Labor organization

[Mountaineer]

Didn’t Bloomberg try banning large sugar drinks in NYC? As I recall, that did not go well. As always, who sets the standards for what is acceptable - Big Bro or the individual? God save us from ourselves, and especially from do-gooders and well intentioned control freaks.

[doodle]

Didn’t Bloomberg try banning large sugar drinks in NYC? As I recall, that did not go well. As always, who sets the standards for what is acceptable - Big Bro or the individual? God save us from ourselves, and especially from do-gooders and well intentioned control freaks.

The problem is that as americans we want freedom without responsibility and that notion has been sold to us by both political parties again and again. We need to have a rational dialogue as a nation about how to confront this. What do you advocate mountaineer? If someone has self inflicted type 2 diabetes and doesn't have money for insulin or kidney dialysis yet we have medical facilities that can treat should we put them outside hospital to die? There is no easy solution here. You are just as guilty as the left for not taking this question seriously.

[doodle]

Take food stamps for example. Should people be able to buy soda with food stamps?

Yes...okay we subsidizing one of key contributors to diabetes.

No...we limiting their freedom to make choices.

No food stamps at all...what about children born in unfortunate circumstances to poor parents or disabled individuals?

I don't see any easy answers...

[doodle]

Oh, and if you think jesus is going to solve this....I waited tables in college and the Sunday church crowd was some of the worst customers I ever had.

[sophie]

Didn’t Bloomberg try banning large sugar drinks in NYC? As I recall, that did not go well.

No indeedy. I remember there were two problems: first, national chains would have had to deal with NYC-specific menus. but the bigger issue was that someone pointed out that if you wanted to drink twice as much soda as the maximum the law allowed you to buy in one cup, you'd just buy two cups. In other words the law would increase business expenses while not doing anything meaningful to curb sugar intake. That eventually got spun into a you're violating my personal freedom meme.

I'm amazed that it didn't pass all the same. After all, misguided laws that are obviously going to be a disaster get passed here all the time. WItness the recent bail law and the NYPD reductions in the wake of the BLM protests.

[Mountaineer]

Oh, and if you think jesus is going to solve this....I waited tables in college and the Sunday church crowd was some of the worst customers I ever had.

I take it you don’t believe every last one of us is a sinner? Jesus came to save sinners, not to ban food, not to create heaven on this earth, and not to endorse the self-righteousness or works righteousness as a means to salvation.

[Mountaineer]

Didn’t Bloomberg try banning large sugar drinks in NYC? As I recall, that did not go well. As always, who sets the standards for what is acceptable - Big Bro or the individual? God save us from ourselves, and especially from do-gooders and well intentioned control freaks.

The problem is that as americans we want freedom without responsibility and that notion has been sold to us by both political parties again and again. We need to have a rational dialogue as a nation about how to confront this. What do you advocate mountaineer? < snip >

Tom has a great answer for how to help people who truly need help:
“The onus should be on extended families and charities from local communities. That adds greater accountability for the kind of food they get.”

I would add: Don’t put your trust in princes (government), they will ALWAYS let you down.

[Kriegsspiel]

Take food stamps for example. Should people be able to buy soda with food stamps?

No...we limiting their freedom to make choices.

I don't see any easy answers...

I think this one has a defensible answer; you don't get freedom when you're dependent on charity. "Beggars can't be choosers" has been part of our Western cultural ethos for a very long time.

[Maddy]

If someone has self inflicted type 2 diabetes and doesn't have money for insulin or kidney dialysis yet we have medical facilities that can treat should we put them outside hospital to die? There is no easy solution here. You are just as guilty as the left for not taking this question seriously.

This question does not strike me as particularly difficult. People make choices every day that seal their fate as losers in life--and what they put into their bodies is just one aspect of it. I'm actually grateful that they have the freedom to live out their lives as they please, and I don't agonize over the predictable consequences of their choices or feel guilt about not jumping in to save them. This isn't hard-hearted; it's a reflection of my refusal to enable self-destructive behavior, as well as my respect for the fact that we live in a pluralistic society in which other people are entitled to live out their lives according to their values, not mine.

The reality is that we already make decisions in the health care setting that ration resources based upon a number of different factors, including "deservedness," as well as the possibility that the benefits of treatment for which others are required to pay will be undermined by the same lifestyle choices that caused the person's health to deteriorate to begin with. Perhaps the most obvious example is organ transplants. You don't even get on the list if you're unlikely, due to longstanding lifestyle choices, to benefit in the long term. During the last year, we witnessed hospitals and policymakers, consumed with the CoVid theme, designing and implementing triage plans that left heart attack victims dying in ambulances and that rationalized the flat-out denial of treatment to people beyond a certain age.

Of all the ethically complex decisions that have to be made when government takes over the role of deciding who lives and who dies, the morbidly obese diabetic is actually the easy case.

[yankees60]

Take food stamps for example. Should people be able to buy soda with food stamps?

No...we limiting their freedom to make choices.

I don't see any easy answers...

I think this one has a defensible answer; you don't get freedom when you're dependent on charity. "Beggars can't be choosers" has been part of our Western cultural ethos for a very long time.

Totally agree with this one!

Vinny

[Xan]

That sounds really easy to say, but I'm not so sure the line is that cleanly drawn.

Is a person on a government pension receiving charity? You might say no, that's payment for work done. What if the government starts giving pensions much more easily than they do now? What if you teach at a poor school for a year and then receive a pension of some small amount? What if it's a larger amount? Where's the line?

Putting on my moda/doodle hat, what if things get to the point where Jeff Bezos and 10 other guys own just about everything, and have no need for human labor anymore. It isn't possible for everybody else to earn a living, so they depend on charity from those 11 people. Do they "not deserve freedom"?

That said I AM totally on board for food stamps to not work for buying Cheetos and soda.

[Kriegsspiel]

Putting on my moda/doodle hat, what if things get to the point where Jeff Bezos and 10 other guys own just about everything, and have no need for human labor anymore. It isn't possible for everybody else to earn a living, so they depend on charity from those 11 people. Do they "not deserve freedom"?

TBH, if there's no human labor involved, I'm thinking it would be UBI time. When you're taking charity from another human then what I said earlier applies, but when it's coming from automation or robots or whatever, some kind of system like in Manna seems ideal.

[Libertarian666]

Is it unfair that you can't really opt out of this system? Isn't that a sort of tyranny of the masses against the freedom of the individual?. I can understand why some people might want to play this capitalist economy game, but what if others don't? They just want to be born free to live on this earth in another manner. I guess they can't because the tyranny of the masses force them to abide by their ideas.

It would be pretty hard to opt out without benefiting immensely from the work done by everyone else who doesn't opt out. You have talked about the social contract sort of thing, and that libertarians don't get it. A person who opts out is definitely flouting the social contract IMO.

People can definitely opt out of capitalism. All they have to do is move to a communist country.
I wonder why no one seems to do that?

[Libertarian666]

Interesting that the sharp break appears right at the closing of the gold window.

It almost looks as though allowing the government to (in effect) print money in unlimited amounts would make life much easier for the well-connected and harder for the rest of society.

I'm sure it's just a coincidence though!

[Libertarian666]

What I found completely surprising was the industry that is "screwing" their employees the most was IT.

Oh, that's easy to explain: H1-B.

[yankees60]

What I found completely surprising was the industry that is "screwing" their employees the most was IT.

Oh, that's easy to explain: H1-B.

That is what I'd posited several days ago and you can see the response I got.

Vinny

Post by Kbg » Thu Oct 29, 2020 7:42 am

yankees60 wrote: ↑Tue Oct 27, 2020 6:42 pm
Kbg wrote: ↑Tue Oct 27, 2020 5:13 pm
What I found completely surprising was the industry that is "screwing" their employees the most was IT.

Is this related to H1-B immigrants?

The companies say that they cannot find enough qualified U.S. employees for the job when what they mean is that they cannot find that class of employees willing to work for the wages they are offering? Then they bring in these H1-B immigrants who can, in some ways, be likened to "indentured servants" with nowhere the same rights as U.S. employees?

Vinny

No, mostly I think it's because IT is basically where all productivity gains are happening and they/the impact of are very substantial.

[Libertarian666]

Is it unfair that you can't really opt out of this system? Isn't that a sort of tyranny of the masses against the freedom of the individual?. I can understand why some people might want to play this capitalist economy game, but what if others don't? They just want to be born free to live on this earth in another manner. I guess they can't because the tyranny of the masses force them to abide by their ideas.

It would be pretty hard to opt out without benefiting immensely from the work done by everyone else who doesn't opt out. You have talked about the social contract sort of thing, and that libertarians don't get it. A person who opts out is definitely flouting the social contract IMO.

People can definitely opt out of capitalism. All they have to do is move to a communist country.
I wonder why no one seems to do that?

Even Marx said that socialism/communism doesn’t work unless you have a prosperous nation to raze and steal from to redistribute. Go to sub Saharan Africa and there’s no Jeff bezos to steal from and redistribute. Socialism doesn’t work to redistribute dirt from villager to another.

Also. Socialists tend to be younger. So they weren’t alive to see Venezuela be prosperous before the socialists took over and ruined the country. So the 20 year olds wearing Che Guevara t-shirts perspective, Venezuela would have worked if not for big corporations or greedy corrupt politicians or whatever else.

I wonder whom are the communists here planning to steal from...

[Mountaineer]

Is it unfair that you can't really opt out of this system? Isn't that a sort of tyranny of the masses against the freedom of the individual?. I can understand why some people might want to play this capitalist economy game, but what if others don't? They just want to be born free to live on this earth in another manner. I guess they can't because the tyranny of the masses force them to abide by their ideas.

It would be pretty hard to opt out without benefiting immensely from the work done by everyone else who doesn't opt out. You have talked about the social contract sort of thing, and that libertarians don't get it. A person who opts out is definitely flouting the social contract IMO.

People can definitely opt out of capitalism. All they have to do is move to a communist country.
I wonder why no one seems to do that?

Even Marx said that socialism/communism doesn’t work unless you have a prosperous nation to raze and steal from to redistribute. Go to sub Saharan Africa and there’s no Jeff bezos to steal from and redistribute. Socialism doesn’t work to redistribute dirt from villager to another.

Also. Socialists tend to be younger. So they weren’t alive to see Venezuela be prosperous before the socialists took over and ruined the country. So the 20 year olds wearing Che Guevara t-shirts perspective, Venezuela would have worked if not for big corporations or greedy corrupt politicians or whatever else.

I wonder whom are the communists here planning to steal from...

John Galt?

[Libertarian666]

Is it unfair that you can't really opt out of this system? Isn't that a sort of tyranny of the masses against the freedom of the individual?. I can understand why some people might want to play this capitalist economy game, but what if others don't? They just want to be born free to live on this earth in another manner. I guess they can't because the tyranny of the masses force them to abide by their ideas.

It would be pretty hard to opt out without benefiting immensely from the work done by everyone else who doesn't opt out. You have talked about the social contract sort of thing, and that libertarians don't get it. A person who opts out is definitely flouting the social contract IMO.

People can definitely opt out of capitalism. All they have to do is move to a communist country.
I wonder why no one seems to do that?

Even Marx said that socialism/communism doesn’t work unless you have a prosperous nation to raze and steal from to redistribute. Go to sub Saharan Africa and there’s no Jeff bezos to steal from and redistribute. Socialism doesn’t work to redistribute dirt from villager to another.

Also. Socialists tend to be younger. So they weren’t alive to see Venezuela be prosperous before the socialists took over and ruined the country. So the 20 year olds wearing Che Guevara t-shirts perspective, Venezuela would have worked if not for big corporations or greedy corrupt politicians or whatever else.

I wonder whom are the communists here planning to steal from...

John Galt?

I think that will work about as well as it did in AS.

[doodle]

You'd be very disappointed with switzerland, Techno


https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54745033

Geneva is a very wealthy place. Home to a huge private banking sector, the United Nations, and auction houses Sotheby's and Christie's, which regularly sell enormous gemstones for eye-watering prices.

And this month it is introducing the highest minimum monthly salary in the world, in response to a referendum at the end of September.

The new hourly rate of 23 Swiss francs - equivalent to £19, $25 or €22 - will give a minimum monthly salary of 4,000 francs (£3,350).

[Kriegsspiel]

Take food stamps for example. Should people be able to buy soda with food stamps?

No...we limiting their freedom to make choices.

I don't see any easy answers...

I think this one has a defensible answer; you don't get freedom when you're dependent on charity. "Beggars can't be choosers" has been part of our Western cultural ethos for a very long time.

Stumbled on this article today. I like the term Ward Paternalism.

Why, though, would anyone support Ward Paternalism? Top two reasons:

1. While irresponsibility is not the sole cause of desperation, it is plainly a major cause. The very fact that you’re asking for government help therefore raises serious doubts about your own prudence. And it makes sense to focus paternalistic energy on you.

2. The standard moral constraint to leave others alone does not apply. “Leave me alone, I don’t want your help” has great force. “Help me, but don’t presume to tell me how to live my life” has little.

link

[Xan]

Take food stamps for example. Should people be able to buy soda with food stamps?

No...we limiting their freedom to make choices.

I don't see any easy answers...

I think this one has a defensible answer; you don't get freedom when you're dependent on charity. "Beggars can't be choosers" has been part of our Western cultural ethos for a very long time.

Stumbled on this article today. I like the term Ward Paternalism.

Why, though, would anyone support Ward Paternalism? Top two reasons:

1. While irresponsibility is not the sole cause of desperation, it is plainly a major cause. The very fact that you’re asking for government help therefore raises serious doubts about your own prudence. And it makes sense to focus paternalistic energy on you.

2. The standard moral constraint to leave others alone does not apply. “Leave me alone, I don’t want your help” has great force. “Help me, but don’t presume to tell me how to live my life” has little.

link

If we are indeed headed for a world of abundance provided by automation, with the masses fed by UBI, then this idea leads to complete government control of everyone's lives.

[Mark Leavy]

Stumbled on this article today. I like the term Ward Paternalism.

Why, though, would anyone support Ward Paternalism? Top two reasons:

1. While irresponsibility is not the sole cause of desperation, it is plainly a major cause. The very fact that you’re asking for government help therefore raises serious doubts about your own prudence. And it makes sense to focus paternalistic energy on you.

2. The standard moral constraint to leave others alone does not apply. “Leave me alone, I don’t want your help” has great force. “Help me, but don’t presume to tell me how to live my life” has little.

link

That was a great read. My sister and I are currently providing for our mom - and she is pushing back on some of the restrictions we have put on her. She's not a fan of losing her independence. Well... guess what? She lost it years ago when we had to start supporting her...

[Kriegsspiel]

If we are indeed headed for a world of abundance provided by automation, with the masses fed by UBI, then this idea leads to complete government control of everyone's lives.

I think an abundant world, or lack of scarcity, or hell, even a world of scarcity but where robots do most/all of the labor... I don't know if the current paradigm will hold true. Then again, maybe everything stays the same as it's always been, even when economics is turned on its head. I'm sure I'm not the only one who could imagine a future where your fusion-powered personal robot/replicator could synthesize food out of air and clean up the dishes afterwards... but you'd still want to get together with your tribe and conquer your neighbors that have nicer beaches.

It's kind of fun to think about, especially the scarcity-with-robots one.