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wateroverfire posted:That sucks? But really not my fault and not in my power to fix. Yeah, that's fair no one can blame you for trying to scrape by as middle management in a rigged game. wateroverfire posted:I'm the owner not an HR person. I have to care about whether who I hire can do the job well. =( Oh, so actually it's exactly your fault and in your power to fix.
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May 15, 2019 21:57
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OP, take your company's total revenue (or your valuation if you're not turning a profit and just running a stock market scam) then divide that by the number of employees you have. That should give you a ballpark as to what your employees are worth. If that number is less than what you're paying them then I guess the glorious free market has decided your company sucks and you'll be going bankrupt here soon. Something tells me that number is significantly higher than what you're paying, though. And, no, you don't have to stick your neck in the guillotine to make us happy. Just acknowledge the fact that you underpay your employees and you profit off the suffering of others. You asked why you're having trouble getting the peons to suck your dick and then refusing to accept the reality of class struggle. Also, gently caress anyone who says the poor don't have ~financial literacy~, overspending on consumer goods and lottery tickets. That's how capitalism loving works, you arrogant gently caress! By definition for a company to be profitable it must short change its workers, and the workers, who make less than the value of their work, must be a majority of the population. You also can't get economic growth without consumption, propensity to consume is inversely proportional to income, so if everyone in the working class took your advice and just saved up, as they did in 1930 and 2008, the economy crashes. Honestly, this almost pisses me off more than the wealth inequality- the fact that so many of the people up the chain actually believe their bullshit. The fact that these morons who don't understand how economics works get to proselytize how they earned their wealth. You could at least acknowledge your loving everyone over for personal gain.
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May 18, 2019 17:57
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BrandorKP posted:Here's an abstract question. What percentage of one's labor in a organization is it acceptable to get or not get back? Ethically 100%. Or at least whatever they don't receive should have strong ethical justification for (healthcare, schools, etc.). Realistically enough that they can cover necessities and have a reasonable level of comfort without having to work themselves ragged (even 40 hour work week is too much, but people are pulling more than that.)
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May 18, 2019 20:28
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BrandorKP posted:But not all that I generate is me alone. I am able to generate more value as part of the organizatio and society than I would alone. Depending on the year only accounting for the cash generated I'd say I get 30 - 60 % (before taxes) and that gives me a very decent income. Firstly, if 30% of the wealth you generate puts you above, say, GDP per capita there's a pretty good chance your work is overvalued and your company is ultimately skimming profits from some other workers. Not saying this as a call out or imply you don't deserve what your making, just that in the abstract when I say workers deserve 100% it would account for that sort of thing. And yes, clearly people working in tandem will accomplish more, I'm not anti-orginization. The fruits of that labor belong to the workers which produced it, collectively. If a two person team works together on something (assuming they put in equal labor) each person is entitled to half the spoils. Same goes for a team of 20 or 2000. There's an argument that different labor contributes disproportionately, which should be accounted for, but it's probably not the pencil pushers who decide logistics and organize the work day who are doing the most vital work. The person scrubbing toilets probably deserves a bigger share than the boss. And if this production is truly worth doing than the workers doing it should be able to agree to pool some part of their capital to keeping the production going. If everyone wants their 100% share and screw the company doesn't that show we, as a society, don't actually want that production anymore?
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May 18, 2019 21:16
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Another big piece is you want your most important workers to be in a constant state of poverty so that they maximize the time they spend working and so they'll be heavily dependant on the job. Despite what the just world morons say, social mobility is antithetical to capitalism- a few outliers can move around but the majority need to be stuck.
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May 20, 2019 00:58
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Seriously, there's this ridiculous myth that people are inherently lazy and will refuse to work unless you threaten them with starvation. But it just doesn't work like that. People like working, they just hate the constant stress that they're livelihood is based in some rear end in a top hat writing their every move down on a clipboard and trying to squeeze blood out of them for the great capitalist machine, all while being told they could get a 3 cent raise and be set for LIFE if they just worked a little harder. But talk to someone on disability or retirement. Everyone I've met in those situations has said the first few weeks were great but then they quickly get antsy without a job to do. That aside, even if people are lazy, social pressure is a big factor. When a community needs a little labor to grind out the energy that keeps them in a life of luxury, if Steve says "nah, I don't feel like it" literally everyone is gonna get on Steve's case for being a tremendous rear end in a top hat. And Steve might not care, but most functioning individuals will pull a 4 hour shift just to make sure their friends don't think they're an rear end in a top hat.
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May 24, 2019 04:52
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Somfin posted:And even then I wonder how long Steve will continue saying that when he's got no other poo poo going on in his life that he's got to spend his energy trying to escape from. A lot of the groups who get broadly accused of being leeches or lazy are just spending their energy in ways that society doesn't like (begging for / stealing the resources to have enough food to survive for another day because planning ahead further than that isn't really an option for them, doing drugs to take their mind off the constant horrific stress of their completely hopeless life situation) or doesn't like to acknowledge (applying for dozens and dozens of jobs in order to qualify for public support despite knowing they won't get any of them, dealing with social workers within systems that are designed to stress them into not having the energy to deal with those systems, being gradually whittled to zero because of medical bills or other debts). We're constantly inundated with marketing for the latest in relaxation technology, junk food, booze and any other chemical they can shove down our throats. The vice of laziness is a product that capitalism has spent centuries pushing with one hand and then punishing us for with the other. There's literally no winning - if you become some ascetic worker you lose all cultural touchstones but any time you actually try to enjoy consumption you're just a lazy leech.
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May 24, 2019 08:57
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If you go to college and become a doctor you can get strawberry flavored nutrient paste, unlike those blue collar hicks and their unflavored nutrient paste.
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May 24, 2019 09:24
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KingNastidon posted:And you want people to use their labor hours to grow your free food while you use your labor hours to play DOTA for an audience of zero while earning the same post-tax income and having the same number of ping pong balls in the lottery for the free La Jolla beach house. Can't let people live on the street, no? Find me literally a single farmer who's itching to quit farming to stream on Twitch.
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May 28, 2019 09:15
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KingNastidon posted:I don't think I'm too good to haul trash, I just don't think it's what I'd choose to do with my labor hours given all other alternatives that pay the same. To each their own. What really needs to be addressed here is the myth of laziness. It's the core idea backing the just world fallacy so our society tries to worm it into our minds. The notion that people are inherently lazy is absolute bullshit. Our bodies naturally reward physical activity- completing tasks feels good. We're also socially primed to seek gratitude of others. Things that communities need get done because there's a natural double whammy of reward to doing things for your community. Classism opposes this natural sense of community. We have to tie the most important jobs, like agriculture and sanitation, to a constant struggle of poverty so the workers stay where we need them and are incentivised to maximize their labor. And since it would be ethically reprehensible to admit that we are forcing massive swathes of people to suffer we push the narrative that anyone who's smart and willing to work hard can make their way up, all these people stuck hauling garbage are just dumb and lazy. Talk to anyone in these jobs, though. They almost never complain about the work itself- they complain about poo poo pay, understaffing, brutal scheduling, bosses up their rear end, bureaucracy, whatever. Most people take pride in what they do and would be insulted by the idea of making their living playing video games. KingNastidon posted:Maybe it'd just prefer to help people via tutoring, gaming tutorials, providing strong opinions on sports, or hell just being a life coach. Bundy posted:Did I miss someone saying that all jobs must be paid exactly the same wage and less "desirable" work shouldn't have any "this is dangerous/smells/backbreaking" bonus to it? I'm pretty sure no one is arguing that a UBI plus incentives for certain jobs is undesirable. I'm also pretty sure it would be logistically impossible to get a UBI passed today without some wage discrepancy. The main argument is that as a socialist ideal we want people to have the same access to resources regardless of their specific job.
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May 28, 2019 20:08
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wateroverfire posted:At that level of unspecificity what are we even talking about? "What if we just remake everything from the ground up?" is the sort of prompt that doesn't contain anything to grab hold of and have a discussion about. At least IMO. We have to be able to agree on at least some parameters that are fixed. Thinking of an ideal society from the ground up let's you examine the features you actually want to strive for. Imagine if early liberals said "sure it would be great if we didn't have a king, but that's just utopianism. So, how do we improve this monarchy?"
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May 28, 2019 20:25
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SpaceCadetBob posted:Just quoting this one since it was the lowest down, but brought up more than once. Sorry, my point might not have been clear with that. I 100% agree that a professional garbage collector will do way better at the task than I would and it would be ludicrously inefficient if we didn't take care of trash in bulk. My point was more about this assumption that it's bad work and no one would want to do it. Ethically we're all responsible for the garbage our community produces which provides a universal motive to do the thing that applies to someone with the expertise to do so. Basically, the claim "sanitation workers would rather stream on Twitch" betrays an assumption that there isn't intrinsic value to the work they do
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May 28, 2019 21:05
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OwlFancier posted:If your best defence of markets is that they can only function for pointless things then why bother with them at all? I'll bite. I like Mountain Dew, but I would not by any stretch call it socially necessary. I don't think Mountain Dew could really exist in a society where production is controlled by the dictatorship of the proletariat. But I would be okay with subjecting myself to 15 minutes of socially unnecessary labor to buy a 12 pack of Dew. I also won't lose any sleep that there happens to be one guy with disproportionate control over the means of Dew production who is hoarding thousands of cans of Dew off the backs of his workers. Because it's very petty and dumb, let the dumb capitalists play stupid king of the hill, I'll play with them long enough to get my 12 pack then go.
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May 30, 2019 00:29
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Bundy posted:Dumb poo poo like Mountain Dew is going to have to go to save the planet my dude. Welcome to late stage consumer capitalism. Why, though? Our production obviously needs to scale way the hell down and we need more responsible delivery methods but I don't see Mountain Dew as inherently contradictory to a sustainable socialist society.
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May 30, 2019 02:09
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Yeah, pretty sure all but a couple of us would agree that the next move is UBI then start chipping away the worst elements of the private market. The real disagreement is whether it's ideal to completely remove the free market or if some part of it will always have a place in society.
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May 30, 2019 04:52
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V. Illych L. posted:yeah people at the top are trying to cut as they always have, but UBI would allow them to drive a wedge between the people who see the general welfare system as basically insurance and those who cost lots of money in e.g. disabled care Labor organization is essentially the heart of any socialist movement, right? Way I see it, you have three major stumbling blocks to unions right now- widescale threat of poverty guaranteeing a constant flow of scabs, the national scale of businesses rendering any local organization pointless and right to work laws effectively pitting unions against the state itself. UBI would at least solve the first, giving workers enough mobility to strike without starving and making people far less likely to jump on the first job they see as scabs.
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May 30, 2019 15:58
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wateroverfire posted:Secondarily, yeah, decoupling value from work is I think a bad idea long term. People who receive from society should also be expected to contribute if they're able. Obviously if we have robots and matter replicators to do everything then that concept kind of loses its meaning but until then, yeah. Oh, no poo poo? Dude who underpays his employees thinks decoupling their value as people from the financial benefit they provide him is bad? Go figure. wateroverfire posted:more economic activity (good) and inflation (bad) lmao
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May 30, 2019 16:17
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OwlFancier posted:UBI has potential problems but basically all the criticisms you level at it can also be leveled at universal healthcare and I am extremely glad that I live somewhere with universal healthcare. You could call literally any government program that benefits the poor "making the poor more dependant on existing power structures." I suppose if your aims are radical restructuring any marginal benefit you give the poor is going to make that less likely. At which point we're arguing for accelerationism. Which is bad.
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May 30, 2019 16:49
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BougieBitch posted:A policy to expand the availability of free meals or improve the quality/decrease the cost/increase availability of public transportation would do a lot more than UBI ever could for exactly the same reasons. Even though a meal might cost the same to make for anyone, the people most likely to take the effort to use them are the poorest, and similarly even though anyone might benefit from another method of transit, the people who stand to benefit the most are those with reduced personal mobility through either disability or just lack of car ownership. Rich people don't typically ride the bus or eat at soup kitchens...
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May 30, 2019 20:28
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A UBI that let's people pay rent is going to benefit landlords, but I consider "landlords profiting off giving people homes" a good compromise between "landlords profiting off denying people homes" and "kill all landlords." I'm not sure what other compromise you're proposing, because you certainly won't get "kill all landlords" through a liberal society.
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May 30, 2019 21:13
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V. Illych L. posted:what an insipid observation "If you demand higher wages, companies will just raise prices to pay for them!"
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May 30, 2019 22:19
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Nevvy Z posted:I think we need to illegalize rent. You're paying, you are paying to own. probably impractical. I agree but if we're asking "what policies will the landlords also support" that ain't one of them.
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May 30, 2019 23:11
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I mean a decent option would be an unemployment system that's actually usable. Like, pays out 10-20k per year and kicks in automatically when you haven't payed any federal income tax for a month or if your income reported is below what your monthly unemployment would be (underemployed). But I feel like that's just as hard, if not harder of a sale than UBI.
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May 31, 2019 08:25
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BougieBitch posted:The point is, UBI is a horribly inefficient way to accomplish goals that we are only even talking about because government buying out businesses is seen as gauche. It's not a good policy in terms of getting people what they need, and even if you object to my specific numbers it should be exceedingly clear why printing money and mailing it out is a bad way to really resolve that problem. I don't disagree necessarily that UBI is more likely to happen in my lifetime, but it's not a good use of money, and I'm not talking about from an austerity perspective but a practical one. You're being very glib about improving the standard of living for the working class. The goal isn't to destroy capitalism because we hate capitalism for no reason- we want to destroy capitalism because it systematically makes the working class miserable. Any quality of life improvement for the working class is a leftist goal. Yeah, government control of private corporations is more efficient and more leftist but that's antithetical to the liberal government we actually live under. A UBI is something even neoliberals can salivate over that would improve the lives of the working class.
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May 31, 2019 18:15
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A major part of the problem is an underlying assumption that people only did welfare because they're lazy so we need to tie it work. This ends up making actual social mobility harder- the work program is liable to barely provide a living wage and require hard hours since it's a punishment for not working not an actual job. I think a job guarantee that reverses this idea would work. Make the ASSUMPTION that you work for the government by default. For instance issue out a good UBI then require any citizen over 18 who isn't a parent or student to either pay x in income tax or work 20-30 hours a week for the community.
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May 31, 2019 19:08
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wateroverfire posted:I'm more interested in how you'd answer those questions in principle. Can those three things be ok, and under what circumstances? As has been discussed earlier, we are social animals. Your society is hosed if you actually need to coerce people to keep their community alive. People are always going to be willing to farm, build houses or sew clothes for the benefit of their immediate community. Otherwise, you're a dick and no one will talk to you. The idea of coercion being necessary is this extreme concept of a famine where one guy is letting crops die because he doesn't feel like working. In that extreme, I suppose the maxim "if a man does not work, he shall not eat" works. But aside from where someone's refusal to work is putting lives at jeopardy, you have to ask "is this work worth doing?" Like if one person decides they want every house painted blue and can't get anyone in the community to help then your conclusion should be the community doesn't need those houses painted blue. If you can't get enough people to run the Mountain Dew factory then people don't want Mountain Dew that bad.
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May 31, 2019 21:00
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wateroverfire posted:The point of the thought experiment is to nail down some parameters so that we have to confront a moral question. "Oh we could just change society..." is a dodge. Maybe we could or maybe we couldn't, but by invoking that proposition we avoid answering the difficult question. Are you trying to pin down basic moral axioms? For me it'd be everyone has the right to life and liberty, with anyone's right to life trumping anyone else's right to liberty. It's unethical to restrict anyone's freedom unless they pose a risk to other people's freedom or life. In a world with finite resources attempting to claim a disproportionate share is inherently limiting the freedom and often life of someone else. You have no entitlement to other people liking you so it's completely acceptable that they shun you for you being a dick. It's not ethical for them to retaliate by denying you sustenance, unless sustenance is limited and your refusal to operate in society is putting others at risk. But right now, a handful of people hold all the resources and they are limiting the freedoms and lives of other almost purely out of spite. It's just silly to talk about the ethical edge cases when the problem is so blatantly skewed.
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May 31, 2019 21:30
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Helsing posted:The entire reason that neoliberals salivate over the UBI is because they understand fully well that no version of it that was actually implemented would actually substantially improve the lives of the working class. The fact is that there's no way to achieve durable gains for the working class without building up organizations that enhance and protect the power of the working class. The fact you're explicitly selling the UBI as an easy fix that would somehow improve the lives of ordinary people without ruffling the feathers of the capitalist class is an extremely dangerous kind of delusional thinking. Do you actually think neoliberals are Machiavellian geniuses constantly scheming how to make the poor suffer? They're apathetic to the wellbeing of the poor and exist in a system that rewards them for causing suffering. They don't give a poo poo if UBI is good or bad for the poor, it will increase consumption, which is good for the economy, which they like. There's a good chance it will increase inflation but it's not gonna be a one to one price hike. Include a provision to adjust the UBI annually for inflation and that aspect self corrects.
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Jun 1, 2019 00:33
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Not being an anti-intelectual, fascist hellhole would also help.
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Jun 1, 2019 18:05
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Absolutely there are a thousand ways to do UBI terribly. A bill that says "Give everyone 1000 bucks" is trash. The amount needs to be a livable wage, needs to automatically adjust for inflation and needs to be trivially easy to receive. And as I said starting this- UBI AND chipping away at private markets. But a good UBI bill should be a single fight. Each markets going to have to be attacked individually- look at the massive fight we've been going through in the U.S. to decommoditize healthcare. The fight to decommoditize housing isn't about to get easier. And try winning a single vote in the rust belt with the platform "get rid of the agriculture industry!" I wouldn't consider UBI even remotely a death knell of capitalism- it's one of many steps and one I think is relatively easy to attain and will help a lot of people.
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Jun 1, 2019 20:59
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V. Illych L. posted:no, of course not, people being worse off is obviously not a good thing - thence there being a need to impose minimum wages in some cases, but that must also be done as intelligently as possible so as not to undermine class consciousness and unionisation But shouldn't they see that the unionized groups are getting better wages and thus begin unionizing?
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Jun 2, 2019 17:27
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V. Illych L. posted:you're leaving out the consequence of non-organisation being more suffering for all! your arguments are that if only we make things immediately better for people, they will remain better. this is utopian; we must maintain and maximise working-class power or any progress we make will be undone or subverted in short order. Okay, let's do utilitarian calculus. Let's say you have control of an old timey Inquisitor unit and you can go around torturing members of the working class. Let's say we're about 100 years from Nationwide unions. You know for sure that for every hour of torture you will speed up unionization by one day. You can also kill someone to speed it up by a month. How much torture or murder should you do to make unions happen faster?
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Jun 3, 2019 08:44
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Helsing posted:This would possibly be the most expensive social program ever implemented and would also face deep and entrencehd opposition at every stage of its conception and implementation. The fact you describe it as a "relatively easy to attain" policy is mindboggling. The reason I'm saying this is relatively easy to attain is because it's not directly confrontational to capitalism. It's something that benefits capitalists by pumping more capital their way and the working class by raising the floor. Universal health care is a direct confrontation to both the health care industry and employers who leverage health insurance against their employees. Solving housing would also be a direct confrontation against landlords, employers who use their employees need to pay rent as leverage and as a nice bonus all the people who tricked into thinking housing was a good investment. These are absolutely vital things that we need to fight for, but they're uphill struggles under a liberal government. Helsing posted:This is even more baffling. You're explicitly advocating that we should pursue piecemeal and individual reforms without linking these struggles around any kind of coherent goals or movement building? Who exactly is doing the attacking here? What's the social base for your reform program? What defends these programs from counter attack? I'm confused what you mean? Is dismantling capital establishments and returning control of production to the workers not a coherent goal? But the people sympathetic to any goal we're talking here are effectively fringe. At the end of the day, change happens when capital gets threatened. You get healthcare one of two ways- either massive organization and work stoppage or you convince capitalists to cannibalize each other by showing how this industry eats into everyone else's profits. If you use work stoppage to get everything at once... Well, okay, you've successfully organized a communist revolution. Barring that, success under liberalism requires courting capitalists as temporary allies. And they would never swallow the total agenda but you might convince them on specific parts that are beneficial to workers across the board and their specific industry.
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Jun 3, 2019 22:23
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V. Illych L. posted:i take socialism being desirable as a given. we can discuss this if it's controversial; i define socialism in a relatively broad sense, so i'm tolerant of both most conceptions of state socialism á la british Old Labour, direct worker's ownership á la the meidner plan and various strains of council communism and anarchism. Maybe I'm reading this the wrong way, but if you're saying socialism is axiomatically good, I disagree. Human suffering is bad, systems which reduce human suffering are good, socialism is such a system ergo socialism is good. But socialism is not a good in and of itself. V. Illych L. posted:this does explicitly mean sometimes sacrificing people to keep the system up! that is not desirable, but it is necessary Okay, so yes or no. If you could kill 1200 people today to ensure a nationally organized labor movement tomorrow, is that morally acceptable?
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Jun 3, 2019 22:58
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V. Illych L. posted:i don't understand what purpose you're serving with these rather sordid dillemas. there is no situation where that tradeoff is imaginable. the sort of tradeoff you seem to be objecting to happens all the time in normal politics, though, no matter what your agenda is. institute environmental protections? people will lose their jobs and years of their lives, and the state loses revenues it could use to save lives. don't institute such protections? many more people will become sick/the planet's dying, cloud. there's always someone who gets hosed, and in the end that's always a matter of life or death. however, those environmental protections aren't getting passed unless there's an active and organised environmentalist movement pushing it; or, if it's too weak, they get repealed immediately. a political movement must look to its own and its allies' strength or every good it achieves is going straight down the drain in short order. Okay, no subterfuge- we both agree capitalism is killing people, right? Would you agree that A) A UBI would lower those deaths and B) UBI can be implemented sooner than systematic Marxist change that would have a similar effect? If we agree on those two points avoiding UBI to make worker organization more viable is killing people to speed up the revolution. So, back to my question. If 1200 people will die from poverty between when you shoot down UBI and some perfect mass union, is that okay? What about when we bump that number up? The number has to be less than 7 billion, but how much less? What is the precise amount of human suffering that makes these socialist goals worth it?
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Jun 4, 2019 05:01
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I agree that a UBI needs to be high enough that it isn't just a life of misery. It's ridiculous to conclude we shouldn't make a policy because it could be sabotaged to not work. That's true of literally any policy Somebody fucked around with this message at 17:40 on Jun 4, 2019 |
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Jun 4, 2019 17:27
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Helsing posted:Given the massive political resistance and huge costs that would be associated with the kind of UBI you're advocating we would be much better off investing our limited political resources more wisely. The version of UBI that is easy to implement is the version that replaces other forms of government transfers with a means tested negative income tax. The hyper ambitious version of UBI that you want to see happen is literally impossible to implement under the current system, either politically or economically, for reasons that you're ignoring. This sticks out to me as a bit of a non sequitur argument. What does a policy being expensive really mean in this context? And why is it something those of a leftist agenda should oppose? Say we send out an annual income of 20 grand. That ends up being a 6 trillion endeavor. But we're going to pay it off one of two ways- either increase income taxes or eat the inflation. Either way, an expensive policy just means we're displacing large amounts of wealth. And isn't that a good a thing? Isn't that a fundamental feature of ALL socialist policy? Aren't housing goals going to involve dismantling a 30 trillion dollar industry? How the hell is that not a massive cost? I also want to know- say I agree, we dump UBI as a goal. What are these better policies we should be looking at? What policies is a UBI going to detract from that we could aquire in a similar time frame?
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Jun 5, 2019 05:17
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