Palum
what Suineg set it to
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Aha, the fatal flaw of forgetting that farms not only produce income but food as well!
Company Raises It's Minimum Wage to $70,000 and All Hell Breaks Loose
- Thread starter Shonuff
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Guest, it's time once again for the massively important and exciting FoH Asshat Tournament!
Go here and give us your nominations!Who's been the biggest Asshat in the last year? Give us your worst ones!
Mist
REEEEeyore
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What the fuck are you talking about? Do you want to go back to a barter economy or something? Our food production is too efficient and too small a segment of the economy; there's no way there will ever be enough 'farm jobs' to support the number of people who actually need to eat.
Seriously, this is how feudalism worked. Back then, agriculture was like ~80% of 'GPD' (obviously they didn't have this term at the time) and ~50% of the population was assigned to food production. If you idiots were in charge we'd be back to fucking serfdom in a week. This is economics 101 level shit.
Vaclav
Bronze Baronet of the Realm
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Mist
REEEEeyore
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Well these people who don't have jobs aren't going to have money to buy land to farm. So, what're we going back to sharecropping now? Yeah, that system wasn't any more economically viable than serfdom.
Seriously, l2economics.
Green Revolution - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Industrial-scale farming rendered all previous paradigms of food production obsolete and inefficient. (This is why the organic weirdos are self-defeating, hypocritical morons; organic produce has a significantly higher carbon footprint than industrial scale farming. Sharecropping would have an even higher total carbon footprint/total resource cost.) The entire reason we get to live in an advanced society is because of how little of our population, and therefore how little of our total energy and resource consumption, we need to devote to food production.
Khane
Got something right about marriage
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Is there a fast food union?
Anyway, yes that certainly can and does happen, but humans kind of suck man. Before unions and collective bargaining were a real, protected thing it was the companies that were holding the workers hostage. Literally... going back to Carnegie again his workers tried to unionize and strike because working conditions were abhorrent. That ended in people dying:
Homestead Strike - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Unions are meant to be a check and balance for corporate greed and they work well at doing that. However, they also can and do become corrupt organizations themselves. It's not a perfect system but it's better than it was before they were around. Restructuring of unions is reasonable, abolition is not.
moontayle
Golden Squire
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Corporations are scared shitless of Unions, and in some cases it's not an unjust fear. My wife had to attend training about unions (mostly on how to avoid having them occur) and they spun a good line about how American made goods, especially Textiles, are higher due to how much companies have to pay their unioned workers. It's also kind of horrifying that they would go there, it's basically saying, "You want cheaper clothes, we need to outsource to countries who don't give a shit about their workers."
Union-like conditions are what people want, but will never have. Unless they're in a union.
In some sectors it makes sense. Especially if the threat of death is ever present. Unions for fast food workers are bullshit. It's using a hammer on a push pin.
Union-like conditions are what people want, but will never have. Unless they're in a union.
In some sectors it makes sense. Especially if the threat of death is ever present. Unions for fast food workers are bullshit. It's using a hammer on a push pin.
Cad
scientia potentia est
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Obviously I was being hyperbolic about school loans and just used you as a prop. Good job coming out with no debt, seriously. Didn't mean to insinuate your loan situation.
Cad
scientia potentia est
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I didn't mean go work on a commercial farm I meant go live in the country and subsist, which is substantially cheaper than living in the city and asking for handouts.
Cad
scientia potentia est
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Sure, but if you think FOB's and poor no-doc loans are what caused the crash you're insane. It was very normal white people getting over-leveraged on properties that were at the time just not worth as much as they paid. So the last ones were left holding the bag, and they defaulted or walked away rather than pay on a property that they overvalued thinking they could sell it to the next sucker.
I've done several mortgage repurchase cases against BofA, JPMC, Citi, and others. I know what went on and it was shady. It certainly wasn't only poor people or FOB's or minimum wage earners in any sense.
Cad
scientia potentia est
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Unions have a reason for existing no doubt, and I don't think their time has passed or anything, but I also think in a lot of cases (airlines, auto workers, to name famous examples) the unions have wielded way too much power over the corporation and forced them into uneconomic practices which ultimately hurt them.
Mist
REEEEeyore
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So far we've got serfdom, sharecropping and subsistence farming for ideas on how to solve our great national food (not)problem.
Rerolled: proving its not just Muslims that want to take us back to the 13th century!
Cad
scientia potentia est
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No we can spread the cost of supporting people at a certain standard of living whether they earn it or not and with no regard to their ability, I know we *can* do this. It might even be the best thing to do, I'm not arguing against it exactly. I just want people to say, yes thats what we're arguing for.
Khane
Got something right about marriage
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We already do this. We're asking for employers to start pitching in appropriately instead of paying and treating low skill job roles as indentured servants.
We're asking employers to stop fucking over us as tax payers because they want to maximize profits. We're saying "FUCK YOU WALTON FAMILY, time to start treating your employees like people and pay them fairly for the work they do. You've made enough money". Instead of what they do now which is pretend 28 hours a week is a full time job and encouraging their employees to go on Medicaid.
Mist
REEEEeyore
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Our only food problem is an efficiency of distribution problem. We throw away a full half of the food we produce. We could easily feed everyone with no additional costs to the economy. There is no real cost to spread around. Even if there was a cost, it would be negligible, food is such a small percent of GDP.
The only problem is that people have turned this into an ideological conflict instead of an optimization problem. Some people just have an ideological fixation that some people don't deserve to eat.
To put it another way, we have a consumerist economy. Our economy grows based on meeting the rising consumer demands of more and more people. But some people have flipped this ideologically, and think that our economy would somehow grow byreducingthe amount the poor consume.
Cad
scientia potentia est
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FWIW, I don't have any problem with supporting those at a level where they won't go hungry. Allowing people to starve these days in the US is stupid. I'm with you there. Especially kids. Some adults have made their choices and they can suffer the consequences but kids didn't make those choices.
I don't think the poor (and by poor, lets define them as the bottom 50% of earners) have enough resources to drive the economy either way. I think the top 20% earn and spend the vast majority of funds in our "consumerist" economy.
I don't think the poor (and by poor, lets define them as the bottom 50% of earners) have enough resources to drive the economy either way. I think the top 20% earn and spend the vast majority of funds in our "consumerist" economy.
Well this is kind of silly circular reasoning right here. People who have resources to spend spend more resources than those that don't? No shit. The point is if the bottom 50% had more resources they would drive the economy more, and probably more efficiently than those super-rich at the top do.
Cad
scientia potentia est
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I think something a lot of you guys confuse is the problems of the .01% super rich and the problems of the top 5-10% who are your basic successful engineers, managers at companies, etc. People making $200k a year seem "rich" because they can afford more than average, but they are still just income earning consumers.
I don't really consider people "super rich" until they stop thinking in terms of income and start thinking in terms of capital and holdings and liquidity and cash flow. That changeover does NOT happen in the top 1%, more like in the top .01%.
The top 20% of earners in this country are the "class" of basic white collar workers who have a household income of 98k+. That is not any kind of exclusive super-rich class.