I’m not trying to win anybody over. Agoraphobia is a real disease. Look it up.
869 karma · joined February 7, 2013
I think this is a social trust thing - lots of people are just scared of strangers. This is particularly true for high-violence/high-tension societies like the US.
My city (in Australia) is very peaceful and I don't feel bothered or frightened at all by the general public - in fact I like being able to people-watch, feel a certain sense of vibrancy, etc.
You understand that each car takes up a car-sized plot of (usually very valuable urban) land 100% of the time, right?
You don't need to lug groceries around - just get them delivered.
- how expensive housing is in that country - how privatized pensions are in that country
For instance, Australia has very high wealth per capita. But that's mainly because:
- housing is extremely expensive - pensions are extremely privatized (via the superannuation system)
So it's actually a measure of dysfunction in many ways.
She does not consider the quality of the household whatsoever. That is the problem.
> TFA states that 50% of children in the US are born to unmarried mothers. Should we assume that 50% of fathers are abusive or demanding or just an overall net negative like Matt suggests? That seems like /quite/ a stretch.
That doesn't mean 50% are divorced. For instance, my own partner and I are unmarried and recently had a child together, but we aren't divorced.
> Matt assumes that the single mothers turning down “$44,000 and free childcare” must be doing so rationally
? No he doesn't.
> quite naively assumes that unmarried mothers have the same ability to find a long-term partner as somebody without kids
Again, no he doesn't assume this at all. In fact, the article doesn't mention repartnering whatsoever.
The healthy home environment causes the lack of divorce, not the other way around.
> In general, there was some kind of problem present in the family that experienced the divorce that was not present in the family that did not experience the divorce. To actually analyze the effect of the divorce, you would need to compare the divorced family to a hypothetical version of itself that did not divorce despite whatever the problem was that lead to the divorce.
> Another way to put this is: you need to compare couples with the same kinds of relationship dysfunctions, but where one couple splits and the other couple stays together. Comparing a split-couple with a certain relationship dysfunction to an intact-couple that does not have that relationship dysfunction, which is what all of this research does, is an obvious mistake.
> To put this in less abstract terms, if dad beats mom and they get divorced, it’s not accurate to say that, but for the divorce, the kids would have fared exactly the same as a similar non-divorced family where dad does not beat mom. Yet that is what the research Kearney relies upon assumes.
Full post here: https://mattbruenig.com/2023/09/20/doing-the-marriage-thing-...
I realized that monetizing is mostly about selling, which I'm simply not good at (probably because I hate it). Telling open source developers to simply get more hustle isn't really a solution.
A big open source project isn't even good for your career. In my experience, recruiters don't care at all.
Did you read what I wrote at all?
Poverty isn't voluntary - it's violently enforced at the point of a gun.
This is a good video response from Matt Bruenig that goes into these stats in detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWBdFHA8KvU
No we don't.
> It's much better to be in "poverty" today than 50 years ago.
No it's not.
> Life will never be perfect but it is tremendously better.
No it isn't.
> Why is walkable so desired? When it's cold (like today) I don't want to leave my car. I'd drive through any day, I'd drive just to avoid walking half a mile.
This is an amazing example of the terrible disease that is Car Brain.
Instead of having a walkable city where you can walk to the shops/gym/restaurants, take convenient public transport to the theatre, and take the kids/dog to the park next door, live in a massive isolated bunker, drive your massive pickup truck to buy groceries, and wonder why the city is so congested with cars and trucks all doing the same thing. Madness.
NZ is terrific if you’ve got family wealth to fall back on, but without you’re doomed.
I wanted to stay, but in spite of graduating top of my computer science class, couldn’t find decently paid work.
I moved to Aus 5 years ago and immediately >doubled my salary, could afford a house, and lived in an exciting city instead of a low wage semi rural small town.
Australia of course has many problems of its own, and in particular, treats poor disadvantaged people terribly. But NZ is grim for everybody except the already well off property owning class.
In countries with sectoral bargaining, where bargaining power is higher, workers get much higher wages and conditions for those same jobs. And yet, those jobs do not cease to exist. You must be very puzzled at how this is possible.
Wages aren't set by the government in sectoral collective bargaining.
Read what I wrote again. The point of sectoral bargaining is to remove downward competition on wages as a possible competitive advantage.
> I'm not quite sure what you mean by underpaying? If people are willing to work for a company, and everything is as promised, what's wrong with that? (If things are not as promised, the legal system can help.)
What’s wrong with that is: low wages are bad. Your conceptual mistake here is thinking that jobs are “voluntary”. Most people are forced to do jobs in order to pay for food and shelter.
In any case, you've missed the point. If Amazon is competitive and better than others on pay and conditions as you say, sectoral bargaining would be good for them, because it would stop them getting undercut by worse employers.
> Firm B would be pretty easy to compete with, because it would end up with the worst human capital out of all of the firms, and a firm with better people would find a way to add value that Firm B could not.
This is obviously not true. Plenty of companies pay terribly and get away with it, and plenty of companies thrive because treating employees badly is their primary innovation. Uber, for instance, has found success through paying "employees" effectively below minimum wage.
Suppose there are two delivery firms:
- Firm A develops innovative delivery routing software that cuts delivery costs by 20%.
-Firm B is rubbish at software, but really good at underpaying workers and getting away with it, such that they reduce costs by 30%.
Without sectoral collective bargaining and stronger labour rights more generally, Firm B will win. But the better outcome for workers and efficiency is for A to win.
Package delivery still exists in countries with sectoral collective bargaining. No government payments are involved - all that's different is industrial bargaining laws. The companies are competitive - they just compete on actual efficiency rather than undercutting worker pay and conditions.
> It's good for people to be able to enjoy cheap shipping.
Yes, that's why sectoral bargaining laws are so important - they force firms to compete on genuine innovation and efficiency, rather than undercutting pay and working conditions.
The real solution here is sectoral collective bargaining: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sectoral_collective_bargaining