals. We evolved from the same ancestors. I'm sure if my dog learned how to farm for meat, pretty much all of dog-civilization would play out with a lot of the same themes as human civilization. Not because I'm not creative enough to imagine other outcomes, but because I have no reason or evidence to assume that their form of life is fundamentally different from ours.
I'm fairly sure that aliens would observe us and the Orca who throws the crying seal in the air as the same. They would either see both as sad, or neither because "That's just what Earth life does. They kill others. They form packs and fight over territory. Some exhibit anti-social behaviors."
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> any of the people employed at very low wages have attributes which mean that they are not worth hiring at higher costs. Unless the job needs to be done, which is generally the case among minimum wage workers. That was my point. You need cleaning staff, and retail workers, and what not. You still hire them even if they cost more. People don't have intrinsic prices. It's not like an old person costs exactly $4.32 an…
The fact that the job needs to be done does not mean that the job needs to be done by the type of person currently doing it . One common response to price floors is to change the qualifications/requirements (as in my wine example). The employer will hire 'over-qualified' candidates to perform a job which does not require their skills or abilities. Wine is still being 'hired' with a price floor, but it is a different…
> Textbooks state that, in the absence of a minimum wage, a worker is paid his “marginal product of labour”, which means the value of what he produces. > Just as a monopolist can set prices higher than would be the case in a competitive market, a monopsonist can set prices artificially lower. A lot of economic arguments forget these ideas. The labor market is not a free market: companies have more power in negotiatio…
Which is why instead of mispricing labour through minimum wage you can have a negative income tax which makes up the difference. The nice thing is that it will apply to everyone -- working or not, sick or not, on mat leave or not, can't work because of covid or not. You top-up people's income and that's paid for through taxes. You take the benefit of efficiency and productivity from the entire economy and return it t…
We ALREADY have negative income taxes. 20% of the population are given more in refunds than they paid in. 40% pay zero taxes. When you add in government benefits and programs, 60% of households take in more from the government than they pay in.
https://taxfoundation.org/60-percent-households-now-receive-...
The point here being that hourly wages from these companies ALREADY account for theses factors. We could abolish these programs and raise wages, but that would be unpopular among a decent portion of the country.
A more interesting discussion is Consumption taxes -- taxes on spending your money. Consumption taxes account for 17-18% of all taxes. These taxes kinda slide under the radar for most people despite accounting for a huge portion of the taxes they pay. These are also the MOST IMPORTANT taxes because they affect goods and services directly (corporations pay attention even if most individuals do not).
A lot of states still charge sales taxes for things like food, diapers, and personal hygiene products (most at a reduced rate). These taxes definitely disproportionately affect the poor and should be abolished. Likewise, most states exempt prescription drugs, but still tax OTC drugs which also adversely affects the poor who are less likely to visit a doctor and/or have healthcare coverage.
Taxing services to "improve or repair personal property" exists in almost half of states and is also a bad idea. It disincentivizes maintaining things and all the important things like cars, property, buildings, etc are already taxed (and most are subject to tax increases based on improvements). Then they ALSO tax the person doing the improvement service effectively taxing one improvement THREE times. This is especially important when looking at small businesses or contractors who have to pay extra overhead to deal with the additional accounting. The most egregious part is that only two states tax white-collar jobs because the white-collar workers are rich enough to lobby while blue-collar service jobs like janitors or construction workers cannot afford such luxuries.
Finally, I'd love to see vehicles under $10,000 be tax-free (value as assessed by the state). Reducing vehicle costs for the poor would drastically increase their access jobs and offer an easier way to leave impoverished areas. In contrast, the electric vehicle incentives are almost entirely tax breaks for the well-off and disappear before the vehicles are cheap enough for the less well-off (if battery prices ever drop low enough for that to happen).
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If a company can hire someone worth $50/hr for only $5/hr and therefore make huge profits/margins, couldn't another company easily come along and undercut them? I don't think a scenario like that could exist very long.
Between all the patents, it would be basically impossible to start a new mobile phone company from scratch which made its own chips, for example.
Services like Straight Talk and others that sublease towers and bandwidth from companies like AT&T or Verizon have massively cheaper costs due to the lack of contract phones (lower risk), lower support costs, lower advertising costs, etc. These lower costs are then passed on to consumers in the form of lower prices to the point that Verizon or AT&T prepay services have changed in an attempt to compete and even their main contract service prices have lowered somewhat.
As an aside, AT&T or Verizon actually rent most of their towers from other companies like American Tower or Crown Castle. They market how they're upgrading their towers, but that's not entirely true (they're basically bidding against each other on priority for tower upgrades).
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> someone worth $50/hr can be paid $5/hr if anyone can do the job What business sectors enjoy consistent 90% gross margins?
I know you were trying to make a broader point, but Facebook has been flirting with 90% gross margins for more than 5 years.
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> That's why minimum wage laws and workers rights are important. How do you translate that into numbers? If $15/hr is better than $14/hr, wouldn’t $150/hr be 10x better, and if so, what’s wrong with a comfortable $1,500/hr? I think that’s where economists start to differ.
Rate that allows the employee to live without government assistance like food stamps and Medicaid. Otherwise the government is just subsidizing the company.
There's always talk about market failures when many times government failures are the true causal mechanism.
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small businesses don't foot the bill, at least not to any painful level if they're anything approaching a reasonably run business. their customers might, and having it be a blanket policy means that small businesses are not disadvantaged or penalized for not having the leverage of big businesses to distribute costs onto the rest of society (e.g., walmart and welfare). at most, on the margin, a small business might gi…
Only a small portion of the increase in wages would find its way back to local businesses. Rents will increase for example, as people will have more money to bid up the prices.
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Yes, the one thing we can all agree on is the right to self. Nobody other than themselves can control their body - by that I mean that no matter what you do, nobody can tell you what to think. You can be brainwashed by force, or conditioned to react a certain way to escape force, but you can never really know what another person thinks. Regardless, one has a right to their body. It is their property. More explicitly,…
>Regardless, one has a right to their body. It is their property. To what extent? Does this principle apply to indentured servitude? How about work related accidents, should a company be legally required to prevent them? Should a mining company pay compensation for the lung damage sustained by their miners, even though that was not in their contract? How about the environment, does this principle imply I have a right…
People today still think those crimes are right, as evidenced by the fact that there are many people who still do them. That's why we have laws against those crimes: to punish the many thousands of people who still attempt to carry them out, and in many cases succeed.
If we could "all agree that they were wrong", then we wouldn't need laws against those crimes, because no one would ever commit them.
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Well yeah. But the thing is, someone had to make the shovel to begin with. The gains in productivity of the shovel are just unrealized value of the original labour (and materials).
The shovel maker is paid handsomely. He's the equivalent of a tech worker.