tmyakal

Not every argument has two sides. Some have five sides. Some have one side. Pigeonholing everything into a duality hampers our ability to understand nuance.

But I guess it does make for better television.

Either this comment is also misogynistic as all hell, or my mother was very masculine.

Could own a two-family home. It’s super common in my area for there to be one apartment downstairs and one upstairs.

I read about a pilot program in Canada back in the '70s or '80s that found that fewer people on UBI had jobs, but those people who left the workforce were overwhelmingly new mothers and older teens who were still in school.

Kurt Vonnegut had a fun take on this exact scenario in his first book, Player Piano.

My professor wrote his own textbook and sold it to us to supplement his salary.

As an individual territory, the U.S. is isolated. As an empire, we have bases on every continent. The risk isn’t being killed. It’s being declawed.

Not advocating for American imperialism, just clarifying the point.

But if you’re not scanning your card with the checkout, how do they know what you purchased? Scanning on entrance just confirms that you entered the store, while scanning with checkout was used to confirm what you purchased on that trip.

Unless you’re using a Costco-issued card at checkout, too, I would have same question. And if you are still scanning at checkout, then this isn’t the time-saver they’re purporting.

When I was in high school, the girls’ running team made shirts that said, “Fast girls have good times.” It’s been more than twenty years, and I still think about how funny that double-entendre is.

So, yeah, you would’ve sold a lot more weiners.

Did you even read my comment? Yes, without minimum wage an employer could theoretically pay an employee less. But minimum wage already doesn’t pay enough for people to survive. All it is doing is giving employers a solid number they can point to and say, “Well, the government says this work is only worth $7.25!”

No one can survive on the current federal minimum wage, but employers are using that as a guideline when offering wages instead of looking at their business needs or local competition. That means the current minimum wage is actively harming employees. So, again:

Minimum wage needs to be adjusted for inflation to match what it was originally intended for, or it needs to be abolished. Right now, it just gives employers a very low starting point for their bad-faith negotiations.

There will always be wants and needs that go unfulfilled

That’s not what ‘needs’ means.

But no one would actually work for free, so now the company has to actually decide how much it values the work at.

Look at what happened with retail and fast-food after lockdowns lifted in the US: wages surged for the bottom 10% of earners. These places couldn’t get people to work for minimum wage, so they had to ignore minimum wage and actually value the work accordingly. As a result, income saw some pretty strong growth for those employees.

What a minimum wage does is set the opening baseline for negotiation. The company can say, “We know this is a shitty job that anyone can do, and the government says that kind of work is worth $7.25.” That creates a hurdle to discourage an employee from negotiating for more.

Minimum wage needs to be adjusted for inflation to match what it was originally intended for, or it needs to be abolished. Right now, it just gives employers a very low starting point for their bad-faith negotiations.

The argument is that raising wages would cost business owners too much. They would need to close up shop rather than pay higher wages, and then the workers aren’t making anything.

And there is some truth to that, unfortunately. Almost half of all private sector employees work for a small business. If small business labor costs doubled overnight, most could not absorb the additional expense and survive. You’d see a lot of places go belly up, and either nothing would replace them or large corporations that were able to absorb the labor costs would take over and raise prices to maintain their margin. A higher minimum wage just strengthens the position of the companies with enough capital to survive the change.

I agree that wages need to increase, but it’s a lot more complicated than just the government saying, “Hey! Pay them more!”

The fun one is where they brag that older workers are making “substantially more” because they’re averaging $22/hr versus $13/hr in 1987. Adjusted for inflation, that $13/hr should be around $35/hr.

More people are working longer for less money.

For the last 40 years or so, Republican voters have mostly been single-issue voters. They care very passionately about one thing, and will let almost anything else slide as a result. Being in favor of cable fees doesn’t matter as long as they’re anti-abortion. Being in favor of cutting social welfare programs that those very voters rely upon is fine as long as they’re anti-trans.

For the most part, each voter only cares about one or two specific things, and the whole picture doesn’t really matter to them.

If the current The Day Before drama is anything to go by, Hello Games could’ve done a lot less than turn NMS into a decent game.

I agree in the case of single-family homes. Even in cases of 3 or 4 unit buildings. But how do you propose full-on complexes get run if not by a company? Very few individuals have the capital to buy a 50-unit building, and honestly, the US needs more dense urban housing to help reduce our impact on climate.

I’d love to, but the text fades out after the first paragraph and is replaced with “This post is for members only.”

No, you only need to abide by the laws of your locality. Just like within your own country in different states or counties. I can’t buy alcohol on Sunday morning in my town, but I can if I drive to the next town over.

I’m American, I don’t need to imagine.