SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Note that Civ and other strategy games in the same ilk got it wrong.
Science/Research is not something you "bank". Science is something you invest in, and continue to invest in. Stop the investment and "Science" regresses.
For those who haven't played the Civilization games, the idea is that you run a civilization and compete with other civilizations. They typically are city-oriented (a key step in expanding power of the civilization is building more cities), and they invariably bank science. That is, if I'm researching writing and decide for some reason to switch over to research other technologies for a while, I can pick up where I left off on writing - even if it is a thousand years later!
This is part of a larger problem, namely that civilization is seen as a strictly progressive affair - anything you do aside from losing wars moves the civilization forward. Sure, if you start next to Alexander the Great or nuclear Gandhi (or worst of all a human player!), you have plenty of opportunity to experience civilization setbacks as the aggressive neighbor makes war on you. But you can slack off on science, infrastructure maintenance, etc and pick it up later.
In the real world, there's plenty of failure modes other than losing wars. Conversely, a number of real world civilizations have lost a bunch of wars yet still were able to keep relevant.
Over the past couple of weeks, I've been watching a podcast series called "Fall of Civilizations". Production values do leave something to be desired (such as showing a trash fire in an unnamed Middle East neighborhood when discussing someone burning something in a war or rebellion or reusing stock images in multiple episodes), but it's an interesting angle on history. The author starts with a discussion of the significant ruins that the civilization left behind, often from the point of view of historical figures who discovered it first, what the civilization actually did that made it notable, and finally, what led to the fall and its aftermath - including from the point of view of the people caught up in the fall. Last I checked he's up to 16 episodes.
What's interesting is how few of these disasters have a single, clearly identifiable cause (sometimes they just don't know why at all). Usually it's multiple factors with considerable uncertainty as to the relative significance of the factors. Again, this isn't something captured in historical games like Civilization. For example, what combination of factors caused the collapse of the Assyrian empire (Episode 13)? Did it fall due to the fact nobody liked them and finally unified enough, climate change transition from the best rainfall in the region to something of a megadrought, vast overextension of the empire (key parts of the army couldn't return in time to the core Assyrian region to save it), or an effect nobody has considered yet (maybe some sort of heavy metal poisoning explains their wacky leaders)?
A key problem for many of these civilizations was that they either stopped banking something (the collapse of the trade networks and disappearance of multiple languages of the late Bronze Age cultures of the eastern Mediterranean which at least partially was due to not diversifying critical resource needs like bronze and food and very low literacy) or they had some hidden deficit in their civilization that grew over time (such as the decline of Sumeria due to widespread salinization of irrigated farmland which when the region was hit with a drier climate turned the area from a great net food producer to mass starvation).
That leads to my observation - that just because a society or civilization has something now, not just nuclear engineering know-how and experience, doesn't mean it can keep it. Too often strengths of civilizations are taken for granted and just assumed that they will continue no matter how much we or the environment impair them. Well, there are a bunch of dead civilizations that indicate otherwise. You or nature can break something to the point that your civilization no longer exists in a recognizable form.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 15, @09:57AM (6 children)
You are leaving your journal open to all and sundry to comment upon? Are you not afraid, khallow? After all, the leading cause of the fall of civilizations is freezed peaches.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 15, @12:47PM (4 children)
I have a peculiar problem I've encountered in Civilization II, which only occurs when I play as the Greek civilization. I'm hoping an expert on Ancient Greece such as yourself can help me resolve the problem.
In a city, I can assign my citizens to be philosophers and scientists. When I do this, the research output of my city initially increases. However, after a few turns, I find that my philosophers and scientists are no longer producing research, but are producing spam and shitposts instead. If I don't solve the problem, the philosophers and scientists will quickly cause a civil disorder within my city. When I get rid of the philosophers and scientists, my city returns to normal. The city is no longer producing any spam or shitposts, and the research is back to the level it was before I assigned any citizens to be philosophers and scientists.
It's peculiar, and I've noticed this only happens when I play as the Greek civilization. If I choose a different civilization, whether it's the Americans, English, Zulus, Russians, Chinese, Romans, or any of the others, I don't encounter this issue.
Do you have any idea why when I play as the Greek civilization, the philosophers and scientists stop doing research, start producing spam and shitposts, and cause civil disorder in my cities? It's a bizarre problem, and I'm hoping an expert on Ancient Greece like you might be able to offer some insight.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 15, @02:38PM
Well done, you silenced the troll with a paradoxical intervention.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 15, @08:06PM
In Greek, it is called "stasis", or civil war. But the Greeks were quite proficient at killing or exiling philosophers, or exporting them to Rome, and thus their eventual decline.
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 16, @09:43PM (1 child)
Have you tried banning Aristarchus?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18, @07:46AM
Tried, but we had to destroy the Soylentnews in order to save it. Damn ChiCom NVC! And aristarchus.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20, @04:11AM
You know, when a khallow journal gets this level of commentary, something is very wrong with SoylentNews. It is like all legitimate discussion has been mysteriously shut off, and aristarchus has been banned.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 15, @10:11AM (20 children)
I don't believe Civilization quite worked that way, if I remember correctly. I played a lot of Civilization II in the past, and I didn't play the original quite as much, so it's possible I don't remember the details of the original. I thought once you started researching a technology, you couldn't change it. Once you discovered the technology, then you were given the option of which one to research next. In terms of infrastructure, I believe there were three main categories of things that cities could build: units, buildings, and wonders. You could switch what a city was building, but I believe Civilization II implemented a penalty if you switched between categories. For example, you could switch from a barracks to the Pyramids, but you'd lose half your progress. I don't think you ever had the option of saving your progress on Pyramids and starting a barracks. I also don't recall ever switching the technology I was researching while in progress.
In your example, the infrastructure you're describing is primarily human infrastructure. When you decide to eliminate a technology like nuclear power, that means there is no longer a reason to produce some critical supplies and equipment that can't readily be adapted for other uses. You also need people to run the nuclear plants, and that was the point of the article. Japan will probably need to import equipment, materials, and expertise from other countries if they're going to come anywhere close to meeting their goal.
We may have much bigger problems in the United States in the future, though not specifically with nuclear power. The number of nuclear plants in the US peaked in the 1990s and has slowly declined since then, so there may be a problem if we want to expand our nuclear capacity. More generally, higher education is a concern, and we don't prioritize this enough.
We don't train students as well in higher education. There is pressure to inflate grades, meaning that we've lowered our standards of what we expect from students. And students increasingly have an expectation that courses should be easy and not require significant time. I've often heard a guideline that for every hour of in-class instruction per week, students should expect to spend about three hours on the course outside of class. For a standard three hour course, that's nine hours outside of the classroom per week. If students actually spend nine hours per week outside of class for a three hour course, the instructor is going to get a huge amount of backlash and horrendous evaluations. Many students are seeking credits, not an education. Universities, of course, are happy to go along with this.
The other issue is there is a war on higher education in our legislatures. State funding for higher education keeps getting cut, and universities are expected to do more with less. Administrative bloat and wasteful spending are real issues, but tuition has also increased dramatically because of the decline in public funding. We've driven up the costs of higher education, making it harder for students to access without either being wealthy or incurring substantial debt. It doesn't help that a significant portion of the political right is openly hostile to higher education, decrying it as indoctrination and encouraging students not to get a college education. In fairness to students, part of the reason they object to spending a lot of time on studying and homework is because they need to work a significant amount of hours each week to pay for college. The result of this will be fewer students getting a college education and a workforce that's less skilled.
This is different from the situation in Japan, because this isn't just a deficit of skilled workers in one area, but across any industry that requires highly skilled labor. The coursework needs to be challenging to promote learning. Paying for college shouldn't be a challenge for students, provided they're doing their part to learn and make progress. We're getting this wrong on both counts. The result may well be a shortage of skilled labor as more people leave the workforce.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 15, @10:26AM (2 children)
Your definition of "credit hour" is off. It is defined as either one "hour" of class per week plus two "hours" of outside work or the equivalent of that as appropriate for the educational setting. That is why lab credits, internship, etc. are worth different amount depending on how their equivalence works out by trading class time for outside time or vice versa. It is also why 15 hours is considered "full time" as the equivalent of 40 hours a week of work and 12 is the minimum for "full time" qualification in various federal programs because that is 30 hours of work a week.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 15, @12:22PM
Let's make sure to get this right. For undergraduate courses, a credit hour is supposed to be one hour of in-class instruction and two hours outside of class each week. You're correct, it's a minimum of three total hours per week, counting in-class and out-of-class work, and it was a simple error in my comment. For graduate courses, this increases to three hours outside of class per week. Graduate students are also considered full time at a lower threshold than undergrads. At many schools, the amount of work outside of class isn't an average but a minimum, meaning that it's a two hour minimum outside of class per credit hour. It is a minimum because that's what needs to be satisfied for accreditation standards. It is, of course, very difficult to measure this because students don't report the amount of time they spend outside of class each week. For a three credit hour class, that's 90 hours outside of class per semester. In practice, you'll get a lot of grumbling from students if a course requires that much work during a semester, which is my point. It's also more complicated than saying that students are lazy and don't want to put in the effort. That is an issue with some students, but it's also due to tuition increasing rapidly and needing to work more to pay for school.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 15, @12:35PM
I'm clearly biased toward the MIT credit scheme (since I'm a grad) which differs from the normal university "hour" system, https://registrar.mit.edu/registration-academics/academic-requirements/subject-levels-credit [mit.edu]
There is no exact conversion to the normal scheme, but that page offers guidelines. Typical course loads I remember of 4 or 5 classes were 40-50 units, which roughly translated into 40-50 hours per week.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 15, @02:52PM (14 children)
The value of the product has declined, but states are expected to fund more?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 15, @05:14PM (13 children)
That is exactly what I am saying, if your goal is to improve the quality of the product.
When states cut funding for higher education, those cuts affect the quality of the product. Schools raise tuition and increase enrollment to make up the difference. They increase enrollment by relaxing the admission standards. Student retention rates are often used to evaluate the quality of schools and are a factor in accreditation. Schools are lowering admission standards while also expecting to retain more students. Although there are programs that provide tutoring and other assistance to struggling students, faculty also face pressure to lower academic standards.
Reducing public funding for higher education encourages otherwise respectable schools to start acting like degree mills. Now, restoring a proper level of funding won't automatically improve the quality of education, but it is a necessary step toward making that happen. Too many students are paying to get credits and a degree, but not necessarily an education. Schools are all too happy to get on board with this because it's good for their budgets. Increasing state funding for higher education will help to decouple the budget from the size of enrollment, making it easier to maintain and increase academic standards.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Sunday January 15, @05:24PM (12 children)
I have a different explanation of that. There's more money per student (subsidized student loans) regardless of the quality of the student. So schools are cutting quality in order to increase revenue. The longer the student stays in school the more money.
Funding hasn't gone done, but up due to massive tuition inflation. States can't be reasonably expected to cover that when they have trouble covering their basic budget.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 15, @05:42PM (11 children)
Your explanation isn't different. Students are paying for the increased tuition in part with loans, which I said in my original post. I agree that schools make money by keeping students in school. That's exactly what student retention is. If schools want to keep students in school longer, they lower the academic standards to increase retention. I said exactly this.
Increasing enrollment is another part of this, because it means more students paying tuition. This means admitting students with weaker qualifications. These students are more likely to struggle in their classes. Retaining these students means further reducing academic standards. But it's good for the budget because there are more students paying tuition, and those students are staying in school longer.
An educated and highly skilled population is good for the economy, and therefore, for future tax revenue. Cutting higher education now to make up budget shortfalls is short-sighted. If you want more economic growth in the future, you need to invest now in human infrastructure.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 15, @05:49PM (6 children)
Except, of course, when it's not more educated and highly skilled. The problem here is that the narrative is broken. Higher education isn't actually cut. It's higher than ever. We're just rewarding bad behavior.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 15, @05:57PM (5 children)
I've said this in earlier comments, and I'll say it again. When a school's budget is less dependent on tuition money, there's less incentive to keep students in school longer, and therefore less incentive to lower academic standards. If you want to reduce the dependence on tuition dollars, increasing state funding for higher education is a good place to start. I don't think it's a sufficient condition for increasing the quality of higher education, but it probably is a necessary condition.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 15, @09:39PM (4 children)
If you want to reduce the price of eggs, increase state funding for chicken coop owners.
If you want to reduce the price of gasoline, increase... oh, forget it, it all means:
If you want to reduce the value of a dollar, increase state funding for dollars.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 16, @01:04AM (3 children)
Your comment is the opposite of insightful.
Obviously increasing state funding for higher education means that taxpayers are subsidizing the costs. If funding for higher education is less dependent on tuition, it reduces the incentive for schools to cut corners with the quality of education they provide.
If I don't have a driver's license, why do I have to pay taxes for roads? If I don't have a child in school, why do I have to pay taxes that fund primary and secondary education? If I'm not directly using either of these, why do I have to pay for them?
These, of course, are asinine questions. Even if I don't drive, I benefit from other people using roads to commute to their jobs and to ship goods to stores. Even if I don't have a child in school, I benefit from other people being educated, so that they can produce the goods and provide the services that I use. Although I might not be a direct user of either of roads or local schools, I still get significant benefits from them.
In the early 20th century, most Americans didn't get high school diplomas. You can read about the history here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_the_United_States#Secondary_schools [wikipedia.org]. This quote is particularly relevant:
Many jobs require more education and advanced skills now than a century ago. Public high schools don't charge tuition because funding comes from taxes. The public benefits from developing human infrastructure. The same should apply to higher education. Eliminate tuition costs for in-state public higher education. If you want to go out-of-state or to a private school, you can pay the tuition yourself, just like with high schools.
Eliminating tuition won't make college free, just like high school isn't free. It will help develop human infrastructure, so that we don't end up with a shortage of highly skilled workers in the future.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 16, @03:10AM (2 children)
I always wanted to drive a BMW Isetta. That's no more tangential than that path you're veering down to avoid facing the tragedy of inflationary and bigoted policies you are promoting.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20, @04:34AM (1 child)
My Father owned an Isetta. Used to stick me and my sister in the back, with the groceries. But I was always a little leery of a steering wheel on the door. So what is your point? Khallow will not approve of this BMW bashing. Try again with VW? (Volkswagen=folks wagon= People's car= Nazis)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20, @07:13AM
See #1287131... Ah, to have an Isetta on Carnaby Street in the '60s.
"I went to a restaurant that serves 'breakfast at any time'
so I ordered French toast during the Renaissance."
- Steven Wright
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 16, @01:36AM (3 children)
And the public through ex-students defaulting on that debt. Nondischargeable debt only recovers so much.
Except when it isn't. We're already seeing parts of the problem, such as an inability to understand or care what is "educated and highly skilled". We have a ridiculous amount of investment in US higher education, it just turns out to be extremely poor return for the investment. This is one of the big US diseases. Higher education is far from the only place where there is massive spending which doesn't go very far.
But going back to this thread, changing how we fund higher education isn't going to fix the problem - namely that large parts of the education system don't care or have to care about what the system is supposed to do.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 16, @01:48AM (2 children)
Cutting state funding won't solve the problem, though. We should be increasing state funding, then requiring that the funding be spent on faculty and student support staff. Prohibit the funds from being spent on more administrators and construction of buildings. It's a fair criticism that the money isn't spent wisely. But the solution isn't to cut state funding even more. Instead, mandate that public universities spend the money in ways that directly improve the quality of education that students receive.
Like I said, increasing state funding isn't a sufficient to improve the quality of public higher education, but it is necessary. The other part is requiring that the funds be spent on actually improving the product.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 16, @02:55AM
> Like I said, increasing state funding isn't a sufficient to improve the quality of public higher education, but it is necessary.
The more it costs, the more it's worth, 'eh?
The Greta Thunberg of education.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Monday January 16, @05:05AM
How much has state funding actually been cut? I see some signs of short term declines following recessions, but like in this article [urban.org], there doesn't seem to be a significant long term issue here with state funding being cut.
Just not seeing the narrative here.
That assumes the people mandating have a clue what the money should be spent on. I'm not confident given your assertion:
If a university can't figure out how to recast its administrators and shiny new buildings as student support staff and such, then they probably aren't smart enough to be a problem now.
My take is that there might be a case for a mild subsidy of education but not a free one nor the subsidized student loan abomination that the US presently has. That's because the public funding sources have demonstrated solidly that they have a mix of profound ignorance and apathy about building educational infrastructure. The people who don't? The universities and their students. If a student wants to spend their own money to have a terrible education, then I'm fine with that. I figure the actual effort of paying for that education will encourage them to make better use of it, than if they just get something for free from the government. Moral hazard and all that.
Universities also do other work than education. And I have no trouble with governments paying reasonable amounts for actual services provided.
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Sunday January 15, @03:48PM
You can change a lot of things in the server settings. On Linux, when setting up a server, I have a lot of options. Playing with those options can change how the game plays drastically. That said, I'll make no attempt to correlate you memories with other people's memories - I have zero idea who played what, when, with whom, or on what servers.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 15, @05:40PM
Later versions allowed for banking of the sort I mentioned. But consider another form of that banking, you could put a lot of "bulbs" into research or little. So say money production was your thing for a while, research would limp along at whatever the lowest rate was. But then you change your mind later and suddenly you can resume without penalty.
And I bet someone thought the same thing when they kicked off this mess by creating those subsidized student loans. Welcome to unintended consequences. When someone thinks something is very important, they can make it very expensive.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Sunday January 15, @03:55PM (175 children)
We've heard that refrain from various people for decades. But, it's happening here.
Also, we often hear that 'Rome wasn't built in a day.' We never hear that 'Rome didn't fall in a day.' But, the latter is just as true as the former. Rome fell due to an accumulation of bad decisions over centuries, not just one bad decision by the last emperor. And, we are making our own bad decisions here, today.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 15, @05:55PM (5 children)
We already have more free bread and circuses than we could ever pay for with magical money, and now the aqueducts are falling apart. We simply need more prophets and orators.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 15, @09:14PM (4 children)
And the people bowed and prayed to the neon god they'd made
And the sign flashed its warning in the words that it was forming
And the sign said the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls, and whispered in the sounds of silence
- Paul Simon
Matters not knowledge at hand
If the truth is shadow-banned
- AC, me
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 15, @10:22PM (3 children)
Is it, the Sound, of Silence? Only the braying dogs of Brietbarf come to the fore!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23, @03:26PM (2 children)
Dogs don't bray
braying
noun
The harsh crying of an ass.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23, @06:26PM (1 child)
Yes, of course. You are correct, and obviously did not get the reference. Now, go cry havoc, and lose the asses of war, M'kay?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 24, @05:19AM
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Sunday January 15, @06:04PM (114 children)
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Sunday January 15, @06:57PM (113 children)
See AC's post above. An economy that depends on welfare is doomed to failure. I've often mentioned that we "need to import labor" because 'Muricans aren't willing to do the work that needs to be done. Bringing in Latin American laborers who work cheap, so that we can subsidize generational welfare families in the ghettos is all wrong. And, no one is going to make a rational argument for the practice. Get those young men and young women out of their ghettos, get them out in the countryside, and put them to work. And, when you do, pay them a fair wage! Don't expect them to work for room and board, and maybe fifty bucks a week, like we expect from immigrants.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 15, @08:11PM (2 children)
We all must get off Runaway's dogpatch, and admit that his racism is real. "Get a job, you darn woke hippy!" Generational gullible rednecks. Living in "Modular Housing" (trailers). Khallow's understanding of higher education is largely from a distance, an exterior, alien view. Simulation? Or video game? Or von Mises economic fantasy?
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 15, @09:32PM (1 child)
Some of us are quite thankful that we were deprived of your fine "education".
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 15, @10:31PM
Ignints es bleese yas?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 15, @09:01PM (74 children)
- Home Depot Cofounder Bernie Marcus Blames Socialism for ‘Lazy,’ ‘Fat,’ ‘Stupid’ Labor Force [breitbart.com]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 16, @01:24AM (73 children)
Bernie Marcus is a misanthropic dumbass, and that's putting it nicely.
While we're on the subject of socialism, let's use the right-wing story about the first Thanksgiving as an example. You can read one version of it here: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/thanksgiving-lessons-about-the-failures-of-socialism-and-the-success-of-private-property-and-capitalism/ [aei.org].
Let's assume this is historically accurate, and that common ownership of the land and goods led to people being lazy and the Plymouth colony almost failing. The account is disputed, but let's not focus on that. Let's focus on how this was solved:
Let's be clear about this: the colonial government gave each family some land. The family was then responsible for using of the land to grow crops, raise animals, or otherwise making productive use of the land. While each family had to work in order to survive, they were also given resources in the form of a parcel of land.
In the present day, giving land to each family would be criticized as a government handout. People like Bernie Marcus would complain that the people weren't forced to work for someone else, save money, and buy the land for themselves. I have no doubt that Bernie Marcus would call this socialism.
Bernie Marcus didn't make his fortune from his own hard work, but from luck and exploiting others. Home Depot is notorious for awful wages and providing employees with as few benefits as possible. That is why Bernie Marcus opposed pro-union bills like the Employee Free Choice Act, because if the bills became law, it would be harder for people like him to exploit workers.
Bernie Marcus has nothing useful to add to the discussion.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 16, @01:42AM (69 children)
So this argument is wrong somehow because rightwingers are hypocritical? Do tell!
In other words, not just his hard work alone - doesn't look like anyone was claiming that Marcus pulled Home Depot out of his forehead. "Exploiting" is just Marxist shorthand for "gainfully employed". And this act (let's call it EFCA for now), is just a clusterfuck waiting to happen. Labor unions are already overpowered legally. We don't need to give them more.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 16, @02:18AM (68 children)
Let's talk about what exploitation really looks like: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/living-wage-hazard-pay-amazon-home-depot-lowes/ [cbsnews.com].
Bernie Marcus is throwing a temper tantrum because he thinks employees should work harder, but he shouldn't have to pay them more for the extra effort and work. Companies like Home Depot have the money, but they prefer to spend the money enriching shareholders instead of the employees who actually create value.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 16, @02:46AM (8 children)
> Bernie Marcus is throwing a temper tantrum because he thinks employees should work harder, but he shouldn't have to pay them more for the extra effort and work.
You want to hire someone to do a job; the job has a certain value to the employer; the prospective employee bitches that it's not enough; the prospective employee moves on; the employer is saved from some unnecessary pain in the ass. The rich get rich by "exploiting" the people they hire; the poor never hire anybody.
It's more about Carl Karcher than Karl Marx. We off-shored the control of the means of production, years ago.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 16, @10:54AM (7 children)
To summarize, you characterize an employee who expects to be paid fairly for the value added to the company, is n "unnecessary pain in the ass." This is enough to tell me you haven't got a clue how corporations actually work. The shareholders aren't creating value by building products, performing services, and making sales. The value is created by the employees, who you describe as unnecessary pains in the ass. I've got news for you: if you get rid of all these unnecessary pains in the ass, nobody is left to create value for the company, and the company is worthless, perhaps worse if they have a mountain of debt. You're a corporate bootlicker who clearly doesn't understand how corporations actually function and create value.
Despite my frequent disagreement with Runaway on a plethora of issues, he at least has the good sense to acknowledge that we should be paying workers fair wages. At least Runaway seems to understand who actually creates value for businesses, and it's not the wealthy people at the top of the corporate pyramid.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 16, @05:21PM (6 children)
> To summarize...
No, that's your interpretation.
In summary: the boss determines what it is worth to hire someone to open the shipping container and put the hammer on the shelf; the prospective hire determines that it is not enough money, and instead of offering more value, they bitch about it. The boss hires someone else, or hires this pain in the ass, and jacks-up the retail price of the hammer; hammer sales decline, or the person who purchases the hammer has to jack-up prices to cover the increased cost; either inflation spirals, or business declines and we all live on government bread while we sit on our asses playing with our circus-phones.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 16, @07:34PM (5 children)
It's a shame that it's the middle of winter. Your comment is some grade A bullshit. If it was warm enough to grow crops, I could print off copies of your comment and use it to fertilize my crops.
Home Depot has more than enough money to pay higher wages without raising prices. They just need to pay their employees instead of paying shareholders with stock buybacks. Employees are the people who create value for companies. Shareholders aren't creating value for the company, but companies like Home Depot prioritize paying them over their employees. Even without stock buybacks, shareholders would still get paid with dividends, and could still sell shares of stock on the open market. There's more than enough money to pay employees better if the money doesn't get spent to further enrich shareholders.
As for your screed about inflation, isn't it convenient that inflation concerns are only raised when money is going to the working class? Inflation conveniently isn't discussed when more money is being funneled to wealthy people. Funny how that works.
It's a false dichotomy to pretend that the only options are to keep employee wages low or to raise prices. The solution is to prioritize paying employees, who actually create value for the company, instead of shareholders.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 16, @07:50PM (4 children)
To summarize: The more you pay, the more it's worth.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 22, @09:33AM (3 children)
This is khallow's alternative to the labor theory of value, the vacuous "exchange value" theory. Something is worth something, even if it is not, simply because someone else will give you something of actual value for it. This is the foundation of crypto-currency.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 23, @05:22AM (2 children)
Given that you acknowledged that one received actual value under this valuation scheme (unlike the labor theory of value!), you just made my rebuttal for me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23, @06:28PM (1 child)
How much bitcoin for your backhoe, per hour? Do you accept unicorn farts or Republican economic theory as alternative payment?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 24, @05:21AM
Don't be an idiot. I can quickly turn relatively liquid bitcoin into something I value. If I could similarly convert unicorn farts and Republican economic theory into a cash equivalent fast, I would accept those as well. But I guess some people just don't get economics. It's an all too common illness in our age.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 16, @04:56AM (58 children)
Let me guess: that highly valuable sense of entitlement is why these employees should be paid double what they presently are. And glancing at the title, clearly a "living wage" is way lower than the author claims otherwise we wouldn't have so many people living on it!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 16, @10:44AM (55 children)
Only in the world of corporate bootlickers like you and the other AC who replied to my post is it entitlement to expect that companies pay their employees fair wages for working.
More accurately, instead of paying employees as the companies pledged to do, they paid the shareholders through corporate buybacks. It's not that the companies didn't have the money to pay employees more. They had plenty of money, but chose to enrich shareholders instead. Would you care to explain the massive value that shareholders added to the companies to get paid instead of the employees? Please do tell.
I should point out that stock buybacks are a shade practice, and they were banned in the US until 1982. The ban was instituted in the 1930s for good reason, because stock buybacks are used as a form of market manipulation. I should also point out that shareholders already get paid in the form of dividends. Most stock buybacks are done on the open market, where shareholders already have the ability to sell stock when they desire to do so.
I would like you to explain how these shareholders are more deserving of being paid than the employees who actually work and add value to the company? Stock buybacks can increase the earnings per share by reducing the number of shares, but they don't add real value to the company. The employees generate earnings, which is what actually adds value to the company. Why should the shareholders get paid instead of the employees, who actually create value for the company?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Monday January 16, @07:05PM (54 children)
They provided the capital and are given some degree of control in return. If Marcus didn't take care of those shareholders, then they would sell to someone else who would. You demonstrate here that you don't understand and/or care about the constraints on the Home Depot CEO. Further, consider that the stock price for Home Depot may have been very underpriced. This might have been a direct way to both maintain control of Home Depot and take advantage of covid-related market hysteria in a way that makes it stronger and a better employer in the long term.
And what I find particularly silly about your complaints is that you haven't bothered to assert why the present wages aren't "fair". It's just some mouth declaring that they are below something called living wages. But then my take is that any level of wages wouldn't be fair in your eyes. It makes no sense to try to placate demands that can never be met. Better to do what's good for the company and just ignore you.
Because the politicians of that time were idiots. We're still suffering from a variety of bad policies instituted then.
Of course, it's market manipulation. So what? It's transparent and approved by the shareholders. That ends the problems for it - keep in mind that workers have no claim to that money.
Your post is a typical cargo cult post. We just need to act in a certain way and the cargo planes will come - mission accomplished. There is no consideration of the situation, particularly the future health of the business. A one time stock buyback can't sustain higher wages forever, for example.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18, @04:41PM (53 children)
I don't feel any sympathy for the plight of the wealthy. It seems that you follow Rule of Acquisition #211: "Employees are the rungs on the ladder of success. Don't hesitate to step on them." That would also make you an awful manager or executive.
When I agree to work for a business, I am agreeing to provide X value in exchange for a set amount of compensation. The compensation can be in the form of salary, wages, or commission. When people like Bernie Marcus are complaining about employees being lazy, they're saying that employees should provide X + Y value, but with no increase to the compensation. They're paying for X but expecting employees to provide Y for free.
It would be different if a company was willing to provide additional fair compensation for the extra time and work they expect from employees. Instead, they want that extra time and work for free. Employees aren't benefiting from the extra value they're expected to provide. Instead, it makes managers look good to their bosses, they get bonuses, and the company funnels some of the extra earnings to shareholders through dividends or stock buybacks.
Let's say that I pay my ISP a set amount of money each month for web hosting. In exchange, the ISP provides a certain level of support, some amount of storage on their servers, and allows a certain amount of data transfer during the month. I am the customer, and I'm buying that service for a set price. The scenario I'm describing would be like me demanding the ISP provide me additional services above and beyond what we've agreed upon, but that I'm not going to pay anything extra for those services. Chances are, my ISP is going to tell me no, that they're not going to provide extra services for free. It would be like me saying that my ISP is greedy, and that their employees are lazy and entitled, because they won't give me stuff for free.
If I did that, you would probably say I have a massive sense of entitlement. You would be correct. That's exactly what people like Bernie Marcus are doing. They are petulant, throwing temper tantrums because employees won't give them extra time and work for free. Bernie Marcus has a massive sense of entitlement.
Quiet quitting is when employees decide to not work or put in time above and beyond what they've agreed upon with their employer. The employees are providing what their employer is paying for, just no more and no less. Managers and executives complain about this, saying it's bad for their companies if employees won't provide extra value for free. It tells me that managers and executives have a massive sense of entitlement. If you want something extra from employees, you need to pay them extra.
As for your comment about it being unsustainable to raise salaries or wages using funds from a one-time stock buyback, that doesn't mean you can't use it to pay employees. If the company is doing well enough to have extra cash around, they always have the option of providing bonuses to employees. If employees are providing extra value so that the company has more profits, good managers would reward the employees with bonuses.
By the way, good managers and executives do make sure good employees are compensated well. It's good for the long term success and profitability of the company because it reduces employee turnover, avoids the costs of training new employees, and helps retain employees who do their job well. When people like Bernie Marcus try to keep employee pay down, it actually shows they're bad executives.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18, @06:32PM
> It seems that you follow Rule of Acquisition #211:
It seems unlikely that any orange people — Ferengi or Trumpi — would hire you. It would be best for you to evaluate your own position in the Star Trek Multiverse. Perhaps you could try to join an Orion pirate ship.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 18, @07:05PM (51 children)
Why should I care that you don't? We get this same nonsense every time. A manager or business that supports the agenda and interests of the poster is considered good and those that don't are considered bad. Then we get the sermons about the mental problems of the rich/wealthy and odes to fairness. Finally, let's consider a question you asked earlier:
Now you (or perhaps some other AC who sounds just like you) write:
There you go. You have a set contract that you agreed to. Your interest in what you "deserve" only manifests when there's money on the table to steal.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18, @07:36PM (50 children)
Ah yes, in your eyes, the wealthy can do no wrong. Instead of addressing the actual points I made, you've pulled out a tiny snippet and basically said "gotcha." Here's what I actually said:
You ignored the second part of that. The business wants employees to go above and beyond the value they agreed to provide. Perhaps that extra value, Y, makes the company more money. Instead of compensating the employees for the extra value, either with raises or bonuses, that money goes to shareholders. When employees decline to provide the extra value, Y, for free, executives like Bernie Marcus throw a petulant temper tantrum, say the employees are too woke, and decry them as lazy.
When the employees provide extra value and the company makes more money, in your eyes that extra money should go to the shareholders instead of paying the employees for the extra value they provide. Just like I said, this is exploitation.
I'm not expecting you will actually address any of this, because it shows that your argument is bullshit.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18, @09:38PM (4 children)
> ...Here's what I actually said:
Look out, everybody! It's coming 'round yet again!
Twentieth verse, same as the first
I'm Henry the eighth, I am
Henry the eighth, I am, I am
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18, @09:48PM (3 children)
Okay, nostyle, do you actually have anything to contribute to the discussion? And yes, you are nostyle; the posting style is very recognizable.
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18, @10:41PM
You couldn't be any more wronger. See my answer after another of your accusations.
You are Bozo The Eighth, aren't you? You do use that writing style.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19, @08:59AM (1 child)
C'mon, Bro! Obviously aristarchus. And, what discussion?
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23, @06:32PM
What? Isn't Aristarchus perma-banned, exiled, shunned, condemned to the Six and three quarters level of hell? Thank goodness he can't post here, anymore, and make fun of the intellectually challenged.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 18, @11:58PM (44 children)
Because it's irrelevant in a perverse way. It's not rich guy grumbling that he's not getting X+Y now for fixed wages Z, but rather someone grumbling that workers deserve Z+Y now for fixed work X.
What extra value? Merely punching in isn't extra value. That "quiet quitting" you mentioned earlier isn't extra value. You've been bragging for several posts now about how workers are determined not to provide that extra value!
Are your expectations worth a pound of bullshit? Maybe you should continue talking about something we all care about.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19, @01:28AM (43 children)
Either you're a total dipshit or you have a massive sense of entitlement. Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn which one of those is the case. If what you said was true, we wouldn't get articles like this:
https://www.businessinsider.com/quiet-quitting-boss-backlash-shows-some-managers-always-expected-overwork-2022-8 [businessinsider.com]
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-backlash-to-quiet-quitting-smacks-of-another-attempt-by-the-ruling-class-to-get-workers-back-under-their-thumbs-am-i-wrong-11661474578 [marketwatch.com]
https://www.fastcompany.com/90833697/quietly-promoted-what-look-out-for [fastcompany.com]
Of course, you'll invent some bullshit reason why none of this is real. You'll invent some bullshit reason to tell everyone that workers should be glad that they're not getting paid so that shareholders can get larger dividends and stock buybacks. I'm not replying because I think you'll care about facts or evidence. I know for certain that you don't care about the truth. I just want to make sure that anyone who is reading this can clearly see that you're full of shit so that they can dismiss anything you post as utter nonsense.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 19, @02:18AM (42 children)
The word is "narrative". Narratives can be real. But they can also be bullshit - like these. For a glaring example, is there any sort of measure of the number of so-called "quiet quitters" or the alleged backlash? It's just a few people giving their opinions to some writers who are hyping it up.
Because writers would somehow write something different to attract eyeballs? They're just selling a narrative. It might matter a little to them whether it's true or not, but really what matters is who reads it.
Like you don't deserve it? Wasn't hard.
You ever get near the truth you let us know, k? In the meantime, this is still the entitlement speaking. Sure, I agree that there are good and bad employers/bosses out there. But what I keep hearing from you like a broken record is what you deserve/want not any serious reciprocal understanding which would also consider the business's interests. If you can find a business willing to entertain that skewed viewpoint and give you what you want, congrats. But don't be surprised, if that doesn't happen often.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19, @08:48PM (41 children)
First, I apologize for my lack of civility when I insulted you in my previous comment. Although I find your position absurd, it does not justify the insults I posted. I am sorry.
Ah yes, the "you don't deserve it" comment. Who are you to determine what a person does or does not deserve? That's an extremely weak justification for your position.
In the situation we're discussing, the company is very profitable and has extra cash on hand. The shareholders get paid through dividends and stock buybacks. The executives get paid through bonuses. The upper and middle managers get paid through bonuses. But arbitrarily, the rank and file workers who are working hard to generate those profits don't deserve it. The managers and executives that get the bonuses aren't making the sales that drive profits. The shareholders aren't making the sales to drive the profits. It's the rank and file employees, but they arbitrarily don't deserve it. That makes zero sense and is incredibly illogical. Rank and file employees who drive the company's profits should get to share in the success. It is perverse and incredibly backwards to say that the employees driving the sales don't deserve to share in the extra profits from those additional sales.
It's not that the shareholders, executives, and managers are evil for benefiting from the success and profitability of the company. However, it is ineffective management when the employees don't also get to share in that success. When employees get to share in the success through incentives like bonuses, they're more likely to be personally invested in the success of the company, so they will probably be more productive.
Your logic is warped. What you're describing is commonly how businesses operate, but it's also bad managing.
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Friday January 20, @01:05AM (40 children)
A person quite capable of making such determinations just like the journalists who sold us these stories.
Do we know that is what is happening? Or is that the narrative talking? First, we do know that Home Depot, the business mostly being discussed in this thread is near [macrotrends.net] a peak profit-wise.
The profit for 2022 (and 2020) is actually a slight decline due to high inflation, but they had a year of extremely good profit growth (mid 2020 through to mid 2021) with a sharp slowdown since though still keeping almost all of that profit growth.
Second, we don't know what bonuses or other rewards they may have given to employees over the past few years. This story [ibtimes.com] indicates those benefits were significant.
My take is that moral outage sells. That's incidentally the principle angle of fake news. Fake news sources don't talk about boring people with different interests and viewpoints, but things like pedophiles grooming your children. Here, it's much the same. I strongly doubt that Home Depot could get where it is now by treating its employees like shit. But a story about corporate leadership selling out employees, sells. People want to believe.
Just keep in mind that those journalists are acting just as bad in reality as what they claim corporate leaders are doing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20, @02:45AM (38 children)
In fairness, we should probably separate the business dealings of Home Depot from the positions expressed by Bernie Marcus. Although Bernie Marcus has a significant about of his wealth in Home Depot stock, he has been retired for 21 years. His opinions do not necessarily reflect how Home Depot is run today.
Workers are not evil. They are not fat, lazy, entitled, excessively woke, or whatever other vile things Bernie Marcus says about them. Workers are simply looking out for their own interests. They are not necessarily being selfish or greedy when they seek higher pay. They are simply acting in their own interest to try to maximize their pay. Without laborers to staff Home Depot stores, Bernie Marcus would not have his fortune. He built his business and made his wealth with the help of the laborers. When the workers sell more goods and services to customers, they increase the profits Home Depot, and help grow the wealth of shareholders like Bernie Marcus. The same people he viciously attacks verbally are the people who still help to grow his wealth. Let's be clear: I don't have a problem with Bernie Marcus being wealthy. I do have a problem with the nasty generalizations he made about labor that keep getting repeated by an AC. In reality, businesses are acting in their own interests, as customers for labor. Workers are acting in their own interests, as the supply of labor.
As you've noted, Home Depot has provided $1.7 billion in temporary benefits during the pandemic and an additional $1 billion annually. The board also approved $15 billion in stock buybacks. Here are sources: https://www.ajc.com/news/business/home-depot-board-approves-15-billion-stock-buyback/XTUQG67SDVACJAPJOYX3AKY3H4/ [ajc.com] and https://ir.homedepot.com/news-releases/2022/08-18-2022-220039606 [homedepot.com]. The previous year, the board approved $20 billion in stock buybacks. Here is a source for that: https://ir.homedepot.com/news-releases/2021/05-20-2021-210606992 [homedepot.com]. By the numbers, Home Depot is spending a lot more on stock buybacks than they are on investing in employee benefits. Employees are just looking out for their own interests and trying to get a bigger bite of the apple.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 20, @03:52AM (37 children)
Except, of course, when they are. Sometimes a few years in the real world can cure that, but there's a lot of ways to evade that. While I doubt they have many like them working at Home Depots, I imagine a lot of those journalists you've been linking have managed to become some combination of the above. I'll note the contrary runs throughout your paragraph. For example, sure, workers are instrumental to Home Depots's success, but so is reducing the number of fat, lazy, etc workers who would otherwise take away/steal from that success.
Also, an enormous thing missed in this sort of game is that Home Depot's leadership and capital is necessary to have a Home Depot. A bunch of "quiet quitting" workers in isolation is just a bunch of cavemen looking for a cave. They wouldn't have either a clue how to run a hardware store (much less any other sort of business) nor any interest in doing so. And the incentives to create and grow businesses mean that there's a bunch of people who actually do something interesting that benefits a lot of other people rather than merely being another warm body that punches in.
That leads to my decades-old observation: when you have a lot of unemployed and many lousy jobs out there, it's because there's too high a ratio of would-be employees to would-be employers. In that case, the employers become the important side of the trade. You won't make it better by making the employing of people harder and more expensive!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20, @04:21AM (36 children)
This is the Bernie Marcus quote that keeps showing up:
I don't think you'll find too many people who support giving good pay to employees who are lazy and don't do the job. If you're an employee who works hard when you're on the clock, you're going to resent if a lazy employee gets the same pay that you do. It's unfair to good employees. You don't find too many people who would oppose firing employees who don't work.
That's not what Bernie Marcus said, though. He isn't saying that lazy employees should be fired. He is making a broad generalization that most or all employees are lazy and don't care. As someone who works hard at his job, I resent that generalization. If you work hard at your job, you should also resent what Bernie Marcus said. You've said that you make sure to do the work your employer expects of you, and that you do the work well. According to Bernie Marcus, you're lazy, fat, and stupid.
All throughout this journal, I've been arguing to pay employees on the basis of the merit they provide. When employees do better work, take on more responsibilities, and provide more value to their employer, they should be paid more. It's unfair to give those employees the same pay as someone who doesn't do the job they're paid to do.
You say that good management of a company is important in making the company profitable, and that selling equity can provide capital to grow the company. I don't have a problem with that. But the company isn't going to be profitable without workers to create goods, provide services, and sell the products to customers. Many of your comments seem to minimize the importance of the laborers, but they are essential to the success of the company. If most or all the workers are lazy, fat, and stupid, Home Depot certainly isn't going to be profitable. I doubt any company will be profitable if most or all of the workers are lazy, fat, and stupid.
You've said that you show up to work and give your employer the work they expect from you. That doesn't make you lazy, fat, and stupid like Bernie Marcus says. It means you're doing your job. And you deserve to be paid fairly for the work you do.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 20, @05:24AM (35 children)
I would - the lazy, don't-do-the-job, would-be employees themselves. And my take is that there are already too many of them.
And in that article, he immediately carved out an exception for the people who worked for Home Depot:
He may have made further exceptions/walk-backs in the Financial Times article which is paywalled. I can't tell.
And I believe I have been so paid. I'm not bothered by what Marcus has said, even if for some reason he includes me as part of the problem.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20, @01:24PM (34 children)
My take is that you're dramatically exaggerating the problem. Neither you nor Bernie Marcus has provided any evidence to support that employees are any lazier or stupider in the past. Bernie Marcus' comments are intended to score political points by bashing those he sees as woke and to exaggerate any potential threats to the economy. You will find very few people who would advocate for abolishing private ownership of the means of production. Americans are not advocating that companies like Home Depot should be privately owned. Whenever someone proposes that their should be more regulations to protect the interests of the working class, people like Bernie Marcus, various AC posters in this journal, and you quickly line up to insist that it is socialism. Regulation is not socialism. Social programs are not socialism. No, socialism is about removing the means of production from private control. Since Bernie Marcus doesn't seem to understand what socialism is, his comments should be dismissed as him trying to score political points.
The origins of the 40 hour work week were in the Netherlands in the 19th century, with the concept of eight hours of work, eight hours for recreation, and eight hours for sleep. This was in an era where 12-14 hour work days were normal. Wealthy people, of course, didn't work in factories or in the fields, and therefore weren't subject to the long work days that were expected of the working class. I expect that the the Bernie Marcus types of that era would dismiss workers as lazy, fat, and stupid for wanting to work eight hours instead of 12-14 hours. If you were alive in the 19th century, you probably would have told workers of that era that, "you don't deserve it."
Henry Ford wrote in 1926, "It is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either lost time or a class privilege." Just as people dismiss advocates for workers' rights as Marxists in the present day, Henry Ford was compared to Karl Marx [theatlantic.com]. It is particularly ironic that Ford was compared with Marx, because Ford was a de facto Nazi. As in the present day, terms like socialism and Marxism were used to oppose and dismiss pro-labor ideas. In that era, fear mongering linking Communism with labor rights activism was so extreme that laws like the Taft-Hartley Act [wikipedia.org] were passed, penalizing labor unions whose leaders did not file affidavits affirming that they were not communists.
Fear mongering linking the pro-labor movement to socialism proved incorrect in the 20th century, and it's also incorrect today. Ironically, Bernie Marcus' criticisms of laborers are lazy and stupid.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Saturday January 21, @05:42PM (33 children)
I strongly disagree. Exhibit A is the substantial decline in the quality of US education over the past half century, top to bottom. Closely related is exhibit B, the growing number of people who never held a job until some point in their mid-twenties. Finally, there's exhibit C, nutty regulations to force people to be lazy, such as your above 40 hour work week.
What's perverse about the last one is that now we have enforced spare time we have a resource that regulators can exploit like low value busywork - sorting near worthless recyclables or increasing paperwork.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 21, @11:09PM (1 child)
Now, now, khallow. Let's just leave Runaway out of this.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 22, @12:13AM
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 22, @10:33PM (30 children)
There you have it, khallow's views are so extreme that he thinks you're lazy, fat, and stupid if you're only spending 40 hours of your week working for someone else*. Also, notice how khallow has become more overt in his contempt for the working class, moving the goal posts from working 40 hours per week being "gainfully employed" to people who work 40 hours per week are lazy, fat, and stupid. He doesn't even attempt to hide how much he despises the working class.
Do you want a 40 hour work week? As khallow says, "You don't deserve it."
* In khallow's world, this magically does not apply to executives, members of the board of directors, or shareholders.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 23, @01:22AM (29 children)
It's interesting how dishonest this question is. I've never been against people choosing to work 40 hour or even zero hour work weeks. What I've been against is using government power to force people to work 40 hour work weeks. It's pathological that you can't understand this.
Who incidentally tend to work a lot more than 40 hours a week. Funny how you refuse to pass on the privileges of the rich to the poor.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23, @02:41AM (24 children)
If that were the case, you wouldn't have cited it as an example of employees becoming increasingly "lazy, fat, and stupid." You didn't simply criticize the regulation.
You did, indeed, use it as an excuse to say that employees are lazy.
That's not true, either. The law does not prohibit employees from working more than 40 hours per week. For one, many employees are classified as being exempt, meaning that their employers can force them to work well in excess of 40 hours per week. Also, even non-exempt employees can work more than 40 hours per week. The law just requires that employers either provide compensatory time off from work or provide overtime pay at a minimum of 1.5 times the regular pay. It is simply not true that the law prevents employees from working in excess of 40 hours per week.
Your issue obviously isn't with how the law applies to exempt employees because the 40 hour work week doesn't apply to them. Therefore, your issue is with employers having to provide compensatory time or overtime pay to non-exempt employees. The Fair Labor Standards Act places no prohibitions on employees working more than 40 hours in a week, nor does it prohibit employers from requiring employees to work in excess of 40 hours per week. It only requires that non-exempt employees receive compensatory time or overtime pay.
The law isn't restricting the poor from working overtime. The law requires that businesses provide compensation when they require non-exempt employees to work overtime.
You lied, and that is a whopper of a lie. How ironic that you accuse other people of lying when you post something like that. Politifact would rate your post as pants-on-fire, and you would deserve it.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 23, @05:41AM (23 children)
Let's review what I actually wrote:
It's not just people becoming increasingly "lazy, fat, and stupid", it's about using regulation to force people to become "lazy, fat, and stupid". That's particularly remarkable since you quoted this very portion in your next section and continued to get it wrong.
The part you completely missed is what color their collars are. White collar, salaried employees are higher paid as a category than the blue collar employees who get paid by the hour. All members of your out-groups, "executives, members of the board of directors, or shareholders" are all white collar and conveniently dodge the 40 hours per week laws.
Privilege of the wealthy.
It just doesn't happen much because of that higher cost. A refusal to recognize unintended consequences is a classic symptom of your sort of argument.
We see that you completely mischaracterized my statements above. You posted falsehoods. I doubt it was intentional, which is the threshold for lies, but it does indicate considerable dishonesty.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23, @09:29AM (22 children)
You are claiming that regulation that sets the work week at 40 hours causes people to only work 40 hours per week, making those people "lazy, fat, and stupid." In other words, if they only worked more than 40 hours per week, they wouldn't be "lazy, fat, and stupid."
The reason you're so upset about what I said isn't because it's inaccurate. It is, indeed, quite accurate. No, your objection is because when I describe what you said, it makes you look bad, and you're trying to weasel out of what you said.
Without the limitations of the 40 hour work week, which really should apply to everyone, many employers would happily require longer hours of their employees. It's unlikely that they're going to give their employees the choice if they want to work more than 40 hours, instead just insisting that employees work longer if they want their jobs. You want to give more employers the option of forcing their employees to work longer hours, of course coming at the expense of the health and quality of life for those employees.
I'll just quote your own words right back at you: "A refusal to recognize unintended consequences is a classic symptom of your sort of argument."
This law restricts the extent to which businesses can exploit their employees by forcing them to work excessively long hours. Only in your warped world is an anti-exploitation law actually some kind of elitist oppression of the working class.
Here's a hint for you: I only work 40 hours per week for my employer. I have a business of my own that I'm growing on the side, doing something I enjoy far more than my day job. At a minimum, it will provide more financial security for me. If I'm more optimistic, perhaps it will allow me to leave my day job. If my employer demanded longer working hours, it would prevent me from doing this. If that constitutes additional work beyond 40 hours, it is different in that my work doesn't go to benefit executives or shareholders. Instead, I directly earn those benefits because I'm working for myself instead of wealthy elites. Again, the FLSA doesn't actually prevent people from working longer than 40 hours per week. It just prevents employers from exploiting their employees.
I have better things to do than continuing this discussion with you, when you're not being honest about what you said.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 23, @04:02PM (21 children)
And when I described more accurately than you did what I actually said, you say I'm "trying to weasel out". There's that dishonesty again.
Let's look at the first paragraph again. You completely miss my point here. If you wish to be that combination of "lazy, fat, and stupid", I'll think it's a poor choice on your part, but I won't do anything to force you to change your life. If you back regulation that uses the power of the state merely to force other people to be "lazy, fat, and stupid", then that's wrong and I oppose that. I believe the 40 hours work week legislation is of that sort and we see some of the unintended consequences of that today such as increased offshoring to areas that are more labor competitive and an increase in automation. You can force employers to follow the laws, but you can't force them to employ more people.
But by itself the 40 hour work week legislation can only do so much damage. There's a lot of other bad law and ideological garbage out there that creates this terrible situation. Two particularly big ones are the undermining of most public K-12 education and higher education in the US, and the continued regulations that heavily favor labor unions in workplaces.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23, @05:38PM (1 child)
That should address just about everything you've been posting about, including spending your entire life working to enrich another and the exploitation of labor.
I can only imagine when the laborers harvesting the crops in the field asked the master for their just wages, to be fairly compensated for their hard work that enriched the master, the master answered, "You don't deserve it."
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 24, @05:17AM
Now, biblical verses? Seriously? I guess that means I won. Moving on, the people we spend our "entire life working to enrich another and the exploitation of labor" for is typically our families and causes we care about. Your bullshit morality is irrelevant because you can't see the obvious. We don't work for others because we want to enrich them. That is merely a fortuitous benefit on the employers' parts. We work to better ourselves and the people we care about.
At best, your posting merely shows the lengths to which we can rationalize greed and envy. There is nothing here to respect (and definitely nothing for you to deserve), but it is a great cautionary tale should we choose to pay attention!
What I think is particularly ridiculous about the whole thing is that it ignores that the money going to shareholders for the stock buybacks that triggered this nonsense already belonged to the shareholders. And that workers already received their share.
And if those laborers then did nothing, the "master" would indeed be correct. This also ignores that the workers might already have their just wages and are just asking for more, possibly more than the alleged "master" can pay and still stay in business. There's just so much broken with your tunnel vision.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23, @06:00PM (18 children)
(Pardon me for interrupting. In California there used to be governmental regulations on hiring full-time employees. I presume they haven't improved. "Full-time" was defined as 30-hours or more per week. Therefore, many had their hours cut to 29. Please continue.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23, @07:35PM (17 children)
I think it's a given that businesses will try to circumvent any regulation or tactic that will raise their costs and cut into profits. That includes, as you say, cutting laborers' hours to avoid having them be full time. This is a surprise to absolutely nobody.
Now, khallow will probably tell you that this means regulation is bad and everything should be left to the free market, which will produce an optimal solution. He will likely tell you that a free market will balance supply and demand better than any government regulation or planned economy.
The fallacy is assuming that if we eliminate regulation, that we will have a free market. The model of a free market advanced in the 20th century by people such as Milton Friedman is very different from what Adam Smith envisioned. Adam Smith believed that a market dominated by a few large businesses was not a free market. The failures of planned economies include large amounts of corruption and waste. However, when the market is dominated by a few large merchants, they exert undue influence, and the market takes on characteristics of a planned economy.
Let's assume you have a city with a lot of rental properties and no government regulation of the market. In the first scenario, the properties are independently owned and managed by individuals, and potential tenants also act individually. In this case, the market balances what tenants are willing to pay with the rent that property owners are accept. Some potential renters may choose not to rent, and instead seek other housing options. Some landlords may choose not to rent and use their property for other purposes if they can't get the rent they seek. Tenants and landlords can also negotiate on other leasing terms and living conditions besides price, and those are also subject to the influences of a market. The interests of landlords and tenants are balanced against each other. Not everyone will get what they want, but it's a free market.
In the second scenario, let's keep everything the same except that all of the properties are owned and managed by a single entity. In this scenario, potential renters can reject the terms offered by the owner, but they cannot shop around to other rental options. In this case, the single landlord is a monopolist and exerts a large amount of control over the market. The landlord can raise prices, cut back on services, and set leasing terms to benefit them, with limited recourse by potential tenants. The monopolist could also buy up land where other rental properties could be constructed or enter into agreements with other businesses to make it prohibitive for new rental properties to be built. In this scenario, the lack of regulation allows the monopolist to dominate the market and create barriers to entry for potential competitors. Despite the absence of regulation, this is not a free market. This will not be an efficient use of resources, and corruption and waste will almost certainly be higher than with a free market. While the government is not planning this economy, the ability of one owner to set prices and control entry to the market makes it effectively a planned economy.
Adam Smith was not inherently opposed to regulation. The landlord in the second scenario is a lot like the merchant elites that Adam Smith wrote about.
In order for khallow's ideas to work, you need to have a free market. We do not really have a free market because some people and corporations exert a large influence over the market and skew it in their favor.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23, @09:51PM (8 children)
According to your training, the glass is never just half full, but the greedy capitalists took the other half. This ChatWPM* is working 29x2!
* Words Per Minute.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23, @10:50PM (7 children)
Is this a new troll tactic, when you can't refute an idea to assert that it was posted by an AI?
The ideas in my comment are hardly new ideas. They are many of the same ideas Adam Smith wrote about. He certainly thought some types of regulation are harmful, but he was not inherently opposed to regulation. Adam Smith was very critical of the merchant elites, but he also thought the regulations of the day were harmful because they were skewed in favor of those elites.
I disagree with khallow's reasoning that the particular regulations in question favor the merchant elites. The reason we have regulations like the Fair Labor Standards Act is that our markets aren't really free markets. If we truly had a free market, laws like the Fair Labor Standards Act would be unnecessary. Adam Smith's idea of regulation was to maintain free markets and prevent the merchant elites from exploiting everyone else.
Adam Smith was a capitalist. There is a lot more to capitalism than Milton Friedman. For that matter, John Maynard Keynes was a capitalist. Keynes also disagreed with people like Friedman, and he noted that not all markets are efficient. Keynes also had a lot of theories about macroeconomics. Dismissing the ideas of Adam Smith as you have would be like calling Ronald Reagan a RINO.
Go read The Wealth of Nations. Educate yourself.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23, @11:01PM (3 children)
Wow, less than an hour! Imagine if all that energy had been used for crypto-mining, instead!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24, @01:05AM (2 children)
I found an actual video of you and khallow talking to a sandal maker whose shop was failing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY5XQU-Psrc [youtube.com]. I'd say it sums up your attitude quite well.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24, @03:37AM (1 child)
Some anonymous BSOD video that nobody will click on? What's that, a ChatWPM stack overflow error? Rebooting... Rebooting... Rebooting...
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24, @05:59AM
Here we are, 37 reply-levels deep in a thread that slipped down the list and lost direction days ago. For some odd reason, somebody felt compelled to waste mod points trying to hide mentions of chat-bots that clearly almost nobody would ever see.
A well-applied chat-bot could bring new life here, though it would drone on repetitively, without insight or anything beyond reactions triggered by keywords. It's simply verbose click-bait, to be quickly skimmed-over and forgotten. Click-bait-bot?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 24, @05:40AM (2 children)
This circular argument is pure. We know we need FLSA because we have the FLSA! And for bonus points how much "freer" does this law make our free markets? /sarc
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24, @06:23AM (1 child)
It is not a circular argument, and I already provided appropriate justification in a prior comment. Your failure to comprehend the justification does not make my argument circular.
In a free market, the interests of supply (labor) and demand (employers) are balanced. That balance is achieved through competition. If an employee demands wages that are unreasonably high, the employer simply hires someone else who is willing to work for less. If an employer insists on paying wages that are too low, the employee finds work with another employer that will pay more. There is competition on both the supply and demand side. The proper term is an efficient market, as you should be well aware.
When either side ceases to be competitive, the market will not be efficient. When competition is reduced on the demand side and it is dominated by a few merchant elites, the market is inefficient. In response, to protect the interests of laborers from the inefficiencies of a market that is not free, we have collective bargaining and laws like the Fair Labor Standards Act. It is not an optimal solution, but it exists in response to the inefficiencies on the demand side of the labor market.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 25, @02:50AM
That one's 201 words. Most of these bot posts are 200-250 words. That's clearly more work than the 50¢ army could do. It could be interesting to lay the posts out, note how frequently themes get rephrased... or maybe there are secret encoded messages. Hard to say if this is the future of this declining site or of Internet forums in general.
It looks like they have no auto-stop, and will keep running around until humans stop taking the bait. I hope there is a way for bots to identify themselves to other bots; otherwise the two could battle forever.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 24, @05:37AM (7 children)
You argument is sinking because of the rebuttal you wrote yourself. It takes strong delusion to take an example of bad regulation, construct a mighty straw man out of it (that mean khallow will use it to say all regulation is bad!!1!), and then expect the rest of us to not snicker. Well, it didn't work. Just because I oppose dumbass regulation that idiots like you come up with doesn't mean I oppose all regulation.
We do need regulation and enforcement of that regulation by someone for a variety of important things: such preventing murder in the streets, fighting fires and helping with large scale disasters, transportation networks, keeping pollution under control, some degree of public and/or subsidized education, and organizing national defenses against the tyrants of the world. But I can't help but notice those sorts of needs form a small minority of what governments actually do. Everyone needs a rollback to saner levels, but it probably won't happen till the societies in question fall apart.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24, @05:47AM (6 children)
No, khallow, I said that such regulations would be unnecessary in a free market. We do not have a free market. Instead, we have a market dominated by merchant elites, that has characteristics of a planned economy because those elites have an outsized influence on the market. An unregulated market is not the same as a free market.
Since you've resorted to name calling and the other AC has started posting offtopic nonsense, I will accept that as an admission that my comment was correct.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 24, @04:29PM (5 children)
Let's no get too hasty with the slurs here. Let's walk through your argument again: free markets are the ideal working state; we aren't in that working state because market elites; and thus we need to break markets even further. This sort of unthinking argument is why I've been gratuitously using labels like "dumbass".
Here, we're going an opposite direction to anything you consider a fix! I know there's a fancy medical name for this that I never remember, but it's a case of the cure being the disease. Market elites as you put them are the ones who can navigate this growing regulatory morass. And of course, the more power and wealth said market elites get, the further away we get from that ideal free market state and the more you feel the need to give them even more. Let's get off this Red Queen race course and do something that works.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24, @07:03PM (4 children)
My position can be summarized with these points:
1) A free and efficient market requires adequate competition on both the supply and demand side. We do not have that.
2) An unregulated market is not the same as a free market or an efficient market. A market can be unregulated while still not being free.
3) I have repeatedly expressed support for Adam Smith's ideas about a free market. I do not support Milton Friedman's ideas to abolish regulation almost entirely. Smith opposed some types of regulation but did not adopt the more extreme positions of Friedman.
4) The current regulations you disagree as a result of the market already not being free. Eliminating labor unions, minimum wage, and laws that restrict working hours, will lead to exploitation unless the lack of competition on the demand side is addressed at the same time. Either simultaneously address the issues in the labor market with both the supply and demand, or stick to the status quo. Blindly lifting regulation without addressing the underlying reason -- lack of competition on the demand side of the labor market -- will make things worse.
5) Smith's invisible hand only works when the market is competitive. Merchant elites make the demand for labor less competitive. Collective bargaining makes the supply of labor less competitive.
6) Regulation is needed to ensure that markets remain competitive. Abolishing all government regulation will, by definition, result in an unregulated market. An unregulated market is not the same thing as a free market. I would actually go a step further and say that an unregulated market is quite unlikely to be a free and efficient market in the long term.
7) Whether a specific form of regulation makes markets freer or less free depends on the nature of that regulation. Reality is more complex than Friedman's simplistic idea that all regulation is contrary to a free market.
8) Paying shareholders who do not contribute value to the company is a form of rent-seeking.
As for your childish name calling, either grow up and discuss economics, or shut up.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Tuesday January 24, @11:59PM (3 children)
Minimum wage in particular encourages population concentration because it is a clueless one-size-fits-all approach. Low cost of living areas will have more trouble employing people because more of their workforce will be near the minimum wage threshold. High cost of living areas also happen to be high market minimum wage regions and thus are less likely to lose jobs from higher minimum wages. Anyone who wants to keep a job will need to move from a low cost of living area to a higher one where the jobs remain. This is particularly notable in California where Silicon Valley already has a market-based minimum wage above the present $15 per hour minimum wage and Fresno [soylentnews.org], one of the lower cost of living locations in California had half of its working population below $15 per hour as of the time I wrote the linked post in 2017.
Puerto Rico is another example. Due to federal minimum wage, the Jones Act (which raises the cost of importing materials from mainland US), and a variety of other terrible policies and governments, more than half of all Puerto Ricans live outside of Puerto Rico (something like 3.2 million in Puerto Rico to 5 million outside). Finally, this lifting of regulation is not blind, but an attempt to address exactly your concern about "simultaneously address the issues in the labor market with both the supply and demand" by removing some of the bigger problems interfering with that. On point 5 and 6, as mentioned above, I proposed lifting of much of this regulation because it interferes with those labor markets negatively. Point 6 in particular is just false. There is no boost to competition among labor demand from the various schemes for reducing supply, increasing cost of employment, and making worse the concentration of employer power.
On point 7, the nature of the regulations we've been talking about makes the problems they're supposed to fix worse and cause all kinds of turmoil (like encouraging people to travel to high cost of living areas or lowering demand for labor) to society for no gain.
Those companies strongly disagree for some mysterious reason on the value of said shareholders. And I bet employees who attempt to snatch money from shareholders every chance they get would have negative value to the company.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 25, @10:53PM (2 children)
Lifting some regulations without restoring competition to the market will not make it efficient or free. That is why I link those things together.
There are regulations that act to promote competition. They include bans on collusion and other unfair business practices, and restricting mergers and acquisitions to maintain competition. While Adam Smith did not generally offer regulatory solutions, I suspect that these are regulations he would have supported and perhaps considered necessary.
As for shareholders and rent-seeking, I did not say paying all shareholders is rent-seeking. I said that paying shareholders who added no value is rent-seeking. Paying someone who adds no value is, by definition, rent-seeking. Just because some rent-seeking practices are widely used and accepted does not change that they are still rent-seeking. The only valid rebuttal would be to argue that all shareholders contribute value, therefore asserting that there is no rent-seeking. That's not what you argued.
There is a cost to the rent-seeking, which is that it takes money away from the business that could be used for other purposes. That includes paying employees but also many other ways that businesses might use the money. Do you ever watch Shark Tank? Kevin O'Leary is a ruthless capitalist. He frequently offers loans to the entrepreneurs instead of taking equity. O'Leary justifies this by noting that once the loan is repaid, he doesn't take any more money from the business, and the entrepreneurs don't have to give up any equity. He's right, and rent-seeking is a long-term drag on the business.
Too often, the interests of shareholders are represented by expecting that quarterly earnings be maximized right now. That extreme focus on the present is unlikely to benefit the business in the long run. For example, if I want to maximize earnings this quarter, I have an incentive to keep wages down and even pay my best employees as little as possible. If those employees leave in a few months to get a better job elsewhere, that doesn't impact the current quarter. It does affect the company in the long run because the best employees will get jobs elsewhere, resulting in lost productivity. When shareholder interests are represented in this way, it is harmful to both the employees and the business.
I didn't say all shareholders are bad. This is more nuanced.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Thursday January 26, @12:03AM (1 child)
Indeed. That's why I targeted regulations that make the situation worse. These aren't merely "some" regulations. They're big problems.
Notice that at no time did I advocate for these to be reversed.
Shareholders are owners. I suppose we can cast normal ownership as rent-seeking except that it's their point of view that becomes the relevant one for whether rent-seeking exists or not.
This incidentally is another side effect of regulation. When society works hard to stamp out risk, often via regulation, entitlements, and subsidy/bailouts, you get a huge population of short-term thinkers - the quarterly earnings maximized now people.
Even so, it's a plentiful source of capital, which is why it'll continue. A stock buyback incidentally is one such way to reduce the amount of rent-seeking since it encourages the short termers to sell out.
A nuance without nuance, I'd say. We have vague rambling about rent-seeking and next quarter thinking. Another group of so-called rent-seekers here are people investing either directly or through a fund in the company in order to grow their own resources for a variety of purposes: retirement, education, starting a business, etc.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26, @09:17PM
I certainly didn't say all ownership is rent-seeking. If you use my Shark Tank example, the sharks aren't rent-seeking. When they take on equity in a business, they want to earn a profit on their investments, so they are actively involved in growing the business. They are adding value, not simply in the form of capital but their skills, expertise, connections, facilities for production and distribution, and other ways as well. That is the opposite of rent-seeking.
Corporate bailouts are an abomination. I am in favor of businesses taking risks to grow the company and to focus more on the future than on quarterly earnings. When there's more focus on the long term, the interests of the business are likely to align more with their employees, and both benefit. I am fine with taking risks as long as the business take responsibility if those risks don't work out.
A fine example is Blockbuster Video. They should have utterly destroyed Netflix. They had a fair amount of debt, which wasn't great, but it shouldn't have sunk the business. Blockbuster actually had a good online DVD rental service, but they lost money in a few areas like allowing customers to return DVDs to any of their brick-and-mortar stores. The CEO believed that if they grew the business enough, they could make that profitable. History says the CEO was right, that Blockbuster's online DVD rental service would have become profitable, despite the short term risk and additional debt. That wasn't enough for a certain activist investor, Carl Icahn, who wanted the online part of Blockbuster's business shut down. Blockbuster didn't adapt their business model, Netflix won, and Blockbuster is dead. If you want to read more, here are some details:
https://www.businessinsider.com/carl-icahns-blockbuster-mistake-2016-5 [businessinsider.com]
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/22/how-netflix-almost-lost-the-movie-rental-wars-to-blockbuster.html [cnbc.com]
https://hbr.org/2011/04/how-i-did-it-blockbusters-former-ceo-on-sparring-with-an-activist-shareholder [hbr.org]
Icahn certainly wasn't a passive investor. But his aversion to risk and focus on short term profits killed Blockbuster. The result was terrible for the business and all of its employees who lost their jobs.
At least perhaps we can find some common ground on reducing the obsession with quarterly earnings and on favoring regulation to keep markets competitive. I'm not opposed to people owning stock in a business. I just want their interests to align more with employees and with the overall health of the business.
By the way, I have actually modded up a lot of your posts in this discussion despite disagreeing with significant portions of what you say. Despite what a certain AC says about me being a bot and his whining about moderation, I am trying to be fair with you and find some common ground.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23, @06:36PM (3 children)
Playing golf and drinking martinis is not working. That's the way you do it, money for nothing, and chicks for free. (D. Trump theory of economic justice)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 24, @04:50PM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 29, @01:36AM (1 child)
It is cute that you think you know what others are thinking, with your teenaged libertarian intellect!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday February 02, @04:19AM
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20, @06:51PM
And "Bed, Bath & Beyond" dropped MyPillow™. They're closing stores faster than a bad night's sleep.
Home Depot, as you note, is doing okay, in this era of miserable economic decisions. coincidentally, they carry MyPillow™ products. It's just a hardware store! They sell hammers! But they believe in free enterprise and the best night's sleep in the whole wide world.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 16, @08:16PM
> And glancing at the title, clearly a "living wage" is way lower than the author claims otherwise we wouldn't have so many people living on it!
I'm an example. I care about tomorrow... my tomorrow; expenses matter. Simple living at the voluntary sub-poverty level — frugality — isn't just honorable and responsible and prideful, it's actually good for global warming, waste, national balance of payments, landfill... karma. Keepin' up with the influencers and an obsession for the latest 'lectro-gadgetry isn't what makes us happy or drives this economy, it aids only China.
The biggest part of my interest in vehicles like the BMW Isetta (and the Fiat Topolino, Lambretta and shoe leather) is their reason for being. People weren't concerned about global warming, they wanted a warm dinner on a cold night for their family. Simple living in Europe in the '50s was not because Greta Thunberg scolded 'em to do it. And it's where we are headed, as myopic marxism drives us all down, again.
Want to make a better tomorrow? Keep your toys an extra year, learn something old, do something for somebody else without being asked, shut up, and work harder.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 17, @07:04AM
Do keep in mind that he did not deny that socialists are lazy, fat and stupid.
Actually, all he added was that they are also arrogant, insensitive and rapacious.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Monday January 16, @09:06PM (1 child)
So they couldn't plan together, but once they planned separately, they had more than enough. I gotta wonder how the natives dealt with the same conditions, other than to "moo ehrta such a wicked pisser cold ehhreeyeh." Considering it further, that's probably why the settlers and the natives couldn't communicate :-P
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 16, @09:23PM
Communal activity and planning routinely falls short of the marketing. The natives you asked about above had their own means to deal with the moocher dynamics that show up.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 17, @12:05AM
Disney's The Grasshopper and the Ants (Short 1934) [imdb.com], based on Aesop's "The Ant and The Grasshopper," should be required viewing in colleges.
Oh the world owes me a living
Deedle dardle doodle deedle dum
If I worked hard all day I might
Sleep badder when in bed at night
I sleep all day so that's alright
Deedle dardle doodle deedle dum
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 16, @02:29AM (34 children)
The problem isn't that people don't want to leave the ghettos or work hard. If they could afford to move out of the ghettos, most of them would have done so a long time ago. The problem isn't that people in the ghettos won't work hard or that they like living in the ghettos. The problem is that the people living in the ghettos generally lack the means to leave despite working hard. There's also a huge difference in the quality of education that young people receive depending on whether they live in an inner city ghetto or a wealthy suburb. There is no equal opportunity when we start some kids off with a substandard education.
Americans are more than willing to work hard, but they expect to be paid fairly in return. The problem isn't that immigrants are bad, but that they're a source of cheap labor that can easily be exploited. Our country would be better off if we prioritized paying workers well, because they are the people who actually add value for the companies, instead of paying the wealthy with things like stock buybacks. I'll give you credit where it's due, that you support paying Americans a fair wage and not exploiting them.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 16, @07:16PM (11 children)
OTOH, a lot of people move around every year to the point that the US moves the equivalent of its entire population every eight years. And it's just not that expensive to move when you don't have anything.
And what makes you think they aren't paid fairly? Your expectations != Americans' expectations.
We keep getting this song and dance. Do what I want and the country would be better off. Promise.
Here, you're ignoring a lot of factors. First, "the wealthy" includes normal people who happen to have bothered to save money either through a pension fund or by direct investment in the business. Second, stock buybacks can make a lot of sense when the company's share price is greatly undervalued (or are you one of those people who thinks the stock markets always accurately value stuff?). A short term, one time investment can create a long term benefit of a stabler company with higher assets.
Finally, the company received the capital to employ all those workers in a long term contract with those shareholders. They have to take care of the latter in order to maintain control of the business. There is no similar contract with the employees. There are long term advantages to taking care of employees, but they won't lose control of the company if they don't pay employees as generously as you think those employees should be paid.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19, @01:00PM (10 children)
Your response can be summarized as "let them eat cake."
Once again, you show your absolute ignorance of the situation. The issue for many people who want to move is getting credit. The people living in the ghettos have a hard time getting banks to lend them money, which is why they're not moving out of those areas. Just because a lot of Americans have the ability to move frequently doesn't mean that it applies to everyone.
I have no doubt that you've intimately familiar with Milton Friedman's works. You've probably read all of his writings many times over. This is real life, and it doesn't work like a Milton Friedman textbook. I don't think you've ever run a business or managed employees, otherwise you'd understand that a lot of the ideas and theories you're posting just don't work in the real world. They might look good on paper, but they don't work in practice.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 20, @01:46AM (9 children)
You don't need credit to move. Sure, it's somewhat cheaper to move and live some place really nice (but unaffordable to a poor person) with a good credit score, but you don't need it.
And yes, my observation does apply to everyone.
I'm reminded here of Friedman's warranted optimism. Certain democratic-capitalist economic systems have created over the course of centuries massive human prosperity. Other economic systems have provided widespread slavery and death.
And what "ideas and theories" am I really posting? For example, speaking of "fairness" while being wholly slanted against employers demonstrates that you are not being fair. Speaking of what hypothetical workers "deserve" from a stilted morality play that doesn't reflect real life (and bragging about dysfunctional relationships with employers) indicates you don't so "deserve".
There is an interesting, self-unaware hypocrisy to these narratives. For glaring example, I see no point to accusing me of never "run a business or managed employees" when I've actually managed people successfully (for example, no massive turnover with people returning year after year when they don't need to). But then perhaps I too should project imaginary flaws onto people who disagree with me in order to win arguments? I bet I get lots of internet points for that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20, @02:23AM (8 children)
Yes, it's possible to save enough money to buy a house outright and not get a loan. Of course, it also takes a considerable amount of time to save that money. While you're saying the money, you're not moving out.
This is quite an extreme position. There are plenty of examples that markets aren't always efficient, and there is ample evidence to refute the theories of people like Milton Friedman. The idea that capitalism leads to freedom but other economic systems lead to "widespread slavery and death" is extreme and a form of fear mongering. Remember that capitalist societies have engaged in slavery and abuses of laborers. There are plenty of such examples in the history of the United States.
Here's a good article discussing Adam Smith's views on economics: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/adam-smith-and-inequality/ [lse.ac.uk]. Adam Smith was a capitalist, but he would find a lot of fault with the ideas of people like Friedman.
To have a functioning economy, there needs to be a healthy balance between labor and management. There needs to be a healthy balance between the working class and the wealthy. In our current economic system, the scales have been tipped so far toward management and so far toward the wealthy that the system is extremely dysfunctional. I am not anti-business, nor am I opposed to people just because they have wealth. You would tell laborers that "you don't deserve it" when the company is profitable but are unwilling to pay the workers better. However, under those same conditions, you are opposed to anyone telling the shareholders that "you don't deserve it." The workers are the people building goods, providing services, and selling products to customers. While shareholders have equity, they are not contributing value like laborers are. In a fair system, both would share in the success of the company, and you would tell both that they "deserve it" to the extent that the company can do so. When you happily defend shareholders but tell workers "you don't deserve it," you come across as being incredibly biased against workers. What you're advocating for is not fairness, but is actually very anti-labor.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 20, @04:27AM (7 children)
Is that an option for your ghetto dweller? If only they had a good credit score, they could borrow money for a house? I think not. Credit scores only matter when you're higher up the economic ladder. And moving out of that urban environment can be a big step towards moving up.
I didn't say all other economic systems, but it's not hard to come up with a very large list of bad ideas and tectonic-level failures.
I see you use past tense for some strange, mysterious reason.
Indeed. I'm the one in this thread advocating for that. Remember this all started because of the outrage generated because Home Depot leadership threw money to the shareholder owners of Home Depot (in a way that likely strengthened the future outlook of Home Depot) rather than throw it all at workers for a one time bonus. Where's the healthy balance in throwing everything at the workers?
Where am I wrong? I think this is particularly silly argument since (from the story I linked [soylentnews.org] to elsewhere) it looks like the workers really were paid significantly better when Home Depot was doing better.
And I think I'm right to do so. This is just a bankrupt morality argument and an ad hominem attack on Home Depot. No attempt was made to find out if Home Depot really were doing this allegedly heinous action before the condemnation and well, looks to me like they weren't.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20, @05:04AM (3 children)
Your linked article describes Home Depot contributing an additional $1 billion per year to employee benefits. It means in 2021, they contributed $1 billion. In 2022, it means they contributed $1 billion.
In 2021, they authorized stock $20 billion worth of stock buybacks. In 2022, they authorized $15 billion worth of stock buybacks.
You say that employees share in the company's success. But shareholders are sharing in the success at a ratio of 15:1 or 20:1 compared to employees. This is just stock buybacks, so it doesn't take into account the dividends that Home Depot is paying to shareholders. At a minimum, there needs to be some compelling justification about how ratios of 15:1 or 20:1 constitute being in balance.
With respect to economic systems, the real issues are corruption and waste. Yes, these have been big problems in actual socialist economies. They have also been big problems in capitalist economies. We have laws about issues workplace safety, anti-competitive business practices, and insider trading. Those laws exist because capitalist societies are also prone to corruption and waste. I can accept that some economic systems may be particularly prone to corruption and waste, but that would include both socialist and laissez-faire capitalist economies.
Milton Friedman would argue that a free and fair market is one that's free from regulation. His ideas are hardly authoritative. Adam Smith had very different ideas about what makes a market free and fair. Many capitalists, including Adam Smith, believed that some government regulation is necessary to have free and fair markets. Here's a good article discussing Adam Smith's ideas about capitalism: https://www.ft.com/content/6795a1a0-7476-11e8-b6ad-3823e4384287 [ft.com].
I'm not a socialist. I am a capitalist. I just support Adam Smith's version of capitalism, not Milton Friedman's version. I strongly encourage you to read the article I linked, because it's a detailed and accurate description of Adam Smith's ideas about capitalism.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 20, @07:46PM (2 children)
And thus the goalposts move. Before the narrative was that the employees shared not (while linking and quoting a story that complained about how good some stock buyback money would be if it were all given to employees). Now, it's that the labor bonuses allegedly have a poor ratio compared to "authorized" stock buybacks (whether they happened or not). I already mentioned that there's more to business than merely paying people wages.
Sorry, that article is paywalled for me. But I see a huge tell here: the platitude about how "some government regulation is necessary" even though you haven't shown in the least that there is a problem which needs more regulation much less the "some regulation" we already have. I continue to find it bizarre how so many people can take this heavily regulated business environment we have throughout the developed world and then pretend it's a completely unregulated wild west that merely needs a little regulation to straighten things out. My take is that we need less regulation (as well as coherent and fair enforcement of the regulation we already have) not "some" more. You're probably not talking about a little additional regulation either, but rather a massive government intervention in labor affairs and the hiring decision. Sorry, I need to see a real problem first.
And I'm a tooth fairy. I don't buy that the meaning behind the "capitalist" label has been satisfied. Capitalism doesn't mean "You can own this thing unless I have feelz and decide you can't."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20, @08:14PM (1 child)
The article wasn't paywalled for me. Perhaps FT limits people to a certain number of articles before they get the paywall messages. There are undoubtedly many other sites that summarize Adam Smith's writing, not just that FT article.
Let's talk about that regulation. Here's an example. Adam Smith believed that regulation was needed to ensure that markets remain competitive, and that society's interests were best served through competition. I agree with a lot of Adam Smith's ideas. Contrast that with Milton Friedman, who argued against pretty much any form of government regulation. Or you can contrast that with the ideas of someone like Karl Marx. Given the three choices, I'll go with Adam Smith's ideas about economics.
Here's a different article discussing Adam Smith's ideas: https://aeon.co/essays/we-should-look-closely-at-what-adam-smith-actually-believed [aeon.co]
The problems I'm citing are very similar to things Adam Smith wrote about. From that article:
The same idea might be expressed as saying that a market that lacks government regulation but is dominated by a few merchant elites, is not a free market. He certainly didn't support a planned economy, but he also strongly opposed government policies that favored the wealthy.
There's a lot more to the article than those quotes. The point is that Adam Smith believed that free markets produced the best outcome for society. He certainly opposed a planned economy. But he also opposed laissez-faire capitalism. Adam Smith likely would not consider our markets free because our markets are dominated by a relatively small number of elites.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 21, @06:41AM
I would point to "some regulation" as a big cause of that situation. For example, there has been an explosion [soylentnews.org] of federal regulations from 1975 to 2015. I wrote on that:
What sort of business can keep up with that? Hint: it'll be large and elite. In addition, I'll note that the labor union dynamic tends to contribute to this problem as well both through concentration of power on the labor union side (which exhibit the same small number of elite unions as businesses do in so many industrial sectors) and through the businesses that they contest (larger businesses having better ability to deal with large labor unions than small businesses).
My take is that a big part of the real problems here are ideologies that create and/or make much worse the problems they claim to be fighting.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 22, @09:39AM (1 child)
No, you are not, you silly and ignorant khallow! And, despite the corrupt and lickspittle Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, corporations are not hominem, so one cannot commit an argumentum ad hominem fallacy against them. Nor against Bernie, since he ripely deserves the appellation.
And speaking of bankrupt morality, khallow, how's that working out for you?
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23, @06:40PM
The Spam mod of Truth? What is that doing here? Who do we report illicit spam mods to?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 22, @09:44AM
Sorry, khallow. If you are not bright enough to comprehend the distinction, I am at a loss as to how I might explain it to you. Perhaps you are using the incorrect metric?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 16, @08:31PM (21 children)
> Americans are more than willing to work hard, but they expect to be paid fairly in return.
Summary: pay me first, and I'll decide how much work it's worth.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18, @04:47PM (20 children)
I gather that you prefer that the workers finish the job first before the boss decides how much to pay them. Apropos of nothing in particular, have you ever heard the story of the pied piper? [wikipedia.org] I didn't think so.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18, @06:07PM (19 children)
Sigh. You're just never going to be able to snatch the pebble from my hand, young Grasshopper.
The ants keep trying to give you the message.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18, @09:58PM (18 children)
Oh, don't worry, my fine little friend with greatly overblown ego. I'm sure that many of us understand you just fine. And we understand the moral of the story of the ants. Maybe you should take on board a couple of pieces of information. First, front-line worker pay has actually decreased over the last several decades, when accounting for inflation. Second, top-line executive pay has grown exponentially over a similar time frame. And let us not forget that the American economy grew at a phenomenal pace during those decades. Perhaps you should take that into account before accusing employees of being "lazy" while demanding higher pay. Just a thought.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 19, @12:01AM (14 children)
Not when including health insurance.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19, @01:40AM (13 children)
As they say on Wikipedia: [citation needed]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19, @01:54AM (11 children)
Even more apropos to the discussion, the typical so-called health "insurance" policy covers less and less with each passing year.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 19, @05:41AM (10 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 21, @11:14PM (9 children)
Expenditures != Benefits. My gawd, are you really this stupid, or just really bad at lying and attempting to defend an indefensible position? You are again arguing in Bad Faith, my crumbly khallow, and everyone knows it. That is why so few engage you! You will never be able to move out of the seasonal dorm, you know.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 22, @01:36AM (8 children)
You going somewhere with that? I notice you never mentioned that again and just segued into a typical dumbass slur fest.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 22, @09:47AM (7 children)
[Sorry, posted this reply elsewhere by mistake.]
Sorry, khallow. If you are not bright enough to comprehend the distinction, I am at a loss as to how I might explain it to you. Perhaps you are using the incorrect metric?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 22, @02:43PM (6 children)
Sorry, it's not a flaw on my end. A one sentence claim that isn't supported by the rest of your post.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 22, @07:35PM (5 children)
Yes, it is, khallow. Sadly, yes it is.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 22, @10:09PM (4 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23, @04:58PM (3 children)
So, you need us to explain to you multiple times why you are wrong before you will accept it? My God! The depths of your stubborn foolishness are truly breathtaking!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23, @06:43PM
That's our khallow! There are few like him.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 24, @05:42AM (1 child)
A stupid argument stated many times is no more acceptable to a rational man than a stupid argument stated once. It's merely more annoying.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 24, @05:51AM
Alas, I missed an opportunity to insert "thinking man" again. Poets and rhetoricians will no doubt weep for generations over this.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 19, @02:22AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19, @02:43AM (2 children)
> First, front-line worker pay has actually decreased
Assuming that's true, you might ask why. Education system? Cooked statistics? Productivity? Competition? Skills? Skilled people moving up? 29-hours per week? Being drooling morons?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23, @05:06PM (1 child)
You forgot at least one other possibility: top-level execs are greedy bastards who think nothing of wringing more and more out of their workers while paying them less. I'm not going to bother looking it up for you but I seem to recall reading a while back that worker productivity has actually been increasing over at least the last few decades. And you are almost certainly right about one thing: global competition. There has been a frenzy among employers to off-shore operations as much as possible in order to take advantage of cheaper labor elsewhere. Of course, this is incredibly short-sighted on their part. They are eating the seed corn which will be needed to plant next year's crops!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 24, @05:44AM
They've always been greedy bastards. This isn't a new phenomena, but always has been the case for the entirety of civilization.
The question you should have asked is what changed?
Answer: labor competition from the developing world combined with self-destructive regulation in the developed world.
You're welcome!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by krishnoid on Monday January 16, @08:45PM (23 children)
In Asimov's Foundation series, which I believe was intended to retell the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, he said that when an empire starts collapsing you start seeing it on the edges, not near the center. I'm not enough of a student of history to know if that's true though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 16, @08:51PM (2 children)
"An edge case is a problem or situation that occurs only at an extreme operating parameter. For example, a stereo speaker might noticeably distort audio when played at maximum volume, even in the absence of any other extreme setting or condition. An edge case can be expected or unexpected. In engineering, the process of planning for and gracefully addressing edge cases can be a significant task, and yet this task may be overlooked or underestimated."
- W*k*p*d**
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 16, @10:36PM (1 child)
Sorry, your edge cases have nothing to do with Asimov's Foundation stories. You may be in the same world that Asimov was, but you're not even in the right football stadium, let alone being out in far left field. And, your tennis racquet is entirely inappropriate for whichever game you thought you were in.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 17, @12:10AM
Well then, there goes my "The Razor's Edge" dissertation. [Putting away the Maugham references.]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Monday January 16, @09:41PM (3 children)
It was to some degree with the Roman Empire, but not as much as you'd think. Roman Britain, for example, was about as frontier as you could get, yet it wasn't abandoned till 410 (AD). The Western Roman Empire of which it was part fell in 476. The dysfunctional aspects of the empire such as rampant inflation, growing feudalism, and the frequent turnover of the emperors all predated that by more than a century. High inflation started in the early 200s and was empire-wide. Turnover of emperors greatly accelerated following the death of Commodus in 192. And early forms of feudalism became widespread after the turmoil of the 200s (a consequence both of centuries of land acquisition by the wealthy class and a growing need for protection).
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 20, @07:49PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20, @08:24PM
Maybe so, but khallow rots from the butt up. That is why all the butt-hurt about "Marxists".
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 21, @01:37PM
This is probably the more common root cause of civilization collapse. Attaching words like "king" to the top parasite does not make it different from other terms like "CEO." Other terms like "government" and "corporation" become vague, and the supposed litmus test for a "government" as monopoly on violence no longer holds. Power rushes into the hands of the few, the masses are disenfranchised. They no longer have ownership of society, and the sociopaths at the top stifle innovation in favor of the utterly banal.
But there are two collapses that are more interesting. There was the bronze age collapse, and also the information age collapse. The animal steals fire from the gods and becomes a man. The man masters the fire, perfects it, gains the capability to rain destruction from the heavens. Yet the man remains a man and is unable to become a god. He masters the fire but refuses to master himself.
29±4 seconds to midnight.
unless
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Monday January 16, @10:41PM (15 children)
It was true enough for Asimov. And, it is mostly true in real life. Relatively speaking, the city of Rome was quite stable, right up until the very end.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 16, @11:10PM (14 children)
Um, Runaway? It's still there.
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday January 17, @02:21AM (2 children)
https://www.history.com/news/6-infamous-sacks-of-rome [history.com]
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 22, @09:49AM (1 child)
Sacks do not end a city, unless it is Carthage, or a town in Arkansas.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 22, @10:36PM
Save your city, avoid paper and plastic.
I always buy reusable cloth sacks at the checkout counter for a dollar. I throw them away when I get home, because it's good for the economy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 17, @06:39AM
Rome is still there, like Steven Wright's antique hammer. Let's see, I seem to recall it goes something like this...
I have this hammer, see, inherited from my great-grandfather.
It's a beautiful hammer, more than 150 years old.
And it's been in use every day for all these years.
Well, of course the handle has been replaced six times.
And the head has been replaced three times.
But it still occupies the exact space it always has.
And so... Rome wasn't rebuilt in a day.
You can still buy hammers. Of course they cost more now, and they don't last as long. And you can't get replacement parts any more.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 18, @01:10AM (9 children)
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18, @07:53AM (8 children)
But *extinct = not stable, as regards existence. Looks to be that we are dealing with *stable geniuses, of the non-existent variety. It becomes more and more obvious that khallow is at least as much of an ignorant moron as this Runaway caricature.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18, @06:14PM
Shouldn't you be out in your father's garage, protecting our national secrets from foreign agents?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 18, @06:40PM (6 children)
No, those are not the same!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18, @07:20PM (5 children)
I see what your problem is. You are trying to use logic to counter anti-logic. I think, in the Star Trek Multiverse, that eventually causes cascading destruction. The only solution is make the other poster realize that marxism is all part of a dream sequence. Repeat after me, tell him: "Wake up, little grasshopper... it was all a dream... wake up..."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18, @08:51PM (4 children)
I am sorry, I truely am, but khallow can't be "woke", because DeSanctimonious has made it illegal. Besides, khallow be living the life, dreaming the Republican dream, asleep while testicle tanning with Cucker Tarlson.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18, @10:04PM (3 children)
I am under the impression that khallow is living in a dorm room out in the middle of nowhere in a National park. (I seem to recall that he works at a hot dog stand.) Asleep? Maybe. Living the Republican dream? I think not.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20, @08:26PM (2 children)
Doxxing is not allowed on SoylentNews! Ban this user! Even if it is information that the khallow as freely dispersed on his own. Illegal! And, do you want to know how to pick up girls of the right body type?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23, @05:09PM (1 child)
Fuck off, ari!!! All of this is info that khallow himself has posted here on SN.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 24, @05:49AM
I see once again that you reply to yourself quite a bit, Ari. While it's a good move that you're telling yourself to fuck off, I should mention that I count beans not hotdogs. And I have never tried YouTubing pickup strategies on the internet mostly because I have no interest in such. Finally, my car is considerably less attractive than the babemobile that this guy drives. But I'm fine with that since it is cheap.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 17, @12:30AM (28 children)
Didn't this site get this same series of pro-marxist, anti-business posts, with very similar phrasing, in the spring of last year? Or did those posts get run through the latest AI essay regeneration software? There is certainly no sign going off the script, just rewording for context.
Seems like you could keep explaining remedial economics until the next server crash. Or is it all just training the AI software?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 17, @06:55AM
In summary: did you ever get the feeling here that you are
shouting attalking to a recording?(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18, @09:10PM (26 children)
If you want to be taken seriously, learn what ideas Karl Marx actually wrote about instead of using that term for anything you disagree with but can't actually rebut.
Here's a hint: calling for businesses to pay workers in a manner consistent with the value they provide is not Marxism. For that matter, it's not anti-business. I actually hope you're posting your drivel from Russia or Belarus. I'd like to think someone as imbecilic as you isn't voting in US elections.
Of course, I know I'm replying to a shitpost, You weren't actually intending to have an intelligent discussion.
Marx·ism
/ˈmärkˌsizəm/
noun: Marxism
A generic term for any economic or social idea that the political right opposes but is incapable of refuting with logical arguments.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18, @09:31PM (8 children)
It's quiet a leap to believe that marxism is all about Karl Marx, any more than Christianity is all about Jesus Christ.
Karl is just one spokesmodel, these days. Your sacred Marxism is expanding to include bizzarro aberrations that almost no sane adult could've predicted, let alone imagined... in this local universe, anyway.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18, @09:35PM (6 children)
Like I said, Marxism has expanded to include any economic or social idea the political right opposes but can't refute with a logical argument. It's basically a generic in the absence of rational or logical thought.
Since you seem incapable of logic and reason, feel free to carry on with posting screeds about Marxism.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18, @09:43PM (5 children)
And right here is where logic and anti-logic collide, and the SoylentNews server explodes (again).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18, @09:50PM (4 children)
Keep up those conspiracy theories, nostyle. Your posting style is obvious, and I know it's you posting this inane drivel.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18, @10:35PM (3 children)
Not even a good guess. Right up there with your attempts at humor. You recognize the writing style because I am a main contributor in his threads; I post there much more than he does. His are the most civil threads in this whole tragicomedy. As far as I know, he hasn't posted in this thread at all. Ever seen a cat play with a bug?
Oh, and a writer is capable of more than one style. I could even do you, but it wouldn't be healthy or enjoyable for me. Just creepy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18, @10:48PM (2 children)
Lying isn't a good look, nostyle.
Yes, you are nostyle. I'm basing this off more than just the characteristics of your writing. Your stylistic tendencies help compromise your identity, but it's hardly the only thing.
I'll let you think for awhile about how I know you're nostyle. You might want to hope for a database glitch that wipes out two or three months. That might cover up the evidence. Otherwise, it's obvious to anyone who pays enough attention that you're nostyle.
I won't bother replying to your other recent comment [soylentnews.org], nostyle.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19, @09:09AM (1 child)
Definitely not nostyle, because plainly there is some style there. My take is that the obvious rebuttal is that Wingman is in his dorm practicing his boot-licking, hoping for that IT hot-dog vending position in the Thiel bunker under the South Island.
Oh, and it is quite clear khallow has never read Marx, let alone Ricardo or Say. His economic thinking appears rather tribal, trivial, and like that of someone who thinks college, and learning and understanding, are a waste of time. You can bank on that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20, @07:46PM
"Inside of a dog it's too dark to read." -- Marx.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 21, @01:45PM
Sort of like how the Libertarian Party became the Hookers and Blow Party, or how the party that ended slavery became a party of fascism. They're just words after all. Right?
As I looked at the wreckage of the city covered in snow and ash, all words failed me except "unless."
You'll just have to see it for yourself to know what I mean.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 19, @12:05AM (16 children)
Where it goes full stupid, is then assuming that work equals value (that labor theory of value thing). I think the bizarre thing here is that no one has shown this is actually a serious problem - that somehow people aren't for the most part being paid in a manner consistent with the value they provide.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19, @01:36AM (8 children)
I know that khallow doesn't give a damn about facts. I'm just posting this here so anyone who might not be aware can see that khallow is full of shit.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinecastrillon/2023/01/13/how-quiet-hiring-will-shape-the-workplace/ [forbes.com]
If you're not certain if khallow is full of shit, just go to Google and search for "quiet hiring" and "quiet promoting." You'll find a very large number of links discussing the exact thing that khallow swears is not real. That should be more than enough to convince you that he's posting bullshit.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Thursday January 19, @03:25AM (7 children)
There has been post after post about what workers deserve, the imaginary extra value quiet quitters deliver, and other dumb shit. Not one word about what value people provide that they aren't being paid for. Moving on:
What would that show? That Google can find search phrases? We know that already. Google has an exceptional ability to find even rarely used phrases or phrases for absolutely stupid behavior. Perhaps you should google for "tide pod challenge" [duckduckgo.com] and report back to us on how relevant and important the illustrated behavior is because it shows up in Google?
What I think is particularly bizarre about this whole thing is that I did what is being called "quiet quitting" decades ago. I decided how much work I was willing to do and that was that. No need for a passive aggressive act around my boss because he's a quiet quitter too. And my employer asks of me what I agreed to give them. It's quite parsimonious and low drama. Things might change in the future in which case, I can simply just leave.
When you're in this constant struggle with your employer, then you're doing it wrong. Most likely the employer as well, but you can't do much about them. If the little you can do isn't enough, then it's time to move on and look for better pastures. Skip this crap. You aren't entitled to a job. They aren't entitled to your labor.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19, @09:43PM (6 children)
Although I disagree with many of the comments you've posted here, I went through and modded up a few of your comments earlier on the basis of their quality. When I get mod points again in a few hours, I'll try to remember to mod up this comment as well.
About a year and a half ago, I took over a project that had been mismanaged to some extent and was behind. Getting this project back on track meant that I would need some of the employees I supervise to take on additional duties that were well beyond what they had been hired to do. The first thing I did was to go to HR and insist that those employees get substantial raises to reflect their additional responsibilities. It seems only fair that if I want my employees to do more, I need to pay them for it.
You seem to be holding employers to the same standard as employees, which is fair. If an employer is paying an employee for a certain amount of work, the employee should do that amount of work, but they shouldn't be expected to do more without getting paid more.
As I've pointed out elsewhere, if employees frequently leave for other jobs, it means that new employees have to be trained to take over those responsibilities. It takes effort to train new employees, and those new employees aren't going to be as productive while they're still being trained on how do to the job. A high rate of turnover is bad for productivity, and good managers will try to avoid this by treating their employees fairly.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Friday January 20, @02:03AM (5 children)
Playing favorites won't help you build better roads or educate more of your people better. In fact, it can have the opposite effect. For example, if construction labor unions are favored over building in a timely, cost-effective manner roads that work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20, @03:09AM (4 children)
Employees are simply looking out for their own best interests. In a capitalist society, businesses are looking out for their own interests, and workers are looking out for their own interests. In a capitalist economy, it is not up to a person to tell an employee that "you don't deserve it." That determination is not made by specific individuals or businesses. A manager or a company can decide that they aren't willing to pay an employee what that employee wants. However, they don't get to tell the employee what they do or do not deserve. You don't get to decide that, either. The market decides it.
My objection to many of your posts is that I believe you are playing favorites, just on the side of executives and shareholders. Where I strongly disagree with you is that I believe our current system is skewed heavily toward corporations and toward the wealthy. We are playing favorites, and we are favoring corporations and the wealthy over the working class.
As you've said elsewhere:
Maximizing value for shareholders right now is often unhealthy for the long term profitability of a company. If you cut corners right now to achieve bigger profits in the current quarter, those decisions may well lower the company's profitability in the future.
In one extreme, if a business increased employee pay enough in the short term, they could bankrupt themselves. The employees would get paid well in the short term. In the long term, those employees are going to be out of a job. In the other extreme, if a business cuts employee pay as much as possible, they might turn record profits in the current quarter. Those employees are going to leave for other jobs, people won't want to apply for jobs at a company that doesn't pay workers well, and the business isn't going to have enough workers to function. Both extremes are detrimental to a business.
If a CEO is focused on maximizing profits in the short term, they're probably cutting corners that will hurt the business in the future. The earnings might look good for the current quarter, but it's not good for the long term health of the business. Focusing too much on the shareholders is not good for the health of the business. It's not anti-business to criticize prioritizing the concerns of shareholders above everything else.
I'll keep my word and mod you up in just a moment.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 20, @04:39AM (3 children)
"You don't deserve it" is a value-add I provide to the internet and its denizens. And if we're going by the market, well the market decided they didn't deserve it too.
Remember that I didn't bring this "deserving" argument into the thread, an AC [soylentnews.org] did that:
They blatantly took sides when there was some money to steal. I merely refuted that.
In these things, the disease is the cure. It's not in our interests to put the thumb on the scale for either party universally just because there are some bad businesses or labor-business relationships out there. What gets missed is that it's more effective to have a lot of businesses fighting for labor rather than a few businesses that due to their oligopoly power will naturally race to the bottom in their relationships with workers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 21, @11:37PM
You poor sad brown-noser of capitalism, khallow!
Incorrect. You did not refute, you merely took that opposing side, which is what we expected. Profit is theft, and as Kropotkin said, property is theft, and intellectual property is imaginary theft. Stop stealing, khallow! Your job-taking will kill the economy!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23, @05:16PM (1 child)
Oh, poor khallow! He cast his pearls before the masses, but the masses didn't appreciate them! Truly, the world is not worthy of your erudite wisdom, khallow!</sarcasm>
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 24, @05:53AM
Dispair not! There are more people in this world than a few loud louts on the internet. I write for them not thee.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19, @02:33AM (2 children)
I remember the first time I experienced this Grasshopper attitude. Many years ago, long before the kids posting here were born, I was working in a place in San Francisco (of course). It was a weeknight, so we needed six people to cover the shift, one for each station; five regulars and a new young woman. Business ramped-up, we took our stations, but the young woman stood there with her arms folded.
She gave the speech you see repeated here... rich evil owners, workers control the whatever. I explained that we were here not just for the evil empire, but to help each other get through the shift in a job we enjoyed. <Woosh.> I put up with it for as long as I could, then sent her home so we wouldn't have to walk around her to get anything done. I never saw her again.
Today, I suppose if they are still open, they have twelve workers, a union-rep, an equity enforcer, and another three or four standing around complaining.
And, at those prices, no customers.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19, @09:13AM (1 child)
Cool story, bro! (Would have to be the woman, eh? Bet she demanded child-support, too. Where are the pieces of her body? Confession is good for the soul. )
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19, @06:01PM
It was San Francisco... there are body parts everywhere.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20, @08:56PM (3 children)
Recently, khallow let slip that despite living in a dorm, he is quiet a bit older than we supposed him to be. Such is the way of the libertarian, though; a teenager forever. But his lack of understanding of economics, and lickspittle sycophantism for the richies, severely warps his argmentation.
The labor theory of value has a long history, and is the basis for John Locke's theory of property. Nature belongs to no one, but if someone should "mix" his labor with the things found in nature, say, but harvesting or manufacturing, or distributing them, then they become commodities. In the course of production, the "capital", or accumulated labor of humans, becomes a part of the capitalist production mode, but by itself produces no new value, unless again it is mixed with labor.
Since labor is the sole source of value*, the full increase in value should go to the laborers. But in Marxist theory, the value of production is split between the cost of labor (a market skewed by over supply and the "vast army of the unemployed") and surplus value, or profit, which for some reason accrues to the owners of the capital, who have done nothing to produce value. This is exploitation, or capitalist theft.
(*Nota Bene: Management is labor, not mere ownership of capital, and thus is compensated as productive activity. Except when management sucks up to capital, and says "The workiing class can kiss my ass! I got the foreman's job at last!" Sums up khallow, except that he hasn't.)
(*Ricardo's theory [wikipedia.org]:
)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 21, @06:50AM (2 children)
*Begging the question and it's patently false. An army of people toiling with spoons won't dig a higher value ditch than a backhoe operator who takes two hour smoke breaks. There's way more labor in the first situation than the second, demonstrating that amount of labor didn't generate the value in that ditch.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 21, @12:04PM (1 child)
You didn't refute his statement. You said that the amount of labor isn't proportional to the value provided. But in both cases, labor is providing the value. In the first example, it's the people manually doing the digging. In the second case, it's the backhoe operator.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Saturday January 21, @04:56PM
Would you understand if it had been prayer or money that was considered the valuation of a thing? When you can vary the input of a allegedly fundamental thing by orders of magnitude without changing the value of the outcome a whit, then it's a solid rebut of the argument that the value of the result is derived from that input.
This is a variation of the sunk cost fallacy. The value of something is not the labor, money, or prayers you sink into it. It's what you use it for. It's what effort and resources you'd go through to replace it. It's what someone would give you in exchange. There are numerous rational ways to value something that don't generate orders of magnitude error. Let's use those.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 10, @05:58PM
LFS: I Realize my generation has a reputation for not wanting to work hard.
LFS: But I am not like that.
PHB: You work hard?
LFS: No. That would be crazy. I don't work at all.
- Dilbert 2023-02-10 [dilbert.com]