Why are reddit and 4chan actually talking politics and economics according to random WTDWTF users



  • @s73v3r said:

    Gossip has been shown to be harmful to a person, even if it never is done to their face. Same thing with cyberbullying.

    That's not a demonstration. Please try again.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    Ciiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiite?

    http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=union+wants+exemption+from+minimum+wage+hike&l=1#

    At the time I generated this search, the first result was this:

    "But Rusty Hicks, who heads the county Federation of Labor and helps lead the Raise the Wage coalition, said Tuesday night that companies with workers represented by unions should have leeway to negotiate a wage below that mandated by the law."


  • :belt_onion:

    i am confused why so many people here are demanding that reddit must allow certain topics.

    Or is this now the "baw i can't spout my socially unacceptable feelings anywhere anymore, why cant someone force these businesses to agree to support my personal morals" topic?



  • Ah, not in Seattle.

    Yeah, California is fucked.




  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @FrostCat said:

    "But Rusty Hicks, who heads the county Federation of Labor and helps lead the Raise the Wage coalition, said Tuesday night that companies with workers represented by unions should have leeway to negotiate a wage below that mandated by the law."

    So they take the stance that a shitty, low-wage job is better than starving? Surprise, surprise, surprise...



  • That was me dumb Belgium


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    Ah, not in Seattle.

    I was pretty sure it was CA, but not sure enough to say that at first.



  • @Polygeekery said:

    The market would end up adjusting to the new wage levels so that the people who have shitty attitudes and shitty skills still live shitty lives.

    Although it is undoubtedly true that having a shitty attitude and shitty skills makes a person more likely to have a shitty life, it does not follow that any particular person who has a shitty life must be in that position due to having either a shitty attitude or shitty skills or both. Poverty traps and market failure are both very real things.

    If you truly believe that most of the people who have shitty lives are in that position through some avoidable fault of their own, but you truly do not see yourself as a person whose fundamental attitude can fairly be described as "fuck you, I got mine": you might want to read up on the Just World Fallacy.


  • :belt_onion:

    meh i don't even care anymore - there's no point debating when the minds are already made up. even if it is hilarious to see the kerfuffle it raises, i'm not feeling the 🚎 tonight.



  • @boomzilla said:

    The real minimum wage is $0

    Actually it's less than that. I am personally acquainted with three people who, having been moved off the Australian Government's unemployment benefit onto its "work for the dole" program, ended up spending more in transport to and from the workplace, and childcare made necessary by mandatory attendance at that workplace, than they were paid for their work there.

    In all cases they were eventually able to switch back to the straight-up unemployment benefit after a few weeks, but the fact remains that for the weeks they were in work, they went backwards financially as a direct consequence of being in that work. To me, that absolutely counts as a negative wage.



  • @Polygeekery said:

    Let's just put them where @flabdablet wants them and give everyone a salary for being alive.

    I can see no reason at all why this proposal should merit instant dismissal with a sardonic smiley, given the context of a wealthy post-industrial economy.



  • @Polygeekery said:

    those who create the jobs

    It's fairly common for people who employ others to believe that employers create jobs, but it really isn't true.

    If there were no demand for whatever it is that those employers are in business to produce, there would be no business. Demand for anything beyond the essentials of life (food and shelter) comes from a society where people have discretionary spending power; the more discretionary spending power we can generate in our societies, the more optional things people will want, and the more jobs will be created in order to supply those optional things.

    Henry Ford understood this principle, and paid his employees accordingly.


  • BINNED

    @FrostCat said:

    McDonald's is supposedy already testing automatic checkout kiosks in a couple of markets

    Seen it several times in France already, I think first time was like 3 years ago. You order at a kiosk or through a website or app. They pop-up your number when everything is ready. I'm not sure it improves either efficiency for the customers or personnel. It seemed the same old thing except you now stand for a kiosk thing going 'euh ... what will I have'. And then it didn't accept my card. Ended up going to the normal queue and payed with the damn same card. What was up with that McDo?



  • @xaade said:

    The myth is that wealth is limited and therefore we have to take it from the rich to give to the poor.

    There's another myth: that spreading wealth more equitably, even to people at the bottom of the income pile who have done nothing to deserve our largesse on traditional moral grounds, will necessarily make the rich poorer.

    In fact, such actual real-world experiments as have been done along these lines strongly suggest that the most prominent effect of directly funding the poor is to increase overall economic activity many times over, making it easier - not harder - to succeed in business.

    If it were necessarily true that taxing the rich in order to fund a UBI in order to increase economic activity at the bottom of the income scale amounted to making the rich poorer, the same principle would mean that the rational thing to do with a turbojet engine would be to disconnect the compressor on the grounds that the power required to run it reduces thrust.



  • @xaade said:

    You can "progress" off a cliff.

    You can also sit on the edge of one, facing away from the sea with your fingers in your ears going "la la la I can't hear you", until it crumbles away from underneath you.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @flabdablet said:

    you truly do not see yourself as a person whose fundamental attitude can fairly be described as "fuck you, I got mine"

    I don't have time to rebuff this tonight and spit out the words that have been forcibly placed in my mouth, but I should have time tomorrow. I'm the meantime, you are a mouth rapist and you need to turn in your SJW membership card.



  • @boomzilla said:

    Some people are genuine idiots / retarded / disabled and simply cannot provide enough value to anyone to support themselves. Others are lazy or don't want to apply themselves. Sometimes the two blend together and it's hard to tell them apart, especially when there's other structural problems (and when aren't there?).

    Quite so. And in my view, telling the "undeserving poor" apart from the rest of the poor is a job with so much inbuilt complexity and uncertainty that no human being can be trusted to do it justly and effectively enough to decide who gets paid and who doesn't.

    Encumbering such decision makers with a requirement to show how their decisions fit within prescribed policy guidelines is going to create more errors than it eliminates, in my view.

    Therefore, it makes sense to me to limit such policy guidelines to the question of who should receive more than a minimum universal welfare payment. That way, we should be able to get rid of most of the structural poverty traps and therefore most of the avoidable suffering, and remake our society in a manner somewhat closer to the just-world ideal.



  • @antiquarian said:

    If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck....

    then she's made of wood, and therefore... a witch! Burn her!



  • @xaade said:

    an ideal meritocracy

    The question of what kind of person gets to define "merit" bears close examination.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @flabdablet said:

    That way, we should be able to get rid of most of the structural poverty traps and therefore most of the avoidable suffering, and remake our society in a manner somewhat closer to the just-world ideal.

    You're fucking delusional if you don't think that this would merely move the goalposts to accommodate. The market adjusts, and it will do so and swallow your "just-world ideal". In the interim, you will likely just make things worse for everyone. The plan is doomed to fail before it is ever enacted.



  • @FrostCat said:

    At the time I generated this search, the first result was

    from a site with a record for honest reportage about on par with Tumblr's?



  • @Polygeekery said:

    you are a mouth rapist and you need to turn in your SJW membership card.

    And you are an MRA manbaby with no opinions worth listening to.

    Am I doing this right?



  • @Polygeekery said:

    The plan is doomed to fail before it is ever enacted.

    I understand that this is your passionately held belief. On what evidence do you base it?



  • @Polygeekery said:

    You're fucking delusional if you don't think that this would merely move the goalposts to accommodate. The market adjusts, and it will do so and swallow your "just-world ideal".

    Here's a hypothetical scenario for you to consider:

    1. Starting point: The cheapest rented housing in Madeupville costs $120/week. There are fifty people who live rough in and around Madeupville, as their cash-in-hand unofficial employment, proceeds of crime etc. does not leave them enough to pay rent after buying food; they stay in Madeupville rather than moving elsewhere because they can at least make enough to buy food there.

    2. Innovation: Every person in Madeupville starts receiving a weekly payment of $150 from the Federal government - no strings attached, no means test required.

    What happens to the Madeupville rental market?



  • @FrostCat said:

    Rusty Hicks

    Sounds like someone you'd ask for when calling Moe's Bar.



  • @flabdablet said:

    wealthy post-industrial economy

    Which will be much less wealthy and post-industrial when you have people making comfortable living not doing shit.

    @flabdablet said:

    decide who gets paid and who doesn't

    You get paid as much as your work is worth. Less if you suck at negotiating, but roughly that.



  • @Maciejasjmj said:

    when you have people making comfortable living not doing shit.

    What evidence do you have to support the conclusion that a universal basic income would yield this outcome?

    Also, "making a comfortable living not doing shit" is a very accurate description of living on the proceeds of investments in other people's businesses, which is by far the most common method for wealthy people to stay that way. What evidence do you have to support the belief that "making a comfortable living not doing shit" has worse consequences when done by people lower on the income scale?



  • @flabdablet said:

    What evidence do you have to support the belief that "making a comfortable living not doing shit" has worse consequences when done by people lower on the income scale?

    Invested money generates movement in economy. People who invest money generally need to have that money, which means they somehow earned it.

    And even if you discount the former, there are more people lower than higher on the income scale. If the wealthiest 1% doesn't do anything, it's not that big of a deal. If the bottom, say, 30% stops doing anything, you have a problem.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @flabdablet said:

    Also, "making a comfortable living not doing shit" is a very accurate description of living on the proceeds of investments in other people's businesses, which is by far the most common method for wealthy people to stay that way.

    You really are fucking delusional. You equate a person who has the valuable commodity of investment capital the same as you do a person sitting on their couch eating Cheetos and smoking copious amounts of pot while doing nothing to benefit society.

    Hint: In one of these scenarios, the person is providing a benefit to society, the other does not.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @flabdablet said:

    What happens to the Madeupville rental market?

    Probably not a whole lot. But, there is probably a good chance that there would be short term gains in the markets of expensive LCD TVs and illicit drug markets...until the market adjusts for all of the worthless money you just pumped in to it.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @flabdablet said:

    I understand that this is your passionately held belief. On what evidence do you base it?

    Common sense? An elementary understanding of economics? The fact that I am not high?



  • @flabdablet said:

    making it easier - not harder - to succeed in business.

    != richer.

    If I tax you at 90% and give it to the poor, it doesn't matter how much this affects the economy, you'd have to show that it overcomes the 90% tax rate.



  • Point being that blind "progress" means nothing. You have to say what you're progressing to.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @flabdablet said:

    It's fairly common for people who employ others to believe that employers create jobs, but it really isn't true.

    Bullshit.

    @flabdablet said:

    If there were no demand for whatever it is that those employers are in business to produce, there would be no business.

    Yeah, fair enough, but by creating jobs they also create income to buy goods.

    @flabdablet said:

    Demand for anything beyond the essentials of life (food and shelter) comes from a society where people have discretionary spending power;

    Yeah, and no one ever gained discretionary spending power by the power of the poor.

    @flabdablet said:

    the more discretionary spending power we can generate in our societies, the more optional things people will want, and the more jobs will be created in order to supply those optional things.

    And none of those things are created without capital. Poor and middle class people do not have the capital necessary to build the businesses, that employ the people, that create the income, for any of it to be discretionary in the first place.

    We tried what you purport a long time ago. Most call it the "agricultural revolution". More people had food to eat than before, but there was no real discretionary spending.

    @flabdablet said:

    Henry Ford understood this principle, and paid his employees accordingly.

    Henry Ford paid his employees as little as he possibly could. But, at the time, he created a new market and those people were the highest skilled of the time. Not just anyone could do those jobs. Any idiot can flip a burger, and there is no marketable skill there, so those who flip burgers get paid jack shit.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @flabdablet said:

    Actually it's less than that. I am personally acquainted with three people who, having been moved off the Australian Government's unemployment benefit onto its "work for the dole" program, ended up spending more in transport to and from the workplace, and childcare made necessary by mandatory attendance at that workplace, than they were paid for their work there.

    Were they forced to participate under threat of imprisonment? Then, if not, @boomzilla's answer still stands and their minimum wage was still $0 as they could have chosen to not participate.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @Polygeekery said:
    I was still an idiot, no argument there. At ~20 years old, I measured my success by my bank account, which was admittedly idiotic.

    Why don't you figure out what message you want to convey here then come back ok?

    Is there something so incomprehensible about the message "when I was young I thought money was the only important thing, but I eventually realised that was wrong"?

    @s73v3r said:

    I see this "She's a terrible person!" meme thrown out there all the time, but nothing that explains why, other than she does the same shit that other VCs do.

    Are you claiming that other VCs are not terrible people?


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @flabdablet said:

    it does not follow that any particular person who has a shitty life must be in that position due to having either a shitty attitude or shitty skills or both.

    There will be outliers to any statement. But, I arrive at that conclusion as a person who has hired and fired a large number of people over the years. As I stated earlier, I was running a construction company where our lowest paid position was ~$40K/year and we were never completely staffed at any point for the simple reason that we could not find enough skilled labor to fill the positions that we had to offer. There were plenty of unfit applicants. Plenty of people failed drug testing. Plenty of people who got fired because they could not make it to work on time. Plenty of people with shitty attitudes that no one wanted to work with. But there were never enough people to completely fill all of the positions that paid what everyone would consider a living wage.

    If you want to help, fuck your notion of UBI. Educate people better. Teach them about money. Teach them that if you piss all of your money away on the latest cell phones, TVs and cars that are well beyond your means that society should have absolutely no sympathy for the fact that you cannot afford proper food. If you want to educate people, I am all for it. If you want to piss money away, rational people are going to think you are a loon.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @Scarlet_Manuka said:

    Is there something so incomprehensible about the message "when I was young I thought money was the only important thing, but I eventually realised that was wrong"?

    Please remember, you are asking this question of Drax. He does not understand human constructs like metaphor and simile and needs everything expressly spelled out for him in literal terms.



  • @flabdablet said:

    It's fairly common for people who employ others to believe that employers create jobs, but it really isn't true.

    @flabdablet said:

    If there were no demand for whatever it is that those employers are in business to produce

    You're right, it takes two elements to create a job, demand for a product, and an entity willing to take on the risk to supply that product.

    Whereas the people in control of demand can stop demanding a particular item, a business owner can adjust to demand and provide a product that is in demand.

    For the most part, demand will always be there, therefore the principle job creator is the business owner. And thus, investment there will have better returns.

    @flabdablet said:

    Demand for anything beyond the essentials of life (food and shelter) comes from a society where people have discretionary spending power

    That's true, for as long as the spenders are responsible with their income and spend in a sustainable manner. The key part you are missing here is productivity. If the spenders stop being productive at the level of their spending, then their spending is unsustainable, and eventually they will be hindered from participating in spending.

    You can throw a ton of money at a person, but if all that money is going to paying off debt, it is no longer going to discretionary spending.




  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Luhmann said:

    Seen it several times in France already

    They're in Belgium too - I used one the other month.
    Some McDonald's over here have them, as well as some KFCs at service stations.

    @Luhmann said:

    I'm not sure it improves either efficiency for the customers or personnel.

    You can have more tills because the amount of space needed is less - also, as the person serving the food isn't the person also wrangling the till, they can do it faster. When it's busy, it does work, and it's not a huge leap to it reducing the amount of people needed (rather than currently providing extra capacity with the same amount of people).



  • @Polygeekery said:

    You equate a person who has the valuable commodity of investment capital the same as you do a person sitting on their couch eating Cheetos and smoking copious amounts of pot while doing nothing to benefit society.

    On the basis of what evidence do you imply that having the valuable commodity of investment capital is a barrier to sitting on a couch eating Cheetos and smoking copious amounts of pot?


  • kills Dumbledore

    @FrostCat said:

    What's your opinion on this?http://readwrite.com/2014/01/24/github-meritocracy-rug

    That sounds like a bunch of people conflating a motto on a carpet with things that actually matter.



  • @Polygeekery said:

    @flabdablet said:
    What happens to the Madeupville rental market?

    Probably not a whole lot.

    So Madeupville now has fifty formerly homeless people who can now afford to rent homes, and that's a bad thing - from anybody's point of view - exactly why?

    @Polygeekery said:

    But, there is probably a good chance that there would be short term gains in the markets of expensive LCD TVs and illicit drug markets...

    And that's a bad thing - from the point of view of consumers and suppliers of expensive LCD TVs and illicit drugs - exactly why?

    @Polygeekery said:

    .until the market adjusts for all of the worthless demand stimulating money you just pumped in to it.

    The only way I can make sense of your apparent objection to this scenario is that you appear to believe that such adjustment would necessarily appear as price inflation. Is that what you think? If so, what makes you assume that any such price rise is going to be the endpoint of market adjustment? If prices go up, that's because demand is exceeding supply; why would you assume that the market would not adjust to that by increasing supply until prices correct themselves?



  • @Polygeekery said:

    Common sense? An elementary understanding of economics? The fact that I am not high?

    If the best argument you have boils down to personal opinion, it doesn't amount to much.



  • @Polygeekery said:

    Were they forced to participate under threat of imprisonment?

    No, under threat of losing eligibility for any welfare support whatsoever.



  • voat.co has keeled over completely and "gone fishing".

    Hehehe, yeah right. Let me waste my time creating an account on a site that doesn't work.

    Imagine being voat's guys at this point. Month after month struggling with a slow but steady trickle of traffic. Noticing the changes on reddit and carefully positioning yourself by declaring your undying love for free-speech. Hoping beyond hope reddit makes the kind of mistake digg had made, that would give you that one in a million chance to shoot for the stars.

    And then, it happens! Millions and millions of people rush over to your site. This is your chance. IT IS HAPPENING! ALL YOUR PLANS COMING TO FRU-

    What?

    You mean, we just slapped together a Rails/MySQL CRUD app and haven't really planned to scale? And now we have to redesign the entire backend, while half the reddit is kicking at our doors? And by the time we're ready, the opportunity will have passed?



  • @xaade said:

    If I tax you at 90% and give it to the poor, it doesn't matter how much this affects the economy, you'd have to show that it overcomes the 90% tax rate.

    Quite so.

    In order for a rich person to end up better off after having their effective total income tax rate increased from 0% to 90%, it would have to be the case that their gross income increased by more than 900%. That number does not look like a plausible effect of the stimulus caused by any fundable UBI. On the other hand, a total income tax increase from 40% to 50% would be offset by an increase in gross income of only 20%, which could easily happen given continuous stimulation at the bottom end of the market.

    This is the kind of question that is best answered with a combination of economic modelling and pilot trials. I cannot see why people who dismiss it out of hand without having paid attention to either of those things should have their views taken seriously.



  • @Polygeekery said:

    Poor and middle class people do not have the capital necessary to build the businesses, that employ the people, that create the income, for any of it to be discretionary in the first place.

    Poor people, usually not. But most small business operators are firmly middle class, and more people are employed by small businesses than large ones.


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