Bomb#20
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Thank you, Jonathan Swift.
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What do you want to do with the little people?
- Thread starter Rhea
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masterpeastheater
Junior Member
Are you questioning our GAWD theeeee freeeeee maaaaarrrrrrrrrkeeeeeeetttttttt?
DBT
Contributor
Automation presumably entails far fewer workers than before, consequently there would not be enough vacancies to employ everyone who lost their job even if everyone was capable of retraining for more complex work.
Bomb#20
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No, that never happened. You're talking about your opponents' views as though they believe in your economic mythology too. The people who think mega wealth is okay because they did something to deserve it aren't the same people as the people who think mega wealth is reaped on the labors of the working poor.
The need to go nuclear is based on lack of carbon emissions, not less labor need.
No, that never happened either. You're once again talking about your opponents' views as though they believe in your economic mythology too. Workers aren't powerless, except in socialist countries that won't allow real trade unions, won't let anyone compete to hire them, and won't let them emigrate.
Progressive taxes are an orthogonal issue -- if they chose to, the voters could perfectly well fund a safety net by taxing themselves uniformly instead of by looking around for an unpopular minority group to discriminate against. And it's the raise-the-minimum-wage folks who ought to think about what will happen to all of these people whose jobs they made go away.
Of course not -- when we ritually eat the Christian babies we like them to still have some meat on them.
laughing dog
Contributor
Nah, we sings songs with lyrics like
They got little hands
And little eyes
And they walk around
Tellin' great big lies
They got little noses
And tiny little teeth
They wear platform shoes
On their nasty little feet....
They got little baby legs
And they stand so low
You got to pick 'em up
Just to say hello
They got little cars
That got beep, beep, beep
They got little voices
Goin' peep, peep, peep
They got grubby little fingers
And dirty little minds....
[YOUTUBE]watch?v=8bfyS-S-IJs[/YOUTUBE]
Bomb, do you have anything at all to say on the topic of what you think should happen to people who lose jobs to automation and are not able to train for something more complex?
Do you have anything to say on the topic of people who cannot survive on minimum wage and are unable to qualify for higher paying jobs?
GenesisNemesis
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https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/feb/23/amazon-bessemer-alabama-union
There are a lot of 'Murican companies that don't allow unions to form. You're full of shit.
Bomb#20
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From your link:
"The National Labor Relations Board mailed out ballots on 8 February, and the 5,800 workers are to mail back their ballots by 29 March. The labor board will then count the ballots, and if a majority of workers vote to unionize, Amazon will be required by federal law to recognize and bargain with the RWDSU."
By "don't allow unions to form", you mean "advise employees to vote no"? Do you perhaps also think it's fascist for anyone to run against your preferred candidate?
Derec
Contributor
They are too little to really fill you up?
TV and credit cards
Contributor
You don't know that. You know you don't know that. You can't know that.
Er. Um. Offer them a wage that is less than the total cost of automation?
$15.55 to work at breakneck speed or get fired. Goodness. Is there anything I can do to help?
"You, Mr. Amazon (Prime) customer? Heavens no. You are just an innocent bystander in all this. You always are. Your life should not be inconvenienced one iota."
Now back to your comfort.
Bomb#20
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Same thing that happens now: they'll need to rely on social services.
If somebody's problem is he's a full-time caregiver for a disabled or elderly person, that's work so he should get paid for it. If his problem is preexisting medical conditions that make employers not want to cover his insurance premiums, employment-based medical insurance is stupid and should be replaced. If his problem is no private employer has a use for him even though he's willing and able to work, the state should find something useful for him to do. If his problem is drug addiction he should go into rehab. If his problem is treatable mental illness we should get him treatment and make sure he takes his meds. If his problem is he can't work due to untreatable mental illness or a physical or mental disability, he should get a guaranteed minimum income. If his problem is he always gets fired because he's a serial screw-up or no-show or obnoxious prick to his coworkers, he should get a guaranteed more minimal income. And if his problem is he's got a job and he's able to keep it but it pays so little the rest of us think he deserves better, he should get EITC. This isn't rocket science. Short thread. If that's really all you wanted to know, why did you pad your OP out with your economic creationism and your bigoted stereotypes about your outgroup?
Bomb#20
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Your ideological adherence to illogical economic theories does not make you an expert on what I do, don't or can't know. We already had this argument back in the Adding rights thread. I asked you a question there. You declined to answer it, but the question didn't go away. For your convenience, here it is again:
Do you think each worker making $10/hour is generating at least $15/hour in extra revenue?
GenesisNemesis
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Are you fucking naive? People get fired for trying to form unions. Intelligent people can see through your bullshit.
LoAmmo
Member
The Conservatives' suddenly-tied-tongues and refusal to honestly engage with your question do not come as a surprise to me; it fits with a recurring pattern I've noticed when having these kinds of "basic issue debates" with many of them on many different forums over a long time. I think they go through a process of
1) confronting the question
2) rapidly/instantly arriving at their "real" or intuitively honest answer
3) dependent on, and expressed to the degree of, the key variable of their individual intelligence/rationality, they "translate" that answer into something more socially acceptable, more morally neutral, less deliberately confrontational.
I also think that some forums, including this one, tend to attract (not to be judgy and subjective, but)...a "higher caliber" of conservative. Or, re-phrased, conservatives who tend towards higher commitment to intellect and rational thought.
The ones at the very bottom of that scale, of commitment to intellect and rational thought, are the ones who, when a reporter's mic is thrust in the face with the question, "was the election stolen from Donald Trump?", instantly blurt out, "Yes! He's still the real President," etc. The smarter ones are those who might initially think, "Well, yes, in a way," but what comes out of their mouth, what they land on as their answer, might be more like, "Well, I mean, Joe Biden is in the Oval Office and he is the current President, but, there were anomalies in the election process that concern me. I'm disturbed that some states re-wrote their absentee ballot procedures at the 11th hour under the cover of Covid-19," or some such. In other words, something that at least can be rationally defended. Whether the basis of their reasoning is actually true or not, at least it's not whack-a-doodle batshit crazy, and it stands up to scrutiny as rationally held, if nothing else.
So when you ask, in good faith, "what should happen to poor people who can't re-train, or get an expensive education," I think many of "our own" here initially and intuitively think, "Fuck them. If they can't hack it, it sucks to be them. I certainly don't want to use MY money that I've earned to support them. I don't care WHAT happens to them, just keep them off of MY payroll." The fact that many of these unfortunates are non-white, and/or immigrants of one method or another, and/or clustered in "Red" inner city enclaves, influences this answer, whether or not it is spoken.
And, for the conservatives at the low end of the intellect/rationality "scale," this is the unfiltered answer that comes whizzing out of them. Ask your question on Stormfront instead of TalkFreethought if you doubt this. Those types never even get to that step number 3) outlined above, that "translation" phase--they only have the two.
But, asking it here, you're going to get some combination of snarky humor derails ("Let's eat them! No, they're too scrawny") that allow the poster to keep their real feelings a bit more private, and some official-enough-sounding socioeconomic statistics to give sufficient credence to a strategy that continues to marginalize those at the bottom.
"Where they belong," the more honest of them might add.
Elixir
Made in America
Somewhere between Moogly's appetizing suggestion and Swammi's statement of the obvious solution (UBI), must lie some alternative wherein the Little People who have been left behind are given some sort of mindless-yet-rewarding tasks that create at least some tiny amount of value for society writ large.
I envision a massive nationwide infrastructure project. Sure, it would be foolish to put heavy equipment in the hands untrained, ignorant people who lack even the intelligence needed to learn to operate a bulldozer. But rather than eat them or waste precious human resources trying in vain to train them, couldn't we give them a shovel and ask them to dig dirt from here and put it over there, in situations where a bulldozer can't reach? Then pay them some wage, equivalent to or just above whatever UBI threshold would make a difference?
Spend enough time here and you will come to realize that the mythical "conservative who tends toward commitment to intellect and rational thought" is an extinct species. In fact, "Higher caliber conservative" is an oxymoron in this post-Trump world.
I would hold up Dwight D Eisenhower has a "higher caliber conservative" but today he would be regarded as a left wing socialist extremist by everyone to the right of the President Of Antifa.
I envision a massive nationwide infrastructure project. Sure, it would be foolish to put heavy equipment in the hands untrained, ignorant people who lack even the intelligence needed to learn to operate a bulldozer. But rather than eat them or waste precious human resources trying in vain to train them, couldn't we give them a shovel and ask them to dig dirt from here and put it over there, in situations where a bulldozer can't reach? Then pay them some wage, equivalent to or just above whatever UBI threshold would make a difference?
Spend enough time here and you will come to realize that the mythical "conservative who tends toward commitment to intellect and rational thought" is an extinct species. In fact, "Higher caliber conservative" is an oxymoron in this post-Trump world.
I would hold up Dwight D Eisenhower has a "higher caliber conservative" but today he would be regarded as a left wing socialist extremist by everyone to the right of the President Of Antifa.
T.G.G. Moogly
Traditional Atheist
My comment about eating them was obviously made in jest. And for the record I'm about as far left as Richard Simmons and his exercise outfits
I'm someone who was so afraid to be unemployed, so frightened of poverty that when I read the economic writing on the wall I yanked up stakes and dragged my family to a better economic clime. I had many friends who would not do that. It was not that they could not do that, it was that they would not do that. Perhaps their world was simply so small and provincial. Perhaps they were more frightened of moving to another state - The Horror - than they were of being unemployed. Who knows. One even committed suicide, I suppose driven by the fear of uncertainty.
People who are underperformers are real people and they aren't going to just fall off the planet one day. The situation must be managed and the situation must be addressed by government policy. I am 100% in favor of the FDR solution, it worked then and it will work again now. So did mental institutions, and I had an uncle who spent his entire life in the care of the state living in one of those places where we visited him at least once a year. He lived to be 92, dying in a group home when those places went out of style.
Thanks for listening.
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No, thank you. You can do your own research. I'm not responsible for what you choose to see and choose not to see.
LoAmmo
Member
Yeah, I had kinda gotten that, mea culpa if it appeared I was painting you with that brush, specifically. All I meant was that I expected to see (predominantly) either jokes and one-liners as a "safe" way of disengagement, or an ostensibly fact-based response intended more or less as "safe cover" to mask a simpler, more primal lack of empathy that's truly driving the answer.
I used your joke as an example of the former, more because of its content (and the fact that it was a fresh example from this very thread) than because of its source. Sorry for the confusion!
TV and credit cards
Contributor
I do not know what you do. I know the CBO has estimated job losses should a fifteen dollar an hour minimum be set. But this is an estimate. And yes I will admit I have an ideological adherence to people making a living wage. That no one should live off of starvation wages and social services. Should the CBO estimates pan out, then we will deal with it if it needs dealing with. Is McDonald's going to cut it's workforce if they have to pay their employees $15 an hour? As if they have an overabundance of employees now. As if employees are so under-worked now they can double up on tasks. As if McDonald's is going to say, that's it, no more Egg McMuffins. We just can't afford to make them any longer. No. They are going to let it eat into profits (absorb cost) and/or raise prices. They will absorb costs as much as possible. They always do. Just like Whirlpool is absorbing the high cost of rolled steel today. Just like auto manufacturers should have to absorb the cost of their chip shortage or at least have maintained an inventory. So much for lean manufacturing. But they won't. They whined and we will provide a social service to them by picking up the cost without demanding any change to prevent this from happening again.
I do not understand the point of your previously ignored question other than to steer the conversation. If a business cannot survive while paying it's employees a living wage then it does not deserve to. Perhaps the goods or service they provided were not necessary or desirable enough for the consumer to pay an increased price. But I think having to absorb the cost is what is at the root of the argument against a living wage. Just a guess.