711–720 of 721 posts
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Slaves are held against their will. Workers submit voluntarily.
I love to voluntarily choose between working for a capitalist and starving, personally
You also do NOT need to work for a capitalist to survive. You need to work for the state or you will starve, thats our modern world.
Is this worth it? Is this worth having the ability to pick between 10,000 different toasters via internet and have them delivered to your doorstep in 2 days? Sometimes I look at society as a complete organ, with a hypothetical ability to make cohesive decisions for itself. And I think, it is making extremely self-destructive choices. All for the sake of satisfying the urge to buy more, at lower prices, with more conv…
Is this worth it? Is this worth having the ability to pick between 10,000 different toasters via internet and have them delivered to your doorstep in 2 days? Sometimes I look at society as a complete organ, with a hypothetical ability to make cohesive decisions for itself. And I think, it is making extremely self-destructive choices. All for the sake of satisfying the urge to buy more, at lower prices, with more conv…
This is far from being unique to Amazon and from my experience constant pressures like these are prevalent in many low to mid-income paying jobs. I briefly worked as an Insurance Claims Representative for Farmer's Insurance. At the time, I lost my place, my car died and I was running low on funds so I had to take the first thing available. The job offered a free car and the first 4 weeks were spent in training. As so…
As someone who only worked there for a month, it was a pretty nice unexpected bonus.
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Sad to see this post downvoted when it seems obvious. If you work for Amazon as a developer make this issue known. Few people have as much power to impact the company as a group of developers - we all know what a pain in the ass it is to hire. I'd never work at Amazon knowing how it treats its workers. Given the market we're in I don't get why others would - if you work for Amazon you should be able to jump ship for…
Part of what they’re so highly compensated for is also to turn a blind eye to the poor people who suffer under these conditions, to ignore the abuse that undergirds their work.
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It is fascinating how frequently modest increases in quality of living in third world countries is wheeled out as justification for the predations of capitalism. If we're going to have a serious conversation about how the world is doing that has to include the fact that the global economy is predicated on continuous growth despite finite natural resources. There is also a few environmental issues that might be releva…
I'd advise reading the article I linked, the increases are far from modest in many cases. I'll agree with you on the environmental issues, but I think we're well on the way to solving those too and largely via the same mechanisms, Chinese solar is close to pushing coal out of business on price. That's not to say there's no role for regulation in the environmental direction though, I certainly think there probably sho…
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> More competition has not lead to better conditions for workers. We are currently at such a low level of employment that economists don't know what the natural level of employment is anymore and this is still happening to employees. 95% extreme poverty to 5%, much higher life expectancy, exponential wealth growth and low unemployement. Your first sentence plainly contradicts reality 100%. > You're argument that "the…
We might be talking about different points of time. I am looking at post ww2 US to today. I would agree with you that so far over the long term conditions have been greatly improved and still are being greatly improved in areas which don't have much to begin with like china 20-30 years ago. As it stands for the past few decades though the situation has been getting worse in the US. To your point about "trickle down d…
Lets remember trickle down is an originally demeaning term that has like a 100 years old, and was i think promoted by a comedian. It contains in itself an inconsistency with the general stance of lowering taxes, because the purported argument that its supposed to mock is that its better to tax poor people over rich people because rich know better to do with the money. But in general, the main reason to lower taxes is because anyone is better to do with money than the state. Its just that the state is just nominally more effective by taking money from those on top. I say nominally because in the end the state does know how to really tax poor people, which have less resources to fight it.
Progressive taxation in itself brings lots of problems and in its glory of simplification it commits many injustices as well. But above all, the idea of a tax to punish wealthy is envious and petty: they have more so they should pay more. Its not economics, its not morality, its a tantrum. It has been said in the past (i dont know if the math is current) that if you eliminated all exemptions of taxes and put a flat 15% tax on income, you would actually increase tax revenue. And you would do so without requirement nearly as much accounting work as it is today. One of the reasons that is politically hard to sell is because its not progressive enough. So I do see progressive taxation as an obstacle to simpler and more effective tax systems.
Inequality is a real problem, when libertarians say it doesnt matter I think they are wrong. But when liberals say that the way to manage that is a bigger state and bigger taxes they are "wronger". How to solve inequality is still an open problem: its growing even in europe where the tax rate is much higher and the state is much higher. So increasing taxes or state benefits are not the way to reduce inequality.
Now regarding labor laws: I dissent entirely with the premise. Labor laws were and are economically useful as long as they keep the state out of trampling their rights, but they are not useful to improve their working conditions. What lifts the workers labor conditions are not laws but competition for their labor. Lets take argentina as an example: it has strict labor laws and a "in dubis pro operario" legal system where any lawsuit against the employer rules in favor of the employee. Unions have constitutional protections, like their leaders cant be arrested. The result is that the strongest unions have high wages. Success? Hell no. Argentina has had growing poverty and stagnant GDP/capita growth since unions were given this power. The unions protect their workers at everybody elses expense. Because the only way to increase a workers wage is to increase his productivity (which unions dont do) or to reduce the number of workers. They plainly reduce supply, which means they push people to not have jobs.
You will find Argentina, Spain and France, countries with strong unions, to have higher unemployment.
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If you're going to play that game, you can very easily make a case (and probably a much stronger one) that capitalism's body-count is much, much higher. For starters, you'd have to credit it with the extermination of the Native Americans, the blood-soaked history of 19th century European colonialism, and the First World War.
Dude, this isn't a game. Show some respect for the dead. You're comparing apples to oranges here. The crimes you mention are all about subjugation of or violence against foreigners. Ill will towards foreigners is the human ur-prejudice -- it's older than our species, in fact. Giving in to this prejudice is something that could have happened under any politico-economic system. It happened under capitalism because capi…
Again, to play this game, we could just as easily say that your crimes are all about authoritarian dominance hierarchies, which certainly occur under capitalism, as well (how many people did Pinochet throw out of helicopters?)
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Labour unions are like leeches they suck productivity and promote mediocrity. If people are unhappy with the job they should simply resign and take up another.
A cursory glance at the history of the industrial revolution, or even conditions today in several places including Amazon, will tell you what happens when labor's right to organize is crushed.
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I don't know about that joke anymore. Being an Amazon customer used to be great, but the deliveries are bordering on ridiculously horrible now. I order something on Prime, then it doesn't show up when I expect it to, I get no notification of any delays, and then when I log in to see what's going on they have changed the original expected date so I can't even see what I was originally promised unless I took a screen s…
Also they don't give price adjustments for most of the products they sell. I bought a book and the day after I received it, the price dropped 30%. The customer support would not refund the difference. Instead I had to ship back the product first and buy it again. Now to ship it back, I have to pay the shipping unless I lie and say it was defective or go to their Amazon store in San Jose to drop it off.