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Bozo_Casanova

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Everything posted by Bozo_Casanova

  1. Ok, and a bonus: what is described above is not some radical dream. It’s the US labor market as it existed from the end of WWII-1994, and began to decline in the early 70’s as the labor participation rate rose and union membership fell off. It is significant to the structure of that market that it included much more expensive stuff. Once upon a time the labor movement looked at automation and machines as holding the potential to create a golden age of shorter hours, higher wages, a radically higher standard of living, and so on. It still could, if we get the tax code right.
  2. The automation of routine work is an intrinsic goal unto itself. “Fear of increased wages” is the wrong comparison. The right comparison is paying a person or feeding an animal to do a thing. Until the cost of a person or animal is zero, faster, cheaper, and more consistently will almost always win out. That’s the nature of any technological disruption since the beginning of time. There is very little you can accomplish with minimum wage laws beyond establishing a baseline of income for a working person and thus the minimum legal attendant cost of a unit of human time. However- if we were using the tax code to capture the externalities of labor getting an insufficient share of productivity, we wouldn’t need income supplementation because people would make more (and stuff would be more expensive and durable).
  3. @HornOnTheBayou all that being said/ the minimum wage should not and is not something a lot of people are actually paid and it’s a lousy proxy to discuss employment and wages, in the same way that minority admissions at Harvard are a lousy proxy for educational opportunities for minorities.
  4. First of all, the minimum wage should be higher, as an enforcement tool to prevent employers from socializing the cost of doing business through the welfare system. It should NOT be a system of enabling low consumer costs or full employment- direct subsidy in the first case and stimulus or better yet direct employment in the second does that job a lot better and cheaper. I realize I’m a pro-market outlier, but as a general rule it’s my view that any employer with more than 1000ish employees or franchised business with the equivalent should be surcharged in the amount of public assistance received by any employee, prorated to the fraction of full time they work. Got an employee on Medicaid and SNAP because you don’t pay them enough to eat and see a doctor? You’re paying for it one way or another.
  5. A reminder that every country in the world that has “full healthcare” pays less per capita for healthcare than we do and almost all western countries have better outcomes, but go off, king.
  6. You seemed to indicate that tipping had some relationship for you to how much the server made, and said that if restaurants in Texas paid more than the minimum wage, you would think about not tipping or eating out less, presumably because you inferred you would have to be overpaying. At this point virtually all restaurants in large and most medium Texas cities are paying way above the minimum wage just to keep staff. You still tipping and eating out or did you cut back, as you said? Why not? Because the cost of labor is a function of the demand for labor. Just like the cost of burgers is set by the demand for burgers. If the cost of the labor required to make burgers goes up, burger places can’t raise past what the market will support. Of course it is. Automation of routine work is universal and pervasive. And in our economy the low hanging fruit isn’t minimum wage workers, but middle management and operational roles.
  7. I seem to recall that you indicated you would have to think twice about not tipping or avoiding restaurants that paid more than minimum wage. Is there a more ironically named periodical than “Reason?” It should be called “Strawman,” or “Question Begging,” or “In Theory.”
  8. I'm not sure about the particulars of international law here, but in political terms I mostly agree with the exception that we wouldn't have to invade it- we already occupy it.
  9. Hey @Ag with kids you’re running out of options.
  10. Republicans super seriously care about deficits
  11. Not if it costs them EU citizenship and all the individual benefits of it. But they really don’t want to lose anything anyway. It’s not so much that they want “independence.” There are only 60k of them and they are basically realists. What they really want is to be what they are today: an autonomous colony that 1) still gets Danish subsidies and 2) enjoys American military protection/investment but 3) also welcomes Chinese investment worth mentioning that in any scenario where we bought Greenland the people would likely get like 80% of it- meaning that if it we bought Greenland for 500B dollars, that would be around $7mm tax free straight into the pocket of every person on the island, along with dual EU/US Citizenship for the current generation. And they know that, too.
  12. Username checks out
  13. Denmark has never really held Greenland in a meaningful way and never wanted to. A little history: Vikings maintained a small settlement in Southern Greenland going back to the 12th century or so, and accepted Norwegian overlordship in the 13th. Norway and Denmark were combined in personal union under the Danish Oldenburg dynasty over the 16th-17th century. When they were forcibly split in 1814 by the British after the Napoleonic Wars, Denmark wound up with the settlement. After the civil war United States sent explorers to the rest of Greenland and claimed it, which prompted the Danish to claim it too. We then recognized the Danish claim as part of the purchase of the British West Indies in 1917, and successfully prevented the British from buying it for Canada or getting a right of first refusal to prevent us from getting it. So in 1921 Denmark was stuck and actually had to declare sovereignty over the whole island. Sort of. fast forward to WWI- Denmark is occupied by the Germans, who then make moved in preparation to invade and occupy Greenland, so we put the coast guard in place and begin to set up bases, and there we have been ever since. Greenland is essential to US strategic defense. Holding it is consistent with the Monroe doctrine, and because the current Danish claim is a post 1823 European colony we tolerate it as an exception. I’m glossing over a lot and some details may be wrong, but that’s the gist.
  14. I'm not sure we can rent it cheaper going forward. For what it's worth Greenlanders seem to broadly prefer independence with EU membership, but I'm not sure how realistic or sustinable that is for anybody. Worth pointing out that Greenland is in North America, and we've got a pretty strong claim.
  15. I wouldn’t give up Puerto Rico to get it, but he’s not wrong about Greenland
  16. My wife and I took our daughters (22 & 18) to the Nutcracker ballet matinee today. My eldest just drank ginger ale, but my 18 year old used her fake ID to buy us both double G&T's, and we cracked wise during the second act. Now we're going to Chuy's. Fun day.
  17. I read this in Matt McConaughey’s voice
  18. 10 whole years? Yes, I'm aware things are changing. You're welcome. It is. It is an umimaginable luxury for 90%ish of the population, including about 90% of the whites. But like a lot of affluent, privileged young progressives you seem to be unable to make up your mind about what you think. For example, square this take: with this take: All of a sudden? I've been talking about this on this board and it's 3 predecessors since 1997, and in real life before that. I watched the public, open recognition that most people (including the whites) are getting shafted too elect Bill Clinton in 1992 and Barack Obama in 2008, not to mention unfortunately electing Donald Trump in 2016 and 2024. And it's true.
  19. The senior consultant and support staff who are not 40+ white men? I only spent 25 years in tech, but I must have missed them. Perhaps it was lost amid the glare of pale bald heads. But whatever, let it be a rainbow coalition. United Colors of Tier 3 Support! Do you agree they have it better than most white people? By the numbers, they make more than 90% of the white population. I didn’t, she did. I just said that the vast majority of them have worse prospects than @safe sex and lead a pretty impoverished existence compared to her. Most people do and my point is that young white men are not an exception.
  20. She’s still smarter than Tommy Tuberville
  21. I met him in Kansas City the day before Harley Race’s funeral. He politely asked the jazz quartet playing at the hotel bar to stop playing so that he could watch Charlotte Flair perform on RAW. My table was under the TV and he stood right in front of us, and he was so proud* of her he teared up while he was watching. It was very touching.
  22. There is a crisis within men, but that’s because they are being played. When I talked about being able to separate the pimps from the tricks, that’s what I was referring to (which I think you got, but @Captainant is apparently too caught up in reflexive white progressive right think to understand.) Not just average. Almost all of them. the young ones especially but not just them. Here’s a thought experiment: in the inner ring suburbs of Austin there are probably a dozen rooms half the size of a football field, filled with cubicles, most of which are occupied by white men over 40, doing mid to senior level technology implementation or tier 3 support. There are many smaller rooms, and many fields other than that, but let’s just focus on them for a second. These men have it better than most - would you agree? They are doing better and are more successful than the vast majority of white men. Would you agree? @safe sex when you consider the variety of options you have, the mobility and freedom afforded to you by your skill set and educational attainment, the richness of your daily life experience and community, would you switch places with any of these men, even though they make about what you make?
  23. No. My point is that you have a better life than the vast majority of them do or ever will. You mentioned all the “mediocre white men” in your field. They aren’t mediocre. Those are way above average white men. Would you switch lives with any of them? Now imagine the below average ones.
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