No, "we" means anyone invested in those companies who make gains or who has loaned money to those companies (which could occur through your bank account).
986 karma · joined October 9, 2013
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Indeed, if most people refuse such employers, the employers will have to raise their wages or stop asking that question.
They're only able to ask this question because some employees are fine with it. So let both voluntarily discuss that question.
Just curious, what's this and how does it work?
What does this mean? Who is the plutocracy? What is this rent? The gains of outsourcing go to customers. War is funded by government debt.
What do you mean? I've plugged in my mother's tablet to the TV on numerous occasions with a mini-HDMI to HDMI cable. Is that uncommon on newer tablets?
No. I'm saying it's a subsidy NOT because randomly you roll the dice of risk and you get lucky; but because the expected value or utility of health risks is less than the cost of insurance (for example, you wouldn't buy health insurance for 1 billion dollars a month).
I'm not saying it's a subsidy because some people don't end up "using" their insurance plan; I'm saying if you repeat the scenario a billion time healthy people will be on average worse off so it's a subsidy. They wouldn't take the insurance unless government forces them.
> I'm not sure i understand what you're advocating. Perhaps you mean each person should set aside some portion of their cash for whatever expenses they might have, and the odd 20 year old with leukemia should take on a few hundred thousand dollars of debt. of course if you're unlucky enough to have one of those 10% survival variations, the cost will of course be multiplied out by 10.
I didn't advocate anything; I'm just saying the issue is a normative question; it doesn't have an absolutely objective answer.
Sidenote: maybe the 20 year old should be in debt. If we want to save as many lives as possible, it's cheaper to put money into clean water, stopping open defecation, vaccines, etc (depends on whether you value someone outside your country as much as someone inside).
The leukemia case is convenient for your viewpoint but what about nonsmokers subsidizing smokers? Should I have to pay for the treatment of the cancer of a smoker or the AIDS of someone who injected drugs or the measles of someone didn't take vaccines?
It's a normative question on altruism.
EDIT: changed phrasing
This depends on whether you're fine with some people subsidizing other people. The average cost by forcing everyone to get insured is less because you're forcing some people to buy plans for whom it's not worth it. See adverse selection.
I think that only applies for particular bounded situations (like electrons). There's nothing inherent in the wave function that says energy is discrete multiples; it's only due to the boundary conditions in the electron (i.e. the energy at r=0 and r=inf IIRC) that forces particular solutions.
The analogy (it's actually quite similar in the differential equations) is a string. If you hold both ends only certain solutions are possible; standing waves where the length of the string is a multiple of half the wavelength. But if you don't, anything is possible.
"I might be dying of malaria; I don't care"
How does this make the West go backward? The researches are helping to improve the situation.
If you are so concerned, you can go donate to charities that distribute vaccines.
Even if you find the situation bad, these researchers helped improve the situation.
The wages are lower even adjusted even with inflation.
> The cost of living has been increasing drastically, despite any efficiency gains.
No, it has not. See https://www.bls.gov/cpi/cpid1611.pdf (PDF Page 70, Table 24). It's increased about 20% in the past 10 years.
In the same period GNI per capita (i.e. average income) has increased about 20%. (See http://data.worldbank.org/country/united-states)
> Seniors who are now retired are now effectively effed and are forced to go back to work to make ends meet.
But, why do you think this is due to capitalism?
> Companies are more willing to hire outside labor -- effectively slave labor, because they are able to pay foreign workers much less than domestic citizens.
How is it "slave labor"? Slavery is forced work. That's different from low wages, which are precisely why it's so wonderful. The poorest people of the world are getting jobs. It's bad but without a job they'll be in an even worse situation.
> Companies are also more willing to replace human employees with robots, because it's cheaper than paying a human to do the same job. [...] Walmart is replacing it's stockers and cashiers with robots. Pizza shops are even going for full autonomy with self-driving pizza trucks that automatically make pizza while delivering it.
That's great; we're moving one step towards robot utopia.
> Companies will not help employees transition into new job positions.
That's not in their contract so it's not their responsibility. Shareholders (most of us indirectly hold stock) want more money just like all of us.
> How then, will the young get their foot in the door and become independent when they have no jobs?
They will do other jobs that aren't replaced by robots. Those jobs' real wages will increase due to robots increasing purchasing power. Also, see lump of labor fallacy.
In fact, although this is probably due to the recovery from the 2008 recession, unemployment rate has been decreasing since the sudden increase in 2008. (https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000)
New technologies replacing jobs is hardly a new phenomenon. Robots aren't new either; they've been used for decades.
> The truck driving industry is about to replace all of it's drivers with robots.
Cheaper truck transport is great.
> That race to the bottom has merely displaced millions upon millions of people and abolished the middle class, in addition to destabilizing the world economy. Capitalism is entirely incapable of keeping up with the modern world. The only way forward is a basic income.
Who has been displaced? How has the middle-class been abolished? Globally, the middle-class is growing (7% -> 13 %) (http://www.pewglobal.org/2015/07/08/a-global-middle-class-is...) and inequality slightly decreased from 1981 to 2005 (ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/012/ak968e/ak968e00.pdf, PDF page 2, Table 1).
> in addition to destabilizing the world economy.
What destabilization? If you mean recessions, socialist countries have had recessions too. And how are recessions due to capitalism?
EDIT: made corrections to part about global inequality
Powerful multi-national corporations often lobby for anti-capitalistic measures (protectionism, subsidies). Socialism only increases the influence of corporations via a bigger government.
The Great Depression was before Reagan and there have been many recessions before Reagan. Why do you think it is due to deregulation?
Capitalism has done much better than socialism, empirically.
How does capitalism only serve a fraction of the population? It has served all of us; and it's done a pretty good job.
Socialism and communism only serve a fraction--lobbyist groups who can make the government do what they what. Indeed, that's what we're seeing with industrial protectionism and farmer subsidies.
That's because socialism is based on centralized control and force, while capitalism is based on individual freedom and mutual cooperation.
"^" is the XOR operator. GP's code has that bug.
> That eval() function sure smells suicidal for anything remotely serious though.
Yes, ast.literal_eval() should be used.
UC is creating jobs by increasing purchasing power. It's just that those people don't have lobbyists.