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  1. #761
    Old God conscript's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Laize View Post
    You don't. Just don't buy said company's product and bam. You're no longer picking up their tab.
    Yes lets all boycott General Electric, one of the most notorious companies that lowers or eliminates their tax burden through loopholes in the tax department that costs literally as much as their proper taxes owed. The tendrils of companies like GE extend so far it is impossible to boycott them. I need to find that infographic of all the big companies and how there are really about 15 companies that own everything in the world from food to television to energy production.

  2. #762
    Quote Originally Posted by Laize View Post
    Hopefully a shitload.

    Was it a CNC machine? I love those things.

    Seriously, don't be a luddite. Just because you get put out of work by a machine doesn't mean you're doomed to unemployment. Why not go into training and learn how to run that machine?
    It was a needle winder and no I'm not being a luddite. Just being a realist. People who have high school educations and are over 40 aren't going to go back to school and magically find a new career with a high paying job. If a thousand people get laid off due to new automation, do you really think there are a thousand jobs out there for them to go and snatch up? While competing with new college grads and others in the same situation?

    I think technology is wonderful (I work in IT) but at the same time, the effect it's having on our workforce isn't given enough credit.

  3. #763
    Quote Originally Posted by araine View Post
    You obvious get very upset when your dream of ultra capitalism and AYN RAND world is worse for everyone when it comes to upwards mobility and being able to work your butt of to become rich. Really isnt something wrong with the system when your utopia of may the strongest survive and screw the rest have LESS notice LESS as is fewer being able to work there asses of to become rich.

    We call this a RIGGED game when it works like this. explain why it is good to have less upwards mobility than in Denmark. and dont go of on some right wing rant about move to fking denmark. Really just explain why less upwards mobility than in socialists countries are a good thing just explain it and dont go on a right wing rant about it. Obviously it hit a sore spot, facts can do that sometimes
    Oh my god. I'm sorry but I really have a problem understanding what you wrote. Your grammar is just atrocious and I have to read your posts 3 times before I have an idea of what you're saying, but here goes.

    First off I don't believe in "Ayn Rand" world. I believe in "Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman" world.

    Level of education in a country is directly tied to social mobility. The costs of education in the United States have been skyrocketing faster than the costs of health care, but no one seems to notice. This has been caused by the failure of our public education system to keep up with the demands of our economy coupled with a near-ubiquitous idea of "go to college because you need to" generating damn-near infinite demand for higher education.

    ---------- Post added 2012-11-16 at 01:45 AM ----------

    Quote Originally Posted by Kaelas View Post
    It was a needle winder and no I'm not being a luddite. Just being a realist. People who have high school educations and are over 40 aren't going to go back to school and magically find a new career with a high paying job. If a thousand people get laid off due to new automation, do you really think there are a thousand jobs out there for them to go and snatch up? While competing with new college grads and others in the same situation?

    I think technology is wonderful (I work in IT) but at the same time, the effect it's having on our workforce isn't given enough credit.
    My brother is 50 years old and will be starting his 5th apprenticeship in February (HVAC). Of course there are jobs out there for people with high school educations over 40. Apprentices for trades are routinely over 40... and those jobs can't be outsources or automated. And they're growing faster than most other job sectors.

  4. #764
    Quote Originally Posted by Laize View Post
    You don't. Just don't buy said company's product and bam. You're no longer picking up their tab.
    If only that were true. Case in point. If you pay taxes, you are picking up the tab for Walmart. Doesn't matter if you shop with them or not, you are picking up their tab.

    I say that cause they pay their employees so low that many of them are on Food Stamps, Low Income Housing and Low Income Healthcare. The managers there actually encourage you to get on them as they do not pay you enough to support yourself. I say this as a Walmart employee myself trying my best to get work elsewhere so I can live without handouts and (hopefully) going back to college in the spring if I can't find a real job before then.

    You even subsidize a good deal of their management as they (at least where I live) have a big thing about hiring retired military for their management positions due to the fact that it gives them an employee working 48 hours for a salaried paycheck and no benefits due to Tricare picking up the tab on that.

    If you really think about it, you are picking up the tab for a lot of companies that way due to their refusal to pay livable wages, just Walmart is the posterchild and the front runner in that regard. You are literally paying their employees to make up for what they won't pay them.

    Edit: Sorry, kinda off topic, but the first thing that came to mind when I got back and read that comment.
    Last edited by Fugus; 2012-11-16 at 01:59 AM.

  5. #765
    Then keep it at your state level so those of us who despise the idea of being like Scandinavia don't have to fight so vociferously against it on a national level.
    No?
    I have no desire to fund a national single-payer service with a 45% tax rate.
    Lots of countries provide health care with effective individual tax rates lower than that for many.
    Everything good that comes with nationalized services comes with SOMETHING bad. Whether that bad thing bothers you or even AFFECTS you is a matter of question.
    Some systems are objectively better. The only way in which our system really out performs public health care by other wealthy nations is in the area of elective procedures, which I think we agree isn't a very big deal.

  6. #766
    Quote Originally Posted by Fugus View Post
    If only that were true. Case in point. If you pay taxes, you are picking up the tab for Walmart. Doesn't matter if you shop with them or not, you are picking up their tab.

    I say that cause they pay their employees so low that many of them are on Food Stamps, Low Income Housing and Low Income Healthcare. The managers there actually encourage you to get on them as they do not pay you enough to support yourself. I say this as a Walmart employee myself trying my best to get work elsewhere so I can live without handouts and (hopefully) going back to college in the spring if I can't find a real job before then.

    You even subsidize a good deal of their management as they (at least where I live) have a big thing about hiring retired military for their management positions due to the fact that it gives them an employee working 48 hours for a salaried paycheck and no benefits due to Tricare picking up the tab on that.

    If you really think about it, you are picking up the tab for a lot of companies that way due to their refusal to pay livable wages, just Walmart is the posterchild and the front runner in that regard. You are literally paying their employees to make up for what they won't pay them.

    Edit: Sorry, kinda off topic, but the first thing that came to mind when I got back and read that comment.
    I view that as a problem with the welfare system rather than Walmart.

    Companies like Walmart will pay as little for "warm body" work as they can. So would you if you were running Walmart. And raising the minimum wage certainly does less than nothing in the long run.

  7. #767
    Quote Originally Posted by Kaelas View Post
    It was a needle winder and no I'm not being a luddite. Just being a realist. People who have high school educations and are over 40 aren't going to go back to school and magically find a new career with a high paying job. If a thousand people get laid off due to new automation, do you really think there are a thousand jobs out there for them to go and snatch up? While competing with new college grads and others in the same situation?

    I think technology is wonderful (I work in IT) but at the same time, the effect it's having on our workforce isn't given enough credit.
    Technology is indeed affecting our workforce, but without concrete numbers your guess is as a good as mine. Menial physical labor is indeed getting replaced, but at the same time, the job growth in the IT department has been exponential by far. 20 years ago you had those thousand workers in a factory, now you have them maintaining websites, updating databases, etc etc while you have 1 machine doing the factory job. Menial labor has simply shifted.

  8. #768
    I wish I was a republican. It seems so convenient. Nothing ever being your fault if it's bad, anything good is a direct result of what you did. Like their stance on government policies. Government policies don't create or drive business, however when people get laid off or businesses fail....well, the government did that.

    People get put in looney bins for saying similar things, yet we let these nut jobs run for the highest public office. Why is that?

  9. #769
    Quote Originally Posted by Wells View Post
    No?
    What if we don't want to be like Denmark?

    Lots of countries provide health care with effective individual tax rates lower than that for many.
    I'd ask which ones since the UK, Germany, all of Scandinavia and France have top marginal tax brackets over 42% and mean effective rates well over America's 29%. In fact, the only one that's in the US' effective tax neighborhood is Switzerland.

    Some systems are objectively better. The only way in which our system really out performs public health care by other wealthy nations is in the area of elective procedures, which I think we agree isn't a very big deal.
    The issue at hand was that he was bitching that the ACA wasn't enough. Surely you can understand my frustration with that.

  10. #770
    Quote Originally Posted by Laize View Post
    I view that as a problem with the welfare system rather than Walmart.

    Companies like Walmart will pay as little for "warm body" work as they can. So would you if you were running Walmart. And raising the minimum wage certainly does less than nothing in the long run.
    I view it as a problem with Walmart and the US in general that they even allow a company to mistreat their employees to such an extent. They shouldn't be allowed to pay sub-human level income. Instead they refuse to allow you full time work. Even if they work you 40 hours a week they still count you as part time and will fire you if you get so much as 5 minutes of overtime. Watched them force an employee to take a 3 hour lunch to avoid overtime and could still make sure he was there for the start and end of his shift.

    They need to raise minimum wage to livable levels and require a company to have a certain percentage of their employees be full time I would say about 80% for any building that hires more than 30 people. You shouldn't have over 500 people working in a building and less than 35% of them be full time and they are only full time due to the fact they have been there for 9+ years and got grandfathered in as such.

    I am also supporter of a healthcare system similar to Canada's. We could have ours be a carbon copy of theirs and it would be a net improvement across the board as we already spend 3 times more than they do as a percentage of our national income for vastly inferior service. At least according to the last studies I read about a year back. That would also solve the full time vs part time to an extent as that way, even the part timers are covered for healthcare.
    Last edited by Fugus; 2012-11-16 at 02:15 AM.

  11. #771
    Quote Originally Posted by Fugus View Post
    I view it as a problem with Walmart and the US in general that they even allow a company to mistreat their employees to such an extent. They shouldn't be allowed to pay sub-human level income. Instead they refuse to allow you full time work. Even if they work you 40 hours a week they still count you as part time and will fire you if you get so much as 5 minutes of overtime.
    There was a time when the minimum wage was considered just dandy. It's kept pace with inflation, and suddenly it's "sub-human". Time change, eh ?

    They need to raise minimum wage to livable levels and require a company to have a certain percentage of their employees be full time I would say about 80% for any building that hires more than 30 people. You shouldn't have over 500 people working in a building and less than 35% of them be full time and they are only full time due to the fact they have been there for 9+ years and got grandfathered in as such.
    We've had a 60 year policy of continually raising the minimum wage. What you want is more of the same. If you keep doing what you've been doing, you'll keep getting what you've been getting.

    As for carbon copying Canada's system... why on Earth people can't be happy we got the ACA is beyond me. You're not even willing to give it a fucking chance before you decide that it's not enough.

  12. #772
    Quote Originally Posted by Lefrog View Post
    Technology is indeed affecting our workforce, but without concrete numbers your guess is as a good as mine. Menial physical labor is indeed getting replaced, but at the same time, the job growth in the IT department has been exponential by far. 20 years ago you had those thousand workers in a factory, now you have them maintaining websites, updating databases, etc etc while you have 1 machine doing the factory job. Menial labor has simply shifted.
    Don't disagree but it goes beyond menial labor. Look at accounting departments or hell even pharmacists. 10-15 years ago you'd need 20 people just for finance. Now you may need 5 due to improvements in software. More and more of pharmacy is being automated to the point where you need 1 person to hand the prescription to the customer while the machine does the rest.

    I think it's great that some people are able to go back and get an education in a different field but my point is not everybody is going to be able to do that. There simply wont be enough jobs to meet the demand of new college grads and those that have been replaced.

  13. #773
    Quote Originally Posted by Laize View Post
    There was a time when the minimum wage was considered just dandy. It's kept pace with inflation, and suddenly it's "sub-human". Time change, eh ?



    We've had a 60 year policy of continually raising the minimum wage. What you want is more of the same. If you keep doing what you've been doing, you'll keep getting what you've been getting.
    http://www.raisetheminimumwage.com/facts/

    according to that, minimum wage would be $10.55 an hour if it kept up with inflation, it is $7.25 an hour here. That is vastly different payscales which puts it squarely in "sub-human" levels with it being about 25% below what it should be.

    If the 60 year policy kept up with inflation and didn't allow companies to find loopholes to avoid providing what they should, the problems wouldn't be so severe.

  14. #774
    What if we don't want to be like Denmark?
    We're a democratic republic. You're free to try to win the national debate and we on the left are free to push for more liberal policies. If your side loses you're free to continue arguing for change back to the right or leave.
    I'd ask which ones since the UK, Germany, all of Scandinavia and France have top marginal tax brackets over 42% and mean effective rates well over America's 29%. In fact, the only one that's in the US' effective tax neighborhood is Switzerland.
    Top marginal rates. And yes most of them pay more in taxes than we do, but they're also getting more in social services. If you want an honest comparison you have to take into account not only what we're paying in taxes but what we're paying in health care and in many cases higher education to what they're paying in taxes.
    There was a time when the minimum wage was considered just dandy. It's kept pace with inflation, and suddenly it's "sub-human". Time change, eh ?
    Inflation is less important than purchasing power. Real value of the federal minimum wage has dropped significantly since the 70s.

  15. #775
    Scarab Lord Naxere's Avatar
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    Papa John's I can tolerate, but not Denny's too!

  16. #776
    Quote Originally Posted by Fugus View Post
    http://www.raisetheminimumwage.com/facts/

    according to that, minimum wage would be $10.55 an hour if it kept up with inflation, it is $7.25 an hour here. That is vastly different payscales which puts it squarely in "sub-human" levels with it being about 25% below what it should be.

    If the 60 year policy kept up with inflation and didn't allow companies to find loopholes to avoid providing what they should, the problems wouldn't be so severe.
    I am so sick of people bringing that bogus website up.

    Let me enlighten you to some facts.

    Here's the Department of Labor's actual chart on minimum wage historical rates.

    Let's look at when the minimum wage was $.25 in 1938. If you plug that into the US Bureau of Labor Statistics' inflation calculator you'll see that the 1938 minimum wage of $.25 equates to about 4.10 today.

    In 1950, when the minimum wage was at the height of its purchasing power, it was $.75, or $7.20 in today's dollars.

    The minimum wage has, historically, fluctuated around a $6-$8 (in 2012 dollars) rate. The point that the "raise the minimum wage" people like to start their charts at is the late 60s and 70s when, for a brief time, the purchasing power of the minimum wage was artificially inflated to ridiculous purchasing power of $10-$11 in today's dollars.

    You'll find that it didn't last long either as inflation quickly normalized it back to its classical rate.

    I'm just so tired of explaining this uncomfortable fact to minimum wage advocates every time it comes up.

  17. #777
    Quote Originally Posted by Laize View Post
    I am so sick of people bringing that bogus website up.

    Let me enlighten you to some facts.

    Here's the Department of Labor's actual chart on minimum wage historical rates.

    Let's look at when the minimum wage was $.25 in 1938. If you plug that into the US Bureau of Labor Statistics' inflation calculator you'll see that the 1938 minimum wage of $.25 equates to about 4.10 today.

    In 1950, when the minimum wage was at the height of its purchasing power, it was $.75, or $7.20 in today's dollars.

    The minimum wage has, historically, fluctuated around a $6-$8 (in 2012 dollars) rate. The point that the "raise the minimum wage" people like to start their charts at is the late 60s and 70s when, for a brief time, the purchasing power of the minimum wage was artificially inflated to ridiculous purchasing power of $10-$11 in today's dollars.

    You'll find that it didn't last long either as inflation quickly normalized it back to its classical rate.

    I'm just so tired of explaining this uncomfortable fact to minimum wage advocates every time it comes up.
    So you are saying that minimum wage was never meant to allow anyone to ever actually live in any fashion? If it doesn't even allow you to support yourself and give you even the most basic of needed things, then what the hell is the point?

    Sorry, if it doesn't allow one to support themselves and provide a minimum of the basics needed just to survive, it isn't enough. If it was that low this entire time, why the hell haven't we had a civil war yet as it is long overdue at that point?

  18. #778
    Quote Originally Posted by Wells View Post
    We're a democratic republic. You're free to try to win the national debate and we on the left are free to push for more liberal policies. If your side loses you're free to continue arguing for change back to the right or leave.
    My problem isn't, necessarily, that the left want more social policies. My problem is that the left, classically, cares far less for the financial realities of the policies they want, choosing instead to lean on nebulous benefits we'll supposedly see down the road (which include "opportunity costs" of not providing X for the poor). The source of the money always seems to go back to the wealthy. I have no illusions I'll make more than $250,000/year. I'm not part of the 1%. I may not even be part of the top 20%. I'm still incredibly uncomfortable with thrusting a burden on someone just because they can afford it. I believe that what should be taken is only what is absolutely necessary and no more.

    Inflation is less important than purchasing power. Real value of the federal minimum wage has dropped significantly since the 70s.
    Inflation is directly related to purchasing power. Yes, real value of the federal minimum wage has dropped significantly since the 70s... but only AFTER it increased significantly from the 40s.

  19. #779
    boycott

    is one of our collective power.

    edit: we should make a list, I will work on that and I will post it everywhere. I know that corporations own almost everything, but i'm on a crusade.
    Last edited by Morogoth; 2012-11-16 at 02:38 AM.

  20. #780
    Merely a Setback Adam Jensen's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Erenax View Post
    Papa John's I can tolerate, but not Denny's too!
    This is getting stupid. Like really. Why punish employees for what Congress does?

    Fuck Denny's your food sucked anyways.
    Putin khuliyo

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