Why Should We Care About Property Rights?

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Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

I can completely believe Jrode got that kind of ride, or at least an approximate equivalent of it seen through some nostalgiac glasses. I would just question that the "great references" were from, say, working at McD's, as opposed to, say, his parents knowing the company's owner. I will be fair that he probably was capable of performing the basic job duties, and based upon his dedication to vomiting up evangelical material about the great and holy church of Capital, probably didn't gently caress it up - but I'd hardly call that merit.

# ¿ Feb 16, 2016 05:52

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 19:21

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Karia posted:

Even if this poo poo was true, it still wouldn't solve the problem, because how many managers does McDonalds need? Three or four per location? Compare that to the number of other employees that they have, I'm getting a high end of 50 staffers per, more likely 30-40. That means that an absolute maximum of 10% of the people who start on the floor are going to get advanced to manager. Everybody else is poo poo out of luck.

Maybe they should have thought of how awful they would be when they freely chose to be born, you ever think of that?

# ¿ Feb 16, 2016 06:01

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

QuarkJets posted:

You're acting as though this is some loving group of scientists when it's really a bunch of talking heads who try to mold the data to fit a conclusion.

See here's the thing: Jrod has specifically said this is what you're supposed to do, at least for economics.

At least fundamentalists have to be fundamentalists about books which say to be charitable to the poor.

# ¿ Feb 16, 2016 08:18

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Saeku posted:

I'm insulted personally, and on the behalf of every other unskilled worker, and every other student with a part-time job, by the statements: "Any idiot could have quickly gotten the skills necessary to do that $23 an hour job. You don't need a college degree or substantial technical training in order to get any decent paying job."

I mean, those things clearly aren't necessary, because you got one without them, but the vast majority of people can't get a decent-paying job and attend school at the same time. I don't know any other full-time students currently who can get flex hours plus living wages. I very rarely see positions like that advertised or mentioned. Jrodefeld, you're calling everyone who isn't you mentally deficient rather than admit that you got lucky so you can look better. You're scum.

Perhaps they should have considered being the Elect of God instead?

# ¿ Feb 16, 2016 08:56

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

"Labor freedom," really.

# ¿ Feb 16, 2016 21:19

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Which letter of STEM is "finance"? I'm guessing M.

# ¿ Feb 17, 2016 23:24

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

In general the ideal employee for anything other than "master of the universe" or, possibly, "some specific openings for very high level computer programmers," seems to be someone who already did that job for ten years but is interested in taking a pay cut for the purposes of personal asceticism. Also, ideally, not a woman who wants to have children.

All this "make everyone learn how to code" stuff for the children is probably meant to break position #2 down to "cube drone," too, in a few years.

# ¿ Feb 18, 2016 08:02

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

QuarkJets posted:

You make it sound like this is a deliberate decision with a deliberate outcome, which is a conspiracy theorist level of stupid and weird. In reality I think it's just because coding skills are useful in a crazy number of jobs, even if you're not a code monkey in a cubicle.

I don't think it's some grand paranoid conspiracy but I would really be shocked if part of the calculation for "let's push computer programming skills to be widely available" is not "this will make it cheaper and easier to get people with those skills in the future."

Like, basic emotional literacy is also really important but there's nobody running emotional literacy bootcamps or saying "We will make every child able to do an HourOfEmotionalLiteracy." e: Or if they are it's not on the TV :v:

# ¿ Feb 18, 2016 09:00

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Mostly, my objections are when it's either portrayed as the one important thing to teach in school, or is valorized at the severe expense of other important elements of teaching small children. Programming is not somehow bad, but ideally it should not be at the expense of other subjects, or should be integrated with them (robotics could be a great way to do multi-disciplinary teaching, for instance).

You say "relevancy," too, which is its own set of value judgments. However, the argument of "why, exactly, do we have schools, and what are they supposed to be doing" is probably not one for the Jrode mock thread.

# ¿ Feb 18, 2016 11:59

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

QuarkJets posted:

On rereading, I realize that Nessus was talking about employers pushing for more STEM education as opposed to educators. Employers using "cheaper labor in the future" as their own motivation makes sense. In the context of the original post, I assumed he meant that educators were using "cheaper labor in the future" as a motivator, which seemed paranoid and delusional. Influence of education by industry is apparent across many fields, and part of that influence is due to a desire to reduce labor costs, I agree. My contention was only with the idea that educators are colluding directly with industry to suppress wages, which I realize now may not have been the intention of Nessus' post and was probably just the result of me being too sensitive to conspiracy theorist cues.

Yeah, I was posting lazily late at night. My argument was more "major pressure groups from industry are probably partially motivated by 'make basic coding skills cheaply available in the future' when they hype up Everyone Needs To Program A Computer Now" than "Big Education wants to make cheap coders in twenty years." I don't think the educational establishment, at least the parts that are "educators" primarily, rather than "edu-space disruptors on a lean tech development path" is motivated by much beyond "Please stop trying to destroy American public education."

QuarkJets posted:

Increase corporate taxes, institute a mincome, and abolish the minimum wage. McDonalds replacing its entire staff with robots wouldn't matter at that point.

Uhhh I think we established with praexology that increasing the corporate tax would be worse than 9/11 times ten thousand and that mass impoverishment, suffering, and megadeath would be preferable to such an initation of force.

# ¿ Feb 18, 2016 23:41

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Mincome is actually approaching acceptability in some areas and could be achieved. I don't even know what a maximum income would be. Surely you achieve a sort of soft cap if you have a high end bracket with a very high tax rate; at a certain point they'll take their pay in other things or reinvest the money.

Plus a maximum income (and I haven't heard any arguments for a formal one) might well be a far, far harder sell politically than a minimum income.

# ¿ Feb 19, 2016 03:58

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

DrProsek posted:

Semi related to the gamer stuff from earlier, but John Stossel hosting the Libertarian Party primary debate reminded me of my favorite Libertarian line: "I'm not racist. I'd boycott a racist company. I'd call people bad for not boycotting racist companies... But companies should have the right to discriminate. You know... Just cause." No, there's no reason for this. They never have anything they want to do with this new right to discriminate. Nothing would change, we'd all still eat with black folks... But there's this unspoken reason that we really really need to have the right to discriminate just in case we want to. Its a right we never want to use and will apply social aggression to anyone who tries to use that right, but it has to exist on paper.

I'm just saying, for a right that nobody seems to want to use, there's a lot of Libertarian tears from Stossel and Jrod over it.

Well the charitable version is that they're being like Rorschach from Watchmen (who of course they often adore - not for being a complex and interesting character, but for his firm refusal to "compromise") and arguing that no good end justifies breaking your inner rules. By this standard, of course, the local liberal is your enemy, while the foreign Bolshevik is merely a foreigner; if the Bolshevik tends his own fields, you have no complaint with him. Indeed, you have a common enemy. Your local liberal.

In practice of course a lot of them would like the color line to get reinstated, if perhaps not in a conscious way.

# ¿ Feb 19, 2016 21:58

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

I can see admiring some aspects of the character of Rorschach, even Portly Liberal Owl Man does so. But there's a difference between "I admire his nerve and dedication to his shtick" and "yes, he is a role model."

# ¿ Feb 21, 2016 00:28

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Yeah the question is: How do you persuade those who do not have property of consequence, and have little reasonable prospect of obtaining property, that property rights are the most important thing in the world? You might be able to make some headway but that seems to be a fundamental disconnect, and doubtless all the bitching about Democracy being Wicked boils down to perceiving this flaw.

Now you could give the general masses a small amount of property, directly or indirectly. However, and here's where America may be running into issues, you can't just produce property out of nowhere after a certain point. America's been completely claimed, and most of the federally held lands are marginal and being kept up for the sake of wildlife and/or bombing ranges, or for the sake of having some timber indefinitely instead of having lots of timber now and a howling wasteland in ten years.

# ¿ Feb 21, 2016 00:58

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

I wonder if that's ever been made explicit. Like you could work with an argument or perspective that says "For my luxury to have true savor, others must be miserable." You could work with that guy, figure out a baseline which while "despicable" and low-brow is nonetheless minimally comfortable and adequate. You could even encourage his sense of sport.

# ¿ Feb 21, 2016 01:41

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Yeah and we're not putting that on him, he openly said in a post (I still can't find it because I am bad at computer) that you can't actually disprove his economic theories with mere evidence, merely support them or - perhaps, generously - slightly refine their execution.

We ought to dig that line up so we can all copy-paste it at him when he comes back.

# ¿ Feb 21, 2016 02:13

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 19:21

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Radish posted:

Doesn't "smelly, outcast paranoiac" pretty much describe Alan Moore? Didn't he go live in the middle of no where and grow a crazy man beard or am I thinking of the guy who originally made Wonder Woman?

Alan Moore is definitely a weirdo with a wizard beard but at last report he's living with two women in a town in England, so I'd say he's doing something right.

# ¿ Feb 21, 2016 21:35

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