311–320 of 479 posts
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Do you have ethical opinions for example about Newton's laws in physics? Or do you accept them for what they are?
This is sarcasm I'm assuming?
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Humans design the system in which the market operates. Obviously one cannot make an appeal to change physics.
We design car and planes just as well with physics.
The economy is like a singular, gigantic vehicle we all occupy. It abides certain natural laws (such as human nature, and the scarcity of certain resources), but the vehicle itself is designed by some of our fellow passengers (and its design does not optimize for the things many of us feel it should).
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Argument for the meme: Labor unions don't challenge the core structure of capitalism; even when they're working, they mostly serve to give a slightly bigger piece of the pie to workers. And in practice, they are hijacked by a certain bureaucratic caste that mostly optimizes for stability and self perpetuation. They become integrated with state sponsorship, which will never allow for substantive change. For instance,…
Nothing is stopping anyone from forming a worker coop in the US. Yet few do. Have you ever considered this?
A highly successful privately owned company leads to a handful of people with a ton of money and free time, which they can use to found other privately owned companies.
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"provide for their families" was also a much lower standard than it is now. Back then having a good life (for immigrants at least) didn't mean a large house in the suburbs and 3 cars, it meant an entire family of 5 sharing 1 bedroom and walking everywhere. A pair of jeans was a multi generational investment. If your family could afford one bicycle, you were living large. This was unimaginable wealth compared to what…
Being able to "walk everywhere" is itself a kind of luxury nowadays, because there are limited walkable cities in the US and they have all become very expensive. It's often actually much cheaper to live somewhere in the suburbs where you can't walk everywhere, because everything is designed around cars.
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Can you build a house without a carpenter? If not, is he entitled to a part of your house even though you paid him to build it?
I would say that, yes, a carpenter is entitled to a share of the profits. They used their labour to build something which appreciates in value. Traditionally, it has been too hard to track fractional ownership of an asset and calculate a share of profits. And most workers prefer cash up front rather than waiting for a payday which might not materialise for decades. I'm not going to go full blockchain/NFT on this idea…
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| Why did I deserve to make more money than a teacher or a nurse? My tech salary, adjusted for inflation, is almost exactly what my RN mother was making when she was my age. Maybe our salaries aren't that extraordinary, they're just the only ones that have kept up with inflation. Don't feel guilty about a tech salary, feel angry others been left behind.
Only a hundred years ago, a bunch of immigrants from places like Germany or Spain or Italy could arrive in New England (including New York City), perform manual labor, provide for their families on one income, and pool their additional money to _build whole buildings_ as social or fraternal clubs. That really puts things into perspective for me.
Why did that happen? Did corrupt unions kill the goose that laid the golden eggs? Or was it poor management of the automotive giants that allowed overseas companies to take market share. Did wages across the board fall behind inflation or was the automotive fundamentally changed by automation.
I wish I understood what happened since I actually lived through that period.
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Nothing is stopping anyone from forming a worker coop in the US. Yet few do. Have you ever considered this?
A highly successful worker coop leads to a bunch of people with comfortable lives and steady jobs. A highly successful privately owned company leads to a handful of people with a ton of money and free time, which they can use to found other privately owned companies.
Can you get away without initial starting capital if your startup has a very low chance of success? You need someone to be willing to eat the 99% risk of failure in exchange for proportionally high returns.
I imagine the same problem is much ameliorated if you were opening a pizza shop, a daycare, or a hair salon, where the business is more predictable?
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The quality of living a family in the suburbs has today is like what a rich person a hundred years ago would have. I see people with houses, multiple brand new cars, TVs in every room, and who take a vacation at least once a year complain about the economy their entire life.
Most, myself included, have a very limited understanding of the economy we are part of, so I'm not surprised by complaints. Every so often, someone making 2 or 3 times the national average income makes an ass of themselves on TV by claiming they're economically disadvantaged. In some senses, you don't even have to go to the suburbs to be unimaginably better off now than it was possible to be a century ago, because a…
Being able to own disposable gadgets made in China doesn't make you rich. Those are not necessities. But you now what is? Housing, stable well paying jobs, healthcare and education , all of which are now massively out of reach for the average joe than they were a few decades ago.
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Most, myself included, have a very limited understanding of the economy we are part of, so I'm not surprised by complaints. Every so often, someone making 2 or 3 times the national average income makes an ass of themselves on TV by claiming they're economically disadvantaged. In some senses, you don't even have to go to the suburbs to be unimaginably better off now than it was possible to be a century ago, because a…
>TVs are cheap now. So are 3D printers, travel, and phones. Being able to own disposable gadgets made in China doesn't make you rich. Those are not necessities. But you now what is? Housing, stable well paying jobs, healthcare and education , all of which are now massively out of reach for the average joe than they were a few decades ago.
And, like I said, much of what we now consider basic healthcare had not yet been invented.
And even in the last decades, those cheap Chinese gadgets you're so dismissive of, they give access for free to not just k-12 but also university and post-graduate level educational courses and materials on topics which had not been invented then either.
And the tech also lets more work remotely, changing the dynamics on housing.
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Not even close. That rich person had servants, could go on lengthy vacations, etc. and most likely they had substantial passive income. The key thing to understand is the difference in how precarious those situations are: that affluent suburbanite has some shiny things but their cash flow is much higher than their wealth. A TV in every room is a rounding error on the $11k/year each of those new cars costs on average,…
The rich people of the past had no internet, cars, air travel, or much health care by modern standards. The average 2022 American is vastly better off materially. What they had was social status, and I think that's more what you're talking about. Social status is incredibly important for humans, so I understand focusing on it. But since it's pretty much a Zero Sum Game, nothing much changes there.