Societies as a whole should be progressing towards more leisure time, not more work time.
Well it should all be about choice. If the individual wants to work more then they should be able to. But it would also be nice to feel you don't have to work 40+ hours a week just to make ends meet.
Um, yes it should. You can't force people not to work. Unless there's just no work to do. Like at my job sometimes there are hours available for overtime. But if there is none, I can't just make myself come into work even if there's no work to do or my shift is already covered.
But even aside from my one job, I can go ahead and work other jobs too if I want. And that's the way it should be. Well, that's the way it is.
If some people are willing to work a lot, and are completely free to do so, then after a while it will be expected of everyone else (if you want a job, that is),
I'm confused. You're saying if people are free to work, then it will be expected of everyone else. But then you say if I want a job, that is. So then what's the problem? If that's only the situation when I actually want a job, then that's a good thing.
and that's how we got into the situation we're in (where you have to work your arse off just to make a decent living).
I'm not sure I see the connection you're making here. Like are you just referring to how many hours a person has to work a week until they are considered full time employees with full time benefits? Cause then I could see what you're getting at. Cause in the U.S. that is how many hours you need to work to be considered full time and you don't get the same benefits if you work less than that. And as things stand now, most companies would never consider, say, 35 hours a week to be full time in the U.S.
Why do you think there's a minimum wage? It's so that desperate people (who are willing to work for next to nothing, because it's better than nothing) don't drag the wages to sub-human levels.
Right. So minimum wage is a good thing. It's protecting people to an extent by guaranteeing they can't earn less than a certain amount. If you want to argue that the minimum wage is too low, then yeah I'd agree with that. But the only alternative to a minimum wage is none at all. I mean, you can increase the minimum wage but it will still be a minimum wage.
Likewise, the tendency of the length of the work week (and of the entire working career) should be to go down, because, as with wages, there are always people desperate enough that they'll work themselves to death just to earn a wage. And if there are enough desperate people around, other people will have to start to work as hard as them if they want to have a job.
I'm sorry but I'm still confused on this point. Maybe what we COULD agree on is that people should still work as much as they want, but start getting overtime pay for fewer hours. So say, if you work more than 35 hours a week instead of 40 you start getting overtime pay. That's how it is in most European countries, isn't it?
But I don't see how it's the fault of the desperate wage earner that other people should have to start working so hard as well. The desperate people aren't raising the bar. They're just filling a labor void. I think the situation is different across the world though and really depends on how you look at it.
In the U.S. for example, some people argue that illegal immigrants who work really hard and long hours are taking people's jobs away. Jobs like the ones in service industries. So if anything, those desperate wage earners here might make it harder in some ways to find work, but they don't cause any of us to have to actually work harder. It's not like my boss would ever come up to me and be like, "Greg, why can't you work as hard as Paco over there who slaves all day keeping the bathrooms here clean?" I have a different sort of job than Paco though. But if I'm working the same job as that desperate wage earner, then the only thing I gotta work harder at is getting a better job than that guy. If I'm not working the same job, then there's really no problem.
That was the comparison I was making between minimum wage and weekly work hours. I think societies should always strive to go in the direction of higher minimum wages and fewer weekly work hours. This would be very easy with a better distribution of wealth, but of course you can't use that expression.....comrade.
I guess no argument here. Yes, society should strive to go in the direction of lots of things. Don't get me wrong. I'd love it if in the U.S. 35 hours counted for full time. I can't imagine how you'd reverse the clock on this though. Here we've been functioning on the 40 hour work week for a long time and companies are trying to cut costs everywhere now as it is. They try never to pay their workers overtime and making a 35 hour work week, they'd probably be unwilling to scale back hours of their operation just to save the overtime compensation.
It doesn't seem we're really in disagreement over things here. You're just seem to be trying more to say how things should be when I'm just saying I think this is how things actually are.
This is an excellent thread, im a strong believe in liberalism. Iv missed half the discussion and i will have to read back on it but just my gripe in politics atm:
Sadly my country(Australia) is run by Union loving morons who piss money up the wall, suck the life out of government assets(and then sell them off to make their budget look good) and waste 40billion dollars on a Broadband network that does not even have a proper business case to encourage investment from the major telecommunication companies. Not to mention the fact they want it to run to every corner of the country where 90% of Australians live around capital cities and those who live outside cities would have little use for such a system.
And yet we have a lack of trained nurses and doctors and a public health system that is very underfunded, we have a pathetic education system that is currently having millions pumped into it with little tangible benefit to the students (i know this because i work on the building projects they have funded).
It angers me more that our liberal opposition leader has poor leadership traits and a stupid disagreement between the liberal party wound up with him replacing a very competent candidate for the last federal election.
Aright grip over. ill leave you with a thought: "If there was no minimum wage, would there be any unemployment, and how high might the cost of living be?"
Pension initially begun as a system that took care of those that were still alive, but couldn't work any longer. From this initial purpose it's evolved into a sort of "reward". Nowadays a large portion of people live far beyond 65 and lead active lives until well beyond 70 and 80.
The problem is that in most western countries the amount of pensioners is increasing while the amount of working age people is decreasing. This is creating a huge strain on governments' budgets and societies.
As such, increasing the retirement age will be necessary.
Another possible solution is to make social security a means tested thing. You know, maybe only give money to people who really need it? But that's an extremely unpopular idea here too. Cause everyone that works pays into social security. So by the time they retire, even if they planned out their own retirement, they want to start getting that money back cause it's their money.
I can understand this and I can't. I mean, I'm not so certain I'll be smart enough to have my retirement plan all figured out. But I may have to anyway because by the time I'm old enough to have social security I there may not be anything left in the fund.
Sadly my country(Australia) is run by Union loving morons who piss money up the wall, suck the life out of government assets(and then sell them off to make their budget look good) and waste 40billion dollars on a Broadband network that does not even have a proper business case to encourage investment from the major telecommunication companies. Not to mention the fact they want it to run to every corner of the country where 90% of Australians live around capital cities and those who live outside cities would have little use for such a system.
Are you referring to like internet as a public utility? That's becoming a greater issue here in the U.S. where people are wondering if the government should begin to provide the internet the way it does public television and radio and have us pay for it with our taxes. I see both good things and bad things about that.
And yet we have a lack of trained nurses and doctors and a public health system that is very underfunded, we have a pathetic education system that is currently having millions pumped into it with little tangible benefit to the students (i know this because i work on the building projects they have funded).
It's sad how inaccessible health care is becoming to so many people. And the thing about nurses, it's very hard to get into nursing schools. The reason why is because there aren't a lot of nursing instructors because there isn't a lot of money in being a nurse instructor at a college. If you have nursing skills you're more likely just to be a nurse, not a nurse educator. And thus colleges have to make nursing applicants be competitive with each other even though so many people who don't make it into nursing school would have easily gone on to be great nurses.
Then you got doctors. Sure they make a lot of money, but they can only really say they do after they pay off their massive amounts of student debt. The average doctor here by the time he finishes medical school can easily have up to 200 thousand dollars of student debt. Crazy.
It angers me more that our liberal opposition leader has poor leadership traits and a stupid disagreement between the liberal party wound up with him replacing a very competent candidate for the last federal election.
I'm curious about this if you wouldn't mind explaining it more.
A high minimum wage is an absolute must. Whoever says otherwise either hasn't lived with an extremely tight budget (i.e., earning minimum wage), or has in the past but now thinks that "poor people are poor because they don't work hard".
I currently live on a very tight budget. I'm not making miminum wage, but I'm not making much more than it either. I'm not sure what you consider to be a high minimum wage. It's usually adjusted according to inflation and the current cost of living. Ideally, it should be higher than just what is the proportional increase I guess. It would be nice even if companies could file for specific minimum wages depending on what their own projected incomes were. Like if a company like Wal-Mart which makes record profits should have to pay a higher minimum wage than say a small locally owned business, that would be good. But these kinds of principles simply don't fly where I'm from.
It doesn't seem we're really in disagreement over things here. You're just seem to be trying more to say how things should be when I'm just saying I think this is how things actually are.
That's also a good statement for a marriage going through financial crisis.
Are you referring to like internet as a public utility? That's becoming a greater issue here in the U.S. where people are wondering if the government should begin to provide the internet the way it does public television and radio and have us pay for it with our taxes. I see both good things and bad things about that.
Don, correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't internet access recognized as a human right in Finland since not too long ago?
First time I heard it it sounded ridiculous, but whether it's true or not, the more I think about it the more I see the reasoning behind such a proposition. With the amount of information relegated to the internet these days, eventually you just won't be able to live a normal life without access to it.
And the thing about nurses, it's very hard to get into nursing schools. The reason why is because there aren't a lot of nursing instructors because there isn't a lot of money in being a nurse instructor at a college. If you have nursing skills you're more likely just to be a nurse, not a nurse educator. And thus colleges have to make nursing applicants be competitive with each other even though so many people who don't make it into nursing school would have easily gone on to be great nurses.
Never thought of that. But it sure explains why there seems to be such a shortage of nurses.
As societies become richer, the poor will always lack the cutting-edge commodities. I personally do not see any way to avoid this, without causing even bigger problems.
Indeed. But isn't this what Sweden (and I suppose Finland as well) are trying to push themselves out of with the massive education we want to give everyone? Fifty years ago you probably never went to high school, nowadays everyone is supposed to have at least a bachelors. I find that politicians, debaters and similar never talk about the deeper underlying concepts of where they want society to head or how to get there, it's all tax number-crunching, but is this the plan? Faced with the everpresent problem of dooming a certain percent of the population to be poor no matter how much we advance technologically, is education the only way we see out of it?
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We don't need so many people, and at one point in our development we won't need nature either.
Inhuman is not that out of the question to great beings.
It's a crazy world, psychos who figures out the way to manipulate this almost too naturally form system are publicly being consider superior intellectual.
I don't think something is going to explode, but human's intellect are considers a mutation, and since neglecting nature had always been a strong suit to human development, human are most strong when being out of the ordinary.
Yeah, but you're talking about it from an individual perspective, as in "I got out of that 10% poorest, so screw everyone else".
That's exactly his point though. If YOU get out of the lowest 10%, someone HAS to fall down below you. If everyone in a country is placed on a list, ranking from richest to poorest, then if you go up from 43,003 to 43,002, then whoever was in place 43,002 will not be in 43,003. You will always have a 10% poorest. This gap can be large or small, and moving it in either direction brings with it certain problems. Too large a gap and you create inequality and a privileged elite. Make it too small, for example through higher minimum wages, and you remove potential jobs, because it will cost too much to hire people.
This is the reason why you don't see anyone in Sweden getting paid to wash your car, greet you when you come to the store or pack your bags at the supermarket. You either do it yourself or have a machine do it, because anything else isn't economical. With the minimum wages we have, you simply cannot run those sorts of businesses. I'm not saying that's bad or good, I'm just saying this is how it is. However, move the minimum wage even higher and you will keep on removing jobs that simply cannot be afforded anymore. What will happen then is people won't be able to get a job, so they will instead do illicit work for lower wages, i.e. circumventing the entire system. People are clever, and the more complex and hindering a system, the greater the incentive to work around it unless monitored constantly.
Now in 200 years when the world GDP is 30,000 trillion USD (or something, I just picked a number), there will still be a 10% that is poorer that everyone else, but speaking in absolute terms, they will have more of everything than almost anyone living today. And because they cannot afford a private spaceship and are thus landlocked to Earth, they will be considered poor.
Neither of us is saying that this is inherently something good or something to defend in and of itself. But reshaping the world is complicated, and simply equating wealth across the spectrum is problematic, and may result in worse situations.
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I think making the cake bigger is a better goal opposed to making sure that everyone has an equally sized slice -- when there is more cake to go around, everyone gets a bigger slice naturally.
But there also has to be methods to ensure that people get the slice they deserve.
So you have a big cake and there's 100,000 people. There's 50% of one group of people, then 30%, then 15%, then 5%.
The 50% group should get a piece of cake that equates to the actual size of the cake. So, if they're getting 50% of the cake, they should get enough pieces that that 50% of cake is doled out to 50,000 people.
I'm not suggesting absolute equality. If anything, I'd like absolute equality in how loud your voice is in society itself. The rich shouldn't be able to speak over the poor which, sadly, is inevitable, so it's a pipe dream for now. I'm just saying that people shouldn't be able to get gipped. If you can make the cake bigger and keep it fair, then I'd be cool with it.
I also know that there are some flaws with my system, mostly because I know that being able to uphold a system such as mine would require an overbearing legal hold over finances and all that, the possibility of loopholes also. There is a big opportunity for corruption.
That is, if it was ruled by humans. I won't let my imagination get the better of me, but what if you could rule finances with computers (which, in my opinion, is how it should be done in the 21st century)? We already have that to an extent, but the actual handling of those finances lies in the hands of federal bodies and banks, which are run by people (including stock market speculators). If you could take the human element out of all of that and have financial systems run by computers, then government could become much more efficient and the financial system, hopefully, wouldn't be so rife with corruption and error. The only thing I'd really be afraid of is hackers.
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I hate the way you cling to ignorance and pass it off as innocence
Minimum wage in the U.S is relative to the state. Washington state, my state, has the the highest minimum wage at $8.55 an hour. There is also a federal minimum wage at around $7.00.
I'm not going to complain about my state's minimum wage; it's at a preferable level for me.
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I hate the way you cling to ignorance and pass it off as innocence
I find that politicians, debaters and similar never talk about the deeper underlying concepts of where they want society to head or how to get there, it's all tax number-crunching, but is this the plan?
Politicians and debaters? I'm a bit confused. Like are you saying that government should be outlining how society should be and their plan to get there? Personally, I find that's mostly all politicians do. They speak in rhetoric and idealism to the point where nothing makes sense to me. Few politicians are ever more pragmatic and speak more of how things really are. When they're thinking in numbers and working with empirical facts, this to me is when they're at their best.
I mean, you can't be so pragmatic though as to be nihilistic. Some of us HAS to start to ask, shouldn't things be this way or that way. But obviously things are being shaped by ideals. I just don't think an ideal should be the definitive model for how to proceed in society. But I'm not sure I understood your point here anyway so I best just not get too deep into it until I think I understand further.
Faced with the everpresent problem of dooming a certain percent of the population to be poor no matter how much we advance technologically, is education the only way we see out of it?
Well, no I guess not but you gotta admit education is a pretty damn good solvent. And even if you don't feel education is gonna solve everything, you still gotta admit there is a lot of the world that still needs way more education before you can seriously ask if there's a better way to solve things like poverty and what not.
Minimum wage in the U.S is relative to the state. Washington state, my state, has the the highest minimum wage at $8.55 an hour. There is also a federal minimum wage at around $7.00.
I'm not going to complain about my state's minimum wage; it's at a preferable level for me.
Yeah, Washington is pretty sweet. You're damn lucky to live there. I wanna get my Master's there.
Yeah, of course there's always going to be a 'ranking' of sorts. The problem is that right now it sucks major nuts to be on the bottom half of the ranking. And not in relative terms...in absolute terms. If you equate not being able to feed your kids to not having a private spaceship, that's your problem.
200 years ago everyone was dirt poor in Sweden. Hell it was pretty bad even a hundred years ago. Since then, thanks to the development of society and most importantly the economic system, we've seen a major increase in well being for all. 200 years ago crops could go bad, you could die of pretty much any disease, you worked most of your life, you got little education and although we had stopped warring with other countries at that point it hadn't been long since the king had forced you to march against the russians. And these people weren't the unfortunate ones, they were the "middle class" of the time
Today, everyone has it better, although the increase hasn't been uniform. Even those at the very bottom don't have to worry about starving to death or dying of tuberkulosis and in theory they can also get an education up to high school. Speaking of Sweden specifically here of course.
Cost too much? Yeah, maybe for very small businesses, but they're not the problem. The problem is the people that already make a million euros a month, but nonetheless fire people because "it costs too much". Who the fuck cares? I think you can afford to make, let's say, 800.000 euros a month instead, and keep those jobs. That's the problem. People don't care a rat's arse.
That's not what I was talking about, although skyrocketing executive salaries are pretty ridiculous at times. But that's not an easy topic to get to the bottom of either.
No what I mean is, is that if you raise the minimum wage, then some professions will simply not make as much money as they cost.
Example: Let's say you have people picking berries in a field. They can pick berries worth 10$ an hour, and you pay them 6$ an hour. This is cheaper than hiring a machine to do it, which would cost 7$ an hour. If the minimum wage is then raised to 8$ an hour, the machine will be the more economical choise, and the workers will be laid off.
This is true for anything, provided you just raise the minimum wage high enough. How great the effect is of course very hard to predict and depends on many factors, but it is there and is something that has to be kept in mind.
We already have that to an extent, but the actual handling of those finances lies in the hands of federal bodies and banks, which are run by people (including stock market speculators). If you could take the human element out of all of that and have financial systems run by computers, then government could become much more efficient and the financial system, hopefully, wouldn't be so rife with corruption and error. The only thing I'd really be afraid of is hackers.
Computers already run a lot of stock market investments, in fact the whole financial sector is incredibly computerized these days. Programs handle a lot of investing and speculation, with humans merely acting as overseers.
But you're talking about a cyberocracy, and without some form of advanced AI that doesn't really solve any of the underlying problems with society except perhaps by speeding up bureaucratic processes.
Politicians and debaters? I'm a bit confused. Like are you saying that government should be outlining how society should be and their plan to get there? Personally, I find that's mostly all politicians do. They speak in rhetoric and idealism to the point where nothing makes sense to me. Few politicians are ever more pragmatic and speak more of how things really are. When they're thinking in numbers and working with empirical facts, this to me is when they're at their best.
What I'm saying is, and perhaps this is a natial difference, politicians often get very nitty-gritty. Should we lower that tax by 1%, should we increase that tax by 2%, should we give funds to that type of school, should this policy make it so bus drivers have to have breaks every 2 hours or whatever. When pressed about why, we may get some nebulous answer about how Sweden is suppoesd to be a land of knowledge to make us competitive in the future.
Take our schools. We have a problem here with quality dropping steadily in the last 10 years (seems like everyone has), but instead of saying "why is there a problem" they say "how much money do we need to fix it?"
I was pleasantly surprised the other week when two politicians in a debate over our school systems really got down to what they think causes our societal problems. It was refreshing and actually provided some insight into the current situation, which was about segregated schools.
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What I'm saying is, and perhaps this is a natial difference, politicians often get very nitty-gritty. Should we lower that tax by 1%, should we increase that tax by 2%, should we give funds to that type of school, should this policy make it so bus drivers have to have breaks every 2 hours or whatever. When pressed about why, we may get some nebulous answer about how Sweden is suppoesd to be a land of knowledge to make us competitive in the future.
Take our schools. We have a problem here with quality dropping steadily in the last 10 years (seems like everyone has), but instead of saying "why is there a problem" they say "how much money do we need to fix it?"
I suppose I understand. But money, at least indirectly is pretty much the only way government can solve anything. I mean, to take just about any idea and implement it into policy requires money. So even if some deeper soul searching takes place and a government gets to the heart of the matter as to why a thing is the way it is, to fix that problem is still likely to cost money. And government's money all comes from taxes. I do sense what you're getting at, though.
Hey, didn't some really right wing guys get into your parliament recently??
Yeah, the Swedish Democrats. Though they're not exclusively right wing, they combine ideas from the entire spectrum. Infofar as they have actual ideas that is, since just about the only solution the have to any problem is "blame the immigrants!" Currently they only have around 7% percent and haven't really been able to affect any policy in favor of their own program, but there's indication that they may get even more support in the next election.
I suppose I understand. But money, at least indirectly is pretty much the only way government can solve anything. I mean, to take just about any idea and implement it into policy requires money. So even if some deeper soul searching takes place and a government gets to the heart of the matter as to why a thing is the way it is, to fix that problem is still likely to cost money. And government's money all comes from taxes. I do sense what you're getting at, though.
Obviously. The problem is however that it's not "hmm, our schools aren't doing too well. Could it be that there is one, or several, fundamental flaws in how the current system is structured?", but rather "hmm, our school aren't doing too well. How about we give you 10 million extra?".
Whether this is a marketing problem from our parties, or our media only focusing on numbers, or something else, I don't know. But it feels weird when politics only seems to be about adjusting numbers here and there. Though come to think of it, it's not that surprising. The only reason our "right" parties defeated the "left" last election is because they emulated the left so well they basically took over their entire program.
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Obviously. The problem is however that it's not "hmm, our schools aren't doing too well. Could it be that there is one, or several, fundamental flaws in how the current system is structured?", but rather "hmm, our school aren't doing too well. How about we give you 10 million extra?".
I do understand your point. It's not just a matter of throwing money at the problem, but really figuring out the underlying issue that is causing a myriad of problems. Ultimately though the solution would probably still involve funding somewhere along the line. Whether that mean cutting funds or adding to them. But governments do tend to waste money with blanket solutions that involve simply using more money, yes.
Whether this is a marketing problem from our parties, or our media only focusing on numbers, or something else, I don't know. But it feels weird when politics only seems to be about adjusting numbers here and there. Though come to think of it, it's not that surprising. The only reason our "right" parties defeated the "left" last election is because they emulated the left so well they basically took over their entire program.
While politicians quote numbers and figures a lot, they really don't understand the true numbers behind solutions. They'll make a flimsy case using some random statistics and then decide on a policy more on a political basis rather than a mathematical solution. Then it's really up to the administrators to crunch the numbers.
Immigrants have been the brunt of criticism for centuries. In my AP US class, we cover a new wave of nativism almost every three chapters (we're on chapter 25 or something, just finished WW2). In my opinion, it's a disgusting way of thinking.
"It's the ________ fault that we have all this crime!"
"________ are taking away jobs from normal people!"
"________ are giving drugs to our kids! They're degenerates and need to go back to where they came from!"
But can you really prove it? Unless the group of people you are trying to exhume are undoubtedly the primary cause of your troubles, you must place the blame on underlying problems within society. Why do you think they're coming into your country in the first place? Did it ever occur to you that, maybe, the place they're coming from was terrible? What if you lived in a place where you didn't feel safe, where your family didn't feel safe? Would you not want to leave for greener pastures?
I live in the US and I don't ever want to see our borders closed. Immigration is inevitable, whether it be illegal or legitimate, and I don't think people really understand that. It doesn't matter how much money you invest into putting 30 meter fences along the border, people are still going to get in, whether you like it or not.
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I hate the way you cling to ignorance and pass it off as innocence
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But even aside from my one job, I can go ahead and work other jobs too if I want. And that's the way it should be. Well, that's the way it is.
I'm confused. You're saying if people are free to work, then it will be expected of everyone else. But then you say if I want a job, that is. So then what's the problem? If that's only the situation when I actually want a job, then that's a good thing.
I'm not sure I see the connection you're making here. Like are you just referring to how many hours a person has to work a week until they are considered full time employees with full time benefits? Cause then I could see what you're getting at. Cause in the U.S. that is how many hours you need to work to be considered full time and you don't get the same benefits if you work less than that. And as things stand now, most companies would never consider, say, 35 hours a week to be full time in the U.S.
Right. So minimum wage is a good thing. It's protecting people to an extent by guaranteeing they can't earn less than a certain amount. If you want to argue that the minimum wage is too low, then yeah I'd agree with that. But the only alternative to a minimum wage is none at all. I mean, you can increase the minimum wage but it will still be a minimum wage.
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I would assume it also only goes up in Portugal?
I'm sorry but I'm still confused on this point. Maybe what we COULD agree on is that people should still work as much as they want, but start getting overtime pay for fewer hours. So say, if you work more than 35 hours a week instead of 40 you start getting overtime pay. That's how it is in most European countries, isn't it?
But I don't see how it's the fault of the desperate wage earner that other people should have to start working so hard as well. The desperate people aren't raising the bar. They're just filling a labor void. I think the situation is different across the world though and really depends on how you look at it.
In the U.S. for example, some people argue that illegal immigrants who work really hard and long hours are taking people's jobs away. Jobs like the ones in service industries. So if anything, those desperate wage earners here might make it harder in some ways to find work, but they don't cause any of us to have to actually work harder. It's not like my boss would ever come up to me and be like, "Greg, why can't you work as hard as Paco over there who slaves all day keeping the bathrooms here clean?" I have a different sort of job than Paco though. But if I'm working the same job as that desperate wage earner, then the only thing I gotta work harder at is getting a better job than that guy. If I'm not working the same job, then there's really no problem.
I guess no argument here. Yes, society should strive to go in the direction of lots of things. Don't get me wrong. I'd love it if in the U.S. 35 hours counted for full time. I can't imagine how you'd reverse the clock on this though. Here we've been functioning on the 40 hour work week for a long time and companies are trying to cut costs everywhere now as it is. They try never to pay their workers overtime and making a 35 hour work week, they'd probably be unwilling to scale back hours of their operation just to save the overtime compensation.
It doesn't seem we're really in disagreement over things here. You're just seem to be trying more to say how things should be when I'm just saying I think this is how things actually are.
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Sadly my country(Australia) is run by Union loving morons who piss money up the wall, suck the life out of government assets(and then sell them off to make their budget look good) and waste 40billion dollars on a Broadband network that does not even have a proper business case to encourage investment from the major telecommunication companies. Not to mention the fact they want it to run to every corner of the country where 90% of Australians live around capital cities and those who live outside cities would have little use for such a system.
And yet we have a lack of trained nurses and doctors and a public health system that is very underfunded, we have a pathetic education system that is currently having millions pumped into it with little tangible benefit to the students (i know this because i work on the building projects they have funded).
It angers me more that our liberal opposition leader has poor leadership traits and a stupid disagreement between the liberal party wound up with him replacing a very competent candidate for the last federal election.
Aright grip over. ill leave you with a thought: "If there was no minimum wage, would there be any unemployment, and how high might the cost of living be?"
Thanks Caniroth for the awesome sig!
I can understand this and I can't. I mean, I'm not so certain I'll be smart enough to have my retirement plan all figured out. But I may have to anyway because by the time I'm old enough to have social security I there may not be anything left in the fund.
Are you referring to like internet as a public utility? That's becoming a greater issue here in the U.S. where people are wondering if the government should begin to provide the internet the way it does public television and radio and have us pay for it with our taxes. I see both good things and bad things about that.
It's sad how inaccessible health care is becoming to so many people. And the thing about nurses, it's very hard to get into nursing schools. The reason why is because there aren't a lot of nursing instructors because there isn't a lot of money in being a nurse instructor at a college. If you have nursing skills you're more likely just to be a nurse, not a nurse educator. And thus colleges have to make nursing applicants be competitive with each other even though so many people who don't make it into nursing school would have easily gone on to be great nurses.
Then you got doctors. Sure they make a lot of money, but they can only really say they do after they pay off their massive amounts of student debt. The average doctor here by the time he finishes medical school can easily have up to 200 thousand dollars of student debt. Crazy.
I'm curious about this if you wouldn't mind explaining it more.
I currently live on a very tight budget. I'm not making miminum wage, but I'm not making much more than it either. I'm not sure what you consider to be a high minimum wage. It's usually adjusted according to inflation and the current cost of living. Ideally, it should be higher than just what is the proportional increase I guess. It would be nice even if companies could file for specific minimum wages depending on what their own projected incomes were. Like if a company like Wal-Mart which makes record profits should have to pay a higher minimum wage than say a small locally owned business, that would be good. But these kinds of principles simply don't fly where I'm from.
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That's also a good statement for a marriage going through financial crisis.
First time I heard it it sounded ridiculous, but whether it's true or not, the more I think about it the more I see the reasoning behind such a proposition. With the amount of information relegated to the internet these days, eventually you just won't be able to live a normal life without access to it.
Never thought of that. But it sure explains why there seems to be such a shortage of nurses.
Indeed. But isn't this what Sweden (and I suppose Finland as well) are trying to push themselves out of with the massive education we want to give everyone? Fifty years ago you probably never went to high school, nowadays everyone is supposed to have at least a bachelors. I find that politicians, debaters and similar never talk about the deeper underlying concepts of where they want society to head or how to get there, it's all tax number-crunching, but is this the plan? Faced with the everpresent problem of dooming a certain percent of the population to be poor no matter how much we advance technologically, is education the only way we see out of it?
Inhuman is not that out of the question to great beings.
It's a crazy world, psychos who figures out the way to manipulate this almost too naturally form system are publicly being consider superior intellectual.
I don't think something is going to explode, but human's intellect are considers a mutation, and since neglecting nature had always been a strong suit to human development, human are most strong when being out of the ordinary.
This is the reason why you don't see anyone in Sweden getting paid to wash your car, greet you when you come to the store or pack your bags at the supermarket. You either do it yourself or have a machine do it, because anything else isn't economical. With the minimum wages we have, you simply cannot run those sorts of businesses. I'm not saying that's bad or good, I'm just saying this is how it is. However, move the minimum wage even higher and you will keep on removing jobs that simply cannot be afforded anymore. What will happen then is people won't be able to get a job, so they will instead do illicit work for lower wages, i.e. circumventing the entire system. People are clever, and the more complex and hindering a system, the greater the incentive to work around it unless monitored constantly.
Now in 200 years when the world GDP is 30,000 trillion USD (or something, I just picked a number), there will still be a 10% that is poorer that everyone else, but speaking in absolute terms, they will have more of everything than almost anyone living today. And because they cannot afford a private spaceship and are thus landlocked to Earth, they will be considered poor.
Neither of us is saying that this is inherently something good or something to defend in and of itself. But reshaping the world is complicated, and simply equating wealth across the spectrum is problematic, and may result in worse situations.
But there also has to be methods to ensure that people get the slice they deserve.
So you have a big cake and there's 100,000 people. There's 50% of one group of people, then 30%, then 15%, then 5%.
The 50% group should get a piece of cake that equates to the actual size of the cake. So, if they're getting 50% of the cake, they should get enough pieces that that 50% of cake is doled out to 50,000 people.
I'm not suggesting absolute equality. If anything, I'd like absolute equality in how loud your voice is in society itself. The rich shouldn't be able to speak over the poor which, sadly, is inevitable, so it's a pipe dream for now. I'm just saying that people shouldn't be able to get gipped. If you can make the cake bigger and keep it fair, then I'd be cool with it.
I also know that there are some flaws with my system, mostly because I know that being able to uphold a system such as mine would require an overbearing legal hold over finances and all that, the possibility of loopholes also. There is a big opportunity for corruption.
That is, if it was ruled by humans. I won't let my imagination get the better of me, but what if you could rule finances with computers (which, in my opinion, is how it should be done in the 21st century)? We already have that to an extent, but the actual handling of those finances lies in the hands of federal bodies and banks, which are run by people (including stock market speculators). If you could take the human element out of all of that and have financial systems run by computers, then government could become much more efficient and the financial system, hopefully, wouldn't be so rife with corruption and error. The only thing I'd really be afraid of is hackers.
I hate the way you cling to ignorance and pass it off as innocence
I'm not going to complain about my state's minimum wage; it's at a preferable level for me.
I hate the way you cling to ignorance and pass it off as innocence
My first job and I got an offer for $11.00/hr for paid internship. I'm in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Damn, I need a job. I want to be able to actually drive this summer and I am not mooching off my parents for gas money.
I hate the way you cling to ignorance and pass it off as innocence
I mean, you can't be so pragmatic though as to be nihilistic. Some of us HAS to start to ask, shouldn't things be this way or that way. But obviously things are being shaped by ideals. I just don't think an ideal should be the definitive model for how to proceed in society. But I'm not sure I understood your point here anyway so I best just not get too deep into it until I think I understand further.
Well, no I guess not but you gotta admit education is a pretty damn good solvent. And even if you don't feel education is gonna solve everything, you still gotta admit there is a lot of the world that still needs way more education before you can seriously ask if there's a better way to solve things like poverty and what not.
Yeah, Washington is pretty sweet. You're damn lucky to live there. I wanna get my Master's there.
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Today, everyone has it better, although the increase hasn't been uniform. Even those at the very bottom don't have to worry about starving to death or dying of tuberkulosis and in theory they can also get an education up to high school. Speaking of Sweden specifically here of course.
That's not what I was talking about, although skyrocketing executive salaries are pretty ridiculous at times. But that's not an easy topic to get to the bottom of either.
No what I mean is, is that if you raise the minimum wage, then some professions will simply not make as much money as they cost.
Example: Let's say you have people picking berries in a field. They can pick berries worth 10$ an hour, and you pay them 6$ an hour. This is cheaper than hiring a machine to do it, which would cost 7$ an hour. If the minimum wage is then raised to 8$ an hour, the machine will be the more economical choise, and the workers will be laid off.
This is true for anything, provided you just raise the minimum wage high enough. How great the effect is of course very hard to predict and depends on many factors, but it is there and is something that has to be kept in mind.
Computers already run a lot of stock market investments, in fact the whole financial sector is incredibly computerized these days. Programs handle a lot of investing and speculation, with humans merely acting as overseers.
But you're talking about a cyberocracy, and without some form of advanced AI that doesn't really solve any of the underlying problems with society except perhaps by speeding up bureaucratic processes.
What I'm saying is, and perhaps this is a natial difference, politicians often get very nitty-gritty. Should we lower that tax by 1%, should we increase that tax by 2%, should we give funds to that type of school, should this policy make it so bus drivers have to have breaks every 2 hours or whatever. When pressed about why, we may get some nebulous answer about how Sweden is suppoesd to be a land of knowledge to make us competitive in the future.
Take our schools. We have a problem here with quality dropping steadily in the last 10 years (seems like everyone has), but instead of saying "why is there a problem" they say "how much money do we need to fix it?"
I was pleasantly surprised the other week when two politicians in a debate over our school systems really got down to what they think causes our societal problems. It was refreshing and actually provided some insight into the current situation, which was about segregated schools.
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Obviously. The problem is however that it's not "hmm, our schools aren't doing too well. Could it be that there is one, or several, fundamental flaws in how the current system is structured?", but rather "hmm, our school aren't doing too well. How about we give you 10 million extra?".
Whether this is a marketing problem from our parties, or our media only focusing on numbers, or something else, I don't know. But it feels weird when politics only seems to be about adjusting numbers here and there. Though come to think of it, it's not that surprising. The only reason our "right" parties defeated the "left" last election is because they emulated the left so well they basically took over their entire program.
While politicians quote numbers and figures a lot, they really don't understand the true numbers behind solutions. They'll make a flimsy case using some random statistics and then decide on a policy more on a political basis rather than a mathematical solution. Then it's really up to the administrators to crunch the numbers.
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"It's the ________ fault that we have all this crime!"
"________ are taking away jobs from normal people!"
"________ are giving drugs to our kids! They're degenerates and need to go back to where they came from!"
But can you really prove it? Unless the group of people you are trying to exhume are undoubtedly the primary cause of your troubles, you must place the blame on underlying problems within society. Why do you think they're coming into your country in the first place? Did it ever occur to you that, maybe, the place they're coming from was terrible? What if you lived in a place where you didn't feel safe, where your family didn't feel safe? Would you not want to leave for greener pastures?
I live in the US and I don't ever want to see our borders closed. Immigration is inevitable, whether it be illegal or legitimate, and I don't think people really understand that. It doesn't matter how much money you invest into putting 30 meter fences along the border, people are still going to get in, whether you like it or not.
I hate the way you cling to ignorance and pass it off as innocence